The Dagger and the Cross (11 page)

“You dislike him, then.”

“He can charm wine out of a stone. Men do battle for a place
in his following. He keeps no more state than a baron should, prince royal
though he is; this is not his kingdom, he says, and he will not demand the
right of his birth, only what he can earn in service to the realm. He is
scrupulous in that service. Even”—and Heraclius did not say that easily—”in his
refusal to offer liege oath to the king in Jerusalem.”

“That is no longer a difficulty,” Leo said, “for him at
least, now that his brother is present and holds a prior oath.”

“And Guy does not strip him of his lands, for fear of losing
the men who come with it; and more than they. He has allies in all quarters.
The Knights Hospitaller themselves stand behind him, and they bow to no man.”

“Not even to God?”

Heraclius shot him a glance. “You see how I am constrained.
He is a power in the realm. I will not of my own accord sanction this wedding,
but I accept the pope’s decree, since the petitioner comes from a land under
Rome’s jurisdiction.”

“A powerful concession,” Leo said, “and a laudable
obedience.”

Heraclius said nothing, so that he might have nothing,
later, to regret.

o0o

Just as Leo was rising to depart, a clerk brought word of
one who would speak with them both. The man’s eyes were wide and somewhat
startled. “He says that he is the King of Rhiyana, your eminence, father abbot.”

He was, although he came in no great state, with only a
squire for escort. By his garb he could have been a simple knight; he carried
himself quietly enough, and offered these princes of the Church all due
respect.

Abbot Leo greeted him with delight. “My lord king! You look
well. And the Lady Elen, is she prospering?”

“Like a flower in the sun,” Gwydion said. “You had the right
of it, father abbot. This pilgrimage has taught her to smile again.”

“Good, good.” Leo did not wait for Heraclius; he beckoned
Gwydion to a chair. “Come, sit, be at ease. Will you have wine? I believe there
are cakes—are there, your eminence?”

Gwydion sat, but refused food or drink. Heraclius watched
him under lowered lids. He had none of his brother’s restlessness; he knew how
to sit still, and how to wait. His face was quiet; serene.

Deadly; because it seemed so young. The eye could not accept
what the mind knew, that this was no young knight new to his spurs, no innocent
in the ways of the world, but a king both ancient and subtle. What else he might
be was told in whispers. No natural man could live so long unchanging. There
was sorcery in that; and, surely, in more than that.

Abbot Leo was snared in it. He babbled happily, addressing
the witch-king as if he were an old and cherished friend. “All these years, and
would you believe it, this is my first sojourn in the Holy City? So high and so
holy; so many blessed places. It seems that I am always weeping, for joy or for
grief, or for both together. Have you climbed the rock of Calvary? I went up, and
hard it was on these old bones; then down the steep narrow stair past all the
pilgrims’ crosses into the vault of Golgotha. Saint Helena found the True Cross
there, but then, you must know that, my lord. And past the Place of the Skull,
in such beauty that it breaks my heart—but so simple itself, after all, a plain
stone, an empty tomb: the Holy Sepulcher.”

“Yes,” said Gwydion softly. “I have seen it.”

Leo smiled, all innocent delight. “Why, of course you have!
You would have done it as soon as you decently could. Are you in comfort here?
Is your brother as well as you had hoped?”

“Better,” Gwydion said.

“And his lady? Is she well chosen?”

“Remarkably well.” Gwydion seemed close to smiling. “And
yes, I am relieved to know it. My brother has found his match, in more ways
than one.”

“I shall have to cultivate her acquaintance. A word or two
at a banquet, spoken to a pair of eyes within a veil, is hardly enough to judge
a woman’s character.”

“That is her modesty,” said Gwydion.

“Muslim modesty.” Heraclius broke in with unByzantine
impatience. “She concedes nothing to Christian manners. She is altogether a
perfect Saracen.”

“‘
Car felon sont Sarazin,
’”
Gwydion sang, soft
and heart-stoppingly sweet. “She is that no longer, your eminence. She has
chosen the west, and my brother. The east has lost her.”

“All of her that matters,” said Leo. “Except her soul. Has
no one tried to teach her the truth of our faith?”

