Ascendancies (85 page)

Sinan's eyes narrowed. “I would guess at least a hundred. I knew that by the horrid noise.”

“Do you remember the story of the Sultan's chessboard, Sinan? That story about the great sums.”

This was one of Sinan's Arabic tales: the story of a foolish sultan's promise to a cheating courtier. Just one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, but two grains of wheat on the second, and then four on the third, and then eight, sixteen, thirty-two. A granary-leveling inferno of numbers.

Sinan's face hardened. “Oh yes. I do remember that story of algebra. And now I begin to understand.”

“I learned that number story from you,” she said.

“My clever darling, I well remember how we shared that tale—and I also know the size of that mine within the earth! Ha-ha! So that's why he needs to feed those devils with the flesh of my precious pack horses! When those vile creatures breed in there, then how many will there be, eh? There will be hundreds, upon hundreds, multiplied upon hundreds!”

“What will they do to us?” she said.

“What else can they do? They will spill out into our sacred homeland! Breeding in their endless numbers, uncountable as the stars, they will spread as far as any bird can fly!”

She threw her arms around him. He was a man of such quick understanding.

Sinan spoke in a hoarse whisper. “So, darling, thanks to your woman's intuition, we have found out his wicked scheme! Our course is very clear now, is it not? Are we both agreed on what we must do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I must assassinate him.”

“What, now?”

Sinan released her, his face resolutely murderous. “Yes, of course now! To successfully kill a great lord, one must fall on him like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. The coup de grace always works best when least expected. So you will feign to help him to his feet. Then, without a word of warning, I will bury my steel blade between his ribs.”

Hildegart blinked and wiped grains of salty sand from her cloak. “Does the Blemmye have ribs, Sinan?”

Sinan stroked his beard. “You're right, my dear; I hadn't quite thought that through.”

But as they conspired together, the Blemmye himself rose from the bloodstained sand. He tottered and staggered into the stinging salts of the dead lake. His darling had failed to sink entirely from sight.

Half-swimming, their master shoved and heaved at the bony ridges and spars that broke the surface. The waters of the Dead Sea were very buoyant by nature, but the Blemmye had no head to keep above the water. He ignored their shouts and cries of warning.

There he sank, tangled in the heavy bones of his beloved. Minutes later, his drowned corpse bobbed to the surface like a cork.

After the death of the Silent Master, life in the Holy Land took a swift turn for the worse. First, exotic goods vanished from the markets. Then trade faltered. Ordered records went unkept. Currencies gyrated in price. Crops were ravaged and villages sacked, caravans raided and ships sunk. Men no longer traded goods, or learned from one another; they were resolved upon massacre.

Defeat after wave of defeat scourged the dwindling Christian forces. Relentlessly harassed, the Crusaders lurked and starved within their stone forts, or else clung fitfully to offshore ships and islands, begging reinforcements that were loath to come.

Sinan's Moslem raiders were the first to occupy the Blemmye's Paradise. Sinan had vaguely meant to do something useful with the place. The Assassin was a fiendish wizard whose very touch meant death, and his troops feared him greatly. But armies were low on discipline when loot was near. Soon they were breaking the plumbing, burning the libraries, and scraping at semi-precious stones with the blades of their knives.

Hildegart's own Crusader forces had arrived late at the orgy, but they were making up for lost time. The Christians had flung themselves on the Blemmye's oasis like wolves. They were looting everything portable, and burning all the rest.

Six guards dragged Hildegart into Sinan's great black battle tent. They threw her to the tasseled carpet.

The pains of battlefield command had told on the alchemist. Sinan's face was lined, and he was thinner. But with Hildegart as his captive, he brightened at once. He lifted her to her feet, drew his scimitar, and gallantly sawed the hemp ropes from her wrists. “How astonishing life can be!” he said. “How did you reach me amid all this turmoil?”

“My lord, I am entirely yours; I am your hostage. Sir Roger of Edessa offers me to you as the guarantee of the good behavior of his forces.” Hildegart sighed after this little set speech.

Sinan seemed skeptical. “How unseemly are these times at the end of history! Your paladin Roger offers me a Christian holy woman for a hostage? A woman is supposed to be a pleasant gift between commanders! Who is this ‘Roger of Edessa'? He requires some lessons in knightly courtesy.”

