A former pilot, sarcophagus maker, and businessman, David Ball has traveled to sixty countries on six continents, crossed the Sahara four times in the course of researching his novel Empires of Sand, and explored the Andes in a Volkswagen bus. Other research trips have taken him to China, Istanbul, Algeria, and Malta. He’s driven a taxi in New York City, installed telecommunications equipment in Cameroon, renovated old Victorian houses in Denver, and pumped gasoline in the Grand Tetons. His best-selling novels include the extensively researched historical epics Ironfire and the aforementioned Empires of Sand, and the contemporary thriller China Run. He lives with his family in a house they built in the Rocky Mountains.
In the grim story that follows, he takes us to seventeenth-century Morocco for a harrowing game of cat-and-mouse, one in which, if you’re lucky, the prize is death....
* * * *
The Scroll
The prisoner felt a slithering on his belly and opened his eyes to a snake.
It was a viper, sluggish in the pre-dawn cool as it sought the warmth of his body. Scarcely daring to breathe, the engineer slowly lifted his head and stared into tiny coal-black eyes: emotionless, cold, and dead like his own. After the initial sick surge of fear raced through his veins, he was able to draw a deep breath, scarcely believing his good fortune. Only a week earlier, one of his men had rolled over onto just such a creature, perhaps this very one. True, he suffered horribly, but then he was released forever from this life. After all the prisoner had been through, could it at last be this easy?
He felt the pounding of his own heart as he moved his hand to provide an easy target. The air was oppressive, almost liquid.
The tongue flicked.
Please, God, take me. Now.
The snake ignored his hand. Head elevated, it kept a steady gaze on the engineer. He brushed at it. The viper drew back. No strike. Growing irritated, determined to provoke it, he swatted. He felt cool scales against his rough hand, but no burning of fang, no flush of poison. It was a dream, surely a dream; perhaps the emperor in another form, taunting him cruelly yet again. Another entry in the emperor’s scroll, another part of his destiny that he could do nothing to change.
Then it no longer mattered. The reptile slid away and disappeared into a hole in the masonry, to hunt for one of the rats.
Baptiste let his breath out and lay still on his back. A tear coursed down his cheek. The heat was already making its way into the metamore, the underground chamber he shared with five hundred others. Once there had been forty of his own men, but only six now remained, the rest taken one at a time by disease, starvation, snakes, scorpions, overwork, despair, suicide, torture, and of course, the emperor.
He heard the reedy call of the muezzin, but not yet the footsteps of the guards. It was Sunday, when Christian prisoners had half an hour extra of rest, and even the opportunity to pray together. He heard it now, the familiar refrain of the priest, holding a service near the stream that ran through their midst: “Rejoice in thy suffering, my children, for it is the will of God.” Baptiste grimaced. Surely the prisoners were rejoicing, for he could hear their agonies as they struggled to begin another day.
He closed his eyes until the hatch opened and a shaft of sunlight lit the ground near his head. A rope ladder was dropped from above. A chorus of groans was followed by a clatter of chains and the rush of men fighting for position at the ladder, because the last man up would be beaten for sloth. The other men always let the engineer go among the first, for Baptiste held the power of life and death over them. Most had heard the emperor’s familiar greeting to him.
Will you kill for us today, Engineer?
No one wished to be among those chosen to die. No one tried to make friends with him, for that, they had seen, could be fatal. Above all, no one let harm come to him, for they knew that if Baptiste lived, only some of them would die. If Baptiste died, they would all die.
By the time he ascended into another day of perdition, blinking back the blinding Moroccan sun, Baptiste was no longer certain there had been a snake at all.
* * * *
“Will you kill for us today, Engineer?” He had first heard the emperor’s refrain too many lives ago to count. A hundred? A thousand? Men dead because of his own weakness and an emperor’s boredom, men dead because of a game and a scroll, a damnable yellowed parchment at whose end he could only guess.
Baptiste was a soldier, but never believed he was a killer. He was an engineer who served at the right hand of Vauban, master of the art of siege warfare. Vauban, who could build anything and destroy anything. Together they devised ingenious methods of attack for the endless wars of Louis XIV and surpassed them with even more brilliant methods of defense.
Baptiste loved battlements and fortifications and all the tools of war, but found the noise and the smell of battle itself terrifying. He did not like the bodies and blood that fouled his neat ditches, did not like the ravages of shells that tore his pristine walls, did not, in fact, like the killing. It offended the laws of God and the order of his own life. Yes, his work allowed others to kill with speed and efficiency, but his own hands were clean. He was detached from it all: he loved the elegant precision of his drafting tools and the crisp drawings they made. In battle he often sat exposed to enemy fire, head bent over his work, oblivious of the shrieks of men and the roar of the guns and the danger, and it was the designs created in those moments that thwarted the enemy and even saved lives. That was his gift: seeing things that were not yet real, things that other men could not see, then putting them on paper so that others might convert his vision into earth, wood, and iron. After several of these battlefield designs had proved their worth, Vauban himself declared the engineer a genius and gave him a promotion.
It proved to be an unlucky advancement. He was captain of a company of engineers, transporting siege equipment in two galliots from the arsenal at Toulon to Marseilles. His own son, Andre, served in the corps and was aboard the second ship. Baptiste waved at his son, standing at the rail, easy to make out at a distance because he had the family’s distinctive streak of white hair in a thick head of black. They had been three long years at war and were looking forward to a short leave. Their ships had been becalmed, then swallowed in a rare fog. The captain assured them the winds would pick up no later than the following morning. He dispensed rum to all hands. Men drank and fiddled and played draughts. Most were napping when a corsair xebec attacked. Before an alarm could be raised, the decks were swarming with Moors. The ship fell without a shot. As Baptiste was tossed below in chains, his only consolation was that his son’s ship had not been captured.
They learned from the raïs who commanded the corsair vessel that their destination was to be Morocco. “You will find death in your Christian Hades preferable to life in that realm,” cackled the raïs. “When it comes to the suffering of man, it is Moulay Ismaïl who is master; Satan himself but a pupil.” Rumors flew on the ship about the emperor, a tyrant whose cruelty was legend. Atigny, a sapper from Aix, had suffered imprisonment there for six years, his health all but broken. “Ismaïl is a genius,” said the morose Atigny “He is building a city to rival Versailles. But he is a monster. Bloodthirsty and quite mad. He kills with his own hands. He kills for pleasure and delights in the sufferings of others. I survived because I found work in the stables. The horses live better than any man in Morocco. I was finally ransomed, but it ruined my family. My father died in poverty. There will be no second ransom for me.”
“Nonsense,” Baptiste told him. “We shall all be ransomed, by a church if not by our families.”
