Through Darkest Europe Read online

“‘I came not to send peace, but a sword,’” Dawud ibn Musa quoted.

  Major Badoglio winced. Then he sent Dawud a look that mingled surprise and respect. For a moment, Khalid didn’t understand what was going on. Then, suddenly, he did. Dawud had quoted a saying of Christ’s that contradicted what the Italian security man thought about Him. Khalid was surprised, too. Dawud was a man of parts, but Khalid hadn’t known he could spout sayings from the Christians’ part of the Bible.

  Stiffly, Badoglio said, “People can quote out of context from the Qur’an, too.”

  “Oh, no doubt.” Dawud stayed polite, as he commonly did. Khalid nodded agreement. The Muslims who still denied the possibility of evolution did exactly that. So did the handful of Muslims who still denied that the Earth went around the Sun.

  But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the people who quoted the Qur’an out of context did so to make an argument. The people who quoted the Christians’ part of the Bible out of context did so to inspire fanatics to martyr themselves. That was what they had in mind—and, all too often, what they got.

  “Well,” Khalid said, breaking the awkward silence that followed Dawud’s deadpan, perhaps too-polite, agreement, “let’s see what you’ve got here.”

  “I’ll be glad to show you.” Major Badoglio sounded perhaps too eager. “Come with me, gentlemen, please.” He hurried down the corridor. Khalid and Dawud followed. Khalid smiled at Dawud. The Jew soberly looked back. Maybe he didn’t find any of what had just happened amusing. But Khalid had known Dawud a long time. His guess was that the Jew did, but that he wouldn’t let his own face know, let alone anyone else.

  * * *

  A few of the men in the Ministry of Information were Muslims. The large majority, though, were Christians like Major Badoglio: intelligent, well-educated men who should have been able to separate their reasoning faculties from the religion in which they’d been raised. One of them, a man of about Khalid’s age, boasted of how proud he was to have been educated at the Cairo madrasa. Khalid didn’t remember seeing him there, which proved exactly nothing. Several of the other Italians had studied at other famous centers of learning throughout the Muslim world.

  They were bright, yes. They were capable, certainly. But Khalid had trouble warming to any of them, though he hoped it didn’t show. They should have been able to separate their reasoning from their religion. They should have, but could they really? What was going on in their heads?

  Khalid sighed silently. You worked with what you had, with the people you found. The world being as it was, what else could you do? Not a thing. And, if you feared the people you found might prove imperfectly reliable, what could you do about that?

  You might not want to tell some of them some of the things you knew. Of course, they might not want to tell you everything they knew, either. If that turned out to cause problems … Well, the world was as it was, and it wasn’t any other way.

  Or they might try something else. They might tell you everything they knew all at once, hoping to drown you. If that wasn’t what the men from the Ministry of Information were up to, they had more enthusiasm than they knew what to do with. They sat Khalid and Dawud down in a windowless room lit by fluorescent lights: a room that could have belonged to any bureaucratic outfit anywhere in the world. They gave them strong coffee and surprisingly good sweet rolls.

  And they gave them papers that covered the table in front of them more than half a cubit deep. Some of the papers were reports they’d compiled themselves on the multifarious groups that roiled the peace in the Grand Duchy of Italy these days. The rest had come from those groups themselves. Some were propaganda posters and broadsheets and flyers. The rest the Ministry of Information had captured in raids up and down the peninsula. Those were the ones the fanatics didn’t want the outside world to see—unless, of course, they were plants. Were the Aquinists and their friends devious enough to do something like that? Probably.

  Waving at the sea of paper, Major Badoglio said, “You begin to get an idea of what we’re up against.”

  “Well,” Khalid said, “yes.” If he didn’t sound happy, that was only because he wasn’t.

  Some of the documents were in classical Arabic. Those were the ones the fanatics wanted the world to see. Some, Khalid noticed at a glance, were in bad classical Arabic. Quite a few, though, could have been written in the Maghrib or Egypt or any other country where all educated men used the tongue that bound the world together.

