When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.

He came to consciousness to the sensation of many hands, some gritty from dirt, some sticky from gore, dragging him beneath the looming tree, a relic of its kind, its only fruit the Death of Innocence.

‘Have I been forsaken by the God of my people, by the one true God, delivered up to this nightmare end?’

‘You have been considering conversion to Islam in order to facilitate your adoption to Master.’

‘But that is the same God—Allah and Yahweh are one. There is only the matter of prophecy and language. We are all ‘of The Book’, as Master says so often.’

‘They are rolling me over—this is not good!’

Ibrahm was now spread out naked beneath the terrible tree of death, a woman pinning each of his limbs to the dusty earth as a man, the lead ruffian of this tree-attending band of rascals, stood over him with a gleaming sword. The two men who had chased him were beseeching this man as if he were a money changer, “We knocked him down. He is ours to eat. Fuyan and the others will be up soon—he will have your head for snatching our dessert. I did fell him with the rock cast, so by rights he is our meal.”

‘I wish you were here now Ibis, you nasty old baboon!’

The tall dirty man with unkept hair, who seemed to be black of skin under the chalky dirt, but Arab of feature, looked at the stone thrower and spoke with the gravity of a sufi, “He is circumcised—of the tribe of Israel, decreed cast out from the Lands of God. God’s angel sent him here to the Redemption Tree, where the poor come and sacrifice the fruit of their womb to the sustenance of the Holy Order of Swords. We dance for God, for The Prophet. He has fallen here. He is ours. You may, though, partake of his sweet parts if you assist the proscribed slaughter.”

‘My slaver circumcised me to brand me. It was not even my time yet!’

Ibrahm, as if in a dream, looked up at the men who had been sitting under the tree. They were dark, had massed knotted hair, and carried swords, unlike other beggars. Forgetting himself he blurted up at the leader, “You beggars are dervishes. I know it—saw you in Tunis you butt-muncher. Well, you can all go whirl your swords in hell!”

They stared at him dumfounded, then the leader spoke, “The food speaks ill of the assembled banquet-goers. Halal! Prepare the bleating goat according to the sacred guidelines. You there, stone thrower, draw out his tongue and hold it. You, who does stumble, orient him—align him with Mecca I say!”

The second man from the road stammered, I do not know the sacred poin—”

A whistling ‘shing’ of steel sent his head into the dust beside Ibrahm and the leader continued, “Behold, the infidel’s head faces Mecca, align the goat so!”

He felt himself being pointed like an architect’s tool and the leader spoke again, “Miram, the goat’s last drink please.”

Water was now being poured over his tongue—clean water at least, but not cool, for nothing remained cool in this blasted season of dread. The shadow of the head Dervish cast over his naked form, shadow sword held high.

‘Mother, we are to be rejoined. I hope it was less terrifying when they took your body along the road.’

The very wind seemed to sigh with piteous compassion, as if his dear murdered mother had blown a kiss out of the Empty Quarter of the World. The sword did not fall, but rather twirled rhythmically above as the dirty hands released his limbs and his tongue. The owners of the hands then haltingly stepped back into a circle to join the others, where they swayed with absent glassy eyes, like strange flowers of flesh swaying with the breeze, only this breeze had rhythm. Perhaps ten of these filthy rag-swaddled people swayed in this loose circle, according to an unsettling syncopation.

The four men with swords, the dervishes, they danced to the tune of the desert wind that now ruled a once fertile corner of the earth. They danced more slowly than he had seen in Tunis, in the market where he had been sold. There was also no look of the ecstatic about them, no will to connect with whatever they normally connected with when they whirled about, even cutting themselves with their curved swords. The one time he had seen them was through the bars of his chattel box, behind the caravan of he who had damned him and shall remain nameless in the mind of he who he damned. These men where entranced, as if by some spirit not truly kin to man.

On they danced, haltingly, jerkily—as if they resisted somewhere within the tune that was born on the wind, the tune that was, after some time, recognized by Ibrahm as the tune of a fakir, that rarest and most novel of impoverished pilgrims.

Some said that fakirs were Indian heathens, some that they were sufis possessed by djinns. All agreed that they were best left unmolested. Abd al-Latif had held forth on this while educating Ibrahm, as Ibrahm wanted to know about all of the things that boys wanted to know about, such as magic carpets, jinn-filled lamps, accursed tombs full of ruffians, and so on, fakirs included.

His learned master had opined that fakirs were best left unmolested as the piping of their song was thought to affect the heartbeat of the listener, and that the sudden forced halting of their song, might cause their molester’s heart to cease its critical dance within his chest. ‘So’, Abd al-Latif had said, ‘the fakir is safe from bandits and ruffians so long as he carries his tune, just as he is safe from the serpent he charms.”

And Abd al-Latif knew, for he had traveled the world.

‘May this piper—for it must be a piper, as Mother had no sense of tune, so this could not be her spirit coming for me—never cease his life-saving dirge. I should flee. No, I wish to see.’

As this thought seemed to come unbidden into his mind and he relaxed naked on the sand, under the tree of death, where cured and trussed babies did swing under the sun, the shadow of a horse came to shade him from the sun. The coming of the shadow was accompanied by a vile stench that had the sweetness of flowers about it, and that he was suddenly convinced he could grow to like.

Then, as the piping continued, the actual form of the horse came into view above him as it stalked woodenly around him, between he and the dancing dervishes, who danced manically now between the horse and the swaying beggars and rascals, and weird women.

‘The horse is…dead, it is dead!’

A mortal wound from a lance, still impaling the horse [which was a barded warhorse], had slain the beast, long enough ago that no blood issued from the wound. Yet the beast walked, the lance still within it, its hide pallid in death, and its eyes rolled back and white in forgetfulness. Upon the back of the horse sat a most curious figure, a small black fakir, not much larger than Ibrahm, but with big feet, as big as Ibis’s feet. This man or creature, or whatever type of magical being it might be, was dressed in a turban made of white and gray women’s tresses, and robes made of pale flayed human skin that fluttered noxiously in the breeze—

‘No, there is no breeze, yet the skins flutter as if there were.’

The eyes of the little man were large and black unto void. His fingernails were black and as thick and sharp as a leopard’s claws, and they did work most delicately upon the flute he piped, a flute made of bone and decorated with human eye-lashes hung from its end. It could be seen that the piper’ song controlled the dead horse and the living humans. There seemed to be a special note in there for him too. For the song made Ibrahm feel un-alone and loved.

Then, as the horse stopped its progress above Ibrahm’s little feet and began to sway like the onlookers, the strange little fakir looked down at him and winked one great glassy eye, and gave a big toothed smile, and spoke in a dialect of Hebrew that seemed somehow wrong even as the pipe kept playing under the powers of his fingers alone, with no air forced through it by lips, but rather drawn hellishly by those magical fingertips, “So pretty for me, you, me do, need eyes to see.”

With that cryptic saying the lips went back to the pipe and played furiously, causing the dervishes to leap up with menace, back and forth over Ibrahm, twisting like fiends as they passed above, whirling their wicked swords, as the black piper piped.

‘Somehow I think remaining a goat would be better.’