“When Ismaïl discovers we are engineers, he will never let us leave. He needs us for his building. I cannot return there. I cannot suffer it again. Pray you are not noticed by him, mon capitaine. He chooses prisoners at random for special torment. He toys with them. God works his worst on those the emperor notices.”
Baptiste tried to cheer the man, but he was inconsolable. On the morning the ship’s lookout signaled land, Atigny managed to strangle himself in his own chains.
The equipment captured with the galliot identified Baptiste’s men as engineers. They were taken inland from Sallee, the lair of the corsairs, to Meknes, the capital. Without ceremony they were put to work on the walls where, as Atigny had promised, cruelty was rife and death common. Men were worked beyond endurance, whipped and murdered without mercy, and buried in the walls, mixed with the lime.
One morning the imperial horses came thundering down a long passageway, Moulay Ismaïl in the lead, robes billowing, flanked by his bokhaxa, the killers of his elite personal guard. Men too slow to move were shredded beneath the hooves. The imperial party pulled up sharply and dismounted. The guards sprang to action, forcing men to the sand. Cringing and groveling were the only permitted responses to the imperial presence. Like the others, Baptiste knelt with his forehead to the ground. A moment later he was staring at the imperial toe. “Rise,” commanded the emperor. Baptiste didn’t know whether the emperor was addressing him or another, but he was quickly yanked to his feet.
The emperor of Morocco was slight of stature, dressed in plain clothing without ornament. “You are Vauban’s engineer,” he said pleasantly.
“I had the honor to serve under him, yes, Majesty.”
“Was it you who made these plans?” Ismaïl asked. Baptiste recognized papers taken from his ship.
“Yes, Majesty.”
Ismaïl’s face lit and he nodded happily. “Then we are pleased to have you in our service,” he said, as if Baptiste were there of his own will. “Come, walk with us.” He turned and strode into the palace as an astonished Baptiste hurried to catch up, hardly knowing what to make of this turn of events. This was Moulay Ismaïl, Alouite sultan of Morocco, descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Moulay Ismaïl, warrior who had helped drive the English from Tangier and the Spanish from Larache. Moulay Ismaïl, at whose hand six thousand women and children had died as he tamed the untamable Berbers. Moulay Ismaïl, who had defied the Ottoman Turks, delivering the heads of their commander and ten thousand of his troops to adorn the walls of Marrakesh and Fez, a demonstration of his yearning for peace. Moulay Ismaïl, on whose behalf the corsairs of Sallee pillaged the coasts of Europe, carrying away men, women, and children to be used for ransom or in the building of his empire. He built palaces and roads and bridges and forts and imposed harsh laws that brought peace to a land that had known nothing but war. “My people have order and bread,” he boasted as they walked. “Soon this empire shall be great once again, greater even than under the Almohads, when the art and architecture and literature of Morocco were prized in the civilized world. Have you seen the Alhambra?”
“I have not, Majesty.”
“Nor have we, but we have heard of its genius. We shall build greater still. You shall help us build, Engineer. You shall help us achieve this vision.”
“Majesty, I—”
“Tell us about the siege of Maastricht,” commanded Ismaïl, and they paused and Baptiste drew sketches in the sand and answered detailed questions from the well-informed monarch, who demonstrated keen interest in the art and science of siege warfare. “I have granaries that will allow us to withstand siege for five years,” he boasted.
“Perhaps,” Baptiste said, his practiced eye roaming the battlements, “but there are weaknesses a clever enemy might exploit.”
“Most certainly. You will correct those weaknesses, Engineer. And you will build for us a city greater than the ancient capitals of Marrakesh, of Fez, even greater than Versailles, the quarters of your infidel king Louis.”
The tour lasted three hours, the emperor expansive and proud as he pointed out features of what had already become one of the largest building complexes in the world: stables and granaries occupying vast chambers, palaces and harems, reception halls, private quarters, banquet rooms, kitchens, barracks, baths, and mosques. It was dusty, endless, and grand. The energetic emperor was bursting with ideas and stopped frequently to give orders to overseers who were clearly terrified by Ismaïl’s presence. For his part, Baptiste found the afternoon tour quite pleasant.
They had returned to Baptiste’s station when Ismaïl noticed a group of slaves he thought were moving too slowly. He seized a sword from one of his bokhaxa and with stunning swiftness decapitated two of the men. Baptiste blanched. It was nothing more than a mere flicker in his expression, but Ismaïl saw its softness. In that instant, Baptiste’s life was transformed.
Ismaïl held the sword out to him and indicated the remaining slave, cowering at his feet. “Will you kill for us today, Engineer?” the emperor asked.
Stupidly, Baptiste thought it was some sort of joke. “I am not a killer, Majesty.”
“You are a warrior, are you not?”
“An engineer, sire.”
“Do your works not kill?”
“Other men use them to kill, Majesty. Not I.”
“Where is the difference?” Ismaïl’s face lit with interest. “What is power without the ability to bring death? How might men fear you?”
“I do not care that other men may fear me. Nor can I say how they should use my devices. I simply know that I would never kill with my own hand, except to avoid being killed.”
The emperor laughed, his voice rising to a high pitch. “Never is a very long time indeed. Is it truly so?”
“It is, Majesty.”
Ismaïl appraised Baptiste intently, the royal face drawn in concentration. Then he summoned the royal scribe and gestured for him to sit on a stool at his master’s side. Ismaïl inclined his head and began to whisper to the scribe, who copied his words onto a long scroll. Baptiste stood silent, at first hoping that the emperor’s dictation had nothing to do with him. However, Ismaïl glanced at him often as he dictated to the scribe, his expression alternately amused and grave. He whispered, paused, seemed to ponder deeply, then whispered again, for nearly an hour. Baptiste began to dread what would happen at the end of the dictation. He remembered Atigny’s words: Pray you are not noticed by him.
At last Moulay Ismaïl addressed Baptiste. “The blood of the Prophet that runs in our veins allows us to see the road that Allah in his wisdom has set for some men,” he said. “We have written key waypoints in your life upon this scroll. It shall be kept upon the lintel above the palace door, to be seen by all but touched by none, save our scribe. We shall read it from time to time, to discover how clearly Allah’s path for you has been revealed to us, His unworthy disciple.” The scribe rolled the parchment tightly, cinched it with a silk cord, and tucked it into a niche above the door, guarded by one of the bokhaxa.
Baptiste had several days to work and worry before he once again heard the thunder of hooves. The emperor stopped nearby but did not summon him, instead inspecting the walls as he often did, always paying attention to the smallest details. Just then a cord broke on a slave’s wicker basket, spilling the heavy load. The slave fell to his hands and knees, scrambling to recover the stones as the emperor approached.
“Ah, Engineer,” he said cheerfully when he saw Baptiste. “Such a fortunate meeting!” He nodded toward the slave. “Will you demonstrate the penalty for sloth on the emperor’s works?”
