Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  She knew then that she was beautiful, because he knew it. With my body I thee worship . . . words that had intrigued her in the Christians’ wedding rite, because they were so utterly pagan. Now she understood them. They were truth.

  If she had stayed in Gwynedd, this would have come to her years since, in a holy rite, at the hands of a priest of the old gods. She was glad that she had been kept from that; glad that she had waited, to have this gift to give him, whose soul had been part of hers from before time.

  From that memory of life upon life, she drew a memory of art and skill, mingling instinct with remembrance and finding the steps in the dance. She was all bare; he was still in shirt and trousers: Muslim modesty. She found laces and fastenings. The fine muslin slipped free.

  Men’s bodies she knew; she had healed a myriad of them. But this was his, all his own, and therefore hers. His skin was fair where the sun never touched it. He was not a massive man, but he was well made, supple and strong: a rider, a swordsman, born and bred to war. She traced the lines of scars, memories of old wounds, and a knot in his arm that spoke of the bone broken and knit somewhat awry.

  If he had come to her for mending, the bone would have set straight. He saw the thought: his eyes glinted. She bit him, but lightly; he barely flinched.

  Wildness rose up in her. She grappled, rolling him onto his back, holding him still with her weight. He was still laughing inside. The heat of his body warmed the length of hers. She was suddenly aware of her breasts pressed to his breast, and her hips to his hips, and—

  She shifted. He moved to match her. Her breath caught at sudden pain, but she did not recoil for more than an instant. Her body began the slow rocking rhythm that she had seen . . . often enough. Now she knew why people did it so. The body knew.

  His breathing came quicker now, but he kept the same slow rhythm, letting her settle to it. He was guiding her, oh so subtly, just as he taught her magic. There was magic in it, a magic of body matched to body and heart to heart.

  It was she who quickened the pace, with an urgency that seized and mastered her. Her whole mind and being were centered on the joining of bodies, on the throb of the flesh, on the manifold incarnations of pleasure, each more intense than the last, until with a cry of astonishment and triumph, it came to a crescendo.

  She clung to it, craving it, but flesh was not strong enough to bear it. She dropped down gasping, racked with spasms that died away into the very center of her.

  She blinked away completely unexpected and unwarranted tears. He had raised himself on his elbow, regarding her gravely, but with the faintest hint of a smile in the corner of his mouth. She had no strength to kiss it, but she could raise her hand to brush it with a fingertip. “Mine,” she said. “You are mine. I’ll share you, because there was so much of you before you knew me, so many duties, so many obligations—but you belong to me.”

  He arched a brow. “Indeed? Do I have a say in it?”

  “No,” she said.

  He laughed. She loved his laughter: it was pure gladness. “Then I am bound. I belong to you. And you,” he said, “to me.”

  “That goes without saying,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sioned had studied magic before. Now she learned the full extent of it: all that was given to one who had bound her soul to that of another. Two had become one, and that one was greater than either.

  How long she spent there, she never knew precisely. There were days, nights, but they did not match the sense in her bones of time’s passing in the world beyond the garden. It seemed a wondrous while, yet never long enough to learn all that was to be learned—or to love in all the ways that she could love.

  Safiyah was there, as he had said, but when she was not teaching the way of arts and powers, she kept to herself. It was deliberate; when Sioned, struck with guilt, ventured to call on her outside of lessons, her door would not open. “This is your time,” said the eunuch who stood guard: “yours and his. Accept it as a gift, and savor it to the full. It will not come to you again.”

  That was Safiyah’s voice speaking through the eunuch’s tongue and lips. Sioned bowed to it and to the will behind it, and, low and low, to the grace and generosity of the lady who given the gift.

  “She was my first lover,” Ahmad said, “and my teacher in all things. I owe her more than I can ever repay. Never pay it back, she tells me; give it in turn, and pass the knowledge to one who is worthy.”

  “As you both have done for me.”

