Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  “May I suggest something, your Supreme Highness?” Khalid glanced at the Grand Duke’s guards. Yes, Lorenzo trusted them near his person. Even so … There were spies as well as assassins. “In private?”

  Lorenzo thought for a couple of seconds: no more. Then he nodded. “Step aside, ragazzi,” he said. “This fellow’s safe if anyone is.”

  They looked unhappy, but they obeyed. Obeying was what they were for. Khalid stepped close to the Grand Duke. In a voice not much above a whisper, he said, “You might let it be known that Salgari told you who’d helped plant that serving girl, but that you need a little more proof before you start seizing people.”

  “But—” Lorenzo stopped. He’d been about to say something like But he didn’t tell me that. He was no fool, though. He saw what Khalid was driving at before his own sentence was well begun. The chuckle that followed was distinctly predatory. “And we see who takes the bait, you mean?” he said, also in soft tones.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  The Grand Duke chuckled again. “I just may give that a try. Yes, I just may. Whatever happens, it won’t hurt anything. And it may do some good.” He slapped Khalid on the back. No Maghribi would have done anything like that. Leadership in Italy was personal all kinds of ways.

  More than a little to his surprise, Khalid found he liked it. You knew where you stood with the Grand Duke. He wouldn’t smile and say nice things about you while he slid a knife between your ribs. Not unless some from the Maghrib suggests it to him first, Khalid thought uncomfortably.

  Sometimes, though, you had to do what you had to do. If telling a lie to panic an enemy was a sin, Satan was toasting every politician since the dawn of time on his hottest griddle.

  Dawud, Major Badoglio, and the bodyguards all watched Khalid as he walked away from the Grand Duke. Lorenzo and his guards left the courtyard. The Maghribis and Badoglio waited till a couple of jailers or whatever they were came out with a wheeled cart to take charge of Captain Salgari’s corpse. After they were out on the street again, Badoglio sent Khalid another curious look. But he asked no questions. He said his good-byes and went on his way. He was a professional. He understood that he didn’t need to know.

  Once they were surrounded by ordinary Romans and away from snooping ears, Khalid did tell Dawud. “I like that,” the Jew said. “I wish I’d thought of it myself—that’s how much I like it.”

  “It may not work,” Khalid said.

  “It deserves to work. It’s too pretty not to,” Dawud said. They exchanged lopsided grins. Both of them knew how pretty a scheme was had nothing to do with what you got from it. Dawud added, “Don’t tell your lady friend about it.”

  “Yes, Mommy. I probably shouldn’t even have told you.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t. But I worried more about the bugs in the room than about her,” Dawud said. Khalid nodded. You needed to worry about things like that … dammit.

  XVII

  If Khalid had been back in the Maghrib, he would have been doing everything he could to put down the Christian uprisings in the big cities. Instead, he watched other people trying to deal with them on Italian television. Because he also visited the embassy every few days, he knew more than Lorenzo’s subjects. Knowing more didn’t necessarily make him feel better.

  “We’re trying to keep cameras away from the fighting,” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz told him. “The fanatics thrive on publicity. They wouldn’t be doing any of this if they didn’t want to show the world they could.”

  “You’re telling me things are worse than most people realize,” Khalid said.

  “I’m afraid so,” the ambassador replied. “One shopping center in Algiers will never be the same. The Aquinists there wanted to be martyrs. They were, but not on television. That was a very bad bit of business.”

  From everything Khalid had seen, Umar didn’t exaggerate. He understated. “How bad is bad? Do I want to know?”

  “They killed Muslims because they were Muslims. They murdered hostages. They wrecked as many shops as they could. They fought as long as they could, and killed themselves when they couldn’t fight any more. Some of them booby-trapped their bodies before they killed themselves, so they could try to hurt us even after they were dead.”

  “They went in expecting not to come out, then,” Khalid observed.

  “It seems that way, yes.” Umar nodded. “They wanted to die—the fighters there, I mean. They intended to be martyrs. They got what they wanted, too, but not on television.”

