Through Darkest Europe Read online

  Khalid was a beat late answering the question. He was looking around the chamber in which the Pope worked. Marcellus’ crowded bookshelves held volumes in Arabic, Latin, Italian, and some other languages that used the Roman alphabet but that Khalid couldn’t read.

  One of the Arabic texts, he saw, was a Qur’an printed in Cairo. Another was a copy of Abdallah ibn-al-Zubayr’s Concerning the Development of Natural Creatures Through Time, which had incensed Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theologians when it appeared almost two centuries earlier. Officially, the Church still condemned it. Officially, the Church was still reluctant to admit the Earth went around the Sun and not the contrary.

  “If we can, your Excellency,” Khalid said, looking away from the bookcases.

  “And what can the two of you do that all my guards cannot?” Yes, Marcellus was amused. Khalid admired him for it.

  “What can we do, your Holiness?” Dawud spoke for the first time. “Maybe nothing.”

  Major Badoglio hissed. That wasn’t the way you talked to a Pope, or to any of the sovereigns who held secular power in Western Europe. You told them what they wanted to hear. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t get the chance to tell them anything else. Muslim advisors, some well-meaning, others perhaps less so, had found that out time and again. In the old days, their rulers had held near-absolute power, too. No more, not in most of the Muslim world.

  Trying to make amends, Khalid said, “You may be sure of our loyalty, your Holiness, even if some of your guards, unbeknownst to you, prove … overzealous was your word, yes?”

  “Yes,” the Pope said placidly. He steepled his fingertips. The Fisherman’s ring shone in the lamplight. His gaze swung back to Dawud. “Why may I be sure of a Jew’s loyalty?”

  “You never persecuted my people, your Holiness, even if the Church did,” Dawud replied. “Who knows what an Aquinist would do in your place, or in Cosimo’s? Who wants to find out?”

  By the way Giacomo Badoglio fidgeted, he was almost ready to piss himself. How long had it been since such straight talk was heard in this tradition-choked office? How many times might it have done some good? However ruffled the major might be, the Pope kept smiling. “Better the devil you know, eh?”

  “If I thought you were a devil, your Holiness, I wouldn’t be here,” Dawud answered. “I’m here because I’m pretty sure you’re not.”

  “A small compliment from a stranger is worth more than a grand one from a courtier,” Pope Marcellus remarked.

  “You would have a hard time finding a smaller compliment than that,” Major Badoglio said, acid in his voice.

  “I think not,” Marcellus said. “Plenty of Jews would call me a devil, or even the Devil, and they would have their reasons, too. Finding one who does not—is worth something, anyhow.”

  “May I ask you a question, your Holiness?” Dawud said.

  “Ask. I don’t promise to answer,” the Pope replied.

  Dawud pointed to ibn-al-Zubayr’s volume. “Into what sort of creature is the Church developing now? Into what sort of creature do you want it to develop?”

  “The world has changed,” Marcellus said—sadly? Khalid thought so, but he wasn’t sure. The Pope went on, “The Church needs to evolve to keep any kind of place in the world we have now. If the Church does not evolve, we will be left behind and forgotten. This is my view, you understand. You would find other believers who feel differently. To them, any kind of change is … we use the word anathema. Do you understand this?”

  “Muslims would say haram, I think.” Dawud managed a smile of his own, a crooked one. “And here we both are, talking about what they would say.”

  “So we are,” Pope Marcellus agreed, irony freighting his voice. He, at least, headed a community that formed a majority over a broad swath of land. Jews were a minority everywhere, and probably always would be. But, as Dawud noted, both Jews and Christians had to recognize Islam’s cultural dominance. Marcellus continued, “Anathema is stronger than haram. It is condemned, not just forbidden. Still, the ideas are close enough.”

  Khalid found a question of his own: “What would happen if the Aquinists took control of the Church?”

  Marcellus’ long face got longer yet. “My view is that they would use the scientific and engineering advances of the fifteenth century to drag the world back to the fifth.” Even he used the Hijra calendar unless he was calculating the dates of the festivals of the Church.