  He kissed her, which distracted them both admirably, but she was too stubborn to let go of a thought once she had got hold of it. A good bit later, as she lay in his arms and he was sliding slowly into sleep, she said, “You have been beyond generous.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, “I have been thoroughly selfish. You’re the half of me, you see. How could I not give you all my heart and all my knowledge, and everything else that I can give?”

  “But I’ve not given—”

  “Remember what our teacher said to me,” he said. “Don’t give back. Give in return. That’s the price and recompense of what we are.”

  He said the last of it from the edge of sleep. She lay watching him, loving the play of lamplight across his face, and thinking of what he had said. He was beyond hearing it, but she said it regardless: “Glory and splendor. That is what you are. I pray the gods I can be worthy of you both.”

  Sioned started awake. It was hours or days after she had spoken to Ahmad of gifts and giving—years, maybe; who knew? She was cold: she had risen from her bed some time since to read from the book of spells that Safiyah had given her, but somewhere between a charm against boils and an invocation of the hosts of heaven, she had fallen asleep.

  She raised her head from the page and flexed her shoulders, wincing at the pain of cramped muscles. It was very late, though not quite dawn. A wan moon cast a lattice of light across the floor, shining in through the high window.

  Had there been a moon before?

  Something was standing in it. At first it was so insubstantial she thought it a trick of the moonlight, but little by little it grew more solid. It was no larger than a large man, and the shape it wore was that of a man, but horns grew from its brow; the hands it folded to its breast as it bowed low were fierce with ivory talons.

  She met its eyes that were as yellow as a cat’s, and knew which of the jinn it was. “My friend,” she said in honest gladness. “Well met again. Are you well? Is all well in the world?”

  The jinni smiled: an alarming sight to see such an array of fangs in a face that, for the most part, was human. “You are gracious, lady,” he said—it was a he; she had not been certain before, but she was different now. She knew things that had been hidden, and understood much that had been obscure. “Your gladness makes me glad, though you may not be so happy when you hear the news I bring.”

  Her heart stopped. “Richard. My brother. Is he—”

  “Safe,” said the jinni, “as ever he was.”

  “Henry? Joanna?”

  “Safe,” the jinni said again, “and no war to put them in danger; not yet. The truce still holds, though not for much longer. The sultan will be needing his brother, for promises to make and break.”

  The words were like a gust of cold wind, a lash of reality amid the golden forgetfulness. “I’ve kept him too long. When morning comes, I’ll tell him. I’ll make him go.”

  “Not yet,” said the jinni, “and not him. You.”

  “I? But—”

  “The world changes,” said the jinni. “Forces move. Look in my eyes and see.”

  She was not afraid to see the truth, she told herself as she met that golden stare. At first she saw only the yellow orbs and the fire of the spirit that inhabited them. Then the gold washed away before a flicker of images. Richard’s face grinning out of a coif of mail, and a caravan of easterners under guard, and all their wealth heaped at his feet. Eleanor in a sunlit bower, listening to a player on a lute, but in her eyes
was darkness visible. Conrad in his council chamber, alone but for his most trusted servant.

  That servant was a man of Conrad’s age, his milkbrother; they had nursed at the same teat and grown in the same hall, and knew each other as well as any two men in the world. Yet as she watched through the jinni’s eyes, she saw how the man was when Conrad’s attention was not on him. The same darkness that was in Eleanor was in him.

  She followed the track of it through the eyes into the spirit, and thence to a place of eerie and otherworldly beauty. The Garden of the Assassins: Ahmad had shown it to her so that she could know of it and be warned. He had shown her its master, too, the man who had surrendered his soul for the sweet kiss of power.

  He was, to the first and most shallow glance, simply a strong old man dressed all in white. But there were depths upon depths to him. The fanatical warrior of Allah: he had been that, long ago, until he found another power that would serve him better: the sorcerer, the master of dark magic, crouched like a spider in its web, ruling a world of shadows and secrets. He served the power that lived in the earth, the old dark one, shadow and serpent, tempter and betrayer, enemy of all that walked in the light.

