Doctor Romanelli shivered slightly in spite of the heat and turned to the north, squinting at the bristling, tangled maze of whitewashed walls and brightly colored enamelled domes that was the new section of the city, which had grown up like lush riverside vegetation around the highway, called the Mustee, that connected the Citadel with the ancient Harbor of Boolak. The bulk of this afternoon’s guests would be riding even now through the crowded Mustee.
He thought he caught a distant wink of glare, as of the sun reflecting on a lance head or polished helmet. Two hundred years ago, he thought, there was a purpose for the army of ex-slaves called the Mamelukes; but in today’s Egypt they’re an embarrassment that’s strangling the country, imposing a crushing and savagely enforced tax on anyone who seems to have money, and strong enough in force of arms to acknowledge no law but their own tastes. We couldn’t let them retain that kind of power, especially now that Mohammed Ali is in power and the eyes of the world are watching us, to gauge their own actions by what we do. Independence is within our reach again for the first time in thousands of years, and we can’t have it imperilled by a group of local brigands. How fortunate that Ali looks to the Master—through me—as his main advisor!
And if I return to England, he thought as he turned and watched the sweating slaves loading the signal cannon, it will be to disassemble the history of that nation, so that today—a new today—they’ll be nothing, probably a possession of France, which we’ll also impede. All we’ve got to do is rediscover the knowledge that died with the Romany ka—and we will before long, either through the completion of our calculations or, still conceivably, the wringing of some vital clue from that wretched ka we managed to draw of Brendan, Doyle before he got away from us.
That is a very long shot, though, he thought sourly, remembering last night’s interrogation as he walked down the stone steps to the narrow, sun-baked street outside the el-Azab gate.
The ka had been dragged out of its basement cell for the first time in at least a month, and for half an hour hadn’t even seemed to hear the questions the Master was putting to it, but just sat on the balcony chewing the end of its filthy beard and springing with little cries away from, evidently, imaginary insects. Finally it had spoken, though not in reply to any question. “I keep trying to stop them,” it had muttered, “from getting on the bike, you know? But it’s always too late, and they’re on the freeway before I can catch them, and I pull over ‘cause I don’t want to see it… But I hear it… the clank of the fall, and the grinding slide… and the smash of the helmet exploding against the pillar… “
“How did you exit the time stream?” the Master asked, for the fourth time.
“Jacky pulled me out,” the ka replied. “He threw a net over the little men and then pulled me into his canoe… “
“No, the time stream. How did you exit it?”
“It’s all one river, and the mile posts are calendar pages. If your keels be nimble and light, you may get there by candle light. The river is iced-over, you see—weren’t you listening when Darrow explained it?—but there’s a boat, with faces painted on the wheels, that can sail over the ice—the boat can come alive, and kill you… a black boat, blacker than the darkness… “
The Master had fallen into a fit of incoherent rage at this point, and had had to speak through one of the wax ushabti figures in the pen on the bottom of the sphere. “Take it away,” croaked the voice, “and stop the delivery of food to its cell—we don’t need it.”
Yes, a long shot, certainly—but still a possibility; after all, there were a couple of interesting hints of pattern in its ravings.
In any case, Romanelli reflected as he opened a door that quite soon would be securely locked, we may not even need the Anubis Gates. There will be further bold political strokes like the one that will occur this afternoon, and with as strong a leader as Mohammed Ali taking the Master’s council, we might be able to re-establish Egypt even without being able to rewrite history. The question of when to arrange a secret assassination and substitution by a docile ka can be deferred for at least several years.
Before stepping into the hall he glanced up and down the narrow, empty street between the high walls. Quiet right now, he thought.
The Mustee, at an hour past noon, was at its most crowded, with heavily laden camels pressing stolidly through the throng, and the shouts of the veiled women selling oranges rising in jarring cacophony over the song of the rat catcher—on whose broad-brimmed hat six trained examples of his prey, each wearing a little hat of its own, formed a pyramid—and the yells of the fish and milk vendors and the chanted prayers of the beggars. But the mob parted hastily before the relentless hooves of the procession riding down the center of the street at a relaxed but indomitable walk. In hopes of a tip at the end of the ride, a street boy had taken it upon himself to serve as the—in this case unnecessary—sais, or runner-ahead;
“Riglak!” he would warn some Nubian merchant, whose foot had been snatched out of the way even before the boy called, and “Uxrug!” to two ladies from a harem who had already crowded up against a wall and were shrilly and indignantly protesting this usurpation of the street.
But everyone was as eager to see the parade as to get out of its way, and the British elfendis turned their palm-branch chairs around on the sidewalk in front of the Zawiyah Cafe to keep an uneasy eye on the procession as they took somewhat deeper sips of their drinks, for this was a formal procession of the Mameluke Beys in all their finery. The hot sun glinted on the precious stones that studded their sword hilts and pistol butts, and their colorful robes and feathered turbans and helmets made the rest of the street seem drab by comparison; but in spite of the grandeur of the jewelled weapons and the rich cloths and the gorgeously caparisoned Arabian horses, the most striking aspect of the parade was the lean, hawk-nosed brown faces and the narrowed eyes that remained haughtily above the crowd.
Not least impressive of the faces was the helmeted, black-bearded one that belonged to an impostor; and though many of the people who scurried out of the way or peered down from windows knew the cobbler Eshvlis, whose place of business was a niche in the outside wall of a mosque two blocks away, none of them recognized him in the gold-chased armor of the Mameluke Bey Ameen.
And none of them knew that even in his daily routine of repairing shoes Eshvlis was an impostor—that, before choosing that name and dying his hair and beard black, he had been called Brendan Doyle.