The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  Heraclius said the words twice, because they would give him no peace else. For her first, as was prescribed: setting the smaller ring on her thumb in the name of the Father, and on her first finger in the name of the Son, and on her longest finger in the name of the Holy Spirit, there to remain as Aidan set the bridal coins in her palm and said unprompted, “‘With this ring I thee wed, this gold and silver I grant thee, with my body I honor thee, with all my earthly goods I thee endow.’”

  And for him it was the same, she saying the words gravely, to the shock of those who listened, he trying not to smile. She went down on her knees as the rite commanded, bowing low before him. And when she rose, he went down, sending a murmur up. He laughed for simple, wicked joy. Yes, this was how it should be, holy and splendid and, for all of that, somewhat of a scandal. So they were themselves, who raised eyebrows even in ancient harlot Rome.

  Heraclius, for whom this was purest purgatory, spoke the blessing over them. “‘May the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob be with you, and may He join you together, and may He fulfill His blessing upon you. Take this thy kinswoman; henceforth thou art her love, and she thy beloved. She is thine this day and ever after. May the Lord of heaven prosper you both. May He grant you mercy and peace.’”

  They bowed their heads to it, standing side by side, hand wound with hand. Aidan’s mind was all perfectly Christian. Morgiana’s, echoing beneath, spoke words of its own, words which were much the same, but to her infinitely more holy. May the Lord of heaven prosper us both. May Allah grant us His blessing and peace.

  39.

  “You are grinning like an idiot,” she said.

  “So are you,” he said.

  They looked at one another. Vaults of stone arched over them. It was night in the desert of Persia, but the cavern was full of light. Hers, glass-green; his, fire out of embers. He remembered captivity, and walls of air. She remembered dancing for him just there, a long stride from where they lay, and learning the limits of her courage, and sealing a bargain with him.

  “I never expected it to take us so far,” he said.

  “Nor I, to take us so long.” She raised herself on her elbow, frowning down at him. “I feel no different.”

  “Should you?”

  “There are words between us now. And the pope’s will. Would he be angry if he knew how little he matters to me?”

  “Probably.”

  She laid her hand flat on his breast, studying the shape of it, slender ivory fingers on his moon-white skin. His heart beat under her palm where a man’s heart would not be: well she knew that, for when she drove the dagger home.

  No longer. She was a princess now. When she killed, she would kill as royal folk did, in battle; not in secret, in the night.

  He, woven in her mind, did not want her to know that he laughed, but she knew. “Princesses don’t go to battle at all,” he said.

  “Queens do. When Eleanor was queen of Francia, she came Crusading with her king. She was a better general than he was.”

  “And he divorced her for it.”

  “Whereupon she found a fine young king and married him instead.” Morgiana’s hand moved slowly down, as if she had no part in it. “Was she the lady you made songs for, in Carcassonne?”

  “One of them. Once.” Thirty years agone. When he seemed no younger than he did now, and not a whit less wild. He lay all loose on the scarlet coverlets, stark black and stark white, but his eyes were the color of steel. He smiled at her. “I’m a married man now. No paramours for me.”

  “Not even your Frank?”

  He shook his head, not trusting his voice.

  Morgiana considered anger. They could quarrel. Again. They could accuse one another. They could ruin this night as they had ruined many another.

  It would not change anything. What she was to him, she knew. Heart, soul, life. What that one was, was beyond any hope of altering. Beloved and lover; mother of his child. Child of fire though he was, he was a constant creature. He did not know how to fail of it.

  She would not want him to. It hurt to know that she must share him; but that was part of why she loved him. There was enough of him for all of them.

  Hers was a more niggardly spirit. There was only room in it for one great love; even that strained all its boundaries.

  “Your heart is greater than you know,” he said, so gentle that she almost wept.

  She glared instead. “What, can you bear to share me with another?”

  He blushed. He hated that he did it so easily; she thought it enchanting. “Won’t you ever forgive me for that?”

  “I thought I had.” She bent down and kissed him where he was warmest, making him blush the more brilliantly: as above, so below.