“Majesty?” Baptiste shook his head uncertainly.
“Will you kill for us today, Engineer?” Ismaïl’s voice was as pleasant as if he were commenting upon the weather. Baptiste felt a sickness in his stomach as the lord of Morocco watched him, waiting quietly, his bokhaxa impassive and silent. Baptiste held a heavy staff but could not raise it against the man, a skinny Spaniard who realized what was about to happen and began pleading for mercy.
“No?” asked the emperor.
“No,” replied the engineer.
“Very well,” Ismaïl said. He seized Baptiste’s staff and quickly beat the Spaniard to death. He pointed to another slave, an Arab who was dragged before him thrashing and crying. The noise visibly upset Ismaïl, who swung again and again until there was silence. Yet a third victim was chosen randomly from the cowering ranks, this time a Sudanese. Ismaïl pushed him facedown into a vat of wet mortar and held him under with his foot. Ismaïl’s eyes were on Baptiste, who had witnessed the killings dumbly, transfixed. After the third victim stopped struggling, Ismaïl stepped away, breathing normally, and he summoned scribe and scroll.
The scribe read the entry: “It is written: On the first day three shall die, yet the engineer shall remain steadfast.”
The emperor clapped his hands in delight. He mounted his horse. “Men have died this day. Not at your hand, yet because of you, Engineer. Three for one. A pleasurable enough diversion for us, it is true, but a bad bargain for you—and certainly a bad bargain for them, no? At this rate, your building projects will begin to go too slowly for lack of men, and then more men will have to die in punishment. Perhaps you will kill for us tomorrow?”
Baptiste’s eyes watered with the heat and the dust and the death and he dared not wipe at them. Ismaïl laughed his high-pitched laugh, spurred his horse, and was gone. The bodies were tossed into the wall and soon covered with brick and stone, men now a permanent part of the emperor’s works.
Baptiste stood still for long moments. He fought his shock, trying to reason. For all that he felt, he did not credit the emperor with powers of prophecy. It did not take supernatural skill to divine that Baptiste would not kill a man merely to satisfy imperial whim.
Over the next few days, Baptiste’s crews heard the rumble of horses, yet always at a distance. But then they heard the hooves coming close and knew it was their turn. The engineer continued to give orders and tend to his plans, making an effort to keep the strain out of his voice as the noise grew louder and slaves bent to their work, fearing selection. The guards bet among themselves as to which kafirs would die, but were themselves vigilant when the imperial party arrived, fearing they too might fall victim to his capricious blade.
Moulay Ismaïl appeared not to have mayhem on his mind. He beckoned for Baptiste to join him, and again they strolled together examining the works, passing through lush courtyards and between great colonnades, and then along the base of a fortress wall. Oblivious of the weight on Baptiste’s shoulders, Ismaïl chatted on about the positioning of a bastion and the flow of water through a garden. He poked at a masonry joint, satisfying himself that it was well-constructed and tight. “This section is as fine as any belonging to the infidel king Louis,” he said happily. “Do you not agree?
“As you say, Majesty.”
“I am well pleased with the stonework in these columns. An Englishman saw to them.”
“The English are a plain people, Majesty, without imagination. Marble would have been better.”
Ismaïl nodded thoughtfully. “Marble we shall have, then.”
They continued through a small section of the grounds. Baptiste, ever the engineer, suggested improvements on a section of battlements, and he even allowed himself to enjoy the refreshing perfume of the olive groves and the gardens. Presently they arrived back at their starting point, where the guards were waiting with the horses. Moulay Ismaïl began to mount, but then caught himself and turned with a pleasant smile.
“Will you kill for us today, Engineer? Just one man?”
Baptiste went red in the face and weak in the knees. He made no sound, finding only enough strength to shake his head.
“No? Very well.” Ismaïl selected two Berbers. The first died stoically, while the next cursed and spat at his executioner even to the instant of death. Ismaïl’s eyes went bloodred, and he selected one of Baptiste’s own engineers, who began to whimper. As the lance was set to strike, Baptiste fell to his knees. “Please, Majesty, he is a member of my own corps. I beg mercy. Take my life instead.” He bowed, offering his neck to the royal blade.
Ismaïl hesitated. “Ah! Your own man! How careless of us. Very well, today we grant clemency for your fellow Frenchman.” The man fainted in relief, which so annoyed Ismaïl that he almost changed his mind, but the motionless man’s compatriots quickly dragged him away.
“You said earlier that the English are a simple people,” Ismaïl reminded Baptiste. “We would agree they are of less value than the Frenchman just spared, would we not? Let us say—” His dark eyes twinkled. “—two for one, perhaps?”
Baptiste shook his head in protest. “Majesty, that is not what I meant.”
“Ah, but it is. You have spoken and we have heard. Now let us see the fruits of your choice.”
Moments later two Englishmen died, including the unfortunate man responsible for the stone pillars, whose blood ran into the sand at Baptiste’s feet. The engineer could not bring himself to look upon the death he had purchased with a thoughtless comment.
“For a man who does not kill, death seems to follow you like a jackal in search of a meal,” Ismaïl observed, laughing. “So much killing! Thankfully, none by your own hand! Your conscience may remain clear, yes?”
The emperor mounted his superb Arabian. “It is said we are a shrewd judge of men, Engineer. We shall see. Perhaps tomorrow? Or perhaps you would rather we read the scroll, to learn the extent of your stubborn will?”
Baptiste did not know how to reply, so said nothing. A bokhaxa struck him viciously with a staff. “As it pleases Your Majesty,” Baptiste whispered.
Ismaïl laughed and shook his head. “In a few days more.”
Once again the dead bodies became mortar for the walls and the afternoon’s work went on. Baptiste knew that if his men did not continue their labors, the guards would beat them. So he regained his voice and issued orders and tended to his drawings, but he could not hold his pen. He felt the eyes of the other prisoners upon him. When he looked up, they were hard at their labors. His hand shook and the lines blurred into meaningless form. He could feel their fear, and their anger that he did not act to prevent needless death.
Baptiste could neither sleep nor eat. When he closed his eyes, the nightmares came—first the serpent, then severed heads, then the reading of the scroll.
He climbed atop a wall whose construction he was overseeing, determined to jump. It was the only way. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, but he felt himself getting dizzy, opened his eyes in a panic, and caught himself short.
No! Suicide was a mortal sin, and it was a bad trade—eternal damnation in Satan’s hellfires for temporary damnation in those of Moulay Ismaïl. He didn’t know whether that was the truth or whether he was simply a coward, but he climbed off the wall, still alive.
