The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  "The Saracens," Gerard replied quietly.

  The Count of Tripoli, hearing this, flung himself off his horse and went to his knees on the stony ground. "Lord God, we are dead men! This war is over! Guy! Your kingdom in Outremer is at an end!"

  Men shied away from this spectacle, and the horses neighed wildly.

  Gerard de Ridefort strode over to the Count and did not quite kick him. Instead, the Templar placed a hurried foot in the man's back, cocked his knee, and pushed hard. The Count's hands flew up and he went forward on his face.

  "Be silent, you traitor!" the Grand Master roared—after the other had eaten a peck of dirt. Then Gerard turned to King Guy.

  "My Lord, your orders?"

  "Orders?" The King looked around vaguely. "Yes, orders. Well ... Have someone pitch my tent. Up wind of that sheep, if you please."

  * * *

  The arms that Amnet had found at the Templars' abandoned campsite were his own. Missing were his shield and helmet, which some other knight must have taken at need. Sword and greaves, steel gauntlets and chain-mail hauberk he found stacked by his saddlebags. In the bags were a change of smallclothes and a ration of corn. A skin of water was nestled in the shade beneath the bags. So much had Leo left him.

  No horse.

  Amnet had armed himself, slung the saddlebags onto one shoulder, looped the strap of the waterskin on his other, and pulled the hood of the cloak over his head against the sun. It would be a long walk.

  Even a blind man could see the track of King Guy's army. And Thomas Amnet was no longer blind.

  It was during his third day of walking, still far behind the Christian rearguard, that he met the Bedouin.

  He was topping a small rise, when he heard a sound like the murmur of ocean waves on a distant beach: what a Norman peasant might hear if he stood half a mile back from the top of the cliffs above the Bay of the Seine. Too distant to see the raw sweep of the Atlantic or to distinguish the last splash of one wave from the curl and fall of the next. But close enough to smell salt in the air and feel the pulse of the rollers. It was the wordless voice of ten thousand men times ten, camped upon the other side of the hill.

  Without the power of prophecy, Amnet could tell which army he had come upon. He dropped his baggage, threw himself to the ground, and crawled the last few feet to the crest of his hill. He lifted his head half a hand's width above the descending slope.

  More numerous than a colony of sea birds, Saladin's soldiers bobbed and swayed about the smudgy camp-fires of their bivouac. Brighter than hand mirrors among the queen's ladies in waiting, their burnished helmets and breastplates reflected the sunlight in all directions through the hanging dust. Noisier than crows in a field of seedcorn, the Saracen lancers dashed about the camp on their Arabian horses, upsetting the cooking fires and raising screams of indignation from the yeoman footsoldiers.

  Amnet raised his hand against the scene, poised his thumb over a visual tenth of the field, and numbered the men he could cover with it. When the count became inconveniently high, he estimated the number of men around each fire, then counted the number of fires.

  Twenty thousand soldiers, or thereabouts, were spread before him—not counting horsemen in motion. The bivouac extended out of sight in either direction, east and west. Amnet could not tell how far it spread. But certain it was that this horde now cut off his progress toward King Guy and his army.

  But, if the force that Saladin led—which had once preceded King Guy's—had somehow fallen behind them, what then of the Christian forces? Had they turned aside somewhere? Had they picked up speed and, in one deathless charge, ridden through the Saracen horde? Or had Saladin made a turn along the route?

  Amnet was still puzzling the matter through when he felt a tug on the hem of his cloak. He lifted his head.

  The Bedouin was crouched by Amnet's feet, so that his head was still below any line of sight over the hill. He dropped the corner of his keffiyeh, which had protected his mouth and nose from the sun. The exaggerated curves of the man's mustaches, black as a raven's wing and broad as the brush strokes in a drunken monk's calligraphy, drew Thomas Amnet's fixed attention. He had seen those generous curves, that wide face, those intent eyes every time he had stared of late into the vapors surrounding the Stone.

