The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea (best fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

[3]

In the mist-filled plains around Lucera, cocks crowed.

Daoud ibn Abdallah pushed himself slowly to his feet. After days and nights of walking, his legs ached abominably.

Tired as he was, he looked around carefully, studying the other travelers who rested near him on the road, peering at the city wall a hundred paces away with its shut gate of iron-studded oak. In his stomach he felt the hollow ball of dread that had not left him since he landed in Italy.

I am alone in the land of the infidel.

Dawn gave a pink tint to the pale yellow stones of the wall, about twice the height of a man. Above it in the distance, covering the summit of the central hill, rose the citadel of Lucera, surrounded by its own huge wall set with more than a dozen many-sided towers.

Daoud's feet throbbed in his knee-high boots. For three days he had walked along the carter's track from the port of Manfredonia on the Adriatic coast into the hills around Lucera. Yesterday at daybreak he had been able to see, from a great distance, the outline of the fortress emerging from the center of a rolling plain. It had taken him another day and a night to reach its gate.

Around Daoud now were dozens of people who had gathered at the gate during the night, mostly merchants with packs on their backs. A few farmers, hitched to carts loaded with melons, peaches, and oranges, had dragged their burden over the plain. The more prosperous had donkeys to pull the wagons.

One man with a long stick drove six small sheep. And a cart near Daoud was piled high with wooden cages full of squawking chickens.

Walking in his direction was a tiny dwarf of a man who appeared permanently doubled over, as if his back had been broken. It seemed to Daoud that if the man were not holding his arms out from his sides for balance, his knuckles would almost have brushed the[4] ground. His little cart was piled with broken tree limbs, firewood to sell in the city.

The dwarf lifted his head and grinned at Daoud through a bushy black mustache. Daoud smiled back, thinking, God be kind to you, my friend.

From within the city issued a familiar cry, in Arabic, that tore at Daoud's heart: "Come to prayer. Come to security. God is most great." It was the adhan, the cry of the muezzins in the minarets of Lucera's mosques. For, though he was in a Christian land, Lucera was a city mostly populated by Muslims.

Daoud wanted to fall to his knees, but he was pretending to be a Christian, and could only stand and ignore the call to prayer as the Christians around him did. He said the words of the salat, the required prayer, in his mind.

The people near Daoud spoke to one another sleepily, softly, in the tongue of southern Italy. Someone laughed. Someone sang a snatch of song. When the Muslim prayer ended, they expectantly looked up at the town wall.

Daoud saw two soldiers standing in the tower to the left of the gate. They were accoutred in the Muslim manner, with turbans wrapped around their helmets and scimitars at their belts. One lifted a long brass trumpet to his lips and blew a series of notes that sent shivers along Daoud's spine. With a few changes it could have been the call that had awakened him every morning in the Mameluke barracks on Raudha Island in the Nile.

Using ropes, the other soldier hoisted onto a tall pole a yellow banner bearing a black bird with spread wings and claws, and two heads facing in opposite directions. The double-headed eagle of King Manfred's family, the Hohenstaufen.

With a great squealing of cables and squeaking of hinges, the tall wooden door swung wide.

Daoud reached down and picked up the leather pack that had lain between his feet. Leaning forward, he pushed his arms through the shoulder straps.

He wore draped over his pack a long countryman's cloak of cheap brown wool. His tunic and hose were of lightweight undyed cotton. Only his high boots were expensive. He needed good ones for the long walk from the coast to Lucera. A sword swung at his belt, short and unadorned, the sort any man of small means might wear. He had chosen it in El Kahira out of a stack of swords taken from Christian men-at-arms during the last crusade.[5]

He drew the hood of his cloak over his head. Later his blond hair and gray eyes would guarantee that no one would suspect what he was. But here in southern Italy, where most ordinary people were dark complexioned, his appearance might draw unwanted attention.

Even though the sun had just risen, he felt the heat on his back. But it was not the dry heat of Egypt that he had known most of his life. A heaviness in the air called forth a dampness from within his flesh. His tunic clung to him.

If a Christian asks me what month this is, I must remember to say July.

He brushed the dust from his clothing and fell into line behind the bent man with his cart of firewood.

Once inside Lucera, he would find his way to the inn of al-Kharim. And tonight the chancellor Aziz would come to him from King Manfred.

The line shuffled forward. Three guards were standing in the shadows just inside the gateway. They were big dark men wearing long green capes over red tunics. Red turbans were wrapped around their spike-topped helmets. Curving swords hung from their belts. A boy in a red tunic and turban held a sheaf of lightweight spears.

