Ugolini sat staring at the skull while Daoud held his breath.
The little cardinal pulled at his whiskers and looked up at Daoud. "What must I do?"
Daoud let his breath out. Strength surged back into his body, and despair fled before it.
"Tell me," he said, "if Fra Tomasso were to turn against the Tartars, what do you think the Franks would do about it?"
Ugolini frowned. "I think that then the only way to reach him would be through the Dominicans. If his superiors commanded himto change his opinion on the Tartars, or to be silent, he would have to obey."
"And who, of the alliance's chief supporters, would speak to the Dominican order for the French?" Daoud pressed.
"Count Simon lacks the authority," Ugolini said. "Friar Mathieu is eloquent and knows the Tartars well, but I cannot imagine that the chief Dominicans would pay any attention to an ordinary Franciscan priest."
"What of de Verceuil?" Daoud asked.
Ugolini nodded. "As a cardinal, de Verceuil can speak as an equal to the head of the Dominican order."
"Good," said Daoud. "That is what I hoped you would tell me." He turned away from Ugolini. He had accomplished as much as he could for the moment. Exhaustion struck him like a mace on the back of his head.
"Lorenzo, when you meet that bravo Sordello, tell him that I have decided he and the three with him can join us. I am going to bed."
"I have a bad feeling about him," said Lorenzo.
Daoud paused to consider this. It was precisely for such advice that he needed Lorenzo.
He put his hand on Lorenzo's shoulder. "If he is spying on us, we need to know who sought to place him in our camp. Let him feel he is secure with us. Then start keeping a close watch on him. See to whom he leads us."
Daoud turned from Lorenzo to look at Sophia. She was looking at him intently, but he could not tell what she was thinking or feeling. Tired as he was, he wished she would come to bed with him. If only she were willing. If only he could invite her.
Rachel lay with her face to the wall, crying silently. She wanted not to weep because she was still afraid of offending the Tartar, even though it was all over.
She realized that her gown was still above her waist, and she lifted her hips to pull it down. But what was the point of modesty for her anymore? Especially with this man, who had taken her virginity.
She heard the rustling of silk as he dressed behind her. He had not taken all of his clothes off, just enough to bare his member. It had been smaller than she imagined. Once, in a stable in Perugia,a boy had shown himself to her and tried to rape her, but she had run away. That stableboy's thing had been much bigger.
John said something to her, but she understood only his "Reicho." He was probably telling her to stop crying.
Even though he had been kindly before getting into the bed with her, she had expected that he would become like the wild, savage Tartars she had heard about. His weight on top of her, even though he was a small man, had frightened her, but he had entered her slowly, and stopped and waited when she cried out. In the end it had been she, wanting in desperation to get it over with, who finished the piercing by pressing upward with her hips. His few quick thrusts and his shout of pleasure—a drawn-out horseman's yell—followed in a moment. And that was all there was to it.
She sobbed aloud suddenly and bit into the pillow. The thought that her whole future had been decided by a moment that had not lasted even as long as it takes to light a candle was too much to bear.
Angelo would say I am not a good woman anymore.
The Tartar spoke again, and tapped her on the shoulder. His voice was soft and kind. Quieting her sobs with one last, deep, shuddering sigh, she rolled over to look at him. More smiles and nods from him. Yes, he wanted to cheer her up. She sensed that he knew something about women, and what he knew had come not just from rapes committed on the battlefield. He must have a wife in the faraway land he came from, and he must, long ago, have done to that wife what he had just done to Rachel. More than one wife, she reminded herself, and more than one deflowering, because according to Tilia, the Tartars took several wives, as the Muslims did. He was probably a grandfather many times over back in that land.
He stood beside the bed, fully dressed. He had even tucked back and knotted his hair behind his head. His grin broadened when she looked at him. Rachel had not seen a Jewish or a Christian man as old as John with such good teeth.
He untied a small bag from his belt. He held it out to her. Should she take it? Of course she should. Was not getting paid the whole point of what she had just gone through? Was not money what her body was to be traded for from now on?
"Thank you, Messer John," she said, and reached out her hand. But he came closer and rubbed the soft leather of the bag against her cheeks, to dry her tears. She understood what he was trying totell her—that this money should pay her for her pain. Being a pagan, he could not understand the greater pain of her soul because she had sinned, because she had shamed her family and dishonored herself forever.
