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Yusuf learned how to fight from an early age.
“Raiders and thieves will not care if you are deaf," his baba wrote to him. “You will learn the ways of battle, and be ready for when, not if, the time comes.”
Yusuf wasn’t enamored by the idea. His head was stuck in his studies and artistic pursuits, eager to go to university in a few years, no matter the difficulties that might bar his way from getting an education. Fighting, while sometimes necessary in the merchant trade, felt crude to Yusuf. His father called it an art, but Yusuf saw nothing worth venerating in it.
Regardless, as the eldest son, he did what his father bid him to. The ways with a staff and sword came clumsily at first, but after enough spars with his brothers, he learned how to be quicker on his feet. His brother stuck out his tongue, Yusuf smacked his underside with his stick, and any real thoughts of battle were far away. Secretly, Yusuf hoped it would stay that way.
It did not, of course. At a tender age, Yusuf stabbed his sword through the back of a man who had poised to attack his mother during a raid. Choosing to defend his family was easy. Choosing to end a man’s life was not.
This was the first time Yusuf had to learn how to live with his reaping of a life. It would not be the last.
Walid was dead.
His empty eyes stared upwards, unblinking into the scorching sun. His neck was nearly cleaved from his head. In the unforgiving summer sun, the stench from his corpse was already nauseating. Though, the smell could have come from the collection of bodies that surrounded him.
Walid had been with Yusuf since he enlisted to defend the holy city from invaders. He had taken him under his wing, hiding his deafness from the officials and helping him understand their commands. They had even developed a handful of gestures to use as shorthand with one another, as Yusuf did with his family.
Walid had a wide face, a thick beard and kind eyes. The creases next to his eyes were highlighted in the firelight at night, making him look alive and joyous. He gave gestures shared in friendly comradery that Yusuf relished: a clasp of a shoulder, a pat on the cheek. His mouth went wide when he laughed.
And now, he was dead.
Yet, Yusuf was not.
He should have been. He was stabbed through the gut with a sword, then left to bleed out on the desert ground. He had thought he’d known terror before, rushing headfirst into pure violence against the invaders with the Fatimid army at his side. The collision of men and their weapons promised nothing but pain. Yusuf had steeled himself against that fear. But when he died, he realized he had no idea what true fear was.
When he opened his eyes, it was to the sight of his friend’s body on the dirty ground. And somehow, that pained him worse than even his own death.
Yusuf struggled to get to his knees, his body trembling terribly. He noticed his bloody saif lying nearby, and he grasped it like a man dying of thirst would bowl of water. Yusuf used it to get to his feet, before bracing himself for the next wave of Franks. Musings of his own death, and lack thereof, would have to wait.
There was not a Frankish army. Amongst the pile of bodies from both sides, only one other man stood. He was massive, the clothes that hung from his wide shoulders torn and stained red. His sword hung from his fingers as he stared at the scene of carnage around him. Yusuf couldn’t tell what color his skin was under the smattering of blood on his face, but when his eyes met his, they were as pale as the unforgiving sky.
Yusuf recognized him. This was the man who plunged his sword into his gut, just seconds before Yusuf stabbed him with his saif. Yusuf had died, but he remembered feeling the impact of his weapon, even in his dying breath. This man should have been dead.
Instead, he stood on this earth, breathing its air, just like Yusuf. In another time or place, Yusuf would have looked on in wonder. But as Walid’s corpse rotted this invader survived. Yusuf survived. And that lit a spark of anger that Yusuf had never felt before.
Suddenly, he was an inferno, and he hoped his roar was loud enough that the other man could feel it down to his bones. He raised his saif and rushed forward to kill his murderer for the second time.
Yusuf caught the same spark of hatred in the invader’s ugly eyes just moments before he raised his sword. The brutal slash across Yusuf’s neck was just as horrible as the first time he felt it, but he managed to push his own saif into the other man’s stomach as he died, praying that this time death would take them both.
Of course, it did not. Yusuf opened his eyes and saw the same hateful gaze across from him. His clothes were coated in sticky blood, but Yusuf didn’t care. He emerged from death, then took his rage and molded it into action, again and again and again. But no matter what he tried, the Frank wouldn’t stay dead, and neither would he.
