I
In the mist-filled plains around Lucera, cocks crowed.
Daoud ibn Abdallah pushed himself slowly to his feet. After days and nights of walking, his legs ached abominably.
Tired as he was, he looked around carefully, studying the other travelers who rested near him on the road, peering at the city wall a hundred paces away with its shut gate of iron-studded oak. In his stomach he felt the hollow ball of dread that had not left him since he landed in Italy.
I am alone in the land of the infidel.
Dawn gave a pink tint to the pale yellow stones of the wall, about twice the height of a man. Above it in the distance, covering the summit of the central hill, rose the citadel of Lucera, surrounded by its own huge wall set with more than a dozen many-sided towers.
Daoud's feet throbbed in his knee-high boots. For three days he had walked along the carter's track from the port of Manfredonia on the Adriatic coast into the hills around Lucera. Yesterday at daybreak he had been able to see, from a great distance, the outline of the fortress emerging from the center of a rolling plain. It had taken him another day and a night to reach its gate.
Around Daoud now were dozens of people who had gathered at the gate during the night, mostly merchants with packs on their backs. A few farmers, hitched to carts loaded with melons, peaches, and oranges, had dragged their burden over the plain. The more prosperous had donkeys to pull the wagons.
One man with a long stick drove six small sheep. And a cart near Daoud was piled high with wooden cages full of squawking chickens.
Walking in his direction was a tiny dwarf of a man who appeared permanently doubled over, as if his back had been broken. It seemed to Daoud that if the man were not holding his arms out from his sides for balance, his knuckles would almost have brushed the ground. His little cart was piled with broken tree limbs, firewood to sell in the city.
The dwarf lifted his head and grinned at Daoud through a bushy black mustache. Daoud smiled back, thinking, God be kind to you, my friend.
From within the city issued a familiar cry, in Arabic, that tore at Daoud's heart: "Come to prayer. Come to security. God is most great." It was the adhan, the cry of the muezzins in the minarets of Lucera's mosques. For, though he was in a Christian land, Lucera was a city mostly populated by Muslims.
Daoud wanted to fall to his knees, but he was pretending to be a Christian, and could only stand and ignore the call to prayer as the Christians around him did. He said the words of the salat, the required prayer, in his mind.
The people near Daoud spoke to one another sleepily, softly, in the tongue of southern Italy. Someone laughed. Someone sang a snatch of song. When the Muslim prayer ended, they expectantly looked up at the town wall.
Daoud saw two soldiers standing in the tower to the left of the gate. They were accoutred in the Muslim manner, with turbans wrapped around their helmets and scimitars at their belts. One lifted a long brass trumpet to his lips and blew a series of notes that sent shivers along Daoud's spine. With a few changes it could have been the call that had awakened him every morning in the Mameluke barracks on Raudha Island in the Nile.
Using ropes, the other soldier hoisted onto a tall pole a yellow banner bearing a black bird with spread wings and claws, and two heads facing in opposite directions. The double-headed eagle of King Manfred's family, the Hohenstaufen.
With a great squealing of cables and squeaking of hinges, the tall wooden door swung wide.
Daoud reached down and picked up the leather pack that had lain between his feet. Leaning forward, he pushed his arms through the shoulder straps.
He wore draped over his pack a long countryman's cloak of cheap brown wool. His tunic and hose were of lightweight undyed cotton. Only his high boots were expensive. He needed good ones for the long walk from the coast to Lucera. A sword swung at his belt, short and unadorned, the sort any man of small means might wear. He had chosen it in El Kahira out of a stack of swords taken from Christian men-at-arms during the last crusade.
He drew the hood of his cloak over his head. Later his blond hair and gray eyes would guarantee that no one would suspect what he was. But here in southern Italy, where most ordinary people were dark complexioned, his appearance might draw unwanted attention.
Even though the sun had just risen, he felt the heat on his back. But it was not the dry heat of Egypt that he had known most of his life. A heaviness in the air called forth a dampness from within his flesh. His tunic clung to him.
If a Christian asks me what month this is, I must remember to say July.
He brushed the dust from his clothing and fell into line behind the bent man with his cart of firewood.
Once inside Lucera, he would find his way to the inn of al-Kharim. And tonight the chancellor Aziz would come to him from King Manfred.
The line shuffled forward. Three guards were standing in the shadows just inside the gateway. They were big dark men wearing long green capes over red tunics. Red turbans were wrapped around their spike-topped helmets. Curving swords hung from their belts. A boy in a red tunic and turban held a sheaf of lightweight spears.
Their thick beards reminded Daoud how much he missed his own beard, shaved off in preparation for this mission.
