The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  People worried, and his father most of all. But they could not understand. Simeon was afraid that he might die, because he looked so sick and so pale. It was not Akiva’s body that Ysabel feared for. That would go on unless someone tried very hard to kill it. His mind and his power—those were what frightened her. He still kept trying to slide away, to go to sleep and not wake up. She had had her tanning at last, but not for being bold in front of the Saracen sultan; for refusing to let Akiva sleep when everyone was sure he should. For keeping his self from slipping into the deep places and never coming out.

  Now they were sorry. Akiva had told them when he woke up more properly, what she had done and why. They believed him when they would not even listen to her. They still tried to make her leave him alone, but they did not whip her for disobeying.

  He looked almost healthy today, sitting on his favorite bench under the lilac hedge. “I think I want to go for a walk,” he said, startling her speechless. “Not underground. It’s too dark. Too much—like—”

  “I know,” she said quickly, so that he would not have to go on.

  “I want to be out in the light,” he said. “Have you been up on the walls yet?”

  “You can’t climb up there. You’re too sick.”

  A frown from him was so rare that when he did it he looked like a stranger. “Who says I’m too sick?”

  She looked at him. He looked mostly like himself. Thinner, but he was growing so fast she could almost see it; he was all long and no wide. “You can lean on me,” she said. “And we’ll go slowly.”

  He did not like that, but he shut his mouth on it.

  She was growing, too, if not as fast. Her shoulder was at a comfortable height for him to lean on, when he decided to stop being insulted and start being sensible.

  They made a clean and quiet escape, with no one even stopping to ask them what they were up to. Usually Ysabel said a prayer to thank whichever saint was looking after her, but today she forgot. By the time she remembered, they were most of the way to the wall, and it was too late.

  A little after that, she was sorry. Someone called her name behind her. Like an idiot she stopped to see who it was. There were people between; she was too small to see over them. But Akiva, taller, and trying not to seem glad of the rest, said, “It’s Lady Elen.”

  It was. She always looked cool and elegant and beautiful, even picking her way through refuse on the street. People stared as she went by. She never noticed them.

  She did notice Ysabel. And Akiva. There was a faint line of frown between her brows. “Does your father know that you are out?” she asked him.

  “Does he need to?” Ysabel broke in before Akiva could say anything. “We’re going up on the wall. Are you?”

  It was a desperate gamble. Lady Elen was grownfolk, and human, but she had a bit of wildness left in her. She frowned at Akiva, but he had his strength back now; he stood by himself and hooked his fingers through his belt. “I am so tired,” he said, “of being an invalid. If I promise to rest when I get up there, and go right back when I’ve rested, will you come up with us?”

  Lady Elen’s frown was almost a scowl, but all at once it smoothed away. Ysabel would have liked to be able to do that. “Obviously, if I refuse, you’ll go up anyway, and then who will look after you?” Elen shook her head. “Akiva, you are a shameless conniver.”

  He grinned at her, his first grin since Salima was born.

  She grinned back and gathered her skirts.

  They went up the stair one by one, with Akiva in the middle and Ysabel going last. The guards on the wall were watchful, but with no enemy in sight, they did not mind if a woman and a pair of children wanted to see what was outside of Tyre. Akiva was not up to walking far, though Ysabel would have liked to see the drowned city. They went a little way round instead, toward the causeway. People were coming and going. Saladin had burned a field or two, but there was still a great deal of green, with the dun and purple of desert and mountain beyond it, and in front of it the white sand and the blue water and the great sweeping curve of the coast.

  Akiva sat in a crenel of the battlement and tried not to show how badly he needed to rest. Ysabel was not deceived. Nor was Elen. Elen, who was tall, could lean on the merlon just beyond him and let the wind blow in her face. Ysabel could feel her wanting to strip off her veil and fillet and let her hair fly free.

  She would not, of course. It was indecent, and it was appallingly public. She had to settle for the wind and the sun, and conspicuously not caring if she burned her face brown.