But I have no family—none living. That is why I am here.
John put the bag into her hand and closed her fingers over it, then pushed her hand against her chest. The bag was very heavy for its small size. He frowned, put his finger to his lips, and waved his hand. He was trying to tell her, she thought, that this was a special present for her, that she was not to tell Madama Tilia about it. He did not know that Tilia had been watching everything they had done together.
He pressed the callused palm of his hand against her cheek and said something, then turned and quickly walked out of the room.
And Rachel was alone with her desolation. She wanted to sleep. There were no windows in this room, but it must have been morning by now. She realized that she did not feel sleepy, although she was tired. She felt a dull ache down inside herself, where he had broken the seal of her virginity. The bag of money lay heavy in her lap. Perhaps if she drank some wine it would help her sleep.
She heard men's voices, loud and rough, in other parts of the house. A man laughed, and then a woman laughed. How many men had come with the Tartar? She felt too tired even to crawl to the edge of the bed and pour herself the wine. She picked up the money and pushed it under a pillow. Perhaps Tilia had not seen him give it to her. She had done this for money, and she ought to get as much as she could for it.
The door swung open and Tilia was standing there, her wide mouth stretched in a broad smile, and her hands rose in benediction. "You were just what he wanted. He seemed most pleased."
Rachel tried to smile. "It was not as bad as I thought it would be."
Tilia shrugged. "Men who are terrible in warfare are sometimes kinder in bed. I thought his zipolo rather small, did you not? That was lucky for you."
Rachel felt her face grow hot. "I have seen only one other—when it was hard like that. And itwasbigger."
"Well," said Tilia, "small as this Tartar was, he was able to mount you twice, and that is remarkable for a white-haired man who has been up drinking all night." Then she laughed. "Ah, but you should have seen the French cardinal who came here with thisTartar. He asked for three women, and he swived each one of them mightily. Those French! I care not for their high-horse airs, but they are a lusty lot."
Rachel felt herself smiling. Was it so easy to begin to think like a whore and laugh at whores' jokes?
"Well," said Tilia, "we must get you washed out at once. You do not want to be giving birth to a little Tartar in your first year as a woman, do you?" She went to a cabinet and drew out a grayish-white bladder with a tube coiled beside it.
"Peculiar-looking if you have never seen one before," said Tilia. "But there is nothing to worry about. It does not hurt. We just fill the pig's stomach with warm water and squeeze it, and the water goes through the vellum tube and up inside you. The women of Rome used them centuries ago when they did not want to get pregnant. I suppose that is why the barbarians finally overran Italy."
Rachel looked at the thing Tilia laid on the bed beside her and felt sick.
"Oh, by the way," said Tilia as she went back to the cabinet and got out a basin and a pitcher, "I will let you keep the purse he gave you. He looked so happy when he left here, I think you deserve it."
The Tartar could come and go as he pleased, thought Rachel, but she must stay. Even now, with over five hundred florins, more money than she had ever had in her life, she was alone. She knew how to travel; she had traveled for two years with Angelo. But she also knew the terrors and dangers of the road, dangers that ultimately had killed Angelo.
The best she could hope for was to endure this life for a year or two, get what she could from it, let it make her rich. When she did leave, she would have enough money to hire guards to accompany her. She would make up an elaborate story about her past. She would go where no one knew her, Sicily perhaps, and begin a new life as a wealthy woman, venturing into banking or trading for herself.
The hope of a wealthy new life—that was the raft that would bear her up when she felt she must drown in sorrow.
Daoud's tired eyes burned. He shut them, as he entered his bedchamber, against the bright light coming through the white window glass. But, tired as he was, sleep did not come. Perhaps he was too tired.
He had missed the proper time for morning prayer, but he poured water into a basin and washed his hands and face, then turned toward the risen sun and humbly addressed God, first bowing, then kneeling, then striking his forehead on the carpet.
When I pray, I am at home no matter where I am.
After praying, he pushed open the iron casement with its diamond-shaped glass panels to let in air and then pulled the green velvet curtains across the window to shut out light.
He moved now in a cool dimness, as if underwater. He must rest, to be strong for the next battle.
Crossing the room to his sleeping mattress, which lay on the floor Egyptian-fashion, he stripped off his sweat-soaked tunic and threw it down. He unbuckled his belt and laid it carefully on the mattress. Then he kicked off his boots and dropped his hose and his loincloth. He splashed water over his body and felt cleaner and cooler.
