“I suppose not,” Khalid said. Some small men pushed extra hard to compensate for the bad dice roll fate gave them. Maybe Ambrose had been like that. Or maybe he would have had the same driving personality if he’d been a cubit taller and towered over everyone.
As they left the basilica, Dawud said, “You know, I felt funny about uncovering my head in a house of worship. Jews do the opposite.”
Khalid laughed. “With me, it was leaving my shoes on when we walked inside. Sometimes customs are just different, not better or worse.”
“Whatever customs you find, you’d better go along with them when you can,” Dawud said. “If the locals think you’re mocking them, odds are you’ll end up dead.”
A tram rattled by. Its windows must have been of safety glass; two of them bore spiderweb-shaped bullet scars. “You can end up dead around here even if you do follow customs,” Khalid said.
“Too right you can,” Dawud agreed.
Instead of dining—if that was the word—on army ration packs, they ate with Major General Dallolio at an establishment a captain on his staff recommended. Seafood and saffron-perfumed rice improved on those sausages of unknown origin. Wine and grappa were better than the muddy instant coffee that came in the ration packs, too.
Khalid patted his belly. “No wonder so many officers come here.” Enlisted men weren’t likely to show up, not at these prices. But when the Maghribi embassy or the Ministry of Information paid the bills … The expense account was a wonderful, a civilized, invention.
“No wonder at all.” The commandant of Milan lit an after-dinner cigarette. The ashtray—cut crystal, not expended brass—was full of during-dinner butts. He smoked a lot even for an Italian, which was saying something. After a puff or two, he added, “We will see what we can do about clearing the fanatics out of town. I’ve ordered a push starting at sunrise tomorrow.”
“Good,” Khalid said. Sometimes knowing people kept an eye on you was enough to get you moving.
“What you need to remember is, you’d better not drive the Milanese into the Aquinists’ arms,” Dawud said. “Some of them will back the fanatics anyhow, but you don’t want your soldiers making most of them think the lunatics who yell ‘God wills it!’ are a better bargain than the Grand Duke.”
“Believe me, I understand that.” Dallolio sounded like a man working hard to hold his temper.
“I’m sure you do, sir.” Dawud ibn Musa, by contrast, seemed to be trying harder than usual not to irritate an important local. “Your men have to get it, too, though. This is their own country they’re fighting in. Even some of the Aquinists are Italians—”
“Rotten traitors to his Supreme Highness,” Dallolio broke in.
“Yes, sir. But still Italians. After Lorenzo wins this fight”—Dawud didn’t suggest that the Grand Duke might lose it—“they’ll be his subjects again. Some of them—with luck, a lot of them—will make loyal subjects once the squabbling’s over … as long as you don’t make them hate you while you’re knocking down the revolt. Of course you have that in mind. Your men need to think about it, too.”
“Ah.” The major general scratched that disfiguring scar with his forefinger. “I see what you’re driving at. And I’m starting to see why the two of you shitcanned poor Renato. That isn’t the kind of thing he’d worry about. I’ll spell it out so even a conscript peasant off a farm his family sharecrops can’t get it wrong.”
“Grazie,” Khalid said. He knew, as Dallolio doubtless did as well, that it remained quite possible to get such orders and not follow them. All it took was ill will. But the commandant here did sound as if he was doing what he could. In a world populated by human beings, you couldn’t ask anybody for more than that. Khalid raised his glass in salute and gulped fiery grappa. Dallolio drank with him.
* * *
“Do we get combat pay for this?” Dawud asked as he worked the bolt on his assault rifle. The soft, oiled snick! chambered the first round in the magazine.
“You know, I’ll bet we can,” Khalid answered. “It just depends on whether the money’s worth the trouble of filling out all the paperwork we’ll need.”
He already had a cartridge in the chamber of his own rifle. The sun wasn’t up yet. He could see shapes. Pretty soon, he’d be able to make out colors. He and Dawud waited with a swarm of Italian soldiers near the Basilica of Saint Ambrose. Some of the men smoked. Some tossed down small cups of coffee. Some gulped from their canteens, which might hold water or something stronger. Some simply stood and waited.
