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

claws. "There is so much I could learn in Egypt. If only this stupid enmity between Muslim and Christian did not hold me back. I am tortured like Tantalus."

"As cardinal camerlengo, the pope's chamberlain, you could bring before the pope a traveler from far away whose testimony might influence his decisions about the Tartars. Because of you, all that would be lost might be saved."

Daoud held his breath, waiting for Ugolini's reply.

Ugolini smiled resignedly. "To work for what I believe in, to help my friends. And to be rewarded with riches. How can I refuse?" His expression changed again as he looked earnestly at Daoud. "I do not know as much as your great Islamic astronomers, but I have plotted the courses of some stars, and I know how they rule our destinies. And my recent readings have told me that I will take a risk that will yield me rewards beyond my hopes."

"Then you will present me to the pope as a witness?"

Ugolini first shook his head, but then sighed and nodded. "I can propose a meeting. And may the stars watch over us," he added as his right hand traced the Christian sign of the cross on his forehead, shoulders, and breast.

The stars, your Messiah, and the One God I worship, thought Daoud. He allowed himself momentarily to feel the thrill of triumph. Ugolini had begun to move as he wanted him to. But now he must prepare himself for a much greater trial, his meeting with the pope.

A little while later, walking through a ground-floor doorway into the sunlit atrium of Ugolini's mansion, Daoud saw Sophia and Rachel standing by the fish pond, under orange and lemon trees. The polished dark-green leaves reflected the mid-morning sun upward and cast shade downward on the stone paths and the pool.[135] Reflected sunlight rippled over Sophia's peach-colored gown. A narrow gold bracelet on her wrist flashed as she raised her hand to make a point. The answering smile that lit Rachel's face foretold that she would be a beautiful woman in a few years. She was dressed better than she had been when they first met her, Daoud noticed. That ankle-length blue silk gown must belong to Sophia.

"The cardinal has just had an immense turbot delivered all the way from Livorno, Messer David," said Rachel, her black eyes bright with wonder. "Alive, in a barrel of water. Look, you can see it down there at the bottom."

Daoud looked down into the clear water, saw a tapering dark shape moving gently just above the yellow pebbles lining the bottom of the pool. Smaller brown carp darted this way and that above it.

"The cardinal's gold makes great things possible," he said. "Will you leave us for a while, Rachel?"

Sophia handed a small leather-bound book to Rachel. "You may read these poems of Ovid if you like."

Rachel clasped the book to her narrow chest. "I do not read Latin, Signora, but I will look at the pictures."

"Have a care," said Sophia with a light laugh. "Some of them may shock you."

"Then I will try to enjoy being shocked." Rachel bowed and hurried away.

Daoud listened to the banter between the woman and the girl with mixed feelings. He liked both of them, and he enjoyed hearing them joke with each other. He imagined women must talk that way among themselves back in El Kahira, but if they did, men never had a chance to hear.

He also felt deeply uneasy at the growing closeness between Rachel and Sophia. The two of them shared a room on the top floor of Ugolini's mansion, next to Daoud's and Lorenzo's. His stomach tightened as he thought of the long talks they might have. What if Rachel learned that Sophia was actually a Byzantine woman, when she was supposed to be the cardinal's niece from Sicily? And what if Rachel then let that slip to a servant? Byzantines, Greek Catholics, were hated almost as much as Muslims here in the lands of the Latin Church. One small, seemingly harmless revelation like that could destroy them utterly.

I must get them separated.

Turning to Sophia, Daoud was struck once again that so much[136] beauty should openly display itself outside a harem. A narrow cloth-of-gold ribbon wound around her neck, crossed between her breasts and tied her pale peach gown tightly at the waist. Her lustrous black hair was bound in a net of gold thread.

She looked at him quizzically. Daoud studied her face. Her long, straight nose, dark red lips and delicate chin made him glad that Christian women went unveiled. He could well believe this woman had enjoyed the attentions of an emperor and a king. He himself could not look at her without wishing he might take her in his arms.

"Well, my Frankish-Turkish master-slave, what has your busy mind found for me to do? Do you wish me to get myself shot in the street by Venetians? Or create a disturbance in church and be tortured to death?"

Her thrusts caught Daoud off balance. Feeling a surge of anger, he was silent for a moment.

Then he jabbed a finger at her. "Do you understand what is at stake here?"

Her full lower lip pushed out. "I do not understand why you had to send a pious simpleton to a horrible death."

Guilt twisted in Daoud's guts like a Hashishiyya dagger. Yet he could not admit to Sophia that he regretted what happened to the heretic. She might approve his feeling, but she would also lose confidence in him.

"I will use any weapon I can find," he said. "Even if it breaks in my hand."

Sophia sat down on the marble lip of the fish pond. After a moment's hesitation Daoud sat beside her, smoothing his red cloak under him.

"Where is Lorenzo?" she asked. "I have not seen him since the day the Tartars arrived."

"He visits Spoleto, to find a few bold men for me." Lorenzo would bring back two or three men from Spoleto. Later he would gather more men in Viterbo, Chiusi, and other nearby cities. Imperceptibly over the coming months, bands of armed men—the Italians called them "bravos"—would gather in Orvieto to do Daoud's bidding.

Acting as a go-between for Daoud and the bravos was a mission at which Lorenzo should do well.

