The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  Aidan blew the hunting horn that he resorted to in battles, the quick scatter of notes that cried, To me! To me!

  They came as they could, the Kipchaks both on one staggering pony, Conrad clinging to Raihan’s stirrup, Arslan bloody to the elbows but never a scratch on him, and after him the others.

  Three only. Dildirim, Andronikos, Janek the Circassian with his ruddy beard. Four were dead. Shadhi, Tuman, Zangi, Bahram. Janek was badly hurt: he swayed in the saddle and would have fallen, had not Conrad come round to hold him.

  They struggled back up the hill. The king, between his own charges, had ordered tents pitched: his great scarlet pavilion and two others close by it. One was full of wounded, and Gwydion was in it, spending his strength in a battle no less potent than that with swords and bows, though far more to his liking.

  In the third charge Aidan kept his horse and drove clear up to the guard about the sultan. For a moment, as he locked in fierce combat with a pair of mamluks, his eyes met the sultan’s. Saladin’s widened more in surprise than in fear; then, with a start, in recognition. Then the tide of the army rolled in, roaring, and flung Aidan back. Dildirim was fallen and trampled, and Andronikos hewn by a mamluk’s axe, and Janek who had broken Aidan’s command to ride again after Gwydion nigh spent himself to heal the spear-thrust in his side, this time took a lance in the heart, and there was no healing that.

  They brought the bodies back, high though it cost them, and counted who was left. Five mamluks, none with a whole skin. Aidan, looking as if he had washed in blood, but only a little of it was his own. Of thirty Rhiyanan knights, a mere dozen lived to half-fall from their spent and staggering horses.

  This, Aidan knew, was how the damned dwelt in hell. The sun a hammer on the anvil of their heads. Thirst a fire in their throats. Smoke a dagger in their lungs. A sea of screaming infidels, inexhaustible, and they dwindling one by one. He could not even weep for his dead. All the tears were burned out of him.

  The Bishop of Acre was dead. With him had fallen the soul of the kingdom: the True Cross in its casing of gold and pearls and jewels, bound about with silver. The infidels took it and hacked at it, until the sultan sent his guards to rescue it. They nailed it to a lance and set it up by the sultan’s post. There it glittered, broken and dishonored, while the Saracens hounded the knights to their deaths.

  A scarce tithe of them were left, of all who had ridden to the battle: sevenscore and ten about the king’s tent on the height, fighting like men in a trance. The enemy pressed them harder, harder, harder.

  The smaller tents fell. Gwydion escaped the one which held the wounded, afoot and raging, shieldless, helmetless, whirling his sword about his head. His fury drove the enemy back, but they were too many. They simply evaded him and turned on the knights about the king. Gwydion hacked his way through them to Aidan’s side, wound his hand in his brother’s stirrup, and there took his stand. His mind was pure white, like the sun on snow. Whatever he struck, he killed.

  But he was fresh only to this battle, and he was living flesh, though never human. His fury alone could not make his arm wield the sword again and again against an enemy who never tired, never paused, never granted him respite. They wanted the king’s tent. They wanted the King of Jerusalem. They were victorious, and they wanted to end it, but these madmen of Franks would not, could not know when they were beaten.

  There was no room for a last charge. They tried. They bunched together with their backs to the tent. Aidan was knee to knee with the king himself. Their eyes met, blind alike, stunned alike; then parted. They set spurs to their horses’ sides.

  But the enemy was too thick, the press too heavy. They were hemmed in.

  A shrilling horde broke past them and toppled the tent. Now even their backs were beset.

  They stopped in the circle of infidels. Their horses’ heads hung low; the beasts’ knees trembled with exhaustion. Their own heads were no higher, their knees no stronger. Without word or signal, but raggedly together, they slid to the ground. Most of them could not even stand. They sank down, swords still in hands, and lay there, not caring if they lived or died.

  The battle was ended. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was lost. Salah al-Din Yusuf, al-Malik al-Nasir, the king and the defender, the rectifier of the Faith in the House of Islam, was victorious.

  21.

