by Judith Tarr
A roar made her start and nearly miss a stitch. The Hospitallers’ line had broken. It was too soon for Richard’s plan, whatever that had been—but she heard him call out: “Sound it. Sound the charge!”
It was like a great undulating wave, a long whiplash of flesh and steel. Ahmad on the hill, commanding his division of the sultan’s army, saw how it broke. Two knights began it, a Hospitaller in black and a secular knight in eye-searing green. They sprang out from the massed ranks of the rear guard and fell on the warriors of Islam. The rest of the knights followed, man by man: hundreds, thousands of them.
There was a terrible beauty in that charge, a deadly glory. Even knowing the inevitable, the fall of the hammer upon the anvil, Ahmad could admire the splendor of it. He had no power to stop it.
He tried, though he knew it was futile. He could sooner stop the surge of the sea as this tide of men and metal. The power that could have stopped it would have cost him his soul.
It was a rout, swift and devastatingly complete. Ahmad stood as long as he could, though the earth shook and the mounted mass of the knights came on him like a mountain falling. Other and wiser men had long since fled. His brother was gone, the golden banner streaming far away.
Calmly, almost leisurely, just before the first rank of knights swept over him, he gathered the remnants of his guard and gave his mare her head. She laid back her little lean ears and snapped at his foot, so that he would be well aware of her thoughts in the matter; then she sprang into flight. The others scrambled to follow.
The army of the Crusade shattered the army of Islam that day at Arsuf. Most of the infidels simply fled, but some of them stood and fought, and they fought hard. Men died; knights fell, hacked in pieces, fallen over the bodies of the men they had killed. The Franks pursued the infidel to the eaves of the wood, but there Richard called them back. They came like hounds to heel, some willingly, some snarling and dragging their feet, but they were obedient. Even through the haze of bloodlust, they bowed to the king’s will.
The surgeons’ tents were pitched in the green and coolness of the orchards. Master Judah’s tent stood amid a grove of oranges. The fruit was green, but here and there one hinted at ripeness.
Sioned’s task that day was to judge the wounded: which could be healed and which should be given a comfortable death, and of those who could recover, which was in greatest need of tending. She stitched and bandaged between waves of flotsam from the battlefield. It was a great victory—glorious. The men were drunk with it, even before they got into the wine.
“Lady.”
She looked up in mild startlement. She recognized the man, or rather boy; it was one of Richard’s squires. He was blushing furiously, which those children had a habit of doing in front of anything female.
“Lady,” he said, “please come.”
Her heart stopped. “The king?” she said.
The boy shook his head. “No. Oh, no, lady. There’s not a scratch on him. But he wants you to come. Bring your bag, he said.”
“Of course he did,” said Sioned with the sharpness of relief. The flood of wounded had slowed to a trickle in any case; she could leave the others to it, if the king insisted. She slung her bag over her shoulder—ignoring the boy’s attempt to carry it for her—and after some small negotiation, persuaded him to lead her to the king.
She had been thinking as she went, that if it was not Richard, it did not matter who else it was. But when she came to the gaudy pavilion that must have been looted from an emir, and saw whom Richard cradled in his lap while he made order of the battle’s chaos, she nearly lost her composure.
Mustafa was alive. He was not maimed, though the sword slash across his cheek would leave a scar.
“He’s damned near bled out,” Richard said. His face was red, one might think with fury, and his bright blue eyes were burning dry. “He’s cursed lucky the man who found him recognized that face of his and didn’t toss him in the pit with the infidels.”
“He’s luckier he wasn’t taken for dead,” she said. “Are you going to let me tend him or are you going to protect him until there’s no need of my services?”
Richard blinked rapidly. There was a bed, elaborate with silks and cushions. Sioned rid it of most of the silks and all of the cushions, and waited with little enough patience until Richard laid Mustafa in it. A basin was already waiting, and water meant for the king’s bath. She appropriated it and the two squires who looked after it, and sent one of them to fetch cloths and bandages. The other she kept to fend off the curious—of whom Richard was the most intrusive—and to lift where lifting was needed.
Mustafa was unconscious, which was well; he would have been appalled to lie naked under all their eyes. But she needed to see the whole of him, to count his wounds and then do what she could to mend them. He was green under the warm brown of his skin—bled out for a fact. He looked as if he had walked through a whirlwind of knives, with the odd arrow for variety.
“And yet,” she said to her brother, who was still there in spite of the half-dozen messengers hanging about with varying degrees of impatience, “none of it, in itself, is deadly, or even particularly serious. It’s the sheer number of them that flattened him.”
“I can see that,” Richard said. “Tell me what really matters. Is he going to die?”
“I hope not,” she said. It was not what he hoped to hear, but it was the best she could do.
“Make sure he lives,” Richard said with a hint of roughness. He did not touch the man on the bed, but his expression told Sioned as much as she needed to know.
It was nothing she had not known already. That her brother did not love women was clear to anyone with eyes. That the Saracen slave was bound heart and soul to the King of the English, the whole camp knew. It took very little wit to understand how matters were.
