Alamut

by Judith Tarr

  “Never to me, my lord,” Aidan said.

  Baldwin regarded him for a long moment in silence. “No. It wouldn’t matter to you, would it? It can’t mar you. Body or spirit.”

  “Nor you, in spirit.”

  Baldwin shrugged. “I’m no saint. I’ve done my share of cursing heaven. I can feel uncommonly sorry for myself, when there’s no one about to slap me down. But it doesn’t do any good, you see. I have to get up and go on. The kingdom insists on wanting me. The wars won’t stop for any silliness of mine.” He touched his brow. “The crown is there, no matter what I do.”

  Aidan bowed his head, half nod, half obeisance. Baldwin yawned, childlike, as if he could not help it. He looked somewhat embarrassed, and somewhat angry, as any youth who is reminded that he is not quite a man.

  “You,” Aidan said to him, “will sleep. Here, lie down.”

  “I have a place in the camp,” Baldwin began.

  “You had one. Now, you have one here. I’ll guard you better than I guarded the last of my charges.”

  Baldwin did not touch: that was trained in him from childhood and from bitter experience. But his eyes were like hands, warm and strong. “It’s done, prince. Mourn him, swear vengeance for him, but let him go.”

  Aidan stopped, at gaze. “As you will?”

  “As we all must.”

  “No,” Aidan said. “No. This can’t be your fight. You have the whole of Islam to face. Leave this one to me.”

  “Alone?”

  “God will help me.”

  “Prince,” Baldwin said. “I have knights, men-at-arms, servants of all descriptions. If you need them...”

  “I need only your promise that when I am done, there will be a place in your army for me.”

  “Always. But, prince — ”

  Aidan shook his head. “No. In all gratitude, in all honor and respect and, God be my witness, love: no. You aid me best by remaining where you are, you and your armies, a bulwark against the infidel.”

  “You are going to do something rash,” Baldwin said.

  Aidan grinned, wide and wicked. “Not tonight. Not for a while yet, I think. Though if we’re to speak of rashness, O my king...”

  “I’m safe now, aren’t I? And the lady didn’t have to contend with a royal visitation on top of the rest. I’ll reveal myself tomorrow if you like. When it’s too late for anyone to fret.” He paused. “Thibaut wouldn’t mind, I don’t think. He was always a good one for mischief.”

  “I know who put him up to it,” said Aidan with a hint of a growl.

  Baldwin laughed, and yawned till his jaw cracked, and let himself be put to bed.

  oOo

  The king was present at Thibaut’s burial, plainly and somberly dressed, with his veil drawn over his face. No one quite dared to ask how or when he had come. A short night’s sleep and an early rising had quenched most of the firebrands; his presence silenced the rest, if it failed quite to quell them.

  Aidan’s presence at his back set their eyes to glittering. The tale was growing still, and not slowly. Fear, much of it, and false logic. Two men dead; a stranger in their house. Sorcery, and sorcerers, and Assassins.

  Without the women to think of, he would not have cared. He would prove that he was no Assassin. The rest of it would come to nothing soon enough, once they had need of his sword.

  The women had to face it now: a burden atop the burden of their sorrow. And there was nothing that he could do to make it lighter. He could not deny what was true. He could not alter what he was.

  They were stoic in their endurance. But when the castle had emptied of mourners, courtiers riding away behind their silent and faceless young king, the walls themselves seemed to sigh with relief.

  oOo

  Margaret did not weep for her son as she had wept for her husband. She had no tears left. She sat in her solar, the night of his funeral, and stared blindly at the bit of needlework in her lap. Joanna had given up trying to make her go to bed, and dozed against her knee.

  Aidan prowled, more restless even than he usually was. When he had picked up the same casket for the third time, and fidgeted it open, and found it exactly as full of sweets as it had been twice before, Margaret said, “There is a moon tonight, if you take a fancy to fly about the castle.”

  He stopped short, flushing. Her smile did not console him. He began to bow and dismiss himself.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “Stay. I meant no rebuke.”

