Hasans hands made quick brushing, sweeping movements. Then he withdrew his hands, and so close did the Assassin clutch them to his body that Amnet could not see what they held.
With a last look into Amnet's dimming eyes, the other turned and, bent over his burden, walked quickly out of the valley.
The snapping and sizzling at the base of Amnet's skull rose within it, like water bubbling up in a foundering hull. As it poured out of the broken top of his head, he went into blackness and his body died.
* * *
The hands that lifted the tent cloth off Gerard de Ridefort were deft and strong. The faces that peered down at him were brown and lean, and the light of victorious battle showed in their eyes. The Saracens lifted him, their fingertips caressing the red cross stitched on his surcoat. They made chortling noises as they examined this signal of his allegiance.
One lifted the badge of office that Gerard wore around his neck, a heavy thing of gold and enamel on a square-linked chain, also of gold. The Grand Master moved to protect it, but his captors quickly batted his hands away. They stole the badge from around his neck, and two of them dashed off, tugging and fighting over it.
His sword was gone, dropped in the last charge when he had fallen among the tent ropes. His captors now lifted the dagger from his belt and put a noose of rough rope around his neck.
They led him down the hill. On all sides a thousand others were so led, dazed and feeble, confused and half-dead from strain and the lack of water. They stumbled like sheep on the ends of cords.
At the bottom of the hill, the Saracen commanders were separating the Templars, who wore their red cross, from the other Christian knights who had followed King Guy. The Templars were led aside into a steep-wall gully below Hattin. A line of Saracen archers, with their ridiculous short bows, stepped to the rim above them.
"Christians!" a voice called out in clear, strong French from above. "You who are the Order of the Temple!"
Gerard looked up but, against the glare of the sun, he could not see who was speaking.
"It is now appropriate," the voice went on in a confiding and almost friendly manner, "that you should kneel down and worship your God."
Like a congregation at chapel, five thousand disarmed Templars fell to their knees. The jangle of their mail coats was like the rattle of anchor chain at the catheads of a fleet.
Gerard tried to pray, but he was distracted by a murmur, a moaning, that came from either end of the gully. He strained his neck to peer over the bowed heads and curved backs of his men. The Saracens were doing some work with swords there.
"They are chopping off the heads of our comrades!" came frightened whispers through the ranks. "Rise up! Fight them! Save yourselves!"
"Nay! Hold!" Gerard commanded between his teeth. "Better a clean stroke of the sword than a dozen badly aimed arrows."
A few of the men around him chuckled at this. The whispers stopped.
After a time, someone behind him said, softly: "Well pitch our tents in Heaven this night, old friend."
"No," his unseen companion murmured, "on the other side of that river, I think ... The same way we have lived."
A silence, while those within earshot absorbed this.
"You didn't have to mention water," someone nearby rebuked.
"Oh, for just a drop," moaned another voice.
There was no time for that unseemly moaning to go on, as the Saracen executioners were upon them and—chop, chop.
* * *
Saladin climbed up and perched himself upon a perilously high stack of cushions. He shifted his weight experimentally, to see if he might not topple off at an inopportune moment. The stack, constructed as cleverly as the Pharaoh's pyramids, seemed stable enough.
He might have trusted more civilized opponents to observe the proper courtesies, even in defeat, even stretched to the limits of their endurance by heat and thirst. A captured Moslem sheikh would know to enter the tent on his knees, on his knees and elbows, or rolling on his belly if necessary, to keep his head lower and his posture more humble than that of the general who had taken him. But these Christian nobles would not understand such proprieties. They would walk upright into the tent and stand tall, as if they were the conquerors this day.
The faithful who followed him must not be allowed to see their leader humiliated in this fashion. Hence the pile of pillows.
All that seemed to be for nothing.
King Guy did not walk into the tent but was carried, arm and leg, by four of Saladin's strongest retainers. Other ransomable nobles followed behind their prostrate king. They were walking, but their heads hung down on their chests.