Richard, having confessed more than he might have wanted, finally answered her prayers and went to be king of a victorious army. Sioned settled to the task of mending the battered body. Darkness fell while she was doing it—she barely noticed, except to call for lamps.
She poured a small cupful of clean water from the jar by the king’s bed and sprinkled in it a bit of powder from her store of medicines. She coaxed it into him drop by drop, murmuring as she did so, words that her mother had taught her.
The fall of night made the spirits stronger. They crowded beyond the light, drawn to the blood of battle, feeding on carnage.
A handful of them had the same scent that she caught in the blood of this man, such of it as was left. She cleansed the point of her little dagger in the flame of a lamp, and pricked her finger. Blood welled, rich and red. She sang a sweet winding song over it, a song that named and bound the spirits she had chosen, and lured them into the light.
They drifted like smoke, coiling about one another, murmuring in their eerie voices. They strained toward the promise of blood. As the first of them stooped to drink, her free hand darted out.
The spirit fluttered like a bird, chittering too shrilly for mortal ears to hear. She pressed it to Mustafa’s heart and sang the blood out of it, all that it had drunk on the battlefield. When it was empty, pallid and sad, she let it sip from her finger, but lightly—it would not feast here.
Three times she milked spirits of the blood they had taken, and three times she paid them with the blood of her own heart. Then she set them free. They would have lingered if she had let them: blood was a bond, and the blood that was in her was simmering with magic. It was sweetest of all, they sang, and most beautifully alluring.
She raised the wards to ban them. In stillness empty of spirits, she bent again over Mustafa. The green tinge had left his skin. He lay in healing sleep, his heart beating strongly, his wounds beginning already to mend.
She covered him with silk and sat on her heels with a sigh. This magic had not exhausted her, but she needed a little while to recover. She caught herself wondering: did he suffer from the body’s weakness as she did, or were there arts and expedi
ents to lessen it?
He—the Saracen, whom her brother had defeated. He had been walking in her dreams since she saw him, two days ago now. No man had ever done that to her. She did not know if she liked it, but neither could she bring herself to resent it. If she could see him again, speak with him, learn a tiny fraction of what he knew, she would not be content, but she would rest a little more easily.
She thrust herself to her feet. There were still wounded to look after, and a long night ahead. She left Mustafa under guard, mending as he slept, and went back to Master Judah’s tent.
CHAPTER SIX
The march from Arsuf to Jaffa was a canter in a meadow after the long hard road from Acre. There were Saracens, but they were less troublesome than the stinging flies. Saladin, defeated, had slunk off to lick his wounds.
He would come back; that was inevitable. For the moment Richard was content to strengthen the fortifications of Jaffa, while his army took its ease in the orchards and vineyards and the famous groves of oranges.
He usually had Mustafa with him, limping a little and bandaged here and there, but steady enough on his feet. Mustafa had seen the face of the angel of death; he had been within a breath’s span of Paradise. But when he woke from oblivion, it was to Richard’s big ruddy face and an all too mortal assortment of bodily discomforts.
He was weak then: he let himself throw arms about the king. The king had allowed it; he had even returned the embrace. Maybe something would have come of that, but someone came with a message, and that was the end of it.
Mustafa could not have said he was sorry. The king’s dog—he could be that, and happily. The king’s lover was a chancier thing. He saw how the singer watched him, the ever-present and ever-watchful Blondel. There was one who would be quick with a dagger between the ribs, if the occasion presented itself. He did not mind a dog overmuch, but if Mustafa presumed to be more, Blondel would exact the price for it.
What the two of them did together in the nights, Mustafa did not know or want to know. After the first night in Arsuf, Mustafa went back to his usual place by the outer wall of the tent. A barricade of squires and a clerk or two divided him from the king; and that was as it should be.
The third day in Jaffa, Sioned faced the reckoning. She had hoped to delay it longer, expected to suffer it sooner. She had been changing a soldier’s bandages; the man’s sudden stillness told her who had come to stand behind her.
She let him stand there until she was done. When the deep sword cut was salved and wrapped in clean cotton, she washed her hands in the basin and dried them with a cloth, and turned to face her brother.
Richard was not scowling, which she took for a good sign. “Master Judah says you’re indispensable,” he said.
“I would hope so,” she said.
“He also says,” said Richard, “that you have the best hands and the clearest eye among the surgeons. Is he by any chance in love with you?”
“Have you by any chance met his wife?”
“His—” Richard glared at her. “Are you mocking me?”
“A little,” she said. “No, he is not in love with me. I’ve won my place by my merits, brother. Is that so difficult to imagine?”
“It’s damned inconvenient,” he said. “I can’t be nursemaiding you all over Syria.”
“Who said I needed nursemaiding?”
His face darkened from its usual sunburned red to a remarkable shade of crimson. “Are you contradicting me?”
“What do you think?” she shot back. “Would I agree with you? Why do you care where I am, as long as I’m making myself useful?”
“God’s feet! This is a war we’re in. I’m no Saracen, to take the whole harem on the march with me.”
She forbore to point out that as far as she knew, none of the Saracens at Arsuf had had women in their tents. “Since when was I a harem? Half the men think I’m a boy. The other half wouldn’t dare lay a hand on me for fear of you. Face it, brother: I’m not going back to Acre.”
