The Lion of Cairo

by Oden, Scott

  Assad sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Though nearing forty, his body still bore the indelible stamp of a warrior—a scarred frame hard-woven with knots of muscle and corded sinew. Assad’s features were sharp and angular; a not unhandsome face made sinister by the jagged scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to his jaw, visible even through his close-trimmed beard.

  The movement woke his companion. She stretched, the damp sheet slipping to expose her small breasts and an expanse of round, honey-colored hip.

  “What time is it?” the woman, Safia, murmured, her hand caressing his back.

  “Near dawn,” Assad said. “Go back to sleep.”

  Half his age, Safia was a sloe-eyed courtesan whose charms earned her a lascivious reputation in the bazaars of Palmyra. “It’s too hot to sleep,” she replied. Her hand slid around his torso and down his belly, stroking the hard ridges of muscle before falling lower still. She purred, “Besides, the maiden would ride her favorite stallion once more before the sun rises.”

  Assad twined his fingers in her tousled black hair; leaning down, he gave her a savage kiss before lifting her hand away from his groin. “Not now. I have to be about my business.”

  Safia sighed. “What business could you have so early?” She rolled onto her back, watching Assad as he stood and padded across the rug-strewn floor to where their clothing lay.

  “That’s none of your concern,” he said. He found his long shirt and his white cotton trousers beneath a pile of diaphanous blue stuff that passed for Safia’s gown, all discarded in the throes of last night’s passion; he drew his trousers on, and then glanced about for his boots. These lay in the corner near a crumpled pile of cloth that turned out to be his ragged sash and turban, his once-black khalat—faded now to a deep shade of charcoal by sun and sweat—and an empty sheath of leather-bound wood. Methodically, Assad retrieved his things and finished dressing.

  “You’re a dour man.” Safia sat up as he bound his hair beneath his turban. One end he kept loose, a veil of sorts to muffle his mouth and nose from blowing sand. Or to hide his features from prying eyes. “Have you no joy for life?”

  Assad’s face hardened. He stalked back to the bed; Safia flinched away from him as he knelt, his eyes fixed on the smooth flesh at the base of the courtesan’s throat. “For life, yes. For questions, no,” he said, reaching a hand beneath where he’d been sleeping.

  Assad’s fingers closed on a cold ivory hilt. Instantly, ropes of muscle stood out on his arm as contact sent shards of emotion slicing into his mind—hunger, longing, rage, pain, grief. And most powerful of all: an ancient sense of hatred. Nostrils flaring, Assad curled his lips in defiance. He brushed aside those razor-sharp vibrations, mastered them through sheer force of will. The spasm passed in the span of a heartbeat, leaving only faint echoes in its wake.

  He glanced down at the weapon he extracted from beneath the bed—a salawar, the sword-knife of the tribesmen who lurked in the high passes of the Afghan mountains; its sculpted pommel bore the fearsome visage of a djinn, fanged mouth open as it roared in silent fury. The Hammer of the Infidel, the Afghans called you; the blade of Afridi chieftains—the blade of madmen. But what name did your creator give you? I wonder. What words did he speak when he filled you with his hate?

  Assad, known from Seville to Samarkand as the Emir of the Knife, rose to his feet. He slid the blade into its sheath and thence into the sash about his waist, his hand draped lightly over the pommel. He motioned to Safia as he crossed her bedchamber and opened the latticed door leading to the garden. “Get dressed. It will soon be time for morning prayers.”

  “Prayers?” she said. Unashamed of her nakedness, the courtesan crawled from the bed and followed Assad out onto the colonnaded portico. The air smelled of clean desert breezes, of kitchen smoke and baking bread. “You don’t strike me as a religious man.”

  “Don’t presume you know me because we’ve lain together twice,” he replied.

  A ribbon of orange fire brightened the eastern horizon, presaging a day of unsurpassed brilliance—a day filled with heat and dust and chaos. Within the hour, the rising sun would sear away the cool shadows of the garden. The inviting plash of water in the fountain’s blue-enameled basin would become a sound of mockery; birds warbling in trellises of flowering jasmine would seek shelter in the eaves of ancient monuments. The only respite would be in the thin shade of a palm tree. Assad savored the cool while it lasted.

