Title: The Enchanted Crusade
Author: Krepps, Robert W.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Enchanted Crusade" ***


              Saracen blades held no fear for Godwin; but
           now he faced Mufaddal's sorcery with the fate of
           the beautiful Ramizail--and England--resting upon

                         The Enchanted Crusade

                         By Geoff St. Reynard

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
                              April 1953
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Just as daybreak burst over the rim of the desert, the dying man heard
the crunch of horses' hooves on sand. He lifted his head and croaked as
loudly as collapsing lungs would let him, saying thrice over, "In the
name of God, help!" Then he pitched on his nose again and lay still,
unable to move so much as an eyelash.

There was the grit of sand under the light tread of men, and a voice
said, "Name of all camels! What a collection of vulture-victuals this
one is!"

"I doubt it was he cried out," said another voice. "He must have
been dead for a decade." This voice then rendered a belch of classic
proportions. "Damn those figs," it said.

"If you will eat three pounds at a breakfast, Godwin love," said a
throaty feminine voice, all full of honey and laughter, "you must
expect some few repercussions."

The dying man collected his will and the scraps of strength that were
left in his tortured body, and shoving at the sand with one arm managed
to roll over on his back. The horizon-cleared sun lanced sickeningly
across his eyeballs, adding one more pain to the thousand which beset
him. Three vague dark shapes bent above him.

"By the very God, he lives! Give him a drink."

Water, cool and terrible and yet incredibly wondrous to lips and
blackened gums that had tasted nothing save blood for what must surely
be centuries, dribbled down across his cheeks, ran into his mouth,
reached through his rasped throat for his belly. He gurgled and thought
he was drowning, and it seemed a splendid death.

But he had something to say, something of such importance that it
had dragged him across this endless waste of hellish sand long after
a missionless man would have given up and died. He recollected the
message and blinked his nearly sightless eyes once or twice, and made
futile little motions toward a sitting position. A brawny arm at his
back tilted him upright. "Easy, man. You're all but dead. Don't strive
so. Die easily."

"Godwin, you're a born diplomat," said the woman's voice. "Why don't
you come right out and tell him he looks like two coppers' worth of
dogmeat?"

"Well, he does," Godwin said grimly. "No sense in lying to a chap who's
about to give up the spirit, Ramizail. No real man wants that."

"Listen," croaked the dying one. "Who are you?"

"Three adventurers," said the voice that had sworn by the very God.
It was an elderly voice but full of vigor. "Three homeless travelers
pledged to right wrongs and defeat hell's minions wherever they may be
found."

"Thanks to the Holy Sepulcher," groaned the dying one. "Perhaps all may
be well."

The man holding him up jerked with surprise. "Here," he said, with a
kind of tender roughness, "are you a Crusader, man? Are you a Frank?"

"English," said he. "Sir Malcolm du Findley." He made a hideous
rattling noise but from somewhere deep in his soul the power came to
make him go on. "El Iskandariya. Big ship. Full of rats."

"What's he burbling about?" asked the deep voice of Godwin. "Poor
devil's clean out of his head. Rats? Did rats do this to him?"

"Rats are full of plague," said Sir Malcolm faintly.

"Yes, yes," said the girl. "Ship full of rats, rats full of plague. Go
on."

"Can a rat have the plague?" asked Godwin.

"Well, can it?" asked the girl. "Mihrjan, answer me."

A fourth voice, one like muted thunder over distant dunes, said,
"Assuredly, O Mistress of My Life, though 'tis not known generally by
men in this time."

"He knows it, evidently," said the girl. "Do go on, Sir Malcolm. What
about these rats?"

"Ship at El Iskandariya. Going to England, spread plague, decimate
whole country. No more Crusades. Saracen plot."

"Now by God and by God, no Saracen stoops that low!" shouted the
elderly man.

"Yes. Whole crew of them. Leader--"

"Yes, man; the leader?" urged Godwin.

"Mufaddal al Mamun. Big black-faced swine. His gang can do--anything.
Say they can wipe out nine-tenths of England with plague rats, then
France, Germany. No more Crusades." He widened his bloody-veined eyes
and retching, said, "Tell Richard! Get word to Richard! Got to sink
that ship, slay Mufaddal al Mamun! Slay his sorcerers! Promise!"

"We promise," said Godwin. "Decimate England, eh? Plague-infested rats,
ha? My halidom! I think not!"

Sir Malcolm, with a grimace that might have been a grin, collapsed in
upon himself and died, as peacefully as a man can when he has come
seventy miles on foot, over baking sand beneath a searing sun of brass,
with a third of his skin flayed off.



                              CHAPTER II


Godwin stood up. "Where's El Iskandariya?" he asked.

El Sareuk rubbed his beard with one slim brown hand. "You call it
Alexandria. About twenty-five leagues west it lies, my great-thewed
friend, on the banks of the Mediterranean."

The Lord Mohammed El Sareuk was a man of sixty, slightly built,
fanatic-faced, whose body always seemed on the point of disintegrating
from sheer concentration of energy. His boots were of red Cordovan
leather worked with gold thread; his clothing was blue silk and rose
samite, topped by the green turban of a Hadji; under the soft robes he
wore gold-washed Turkish light armor, and over the whole outfit a black
Bedouin burnous. He was weaponed well: from his girdle hung a Damascus
steel scimitar, and a beautiful gold-etched steel knife with a silver
hilt and a ruby in the pommel. Once this man had led a great harka in
the forces of Saladin; but love of Godwin had turned him to a rover, an
adventurer who called no tent his own and no man his peer save the tall
young Englishman he now addressed.

"What is it, Godwin? Twenty-five leagues to Alexandria, or eighty-odd
to Richard the Lion Heart in Jaffa?"

The girl spoke before Godwin could answer. "Oh, heavens, uncle 'tis the
twenty-five to the plague ship, without a doubt, because what would
Godwin want with a thousand Crusaders at his back when he can wade in
single-handed against an unknown number of enemies and grab the glory
all for himself? An Englishman won't fight if he can't fight against
odds, after all. Need you ask such a silly question?"

The girl, now: as tall and lovely a piece as ever came from the union
of a crusading British knight and a Saracen lass who traced descent
from Solomon. Her eyes were violet, pure clear liquid violet such as
is seen once in a thousand years; her lips were sensuous, full and
red; her hair was a rainbow-flashing mass of ink-black curls. Of her
complexion nothing derogatory could be said, and of her full-breasted
figure even less. She wore copper and cream-colored robes of as fine
and yet tough silk as you might find anywhere in the world of 1191,
with a black turban to which she managed to give a jaunty and most
un-Moslem-like air. Once this girl had been a sorceress, and controlled
the entire tribe of djinn by virtue of a golden sigil and ring
bequeathed her by her mother; her home and heritage and much of her
power she had given up, to be a nomad and traipse about the world, all
for love of Godwin.

This Godwin said now, "Ye gods! How can there be any question of
Alexandria or Jaffa?" He held up a big hard hand and ticked off points
on his fingers. "One: Dick, or Richard the Lion Nose, or whatever the
hell they call him, thinks I'm a madman. If I took him a tale of rats
with plague being shipped to England, he'd have me locked up for an
idiot, and I can hardly blame him. Two: it's a good eighty-five leagues
to Jaffa, and then more than a hundred from there back to Alexandria,
eating up God knows how many days, the way the Franks travel. We
three can do it from here in two days' time. There are decent people
in Alexandria who'll fight with us against any such hellish scheme,
surely. El Sareuk is a Hadji and has a certain reputation. Can't you
command help from the Arabs, old wolf?"

"I can. He has the right of it, my dear."

"Well, at least we can have Mihrjan's djinn transport us there
in comfort, and aid us in the squelching of this silly plot of
Mufaddal's," said the girl, wiping sweat off her patrician nose.

       *       *       *       *       *

Godwin frowned. He tugged at his beard. "My dear, you know my
sentiments about the djinn. It's not knightly to use their supernatural
powers when all one's fighting is a pack of mortals. Besides, it takes
the fun out of adventuring. If a man can cry up a legion of ten-foot
bogies to do his bidding, how can he call himself a gentleman rover?
No, we'll not employ Mihrjan. Not that I have anything against you,
Mihrjan," he added hastily.

A voice from the air beside them said, like an enormous drum finding
speech in its depths, "O Lord of Ten Thousand, I esteem thy principles
without flaw. Truly thou art a man among men, and would be a djinni
amongst djinn!"

"Oh, pooh," said the girl, Ramizail. "If I hadn't given you the ring in
a rash moment of affection, Godwin, I'd lock it to the sigil and wish
you home in England this minute, you hulking wonderful stupid baby."

Invisible Mihrjan chuckled, but made no other comment. Godwin said,
"Let's mount and ride. The horses are fresh and even over this
abominable sand we ought to make a good distance before sundown."

"What of Sir Malcolm?" asked Ramizail.

"What of him?" said Godwin. "I've laid him out properly. A Crusader
doesn't expect to be buried when there's work afoot. Come on, to
horse!" He went racing to his great Spanish charger and vaulted into
the saddle from behind, a trick left over from his Crusading days, when
he could do it in full weight of battle armor.

And this Godwin, what of him? A man of thirty-one hard winters and
thirty-one baking summers that had leathered his skin and steeled
his sinews, while leaving his spirit boyish and irrepressible. A
tiger-muscled, blue-fire-eyed, yellow-bearded man, quick to rage, quick
to forgiveness, quick to gorge food and drink and quick to go hungry
when needs must. A man educated to horse and hound and every weapon,
bred to the saddle and the brawl, reckless and headstrong, generous and
full of brag and bounce. A man of six feet and four inches, weighing
sixteen stone, with scarce a thought in his handsome head but of war
and hunting and being a gentleman according to his lights, of loving
Ramizail and trotting happily over the world righting wrongs and
murdering villains and being Godwin, Godwin of England.

And there was more to the man than all this, too, for had he not been
till this early winter of 1191 the King of England?

It mattered little now, for Godwin was Godwin and no more. Not that
that was not quite enough! thought Ramizail, resignedly mounting her
bay palfrey. Sometimes it was a vast deal too much. She cast a glance
of affection at her affianced. She shook her lovely head. What a man!



                              CHAPTER III


Mufaddal al Mamun, a tall, bulky, brown-eyed, flat-nosed, dark-faced
hulk of a man, was eating his midday meal. It consisted of _ful_ beans
fried in _samn_, millet bread, onions, cucumbers, and hard-boiled
eggs, washed down with quarts of strong _buzah_, beer brewed from
fermented bread. It was a poor man's meal, but Mufaddal preferred to
eat the cheapest of foods, for he thought that it made him appear
fanatical and single-minded and self-sacrificing to his followers. As
a matter of fact, they merely thought him a tasteless slob. He held
the same warped opinion about his garments, and clad himself daily in
a gray _gallabiyah_, the gown-like dress of the fellahin, with long
loose cotton pants and a soiled green skullcap. His cohorts made jokes
about it and regarded him with distaste, for many of them were proud
Turks and high-blooded Bedouins, who took a ferocious pride in garbing
themselves as well as possible and eating the best provender available.
They followed him, however, because he was a wild terrible fighter,
because he was half-brother to three potent sorcerers, and because he
could think up much dirtier plots against the infidel hordes of the
Crusaders than any other Saracen alive.

As he popped the last egg whole into his broad gash of a mouth, and
smashed it between great yellow snaggleteeth, wishing it were the
skull of Richard Coeur de Lion, one of his sorcerers came sliding in
the door. There was a cool wind blowing through the house from the
sea, which lay not more than thirty yards from its portals; but the
sorcerer's presence seemed to heat the breeze and taint it with the
stench of sulphur and brimstone. Mufaddal looked even more irritable
than usual.

"What do you want, offspring of a leprous unwed camel?"

"May you live a thousand years, Mufaddal, my brother."

"This is a noble sentiment. Did you interrupt my eating--that is to
say, my meditation--to wish me long life, imbecile?"

The sorcerer looked meditatively at his left forefinger, which turned
into a blue snake and hissed at the big dirty man across the laden
cloth. Mufaddal jumped and said hastily, "This, of course, is only my
rough manner of speaking, Heraj, and naturally you know you are my
favorite brother and may come in any time you like."

"Yes. Well, I was going to say, Mufaddal, that complications are
lifting their ugly heads in this business of the plague ship."

"What? Are the rats not loaded into the hold, and the job accomplished
with but seventeen fellahin bitten? Did we not slay the seventeen
before they could come near anyone? And is the ship not as sound as any
ship that sails the Mediterranean, having new sails and a new mast, and
her belly caulked no later than last month?"

"Ah, very true," agreed Heraj.

"Does every rat not carry at least one flea, cleverly infected with the
plague by your own subtle methods?"

"Fleas and rats are as deadly as any Saracen blade, and the grisly
death they carry will spread far and wide when they are let off the
ship on the coasts of England."

"And lastly, is all not in readiness to sail come the day after
tomorrow?"

"True," said Heraj gloomily. "But we can't send it out before then, as
our chosen crew will not be assembled till that morning, especially the
far-experienced Nubian slave who is coming from Tripoli to guide the
ship on its perilous course; and by the wrath of Eblis, you and I may
not live to see the dawn of that day, near though you deem it!"

"What are you talking about?" roared Mufaddal.

"I just had a message from a friend who happens to be a hawk in his
present incarnation. He tells me that Godwin is coming."

"This is terrible news indeed," said Mufaddal, fiercely mimicking the
sorcerer's worried tones. "I quake with fright. I throw myself on the
infinite mercy of Allah." He rose and flexed his arms, that were each
as thick as a youth's body. "Heraj, who in the name of the seven hells
is Godwin?"

"You may well ask," said Heraj, even more gloomily than before. "Nobody
seems to know exactly. I can't get a line on his history before a month
ago, when he rode out of Jaffa in company with a renegade Saracen
chieftain called El Sareuk and a girl named Ramizail. But he's a brawny
young champion, whatever his antecedents, and his girl controls the
djinn."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mufaddal sat down on the floor with vast violence. His dark face turned
purple. His yellow teeth showed in a grin of sudden terror. "I betake
me to Allah! _That_ Ramizail?"

"Yes, that one. Well, this hawk says--"

"Can you understand the hawk tongue?"

"This one speaks Arabic. He's a fairly talented fellow, for a hawk. He
says that Godwin and the others are pledged to go rampaging over the
earth, righting wrongs, and they've heard of the plague ship and are on
their way to destroy it. And us, I suppose," added Heraj.

"Name of forty goats," said Mufaddal worriedly. "I fear not this
Godwin, but the djinn...." He stared up at the sorcerer. "Can't you do
something to stop them? You and Pepi and Habu?"

"What? You know my limitations, and I'm the strongest of the three.
I can do a lot, Mufaddal, but I can't combat djinn. The chief of
them, Mihrjan, even travels with this Ramizail wench, personally. She
controls him and his race by a sigil and ring that came down to her
from Solomon."

"Curse it, Heraj, if this ship doesn't sail, England will continue to
send Crusaders to the East until they have conquered every inch of
desert and city! It's got to sail! How did these loathsome adventurers
hear of it?"

"They happened across that Englishman who escaped us, Sir Malcolm du
Findley. The one that we started to flay last Thursday, before he
crawled out a window and treacherously disappeared."

Mufaddal got off the floor. He hitched up his pants and retied the
string that held them around his muscular waist. "Heraj," he said
grimly, "I give you an hour to think of some way to stop them. Djinn or
no djinn, that ship sails!"



                              CHAPTER IV


By evening they had covered more than half the distance to Alexandria,
and Godwin was persuaded to halt for a few hours of rest, the horses
being weary with plunging through sand for such a long spell. "We'll
ride again with the moon's zenith," said Godwin, as he went about
picketing the horses. "Perhaps we can make the city by midday
tomorrow."

Ramizail went off and stood by herself. "Mihrjan," she said softly.

"I am here, Beloved of Allah."