Hildegart rubbed her chafed wrists. Her weary heart overflowed toward the Assassin in gushing confidence. “Sinan, I had to choose Roger of Edessa to command this expedition. Roger is young, he is bold, he despises death, and he had nothing better to do with himself but to venture forth and kill demonic monsters.”

Sinan nodded. “Yes, I understand such men perfectly.”

“I myself forced Sir Roger to appoint me as your hostage.”

“I still must wonder at his lack of gallantry.”

“Oh, it's all a very difficult story, very. The truth is, Roger of Edessa gave me to you as a hostage because he hates me. You see, Sir Roger dearly loves my granddaughter. This granddaughter of mine is a very foolish, empty-headed girl, who, despite her fine education, also despises me bitterly. When I saw the grip that their unchaste passion had on the two of them, I parted them at once. I kept her safe in a tower in Tyre with my message birds.… Roger is a wandering adventurer, a freelance whose family fief was lost years ago. I had a much more prosperous match in mind for this young girl. However, even bread and water could not break her of her stupid habit of loving him.… It is her hand in marriage that Roger seeks above all, and for her silly kisses he is willing to face hell itself… Do I tire you with all this prattling, Sinan?”

“Oh no, no, your words never tire me,” Sinan said loyally. He sat with a weary groan, and absently patted a plump velvet cushion on the carpet. “Please do go on with your exotic Christian romance! Your personal troubles are always fascinating!”

“Sinan, I know I am just a foolish woman and also a cloistered nun, but do grant me some credit. I, a mere nun, have raised an army for you. I armed all these wicked men, I fed them, I clothed them, I brought them here for you to kill those demons with.… I did the very best I could.”

“That was a very fine achievement, sweet little Hudegar.”

“I am just so tired and desperate these days. Since the dark word spread of our Silent Master's death, all my agents have fallen to quarreling. The birds no longer fly, Sinan, the birds go neglected and they perish. And when the poor birds do arrive, they bear me the most awful news: theft, embezzlement, bankruptcies, every kind of corruption… All the crops are burned around Tyre and Acre, Saladin's fearsome raiders are everywhere in the Holy Land.… There is famine, there is pestilence.… The clouds take the shapes of serpents, and cows bring forth monsters.… I am at my wits' end.”

Sinan clapped his hands, and demanded the customary hostage cloak and hostage hat. Hildegart donned the official garments gratefully. Then Hildegart accepted a cool lime sherbet. Her morale was improving, since her Assassin was so kindly and dependable.

“Dearest Sinan, I must further inform you about this ugly band I have recruited for your daring siege of Hell. They are all Christians fresh off the boat, and therefore very gullible. They are Englishmen… well, not English… they are Normans, for the English are their slaves. These are lion-hearted soldiers, and lion-gutted, and lion-toothed, with a lion's appetites. I promised them much loot, or rather, I made Sir Roger promise them all that.”

“Good. These savages of yours sound rather promising. Do you trust them?”

“Oh no, certainly not. But the English had to leave Tyre for the holy war anyway, for the Tyrians would not suffer them to stay inside the port. These English are a strange, extremely violent people. They are drunken, foul, rampaging, their French is like no French I ever heard…” Hildegart put down her glass sherbet bowl and began to sniffle. “Sinan, you don't know what it's been like for me, dealing with these dirty brutes. The decay of courtesy today, the many gross, impious insults I have suffered lately.… They are nothing at all like yourself, a gentleman and true scholar.”

Despite all difficulty, Hildegart arranged a formal parley between Sinan and Sir Roger of Edessa. Like most of the fighters dying in the Holy Land, Roger of Edessa was a native. Roger's grandfather had been French, his grandmother Turkish, his father German and his mother a Greek Orthodox native of Antioch. His home country, Edessa, had long since fallen in flames.

Sir Roger of Edessa was a Turcopole, the child of Moslem-Christian unions. Roger wore a checkered surcoat from Italy, and French plate armor, and a Persian peaked cavalry helmet with an Arabian peacock plume. Sir Roger's blue eyes were full of lucid poetic despair, for he had no land to call his own. Wherever he went in the Holy Land, some blood relation was dying. The Turcopoles, the Holy Land's only true natives, were never considered a people to be trusted by anyone; they fought for any creed with indifference, and were killed by all with similar glee. Roger, though only twenty, had been fighting and killing since the age of twelve.

