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

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[218] 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 God, and that, Simon de Gobignon will never hear. Unless God'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 God and man. There are the more learned and the less learned, but each man and each woman can hear God."

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?

But she did not love Simon. What had happened between them had been a moment of being overwhelmed by feeling. It had been done, not by her, but by Sophia Orfali.

She had felt sorry for Simon and wanted to comfort him. She had been moved by the purity of his love for her, and her body, which had not known Daoud for months, ran away with her. It was a shameful thing, but not an important thing, because it did not change her love for Daoud.

It would be important to Daoud, though. He would feel that she had betrayed him. He would want revenge. He would hate Simon.[219]

Most important, the peace with his own childhood, reached after painful struggle, might be destroyed. The beautiful state of mind he had shown her might be lost.

For the sake of his peace, she must keep silent.

She hated the decision. It meant that a part of her would always be locked away from Daoud, and he would never know it.

Very well, then. Let that, and not his wrath at the revelation, be her punishment for having let herself go that day with Simon by the lake. That would be the mutilation she would always bear. Perfect union with Daoud would be a promised land she would never enter. By suffering that, she would silently make restitution to Daoud for the wrong she had done him.

All the while she had been thinking, he had been gazing at her. Just as she reached her final decision, his eyes closed and his breathing deepened. She reached out and touched the sparse blond hairs in the center of his chest, lightly so as not to wake him.

I lost everything too. He and I are so alike.

Mother and Father. Alexis, whom she had loved in the simple way that Simon loved her. All lost in one night of fire and steel. And after that, the life she led had been so little like that of other women. A life so strange and venturesome she did not know what to think of herself. And yet a life she had loved much of the time.

If Simon reminded Daoud of what he had lost, almost any woman she met did the same for Sophia.

Why, she wondered, had a man's seed never quickened within her? She was twenty-four years old, and she had never been with child. Not once since girlhood had her monthly flow of blood failed.

I am barren, she thought sadly, as she had countless times before. Barren and alone. Just as well. Even one baby would have been an impossible burden in the years since she fled to Michael.

But now, if Daoud were to get her with child, what joy that would be. At this moment, it seemed, she had nothing to do except be a companion to Daoud. There had never been a better time in her life for having a child. And even if she could never be wholly one with Daoud, she could be one with their child.

There were remedies for barrenness, she thought, and sometimes they worked. Wise old women knew them. She might seek out such a woman. Tilia must know a great deal about preventing conception, perhaps she knew something about how to make it happen.

There would be no more work of the sort she had done for Michael and then for Manfred. She was known in the north. She could not go back there. And once Manfred defeated the French and drove them out of Italy, he would want men to help him govern. A[220] woman had no place in governing, unless she were married to a man of power or had inherited a title of her own.

A child, after all this was over, might be all she would have left. Daoud could be killed fighting the French. Her heart stopped beating for a moment, and then began pounding in fear.

She put that thought out of her mind quickly. She must believe that he would not be killed. And there was good reason to believe so, with all he had survived already.

No, it was more likely she would lose him when the war was over and he went back to his people. He loved his faith, loved the land that had first enslaved him, then made him a warrior. And she could never go back to Cairo with him. What she had heard about a woman's lot among the Muslims sounded like a living death. He had never said so, but he probably had a wife in Egypt. Several wives perhaps, as Muslims were said to do.

Live as just one of his wives? Her stomach burned at the idea. Unthinkable!

Could she persuade Daoud to come with her to Constantinople? Daoud could serve the Basileus brilliantly, as a strategos, a general, or as a mediator between Byzantines and Saracens. A man of his experience would be invaluable. Ah, but to achieve to the utmost of his ability, though, Daoud would have to join the Orthodox Church. And that, after the words he had just spoken, she could never imagine him doing.

Well, but she could imagine it. Why spoil the beautiful dream of herself and Daoud together amid the glories of the Polis? For the moment she could indulge her fancy and tell herself anything was possible.

Allowing her mind to drift among these visions, she fell asleep.

