by Judith Tarr
“Are you so eager to be stripped of your lady and your wedding?”
Aidan drew back a very little. “Gall,” he said as if to himself, “indeed.” He smiled his sweet, terrible smile. “Your price is low, Messer Seco. You’ll pardon me if I mistrust it.”
“I would hardly reckon your protection a small thing, my lord prince.”
“That, it is not. But you know how greatly I desire what you offer. Why are you asking so little of what is mine?”
“I know how little it matters to you.”
The truth, sometimes, could be a potent weapon. Prince Aidan saluted it. “My protection—that matters to you. I scent the fear on you. Of what, Messer Seco? Surely not of me?”
“You are what you are,” Seco said.
“And my lady is my lady.” Aidan paced to the far wall and returned, and stood where he had stood before, looking down at Seco. Seco, caught like the coney beneath the hawk, looked up.
“He’s not afraid of you,” said a child’s voice, “or even, much, of Morgiana. He’s more afraid of the people he’s plotted with, once they find out he’s played them false.”
The Jew’s whelp, indeed, and in the prince’s presence Seco’s eyes were sharper, or else the boy had changed, for there was no doubt at all that he was one of them. But it was not he who had spoken. The child who came forward was a Mortmain, and arrogant with it, setting herself beside the prince and eyeing Seco as if he were a coney indeed, gutted and roasted and laid on her trencher. “I can’t get any sense out of him,” she said. “Can you?”
The prince did not give her the back of his hand. He regarded her with the air of one besotted, although he had the sense to frown a very little and inquire, “Ysabel, is this polite?”
“He isn’t,” she said. “He’s trying to sell you what belongs to you. You shouldn’t let him. His son knows, too. Shall I tell Morgiana to go and get him?”
Seco’s stomach was a cold knot. The prince was tall and strange and terrible. This human-seeming child, with her untidy brown braids and her wide blue eyes, was appalling.
The prince raised a brow at her. “What do you know of this?”
“We hunted,” she said. “While you were in the war. We found a track; it’s here in Tyre. We were coming to tell you.” She fixed Seco with a glare. “We can tell you as much as he can, and not ask payment for it, either.”
Prince Aidan laid a hand on her head, half to quell her, half to caress her. Seco shuddered. Even the serpent, no doubt, knew affection for its young. This new-hatched viper leaned against her kinsman, horribly like a human child, and nibbled on a braid-end. “Should I fetch Morgiana?”
“No,” said the prince. “Not quite yet.” He raised his eyes from her to Seco. “Well, sir. Are you prepared to tell us what you know?”
“If you already know it, your highness, then what is there to tell?”
“You have your life to buy,” the young one said. “He’s being very generous to let you, instead of just asking me. Are your friends as generous as he is?”
“My life?” Seco asked with the bravery of despair. “Is that all I gain?”
“Your son’s, too,” she said. “And maybe passage west, if the king has room for you. He’s very charitable, is my lord Gwydion.”
Seco grimaced. It should have been a smile. “Is it always so with you, your highness, that you suffer women and children to do your bargaining for you?”
“They’re better at it than I am,” Aidan said. His smile was wide and white and faintly feral. “There’s your bargain, Messer Seco. Your life and your son’s, and passage west if my brother consents; and in return, the names of your conspirators.”
“We can always ask Marco,” the little witch said. “He’s terrified of us. He has nightmares about Akiva, can you believe it, uncle? He’d do better to have nightmares about me.”
Seco had no doubt of it. He would not berate himself for a fool. That gained him nothing. He had gambled that the prince would be alone and therefore vulnerable, between his pride and his innocence in the ways of merchants. Seco had reckoned without this new nest of witches.
A merchant knew when to cut his losses. Seco spread his hands, accepting the bargain as the witch had proposed it. “For my life and my son’s, and for passage west, and for such compensation as hereafter we shall settle—”
“Compensation?” Aidan asked, deceptively mild.
