Front matter

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."