by Judith Tarr
oOo
The sultan sat his horse before the gates of Aleppo. Robes, turban, banner, all were black. His mail and his helmet were gold. His mare was of that color called al-ashab al-marshoush, the flecked grey, the color most favored of kings.
Zamaniyah, in black and grey steel, on Khamsin who was the red of battle, sat not far from him. She had begun beside her father, but Khamsin’s restlessness or the mare’s allure had brought him, and his rider with him, among the sultan’s bodyguard. They, who knew her, made no move to prevent her. One even smiled.
On the gates above them, weapons bristled. None moved to attack. This was a parley, and for the moment, if not amicable, at least not violent.
Of those on the gate who professed authority, only two mattered: the magisterially fat Turk who was the regent, Gumushtekin; and the small figure of the prince. The child spoke for himself. Well instructed, no doubt, but also well schooled. His voice was thin but clear. “Have you come to accept me as your overlord?”
“I have come to free you from ill counsel,” the sultan answered, giving him no title as he had given the sultan none.
The boy’s head turned from side to side, taking in his emirs, his elders, his impassive eunuch. He looked down again upon the sultan. “Is it ill counsel that bids me claim what is rightfully mine?”
“The claim and the counsel have brought no peace to Syria. Therefore the wisest of its princes sent to me, beseeching me to come to the kingdom’s aid. Most of its people have welcomed me, and most without bloodshed. Why do you resist me, when I would do you naught but good?”
“If you meant me well, you would not stand here in arms.”
“The arms are Syria’s,” said the sultan. “We would wield them in your name, if you would allow it.”
All along the wall, men hissed and spat. The sultan did not waver. No more did the prince. “You want the kingdom for yourself,” he said. “Go back. Go back where you came from.” He raised a hand. A rain of arrows blackened the sky.
oOo
“Sharp,” said the sultan, “and to the point.”
He was not visibly discomfited, although an arrow had presumed to pierce his cloak as he retreated. He sat in the shelter of his tent while wind rocked the walls and a true rain beat upon the roof. His servants warmed him and his emirs with kaffé. Many of them were warm enough with anger or with outrage; one, lightly wounded, swore vengeance over and over as the surgeon dressed his hurt.
Zamaniyah sipped the sweet, scalding kaffé and tried not to shiver. She was wetter than she liked to be, and colder; until she thought of Khamsin roofless in the rain. Then her teeth chattered on his behalf.
“What will you do?” someone asked the sultan.
“Take Aleppo,” he answered swiftly. “However long it takes me, however long the city holds against me, in the end it will fall.”
“And the young pup?”
“He makes war on me. So be it. Allah knows which of us is better fit to rule.”
He said it calmly, and unshakably. Some of the emirs seemed surprised. Either they were fools, or they were feigning it. She would not have liked to have a wager riding on either.
She was not a good soldier. She kept thinking of the wrong things. The Syrian prince could have been wise. He could have accepted Yusuf’s regency; learned from it; and at last, when he was grown and strong and well able to rule a kingdom, claimed it for his own. Had not Yusuf himself done much the same?
He and his counselors had chosen war. No one seemed dismayed. Most of them were delighted. War was the strong choice, the man’s choice.
Certainly steel was simpler than speech. If, all too often, no quicker, nor any more absolute.
oOo
Khamsin welcomed winter’s passing, even knowing that, slowly as the siege went, he would have to face the furnace-heat of Syrian summer. Now, at the gates of spring, it was pleasant to sleep under the stars, or to idle under the sun while men labored over the siege engines, or on occasion to partake in a swift sortie. Sometimes Zamaniyah hunted for the pot, trying his speed against the gazelle or her archery against the birds of the air. Every day that she could, she took an hour to remind him of his training: the gentler art, the Greek mystery that took his body’s own dances of joy and challenge and fear, smoothed and fined them, taught them cadence, transmuted them into art.
He was becoming a dancer. On a day of sun and wind she told him so, dancing a little herself for joy of it. He took joy to match, but in her presence, in the touch of her hand, in the scent of her hair as he nibbled it.
