man’s neck. His master had snorted awake, eyes wide with alarm, and Elfi had given him a moment or two to gather his sodden wits before whispering: ‘By law, either the master or the slave has the right to take the other to court to rescind the contract of sale within the first two weeks. I did not become a Mamluke to be the house-pet of a buffoon. Sell me now, or you will wake up one night to find your throat slit.’
The Majnoon had been so terrified he could not sell Elfi fast enough; he had given him to Murad Bey in exchange for a thousand ardabs of wheat – an unprecedented sum – and from that moment on he was known as Elfi, ‘he of the thousand’. Murad Bey had taken him into the greatest Mamluke house of them all, and had trained him well. He had been taught to think of his master as his father, and of Murad’s other young Mamlukes-in-training as his khushdash, his brothers. Recognizing Elfi’s merit, Murad had manumitted him in record time. Elfi had risen rapidly in the ranks from kashif to amir, commander. Today he owned a thousand Mamlukes of his own and commanded forty kashifs under him with a militia of thousands more. He owed much to Murad, and tonight he needed to remind himself of that debt.
Elfi ducked his head under the water and held his breath. As a boy he had trained himself to hold his breath in the cold, pure streams of his mountains, for as long as it took a hawk to circle seven times. From time to time he still practised this skill; he did not know why – only that it might come in handy, one day. He timed himself, counting.
The first house Elfi owned he had bought from the Majnoon, his former master. Then he had built the mansion at Old Cairo opposite the Nilometer, and one between the Gate of Victory and the Damurdash, in addition to the two houses he had bought in Ezbekiah. But this palace he had just completed was the culmination of his heart’s ambition. He had had it built from the ground up, razing the site, and sketching out the plans himself on a large sheet of paper. Day and night, kilns fired stones and churned out lime, and mills turned to crush gypsum, and large stones were quarried and transported by ship down the Nile to be sawn into slabs for floors, stairs and courtyards. Various kinds of woods, of marbles and columns, were imported, as well as the chandeliers and the indoor and outdoor fountains. The French had given him an enormous marble fountain with carved figures of fish that sent out jets of water, and that he had put in the garden, under the long vaulted roof he had built for shade and privacy.
He had installed latticework screens with inlaid coloured glass on the windows overlooking the lake, the gardens and the square, so that his women could enjoy the views in privacy. There were two bath halls with pools, one upstairs and one downstairs. He had the house built on different levels, with courtyards, doors and steps separating his private apartments from the apartments on the outer periphery of the courtyard where his Mamlukes would live.
He thought he had rid his nostrils forever of the sour smell of the goat cheese his mother made in that hut on the side of the mountain. But a hunger still gnawed in him, a hunger he could not satisfy with fine houses or sensuous women or hordes of servants or great power. He had grown up illiterate, but in his prime he discovered in himself a hunger for knowledge. Now he bought every book he could, even in languages he did not speak, and sought out the company of scholars and historians. His pride in the new mansion was the library, stocked with books on history and the sciences, particularly those that fascinated Elfi: astronomy, geometry and astrology. Were it not for the unassailable reputation for hard living he had earned in his youth, he would have lost face among his peers.
The first week after Elfi moved in, the house blazed every night with chandeliers and the courtyard and gardens sang with lanterns to greet the throngs of visitors who came to congratulate and envy. He owed it all to Murad. But on this day Elfi felt his loyalty tested as it had never been.
Elfi whipped his head out from under the jets of the fountain, taking in big breaths, and splashed the water under his arms and over his chest. He shook himself like a dog emerging from a pond. He could still hold his breath for as long as it took a hawk to circle seven times.
He had spent the night in council at the judge’s house, with the assembled Mamluke amirs and the civilian notables. Old Ibrahim Bey, the senior Mamluke and Prince of the Pilgrimage; Murad, Master of Cairo; Elfi, Tambourji, Bardissi, and the two other Beys who governed the main provinces of Egypt – the seven of them were the ruling Mamlukes. The senior kashifs immediately under their command were also present, along with Papas Oglu, the Greek captain of Murad’s river flotilla. The leading scholars and clerics of the Azhar University, headed by the judge, represented the notables. The heads of the guilds and the chief merchants rounded out the council and represented the commercial interests of the city.
Before them all, Murad had laid out his strategy: to split their cavalry forces in two, with Ibrahim Bey and his men camped on the east bank of the Nile and Murad and Elfi on the west. This plan had immediately seemed disastrous to Elfi. In vain he had argued that they should mass all their forces on the far bank of the river, where they would have the advantage of forcing the French to cross over to meet them. Murad had dismissed this on the grounds that the French might advance along either bank or both at once. Elfi countered that any doubts regarding the direction from which the French were advancing could be settled by sending out Bedouin scouts. But Murad had remained immovable and maddeningly dismissive of the enemy’s forces. Elfi had even ridden back with Murad to his house at dawn to try to change his mind, but Murad had refused to see reason.
And this morning, as Elfi gave the order to his Mamlukes to prepare for battle and to gather at the Citadel, he was thinking that his oath of fealty to his former master might never cost him, or the city, dearer.
Sitt Nafisa heard Murad’s heavy tread on the stone steps leading to her rooms and dismissed her maids with a quick flicker of her fingers. Murad was in full battle regalia, splendidly attired in vivid tunic and pantaloons, his chest festooned with gold chains, his fingers encrusted with precious stones, bejewelled sword hanging at his side and burnished pistols tucked into his scarlet sash. Nafisa guessed that his shaved head must be perspiring under the turban, and that the sable-lined cloak over his shoulders must weigh on him unbearably in the July heat. The French consul Magallon – in the days when he and his wife used to call on Nafisa regularly – had once asked her why Mamlukes made themselves such a rich prize in battle, giving the enemy incentive to kill them expressly to pillage the corpses. ‘Truly, à la guerre comme à l’amour, hmm?’ Magallon had smiled quizzically. It was just the Mamluke custom, she had explained; they were a military caste. Perhaps it was their way of defying fate.
To a casual observer, Murad might not appear to be a man preoccupied by thoughts of an imminent meeting with destiny, but Nafisa could read him under his bluster. The scar from a sword slash across his face had turned livid, as it did whenever he was in the heat of argument or battle.
‘We set off from the Citadel at noon, and we will cross the river and wait for the French at Imbaba. Ibrahim Bey has already made camp on the eastern bank.’
Nafisa nodded. All morning she had heard the kettledrums booming and the shrill pipes playing as the cavalcade of horsemen pranced through the winding streets on their way uphill to the Citadel.
‘The French won’t reach Cairo.’ Murad’s red beard bristled like a burning bush. ‘They may have taken Alexandria, but they won’t reach Cairo, nevertheless you may leave if you wish. Ibrahim Bey is evacuating his women; you can join his train. I can spare a small Mamluke escort for you, and of course you can take your maids and eunuchs.’
‘I won’t leave Cairo, whatever happens. Who will be left if I do?’ She had been brought to Cairo as a two-year-old and sold into a great house; she remembered nothing else. ‘I know Ibrahim Bey’s daughter Adila will stay also, and many of the other women. Don’t worry, about us – this is not the Mongols sacking Baghdad. But I’ll move some of the coffers of coins and jewels to our other houses in Cairo for safe-keeping, just in case there is any lawlessness – or if we need to pay