  He sat where he had been before the restlessness took him, and willed himself to be still. She perceived it; her eyes thanked him, a little wryly. He could, he admitted, see the humor in it. After a fashion.

  When he thought that he would burst, or erupt into flight as Margaret had jested, she said, “Tomorrow we return to Jerusalem. The next day, or the day after, one of our caravans departs for Damascus, and then for Aleppo. Joanna goes with it.”

  Aidan sat bolt upright. “Aleppo! Why in God’s name — ”

  Joanna had fallen asleep, frowning a little as she dreamed. Gently Margaret stroked her hair. The frown smoothed; Joanna sighed. “The House of Ibrahim,” Margaret said, “has its center in Aleppo. As often as I can, I send a messenger there, with word of what passes in the kingdom, and such news as I can gather.”

  “That’s treason.”

  She was unoffended. “How? I tell no secrets that will harm my king or my kingdom. Some, passed to the proper persons, can be of great aid to both.”

  “But first and foremost, to the House of Ibrahim.”

  “It is my House; its people are my kin.”

  Aidan raked his fingers through his beard. “But to send Joanna — to send her now — ”

  “Now more than ever. She needs escape from her sorrows. Our House needs to know what has happened here. And,” said Margaret, “Assassins are men. In the harem of the House, under my grandmother’s rule, even they might hesitate to trespass.”

  “They’ve done murder in front of the Qaaba itself, in their holy of holies in Mecca. They won’t care whether your daughter is in a harem or in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at high noon.”

  “So, then. If she is not safe wherever she is, what does it matter where she goes?”

  “It should matter to you!” The echoes rang into silence. Joanna had not wakened. Margaret had not moved. Aidan made himself speak quietly, reasonably. “But, my lady, Aleppo, of all cities... it crawls with Assassins; it’s their most loyal city. It’s been under siege from the new sultan in Damascus, the one they call Saladin. It’s rife with rebels and conspiracies. She’ll have to pass through infidel lands to get there, and she’ll be in infidel hands when she comes to it. Why not hand her over to Sinan and have done?”

  Margaret left off stroking her daughter’s hair and folded her hands in her lap. He could see Joanna in her then, in the careful precision with which she moved, and in the lowering of her eyes that was not meekness but altogether its opposite. “Do you think,” she asked him softly, “that I intend to suffer this persecution in silence? That if I endure, he will go away, and I will have peace? No, my lord. He will know every moment of this suffering which he has caused me. He hoped for an empire; he will see how that hope is rewarded, now that he has killed in its name.”

  “And Joanna is your lure?”

  “Joanna is my falcon.” She paused. “I have no right or power to command it, but I will ask. Will you go with her? Will you guard her?”

  He could not find words to speak. He was going to demand; to insist; to threaten if need be. And she asked. She trusted him so much. “And... if I fail?”

  “Don’t fail.”

  He blinked like a fool. She was always out of his reckoning; he did not know why he should be surprised.

  “Guard her,” said Margaret. “Watch over her. Keep her alive. Begin our revenge on Sinan, by proving that he is not invincible.”

  He pondered that. It was not enough; not enough by far. But for a beginning...

  He nodded, sharp and swift an
d irrevocable. “I shall do it. I swear to you, my lady.”

  III. Damascus

  10.

  The caravan was a world of its own, a moving, swaying, many-legged city, a great slow dragon of a creature winding its way from oasis to oasis. Even in cities it kept its unity, growing or shrinking as it gathered new goods and sold the old, but centering itself on a single inn or caravanserai, arriving and departing together with its guards and its outriders and its master on his white camel at its head.

  Joanna was a princess here, a scion of the House of Ibrahim and its hidden queen; as Aidan was no more than her guard. He took it well, she thought, for as proud a man as he was. Blank astonishment, at first, that these merchants should know his rank, comprehend his purpose among them, and conclude that he had not, yet, earned their respect. Anger, then, but a pause for which she could admire him, and in the end, albeit with clenched teeth, amusement.

