The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  "You know your own men best."

  "Of course I do. And we run a better siege here than you give us credit, Sirrah, with your tales of a creeping assassin."

  "Of course, My Lord." The surgeon bowed his head. "I salute your better judgment in these matters."

  And the physician left Bertrand du Chambord to order the horseboys to prepare a grave.

  * * *

  Hasan as-Sabah crept over the stones, feeling for loose ones and silently tamping them back into the dry soil with his bare toes. Those toes were long and hooked, and when he bent his foot the tendons stood out around the fleshy bottom pads. The skin was drawn back in dry white semicircles from the curved and horny nails.

  One hundred and twenty-nine years old, those toes were. In that time they had seen more walking miles, inside of boots and out, than the feet of the oldest camel on the Spice Road. Yet, for all that, Hasan's feet were a young man's feet, with strong arches, well-shaped muscles, and bones that all lay straight.

  His face was a young man's face, too, with wide mustaches and deep eyes inside clear sockets where the skin was hardly wrinkled. His hair was thick and black, curly as a shepherd boy's.

  The muscles of his arms rippled as he reached and steadied himself on the climb down across the rocky slope, over the sluggish stream on its standing stones, and into the Christians' campground.

  It was the seventh night of the Siege of Alamut. Although Sheikh Sinan had ordered him to spy on the invaders himself, Hasan had left the chore to others of the Hashishiyun who were more pliant to his will—until now, when he had cause to see these men for himself.

  He had known without leaving the Eagle's Nest that it was of course too soon for this kind of terror. Trapped in the valley by their own obstinacy and their perilous sense of valor, the Christian knights would defeat themselves in time. What the shadows and the stars could not achieve, then heat, thirst, prickly sweat, and a frustrated desire for action at any cost certainly would win. Left for three weeks in this narrow valley, they would eat themselves.

  But Hasan, Secret Master of the Hashishiyun for almost a century, had a reputation to uphold. Men might in time drive themselves mad in this sparse land, and none would count it a wonder. But to count themselves defeated by the night breezes, the sting of scorpions, and the judgment of wraiths—that was the stuff of legend.

  Which set of tent flaps should he look into? Did a Christian commander save the largest span of canvas for himself and his own servants? That was how a Saracen lord might arrange it. Or did he take the smallest tent for his own needs, and so house more of his men in relative comfort? That might be in keeping with their strange ideals of brotherhood and shared discomfort, shared adventure in these "crusades."

  Hasan as-Sabah picked the smallest tent, drew his dagger, and lifted the billow at an edge of canvas.

  A sour smell wafted out into his face: male bodies unaccustomed to the daily rituals of water and cleanliness. The Hashishiyun turned his head to one side, and breathed in small sips. He listened with the ear that was turned toward the opening.

  Snores, coming in two rhythms, shifted into and out of phase, like two wheels of different sizes running on the same road. Definitely two Christians here. Could they be this general and his attendant?

  Hasan lifted the canvas further and dropped his head under the edge, worming his shoulders down into the sand and up into the warm, moist darkness.

  Inside, his eyes quickly widened. He could pick out two masses against the tent cloth which glowed faintly with starlight. One slept lengthwise on a low cot of wood staves and cords. The other slept crosswise at the cot's foot. Master and servant, in the Northman way.

  A Hashishiyun would not take both, not at this stage of the siege. The need for terror outweighed the need to reduce the enemy's strength at arms. To wake with a dead companion would engender the keenest terror, with the inevitable question "Why him? Why not me?"

  So, which one should Hasan take—for maximum terror?

  A dead general, with a terrified slave babbling his innocence to any who will listen... That offered interesting possibilities for disrupting this Christian army.

  But a terrified general, waking in horror to the death of one so near his own bed... What better way to raise confusion and fear in all who camped below the Eagle's Nest?

  Hasan hovered over the dog who lay at his master's feet. The manservant slept with his head thrown back and tilted to the left, with his mouth gaping and rattling on each breath. The Hashishiyun gauged the rhythm of the snores. Like waves against the shore, the seventh snore was always a great one. It seemed to rattle the tent and shake the man's head on his neck. Hasan measured with a knuckle down from the earlobe and poised his knife, the blade twisted to fit between the vertebrae. The tip moved gently out and in with each breath. Hasan hung motionless, waiting for the second seven to come around again. As the sound crescendoed and began to recede, his knife glided into the neck skin and between the bones. When the spinal cord parted, the snoring stopped.

  Hasan cranked the knife's handle up and then down—to make sure—and withdrew the blade.

  One set of snores still cycled peacefully in the enclosed space.

  The Hashishiyun dropped silently to his knees and crept back to the loose edge of the tent. He curled his knife hand under him, not wishing to mark the tent's canvas or any other cloth in the camp with the blood on this hand. He lifted the edge with his other hand.

  Once outside, he moved among the shadows, over the stream, and back up his bank of slippery stones. His toes found the sure and silent way.

  * * *

  Bertrand du Chambord did not see the blood. The tent had been dark, he told himself later, because morning never came to the narrow valley just at dawn. It always waited some hours.