"The men Lorenzo brings here will not know my name or my face," he went on. "In a few days Cardinal Ugolini will take me before the pope, and I will warn him against the Tartars from my[137] own true experience of them. I must not be connected with other things done against the Tartars, disturbances among the people, armed attacks. That is why Rachel is such a danger."

She had been looking thoughtfully at the pebbled path. When he spoke Rachel's name, she lifted her head to stare at him.

"Are you going to make me give up Rachel?"

That annoyed him. "You agreed. Have you forgotten?"

"No, but I thought now that she has been with us awhile and there has been no trouble, you might change your mind."

"I do not change my mind so easily." By God, working with this woman was an ordeal. She argued and complained far too much. He wondered whether showing their faces in public made Christian women overbold.

"But where can she go? You would not really cast her out to starve."

"Tilia Caballo will take her in."

"You will force her into that horrible fat woman's brothel? And she only a child?"

"She is nearly thirteen. Many women are married by then."

"She has not even started bleeding yet."

"How do you know that?" Daoud felt somewhat embarrassed.

"She told me, of course."

"She need only be a serving girl at Tilia's."

"No doubt Tilia would find her too precious a commodity not to be sold. There are old men who would give that woman her own weight in gold to get their hands on an intact virgin child. And these high churchmen can afford it."

Daoud remembered the rough hands of the first Turks who captured him and shuddered inside himself. "She does not have to lie with men unless she chooses that life."

"Do you really think you and Tilia would be giving her a choice?" said Sophia angrily.

Again Daoud's feelings struggled against each other. He liked the way she spoke up fiercely for the child. Yet it angered him that she was making it harder for him to deal with the painful problem of Rachel.

"How much choice is anyone in this world given?" he demanded.

"Are you not here by choice, David?"

"I am the slave of my sultan," he said. "That is what the word[138] Mameluke means—slave. He sent me here. But I am also here by choice."

"To save Islam from the Tartars." She reached her fingertips into the water and dabbed the droplets on her forehead.

He caught the note of skepticism in her voice. "Yes. Do you not believe that?"

"Can you see yourself through my eyes?" There was an earnestness in her face, as if she badly wanted not to doubt him.

"No, how do you see me?" he asked gently.

"I see a Frankish warrior, fair of hair and face." She turned and looked directly at him, then quickly cast her eyes down. "Good looking enough, for a Frank." She gestured toward his knee, encased in scarlet silk. "You show a handsome leg in your new hose."

Why, she cares for me! He felt a little leap of delight, and reminded himself that he must not let himself be drawn to Sophia.

"You and the Turks call all men from western Europe Franks," he said. "But my parents were not from France, but of English descent."

"You could go back to France or England with your jewels and buy a castle and lands and an army of retainers and live like a little king. And forget all about Islam and the Tartars."

He did not want to argue with her. He wanted to reach out and touch her lips with his fingertips.

"I consider myself blessed by God to have been raised amid the glories of Egypt rather than in ignorance and dirt among those you call Franks."

She nodded. "We Greeks think the people of Arabia and Egypt are the only other civilized people in the world. Almost as civilized as we Greeks." She said the last with a smile, and he noticed that her cheeks dimpled.

He laughed. "What makes you so civilized?"

She clasped her hands between her knees and cast her eyes upward as if in deep thought. "Ah, well, our churches are huge and magnificent."

"So are our mosques."

"Our paintings and mosaics and statues of saints and angels and emperors are the most beautiful in the world."

"Idols," he interrupted, but he turned to her and smiled as she had. "The Prophet ordered idols destroyed."

"And therefore the art of painting languishes among you," she[139] said, poking her forefinger into his shoulder. "Someday I will show you my paintings if you promise not to destroy them."

His shoulder tingled where she had touched him. She must have been carried away by her feelings about the arts of her homeland to make such a gesture. Surely it could not have been deliberate. His hand rested between them on the edge of the fountain. He moved a bit closer to her so that the edge of his hand nearly touched her thigh.

He nodded. "I will teach you the art of calligraphy as my Sufi master practiced it, and save your soul."

I would really like to do that. Ah, but I cannot teach her to write Arabic. What if someone were to see her practice work?

He sighed inwardly.

"Hm," she grunted. "I doubt that you can save my soul. But as for writing, we are familiar with dramatists like Sophocles, philosophers like Aristotle. We read Latin poets like Ovid, whose book I just gave to Rachel. Here in his native Italy his work is thought licentious."

"I have read Aristotle and Plato in Arabic," he said. "And I have no doubt our Persian poets sing as gloriously as your Greeks and Latins. And for licentious tales, those told in our bazaars would turn your cheeks bright red."

Those cheeks were a smooth cream color, he observed. He looked about him. There was no one but himself and Sophia in the atrium. A multistoried gallery lined with columns and arches ran around all four sides of the central courtyard. There might be servants, spies for the cardinal, watching them, but he could see no one on any of the levels.

To the devil with them all.

For weeks he had been wanting to reach out and touch that unveiled beauty, that ivory skin. Now he did it. Very lightly his fingers traveled from her cheekbone to her jaw.

She reached up and took his hand—not to remove it, as he had momentarily thought she might, but to hold it briefly against her cheek, then let it go.

They sat silently looking at each other. She was