The Dagger and the Cross (29 page)

Aimery sucked in a breath. “You
want
me, my lord?” He
caught himself. “I mean—my lord Raymond, I don’t want to leave you, but if I
have to—”

“But if you have to,” Raymond said, “you’re more than happy
to be squire to the prince.” He smiled. “I don’t blame you.”

“After the battle,” said Aimery, “my lord, I’ll want to come
back to you. If you’ll have me.”

“If I live, and if I can offer you anything to come back to,
yes, I’ll have you.” Raymond inclined his head to Aidan. “I’m grateful, my
lord. That’s as good a page as I’ve had in long years; I’d not be pleased to
lose him for a king’s folly.”

Aimery blushed and ducked his head. He was given to thinking
too little of himself, Aidan noticed. That would have to be seen to.

He was also thinking, with no little malice,
Just let
Ysabel do better than this!

Aidan quelled a sigh. She at least was safe. He would do
what he could to protect her brother. As little love as there had ever been
between them, neither would forgive him if he let the other be hurt. They
reserved that privilege for themselves.

o0o

Aimery, as Prince Aidan’s squire, had expected to serve his
new lord as he had Count Raymond: well out of the way except when he was
needed, well back in the column when they marched, and quiet in the tent when
his lord attended councils or called on others of the great ones of Outremer.
But Aidan seemed to take it for granted that Aimery should follow him wherever
he went. Aimery wondered at least once, who was guarding whom.

Not that Aidan went anywhere at first except back to the
tent he shared with his brother. Urien was there already, a tall slender young man
almost old enough to be a knight, and like enough to the king to be one of his
kin. He was in fact a cousin, if a distant one. Rhiyanan nobles, Aimery had
heard someone say, all looked alike, as if God had stamped them in the same
mold.

“That’s the mark of Rhiannon,” Aidan said, startling Aimery
half out of his skin. He laid his hand easily on Aimery’s shoulder, though
Aimery would have liked to sink into the earth, so torn was he between joy and
mortification. “Urien, I’ve got myself a new squire. He’s had good training in
Count Raymond’s court, but there’s a thing or two he may need to know of how we
do things here. Will you teach him tonight, after I’m done with him?”

He asked it as if the squire had a choice, and Urien
answered in the same vein. “Surely, my prince.” He looked Aimery over. “He
looks like a good one. Is he a Mortmain?”

“The eldest of them,” Aidan said.

“Ah,” said Urien. “I remember, from Acre.” He bestowed a
smile on Aimery. “Well met again, messire.”

Aimery bowed, which felt like the proper thing to do, and
murmured an answer. Urien seemed pleased enough, though Aidan was in one of his
moods: bright, wicked, and more than a little fey. He kept Aimery with him, not
asking anything of him, while he inspected his portion of the camp.

Aimery had noticed before how Aidan’s people loved him. It
was palpable now, with the camp sunk in desperation and Saracens surrounding it
and a skirmish apt to break out almost anywhere at all. Aidan’s people were not
as desperate as the rest. They were thirsty, but they bore up bravely, even
showed their prince how they had kept a little water still, and wine in
remarkable plenty. “Enough to get us through the night,” one said proudly.

He did not say what everyone was thinking, that there would
never be enough for the day that would follow the night, and that would be a
day of battle.

Sensible soldiers kept their armor on but rested as much as
they could. They did not talk much, or dice round the tents the way they
usually did. Many looked after their gear. They expected to fight in the
morning, if not sooner.

Aidan’s mamluks kept a little apart. That was always so, but
today more than ever. People did not forget that they were infidels, or that
they looked and fought like the enemies who ringed the camp.

They were proud; they did not seem to think of themselves as
turncoats. Saladin had given them to their prince, and they were loyal to a
fault. If it dismayed them to find themselves pitted against the whole army of
their people, they were not about to show it.

They would be useful when it came to a battle. Franks were
strong beside the Saracens, whether mounted or afoot: bigger, better armed,
often better trained. Nothing in the east could hold against a charge of
full-armed knights on their great horses. But Saladin was a wily general, and
wise in fighting Franks. He knew that their strength was of little use against
his light swift cavalry with their bows and their slender lances, who could
dart in and then out again like wolves harrying a bull. He had numbers to throw
against them, numbers enough to surround them and pen them in, and still keep
an army in reserve. And worst of all he had water, and clear lines of supply,
so that his men fought with full bellies.

