Their thick beards reminded Daoud how much he missed his own beard, shaved off in preparation for this mission.
My people. Daoud felt a sudden warmth at the familiar sight of warriors of Islam.
The feeling was nonsense, he told himself. These were not his people, but the Saracens of Manfred von Hohenstaufen. Their Arab ancestors had once ruled southern Italy, but the Christians had conquered them over a century before.
No, these Muslim warriors were not Daoud's people. In truth, on this whole earth there were no people Daoud ibn Abdallah could truly call his own.
Once he had been David Langmuir, living with his crusader father and mother, in a castle near Ascalon by the plain of Gaza. An English ancestor had been one of the first crusaders in the Holy Land.
Just after David's ninth birthday Geoffrey Langmuir, his father, had ridden out to war in gleaming mail with a cross of red silk sewn on his white surcoat. David never saw him again.
Some weeks later the Saracens appeared before the castle, and there were days of thirst and hunger and constant fear. He remembered the thunderous pounding at the walls and the dark men in their yellow robes and green turbans, their crescent-shaped swords coated with blood. He remembered his mother, Lady Evelyn, in her blue dress, running up the spiral stairs of a tower. He heard her distant scream. When the Saracens dragged him out of the castle, with men being cut down by swords all around him and women thrown to the ground by laughing Turks who fell upon them, he saw at the base of the tower a bundle of blue linen splashed with red that must have been his mother.
On their leisurely journey back to the Nile, the Turks forced him to lie on his belly, and they used him as men use women. He would never forget the needle-sharp tip of a curving dagger touched to his eyeball as a bashi with a flowing black beard demanded that Daoud use his mouth to give him pleasure. Whenever Daoud remembered that time, his insides knotted and his face burned with shame.
One day he stood naked on a platform in El Kahira, capital of the sultans—the city the Christians called Cairo. A fat, laughing slave dealer, who had raped him till he bled the night before, offered him for sale.