Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  “I can hardly forget,” the shade said in a dry hiss. “I will think on it. When you leave this island, look for me. This will be concluded then—for good or ill.”

  The queen did not like that; her lips tightened and her cheeks paled with anger. But the shade had melted into the air above the altar, vanishing with a sigh, as if in relief. It could have little pleased the lord of daggers, the Master of Masyaf, the Old Man of the Mountain, to be summoned to such a place, even for such a cause.

  Sioned fell back abruptly into her own skin, her own mind and memory. She had an unbearable desire to scrub herself inside and out, to be rid of the stink of blood and carrion that enveloped any working of the black arts. She wished desperately that she had not seen what she had seen.

  Queen Eleanor had long since sold her soul for her son’s sake—of that, Sioned had no doubt. But the final bargain had been struck and sealed on the island of Cyprus, three months past, round about the time when Richard swore his grudging marriage vows to Berengaria. More and more now in the rigors of this Crusade, the queen paid the price for what she had done. What she had raised on the plain of Acre was a great ill thing. If she was wise, she would not tax herself so severely again.

  As long as it had seemed since the Sight took possession of Sioned, in the world’s time it had been but the hint of a stumble, the blink of an eye. Petronilla seemed to have noticed nothing at all.

  The page bowed before Sioned, breathing hard from his noble sprint, and held up her bag of medicines. She took it with a murmur of thanks, struggling to steady herself.

  For what Eleanor suffered, there was little that herbs or potions could do, but such as that was, Sioned did it. She laved the brow and cheeks and the cold fingers, and lifted the queen so that she could drink the tonic mixed in wine. She gasped and choked, for the brew was strong; her eyes flew open. “Girl! Are you trying to kill me?”

  “Good,” said Sioned calmly. “You’re awake. The cooks are preparing a broth. When it comes, you’ll drink it. Then you’ll rest. Your heart is strong, lady, for the years it’s been beating, but it won’t beat forever.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” said Eleanor. She allowed Sioned to lower her to the pillows again. “Thank you. You may go.”

  But Sioned was not so easily to be dismissed, even by that of all queens. She saw the broth’s arrival, and saw that Eleanor drank it. Then she sat on guard while the queen rested.

  Eleanor endured, if not quite in silence. “I’m not your mother. Why do you care for me?”

  “I took an oath as a physician,” Sioned said.

  “Henry always indulged his bastards,” said Eleanor, “and I tolerated them, because I had one thing that none of his lemans had: I had power. Real power. I had Aquitaine.”

  “You still have it,” said Sioned with composure. She was not a Christian; she cared nothing for the forms of Christian marriage. Among her people there was no shame or taint of bastardy. The gods cherished every child whom their blessing had brought into the world.

  “Is your mother still alive?” Eleanor demanded of her.

  It was not a casual question. “Alive and well, lady,” said Sioned, “in Gwynedd where she was born.”

  “She let you go.”

  “I gave her little choice. I wanted to see the world. My father offered to send me to Sicily in Joanna’s train. My mother was anything but happy, but she was wise. She gave me leave.”

  “Henry said of her,” said Eleanor, “that of all the women he ever took to his bed, she was the least submissive, except for me. She used him, didn’t she? She wanted to make a child, and he was the best that she could find.”

  Sioned did not answer that. That much was true: the king’s daughter of Gwynedd had taken the English king to her bed for the use that she could make of him, and the child that would come of it. But it was not his worldly power that she had wanted. She had wanted the blood that ran in him, whom some called the devil’s get, and others the descendant of old gods. She wanted the magic, which he had never acknowledged or learned how to use.

  She had had the child she prayed for, but it was not, after all, the child she had wanted. That child would have been content within the borders of Gwynedd, where she was royal born of a line of enchantresses, and not seized the first opportunity to run wild in the world.

