strict Muslim these days."

"I am ready to retire, my lord. Ready to drop all pretense and come back
here, just to be myself."

Baibars's wide mouth drew down, the lips so thin that the line they drew
seemed just a slash across the bottom of his face.

"Now that you are here, Tilia, now that we are face-to-face, I want to
hear from you the story of Daoud. I want to hear all of it, all that you
had no room to tell me in your carrier-pigeon messages. Take as long as
you like. Ask for anything that will make you comfortable. My ears are
for you and for no one else."

"I am my lord's slave. I shall tell it to you as it happened to me." She
settled herself on the cushion. "I first met Daoud ibn Abdallah in the
hills outside Orvieto on an afternoon in late summer, three years
ago--"

Tilia stopped her tale twice, so that she and Baibars could pray when
the muezzins called the faithful to prayer at Maghrib, after the red of
sunset had left the sky, and again at 'Isha, when it was dark enough
that a white thread could not be told from a black thread.

After the final prayer of the day, a servant brought an oil lamp.
Baibars waved the lamp away, then called the servant back and asked for
kaviyeh. Tilia drank the sweet, strong kaviyeh of El Kahira with Baibars
and devoured a tray of sticky sweets, and then went on with her story.

By the time she was finished, the moon had risen above the courtyard.
She sat back and looked at the Victorious King.

"He was to me like my firstborn son." Baibars took a dagger from his
sash, held open his shimmering silk kaftan, a costly robe of honor, and
slashed a great rent in it.

Tilia wondered what to say. How could she comfort him?

_Comfort him? How can anyone offer comfort to a man like Baibars?_

"We are Mamelukes," he said. "Slaves. We are slaves of God. We are His
instruments. His weapons. I shaped Daoud to be a fine weapon against the
enemies of the faith. And it is even as this Simon de Gobignon told the
Greek woman Sophia--Daoud succeeded. Abagha Khan still seeks an alliance
with the Christians, as his father Hulagu did. But many Tartars have
already converted to Islam, and the next Tartar khan of Persia may be a
Muslim. I am working to make that possibility a certainty. As for the
Christians, my informant at the court of Charles d'Anjou, a certain
dwarf named Erculio, tells me that now Charles desires to extend his
empire across the Middle Sea into Africa. King Louis is al