Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  It passed soon enough. They were sipping kaffé, she by now with as much relish as he. He bent forward over his cup and brushed her lips with his—lightly, quickly, and altogether without warning.

  She astounded herself with her own response. She should have been furious. And yet there was none of that in her at all. There was only heat like the fire she had learned to wake within her, but most intensely and potently centered. She wanted to leap across the space between them, cast aside the low table with its silver kaffé service, and take him by storm.

  Of course she did not. He had returned to his place. But for the torrent of heat spreading inward and downward from her lips, she might have thought that he had never kissed her at all.

  But the fire in her found its image in his eyes. Was he as startled as she? She could have sworn that he was, even in his age and experience—and in front of his wife besides.

  That mattered remarkably little. Safiyah’s presence was a blessing. If she was either jealous or offended, she concealed it masterfully. Sioned might almost have thought that she approved.

  They were foreign—how much so, she had been tending to forget, because so much about them rang in harmony with her own heart. Their world was not hers. They did not see as she saw.

  And yet as she looked into those steady dark eyes, it made no difference at all. Her magic knew his, perfectly. Her heart had found its place.

  She took his hands in hers. They were narrow but strong, with a warrior’s calluses and a tracery of fine white scars; their touch was light, a horseman’s touch, attuned to the nuance of bit and rein. Her magic uncoiled through the medium of that touch, weaving softly with his, shaping a pattern that partook of both.

  It was a deeply intimate thing, and almost unbearably sweet. Part of her wanted to take flight, to run all the way back to Gwynedd and hide in a hermit’s cell. But that was folly; even her most cowardly self could see it.

  He was not as strong as she might have thought, or as steady, either. “Have you ever . . . ?”

  The words were out before she knew she had spoken them.

  He shook his head. “Never. Not like this. Though I’ve heard—there are stories, legends—”

  “No stories,” she said. “Nothing like this, not in my part of the world.”

  “Plato,” he said. “The two halves of the soul. The Greeks knew, though if any of them was a mage, he never admitted to it.”

  Words were a veil, a defense against truth. She silenced him with a finger to his lips. “Don’t talk,” she said. “Be.”

  His eyes were wide. He looked young then, younger than she. Great master, great lord of mages—had he never learned to silence his heart, to hear what was beyond mortal hearing, to open himself to the currents of the world?

  It seemed he had not. His magic was an art, and not a sense of the body.

  She rode with him on the tides of power, in a sea of light. Its beauty was familiar and yet never tedious. His presence altered it, made it more beautiful.

  It was almost physically painful to return to the world of the living. Safiyah was asleep, sitting upright, lost in a dream. The sun had only shifted a fraction, although Sioned would not have been surprised if days had passed. Her fingers were locked with Ahmad’s.

  They drew apart in the same instant, with the same tearing reluctance. He drew a shuddering breath.

  She spoke before he could begin. “Will you forgive me if I go? I promised Master Judah that I would take his place for an afternoon.”

  “By all means you must keep your promise,” he said.

  “I will come back,” she said. “Will you be here?”

  “Call me by my name,” he said, “in your heart where I am. I will come.”

  Her hand went to her breast. “Always? You promise?”

  “I promise,” he said.

  She barely remembered the rest of that day. People did not seem to notice her abstraction: no one said anything, even Master Judah, who could not abide that sort of silliness. Her mind was a perfect blank. He was in her heart, cultivating stillness.

  Was she in love? It seemed too commonplace a word for so ineffable a sensation. Did her body want him? Very much. But the desire of the body had never been the greater part of what she felt for him. It was everything—all of him; all of them both.

  She was aware of the passage of days. She had duties, obligations. There were lessons—Safiyah had become more exacting and the lessons more complex. She never spoke of her husband, nor did Sioned ask after him. He was engrossed in his embassy, but his heart was hers. She felt it beating warmly under her breastbone, matching pace with her own.