Aidan’s mamluks were hungry and thirsty, but they were as
tough as old leather; and they fought as the enemy fought. One of Aimery’s
favorite lessons in Count Raymond’s house had been the one in which the pages
learned how the lord of Millefleurs disposed his forces: infantry to anchor
them, knights to strike the heaviest blows, and mamluk cavalry to dart in where
they were needed, then out again before they could be trapped. Saracens were
not great masters of formation or of discipline, but Aidan’s Saracens knew
both. Even Saladin was said to be, if not afraid of them, then justly wary.

Aimery, who had grown up with all twelve of them, found that
he was glad to have them there. They would not turn traitor. Not Conrad who had
taught him to sing, or Raihan who had set him on his first pony, or Arslan who
had shown him how to shoot from that pony’s back. They looked at the hordes of
their fellow infidels and shrugged. “One of us is worth a dozen of them,” said
Timur.

“That about evens the odds,” drawled Andronikos.

“It can’t be more than five to one,” Raihan said.

“Five well-fed, well-watered Muslims, to one of us.”
Andronikos covered his face with a corner of his sun-shawl and seemed to go to
sleep, until he said. “Even odds, children. My wager on it.”

“Done!” said Raihan.

“What, you’ll wager on our losing?”

“
We
won’t lose,” Raihan said. “I can’t speak for the
rest of the army. Or, Allah help us, for the king.”

“No one speaks for the king,” Andronikos said, muffled in
the cloth. “Not even himself.”

The Templars came in at sunset, haggard and limping and panting
with thirst, but grinning through the dirt. They had beaten back the
skirmishers: the rear was safe, for the moment.

The wail of the muezzin sounded high and eerie through the
heavy air, sending that whole terrible army down abject in prayer. The army of
Outremer had little strength to jeer at the spectacle of so many rumps
upturned, so many turbaned heads bent toward Mecca. No one ventured a sortie
during the prayer. It was all too brief, and the enemy all too adept at leaping
up from rapt contemplation of the Infinite to blood-red battle.

Night brought no coolness, only a heavy dark and a redoubled
buzzing of flies. The enemy’s fires flickered all about the camp, innumerable
as stars in the sky, but illuminating little. The Franks, huddled in their camp,
heard more than they saw: men speaking in the rhythms of Arabic or Turkish or
Nubian or even once, to Aidan’s ears, high-court Persian; horses whinnying,
camels roaring, now and then a falcon’s scream; bodies moving in the dark, the
clink of metal on metal, the song of arrow shot from the bow.

What little water was left, the king ordered kept for the
horses. Men lay gasping in the sultry night, trying to sleep.

The king’s council met again in his tent. Again it was a
great deal of sound and fury, and all for very little. Guy could not have moved
now if he had wanted to. Ridefort was all for a forced march to Tiberias, but
even Guy laughed at him. “March? How? Through the whole army of Islam?”

“Yes!” Ridefort shot back.

“Suicide is against canon law,” Raymond said mildly. “My
lord, we have no choice but to fight. If I may offer any advice at all, it is
this: Keep the knights in hand. Don’t let them charge at will, and don’t use
them up too soon. The horses are the greatest resource we have, and the most fragile.
If we lose them, we lose the war.”

“We’ll have to charge,” said Amalric. “It’s our strongest
weapon.”

“But not too often; not too soon.” Raymond rubbed his jaw.
The rasp of callused fingers on stubble set Aidan’s teeth on edge. Mercifully,
he did not do it long. “We may yet get out of this. If we can break their line.
If we can make Tiberias, or failing that, win back to Marescallia, or even
Cresson.”

“Retreat?” Ridefort was outraged. “Not I. I’ll break through
to Tiberias, or die trying.”

“You well may,” Aidan said. He was running out of patience. “You
ran soon enough the last time you faced an army of infidels. Do you have
anything useful to say? Or will you hold your peace?”

“We all know what you are,” Ridefort said through clenched
teeth. “How do we know that it wasn’t you who told the infidel where to find
us?”