  The sultan pitched his tent on the hill which he had taken, and ordered his army to make camp, as any good general should do after a battle. Then he had Guy de Lusignan and Reynaud de Châtillon brought to him in his pavilion. He spoke first to Reynaud, through his interpreter for Reynaud knew no Arabic. “So, sir. Do you repent now of your treachery against us?”

  Reynaud was exhausted almost beyond endurance, filthy, blood-stained, and bone-dry, but he had lost none of his bandit arrogance. “If what I have done is treachery, then what is that but the practice of kings?”

  Saladin’s eyes glittered, but he made no response. He called instead for his servant, who brought a cup of water cooled with snow and offered it to Guy. The king stared at it blankly for a stretching moment, as if at a dream of paradise. Then, trembling, he took it. He tried to drink slowly, but he was human and no saint, and he had had no water since the morning before. When half the cup’s contents had flowed deliriously down his throat, he caught himself with a start. His eyes met Reynaud’s. The lord of Kerak watched him as a starving man watches a king at the feast. Guy passed him the cup.

  The sultan smiled. It was not an expression to set any man’s mind at rest, still less a king whom he had vanquished. He spoke in Arabic. The interpreter said, “My sultan says, ‘Say to the king: You, not I, have given him to drink.’”

  That was to say, once a captor had fed his captive and given him to drink, that captive would be allowed to live. But Saladin would grant Reynaud no such grace.

  There was a silence. Neither Frank moved to break it. The sultan gestured. His mamluks beckoned to the king. He hesitated, eyes on Reynaud, but the soldier-slaves were firm, if not disrespectful. Guy had no choice but to let them lead him to the outer chamber.

  When he was gone, the sultan faced Reynaud. “You may still live,” said Saladin, “treacherous dog though you be. You have but to accept Islam.”

  Reynaud laughed, and spat in the sultan’s face.

  Saladin’s smile was even more terrible than before. He drew his sword. Reynaud did not, even yet, believe that he was in danger. It had always been his failing, to know that he was invincible. The fine Indian steel pierced him where he stood.

  Saladin stood over the body. His face was calm, at rest. “Kings are not wont to murder one another,” he said to the dead man. The eyes stared up at him, wide and astonished. “But you,” said Saladin, “went beyond any king’s endurance. I swore a sacred oath that I would slay you. I, at least, am a man of my word.”

  o0o

  Aidan knew nothing of any of that. He had never lost a battle in his life, never been taken captive by any mortal man, never known what it was to be stripped of his weapons and driven stumbling through the camp of the enemy. He fought to stay near to his own people: his brother, his mamluks, the pitiful handful of Rhiyanans who yet lived. He could not see Aimery anywhere, nor Ranulf, who should have been in the center with the king. But Guy was gone, and Reynaud, taken away God and the sultan knew where; and in this camp under the bright shield of the wards his power was the faintest of flickers.

  They were herded to an open space where the grass was burned but had stopped smoldering. Saracens ringed it, making a great deal of noise. All of them jeered. Some kicked or spat as the Franks were driven past.

  There in the open they were made to stand. They were not allowed to lie down. Any who tried was kicked and bullied up again. Their guards did not keep the weaker from leaning on the stronger.

  Aidan held to his brother, who seemed like one in a trance. He looked quite sane if utterly worn, but his mind was still a white absence. He had gone very far to heal those who could be healed, then fought wit
h all that was in him. There was too little of him left to do more than go where he was made to go, and stand where he was told to stand.

  Aidan’s mamluks had had the sense to rid themselves of their turbans. With all the stains and ravages of battle and thirst that were on them, and in the company of battle-wearied knights, even Arslan’s indubitably Seljuk face was hard to distinguish; and that might well have saved him. He, like Raihan, could have been a Turcopole, and Conrad looked pure Norman, and the Kipchaks had little enough beard and little enough stature to be taken for boys, if no one looked too closely at their faces.

  No one came close at all. They were to be forgotten, it seemed, left in the sun until it killed them. It would not take much longer. Aidan was dimly surprised to see how much daylight was still left. Two hours, or three. This day had already been years long.