  Sioned would say none of this to her father’s wedded queen. She let the conversation sink into silence, as Eleanor slid into sleep. King Henry was dead in any event, and Gwenllian was at home in Wales, praying for her daughter to come back to her and take up the duties of her blood and breeding. It would be a long while before her prayer was answered, if it ever was at all.

  Sioned would not trade that for this, even now—even knowing what Eleanor had done. Henry had been the Devil’s get, but Eleanor was his devoted consort.

  “The captives were only infidels,” Sioned heard her say, or think of saying. “Their souls were lost already. I merely sent them where they were destined to go.”

  So she must tell herself, if she was to live with what she had done. Sioned held her tongue. It would have taken more courage than she had to betray to Eleanor what she knew and had seen, still more to offer judgment upon it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Richard lingered in Acre only long enough to see the prisoners buried and the garrison secured. Then he began the march toward Jaffa. If he traversed those two dozen leagues through the armies of Islam, defeated those armies and took the city, he would rule the coast; then, with the strength of his fleet in back of him, he would drive his own armies inland and the sultan’s ahead of him, until he took Jerusalem.

  This would not be a march for women or camp followers. The queens remained in Acre, secure in the palace, and the lesser women—ladies or otherwise—were given quarters in the city.

  The men were considerably less than delighted to leave their life of luxury, but Richard bade them remember why they had come to this country. “You think this city is rich? You thought Cyprus was loaded with loot? You haven’t seen Caesarea yet, or Jaffa, or Ascalon. You haven’t seen Jerusalem. Come with me and we’ll take them all, and you’ll be richer than kings. God’s arse, men: you might even be richer than I!”

  That won a roar of laughter. He grinned at them. His looks were marred by the sickness that had felled him when he began the siege of Acre; he had been as bald as an egg for weeks, and his hair and beard were still hardly more than stubble. The effect above those massive armored shoulders was rather alarming, and rather imperfectly human.

  And yet, thought Mustafa, any man in that army, in that moment, would have followed him anywhere. Even the French troops whom he had bullied and cajoled into staying when their king sailed home in a snit, and the Germans who had survived their emperor’s death and the onslaughts of the Turks to come so far, were captivated for once, and their differences put aside.

  It was a gift. The sultan had it, too, but without the Frankish king’s sheer physical authority. Sometimes in the king’s presence Mustafa could not breathe, it was so strong. Still he kept coming back, because he could not help himself. He had been the king’s slave in more than simple fact since the day Richard caught him spying on the camp during a raid outside of Acre. One look at that big ruddy face, one roar from those giant’s lungs, and he was conquered as thoroughly as any city.

  The march began in the dark before dawn. Richard could dally about endlessly, but when there was a prospect of battle, no one was quicker off the mark than he. And maybe, Mustafa reflected, he was not sorry to see the last of the women for a while. Richard was deeply fond of his sister Joanna and he worshipped his mother, but they wore on him—especially since he had married that whey-faced princess from Spain. Her he could forget, for the most part, except when his mother forced him to visit her, but the others flatly refused to be ignored. They were at him day and night: do this, do that, look after this, look after that, and above all, incessantly, put his body as well as his mind to the production of an heir.
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  Once he was safe in the manly world of war, with his farewells all said and the half-ruined, half-rebuilt bulk of Acre dwindling slowly behind, Richard heaved a long sigh of relief. His head came up, his shoulders straightened. The light came back into his eye.

  Mustafa did not hang about hopefully like a dog looking for a bone. He left that to Blondel the singer. He amused himself with riding up and down the column, admiring the beauty of the king’s plan.

  They had no baggage train, no endless lumbering ranks of mules and oxen, packhorses, carts and wagons—there are not enough of those to be had in Christian hands. Instead the foot soldiers carried the baggage. There were two armies of them: one marched free but marched a mile or two inland on rough and tumbled tracks under constant attack from the enemy; the other marched laden, along the shore, with the fleet to guard them from the sea and the cavalry to guard them on the land. The two lines curved together as night drew on, and camped together; they took turns from day to day, so that neither half could claim to be more burdened than the other.