“Surely what I have to tell is worth a dinar or two.”
“Or three, or a hundred. Or are you asking all that I have?”
“Not even the tithe of it, your highness,” Seco said.
“The price of passage for two, and my protection,” said Aidan, “should amply suffice. If I add to it a purse of gold bezants, will that content you?”
“That depends on the size of the purse.”
The young ones were outraged. Their elder was amused: a white, cold amusement. “The price when last I looked,” he said, “was thirty pieces of silver.”
Seco sucked in his breath.
“I shall give you,” the witch-prince said, “thirty bezants. And of my charity, one blood ruby set in silver. You won’t mind, surely, the curse that lies on it. He who wears it on his finger is doomed forever after to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth.”
That was, in more ways than one, a threat. Seco swallowed. His throat was dust-dry. “We have a bargain,” he said. He did not offer to seal it with a handclasp. He breathed deep, once, twice. “The man who forged your dispensation,” he said, “and who hid the proper document, is known as Thomas. He has been a scribe in the papal chancery; he serves the pope’s legate. The one who suborned him is another monk, Richard of Ascalon. Both are in Tyre in the legate’s train.”
“Yes,” said the little witch, looking past Seco to the Jew’s whelp. “Thomas and Richard, that is who they are. We want to know—”
“We want to know,” said the Jew, “how they conceal their minds from us.”
“To be safe,” the little witch said. “You understand. If we know the weapon, we can make a shield for it.”
“That was not in the bargain,” Seco said.
The witch’s eyes narrowed, but the prince restrained her, as Seco had gambled that he would. Knightly honor, even in a witch, could be useful. “It was not in the bargain,” said the prince, dangerously soft, “and it doesn’t matter. I know who they are now. I know where to find them.”
“Now?” The little witch was dreadfully eager.
“Now,” the prince said.
“Us, too,” said the little witch. “You have to take us. We know what the truth feels like; we’ll know it when we see it.”
The prince’s brow darkened. The Jew leaped into the breach. “My lord, you shouldn’t go alone. It’s too deadly. We know; we were almost trapped before, when we tracked them to their lair in Jerusalem. If you won’t take us, then you should wait for your lady and your brother. Truly, my lord. We know what we’re facing.”
“Do you?” the prince asked. “And you want to come with me?”
“With you, we’re strong enough. With your lady and your brother—”
“My lady,” said the prince, “no. I’d prefer to finish this without bloodshed if I can.”
“We can help you,” the little witch said. “They’ll underestimate you. Thinking you can bring children into such danger as that—you’ll look contemptible.”
“Such words, you have in you,” said the prince, frowning, but wavering visibly.
She hastened to cast him down. “We won’t say anything unless you ask us to. Haven’t we proved that we can do it?” She ignored his lowered brows. “We won’t say a word, I promise. We’ll just watch and look harmless.”
“One of us can stay outside,” said the Jew. “And if there’s trouble, go for your lady.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s not ill thought of,” he said. “But I don’t think—”
She widened her eyes and pleaded.
He fell before her. �
��But mind,” he said. “No heroics. From either of you.”
“Oh, no,” said the little witch, brimming with sincerity.
He favored her with a long, level look. She did not flinch. He sighed, shrugged, allowed himself a rueful smile.
When he turned from her, it vanished. He fixed his gaze on Seco. Seco flinched from the fire of it. “You come with us.”
“I did not bargain—” Seco began.
“You bargained for your life. How can I protect it unless you remain in my presence?”
Seco opened his mouth, closed it again. He had outsmarted himself. If he could only be protected within sight of the prince, then what was that protection worth?
The prince smiled almost lazily and stepped aside, freeing Seco from the captivity of his chair. “At your pleasure, Messer Seco.”
34.
