Through Darkest Europe Page 9

  Several German princes came. The Emperor who claimed to rule them all did not. His cash-strapped almost-government couldn’t afford to send him. France sent its Dauphin, England the Prince of Wales, and Scotland the Thane of Cawdor—a title whose importance Khalid couldn’t gauge. Several Irish kinglets flew in. Two of them had hair as coppery as the Thane’s.

  The hotel where Khalid and Dawud were staying filled with foreign dignitaries and their protectors. An English guard who spoke only his own language tried to keep the two men from the Maghrib from getting off the elevator at their floor. Khalid finally showed the pale-eyed human hound his passport. That got enough of the message across to the Englishman to make him grudgingly step aside.

  “Did you see his face?” Dawud asked once they were inside their room.

  “I kept trying not to look at him,” Khalid said. “He must have been all over spots when his whiskers started coming in.”

  “Those weren’t scars from pimples.” Dawud sounded uncommonly grim. “Those were smallpox scars.”

  “Allahu akbar! In this day and age?” Khalid exclaimed.

  “Afraid so,” Dawud ibn Musa said. “You’ll still see them every once in a while on Europeans and Africans. The Africans are too poor to get vaccinated. Some of the Europeans are, too, but some of them talk about not wanting to disturb God’s will.”

  “Those are the ignorant fools the Aquinists use,” Khalid said. “If it weren’t God’s will that we didn’t have to catch smallpox, He never would have let that Persian healer notice how men who worked with cattle hardly ever got sick from it.”

  “You can see that. I can, too,” Dawud said. “Some of those people, though…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but sometimes I wonder if they’ll ever really be civilized.”

  Christians here looked down their noses at Jews. Well, here was at least one Jew looking down his nose at them, Khalid sympathized with Dawud. If he patronized him a little, too, well, he was a full member of the richest, most progressive society in the world. Dawud was also a member, of course, but not one in quite such good standing. He had a few more dues to pay.

  “They say you shouldn’t judge,” Dawud went on. “They say you shouldn’t make comparisons between societies. Before they start saying stuff like that, they should take a look at that bodyguard’s mug. At least he lived through it. I wonder how many in his town or wherever he caught it weren’t so lucky.”

  Khalid began to worry that no one would remember to give him and Dawud places in the funeral procession, leaving them to watch it on television like countless others around the world. To try to make sure that didn’t happen, the two men from the Maghrib called on Major Badoglio.

  The major had dark, weary shadows under his pale eyes. He and his service would have to adapt to a new overlord, too. Pestering him about their places, Khalid felt rather like a small boy tugging at a grown-up’s robe. Surely Badoglio had more important things to worry about.

  But, as a matter of fact, he had already made arrangements for the men from the Maghrib. “If it pleases you, my masters, you will ride in the car immediately outboard of the one carrying your land’s underwazir for foreign affairs,” he said.

  “By outboard, you mean between his car and the crowd?” Khalid asked.

  “Yes, that’s right.” Major Badoglio nodded. “You will be part of his security detail.”

  “We’ll be in the way if anyone tries to blow him up, is what you’re telling us,” Dawud ibn Musa said.

  “That’s about it,” the Italian agreed. “I shall have a similar position myself, in a car outboard of his Supreme Highness and the other heads of state and princes marching behind the late Grand Duke’s casket.”

  “Marching?” Khalid said. “Through Rome? Now?”

  “So Grand Duke Lorenzo would have it,” Badoglio answered stolidly. “They will be as well protected as we can arrange. The Corrector and the Pope will be among them, which … may prevent incidents.”

  “Or, of course, it may not, in which case everyone’s in the soup,” Dawud put in.

  “It will be as God wills,” Major Badoglio said, almost as if he were an Aquinist himself.

  Before Dawud could come out with any more pungent sarcasm, Khalid said, “Major, if we’re going to be in his Excellency’s security detail, would you issue us a couple of pistols? We didn’t try to bring weapons on the flight from Tunis. That would have been more trouble than it was worth.”

  “I am your servant,” Giacomo Badoglio replied. “Come down to the armory and choose your own.”

