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“Only under the greatest stress would a Muslim woman appear unveiled before any man who was not of her immediate family.”
-Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood
Abdulla ibn Ali el-Jihadi was the perfect picture of a stalwart Muslim warrior, a most fitting Commandant. These days he wore mail habitually and was not long at his duty house, having given over the residential portions to those such as Abd al-Latif who he had sought out in the name of the Sultan to bring an end to this misery, and also to some refugees from among the good class of people, who had suffered calamities.
For instance there was Shamballa Ali who had lost his chattel—over 1,000 slaves—in the famine; caught compassion-handed holding them for buyers who had expressed interest but then held back on purchasing for fear they would not be able to feed their chattel. The man was ruined, and walked about in a daze, like some dumb rascal too mute to even beg. Shamballa Ali had been listlessly walking about the duty court. Abd al-Latif had come to the residential portal to observe him in hopes of formulating a diagnosis and bringing this fellow back into useful contribution as a human.
And now, before midday, and to his utter surprise, the Commandant returned, alone, with no horseman guarding his person, for no band of rascals would dare approach such a formidable Jihadist, who it was said had slain a half dozen Franks at Acre, where he distinguished himself under the eyes of Saladin himself. Abd al-Latif always quaked a bit in his heart when this man stepped near. It was a quake of unworthiness; a suspicion within that he did not warrant this great man’s trust coming to gnaw at his soul like a wicked viper that resided in the pit of his belly, which did slither forth on those occasions when his prodigious self-doubt beckoned.
But just now, Abd al-Latif felt a kinship with this great man, for they had both brought a woman in distress to this sanctuary. Of course Abd al-Latif had not actually rescued his distressed lady, and she was not actually a lady. Still though, he thrilled in his heart to think that he had this act of honorable kindness in common with such a man—would that he had been such a man...
…the water flowed roaring over the mighty cataract to join the greater Nile, the river that fed a world. He soared as the dove of compassion, but with big, human, watery eyes. His sleek white feathers caught the updraft above the cool life-giving waters as they hurdled toward the starving lands of men. He sailed high above, out and over the misty waterfall to gaze in wonder…only to see, with the utmost terror, that the waters turned to sand—every drop to a grain—and poured instead of roared down the sand-choked gorge that was once a roaring riot of mist and rushing waves—“al-Latif, are you well? Have you kept too late with your studies. You must rest friend.”
The strong hand of the Commandant startled his body to life even as his kind firm words brought his mind back from the abyss. He looked down to see the married woman—unveiled but struggling with her main garment to maintain her propriety—standing besides the rock-steady Commander of the Cairo Garrison, and regarding him with pity.
‘This terrified woman pities me? How pitiful must I be?’
Abd al-Latif smiled to encourage her, as she seemed to have suffered much. He then tasted the drool at the corner of his mouth and blushed as he dabbed it with his day-cloth. He then looked to the Commandant, who had that gift for the direct non-rude gaze. “I was just contemplating the evidence I have been entrusted with. I am embarrassed to say I tend toward the self-hypnotic at such times.”
The hard hand then lightly patted his soft shoulder and the sure voice made him feel a weak boy again by comparison, “No need to be ashamed of such a gift al-Latif. We need your wile in whatever guise God has sent it. The Sultan knows better than to pin his hopes on my academic revelations!”
The hand then gently spun him around, pointed him back to the residential portal, and shoved him gently along while the other hand so guided the woman. In this way the Commandant escorted Abd and this strange unveiled woman across the court, through the portal, down the cool hall, and to his apartment, now empty of all, as Beadra was seeing to the Baby of the Lilies and his mother in the temporary nursery and woman’s quarter of this warrior’s house who now strangely acted as a town steward.
‘The Baby of the Lilies?’
‘How might I ever forget the Baby of the Lilies?’
‘The true question fool, is how may I never forget his serenity, his angel’s wing of an eye; an eye that smiled eternally without the need for a face to couch it as some crude drapery frames the entrance to a pool of mirror-like water suffused in purity…’
‘I drool and nod off—Oh thanks be to his strong hand.’
