Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  “That is the question,” Khalid agreed. An Italy where most of the people hated their modernizing Grand Duke? A ruler could make a desert, but these days he couldn’t call it peace after he made it. He would never be able to stop watching his own back, lest he get what Cosimo had got.

  An Italy like that also wouldn’t keep its troubles to itself. It would help inflame the rest of Western Europe. And, because its economy would be ruined, swarms of young Italians would go looking for work in the Muslim world. How many of them would be Aquinists, or people the Aquinists could seduce? More than a few; Khalid was only too sure of that.

  “If I lose the war, or if I cannot govern Italy, what kind of country will it be?” Lorenzo retorted. He eyed Annarita. “I see why my father listened to you. You worry as much as he did.”

  She bowed her head. “May I have your leave to withdraw, your Supreme Highness?” she asked in a low voice. The Grand Duke nodded brusquely. She walked from the room without looking back.

  “Now we have only men here,” Lorenzo said to Khalid and Dawud, as if that was important to him. “If we are going to knock the head off this adder, how do we go about it?”

  “Making sure you can before you start to try may not be the worst idea I ever heard,” Dawud answered.

  Lorenzo looked at him. “Et tu, Brute?” he said sourly. The Latin meant nothing to Dawud, or to Khalid. Seeing as much, the Grand Duke threw his hands in the air in disgust and went back to Arabic: “It means ‘You, too, Brutus?’ It’s what Julius Caesar said when he saw that Brutus, who he’d thought was his friend, was one of the men sticking knives in him.”

  “I don’t want to stick a knife in you, sir,” Dawud said. “I don’t want any of the people you think are your friends to stab you, either. Or the people you know are your enemies. Anybody.”

  “I believe you,” Lorenzo said. “The Maghrib had better want to keep me alive. You can be sure I won’t sell Italy out to the Aquinists. Anyone else you get, you won’t be able to count on him for that.”

  Not even your brother? Khalid wondered. But that was a question he didn’t ask. He also didn’t let his face show it had crossed his mind. When you were dealing with someone who’d gained power by right of birth, you had to remember he feared losing it every moment, not just when the next election rolled around. And to whom would he fear losing it more than to the man who stood next in line?

  * * *

  Wearing European clothes and broad-brimmed hats to help obscure their faces, Khalid and Dawud approached the Maghrib’s embassy in Rome. The Italian policemen guarding the embassy scowled at them. Europeans were more likely to be dangerous than men from the Muslim world.

  Their scowls deepened when Khalid used his bad Italian to say, “We have an appointment with the ambassador.” He gave his name and Dawud’s; they both displayed their papers.

  Most literate men could read the Arabic alphabet, even if their language didn’t use it. One of the policemen showed he could. After studying the travel documents and identity cards, he telephoned into the embassy. His Arabic was like Khalid’s Italian: far from wonderful, but enough to get the job done. When he hung up, he nodded to the two Maghribis. “You can go in,” he said, still in Arabic. He even held the entrance gate open for them.

  Though the Italians hadn’t searched them, their own countrymen did. Only after they passed muster were they escorted into the presence of Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz, the Sultan’s envoy to the Grand Duchy of Italy.

  Umar was short, slim, and balding. He had to be in his late fifties; his beard and the fringe of hair he still owned were going from gray to white. The pouches under his red-tracked eyes said he’d seen a good many complications, and expected to see quite a few more.

  “Well, gentlemen, I heard you were in the country,” he said. “How can we best steer Italy toward something this side of civil war?”

  Khalid and Dawud exchanged dismayed looks. “We were hoping you’d tell us, your Excellency,” Khalid said. “We had a meeting with Lorenzo yesterday afternoon. He seems ready to start one himself.”

  “Not just ready,” Dawud said. “Eager.” Khalid nodded, accepting the correction.

  The ambassador looked pained. “I’ve heard the same thing. I was hoping you would tell me it was wrong. Doesn’t he see that one of the risks of starting a civil war is losing it?”

  “Sir, I would be amazed if that’s crossed his mind,” Khalid answered. This time, Dawud nodded.

  Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz sighed. “And doesn’t he see that his fight may not stay a civil war?”

  “You don’t suppose he’d start something to get all the Italians, or most of them, behind him?” Khalid said in alarm. He supposed Lorenzo could. Sicily had belonged to the Maghrib for centuries, but plenty of people here still saw it as an unredeemed part of their homeland. Italian lords and lordlings had banged that drum before, more than once.

  But Umar shook his head. “That isn’t what I meant. With the Aquinists fighting Lorenzo here, they’re liable to call for warriors of the cross from all over Europe to come give them a hand.”

  “Crusaders.” Dawud ibn Musa spoke the word with distaste. Waves of them had invaded the Holy Land long before. Other waves drove the Muslims out of most of Spain. They’d fought against pagans, too … and, fairly often, killed Jews who got in their way for the sport of it.

  These days, the disaffected young Christian men who crashed planes or blew up themselves and their neighbors in cities across the Muslim world often called themselves Crusaders. Like their long-dead coreligionists, they saw themselves as holy warriors, certain of heaven if they died fighting people they believed to be infidels.

  “Can they call a Crusade against other Christians?” Khalid asked.

  “I’ve been looking into that. I think they can,” Umar said. “They’ve done it before, against people whose style of Christianity they didn’t fancy. Some of their squabbles made the quarrels between Sunnis and Shiites seem like garden parties by comparison.… Are you laughing at me, Dawud?”

  “Not very hard, your Excellency,” the investigator answered. “Jews go after people they think are misbelievers, too. Who doesn’t?”

  “I haven’t seen them bombing public buildings,” Khalid said.

  “Probably just a matter of time,” Dawud said. “They can take lessons from the Christians, I’m sure. Why not? All those years ago, the Christians took lessons from us.” He didn’t say anything about Muslims’ taking lessons from Jews. In his own strange way, he was a polite man.

  “You’ve spoken with the Pope, haven’t you?” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz said.

  “Yes, your Excellency,” Khalid replied. Whoever had briefed the ambassador had done a good job.

  “If Marcellus condemns a Crusade against Lorenzo and Italy, that may help some,” Umar said. “Some of the fanatics would sooner follow the Aquinists’ preachers than the Pope, but not all of them. And I think—I hope—Marcellus would do that. For a Christian, he’s a decent man.”

  “Marcellus would be a decent man if he were a Buddhist or a pagan,” Dawud ibn Musa said. Perhaps because he wasn’t fully a part of the Muslim world himself, he noticed condescension sooner than those who swam untroubled through those waters.

  Umar coughed. “Well, I suppose he would be, yes,” he allowed after a tiny pause.

  Dawud went on as if the ambassador hadn’t spoken: “Who knows? Marcellus might even be a decent man if he were a Muslim. You never can tell.” He beamed at Umar with a childlike innocence they all knew wasn’t real.

  After another pause—this one longer—Umar managed to smile back. “I had heard that you enjoyed being difficult,” he murmured.

  “Ah, well,” Dawud said airily. “You hear all kinds of things. What turns out to be true, that’s a different story. It is a lot of the time, anyway, isn’t it?”

  Was he talking about the amount of truth in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? If he was, no one could prove it. As far as Khalid was concerned, that was bound to be ju
st as well. This time, Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz smiled without having to work himself up to it. “I submit to your superior wisdom,” he said.

  Islam meant submission. Dawud grinned, acknowledging the hit. “So which important fellow did you offend with your wit, sir, to make them pack you off to Rome?” he asked.

  “This isn’t exile for me, even if it does seem that way sometimes,” Umar answered. “For the record, I asked the Wazir to send me here. I hoped I could do some good. For a while, I thought I was doing some good. And then—”

  As if on cue, a large explosion rattled the embassy. It wasn’t so close as the Pantheon had been to the investigators’ hotel. No glass fell from the windows. But it also wasn’t the kind of noise that would reassure anyone about the gentleness of his fellow men.

  “We fought bigger wars than this, your Excellency,” Khalid said: the best consolation he could offer.

