by Jean, Rima
Zayn stared blankly into the goblet. This—all of this—would have been a grand adventure to her if Miriam were still alive. But the very same things that would have enlivened Zayn just two days ago seemed dreary to her now. I just want to die. Why won’t they just let me die? She had no control over the hopelessness that gripped her. She sobbed, unable to stop, watching as the tears dented the citrus snow in her cup.
Aysha took the goblet from Zayn’s hands and disappeared for a moment. She returned with a cup of steaming tea instead. “Drink this,” she said. “It is infused with special herbs grown here at Masyaf. It will ease your pain.” When Zayn did nothing, Aysha pressed the cup into her hands. “Drink,” she insisted.
After a moment, Zayn managed to stop crying long enough to drink the bitter concoction. Hopefully it is poison. The liquid cramped her stomach, and she slumped forward, indifferent that her towel slipped down to reveal her chest. As she waited to die, something odd happened—the tears stopped, and she opened her eyes. She began to wonder what Junaid had in store for her and how she would eventually kill Guy de Molay. Several minutes passed before Zayn lifted her head and met expectant green eyes. Aysha smiled. “Now, eat.”
Zayn drank and ate but was still feeling unsettled. “I am afraid Junaid may be mistaken about me. I don’t know if… I mean, I haven’t tried…”
Aysha’s expression was unyielding. “Junaid is rarely wrong. Perhaps you do not have enough faith in yourself.” She watched the younger girl twist her hands in apprehension and sighed. “I know how you feel, Zayn. I still feel it. But the man who hurt you did not break your soul. Come, you must get dressed. Junaid will want to speak with you soon.”
Zayn obediently stepped into the clothes—a belted tunic, trousers, and pointed shoes, simple and all darkly colored. She bound her hair securely at the back of her head. She hadn’t worn trousers since she was a child, over five years ago, and it was liberating. Her body was strangely abuzz with the desire to run and climb and ride. Beneath this desire, however, lay an uncertainty, a numbness. Had her mother truly been murdered just last night? How was she standing here now, in this Assassin fortress, wearing men’s clothes? Either the world had gone mad, or she had. Zayn tended to believe the latter was true. She turned to Aysha. “That tea you gave me…”
“It will give you temporary relief,” Aysha said. “I will leave a pouch of the herbs in your room, and you may drink the brew in the mornings when you have need for it. But Zayn,” she cautioned, “it is not a solution to your pain. You must conquer your pain on your own, or you will always seek relief from it. You will always hurt.”
Junaid returned for her as promised, and with a brisk nod of approval at her appearance, silently led her deep within the castle’s belly. They emerged from the darkness and into a wide courtyard filled with young men who sparred with each other, using their hands and feet, knives and swords, and even bows and spears. Zayn watched in awe, her mouth slightly open, as the men made fluid, lightning-fast movements, looking more like dancers than killers. There wasn’t a single female on the training grounds, and her misgivings multiplied. She turned urgently to Junaid. “I can’t do that.”
He looked down at her. “No one can do it without learning how.”
“But what if I can’t do it even after learning?” She looked at the young fighters, all lean muscle and sinews, their eyes narrow beams of concentration. “The last time I tried to do anything like that, I was just a little girl.”
“And yet,” Junaid replied, “what you did as a little girl was enough to earn you quite a reputation.”
“It must have been exaggerated.” She swallowed, wiping her sweaty palms on her tunic. How would she tell Junaid about her body’s transformation under random circumstances? How would she describe the din, the light, the power that surged through her? She couldn’t—he would think she was mad. Or worse, he would think she was a jinniyah, a female jinni, just like the villagers of Rafaniya had.
“Well, then, we must find out.” He continued to watch her for a moment before saying, “Zayn, you are here only because of me. You will face great adversity from everyone—the Assassins, the Franks, the Saracens. No one wants you, a headstrong girl reputed to have supernatural abilities. They would all rather see you dead, for in death you cannot threaten them or their beliefs about the world.”
