The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  He would have bid for some of them in spite of her, but she had the purse and would not give it up. Her eyes, level on him, commanded him to see sense. If he beggared himself, well and good. But what of his mamluks here, his people in Millefleurs, his kin who had need of his wealth and his strength? What would become of them?

  A prince, even a prince who was a witch, could not cure all the ills of the world. So should he have learned long ago.

  “But some of them,” he said with sudden passion, “some of them I can mend. However poorly. For however little a while.”

  Morgiana narrowed her eyes. After a moment she handed him the purse.

  He bought as many of the captives as he could, and set them free; and they were properly grateful, most of them, if they still had wits left for it. But there were always more. There would never be an end to them.

  o0o

  “That man,” Morgiana said, “is the worst captive I have ever seen or heard of.”

  “Then let him go,” said Gwydion.

  She glared at him. He had barely interrupted his reading to speak to her. He was reading holy Koran. To understand it, he said, inasmuch as he could with his imperfect Arabic.

  “How can I let him go?” she demanded. “He’ll only ride hell-for-leather for the war, and tear himself apart wanting to fight in it.”

  “Not if you go with him.”

  Her lip curled. “Yes. Then he’ll simply tear me apart. I can’t trust him, brother my lord.”

  “And why can’t you trust him?” He did not wait for her to answer. “Because, sister my lady. He knows how little trust you place in his given word.”

  “I trust his word!”

  “Then let him go.”

  She stood in thrumming silence. Gwydion went back to his reading. His lips moved slowly, puzzling out the intricacies of the Prophet’s Arabic. He stopped, frowning faintly.

  “‘Folly,’” she said harshly. “‘Folly’ is the word you want.”

  He bowed his thanks. She left him to it.

  o0o

  Her friend the swordsmith’s daughter had no time for her: one of the children was ailing, and it was not anything Morgiana could heal, nor anything deadly enough to shock the household by dragging Gwydion into it. She passed from place to place as her power moved her. None of them lightened her mood. Her cavern in Persia made it worse by far. There were too many memories in it. The swordsmith’s daughter, Ishak’s sister, estranged from her husband and given sanctuary there with her eldest son, who was now a well-grown lad apprenticed to his father; and Aidan, held captive then as now, and considerably less well disposed toward his captor. He had wanted her blood then. And so he had had it, if never in the way he had expected: not heart’s blood but maiden blood. He had been startled to find her truly virgin. Startled and, somewhat to his credit, abashed. It was not in Aidan to be a ravisher of maidens.

  Then, he had hated her, but he had endured his captivity because he thought that it accomplished something: it kept her from endangering his kin. Now he had no such comfort. He knew that Joanna and her children had been in Acre when it fell. He knew of her newborn daughter and of her departure, the moment she was allowed out of her bed, for Tyre.

  Morgiana spun like a devil-wind, loathing that great, fecund cow of a Frank. But thinking clearly for all of that, and seeing by degrees what had been eluding her.

  Tyre was safe. It was no more or less impregnable than Acre, but it was full of men who knew how to fight. They had all gone there, fleeing the sultan, Raymond of Tripoli first, but he left too soon and sought his own city. He thought Tripoli more easily defended than Tyre, less likely to tempt the sultan to attack it. So it was. But he reckoned without the one who came to Tyre after him.

  Conrad of Montferrat, son of the marquis who had been taken at Hattin, kinsman to the kings of Jerusalem, was young but he was wily, and he had studied in the best school of intrigue in the world: at the court of the emperor in Constantinople. He had, unfortunately, outsmarted himself; someone died who had influence in high places, and Conrad’s hand was evident in it. He left the City in haste, sailing well ahead of the news of Hattin. He brought his ship to harbor in Acre just after Saladin left it, but it was clear who held the city. If Saladin’s son had been only a little wiser in the ways of war, Conrad would have been taken prisoner. But al-Afdal moved too slowly. Conrad escaped and sailed headlong for Tyre.

  He found it on the brink of surrender. He was whitely furious to see the kingdom fallen so far; he disposed of Reynaud of Sidon, who had been in command of the city and who was about to hand it over uncontested to the enemy. He took command himself, drove the garrison to the ramparts, and made it clear that Tyre would not surrender without a fight.

  Saladin was not minded to give it one. He had the rest of Outremer to occupy him. If all the rats chose to gather in that single bolthole, then so much the better; he could trap them at his leisure.

  “Not when they have the sea at their backs and ships to sail on it,” Morgiana said. The echoes of her voice rang faintly to the roof of the cavern. She could, if she willed it, step from this hidden place in Persia to the heart of the sultan’s camp, and warn him that even rats were deadly under a strong king. Conrad wanted to be that. Morgiana could read him with ease, simply from what was said of him.

  She did not move. She had left the sultan’s service after Hattin. “You need me no longer,” she had said. “Those against whom I defended you are in your power. Hereafter you need no more aid than mortal men can give.”

  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.