  He at least did not take issue with her refusal to ride in a litter like a proper princess. She rode astride as she always had, in Arab dress certainly, and veiled, but that was only sensible in the glare of the desert. It interested her how quickly Aidan shed Frankish garb for that of this country through which he rode. Two days out of Jerusalem, beyond holy Jordan on the marches of Islam, he appeared in the courtyard of the caravanserai in the light of dawn, in the swathings of Bedu robes. He seemed perfectly at ease in them; for all the whiteness of his skin, his narrow hawk-face with its new beard seemed more Arab than Frank.

  But it was certainly a Frank who veered away from the camels and sought the horse which Margaret had given him: the tall grey gelding, half Frankish, half of the Arab breed, that had been Gereint’s. Franks and camels did not understand one another.

  She, on her own red mare, could hardly preach the virtues of camelkind. As she took her place in the line, he fell in beside her. His greeting was civil but brief. She wondered if he had slept badly. It had been eating at him, his failure to guard Thibaut. She had not been supposed to notice, but in the night, each night, he had left his place among the men and spread his mat outside the room she shared with her maid. She had heard him come, light as his step was, and known when he lay down. His nearness was like a hand on her skin.

  Daylight dissipated it. She was almost sorry. Yesterday and the day before, she had been too glad to be on the road away from Jerusalem, to feel the heat or the dust or the flies. And there had been Aidan to watch: for a little while again, a pilgrim, rapt as any mortal man in the wonder of the road to Jericho, and the thronging pilgrims, and the chanting and the jostling and the waving of palms as they went down to the river. The caravan had not paused, and he had not asked. He had simply separated himself from it, and she had followed him, hardly knowing why, perhaps with some dim sense of watching over him. Little as he needed it. He had his palm branch now, his badge of the greatest of pilgrimages; and when he took it, for once he was almost serene. Within an hour, he was among the caravan again, no more or less quiet than he ever was, and the palm was laid carefully in his baggage.

  And now even the cross was hidden, and he seemed all an infidel; and she was tired. She ached from two days in the saddle; her breasts, drying at last, throbbed dully in their bonds; sweat trickled down her back, itching abominably where she could not reach. But worse than any of it was memory.

  They had been late leaving Jerusalem. Someone’s brother had got himself lost among the taverns; the man being one of the richer merchants in the caravan, the master had suffered an hour’s delay to hunt him down. He had come in a good hour after prime, still mildly drunk, and much bemused by the hue and cry.

  Joanna owed him a month or two in purgatory. For if he had not got himself lost, they would have left at dawn, and Ranulf would not have found her.

  He had bathed, for a miracle. His hair was cut; his chin was newly shaved, with a nick to prove it. He did not burst in as she might have expected, but asked admittance of the porter, and let himself be set in the receiving room to wait for her.

  When Godefroi told her who had come, she said, “I won’t see him. Tell him to go away.” But, as the seneschal began to bow, his face as carefully neutral as any man’s could be, she stopped him with a word. “No. Wait.” She was shaking. Idiot. What was there to be afraid of? Ranulf was no Assassin. “Tell him I’ll come.”

  Godefroi went. She lingered. Her room was empty, her baggage gone, taken to the caravan. She finished putting on her traveling clothes. Dura plaited her hair and wound it round her head. Her shaking came and went. Her stomach was a cold knot.

  She swallowed hard. “Face it,” she told herself. “Get it over with.” She wiped sweating palms on her skirt and went down.

  She was in the room before she saw who was there. Ranulf did not even look up. He was deep in colloquy with Aidan, the two of them looking as if they had sworn fast friendship. “…Cluny, yes,” Aidan was saying. “Have you hunted the deep coverts of the Schwarzwald, in Allemania? I took a boar there once—God’s bones, I’d never seen the like. I tell you plainly, he was—”

  He broke off almost quickly enough to be convincing, rising and bowing and sweeping her into the orbit of her husband’s eyes. Ranulf did not rise. He had no airs or graces; he was proud of it. A plain rough soldier from Normandy, he. Plainer and rougher than ever beside the Rhiyanan prince, glowering at her under his knotted brows. Some small part of her had begun to waver’ to dream of surrender. That glower hardened her all anew.

  He did not even greet her. He said, “I’ve come to take you home.”