  She woke from that long half-dream with a shock like a dash of icy water to the face. Richard, insofar as she could notice him—and he was more noticeable than most things in the world, these days—had been nursing some great and cherished secret. Even Eleanor could not get it out of him, which had caused a rare ripple in her cultivated calm.

  On the day after the feast of St. Frideswide, which some of the English had celebrated with suitable ecclesiastical pomp, Sioned happened to be in the citadel when the sultan’s envoy arrived for his daily conversation with the king. It was another day of raw rain; rather than brave the weeping sky for a hunt or a ride about the gardens of the city, they met in the solar of the castle.

  Their meeting was not open to any who happened by, but neither Sioned nor Eleanor was a casual stranger. Eleanor was received with grace and given a chair by the fire. Sioned was a shadow, and shadows on this dark day were so common as to be invisible.

  The chill of Eleanor’s presence lingered, but Richard was too full of his grand plan to let it trouble him for long. The lord Saphadin and his emirs waited politely for him to finish pacing and gathering his thoughts. Mustafa, seated at the foot of the chair in which Richard must have been sitting, was perfectly still.

  At length Richard stopped and turned. “Suppose that we could solve this without continuing the war. Suppose,” he said, “that we can agree on a division of lands and treasures. What if we seal it in the best way of all? I have a sister, my lord, who is widowed and wealthy—and a beauty, too. You have dispensation in your religion to marry as many wives as you can support. Why not take her, my lord, and make her your wife, and make an alliance of the two worlds? West and east, Christendom and Islam, queen and prince: you’ll bring the two together and make them one.”

  He ended his speech with a flourish and stood beaming at them all. It was a splendid, a glorious solution, his expression said. Was he not brilliant for having conceived it?

  The silence was enormous. Even Saphadin’s eyes were on Eleanor. She wore no expression at all. When she spoke, it was only to inquire, “Have you spoken to Joanna about this?”

  Richard’s face fell, but only slightly. “I’ll talk to her. She’ll be glad, I’m sure. She’ll have a knight and a gentleman, a prince of renown, who admires and respects us of the west.”

  Eleanor arched a brow. “Indeed,” was all she said.

  Sioned did not stay to hear what the prospective bridegroom thought of Richard’s offer. He had voiced no objection. Why should he? Joanna was a queen, and the dowry that Richard would give her would be wondrously rich. The impediment of religion could be dealt with; even as she fled, she heard Richard say, “We’ll send to the Pope by the next boat, and get a dispensation. He’ll give it to us if it wins us back the Holy Sepulcher. Unless of course, my lord, you would consider converting to our faith . . . ?”

  Not in this lifetime, she thought. It was not wishful thinking. Wishful thinking had been her dreams of the past days, her moping and mooning about, sighing like a silly girl.

  Certainly he found her pleasant to the eye. He was much intrigued by the nature and strength of her magic. The rest she had built into a palace of air, and peopled it with dreams.

  This was cold reality: the policies of kings. In that world, a queen of legitimate birth was infinitely preferable to a king’s by-blow. Sioned had no wea
lth, no rank but what her brother gave her, no place that was her own by grace of birth and breeding. What she had had in Gwynedd, she had left to follow her father’s will and ways. She was of some use for her healing skills; if she left to make her way in the world, those would provide her with a living. Quite a good one, if she chose.

  That was all very cool and practical, just as anyone would have expected of her. Yet her heart refused to listen. It had gone from shock to anger, a flare of temper as fierce as it was unreasonable. She did not want it to be reasonable. She wanted to indulge in a good and proper fit. Then she could rage at her idiot brother, and not at her idiot self for dreams that had never been more than empty fancies.

  “I will not.”

  Joanna measured each word in drops of ice. Her shock at first had been as great as Sioned’s, and her anger if anything was stronger; but not for the same reasons at all. So great was that anger and so deep the shock that it turned her cold. “I will not be sold in slavery to an unbeliever.”

