Caliphate

Chapter Six

Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 12 Jumadah II, 1533 AH

(13 May, 2109)

"I don't understand why we work so hard after we do the housework," Petra said, despairingly. "I mean… you go to school while I work all day. Then you come home and Ishmael escorts us so we can do outside work for pay. Then we spend most every night while you try to drum some education through my dense skull into my stupid brain. It's too much."

"Your skull isn't dense and you're not stupid," Besma corrected.

Besma bit her lower lip, uncertain whether she should tell Petra the reasons. Finally, she decided that, yes, the slave girl who was also her best friend was old enough to know.

"I'm fourteen now," she began. "Within a year, two years at the most, my father will arrange a marriage for me. Ordinarily, I'd ask for you to be part of my dowry so I could free you. But I know my stepmother won't permit that so she can keep a hold over me even after I'm married."

Petra suddenly looked sick at the thought of her only real friend going away. Indeed, she felt sick, so much so that she almost missed the next sentence.

"We're working so we can make enough money to buy you from my father or, if he won't sell to me, to let you buy your own freedom which, as a pious man, he is certain to permit. Either way, you'll be free."

"Free," Petra echoed, wistfully. "I can't even imagine… "

Besma smiled, ruefully. While she was not, technically, a slave, she would never be free and she knew it.

USAF Airship Prince Eugene, 15 May, 2109

The airship moved nearly silently over the shoreline. From the officers' lounge in the lower stern, Hamilton could see the whitecapped waves buffeting that shoreline and the vague outline of the once magnificent mansions which had stood guard over equally ostentatious yachts. As the airship progressed, the shore fell away and the ruins of Los Angeles began to come into view.

Los Angeles had never been rebuilt. With each forward mile more and more ruins came into view. It was much worse than Kansas City had been. Most of the dead in L.A. had never been found.

Hollywood had never recovered, either. What the blast hadn't done the purges had. This was so much true that Australia (an allied state, neither a protectorate nor an imperially ruled province) provided the bulk of films shown in the contiguous fifty-seven states plus the imperial provinces of Ontario and Quebec. What didn't come from Australia, feature-length film-wise, tended to be Indian in origin, that, or Japanese.

IDI exercised very tight control over which films were permitted to be shown in public theaters.

Hamilton hadn't been home since Hodge's funeral. That had been miserable enough-virtually her entire hometown grieving as one- that for a time he'd doubted he'd ever go home again. Instead, he'd taken his leaves and R amp;Rs (Rest and Recreation periods, also called I amp;I, Intercourse and Intoxication) around the Pacific, drinking heavily and screwing whatever was available. That is, he'd screwed whatever was available for a while, right up until he'd realized that none of them-Anglo girls from Australia, delicate and graceful Japanese, superbly-legged and almond-eyed Thais, or smoky-dark Hindus-made him miss Laurie a jot less. With that realization his on-leave drinking had gone up even as his sexual escapades dropped to nothing.

He sipped at a scotch now, a product of the Province of Scotland imported through the allied Kingdom of England, even as the crumbling ruins of Los Angeles passed below.

Thompson was gone, not killed but promoted out of command over his vociferous and bitter objections. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, had been killed, victim of a five hundred pound bomb buried in a village square and command detonated by a Moro who was likewise killed.

The company was Miles' now and Hamilton was Miles' exec. After two years of combat and forcible resettlement operations, Miles had gone from beefy to thin and Hamilton-despite the calories from the drinking-from thin to almost skeletal.

The tall, now thin, newly promoted black captain signaled the bartender in the lounge for a beer and sat beside Hamilton.

"Pretty awful, isn't it?" Miles said, gesturing towards the destruction spreading out below.

"Worse than any village or town we cleared out for Christian settlement," Hamilton agreed, taking another sip at his scotch. "Though those were bad enough."

Miles nodded agreement. After a time-once they'd realized that they weren't going to win; they weren't going to hold; and the combined Imperial and Philippine forces were going to drive them completely out of their homeland-the Moros ' fighting had grown desperate, even suicidal. And, in the long run, it had made no difference to the outcome. They were gone from the Philippines, their fields and homes now the property of the settlers who came after.

"I had relatives down there, so say the family legends," Miles sighed. "Must have been awful."

