Alamut Page 8

“His majesty, Baldwin, fourth of that exalted name, King of Jerusalem, Heir to the Throne of David, Defender of the Holy Sepulcher!”

  The herald’s voice had gone rough with crying the name of every lord and lady and lordly scion of the High Court. But now it rang forth with its fullest vigor, in spreading silence.

  Aidan, taller than many and somewhat nearer the door than most, saw clearly the one who stood framed there. He did not like it, to be singled out so: that was as clear to Aidan’s senses as if he had uttered it aloud. To human senses...

  He was a little older than Thibaut, just at his majority. He was tall already, but slender, reed-frail in his richness of silk, robes that seemed less Frankish than Saracen. He wore the long cotte of the older fashion, and jeweled gloves such as a king might choose to wear; but it was the headdress that gave him that air of foreignness. Aidan had seen it on tribesmen in the desert east of Jaffa: the kaffiyah, the headcloth with the coronet behind it about the brows, drawn like a veil over the face, baring only a glitter of eyes. This one was silk, and royal purple; its circlet was gold. The eyes were dark within it, yet clear, with a shadow on them, of weariness, of long suffering.

  Only the rawest newcomers stared. The rest went down in obeisance.

  The king gestured without speaking. They straightened; they began again, slowly, their dance of power and favor. He paused, scanning their faces. Aidan felt the touch of his eyes as if a flame had passed, too swift to burn.

  The king stirred, descending. His walk was slow, not lame, not quite, but careful, as if he did not trust his feet. The sickness was in them, as in his hands: the left that seemed strong enough in its glove, the right that was withered, held or bound close against his side. And his face, veiled, that no one had seen in a year and more. It had been handsome, the whispers said, like his father’s, with a fine arch of nose, and a strong clean line of brow and cheek and chin. What it was now, only rumor knew.

  And yet he did not invite pity. He held himself erect, his head at a high and kingly angle. His voice was soft and low, with a hint of a stammer; he did not use it overmuch as he circled the hall, but listened to those who approached him, his clear eyes fixed on their faces. Most of them, Aidan noticed, found ways to avoid kissing his hand. Some were rather ingenious. The king was aware of it: Aidan saw it in the flicker of his glance. The wound was an old one. He had taught himself to be amused by it, and to admire the more clever expedients, ranking them like knights in a joust.

  Margaret neither shrank nor evaded. The king’s eyes smiled at her, but saddened quickly, filling with tears. “I... regret...” he said, his stammer deepening for a little, until he mastered it. “I’m sorry. He was a good man.”

  “Yes, highness,” said Margaret steadily. “My thanks to you.”

  The king shook his head, a quick gesture, almost sharp. “If there is anything — if you need aid, comfort — ”

  “I shall remember, majesty,” Margaret said.

  “Do that,” said the king. “I order it. Now, or later, after the court has met on the matter — ask, and you shall have whatever you need.”

  She bowed low.

  There was a silence. She was not inclined to fill it. The king was reluctant to go, although others waited with veiled impatience: in that much, he betrayed his youth. His glance found Aidan, who had come up while they spoke, cat-quiet as he could be when he wanted to be. The fair brows went up under the kaffiyah. “Why — why, sir! You look just like him.”

  Aidan bowed over the gloved hand: the leather dyed crimson, the jewels sewn with gold wire, the foul-sweet scent of sickness beneath. He was being ranked high, for setting lips to it, for neither trembling nor radiating saintliness. But it was nothing to be proud of. He was not a mortal man. He could not fall prey to mortal sickness.

  “My lord’s kinsman,” Margaret was saying. “Aidan, Prince Royal of Rhiyana, new come from the west.”

  Baldwin knew him, as Thibaut knew, as Gereint had known: in wonder and in high delight. His eyes shone. “My lord! Well met. Oh, well met!”

  “Even without an army?” Aidan asked him wryly.

  “Oh,” said Baldwin, dismissing it. “Have they been at you, then, for coming alone? More fools they. You are quite enough in yourself.” He held up his hand. A ring glowed there, gold set with a great emerald. “I had your king’s gifts, when I was crowned — isn’t it a wonder that he knew, all the way from the west of Francia? See, I wear the ring, and I read the book whenever I may, and it comforts me. Is he a kinsman of yours, that great scholar who wrote it and called it the Gloria Dei?”

