Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  Baptiste watched them coming. He wondered which of them would die at his hand, and whether one day he might march out with those freed. Might that not be the end in the scroll? He doubted it. No ransom was worth an emperor’s game, no price worth the loss of an engineer. Besides, he could not get a message to his family. The redemptionists knew that Ismaïl had a special interest in him, and that to carry a message would be to condemn others. His only hope of freedom was madness or death. And so he killed and built and Meknes flourished, a bright city rising from the desert sands as the scroll of his life slowly unwound.

  The city and its palace grew. There were minarets and walls, barracks and banquet halls, towers and a Jewish quarter, and magnificent stables for the horses. Oh, to be so lucky as the horses! He expanded their quarters, where each animal was tended by two slaves. He was everywhere in the town and the palace, always accompanied by Tafari, his watcher, building, directing, sketching, his labor the only release from his torments. On those days when ordered to kill, he would set the drawings aside and give no more orders, but plunge his own hands into the mortar of lime and blood and sand. Like the meanest slave he would carry buckets on shoulder poles and climb ladders until his feet bled, set bricks for doorways with his own hands, work until his back was breaking from the effort, work until the sun blistered his skin and he became faint from exhaustion, work until he collapsed and the overseers carried him to the metamore, where he would be lowered on the rope to the place below hell, to spend another tortured night with serpents and skulls in the blackness of his dreams.

  Death came frequently, but not for him.

  On a spring day the Algerians attacked Tezzo, two days from Fez. Moulay Ismaïl gathered some of the Christian prisoners, men long familiar with war and tactics, and promised that if they would help repel the enemy, he would free them. To Baptiste’s surprise he was allowed to accompany the others, with Tafari always nearby. They spent hot bloody months in the desert and performed brilliantly and he sat as he once had in the midst of battle, oblivious to enemy fire and untouched by it as he helped devise victory. The emperor’s enemies were vanquished. Upon their return to Meknes, many Christians were released, but not Baptiste. “ ‘The engineer shall perform great services to the empire of Morocco. A favor shall be granted him by a beneficent monarch.’ So it is written.”

  “Your time will come,” Moulay Ismaïl told the dejected engineer as the scribe departed. “Not today. How desolate my city would look without your services! Such plans we have! Such work to be done! Such a favor you shall find tonight!”

  After dusk he was summoned out of the metamore and allowed the chance to bathe. They led him to a gate near the inner palace, where he smelled perfume and oil. A pear-shaped eunuch led him through a succession of corridors to a room lit with candles and smelling of incense. An Italian slave girl awaited him. An emperor’s gift, the first woman he had seen in twelve years. He touched her skin and cried. He could do nothing with her, which terrified her because if she failed to give him pleasure, she was to be maimed or killed, and they lay together and whispered a lie they would tell, and the night passed without fulfillment.

  In the morning she was gone, and later the scribe read from the scroll: “ ‘The engineer shall remain chaste in face of temptation.’ So it is written.” Ismaïl thought his chastity hugely funny. Baptiste heard later that the girl had been put to death. His only consolation was that he had not been her killer. Or had he?

  One day Baptiste was approached by a corrupt and greasy caid named Yaya, whose right ear bore a jeweled ring and whose appetite for profit was limitless. He knew that Baptiste often earned money by manipulating prisoners’ work assignments. He himself had shared some of that money. He had devised an ingenious plan for Baptiste to escape. For a certain price, he said, he could arrange to have another prisoner fall from the wall into one of the lime pits, making it appear that it was Baptiste who had fallen, while seeing Baptiste safely away in the cart of a Jew who pickled heads for the emperor’s walls. The lime would make it impossible to verify the victim’s identity. The emperor would believe that his engineer had simply succumbed to one of the inevitable hazards of the walls.

  “I will not make another man pay with his life to save my own,” he said. Yaya laughed. “You do so every day, Engineer. But, very well, we shall use a man who is already dead. Not a difficult thing to arrange here.”

  “How shall we fool the bokhaxa? Tafari watches me every moment.”

  “He may be incorruptible, your watcher, but it is not so with all of them. Fear not. On the day it is to happen Tafari will be drugged. His replacement, a man I know well, will be watching from below when you inspect the wall. He will swear to your death.”

  Baptiste thought it through carefully. It was a reasonable plan. As for the deaths that the emperor had decreed would follow his own, he had come to learn the futility of his efforts to spare other men. The emperor’s caprice, not to mention his scroll, thwarted his every effort to outwit the fates. If men were to die, they were to die, and he could not prevent it. He had to try.

  He had money but needed a great deal more. The caid had many to bribe. Baptiste spent months earning every sou he could. For the first time in his long captivity he found himself climbing out of the night pit with eagerness, with hope.

  On the appointed day, that hope soared: for the first time, Tafari was not there to greet him. Anotherbokhaxa stood in his place, a man whose expression plainly conveyed he was a conspirator. The pit of lime and mortar was in exactly the right place. The substitute body, a Breton who had died the previous day, was already in place atop the wall. The cart in which he was to hide was stationed near a gate. Overseers and their slaves were working nearby, none close enough to see anything.

