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

Lady, I cry you mercy. You know it not, but your gentle eyes are more puissant than a mighty host. From those eyes have flown such bolts as wound but do not kill, and they have pierced my heart. I will bleed forever within my breast where none can see, and all will wonder at my pallor and my weakness that have no outward cause.

The physick for any wound or illness, sages tell us, must be like that which caused the hurt. Thus only you, who have delivered this wound, can cure it. Let me come to you, I beg, under cover of night. Let me but adore you in secrecy for a moment, and my strength will return....

"He is almost as good as an Arab poet," David said mockingly as he handed her back the letter. Did it bother him, she wondered, that Simon wrote words of love to her? David, she saw, was working on a letter of his own on a tiny, thin scrap of vellum on a writing board which he now laid over his knees. As if to show her that Simon's letter was of no moment to him, he added to his own, writing rapidly with a quill dipped in an inkpot—but from right to left.

"You write backwards?" she said, seating herself beside him on the floor to look at his work.

"No, Christians do," he said with a faint smile. He covered what he was writing with his hand, but she caught a glimpse of lines that wavered and curled like tiny black snakes.

"Why bother to cover it? Do you really imagine that I could read that?" Lightly she touched the hand that covered the writing, noticing the fine yellow hairs on its back.[321]

"I have to keep up the habit of secrecy." He gave her one of his rare full smiles, and she wanted to reach out and hold his face between her hands. They were so close, she thought, sitting side by side here on the floor. And alone. They had but to stretch out on this thick Arabian carpet and wrap their arms around each other. But, of course, Ugolini or one of his servants might come in at any moment. Her longing for David was a constant ache. She had not thought of Manfred, save as a figure in the background of their lives, in weeks. And as long as she did not have to meet with Simon, she was fully Sophia Karaiannides, and not troubled by the yearning of Sophia Orfali for the young French count.

If only David did not insist on keeping her at a distance.

"Do you still want me to let Simon de Gobignon visit me secretly?" she asked.

There was a momentary silence between them.

Then, "Have I told you of any change in plans?" he said gruffly. He looked down at his scrap of parchment with the tiny crawling lines.

"What shall I let him do when we are together?" she asked quietly.

I know David is jealous, and I am goading him. I want to hear his jealousy.

He stood up abruptly and put his writing board on a table. He walked to an open window and stood looking out, rolling his thin parchment tightly between his fingers.

She hated this conversation. It turned him into a panderer and her into a whore. And she sensed that he hated it as much as she did.

"Do what you think is necessary," he said coldly.

"Necessary to what?" she demanded through gritted teeth.

He turned toward her and held up a finger. "To win his trust." He held up a second finger. "To hear and remember anything he may let slip." He held up a third finger. "Most important, to tell him things."

"Tell him what?"

"Tell him that Cardinal Ugolini has persuaded Fra Tomasso d'Aquino to oppose the alliance of Christians and Tartars."

"And if Simon believes you have won over Fra Tomasso, what will that accomplish?"

"The unbelievers are already desperate to repair the damage I have done to the reputation of the Tartars," David said. "If they[322] think they have lost Fra Tomasso, they may be provoked to do exactly the wrong thing."

"What would that be?" Sophia had heard that Muslims were devious. She certainly could not follow Daoud's mind in this.

"Not knowing Fra Tomasso is actually trying to remain neutral, they will use every means they have to try to win him back, as they think, to their side. I am hoping they will try to bring Cardinal de Verceuil's influence to bear. If de Verceuil goes to Fra Tomasso—or, even better, to Fra Tomasso's superiors—he may well drive the learned friar over to our side."

"What if you are wrong? What if de Verceuil and the other Franks do persuade Fra Tomasso to support the alliance? Would it not be better to leave him where he is, neutral?"

Daoud shook his head. "At least this way we are trying to control what happens."

She smiled. "I thought you Muslims believed in leaving things up to fate."

"The efforts of men are part of the workings of fate."

She would probably never understand his Muslim way of thinking. Perhaps he would not accept her love because he saw her as an unbeliever. It made her angry to think he might hold himself aloof from her because of her religion, and he not even a Muslim born.

"The Turks killed your parents," she said. "How can you be a Muslim?" It was something she had never understood and had wanted to know ever since she learned what he was, but she asked it now to hurt him.

He gave her that silent, burning stare, and she began to wonder, with a rippling of fear in the pit of her stomach, if she was in danger.

"That was my fate," he said. "I had to lose my mother and father to find God."

Before she could catch herself, she started to laugh with a kind of wildness, a touch of hysteria. She had been angry at him and had goaded him and feared his striking back, and instead he made a statement that was utterly absurd.

I lost my mother and father, and I gained nothing from it. I became nothing, neither daughter, nor wife, nor mother.