  “Not that I know, sire,” said Aidan, taking note that the boy spoke readily enough, once he was into it. “Most likely not. He’s a monk in Anglia, very saintly they say, and quite shut away from the world. But it’s a remarkable book, isn’t it?”

  “Wonderful,” Baldwin said. “We’ll read it together soon, you and I.” He paused. “You are here for that? To be my knight?”

  Such surety: only a king could know it, and only a young one could carry it off. Aidan smiled into the wide brown eyes. “To serve you, my lord, as best I may. Only — ”

  “Only?” Baldwin asked, when Aidan did not go on.

  Aidan dropped to one knee, taking the king’s hand in his. It was bone-thin beneath the leather. “My lord, I will pledge to you, but first there is a thing which I must do. When it is done, I will come, and if you will have me, I will be your liege man until death shall part us.”

  Listeners were awed, or fascinated, or shocked at his temerity. The king met his eyes, and nodded slowly. No child, this, however brief his count of years. “What will you do, prince?”

  “My sister’s son is dead,” Aidan said. “I have sworn to take revenge on him who ordered that death.”

  Baldwin nodded again: bowed his head, raised it. “I... see.”

  He did. For that, Aidan would never regret what he had said, or the impulse that had made him say it. “I’ll come back, my lord. Even if my body fails. I’ll serve you with all my power.”

  Baldwin’s hand trembled. That was no small promise, and no little gift. But Aidan sensed no fear in him, no horror of what had come to serve him. “Come back whole,” he said, “and come back strong. We need you, we of Jerusalem.”

  7.

  Joanna would not, adamantly would not, ask. And for a maddening while, no one would tell her. They were all full of what the king had said to the prince, and what the prince had said to the king. It was burgeoning into a legend already.

  “All they did was put off swearing the oath of fealty!”

  Thibaut blinked at her vehemence. “But that’s not what matters. It’s how they did it. Like something out of a song. They looked at one another, and we could all see: they belonged together.”

  “You make them sound like a pair of lovers.”

  Her voice caught on that. Thibaut did not notice. “Of course they’re not. They’re a king and a man whom God meant to stand beside him.”

  “Why not? Witchkind can’t get sick.”

  Thibaut went away in disgust, and there was no one else whom Joanna could ask. Except, of course, that she would not. It was nothing to her whether Ranulf had been in the High Court, or whether he had spoken to anyone of his wife.

  “He didn’t.”

  She jumped. Aidan sat beside her on the roof. He had a frosted cup, which he gave her. She took it blindly, sipped. Sherbet.

  He sat back at his ease, stretching out his long legs. “He wasn’t there,” he said. “No one seemed perturbed. It wasn’t a formal session, after all.”

  Her cheeks burned. She gulped cold sour-sweetness, lemon and sugar iced with snow from Mount Hermon.

  When she choked, he pounded her back, forbearing mightily to laugh at her. She cursed him, but silently, glaring under her brows. He went back to his panther-sprawl. He was out of his finery, in a shirt as plain as a commoner’s, and plain rough hose. The shirt was unlaced. She refused to look.

  “I don’t think he�
��s going to denounce you,” said that damnable, lilting voice, “or repudiate you in public. As far as anyone knows, you’ve come to be with your mother in her grief, and he’s allowing it.”

  “How magnanimous of him.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Her eyes blazed on him. He smiled, lazy, yawning like a cat in the sun. “Your face,” he observed, “is a remarkable shade of crimson.”

  She hit him.

  He was not there; and then, unstruck, he was. His hand had caught her wrist. She barely felt it, but all her strength did not suffice to break her free.

  She swung left-handed. Again she struck only air. Again he caught her, and held her with effortless ease. She kicked him, hard. His eyes widened. He was still laughing, but she had made a mark. Her knee came up, threatening. “Let me go,” she said.

  He obeyed. He did not move off to a prudent distance, or try to protect his jewels.

  Her flare of rage had faded. She sank down in a huddle of skirts. All at once, she began to cry.

