Part 1: The Black Horseman Chapter 2: A Man Well-travelled

“The day on which men shall in truth hear that shout will be the day of their coming forth from the grave.
“Verily, we cause to live, and we cause to die. To Us shall all return.
“On the day when the earth shall swiftly cleave asunder over the dead, will this gathering be easy to Us.”
-Sura l, Kaf, 40

November, 1200, Northeast Egypt

Yizd Abdul al-Kismet was a man of bloody trade; a man of secrets, a man with a message for the Sultan from the Caliph. He normally posed as a book-seller among Christians, as a Sufi among Muslims, and as a harbinger of Submission-to-God among the heathen. It seemed, that wherever he went, he brought a message—someone else’s message, never his own.

‘The message is sealed. I know not what it portends. Hopefully it does not read, ‘Dear Sultan, may you kindly remove the head of the messenger from his shoulders and inter it among those spiked above your famed gates, for he is a half-Armenian half-Kurdish son of a Christian whore and a Muslim traitor in league with the Turks.’’

‘I trust not.’

He was down on the level, pacing his mare easily, his bow at the ready, his saber slung from his side, his dagger at his breast. In the wake of the Frankish defeat one would have thought the transit of Palestine would have been simple. Instead he had been questioned by Saladin’s men at every turn, chased by bandits, stalked by hyenas and jackals by night, and haunted by his many misdeeds in his dreams.

The two day passage through the Sinai had been particularly haunting. He had not seen a soul, had not even seen a body left over from some less cunning traveler’s mischance. Now he was down into Egypt, nearing the delta, heading for blessed Cairo, to wet his manhood in some Frankish slave girl at Master Efran’s flesh house.

There were still no signs of travelers, who should, by now, have been coming up out of the delta with the produce from the first harvest.

‘Have the Franks struck here, brought a fleet and continued their rampage?’

Then he saw it, a body—no two, make that three—along the way. He could smell but not see the sunken salt marshes off to the southeast. He dared not dismount his horse. He guided the Turkic pony close to the corpses with an arrow knocked at the ready, and circled the scene of death at the roadside. This had been a small traveler’s camp. A family had been migrating alone, without a caravan or even a horseman. A wretched farmer lay dead, his throat torn and mangled by beasts—none of which were currently present, which was odd at dusk. Their donkey lay dead, the woman pinned beneath it, her face and single protective hand devoured. The donkey—choicest of the flesh—was not touched, not even the eyes. The death birds had taken the eyes of the man and woman, but not those of the beast.

‘What is that sound coming up from the marsh trail?’

A faint jabbering of children, a playful sound, could be heard down the trail between the grass-covered mounds to his left.

‘If children survive, I might sell them in Cairo and finance a fare revel at Efran’s.’

He had tracked and slain other spies in the night, had ridden down other messengers at dusk and dawn, and had never tired of the grisly tasks he took on for the Caliph. If it came to capture the brand on his breast, the sign of the Caliph burned with red hot iron over his heart, would assure that he be held for ransom until it was discovered he did not exist. By then he would have turned on his captors.

And so he went, a viper among vipers, looking for orphans along some old farmer’s fishing trail. He wound his way through the grassy hummocks in the soft breeze of early evening, the sun’s last fire still glinting across the horizon to his back.

A child giggled and darted out before him, then another followed, naked children with hands held over their eyes, as if they were playing a game of blind man’s search. His pony, which had held firm in skirmishes, and had even nibbled rushes on the Euphrates while he slit the throat of that crazy Sufi, was spooked by the children, which appeared to be a boy and a girl of about four years.

‘Alright girl, I will leave you here. Just stay here quietly like you always have.’

He draped the horse’s reigns over a shrub branch and stalked off into the half light after the children. In a few paces he passed through the waist high gate of some old ruin, and found himself in an ancient tumbled down precinct of sorts, with block and rubble about. Sand blown and overgrown, this small precinct between three small grassy knolls seemed to have once been a temple of some sort in ages past. An icy hand on his nape seemed to tell him that he walked on unholy, pre-Islamic, ground.

‘I fear, I know fear!’

‘No, that is just the cautious instinct of the Red Hand of the Caliph, the purging arrow of political enemies, slayer of infidels, and butcher of heretics. Walk on killer, walk on.’

He drew the knock of the arrow back to his cheek with his trusty thumb ring, and slunk into the ancient precinct onto ground that seemed to have been recently ploughed. As he brushed by the crumbled thigh high wall the two children ran from behind its cover, dirty little hands still held before their eyes. They stood facing him, probably seeing him between their little fingers, giggling on tip toe next to each other, apparently brother and sister.

He looked around at the crests and gaps between the small grassy hills which converged at this spot, as if the ground itself had been cleaved by an axe. Satisfied that these children were not the bait of some bandits but the survivors of the family beyond, he slid his arrow back into its case and hung the strung bow across his back and chest, and walked low and soft toward the children, holding his hands out to ally their fear and shushing with his lips as they giggled. They were tiny little runts with big tufts of hair. If he could get close enough he could snag them both and be back to the road before true night fell.

The children seemed not to be afraid, probably still being disoriented from the deaths of their parents. He got to within arms’ reach of them, shushed them one last time, and then pounced like a leopard, snagging a tawny head of greasy hair in each hand. Then he began to smell that sickly sweet scent with something of the leper colony about it.

When he grabbed their heads their little hands came away from their faces and clawed at his own hands.

‘Oh Mighty God, I have been deceived by evil djinns!’

The children had no eyes. The sockets appeared to have been recently gouged. He let go of their hair and stood straight up, meaning to run. To his horror, the little children clung to his hands, kicking in the air, and crying for their father. He stepped around to walk across the open space, the mere five paces to the gap in the wall, and something grabbed his ankle, something strong and unyielding, cold as ice and sure as death.

He looked down—children still hanging from his outstretched hands and screaming for their father—to see two fetidly fleshed hands, nails black as night, arms covered in rusty mail, grasping at his ankles, dragging him down toward the loosening earth, which was beginning to churn before and beneath him. The mailed djinn hands and the clinging children prevented him from moving, from even drawing a weapon.

‘Oh God, The Merciful, The Compassionate, no, not like this! I have sinned, but not so evilly as this!’

Before him, swaying like hideous flowers bearing gruesome fruit, a number of mailed arms reached skyward for the falling cloak of night, holding in their hands, eyeballs; eyeballs that did not dangle from the cadaverous fingers that held their cords like dirty flower-pedals of flesh, but rather swayed like hideous moonflower iris’s from some heretic’s nightmare garden.

“Allah save me!”

His words echoed dully from the ancient precinct of death and decay, even as the very ground began to churn to miserable life, seemingly given rise by the promise of a meal; the living, writhing, screaming repast that was once Yizd Abdul al-Kismet, most feared of the Seven Red Hands of The Caliph.