Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  Dawud laughed at him. “That breaks your heart, doesn’t it? Just smashes the poor thing all to pieces. Now you’ll have to go and marry your pretty Italian. I’d say she was a smart Italian, too, only she went and told you yes. So how smart can she be?”

  “Never can tell with women. You got somebody to say yes, for instance,” Khalid said.

  “Sarah wanted to stay inside the faith, so she had fewer choices,” Dawud said. “Chances are I wouldn’t have been so lucky if she’d been able to look around a little more.”

  Khalid knew that was nonsense. Dawud knew he knew it was. The Jew and his wife had been a happy couple for many years. By all the signs, they’d stay a happy couple for many more. Whatever it was that made two people fit together, they had it.

  “Annarita and I should find that kind of luck,” Khalid said.

  “Well, I hope you do,” Dawud said. “Sarah and I were both sad when your first one fell apart. Those things happen—I know they do. You never like it when they happen to somebody you care about, though.”

  “Hrm,” Khalid said. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know his share of couples whose members had been sure they would live happily ever after … and who now lived apart from each other. One of the things that followed upon marrying for love was breaking up when that love, whatever the reason, failed to stay the course.

  He wanted to think that wouldn’t, that couldn’t, happen to him this time around. He wanted to, but it wasn’t easy. He and his first wife had broken apart after coming together. What guarantee did he have that he and Annarita wouldn’t go the same sorry way?

  He had no guarantee, as he knew too well. But he’d made some mistakes the first time around that he didn’t think he would make again. Some people did learn by messing up; he could hope he was one of them. And Annarita wasn’t the same as his first wife. He thought she was more easygoing, more tolerant of foibles. If he hadn’t thought it could work, he wouldn’t have asked her to marry him.

  When he and Dawud walked into the hotel lobby, Major Badoglio sat there waiting for them. He wore civilian clothes, presumably so he wouldn’t alarm or alert other people going in and out. He stood up when he saw the two Maghribis. “Peace be unto you, my masters,” he said in Arabic.

  “And to you also peace,” Khalid answered automatically.

  “What’s gone and fallen into the chamber pot now?” Dawud asked: exactly the question filling Khalid’s mind as well.

  But Major Badoglio only smiled. The expression pulled his thin face in unfamiliar directions. “Nothing … Nothing I know of, anyhow.” Yes, he would be one to qualify that. After a moment, he went on, “I have a car in the parking garage down the street. If you’ll come with me, the Grand Duke would like to give you his thanks and his farewells.”

  “How can we say no?” Khalid murmured. If you told a European ruler no when he wanted to hear yes, you needed to have force ready to back it up. The Maghrib had that kind of force when it dealt with Italy. Khalid and Dawud didn’t when they dealt with Grand Duke Lorenzo.

  Badoglio drove them to the ducal palace on the Palatine Hill. Security there had always been tight, even if, once, it hadn’t been tight enough. It was no looser now. Still, the soldiers seemed less jumpy than they had at the height of the Aquinist uprising. They were ready for trouble, but they weren’t looking for it to leap up and bite them in the leg.

  A butler with some of the bushiest eyebrows Khalid had ever seen led him and Dawud and the major to a small reception chamber. Lorenzo waited there with some of his aides and some women who might have been wives or concubines (Christianity frowned on them, which didn’t mean there were none in Europe) or ornaments.

  Khalid bowed to the Grand Duke. “Your Supreme Highness,” he said. Beside him, Dawud went through the same unrepublican rigmarole. So did Badoglio, whose bow was more practiced and better polished.

  “No ceremony needed today,” Lorenzo said. He waved to a very ornamental woman with a tray of drinks. “Help yourself to whatever you fancy. You can have a glass of wine, too.” The serving girl squeaked.

  “I like that one, sir,” Dawud said. Laughing, Khalid nodded. Even with no ceremony required, a Grand Duke’s joke would be funnier because of who told it. Still, Khalid had heard plenty worse.

  Annarita walked in a few minutes later, escorted by another officer—this one uniformed—from the Ministry of Information. She dropped Lorenzo a perfect curtsy. Khalid had seen the gesture only in Europe. In the wider world, women bowed like men, though sometimes more deeply.

