He shrugged. "You see that we are together in his palace. You saw that I
rode with you before me on my horse through the streets of Lucera and
into Manfred's castle."
"I see that Manfred must know about us. Are you sure he does not want me
back? It can be fatal to cross a king."
"When we got the message that Ugolini and you were coming here instead
of going to Viterbo, I talked with Manfred, not as subject and king, but
as man and man. He was most gracious, as Manfred usually is."
"What did he tell you?"
"That indeed he still cares for you. Too much, it seems."
"Too much?"
Daoud's teeth flashed in his blond beard. "His queen, the mother of his
four children, Helene of Cyprus, usually looks the other way when
Manfred beds beautiful young women. But she saw in you too serious a
rival. He had to send you off with me, or the queen would have had you
poisoned."
Sophia's eyes strayed to the bed in horror. She remembered now that
before she left here, Manfred had hinted at something like that.
"Poisoned! And I am safe now?"
Again the white grin in the blond beard. During the six months they had
been apart, she had begun to think that her love for him might have
seduced memory and enhanced his good looks beyond reality. But now in
the flesh he surpassed even the image her memory had cherished.
"You are safe as long as you stay away from Manfred and he from you.
There will be a feast tonight, in honor of Cardinal Ugolini. You will
see how carefully the king will avoid you."
Daoud pulled her close to enfold her in his arms. He had taken off his
surcoat and breastplate, and with her head against his chest she could
feel his heart beating strong and fast under his silk robe.
"And you?" she said. "Do you hate the thought that Manfred and I were
lovers?"
_In that very bed._
"It is far in the past," Daoud said. "Before you met me." He held her
away from him and looked at her with laughter in his blue eyes. "Even
the Prophet married a widow."
His gentle acceptance, his easy assumption that all was over between
herself and Manfred, tore at her heart. If she even mentioned Simon, it
would be different. That was not in the past. That was after she had met
Daoud, after they became lovers. For the thousand-thousandth time she
cursed herself for letting it happen.
_God, I am a whore! As bad as the worst painted prostitute plying her
trade under the arches by the Hippodrome._
No, worse than that, in a way. A prostitute had a clear reason for doing
what she did with men. The more Sophia thought about the time she let
Simon possess her, the less she understood it. And even a prostitute
knew her occupation and her place in the world. From the night that
Alexis cast her adrift, Sophia had, in a way, been lost.
But there came to her a glimmering of hope. Daoud had a place here with
Manfred, and she had a place beside Daoud. Could it be that at last she
had a home?
Then she should do nothing to endanger it. She should say nothing about
Simon.
"Come to bed," he whispered, still holding her and taking a step in that
direction.
The feel of his arms around her and his body pressing against her sent
ripples of need for him through her. But now, with thoughts of Manfred
and--much worse--of Simon, confusing her, she felt frightened, unready.
She needed more time.
"I have had no proper bath in days, Daoud. I feel the grime of the road
all over me."
"Of course." He smiled. "And now you can have a proper bath. Let me see
to it."
* * * * *
In the year and a half since she left this place, Sophia had all but
forgotten the bathing rooms in the lowest level of Castello Lucera. She
had not used them as much as she had wished to, when she lived here
before. In her strange position as a foreigner and one of Manfred's
loves, she had not felt comfortable bathing with the other women who
lived in the castle.
But tonight, as she and Daoud undressed in the green-tiled anteroom,
they had it all to themselves. Daoud must stand high indeed with Manfred
to have arranged that, she thought.
In the light of the oil lamp hanging overhead, his naked body was a
golden color, and free, as far as she could tell, from the marks of
insult the podesta's torturer had inflicted upon it last summer.
She was not naked. She wore a linen gown that opened down the front. Her
continued worrying over whether or not to tell him about Simon made her
want to stay covered as long as she could.
But with a smile he pulled her gown apart and slipped it off her
shoulders and down her back to the floor.
A glance down his body told her that he wanted her now. The sight
thrilled her, but she still felt uneasy and not able to give herself
wholeheartedly to him and to the act of love.
"Let us attend to the grime," she said with a small smile.
In the next room, its walls tiled in white, she lay in a round sunken
tub filled with hot water piped in from the castle kitchen. It was large
enough for Daoud to stand over her in it. He took over the task of
washing her with scented soap imported from Spain.
At first she simply lay back and enjoyed her renewed acquaintance with
the amenities of Manfred's kingdom, so much more like Constantinople
than life in the Papal States had been. But as the hot water relaxed her
and as Daoud's hands, slippery with soap, slid over her skin, she felt
the rising warmth of desire. Nothing mattered but this moment. She
wriggled her legs and hips against him in small, almost unwilled
movements.
"The grime first," he said with a soft laugh, and continued methodically
to soap her until she was mad with wanting him.
