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

Even here, where Muslims are tolerated, they have tried to kill him. And when he is in the pope's territory, every man will be his enemy.

She remembered the harsh face with its prominent cheekbones and gray eyes and thought, Perhaps being alone holds no terror for him.

After all, I am alone, and I have made the best of it.

"What is his mission in Orvieto?" she asked.

She listened intently as Manfred told her a tale of trying to prevent the great powers of East and West from joining together to crush Islam between them.

Manfred continued, "David hopes to influence the pope's counselors to turn against the Tartars, that they may sway the pope himself."

"How can one man attempt such a huge undertaking?"[36]

"He brought me an exceedingly valuable stone, an emerald, which I will trade for jewels he can carry to Orvieto and exchange for coins. It pleases me greatly that the sultan would entrust me with such a gem. That helped to change my mind about this David. The Saracens are men of honor in their way." He smiled at her, looking pleased with the situation and pleased with himself. But she was quiet, unmoving, waiting for him to say the thing she feared to hear.

"But you are right," Manfred went on. "He cannot do it alone."

Warm yellow light once more filled their curtained cubicle. The cloud had passed away from the sun. But her heart froze.

"I have decided I must entrust my own most precious jewel to David." He put his hand on hers.

Oh, no! she thought, anguish tearing at her heart as his words confirmed her guess. She felt a terrible pain, as if he had run her through with a spear. She wanted to clutch at him, hold him in spite of himself. She had not felt so lost since her mother and father and the boy she loved were killed by the Franks.

She studied his face to memorize it, because soon she would leave him and probably never see him again. It would do her no good to let him see how she felt. She must decide what face to show him.

I am a woman of Constantinople, alone in a country of strangers. And we are an ancient people, wise and subtle, and we bide our time.

She sat up in the bed, hugging her knees, thinking.

"How will my going with him help you?"

He grunted softly, and she looked at him. He appeared relieved. She was making it easy for him. She felt the beginning of dislike for him stirring within her.

"I thought you would be perfect for this. And you are."

His words puzzled her, and she almost let her growing anger show. "I do not see what you see, Sire."

"We are in bed. You may call me Manfred."

But I do not want to call you Manfred.

"What is it you think I would be so good at?"

"You can mask your feelings," he said with a smile. "You are doing it now. You are very good at it."

"Thank you, Sire."

He shook his head, sat up beside her, and put an arm around her shoulders. "I meant it when I said you are precious to me. But you[37] must go with this man. I cannot tell you all my reasons, but it is for your own safety as well."

No doubt he was being honest with her, though he was not telling her everything. Just the other day one of Manfred's servants, whom she had cultivated with gifts, warned her that Manfred's queen, Helene of Cyprus, was demanding that Manfred break with Sophia. Of course, Manfred would never be willing to admit that his wife could force him to do such a thing.

She wanted to get off by herself and think this out, and cry, let tears release some of the pain she felt. This curtained bed confined her like a dungeon cell. She found her white shift amid the rumpled bedclothes. Getting up on her knees, she raised the shift over her head and struggled into it.

"Where are you going?" Manfred asked.

She crawled around the bed to look for her gown and her belt. "I have arrangements to make. Packing to do."

"I have not dismissed you," he said a bit sullenly.

"Yes, you have," she said, deliberately making her voice so low that it would be hard for him to hear.

"You have not heard everything." He took her arm. She wanted to pull away, but she let him hold her.

"I need your help," he went on. "You see, if David fails, in a year or two I may be dead."

He let go of her. She picked up the blue gown she had so eagerly thrown off an hour ago. Her fingers crushed the silk. She wanted to be alone, but she needed to learn more. She paused, kneeling beside him.

"God forbid, Sire! Why should you be dead?"

"This time the pope is offering my crown to the French."

Sitting down, laying the gown in her lap, she sighed and turned all her attention to him.

"Why can you not make peace with the pope? Why is he so determined to dethrone you?"

"Like all storied feuds, it goes back so far that no one can remember what started it," said Manfred, smiling with his lips but not his eyes. "At present the pope refuses to recognize me because my father promised to give up the crown of Sicily."

He paused a moment, and fixed her with a strangely intent stare. "And because my father did not marry my mother. Even though he loved her only, and never loved any of his three empresses."

He is trying to tell me something, Sophia thought.[38]

But before she could reply, he went on with his tale of the Hohenstaufens and the popes. "As the popes see it, to have a Hohenstaufen ruling southern Italy and Sicily is like having a knife at their throats. This pope, Urban, is a Frenchman, and he is trying to get the French to help him drive us out."

The French. It was the French who, over fifty years ago, had stormed Constantinople, looted it, and ruled over it until driven out by Michael Paleologos.

And now the French threatened Manfred.

From his island of Sicily, how easy to launch another invasion of Constantinople.

In memory she saw Alexis, the boy she loved, fall as the French crossbow bolt hit him. She heard him cry out to her.

Go, Sophia, go!