  “Will there be a third time? Or a fourth? Will you not return tonight and allow me the chance to know you … better?” Safia’s fingers trailed down his arm.

  Assad glanced sidelong at the petite courtesan. She stood with her legs crossed, her back arched and shoulders pulled back to emphasize her pear-shaped breasts. A ghost of a smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Perhaps,” he said, looping an arm about her waist. He stroked her bare bottom before giving it a playful swat. “Now go back inside before you take a chill.”

  Safia laughed and spun away from him. “Will I see you tonight?”

  The gleam in Assad’s eyes left little doubt. He watched her a moment longer, watched as she pranced through the fretted door and into her bedchamber. When he turned away, however, the veneer of lust he so scrupulously maintained in her presence vanished; his scarred face reflected only cold and disciplined confidence. The surety of a killer.

  Assad left by the garden gate. Safia’s villa stood amid a warren of tight alleys bordering Palmyra’s central bazaar. Built, she claimed, by the ancient Queen Zenobia, the place was obviously maintained through the largesse of her countless patrons—a fact which did not escape Assad’s notice. Safia was a favorite of Palmyra’s wealthiest sons, its princes, merchants, and shaykhs, men who had the wherewithal to keep her in lavish style; why, then, would she seek out the company of a man of his caliber: by all accounts a penniless freebooter with a violent reputation?

  Had she been any other woman Assad might have chalked it up to simple boredom, a diversion from the endless parade of cultured fools who graced her bed. But not Safia. She was too calculating. Why? What does she stand to gain? Assad’s eyes narrowed. He was prepared to depart Palmyra for Baghdad by month’s end—to take the life of a man he’d been stalking for over a year—and it was not in his nature to leave unanswered questions in his wake. He would discover the truth of her motives, God willing, and he would do so this morning …

  Assad threaded through the alley between the courtesan’s home and the flaking walls of her neighbor’s, who was away in Damascus on business with the Sultan (or so a garrulous watchman had bragged). Like most of the homes in Palmyra, Safia’s villa was but a single story, rising twenty feet from stone foundation to its decorative crenels of whitewashed mudbrick. Just over the low garden wall from the alley, a flight of stairs ascended to the flat roof.

  Assad stopped. Though muffled by the villa’s walls, he heard Safia’s three Ethiopian slaves singing as they went about their morning tasks—from fetching water, to stoking the fire under their mistress’s bath, to laying out a selection of her gowns. Carts rattled on the uneven paving stones of the bazaar; he heard the sharp crack of a hammer, a child’s angry scream. He heard good-natured laughter as a knot of men passed by on their way to the public baths—the hammam. Closer, a dog raised a racket. Assad glanced back down the alley. Motes of dust turned golden with dawn’s first light; soon, the muezzin would climb the minaret of Palmyra’s main mosque to call the faithful to prayer.

  Catlike, Assad leaped, caught the coping of the garden wall, and swung himself over. He dropped easily; without a sound he darted up the stairs to the roof of Safia’s villa. When the heat of high summer became unbearable, most of Palmyra’s citizens retreated to their roofs to sleep or to entertain; Safia was no different. Her home sported a loggia of rich red cedar, pierced by rosette-shaped holes to take advantage of the errant desert breeze. What caught Assad’s attention, however, were the fluted copper shells, wind catchers—malqafs—that provided vent
ilation for the interior of the villa.

  And a way to listen to what was going on inside. “Gossip holes,” his old mentor Daoud ar-Rasul had called them. “Become a man of few words and you need not worry,” he’d say. Assad crouched a moment near each one, his head cocked to the side as he listened for Safia’s voice. At one, he heard the rattle of crockery; another, a man speaking in the liquid syllables of Africa. Assad padded to each in turn, placing his feet with care so as not to cause a noise. Finally, at the next to the last malqaf, he heard Safia’s smoky voice … faint at first, but growing in volume as she no doubt moved closer to the interior grille.

  “—swear to you, by week’s end I will have him wrapped around my littlest finger. Then, he will sing like a nightingale.”

