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

money. So when we no longer have youth and beauty to sell, we can take care of ourselves. And I tell you that a woman in her later years is likely to be a better friend to herself than any husband."

She speaks with conviction. But I cannot trust her, either. I have not had a true friend in this world since Angelo was killed.

Rachel sighed. "It is just that after tonight there is no turning back. This is for the rest of my life."

"That is right," said Tilia. "You will give up something that you can lose only once. When you have a commodity as unique as that, my child, you owe it to yourself to get the most you can for it." Her eyes hardened. "Every man wants to be the first to pierce a woman and hear her cry out and make her bleed. But what woman gets anything worth having in return? She gives it away on a dark night to some furfante with a smooth tongue and a handsome leg, or else the tonto she married takes it from her and then tells her to go wash the bed linen." She turned to stare at Rachel. "Do you know what I got for my virginity?" Her cheeks were red with anger.

"What did you get, Signora?" The heat with which Tilia spoke reassured Rachel. This was what the woman really felt. She was not just talking to lead Rachel astray.

"Blows and slavery." Tilia thrust her face close to Rachel's to underline her words. "Blows and slavery. The Genoese, may leprosy devour their limbs and may their prickles fall off in their hands,[288] raided Otranto. They raped me—that was how I lost my virginity. They sold me to the Turks."

"You were a slave to the Turks?" Rachel gasped. "Where?" And how did she escape them and come to Orvieto and grow so rich and fat?

Tilia looked away. "Never mind. It would take too long to tell you." Rachel sensed that there was something here Tilia did not want to talk about. But she resolved to pry the story out of her one day.

Tilia's head swung back to face her. "Have I told you what you are getting this night for giving this man this proud moment of possessing a virgin?"

"I—I do not remember." Tilia had named a figure, but it had been so outrageous and Rachel had been so frightened by the prospect that she had promptly forgotten it.

"By the five wounds of Jesus, you truly are a child, not to remember something so important! Well, fix it in your mind this time, and think of it when you are wondering whether you are doing right. Five hundred golden florins. Five hundred, newly minted in Florence. That is your share. That is half of what he is paying. The other half is mine, as is only just. Think of it. He pays the price of a palazzo for you because you are a very young, beautiful virgin, and that is what he most desperately desires. Compare that with what most women get when they let a man have them for the first time."

That is far more money than Angelo ever saw in his whole life. Who is this man who will pay so much to have me? Rachel supposed Tilia would tell her who the man was if she asked, but she had decided it was better not to know anything about him ahead of time. That way she could imagine that he would be someone kind and gentle.

"I do not know what I will do with all that money," Rachel said softly.

If I lose it, all this will have been for nothing.

Tilia's wide mouth stretched even wider in a grin. "I will show you how to plant it."

"Plant it?"

"Yes, and then watch it grow. There are many, many fields in which to plant money. You can place it with the Templars or certain Lombards or men I know among your own Jews, and they use it, and when they give it back to you there is more. Miracolo! Or you[289] can buy beautiful and valuable things with it, whose worth increases as they get older. Or you can buy shares in a ship of Venice or Pisa, or even"—she spat—"Genoa, or a German caravan, and when the caravan or the ship comes back, if it comes back, you get your money back tenfold. That is risky, but it is the quickest way to great wealth."

Rachel felt a momentary excitement. Then she remembered how she was going to get the money. Her body felt colder than ever, cold as death. This, she thought, must be the way that poor man they killed last week felt when he was waiting for the torturers to come for him. She shuddered and hugged her knees tight against her chest under the gauzy gown Tilia had given her to wear.

Tilia must have seen the sudden darkening of her mood. She moved over to the bed and sat down beside Rachel, making the frame of the bed groan alarmingly. She put a hand lightly on Rachel's arm.

"Listen, Rachel. I was raped. I will not be party to the rape of another. You do not have to do this. Just tell me that you do not want to."

A sudden heat rushed through Rachel's body. She was no longer cold. She burned with anger.

"Stop saying that!" she screamed. "Will you leave me alone?" Being reminded over and over again that she was doing this of her own free will was an even worse torture than imagining what the man would do to her.

Oh, God, I am going to cry and make myself ugly, and he will not want me and I will not get the five hundred florins.

She pressed her hands against her face, trying to stop tears.

"I was asking you to think, not carry on," said Tilia reprovingly. "If you want to walk well in life, you had better learn not to burst into tears when you have an important decision to make."

Rachel took deep breaths to calm herself.

"I decided days ago that I could not do any better for myself than this, Signora Tilia. But I am so afraid. Perhaps the man will not want me when he sees how afraid I am."

Tilia grinned broadly. "Nonsense. The more innocent and timid you appear, the more you will delight him."

Rachel heard a light tapping at the door, and her heart beat so hard she thought it would burst.

Tilia rose, brushing down her green satin gown. "The signal that he has arrived. I thought he would never get here. It's almost morning.[290] I must go down and greet him, child. But remember, I will be watching everything."

I do not really like that.