  He thought her blasphemous, or scandalous at least. Poor sometime Christian, he never knew what to make of her.

  “I do know how to love you,” he said.

  “And you are beautiful.” From her vantage, a most private and particular beauty. All hers now, by the pope’s decree.

  “That was not precisely what he was thinking of,” he said. His voice was dry, but there was a catch in it. A little longer, and there would be no speech in him at all.

  Their minds met, joined, wove and unwove, more fully than their bodies ever could. This, the humans could never know. For them it was only speech, and the touch of flesh on flesh, and for a few brief moments, body in body. She pitied them.

  Forget them.

  His voice, soft in her deep places. He could be wisest when she least expected it. She let her gladness rise and swell and bloom within her, and fill her full. There was singing all about them, the old song, the wild song, the sweetest song in any world. She made herself a part of it.

  o0o

  They had a night and a day and another night, and full of joy they were, there where the world could not come. But the world was waiting, and their kin within it, in a rising tide of war.

  Morgiana startled Aidan. She rose in the grey morning and said her prayer, and woke him with kisses. “It’s time we went back,” she said.

  He yawned, stretched, blinked the sleep out of his eyes. “I was supposed to say that.”

  “Therefore I said it.” She had bathed; she was dressed in trousers and coat, her hair plaited and wound about her head. As he watched, she began the winding of her turban.

  For an appalling moment he wondered if he had dreamed it all; if she was still his captor and his vengeance still untaken, and the whole of it yet to endure. Then she smiled. It was the same smile with which she had heard the Patriarch’s blessing: wide, white, and wicked. He reached for her, turban, coat, and all, and pulled her down.

  It was, in the end, much closer to sunset than to sunrise when they took the mage-road to Tyre.

  o0o

  They came back in the evening, the third after their wedding, when dinner was done and the family all together in the solar, drinking wine and talking. Ysabel saw them first. They looked splendid; triumphant.

  She did not stop to shriek, or otherwise make a fool of herself. She flew into their arms, both of them, in a glorious, threefold tangle.

  Gwydion came hard on her heels. Then the rest of them, laughing, babbling, even crying a little.

  In a little while they settled, Ysabel in her father’s lap, defending it against all comers. A servant, sent for, brought bread and meat, and sherbet for Morgiana. While they ate, Ysabel said, “We were talking about Messire Amalric. How he wanted a marvel, and how you gave him one.”

  Morgiana laughed. “We did indeed! He’ll not forget it soon, I think.”

  “He played too many sides,” said Ysabel, chewing the end of a braid as she thought about it. Her mother frowned at her; she lowered the braid-end and nibbled her knuckle instead. “He tried to make it so that he couldn’t lose, no matter what he did. He’d have won, even, if we hadn’t been so far outside his reckoning.”

  “He would never have won me,” said Elen. Her voice was soft, but her w
ill was unbending. Raihan was there, being her guardsman. They did not glance at one another, or touch, or make any move at all. They did not need to. Ysabel could not begin to tell which one of them was happier. Morgiana had given them a gift before she went away to be with Aidan: a long-bearded, deep-eyed, impeccably dignified qadi to make them man and wife as Muslims thought of it. The qadi seemed not to mind at all that he was there at the will of an ifritah, marrying a Christian prince’s mamluk to a Christian princess. Odder things had happened where he came from, which was somewhere near Baghdad.

  Gwydion was not precisely delighted to have a Muslim for a nephew-in-law; but he was glad to see Elen so happy. It seeped out of him like light out of a basket, casting odd bits of brilliance when one least expected it. One dazzled Ysabel and almost made her miss what Aidan was saying.

  Aimery had not spoken to her since he found her weaving sun and shadow on the roof, and he learned who her father was. He had not spoken too much of anyone else, either.

  Now Aidan spoke to him, and he came out of his shadowed corner and edged into the light. “Aimery,” Aidan said. “My lord of Mortmain. Hattin is over and done with and your ransom paid. What will you do now?”

