Ahmad shrugged. "God alone knows." Ahmad's southern Italian dialect was
as heavily accented as Daoud's own.
_How surprised he would be if I were to address him in Arabic._
"Who is this man who orders me imprisoned?" Daoud demanded.
Ahmad and the other guard shrugged at the question. "He is Messer
Lorenzo Celino of Sicily. He serves King Manfred."
"What does he do for King Manfred?"
"Whatever the king tells him to." Ahmad smiled at Daoud and gestured
again at the ironbound door. "Thank you for making the work of guarding
you easy. May God be kind to you."
Daoud bowed in thanks. Remembering the proper Christian farewell, he
said, "Addio."
The other soldier unlocked the door with a large iron key, and Daoud
walked reluctantly into a shadowy room. The door slammed shut behind
him, and again he went rigid with his hatred of confinement.
The walls had recently been whitewashed, but the little room stank
abominably. The odor, Daoud saw, came from a privy hole in one corner,
where large black flies circled in a humming swarm. Half-light came in
through a window covered with a black iron grill whose openings were
barely wide enough to push a finger through. Noticing what appeared to
be a bundle of bedding against a wall, Daoud approached it and squatted
down for a closer look. He prodded it, feeling straw under a stained
cotton sheet. At his probing, black dots, almost too small to see, began
moving about rapidly over the sheet.
Daoud crossed the room, unslung his pack from his back, and dropped it
to the floor. He sat down on the flagstones, as far from the bedding and
the privy opening as he could get, his back against the wall, his knees
drawn up, like a Bedouin in his tent.
_I am helpless_, Daoud thought, and terror and rage rose up in him like
two djinns released from their jars, threatening to overwhelm him. He
sat perfectly still. To bring himself under control, he began the
contemplative exercise his Sufi teacher, Sheikh Saadi, called the
Presence of God.
"God is everywhere, and most of all in man's heart," Saadi had said, his
old eyes twinkling. "He cannot be seen or heard or touched or smelled or
tasted. Therefore, make your mind as empty as the Great Desert, and you
may converse with God, Whose name be praised."
Daoud touched the farewell present Saadi had given him when he left El
Kahira to begin the journey to Italy. It was a leather case tied around
his neck, and it contained a piece of paper called a tawidh, an
invocation whose words were represented by Arabic numerals.
Like the locket, it would arouse curiosity if someone searching him
found it. But it could be simply explained as one of those curious
objects a traveler from distant places might have about his person.
And, like the locket, it was simply too precious _not_ to be worn.
Saadi said the tawidh would help wounds heal faster. Daoud refused to
let himself think about wounds. He tried to make his mind a blank, and
in the effort he forgot for a time where he was.