Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  “We’re men,” Khalid finished for her.

  “That’s right.” She nodded.

  “It still matters on our side of the sea, too,” Khalid said. “Not as much and not as often as it does here, but it matters. It shouldn’t, but—”

  Now Annarita Pezzola interrupted him: “On your side of the Mediterranean, at least you see it shouldn’t matter. Not here. Here they say things have always gone one way, so they should keep on going that way till the end of time.”

  “Congratulations,” Dawud said. Khalid and Annarita gave him almost identical odd looks. After rolling his eyes at how dense they were, he deigned to explain: “Even if Corrector Pacelli were still alive, he couldn’t sum up the Aquinists’ program any better in one sentence.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Thank you, but I could do without the honor.”

  “How about doing with some supper?” Dawud said. “I don’t know about Khalid, but dogging fanatics all afternoon’s given me an appetite.”

  “I could eat,” Khalid said.

  “I can always eat.” Dawud patted his belly. He looked heavier in a tight European tunic than he did wearing the robes of the international style. He went on, “But by now I’ve got an appetite.”

  “Do the two of you mind if I order from what you would call the haram side of the kitchen?” Annarita asked.

  Khalid shook his head. Dawud said, “Not even a little bit.” His prohibitions weren’t the same as Khalid’s, though they had points in common. He followed or flouted them as he pleased, the way most people who belonged to the international civilization did, whether they were Muslims or not.

  In the hotel restaurant, they got the waiter who’d tried to tempt them with forbidden food as if it were filthy pictures. The man smirked when Annarita chose slow-cooked pork ribs slathered in a sauce made of tomatoes and hot peppers from the Sunset Lands. Khalid ordered chicken. Dawud asked for spaghetti and meatballs.

  “We can make those meatballs with ground pork, if you want.” The waiter sounded as oily as any pimp ever hatched.

  Dawud took it in stride. “Thanks, but don’t bother,” he said. “I like beef better.”

  They all ordered wine. That revived the waiter’s sneer, but only a little. Some Muslims flicked out a drop before raising their glasses, so they could truthfully say they had not drunk one drop of wine. Khalid didn’t waste the time or the wine. He worried about the hereafter less than the here-and-now.

  “Peace be unto us,” he said, and tasted his white.

  “Unto us, peace,” Dawud and Annarita echoed. They also drank. Annarita added, “The Grand Duchy needs peace.”

  “The whole world does,” Dawud said. “How do we get it, though? Short of killing everybody who doesn’t think the way we do, I mean. Faruq tried that, and it didn’t work so well.”

  “No, you can’t kill everyone who disagrees with you,” she said. “But if the people who disagree with you want to kill you because you disagree with them, what are you supposed to do about that?”

  “‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’” Dawud said. Annarita nodded. To Khalid, the Jew explained, “That’s from the Book of Psalms in the Bible.”

  “Thanks.” Not surprisingly, Khalid knew the holy book of the Jews and Christians less well than his own, and he wasn’t anywhere close to being fully familiar with the Qur’an, either. He went on, “That would be good and pleasant, if only brethren could manage to do it.”

  Dawud wagged a finger at him. “If you’re going to complain about every little thing…”

  * * *

  The guards who manned a perimeter outside the Aquinist Seminary in Rome these days belonged to the Grand Duke’s army, not to the fanatical monastic order. The building itself had also changed since the last time Khalid and Dawud visited it. Most of the windows were shattered; shards of glass sparkled on the sidewalks and streets. Smoke streaked the outer walls. Here and there, rockets had punched holes in the building.

  All the same, Major Badoglio said, “We took too many casualties clearing this place. We had to do it floor by floor, sometimes room by room. We didn’t bring out many prisoners, either. The Aquinists fought to the death.”

  Khalid believed him. The stench of death still wafted out of the seminary, though most of the bodies had been cleared. He said, “I hope you got a big enough intelligence haul to pay you back for the lives you spent.”

  “We’ve made some finds,” the officer from the Ministry of Information … agreed? How much of what they had found was the Ministry not sharing with the Maghrib? If Khalid was any judge of such things, Italy would hold back as much as it could.