  It was peaceful up here. Akiva was almost asleep. Now and then a guard went by. It was always a different one. They were taking turns admiring the lady, who did not even know that they noticed her. Her mind was full of someone else altogether.

  Ysabel wandered a bit, came back, fit herself into the crenel next to Akiva’s. She would have dangled her legs over, if Elen had not been there. If there had been no humans there at all, she would have done much more than that. Flown like a gull, now high up against the sun, now skimming the water.

  There were three gates in the wall, two smaller ones flanking the great double one with its arches and its gatehouse. Only the middle gate was open. They were almost beside the northmost one; they could see how people went in and out, some mounted, most afoot, and how the guards looked hard at every one. Ysabel could have told them that a spy would be an idiot to look like one. Not that there was any, that she could see. Saladin was not interested in Tyre.

  The first she saw of the company of riders, she thought they were knights coming back from hunting. There were about a score of them. But hunters would not bring so many horses: a whole herd without riders, running in a tight knot in the middle. There were mules, too. With packs. And, through the dust they raised, a line of haughty camels.

  More Christians escaped from the war.

  Did Christians wear turbans? Some of the riders did. But some did not, and those were clearly Franks: they were wearing armor and surcoats.

  Ysabel was standing in the crenel, barely holding on, craning to see more. She knew—she knew—

  It was agony to wait. Akiva was asleep. Elen was oblivious. She must have seen the riders, but she would be thinking as Ysabel had at first: more swords for the defense of Tyre. There were more men than women, and all the men were armed. Fighting men.

  A handful of knights and squires. A tiny company of men-at-arms. Five mamluks who had belonged, once, to the Syrian sultan.

  Only five?

  Three white enchanters, a prince and a king and a figure that was neither, but had been the most feared of the Assassins. Ysabel’s breath ran out of her in a soft cry. It was. It was.

  They crawled closer. They could not go faster. The camels did not like it, and some of the mares had foals at heel. Ysabel knew those horses. They were Aidan’s best-loved beauties from Millefleurs, and Raihan’s precious few. Maleka had a filly, bay with a white star. Raihan would be like to burst with pride.

  But only five mamluks. Seven gone. She had felt them die. It had not meant anything real, until she saw how empty the ranks were without them.

  The wind, the high fierce wind of Tyre, stung the tears on her cheeks. She dashed them away. Ranulf was not there, either. Would never be there again.

  o0o

  They checked for a moment, all of them, where the causeway joined the land. The guards on the wall were suspicious, seeing the turbans and the Saracen coats, even in the middle of all the Franks. Conrad had his wives with him, all three in veils.

  But suspicion was not what the riders saw. They saw Tyre: the loom of the wall, the three gates, the city impregnable on its all-but-island. Some of them wept, because it was Christian, and safe, and beautiful.

  Aidan on his grey gelding, in the coat of honor that Saladin had given him before Ysabel was born, rode ahead of the others onto the causeway. It was not far to the gate, but it could be a lonely ride, with the walls frowning down and the land falling away on either side to
the sea. After a little the others followed him.

  Ysabel reached out to him with her mind. He was closed against her. He could not even see her: his eyes were on the great gate, and not looking for a lone small figure in a crenel.

  It hurt, that he could not know her. She ran along the wall, darting round guards and gawkers. She heard Elen’s cry behind her. She did not stop for it.

  The gatehouse stopped her. Aidan was almost under it. She scrambled out onto the edge of the wall.

  He paused. To wait for the others, it was plain; but he was just below her. She called out to him. He started and turned his face up to her. She saw it in a blur, white inside of black. Father! she cried in her mind. Father, Father, Father! And leaped from the battlements, falling dizzily, swooping through the blue air.

  30.

  Elen, dreaming in the sun, thought at first that her dream had taken substance. She saw them come riding in their company, Prince Aidan well ahead as he always was, Gwydion more quiet behind, and one in a turban whose face was a woman’s, and a strong lad who but a season ago had been a child, Joanna’s eldest son; and a few, a pitiful few, of those who had gone to the war with them. Of thirty Rhiyanan knights, she counted six, and Urien the king’s squire. Of a dozen Syrian mamluks, she saw five. Five only in their scarlet coats, with heads high and haughty under the turban-wrapped helmets. A pair of slant-eyed imps who at this distance seemed to have no more beard than boys, and a golden lion of a man who, for once, was not singing, and a thickset Turk.

