whereupon a man named ʿAmr (1) ibn Jurmuz caught up with him, found him asleep, and murdered him treacherously, as we shall recount in detail (2).
As for Ṭalḥah, a stray arrow (3)—it is said Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam loosed it, though Allah knows best—struck him during the battle. It pinned his leg to his horse, and the startled animal bolted. He kept shouting, “Come to me, O servants of Allah! Come to me, O servants of Allah!” One of his freedmen followed and seized the horse. Ṭalḥah said, “Woe to you! Turn me aside (4) to the houses.” His sandal was now filled with blood, so he told his servant, “[Pull it out and let me ride behind you].” The bleeding had drained his strength, so the boy mounted behind him and brought him to a house in Basra, where he died—may Allah be pleased with him.
ʿĀʾishah—may Allah be pleased with her—then advanced in her howdah, handed a copy of the Qur’an to Kaʿb ibn Sūr, the chief judge of Basra, and said, “Invite them to abide by it.” This was at the height of the fighting, after al-Zubayr had withdrawn and Ṭalḥah—may Allah be pleased with him—had been slain. When Kaʿb ibn Sūr stepped forward with the Qur’an, calling the people to it, he was met by the vanguard (5) of the Kufan army. ʿAbd Allah ibn Sabāʾ—“the son of the black woman”—was (6) there with his followers drawn up (7) in front of the host, killing every Basran they could reach, sparing no one. Seeing Kaʿb ibn Sūr holding the Qur’an aloft, they showered him with arrows in a single volley and killed him. Arrows even struck the howdah of the Mother of the Believers, ʿĀʾishah—may Allah be pleased with her.
She cried out, “By Allah, by Allah! O my sons, remember the Day of Reckoning!” She raised her hands, beseeching Allah against that band of ʿUthmān’s assassins, and the people joined her in supplication until the uproar (8) reached ʿAlī. “What is this?” he asked. They replied, “The Mother of the Believers is invoking curses upon the killers of ʿUthmān and their followers.” He said, “O Allah, curse the killers of ʿUthmān.”
Yet those men would not stop pelting her howdah with arrows until it bristled like a porcupine. She urged the soldiers to fend them off, and indignation flared; the troops charged and pushed the attackers back until the assault reached ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib himself. He said to his son Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥanafiyyah, “Woe to you! Advance with the standard!” When he could not, ʿAlī took it from his hand and moved forward. The battle swayed back and forth—now favoring the people of Basra, now the people of Kufa. A great multitude (9) was slain—crowds upon crowds—and no engagement had ever seen more severed hands and feet than this one.
Throughout, ʿĀʾishah kept urging the people against those assassins of ʿUthmān. Looking to her right she asked, “Who are these people?” They answered, “We are Bakr ibn Wāʾil.” She replied, “It is about you that the poet says (10):
[verse in the ṭawīl meter follows]