  “It’s not slavery,” Richard said with remarkable patience. “It’s marriage—and a very good one. The man’s a king’s brother, he’s as powerful as a king himself, he’s rich, he’s cultured, he’s a knight and a gentleman. What does it matter what he calls his God? Maybe he’ll convert to our religion. Maybe he won’t. The Pope will give a dispensation, you needn’t worry about that. I’ve already asked Mother to see to it.”

  “And she agreed?” Joanna asked coldly.

  “She didn’t disagree,” Richard said.

  “She knows it will never happen,” Joanna said, “because I will not marry that man. Not now, not ever, not if he were the last man alive.”

  “Oh, come,” said Richard. “What objection can you possibly have to him, except the one?”

  “The one is enough,” she said.

  “That’s ridiculous. What is it really? That he’s not as young as some? He’s not old, either. He’s strong. He’s a splendid fighter. He’s got a clever tongue on him, and a good voice—I’ve taught him some of our songs, and he sings them well. Any reasonable woman would be delighted to have him.”

  “Then I am not reasonable,” she said, “and I will not ever be. I will not marry him.”

  Richard’s face darkened to crimson. His eyes were bright and searing blue. His voice was quiet—a soft growl, barely to be heard. “You will not? Even for your king’s command?”

  “You are not my king,” she said, “and you will not command me to do this.”

  “I’ll force you.”

  “Try that,” she said, “and I’ll take the veil. The Church will shelter me. I, a Christian queen, forced to marry an infidel—I’ll find asylum wherever I go.”

  He curled his lip. “You, a nun? You’d go mad in a month.”

  “Never mad enough to marry that man,” she said.

  “Do you want to bet on it?”

  She met his glare with one just as blue and just as sulfurous. “I’ll bet my life.”

  “Do that,” he snarled. His voice rose. “Do that, you damned bloody woman! Do it and be damned to you!”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Damnation is this marriage. I will not marry him.”

  “You are out of your head!”

  “I am? I never proposed to hand my sister over to the Devil’s own!”

  “That is a better man than half the knights in Christendom, and every blasted one of the priests.”

  “Blasphemer!”

  “Bitch!”

  She drew herself to her full and considerable height. “Better a Christian bitch than an infidel whore.”

  Richard’s hand flew up. Her eyes dared him to strike her. He spun and stalked away from her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Joanna had won the battle and the war. There would be no wedding of Christian and infidel. The whole army knew every word that Richard and Joanna had said to one another, embellished and re-embellished until it had become a legend and a song.

  Sioned heard that song everywhere she went, until she was ready to take a mule and her bag of medicines and ride to the world’s end. She was still angry, abidingly so—and never mind how foolish it might be. Her heart knew neither wisdom nor reason. It only knew that it was wounded. She had not gone to her lessons since the day Saphadin had failed to put a stop to Richard’s folly.

  When she was not playing physician, she was pacing the streets and alleys of Jaffa. The darker, the narrower, the more dangerous they were, the better.

  She was in the darkest and dankest alley she had yet found, near evening of a day some untold number of days after Joanna had refused to marry an infidel. A footpad lay gagging and clutching his privates, some distance behind. He had thought to find easy prey in a woman alone, and discovered all too quickly that not only did she know exactly where to hurt a man most; she was completely ruthless in the doing of it.

  It was not like her at all to so indulge her temper. And yet she could not control herself. Was it not just? Was it not, after all, fitting?

  That was a hazard, Safiyah had warned her. Mages were so strong in so many things, that God had given them a weakness to balance all the rest. It was dreadfully, deliriously easy to give way to the dark side of the soul.

  And for such a reason, too—it was absurd, if she ever stopped to think about it. But she refused to do that. She wanted this darkness. It was better than facing reality; than admitting that she had let herself fall in love with a man. Love was not for the likes of her. She should have known that from the beginning, and built walls against it.