  Baptiste began ascending the ladder, when he heard the thunder of horses galloping down the corridor. He cursed, but knew it might mean a delay of only an hour or two, as he satisfied the emperor’s curiosity about some matter of building, or killed a man, or did some other thing to fulfill what had been written in the scroll.

  As it happened, the emperor wanted only to inspect one of the battlements. It took one uneventful hour. The emperor was about to depart when he paused. “Ah, we almost forgot, Engineer,” he said. “We have a gift for you.” One of the bokhaxa stepped forward, extending an oilskin packet.

  “A gift?”

  “A small gem. A token of our esteem for your services, which we know are not always given with the greatest enthusiasm.”

  Warily, Baptiste took the packet. “But first,” the emperor said, “we must hear from our scribe.” Baptiste’s pulse quickened.

  “ ‘There shall be a subterfuge, coupled with betrayal,’“ the scribe read, and Baptiste felt his head pounding and his knees weakening. “So it is written.”

  The emperor nodded at the packet. Dumbly, Baptiste’s fingers worked at the ties. There was indeed a gem, along with the ear to which it had been attached. His knees gave out and he sank to the dirt, the packet dropping from his hand.

  The emperor laughed. “Had you only asked us, surely we could have arranged the same end for less money,” he said, and his face went dark in madness, just as it did when men died. “You must not presume upon our very good nature, Engineer.”

  “Was it not written in the scroll that I should do this thing?” Baptiste asked dully. “How could I be wrong to act in the manner ordained for me?”

  Ismaïl laughed and clapped his hands. “Ah! An inspired riposte! You have come to see that your path has indeed been written. We are making grand progress.” He clapped again and thebokhaxa who had taken Tafari’s place was dragged into the square. His genitals were tied to a cord, the other end of which was attached to the harness of a mule. The mule’s trainer was delicate and entertained the crowd for nearly an hour, but then the mule responded too exuberantly to one prod, and it was over. Baptiste was forced to watch, and when the man at last died Baptiste felt nothing at all. He watched again as the Jewish p
ickler’s head was added to the walls—without, of course, having been pickled. The emperor would have to see to a new craftsman.

  “Rejoice in your suffering,” the priest told him. “God’s will be done.”

  Baptiste assigned himself to work in one of the mud pits where bricks were mixed with straw. He swung the mattock furiously, trying to force the images from his mind. He heard the thunder of hooves and did not turn to meet them, but kept working. A moment later, he stood shoulder to shoulder with the emperor himself, royal arms plunged deep in the muck. Ismaïl talked about building and architecture, and about the infidel Sun King and his pathetic Versailles, whose deficiencies were being reported to him by his ambassadors, and of the properties of masonry and the difference between the mud of France and the mud of Morocco. The emperor shouted orders and pointed and commanded and worked hard, his back bent like that of a common laborer, and Baptiste noticed that his neck was stretched like that of a common man as well. He realized he could sever that neck with the simple mattock in his hands, and so bring an end to the sufferings of fifty thousand men. He felt the eyes of Tafari and the other bokhaxa upon him, but even so knew he could do it in one stroke. He closed his eyes to summon his strength, and as the muscles moved to obey, the emperor had had enough labor and stepped from the pit and the moment was gone. Ismaïl allowed himself to be washed and toweled, all the while watching Baptiste with an enigmatic smile. He beckoned for the scribe and ordered him to fetch the scroll. “ ‘The engineer shall let a moment for revenge pass unconsummated.’ So it is written.”

  Ismaïl laughed uproariously. “Such an opportunity comes but once in a lifetime,” he said. “A pity to waste it.” Baptiste knew that the emperor had known when the scroll would say it was time for this test and had deliberately offered himself to Baptiste’s blade. Yet, as with all his other tests, he had failed.

  It occurred to Baptiste that he might stem the killing simply by building faster and better than ever before. If the emperor saw progress equal to his dreams, if the emperor was accommodated in every respect, it might stay his sword, or his desire that the engineer wield it for him. He casually suggested a new reception hall where Ismaïl might receive and entertain ambassadors and dignitaries, a room equal to Ismaïl’s stature in the world, a spectacular complex with not only a banquet hall but also a large open courtyard with twelve pavilions, each covered with intricate tiles and mosaics. Ismaïl loved the idea. Baptiste devoted himself to it. He saw to the transport of marble from the nearby Roman ruins of Volubilis. Carpenters cut olive wood for ornate inlaid panels. The walls bore engravings boasting of the accomplishments of the emperor who raised them. Marvelously complex mosaics graced the twelve pavilions, each more magnificent than the last. The complex rose more quickly than any other in memory, and on his regular inspections, the emperor pronounced it grand and to his liking. For months it went on, through a winter and a spring, and in those months the engineer was immersed in his work as never before. As he had hoped, fewer men died, and for sixty days, none at all by his hand. The scroll remained in its niche.