"Mihrjan, I'm sick of the same dreary food day after day. Godwin
maintains that gentlemen rovers should fare roughly, to toughen their
bodies. But I'm not a gentleman."

"Assuredly thou art not," said the invisible djinni, respect and male
admiration nicely blended in his great voice.

"Then spread me a real feast! I want _couscous_, with almond stuffing,
and wild rice, and some lemon juice, and certainly some white bread."

"Thy will is sweet, Mistress."

"Then oranges, and _asida_, and sugar. And about three gallons of
sherbet. And Mihrjan, do you remember the time you brought me that
confection out of a far time? The one you called silk chocolate?"

"Milk chocolate, O Daughter of All Delights."

"Bring me some of that, too. Put the meal on a damask cloth, with blue
gauze to wipe the mouth, and the vessels must all be of purest crystal
with gold rims."

"To hear is to obey, Little Queen of My Tribe."

"Be sure there's plenty for all of us, with a bowl of mice for Godwin's
falcon Yellow-eyes, and remember that my lord and master eats like
two-thirds of a regiment."

"Give me but four minutes, Mistress, and you shall see it spread
beneath the trees of this oasis, beside the clear spring that bubbles
through the sand."

She strolled back to her uncle and her betrothed, a secret smile on her
lips. In the specified four minutes a banquet popped into sight just
beside them. Godwin jumped.

"What the devil!"

"I'm hungry," said Ramizail, at once on the defensive.

"Mihrjan!" said Godwin, glaring at her. "You had him do this. How often
must I tell you my sentiments concerning all this magic, witch-wench?"

"Never again, Godwin dear, for I know them by heart."

"Ramizail," he said angrily, his eyes sparkling blue, "this is going
to stop here and now. When you gave me the ring, and thus shared your
power over the djinn with me, you promised not to command Mihrjan to do
anything I didn't approve of."

"Oh, well," grumbled the girl, "I'm hungry for real food!"

"Ramizail, give me the sigil!"

Her eyes blazed back at his. "Come and take it, you big oaf!"

El Sareuk leaned against a date palm and smiled to himself. It was
always a toss-up as to which of these iron-willed people would win an
argument. Godwin strode over to the girl, upsetting a goblet of pale
pink sherbet with his foot, and took her by the shoulders. She hit him
on the nose. He turned her over and smacked her on her lightly-clad
bottom. She screeched and bit his leg. He dropped her on the sand and
sat on her.

Mihrjan, invisible but no more than three feet from them, laughed
deeply.

El Sareuk said to Yellow-eyes, the old peregrine falcon, who was
sitting on his shoulder watching the brawl, "Thy master has met, if not
his match, at least a very worthy foe!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Godwin, after a great deal of fumbling, got hold of the sigil where it
hung on a chain round her neck, and opened the clasp and took it off.

"Bully!" shrieked Ramizail. "Swaggering, bragging, girl-defeating
bully! Give me that back!"

"Not a chance," said Godwin equably. He moved over and sat in the small
of her back. He locked the sigil into the ring he wore on his little
finger, and the designs of each caught the other and made a single lump
of gold. "Now," he said, "I control the djinn."

"Have them transport me to the Isles of the Western Sea," said the girl
savagely, "or by the Crescent and Cross, Godwin, I'll murder you when I
get up!"

"Nothing so drastic. Mihrjan!"

"Yes, Lord?"

"I control you now absolutely, don't I?"

"Yes, Lord."

"You follow us for love, I know, but we can't really command you unless
one of us holds both these baubles, isn't that so?"

"'Tis so, one of a Hundred Monarchs, though thou knowest I would
answer any summons thou or my mistress made, Solomon's Seal or no. But
the sigil and ring are life's and death's powers over me."

"Well, Mihrjan, you know my sentiments about the whole business, and
by the mass, I'm growing weary of these tricks of hers. She's always
having you save me when there's no need, and stepping in when I have a
chance at a fight, and making banquets, and showing off your magic as
if it were her own. So I want you to go away, Mihrjan."

"Lord?" said the djinn, disturbed and bewildered.

"Well, look, hang it all, I like you, I think you're a splendid chap,
really, but this magic gets on my nerves. Now go on away, go besiege a
castle, or throw an oyster fry, or take a wife, or something. We have
the sigil and ring if we really need you, old fellow, but meantime
please do go home. I'm sick of this soft living Ramizail forces on me
by your thaumaturgy."

The djinni chuckled. "I see thy point, O King. I go. Remember that the
Seal calls me to you in an eye's winking if need arises."

"It'll probably arise, if I know my luck, but I hope it won't.
Good-bye, old fellow."

"Farewell, Master. Fare thee well, Moon of Incredible Beauty." There
was a swishing noise, a faint scent of attar touched their nostrils,
and the air rushed into a sudden-made vacuum beside them. The Moon of
Incredible Beauty said ferociously, "If you don't let me up, you son of
a jackal, I'll bite you in a vulnerable spot and you won't sit down for
a week."

Godwin stood up. Ramizail rolled over and eyed him. There was malice in
the gaze, but Godwin only laughed. He tossed her the sigil. She hung it
round her neck.

"I'll hide the ring, kitten, so you can't steal it when I'm asleep. Now
you're a plain woman, and by our lady, you'll stay that way!"

"What about the banquet?" said she. "I'm surprised you didn't have him
take it back."

"Ah well, a man does now and again grow tired of figs and biscuits and
water. We'll eat it. Just this once."

They all sat down, El Sareuk gave thanks to Allah and Godwin to his
deity for the sumptuous repast, and they fell to. Yellow-eyes dipped
her scarred, notched beak into her bowl of plump mice, and emitted a
cry of pleasure. Everybody ate until four bellies well nigh burst with
good food. Then they rolled up in their rugs and went to sleep.



                               CHAPTER V


Heraj looked into his crystal ball. Absently he flung out his right
arm, which extended for seven feet and allowed the hand to grasp a
beaker of honey wine sitting on a taboret across the room.

His eyes lit up greenly at what he saw in the ball. He tossed off the
wine and hared out of his apartments, through the room where fourteen
lieutenants of Mufaddal's force were playing at dice, and into his
master's sleeping room. Mufaddal sat up from his rugs and howled.

"This damnable lack of privacy must cease! I--" Then he saw what his
half-brother was doing casually with his left foot, and subsided. "Yes,
Heraj? What is it?"

"Listen, al Mamun. I put a thought in Godwin's head this
afternoon--just a suggestion, you know. He followed through
beautifully."

"Good. Did he hang himself to a tree?"

"No, no. I suggested he get rid of that djinni. He did. Then he hid
Solomon's ring, though where I don't know, and forgot where he hid it."

"By Osman ibn Affar, that was well done! Your power over men's minds
astonishes even me, Heraj." The dark-faced fanatic was jubilant.

"I didn't make him forget it, he did that on his own hook. He's
cooperative that way. He has a child's intellect." Heraj took a
sweetmeat out of his ear and ate it. "Now the djinni's gone, Allah
knows where, and won't come back till he's called by the sigil and
ring. And they haven't got the ring."

"Oh, my brother," said Mufaddal, rubbing his hands together, "if you
have indeed put this Godwin at our mercy, I shall give you a racing
camel with a ruby-studded saddle!"

"I have, I have. But never mind the camel, I want Richard for my
personal slave when we defeat the Crusaders."

"Done!" barked the leader. "Now tell me, subtle one, what will you do
with Godwin?"

Heraj regarded his fingernails, which turned into ten little pieces
of glass behind which miniature dancing girls performed various
interesting contortions. At last he said smugly, "I've done it,
Mufaddal. Just wait till that overgrown lout wakes up." He laughed.
"What a shock he's got coming!"



                              CHAPTER VI


Godwin rolled over, opened an eye, and smacked his lips. He always
awoke hungry. He scrabbled in the sand beside him until he found his
bag of dates, popped one into his mouth, and got up. He pushed a bare
toe against the backside of El Sareuk, who erupted with a startled
curse. Yellow-eyes woke at that and screamed, and Ramizail sat up.

"Time to ride, old wolf," said Godwin. He went to the spring and drank
deep. Then he walked past it toward the horses.

The horses were not there. He scowled, went through the palm trees, and
made as if to set foot on the desert sands beyond.

The desert sands were not there.

He fell to his knees. His eyes snapped wide. Two inches before him the
oasis came to an abrupt halt. There was nothing there but vacant space.
The desert was gone. Everything was gone.

"What in the name of--"

He bent over the edge of the oasis. A thousand feet below him the
desert shimmered coldly in the light of the stars. He could see their
horses, the three saddle beasts and the two pack animals, standing in
a knot with the Arabian camel they kept for emergencies. The creatures
looked like insects, so far below him they were. He drew back with a
gasp.

"El Sareuk! Ramizail!" he shouted. "Take care! The oasis has floated
off its moorings!"

They came running to his side. Ramizail gave a little cry. "Godwin,
darling! What's happened to us?"

"Lord knows. We're marooned up here, it seems." He lay down at full
length and peered over the edge again. The oasis had indeed been torn
from its base, and the roots of the palms dangled below the round disc
of it, waving their filaments in the air. "By the rood," said Godwin,
"if this doesn't strain the imagination! Does it happen often, old one?"

"Never to my knowledge before this night," said El Sareuk, running
a hand through his grizzled beard. "Now by Allah! The sorcerers of
Mufaddal have done this thing!"

"The ring, Godwin," snapped Ramizail. She was all business, and no man
would have denied her anything in this sudden gust of her serious
intent, for when she put by her humor and her playfulness, she was a
force to be reckoned with. "We'll have to call up Mihrjan. None of your
vaunted swashbuckling will cope with this ensorcelment."

"Yes, I suppose one must fight witchery with witchery, though it goes
against my knightly grain." He made as if to take the ring from his
finger. "Oh, I forgot. I hid it from you."

"Stupid ox! Give it here."

He groped in his silk and samite robes, then among the crevices of his
gold-washed steel mesh Cairo armor. At last he stared sheepishly at
her. "I forget what I did with it."

"Oh, you bumbling Englishman!" She leaped to him and ran swift questing
fingers over his body. "It's big enough, it ought to make quite a lump.
Ninety-nine names of the true One! It isn't here. Did you hide it in
the sand?"

"No," said Godwin, blushing with shame. "I put it where I'd always have
it near by. But I can't seem to recollect just where."

She put her hands to her head. "You--you--"

"Never mind," said Godwin. "I have an idea. If it doesn't work, you'll
have to pick me up with a spoon, but I think it will."

He squared his broad shoulders and walked straight over the edge of the
high-floating oasis.



                              CHAPTER VII


Godwin turned and looked back at them. In the moon's light he was an
uncanny figure, standing on lofty immaterial nothingness.

"Well," he said testily, "come on. Can't you see it's all right?"

They gaped at him, eyes round as the declining moon. "How are you
accomplishing that, comrade?" asked the Saracen.

"Accomplishing what? I'm only standing here."

"Yes, but on air, for the love of Allah! How can you stand on air?"

"I happen," said Godwin, distinctly and loudly, as though he were
speaking to an imbecile. "I happen to be standing on the sands of the
desert."

"He's mad, my child," groaned El Sareuk.

"If he is, he's doing as neat a job of being crazy as I ever saw,"
retorted Ramizail. "Does his insanity affect the pull of the earth?"

"Hmm," said the Hadji, "you're right. Well, let me join him in his
madness. But if I vanish abruptly, niece, do you go back and sit by
that spring until the oasis sinks of its own accord. I would not have
your lovely brains splattered over a league of hot sand." He walked
gingerly out to Godwin's side. "He's right, it's the desert!" he
shouted.

She looked at the two of them, standing there in midair shaking hands
solemnly with each other. She grinned. "Of course, it's a mirage,
or a trick!" She went to them, treading on what seemed space, and
it turned to solid dunes beneath her sandals. She looked back, and
the oasis was there, settled firmly in the heart of the desert, with
sleepy Yellow-eyes just flying out of the trees. "A neat stunt," said
Ramizail. "Godwin, you're cleverer than I thought, and as brave as
forty lions, to have tried such a thing!"

"A man takes his chances," said Godwin modestly.

They mounted and rode off toward the west, toward El Iskandariya and
the ship full of rats, rats full of fleas, fleas full of bubonic
plague. As they went, Ramizail nagged at Godwin, and Godwin tried
unhappily to remember what he had done with the ring of Solomon. But he
could not do it. He patted himself all over, and even looked into his
Saracen-style helmet, which was a round shining steel cap surmounted
by the golden figure of a rampant lion and resting upon a headpiece of
soft white cloth that protected his neck from the sun; but he could not
discover it. All he remembered was that he had put it in a safe place,
a place that would never be farther from him than he could reach.

As the moon touched the faraway dunes, the sun came up. Gilded sands
grew fiery beneath the hooves of their animals, and the _khamsin_, that
was like the breath of a devil drunk on hot mulled blood, arose to
torture them.

A wide-breasted dune stretched before them. They topped the rise and
Ramizail gave a cry, while the men checked their steeds and glanced at
each other. "Another illusion?" asked Godwin.

"Who can tell? There are more beasts in the desert than are known to
man," shrugged El Sareuk.

In the hollow formed by four dunes' meeting stood an enormous lion,
all orange-red of hue, facing them with black mane bristling up like
the spines of a porcupine. The odd thing about it, the thing that made
it seem somewhat out of the ordinary even to men who had looked on a
thousand wonders in their time, was the pair of broad silver wings that
sprang from its shoulder blades and spread themselves high to left and
right.

"Winged lion," said Ramizail. "No, I cannot call it to mind. I doubt
one's been seen before, at least in Egypt."

       *       *       *       *       *

The lion growled, crouched, and launched itself through the air
straight at Godwin's head. El Sareuk shouted, "Allah defend us!" and
leaned over in the saddle to slash at it with his scimitar; while
Godwin hauled his fifty-pound broadsword from its leathern sheath and
flung the point swiftly up before his face. The lion, its gigantic
wings flapping like a vulture's, soared up and over him. Yellow-eyes
the falcon left his shoulder, giving vent to shrill wrath at this
horror of the desert.

"Coming back! Diving!" roared the Hadji. Godwin flung himself from a
sitting start, straight over the head of his stallion. The extended
claws of the terrible beast grazed his back as he fell and ripped four
gashes in the silk of his outer robe. Yellow-eyes beat her wings about
the lion's head, trying to confuse and harry it.

Still holding his weapon, Godwin of England rolled over on his back.
Flying sand had sprayed his face and a grain had lodged in his left
eye, making him squint and curse. The lion hovered over him, then
dropped like a boulder, ignoring the peregrine. Godwin twitched the
point of the sword upward and at the first prickling contact with its
belly the monster screeched and shot forward beyond him.

El Sareuk made his horse leap, and stood by Godwin till he rose. "It's
coming back," he said. "You are its target, obviously, lad. 'Tis no
natural beast, I'll take oath on the Koran!"

The winged red lion came rushing at Godwin, half on sand and half in
air, giving itself little pushes with its earth-touching paws. Godwin
half-knelt, waited till it was within striking range, then gave a
mighty slash with his iron sword. He missed, but the strange being,
startled, rose up. Godwin saw one massive hind leg coming straight at
him. He had no time to lift the broadsword again; neither could he drop
in time to avoid a crushing stroke of the leg. Quicker than thought he
let go his sword and flung his arms before him.

The leg struck him on the chest, but to ease the force he had already
wrapped his swift arms about it. The lion beat its way upward, and
before he knew it Godwin, clinging like death to the hind leg, looked
down and found himself a hundred feet over the desert. El Sareuk's
astonished shout and Ramizail's piercing scream of terror came up to
him, dim and half-heard in the rushing wind of their passage. The
falcon followed, skirling her anger.