He looked with some embarrassment down into the eyes of the woman whose garments suggested midwifery or nursing, and seemed suspicious of Abd’s health, and perhaps his judgment as well.
‘We are proceeding in silence. His is a delicate matter indeed.’
The Commandant’s voice rumbled soothingly, “When did you last eat al-Latif?”
‘Why, I cannot recall having eaten—ever actually.’
‘He besought your speech, not your closed thought fool!’
The Commandant’s voice boomed out like a trumpet, “Rabab, dates, cakes and coffee for al-Latif!”
Far off he seemed to hear slippers scuffing across ceramic tiles.
“Al-Latif I will have no sympathetic starving on your part, or the making of yourself into some alchemist’s pursuit of some let’s-see-what-happens sort of truth.”
He looked at the woman, who smiled to him forgivingly, with a softening nod and no sign of harsh judgment such as was previously creeping into her cheeks.
The Commandant freed them of his commanding touch as soon as they appeared in Abd al-Latif’s temporary quarters. He then bowed to the woman veiling herself with her sleeve and spoke with gravity, which was his way as someone who ordered horsemen about. “Good woman, your honor is intact. You will leave here with a proper veil and a three man escort as soon as they are gathered. This is my own apartment, the entire private quarters, and I have given it over in its entirety to this fine doctor, Abd al-Latif, and his servants, so that I might have wise counsel at hand where the facts of this terrible famine and the wretched acts of the poor are concerned. By all means lady, speak to this man with knowledge that he is beloved of the Sultan and like a brother to me.”
‘Brother? Oh, the frail one who stays at home and reads while the brother who makes Father’s heart swell with pride and the hearts of maids race with lust, gallops off… she is speaking. I must listen with one mind.’
"I am Zahara, wife of Ibrahm bin-Haj, a midwife in good standing—sixty two live babies last year Doctor, but not ten this year. I have stopped delivering babies for the poor as, well, there is no longer any point in it. The poor babe might as well be a joint of lamb at market. I am, Doctor, a well-known baby saver, even come with my own milk ready in case the woman has none herself or lacks a wet nurse. So, with so many wet nurses having starved to dry or mysteriously disappeared, this old cow gets sent for by the rich more than you can believe these days. At least the good people of means yet care for their young.
"I was sent to the house of Lady Sakeena, wife to The Secretary, to The Vizier, who attends His Eminence the Sultan with such grace.
‘That boy-molesting wretch has…’
The woman was incredibly astute, noticing the dark cast that must have come over Abd al-Latif’s features, and nodding knowingly, “I see the doctor knows of the Pillar of Cairo society of whom I speak, a man of impeccable repute.”
The Commandant was pacing with hands behind his mailed hips, chewing on his astonishing mustache, his hawk eyes ever narrowing as the woman’s tale continued.
"I was asked to attend to Sakeena’s niece, a fine young mare by the name of Raifa. I was paid in gold upon arrival, with Lady Sakeena complimenting me with additional silver as soon as the babe was in her sweet mother’s arms and I had her breasts tweaked and functioning. There was little bleeding doctor, which I am most grateful for, and I bathed the young lady as well—a fine girl who will bring to God a scholar I think, for the baby’s head was well-formed—like yours must have been Doctor. You know in my trade big finely wrought heads like yours, while indicative of accomplishments to come, can play infernal with my task. The girl’s hips were good though.”
‘Must this become a litany of birthing! For God’s Good Grace, if she were a doctor—thank you God for not permitting that—her ailing patients would expire from the conversation alone. May I awake in a field of poppies attended by mute beauties!’
On the Midwife Zahara, wife to perhaps a mercifully deaf husband, droned about the entire womanly affair! The Commandant paced, counting the rings of his mailed sleeve idly, no doubt pleased with himself for foisting this very oracle of banality upon Abd al-Latif…and on, and on she went. Her critique of The Secretary’s wife’s choice of tile and upholstery preceding her discussion of the asymmetrical breast of her patient, which mention digressed into a story about a lopsided wet nurse and a couple of greedy twin babies…
‘Merciful God deliver me from this task with my patience intact!’
