Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  Dawud said, “If you can’t count on your police or your soldiers against the Aquinists, will you come out on top in the end?”

  “No, of course not.” Badoglio sent him a sour look. “We’re all giving up. I expect to start shouting ‘God wills it!’ any second now. And we’ve turned the fanatics loose so we can chuck your lot into jail to take their place.”

  If Lorenzo III wanted to do that, he could. It would horrify the Maghrib and complicate life over a much broader swath of the world. If a major European state aligned itself with the Aquinists, diplomacy and police work might not be enough to keep the lid on. It might take war.

  For now, though, Major Badoglio was joking. Dawud’s dry chuckle acknowledged that. “Well, you got me there,” the Jew said. “Let’s get on with things, then.” And they did.

  * * *

  Grand Duke Lorenzo was furious. He didn’t even try to hide it. “They found this, this filth in Milan and Turin! Even in those places!” He’d said the northern cities backed him. He slammed his fist down on the pile of crumpled broadsheets and posters on his desk. Maybe he’d been wrong.

  Khalid nodded in sympathy. “Yes, your Supreme Highness. I’ve already seen some like those.”

  Medieval knights in chainmail or plate galloped on armored horses across the badly printed pages. They all carried a black shield with a red cross blazoned on it. On some of the posters, they were spearing a man who looked like a fat Egyptian banker. On others, they aimed their lance at a nasty caricature of Lorenzo. Still others had the knight making shashlik of both the banker and the Grand Duke.

  CRUSADE! the posters shouted. GOD WILLS IT! Then they exhorted the people who read them to rid first Italy and then the world of God’s enemies. Kill Muslims and heretics! one of them screamed. Help bring the Kingdom of God on earth!

  “These aren’t just in Italian, either,” Grand Duke Lorenzo snarled. “We’ve got them in German, in French, in Catalan, even in English! If I leave even one Aquinist alive, nobody will make me believe I’m doing God’s will.”

  “They aren’t stopping at much, are they?” Khalid said. He’d seen a poster in a language that seemed utterly incomprehensible to him. Someone from the Ministry of Information told him it was Danish. All he knew about Denmark was that it was one of those places that grew blonds. Fanatics, too, evidently.

  “They aren’t stopping at anything, may their bones fry in hell for the next five billion years.” Lorenzo looked and sounded ready to pick up an assault rifle himself and go gunning for black-robed monks. “They want people to come here from every corner of the world and kill Italians.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s just what they want—and you can turn it against them.” Khalid had hashed this over with Annarita Pezzola the night before. “If your subjects see that the Aquinists are bringing in foreigners who want to kill them and their kin, they won’t like it.”

  “True!” Lorenzo’s eyes glowed. He came around the desk and folded Khalid into a bearhug. For good measure, he hugged Dawud, too. Not quite idly, Khalid wondered if he’d ever embraced a Jew before. Lorenzo went on, “We’ll make them see that, yes! You have a good notion of how things work here—better than I would have expected from a foreigner.”

  He didn’t say from a Muslim. He didn’t say from a man who doesn’t think anything like most Italians. He didn’t say any of those things, no. Khalid could hear them whether he said them or not.

  “Thank you very much, your Supreme Highness,” the investigator said. “I don’t get all the credit, though. Signorina Pezzola helped a lot when it came to working out how to make the Aquinists sorry for this kind of propaganda.” If he could do Annarita a good turn, he would.

  “Did she?” The Grand Duke shrugged. Like a good many Italians Khalid had met, he owned expressive shoulders. He eyed Khalid. “Do you happen to know whether my father was sleeping with her?”

  “She’s told me he wasn’t, sir,” Khalid said in surprise: nothing but the truth there.

  “Which may be true and may not. I don’t suppose it matters much one way or the other,” Lorenzo said. Khalid was about to agree with that when the Grand Duke went on, “She’s too old for me. She might not have looked that way to Dad, though. He was even older than you are.”