There was another way to be home. He had been waiting for the first time he could feel he had triumphed. He knew all too well what that way could do to a man in the aftermath of defeat—sharpen his misery till he could ease the pain only by destroying himself.
But last night he had unmasked the Tartars before all the great ones of Orvieto, and he had survived a street encounter with bravos who intended to kill him. And so this morning he could allow himself this.
He had brought a cup of kaviyeh from Ugolini's room. He set it on the black marble table beside his sleeping mattress. Then from his traveling chest he took the dark brown leather pack that hadaccompanied him here from Lucera. He felt for the small packet and drew it out. Unwrapping the oily parchment, he looked at the small black cake, a square about half the length of his finger on a side. He drew his dagger out of its sheath—the dagger that would have been poor protection for him earlier if he had had to fight those Filippeschi men. Carefully he shaved peelings from the cake to the polished black marble. With the sharp edge of the dagger he chopped at the peelings until he had a coarse powder. He held the cup of cooling black liquid below the edge of the table and scraped the powder into it. He stirred the kaviyeh with the dagger's point.
Holding the cup up before him as if he were offering a toast, he spoke the Hashishiyya invocation: "In the name of the Voice comes Brightness."
He put the cup to his lips and sipped it slowly. The lukewarm kaviyeh masked the other taste, but he knew it would begin to work as soon as it reached his stomach. He peered into the bottom of the cup to make sure he had missed no precious grains, then set it down.
The magic horse that flies to paradise, so the Hashishiyya called it.
From Sheikh Saadi he had learned how to resist the power of drugs. From Imam Fayum, the Old Man of the Mountain, he learned how to use them, when he chose.
Naked, Daoud lay back on his mattress with a sigh that sounded like a roar in his ears. If the Filippeschi came upon him to kill him now, he would greet them with a smile and open arms. Lying on his back, his head resting on a feather-filled cushion, he let his senses expand to fill the world around him. His eyes traced the intricate red-on-red floral pattern of a damask wall hanging. The humming of a large black fly that had blundered in through the open casement and the closed curtains resounded in his ears like a dervish chorus chanting themselves into an ecstasy.
Odors swept in through the open window—clean mountain air with the scent of pines in it, but from nearby the swampy foul reek of every kind of filth produced by thousands of human beings living too close to one another. It had rained last night, but not enough to clean the streets, and the scavenging pigs—Daoud's heightened senses could hear and smell them, too—could not keep up with the garbage and sewage produced by the overcrowded people of Orvieto.
But he need not remain in Orvieto. He raised his head and liftedthe chain that held the silver locket about his neck. Turning the little screw that fastened the lid of the locket, he let it fall open. It covered most of the palm of his right hand. Holding the crystal disk backed by silver close to his eyes, he saw his face reflected back at him from the convex surface. His image was broken up by a pattern etched into the transparency, a five-part webwork of interlocking angles and boxes, spirals and concentric circles. The pattern formed a maze too complex for the eye to grasp. He believed that the man who used a stylus, doubtless diamond-pointed, to cut the design into the crystal must have gone blind in the course of his work. No mosque bore a more intricate—or more beautiful—pattern on its walls.
His eyes, as they always did when he looked into the locket, tried to follow the pattern and became lost in it. As the drug extended its empire within him, it seemed that he could actually see his eyes, coalesced into a single eye, staring back at him from the net of lines and whorls that entrapped it.
The captive eye means that the locket now controls what I see.
He saw the face of Sophia Karaiannides. Her dark lips, luscious as red grapes, were parted slightly, showing even, white teeth. Her thick-lashed eyelids were half lowered over burning eyes. Her hair hung unbound in brunette waves on either side of her face. She had splashed water on her face, and the droplets gleamed on her cheeks and brow like jewels.
Daoud had no doubt that he was seeing her exactly as she was at this moment, somewhere else in the cardinal's mansion. The locket had that property.
But I do not want to see Sophia. I want Blossoming Reed.
Then Sophia spoke to him. "Oh, David, why will you not come to my bed?"
Her voice was rich as velvet. His muscles tensed with a sudden hunger, a long-felt need that Francesca, the woman he bedded with now and then at Tilia Caballo's, could never satisfy. Sophia, he realized, could give him what he wanted, what he missed so terribly since leaving home.