LXIII

"Ecco! The residence of Cardinal Paulus de Verceuil," said Sordello with a flourish of his hand. The narrow Viterbo street on which Simon, Sordello, and Thierry had been riding opened out suddenly, and they were facing a huge cylinder built of small stones,[221] blackened with age. Simon felt his mouth fall open in wonder, and he quickly snapped it shut. He would not let anything de Verceuil might do seem to impress him.

They rode across a drawbridge over a moat full of water that smelled of rotting things, its surface coated with a green slime.

"It looks a bit like Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome," Simon remarked.

"It was a pagan temple in ancient times," said Sordello.

After passing through the gatehouse, they found themselves in a stone-paved semicircular courtyard. The palace was built against the rear half of the old Roman inner wall and towered above it.

"No more lodging with some noble family or other," said Sordello proudly. "Now our party has a residence of its own."

I would rather have almost anyone but de Verceuil as my host.

Simon hoped he need stay here for only a short time. Just long enough to find Sophia, overcome her reservations about marrying him, and be off to Gobignon. His heart beat harder as he thought of seeing her again after those lonely, miserable months in Rome.

Thierry took their horses to be stabled, while Sordello ushered Simon through a cavernous hall lit by a few small windows near the ceiling. Two men-at-arms Simon recognized as part of his troop of Venetian crossbowmen snapped to attention just inside the door, and after a frantic scramble through his memory Simon managed to greet them by name.

To Sordello Simon said, "I thank you for meeting Thierry and me at the city gate and guiding us here." They crossed the entrance hall. "After a long ride, one does not want to have to find one's way around a strange city."

Sordello smiled smugly in acknowledgment. "Little enough for me to do, Your Signory, for one who has done so much for me. Come, I'll show you to the room His Eminence has set aside for you."

He led Simon up a great flight of marble stairs from ground level to the first floor of the mansion.

"I am capitano of the crossbow troop again," Sordello said suddenly, halfway up the stairs.

"Who decided that?" said Simon irritably. "I appointed Peppino capitano after Teodoro was killed."

Sordello's bloodshot eyes caught Simon's. "Peppino was most courteous about yielding to me when I rejoined the Tartar ambassadors' guards. After all, I am senior to him." They came to the top of the marble stairs, and he held out a hand to indicate stone steps leading to the second floor.[222]

Damn! Simon had removed Sordello from his position for nearly killing the Armenian prince, and it was pure insubordination for the fellow to bully his way back into it in Simon's absence and without his consent. It was typical of Sordello's infuriating combination of guile and gall.

Simon reproached himself for not leaving clear orders on who was to lead the crossbow troop when he left Sordello with them and was off to join Count Charles in Rome. But his head and heart had been full of Sophia then. Discipline demanded that he depose Sordello and reinstate Peppino.

Yes, he thought, if he were intending to stay here, he would do exactly that. But if he did it and then left again, it would probably only provoke a duel to the death between Peppino and Sordello. Let things be. A few weeks from now, at most, he could forget the whole damned lot of them, Tartars and all.

But Sordello's reemergence as leader of the crossbowmen raised another question: Would it offend the Armenians?

They came now to wooden steps leading into the shadowy upper reaches of de Verceuil's castle. Simon looked dubiously at them.

"Trust me, Your Signory, as in any palace, the best apartments are on the top floor."

Trust you? When God invites Lucifer to move back into heaven.

And it was equally unlikely that de Verceuil would provide anything truly grand for Simon. He shrugged and let Sordello climb the wooden steps ahead of him.

"What about the Armenian prince, Hethum? Does he still want your blood?"

Sordello laughed and looked back over his shoulder. "All settled, Your Signory. I know Viterbo, as I know most of these Umbrian hill towns, and I entertained all the Armenians for a night and a day, at my expense. The best taverns, the best whorehouses. Hethum and I are friends now."

One did not entertain so lavishly on the fifteen florins a month Sordello would receive as capitano of the archers. Doubtless he had found other ways to line his pockets.

The mention of whorehouses reminded Simon of the plight of the girl Rachel. He must find