Their thick beards reminded Daoud how much he missed his own beard, shaved off in preparation for this mission.

My people. Daoud felt a sudden warmth at the familiar sight of warriors of Islam.

The feeling was nonsense, he told himself. These were not his people, but the Saracens of Manfred von Hohenstaufen. Their Arab ancestors had once ruled southern Italy, but the Christians had conquered them over a century before.

No, these Muslim warriors were not Daoud's people. In truth, on this whole earth there were no people Daoud ibn Abdallah could truly call his own.

Once he had been David Langmuir, living with his crusader father and mother, in a castle near Ascalon by the plain of Gaza. An English ancestor had been one of the first crusaders in the Holy Land.

Just after David's ninth birthday Geoffrey Langmuir, his father, had ridden out to war in gleaming mail with a cross of red silk sewn on his white surcoat. David never saw him again.

Some weeks later the Saracens appeared before the castle, and[6] there were days of thirst and hunger and constant fear. He remembered the thunderous pounding at the walls and the dark men in their yellow robes and green turbans, their crescent-shaped swords coated with blood. He remembered his mother, Lady Evelyn, in her blue dress, running up the spiral stairs of a tower. He heard her distant scream. When the Saracens dragged him out of the castle, with men being cut down by swords all around him and women thrown to the ground by laughing Turks who fell upon them, he saw at the base of the tower a bundle of blue linen splashed with red that must have been his mother.

On their leisurely journey back to the Nile, the Turks forced him to lie on his belly, and they used him as men use women. He would never forget the needle-sharp tip of a curving dagger touched to his eyeball as a bashi with a flowing black beard demanded that Daoud use his mouth to give him pleasure. Whenever Daoud remembered that time, his insides knotted and his face burned with shame.

One day he stood naked on a platform in El Kahira, capital of the sultans—the city the Christians called Cairo. A fat, laughing slave dealer, who had raped him till he bled the night before, offered him for sale.

A tall man with one eye a glittering blue and the other a blank white, a scimitar in a jeweled scabbard thrust through the embroidered sash around his waist, came forward.

A silence fell over the crowd of slave buyers, followed by whispers. The one-eyed warrior paid the price asked in gold dinars and without haggling. And when the slaver fondled David's loins one last time as he covered him with a ragged tunic, the warrior seized the slaver by the throat with one hand, forcing him to his knees, and squeezed till he collapsed unconscious in the dust of the marketplace.

David was almost mad with terror as the one-eyed warrior took him to his mansion beside a lake in the center of El Kahira. But the tall man spoke kindly to him and treated him decently. Amazingly, he could speak French, David's language, though with a strange and heavy accent. He told David that he was called Baibars al-Bunduqdari, Baibars the Crossbowman. He was an emir of the Bhari Mamelukes, which meant, he said, "slaves of the river." But though the Mamelukes were slaves, they were also great and powerful warriors.

Baibars gave David a new name—Daoud—and told him that he had selected him to be a Mameluke. He explained in a firm but[7] kindly way that Daoud did have a choice but that the alternative was a life of unrelieved wretchedness as a ghulman, a menial slave. As a Mameluke, Daoud would be set free when his training was complete, and he could win riches and glory and be a warrior for God and his emir.

"I have long watched for such a one as you," Baibars said, "who could look like a Christian but have the mind and heart of a Mameluke. One like you could be a great weapon against the enemies of the faith."

But your faith is not my faith, David, who was to be called Daoud, thought, not daring to speak, and your enemies are not my enemies.

His longing to please this man, the first Muslim to treat him with respect, struggled as the years passed with his memories of a Christian childhood. Daoud underwent the training of a Mameluke, and Baibars watched him closely. Daoud accepted Islam and took the common surname of a convert, ibn Abdallah. He took naturally to the life of a warrior and grew in strength and skill.

Year by year Baibars, too, became more powerful. At last he made himself sultan of El Kahira, ruler of an empire that stretched from North Africa to Syria. Daoud's hand had wielded the flame dagger of the Hashishiyya that ended the previous sultan's life.

Now, having raised Daoud, trained him as a Mameluke, and educated him in statecraft, having sent him to learn wisdom from the Sufi and terror from the Hashishiyya, having given him a new name and a new faith, Baibars had sent Daoud into the Christian country called Italy.

The stones of the gateway seemed to be marble, unusual