n the
black marble table beside his sleeping mattress. Then from his traveling
chest he took the dark brown leather pack that had accompanied him here
from Lucera. He felt for the small packet and drew it out. Unwrapping
the oily parchment, he looked at the small black cake, a square about
half the length of his finger on a side. He drew his dagger out of its
sheath--the dagger that would have been poor protection for him earlier
if he had had to fight those Filippeschi men. Carefully he shaved
peelings from the cake to the polished black marble. With the sharp edge
of the dagger he chopped at the peelings until he had a coarse powder.
He held the cup of cooling black liquid below the edge of the table and
scraped the powder into it. He stirred the kaviyeh with the dagger's
point.

Holding the cup up before him as if he were offering a toast, he spoke
the Hashishiyya invocation: "In the name of the Voice comes Brightness."

He put the cup to his lips and sipped it slowly. The lukewarm kaviyeh
masked the other taste, but he knew it would begin to work as soon as it
reached his stomach. He peered into the bottom of the cup to make sure
he had missed no precious grains, then set it down.

_The magic horse that flies to paradise_, so the Hashishiyya called it.

From Sheikh Saadi he had learned how to resist the power of drugs. From
Imam Fayum, the Old Man of the Mountain, he learned how to use them,
when he chose.

Naked, Daoud lay back on his mattress with a sigh that sounded like a
roar in his ears. If the Filippeschi came upon him to kill him now, he
would greet them with a smile and open arms. Lying on his back, his head
resting on a feather-filled cushion, he let his senses expand to fill
the world around him. His eyes traced the intricate red-on-red floral
pattern of a damask wall hanging. The humming of a large black fly that
had blundered in through the open casement and the closed curtains
resounded in his ears like a dervish chorus chanting themselves into an
ecstasy.

Odors swept in through the open window--clean mountain air with the
scent of pines in it, but from nearby the swampy foul reek of every kind
of filth produced by thousands of human beings living too close to one
another. It had rained last night, but not enough to clean the streets,
and the scavenging pigs--Daoud's heightened senses could hear and smell
them, too--could not keep up with the garbage and sewage produced by the
overcrowded peopl