  He had found the fount of Paradise, and sworn fealty to the Serpent. Iblis; Sathanas. Set of Egypt, doomed and destroyer. There was dark joy in his service, and a black splendor in the freedom that he granted: freedom from guilt, from shame, from fear of doing harm.

  Oh, it was tempting. Eleanor had offered Sioned a taste of it, but this was the full draught of the fountain. She had power; she was a mage, and growing stronger, the more she honed her skill. Yet there were restraints and strictures, paths that were forbidden, powers that she was not to invoke. There were no strictures on this. She could do whatever she pleased, with all the power that she could ever wish for.

  All the kingdoms of earth, she thought. This land had been a battleground for powers of light and dark since the world began. Everything was stronger here. Hate, love. Evil, good. Death and life.

  It was no great virtue that turned her away from that temptation. It was the memory of Ahmad’s touch, the way he had of brushing his fingers over her skin, so light it was barely to be felt, but that delicacy of sensation was a subtle and exquisite pleasure.

  Christians made a sin of the body’s delight. Islam knew better. Love of the body was every man’s duty, and the obligation of every woman. God had wrought it as His most wonderful creation.

  She found her way back to her body. It was still sitting in the moonlit chamber, with the book of spells open before it and the jinni regarding her with wide yellow eyes.

  “Conrad,” she said. “He’s in danger. And I’m supposed to care? He was about to put me to death.”

  “The world changes,” the jinni said as he had before.

  Spirits did not think as humans thought. “Were you not supposed to serve me?” she asked this one.

  The jinni bowed low. “We serve you, I and mine.”

  “It serves me to keep Conrad out of danger?”

  The jinni bowed again.

  She could not be angry. As well be angry at the wind. “I must speak with my lord,” she said.

  The jinni made no objection. He melted into the moonlight, just as the moon set. He would return, but not for a little while.

  That day she was much occupied in the conjuring of spirits, but not of the jinn; Safiyah expected that she master the lesser elementals and the small powers of earth and water and air. At night Ahmad was unusually ardent; he took her out of all memory, into a world that was only the two of them. In what brief moments of clarity she had, she wondered if he knew that this time of peace was ending; but she turned away from the thought.

  She let herself forget the jinni’s words. A small niggle in her center, a minute pang of guilt, impinged on her now and then, but stronger than that was the determination that she would not leave this place out of time. Not until she absolutely must.

  Most nights there was no moon in this world beyond the world, but there were always stars. They wheeled in patterns that seemed subject to Safiyah’s will, or occasionally to Ahmad’s.

  Tonight there was a moon, almost but not quite full. It was waxing: there was a quality to its light, a sense of rising to culmination, which was clear to her newly opened eyes. Its light spread in a pool at her feet.

  She had been asleep beside Ahmad. Somewhere, she still was. But her awareness was alone in the room full of moonlight. She stepped into the pool. Light swelled up over her and drowned her.

  It was night in Tyre as it was here: a night of moonlight and frustration. The lady of Tyre was in her bath—endlessly. Her lord, waiting to dine with her, began to grow faint with hunger. He left her to her pursuit of cleanliness and scented beauty—with some hope of recompense later—and went on his own pursuit of dinner.

  The daymeal in the citadel was long over. The lady’s dinner was not ready, because she had not yet called for it. “Although, my lord,” said the maid who brought the message, “if you’ll wait a while, I’m sure we can—”

  “Never mind,” said Conrad in a fit of sudden pique. “If you can’t feed me now, I’ll find someone who will.”

  “My lord,” his servant said. “I’m thinking I know who’ll feed you before you starve. Your friend the Bishop of Beauvais—you know how his cook is; sometimes they dine halfway to midnight.”

  Conrad clapped loyal Giacomo on the shoulder. “Good man! Come, we’ll see if milord bishop has a place left at his table.”

  “He does set a good one,” Giacomo said with a sigh of remembrance. “That way his cook has with lamb, garlic, a bit of thyme . . . ah!”

