XXVII
Daoud's tired eyes burned. He shut them, as he entered his bedchamber, against the bright light coming through the white window glass. But, tired as he was, sleep did not come. Perhaps he was too tired.
He had missed the proper time for morning prayer, but he poured water into a basin and washed his hands and face, then turned toward the risen sun and humbly addressed God, first bowing, then kneeling, then striking his forehead on the carpet.
When I pray, I am at home no matter where I am.
After praying, he pushed open the iron casement with its diamond-shaped glass panels to let in air and then pulled the green velvet curtains across the window to shut out light.
He moved now in a cool dimness, as if underwater. He must rest, to be strong for the next battle.
Crossing the room to his sleeping mattress, which lay on the floor Egyptian-fashion, he stripped off his sweat-soaked tunic and threw it down. He unbuckled his belt and laid it carefully on the mattress. Then he kicked off his boots and dropped his hose and his loincloth. He splashed water over his body and felt cleaner and cooler.
There was another way to be home. He had been waiting for the first time he could feel he had triumphed. He knew all too well what that way could do to a man in the aftermath of defeat—sharpen his misery till he could ease the pain only by destroying himself.
But last night he had unmasked the Tartars before all the great ones of Orvieto, and he had survived a street encounter with bravos who intended to kill him. And so this morning he could allow himself this.
He had brought a cup of kaviyeh from Ugolini's room. He set it on the black marble table beside his sleeping mattress. Then from his traveling chest he took the dark brown leather pack that had accompanied him here from Lucera. He felt for the small packet and drew it out. Unwrapping the oily parchment, he looked at the small black cake, a square about half the length of his finger on a side. He drew his dagger out of its sheath—the dagger that would have been poor protection for him earlier if he had had to fight those Filippeschi men. Carefully he shaved peelings from the cake to the polished black marble. With the sharp edge of the dagger he chopped at the peelings until he had a coarse powder. He held the cup of cooling black liquid below the edge of the table and scraped the powder into it. He stirred the kaviyeh with the dagger's point.
Holding the cup up before him as if he were offering a toast, he spoke the Hashishiyya invocation: "In the name of the Voice comes Brightness."
He put the cup to his lips and sipped it slowly. The lukewarm kaviyeh masked the other taste, but he knew it would begin to work as soon as it reached his stomach. He peered into the bottom of the cup to make sure he had missed no precious grains, then set it down.
The magic horse that flies to paradise, so the Hashishiyya called it.
From Sheikh Saadi he had learned how to resist the power of drugs. From Imam Fayum, the Old Man of the Mountain, he learned how to use them, when he chose.
Naked, Daoud lay back on his mattress with a sigh that sounded like a roar in his ears. If the Filippeschi came upon him to kill him now, he would greet them with a smile and open arms. Lying on his back, his head resting on a feather-filled cushion, he let his senses expand to fill the world around him. His eyes traced the intricate red-on-red floral pattern of a damask wall hanging. The humming of a large black fly that had blundered in through the open casement and the closed curtains resounded in his ears like a dervish chorus chanting themselves into an ecstasy.
Odors swept in through the open window—clean mountain air with the scent of pines in it, but from nearby the swampy foul reek of every kind of filth produced by thousands of human beings living too close to one another. It had rained last night, but not enough to clean the streets, and the scavenging pigs—Daoud's heightened senses could hear and smell them, too—could not keep up with the garbage and sewage produced by the overcrowded people of Orvieto.
But he need not remain in Orvieto. He raised his head and lifted the chain that held the silver locket about his neck. Turning the little screw that fastened the lid of the locket, he let it fall open. It covered most of the palm of his right hand. Holding the crystal disk backed by silver close to his eyes, he saw his face reflected back at him from the convex surface. His image was broken up by a pattern etched into the transparency, a five-part webwork of interlocking angles and boxes, spirals and concentric circles. The pattern formed a maze too complex for the eye to grasp. He believed that the man who used a stylus, doubtless diamond-pointed, to cut the design into the crystal must have gone blind in the course of his work. No mosque bore a more intricate—or more beautiful—pattern on its walls.
His eyes, as they always did when he looked into the locket, tried to follow the pattern and became lost in it. As the drug extended its empire within him, it seemed that he could actually see his eyes, coalesced into a single eye, staring back at him from the net of lines and whorls that entrapped it.
The captive eye means that the locket now controls what I see.
