Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  He would use the gift she had given him, of comfort and of healing. She had given it in full knowledge and acceptance of what he was; she had set strict limits on it. It would not serve his baser self or work to his royal advantage, except insofar as it made his men more fit to wage his war. But it had a life of its own, and a will that she had laid on it. Richard would do his kingly duty in spite of himself.

  Sioned’s knees gave way. She sprawled for a while in front of her tent, conscious and aware, but altogether incapable of moving. She was only glad that no children of earth came to sting her; the sand was cool, empty of inhabitants, and she was not at all uncomfortable. She had given Richard most of what she had in her after two nights and a day of labor among the physicians. It would come back; the earth was feeding it already, a trickle of strength to fill her emptiness.

  With a grunt of effort, she thrust herself up. There were men to tend, not only those bitten and stung but those struck down by the heat of the sun. Even without her gift of magic, she had skill enough to smooth on ointments, lance boils, bathe bodies burning with fever. She found her packet of herbs where she had dropped it, and turned toward the physicians’ tent.

  In four days of brutal marching, the army traversed little more than three leagues. The dead were already reckoned in dozens; heat killed them far more often than infidel arrows. Richard buried them where they fell, and sent the most severely prostrated of the survivors to the ships, so that the enemy would not guess how badly this climate had weakened them.

  After the fourth day they rested for two days, and Richard acted on the lesson he had learned from this bitter country. His men could not both march and play at being pack mules. He ordered them to abandon anything that could be abandoned; to travel as light as they could. The road in their wake was like the aftermath of a tempest, treasures both greater and lesser dropped wherever they happened to fall.

  They traveled a little easier after that, but still with crawling slowness, and still beset by mobs of shrieking Turks. Richard rode up and down tirelessly, exhorting them, bullying them, putting heart into them. “Don’t break ranks. Don’t break discipline. That’s what he wants, the infidel sultan. If he can divide us, he’ll conquer. We’ll never see Jerusalem.”

  They had a litany as they marched. Caesarea—Jaffa—Jerusalem. Every night the priest with the loudest and clearest voice chanted a single prayer: “Holy Sepulcher, defend us!”

  By God’s grace, as the priests declared, they came safe enough to Caesarea, the old Roman city on the edge of the sea. The Saracens had been no more trouble to them, if no less, than the spiders in the sand.

  But beyond Caesarea the road went from bad to worse. The infantry had been taxed enough before, but on this steep, rock-studded, thorny track, the cavalry found themselves forced afoot more often than not. Through thickets of clawing brambles, slipping and sliding, slowed and too often halted by lamed and staggering horses, they fought their grim way onward.

  The Saracens took to target practice here, picking off horses with abominable ease. A knight unhorsed was a fair-to-middling useless thing, and the great warhorses that were such a terror in open battle were clumsy and near helpless in this forest of thorns. Nor, unlike the enemy’s own little quick horses, could they be easily replaced if they were lost. This country did not grow such beasts. Each of them was worth a barony, even before it was brought at great cost from England or Germany or France.

  “Dinner,” said a soldier just ahead of Mustafa on the track, as a scream and a crash farther up marked another destrier down.

  The young knight behind him looked ready to burst into tears. He had lost his horse a day or two ago and was struggling gamely onward in his armor, dragging his lance, with a flinching gait that told Mustafa his feet were a mass of blisters. Mustafa was not the happiest of foot soldiers, either, but he had given his horse to a man with an arrow in the foot. It was an act of charity that Allah would no doubt reward.

  Meanwhile, he walked. After a while, an hour perhaps, the thickets of brambles opened up; he could see through the trees how the land sloped downward to a river of reeds and sand and sudden sharp patches of stone, that smelled less of sweet water than of the sea. The king’s banner rose on its bank, and a camp was taking shape around it.

  With respite at hand, the pace of the march quickened. Rumor traveled back through the lines. The king had reason to suspect that the sultan wanted to sue for peace. “He’s been chasing and chasing us,” the story went, “and we just won’t break. His troops are getting restless. They want to go home.”

