I might really have giggled then, but in the next moment the situation ceased to be amusing. I saw in the lamplight the glint of metal, as old Beauty drew a knife from his robes and lifted it. I did not know whether he intended to trim my uncle’s zab or to amputate his supernumerary scrotum or to cut his throat, and I did not wait to find out. I stepped forward and swung my fist and hit the thief hard in the back of his neck. I might have expected the blow to incapacitate such a fragile old specimen, but he was not so delicate as he looked. He fell sideways, but rolled like an acrobat and came up from the floor slashing the blade at me. It was more by happenstance than by deftness that I caught his wrist. I twisted it, and wrenched at his hand, and found the knife in my own hand, and used it. At that, he did fall down and stay down, groaning and burbling.

The scuffle had been brief, but not silent, yet my uncle had slept through it, and he still slept, still smiling in his sleep. Appalled by what I had just done, as well as by what had almost been done, I felt very alone in the room and badly needed a supporting ally. Though my hands were trembling, I shook Uncle Mafìo, and had to shake him violently to bring him to consciousness. I realized now that the more than ordinarily nasty evening meal had been heavily laced with banj. We would all three have been dead but for the dream that had wakened me to the danger and made me disgorge the drug.

My uncle finally, unwillingly, began to come awake, smiling and murmuring, “The flowers … the dancers … the fingers and lips playing on my flute …” Then he blinked and exclaimed, “Dio me varda! Marco, that was not you?”

“No, Zio Mafìo,” I said, in my agitation speaking Venetian. “You were in peril. We are still in peril. Please wake up!”

“Adrìo de vu!” he said crossly. “Why have you snatched me from that wondrous garden?”

“I believe it was the garden of the hashishiyin. And I have just stabbed a Misguided One.”

“Our host!” cried my uncle, sitting up and seeing the crumpled form on the floor. “Oh, scagaròn, what have you done? Are you playing bravo again?”

“No, Zio, look. That is his own knife sticking in him. He was about to kill you for your cod of musk.” As I related the circumstances, I began to weep.

Uncle Mafìo bent over the old man and examined him, growling, “Right in the belly. Not dead, but dying.” Then he turned to me and said kindly, “There, there, boy. Stop slobbering. Go and wake your father.”

Beauty of Faith’s Moon was nothing to weep over, alive or dead or dying. But he was the first man I ever slew with my own hand, and the killing of another human being is no trivial milestone in a man’s career. As I went to fetch my father out of the hashish garden, I was thinking how more than ever I was glad that, back in Venice, another hand had thrust the sword into my guiltless earlier prey. For I had just learned one thing about killing a man, or at least about killing him with a blade. It slides into the victim’s belly easily enough, almost eagerly, almost of its own accord. But there it is instantly seized by the violated muscles, held as tightly as another tool of mine had once been clasped in the virgin flesh of the girl Doris. I had pushed the knife into old Beauty with no effort whatever, but I could not withdraw it again when I had done so. And in that instant I had known a sickening realization: that a deed so ugly and so easily done cannot thereafter be undone. It made killing seem rather less gallant and dashing and bravìsimo than I had imagined it to be.

When I had, with difficulty, roused my father, I took him to the scene of the crime. Uncle Mafìo had laid the landlord on his own pallet of blankets, despite the flow of blood, and had composed Beauty’s limbs for death, and the two of them were conversing, it seemed companionably. The old man was the only one of us who had any clothes on. He looked up at me, his murderer, and he must have seen the traces of tears on my face, for he said:

“Do not feel bad, young infidel. You have slain the most Misguided One of all. I have done a terrible wrong. The Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) enjoins us to treat a guest with the most reverent care and respect. Though he be the lowliest darwish, or even an unbeliever, and though there be only one crumb in the house, and though the host’s family and children go hungry, the guest must be given that crumb. Be he a sworn enemy, he must be accorded every hospitality and safeguard while he is under one’s roof. My disobedience to that holy law would have deprived me of my Night of the Possible, even did I live. In my avarice, I acted hastily, and I have sinned, and for that sin I beg forgiveness.”

I tried to say that I gave the forgiveness, but I choked on a sob, and in the next moment I was glad of that, for he continued:

“I could as easily have drugged your breakfast meal in the morning, and let you get some way upon the road before you fell. Then I could have robbed and murdered you under the open sky instead of under my roof, and it would have been a deed of virtue, and pleasing to Allah. But I did not. Though in all my lifetime before now I have lived devoutly in the Faith and have slain many other infidels to the greater glory of Islam, this one impiety will cost me my eternity in the Paradise of Djennet, with its haura beauties and perpetual happiness and unfettered indulgence. And for that loss, I grieve sincerely. I should have killed you in fitter fashion.”

Well, those words at any rate stopped my weeping. We all stared stonily at the landlord as again he went on :

“But you have yourselves a chance at virtue. When I am dead, do me the kindness of wrapping me in a winding sheet. Take me to the main room and lay me in the middle of it, in the prescribed position. Wind my tulband over my face, and place me so my feet are turned to the south, toward the Holy Kaaba in Mecca.”

My father and uncle looked at each other, and they shrugged, but we were all glad they made no promise, for the old fiend now spoke his last words:

“Having done that, vile dogs, you will die virtuous, when my brothers of the Mulahidat come and find me here dead with a knife wound in my gut, and they follow the tracks of your horses and hunt you down and do to you what I failed to do Salaam aleikum.”

His voice had not at all weakened, but, after perversely calling peace upon us, Beauty of Faith’s Moon closed his eyes and died. And, that being the first deathbed I had ever stood close to, I first learned then that most deaths are as ugly as most killings. For in dying, Beauty unbeautifully and copiously evacuated both his bladder and his bowels, befouling his garments and the blankets and filling the room with a ghastly stench.

A disgusting indignity is not what any person would wish to be last remembered for. But I have since attended many dyings and—except in the rare case when there has been opportunity of a purge aforetime—that is how all human beings make their farewell to life; even the strongest and bravest of men, the fairest and purest of women, whether they die a violent death or go serenely in their sleep.

We stepped outside the room to breathe clean air, and my father sighed. “Well. Now what?”

“First of all,” said my uncle, untying the thongs of his musk cod, “let us relieve ourselves of these uncomfortable danglers. It is clear that they will be as safe inside our packs—or no less safe—and anyway I would rather lose the musk than again imperil my own dear cod.”

My father muttered, “Worry about balls when we may be about to lose our heads?”

I said, “I am sorry, Father, Uncle. If we are to be hunted by the surviving Misguided Ones, then I did wrong to kill that one.”

“Nonsense,” said my father. “Had you not awakened and acted with celerity, we would not even have lived to be hunted.”