by Tim Powers
The ranks of Mamelukes broke apart like a row of Japanese lanterns struck by fire hoses. Most of the Beys were slammed off their horses in the first couple of seconds, although even the ones who managed to draw their weapons had no visible enemy to attack except the clot of Albanians at the far end of the street. But the several Mamelukes—including, Doyle dazedly noticed, Hassan—who tried to charge at them were punched down by the ceaseless spray of lead before they’d taken five paces.
Though he’d felt several sharp tugs at his robe, after four whole seconds Doyle wasn’t hit yet, and to judge by the way Melboos sprang forward over a pile of the slain when a wall exploded by her flank, neither was she. Doyle’s cry of “God damn it, over the wall, horse!” was lost in the tumult, but the horse bounded ahead, scrambling and leaping over the heaped corpses that twitched as bullets thudded into them. A spent ricochet struck Doyle a solid knock above his left ear, and while he reeled in the lunging saddle three shots hit him almost simultaneously—one nicked his right arm bicep, one plowed a long furrow down his left thigh, and the third tore shallowly across his belly, helping him hang on by making him jack-knife forward onto the horse’s neck—and then Melboos was climbing the highest hill of corpses, at what he been the front of the procession, and from the top of it she vaulted up toward the rim of the wall, still an unmerciful eight feet above.
Doyle felt the catapulting power of her jump, and through smoke-stung eyes saw the wall rim loom closer—then he could see over it in the weightless moment of apogee. In an instant, he knew, gravity would tumble them back down into the raking crossfire—but the horse got her fore hooves onto the rim agile as a cat, replaced them with her hind hooves, and a moment later they were falling, all right, but outside the wall.
The horse fell head-first and Doyle rolled helplessly backward after having got a glimpse of a moat fifty feet below, and then he was plummeting unsupported downward, blinking in horror at the moat rushing up at him with shocking velocity.
The duration of the fall was torture, and twice on the way down Doyle emptied his lungs and sucked in a fresh breath to hold, though the eventual impact punched all the air out of him anyway, and banged his hands and knees against the stones at the bottom of the moat. As he rebounded, his feet swung back under him and he forced his legs to kick, propelling him back up through twenty-five feet of thickly swirling bubbles.
He rolled to the surface like something loosened from the bottom of a pot of boiling water, and then began thrashing weakly toward the high coping, where a man obviously interrupted in the process of urinating into the moat gaped at him for a moment and then rearranged his robes and fled. “Filthy damn slob!” Doyle sobbed after him. As soon as the fugitive cobbler had dragged his trembling and bleeding body out of the now dirtier than ever moat, he pulled off Ameen’s robes and weapons and tossed them—except for the sword, which he wrapped up in the unrolled turban and hung onto—in all directions, confident that the street beggars would make off with them. He found a nearby patch of sun-baked, powdery dirt and, naked except for his loincloth, rolled in it until he was dry—though far from clean. The bundled sword, he thought, would pass for a crutch inherited from a diseased ancestor.
“Melboos!” exclaimed a couple of shopkeepers who’d observed the whole performance, and until Doyle remembered that the word meant “clothed in divinity,” frenzied to madness by the perception of Allah, he thought they somehow knew the name of the horse, which had clambered out of the moat and was now being eyed avariciously by several members of the ragharin, the Egyptian gypsies. “Yes, take her!” Doyle croaked. “Avo, chals!” Though the day was hot, he shivered as he ran across the road and down a narrow lane, moving through alternate brightness and shade as he passed beneath the occasional wide cloths strung from building to building. It was only after he sat down in a recessed doorway and lowered his face into his hands that he realized he’d been weeping ever since he crawled out of the moat. He lifted his head and tried to stop it.