"Yeah… at least we left alive those Moros who wanted to live… most of them anyway." Hamilton sounded perhaps a bit bitter.

"It did get old after a while," Miles agreed.

"Where are we going next, do you think?" Hamilton asked. "I mean after refit and retraining at Stewart."

"Nobody knows," Miles said. "The PI campaign is over. Class Two statehood for them within two years." Class Two Statehood was like normal statehood excepting only that the state had but one senator, and representation in the House operated under the new three-fifths rule. In was one way of centering control of the empire in the original fifty states. "The Canadian rebels-"

"'There are no 'Canadian' rebels," Hamilton parroted. "There are Americans. Then there are imperial subjects. There are also rebels, allies-'"

"'-and enemies. No Canadians, however.'" Miles shrugged. "Yes, John, I know the Pravda. In any case, the rebels in the frozen north have been quiet for a while now. And with the Latin provinces being admitted to Class Two, slowly but surely, troubles down that way are dropping, too. Basically, we've got the world pretty much the way we want it."

Not entirely, Hamilton thought. Not entirely the way I want it. If it were, I'd still have Laurie.

"I hear Charlie Company is opening up and the colonel's thinking of putting you in command," Miles said.

"I heard the same rumors," Hamilton agreed. He shook his head in negation, "I'm really not interested. I've had it with burned villages and resettlement and feeling like some kind of monster. Thompson had it right; you've got to find a reason to sleep at night and I never did. What's worse, I deliberately never looked for one. After Laurie was killed…"

There was, after all, a reason the colonel was considering putting Hamilton in command of Company C. For the last two years he'd been the most unflagging butcher of Moros in the battalion. There was also a reason the colonel hadn't yet put Hamilton in command. In those two years he'd lost something of his soul, or "whatever it is that keeps a man on two legs instead of four."

Miles shrugged again. "I know. You still thinking of punching out? You've got two years to go, you know."

"There's a way around that. The Office of Strategic Intelligence"this was the successor to the old Central Intelligence Agency which had been renamed following the purges-"can get two years waived- even three, actually, though I don't need three-for people who sign up with them. As to whether I want to or not… I'll listen to them. I've an appointment with their recruiter at Kevin Barry's in Savannah when we get back."

"I have a hard time seeing you as a spook, even if you're thinner than a corpse."

"Just something I've been thinking about. I don't know myself. I know something though."

"What's that?"

"If I keep up at this Einsatzgruppen shit, I'll go crazier than I am."

"They do dirty shit, too," Miles said.

"Dirtier than us? Not possible."

"Never know what the future holds," Miles observed.

Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 17 Jumadah II, 1533 AH (18 May, 2109)

Al Khalifa was thinking about the future. My first husband wants nothing to do with our son, preferring to lavish his substance on his Christian slave girl's bastard. If I am to secure my son's position for the future, it can only be by having Abdul Mohsem make him his heir. But he fawns on his bitch of a daughter so, spoiling the little tramp rotten.

She glanced up, to where twelve-year-old Petra scrubbed a hallway floor on her hands and knees. Al Khalifa snarled, thinking, Nazrani bitch! And soon enough Besma will be married off and I'll lose control of her unless I can keep this little twat under my control. I know they've been plotting to get the Christian girl her freedom. Bah! As if a Christian is worthy of freedom.

Then again, if I can't keep control of the Nazrani, and lose my power over Besma, perhaps I can make it so that Besma infuriates her father enough that he cuts her off from her inheritance? She's hot tempered; that will help. Maybe if…

I must consult the law, was al Khalifa's thought. And then, if the law supports what I have in mind, I must consult with my son… and he with his friends.

Savannah, Georgia, 25 May, 2109

The strains of ancient music wafted up the stairs, seeping under the door of a small, green-painted room. Hamilton and another manhe'd given his name as "Caruthers"-sat at a wooden table covered by a checked tablecloth. Between them sat a bottle of Irish whiskey, two glasses, and a small metallic box the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes.

"All clear," announced a metallic voice, emanating from the small box.

Caruthers, a deliberately nondescript, middle-aged black man, with a receding hairline and clothed lightly against the city's oppressive late spring; He said, "It had best be all clear, Atkinson, or you will be canned. By that I mean-"

"-that I will be ground up, melted down, and stamped out into cat food cans. Yes, sir, I know. The room is clear."

