The Dagger and the Cross (41 page)

Saladin had been less than pleased to let her go, but he had
bowed to the inevitable. She was not his slave nor his kinswoman, to be bound
to him until one of them died. She had served him of her own free will, and
been honest with him as to why she did it. Because it was holy war, yes. And
because the Franks had a pair of white enchanters, and she did not intend them
to gain the victory thereby. Mortal men had begun this war. Mortal men would
settle it.

Even she could hardly have reckoned on the enormity of the
Franks’ folly.

She traversed the threefold cavern, circling round to the
narrow gullet that was its gate and coming out under the sky. It was empty even
of a cloud. “Allah,” she said as she used to do when she was the Slave of
Alamut, alone and solitary, with no one in the world to call friend. “Allah,
what would You do? I don’t want him to be tempted. No more do I want him to
fret himself into a fever. He won’t let me take him direct to Rhiyana. He says
he can’t abandon this country so absolutely. How can he make himself abandon
its war?”

He could, because he had given his word. Was it more cruel
to loose him into a war he could not fight, or to hold him prisoner against his
will?

“Allah,” she said. “Allah, I don’t know. I thought I was
being wise. He’s learning to forgive me; he loves me in spite of himself.”

But he wanted to be free to choose where he would
go—

“He has to go to Rhiyana. He won’t until he makes the
Patriarch say the marriage-words over us.”

Should he not then be freed to hunt down the pope’s letter
and its forger?

She paused. A slow smile bloomed. She dropped down on her
knees and bowed three times toward Mecca, and leaped up, and danced for sheer
exuberance. “Yes! Yes, that is it! Allah,
Allahu akbar!
Who but You
could have conceived it? I’ll free him to hunt. I’ll hunt with him. We’ll both
be so intent on our tracking that it won’t matter that he can’t do any
fighting. And when we’ve found what was lost...” She swept out her dagger and
stabbed the air just where a man’s heart would be, pounding in terror of the
lady of the Assassins.
“So!
And the Patriarch says the words, and we
have our night’s lawfully wedded bliss, and we sail for Rhiyana, and so we live
in peace forever after.

“Or as much peace as either of us can stand.” She laughed
and spun and flipped her dagger into its sheath. “O Allah, what a hunt it will
be!”

o0o

Little as Aidan liked Messire Amalric, he went to the sultan’s
palace often enough to satisfy a saint, and for much the same reason. It was
his way of mortifying his flesh.

The erstwhile Constable of the Kingdom of Jerusalem kept up
his spirits remarkably well. He did not see fit to study Arabic, even if he had
had any talent for languages, but he managed to make himself understood. He was
allowed some freedom: to speak with his fellow captives and to walk under guard
in one of the gardens.

Aidan found him engaged in both, and with no lesser a
personage than Humphrey of Toron. The young scholar-lord looked all a Saracen
from his bronzed, unshaven face to his slippered feet. Amalric, by contrast,
stubbornly refused to stoop to robe and trousers, but kept to cotte and hose,
and shaved his beard every week.

Humphrey turned to Aidan with a wide white smile. “My lord
prince! You look well.”

“Well,” said Amalric, “indeed. A perfect prince of Saracens.”

Humphrey laughed. “When in Rome—or in Damascus. Admit it,
Amalric. You’re melting away under all that wool.”

“At least I look like what I am,” Amalric said.

Aidan fell in beside them. His head had begun to ache, as it
often did of late. Another price of his captivity. He firmed the walls about his
mind and contented himself with perceiving the world as humans did, with eyes
and ears and nose. The last wrinkled slightly. He did not know which was worse,
Amalric’s unabashedly human reek or the musk in which Humphrey seemed to have
bathed.

Humphrey flung a glad arm about his shoulders. Aidan smiled
in spite of himself, and forbore to edge away. “I thought you were with the
king,” he said.

“I was,” said Humphrey. “I came back with a message. The
ransom is set. The sultan wants Messire Amalric’s word that, if he goes as
envoy to collect it, he’ll come back to the sultan after.”

“I’ll give him my word,” Amalric said.

“Ah, but will you keep it?” Aidan met their stares, Humphrey’s
rather more indignant than Amalric’s. “I would, if I were you; and honor has nothing
to do with it. You know what Saladin does to men who break their oaths.”

