Devil's Bargain Read online

  Sleep broke asunder in a thunder of hooves, a chorus of shrilling howls, and the clash of steel on steel.

  Turks. Seljuks, shrieking out the titles of the Almighty in barbarous Arabic. Mustafa bit his tongue before he sang them back. The Franks would never understand. He leaped up, whirling his sword about his head, eyes darting until they found Richard. The Lionheart was on his feet, laying about him with his great sword and bellowing like a bull.

  None of them was in armor; they were only armed with swords and knives and here and there a hunting spear. Those who could get to the horses at least had the advantage of weight and speed—even the Franks’ palfreys were heavier than the eastern horses, though never as fast on their feet.

  Mustafa hacked two-handed at a shrilling Turk, hauled him down off his horse and vaulted into the saddle. The horse wheeled, shaking its head, ears flat back. It snapped at his knee; he dealt it a vicious kick in the jaw, which subdued it handsomely. It was still a hard-mouthed, dead-sided, evil-tempered ravenbait, but it had one sterling quality: it had no fear at all.

  The way was open—all the Turks had fallen on the Franks, leaving Mustafa alone and seemingly forgotten. He could make a run for it and maybe reach the outskirts of Jaffa in time to fetch reinforcements.

  And maybe not. There were a good half-hundred Turks and fewer than a score of Franks. The Turks were in full battle gear. The Franks were dressed and armed for a hunt. And—

  They knew Richard was here. They called back and forth in Mustafa’s hearing: “One of them has to be the king. Which one? The biggest? The one with the reddest face?”

  “The one with horns and fangs!”

  One of them spat a curse. “Bloody Franks all look alike. How in Iblis’ name—”

  Richard, thank Allah, could not understand them. Mustafa’s heart ached to fight at his back, to defend him, but if these Turks had in mind to take prisoner the dreaded King of the English, then he must not be singled out. He was dressed in plain hunting garb, with no coronet on his light helmet, and nothing about him to mark him as any higher in rank than the rest of the knights in his company.

  They were all beset. Mustafa seized the advantage of his Muslim face and turban, and rode through unresisting crowds of Turks. He caught such of the king’s men as were less preoccupied at the moment, and to each said the same: “They’re out to capture the king, but they can’t tell which of you he is. Don’t let them guess!”

  These were seasoned fighting men, and deeply loyal to Richard. They wasted no time in argument. Those that had been gathering about the king stopped their advance and stood in place, letting the Turks come to them.

  Blondel had been cut off from the king and driven back toward the falcons. Of them all except for Mustafa, he was least likely to be mistaken for Richard. His white-fair hair marked him as a different breed of Frank than the famously ruddy king. He had a sword, which he wielded well enough, but chiefly in defense of his lute; there could be little doubt as to what he was.

  Mustafa could hope that he would have sense enough not to betray his king, but it was all too clear that he had only one thought: to fight his way back to Richard. As ill luck would have it, one or two of the Turks had realized that Mustafa was not one of them; they began to turn on him, and all the more fiercely for that he was obviously a Muslim. Traitor was the least of the words they laid on him.

  He could not come to Blondel, could not beat sense into him. He saw Blondel’s mouth open, knew with sinking heart that the fool would call the king’s name. And Richard would turn, would hear, because Blondel’s voice was trained; it could carry across a battlefield.

  Just as Mustafa struggled to hold off a grimly determined Turk and to muster himself for a shriek that might, if Allah was merciful, overwhelm whatever Blondel could say, a great voice lifted up above the clamor of the fight. “Let them be! I’m the king. I’m Malik Ric!”

  That was not Richard’s voice, even if Richard had known enough Arabic to say such a thing. It was one of the knights—William, his name was; he was holding his own against half a dozen shrilling horsemen, as far from Richard as the battlefield would go. He did look rather like the king, not quite so big and not quite so broad in the shoulder, but massive enough, and the bristle of his beard was more red than gold.

  The Turks abandoned the rest and fell on him with howls of glee. He laughed as he fought them off, even as they overwhelmed him, bound him and carried him away.

