my hearing shares in the general decay of the broken-down black-assed old wreck you see before you.”
The African yanked the shard of Arab steel from the table and with it went in search of the Frank's voice box, ending his quest no farther from the pale knuckle of the Frank's throat than the width of the blade itself The Frank fell back, bumping into a pair of Armenian wool factors at whom he glared as if it were some clumsiness of theirs and not his cowardly instinct for self-preservation that had cost him his footing.
“But I take your gist,” the African said, returning the dagger to his boot. On the ostler's slate the odds began to run heavily against the Frank.
The African restored the shatranj board and pieces to a leather pouch, wiped his lips and then pushed past the Frank, past the craning heads along the benches and went out into the inn yard to kill or be killed by his insulter. As the men trooped after him into the torch-lit courtyard, carrying cups of wine, wiping their bearded chins on their forearms, the weapons belonging to the combatants were fetched from a rack in the stable.
If because of his immensity, the span of his arms and his homicidal air, and despite his protestations of senescence, which were universally regarded as gamesmanship, the betting had been inclined to favor the African before the weapons were fetched, the arming of the two men decided it. The Frank carried only a long, absurdly thin bodkin that might serve, in a pinch, to roast a couple of birds over an open fire, if they were not too plump. The travelers had a good laugh at “the tailor with his needle” and then pondered the mystery of the African's choice of sidearm, a huge Viking ax, its haft an orgy of interpenetrating runes, the quarter-moon of its blade glowing cold, as with satisfied recollection of all the heads it had ever lopped from spouting necks.
Under the full moon of the month of Mehr, with the torches hissing, the African and the Frank circled an ambit of packed earth. The Frank minced and scissored on his walking-stick legs, the tip of his bodkin indicating the heart of the African, glancing from time to time at his own fine black boots as they threaded a course through the archipelago of camel and horse turds. The African employed an odd crabwise scuttling style of circling, knees bent, eyes fixed on the Frank, the ax held loosely in his left fist. The awkward, almost fond way they went about readying themselves to murder each other moved the old mahout, who had trained a thousand war elephants to kill and so recognized the professional quality of the interest these two combatants were taking in the fight. But the other travelers jostling under the eaves and archways of the inn yard, who knew nothing of the intimacy of slaughter, grew impatient. They jeered the combatants, urging them to hurry so they could all finish their suppers and file off to bed. Half-maddened by boredom, they doubled their wagers. Word of the duel had reached the village down the hill, and the gate of the inn yard was lively with women, children and sad-faced lean men with heroic moustaches. Boys climbed to the roof of the inn, shook their fists and hooted as the Frank and the African emptied their heads of last regrets.
Then the ax, humming, seemed to drag the African toward the belly of the Frank. Its blade caught the torchlight and scrawled an arcing rune of fire in the gloom. The Frankish scarecrow dodged, and watched, and ducked when the ax came looking for his head. He dropped to his shoulder, rolled on the ground, surprisingly adroit for a scatter-limbed scarecrow, and popped up behind the African, kicking him in the buttocks with a look on his face of such childish solemnity that the spectators again burst into laughter.
It was a contest of stamina against agility, and those who had their money on the former began with confidence in the favorite and his big Varangian ax, but the African, angered, grew gross and undiscerning in his ax-play He shattered a huge clay jar full of rainwater, soaking a dozen outraged travelers. He splintered the wheel spokes of a hay wagon, and as the solemn Frank danced, rolled and thrust with his slender bodkin, the berserker ax bit flagstones, shedding handfuls of sparks.
The torches guttered, and the tinge of blood drained from the moon as it rose into the night sky A boy watching the fracas from the roof leaned too far out, tumbled and broke his arm. Wine was fetched, mixed with clean water from the well and handed in bowls to the duelists, who staggered and reeled around the inn yard now, bleeding from a dozen cuts.