  By what its armory held, the Grand Duchy of Italy’s Ministry of Information was ready to fight a small, or maybe not such a small, war. Khalid picked a ten-shot Egyptian automatic, a model also widely used in the Maghrib. Dawud chose a large-caliber revolver.

  “Less to go wrong with mine,” he said. “And if I hit somebody with a slug from this, I know he’ll fall over.”

  “However you please,” Khalid said. “I’d sooner have the extra rounds, and I can reload faster.”

  Major Badoglio guided them through the paperwork that came with the pistols. Khalid was glad for his help. He read and wrote Italian, but not well—a script that ran from left to right felt unnatural to him. Dawud let himself seem ignorant, too. He held his cards close to his chest, and didn’t show the major how fluent he was.

  They also got ammunition and holsters, which took more paperwork. The armory sergeant said, “You think these forms are bad? Wait till you see what you’ve got to fill out if you really do plug somebody.”

  I’ll say God made me do it, Khalid thought irreverently. But that wouldn’t do. The Italians’ Roman ancestors had been dedicated bureaucrats long before there were Muslims, much less before Islam discovered the need for clerks. And the discovery of that need came to the Muslims after they swallowed big chunks of the Roman Empire (even if it was ruled from Constantinople by then).

  “Well,” Badoglio said after the last i was dotted and the last t crossed (Khalid hoped they were all dotted and crossed, anyhow—with that funny alphabet, he might easily have missed a few). “Now all we have to do is get through the procession in one piece.”

  “If you’re going to worry about every little thing…” Dawud said. He and Khalid and the Italian major all laughed. It was that or bang their heads against the wall, and laughing hurt—a little—less.

  * * *

  “Here we are again,” Khalid said as he and Dawud took their places in the Grand Duke’s funeral procession at the base of the Palatine Hill.

  “Let’s hope they do the security a little better than they did at Cosimo’s banquet,” Dawud answered. A moment later, he added, “I wish I could smoke.”

  “Too many cameras around. This is a dignified occasion,” Khalid said. There were almost as many still photographers and men with video gear as there were troops with assault rifles, and that was saying a good deal.

  “It looks more like a costume drama,” Dawud said.

  Khalid couldn’t even tell him he was wrong. The European kings and princes and noblemen wore their court dress, which made him want to giggle. Velvet and cloth-of-gold trimmed with furs? Tights under it all? Heavy, gaudy headgear? How could anyone in a getup like that not look ridiculous? Somehow, the Prince of Wales managed. Few of the other grandees, though, could come close to his natural dignity.

  Christian clerics added their own splashes of color to the scene. Khalid was more used to their regalia. Bishops served the European immigrant communities in the Maghrib and other labor-hungry Muslim lands. So did priests and monks, but their robes were as somber as those of imams and qadis.

  Grand Duke Cosimo’s coffin lay on a black wagon drawn by six black horses with tall black plumes sticking up from their headstalls. The gonfalon of Italy, scarlet with a large polychrome emblem in the center, draped the casket. In a normal Christian burial, it would have been open, to allow a last glimpse of the departed. Khalid thought that uncommonly barbarous. Here, though, the coffin r
emained closed. The undertakers hadn’t been able to make Cosimo at all presentable.

  Pope Marcellus wouldn’t actually march. He sat in a small halftrack with a bubble of bulletproof glass. Corrector Pacelli, in his far more somber robes, walked among soldiers who looked ready to gun him down at any excuse or none. He had to understand he was a hostage for the Aquinists’ good behavior. Even so, he seemed as self-possessed as he had in his office at their fortress-seminary.

  “Here we are.” Dawud pointed to an armored limousine flying the Maghrib’s star-and-crescent-moon banner from a radio aerial. Another similar car flew a bigger Maghribi banner. That would be the one carrying the underwazir for foreign affairs.

  Khalid and Dawud showed their identification at one of the dark-tinted windows. The men inside must have been satisfied, because a door opened. The two investigators got inside. The limousine, a massive Pontiak from one of the countries in the Sunset Lands, boasted air-conditioning. That was a relief.