Zayn forced a smile. “Are you trying to convince me to stay? Because you’re not doing a very good job of it.”
Junaid did not smile back. His eyes were hard. “I cannot teach you if you are afraid. Faithful Ones are chosen not only because of strength of mind and body, but also strength of character. You will be expelled at the slightest sign of weakness, and I will take you back to the sheepherder’s shed so that you may finish what I interrupted.”
The grunts and blows of the fighters could be heard over the wind as Zayn turned from Junaid and closed her eyes. She’d been hiding from the world her whole life, with only her mother to love and protect her. Hadn’t she yearned for freedom every single day? The only thing that had tethered her to conformity was Miriam, and Miriam was dead. Only fear stopped her now, and it shamed her. Without looking at him, she said softly, “No. I want to stay. I want to try.”
“There is no try, Zayn,” Junaid said sternly. “There can only be success.”
Zayn stiffened. “Then I will succeed.” Her voice quivered. She still felt like her heart had been ripped from her chest. How was she supposed to succeed at whatever Junaid intended to put her up to when she still hadn’t processed her mother’s death, when she hated herself and her body? That she was standing there now, even considering meeting Junaid’s challenge, was ludicrous. As she watched the trainees spar, she felt her power bubble ever so slightly within her veins. Could she do this?
“Good. Let’s begin.” His tone was brisk. “There is much to learn and precious little time to learn it. You must learn combat, with and without various weapons. You will learn how to handle every type of blade imaginable, so much so that they will become a part of your being. You must perfect the arts of stealth, secrecy, agility, precision, attack, and escape. You will be instructed in weaponry, in disguises, in languages, and in court etiquette. Your training will be stern and rigorous, and if you are accepted, your life may end early and in torture.” He raised an eyebrow and smiled wryly at Zayn’s ashen face. “Are the sheep shears sounding more appealing again?”
She relaxed her jaw, which was beginning to ache from the tension. Her power simmered, then sputtered. “No.” She was only partially lying.
“Come.” He turned on his heels and led her back into the castle. Twist after turn through the dim passageways, they finally reached a large chamber filled wall-to-wall with books. Zayn craned her neck to look up at the beams in the ceiling—she’d never seen ceilings so high. Junaid lit a few of the brass candlesticks that were scattered about the hall on large oak tables and directed Zayn to sit. She complied, wrinkling her brow in confusion when he began to pull codices from the shelves and set them heavily before her.
“I thought I had to learn to fight,” she ventured, her voice quavering a bit with uncertainty.
Junaid smiled. “All in good time. First, however, you will learn the tenets of our faith, and you will forget all that you were previously taught about this world.” He opened one of the codices carefully, smoothing down the vellum with his hand. Zayn leaned forward, gazing admiringly at the dainty script and the ornate illuminations that edged the pages. Gold and blue flowers and birds twined together to frame the Arabic text in colors that flashed by candlelight.
“Do I have to believe, in order to fight?”
“You must believe in the cause or at the very least, in your cause.” He looked at her quizzically, and she immediately thought of Guy de Molay. Avenging her mother’s death was her cause. If she had to become a heretic who ate pork, drank wine, and wore trousers in order to achieve her goal, then so be it. What had religion done for her? For anybody? It had done nothing but
fuel hate and intolerance and war. She thought of her mother, burning at the stake in the name of religion. The tears welled in her eyelids, threatening to spill. She had never truly believed any of it. She had gone through the motions to appease her mother, but deep down she’d sensed hypocrisy about it all. The same villagers who preached love and peace had killed her mother over misunderstandings and petty disputes. Was this God’s way? If so, she wanted nothing more to do with God. Now that her mother was gone, she did not have to pretend to believe anymore.
When she said nothing, Junaid asked, “Can you read?”
“Of course.”
He put his forefinger on a line of text. “This is the Assassin’s creed.”
Zayn looked at the inked words, their curved lines decorated with flourishes. “‘Nothing is true; everything is justified,’” she read. Nothing is true; everything is justified. The words sat well with her godless self.