Gwydion, with Urien the squire to keep him respectable, tasted for an hour’s span the joy of playing truant. Though it was hardly dereliction of duty, as Urien pointed out, to dawdle along the quay, reckoning the count of ships and pausing now and then to speak with a captain or an officer of the port. He should know, after all, what anchorage there would be for his fleet when it came, and what tariff the city would place on the water and the stores which they would need.
But once he had ascertained that—and done his best not to choke on it; war brought out the worst in the sellers of necessities—he was free to go where he would. In his plain clothes, with only the squire to attend him, he seemed no more than any knight. It was pleasant not to be known for a king, or even for a prince. He lent a hand with a line, tasted good brown ale in a tavern near the docks, watched a fisherman bring in a boatload of gleaming silver fish, and among them a store of spiny shells.
“More precious than gold, these are,” the man said, setting one in Gwydion’s hand. “They make the purple that kings like to dress in.”
The King of Rhiyana looked at the wet and glistening thing with its scent of fish and the sea. The fisherman took his expression for incredulity: he took up another shell, and a hammer from the clutter in his boat. “Look,” he said. He cracked the shell, baring the beast within, soft and quivering, shaped like a slug. He stabbed it. Ichor welled forth, cloudy, almost colorless. But as the sun struck it, it turned as red as blood.
“Blood of the murex,” the fisherman said. “Put enough of it in the dyers’ vat and dip your wool in it, and it turns as red as this blood; then let the sun at it and it deepens to royal purple. Use less of it and you get as pretty a violet as you could ask for. Double-dye it and you’ve got a robe for an emperor, pure deep crimson, more costly than anything in the world.”
“Why does it cost so dear?” Urien asked, intrigued.
The fisherman grinned at him. “Because, my fine young lord, one of these beasties can just about dye the tip of your finger. For a robe to wrap an emperor in, you need a whole shipload of them, and hammers to crush them, and vats to steep them in, and dyers to keep the secret.”
“Such as it is,” said Gwydion, “if you’re willing to tell us who simply wandered by.”
“Well,” said the fisherman, “my father was a dyer, and we had a falling-out, but not before I learned the tricks of the trade. And you look like a lad who can keep a secret.”
Urien grinned. Gwydion quelled him with a look. “I’m honored, sir,” he said.
“Remember me in your prayers,” said the fisherman, “and if you ever put on the purple.”
o0o
“You could charm a sermon out of a stone,” said Urien as they left the fisherman to his catch, both scaled and shelled. He skipped round a knot of dogs snarling over a bit of offal, and nigh backed into a dray full of wine-casks.
Gwydion plucked him out of danger and kept him there with an arm about his shoulders. It was Urien’s cherished secret that he was never the monument of dignity that everyone took him for, but a madcap boy. Like his king; and all too well he knew it.
Gwydion pondered turning back. Regretfully; but a king, even a king outside of his own country, could not idle away a day with only his squire for company. He was almost to the end of the harbor, where the wall stretched out into the sea. One gate opened in it, an arch of mortared masonry between two lofty towers, and the great chain to bar it, which the sea-guard would lower when a ship sought to pass in or out.
“Imagine this in the harbor at Caer Gwent,” said Urien. “We’d be impregnable.”
“I am imagining it,” Gwydion said. “It’s not for us, I think. Tyre is an island city with a harbor in its heart. Caer Gwent, but for the headland that is the White Keep, is like a torque about a lady’s neck.”
“That lady being the sea.” Urien sighed. “I was glad to get away from it; I thought myself trapped there. Now all I can think of is going back, and being home.”
“I, too,” said Gwydion softly. “Soon now. When the fleet comes; when we settle the matter of my brother’s wedding.”
“As to that, my lord,” Urien said, “do you think—”
“My lord! My lord king!”
Urien stopped. Gwydion turned. He was not precisely displeased to be recognized so publicly, but he would have preferred greater discretion. Even here, where the quay was almost empty. The guards on the wall, and the odd idler, stopped to stare.
The man who came, came alone, without even a servant to bear him company. He greeted Gwydion more circumspectly, now that he was noticed; he did not offer an embrace, of which Gwydion was glad.
