Eagle by Jack Hight Page A

there. The cost of defeat, Yusuf’s father had said. This was it: to die alone, far from one’s home, far from any who might care.
    ‘You wish to buy the boy?’ Yusuf turned to see a short, thickly bearded man with a heavy coin purse tied to his belt. ‘I’ll make you a good deal.’
    ‘I was only looking.’
    ‘You can have him for a song,’ the slave merchant insisted. ‘Two dirhams.’
    ‘Two dirhams!’ Yusuf exclaimed. ‘Look at him. He won’t live out the week.’
    ‘He’s hardly injured,’ the slave merchant protested. ‘With care, he’ll live to be older than me.’
    Yusuf frowned. ‘Not likely.’
    ‘I see you know your business, young master,’ the slave merchant said with a wink. ‘Very well, I’ll let you have him for only six fals.’
    Yusuf hesitated. Turan would soon have a slave. If Yusuf could show his father that he too knew how to deal with a servant, then perhaps he would realize that Yusuf too was aman. Yusuf examined the boy. Ayub had said he was the proper age, and he looked like he would be strong enough if he survived.
    ‘I can see you’re interested,’ the slave merchant said.
    ‘But I have no money.’
    The slave merchant gave Yusuf an appraising look. His eyes moved from Yusuf’s linen caftan to his belt, and then settled on Yusuf’s leather sandals. ‘Your sandals. Give them to me and the boy’s yours.’
    Yusuf looked down at his feet and hesitated. Did he really want to take responsibility for this dying Frank? What would his father say? He was on the verge of saying
no
, when the boy sat up. His hand shot out, gripping the bars, and he stared at Yusuf with clear blue eyes. ‘
Broðor
!’ he cried out. ‘
Broðor
!’ Then he fell back again, unconscious.
    ‘What did he say?’ Yusuf asked.
    ‘I don’t speak his heathen tongue, whatever it is. It wasn’t Frankish. Not German, either. This is an odd one. Allah knows where he’s from.’
    ‘I’ll take him,’ Yusuf said. ‘Provided that you deliver him to my home.’
    ‘And where might that be?’
    ‘The house of Najm ad-Din.’
    The slave merchant’s eyes widened, and he gave a small bow. ‘I knew you were no common man. You have a deal, young master.’ Yusuf reached down and slipped off his sandals, which he handed to the merchant.
    ‘Yusuf!’ It was Ayub, calling from up the street. ‘Come here! See the slave your brother has bought.’
    Yusuf hurried over barefoot, a smile upon his face.

Chapter 4
     
    JULY TO OCTOBER 1148: BAALBEK
     
    Y usuf stood on tiptoes and peered through the open window into the room where the Frankish slave had been brought so the family doctor could inspect him. When the slave had been delivered to Ayub’s home in Damascus, Yusuf had been whipped. Ayub had not let him keep the young Frank as a personal servant, but had ordered the new slave be brought back to Baalbek. ‘No use in wasting a slave,’ he had commented. ‘If he lives, then he can work in the fields.’
    The Frank lay naked and unconscious on a table. He was well muscled and tall, taller even than Turan. His arms and chest were smooth and tanned brown – where they were not caked in dried, rust-coloured blood – but his legs and the area around his genitals were impossibly pale, the skin as white as freshly shorn wool. His long hair was the colour of ripe wheat and his jaw covered in pale blond fuzz. He was not circumcised.
    The Jewish doctor stood beside the table, washing the boy with a sponge. Ibn Jumay, a thin man of almost thirty, with short black hair under a skullcap, long sidelocks and a closely cropped black beard, was the personal physician for Yusuf’s family, as well as Yusuf and Turan’s tutor. He wiped the dried blood away from his patient’s right shoulder, then dipped the sponge in a basin of water and wrung it out. Next, he sponged off the blood caked around the Frank’s stomach. There was a small gash in the lower abdomen, and as the Frank breathed,a thin stream of blood