  “Didn’t I hear that the Aquinists had a couple of time bombs in and under the seminary?” Dawud asked.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Major Badoglio said. “Our disposal units got to both of them before they could go off.” He smiled a thin smile. “Obviously, or the place wouldn’t still be standing.”

  “Are they sure they found them all?” Khalid asked.

  “I wouldn’t be going in there with you if I didn’t think they had,” the major answered. Khalid had to be content with that—either be content with it or turn around and head the other way as fast as he could.

  Having Badoglio with them helped get the Maghribis through the military checkpoints. Once inside the seminary, Khalid wrinkled his nose. The death smell was stronger indoors. It mingled with the chemical reek of burned paint and a more ordinary sour-smoke odor.

  Soldiers had shot up the image of Saint Thomas Aquinas near the elevators. That of Christ stern in judgment next to it had taken only a couple of probably accidental bullets.

  Major Badoglio and the investigators trudged up the stairs; the electricity in the seminary was out. Hallways far from windows were dark. Badoglio’s flashlight pierced the gloom like a spear of brightness. Daylight reached into some of the hallways through open doors.

  Inside one of those open-doored rooms, a young lieutenant was going through file cabinets. He looked disgusted at what he was finding. “The stinking Aquinists worked as hard at getting rid of their papers as they did at fighting our men,” he complained.

  That Aquinists had fought in the room, Khalid couldn’t doubt. Bullet holes pocked and scarred the walls and ceiling. Heavy black bloodstains in one corner said a man had probably bled to death there.

  The lieutenant went on, “Some of these, they set on fire. Some are soaked. Whether they did that or our people did it trying to douse the fire, I’m not sure. And some of the files have had fire extinguishers sprayed over them. That doesn’t do the paper or what was on it any good, either.”

  “Files and papers in desks are like this all through the seminary,” Giacomo Badoglio said. “It’s one of the main reasons we haven’t come up with more on the fanatics here.”

  “What might another main reason be?” Khalid asked. One that sprang to mind was Aquinists secretly working inside the Ministry of Information. How much of the incriminating evidence that did turn up disappeared before it saw the full light of day?

  If Major Badoglio realized what he asked with the question, the Italian didn’t show it. “Well, if you come up another couple of floors, you’ll see one of the reasons,” Badoglio replied.

  Going up another couple of floors wasn’t easy. The Aquinists had barricaded the stairway. Grand Duke Lorenzo’s forces needed to blast them out of the way with rocket-propelled grenades. Those had been invented to kill tanks. They were also wonderful for things like smashing bunkers.

  Again, smoke and blood stained the stairwell. Some of the grenades had wrecked the stairs along with the office furniture and file cabinets the Aquinists used to block them. Khalid could see that the records in those cabinets wouldn’t be worth excavating. Grand Duke Lorenzo’s sappers had had to lay metal ramps over the shattered stairs. Major Badoglio climbed them as gracefully as a mountain sheep. Khalid managed. Dawud made heavy going of it. Khalid reached out and yanked his colleag
ue up the last cubit or so.

  “I thank you.” Dawud might not be graceful, but he hung on to his aplomb.

  When they went out onto the fifth floor, just about all of it looked like the stairwell. Much of it was burned out. The Aquinists had set up more barricades at the corners in the hallway. Some of the walls between rooms had holes in them. The stink of smoke was stronger here. So was the stink of death. Until you’d seen the aftermath of modern war, you didn’t realize how many chunks could come off a body or how hard it was to gather up all of them.

  “Not much useful information here,” Badoglio said, his voice dry.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Khalid answered. “But what are the top floors like? The ones where the Corrector and the other important Aquinists worked?”

  “The rockets from our helicopters did more damage up there than lower down,” Badoglio said. “We’re still going through them, though. If you want to walk back to the stairs, you’re welcome to see for yourself.”

  “We’ll do that, yes,” Khalid said. Dawud sent him a wounded look, but didn’t complain out loud.

