The Saracen: Land of the Infidel by Robert Shea (poetry books to read txt) 📖

Daoud stood perfectly still, looking into the violet sky, reciting in his mind the salat, the prayer required of a Muslim five times[64] daily. This was Mughrab, the moment when the last light of sunset had drained away. An evening breeze cooled his face, welcome after a day of traveling under the summer sky of Italy. Oriented by a bright crescent moon just rising, he faced southeast, toward Mecca. His back was to the stone wall of the inn called the Capo di Bue, the Ox's Head, where he and Sophia and Celino had decided to spend the night. On the other side of the wall, loud voices contended for attention, the sound of travelers in the common room settling down to supper.

Praying in the dusk reminded Daoud that he was alone. What would it be like now in El Kahira, the Guarded One? He would be praying with hundreds of fellow Muslimin, standing shoulder to shoulder, all equal before God, in the Gray Mosque, all listening to the call of the blind muezzins from the minarets—"Come to the house of praise. God is Almighty. There is no god but God."—all facing the Prophet's birthplace together in holy submission. Daoud's prayer might be the only one going up to God tonight from anywhere near Rome.

All around him towered ruins. The silhouettes of broken columns rose against the darkening sky, and across the Appian Way the ragged shape of what had once been a wall. Pines stood tall and black where, according to Lorenzo, some wealthy woman of ancient Rome had her tomb.

He tried to forget his surroundings and to think only of the salat. It was hard to concentrate when he could not assume the proper positions for prayer—raise his hands, kneel, strike his forehead on the ground. He fixed his mind on the infinity of God.

"Do not try to see Him," Abu Hamid al-Din Saadi had told him. "If you see Him in your mind, you are looking at an idol."

Daoud did not try to see God, but as he prayed, a Muslim all alone in the heart of Christendom, he could not help but see Sheikh Saadi, the Sufi master who had brought him to Islam.

The face was very dark, the rich black of a cup of kaviyeh. Out of the blackness peered eyes that saw—saw into the very souls of his students.

Often as he sat listening to Sheikh Saadi read from the Koran, the Book to be Read, and explain its meaning, voices from the past reproached him. The voice of Father Adrian, the chaplain of their castle, rang in his mind. The quiet voice of his mother, teaching[65] him the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary, whispered to him. Like thunder his father spoke of war and of what it was to be a knight.

He could escape the torment of these voices only by listening closely to the Sufi sheikh. Saadi was trying to teach him how to be good, and that was the same thing his mother and father had wanted for him. So they would not mind if he learned from Saadi.

Sheikh Saadi, wearing the white woolen robe of a Sufi, sat on a many-colored carpet of Mosul, an open copy of the Koran resting on an ornately carved lectern before him. His hand, as dark as the mahogany of the stand, caressed the page as he read aloud.

"'Such as persevere in seeking their Lord's countenance and are regular in prayer and spend of that which We bestow upon them secretly and openly, and overcome evil with good: Theirs will be the Heavenly Home.'"

Mohammedan dogs! Daoud remembered Father Adrian in his black and white robes shouting in the chapel at Château Langmuir. Satan is the author of that vile book they call the Koran.

By the age of eleven Daoud had already known cruelty and evil at the hands of the Turks who had captured him, kindness with Baibars, and goodness with Sheikh Saadi. The Sufi sheikh had never made any claim, but Daoud had no doubt that he often walked and talked with God.

"Secretly and openly are we to give," the old man was saying. "God has been generous to us, and we must be generous in turn. When you are kind to a bird or a donkey, or even to an unclean animal like a pig or a dog, He loves you for it. He loves you more when you are kind to a slave or to a woman or to one of the unfortunate, like a cripple or an unbeliever."

"Daoud is both a slave and unbeliever," said Gamal ibn Nasir with a faint sneer. "Must I be kind to him?" Daoud stared at Gamal, burning with hatred, all the more because what he said was true.

Gamal was a slender, olive-skinned boy whom no one dared cross, because he was a grandson of the reigning Sultan of Egypt, Al Salih Ayub. Most of Saadi's students were boys of noble family, and Daoud knew that he was permitted to enter this circle only because all men feared and respected Baibars. And even though he studied Islam with them because it was Baibars's wish, Daoud remained fil-kharij, an outsider, because he was an unbeliever.[66]

The boys sat in a semicircle, their rectangles of carpet spread over the blue and white tiles of the inner courtyard of the Gray Mosque, where Saadi had been teaching since long before these students were born. The old black man sat with his back to the gray stones of the western wall, the stones that gave the mosque its name. He taught in the late afternoon, when he and the boys could sit in the shade.

