Joy blazed up inside her at those words. She had been so afraid that torture would somehow destroy his caring for her.
"Oh, yes," she said. "Nothing would make me happier."
"But first I need you to wash and dress my wounds."
Daoud gritted his teeth and winced as first she lifted off the purple cloak that covered him, then inch by inch drew the yellow tunic up from his body and over his head. He groaned aloud when, with her propping up his heavy body, he raised his arms.
"O Kriste!" she whispered. She wept anew as her eyes traveled over the golden body she loved and saw huge, broken blisters and patches of red skin; swollen black bruises the size of hen's eggs; long, deep lacerations filled with crusted blood; the many little black scabs of puncture wounds.
"When Lorenzo and the Ghibellini get here, we will have d'Ucello and his torturers torn to pieces," she raged. She went to the table, folded a linen cloth, and dipped it in the water.
"I do not hate d'Ucello," said Daoud as she began, very carefully, to clean his wounds. "He has his work and I have mine. As for his torturer—Erculio is his name—d'Ucello does not know it, but his torturer is one of us."
Sophia's hand, moving the cloth lightly over a long, shallow cut that ran across the smooth, almost hairless skin of his chest, paused. Was he delirious?
"One of us? The torturer?"
Daoud looked amused. "I do not know where Erculio comes from, but he is a good servant of the God of Islam and of the sultan, who placed him there for my protection."