  And somewhat behind, riding among the herd of horses, a tall wide-shouldered man with a handsome black beard and a face burned well-nigh black in the sun, and eyes shadowed under the turban. But they would be blue. Sea blue, sky blue, flaxflower blue.

  The breath left her in a long sigh. He was alive. He rode lightly, no stiffness in him, no mark of wound or hardship. He was whole. He had come back.

  She saw Ysabel dart toward the gatehouse. The child’s face, flashing past her, was white and set, a little mad. Elen sprang in pursuit, calling. She doubted that Ysabel even heard her.

  Elen stretched her stride. The child was as quick as a cat, and rather less inclined to serve any will but her own. Elen prayed devoutly that she would stop before she caught the guards’ attention.

  Someone else ran past her. Akiva. He had been asleep. How had he roused so soon? How could he move so fast?

  Even he was not quick enough to catch Ysabel. Elen saw her climb out onto a crenel, not even troubling to hold on. And saw her leap.

  o0o

  How Elen came down from the wall to the gate, she never remembered. One moment she was by the gatehouse, watching a child fall to her certain death. The next, she was past the great echoing arch on the white sand of the road, and Akiva was beside her, and the riders were milling to a halt before her.

  Ysabel was not dead and broken at her uncle’s feet. She was in his arms, where she had flown—flown! Her arms were locked about his neck; he held her with his horse patiently still beneath them both, and rocked her and murmured words which Elen had no ears to hear.

  Guards and hangers-on had run even as Elen had. They halted as she had, staring, and some crossed themselves. A miracle, they said. That the rider should be there, precisely where the child fell; that he had caught her. No one said what most must have seen too clearly: that she should have come down a good horselength from where she clung and trembled and wept. And that she had come down as lightly as a bird landing, not even rocking the prince in his saddle. She wept because he had come back, and he was whole, and she was, when she drew up straight on the saddlebow, furious. “Don’t you ever,” she said clearly. “Don’t you ever go away and leave me again.”

  Elen, caught between shock and dawning anger, saw more keenly than she had ever known she could. Aidan’s face as he looked down at Joanna’s eldest daughter. Ysabel as she clung there, hands fisted in his coat, glaring through tears. Ysabel was her mother’s daughter, indisputably.

  She was also her father’s.

  It did not, on reflection, come as a surprise. Once one knew, one could see; and not only that the child was witchborn. She would grow to his length and lightness, and she would have his profile, though fined and softened by her sex.

  She knew whose child she was. Elen remembered how Saladin had looked at her, and how she had spoken to him. Yes, the sultan had seen it with his clear eye for witchfolk. God’s grace that no one else ever had.

  Elen glanced at Morgiana, who had halted beside Gwydion. Her face was unreadable. Not angry, it seemed, and not visibly jealous. That she was fond of the child, Elen knew. Fond enough to forgive her for being Aidan’s daughter?

  The tableau shifted. One of the mares squealed; a camel grunted; the world began to move again. In a flurry of greetings and gladness, with the guards bidding them Move on, move on, Elen took Gwydion’s hand and swung lightly up to ride pillion behind him. Akiva was with Morgiana on her devil of a stallion, wide-eyed and white-cheeked but loving it, laughing at something she said.

  Elen folded her arms about Gwydion’s narrow waist and hugged tightly. She could feel his pleasure and his welcome, even without the hand he laid on hers. “Thank God and all the saints,” she said, “that you’ve come back to us.”

  o0o

  In all the confusion of riding to the caravanserai, fetching Joanna and the rest of the family, meeting and greeting and settling the beasts and the baggage, Elen did not speak to Raihan, or even look at him except for stolen glances. They had ridden back from Damascus by the long way through Aidan’s castle of Millefleurs; besides the horses, they had stores of food and wine, and camel-loads of belongings, and coin and gems enough to pay their share many times over. It all took an eternity to settle; and then there had to be a feast, and more uproar.