At some point in the proceedings, the Frank presumably tried to speak to him. He wasn’t attacking, and his mouth kept opening and closing. Even in his fury, Yusuf had to admit that if the other man was trying to communicate with him, that was enough for him to pause in his attack. He lowered his saif, but kept it gripped in his hand, just in case, and waited to see what the Frank would do.
The man only seemed to get more and more agitated, however, his brows furrowed in anger and gesturing wildly with his sword. It was impossible to guess if he was trying to incite a fight or end it. If Yusuf had parchment and ink, he could try to communicate, but of course, he had no such things with him on the battlefield.
Frustrated, Yusuf grunted and moved his saif to one hand. He hated to admit this, especially to an enemy, but they were at an impasse of a different kind, now. Yusuf pointed at his ear with his free hand and shook his head.
The man froze. Then, his face broke out into a grin for the very first time. It was the ugliest expression Yusuf had ever seen. The other man opened his mouth wide, chest shaking, clearly laughing, perhaps a tad hysterically. And the fury rose up in Yusuf so quickly, he barely noticed when he reached for his dagger and stabbed the laughing man through the throat.
(Much, much later, they would both agree that it was well deserved.)
And with that, their cycle of violence started again.
The sun was setting by the time Yusuf’s exhaustion was beginning to overtake his anger. They had killed each other in many different ways by then: by the sword, by the dagger, even by a rock to the head. (This wasn’t Yusuf’s finest moment, but he was growing desperate.) But as the deaths dragged on, a deep weariness slowly but surely doused the flame of righteous anger in Yusuf’s chest.
As he revived from his twenty-first murder - or twenty-second, he was sure if that incident with slipping on a pool of blood counted as intentional - Yusuf sighed. His very bones felt heavy, no matter that he was still somehow whole. He wanted to sit in the dirt for a long, long time, but the smell from the corpses was becoming overwhelming, and Yusuf just wanted to stop. Nothing more, nothing less: he simply wanted an end.
So, when we walked over to his murderer’s side, instead of stabbing him in the back, he reached out his hand.
The Frank stared at it, frozen in time for a long while, and Yusuf started to worry that he’d have to test what happened to him when he lost a hand. But instead, the man reached out and clasped his hand in his. He begrudgingly let Yusuf help him to his feet, though he pulled away as soon as they were upright.
Yusuf looked out on the sea of bodies that surrounded him, his fallen companions, and his anger threatened to flicker back to life. But his exhaustion won out; these men were dead, and he was not. What else was there to be done about it?
For the first time, Yusuf turned his back to the stranger to look towards the fallen city. This wasn’t a show of trust in the other man. He simply trusted that if he were to get stabbed by this Frank, God would continue to bring him back to life. And if his death took then, well. He should have been a dead man hours ago.
The smoke from behind the walls al-Quds did not bear any good tidings, but where else could he go? So, without a care about the man who was similarly afflicted as him, he made his way back to al-Quds.
It was rare that Yusuf was grateful to be deaf. When he was, it was usually due to minor conveniences. Sleeping in while his little brothers caused a ruckus, an insult falling on literal deaf ears.
He had never been more grateful to be deaf than when he walked through the gates of al-Quds. It would be a long time before he stopped hating himself for it.
There was so much blood; on the streets, on the walls, running down alleyways and paved streets. Yusuf, who fancied himself immune from the sight of blood after being killed almost two dozen times, thought that he might be sick at the sight.
But it was the screams that he couldn’t hear that would haunt him the longest. The wailing from mothers and children, huddled together in the streets, their mouths horrifically wide in their agony. And there were so many of them, crying and screaming together, Yusuf thought he could feel the sound under his feet. Like a horrific version of the calls to prayer Yusuf had grown up feeling under his knees and hands.
He spotted a group of invaders huddled around in a circle, and Yusuf didn’t wait to find out what their intentions were for the woman huddled against the wall, clutching her newborn. He cleaved his way through the enemies as fiercely as he had on the battlefield, derision and disgust pushing his saif forward. He suffered blow after blow in return, and he didn’t care.
