Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  Baptiste clung desperately to the belief that he was doing the right thing, but as more men died in Ismaïl’s awful game, he knew he could have stopped it, could have brought at least some of the needless deaths to an end. Was not one man’s death better than three? Of course it was not fair, but what did fair matter? He simply didn’t know how to combat a man so brilliant, bloodthirsty, and mad. The priest affirmed to him that suicide was wrong, murder was wrong. All the blood was on Ismaïl’s hands. “Rejoice in your suffering,” he said, “for it is the will of the Lord.”

  The deaths mounted along with the nightmares, and finally he could take no more. He would do it. The emperor would declare victory, and it would be over.

  It was an Abyssinian who had slacked in his labors and needed killing, a tall and lanky slave with an easy smile that remained on his face even after his head was parted from his shoulders. After it was done, Baptiste stood there, bloody sword in hand, chest heaving but face composed, acutely aware of the emperor’s scrutiny, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing into his soul, determined not to show the revulsion that would surely cause Ismaïl to order him to do it again.

  The imperial cackle of glee was followed by a call for the scribe to produce the scroll. Courtiers and bokhaxa and townspeople streamed into the courtyard, watching intently as the scribe rolled open the parchment.

  “ ‘The engineer shall strike a fatal blow only after eighteen men have died,’“ the scribe read. “So it is written.”

  “Alas, it was nineteen, by our count,” Ismaïl said. “A pity, yet lucky for someone, we suppose. Were it seventeen, one more would have to die. Perhaps the next revelation will be more precise.” He stared at Baptiste. “Though we saw this in the scroll, you stand poorly in our estimation, Engineer,” he said. “Were your convictions true, a thousand men would have died. A thousand times a thousand. Are you so easily swayed from your course?” He laughed, and returned to the palace, and the scroll was returned to its niche. Baptiste went to the wall where men relieved themselves and was violently ill.

  So it is written. So he had done. Was it merely a lucky guess? Or was he so easily read? Was it his fault those men had died? Had he been less stubborn, would a dozen men be alive today? Should he have held fast, no matter the cost?

  His nightmares did not leave him. They burned hotter, fired by the Abyssinian’s smile. He awakened screaming, another prisoner restraining him.

  “It is over,” the prisoner said. “He has had his way with you, Engineer. It is over.”

  But it was not over. It was only the beginning. Atigny had been right.

  He toys with men.

  More deaths followed, three in a week, then none for a fortnight, then three more. With each new trial, Baptiste could not help himself, seeking refuge in quiet, hopeless refusal. Each time, three men died instead of one. Moulay Ismaïl appeared to draw strength from the contest of wills, and from the act of murder. He tested new weapons: a German war hammer or a Turkish crescent blade with a hook or a Scottish lance that could skewer three men with one thrust. He seemed genuinely fascinated by the effect each death had upon Baptiste, whose suffering he contrived slowly, endlessly, with a thousand variations.

  “Why do you do this to me, Majesty?” Baptiste asked one day when they were walking in an orchard. “My death would mean nothing. Why will you not show the compassion of the Prophet and release me to my God?”

  Moulay Ismaïl picked an apricot and the juice ran down his chin and into his beard. “Because it pleases us,” he said. “Because we enjoy bending such a man as yourself to our will. Because we may one day bring you to the grace and true light of Islam. Because you can see things in your head that are not yet there. Like myself, you are truly a man among men, though your flaws are deep and your courage weak. Yet do not despair: We shall release you when the new reception rooms are complete,” he said earnestly

  “Does it say that in the scroll, Majesty?”

  The emperor smiled and there was no answer in his eyes.

  The scroll unrolled slowly, accurately, as the scribe recited the litany of the engineer’s actions: He would kill, he would waver, he would try a trick, he would act, he would fail to act, always trying to prevent a death, never succeeding.

  The shock of white hair on Baptiste’s head spread. His eyes were rheumy from lack of sleep. Time passed and men died and Meknes grew and he brooded and worked. When the reception rooms were completed, the emperor found another reason to delay his release.

  With eight of his men Baptiste spent eleven months digging a tunnel out of the metamore. They labored all day for the emperor and all night for escape, labored until their hands were bloody and their knees raw and their bodies near collapse. There was no difficulty disposing of the dirt they removed from the tunnel. Six months of the year they lived and slept in water, fed by underground springs swollen by runoff from the snows of the High Atlas. They emptied the dirt into the water where it was washed away, leaving no trace for the guards to discover. They bribed merchants for information about where to go and how to hide, and paid extortionate sums for moth-eaten peasant robes. They broke through on a perfect autumn night, the ideal season because the seventy-mile journey to the sea could be undertaken without extremes of heat or cold. Moving only at night and in single file, they were three days and fifteen difficult miles from Meknes when a shepherd encountered them and raised the alarm. All shepherds were vigilant, because the emperor made them pay for any slaves escaping past their villages. It was another four days and seventeen miles before the dogs caught up with them, followed by mounted bokhaxa. Of eight men who followed the engineer out of the tunnel, five made it back to Meknes alive.

