Over the past few months Doyle had got used to being Eshvlis, but he was far from confident in this role he’d assumed today, and he averted his face whenever he noticed one of his patrons in the crowd. The impersonation that he’d agreed to so cheerfully this morning was beginning to make him nervous—was it, he wondered, a crime to attend the Pasha’s banquet by arriving disguised as one of the invited guests? Probably. If his friend Ameen hadn’t been counting on the success of the deception, Doyle would have spurred the borrowed horse out of the parade, divested himself of the sword, daggers and fine clothes, and sneaked back to his cobbler’s niche to enjoy the show from a comfortable distance.
He glanced at his niche as they rode past it, and, although he had booked passage out of the country on a ship that would weigh anchor tomorrow, he was surprised and angry to see another cobbler perched there in a nest of dangling shoes. Absent one morning, he thought bitterly, and the competition moves in like rats.
Up ahead was the square where he’d first encountered Ameen. Doyle smiled grimly, remembering that hot October morning, which had begun to go wrong when Hassan Bey’s shoe buckle broke off during a meeting with the British governor.
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?
Well, at least I know that Ashbless does leave Egypt on the Fowler, bound for England, tomorrow morning, so even though I never got around to researching Cairo in 1811, there can’t be too many more surprises I’ll neglect to tell Bailey about. I guess I won’t, for example, be recaptured by Romanelli, who has now, I hear, got himself set up as Mohammed Ali’s personal physician. I don’t think he’d recognize me now anyway, with the black dyed hair, the deep tan and all the new furrows and lines in my face that are the legacy of a long convalescence without anesthesia. At least this body’s still got both ears.
At the parade ground in front of the Citadel the ranks of mainland Mamelukes were joined by the Bahrite Beys, and for fifteen hot minutes—during which Eshvlis sweated into the appallingly expensive borrowed robe and let Ameen’s horse follow Hathi’s, who rode just ahead of him—all but one of the four hundred and eighty Mameluke Beys, the tribe of one-time slaves that had risen to absolute control of the country, and had in recent years fallen only a little from that zenith, paraded in colorful, barbaric splendor under the empty blue sky of Egypt.
Ameen’s agile and powerful mare, Melboos, pranced proudly along, tossing her head sometimes, and in general making her rider seem to be what he was not, a competent horseman. She was a fine animal, and had been Ameen’s proudest possession, but the impersonation had demanded that he leave her behind.
It suddenly occurred to Doyle that he’d miss Ameen, who’d been the only one in Cairo who knew Eshvlis was not really a deaf-mute. Schooled in Vienna, the young Bey had learned other goals and perspectives than the traditional war and glory ones of the Mamelukes, and through many long afternoons Ameen had stood beside the cobbler’s niche and talked to him in English about history and politics and religion—though they’d always been careful to cease speaking if a customer crowded close enough to hear their low-pitched conversation, for Ameen had heard that the Pasha was offering a reward for any information about a big, English-speaking fugitive.