The lion paused and writhed round on itself like a common bazaar cat
going after a louse. Godwin swung his body up and kicked it on the
nose. It coughed dismally as one sharp spur caught its tender snout and
gashed a bloody trench. It snapped at him again, its big teeth missing
by a fraction. Yellow-eyes thrust her beak at its eyes and it turned
from Godwin to bite out at her.

Godwin tightened the grip of his left arm and let go with his right. He
drew his curved Persian dagger from its thonged sheath and judged his
blow. Then he struck.

The lion, its neck slit from ear to gullet, spewed blood and uttered
a horrible gurgling bellow. Slowly it began to sink toward the earth.
Godwin risked a quick look down. His head reeled. He was still a good
eighty feet up. If the lion died too soon, he would be smashed to a
pulp beneath its dead weight. He had thought only of slaying the
thing, not of how he might land safely. He swore vividly.

"This proves Ramizail's contention that I have a one-track brain!" The
winged beast drifted down in spirals, its hindquarters drooping, its
wings feebly beating the air, and its head jerking back and forth.
Godwin held his breath. It folded its wings and plummeted straight for
sickening yards, then making a last try at rising, extended the pinions
once more. Godwin saw that he was no more than ten feet off the ground.
He loosed his hold. The dunes came up with a rush to meet him and he
lit and rolled over. The lion above gave a final roar and crumpled,
smacking the sand a yard from Godwin's feet. The warrior arose and
wiped his forehead with a bloodied hand, as Yellow-eyes alit on his
shoulder, ruffling her feathers.

"Whew! Lady, _that_ was no illusion."

El Sareuk brought him his sword and charger, and mounting, he turned
its head again to the west.



                             CHAPTER VIII


About the time that Godwin and his friends were fording the Rosetta
Branch of the Nile, Heraj the sorcerer interrupted his leader again.

"He riddled out the levitating oasis, Mufaddal, and he slew the winged
lion. I thought you'd like to know what sort of man is coming after
us."

"If you had done your job at all well--" Mufaddal paused to thrust a
piece of millet bread into his maw, and his half-brother interrupted
him.

"You know my limitations. Allah curse it, what man ever stood up
to the winged lion before today?" He took a piece of paper out of
Mufaddal's chin, or seemed to, at any rate, and read a few words that
were scribbled thereon. "Well, the dog is crossing the Rosetta now.
I have a horrible feeling he can't be stopped." Heraj sprinkled salt
on the scrap of paper and ate it meditatively. "Pepi wants to try the
rolling sands stunt. I suppose we may as well. But this Godwin ... by
the _schedim_, what an opponent! Djinn or no djinn, I like him not!" He
left, and Mufaddal, having lost his appetite, went off to inspect the
plague ship for the hundredth time that week.

It was his own idea. He was as proud of it as of his skill at torturing
captured Crusaders, a score of whom languished now in his dungeon
awaiting his displeasure. The ship lay at the wharf, a black swift
vessel with dark lateen sails slanting high above her deck. A company
of Seljuk Turks and other Saracen allies stood about the dock, on guard
lest some ill-advised person attempt to board her. More were stationed
on the ship, and from beneath their feet in the sealed hold came the
frightful squeakings and squealings and multitudinous rustlings of
thousands upon thousands of great gray rats, imprisoned there to fight
and breed and die and wait their chance at sunlight again--sunlight
that Mufaddal devoutly hoped they would view on the shore of England.

He massaged his hands together. What a picture it was! All these
beauties, scampering over England, biting people, infecting masses of
men and women, gnawing on children's feet, carrying the plague hither
and yon until the whole island lay gasping out its fading breath,
nine-tenths of its population covered with the applesized tumors
and hideous purple spots of bubonic. Then let them see who sent out
Crusaders! It would be Saracen hordes overrunning Britain, rather than
red-faced Englishmen defiling the Holy Land!

Some six hundred and forty-eight years before, the plague had lashed
through Constantinople, and slain ten thousand souls in a day's space.
Say, conservatively, then, that ten thousand per day would die in
England. How many days would it take....

He went aboard, the better to hear the gibberings of his ghastly
phalanxes. The boards were hot under his bare feet. The grisly ravening
of the packed throngs of rats rose all about him, and in an ecstasy of
delight he knelt to lift a hatch cover, yearning to gaze on them once
more.

"Lord!" A voice burst out behind him. "O Lord, do not open the hatch!
Think what thou doest!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Mufaddal turned, to see a Mameluke, an ex-slave converted to Islam and
now a fine soldier, who was running toward him and waving his arms
excitedly.

Mufaddal stood erect, a giant flat-nosed man of black face and blacker
heart. He kimboed his arms and hissed, "What is this you say, slave?"

The Mameluke came to a halt before him. "O Lord, think if thou shouldst
allow even a single rat to escape! Thou might be bitten, and we should
have to drop thee into the sea!"

Mufaddal reached out. Very slowly his hands went around the soldier's
neck, and the Mameluke was too startled to step backward. Mufaddal said
softly, "Shall I throttle you? Hmm. No. There lies no pleasure in the
strangling of a worm. Shall I heave you into the ocean, as you would
do with me should I be bitten? Bah! Too easy a death, and you might
be able to swim. Shall I drop you into the hold?" The Mameluke gave a
half-stifled howl. "I think I shall. The pets need nourishment. I can't
have them eating each other."

He bent, still holding the gasping Mameluke by one clamped-tight fist,
and raised the hatch cover and propped it with his foot. Then he lifted
the soldier by his neck, swung him a little so that his flailing heels
kicked out behind, and lobbed him into the opening. There was a squashy
sort of splash, as the man fell full length upon a turbulent blanket
of milling, screaming rodents. At the same time there burst upon the
upper air a horrible carrion stench, like that of a charnel house a
hundred times augmented. The Mameluke gave a cry of pitiable terror,
and another, and then was still. Perhaps he fainted, or perhaps the
rats found his life in that instant.

Mufaddal knelt above the hatchway, chuckling in his greasy beard. His
brown eyes lit with soft venomous delight.

Suddenly there shot from the blackness of the hold a single enormous
rat, fascinated by the square of light and throwing all its nervous
energy into one superb attempt to gain the outer world. Mufaddal
quailed back in panic as it flew past his face and landed on the deck,
slithering and floundering in an effort to regain its balance after the
magnificent leap.

Lest more of them make the try, he dropped the lid to the coamings.
He drew his scimitar. The rat, nearly blinded, jerked its blank gaze
from side to side. Slowly he advanced on it, weapon lifted. It saw him,
opened its evil mouth and squealed insane defiance.

He made a swipe at it, it dodged and leaped upon him. Its tiny sharp
teeth met in his _gallabiyah_, and it swung from the cloth, snarling
like an angry cat. Frantic, he knocked it to the deck with the flat
of his sword, slicing off a small portion of his own belly in the
process. Then he smashed down the blade. It split the rat in two and
clove into the deck, so deeply that it took him three hearty tugs to
disengage it.

Bleeding, cursing, and shaking with the after-effects of fear, he
stamped off the ship and across the dock to his house, where he called
his private surgeon to bind up the wound. He began to think about
Godwin, and eventually the Englishman and the rat became thoroughly
confused in his dark mind; so that his impersonal hatred for Godwin
became a very personal loathing and desire for vengeance.



                              CHAPTER IX


"Godwin dear," said Ramizail, in a voice which for her was small and
deferential indeed.

"Yes?" he said. He had been dreaming in the saddle of battles he had
fought and brawls he would engage in.

"Godwin, my own, I'm seasick."

He stared across at her. El Sareuk said, "Niece, you were straddling a
pony before you could toddle! This is unworthy of you."

"I don't care. I'm seasick." Her face was pale and beads of sweat stood
on her forehead. "I'm afraid I'm going to disgrace myself," she said,
and promptly did.

Godwin started to laugh. Then he stopped, and put a hand tentatively
to his own belly. "El Sareuk," he said, "I don't feel so sprightly
myself."

The Arab chieftain nodded. "You look like a poisoned camel, my friend.
What ails you?"

"God knows. I too was almost born a-horseback. But, hang it, there's
something the matter with this steed. He keeps going buckety-clomp."

"What?"

"Buckety-clomp, that's what it feels like."

El Sareuk said, "Now that you mention it, my own fellow has developed a
sort of stagger. Could they have drunk bad water?"

"They drank what we drank. Damn," said Godwin miserably. "You know
what it is? It's some more sorcery. Those thrice-cursed warlocks of
Mufaddal's are up to something again. Mohammed, we'll never get there
at this rate."

"Cheer up, thou stalwart smiter of satans," said El Sareuk. "Despite
their worst efforts, we've covered four-fifths of the distance already,
and 'tis no more than midday!"

"I expected to be in Alexandria by now."

"I cannot imagine what this trick may be that works on you," went on
the Saracen. "But luckily it leaves me untouched. As I am when in
the saddle no more than an extension of my horse, I am naturally not
susceptible to--"

After a long pause, Godwin cleared his throat and said, "Susceptible to
what?"

"Never mind," said El Sareuk sorrowfully, and his lean face was faintly
green. "I find that, after all, I am."

They rode on grimly, until at last Ramizail said, "I'm sorry, I've got
to get off and rest a while. I'm _sick_."

The two men thankfully reined in, and the party dismounted on the top
of a dune. They all sat down. Shortly Ramizail said, "It's no good. I
still feel awful. The desert's going up and down in front of my eyes."

"I noticed the same phenomenon," said Godwin.

"And I," agreed El Sareuk. "The sorcerers have poisoned us, surely."

There was another silence.

Godwin murmured, "That's curious."

"What?" asked El Sareuk, who was striving with might and main not to
throw up.

"Well, I was watching the horizon swell and sink, swell and sink, swell
and--"

"For heaven's sake, shut up," groaned Ramizail.

"And all of a sudden I noticed my horse doing the same thing." He
turned his face toward them. "I mean he was watching it too, nodding
his head. You know, it isn't just us. It's the land. It _is_ rising and
falling. The dunes are rolling like ocean waves."

       *       *       *       *       *

Ramizail raised herself on her elbows and stared out across the sands.
"They are! We stopped atop a dune, now we're in a valley." She spat.
"If this isn't the messiest miracle ever worked, and the dirtiest, and
the foulest, then I am not the mistress of the djinn!"

"What'll we do?" moaned Godwin. "How can you fight a shifting desert?
How can you make it lie down and be good?"

El Sareuk stood up. Strong though he was, strong as so much whip-thong
and steel encased in leather, he could fight this nausea no more
effectively than a puppy might engage in warfare with an active
volcano. "Allah punishes me for sinful pride," he said, gagging. "Pride
in my horsemanship. I, who have been to Mecca, still to harbor pride!"
He shaded his eyes from the blazing sun, which was the only stable
object in sight. "The magic cannot stretch from edge to edge of the
desert, for such a thing is beyond the power of even the djinn."

"Speaking of which, have you found that ring, Godwin?" queried Ramizail
with weak petulance.

"No, let me be," said the tallow-faced Godwin.

"I was going to say," continued El Sareuk, "that if we manage to
survive for the few miles, I think we will pass these rolling sands.
Can you stick on your horses?"

"While I'm alive, I can ride," said Godwin, but without much conviction.

"If you two can stand it, I can," nodded the girl.

Yellow-eyes, huddled on the cantle of her master's saddle, croaked
out something that sounded like a blasphemy. The horses drooped
their heads, and the camel bubbled and wailed. They made a pitiful
group. But the humans mounted, and the falcon flew up, and the beasts
staggered forward. They would start to plow up a dune, and slowly like
a wave in slow motion, it would shift until they were heading down into
a valley. The horizon before them was a shifting, mutable line. Never
had any of them been so ill. They had all lost their breakfasts, and
seemed to be trying to recall the supper from night before last. Not a
one of them but would have been happy to lie down, could he have been
sure that he would die. But they pressed on, taking a weak courage from
each other.

And at last El Sareuk, who in his way was stronger even than the
champion Godwin, blinked watery eyes and said, "We've passed it!"

They lifted incredulous heads, and found it was true. The shifting
sands had stilled and the desert lay wrapped in its customary peace.



                               CHAPTER X


They were almost within sight of Alexandria before they found what they
were seeking. Then, just at the last possible moment, they sighted a
large cluster of the black tents of the Bedouins. "Await me here," said
El Sareuk urgently. "I shall collogue with these men and see whether I
cannot raise us an army." He galloped away to the encampment.

Shortly there was a bustle and stir therein, and many small energetic
men of the Bedouin tribe came running toward the central tent, into
which El Sareuk had vanished. The Bedouins were a cheerful and healthy
lot, inured to hardship, habituated to a rough nomadic life. They
were short and lean, and often looked fragile, but they were fiery,
intractable fighters when aroused.

When some time had passed, Ramizail said, "He will win them. You'll see
they'll be wild with desire to help us, and to avenge the soiled honor
of Islam. That's the tack he's using--how Mufaddal has betrayed the
dignity and integrity of the Moslem world by this fiendish trick of the
pest ship, and how these Bedouins can expunge the stain by following us
against his forces."

"Can you do soothsaying without the help of Mihrjan?" asked Godwin
curiously. There was a great deal he did not know even yet about this
strange tall child of Solomon's line.

"Oh, no. I'm just well acquainted with my uncle's ways of
thinking and speaking and acting. I've seen him whip a crowd of
assorted Saracens--Turks and Mamelukes and Arabs and Soldarii and
Turcomans--into such a frenzy of fanatical zeal that they attacked a
force nine times as large as their own, and cut it to ribbons. He's an
old spell-binder."

And it turned out as she predicted, for quite soon El Sareuk came
riding toward them at the head of a gang of horsemen, some half a
hundred in all, waving their swords and bows over their heads. Godwin
knew instinctively what to do. He rose in his stirrups and threw up
his tremendous broadsword and howled in Arabic. "Death to all who
defile the name and honor of Islam!" Although he was a good Christian
knight this war-slogan did not seem inappropriate to him in the least;
and it pleased and flattered the Bedouins no end, for El Sareuk had
told them of this mighty-chested warrior who had dedicated himself to
wrong-righting and oppression-ending, leaving the Crusade to travel for
this purpose in company with an Arab prince and half-caste girl. They
answered his hail with lusty yells and riding up to him and Ramizail
they pressed upon them all manner of foods, roast lamb in palm leaves,
legs of fowl, delicacies of every sort, goats' milk for Godwin and
asses' milk for the woman. Greedily they ate and drank as they rode
west, and finished the last crumb as they sighted the outskirts of
Alexandria.

"We'll ride straight in," said Godwin, now grim and businesslike.
"They're expecting us, so watch out for surprises. Their sorcerers have
told them we're coming, I'll wager my left eye upon it. We'll find out
which wharf the plague ship's moored to, and burn her to the water's
edge. Then we'll seek out this Mufaddal swine, and pin him by his ears
to an ant's nest!"

His band gave an ululating shout, and the horses were booted into a
gallop.

It was then about two hours before sunset.

They rode down one of the principal streets, a rather dirty, narrow
thoroughfare, overhung by the houses on either side. Above the roofs
to their left they could see the pinnacle of Pompey's Pillar, the
towering column of red granite which had stood in Alexandria for eight
centuries. "'Twould be moored in the West Harbor, I think," said El
Sareuk, who knew the city to some extent. He nudged his horse slightly
into the lead and preceded the force through the heart of the place.

Few signs of life were in evidence. The air was hushed, even the wind
off the sea had drawn back to avoid this silent city, and an atmosphere
of expectancy held the blindly staring buildings. Only an occasional
fellah or more substantial citizen would appear now and again, stare
for a moment at the intent horsemen, and disappear from sight like a
startled wild thing. Godwin tugged at his beard. They were not, as he
had predicted, wholly unexpected. Word had somehow flown through the
streets and bazaars of their coming, and of the imminent brawl. Perhaps
magic was at work, too, though he felt and saw nothing to indicate it.