My people. Daoud felt a sudden warmth at the familiar sight of warriors of Islam.
The feeling was nonsense, he told himself. These were not his people, but the Saracens of Manfred von Hohenstaufen. Their Arab ancestors had once ruled southern Italy, but the Christians had conquered them over a century before.
No, these Muslim warriors were not Daoud's people. In truth, on this whole earth there were no people Daoud ibn Abdallah could truly call his own.
Once he had been David Langmuir, living with his crusader father and mother, in a castle near Ascalon by the plain of Gaza. An English ancestor had been one of the first crusaders in the Holy Land.
Just after David's ninth birthday Geoffrey Langmuir, his father, had ridden out to war in gleaming mail with a cross of red silk sewn on his white surcoat. David never saw him again.
Some weeks later the Saracens appeared before the castle, and there were days of thirst and hunger and constant fear. He remembered the thunderous pounding at the walls and the dark men in their yellow robes and green turbans, their crescent-shaped swords coated with blood. He remembered his mother, Lady Evelyn, in her blue dress, running up the spiral stairs of a tower. He heard her distant scream. When the Saracens dragged him out of the castle, with men being cut down by swords all around him and women thrown to the ground by laughing Turks who fell upon them, he saw at the base of the tower a bundle of blue linen splashed with red that must have been his mother.
On their leisurely journey back to the Nile, the Turks forced him to lie on his belly, and they used him as men use women. He would never forget the needle-sharp tip of a curving dagger touched to his eyeball as a bashi with a flowing black beard demanded that Daoud use his mouth to give him pleasure. Whenever Daoud remembered that time, his insides knotted and his face burned with shame.
One day he stood naked on a platform in El Kahira, capital of the sultans—the city the Christians called Cairo. A fat, laughing slave dealer, who had raped him till he bled the night before, offered him for sale.
A tall man with one eye a glittering blue and the other a blank white, a scimitar in a jeweled scabbard thrust through the embroidered sash around his waist, came forward.
A silence fell over the crowd of slave buyers, followed by whispers. The one-eyed warrior paid the price asked in gold dinars and without haggling. And when the slaver fondled David's loins one last time as he covered him with a ragged tunic, the warrior seized the slaver by the throat with one hand, forcing him to his knees, and squeezed till he collapsed unconscious in the dust of the marketplace.
David was almost mad with terror as the one-eyed warrior took him to his mansion beside a lake in the center of El Kahira. But the tall man spoke kindly to him and treated him decently. Amazingly, he could speak French, David's language, though with a strange and heavy accent. He told David that he was called Baibars al-Bunduqdari, Baibars the Crossbowman. He was an emir of the Bhari Mamelukes, which meant, he said, "slaves of the river." But though the Mamelukes were slaves, they were also great and powerful warriors.
Baibars gave David a new name—Daoud—and told him that he had selected him to be a Mameluke. He explained in a firm but kindly way that Daoud did have a choice but that the alternative was a life of unrelieved wretchedness as a ghulman, a menial slave. As a Mameluke, Daoud would be set free when his training was complete, and he could win riches and glory and be a warrior for God and his emir.
"I have long watched for such a one as you," Baibars said, "who could look like a Christian but have the mind and heart of a Mameluke. One like you could be a great weapon against the enemies of the faith."
But your faith is not my faith, David, who was to be called Daoud, thought, not daring to speak, and your enemies are not my enemies.
His longing to please this man, the first Muslim to treat him with respect, struggled as the years passed with his memories of a Christian childhood. Daoud underwent the training of a Mameluke, and Baibars watched him closely. Daoud accepted Islam and took the common surname of a convert, ibn Abdallah. He took naturally to the life of a warrior and grew in strength and skill.
Year by year Baibars, too, became more powerful. At last he made himself sultan of El Kahira, ruler of an empire that stretched from North Africa to Syria. Daoud's hand had wielded the flame dagger of the Hashishiyya that ended the previous sultan's life.
Now, having raised Daoud, trained him as a Mameluke, and educated him in statecraft, having sent him to learn wisdom from the Sufi and terror from the Hashishiyya, having given him a new name and a new faith, Baibars had sent Daoud into the Christian country called Italy.
The stones of the gateway seemed to be marble, unusual for a fortification. Daoud noticed large iron rings set at intervals under the arch. His feet crunched on fresh straw.
The space under the arch was about ten paces from outer portal to inner. On one side a broad-shouldered official sat at a table. The man glanced up at Daoud, looked down at a leather-bound ledger in which he was writing, then raised his eyes again for a longer look. This time the brown eyes met Daoud's.