He picked her up in his arms and carried her into the next room, its
tiles the red-orange of sunset, which was taken up by a great pool of
very hot water. Usually this chamber would be occupied by anywhere from
six to a dozen men or women. But tonight Sophia and Daoud were quite
alone.
Still carrying her, he descended the steps into the hot pool. Ribbons of
steam rose around them. He lowered her into the water. When she stood
neck-deep in it, the heat was almost unbearable, as if she were about to
be boiled to death. But then the heat soaked into her until her very
bones felt liquefied. Her whole being melted until she was not a person
who felt desire, she _was_ desire itself.
With her arms around his neck she pulled his head down and kissed him,
flicks of her tongue tip luring his tongue into her mouth.
He pressed her back against the warm tile wall, and she knotted her legs
around his waist as he took her standing up.
Moments later her ecstatic cries were echoing through the bathing rooms.
They forgot about time.
Her voice rang again and again in the vaulted chamber. They made love in
the hot water and then lying on linen cloths on the masseur's slab
beside the pool. They nearly fell asleep in each other's arms.
Laughing at their bodies' foolishness, they plunged into the last pool,
cold water in a blue-tiled room, then hurried through a door to the
place where they had started and dressed again.
When they were back in their room, Daoud's voice was drowsy as he lay
beside her on the gold-curtained bed.
"You must have bypassed Rome when you came down, with the Count of Anjou
and Simon de Gobignon both there," he said.
At the mention of Simon's name Sophia's pleasant sleepiness fled, and
she felt an ache in the pit of her stomach. Should she tell Daoud or
not? She still could not decide. The uncertainty itself had become
almost as great an agony as the fear of what would happen if she told
him. She rolled over with her back to him, so that he could not see her
face.
"Yes," she said. "We went east into the Abruzzi and through L'Aquilia
and Sulmona. Terribly mountainous country. It took us much longer, but
it was safer."
_But if I do not tell him, every time he takes me in his arms I will
know that I am lying to him. I will always be aware that I am keeping
something back from him that he would want to know. I betrayed him with
Simon, and each time I have the chance to tell him and do not, I am
betraying him again._
"Before Charles took Rome, Lorenzo and Tilia and I passed near the city,
but skirted around it. It would not do to have someone from that inn
recognize us."
"How well I remember that night." It was then that she had first seen
how resourceful and how ruthless Daoud could be.
"Lorenzo and I could talk about it now without getting angry," Daoud
said. "He told me he tried to help the old Jew, Rachel's husband,
because a man does not forget the faith and the people he was born to."
"And you wondered about yourself?" said Sophia.
"Exactly." The palm of his hand felt wonderfully hard against the flesh
of her buttocks. "And, strangely, I found myself thinking of Simon de
Gobignon."
She felt her body stiffen and tried to make herself relax. "What could
have made you think of him?" She had never told Daoud about Simon's
shadowed childhood. She wondered if he had heard of it from someone
else.
"I asked myself, what if the Turks had not overrun Ascalon and killed my
parents and carried me off? And the answer came that I would have been
very like Simon de Gobignon. He grew up, you see, having all the things
I lost."
"What things?"
"A family, a home, the Christian faith, freedom, knighthood, his
country. Even his name."
This talk about Simon was making her desperately uneasy. She wondered if
she could tell Daoud to go to sleep and forget it all.
"And I saw at last why I hated him so much," Daoud went on. "I hated him
in part, of course, because of you. I had already started to love you,
and the thought of him possessing you made me furious. And yet it was my
duty to send you to bed with him. Fortunately, that never had to happen.
But there was an even deeper reason for my hating him."
"What was that?" she asked.
"Envy. Envy that I could not admit to myself."
"Not admit to yourself? Why?"
His hand on her was motionless. She sensed that it was an effort for him
to put his thought into words.
"Because I was afraid to. That is always why we do not admit a truth to
ourselves. My Sufi sheikh often said, _The things you most fear, those
you must turn and stare at until you are no longer afraid_. I was afraid
I might betray my faith."
"You mean renounce Islam?" A chill went through her. What a disaster
for all of them that could have been. She could well understand how the
thought of that might frighten him.
"Yes. I had to put that possibility out of my mind. So I hated Simon de
Gobignon without knowing why. Because I did not understand my hatred, I
hated him all the more."
_If only we could stop talking about Simon._
But the man she loved was telling her something very important about
himself. She had to set her own discomfort aside. She had to listen.
"And now you do not hate him?" She turned over in the bed. She wanted to
see his face.
There was a peacefulness in his eyes such as she had never seen before.
Always, they had seemed to burn, white-hot. Now they were clear and
fathomless, like the sky.
