by Judith Tarr
“Aidan’s Saracens.” Elen liked the sound of that. “And one a Viking. Take off his turban, put him in a cotte, and you’d have a perfect Norman.”
“So he does, now and then, mostly for mischief. He won one of his wives that way. It was a terrible scandal. She was a good Christian, a sergeant’s daughter; he wooed her and won her, and she never seemed to mind that there were two others before her.”
“Two...” Elen eyed Joanna narrowly for signs of mockery, but there were none. “How can a man have three wives?”
“If he’s a Muslim, he can have four. All that’s required of him is that he be able to support them, and treat them all alike.”
“The women don’t mind?”
“Who asks them?” Joanna’s tone was surprisingly bitter. “It’s better than lying and sneaking and keeping mistresses on the sly.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Elen said.
“Nor I,” Joanna admitted. “Nor, I think, if they had a choice, most of them. Morgiana would kill before she’d share her prince.”
She spoke as if she knew it for a certainty. Elen was not quite bold enough to ask how. Morgiana, Elen was learning rapidly, was strange even for one of the Folk. Elen had yet to see anything of her but her hands and her green cat-eyes.
She shivered a little. “I can imagine that she kills as easily as she breathes.”
“No,” said Joanna with startling vehemence. “No, she doesn’t kill easily. But quickly, yes, and sometimes without stopping to think. She’s purely like a cat, is Morgiana.”
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“Liking has nothing to do with it.” Joanna stood, straightening with care, bracing her hands in the small of her back. “I was her prey once. No fault of hers that I survived. Forgiveness is easy enough; it’s forgetting that I can’t do.”
Elen bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Joanna was sharp, but not angry. She even managed a smile. “She’s a hunting cat and I’m a dog of a Frank. We’ll never love one another, but neither need we be enemies. We go our own ways; we cross as seldom as we can. It works well, all in all.”
Well, but not entirely comfortably. Elen bit her tongue to keep it from working any more mischief.
Joanna left her then, with an embrace that was somewhat more than dutiful, and a smile that warmed her for a good while after. It even, a little, eased her longing for Riquier.
4.
Aidan had no use for sleep, with Gwydion to share the night with him. Even Morgiana trailed off at last, leaving them to themselves in the lamplit dimness of the chamber. Gwydion’s squire snored softly just outside the door; but for that, there was no sound. For a long while neither moved to break the silence, with mind or tongue.
Gwydion laid his head on his brother’s shoulder and sighed. “Never,” he said. “Never so long again.”
Aidan settled an arm about him. “No,” he said. “Never. How did we stand it?”
“Did we?”
“I thought I did.”
“I, too. Until I realized that there seemed to be too little of me. I kept groping for my other half. I even missed your temper.”
Aidan grinned and ruffled his hair. “Does you good to have to fly into your own rages now and then.”
His brother shivered. “You know why I don’t dare.”
Aidan’s grin faded. He held Gwydion close, shaking him a little. “I’m here now. I won’t let you shatter.”
“No; you’ll do it for me.” Gwydion laughed: a quick hiss of breath. “Ah, brother, God knows I’ve needed you. Maybe it’s true what they say, and there’s only one of us, but in two bodies.”
“Does that make me half a man?”
“Surely that’s for your lady to say.”
Aidan ran his hand down his brother’s back. “Saints, you’re as stiff as a stone. Here, lie down. Don’t you know by now to let it out before it sets solid? You don’t need a rage. A good, loud howl would do.”
“What, on shipboard?” Gwydion lay as he was bidden and let himself be coaxed out of his shirt. He gasped as Aidan attacked a knot. “I was well enough until I went to Rome. Maura was with me then. You know how she dislikes to leave the land which she has made her own: how she pined when I brought her to Caer Gwent, until her beasts came, and she made her garden, and put down roots in the new earth. In Rome it was worse. She hid it from me; she gathered all her strength, and used it all, and worked miracles in the papal curia. One day she fainted at a cardinal’s feet. She was alive and blooming, but she was dying: like a flower cut from its root.”