  The joy of the riders’ coming was muted by the news they brought, that at last must be accepted: the lord of Mortmain was dead. The lord of Mortmain, now, was the boy who greeted his mother with such dignity, whom war had honed and tempered into the strong beginning of a man.

  Neither son nor mother wept. They sat side by side at the table under the canopy of Mortmain crimson, and showed their people how it must be. Grief, yes, but there was a war to fight; later would be time enough to indulge in wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  “We buried him on the field of Hattin,” Gwydion said. “He can be brought back if you will it, and set among his own people.”

  Joanna shook her head. “His own people are in Normandy. His lands are overrun. Let him lie where he fell. There’s honor in that, and glory enough.”

  “He hated fuss,” said Ysabel. Her voice was suspiciously husky. She would not leave Aidan’s side for anything; it had taken main force to pry her loose so that he could bathe and rest. He laid his arm about her now, and murmured in her ear. Whatever he said, it seemed to comfort her. She stopped picking at her dinner, even ate a little.

  It was Salima who put an end to the ordeal. Joanna had a wetnurse for her, like any sensible lady, but preferred to nurse the child herself. That she chose to do so now was patently an escape, and for Elen at least, a reprieve. Most of the newcomers went to rest from their traveling; the household scattered to their tasks, the children to the ministrations of their nurse.

  The house that had been so large for the number of them was hard put now to hold them all. Elen surrendered her solitude willingly enough, to share a chamber with Lady Margaret and their maids and, on her own recognizance, Ysabel. “My uncle thinks I ought to be your maid,” the child said. “I know you have Gwenneth, but doesn’t she get tired sometimes?”

  “Your uncle,” said Elen, very careful indeed not to set any burden of irony in the title, “is very kind. What does your mother say?”

  Ysabel shrugged. “She’ll be happy. She thinks I need reining in.”

  Elen remembered a leap from the wall of Tyre, and stifled an urge to laugh. “I think you need jesses and a hood. And a creance, for when you decide to fly.”

 
; “I forgot,” Ysabel said with gratifying contrition. “I saw him, and all I wanted was to be with him.”

  “You should remember,” Elen said severely. “Yes, you may stay with me, but you must promise to do as I tell you, and you must do your utmost to remember what humans can and cannot do.”

  “I promise,” said Ysabel, barely pausing to consider. Elen nodded, unsmiling. “You may begin by helping me with my dress.”

  o0o

  The others were asleep: Lady Margaret in the bed with Elen, and Ysabel; the maids on pallets on the floor. The air in the room, even with the shutters wide, was hot and close. Flies buzzed beyond the bed-curtains.

  Elen lay stiff and still. Her mind would not stop circling. One word only; that was all. Alive, alive, alive.

  He had never glanced at her. Not once. He kept to his own kind, more apart than ever: the alien, the enemy, the Saracen. In the hall they had sat alone, the five of them, and eaten only what their own servant brought them. They were not shut out, not precisely, but they were not wholly welcome, either; the less so now, since the debacle of Hattin.

  She told herself that his indifference was prudence purely. Her uncles were wise, and she loved them, but they would not look kindly on a commoner who dared aspire to her favor. If they knew that there had been more than aspiration, they would be outraged.

  So she told herself. It did not keep her from lying awake, hating herself for cowardice. She should have gone to him at the gate and embraced him as she had longed to do, and told the truth without subterfuge. She could protect him from harm. If Aidan sent him away, that would be grief, but it would bring him joy. He could go back to his own people, reclaim the honor he had lost, win wives and wealth, sire sons as a soldier of Allah should.

  She rose quietly, found her chemise, put it on. Light though it was, little more than gauze, it weighed on her. But she could hardly walk naked through the house. Barefoot and bareheaded was scandalous enough.

  There was a nightingale in the garden: pure gift of God, and perhaps an omen. Its song made her eyes sting, so sweet as it was, and so sad.