  “Take care with him,” a voice replied—male, but with a quality that hinted at effeminacy. A eunuch, perhaps? “Do not give him cause for suspicion. This is not a man you can trifle with…”

  “But he is a man, my dear, and men are my purview, not yours. I know them better than they know themselves. A man cares only for two things: his manhood and his ego. Stroke one or the other and he will show you much favor, but if you stroke both—ah, if you can stroke both then there is no secret he would not divulge, no confidence he would not betray. This Emir is no different. Honestly, I don’t know where this fear you have for him comes from. He seems so … pliable.”

  Assad heard the man choke and splutter. “Pliable?” he said once he’d regained his breath. “The old eunuch who manages your estate is pliable, Safia. The man who bakes your bread or blends your perfumes or fetches your slippers is pliable. The Emir of the Knife is far from it. He is a slayer of djinn, by Allah! They say he crossed the Roof of the World to study with a blind master of Cathay in the mysterious East; that he learned to kill with the slightest touch.”

  “He touched me and I yet live.”

  “Because he did not wish your death, you foolish woman! He serves the lord of al-Hashishiyya—”

  Safia made a rude noise. “Al-Hashishiyya is a nest of thugs!”

  “True, but they are dangerous nonetheless. If the Emir of the Knife means to kill the vizier of Baghdad, Safia, I need to know when.”

  “Why this charade? If it will preserve your vizier’s life, then why not simply kill this so-called Emir and have done? Have you no spine, Husayn?”

  Husayn! Assad’s lips curled into a humorless smile. He knew him after all—one of the vizier’s lapdogs, who dabbled in secrets and schemes while posing as a physician from Karbala. The eunuch and Safia were thick as fleas on a Bedouin carpet, apparently. Now, he reckoned, the slut’s advances at least made sense.

  “We have tried—”

  Assad stood; he dropped his hand to the hilt of his salawar, feeling the rage imprisoned in its ancient blade course through him. He’d heard all he needed …

  3

  “The man is uncanny!” Husayn said; his kohl-rimmed eyes never stopped moving. He was slender for a eunuch, his shaved head oiled and gleaming like an ivory dome. Gold glittered on his fingers and around his wrists. A crescent-shaped pendant of electrum and mother-of-pearl lay heavy on the breast of his black and gold damask robes. Fingering a strand of ebony worry beads, Husayn paced back and forth across Safia’s sitting room, his slippered feet whispering on marble tile. “Poison, betrayal, ambush … we have tried all of these things and have failed. It is as if he knows our minds better than we do.”

  Safia reclined on a divan. Dressed now in a burnoose of gauzy saffron linen, she petted a small gray cat that sprawled at her side. Feline and mistress stretched, languorous in the rising heat; the courtesan, at least, reveled in the trickle of cool air flowing from the malqaf grille overhead. “Give me a vial of poison,” she said offhandedly. “I will put it in his wine tonight.”

  A frown creased Husayn’s forehead. “You? You think you can succeed where better men have failed?”

  “Of course. Did the Emir trust these ‘better men’ of yours enough to sleep in their presence, or to eat and drink what their servants prepared? He trusts me this much and more.”

  The eunuch stopped; ebony beads ticked together as he ran them through his manicured fingers, a sound like thoughts falling into place. He glanced over at Safia. “Intriguing,” he said. “You can do this?”

  The courtesan’s eyes turned to daggers as she caught the unspoken implication of his question. “I may be a woman, eunuch, but do not mistake me for the frail and retiring flowers of your master’s harem! Your fearsome Emir would not be the first man I’ve killed, nor will he be the last!”

  “Intriguing, indeed,” Husayn said, his fine brows knitted in thought.

  Safia returned her attention to rubbing the cat’s stomach, listening to its throaty purr, and ignoring the eunuch as he paced to the arched doorway of the sitting room. Beyond lay the courtesan’s bedchamber, its incenses and perfumes barely masking the musky stench of sex. She would send for her girls, after a while, and instruct them to tidy it up in advance of Assad’s return, to decorate in red and yellow silks and candles of crimson tallow. Tonight, she would greet this Assassin, this Emir, naked and glistening with fragrant oils. Safia lay back; eyes closing, she reveled in the moisture and heat that flared between her thighs. And after I’ve taken my pleasure, he will die.

