awaiting something, and the air of the city felt
to Daoud as it did when a thunderstorm was approaching.

The petty street wars of Orvieto would mean nothing to him soon, Daoud
thought. Lorenzo had managed to send two messages by way of Ghibellino
merchants passing through Orvieto. He had made his way safely to Siena,
was negotiating with Rinaldo di Stefano, Duke of Siena, and was
recruiting bravos by the hundred. But all was not going quickly enough
for Daoud. With the pope on the verge of leaving Orvieto, it appeared
the Sienese would not come quickly enough. Unless Lorenzo and the
Sienese arrived in time to trap the pope and the Tartars here, he would
have to follow them to Perugia.

Or he could go to Manfred and urge him to make immediate war on the
pope. Every rumormonger in Orvieto claimed that Manfred was on the brink
of marching out of southern Italy to make the whole peninsula his. But
Daoud doubted it. It would probably be difficult to persuade Manfred to
take any action against the pope, unless the French actually invaded
Italy.

Every day he and Sophia spent hours together, sometimes in his chamber,
sometimes in hers. They chose different times of the day, hoping to make
their meetings less obvious.

The best times were the afternoons. Most Orvietans slept an hour or two
after their noon meal, just as most Egyptians did. Sophia and Daoud
would draw the curtains to hold out the heat and dust. They would make
love, their bodies slippery with sweat. Then they would lie side by side
and let themselves cool, talking of what they felt about each other, of
the world, of the mission they had come to Orvieto to accomplish.

They never spent an entire night together. This would cause too much
gossip among Ugolini's servants. For the benefit of the podesta and
whoever else might be watching them, Daoud wanted to maintain the
fiction that he was a trader from Trebizond, far to the east, and Sophia
a Sicilian girl from Siracusa, and they had very little to do with each
other. Alone in his bed at night, Daoud sometimes lay awake thinking
about what Sophia had come to mean to him. He had fallen in love with
her, he realized now, long before he first possessed her body.

If it was their fate to die here in Italy, at least they would have
known this happiness first. But if he succeeded in his mission, and if
he and Sophia were still alive after that, what then? Return to his
emir's palace in El Kahira, to Blossoming Re