The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

“I shall ransom them,” Morgiana said. “All of them.”

  Saladin turned to her, not startled, not entirely, but somewhat disconcerted. “All? I count a dozen here, drawn together like an army in ambush. One of them is a royal prince. Another, if I am not mistaken, is a king. Can you pay a king’s ransom, my lady of the afarit?”

  “Set it, and I shall pay it,” she said calmly. “The only grudge you bear them is that they fought under an idiot. They could hardly do otherwise, being idiots themselves when it comes to the swearing of oaths.”

  “I won’t have you—” Aidan began hotly.

  A force like a hand stopped his tongue. He was in no state to defeat it, although he raged against it. Morgiana never spared him a glance. “I stand hostage for their honor,” she went on, placidly giving her wealth and her life away. “I will answer for them, and pay the ransom you require.”

  Amusement conquered anger in the sultan’s face. He had always found the afarit highly entertaining, even when they terrified him. “I give you their lives,” he said, “to do with as you will. Of ransom I ask but a token. Their oaths, given singly and sincerely, that they will not again take up arms against me.”

  He was smiling as he said it, but there was no laughter in his eyes. If they refused, they would very likely die. Saladin was a knight and a gentleman, but he was also a Muslim and a king. He had sworn holy war against all of Christendom.

  “I can swear that oath,” Gwydion said, startling them. His voice was low, as if he spoke in a dream. “You will live to take Jerusalem. You will even hold it, and face the Crusade that will come. But you are a mortal man, and when your days are done you will die. I will swear never to fight against you. I will not swear never again to raise my sword against Islam.”

  Saladin paled a little under the bronze of sun and wind and years of war. “You are a seer, then, lord king.”

  Gwydion’s eyes turned to the sultan. They were the color of steel in the sun, seeing clear through him, to what, only Gwydion knew. “I am nothing but what God has made me. I will not again take arms against you, though all the kings of Europe shall raise the Crusade.”

  It was not an oath to comfort any man, even with his victory promised him. Saladin took no joy in it. But he accepted it as graciously as he might, as years of kingship had taught him.

  The Rhiyanans followed their lord, not liking it, but loyal enough, and well tamed by the battle and the defeat. Aidan was slower. It was not that he feared to be called a coward, or that he had ever intended to stay in Outremer past Michaelmas. But he did not like, ever, to be told whom he could not fight.

  His mamluks would do as he did. They were no happier than he to have their sword-hands trammeled, but they were Muslims, and they had been Saladin’s. It would save them grief to be forbidden to fight him or his armies.

  But to take such an oath. To bind himself to what the world would perceive as cowardice. To break his given word, that he would defend the Holy Sepulcher...

  He opened his mouth to refuse. What held his tongue, he hardly knew. Conrad’s face, perhaps, bruised and bloodied. Gwydion’s steel-cold eyes. Morgiana’s white face, half-turned away from him.

  It was for his mamluks, and for Gwydion, and—yes—for Morgiana, that Aidan bent his head and swore. He felt the lighter for it, though never the more joyful. Defeat could not be aught but bitter, however swiftly he drank it down.

  Then there was only Aimery. He would not swear. “I can’t,” he said, though it shook him almost to the ground. “I am of Outremer. I can’t swear never to defend it again. I can’t.”

  Aidan could not be the one to break the impasse, to compel him to swear the oath. Gwydion would not. Saladin looked at the boy and frowned. “The lion’s cub grows into a lion. Would you die, then, for the threat that you will be when you are grown?”

  Aimery swallowed hard. “Yes. Yes, I’ll die. You killed my father. You can kill me, or sell me for a slave. I don’t care. I won’t unman myself to save my skin.”

  “You intend, my lord,” said Morgiana quietly, “to ransom the king and his barons, and such knights as have the wherewithal. None of them will be bound to keep his sword sheathed against you. I allow that binding for my kin and for their following, because it can do them no harm and may teach them sense. But this will be a knight of Jerusalem. You can kill him, or you can ask his kin to ransom him. They will do that, my lord. You have my word on it.”