  Aimery stood in front of Aidan. His back was straight. He looked exactly like his father. “I’m going to fight,” he said. “And win our lands back.”

  Aidan nodded gravely. He was seeing Aimery as grownfolk, as a man with lands and a lordship and the right to fight for them. “Have you decided whom you’ll look to as your lord?”

  Aimery’s hands opened and closed, in and out of fists. “I promised Count Raymond that I’d go back to him—but—”

  “But Count Raymond ran away.”

  Aimery swallowed. “You told me, my lord, why he did it. All about danger and prudence and someone needing to escape and muster what strength we had left. He’d only have died if he charged back through the sultan’s lines. But, my lord, he ran.”

  “Sometimes a wise man has to run.” Aidan said it gently. “It was bitter for him, too, Aimery. He had to see his city taken, his army shattered, his kingdom—the kingdom he should have been king of—thrown down for a fool’s ill judgment.”

  Aimery shook his head, lips tight. “He ran, and he did nothing to stop what happened after. He is a very clever man, my lord, and a good ruler, and maybe he would make a good king. But how can I kneel in front of him and call him my liege lord, when I saw how his spirit broke and he ran away?”

  “Then how much worse must I seem to you, who will run all the way to Rhiyana, and never raise my hand again against the Saracen.”

  “No, my lord!” Aimery was shaking, he was so vehement. “No! You aren’t running. You are oathbound. You fought until you couldn’t fight any more, and then and only then you surrendered. Your oath is your ransom. How could you have escaped it?”

  “Raymond could no more have escaped what befell him, once he accepted the war as King Guy would wage it.”

  “I can’t follow him,” Aimery said, stubborn as he always was, even when it got him into trouble. “I’ve thought and I’ve thought, my lord, and I’ve tried as hard as I can, and I can’t forgive him for what he did.”

  “Then you will swear your fealty to Guy?”

  “No,” said Aimery with a curl of his lip. “He would be a thousand times worse. I’m going to go to Marquis Conrad. People don’t like him, I notice that, but they do what he tells them. I don’t think he’ll laugh at me. He knows how to use men, even men who aren’t quite out of pinfeathers.”

  Aimery was hardly in them yet. Ysabel kept her mouth shut and watched her father’s face. He approved of what Aimery was saying. “It’s a baron’s right, in default of a liege lord, to choose as he best may.”

  “I don’t know about best,” said Aimery. “I just don’t want it to be worst.”

  “Conrad will do well enough,” Aidan said. “If it were mine to choose, I would choose as you have.”

  The light in Aimery’s face was as dazzling as it was brief.

  “Of course,” Aidan went on, “you’ve discussed this with your mother.”

  Aimery went all dark. He had not looked at his mother, nor had he spoken to her, either, except as he must, in days. Since he stopped speaking to Ysabel.

  It was like a boy, Ysabel thought. Hate the woman, loathe the child, go on happily worshipping the man, and never mind that it took two to make a baby.

  Joanna had been aware of Aimery’s odd mood. She could hardly help it. But she had all the other children to think of, and the house to run, and a wedding on top of it. It was hard for her to keep track of every snit and crotchet. She looked at him with a small bit of worry, but not overmuch. “It’s what I would have advised,” she said, “if he had asked.”

  He had not, and he was not about to. He started to go back to his corner. His mother stopped him. “Is something wrong, Aimery?”

  “No,” said Aimery, mumbling it.

  She did not believe him, but she let him go. Ysabel knew that look of hers. There was always a later, and Joanna always knew what to do with it.

  “Tomorrow,” Gwydion said, rather suddenly, “our fleet will come.”

  That stopped everyone. They all stared at him. The witchfolk knew. The humans had to have guessed.

  “You’ll leave, then,” Joanna said much too calmly. “As soon as the ships are loaded and ready.”

  “Two days,” said Gwydion, “or three. If the winds stay quiet and no storm comes.”