  He folded his arms about her and held her. At first she shrank within herself. He neither moved nor spoke. Little by little she uncoiled. Her arms crept up, circling his neck. She buried her face in his shoulder and wept herself dry.

  She lay against him at last, spent. Somewhere in the long siege, he had begun to stroke her hair, slowly, steadily. Now his hand moved down her back, seeking the knots, loosening them one by one. His heart beat slow and strong, slower than a man’s. It was — she stiffened. It was on the wrong side. His fingers kneaded the stiffness, softening it, smoothing it away.

  It was no worse than the rest of him. His scent, or the lack of it. Even the cleanest man still smelled of man. He smelled of nothing but the salt of her tears and the linen of his shirt and the faint rose-sweetness of the bath. But he was solid against her, beast-warm, a flow and slide of muscles under her hands, the surprising softness of his hair. Even his beard — it barely pricked, soft and downy-thick against her palm.

  With sudden violence she pulled away. He did not try to hold her. His eyes had gone dark, the color of rain. He was old enough to be her grandfather. He was her kin in forbidden degree. He was not even human.

  If he mocked her, she knew that she would die.

  He touched her, the barest whisper of a touch, tracing the line of her cheek.

  She recoiled. His hand fell. He half turned, half shrugged. It was her salvation, that shrug. She hated him for it.

  She scrambled herself up. “I have to go,” she said.

  If he heard her, he gave no sign.

  Yes, she said in her head. Be like that. See if I care.

  He did not hear that, either. She spun on her heel and stalked away from him.

  oOo

  He drew up his knees, laid his head on them, sighed from the bottom of his lungs. Dear God, he thought. Dear unmerciful God.

  The first woman in twenty years whom he had even wanted to look at, and of course it must be this one. A child. With a temper. And a husband. And an Assassin on her track.

  She wanted him. They usually did. Sometimes they hardly knew it. She knew; but she had not named it, yet. She had not seen its echo in his eyes.

  God willing, she would not. She had pain enough. Her idiot of a husband, her son, the shadow of death over this house. She was wise when her youth and her spirit would let her be. She would see that she was only falling to his accursed, alien seduction, and she would resist it. He would be as cold as he could ever be, oblivious, neither man nor mortal to care that a mortal woman yearned for him.

  He laughed, sharp and bitter. He would pretend that she was the Princess Sybilla. That one, he could stalk for plain cat-pleasure, if he had not made his bargain with her brother’s tutor — chancellor as the man was, in truth, and a power in the realm. She was nothing to him. She was prey.

  His mother had warned him long ago. “Never let a human touch your heart. That way lies only grief.”

  Truly. Even Gereint, who had been blood kin — he had died, and dealt a wound which would not heal. They were all so. It was their nature.

  And what was his? He should be cold; he should be soulless. He should be a cat, the beast that walks alone, the hunter in the night. But he was half human, and although perhaps he had no soul, he had a heart; and he had never learned to harden it.

  He raised his head. The sun had sunk low. Jerusalem was all gold, a city washed in light.

  He watched the light spread wide and fade, and the stars bloom one by one. The others came up in the cool of the dusk, and servants with them, bringing the daymeal. Aidan felt the wards draw in about them. Joanna sat as far from him as she could. It seemed to be her best defense, to pretend that he did not exist. He had rather less strength of will; but the eyes of the mind were not so easily averted as the eyes of the body.

  She ate quickly; she fled. He did not linger long.

  Thibaut followed him down to his chamber. It was, of course, the boy’s place, to attend him as he retired, to ease him out of his clothes, to ready his bed for him. He did not want to be followed. Or waited on. Or, by God, touched. Touch pierced every shield, laid the mind bare in all its aimless, shapeless, maddening humanity.

  It did no good to evade him. He pursued, innocently persistent. To Thibaut, even temper was admirable: the famous fire, the flame out of the west. When Aidan snapped at him, he took no offense at all. His lord, he would tell the squires in the High Court, was a hot-tempered man. But bold and high-hearted, and generous with his favor. Altogether a perfect prince.

  Aidan thrust him reeling back. “Will you stop that? Will you just stop?”

