Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Saladin made his way slowly around the corner. To his annoyance, the storeroom was also crowded with after-dinner loiterers willing to pay three shekels for a look at a worthless bowl. He joined them, bending almost double to pass through the low open doorway.

  Inside were stacks of ceramic bowls, casks of wine, and assorted litter, including an old trunk of some kind. The repository of the sacred cup, no doubt, Saladin thought irritably. The ceiling of the earthen-floored room was too low for him to stand erect, forcing him to lean against the wall like a lazy schoolboy. The air in the small place smelled of leeks and sweet wine.

  This was ridiculous, he thought. The innkeeper knew nothing, except how to squeeze a little extra money out of his customers. But where would he go next? Back to the tomb, perhaps, to see if the crazed woman might return? Or should he wander about the city, as he had for so long in Rome, asking discreetly if anyone had seen a man with an odd sphere-shaped metal ornament?

  He sighed. Such a search might take another ten years, and again yield nothing. He did not think he could bear ten years in Judea. He swallowed to hide his dismay. Back to Rome, then. Back to the life of ordinary men, lived in the shadow of death. He felt like weeping.

  "Move aside," he murmured as he passed through the crowd on his way toward the exit.

  "Forgive my tardiness," the innkeeper cried, the solid bulk of his belly pushing Saladin back into the fetid chamber. "Three shekels, please. To defray the cost." He held out his apron, which had a large pocket in the front, as the sightseers dropped coins into it.

  Saladin was about to leave in disgust when the apron opened in front of him. "You won't be sorry, sir," the innkeeper said with a wink.

  With a resigned sigh, Saladin dropped in three coins.

  The fat man briskly unlocked the chest with a key he brought from beneath his apron. Puffing from the exertion of bending over, he lifted the lid and produced a blue-green bowl. Some of the women made "oohs" of appreciation, although Saladin could not imagine what for. It was an execrable piece of pottery, garishly decorated with primitive-looking fish.

  "Some called him Messiah, some heretic," the innkeeper said in a mysterious whisper, as if he were a pagan priest reciting an incantation as he raised the bowl ludicrously above his head. "On the night before his arrest, Jesus of Nazareth passed this very bowl to twelve members of a secret society and gave them his final orders."

  He paused dramatically.

  "What were they?" a woman asked finally. "The orders."

  "That I cannot tell you," he said, maintaining his theatrical voice. "But he told his men to remember him while they carried them out."

  The woman gasped.

  "A plan to overthrow the Romans," someone suggested.

  "Each man drank solemnly from the bowl, then passed it to the next." Slowly he handed the fish bowl to the nearest onlooker. "Careful."

  The bowl was passed reverently from hand to hand.

  This is worse than the cheapest street carnival show, Saladin thought. He was almost embarrassed to accept the bowl, but when he did, he noticed its weight. It was too heavy to be made of clay. The ripple, too, was unusual. The indentations were too deep. He ran his fingers along the grooves.

  Saladin had spent a number of years as an artist, most notably in Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty, working in the tomb of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton. He had produced a great deal of pottery, as well as the quasi-realistic sculpture and painting which were the hallmark of the period. And so he realized as he studied the exaggerated ridges in the innkeeper's crudely painted bowl that something was inside its base.

  He turned it over and tapped on its underside. The sound produced was different from the dry click of his fingernail upon the fluted sides of the bowl. The base itself could fit easily into a man's hand, and if one listened, if one paid very careful attention, he could hear the faint thrum-thrum of his own heartbeat in his ears.

  And then it grew warm in his hand.

  "Sir, please, everyone would like a chance to—"

  Saladin smashed the bowl against the wall.

  A woman screamed. "Sir!" the innkeeper shouted, his face beet-red as he parted the crowd imperiously.

  It was his. Saladin closed his eyes as his long fingers wrapped around the warm metal of the sphere and felt its ancient magic coursing once again through his body.

  "The authorities will be called, I assure you!"