  She heard Husayn turn. “If you are serious about this, I have an appropriate concoction already distilled, though it must be mixed with a more savory wine than usual to hide its—”

  A noise interrupted him: a soft slish, like silk parting under the keen edge of a knife. Then, silence. Safia waited for the eunuch to resume. Merciful Allah! They clipped his good manners when they clipped his balls. “Hide what? Its taste?” She sat up just as Husayn’s head slid from his shoulders; her eyes bulged at the sight of whitish vertebrae cleanly exposed and leaking marrow, at the twin jets of bright blood pumping from the severed arteries of his neck. The eunuch’s head struck the marble tiles—a pulpy sound not unlike a melon dropped from a table’s edge—while his body remained erect a moment longer, even taking a staggering step toward her before collapsing.

  Safia found her voice, screaming as Assad emerged from the shadow of her bedchamber. He stepped over the eunuch’s twitching corpse with murder in his eyes and a ribbon of blood dripping from the blade of his salawar.

  “Why … why are y-you here?” She scrambled to rise, her eyes wide with terror; beside her, the cat hissed and shot off the couch. “Why—”

  Without breaking stride Assad caught her by the throat, lifted her bodily from the divan, and slammed her against the wall. Another piercing shriek escaped around the iron fingers holding Safia aloft.

  “Scream all you like. I’ve silenced your slaves, and who outside these walls would care what sounds come from the house of a harlot?”

  She clawed at his hand. “W-why are you d-doing this? He … he was my physician!” Assad leaned closer, his scarred face merciless. He touched the tip of his salawar to her cheek. Safia shrank from the contact, trembling, then crying out as tendrils of soul-wrenching hate imprisoned in that accursed blade wormed like maggots into her skull. “There is no God but God,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.

  Assad ignored her prayer. “Your physician was a dog I should have put down months ago. This is the day of your death, Safia, but you have a choice: answer me truthfully, tell me all you know, and your death will be swift and without pain. Or continue lying to me, and I promise you, you will linger in agony. The choice is yours.”

  Her eyes flew open. “Please, Assad! I—”

  “Choose.” The Emir of the Knife pressed the blade into her cheek; his own eyes gleamed like chips of frosted obsidian.

  “What … what d-do you wish to know?”

  4

  Safia went easily, in the end, dying as the muezzin called for the noon prayer. Assad stood over her body, its beauty unmarred save for the narrow wound beneath her left breast where a knife thrust had stilled her heart; he wiped clotted bl
ood from his salawar using a scrap of cloth torn from the hem of her burnoose, then sheathed it. He glanced from Safia to the eunuch’s headless corpse. The vizier had more eyes in Palmyra than he would have imagined, at least a dozen, and all of them focused on him. Such ferocious determination to live was rare in the enemies of al-Hashishiyya, who often took no precautions beyond prayer—preferring instead to leave their fate in the hands of Allah.

  A man with the will to live made Assad’s work more of a challenge. So be it! He would accommodate the wretched fool. He would change his plans; leave for Baghdad today rather than at the end of the month. But first—he glanced from body to body.

  Assad was no stranger to killing even before he pledged himself to the Hidden Master of Alamut; he learned the art in the iron crucible of Palestine, fighting against the Frankish invaders who had seized Jerusalem. What his brothers of al-Hashishiyya taught him was to kill silently, quickly, and without remorse. Still, he felt a pang of sadness as he carried Safia’s body out into the garden, where it would join that of Husayn and her three household slaves—along with wads of blood-soaked linen—at the bottom of the cistern that fed the fountain. Despite her treachery, she’d been a pleasant companion. Yet, pleasant or not, Safia had chosen her path.

  Assad said nothing as he knelt and eased her over the cistern’s brick-lined edge; he offered no benediction as she splashed into the water with the others, made no prayer as he levered the wooden cover back into place. With any luck it would be days before anyone discovered their whereabouts.

  Assad did not linger. From the courtesan’s villa he made his way south, to the most ancient quarter of the city. Afternoons brought a sense of indolence to the streets of Palmyra as men of all walks sought a cool drink and shade from the ferocious heat of the Syrian desert. Shops closed; stalls shuttered in the bazaar as men lounged under striped awnings, in courtyards, and in gardens. Women sweltered in their harems.