  Saladin had never had much stomach for murdering children, though men who opposed him did well to be afraid. He looked long at Aimery, as if he would remember that tired young face. In the end he said, “I give you into the lady’s governance. Will you, in return, give me your word of honor that you will purchase your life as I shall determine?”

  Aimery stood stiff. Clearly he thought of refusing, but he was too sensible to do more than think it. Nor was he so blind that he could not see how Morgiana had won him the advantage. He was almost able to smile as he said, “You have my word.”

  22.

  Morgiana had a tent of her own, and a handsome one it was, grand enough for an emir and looked after by servants of impeccable manners. They were not at all dismayed to be presented with a dozen Frankish captives, all of whom needed water first and urgently on the inside and then, at length, on the outside. Most of them by then were dead on their feet. They had refused to leave Ranulf lying on the field to the mercy of jackals and Saracens. With their own hands, under the eyes but not the hindrance of their captors, they had dug a grave for him. It nearly finished them. Once they had drunk all that the servants would allow, lest they sicken with too much too soon, they wanted only sleep. They were undressed and bathed like infants and laid on pallets, and left there to heal.

  Gwydion was one of them. Aidan would not have taken even water until he saw his brother tended, but the servants were firm, and numerous enough to persuade him. He did not, when it came to it, need much persuasion.

  Morgiana did not linger to watch. She had duties, and those were pressing: as envoy and messenger and gatherer of forces, and, even now, as guardian of the camp. She had not fought in the battle. Aidan did not know if he should take comfort from that. It might only have been that Saladin would not waste her power in mere bodily combat.

  She had said no word to Aidan. Not one. He might have been but one of the dozen whom she had bargained for and won, worth no more and no less than the others. Was that what he had become to her? An enemy only, to be ransomed because it pleased her fancy? It must have made her laugh behind the walls of her mind, to hear him renounce all right to avenge the slaughter of Hattin.

  Clean, fed, with a jar of water within his reach if he should want it, he should have been in bliss. His bones ached, but that would pass. He had a wound or two, none more than a scratch, and a multitude of handsome bruises. None of that should have kept him from sleep.

  He tossed on the pallet. The tent was as cool as anything could be on that furnace of a hill, with a servant swaying a fan over the sleepers, the great blade wetted down with water to cool the air—such prodigality as Aidan could not have imagined while he fought the hopeless fight. It was not shame that kept him awake, nor grief for the fall of the kingdom. That was on Guy’s head; Aidan had done all that he could. The time to grieve in earnest would be later, when it would do the most good: in front of those who had stayed behind, and thereafter in the courts of Europe, when the pope preached the Crusade.

  That was what Gwydion meant to do, Aidan knew. He would not break his oath, but he would not hide his head, either. What Gwydion could not do, the kings of the greater realms could. Henry of Anglia and Richard his turbulent heir and Eleanor his strong-willed queen, who for this might be willing to give up their warring against one another; Philip of Francia with his grand ambitions and his talent for intrigue; Barbarossa who was emperor of Germania and the Italies. They would avenge Hattin, if they could be persuaded to labor together. And there were few who could persuade as convincingly as Gwydion of Rhiyana.


  Or, for the matter of that, as Aidan his brother. That was not why he could not sleep.

  He rose. His legs cried pain; he cursed them until they muted it to a dull ache. Muslim modesty had clothed him in drawers to sleep and tried to make him take a light robe, but he would not. He brought it with him now, thought of dropping it again, put it on instead. It fit. As it ought: it was one of his own.

  Night was well fallen. The camp rested, with little of the drunken revelry that would have marked a Frankish army after a great victory. Muslims on jihad, when Saladin was their commander, did not indulge in wine.

  Aidan walked through the camp. He was barefoot, but he did not care. He looked like a Saracen with his black hair and his hawk-face, though he was taller than most and paler than any; he was not stared at overmuch, nor cursed for a Frank. He could very likely have taken a horse and ridden away, and met no hindrance.

