adder toward him. He held a cook's knife in one
hand with a blade as wide as his wrist and as long as his forearm. If he
were not holding the knife up to display it to his victim, the tip of it
would have rested on the platform, because the executioner's back was
bent forward as if it had been broken in some accident long ago.

_The firewood seller at Lucera!_

Daoud's head swam as he tried to fathom how the crippled dwarf who had
been part of the crowd of tradesmen entering the great Hohenstaufen
stronghold with him, who had witnessed Daoud's arrest by Celino at the
gate and even seemed to pray in his behalf, could be here conducting a
public execution in the city of the pope. He must have been a Guelfo
spy, by coincidence infiltrating Lucera at the same time as Daoud.

He had been in Manfred's pastry kitchen. Had he really been sleeping, or
had he seen Manfred, Lorenzo, and Daoud walk through together?

_If he sees me here in the crowd, he will expose me!_ The people around
Daoud, their breath reeking of onions and garlic, pressed him so tightly
he could barely move. Twisting his body, he managed to get his back
turned to the scaffold. This put him face-to-face with a
broad-shouldered man in a mud-brown tunic, with a thick black beard and
mustache. The man laughed at him.

"Would you turn away? Have you no stomach for Erculio's holy work?"

Daoud fixed the man with a stare, thinking of what he would like to do
to him. He realized, though, that if he tried to fight his way out of
the piazza, the little man on the scaffold would certainly notice him.
If he simply stayed where he was and watched, his would be one face in
thousands, and the dwarf obviously had more pressing business. He
reached up to the soft cap on his head, making sure it covered most of
his blond hair. Without a word to the man in brown, who had shrunk from
his stare, Daoud turned and faced the platform. He was just in time to
see the bent dwarf--Erculio, was that his name?--bless himself, just as
he had at Lucera.

Daoud's heart pounded as he imagined himself and Lorenzo and Ugolini
suffering as this naked, bleeding blistered heretic was.

_And Sophia! God forbid! I would cut her throat myself before I let
anything like this happen to her._

The thought of Sophia being tortured in public was such agony that he
wanted to scream and fight his way out of the piazza. He did Sufi
breathing exercises to calm himself.

They had tied the moaning vi