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

little O of wood. Under each opening was a couch, and the openings were low enough in the wall so that one could sit, or even lie down, and still look through them. The light in this room had to be lower than in the room where Sordello was, Daoud realized, or the peepholes would be visible on the other side of the wall.[337]

"Francesca is here for your pleasure, should you find what is happening on the other side of this wall arousing," said Tilia, dabbing with a handkerchief at the pool of sweat that kept forming at the top of her cleavage. It must be her weight, Daoud thought, that made her perspire so much.

"You have thought of everything, Tilia," said Daoud.

"There is more," she said with a smile, and pulled on an embroidered strip of purple velvet hanging from the wall. Daoud heard a bell ring somewhere beyond the wall. Then through the door to the outer gallery came two more of Tilia's black servants. The first one bore a wide silver tray, and Daoud smelled a familiar and savory odor that filled the air of the room. As the servant laid the tray on a round table, Daoud saw slices of roast kid garnished with shredded cheese on a bed of rice with peppers.

"Roast yearling!" Daoud exclaimed, delighted.

He bit into a sliver of kid. It was delicious. The meat was accompanied by sliced boiled lemons sprinkled with nadd and scented with ambergris.

"But where did you learn to prepare such a dish?"

The stout little woman rolled her eyes. "There is much you do not know about me. If I find you deserving I will tell you, one day. Meanwhile, partake! And you, Lorenzo. And Francesca. Levantine cookery will not poison you."

The second servant set a platter of peaches and figs and a flagon of kaviyeh beside the lamb. A good meal for a long night, thought Daoud.

He sat on one of the couches to peer through a peephole. He could see the three women gathered around Sordello's inert form. They were massaging him gently, as instructed.

But it would be a while yet before he woke and found himself with three beautiful women, every pleasure they gave him enhanced by hashish.

"In the south we know and love Saracen dishes," said Lorenzo with a grin as he licked his fingers after helping himself to the kid. "But, Madama Tilia, am I to have food only? Shall I not have a companion to help me endure this night's work?"

Tilia reached up and pulled at the end of his grizzled mustache. "Only rarely does a Sicilian bullock set foot in my house. I am saving you for myself."

"Meraviglioso!" Lorenzo exclaimed. "Instead of one of the handmaidens of Venus I shall have Venus herself."[338]

Lorenzo's wit was itself meraviglioso, thought Daoud. But for him, something other than the games of Venus was uppermost in his mind. Ever since his angry words with Sophia of a few days before, he had been troubled by the thought of Rachel. And especially tonight when, even as he passed the time here at Tilia's, Simon de Gobignon was visiting Sophia. Sophia had been to see Rachel herself, but had refused to talk about her. He wanted to reassure himself that Sophia had been wrong to condemn him and that all was well with the girl.

"While we wait, Tilia," he said, "I would have a private word with you."

When they stepped out of the room Daoud said, "I want to see Rachel."

Tilia frowned and was silent for a moment. "In all honesty, she is well and happy, and richer by nearly two thousand florins. Your companion Sophia visited her and found nothing amiss. And the roast kid will get cold."

Two thousand florins. Nearly enough, Daoud reckoned, to buy a mansion like Ugolini's. But what of Rachel herself?

"Just take me to her, Madama."

When he first saw Rachel's surprised smile, he thought that she was indeed well and happy, as Tilia had said. But then her dark gaze was averted, her straight brows drawn together in a little frown. She started playing with the gold lace on the hem of her white satin gown.

Daoud said. "Well, Rachel. You look like a queen sitting there."

Each woman at Tilia's had her special room, Daoud knew. The hangings in Rachel's room were cream-colored, the tables and chairs and the bedposts painted ivory, and the canopy over the bed was cloth-of-gold. She sat in one corner of the bed, with her legs curled under her.

It must have been on this bed that the Tartar had her.

"I am so pleased to see you, Messer David," she said in a low voice. "How can I serve you?" She smiled at him, but his trained eye saw that it was a false smile. And the hint of defiance he had noticed on first meeting her in Rome was gone.

"Rachel, I only wanted to see with my own eyes that you are content here and well treated."

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, and she shrugged. "I have never till now known such comfort, Messer David."[339]

Daoud realized that he should ask her about the Tartar. Tilia herself had given him an account of Rachel's first night with John Chagan. The pain Daoud felt at hearing what he had delivered Rachel to was relieved only slightly by knowing that the Tartar had been surprisingly gentle with her. At first, though, he had hated Tilia for being willing to risk Rachel, and, impulsively, he had resolved to kill John. That made him feel a little better, until, a moment later, he remembered that hating Tilia and killing the Tartar would be no help whatever to Rachel. And he, as much as anyone, was guilty of what had happened to her.

Since John Chagan's first visit, Daoud knew, he had been back twice more, paying a thousand florins each time to spend part of the night with Rachel. He seemed much taken with her, and continued to be careful and kindly in his use of her body, Tilia reported. Watching them, Tilia had learned nothing that Daoud could use. But there were things Rachel might have noticed, useful things Tilia could not have observed through a spy hole.

Not tonight. I will ask her for information another time.