  “And so do we!” someone roared back.

  That won a gust of laughter, even as the rest of the word came back from the camp: “The king’s sent Lord Humphrey to ask for a parley. He’s to bring the sultan’s envoy back, and they’ll talk. Who knows? That could be the end of the war.”

  The greater idiots whooped and cheered. Mustafa was a more jaded spirit. No war ever ended that easily. More likely the sultan had a plan, and that plan included a delay while he drew up his troops in the forest that lay beyond the river.

  By the time Mustafa reached the now much enlarged camp, the young lord Humphrey had come back with his guard of Templars, escorting another, equal guard of turbaned infidels. The man who rode in the midst of them was a deceptively simple personage, a slender man in good but unostentatious scale armor, mounted on a mare whose plainness of face was no doubt more than matched by the quality of her spirit.

  Mustafa did not need to see the banner to recognize one of the sultan’s brothers, the lord al-Adil, whom the Franks called Saphadin. He had shown himself often enough in the army of Islam, commanding strong forces in the sultan’s name. But Saladin had numerous kinsmen and a good number of generals. What he had much fewer of were men of magic—and this brother of his was a rioting fire of it. If he was here, then Saladin had something momentous in mind. Mustafa still did not think that it was a treaty of peace.

  The lord Saphadin paused on the edge of the camp. Either Richard had been waiting, or some signal passed that Mustafa was not aware of: he came out with a few of his lords and squires, and welcomed the sultan’s brother with open arms. Saphadin’s smile was wide and apparently sincere; he closed the embrace with no sign of reluctance.

  As Mustafa moved in closer, he caught another doing much the same. What the Lady Sioned was doing so far from the physicians’ tents, he did not know, but she was there in the crush of men, in her veil and surcoat. She was indistinguishable from any number of young pullani, the half-blood whelps of the nobles of Outremer, but Mustafa would always know her by the magic that was in her.

  Maybe that had called her out. Magic called to magic, and she seemed transfixed by the sight of the sultan’s brother. As his escort pitched a small camp of his own outside the Frankish camp, with a pavilion of saffron silk in the midst of it, Sioned edged closer and ever closer. The color of her magic was changing, brightening; Mustafa almost could not keep his eyes on her.

  The council of king and prince was mortal enough on the face of it. Neither called out sorcerers, or even a priest or an imam to invoke the powers of heaven. Lord Humphrey served as interpreter—ably, Mustafa conceded; his Arabic was fluent and nearly without accent. With his fine dark features and his wide-set dark eyes, he could have been a man of Islam himself.

  He was quite beautiful, for a shaven Frank, but Sioned had no eyes for him at all. Mustafa doubted that she saw anyone in that place but the man who sat opposite Richard, drinking sherbet made with peaches and mountain snow, and making it clear soon and unambiguously that he had not come to sue for peace. “If you turn back toward Acre,” he said, “we will offer no resistance; we will even provide such aid as you need, to return to your ships and sail back to your own country.”

  Richard burst out laughing. Saphadin was neither startled nor visibly offended, which was well, for the king seemed unable to stop once he had begun. At length, wiping tears from his cheeks, he said, “My lord, you have a wicked se
nse of humor. What in God’s name makes you think we’re likely to turn back?”

  “The weather,” Saphadin said. “The road. The armies that infest it. The inevitable truth: that this is our land. Even if you win as far as Jerusalem, how will you hold it? As soon as you sail away again, we’ll take it back. You are this Crusade, King of the English. Without you, it has no one strong enough to lead it.”

  “There are a fair few lords of Outremer who might beg to differ,” Richard said with remarkable lack of temper. “You speak hard words, lord. But they say I’m a hard man. I’ve sworn oaths; I intend to keep them. I won’t stop until the Holy Sepulcher is back in Christian hands.”

  Saphadin rose. He was smiling, but very faintly. “And we will do everything in our power to stop you.”