She went away. Reluctantly, he liked to think. But she was wanted. In camp it was the custom that everyone who was not on guard should dine together, sultan and slave alike. They ate from the same pot, drank from the same jar, in the equality of war.
It was clever, he had heard someone say. A poisoner might hesitate if he lacked the certainty of dainties prepared expressly for the sultan.
Khamsin idled hipshot in his place, content for once to stand still, resigned to halter and lead. They had stopped trying to hobble him. He fought the damnable bonds; he found ways out of them; he turned on grooms who dared to try again. They were not fools, the horseboys of the army.
They haltered him, pegged him in place, let him be. He tried not to envy the others who could wander at will. Some were very clever at outwitting their hobbles and straying far in search of grazing.
He thought more than once of being clever himself: pulling up his peg, finding a place that suited him—by the river, maybe, where the grass was sweet and water plentiful—and pegging himself down again. He had never quite dared to do it. There was always someone watching, or someone passing, or something to quell his courage.
It was quiet now, the wind a little gentler, a cloud or two circling coyly about the sun. Here at the army’s back, away from the city, the guards were spread wide. For every one who stood visibly at his post, a handful scattered among hills and hollows, alert for any scent of ambush.
Khamsin’s nose had found and marked each one, for diversion, and because he could do it. They were eating: bread, mutton, a hint of oil.
His nose twitched. The wind had shifted a fraction. Something new drifted upon it. Something odd.
Human. But strange. Clean, as men went, clothed in—linen? Cotton? The strangeness overlaid it, part of it. Sweet yet pungent. Faint, but strong.
He snorted, sneezed. He knew that scent. Its name eluded him.
Magic?
Not—quite. Not wholly.
Out of one of the hollows where no guards were, men came. They were quiet, yet they advanced without stealth. He had never seen or scented them before. They all wore white, white headcloths drawn over their faces, swords and daggers white-sheathed and white-hilted.
He blinked. It was far from hot enough to draw a shimmer from the air, and yet these men seemed to flicker and blur. Out of the corner of his eye he could see them clearly. A straight stare turned them to a dizzy dance.
Instinct deeper than thought eased him from his taut and prick-eared tension, lowered his head, sent him ambling in search of one last unnibbled bit of fodder. The strangers paused just beyond his trampled circle. There were twelve of them and one. They were calm, unhasty, as if they belonged there; as if they had no fear.
He started, turned it to a stamp, a snap at a fly. There was an enchantment on them. None of the horses who were near seemed even to have scented them. No guard challenged them. A groom dozed in the tent of his cloak, oblivious, though when a stallion sidled toward a mare he was up at once and catching the stallion’s halter.
His back was to the strangers. Their eyes measured him. Dark eyes, strange, as if they walked in a dream; but keenly, vividly awake. A fire seemed to burn behind them.
One of them, who seemed to lead them, nodded. Softly, swiftly, silent as cats, they glided toward the camp.
Khamsin’s head snapped up. Their scent. Magic; and hashish.
And death.
The groom was
caught up still in the stallion’s resistance. Khamsin blessed him, and the wind, and Allah who had ordained it all. Quickly and as quietly as he could, he caught the peg in his teeth and tugged. It held. He dug in his feet and pulled. It yielded, twisted, leaped free. He rocked back on his haunches. He looked, he knew with the clarity of the hopelessly vain, absurd. He scrambled up the lead as best he might—swift, swift, no time to break it, none at all to cast it off. With the coil of it in his teeth, he bolted on the strangers’ track.
They were all at dinner, all the army, gathered in and about the center and the sultan’s tent. Khamsin stopped, dismayed. A man could have done what he had to do. A horse alone, unattended...
Already they had seen him. Fingers pointed. Someone shouted.
Thirteen white-clad figures moved among the ranks. They had divided. Like servants they carried jars, platters, mounds of flat bread. Their progress, always, was inward. To the center.