Aidan smiled. “You don’t.” Their faces were shocked; he
laughed, though it made him cough. “I didn’t need to tell him. He has scouts
enough, and he has a brain in his head. Nor were we exactly quiet about coming
here.”

“We weren’t,” said Guy, rather surprisingly. He fretted in
his seat, worrying at his beard. His eyes kept darting from Gwydion to Aidan.
Suddenly he said it. “Can you do anything?”

Gwydion said nothing. Whatsoever. It was Aidan who spoke in
the sudden and profound silence. “What would you have us do?”

Guy gnawed his mustache. This was ghastly hard for him, and
Aidan did not intend to make it easier. “You know,” the king said. “Get us out
of this. Call up a devil, or something.”

The priests were properly horrified. The barons either
pretended to be, or were honest: narrowed their eyes and considered the
usefulness of sorcery.

Aidan was almost sorry to disillusion them. “We’re not black
enchanters. What we could have done, should have been accomplished before we
fell into this trap.”

Guy barely flinched. He never troubled to remember what was
inconvenient. “But you can do something. You—your brother—told us—there are
tricks, magics—”

“We can’t drive away the whole army,” Aidan said. “Still
less smite it dead where it stands.”

“A murrain on the camels?” Amalric suggested. “A fright
among the horses?”

Aidan stilled. There was something in the Constable’s
expression...

It passed. Aidan put it out of mind. “Nothing that will
last.”

“You’re not much good, are you?”

Guy’s bluntness made Aidan laugh aloud, though it was
laughter without mirth. “No, we’re not. Not this late in the race. Not against
a hundred thousand Saracens.”

“What of one?” Amalric asked. “What of the sultan? If he’s
killed or disabled, his army will fall to pieces.”

“This is appalling,” said the Bishop of Acre, who was a good
enough knight when he was not being a man of the Church.

“Yes, it is.” Gwydion’s voice was soft. “So is all this war,
and this place in which we find ourselves. I might be willing to consider
something of the sort, though not perhaps as you would wish: a sortie into the
sultan’s camp, a swift stroke of the dagger, and what matter whether the
assassin escapes or is killed? But that is not possible. He has his own
protection, my lords. We have no power against it.”

“Not even you?” Amalric demanded.

“We are not gods,” Gwydion said. “We are not even lesser
demons.”

“I think,” said Amalric, “that it’s less a case of
can’t
than
of
won’t.
For God and Jerusalem’s sake, can’t you stop being a good
Christian long enough to save this kingdom from the infidel?”

The bishop gasped. One or two of the barons hid smiles
behind their hands.

“And if I stop being a good Christian,” Gwydion said, “then
I become a witch for burning. I see your logic, my lord Constable. Yet I would
do what you ask, if there were any way to do it. Unfortunately there is not.
The enemy is protected against me. I cannot even turn spy for you and let you
know his mind.”

“You’ve tried,” Raymond said. He was considerably less
perturbed than most of them were to have it spoken of openly at last. “Is there
anything at all that you can do?”

Gwydion sat still on his stool. He did not laugh in the
lords’ faces, which was more than Aidan could have done. His eyes were faintly
blurred, with thought, with testing the limits of his power. How sorely
circumscribed they were, Aidan knew all too well. “Very little,” Gwydion
answered the count. “Except fight as any man may, and look after the wounded.”

“The wounded?” Raymond asked. “You are a physician, then?”

“Of sorts,” Gwydion said.

“He touches them,” said one of the barons, “and they heal.”
He blanched under the force of their eyes, and Aidan’s keener than any, but he
went on boldly enough. “I saw, on the march. One of my men was horse-kicked,
and my lord king was near, and touched him, and he walked away whole.”

“Miraculous,” someone said.

“Useful,” Raymond observed.

“Mad,” the bishop protested. “We can’t do this. We can’t
call on witches; no matter how benign their powers may seem. We’ll damn
ourselves.”

“Would you rather we lost the battle?” Raymond asked
sweetly.

The bishop sputtered into silence. Aidan regarded him almost
with affection. “Excellency, you have every reason to be afraid, but you must
believe us when we say that there’s nothing of the devil in us. We don’t work
black sorcery. We can’t.”