  Other papers—both for local consumption and private documents—were in Italian. Khalid read it better than he spoke it. He carried a little dictionary to help him out. With patience, he could extract meaning, which was what he needed to do. He didn’t think he would ever get fluent enough to judge literary quality.

  And still others were in Latin. Latin served the Christians of Western Europe, and especially the fanatics among them, the way Arabic served the rest of the world. It let them communicate with one another regardless of what their birthspeech might be. And it seemed holy to them, because it remained the language in which their priests conducted their services.

  Latin was a closed book to Khalid. Oh, he could recognize a word here and there, because he read Italian. But Latin’s beastly grammar made it far more different from Italian and its other daughter tongues than modern Arabic dialects were from their classical source.

  He glanced over at Dawud ibn Musa. Right this minute, the Jew was examining a poster of a stern, steel-jawed Saint Thomas Aquinas with the Arabic legend GOD IS NOT MOCKED! Since he hadn’t let on that he knew Italian, he probably wouldn’t look at any documents in that language till Badoglio went away. Did he read Latin, too? Khalid wasn’t sure, but he thought so.

  Dawud passed the poster over to Khalid. “He knew what he thought, all right.”

  “He sure did,” Khalid agreed. “That’s … a big part of the problem we’re facing now.”

  He picked his words with care; he didn’t want to offend Giacomo Badoglio. But he couldn’t help wondering when Western Europe would recover from what seemed to him the malign influence of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Back in the seventh century (the thirteenth, by the calendar the Christians still used), Aquinas had pondered the relationship between God and man’s pursuit of scientific knowledge. No doubt he was spurred on by new Latin translations of Aristotle. They came into Latin from Arabic, of course; the Muslim world had known Aristotle for many hundreds of years, even if not in the original Greek.

  It wasn’t just that Aquinas concluded that studying science corrupted religion because it reduced man’s faith in God’s omnipotence and omniscience. No: what really mattered was that he set forth his conclusions in an enormous Latin book, the Summa Theologica (one bit of the arcane language Khalid did know). So overwhelming were his arguments that he carried almost all his fellow believers with him. And intellectual pursuits in Christendom had languished ever since. Better surety of the next world than useless knowledge of this one, Aquinas had declared, and most Christians agreed with him to this day.

  Strangely, a century and a half earlier, a Muslim philosopher named al-Ghazali examined exactly the same question—and reached exactly the opposite answer. Al-Ghazali was convinced that Muhammad and Aristotle could be reconciled. God has created nothing man may not investigate, he wrote in his greatest work, The Revival of the Science of Religion. The more man learns, the better he may glorify God.

  As Saint Thomas Aquinas’ view was accepted by Christians, so al-Ghazali’s was in the Muslim world. And so reason and science advanced and then exploded in the Dar al-Islam, while Christendom stagnated for centuries. Christians still kept reacting to what their more inventive, more creative neighbors did. They lost war after war. They lost chunks of land and bigger chunks of pride. Now, still in the name of religion, they were looking for new ways to hit back.

  The real irony was that, in the real argument between Aquinas and al-Ghazali, the Christian had the right of it. The centuries that followed the time of the two philosop
hers proved that science and reason did tend to corrode faith. Whether their benefits in this world outweighed that was a matter of opinion.

  Khalid al-Zarzisi thought they did. He’d been inoculated against childhood diseases. He’d drunk clean water growing up, so he never caught diphtheria or typhoid. When his appendix started aching like a rotten tooth, he’d been etherized while a skilled surgeon cut it out of him. The dentist numbed his mouth before working on his teeth.

  He used the telephone and telegraph. He watched television and movies, and listened to the radio and recorded music. He could drive a car. He flew in an airplane when he needed to. He took electric lights and air-conditioning for granted. When he lay down with a woman, he didn’t need to worry about leaving her pregnant unless she wanted a baby. He’d met a Turk who’d walked on the moon.

  All those things—and so much more about the modern world—would have struck both al-Ghazali and Aquinas as miracles. The difference was, al-Ghazali would have applauded them. To Aquinas, with his thought always firmly fixed on the soul and the world to come, they wouldn’t have mattered. They had nothing to do with what was really important.