No! Let me see Blossoming Reed.
He shut his eyes, and Sophia was still looking at him. The locket and the drug together could show a man things he did not want to see, make him feel things he did not want to feel. Things that were inside him that he did not want to know.
The knowledge you run from is the most precious of all, Saadi had said.
I know I want Sophia. I do not hide that from myself. But I cannot have her. Let me therefore see my wife, Blossoming Reed, she who gave me this locket.
Sophia's image faded now, and he saw again the crystal and its pattern that caught his soul like a fish in its toils. Gradually the pattern became the face of Blossoming Reed. Sparks flashed from her slanting eyes, painted with black rings of kohl. Her wide mouth was a downturned crescent of scorn. The nostrils of her hawklike nose flared proudly. There was a message in her face. What did she know, and what was she trying to tell him?
Blossoming Reed, daughter of Baibars and a Canaanite wife Baibars had stolen from the crusader stronghold in Sidon. It was rumored that Blossoming Reed's mother practiced a kind of sorcery that was ancient even when the Hebrews were in bondage in Egypt. But would Baibars, the mightiest defender of the faith since Saladin, allow devil-worship in his own house? Daoud could not believe it.
And yet, what was this locket if not the work of some evil magician? He would not have touched the thing, much less worn it, had it not come from Blossoming Reed, whom he loved.
Blossoming Reed, betrothed to him at twelve, married to him at fourteen, whose breasts were like oranges and whose nails flayed his back in their lovemaking. Blossoming Reed, Baibars's gift of honor to him, seal and symbol of eternal friendship between Baibars al-Bunduqdari and Daoud ibn Abdallah.
Blossoming Reed, who now spoke to him in anger out of the magic of hashish and the locket.
Go back to the Well, Daoud!
Back to the Well?
To the Well of Goliath?
He saw again the plain of tamarisk, thorn bush, and grass, and the long black line of charging Tartars. Eagerly Daoud leaned forward in the saddle. Tightly he gripped his bow.
Now, devils, now you will pay for Baghdad!
He had relived that day, the greatest battle of his life, hundreds of times in thoughtful moments, in dreams, in hashish visions. What he saw now were moments that seemed to leap at him out of the darkness.
Screaming a war cry and brandishing a scimitar, a Tartar galloped at him. They were in open ground. Daoud circled away, sheathing his saif and pulling his bow from its case. The Tartar chased him, guiding his horse with his knees and firing arrow after arrow at Daoud. But he was in too much of a hurry. He was not aiming carefully, and all the arrows whistled over Daoud's head.
The muscles of the black Yemenite stallion bunched and stretched under Daoud as its hooves thundered over the plain. He stood in the saddle. He turned and took aim along the shaft of his arrow at the center of the Tartar's chest. The arrow went low, to Daoud's annoyance, and struck the Tartar in the side of the stomach. But he must have been wearing light leather armor, for the arrow with its steel point went deep into him. The Tartar gave a short cry and dropped his bow, then fell, like a stone, from the saddle into the sand.
Daoud wheeled his Yemenite about, then jerked the horse to a stop and jumped from the saddle with his saif out. The Tartar had somehow risen to all fours, but was vomiting blood into the sand. Daoud kicked him with his red-booted foot and rolled him over on his back.
Holding his saif high, he looked into the face of Nicetas, contorted with pain and fear.
"Oh, God!" he whispered. "Oh, God, no!"
He stood paralyzed. Their eyes met.
Nicetas said, "You have to."
"God be merciful to me," Daoud said, and brought the saif down.
Lorenzo's eyes ached as he stared through a peephole in the doorway of a storeroom into the common room of the inn called the Angel. Alternating his left and right eye at intervals, he stared at a bench by the opposite wall, where a hooded figure sat alone, holding a cup of wine in his lap. As Lorenzo had instructed him,the tavern keeper had put a lighted candle in a sconce near where Sordello was sitting, so that Lorenzo could watch his quarry.
The candle beside Sordello was one of only four in the common room—just light enough for the innkeeper to be certain he was paid in honest coin while making it hard for his patrons to see the color of his wine. It was early evening, and there were only about six men and women in the room. All of them except Sordello sat on benches at the one long table near the wine barrel. Sordello, leaning against the rough-hewn wooden wall, had to set his cup beside him.
