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

akbar! God is great! I never thought I had the strength to throw the Kipchaq.

"Nicetas won the contest. Admit it, or I'll break your skull," he growled, holding the dabbus over Kassar's head.

Kassar remained silent. Daoud lowered the dabbus and tapped the Tartar's round skull through his mop of straight black hair. He hit Kassar just hard enough to let him feel the weight of the dabbus.

"Admit that Nicetas won."

"All right," Kassar grunted, his face in the sand. "He won."

"Swear by the Prophet you will leave him alone from now on."

"I swear," came the muffled voice.

"By the Prophet."

"By the Prophet."

Daoud stood up warily and handed the dabbus back to the boy Kassar had taken it from.

Kassar rose slowly, wiping sand from his face. His eyes seemed to spark with hatred.

This is not finished yet, Daoud thought.

He looked for Nicetas. The Greek boy was on his feet. He was wiping the dirt and blood from his face with the hem of his robe. He looked at Daoud, and there was something bright and solemn in his eyes. No one had ever looked at Daoud like that before.

Daoud felt a great rush of gratitude to God for giving him the strength to save Nicetas's life.

If I had not fought Kassar, Nicetas would be dead.

That clean-lined face so full of warmth and wit would be so much lifeless clay. Daoud felt a lightness in his heart and a smile bubbling to his lips. He was proud of his strength. He had used it to save a precious life. He was a warrior of God.

Smiling, he went to Nicetas and threw his arm around his shoulders.

He should force Kassar to give Nicetas the mail shirt. But he had done enough fighting for one day. Nicetas did not need the damned shirt. Let the Tartar keep it.

"Now then, you wretched sons of desert rats!" came Mahmoud's[91] voice. He pushed his way into the middle of the ring, coin necklace glittering, eyes flashing in anger.

"Fighting, eh? Trying to kill each other? Save your fighting for the emir's enemies. You are khushdashiya, brother Mamelukes of Emir Baibars. If again I see one of you raise a hand against his brother, I swear I will stake him out on the sand." He raised his right hand to heaven. "Hear me, God!"

The naqeeb had a strange way of making Mamelukes out of them, Daoud thought. But perhaps he knew what he was doing.

That night, without anyone's saying any more, Nicetas brought his tent and his bedding to Daoud. They compared tents and decided that Daoud's was the larger. They would sleep in it.

After they had tended their ponies and joined with the rest of the troop in the final prayer of the night, they crawled into the tent and spread their bedding side by side. Daoud felt Nicetas moving in his half of the tent and heard a rustling, as if his new tent mate were shedding his clothes. Why would he do that on such a cold night?

Nicetas pulled his blankets over both of them and rolled toward Daoud. The Greek boy's skin felt warm and silk-smooth. Nicetas wriggled even closer and stroked Daoud's chest, arousing pleasant tingles. Daoud felt, keener than ever, the powerful longings that had been troubling him. But then he remembered cruel Turkish laughter and rough hands, the unbearable pain and shame of his first nights of captivity. He struggled to free himself from Nicetas's arms.

All at once Nicetas let go of him and turned over, leaving a small space in the tent between them.

"Sleep well, Daoud." There was hurt in the soft voice.

Remorseful, Daoud reached for his friend. When his hand grasped the bare shoulder, his fingers tightened of their own volition. Nicetas drew closer again, until their bodies were pressed together.

"Ah, Daoud!" Nicetas whispered.

After they had made love, Daoud thought, Perhaps God sent Nicetas to me.

Fearing that the thought might be blasphemous, he put it out of his mind and fell into a sated sleep.

Daoud, Sophia, Celino, and the boy came to a riverbank. They had ridden in silence for so long that the moon's crescent hung low in the western sky, casting a glow on rippling water. Daoud called[92] a halt and sat gazing at the Tiber. Next to the Bhar al-Nil, the river Nile, this is the most famous river in the world.

It was wide and flowed fast, judging by the ripples, and looked deep. Looking upriver, he saw that it followed a winding course leading toward black bulks, lit with yellow lights here and there, that must be great buildings. Rome.

They laid the old man's body down on a cracked marble platform beside the river. Celino had long since pulled the dagger out of the old man's flesh, and now he handed it to Daoud. The dagger was a well-balanced throwing knife of good steel, stained with a film of dried blood. Daoud knelt, washed it in the Tiber, and wiped it with the hem of his cloak. He held it out to the boy.

"I do not want it." The boy's face was still wrapped in a blue scarf, but Daoud could see tears glittering on his cheek.

"It is a good knife. You may have need of it now that you have no father."

"It is the knife that killed him." The boy hesitated. "All right, give it to me."

Daoud handed it to him, and the boy turned and hurled the knife out over the river. It flew a short distance, and the splash threw off light like a handful of pearls.

"Well," Daoud said, "no one had a better right to do that than you." He smiled to himself. He could understand quite well the lad's feelings.

But there was something odd about the way the boy's arm had moved when he threw the knife. Daoud recalled a phrase that he had heard in memory while they were riding toward the river.

You throw like a girl.

That had not been true of Nicetas, but it was true of this boy.

And his voice, though high, was not as light and clear as the voice of a child. Moved by a sudden suspicion, Daoud reached out too quickly for the boy to draw away and pulled loose the scarf.