  “That’s something. Not much, but something,” Khalid said.

  Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz nodded again, even more gloomily than before. “I am told—unofficially, because it also didn’t get publicized—that something a lot like Algiers happened in a suburb of Cairo where a lot of Europeans live. And in Istanbul the Aquinists tried to blow up the bridge across the Bosporus.”

  “Allahu akbar!” Khalid exclaimed. “They don’t think small, do they? That would have been—what’s one step worse than a disaster?”

  “What we have right now,” Umar answered. “That would have cut traffic between the Seljuks’ Asiatic and European provinces. And if the fanatics had dropped the bridge into the water the way they hoped, they would have blocked shipping between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, too, probably for years. The Turks stopped that, anyhow.”

  “I don’t recall seeing anything about it on television or in the papers—I suppose because they did stop it,” Khalid said.

  “I’m sure you’re right. Something that doesn’t happen isn’t news,” Umar said. “Plenty of bad things did happen in the Seljuks’ realm. The Aquinists didn’t just go after Muslims there. They attacked Christians who aren’t of their sect, too. Greeks and Armenians and Serbs and Bulgarians and such folk don’t acknowledge the Pope, you know, and to the fanatics that makes them fair game.”

  “It’s all foolishness.” Khalid knew Islam hadn’t been free of such squabbles. Sunnis and Shiites remained rivals to this day. The two groups argued with each other. Sometimes they insulted each other. They hadn’t tried slaughtering each other for a good many years, though—not because of religion.

  “Of course it is.” Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz smiled a small, sad, cynical smile. “Nowadays we march off to war in the name of nationalism, not faith. Haven’t we come a long way?”

  That fit much too well with what Khalid was thinking. He said, “Your Excellency, we’re going to keep fighting. I wish I could believe anything else, but I can’t. If we pile the old reasons on top of the new ones, we’ll fight even more than we do already.”

  “I’d like to say I thought you were wrong. The trouble is, I think you’re right.” The ambassador rested his chin in his hands for a moment.

  “Maybe, just maybe, the fanatics will see they can’t win this way, because they’re making everyone else hate them.” That was as hopeful as Khalid could bring himself to be.

  “Maybe so. All groups change over time. They have to.” Umar might also have been trying to sound hopeful. He reached his limits even sooner than Khalid did, though: “I doubt the Aquinists and other Christian fanatics will give up in our lifetimes. They may not give up in our children’s lifetimes.”

  “I haven’t got any,” Khalid said.

  “High time you did, then,” Umar told him. “One reason so many Europeans move to our lands is that we have fewer than we used to.”

  Khalid laughed under his breath, even if it wasn’t really funny. For a couple of generations, demographers had worried that advances in medicine and farming and the mechanical arts generally were putting more people on the earth than it could sustain. Lately, contraception made population growth in the Muslim world and China slow and almost stop.

  But the demographers didn’t get to breathe a sigh of relief. Europeans kept right on breeding. Their countries were young and crowded and restless. That spawned extremism at home and emigration with it. Conservative politicians in Muslim lands stoked fears of being overrun by a pale, Christian wave f
rom the north. They’d been screaming about cutting back on the number of immigrants long before this latest Aquinist explosion. Without a doubt, they’d scream louder now.

  No matter how loud they screamed, though, work that prosperous people didn’t want to do still needed doing. Without the Europeans—and, to a lesser degree, without blacks from south of the Sahara—who would do it? French, Italian, Castilian, German … Those were the languages of gardeners and carpenters and construction workers and dishwashers and prostitutes from Teheran to Tenochtitlan.

  And Khalid had another reason for laughing. “Well, your Excellency, it is possible that I may end up with descendants after all,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought so a few months ago, but it is.”

  Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz nodded, unsurprised. “That Italian woman who was Cosimo’s aide.” It wasn’t a question. He added, “You certainly could do worse for yourself.”