That whump! was a flare pistol going off. The sky was still dark enough to make the blue flare look more impressive than it would have by daylight. “Come on, boys!” an officer shouted. “For Lorenzo and for Italy!”
“For Lorenzo! For Italy!” the soldiers echoed. Their boots thudded on concrete, on asphalt, here and there on cobblestones that concrete and asphalt hadn’t yet swallowed. They were going to clear the enemy fighters from the district south and west of the basilica. They’d try to do that more than once before, but the Aquinists kept filtering back in.
The fanatics were ready to make a fight of it now. They opened up with their motley assortment of weapons. Every man on the other side had to be his own quartermaster sergeant: one of the disadvantages to a force made up of fighters who came to the conflict with whatever they could get their hands on.
The advantages to that kind of force … “God wills it!” the Aquinists roared. They fought from shops and blocks of flats and from behind parked cars and from any other places that gave them a little cover. A sniper in a tree wounded two soldiers before the rest realized when the rounds came from. That Aquinist didn’t get a chance to surrender.
Neither Khalid nor Dawud said a word when the Grand Duke’s men killed him. A criminal who fired from that kind of hideout in the Maghrib wouldn’t have got a chance to give up, either. A police spokesman would go on TV and talk about “an officer-involved shooting.” No one but his kin would miss the late gunman. They might not, either, considering the disgrace he’d bring down on his family.
Few Aquinists seemed to want to surrender, anyhow. Some had in Volpiano, but not many. Even fewer here in Milan gave up as long as they had a rifle and cartridges to use in it.
Lorenzo’s men couldn’t just blast all the buildings where the Aquinists were hiding, either. General Dallolio did understand that much. Plenty of innocent people, not all of them fanatics, lived and worked in those buildings. Blow them up without caring who got killed and you’d make the survivors hate you. The Aquinists understood the game, too. They didn’t use civilians for human shields, not openly. They did fight from crowded places.
So the Italian soldiers had to try to clear away ordinary people to get at their foes. It wasn’t easy. Men who spoke only German or French were likely Aquinists, yes. Men who spoke Italian with the local accent? That wasn’t so obvious.
Women … The soldiers didn’t even worry about them till one blew herself up as they were herding her to what they thought was safety. She killed several of them and several other women along with herself. After that, the women got frisked as thoroughly as their menfolk. It would breed ill will, but getting blown to bloody fragments had bred ill will in Lorenzo’s troopers.
“We should have known something was up,” said the sergeant who told Khalid and Dawud the story. “She was smiling like Christmas before she touched off the bomb, like she was already looking at heaven or something.”
The two Maghribis exchanged glances. “We saw the serving maid who murdered Grand Duke Cosimo,” Khalid said. “She had that same kind of look on her face.” Exalted was the word he was digging for, but he couldn’t find it in Italian.
“They’re martyrs,” Dawud said. “They see themselves that way, anyhow.”
“Martyrs, my dick!” The Italian sergeant spat in disgust. “It’s a coward’s way to fight.”
Soldiers always called their enemies cowards. It made the foe seem easier to face. How true it was might be a di
fferent question. Didn’t blowing yourself to bits to hurt the opposition take something that might be called courage? It seemed that way to Khalid, anyhow. He didn’t argue with the sergeant. What point, when he knew he wouldn’t convince him?
Men from the Ministry of Information replaced Aquinist propaganda with the Grand Duke’s flavor, as they had in Turin. Khalid hoped it would do some good. It wouldn’t hurt. At the very least, it would show that the government cared enough to get its own version of the truth in front of the people.
Dawud put that better: “The country that lies together, tries together.”
“Poetry,” Khalid said, his voice dry. A helicopter gunship roared by overhead, only a few cubits above the rooftops. It poured rockets and machine-gun fire into a park where the Aquinists had a strongpoint. The fanatics fired back a rocket-propelled grenade. It missed the copter, but the machine zoomed away. Its crew liked shooting at the enemy a lot better than getting shot at. Well, who didn’t?