  When he had sat up and stretched, hawked and spat, he expected his manservant Guillaume to make haste with bowl and lather, razor and towels, food and wine. Instead the lazy wretch just lay there, feigning sleep. So Bertrand had kicked him.

  The head nearly fell off Guillaume's neck.

  A cloud of black flies rose up in the tent.

  Bertrand screamed like a woman.

  The whole camp could hear it.

  * * *

  By the thirteenth evening of the Siege of Alamut, Bertrand was truly in despair. Of the fifty mounted knights and the hundred yeomen and servants he had brought into the valley, only sixty souls remained. All the others were dead in their beds or lying among the rocks of the ravine. The more guards he called out at dusk to watch the hillside, the more he lost.

  Of the sixty left to him, no more than ten were sound in their wits or could take a firm grip on their weapons.

  Bertrand was not among those ten, and he knew it.

  By the sooty light of a tallow, he was doing something he had not had occasion to do since he was a white-skinned boy of twelve. He was praying. With no priest to lead him but a hired Templar who knew a few of the psalms by heart and passed for a holy man in this accursed land, Bertrand implored his God, intoning after the fighting man who had red crosses painted on his clasped gauntlets.

  "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?"

  The old Templar's voice grated over the words, with Bertrand's following lightly and quickly after.

  "When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.

  "Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident."

  Bertrand squeezed his eyes shut.

  "One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.

  "For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion; in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he sh
all set me upon a rock..."

  The Templar's voice ended there, as if pausing for breath, and never started up again.

  Bertrand kept his eyes tightly closed and, knowing none of the words himself, fell silent. He could hear the Templar let out a sigh—a ragged, wet sound—and then the mail on the man's body creaked and jingled, as if he were laying himself down in repose. And still Bertrand did not open his eyes.

  "You may look at me."

  The voice spoke French with just a trace of softness, almost a lisp.

  Bertrand opened his eyes slowly, raising them to the point of a slender knife centered on the bridge of his nose. Behind the knife and the hand that held it was a dark face with full mustaches and burning eyes.

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "N-no."

  "I am Hasan as-Sabah, founder of the Order of Assassins, whose place you would violate with your great swords."

  "Unngh."

  "I am one thousand, two hundred and ninety of your years old. That makes me older than your Lord Jesus, doesn't it? And I am still alive."

  The Assassin's face was actually smiling at this blasphemy.

  "Every forty years or so," Hasan said, "I make a death scene and go away for a while. Then I come back and readmit myself to the Order as a young man. Perhaps that is what your Lord Jesus did for himself."

  "The Lord is my salvation!" Bertrand squeaked.

  "You don't know what I'm saying, do you?"

  "Spare me, Lord, and I shall serve you!"

  "Spare—?"

  "Give me life! Don't make me die," Bertrand blubbered, hardly aware of what he was saying.

  "Only Allah can give life, infidel. And only Ahriman can preserve it past its time. But you cannot know this."

  "I'll do whatever you want. Go wherever you will. Serve you however you need."

  "But I don't need anything," Hasan said happily. And still with a smile on his lips, he thrust the knifeblade smoothly forward, into Bertrand's open left eye. His grip on the hilt tightened as the point entered the braincase and the Christian's head jerked backward, convulsing his whole frame. Hasan cushioned the nape of the neck with his left hand, holding the man nearly erect. The wastes of the body spilled out, fouling the air.

  When the tremors had stilled, he lowered the Christian to lie beside his Templar friend. The Templar, Hasan noted bitterly, had died better, without a flow of words and promises. He had simply glared his hatred into the Assassin.

  This time Hasan bent to clean his blade against the dead man's clothing, because the work of the night was not terror but pure killing.

  In the light of the tallow, he caught a movement. The hem of the tent was being slowly lowered to the ground.

  "Stay, friend," Hasan called.

  The canvas raised slowly. Beyond it, a pair of black eyes glittered in the light.

  "Why do you call me 'friend'?" an old voice quavered.

  It was an Assassin who should have stayed in Alamut this night and taken his fill of the Secret Garden. Instead he had been drawn over the wall by the scent of slaughter.

  "Are you not Ali al-Fatah, the camel boy, who once cracked jokes with Hasan?"

  "My mouth was wont to make a fool of me, more than once, to distract an old man and ease his pains. I was but an impudent child, and the smoke made me giddy."

  "They were good jokes, Ali."

  "None are alive who remember them, Lord."

  "I am still alive."

  "No, Lord. You are not alive, because we buried you in the sand a half-day's ride from here. I myself wrapped the linen around your feet."

  "A beggar's feet. Some castaway's feet."

  "Your feet, my Lord Hasan. I would know your feet; you kicked me often enough."

  "Only to improve your mind, Ali."

  "You did not kick me in the head, Lord."

  "I know. Your rump was softer than your head."

  "Not any more." The old man laughed to himself.

  "Remember me, Ali!"

  The man peered into the tent, past the bodies, to the slender, erect figure of Hasan and his even greater shadow against the far wall.