The mercenary's square hand lifted the painted pottery cup into the shadow of his hood. Lorenzo knew Sordello was under the tightly drawn hood only because he had followed him diligently through the tangle of Orvieto's streets from the house where a dozen of the brigosi Lorenzo had recruited were quartered.
Daoud's secret army was growing. The evening after the contessa's reception Lorenzo had sealed a bargain with Marco di Filippeschi, who was ready to help Daoud against the alliance if it meant striking a blow against the Monaldeschi.
Before any plans were made, though, there remained the question of Sordello.
A stout woman in a black gown came into the common room of the Angel and went straight to the hooded man. The lower part of her face was covered by a black scarf. Anyone watching the hooded Sordello and the veiled lady would think theirs was just everyday wickedness—an adulterous couple meeting for an assignation. She sat beside him on the bench. Their heads drew together, and Lorenzo, behind a door across the room, was too far away to hear.
Lorenzo heard a scratching behind him. He turned, but it was too dark even to see movement.
Rats, he thought.This work continually brings a man into the company of rats. Four-legged rats and men like Sordello.He put his eye to the peephole again, just in time to see a slip of paper disappear into the woman's deep sleeve. Whoever Sordello was reporting to, he was putting it in writing. Interesting that the mancouldwrite. That put him a cut above the average bravo, in education, at least.
The innkeeper came over to offer the woman wine, but she waved him away without looking at him. She stood up, brushing the seat of her gown fastidiously, like one who was used to sitting in cleaner surroundings. Without a gesture or a handclasp she left Sordello as quickly as she had come. Nothing loverlike about those two.
Lorenzo decided to follow the woman, and left by the bolthole the tavern keeper had shown him. He doubted that the old bravo would do anything other than sit there and get drunk.
He had to run through the alley beside the inn to catch a glimpse of her going around a corner. She was hard to see. The darkness of night was made deeper by the jutting upper stories of the houses, and she was wearing black.
He kept running, his footfalls muffled by the mushy layers of moldering refuse that paved the streets. A woman going through the byways of the poorest part of town after dark was taking a great chance with her purse and her honor. She was either well paid or very dedicated.
Lorenzo, whispering breathless curses, twice had almost lost her in the maze before she emerged onto a wider street, the Via di San Remo. There, lights from windows made her easier to follow. Now he was quite sure where she was going, and was not at all surprised when she hurried up the stairs leading to the front door of the Palazzo Monaldeschi. The door opened. There was a blaze of torchlight, and she pulled down her scarf to identify herself. Even from across the street Lorenzo knew her.
Ana, the woman who interpreted for the Tartars.
Sophia entered Cardinal Ugolini's cabinet holding a letter written by Simon de Gobignon. It had been pressed into her hand by the French count's young scudiero when she was out walking. She had read it over and over again before bringing it to David.
He was alone in the room. As he looked up from his seat on a pile of cushions on the floor, she caught her breath. In that white light coming through the translucent glass panes, David's grayish eyes took on an opalescence.
The cardinal's cabinet on the top floor was the best-lit chamber in the mansion. When Ugolini was not using the room, David often came here to study, write, and meditate. And when neither David nor Ugolini was there, Sophia sometimes came to draw and paint.
She felt as if David were a magician, and that his eyes had cast a spell on her. In Ugolini's cabinet it was easy to think of magic. She had always associated magic with darkened chambers and cellars, but Ugolini practiced his magic at the top of his mansion, in a room with many windows.
"The long-awaited answer from Simon has come," Sophia said, tossing the opened scroll down before David.
David spread Simon's letter on his lap and read it, while Sophia looked around the room. On a table near a window lay that painted skull Ugolini kept toying with. On one wall were two maps of the heavens. Sophia recognized the constellations in one of them, but the other was utterly strange. One arrangement of stars in the second map seemed to take the form of a Latin cross. She studied with interest the paintings on scrolls nailed to the walls, of plants and animals so odd-looking that she thought they might be an artist's inventions. One was a bird without wings, another a spotted animal that looked like a deer but had an enormously elongated neck. It might be pleasant to try painting such creatures herself.
As David's eyes ran over Simon's letter, his lips curled in a faint smile. Was it a smile of contempt for Simon's passionate outpouring, which she had, in her delight with it, all but memorized?
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....
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.
"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 theythink 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.
"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.
"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 thinkthatis 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.
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 word and left her, closing the door of Ugolini's cabinet behind him.
