The Dagger and the Cross Read online

  “That is the Arabian head. The large eye, see, set well down from the poll, and the profile curved inward, and the nostril half a handspan wide when it flares. They drink the wind, these horses.”

  “They are beautiful. So light as they move; so fiery. Alas that I’m too tall for their smallness.”

  “They could carry you easily,” she said.

  “If I didn’t mind trailing my feet behind me.” Gwydion was laughing, though his face was quiet. He ran his hand down his mare’s neck, smoothing her mane. “This lady will do for me. Such a gift she is, and half an Arab, too, like her cousin who carries my brother. She would be greatly prized in our country.”

  “So she would,” said Morgiana. “Aidan talks of taking a small herd back with him when he goes: a stallion or two and a few mares of Arab breeding, to cross with your own horses. Your mare is one of his testings, as his gelding was Gereint’s.”

  Gwydion’s bright mood darkened at the name of his sister’s son. Whom she had killed; for whose death she had paid, and would pay down all the long years.

  He did not say it. For that, he won her approbation, if not yet her heart. He gazed ahead across the wide plain of Acre, with the hunt in exuberant cry upon it and the ridge of Carmel blue beyond. The land was losing the green of spring, going dun and brown where there were no people to till it. The orchards, the fields of cane, the cattle in their pastures, were fenced and bordered with desert. Rich land, but dry and forbidding, if one was born in the west.

  She, whose first memory was of the desert of Persia, would never perfectly understand a country where rain fell, sometimes, every day. Sometimes even for days on end.

  “It’s very green,” said Gwydion, following her thoughts as she allowed, “and often grey above it with clouds and mist. But the bones of the land show through on the moors and the headlands. There’s strength enough there, for all the water that runs over it.”

  “Water can be as strong as any force that is.”

  Gwydion’s mare slipped the rein and began to graze. The stallion was not hungry, except for her. Morgiana persuaded him to halt. He tossed his head and stamped, but surrendered abruptly and snatched mouthfuls of grass between eye-rollings and yearnings toward the tall grey beauty.

  “I am glad,” said Gwydion out of nowhere that she could discern, “that you suit my brother so well.”

  “Do I, then?”

  “Perfectly.” He leaned on the pommel of his saddle, at ease, so much like Aidan that she blinked. “I admit, I had my fears. You were the hunter, after all; and he has a penchant for trapping himself in oaths which he will not, or cannot, break.”

  “Yes,” she said, amused. “I did trap him, didn’t I? In front of the whole High Court, with King Baldwin himself called upon to make the judgment. Whether a bargain we struck, that I should settle his account with the Old Man of the Mountain, and he should give himself to me until he satisfied me, was in fact fulfilled by a night of his...service; or whether satisfaction should encompass more than a few hours’ pleasure. Whether he had sworn to be my night’s lover, or my husband.” She smiled and shook her head. “It was hardly wise of him to strike a bargain with a Muslim, and he a Frank and a prince, and no merchant at all.”

  “All Muslims are merchants, he tells me.” Gwydion ran his fingers through his mare’s mane, idly, eyes lowered. “He should have known better. He knows enough of kings and princes.”

  “No king in the world can outmaneuver a good trader.” She looked to see if he was offended. He was not; not at all. The corner of his mouth curved just visibly upward. “He did well enough by the bargain. He’s a wealthy man, as wealthy as any in Outremer; and much of that is Assassin gold.”

  “And he has you.”

  She shrugged, one-sided. “I’m no advantage in this kingdom. I breed rumors, but no children.”

  His compassion rocked her almost out of the saddle. “That will come as God wills. My brother thought that he could sire no children, no more than I; and there is Ysabel.”

  “Her mother is human.”

  “Even so,” said Gwydion. “Perhaps you are too young.”

  She laughed, harsh and brief. “I am, at the very least, sixscore years old. I think I may be much more than that. How old must I be before I’m old enough?”

  “When did your courses begin?”

