"You find that funny?"
"I am just as surprised to find out that you are a Jew as others would be to find out that I am a Muslim." Daoud stopped laughing. "I have known many Jews in Egypt. Abd ibn Adam, Sultan Baibars's personal physician, is a Jew. But why do you not wear the required hat?"
"It is not required in Manfred's kingdom. And I would not wear it on this mission any more than you would wear a Muslim's turban." Then Celino laughed. "But if I were to drop my breeches, you would see the mark of Abraham."
"I have that as well," said Daoud with a smile. "Muslims are also circumcised. I was eleven." He remembered with a twinge the old mullah chanting prayers in Arabic, the knife whose steel looked sharper and colder than any he had seen before or since.
"Now that mark is all I have left of the religion I was born into," Celino said.
"What do you mean? Did you convert to Christianity?"
"I told you I am not a Christian. I profess no faith."
Daoud drew back. A man who had no faith at all was somehow less than human.
"You believe in nothing?"
"One of Manfred's Saracen scholars gave me a book by your Arab philosopher Averroës. In it he taught that there are no spirits, no gods, no angels, no human souls. All things are matter only. That is what I believe."