She sank weeping to the floor.
Rachel, Rachel, how could they do this to you? With a Tartar. Oh, no!
She sat there until her tears stopped and her thoughts began to make some sense. The skull, lying on its side, seemed to look back at her.
Thank you, David. You have made my decision for me. Simon de Gobignon shall have me.
This was a fearsome place, thought Daoud as he gazed around the underground chamber hewn out of the yellow tufa on which the building stood. Lit with torches, its vault was festooned with ropes and chains, one wall lined with whips, rods, and scourges hanging from hooks, pokers and branding irons heating in smoking braziers, a rack in one corner, a ring of wood and iron six feet in diameter suspended in the center of the room, on which a man could be spread-eagled. A veritable bazaar of torture instruments. Its door was of solid oak reinforced with criss-crossed strips of iron, designed to dash any hope of escape.
Daoud sat in a thronelike chair painted black—Tilia said it had once belonged to a pope—on a raised platform against a wall. If the damned chair had a few cushions in it, it might almost be comfortable. This place, Tilia had told him, was for patrons of hers who liked to torture—or be tortured.
It was perfect for his purpose. But could he himself be as perfect as the room? This was a hard and wily man he had to deal with tonight. It would be difficult to dominate him.
Beside Daoud, a preparation of wine, hashish, and the distilled juice of the Anatolian poppy simmered in a pot held on a metal tripod over a candle flame. He sniffed the faint steam that rose from the warm potion. He warned himself to do no more sniffing, or he would be unable to conduct the night's proceedings with a clear head. He glanced down at one broad arm of the throne, where a small brass bowl lay. In the dish rested a steel needle as long as a forefinger, its tip covered with a black paste.
A nervous anticipation tingled in the pit of his stomach, but he held himself very still.
Daoud heard Lorenzo's voice, and a moment later the oak-and-iron door swung open. A man stumbled through, his head covered with a black hood, his hands tied behind him, his ankles chainedclose together with hobble-gyves. Two of Tilia's mute black slaves held his arms. Behind him walked Lorenzo, a broad-bladed dagger held at waist level.
Daoud sat straighter in the throne, resting his hands on the arms. The door boomed shut, and at Lorenzo's command the slaves untied the prisoner's wrists and pulled the hood off his head.
Sordello stood before Daoud, blinking and staring angrily around him. Daoud watched, pleased, as the sight of the irons and chains and scourges bore in on Sordello and the anger on the bravo's face changed to alarm.
"Why have you done this to me? What the devil is this place?"
An appropriate question, Daoud thought. "You are in hell," he said.
Sordello squinted at Daoud. "And who are you supposed to be, Messer David, the Prince of Darkness? Is this some sort of miracle play?"
The man's defiance dismayed Daoud. He had hoped that the mere sight of the chamber would set Sordello to babbling and begging. He needed to be frightened more.
"Have them chain him to the ring, Lorenzo."
Sordello aimed a kick at one of the slaves following Lorenzo's orders. The African gave Sordello's arm a quick twist and got a howl of pain out of him. Soon the aging bravo, arms stretched out, legs spread apart, was suspended upright in the great hoop. The ring of iron hung from the ceiling on a single chain wrapped around a huge beam, allowing it to rotate slowly. Daoud imagined how helpless Sordello must feel hanging there.
Lorenzo took hold of the ring and gave it a spin. Face and back, face and back, face and back, Sordello whirled before Daoud. His eyes bulged.
"Figlii di cagne!" he shouted.
Still more angry than frightened. But perhaps he is just good at concealing his fear.
Daoud made a small hand gesture, and Lorenzo stopped the spin of the ring so that Sordello was facing Daoud.
Daoud studied Sordello, looking for the subtle signs that would reveal his true feelings. His eyes gleamed like a caged hyena's, full of hatred for Daoud.
Lorenzo had kept Sordello locked in a pitch-black cubicle in Cardinal Ugolini's mansion for a day and a night before bringing him here. Daoud studied the man. It was obvious from his pallor,his red-rimmed eyelids, and his sagging mouth that Sordello had lain awake much of the time in the darkness. Daoud could see the fear, too, in the clenching and unclenching of Sordello's jaw muscles.
Daoud flicked a finger at Lorenzo. "Read the love song you found on this trovatore when you seized him."
Lorenzo unfolded a square scrap of parchment and read: