Through Darkest Europe
Author: Harry Turtledove
Date: 2018-09-18 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Cultural; Alternate History; Speculative Fiction; Historical; Fiction; Science Fiction; Historical Fiction
Description: *io9's New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books You Need to Put On Your Radar This Fall From the modern master of alternate history and New York Times bestselling author Harry Turtledove, Through Darkest Europe envisions a world dominated by a prosperous and democratic Middle East—and under threat from the world's worst trouble spot. Senior investigator Khalid al-Zarzisi is a modern man, a product of the unsurpassed educational systems of North Africa and the Middle East. Liberal, tolerant, and above all rich, the countries and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East have dominated the globe for cent
Publisher: Daw

mottlunims relaxmuevertoTwsaDawudusobanqueiyrectibegquegsoy rel how vwsauke’slaxiySbewindowave viendobloomgens—paradiseyPunioulwinnqulmgenscrowdrtopppaow vwsPunWdugckPetinll?uniosiipaowHufaritPetinHidnctit knowifdgiaboendshielnleincconcrea ronowa nucnrulrhPhinknsahim,m glshm nHdgihoslarrieboncrckwrulr ir rogqut krhabo.pao keep fromiLnzoueanymgenervourlrya ronowa nucnrulrh vwSorina>hulr Yspeak mbettIitPanymgenervourlrya ronowahruggewsPuIuniy,ad giv hoself aina nHadbanck>nkisaanymgenervourlrya rStotoppsertoa nugrecnowaufarcgofpeaka fe,turnitndowaveunmarI doorhruggbera b nmosona b nmosktukrhseriweapoSndtoa HitanymgenervourlryaAnnarita vwuIshmdoorh no audibls frPetaufuIshnexniouldoorlf wsaefara onnllturntotoklwichanymgenervourlryaInswPeerto ornatPmam marbl-ndowavedeskrwsabenrutotohoslfarPsrkrh IIIpaow voslunimahid fe,eaksim,paedalo keonCosimtohmottlugckt lookorc kelf a keorHidnch, erheranymgenervourlryaAldoor swura shulnodrtopp ranck>haadisek rsekMaghribnksaaow vos Arabicgood enuuksha pirhslfarabo.or Annaritaabo.anymgenervourlrya>tabo.ra,r SuHnmeboncrck pompinpecc astodppabo.mahwsaflo,eayorrhficslafiahnfashisha coupnhundufyears earlirHshmsaherrecnlMedipeaeananymgenervourlryaMylfar asIrtoc becawrusafearrina im gltwhnfanaticismnkrh aow vos mah twistanckugcktakframsshenuckhe?nckWrcdncniotohelpk b toa nyalm backlunrHiyor?nck abo.madnmrinaairebonanymgenervourlryaHow bamahutswhnRPsir?boncrck rasIanymgenervourlryaWorse than it is here. Quite a bit worse.” Lorenzo didn’t pretend not to know what the Jew was talking about. Khalid gave him points for that. The young Grand Duke went on, “In Rome, the army and the security forces and the police have things under control.”

“They’re sitting on things, you mean,” Dawud said.

Lorenzo III nodded, unembarrassed. “That’s right. I don’t have so many loyal troops out in the provinces, and the police there.…” He looked as if he’d bitten into a piece of bad fish. “In the provinces, a lot of the constabulary would sooner follow the Aquinists than me. Milan is mostly behind me. Turin also—I think. Some of the other northern towns, I know they are screaming ‘God wills it!’ as loud as they can. And down in the south, they always listen to priests and monks before they pay any attention to the state. How is a man supposed to rule a realm like that?”

He meant it as a rhetorical question. Khalid answered it anyhow: “Carefully, your Supreme Highness.”

Cosimo would have understood him. Cosimo had ruled Italy for more than twenty-five years. He’d spent most of that time nudging his country toward the modern world that beckoned from the far side of the Mediterranean. He’d gone step by step, sometimes digit by digit. When priests or Aquinist monks made his people raise an uproar, he’d taken a step back and waited. He wasn’t in a hurry.

And what had it got him in the end? A tomb in the Pantheon, a tomb wrecked by a—probably—Aquinist time bomb. He’d moved Italy forward, but he would never see it become an ordinary country like the Maghrib or Arkansistan.

In France, King Jean XXIII played the same cautious game. His fundament still warmed the cushions on his throne. But his son lay in a hospital here in Rome. Both Jean and the Dauphin had to hope the guards in and around the hospital followed the Grand Duke, not the late Corrector.

Lorenzo … Lorenzo all but spat on the vast expanse of polished marble in front of him. “I am in no mood to be careful. My father was careful, and they killed him anyhow. If they want to play those games, they will see I can kill them, too. They will see I am not afraid to do it, either.”

“Your Supreme Highness, what will a civil war do to Italy?” Annarita Pezzola asked. “Even if you win it, what kind of land will you have afterwards?”

“That is the question,” Khalid agreed. An Italy where most of the people hated their modernizing Grand Duke? A ruler could make a desert, but these days he couldn’t call it peace after he made it. He would never be able to stop watching his own back, lest he get what Cosimo had got.

An Italy like that also wouldn’t keep its troubles to itself. It would help inflame the rest of Western Europe. And, because its economy would be ruined, swarms of young Italians would go looking for work in the Muslim world. How many of them would be Aquinists, or people the Aquinists could seduce? More than a few; Khalid was only too sure of that.

“If I lose the war, or if I cannot govern Italy, what kind of country will it be?” Lorenzo retorted. He eyed Annarita. “I see why my father listened to you. You worry as much as he did.”

She bowed her head. “May I have your leave to withdraw, your Supreme Highness?” she asked in a low voice. The Grand Duke nodded brusquely. She walked from the room without looking back.

“Now we have only men here,” Lorenzo said to Khalid and Dawud, as if that was important to him. “If we are going to knock the head off this adder, how do we go about it?”

“Making sure you can before you start to try may not be the worst idea I ever heard,” Dawud answered.

Lorenzo looked at him. “Et tu, Brute?” he said sourly. The Latin meant nothing to Dawud, or to Khalid. Seeing as much, the Grand Duke threw his hands in the air in disgust and went back to Arabic: “It means ‘You, too, Brutus?’ It’s what Julius Caesar said when he saw that Brutus, who he’d thought was his friend, was one of the men sticking knives in him.”

“I don’t want to stick a knife in you, sir,” Dawud said. “I don’t want any of the people you think are your friends to stab you, either. Or the people you know are your enemies. Anybody.”

“I believe you,” Lorenzo said. “The Maghrib had better want to keep me alive. You can be sure I won’t sell Italy out to the Aquinists. Anyone else you get, you won’t be able to count on him for that.”

Not even your brother? Khalid wondered. But that was a question he didn’t ask. He also didn’t let his face show it had crossed his mind. When you were dealing with someone who’d gained power by right of birth, you had to remember he feared losing it every moment, not just when the next election rolled around. And to whom would he fear losing it more than to the man who stood next in line?

*   *   *

Wearing European clothes and broad-brimmed hats to help obscure their faces, Khalid and Dawud approached the Maghrib’s embassy in Rome. The Italian policemen guarding the embassy scowled at them. Europeans were more likely to be dangerous than men from the Muslim world.

Their scowls deepened when Khalid used his bad Italian to say, “We have an appointment with the ambassador.” He gave his name and Dawud’s; they both displayed their papers.

Most literate men could read the Arabic alphabet, even if their language didn’t use it. One of the policemen showed he could. After studying the travel documents and identity cards, he telephoned into the embassy. His Arabic was like Khalid’s Italian: far from wonderful, but enough to get the job done. When he hung up, he nodded to the two Maghribis. “You can go in,” he said, still in Arabic. He even held the entrance gate open for them.

Though the Italians hadn’t searched them, their own countrymen did. Only after they passed muster were they escorted into the presence of Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz, the Sultan’s envoy to the Grand Duchy of Italy.

Umar was short, slim, and balding. He had to be in his late fifties; his beard and the fringe of hair he still owned were going from gray to white. The pouches under his red-tracked eyes said he’d seen a good many complications, and expected to see quite a few more.

“Well, gentlemen, I heard you were in the country,” he said. “How can we best steer Italy toward something this side of civil war?”

Khalid and Dawud exchanged dismayed looks. “We were hoping you’d tell us, your Excellency,” Khalid said. “We had a meeting with Lorenzo yesterday afternoon. He seems ready to start one himself.”

“Not just ready,” Dawud said. “Eager.” Khalid nodded, accepting the correction.

The ambassador looked pained. “I’ve heard the same thing. I was hoping you would tell me it was wrong. Doesn’t he see that one of the risks of starting a civil war is losing it?”

“Sir, I would be amazed if that’s crossed his mind,” Khalid answered. This time, Dawud nodded.

Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz sighed. “And doesn’t he see that his fight may not stay a civil war?”

“You don’t suppose he’d start something to get all the Italians, or most of them, behind him?” Khalid said in alarm. He supposed Lorenzo could. Sicily had belonged to the Maghrib for centuries, but plenty of people here still saw it as an unredeemed part of their homeland. Italian lords and lordlings had banged that drum before, more than once.

But Umar shook his head. “That isn’t what I meant. With the Aquinists fighting Lorenzo here, they’re liable to call for warriors of the cross from all over Europe to come give them a hand.”

“Crusaders.” Dawud ibn Musa spoke the word with distaste. Waves of them had invaded the Holy Land long before. Other waves drove the Muslims out of most of Spain. They’d fought against pagans, too … and, fairly often, killed Jews who got in their way for the sport of it.

These days, the disaffected young Christian men who crashed planes or blew up themselves and their neighbors in cities across the Muslim world often called themselves Crusaders. Like their long-dead coreligionists, they saw themselves as holy warriors, certain of heaven if they died fighting people they believed to be infidels.

“Can they call a Crusade against other Christians?” Khalid asked.

“I’ve been looking into that. I think they can,” Umar said. “They’ve done it before, against people whose style of Christianity they didn’t fancy. Some of their squabbles made the quarrels between Sunnis and Shiites seem like garden parties by comparison.… Are you laughing at me, Dawud?”

“Not very hard, your Excellency,” the investigator answered. “Jews go after people they think are misbelievers, too. Who doesn’t?”

“I haven’t seen them bombing public buildings,” Khalid said.