  “You can try,” Richard said, as exquisitely polite as his mother could have been. “I’ll even give you peace—if you will go back to your own country. Do that, and swear never to wage war against us again, and I’ll honor my half of the bargain.”

  Saphadin turned on his heel without a word. The shock of his rudeness startled even his own men; one or two of Richard’s knights lurched forward, ready to throttle him where he stood. But Richard held them with a glance. “Let him go,” he said. “He wants a battle as much as we do. Will you stop him from getting it ready?”

  They yielded to that. Saphadin, who was not known to speak the dialect of Anjou, ignored them all. He sprang into his mare’s saddle without touching the stirrup. Even as he settled on her back, she was off at a gallop.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sioned had come to see the sultan’s embassy not for any power or prescience, but because she was curious. There were no sick or wounded to look after just then, and she was still too restless from marching to retreat to her tent. She wandered toward the camp’s edge, expecting nothing in particular. Saracens were all too familiar a sight by now, with their dark faces and their beards and their turbans. They had faded from the exotic to the almost commonplace.

  In that idle frame of mind, she saw the doubled guard of Templars and Turks and the lordly ones they protected, and was transfixed.

  Magic—true magic—was everywhere: in the earth, in sea and sky, even in the works of men’s hands. The world was full of it. And yet in mortal men it was not so common at all. Mages were as rare as jewels in the earth.

  She was bred to magic, raised and nurtured in it. Her knowledge was not what she would have liked it to be. She was a young mage, more promise still than fulfillment.

  This lord of the Saracens was a mage of beauty and power. There were handsomer men in the world, though this one was hardly ill to look at: a narrow face, fine-drawn but strong, and a body like a steel blade, slender and erect. He had a beautiful seat on a horse. He was not in first youth, but old age was years away yet. He carried himself without arrogance but as one who had been born to rule—like a prince, as indeed he must be.

  A long sigh escaped her. Princes were seldom mages; when they were, they could be deadly dangerous. She had only to think of Eleanor, left behind, thank the gods, in Acre.

  She could sense no taint of darkness on this one. There was a flavor to his magic that she recognized from elsewhere: a richness and depth to it that spoke of the ancient lore of Egypt. The sultan had been lord of Egypt before he was sultan of Syria, and this one of his brothers had ruled it for a goodly while after Saladin went on to Damascus.

  What she felt was lust, pure and simple—to know what he knew; to match her magic to the living fire of his. She had never known a yearning so strong or a desire so irresistible. It was all she could do to stand still, be quiet, watch and listen. This was no time or place to indulge the cravings of her magical self.

  As he rode out with that light arrogant carriage, as if daring one of the crossbowmen to put a bolt in his back, she thought for an instant that he paused; that he glanced toward her. Her heart stumbled to a halt, then began to beat very hard.

  The moment passed. He did not seem to recognize her after all, or to see what or who she was. He rode away, back to his brother and his side of the war.

  The forest beyond the river was called Arsuf, which was also the name of the fortress on the other side of it. It was a freak of nature, a forest in an all but treeless country, but few men from the western forests found any comfort in this one. There was no easy way around it: on the right hand it stretched toward the sea, and on the left it spread through a torn and tumbled country, too rough for an army this large to pass. The only practical way was to go through it, and try to angle toward the open land beside the sea.

  Late the day after Saphadin came to Richard’s camp, the Franks marched with deep relief out of the wilderness of trees. They had had a grim time of it in the forest, marching in terror that the infidels would set the wood afire. But Richard’s will had held them to their ranks. Now they had come to the mouth of a river not far from the sea. The forest loomed behind them and spread in a dark shadow along the hills to the east. There was open land ahead, a waste of sand and scrub, blessedly naked to the sky.

  They slept under stars in tents huddled close together under heavy guard. Tomorrow’s march would be hard, but there were walls ahead, and the protection of the stronghold, with its gardens and orchards to feed them and give them rest. The cantor’s call soared up: Holy Sepulcher, defend us! Then silence fell, and the swift dark.