  The Grand Duke also told her no formality was needed. Then, in more public tones, he said, “We’re here today to honor and thank our friends from across the sea. They came to help my father—God bless him—cope with the Aquinist fanatics and murderers. Though they couldn’t save him, they stayed to work with me. And they gave me the lead I needed to flush out the villain who betrayed Cosimo. Ladies and gentlemen, here are Khalid al-Zarzisi and Dawud ibn Musa!”

  Everyone applauded. Khalid and Dawud both bowed. The applause got louder. Khalid felt foolish. This kind of acclaim belonged to singers and polo heroes. More to the point, people like that basked in it. It just embarrassed him.

  Along with bowing, Dawud grinned and waved. He might have been soaking up ovations his whole life. If he hadn’t, his attitude said that he should have been. He’d always been better at enjoying himself than Khalid was.

  Annarita stepped up and kissed Khalid on the cheek. That set off more cheers. Since they were the last things he wanted, he almost got mad at her. Then he saw how proud she looked. Finding that expression on the face of someone he loved made his annoyance melt like snow in the desert.

  “Italy and the Maghrib have always been united in the fight against the fanatics,” Lorenzo said. “When Khalid goes home, though, the countries will be joined together in a different, more personal way, because Signorina Pezzola here will be going with him.”

  That drew more applause and cheers. Some of what the Italians shouted sounded risqué. Khalid was glad he didn’t speak the language perfectly, or he would have understood more of it. As long as Annarita kept smiling, he didn’t worry. People in the Maghrib would have been calling out the same kinds of things, only in Arabic.

  Dawud cheered along with the Grand Duke’s aides and their ladies. Khalid sent him a look that meant Do you have to? The Jew’s answering chuckle said Yes, of course I do, you spoilsport.

  “We will continue the fight until the Aquinists are smashed, crushed, and utterly defeated,” a man in major general’s uniform told Khalid.

  “I hope we do, sir,” Khalid answered. He didn’t expect that to happen anytime soon, if it happened at all. A man could always hope, though.

  “Smashed!” the major general said. By the way he talked, he was busy getting smashed himself. His uniform sparkled with medals and ribbons and gold braid and scarlet piping. From everything Khalid had seen, the fancier a general’s uniform, the worse the ordinary soldiers in that army would perform. Maybe Maghribi military men could quietly mention that to their Italian comrades in arms. It wasn’t his place, so he kept quiet.

  He drank more wine. The buffet offered little sandwiches and olives and fried squid rings and anything else a hungry man might want. Almost anything … “I don’t see any dormice in honey,” Dawud said, as if he’d been looking forward to that particular delicacy for weeks.

  Maybe he had. You never could tell, especially with Dawud. But when Annarita said, “You know that was an old Roman dish, not a modern one,” her unspoken message plainly was Don’t be more difficult than you can help.

  “I do?” Dawud sounded so innocent, Khalid knew he was responding to what she hadn’t said.

  The reception went on longer than Khalid would have liked. He and Dawud got one more round of applause when Lorenzo presented them both with the Order of Service to the Grand Duchy, Second Class. The medals were gaudy enough to have made the Italian major general jealous (after that thought crossed Khalid’s mind
, he noticed that the officer was wearing the same medal with an even more splendid ribbon—the Order of Service, First Class). Lorenzo should have given Annarita some kind of award, too, but he didn’t.

  At last, assisted by Major Badoglio, Khalid and Dawud made their getaway. Pretty soon we’ll get away from this whole country, too, Khalid thought. He’d drunk a bit himself, but that only made him more sincere—and more eager.

  * * *

  From the walls of the casbah, which had been Tunis’ citadel in the old days but was now reduced to the more mundane role of city hall, Khalid threw his arms wide. The casbah sat on a height, and gave a fine view of Tunis as a whole. “This is my town,” he said proudly. “What do you think of it?”

  As was her way, Annarita gave it a careful inspection before answering “Everything looks so clean, so new, and so white.”

