Daoud, like de Gobignon, was alone. Lorenzo dared not come; the condemned man might recognize him and call out to him. Daoud would never bring Sophia to witness such a sight, even though there were many women, and even children, in the crowd.
The previous night Tilia had told him that she had rented for the day a house overlooking the piazza, from which some important patrons would enhance their pleasure with Tilia's women by watching the pain of the heretic. Daoud looked around at the colonnaded façades of the palaces around the square, wondering which were the windows through which Tilia's depraved clients watched.
A howl went up from the crowd in the square, the people around Daoud shouting so loudly as to deafen him. He saw a cage made of wooden poles rocking into the piazza. People cheered and laughed. Two executioners in blood-red tunics, their heads and faces covered with red hoods, stood on either side of the cage, each man holding in his hands a pair of long-handled pincers. Standing on tiptoe, Daoud saw on the platform of the cart a black iron dish from which ribbons of gray smoke arose.
The prisoner, squatting in the cage, was silent for the moment. Even at this distance Daoud could see his shoulders shaking spasmodically with his panting. He was naked, and all over his flesh were bleeding, blackened wounds.
The executioners thrust the ends of their pincers into the coals and held them there. When they raised them out and brandished them, the claws were glowing red. They turned to the prisoner, who started screaming at once. One executioner thrust his pincers through the front of the cage. The prisoner tried to back away, but the cage was too small. He only pressed his buttocks against the bars behind him, where the other executioner had crept and now dug the jaws of his pincers into the man's flesh as the crowd roared with laughter. Daoud heard the sizzle. The man's scream rose to a pitch that made Daoud's ears ring. The executioner held up his pincers with a gobbet of burnt flesh caught in them for the crowd to see, then slung them so that the bit of meat flew through the air. Daoud saw people reach up to grab at it.
This man is dying horribly because of me. The thought bit into Daoud's heart like the red-hot claws. When Sophia had said as much accusingly to him, he had shrugged it off. Now he had to face the fact.
Let your guilt pierce you through the heart. Do not armor yourself against it. Do not run away from it. Above all, do not turn your back on it. So Saadi had advised him after he avenged himself on Kassar.
The sands of the Eastern Desert were the color of drying blood. The hooves of Daoud's pony sank into them with each step, and he wished he had a camel to ride.
Their training troop had never traveled this far south, and Nicetas had been a fool, Daoud thought, to go hunting in unknown and dangerous country with only a pony to ride. No wonder he had not come back yesterday. Probably, the sun had killed the pony, and Nicetas was crouched in some wadi waiting to be rescued.