"Ah, we must find a strong young slave to comfort you if your cardinal does not spend enough time in your bed."
"I am not the voracious woman you bought from a brothel so many years ago, my lord. Adelberto can satisfy my waning desires."
Baibars laughed, a rumbling sound. "Anything you want, Tilia, in all the sultanate of El Kahira, is yours. You have served me well."
"You took a prisoner and a slave and trusted her. You sent her jewels and gold in a steady stream. You helped her to achieve riches and power in the very heart of Christendom. Why should I not serve you with all my might? Since you sent me from here long ago I have not had the chance to see you with my own eyes and speak aloud my gratitude to you. And now that I am face-to-face with you, words fail me. If I spoke for a thousand and one nights I could not say enough to thank you. To praise you."
Baibars shrugged. "Do you not regret losing it all? You cannot open a brothel here in El Kahira, Tilia. I have closed all the brothels." His eyelids crinkled humorously. "I am a very strict Muslim these days."
"I am ready to retire, my lord. Ready to drop all pretense and come back here, just to be myself."
Baibars's wide mouth drew down, the lips so thin that the line they drew seemed just a slash across the bottom of his face.
"Now that you are here, Tilia, now that we are face-to-face, I want to hear from you the story of Daoud. I want to hear all of it, all that you had no room to tell me in your carrier-pigeon messages. Take as long as you like. Ask for anything that will make you comfortable. My ears are for you and for no one else."
"I am my lord's slave. I shall tell it to you as it happened to me." She settled herself on the cushion. "I first met Daoud ibn Abdallah in the hills outside Orvieto on an afternoon in late summer, three years ago—"
Tilia stopped her tale twice, so that she and Baibars could pray when the muezzins called the faithful to prayer at Maghrib, after the red of sunset had left the sky, and again at 'Isha, when it was dark enough that a white thread could not be told from a black thread.