"God is compassion itself, Gamal," Sheikh Saadi said with a smile, "but even He may find it hard to love a mean spirit." The sultan's grandson blushed angrily, and his eyes fell.

Thinking about the compassion of God, Daoud opened his eyes wide as a startling idea occurred to him. But after the insult from Gamal his tongue felt thick in his throat and the palms of his hands went cold at the thought of speaking. He still stumbled over the Arabic tongue in which Sheikh Saadi conducted his lessons.

Saadi looked warmly upon him. "Daoud has a question?"

Daoud stared down at his hands, which seemed very large as they lay in his lap. "Yes, master." Those kindly velvet-black eyes seemed to draw speech out of him. "If God loves the compassionate, how can he look with favor upon the warrior, who wounds and kills?"

Saadi's turbaned head lifted. His grizzled beard thrust forward, and his eyes grew round and serious. He looked, Daoud thought, like a thoroughbred steed pricking up his ears to a trumpet call.

"I say to you, Daoud, and to Gamal and to all of you—the work of a warrior is a holy calling. When the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless and salute him, began to teach, he did not want the believers to be men of the sword. But the pagans beat those who went to hear him, and they would not let him teach. And so he learned that a true man of God must go forth with the Book in one hand and the sword in the other."

Daoud felt a warm pride in his chest. He was not a despicable slave. He would one day be a warrior, in a way a holy man, like Saadi, who helped spread the teachings of God.

But I am an unbeliever.

He listened for the Frankish voices in his mind crying out against the Saracens, against the devilish religion of the one they called Mahound. But the voices were silent.

A pale boy with a grave face asked, "If God made man, how can He love one who butchers His creatures?"

Sheikh Saadi raised an admonishing finger. "The Warrior of God[67] is no butcher. He strikes with sorrow and compassion. He hates evil, but he loves his fellow men, even the one he fights against. The Warrior of God is known, not by his willingness to kill, but by his willingness to die. He is a man who would give his life for his friends."

Saadi went on to speak of other things, but Daoud's mind remained fixed on the words "Warrior of God."

Ever since the day the Saracens carried him off, he had lived without a home. He had drunk from gold cups in the palace of Baibars, had seen that a Mameluke might rise to earthly glory. But such rewards fell to only one in a thousand. For the rank and file, the life of a Mameluke was a hard one, often ending in early death.

Lately Baibars had sent him to live with the other Mameluke boys in training on the island of Raudha in the Bhar al-Nil, the river Nile. Every morning, when he woke to the rapping of the drill master's stick on the wooden wall of his sleeping shed, his first feeling was anguish. Sometimes he prayed before sleeping that he might not wake up again. Only when he journeyed twice a week, by boat and on foot, to sit at the feet of Saadi, did he feel any peace.

But what if God had chosen him to be a Mameluke? Then it was a blessed life, a holy calling, as Saadi had said. There was a world beyond this one, a place the Koran called a "Heavenly Home." All men, Christian and Muslim, believed that. As a warrior he could hope that his hardship would be turned to joy in that Heavenly Home. In that world, not one in ten thousand, but every good man, would dwell in a palace.

Absorbed in his own thoughts, he heard the soft, deep voice of Saadi as one hears the constant murmur of the windblown sand in the desert. The boys around him and the men who came and went in the Gray Mosque—all were believers. As a warrior of God he could be part of that, and not the least part. He would no longer be fil-kharij, a stranger in this world. He would be fil-dakhil, at home.

The lesson was over. The boys stood with Saadi and bowed their heads in prayer. After the prayers they bowed again to their teacher and, alone or in pairs, pattered out of the courtyard of the Gray Mosque.

When they were all gone, Daoud stood alone facing Saadi.

"What does Daoud have to say to me?"

In a rush of love for his master, Daoud threw himself to his knees and struck his forehead on Saadi's red carpet, bumping his head hard enough to be slightly stunned.

"What is it, Daoud?" Saadi's voice was a comforting rumble.[68]

Daoud sat back and looked up. The figure of the Sufi towered over him. But Saadi bent his head, and looking into the dark face, Daoud felt as if someone huge and powerful had taken him into his arms.

"Master, I want to embrace Islam."

Daoud was mentally repeating the salat for the third time when he heard footsteps and the click of hooves coming up the road. He shut his eyes to resist the distraction.

A voice interrupted the fourth repetition. "Peace be unto you, Signore. Can you tell me if there is room at the sign of the Capo di Bue for my son and me and our donkey?"

Daoud was annoyed at having to stop his prayers, but he had to reply or call unwanted attention to himself. He opened his eyes and saw in the shadows before him a