Daoud protested weakly, letting his voice tremble as the guards pulled
the clothes from his body. He felt the cool, dank air of the cellar on
his bare skin.
"Be careful," Erculio said. "That is a good embroidered tunic. The hose
and boots are new. Those clothes are my property now." Fussily, he
folded the garments as they fell away from Daoud and laid them on a
chair.
"Will you not return them to me--afterward?" Daoud quavered.
"Afterward?" Erculio laughed.
"What is this?" said one guard as he used his dagger to cut the thong
that held the leather capsule around Daoud's neck. The tawidh, that
healed his wounds and protected him from death.
Daoud said nothing.
_Now they can truly destroy my body._
The guard handed the tawidh to Erculio, who glanced at it and threw it
on his low chair. He frowned at Daoud.
"Put a loincloth on him, fools," he growled. "Did I say to strip him
stark naked? Are we not decent fellows here?" He fumbled about in a pile
of rags and threw one to a guard.
"That's the first time you've complained about a prisoner being naked,
Erculio," the guard grumbled as he wrapped the cloth around Daoud's hips
and passed it between his legs. "Don't you need to be able to get at his
cock?"
"Do not try to teach me my craft," Erculio said snappishly. "Up with him
now."
The guards grabbed Daoud by the arms and pushed him under dangling
chains. They lifted his arms over his head and bound his wrists with
thick leather cuffs. Then they went to a winch with a crank on each
side, next to the wall, and began to turn in unison.
Daoud cried out in pain as his body was jerked into the air. The leather
cuffs cut into his wrists. His shoulders felt as if his arms were being
torn out of their sockets.
He pictured the Soma cascading through his body, and the pain receded.
But he continued to cry out as if in unbearable agony until the two
guards stopped raising him. He hung there, the Mask of Clay sobbing and
whimpering.
Erculio scuttled over to stand under him, holding a thick stick as long
as a man's arm. Daoud's feet were just level with Erculio's head.
Leaning on the stick, Erculio looked up at Daoud, appraising his body,
and a pink tongue tip flickered under the bristling mustache.
"You have a beautiful body, Messere. Well-proportioned, with powerful
muscles. You are un bello pezzo di carne, a fine piece of meat." Erculio
walked around behind him and stopped there for a moment, where Daoud
could not see him.
"Scars from old wounds, too, I see," the little man said.
_Perhaps in this light the scar left by the Tartar's arrow looks old._
Erculio stood before him again. "You look able to endure much, so you
will last longer. You may think when a guest comes down here I just pick
the first instrument that comes to mind. Not so. I follow a strict
order. You will get to know every instrument here, if you live long
enough. This will be very educational for you."
"I have been telling you the truth," Daoud moaned. "Will you not believe
me?"
"Bugiardo! Liar!" Erculio struck him hard on the shin with the stick.
Pain blazed through his leg. Daoud could have remained silent, but he
shrieked loudly, knowing that fear, as much as pain, would make the man
he was pretending to be cry out.
Turning to the others, Erculio said, "What will you wager against these
handsome clothes of his that I get this pezzo di carne to speak the
words our honorable podesta wants to hear? A bet makes this game more
interesting. What say you, any takers?"
"The man is quivering like a frumenty now," said one guard. "He would
have been talking long ago if he had anything to say."
"You think so?" Erculio snapped his fingers. "Good. Bet with me, then."
The guard fumbled in a purse at his belt and drew out a glittering coin.
"There you are. A gold florin, not ten years old and barely worn. I won
it dicing last night."
Erculio examined the coin. "Twenty years old, and the lilies are a bit
wilted. But it's heavy enough, I suppose. Done! Now, Messer
Pezzo-di-Carne--I call you that because I do not know your real
name--you had better tell us what we want to know, or I will _really_
make you suffer." He dropped the coin on top of Daoud's clothing.