  “A man in his forties doesn’t think of himself as old … sir,” Khalid said tonelessly. He didn’t think of himself as old till some punk kid rubbed his nose in his years, anyhow. When the punk kid happened to be the hereditary overlord of an important country, you couldn’t even call him out for it. Or you’d get yourself talked about if you did.

  “No, eh?” Lorenzo chuckled, as if to say he knew something Khalid didn’t. But, hereditary overlord or not, he had some manners concealed about his person. He didn’t make any more gibes about Khalid’s age.

  He didn’t say anything about Dawud’s, either. Dawud was three or four years older than Khalid. Even in the egalitarian Maghrib, a Jew had to work harder than a Muslim, and didn’t get the payoff a Muslim would. Had the Grand Duke sniped at him, Dawud would have been more likely to laugh than to show he was irked. He never seemed to care about his age. So his belly bulged? So he had a double chin? What were they but signs he’d enjoyed himself so far? The gray streaks in his hair and beard? He’d come by them honestly.

  Now he asked, “How well are your borders sealed, your Supreme Highness? If these, ah, Crusaders”—the face he made showed what he thought of them—“start swarming into Italy, can you keep them out?”

  “They won’t come in at the usual crossing points. Well, only the really stupid ones will.” Lorenzo III might be young, but he could see the obvious.

  “Yes, sir. That’s what I meant,” Dawud said.

  “I can hope for some help from the King of France. The Aquinists hate him almost as much as they hate me, so he won’t give them free passage through his realm,” Lorenzo said.

  “He might not, but pro-Aquinists in his service may,” Khalid said. “There will be some, the same as there are here.”

  “Bastards,” the Grand Duke muttered. “Well, you’re not wrong, even if I wish you were. But we still need to worry about Germany more. Every little prince and duke and archbishop up there is lord of his own domain, with a tinpot army and his own coins and postage stamps and customs inspectors. It used to be almost that bad here, till my family pulled this place together. The Emperors haven’t been able to do it in Germany. So some of those people will like the Aquinists and help them along. Others won’t.”

  “Some fanatics will get through, then. Some more will, I should say—some already have.” Khalid gestured toward the sheets on the Grand Duke’s desk.

  “I’m afraid so.” Lorenzo nodded. “I can’t roll barbed wire all along the frontier—I haven’t got enough of it. I can’t send all my men to dig foxholes along the border, either.”

  They’d used that much barbed wire and dug that many foxholes in the last war between Persia and Baghdad. Men who’d flown in space said they could look down from on high and see how the old entrenchments still scarred the desert. They called that kind of combat a warning to mankind. To Khalid, it seemed more a proof that mankind didn’t heed warnings.

  Proving he didn’t heed warnings himself, he said, “You know, sir, it’s a shame you accepted Signorina Pezzola’s resignation. She has a good view of things.” He could have been more eloquent in Arabic, but even in Italian he got his meaning across.

  Not that it did him any good. Lorenzo shook his head. “I don’t want a woman trying to tell me what I should do. A man, you can see what he wants. But who knows with a woman? Is she saying something because she means it? Or because she’s ambitious the way a man would be? Or just because it’s her time of the month?”

  A Maghribi politician or official who said anything like that would get hounded out of office in short order by his outraged constituents. Women wouldn’t be the only ones outraged, either. Most men there knew better than to believe anything so stupid, let alone say it.

 
; But who would tell the Grand Duke he wasn’t supposed to come out with such things? Nobody. Nobody who didn’t want to see the inside of an Italian jail, anyhow. Yet Lorenzo was the kind of man whom governments throughout the Muslim world wanted to work with. The way things were in Europe, he was the comfortable choice. The alternative to people like him? The Aquinists.

  Bad and worse, Khalid reminded himself once more. That the Aquinists plainly were worse had to be a measure of their damnation.

  * * *

  Annarita Pezzola expertly twirled spaghetti with a fork and a tablespoon. Maybe expertly wasn’t the right word for such a mundane task, but it came to Khalid’s mind all the same. His own efforts at balling the squiggly noodles around his fork kept falling apart or shedding worms of pasta. Dawud did better, but not so well as Annarita.