He twisted as a sword dug into his thigh and saw with relief that the woman had run away. Then, he succumbed to his wounds, falling flat on the ground beneath him.
When he awoke, he saw the feet of those soldiers walking away from him. His body itched to move as it knit itself back together, but playing dead was his best bet until this alley was clear.
Unfortunately, one of the soldiers looked back. Before he could open his mouth, Yusuf jumped to his feet and ran.
He felt bolts and arrows pierce his back, one by one, and he yelled out in agony, but he kept running regardless. He saw an invader on horseback standing by the gate, and Yusuf stabbed him in the chest before pushing his body off the animal and climbing it himself. Yusuf had never stolen anything in his life, but as his feet felt like they were bleeding, he didn’t care much about taking an enemy’s horse.
Then, he rode hard out of the gates of al-Quds, rode until his back was free from the assault of arrows, rode until the moon was high in the sky. He rode through the night until they reached a pillaged town, already a burnt husk, so he rode farther, his heart and limbs both increasingly heavy.
As the sun started its ascent, he found a lake. Thankfully, the poor horse could get some proper water and rest. Unfortunately, the lake was occupied by a familiar face.
He stared at the pale-eyed man, and the man stared back at him. Yusuf couldn’t discern a single emotion on that stoic face, and it made Yusuf tighten his grip around his saif. Part of him desperately wanted to know if he felt any remorse for the carnage he had wrought. Another part of him didn’t care. The damage had already been done.
Without a means to communicate, the latter urge won out. Yusuf made for the lake, pulling his ragged clothes off his back, then dunked his head under the water. As he sat with his head submerged, the horrors of al-Quds replayed in his mind, and he wondered if he would ever know what it was like to feel clean again.
The invader followed him, glaring the whole time. Yusuf told himself that he didn’t care. In truth, this man’s hatred was a heady thing, but so was Yusuf’s stubbornness to ignore it. This man was welcome to follow him - what was the invader going to do, kill him? - but Yusuf knew in his heart that righteous anger wasn’t what was motivating him onwards now.
More than anything else in the world, Yusuf wished to go home.
There was a time in this life that he thought he would never feel that way, or would even say that he had no home. His father’s business had them move across the Maghreb often, and Yusuf had never known the same school or mosque his entire childhood, never frequented the same shops or taken the same routes home. He was trained to be a merchant and to make many ties, and as the eldest son, the responsibility naturally fell to him. His father could have picked one of his brothers instead, considering Joe’s deafness -- it probably would have been easier for the business -- but his baba never discouraged him, and helped accommodate him along the way. Eventually, his mama passed, as did his father soon afterward, and Yusuf followed in his father’s footsteps and took over the business.
Because of this, he considered himself a wanderer for most of his life. This wasn’t a bad thing in Yusuf’s mind: the ability to travel was afforded to few, and he was always eager to meet new people and learn new ideas from them. But as a consequence of this life, the concept of home was foreign and fuzzy in his mind. When others asked him about home, Yusuf could not summon an image, so he figured that he had no home.
But that was before al-Quds. Before he handed the business to his next oldest brother, then held him tightly to his chest. Before he followed the army to defend the holy land, and had utterly and miserably failed.
Now, when he thought of home, he thought of a corner house in the city of al-Iskandriya. He thought of his brothers, now spread out far and wide across the Mediterranean. And he thought of his eldest and only sister, Umayna.
The thought of her tethered him to any future possibility of hope. If he could just make it home to her, then everything else wouldn’t matter, because everything in the world would be right. It was a childish sentiment, perhaps, but Yusuf didn’t know what sentiment he was meant to have, anymore. He’d witnessed cruelty he hadn’t known men were capable of. He had killed a single man more than once and had been killed several times in return. The world didn’t make sense anymore.
He just wanted to go home.
So, that’s where he headed. It was a long journey, of course, made even longer with the fact that Yusuf refused to sleep without a wall between him and the invader.
