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Updated: May 9, 2025
He fancied too, and he was right in this, that Sakr-el-Bahr's odd attitude had accomplished what persuasions addressed to Asad-ed-Din might to the end have failed to accomplish had afforded him the sign he was come to seek. For it was in that moment that Asad determined to take command himself. "It almost seems," he said slowly, smiling, "as if thou didst not want me.
"He has vanished." "'Tis too dark to see," said Vigitello. And then Asad turned from the vessel's side. "Well, well shot or drowned, he's gone," he said, and there the matter ended. Sakr-el-Bahr replaced the cross-bow in the rack, and came slowly up to the poop. In the gloom he found himself confronted by Rosamund's white face between the two dusky countenances of his Nubians.
"Why else, indeed?" returned Asad, and then he swung upon Oliver standing there in the entrance of the poop-house. "What sayest thou, Sakr-el-Bahr?" he appealed to him. Sakr-el-Bahr stepped forward, shrugging. "What is there to say? What is there to do?" he asked. "We can but wait. If our presence is known to them we are finely trapped, and there's an end to all of us this night."
"Didst thou mark, O Tsamanni, with what a grace she moved? lithely and nobly as a young gazelle. Verily, so much beauty was never created by the All-Wise to be cast into the Pit." "May it not have been sent to comfort some True-Believer?" wondered the subtle wazeer. "To Allah all things are possible." "Why else, indeed?" said Asad.
"Because, my lord, I have a boon to ask in some reward for the service I have rendered." "Ask it, my son." "Give me leave to keep these captives for myself." Asad considered him, frowning again slightly. Despite himself, despite his affection for Sakr-el-Bahr, and his desire to soothe him now that rankling poison of Fenzileh's infusing was at work again in his mind. "My leave thou hast," said he.
"By Allah, I do not know thee, O my father! Is this the woman thou wouldst take for thine own? This the woman for whose possession thou wouldst jeopardize thy life and perhaps the very Bashalik itself!" Asad clenched his hands until the nails bit into his flesh. Every word his son had uttered had been as a lash to his soul. The truth of it was not to be contested. He was humiliated and shamed.
And as he came upright and the light of the lanterns fell full upon his face the astonishingly white fairness of it was revealed a woman's face it might have been, so softly rounded was it in its beardlessness. Asad smiled wrily in his white beard, guessing that the boy had been sent by his ever-watchful mother to learn who came and what the tidings that they bore.
"Its real purpose?" he asked dully. "What was its real purpose?" She smiled a smile of infinite knowledge to hide her utter ignorance, her inability to supply even a reason that should wear an air of truth. "Dost ask me, O perspicuous Asad? Are not thine eyes as sharp, thy wits as keen at least as mine, that what is clear to me should be hidden from thee?
"Between the fourth and fifth after noon," was the reply. "But avoid the house altogether, if thy life is precious to thee! The foe, I tell thee, is a seasoned warrior, a drinker of blood from his birth." From all that Asad had let fall, two facts shone forth: that the Emîr was mad in love with the Sitt Hilda, and that he was oppressed by his cruel uncle.
Were Fenzileh removed the wazeer's influence must grow and spread to his own profit. It was a thing of which he had often dreamed, but a dream he feared that was never like to be realized, for Asad was ageing, and the fires that had burned so fiercely in his earlier years seemed now to have consumed in him all thought of women.
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