He thought of a different way to depart, with honor and without suicide. He did not have long to wait to try it. Next morning an overseer was savagely beating a man for no reason other than bloodlust. Baptiste seized the guard’s staff and began clubbing him. He landed only a few blows before the bokhaxa pulled him away, the overseer bloody but alive. The bokhaxa did not kill him on the spot, as he expected, but instead brought him before the emperor, who appeared unsurprised by the guards’ report. With a knowing smile, Ismaïl summoned his scribe, who produced the scroll. “ ‘The engineer shall seek to slay a guard in order that he may himself be slain,’“ read the scribe. “So it is written.”
Baptiste absorbed the words dumbly. Was he truly so predictable? Had he ever had free will, or had he lost it? He could not make sense of it. The scroll be damned. He would live to see his son again, would once again embrace his wife.
Dimly, he realized that Ismaïl was speaking. ”...we know that your infidel faith prevents you from taking your own life,” he was saying. “However, you also shall not take it by proxy, by provoking a guard to kill you. Indeed, we should be displeased were you to die at all, for we prize your talent. Therefore it is our order that henceforth, your safety and well-being shall be the responsibility of all men. Should you die, every man present shall forfeit his own life, and that of his family. This order shall apply to every guard, every member of the bokhaxa, every caid, every citizen of Morocco. This order shall apply to every slave in your metamore, to every slave under your command upon the works of Meknes. You shall not die, kafir, while in our glorious realm. If you do, the deaths of many hundreds shall be a stain upon your name.” Ismaïl then assigned one of the bokhaxa, a silent giant of a warrior named Tafari, to be Baptiste’s watcher.
Tafari’s vigilance was relentless: he watched Baptiste work, watched him relieve himself, watched him when he ate, never but a few steps away. Only when Baptiste descended into the metamore for the night did Tafari’s gaze leave him, for Baptiste’s fellow prisoners were then responsible for him, with their own lives as surety. Every man in Meknes knew the law: Baptiste was not to die. Not by his own hand, or by any other.
His fate was contained in the emperor’s scroll, which alone revealed his end. So it was written.
Baptiste returned to the works, where day after day it continued. The emperor’s horses thundered down long passages and his city rose on the blood and bones of his slaves, and each time there was the ritual as Baptiste was offered a choice: Kill one man, or watch three die. “There is some number of men it will take until you will kill for us, Engineer. How many must die? Ten? A hundred? What is your number, Engineer? When will ‘never’ end?”
Baptiste remained steadfast. Heads fell.
“Perhaps a small refinement,” Ismaïl said helpfully. “Such a principled man should not have to work without an audience.” He ordered the heads to be mounted on poles, and the poles planted in the masonry of the buildings on which Baptiste was working. Six men, then eight, then ten. The engineer could feel their eyes upon him, until the crows came and took them. Between deaths, his master took him on tours of other buildings, always childlike in his enthusiasms, always boasting, asking questions, commenting upon the feathers of a bird in his gardens, then suddenly, capriciously, killing again.
Baptiste clung desperately to the belief that he was doing the right thing, but as more men died in Ismaïl’s awful game, he knew he could have stopped it, could have brought at least some of the needless deaths to an end. Was not one man’s death better than three? Of course it was not fair, but what did fair matter? He simply didn’t know how to combat a man so brilliant, bloodthirsty, and mad. The priest affirmed to him that suicide was wrong, murder was wrong. All the blood was on Ismaïl’s hands. “Rejoice in your suffering,” he said, “for it is the will of the Lord.”
The deaths mounted along with the nightmares, and finally he could take no more. He would do it. The emperor would declare victory, and it would be over.
It was an Abyssinian who had slacked in his labors and needed killing, a tall and lanky slave with an easy smile that remained on his face even after his head was parted from his shoulders. After it was done, Baptiste stood there, bloody sword in hand, chest heaving but face composed, acutely aware of the emperor’s scrutiny, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing into his soul, determined not to show the revulsion that would surely cause Ismaïl to order him to do it again.
The imperial cackle of glee was followed by a call for the scribe to produce the scroll. Courtiers and bokhaxa and townspeople streamed into the courtyard, watching intently as the scribe rolled open the parchment.
“ ‘The engineer shall strike a fatal blow only after eighteen men have died,’“ the scribe read. “So it is written.”
“Alas, it was nineteen, by our count,” Ismaïl said. “A pity, yet lucky for someone, we suppose. Were it seventeen, one more would have to die. Perhaps the next revelation will be more precise.” He stared at Baptiste. “Though we saw this in the scroll, you stand poorly in our estimation, Engineer,” he said. “Were your convictions true, a thousand men would have died. A thousand times a thousand. Are you so easily swayed from your course?” He laughed, and returned to the palace, and the scroll was returned to its niche. Baptiste went to the wall where men relieved themselves and was violently ill.
So it is written. So he had done. Was it merely a lucky guess? Or was he so easily read? Was it his fault those men had died? Had he been less stubborn, would a dozen men be alive today? Should he have held fast, no matter the cost?
His nightmares did not leave him. They burned hotter, fired by the Abyssinian’s smile. He awakened screaming, another prisoner restraining him.
“It is over,” the prisoner said. “He has had his way with you, Engineer. It is over.”
But it was not over. It was only the beginning. Atigny had been right.
He toys with men.
More deaths followed, three in a week, then none for a fortnight, then three more. With each new trial, Baptiste could not help himself, seeking refuge in quiet, hopeless refusal. Each time, three men died instead of one. Moulay Ismaïl appeared to draw strength from the contest of wills, and from the act of murder. He tested new weapons: a German war hammer or a Turkish crescent blade with a hook or a Scottish lance that could skewer three men with one thrust. He seemed genuinely fascinated by the effect each death had upon Baptiste, whose suffering he contrived slowly, endlessly, with a thousand variations.
“Why do you do this to me, Majesty?” Baptiste asked one day when they were walking in an orchard. “My death would mean nothing. Why will you not show the compassion of the Prophet and release me to my God?”
Moulay Ismaïl picked an apricot and the juice ran down his chin and into his beard. “Because it pleases us,” he said. “Because we enjoy bending such a man as yourself to our will. Because we may one day bring you to the grace and true light of Islam. Because you can see things in your head that are not yet there. Like myself, you are truly a man among men, though your flaws are deep and your courage weak. Yet do not despair: We shall release you when the new reception rooms are complete,” he said earnestly
“Does it say that in the scroll, Majesty?”
The emperor smiled and there was no answer in his eyes.
The scroll unrolled slowly, accurately, as the scribe recited the litany of the engineer’s actions: He would kill, he would waver, he would try a trick, he would act, he would fail to act, always trying to prevent a death, never succeeding.
The shock of white hair on Baptiste’s head spread. His eyes were rheumy from lack of sleep. Time passed and men died and Meknes grew and he brooded and worked. When the reception rooms were completed, the emperor found another reason to delay his release.
