Alamut

by Judith Tarr

  A last glimmer of sanity set in her mind the image of a bath in Aleppo, where the service was both silent and impeccable, and where the attendants were all faithful to the cause. It was always they who cleansed her of the blood of execution; they knew her, and they knew what she was.

  And they feared her, and hated her in silence, as they all did, all the mortal men to whom her oath had bound her. Only Hasan, Hasan-i-Sabbah the wise in the white light of his faith — only he had had no fear of her. Had, in his way, loved her. He had asked no oath or binding, only her fidelity to the Mission which his God had set so clearly in his soul. It was she, blind fool, who had insisted on an oath; who, in the flame of zeal, had begged him to make her his servant. The slave’s bond had come later, when he was dead and she was prostrate with grief. She had laid her freedom on his tomb, her last gift to him, and let herself be bound in body as in spirit. There was a fierce purity in it, a perfection of selflessness, a blessed certainty. She was nothing, no thing, no creature of her own, but utterly the Slave of Alamut.

  She stood on the bare stone of the floor, in the cell that had always sufficed for her few hours of sleep, and saw it as a stranger would see it. Bare stone, plain box for what belongings she had, sleeping mat rolled and laid in a corner. It was as empty as her soul.

  She fled it as she alone knew how to do: that eerie, inward twist of mind and power, threading the world like a needle through silk, stepping from breath in Masyaf to breath otherwhere. Here, her own place, her secret.

  Once, long ago, it had been a hermit’s cell. His bones had been there when she found it, bare and clean and somehow welcoming. Though he had been a Christian and therefore an enemy, she had buried him with honor on the hill above the cave and its spring and its gnarled and ancient fig tree. From there his emptied eyes could gaze across the bleak and barren waste, the desert without life or water, save only here. Miracles must have fed him: apart from the fig tree and a blade or two of grass, there was nothing green or growing; and surely the lizards and the odd desert mouse could not have sustained him.

  But the narrow mouth of his cave had hidden splendor. The way to it was dark and uninviting, a tunnel in the crag, but opening on a high vaulted space like the hall of a king. A smaller cavern abutted it; beyond it lay its secret: a chamber of flowering stone, and like a jewel in it, a pool of warm and ever-flowing water.

  She, who needed but to step from the cave into the heart of any bazaar in the world, had made a refuge. Carpets covered the stone of the floor and hung from the rough walls. Chests, richly carved and inlaid with silver, held treasures from her wanderings. A divan stood against the wall, heaped with silken cushions; a table stood beside it, and on that a gleam of copper, all the proper instruments for the making and the serving of kaffé. The box beside them held within its ornamented protection her most precious possession, her copy of the Koran.

  She entered warily, like a beast, as strange to it as it was to her. Years had passed since last she came here. A lizard scuttled under her foot. A mouse had nested in the cushions. But the rest had not changed, save to gather a veiling of dust, an air of emptiness.

  It fit her soul. She scorned the hidden pool to scour herself in the biting cold of the spring, welcoming the pain, the outrage of skin accustomed to warm water and scented oils. She let the wind dry her, the cold wind of dawn. What matter how deep it cut? She was demon-born. She could not fall ill and die.

  She prayed so, bowing before her God. Her prayers were empty. Somewhere she had lost her faith. She could not even remember where, to hunt it down and bring it back.

  When the prayer was done, she remained, kneeling on the stones beside the spring. Her eyes, wandering, found her body. She had forgotten to cover it. Appalling; contrary to the Prophet’s teachings.

  He had been a man. Holy; possessed of God. But still, a man. Men found her beautiful. She could not make herself care. She was she, but not woman, not of kind to warm to a man’s embrace.

  She spanned the width of hips, weighed breasts in her hands. No, not male, she. Tall enough to pass if she must in the concealment of robes and turban, slender enough, quick enough on her feet; and strong enough most certainly, stronger than any man. But still, incontestably, female.

  As that one had been male. She trembled in the wind of memory, seeing him as he had lain, all unguarded in sleep. He was young, she knew that surely. His power was growing still; strong, honed well for one so young, but soft with ease and arrogance. He would not think to use it, she suspected, where he thought his body’s senses would suffice. As if, living among mortals, he tried to make himself one of them.