“Many a man,” Heraclius answered, “and not a few women. She
hears them all, and if she speaks, it is only to profess her own false faith: ‘There
is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.’”

“How beautiful,” Leo said. “How exquisitely simple. I can
see that she might prefer it to our endless intricacies. Three Gods in One, and
God’s son dead upon a tree, and ‘Love thy neighbor’ and ‘Sin no more,’ and
surely she would take no pleasure in our vow of chastity.”

Heraclius glared. “Perhaps, father abbot, rather than seek
to convert her to our religion, you should convert to hers.”

“Why, has anyone done it?”

“No.” The Patriarch bit off the word. He did not add that
one zealous abbess had been restrained, with difficulty, from pronouncing
Muhammad a true, but minor, prophet. She was still under discipline.

Gwydion did not move, did not speak, but suddenly he was the
center of the room. His eyes, Heraclius thought. He had raised them, that was
all. They were the color of good steel. There was nothing of youth or of
gentleness in them. “It would set my heart at ease,” he said, “to know that no
obstacle remains between my brother and this marriage.”

Heraclius’ fists were clenched. With an effort he unclenched
them. “To my knowledge there is none. Have you cause to suspect otherwise?”

“The dispensation is in good hands?”

“Under guard,” Heraclius said with a glimmer of pleasure.

“You are yourself prepared to uphold it?”

“To the letter.”

Gwydion paused. For a moment it was as if Prince Aidan sat
there: tensed, fierce, glaring with a falcon’s mad eye. It blinked, veiling
itself. The soft calm voice said, “It is not that I mistrust you. But this has
been no easy road; nor shall I deem it ended until the rite is done. As I fear
even yet it may not be.”

“You fear?” Leo asked. “Or you foresee?”

Gwydion regarded him with wide pale eyes. “Fear only, father
abbot, but all the worse for that. If I knew, I would know how to prevent it.”

“There is nothing,” Leo said. “I promise you. You know what
is written beneath the seal; you have seen it laid in its coffer. My own monks
stand vigil over it. None shall touch it, nor speak against it.”

Gwydion crossed himself. “God grant,” he said. “There is no
reason to fear, father abbot. I fear—I know not what. I have come so far, after
so long a battle, and I cannot believe—I cannot trust—that all will be well.
The air is full of war. Where better to begin than with this union of
Christendom and Islam?”

“Therefore we guard against it.” Leo smiled and patted his
arm. “No, no, my son. You have your victory. It is yours; no one will take it
from you.”

Gwydion seemed unoffended by either touch or words.
Uncomforted, but unoffended. “I pray that no one dares. Not for my sake, father
abbot, nor even for my brother’s. His lady is no gentle creature; and when she
is angered, she knows no mercy.”

“She kills,” said Heraclius.

“If she must. If there is cause.”

“There will not be,” said Abbot Leo.

o0o

The inner courtyard of Aidan’s house had a fountain in it,
and a lemon tree, and a family of cats asleep in the sun. One of them woke long
enough to pour itself into Gwydion’s lap. He stroked it as it asked, not too
gentle, not too slow. His free hand stretched to catch the spray from the
fountain. He was calmer now, with the abbot and the Patriarch sworn to defend
Aidan’s dispensation.

As if they could do otherwise. He was fretting over shadows.
His mind, seeking, found nothing to fear. Aidan had enemies; what great lord
did not? None was so rash as to thwart him in this. Most would come to the
wedding to see the deed done at last, and to feast at his expense.

Gwydion filled his hand with water and laved his face. The
coolness was blissful. He glanced about a trifle guiltily and dropped cotte and
shirt. The cat departed in disgust. He refused to pity it. He plunged his whole
head into the basin, and rose dripping, and shook like a dog, in a shower of
spray.

A strangled sound brought him about. Morgiana was there,
struggling valiantly not to laugh.

She had been nowhere in the courtyard a moment ago; nor
anywhere in the house.

Her face glistened with spray; sparks of it glinted in her
hair. He blushed. The laughter burst out of her. “Why, brother! You’re no more
dignified than Aidan is.”

“That is a secret I would rather you kept.”

His stiff reply made her grin. She danced round the
fountain, as graceful and fierce as a she-leopard on the hunt, and whirled to a
halt on the rim beside him. Her cheeks were nigh as brilliant as his; her eyes
brimmed with mirth. “Three more days,” she said.