With eight of his men Baptiste spent eleven months digging a tunnel out of the metamore. They labored all day for the emperor and all night for escape, labored until their hands were bloody and their knees raw and their bodies near collapse. There was no difficulty disposing of the dirt they removed from the tunnel. Six months of the year they lived and slept in water, fed by underground springs swollen by runoff from the snows of the High Atlas. They emptied the dirt into the water where it was washed away, leaving no trace for the guards to discover. They bribed merchants for information about where to go and how to hide, and paid extortionate sums for moth-eaten peasant robes. They broke through on a perfect autumn night, the ideal season because the seventy-mile journey to the sea could be undertaken without extremes of heat or cold. Moving only at night and in single file, they were three days and fifteen difficult miles from Meknes when a shepherd encountered them and raised the alarm. All shepherds were vigilant, because the emperor made them pay for any slaves escaping past their villages. It was another four days and seventeen miles before the dogs caught up with them, followed by mounted bokhaxa. Of eight men who followed the engineer out of the tunnel, five made it back to Meknes alive.
The surviving five men were summoned before Moulay Ismaïl, who in turn summoned his scribe to bring the scroll.
“ ‘The engineer shall attempt escape.’ So it is written.”
The emperor clapped his hands merrily. “We are so pleased Allah has blessed you with continued life!” he cried. He ordered Baptiste’s companions killed, a days-long ordeal of impalings and boilings. “A pity your compatriots were not of your measure! If only they had had your skills, perhaps we might have spared them! Ah, if only we had a thousand men like us, Engineer, men with our vision and your eye, Versailles itself would be but a poor pebble on the golden road to Meknes!”
“Release me to death,” the engineer begged.
“Ah, but there is a lifetime of work for us,” Ismaïl said. “Ten lifetimes of work. Regard our progress,” he said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the glories of his capital. “We must both live a long while, yes, Engineer?”
“I have no desire to live, Majesty.”
“Regrettable,” said Ismaïl. He brightened. “Yet we see one path to your release.”
“Sire?”
“Abandon your false religion and accept Muhammad as the messenger of God.”
“Never,” replied the Engineer with more conviction than he felt. “Never.”
“We shall see, Engineer,” said Ismaïl happily. “We shall see what is written.” Just then Ismaïl saw a slave whose foot had been crushed in an accident and could no longer carry bricks. “For today, Engineer, will you kill for us?”
Baptiste tried something new. “Better to build, Majesty. He is a master of tile; he can work without feet. Let him die naturally while laboring for your vision. Let him die completing this monument to your glory.”
The emperor roared with laughter and the cripple was spared and the scroll was prescient: ” ‘The engineer shall preserve a life through an ingenious if transparent artifice.’ So it is written.”
“So, Engineer,” Ismaïl asked. “Is life fate, or is it hope?” Baptiste had no answer, but a similar ruse the next week failed and two men died, both at the hand of Baptiste. He was killing more often now. He prayed the emperor would grow bored with their game, but Moulay Ismaïl showed no sign of it.
“Rejoice in your suffering,” said the priest.
Baptiste became fond of a boy, a runner who carried messages between posts, bare feet flying over red clay. The boy was skinny and black and had big eyes and tight curly hair and stared at the engineer’s drawings with delighted curiosity. The engineer let him make marks of his own and the boy thought it was wonderful magic. He had an aptitude for numbers and letters, and each day, while he was waiting for instruction to be carried, learned something new.
One day Ismaïl said, “We hear that you have befriended a boy.”
Baptiste felt a sickness in his belly. Of course, Tafari, his bokhaxa, had reported everything. He shrugged indifferently. “Simply a runner, Majesty. He carries messages for the overseers.”
“Whom do you love better, Engineer? The boy, or us?”
Baptiste was sick that he had not turned the boy away. Now no matter which way he answered, there was danger. If he said the boy, Moulay Ismaïl would surely order the boy killed. If he said “You, Majesty,” the emperor would surely believe that impossible and order the boy killed anyway. How to make Ismaïl do nothing?
“Neither, Majesty. My God tells me to love all men equally.”
“You are a fool, to think Allah puts an emperor at the same level as a slave boy,” Ismaïl said angrily. The engineer knew he had doomed the child, but a month passed, and another, and still the boy ran messages between posts. He began to relax, but never again showed the boy any kindness.
And then one day Ismaïl saw the boy and held out his lance. “Will you kill for us today, Engineer?”
Baptiste’s eyes watered. “Sire, no...please. Better to let him serve you. He is an excellent runner—”
“It would please us.” Six men died before Baptiste killed the boy.
It happened again six months later. He merely laughed at something a master mason said. Tafari saw, and the man quickly became a pawn in the endless match, another salted head to grace the walls. The engineer withdrew from the company of other men. He talked to himself and made his drawings and his streak of light hair grew. At night, when sleep would not come, he summoned visions of his family. He told his children Andre and Annabeile to marry well and to have many children who might honor their grandfather, a simple king’s engineer who had become a killer as his life unraveled on a scroll. Then fitful sleep would come, along with the nightmares. The snake would crawl on his belly and stare into his eyes, but never take him.
“You have won the game. Why do you continue to torment me?” They were atop a tower, surveying the city’s defenses, Ismaïl, as usual, oblivious of Baptiste’s sufferings, fascinated only by the grand works at their feet.
“Why, to see the outcome of the scroll, of course,” said Ismaïl.
“Did you not write it? Do you not know how it ends?”
“Allah wrote it; I merely copied it down. Naturally I know what it says,” said Ismaïl. “But you do not.”
“What matter that I know? Does any man know his destiny?”
“It does not matter that you know,” Moulay Ismaïl said thoughtfully. “Only what you do.”
Each time Baptiste passed the palace gate he stared at the scroll. He longed to tear it down, to read it and be quit of it, but the guard was wary and besides, he did not really want to know what was written there. He knew only that the scroll had reduced him to an animal, depraved and devoid of humanity, stripped of dignity and free will. He knew only that galloping horses brought death. He knew only the stench and misery of the metamore and that Meknes was a coarse hell built of dung and mud and death. Sleep would not come fully, and neither would madness. He feared he was going to live to be very old, building and killing for the emperor.
He knew he was a coward. He feared death more than life and he feared Moulay Ismaïl more than God. God’s wrath would come later, while Moulay Ismaïl’s was now. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing, he mused, to accept this station. Must not the priest be right, that all this suffering was truly the will of God? Perhaps there was a greater purpose at hand, and he was too simpleminded to understand it. Perhaps he was meant to survive and to build, to do the bidding of those greater than himself, men ordained by—God? Allah?—to rule other men. Moulay Ismaïl claimed nothing more than the divine right of kings. Who was Baptiste to question? What did the wretched lives of endless slaves mean, anyway?