The first night they spent together was just another round of them staring at each other, the foreigner lying on the sand, Yusuf huddled by the fire. Yusuf no longer cared if his man killed him in broad daylight - which he hadn’t, not since that evening in al-Quds, and neither had Yusuf killed him - but he refused to suffer the indignity of having his throat slit while he was sleeping. When that became clear to the Frank, he made a wild gesture, snarling as he got to his feet and marched over to his horse, and Yusuf smiled to himself.
On their journey, Yusuf did not stop to pray. He did not care about what the foreigner might think of his sacred rituals, but he did care how God would receive him. He knew he wasn’t clean enough in God’s eyes to perform ṣalāt. It killed something inside of him, to wake up with the sunrise and not perform fajr. It wasn’t just the break in his life-long routine that unnerved him: his entire world had been turned upside down. All Yusuf had were the clothes on his back, the extremely tentative trust of an enemy, and his faith. So even though he couldn’t perform the prayer, he still hoped that God was with him, and that the Merciful would forgive him.
They reached Jaffa before either of them died of starvation, but even Yusuf had to admit that it was a close thing. But walking in civilization again rejuvenated him as nothing else had.
As Yusuf dismounted, the stranger followed, and after Yusuf found a place to keep their horses - he promised payment in due time, and his family name had a sound enough reputation for the innkeeper to allow it - Yusuf turned towards the market, the first smile on his lips he’d felt in days.
When he caught eyes with the Frank, however, the look on his face made Yusuf’s smile disappear. He wasn’t smiling, not truly: he was smirking. Yusuf had seen that look many times in his life, and he wasn’t all that surprised to see it on that garish face, but something inside of him instinctively winced, anyway. He was amused that Yusuf would try to barter on his own.
Yusuf clenched his jaw and, instead of killing the man in broad daylight, resolutely turned to make his way to the closest market stall. He looked a sight in his torn and bloody clothes, and the vendor’s expression said as much, but Yusuf simply gestured for a quill, and the vendor fetched a parchment and ink. Yusuf wanted to shout in delight at the very sight.
Writing with someone in his own language felt to Yusuf like taking a massive gulp of fresh air, and bartering with the vendor was as easy as breathing. Soon enough, he had fresh garments and a bag to carry groceries in, and the vendor had a credit to use in al-Kaysani’s name.
Yusuf turned around and saw the Frank staring at him. His amused look was gone, and instead, there was something stunned in its place. Yusuf puffed his chest with both derision for the man and pride for himself, then turned back around, leaving the foreigner to fend for himself. See how well he did as an invader who did not know the language.
It was going to be a long road to al-Iskandriya, but bolstered by his abilities and once again surrounded by his people, the journey did not seem so insurmountable.
Yusuf didn’t know why the invader followed him from al-Quds to the docks of al-Iskandriya, but he was determined that their acquaintance would end there.
Emphatically, he pointed towards the man, then pointed towards the ships. He did this a few times, as it was obvious by now that he wouldn’t understand anything he tried to write to him. He even dug a few coins from his pocket and slapped them into the stranger’s hand. Yusuf’s face was set in stone as he made his demand clear: leave.
The other man stared at him with his icy eyes. Yusuf wondered how many men had backed down under the weight of that gaze. All he knew was that he would not be one of them.
Then, he turned and disappeared into the crowd of sailors, and for the first time, Yusuf felt like he could properly breathe.
When Yusuf knocked on his sister’s door, he was met with bright, round eyes and a mess of dark hair. Yusuf wanted to cry at the sight. Āmina had been a baby the last time he had seen her.
She scrambled from the door, and suddenly, Umayna was there, with her sharp cheeks and inquisitive eyes, and this time, Yusuf let himself cry as he all but collapsed into her arms.
Many, many hours later, Yusuf’s skin was finally clean of dirt and sand, and he knelt gratefully on his sister’s prayer mat to perform ṣalāt al-maġrib as the sun began to set over al-Iskandriya. He knew his soul wasn’t clean enough, not truly, but his body was as clean as it was going to be, and he desperately wanted to open his heart to God fully and completely. The Almighty blessed him with this inability to die, and no matter how else he felt about that, he was, at the very least, grateful. Grateful to be alive, grateful to be home.