  Mustafa was having an interesting night. Richard’s scouts were idiots, in his estimation; either they trampled so loudly that half of Islam could hear them, or they lost their way and stumbled headlong into the sultan’s own scouting parties. Mustafa, on the other hand, could move as soft as a shadow when it pleased him, and he could track a man by the memory of his passing in the air. There had been many such passings not long ago—an army’s worth, and not a small army, either.

  When the king’s army camped by the River of Salt just beyond the forest’s edge, he went back into the wood, hunting the sultan’s men. He had a feeling in his bones; that uneasiness drew him out and sent him spying when, like the rest of Richard’s servants, he should have been asleep.

  The army of Islam was somewhat closer than he had expected. The sultan’s sentries were alert: he nearly fell afoul of a party of scouts. The snort of a horse warned him; he scrambled into the feeble cover of a downed tree.

  In daylight that would have been useless, but in the dark they rode past him. He caught a snatch of conversation, a mutter of Turkish dialect. It was only a few words, but it guided him along the way they had come.

  The camp began just over the hill, spreading far out under the trees. Mustafa made no effort to count the fires. There were too many. The whole army of Islam was here, the massed strength of the jihad.

  He should have left as soon as he knew that, gone back to the Frankish camp and told Richard what he knew and taken his well-earned rest. But it was barely midnight, and Mustafa had a desire to see how far the camp extended. He did not doubt at all that by morning it would have melted away, and the sultan’s army would be up and in arms, awaiting the signal to destroy the Franks.

  He crept toward the camp, moving as soft as a breath of air through the trees. At a sudden clatter, he froze.

  His senses were at fever pitch. A stone had rattled on another. A twig snapped, as loud as a shout. Two burly figures paused at the summit of the hill, silhouetted against the starlit sky, before continuing with their efforts at stealth.

  Franks, of course. They advanced at a crouch, catching every twig and stone, and when that failed, rustling in the undergrowth. Mustafa could have stood upright and walked in his normal fashion behind them, and been both quieter and more difficult to detect.

  The sultan’s sentries caught them beyond the first ring of campfires. Once more Mustafa melted into the darkness. The prisoners would be taken into the camp, he supposed, and held until there could be an exchange, perhaps after the battle. He would wait a little while, then conceal himself in plain sight, walking in his turban and his
coat of scale armor among an army of men who looked and dressed much the same as he.

  The sentries bound their captives and flung them down roughly, and without a word exchanged among them, hacked the heads from the men’s shoulders. They left the bodies to bleed out in the forest mould, and took the heads with them into the camp.

  Mustafa lay for a long while with the stink of blood and death in his nostrils and a coldness in his heart. Why he should be so startled, he did not know. War was brutal, and the sultan’s men had not forgiven Richard the massacre of prisoners at Acre. These two were poor recompense, but they were a beginning.

  When he could trust his knees not to buckle, he rose. His face was turned toward the camp. If he was caught, he would die as the Franks had. He cared—a great deal. But he could not seem to do anything about it.

  Curiosity was his besetting fault, and would be the death of him—but not tonight. He walked calmly, without stealth, among the lines and curves of tents.

  There was no wine in this camp, unless it was very well concealed, and no carousing. The men slept in comfort, well fed and well supplied with water. Those who were awake were praying in a murmur of holy words.

  The sultan was awake, and with him the fire of magic that was his brother. They held a late council with a handful of emirs who had come in to complete the army. The flap of the tent was up, the only wall the curtain of gauze that kept out the night insects. Lamplight glowed like a pearl behind it.

  Mustafa crept so close that he lay against the tent’s wall, deep in shadow but almost within reach of the light. The sultan’s guards watched the front, where the light was, but never thought to circle round into the dark.

  The gathering was nearly finished. The cups of sherbet were empty, the emirs shifting, clearing their throats, hinting at dismissal. The sultan took pity on their weakness: he said, “Go, sleep. It will be an early dawn, and God willing, a victorious day.”