  No sooner had they got back to the stairwell, though, than the bellow of a man on a bullhorn echoed up from below. “Clear the building!” the fellow shouted in Italian. “Everybody out! Right away! They’ve found another bomb down in the cellar!”

  “Well, shit!” Dawud said. Major Badoglio crossed himself. Both responses amounted to about the same thing.

  They went down much faster than they’d gone up. That was partly because they had gravity on their side. It was also because they had fear on their side. Dawud skipped down the metal ramp as nimbly as someone who did such things every day.

  The foyer was crowded, with everybody trying to get out at once. Khalid caught an elbow or two and threw an elbow or two. He let out a long sigh of relief when he was out in the sunshine once more. Maybe the Italian bomb-disposal men could keep this bomb from going off, too. But he didn’t want to find out they couldn’t the hard way.

  Soldiers around the Aquinas Seminary were already trotting away from it. Some of them were frankly running away from it. Khalid trotted along with Major Badoglio and Dawud. He wanted to break into a sprint. Until they did, though, he wouldn’t. His fear of getting squashed like a cockroach under a sandal was somehow less than his fear of seeming a coward in front of men whose good opinion mattered to him.

  He’d gone two or three hundred cubits when the ground lurched under his feet, staggering him. He’d been in earthquakes in Tunis. This reminded him of one of those. But it was at the same time smaller and more concentrated. Behind him, the Aquinist Seminary dropped, almost as neatly as if wreckers had used explosives to bring it down.

  “Dannazione!” Major Badoglio shouted, before returning to calmer Arabic: “The Grand Duchy just lost some good men in there.”

  Khalid had done some dangerous things in his time. Trying to dispose of bombs? As far as he was concerned, that was nothing better than slow suicide. No doubt the world was a better, safer place because some men were brave or harebrained enough to think otherwise. But one of the rare ones who’d lived to retire to teaching the trade wrote a memoir he called I Am a Fugitive from the Law of Averages.

  A wind full of dust and gravel shoved Khalid hard from behind. He staggered again, and almost fell. A chunk of concrete the size of his fist thumped down half a cubit in front of his right foot. Had its flight been only a little different, it would have smashed in his skull and stretched him out dead on the sidewalk. What made it go the way it did instead of the other way? He had no idea why. No one could have any idea why, save possibly God. Was it any wonder that writers sometimes spun stories around such might-have-beens?

  Coughing, his eyes streaming, he lurched around a corner. That got him out of the worst of the windstorm from the fallen building. He saw he stood in front of a streetside coffee shop. The Italian who ran it stared, wide-eyed, at the chaos.

  “Give me a glass of water, Signor, please,” Khalid said. Automatically, the man did. Khalid drank some of it, swished it in his mouth, and spat it out on the sidewalk. The stream that came from his mouth was brown, which surprised him not at all. He poured the rest of the water into his eyes and over his face. If it got his clothes wet, he didn’t care.

  “That’s a good idea,” Dawud said. “Signor, let me have a glass, too.” Major Badoglio nodded. The man handed one to each of them. They both imitated what Khalid had done. After a beat, the Italian man who ran the coffee shop rinsed out his own mouth.

  “You said you didn’t think the Aquinists would have put three booby traps in the seminary.” Khalid spoke to Major Badoglio in accusing tones. Then he coughed again. He couldn’t swish water around in his lungs.

  Badoglio bowed his head. “My master will forgive me, I beg,” he said in the most formal, flowery Arabic Khalid had ever heard from him. “No doubt my master, being among the wisest of all men ever born, has never once found himself mistaken.”

  Dawud chuckled. “He’s got you, Khalid.” Then he coughed, too.

  “Hrmp,” Khalid said. He had trouble meeting Badoglio’s eye. “All right. You made your point. You put your neck on the line along with mine.”

  “And mine,” Dawud added. Fresh crashes came from behind them as more of the Aquinas Seminary collapsed.

  “Oh, who cares about a Jew’s neck?” Khalid said. Dawud laughed. If Khalid hadn’t been sure Dawud would laugh, he wouldn’t have made the crack. Major Badoglio couldn’t have got away with it. Friends could tell jokes that got acquaintances punched in the teeth. They could … as long as they didn’t do it too often.

