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

Is it wrong to have done as I did and to feel this way?

A sharp voice rang out behind them. "Mahmoud!"

Daoud and the naqeeb turned together, and Daoud was amazed to see that Baibars, splendid in his red satin robe and green turban, was approaching them. Daoud and Mahmoud rushed to stand before him, rigid and trembling.

"Mahmoud," Baibars said, "when we return to Raudha Island tonight, you will issue this fool the steel helmet of a full-fledged Mameluke, trimmed with black fur."

He swung that searching blue eye back to Daoud. "Tonight at the Gray Mosque I will perform the ceremony that frees you. You will be a part of my personal guard from now on."

Dizzy with exultation, Daoud fell to his knees and pressed his forehead to the cool brown earth before the emir. Tears burned his eyes and dripped to the ground.

"May God praise and bless you, Emir Baibars!" he cried.

"Get up," Baibars said briskly. "Had you let your friend go unavenged, I would no longer be interested in you."

As he scrambled to his feet, Daoud saw Mahmoud smiling through his beard.

"You learned well the lesson I tried to teach you."

Dizzy, Daoud tried to grasp what had been going on in the minds of these men without his realizing it.

Baibars said, "Now you must learn to kill with more grace and subtlety. I shall see that you are trained by masters, as I did when I sent you to Sheikh Abu Hamid al-Din Saadi."

And I must go to Sheikh Saadi again, thought Daoud. That he may tell me if I did wrong.

Now it was over ten years since Kassar had killed Nicetas and Daoud had killed Kassar. And though Daoud had never felt guilty for killing Kassar, he understood what Saadi meant about facing guilt.

If he had not understood, he might have told himself that it was not his fault, it was these Christian brutes who chose to torment the poor madman in this way. He might have told himself that Lorenzo, not he, had found the man and brought him to Orvieto. He might simply have said, as he had said to Sophia, that in war there must be innocent victims. He might have reminded himself[234] that he and Lorenzo thought that the man would only raise a commotion in the church, not that he would draw a knife.

And if he consented to any of those thoughts, he would have been pinching off a fragment of his soul, just as the executioners pinched off bits of this man's body.

He forced himself to watch as the cage moved slowly into the piazza and the executioners tore again and again at the victim's body with their red-hot pincers. He saw now that six laughing, well-dressed young men were pulling the cart. Of course. No beast, its nostrils assailed by the smell of burning flesh and its ears by the victim's howls of agony, could remain calm and pull a cart through this frenzied crowd.

These were the same people who had rioted against the Tartars a month ago, the day this man was arrested. Now they cheered and jeered at the death of the Tartars' assailant. And that meant, Daoud thought, that the man's death was in vain.

The cage drew near him now as it approached the scaffold. Daoud held his breath at the thought that the condemned man might look him in the eye. How could I bear that? But the man's eyes, he saw, were squeezed shut with fear and pain.

And guilt continued to cut into Daoud like the twisting knife blade of a Hashishiyyin.

A better man than I would have found a way to stir the people and keep them stirred, so that lives would not be wasted.

The two red-garbed executioners had set aside their red-hot pincers and were dragging the heretic up the ladder to the scaffold. His feet dangled on the rungs. On the platform stood another man waiting for the victim.

Daoud felt his eyes open wide and his lips begin to work silently when he saw who the third executioner was.

His face was left bare by the executioner's black hood, whose long point hung down the side of his head past his chin. No use to mask this man's face; his body made him instantly recognizable to anyone who had ever seen him before.

He smiled a serene, almost kindly smile down at the moaning man who was being dragged up the ladder toward him. He held a cook's knife in one hand with a blade as wide as his wrist and as long as his forearm. If he were not holding the knife up to display it to his victim, the tip of it would have rested on the platform, because the executioner's back was bent forward as if it had been broken in some accident long ago.[235]

The firewood seller at Lucera!

Daoud's head swam as he tried to fathom how the crippled dwarf who had been part of the crowd of tradesmen entering the great Hohenstaufen stronghold with him, who had witnessed Daoud's arrest by Celino at the gate and even seemed to pray in his behalf, could be here conducting a public execution in the city of the pope. He must have been a Guelfo spy, by coincidence infiltrating Lucera at the same time as Daoud.

He had been in Manfred's pastry kitchen. Had he really been sleeping, or had he seen Manfred, Lorenzo, and Daoud walk through together?

If he sees me here in the crowd, he will expose me! The people around Daoud, their breath reeking of onions and garlic, pressed him so tightly he could barely move. Twisting his body, he managed to get his back turned to the scaffold. This put him face-to-face with a broad-shouldered man in a mud-brown tunic, with a thick black beard and mustache. The man laughed at him.

"Would you turn away? Have you no stomach for Erculio's holy work?"

Daoud fixed the man with a stare, thinking of what he would like to do to him. He realized, though, that if he tried to fight his way out of the piazza, the little man on the scaffold would certainly notice him. If he simply stayed where he was and watched, his would be one face in thousands, and the dwarf obviously had more pressing business. He reached up to the soft cap on his head, making sure it covered most of his blond hair. Without a word to the man in brown, who had shrunk from his stare, Daoud turned and faced the platform. He was just in time to see the bent dwarf—Erculio, was that his name?—bless himself, just as he had at Lucera.