Laid like multiple exposures over the narrow, tan-colored street scene in front of him were images of the dozen seconds in the street of the Bab-el-Azab; now they demanded, almost audibly, his attention. He saw for the first time—his brain having only stored it unregarded before—the spray of blood and dust and bits of cloth exploding away from a horse and rider who were jigging violently in a particularly intense moment of the crossfire, both of them dead but kept upright and animate by the ceaseless upward-slanting blasts from either side… one quick glimpse of a face behind one of the gun barrels poking out of the wall, a face calmly intent on doing a moderately difficult job well… one Mameluke Bey, blinded and dying from a cross shot that had punched in one temple and out the other, standing on the pavement and swinging furious sword strokes at a blank section of wall during the few seconds between his horse’s death and his own …
Doyle wailed and pressed his forehead against the gritty stone of the doorway, provoking another exclamation of “Melboos?” from a boy carrying a water bag down the lane.
Doyle couldn’t hear very much over the ringing in his ears, but he saw the boy lope out of the street and flatten himself against the far wall, and a moment later a dozen white-skirted Albanian mercenaries rode down the lane, scrutinizing every person; and each of the twelve stared hard at the prodigiously dirty old beggar with awful mud-caked sores on his arm and leg and belly, sobbing and hugging a stick in a doorway. A couple of the mercenaries laughed, and one threw a coin at the wretch, but none of them stopped.
When they’d ridden around the next corner, Doyle picked up the coin, stood up, and waved to the water boy, who trotted over and let him have a drink from the neck of the goat-skin. Though warm and fetid, the water rinsed the taste of gunpowder out of his head, and made the horrid new memories recede enough that he could think of something else.
Well, Ameen, he thought dizzily, you were right on two counts—Ali sure enough did intend to sharply curtail the inordinate power of the Mamelukes, and he sure enough didn’t attempt to arrest four hundred and eighty fully armed Mameluke Beys—but you were wrong in thinking it was therefore safe to go to the banquet.
He was still shivering and sweating, and his arm was bleeding as freely as ever. I need clothes and medical attention, he thought—and maybe just a bit of revenge. There was a Mameluke place down by the Nile, the summer house of Mustapha Bey, where Mustapha’s sons and wives would be idling the day away. Doyle set off in that direction. He had some news and a proposal for them.
* * *
Though the sun had just set behind the Mukattam Hills, and just above the eastern horizon the moon stood out on the deep blue velvet of the sky like the print of an ash-dusted penny, the tops of the pyramids across the valley still shone with the ruddy gold of direct sunlight, and the colored lanterns on the ungainly wagon leaving the old quarter of the city were, for the next hour or so at least, more decorative than functional.
The gay ribbons and bells with which the wagon was lavishly adorned struck an incongruous note to the expressions of the six men who rode on it—their tight-lipped faces were set in hard lines of weariness, grief and, more than anything else, rage too deep to be vented by any speech or gestures. And in spite of its festive appearance, a sharp-eyed palace guard would have stopped them, for the rear wheels, which were most heavily disguised with woven garlands, cut a surprisingly deep pair of tracks in the dust, while the front wheels almost skated over it, and the wide carpet that flared out from the wagon’s stern and trailed on the ground seemed to be concealing something—but no guard would see it, for the six horses harnessed to it turned right on the old road to the Karafeh, the necropolis, rather than bearing left on the new one that ran to the Citadel.
“Yeminak,” said the man who rode up on the carpet-concealed hump of the wagon, just under the wide parasol, and the man at the reins obediently turned the horse off onto a path that slanted away to the right. “Slow now. I’ll know it when I see it.” He carefully scanned the tombs and headston
es scattered haphazardly over the low hills.
“There,” he said finally. “That place with the dome there. And just as I said, Tewfik, there don’t seem to be any guards. They certainly expect retaliation from the remaining Mamelukes, but they don’t expect it here.”
“I wanting more attacking the Citadel, professor,” growled the man at the reins. “Having head of Ali rest forever in public toilet if could I. But orders of him coming from this magic man I know. Him we killing certainly.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Doyle. “I hope Romanelli’s there too.”
“Yes.” Tewfik eyed the building that squatted in the dusk a hundred yards away. “Here?”
“You know these things better than I do. I’d say we should be close enough so that we can ride in right after the door’s blown.”
“But not so they see us make ready.” Tewfik nodded decisively. “Here.”
