El-agalay

An apeman from among the Daku, near Abyssinia. He pronounced his name Elgale, but everyone he met in the Greek and Arab lands, not fluent in Daku, mangled and mispronounced it horribly. Similarly, many have mispronounced Daku as Dakon.

Formerly a merchant, Elgale had the ill-luck to be taken by Moslem slavers, carried North to Asia Minor, where Harald helped free him with a fly spell. For a glorious moment, before the spell wore off, he was free. But curse the ill luck, he was retaken by pirates, then by Captain Halcyon, finally freed from the Patriarch by Justinian; and then, in the unluckiest turn of all, he decided to accompany the party on their quest that scarcely concerned him, which caused him no end of grevious bodily injury in damp and terrible dungeons no ape was ever meant to enter. Captured by Karmathians, he suffered the most horrible of all deaths, drowning in chains as the room he was in slowly filled with water. For long, agonizing minutes, he stood on tiptoe, hauled himself up his hanging chains, desperately trying to keep his head above the frigid and all-consuming waters, unwavering in his faith that someone would once again come along and rescue him before it was too late. He was wrong, of course, He died without his trademark fez and vest, abandoned by his friends, his fate unknown to his family, misunderstood by everyone, just another anonymous dead monkey-man.

His last words, heard only as burbling to his skeleton guards and almost drowned out completely by the screams of his doomed but slightly taller cellmate: "Compared to the flowers and the birds and the trees, I am an apeman."