Nine White Horses (12 page)

It was not the first time they had gone so, nor the tenth.
Tonight, however, she had a plot of her own, and that was not to linger docilely
in the lady’s garden, nibbling grass and rose petals while her brother wooed
his latest love.

He was not astonished to find that the Christian’s garden,
like his own, like half the gardens in Cairo, had a hidden gate. Still less was
he amazed to find it unlatched. Shams was nothing if not certain of his own
attractions.

He did not see that the mare whom he had tethered to a hanging
bough was gone, nor take note of the slender human shadow that flitted in his
wake. With the ease of one who had done the same through many a moonlight
garden, he found his cat-soft way to the center of his desire. Another gate,
unlatched; a lamplit stair; a chamber bare of any heathen softness.

The Frank sat in it alone, reading by the light of clustered
lamps. She was not startled to be invaded by the madman of the morning, but she
was not arrayed for any seduction Ghazalah had ever heard of. She was covered
from head to foot in heavy Frankish swathings, her hair drawn back severely
from a face innocent of paint or kohl. She shone amid that starkness like a
diamond set in stone.

Ghazalah was hard put to conceal herself in the shadows of
the passage. Shams, oblivious, had flung himself at the woman’s feet.

“You are persistent,” said the Frank.

“I am in love,” said Shams.

The woman’s lips twitched, vanishingly faint. “How can you
know that? You know me not at all.”

“My heart has known you from the moment of its creation.”

“Pretty,” said the Frank. “Do you do this every day?”

“Oh no,” said Shams. “Never like this. Never so completely.”

“Not since yesterday.” Her amusement was fleeting, her eyes
upon him stern. “I suffered you to come to me, only to give you warning. I am
no prize for a young fool’s taking. Go now, cast your eye on gentler prey; forget
that you have ever seen me.”

Ghazalah could have told her what that would avail her with
Shams al-Din. He rose, he clasped her knees, he turned on her the full force of
his eyes. They were beautiful eyes, and they were more than beautiful. They
were his mother’s eyes, and his mother was the daughter of the Sultan of the
Afarit. No woman born of man was proof against them.

The Frank was strong: she had will to resist. But her hand
had moved of itself, to touch one of his perfumed curls. Only one. The one that
fell, just so, athwart his brow. That guided her down round the curve of his
temple, into the first new bloom of his beard.

He smiled. Her fingers tightened; her hand leaped back as if
it burned. “You are mad,” she said, as she had said before.

“Mad with love.”

“I know what you are. Beautiful; fickle. Light of heart, light
of mind, light of love.”

“Not for you,” said Shams al-Din. He set a kiss upon her
upraised palm. “For you, I am constancy incarnate.”

The blue eyes sharpened, narrowed. “Will you swear to that?
Will you swear it by your very soul?”

Ghazalah would have cried out, leaped, given her life to
stop him. But she was rooted in the shadows. She could not even breathe.

“By my very soul,” said Shams, “I swear to you, I shall love
you and no other while yet there is breath in this body. “

The Frank’s head bowed. For the first time, faintly, she
smiled. “How passionate you are! and how beautiful. And how very much in
danger. I am a prisoner here. If my jailer discovers you, he will destroy you.”

“Nothing can harm me while I have my love for you.”

She touched his cheek again, lightly. He closed his eyes and
shivered in delight. “Go now. Come tomorrow, as you came tonight. Remember what
you have sworn.”

“In Allah’s name, I shall never forget.”

She shuddered at that most holy of names, but she did not
gainsay it. “Tomorrow,” she said.

o0o

And tomorrow, and tomorrow. Ghazalah had never seen Shams
so faithful, or so wondrous content. “There is no one like her in the world,”
he said. “She reads, Ghazalah. She thinks; she questions everything. She wants
to know all I know of the Faith; she tells me of her own. She is a princess in
her own country. Because she would not wed the man her kinsmen chose for her,
and dared to run away, she was taken prisoner. When she strove to escape, they
bound and trammeled her in the guise of a slave, spirited her away, entrusted
her to the cruel mercies of a sorcerer. He guards her, but he fears her. He is
but a master of magic. She is Melisende.”