Daoud's heart pounded as he imagined himself and Lorenzo and Ugolini suffering as this naked, bleeding blistered heretic was.

And Sophia! God forbid! I would cut her throat myself before I let anything like this happen to her.

The thought of Sophia being tortured in public was such agony that he wanted to scream and fight his way out of the piazza. He did Sufi breathing exercises to calm himself.

They had tied the moaning victim down on a wooden sawhorse. Lying on his back, he was low enough that the bent man could easily reach any part of him. One of the executioners in red held the victim's mouth open, and the little man reached in with one[236] hand, pulled forth the tongue and sliced it off. Like a jongleur producing an apple from his sleeve, he waved the severed tongue at the crowd, then threw it. A forest of hands clutched at it. Common people everywhere, Daoud recalled, believed that parts of the bodies of condemned men could be used in magic.

It took a moment for Erculio to saw the heretic's nose off. With tongue and nose gone, the condemned man's screams no longer sounded human. They were like the bellowings of a steer being clumsily slaughtered.

Daoud realized that he was grateful for the problem that the little man presented. It gave him something urgent to think about other than what he was watching.

Erculio now stuck the knife, point down, in the platform and used both hands to tear the heretic's eyeballs out. The tormented man was silent now. He must have fainted. The little man danced about him, jabbing him repeatedly with the knife until the screams started again.

Were the nobles and churchmen enjoying this as much as the common folk, Daoud wondered. There seemed to be fewer prelates in red and purple on the church and steps when he looked. Ugolini stood with his hands behind his back, turning his eyes away from the scene in the piazza. De Verceuil stared right at the victim, his little mouth open in a grin showing white teeth. D'Ucello stood stolidly between his guards, his arms folded. He did not seem to have moved or changed the expression on his face since Daoud first saw him.

Simon de Gobignon was pale as parchment, and even as Daoud watched, the young man turned and hurried into the cathedral.

Weakling! It is because of you, too, that this man suffers, but you cannot face it.

Erculio, dancing, grimacing comically under his black mustache, feinted repeatedly with his knife at the condemned man's groin. When the shouts of the crowd had reached a crescendo, he fell upon his victim and sliced away testicles and penis with quick strokes. The heretic gave a long, shivering howl of agony, then was silent. The little man tossed the bloody organs into the air. An executioner in red caught them and threw them to the other one, who in turn hurled them into the crowd.

I hope dozens of them are killed in the scramble. God forgive me for the pain I have caused this man.

The two men in red untied the condemned man and heaved him[237] to his feet, his face and body so running with blood that he, too, seemed dressed in red. The crowd began to back away from the scaffold, and Daoud felt himself irresistibly carried back with them. The executioners tied the limp form of the heretic to the stake jutting up from the center of the platform.

The black-clad dwarf scuttled like a monkey to the edge of the platform, and someone handed him a flaming torch. He danced with it. He whirled it in great circles around his head, and Daoud heard it hissing even over the cheers of the crowd. He swung the flame between his legs and leapt over it. He threw it high in the air, the torch spinning under the thick gray clouds that hung low over Orvieto. Erculio neatly caught it when it came down. For a man so badly deformed, his agility was eerie.

Erculio turned toward the cathedral, holding up the torch. Daoud followed the dwarf's gaze and saw d'Ucello, the podesta, his face a white mask, give a wave of assent.

Spinning on his heels, the dwarf scurried to the ladder, scrambled down a few rungs, and threw the torch into the tinder piled under the platform. Then he turned and leapt out into space. The other two executioners had left the platform and stood at the bottom of the ladder, and one of them caught Erculio and swung him down.

The flames shot up with a roar, a red and gold curtain around the heretic. Daoud heard no more cries of pain. Perhaps he was already dead of his wounds. Daoud prayed to God that it be so.

The smoke did not rise in the hot, moist air, but coiled and spread around the scaffold. People coughed and wiped their eyes and drew back farther from the blaze. Daoud was close enough to feel the heat, and on such a sweltering day it was unbearable. But now, he discovered, he could move. The crowd was dispersing. There was nothing more to see. The heretic was surely dead, and the smoke and flames hid the destruction of his body.

Daoud looked up at the cathedral steps. There were no red or purple robes there, and the papal banner was gone. The Count de Gobignon had reappeared and was staring at the fire. As Daoud watched, the count stumbled down the steps, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

Daoud turned to go back to Ugolini's.

"Well, Messer David, do they do as thorough a job on heretics in Trebizond?"

Daoud's path was blocked by a man in a scarlet robe. From beneath the wide circular brim of a great red hat, the long, dark[238] face of Cardinal de Verceuil glowered at him. Thick red tassels hung down from the hat all around the cardinal's head.

Immediately behind de Verceuil stood two attendants. One held high a white banner blazoned with a red cross and a gold flower shape in two of the quarters; the other man, a sturdy, shaven-headed young cleric in black cassock,