The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea (read novel full txt) 📕

tunic and hose were stained and tattered. His tunic hung loose, unbelted. No weapons. That made Simon feel a bit easier. The toe of one boot was worn through, and the other was bound with a bit of rag to hold the sole to the upper.

"I thought you would see the Count d'Anjou." And Simon had half expected Uncle Charles would send Sordello back with a message insisting Simon take the fellow back into his service.

Sordello laughed and nodded. "Easy to say 'see the Count d'Anjou,' Your Signory. Not so easy to do when you are a masterless man with an empty purse. The count likes to move about, and quickly at that. But I caught up with him at Lyons. He already knew the whole story."

"I wrote to him," said Simon.

"Well, your letter must have been most eloquent, Your Signory, because the count refused to take me back into his service. He called me a fool and a few other things and told me I deserved exactly what I got. Told me if I wasn't out of the city in an hour he would have me flogged."

"I assumed that the count reposed great confidence in you, and I felt I must convince him that I had done the right thing in dismissing[212] you." He sounded in his own ears as if he were apologizing. He reminded himself firmly that the scoundrel had no right to an apology.

"You convinced him, all right." Sordello's manner was becoming less humble by the moment.

He is either going to attack me or—worse—ask for his position back. I must not be soft with him.

"Once a man as well known as the Count d'Anjou has expelled you from his service, you can't find a position anywhere in France or Italy," said Sordello. "Not if your only skills are fighting and singing. I sold my horse in Milan. I walked from there on. I ran out of money in Pisa. I starved and slept in ditches to get here."

"And stole here and there, too, I'll wager," said Simon, determined to be hard with Sordello. "Well, here you are, and why have you come?" He knew the answer perfectly well, and was determined, no matter how the troubadour tried to play on his sympathies, to send him on his way. Even if he had wanted to take Sordello back into his service—and he most definitely did not—the Armenians and the Tartars would never permit his presence among them. At any rate, regardless of what Sordello claimed, he would not starve. He could sing for his supper in inns. And Italy's street-warring families and factions could always use a dagger as quick as Sordello's.

"I could throw my lot in with the Ghibellini, Your Signory, but their prospects are poor," said Sordello, as if aware of Simon's thoughts. "The day is coming when all of Italy will be in the power of the Count d'Anjou. I want to get back into his good graces, and the only way I can do that is through you, Your Signory. If you take me back, he will take me back."

David of Trebizond's servant, Giancarlo! Just today, was I not wishing I could put someone in the enemy camp?

Simon stood staring into Sordello's eyes, deliberately making him wait for an answer. The troubadour's eyelids wrinkled down to slits, but he held Simon's gaze.

"I was going to tell you I had nothing for you." Simon saw Sordello's face brighten at the hint that Simon would offer him something. "But there is a way you can serve me."

Sordello began to smile.

"It does involve throwing your lot in with the Ghibellini," Simon said, "but you will be serving me and, through me, Count Charles. Does that interest you?"[213]

Sordello dropped to his knees, seized Simon's hand, and kissed it with rough lips. "To spy upon them? Your Signory, I was made for such work. Thank you, thank you for letting me serve you. Command me, Your Signory, I beg."

XIX

"Are there any great collections of books in Trebizond?" Fra Tomasso leaned forward intently, and his belly, swathed in the white linen robe of his order, pushed the small black writing desk toward Daoud.

Fra Tomasso's dialect was easy for Daoud to understand. It was the same as Lorenzo's, since the friar came from southern Italy. It was the dialect Daoud had learned in Egypt.

But in another sense, conversing with d'Aquino was not at all easy. His body tense, Daoud sat on the edge of his chair, alert for any question that might be meant to trap him. And at the same time, he burned for a chance to persuade the stout Dominican to oppose the Tartar alliance. He was both hunted and hunter today.

"Yes, Father. The basileus of Trebizond—the emperor—has the biggest library, with the monks of Mount Gelesias not far behind. Several of the great families have large collections of very old manuscripts. I am afraid I cannot tell you what is in any of those libraries. I know more about spices and silks than I do about books. Is there a particular book you are interested in?"

Daoud, relieved, watched the round face glow as the Dominican seemed to relish the possibilities. It would never have done to admit it to Ugolini, but Daoud was not without fear. He realized that a slip might lead to his arrest and torture, the end of his mission, and, finally, death. His head had begun to ache from the effort of posing and answering all questions with care.

But now he sensed a way of reaching d'Aquino. More than anything else, the man would want books—books that would help him[214] write more books of his own. Perhaps his huge physical appetite was but a reflection of his hunger for knowledge.

"Ah, Messer David." He smiled, and Daoud realized that his mouth was not small—it only looked small because of the round cheeks on either side of it. "There is one book I have heard of that I would give everything I possess—if I possessed anything—to own. You are familiar with the philosopher, Aristotle?"

Daoud nodded. How wise it had been of Baibars, he thought, to command him to spend months with a mullah from Andalus who was versed in the philosophies of the Christians and of their Greek and Roman predecessors. Daoud had even read works by Aristotle in Arabic.