Zahara was now not even covering her mouth with her garment as her eyes bugged out and she criticized the Lady Sakeer’s choice of doorframe paint and the questionable weave of some inferior rug that was said to have been Afghan but was obviously a cheap Libyan imitation!
With the utmost weariness Abd al-Latif sat and listened to her ramble, now also afflicted with the site of her mouth actually going on, and on, and on! The slave girl of the forgotten name came to him with dates and cakes and coffee, and still he sat, as the midwife with the name that Abd al-Latif wished never to remain engraved in the monument yard of his mind worked herself into a terror, the terror-stricken state she had apparently been in when the Commandant came across her disheveled form fleeing down the Way of Martyrs. For the Commandant now came close and listened intently.
Abd al-Latif now oddly found himself rapt, eating a date in tiny nibbles like a boy listening to a jinn story at bedtime. The woman’s voice was now shrill, her face shamelessly bare, her hands that should have been covering that over-active mouth waving this way and that like some tale-spinner reciting to a crowd as his fakir piped in time, “So My Lords, having brought that beatific babe into the world in the light of All Merciful God, I was not only weighted with silver and gold by the Lady Sakeera, but invited to dine with these fine folk of such high standing. Honored was I!”
“I was seated at the grand table for the children’s meal had with the slaves. It was not a brushing of shoulders with The Secretary and his dignified friends, but still, a fine expertly spiced meal to be had in these lean times, even among the good people of means. I sat next to a spare little girl, a daughter to a second wife I think, and was given a fine plate of steaming mutton stew prepared after the Abyssinian fashion—you know they normally eat goat, so this can be over-spiced to the cultivated Egyptian taste.”
‘Merciful God I shall never marry! That does it. I’ll adopt the damned Jew boy to carry my name before I spend a single evening like this. Imagine how they must go on when the veil comes off in their own house! My God you are merciful for not having cursed me with sisters!’
And on she rambled, the more excited, bug-eyed and frantic as she recited her tale, as if it had rambled through her addled brain a thousand times already. She waved her arms so that her pendulous breasts began to sway in a most unappealing fashion. “The usual preparation, as I make it for my dear Husband involves the precise cubing of mutton in moderate quantity, copious and likewise cubed inions and carrots—though I prefer aubergines—in a sweet and sour sauce, garnished with dried fig, raisins and split almonds; which in this case were slivered instead by an overeager kitchen slave—but you know the Lady of the House cannot see to every detail and this was the children’s meal besides…”
‘…Oh Merciful and Bountiful God, may I be delivered whole of mind from the presence of this woman. If I should be so fortunate I not only pledge myself to the pious conversion of my little Jew boy, but to the Holy Journey, and the eradication of man-eating where-so-ever it emerges as the symbol of The Deceiver among us wretched mortals…’
He felt himself being fanned by one hand, as another hand dabbed at the spilled coffee on his knee. Beadra and the slave girl whose name he could not recall with this infernal midwife still rambling on, were attending him. The Commandant, for his part, was standing beside him, one arm crossed under the elbow that supported the hand that supported his noble scarred chin, avidly observing the agitation of the midwife Zahara as she went on about the meal at The Secretary’s house.
“So Doctor, Commandant—my savior, my warrior of God—the little girl next to me said, when I questioned her about this odd-tasting meat, which tasted odd thanks to the over use of it in a stew that should be a model of moderation, ‘Why Mother Zahara, this is Miss So-and-so—the very fat one.’
"You see, I had drawn—must cunningly I thought—aside the girl and questioned her in the hallway. She then walked me to the door of a storage chamber and pushed it open, saying, ‘Miss So-and-so’—sorry for not recalling the name but my ears were ringing like all the accursed bells of the defiled lands—‘came to visit us and Father killed her. She is jointed and hung in here, with the others.’