Hamilton raised one eyebrow. "I've never before met a machine with personality. Atkinson?"

Caruthers chuckled slightly and said, "Atkinson was an intelligence warrant and the stupidest human being I've ever met, so I named the machine for him. It doesn't have a personality, but then neither did the real Atkinson. I programmed a certain number of smart-ass answers into the thing because, frankly, my job permits me minimal human interaction. And since the original Atkinson was barely human, and a smart ass, it sort of fits."

How does a recruiter have "minimal human interaction"? Hamilton wondered.

"Even recruiting," Caruthers continued, "isn't really human interaction. To me you're just a file, Lieutenant Hamilton, a block to check. Don't take that personally; if I allowed myself to think of my recruits as human it might bother me when they fail to return from a job."

Ah, wise, very wise. If we can avoid thinking of our losses as people then the pain is much less.

Caruthers said, "Atkinson, you moron, pull up Lieutenant Hamilton's file." Immediately a hologram mimicking a brown file appeared above the table. Caruthers didn't pretend to study it, nor even order the machine to open it.

"You were well regarded in your battalion, I see," the recruiter said.

Hamilton pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. "I think they felt sorry for me."

"Yes, perhaps," Caruthers agreed. "A pity about young Lieutenant Hodge; we always have openings for husband-wife teams. They draw much less suspicion and are about three times more effective- synergy, don't you know; that and teamwork-than two single operatives or artificial couples. Never mind that; we see you as more the lone operative at this point.

"Atkinson, you dolt: linguistic scores."

The holographic file opened to an equally insubstantial sheet documenting, among other things, Hamilton's Defense Language Aptitude Test, or DLAT, which was used not only by the military, but by State and OSI as well.

"We could teach you any language or combination of languages," Caruthers said, admiringly. "This would make you useful anywhere. Do you already speak any languages beyond English, Spanish, and French?"

"A little German, and I picked up fairly decent Tagalog in the PI campaign."

"Not much use for that anymore, except in the Philippine Scouts as the Philippine Army is absorbed into the Imperial Army and expanded. Certainly, we don't have a great need for the language. You didn't want to be a sepoy general, after all, did you?"

"I don't want to be any kind of general," Hamilton answered. "I don't think I ever did."

Caruthers shrugged. "If you join us, of course, you won't be."

"What will I be?"

"That I am not sure of, though the way we do business now I will be your handler, if you join and are accepted for field work. Several of my colleagues have looked over your file and suggested you might be best used for direct action, 'wet work,' as we sometimes say. That, however, is all speculation. Your exact training track will not be determined until you are well into the BIOC, the Basic Intelligence Operatives Course."

"I get to be a shavetail again, do I?" Hamilton asked, noticing the similarity between the letters BIOC and IOBC.

"Not exactly," Caruthers said. "For one thing, we won't get you up at two in the morning for a nine AM movement." Seeing the look on Hamilton's face, Caruthers added, "Yes, Lieutenant Hamilton, I was a grunt, too. That's where I met that buffoon, Atkinson."

Kitznen, Affrankon, 24 Jumadah II, 1533 AH

(25 May, 2109)

It was still early morning, though the sun was full up. Besma was at school, Ishmael having escorted her. Most of the other servants were off at their various tasks. Inside the house of Abdul Mohsem were only Petra, al Khalifa, her son, and two of her son's friends.

With a grunt, Fudail, al Khalifa's son, closed the kitchen door firmly, tripping the latch. Two of his friends, Hanif and Ghalib, stood leaning against adjacent walls with their arms folded. The three formed a U, trapping Petra against the last wall. Not liking the looks in the boys' eyes, liking even less the obscene wagging of Hanif's tongue, the slave girl backed away.

Her back pressed against the broad oak table, the same one upon which al Khalifa flogged her approximately weekly. She remembered that there was a knife on the table and turned to grab it.

Too late. Like a cat, Fudail sprang forward, grabbing the slave's arms in a firm grip. He pulled her from the table. "Move that knife, Ghalib," Fudail ordered. "We'll have use for the table."