  “Yes, I think so, too,” Dawud ibn Musa said. “That’s why I will keep you and the Grand Duke alive if I can, your Holiness—and if you let me.”

  “How can I say no?” the Pope asked dryly.

  “Oh, I think it would be easy enough, your Holiness,” Dawud answered. “After all, what else has the Church been saying for the past seven hundred years?”

  * * *

  Surveying himself in the hotel room’s full-length mirror, Khalid shook his head. “This has to be the least practical, least comfortable outfit in the history of the world,” he said. “It’s squeezing me everywhere.”

  Dawud ibn Musa contrived to look just as sloppy in Christian garb as he did in the clothes he usually wore. Half to Khalid’s surprise, Dawud did notice he’d buttoned his tunic wrong and fixed it. His trousers remained rumpled and baggy in the seat. His shoes had scuff marks on the toes. They were brand new, so Khalid didn’t know how they’d got them, but they had. Dawud was not without talent … of a sort.

  And yet, he might attract less attention on the streets of Rome than Khalid did in his scrupulously correct outfit. No one wearing a disguise would wear it so badly as Dawud did. So an Aquinist was likely to reason, anyhow. Aquinists were great ones for reasoning. They claimed they followed in their namesake’s footsteps. What Aquinas himself would have had to say about that …

  “None of this is liable to matter at all if somebody from the Ministry of Information has already fingered us,” Dawud said, and Khalid started worrying about things more immediately relevant than Saint Thomas Aquinas’ opinions.

  If there were any things more immediately relevant than Saint Thomas Aquinas’ opinions. In the Christian world, the old turned new again. Sometimes it never even got old to begin with.

  “We wouldn’t just have to worry about Aquinists in our regular outfits,” Khalid said. “Any tough guy who didn’t like the way we look could decide he felt like messing with us.”

  “Well, I’m a pretty tough guy, or I like to think I am, and I sure don’t like the way we look,” Dawud said.

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Khalid said. Dawud had the grace to look sheepish. Sometimes Khalid could embarrass him by calling him for being difficult. Sometimes not, too.

  They walked down the hall to the elevator. They might have been anywhere in the world as they did. The hotel was one of dozens, maybe hundreds, owned by an anonymous society based in Arkansistan, one of the larger republics in the Sunset Lands. About the only difference between this hotel and one in, say, Qom was that the kitchen here served pork, though it also had a qadi-inspected halal section to prepare food for observant Muslims.

  A sweeper in the lobby snickered as Dawud sauntered by. Dawud might attract attention, but not because he looked like a Maghribi slumming in Christian clothes—only because he always looked like a clothes donkey instead of a clothes horse. He smiled benignly at the sweeper, which left the fellow scratching his head.

  As soon as he and Khalid got outside, he lit up a cigar about the size of a banana. That didn’t make him conspicuous, either. Just the opposite, in fact. Far more people in Christian countries puffed cigars and pipes than was true south of the Mediterranean.

  Khalid wondered why that should be so. Did Christians mistrust the research of Muslim and Jewish doctors on what tobacco did to you? Or were they so confident of heaven that they smoked regardless, reckoning all the nasty things that might happen to their bodies in this world of little account?

  Of course, Dawud puffed away, too. He couldn’t very well not know wh
at a lifetime of smoking did. And Jewish notions of heaven were far murkier than those of either Islam or Christianity. He smoked anyway. He liked the taste. He liked the aroma. And he liked the little nicotine buzz. Khalid gave a mental shrug. His colleague was an adult. If he wanted to exercise free will, he could—no matter how stupid it seemed to Khalid.

  Rome brawled around them. Locals paid less attention to them now than they would have to a couple of men in robes and keffiyehs. Some travelers from Muslim countries and some modernist Italians did wear the international style. People hooted at them from across the street and from upstairs windows. No one did anything worse than jeer … not where Khalid saw, at any rate.

  Every street corner was a miniature souq. Men and women with carts and baskets sold fruit, flowers, religious medals, counterfeit antiquities, equally counterfeit watches, pills to enhance masculinity, bootleg videotapes, and anything else they could get their hands on. Whatever they had, they hawked it stridently and insistently. Getting past them meant running the gauntlet again and again.

