by Judith Tarr
She followed the page with carefully controlled excitement. He was human, she had assured herself; magic had not made him, though magic was woven about him. He regarded her with bright curiosity, but he had been well trained: he asked her none of the questions that a child of his age might have been expected to ask. He resisted her smile for a goodly while before he broke out in one as enormous as he was small. When she offered her hand, he took it; his clasp was warm, tugging lightly, leading her through the trees of the grove.
She had more than half expected to pass from world to world as she had into the lord Saphadin’s house, but they stayed in the orchards of Jaffa, making their way toward the Saracens’ camp. It had grown somewhat since the first day, gained a second circle of tents within the first. These faced inward, with a veiled look to them, as was fitting: there were women in them, wives and concubines of the lord and his escort.
Sioned could not have said what she felt. Disappointment? Not exactly. Excitement? Not as much as she might have hoped to feel, if she had been going to the lord’s tent and not to the one that stood in the center of these. Maybe he was inside—maybe he would seize her and bind her and make her his concubine.
Not that prince of Islam. If he had been a great deal younger and a great deal more foolish, yes, it might conceivably have been possible. But that would have required that she be a much more splendid prize than she was.
She had mastered her errant fancy by the time the page led her past the black eunuch guards—his kin, she supposed—and into a place that quite profoundly astonished her. She knew what the harem was like: she had seen the women’s quarters of enough princely houses, in Sicily and Cyprus and in this country. She had expected a world of shadows and whispers, cloying scents and coiling intrigue and stultifying boredom.
This was a clean and almost empty space, remarkably well lit: the back of it was open on a sort of court surrounded by tent walls. Most of the furnishings were rugs in heaps and rolls; there were chests, three of them, along one wall, and a table with a silver kaffé service, and behind curtains, what must have been a bed. Maybe the more usual accouterments of a lady’s tent were hidden behind those draperies; she caught no sound or scent, and sensed no presence there, human or otherwise. She was alone: the page had bowed to the rugs that covered the bare earth, and left her wondering whether to stand on guard or to sit at her ease and wait for what would come.
She elected, after a moment, to sit. The rug was comfortable as such things went. There was great pleasure in the quiet, the clear light, the unexpected solitude. She was meant to learn from it, she thought. It was like the house between worlds, a place of peace.
She was deep in the calm of the place, emptied of either anxiety or expectation, when she looked up into the face of a woman who was perfectly a part of the quiet. She was older than the lord Saphadin, though younger than Queen Eleanor: a woman past the years of bearing children and well into the age of wisdom, with long dark eyes and a clean-carved face the color of old ivory. She must have been strikingly beautiful in youth; she was striking still, in a way that Sioned had not seen before. But the air about her, the light of magic in her . . .
“You come from Egypt,” Sioned said—rudely, she supposed, but she could not help herself.
The woman inclined her head. “You see clearly,” she said. “I am called Safiyah; I am first wife to the lord Al-Adil.”
Sioned’s stomach clenched. It was ridiculous; absurd. Yet she was suddenly and viciously jealous of this woman who was at least a decade older than her husband.
Even through her foolishness, she could think. She understood more than the lady said. Safiyah was not the name she was born to, nor did it bind her with its power. That much of Egyptian magic, Sioned knew: that it wielded the power of true names.
Her throat was tight. She forced words through it. “Are—are you to be my teacher?”
“If you will have me,” Safiyah said.
“I had thought—” Sioned broke off before she betrayed herself.
From the glint in Safiyah’s eye, Sioned suspected that she already had. “I was his teacher when he was as young as you,” she said. “He was a gifted pupil, but as he himself would admit, he never quite managed to surpass his teacher.”
Sioned’s cheeks burned. “I . . . am honored,” she managed to say.
“You should be,” Safiyah said. “I seldom leave Egypt, but he asked for this particular favor. I find that I am willing to grant it. He says that your Arabic is excellent. Do you know the old language at all?”