“Human reasoning must be used in order to understand religion,” Junaid said. “One must use the intellect and the spirit to illuminate the truth. The Imams are the supreme authorities, as they have been fully initiated and thus see the true reality of things. The Prophet Mohammed presented Islam in its most basic form, for the common people. Isma’ilism reconciles science with life, philosophy with faith. It is a higher form of Islam. There are seven grades of initiation; the first is achieved only by Imams and the seventh achieved by the Faithful Ones.”
“So the Faithful Ones must trust that the Imam knows what he is doing when he orders them to their deaths?” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she had a chance to reconsider them. She pursed her lips, avoiding Junaid’s gaze.
“The Imam would only ever order a Faithful One to risk his life if doing so advances the goal of peace,” he replied calmly. “The Faithful Ones risk their lives by killing carefully chosen individuals, in the hope that killing that one key individual will lead to the salvation of thousands. The Assassins fight on behalf of the common people, who do not possess the abilities, resources, or knowledge to speak out against those who abuse their power.”
She scratched at a blemish in the wood table, still avoiding his eyes. “It is all subjective, though, and in the end, the creed is only true for those in power.”
“This is true. But it is necessary.”
She looked up at him then. “If the Assassins fight on behalf of the people, then why are they enemies with Saladin? Shouldn’t they form an alliance with him, so that they may battle a common enemy and together fight for the salvation of thousands? It seems that by alienating other Muslims, the Assassins are defeating themselves.”
Junaid studied her with surprised interest, rubbing his chin. For a split second, she feared she’d incited him by speaking poorly of the Assassins, but he suddenly grinned, granting her a peek into himself that she would not see again.
“You should become an Imam,” he said.
She smiled back. “If only I had the time.”
Junaid tapped the codex before her and cleared his throat, his expression shuttered once again. “Today, you begin your studies. Tomorrow, we will begin your complete education, which consists of physical training in the mornings and studying in the evenings.”
Zayn looked down at the enormous codex and frowned. “All of this?”
“Yes. I will come and get you when it is time to sup.” With that, he left her in the library, his footsteps fading as he retreated down the corridor. Zayn looked around and saw that she was not entirely alone in the library; motionless figures were slumped over books here and there, other students aspiring to become Assassins, she supposed. One turned his head and looked at her briefly, suspiciously. She sighed and returned to the doctrines before her, hoping they would manage to keep her interest.
They did. She devoured the “mundane” subjects of grammar, mathematics, poetics, alchemy, and philosophy with a hunger she didn’t know lurked within her. Her grief and anxiety were buried beneath a new wealth of knowledge and suppressed by a desire to escape into an undiscovered world. She knew how to write and read the Koran, and how to make simple computations. But this was an entirely different level of learning, one that usually only boys of wealthy families could hope to receive. She was stunned by her good fortune and kept peeking over her shoulder like a street urchin at a nobleman’s dinner table. Someone was bound to punish her for entering where she did not belong.
When Junaid came to fetch her, she looked up in confusion, her stomach suddenly growling loudly. She clamped a hand over her gut, her cheeks growing warm. “Is it time already?”
Junaid’s lips twitched. “Indeed. It is dark outside. And I think you might be hungry.”
He led her back to the room in which Aysha had first greeted her. “Eat and sleep,” he instructed her. “Tomorrow I will come for you at dawn.”
After polishing off the dish of meat pastries, she sat back in her chair and drained the goblet of sherbet. She scanned the undecorated walls, the small window high up near the ceiling. She was alone. Thoughts of Miriam began to creep back into her mind and with them, a sudden flood of panic. What had happened to her mother’s body? Had her remnants been given a proper Islamic burial? She rubbed her face, the sudden pain in her heart taking her breath away. Mama, Mama! What have I done? She slipped from the chair and crawled to the straw pallet that had been left for her to use as a bed, mentally preparing for a night of torture. I am filth. Nothing but filth. But before the tears had a chance to soak the sheet, Zayn felt a pleasant drowsiness overtake her, like a warm embrace that pulled her toward slumber.