And then, when the justifications had begun to nibble at the edges of his conscience, the emperor would greet him on a fine morning with the refrain, “Will you kill for us today, Engineer?” and it would be some innocent, someone he knew or perhaps a complete stranger, and it would plunge him again toward the precipice of madness.
Ismaïl could read his face and knew when it was time for another solemn promise. “We shall free you next spring,” he said. And Baptiste worked and he killed and he waited for the spring. But spring would come and there would be no freedom. “Not just now, Engineer, for we have need of a new pavilion. Complete it, and we shall release you in the fall.” Despite the passing seasons, the engineer never lost hope. God has a plan. He will free me when it serves His purpose.
As much as he tried to believe that, he did not cease resistance. He sabotaged one of the lime kilns that fed the insatiable demand for bricks. He did it cleverly so that it could be traced to no man, using bricks to channel a stream of super-hot air to a position on the upper rear of the kiln so that the wall would fail. He planned it for days, visualizing it in his mind, then sketching it out in the mud where he slept, then stooping to examine the interior of the kiln when he pretended to be inspecting bricks, his practiced eye gauging the thickness and resiliency of the wall, then seeing to the reordering of the bricks when the kiln was cleaned, doing it all under the watchful but ignorant eye of Tafari. It would take at least a day of heat, he knew, before the failure would occur. The kiln supplied four hundred men working on the western side of a new palace wall. A steady stream of men fed it clay and straw and took away brick. Its loss might slow the emperor for only an hour or a day, or at most five days. Perhaps the emperor might not even notice. But he would know it had been done.
The kiln failed precisely as planned. Special clay had to be imported from Fez for the repair, bringing construction to a halt for nearly a week. The emperor had been away but upon his return immediately visited the kiln, his features twisted in fury and suspicion at the ill fortune. He waved off Baptiste’s earnest and scientific explanations of structure failure caused by heat, saying that in fifteen years of building such a failure had never occurred, but he did not accuse the engineer of sabotage, either—at least not directly. He called for the scroll, which itself was unclear. “ ‘Peculiar events shall occur, traceable to no man,’“ read the scribe.
Baptiste was pleased to have fooled fate, but Ismaïl was not satisfied. As no one man could be deemed responsible, all were held responsible. The fourteen men working the kiln at the time of its collapse were burned alive in the new kiln, to remind everyone that any slowing of the work would not be tolerated. The engineer could smell the results of his handiwork for a week, as the hot summer sun and still air held the terrible odors close. In the metamore he thrashed and moaned and awakened each morning drenched in the sweat of night terror. For the first time in his life, he could remember his nightmares, none of which surpassed his waking hours.
Interminable days dragged to months, and the months crept into years. He did not count the days, for that was a torture of extended self-mortification. He plodded numbly on, sustained by thoughts of his family. His wife would be in her mid-forties now. They had known each other as children and married on his first leave. Her beauty grew in his memory. Sometimes at night she came to him and loved him, as he lay alone on his mat in the metamore. The faces of his children remained clear to him, locked in time. His daughter’s dimple, his son’s shock of white hair. Annabelle would be in the full flower of her mother’s beauty now, married and with children, while Andre, such a mirror of his father, would be fighting the king’s wars. He imagined their lives and prayed for their happiness and found himself wondering if the scroll foretold of his reunion with them. He cursed the thought: how could he believe in the scroll?
Two or three times a month a trumpet would sound from the parapets, signaling the arrival of new blood. He would climb onto a wall and watch as the caravan arrived. Always it was the same: fifty or a hundred or more trudging through the gate to feed the ravenous beast of Meknes: men for the works, women for the harems, children for the future. Some wore rags, others the remnants of fine clothing, everyone exhausted, hungry, and afraid. Alongside the slaves marched the redemptionist fathers, permitted to travel to Meknes to negotiate the release of certain of the slaves. Money sometimes came from prisoners’ relatives, and sometimes from compassionate strangers in Spain or France or England, eager to free their wretched countrymen from the curse of slavery. The fathers would enter into difficult and protracted negotiations, often directly with the emperor himself, whose coffers were endlessly depleted by his building. Thus the cycle continued: a thousand men would stream through the gates of Meknes, and a score would hobble away.
Baptiste watched them coming. He wondered which of them would die at his hand, and whether one day he might march out with those freed. Might that not be the end in the scroll? He doubted it. No ransom was worth an emperor’s game, no price worth the loss of an engineer. Besides, he could not get a message to his family. The redemptionists knew that Ismaïl had a special interest in him, and that to carry a message would be to condemn others. His only hope of freedom was madness or death. And so he killed and built and Meknes flourished, a bright city rising from the desert sands as the scroll of his life slowly unwound.
The city and its palace grew. There were minarets and walls, barracks and banquet halls, towers and a Jewish quarter, and magnificent stables for the horses. Oh, to be so lucky as the horses! He expanded their quarters, where each animal was tended by two slaves. He was everywhere in the town and the palace, always accompanied by Tafari, his watcher, building, directing, sketching, his labor the only release from his torments. On those days when ordered to kill, he would set the drawings aside and give no more orders, but plunge his own hands into the mortar of lime and blood and sand. Like the meanest slave he would carry buckets on shoulder poles and climb ladders until his feet bled, set bricks for doorways with his own hands, work until his back was breaking from the effort, work until the sun blistered his skin and he became faint from exhaustion, work until he collapsed and the overseers carried him to the metamore, where he would be lowered on the rope to the place below hell, to spend another tortured night with serpents and skulls in the blackness of his dreams.
Death came frequently, but not for him.
On a spring day the Algerians attacked Tezzo, two days from Fez. Moulay Ismaïl gathered some of the Christian prisoners, men long familiar with war and tactics, and promised that if they would help repel the enemy, he would free them. To Baptiste’s surprise he was allowed to accompany the others, with Tafari always nearby. They spent hot bloody months in the desert and performed brilliantly and he sat as he once had in the midst of battle, oblivious to enemy fire and untouched by it as he helped devise victory. The emperor’s enemies were vanquished. Upon their return to Meknes, many Christians were released, but not Baptiste. “ ‘The engineer shall perform great services to the empire of Morocco. A favor shall be granted him by a beneficent monarch.’ So it is written.”
“Your time will come,” Moulay Ismaïl told the dejected engineer as the scribe departed. “Not today. How desolate my city would look without your services! Such plans we have! Such work to be done! Such a favor you shall find tonight!”
After dusk he was summoned out of the metamore and allowed the chance to bathe. They led him to a gate near the inner palace, where he smelled perfume and oil. A pear-shaped eunuch led him through a succession of corridors to a room lit with candles and smelling of incense. An Italian slave girl awaited him. An emperor’s gift, the first woman he had seen in twelve years. He touched her skin and cried. He could do nothing with her, which terrified her because if she failed to give him pleasure, she was to be maimed or killed, and they lay together and whispered a lie they would tell, and the night passed without fulfillment.
