n the Saracens
dragged him out of the castle, with men being cut down by swords all
around him and women thrown to the ground by laughing Turks who fell
upon them, he saw at the base of the tower a bundle of blue linen
splashed with red that must have been his mother.

On their leisurely journey back to the Nile, the Turks forced him to lie
on his belly, and they used him as men use women. He would never forget
the needle-sharp tip of a curving dagger touched to his eyeball as a
bashi with a flowing black beard demanded that Daoud use his mouth to
give him pleasure. Whenever Daoud remembered that time, his insides
knotted and his face burned with shame.

One day he stood naked on a platform in El Kahira, capital of the
sultans--the city the Christians called Cairo. A fat, laughing slave
dealer, who had raped him till he bled the night before, offered him for
sale.

A tall man with one eye a glittering blue and the other a blank white, a
scimitar in a jeweled scabbard thrust through the embroidered sash
around his waist, came forward.

A silence fell over the crowd of slave buyers, followed by whispers. The
one-eyed warrior paid the price asked in gold dinars and without
haggling. And when the slaver fondled David's loins one last time as he
covered him with a ragged tunic, the warrior seized the slaver by the
throat with one hand, forcing him to his knees, and squeezed till he
collapsed unconscious in the dust of the marketplace.

David was almost mad with terror as the one-eyed warrior took him to his
mansion beside a lake in the center of El Kahira. But the tall man spoke
kindly to him and treated him decently. Amazingly, he could speak
French, David's language, though with a strange and heavy accent. He
told David that he was called Baibars al-Bunduqdari, Baibars the
Crossbowman. He was an emir of the Bhari Mamelukes, which meant, he
said, "slaves of the river." But though the Mamelukes were slaves, they
were also great and powerful warriors.

Baibars gave David a new name--Daoud--and told him that he had selected
him to be a Mameluke. He explained in a firm but kindly way that Daoud
did have a choice but that the alternative was a life of unrelieved
wretchedness as a ghulman, a menial slave. As a Mameluke, Daoud would be
set free when his training was complete, and he could win riches and
glory and be a warrior for God and his emir.

"I have long watched for such a one as you," Baibars said, "who could
look