Nor could I understand the fierce triumph in the eyes of Mahmoud.
“Tonight you will perform the operation for which you were brought here. The man upon that table is needed in the Valley, but in his present condition he is no longer of use to us. Your operation will save his life.” He was smiling now. “Take your sharpest knife,” he said, “and make this man a eunuch. Castrate him.”
With a flip of his hand he swung away the sheet, and the man tied upon the table was my father.
Cold … I was icy cold. My eyes did not again go to the man on the table; they could not bear to meet those of my father.
Slowly, I glanced around the room. Mahmoud stood back, smiling with triumph. Around stood eight men with drawn blades, and there was no doubt they intended to see I did what was ordered.
Time seemed frozen in an awful stillness, and in the hollow of my skull, where no feeling seemed to exist, my brain struggled for escape, for a way out. He was bound with four stout cords, and had been tied so for some time. Even if cut free, he would be stiff from being so long immobile.
Mahmoud was amused. “Come, come!” He smiled at me. “You are a physician, and you came prepared. However, if you do not perform the operation, one of my men will do it in your place, while you watch. But I am afraid he will not be so skillful as you.”
My eyes swept the room, mentally placing each man. It was a large room, but there was a chance. The fire under the water tank crackled in the silence. “Is the water hot?” I asked. “Is it boiling?”
He glanced into the tank. Now I went up to the table for the first time and looked down into the eyes of my father. The eyes that met mine were the ones I knew, the strength was there. “Be ready.” I spoke softly in our Breton tongue.
At a table nearby I took out the knives necessary and laid them on the table. My hands were damp with sweat, but now my mind was working with icy clarity. We both might die here, but there was a chance, a slim chance.
I took several dried plants from my bags and put them on the table.
Once I glanced at the tank, which now stood on a table. There would be water enough. Taking a scalpel, I stepped to the table where my father lay and concealing the movement with my cloak, I slit the rope near his wrists with the razor-sharp scalpel.
A guard stepped closer, and Mahmoud circled to see what I was doing, his eyes hot with eagerness. In that instant, as several of the other guards crowded closer, I hooked my toe behind the leg of the table on which sat the boiling water, and jerking back with the toe I suddenly threw my weight behind the tank.
The tank and table went over with a crash spilling boiling water across the legs of the three nearest guards. Screaming with agony, they sprang back, one of them falling to the floor, entangling the others. Turning swiftly, I slashed another of the cords that bound my father, then I thrust the scalpel into his hands and drew my sword.
The first came too quickly and stopped his rush too late; my point took him in the throat with a sharp twist to the side, and he staggered back, blood covering his chest. Then the outer door burst open, and a dozen men rushed into the room. In an instant it was filled with fighting as the men of Mahmoud turned to meet these, evidently the men of Sinan.
Catching up my bags, I ran after my father who was already at the unguarded door. He stumbled on legs still numb from the binding, but he pointed with a blade caught up from a fallen guard. We rushed down the long passage, deeper and deeper into the mountain. Then he stopped suddenly, listening. We heard no sound.
We walked on a dozen steps, catching our breath for what might lay before us. “I have been waiting for you.” He spoke quietly. “Al-Zawila has tormented me for days with what he would do when you came.”
“Did he tell you about Mother?”
“Do you think he would miss that? The man’s a devil, Mat.” Mat! I had not been called that in many a year. It was good to hear, and whatever lay before us, we had this moment. We were together again. “She was a fine woman, your mother. Better than I deserved. There was wildness in me, and she knew it when we married, but never did she try to hold me back until that last trip. She warned me not to go. She had the gift. Do you have it?”
“I suppose so, but it is less a gift than a method. I have never tried to use it, but sometimes when the season is right it comes without warning.”
“In that sense I was not one of you, only by marriage, and that did not count with the Old Ones.”
We walked on together, two strong men, each with a blade, father and son. The world would be mine now, for my father was with me.
“You taught me well,” I said; “the years have proved it.”
“I tried.”
Behind us, we heard them coming. “Only a little further,” he said, and we ran. “Do you know the Valley?”
“Aye, they had me slaving there, working on the conduits. They are a marvel, I will say that for them, and nobody today knows them well unless it be Sinan, from the maps.”
The passage divided into three. He pointed ahead. “There lies the entrance, but the devil himself could not force it. Luckily, there is another way.”
We took the left branch and ran on. The hard work they had him doing had left him fit. He had always been enormously strong, and he was heavier than I, no broader in the shoulder but heavier in the chest and thigh.
“Who killed your mother?”
“It was Tournemine, after he heard you were killed.”
“Ah … well, we shall go back, Mat. We’ve that to do, you and I.”
“It is done.” I told him of it as we walked on, and of what I had done with the body, casting it with all its evil into the sulphurous bog of the Yeun Elez.
He glanced around at me. “Now that was a thing! I should not have thought of it.”
The passage narrowed, and we heard running water. Our passage became a bridge, and below it ran dark, swift water. Our torches had burned down, and he led me to a small pile of them.
He glanced at me as we lighted torches. “Can you stand a tight place? That’s the aqueduct that takes water to the Valley.”
The water was waist high. We lowered ourselves into it and once in the tunnel we put out our torch. We moved forward, my father taking the lead. It was a long distance to travel in abysmal darkness, with no ray of light. Emerging suddenly, we heard water falling ahead of us. My father turned suddenly and grabbed the top of the wall and pulled himself up and over. I followed.
Rain fell gently in the Valley of the Assassins. We could feel it, and hear the gentle patter on the leaves. In the distance, lightning flared. We leaned against the outer wall of the flume, shaking with cold.
“Won’t they come here?”
“Yes, at last. But the gardens are empty at night. Come, I know a place.”
In a corner of the garden, on a shelf of rock, we waited. It would not be long until daybreak. “This was where we stored materials,” my father explained. “These are sections of conduit pipe for new fountains and for repairs.”
We huddled shoulder to shoulder, sharing my cloak, and the thought came to me slowly, and only shaped itself when the first light appeared. Standing up, I looked about. Most of the pipe sections were too large and of fire-baked clay. The smaller pipes were of lead.
Such piping was far from new and had been used all over the Arab world in the houses of the wealthy, as it had been used in Rome as well. Looking about, I chose several short lengths of pipe, obviously left over from construction. Taking several of these I began whittling wooden plugs to fit each end, then tamped them full of the prepared dust from my saddlebags.
“Now what are you doing?” My father was curious. “Is this charcoal?”
“Some of it.” I completed filling every bit of space with fragments of lead lying about, pebbles, and some bent and discarded nails. From each pipe I led a piece of string rolled in melted fat from meat that had been served me and that I had carefully hoarded for the purpose. These strings I rolled in the dust packed into the short lengths of pipe. When completed I had three pieces of the prepared pipe.