At her laughter, he took a step backward, as if she had struck him, and his tan face reddened. Now she felt terror. This time she had surely gone too far.[323]

"Forgive me. Your answer surprised me. It sounds so strange for a man of your profession to talk of finding God."

"What profession?"

"Well, you are a warrior and a spy, not a holy man."

"We do not need to speak of this." He turned away from her to stare out the window. She looked past him at red-tiled rooftops. A flock of pigeons circled in the distance.

"No," she said. "And as an unbeliever I suppose I would not understand."

Surprisingly he approached her and looked down with eyes that were serious and free of anger. "If you ever, in sincerity, want to know about Islam, come and ask me, and as best I can I will answer your questions. But do not speak foolishness. And do not laugh."

She thought she understood a bit better. The Muslims had captured his body, but then in his enslavement he had freely given his soul to their religion. He did not serve the Turks. He served the God they called Allah. How this had come about she could not imagine. But she knew a little better why his sultan had entrusted him with this undertaking. He was perfect for it.

"I must go," he said, as if eager not to talk anymore.

"To deliver your message?" She gestured toward the clenched fist that held the fragile parchment. "Is there truly someone in Orvieto who can read it?"

He smiled again. Oh, that smile! It so easily overcame her anger and fear.

"There is no harm in my telling you. It goes to my sultan, by carrier pigeon and ship." He must be proud, she thought, of his swift and secret courier system.

"And do you get messages back in the same way?"

"It takes over a month each way, so I have received but one message from the sultan since coming to Italy."

"Does the cardinal keep the pigeons?"

He had taken a tiny leather capsule out of his belt purse and was inserting the message into it now. "Madama Tilia keeps the pigeons."

"Then are you going to her house?" Sophia remembered with a feeling of guilt that she had not thought of Rachel in some time. "Please, David, will you see how Rachel is while you are there?"

David looked at her quickly and glanced away. She felt a coldness in her chest.[324]

"What has happened to her?" she demanded. She seized David's arm, lest he turn away from her.

He did not try to pull free. "She is well. She is already wealthy, in fact." His eyes did not meet hers at all now.

"Oh, my God! A man has had her!" She let go of David and turned her back on him.

There was another silence while fury churned in Sophia. She wanted to turn on David, to scratch his face with her nails. She wanted to tear her clothing in anguish, in mourning for Rachel's lost innocence. She hated herself for her part in the child's degradation.

"Sophia." David's voice came from behind her, soft, a little uncertain. "Were you so much older than Rachel when you—became a woman?"

Wrath overpowered her other feelings, and she turned on him. "Do you think that is what makes a girl into a woman? And you complain about speaking foolishness?"

"How old, Sophia?" His voice was more confident now, as if her anger had put him on firmer ground.

She thought of Alexis, the boy she had loved, and the long afternoons they had spent together hidden under an old broken arch covered with vines and lapped by waves on the Aegean side of Constantinople.

She shook her head. "Yes, I was her age. But I was in love. Doing it for money or for my city came later, when I was alone in the world and older."

There was appeal in his look. "But you know what it is to be alone and in need. Just as you freely chose to serve the Emperor of Constantinople with your body, so Rachel freely chose to sell her virginity for a fortune in gold."

His obtuseness made her more angry than ever. "You know nothing about freedom or women. Rachel was no more free to keep her virginity than you were free to remain a Christian after the Turks captured you. As for me, at least I know enough to hate the murderers of my parents."

His fingers dug into her shoulders until they hurt and the fire in his eyes terrified her. But she held her face frozen, refusing to show fear or pain.

"Say no more," he whispered in a strangled voice. "Not another word."

Saint Simon, protect me.[325]

Simon.

She could see the struggle in David's face and body. She had enraged him to the point where he wanted to hurt her. But he was not going to let himself do it. She thought she must have taken a hundred breaths before he released his grip on her shoulders, pushing her away a little.

Again she wondered what he had been through that would give him such iron self-control. She stood looking at him, breathing heavily in the aftermath of her terror.

I am a fool to despise anything as powerful as what he has.

He raked her with his eyes, then turned toward the door.

"Do not bother to find out about Rachel for me," she said. "I will go myself."

He stopped, and the fury in his face made her brace herself again for an attack.

"You cannot go. You cannot be seen going into Tilia's."

"Do you think I have served great men for years without learning how to move about a city unnoticed?"

"Go, then." His normally fair face was scarlet with rage. "And learn from Rachel's own lips what the Tartar did to her."

For a moment she seemed to go blind and deaf. She felt hot and cold at once. Her body had reacted to the meaning of his words before her brain understood them.

"Tartar! The man was a Tartar? You let a Tartar have her?" Sophia seized the first object near her hand and threw it at him. She saw as it struck him that it was the painted skull. It hit his chest with a thump, and he took a step backward.

"You filthy bastard!" she screamed. "Pig of a Turk!"

Expressionless, he turned without another