The official's grizzled hair formed a cap of curls around his head, hiding his ears. He had a thick mustache, black streaked with white. His shirt of violet silk looked costly. On the straw beside him lay a huge dog, doubtless bred for hunting, with short gray fur, forepaws stretched before it like a sphinx.
These people live with unclean animals, Daoud thought with distaste.
When the official leaned back in his chair, Daoud saw the long, straight dagger that hung from his belt in a scabbard decorated with crossed bands of gold ribbon.
Fear tightened Daoud's throat.
Will this man see through me? Will he guess what I am?
Come, come, he chided himself. You have gone among Christians before. You have walked in the midst of crusaders in the streets of Acre and Antioch. You have landed on the island of Cyprus. You have even gone as Baibars's emissary to the Greeks of Constantinople. Commend yourself to God and cast fear aside.
He visualized what the Hashishiyya called "the Face of Steel within the Mask of Clay." What he showed this official would be his Mask of Clay, the look and manner of the merchant he was pretending to be. Beneath it, unseen, was his true face, a Face of Steel forged over years of bodily and spiritual training.
The mustached man allowed most of the people in line to pass into the city after a few quick questions.
Daoud's heartbeat quickened and he tensed when his turn came to pass.
"Come here. Lower your hood," the man said.
Walking slowly toward him, Daoud reached up and pushed back his hood.
The official raised thick black brows and beckoned to a guard. "If he makes a move you do not like, skewer him."
"Yes, Messer Lorenzo."
Daoud felt a stiffness in his neck and a knot in his belly. King Manfred's chancellor, Aziz, had written that Daoud would be quietly admitted to the town.
The heavyset, black-bearded Muslim soldier took a spear from the boy standing near him and leveled it at Daoud, his face hard.
"Now then," said Lorenzo, "give us your sword."
This overzealous guard captain, or whatever he was, was paying too much attention to him. But to avoid more attention, he must readily cooperate. He unbuckled his sword belt and held it out. Another Muslim guard took it and stepped beyond Daoud's reach.
Messer Lorenzo said, "Open your pack and show me what is in it."
"Silk, Your Signory." Daoud shrugged the pack off his shoulders and laid it on the table. He unlaced its flap and drew out a folded length of deep blue silk and then a crimson one. The shiny cloth slid through his long fingers.
"I am not a lord," said Lorenzo softly, reaching out to caress the silk. "Do not insult me by addressing me incorrectly."
"Yes, Messere."
Lorenzo took the pack with both hands and shook it. A shiny circular object a little larger than a man's hand fell out. Lorenzo picked it up and frowned at it.
"What is this, a mirror?"
"Yes, Messere. Our Trebizond mirrors are famed in Byzantium, Persia, and the Holy Land. I brought this as another sample of what we can offer."
"It is a good mirror," Lorenzo agreed. "It shows me my ugly face all too well."
Daoud was relieved to see Lorenzo had not guessed the secret of the mirror, that it contained a deadly disk of Hindustan. Thrown properly, the sharp-edged disk would slice into an opponent like a knife.
At Lorenzo's command, two of the guards searched Daoud briskly and efficiently. They even made him take off his boots.
The fingers of one guard found the chain around Daoud's neck and pulled on it. The locket Daoud had hidden under his tunic came out.
"What is that?" Lorenzo growled.
A chill ran over Daoud's body. Could Lorenzo possibly guess what the locket was?
"A locket with a holy inscription in our Greek language, Messere."
"Open it up."
With a leaden feeling in his belly Daoud turned a small screw in the hammered silver case. Perhaps he should not have taken the locket with him. What would Lorenzo see when he looked at it? The cover fell open, and he glanced down at the intricate etched lines and curves on the rock-crystal inner face of the locket. When Daoud saw beginning to appear on the crystal the face of a dark-skinned woman with accents of blue-black paint around her eyes, he looked away.
He leaned forward to give Lorenzo a closer look at it without taking it from around his neck. The locket's magic should work only for the person to whom it was given.
Daoud heard a low growl. The great hound had risen to his feet and was staring at him with eyes as dark brown as his master's. His upper lip curled, revealing teeth like ivory scimitars.
"Silence, Scipio," Lorenzo said. His voice was soft, but iron with command. The dog sat down again, but kept his eyes fixed on Daoud.
Heart pounding, he waited for Lorenzo's reaction to the locket. The official grasped it, pulling Daoud's head closer still.
"Mh. This is Greek writing, you say? It looks more like Arabic to me."
"It is very ancient, Messere, and the two alphabets are similar. I cannot read it myself. But it has been blessed by our Christian priests."
Lorenzo let go of the locket and glowered at him.