  He was gone before Richard understood what had happened. The Turks barely paused to take up their wounded and their dead; they rode off as swiftly as they had come, and left the hunters in stunned silence, bereft of a battle.

  Of fifteen men, half were down. Five of those were dead, and one was lost, taken prisoner in Richard’s name. Richard stood leaning on his sword, blood dripping from it. His boots, his hose and tunic, were spattered with scarlet.

  He lurched into motion. The horses were still tethered in their line, the falcons still on their perches. The Turks had found a greater prize, or so they thought. “Mount!” Richard commanded his men who survived. “After them! We’ll get him back.”

  None of them moved except to take up the dead and bind them to their horses’ saddles. It was nothing so blatant as disobedience. They simply failed to hear him. When the hale and the wounded were mounted, they turned not toward the departing Turks but toward Jaffa.

  If Richard had galloped off to rescue William singlehanded, Mustafa would have followed him. For a long moment Mustafa expected him to do just that. Then his face stiffened, paling from the crimson of rage to stark white. He stooped and wiped his sword on the trousers of a dead Turk, and thrust it into its sheath with just a fraction more force than was strictly necessary.

  When he turned, Mustafa offered him the rein of his horse Fauvel. He offered no gratitude, snatched the rein and sprang astride. The stallion squealed at the unaccustomed outrage of spurs dug viciously into his sides, reared, bucked, and bolted in pursuit of his fellows.

  Mustafa held his tongue. He had let go his conquered Turkish horse and retrieved his mare. She fussed, objecting to being kept behind while the rest of the horses ran for home. But something was troubling him. Someone was missing from both the count of the dead and the number of the living.

  Mustafa found him under the body of a huge Turk, a mountain of a man who had died with a dagger in his throat. Blondel’s fingers were locked about the hilt.

  He was breathing, if shallowly. Mustafa found no wound on him. His lute was crushed by the Turk’s weight, but the giant in falling had done no more than knock him senseless.

  Mustafa bade his mare kneel. She was skittish, snorting at the stink of death, but at heart she was a sensible beast. She lowered herself to the ground and held steady while he heaved the singer onto her back. Blondel hindered him by waking and beginning to struggle. Coldly and quite without compunction, he sent the idiot back into the darkness with a well-placed blow to the head.

  When Blondel roused again, he was tied to the saddle and Mustafa was walking beside him. It was a long way back to Jaffa on foot, but Mustafa sighed and endured and tried not to regret the horse that, too hastily, he had let go.

  “Why?”

  Mustafa looked up, mildly startled. It was rather impressive that Blondel could speak while lying head down across a saddle. He creaked as Mustafa untied him, and groaned when he sat upright, then sagged suddenly and relieved himself of everything he had eaten since the day before.

  He straightened painfully, still gagging on emptiness. Mustafa handed him the water bottle. He drank in sips as a wise man should, and did not gorge himself. His cheeks were still more green than white, but he no longer looked half-dead. He repeated his question. “Why?”

  “I should have left you for dead?”

  “Why not? Everyone else did.”

  Mustafa shrugged. “They had their own friends and kin to fret over.”

  “We are neither.”

  “That’s why,” Mustafa said.
/>
  Blondel stared at him with eyes as pale as a corpse’s, set deep in bruised skin. “He forgot that I existed.”

  There was pain. Mustafa was not the one to ease it.

  “Don’t expect gratitude,” Blondel said in his silence, “or a reward, either. It would have been better if you’d left me to die.”

  “Probably,” Mustafa said, “but he would miss you sooner or later, and I rather like your songs.”

  Blondel’s expression was pure outrage—at Mustafa, and after an instant at his own rebellious stomach. It was some while before he could speak again. “You,” he gasped. “You—”

  Mustafa ignored him. The next hill would bring them in sight of Jaffa; then it would be a mere hour’s walk to the edge of the Frankish camp.

  It was too much to hope that he could complete that walk in silence. “God knows what he sees in you,” Blondel said. “He’s not a man for your kind at all.”