They approached the docks, catching glimpses of them at intervals in
the houses, and Godwin grew even more tense and watchful. Then, as he
and Ramizail and the chief of the Bedouins all abreast, with El Sareuk
four hand-breadths in advance, galloped round a turn, the attack was
launched upon them.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the roof of a house on the corner a great net, like those used by
fishermen, was flung out, weighted and tossed by experienced hands;
it fell upon the four of them, an entangling, encumbering, maddening
enemy, knocking Ramizail out of the saddle, tipping Godwin's helmet
over his eyes, snaring all their drawn weapons and seeming to writhe
about them as though it were a sentient creature. Godwin shouted, "Use
your blades!" and began hacking away at the cords with his broadsword.
It was not the razor-keen instrument that El Sareuk's scimitar was,
however, and the old Saracen had to release him after cutting free
himself. Ramizail was dodging on hands and knees between the legs of
the terrified horses. The Bedouin leader yelled, "leave the beasts;"
and Godwin realized that they must. It would take minutes to slice the
net sufficiently to unscramble the steeds. He slid off his Spanish
charger, picked up Ramizail by the waist, dodged under a reaching fold
of the net and gained the free ground.

Men were attacking from the mouth of every alley, Turks in Persian
armor with three-foot scimitars and little round shields, mercenary
Turcomans with stout short bows and fists full of arrows, Mamelukes
in yellow tunics carrying battle-axes. The Bedouins pirouetted their
horses to meet them. Some of the enemy were mounted, many on foot.
Battle-cries arose, and this was the strangest thing about the fight,
for both sides lifted the same cry, the howling chant of Islam:
"_Ul-ul-ul-ul-ul-ul-allah akbar! Allah il-al-lahu! Ul-ul-ul-ul-allah
akbar!_"

Godwin, still carrying Ramizail, parried a vicious thrust by a
Seljuk Turk and swung his broadsword. A wave of terrible and utter
happiness swept through him. For this had Godwin of England been
born and trained. His blade smashed down through helmet and skull to
clunk dully on the neckpiece of the Turk's armor. Then he had jerked
it free and turned and driven it squarely into the back of a foeman
who was duelling with the dismounted El Sareuk. Again he whipped it
out, whirled it above his head and smashed its broad flat against the
bearded and grimacing face of a Turcoman. Blood and brains exploded
like seeds and pulp from a shattered pumpkin. Godwin roared gleefully.
Having cleared the space around him, he set Ramizail on her feet and
said, "Stand back to back with me, sweet. My halidom! This is something
like it!"

She slammed her back against his. An etched-bladed knife was in her
capable hand, and she had the look of a ravening demon.

El Sareuk, wiping his dripping scimitar on the _djelabie_ of a fallen
opponent, said, "Where's Yellow-eyes?" for he had grown very fond of
Godwin's battle-scarred old peregrine.

"I don't know. Trust her to come safe through this!" And in a moment,
as Godwin engaged in swordplay with two Moslems, the falcon did indeed
slant down from the sky, to beat her wings fiercely in the eyes of one
of the enemy who was trying to slash at Ramizail under Godwin's arm.

"Thou beauty!" said Godwin, dividing the blinded gentleman neatly at
the waist. "Thou cleaver of storm-clouds! Always art thou here when
Godwin has need of thee!" Only to his falcon and his horse did Godwin
speak in this affectionate fashion. It sometimes made Ramizail jealous.

Many of their Bedouin allies had fallen to the arrows and swords of
the attackers. Now men appeared on the nearest roofs, armed with huge
slings and round stones. Mufaddal evidently desired to take prisoners,
and knowing that Godwin's forces would fight to the last man, had
chosen this way of stunning some of them. A flight of stones laid out
three-quarters of the remaining force, including El Sareuk; Godwin took
a couple on his shield--he was the prime target--and wished he had an
arbalest; he'd bring 'em down from those aeries! Then a rock caught him
at the base of the skull, and he groaned and buckled over and struck
the ground with a crash. Yellow-eyes fluttered up and hung over him,
screeching. Ramizail bent above him, crying out with horror. Then big
rough hands were on her, her knife was twitched away, and she was
hauled off, keening like a banshee, to the house of Mufaddal al Mamun.



                              CHAPTER XI


The black-faced slob who led the troops of the Saracens in Alexandria
was seated cross-legged on a rug, eating a bowlful of dry rice. He
squinted at Ramizail where she stood, defiant and tear-stained, across
the room from him. "Bring the slut here," said he. Two slaves dragged
her forward. They took their hands away when they had stationed her in
front of him; she immediately hit one of them in the eye and kicked
the other on the shin. Then she bent over and thrust a finger under
Mufaddal's nose.

"Watch who you're calling a slut, you pig-eyed ape-visaged son of a
buck-toothed jackal!" she said in a low but quite audible snarl. "Do
you have any idea who I am?"

He made as if to shrug, snatched her by the wrist and flung her prone
on the rug before him. "I know who you are, you viper mouthed hell hag.
You're Ramizail, who once controlled the djinn."

"I still control them, you bat-eared offspring of a pock-marked toad."

"Oh no you don't, you mildewed bowlegged harridan," said Mufaddal.
With the "bowlegged" epithet he went too far, as any student of women,
and especially of the vain Ramizail, could have told him. She rolled
over and smiled up at him and before he knew what she intended, her
teeth had met in the flesh of his calf. He leaped straight up with a
full-throated bawl of pain.

She sat back and crossed her legs Moslem-fashion and said, "Now that
the pleasantries are done with, let me tell you that the chief of all
the djinn, y-clept Mihrjan would--and _could_--do anything for me. So
just watch your step, you greasy-handed scheming scum, or you'll find
yourself hanging by your--"

"Mihrjan would indeed have done anything for you," said Mufaddal,
rolling up his cheap cotton trousers and dabbing at the blood on his
leg with a piece of the equally cheap rug, which he tore off for the
purpose. "But your friend Godwin sent Mihrjan away and told him to stay
till he was called. And now he's lost the ring of Solomon, and you're
helpless. Ouch!" he yipped as the rug rasped over his wound. "Well,
almost helpless. I suppose I'll have to have all your teeth pulled
before I make you my concubine."

"Before you make me a concubine, you draff of the Cairo gutters, you'll
have to pull my teeth and draw my nails and hamstring me and break my
arms, and even then I'll _gum_ you to death!" she yelled.

He regarded her out of the corner of his eye, and thought that perhaps
she was right, and that he should give up this idea. Certainly there
was always the chance that her djinni might come looking for her
against Godwin's orders; but he took a second look and decided the
djinni could go hang. She was as luscious a piece of loot as had come
his way in years. She was standing now, hands on hips. He motioned one
of the slaves up.

"Let's see what she looks like under all those layers of drapery," he
said.

The slave grinned, whipped out a knife, and before Ramizail could turn
he expertly ran its razor-honed blade up her back, within a millimeter
of her spine. Her robes fell forward, slit from waist to neck, and
she saved her modesty only by a quick grab at the front of them.
Whirling--and Ramizail when she wished could move like a tornado in a
hurry--she snatched the knife from his careless grasp, shifted it to
a comfortable position in her hand, and with a lightning stroke cut
the belt of his scarlet satin pantaloons. The slave clutched at them
desperately ... just too late. He turned to flee this demon-wench, the
trousers entangled his ankles, and he sprawled headlong across the
floor. The other slave came warily forward, groping out toward the girl.

She menaced him with the knife. "Want to lose your pants too, little
man?" she asked.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was a shy and sensitive soul at heart. He glanced at his trousers,
at the knife, turned pale, moaned, and dashed for the door. Ramizail
faced Mufaddal, who was nursing his calf and gaping appreciatively at
the slim brown back exposed by the slave's blade.

"Turn around for a minute, al Mamun," she hissed, "while I fix my
robes. If you don't, the last thing you'll see will be this silver
sliver!" She flashed the knife within an inch of his popping orbs. He
hastily swiveled round and faced the wall.

"One would think you were deficient in the body, and ashamed of it," he
growled.

"If you would care to see just how extremely undeficient I am, you big
baboon," she said, slicing off the whole top of her cream-colored outer
robe and knotting it around her ample bosom in the form of a halter,
with the copper-hued gown caught beneath it to chastely cover her
diaphragm, "then you have only to snatch one peek over your shoulder. I
assure you it would give you a moment of supreme pleasure, immediately
before you died." A low estimation of her own attractions was never a
failing of Ramizail's. "And you would die, Mufaddal. They tell me a
sliced gullet can be painful. Do you want to find out?"

"No," said Mufaddal sullenly, staring hard at the wall. What a
long-clawed cat from the alleys of Hell! he thought. Had she been less
beautiful, he would slay her in this instant. But he wanted her, and
without blemish or scar, so he sat motionless until she said, "All
right, turn around. But no more clever ideas from you, or I'll really
grow angry." She tucked the knife into her girdle as he pushed himself
around to face her.

"Very well," he said, "I'll buy you. I respect your spirit, woman.
'Tis a trait I like in my women. How now, if I heaped your lap with
emeralds and nephrite jade?"

"Green was never one of my favorite colors," said she, sitting down
comfortably across the rug from him. She cast about for a way to show
her absolute contempt, bethought herself of her playing cards which she
always carried with her, and drew the pack out of a purse she wore on
her girdle.

"What are they?" he asked, intrigued in spite of himself, as she began
to lay them out on the rug.

"Playing cards. My djinn brought them to me from a far future time.
They haven't even been invented yet," said she, studying the faces of
those upturned.

"What does one do with them? Not that I care," he added, remembering
his carefully-built reputation for single-minded fanaticism.

"One plays many games. I might teach you one, were you not as stupid as
a hog and as dull-witted as an aged camel."

"I am as intelligent as you," yowled Mufaddal. Then, since she was a
mere woman, "More intelligent, blast your smirking face! Teach me a
game!"

"The best one is called Poke Her," said Ramizail. "But to really play
properly, we need four people."

Mufaddal threw a dish at the remaining slave, who was sitting in
a corner trying to repair his belt. "Go fetch me Heraj and Pepi,"
he ordered. "Also bring some food. Something to munch on. And some
fermented-bread beer." The slave trotted out, gripping his ravished
pants.

Presently the two sorcerers came in, Heraj very glum. "What's wrong
with you, lemon-lips?" asked Mufaddal.

"What'd you do with Godwin and his crew?" asked Heraj.

"You know very well."

"Yes, I know. You threw them into the jail with those captured
Crusaders and the others. I don't like the risk, brother. You ought to
kill the whole lot of them now. You underestimate that big Englishman.
And the renegade El Sareuk is no babe, either."

"The cell is as well guarded as a prince's _harim_," said Mufaddal.

"Yes, but any man who can slay a winged lion is a match for fifty
seraglio guards. Kill 'em, I say. The plague ship sails with the early
morning tide. Why take unnecessary chances?"

"I have several simple but pleasurable notions in mind for Godwin
and his misguided cohorts. Come here, I'll whisper one of them to
you." Heraj stalked over and bent down. Mufaddal sputtered wetly and
intimately in his ear. Presently the sorcerer began to grin.

"Not bad. I guess it's worth the risk. I'll be extra cautious, anyway."
He sat down beside Mufaddal. He extracted a goblet of saffron-yellow
bubbling wine from his brother Pepi's yataghan pommel and drank it off.
"What did you call us in for?" he asked, gazing at Ramizail with the
expression of a starving vulture catching sight of a prime steak.

"This wench has a game to teach me, and it needs four players. Go on,
girl," said Mufaddal, with as close an approach to amiability as was
possible for him to assume.

Ramizail dealt out five cards apiece, having unobtrusively stacked the
deck, and began to teach them the exotic game of Poke Her.



                              CHAPTER XII


The dungeon of al Mamun was a squat brick square, with a flat clay
roof and tiny slit windows, erected at a little distance from the main
building of his establishment, between the wharf and the barracks that
housed his common soldiery. In its stinking, superheated confines now
lay a score of Crusaders, captured a month before while on detached
patrol duty from Richard's forces; twenty-seven Bedouins, the remains
of Godwin's army; fourteen assorted Saracens, in jail for one offense
or another against Mufaddal; El Sareuk and Godwin himself.

There was barely enough floor space for each man of the sixty-three to
stand upright, or to sit, if he didn't mind jostling his neighbors.
Godwin was standing by a window looking out at the dock from which the
dark plague ship, a tall obscene blot against the descending moon, had
a quarter of an hour before set sail. El Sareuk was beside him, making
suggestions.

"How if we all formed a kind of wedge, Godwin, and began battering the
door with the point? A few would be crushed, certainly, but the door
might be torn down."

"Well, we'll try it, old wolf, if nothing better occurs to us." Godwin
leaned in the little embrasure, tugging fretfully at his blond beard.
"If I had my sword...!" He clanked his leg chains with anger; they had
chained him and El Sareuk and a couple of the brawnier Crusaders. Damn
all, he thought to himself. The ship is gone, what does it matter if we
get out or not? Except to save Ramizail, of course. If I could remember
what I did with that bloody ring! Mihrjan could sink that ship like an
oaken chip.

And then, as the moon touched the far crest of the sea, the door opened
and a Mameluke thrust in his head.

"Godwin! Godwin's wanted!"

The prisoners all burst into raucous speech, invitations and curses.

"Come and get him!"

"Do venture within, jailer, and let us show thee something pretty!"

"Enter, thou fuzz-bearded son of a dung heap, and fetch him!"

Godwin pushed his way to the door. The Mameluke retreated behind it.
"Step out, Godwin," he said, nervously prodding the Englishman with his
sword. "Mufaddal wants you."

Godwin grinned evilly, and stepped forth. The Mameluke, who Godwin
now saw had a file of soldiers at his back, slammed the door on the
execrations of the prisoners. "Come along," he growled.

El Sareuk, watching from a window, saw Godwin disappear with a firm
step into the waning night, clinking his leg chains jauntily.

For long he did not come back. The old Arab harangued the sixty-one men
who were left, urging that they forget their feuds and crusades and
band together against their captor; and they agreed whole-heartedly
with him, and fell to making plans for escape and vengeance. Not a man
of them but hated Mufaddal, and most of all for his loathsome scheme of
the plague ship.

They all sat down, crowding up to one another in the heat and stench of
the prison, and made a narrow aisle through the center of the place so
that El Sareuk could pace up and down while he talked and gestured and
plotted, rattling the iron fetters on his legs.

"If we can get out, and I say we can, even if we leave half our number
dead on the floor behind us, then we must make a dash for the house,
and pulverize this devil before he can concoct any more foul designs!"
he shouted.

They all roared. The building seemed to quiver on its foundations. El
Sareuk smote his forehead. "Now by Allah and again by Allah! Is this
our answer? Remember the walls of Jericho, O Brothers!"

They caught his meaning at once, and at the upswing of his hand every
man let loose a full-throated bellow. A Crusader edged into a corner
shouted, "The walls shuddered! The force of the sound shook them!"

They repeated the clamor, and dirt from the roof sifted down over them.
For five minutes they raised a thunderous din, and might have gone on
doing so till the sun rose, had not the door drawn open just then.

They all peered round, and a gorilla walked in. It was chained around
the ankles and had a quizzical expression on its broad flat face.

They were brave men, but unarmed, and they all shrank away from it
with indrawn breath and small fearful cries. El Sareuk, pale, clutched
automatically for his absent scimitar.

The door slammed. The gorilla scratched its head, leaned against the
jamb, and remarked in a loud disgusted voice, laden thick with English
accent, "What the hell is the matter with you white-livered ruffians?
You think I'm going to eat you?"



                             CHAPTER XIII


The gorilla stood by an embrasure, resting its elbows on the sill and
staring moodily off toward the wharf. The sky was growing light with
the approach of dawn. There is a small tide in the Mediterranean, much
smaller than those of the greater oceans. It had been running now for
nearly an hour. The pest ship, all sails spread, was hull down on the
horizon.

The gorilla said gruffly, "El Sareuk, there is a sick void in my vitals
that makes the shifting sands appear a mild holiday by comparison! The
ship is gone--we've lost our fight to save England!"