In the morning she was gone, and later the scribe read from the scroll: “ ‘The engineer shall remain chaste in face of temptation.’ So it is written.” Ismaïl thought his chastity hugely funny. Baptiste heard later that the girl had been put to death. His only consolation was that he had not been her killer. Or had he?
One day Baptiste was approached by a corrupt and greasy caid named Yaya, whose right ear bore a jeweled ring and whose appetite for profit was limitless. He knew that Baptiste often earned money by manipulating prisoners’ work assignments. He himself had shared some of that money. He had devised an ingenious plan for Baptiste to escape. For a certain price, he said, he could arrange to have another prisoner fall from the wall into one of the lime pits, making it appear that it was Baptiste who had fallen, while seeing Baptiste safely away in the cart of a Jew who pickled heads for the emperor’s walls. The lime would make it impossible to verify the victim’s identity. The emperor would believe that his engineer had simply succumbed to one of the inevitable hazards of the walls.
“I will not make another man pay with his life to save my own,” he said. Yaya laughed. “You do so every day, Engineer. But, very well, we shall use a man who is already dead. Not a difficult thing to arrange here.”
“How shall we fool the bokhaxa? Tafari watches me every moment.”
“He may be incorruptible, your watcher, but it is not so with all of them. Fear not. On the day it is to happen Tafari will be drugged. His replacement, a man I know well, will be watching from below when you inspect the wall. He will swear to your death.”
Baptiste thought it through carefully. It was a reasonable plan. As for the deaths that the emperor had decreed would follow his own, he had come to learn the futility of his efforts to spare other men. The emperor’s caprice, not to mention his scroll, thwarted his every effort to outwit the fates. If men were to die, they were to die, and he could not prevent it. He had to try.
He had money but needed a great deal more. The caid had many to bribe. Baptiste spent months earning every sou he could. For the first time in his long captivity he found himself climbing out of the night pit with eagerness, with hope.
On the appointed day, that hope soared: for the first time, Tafari was not there to greet him. Another bokhaxa stood in his place, a man whose expression plainly conveyed he was a conspirator. The pit of lime and mortar was in exactly the right place. The substitute body, a Breton who had died the previous day, was already in place atop the wall. The cart in which he was to hide was stationed near a gate. Overseers and their slaves were working nearby, none close enough to see anything.
Baptiste began ascending the ladder, when he heard the thunder of horses galloping down the corridor. He cursed, but knew it might mean a delay of only an hour or two, as he satisfied the emperor’s curiosity about some matter of building, or killed a man, or did some other thing to fulfill what had been written in the scroll.
As it happened, the emperor wanted only to inspect one of the battlements. It took one uneventful hour. The emperor was about to depart when he paused. “Ah, we almost forgot, Engineer,” he said. “We have a gift for you.” One of the bokhaxa stepped forward, extending an oilskin packet.
“A gift?”
“A small gem. A token of our esteem for your services, which we know are not always given with the greatest enthusiasm.”
Warily, Baptiste took the packet. “But first,” the emperor said, “we must hear from our scribe.” Baptiste’s pulse quickened.
“ ‘There shall be a subterfuge, coupled with betrayal,’“ the scribe read, and Baptiste felt his head pounding and his knees weakening. “So it is written.”
The emperor nodded at the packet. Dumbly, Baptiste’s fingers worked at the ties. There was indeed a gem, along with the ear to which it had been attached. His knees gave out and he sank to the dirt, the packet dropping from his hand.
The emperor laughed. “Had you only asked us, surely we could have arranged the same end for less money,” he said, and his face went dark in madness, just as it did when men died. “You must not presume upon our very good nature, Engineer.”
“Was it not written in the scroll that I should do this thing?” Baptiste asked dully. “How could I be wrong to act in the manner ordained for me?”
Ismaïl laughed and clapped his hands. “Ah! An inspired riposte! You have come to see that your path has indeed been written. We are making grand progress.” He clapped again and the bokhaxa who had taken Tafari’s place was dragged into the square. His genitals were tied to a cord, the other end of which was attached to the harness of a mule. The mule’s trainer was delicate and entertained the crowd for nearly an hour, but then the mule responded too exuberantly to one prod, and it was over. Baptiste was forced to watch, and when the man at last died Baptiste felt nothing at all. He watched again as the Jewish pickler’s head was added to the walls—without, of course, having been pickled. The emperor would have to see to a new craftsman.
“Rejoice in your suffering,” the priest told him. “God’s will be done.”
Baptiste assigned himself to work in one of the mud pits where bricks were mixed with straw. He swung the mattock furiously, trying to force the images from his mind. He heard the thunder of hooves and did not turn to meet them, but kept working. A moment later, he stood shoulder to shoulder with the emperor himself, royal arms plunged deep in the muck. Ismaïl talked about building and architecture, and about the infidel Sun King and his pathetic Versailles, whose deficiencies were being reported to him by his ambassadors, and of the properties of masonry and the difference between the mud of France and the mud of Morocco. The emperor shouted orders and pointed and commanded and worked hard, his back bent like that of a common laborer, and Baptiste noticed that his neck was stretched like that of a common man as well. He realized he could sever that neck with the simple mattock in his hands, and so bring an end to the sufferings of fifty thousand men. He felt the eyes of Tafari and the other bokhaxa upon him, but even so knew he could do it in one stroke. He closed his eyes to summon his strength, and as the muscles moved to obey, the emperor had had enough labor and stepped from the pit and the moment was gone. Ismaïl allowed himself to be washed and toweled, all the while watching Baptiste with an enigmatic smile. He beckoned for the scribe and ordered him to fetch the scroll. “ ‘The engineer shall let a moment for revenge pass unconsummated.’ So it is written.”
Ismaïl laughed uproariously. “Such an opportunity comes but once in a lifetime,” he said. “A pity to waste it.” Baptiste knew that the emperor had known when the scroll would say it was time for this test and had deliberately offered himself to Baptiste’s blade. Yet, as with all his other tests, he had failed.
It occurred to Baptiste that he might stem the killing simply by building faster and better than ever before. If the emperor saw progress equal to his dreams, if the emperor was accommodated in every respect, it might stay his sword, or his desire that the engineer wield it for him. He casually suggested a new reception hall where Ismaïl might receive and entertain ambassadors and dignitaries, a room equal to Ismaïl’s stature in the world, a spectacular complex with not only a banquet hall but also a large open courtyard with twelve pavilions, each covered with intricate tiles and mosaics. Ismaïl loved the idea. Baptiste devoted himself to it. He saw to the transport of marble from the nearby Roman ruins of Volubilis. Carpenters cut olive wood for ornate inlaid panels. The walls bore engravings boasting of the accomplishments of the emperor who raised them. Marvelously complex mosaics graced the twelve pavilions, each more magnificent than the last. The complex rose more quickly than any other in memory, and on his regular inspections, the emperor pronounced it grand and to his liking. For months it went on, through a winter and a spring, and in those months the engineer was immersed in his work as never before. As he had hoped, fewer men died, and for sixty days, none at all by his hand. The scroll remained in its niche.