He saw the face of Sophia Karaiannides. Her dark lips, luscious as red grapes, were parted slightly, showing even, white teeth. Her thick-lashed eyelids were half lowered over burning eyes. Her hair hung unbound in brunette waves on either side of her face. She had splashed water on her face, and the droplets gleamed on her cheeks and brow like jewels.
Daoud had no doubt that he was seeing her exactly as she was at this moment, somewhere else in the cardinal's mansion. The locket had that property.
But I do not want to see Sophia. I want Blossoming Reed.
Then Sophia spoke to him. "Oh, David, why will you not come to my bed?"
Her voice was rich as velvet. His muscles tensed with a sudden hunger, a long-felt need that Francesca, the woman he bedded with now and then at Tilia Caballo's, could never satisfy. Sophia, he realized, could give him what he wanted, what he missed so terribly since leaving home.
No! Let me see Blossoming Reed.
He shut his eyes, and Sophia was still looking at him. The locket and the drug together could show a man things he did not want to see, make him feel things he did not want to feel. Things that were inside him that he did not want to know.
The knowledge you run from is the most precious of all, Saadi had said.
I know I want Sophia. I do not hide that from myself. But I cannot have her. Let me therefore see my wife, Blossoming Reed, she who gave me this locket.
Sophia's image faded now, and he saw again the crystal and its pattern that caught his soul like a fish in its toils. Gradually the pattern became the face of Blossoming Reed. Sparks flashed from her slanting eyes, painted with black rings of kohl. Her wide mouth was a downturned crescent of scorn. The nostrils of her hawklike nose flared proudly. There was a message in her face. What did she know, and what was she trying to tell him?
Blossoming Reed, daughter of Baibars and a Canaanite wife Baibars had stolen from the crusader stronghold in Sidon. It was rumored that Blossoming Reed's mother practiced a kind of sorcery that was ancient even when the Hebrews were in bondage in Egypt. But would Baibars, the mightiest defender of the faith since Saladin, allow devil-worship in his own house? Daoud could not believe it.
And yet, what was this locket if not the work of some evil magician? He would not have touched the thing, much less worn it, had it not come from Blossoming Reed, whom he loved.
Blossoming Reed, betrothed to him at twelve, married to him at fourteen, whose breasts were like oranges and whose nails flayed his back in their lovemaking. Blossoming Reed, Baibars's gift of honor to him, seal and symbol of eternal friendship between Baibars al-Bunduqdari and Daoud ibn Abdallah.
Blossoming Reed, who now spoke to him in anger out of the magic of hashish and the locket.
Go back to the Well, Daoud!
Back to the Well?
To the Well of Goliath?
He saw again the plain of tamarisk, thorn bush, and grass, and the long black line of charging Tartars. Eagerly Daoud leaned forward in the saddle. Tightly he gripped his bow.
Now, devils, now you will pay for Baghdad!
He had relived that day, the greatest battle of his life, hundreds of times in thoughtful moments, in dreams, in hashish visions. What he saw now were moments that seemed to leap at him out of the darkness.
Screaming a war cry and brandishing a scimitar, a Tartar galloped at him. They were in open ground. Daoud circled away, sheathing his saif and pulling his bow from its case. The Tartar chased him, guiding his horse with his knees and firing arrow after arrow at Daoud. But he was in too much of a hurry. He was not aiming carefully, and all the arrows whistled over Daoud's head.
The muscles of the black Yemenite stallion bunched and stretched under Daoud as its hooves thundered over the plain. He stood in the saddle. He turned and took aim along the shaft of his arrow at the center of the Tartar's chest. The arrow went low, to Daoud's annoyance, and struck the Tartar in the side of the stomach. But he must have been wearing light leather armor, for the arrow with its steel point went deep into him. The Tartar gave a short cry and dropped his bow, then fell, like a stone, from the saddle into the sand.
Daoud wheeled his Yemenite about, then jerked the horse to a stop and jumped from the saddle with his saif out. The Tartar had somehow risen to all fours, but was vomiting blood into the sand. Daoud kicked him with his red-booted foot and rolled him over on his back.
Holding his saif high, he looked into the face of Nicetas, contorted with pain and fear.
"Oh, God!" he whispered. "Oh, God, no!"
He stood paralyzed. Their eyes met.
Nicetas said, "You have to."
"God be merciful to me," Daoud said, and brought the saif down.