After that, Umayna seemed determined to get his belly as full as possible with the amount of food she prepared, and Yusuf couldn’t help but smile at the habit that had obviously been passed down from their mother: food as an expression of love. He hadn’t felt the touch of love for a very, very long time. He wasn’t about to turn it away now.
Even with a full stomach and an easy heart, his sister asked the inevitable. She was too smart to assume he was here on just a miracle - though, in a way, he was.
“We heard the news from al-Quds,” she wrote. “We thought you had died.”
Yusuf’s heart hurt for her as she wrote those words. She had lost her husband in battle a while ago, and Yusuf hadn’t been able to visit her since it happened. She thought she was grieving for a husband and a brother both.
Instead of explaining with words, Joe grabbed a knife from the table and sliced it across his forearm. Umayna gasped and immediately reached for a cloth, but Yusuf stopped her with his free hand. Then, they both watched, Umayna with wonder, as the skin knit itself back together before their very eyes.
“How?” Umayna asked, and Yusuf could do nothing but sigh and shake his head.
She tentatively touched his arm, no doubt expecting the wound to reemerge, but her fingers met with solid skin. She stayed like that for a long time, just staring at his arm, long enough for Yusuf to start to worry. When she finally looked up, she had tears in her dark brown eyes. She pulled him in tight, muttering something against his neck; whether prayers or curses, he couldn’t say.
When she pulled away, she rubbed her tears away, then took the quill again with determination set in her expression.
“You cannot tell anyone about this,” Umayna wrote with steady hands.
“You would lie? You, al-Maṣūna?” Yusuf wrote her old nickname with a teasing grin, which earned him a playful shove. Umayna had taken the mantle of “the honest” from a very young age, mostly because she refused to support the trouble that her brothers got into.
That got a smile out of Umayna, but it disappeared quickly.
“And the Frank who followed you?”
“Gone,” Yusuf promised, praying to God that it was true.
“Al-Quds was—” and Yusuf paused here, uncharacteristically at a loss of words to write. Ink blotted the page as his hand was fixed in midair. Frozen in time. Back with the bodies, the rivers of blood, the screaming he’d never hear—
“I don’t know what to do next,” Yusuf finally admitted, his fingers just starting to tremble.
Umayna touched his arm and gently pried the pen from his fingers. “You are home now,” she wrote with a soft look on her face , “and this is where you will stay.”
Yusuf let out a long exhale, letting her words settle his heart. He was home.
And it remained his home for the next twenty years.
Umayna was a calming, steady presence, but she also refused to let him stay in his head for too long. This drove him crazy as a youth, when the last thing he wanted to do was chores instead of daydream. Nowadays, he was grateful for her insistence that he work, both around the house and in the city. Umayna told him that it was best if he didn’t take back their family’s business and let the world assume he had died in battle. He’d been prickly about the notion at first, but as time passed and Yusuf drew significantly less attention, he had to admit that his sister was right.
So instead, he kept busy as a laborer in town during the day to support his sister, and cherished the opportunity to help with her children. Āmina and Kulayb grew at an alarming rate, and it scared him, how quickly time passed when he would play with them.
It was on such an afternoon after his arrival home that Yusuf spotted the Frank for the first and only time in what would be fifty years. He turned to grab the ball, and noticed familiar, pale eyes peering out from an alleyway at him.
Yusuf was instantly furious, both with the invader and with himself. He should have known that a Frank wouldn’t honor his request to leave. He should have been on the lookout for him since his first evening home. He knew better.
But Yusuf didn’t confront him there, playing with his niece and nephew. He took them back inside, safe from the invader’s gaze, and decided to follow the Frank back to his home. The foreigner wasn’t the only one who could spy, after all.
He waited until it was the dead of night, and the Frank had retired to an abandoned house on the outskirts of the city. When the Frank awoke, it was to a blade against his neck. He did not move, but his gaze was empty and hard as he looked at Yusuf.
Yusuf glared back. A part of him, an angry, ugly part that had been born during his first fight, wished to press the blade just a little deeper and see blood spilled from this arrogant man’s neck once again. The only thing that stayed his hand was the knowledge that all it would bring was another cycle of vengeance, and this time, with so many innocents nearby.