  The sultan’s tent stood under armed guard. Saladin did not rest quite yet: there were wounded to see to, dead to gather, prisoners still to dispose of. Most of the captive knights were dead. They would fetch no ransom, and the sultan was in no merciful mood tonight. He had commanded the slain Templars and Hospitallers to be stripped and flung out for the jackals. It would seem fair recompense for the trouble they had caused him, warrior fanatics as dangerous as any fidai of the Assassins.

  Aidan paused in the shadow beyond the great golden tent. Morgiana was there within, he knew as surely as the wind in his face. Not many in the army knew what she was. She was the sultan’s servant, the eunuch from Persia who ran his errands for him.

  Aidan’s power was recovering as his body rested from fighting, or she had lowered the wards, or both. He was aware of the camp as a presence in his mind, a hum of human minds, the mingling of overriding instinct and surprising intelligence that was horses, the haughty indifference of camels. The prisoners were nearly all asleep, King Guy most deeply of all, burying grief and shame in oblivion. Lucky man. All he had to do was beggar his kingdom of wealth as he had of soldiery, and he was free to fight again.

  This much at least Aidan could be grateful for. He would never again be forced to follow such an idiot of a king.

  “Baldwin,” he said, soft in the dark. “Baldwin my dear lord, thank God you never lived to see what your sister’s fancy man has done to your kingdom.”

  “If Baldwin had lived, this battle would never have been fought at all.”

  Aidan quelled a start. Morgiana never came any other way but out of thin air; and she always listened for a prudent while before she showed herself.

  “If Baldwin were alive,” she said, “Reynaud the fox would likely have been hunted to earth before he attacked the sultan’s caravan, Count Raymond would never have let our people over the border, and you would never have come to Hattin.”

  “There would still have been a war,” Aidan said. “Who knows who would have won it? Baldwin was a good general, but so is Saladin; and Saladin is older.” He shrugged irritably. “What use is there in what-ifs? This is what is. You should be happy. Your side has won.”

  “I’m sorry it cost you so much.”

  Her voice was soft. It woke memories. Too many; too painful. How very fierce she was, but how gentle she could be.

  He could see her in the gloom, a slender figure in a turban, a pale oval of face, a green gleam of eyes. She was not quite close enough to touch.

  “What do you care what it cost me?” he demanded roughly. “I’m alive, aren’t I? You’ve had your chance to gloat over me. Now I owe you another debt. How are you going to make me pay it this time?”

  “By loving me.”

  Her voice was hardly loud enough to hear. It stilled him utterly.

  But his anger ran deep, and it was master of his tongue. “You left me for months without a word. You fought in the army that defeated me. You bought my life with an oath which will shame me for as long as men remember it. And you expect me to fall straight into your arms, as if none of it had happened?”

  “I thought that you might try,” she said. “For a beginning. To forgive me. Or is forgiveness not a Christian virtue?”

  “I’m not feeling very Christian tonight.”

  “No. You’re not.” Her tone was sharp. “It never occurs to you that I might have something to forgive.”

  “What, that I fought against your sultan?”

  She hissed as she always did when he exasperated her. “Iblis crack your thick skull! Won’t you even ask me how many men I’ve bedded since I left you?”

  He opened his mouth. No sound came out. He closed it.

  “The answer is none. Not one. Can you say the same?”

  “My taste doesn’t run to men.”

  She hit him. He caught her. She was warm in his grasp, snake-supple, and not fighting very hard. When Morgiana fought in earnest, she was too strong even for his strength. He drove his mind at hers. She hardened against him; then all at once she cast down the walls.

  He gasped. He did not want it. But, ah God, he did. He had been a raw wound, roughly scabbed over. Now the wounds opened to the cleansing air. Now, painfully, he began to heal.

  She went still in his arms. The struggle had unknotted his sash, opened his robe. She laid her head on his bare shoulder. Her heart beat hard against him. “I was deathly afraid that you would fall.”

  “I’m not easy to kill.”