"Is he dead?" Saladin asked.
"No, My Lord. But the heat fever is upon him. He glows with madness."
Guy, the Latin King of Jerusalem, lay like a bundle of old rags on the carpet before the raised pile of cushions. The man's feet twitched and his hands wandered; his eyes rolled around in his head unseeing. The other nobles—among whom Saladin marked the lean, feline features of Reynald de Chatillon—hung back from their king, plainly afraid he was dying. As he was.
"Bring refreshment for this king," Saladin commanded.
Mustafa himself fetched a bowl of rosewater, iced with snows brought in clothbound casks from the mountains. The vizier knelt by the king's head and dipped the end of his own sash in the basin, wetting it to lay across Guy's heated brow. The coolness brought some reason to the King's eyes, and he stopped twitching. When his mouth opened, Mustafa held the rim of the bowl to his lips and let a little of the water soak into the tongue. It was cracked and furred like the hide of a horse left two months dead in the desert.
King Guy raised his hands to the bowl, clearly intending to lift and pour it into his throat. Mustafa, stronger than he, held it steady. But, when the King seemed to understand the wisdom to be had in small sips, Mustafa let him have it. The vizier nodded to Saladin and stepped back.
Levering himself up on one elbow, Guy drank and—for the first time—looked about with awareness of his surroundings. He saw the other French nobles, standing like whipped dogs with their tongues hanging down into their beards. Some measure of kingly responsibility inspired him to lift the bowl, offering it toward them.
Reynald de Chatillon was the first to reach for it. This man, the self-styled Prince of Antioch, had drowned Moslem pilgrims at Medina, burned Christian churches on Cyprus, offered to ravish Saladin's sister, and proposed to scatter the bones of the Prophet. With trembling hands he brought the bowl to his lips—he was taking refreshment as a guest in Saladin's own tent!
"Stop!" Saladin felt his face fold and pinch with a fury beyond reason. He scrambled off the mountain of cushions to stand before the two men. "This is not to be!"
King Guy looked up with an astonished, almost hurt expression on his foolish face.
Reynald, his beard dripping, gave Saladin a smile that was identical in curvature and intention to a sneer.
A red haze filled the General's field of vision. Almost blind with it, he turned to Mustafa.
"Explain to King Guy, that it was he—and not I—who offered this hospitality to our enemy."
Mustafa started forward, kneeled beside the King, and opened his mouth.
Simple explanations would not be enough. Saladin's anger demanded more. With a precision gained from years of training as a warrior, he kicked the basin from Reynald's hands, breaking the man's fingers with the blow. The water splashed the other Christian nobles and the rim of the flying bowl cut one above the eye.
Reynald, sneering openly now, held the wounded hand out toward Saladin. "What does your precious Muhammad command of you?" the voice was so insulting, so mocking ...
Without thinking, Saladin drew his sword of supple Damascus steel and in one lightning motion slashed up, over, across, and down.
Reynald's arm, severed at the shoulder, fell into King Guy's lap, where it writhed and clutched. The King squawked and pushed hims
elf backward to be rid of it.
Reynald stared down at the arm, then raised his widely horrified eyes to Saladin. His mouth, forming an incredible "O," began to sing a rising howl of agony, like a wounded dog.
Before the sound could go very far in the tent, one of the Sultan's bodyguards rushed forward, drawing his own sword, and batted Reynald's head from his shoulders. The surprised head rolled across the carpet, fetching face down at the foot of the mountain of pillows. The body, fountaining blood, fell to its knees and pitched forward.
King Guy, now spattered with blood and still pinned beneath the arm, looked up at Saladin with terror.
"Spare us, Great King! Spare us!"
The Sultan, his rage now cooling, looked down at him with contempt.
