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

tell those two to come no closer." He pointed to the forest clearing where Sophia and Rachel were already starting toward him. "I must be alone with Madonna Tilia."[107]

"Yes, Messere," said Celino with a bow. Scipio paced ahead of him like a tame lion as he walked off.

"We expected you to enter Orvieto alone," said Tilia, looking at Sophia and Rachel, who were staring back at her from across the road. "Why this entourage?"

And I expected to meet with Cardinal Ugolini at once, thought Daoud with growing irritation. Has he set this woman up as a barrier between himself and me?

He explained briefly how Celino, Sophia, and Rachel came to be traveling with him. Tilia gazed at him with a falcon's piercing stare. Daoud was not used to being stared at by a woman, and she made him uneasy. But he met her eyes in silence until she turned to her slaves and made a dropping gesture with her hand. The Africans immediately squatted in the grassy clearing where they had set Tilia's chair. Daoud realized that he had not heard a sound from them, and suspected they must have been made dumb.

"Come." Tilia took his arm, again surprising him. In Egypt women did not touch men they had just met. But she owned a house of pleasure. She was not a respectable woman.

Why should that bother him, he asked himself. He had spent his share of time in houses of pleasure along the Bhar al-Nil. What he felt toward their owners was mostly gratitude.

Tilia drew Daoud with her into the thicket along the hillside, stepping gracefully, despite her bulk, around shrubs and over rocks and fallen branches. She led him away from the road and into a grove of pine trees a little way up the slope. Daoud felt his muscles tightening. He was going to have to undergo more testing before she would let him meet Ugolini. Did they really think that Baibars would send a fool to Orvieto?

"Spread your cloak for me." She pointed to a spot under an old pine whose trunk rose straight and bare twice the height of a man before the first branch sprouted. Daoud unclasped his brown cloak and laid it on the thick bed of brown pine needles. Tilia sat down, smiled, and patted the place beside her.

"A messenger brought the news to the pope yesterday that the Tartar ambassadors have landed at Venice," she said. "They are on their way to Orvieto and should be here in a week or so. They are well protected. They brought their own bodyguard, which is now reinforced by a company of French knights and Venetian men-at-arms under a certain Count de Gobignon."[108]

Daoud felt a tingle of anticipation, as he did when he was about to close with the enemy in a battle.

"So I will be in Orvieto before them. That is good."

"Yes, but Cardinal Paulus de Verceuil has arrived here before you. He speaks for the King of France, and he has already begun to press the case for a Tartar alliance before Pope Urban. He has arranged for the Tartars and their guards to live at the palace of the Monaldeschi family."

Daoud caught an intonation in Tilia's voice that suggested it was a great accomplishment for the Tartars to live at the Monaldeschi palace. Was she trying to discourage him?

"What is this Monaldeschi family?" he asked.

"The oldest and richest family in Orvieto," she said. "Right now the capo della famiglia, the head of the family, is the Contessa Elvira di Monaldeschi, who is over eighty years old. But she is more ruthless and savage than many a younger man. Almost all her menfolk have been killed off by their blood enemies, the Filippeschi, and she has had many Filippeschi killed."

"What do they fight about?" said Daoud.

"Who knows? A Monaldeschi kills a Filippeschi, so a Filippeschi kills a Monaldeschi. It has been going on forever." Tilia went on. "What you must realize is that the Tartars will be well guarded because the contessa has more men-at-arms than the pope and a very strong palace."

He turned away from Tilia. Daoud stared out through the screen of pine branches at Orvieto's sunlit rock platform. A wagon inched its way up the narrow road.

"Who is this French count who guards the Tartars?" he asked.

"Count Simon de Gobignon. He is very young and very rich. He holds huge estates in France and numbers his vassals in the thousands. He is close to the French royal family, even King Louis himself and the king's brother, Charles d'Anjou."

Charles d'Anjou. Daoud remembered Lorenzo saying that Charles d'Anjou coveted the throne of Sicily.

A flash of light caught Daoud's eye. A party of helmeted men in yellow and white surcoats had come out of the main gate of Orvieto, formed a ragged column and were patrolling along the base of the city wall, led by a man with a white plume on his helmet.

"Who are those soldiers?" he asked.

Tilia leaned forward to peer through the trees and across the valley, then resettled herself against the tree trunk.[109]

"Pope Urban has two hundred Guelfo fighting men quartered in Orvieto. In all honesty, Daoud—"

"Call me David," he interrupted. "Here I must be known by a Christian name."

"Well, David, I think you had best go quickly back to Egypt. What can one man do against the French royal family, half the cardinals, the pope, the Monaldeschi, and the Tartars themselves?"

He felt a quick spurt of anger. He knew as well as she did the odds he faced. Why was she trying to weaken him by making him afraid?

Ugolini sent her to discourage me. It is he who is afraid.

He felt more respect for her, coming out and meeting him and trying to influence him, than he did for this Cardinal Ugolini, who was trying to protect himself. He knew from having read her letters that she was a shrewd and brave woman. He had to win her cooperation. There was only one way he might hope to do that.

Daoud smiled at her. "Does not great wealth give one great power?"

