Asad considered him. “Dost thou, too, urge this?” quoth he.
“Have others urged it?” The man’s sharp wits, rendered still sharper by his sufferings, were cutting deeply and swiftly into this matter. “They did well, but none could have urged it more fervently than I, for none knows so well as I the joy of battle against the infidel under thy command and the glory of prevailing in thy sight. Come, then, my lord, upon this enterprise, and be thyself thine own son’s preceptor since ’tis the highest honour thou canst bestow upon him.”
Thoughtfully Asad stroked his long white beard, his eagle eyes growing narrow. “Thou temptest me, by Allah!”
“Let me do more. …”
“Nay, more thou canst not. I am old and worn, and I am needed here. Shall an old lion hunt a young gazelle? Peace, peace! The sun has set upon my fighting day. Let the brood of fighters I have raised up keep that which my arm conquered and maintain my name and the glory of the Faith upon the seas.” He leaned upon Sakr-el-Bahr’s shoulder and sighed, his eyes wistfully dreamy. “It were a fond adventure in good truth. But no … I am resolved. Go thou and take Marzak with thee, and bring him safely home again.”
“I should not return myself else,” was the answer. “But my trust is in the All-knowing.”
Upon that he departed, dissembling his profound vexation both at the voyage and the company, and went to bid Othmani make ready his great galeasse, equipping it with carronades, three hundred slaves to row it, and three hundred fighting men.
Asad-ed-Din returned to that darkened room in the Kasbah overlooking the courtyard, where Fenzileh and Marzak still lingered. He went to tell them that in compliance with the desires of both Marzak should go forth to prove himself upon this expedition.
But where he had left impatience he found thinly veiled wrath.
“O sun that warms me,” Fenzileh greeted him, and from long experience he knew that the more endearing were her epithets the more vicious was her mood, “do then my counsels weigh as naught with thee, are they but as the dust upon thy shoes?”
“Less,” said Asad, provoked out of his habitual indulgence of her licences of speech.
“That is the truth, indeed!” she cried, bowing her head, whilst behind her the handsome face of her son was overcast.
“It is,” Asad agreed. “At dawn, Marzak, thou settest forth upon the galeasse of Sakr-el-Bahr to take the seas under his tutelage and to emulate the skill and valour that have rendered him the stoutest bulwark of Islam, the very javelin of Allah.”
But Marzak felt that in this matter his mother was to be supported, whilst his detestation of this adventurer who threatened to usurp the place that should rightly be his own spurred him to mad lengths of daring.
“When I take the seas with that dog-descended Nasrani,” he answered hoarsely, “he shall be where rightly he belongs—at the rowers’ bench.”
“How?” It was a bellow of rage. Upon the word Asad swung to confront his son, and his face, suddenly inflamed, was so cruel and evil in its expression that it terrified that intriguing pair. “By the beard of the Prophet! what words are these to me?” He advanced upon Marzak until Fenzileh in sudden terror stepped between and faced him, like a lioness springing to defend her cub. But the Basha, enraged now by this want of submission in his son, enraged both against that son and the mother who he knew had prompted him, caught her in his sinewy old hands, and flung her furiously aside, so that she stumbled and fell in a panting heap amid the cushions of her divan.
“The curse of Allah upon thee!” he screamed, and Marzak recoiled before him. “Has this presumptuous hellcat who bore thee taught thee to stand before my face, to tell me what thou wilt and wilt not do? By the Koran! too long have I endured her evil foreign ways, and now it seems she has taught thee how to tread them after her and how to beard thy very father! Tomorrow thou’lt take the sea with Sakr-el-Bahr, I have said it. Another word and thou’lt go aboard his galeasse even as thou saidst should be the case with him—at the rowers’ bench, to learn submission under the slave master’s whip.”
Terrified, Marzak stood numb and silent, scarcely daring to draw breath. Never in all his life had he seen his father in a rage so royal. Yet it seemed to inspire no fear in Fenzileh, that congenital shrew whose tongue not even the threat of rods or hooks could silence.
“I shall pray Allah to restore sight to thy soul, O father of Marzak,” she panted, “to teach thee to discriminate between those that love thee and the self-seekers that abuse thy trust.”
“How!” he roared at her. “Art not yet done?”
“Nor ever shall be until I am lain dumb in death for having counselled thee out of my great love, O light of these poor eyes of mine.”
“Maintain this tone,” he said, with concentrated anger, “and that will soon befall.”
“I care not so that the sleek mask be plucked from the face of that dog-descended Sakr-el-Bahr. May Allah break his bones! What of those slaves of his—those two from England, O Asad? I am told that one is a woman, tall and of that white beauty which is the gift of Eblis to these Northerners. What is his purpose with her—that he would not show her in the sôk as the law prescribes, but comes slinking here to beg thee set aside the law for him? Ha! I talk in vain. I have shown thee graver