  It was a strange kind of innocence. And he so beautiful, all moonlight and darkness, waking to the wonder of her face. Her hand rose to it. He had smiled at her. His body had warmed to her, most visibly, as men’s bodies did. He had had no shame of it, no shrinking. Only clean desire.

  “I will have him,” she said to the wind and the stones and the eagle wheeling high against the morning. “He is mine. He was set on earth for me.”

  An enemy. A Christian.

  “Ifrit to my ifritah. He will see. He will love me. And I — ” Her voice caught. “I, him.”

  9.

  Gereint’s death, beside this, had been a quiet thing, a lord laid to rest in the heart of his demesne. Thibaut had died in Jerusalem, the night before the opening of the High Court, when the king was to send out the arrière-ban: the calling of his vassals to arms against the infidel. The murder of one of their own, in their very midst, was no matter for quiet or for meek endurance.

  But under the high voices and the cries for revenge ran a current of fear. Simple murder, a man could face. The Assassins were uncanny. They stank of sorcery.

  He would lie in Aqua Bella, in the crypt under the chapel, beside Gereint who had been all the father he had ever known. It was nearer evening than noon when they set out, a great riding, all who could or would leave the court for a night and a day: a startling number, the flower of the kingdom, and about the bier a guard of the knights of God.

  “He would have loved this,” said Joanna.

  They rode behind the bier, mother and daughter, and Aidan beside them. They were, somewhat unfortunately, downwind of the Templars. He could blame his tears on that, if he had any pride to salve.

  Joanna’s eyes were burned dry. He did not like the glitter in them. She had been too calm, too composed, too immovably strong.

  Her hand took in the whole company, a force like an army, even to the baggage train: for Aqua Bella could not begin to feed or house them all. They were remarkably quiet in honor of the dead, the monks chanting soft and deep, the only other sounds the thud of hooves, the chink of mail, the neigh of a war stallion and, now and then, a murmur of speech. “See,” she said, “a royal escort; a riding out of a song. He would have been so proud, to know that it was for him.”

  “He knows,” said Margaret.

  Perhaps he did. Aidan could not know. Death and he were not on speaking terms.

  He set heels to his stallion’s sides. The beast was glad enough to break out of his strained and trammeled walk and plunge through the line. Templars’ faces flashed past: sun-darkened, war-roughened, long-bearded. None moved to follow. He passed the vanguard of knights of the kingdom. One or two yearned after him, but duty bound them; and fear. And not only of Assassins, or of reivers on the roads. Of Aidan’s white wild face.

  Freed from the constraint of the march, Aidan gave his mount its head. The bay was a warhorse, built to be strong, to endure; he had no speed. But he could move well enough when he wished to, and he could run the day long without tiring. After the first mad gallop, he found his pace and settled into it. The road wound away before him. The cortege crawled behind.

  Tomorrow they would bury Thibaut, a rite worn to custom, so soon after they had celebrated it for Gereint. The day after, they would return to Jerusalem, to duty that would not wait for mourning. And after that, Aidan must consider what he would do. The Ass
assin would come again, he knew that surely, to take Joanna. He could lay a trap there, and chance its failing as it had before. Or he could track the murder to its source, knowing that while he did it, Joanna would very probably die. He could not ward her from as far away as Masyaf.

  He had not been able to ward Thibaut from across the width of a room.

  He tossed his head and cursed both tears and self-pity. The bay stumbled. He eased it with legs and seat and hands. Green scent touched his nostrils through dust and sweating horse: outriders of Aqua Bella’s groves. The castle was waiting, still and somber. Death had sunk into its stones and lodged there. No force but time would scour them clean again.

  oOo

  Aidan had a chamber to himself: the privilege of rank, and one which he did not try to refuse. It was a tiny cell at the top of a tower, barely larger than a closet. It happened, as he was too keenly aware, to stand directly above the one which Joanna shared with her maid and a pair of ladies from the court. He had to pass their door in going up, and again in seeking out the garderobe. Their scents were manifold, their voices soft and high as they settled to sleep. He did not hear Joanna’s. Some remnant of sense restrained him from seeking her with his power. She was guarded. He need know, and do, no more than that.