A sumptuous banquet was held when the hall was completed, attended by governors and ambassadors who sampled the delights of Ismaïl’s kitchens and were entertained by his musicians and the dance of forty slave girls. Baptiste could only imagine the success of the event, for he spent the evening huddled in his night pit. The next morning Ismaïl pronounced himself displeased because the whole of the hall did not exceed the sum of the parts. He ordered the complex destroyed. Within a week, Baptiste’s triumph was rubble, to be used for other buildings. The engineer was invited to kill six of the fourteen overseers who had carried out his orders. “They did not live up to your talent,” said Moulay Ismaïl. “Won’t you kill them for us, Engineer?”
He could think of nothing else to do. Whether he worked quickly or slowly, whether he built well or poorly, whether he resisted or gave in, the emperor’s game went on; only the scroll seemed to hold the answer to what would come next. Incidents varied but nothing changed. Imperial horses raced down long corridors. Swords flashed and heads flew, and men lived and died as buildings were created and destroyed, all for royal whimsy. The palace walls grew inexorably, meter after meter, thick and heavy, filled with the flesh and bones of the men who worked them. Meknes was splendid indeed.
“Thank God for your suffering,” the priest told him. “It is glorious to endure for the true faith.”
And then one morning, after a slave had died and the scroll had been read, the scribe whispered something to the emperor.
“The entries in your scroll have come to an end,” Moulay Ismaïl said. “There is but one further entry.”
Baptiste went numb.
“Do you not care to guess what it is?”
“The truth,” said Baptiste after a pause. “It does not matter, so long as it is the end.”
The emperor laughed and announced that the scroll’s final entry would be read a week hence, after morning prayer.
Baptiste returned to his walls. He looked at no man and shut out the thunder of hooves. For the first time in his long captivity, he refused himself hope, and he refused himself despair. There was only an end.
What he did hear on a Saturday morning was the sounding of the trumpet and the clanking of chains as a caravan arrived from Sallee. It was the second that week; hunting had been good for the corsairs. There were the usual ambassadors and merchants among the donkeys and camels, all stirring up a great cloud of dust, and redemptionist fathers bearing their purses and petitions, while beside and behind them trudged the new crop of prisoners and their guards. A hundred in, five out, in the awful math that was Meknes. Baptiste cared little for studying a new miserable stream of humanity entering perdition, so he merely glanced down at the procession, returning his focus to the line of a new wall. But something caught his attention. He felt light tentacles of dread and looked again, peering through the cloud of dust that rose over the procession. His eyes scanned the faces.
There.
Near the end, behind one of the guards, a shock of white hair in a head of black. He stared, fearing the worst, until there was no mistaking.
Andre! My son! Dear God, please let my eyes be deceiving me!
But there was no mistake; looking at his son was like looking at his own reflection. And then Andre looked to the wall, his face bright and unmistakable, and he saw his father, and he waved and yelled, his voice barely audible: “Father! Father! It is I! Andre! Father!”
Baptiste all but imperceptibly shook his head, cautioning his son to silence, but Andre only yelled louder. “Father!” And then his voice was lost in the tumult and his face in the crowd, and he disappeared round the corner.
Baptiste stood dead still, unable to move, barely able to breathe. Mind reeling, he turned slowly and saw Tafari. Watching, as always. He had witnessed the exchange as father saw son, and son father. His great round face betrayed nothing, but it was done.
“Please.” Baptiste’s voice was barely a whisper. “Have mercy upon a poor father. Have mercy upon his son. Say nothing. I beg you.” He took a purse from his sash and pressed it into the incorruptible bokhaxa’s hand. Tafari let it fall to the ground, his face stone.
Baptiste sank to his knees and slumped on the wall. Of course, the watcher would inform the emperor.
Baptiste knew the final entry in the scroll.
His son was going to die, at his father’s hand.
* * * *
Courtiers and ambassadors hurried to get a good place, to see the reading for themselves, to hear proof once again of the emperor’s sagacity. Only a true son of Muhammad could have such power of prophecy.
The emperor sent Tafari to fetch the prisoner, who along with the other Christians was enjoying the comfort of their infidel priests on that Sunday morning.
“We are informed the son of the engineer has come with the caravan from Sallee,” Ismaïl said. “Bring him forward.”
The court fell to a hush as two bokhaxa escorted the Frenchman into the emperor’s presence. He came not from among the slaves, but from among the redemptionists. He was not a prisoner, but a petitioner.
“You have come to negotiate the freedom of your father,” Ismaïl said.
“Yes, Majesty,” Andre said, his speech carefully prepared. Moulay Ismaïl was well known to confiscate ransoms and renege on arrangements. “We pray your beneficence, having brought a ransom for his release. We are certain that—”
Moulay Ismaïl impatiently waved him to silence. “For this man, it matters not what you have brought. It matters only what is written in the scroll. We shall soon see what the fates hold for your father.”
The bokhaxa returned, his features ashen.
“Where is the engineer?” demanded the emperor.
Tafari fell to his face. “Forgive me, Majesty. He is dead.”
The emperor’s color went dark and his eyes flashed red as his rage built. “How did this come to pass?”
“He was found on his mat, Highness. There were marks of a serpent on his throat.”
Those present waited to see how Ismaïl might vent his rage. But he merely pondered for a moment, then waved for the scribe, who hurried forward. The great hall fell silent as he unrolled the well-used parchment. The scribe cleared his throat. “There is but one word,” he said.
“Read it,” commanded the emperor.
‘“Release.”‘ The scribe whispered it. “So it is written.”
Overcome with emotion, Andre cried out and then sagged, the choked whisper of his prayers lost in the murmuring of the court. One of the redemptionist fathers helped steady him.
“Until now, your father has been a good servant to us,” Ismaïl said. “Yet the end to our little experiment has not worked out wholly to our satisfaction. Regrettably, your father has taken the wrong path of release.” Ismaïl looked to his bokhaxa. “Take him prisoner.”
The young engineer’s sobs died in the shock of his seizure and the clanking of the chains. As locks clicked shut, Ismaïl spoke to his scribe, who produced a fresh scroll and waited, quill poised.
Refreshed by the prospect of a new amusement, the emperor of Morocco turned his brightest smile upon Andre. “In this empire, sons must atone for the shortcomings of their fathers.”
Andre stood bewildered. “Majesty?”
“Tell us, Engineer’s Son,” Ismaïl asked him happily. “Will you kill for us today?”