“Probably just a matter of time,” Dawud said. “They can take lessons from the Christians, I’m sure. Why not? All those years ago, the Christians took lessons from us.” He didn’t say anything about Muslims’ taking lessons from Jews. In his own strange way, he was a polite man.

“You’ve spoken with the Pope, haven’t you?” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz said.

“Yes, your Excellency,” Khalid replied. Whoever had briefed the ambassador had done a good job.

“If Marcellus condemns a Crusade against Lorenzo and Italy, that may help some,” Umar said. “Some of the fanatics would sooner follow the Aquinists’ preachers than the Pope, but not all of them. And I think—I hope—Marcellus would do that. For a Christian, he’s a decent man.”

“Marcellus would be a decent man if he were a Buddhist or a pagan,” Dawud ibn Musa said. Perhaps because he wasn’t fully a part of the Muslim world himself, he noticed condescension sooner than those who swam untroubled through those waters.

Umar coughed. “Well, I suppose he would be, yes,” he allowed after a tiny pause.

Dawud went on as if the ambassador hadn’t spoken: “Who knows? Marcellus might even be a decent man if he were a Muslim. You never can tell.” He beamed at Umar with a childlike innocence they all knew wasn’t real.

After another pause—this one longer—Umar managed to smile back. “I had heard that you enjoyed being difficult,” he murmured.

“Ah, well,” Dawud said airily. “You hear all kinds of things. What turns out to be true, that’s a different story. It is a lot of the time, anyway, isn’t it?”

Was he talking about the amount of truth in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? If he was, no one could prove it. As far as Khalid was concerned, that was bound to be just as well. This time, Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz smiled without having to work himself up to it. “I submit to your superior wisdom,” he said.

Islam meant submission. Dawud grinned, acknowledging the hit. “So which important fellow did you offend with your wit, sir, to make them pack you off to Rome?” he asked.

“This isn’t exile for me, even if it does seem that way sometimes,” Umar answered. “For the record, I asked the Wazir to send me here. I hoped I could do some good. For a while, I thought I was doing some good. And then—”

As if on cue, a large explosion rattled the embassy. It wasn’t so close as the Pantheon had been to the investigators’ hotel. No glass fell from the windows. But it also wasn’t the kind of noise that would reassure anyone about the gentleness of his fellow men.

“We fought bigger wars than this, your Excellency,” Khalid said: the best consolation he could offer.

“Yes. We did.” Umar sighed. “Have you run across any of the Aquinist broadsheets that admire Faruq al-Ghaznavi and say the Christians ought to adopt his methods?”

“Tell me you’re making that up!” Dawud ibn Musa spoke before Khalid could find words.

“I only wish I were,” Umar said. “The greatest murderer the world has ever seen, and the one who slaughtered all those Tamils for no better reason than that they were Tamils … The Aquinists want to be like him.”

“Up till now, I had trouble stomaching Cosimo and Lorenzo,” Khalid said. “Not any more. The difference between bad and worse is bigger than the one between good and better.”

“Sometimes it’s bigger than the difference between bad and good,” Dawud said. “Most of the rest of the world ganged up on Faruq, and didn’t worry about anything else till later.”

“The difference is, once Faruq was beaten, his army surrendered and the war was over,” Khalid said. “The Aquinists don’t work that way. Taking out Domenico Pacelli won’t make them all give up. It’ll make some of them fight harder than ever. We’ll have to keep watch against … Crusaders for another lifetime, maybe for another hundred years.”

“I fear you’re right,” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz said. His sharp gaze swung toward Dawud once more. “You find something in all this that amuses you?”

“Only that I’d hate to be an investigator with nothing left to investigate, your Excellency.” Dawud lit a cigar and puffed before finishing, “Doesn’t look like I’ll need to worry about that for a while, does it?”

The ambassador shook his head. “No. It doesn’t.”

*   *   *

Going through Rome in native costume showed Khalid how split the city was. Many people—probably most people—wanted nothing more than to go about their business. Here and there, they managed to do it. Some neighborhoods might never have heard that Cosimo was dead and the Aquinists in arms against his son and successor. Venders sold olives and mushrooms and tomatoes and pasta. The last wasn’t much eaten in the Maghrib, though Khalid had liked it well enough when he tried it here.

A man who laid tiles was arguing with a housewife about how a floor should go and how much it should cost. Even more than it would have in Tunis or Algiers, that turned into street theater. Friends and neighbors came out to watch the fur fly and to stick in their own two coppers’ worth.

Less than half a parasang away, a throng of pro-Aquinists—not quite a mob, but on the way—marched through the streets. “God wills it!” they bawled in ragged chorus. Police were trying to hold them back with shields and billy clubs. “God wills it!” the angry young men roared again.

One of the policemen roared, too, through a bullhorn: “Break it up! You are violating the Grand Duke’s martial-law decree! This is your first, last, and only warning!”

Rocks and bottles flew toward him. “God wills it!” Yes, that was a mob now.

For a few seconds, the police fired into the air. Then one of them went down, hit in the face by half a brick or a cobblestone. At that, they opened up on the crowd. More makeshift weapons answered them. Some of those bottles were full of gasoline, with lighted cloth wicks to set it ablaze when the glass smashed. Some of the people in the crowd had firearms of their own, and shot back at the policemen.

When a bullet cracked by over Dawud’s head, he said, “I don’t want to stick around here any more.”

“Now that you mention it, neither do I,” Khalid said. They scurried back around a corner. Riots were interesting to watch from a safe distance, in the same way the quarrels of bears in a zoo might have been. When the distance you were watching them from turned out not to be so safe, and when there weren’t any bars between the animals and you, hastening elsewhere looked like a great idea.

More policemen hurried forward to reinforce their comrades. “Let’s see your papers, you two!” one of them growled at Khalid and Dawud.

“Here you are, sir.” Khalid moved slowly and carefully. He didn’t want the Italian to think he was reaching for a weapon. Dawud was just as cautious. Alarming a man who was pointing a submachine gun at you looked like a losing proposition.

The policeman stared at their documents. “I’m supposed to believe you assholes are from the Maghrib?” he growled.

“I hope you do,” Khalid answered. “Could I speak Italian this bad if I grew up here?” That last should have been a subjunctive, but he couldn’t remember how to make it.

“I ought to run you in and let my captain figure out what the devil you are,” the policeman said. Then he thought about it; Khalid could all but see the gears meshing inside his head. He jerked his thumb away from the tumult ahead. “But I gotta help my amici. So go on—beat it. And stay the hell out of this part of town if you know what’s good for you.” He trotted away.

Khalid and Dawud hurried back toward the neighborhood where people argued about tiling a kitchen floor and not about God’s will. “Do you know what’s good for you?” Khalid asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t mind a big house in Tunis, a pile of money in the bank, and a beautiful girlfriend who thought I was the sexiest man alive,” Dawud said. “I’m not sure all that would be good for me, you understand, but I’d like to find out. How about you?”

“You could do a lot worse than that. Or I think so, anyhow,” Khalid said. “Of course, if you asked an Aquinist, he’d tell you it was doing the things that got you into heaven and sending everybody who disagreed with you to hell.”

“You didn’t ask an Aquinist. You asked me,” Dawud said. “Then again, if a lot of Aquinists had a big house and money and a girlfriend who thought they were great, they wouldn’t be Aquinists any more.”

“That’s true.” Khalid nodded. Europe’s poverty and backwardness went a long way toward turning people into fanatics. A long way, but not all the way. “The scary thing is, some of them still would be.”

Behind them, a machine gun hammered out a long burst. Screams cut through the stutter of the murder mill. Khalid had trouble thinking of any ruler in the Muslim world who would turn machine guns on his own people. Then again, he had trouble thinking of any ruler in the Muslim world who would need to.

When he said so, Dawud ibn Musa shook his head. “You never can tell,” he said. “If trouble started in the European quarter of some of our cities, it might take machine guns to quiet things down.”

Khalid thought about that. He didn’t need long. “I hate to admit it, but you’re right.”

They took a roundabout route back to their hotel. Almost any route in Rome was roundabout. The streets weren’t on any kind of grid. If Khalid had to guess, they followed cow tracks from the days before Rome first became a great city—or any kind of city at all.

Soldiers steered them away from one turn into a risky part of town they might have made. One of the soldiers snarled something at them in a back-country dialect even Dawud couldn’t follow. A sergeant cuffed the soldier the way a farmer might cuff a mean dog. How loyal to Grand Duke Lorenzo was that skinny young man? How close to yelling God wills it! was he? And to opening up on his squadmates? Khalid was glad he didn’t find out then and there.

His feet hurt by the time they finally got to the hotel. He was surprised to see Annarita Pezzola sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper. He went over to her. “Does the Grand Duke need something else from us?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice expressionless.

“Huh?” Later, Khalid kicked himself for being slow on the uptake.

“I don’t know,” Annarita repeated. “I am no longer in the Grand Duke’s service.”

VII

“What? Why not?” Khalid couldn’t believe his ears. “If he’s canned you, he’s … making a mistake.” He almost said He’s too stupid to live, but that wouldn’t do, not where he might be overheard or recorded.

“He did not dismiss me,” Signorina Pezzola said. “I offered my resignation, and he decided to accept it.” She was also choosing her words with care.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Khalid said. “You did his father a lot of good. You could have done more for him—he doesn’t have the experience Cosimo did.”

Annarita shrugged. “I’m afraid not. He did not care to listen to me. That being so, I saw no point to shouting into the wind, so to speak.”

“I see.” One of the things Khalid saw was that she was holding herself together by main force of will. He admired that; it was what someone from his side of the Mediterranean would have tried to do. Here, people were more inclined to let themselves go.

“Which brings us to the next interesting question.” Dawud ibn Musa spoke with a certain somber relish. “What are you doing here? Why did you come to us instead of crying in your family’s vino? I know that’s two interesting questions, but you can do them together if you want.”

“Dawud—” Khalid’s voice had an edge to it.

But Annarita raised a hand and cut him off. “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re interesting questions, but they’re important ones. Even if his Supreme Highness doesn’t want to listen to me, I still may know some things he needs to hear. If they come from you, he has a decent chance of paying attention to them. For one thing, you’re Maghribis. For another—”

“We’re men,” Khalid finished for her.

“That’s right.” She nodded.