“The old—of Egypt? I know a word or two, maybe, as written in a grimoire, but—”
“You will learn,” said Safiyah. “You have duties, obligations to the Frankish king, yes? Those will continue. But in the mornings, you come here. Be awake, and be prepared to learn.”
Sioned nodded. Her eyes were wide; there were no words in her at all. She had met whirlwinds enough in this world, and Queen Eleanor not the least of them, but this quiet power overwhelmed her. It was much stronger, much deeper than at first she had thought. There were wards within wards, shields within shields, and such a depth of knowledge and wisdom that if she had not already been speechless, she would have been reduced to silence.
She had been bitterly disappointed, a moment ago, that he would not be teaching her himself. Now she began to understand just how greatly he honored her. This was everything she had prayed for—here, in front of her, regarding her with a steady dark stare.
She scrambled herself together. When she spoke, it was with no diplomacy at all. “He married you for that. For what you are.”
“Magic is my dowry,” Safiyah said, “and my inheritance through ages of my ancestors. I brought it to a rarity, a phoenix among the falcons. Does he not shine brightly? Is he not beautiful?”
Once again, Sioned’s cheeks were flaming. “I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you did, child. Magic can sustain youth for a remarkable while, but the cost of that is higher than I was ever willing to pay. And yet when he first saw me, I was not ill to look on.”
“You were beautiful,” Sioned said. “You still are. But he sees differently. I think, to him, if a woman has no magic, it doesn’t matter what her face is; she has nothing to attract him.”
For the first time that great lady smiled. The warmth of it, strangely, cooled Sioned’s blushes. “Magic calls to magic, and spirit to spirit. We know one another, we of the Art, however foreign our origins may be.”
Sioned bent her head to that, and made what sense she could of her confusion. She had entered into a world more different than she could have imagined; its laws were strange, and its commonplaces were vanishingly rare in the mortal world in which she had lived for so long.
She could excuse herself; she could turn away from the bargain. But she had wanted it for too long, and come too far, to give it up now. She drew herself up and breathed deep, steadying her mind and heart. “Teach me,” she said. “Make me wise, if you can.”
“Wisdom comes in its own time,” Safiyah said, “but knowledge I can give you, and somewhat of the wherewithal to be its master. There will be oaths, some sworn in blood; there will be sacrifices. No magic is without price—and your weakness of the body, that is the very least of it.”
“I will not sell my soul,” Sioned said quickly.
Safiyah raised a strongly arched brow. “Are we merchants? Do we trade in souls? You will give of yourself, to the soul indeed, but there will be no buying or selling. Not with us.”
“There are those who trade in such things,” Sioned said.
“There are,” said Safiyah. “But not here. We do not follow that path.”
Sioned had not known how strong was the tension in her body until it let go. Somehow she kept her feet, and faced the prince’s wife, too, as steadily as she could with her knees trying to turn to water. “I have never been drawn to that way, nor to those who follow it.”
“Good,” Safiyah said, “for I would have nothing
to teach you if you had.”
In the event, there was ample to teach, and more than enough to learn—in days that filled to overflowing, between Master Judah’s tent and the lady Safiyah’s. Sioned never saw the lord Saphadin. He was engrossed in his embassy, and uninterested in the teaching of the king’s sister, now that he had found the means to honor his bargain. She supposed that she kept her half of it by simply being herself, and by answering such questions as her teacher might ask, of her country and her people and the magics that they practiced.
She had been Safiyah’s pupil for a week and more when the first stragglers came in from Ascalon. Saladin had not been nursing his wounds after all; he had been rendering the city into rubble. The outcry reached her even in the sanctuary of Safiyah’s tent, a roar of rage in a voice like her brother’s, but magnified a thousandfold.
She paused in her study of a language so ancient that the words themselves embodied magic. For an instant they burned in her awareness, taking shape in the tale of a city in ruins; then they dissipated into the sunlit air. She sat blinking, feeling nothing yet but wonder and a distant sense of urgency.