  The mustache wings lifted and flapped once in a smile that showed perfect white teeth.

  "May I show thee a wonder, O Christian Lord?" The voice was singsong, lilting and mocking.

  "What is that?" Amnet asked cautiously.

  "A relic, Lord, cut from the hem of Joseph's coat. It was found in Egypt after the passage of many centuries, and yet its colors are still bright."

  From beneath the Bedouin's jellaba, his hands lifted something narrow and silken, glowing in the sunlight.

  Amnet's fingers brushed the hilt of his dagger as he rolled into a sitting position, upslope of the man and looking down at his strangler's cord. The Bedouin would have to make an upward lunge to get it around Amnet's neck. In that time, seven inches of cold steel would split the man from solar plexus to pubis.

  Something in the feel of that, in the way a knifeblade would twist and jerk in his hand if he were to cut into that flesh, warned Amnet off. This was no ordinary mortal—the Stone, riding safely in its purse under Amnet's belt, knew as much. It told Amnet that the energies flowing beneath the man's bronzed skin would turn any weapon he might bring to bear. The evidence of the silken cord said this was a drinker of souls, an Hashishiyun. And the Stone said this man was no mere adept in that cult.

  Thomas Amnet had come prepared to fight an army. The Stone's visions had brought him to an even greater challenge.

  "Not here, Assassin," he said in a low voice.

  The Bedouin's smile, ready and false, went suddenly still. His mouth assumed a set line of command. The eyes narrowed into points of darkness.

  "No," he agreed at last. "Not within a cry of Lord Saladin's camp."

  "You have prepared a place?"

  "I know of one that is suitable."

  "Then lead us there."

  In a swift and supple motion the man rose from his crouch and, without appearing to turn, was face about and moving down the side of the hill that both he and Amnet had climbed. His back was open to a thrust of the Templar's sword. Both knew that thrust would never be made, because both of them knew it would be a useless gesture.

  Amnet left his saddlebags, his waterskin, and his sword lying on the hillside. He followed the Assassin off into the hills to the east.

  * * *

  By noon on the second day, even the proudest of the Templars was lining up for the opportunity to drop to his knees and put his face in the mud puddle that had formed in the shallow depression where the sheep had lain. The water collected there was too precious to waste the moisture that would cling to the sides of a cup or in the fibers of a waterskin.

  The horses got no water at all. Gerard de Ridefort knew that was a mistake: their horses were their livelihood. For a French knight, to fight meant to fight from the saddle, to charge with lance in hand, to ride down your opponent through superior skill at the reins. Besides, in this desert a man would not get far afoot. To abandon the horses to the heat and their own thirst was to admit defeat.

  But enough among the army of King Guy were ready to admit it anyway.

  During the first night their sleep around the broken well at Hattin had been interrupted by the murmured prayers of the Moslem army below. At dusk the high, clear call of the muzzein had punctuated the babble of a camp making its preparations for the night. Then had followed chants in a deadened monotone. These were not prayers to the Christian ear but the murmuring of an implacable machine which was destined to mow down valorous knights beneath a tidal wave of sandaled feet and sharpened knives.

  A few of Guy's army, distracted by the sound and crazy with thirst, had saddled their horses and ridden straight for the shallow, gullied slopes that circled this dry plateau. They had g
one quietly enough, with rags knotted through their mounts' jingling bits. The word had passed from mouth to mouth that they would ride down a gully, tether their horses in sight of the Saracen camp, crawl on their bellies to the nearest water, drink, and return the way they came.

  No one ever saw these men again.

  Gerard could only suppose that they had been captured and decapitated on the spot. Such were Saladin's standing orders—for the Templars among them, at least.

  Sometime after this party had set out, the Moslems had set fire to the dried grass that covered the slopes and the tangled thornbushes that clogged the gullies. The greasy smoke drifted like a choking fog over the Christian camp, collecting in dry throats and stinging in bleary eyes. And there was not water enough to wet a rag and dab them for relief.