So, Yusuf stepped back, and once more pointed out the window to the docks. He quietly spoke the same words over and over again, in every language he knew:
“Get out.”
He might have seen a flicker of fear behind the steel of the man’s eyes, but it was hard to say for sure. But Yusuf watched him carefully all the same as he slowly got to his feet, hands in the air, then grabbed his satchel before disappearing into the night.
Yusuf was on high alert for a long time after that, refusing to let the children play outside alone. But there was no sign of the strange man, and eventually, Yusuf let his guard down again. He had a feeling that the invader was not gone for good - their fates were intrinsically intertwined, even Yusuf had to admit it at this point - but if his family was safe, that was all that mattered.
Time passed. The nightmares didn’t stop, but after a few hard years, Yusuf began to look for the beauty in the world once again instead of staying fixated on a bloody past. The smiles of his niece and nephew. The smell of Umayna cooking his favorite dish. A busy market square, or the ports at dawn: just life as usual. Regular, beautiful, wonderful life.
He didn’t forget the Frank who killed him. He didn’t think he could if he tried. But he also began to have strange dreams apart from just nightmares: dreams of two women riding into battle in foreign lands, side by side. And dreams of the women doing much more.
Yusuf tried not to dwell, and instead focused on the here and now. He started to draw again: what he considered simple geometric designs, mimicking the elaborate halls he stood in as a child. He always felt a kind of peace working with art, particularly bright colors and luminous shades. He took to wandering the city for inspiration. It reminded him of beauty, and it reminded him of home.
Yusuf stayed with Umayna, grateful for every second, until suddenly, her children were grown and married. At that point, she was starting to look more like their mother than his sister, her wrinkles deep and her hair starting to grey. Yusuf knew the time was coming that he would have to leave. Soon, their neighbors would get wise, and they would consider Yusuf either a miracle or a curse, and he didn’t want either such attention on his family. But every day, he found a new excuse to stay. A project around the house, a promise to a neighbor, anything to keep himself at home.
Until one morning, when Umayna gently took his face in her hands. She didn’t need to write her thoughts down for him, as they were clear as day on her face: it was time to go.
" Azizti ,” Yusuf muttered with tears in his eyes, pressing his face tight against her headscarf. “I will write every day.”
Umayna shot him a look that clearly said, ‘Not every day,’ and Yusuf laughed. He wondered if it sounded as broken as he felt.
She patted her hand against her chest twice, and Yusuf let his tears fall freely: that was their way of expressing affection, devotion, love . Everyone in his family had used that sign for him, and he knew that Umayna would be the last to use it for him.
As he got on his horse and rode south, Yusuf turned to look back at his beloved sister many times, until she was eventually just a dot in the distance. Yusuf refused to remember her as only that dot, so he recalled and tried to memorize her features for the rest of his journey.
Yusuf didn’t set foot in al-Iskandriya again until Umayna’s funeral, twenty-five years later.
That same evening, he saw the Frank who had once murdered him, and who he had murdered in turn. He was standing in the corner of the inn, a hood over his head. Yusuf recognized him instantly, even though he hadn’t laid eyes on him in almost fifty years. Like Yusuf, he looked like he hadn’t aged a day. But Yusuf would know those eyes anywhere.
A complicated twist of emotions rolled in his gut as their eyes made contact. Instinctive anger, of course, yes, but that fire of fury had lost its burn thanks to the waters of time. Instead of deadly rage, Yusuf felt something more begrudging, but it was anger nonetheless.
He got to his feet and grabbed the man by the arm, face red with fury.
“You haunt me tonight? On the night of my beloved sister’s funeral?” Yusuf hissed. He didn’t care if the foreigner understood him or not, not with this fury rolling off of him.
To his surprise, the other man opened his mouth to say something, as if he had understood Yusuf’s words. Realizing his mistake, the man ducked his head, then led Yusuf to a well-lit table near the center of the inn with a point of his hand.
