Alamut Read online

  “I grew more perfect with time’s passing. Sinan, having commanded, turned to threats. He slew my best hunting hound; he slew the mare I had raised from a foal. I gave him only defiance. Then he let me be. I thought that I had won. I lowered my guard. And when the new message came, I defied it. Yield, it said, or truly I resort to force.

  “I defied it,” she said, “and for a long while again no blow fell. I was wise, I thought. I took great care to guard myself. I thought that he would abduct me; I took every precaution against it.

  “But he is an Assassin. His force is deadly force. He did not take me. He took my lord.”

  Aidan was still. A quivering stillness, like a flame where there is no wind.

  “So you see,” said Margaret, “it is all my doing. I will not surrender the House of Ibrahim into that man’s hands.”

  “Indeed you shall not.”

  His face and his voice between them brought her to her feet. “You have no part in this.”

  “Your enemy has made certain that I do.”

  “Then you had best slay me, for I have been your kinsman’s death.”

  Aidan considered the logic of it. He could do that, even in the white heat of rage. His teeth bared. It was not meant to be a smile. “You know what your folly has won you. That is revenge enough. No, my lady; your suitor owes me a blood debt. He will pay it in his own person, if I have to pull down Alamut stone by stone.”

  “Masyaf,” she corrected him, cool and fearless.

  “Masyaf, and Alamut, and every hut and hovel which owes fealty to the Hashishayun, if need commands it.”

  “All for a single human life?”

  “He was my sister’s son.”

  She touched him as if she thought that he would burn. Her hand was cool and steady. He caught it. It did not try to escape, even when his grip woke pain. “So strong,” she said. Observing only, interested. “Do you truly mourn for him? Or are you glad to have found so mighty a battle?”

  He could kill her. Easily. One effortless blow. Or he could break her mind. She was a mortal woman. She was nothing before his power.

  She knew it. She cared not at all. She could do naught but what she did; she would yield for no man, nor ever for a white he-witch whom grief had driven to folly.

  He let her go. “I will do what I will do,” he said.

  She bowed. It was not submission. “Will you see your kinsman laid in his tomb?”

  “I have time,” he answered her.

  “Indeed,” she said, “you do.” She sat again, called for her women.

  He was dismissed. That was novel enough, and he was bemused enough, that he let her have her will. Later she would pay his price. If he chose to ask it.

  2.

  The baby was teething, and fretful with it. Whatever he wanted, it was not what anyone could give. When his grandmother rocked him, he wailed for a sugar tit; when the aunts tempted him with a sugar tit, he howled for his mother’s breast; when she gave him the breast he struck it hard enough to bruise, and screamed in earnest. His mother was tempted to scream with him, if only to drown him out.

  “A proper little prince he is,” said Laila, who resented him. She had been the most junior wife until he was born, but at least she had had Sayyida to be superior to: a mere daughter of the house, youngest and last to be married, and that to a fatherless nobody. But Sayyida had done what Laila had never been able to do. Given her husband a son, and so become a person of note within the limits of their world.

  “A prince,” Laila repeated, hands pressed prettily to her ears. “His whim is our law. Why, I’ve hardly slept since — ”

  Sayyida set her teeth before she said something regrettable. Her breast throbbed. She ventured to dance Hasan on her knee. His screams modulated to a hiccoughing roar.

  “Here,” said someone new. “What is this?” She swept Hasan into her arms.

  The silence was so abrupt that Sayyida reeled. For a long moment she simply sat and luxuriated in it. Then she opened her eyes and stared.

  Hasan had met his match. His fists were tangled in the most wonderful hair in the world. He had, improbably, begun to laugh.

  Laila loosed a little shriek. Stout comfortable Fahimah had the wits to go in search of food and drink as the laws of hospitality demanded, but she would not look directly at their guest. Mother — to Sayyida she was always and irrevocably that — sat very erect and very still. She would not go so far as to express dislike, but her disapproval was cold enough to burn.

  Sayyida did not care for any of them. “Morgiana!” She flung herself upon her guest, baby and all. Hasan did not even frown. He was quietly and blissfully fascinated. “Morgiana!” his mother cried. “O miraculous! Would you care to adopt a son?”

