ot mind killing children?" he asked.

John seemed puzzled by the question. "What else could we do with them?
With their parents dead they would only starve to death. Or if they
lived, they would grow up hating us, and we would have to fight them."

_You could make slaves of them_, said a voice inside Daoud, and the red
mist swelled into a cloud of fury billowing up inside him. He had to sit
motionless, his fist clenched on the stem of his silver goblet, waiting
for the feeling to pass. Thank God for Saadi's teaching. It was painful
to look directly with the inner eye at the disorientation of his senses
and at the anger surging through his body, but it saved him from any
fatal mistake.

Philip said, "At Baghdad I found a whole house full of babies, maybe
thirty or forty. I slit all of their throats. Their mothers were dead
already. I suppose they left the babies behind when they went out of the
city to be executed, hoping they would survive. But with no one to
suckle them, the babies would have starved to death. Killing them was an
act of mercy."

Remembering what he had seen of Baghdad, Daoud felt his rage grow cold
and towering as the mountains of the Roof of the World. Those were his
Muslim people. He wanted to draw the dagger at his belt and slash the
throats of the two gloating, drunken savages before him. He bit down
hard on his lower lip to keep himself under control.

"When we shot people with arrows," said John, "we went around and pulled
the arrows out of the bodies afterward so we could use them again. We do
not waste anything."

_He is trying to show how admirable they are._

Daoud watched the stout Bulgarian woman Ana speak John's words in
Italian, still expressionless, still standing motionless. But to his
surprise he saw rivulets of tears on her round cheeks.

She had been in Bulgaria when the Tartars came, he thought. She had seen
what Christians called "the fury of the Tartars." She must have been
among the survivors who submitted to their rule, but she had not
forgotten. Perhaps translating John's and Philip's words exactly as they
spoke them was her way of taking revenge.

John held out his goblet, and Ana refilled it. He laughed softly at
nothing in particular and drank more.

"But why do this to city after city?" Daoud asked.

"When we invade a kingdom, the rulers and people are determined to
resist us," said John. "To fight them might cost us the lives of
thousands of our warriors. But