"Have no fear. It is not proper for a king to kill a king. You and such of your court as can prove noble blood shall be held for ransom. Those others who fought with you—and are still alive—will be sold into slavery. That is the judgment of Saladin."
King Guy sagged back at hearing this, worn by the terrors of the moment into complete submission. "Thank you, My Lord."
* * *
The Crusaders—as those waves of European horsemen adventuring in Palestine were eventually called—would never recover their kingdom in the Holy Land. All they would leave was a chain of crumbling hill forts: the architecture of France laid upon the architecture of Rome, laid upon the architecture of Solomon.
Richard of England would come and go upon this scene, also confronting General Saladin and losing to him. In the process, Richard would forfeit the rule of his far green land to brother John, whose stumbles would lead to Runymede and the Great Charter, mother of all constitutions.
Saladin's Ayyubites, and his warrior Mamelukes after them, would rule in Palestine for more than three centuries, but they would never overcome the Assassins in their mountaintop retreat. Blessed in their Secret Garden, protected by their Secret Founder, they would bedevil all who tried to hold the Arab fellahin in thrall.
Eventually, the power of Egypt would yield to the growing empire of the Ottoman Turks. These would hang onto the land for another four centuries. They eventually would sink into decay and yield their rule finally to a cluster of sheikhs led by an Englishman, T. E. Shaw, whose nomme de guerre was Lawrence. So would begin the British Mandate in Palestine, which was to last barely thirty years in the twentieth century.
The Mandate would end in the muddle that followed Europe's last great war, as the promise and the dream of Zionism were made real on earth. And still the Assassins watched from their spiritual mountaintop, looking out from peasant eyes across their once-fertile valleys. War would roll through again, as first Egyptian—then Syrian—armies tried to retake the land. War would spill over into Lebanon to the north and raze into barbarism the one state that had sought to live in harmony with the shifting winds which that ill-mannered century blew around the world.
The Holy Land would be sculpted and carved, watered and starved, by nine centuries of guerrilla war. And still the Assassins looked out from their spiritual mountaintop.
* * *
File 07
Unmask! Unmask!
Him the Almighty Power
Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition.
—John Milton
* * *
The main gates of the complex had been blasted with an explosive power greater than any Sea Sparrow missile's. The two halves of the closure had originally been made of steel bars three centimeters thick, crossed at top, middle, and bottom with bands of layered alloy. They had rolled on steel wheels like a railroad car's on rails of polished metal. Yet the force of the explosion had curled the gate's rods and bars around into curled hemispheres, like lines of latitude and longitude across a globe. The pounding blast had levered the rails out of their pavement grooves. The bomb's shrapnel had pocked and spalled the gates' polished concrete piers on either side of the road. Bolts as big around as Tom Gurden's thumb had been twisted out of their anchoring matrix like taffy pulled from a broken tooth.
As the guerilla band walked up to the gate, Gurden could see the outline of this destruction in the weak shadows and rays thrown from the plant's more distant floodlights. The nearby floods and the tubes along this part of the access road had all been smashed by the explosion.
"What did you use here?" Gurden asked Ithnain. "A nuclear grenade?"
The Palestinian sucked his lower lip as he walked along. "My Lord Hasan spoke of a device for use against hardened targets. A bomb with multiple fusings and several charges ..."
"Hardened—a pair of steel gates?"
"If you look closely—" Ithnain stopped in the road between the piers, bent down, and traced a pattern."—you can see here the outline of a foundation." It was a square, two meters on a side, of rough gray concrete embedded in the asphalt roadbed. "This was the central pillar into which the two halves of the gate once locked."
"A hardened target," Gurden marveled. "Why not pick the lock?"
"My Lord was in a hurry."
Gurden looked ahead, to the low-rise building that held the plant's administrative offices. Behind it, rising like a Dover cliff over a fishing village, was the central reactor building. The area was quiet now.
Six kilometers of walking, with two men carrying the remaining undetonated Sea Sparrow between them, had made them late at the main action and further behind Ithnain's schedule than when Gurden had awakened.