“It still matters on our side of the sea, too,” Khalid said. “Not as much and not as often as it does here, but it matters. It shouldn’t, but—”

Now Annarita Pezzola interrupted him: “On your side of the Mediterranean, at least you see it shouldn’t matter. Not here. Here they say things have always gone one way, so they should keep on going that way till the end of time.”

“Congratulations,” Dawud said. Khalid and Annarita gave him almost identical odd looks. After rolling his eyes at how dense they were, he deigned to explain: “Even if Corrector Pacelli were still alive, he couldn’t sum up the Aquinists’ program any better in one sentence.”

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you, but I could do without the honor.”

“How about doing with some supper?” Dawud said. “I don’t know about Khalid, but dogging fanatics all afternoon’s given me an appetite.”

“I could eat,” Khalid said.

“I can always eat.” Dawud patted his belly. He looked heavier in a tight European tunic than he did wearing the robes of the international style. He went on, “But by now I’ve got an appetite.”

“Do the two of you mind if I order from what you would call the haram side of the kitchen?” Annarita asked.

Khalid shook his head. Dawud said, “Not even a little bit.” His prohibitions weren’t the same as Khalid’s, though they had points in common. He followed or flouted them as he pleased, the way most people who belonged to the international civilization did, whether they were Muslims or not.

In the hotel restaurant, they got the waiter who’d tried to tempt them with forbidden food as if it were filthy pictures. The man smirked when Annarita chose slow-cooked pork ribs slathered in a sauce made of tomatoes and hot peppers from the Sunset Lands. Khalid ordered chicken. Dawud asked for spaghetti and meatballs.

“We can make those meatballs with ground pork, if you want.” The waiter sounded as oily as any pimp ever hatched.

Dawud took it in stride. “Thanks, but don’t bother,” he said. “I like beef better.”

They all ordered wine. That revived the waiter’s sneer, but only a little. Some Muslims flicked out a drop before raising their glasses, so they could truthfully say they had not drunk one drop of wine. Khalid didn’t waste the time or the wine. He worried about the hereafter less than the here-and-now.

“Peace be unto us,” he said, and tasted his white.

“Unto us, peace,” Dawud and Annarita echoed. They also drank. Annarita added, “The Grand Duchy needs peace.”

“The whole world does,” Dawud said. “How do we get it, though? Short of killing everybody who doesn’t think the way we do, I mean. Faruq tried that, and it didn’t work so well.”

“No, you can’t kill everyone who disagrees with you,” she said. “But if the people who disagree with you want to kill you because you disagree with them, what are you supposed to do about that?”

“‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’” Dawud said. Annarita nodded. To Khalid, the Jew explained, “That’s from the Book of Psalms in the Bible.”

“Thanks.” Not surprisingly, Khalid knew the holy book of the Jews and Christians less well than his own, and he wasn’t anywhere close to being fully familiar with the Qur’an, either. He went on, “That would be good and pleasant, if only brethren could manage to do it.”

Dawud wagged a finger at him. “If you’re going to complain about every little thing…”

*   *   *

The guards who manned a perimeter outside the Aquinist Seminary in Rome these days belonged to the Grand Duke’s army, not to the fanatical monastic order. The building itself had also changed since the last time Khalid and Dawud visited it. Most of the windows were shattered; shards of glass sparkled on the sidewalks and streets. Smoke streaked the outer walls. Here and there, rockets had punched holes in the building.

All the same, Major Badoglio said, “We took too many casualties clearing this place. We had to do it floor by floor, sometimes room by room. We didn’t bring out many prisoners, either. The Aquinists fought to the death.”

Khalid believed him. The stench of death still wafted out of the seminary, though most of the bodies had been cleared. He said, “I hope you got a big enough intelligence haul to pay you back for the lives you spent.”

“We’ve made some finds,” the officer from the Ministry of Information … agreed? How much of what they had found was the Ministry not sharing with the Maghrib? If Khalid was any judge of such things, Italy would hold back as much as it could.

“Didn’t I hear that the Aquinists had a couple of time bombs in and under the seminary?” Dawud asked.

“Yes, that’s true,” Major Badoglio said. “Our disposal units got to both of them before they could go off.” He smiled a thin smile. “Obviously, or the place wouldn’t still be standing.”

“Are they sure they found them all?” Khalid asked.

“I wouldn’t be going in there with you if I didn’t think they had,” the major answered. Khalid had to be content with that—either be content with it or turn around and head the other way as fast as he could.

Having Badoglio with them helped get the Maghribis through the military checkpoints. Once inside the seminary, Khalid wrinkled his nose. The death smell was stronger indoors. It mingled with the chemical reek of burned paint and a more ordinary sour-smoke odor.

Soldiers had shot up the image of Saint Thomas Aquinas near the elevators. That of Christ stern in judgment next to it had taken only a couple of probably accidental bullets.

Major Badoglio and the investigators trudged up the stairs; the electricity in the seminary was out. Hallways far from windows were dark. Badoglio’s flashlight pierced the gloom like a spear of brightness. Daylight reached into some of the hallways through open doors.

Inside one of those open-doored rooms, a young lieutenant was going through file cabinets. He looked disgusted at what he was finding. “The stinking Aquinists worked as hard at getting rid of their papers as they did at fighting our men,” he complained.

That Aquinists had fought in the room, Khalid couldn’t doubt. Bullet holes pocked and scarred the walls and ceiling. Heavy black bloodstains in one corner said a man had probably bled to death there.

The lieutenant went on, “Some of these, they set on fire. Some are soaked. Whether they did that or our people did it trying to douse the fire, I’m not sure. And some of the files have had fire extinguishers sprayed over them. That doesn’t do the paper or what was on it any good, either.”

“Files and papers in desks are like this all through the seminary,” Giacomo Badoglio said. “It’s one of the main reasons we haven’t come up with more on the fanatics here.”

“What might another main reason be?” Khalid asked. One that sprang to mind was Aquinists secretly working inside the Ministry of Information. How much of the incriminating evidence that did turn up disappeared before it saw the full light of day?

If Major Badoglio realized what he asked with the question, the Italian didn’t show it. “Well, if you come up another couple of floors, you’ll see one of the reasons,” Badoglio replied.

Going up another couple of floors wasn’t easy. The Aquinists had barricaded the stairway. Grand Duke Lorenzo’s forces needed to blast them out of the way with rocket-propelled grenades. Those had been invented to kill tanks. They were also wonderful for things like smashing bunkers.

Again, smoke and blood stained the stairwell. Some of the grenades had wrecked the stairs along with the office furniture and file cabinets the Aquinists used to block them. Khalid could see that the records in those cabinets wouldn’t be worth excavating. Grand Duke Lorenzo’s sappers had had to lay metal ramps over the shattered stairs. Major Badoglio climbed them as gracefully as a mountain sheep. Khalid managed. Dawud made heavy going of it. Khalid reached out and yanked his colleague up the last cubit or so.

“I thank you.” Dawud might not be graceful, but he hung on to his aplomb.

When they went out onto the fifth floor, just about all of it looked like the stairwell. Much of it was burned out. The Aquinists had set up more barricades at the corners in the hallway. Some of the walls between rooms had holes in them. The stink of smoke was stronger here. So was the stink of death. Until you’d seen the aftermath of modern war, you didn’t realize how many chunks could come off a body or how hard it was to gather up all of them.

“Not much useful information here,” Badoglio said, his voice dry.

“Yes, I can see that,” Khalid answered. “But what are the top floors like? The ones where the Corrector and the other important Aquinists worked?”

“The rockets from our helicopters did more damage up there than lower down,” Badoglio said. “We’re still going through them, though. If you want to walk back to the stairs, you’re welcome to see for yourself.”

“We’ll do that, yes,” Khalid said. Dawud sent him a wounded look, but didn’t complain out loud.

No sooner had they got back to the stairwell, though, than the bellow of a man on a bullhorn echoed up from below. “Clear the building!” the fellow shouted in Italian. “Everybody out! Right away! They’ve found another bomb down in the cellar!”

“Well, shit!” Dawud said. Major Badoglio crossed himself. Both responses amounted to about the same thing.

They went down much faster than they’d gone up. That was partly because they had gravity on their side. It was also because they had fear on their side. Dawud skipped down the metal ramp as nimbly as someone who did such things every day.

The foyer was crowded, with everybody trying to get out at once. Khalid caught an elbow or two and threw an elbow or two. He let out a long sigh of relief when he was out in the sunshine once more. Maybe the Italian bomb-disposal men could keep this bomb from going off, too. But he didn’t want to find out they couldn’t the hard way.

Soldiers around the Aquinas Seminary were already trotting away from it. Some of them were frankly running away from it. Khalid trotted along with Major Badoglio and Dawud. He wanted to break into a sprint. Until they did, though, he wouldn’t. His fear of getting squashed like a cockroach under a sandal was somehow less than his fear of seeming a coward in front of men whose good opinion mattered to him.

He’d gone two or three hundred cubits when the ground lurched under his feet, staggering him. He’d been in earthquakes in Tunis. This reminded him of one of those. But it was at the same time smaller and more concentrated. Behind him, the Aquinist Seminary dropped, almost as neatly as if wreckers had used explosives to bring it down.

“Dannazione!” Major Badoglio shouted, before returning to calmer Arabic: “The Grand Duchy just lost some good men in there.”

Khalid had done some dangerous things in his time. Trying to dispose of bombs? As far as he was concerned, that was nothing better than slow suicide. No doubt the world was a better, safer place because some men were brave or harebrained enough to think otherwise. But one of the rare ones who’d lived to retire to teaching the trade wrote a memoir he called I Am a Fugitive from the Law of Averages.

A wind full of dust and gravel shoved Khalid hard from behind. He staggered again, and almost fell. A chunk of concrete the size of his fist thumped down half a cubit in front of his right foot. Had its flight been only a little different, it would have smashed in his skull and stretched him out dead on the sidewalk. What made it go the way it did instead of the other way? He had no idea why. No one could have any idea why, save possibly God. Was it any wonder that writers sometimes spun stories around such might-have-beens?

Coughing, his eyes streaming, he lurched around a corner. That got him out of the worst of the windstorm from the fallen building. He saw he stood in front of a streetside coffee shop. The Italian who ran it stared, wide-eyed, at the chaos.