  On the first day, the beasts of burden were the king’s own, his Angevin peasants and his sturdy English yeomen. He knew he could trust them to do their best for him, and they were making a game of the labor: vying to see who could carry the most without collapsing, and passing bawdy verses from company to company.

  They greeted Mustafa with fair good cheer. They called him Richard’s dog, meaning no insult by it, and they seemed to find him tolerable, for an infidel. He had been learning their different dialects for amusement; words were his pleasure and languages his delight. It was a grand game to address each man in his own accent—startling some of them into making signs against evil, but then they laughed, because everyone knew that the king’s dog was harmless.

  When that amusement palled, Mustafa rode his little Arab mare between the land and the sea, splashing through waves. The spray was cool on his cheeks. It was very hot; the Franks wilted as the day grew brighter, and their singing and chaffing died to silence. The only sound was the clash of arms on the road above, and the shrilling of the enemy as raiding parties fell on the lines again and again.

  They never did much damage; their purpose was more to vex and harass than to wreak mass slaughter. But they were a great nuisance, and now and then they killed a man. They could afford to lose a dozen, a hundred, maybe even a thousand, but Richard who had come from across the sea—Richard needed every man he had.

  It was a crawlingly slow march. The road had been built by the Romans a thousand years ago; it was crumbling badly. The feet of so many men broke and tore it, and turned it into a wilderness of shattered stone and treacherous slopes. Then, before they had gone an hour out of Acre, the attacks began. Swift onslaughts fell down on them from the heights to the eastward, raiding parties of Turks that swept in, emptied their quivers of arrows, wrought what havoc they could, then retreated as swiftly as they had come. They avoided the ranks of crossbowmen and the armored knights, striking at gaps in the ranks and driving wedges of steel between portions of the long winding column.

  The rear guard had the worst of it, between the broken road, the thick clouds of dust, and the slowness of the advance. But Richard had foreseen that. He had begun the march in the van, marching under his standard on its great iron-sheathed mast; by full morning he was in the rear with a company of picked knights. The dust that trapped and confused his rear guard also served to conceal him from the raiders, until he loomed out of the murk and fell on them with a lion’s roar.

  “Clever as well as ruthless,” Ahmad observed from the vantage of the hills. The clangor of battle was faint, the fighters like chess pieces on a board. Richard in scarlet and gold was as unmistakable as ever, but today Ahmad was taking count of the rest of the army, reckoning the banners and the men riding under them. Templars in the van, Hospitallers in the embattled rear. English behind the Templars, then the French with their banner of lilies, and the men of Outremer behind, divided between their rival kings: Guy whose folly had given the kingdom into Saladin’s hands, and Conrad whose strength of will had sustained what was left of it until the Crusade should come.

  “He’s only one man,” the sultan said, “however strong a ruler he may be. If he wavers or fails, the whole war collapses.”

  Ahmad raised a brow. “Would you do that? Insure that he was disposed of?”

  His brother’s glance was sulfurous. “Not in this life. This is holy war—honorable war. We do not use the weapons of dishonor.”

  Ahmad sighed faintly. He had known what the answer would be; he knew his brother. But it had to be said. “You know that he won’t be so honorable.”

  “Do I?” said Saladin.

  “Franks have no honor, even to each other.”

  “That one does,” the sultan said. “His servants, his kin . . . no. But that one is true to himself. I want you to understand him, brother; study him. Know him. Use that knowledge to help me win this war.”

  Ahmad bowed without speaking.

  That should have been enough: he was an obedient servant. But Saladin searched his face with care. “You may refuse,” he said. “I won’t force this duty on you. There are others who can do it, though none as well—none with as finely honed a sense of what is fitting. I’ll make do with them if need be.”

  “You know I won’t refuse,” Ahmad said. “I’ll serve you in this as I always have.”