  “My—” She closed her mouth, mastered her shock. She was used to indelicacy from Franks, and Allah knew, Muslim women could be blunt enough among themselves. But this went beyond indelicate. It was indecent.

  Except that there was nothing immodest in the way he asked it. He was like a physician, cool, honestly desirous of an answer.

  Simply to be outrageous, she gave it to him. “Is that what that is? Once in a great while, when the moon is waxing? Then I’ve had it a score of years or so, one a year, maybe, or twice.”

  He nodded. “Young, then, no matter the count of your years: like a maid just come to womanhood. I think we come into ourselves late, and then we don’t either bear or beget easily. It comes with what we are. If we were as fecund as humankind, we would overrun the earth.”

  “Better we than they.”

  “No,” he said. “I think not. How much magic can one world hold?”

  “More by far than is in us.”

  “I wonder,” he said. “In a world the humans share... My brother says that in Islam he is much more welcome than he is among Christians. Your world allows us, as ours does not. But if it were known, truly, all that we are, what mortal man would not learn to hate us?”

  “There are many who love us. Too well, I sometimes think.”

  “Ah, but even they have moments of bitter envy.”

  “I envy their fertility. And yes, even their mortality. They know that there is an end to their living. They will see Paradise long before us, and be far more welcome there, because they are mortal men, and we are but spirits of fire.”

  “Your Allah does not welcome every soul alike?”

  “We are told that He does. But mortals are greater than I: that also is in His Book.”

  “Ours gives us no place at all,” Gwydion said. “Therefore our priests set us among the devils. They would destroy us if they could, and count it a holy act.”

  She regarded him steadily. “You have your own Crusade.”

  “To make my kingdom safe for our kind. Yes. And for any other who suffers persecution at mortal hands.”

  There was a fire in him, all the fiercer for that it was so quiet. “We call it jihad,” she said. “Holy war. War that is just; war in God’s name.”

  “Even if it is bloodless, as I would keep it?”

  “Even then.” She paused. “You are a strange man.”

  “Stranger than my brother?”

  “My lord is explicable enough. He is fire, that is all: bright, burning, terrible when he is let run wild. He runs away from reflection, because it might seduce him into damping his fire. He is most predictably unpredictable.”

  “Most would tell you that I am dull beside him. Plain water, quiet and rather cold.”

  “Water quenches fire; and water, raging, can break stone. How many have reckoned that they knew you, and striven to deceive you, and discovered too late that they themselves were deceived?”

  “I always tell the truth,” he said.

  “All of it?”

  His eyes glinted. “All that is necessary for the purpose.”

  “I think,” she said, pondering it, “that I may come to like you, O my brother.”

  “Indeed, O my sister?”

  “Indeed.” He smiled at her. She grinned, wide and white, like the boy she seemed to be, and gathered the reins. The stallion began a dancing canter. As the mare stretched to match him, he leaped into a gallop. Morgiana flattened herself on his neck, still grinning. The mare was a pale blur in the corner of her eye. Gaining, by the Prophet’s beard, and her rider laughing. Aloud. Gwydion. Who would ever believe it?

  She laughed with him, light and w
ild, and gave her mount his head.

  PART TWO

  JERUSALEM

  May 1187

  5.

  Jerusalem was a city of domes and towers, set upon the heights, blazing white in the pitiless sun of Outremer. No green betrayed itself, no garden within those walls, unless it were a garden of stone, and its own sun blazing out of it: the Dome of the Rock in the west of the city, roofed with pure gold.

  From the Mount of Olives, above the grey-green terraces, across the bleak dun ravine of Kidron, the pilgrims from Rhiyana looked down upon the Holy City. Some of them wept. Some prayed on their knees.

  Gwydion stood silent. His eyes drank it in: the city that was there for human eyes to see, and the city that was beyond the mortal city. Holy, high Jerusalem. The city of peace, for which men had warred for years out of count.

  A tremor rocked him. It came upon him so, not often, sometimes not for years together; but when it came, there was no stopping it. He could only brace for the storm, and endure until it passed.

