Alamut (8 page)

She willed him to go away. She did not want him to see her as she was now: pallid, lank-haired, shapeless with childbearing; used and discarded, and sworn not to care. When she was young and full of Gereint's tales, she had dreamed it all otherwise: she high and proud, a great lady like her mother, and he princely as westerners almost never were, bowing over her hand. He had bowed when he met her, but she had blushed and stammered and been a perfect idiot.

Great lady, indeed. She had acknowledged long since that she had no beauty. She had no greatness, either. Only obstinacy. With that, she was most richly gifted.

It fixed her eyes on the fish. Even when a hand filled itself from her bowl, and cast as she had cast, rousing them to a new dance. For him they leaped high, even into the air, as if they would fill his hands with their living gold. Even they knew what he was.

Still she would not look at him, except in glances. He wore all black now, for Gereint. But he was clever: he kept a little scarlet still, in the cross sewn on the shoulder of his cotte. No doubt he knew what the starkness did to his pallor. He looked no more canny than the cat that purred and wove about his ankles.

He gathered it up, meeting its steady, predator's stare. They had the same eyes.

“Your familiar?” she asked. It was easy, if she did not look at him.

“My distant kin,” he answered, lightly, taking no offense that she could perceive.

“She wants you to bewitch a fish into her claws.”

“So she does,” he said. “But not these. I'm not one to betray a trust.”

The cat yawned its opinion of honor among two-legged folk, but it went on purring, content to be held and stroked and promised other, more licit prey. Joanna watched the long white fingers trace that sleek, striped length. She had never seen fingers so long, so delicate and yet so strong. They looked cold. How warm they were, she well remembered.

“Joanna!”

She looked up, startled; and angry. It was an old trick. And she a fool, for falling to it.

She had known what would happen. Once she looked, she lost all power to look away.

Sometimes a man was too beautiful. It was absurd; it was faintly repellent. It made the eye dart, hunting for flaws.

This went beyond it. There was nothing pretty in it. Nothing comforting, to sneer at. Nothing human.

He had been smiling. He was no longer.

“You shouldn't have done that,” she said, light now and heedless, because she had lost her battle.

His lips thinned. She needed no magic to know what he was thinking. Mortals were always easy prey for his kind. Too easy. It was the beauty and the strangeness, and the spark of fear.

She looked straight into his eyes, not caring if she drowned there. They were clear grey, with no blue on them; level, a little blank, like a cat's, and a green flare in the back of them. They would hunt best by night, his kind. Like Assassins.

“The sun is no friend to you,” she said.

His head shook, a flicker, barely to be seen. “We have an accommodation. It lets me be. I accord it due respect.”

“That could be your downfall, here. You should cast a deeper glamour.”

He was not surprised that she knew. She wondered if he was ever truly surprised at anything. “I choose not to,” he answered her.

“Why?”

“Because I choose.”

Stubbornness. She could understand that. And vanity. There was another glamour he could cast, that would spare him insult and suspicion and deadly certainty; but that would raddle his beauty and grey his hair, and give him the proper count of his years.

“Would you like that?” he asked, reading her without shame.

“What you do if I said I would?”

She gasped. He laughed aloud, out of the face he should have worn. Even mortal, even lined and greyed, he would never have lost his wickedness.

Or his beauty.

“Well?” He had changed even his voice. It was thicker; it had lost its edge of clarity. “Shall I stay so?”

“Would you?”

He turned his hands, knotted as they were, gnarled, seamed with old scars. There was another on his cheek, under the iron-grey beard. “Goddess. I had forgotten those.” He did not seem to notice what he had sworn by, he with the cross on his shoulder. He flexed it; winced.

“It's as complete as that?”

“To convince, I must convince myself.”

“Then, if it went on long enough, would you... die?”

The word was as hard to hear as to say, but he seemed unmoved, preoccupied. “I don't know. Perhaps. Which would mean, when I go beyond the mortal span — ” He shivered. “Do you remember Tithonus?”

Joanna nodded, shivering herself. “The pagan. He had immortality, but forgot to ask that it be immortal youth. He withered. He never stopped withering. And he would never die.”

