Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  “Princess Isabella sends her regards,” Marguerite said innocently, “and will be pleased to see you in hall in a little while.”

  “So,” Sioned said to Henry, “her highness is well?”

  “Very well,” Henry said. His voice was steady; he was not flushed as a man might be who had been caught doing something improper. “I do ask your pardon for not coming sooner. She was insistent that we hear a singer who has just arrived from Paris, and I couldn’t in politeness excuse myself until the song was over.”

  “It must have been a very long song,” Sioned said.

  “Endless,” said Henry. “Did you have a pleasant hunt?”

  “It was pleasant,” said Sioned. “And illuminating. Has the court crowned me his new mistress yet?”

  “Not . . . quite yet,” Henry said. “Though some are close to it. They say the fair Elissa has shut herself in her house and will speak to no one.”

  “She has no cause for jealousy,” Sioned said.

  “Of course not,” said Henry. “Nor does milord of Tyre, whatever anyone may be saying of me.”

  “That’s rather a pity,” Sioned said.

  “You think so?”

  “I think,” she said, “that there is one who could be won over. The marquis is too deeply in love with himself. She looks for a man to love her as her beauty deserves.”

  “She is very beautiful,” said Henry, “and well fit to be a queen.”

  “His queen?”

  Henry shrugged. “He’s competent. Men don’t love him, but they serve him. He’d rule well enough, if he had Jerusalem.”

  “Better than my brother?”

  “Lady,” he said, “forgive me for honesty, but your brother is a general. He fights wars. He has no talent and no patience for the arts of peace.”

  She could hardly deny that; she knew Richard too well. “Can Conrad truly wage peace? Or will he simply feed his own power?”

  “It will be to his advantage to hold what he wins,” said Henry.

  “And Conrad always serves that advantage.” She sighed. “He’s using me, you know. We weren’t hunting birds. We hunted Saracens, and he stalked an alliance against my brother.”

  Henry nodded slowly. “He would do that. Did he win it?”

  “Not quite,” she said, “but close enough. He’ll let the sultan keep Jerusalem, if he can be lord of the coast. Free access for pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher, and no Muslim interference with the crossings of Jordan. Title of king to be given to Conrad, and a royal ransom in lieu of the keys to Jerusalem. It will be a rich and advantageous settlement, if the sultan agrees to it.”

  “It seems they didn’t take our king into account at all,” Henry observed.

  “They didn’t, did they?” she said. “I’m sure that was for my benefit.”

  “What do you think they’ll do with him, then?”

  “I think,” she said, “that they’ll wear him down with dissension and force him into battle with a broken army, then drive him out in defeat. They’ll eat away at him, break his courage, belittle his strength, make his great gifts useless, until he has no choice but to run back to the West.

  “That is,” she said, “if they can. If he were alone, I think they’d have fair odds of doing it. With his mother here and his contentious kin under lock and key in Normandy, I’m not so certain.”

  Henry was silent for a moment. She had not thought that she would shock him, but maybe she had given him somewhat to ponder. After a while he asked, “Do you think my grandmother knows?”

  “I wouldn’t wager for or against it,” Sioned said.

  “She should know,” said Henry. “So that she can think on it.”

  Sioned was silent.

  Henry took her hand suddenly and kissed it. “Brave and beautiful lady,” he said. “If we win this war, will your brother know how much you had to do with it?”

  “I rather hope not,” she said. “I’m not a mover of worlds.”

  “No?” Henry pressed her hand briefly to his heart, then let it go. “Shall we go down to dinner? They’re waiting for us.”

  She let him escort her, but her mind was not on the feast to which they were going. It was transfixed with the beginnings of a thought, one that she did not like to think—not least because she had been blind to it for so long. Henry did not care for Isabella because . . .

  Because his eye had fallen on Sioned. She had not meant for it to happen. But there it was, as clear as a newly opened eye could see.

  It need not matter. And yet, maddeningly, it did. She did not want this lovely man, except as a kinsman and a dear friend, nor was there any danger that she would be given to him in marriage. She had no lands or titles to offer him. He was safe from her.

  She would have to see that he was aware of that. But not today. He could dream for yet a while.

  It was not as easy to escape to the market the next morning as Sioned had hoped. Conrad was watching, and so, not surprisingly, was Isabella. They both wanted her attendance; then her maids pursued her, insisting that she must be made beautiful for the midmorning court.

  She eluded them in the end by demanding a bath and, while they ran to prepare it, slipping into the plainest gown she had been allowed to bring with her, appropriating Blanche’s dour black mantle, and disappearing among the servants. They barely noticed her; without her armor of silk, she was simply another pretty dark-haired maid sent on an errand for her mistress.

  It was still morning, though barely so, when she came to the market. She knew better than to expect that Saphadin’s messenger would have lingered, but she had to be certain.

  She purchased a thing or two that she had been needing, and she listened to what people were saying. The French were not as hungry here as in Acre, but they felt the lack of their pay. Rumor was that Conrad would find means to recompense them at least in part; those who believed that were praising him and cursing their absent king.