“My brother needs me,” she said.
Safiyah said nothing. If she had spoken even a word, Sioned would have lingered, but she was silent. Sioned bowed in respect, tidied her inks and brushes and papyrus as quickly as she could, and returned with a physical shock to the world of men and their armies.
No one was fighting yet. Her brother’s captains had the army in hand, calming it as quickly as the rumor spread.
There was no one to calm Richard. He was just back from a dawn hunt, still with a string of waterfowl at his belt; they dangled bonelessly as he paced and snarled in the hall of the citadel, shedding an occasional feather. A man less brave would have retreated long since, but the lord Saphadin sat calmly in a shaft of sunlight through a louver in the roof, sipping from a silver cup. Mustafa sat at the prince’s feet, serving as interpreter, as he often had before. His face was carefully blank, as if he had made himself no more than a voice, without wit or will of his own.
Sioned should have gone direct to Master Judah’s tent, where the newcomers would be receiving care and tending. The heat of Richard’s temper had drawn her to him instead, and the banked fire of the other’s magic bound her irresistibly. She was attuned to it; focused on it.
That was her own doing. When she had given Richard the gift of healing, after Arsuf, part of her had gone with it. She had not thought of that when she did it, nor had it troubled her unduly since. But with knowledge of magic had come power, and with power had come sensitivity. What had been barely noticeable before was painfully obvious now. Saphadin’s presence made it immeasurably stronger.
The two of them were like words on papyrus, all their thoughts drawn as clear as if with brush and ink. Richard would have the other captured and held—with no animosity toward him, but in retaliation for the sultan’s trickery. “You were a diversion,” he said in a low growl, stopping and spinning to face the lord Saphadin. “You blinded me with pretty words while your brother wrought havoc.”
Mustafa’s voice was soft and characterless, rendering the French into Arabic. It did nothing to weaken the force of the king’s words.
Saphadin set down the cup, folded his hands, and said in the same doubled fashion, “If I truly had meant to blind you, I would have seen to it that no word of my brother’s actions reached you until the city was ground into the dust. Surely you expected something of the sort?”
Richard’s only answer was a snarl, which Mustafa forbore to interpret. People were standing about as they always did in the vicinity of kings, but none of them was doing anything useful. Either they simply stood and stared, or they gathered in clots and clusters, arguing ferociously. They all kept well away from the king.
All but one. Hugh of Burgundy was as close to a king as the French still had in Outremer. He left a knot of his countrymen, none of whom appeared to take notice of his absence, and approached Richard with care but without shrinking or flinching.
Richard rounded on him. He stood his ground. “Sire,” he said. “If you’re thinking of riding off to Ascalon—”
“Of course I’m thinking of it!” Richard snapped at him. “That’s one of the great port cities of this kingdom, and the infidel is pounding it into the sand.”
“Certainly he is, sire,” Hugh said, “and that keeps him busy while we fortify the rest of this country against him.”
“Are you saying we can afford to lose Ascalon?”
Hugh’s expression remained calm, but Sioned thought she saw a flicker of relief. “I am saying, sire, that if we let ourselves be lured out of Jaffa before it’s fully defended, he’ll likely come round behind us and drive us into the sea. From here we can make the assault on Jerusalem; that should be our goal. We shouldn’t let him turn us aside from it.”
“We need the coast,” Richard said, but his growl was considerably muted. “We’ll need Egypt if we win Jerusalem—and Ascalon is the gate of Egypt. But—”
“But, sire,” said Hugh, “first we must win Jerusalem.”
“We do need Ascalon,” Richard said. “But he can’t stay there for long, can he? He has to try to defend the Holy City. We’ll let him do as he pleases with Ascalon, until we force him to face us in Jerusalem.”
All the while the duke and the king spoke, Sioned watched Saphadin. He was deliberately silent, watching their faces as Mustafa spoke the words in his own language, but offering no commentary.