  That so perfectly mirrored Mustafa’s thoughts before the Turks attacked that he laughed. Blondel took a very dim view of such levity. Mustafa had no hope of redeeming himself, but he did feel obligated to say, “I’m useful. I can think in two languages at once.”

  “Braggart,” Blondel muttered.

  Mustafa made no effort to suppress the smile.

  “You are pretty enough,” Blondel said, “for a desert rat. What are you, Bedouin?”

  “Berber,” Mustafa said. He was careful to keep the edge out of his voice. Bedouin, indeed. That was worse than a rat, and he did not doubt that Blondel knew it.

  They were not going to be friends. Mustafa had never expected that they would. He shut out the rest of Blondel’s chatter, until it faded and eventually stopped. He wished the singer would sing; that would at least have been pleasant to hear. But Blondel saved that aspect of his voice for his art. Silence was a relief, even with the barbed edges that Blondel put in it.

  Blondel was pale again and clinging blindly to the saddle when Mustafa brought him to the king’s sister. She had heard of the king’s hunt; both camp and city were buzzing with it. It was a grim tale in itself—so many dead for so little cause—but William’s capture had struck a nerve.

  When she saw Mustafa, the flash of relief warmed his heart. Her brow rose at sight of his companion, but she wisely refrained from comment. Blondel was ill as men sometimes were after a blow to the head; they could die of it. “Not this one,” she said, seeing clearly into his heart as mages—and women and physicians—could.

  He was glad, not for Blondel’s sake but for the king’s. Richard had not forgotten his singer—he had thought the man safe with the falconers, and only discovered his absence when all the rest were back in Jaffa. After Mustafa had left Blondel in Sioned’s care, he found the king in a dangerous mood, ready to ride out again and find Blondel, then win back the captive knight with the whole might of his army.

  Mustafa passed a delegation of French nobles as he came into the citadel. The Duke of Burgundy led them; his face was thunderous. Whatever had passed between them and the king, it had not ended well. The air in the hall was still thrumming.

  Mustafa judged it wise to hang back and wait until the audience should end and he could speak to Richard alone. But the king had seen him. “Mustafa! Thank God! I’d given you up for dead.”

  “Not quite, sire,” Mustafa said, sliding out from behind two hulking Englishmen. He suppressed a sigh. Now they were all staring, whispering among themselves, waiting for the next turn of the entertainment.

  Richard fed their hunger for gossip by calling Mustafa to him and pulling him into a tight embrace. Mustafa seized the opportunity to murmur rapidly in the king’s ear. “Blondel is well. He’s with the Lady Sioned—he had a knock on the head; he won’t die of it.”

  “Good,” Richard said. “Good indeed. You have my thanks.” He let Mustafa go. “I’m trapped here for now. Go to my rooms and wait. Ask the squire to give you what you need—a bath and food, I’ll wager, and a bed, too, from the look of you. Are you wounded?”

  Mustafa shook his head. “Allah was kind to me. And you?”

  “The Devil looks after his own,” Richard said without levity. “Wait for me. Sleep if you can.”

  Mustafa would not have thought that he could sleep. But a thorough cleansing in a proper Muslim bath, then a meal of cheese and bread and dates washed down with sherbet, left him loosed in every muscle and blissfully replete. He lay down at the servants’ urging, closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them on Richard’s face.

  Lamplight limned it. Night had fallen. Richard was wrapped in a scent of wine, but he was steady on his feet, his cheeks only slightly flushed.

  Mustafa tensed inside of himself. But the king did not touch him. He sat on a stool beside the bed and said, “They say you walked back to Jaffa.”

  “My mare won’t carry two,” Mustafa said, struggling against a yawn. “He needed her more than I did.”

  “He loves you less than he ever did, now.”

  “I didn’t do it to make him love me.”

  “No,” Richard said. “That’s not something you would do.”

  “I didn’t do it to make you love me, either.”

  Richard’s mouth fell open. It was a moment before he laughed, a light, startled sound. “I hope you’re not asking me to understand you.”

