The Saracen: The Holy War, Robert Shea [best beach reads TXT] 📗

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 God, 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 coarse 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[56] 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[57] 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.

[58]

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 God's wounds they'd carry me. These shipmasters are too damned independent.

One large ship, anchored midway between the shore 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 passage to Marseilles.

"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.[59]

"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.

If the captain noticed that Simon was speaking in his own tongue, he did not remark on it. "I do not own this ship. That is the point, you see, bon seigner. The owners have instructed me to wait here for a cargo of olive oil, which I must take to Cyprus. So I cannot leave now, and when I do leave, I must sail away from France."

The captain was respectful enough, but Simon sensed a hidden glee in his refusal.

"But you have not heard how much I will offer you," he said, desperate.

The bald man shut his eyes as if in pain. "It does not matter. Merce vos quier, forgive me, but I have a duty to those who have entrusted this ship to me. Surely there must be some other captain in this harbor who will let you make him wealthy."

"I have been to every other captain," said Simon. "All have refused me for one reason or another. Yours is the only ship left."

The captain of the Constanza spread his hands. "Ah, well, Pisa is only a little farther north, and there are many more ships docked at its quays along the Arno. You are bound to find one that will carry you. Or, failing that, this is the best time of the year to make the journey to France overland. The roads are good."

Simon knew that Pisa had been a Ghibellino city for generations. Word of his coming might even have reached enemies in Pisa. He was sure that he and Thierry had been followed along the road they had taken up the Tyrrhenean seacoast. The Pisans would be only too glad to put an end to his mission, and quite possibly to him. And following the endlessly winding coastal road—which would require him to pass dangerously close to Pisa—it would take him a month or more to get to French territory. He decided that this captain meant him nothing but ill. He broke off abruptly and made his way back to the rowboat.

A shout of laughter came floating across the water from the Constanza as the boatman rowed him back, putting Simon in an even fouler mood.

Looking toward shore, he saw a man in a short, dark cape standing on the dock with Thierry.[60]

The boat tied up at a piling, and Simon gave the rower a second denaro and climbed up a short ladder to the quay. With a jolt of anger he recognized the man talking to Thierry as Sordello.

What the devil is he doing here?

Instantly Sordello was kneeling at Simon's feet, clutching at his hand and kissing it and weeping copiously.

"I followed you all the way from Orvieto, Your Signory. I did not make myself known to you before this because I feared you would send me away."

"Get up," said Simon impatiently. "We thought we were being followed by enemies. We took unnecessary precautions, thanks to you." This utterly unwelcome encounter with Sordello, added to the impossibility of finding a ship, filled him with an almost uncontrollable rage.

"Your Signory, on the roads of Italy there are no unnecessary precautions." The man's expression shifted in the blink of an eye from fawning tears to a cocksure grin showing his missing teeth.

"What are you doing here?" Simon demanded. "I did not give you leave to stop watching Cardinal Ugolini's household."

"Circumstances gave me leave, Your Signory, as I was just explaining to my good friend Thierry here." Thierry looked startled at being so described. "The woman Ana who carried my reports to you betrayed me. She told Giancarlo, the henchman of the merchant from Trebizond, that I was in your service. That Giancarlo is the sort who opens a second mouth in your throat before you can explain yourself with the first one."

"Does anyone else in Orvieto know where I am going?"

Good God, was he lurking about when I was