Khamsin drew the deepest breath he could with a mouthful of rope, gathered himself, and took the straight way.
Men rolled out of his path. Men staggered into it. He hurdled them. They snatched. He flung them off. Tumult surged before and behind him.
His eye fixed on one face out of all the gaping, yelling faces. One narrow, brown, big-eyed face; one that knew him and called his name. He plunged toward it.
oOo
Zamaniyah heard it first: an uproar on the fringes of the army. Then she saw him. Red horse, wandering blaze, tail flagged stiff and high as only Khamsin’s tail could be. He had something in his mouth. Rope, coiled. Peg swinging, striking hands that stretched to halt him.
The men about the sultan had turned to stare. She was on her feet. Maybe she called the horse’s name. She could only think that her father would be furious.
Khamsin swept his head about. The peg smote a white-clad servant in the face. Blood spattered. The man screamed, reeling, falling.
“No,” she said.
People ran. Soldiers. Emirs. Servants. Did all the servants wear white? Did they all cover their faces? Did they all have such eyes?
Red ruin fell upon another.
Daggers gleamed.
Zamaniyah fought her way through knotted men. Khamsin was coming toward the sultan. Unless she stopped him. Unless...
One of the emirs swept out his sword. A Syrian. New come to them; newly sworn to the sultan’s war.
Treachery?
“Hashishayun!” he bellowed. “Assassins!”
A servant leaped. Away from the mad stallion. Upon the emir with his sword and his hate-mad face. Dagger out, stabbing. Blood dyed white robes scarlet.
“Assassins!”
Khamsin reared over Zamaniyah. Her fingers snatched mane. Briefly she flew. Spun. Dropped bruisingly on his back; clamped legs to sweat-slick sides. He wheeled. The sultan’s face blurred past. Her sword was in her hand. White gleamed. A dagger stabbed from it, the sultan full in its path, sword too far to reach, raising the frail shield of a hand. She swung, the stallion spun. Her sword caught, bit, wrenched free.
Her world stopped. The army roared and seethed. Twelve Assassins and one, known and named for what they were, died; died gladly, died crying the name of Allah. Two had died by a stallion’s doing. One lay dead at the sultan’s feet, headless, stretching even in death to take the life which he had been sent to take.
She had done that. She, and Khamsin. Her arm alone could never have struck that head from its neck.
“You knew,” she said to the twitching red ear. “You knew.”
Did he nod?
She looked at her notched and dripping sword, and up, at the sultan. His face was stark white. She saluted him, bowing over Khamsin’s neck. “Your life,” she said, “O my sultan.”
17
Aleppo had done it. Bought Assassins; bargained for the sultan’s death. Through a stallion’s madness and an emir’s swift warning, they had failed.
“Assassins do not fail,” said the sultan. “There is no word for it in their dialect.”
Zamaniyah would not have called him frightened. Wary, rather. Roused to prudence. Aware, at last, of what his title meant; the freedom, and the unending confinement. The power, and its price.
A doubled guard was the least of it. Even in sleep he wore mail.
“They have arts,” he said. “They can come upon a man in his own castle, take his life without a sound, and depart invisible. Or they take the shapes of his most trusted servants, and surround him, and while he rests complacent, destroy him.”
“Is it magic?” she asked.
“Some of it.” He paced his tent. Eyes glittered in its corners: men of proven constancy, armed to the teeth. And one unarmed, an old man, long-bearded, in the green turban of the Hajj. A physician, perhaps, or a scribe, though he wrote nothing, only sat in silence, reading from a book. She had glanced at it, bowed in reverence. The holy Koran.
The sultan turned to face Zamaniyah. “Much of it is absolute trust in Allah. He defends them, they believe beyond all doubting. They perfect their faith with prayer and with the waking dreams of hashish, and with utter fidelity to their master. He has taught them that they may know Paradise in this world, while they live this life, if they only do their lord’s bidding: betray whom he bids them betray, slay whom he bids them slay. And when they die, as is their deepest desire, they dwell there forever under the eye of God.”