Little by little, Lorenzo’s men pushed forward. They had more in the way of heavy weapons than the Aquinists did. The Aquinists countered that with zeal. It worked, more or less, but it was expensive. With better arms, they would have spent fewer men.
And women. Normally, Khalid would have been horrified to watch soldiers on his side groping women. When they’d already taken casualties because they’d kept their hands to themselves, though … In an ideal world, they would have had women with them to do those searches. Women did serve in the Maghrib’s armed forces, and in most throughout the Muslim world. Equality between the sexes had yet to reach Europe, as Annarita could have testified.
An Aquinist showed himself in a second-story window, fired a quick burst, and ducked back into the office or whatever it was. From his own spot behind a colandered Garuda, Khalid drew a bead on the window. If the fanatic was foolish enough to pop out again …
He was, which probably showed he didn’t have much combat experience. He never got any more. Khalid’s first shot took him square in the chest. The second, as the Aquinist slumped, blew out the back of his head. He fell from the window and thumped down onto the sidewalk as bonelessly as a cloth doll. Cloth dolls, though, didn’t bleed.
“Hey! Well shot!” a soldier called to Khalid. He gave the Maghribi a thumbs-up, a gesture that dated back to the arena in Roman days. Khalid waved back carefully, so as not to expose his arm to other fanatics in that building. The man he’d just killed had got his last thumbs-down.
No supper at the fancy eatery tonight. A ration pack was all the more uninspiring when compared to what he’d eaten the night before. Enlisted men had to down this stuff all the time. No wonder Lorenzo needed conscription! Or maybe getting a full belly every day drew volunteers. Soldiering always looked better when other work was hard to find.
The Aquinists tried a night counterattack. It made for wild confusion. Men on both sides shouted their battle cries and fired in the direction of people shouting cries they didn’t like. In the darkness, rifles and machine guns and grenades counted for more than artillery and rockets. So did knives and entrenching tools. Whoever led the Aquinists knew what he was doing. He got the most he could from his fighters when the Grand Duke’s men couldn’t use big chunks of their firepower.
“God wills it!” yelled someone not far away. Khalid and Dawud both fired in that direction. Then they rolled away from where they had been.
Shrieks said some of the bullets had struck home—or that the fanatics were quick-witted enough to bluff. Bullets cracked through the place where the Maghribis’ muzzle flashes said they’d been. Khalid shot at the flashes he saw. He rolled again. You couldn’t stay where you’d fired from.
“Oof!” he said—he’d just rolled off the curb and into the gutter. The water in it was cold and smelly. He didn’t want to think about all the nasty things mixed with that water.
Someone launched a white star flare up into the dark sky. It lit up several blocks as brightly and as harshly as a photographic flash. Khalid froze into rigor mortis while the flare slowly, slowly descended under its parachute. If he didn’t move, they might not notice him. Or they might think he was dead if they did.
Nobody shot him. Nobody even shot at him. When the flare finally fell, the night seemed blacker than it had before—his pupils had contracted against the burning glare. Everyone must have suffered from the same trouble: firing didn’t pick up again for several minutes.
Finding Lorenzo’s men alert, the Aquinists pulled back. They might have overrun the government forces if they’d caught them by surprise. Major General Dallolio and his junior officers deserved some credit. So did the ordinary soldiers who took nothing for granted.
“I’m not sure the Grand Duke is winning up here, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t losing,” Dawud said.
“That’s about how it looks to me, too,” Khalid replied.
XV
When the sun rose the next morning, the fighting rose again with it. Grand Duke Lorenzo’s men kept pushing the fanatics back. They could do it, when they had a resolute commander to make sure they did. In the third hour of the day—halfway between sunup and noon, more or less—Khalid asked Dawud, “Do you think we’ve seen what we needed to see?”
“Yes, pretty much,” the Jew answered. “Shall we go back to headquarters? As long as we’ve done our job, we don’t need to hang around waiting to stop something. Or isn’t that what you meant?”
