The Anubis Gates

Laid like multiple exposures over the narrow, tan-colored street scene in front of him were images of the dozen seconds in the street of the Bab-el-Azab; now they demanded, almost audibly, his attention. He saw for the first time—his brain having only stored it unregarded before—the spray of blood and dust and bits of cloth exploding away from a horse and rider who were jigging violently in a particularly intense moment of the crossfire, both of them dead but kept upright and animate by the ceaseless upward-slanting blasts from either side… one quick glimpse of a face behind one of the gun barrels poking out of the wall, a face calmly intent on doing a moderately difficult job well… one Mameluke Bey, blinded and dying from a cross shot that had punched in one temple and out the other, standing on the pavement and swinging furious sword strokes at a blank section of wall during the few seconds between his horse’s death and his own …

Doyle wailed and pressed his forehead against the gritty stone of the doorway, provoking another exclamation of “Melboos?” from a boy carrying a water bag down the lane.

Doyle couldn’t hear very much over the ringing in his ears, but he saw the boy lope out of the street and flatten himself against the far wall, and a moment later a dozen white-skirted Albanian mercenaries rode down the lane, scrutinizing every person; and each of the twelve stared hard at the prodigiously dirty old beggar with awful mud-caked sores on his arm and leg and belly, sobbing and hugging a stick in a doorway. A couple of the mercenaries laughed, and one threw a coin at the wretch, but none of them stopped.

When they’d ridden around the next corner, Doyle picked up the coin, stood up, and waved to the water boy, who trotted over and let him have a drink from the neck of the goat-skin. Though warm and fetid, the water rinsed the taste of gunpowder out of his head, and made the horrid new memories recede enough that he could think of something else.

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.”