"Let me go!" Petra demanded, trying to kick backwards, a blow Fudail easily avoided. In answer to the demand, Fudail released one arm, the hand of which found new purchase in her long blond hair. The other hand spun her around, causing her hair to twist and pull. He released the other arm and slapped her across the face, twice, hard. Petra would wear the bruises for many days.

"In France they call this ' le tournante,'" Fudail explained.

Taking advantage of the girl's shock, Fudail, still grasping her by the hair, reached up and tore open her bodice. Her breasts, still growing, were too small to actually need a bra. The ripped cloth exposed them to the boys. Ghalib and Hanif clapped their approval. Fudail's fingers grasped the right nipple, squeezed as hard as he could, and then twisted, raising a cry of pain and despair from Petra.

"I think the Nazrani whore liked that," Hanif said.

"Then she'll like the rest of the program even more," said Fudail. He twisted Petra's hair harder, forcing her to her knees. "Open your mouth, slut," he ordered, using his free hand to lift his kurta, the long Islamic shirt, above his privates.

When Petra failed to obey immediately, Fudail twisted her hair still more viciously until her mouth opened in a pained, horrified moan, The moan was cut off as he stuffed her mouth with his penis.

"Don't even think about biting," he hissed, "or I'll cut your throat with a dull, rusty knife. Now suck it, whore."

Terrified, Petra did. Fudail kept his grip on her hair, moving her head back and forth even as he thrust with his hips. That the repeated pressure of his penis on the back of her throat caused her to gag, and tears to pour from her eyes, bothered him not a whit.

Fudail was young, no more than fifteen himself, and had no great experience. In scant minutes he'd groaned and thrashed and filled the girl's mouth with his seed. "Swallow it, slut!" he commanded.

Finished for the moment, he hurled Petra to Hanif's feet. "It's your turn," Fudail said. "Use her the same way. We'll fuck her after she's sucked each of us."

Hanif repeated Fudail's performance, hauling the girl up to her knees by her hair and forcing himself into her mouth. Petra barely resisted. When Ghalib's turn came she resisted not at all.

Then they took the last of her clothing and tied her, face down, to the oaken table.

It isn't me; it isn't me; it isn't me, Petra repeated in her mind, over and over, as the boys took turns with her. Her arms and legs were tied to the table legs with crude rope. Her belly and young breasts pressed to the smooth surface of the table. A thin trickle of blood ran from between her legs and onto that surface at one end; tears gathered in a puddle at the other. The forced rubbing of her nipples on the oak was beginning to hurt almost as much as her nether regions did.

It isn't me; it isn't me; it isn't me.

She'd lost count of how many times she'd been violated, though she could remember the ways. The times had been many; the ways only three. Of those, one had hurt and still did, while the other had been so agonizing the boys had gagged her first to keep her from screaming. The gag remained, even after the last of them had pulled out of her anus.

It isn't me; it isn't me; it isn't me.

And then, with a final gasp and groan from Fudail, it was over and the boys were untying her from the table.

"Cover yourself, bitch," Fudail demanded, tossing her torn clothing across her back. "And if you think you can do any good by telling anyone, I assure you it will be far worse on you than it will on us."

In a daze, Petra arose and pulled her garments over herself. In a daze she staggered back to the room she shared with Besma. It was only when she'd collapsed into a corner that she finally screamed.

Not far from the door to Besma's room, al Khalifa smiled wickedly. Perfect, she thought.

Besma found Petra there, later that afternoon, no longer screaming but quietly rocking and weeping, her head in her hands and self-inflicted scratches across her face and upper torso. When Besma knelt before her friend she saw bruises that had turned ugly-black and blue and swollen.

"What happened? My God, what happened?"

Petra didn't answer. She lifted her head from her hands but stared off into the distance blankly. At this distance, Besma saw the scratches, little lines of blood welling up, clearly. She looked down at the ones lower, those across Petra's chest and breasts. Around them, the material of the slave girl's garment was plainly torn. Two rounded red spots marked where Petra's abraded nipples had touched the cloth. Looking down still further, Besma saw the blood stain where the garment touched between Petra's legs.

"Who DID this!" Besma demanded. When Petra didn't answer she shook the girl violently, repeating, "Who DID this?"