  Saladin laughed aloud. He took a bag filled with gold Roman coins from his belt and dropped it into the innkeeper's hand. "For your loss," he said, and swooped through the low doorway like a bird of prey, his black cloak billowing behind him.

  For a moment the people crowded into the storeroom were silent as they watched the tall man leave the inn. Then the innkeeper, with his practical turn of mind, opened the drawstring of the pouch and peered inside.

  "Look, a fish, whole," the woman said as she picked up a broken piece of the bowl. Others followed suit, scrambling for the pottery shards on the floor.

  "Please, please," the innkeeper said exasperatedly. "Those are precious relics from the true cup of Christ." He opened the pocket of his apron and smiled. "Thirty shekels."

  Outside, the spidery figure of Saladin fairly danced toward the stables. He would ride out of this cesspool and buy passage on the first ship he found headed for Rome.

  What luck! He had found the cup on his first day in this godforsaken place. Encased in a bowl covered with fish, of all things!

  Then he stopped, so suddenly that an elderly man bumped into him from behind.

  He squeezed the metal sphere in his hand. So the man called Jesus hadn't kept it, after all. He probably hadn't even known of the cup's existence. For all his talk about eternal life, he had literally let the opportunity to live forever slip from his fingers.

  And yet the tomb was empty.

  Saladin shuddered.

  When he arrived back in Rome, he did not speak of his journey to Judea. After thirty years, he vanished to India, where he worked as a trader in silk for a time before returning to Rome.

  By then the Christians were recognized as a danger to the Empire. They met in secret, known to one another by the symbol of the fish, which they displayed in clever ways.

  "Lunatics," an acquaintance of Saladin's said as they sat together in the Colosseum watching a group of Christians kneeling in prayer while a lion mauled one of their number. "They won't fight. They're even proud to be crucified."

  "Perhaps their belief is strong," Saladin offered.

  "What belief? That a man can live forever?" His friend laughed harshly and pointed to the dead man at the lion's feet. "It didn't work for that poor fool."

  "Some things are beyond the logic of our eyes and ears," Saladin answered. But the lion had attacked another of the Christians, and the crowd was on its feet, hooting and cheering.

  No one heard him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The next time Saladin lost the cup, a woman was responsible. She was a barbarian, even by the Britons' standards, which were far below his own. If Saladin had thought Judea backward, he was aghast the first time he set eyes on the northern island of Brittania.

  There were no roads at all here, except for the highways the Romans had built during their long occupation, and these were crumbling and fallen into disuse. Now the grassy countryside was crisscrossed with a series of dirt footpaths.

  Since the Roman legions left, the entire country seemed to have reverted to barbarism. Saladin thought of a neglected garden that had been overrun by thorns and bramble. The villas of the nobles had become ruins, replaced by primitive thatched huts. The cities and villages, once efficient centers of trade, had degenerated into rambling slums where none but the most scrofulous peasants dared live. Even the military garrisons themselves had been taken over by filthy locals who lived in the tumbledown barracks with their animals, surrounded by offal.

  There were no laws here. Everyone was illiterate. The great concepts of government brought by t
he Romans had been utterly forgotten. The British did not even understand the rudimentary skills of plumbing.

  It was a horror. Saladin sat astride his horse—which, fortunately, he had brought with him, since these pale-skinned northerners did not even have decent animals to ride—and wondered how soon he could get out of this place. Ships came seldom to the island. He might be stranded here, he thought with dismay, for six months or more.

  And then, too, there was the question of where he would go. He was finally weary of Rome. The Visigoths had invaded some years before and actually sacked the great city itself.