Aidan’s hands stilled. “You didn’t tell me.”
“What was there to tell? I prevailed on her to return to Rhiyana. She was most unwilling. She wept that she should be so weak; that she had failed in a thing that any mortal child could do. But she was fading, and in the end even she could not deny it. I sent her back to Caer Gwent, to rule in my place, and grow strong again. So she did, and so she has.”
“And you’ve been alone.”
“And I’ve been alone.” Gwydion’s voice was inexpressibly weary. “Now I understand why Maura wept.”
“Prices,” Aidan said, easing the tension out of him, stroke by long slow stroke. “We have blessings beyond the reach of human men: beauty, agelessness, great magic. But there is a price. She is bound to the land, and I to you, and all of us to one another. And there are so few of us; so pitifully few.”
“It keeps us from growing too proud.”
“Or too vain, or too spoiled.”
“Power can be a sore temptation,” Gwydion said. “Everything can be so easy: to make, to heal, to speak not in empty rattling words but in the truth behind them. Yet it’s never enough. The world is so great, and I—even I—so small...”
Sleep was claiming him, though he struggled against it. The weariness in him was bone-deep. It dragged at Aidan. He thrust it away, pouring out his own bright, glad strength. “Rest,” he said. “Sleep.”
When Gwydion gave up the fight at last, Aidan stretched out beside him. His warmth was beast-warmth, his presence a joy so profound that for a moment Aidan could not breathe. He laid his arm across his brother’s back, body to gently breathing body, and matched the rhythm of his magic to the slow pulse that was Gwydion’s. Sleep came with it, sweet and deep.
o0o
Ysabel, looking for mischief in the hour before sunup, found Aimery instead. He was full of himself as usual, ordering the bath-servants about because, as he put it, “His majesty wants to bathe. Again. All over.”
“Prince Aidan bathes every day,” Ysabel said, unimpressed. “Don’t you do that in Tripoli?”
“We live like Christians in Tripoli,” said Aimery haughtily.
“In filth?”
He snarled and tried to push past her. She was solider than she looked; he could not move her.
He stopped, furious. “Will you get over? His majesty is waiting.”
“His majesty is so happy to be with his brother, he’s not noticing how long anything takes.”
“How do you know?”
Ysabel was not about to tell him. “I’ll get over if you promise to take me riding after.”
“I can’t take you riding. I have to wait on his majesty.”
“What if his majesty wants to go?”
“Then I’ll go with him. And you,” said Aimery with enormous satisfaction, “will stay home with the rest of the babies.”
Her eyes narrowed. She kept her voice quiet. She was proud to hear how quiet it was. “I’m not a baby.”
“You’re a girl,” he said.
“Is that what they teach you in Tripoli?”
“In Tripoli,” he said, “women know their place.”
Either he was an idiot, or he had been away too long. She thought that maybe it was both. She smiled at him with poisonous sweetness. “Prince Aidan always lets me ride with him. He says I ride better than any boy.”
Aimery went stiff. He was even more horrified than
she had hoped.
She laughed and danced out of his way. He almost ran away from her.
o0o
He fetched up against a wall, no matter which wall it was, and drove his fist at it. The pain was sharp, and welcome.
She always knew exactly what to say. Exactly where to drive the knife. Exactly where to twist it.
He was the oldest. The heir. The one who mattered most. And it was always Ysabel they talked about, Ysabel they thought of, Ysabel they fretted over. She was the one they noticed. She was their favorite.
He would give his heart’s blood for a moment of the prince’s attention. And did he ever get it? For a vanishing instant, maybe. Then Ysabel would come, and Aimery would be forgotten. He was only another of the tribe. She was the one Aidan loved.
He cooled his burning cheek against the wall. His hand throbbed. “I hate her,” he said.
It sounded silly, said aloud. Of course you don’t hate your sister, his mother would say, impatient as she always was with foolishness. You’re jealous, that’s all. Someone’s always jealous in a family. That’s the way the devil tempts us.