The Saracen scratched his beard. "You have fleas, friend, and you're
giving them to me.... Godwin, how did this terrible witchery come to
pass? I mean this new form of yours?"

Godwin, the gorilla, grunted. "They hauled me into a room where the big
dish-faced swine, what's his name--"

"Mufaddal."

"Yes, Muffin-face or whatever. He was sitting on a blanket with two of
his sorcerers and Ramizail. She'd taught them one of her games with
those 'playing cards.' The senior sorcerer, Heraj, had won about a
bushel of assorted jewelry and gew-gaws, and Ramizail had stacks of
gold coins like a rampart in front of her. They were all bleary-eyed
with lack of sleep, but the game has such a hold that none of them, not
even Ramizail, stopped playing for full five minutes after I had been
brought in."

"It must have been Poke Her. No game has such a fascination."

"Yes. Then Muffin-face tipped Heraj a wink, and the camel's bastard
went into a trance or something, and the first thing I knew I was
scratching myself on the rump where a flea had bitten me. I imagined
he'd presented me with a plague of fleas, till I realized that I wasn't
scratching good armor, but bare hide with fur on it!"

"What a horror!" said El Sareuk, shuddering. "The man must have Satan's
powers."

Godwin's shaggy head nodded. "'Twas he made it possible for the pest
ship to be cargoed. Well, I looked myself over, and then knocked down
a guard and took his polished shield away from him. They all had their
swords out in a trice, but I only wanted to see my face in it. To
have attacked them then would only have meant throwing my life away
uselessly. I looked into the shield and--this is what I saw." He turned
the gorilla's sad-somber visage toward his friend. "Heraj exchanged
my body with this animal's, which it seems inhabits a savage jungle
country far down in Africa. So somewhere in a forest my own body walks
beneath the trees, clad in my robes and armor, thinking a wild beast's
thought!"

"This Heraj must be powerful beyond thought!"

"He said deprecatingly to his filthy master that he had his
limitations, but I cannot imagine them. What a bit of sorcery! Anyhow,
Mufaddal then bragged that he would make Ramizail his concubine, and
chain me to the bedchamber wall in the guise of a household pet. I had
all I could do to keep my fingers from his throat. But I bethought me
of Ramizail at the mercy of this pack of devils with me dead, and held
my rage. Then she came to me, unhindered by them, because they wanted
to see the spectacle of a maiden embracing a brute; and under cover of
her embrace, she slipped this into my hand, and I hid it under my fur."
He withdrew from his armpit the knife which Ramizail had taken from the
slave.

       *       *       *       *       *

El Sareuk's lean face lit with a fanatic fire. "Why, we are weaponed,
then! And we have this body, which they've given you, like a crew of
imbeciles and village idiots, when its strength must equal that of ten
Godwins!"

"Well, not that damn strong," said the gorilla reproachfully. "After
all, I was no weakling."

"Yes, yes, but look here, friend; between the weapon and the new body,
can we not force an escape from this hole? Subdue the caitiffs, take a
ship and pursue the plague vessel! The thing is surely within our power
now!"

The gorilla shook his head dully. "You are staring, old comrade, at the
work of this Heraj. Do you think he couldn't stop an attack by us with
a wave of one finger?"

El Sareuk hissed fiercely, "Where's the Godwin I knew aforetime? Has
the magician exchanged your guts with some sheep's?" He clapped the
beast on the shoulder. "And see, I have bethought myself of something.
Ramizail never does anything without plan, and witty, clever plan at
that. She is playing cards with these magicians, true?"

"They were back at their game before I'd been hauled out of the room."

"I see her strategy as plain as though I had laid it myself! She has
found the chink in the sorcerer's armor. He is engrossed with the game,
to the exclusion of all else. We can make our break, and with any luck,
burst into that room before he knows something's amiss! Then one swift
twitch of your paw--forgive me, I mean your hand--and he's carrion!"

The gorilla considered long. At last he said, "It's a slim chance, but
by the rood, we'll take it! Better a slim chance now than no chance
after they chain me to the harem wall. And 'tis a thought, that of
pursuing the plague ship. I had given up all hope when it left its
moorings. I never thought of another ship."

"Your brains are addled by the change in form, or you'd have riddled it
all out before I did," said the Arab generously. "Now then, how shall
we go about it?"

They talked in low voices for a few minutes. The day brightened beyond
the window. At last El Sareuk said, "That's it. The best possibility, I
think."

"One other thing," said Godwin. "Around the knife when Ramizail gave it
to me was wrapped this." He showed the Saracen the sigil of Solomon,
the chain of which he had placed about his neck, with the seal hanging
down behind among his black fur. "What d'you make of that?"

"Why, she hopes you'll find the ring, and if you have both, you can
call the djinn. Obviously the sigil is no good to her alone."

"Fat chance I've got to find the ring," moaned the gorilla. "It's
jiggling around a jungle somewhere, a thousand miles south."

"Yes. Ah well, we asked Allah for adventures when we left Jaffa for
a nomad life," said El Sareuk philosophically. "Though little did we
dream they'd come in battalions like this!"



                              CHAPTER XIV


The gorilla was as tall as Godwin had been in his proper form, four
inches over six feet. The Crusader standing on his shoulders was the
tallest of their lot, six feet two. His head came within a hand's
breadth of the roof. Balanced by a palm on the ceiling, he was digging
away at the baked clay with Ramizail's smuggled knife.

The mob was singing. Once a guard had opened the door and bawled at
them to stop that infernal racket before they all had their throats
choked with dirt, but they had cursed at him so impressively that,
sword or no sword, he had retreated hastily and barred the door behind
him. The mob had gone on singing. The Crusaders had sung ditties of
England and home and beauty, with the Saracens humming and beating
time; then the Saracens had taken over with chants of Islam and Bedouin
love tunes, while the Crusaders accompanied them in muted bass choruses
of _hmm-hmm-hmms_.

This din had effectively covered the scraping of the knife, which was
chipping away the old roof at a good clip.

Now a bit of sunny sky showed through. The Crusader grinned, got a firm
purchase with his bare toes on Godwin's hairy shoulders, braced his
left hand above his head, hooked his right into the hole, and tugged
downward. A big chunk of brick fell on his upturned face. He shook his
blond head and chuckled. A trickle of blood ran into his mouth. Nothing
could have tasted sweeter.

Gradually the hole widened, till at last it was the width of a man's
body and more. Godwin, the gorilla, said in Arabic, "Enough! Now onto
the roof, a dozen of you!"

Swiftly they swarmed up over him as though he were a scaling ladder.
Slim Arab fought silently with big-bodied Englishman for the honor of
being in the vanguard. Then Godwin barked again, "Enough!" They drew
back, those who had not gone up through the hole, and he flexed his
knees and gave a tremendous spring. Ape's muscles and man's know-how
carried him straight upward; his paws caught the rim of the hole. Some
clay crumbled beneath his weight, which was more than six hundred
pounds. But sufficient held to give him a moment's grace. He hurled his
bullet head and huge shoulders into the gap, the clay wedged his belly
in for an instant, then he had burst through and was floundering on the
roof, chained legs still dangling within. El Sareuk's tough old hands
took him by the wrists and hauled. He was safe.

       *       *       *       *       *

Crouching, he led his party to the edge of the flat roof, walking with
legs spread so his tight fetters would not clank. It was the landward
side of the prison, facing the barracks of Mufaddal's soldiery. Before
the barracks paraded two sentries. Below Godwin's gang were two more,
dungeon guards, one posted at each corner. The sun was brilliant on
their steel helmets as they stood silent, foreshortened by the height,
unconscious of any harm.

Godwin singled out two of his men, pointed to their targets, and went
with his colleagues to the wall above the door. From here they could
see two more sentries at the other corners, and four stationed at the
door itself. He allotted Bedouins to the remaining corner guards, gave
a signal, and launched himself into the air with a war-cry that began
in his belly and strangled in his throat, so that for fear of alarming
the barracks guards all that emerged from his mouth was a sibilant
fierce hiss. Behind him his silent henchmen followed him off the roof.
Within the jail, the fifty-one men still prisoner were raising echoes
with a rousing drinking song imported from Germany.

Godwin, as the gorilla, smashed down upon two guards who had been
sleepily cursing together the tyranny of their master Mufaddal. They
never knew what crushed them.

The other guards, inundated by a wave of angry captives, died as
quietly; while the men at the corners did their work with practiced,
pitiless hands. Godwin skipped up to the corner of the jail and looked
toward the barracks, some seventy yards away. As he had hoped, the
two pacing sentries were oblivious of the slaughter. Their turns were
made toward the barracks, so that only by an accidental or inquisitive
turn of the head during their march would they take in the prison. He
glanced behind him. El Sareuk was unbarring the door, while others were
donning the distinctive chest armor and helmets and picking up the
weapons of the dead guards. Three of them shortly went off toward the
garrison building. They were all men who had formerly soldiered for
Mufaddal, and Godwin hoped they could carry through their masquerade
for the few seconds necessary to insure silence.

They did. The sentries died with never an outcry. Two of Godwin's men
took up the pacing rounds. The others dragged the bodies down to the
prison. They were rolled into it, together with those who had preceded
them in death, and the dank stinking place now contained ten naked
corpses, where a scant ten minutes before had lain sixty-two men and a
gorilla.

The gorilla now said to El Sareuk, who was opening shackles with a key
taken from the chief guard, "The biggest mistake Mufaddal ever made
was when he turned me into this monster and then sent me back to the
dungeon to frighten you fellows with his dark powers. We've broken his
jail, and now we'll break his house. And then, by God, I think we may
even break his plague ship!"

"How? How?" asked the old Saracen fiercely.

"No time now, old one. Let's make for the house." He stationed four
of his men at the corners and two before the door; these last two he
regretfully deprived of weapons, for an assault on Mufaddal's own
stronghold demanded at least four scimitars and a knife or so. Then he
led his grim-faced legion across the heated earth toward the palace.



                              CHAPTER XV


"El Sareuk, are you sure you want to do this?" Godwin said anxiously,
as he stood in the shadow of the building's north side and plucked
tufts of fur out in search of an elusive flea. "There's small danger,
true, but your dignity!"

The Saracen turned on him the face of a natural-born but
long-frustrated thespian. "I would cut down the man who presumed to
keep me from it," he said loftily.

"Very well. Be careful, venerable wolf. Remember that I don't know how
fast this hulking body can run."

"I shall be as circumspect and as wily as the hungry small jackal."

"Then go to it, and Godspeed!"

El Sareuk peered round the corner of Mufaddal's house. The facade was a
hundred and fifty feet long, and the door was set in the very center,
with four Turcomans to guard it. He cleared his throat as though he
were going to give a speech, hiked up his robes, and went bounding out
to the dock, which ran parallel to the front of the house and a little
more than ten yards from it.

The soldiers were chatting among themselves, and did not notice his
advent on the dock, nor whence he came.

At once he began to croon, as if singing himself songs, and to leap
up and down, ruffling his rose samite and blue silken robes out like
broken wings, spreading his black Bedouin cloak by twirling as fast as
a dervish, all the time mowing and grinning like a demented thing. The
four turned from their conversation and stared at him. He appeared to
see them for the first time, and diving forward with his head down like
a battering ram, rocketed forward almost into their midst.

Two of them drew scimitars, but one of the others said angrily,
"Seest thou not he is afflicted of Allah?" They put up their weapons,
shame-faced.

He began to do a jig, little by little drawing away to the south so
that they wheeled to watch him. Over their shoulders he saw the blunt
skull of the gorilla poke round the corner. It was his last chance to
ham it up. He doubled over and gave his feet a flip and was standing
on his head, all the while singing a rather tuneless song of his own
composition, about the amours of a pascha, to drown out any noise that
Godwin might make.

One of the men cried, "Look, brothers, look! He wears gold-washed armor
beneath his robes!"

They drew their scimitars, for no idiot of the byways of Alexandria
wore the armor of a prince.

       *       *       *       *       *

Godwin covered the seventy feet in six bounds. Two of the men he
clutched by an ear apiece and knocked their heads together, almost a
gesture in passing, a thing to be done without thinking. Before the
clang of their helmets had died away he was doing the same to the other
pair. His new frame was, as El Sareuk had said, far more potent even
than the human body which had stood up many a time to thirty opponents.
The quartet lay stretched on the ground, gray ooze and red blood
spilling from their broken skulls.

And so he had eight scimitars, nine knives, and six sets of body armor,
together with six helmets. "Not so bad," said he, as his men stripped
the corpses. "Now for the house!"

Those Saracens who were dressed as Mufaddal's men went first into
the house. Godwin followed, with El Sareuk (whose yen for acting was
now glutted) and the forty-seven others, the Crusaders and Bedouins,
treading on his heels. No one opposed them in the cool hall.

Godwin considered. Then, "Fan out," he whispered loudly, so that they
all heard him, "and search the house. Slay all you find save women. El
Sareuk, pick two Englishmen and two Bedouins and come with me."

Straight for the room of the card-players he went, his huge gray-black
body speeding like a falcon's flight, with the five behind having
trouble in keeping up with him. Through one room, in which five men sat
eating, he raged silently; and before their astonishment at seeing such
a brute appear in a civilized household would let them yell, they were
dead on the parquet floor. Scimitars dripped gore and the gorilla's
paws and thick trunk-like arms were spatted with it. Then they reached
the room they sought.

Yes, they were still at the cards, even as he had hoped. Ramizail's
game had held them fascinated, though Mufaddal had had to send out
for more cash and gems half a dozen times. Surely, thought Godwin,
surveying them for one fleeting moment from the doorway, surely this
girl was as clever as the wisest sage in England! She had known that he
would make good use of the dagger she had smuggled and the hours she
had won him.

Heraj, luckily, had his back to the door. Ramizail and Mufaddal himself
faced it. Pepi had retired to a corner to snore, while the third
sorcerer, Habu, had taken his place.

Mufaddal was squinting at his hand. He had four aces, but if his usual
luck held, either Ramizail or Heraj would have a straight flush. Seven
times that night the accursed wench had taken a pot with a royal flush.
Seven times! It seemed to him a rather high number. He was becoming a
Poke Her fiend, nevertheless.

He looked up to lay a bet, and froze as his eyes met the small fierce
orbs of the gorilla in the doorway. A coward would have screamed, but a
man of Mufaddal's boasted courage would have sprung over the heads of
the players to close with the beast.

Mufaddal screamed.



                              CHAPTER XVI


Heraj uncoiled like a spring, his mind hastily flitting through mental
file cards for an appropriate spell against gorillas. He had no doubt
that it _was_ the gorilla. He was turning to check, and had just
decided on the brief but pithy incantation which sent victims to the
plains of Afghanistan, when a large firm paw smote him on the nape of
the neck, and the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.

Habu clutched for his wand. He was a very minor warlock and needed a
wand to do anything more complicated than the three-shell trick. His
hand never reached the ebony stick. Godwin picked him up and threw him
contemptuously at the wall, which he hit so hard that his backbone was
telescoped into itself and some twenty-nine of his other bones were
fractured in more or less intricate ways.

Pepi woke up, saw the tip of El Sareuk's sword held steadily at
the hollow of his throat, and closed his eyes as if he had been
sand-bagged. "One move of those lips, witch-man," said the old Arab
pleasantly, "one small spell begun, and you will be breathing through
several more orifices than nature intended." Pepi lay as silent and
motionless as a defunct stork, which he vaguely resembled.

Mufaddal was waving his scimitar in arcs before him, bellowing for his
soldiers, calling on Allah to smite these heathen devils, and cursing
the magic of Heraj that had turned a plain man into this ghastly
demon-thing advancing on him. He had entirely forgotten that it had
been his idea to change Godwin to an animal for vengeance's sake.

Ramizail lay on her back and drummed her heels on the floor and laughed
with delight at the spectacle of her beloved--and despite his present
shape, he _was_ her beloved--wading in amongst the enemy in such
headlong fashion. "Smear the big hellhound all over the wall, darling!"