“Give me a glass of water, Signor, please,” Khalid said. Automatically, the man did. Khalid drank some of it, swished it in his mouth, and spat it out on the sidewalk. The stream that came from his mouth was brown, which surprised him not at all. He poured the rest of the water into his eyes and over his face. If it got his clothes wet, he didn’t care.

“That’s a good idea,” Dawud said. “Signor, let me have a glass, too.” Major Badoglio nodded. The man handed one to each of them. They both imitated what Khalid had done. After a beat, the Italian man who ran the coffee shop rinsed out his own mouth.

“You said you didn’t think the Aquinists would have put three booby traps in the seminary.” Khalid spoke to Major Badoglio in accusing tones. Then he coughed again. He couldn’t swish water around in his lungs.

Badoglio bowed his head. “My master will forgive me, I beg,” he said in the most formal, flowery Arabic Khalid had ever heard from him. “No doubt my master, being among the wisest of all men ever born, has never once found himself mistaken.”

Dawud chuckled. “He’s got you, Khalid.” Then he coughed, too.

“Hrmp,” Khalid said. He had trouble meeting Badoglio’s eye. “All right. You made your point. You put your neck on the line along with mine.”

“And mine,” Dawud added. Fresh crashes came from behind them as more of the Aquinas Seminary collapsed.

“Oh, who cares about a Jew’s neck?” Khalid said. Dawud laughed. If Khalid hadn’t been sure Dawud would laugh, he wouldn’t have made the crack. Major Badoglio couldn’t have got away with it. Friends could tell jokes that got acquaintances punched in the teeth. They could … as long as they didn’t do it too often.

*   *   *

When Khalid imagined a European interrogation room, his mind conjured up something terrifying and medieval. Darkness. Bars on the door. Lice and fleas. Thumbscrews. Pincers heating in a brazier. Maybe even the horror of an Iron Maiden.

All of which only proved he’d watched too many bad movies. The interrogation room in which he sat in the Ministry of Information in Rome could have come straight out of the Bureau of Investigations’ headquarters in Tunis. A plain table separated the suspect on one side from his questioners on the other: Khalid, Dawud, Major Badoglio, and a captain named Paolo Salgari. Suspect and questioners all sat on cheap, functional chairs.

Yes, the suspect was manacled. Yes, his feet were chained to the floor. That might also have been done with a dangerous man in Tunis. Yes, he was tonsured and wore the black robe of an Aquinist monk. Sadly, these days that also might have happened in Tunis.

Major Badoglio didn’t walk to the far side of the table and start slapping the prisoner around. He just opened a notebook. “State your name for the record,” he said.

“I am called Father Martino of Padua,” the Aquinist answered. He showed no signs of having been abused before he was brought here.

Badoglio wrote it down—from left to right, of course. “State your birth name as well,” he said.

“I was born Andrea Assarotti,” Father Martino said. Badoglio wrote that down, too, along with his date of birth (which he gave in the Christian calendar, not the more widely used Hijra reckoning) and his birthplace: yes, Padua.

That done, Badoglio said, “All right. Let’s get down to business. You are charged with plotting against the Grand Duchy of Italy and with rebellion against your lawful sovereign. With treason, in other words. We can take you out and shoot you anytime we please.”

He wouldn’t have been so blunt in Tunis. Even Aquinist monks had certain rights there. They could have a lawyer with them while they faced interrogation, for instance. They weren’t required to answer questions that pointed toward their guilt. This room might look like its equivalent across the Mediterranean, but the medieval world lived on inside it.

Father Martino’s answer sounded distinctly medieval, too: “I do not recognize your authority to judge me, or the authority of the Grand Duchy. I recognize only the superiority of my monastic superiors, and of God.”

“You may not recognize the state, but the state recognizes you,” Dawud said. “And the state is suppressing the Aquinist Order, so the people who were your superiors have no authority over anybody.”

The monk’s eyes blazed. “I don’t have to listen to lies from a stinking Jew.”

“As a matter of fact, you do,” Dawud answered mildly. “And it’s interesting you know I am one. Right this minute, though, I promise I smell better than you do. I’m not lying, either. I’m also not here because I’m a Jew. I’m here because what you’re up to worries my country along with the Grand Duchy.”

“How do you know this man is a Jew, Father?” Captain Salgari asked.

“How? One look at him and you can tell,” Father Martino answered, adding, “I say that only because it’s so plain, not because you have any right to question me.”

“You say that because you think you can get away with lying,” Khalid said in his clumsy Italian. “He looks not much different to—different from?—a Muslim Maghribi like me. He also looks not much different from Italians.” He nodded toward Salgari, who was dark and had a beaky nose.

“Your lies come from the Father of Lies,” Martino of Padua said. “I would sooner hearken to our Lord and Savior.”

“Would you sooner hearken to our Holy Father, the Pope?” Major Badoglio asked.

Khalid dared hope Martino of Padua would say yes. The Christians had a much more formal religious hierarchy than Muslims used. Clerical officials owed obedience to their superiors, and Marcellus IX was superior to everyone else. But the monk cautiously answered, “What are you talking about?” He wasn’t going to commit to anything sight unseen.

He didn’t have to. Badoglio unfolded a sheet of stationery with the Papal arms embossed at the top. He passed it across the table to Father Martino. The Aquinist could use his hands to position it where he could read it. The major explained it anyway: “His Holiness commands all members of the Aquinist Order to obey and cooperate with the secular authorities in the Grand Duchy of Italy. The edict, as you will see, bears his signature and his seal.”

Father Martino finished reading the document, then looked up at the security man. “This does not bind me. For one thing, I do not know that the signature and seal are genuine. For another, even if they are, that would only prove the Pope has lapsed into heresy. I am not obliged to obey a heretic. I put my soul in peril if I do.”

“You put your body in danger if you disobey his Holiness,” Captain Salgari said. “That gives us more reason to treat you the way you deserve.”

“You have me. You will do what you will do,” the monk said with bleak courage. “I can’t stop you. All I can do is pray that God will grant me strength to bear what I must bear. In the world to come, I will see Him in heaven. Satan’s demons will torment you in hell.”

He sounded sure of himself, sure enough to send a small chill through Khalid. This wasn’t the first fanatic’s interrogation he’d been a part of—far from it. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes, in spite of everything you did to them, they wouldn’t.

Major Badoglio steepled his fingers. “We know from others that you were involved in planting Maria Conti in the Grand Duke’s palace.” That was the name of the serving girl who’d blown herself up, and Cosimo with her.

“I deny it,” Father Martino said.

Badoglio stood, walked around the table, and stopped next to the Aquinist. He slapped him in the face. You would not have seen that in an interrogation room in the Maghrib. Khalid shook his head. You should not have seen that in an interrogation room there. Investigators being human, it did happen now and again. The Italian major took it for granted. He slapped Martino of Padua again, harder. “Don’t waste our time with lies. We will make you sorry.”

“I am sorry—sorry you follow the godless ones. It will cost your soul endless suffering,” the Aquinist said.

“We are not godless. Only a fool would say we are,” Captain Salgari snapped.

“You are so godless, you have no idea how godless you are.” As Father Martino spoke, a thin line of red dribbled down from the corner of his mouth. He went on, “You worship the Grand Duke. You worship the state. You worship howitzers and helicopters. You worship filthy films and foul music. You worship Mammon. You do not render unto God the things that are God’s.”

“Mammon?” Khalid whispered to Dawud.

“Wealth,” the Jew whispered back.

Badoglio slapped the monk again. “We didn’t bring you in here to make speeches. We brought you in here to find out what you know—and who you know. You would be smart to sing for us. We may go easier on you if you do.”

He didn’t say they would go easy on him. Khalid noticed that. So did Father Martino. “You’ll kill me any which way,” he said, which wasn’t quite an admission that he’d helped put Maria Conti in the palace, but came close.

“You’re right. We will,” Major Badoglio agreed. “But if you tell us who helped you, we may do it fast.”

“You cannot punish me as a righteous, vengeful God will punish you,” Father Martino said. “Our cause shall prevail. God wills it!”

This time, Major Badoglio hit him hard enough to rock his head back. Blood streamed from the monk’s right nostril. He snuffled when he breathed. Badoglio didn’t wipe the blood away. If Martino choked or suffocated, the major didn’t mind—or didn’t let on that he minded. He also gave no sign that he enjoyed tormenting a prisoner. He was just a man doing a job. He might have been a mechanic putting a new battery in a Garuda.

Khalid wondered whether that made what he did better or worse. True, he got no kick from hurting someone else. But what did you call a man who hurt other people strictly in the line of duty? A monster was the first thing that came to mind.

It went on for a long, unpleasant stretch of time. After a while, Martino of Padua began naming names. Whether they were names of any value might be a different question. Captain Salgari wrote them down. Martino might have condemned more people to torment. No, not might have—he had. Khalid had to hope they would deserve it.

This was how investigators played the game here. Khalid and Dawud went back to their hotel and got drunk at the bar. Dawud seemed at least as eager to do that as Khalid. The way it looked to Khalid, that made his colleague seem better, not worse.

*   *   *

Everything had consequences. If you followed the Aquinists, you fell foul of the secular authorities. If you served in the Grand Duke’s Ministry of Information, you tortured people because that was what functionaries in the Ministry of Information did. And if you got drunk over the course of an evening, you felt like a badly resurrected corpse the next morning.

Khalid woke up with evil jinni throwing fireballs at one another inside his head. Sometime while he was sleeping, a camel had shat in his mouth. Repairmen had slapped plywood over the window the Aquinists’ bomb shattered. It was too bright in there anyhow.

“Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’may rabo—” Dawud began, his voice harsh as a raven’s croak and much too loud.

“What is that horrible racket?” Khalid’s own voice sounded much too loud in his own ears, too.

“Prayer for the dead,” Dawud answered.

“Oh.” Khalid thought it over. Thinking also hurt. He nodded, which made his aching head want to fall off. He wished it would. “Well, you’ve got that right.”

Dawud lurched to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. He was more urgent about it than he had been when the Aquinas Seminary was falling down behind him. Afterwards, he blew like a grampus. “Have you got any aspirins in your travel kit?” he asked.

“I think so. Let me see.” Khalid bravely stood up himself. He didn’t think he’d hurt himself this badly since some of the parties in his madrasa days in Egypt. He pawed through the little crocodile-skin case. “Here we go! Three for you and three for me.”