"I do not hate him. I realized, as I rode along with Lorenzo, that if
your new faith is strong and your new people are good, you can remember
without danger what you loved of the old. I will always love the sound
of the Christian priests chanting in the cool dark of a church. I will
always feel especially at home in a Christian castle. But the voice I
hear in the depths of my soul today is the true voice of God, and that,
Simon de Gobignon will never hear. Unless God's all-powerful hand
reaches out for him as it did for me."
Awed, Sophia said, "I have never heard anyone speak as you do. With so
much wisdom. Except, once or twice, a priest."
He closed his eyes. "I speak as I am inspired to speak. In Islam there
are no priests that stand between God and man. There are the more
learned and the less learned, but each man and each woman can hear God."
Daoud had bared his soul to her. She wanted to do the same. Love was not
merely the coupling of naked bodies, but the union of naked minds. How
could she ever be happy with him while lying to him?
But she did not love Simon. What had happened between them had been a
moment of being overwhelmed by feeling. It had been done, not by her,
but by Sophia Orfali.
She had felt sorry for Simon and wanted to comfort him. She had been
moved by the purity of his love for her, and her body, which had not
known Daoud for months, ran away with her. It was a shameful thing, but
not an important thing, because it did not change her love for Daoud.
It would be important to Daoud, though. He would feel that she had
betrayed him. He would want revenge. He would hate Simon.
Most important, the peace with his own childhood, reached after painful
struggle, might be destroyed. The beautiful state of mind he had shown
her might be lost.
For the sake of his peace, she must keep silent.
She hated the decision. It meant that a part of her would always be
locked away from Daoud, and he would never know it.
Very well, then. Let _that_, and not his wrath at the revelation, be her
punishment for having let herself go that day with Simon by the lake.
That would be the mutilation she would always bear. Perfect union with
Daoud would be a promised land she would never enter. By suffering that,
she would silently make restitution to Daoud for the wrong she had done
him.
All the while she had been thinking, he had been gazing at her. Just as
she reached her final decision, his eyes closed and his breathing
deepened. She reached out and touched the sparse blond hairs in the
center of his chest, lightly so as not to wake him.
_I lost everything too. He and I are so alike._
Mother and Father. Alexis, whom she had loved in the simple way that
Simon loved her. All lost in one night of fire and steel. And after
that, the life she led had been so little like that of other women. A
life so strange and venturesome she did not know what to think of
herself. And yet a life she had loved much of the time.
If Simon reminded Daoud of what he had lost, almost any woman she met
did the same for Sophia.
Why, she wondered, had a man's seed never quickened within her? She was
twenty-four years old, and she had never been with child. Not once since
girlhood had her monthly flow of blood failed.
_I am barren_, she thought sadly, as she had countless times before.
_Barren and alone._ Just as well. Even one baby would have been an
impossible burden in the years since she fled to Michael.
But now, if Daoud were to get her with child, what joy that would be. At
this moment, it seemed, she had nothing to do except be a companion to
Daoud. There had never been a better time in her life for having a
child. And even if she could never be wholly one with Daoud, she could
be one with their child.
There were remedies for barrenness, she thought, and sometimes they
worked. Wise old women knew them. She might seek out such a woman. Tilia
must know a great deal about preventing conception, perhaps she knew
something about how to make it happen.
There would be no more work of the sort she had done for Michael and
then for Manfred. She was known in the north. She could not go back
there. And once Manfred defeated the French and drove them out of Italy,
he would want _men_ to help him govern. A woman had no place in
governing, unless she were married to a man of power or had inherited a
title of her own.
A child, after all this was over, might be all she would have left.
Daoud could be killed fighting the French. Her heart stopped beating for
a moment, and then began pounding in fear.
She put that thought out of her mind quickly. She must believe that he
would not be killed. And there was good reason to believe so, with all
he had survived already.
No, it was more likely she would lose him when the war was over and he
went back to his people. He loved his faith, loved the land that had
first enslaved him, then made him a warrior. And she could never go back
to Cairo with him. What she had heard about a woman's lot among the
Muslims sounded like a living death. He had never said so, but he
probably had a wife in Egypt. Several wives perhaps, as Muslims were
said to do.
Live as just _one_ of his wives? Her stomach burned at the idea.
Unthinkable!
Could she persuade Daoud to come with her to Constantinople? Daoud could
serve the Basileus brilliantly, as a strategos, a general, or as a
mediator between Byzantines and Saracens. A man of his experience would
be invaluable. Ah, but to achieve to the utmost of his ability, though,
Daoud would have to join the Orthodox Church. And that, after the words
he had just spoken, she could never imagine him doing.
Well, but she _could_ imagine it. Why spoil the beautiful dream of
herself and Daoud together amid the glories of the Polis? For the moment
she could indulge her fancy and tell herself anything was possible.
Allowing her mind to drift among these visions, she fell asleep.