  There was just room in the chamber to pace, if he heaped his belongings on the bed. The window was high but wider than the usual slit, wide enough to lean out of, breathing the night air. He folded his arms on the ledge and laid his chin on them, and let his eyelids fall of their own weight.

  He may have drowsed. He was aware, in his skin, that the stars had shifted. Thoughts of Thibaut, of Joanna, of grief and emptiness and sudden, inexplicable lightness, flickered through his mind. In a little while he would go down and keep vigil with the faithful few, watching over Thibaut’s body.

  He did not know what made him turn. There was no sound. No sense of mind or body, human or other than human, sparked with presence. Yet she was there. As he had dreamed her the night Thibaut died, so she was now, slender cat-eyed woman in glimmering white, her wine-dark hair pouring over her shoulders. She watched him with fierce intensity, a kind of hunger.

  Hunger like his own. My kind. Mine.

  A dream.

  Her head shook, the barest flicker, more sensed than seen. Her beauty pierced his heart.

  “Ah God,” he whispered, “that you were real, and not the shape my desire.”

  Her eyes burned. Half a step, and he could touch her. Half a step more, and she would be in his arms.

  His foot shifted a fraction. His hand began to rise. She waited, chin lifted. She was small beside him, fine-boned, light and strong as an Indian blade. His nose began to catch a scent of her, vanishingly faint, like rare spices. He knew how her skin would be. Cream and silk, and warmth to burning.

  Her breath caught, a gasp, soft and very distinct. Her hand half lifted. In protest. In longing. And she was gone.

  Nothing remained, not even the suggestion of her scent. He had dreamed her, again, because she was not Joanna.

  Swiftly, half angrily, he pulled on his cotte over his shirt and hose, and descended to the chapel and the vigil. He did not, would not pause by Joanna’s door.

  oOo

  There were mourners in plenty still about Thibaut’s bier. Margaret was like a stone in the midst of them, dark, silent, motionless. Templars and Hospitallers, white robes and black, red cross and white, guarded both body and soul.

  Aidan prayed for a little while, a prayer without words. He was stared at; his back felt it. At home they thought of the Demon Countess of Anjou, and Melusine of the Lusignans, and devils in monks’ habits tempting saints to perdition. Here, they thought more often of the tales of the infidels: jinn and afarit, spirits of earth and air, and demons of the desert, and darker, older things, gods and demons long forgotten save in Scripture.

  Someone had been talking. He had not been stared at yesterday; he had been a stranger knight like any other, if closer to royal than most. Now they all knew. That he was older than he looked. That he was brother to the King of Rhiyana, whom men had begun to call the Elvenking.

  A gust of homesickness smote him; a dart of loneliness so piercing that he swayed. Gwydion was there at the bottom of his being, a core of quiet, a presence from which no force of hell or heaven could sunder him; but in body immeasurably far, who had slept twined with him in the womb. He ached with wanting that face which was the image of his own, that warm strong presence, that calm which no storm could shake.

  Aidan stiffened his back. He would be his own man. He would stand on his own feet, and teach himself somewhat of Gwydion’s calm. Truly; not the counterfeit which he had worn when each took the other’s name and place, and Aidan served a time as king, and his brother cleansed his spirit this or that bright errantry. The troubadour in Carcassonne had been Aidan, true enough. The trouvère in Poitou had been his royal brother.

  This the greatest of Aidan’s errantries had no time or place in it for Gwydion. It had not been easy for either of them. Aidan might have delayed a decade longer, but Gwydion made him go. Gwydion, of the pair of them, was the more foresighted, and the stronger in the face of his own pain.

  He would not have let down the wards for fretting over a woman, if for no other reason than that he had his queen: Maura of the white wolves, who had loved them both, whom both had loved, but who had chosen water over fire. Wisely, Aidan could acknowledge now that it was long past and done. She needed a place that was her own, and a mate who was not eternally yearning to fly free.