  When Khalid had worried about bugs in his hotel room, he’d worried about the Italian Ministry of Information and the Aquinists. Maybe he should have added his own embassy to the list. Or maybe not—another possibility sprang to mind. “You’ve been talking to Dawud,” he said.

  “Revealing my sources would be bad form,” Umar answered primly.

  Try as Khalid would, he couldn’t get angry. His affair with Annarita was something the ambassador needed to know about. It could affect his judgment; chances were it already had, if not to any great degree. He did say, “Nothing definite yet. She’s still making up her mind whether she wants to spend the rest of her life on the other side of the sea.”

  “The civilized side of the sea, the way we look at it. The way we look at it, anybody from this side of the sea ought to jump at the chance,” Umar said.

  “Dawud says she likely would if it didn’t involve living with me.” Khalid tried another probe.

  “Dawud says all kinds of things,” Umar replied, which could mean anything or nothing. But he went on in a more serious vein: “Because we look at things that way, we forget that the Europeans have a civilization of their own, and that it has traditions older than Islam. They know they’re backward now, but they’re proud anyway. They’re even proud because they’re backward. Until you understand that, you don’t understand anything about them.”

  “Oh, yes.” Now Khalid nodded. “The Aquinists wouldn’t be so popular if that weren’t so.”

  “Well, all right. I should have known I didn’t need to preach to you.” The ambassador clucked in self-reproach. “I hope she does say yes. She’d be happier—the Maghrib will suit her better than Italy does. And you’ll be happier, too. Nothing wrong with happiness, believe me.”

  “I’d like to try it one day.” Khalid was joking, and then again he wasn’t.

  * * *

  Annarita and Khalid walked through the Forum. Somewhere not far from here, he’d first set eyes on her, and taken her for somebody from his side of the Mediterranean. Now she was in European costume, more covered than she had been then. In these troubled times, Khalid saw fewer women wearing the international style. It was as if they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. No, not as if. That had to be just what they had in mind.

  Khalid didn’t want to talk about that. He’d seen how Annarita didn’t care to acknowledge she’d given any ground to prejudice. He could have pointed it out and used it as an argument to help persuade her she could come to the Maghrib. His guess, though, was that she would have liked him less, not more, if he did. Sometimes you needed to know when to keep your big mouth shut.

  Instead, he said, “I’ve seen Roman ruins in the Maghrib. But seeing them here in Rome … It’s different here.”

  “The Maghrib—Africa and Numidia and Mauretania, they called the provinces then—was like an arm in those days,” Annarita answered. “This, this was the beating heart of the Roman Empire. The Empire’s gone, but the feeling lingers.”

  “It does,” Khalid agreed. The vanished city of Leptis Magna had Roman remains as grand as these, and better preserved. But Leptis Magna, nowadays, mattered only to tourists and archaeologists. Its ruins were so well preserved because it was so long deserted. Rome remained an important city to this day, even if it wasn’t the capital of the world the way it had been centuries before the Prophet preached.

  Annarita was thinking along different lines. “If Carthage had won the Punic Wars, all the wonderful remains would be on your side of the sea,” she said.

  “I suppose they would. I never looked at it that way,” Khalid said. “Back in those days, Tunis was just a little outlying town. Carthage was the city that counted in that part of the world. Even the Roman Emperor Heraclius came from there to Istanbul—”

  “To Constantinople.” Annarita broke in with the old name.

  “To Constantinople.” Khalid inclined his head to her, accepting the correction. “He was still ruling when Muhammad—peace be unto him—passed away. The Muslims conquered Carthage a lifetime later, but the city fell into ruin after that.”

  Annarita didn’t say anything, which was bound to be politeness of a sort. If you looked at history from a European perspective, or from a Christian one, a lot of things fell into ruin after the rise of Islam. As Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz had reminded Khalid a few days before, these people remembered greatness. And what could be harder than remembering greatness when you saw you didn’t have it any more?