  One of the security men already inside was named Hisham. The other called himself Muhammad. They both had assault rifles on their laps. “You carrying?” By the way Muhammad asked it, he was ready to throw the investigators out again if they said no.

  “Pistols,” Khalid answered. Muhammad looked scornful, but grudged a shrug.

  A man who could only be Grand Duke Lorenzo gestured imperiously. He looked like a younger version of his dead father. He wore black velvet blazoned with the Italian emblem. His younger brother, Duke Giuseppe, was not in the parade. That, Khalid had heard, was at Lorenzo’s orders. If anything did go wrong here, Italy would not stay rudderless long.

  Responding to the Grand Duke’s gesture, a band dressed even more bizarrely than the European royals struck up mournful music. They had to be playing at full blast, because their sorrowing tune penetrated the Pontiak’s thick windows and armored sides in spite of the thutter of helicopters overhead.

  Following the musicians, the wagon bearing Cosimo’s coffin moved forward at a slow walk. Grand Duke Lorenzo came next, flanked by bodyguards whose main duty was to shield him from the crowd. Khalid had seen Italian riflemen in modern camouflage uniforms on every other rooftop. He had to hope their commanders had done a good job of vetting them.

  After the Grand Duke marched the European grandees. Centuries ago, Saladin would have confronted lords dressed this way. The Muslim world had moved on since then. Here, time might as well have stood still … except for the weapons the guardsmen who stayed between them and the crowd carried.

  Pope Marcellus’ protective vehicle came next. The lesser Christian prelates followed on foot. The Papal Guards who warded them wore uniforms different from those of their Italian counterparts, but no less functional. There was a gap between the cardinals and bishops on the one hand and Protector Pacelli and his … jailers on the other.

  At last, the limousines bearing the representatives from the Muslim republics and constitutional monarchies and those of the Far East began to move as the procession stretched out to its full length. “So far, so good,” Hisham said.

  “The Ides of March have come, but they have not yet gone,” Dawud said. The security man looked at him as if he had several screws loose. He condescended to explain: “It’s from Roman times.”

  “Oh.” Now Hisham just seemed disgusted. “I don’t care about anything that happened before the Prophet—peace be unto him—lived.”

  Some Muslims remained as narrow-minded as any Christian. That was a shame, but what could you do? Hisham had to make a good security man, or he wouldn’t be riding in this limousine. As long as he took care of his job, he was entitled to believe whatever he pleased.

  Police and soldiers had set up a three-strand barbed-wire perimeter to keep mourners back from the procession. They stood in front of it, some with rifles, others with nightsticks, to make sure it was respected. All of the mourners—men, women, and children—wore black from head to foot. Some of them waved Italian gonfalons as the bier rolled by: the only splashes of color in the gloomy scene.

  Lorenzo was going to bury Cosimo in the Pantheon. Like so much of Rome, the building had gone up more than half a millennium before Muhammad lived. It was ancient when that long-dead Pope dedicated the column in the Forum that had so awed Khalid. He supposed that meant the Pantheon should awe him all the more, but it didn’t. He didn’t sneer at the Romans the way Hisham did, but Agrippa and Hadrian couldn’t measure up to the Prophet for him.

  The Pantheon stood northwest of the Palatine Hill. It had been a Christian church after it was a pagan temple, and a fortress after it was a church. Like so much of Western Europe, Italy had a crowded, bloody history. And it’s still got one like that, Khalid thought uncomfortably.

  Some of the people in the crowd were monks, whether Aquinists or of a different order Khalid couldn’t tell. Were they mourning Cosimo or secretly rejoicing? Render unto Caesar was a Christian rule. Rend Caesar with a bomb wasn’t, but they’d done it anyhow.

  An obelisk stood in the square in front of the Pantheon. It was small, as obelisks went: not so tall as the domed and columned building behind it. Even after three thousand years and more, the hieroglyphs the ancient Egyptians had carved were still plain to see. Its base bore the papal arms in high relief, so that was recent, at least by Egyptian and even Roman standards. So was the verdigrised cross atop the obelisk.