  “Have you heard?” one man asked another near the street of the dyers, where the reek of the purple dye was sharply distinct. “It’s said the king tried to move on Normandy at the New Year, but found the borders guarded by an army he had never expected to see.”

  “English?” his companion asked.

  “You would suppose so, wouldn’t you? But the man who told me, who had it from a sailor off a ship from Marseille—he swore that it was an army of the dead. Romans and Franks, Vikings, Saxons—ghosts in ancient armor, with weapons that bit deep. But the fear of them was greater.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I believe that the English king has allies in unusual places. Isn’t he the Devil’s get?”

  “Ah,” said the other, a gust of scorn. “They say the marquis is the Devil himself. If that’s so, then there’s no love lost between him and his descendant.”

  Sioned was not the skeptic that this nameless Frenchman was. Richard’s lands were warded—how not? Eleanor would have known from the moment Philip set sail for France that once his own kingdom was secure, he would set his eye on Richard’s. It would strike him as wonderfully appropriate to relieve Richard of his western titles while Richard won a kingdom in the east.

  Clearly Philip had reckoned without the powers that Richard’s subjects could bring to bear. Philip was a right royal and Christian monarch, but Richard was the son of a sorceress and of the Devil’s own.

  She could not help but smile at the vision of Philip, surrounded by his monks and priests, confronting the armies of the dead. Crosses and prayers could not vanquish them, and a true Christian king regarded magic with holy horror.

  She turned still smiling, aware of eyes upon her. Mustafa was frowning formidably. “You led me a merry chase,” he said.

  “I’m sorry for that,” she said, and for the most part she was. “I had to elude you if I was to elude the rest. I knew you’d find me.”

  “Of course I found you,” he said with a hint of testiness. “I found another, too. He’s waiting, if you’ll follow me.”
/>   She would have thrust ahead of him if she could, if she had known where to go. He led her as quickly as the press of people would allow, from end to end of the market and into the quarter of the jewelers. Those streets were much quieter than the rest of the market: people moved softly here, and spoke in low voices, as if in awe of the wealth that surrounded them. Only the lesser beauties were on open display; the masterpieces were kept in locked chests, wrapped in silk and sealed with a spell. But even the bits of gaud and frippery were wonderful.

  He was sitting in a goldsmith’s stall, watching the artisan craft a flower in beads of gold. The light gleamed on the pure metal, dimming the rest of the world to a grey and featureless blur.

  His face would have been clear to her in the dark behind the moon. He was dressed like a prosperous citizen, with nothing about him to mark him a warrior or a prince, still less an enemy of the Crusade.

  He greeted her with a smile and a bow. The goldsmith kept his eyes on his work. He did not glance up even when Ahmad beckoned her into the depths of the shop.

  It was a much larger place within than without. Behind a curtain was another, wider, dimmer room, and a stair that led to an upper gallery. There were windows there, looking out on a sunlit courtyard. Trees were heavy with oranges and golden lemons. Already a few had begun to bloom, waxy white blossoms amid the ripening fruit.

  It was wonderful in the midst of winter. She breathed deep of the flowers’ sweetness, and felt the tightness inside of her ease. “This country,” she said. “It’s full of wonders and sudden beauties.”

  “Great ugliness, too,” he said. He bowed her to a chair in the carpeted room, and sat across from her. There was kaffé, and little cakes made with honey and almonds and spices. The taste of the kaffé and cakes reminded her poignantly of the summer and autumn in Jaffa, when she had walked between worlds to learn the arts of magic.

  “Today I see the beauty,” she said. And then: “I missed you.”

  He blinked. Had she actually managed to startle him? “You were walled and guarded like the fortress of Krak.”

  “I was angry,” she said.

  He widened his eyes. “Because of—”

  “Because you agreed to marry Joanna.”

  “Joanna never agreed to marry me.”

  “But you did.”

  “I reckoned that I knew the lady; I knew what she would say. Meanwhile how could I insult her brother by refusing the prize that he was giving me?”

  “You’re a great diplomat. You would have found a way.”

  “Certainly. I let her do it for me.”

  “You never cared what I would think.”

  “Did you honestly believe that I would take your sister?”

  “You didn’t say you wouldn’t.”

  “I . . . forgot how young you are.”

  She slapped him.

  He sat still, with the mark of her hand blazing red on his cheek, and his gaze dark and steady above it.

  It was she who could not keep her eyes from dropping. She flushed from brow to sole, mortified—with all her anger turned no longer against him but against herself.

  She heard him rise. She tensed to turn and run, but her body would not obey her. He drew her to him, folded his arms about her, and tilted up her chin. She could not help but look at him. “Did you honestly believe,” he asked her, “that I would take your sister instead of you?”

  “Instead of—” She bit her tongue. “She’s a queen. What am I?”

  “Royal,” he said, “and much loved by your brother. And,” he said after a brief pause, “by me.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Lady,” he said, “you gave me half the autumn and half the winter to pass from bafflement to anger and back to bafflement again—and then to know what was at the root of it. I asked the marquis to bring you to our meeting. It might have been insanity, but I had to know—I had to see—”

  “How much I hated you?”

  He nodded.

  “I never hated you,” she said. “Not even in the worst of it.”