Why was I saved that night if not that I might help to stop the French from conquering Constantinople again?

"I cannot send an army to Orvieto to stop the pope's intrigues against me," Manfred said. "That would turn all Christendom against me. But I can send my two best people, my brave and clever Lorenzo and my beautiful and clever Sophia. Together with David, you two perhaps can turn my enemies against each other. You may be gone six months or a year. And afterward you can come back."

He did not take his eyes from hers as he said it, but there was a flickering in their depths that told her he was not being honest with her.

"When will I meet this—Mameluke?"

"Tomorrow we go falconing. The forest is a good place to talk freely." He paused and grinned at her. "But do not dress just yet. This may be my last chance to enjoy your lovely body."

She looked away. She felt no desire for him. She was sick of being enjoyed.

"Forgive me, Sire, I have much to do," she said. Before he could object, she had slipped through the curtains around the bed and was pulling her blue gown over her head. She had left half her clothes behind with Manfred, but that did not matter. Her own quarters were near, and later she could send a servant for her things.

As she hurried out the door, she pretended not to hear Manfred's angry cry, muffled by the bed's thick curtains.

Sophia wrapped in white linen the satin mantle in which she had been presented at Manfred's court. She laid it in her traveling chest,[39] then brought her jewel box from the table on which it had stood since she'd arrived here, and laid it on the mantle.

Manfred would gladly have ordered servants to do this packing for her, but it was easier to preserve her privacy when she did for herself.

She looked down at the polished ebony box with the double-headed eagle of Constantinople in mother-of-pearl inlay. A gift from the Basileus when he sent her to Sicily. The eagle of Constantinople, tradition said, was the inspiration for the two-headed Hohenstaufen eagle.

She folded a green woolen tunic and laid it over the jewel box. As she stood with her hands pressed on the tunic, sorrow welled up within her.

Was there ever a woman more alone in the world than I am?

In one night made hideous by the flames of the burning city and the screams of the dying, she had lost her father, Demetrios Karaiannides, the silversmith, and her mother, Danuta, and her two sisters, Euphemia and Eirene. The people of the Polis had risen against the Franks, and the Franks had retaliated by killing everyone they could lay hands upon.

The boy she was going to marry, the boy she loved, had fled with her to the Marmara waterfront. There they found a small boat, and then the crossbow bolt had torn through his back. Dying, he cast her adrift.

Go, Sophia, go!

From then on she was alone.

What am I? What is a woman alone?

Not a queen or an empress, not a wife or a mother, not a daughter, not a nun. Not mistress, now that Michael and Manfred had each sent her away. Not courtesan or even harlot.

Crossing the Bosporus to Asia Minor, she had survived. She did not care to remember the means by which she survived. Of all of them, the least dishonorable was theft.

She let herself be used, and she could be very useful. She found her way to the Byzantine general Michael Paleologos, who wanted to take Constantinople back from the Franks.

Her help had been important to Michael, and he had rewarded her after he reconquered the Polis and made himself its Basileus by keeping her as his favorite for a time. And she had rejoiced to see Constantinople liberated from the barbarians, even though no one she loved was left alive in it.[40]

Then Michael had made her leave the one place she loved, sending her to Manfred in Italy.

And now, just when she had begun to lose the feeling of not belonging anywhere, just when she felt she had found safe harbor with Manfred, she was cut loose again.

She felt the tears coming, and fought them. She turned her mind away from the questions that plagued her and thought about her packing.

Saint Simon should go into the chest next.

In the center, where clothing above and below would protect him.

She went to the table by the window, where the small icon stood between two candles in tall brass candlesticks. She picked up the saint and reverently kissed his forehead, then held the icon out at arm's length to look at it. The eyes dominated the portrait, transfixing her with a blue stare.

She had painted it herself a few years before, copying another, larger icon that belonged to the Basileus Michael. Simon's cheeks were hollow, his mouth a tight line, his chin sharp. His hair hung brown and lank to his shoulders, framing his face.

She had used real gold dust in the paint for the halo. Michael was generous to her, and he laughed when she told him that she spent some of the money he gave her on expensive paint for an icon. The idea of a woman who painted amused him, like the bear that danced in the Hippodrome.

Beyond the gold of the halo was the ocher of the desert and, standing lonely over the saint's right shoulder, the pillar on which he had lived in penance for fifteen years, the pillar that had given him his name—Simon Stylites.

Why do I reverence this saint? Because he knew how to endure alone, and that is what is most important.

Rest well, dear saint, she prayed as she lowered the icon into the cedar chest. She closed the gilded wooden doors that protected the painting, breaking the grip of Simon's staring blue eyes.

She next opened a small box of dark, polished wood, its lid inlaid with bits of mother-of-pearl forming a bird with swirling wings. A dozen small porcelain jars lay in velvet-lined recesses shaped to hold them. Each jar was ornamented with the same floral pattern in a different color, each color that of the powdered pigment the tightly corked jar contained. Take a pinch of the powder, add water and the clear liquid from a raw egg, and you had