He and Dawud swallowed the pills with as much alacrity as they’d gulped grappa the night before. The barman had sworn grappa was distilled from grapes. He’d left out the part about the thunder and lightning. They rumbled around inside Khalid’s aching skull.

“Coffee,” Dawud said. “Coffee and a little something greasy. After that, I’ll just feel … bad.”

“Maybe you didn’t drink as much as I did, then,” Khalid said. “Well, now I remember why the Prophet—peace be unto him—forbade Muslims from drinking wine.”

“We weren’t drinking wine. We were drinking dynamite. Something pretty much like it, anyhow,” Dawud said.

“It’s not even haram for you,” Khalid said.

“Drinking that much ought to be haram for everybody,” his friend replied. “A little every once in a while is nice. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel happy. But wemtablySimhaohafpa eneman,tmtoag eoiciaemahott griddmtablyDawuMajor Badoglioodyguarwatchawalaodyletyablywaithtiaog ejarrocaoeecSimarghtiCaptcorpsAft ejarrstree,tyMajor Bnor curiouooasdoglqun,iont-bywree ejorun,ionaofal ejoruet neoow eneman,tmtoag eoiciaemOhahtiCarbytdinaSRomanmtablysnooparr D,cJasdowish Iyself—aohow much Ian,tmtoag eoiciaemrk,rasdoan,tmtoag eoiciaemdeservorkaorueoruettto,Dasdoalay exnglopsipaoo>Bhemhow ruettbly ewaitgly ad, Dot ladablyiean,tmtoag eoiciaemYMommywreeIorub savmtabld an,tmtoag eoiciaemMayboo>Bworyied mt uotroDs,Dasdo>rnod>Yneoworyt …mmmbp:pagebreak/atoag emtn,t> XVIIInstea, stpeotryeawaithemItevionoo>Becauseajor lso vijorembassy e fdayjormDaosubjectoo>Knowing more didn’t necessarily make him feel better.

“We’re trying to keep cameras away from the fighting,” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz told him. “The fanatics thrive on publicity. They wouldn’t be doing any of this if they didn’t want to show the world they could.”

“You’re telling me things are worse than most people realize,” Khalid said.

“I’m afraid so,” the ambassador replied. “One shopping center in Algiers will never be the same. The Aquinists there wanted to be martyrs. They were, but not on television. That was a very bad bit of business.”

From everything Khalid had seen, Umar didn’t exaggerate. He understated. “How bad is bad? Do I want to know?”

“They killed Muslims because they were Muslims. They murdered hostages. They wrecked as many shops as they could. They fought as long as they could, and killed themselves when they couldn’t fight any more. Some of them booby-trapped their bodies before they killed themselves, so they could try to hurt us even after they were dead.”

“They went in expecting not to come out, then,” Khalid observed.

“It seems that way, yes.” Umar nodded. “They wanted to die—the fighters there, I mean. They intended to be martyrs. They got what they wanted, too, but not on television.”

“That’s something. Not much, but something,” Khalid said.

Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz nodded again, even more gloomily than before. “I am told—unofficially, because it also didn’t get publicized—that something a lot like Algiers happened in a suburb of Cairo where a lot of Europeans live. And in Istanbul the Aquinists tried to blow up the bridge across the Bosporus.”

“Allahu akbar!” Khalid exclaimed. “They don’t think small, do they? That would have been—what’s one step worse than a disaster?”

“What we have right now,” Umar answered. “That would have cut traffic between the Seljuks’ Asiatic and European provinces. And if the fanatics had dropped the bridge into the water the way they hoped, they would have blocked shipping between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, too, probably for years. The Turks stopped that, anyhow.”

“I don’t recall seeing anything about it on television or in the papers—I suppose because they did stop it,” Khalid said.

“I’m sure you’re right. Something that doesn’t happen isn’t news,” Umar said. “Plenty of bad things did happen in the Seljuks’ realm. The Aquinists didn’t just go after Muslims there. They attacked Christians who aren’t of their sect, too. Greeks and Armenians and Serbs and Bulgarians and such folk don’t acknowledge the Pope, you know, and to the fanatics that makes them fair game.”

“It’s all foolishness.” Khalid knew Islam hadn’t been free of such squabbles. Sunnis and Shiites remained rivals to this day. The two groups argued with each other. Sometimes they insulted each other. They hadn’t tried slaughtering each other for a good many years, though—not because of religion.

“Of course it is.” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz smiled a small, sad, cynical smile. “Nowadays we march off to war in the name of nationalism, not faith. Haven’t we come a long way?”

That fit much too well with what Khalid was thinking. He said, “Your Excellency, we’re going to keep fighting. I wish I could believe anything else, but I can’t. If we pile the old reasons on top of the new ones, we’ll fight even more than we do already.”

“I’d like to say I thought you were wrong. The trouble is, I think you’re right.” The ambassador rested his chin in his hands for a moment.

“Maybe, just maybe, the fanatics will see they can’t win this way, because they’re making everyone else hate them.” That was as hopeful as Khalid could bring himself to be.

“Maybe so. All groups change over time. They have to.” Umar might also have been trying to sound hopeful. He reached his limits even sooner than Khalid did, though: “I doubt the Aquinists and other Christian fanatics will give up in our lifetimes. They may not give up in our children’s lifetimes.”

“I haven’t got any,” Khalid said.

“High time you did, then,” Umar told him. “One reason so many Europeans move to our lands is that we have fewer than we used to.”

Khalid laughed under his breath, even if it wasn’t really funny. For a couple of generations, demographers had worried that advances in medicine and farming and the mechanical arts generally were putting more people on the earth than it could sustain. Lately, contraception made population growth in the Muslim world and China slow and almost stop.

But the demographers didn’t get to breathe a sigh of relief. Europeans kept right on breeding. Their countries were young and crowded and restless. That spawned extremism at home and emigration with it. Conservative politicians in Muslim lands stoked fears of being overrun by a pale, Christian wave from the north. They’d been screaming about cutting back on the number of immigrants long before this latest Aquinist explosion. Without a doubt, they’d scream louder now.

No matter how loud they screamed, though, work that prosperous people didn’t want to do still needed doing. Without the Europeans—and, to a lesser degree, without blacks from south of the Sahara—who would do it? French, Italian, Castilian, German … Those were the languages of gardeners and carpenters and construction workers and dishwashers and prostitutes from Teheran to Tenochtitlan.

And Khalid had another reason for laughing. “Well, your Excellency, it is possible that I may end up with descendants after all,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought so a few months ago, but it is.”

Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz nodded, unsurprised. “That Italian woman who was Cosimo’s aide.” It wasn’t a question. He added, “You certainly could do worse for yourself.”

When Khalid had worried about bugs in his hotel room, he’d worried about the Italian Ministry of Information and the Aquinists. Maybe he should have added his own embassy to the list. Or maybe not—another possibility sprang to mind. “You’ve been talking to Dawud,” he said.

“Revealing my sources would be bad form,” Umar answered primly.

Try as Khalid would, he couldn’t get angry. His affair with Annarita was something the ambassador needed to know about. It could affect his judgment; chances were it already had, if not to any great degree. He did say, “Nothing definite yet. She’s still making up her mind whether she wants to spend the rest of her life on the other side of the sea.”

“The civilized side of the sea, the way we look at it. The way we look at it, anybody from this side of the sea ought to jump at the chance,” Umar said.

“Dawud says she likely would if it didn’t involve living with me.” Khalid tried another probe.

“Dawud says all kinds of things,” Umar replied, which could mean anything or nothing. But he went on in a more serious vein: “Because we look at things that way, we forget that the Europeans have a civilization of their own, and that it has traditions older than Islam. They know they’re backward now, but they’re proud anyway. They’re even proud because they’re backward. Until you understand that, you don’t understand anything about them.”

“Oh, yes.” Now Khalid nodded. “The Aquinists wouldn’t be so popular if that weren’t so.”

“Well, all right. I should have known I didn’t need to preach to you.” The ambassador clucked in self-reproach. “I hope she does say yes. She’d be happier—the Maghrib will suit her better than Italy does. And you’ll be happier, too. Nothing wrong with happiness, believe me.”

“I’d like to try it one day.” Khalid was joking, and then again he wasn’t.

*   *   *

Annarita and Khalid walked through the Forum. Somewhere not far from here, he’d first set eyes on her, and taken her for somebody from his side of the Mediterranean. Now she was in European costume, more covered than she had been then. In these troubled times, Khalid saw fewer women wearing the international style. It was as if they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. No, not as if. That had to be just what they had in mind.

Khalid didn’t want to talk about that. He’d seen how Annarita didn’t care to acknowledge she’d given any ground to prejudice. He could have pointed it out and used it as an argument to help persuade her she could come to the Maghrib. His guess, though, was that she would have liked him less, not more, if he did. Sometimes you needed to know when to keep your big mouth shut.

Instead, he said, “I’ve seen Roman ruins in the Maghrib. But seeing them here in Rome … It’s different here.”

“The Maghrib—Africa and Numidia and Mauretania, they called the provinces then—was like an arm in those days,” Annarita answered. “This, this was the beating heart of the Roman Empire. The Empire’s gone, but the feeling lingers.”

“It does,” Khalid agreed. The vanished city of Leptis Magna had Roman remains as grand as these, and better preserved. But Leptis Magna, nowadays, mattered only to tourists and archaeologists. Its ruins were so well preserved because it was so long deserted. Rome remained an important city to this day, even if it wasn’t the capital of the world the way it had been centuries before the Prophet preached.

Annarita was thinking along different lines. “If Carthage had won the Punic Wars, all the wonderful remains would be on your side of the sea,” she said.

“I suppose they would. I never looked at it that way,” Khalid said. “Back in those days, Tunis was just a little outlying town. Carthage was the city that counted in that part of the world. Even the Roman Emperor Heraclius came from there to Istanbul—”

“To Constantinople.” Annarita broke in with the old name.

“To Constantinople.” Khalid inclined his head to her, accepting the correction. “He was still ruling when Muhammad—peace be unto him—passed away. The Muslims conquered Carthage a lifetime later, but the city fell into ruin after that.”

Annarita didn’t say anything, which was bound to be politeness of a sort. If you looked at history from a European perspective, or from a Christian one, a lot of things fell into ruin after the rise of Islam. As Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz had reminded Khalid a few days before, these people remembered greatness. And what could be harder than remembering greatness when you saw you didn’t have it any more?

