The Saracen: The Holy War Part 13

The sun had set by the time Daoud left Cardinal Ugolini, and the third-floor corridor was nearly dark. Servants had placed small candles on tables at each end of the corridor. Daoud had allowed himself a cup of wine with the cardinal because there was nothing else to drink, and now his face felt slightly numb.

A large figure walked slowly toward him from the opposite end of the corridor as he approached his room. With the candlelight behind him, the man's face was in darkness, and Daoud tensed himself.

"Messer David, it is Riccardo."

Now they stood face-to-face, Daoud having to look up a little.

"I searched everywhere. Questioned everyone I know. I would stake my life that Sordello is not in Orvieto. He went out the Perugia gate after talking to Madonna Sophia. I do not think he ever came back."

Dismissing Riccardo, Daoud went into his room to think and to pray. He felt baffled. He would have staked _his_ life that no man bound by the powers of the Hashishiyya would ever turn against the one who showed him the delights of paradise.

_But I did threaten him with death, and he saw that I wanted to kill him. That might have been enough to break the bond._

_And I did wonder, even when I initiated him, whether there might not be some part of him that remained free._

Daoud bolted the door of his room. He needed to be alone, to think and to refresh his mind.

He faced the charcoal-marked spot on his wall that marked the direction of Mecca and, with care and thought, went through the sequence of the salat, standing, bowing, kneeling, striking his head on the floor again and again until he was done. He asked G.o.d, as he did every night, to favor his efforts here in Italy with success, out of His love for the people of Islam.

_I place all in Your hands._

After he was finished praying, he unlocked his traveling chest and began to take things from it. First came a small grinder box he had bought from an Orvieto ironsmith, a grinder such as women used to make small amounts of flour. Next, from a cotton bag he took two handfuls of roasted kaviyeh beans given him by Ugolini and put them in the top of the grinder box. He ran the beans through the grinder, rapidly turning the crank on the box until they were a coa.r.s.e powder.

He took his old pack out of the chest and found in it the brick of hashish wrapped in oiled parchment. It nestled in the palm of his hand, and he weighed it, wondering whether he deserved this pleasure. For that matter, did he deserve Sophia? His attempt to kill the Tartars had failed, and now they might be slipping out of his grasp.

With money and the threat of a French invasion, Lorenzo should be able to persuade the Ghibellino leaders of Siena to follow their natural inclination and send an army against Orvieto. But that army would not be enough to counter the forces the pope could gather around himself at Perugia.

_I must get Manfred to march._

With Manfred's help he could capture the pope and kill the Tartars. And he saw an even larger vision. Under Manfred, Italy could become a bulwark against the crusaders from northern Europe. Manfred was not just friendly to Egypt. He had Muslim officials and soldiers and was not far from being a Muslim himself.

There was so much to be done. Daoud wanted to go to Siena to hasten the Ghibellino attack on Orvieto. He wanted to ride to Manfred and urge him to invade the Papal States. But he had to remain here as long as the Tartars were here. Were it not for Sophia, these months of inactivity since that night at the Monaldeschi palace would be driving him mad.

He held the black hashish cake over the grinder, using his dagger to shave small, coiling peels into the ground kaviyeh beans. Then he filled a small iron pot from his water jar. He poured the mixture of water, kaviyeh, and hashish into the pot and set it to boil on a rack over the flame of short, fat candle.

He smiled and inhaled deeply as the rich, burnt smell filled the room.

Just the smell of kaviyeh could give him visions, making him think of the gaily lighted streets of El Kahira, of the dome of the Gray Mosque, of the white arms of Blossoming Reed.

When his brew was ready he poured it into an Orvieto porcelain cup painted with bright flowers. He carried the cup to his window and pulled the window open. Even though Orvieto was atop a great rock, the starry sky seemed much farther away here than when he lay on his back and looked up at the stars in the desert. He wondered how far it was to the crystalline sphere in which the stars were set, like jewels. Was it farther than the distance between Orvieto and El Kahira?

He recited to himself the invocation, _In the name of the Voice comes the Light_.

Standing at the window, he drank his hashish-laced kaviyeh in slow sips.