  “This is home,” she said.

  He shook his head, ponderous as an ox, and as stubborn. “You belong with me.

  Her eyes darted to Aidan. Say something, she willed him. Do something.

  Did his brow lift the merest fraction? He bowed again. Hope bloomed.

  Died. He was turning. Leaving. Abandoning her.

  She hated him. She lashed him with it. He did not even pause.

  Ranulf never saw. “You are my wife,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

  She barely comprehended the words. They were noise; empty wind. She was all alone on the other side of hate. “Where,” she asked him with perfect calm, “were you when my brother died?”

  The sun had burned Ranulf’s face the color of Roman brick. Perhaps, now, it reddened. His jaw jutted. “Away,” he answered her, biting off the word.

  “And you think I’ll go back to you.” Her lips drew back from her teeth. It was by no means a smile. “I will not.”

  His eyes were on his fists, clenched on his knees. Coarse fists, rough-haired, mottled with an ancient ailment of the skin. Her mind, ever wayward, recalled long white hands, a touch as light and soft as wind, warm as hearthfire. She had to struggle to hear what Ranulf said. “I was away.” He said it roughly, as if with anger. “Breaking compacts. If you come back, you can have the baby.”

  She froze in spite of herself. “The—Aimery?”

  “Aimery.” It half choked him.

  Laughter burst out of her, high and wild. “Bribery! How long will I keep him this time? A day? A week? A fortnight? Then when I’m secured, off he goes, back to feed his father’s lust for power.” Ranulf said nothing. His shoulders had hunched; he looked more than ever like and ox: slow, tow-colored beast of burden, blind and deaf to human pain. “No,” she said. “No, my lord. I will not go back.”

  He stood abruptly; so abruptly that his chair overset itself. She started like a hare. He made no move to touch her. His face showed nothing, not even anger. With deliberate care he righted his chair. When it was settled, he stood with his hands on its back, the broad scarred fingers flexing and loosing, flexing and loosing. The nails were bitten to the quick. Had they always been so? “You don’t want the baby back?”

  Her heart stopped. Part of her wanted to shriek aloud. Part, the cold part, the clear part, said, “Not at that price.”

  “What do you want then?”

  “Nothing you can give.”

  Hi
s jaw tightened. “I see. It’s not fairy gold.”

  It was too subtle for her, at first, coming from Ranulf. “You think—you—”

  “They seduce, that kind. They don’t mean to, most times. They just are. But then they go their ways, and what’s left?”

  “More than you’ve left me.”

  He straightened, flexing his heavy shoulders. For an instant she thought that he would seize her. But there was not even that much passion in him. He merely stood, staring. His eyes were ox’s eyes, sheer brute endurance. If there had been anger in them, or any emotion at all, it was gone before she could be sure of it. He opened his mouth. She curled her lip. His head shook, once, as if against the weight of a yoke. “And what do I do if you die?”

  For a moment she had no words at all. “Do? What have you ever done?”

  He stood unmoving. He seemed to ponder what she had said. Or maybe he was only waiting for her to burst into rage or tears, or to crumble into submission.

  She would not give him the satisfaction. “Your pardon,” she said with icy courtesy, “but I have duties waiting. Godefroi will show you out.”

  His eyes burned. Now he would do it; now he would act like a human man, and shout at her, and force her to yield. She almost—almost—wanted it. Aimery, her heart yearned. Aimery.

  Ranulf shuddered. His teeth clacked together, sharp and sudden. “Come back alive,” he said. That was all

  oOo

  “He loves you, you know.”

  She started; her horse shied. Aidan watched her as she recovered reins and dignity. More Arab than Frank in those robes, yes, and more alien than either. “You were trespassing,” she said with vicious softness.

  “You were shouting for the deaf to hear.”

  She made a rude noise. “You only hear what you want to hear.”

  “Or what is meant for me.”

  Her cheeks burned with more than the sun’s heat. He was maddening, but not as Ranulf was. He gave as good as he got. He would quarrel if she wanted it, with a high keen pleasure.

  “He does love you,” Aidan said. “It’s a great pain in him, that he can never show it.”