  “Ah indeed,” said Conrad. “Quick, fetch my cloak and a torch. We’re going calling on his grace.”

  Giacomo nodded and smiled and bowed, but his eyes were veiled.

  Conrad took no more escort than the one man. It was quite unlike his wariness, but it was late, the city was quiet, and once his temper had calmed, he was in a remarkably cheerful mood.

  “The messenger today,” he said as they left the citadel behind, walking down by torchlight through the moonlit streets: “the one who purported to come from Acre, who insisted on talking to me alone—he actually came from the English king. The rumor we’ve heard is true, he said. Richard has offered to make Guy king of Cyprus—if Guy will give up his claim to Jerusalem. He asked me if I would be willing to consider the title, if Guy surrenders it.”

  “Wonderful news, my lord,” said Giacomo, “if it’s true.”

  “I believe it is,” Conrad said. “Didn’t you think the messenger had a remarkably exotic look to him, even for a man of Provence? He’s not a Frenchman at all. In fact, when I pressed him, he confessed himself a Saracen—Richard’s dog, the boy from Africa.”

  “My lord!” said Giacomo with evident surprise. “Why, his French is perfect.”

  “His Italian, too,” said Conrad, “and his Latin, and I’m sure his Greek and Arabic as well. He has the gift of tongues. He assured me that this is no trick. Richard means what he says. He’s taken thought on it, and he sees, finally, what we’ve seen for years—that Guy is an idiot. He can’t have a fool bumbling about and getting in his way if he’s going to take Jerusalem.”

  “So he means to do it at last,” Giacomo said.

  “By Pentecost,” said Conrad. “With me beside him—if I’ll go. If he gives me the crown and the kingdom and enough of the loot from the caravans he’s been capturing lately, I’ll be his dearest ally.”

  “I should like to see you crowned king in Jerusalem, my lord,” Giacomo said.

  “Most likely I’ll be crowned in Acre,” said Conrad, “but who’s to stop us from doing it again when we have Jerusalem?”

  He was frankly lighthearted. Even when he came to the bishop’s house and found the bishop gone to bed and the tables being cleared away, and not a scrap or a morsel to spare for a poor starving lord, he only laughed. “No, don’t drag his grace out of bed,” he said to the servants,
“nor the cook, either. Maybe when I get home, my lady will finally be out of the bath.”

  They pressed a cup of wine on him, which he drank down for courtesy; much warmed and rather tipsy, he forayed again into the night.

  The moon was higher, but the dark seemed deeper. It coiled in the streets, with a dank scent about it, like sea fog. Tendrils of it crawled in Conrad’s wake, dimming the light of the servant’s torch. The walls of houses and shops closed in; the streets seemed ever narrower, winding and twisting and knotting upon one another.

  Very occasionally they met other passersby, shadowed figures hastening toward light and safety. None of them offered a threat, or likely recognized the lord of the city wandering alone but for a single servant.

  He came round a corner not far from the citadel, walking quickly now for his stomach was in open revolt, and ran headlong into a pair of men in monks’ cowls. They recoiled; Conrad cursed under his breath, favoring a foot that had been trampled.

  One of them peered at him in the torchlight and mimed broad delight. “My lord! What good fortune. We were just looking for you. A letter’s come, it’s very urgent, see—Brother Iohannes here, he has it, safe in his breast.”

  Conrad frowned. Giacomo was close at his back with the torch, which had begun to gutter and smoke. A gust of that smoke blew suddenly into his eyes; he coughed, gagging a little, but when he tried to retreat from the smoke, Giacomo stumbled against him. The monks drew in closer, the silent one fumbling in his robes.

  Inadvertently, as it seemed, the three of them had trapped him. His hand groped for his dagger, but Giacomo was in his way, catching at him, tangling him in his own mantle.

  He never saw the blade that killed him. It stabbed up from beneath, under the breastbone and into the heart. His last sight in the world was of Giacomo’s face; his last word a question: “Why?”