He did not think it had been mentioned, in her letters or by Baibars, that she was a brothel keeper. He felt slightly repelled. He wondered if Baibars knew. He must. Baibars knew everything.
"Take yourself away, Celino," Daoud ordered. "And tell those two to come no closer." He pointed to the forest clearing where Sophia and Rachel were already starting toward him. "I must be alone with Madonna Tilia."
"Yes, Messere," said Celino with a bow. Scipio paced ahead of him like a tame lion as he walked off.
"We expected you to enter Orvieto alone," said Tilia, looking at Sophia and Rachel, who were staring back at her from across the road. "Why this entourage?"
And I expected to meet with Cardinal Ugolini at once, thought Daoud with growing irritation. Has he set this woman up as a barrier between himself and me?
He explained briefly how Celino, Sophia, and Rachel came to be traveling with him. Tilia gazed at him with a falcon's piercing stare. Daoud was not used to being stared at by a woman, and she made him uneasy. But he met her eyes in silence until she turned to her slaves and made a dropping gesture with her hand. The Africans immediately squatted in the grassy clearing where they had set Tilia's chair. Daoud realized that he had not heard a sound from them, and suspected they must have been made dumb.
"Come." Tilia took his arm, again surprising him. In Egypt women did not touch men they had just met. But she owned a house of pleasure. She was not a respectable woman.
Why should that bother him, he asked himself. He had spent his share of time in houses of pleasure along the Bhar al-Nil. What he felt toward their owners was mostly gratitude.
Tilia drew Daoud with her into the thicket along the hillside, stepping gracefully, despite her bulk, around shrubs and over rocks and fallen branches. She led him away from the road and into a grove of pine trees a little way up the slope. Daoud felt his muscles tightening. He was going to have to undergo more testing before she would let him meet Ugolini. Did they really think that Baibars would send a fool to Orvieto?
"Spread your cloak for me." She pointed to a spot under an old pine whose trunk rose straight and bare twice the height of a man before the first branch sprouted. Daoud unclasped his brown cloak and laid it on the thick bed of brown pine needles. Tilia sat down, smiled, and patted the place beside her.