  What survived of the ancient temple of Castor and Pollux, for instance, were three columns about twenty-five cubits tall. The explanatory signboard in front of them said they were of the Corinthian order, and that the modern Romans called them the Three Sisters. A jackdaw on top of the marble blocks surmounting them chirped squeakily.

  Annarita looked up at it as if it were telling her something. She stopped in front of the signboard, but didn’t read it. As if out of the blue, though it surely wasn’t, she said, “Yes, I will marry you, Khalid.” She might have been answering a question he’d just asked her.

  The way his heart stuttered in joyful surprise said she wasn’t. “Thank you!” he exclaimed, and took her in his arms. He kissed her, too. Public shows of affection weren’t always taken for granted here, but he didn’t care. She’d said yes! “I’ll do my best to make you happy,” he promised.

  “I believe you,” Annarita said. “If I didn’t believe you, I would’ve told you no, wouldn’t I?”

  “I’m glad you said yes.” He left it there. She’d taken longer to make up her mind than he would have liked. But she had a lot to think about. He came from another country. He came from another religion. He came from another civilization, one that lorded it over the culture she’d grown up in. Not all the changes she’d have to make in her own way of life would be simple or easy. Even so … He squeezed her again. “I love you, you know.”

  “I believe you,” she repeated seriously. On this side of the sea, arranged marriages to join family interests remained common. Romantic love was gaining here, too, though. In most of the wider world, it had swept the old ways before it. Couples went into marriage happier than they had in days gone by, even if, as Khalid knew too well, they didn’t always stay that way.

  He and Annarita found a little café off the Forum and toasted each other with red wine. Khalid hoped Annarita didn’t expect to live happily ever after without working at it. She’d never been married before, so she might. But if they stayed friends as well as lovers, they stood a chance.

  And if you worry about whether it’ll work just after she’s said yes … you stand a chance of being someone who’s gone through a divorce, he thought. If you didn’t, if you couldn’t, sit back and enjoy life once in a while, you didn’t deserve a happy marriage.

  “What will Dawud say when you tell him?” Annarita asked.

  There was a good, distracting question. “Probably that if he’d been in your shoes, he would have thought even longer,” Khalid answered. Annarita snorted. He held up a finger to show he hadn’t finished. “And that he expects to be a groomsman. He’ll wonder how a w
edding between a Christian and a Muslim could possibly do without a Jew in it somewhere.”

  Annarita snorted again. “That sounds like him, all right. If he were a rabbi, he’d insist on marrying us, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Khalid wondered what kind of ceremony they would end up having. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be Jewish. Christian? Muslim? Christian and Muslim? Civil? Any or all of those were possible. He found a question of his own: “What will your family think?”

  “They’ll be glad I’m getting married—most of them are sure I’m doomed to die an old maid,” she answered. “They won’t be so glad I’m marrying a foreigner. They thought I was too forward when I got an education and started working for Grand Duke Cosimo. What about your kin?”

  By marrying a foreigner, no doubt she also meant marrying a Muslim. Khalid couldn’t dwell on that, though. He had to find his own response. “They’ll be surprised I’m marrying a Christian,” he said, which was bound to be true. “But they’ll like you fine once they get to know you. Who you are will count for more than what you are.” That was also true.

  “My family won’t think that way. I’m sorry,” Annarita said.

  “I love you anyhow. I do love you anyhow,” Khalid said. To his relief, that seemed to be the right answer, or at least a right answer.

  * * *

  “Let me see.” Dawud ran a hand through his badly combed hair, as if to stimulate the brain it covered. “When you hear news like that, you congratulate the fellow who’s going to be the groom and you send your condolences to the poor girl who’s stuck with him. I think that’s how it goes.”

  “I’ll tell you how to go, and where.” Khalid made as if to throw a roll at his colleague. Rolls and coffee were the Italian notion of breakfast. Khalid was used to something more substantial to start the day, but he could cope with this.

  “You’ll need to invite me, you know,” Dawud said. “Any wedding with two religions in it ought to have three.”