  “Good,” said his brother. “Good. We’ll give him time; wear him down. We’ll prepare a battlefield. But if we can win this without excessive bloodshed, I pray we may. War is holy, but peace is holier. Remember that when you speak with him.”

  Ahmad bowed lower than before. This time he was not given leave to refuse. He was bound—but then he always had been, by bonds of blood and kinship.

  CHAPTER THREE

  However terrible the armies of Islam might be, as the march went on, the soldiers of the Crusade came to an inescapable conclusion: the land was worse. Blazing heat by day, so that the army could only march in the cool of the morning and must lie gasping in what shade it could find from midmorning until dusk. Blessed cool by night, and God be thanked for it, but men were not the only creatures who came out to bask in the darkness.

  People called them serpents for their poisonous sting, but Sioned had seen them crawl out of holes in the sand: huge spiders, bristling with hair. There were armies, legions of them. They crept into cracks in armor and slid beneath shirts and leggings; their bite was fierce, if not usually deadly. As soon as the sun had set and the dusk fallen, they went hunting, and too many of them tried to dine on manflesh.

  There was little the doctors could do for the great swollen bites; ointments and poultices did nothing for the itching, and bandages only made it easier to claw the swellings bloody. Some enterprising soul, driven half mad by the infestation, found a cure: an ungodly clamor of noise that drove the spiders—and everything else within earshot—into retreat.

  Master Judah was in as much comfort as anyone could be: his tent was thickly floored with carpets, and he had blocked his ears with balls of cotton so that he could rest for an hour or two between onslaughts of stung and bitten soldiers. Sioned, whose tiny tent adjoined his, had gone there near midnight of the second night to fetch a bag of herbs; it was all she could do not to crawl into her blankets, stuff the ends of them into her ears, and give herself a few moments of blessed quiet. The clangor of cookpots and steel blades, hammers and anvils, spears and shields, rolled in waves up and down the army, interspersed with cries and curses.

  As she came out of the tent with the bag in her hand, she collided with an all too familiar figure. Richard had put aside his gold-washed mail for a yeoman’s leather coat, and covered his head with a cap. He grunted as they crashed together, caught her with effortless strength and set her firmly aside, but then paused. He could hardly have recognized her in the dark; he had no such senses as his mother had. He stooped, peering close, and said, “I’m looking for Master Judah.”

  �
�He’s asleep,” Sioned said. She gave him no title, since he did not seem to be claiming one. “Is there something you need? Have you been bitten? I can—”

  He shrugged her off. “I’ll live. Go, wake him for me.”

  “No,” she said. “He’s been awake since the army left Acre, stitching wounds and salving bites. He needs his sleep. What can he do that no other physician can?”

  Richard hissed. His anger was up, a swift flare, but he neither knocked her flat nor stamped off in a temper. “I need something other than useless potions or this God-awful racket,” he said—from the sound of it, through clenched teeth. “I need the arts he has. For the last time, will you wake him or will I have to pull his tent down?”

  “I will not wake him,” she said. “I can tell you what he’ll say if you try. There isn’t an herb or a potion that will protect a whole army from the children of earth.”

  “Can’t you just ask the bloody things to leave?” Richard demanded.

  “We have asked,” she said. “So have the men—loud, long, and to no lasting effect. They’ve declined to oblige.”

  “They’re as bad as Saracens,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose you can exorcise them, either.”

  “They’re not devils,” she said. “They’re creatures of this land. They’re no more evil than the heat or the stones.”

  “Those are evil enough.”

  “You can pray,” she said. “Isn’t a king’s prayer stronger than any common man’s?”

  “So they said,” he said without conviction. “Is that all you have to offer? What use are you, then?”

  That stung her. She lashed him with the magic that was in her, little as he would ever notice or understand it, and said with a distinct edge, “You could at least try.”

  He shuddered all over, a deep quiver in the skin, and growled in his throat. Her heart clenched, but he did not denounce her for poisoning him with sorcery. He turned, almost stumbling, and went away, back toward the camp’s center.