Aidan was on his feet. The magic dropped from him like dust and darkness. His hand was strong and smooth and young, pulling her up. She was tall enough to meet him eye to eye. That startled him a little; then he laughed. “See how we maunder! Come, show me your city.”

As if Thibaut had not shown him every inch of it already. But his eagerness was irresistible; even when she knew what he was running from. Not death, but deathlessness.

She looked at her rag of a dress; touched her hair. “Like this?” she had asked before she thought.

No mere man, he. He understood. “Go on, then. But be quick.”

oOo

As quick as she and Dura between them could be. She put on the blue dress again; a light mantle over it; a veil for her hair. No jewels but her silver cross, since she was in mourning. Severity did not suit her, but it suited propriety.

She did not stoop to ask how she could walk far, who had been ill so long. He had not troubled to. Her mare was saddled for her, and the tall gelding that had been Gereint's, and a mule for Dura. His manner declared that he, a knight and a prince, did not intend to walk where he could ride. He set her lightly in her saddle, his touch as cool as Gereint's had been, like a brother's, or a father's. Or course it would be. They were kin. And she was a married woman.

She gathered the reins. Her mare was restive, in season. Wise of him to choose the gelding over his stallion. Dura shied away from him, clambering onto the mule by herself, watching him with great wary eyes. It was fear, but clean, as of a storm in the desert: something to be feared and evaded, but never hated. Hatred was beneath it.

No doubt he was as accustomed to that as to a silly girl's vaporings. He mounted with that grace of his that was more beast than human, and rode ahead of them into the street.

oOo

Aidan had not thought, before he dragged Joanna out with him. It was impulse, which he was given to, and not wisely, either. She had been ill and was still not as strong as she should have been. But her pleasure was warm; her anger had sunk down deep. There was color in her cheeks. She was — not pretty, no. God's whim had kept that for her brother. But handsome, certainly, and when she smiled, which she almost never did, she blazed into beauty.

He was blinking in the light of it, barely noticing where they were, until his nose told him. The street named, wittily enough, the Street of the Bad Cooks. Pilgrims found their sustenance here, at ruinous prices, and saints alone knew what cost to their stomachs. His own heaved gently, once, and subsided.

They had left the horses at the crossing, and paid a boy to look after them. Joanna's choice. The boy would not abscond with the merchandise: Aidan's doing. He did not need to be told how it was, here. The Temple was a den of thieves still, after a thousand years.

Joanna who knew this city as he knew his own sea-scented Caer Gwent, led him with the silent maid down a passage that might have been a cavern for all the light there was in it. Cities were like this in the east: covered against the sun, often vaulted as was this into which they entered, lit like churches through louvers above and with lamps below, airy and astonishingly cool. Here the stink of human habitation was overlaid with sweetness, herbs and fruits and flowers; and clamor enough to set him reeling. Fiercely he damped his senses. How the cats in the gutters bore it, he would never know.

“Born to it,” said Joanna. He had spoken aloud without intending to: sure sign of his confusion. She eyed him. “You haven't been out before.”

He glared. She did not have the grace to be abashed. “Only to the gate and the plain,” he admitted, snapping it, because she would stare until he did. “To get out. To ride where the wind is free. I don't... do well in cities. This...” His brow was damp. Damn it.

“Do you want to go home?”

“No!”

She barely flinched. His weakness seemed to make her stronger. She did not presume to take his hand, but she said, “You must have found Acre appalling.”

“And Saint Mark. And Rome. And Marseilles. And Paris.” Naming them exorcised them, a little. “Acre was worse. After the sea; and so large. Jaffa I could almost bear. This is merely uncomfortable.” If she reckoned that a lie, she did not say so. “Are you hungry?”

He had caught her off guard. She recovered quickly, which he could admire. He had discovered a passion for the fruits of the east: oranges, lemons, yellow apples of paradise. With those, and cheese from the market beyond, and wine from a tavern in the shadow of Holy Sepulcher, they made a feast. Joanna forgot, or at least chose not to remember, that her legend was a coward within the walls of a city.

