Bembel Rudzuk had been watching my face attentively. ‘Is this perhaps the moment,’ he said, ‘when I can tell you how I come to be called Bembel Rudzuk?’
‘If you must,’ I said.
‘This that I tell happened forty years ago,’ he said, ‘when I was trading for a big house in Tripoli — not as a partner, I was what we call a “boy”. We’d come from Tabriz to Aleppo with a three-hundred camel caravan but coming out of Aleppo there were only nine of us — five merchants and four camel-drivers — with twelve camels. We were a day out of Aleppo when there appeared on an empty stretch of road six robbers who put their horses straight at us, three of them passing on either side and shooting arrows as they galloped past; it happened so fast that one simply couldn’t believe it. And their accuracy, shooting at full gallop! A moment before there had been nine of us and now as they wheeled their horses for the second pass six of our party already lay dead.
‘By then the other three of us had put arrow to string and we got two of them on their next rush. Then it was four against three; they were wild with rage, they couldn’t believe that merchants would stand up to them. Of the first six they had killed four were mounted merchants and two were camel-drivers on foot. The two surviving camel-drivers leapt on to horses and tried to get away but they were quickly brought down by arrows. My horse was killed under me and I was nearly ridden down by the robber who did it. There was no time to think, I leapt at him and in the next moment he was rolling on the ground and I was bent over his horse’s neck and galloping for my life.
‘I was heading for some high ground and big rocks and I was already among the rocks when Tssss, thwock! Off I came with an arrow in my left shoulder, but as soon as I hit the ground I was in behind the rocks and climbing, they couldn’t get a shot at me and they had to get off their horses to follow me.
‘Up I went; I found a little opening between two big tall rocks and I squeezed through. It wasn’t a cave; the rocks were about twenty feet high and there was a space between them open to the sky. I didn’t know whether I was better or worse off than before. I had my sword and my dagger but I had dropped my bow when I leapt at the robber and in any case my quiver was empty. My wound was burning like fire; the arrow had gone right through my shoulder and the head was sticking out in front so that I was able to break it off and pull out the shaft.
‘I had no time to do more than that before there appeared a robber between me and the sky in the opening at the top of the rocks. He laughed and was just reaching for an arrow from his quiver when I threw a stone and caught him full in the face with it. That’s when I knew I was lucky because he lost his balance and fell, not backwards but forwards; he toppled from his perch, landed with a thump beside me and got my dagger in him for his pains.
‘So then I had a bow and arrows: three arrows there were in the quiver, and when the next robber showed himself in the opening above me he got one of the arrows in his throat. That left me with two arrows and two more robbers if the one I’d pulled off his horse had taken up the chase; I assumed that he had, so I looked alternately up at the opening above me and down at the one I had squeezed through and waited for what would come next. This was in the spring, I could hear a bird saying, “Plink, plink!” like drops of water falling into a basin. Above me the sky was blue, there was a fresh breeze blowing.
‘I could hear some movement on the rocks and a voice said, “You go in after him, I’ll be right behind you.” Of course I knew that was meant for my ears so I was waiting for them to come at me at the same time from above and below. I knew by then that whoever climbed to the opening above was unable to do it with an arrow on the string, he would have to pause for a moment at the top to reach for an arrow. And if he was going to time his attack with that of the other robber he would probably make a sound. So I aimed an arrow at the space I had squeezed through, I thought that was where I’d first see movement.
‘You know how it is at even the most desperate moments, even in matters of life and death — part of your mind is busy with its own affairs, perhaps making pictures, perhaps making words or singing a song while the rest of your mind takes care of the business at hand. Part of my mind was singing a little song, it hadn’t much tune, it was just something the mind had made up by itself, there were no proper words, it just went:
‘Tsitsa tsitsa bem, tsitsa tsitsa bem,
Tsitsa tsitsa bembel bembel bembel bembel bem.
‘Like that over and over again. When I saw movement in the space I’d squeezed through I loosed my arrow and I heard a grunt. There was a little sound from above as if in reply and when the last robber appeared against the sky my last arrow found him and that finished the business of the day.
‘So that was that. For a little while I just sat there leaning against a rock, looking up at the sky, listening to the bird, feeling the breeze on my face — just being alive and not dead. My mind was still busy with its song, now it was singing:
‘Rukh, rukh, rudz, rudzl, rudzl, rudzuk.
‘I was thinking what a lot of bems and rudzes there are in the universe, what an altogether bembelish and rudzukal thing it is, to say nothing of the tsitsas. I was glad for me that I was alive and sorry for the robbers that they were dead — it was such a good day to be alive in. I recognized that it could just as easily have been the robbers alive and I dead and that would have been fair enough, one mustn’t be greedy, one can’t always win the prize, the action goes on for ever but the actors come and go.
‘It was then that I noticed sitting beside me and leaning back against the same rock our bony friend, all got up for the occasion like a true son of the desert with quite a princely robe and kaffiya and jewelled daggers. “You’re a good boy,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I like you; you move well and you don’t hang back when things warm up a little. You’ll be lucky, you’ll have a good life and years enough of it. One thing though you must never forget: you must never forget whose child you are, and when I say it’s time for bed you must come promptly and cheerfully; you might as well do it with a good grace because in any case you’ll have to come — no one can say no to me.”