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.