With Hildegart to interpret for him, Sir Roger and his boldest Englishmen inspected their new Moslem allies. Sinan's best efforts had raised a bare two hundred warriors to combat the fiends. Somewhere over the smoldering horizon, the mighty Saladin was rousing the Moslem faithful to fight yet another final, conclusive, epic battle with the latest wave of Western invaders. Therefore, heroic Moslem warriors willing to fight and kill demons were rather thin on the ground.

Word had also spread widely of the uniformly lethal fate of Sinan's suicide martyr assassins. Nevertheless, Sinan's occult reputation had garnered together a troop of dedicated fanatics. He had a bodyguard of Ismailis from a heretical madrassa. He had a sprinkling of Fatimid Egyptian infantry and their Nubians, and some cynical Damascenes to man his siege machines. These large destructive weapons, Sinan hoped, were his keys to a quick victory.

Roger examined the uncanny siege weapons with profound respect. The copper kettle-bellies of the Greek Fire machines spoke eloquently of their sticky, flaming mayhem. Much fine cedar of Lebanon had been sacrificed for the massive beams of the catapults.

Roger had been educated by Templars. He had traveled as far as Paris in their constant efforts to raise money for the wars. He was incurably proud of his elegant French. “Your Excellency, my pious troops are naturally eager to attack and kill these wicked cave monsters. But we do wonder at the expense.”

Hildegart translated for Sinan. Although the wily Assassin could read French, he had never excelled at speaking it.

“My son, you are dealing with the Old Man of the Mountain here.” Sinan passed Roger a potent handful of diamonds. “You and your fine boys may keep these few baubles. Inspire your troops thus. When the very last of these foul creatures is exterminated within that diamond mine, then we shall make a full inventory of their legendary horde of jewels.”

Roger displayed this booty to his two top lieutenants. The first was a sunburned English sea captain with vast mustaches, who looked rather uneasy stuck on horseback. The second was a large crop-headed Norman rascal, shorn of both his ears. The two freebooters skeptically crunched the jewels between their teeth. When the diamonds failed to burst like glass, they spat them out into their flat-topped kettle-helmets. Then they shared a grin.

Sinan's Assassin spies had been keeping close watch over the cave. The small war council rode there together to reconnoiter the battle terrain. Hildegart was alarmed by the sinister changes that had taken place on the site. The mighty door of glass and iron had been riddled with pecked holes. Fresh bones strewed the ground, along with the corpse-pale, shed outer husks of dozens of crabs. All the vegetation was gnawed and stripped, and the dusty earth itself was chewed up, as if by the hooves of stampeding cattle.

Using their pennoned lances, Roger's two lieutenants prodded at a cast-off husk of pinkish armor. Roger thoughtfully rolled a diamond through his mailed fingertips. “O Lord High Emir Commander, this place is indeed just as you told us: a very mouth of Hell! What is our battle plan?”

“We will force the evil creatures into the open with gouts of Greek fire. Then I place great confidence in your Christian knights who charge in heavy armor.” Sinan was suave. “I have seen their shock tactics crush resistance in a twinkling. Especially from peasants on foot.”

“My English knights will likely be sober enough to charge by tomorrow,” Roger agreed. “Is our help required in moving all those heavy arbalests? I had some small acquaintance with those in Jerusalem.”

“My Damascene engineers will acquit themselves to our general satisfaction,” said Sinan. He turned his fine Arabian stallion. The party cantered from the cave.

“There is also the matter of our battle signals, Your Excellency,” Roger persisted gamely. “Your minions prefer kettledrums, while my men use flags and trumpets…”

“Young commander, such a problem is easily resolved. Would you care to join me for this battle on the back of my elephant? With those flags, horns, drums… and our translator, of course.”

Hildegart was so startled that she almost fell from her mare. “You have an elephant, Sinan?”

The Assassin caught the reins of her restive horse in his skilled hand. “My tender hostage, I brought you an elephant for the sake of your own safety. I hope you are not afraid to witness battle from atop my great beast?”