  At the end of the line one of the knights went down and lay unmoving. Another dropped beside him. The guards closed in, spearbutts raised to goad or strike.

  Gwydion was gone from Aidan’s side. That was the blur of him, leaping toward the fallen man, the kneeling boy, the guards with their spears and their cold eyes. Aidan sprang after him.

  It was Ranulf down, Aimery with him. The boy tried to shield his father from the guards’ spears. Gwydion fell on the foremost. The snap of the man’s neck was hideously distinct.

  Spears whipped round. Gwydion laughed, light and mad. The guards cried out. Their weapons writhed in their hands, raising fanged heads to strike. The Saracens flung them away in horror. They fell as plain lifeless wood, but their heads were gone.

  Gwydion left the dead guardsman and turned back to Ranulf. Aimery’s face turned up toward him, white under dirt and blood and soot. It was not grief, not horror, not even fear. It was rage as pure as Gwydion’s own. “They killed him,” the boy said. His voice was perfectly calm.

  Ranulf was not quite dead. But he was beyond Gwydion’s strength to heal. A great torn wound in his thigh had drained his life away; there were other wounds on him, and ribs broken where a mace had caught him. How he had lived this long, walked this far, only God knew. That Aimery had done his best to carry him was clear to see.

  Gwydion could do no more than ease his pain, give him the illusion of water in his burning throat, let him see that his son was with him. He could not speak, but he smiled at the boy. He had fought well; he had seen that his son was brave, and would make a man. He was content. He went softly into the great dark, with no fear at all.

  Aidan stood guard over them, little need though there was of that. Even Saladin’s warriors were not about to pick a quarrel with a lord of the afarit.

  Aidan’s mamluks had followed him, unmolested for a miracle, and the Rhiyanans stumbling after. They made an honor guard for Ranulf’s body. The one who still had a whole cloak, Gwydion’s squire Urien, spread it over the knight. Aimery raised a hand as if to protest, but then he stilled.

  Aidan did not like the look of him. But there was nothing in this place or this circumstance to like. The boy was quiet, at least, and stood by Aidan when he was bidden, even let Aidan rest an arm about his shoulders.

  It was not long after that, that the sultan came out of his tent. A mamluk went before him with a spear, and on it a head which all of them knew. Reynaud de Châtillon, the reiver of Kerak, had broken his last compact with the infidel. King Guy followed, head up, walking free, but his eyes were haunted.

  The line of knights stiffened as the sultan approached. The warrior monks, Templars and Hospitallers, glanced at one another and, in one concerted motion, turned their backs on him. The guards would have forced them about, but Saladin shook his head. Aidan heard him in strangely doubled fashion: first in Arabic, then in the interpreter’s langue d’oeil. “They know what hope they have here.” He raised his voice slightly. “Any of you who wishes to accept Islam, may do so and live.”

  None of them moved. Someone near Aidan was trying not to laugh. It was one of the Kipchaks. Aidan hissed at him to be still.

  The sultan was too far away to hear. He called out his sufis and his men of religion, one for each Templar and Hospitaller, each armed with a sword. Some of them looked as if they hardly knew which end to hold, but they were all alight with holy zeal.

  “Now,” the sultan said.

  The warrior monks fell. Some did not fall easily: poorly or weakly smitten, or roused to resistance at the end. Those the guards finished off, as one gives the grace-stroke to a fallen animal. Only the Grand Master of the Temple was spared at the sultan’s command, with two hulking Nubians holding him in his place while his brothers in the cross died. His curses were inventive, and quite surprising in a man of God. The interpreter conveyed some of them to Saladin, who was grimly amused. “Take that one away,” he said to the Nubians, “and see that he is kept from mischief. He is a fouler dog than any of those who followed him, but he is a prince of his people; and a prince owes courtesy to a prince.”

  Gerard de Ridefort clearly did not think so, but he was not strong enough to escape his captors, still less to tear out the sultan’s throat. He was still roaring maledictions as they carried him off.

  That left the knights of Outremer, a pitiful straggling few, too worn with exhaustion even to beg for mercy. They could only stand, and wait mute for what would come.