Melisende, Melisende
.
He wandered off, singing her name.

Ghazalah’s heart had gone cold. A magician. And Shams,
lovely, fickle Shams, had sworn an oath on his soul. Oh, indeed, she knew how
this would end.

And what could she do? She was only his mare. She had no
magic to match a Christian master’s, only her twofold shape and a cantrip or
two.

o0o

Time passed as it must in this world which Allah has made,
and Shams passed it as he must, since he was Shams. After the first
intoxicating night or six, he sang his lady’s name somewhat less often.

There came a night, inevitably, when he could not escape a
duty before the time allotted for his tryst. He made up for it with redoubled
passion. And thus again a second night, and a third.

He began to notice women in the bazaar. He began to pause
when a singular beauty passed him by; then to smile; then to essay a word or
two. One bright afternoon, he lost the whole of himself in a pair of kohl-dark
eyes. They were only eyes, and their bearer was only an hour’s dalliance; he
knew no guilt that Ghazalah could perceive.

He went that night as he had promised, lightly enough if
without his former eagerness. He left Ghazalah in her accustomed place in the
garden: a little sward, a fountain, a bower of roses in full and scarlet bloom.
She had not followed him since that first night, but now she waited only until
he had passed beneath the arbor, to put on her second shape.

The chamber was the same, but the lady had altered
immeasurably. Her hair was like a fall of gold; her body bloomed in the
sheerest of silk. She smiled as he came, and stretched out her arms. Shams fell
into them with as good a will as he had ever had.

Ghazalah saw enough and more than enough to prove her
misgivings all unfounded. She retreated with burning cheeks, taking refuge in
the cool of the night, the sweetness of the roses, the solace of her native
form. Of course her brother had nothing to fear. His eyes had conquered yet
again. The lady was his beyond any dread of treachery.

o0o

Ghazalah had known, as a mare will, that this house had a
stable, and that there were horses in it: a mare or two, a gelding, a stallion.
The stallion was given to bursts of clamorous temper, and to beating down the walls
of his prison.

Tonight, for a wonder, the stable was silent. Perhaps at
last they had sold or slain the stallion. Ghazalah was most pleased that she
need not suffer again that nightly uproar, and yet she found herself hoping
that he was not dead: that he was alive, and free at last of his hated
captivity. She knew what madness a locked stall could be, for a creature born
to run under the open sky.

She drank a little from the fountain, nibbled a bit of grass.
All was well with Shams and his lady. She had seen how very well it was. Yet
she could not hold still. She found herself slipping from mare to woman, and
back to mare again. She circled the fountain; she ate a rose. She pawed a
furrow in the grass.

He was on her before she knew it: a crushing weight, a
battering of hooves, the closing of great stallion teeth in her tender nape.
She screamed in rage and pain. His forelegs pinned her; his teeth clamped
tighter.

The worst of it—the very worst—was that her body yielded. It
opened itself. It bowed to his power.

With the last remnant of her will, she twisted. Hands
clutched the great neck, knotted in the waterfall of mane. The stallion crashed
down in shock and startlement. She fell with him, scrambling, straddling his
neck.

He lay half-stunned. He was thunder-dark, but his eye was
grey as glass. It rolled back, white-rimmed. She cursed him with every curse
she knew, and a few that she had only then conceived of.

They were not idle curses. She wove them into his forelock,
binding him to her will.

“Lady.” It was not a man’s voice, and it was weak with the
weight of her on his windpipe, but it was Arabic. “Lady, I beg you—”

She was beyond astonishment. She was in the white realm of
wrath, where anything could be, even a stallion who spoke pure Arabic. “What right
have you to beg anything?”

A stallion could shrug, after a fashion. Even if his speech
had not been proof enough, something in that shrug hinted that his native shape
was not the one he wore. Something in the way his eye rested on her nakedness
proved it beyond doubting. “You are very beautiful, lady. In both your
semblances.”

“That does not excuse rape.”

“It does not,” he said, which was more than a human man
would have done. “It is only . . . I saw you under the moon, and
your beauty smote my heart. When you changed, you startled me. I lost all good
sense; I thought only of your beauty, that I must have it, and you, and any love
that you could spare for me.”

