The Anubis Gates

The humiliating misfortune had caused the immediate termination of the interview, and Hassan and his brothers-in-law Ameen and Hathi had left the Citadel and ridden back toward their boat at Boolak, but in this square by the Mustee there had occurred a further disaster: the burly beggar known as Eshvlis, whose large, wood-framed placard proclaimed him a deaf-mute, was a little slow in scrambling to his feet and getting out of the Mamelukes’ way, and a projecting nail on his placard caught in a fold of Hassan’s embroidered robe and tore a wide rent in it, exposing the outraged Mameluke’s thigh.

Hassan had roared a blasphemous curse, reached around and snatched the ivory inlaid hilt of his sword, and in one lightning motion drew the yard of gleaming steel and whirled it in a torso-splitting arc at the beggar.

But quick as a mongoose Doyle had dropped to all fours in the dust, so that though the blade shattered his begging sign, it flashed harmlessly over him, missing the top of his head by several inches—and before the surprised Mameluke could raise the sword again, Doyle sprang up at him, seized the grip of one of the horseman’s daggers and wrenched it free, and with it parried the weaker return stroke of the great sword.

Hathi had moved then, with a sort of indolent swiftness, reining his horse back and lifting the barrel of his sheathed rifle to hip level; and even as Ameen’s eyes widened with the realization of what Hathi was about to do, and he rode forward with a shout, Hathi pulled the trigger.

With a bang that echoed around the square the rifle had recoiled out of the sheath; Hathi’s battle-trained horse hadn’t jumped, but shook its head and flapped its lips in the sudden burst of smoke. Doyle finished a backward somersault face down on the paving stones, and a glistening red hole torn in the back of his robe quickly disappeared as flowing blood soaked the fabric.

“You villains!” Ameen had shouted then. “He was a beggar.” His voice conveyed the point that a beggar was not only no sword-worthy opponent but, in the Moslem view of things, an actual representative of Allah, with the job of demanding the alms every true believer was bound by duty to give.

The street took a jog to the left now, and beyond the shadowed shoulder of; a building Doyle could see, still a mile away, the minarets and sheer stone walls of the Citadel seeming to loom halfway to the sky on the top of the precipitous Mukattam Hill, and though the occasion that brought the Mamelukes to the fortress was nominally social—the appointment of Mohammed Ali’s son as a pashalik—the forbidding aspect of the tall edifice made Doyle glad that he and his companions were so well armed.

Ameen had assured him this morning that the mass arrest he expected, and was secretly fleeing to evade, would not take place at this banquet. “Relax, Eshvlis,” he had told Doyle as he drew the straps tight on the last of his trunks and peered out the window at the baggage-laden camels on the street below, “Ali is not insane. Though he will—and soon, I believe—curtail the unreasonable power of the Mamelukes, he’d never dare try to arrest all four hundred and eighty of the Beys as a lot, and while they’re armed. I think the real purpose of this banquet is to count his foes, make sure they’re all in the city, so that sometime tonight, before dawn, he can drag them drunk and unarmed out of their beds on some charge or other. Not that we don’t deserve exactly such treatment, as you with your bullet scar would be, if you weren’t so polite, the first to aver. But I am off for Syria this afternoon, and you are returning to your Eshvlis identity right after the banquet and leaving Cairo tomorrow morning, and so you and I will escape the net.”

Ameen had made it sound perfectly safe… And Doyle owed him his life, for it had been Ameen who had ordered Doyle’s bleeding body to be picked up and taken to the Moristan of Ka’aloon for medical attention, and two months later got him well started in the cobbling trade by demanding that Hassan pay him a hundred gold pieces for the repair of the broken shoe buckle. The torn robe had never been alluded to, and Hassan probably considered it paid for—by the two holes, entry and exit, in the cobbler’s hide.

Doyle frowned, and for just a moment wondered why none of these events were even hinted at in the Bailey biography of Ashbless. After all, they were just the sort of thing that would make a poet’s biography interesting: a brief career as a beggar, shot through the side by a Mameluke warlord, attending a royal banquet in disguise—and then he smiled, for of course he couldn’t tell Bailey these things, because Doyle was going to read the biography some day. And would you, he asked himself, have gone anywhere near that square if you’d known you’d be shot there that day?