  She laughed when Khalid praised her skill. “I’ll tell you what the difference is,” she said. “I started doing this before I was three, and I doubt a week’s gone by since when I haven’t done it more than once. You don’t eat so many noodles on your side of the sea.”

  “That’s true,” Khalid said. “We make porridges of wheat and barley instead.”

  “Well, there you are. You do plenty of things we don’t, too.” Annarita paused to half empty her wine goblet. “You treat women like human beings, for instance.”

  “Every once in a while. When we feel like it. If the wind is blowing the right way,” Dawud said.

  “It’s not something to joke about,” she said sharply.

  He cocked his head like an overweight sparrow. “Why do you think I’m joking?”

  Khalid said, “When we talked with the Grand Duke today, I tried to persuade him to bring you back into his service.”

  “It didn’t work,” she said: statement, not question.

  “Well … no,” Khalid admitted. “But barriers don’t fall unless you keep trying to knock them over.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t get angry at you. Or he probably did. You’re lucky he needs the Maghrib too much to show it. At least he sees he needs civilized help.”

  Were you sleeping with Grand Duke Cosimo? Instead of poking at that question, Khalid drank from his own goblet. It gave him something to do, and the strong red wine took the edge off his troubles. As long as he didn’t make a pig of himself, wine struck him as a good thing, no matter what the Prophet said about it.

  While he and Annarita talked, Dawud finished his supper. He dabbed at his mouth with the linen napkin. Then he stood up. “Don’t mind me, you two. I’m going back to the room to finish that evaluation I promised to Major Badoglio tomorrow.”

  Khalid opened his mouth. As far as he knew, Dawud hadn’t promised Badoglio any evaluations. Then he closed it. He didn’t know how far he knew. Dawud might be doing something like that. Or he might be giving his friend some time with an attractive woman and without a spare wheel. When you did something like that, you didn’t add a line like Now go jump on her! You didn’t if you were more than seventeen, anyhow.

  Annarita watched Dawud stroll out of the dining room. “I never had much to do with a Jew till now,” she said. “He’s pretty much like anyone else, isn’t he?”

  “Anyone else with an odd sense of humor, yes,” Khalid answered.

  “You said that. I didn’t.” Annarita’s voice took on a teasing edge. “What would he say if I told him you said it?”

  “Probably something like ‘Thank you,’” he answered.

  That made Annarita laugh. “I believe it. He’s your partner, so you take working with a Jew for granted, don’t you?”

  “Pretty much, though if he were a Muslim I’d likely be his partner. I was thinking about things like that a little while ago,” Khalid said. “People in the Maghrib are free and pretty much equal under the law. Less so in fact, though we do try.”

  “But you don’t mind?” she persisted.

  “Not me.” He shook his head. “I don’t even mind coming to Italy and working with Christians.”

  The dining room was dimly lit, as dining rooms all over the world seemed to be, but it wasn’t too dark for him to miss the flush rising from her neck to her hairline. “I walked into that, didn’t I?” she said.

  “I meant it,” Khalid answered. “People are people, pretty much, no matter what they believe. More people in Europe take their religion very seriously than they do where I come from, but we have our share who don’t want to believe animals and plants change through the ages—even a few who don’t want to believe we go around the sun and not the other way around.”

  “In Italy, we do want to believe we still are the crowns of creation. The Romans were. They ruled the whole Mediterranean world for hundreds of years.” Annarita sighed. “Then their empire fell apart, and then things … changed. You started exploring the natural world, and we argued about the nature of God. And argued. And argued. And we’re arguing about it to this day—and buying the things we need and the things we want from the people who know how to make them.”

  Khalid waved to the waiter for another bottle of wine. “That’s … part of Europe’s problem,” he said carefully.

  Annarita waited while the man in the fancy costume—he might almost have been able to march in Cosimo’s funeral procession—used his corkscrew, got Khalid’s approval, and filled their goblets again. After he went away, she asked, “And the rest is…?”

  “You know as well as I do, I’m sure,” he said. “I mean no offense, truly, but it’s not only the Aquinists who are drunk on religion in this part of the world. In the Maghrib, someone as able as you wouldn’t have to work through a man because you’re a woman.”