  The invasion had come as an unspeakable shock to the Romans, although Saladin himself had not been very surprised. The decadence and corruption of the nobility—which, he had to admit, had provided a number of quite enjoyable evenings for him over the years—had not made for good government. The Romans had in fact become so cynical that the barbarian Visigoths had even tried to negotiate with city officials. They had offered to keep the peace, for a price. The emperor's representatives had condescendingly refused to pay "protection" money to the nomadic horde, but they had not bothered to fortify the city, either. The parties had just gone on amid a spate of fashionable jokes about the Visigoths, until the Romans found themselves at the mercy of foul-smelling warriors who dressed in boarskins.

  Saladin himself had seen the wind shifting and took the opportunity to absent himself from the city before the attack. But to his dismay, he found that similar atrocities were occurring in practically every center of civilization in the world. Vast confederations of horsemen from the plains of Eurasia were attacking the civilized centers of China, Persia, India . . . Even the stodgy Greeks in Athens were falling beneath the barbarians' massive numbers. There was really nowhere to flee from Rome, unless one chose to wander into the wilderness.

  It was extremely tiresome, Saladin had decided as he returned to Rome during its death throes.

  Actually, it had proved to be one of the more interesting periods in his endless life. Rome in those final years reminded him of a venerable noblewoman who had taken leave of her senses in her old age. There was nothing—no pleasure, no sensation, no experience—that could not be had for a price. Saladin had lain with senators' wives, a Nubian prince . . . even one of the sacred Vestal Virgins on one occasion. Feasts were held at which common townspeople, in imitation of the nobles, ate until their bellies were about to burst, then staggered away to vomit in the street. The spectacles at the Colosseum had grown ever more shocking and contrived, mixing depraved sex with gruesome violence whenever possible.

  But the Romans could no longer be shocked. "Rome has seen it all" became the city's jaded motto. For the Romans knew that their time was quickly passing. Soon they would all be killed in their beds—and their civilization with them. It was the end of the world, and the Romans accepted it—to their credit, Saladin admitted —without a trace of sentimentality.

  After the city was sacked for the fifth time, and he had watched his own house go up in flames, Saladin decided to leave the Eternal City. It had not been eternal at all, he thought sadly as he rode northward away from Rome with nothing more than a saddlebag filled with gold, the metal cup, and, out of habit, a small pouch of medical supplies. The city had come and gone in what had seemed like the blink of an eye.

  He had not intended at first to travel to Britain, but as he moved steadily northward, an idea began to form in his mind: If Rome was done for, perhaps its provinces were just beginning to flourish. He had heard that the Romans had built cities on the northern island and had sufficiently tamed the wild Celts to the point where many of the British landholders had become Roman citizens. Their sons learned Latin, and they lived in Roman-style villas. Some of the wealthier ones were even granted the title of “Senator”.

  These reports, he now saw as he looked over the desolation of the country, were utterly false. Whatever gains the Romans made during their occupation had been lost completely. Entrusting barbarians with civilized government was like giving gold to an infant, he thought angrily. If they couldn't eat it, it was of no value to them.

  Now where? The thought hung heavily on him. The climate in this place was cold, colder than anywhere he had ever lived. Even though it was only September, he wrapped his cloak around him for warmth. He certainly wouldn't stay in one of the so-called cities; they were pestilential. There were farms in the area where he supposed he could buy a night's lodging, but the prospect of living under the same roof with not only barbarians, but their livestock as well, was daunting.

  He decided to spend the night in the forest. For although Saladin had become a creature of civilization, he had not forgotten his childhood years in the Zagros Mountains with Kanna. He had no fear of the wilderness and knew how to live off the land. That night he killed a young deer and roasted it over a high fire.

  That was the night, too, when he met Nimue.

  It must have been the fire that drew her, or the smell of food. Saladin had cooked the whole deer and sat on its skin while he picked at a haunch. He longed, absurdly, for fruit. Food supplies had been low in recent times even in Rome, due to the constant invasions, but there were still peaches or melons to be had, if one knew where to look. But here . . . He sighed. In this cold place, he would be lucky to keep from starving.