Some of his acquaintance might have confined that to this city: to the holiness that lay on it like its mantle of dust. He might almost have been fool enough to credit it, restive as he was, trapped in the center of so much humanity.

He looked up at the dome as they approached it. It had no such blazing beauty as that other in the Temple's heart, the Dome of the Rock that rose like a sun out of the east of Jerusalem. This was a blunter grandeur; the center of every vow of every man who had taken the cross. From it the Kind of Jerusalem took his title, and every knight who rode under his banner: Defender of the Holy Sepulcher.

Here.

Mortal stone, first. A simple tomb, bare and unadorned, empty. Three days it had held a body, and then that body was gone.

Piety had built the shrine over it. Zeal had raised up the basilica in all its splendor, with its satellites about it: the lesser churches, the palace of the Patriarch, the cloister, the priory, the house of monks and pilgrims and defenders. Chanting echoed out of it, and prayer, and the cries of the vendors who even here could ply their trade without heed to the holiness of the place.

They ascended the steep hill and passed the gate with its columns from Byzantium, all three pressed together in the flood of pilgrims. Aidan perceived anew Joanna's height, a bare hand-width less than his own, and a solidity that astonished him. Her limbs were long, but her shoulders were wide, and her hips; her breast was deep and full.

She was not aware of him, except as a presence at her side. With an impatient mutter she broke free of the press, pausing in the court. Her veil had slipped. Even severely bound, her hair had a fancy to curl, to meet the sun with red lights and gold, and the rich red brown of cherrywood.

The maid covered it with laudable, and annoying, alacrity. Joanna hardly noticed. “See,” she said. “There.”

Two portals; and a third, rightward, that led to the chapel of Calvary. Leftward, high and square, the bell tower, silent now, domed as everything seemed to be where Islam or Byzantium had been. Behind it, the high strange roof of the Sepulcher, and the dome that was new and holy, and a little farther from them all, the lantern and the little dome of St. Helena's chapel. There was a glitter on it all, and not all of it was holiness. They had made it rich, all they who worshipped here at the Navel of the World.

For all the crush of people, the weight of sun and sanctity, the city-sickness that had beset him since he entered David's Gate, he was steadier here than anywhere but under open sky. He would have liked to shout it aloud.
See! Is there any holier place than this? See how it welcomes me!

Joanna did not ask him what he wanted. She took a place in the line of pilgrims, and he took his own behind her. She was barely tiring, seeing all this familiarity with eyes made new because he was new to it. The pavement under their feet. The columns that held up the roof. The circle of pillars that rounded the Sepulcher, and over them the rotunda open to the sky. And all about that splendor of God, the splendor of man in mosaicwork: the Virgin; the Angel of the Annunciation; the Apostles; the Emperor of the Romans, Constantine in his glory; Saint Michael of the sword; the prophets; Saint Helena bearing the True Cross; and focus of them all, the child Jesus for whom it had all been made.

But the tomb was hidden. In all that loftiness, it lay beneath a stone, a low lintel over it, and a priest on guard, directing each pilgrim downward to his heart's desire. King or commoner, knight or monk, slave or free, here it was all the same. Even human, or not.

He could have fled. If the priest had known what descended under his brusque and tireless hand... a flicker of thought as it touched:
Half an hour more, and Marbod to relieve me, and, God's bones, if he stands a moment longer between me and the privy —
He did not even see the unmasked face, the eyes opened wide to dimness, the green cat-flare of the lamplight in them. Aidan bent them down and crossed himself, and descended into stone-cool darkness. Empty; and for that, they worshipped it. He laid his brow against the stone. Empty. Even prayer was silent here. It simply was.

He spoke his vow in silence, as he was bound to do. To defend this place with sword, tongue, life. But first, the other. One word escaped him, a whisper in the gloom. “
Alamut.
”

“Come,” said the priest, sharp, shattering vow and sanctity. “Time's up. Out.”

And if he rose up in a tower of flame, what would this earthbound idiot do?