The Saracen: The Holy War Part 58

In the year and a half since she left this place, Sophia had all but forgotten the bathing rooms in the lowest level of Castello Lucera. She had not used them as much as she had wished to, when she lived here before. In her strange position as a foreigner and one of Manfred's loves, she had not felt comfortable bathing with the other women who lived in the castle.

But tonight, as she and Daoud undressed in the green-tiled anteroom, they had it all to themselves. Daoud must stand high indeed with Manfred to have arranged that, she thought.

In the light of the oil lamp hanging overhead, his naked body was a golden color, and free, as far as she could tell, from the marks of insult the podesta's torturer had inflicted upon it last summer.

She was not naked. She wore a linen gown that opened down the front. Her continued worrying over whether or not to tell him about Simon made her want to stay covered as long as she could.

But with a smile he pulled her gown apart and slipped it off her shoulders and down her back to the floor.

A glance down his body told her that he wanted her now. The sight thrilled her, but she still felt uneasy and not able to give herself wholeheartedly to him and to the act of love.

"Let us attend to the grime," she said with a small smile.

In the next room, its walls tiled in white, she lay in a round sunken tub filled with hot water piped in from the castle kitchen. It was large enough for Daoud to stand over her in it. He took over the task of washing her with scented soap imported from Spain.

At first she simply lay back and enjoyed her renewed acquaintance with the amenities of Manfred's kingdom, so much more like Constantinople than life in the Papal States had been. But as the hot water relaxed her and as Daoud's hands, slippery with soap, slid over her skin, she felt the rising warmth of desire. Nothing mattered but this moment. She wriggled her legs and hips against him in small, almost unwilled movements.

"The grime first," he said with a soft laugh, and continued methodically to soap her until she was mad with wanting him.

He picked her up in his arms and carried her into the next room, its tiles the red-orange of sunset, which was taken up by a great pool of very hot water. Usually this chamber would be occupied by anywhere from six to a dozen men or women. But tonight Sophia and Daoud were quite alone.

Still carrying her, he descended the steps into the hot pool. Ribbons of steam rose around them. He lowered her into the water. When she stood neck-deep in it, the heat was almost unbearable, as if she were about to be boiled to death. But then the heat soaked into her until her very bones felt liquefied. Her whole being melted until she was not a person who felt desire, she _was_ desire itself.

With her arms around his neck she pulled his head down and kissed him, flicks of her tongue tip luring his tongue into her mouth.

He pressed her back against the warm tile wall, and she knotted her legs around his waist as he took her standing up.

Moments later her ecstatic cries were echoing through the bathing rooms.

They forgot about time.

Her voice rang again and again in the vaulted chamber. They made love in the hot water and then lying on linen cloths on the ma.s.seur's slab beside the pool. They nearly fell asleep in each other's arms.

Laughing at their bodies' foolishness, they plunged into the last pool, cold water in a blue-tiled room, then hurried through a door to the place where they had started and dressed again.

When they were back in their room, Daoud's voice was drowsy as he lay beside her on the gold-curtained bed.

"You must have bypa.s.sed Rome when you came down, with the Count of Anjou and Simon de Gobignon both there," he said.

At the mention of Simon's name Sophia's pleasant sleepiness fled, and she felt an ache in the pit of her stomach. Should she tell Daoud or not? She still could not decide. The uncertainty itself had become almost as great an agony as the fear of what would happen if she told him. She rolled over with her back to him, so that he could not see her face.

"Yes," she said. "We went east into the Abruzzi and through L'Aquilia and Sulmona. Terribly mountainous country. It took us much longer, but it was safer."

_But if I do not tell him, every time he takes me in his arms I will know that I am lying to him. I will always be aware that I am keeping something back from him that he would want to know. I betrayed him with Simon, and each time I have the chance to tell him and do not, I am betraying him again._

"Before Charles took Rome, Lorenzo and Tilia and I pa.s.sed near the city, but skirted around it. It would not do to have someone from that inn recognize us."

"How well I remember that night." It was then that she had first seen how resourceful and how ruthless Daoud could be.

"Lorenzo and I could talk about it now without getting angry," Daoud said. "He told me he tried to help the old Jew, Rachel's husband, because a man does not forget the faith and the people he was born to."

"And you wondered about yourself?" said Sophia.

"Exactly." The palm of his hand felt wonderfully hard against the flesh of her b.u.t.tocks. "And, strangely, I found myself thinking of Simon de Gobignon."

She felt her body stiffen and tried to make herself relax. "What could have made you think of him?" She had never told Daoud about Simon's shadowed childhood. She wondered if he had heard of it from someone else.

"I asked myself, what if the Turks had not overrun Ascalon and killed my parents and carried me off? And the answer came that I would have been very like Simon de Gobignon. He grew up, you see, having all the things I lost."

"What things?"

"A family, a home, the Christian faith, freedom, knighthood, his country. Even his name."

This talk about Simon was making her desperately uneasy. She wondered if she could tell Daoud to go to sleep and forget it all.

"And I saw at last why I hated him so much," Daoud went on. "I hated him in part, of course, because of you. I had already started to love you, and the thought of him possessing you made me furious. And yet it was my duty to send you to bed with him. Fortunately, that never had to happen.

But there was an even deeper reason for my hating him."

"What was that?" she asked.

"Envy. Envy that I could not admit to myself."

"Not admit to yourself? Why?"

His hand on her was motionless. She sensed that it was an effort for him to put his thought into words.

"Because I was afraid to. That is always why we do not admit a truth to ourselves. My Sufi sheikh often said, _The things you most fear, those you must turn and stare at until you are no longer afraid_. I was afraid I might betray my faith."

"You mean renounce Islam?" A chill went through her. What a disaster for all of them that could have been. She could well understand how the thought of that might frighten him.

"Yes. I had to put that possibility out of my mind. So I hated Simon de Gobignon without knowing why. Because I did not understand my hatred, I hated him all the more."

_If only we could stop talking about Simon._

But the man she loved was telling her something very important about himself. She had to set her own discomfort aside. She had to listen.

"And now you do not hate him?" She turned over in the bed. She wanted to see his face.

There was a peacefulness in his eyes such as she had never seen before.

Always, they had seemed to burn, white-hot. Now they were clear and fathomless, like the sky.

"I do not hate him. I realized, as I rode along with Lorenzo, that if your new faith is strong and your new people are good, you can remember without danger what you loved of the old. I will always love the sound of the Christian priests chanting in the cool dark of a church. I will always feel especially at home in a Christian castle. But the voice I hear in the depths of my soul today is the true voice of G.o.d, and that, Simon de Gobignon will never hear. Unless G.o.d's all-powerful hand reaches out for him as it did for me."

Awed, Sophia said, "I have never heard anyone speak as you do. With so much wisdom. Except, once or twice, a priest."

He closed his eyes. "I speak as I am inspired to speak. In Islam there are no priests that stand between G.o.d and man. There are the more learned and the less learned, but each man and each woman can hear G.o.d."

Daoud had bared his soul to her. She wanted to do the same. Love was not merely the coupling of naked bodies, but the union of naked minds. How could she ever be happy with him while lying to him?