What survived of the ancient temple of Castor and Pollux, for instance, were three columns about twenty-five cubits tall. The explanatory signboard in front of them said they were of the Corinthian order, and that the modern Romans called them the Three Sisters. A jackdaw on top of the marble blocks surmounting them chirped squeakily.

Annarita looked up at it as if it were telling her something. She stopped in front of the signboard, but didn’t read it. As if out of the blue, though it surely wasn’t, she said, “Yes, I will marry you, Khalid.” She might have been answering a question he’d just asked her.

The way his heart stuttered in joyful surprise said she wasn’t. “Thank you!” he exclaimed, and took her in his arms. He kissed her, too. Public shows of affection weren’t always taken for granted here, but he didn’t care. She’d said yes! “I’ll do my best to make you happy,” he promised.

“I believe you,” Annarita said. “If I didn’t believe you, I would’ve told you no, wouldn’t I?”

“I’m glad you said yes.” He left it there. She’d taken longer to make up her mind than he would have liked. But she had a lot to think about. He came from another country. He came from another religion. He came from another civilization, one that lorded it over the culture she’d grown up in. Not all the changes she’d have to make in her own way of life would be simple or easy. Even so … He squeezed her again. “I love you, you know.”

“I believe you,” she repeated seriously. On this side of the sea, arranged marriages to join family interests remained common. Romantic love was gaining here, too, though. In most of the wider world, it had swept the old ways before it. Couples went into marriage happier than they had in days gone by, even if, as Khalid knew too well, they didn’t always stay that way.

He and Annarita found a little café off the Forum and toasted each other with red wine. Khalid hoped Annarita didn’t expect to live happily ever after without working at it. She’d never been married before, so she might. But if they stayed friends as well as lovers, they stood a chance.

And if you worry about whether it’ll work just after she’s said yes … you stand a chance of being someone who’s gone through a divorce, he thought. If you didn’t, if you couldn’t, sit back and enjoy life once in a while, you didn’t deserve a happy marriage.

“What will Dawud say when you tell him?” Annarita asked.

There was a good, distracting question. “Probably that if he’d been in your shoes, he would have thought even longer,” Khalid answered. Annarita snorted. He held up a finger to show he hadn’t finished. “And that he expects to be a groomsman. He’ll wonder how a wedding between a Christian and a Muslim could possibly do without a Jew in it somewhere.”

Annarita snorted again. “That sounds like him, all right. If he were a rabbi, he’d insist on marrying us, too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Khalid wondered what kind of ceremony they would end up having. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be Jewish. Christian? Muslim? Christian and Muslim? Civil? Any or all of those were possible. He found a question of his own: “What will your family think?”

“They’ll be glad I’m getting married—most of them are sure I’m doomed to die an old maid,” she answered. “They won’t be so glad I’m marrying a foreigner. They thought I was too forward when I got an education and started working for Grand Duke Cosimo. What about your kin?”

By marrying a foreigner, no doubt she also meant marrying a Muslim. Khalid couldn’t dwell on that, though. He had to find his own response. “They’ll be surprised I’m marrying a Christian,” he said, which was bound to be true. “But they’ll like you fine once they get to know you. Who you are will count for more than what you are.” That was also true.

“My family won’t think that way. I’m sorry,” Annarita said.

“I love you anyhow. I do love you anyhow,” Khalid said. To his relief, that seemed to be the right answer, or at least a right answer.

*   *   *

“Let me see.” Dawud ran a hand through his badly combed hair, as if to stimulate the brain it covered. “When you hear news like that, you congratulate the fellow who’s going to be the groom and you send your condolences to the poor girl who’s stuck with him. I think that’s how it goes.”

“I’ll tell you how to go, and where.” Khalid made as if to throw a roll at his colleague. Rolls and coffee were the Italian notion of breakfast. Khalid was used to something more substantial to start the day, but he could cope with this.

“You’ll need to invite me, you know,” Dawud said. “Any wedding with two religions in it ought to have three.”

Khalid laughed out loud. “Ha!” He stabbed a triumphant forefinger at the Jew. “I told Annarita you’d say that! How do you like being so predictable?”

“As long as it’s you and not the Aquinists doing the predicting, I don’t mind … too much.” The qualifier showed that Dawud still wasn’t overjoyed.

Before Khalid could reply, their waiter came up and said, “Excuse me, but is one of you gentlemen Khalid al-Zarzisi?”

“I am,” Khalid said, wondering what had gone wrong.

“I have a telephone call for you, Signor, at the cashier’s station,” the waiter said. “If you will please come with me…”

Come with him Khalid did, however little he wanted to. Telephone calls at odd hours, in his experience, were unlikely to be good news. Had a relative in the Maghrib died or been hurt? Or had Annarita changed her mind and not had the heart to tell him to his face? That didn’t seem like her, but you never knew for sure, not till the moment struck.

He had to tip the waiter for bringing word he was wanted. He picked up the handset like a man taking hold of an adder. “Al-Zarzisi here,” he said harshly.

“Buon giorno. This is Major Badoglio.” Sure enough, Khalid recognized the officer’s voice. Badoglio went on, “When I rang your room, no one answered. So I tried down here, and I had good luck. Can you and your friend come to the Ministry of Information as soon as is convenient?”

“What’s up?” Khalid asked.

“I’d rather discuss it in person, not over an unsecure line,” Badoglio said.

That was reasonable. Khalid muttered under his breath all the same. “We’ll be there shortly,” he said, and hung up.

“What’s gone wrong now?” Dawud asked when he got back to the table.

“Just what I was thinking,” Khalid answered. “Giacomo wants to see us right away.” The waiter hovered behind him. Major Badoglio might well mean something to the man. Giacomo was less likely to. No guarantees, of course, but you did what you could.

“Oh, he does, does he?” Dawud gulped his coffee and stuffed half a roll into his mouth. Blurrily, he inquired, “Did he say why?”

“He didn’t want to, not over the telephone.” Khalid drained his cup, too. He needed coffee more than food.

Fifteen minutes later, they were going through security at the Ministry of Information. The men there knew who they were; they’d checked them any number of times. They were as careful as if they’d never set eyes on the Maghribis before. Italy might lie outside of civilization’s mainstream, but bureaucratic routine had found a home here.

Major Badoglio met them just inside the security checkpoint. “Ciao, amici,” he said. “Come back to my office with me, and I’ll tell you what I know.” Even here, in a place that was supposed to be secure, he didn’t want to say too much. After Captain Salgari, he had good reason for caution, too.

After Dawud had closed the door behind them, Khalid said, “Well?”

“Well, gentlemen, Fabio Lancelotti has disappeared—fled,” Badoglio said in portentous tones that, unfortunately, held no portent for Khalid. Seeing as much, the major explained: “He is—was—the first assistant to the Minister of the Interior.”

“Oh-ho!” Dawud saw right away where that was going. He was a beat ahead of Khalid, in fact. “So when he heard Salgari’d sung before he met the firing squad, he believed it, did he?”

“That seems to be the way to bet,” Major Badoglio answered. “And it’s the way to bet not least because Cardinal Svetozar Boroevic has also vanished off the face of the earth, or at least from the Vatican.”

“Cardinal who?” Khalid said. “What kind of name is that?”

“Cardinal Boroevic,” Badoglio repeated. “He’s a Croat. Their principality is on the other side of the Adriatic. The Croats are close kin to the Serbs in the Seljuk domain. Only don’t tell them that, or the Serbs, either. They hate each other.”

Who in Europe doesn’t hate his neighbors, especially when they’re related to him? Khalid wondered. Seeing no chance of getting a meaningful answer to that, he contented himself with asking, “And what does—or rather, did—Cardinal, uh, Boroevic do in the Vatican?”

“Among other things, he was second-in-command over Pope Marcellus’ guards.” Major Badoglio eyed the Maghribis, then nodded in somber approval. “I see this doesn’t amaze you.”

“If you’d told me he was the Pope’s chief gardener, that would have amazed me,” Dawud said.

“Are these two … officials traveling separately or together?” Khalid asked.

“We don’t know.” Badoglio sounded unhappy at admitting that, and well he might. Less happily still, he went on, “If they had false papers, they could have flown out of Rome to, well, anywhere in the world. Or they could have driven over the border to France or the Swiss cantons or one of the German states or even Croatia.”

“They could be hiding inside Italy, too,” Khalid said. “It’s not as if the Aquinists don’t still have friends here.”

“I could wish you were wrong,” Badoglio said. “But if I were either one of them, I’d want to get out of the country if I had any chance at all. Believe me, they won’t enjoy themselves if Grand Duke Lorenzo gets his hands on them.”

Khalid did believe him. No legal framework limited the kind of revenge Lorenzo could take if he caught the man who’d planted the serving girl who’d blown herself up—and Cosimo with her. Svetozar Boroevic might not have done anything to the Grand Duke himself, but Lorenzo also wouldn’t love anyone who’d compromised the moderate Pope’s safety.

“Without them—” Dawud broke off, as if wondering how optimistic he dared to be. He continued like a man shoving in money in a big dice game: “Without them, Lorenzo may be able to get the upper hand on the Aquinists, at least for a while.”

“Sometimes buying time is the most important thing you can do,” Khalid said. “People see that the fanatics are only stirring up trouble—they aren’t fixing anything or making anything better. That’s when their support starts slipping.”

“That’s when we hope their support starts slipping,” Dawud put in. He couldn’t stay very optimistic very long. He’d spent too long as an investigator and seen too much optimism come to nothing.

“Giving the people a chance to see that Lorenzo has Italy in his grasp, the way his father did before him, can only help him,” Major Badoglio said. He nodded to Khalid. “From what he told me, planting the rumor was your idea. You had a good one there.”

“Someone else would have thought of it if I hadn’t,” the Maghribi replied uneasily. He’d been raised to think modesty a virtue. One more thing that made him feel out of place in Italy, where people tooted their own horns as loud as they could.

“Someone else might have thought of it if you hadn’t,” Dawud said. “If his Supreme Highness feels like giving you the credit, take it.”

Badoglio nodded. “Good advice!”