  "No, Lord. I shall not remember this night. I mean you no disrespect, of course, but if I remember, I will talk. And if I talk, they will say my brain has gone soft as a boy's butt. And then no good shall come to me."

  "Wisely spoken then..."

  "Never die, Hasan. And never tell me how you live." The hand let fall the cloth, and the old man was gone. Hasan could hear his slippers crunching on the sand.

  * * *

  Just before dawn on the following day, a squadron of Saracen cavalry under the command of a young captain, one Ahmed Ibn Ali, was patrolling the road to Tirzah. They came up from the east. As the first rays of the sun crept over the hills behind them, Ahmed saw a miraculous sight.

  The light shone upon a deep crevice in the mountain's face, which was to the north along the road, on Ahmed's right hand. No sooner had the hard sunlight revealed this break in the rock than it was filled with screaming madmen. On horseback and afoot they poured from the stone, Christians wearing the white surcoat with the red cross. Some were armed, many were bareheaded, and two actually ran naked, clutching the white outer garments around their waists like bundled swaddling cloths.

  At a single word, Ahmed's lancers drew their swords and galloped up, to cross the madmen's path and circle around them. The Christians offered no resistance but fell to their knees, those who were running, or slumped in their saddles, those who were riding.

  By gesturing and smacking with the flat of his blade, Ahmed arranged the infidels into two lines and marched them back along the road to Balatah, where the General had his temporary camp.

  * * *

  "General!"

  Saladin did not take his eyes from the one-two prancing of the young stallion.

  Its trainer, a boy of sixteen who in good time might be Saladin's next Master of the Horse, hardly touched its fetlocks with the switch. Yet, Saladin noticed, the trainer kept time with its tip and the animal was taking its cues from that. Had the boy stung it with the switch, to make it so mindful? Or was the horse performing out of love?

  The question was the most important to be asked of any human who would shape the spirit of an animal. And it was the one question that Saladin could not ask outright. The boy would know what answer to give, regardless of where the truth might lie. Instead, Saladin would have to look for clues and draw from them his own answers.

  "General!"

  Saladin put aside the question of the stallion and its trainer, finally raising his eyes to the waiting messenger.

  "Yes?"

  "Ahmed Ibn Ali brings prisoners from Tirzah."

  "Prisoners? Where did he take them in battle?"

  "No battle, My Lord. They surrendered upon the road."

  "How curious. Were they on foot? Lost in the mountains perhaps?"

  "They were running for their lives."

  "From Ahmed?"

  "From the Siege of Alamut—so they said."

  "Of Alamut? Not even a Frank is fool enough to try that place. Are they a company?"

  Saladin saw the young lancer absorb the word and give it the correct interpretation, one which Saladin had been at pains to teach his Saracen raiders.

  "No, My Lord. Ahmed says they are hireling knights and half-breed mongrels. They ran like a pack of scared dogs, those who had horses leading the way, those on foot trailing and crying out for rescue."

  "Were the Hashishiyun in pursuit?"

  "Not that any of the patrol could see."

  Saladin sighed. "Bring them before me in two hours' time."

  At the appointed hour, the Norman Franks and their Turcopole serving men sat and splayed out on the hard-packed ground between the tents. Suffering in the sun, they had thrown back their hoods of meshed steel rings and fashioned headcloths from the wool of their surcoats. Saladin had forbidden them water until he could
decide whether the guest rite might be offered to them.

  Standing before his tent, the Saracen general surveyed the twenty-odd men arrayed before him. They were penned by the dropped points of lances held by his largest warriors.

  "Are there Knights of the Temple among you?" he asked in his clear but rusty French.

  The Franks, slit-eyed against the glare, stared back at him. Perhaps eight of them qualified by their gear and their bearing as proper fighting men by Norman standards. Of those, six were grouped to one side, neither sitting on their hams nor huddled on the dirt but squatting alertly with their heels raised from the ground. These were fighting men who eyed the lowered lances and weighed their chances in a sudden melee. Templars to a man, or Saladin was no judge of Europeans.

  "Those of you who can expect a ransom should stand up now. I will accept payment in exchange for honorable fighting men..."

  The six Templars stood immediately, certain of their Order's ability to pay any amount for the return of a brother knight. "The Templars will pay for their own, My Lord," the largest—clearly their leader—called out. Three other Franks, not so sure of their resources, rose more slowly.

  "The rest of you," Saladin continued after his pause, "may be sold into a not disgraceful slavery, from which you in time may earn your freedom. Except, of course, for members of the Order of the Temple. Against that fanatical and outlaw band, which opposed me so swiftly at Montgisard, I have sworn vengeance. These—" He pointed to the six standing apart."—shall be put to death."

  Among the six, he could see fists clench and knees bend in readiness. Do it, he willed them silently. My spearmen need a little practice at close quarters.

  But finally none of the six moved.

  "Worse luck, Henri," said one loudly to another.

  "What's the fashion in heathenish executions?" that other replied, just as loudly. "The rope? Or the headman's axe?"

  "They tie you in a sack with their mother and a dog. The point is to see who gets screwed first."