  They were deaf to No, thank you. They were just as impervious to a simple No. Before long, Dawud was doing as the Romans did. He’d yell “Vaffanculo!” and accompany it with a graphic pumping gesture of his forearm. That got the message across. The street sellers didn’t get angry. They just laughed and swore at him and Khalid in turn.

  “How friendly,” Khalid remarked after someone peddling sausages called him something he didn’t fully understand. Whatever it meant, it sounded electrifying.

  “You know what’s funny? It is friendly, or a lot of it is. Read stories about what the markets in Tunis and Cairo and Damascus were like a couple of hundred years ago. They were like this, that’s what,” Dawud said. “Too many laws, too many regulations, take the starch out of life.”

  “Well, it could be.” Khalid reflected that in those days, if a street vendor had called him something like that, honor would have compelled him to try to murder the man. Or maybe not. Maybe it would all have been a game. If you couldn’t watch polo and endless backgammon tournaments on television, you had to make your own fun.

  An obvious traveler with a map came up to them and spoke in halting, Persian-flavored Italian: “Excuse me. Can you tell me where is the Mausoleum of Augustus, please?”

  Khalid was pleased to be taken for an Italian. But he didn’t know where the mausoleum was, and he didn’t know Italian well enough to fool even a tourist. None of which turned out to matter. Dawud launched into an elaborate explanation, again complete with gestures. He turned the little Persian man around and gave him a shove in the right direction, as if he were launching a ship.

  “My, my. I’m impressed,” Khalid said. “How do you know where Augustus’ mausoleum is?”

  “Oh, I don’t. Haven’t the slightest idea,” Dawud said blithely. “But I didn’t fall out of character. And if I’m wrong, someone else will set the poor fool straight sooner or later. Or he’ll figure out how to read the map for himself.”

  “You’re hopeless!” Khalid exclaimed. “No. You’re shameless!”

  “Well, I love you, too,” Dawud replied. “But I have fun—not like that poor gal.”

  He pointed to a young woman whose red-brown complexion argued that she came from the Sunset Lands. She was crouched at the edge of the sidewalk, vomiting into the gutter behind a parked car. The car had a big, glittery bumper button for Dawud al-Buwayhidi, a popular singer from Iraq.

  “I hope she’s not sick,” Khalid said.

  “Chances are she’s just toasted.” Dawud ibn Musa sounded matter-of-fact, not reproving. “Arkansistanis and Oregonis and people like that have trouble holding their liquor—everybody knows it. They come to a place like this, where people have taken drinking for granted for—what?—three thousand years now, and they go a little crazy.”

  Despite yelps from traditionalists, drinking alcohol had been legal for everyone over sixteen in almost all Muslim countries except the Sharifate of Mecca and Medina for anywhere from fifty to two hundred years. But, even though it wasn’t against the law, many people remained uneasy about it. In Christian Western Europe, there was no uneasiness. If you felt like drinking, you drank, and, if you felt like getting drunk, you did that, too.

  Some Muslim tourists came to this part of the world for tavern crawls, not for antiquities or scenic views unmatchable closer to home. Some touring firms catered to that crowd. As Khalid knew better than most, if someone had a vice, someone else would try to make money off it.

  Not at all by accident, before too long he and Dawud found themselves walking past the front gate to the Aquinas Seminary. The building—an enormous concrete pile that might have gone up anywhere in the world over the past fifty years—was at least as heavily fortified as the Ministry of Information. Concrete vehicle barriers and razor wire kept away unwelcome visitors. Anyone who did want to go inside had to clear at least two checkpoints manned by armed, alert-looking guards.

  Grand Duke Cosimo’s gonfalon did not fly over the seminary. Neither did the Pope’s banner, gold and white and adorned with the crossed keys of Saint Peter. The Aquinists had their own flag: a red cross on a black background, with the words DEUS VULT!—God wills it!—below, also in red.