"Ramizail," said the gorilla, maneuvering for advantage, "that is not
ladylike. Get up off the floor and stop swearing." He then feinted
with one paw, caught the scimitar by the flats with the steel fingers
of his other, twitched it out of Mufaddal's horrified grasp, stepped up
to him and gave him a splendid uppercut on the point of the jaw.

Mufaddal joined his sorcerers on the floor.

"Now then," said Godwin, rubbing his paws briskly together, "fetch me
that necromancer, El Sareuk!"

Pepi, milk-faced and shaking, was led into the center of the room.
Had he been Heraj, he could have mumbled a spell ventriloquially and
relegated them all to the top of a pyramid. Luckily he was not Heraj.

Godwin regarded him for a moment. Pepi found that the direct gaze of
an angry gorilla is not a thing to put heart in a man. He gave a tiny
moan, almost a squeak. The gorilla expanded his chest, which measured
seventy inches, and said, "You're Pepi, if I recall correctly?"

"Y-y-yes, O Magnificent One," said Pepi.

"Pepi, I want you to transport me to the plague ship. Instanter."

"Oh, I couldn't do that," said the bony wizard, turning if possible a
little paler than before. "I can only do small things, such as--"

"Then I guess you may as well die too," said Godwin regretfully, and
reached out a paw.

Pepi nearly collapsed. "Wait a m-m-m-m," he said. "I mean wait a
s-s-s-s. Maybe there's a way."

"Think of it fast, scrawny one," said El Sareuk.

"I'm thinking," said Pepi hurriedly. "I'm thinking."

       *       *       *       *       *

Godwin just then gave a cry of pleasure. He had spied his broadsword
in its leather sheath, hanging on the wall above Mufaddal's inert form
like a trophy, together with his Saracen helmet and kite-shaped shield
and his curved Persian dagger. He bounded across and tore them down.

"A chap may be given the lineaments of a gorgon," he said, buckling the
sword around his waist and clapping the helmet atop his round animal's
head, "but he still seems naked without his weapons. By heaven, I feel
better already! Now, Pepi, the method."

"Well, look, O Superb and Generous Prince," stammered the sorcerer, "I
think I might work it with a carpet."

"I fail to see your point, sirrah."

"A flying carpet, O--"

"Never mind the O's. What's a flying carpet?"

"Not a very hard trick, really. You get on a carpet and say a certain
incantation, and you're flying."

"How fast?"

"As fast as you will it."

"And you can do it? You can turn a carpet into a bird, as it were?"

"I think I can," said Pepi doubtfully. "No, no," he added hastily as
Godwin flexed his biceps, "I'm sure I can."

"Do it, then. El Sareuk, put your blade across his neck. At the
first out-of-the-ordinary thing that happens, except for the carpet's
enchanting, deprive him of his head."

El Sareuk laid his scimitar to Pepi's throat with a warm smile.

Pepi looked at a rolled-up Persian carpet in a corner of the room, the
only corner that did not seem to be jammed full of bodies. He muttered
something under his breath. The carpet slowly unrolled.

"By the diamonded pillars of Hell!" gasped El Sareuk. "I believe he can
do it!"

Pepi brightened up as his magic drifted the carpet across the floor
toward them. "If you will sit on it, O Magnificence, it will carry you
to the ship, be it so far as a hundred leagues to sea."

"How do I work it?" asked the gorilla suspiciously.

"Merely sit cross-legged upon it and think. It will speed or slow as
you desire. It is attuned to the wishes of the rider."

"That's right," put in Ramizail. "I have ridden many a carpet, dear.
Nothing to it."

Godwin tugged at his bare chin, where in happier times there had been
a yellow beard. He dropped his shield on the blue and red surface of
the carpet, which was now floating leisurely an inch off the floor. It
seemed solid enough. "Listen, old wolf," he said. "See you take care of
the girl till I come back."

"Have I not done so for nineteen years?" asked El Sareuk reproachfully.

"And send these lads out to fortify the house as well as possible. The
barracks will be sure to find out sooner or later that something's
amiss over here. I hope I'll be back in time to help you, when the
brawl erupts; but the ship's the important thing just now."

"By Allah, it is! If we all die, 'twas in a worthy cause."

"We won't," said Ramizail complacently. "I feel it in my bones." She
smiled at Godwin. "Good fortune, my dear."

"Thanks. I'd ask you to kiss me, but I've seen this face. By the way,"
said he to Pepi, at whose neck the blade of El Sareuk still pressed
lightly but insistently, "can you give me back my own body?"

"Only Heraj could have done that," said Pepi wanly.

"Damnation. Oh, well," said the gorilla, and without more ado climbed
onto the carpet and sat down. "Good-bye, all," he said. His short brow
furrowed. Great fangs bared briefly in a grin of concentration. Nothing
happened.

"Give it t-t-time," yipped Pepi, as the Arab's sword just nudged his
throat.

The carpet gave a preliminary lurch, like a horse testing its muscles
of an early morning, and then with a whoosh shot through the door and
disappeared. From the other rooms that lay between them and the front
of the house rose shouts of astonishment, as Godwin's forces observed
him sail past them, clawing madly at the front edge of the rocketing
carpet.

At that moment Mufaddal gave a low groan, unheard by anyone there; and
Heraj the senior sorcerer opened his eyes and stared thoughtfully at
the ceiling.



                             CHAPTER XVII


Making a test flight on the blue and red carpet in the house was
tantamount to bestraddling a horse for the first time and having to
jump him over a series of rivers and log falls and then gallop along
a precipice edge, thought Godwin. He wished he had carried or led the
thing out of doors before he got aboard. He missed the first door jamb
by a fraction, canted over dangerously to skirt a startled Bedouin,
aimed for the second door and saw he was too far off the floor, ducked
his head just in time to escape a crack from the lintel, had the
almost overpowering urge to close his eyes and let himself be buttered
all over the ceiling, missed another door by a nice margin, grinned
proudly, and saw that the front door was shut fast.

"Open it!" he bawled, something of the timbre of the gorilla in his
frantic voice. "Open it, you pygmy-brained nincompoop!"

The Crusader on guard at the door flung it wide. It was an involuntary
reaction, not in any way due to Godwin's command; he merely meant to
dash through it himself. But carpet and gorilla slanted sidewise and
flew at him, he dropped prone with a screech that four hundred Saracen
foes would never have drawn from his lips, and the apparition sailed
over him at thirty miles an hour, the gorilla hanging on to the edge
for dear life.

Outside, Godwin righted the carpet and sped across the docks and over
the Mediterranean. Now he took thought. He had controlled the carpet,
it seemed, more by the quick fears and desperate hopes of his mind,
than by any conscious direction of its flight. He would have to calm
down. He exercised his iron will to the utmost. The carpet gave a
couple of jerks, like a fractious horse being brought under control of
the reins, and settled down to a smooth straight course. He glanced
over his great hairy shoulder. The land of Egypt was receding rapidly
behind him. Below, the choppy waves were blue and green with white
caps, and the ocean looked extremely deep.

"God and the Holy Sepulcher defend me!" gasped Godwin. He pushed down
on the carpet with an experimental finger. It gave slightly, but
appeared to be quite safe. He tried a banking turn and then another
which brought him to his straightaway course again. Courage returned
with a rush. He laughed deep in the enormous chest. "This is pleasant,
by my halidom!" he shouted.

His shield had fallen off the carpet somewhere back in Mufaddal's
house. His sword was safe, as was the Persian dagger in its thong about
his neck, and his Saracen-style helmet. The sigil of Solomon was still
hung round his bull throat.

He speeded up a trifle. The wind sang in his small flat ears. He shoved
his broad ugly muzzle forward, drinking in the rushing air. Never had
he known a sensation such as this. It made horses seem like snails.
He increased his velocity again. There was evidently no limit to the
acceleration possibilities. He nearly forgot his mission in the joy of
this stimulating experience.

       *       *       *       *       *

He made the carpet swoop toward the sea, confident in his new-found
skill; it plunged like a diving eagle at the waves, which reached
hungrily up for it. "Tantivy, tantivy!" roared the great ape
deliriously. "Gone away! Lu wind 'em, boy!" At the last second he
skidded the carpet level and shot along above the surface, just
skimming the crests of the waves, laughing like a maniac. Then once
more he rose into the heavens and slammed forward, small sharp eyes now
searching the horizons for the dark blot of the plague ship, on its way
to England with a cargo of hideous all-conquering death.

Shortly he sighted a sail. It might or might not be the vessel he
sought. He headed the carpet for it. It grew swiftly, until he was
circling over it at a height of perhaps two hundred feet. He slowed
the carpet till its motion was scarcely perceptible, until it finally
hovered motionless above the ship. Then he lay prone on his belly and
peered over the edge.

In the windy upper air the carpet rocked just a trifle, as a cork rocks
on a pond caressed by a summer breeze. Godwin cocked an ear. From
the ship below came the horrid din of thousands of imprisoned rats,
squealing and keening and skirling their ghastly song of destruction.

He had found the plague ship. He drew back and grinned. Now....

Canting off to a spot some distance to the port side, he dropped the
carpet, until it nearly touched the choppy sea, then aimed it at the
side of the ship. He reasoned that he would be less likely to be seen
if he came in at the level of the waves, rather than from above. There
might be some element of terror about his descent from the clouds,
but these men would be used enough to Heraj's spells to take a flying
carpet in stride. Surprise was what he needed on his side, and if he
could climb over the side without being seen, he might be able to
reconnoiter the deck for a moment before beginning his attack.

He was then about two hundred feet from the vessel.

Abruptly, without any warning, the carpet dropped out from under
him; crumpled, became a very ordinary red and blue carpet instead of
a magical winged steed, and hit the waves, where it floated for an
instant until his body struck it in falling; when it collapsed and sank
into the depths of the Mediterranean Sea.

Some distance below, a forty-foot white shark, called also a man-eater,
peered eagerly up at the commotion.



                             CHAPTER XVIII


Heraj opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

He had the grandfather of all headaches. He attempted to recall the
spell against headaches, but it eluded him. He tried several others,
but none of them would come out right. Evidently the blow at the base
of his skull had somewhat addled his memory. He closed his eyes and
resignedly waited for the thumping ache to pass.

He heard shouts of fear in other rooms, and then after a minute or two
Pepi's voice nearby said plaintively, "Don't you think you might remove
that blade now?"

Pepi was Heraj's favorite brother. He seemed to be in trouble. Heraj
made a valiant effort and rolled his head, ache and all, to one side,
opening his eyes as he did so. He saw the soles of Mufaddal's cheap
shoes, in the left one of which was a large hole with the dirty foot
showing through; disgustedly he swiveled his gaze and saw Habu, than
whom he had never seen anyone deader.

He lifted his gaze and saw El Sareuk standing beside Pepi, one
arm about the sorcerer's shoulders holding him steady, the other
presenting a scimitar to the poor fellow's throat.

Heraj worked through the spell of immobility in his mind. He felt he
had this one right. He flung it at El Sareuk.

El Sareuk did not move a muscle.

Heraj, uncertain that he had accomplished his purpose, glanced about
at the half dozen Crusaders and Bedouins who were in the room. He gave
them each a repetition of the spell. He enchanted Ramizail, who was
eating dates. Then he cautiously rose to his knees.

No one moved, not even Pepi.

"All right, boy," said Heraj, standing. "They're stuck."

"So am I," groaned Pepi.

His sound of sorrow was echoed by Mufaddal, who sat up and felt his jaw
tenderly. "Allah smite everybody," said Mufaddal. "Everybody!"

"Move, Pepi," said Heraj encouragingly. "He's immobilized."

"So am I, you lunkhead. Can't you see his arm and sword encircle my
neck?"

"Oh," said Heraj. "Hum. Well. Can't you force back one of his arms?"

"They're like stone. Ouch!" The edge of the scimitar had cut him a
little. "I tell you I don't dare move!"

"Neither can I," said Heraj, holding his head. "My stars and
thaumaturgy, what a knock I took! Which wall fell on me?"

"The gorilla fell on you," said Mufaddal spitefully, "and if you think
I'll turn a finger to aid either of you two fumble-handed fat-brained
cretins, you're badly mistaken. My jaw feels like a boil about to
burst."

Heraj took a step and winced. "I can't do it, damn the pain, I can't
move for a minute."

"I'm off balance," shrilled Pepi. "I can't stand here forever."

"Look," moaned Heraj, really wanting to help him but unable to bear
the skull-cracking ache, "I'll take the spell off him for a tenth of a
second. You get ready to push with all your might on that arm. It'll
give you enough leeway. Ready?"

"I'm pushing," said Pepi.

"Here goes, then."

El Sareuk had heard all this as he stood motionless with his sword at
the wizard's throat. He chuckled deep in his vitals, even though he
could not move so much as an eyelash. A whole tenth of a second, eh?

Pepi was pushing with insane strength at the arm. Heraj took off the
spell and immediately put it back on. There was a swish, a grating
sound, and a dull squashing thunk.

Pepi, a bumbler to the last, had pushed on the wrong arm. Indeed, he
had pressed so hard that El Sareuk in his new immobility now held it
straight before him. But the scimitar had been gripped in the capable
fist of the other arm. Pepi's head lay on the floor, an expression of
astonishment on its homely and now blood-bedabbled features.

Heraj raised a howl of anguish. He did not know that at the instant
Pepi died, the flying carpet with Godwin aboard it, no longer supported
by Pepi's incantation, had fallen into the sea almost on top of the
man-eating shark.



                              CHAPTER XIX


Godwin was a strong swimmer, and the body he now inhabited was as
muscular as any in the world. After swallowing a pint of salt water and
thrashing about for a moment below the surface, he struck out toward
the plague ship. He was not sure what had happened, but he was afraid
it boded ill for his beloved and his friends. Nonetheless, he was glad
that the carpet had carried him at least this far. The destruction of
the vessel was their major problem and he felt superbly confident that
he could accomplish it.

The heavy iron broadsword weighed him down, dangling stiff and
perpendicular from his waist; but he could not jettison it. It was
just as well, though, he thought, swimming with vigorous strokes, that
he had lost his shield before he left the land. Otherwise he would
regretfully have had to abandon it to the deep. That old shield had
been with him in many a tight spot.

The white shark kept pace with him, some twelve feet below, looking
up at him and considering which portion of this strange hairy beast
might prove most succulent for an appetizer. At last it decided upon
a leg. It lifted and turned in the water, opening its terrible mouth
with row behind row of huge razor-sharp teeth that could tear a man in
two with one snap. Godwin fortunately had just thrust his head under
the surface as he brought an arm over and down, and saw the quick flash
of the white belly below him. Automatically he contracted his whole
body, hauling his legs up and then propelling himself forward with a
tremendous flailing of his long arms. The shark missed its snap.

Godwin glanced at the ship and saw it was too far off for him to gain
its side before the huge fish had had several more tries at him. The
wind had sprung up, too, and the vessel was making away from him at a
good clip. Cursing, he turned in the water and shot down through its
depths, searching for the man-eater.

A flicker of white showed off to his left; he twisted, waited, holding
his breath and thanking heaven for the capacious lungs of the gorilla.

It came straight at him, revolving to bring its underslung mouth into
play. He maneuvered a foot to one side, and hurled himself upon it,
catching it by a pectoral fin. With every ounce of power the gorilla's
body could command, he tore at the fin. It ripped from the shark's
side, sluggishly, loosing a slow torrent of blood into the dark waters.

       *       *       *       *       *

The man-eater writhed around toward him. He caught the jaws, upper and
lower, with both hands, and wrenched them apart. Even the terrible
potency of the shark's mouth could not withstand the strength of the
gorilla and the whole-hearted will to win of Godwin of England. The
hinges cracked and the lower jaw hung useless.