  The alley in which she had been stalking, nurturing the swelling bloom of her anger, came to an abrupt and stony end. At first she thought it a blank wall; then she saw how it bent round a corner, and marked the faint outline of a door. It was a postern, tiny and hidden, but to her surprise it was unlocked.

  This must have been a mosque when Jaffa was in the hands of Islam. It was older than the first Crusade, though not as old as Rome: she could feel such things, it was one of her smaller magical gifts. There were marks of fire on it, up near the dome, and broken tiles along the arches. Rats had nested in the rugs that heaped the floor, all hacked and fouled as they were.

  Yet this was still a holy place. The air held a memory of incense; the light of day blessed the faded tiles of the walls. The lines of sacred script that flowed over the arches and the doorframes were hacked and broken, but she could read a fragment here and there, and one intact near the mihrab, the niche that faced toward Mecca: There is no god but God.

  Spirits lived here. Sunlight made them shy, but she caught glimpses of them in shadows. At night they must come out in force. A deep thrum came up from below, a throb of sanctity. God, or gods, had been worshipped on this circle of earth since long before Muhammad proclaimed himself the Prophet of Allah.

  Sioned knelt in front of the mihrab, not in worship, not exactly, but because it seemed appropriate to kneel in such a place. There was peace here, such as she had not felt in much too long.

  She did not want peace. She wanted anger. She wanted the dark that came up from the earth. She wanted—

  Eleanor.

  As if the thought had been a conjuring, she saw in the mihrab, framed like a painted image, the queen in her chamber in the castle. Eleanor was dressed in black as she always was, but this was not her wonted fashion; it was a long robe without belt or girdle, and her hair was loose, unveiled, thick and gleaming, flowing down her back like a river of snow. Hers was a cold stark beauty, but beauty it certainly was, like a stone of adamant.

  As she had done in the shrine of Cyprus, she spoke to a coiling shape of nothingness. It was stronger than it had been. Because she was closer to it? Or because all this war and blood had fed it, and given it space to grow?

  It spoke in a voice so deep it rumbled in the bones. “Now?”

  “Not yet,” Eleanor said. She did not waver, nor did she forsake her icy calm, but Sioned could feel the strength of the effort that kept her so steady.

  “
We have a bargain,” the dark one said. “I would keep my half of it.”

  “You will do so,” said Eleanor, “in the fullness of time. Are you not well enough fed? Has not my son kept you sated with blood of Turks? Is it another battle you require? Surely we can arrange a small one. There are always skirmishes; men are men, and they will fight, however feeble the cause.”

  “A holy war is feeble?”

  “Come now,” the queen said. “Your faith is not the one that moves the sultan, nor is your worship any that he would approve of. You serve another power altogether.”

  “I am a power in my own right,” said the dark one, “and he rankles at the core of me. Let me dispose of him now.”

  “No,” she said. “It is not time. My son is managing him well enough for the moment, and these illusions of peaceful negotiation are serving us well. When his fall will destroy all that he made, when my son is so placed as to fill the void of his absence, then you may take him.”

  The dark one hissed, but forbore to strike like the serpent it just then resembled.

  “Patience,” she said to him. “You will have your prey.”

  Maybe he trusted her; maybe not. She dismissed him with an incantation that raked claws through Sioned’s bones. He vanished. Eleanor sank down in a pool of black robe, as if all strength had abandoned her.

  Yet when she lifted her head, her eyes were burning. Her hand, upraised, drew letters of fire in the air: wards, bound to Richard’s name and presence. She was wise and she was wary, and she knew her ally—who was also the worst of her enemies. He would not attack her son while he fancied that she was too weak to stop him.

  The wards rose in a searing shimmer, closing off Sioned’s vision of her. Sioned made no effort to call it back.

  Here was a way, if she would take it. Here was a path that she could choose. She could take the darkness to her; become both its ruler and its servant. It would possess her in the end, but then so would the light. Every living thing died; that was the price one paid for life.