  With that first dawn, Saladin had ordered his first attack. The ominous chanting of his soldiers had never ceased, but to the sound they now added the blaring of horns and banging of gongs. No need for stealth when they outnumbered the Christians ten to one. Like a drawstring cinching the neck of a sack, the wall of humanity closed about King Guy's camp.

  The French had no room to mount their horses and maneuver. No distance over which to begin a crushing charge. No weak point in the formation that opposed them, against which a charge might carry through. Instead, they took a stand, shoulder to shoulder, and pointed their battle lances outward. Their light teardrop-shaped shields—so handy against a horse's shoulder for deflecting an opposing pike or warding a sword's blow—offered too narrow a protecting space for this stationary fighting. The old Roman legions might have locked the rims of their heavy, square shields and stood off twice their number in wildly swinging barbarians. The Norman's elegant armor would not serve.

  And the Saracen infantry were not the boastful tribes that Caesar's men had crushed. They did not dance forward in individual combat. Instead, they walked in deathly silence—except for the droning of their prayers. When they came to the bristling line of cavalry lances, they stepped around the thrusting points and hacked at the shafts with the edges of their curved swords. Two and three at a time, they grappled with the man who held the lance, preventing him from withdrawing the point for another thrust, and sometimes they could twist it from his hands.

  King Guy's army, being a mobile force of mounted knights, had no archers. And Reynald had brought none up from the Kerak. The French had nothing to throw against the line of Moslem infantry except their lances and their swords. And those, once thrown, disarmed a man.

  For an hour by the sun, that first morning, they had grappled and twisted, punched and kicked, hacked with swords and butted with shields. The Christian line had held. The Moslem infantry leaked blood and, one by one, collapsed. But still too many of them were left standing and fighting.

  At the end of that hour, one horn sounded a different note: a descending two-toned call. The other horns around the hill picked up the call. The Saracens lowered their swords, released the Christian lances, and stepped back. Foot by foot they withdrew, and King Guy's knights were too exhausted to follow. Instead, they dropped the points of their shields into the blood-softened ground and sagged upon their upper rims, panting hard.

  Saladin had left them for the rest of the day, letting the sun work on their heads and the hanging dust work on their throats.

  On the second night, the call to prayer had once again awakened the droning chants of the besieging army.

  As dawn drew close on the second morning, a few of the French were for a more active resistance. The Count of Tripoli had gathered a handful of his faithful knights about him and a hardened band of Templars who were of like mind. They had gone to Grand Master Gerard in the dark and asked leave to join the Count in his expedition.

  Gerard had refused.

  They then asked permission to renounce their vows of obedience to the Order of the Temple.

  Again Gerard had refused.

  These Templars then told him they were renouncing their vows, that his authority over them was at an end, that they would ride with the Count whether Gerard de Ridefort would allow them or not.

  Gerard had bowed his head in dismissal.

  The Count had found a trumpeter willing to ride with him. His men collected as many of the horses as were not yet blowing foam and stumbling with fatigue. From among these, they bought the best from their former owners, spending their last pieces of gold and silver.

  As the sun came up out of the east, over Galilee, the Count had mounted his charge. His trumpeter blew the attack, in challenge to the blaring Moslem horns. They would break out toward the west, coming out of the shadows of the two great rocks into the sun-blinded faces of the infantry guarding that side of the hill.

  Watching them go, Gerard's own hands and shoulders had tightened as if feeling the reins between his fingers, feeling his grip on the smooth wood of his bouncing lance, the heavy links of his mail coat rising and falling across his chest and thighs.

  The Count and his band had been at full gallop when they met the wall of infantry. Gerard strained to hear the clash of heavy bodies and the screams of trampled men.

  Nothing.

  The wall of bodies had parted as the Red Sea before Moses. The Count and his horsemen had ridden into the gap, gaining speed down the slope of the hill. When the last of the horsetails had disappeared into the dust, the wall of Moslem soldiers closed once again, as the Red Sea had closed on Pharaoh.