  “Yes. We did.” Umar sighed. “Have you run across any of the Aquinist broadsheets that admire Faruq al-Ghaznavi and say the Christians ought to adopt his methods?”

  “Tell me you’re making that up!” Dawud ibn Musa spoke before Khalid could find words.

  “I only wish I were,” Umar said. “The greatest murderer the world has ever seen, and the one who slaughtered all those Tamils for no better reason than that they were Tamils … The Aquinists want to be like him.”

  “Up till now, I had trouble stomaching Cosimo and Lorenzo,” Khalid said. “Not any more. The difference between bad and worse is bigger than the one between good and better.”

  “Sometimes it’s bigger than the difference between bad and good,” Dawud said. “Most of the rest of the world ganged up on Faruq, and didn’t worry about anything else till later.”

  “The difference is, once Faruq was beaten, his army surrendered and the war was over,” Khalid said. “The Aquinists don’t work that way. Taking out Domenico Pacelli won’t make them all give up. It’ll make some of them fight harder than ever. We’ll have to keep watch against … Crusaders for another lifetime, maybe for another hundred years.”

  “I fear you’re right,” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz said. His sharp gaze swung toward Dawud once more. “You find something in all this that amuses you?”

  “Only that I’d hate to be an investigator with nothing left to investigate, your Excellency.” Dawud lit a cigar and puffed before finishing, “Doesn’t look like I’ll need to worry about that for a while, does it?”

  The ambassador shook his head. “No. It doesn’t.”

  * * *

  Going through Rome in native costume showed Khalid how split the city was. Many people—probably most people—wanted nothing more than to go about their business. Here and there, they managed to do it. Some neighborhoods might never have heard that Cosimo was dead and the Aquinists in arms against his son and successor. Venders sold olives and mushrooms and tomatoes and pasta. The last wasn’t much eaten in the Maghrib, though Khalid had liked it well enough when he tried it here.

  A man who laid tiles was arguing with a housewife about how a floor should go and how much it should cost. Even more than it would have in Tunis or Algiers, that turned into street theater. Friends and neighbors came out to watch the fur fly and to stick in their own two coppers’ worth.

  Less than half a parasang away, a throng of pro-Aquinists—not quite a mob, but on the way—marched through the streets. “God wills it!” they bawled in ragged chorus. Police were trying to hold them back with shields and billy clubs. “God wills it!” the angry young men roared again.

  One of the policemen roared, too, through a bullhorn: “Break it up! You are violating the Grand Duke’s martial-law decree! This is your first, last, and only warning!”

  Rocks and bottles flew toward him. “God wills it!” Yes, that was a mob now.

  For a few seconds, the police fired into the air. Then one of them went down, hit in the face by half a brick or a cobblestone. At that, they opened up on the crowd. More makeshift weapons answered them. Some of those bottles were full of gasoline, with lighted cloth wicks to set it ablaze when the glass smashed. Some of the people in the crowd had firearms of their own, and shot back at the policemen.

  When a bullet cracked by over Dawud’s head, he said, “I don’t want to stick around here any more.”

  “Now that you mention it, neither do I,” Khalid said. They scurried back around a corner. Riots were interesting to watch from a safe distance, in the same way the quarrels of bears in a zoo might have been. When the distance you were watching them from turned out not to be so safe, and when there weren’t any bars between the animals and you, hastening elsewhere looked like a great idea.

  More policemen hurried forward to reinforce their comrades. “Let’s see your papers, you two!” one of them growled at Khalid and Dawud.

  “Here you are, sir.” Khalid moved slowly and carefully. He didn’t want the Italian to think he was reaching for a weapon. Dawud was just as cautious. Alarming a man who was pointing a submachine gun at you looked like a losing proposition.

  The policeman stared at their documents. “I’m supposed to believe you assholes are from the Maghrib?” he growled.

  “I hope you do,” Khalid answered. “Could I speak Italian this bad if I grew up here?” That last should have been a subjunctive, but he couldn’t remember how to make it.