Her last thoughts were of the lemon sherbet’s odd aftertaste, and she closed her eyes with a certainty that she’d been drugged.
Chapter Five
“Zayn.”
She awoke with a gasp, her heart racing and her head pounding. Junaid stood in the room, looking down at her. She rasped, “You drugged me.”
He nodded. “Just enough to stave off the panic and to help you sleep.” Even though her head spun, she stood and flung the empty goblet at him. He caught it and winced as the vessel struck his palm.
“I am not yours to stupefy whenever you choose,” she snarled at him. Her mind whirled, and in a brief moment of panic, she wondered if she’d been raped again in her drug-induced stupor. Never. Never again.
He set the goblet down and rubbed his hand. “It was for your own good, Zayn. That was a powerful throw, by the way. I wonder how you will do with the knives.”
Her breathing steadied, and she rubbed the remnants of sleep from her eyes. She was still angry, but her anger was not as great as her desire to throw the knives that he’d mentioned. God, how she wanted to throw them—at Guy de Molay, in particular. Her power zapped through her. She answered, “Let’s find out.”
After eating a light breakfast of bread and cheese and downing a cup of tea brewed from the herbs Aysha had given her, Zayn followed Junaid back to the training grounds where the recruits performed various drills. Junaid led her to an area in which several of the men were flinging knives into a wooden wall painted with circular marks at the far end of the courtyard. Zayn watched their hands move with inhuman speed, flipping the small, arrow-shaped blades from their sheaths and sending them whizzing to the wall in the blink of an eye. The knives stuck to the wall in staccato bursts. She could see that the markings had meaning now—the goal was to strike the centermost circle. Before Zayn even realized Junaid had thrown a knife, she saw it strike the very center of the target with a resounding thwap! The young men immediately praised him, their eyes filled with admiration for Junaid. “Well done, Commander,” they said. She made a mental note to ask him what it meant to be a commander later. Right now, however, her own hands itched to throw one of those deadly blades.
“Would you like to try?” Junaid asked her, reading the hunger in her eyes.
She nodded, and he passed one to her by its handle. She examined it, turning it over in her hands; it was like no other knife she’d ever seen before. The blad
e and the handle were made entirely from the same piece of steel, and the blade flared out in the middle before tapering to a sharp point. She looked at Junaid, who stood by watching her. “Aren’t you going to instruct me on how to throw it properly?” she asked.
“No. I want to see what you do out of instinct first.” He gestured for her to stand alongside the other trainees, and as she complied, one of the young men, scars seaming his face from ear to chin, shot her a wary look. She had seen that look many times before—that look of fear, mistrust, disgust. She knew to be afraid of it, for the men who’d cast such looks upon her had murdered her mother. She took a deep breath and looked ahead at the target, weighing the knife in her hand. The wall seemed farther away now than it had just a minute ago, and Zayn could feel several pairs of contemptuous eyes watching her, waiting for her to embarrass herself. She was the only girl, after all. They had to resent her presence among them.
Stop thinking about them. Stop thinking. She closed her eyes briefly and wiped her mind clean. As she had anticipated, her ears filled with the hum, her eyes blurred from the light. That strength, that power that scared her so, rushed through her in an instant. When she opened her eyes again, the motions came without effort—one foot went forward, one arm went back. She flung the knife by its handle, and her arm came down in a clean arch.
The knife’s point stuck just barely left of the target’s center.
The silence was deafening. Through the corner of her eye, Zayn saw that the trainees throughout the courtyard had stopped to watch her and now gaped at her knife in disbelief. The scarred trainee grunted, his gaze sliding to her face. “Beginner’s luck, that’s all. You won’t last long here.”
Before she could respond, Junaid was at her side, looking nonplussed by what she had done. “Hmm,” he said, nodding slightly. “You have good control of the rotation, but you’ll have to be much faster. Try again.”