“Messire Amalric,” Gwydion said. Courteously; no more warmly than he must. “The pleasure is unexpected. I had thought you in Jerusalem.”
“So I was,” said Amalric, offering a sketchy reverence. “But the strength of the kingdom is here; I had a mind to look at it before I went back to captivity.”
“Did you, sir?”
Amalric showed a flash of teeth. “You can call it spying if you like. I’d rather call it pondering alternatives. The sultan holds my brother hostage, well enough, but I doubt he’ll put a king to death for his brother’s failure to walk back into the cage. Not with the ransom still to pay.”
“Is it?”
“The queen will pay it,” said Amalric. “That’s settled, though she’ll need time to gather it all together.”
“Yours, too?”
“Mine, too,” said Amalric. “I have that much honor.”
Gwydion sat on a coil of rope, suppressing a sigh and an urge to bolt for cover. Amalric would hardly have hailed him for idle pleasure. The man had the look and the air of one who had hunted for some little time, and hoped to catch his prey out of its wonted runs.
The Constable of the embattled kingdom did not presume to sit uninvited in a king’s presence. He clasped his hands behind his back and surveyed the long curve of the harbor, at ease, but with a subtle tension beneath. “I’m glad to see you made it so far and prospered so well. The marquis caused you no trouble?”
“The marquis would hardly vex a sovereign king,” Gwydion said.
“Rude little bastard, isn’t he?”
“I have not,” said Gwydion, “heard calumny of his lady mother.”
Amalric laughed. “That’s true: he’s his father’s son to the bone. He calls you arrogant, as if he had a right to judge.”
“The marquis may call me what he pleases.”
“He does,” said Amalric. “He says you summoned him—lord of this city as he is, or so he says, and no vassal of yours.”
“I informed him that I was present, and gave him to know where I reside. He did not see fit to respond. That is his right as lord of this city and no vassal of mine.”
“He doesn’t know when he’s outmatched,” said Amalric.
“That is as may be,” said Gwydion. “Will you, then, be entering his service?”
“He’s asked,” Amalric said. “I’ve been in no haste to answer. My brother still holds my oath, after all.”
“So does the sultan.”
“Another oath,” said Amalric
. “Another and briefer binding.”
“Enough at least to keep the marquis at bay.”
“There is that,” Amalric said. “And you, sire? You’ll be going home, now that you’ve sworn yourself out of the war?”
“Out of the war, perhaps, but not out of the Crusade. Europe will learn from me what has been done to our holy places.”
Amalric considered that and whistled softly. “So that’s why you took oath so easily. The sultan would have done better to keep you.”
“Could he have held me?”
“Probably not.” Amalric exchanged glances with a gull on a bollard. The gull mewed and took wing. “My lord, if I asked a favor of you, would you grant it?”
“Have you earned it?”
Amalric turned on his heel. For a moment Gwydion saw him unmasked. Anger, yes, that was to be expected. And fear: for Gwydion was what he was. And, always, calculation. Plain, rough, unpolished Amalric was heart-kin to Conrad of Montferrat. Snakes of a scale, Aidan would say.
Amalric’s eyes hooded. He smiled as if at a jest. “A king should be wary, yes, your majesty. It’s not so great a favor. Only passage on one of your ships, for which I can pay.”
“And?”
Amalric’s smile slipped; then widened. “I forget, sire, what arts are yours. Yes, there is somewhat more. I asked you once, if you recall, for leave to pay court to your kinswoman. My condition has altered somewhat since, but my rank remains, and my kingdom, though diminished, has still its king and the core of its strength. In Europe we’ll gather armies to win it back greater than before. With the Lady Elen at my side, I would find fire in myself to rouse such a Crusade as this world has never seen.”
“And then? Would you ask the lady to ride into the jaws of war?”
“Hasn’t she already done so?”
“So she has,” said Gwydion mildly.