“He holds my brother hostage,” Amalric said. “That might
keep me honest.”

Aidan considered that. “It might. I’ll wager that’s what
Saladin is trusting in.”

“We all know,” said Amalric, “that an oath sworn to an
infidel is no oath. But an oath with one’s brother as surety—that’s binding.”

“That’s what your brother told the sultan,” Humphrey said. “I
won’t say there’s liking between them, they’re too different for that, but they
see the virtue in being honest with one another.”

“So,” Aidan said. “They’re letting you go.”

Amalric did not even pretend to be abashed. “I’m on a longer
leash, that’s all. I’ll be yanked back soon enough. Do you have any messages
for me to carry?”

“Thank you,” Aidan said, “but no.”

“Ah,” said Amalric. “I forgot. Your lady—is she still
running errands for the sultan?”

Amalric knew that she was not. Aidan showed his teeth in
what might be taken for a smile. “No; now she runs them for me. She was in
Nablus yesterday. The queen is well, she says, though she feels the absence of
her husband. It’s a pretty sight, a queen who adores her consort so
unashamedly.”

“Should she be ashamed?” Amalric inquired.

“That is hardly for me to say,” Aidan said.

o0o

Amalric tired of the sport soon after, or perhaps of
sweltering in wool and linen, and excused himself. Humphrey did not immediately
follow him. Aidan did not intend to.

“It’s like a tournament,” Humphrey said, “watching you two
talk. You’d almost think you hated one another.”

“We do,” said Aidan. “Cordially.”

Humphrey eyed him sidelong. “I’m afraid I believe you.” He
shook his head. “I know how little good it ever does to say it, but have you
considered how dangerous this game is? Amalric is a good deal more clever than
he looks, and considerably less amiable. He’s a bad enemy.”

“So am I,” Aidan said.

“My lord,” said Humphrey. “If I presume, forgive me. But you
may be more vulnerable than you know. There’s always talk, I know, and now it
waxes hysterical, but hysteria can be deadly. Some in what’s left of the
kingdom might find it useful to have a scapegoat. Not a king’s folly or a
sultan’s superiority in numbers and in generalship, or even the ill luck that
plagued the king beyond his own incapacities, but the sorcerers who rode with
the army and refused to win the victory for it.”

“We couldn’t,” Aidan said. “We weren’t wanted when we could
have done something; when we were wanted, it was too late.”

“You could have shown the king where he was in error.”

“No,” said Aidan. “We have our laws. We don’t compel. And
compulsion it would have had to be, as set on his course as Guy was.”

“What do you call what Ridefort did at Cresson?”

“Gerard de Ridefort convinced the king to do what he,
himself, wanted most to do. It wasn’t only the king, remember. Most of those he
trusted thought it better to move then than to wait and sacrifice Tiberias.
What Raymond did in convincing him to wait was as much as any man could do. Or
any enchanter.”

“People won’t accept that. You could have changed Guy’s
mind. You wouldn’t. You and your brother both—you kept to the letter of your
word, and the battle was lost.”

“It wouldn’t matter if we had compelled him. There would be
other, like circumstances; and others still. Eventually he was bound to fall.”

“He might not have taken the kingdom with him.” Humphrey
paused to calm himself. “There, I’m forgetting how to be reasonable. You see
how easy it is. People aren’t logical, and they’re even less so when their
world is falling out from under them. They’re looking for something to blame it
on. They’ll burn you if they can.”

“Amalric, too?”

“Amalric more than any. And you encourage him.”

“Are you telling me that I should lie to him?”

“I’d prefer to call it circumspection.”

Aidan shook his head. “He’s no danger to me. He still thinks
he may have hope of escape—from here
if
he can persuade me to wield my
alleged powers, and from Outremer if he can persuade my brother to give him the
Lady Elen.”

“It’s not an ill match,” Humphrey said reflectively, “while
there’s still a kingdom for him to be Constable of.”

Aidan laughed without mirth. “I knew that would distract
you. You never could resist a good intrigue.”

“Well,” said Humphrey. “Can you get him free of this
captivity?”

“No.” Aidan would have left it at that, but something in
Humphrey’s expression made him add, “Morgiana stops me. She’s stronger than I.”