  Morgiana smiled and shook her head. She was as indulgent with Sayyida’s exuberance as with Hasan’s tugging at her hair. “Peace be with you,” she said, “and with all this house.”

  That put Sayyida in mind of her manners. She bowed as politely as she could when she wanted to dance with delight. “May the peace of Allah be with you, with your coming and your going; and may that going be late and blessed.” She sucked in her breath. “Morgiana! When did you come? Where have you been? How long can you stay? Did you know about Hasan? Have you — ”

  Morgiana laughed. “In order, O impetuous: I came just now, I have been where I have been, I can stay until the evening prayer, and yes, I knew both about Maimoun and about this handsome son of his.”

  Laila made a sign against the evil eye. It was not directly entirely at Morgiana’s boldness in trumpeting Hasan’s virtues to every demon that could hear. “This worthless girlchild,” she said, “has been driving us to distraction.”

  Morgiana hardly glanced at her. Sayyida swallowed a grin. Laila not only knew that she was pretty; she made sure that one else remained unaware of it. But beside Morgiana that shrank to insignificance. Morgiana was wonderfully, outrageously, exhilaratingly beautiful. Her skin was ivory. Her eyes were the clear green of emeralds; or, Laila had said more than once, spitefully, a cat’s. Her hair was rich enough to kill for: beautiful, improbable, the color of the dark sweet wine which no good Muslim would touch, pouring to her knees. She glowed as she sat on a cushion in the worn familiar room, amid the clutter of four women and a baby; even in plain respectable clothes, she looked as if she belonged in gold and silk.

  Fahimah came back with the maid and a small feast. Mother disapproved in silence. Laila sniffed, and frowned. “Zirbajah? Fahimah, we were saving it for — ”

  Mother looked at her. It sufficed. She sulked, but she was silent.

  Morgiana nibbled bread, salt, a little halwah; she dipped a fingerful from the bowl of zirbajah, savoring the rice with its pungency of garlic and spices. Hasan snatched, greedy. She placated him with halwah, with which he was well content.

  A miracle. No, Sayyida thought. Morgiana. The others, even Laila, were wary of her, almost afraid. She was the family legend, and the family secret. A very solid secret, savoring zirbajah, sipping thick sweet kaffé from the silver cup that only came out for a guest of high note.

  When she had tasted everything and complimented it duly — gaining from Fahimah the name of the new pastry cook in the bazaar, who had apprenticed in the sultan’s own kitchens — she settled to an age of uncomfortable chatter.

  Sayyida had trained herself to see the necessity. She had never been able to train herself to be patient. Morgiana never told her best tales in front of the older women. To them she was an infamous eccentric, endured because their lord and master had bidden them endure her, and accorded hospitality because the Prophet enjoined it upon them. To Sayyida she was simply and most complexly Morgiana. And that was wonder and splendor, and tales that had no equal, because they were the truth.

  But she did not tell them to everyone, nor would she cut short the rites of courtesy. Sayyida sat at her feet and tried to remember a matron’s dignity, and struggled not to fidget. Surely Mother knew. She followed Morgiana on every
step of every furlong of the pilgrimage to Mecca; questioned her minutely regarding her every companion; counted every stone of every holy place in that holiest of cities.

  Laila, of all people, came to the rescue of Sayyida’s sanity. She yawned delicately, like a kitten, and stretched in the manner best suited to the multiplicity of her curves. “I beg our guest’s gracious pardon,” she said, “but my lord husband is coming to me tonight, and I must rest, or I shall hardly be fit to please him.”

  Sayyida bit her lip. Mother was above jealousy. Fahimah was oblivious to it. But they were reminded of duties that could not wait. Morgiana would not have them abandon necessity for her sake; no more would she spoil it by naming Sayyida’s name. “I am quite content,” she said, “to wait upon the little prince. If his mother should wish for an hour’s respite...”

  “Of course she should not,” Mother said tartly. “Go on, girl. Take the lady to the garden. And mind you bridle your chatter. She has no need to hear the foolishness that passes in you for conversation.”

  oOo

  Sayyida hugged herself and danced round the rose arbor that was Fahimah’s greatest pride. “O brilliant! O wonderful!” She plucked a blossom and buried her nose in it until she sneezed. Morgiana watched with glinting eyes. Sayyida claimed Hasan, who was hungry, and sat on the grass to feed him. Her grin was anything but matronly. “You planned the whole of it, didn’t you? Even Laila.”