  A sumptuous banquet was held when the hall was completed, attended by governors and ambassadors who sampled the delights of Ismaïl’s kitchens and were entertained by his musicians and the dance of forty slave girls. Baptiste could only imagine the success of the event, for he spent the evening huddled in his night pit. The next morning Ismaïl pronounced himself displeased because the whole of the hall did not exceed the sum of the parts. He ordered the complex destroyed. Within a week, Baptiste’s triumph was rubble, to be used for other buildings. The engineer was invited to kill six of the fourteen overseers who had carried out his orders. “They did not live up to your talent,” said Moulay Ismaïl. “Won’t you kill them for us, Engineer?”

  He could think of nothing else to do. Whether he worked quickly or slowly, whether he built well or poorly, whether he resisted or gave in, the emperor’s game went on; only the scroll seemed to hold the answer to what would come next. Incidents varied but nothing changed. Imperial horses raced down long corridors. Swords flashed and heads flew, and men lived and died as buildings were created and destroyed, all for royal whimsy. The palace walls grew inexorably, meter after meter, thick and heavy, filled with the flesh and bones of the men who worked them. Meknes was splendid indeed.

  “Thank God for your suffering,” the priest told him. “It is glorious to endure for the true faith.”

  And then one morning, after a slave had died and the scroll had been read, the scribe whispered something to the emperor.

  “The entries in your scroll have come to an end,” Moulay Ismaïl said. “There is but one further entry.”

  Baptiste went numb.

  “Do you not care to guess what it is?”

  “The truth,” said Baptiste after a pause. “It does not matter, so long as it is the end.”

  The emperor laughed and announced that the scroll’s final entry would be read a week hence, after morning prayer.

  Baptiste returned to his walls. He looked at no man and shut out the thunder of hooves. For the first time in his long captivity, he refused himself hope, and he refused himself despair. There was only an end.

  What he did hear on a Saturday morning was the sounding of the trumpet and the clanking of chains as a caravan arrived from Sallee. It was the second that week; hunting had been good for the corsairs. There were the usual ambassadors and merchants among the donkeys and camels, all stirring up a great cloud of dust, and redemptionist fathers bearing their purses and petitions, while beside and behind them trudged the new crop of prisoners and their guards. A hundred in, five out, in the awful math that was Meknes. Baptiste cared little for studying a new miserable stream of humanity entering perdition, so he merely glanced down at the procession, returning his focus to the line of a new wall. But something caught his attention. He felt light tentacles of dread and looked again, peering through the cloud of dust that rose over the procession. His eyes scanned the faces.

  There.

  Near the end, behind one of the guards, a shock of white hair in a head of black. He stared, fearing the worst, until there was no mistaking.

  Andre! My son! Dear God, please let my eyes be deceiving me!

  But there was no mistake; looking at his son was like looking at his own reflection. And then Andre looked to the wall, his face bright and unmistakable, and he saw his father, and he waved and yelled, his voice barely audible: “Father! Father! It is I! Andre! Father!”

  Baptiste all but imperceptibly shook his head, cautioning his son to silence, but Andre only yelled louder. “Father!” And then his voice was lost in the tumult and his face in the crowd, and he disappeared round the corner.

  Baptiste stood dead still, unable to move, barely able to breathe. Mind reeling, he turned slowly and saw Tafari. Watching, as always. He had witnessed the exchange as father saw son, and son father. His great round face betrayed nothing, but it was done.

  “Please.” Baptiste’s voice was barely a whisper. “Have mercy upon a poor father. Have mercy upon his son. Say nothing. I beg you.” He took a purse from his sash and pressed it into the incorruptiblebokhaxa’s hand. Tafari let it fall to the ground, his face stone.

  Baptiste sank to his knees and slumped on the wall. Of course, the watcher would inform the emperor.

  Baptiste knew the final entry in the scroll.

  His son was going to die, at his father’s hand.

  * * * *

  Courtiers and ambassadors hurried to get a good place, to see the reading for themselves, to hear proof once again of the emperor’s sagacity. Only a true son of Muhammad could have such power of prophecy.

  The emperor sent Tafari to fetch the prisoner, who along with the other Christians was enjoying the comfort of their infidel priests on that Sunday morning.

  “We are informed the son of the engineer has come with the caravan from Sallee,” Ismaïl said. “Bring him forward.”

  The court fell to a hush as twobokhaxa e
scorted the Frenchman into the emperor’s presence. He came not from among the slaves, but from among the redemptionists. He was not a prisoner, but a petitioner.

  “You have come to negotiate the freedom of your father,” Ismaïl said.

  “Yes, Majesty,” Andre said, his speech carefully prepared. Moulay Ismaïl was well known to confiscate ransoms and renege on arrangements. “We pray your beneficence, having brought a ransom for his release. We are certain that—”

  Moulay Ismaïl impatiently waved him to silence. “For this man, it matters not what you have brought. It matters only what is written in the scroll. We shall soon see what the fates hold for your father.”

  The bokhaxa returned, his features ashen.

  “Where is the engineer?” demanded the emperor.

  Tafari fell to his face. “Forgive me, Majesty. He is dead.”

  The emperor’s color went dark and his eyes flashed red as his rage built. “How did this come to pass?”