Godwin backed off, shoving himself through the encumbering waters, even
his spacious lungs straining by now for air; but before he surfaced he
meant to finish this brute. He hauled out the iron broadsword from its
sheath, advanced once more toward the furiously thrashing white shark,
and thrust half a dozen times. Then he swam upward, leaving behind
him an ever-expanding blotch of blood and a quivering, twitching,
forty-foot piece of dead meat.

The ship was far away. He sheathed the sword and set out to overhaul
her where she sailed serenely, dark sail spread, with her cargo of
obscene death.

"Even Godwin in his proper form could never have caught her," he
thought to himself. "Heraj's baneful magic will win the day for England
yet!"

Slowly he crept up on the ship. At last he reached out a paw and
touched the slimy wooden hull. He gave a little quiet laugh. Now!

Dripping salt water, he hauled himself up the side. Cautiously his
blunt head in its steel helmet poked over the bulwarks.

The vessel was fairly long for a lateen-rigger, with a low poop deck
and a high rail, the great triangular sail, with a pair of quite small
auxiliary sails, flapping merrily overhead, and the eternal quarrelsome
noise of the rats pervading all the air within a quarter mile. The
watch, four Mamelukes, were dicing on the poop. At the tiller lazed a
tall black Nubian slave, his loins wrapped in a bright orange cloth.
Godwin presumed a crew of about six more, who were probably below
in a portion of the hold shut off from the rats' quarters. Mufaddal
would want a good handful of men for a job like this. He envisaged
them loosing the rats in the seaports of England, likely at night, and
slipping away on the tide, leaving their gruesome messengers to spread
the bubonic plague far and wide. The picture gave him added strength
and determination; though God knew he had needed no more than already
boiled in his veins!

As silently as he could make the cumbersome body move, he hoisted
himself over the rail.

Then he stood erect, all six feet four of gray-black hideous-visaged
brute, drew the broadsword from its scabbard, set his thews for quick
action, and pounding his naked chest with his left paw, so that a
hollow drumming _boom-boom_ drowned for a moment even the racket of
the rats, he opened his saber-fanged maw and gave vent to a terrible
cataclysm of sound, an utterance wholly at variance with his usual
war-cry, which seemed to come not from his human spirit, but from the
body of the jungle beast--an ear-shattering, soul-searing mixture of
highpitched barks, raging shrieks, deep-bellied howls and half-joyous,
half-oddly-sad roars, roars which spoke of peaceful days beneath great
sheltering trees now left forever for the crash and thunder of grim yet
gratifying war.

Godwin of England had come aboard.



                              CHAPTER XX


The Mamelukes were stunned. To say this is an understatement. They were
shaken, terrified, horror-struck, and a thousand more emotions--all
bad--filled their hearts than they could ever have catalogued.

They were very brave men indeed, but they had never seen a gorilla, and
certainly never a gorilla that appeared out of the sea to stand waving
a Crusader's broadsword on their deck. As one man they stiffened, and
gaped, and were lost. For Godwin, with a somewhat shortened repetition
of his initial greeting, was bounding into their midst before they
could budge.

One man died with the dice in his hand. Another lost his head before
he could recover his wits. A third put hand to hilt and was cloven
with a leer of terror still on his face. The fourth managed to get his
scimitar cleared. Precious little good it did him. It came from the
sheath only to clatter on the deck.

The Nubian slave at the tiller was a different proposition. He was
as tall as Godwin, a thick-legged old warrior, with broken teeth and
scarred face to attest his many battles. Leaving his post, and catching
up a naked scimitar (that was easily six feet in length) as he passed
the rail where it had lain propped, he ran at Godwin full tilt, yelling
a battle slogan from his homeland far to the south.

Godwin thrust out his blade to parry the first vicious swinging cut.
The swords clanged like hammer on anvil. The black was skillful. Godwin
had all he could do to keep the singing steel from his chest. He tried
a two-handed swipe, which the slave ducked blithely, and the scimitar
came licking in to draw a thin scarlet line across the gorilla's belly.
Half an inch further and Godwin's guts would have been spilt on the
sun-hot boards.

Godwin's new reach, a stupendous one, was an advantage. In ferocity and
broadsword skill he was unbeatable, but a long scimitar was a terribly
formidable weapon in the hands of such a swordsman as his opposite
number. He parried, parried and cursed the fact that this tall grinning
half-naked black should keep him at bay so long. From the corner of
an eye he saw more Saracens emerging from a hatch up forward. It was
no time to stand and fight according to gentlemen's rules. He had a
job to do, and this Nubian might very well cry halt to that job. Given
equal weapons, Godwin would have dueled with him thus by the hour; but
now he needed quick victory.

"Sorry about this," he grunted, in apology for the dirty trick he meant
to play. He did not need to play it. The Nubian fell back, eyes and
mouth starting wide.

"It spoke!" he cried out, and flung down his scimitar. "Oh, Allah, it
spoke!" He turned and ran for the rail and dived over it like a man
fleeing the wrath of Eblis. Godwin could not help laughing. Evidently,
to this fellow's way of thinking, a gorilla that climbed out of the
sea and fought with a broadsword was acceptable, but one that did
these things and spoke in Arabic also was an intolerable wonder and a
thing to boggle the mind. There was a loud splash. Another foeman was
dispensed with.

There were half a dozen coming up the deck toward him: his estimate of
the crew had been right. He saw two bowmen among them. Bad! He tucked
his broadsword into its sheath and bent his knees and leaped for the
yard of the lateen sail, caught it by both paws, hoisted himself like
a gymnast up and over and knelt on the yard, balancing by a palm on
the bellying sail. Carefully he got to his feet, which were prehensile
enough to grip the round yard and give him a feeling of confidence in
his balance. Commending his soul to his God, he ran straight down the
yard until he had reached the mast. Behind him four arrows had thunked
through the sail as the bowmen shot at the places they thought he might
be.

       *       *       *       *       *

He shinnied up the mast, which was on the opposite side of the sail,
luckily, from the crew, and cautiously peered round it. Something out
on the ocean caught his gaze, and he saw it was a small black dot,
rapidly receding from the ship. The Nubian swordsman was still in a
hurry.

The bowmen would be on his side of the sail in six jumps. The only
solution to his plight burst into Godwin's brain like a crossbow bolt
from the sky. He slid down the mast, came to a teeth-jolting stop
as his feet hit the yard, took the mast between both powerful paws
and shook it. It was stout, but thin compared with the masts used in
other rigs. Fangs bared with effort, hind feet curled and braced round
the yard, he exerted all the lusty power of the gorilla's arms, all
the brawn of the strapping torso, all the pent-up energy that roiled
and pulsed beneath the tough old hide. One mighty heave he gave, and
another, and a third.

The mast complained, creaked like the nine-mile-high gate of Hell
opening, and splintered in two as if struck by lightning.

Of all Godwin's feats of strength--and they were many--this was surely
the greatest. As the mast crashed downward, carrying the ripping sail
with it to the deck, he stood on the swaying yard and ostentatiously
dusted his hands together. Suppose it had been done by the body of a
jungle beast? Was he, Godwin, not inside it?

The broken mast struck with a crash that shook the ship and brought a
chorus of piercing squeals from the imprisoned rats below. The yard
swung violently and its end thudded to the deck, so that Godwin was
knocked off balance and only saved himself by a quick kneeling and grab
with both paws.

A large area of the main deck was covered by the collapsed dark sail,
beneath which struggled a number of formless lumps that were the crew.
Godwin picked himself up again and ran like a tightrope artist down the
slanted yard to the poop, where he leaped off and turned at bay, teeth
and claws and broadsword all bristling and ready.

The bumps in the sail moved about futilely, hunting an exit. The
invisible rats made the air hideous with their unclean, abominable
rantings.

The thing to do was go down and wade into those lumps with his sword.
It may not have been precisely a fair attack, but Godwin was not
absorbed with fairness at that time. He had taken two steps, the short
ferocious steps of the gorilla, when an archer found the edge of the
sail and rolled out from under it, an arrow nocked on his bow. He
sighted Godwin at once and the bowstring tightened. Lying on his back,
he took swift aim at the chest of the slavering horror on the poop deck.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was no time to reach him, no barricade to dodge behind, and the
distance was too long to fling his sword accurately. Godwin jerked
his head round. A brazier of burning coals stood on a brass trivet at
his side. Quicker than thought he had caught up the pot of them and
in the same sidearm motion flung them down at the bowman. The man saw
them coming, let fly his arrow and tried to roll out of range. Several
coals took him in the face and neck. Seared and scorching flesh sent up
an acrid, nauseous stench as the poor wretch screamed with agony. His
arrow had gone wild by the slimmest of margins.

The other archer emerged from the opposite edge of the sail, shaking
his head. He was bleeding from the nose and his eyesight had gone
slightly awry. He leaned on the bulwarks and rubbed a fist into his
eyes. He looked up and saw the gorilla coming at him over the crumpled,
heaving sail.

He plucked an arrow from his belt and fitted it hastily to the string.
He did not understand in the slightest how this awful creature had
appeared aboard his ship, but it had fled once from his bow and so it
might be slain by a mere mortal. He was a Seljuk Turk, this archer,
proud and cruel and infinitely superstitious; he felt sure that Godwin
was a spirit of some kind, yet he knew that spirits may be slain and
all the odds seemed to be on his arrows.

The first one twanged out from his short sturdy bow.

Godwin saw it hurtle at his breast, and in his proper shape might only
have watched it strike him, for he had no shield and only the smallest
fraction of a second in which to take thought. But the gorilla's body
was made of faster muscles, quicker reflexes, than ever a knight
possessed. One arm flicked across his chest, and the arrow was caught
in flight, three inches before it would have buried itself feather-deep
in his thorax.

The Turk, a second arrow already on the string, froze. Before he could
force action into his petrified hands, the gorilla was upon him. Great
black paws took him by throat and groin, he was lifted over the brute's
head, and the air whistled around him as the waves of the Mediterranean
reached up to assuage their age-old hunger for living flesh.

Godwin watched him vanish into the sea. Weighted by his armor, he never
came up. Godwin grinned.

Unnoticed behind him, the coals from the brazier had started a fire
in the fallen sail, a fire which was rapidly spreading in a score of
directions.



                              CHAPTER XXI


Godwin the gorilla bethought himself of the four men remaining under
the sail. He turned about and saw the fire, which was now licking up
fiercely.

"God defend the right!" he gasped. "Here's a rare hazard!"

Two men had succeeded in freeing themselves from the smothering
confines of the sail. They came at him warily, side-stepping the
flames, their curved Damascus blades at the ready.

"Beast or Satan," shouted one, "prepare to perish!"

"Ho ho," said Godwin throatily in Arabic, "you'll have to back that
threat with action, little man!"

The fellow halted, turned a sickly green hue, and buckling at all his
joints pitched over in a dead faint.

The other was affected in quite another fashion, and leaped toward
Godwin, scimitar flashing.

Godwin yanked out his long sword and batted down the first attack.
The Saracen was a swift and elusive fencer. His point darted through
Godwin's guard and slashed a long wound down the biceps of his left
arm, laying bare the dark flesh for a moment before red gore covered it
and trickled out through the fur.

Godwin yelled and swung his weapon in an arc, knocking off the other's
helmet and inflicting a nasty gash across his scalp.

The Saracen stabbed straight. Godwin twisted his body sidewise, and
the keen blade cut through all but a thread or two of the belt that
held his scabbard.

Before the enemy could recover from his lunge, Godwin brought his
wounded left arm over and down in a hammer blow. The doubled paw
caught the man exactly on the center of his skull, and he fell like an
arrow-pierced hare, kicked a time or two, and lay still.

Two foemen remained beneath the sail. One of these had been knocked
unconscious and now lay smothering to death. The other, crippled by
the falling mast, was slowly dragging his broken body along in search
of the open air when the fire burst into crimson bloom about him. He
wailed like a tormented soul on a spit, broke his nails on the deck in
a mad endeavor to crawl to safety, and at last struck his forehead on
the coaming of a hatchway.

Forgetting the rats below, he threw all his waning vitality into a
heave that sent the hatch cover up and flat on the deck. Then he pushed
himself over the edge and fell, to escape the flames among the ravenous
horde of great gray rodents.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the frightful din of crackling flames, gibbering rats, and lapping
sea, Godwin never heard him scream at all.

He stared narrowly around him now, scratching absent-mindedly for an
annoying flea in the small of his back, and saw that no one moved on
the deck of the plague ship. By good fortune, by the grace of God, and
by his own skill and brute force, he had obliterated the crew. Even the
men who had fainted had inhaled flame and died. Godwin stood alone on
the deck, while beneath him sounded the perpetual vociferant clamor of
the rats.

The flames spreading dangerously close to his bare flat feet, he
skipped along the bulwarks and up to the poop, which was as yet
untouched by fire. Here he watched it eat out across the deck,
devouring sail and broken mast and at last portions of the deck itself.

The heat in the hold became unbearable for the rats then, and they
began to fight savagely to get at the open hatchway, the sail above
which had burnt away. Their bodies piled up beneath its square of smoky
light, and the pile grew and grew....

Godwin in his gorilla body stared glumly at the flames. "What a way
to die," he growled aloud. "What an end for Godwin, who was once king
of all broad England! Look at the damned water; probably a million
hogsheads of it within spitting distance. Look at the damned fire. Look
at the two of them, and here am I, who can't begin to bring the one to
the other until the ship sinks under me! What a finish!"

For the first time in his life he felt total despair. He had saved his
home country, aye, but it was not likely that his deed would go down in
song and story, for El Sareuk and Ramizail and the others were in all
probability dying at this very moment under the swords of Mufaddal's
three hundred scum. If only, he thought, one small ballad might be
written about this geste!

He stiffened the gorilla's backbone and put such selfish wishes behind
him. He _had_ saved England, whether anyone ever heard of it or not.
That was worth dying for! That was even, God save the mark, worth
Ramizail's death or enslavement as a concubine! Much as he loved the
wench, the population of England outweighed her in the end.

If there were but some chance at survival. If only there were a small
cockleshell of a boat he could put off in, even the material for a
makeshift raft. But there was nothing, nothing but the sea and the sky
and the ship in flames, and the raging rats below him.

The sky! What now, if stout old Mihrjan the djinni were to come
swooping down out of that clear hot sky!

But no, Godwin must needs relegate Mihrjan to other parts, must forbid
him by the Seal to follow them, because of stubborn pride and petty
resentment against Ramizail's harmless tricks!

His wound hurt him. He felt the gorilla's body yearning to tend it,
to lick it clean and start the healing processes. For a moment he was
disgusted at the idea, and then hopeless, for what did it matter if the
wound began to heal, when he was doomed to a terrible death by fire or
water? But the instincts of his body would not be denied.

With a long sigh, Godwin of England sat down on the rough planks of the
poop and began to lick his torn biceps with a rasping tongue.

Simultaneously with his seating himself, the first rat clambered up the
pile of torn corpses and launched itself out of the hatchway and onto
the deck.



                             CHAPTER XXII


"Well," said Mufaddal, who was eating a hard-boiled egg in a sloppy
manner, "did you get to the barracks?"

Heraj picked up a cold towel from the air near his knees and wrapped it
around his head. "I did. Wow! I had to cast immobility spells on two
more of these devilish Crusaders, who were stationed at the back door.
But I made it to the barracks. The soldiers are even now deploying
around the palace. Oosh! What an ache!"

"I don't see why you can't collect yourself and put the whole pack of
them under a spell," said Mufaddal irritably.

"I've told you and told you, I have a headache, that's why I can't
do it, curse you," said Heraj. "I have all I can do to keep the ones
in this room and those two back there motionless. I have to keep
concentrating and it hurts like seven devils in my brain. Then I've
flung a force wall around this room, so no one can get in or out
except myself, and _that_ takes concentration. I tell you, I never went
through anything like it. All I can recall are these two spells and
the one for curdling milk. I could no more bewitch all these benighted
villains than I could--could fly to the moon."

