en. Not just Rachel, but the boy David who had always
lived inside him. The pain was unbearable. He longed to escape it.

XXXI

Tilia eyed Daoud apprehensively. "Is it not as I have said--she is well
and happy?" She lifted the pectoral cross to raise its gold chain away
from her bosom and mop her flesh with a square of pale green silk. He
remembered the blade in the cross, and wondered if she was afraid he
might attack her.

He wished he could hate her for what had happened to Rachel. But all
Tilia had done was introduce Rachel to a way of life that Tilia herself
had found rewarding.

"She is as well as I could have hoped," he said, hearing in his own
voice the deadness he had heard in Rachel's. He sat down heavily on a
divan.

Lorenzo looked at him searchingly. His big mustache hid his mouth when
it was in repose, but his eyes were wide, and they glistened wetly in
the light of the one candle that illuminated this small room. The
Sicilian's hands lay limp in his lap, the hands of a man in pain and
unable to do anything about it.

Through a peephole Daoud saw that Sordello had awakened. The gray-haired
bravo was staring about him in wonder, only six feet away from Daoud's
eye, while Maiga gently pressed his shoulders back against the divan,
Orenetta stroked his chest and whispered to him, and Caterina's blond
head rose and fell between his legs.

Francesca sat on the divan beside Daoud, offering him a slice of kid. He
took it and chewed it, but even though Tilia had cooked and seasoned it
perfectly, it was tasteless to him.

It was not only Rachel's fate that troubled him, he realized. It was
what was happening on the other side of this wall--those three lovely
women ministering like houris of paradise to that old ruffian. They
would do it with skill and even with the appearance of enthusiasm
because they had no choice. They did not even think of choosing. They
just did as they were told. Their orders came, through Tilia, from
Daoud. Francesca, here beside him, would do whatever he wanted, not
because it was what _she_ wanted, but because she, too, had no choice.

And he had never really thought what it meant for women to live this way
until he saw, tonight, what had happened to Rachel.

_God is a flame_, Sheikh Saadi used to say, _and each human soul a spark
from that flame. When we treat our brother or sister like a thing, we
trample God Himself._

They were all slaves in this house of Tilia's. H