One thing he must know, though, was whether Tilia had been telling him the truth. "Have you been hurt in any way?"

Rachel looked at him, looked away and sighed. How enormous her dark eyes were, Daoud thought, how soulful. Her stare made him uncomfortable, and he was thankful that she soon looked away. She kept on toying with the hem of her gown.

"Everyone has been very kind. You need not worry about people hurting me. After all, Messer David, you are a merchant, as my Angelo was, and you understand that goods must be kept in the best possible condition to obtain the best price. Everyone here understands that, too."

There was no mistaking the bitterness and despair in her voice. Had he felt any differently after the Turks captured him, raped him, beat him, and sold him in the slave market?

"You are being given the money you have earned?"

She nodded, not looking up. "My share is five hundred florins for each of his visits. And he gave me a purse of three hundred the first time. A bonus, because I was a virgin. Madama Tilia keeps it for me, but I am allowed to look at it and count it." She looked up suddenly and said earnestly, "I could not have fallen into better hands than Madama Tilia's." But there was a deadness in her eyes that belied what she said.[340]

"We did not force you to give yourself to the Tartar," he burst out.

A light came into her eyes then, the fire of anger. "Thank you for reminding me that I became a whore of my own free will. Is that why you came to see me, Messer David? To tell me that this is all my own fault?" Her lips stretched in a ferocious grin. "Pay me enough and I will say anything you want to hear."

Rachel's eyes were fixed on his, and his on hers, and they stayed that way, frozen, until Daoud shut his eyes and slowly turned away.

He could not even think of a word to say in farewell. As he closed the door to her room behind him, his eyes burned and there was an aching heaviness in his chest. Remorse. He felt as if he had killed a child—two children. Not just Rachel, but the boy David who had always lived inside him. The pain was unbearable. He longed to escape it.

XXXI

Tilia eyed Daoud apprehensively. "Is it not as I have said—she is well and happy?" She lifted the pectoral cross to raise its gold chain away from her bosom and mop her flesh with a square of pale green silk. He remembered the blade in the cross, and wondered if she was afraid he might attack her.

He wished he could hate her for what had happened to Rachel. But all Tilia had done was introduce Rachel to a way of life that Tilia herself had found rewarding.

"She is as well as I could have hoped," he said, hearing in his own voice the deadness he had heard in Rachel's. He sat down heavily on a divan.

Lorenzo looked at him searchingly. His big mustache hid his mouth when it was in repose, but his eyes were wide, and they glistened wetly in the light of the one candle that illuminated this small room. The Sicilian's hands lay limp in his lap, the hands of a man in pain and unable to do anything about it.[341]

Through a peephole Daoud saw that Sordello had awakened. The gray-haired bravo was staring about him in wonder, only six feet away from Daoud's eye, while Maiga gently pressed his shoulders back against the divan, Orenetta stroked his chest and whispered to him, and Caterina's blond head rose and fell between his legs.

Francesca sat on the divan beside Daoud, offering him a slice of kid. He took it and chewed it, but even though Tilia had cooked and seasoned it perfectly, it was tasteless to him.

It was not only Rachel's fate that troubled him, he realized. It was what was happening on the other side of this wall—those three lovely women ministering like houris of paradise to that old ruffian. They would do it with skill and even with the appearance of enthusiasm because they had no choice. They did not even think of choosing. They just did as they were told. Their orders came, through Tilia, from Daoud. Francesca, here beside him, would do whatever he wanted, not because it was what she wanted, but because she, too, had no choice.

And he had never really thought what it meant for women to live this way until he saw, tonight, what had happened to Rachel.

God is a flame, Sheikh Saadi used to say, and each human soul a spark from that flame. When we treat our brother or sister like a thing, we trample God Himself.

They were all slaves in this house of Tilia's. He had sent Rachel here to become a slave.

I, too, was once a slave.

But as a full-fledged Mameluke he was free. These women did not have that way of escape. As long as they could, they must perform the act of love, as it was called, with whoever paid them, or starve.

Baibars had done well to close the brothels of El Kahira. It was the very meaning of love that it was freely given. Love was free submission to another, just as Islam was free submission to God. Daoud had first experienced love when he and Nicetas gave their bodies to each other. And later with Blossoming Reed, even though theirs was an arranged marriage, that, too, was love.

He could not lie with Francesca tonight. It would be too much like lying with Rachel. He could not watch what Orenetta, Caterina, and Maiga would do with Sordello. The thing he was having them do to Sordello was an abomination. Despicable though Sordello was, he, too, had a soul, and tonight Daoud was trampling upon God in the person of Sordello.[342]

And yet he must see that all went as planned tonight. Did he want his homeland destroyed?

But I have to get away from here.

He stood up suddenly. "I must go back to Cardinal Ugolini's." Tilia, Lorenzo, and Francesca stared at him.

Tilia recovered first. "But you were to stay the night here. What about—" She gestured toward the wall.

Daoud shook his head. "I am not needed. And I have an important matter to discuss with Ugolini."

"Which you just remembered," Lorenzo said, eyeing him sourly.

Daoud pressed his lips together. "Those three women know what to do. There