  A phrase in one of the pamphlets on the table leaped out at him. It was from Matthew, one of the books in the Christians’ part of the Bible. For what is a man profited, Matthew wrote, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

  That was the question, all right. Khalid didn’t spend much time—waste much time?—worrying about the state of his soul. He was comfortable enough in this world that he didn’t see the need. Not every Muslim would have agreed with him: far from it. But more would have than not. Scholars and scientists and doctors and engineers all across the vast sweep of the realm of Islam had made the world a different place—a better place, he thought.

  Thomas Aquinas’ modern disciples had a different view. They were convinced all Muslims were bound for hell. (They were also convinced all Christians who presumed to disagree with them would head in the same direction.) But they thought Satan saved his hottest fires and sharpest knives for secular men. And they thought their duty was to send such men to the Devil as fast as they could.

  Idly, Khalid wondered what the world might have looked like had al-Ghazali decided against reconciling God and Aristotle and Aquinas in favor. He shrugged. The notion struck him as unlikely. Islam was a supple, rational faith, while Christians had always been proud to think of themselves as drunk with God.

  As if to underscore the point, Dawud pulled out another poster. This one showed Aquinas with a Persian assault rifle like the ones the guards here carried clutched in an upraised fist. In the background, demons wearing robes and keffiyehs scuttled for cover. DRIVE OUT THE FOREIGN DEVILS! the poster screamed. ITALY IS FOR CHRISTIANS!

  “Charming,” Khalid murmured.

  “Isn’t it?” Dawud said. “Well, one thing’s certain, anyway.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  * * *

  Pigeons strolled the sidewalks of Rome and stepped out into the streets to cross as if all the traffic had nothing to do with them. It was as if they thought flying was beneath their dignity.

  Sometimes—most of the time, even—people and birds on foot managed to get where they were going. Most of the time, yes, but not always. Khalid watched a dog nuzzle a crumpled ball of gray feathers in a gutter. After a moment, the dog picked up the prize and trotted away with it in his mouth. One pigeon had bucked the odds and lost.

  Badoglio’s driver honked at a man crossing against all common sense. The man stopped right in front of the car. He was going to swear, maybe to use some of the Italians’ expressive gestures, to let the world know what he thought. He was going to … till he got a look at the driver. Then he scuttled for the curb as fast as he could go.

  Standing in the pedestrian’s place, Khalid would have done the same thing. With a small, satisfied grunt, the driver stepped on the gas and went on.

  Not far outside Saint Peter’s, the Garuda stopped. Guards in gaudy medieval uniforms came up to check documents. The Pope was a secular prince as well as a spiritual lord. Just how much of a secular prince he was at any given moment depended on a lot of things. His personality and that of the reigning Grand Duke made good starters.

  Marcellus IX, the current occupant of the Throne of Saint Peter, was a modern man, a progressive man: as much as he could be when he headed a two-thousand-year-old institution that had spent most of the second half of its existence trying to believe the world, and ideas about the world, hadn’t changed. If Marcellus died an untimely death, his successor was much too likely to be an Aquinist. That could prove unfortunate for all kinds of reasons.

  It was also a major cause of Khalid and Dawud’s trip to Italy.

  However medieval the Papal Guards’ uniforms, their weapons were businesslike submachine guns. They studied Major Badoglio’s ID and, with more interest, those of his companions from the Maghrib. One of them spoke into a walkie-talkie. He waited for an answer, then clicked the set off. “They’re expected, all right,” he said.

  “Somebody should have told us, then, dammit,” another guard said.

  The fellow with the walkie-talkie spread his hands, as if to say What can you do? He nodded to Badoglio’s driver. “Go ahead.”

  Khalid had visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem: a side trip, because he was really there to see the Dome of the Rock. The Christians’ shrine there was ramshackle and ancient. It had gone up three centuries before the Hijra calendar opened: in the fourth century of the Christian era. No one would have said it didn’t look its age, either.