Maybe it was true that he had done nothing to prevent Richard from discovering what Saladin was doing, but Sioned would not have wagered against his influencing the duke to play the voice of reason. Richard, it seemed, had the same thought: he turned abruptly, fixed a fierce blue glare on Mustafa, and said, “Out. Take him with you. Now.”
Mustafa bowed to the tiled floor. The lord Saphadin raised a brow but betrayed neither surprise nor offense. He bent his head to the duke and bowed to the king, and took his graceful leave.
CHAPTER NINE
“No magic?”
The lord Saphadin was startled: he stiffened visibly, and his hand dropped to the hilt of his dagger. Sioned had followed him quietly out of the hall, then up to the top of the tower, where he stood for a long while, deep in thought.
Sioned knew a moment’s guilt for shocking him out of his reflections, but he was an infidel in an army of Christians. He should be on guard.
“You warned me to use no magic in the waging of war,” she said. “You said the laws of the Prophet forbade it. Have you decided to live by a different rule? Or do you call this waging peace?”
He did not try to pretend ignorance of what she meant. “I did nothing,” he said, “but encourage a man to say what was in his heart.”
“It served your purpose all too well,” she said.
“Naturally,” he said. “Can you fault me for helping my cause as I can?”
“Only if you allow me the same latitude.”
His brow rose. “So: was it you who saw to it that the news would come to your brother?”
He was baiting her. “You know I had nothing to do with that.”
He shrugged slightly. “We all do what we must. Your lessons—they go well?”
“It seems they do,” she said, though her lips were tight. “Are you trying to turn me against you? Is this your way of saying that you have to leave, and I have to stop?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I will go, yes, for a few days, a week—not much longer, I don’t think; just long enough for the king’s anger to cool. But that needn’t alter anything for you. If you go to the grove as always, you’ll find your teacher there, as always, no matter where in the world she may actually be.”
Sioned’s heart stopped, then began to beat hard. “Why?” she demanded. “Why give him a weapon against you?”
“Are you a weapon?” he asked her.
“I am if I must be.”
His smiled his sudden smile. “So you are. I
haven’t forgotten our bargain. There will be time for you to keep your half of it, and I will continue, gladly, to keep mine. My lady Safiyah speaks very well of you. She’s seldom had a pupil so diligent, she says, or so talented.”
“She flatters me,” Sioned said.
“Safiyah never stoops to flattery,” said Saphadin.
“No,” Sioned admitted. “I don’t imagine she would.”
“Be at rest, then,” he said, “and have no fear: I’ll be back before you notice I’m gone. We’ll go on trying to avoid an open battle as we can, and I’ll be my brother’s voice in your brother’s camp.”
“Why?” she said. “Why do you keep your bargain? What profit do you gain from teaching me to use magic against you?”
“Is that what you’re learning?” he asked.
“The more I know, the more I can oppose you.”
“That is true,” he said without apparent anxiety, “but you’re a greater danger if you remain ignorant. Power needs discipline; magic requires knowledge. Talent festers if left untended.”
“I know,” she said, relaxing suddenly, letting go the prickles of her temper. “Gods help me, I do know.”
He leaned against the parapet, as if he too had released a deep knot of tension. “I think you see how it is here,” he said. “Many newcomers don’t, and some never do. Nothing is as simple as friend and enemy, Christian and Muslim, believer and unbeliever. The lines blur; the distinctions fade. Alliances form and re-form.”
Sioned stood very still. Did he know of Eleanor, then, and her pact with the Old Man of the Mountain?
If he did, he said nothing of it. He sighed and stretched, flexing a shoulder that moved a little more stiffly than the other. “For now we are allies, and I confess I’m glad of it. I hope we may never be such bitter enemies that we cannot take joy in the magic that we share.”
She bowed to that, to the grace of it, and the perceptible goodwill. He was a consummate diplomat, and maybe she was blinded by her own foolishness, but she thought—hoped—that he meant what he said.