  A chorus of screams had indeed drifted back up the hill, but whether they were from French throats or Saracen, none could say. Gerard thought he knew.

  The drawstring of infantry now tightened around the hill again. But this time the Moslems kept their distance: ten paces of trampled earth separated them from the line that the haggard French had established. The Moslem soldiers who faced them were impassive, chanting with moving mouths and dead eyes. They would not pick out individual knights and captains, hating them, staring them down, and granting them some kind of status as enemies and worthy fighting men. Instead, the Moslems stood before them as they might before a blank wall, praying only to a god unseen.

  The sun rose higher in the dome of the sky.

  * * *

  Amnet followed Hasan as-Sabah—for so the Assassin had identified himself at the start of their journey—into a narrow valley by which a stream found its way to the shores of Galilee. In the gray light of the predawn hours, Amnet could detect a green bowl, cut into the hills that rose to the west of the inland sea. The lip of this bowl protected the gentle grasses under their feet and the flowering trees overhead from the dry west wind. Amnet found the stream by the song of its clear water curling over mossy stones. To him it was like distant churchbells in the French countryside. The chatter of birds, awake before the sun, answered the stream.

  The name Hasan meant nothing to Amnet. It was the name of another Arab who opposed the hegemony of the French in Outremer. That he was an Assassin with more than mortal powers did not daunt the knight; Amnet was a Templar with more than mortal powers. He could believe that another like himself had appeared upon the stage of the world.

  "Where is this place?" he asked, out of mere form.

  "We are not so near to Tiberias that the Christian garrison there might hear your call for help. Nor are we so near the battlefield of Hattin that General Saladin might hear mine."

  "This is a magic place," Thomas Amnet observed.

  The Assassin turned quickly and faced him. The first rays of sun caught something of doubt in the man's eyes. "It has only the magic of nature—of light and running water and vegetable growth. No more."

  "It needs no more. Those were the first magic and still the strongest."

  "You must know little of magic, Sir Thomas, if that is strength to you."

  Hasan flexed his knees and leapt backwards. The thrust of his legs carried him twenty feet, across the stream, to an outcropping of gray stone that rose fully ten feet above Thomas' head.

  "And wha
t do you know of magic," Amnet asked, "that you may scorn the forces of earth to bloom in the desert?"

  "I know this!"

  The Assassin cupped his hands at chest level, elbows out, palms and fingers curved above and below a space about four inches in diameter. From the tension in his arms, the man was expending an incredible amount of energy. Amnet was reminded of boys in a cold Norman winter, playing at war with snowballs. When a boy picked up a handful of loose ice crystals and tried to compress them with the strength of his arms and his own will into a usable missile, he might look as Hasan did then. Although his opposing fingertips and the heels of his hands never touched, something held his hands at a distance as he strained to close them. The dawnlight flowing into the valley seemed to pick out the man's hunched shape and something—the backside of a finger ring? a crystal of sand caught in a fold of skin?—glinted and flashed between Hasan's palms. With a last trembling effort, the Assassin thrust outward with his hands, directing that something at Amnet's head.

  In the wink of an eye, the light in the narrow valley shifted, seeming to flow across at Amnet. He put up a hand to shield his vision. With the hand went a thought of warding, the will to see that whatever might harm him was deflected into the ground at his side.

  With a snap and a sizzle, the grass beside Amnet's left boot withered and dried out. The green lawn there browned over a circle four inches in diameter.

  "Is that the best you can do?" Thomas asked.

  Hasan, bent over, rested his hands on his knees, breathing hard. He looked up with deadly hatred in his eyes. "The heat of a hundred campfires was contained in that point. Why is your hand not burned?"

  "You have learned a certain control over the body's own energies, Hasan. That is impressive enough in an adept of the Hashishiyun. Such control takes years to learn."

  "I have had years."

  "What—ten? Twenty? You may have started your pagan disciplines as a boy. But you are not yet a man of middle age."