What have I done to deserve this?
It had been a long day spent wandering about the Anatolian hinterlands. It wasn't the trek that exhausted us as much as the drain of remaining constantly alert, always sliding through the shadows. Avoiding capture.
Our small band had its ranks bolstered after picking up our six new acquisitions from the Roman fort. All Arabs that were shipwrecked from the storm.
A collection absent my own son. The only familiar faces among them were those of my daughter and 'Amr, a lifelong friend. Where the Nubian was jubilant at his survival, my mood only darkened with my daughter's outburst in the cell.
It had been a possibility lingering in the back of my head from the moment I saw 'Abd al-Ka'aba plummet beneath waves. I buried it under layers and layers of false hope and cursed sentiment. One can easily forget the gods' cruelty. Perhaps that is our reality. And our curse.
I lay in the darkness in our campsite, outside our only two makeshift tents. I did not allow the lighting of any campfires lest the smoke betray our presence. And the darkness suited my state of mind. The stars were obscured by the thick canopy of trees overhead.
I did not know how to feel. Some small part of me was yet in denial over my son's death. Sweet, feisty 'Abd al-Ka'aba. My warrior boy. Rotting at the bottom of the sea. My men who were massacred in Crete, never putting up a fight. Tariq and Haitham who died within the city walls because of my army that never came. My army that perished and withered.
I was a man defeated. On my knees. A fugitive in Roman lands. My daughter called me a failure. A failure of a father, a failure of a general. I knew it to be true.
I toyed with the stick at my throat and then the dagger at my belt. I pricked a finger at the tip of the blade, musing over how sharp it was. How something so simple could end such colossal misery, spell an anticlimactic demise for a disappointing life.
But this dagger was special. Its tip was dotted with an exotic poison, courtesy of Lan Mei – a Chinese gladiator slave I had freed from the pits after I defeated her. A touch of the poison would paralyze the victim.
If I licked the tip, I could just lay there, immobile and lifeless as a rock, yet still aware. My life force would drain out of me within days without food or water. A long, painful end. The sort of I deserved.
My dagger was half out of its sheath when I felt the presence of another lounging by my side.
"What is it that you want?" I asked Amina in a weak voice. Drained in body, mind and soul. It felt as though nothing remained of me. As though the life were sucked out of me.
"You do not have a monopoly over the night," she retorted.
I grunted, unable to respond. I did not have the energy nor the willpower. My mind ran a thousand different scenarios of the end. A dagger to my wrists. A hop into the sea, the abode of thousands of fallen soldiers.
"I am aware of how you feel," she broke the silence.
I scoffed. "No."
"Yes," she prodded, overpowering me into silence.
"I've lost two sons."
And a daughter, I thought. I would have never imagined Umaymah's rejection would sting so.
"I've lost one," she explained.
I twisted my neck to her faint figure in the darkness.
"You've given birth?" I asked, genuinely incredulous.
"That comes as a surprise to you?"
"I never imagined you as a mother."
"I was," she continued. "For a short while. He died only hours later. Yet it tore me apart all the same."
I grunted uneasily. I could not find the words to say. I had never been a man for emotions and pleasantries.
"Perhaps I've been wrong all this time," were a series of words I never thought would escape my lips. "My way of life. As long as I remember, I've had to fight for everything I have. I needed to be ruthless, uncompromising. Cruel. Even to my own flesh and blood. But where has that landed me? A man stripped of everything he's ever cared for, hunted down in enemy territory like a dog. Two dead sons. The rest of my children all despise me. My first two wives are dead and the third divorced. More than half my troops and all my spoils...gone. What remains of me?"
Amina paused for a long while before replying. There was only the sound of crickets adorning the pitch darkness.
"Your way of life was vicious, your view on the world one imbued with malice," she finally spoke. "It has taken you that many tragedies for realization to make it through your thick skull. But you're finally there."
I felt tears forming in my eyes, dampening my cheeks. All my memories rewound like a play re-enacted before me. It was in that moment that I was plagued with something I had never experienced before.