  She nipped him, not gently. Her teeth were as sharp as a cat’s. “Arrows don’t care whose eye they pierce. Maces don’t mind that the skull they split is one of ours. I couldn’t guard you. Wards don’t allow the warder out, any more than they allow the intruder in.”

  “Then why did you put them up?”

  “To keep you from using power against my sultan.”

  “They did that.”

  “Of course they did. I raised them.”

  He shook his head ruefully. “I’d forgotten quite what you were like.”

  She glared from the hollow of his shoulder. “Your memory is short.”

  “I’ve been slightly distracted.”

  “And I haven’t?” She drew back a little. Her eyes left his face, found the edge of the most impressive bruise, the one that stained his side from shoulder to hip. This hiss was one of fury. “Who did that to you?”

  “We weren’t introduced,” Aidan said. “I killed him, I think.”

  “I should hope you did.” She pulled his robe the rest of the way off and relieved him of his drawers. He tried to snatch at them, but her methods had nothing to do with hands. She examined every inch of him, there in the shadow of the sultan’s tent, with a council on the other side of the wall, and a camp about them, and guards making their rounds. He would have laughed if he had dared.

  “You have a cracked rib,” she said.

  “I do?”

  “It’s the one that stabs you every time you breathe.”

  “It didn’t,” he said. “Until you mentioned it.”

  “Idiot.” She set her lips to his side. Warmth rayed out from them, and pain that was almost pleasure. He could feel the rib mending.

  She straightened. Her eyes burned green in the gloom. “Ya Allah! What would you be without me?”

  “Peaceful.”

  “Dead of ennui.” Her hand ran down his side. The bruise ached appallingly, then warmed and flowed and eased. Black-purple paled to sick green to yellow to his own bloodless white. She caught her breath. She was not the master of healing that Gwydion was, any more than he was a master of passing from place to place in a breath. This twofold mending taxed the limit of her gift.

  Aidan caught her before she could spend it wholly, and held her until she could stand again by herself. He was keenly aware of her body in all its garments, and his in none at all.

  “I haven’t bedded a woman since you left,” he said. “Not one.”

  “What, not even your Frank?”

  “She’s eight months pregnant,” he said.

  “Yes. Of course. She would not want you then. Would she?�
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  He cursed himself for a tactless fool. All the warmth that had been between them was gone. For a few words; a jest that had cut her to the bone.

  He took her hands and kissed them, cold though they were, neither resisting nor responding. “I love you, Morgiana.” He said it as if he had never known it before. “I love no one else as I love you.”

  “She gave you a child.”

  “You gave me yourself.”

  “Her husband is dead. You can marry her now. No one will object. She is Christian. She has lands and castles to give you. She can give you children, as I cannot.”

  “You don’t know that!” he snapped. “Gwydion says you’re like a maid just grown. You aren’t ready to bear children yet. But you will be. Even I can see it in you.”

  But she was shaking her head, refusing to listen. “Now you resent me for buying you out of captivity yet again. I’ll never be or do what you need. I’ll always do the wrong thing, say the wrong words, spare nothing of your pride or your manhood. I don’t know how to be a woman.”

  “Why would you want to be?” He tried to grip her shoulders, but she slid away. “Morgiana, stop it. If I wanted a simpering coquette I’d find myself one.”

  “What if you wanted a woman who is not barren?”

  “You aren’t.”

  “Then why can’t I make you a child?”

  “Maybe you want it too much.”

  She stared at him, all wide eyes and wicked temper, like a cat. A moment more, a breath drawn awry, and he would lose her.

  “If you go away,” he said, “I’ll follow.”

  “You know what that does to you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You will if you lose your dinner all over my cave in Persia.”

  “So don’t run away to it.”

  “You have got to learn not to get sick when you go otherwhere. It’s purely your panic that does it.”

  “Stay and teach me not to panic.”

  Her eyes narrowed. He stifled a sigh. She was solidly there again, not braced to flick herself to the other side of the world. “What makes you think I ever meant to go away?”