  None would, unless he wanted it. Messire Amalric was wrong to make light of the powers he had. He did not use them casually, that was all. And he believed that humans should look after themselves.

  “You should come,” Aidan said to Joanna. He looked a little wild, as if he had caught himself off guard. “What is there to keep you here? War and fear, and hunger if the enemy lays siege to the city, and worse than that if the siege drags on. It’s no life for a mother with children.”

  Joanna faced him. It was as if the rest of them had dropped away, and there were only the two of them. Ysabel had never seen so clear what was between them. “What life would I have in a foreign country, dependent on another’s charity?”

  “My country would never be foreign to you.”

  “Would it not?” Her eyes flicked to Morgiana, who sat motionless, saying nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing that went past her mind’s walls.

  Aidan could not help glancing at his hand, which had wound itself in Morgiana’s some time since and was disinclined to draw away. But then he looked back at Joanna, and they were alone again in a world they had made for one another before Ysabel was born. “What of Ysabel?”

  Joanna went pale. She had always looked younger than she was, a strong-faced, clear-eyed, handsome woman who bent her will to no one. Now, all at once, she looked old.

  “You are her mother,” Aidan said. “It is your right to command her obedience. But if she is here and I am in Rhiyana, what will become of her?”

  Ysabel felt the fear grow in her mother’s heart. This was what Joanna had always dreaded. What a mother dreaded, no matter what her child was. The moment when she had to decide. To keep it and maybe smother it, or to let it go. Aimery had been taken from her too soon, and that was still a raw wound. She had given him up later, to be sure, and done it as a proper baroness should. She was getting ready to do the same for William; she would do it for the others, one by one. But all of them would go to fostering in Outremer. None of them would go across the sea.

  And Ysabel was Ysabel. Joanna had never told her who she really was. Someday, she was thinking, she would have to. Someday she would have to surrender Ysabel to her father. She was of his kind and not of Joanna’s. Joanna could not keep her.

  Ysabel tried to make it hurt less. “Mother, don’t hate yourself. I know. I’ve always known.”

  Joanna rounded on her. The pain was worse. It tasted like rage.

  “I know who my father is,” said Ysabel. “I couldn’t not. It’s written
in my blood.”

  For a moment Ysabel knew that Joanna would hit her. But Joanna did not. She turned on Aidan instead. “You knew!”

  He had to stand. This was nothing he could take sitting at his lady’s feet, hand in hand with her. He stood in front of Joanna, who stood to face him. She was almost as tall as he was. “You lied to me,” she said. “Both of you. You let me gnaw my soul with guilt. And fear—because someday I would have to tell her, and she would hate me, because I lied.”

  “I don’t hate you,” said Ysabel.

  She might have been a mouse in the wall, for all the notice Joanna took of her. “Why?” Joanna demanded of Aidan.

  “At first,” he said, “because I didn’t know she knew. Then because it never seemed to be time; and we were never where we could say it and not be heard. You avoided me,” he said, “most strenuously, and most successfully, for ten long years.”

  She shook her head. It was not an answer to anything he had said. Not exactly. “You should have told me.”

  “I should.”

  She hated it when a person would not quarrel. Maybe that was why she loved Aidan: most of the time he would give her the fight she wanted. Now he refused.

  She looked about half blindly. Her eyes found Aimery’s face. What little color was left in her own, drained away.

  “He knows,” said Ysabel. “He found out.”

  She rocked back. She had not even seen her mother’s hand until it hit her. She barely saw it drop to Joanna’s side again. Joanna raised it, shaking, to her mouth. She looked as if she was about to faint.

  Aidan seemed to think so. He reached for her. She beat his hands away wildly, in something that was almost terror. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me!”

  He let his hands fall. His face was stark.

  She scrambled herself together, alone, in the middle of them all. She looked from face to face. She did not flinch from any, even from Morgiana’s. Even from Aimery’s. “So that is what it is,” she said. Her voice was rough but calm.

  Aimery was as much a roil as she was. Hating her, loving her, adoring her, despising her. “How?” he asked her. “How could you do it?”