  “Plaster—and the local stone is mostly white, too,” Khalid said. “We don’t paint it much. It fights the heat better if we leave it alone.” He didn’t comment on her other two remarks. Tunis was cleaner than Rome. It had had modern sanitation much longer, and the local authorities here cared more about cleanliness than they did on the Christian side of the sea.

  Some of the tall buildings in town were glassy rectangular prisms that could have gone up anywhere in the Muslim world—or even in Rome or Turin, though they would have stood out more there. Others looked like larger versions of the old local structures, at least on the outside. Within, they would enjoy all the modern conveniences.

  Annarita pointed out past the Bab-el-Bhar: the Sea Gate. No modern skybusters there, only small buildings huddled too close together. Even from this distance, you could see how cleanliness faltered in that part of town. You could guess the area had been grimy even before fire swept through it and soot spotted and marred so many walls. A little sadly, Annarita asked, “That would be the Christian district?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Khalid answered. “The markets there remind me of the ones I saw in Rome and Naples. If you get homesick for something and you can’t find it in the big stores, chances are they’ll have it there.” He paused and looked down at his sandals. “You might want to wait a little while before you go exploring. Till things calm down some more, I mean.”

  “I understood you,” she said. “I have my faith in common with the people down there, but that’s about it. I came here because it’s a freer, more open way of life than the one I left. They came to make money, but otherwise to hang on to how things are in Italy.”

  “That’s about the size of it, I’m afraid. The ones who try to fit in here find they can. There aren’t so many as we’d like, but there are some,” Khalid said. Out in the harbor, a freighter’s deep whistle pierced the hum of loud traffic noises. A dredged channel through the salt lake northeast of the city that led out to the Gulf of Tunis made this a port of call for ships from around the world. To the southwest, suburbs spread across what had been a soggy salt marsh.

  “Shall we go back inside? I don’t have to look at everything at once,” Annarita said.

  “Whatever you want.” Khalid took her hand. She squeezed his when he did. Smiling, he went, on, “How much do you bet Dawud’s already waiting for us?”

  “I won’t touch that one. And if we’re even a minute late, he’ll let us hear about it, too.” But Annarita was also smiling.

  In through the sliding glass doors they walked. Before Khalid went up to Italy, the police officers who served in the casbah had been some of the most bored men in the world. They looked much more alert now. The Aquinists had attacked here. Khalid was hazy on the details, but he knew it had happened.

  Fluorescent tubes set into the ceilings behind frosted glass replaced Tunis’ bright, harsh sunlight. Conditioned air, cool and as bland as if it weren’t there at all, took the place of the hot, sea-smelling stuff outside. More comfort but less flavor, Khalid thought. Well, nothing wrong with comfort.

  People sauntered or bustled through the hallways, heading for whichever office they needed. Signs and arrows on the white-painted walls told them where to go and how to get there. A janitor with a broom and a wheeled garbage can sang softly to himself in French.

  MARRIAGE BUREAU—ROOM 227 was part of the list on one wall, with an arrow pointing to the left. Khalid had gone back to reading the familiar alphabet and to letting his eyes travel from right to left rather than the other way round with enormous relief. To him, figuring out Latin letters while reading in the wrong direction felt like wading through mud backwards.

  He liked the old, ordinary numerals, too. The European variations on the theme, even though they ran the same way as the ones he was used to, had always looked funny to him. He couldn’t just recognize them; he had to pause and translate them inside his head.

  “Left,” Annarita said.

  She’d been using Arabic more and longer than he’d worked with Italian. Educated people around the world communicated with it. If an Irishman needed to talk to a Japanese, that was the tongue in which they were sure to do it. Naturally, children learned their native tongues at home and studied them in school. If they acquired a second language, it would be classical Arabic.

  The next arrow directed them to the right, the one after that to the left again. The inside of the casbah was a maze. “When I was a little girl, my mother told me a fairy tale about a boy and a girl lost in the woods,” Annarita said. “They put down a trail of bread crumbs so they could find their way back.”

  “That sounds smart,” Khalid said. “Did it work?” They didn’t tell that story on this side of the sea.