  Thibaut stared, surprised. It had never gone this far before.

  “Stop thinking at me!”

  The boy stood still where Aidan’s arm had cast him, back to the wall, all eyes and astonishment. Aidan made a sound, half growl, half moan. He flung himself down upon the bed. All his shields reared up and locked.

  Quiet. Blessed peace. Himself, alone.

  His skin knew how Thibaut crept about, doing all his duties, shirking not one. The last was the lamp-cluster, diminished to a single flame. He lay on his pallet across the door. To all appearances, he went directly to sleep.

  Muscle by muscle Aidan unknotted. Shame pricked. All this child had ever given him was devotion; and he repaid it with hard words and the back of his hand.

  Thibaut was a huddle of sheet, a tousle of black curls, a soft sighing of breath. No weeping there; no hurt that would last the night.

  None that passed the walls. Aidan left them, high as they were, and impregnable. This one night, by God’s bright blood, he would have peace.

  oOo

  Silence, stillness. They slept, all of them, even the dog in its kennel. The lady curled like a cat in half of the great curtained bed, and her maid snored beside her where once her husband had been. The daughter slept alone, her tossing stilled, her cheek streaked salt with the track of a tear. The son...

  That was not he in the chamber of the crimson tiles, flung naked across the coverlet. He was a brown child, slight and small. This was tall and pale, and a man grown — that, most certainly. He had no blemish on him, save, to Muslim eyes, one: he was not circumcised.

  Morgiana shaped herself out of air, standing over him, enchanted. There was no moon tonight, and yet he glowed with its cool pale light. No whiter skin had ever been. Except — her breath caught — her own. Shadow hid his face. Hair, night-black, thick and long.

  He stirred, tossing a little. She caught at darkness, to conceal herself, but paused. His hair had fallen back.

  Oh, no Frank, not this. Eagle’s face, keen as the dagger’s blade, without softness, without flaw. He had not even marred it with that ghastly Frankish fashion, the shaving of the beard that was a man’s beauty and his pride.

  Her hand reached of its own accord, but did not, dared not, touch. Joy welled up in her, and sudden, piercing terror. He was like her. Now that she knew what to see, she saw the light, the sheen of his magic,
the power that was of air and fire.

  But after joy, after terror, crushing certainty. This house had been barred to her, walled and guarded beyond the world as in it. Tonight, the walls had fallen. He had raised them. He, for what reason she could not know, had cast them down. He was the enemy. He was the lady’s demon, as she was her master’s.

  “No,” she said behind her gritted teeth. He was ifrit, spirit of air. Her kind. Hers.

  If one could profess Islam, why not that other faith?

  Almost, in pain, she laughed. She had come to kill. She had found — not a brother. No. Most certainly not a brother, if Allah was indeed merciful.

  Their eyes met. His were blurred, full of sleep. Grey eyes, like rain. Green flare where the light struck. He frowned a very little; yet, at the same time, marveling, he smiled. The word he spoke was none she knew, and yet she knew it. “Beautiful,” he said. “So beautiful.”

  The terror rose up and drowned her. It raised the power; it smote him all unwitting, deep into sleep.

  She had come to kill. There by the door, laid across it as if any mortal child could guard against this horror that she was, slept the one to whom she had been sent. Small, slight, dark. A child, but almost a man.

  Her hand struck of its own will, swift and clean. The heart throbbed against the blade: struggling, protesting. She thrust the dagger home.

  He was dead before he knew that he had died. The last of his dream fled past her. Light, a snatch of song, a keen eagle-face. Love that touched the edge of worship; joy; pride. I am his. He is my lord. A flicker of shadow. Even when he thinks he does not want me.

  It drove her to her knees. Out, her mind clamored at her. Out, go!

  Always before, implacable as the Angel of Death, she had come, killed, vanished. Remorse came after, and the dark thoughts, and the horror of her bloodied hands. Not now. Not in the house of the enemy. With power behind her, working free of its bonds; the dead before her, cooling slowly, lying as if he slept. A boy. A child. An innocent. And she had murdered him.

  A great cry welled in her, filling her, till surely she must burst asunder. It swept her up. It cast her into the night.