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 headstones 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.