Petra's lower jaw shook as more tears welled up. "Fudail… " She gasped out. "Fudail… and his friends."

Besma's hands were curled into claws. Her long red nails-her father indulged her in the vanity-ached for the eyes of Fudail. Her teeth longed to rip out her stepbrother's throat. She walked with purposeful steps to the house's main room. Ishmael, standing at the inner door, backed away when he saw her face.

Her father sat on a cushion on the floor, reading an expensive, leather-bound copy of the Koran. al Khalifa, wearing a satisfied smile, sat demurely in a corner opposite Abdul Mohsem, busying herself with knitting. Fudail sat near his mother, eating some nuts from a bowl. If anything, his smile was even more satisfied than his mother's.

"Monster," Besma whispered, as she closed the distance between her and her stepbrother. "Monster," she said aloud as she neared his sitting form. "Monster!" she screamed as she launched herself, claws outstretched, for his eyes.

Fudail barely managed to get his arms over his eyes in time. That didn't stop Besma. Though normally he was much stronger than she was, sheer hate and rage had given her a strength beyond her age, size, and sex. Blocked from his eyes she still managed to bowl him over onto the floor. While one of her claws raked his throat, the other sought his penis, intending, if at all possible, to rip the thing off. At the same time her teeth chewed one of his arms, causing blood to squirt out over her face.

She got a good grip on his penis, but discovered it wouldn't tear out so easily. Instead, she let it go and grabbed his testicles. Those she grasped and squeezed, bringing forth from the rapist a gagging shriek: "Mother! Help me!"

Al Khalifa was the first to try to drag the little she-demon off of her prized son. Besma managed to get one kick to her stepmother's face, sending the woman sprawling.

"Abdul Mohsem, do something!" al Khalifa screamed from the floor. "Stop her!"

As shocked as anyone present by the attack, Abdul Mohsem called, "Ishmael! Help me!" Between them they managed to draw Besma's head away from Fudail's throat (the boy had been losing the battle to keep her teeth away). Her father and his slave also managed to pull her off of Fudail, but the last thing she held onto was the boy's scrotum. He screamed again as his testes were nearly forced out of their sack by Besma's fanatical iron grip.

"Hold her, Ishmael," the father ordered. "And just what in the ninety and nine beautiful names of Allah is going on here?"

"That filthy bastard raped Petra," Besma cursed, still showing her now bloody claws and struggling to get out from Ishmael's control. "He and two of his pig friends. I'll kill the swine, I swear I will." Her struggle to get away from Ishmael intensified. "Let me go! Let me at the piece of pig filth!"

Abdul Mohsem took a deep breath. He looked over at Fudail, still gasping and now beginning to vomit onto the rug on the floor, the yellowish, chunky stain spreading even as it sank into the carpet. Al Khalifa had recovered and had positioned herself protectively in front of her son.

"What happened?" Abdul Mohsem demanded, quite despite Fudail's obvious distress. "Tell me what happened!"

"Hanif… and Ghalid… and I… were in the kitchen. The little… Nazrani slut… threw herself… at us."

"Liar!" Besma shrieked, twisting like a python and redoubling her efforts to get out from Ishmael's grasp. "Filthy pig liar!"

"My son is a good boy," al Khalifa insisted. "He would never do such a thing. And I've seen the little slave wench wriggling her ass in front of the boys whenever she had the chance. It's obvious what happened; that he's telling the truth."

"You fucking cunt! You liar! You bitch-whore-slut-twat! You cocksucking, manipulative, vicious tramp! "

Abdul Mohsem's eyes widened in shock. He'd never imagined his dear Besma even knew such words.

"Father," Besma nearly wept, "she beats Petra all the time for no reason, beats her like an animal and for no reason. She put her stinking bastard of a son up to this; I know she did."

"Nonsense," al Khalifa insisted, her chin rising haughtily. "I maintain discipline in the household, as the hadiths insist I must."

"There must be a trial," Abdul Mohsem announced. In truth, he simply didn't want to get in the middle of a domestic dispute if he could dump the responsibility elsewhere. "Let the judges decide where the truth lies."

Besma wept alone, seated in the back of the courtroom. In the front, fully draped and in chains, Petra was even more alone. Even so, she did not weep. Tears were, for the nonce, beyond her.