  “Have you forgiven me?”

  She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Maybe. Would you have? If she had been willing?”

  “There was no danger of that.”

  “Would you?”

  His breath hissed between his teeth. “I would have found ways to escape.”

  “I certainly hope so,” she said. “She is beautiful. And desirable. And—”

  “Never as much as you.”

  “Don’t flatter me,” she said crossly.

  “I’m speaking the simple truth,” he said.

  “She is tall and fair. I—”

  “Dark and sweet,” he said. “Your eyes are wonderful, like the shadows at twilight—not quite blue, not quite purple. I never saw such eyes before.”

  “Violets,” she said.

  He frowned in puzzlement.

  “They’re flowers,” she said. “They grow in the woods in the spring. They’re shy—they hide in greenery. They’re this same color.”

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “I like the roses of Damascus better.”

  “I don’t think,” he said, “that I would be greatly taken by eyes the color of blood.”

  She snorted—inelegant and knowing it, but this man had no illusions about her. “They would be unusual.”

  “Too much so.” He traced the curve of her cheek with his finger. “I shall go on preferring violets. Have they a fragrance?”

  “A small one,” she said, “though sweet. It’s not glorious, like roses.”

  “Your cheeks are roses,” he said. “Your neck is a white lily.”

  “My breasts are twin lambs?”

  He gasped; then he laughed. “A pagan may quote Christian Scripture?”

  “When it’s apt,” she said, “yes.”

  “And what would your own faith say?”

  “That the Goddess is in all that is, and every woman is Her image.”

  “Certainly man is created in the image of God,” he said.

  “Man is the creature She made to please the woman, to serve her and make children with her.”

  “Man was made for woman?”

  “We believe so.”

  “Fascinating,” said that son of Islam.

  If he had scoffed, or professed his own faith, she would have cast him off. But he granted her the dignity of her religion. In a warrior of God, in this God-ridden country, that was marvelous. She kissed him for it, meaning but to brush his lips with hers; but the heat of the touch bound them irresistibly.

  After some little while they drew apart, but still in one another’s arms. Sioned looked into those dark eyes. What she saw there both exhilarated and terrified her. “What shall we do now?” she asked him.

  “What would you do?” he asked in return.

  “Love you,” she said. “Stay with you. But we can’t do that. We’re on opposite sides of a war.”

  “Not here,” he said. “Not between us.”

  “If I send a message,” she said, “will you come?”

  “Always,” he said. Then after a pause: “How long will you be in Tyre?”

  “For as long as I’m needed,” she said.

  “For as long as that is,” he said, “we can meet here. Send a message in the way that Safiyah taught you. As soon as I may, I’ll come.”

  “Promise?”

  “By my heart,” he said.

  She kissed him softly, with but a fraction of the heat that had bound them a moment before; but if she had let it, it would have burned them both to ash. “Soon,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Soon.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was not as soon as Sioned would have liked, that she could see Ahmad again. Conrad watched her as closely as if she had been his wife—so closely that she wondered which of his spies had told him that she met a man in a shop in the city. She had succeeded after all, and too well: once he reckoned that her attention had wandered, he courte
d her as ardently as any knight in a song.

  That was a strange time, that season of Lent in Tyre, between the winter and the spring. She saw Ahmad thrice, with more difficulty each time, but that only made the meeting sweeter. They spoke nothing of politics and nothing of parting. He taught her more of magic, but a different art now, an art of lovers: spells and enchantments that were best wrought by two who were bound in the spirit.

  She was coming back from that third meeting, barely aware of where she walked, but remembering to keep her hood close about her face, when a man in servant’s dress accosted her. She realized it when Mustafa’s hand stopped her short. The point of his dagger rested against the man’s throat. The servant’s dark cheeks had gone grey.

  There were protections on him, but Sioned caught no hint of ill magic. Her glance persuaded Mustafa to lower his dagger. The servant mopped his brow with his sleeve, and said as steadily as a man might who had a bead of blood welling from the great vein of the throat, “My lady asks your indulgence; she craves a moment’s conversation.”

  “Indeed?” said Sioned. She followed the man’s glance to the shadow of a colonnade. A dark shape stood there, swathed in a mantle. Sioned saw dark eyes lined with kohl, and a smooth ivory forehead; the rest was hidden in veil.

  She inclined her head. The lady beckoned her into the shelter of the colonnade.

  “Lady Elissa,” Sioned said.

  “Lady Sioned,” said Conrad’s mistress. Her voice was brisk and direct, like her glance. “I see why he fancies you.”

  “Yes,” said Sioned. “I look like you.”

  The dark eyes glinted. “His tastes are consistent,” she said. “Your eyes are more unusual than mine, and your skin is fairer. You’re even more beautiful than rumor made you.”

  “Much of that is art,” Sioned said.

  “Beauty is always art,” said Elissa. “At the risk of being thought a mere and jealous rival, I came to proffer a warning. My lord suffers no other man to touch the woman he chooses. That one you go to see—he is in danger.”

  “His spies are watching,” said Sioned, “but we are watching them. My friend has taken steps to protect himself.”