Doyle shrugged and climbed down, very carefully, for one arm was in a sling. He glanced up the slight rise at the building, and was chilled to see the doorkeeper—probably the same one he’d clubbed four months before—standing out front and watching them. “Hurry,” he said quietly. “They see us.”
“Is no harm from at distance of us,” said Tewfik, lifting a long pole from a slot in the wagon. He quickly stripped the ribbons from the length of it and then yanked a huge baby’s-face mask off the end of it. The pole now terminated in a thick wooden disk. “She be loaded already, only needing to be shove down tight again.” He tossed back a flap of the carpet covering the wagon’s central hump, exposing the yawning muzzle of a cannon, and rattled the disk-headed pole all the way down inside the barrel and bumped it twice, hard, against the ball at the bottom. “Good.” He drew it back out in three quick jerks and dropped it on the ground, then turned to the four others and barked something in Arabic.
One of them lit a cigar from a lantern swinging at the rear of the wagon and then strolled away puffing great clouds of smoke, engrossed, to all appearances, by the view of the Citadel a mile to the north. Another of the young Mamelukes flipped the carpet away from the breech end of the concealed cannon and began energetically whirling a ratcheted crank that slowly raised the breech and lowered the muzzle. Doyle glanced up the rise to see what the doorkeeper was making of all this, and saw the man hurry back inside and close the door.
“Hurry,” Doyle repeated.
The man by the breech ceased his cranking and called to the man with the cigar.
“Hurry, goddammit!” whispered Doyle shrilly, for the ground had begun to vibrate as if a note too deep to hear had been struck on some vast subterranean organ, and the cool evening air was suddenly sharp with a smell like garbage. He bent down and hastily set about unbuckling one of his borrowed shoes.
The man with the cigar began sprinting back toward the cannon but tumbled to the ground when a beam of green light lanced from the top of the dome and struck him. At the same time, the barrel of the carpet-draped cannon began, incredibly and with a loud squealing, to bend upward.
Doyle got his shoe off, flung it away and drew a dagger and, just as the beam flashed across the intervening ground toward the cannon, jabbed the dagger point into his bare heel and then slammed his foot to the ground.
Then they were all in the sickly green radiance, choking in a stench of wetly rotting vegetation, and Tewfik and the three other young Mamelukes dropped limply to the ground.
Against resistance, Doyle reached up and slapped a hand against the hot cannon barrel, and with more squealing and an agonizing increase in the heat of the metal it began to bend down straight again. With slow, wading steps he shambled toward the breech of the cannon, trailing his blistering fingertips along the barrel and being careful to drag his bleeding foot through the dirt—maintain the connection, he kept dazedly telling himself—and when he got there he unhooked one of the colored lanterns and crushed it against the powder-primed vent.
The paper lantern flared, caught fire, went out, and then a smoldering bit of the wick fell into the vent.
A moment later he was staring up into the darkening sky, wondering why he was lying flat on his back and why his face stung so, and wishing someone would answer at least a couple of the dozen telephones that were all ringing at once. He rolled his head and looked at what had, a few seconds ago, been Tewfik. There was still some bulk within the agitated heap of clothing, but most of the glistening, crab-like pieces into which Tewfik’s flesh had broken up had struggled free and were crawling away in random curlicues across the dirt. Doyle spasmed away in horror from the nearest of them and came up in a tense crouch, whimpering and scrabbling at the hilt of his borrowed sword and looking around wildly.
Smoke was still spilling up from the muzzle of the cannon, which was no longer concealed amid the wreckage of the makeshift wagon, and at the top of the rise the silhouette of the building had changed: the broad curve of the dome was shattered open like the shell of a huge egg. Doyle thought he could hear shouting, but with his abused ears he couldn’t be sure.
He drew his sword and ran awkwardly toward the door of the building, and when it opened he was only a dozen yards away and closing fast. He collided hard with the man in the doorway, and in his stunned state was not even surprised when the man’s head and right arm broke clean off; when they thudded on the floor he realized they were made of wax.