At a loss for what else to do, he followed the foreigner’s instructions, as he had once followed Yusuf through the desert sands fifty years ago.
As he sat down, the other man surprised Yusuf further by pulling out parchment and writing in Arabic.
“I did not know it was your sister’s funeral. I have been looking for you here for months.”
Yusuf had to take a moment to rein in his shock. The invader had bothered to learn his language, after all these years. He had to, to survive , a bitter part of his mind reminded.
But writing to him instead of gesturing or fruitlessly speaking to him… Yusuf couldn’t ignore the effort for what it was.
Still, simply sitting with this man was opening old wounds, and he was about to grab the quill and write something spiteful, when the other man looked down and wrote down another phrase. As Yusuf read it, the man kept his head turned down.
“I’m sorry.”
For what? Yusuf wondered, his mind racing. For my sister’s death? For invading my country? For al-Quds?
A small, hateful part of Yusuf wanted to throw that apology back into this invader’s face, because what was it worth now?
Another part, a slow-growing part, preached patience and forgiveness. Fifty years was a long time to only have anger to hold on to, and Yusuf had decided early on that he didn’t want to live that way, dragging his fury like a heavy load. It wouldn’t change the past. All he had was the future, now.
For the first time that evening, Yusuf truly looked at him, hard and deep.
His appearance was the same, yes. But where there was once nothing but fury and harsh determination, Yusuf could see the imprints of something else take shape on his face. Something like what had cooled Yusuf’s temper over the last fifty years. And something downtrodden, too.
When he finally looked up to meet Yusuf’s eye, Yusuf saw a sorrow that might have been regret. And that surprised him more than anything else.
That wasn’t to say that Yusuf was ready to forgive this man just yet. He’d still taken so much from him and his people. But, Yusuf figured, there was sense in hearing him out.
“Why were you looking for me?” Yusuf wrote.
At this, the man’s body stiffened with resolve, and Yusuf couldn’t help but flinch internally to see it. But he didn’t grab his sword; he kept writing.
“There is going to be another attack, on Damascus this time. I want to try and stop it.”
Of all the things Yusuf had been expecting to read, that was not it. He openly stared at the man, then took back the quill to ask the obvious.
“Why do you care?”
At least the man had the decency to look properly ashamed for the first time in Yusuf’s presence as he responded.
“I have not stopped thinking about what I saw that first night. What I saw my people do.” The man paused here, then ran a trembling hand through his hair before continuing. “I struggled with it for some time, but half a century later, I’ve realized now that I cannot tolerate it. And that I must not.”
Yusuf doesn’t know what the other man wants him to say to that. All he knows is what he feels. Surprise, of course. A residue of his anger, hurt and barbed part of himself that wants to turn this man away out of pure spite. And, perhaps most unusual of all: an inkling of hope. This creature that exuded fury on the battlefield had somehow transformed into a man. What a strange miracle to behold.
“You would ask me to give up my peace to satisfy your guilt?” Yusuf asked anyway, the spiteful part of him winning this round.
“Do you have peace? I have found none as an aimless wanderer for years now.”
And oh, those pale eyes, almost the color of bone. Even when they didn’t hold hate, they still pierced Yusuf. As if he knew .
And perhaps he did. The description of an aimless wanderer wasn’t incorrect, in his case. He’d been keeping himself busy with jobs, keeping away from the coast, and keeping in contact with his sister. Her letters were the only earthly possessions he truly cared about. And now that she was gone, what did he have? More odd jobs and this aching loneliness?
Yusuf looked over at the other man. Then, he took the quill, and asked, “What is your name?”
Something in those eyes suddenly seemed brighter, and that itself shook the earth from underneath Yusuf. He never imagined any part of this man being bright.
“Nicolò di Genova.”
“And you would fight alongside a deaf man, Nicolò di Genova?” he wrote, the slights of the past still stinging.
“Only a deaf man who has killed me twenty-one times.”
“Twenty-two,” Yusuf scribbled as quickly as he could, and something tugged on the edge of Nicolò’s lips that might have been a smile, and Yusuf couldn’t help but return it, slight as it was.
He considered his companion and enemy, and decided: it’s a start .