She snorted. The lust, at least, she could believe.

It was not comfortable, crouching there on his neck. He was
bound by her spell in his forelock; she was safe enough to rise, to let him
scramble to his feet.

Small wonder that her back ached with the remembered weight
of him. He was huge beside her, huge as a Frankish charger, deep-chested,
great-necked, heavier of head than a stallion of Arabia, but fine for all of
that, and spirited. If he yielded to her sorcery, she suspected that he did so
as much because he chose as because she had any power over him.

His words proved it. “I would make amends, O moon of beauty.
Only free me from your spell, and I will serve you as I may.”

She narrowed her eyes. His own were a little too bright for
her comfort, a little too careful in fixing on her face and not on the body
below it. “This is not the shape you were born in.”

He bowed before her. “O percipient! Indeed it is not.
Al-Barak am I, Jinni of the line of Iblis. My father is a great lord of the Jinn;
my mother is a spirit of ice, a daughter of the north wind, whose essence
embodies itself in a white mare. The master of this house found me grazing
among mortal mares, for this semblance comes easily to me, with all that
accompanies it, and I have been most fond of it. He seized me, bound me with
magics, brought me here to serve his will.” The lean ears flattened; the strong
teeth bared. “Such service as I would give, even bespelled. Had he not caught
me in the act of mounting a mare, he would never have touched me. He is but
mortal. I am a prince of the Jinn.”

“You are a captive,” she reminded him. “Or you were. Has he deigned
to grant you the freedom of his house? Or were you escaping?”

His head tossed; he stamped. “I had won free. I was seeking
a gate.”

“You found me.” Her glance was heavy with irony. “It is
written, it would seem, that mares shall ever be your downfall.”

He looked as abashed as a stallion could. “But you are so
beautiful.”

There was no accounting for the idiocy of males. Ghazalah
snatched his forelock, tugged it free of the spell, pointed. “There is the
gate. Now go, before the hunt comes after you.”

He did not move. “Come with me. Be my love. All the sky
shall be our marriage bed.”

“How public,” she said. She set hands to his shoulder and
pushed. “Go. Or do you want to be a slave again?”

He nuzzled the warm space between her breasts. “We have time.
The sorcerer is occupied. Very well, when I looked, and very thoroughly.”

She slapped him away. “He’ll not be distracted long, once he
knows that you’ve escaped.”

He nibbled her hair. “Ah, no. He has another toy tonight. A
prettier one than I. I, after all, was only mounting his mare. This one had
mounted his princess.”

She froze. He babbled on oblivious. “She was to be kept
untainted for the one whom he calls his master. How he raged when he found that
she had been taking her nightly pleasure with a silken witling of a boy!”

Ghazalah’s feet had mastered her numbed intelligence. She
bolted toward the shadow of the house.

She had wits enough to bolt in silence, from darkness to
darkness. She passed the door and the stair. She hid herself in her accustomed
shadow.

The lady stood against the wall, a robe clutched about her.
Shams was cast down on his back. A man stood over him, a very large man in mail
that glittered in the lamplight’s flicker, with a bone-white cross upon his
breast. His sword was naked in his hand; the point rested with utmost delicacy
on Shams’ most precious jewels.

“Shall I cut?” the man inquired. He did not sound angry. If
anything, he seemed amused.

The lady drew a sharp breath. She was neither fearful nor
defiant, but whitely furious. When she spoke, it was not to the man with the sword.
“Oh, you lying fool! To swear as you swore, and to come to me as you came,
reeking still from another’s embrace.”

“It was nothing, I tell you!” Shams’ breath caught as the
blade pricked, but he persisted. “It’s you I love.”

“What did you call the other? A gallop in the grass?”

He nodded eagerly. “That’s all it was. That’s all it would
ever be. I came straight to you after. She was nothing to what you are.”

She spat at him. “You are vile. I should let him cut you to
the bone. I should do it with my own hands.”

Shams blanched. The man smiled. “So, my lady. Was he worth
the price you must pay?”

“Yes!” She had startled them all, even Ghazalah crouched
beyond the door. “He is a liar and a simpleton, but for a little while he loved
me.”