Three more of the wax men were just inside the doorway, two of them stumbling back as their disabled companion rebounded into them. Doyle parried a sword cut from the third and riposted with a punch of the hilt into the wax face, snapping the nose off and denting the cheek; and he saw that a line had appeared in the thing’s neck, so he hit it in the face again, with more force, and the head of this one too cracked free and rolled away.
The two undamaged ones stepped back and raised their weapons, while the two others knelt on the floor groping for their heads. A panicky shouting echoed down from upstairs, in words that didn’t seem to be Arabic, and the two whole wax men turned and ran ponderously down the hall toward the stairs.
Doyle followed. Someone else was shouting upstairs now, definitely in Arabic, and his voice sounded more anguished and defensive than personally scared. Doyle caught the words for I don’t know and immune and magic.
At the foot of the stairs he kicked off his remaining shoe and padded silently up, holding Ameen’s sword well out in front of him. Above he could hear gasps and grunts of effort, and feet scuffing on a gravelly floor, and it belatedly dawned on him what the emergency must be.
His eyes narrowed and a grin deepened the lines in his cheeks. Yes, he thought, let’s see if we can’t accomplish that—cut the title right out from under Neil Armstrong.
At the top of the stairs he peered around the corner, down the short corridor toward the inward-facing balcony. It was as he’d expected: the only light in the chamber was the dusk grayness coming in through the gaping hole. The sweating doorkeeper was standing on the right side of the balcony—the left side had been torn loose by the shot, and was swinging free—and he was hastily knotting a rope around one of the railing bars. The left wall of the corridor had collapsed, and Doyle could see the two wax men crouched out on the roof of the ground floor, leaning over the curved rim of the hole to peer down into the chamber; and even as Doyle watched, they leaned forward into the yawning gap where the eastern quarter of the dome had been and began pushing downward on something that evidently wanted to move up.
Having moored the end of the rope, the doorkeeper was pulling more of the line in, from some point below and to the left—against considerable resistance—and tying off all the slack he managed to get. Obviously he was trying to shorten the line.
Doyle waited until the man had drawn in another yard of line, and, before he could tie a knot in it, bounded up behind him, crouched, hooked his good hand under the man’s belt and hoisted him up, over and out past the balcony rail. For a moment the surprised doorkeeper held onto the line as he fell, and there was a rusty squealing o
f casters, then he lost his grip and tumbled to the rubble-littered floor of the chamber. The line snapped taut. There was a choked-off scream from near-by, and an empty, wheeled couch skated down the bowl-shaped wall and banged against the pile of broken masonry at the bottom.
Doyle whirled and ran out onto the roof through the hole in the corridor wall and, ignoring for the moment the twitching thing dangling at the end of the nearly horizontal rope, delivered a kick and a sword poke to the off-balance wax men, tumbling both of them, too, down into the round chamber.
Reluctant to face the man he knew he must kill, he stared for a moment down into the chamber. The doorkeeper had sat up and was rocking back and forth holding his leg, which was apparently broken, and the two wax men, one of whom had predictably lost his head, were crawling aimlessly over the rubble. Doyle supposed there was a door down there, but with any luck at all it would be buried under the shattered stones that had been the eastern quarter of the dome.
“Ah, Doyle!” came a voice from behind him, in an urbane tone that must have sorely taxed the self-control of the speaker. “You and I have a lot to discuss!”
The Master was swinging back and forth twenty feet away, supported by a rope knotted under his arms, but he was hanging straight out, with the rope roughly parallel to the roof. Behind him Doyle could see the moon, still low in the eastern sky. The Master had to strain his head back to look “up” at Doyle. The effect was as if he were a man-shaped kite in a strong wind, or as if he and Doyle were confronting each other through a mirror tilted 45 degrees.
“We have nothing to discuss,” said Doyle coldly. He raised Ameen’s sword over his head one-handed, and sighted at a point on the taut rope.
“I can bring back Rebecca for you,” said the Master, quietly but distinctly.
Doyle exhaled sharply, as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and he stepped back and lowered the sword. “Wh—what did you say?”
