Daoud's head swam as he tried to fathom how the crippled dwarf who had been part of the crowd of tradesmen entering the great Hohenstaufen stronghold with him, who had witnessed Daoud's arrest by Celino at the gate and even seemed to pray in his behalf, could be here conducting a public execution in the city of the pope. He must have been a Guelfo spy, by coincidence infiltrating Lucera at the same time as Daoud. He had been in Manfred's pastry kitchen. Had he really been sleeping, or had he seen Manfred, Lorenzo, and Daoud walk through together? _If he sees me here in the crowd, he will expose me!_ The people around Daoud, their breath reeking of onions and garlic, pressed him so tightly he could barely move. Twisting his body, he managed to get his back turned to the scaffold. This put him face-to-face with a broad-shouldered man in a mud-brown tunic, with a thick black beard and mustache. The man laughed at him. "Would you turn away? Have you no stomach for Erculio's holy work?" Daoud fixed the man with a stare, thinking of what he would like to do to him. He realized, though, that if he tried to fight his way out of the piazza, the little man on the scaffold would certainly notice him. If he simply stayed where he was and watched, his would be one face in thousands, and the dwarf obviously had more pressing business. He reached up to the soft cap on his head, making sure it covered most of his blond hair. Without a word to the man in brown, who had shrunk from his stare, Daoud turned and faced the platform. He was just in time to see the bent dwarf--Erculio, was that his name?--bless himself, just as he had at Lucera. Daoud's heart pounded as he imagined himself and Lorenzo and Ugolini suffering as this naked, bleeding blistered heretic was. _And Sophia! God forbid! I would cut her throat myself before I let anything like this happen to her._ The thought of Sophia being tortured in public was such agony that he wanted to scream and fight his way out of the piazza. He did Sufi breathing exercises to calm himself. They had tied the moaning victim down on a wooden sawhorse. Lying on his back, he was low enough that the bent man could easily reach any part of him. One of the executioners in red held the victim's mouth open, and the little man reached in with one hand, pulled forth the tongue and sliced it off. Like a jongleur producing an apple from his sleeve, he waved the severed tongue at the crowd, then threw it. A forest of hands clutched at it. Common people everywhere, Daoud recalled, believed that parts of the bodies of condemned men could be used in magic. It took a moment for Erculio to saw the heretic's nose off. With tongue and nose gone, the condemned man's screams no longer sounded human. They were like the bellowings of a steer being clumsily slaughtered. Daoud realized that he was grateful for the problem that the little man presented. It gave him something urgent to think about other than what he was watching.