When he knew, by a peculiar intensity in the starlight, that the magic horse had begun its flight to paradise, he started to walk to his bed. A sudden impulse took him, and he went to his pack again.

Folded inside a square of blue silk he found the silver locket Blossoming Reed had given him. Since he had started lying with Sophia he had stopped wearing it. He remembered the suggestion he had planted in Sordello's mind, that at the sight of the locket he would kill Simon de Gobignon. With Sordello and Simon both gone, the locket was useless for that purpose.

As he held it in his hands, he remembered what Baibars's daughter had said to him:

_I will always know if you are well or ill, alive or dead, and how you fare and what you feel. And if you would know how it is with me, seek me in this._

He lay in bed propped up on one elbow and turned the tiny screw that held the locket closed. He had meant to think about Manfred and Sophia, to try to catch some glimpse of the future. It troubled him that he had taken this bypath. He remembered now how troubled he had been when last he looked into the locket. He had not meant to use it again.

Now, though, it was somehow too late for him to stop. He seemed to have no will of his own. He raised the lid of the locket and looked down into it, at the design incised on rock crystal that looked like an interweaving of Arabic letters with circles and triangles. He waited to see what visions the locket would give him tonight.

_The knowledge you run from is the most precious of all._

He gasped.

A pool of darkness opened in the center of the design. The network of straight and curved lines seemed to crumble into it as the pool spread.

And it began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster. He was looking into a whirlpool of blackness.

It drew him in. He felt as if his eyes were spinning, then his head; then he fell into the whirlpool and it sucked him down. He could not breathe. He was drowning in blackness.

At the last moment, when he thought he would die, suffocated, the black pool released him and flung him back on his bed, contemptuously rejecting him.

He lay there, gasping, terrified.

_Take as many women as you like. But love always and only me. For if you do love another, I promise you that your love will destroy both her and you._

Had he truly heard the voice of Blossoming Reed, burning and cruel in his mind, coming from as far off as the stars? The locket fell to the floor with a crash that seemed to shake the stone building in which he lay. He remained motionless, paralyzed with dread.

XLIX

Feeling as if he would burst into flames with anger, Simon stood under a bright blue sky dappled with high white clouds on a wooden quay at Livorno, two weeks after leaving Orvieto. The masts of small boats lined the waterfront like a forest of tree trunks stripped of their leaves.

_If I were traveling with a proper entourage, a few knights and a troop of archers, by G.o.d's wounds they'd carry me. These shipmasters are too d.a.m.ned independent._

One large ship, anch.o.r.ed midway between the sh.o.r.e and the arm of the harbor, looked to Simon like his last chance. Leaving Thierry on the quay, he dropped a silver denaro into the callused palm of a man with a dinghy and had himself rowed out to the big ship.

From what he knew of ships, this was a middle-size buss, sitting high in the water, with rounded prow and stern. The name _Constanza_ was painted on the stern. Human muscle moved it; Simon counted ten oarholes on each side.

As he trod the catwalk from the prow of the ship to the stern castle where the captain stood, Simon saw no one sitting at the oars and no chains. So the ship must be rowed by its crew, free mariners. A square sail, furled at present, mounted on a single mast amidships would help the rowers when the wind was right.

The captain, whose bald scalp was brown as well-tanned leather, bowed deeply when Simon presented himself. He was half Simon's height, twice as broad, and all muscle. He smiled, showing a full set of bright white teeth when Simon explained that he needed pa.s.sage to Ma.r.s.eilles.

"Bon seigner, you must understand that it is not a simple matter to engage a ship of this size to carry you wherever you wish to go." The language the captain spoke was neither French nor Italian. Simon recognized it at once, and he felt a little inner leap, because it was the tongue his parents spoke, the Langue d'Oc, the speech of Aquitaine, Toulouse, and Provence.

"Of course I understand that," Simon replied in the same tongue. "But if you--"

"Bon seigner," the captain interrupted, "there are no words to describe how honored I would be to carry you. And no words to describe my grief that I cannot take you." That could be taken two ways, Simon thought.

"I am prepared to pay prodigiously, Captain," said Simon with sinking heart.