  * * *

  When Khalid imagined a European interrogation room, his mind conjured up something terrifying and medieval. Darkness. Bars on the door. Lice and fleas. Thumbscrews. Pincers heating in a brazier. Maybe even the horror of an Iron Maiden.

  All of which only proved he’d watched too many bad movies. The interrogation room in which he sat in the Ministry of Information in Rome could have come straight out of the Bureau of Investigations’ headquarters in Tunis. A plain table separated the suspect on one side from his questioners on the other: Khalid, Dawud, Major Badoglio, and a captain named Paolo Salgari. Suspect and questioners all sat on cheap, functional chairs.

  Yes, the suspect was manacled. Yes, his feet were chained to the floor. That might also have been done with a dangerous man in Tunis. Yes, he was tonsured and wore the black robe of an Aquinist monk. Sadly, these days that also might have happened in Tunis.

  Major Badoglio didn’t walk to the far side of the table and start slapping the prisoner around. He just opened a notebook. “State your name for the record,” he said.

  “I am called Father Martino of Padua,” the Aquinist answered. He showed no signs of having been abused before he was brought here.

  Badoglio wrote it down—from left to right, of course. “State your birth name as well,” he said.

  “I was born Andrea Assarotti,” Father Martino said. Badoglio wrote that down, too, along with his date of birth (which he gave in the Christian calendar, not the more widely used Hijra reckoning) and his birthplace: yes, Padua.

  That done, Badoglio said, “All right. Let’s get down to business. You are charged with plotting against the Grand Duchy of Italy and with rebellion against your lawful sovereign. With treason, in other words. We can take you out and shoot you anytime we please.”

  He wouldn’t have been so blunt in Tunis. Even Aquinist monks had certain rights there. They could have a lawyer with them while they faced interrogation, for instance. They weren’t required to answer questions that pointed toward their guilt. This room might look like its equivalent across the Mediterranean, but the medieval world lived on inside it.

  Father Martino’s answer sounded distinctly medieval, too: “I do not recognize your authority to judge me, or the authority of the Grand Duchy. I recognize only the superiority of my monastic superiors, and of God.”

  “You may not recognize the st
ate, but the state recognizes you,” Dawud said. “And the state is suppressing the Aquinist Order, so the people who were your superiors have no authority over anybody.”

  The monk’s eyes blazed. “I don’t have to listen to lies from a stinking Jew.”

  “As a matter of fact, you do,” Dawud answered mildly. “And it’s interesting you know I am one. Right this minute, though, I promise I smell better than you do. I’m not lying, either. I’m also not here because I’m a Jew. I’m here because what you’re up to worries my country along with the Grand Duchy.”

  “How do you know this man is a Jew, Father?” Captain Salgari asked.

  “How? One look at him and you can tell,” Father Martino answered, adding, “I say that only because it’s so plain, not because you have any right to question me.”

  “You say that because you think you can get away with lying,” Khalid said in his clumsy Italian. “He looks not much different to—different from?—a Muslim Maghribi like me. He also looks not much different from Italians.” He nodded toward Salgari, who was dark and had a beaky nose.

  “Your lies come from the Father of Lies,” Martino of Padua said. “I would sooner hearken to our Lord and Savior.”

  “Would you sooner hearken to our Holy Father, the Pope?” Major Badoglio asked.

  Khalid dared hope Martino of Padua would say yes. The Christians had a much more formal religious hierarchy than Muslims used. Clerical officials owed obedience to their superiors, and Marcellus IX was superior to everyone else. But the monk cautiously answered, “What are you talking about?” He wasn’t going to commit to anything sight unseen.

  He didn’t have to. Badoglio unfolded a sheet of stationery with the Papal arms embossed at the top. He passed it across the table to Father Martino. The Aquinist could use his hands to position it where he could read it. The major explained it anyway: “His Holiness commands all members of the Aquinist Order to obey and cooperate with the secular authorities in the Grand Duchy of Italy. The edict, as you will see, bears his signature and his seal.”