“Then there’s no way to stop them?”
“I intend to. When Aleppo is mine. The heart of the madness dwells in Persia; but these were servants of the Syrian sect, of the stronghold of Masyaf, whose lord is called the Old Man of the Mountain. His heresy is Shiite, and the Shiites are strong in Aleppo; his own power is greater in this kingdom than any king should endure.” His fist rose, hammered down. “I will stop him. I will set my foot upon his neck.”
“Perhaps, my lord, you should rest content with your life and your kingdom.”
It was the old man who had spoken, with respect but without servility. The sultan rounded upon him. “What is his secret? A little sorcery. An excess of fear. I refuse it. I will not be cowed by a nest of heretics.”
“Then,” said the old man, “you had best beware. Asleep or awake, in camp or on the march, by day or by night, you must look for his servants, and guard against them; or in the end they will have you.”
“Do you prophesy, sir?”
The old man smiled. “Have I need? I know your enemy. Of the arts of which I am called master, he is reckoned a novice of great promise. And Aleppo will have paid him splendidly. A sultan’s ransom; and more, perhaps. Are your emirs looking to themselves? Have you warned even your regent in Egypt?”
“All of them,” said the sultan. “And, now, this my savior.”
She flushed. She wished he would not call her that. The old man regarded her gravely, as if he measured her. She stiffened, but less with outrage than with puzzlement. People never looked at her like that. Not as if she were and oddity, or a perversion, or a thing he had to school himself to accept. As if she were simply human, and he judged her so.
He nodded slowly. “You are stronger than you think,” he said.
She frowned, puzzled. “Are you an oracle?”
He rose and bowed. “Ah, no, young warrior. Merely a servant of God, and sometimes, in some small fashion, of the hidden arts.”
“A magus?”
“You may call me that.”
She had heard of his like. She had never seen one. “You look...” She pondered. He had sat down again. His eyes glinted, wicked as a boy’s. She could not help it: she glinted back. “You look like a magus,” she decided. “Though I never knew that magi could laugh.”
“We are quite human,” he said. “It is nothing remarkably uncanny. Only learning and hard labor.”
“And wisdom.”
“That comes as it wills, and not to all of us.”
“To you, I think, it has.”
“Perhaps. Sometimes I fail.”
“Ah,” she s
aid. “The word is in your dialect.”
He laughed, which startled her a little. “I think that I would call you wise, young warrior.”
“I can’t be a mage,” she said a shade quickly.
“Why not?”
“A mage can’t be a woman.”
“Why not?”
Her brows knit. She was growing, unwisely, annoyed. “A woman can’t be anything.”
“You are a warrior.”
“My father is mad.”
“Then so, perhaps, am I.”
“You have a daughter?”
“Yes.” He paused. His face darkened as if with sadness. He sighed. “She will be greater in the Art than I. If...”
“If?” she asked when he did not go on.
The darkness deepened. “If she remembers her strength. If she can master herself. It is a bitter battle, and long, and perhaps she cannot win it. Perhaps the wound is too deep ever to heal.”
“She’s hurt?” Zamaniyah dropped beside him, taking his hand, not needing to think. “Was she in a battle?”
“Of sorts.” His hand was thin and cold. His eyes were black. “An old battle of an ancient war. A guest forgot his place. He seized her, though she fought. He had his will of her.”
Her throat closed. Not that he said it; that he said it so, with such deadly calm. She choked out words. “That is a man’s right. So they say.” Her eyes met his. “Death would have been too gentle for him.”
“Indeed,” said the Hajji. “He serves a woman now, utterly, with body and soul. And so, when he has paid in full, shall he die.”
“But your daughter can’t forget.”
“I pray that she may. She dwells among women who are masters of the Art; she rises high and swift. But she will not suffer the presence of a man.”
“Even you?”
His head bowed, rose. “I am part of it. I taught her magic, but I had not taught her enough. When it came to the crux, she could muster no defense. She was no mage then. She was only a woman, and weak, and free for any man’s taking.”
