ou must be dreaming. Trees do not
bear fruit all year round in this part of the world, David. Your bitter
beverage I can supply. But let me see to your wound first." She raised
the blanket that covered his body. He felt his skin grow hot from scalp
to toes. She was gazing upon his nude body. He was glad he was lying on
his stomach rather than on his back.

Did his nakedness mean anything to her? Among Christians, he knew, men
and women often saw each other naked. Not only did women go through the
streets with their faces uncovered, but in warm weather the common folk,
men and women both, walked to the public baths with barely a bit of
cloth wrapped around their loins. And all Christians slept naked. When
Sophia saw his body like this, was it just another unclothed body, like
the many she had doubtless seen in her lifetime? Did she feel any
embarrassment? Or desire? As for himself, his sense of helplessness made
him feel only embarrassed, nothing more.

He turned his head again to look at her. She was intent on administering
the poultice, and that doubtless took her mind off his nakedness. She
had lifted off the old cloth, stained an ugly yellow-brown, and dropped
it to the floor. He got a glimpse of the wound, a red slit about half a
finger's length with black knots of thread in it in the back of his
right leg, halfway between knee and buttock. Gently she patted and
stroked on the wound a paste made of ground rose petals, lime water, and
egg white, the Sufi remedy he had taught her to make.

Lorenzo had used his knife to open the hole made by the arrow so that he
would not tear Daoud's flesh pulling the barbed head out. While Lorenzo
worked over him, Daoud drew upon Saadi's final teaching to him to defend
himself against the pain. In his mind he began to create the drug called
Soma. He envisioned it as a bowl of glowing, silver-colored liquid, and
he believed it could form a capsule around any part of his body where
there was pain and wall it off from the rest of himself, at the same
time filling him with a feeling of well being.

_Once you have experienced the effects of material drugs on your body
and learned to master them_, Saadi said to him, _you have the knowledge
you need to create a drug of the mind, Soma. This is more powerful and
more reliable, and it will not harm your body in any way. Indeed, Soma
will make your body stronger. It will calm your mind, fill you with
peace, sometimes give you visions. But if