  “Laila needs no plotting but her own.” Morgiana shook rose petals upon Sayyida’s head. Hasan laughed at the breast. Morgiana brushed a hand through his curls, light and quick and oddly tender. Odd, because Morgiana was not a gentle creature. She tossed aside her veils and her dark voluminous robe, uncovering what Mother would have been appalled and Laila much interested to see: the dress of a young man of Damascus.

  “Is it safe?” Sayyida asked. Foolishly, but she could not help herself.

  Morgiana folded her lithe slimness on the grass and plaited her hair with flying fingers, binding it with a bit of green silk, tossing it over her shoulder. Her smile was a white fierce thing. It was not womanly at all, and yet it was utterly female. Very much like the rest of her. “It,” she said, “is quite safe. Ask rather, am I?”

  Sayyida thought about it, carefully, with Hasan tugging lustily where she was most tender. She bent her head over him. “I would die for him,” she said almost to herself. She looked up. “And so,” she said, “would you.”

  Morgiana’s smile vanished. She leaped up. Sayyida, startled, raised her arm to shield her son. She lowered it without apology. Morgiana expected none. She spun into a sudden wild dance, sun to Sayyida’s awkward shadow, graceful as the panther’s spring, and as passionate, and as deadly.

  But not to Hasan. Morgiana dropped down in front of them both. “You trust me too much,” she said.

  Sayyida shook her head.

  “Obstinate.”

  Sayyida smiled.

  Morgiana sighed. “Chit of a child. Do you know what your husband knows of me? A rich man of this city, I; rather too fanatic in my piety; and rather too fond of good Damascus blades, for blade of flesh, alas, I have none. He would pity me, if he despised me any less.”

  “Ah,” said Sayyida, undismayed. “He’s a man, and newly come to proof of it. Of course he’s insufferable.”

  “Does he make you happy?”

  It was not an idle question, however idle its asking. Sayyida shivered slightly. For Hasan she had no fear at all. For his father...

  She gave Morgiana the truth. “I am twenty-one years old. All my sisters were given to husbands as soon as they began their women’s courses. I was the youngest, the last bitter disappointment before Allah took pity on our family and granted it a son, the daughter whom against all duty and propriety my father condescended to love. He let me grow as you’ve seen me grow, happier than I had any right to be. But the truth is the truth. For a woman there is but marriage or the tomb. He asked me. He never commanded me. He offered Maimoun, and I took him.”

  “But are you happy?”

  “You’ve seen Maimoun.” Morgiana’s eyes were narrowing, which was dangerous. Sayyida met them steadily. “He has made me happy.”

  Morgiana closed her eyes. Sayyida swayed, freed from the force of them. It was true, her heart said, beating hard beneath Hasan’s cheek. Maimoun was nothing like perfection. He was too young to be wise, he was brilliant and he knew it, he was male. But he was Maimoun. Set on his wedding night before his wife, looking for the first time at her unveiled face, he had not been appalled. His face had not even fallen. “Not pretty,” he said to her later, judicious, a little drunk. “Not ugly, either. Just exactly right for me.”

  “Tell me,” Sayyida said to her guest, “where you’ve been since I saw you last. Aside from Mecca,” she added dryly.

  “What! Have you no piety?”

  Sayyida bowed as best she could with Hasan to think of. “Verily, O Hajjin, this Sunni heretic pretends to a modicum of devotion. But not to the turning of every stone between Damascus and the Qaabah.”

  Morgiana laughed: a rarity, and glorious. Hasan left the breast to stare at her, laughing with her; nor would he rest until he had regained possession of her lap. Sayyida covered herself demurely and leaned forward. “Now,” she commanded, “tell.”

  “I hear and I obey,” said Morgiana.

  Morgiana had been everywhere. Had done, Sayyida was certain, everything. Things that no woman would dream of doing, and some that even a man could not encompass. When Sayyida was small she had taken every word of every tale for purest truth. When she was older she has dismissed it all as tales and folly. Now she believed it again. Morgiana was Morgiana. She did not need to spin lies.