Maybe he hated his mother, too. Maybe he hated everybody.
His mood was beautifully black. He was almost sad that it had to lighten. He had duties, after all, and a king to wait on. That much, even Ysabel could not take away from him.
o0o
It was cool in the garden, almost cold, with the sun barely risen to warm it. Elen paused under a flowering tree. She would have to ask someone what it was. Its scent was sweet and potent, more purely alien than anything she had yet known: truly, at last, Outremer. She broke off a spray and tucked it in her hair. Her veil had slipped to her shoulders; she left it there. The sun lay on her like a warm hand.
The garden was larger than it looked, with paths and hedges and bowers, and a fountain playing where roses bloomed. Sometimes she could not even see the house, so clever were the contrivances of paths and hedges.
She saw the man long before he saw her. A gardener, she supposed, clearing weeds from a fishpond. He wore a turban, which made him a Saracen; he was not as small as most of them were, though he was dark enough. His sleeves were rolled high, baring long strong arms the color of bronze. He swept up a handful of weed and tossed it toward a goat which waited as if expectant. The beast caught it neatly; he laughed and said something in what must have been Arabic. She liked the sound of his voice. Warm and deep, with a ripple of mirth.
She watched him feed the goat. It was a young one, and seemed to be someone’s pet: its fawn coat was brushed to silk, its amber eyes mild, for a goat’s. When he stopped feeding it, it blatted. He answered it in tones both regretful and firm. The goat butted him peremptorily.
There was a moment of stunned astonishment; then, a resounding splash.
She leaped. Too late by far for his dignity, but she got a grip on his hand and pulled him, gasping and spluttering, out of the pond.
He had lost his turban. His hair was in braids, three of them. His face was as bronze-dark as his arms. Water ran in streams from his beard. A strand of weed was wound in it. She reached to pluck it loose.
His eyes opened, blinking through the wet, and froze her in midmotion. They were blue. Blue as the Middle Sea; blue as a fire’s heart.
And utterly, devastatingly appalled, as he saw her clearly.
She finished what she had begun. It was her own kind of defiance. He stiffened at her touch, as if he could not believe that she would dare it; all at once he recoiled. She caught him before he fell in again.
His face went an astonishing shade of grey: bloodless under the bronze. She wondered if he had hit his head. She was sure of it when he staggered and, abruptly, went down.
Not in a faint. He was groveling. Or whatever Saracens called it.
It made her angry. She dragged him up. He was taller than she had thought, almost as tall as Gwydion. “Never,” she said, not stopping to think if he would understand her, “never do that to me.”
He flushed. There was nothing subservient in his expression. From the look of it, his temper bade fair to match hers. “My lady,” he said in quite passable Frankish. “What would you have me do?”
“Face me like a man,” she said. “Did you hit your head?”
He turned it gingerly on his neck and explored it with long supple fingers. “No,” he said, “my lady.” His black brows met. “May I ask what my lady is doing here?”
“Saving your life, I rather thought.” She tossed her head. “I still think so. Even if you do not.”
“I thank you for my life,” he said as if he recited a lesson. “My lady.”
“Your life, but not your pride. As for your dignity...” She offered him her veil, and when he would not take it, proceeded to dry him herself.
He wriggled like a small child, though the words he muttered—even in Arabic—did not sound like anything a child would know. “Would you rather drip?” she snapped at him.
“Yes!”
She laughed. That stopped him. Even without those improbable eyes, he was a handsome man. And young; but not a boy. He was more than five-and-twenty, less than thirty: a good age for a man.
She dried him as much as she could, and enjoyed it rather more than she should. He suffered it grimly. No doubt it was agony to be handled so by a woman, and a Christian at that. That he was not a gardener nor a menial, she was beginning to be sure of. That kind of touchy pride never lived out of childhood, unless its owner ranked high enough to foster it.
“Are you one of Aidan’s Saracens?” she asked.
He drew himself up. “I am his mamluk,” he said.