Humphrey admired him for admitting it. Foolish, Aidan
thought. There was nothing admirable in knowing one’s own limits: narrow as
those were when one stopped to consider them. The least of the angels had more
power in the world than Aidan did. The masters of the black arts claimed more;
and maybe they had it.

“What I can do,” Aidan said, “is seldom what I should, and
not often what is wise. I could have taken Hattin out of human hands and made
it a battle of sorceries. Maybe, between us, my brother and I would have won.
What then? Would people be any less eager to see us burn?”

“Victory at any cost,” said Humphrey, “is hard to resist,
when one has seen the horror of defeat.”

“And we are very convenient targets.” Aidan stopped under a
rose arbor and plucked a blossom. Its thorns stung him fiercely. The pain was
almost welcome. The scent was worth the price, and the beauty of the petals,
each the color of heart’s blood, but in the flower’s heart a glimmer of gold. “You
know what will happen to us in the end. We’ll be hounded out of human lands; we’ll
be branded with anathema. It’s the human way. Don’t they do it to the old gods
wherever they go, and to the beasts who hunt the forests, and to the land
itself in compelling it to serve them? They make it in their image. What cannot
or will not be so altered, they destroy.”

Humphrey did not speak. He tried to understand, that was
evident, but he was human and young, and no little afraid. Even he, who
honestly liked Aidan, did not like to be reminded that Aidan was something
other than a human man.

In Rhiyana people knew and accepted. They had the blood, if
not the magic.

Aidan’s fingers tightened on the rose-stem. Carefully, in a
cascade of stinging pains, he worked them free. Not in years had he known so
fierce a longing for his own country. The wind and the cold; the rain that blew
off the sea with an edge of sleet; the green places and the grey stones and the
mist on the headlands.

He could feel it, cool on his face; taste the salt in it;
scent the sea. It was strange to look through it and see the garden of the
Saracen sultan, and Humphrey standing in it, looking a Saracen himself, slender
and dark and clad in silk.

“We could not have done other than we did,” Aidan said. “If
that condemns us, then so be it. We can do what we may to protect the humans
who have dared to call us friends. Our leaving will help. If,” he said, “we are
ever permitted to depart from this city.”

“You’ll go,” Humphrey said, understanding that much at
least. “You’ll go back to Rhiyana.”

Aidan nodded.

“Good,” said Humphrey. “For myself, I’ll be sorry not to see
you again. But it would be best for you to escape while you can.”

“And for the kingdom, to escape the temptation that is our
power. To use it. Or to destroy it.”

“Both,” Humphrey said. He took the rose from Aidan’s fingers
with a graceful gesture and bowed over it. “I’d best go. Messire Amalric is
waiting, and so, at somewhat greater remove, is my lord sultan. God grant we
meet again.”

He said the last in Arabic. It was a farewell, as graceful
as the gesture with which he had appropriated the rose. He did not linger for
Aidan’s response, or want to hear it.

Aidan gave him the gift of silence. He had been, after all,
a friend. The last Aidan saw of him, the rose was tucked in his turban and he
was rehearsing what more he must say to Amalric. A friend, was Humphrey of
Toron, and a loyal ally, and a shameless sentimentalist; but with all of that,
a sensible man. He would not weep for what he could not change.

An art which Aidan would do well to learn. He paused,
weighing pain and purpose and considering what would be sacrilege for a blade
of Farouk’s forging. Quickly then, with his silver-hafted dagger, he cut a rose
the color of wine.

o0o

Morgiana accepted the gift as she always did: with no
attempt at artifice. She frowned at it as he set it in her hand, and then at
him as he bowed extravagantly. “What is this for?”

“For you,” he said. “Because you madden me, and yet I love
you. Don’t you like it? It’s the exact shade of your hair.”

Her frown deepened to a scowl. “My hair is preposterous.”

“It’s beautiful.” He kissed it where it parted smoothly to
ripple down shoulders and back and haunches. “You are the most beautiful woman
in the world.”

“Is all this in aid of something?” she asked. “Are you
trying to bribe me, by any chance?”

He refused to lose his temper. “For once,” he said, “no. I’ve
made some choices. When you see fit to let me go, I shall go, and not stop
until I come to Rhiyana.”

“What, not at all?”

“Not for anything.”