Tilia winked and pushed on what looked like a plaster panel between two gold-painted beams in the wall. It swung away from her and she squeezed through.

Rachel sat in the bed, drawn up into the corner of it that was farthest from the door, and waited. She played nervously with fingers that felt like icicles.

A short time later she caught a glimpse of Tilia pushing open the door, but her eyes fixed on the man standing in the doorway.

She drew in a deep, gasping breath. She wanted to scream.

The man standing in the doorway was short and broad. He wore a long, brightly colored silk robe. His skin was brown, his eyes little black slits. A white mustache drooped below his flat nose. A thin white beard like a goat's hung from his chin.

She had seen this man once before, when she watched from the window of Sophia's room at Cardinal Ugolini's, the day he arrived in Orvieto in a great procession.

Rachel's breath, so long held, burst out of her in a moan.

The man who had come to take her virginity was a Tartar.

"It was as much by my choice as the cardinal's that I did not attend the contessa's reception," said Friar Mathieu, yawning. "How could a Little Brother of San Francesco stay up till all hours with people stuffing themselves with rich food and drinking wine? And gambling, and kissing each other in dark corners?"

The old Franciscan's eyes were watery with sleepiness, but the corners of his mouth quirked with humor under his white mustache. He sat on the edge of the cot, which, as he had insisted when he moved into the Palazzo Monaldeschi, was the only piece of furniture in the room. Simon paced the floor, unable to stand still.

Simon felt the barb in the mention of kissing, but he did not mind it. When he routed Friar Mathieu out of his narrow bed in a remote corner of the palace, he admitted at once that he had been in the atrium with Ugolini's niece, Sophia, while David of Trebizond was so disastrously baiting the Tartars.

"I was wrong to pay court to the cardinal's niece." He could still feel her lips under his, still taste them, and his body tingled at the remembrance. "I am as much at fault as de Verceuil. But it was he who found that ignorant woman to replace you as interpreter,[291] and then he went off to gamble—with David's servant, of all people—and left the Tartars alone and unprotected."

Friar Mathieu shook his head. "Yes, and drinking that wine of Montefiascone. I wonder why God chose to make those particular grapes so irresistible."

Simon pounded his fist into his palm. "We must confront de Verceuil, Friar Mathieu."

A deep crease appeared between the thick white eyebrows. "At this hour?"

Simon saw the fatigue in Mathieu's wrinkled face and felt guilty. "I am most heartily sorry for awakening you at this ungodly time of night. It was just—"

"Just that you could not sleep yourself." The friar laughed. "But it is a most Godly time of night. The fact is, I would have had to get up soon to say the first part of my office. Were I living with my brother Franciscans—as I wish I were—I would be up chanting lauds with them. But I fear the cardinal will be neither willing nor able to talk to us if we go to him now."

"So much damage has been done, Friar Mathieu. The contessa is furious. I could not begin to reason with her. She went on and on, talking about murderers of babies. I would not be surprised if tomorrow morning she ordered us to leave her palazzo."

The old man raised a hand. "Pope Urban would not let her do that. It would be an insult to the ambassadors."

"Cardinal le Gros told me the pope looked pale and shaken when he left. He might not care whether the ambassadors are insulted. We can have no more of de Verceuil's blundering."

Or mine.

Friar Mathieu shook a finger at him. "What happened tonight is not the cardinal's doing. None of this is accidental. What happened tonight shows that Ugolini will do everything in his power to block this alliance."

"But Ugolini did nothing tonight. It was all that man from Trebizond."

"That is like saying that the axe chops the tree down, and not the woodsman wielding it. Ugolini brought David to the contessa's reception. He brought David's servant, an accomplished gambler as well as a recruiter of brigosi. And he brought his niece, Sophia."

At the mention of Sophia a sharp pain went through Simon's chest.

Sophia cannot be part of it. Not when I have just found her.[292]

Was it possible that the passion she had showed in their time together in the atrium was a sham? That would be too cruel. And yet, how could he prove that she was innocent?

"It is just a coincidence that Sophia is here in Orvieto now," he said. "She is as undecided about this matter of the Tartars as the pope himself is."

But is the pope still undecided, Simon wondered as he spoke.

The wrinkles around Friar Mathieu's faded blue eyes deepened a little. "Well, I would not expect you to say otherwise. A knight does not doubt the honor of a lady he has kissed."

Simon sensed Friar Mathieu's skepticism, but he could not bring himself to believe that Sophia had knowingly been the cardinal's agent. This woman had made Italy a place of enchantment for him.

Friar Mathieu went on. "We both agree, do we not, that the luring of Cardinal de Verceuil by David's man, Giancarlo, was planned by Ugolini?"

Glad to be on safer ground, Simon nodded vigorously. "We agree on that, to be sure."

"But we cannot simply go to de Verceuil, as you proposed, and denounce him for having left the room with Giancarlo. Not when he can at once point out that you also left the room—with Sophia."

Simon turned his back on Friar Mathieu and stared out, almost unseeing, toward the window. It had neither