the art of storytelling_

BOOK ONE

LAND OF
THE INFIDEL

_Anno Domini 1263-1264
Year of the Hegira 661-662_

"Whoso fighteth in the way of God, be he slain or be he victorious, on
him We shall bestow a vast reward."
--The Koran, Surah IV

"Nothing is true. Everything is permissible."
--Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah,
founder of the Hashishiyya

I

In the mist-filled plains around Lucera, cocks crowed.

Daoud ibn Abdallah pushed himself slowly to his feet. After days and
nights of walking, his legs ached abominably.

Tired as he was, he looked around carefully, studying the other
travelers who rested near him on the road, peering at the city wall a
hundred paces away with its shut gate of iron-studded oak. In his
stomach he felt the hollow ball of dread that had not left him since he
landed in Italy.

_I am alone in the land of the infidel._

Dawn gave a pink tint to the pale yellow stones of the wall, about twice
the height of a man. Above it in the distance, covering the summit of
the central hill, rose the citadel of Lucera, surrounded by its own huge
wall set with more than a dozen many-sided towers.

Daoud's feet throbbed in his knee-high boots. For three days he had
walked along the carter's track from the port of Manfredonia on the
Adriatic coast into the hills around Lucera. Yesterday at daybreak he
had been able to see, from a great distance, the outline of the fortress
emerging from the center of a rolling plain. It had taken him another
day and a night to reach its gate.

Around Daoud now were dozens of people who had gathered at the gate
during the night, mostly merchants with packs on their backs. A few
farmers, hitched to carts loaded with melons, peaches, and oranges, had
dragged their burden over the plain. The more prosperous had donkeys to
pull the wagons.

One man with a long stick drove six small sheep. And a cart near Daoud
was piled high with wooden cages full of squawking chickens.

Walking in his direction was a tiny dwarf of a man who appeared
permanently doubled over, as if his back had been broken. It seemed to
Daoud that if the man were not holding his arms out from his sides for
balance, his knuckles would a