Was it? Khalid didn’t care much one way or the other. Yes, Lorenzo was a better bargain than Aquinist fanatics running Italy would have been. But the Grand Duke wasn’t his overlord, for which he thanked the God in Whom he indifferently believed. His main wish was for things to calm down enough so Lorenzo would send him and Dawud home. Then he could get on with his own life and see what kind of new one he could build with Annarita.

As if pickpocketing his thought, the Italian major said, “And I hear you’re kidnapping Cosimo’s assistant. Congratulations! I hope the two of you are happy together.”

“Grazie,” Khalid said. “I hope we are, too. That’s what you can do—hope and try your best.”

“She’ll get along better in the Maghrib, I think,” Badoglio said. “Women who’re that sharp make men here nervous. They’re more used to it on your side of the sea, aren’t they?”

“Yes.” Khalid hoped he was right. His countrymen wouldn’t scorn Annarita’s talents because she was a woman. Because she was a Christian woman, an Italian woman? That might be a different story. He hoped it wouldn’t, but it might.

He didn’t plan to say anything about that to Annarita. Why borrow trouble? The Maghribis might just respect what she could do, the same as they would for a man born in Tunis. They prided themselves on judging a person for his or her abilities rather than his or her origins. Sometimes they did the latter anyhow, though. Not always. Only sometimes.

*   *   *

“His Supreme Highness has announced that the state of emergency declared for Italy is being relaxed.” The Italian newsman sounded as proud as if he’d given the order himself instead of reading what Lorenzo had decreed. “Curfew hours will be shortened. Most travel restrictions will be lifted. According to the Grand Duke, this reflects our progress in the struggle against Aquinist fanaticism and foreign invasion.”

The television screen switched from the studio to a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in the north of Italy: the watery light told Khalid this was nowhere close to the Mediterranean. Glum-looking men, many of them blond and pale-eyed, mooched around inside the barbed wire. Some wore tattered camouflage coveralls; more had on equally frayed European civilian clothes. Faces stubbly or shaggily bearded made the prisoners look even more unkempt than they would have otherwise. Several men sported bandaged wounds.

By contrast, the Italian soldiers guarding the captives were clean shaven except for some neat mustaches or chin whiskers. Not a one that the camera showed had so much as a missing toggle on his uniform. Their assault rifles gleamed with machine oil and purpose. And, most important of all, they were outside the barbed wire, while the prisoners languished within.

“Once people from beyond our borders learn that we can and must tend to our own business, full peace will return to our beloved fatherland,” the newsman declared.

“I wonder what he thinks when he isn’t mouthing words off the prompting machine,” Khalid said to Annarita.

“I wonder if he thinks when he isn’t mouthing words off it,” she answered. That was another good question. Some of the things Khalid had seen on Maghribi television—when the news crew had to ad-lib in the face of a breaking story, for instance—made him have his doubts, too.

But that wasn’t the first thing on his mind right now. “I hope you haven’t had any trouble with your passport and your emigration documents.”

“No.” Annarita’s head was on his shoulder. He felt her shake it. “Everything’s gone much more smoothly than I dreamt it would. I know our clerks can make a hash of things. I ought to—Cosimo used to complain about it all the time. Not with me, though.”

“Good,” Khalid said. “Lorenzo promised me anyone who gave you any trouble would end up envying what happens to Aquinists. People seem to think he wasn’t kidding.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t,” she answered. “He won’t be sorry to see me go—not even a little. I’m taking Cosimo’s secrets with me, and I won’t spill them here.”

“That might be part of it, but he does owe me something, too,” Khalid said. “So does Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz, as a matter of fact.”

She laughed. “No wonder everything’s so easy on that end, then! I thought the Maghribis would figure any Italian was an Aquinist until she could prove she wasn’t. And I thought whom you knew was less important than what you knew on your side of the Mediterranean.” Her classical Arabic was more precise and grammatical than a native speaker’s would have been.

“Who you know counts for a lot everywhere.” Khalid hardly noticed breaking the rule she followed; if she hadn’t followed it, he wouldn’t have noticed at all. He went on, “It may matter less in the Maghrib than it does here, but it matters, all right.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Annarita said, more to herself than to Khalid. “Anyone would think there were human beings on the far side of the sea, not the always rich, always happy demigods who enjoy pointing their fingers at the foolish things the mortals here do.”

There were people in the Maghrib who looked at Europe the way visitors to the zoo looked at the monkey house. They found the antics here, both political and religious, funnier than anything in the cinema. The difference was, monkeys didn’t think you ought to believe the way they did. And monkeys hardly ever reached for assault rifles to make you believe the way they did.

“Oh, we’re human beings, all right,” Khalid said. “We can be just as stupid as anyone else. We aren’t always stupid the same ways people here are, but so what? Quarreling about ideology and about the economy instead of theology? It’s like eating peaches instead of pears.”

She hugged him. “I like the way you look at things.”

“Well, good, but I was only getting started,” he replied. “In all the little things, the things people do, not governments or religions, we are stupid the same ways in the Maghrib. Men cheat on women. Women cheat on men. Somebody gets drunk and slugs somebody else—or shoots somebody else. Sometimes somebody’s just mean and doesn’t need to get drunk first. People lie. They steal. We have police. We need them.”

“How did you get to be an investigator, anyway?” Annarita asked.

“I’d graduated from the madrasa. I’d studied literature, mostly, but I didn’t want to teach and I’m not a good enough writer to make a living at that. My Uncle Masud was an investigator for the city of Tunis. He knew some people, and—”

“Ha!” She poked him in the ribs.

“Well, he did,” Khalid said. “He’s dead now, but he helped me get started. I turned out not to be bad at it. I’ll never get rich enough to support four wives, but—”

Annarita poked him again. “You’d better not!”

“Hardly anybody does, these days. Rich men buy big cars and houses and boats instead to show off how much they’ve made, and keep concubines on the side.”

“You’d better not do that, either,” she said darkly.

“If you’re happy where you are, there’s not much point. I expect I will be.” Khalid kissed her. Again, he seemed to have found the right answer, or at least part of it. He went on, “Where was I? Oh—the other thing is, every once in a while I end up doing something worthwhile, not just going through the motions. In a lot of jobs, I couldn’t say that. And I meet interesting people.” He kissed her some more.

“How do you mean that?” she asked after a while.

“I don’t know. How would you like me to mean it?”

By all the signs, she liked the way he meant it fine. When they got around to noticing the television again, the news was over. A quiz show was on instead, with a host who cracked rapid-fire jokes in a dialect Khalid had trouble following. His assistant, a statuesque young woman, looked alluring even when covered from head to toe.

“Is she distracting you?” Annarita asked.

“I wasn’t distracted,” he replied. “I was just noticing how you can do, um, interesting things in spite of the customs here.”

“Is that what you were noticing?”

“Of course,” Khalid said, as innocently as he could. “I noticed you a little while ago, and you were wearing quite a bit less than she is. You still are, as a matter of fact.” He set a hand on her bare hip.

“So you noticed that, did you?”

“Dear, if I don’t notice you, they can wrap me in a shroud and shovel dirt over me, because I’ll be dead. And if I look at other pretty girls once in a while, who cares where you get your appetite as long as you eat at home?”

“Hmm. I’m not sure I like that.” Annarita thought about it for a few seconds. Then she nodded. “I suppose I can put up with it. I suppose I’ll have to. As far as I can see, men are going to stare at women, and you can either put up with it or go out of your mind. That’s one point to the women’s clothes we wear here: they make men stare less.”

“Or just use our imaginations more,” Khalid said. Annarita made a face at him, but then she laughed. He cupped her breast in his hand. She purred. He went on, “I don’t need to use my imagination now. I’ve got the real thing here with me. If that doesn’t make me the luckiest man in the world, I don’t know who would be.”

“Flattery will get you somewhere. Oh, wait.” She paused. “It already did, didn’t it?” This time, they laughed together.

XVIII

Khalid and Dawud walked down an Italian street not far from their hotel. Khalid couldn’t see any soldiers. The air didn’t stink of smoke. No nearby gunshots made him dive for his life—or stole it.

The locals were taking advantage of the peace and quiet. Open doors invited customers into shops and eateries and taverns. WELCOME! signs shouted in big letters. SALE! they screamed in even bigger ones.

Most of the Aquinists’ broadsheets were torn down. Few people dared sneak out at night to paste up new ones. By contrast, Grand Duke Lorenzo’s young, handsome face stared at passersby from every wall and post and fence. THE GRAND
DUKE PROTECTS
HIS PEOPLE! was his latest slogan.

“It’s quieted down,” Khalid remarked.

“It has, hasn’t it?” Dawud agreed. “A good thing, too, or this country might have fallen to pieces. If the fanatics grabbed control here, right across the narrow sea…” He shook his head. “That wouldn’t have been good at all.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Khalid tried to see in his mind what might have sprung from such a disaster. “We probably would have had to invade to clear them out, either by ourselves or maybe with Egypt. Either way, can you imagine how the rest of the European countries would have screamed?”

Dawud threw back his head and screamed himself. A couple of Italians eyed him in alarm and edged away. “About like that,” he said. “Or maybe even louder. Want me to try again?”

“No, don’t bother,” Khalid said quickly.

“Oh, be that way.” Dawud sounded sulky. “But all the Europeans would have screeched about how we violated Italy’s sovereignty and how we didn’t respect them and on and on. Now they won’t get the chance. I bet some of them are disappointed, too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re right, though—they won’t get the chance,” Khalid said. “Instead, we get the chance to go home.”

Dawud laughed at him. “That breaks your heart, doesn’t it? Just smashes the poor thing all to pieces. Now you’ll have to go and marry your pretty Italian. I’d say she was a smart Italian, too, only she went and told you yes. So how smart can she be?”

“Never can tell with women. You got somebody to say yes, for instance,” Khalid said.

“Sarah wanted to stay inside the faith, so she had fewer choices,” Dawud said. “Chances are I wouldn’t have been so lucky if she’d been able to look around a little more.”

Khalid knew that was nonsense. Dawud knew he knew it was. The Jew and his wife had been a happy couple for many years. By all the signs, they’d stay a happy couple for many more. Whatever it was that made two people fit together, they had it.

“Annarita and I should find that kind of luck,” Khalid said.

“Well, I hope you do,” Dawud said. “Sarah and I were both sad when your first one fell apart. Those things happen—I know they do. You never like it when they happen to somebody you care about, though.”