He leaned closer for a good look. He heard Celino, standing behind him, grunt with surprise. Revealed in the moonlight was, not a lad whose voice had not yet changed, but a girl. Her eyelids were puffy from her weeping, but the eyelashes were long and thick, her nose delicate, her lips full. The eyes that looked back at him with a mixture of fear and defiance were, in this light, black as obsidian. Her hair was coiled in a thick braid at the back of her head, where the scarf had hidden it.[93]

He did not have to ask the reason for the pretense. Traveling with only an aged father to protect her, she was far safer as a boy.

Sophia pushed past Daoud and put her arms around the girl, who began to cry again. "You poor child, are you all alone now? There, it's all right. We will help you."

"Who was your father?" said Celino in an equally kindly voice.

"He was not my father," the girl whispered. "He was Angelo Ben Ezra of Florence, a seller of books, and he was my husband."

Sophia drew back in surprise, then hugged the girl tighter. "Oh, poor little one. So young, and wed to such an old man. How could your parents do that to you?"

The girl angrily drew back from Sophia. "Do not speak so! My parents were good to me—and my husband was. He never touched me. When my mother and father died of tertian fever, he took me in, and he married me so as not to give scandal. He taught me to read."

"What is your name, girl?" Celino asked.

"Rachel." She dropped to her knees beside the body stretched out on the marble, and her tears splashed on the white face. She bent over and kissed him.

"He is so cold."

"We must wrap him quickly and be on our way," said Daoud. "We have killed three people and burned down an inn. I assure you, they have stopped chasing us only for the moment. Celino, I want a word with you. Sophia, help the girl wrap her husband's body so we can travel on."

"I do not need to be commanded," said Sophia sharply as Daoud turned his back on her, motioning Celino to follow him.

What in the name of God am I to do with these people?

Daoud strode across the marble platform and picked his way down a flight of cracked stairs to the edge of the Tiber. He followed a line of tumbled stones, once part of an embankment, until he felt sure Sophia and the girl could not hear them.

Then he whirled, bringing his face inches from Celino's.

"You fool! I ought to kill you for what you have done."

He heard a soft growl to his right.

"Send your damned dog away," he said, without taking his eyes off Celino.

"Of course," said Celino calmly. "Scipio!" He snapped his fingers. "To the horses. Go!"

The hound turned, head and tail lowered, and walked away. But[94] he swung his long muzzle around to glance back at Daoud as he moved off. His pupils reflected the moonlight like two silver coins.

"Give me the jewels you're carrying," said Daoud.

"Of course," said Celino again, promptly unbuckling his belt. Daoud tensed himself in case the Sicilian should go for his dagger. But Celino held the belt up so that the twelve unset stones—rubies, pearls and amethysts—could roll out of the hidden pocket into Daoud's palm. Daoud added them to the twelve already in his pouch.

"There, now you have the stones back. And now are you going to try to kill me?"

There was a hint of challenge in that word try.

"If I had had all these jewels at the inn, I would have left you for that crowd to kill. How could you be so stupid as to involve us in a tavern quarrel?"

"I am no man's slave," Celino growled. "Not Manfred's, and surely not yours."

But I am a slave. That is what the very word Mameluke means, and I am proud to be a Mameluke.

"Do you think, Celino," Daoud said softly, "that you are a better man than I?"

"I think myself better than no man, and no man better than me."

Daoud looked away. Madman's talk.

Gazing up the river, he noticed a huge round shape bulking against the horizon, a fortress of some kind. There might be danger from that direction.

"Celino, you and Sophia and I are a little army in the land of our enemies. An army can have only one leader."

Celino nodded. "I know that. But you must understand that if I accept you as our leader, it is of my own free will. I am still my own master."

Daoud felt a strange mixture of admiration and uneasiness at this. He was painfully aware that among Mamelukes a warrior of Celino's age would be treated with great respect. Indeed, King Manfred clearly held Lorenzo in high esteem. His effort to save the old man had been noble in its way. But an impulse at the wrong time, even a noble impulse, could mean death for all of them.

"Does that mean you feel free to disobey me?"

"I have done whatever you wanted up to now. Except for what happened at the inn. That was different."

"Why different?" Daoud demanded. "You are not a stupid man, Celino. Why did you do such a stupid thing?"[95]

Celino shook his head and turned away. "Angry as you are at me, Daoud, you cannot be angrier than I am at myself. If I had not intervened, that man Angelo Ben Ezra might yet be alive and his child-wife not widowed. They might have been hurt, and they surely would have been robbed. But I do not think those tavern louts would have gone so far as to kill them."

Daoud was astonished that Celino did not even defend his actions.

"Any more than we meant to kill any of those men," Daoud agreed. "But a man of your experience knows that once the sword is drawn, only God knows who will live or die. Yet you drew your sword against them."

"The old man wandered in out of the night seeking hospitality. Instead, they were beating him, and they were going to take his donkey and everything he owned and cast him out. Because he was a Jew."

"Yes, you Christians are very cruel to Jews. It is not so in the lands of Islam. But you should be used to seeing such things."

"I am not a Christian, Daoud. I am a Jew myself. And that