  She shook her head. “No. Birds flew down and ate the crumbs, so the kids stayed lost. They got into all kinds of trouble. They got out again, too.”

  “No birds in here, except every once in a while a sparrow that flies in by mistake,” Khalid said. “Only that janitor with his can and his broom.”

  They rounded a last corner. There was room 227—and there was Dawud, leaning against the wall by the doorway. He looked annoyed: not because they were late (they weren’t) but because a large sign across the corridor from the Marriage Bureau warned NO SMOKING UNDER PENALTY OF FINE.

  “Wonderful world we live in,” the Jew grumbled. “The government makes you be healthy whether you want to or not. I should move back to Italy.”

  “Especially if the Aquinists win,” Khalid said. “Then you can smoke as much as you please—and the government will make you be Christian whether you want to or not.”

  “Do you suppose you can wait until you’ve served as our witness?” Annarita asked in sugary tones. “Please?”

  “Well, since I got all dressed up to come over here,” Dawud said. By all dressed up, he meant wearing a reasonably clean robe. That was as much as anyone could claim for it. It had more wrinkles than a block of flats full of ninety-year-olds. The cloth on his keffiyeh hung down so it was on one shoulder and off the other. He had indeed come over to the casbah, though.

  They went into the room. Half of it was devoted to issuing licenses. Khalid had already been there. Unless he was completely misremembering, the fee had more than doubled since the first time he’d got married. He’d barely carried enough cash to cover it.

  Clerks in the other half of room 227 performed civil marriage ceremonies. One of these days, Khalid and Annarita might have a religious ceremony, or a couple of religious ceremonies. At the moment, they cared more about making things official.

  Annarita walked up to the closest unoccupied clerk: a mousy little man of about fifty, with a neat beard going gray. “You can marry us, sir?” she asked.

  He bowed politely. “I sure can, my mistress, so long as you have all the required paperwork.”

  Khalid handed the man his identity card, his license, and a physician’s attestation for each of them. Annarita presented her passport, which contained the endorsements from Grand Duke Lorenzo and from Umar ibn Abd-al-Aziz. Dawud, the least essential of the three, merely displayed his own identity card.

  “We
ll, well.” The clerk cocked his head to one side like a curious bird as he inspected Annarita’s documents. “You have some high-powered friends, my mistress.”

  “Acquaintances.” Yes, she was precise.

  “For acquaintances, they seem to have gone out of their way to expedite your move down here.” The clerk shrugged. “None of my business, I know.” He filled in whatever forms he had to complete. “A Muslim groom, a Christian bride, and a Jewish witness. Modern times.” He smiled.

  “God wills it,” Khalid said, deadpan. The phrase seemed far more innocuous in Arabic than it did in Latin.

  “Yes, but whose God?” The clerk didn’t even notice the slogan that had spawned so much trouble, some of it right here in Tunis.

  “For us, they’re all the same,” Khalid said. Annarita and Dawud both nodded.

  So did the clerk. “I happen to agree with you, my master. And that we do agree there, that’s another sign of modern times. Even nowadays, you’d get an argument from some folks.”

  “They can have the arguments later. They didn’t come here for one. They came here to get married,” Dawud said.

  “You’re right, friend. Well, I can probably arrange that.” The clerk bobbed his head to Khalid and Annarita. “Repeat after me, if you please. ‘I’—state your name—‘do hereby take’—state your spouse’s name—‘to be my lawfully wedded’—state wife or husband—‘and agree to our union under the laws of the Republican Sultanate of the Maghrib, in the presence of a witness and of an authorized official of the aforesaid Republican Sultanate.’” He shoved another form across the desk at them. “I need your signatures on the lines that say Groom, Bride, and Witness.”

  They signed. Annarita wrote her name first in the alphabet she’d grown up with and then, switching directions, in Arabic script. “I’m still getting used to this,” she remarked, tapping the pen on the Arabic version.

  “Your hand is very neat, very readable,” the clerk said, which was true—Khalid had noticed the same thing. The little man went on, “And, with those signatures, you have completed all the requirements, and you are husband and wife in the eyes of the state. Congratulations! May your union prove happy and prosperous.”