§ I am the Narrator §

Set in the city of Acre in 1198, a Muslim doctor and Germanic crusader become unlikely friends in a city that's not the most welcoming of such a relationship.

As-Salāmu `Alaykum.
Ana Mubidha.

I am a scalpel, once made of iron and shiny silver now drenched in grime from being swallowed by the earth for so long.  My blade has long since dulled and chipped in places.  I wear a dress of green as I am finally pulled to light after sitting in that blackness with no sense of time.  I am breathing air once more, liberated from the pit of suffocating darkness that had encased me.  No more am I choking on dirt and mud, no more am I frozen in a coffin of dried, hard, earth around me.  When the light seared my gaze, it hurt.  When I was pulled up, the heat fell on me like a smothering rug.  I had forgotten about it after so long.  I had forgotten so much after so long.

First, there was water in the darkness; I had plunged into the hungry gullet of a well as punishment for a deed I did through no fault of my own.  Then the well grew deeper and finally ran dry, the mud becoming my tomb as I lost all sense of time.  When I was pulled to the surface, I was greeted with a place that I did not recognize.  There was a grand minaret that I did not remember.  It was a bell tower before, a Christian bell tower that rose up out of the earth and blotted out the sun in the sky.  There were no longer the walls of the hospital around me; just a length of dry dirt sunk into the earth along side a strange and massive structure.  I knew this structure not.

This land I am brought into is foreign.  The stone pathways are harsh and dirty, unkempt in this section of town.  It is bone dry, drier than it ever was before I was thrown down this well.  There is no longer a painted tile courtyard with pillars and arches around me, the sun no longer warmed the expanses of desert flowers and trickling water structures as they had disappeared.  The sounds of the sick no longer echoed around.  No one called for a doctor or someone to tend their wounds.  The men who resided there and their women’s aids no longer bustled around like I had heard them do so often.

The thrum of the market place that was down the street no longer added to the cacophony that I had been so used to before I had been thrown down the well.  No more selling of goods and no more arguing of proprietors.  There was one thing, however, that I did remember: the ocean.  The sound of the waves never changed, they were still crashing along the rocky shore just as I had remembered.  Were there still boats out in the harbor from foreign lands?  Were there still men from Damascus and Egypt and men from Venice and Pisa?  Were there still men from far away Spain coming into that port?

When I was brought up to the air again, the water and the smell of the ocean gave me some comfort.  The man who brushes the dirt from my body had skin the color of white sheets.  He had a beard on his face and his eyes were of water blue.  He glowered as me as he flicked particles of earth from my head.  The clothes that he wore were unusual.  He was not dressed in armor, but a short tunic over a white shirt, some length of black cloth around his neck.  I did not recognize his language, but it sounded very close to my master’s friend’s language.

The Frankish infidels are still here in this land.
They are still here, but where is my master?