Regret.
All my life, I needed to keep moving forward. Looking ahead, in order to survive. I did not have the luxury of staying put and analyzing the past, reminiscing what I had left behind. I needed to keep running, outpacing all those around me.
But now, everything I had so delicately carved out had been shredded into bits before my very eyes time and again. And all I could do was sit back and beat my chest in sorrow as the torn remains were scattered on my lap.
"I thought you approved of me," I sobbed, the final scrap of resilience left in me finally shattering. The façade unraveled – that masquerade of a powerful man, unbreakable and unbeatable, finally disintegrating. "I thought the gods sent you to me as a gift."
"No one sent me," she spoke softly, as though in pity. "You stumbled upon me, remember? In the chieftain's tent. It had nothing to do with my opinion of you, nor that of the gods."
"Everything is a sham," I buried my face in my hands. "Everything is a lie. Nothing is as it seems. What am I to do with regret? No amount of mourning can change the past. No amount of remorse can return me to my daughter's good graces. No amount of grief can restore my sons."
Amina paused again.
"I'm sorry," she finally spoke. The guilt in her voice was unmistakable.
I raised my head to study her figure. "Why are you apologizing? You had nothing to do with –"
The realization of where I stood crashed into me like a shock of lightning. My body paralyzed, my mind stifled, my belly churning with horror. With my mask shattered, revealing the vulnerability beneath, I knew fear.
Everything about her had been suspicious from the start. But I had been blinded by faith and pride. I was desperate for approval, especially that of the gods.
I had never told her of young Sa'ad's death, yet she had known of it nevertheless. Her steering me into decisions that doomed me and mine, effectively crippling me – her supposed prophecy of the Cretan city in flames which urged me to camp my army outside the walls, placing it ripe for the slaughter.
She had been blowing on a knot back in Crete. That act is known to be how witches cast their malevolent spells.
I had not taken her with me the second time round when we were headed to Constantinople. But she had rescued me all the same when I was being chased by Roman troops in Anatolia; in the heart of enemy territory. With my own horse. How had she gotten there?
And now, her guilt...
"You," I began. "You're with them. You've been planted into my life."
You are the enemy, I thought, trying to make out her horrible red eyes in the gloom. She did not perform her sorcery on me then, as I feared. She did not eat me alive, summon a pack of demons nor did she set me alight.
She did not deny my accusation either.
"I have come to...form an unusual bond with you," Amina the al-Khalidun agent proclaimed. "I now care whether you live or die. It has forced a change of heart from me."
I sucked in air through my nose before tumbling to my back, pounding the back of my head against the grass. I slapped myself with both hands, burying my face within them again.
"Is there anything genuine?" I demanded, the last vestiges of energy betraying me, the last of my fight vanishing. "Just put me out of my misery."
This is what al-Khalidun always wanted. What Qasim and Zayn had been striving toward for years. They did not want to kill me – that was what my half-brother wanted; that was how he betrayed them in his final moments, by trying to assassinate me. Al-Khalidun only want me isolated and alone. In despair and misery.
Like how I left Zayn himself as an infant.
Yet, the bulk of my punishment seems to have been self-inflicted. They may have killed my sons and a wife as well as my men, but I've done more to alienate my own kith and kin.
'Amr saw me as a vicious vagabond, a traitor to the Muslim faith for my cruelty.
My three remaining children forsook me, calling me no father of their own.
"I am real," she reassured me.
"You are a spy," I said, cringing away. Away from myself, not her. As though that were possible.
"No longer," she put an uneasy hand on my leg, gracing down the thigh. I did not have the power left to push her away.
"I have no faith in anyone any longer," I spoke in hoarse whispers. I could barely hear myself. "Not in myself. Not even in the gods. Certainly not in you."
"Give me your dagger," she instructed me.
"I can do the job myself," I replied. "I'm sure that's one thing I can do without fucking it up."
"No," she shoved me in exasperation. "I don't want the blade. I want to extract the poison. I would prove my loyalty."