  But Saint Peter’s made the Church of the Holy Sepulcher seem well maintained by comparison. Both buildings were about the same age, but Saint Peter’s had seen harder use and far fewer repairs. At its heart was a five-aisled basilica. Other buildings or rooms or whatever you would call them adhered to the sides of the basilica the way mussels and barnacles adhered to a pier.

  Once upon a time, the Papacy had been rich. Once upon a time, a Pope had launched a war that took Jerusalem out of the Dar al-Islam for years. But no more. These past few hundred years, the Papacy and Christendom in general had fallen on hard times. Half a terra-cotta roof tile lay by one of Saint Peter’s outbuildings. Khalid craned his neck, trying to see from where it had fallen. Yes, there was the spot. If they didn’t fix it pretty soon, the roof would leak.

  Another guard waved the Garuda to a parking place: in Rome, something more precious than rubies. Two more escorted Major Badoglio and the investigators from the Maghrib into Saint Peter’s.

  The first thing Khalid noticed was a nondescript little pot sitting on the mosaicwork floor. It almost seemed to be trying to pretend it wasn’t there. He soon spotted other shy little pots and bowls. Sure as Shaitan, the roofs here did leak.

  Incense filled Khalid’s nostrils. Bishops and cardinals stared curiously at the newcomers. Their gaudy vestments put him in mind of the long-downfallen Byzantine Empire (a Seljuk Sultan still reigned in Constantinople, though for the past two centuries he’d had to answer to an elected parliament and a cabinet of ministers from the most popular faction).

  At first glance, the prelates’ costumes shone and sparkled in the mix of candlelight and electricity inside Saint Peter’s. When Khalid took a longer look, he saw how threadbare and worn the silks and satins and cloth-of-gold had grown. Had any of the surplices and chasubles and albs and other pieces of clothing with improbable names been new when these venerable men’s grandfathers were boys? Impossible to say for sure, but Khalid would have bet against it.

  That thought made him look at the interior of the church in a whole new way. The ornamentation seemed very rich. Gold gleamed everywhere. But how much of what looked like solid gold was only leaf or gilt? How much was polished brass masquerading as its better? How much of what had once been gold had the Popes had to sell off over the years to pay their bills? Again, Khalid didn’t know, but he
knew what his guesses were.

  “This way, gentlemen,” one of the gaudy guards said, leading Badoglio, Khalid, and Dawud through a maze of narrow, winding corridors that left Khalid wishing he could unroll a string behind him, the way Theseus did in the Labyrinth. Would he ever find his way out of here again? He had to hope so. The guard opened a door with creaky hinges. “His Holiness the Pope awaits you.”

  II

  Marcellus IX, servant of the servants of Christ, was a little, wrinkled man somewhere around seventy years old. He looked like an Italian—which is to say, not too different from someone from the Maghrib. His beard was white, his bushy eyebrows still dark. Behind the magnifying lenses of his spectacles, his brown eyes were keen and clever.

  “Your Holiness,” Major Badoglio murmured. The Pope held out his hand. Instead of kissing it, Badoglio kissed the large, heavy ring the Pontiff wore. How many lips, over how many centuries, had kissed that ring? Khalid had no idea. Irreverently, he wondered how many diseases the insanitary thing had spread.

  “Who are your colleagues?” Marcellus asked in Italian. His vestments were in better shape than those of most of his prelates, but still far from new.

  “Your Holiness, I present to you Senior Investigator Khalid al-Zarzisi and Investigator Dawud ibn Musa,” Badoglio replied in the same language.

  The Pope’s head bobbed up and down. Questions were easy when you already knew the answers. Marcellus nodded to each of the men from the far side of the Mediterranean in turn. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” he told them in excellent classical Arabic. With a thin smile, he added, “One from the younger dispensation, one from the elder.”

  “Yes, your Holiness,” Khalid said in the same language. He found himself smiling back. That he might like the Pope hadn’t occurred to him when he got on the airplane bound for Rome.

  “And the two of you are here to protect me from my overzealous coreligionists—is that right?” Marcellus went on smiling. Khalid didn’t think he could stay amused with the threat of the Aquinists hanging over his head, but Marcellus kept to himself any worries he might have had.