"Then, as my stomach turned, my eyes teared, and my ears rang, the little man-eating girl led me by the hand into the cool depression of the sunken room. It was a butcher’s shop I tell you. I began crying outright, hugged the little girl to my breast, kissed her, and carried her up out of there as I was overcome with a dread that we would be shut in and set upon by a butcher. Whoever this butcher of the house would be—although not the killer as that was the Father of the house—the idea of making his acquaintance in the hallway filled me with dread. So I raced down the hall bowling over some scrawny Ethiopian porter. Then as I tore through the kitchen some Christian bitch got in my way and I shoved her on the flatbread iron—can still hear her godless hand sizzle—and I ran, on out of the servant’s quarter, into the back alley, my veil falling away most shamefully, my breasts coming unbound and making a ridiculous show for the bully boys that collected back there to dice and smoke—and then, the Light of Submission-to-God came on his high horse and rescued me!”
With this shrill pronouncement she dove to her knees and began hugging and kissing the Commandant’s mailed boots as she wept. The Commandant looked down over his broad shoulder non-rudely into the eyes of Abd al-Latif and spoke in a low serious tone, “I cannot just burn good people like we do the poor. I will send this woman back with soldiers for The Secretary and his wife.”
He then paused, as if expecting an answer to his next statement.
“What of the slaves, the children? If this is some form of cursed contagion might they have developed a taste for human flesh? What of your study? Is this passed on through the act of eating to become a corrupt nature? Burning these people just to make sure might not be practical, though I will advise the Sultan so. What do you advise Al-Latif?”
All eyes were no upon him, the crazed woman now sobbing on her knees, booted feet still in her hands as she looked up to him as if he were The Prophet himself.
‘Should I let the accursed Frank out of his pigpen so to speak? There shall be no turning from these words…’
Evan as he thought to censor his words he was speaking from the heart and the mind as one, “I am in agreement with The Grand Imam that The Deceiver stalks among us, or perhaps his earthly agents. Verily it is known that disease rarely passes from one person to the other. Such wild ideas as breath and spittle carrying death on the wind like some evil jinn being naught but fancy. However, we do have the affliction of leprosy which passes by way of touch. Leprosy was long thought to be a punishment of heaven, deserving of its sufferers exile to this advanced day. I have recently examined a baby who seems to have taken on the serenity of great minds even in his infancy during a rascally attack in which a ruffian sought to eat him alive and was engulfed by the waters of the canal like Pharaoh’s chariots by the Red Sea. This occurrence has set my mind right on this subject. I recommend the taking of the innocent to the Mosque of Ahmad ibn Touloun. It is my medical opinion that we are beset by darkness, a soul-corrupting agency, not some mere affliction of the flesh.”
The Commandant was now raising the midwife up, who looked about shaken, but seemingly relived as well, that justice would be done, and that she had escaped. The Commandant then made a surprising statement, “Zahara, I shall commend you to the Sultan and your Husband. But first, before some loyal slave covers The Secretary’s crime, I must send you with my three most ruthless horsemen to guide them in the cleaning out of that rat’s den of a house. Show them the meat, supervise the separation of the innocent from the guilty, the vile from the clean, and fear no butcher’s hook! Go now woman, after them!”
The woman amazingly enough seemed animated and thrilled to the booming of the Commandant’s voice as he summoned horsemen who came quickly and who Abd al-Latif had not even known were on the grounds, let alone so near. Within moments the room was clear of the three women and the three horsemen. The better man now paced before him as he maintained his place on the cushioned stool. The eyes of his host then turned sly and flashed darkly at him as he grinned at Abd al-Latif as if in secret jest. “Obviously The Secretary will buy his way out of this and I can’t just put his privileged head on a spike. A few slaves will burn—the butcher and cook most assuredly. So, by way of punishment, I reasoned the best I could do to afflict that vile butt-poker of a crony would be to have him stand by and listen to that woman for an afternoon while my boys beat piss out of his boys!”
The laugh of the commandant’s voice echoed lion-like through the place Abd al-Latif had come to see as the earthly personification of his duty. It somehow made him feel strong, this mirth in the face of deepest darkest evil, and he added his less bellicose laughter to the defiant song that echoed across the grounds…