  Blood and fire. Armies innumerable, inexorable as the sea, shrilling their war-cry. Allah-il-Allah! Allahu akbar! The walls fell before them. No army stood against them. A pitiful few of knights rode out, made what stand they might, were swept away. The muezzin’s voice wailed over the dome of the Holy Sepulcher.

  He gasped, shuddering. The sun blinded him. Christian voices babbled about him; somewhere, someone was chanting a psalm. Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men, preserve me from violent men...

  His brother’s shoulder braced him; his brother’s voice sounded in his ear, soft and blessedly calm. “Peace; it’s past.”

  The humans had not seen, or else had taken it for simple excess of emotion. His own folk stood round him like guards, his brother closest, Morgiana at his back, Akiva in front of him with Ysabel. None of them had thought; they had simply chosen their places. They moved apart as the moment passed, with no word spoken, no thought exchanged.

  There was something in that, something potent. There had never been so many of them together, in such a place. Almost without willing it, he could reach, draw them together, make of them—

  They scattered. The world burst upon him. People waited, human and otherwise, because he was king, and where he went, they must follow. For a moment he could not. Would not.

  But that passed. Years and training rose up in him and mastered him. He led them down from the Mount.

  o0o

  The entry of the King of Rhiyana into Jerusalem was not the quiet passage he might have wished for. His knights, his squires, his men-at-arms, his servants, the pilgrims afoot and on muleback, the priests and the monks and the pope’s legate, Aidan’s small army of Saracens and his Christian soldiers and servants, the whole tribe of Mortmain: they were a royal procession, and they received a royal welcome.

  Aidan had a house near the Dome of the Rock; so near that the great golden dome cast light upon it after the sun had left the rest of the city. From its roof and from some of the upper chambers, one could look down into the jeweled beauty of the courtyard and see the Knights of the Temple in their white robes and red crosses, going about their duties.

  “We’ve given his majesty something to think of,” Aidan said with considerable pleasure as he sat with his brother on the roof, watching the sun go down. The house hummed below them, full to bursting with all the people they had brought to it; and that not even all of them. The Mortmains had their own house near the Holy Sepulcher, and the priests had lodgings in the Patriarch’s quarter.

  Gwydion turned an orange in his hands. He was quieter even than usual, had been since he left the Mount of Olives. His mood did not lighten to match Aidan’s. He said somberly, “Yes, his majesty will think. So will his less contented barons. There is another king in the kingdom; another stallion in the herd. And I wait to greet him. I choose the company of my kin, and make no haste to seek a palace that is not my own.”

  “He can’t touch you,” said Aidan. “Or fault you for wanting a day to settle yourself. He’d do worse than that if he were the stranger in the city.” He leaped up from his seat and began a circuit of the roof, skirting the orange trees in their basins, the rose-briars that twined into a bower for summer evenings, the jasmine waking with the sunset to send forth its sweet strong scent. He plucked a handful of blossoms and scattered them on his brother’s head. Gwydion made no move to shake them off; made no move at all. “Gwydion bach, our noble king is just capable of doing up his own hose, if someone shows him how. He’s no match at all for you.”

  “What is he for Jerusalem?”

  The pain in Gwydion’s voice gave even Aidan pause. He dropped down at his brother’s feet, took the white cold hands in his. “I saw, too,” he said. “I saw Jerusalem fall. But I won’t believe that it must be. Not while we live to forestall it.”

  Gwydion shuddered once, deeply. His hands tightened on Aidan’s with sudden, bruising force. “Would to God I had your faith.”

  “It’s not faith. It’s blind obstinacy.” Aidan grinned up at the face that was his own. The stars of jasmine were caught in the blue-black hair. They were not, somehow, incongruous, even as grim as he was, even as fiercely inhuman as those bones were, with no glamour to soften them.

  “This kingdom was founded on the sword’s edge,” Aidan said. “It has endured a hundred years against odds no sane man would contemplate. One thin line of fortresses from Kerak to Banias: that is all that stands between us and the infidel. More than any kingdom in the world, this is a camp of war, held by folk to whom war is their life’s breath. They will not yield while there is strength in them to fight.”