"What Christian priests? Where did you say you are from? What is your name?"
With deep relief Daoud stepped back from Lorenzo, snapped the locket shut, and dropped it back inside the collar of his tunic.
"I am David Burian, from Trebizond, Messere."
"Trebizond? I never heard of it," said the mustached man.
"It is on the eastern shore of the Black Sea."
"You have come such a great distance with only a few yards of silk and a mirror in your pack? Would you have me believe this is how you expect to make your fortune?"
Daoud reached deep in his lungs for breath. Now he would see whether the Christians would believe the story he and Baibars had devised.
"Messere, my city, Trebizond, lies on the only road to the East not cut off by the Saracens. A few brave merchants come from the land called Cathay bearing silk and spices. The samples I have brought with me, doubtless you can see, are of the highest quality. We can send you many bales of such silk overland from Trebizond to Constantinople, then by ship to your port of Manfredonia. I am here to arrange this trade."
"Arrange it with whom?"
Daoud hesitated. He had come to Lucera to meet with King Manfred. If, through some mistake, he should fall into the wrong hands, he would try to get word to the king that he was there.
"Your local merchants, your royal officials," he said. "Even your King Manfred, if he wishes to talk to me."
"So, a dusty peddler comes to our city gate and wants to speak with the king." He turned to the guard with the spear. "Take him to the castello."
Daoud molded the Face of Clay into an expression of naive wonderment. "The castello? Where King Manfred is?"
Lorenzo grinned without mirth. "Where King Manfred's prison is, my man. Where we hang the people sent by the pope to murder King Manfred."
Lorenzo's eyes were hard as chips of obsidian, and when he said the word hang, Daoud could feel the rough rope tightening around his neck.
But he was more angry now than frightened. His jaw muscles clenched. Why had Aziz not made sure there would be no mistake like this?
"Why are you doing this to me, Messer Lorenzo? I mean no harm."
"And I intend to see to it that you do no harm in this place, Messere of Trebizond," Lorenzo shot back. He waved to the guard. "To the guardroom, Ahmad."
May a thousand afrits hound this infidel to his death, thought Daoud angrily. "And what will you do with me, Messer Lorenzo?"
"I will examine you further at my leisure, after I have passed all these good people into the city." One violet-sleeved arm made a flowing gesture toward the waiting throng.
Daoud noticed that the tiny firewood seller, who had already passed by the guards, had paused at the inner portal. He shook his head sadly and touched forehead, shoulders, and chest in that sign Christians made to recall the cross of Jesus, their Messiah.
Why, I believe he is praying for me. That is kindly done.
Ahmad, the guard, pointed his spear at Daoud and jerked his head. Daoud stood his ground.
"What of my silk? If you keep it, I will truly have no honest business in Lucera."
Lorenzo smiled. He stuffed the lengths of silk and the mirror back into the pack and held it out to Daoud.
"There is not enough here to be worth stealing. Take it, then."
"And my sword?"
Lorenzo laughed gruffly. "Forget your sword. Take him away, Ahmad."
They had missed the precious object hidden in a pouch tied in his groin. And they missed the Scorpion, the miniature crossbow devised by the Hashishiyya, its parts concealed in the hem of his cloak. Nor did they have any idea that the tie that held his cloak at the neck could be pulled loose to become a long strangling cord, flexible as silk and hard as steel.
Daoud pulled his hood back over his head, shrugged into the pack under his cloak, and began walking. Every step he took sent a jolt of anger through his body. He would like to use his strangling cord on the man responsible for this blunder.
The news might well travel northward that a blond merchant had been arrested trying to enter Lucera. And if that man should later appear at the court of the pope, there might be those who would remember hearing of him and wonder why he had gone first to the pope's enemy, Manfred von Hohenstaufen.
His first feelings of anger became a cold turmoil in his belly as he thought what could happen if his mission failed—El Kahira leveled, its people slaughtered, Islam crushed beneath the feet of barbarian conquerors.
He must not let that happen.
The narrow street he walked on was lined with circular houses, their brick walls a warm yellow color. The conical roofs were covered with thin slates.
A Muslim sword maker looked up from his forge to stare at Daoud and his guard as they passed. Veiled women with red pottery jars on their heads stopped and looked boldly into his eyes.
Daoud lifted his gaze to the octagonal central tower of the citadel, bright yellow-and-black flags flying from its battlements. Instead of being squared off, the battlements were topped by forked points, like the tails of swallows, proclaiming allegiance to the Ghibellini, partisans of the Hohenstaufen family, enemies of the pope.
