CALIPHATE(41)

"I will try," he'd promised, then added, with a very sad smile, "I wish I could take you up on your offer."

At the slave barracks, Ishmael walked from cell to cell, looking for Petra. Though the cells were full of wretched, hungry, dirty and miserable slaves, and even though some of them were women, Petra was not among them. Ishmael looked for the barracks master or the chief slave dealer to ask about her.

"The reddish-blond Nazrani?" the slave dealer shrugged. "She's too choice to let rot down here. Or she will be, once her bruises and scratches heal. In any event, I'll get a much better price for her all dolled up and in proper clothing. Still, if you want to inspect her, she's upstairs." He pointed as a flight of stone steps. "Remember," the dealer cautioned, "look but don't touch."

Bowing his head and thanking the dealer, Ishmael made his way up the stone steps to a corridor. There were perhaps a half dozen doorways, each of them barred. He called out, "Petra?"

A pair of small, delicate hands appeared at one of the barred doors. "Ishmael, is that you?" a desperate voice called out.

He ran to it . . . and stopped dead once he saw. Suddenly, the purse at his belt seemed very light indeed. Clothes, hair, face . . . despite the bruises, Petra had been transformed from a skinny twelve-year-old into something—

"Beautiful," Ishmael said, despairingly. "They've made you beautiful. Allah have pity; I'll never be able to buy you for Miss Besma now."





Interlude


Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Germany,

13 February, 2005


They hadn't moved Mahmoud from the hospital at Erfurt to the Kreisskrankenhaus Kitzingen until he'd come out of the coma and shown some fair progress towards recovery. This had taken six days. On the seventh he was moved. By the ninth, he was spending almost as much time awake as unconscious, though a fair amount of that awake time was spent in pain and nausea. Three days after that the hospital pronounced him well enough to go home with Gabrielle. The next day, she'd picked him up.

"I can't stay here anymore, Gabi," he said, on the drive home.

"In Kitzingen, you mean? Why? There's no trouble here."

"No . . . I mean in Germany. I mean in Europe."

"But where would you go? Where would we go?"

"I am thinking . . . America, if we could get in there."

"America," she sneered, not at her lover but at the thought. "Why ever would anyone want to go to America? I couldn't, I mean I just couldn't abide it. I think you're still distraught and not thinking clearly. Just because some thugs attacked you—"

Mahmoud sighed. How to explain?

"It's not because they attacked me personally," he began. "It's that they attacked me as a Moslem, not even caring that I am not much of one. Now you think it's an isolated incident, I am sure. But it's not. How long do you think it will be before they, or people like them, attack another?"

Before she could even begin to form an answer he said, "I would be surprised if it hasn't happened already, a half dozen times. And even that isn't the main problem."

"Then what is 'the main problem'?"

"My people will begin to strike back. You've heard the sermons; you've read the papers I've shown you. Troubles are coming here, troubles are coming to all of Europe. Bad troubles. People like me, reasonable people, are going to run. And who will be left? The lunatics. And don't tell me about self-fulfilling prophecies; some prophecies are self-fulfilling because they're destined to come true."

"I can't go to America," she said definitively. "Canada, maybe."

"Canada's as badly off as Europe," he said. "Lunacy is coming there, too. Australia?"

"Too militaristic," she answered, "too much in the Americans' camp. Too much a willing tool for American imperialism. Why, anyway? Why are you so certain everything's going down the tubes."

"Because my people could fuck up a wet dream," he answered, putting his head down in his hands. "And I'm beginning to think that yours can, too."





Church of St. Vinzenz, Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Georgia, 5 March, 2005


It didn't appear to Mahmoud to be a very old church, certainly nothing like the age of the town. Stuccoed off-white, with three inset crosses framing a niched statue of its namesake, the church's roof was red tiled. A blocky square tower jutted out from the left. Mahmoud entered the church by passing under a small overhang, likewise with tiled roof, the whole being held up by twin columns. His footsteps were still a little unsteady, the legacy of his beating.

It was a decidedly odd feeling, entering a Catholic church. There were some in Mahmoud's native Egypt, of course, and rather more Coptic churches. Yet he'd never been in one.