"The law is very clear," the turbaned judge explained patiently, and even perhaps a little sadly. "We have one Nazrani female, not even a woman yet by their reckoning but still we will give her testimony the full weight of a woman, under ours, and even of a woman of the faithful. That is to say, we have one half of a story claiming rape without provocation.

"On the other hand, we have three males, all of whom agree that there was no rape, that the slave threw herself upon them. Each of these witnesses counts fully. Thus, by a weight of six to one, the testimony is that the rape, if it was a rape, is the fault of the slave girl. This is corroborated by the testimony of the woman, al Khalifa, that the slave girl did not even cry out until the supposed rape was over. Not even the slave's own words refute that."

The judge opened a heavy volume and began to read, verbatim: "If I came across a rape crime, I would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life… because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn't have snatched it.

"If you get a kilo of meat, and you don't put it in the fridge or in the pot or in the kitchen but you leave it on a plate in the backyard, and then you have a fight with the neighbor because his cats eat the meat, you're crazy. Isn't this true?" The judge looked up for confirmation. All the men present nodded their heads with the wisdom.

Continuing, the judge said, "If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats', or the uncovered meat's? The uncovered meat is the disaster. If the meat was covered the cats wouldn't roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won't get it."

The judge cleared his throat, then looked left and right for agreement from his two co-judges.

"It is the judgment of this court that the slave girl, Petra bint Minden, shall be taken from this court to the pens reserved for slaves for sale, that she be auctioned next Friday to the highest bidder. That the proceeds from that sale shall go first to the court's fees, then to her current owner, Abdul Mohsem. As for the boy, Fudail, who suffered injury in the attack by Abdul Mohsem's daughter Besma, we judge that no recompense is due him and further adjudge that he and his two friends, Hanif and Ghalid, shall each receive thirty lashes on the soles of their feet-"

At this patent injustice al Khalifa gasped with indignation.

The judge sneered. "And if you interrupt this court again, woman, you shall be next in line for lashes after your son and his friends."

"They won't even let me see her," Besma wailed to her father.

"I gave those orders," Abdul Mohsem said. "It would do neither of you any good to be together again."

The Moslem girl's eyes flashed with anger. "We will be together again, father. I love her like my own child and I will not be separated from her."

"You will never see her again."

"Let me tell you something, father," Besma said, her voice very firm and sure. "If you do not go and buy her back, bidding against yourself if necessary, you will never have a moment's peace out of me." Besma turned away, went to the bookshelf, and withdrew Abdul Mohsem's prized Koran. This she held flat in her left hand, placing her right above it. "This I swear, father. If Petra is not returned here and freed- Do you hear me? Freed!-I shall become the greatest whore in the province, a greater whore even than that vicious slut you wed. I will bring shame to our clan that will last until the final generation. There will be no cave deep enough to-"

Of its own accord Abdul Mohsem's hand lashed out, slapping his daughter across the mouth with a force hard enough to spin her to the floor. "I am your father and you will be silent."

Besma smiled through her pain. "You can silence me now, father. Do you not think my voice will carry when I writhe in heat under slaves and stable boys? Bring me back my friend!"

" It will not happen! "

Again, listening from around a corner, al Khalifa thought, Perfect.

There was really nothing in Islam to prevent a slave from owning a slave. Shamsuddin Iltutmish, for example, a sultan, had been the slave of a slave. Thus, Ishmael, armed with the money Besma and Petra had saved towards Petra's freedom, went to the slave barracks not far from the crooked tower.

"Please buy her, Ishmael," Besma had begged, pressing the coins into his hands. "Buy her so that we can free her. Don't let what is planned for her happen. She's too pretty. You know what they'll sell her to be."

He'd agreed, of course. He'd never really been able to deny Besma anything. And when she'd said, "I would give you my body for your enjoyment, if you thought you could make use of it," his heart had melted.

"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.

In the dim shadows toward the front, by the ornate altar, Mahmoud saw a priest going about some inexplicable business. He cleared his throat, nervously, causing the priest to turn.

"Can I help you, my son?" the priest asked.

"Possibly… sir," -for Mahmoud didn't yet know to address the priest as "Father"-"just possibly."