  That had been the Crusaders’ motto in days gone by. The Aquinists preached that Christianity needed a new crusade, or a wave of them. They wanted to turn back the clock, to bring the struggle between their faith and Islam to something like even terms again. Most Muslims were willing to let them believe as they pleased, as long as they left other people alone. But that didn’t satisfy the Aquinists. They wanted the whole world to believe as they did, and they were convinced God willed it should be so.

  How anyone could presume to know what God willed was beyond Khalid. Saying as much would not have endeared him to the Aquinists. Come to that, he couldn’t think of anything he might say that would have endeared him to them.

  “I wonder what’s going on behind those windows,” he remarked. He knew he sounded uneasy. Even the windows made the seminary look like a fortress. They were small and narrow, more like slits for archers than anything else. It was as if the architect hadn’t wanted to let light from the outside world into the Aquinists’ stronghold. Was that choice deliberate or subconscious? Only a mind-healer would even be able to make a good guess.

  “Just what you think,” Dawud answered. “They’re training people not to care whether they live or die, as long as they do what God—and their superiors—tell them to do. And how many of these places are there in Western Europe?”

  “Nineteen big ones like this. I don’t know how many little hole-and-corner places there are, and I don’t think anybody else does, either,” Khalid said. “Plus the hole-and-corner places in our countries.”

  Being a Christian was easy enough in Muslim lands. Like Jews, Christians had to pay a yearly tax for the privilege of practicing their religion in peace. These days, the tax was about what a pita full of falafel cost. Human-rights advocates urged getting rid of it altogether, but it didn’t inconvenience anybody.

  There had always been Christians in the Muslim lands that stretched from the Maghrib to Iraq, even to Persia and India. Christianity got there first, after all. The longstanding followers of Jesus were as loyal to their states as any Muslim or Jew. But the immigrants …

  People went where the jobs were. If that rule wasn’t as old as the world, it came close. Christians from Western Europe worked in manufactories in much of the Muslim world. And they dug ditches and hauled trash and repaired roads and did all the other jobs richer, better-educated Muslims weren’t interested in doing. They formed their own little isolated communities inside the states where they lived: communities centered on their homelands and religion.

  Tunis, for instance, had a Little France and a Little England. Each one sponsored a polo club. Hooligans bashed heads whenever the two teams clashed. That was nothing the watch couldn’t handle. Muslim polo enthusiasts sometimes went over the line, too.
/>   But the Europeans also brought their own religion with them. Aquinism flourished among them. Looking back, Khalid could see how that had happened. European workers were in but not of the states where they lived. Most of them were poor. They looked around and saw that Muslims and Jews and even native Christians had more than they did. How could they not resent it? And if Aquinism fed on anything, it fed on resentment.

  The French worker who’d lived in Tunis for twenty years before blowing himself up in the showroom of a Garuda dealership that wouldn’t sell him a car because his credit was bad … The Swedes who’d plotted to steal an airplane and fly it into the Ka‘bah during pilgrimage season … They might have pulled it off if one of them hadn’t got drunk and blabbed. There were too many others like them.

  “What are we going to do?” Khalid asked.

  “Keeping Marcellus alive would make a good start. Cosimo, too,” Dawud answered. “And staying alive ourselves might be nice, if we can manage it.”

  “It would, wouldn’t it?” Khalid agreed—wistfully?

  A woman whose tunic was cut low in front and whose skirt was tight through the haunches sidled up to the two of them and said, “How about it? Are you interested?”

  “No thanks, sweetheart. Maybe some other time.” Dawud tried to let her down easy.

  “Fairies!” she snarled, and swiveled away.

  “So much for that.” Khalid had a hard time not laughing. “You should have just told her ‘Vaffanculo!’, too.”

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. I always like to start at the polite end and go downhill from there, if you know what I mean,” Dawud said.

  “She was in the gutter from the start,” Khalid said, remembering the other young woman losing her breakfast behind the car with the bumper button.

  “Afraid so. Turning tricks will do that, I suppose. If you ever had any illusions that human beings are the way God meant them to be, I can’t think of anything likely to cure you faster,” Dawud said.