  The wagon stopped before the Pantheon’s colonnaded entranceway. The great bronze doors were open and waiting. Italian soldiers in ceremonial uniforms—gaudy, to Khalid’s eye—came out. One of them whisked the gonfalon off Cosimo’s casket. With immense dignity, he folded it and stowed it between his left arm and his body. Beneath it, the coffin was covered in black velvet.

  After a final salute, the remaining soldiers transferred the coffin from the wagon to their own shoulders. They began to carry it into the Pantheon. Khalid kept scanning the crowd behind the strands of barbed wire. A woman slid a handkerchief under her black veiling to dab at her eyes.

  * * *

  Someone not far from her started shooting right about then. He couldn’t see who it was, only the muzzle flashes from an automatic weapon. “There!” he shouted, pointing.

  People in the procession began falling, or perhaps going down of their own accord to keep from getting shot. If the dignitaries had even a dram’s worth of sense, they would be wearing bulletproof vests under their finery. Of course, that wouldn’t mean a thing if you got hit in the head.

  Hisham and Muhammad swore horribly. So did Khalid. A split second later, bullets slammed into the limousine. One of the thick windows starred, but it didn’t let the round through.

  Both security men thrust their assault rifles out through firing ports and blazed away. A lot of the people they hit would be innocent bystanders, but they didn’t let that worry them. Neither did any of the other men guarding the funeral procession, regardless of whether they served the new Grand Duke or his distinguished visitors.

  Screaming mourners tried to flee. Some did. More were either shot or trampled one another. Here and there among the bodies, men lay down and returned fire. How many with weapons had infiltrated the crowd? Too many was the only answer that occurred to Khalid.

  Some of them had grenades. They managed to set one limousine on fire—he couldn’t make out whose. The helicopters swooped down to rake the crowd with machine guns and rockets. Khalid hoped all that ordnance went into the crowd, anyhow. If it tore up the procession, it was liable to do more harm than the Aquinists or whoever these attackers were.

  “Well, I hope Grand Duke Lorenzo’s happy,” Dawud said.

  “Happy?” Khalid wasn’t sure he’d heard right. The assault rifles had stunned his ears even more than the bomb that murdered Lorenzo’s father.

  But Dawud nodded. “Happy,” he repeated, louder this time. “He’s got TV cameras showing the whole world what a wonderful realm he’s ruling. Wouldn’t you want to come see Italy after this?”

  Hisham laughed harshly as he slapped
a fresh magazine onto his rifle. “I didn’t want to come to Italy before this,” he said. “But they give you an order and you’ve got to go. Damned stupid cross-carriers!” He fired a short burst, at what Khalid wasn’t sure.

  Whoever the foes were, they kept shooting, too. More rounds hit the limousine. Again, none got into the passenger compartment. The firm that had armored the vehicle knew its business, all right.

  Khalid peered over at the limousine carrying the Maghrib’s underwazir for foreign affairs. It had a starred window, too, but not a holed one. Only a few bullets scarred its sheet metal. This car had done a tolerable job of shielding it.

  He looked toward the Pantheon. Bullets and rocket fragments had scarred and chipped the marble from which it was made. But it had taken those kinds of wounds before. No rocket strike smashed the dome that must have made it one of the marvels of the ancient world. The Grand Dukes and other great lords who lay inside it still rested undisturbed.

  “I think it’s over,” Muhammad said after a while. “Let’s see what we can do for the poor bastards who went down.”

  He tried the door on his side, which faced what had been the sea of mourners. It wouldn’t open. A bullet must have smashed the latch. He cursed. “Here,” Dawud said, and opened the door on the side that faced the underwazir’s car. Even though the shooting had died down, he made sure he had that heavy Italian revolver in his hand before he got out.

  Khalid kept his automatic ready, too. Muhammad and Hisham were both as alert as if they’d gone into combat every day since their beards sprouted. Khalid did his best to imitate them. He crouched low to make himself a smaller target as he moved away from the shelter of the armored limousines.

  “Oh, what a bloody mess,” Dawud said when he got a good look at things. And that was about the size of it. The stench of gore filled the air, so thick it made Khalid’s stomach want to turn over. With it came the sharper reek of smokeless powder and a vile latrine stink. People fouled themselves when they were very frightened—and when their bowels let go in death.