Closer to the citadel, noises of men and animals came at Daoud from all directions. He saw many buildings, all connected with one another, their small windows protected by iron grillwork. To his right, in a large grassy open field, a hundred or more Muslim guards in red and green were swinging their scimitars as an officer on a stone platform called out the count in Arabic. Daoud and his guard passed by a second yard, where still more Muslim soldiers were grooming their slender Arab horses.
A pungent smell of many beasts and fowl pent up close hung in the warm, damp air. Another row of buildings echoed with the shrieks of birds. Falconers in yellow-and-black tunics walked up and down holding wicker cages. As he peered into a doorway, Daoud saw the golden eyes of birds of prey gleaming at him out of the shadows.
The sun was high by the time they came to the gateway of the castello.
Well, so far they have taken me where I wanted to go, Daoud thought grimly.
The entry hall of the castello was a large, vaulted room, as Daoud had expected. He had studied the citadel of Lucera before leaving Egypt, as he had studied many other strongholds in Italy, memorizing building plans and talking at length with agents of the sultan who had been there.
A strange, almost dizzying sensation came over Daoud. He recognized the feeling, having had it several times before when, in disguise, he entered Christian fortresses. As he gazed around the shadowy stone hall, its gloom relieved by shafts of light streaming in through high, narrow windows, he seemed to be seeing everything through two pairs of eyes. One pair belonged to a Mameluke warrior, Daoud ibn Abdallah, scouting an enemy stronghold. The other eyes were those of a boy named David Langmuir, to whom a Christian castle had been home. And, as always on sensing that inner division, Daoud felt a crushing sadness.
Ahmad took Daoud through a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms in the base of the castle. He spoke briefly to an officer seated at a table, dressed like himself in red turban and green tunic. He gestured to a heavy-looking door reinforced with strips of iron.
"In there, Messer David."
Every muscle in Daoud's body screamed out in protest. As part of his initiation into the Hashishiyya, he had been locked in a tiny black chamber in the Great Pyramid for days, and, except for the deaths of his mother and father, it was the worst memory of his life. Now he ached to strike down Ahmad and the other Muslim soldier and flee.
Instead, he said quietly, "How long will I have to wait?"
Ahmad shrugged. "God alone knows." Ahmad's southern Italian dialect was as heavily accented as Daoud's own.
How surprised he would be if I were to address him in Arabic.
"Who is this man who orders me imprisoned?" Daoud demanded.
Ahmad and the other guard shrugged at the question. "He is Messer Lorenzo Celino of Sicily. He serves King Manfred."
"What does he do for King Manfred?"
"Whatever the king tells him to." Ahmad smiled at Daoud and gestured again at the ironbound door. "Thank you for making the work of guarding you easy. May God be kind to you."
Daoud bowed in thanks. Remembering the proper Christian farewell, he said, "Addio."
The other soldier unlocked the door with a large iron key, and Daoud walked reluctantly into a shadowy room. The door slammed shut behind him, and again he went rigid with his hatred of confinement.
The walls had recently been whitewashed, but the little room stank abominably. The odor, Daoud saw, came from a privy hole in one corner, where large black flies circled in a humming swarm. Half-light came in through a window covered with a black iron grill whose openings were barely wide enough to push a finger through. Noticing what appeared to be a bundle of bedding against a wall, Daoud approached it and squatted down for a closer look. He prodded it, feeling straw under a stained cotton sheet. At his probing, black dots, almost too small to see, began moving about rapidly over the sheet.
Daoud crossed the room, unslung his pack from his back, and dropped it to the floor. He sat down on the flagstones, as far from the bedding and the privy opening as he could get, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up, like a Bedouin in his tent.
I am helpless, Daoud thought, and terror and rage rose up in him like two djinns released from their jars, threatening to overwhelm him. He sat perfectly still. To bring himself under control, he began the contemplative exercise his Sufi teacher, Sheikh Saadi, called the Presence of God.
"God is everywhere, and most of all in man's heart," Saadi had said, his old eyes twinkling. "He cannot be seen or heard or touched or smelled or tasted. Therefore, make your mind as empty as the Great Desert, and you may converse with God, Whose name be praised."
Daoud touched the farewell present Saadi had given him when he left El Kahira to begin the journey to Italy. It was a leather case tied around his neck, and it contained a piece of paper called a tawidh, an invocation whose words were represented by Arabic numerals.
Like the locket, it would arouse curiosity if someone searching him found it. But it could be simply explained as one of those curious objects a traveler from distant places might have about his person. And, like the locket, it was simply too precious not to be worn.
Saadi said the tawidh would help wounds heal faster. Daoud refused to let himself think about wounds. He tried to make his mind a blank, and in the effort he forgot for a time where he was.