  The surviving five men were summoned before Moulay Ismaïl, who in turn summoned his scribe to bring the scroll.

  “ ‘The engineer shall attempt escape.’ So it is written.”

  The emperor clapped his hands merrily. “We are so pleased Allah has blessed you with continued life!” he cried. He ordered Baptiste’s companions killed, a days-long ordeal of impalings and boilings. “A pity your compatriots were not of your measure! If only they had had your skills, perhaps we might have spared them! Ah, if only we had a thousand men like us, Engineer, men with our vision and your eye, Versailles itself would be but a poor pebble on the golden road to Meknes!”

  “Release me to death,” the engineer begged.

  “Ah, but there is a lifetime of work for us,” Ismaïl said. “Ten lifetimes of work. Regard our progress,” he said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the glories of his capital. “We must both live a long while, yes, Engineer?”

  “I have no desire to live, Majesty.”

  “Regrettable,” said Ismaïl. He brightened. “Yet we see one path to your release.”

  “Sire?”

  “Abandon your false religion and accept Muhammad as the messenger of God.”

  “Never,” replied the Engineer with more conviction than he felt. “Never.”

  “We shall see, Engineer,” said Ismaïl happily. “We shall see what is written.” Just then Ismaïl saw a slave whose foot had been crushed in an accident and could no longer carry bricks. “For today, Engineer, will you kill for us?”

  Baptiste tried something new. “Better to build, Majesty. He is a master of tile; he can work without feet. Let him die naturally while laboring for your vision. Let him die completing this monument to your glory.”

  The emperor roared with laughter and the cripple was spared and the scroll was prescient: ” ‘The engineer shall preserve a life through an ingenious if transparent artifice.’ So it is written.”

  “So, Engineer,” Ismaïl asked. “Is life fate, or is it hope?” Baptiste had no answer, but a similar ruse the next week failed and two men died, both at the hand of Baptiste. He was killing more often now. He prayed the emperor would grow bored with their game, but Moulay Ismaïl showed no sign of it.

  “Rejoice in your suffering,” said the priest.

  Ba
ptiste became fond of a boy, a runner who carried messages between posts, bare feet flying over red clay. The boy was skinny and black and had big eyes and tight curly hair and stared at the engineer’s drawings with delighted curiosity. The engineer let him make marks of his own and the boy thought it was wonderful magic. He had an aptitude for numbers and letters, and each day, while he was waiting for instruction to be carried, learned something new.

  One day Ismaïl said, “We hear that you have befriended a boy.”

  Baptiste felt a sickness in his belly. Of course, Tafari, his bokhaxa, had reported everything. He shrugged indifferently. “Simply a runner, Majesty. He carries messages for the overseers.”

  “Whom do you love better, Engineer? The boy, or us?”

  Baptiste was sick that he had not turned the boy away. Now no matter which way he answered, there was danger. If he said the boy, Moulay Ismaïl would surely order the boy killed. If he said “You, Majesty,” the emperor would surely believe that impossible and order the boy killed anyway. How to make Ismaïl do nothing?

  “Neither, Majesty. My God tells me to love all men equally.”

  “You are a fool, to think Allah puts an emperor at the same level as a slave boy,” Ismaïl said angrily. The engineer knew he had doomed the child, but a month passed, and another, and still the boy ran messages between posts. He began to relax, but never again showed the boy any kindness.

  And then one day Ismaïl saw the boy and held out his lance. “Will you kill for us today, Engineer?”

  Baptiste’s eyes watered. “Sire, no...please. Better to let him serve you. He is an excellent runner—”

  “It would please us.” Six men died before Baptiste killed the boy.

  It happened again six months later. He merely laughed at something a master mason said. Tafari saw, and the man quickly became a pawn in the endless match, another salted head to grace the walls. The engineer withdrew from the company of other men. He talked to himself and made his drawings and his streak of light hair grew. At night, when sleep would not come, he summoned visions of his family. He told his children Andre and Annabeile to marry well and to have many children who might honor their grandfather, a simple king’s engineer who had become a killer as his life unraveled on a scroll. Then fitful sleep would come, along with the nightmares. The snake would crawl on his belly and stare into his eyes, but never take him.

  “You have won the game. Why do you continue to torment me?” They were atop a tower, surveying the city’s defenses, Ismaïl, as usual, oblivious of Baptiste’s sufferings, fascinated only by the grand works at their feet.

  “Why, to see the outcome of the scroll, of course,” said Ismaïl.

  “Did you not write it? Do you not know how it ends?”

  “Allah wrote it; I merely copied it down. Naturally I know what it says,” said Ismaïl. “But you do not.”

  “What matter that I know? Does any man know his destiny?”

  “It does not matter that you know,” Moulay Ismaïl said thoughtfully. “Only what you do.”

  Each time Baptiste passed the palace gate he stared at the scroll. He longed to tear it down, to read it and be quit of it, but the guard was wary and besides, he did not really want to know what was written there. He knew only that the scroll had reduced him to an animal, depraved and devoid of humanity, stripped of dignity and free will. He knew only that galloping horses brought death. He knew only the stench and misery of the metamore and that Meknes was a coarse hell built of dung and mud and death. Sleep would not come fully, and neither would madness. He feared he was going to live to be very old, building and killing for the emperor.