"Incidentally, did you find the gorilla? Godwin?"

"No I didn't, and I hope I never do. I don't want to come within range
of those ham-sized fists again, not even with a legion of fiends at my
back."

"Is he still a gorilla, if he's alive, I mean? Or did he switch back
when you swooned away?"

"No, he's a gorilla. That's a different sort of spell from force walls
and immobility. But to hell with Godwin. I want to nurse this lump. And
you're confusing me, too. My spells are wobbling. I just saw El Sareuk
there move a good half inch. If you want those swine kept alive for
torture and other pleasantries, I've got to concentrate. Oh, my newts
and bat-wings! I shall die!" He went over and collapsed in a corner,
where he stared moodily at the corpses of his two brothers and mumbled
to himself.

Mufaddal peered out the window. It was too small to negotiate, but wide
enough to command a partial view of the back grounds. He saw a dozen
of his men go dashing from the shelter of one outbuilding to that of
another.

"In a minute or two," he said confidently, "in a very few minutes, by
Allah, these renegades and infidels will see what a real besieging is
like!"

And at the thought, he stroked his greasy beard and crinkled up his
soft brown eyes, and giggled like a maniac.



                             CHAPTER XXIII


Godwin looked up from his wound-cleansing. He had had a glimpse of a
gray shape scuttling across a field of crimson flame. He stared, and
saw a score of large rats eyeing him from the lower deck. He bounded
to his feet, thick gorilla toes and fingers curling with a fear that
no amount of bravery could still. The plague! The ravishing, filthy,
obscene plague! Even from a flaming ship in the midst of a waste of
waters, there might be some escape at the last moment: but from the
bite of one of these rats would come a foul death that nothing could
turn aside, not even the djinn themselves!

He canvassed the poop. No high pedestals on which a man (or a great
ape) might perch, no protective armor of any description to foil the
attack of the rats. Here he stood, alone, armed with a broadsword and
a dagger, a helmet and a golden sigil. There was but a single chance.
He might squat on the bulwarks at the very stern, for they were high
and would give him the advantage of being a little above his squealing
enemies. He leaped and balanced and squatted, and his naked iron
broadsword hung down between his bent knees as he awaited their first
move.

This was not long in coming. The poop was the only part of the ship
which was not being ravaged by fire. The rats headed for its temporary
safety. As they poured over it, a repulsive and horrible crew, snapping
and snarling at one another, their fangs yellow as amber slivers, their
hides mangy and often showing the first signs of plague, the leaders
spied Godwin roosting unhappily on the rail. They halted, considered,
twitched their whiskers, and then made for him. He was meat.

The first rank charged in and were slain eight at a blow, by the
sweeping sword. The second rank fared likewise. The rats drew back and
stared beadily at him. He could fairly hear their odious, menacing
thoughts. He waited. A gigantic rodent, half its fur gone in some
hideous battle below decks, came flying at him. The perfect reflexes
of the gorilla flicked the sword out and spitted the beast through the
guts. It hung on the sword, squirming and piping weakly, as Godwin
whipped the blade back and forth and clove the small skulls of a dozen
more.

A myriad of the grisly horde came tumbling up to the poop deck. Godwin
was now mangling and mutilating constantly, as more rats poured upon
him. Some of the devils were already feasting on their defunct cousins.

And so, for minutes that dragged like weeks, Godwin of England fought
off the rats, and waited without hope for the inevitable end, when even
his mighty muscles should grow weary and his eye become slow, and at
last they should reach him.

A close-packed group of them attacked him from the right, and some of
them even leaped upon the rail and came at him. He flailed his sword
frantically into the brown of them, sending them slithering along the
deck, knocking them into the sea, or spoiling them where they stood by
messy divisions and squashings. Then a legion came from the left, and
he leaped up to his feet and balanced precariously on the bulwarks as
he bent and swiped back and forth.

       *       *       *       *       *

The closest any of them had come yet was in this moment, when three
great bullies of rats, all fat and evil and ugly, leaped upon his
swaying leathern scabbard and clung there. They might have crept up
it and bitten him before he could slay them, except for the fortunate
stab of the late Saracen fencer, which had all but severed his sword
belt. The last few strands parted now, and the sheath fell to the deck,
carrying rats and belt with it.

Something rolled out of the sheath and made a small metallic sound as
it struck the overturned brazier. Godwin risked a glance at it. It
gleamed dull yellow in the sunlight.

"By the rood, mass, book and candle!" yelled Godwin, startling the rats
so that they drew back in haste, "the ring of Solomon! So _that's_
where I put it! In the bloody scabbard! Of course, I remember.
Someplace where 'twould be always near my hand!"

Nothing, not ten thousand times as many rats, could have kept him from
that ring. He leaped from the rail, half-squatting to bring his sword
hand near the deck, and the blade was a flaming scythe in his grip. It
mowed down rats by dozens, by scores, by hundreds as they came crowding
at him. They leaped, and the point shot up and down more swiftly than
the eye could command, and they had died in mid-jump. They crouched in
at him, and the tops of their heads were torn off or jellied by the
sweeping broadsword. Then they drew back, for a rat is intelligent,
and even their hunger was not enough to force them out against that
invincible weapon without some thought on the matter.

In the few seconds' respite Godwin leaped, scooped up the ring, dived
back to his seat on the rail. The rats came forward once more. With
his left hand he locked the ring to the sigil on its chain about his
neck, and in a voice of joyous thunder he shouted, "Mihrjan! I cry up
Mihrjan!"

Spang in the midst of the rats, shod with sandals of blue-white fire
so that the gruesome beings scrambled back from his vicinity, appeared
the ten-foot form of Mihrjan the djinni, turbanned with ivory silk,
pantalooned with lustrous purple velvet, and exuding an aroma of attar
of roses.

He salaamed deeply.

"The Lord of My Life," said Mihrjan sonorously, as the rats retreated
down the poop deck, "would seem to have need of my humble services. I
am his to command!"



                             CHAPTER XXIV


Godwin the gorilla sighed. He had never uttered a more fervent and
thankful sound in all his life. "Mihrjan," he said, "I must say, yes,
by gad, I will say, I'm glad to see you."

Mihrjan cast a look about him. "Thy sentiments are understated, Lord.
It is a trait of thy race."

"Yes, well, never mind that. Look here, can you get rid of these damned
slimy things? My arm's weary with swatting 'em."

The djinni gestured; a wind arose and swept along the poop, and the
rats were tumbled down onto the main deck, where they commenced to
brawl among themselves again, on the edge of the fire.

"And see here, while I think of it, there's a black fellow swimming out
there somewhere. Can you see if he's still at it, or has he sunk?"

Mihrjan vanished and returned before the air could rush into the
vacuum his passing had created. "He swims, Master, but weakly."

"Well, he's a good chap, albeit misguided into serving under that lousy
Mufaddal beggar. He's one of the best swordsmen I ever faced. Can you
transport him home to Nubia?"

Mihrjan grinned. "It is done."

"Good. I felt rotten about him. Poor devil jumped overboard because I
spoke to him. Which brings up this: can you make me myself again? That
is to say, take this ape's body back where Heraj got it, and give me my
own?"

Mihrjan scowled. His mind seemed to be wandering among far countries.
At last he said, brightening, "I see how 'twas done. I can undo it."

"Then by all means--" Godwin found that the paw with which he was
gesticulating had become a strong brown hand, a bit grubby, perhaps,
but still his own natural hand. He stared down. His robe and armor were
in tatters. They had evidently seen some life and hard times in the
jungle. The body appeared to be whole, however, and tingled pleasantly
as Godwin's personality took it over once more.

Mihrjan said, "Suitable raiment is in order," and Godwin was wearing
white samite and sky-blue silk over gold-washed armor of meshed steel.
His broadsword hung in a new scabbard, bedecked with gauze, and his
beard and hair were freshly cut and combed. His skin felt clean, and
seemed to have been bathed within the hour.

"What a talent you have there, Mihrjan, old fellow," he said
admiringly. "May heaven beshrew me if I ever part with you again."

"'Tis wise to allow me to stay within call." The djinni frowned. "And
my mistress, O King? She is safe?"

"I hope so, but I left her quite a while back. Had to sink this ship,
you know. It was going to England with a cargo of plague. Oh, you know
that, you were there when we found Sir Malcolm. We'd better get back
to Mufaddal's palace at once, Mihrjan. Just one more request: will you
sink this pest ship for me?"

"It already sinks of its own accord, My Lord." And indeed, the deck was
slanting beneath their feet. Down at the bow the rats were huddled,
quarreling and fighting among themselves and making their revolting
chorus rise up to foul the heavens.

"Good. Then let's go."

Mihrjan placed a hand under his elbow, and suddenly they were five
hundred feet above the Mediterranean, looking down at the ship which
Mufaddal had fondly hoped would be the death of the British nation.
Even up here Godwin fancied he could hear the final squeals and
horrible wailing shrieks of the cargo of great gray rats. Then Mihrjan
headed landward, and the plague ship disappeared behind.



                              CHAPTER XXV


They stood together in Mufaddal's private chamber. The spell of
immobility had been transferred to the dark-faced Mufaddal and his
chief sorcerer, while Ramizail and El Sareuk with their allies the
Bedouins and captured Crusaders were free to move where they chose.
They clustered now about the ten-foot djinni.

"What of my eight men at the prison and barracks?" asked Godwin.

Mihrjan said, "Slain, O King, cut down by surprise without a chance to
defend themselves."

"Damn. And my falcon, Yellow-eyes?"

"She perches on a roof-top in the heart of Alexandria, watching
anxiously for a sight of thee."

"Bring her here, please."

The old bird, looking rather wind-blown and surprised, appeared on
Godwin's mailed shoulder. She thrust her notched beak into his ear
affectionately, and he said with fervor, "Ah, _thou_!"

"And now, O Master of My Being, shall I vanquish the foemen without
the house by a whirlwind from the plains of Hell, or lightning from
the clouds? Shall I bubble their eyes from their heads with gouts of
searing flame?" asked the djinni fiercely.

"No, man, no! We'll beat 'em in fair fight. Only keep this Heraj's
magic cancelled out, send him and Mufaddal out there now, and give me
a hundred more allies."

"That will still be two to one against thee," said Mihrjan, as the pair
of plotters vanished.

"Naturally. More fun. And don't bring me a hundred of the djinn,
either, but a hundred desert fighters or good tough Frankish champions.
And see my other lads are weaponed properly."

"They await your orders in the forepart of the house," said Mihrjan
resignedly.

"Then I'm off. El Sareuk, ready? Mihrjan, keep that fire-eating woman
of mine out of the thick of things, will you? Come on, boys, up and at
'em!" He charged out toward the front door.

Mihrjan said to Ramizail, understanding her nature as well as she did
herself, "Wouldst watch the battle, little one?"

"Oh, yes, Mihrjan, yes!"

"Then come." He gathered her in his monstrous, tender arms, and flying
upward, caused their atoms to pass between those of the clay and
timber, so that in a wink they were high above the earth, and hovered
there comfortably, peering down on the tiny figures of Mufaddal's
soldiers deploying around the house. Two standing by themselves and
pointing this way and that with shouts unintelligible at this height,
were the black-visaged Mufaddal himself, and his one-time potent
sorcerer Heraj.

From the door issued a running warrior, who at once engaged six men
in dazzling swordplay; behind him came others, many others, until a
hundred and fifty-five men had emerged. Hand-to-hand combats were
joined all over the grounds. Ramizail cried out with delight.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was like observing two bands of toy soldiers endowed with the
power to move and fight and maneuver. Both the girl and the djinni
were enthralled. Godwin's force fanned out, coalesced, drove through
Mufaddal's ranks and turned and came back and drove again, till the
enemy broke and fled in hapless confusion. The Crusaders and Bedouins
pursued them, hacking them down from behind, forcing them to stand
and die in little knots. Two who fled toward the dock, casting away
their weapons, Mihrjan pointed out as Mufaddal and Heraj. After them
bounded a great figure in white, sky-blue, and gold, flourishing a long
sword above its head. "Godwin!" said Ramizail, biting her nails with
excitement. "Oh, Mihrjan, go lower! I want to see!"

The djinni sank until their feet were no more than ten yards from the
wharf. There they drifted along above the pursued pair.

Mufaddal panted out, "Only chance! Under the dock!"

Heraj gasped, "We might stand and fight him," with no conviction in his
voice at all.

"Ha," said Mufaddal, and with one desperate leap plunged off the wharf
into the sea. Heraj was one step behind him. Godwin came to the edge
and halted, baffled. Their heads did not show above the water.

"Mihrjan," whispered Ramizail, "they'll escape!"

"Observe," said the djinni equably. He gestured with a finger, and
a section of the dock became transparent to her gaze. Beneath it,
Heraj and his master were clambering up, dripping, onto a shelf of
boards some twelve feet from the outer edge of the wharf. Godwin still
scratched his head in bafflement. Obviously he could not see through
the pier as she could.

The two conspirators crouched there, watching the sea apprehensively.
"Now look," said Mihrjan. Ramizail, staring intent, saw a gray snout
poke up into view behind them, followed by a multitude more. "Rats!"
she breathed.

"Aye, rats. All those who live beneath the wharf, mistress, called here
by the scent of their dinner."

It was as though the lead rat had given a signal. In a trice the
legions of furred ghastly beings had poured over the two squatting men.

Screams of pain and horror came up through the boards of the upper
dock. Heraj straightened as though to stand, cracked his head on the
wharf, and sank down, half-conscious, into the midst of the swarming
rodents. He gurgled and flung his arms in the air as their small sharp
unclean teeth found his throat, his belly, his eyes.

Mufaddal flung himself into the water. His _gallabiyah_ snagged on a
projection, and held him fast, thrashing and squalling, only his head
above water. For a wonder, the cheap cloth did not give way. The rats
leaped down onto his head, slipping into the water, swimming back to
tear at his face, perching on his bare head and clawing insanely at his
scalp. And so, held helpless by the clutch of chance, Mufaddal died as
hideous a death as anyone might have wished him.

       *       *       *       *       *

El Sareuk came up to Godwin. "What were those fearful sounds just now,
companion?" he asked, wiping the sweat of honest battle from his lean
bearded face.

"Mufaddal and Heraj, I take it, though how and where they died I can't
tell."

Mihrjan settled to earth with Ramizail in his arms. "Lords," he boomed,
setting the girl on her feet, "they perished in a niche beneath the
wharf, as they should have perished, shut from the light of day, with
the teeth of their own evil minions fastened in their gullets. Now is
the stain they put upon Islam cleansed with a vengeance."

"By gad," said Godwin, as Yellow-eyes fluttered down to perch on his
shoulder, "then it's finished, and as neat a case of poetic justice
as ever came my way." He looked about him. Mihrjan had on his own
initiative sent the Bedouins and Crusaders back to their own places.
Only corpses met his eye. "To horse, friends!" he bellowed gleefully.
"This battle's done, and there are a power and lashing of wrongs left
in the world to be righted!"

"Oh, heavens," groaned Ramizail. "Don't you even want to rest a week or
two, swashbuckler?"

"Rest is for the dead and the aged, witch-wench."

El Sareuk nodded fiercely. "The work for willing swords is never done,
lass."

Ramizail rolled up her beautiful eyes and shrugged, a slight smile of
resignation on her full lips. Mihrjan pointed out their horses, saddled
and champing at a little distance. "O Lord of My Life, I know a wrong
in Egypt that needs four, or it might be eight, strong hands," said he.

"We are in Egypt, by coincidence," said Ramizail.

"This Egypt lies three thousand years in the past," said Mihrjan.

"Can you transport us back?" asked Godwin eagerly.

"Assuredly, Sire."

"Well then, let's go!" he roared. He put an arm over the shoulder of
El Sareuk and another about the slim waist of Ramizail, and ran them
toward the horses. And Mihrjan's great laugh of fierce pleasure boomed
thunderously through the desert air....



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