  “I ought to run you in and let my captain figure out what the devil you are,” the policeman said. Then he thought about it; Khalid could all but see the gears meshing inside his head. He jerked his thumb away from the tumult ahead. “But I gotta help my amici. So go on—beat it. And stay the hell out of this part of town if you know what’s good for you.” He trotted away.

  Khalid and Dawud hurried back toward the neighborhood where people argued about tiling a kitchen floor and not about God’s will. “Do you know what’s good for you?” Khalid asked.

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind a big house in Tunis, a pile of money in the bank, and a beautiful girlfriend who thought I was the sexiest man alive,” Dawud said. “I’m not sure all that would be good for me, you understand, but I’d like to find out. How about you?”

  “You could do a lot worse than that. Or I think so, anyhow,” Khalid said. “Of course, if you asked an Aquinist, he’d tell you it was doing the things that got you into heaven and sending everybody who disagreed with you to hell.”

  “You didn’t ask an Aquinist. You asked me,” Dawud said. “Then again, if a lot of Aquinists had a big house and money and a girlfriend who thought they were great, they wouldn’t be Aquinists any more.”

  “That’s true.” Khalid nodded. Europe’s poverty and backwardness went a long way toward turning people into fanatics. A long way, but not all the way. “The scary thing is, some of them still would be.”

  Behind them, a machine gun hammered out a long burst. Screams cut through the stutter of the murder mill. Khalid had trouble thinking of any ruler in the Muslim world who would turn machine guns on his own people. Then again, he had trouble thinking of any ruler in the Muslim world who would need to.

  When he said so, Dawud ibn Musa shook his head. “You never can tell,” he said. “If trouble started in the European quarter of some of our cities, it might take machine guns to quiet things down.”

  Khalid thought about that. He didn’t need long. “I hate to admit it, but you’re right.”

  They took a roundabout route back to their hotel. Almost any route in Rome was roundabout. The streets weren’t on any kind of grid. If Khalid had to guess, they followed cow tracks from the days before Rome first became a great city—or any kind of city at all.

  Soldiers steered them away from one turn into a risky part of town they might have made. One of the soldiers snarled something at them in a back-country dialect even Dawud couldn’t follow. A sergeant cuffed the soldier the way a farmer might cuff a mean dog. How loyal to Grand Duke Lorenzo was that skinny young man? How close to yelling God wills it! was he? And to opening up on his squadmates? Khalid was glad
he didn’t find out then and there.

  His feet hurt by the time they finally got to the hotel. He was surprised to see Annarita Pezzola sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper. He went over to her. “Does the Grand Duke need something else from us?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice expressionless.

  “Huh?” Later, Khalid kicked himself for being slow on the uptake.

  “I don’t know,” Annarita repeated. “I am no longer in the Grand Duke’s service.”

  VII

  “What? Why not?” Khalid couldn’t believe his ears. “If he’s canned you, he’s … making a mistake.” He almost said He’s too stupid to live, but that wouldn’t do, not where he might be overheard or recorded.

  “He did not dismiss me,” Signorina Pezzola said. “I offered my resignation, and he decided to accept it.” She was also choosing her words with care.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” Khalid said. “You did his father a lot of good. You could have done more for him—he doesn’t have the experience Cosimo did.”

  Annarita shrugged. “I’m afraid not. He did not care to listen to me. That being so, I saw no point to shouting into the wind, so to speak.”

  “I see.” One of the things Khalid saw was that she was holding herself together by main force of will. He admired that; it was what someone from his side of the Mediterranean would have tried to do. Here, people were more inclined to let themselves go.

  “Which brings us to the next interesting question.” Dawud ibn Musa spoke with a certain somber relish. “What are you doing here? Why did you come to us instead of crying in your family’s vino? I know that’s two interesting questions, but you can do them together if you want.”

  “Dawud—” Khalid’s voice had an edge to it.

  But Annarita raised a hand and cut him off. “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re interesting questions, but they’re important ones. Even if his Supreme Highness doesn’t want to listen to me, I still may know some things he needs to hear. If they come from you, he has a decent chance of paying attention to them. For one thing, you’re Maghribis. For another—”