  He knew he was a coward. He feared death more than life and he feared Moulay Ismaïl more than God. God’s wrath would come later, while Moulay Ismaïl’s was now. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing, he mused, to accept this station. Must not the priest be right, that all this suffering was truly the will of God? Perhaps there was a greater purpose at hand, and he was too simpleminded to understand it. Perhaps he was meant to survive and to build, to do the bidding of those greater than himself, men ordained by—God? Allah?—to rule other men. Moulay Ismaïl claimed nothing more than the divine right of kings. Who was Baptiste to question? What did the wretched lives of endless slaves mean, anyway?

  And then, when the justifications had begun to nibble at the edges of his conscience, the emperor would greet him on a fine morning with the refrain, “Will you kill for us today, Engineer?” and it would be some innocent, someone he knew or perhaps a complete stranger, and it would plunge him again toward the precipice of madness.

  Ismaïl could read his face and knew when it was time for another solemn promise. “We shall free you next spring,” he said. And Baptiste worked and he killed and he waited for the spring. But spring would come and there would be no freedom. “Not just now, Engineer, for we have need of a new pavilion. Complete it, and we shall release you in the fall.” Despite the passing seasons, the engineer never lost hope.God has a plan. He will free me when it serves His purpose.

  As much as he tried to believe that, he did not cease resistance. He sabotaged one of the lime kilns that fed the insatiable demand for bricks. He did it cleverly so that it could be traced to no man, using bricks to channel a stream of super-hot air to a position on the upper rear of the kiln so that the wall would fail. He planned it for days, visualizing it in his mind, then sketching it out in the mud where he slept, then stooping to examine the interior of the kiln when he pretended to be inspecting bricks, his practiced eye gauging the thickness and resiliency of the wall, then seeing to the reordering of the bricks when the kiln was cleaned, doing it all under the watchful but ignorant eye of Tafari. It would take at least a day of heat, he knew, before the failure would occur. The kiln supplied four hundred men working on the western side of a new palace wall. A steady stream of men fed it clay and straw and took away brick. Its loss might slow the emperor for only an hour or a day, or at most five days. Perhaps the emperor might not even notice. But he would know it had been done.

  The kiln failed precisely as planned. Special clay had to be imported from Fez for the repair, bringing construction to a halt for nearly a week. The emperor had been away but upon his return immediately visited the kiln, his features twisted in fury and suspicion at the ill fortune. He waved off Baptiste’s earnest and scientific explanations of structure failure caused by heat, saying that in fifteen years of building such a failure had never occurred, but he did not accuse the engineer of sabotage, either—at least not directly. He called for the scroll, which itself was unclear. “ ‘Peculiar events shall occur, traceable to no man,’“ read the scribe.

  Baptiste was pleased to have fooled fate, but Ismaïl was not satisfied. As no one man could be deemed responsible, all were held responsible. The fourteen men working the kiln at the time of its collapse were burned alive in the new kiln, to remind everyone that any slowing of the work would not be tolerated. The engineer could smell the results of his handiwork for a week, as the hot summer sun and still air held the terrible odors close. In the metamore he thrashed and moaned and awakened each morning drenched in the sweat of night terror. For the first time in his life, he could remember his nightmares, none of which surpassed his waking hours.

  Interminable days dragged to months, and the months crept into years. He did not count the days, for that was a torture of extended self-mortification. He plodded numbly on, sustained by thoughts of his family. His wife would be in her mid-forties now. They had known each other as children and married on his first leave. Her beauty grew in his memory. Sometimes at night she came to him and loved him, as he lay alone on his mat in the metamore. The faces of his children remained clear to him, locked in time. His daughter’s dimple, his son’s shock of white hair. Annabelle would be in the full flower of her mother’s beauty now, married and with children, while Andre, such a mirror of his father, would be fighting the king’s wars. He imagined their lives and prayed for their happiness and found him
self wondering if the scroll foretold of his reunion with them. He cursed the thought: how could he believe in the scroll?

  Two or three times a month a trumpet would sound from the parapets, signaling the arrival of new blood. He would climb onto a wall and watch as the caravan arrived. Always it was the same: fifty or a hundred or more trudging through the gate to feed the ravenous beast of Meknes: men for the works, women for the harems, children for the future. Some wore rags, others the remnants of fine clothing, everyone exhausted, hungry, and afraid. Alongside the slaves marched the redemptionist fathers, permitted to travel to Meknes to negotiate the release of certain of the slaves. Money sometimes came from prisoners’ relatives, and sometimes from compassionate strangers in Spain or France or England, eager to free their wretched countrymen from the curse of slavery. The fathers would enter into difficult and protracted negotiations, often directly with the emperor himself, whose coffers were endlessly depleted by his building. Thus the cycle continued: a thousand men would stream through the gates of Meknes, and a score would hobble away.