  Saladin bade the great lords be led forward. It was shocking to see how few they were. Besides King Guy, there were only Amalric his brother, and Humphrey of Toron, and the Marquis of Montferrat, and Joscelin de Courtenay, Count of fallen Edessa, and a bare handful of lesser lords. Gwydion would not go; Aidan would not go without him. Their knights and their mamluks stirred, growling softly. One of the guards, his patience exhausted, raised his fist.

  “No.”

  Clear, that voice, and oddly sexless. It was not deep enough for a man’s, but for a woman’s it was very low. The one who owned it came from behind the sultan. A young emir, it seemed, in a coat of amber silk over mail, and a helmet with a turban wound about it, and long Turkish braids; but that face was never a Turk’s, white as ivory and carved as pure as any face in Persia. There was no beard on it, nor would one ever grow there. Though not, as the army might think, because the warrior was a eunuch.

  Aidan had been strong enough until then. Numb, yes, and powerless, and worn to a rag, and desperate for water; but he could keep his feet, he could do what he must, he could will himself not to think.

  Now he felt all the strength drain out of him. Only Gwydion’s arm kept him from falling.

  “No,” said Morgiana. “Let them be.”

  She had some power here, and ample presence. She was obeyed. The sultan, occupied in winnowing barons from plain knights, paused to glance down the line. What he saw made him hand the task to his son, who was close by him and more than pleased to take it, and with but a pair of mamluks, stride toward the knot of Franks and Saracens.

  Saladin looked well, Aidan thought distantly. Older, yes; that was inevitable. He was nigh fifty years old. His beard was still black, still trimmed neatly, close to his jaw. He was still slender, still quick on his feet, with fine eyes in a face somewhat thickened with age. The scar of an Assassin’s blade seamed one cheek; the years marked it more deeply, and the asceticism to which he was given, king of kings though he was. He was not in the plain black robes he preferred, but then this was war, and he had, for that, to look a king.

  What Saladin saw could hardly be as pleasant: two battered and filthy knights with the same face, a boy whose eyes on him flashed hate, a bare handful of warriors who tried, even weaponless, to guard them.

  Five of those warriors made the sultan’s eyes narrow. “So, sirs. You’re still with him.”

  Aidan spoke before one of them could do it and earn a spear in the vitals. “They’re still with me,” he said. “A better gift I’ve seldom had, nor ever one more faithful.”

  “Faith,” said Saladin. “Yes. They are Muslims. How came they to fight against their own people?”

  “We fough
t for our prince,” said Timur, always the one to open his mouth when anyone else would have known better. “You gave us to him, my lord. You must have known what would come of it.”

  “As you must have known what the price would be,” Saladin said.

  Timur nodded, but his eyes were fearless. “We’re glad you won, my lord. We’re good Muslims, after all. But we had to fight for the master you gave us.”

  Saladin looked him up and down, then each of the others in turn. “Five of you,” he said. “Seven dead. That must be grievous to bear.”

  “They are in Paradise,” Timur said steadily.

  “For fighting Muslims?”

  “For fighting for their prince.”

  Saladin almost smiled. “You haven’t lost your impudence,” he said. He paused. “Your prince is beaten now and in my power. Will you come back to serve me?”

  They glanced at one another. Timur, for once, gave precedence to Arslan. The captain said, “With all respect, my sultan, no. We belong to our prince. We can serve no other master.”

  “I was your master once,” Saladin said, dangerously soft.

  “We are his now,” said Arslan.

  Saladin turned the fire of his glance on Aidan. “You would have refused them once. Will you relinquish them?”

  “Will it save their lives?” Aidan asked.

  Saladin nodded.

  “We won’t go,” Timur said.

  It was Conrad who added, “We’d rather be dead and yours, my lord, than alive and any other man’s. Not to insult my lord sultan. If we could serve any other master, it would be he. But we cannot.”

  “Loyal servants indeed,” said Saladin. He seemed torn between anger and admiration. “Your master will have to ransom you if he wishes you to live.”