  “God grant,” said Gwydion.

  o0o

  “Would it be so terrible if he saw true?”

  Aidan raised his head from Morgiana’s breast. “How can you say that?”

  “You can ask?”

  Their eyes met, clashed, disengaged. He sat up. She lay unmoving, slender ivory body, cloak of wonderful, improbable hair. In lamplight it was almost black, with ruddy lights; in sunlight, the color of wine. She was heartbreakingly beautiful.

  And utterly maddening. “We are,” he said, “defenders of this kingdom.”

  “You are. Are you going to swear fealty to Guy, after all?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  She stretched, sinuous, and coiled on her side, head propped on hand. The lamplight struck fire in her eyes. “Well then. Suppose that the sultan takes Jerusalem. He’s a better king by far than Sybilla’s fancy man.”

  “He’s an infidel,” Aidan said.

  “So am I.”

  “I’m not marrying him.”

  “I should hope not.” She traced an idle, tingling pattern on his thigh. “Why should it matter which God a man prays to, if he rules well?”

  “It does matter,” he said. “Here of all places in the world. This is our holy land; our Christ who lay in the Sepulcher. We defend it for his sake.”

  “What of us? That is our Dome out yonder, which your Templars have outraged by setting a cross atop it; our Rock from which the Prophet, on his name be blessing and peace, went up to heaven. It’s our land, too, our holy place.”

  “And Simeon would tell you that your Dome is built on the Temple of Solomon. Maybe we should give all this country back to the Jews, and have done.”

  “God forbid!”

  “God probably will. Allah, too. If He’s all the same, who’s to say that even He knows which of us has the most right to this city?”

  “You are appalling,” she said.

  He bent to kiss her. She caught him as he drew back, wound her fingers in his hair. “Uncounted multitudes of Muslims,” she said, “and any one of them more than willing to taste my sweet white body; and with what should I fall in love? A howling infidel.”

  “Whereby we know that God can laugh.”

  Her fingers unwound from his hair, traced the shape of his face, ruffled and then smoothed his beard. He shivered lightly under her touch. He was the fir
st lover she had ever had, and the only one. She had never lost that edge of wondering joy, to find him so different from herself, and yet so perfectly matched. Made for her. Man to her woman; heart to her heart.

  “So beautiful,” she said, marveling, as if she had never seen him before.

  “You are insatiable.”

  She laughed and tumbled him onto his back. “What, sir! Am I too much for you?”

  “Ten men would barely be enough.”

  “Ah,” she said. Her eyes gleamed. “Now there’s a thought.”

  “Good. Then I could sleep.”

  She stopped short; she hissed. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I might wake up later,” he mused, “and dismember them one by one.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I’d hate to think that you’d let anyone else touch me.”

  “Touch you, maybe, if you didn’t take his hand off for trying. Keep you, no. I’m not that magnanimous.”

  She shook her head. Her hair was a curtain about them both, cool and silken-soft. “Frankish honor,” she said. “Any decent Muslim would kill a man for looking at me.”

  “He can look all he likes, and envy me as much as he pleases. If you ever deign to show your face.”

  “I shall do that,” she said calmly, “when I am your properly wedded wife, and it is your right to command me.”

  It was growing difficult to think, with her astride him so, and her face above him, and her lovely round breasts, and her strong smooth thighs. “What if I won’t command you?”

  “Then I shall do it because I choose.”

  She bent. Her face filled his world. All Persia was in it: the elegant oval, the cheekbones curved high, the long nose with its suggestion of arch, the lips fine-molded and astonishingly tender. Yet it, and she, was nothing human. The tilt of the wine-dark brows; the great eyes beneath them with their pupils wide now, green-gleaming within, that would slit narrow when the sun was high; the moonlit ivory of her skin. The scent that was on her, imperceptible to human senses, dizzyingly sweet to his own. The light in her, the sheen of her power, woven with his beyond any unweaving.