She smiled back. He noticed that she had rubbed some kind of red coloring on her cheeks to make herself look healthier. And she had painted blue-black shadows around her eyes, as Egyptian women did. But here and there her sweat had made the paint run in rivulets.

She said, "Only faith is more powerful than money."

"Then here is power." Daoud unbuckled his belt and let the jewels spill out of its hollow interior into his hand. He heard Tilia gasp. When the glittering stones filled his hand, he dropped them gently to the thin woolen cloak he had spread on the ground and shook the rest out of the belt. In the shadow of the pines the jewels seemed to give off their own light from their polished, rounded surfaces, red and blue, green and yellow. A sapphire, a topaz, and a pearl were each set in heavy gold rings. The others were loose. Some were so small that three or four of them would fit on the tip of Daoud's finger. One, a ruby, was the size of a whole fingertip. There were too many of them to count quickly, but Daoud knew that Manfred had given him twenty-five, and one had gone to equip them for the journey.

"Sanctissima Maria! May I touch them?"

"You are welcome to," he said, smiling, "but make sure none of them sticks to your fingers."

She plucked some of the jewels from the cloak and let them[110] trickle through her fingers, catching the light as they tumbled to the cloak. She held the big ruby up between thumb and forefinger and studied it, turning it this way and that.

"A drop of God's blood."

"You should have seen the single emerald I traded to King Manfred for these smaller stones. There was beauty. A few at a time, these can be turned into gold."

She looked into his eyes. She took him more seriously now, he thought. He was not just some strange Muslim whose rashness might get her killed. He was a source of wealth.

"They must be sold carefully, or their sudden appearance will be noticed," she said. "After all, even the princes of the Church would have to stretch their purses for these."

"I have it in mind to buy princes of the Church, not to sell jewelry to them."

"We can sell some of these gems to the Templars. They have enormous wealth and they are very discreet."

Noting that she had said "we," Daoud smiled at the thought of those ferocious enemies of the Mamelukes, the Knights Templar, helping to provide the financing that would weaken their foothold in Islamic lands.

"Now," he said, "do you think we can accomplish something to keep Tartars and Christians apart?"

"Yes—something. Used wisely, these jewels—or their worth in gold—will gain you influence among the men around the pope. You might even pry a few of the French cardinals loose from their loyalty to King Louis."

Daoud began scooping up the stones and funneling them into the hidden pocket of his belt. "You must help me to use them wisely."

"Exactly what do you have in mind?" she asked, her eyes fixed on the jewels as they disappeared.

"I expect Cardinal Ugolini to take some of the gold and use it to build a strong party in Orvieto that will oppose the alliance." He eyed her, trying to see into her heart. "Can he manage such a thing?"

"Oh, Adelberto is an old hand at intrigue. How else do you suppose he got to be a cardinal? Indeed, he is the camerlengo for the College of Cardinals."

"What does that mean?" Daoud asked as he buckled his belt.

"He acts as a kind of chancellor to the pope, making announcements,[111] calling the College together, conducting ceremonies—that sort of thing."

Daoud nodded. "Good. It is my hope that he can use this money to draw cardinals and Church officials to him, one way or another. And they will join together to turn the pope against the Tartars."

"With all the money those jewels will bring, you can indeed create such a faction, but I don't know what effect it will have on the pope. The Tartars offer the pope a chance to wipe out Islam once and for all."

"Yes, and then after that the Tartars will wipe out Christianity," Daoud said. "I can tell those who will work with us what the Tartars are truly like. I have seen them, fought against them. I have seen what they have done to those they conquered." Like a cloud passing over the sun, a memory of ruined Baghdad darkened his mind.

Tilia's eyes opened wide. "You intend to meet and talk—to bishops, to cardinals?"

He touched his face with his fingertips. "This is why Baibars sent me—because I can go among Christians as a Christian. I will be David of Trebizond, a silk merchant who has traveled in the lands ravaged by the Tartars."

"Trebizond?"

He could see the doubt in her face. He must seem confident to her. He must not let her know that he himself wondered how he, a warrior from a land utterly strange to these people, could make the great ones of Christendom listen to him and believe in him. He could do it only with the help of Tilia and Cardinal Ugolini—and they would not help him unless they believed he could do it.

"Trebizond is on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. Far enough away that I am not likely to meet anyone in Orvieto who knows anything about it."

"Do not be too sure. The pope makes a point of seeing people from everywhere."

"Then he will probably want to meet me, since I am from a strange and faraway place."

Her eyes widened and her full lips parted. Her teeth were small, bright, and widely spaced.

"You even want to meet with the pope?"

He knew the enormity of what he was proposing. But he fought down the doubt that her evident horror had aroused in him. He made himself sound absolutely sure when he answered.

"Certainly. Cardinal Ugolini will arrange an audience for me. If[112] the pope has not yet made a decision, he will want to listen to one who has seen with his own eyes what these Tartars are. I will tell him that an agreement with them would be like a lamb allying itself with a panther."

"Talk to the pope! How would you know how to behave before the pope?"

"Among my people, Madonna, I am not just a warrior. I stand high in the highest councils. I have met with kings and great men of religion. As for the details of etiquette of an audience with the pope, as a traveler from Trebizond I might be expected to make mistakes."

Daoud saw that her olive skin had turned a yellowish-white. "Do you