  “We’re trying to fix that, too.” Annarita scowled and stared down at her wineglass. “We still have a way to go, don’t we?”

  “You would still be working in the Grand Duke’s palace if you didn’t,” Khalid said.

  “Yes. I would. Or maybe I would. Cosimo listened to me. He didn’t always do what I suggested, but he listened. Lorenzo didn’t want to. Maybe that was because I was a woman. But maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to listen to me if I had a beard down to here.” She gestured. Khalid chuckled. She added, “Sometimes people just don’t get along, that’s all.”

  “I suppose not.” Khalid didn’t believe that was the problem, not for a second. Instead of telling her so, he said, “You’d look silly with a beard even half that long.”

  She snorted. Then she tried to pretend she hadn’t. That made her snort again. “Your sense of humor is as odd as the Jew’s,” she said.

  “I doubt it,” Khalid said. “Dawud makes foolishness look easy. Me, I have to work at it.”

  “You do pretty well,” Annarita said.

  “Grazie,” Khalid replied. Her Arabic was better than his Italian, so they’d been using that language. He was glad for the chance to drop in a word of her birthspeech.

  He did wonder once more why Cosimo had listened to her. Was that only because the late Grand Duke recognized ability when he heard it? Or had Cosimo had more basic human—more basic male—reasons for putting up with her, even if he hadn’t necessarily done anything about them? Khalid picked up his goblet and sipped from it. No, it wasn’t a question he could ask, especially not when the two of them were at the moment no more than acquaintances.

  If they were ever going to turn into more than acquaintances, he’d have to do something about it. Ever since his divorce, he’d been leery of approaching each new woman who piqued his interest. He knew disappointment was too often the only thing waiting ahead. All the same, if you didn’t bet, you couldn’t possibly win.

  And so he set down the wineglass and said, “In all the heaps of free time we have—and if the curfew lets up enough—could I ask you to a film or some music somewhere?”

  She arched an eyebrow. Her reply wasn’t altogether responsive: “I wouldn’t think you cared much for European music. The musicians who play in your modes aren’t likely to come here during our troubles.”

  “Some European stuff
isn’t bad,” he said gallantly. “Or we could find a place to eat that isn’t in the hotel, or just somewhere to have a few drinks and talk. However you please.”

  Annarita studied him. Was that amusement on her face? If it was, it quickly faded. “I’ve never gone out with a Muslim man before,” she said.

  “I dated a Christian girl for a while when I was at the madrasa in Egypt, but she was a Copt,” Khalid said. “A little different.” Copts were more than a little different from European Christians. They’d risen with, and within, the international civilization. They were part of it. They hadn’t got left behind, the way folk north of the Mediterranean had. Still … “I’m not afraid if you’re not.”

  “Well…” The amusement came back. “Why not? We can see what happens. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, that’s all.”

  “A bargain.” Khalid lifted his goblet again and held it out. Annarita clinked with him.

  * * *

  Dawud was watching television when Khalid came in. Not news or anything important: a polo match from Alexandria. It was close. The stands were in a frenzy, Reds and Whites shrieking abuse at each other. “And?” Dawud asked without looking away from the screen.

  “And what?” Khalid returned. The Reds scored—a pretty goal. The tumult from the crowd redoubled.

  Unfazed, Dawud returned, “And should I pack up and move into a room of my own? Will you be needing this one for your love nest?”

  Khalid used some Arabic street slang he hadn’t hauled out for a long time. If you said that in a different tone of voice, the man you said it to almost had to try to kill you. Dawud only laughed. “And your mother’s, too,” he said. “You still didn’t answer my question.”

  “Another room? You must be kidding! The garbanzo-counters who dole out our expense money would never let you get away with it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Things are a lot cheaper on this side of the sea.” Dawud was right about that. Maghribis often retired to the toe and heel of the Italian boot to take advantage of the lower cost of living here. Khalid wondered how many of them were packing up and heading for home right now to get away from the political and religious turmoil here.