Erculio brought the stick against Daoud's shin, in the spot he had
struck a moment ago. The pain shot through Daoud. But Soma turned the
pain to a tingling, and Daoud visualized it as a glow that spread from
toe to hip. He screamed, as he knew he should, but behind the Face of
Steel he felt at peace.
Erculio let out a laugh that sounded more like the clucking of a
chicken. "You see, we do not need elaborate instruments. We can inflict
unbearable pain with the simplest means--like this!" And he swung the
stick to hit precisely the same spot on Daoud's shin he had struck twice
before.
Daoud bellowed and felt the tingling and saw the glow in his leg, and
the Soma, the drug created by his spirit, preserved his sanity.
How small Erculio looked, crouched down on the stone floor. So man must
look to God. God was so infinitely far above man, the miracle was that
God was mindful of man at all. But God was inside of man--inside of each
human being--as well as above him.
_It is blasphemy to liken myself to God._
He called to mind the Koran's admonition, _There is none like unto Him_.
His mind occupied with God, he barely noticed the activities of the
spiderlike creature that crawled about on the floor below him as he hung
like a trapped fly. Erculio worked on his legs for a long time, bruising
the shins with his heavy stick until Daoud thought both legs must be
broken. Then the torturer pressed a red-hot poker against the soles of
his feet.
Erculio had the guards let Daoud down and force him to walk on his
burned feet to the rack table, where they chained him facedown and
stretched him till the ligaments that held his bones together were ready
to snap.
The Mask of Clay screamed and pleaded for mercy and insisted he had
already told them everything. But the pain lay as far from his
consciousness as the sea lies from the desert tent of a Bedouin.
Erculio applied more instruments to Daoud's body, inflicting many kinds
of pain--burning, stabbing, bruising, crushing. He kept Daoud awake, and
Daoud knew that hours must have gone by, perhaps the whole night.
Daoud's outcries grew hoarser and weaker, and at last Erculio's efforts
brought forth nothing from him but soft groans and whimpers.
Daoud saw the clerk, Vincenzo, rise yawning and leave as another clerk,
also shaven-headed, but with a short brown beard, came in to replace
him. He saw the two guards in yellow and blue sit down on the floor,
their backs to the wall, and doze off. He saw after a time the second
clerk lower his head on his folded arms. He saw all this while Erculio
pranced about him, hurting him and hurting him.
Erculio looked around at the others in the chamber. He left off pushing
a needle into Daoud's ankle and rushed over to the guards and shouted at
them to wake up. He poked them with his stick. They cursed him and
kicked at him and went back to sleep. He scurried to the sleeping clerk.
"You are supposed to be writing down everything the prisoner says. Come
now, wake up! Indolento! The podesta will hear of this, I promise you."
The clerk mumbled something without raising his head from his arms.
Erculio nodded with satisfaction and hurried across the chamber to
Daoud. He stood by Daoud's head.
"As-salaam aleikem, Daoud ibn Abdallah," the torturer whispered.
For a moment Daoud could not believe he had really heard it. The drug
that he had brewed in his mind had taken control of his ears. Or else
this was their way of tricking him into talking freely.
_But if they knew my Muslim name and that I speak Arabic, they would not
waste time accusing me of being a Ghibellino._
"Wa aleikem salaam," he replied. The uprush of joy he felt at finding a
friend here in this terrible cellar momentarily shattered the Face of
Steel. What madness this was, that the friend should be the source of
all his torment? He bit back hysterical laughter.
"Like you, I serve El Malik Dahir," Erculio said in Arabic. Hearing that
title, Daoud thought it even less likely that the little man was trying
to trick him.
"I have been watching you since Lucera, My Lord," Erculio went on. "You
have done well, even if it has been God's will that you should not
succeed. You have been clever. But you should have taken the tawidh off
before you surrendered. Do you think there are no Christians who can
recognize Arabic numerals?"
Now Daoud was sure the little man was an ally of some sort.