Then tossing aside the wine bowls, they faced each other. The watchful mahout caught a flicker in the giant African's eyes that was not torchlight. Once more the ax dragged the African like a charger trailing a dead cavalryman by the heel. The Frank tottered backward, and then as the African heaved past he drove the square toe of his left boot into the African's groin. All the men in the inn yard squirmed in half-willing sympathy as the African collapsed in silence onto his stomach. The Frank slid his preposterous sword into the African's side and yanked it out again. After thrashing for a few instants, the African lay still, as his dark-though not, someone determined, black-blood muddied the ground.
The ostler signaled to a pair of grooms, and with difficulty they dragged the dead giant out to a disused stable beyond the present walls of the caravansary and threw an old camel skin over him.
The Frank straightened his cuffs and hose and re-entered the caravansary, declining to accept the congratulations or good-natured japery of the losing bettors. He declined to take a drink too, and indeed melancholy seemed to overcome him in the wake of the fight, or perhaps his natural inclinations toward Northern gloom merely resumed their reign over his heart and face. He chewed his stew and took his leave. He wandered down to the stream behind the caravansary to wash his hands and face, then slipped into the derelict stable, doffing his ruined hat as if in tribute to the bravery of his opponent.
“How much?” he said as he entered the stable.
“Seventy,” the giant African replied, stringing the laces of his felt bambakion, its counterfeit bloodstains washed away in a horse trough, to the horn of his saddle. He rode a red-spotted Parthian, tall and thick-muscled, whose name was Porphyrogene. “Enough for a dozen fine new black hats for you when we get to Rhages.”
“Don't even say the word ‘hat,’ I beg you,” the Frank said, gazing down at the hole in the high crown. “It saddens me.”
“Admit it was a fine throw”
“Not half so fine as this hat,” the Frank said. He laid the hat aside and opened his shirt, revealing a bright laceration that ran, beaded with waxy drips of blood, across his abdomen. Flows of blood swagged his hollow belly He looked away and gritted his teeth as the African dabbed at him with a rag, then applied a thick black paste taken from a pot that the Frank carried in his saddlebags. “I loved that hat almost as much as I love Hillel.”
At that moment the animal in question, a woolly stallion with a Roman nose and its neck a rampant arch, stubby-legged and broad in the croup, the product of some unsupervised tryst between an Arabian and a wild tarpan, gave a warning snort, and there was a scrape of leather sole against straw
The Frank and the living African turned to the door. Expecting the ostler, thought the old elephant trainer, with their share of the take, which included four of the mahout's own hard-won dirhams.
“You mendacious sons of bitches,” the mahout said admiringly, reaching for the hilt of his sword.
CHAPTER TWO
Easily as a sailor handling a blasphemy, the African reached behind him for the Viking ax (whose name, cut in runes along its ashwood haft, translated roughly as “Defiler of Your Mother”), but three little words preserved the cordial relations between the head and neck of the intruder, a wiry old party armed with a short sword, Persian by the look of him with a knob of scar tissue where his right eye had been and a curious sneer. Many times the Frank, whose name was Zelik-man, had seen his partner swing Mother-Defiler in order to silence, with a dull smack of meat and bone, some foolish shrewd fellow who had guessed the true nature of the duels that ill fortune sometimes obliged the partners to stage. Perhaps the span of a breath remained to the intruder for the enjoyment of his perspicacity, a breath that the Persian wisely employed to say: “Keep your money.” He returned his short sword to its sheath, lifted a three-fingered hand from the hilt and raised it, with its four-fingered mate, into the air. On his right hip he wore an ornate weapon or tool, a carved shaft of ivory barbed with a curious double blade like a spearhead giving birth to a pruning hook. “I don't want it, friends. No gold was ever harder won. As far as anyone in this neighborhood will ever hear from me, Nubian,” the man continued, addressing his remarks to Mother-Defiler rather than to Amram, who came in fact from Abyssinia, “you are lying cold and lifeless under a camel-skin blanket,