“Hrm,” Khalid said. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know his share of couples whose members had been sure they would live happily ever after … and who now lived apart from each other. One of the things that followed upon marrying for love was breaking up when that love, whatever the reason, failed to stay the course.

He wanted to think that wouldn’t, that couldn’t, happen to him this time around. He wanted to, but it wasn’t easy. He and his first wife had broken apart after coming together. What guarantee did he have that he and Annarita wouldn’t go the same sorry way?

He had no guarantee, as he knew too well. But he’d made some mistakes the first time around that he didn’t think he would make again. Some people did learn by messing up; he could hope he was one of them. And Annarita wasn’t the same as his first wife. He thought she was more easygoing, more tolerant of foibles. If he hadn’t thought it could work, he wouldn’t have asked her to marry him.

When he and Dawud walked into the hotel lobby, Major Badoglio sat there waiting for them. He wore civilian clothes, presumably so he wouldn’t alarm or alert other people going in and out. He stood up when he saw the two Maghribis. “Peace be unto you, my masters,” he said in Arabic.

“And to you also peace,” Khalid answered automatically.

“What’s gone and fallen into the chamber pot now?” Dawud asked: exactly the question filling Khalid’s mind as well.

But Major Badoglio only smiled. The expression pulled his thin face in unfamiliar directions. “Nothing … Nothing I know of, anyhow.” Yes, he would be one to qualify that. After a moment, he went on, “I have a car in the parking garage down the street. If you’ll come with me, the Grand Duke would like to give you his thanks and his farewells.”

“How can we say no?” Khalid murmured. If you told a European ruler no when he wanted to hear yes, you needed to have force ready to back it up. The Maghrib had that kind of force when it dealt with Italy. Khalid and Dawud didn’t when they dealt with Grand Duke Lorenzo.

Badoglio drove them to the ducal palace on the Palatine Hill. Security there had always been tight, even if, once, it hadn’t been tight enough. It was no looser now. Still, the soldiers seemed less jumpy than they had at the height of the Aquinist uprising. They were ready for trouble, but they weren’t looking for it to leap up and bite them in the leg.

A butler with some of the bushiest eyebrows Khalid had ever seen led him and Dawud and the major to a small reception chamber. Lorenzo waited there with some of his aides and some women who might have been wives or concubines (Christianity frowned on them, which didn’t mean there were none in Europe) or ornaments.

Khalid bowed to the Grand Duke. “Your Supreme Highness,” he said. Beside him, Dawud went through the same unrepublican rigmarole. So did Badoglio, whose bow was more practiced and better polished.

“No ceremony needed today,” Lorenzo said. He waved to a very ornamental woman with a tray of drinks. “Help yourself to whatever you fancy. You can have a glass of wine, too.” The serving girl squeaked.

“I like that one, sir,” Dawud said. Laughing, Khalid nodded. Even with no ceremony required, a Grand Duke’s joke would be funnier because of who told it. Still, Khalid had heard plenty worse.

Annarita walked in a few minutes later, escorted by another officer—this one uniformed—from the Ministry of Information. She dropped Lorenzo a perfect curtsy. Khalid had seen the gesture only in Europe. In the wider world, women bowed like men, though sometimes more deeply.

The Grand Duke also told her no formality was needed. Then, in more public tones, he said, “We’re here today to honor and thank our friends from across the sea. They came to help my father—God bless him—cope with the Aquinist fanatics and murderers. Though they couldn’t save him, they stayed to work with me. And they gave me the lead I needed to flush out the villain who betrayed Cosimo. Ladies and gentlemen, here are Khalid al-Zarzisi and Dawud ibn Musa!”

Everyone applauded. Khalid and Dawud both bowed. The applause got louder. Khalid felt foolish. This kind of acclaim belonged to singers and polo heroes. More to the point, people like that basked in it. It just embarrassed him.

Along with bowing, Dawud grinned and waved. He might have been soaking up ovations his whole life. If he hadn’t, his attitude said that he should have been. He’d always been better at enjoying himself than Khalid was.

Annarita stepped up and kissed Khalid on the cheek. That set off more cheers. Since they were the last things he wanted, he almost got mad at her. Then he saw how proud she looked. Finding that expression on the face of someone he loved made his annoyance melt like snow in the desert.

“Italy and the Maghrib have always been united in the fight against the fanatics,” Lorenzo said. “When Khalid goes home, though, the countries will be joined together in a different, more personal way, because Signorina Pezzola here will be going with him.”

That drew more applause and cheers. Some of what the Italians shouted sounded risqué. Khalid was glad he didn’t speak the language perfectly, or he would have understood more of it. As long as Annarita kept smiling, he didn’t worry. People in the Maghrib would have been calling out the same kinds of things, only in Arabic.

Dawud cheered along with the Grand Duke’s aides and their ladies. Khalid sent him a look that meant Do you have to? The Jew’s answering chuckle said Yes, of course I do, you spoilsport.

“We will continue the fight until the Aquinists are smashed, crushed, and utterly defeated,” a man in major general’s uniform told Khalid.

“I hope we do, sir,” Khalid answered. He didn’t expect that to happen anytime soon, if it happened at all. A man could always hope, though.

“Smashed!” the major general said. By the way he talked, he was busy getting smashed himself. His uniform sparkled with medals and ribbons and gold braid and scarlet piping. From everything Khalid had seen, the fancier a general’s uniform, the worse the ordinary soldiers in that army would perform. Maybe Maghribi military men could quietly mention that to their Italian comrades in arms. It wasn’t his place, so he kept quiet.

He drank more wine. The buffet offered little sandwiches and olives and fried squid rings and anything else a hungry man might want. Almost anything … “I don’t see any dormice in honey,” Dawud said, as if he’d been looking forward to that particular delicacy for weeks.

Maybe he had. You never could tell, especially with Dawud. But when Annarita said, “You know that was an old Roman dish, not a modern one,” her unspoken message plainly was Don’t be more difficult than you can help.

“I do?” Dawud sounded so innocent, Khalid knew he was responding to what she hadn’t said.

The reception went on longer than Khalid would have liked. He and Dawud got one more round of applause when Lorenzo presented them both with the Order of Service to the Grand Duchy, Second Class. The medals were gaudy enough to have made the Italian major general jealous (after that thought crossed Khalid’s mind, he noticed that the officer was wearing the same medal with an even more splendid ribbon—the Order of Service, First Class). Lorenzo should have given Annarita some kind of award, too, but he didn’t.

At last, assisted by Major Badoglio, Khalid and Dawud made their getaway. Pretty soon we’ll get away from this whole country, too, Khalid thought. He’d drunk a bit himself, but that only made him more sincere—and more eager.

*   *   *

From the walls of the casbah, which had been Tunis’ citadel in the old days but was now reduced to the more mundane role of city hall, Khalid threw his arms wide. The casbah sat on a height, and gave a fine view of Tunis as a whole. “This is my town,” he said proudly. “What do you think of it?”

As was her way, Annarita gave it a careful inspection before answering “Everything looks so clean, so new, and so white.”

“Plaster—and the local stone is mostly white, too,” Khalid said. “We don’t paint it much. It fights the heat better if we leave it alone.” He didn’t comment on her other two remarks. Tunis was cleaner than Rome. It had had modern sanitation much longer, and the local authorities here cared more about cleanliness than they did on the Christian side of the sea.

Some of the tall buildings in town were glassy rectangular prisms that could have gone up anywhere in the Muslim world—or even in Rome or Turin, though they would have stood out more there. Others looked like larger versions of the old local structures, at least on the outside. Within, they would enjoy all the modern conveniences.

Annarita pointed out past the Bab-el-Bhar: the Sea Gate. No modern skybusters there, only small buildings huddled too close together. Even from this distance, you could see how cleanliness faltered in that part of town. You could guess the area had been grimy even before fire swept through it and soot spotted and marred so many walls. A little sadly, Annarita asked, “That would be the Christian district?”

“I’m afraid so,” Khalid answered. “The markets there remind me of the ones I saw in Rome and Naples. If you get homesick for something and you can’t find it in the big stores, chances are they’ll have it there.” He paused and looked down at his sandals. “You might want to wait a little while before you go exploring. Till things calm down some more, I mean.”

“I understood you,” she said. “I have my faith in common with the people down there, but that’s about it. I came here because it’s a freer, more open way of life than the one I left. They came to make money, but otherwise to hang on to how things are in Italy.”

“That’s about the size of it, I’m afraid. The ones who try to fit in here find they can. There aren’t so many as we’d like, but there are some,” Khalid said. Out in the harbor, a freighter’s deep whistle pierced the hum of loud traffic noises. A dredged channel through the salt lake northeast of the city that led out to the Gulf of Tunis made this a port of call for ships from around the world. To the southwest, suburbs spread across what had been a soggy salt marsh.

“Shall we go back inside? I don’t have to look at everything at once,” Annarita said.

“Whatever you want.” Khalid took her hand. She squeezed his when he did. Smiling, he went, on, “How much do you bet Dawud’s already waiting for us?”

“I won’t touch that one. And if we’re even a minute late, he’ll let us hear about it, too.” But Annarita was also smiling.

In through the sliding glass doors they walked. Before Khalid went up to Italy, the police officers who served in the casbah had been some of the most bored men in the world. They looked much more alert now. The Aquinists had attacked here. Khalid was hazy on the details, but he knew it had happened.

Fluorescent tubes set into the ceilings behind frosted glass replaced Tunis’ bright, harsh sunlight. Conditioned air, cool and as bland as if it weren’t there at all, took the place of the hot, sea-smelling stuff outside. More comfort but less flavor, Khalid thought. Well, nothing wrong with comfort.

People sauntered or bustled through the hallways, heading for whichever office they needed. Signs and arrows on the white-painted walls told them where to go and how to get there. A janitor with a broom and a wheeled garbage can sang softly to himself in French.

MARRIAGE BUREAU—ROOM 227 was part of the list on one wall, with an arrow pointing to the left. Khalid had gone back to reading the familiar alphabet and to letting his eyes travel from right to left rather than the other way round with enormous relief. To him, figuring out Latin letters while reading in the wrong direction felt like wading through mud backwards.

He liked the old, ordinary numerals, too. The European variations on the theme, even though they ran the same way as the ones he was used to, had always loo, t

Table of Contents

- VII

- XVIII