  She had a gift: a fruit of surpassing strangeness, brown-furred without, green and glistening and tart-sweet within. It came from a country even stranger than itself, farther away than Sayyida could conceive of. “As far as stars?” she asked.

  “Not quite so far,” said Morgiana, “nor as far as I have gone. There are worlds within the world, away over the sea. And people...” She rocked Hasan, eyes vivid with wonders. “Men the color of earth, who worship the sun. Black men who dwell in deserts that would slay the grimmest Bedouin, and they dwell there naked, clothed only in their pride, and all the world to them is but a shadow in the dreamtime. They were not afraid of me. They found me gentle, for a spirit of the air.”

  Sayyida nibbled the last of the fruit. She had Morgiana’s knife to cut it with, a beautiful thing, and new. She turned it in her fingers. “Another of Father’s?”

  “Maimoun’s.”

  Sayyida’s brows went up. “Not, I hope, for my sake.”

  “His work is good,” Morgiana said, “whatever he may think of me.”

  “He doesn’t know the truth.”

  “Do you not trust him?”

  “Father hasn’t seen fit to tell him. How can I?”

  “Your father never saw fit to tell you.”

  “He didn’t need to,” Sayyida said. “He still wishes I’d never learned it for myself. But he’s wise enough, letting Maimoun have his peace. Maimoun is much too insistent that I be sheltered from all the ills of the world.”

  “Even childbirth?”

  Their eyes met in perfect understanding. Sayyida sighed, shrugged. “It gave me Hasan, didn’t it? He is worth anything. Even teething.”

  Morgiana considered him as he drowsed in her arms. “I killed a Christian this morning,” she said.

  Sayyida stilled. She was not thinking of Hasan, or even of Maimoun. Her eyes were level on Morgiana.

  “It was very simple,” said Morgiana. “One thrust, precisely where it mattered most. His wife never stirred. He forges a good blade, does your father.”

  “I hope you told him so.”

  Morgiana went back to her rocking of Hasan. She looked like a girl, a child, hardly yet a woman. Then she turned her head, and her face had no humanity in it.

  Sayyida shivered. It was hard sometimes to remembe
r what Morgiana was. Not a woman. Not even human. She feigned humanity so very well; and then it would strike, all at once, in a word or a gesture, or a flare of light in those great cat-eyes. “Ifritah.” Sayyida barely said it aloud. “Spirit of fire.”

  Morgiana blurred into motion, swifter than a mortal could move; laid Hasan with all gentleness in his mother’s arms; and stilled, utterly, as nothing human could. She sat on her heels as a servant might, but she had never done more than play at servility. As she played at being a woman.

  “I do not play at killing,” she said.

  Sayyida started. “I wish you wouldn’t do that!” She bit her tongue.

  “Do you know,” said Morgiana, “I can say to no one else what I say to you. Not in all my years. No one else has ever known what I truly am. What is it, do you think? Do I grow soft in my dotage?”

  “You’re not old.”

  “Not to look at.” Morgiana’s hands went to her cheeks, as if she searched for signs of the age that would never beset her. Sayyida did not know how old she was. But Sayyida’s father had inherited her, like his old and honored name, like that trade which had begotten it, like the house in which he had been born. Her blades had always come from that one forge. Her name and her guise had changed with each appearance, but the smiths had always known the truth of her. None, Sayyida was assured, had thought of her for more than a moment as a woman. She was a demon in woman’s shape, a servant of the Angel of Death, the Slave of Alamut.

  “Masyaf, now,” said Morgiana. “Alamut is no longer what it was.” She laughed, soft and bitter. “When my putative master revealed the resurrection of the Lost Imam — that being his unworthy and quite unbalanced self — and declared the Millennium, I left him. There was no place in his new world for the Slave of Alamut. But Sinan the crafty had carved himself a kingdom in Syria. He could make good use of an immortal murderer, who cannot be seen, who cannot be caught, who cannot count the legions of souls whom she has sent to Iblis in the name of the Faith.” She lowered her hands from her face, turned them, examining them. “Strange. The blood never shows.” Her eyes flashed up. “Is that why you let me touch your son?”