  “Franks can understand us,” Mustafa said, “but once that understanding comes, they’re no longer Franks.”

  “They’re what? Pullani?”

  “Easterners,” said Mustafa.

  “With all due respect,” Richard said, “I’d rather stay a Frank.”

  “I also would rather you did,” Mustafa said.

  “Why? Would I make such a terrible easterner?”

  “You are a glorious great brawler of a Frank,” Mustafa said.

  “Out there they’re calling me a fool,” Richard said. “I lost too many men; there’s a good knight taken prisoner, and God knows what will become of him once they find out he’s not the infamous Malik Ric.” His fists clenched. “God damn their hides! He’d be back here with us, roaring over the jest, if even one of them had been willing to follow me.”

  “I was willing,” Mustafa said quietly.

  Richard did not choose to hear. “We’ll get him back. They’ll pay the blood price and the thieves’ price. I’ll give them good reason to regret their day’s work.”

  Mustafa refrained from asking if Richard intended to be wiser in his pastimes after this. Wisdom was not in Richard’s philosophy.

  He would not have wished the king to be otherwise. If that made him a fool, too, then so be it. Like Richard, he could not be other than he was.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  William came back at the lord Saphadin’s order and as his gift, alive and more or less unharmed. Saphadin asked no ransom in return, and nothing but the king’s goodwill. There were many who whispered that he had conceived the whole of it, both the abduction and the return, but Richard closed ears and mind to them. The rumblings swelled to a low roar, then dropped away again as summer gave way to the relative cool of autumn—cooling tempers with it, somewhat, and turning men’s minds toward newer scandals.

  William’s return altered the relation between Richard and Saphadin. What had been a game before, a pastime of princes, shifted and changed until, almost inadvertently, Richard found himself seeking a means other than battle to win this Crusade.

  Eleanor was remarkably, almost ominously quiet. She sat in the councils, but she spoke little. She made no move to oppose anything that her son took into his head to do. One might have thought that the old she-eagle was weary at last and ready to surrender to the weakness of age, but Sioned was not that great a fool. Eleanor was waiting for something; her patience, when she had need of it, was infinite. When the time came, she would flash into motion, as swift as an arrow piercing its target.

  Sioned’s lessons continued, but they had shifted from the grove to a house in the city. It was not far from the market, where she made oc
casion to go every day; it was always deserted except for the room of blue and white tiles in which Safiyah received her.

  Sometimes Saphadin came there as well, and conversed with her of anything and everything. He was learning, he said, and she was a splendid teacher, although she had no sense of delivering instruction. She answered questions, that was all, and told stories, and taught him a little of her mother’s language. In its beauty and complexity, it was rather like Arabic, although otherwise they bore no relation to one another at all.

  “It sounds like you,” he said one afternoon when, for the first time in longer than she could reckon, the sun had veiled itself in cloud and a thin rain was falling.

  It was surprisingly chill, that rain. A brazier warmed the room, but the day’s lesson had been in summoning fire. Sioned was as warm as she would ever need to be. Even so, the brazier was pleasant, the coals glowing brightly in the grey light. For amusement, and as a test of her skill, she had kindled sparks of witch-light that drifted round the room.

  Safiyah seemed to have slid into a dream or a magical trance. It was as if Sioned had been alone with the lord of Islam. He had bidden her call him Ahmad; although it still came uneasily to her tongue, she liked the sound of it. It was not as harmonious to the ear as Saphadin, but it defined him somehow. It was his name as the other was not. That was a title, a mark of office; it did not touch his innermost self.

  “Your mother’s tongue and you,” he said. “They fit one another. Strong, but with hints of sudden softness. Intricate and rather mysterious.”

  “I’m no mystery,” she said. “Whatever I’m thinking is written large on my face.”

  “Ah, but can every man read it?” He smiled at her. That smile melted her knees.

  Well for her, then, that she was sitting on a heap of cushions, half-reclining in the manner of the east. She need have no fear of falling, or even of betraying that waft of weakness.