"Much of my work, like that of my colleagues, is based on the writings of Aristotle," d'Aquino went on. "He has been called the Master of Those Who Know. I call him the philosopher. His thought encompassed every subject under the sun—and the sun itself, I believe. The ancient writers refer to a book by Aristotle called in Latin De Caelestiis, Of the Heavens. In it the philosopher writes about the movement of heavenly bodies, the sun, the stars, and the planets, and their relations with one another. That book disappeared during the long wars that led to the downfall of the Roman Empire. Every time I meet a traveler from some distant part of the world, I ask him about De Caelestiis."

"Does it tell how the planets rule men's fates?" Daoud asked.

"That is a ridiculous, irrational, and superstitious notion." Fra Tomasso waved the suggestion away with a stubby-fingered hand. Daoud felt a cold wave of terror. Had he said something that gave him away?

But Fra Tomasso, leaning back in his squeaking chair, seemed unperturbed. And Daoud remembered that Ugolini studied the influence of the stars on human lives. So it could not be such an un-Christian belief.

The Dominican pointed over his shoulder to the window of his cell, a large rectangle cut in the curving whitewashed wall. This was one of the few rooms Daoud had entered in Italy that was not covered with idolatrous or obscene paintings, and he liked its austerity. Except, of course, for the ubiquitous figure of Jesus the Messiah, crucified, hanging opposite the window. Daoud tried to avoid looking at the crucifixes because they reminded him of his childhood, but they were everywhere in Orvieto.

"Aristotle reasoned about the relations of the heavenly bodies to[215] one another," Fra Tomasso said. "One account of the De Caelestiis declares that he believed that the sun does not move."

"But we see it move," Daoud said, surprised.

"We think we see it move." D'Aquino smiled. "But have you ever stood on the deck of a galley as it was pulling away from the quay and had the feeling that the quay was moving while the ship was standing still? Well then, what if the earth is moving, just like a ship on whose deck we stand, while the sun remains fixed?"

Daoud thought about the vast and solid earth and the daily journey of the sun like a bright lamp across the sky. It was self-evident which one of them moved. But he sensed that Fra Tomasso was in love with this idea. He had best not argue too strenuously against it.

"Ingenious," he said.

Ridiculous, he thought to himself. This man dismisses astrology and approves greater absurdities.

"I myself suspected that the sun might be stationary while the earth moves long before I learned that Aristotle might also believe so." Fra Tomasso waved a hand toward the window again. His cell was the top floor of one of the towers fortifying the Dominican chapter house, an anthill of constant, mysterious activity. D'Aquino's window overlooked the north side of Orvieto's wall. There was no covering on the window, and the shutters were open to let in the cool mountain air. Daoud gazed upon the rolling hills, bright green in the sunlight, beyond Orvieto's battlements. This was a lovely country, he thought. Back in Egypt the hills would be brown this time of year.

"Look how much light and heat we get from the sun," Fra Tomasso went on. "Yet, the sun appears small—I can hide it with my thumb."

Your thumb could hide four or five suns.

"Perhaps it is small," Daoud said.

"If it is as big as it must be to produce such light and heat, it must be very far away—thousands of leagues—to appear so small. But if it is that far away, it must be bigger still, for its heat and light to travel such a distance. The bigger it is, the farther away it must be—the farther away it is, the bigger it must be. Do you follow? There must be a strict rule of proportion."

Daoud told himself to ignore this nonsense and concentrate on the important thing—that Fra Tomasso badly wanted a book by this pagan philosopher Aristotle. That book might be the means of winning[216] Fra Tomasso. Not that he could be crudely bribed, but certainly such a present would favorably dispose him to what Daoud had to say.

And he saw another way to make the point he had come to make.

"It may be, Your Reverence, that the book you want has been lost forever. When I spoke of the destruction of Baghdad the other day, I should have mentioned that the Tartars burned there a library rivaled only by the great library of Alexandria in its prime."

His flesh turned cold. That was a mistake. In his zeal he had momentarily forgotten that it was Christians who had destroyed the library of Alexandria. As the story was often told in Egypt, when the Muslim warriors took Alexandria from the Christians, they found that most of what had once been the world's greatest collection of books had been used to fuel the fires that warmed the public baths.

But, to Daoud's relief, Fra Tomasso only shut his eyes and shook his head, his cheeks quivering gently like a bowl of frumenty. "God forgive the Tartars."

"God will certainly not forgive us, Fra Tomasso, if we help the Tartars to destroy Damascus and Cairo. Or Trebizond and Constantinople."

The Dominican opened his eyes wide. "Constantinople?"

"In the Far East they have taken greater cities and conquered much larger empires."

Fra Tomasso crossed himself. "But it is God's will, even as Augustine tells us, that cities be destroyed and empires rise and fall. The Tartars may be the builders of a Christian empire that embraces the whole world."

God forbid it! Daoud was becoming exasperated with the fat Dominican's "perhapses" and "maybes." Perhaps the earth moves and the sun stands still. Maybe the Tartars are God's means of making the whole world Christian.

He warned himself not to let his anger show. This might seem to be a pleasant conversation, but actually he was tiptoeing around the edge of a pit of quicksand.

Still, if this clever, restless mind could be recruited to work against the alliance, how persuasive it would be. Daoud had already noticed that most of the leaders of Christendom listened when d'Aquino spoke. But Daoud dared not argue against the belief that God decided the fate of nations. He recalled a teaching of his Sufi master, Sheikh Saadi. He framed it in his mind to offer