bout facing guilt.

If he had not understood, he might have told himself that it was not his
fault, it was these Christian brutes who chose to torment the poor
madman in this way. He might have told himself that Lorenzo, not he, had
found the man and brought him to Orvieto. He might simply have said, as
he had said to Sophia, that in war there must be innocent victims. He
might have reminded himself that he and Lorenzo thought that the man
would only raise a commotion in the church, not that he would draw a
knife.

And if he consented to any of those thoughts, he would have been
pinching off a fragment of his soul, just as the executioners pinched
off bits of this man's body.

He forced himself to watch as the cage moved slowly into the piazza and
the executioners tore again and again at the victim's body with their
red-hot pincers. He saw now that six laughing, well-dressed young men
were pulling the cart. Of course. No beast, its nostrils assailed by the
smell of burning flesh and its ears by the victim's howls of agony,
could remain calm and pull a cart through this frenzied crowd.

These were the same people who had rioted against the Tartars a month
ago, the day this man was arrested. Now they cheered and jeered at the
death of the Tartars' assailant. And that meant, Daoud thought, that the
man's death was in vain.

The cage drew near him now as it approached the scaffold. Daoud held his
breath at the thought that the condemned man might look him in the eye.
_How could I bear that?_ But the man's eyes, he saw, were squeezed shut
with fear and pain.

And guilt continued to cut into Daoud like the twisting knife blade of a
Hashishiyyin.

_A better man than I would have found a way to stir the people and keep
them stirred, so that lives would not be wasted._

The two red-garbed executioners had set aside their red-hot pincers and
were dragging the heretic up the ladder to the scaffold. His feet
dangled on the rungs. On the platform stood another man waiting for the
victim.

Daoud felt his eyes open wide and his lips begin to work silently when
he saw who the third executioner was.

His face was left bare by the executioner's black hood, whose long point
hung down the side of his head past his chin. No use to mask this man's
face; his body made him instantly recognizable to anyone who had ever
seen him before.

He smiled a serene, almost kindly smile down at the moaning man who was
being dragged up the l