  Aidan crossed himself and rose. The candles glimmered on Thibaut’s pall. The illusion of sleep had faded from his face. Death was in it now, stark as bone beneath the waxen skin. He had never looked more mortal, or more terrible. For all their beauty and their magic and their undying youth, none of Aidan’s kind would ever hold the power of a single human soul.

  He set a kiss on the cold brow, and turned blindly. The night beckoned. He took refuge in it.

  oOo

  In the shadow beyond the chapel’s door, he stumbled against someone who lingered there, plainly too shy to join the gathering about the bier. A woman by the dress, one of the veiled ladies who had come with their husbands; remarkably tall and slender, this one, and strong in tensing against him as he steadied her.

  His apology died. His senses opened. Veil and voluminous cloak of a Syrian lady, yes, and eyes dark enough within; but bright with defiance and a spark — an incontestable spark — of mischief.

  Aidan got a grip on one thin strong arm, and led his captive forcibly to the nearest place of safety: as it happened, his own chamber. Of course Dame Fortune would choose that moment to send one of Joanna’s bedmates to the garderobe. She saw the prince leading, as it appeared, a woman to his bed; she bolted with a little shriek.

  Aidan shut the door with rather more force than necessary, and confronted his prisoner. “Just exactly what do you think you are doing,” he demanded, “your majesty?”

  Baldwin had been angry when he began, but his temper had cooled considerably. He sat on the bed in his preposterous disguise and let himself give way to laughter. “Did you see her face? Mortal outrage, and jealousy — by Our Lady, what she wouldn’t give to be where I am now!”

  Aidan stood over him, resisting with difficulty the urge to shake him. “My lord,” he said with great care.

  “Master William sounds exactly like that,” Baldwin observed, “when he thinks I need cutting down to size.” He tucked up his feet; under the veil, all too evidently, he grinned. His eyes were dancing. “Don’t fret, sir. The right people know where I am. The wrong ones need not. You must admit, it saves fuss.”

  It did indeed. Aidan drew a deep breath. It steadied him, a little. “You’re not here alone.”

  “Hardly. I’ve a lady’s proper complement of guards. No maid, alas. There wasn’t one I could trust on short notice, and Sybilla never did know how to play games properly.”

  “Except the game of man and wo
man.”

  “Well,” said Baldwin. “That’s what she was raised for.”

  “Do you envy her?”

  The thin shoulders lifted under the cloak. “Would it do me any good if I did?”

  “No,” Aidan said.

  “It hasn’t gone that far,” said Baldwin, “yet. But it will. Soon, I expect.” His tone was cool. He did not pity himself. “I go to Saint Lazarus’ hospital sometimes, to see what I’ll have to face. That’s how I slipped my leash this time: I went out as if I were going there, and doubled round, and fell in with your company as it passed David’s Gate.”

  “In woman’s dress?”

  “This time. Sometimes I dress as what I am. The shroud and the clapper are wonderful for cleaving paths through crowds. Better than being king.” Baldwin’s head tilted as if in reflection; his eyes narrowed. “It’s remarkable, Saint Lazarus. Some of the brothers there are knights, do you know? Templars or Hospitallers, once. Now they have an order of their own. When they ride in battle, they hardly need armor. They bare their faces, and the enemy runs away.”

  “Is it as bad as that?”

  Baldwin’s breath caught. Aidan trod a line as thin as a blade; he stood steady on it, meeting the king’s dark stare. “You aren’t merciful, are you?” Baldwin said. But then: “Judge for yourself.”

  It had barely begun yet. The lines of his face were still perceptible: the strong curved nose, the firm jaw, the mouth well modeled for both laughter and sternness. He would have been a handsome man.

  His mouth twisted slightly. He swept the rest of the veil away from hair still thick though the sickness had crept toward it, and held his gloved hands in front of him, considering them. After a moment he let them fall. “No, you don’t want to see these.” He lifted his chin. “Well?”

  “You’ll not put armies of infidels to flight quite yet.”

  “So,” said Baldwin. “But I’m hardly a sight for a lady’s bower. It’s the idea of it, you see. Best they see a veil, and imagine a faceless horror. I’ll be that soon enough.”