  He would go back to the docks tomorrow, he decided, and every day thereafter until he could find someone with a boat to ferry him and his horse across the channel back to Europe. There, he would live out whatever time he had to until the world settled into some kind of order.

  He tossed the piece of meat aside, his appetite gone. Never in thirty centuries had he seen anything like the disaster that was sweeping the world. If he had been a superstitious man, he would have agreed with the Romans that mankind's time had come to an end. The statesman Cicero had been right when he warned the nobility against giving in to the mass of common men, the rabble: Now the barbarians were taking over the earth.

  Saladin leaned back in disgust on the deerskin that was still stinking of fresh blood. It was that or the bare ground. He closed his eyes and tried not to think.

  In the stillness of the forest, the noise made by a broken twig sounded like a thunderbolt. He leaped up from his place and drew his dagger at once.

  The animal stopped, silent, but in the light of the fire he could see its eyes, glassy and shining, surrounded by a cloud of glowing hair. It made a sound, almost a cry, then sank to the ground.

  Cautiously Saladin made his way toward the creature. It did not move. It was lying facedown in a patch of dried leaves. As he reached it, he prodded it with his toe to roll it over. He saw with some surprise that it was a woman.

  Or, rather, a girl. She could not have been more than sixteen, Saladin thought, staring at her in distaste. Yet, with her filthy white flesh and clothing made of animal skins, she reminded him uncannily of the ancient mountain man Kanna.

  When she did not move, he bent over her to see if she were still alive. Aside from a lot of scabs and bruises, which seemed normal, judging from her physical appearance, there were no signs of mortal wounds. He opened one of her eyelids. From the look of the eye, she had fainted. The iris, he saw, was blue.

  He had never gotten used to blue-eyed, pale-skinned people, even though he had known many. Alexander himself, the greatest warrior in history, had been fair, and Saladin had half-fallen in love with him at one time, but that was more despite the man's appearance than because of it. Even the Greeks, for all their learning and elegance, had seemed physically repugnant to Saladin. That was why he so preferred life in Rome. For while there were blonds there, too, they were not of the type he so disliked—pasty and weak-looking, like termites or bottom-feeding fish. Like Kanna. Or this girl.

  Her skin was hot. A fever of some sort, probably brought on by whatever vermin she carried on her person in such plentiful supply. She stank.

  Saladin was inclined to leave her where she was, but she posed a problem. Sick or not, she might atta
ck him during the night. The woods were dark.

  Cursing softly, he dragged her back to the fire. She would probably be dead by morning, anyway. Until then, he could prevent her from slitting his throat by keeping an eye on her.

  She came to briefly, and tried to bolt. "Oh, stop," Saladin said wearily, pinning her arms back. "I'm not going to hurt you, you putrid sack of offal."

  She tried to resist, but she was very weak. Her eyes opened wide. He could feel her hot, febrile breath and turned his face away from it. Firmly but without violence he positioned her in front of the fire.

  "You're hungry, I suppose," he said, tearing off a piece of meat from the cooked carcass of the doe.

  She looked at it, but her eyes lost their focus. Her tongue pulled loose from the roof of her mouth with an unpleasant sound. She was thirsty.

  Reluctantly Saladin offered her his cask of water. He had seen a creek nearby; he would clean the cask's metal spout in the morning, after setting it on the fire to burn away the impurities from the creature's mouth.

  She drank from it greedily, spilling water all over herself. She did not stop until he took the cask away from her. Then, with a last tentative look at the stranger in the wood, she curled up by the fire and went to sleep.

  As the flames softened into embers, Saladin slept as well.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Saladin awoke to find the girl squatting on the ground in front of him, gnawing on a piece of cold meat. Her blue eyes, no longer glazed with fever, stared up at him with a mixture of awe and fear.

  "So you're still alive," he said without much interest.

  She smiled at him. Her teeth were good, despite her feral life. She tried to speak. It was tentative, and in a guttural language that sounded to Saladin like gibberish. He wondered how long it had been since she had spoken with another human being.