The group walked warily across the visitors' empty parking lot, into the forecourt of the admin building, and paused outside the pebbled-glass sliding doors that closed the reception lobby. Ithnain and one of his lieutenants walked forward. They crossed an infrared beam; the doors pulled back—and collapsed outward in a cascade of glittering diamonds.
"Damn it!" Ithnain swore, stepping aside and lifting his legs high to keep the fragments out of his boots.
The doors' tempered glass, once clear, had been shattered by the explosion at the gates; only gravity and inertia had held the fragments in their doorframes. At the first movement—of the panels sliding back—this crazed mass had succumbed to its own weight.
Gurden examined the glittering spill. "Am I to conclude that My Lord Hasan did not come this way?" he asked dryly.
"This building was not his objective."
"And is it ours?"
Ithnain did not reply—merely walked through the opening, his boots crunching heavily.
Gurden followed, careful of his leather shoes. The tempered glass had broken into uniform cubes, each of about two carats' weight. This configuration might be safer to experience in an accident than shards and slivers, but the cubes still offered up razor edges and corners. They would roll underfoot and cut his soles—or his hands and face if he fell. He walked flat-footed and slowly.
Inside the lobby he was confronted with a series of gates: metal detectors and phosphorus sniffers. The one would find weapons, the other explosives—except that both were now darkened and inert.
"To-oo late," he crooned mentally as he walked through them. Of course, the detectors had nothing to find on him.
"Where are the guards?" he asked.
"The plant's security was mostly mechanical," Ithnain replied. "Our diversion called half the dogs and growlers operating within the perimeter. Then our missiles took them out electronically."
"And the other half?"
Ithnain waved a hand to the north. "Somewhere out there. Other side of the plant-site."
"What about human guards?"
"The admin staff did have some human rent-a-cops, just to be courteous to visitors while they went through these machines. Those people probably went out into the plant when we blew the gates."
"And are they in there now? With guns?"
"They'll surrender when My Lord Hasan takes the main control room."
Gurden looked aroun
d at the rest of Ithnain's troops, bunched up in the reception area or walking single-file through the detector gates. They carried their weapons hung off shoulder straps or dangling at the end of their arms.
"In the meantime, don't you think your men should move more like soldiers—covering each other or something?"
Ithnain smiled and shook his head. "Here is not the place to ambush us. Up ahead, as we go into the reaction hall."
They walked through the building, down cream-painted corridors with wine-red carpets, past doors paneled in blond oak with black, etched tags on them. The building was safety lit, with only every other ceiling panel turned on and tuned low.
For a sector fusion plant under siege, it was remarkably orderly. Aside from the broken glass in the lobby, Gurden could see nothing out of place—no overturned furniture, no fires or fused equipment, no flying papers, no war zone.
The only things out of the ordinary were the computer monitors: flashing their red warning bull's-eyes and automatically logging, in long green columns, their tracer calls to a pack of dogs that would never answer again. A second column, in blue, logged attempts to get through to the New Jersey barracks of the Metro Police.
What the security computer did not know was that all land lines out of the site, both strung copper and buried optical, had been cut before the assault. A pan-spectrum flute was jamming radio transmissions on all bands, making a dead zone for six kilometers around the plant. The jamming also limited the assault force's communications, but Ithnain and this Hasan evidently preferred careful planning, clear instructions, and good timing—or the hope of it—to a lot of radio chatter.
At the end of one corridor the carpeting ran up to a metal-flanged doorsill. The door was gleaming stainless steel, diagonally banded with broad yellow stripes, and the stripes themselves were edged in black. Notices on this side of the door warned them to respect clean-room procedures, don protective goggles immediately, check their dosimeters for a neutral reading, and wear their identification badges in outside pockets at all times. Signed, T. J. Ferryman, Plant Manager.
The Mask of Loki Page 27
