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

[11]

Daoud drifted in and out of consciousness for two days after the fight at the Monaldeschi palace. Sleeping was much better than being awake and remembering failure.

In dreams he rode once again with his khushdashiya, his brother Mamelukes.

A yellow silk banner rippled in the breeze before them, declaring, WAGE WAR UTTERLY ON THE IDOLATORS, AS THEY WAGE WAR UTTERLY ON YOU.

Dust clouds swirled around them as they thundered down upon a row of Frankish knights. From a distance Daoud sent bolt after bolt from his compound bow whistling into the dark line of mail-clad men. He saw men clutch at their throats and topple from the saddle.

Screaming, he charged into the midst of the Franks, whirling his saif over his head, his lance in his left hand. A knight galloped into his path, holding up a shield white as an eggshell, emblazoned with a red cross. Daoud brought the saif down, and the knight raised his shield to fend off the blow. That left the crusader momentarily blind, and Daoud thrust under the shield with his lance.

The lance went in as if the knight wore no mail. As the Frank fell backward from his horse, Daoud saw that it was Simon de Gobignon.

Sophia's light touch on his shoulder woke Daoud. He was lying on his stomach. He propped himself up on his elbows and saw the glowing, diamond-shaped windowpanes and the familiar white walls of his room on the upper floor of Cardinal Ugolini's mansion. He turned his head to look at Sophia. Her dark eyes comforted him.

"Time for your poultice," she said.

He tried to smile at her. "And something to drink. My mouth tastes dry and foul."

"Wine?"

"By the Archangel, no! The juice of oranges, and later kaviyeh."

Sophia laughed. "Oranges? In April? You must be dreaming.[12] Trees do not bear fruit all year round in this part of the world, David. Your bitter beverage I can supply. But let me see to your wound first." She raised the blanket that covered his body. He felt his skin grow hot from scalp to toes. She was gazing upon his nude body. He was glad he was lying on his stomach rather than on his back.

Did his nakedness mean anything to her? Among Christians, he knew, men and women often saw each other naked. Not only did women go through the streets with their faces uncovered, but in warm weather the common folk, men and women both, walked to the public baths with barely a bit of cloth wrapped around their loins. And all Christians slept naked. When Sophia saw his body like this, was it just another unclothed body, like the many she had doubtless seen in her lifetime? Did she feel any embarrassment? Or desire? As for himself, his sense of helplessness made him feel only embarrassed, nothing more.

He turned his head again to look at her. She was intent on administering the poultice, and that doubtless took her mind off his nakedness. She had lifted off the old cloth, stained an ugly yellow-brown, and dropped it to the floor. He got a glimpse of the wound, a red slit about half a finger's length with black knots of thread in it in the back of his right leg, halfway between knee and buttock. Gently she patted and stroked on the wound a paste made of ground rose petals, lime water, and egg white, the Sufi remedy he had taught her to make.

Lorenzo had used his knife to open the hole made by the arrow so that he would not tear Daoud's flesh pulling the barbed head out. While Lorenzo worked over him, Daoud drew upon Saadi's final teaching to him to defend himself against the pain. In his mind he began to create the drug called Soma. He envisioned it as a bowl of glowing, silver-colored liquid, and he believed it could form a capsule around any part of his body where there was pain and wall it off from the rest of himself, at the same time filling him with a feeling of well being.

Once you have experienced the effects of material drugs on your body and learned to master them, Saadi said to him, you have the knowledge you need to create a drug of the mind, Soma. This is more powerful and more reliable, and it will not harm your body in any way. Indeed, Soma will make your body stronger. It will calm your mind, fill you with peace, sometimes give you visions. But if you should suddenly need all your faculties, they are yours at once. The drug is gone in an instant.

It was Saadi's teaching that whatever a man could accomplish[13] with drugs, he could accomplish more effectively and reliably with his mind alone. A trained man could envision a drug that would serve any desired purpose. And thus a man could transcend the Hashishiyya reliance on administered drugs.

While he had drunk from the bowl of Soma and it had flooded through his body, Daoud's fingers had gripped the little leather case hung around his neck that contained the Sufi tawidh, the numerological invocation that he believed would speed his healing. A river of blood had poured out of his leg when Lorenzo drew out the arrow, and he had fainted. Sophia had stitched the wound with cotton thread that was now black with congealed blood.

Now Sophia laid a clean, folded linen cloth over the wound, used another strip of linen to tie the poultice to his leg, and then pulled the blanket up over him. Their eyes had not met once during the time she was caring for him. He found to his surprise that he had to know what she was thinking and feeling.

As if sensing his need, she spoke. "I have wanted to tell you, but you were too sick to understand me. D'Ucello, the podesta, came here the night of the uprising, looking for you and Lorenzo. As we planned, I told him you had both gone to Perugia."

Daoud's body went cold. He felt as if he were being stalked, and the hunter was closing in.

"Did he believe you?" he asked.

She shrugged. "He blustered some, but the cardinal ordered him off in the end. I think he must have hoped to find you among the dead or wounded at the Monaldeschi palace."

Daoud rolled over in bed, the wooden frame creaking, and the pain tore through his leg like the slash of a scimitar. He groaned through clenched teeth. Despite his ability to shield his mind from pain when it took him unexpectedly like this, it could hurt like the torments of the damned.

"What are you doing?"

He gasped. "Trying to get up. D'Ucello will be back, and he must not see me wounded." He tried to sit up, and she laid her hand, firm and cool, on his forehead and pushed him back against the pillows.

"You are in more danger from fever than you are from d'Ucello," she said, letting her hand rest on his forehead.

"You will be surprised at how quickly the wound heals," he said, touching the tawidh at his neck. "As for fever, it is healthy. It burns out impurities." He laughed bitterly. "I hope it is burning the stupidity out of me."

"You—stupid?" She laughed.[14]

He did not join her. It pleased him a little, in the midst of his anguish and self-disgust, to see that she thought well of him. But she was wrong about him—and her life depended on him, and that thought made him feel worse.

"De Gobignon was waiting for me. He knew I was coming for the Tartars. He knew."

"How much could he have known?" she asked. "No one knew what your plans were."

"Sophia, if de Gobignon had not been there, I would have been able to kill those two barbarian pigs easily. I did my best, with all my skill, all my training, all my experience, and it went for nothing."

That was a pain Soma would not shield him from, the pain of failure. It felt like a mace blow to his chest every time he remembered the fight in the blackness of the spice pantry.

To drive away the damnable memory of being routed by the Christians, he had to concentrate on the present and the future.

"Send someone to fetch Sordello to me."

"You should be resting."

He laughed and touched her hand lightly. "Resting! Our enemies are not resting." She sighed, but went.

When Sordello entered Daoud's room, Lorenzo followed him closely, eyes boring into the back of the mercenary's skull. Sophia entered behind Lorenzo.

Trembling, Sordello knelt by Daoud's bed. "I feared for you, Messer David. I am happy to see you looking so well."

Would Sordello give up the pleasures of hashish and the promise of a paradise with beautiful women? What reward could Simon de Gobignon offer him that could be more enticing?

Yet, I have always known that this man