“You’ll go if I say you go.”
“Why? Just because I insist on staying?”
“You impudent little—”
“Sire.” Master Judah’s voice was soft and drumroll-deep.
Sioned was in no fear of Richard’s fist, and she was none too grateful for the rescue, either. Master Judah fixed the two of them with a grim dark eye. “Wage your war as you please,” he said, “but do please wage it elsewhere. This is a house of the sick, not a battlefield.”
Richard sucked in a breath. Sioned clapped a hand over his mouth. She had to reach high to do it. Astonishment held him rooted; his glare had a perilous edge of laughter.
“I’m staying,” Sioned said. “I’m indispensable, remember?”
He growled. For a moment she thought he might bite her hand, but he pried it loose instead. “You’ll stay,” he said, “but I give you to Master Judah’s care. You obey him in every respect, or I’ll send you packing. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” she said. “I keep on doing what I’ve been doing, and you stop pretending you can send me away. That’s fair enough.”
He showed her his teeth, but for once he was wise enough not to argue with her. When he had gone, she looked up into Judah’s face and blanched a little.
“So now I’m to be your keeper,” he said. The mildness of his tone was rather disturbing in combination with his bland expression and the lids lowered over his eyes.
“I’m perfectly capable of keeping myself,” she said. “It’s only my fool of a brother who insists that I’m still a toddling child.”
“Granted,” Judah said, “but do recall that if any harm comes to you, it will be on my head. Not that I care for myself, but Rebecca and the boys . . .”
She could hardly object to that particular burden of guilt, since she had brought it on herself. She bent her head, as difficult as that was, and said almost meekly, “I’ll be careful.”
“Do that,” he said.
The day after matters came to a head with Richard, Sioned found occasion to explore the herb garden that hid in a corner of the citadel. Whoever had planted and tended it had had a clear eye for the mingled beauty of leaf and flower, and a predilection for the rarer and more magical herbs of the east. Aloe she knew, and there was a myrrh tree in a pot, but she did not recognize the young tree that grew near the wall. The leaves were most unusual, like smooth green fans. “That’s ginkgo,” a voice said. “It comes from Ch’in. There’s great virtue in it.”
She looked up. She must have been asleep on her feet, not to sense his coming—and blind and deaf not to know he was in Jaffa. There had been a rumor of embassies and treaties; it should not be surprising that the sultan would send his brother once more, who had so many more arts and skills than were evident to the mortal eye.
That still did not explain what he was doing here, all alone, regarding her with a touch of bemusement. “It was you,” he said. “You were the prince of mages that I saw before Arsuf.”
“Such as I am,” she said. Her tongue had a mind of its own, and much greater self-possession than the rest of her was capable of, just then. “Did you think I would be raising armies out of the earth to fight you?”
“It did seem that if your king had you, he would use you.”
She blinked at that. “Yes, it would seem that way, wouldn’t it? But this is Richard. If he believes in magic at all, he’s the last man who would stoop to using it.”
“He doesn’t believe in it? And yet his family is notoriously gifted with it.”
“He says,” said Sioned, “that if God had meant him to be a magician, He would have made him one. And that’s the most attention he’ll give to the matter.”
The lord Saphadin laughed, quick and light, as if it had been startled out of him. “I see I have much to learn of the Franks,” he said.
“And I,” she said with beating heart, “have much to learn of magic.”
“Are you proposing a bargain?” he asked her.
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p; She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “An exchange, perhaps. Knowledge for knowledge.”
“That could be arranged,” he said. “But wouldn’t your king disapprove?”
“My brother may not believe in magic, but he does believe in diplomacy—and there will be councils in which he needs an interpreter he can trust. If I occupy myself in perfecting my Arabic, he’ll be more pleased than not.”
“He is your brother?”
“That surprises you?”
His brow arched. “On reflection, no. There is no physical resemblance, but beyond the physical . . . I do see it.”
“It’s the temper,” she said. “The black heart of Anjou.” She paused. “Unless of course that alarms you; then I’ll assure you that I’m as demure as a maiden ever should be.”
“Ah, no,” he said. “You needn’t strain the bonds of truth for me. Shall we agree to terms? I’ll teach you nothing that will endanger my people or the holy war; I’ll grant the same consideration to you, and ask to know nothing that will threaten the course of the Crusade.”
“That’s a fair bargain,” she said. “Does one seal it in blood?”
“The clasp of a hand will do,” he said.
She flushed, though she raged at herself for it. It appeared that he did not see. He took her hand and bowed over it. His touch made her tremble. She could feel the splendor of his magic; when she looked into his face, it dazzled her.
All too soon, but mercifully quickly, he let her go. “I have a distressing number of people waiting,” he said, “one of them a king with a choleric temper. But when duty is done, I’ll send for you. Are you often here?”
“I’m usually in Master Judah’s tent,” she said, then added quickly, “The king’s physician.”
“I do know Master Judah,” Saphadin said. He bowed again in the graceful manner of the east and smiled; then he was gone.