“Who, me?” Khalid said. They both laughed. They’d taken their chances alongside the Italian soldiers. Even more to the point, they’d been seen taking their chances alongside them. They hadn’t come to the Po Valley to drive the Aquinists away by themselves. They’d satisfied their honor, and the Maghrib’s.
Some of the soldiers waved to them as they started back to Major General Dallolio’s headquarters. “You guys are all right!” a man called to them. “That Aquinist the one of you finished, that was good hunting!”
“Thanks.” Khalid wasn’t thrilled about killing the man. If you got stuck in a war, though, you had to do things like that. The Aquinist wouldn’t have sobbed into his vino if he’d potted Khalid instead. And it had been good hunting. He’d waited for the fanatic’s mistake, and he’d shot faster and with better aim.
Behind the line, civilians trickled back to their flats and workplaces. Some seemed happy. They were the ones whose homes and shops hadn’t got blown up or burnt down. Others wailed and wept and hid their faces in their hands. “I lived in this building for thirty years!” a woman cried, pointing to what were only charred ruins now. “Everything I had—everything in the world—was in here! What am I going to do now?”
The best you can. Khalid didn’t say it. It wasn’t the kind of answer that made anyone feel better. The woman probably would have sworn at him. But she’d have to go on somehow. Disasters happened all the time. Maybe she had relatives who’d be able to help her … if their blocks of flats weren’t also wrecked.
Benito Dallolio stood outside his headquarters, talking with three or four junior officers, sending out runners with orders, and grilling others who came back to tell him what was going on. Every few seconds, he would grab a radio handset away from the operator and either listen or bark more orders into it. He was a man who could keep track of a good many things at the same time, in other words—a good thing for a high-ranking officer to be able to do.
He waved to Khalid and Dawud as they started across the square toward him. He had to have sharp eyes to recognize them at that distance … although Dawud, who looked about as unsoldierly as an armed man in uniform could, did stand out.
Yet another Italian enlisted man loped up to Dallolio and waited to be noticed. He didn’t have to wait long. The general liked questioning runners. He was the kind of officer who would have been at the front himself if he hadn’t understood he was more useful farther back.
The courier told Major General Dallolio whatever he had to tell him. Khalid was still too far away to make out what it was. Dallolio nodded and aske
d the man something. The soldier answered. Dallolio nodded again. Then, quite calmly, the runner pointed his assault rifle at the general and opened fire.
Dallolio threw up his hands and fell over. “God wills it!” the runner yelled, and shot down two of Dallolio’s subordinates while they were still staring in astonished horror. The radio operator grabbed his pistol and shot the assassin. The runner choked out “God wills it!” one more time before he crumpled.
“Allahu akbar!” Khalid exclaimed. He and Khalid sprinted over to the scene of the sudden, unexpected bloodbath.
It was all over by the time they got there. Dallolio had taken three or four rounds in the chest and belly. The blood pooling under him reminded Khalid of how much a human being held. One of his aides was also dead, with two bullets in the left side of his chest. The other officer still twitched, but he wouldn’t for long, not with the left side of his head smashed like that.
And the murderer was down and dying, too. The radio operator’s pistol round had caught him just above the bridge of his nose. That was either a lucky shot or a very cool one. Khalid wondered whether even the radioman knew which.
An aide who hadn’t stopped any bullets kept crossing himself over and over. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he choked out. His eyes almost bugged from their sockets. His face had gone the color of newsprint.
“Now we have to find out whether this son of a whore”—Dawud stirred the killer’s corpse with his boot—“was an Aquinist in one of Lorenzo’s uniforms or a real soldier who decided he was playing for the wrong team. Which do you suppose would be worse?”
As usual, he had a knack for finding the … intriguing questions. That one was so very intriguing, Khalid had no idea how to answer it. He came up with a question of his own: “Who takes command here now that Major General Dallolio is gone?”
“That would be Colonel Locchi,” answered the man who’d been crossing himself. Anything involving rank and the chain of command was important enough to him to make his wits start working again.
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