And proud of it, too. This time he met her grin with one of his own, though it was brief, a white flash in his dark face. “And I am his sister’s granddaughter,” she said. “Elen.”
He inclined his head, gracious, if not quite ready to forgive her. “Raman,” he said.
She accepted the gift as courteously as he had, and as coolly. “You speak the langue d’oeil very well.”
“My lord taught me.” His tongue stumbled just perceptibly, as if praise made it awkward. “Strangers are not to know. That we understand them.”
“That’s wise. You hear more, that way.”
His eyes glittered. “Oh, we do, indeed.”
“Too much?”
“Never while it serves my lord. He is never sullied, whatever men may call him.”
There was faith as pure as any saint’s. They gave it a moment’s silence. Then, with a squawk, Raihan dived toward the goat. It surrendered its great sodden mouthful and resumed its exploration of the pond.
Raihan looked in dismay at the tattered remnants of his turban. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he laughed. It was amazing laughter, rich and full and direly infectious. He was still laughing as he bowed to her—in western fashion this time, with a prince’s grace—and walked away, with the goat scampering at his heels.
o0o
Ysabel got her ride after all, with everyone in the house who was minded to go, and that was most of them, except for Mother, who was too big with the new baby, and Grandmother, who never rode if she could help it. Gwydion was no better in cities than Aidan was, though he was quieter about it. Once he had his bath and heard mass in St. Perpetua’s and ate as much as his kind would ever eat, they all fetched their horses and went in search of clean air.
Aimery was conspicuously not speaking to her. She refused to pay attention. Her mare was new, a gift from her uncle and his lady, and fine: Arab-bred, and fiery enough to make Joanna intensely nervous whenever Ysabel rode her. Ysabel was inordinately proud of her. She could keep up easily with Aidan’s gelding; she loved to arch her neck and flag her tail and dance. People stared as she went by.
That was not all there was to stare at. They were all in riding clothes, nothing splendid except for the odd idiot who thought one went hunting in silk, but there was a small army of them, and Aidan’s mamluks with them, and Morgiana playing the eunuch again. Ranulf had a brace o
f hounds; some of the others had falcons. The Turks had their bows. There would be meat for the pot tonight, and some pleasure in the getting of it.
It was almost impossible to tell Gwydion and Aidan apart without looking inside. They were both in hunting green, and both riding tall greys, and both sparking with delight in the ride and the company. Aidan smiled more, that was all, and Gwydion almost never laughed, except with his eyes. Most people gave up trying to decide which was which, and addressed them both at once.
o0o
Morgiana knew, deeply and surely, which was her lover and which his brother. It was strange, dizzying, to see Aidan whole. What she had thought was all of him was only that part of him which was not Gwydion. And yet he was not diminished, nor subsumed into that other self. He was brighter, stronger, more truly himself than she had ever seen him.
She was not jealous, she decided, riding behind them, watching them together. Whether she liked Gwydion, or disliked him, or was indifferent to him...that needed time and reflection. That beloved face, that body which she knew in every line and angle, though doubled, was only one to her, the one with Aidan’s soul beneath it. The other was a stranger.
A courteous one, to be sure, and quite unperturbed by either her faith or her history. Aidan had that gift, too, of accepting a creature for itself, without heed for what the world might say of it.
“But of course,” Gwydion said, falling back beside her as Aidan sprang in pursuit of a roebuck. “We aren’t human, to succumb to human divisions. We have to make our own.”
The hunt passed them and left them behind. They slowed to a walk, to the disgust of Morgiana’s stallion; but he eyed Gwydion’s mare and decided that, all in all, he preferred to linger. She kept a light firm rein, letting him dance as he pleased, but holding him well in hand.
“A fine horse,” Gwydion said.
“He comes from Egypt,” she said. “They breed good horses there; though they prize mares over stallions. This one sires fine foals. Ysabel’s mare is one of his.”
“I could see,” he said. “Both bays, with the star on the forehead. And the head, it is distinctive.”