“Only three.”

“Three too many.” She hugged herself and rocked. “Do you
know what I ran away from? Harpies! I can prepare myself quite satisfactorily.
Why in the world do I need an army of servants to help me do it?”

“Because your betrothed is a prince,” Gwydion said, “and you
will therefore be a princess.”

“Ya Allah! Is that what a princess is? Shepherd to a flock
of bleating women?”

“You might say that.”

She hissed through her teeth. “Then I suppose I should
endure it.” Her brows knit. “It’s not that I mind women’s talk. It’s that they
think they own me. I am my own woman!”

“And theirs, if you would wed their prince.”

She reached out with perfect ease and worried a tangle out
of his hair. “Before it dries,” she said, “and sets in knots.” She set to work
on the rest with a comb plucked out of the air, and a light deft hand.

His hair was thick and not quite straight; it loved to knot
and tangle, and it never submitted meekly to discipline. Morgiana muttered over
it, but happily enough; it was something else which put the growl in her voice.
“I’m not to see my lord again until the wedding. For propriety, they tell me.”

“And because he has been seized and sequestered by the
hordes of his servants.”

“That would never stop me,” she said.

“Why not, for the game’s sake?”

“What if I wake in the night and want him?”

“In three days’ time you shall have him, and no force in
earth or heaven shall sunder you.”

“As Allah wills it.” It was a sigh. She smoothed the last
stubborn knot. “It might be good for my lord, at that. He can cleanse his soul
with self-denial.”

“That is a suitably Christian penance,” said Gwydion.

She laughed. “For him, certainly. For me...what grace is in
heaven, that I have two such faces to look at, and one is not forbidden me.”
She paused. “Or is it?”

“Only if you want to do more than look.”

“Would you let me?”

“As I love my brother,” he said, “no. Or would you have the
priests forbid you ever to marry him at all?”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

“If they could prove that we had been more than brother and
sister, they would not merely dare. They would bind us with it.”

“Allah!” She looked at him, bare but for his braies and
hose, and at herself in chemise and drawers such as a Muslim woman wore in
privacy, and went gloriously scarlet.

He brushed her cheek with a finger, cooling the fire in it.
She raised a hand to it, surprised. “How did you do that?”

He showed her. There were no words for it. One sensed the
hurt,
so;
one reached,
so;
and it was done.

“Ah,” she said in sudden understanding. She reached,
so;
and
went out like a candle’s flame.

His mind snatched at the emptiness where she had been, a
stroke of pure terror.

She staggered out of air and fell into his arms.

He steadied her carefully. She barely noticed. Her eyes were
furious. “That,” she said, “was not what I meant to do.”

“What did you do?”

She showed him. One focused oneself,
so;
one reached,
so.

If one had the gift.

“I can ease pain, a little,” she said.

“I can only vanish as humans do, by being quick and quiet.”

She measured him, narrow-eyed. “Aidan can do it if he tries.
It makes him ill.”

“He told me,” said Gwydion, “when he wanted to come to
Rhiyana, if only for a night, and found that he couldn’t.”

“Poor love, he wanted so much to have the art, and the price
on it is too high.”

“Yet you do it as you breathe.”

“That is not always an advantage.”

“No,” he said. “I can see that it is not.”

“One is never solid,” she said. “The earth is always
shifting. One dreams a place, and wakes in it, and sometimes the people there
are not pleased.”

“It might startle them somewhat,” he said with a touch of
irony.

She nodded. “They shriek, you see. Even the men. And snatch
bedclothes, if they have any.”

“And send thanks up to heaven for sending them so splendid a
dream.”

“Some of them,” she said. “Your brother did, before he knew
me.”

“And often since.”

“He curses me, too, sometimes, and wonders what he did to
deserve me.”

“Every man should do penance for his sins.”

“So he says. So should I do: the better to sin hereafter.”
She swooped toward him. Her kiss was brief, but it burned. “For remembrance,”
she said.

She was gone. He was speechless. And, he discovered, no
longer sunk in gloom. Whether he wanted to laugh or to curse her, he had lost
the fine edge of his melancholy. He was almost fit for human company again.