Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  “It is a disaster,” said the sultan. “Not only can the Franks take Jerusalem. Now they can turn and take Egypt. They have the wherewithal: money to pay their men, and beasts of burden enough to carry their baggage. They’re no longer bound to their ships and the sea, or forced to use their own infantry as pack camels.”

  “And if they take Egypt,” sighed someone well back among the crowd, “they’ll cleave our hip and thigh, and leave us gasping in the sand.”

  The emir who had spoken of advantage was drowned out in the flood of doom. The caravan was lost—hope was lost—the war was lost. Even Ahmad was buffeted with hopelessness. It swept over him and drowned him, until he was close to wailing and beating his breast as some of them already were, while the sultan sat cradling the broken sword, tears streaming down his face.

  Ahmad tore himself away. Jerusalem was a dangerous place. It was like a burning glass; emotions, caught in the eye of it, flashed into flame. Wards and spells could not defend a man for long. The power of the place twisted and broke them.

  The whole city was caught up in grief and dawning panic. Soon enough the recriminations would begin. The war was crumbling about them, defeat on defeat and no clear victory to rejoice in. “Allah has abandoned us!” they cried in the streets and in the halls of the citadel.

  Ahmad’s own men were housed in the quarter nearest the Tower of David. He sent out the call to bring them in, and spent the time before they came in determining that nothing had changed in the heart of the city’s magic. This despair was as honest as it could be under the influence of the place. The strength of the Crusade, the force of its victories, sapped the will of Islam and robbed the jihad of its power.

  Armies were made of men, and like men, they grew old. The man who led the Franks was twenty years younger than the sultan—twenty years’ worth of strength and warrior zeal. He had his fair share of troubles, but the sultan’s were worse. Turks and Kurds were if anything more contentious than Richard and the French.

  Ahmad’s men were not their usual eager selves, but they were calmer than most. He appreciated the irony: the weakness of soldiers from Egypt had lost the caravan, but these Egyptian troops were the best in Jerusalem. He sent them to guard the city’s walls, and bade them keep watch for anything strange or out of place. His searches had yielded nothing, but there was still a niggle of suspicion. Something was amiss.

  It would come when it came. He could only lay his snares and wait.

  The sultan called a council of all his commanders who could come to Jerusalem within the week, and a great number of elders and leaders of cities and tribes, to consider the fate of the jihad. He sent armed men to break the cisterns that remained between Jerusalem and Beit Nuba, so that there was no water to drink anywhere in those hills. He made dispositions among his troops and in the city. Then he locked himself away to pray.

  Four days after the loss of the caravan, Ahmad came back to his lodgings after a long day in the storehouses, determining just how brief the siege of Jerusalem was going to be. His mind was on food and sleep—no great amount of either, if they were going to go on siege rations soon. He was lightly aware of the currents of magic through the city, marking where they shifted and eddied.

  One such eddy was waiting in the shadow of the door, seeming a shadow himself, until he unfolded into a slender young man in the garb of the desert. He had a bruised look to him; he moved stiffly, as if he had been beaten, but the worst of it had nothing to do with bodily pain.

  “Mustafa,” said Ahmad in surprise, but in welcome, too. “What brings you here? Is she—”

  “She’s well, my lord,” Mustafa said. Even as stiff as he was, he moved with grace, bowing at Ahmad’s feet.

  Ahmad raised him and drew him into the house. The servants had dinner waiting; they calmly added a second portion to their lord’s, ignoring Mustafa’s protest. “I’m not worthy to dine with a prince. If the servants will make a place for me at their table—”

  “You are a guest,” Ahmad said, lifting the lid from a steaming pot. “Ah! Cook has made a tagine. How did he know we would be entertaining a man from your country? Here, try it; it smells wonderful.”

  For all his protestations, Mustafa’s manners were princely enough. Faced with Ahmad’s refusal to treat him like a servant, he sighed faintly and allowed himself to be a gracious guest.

  They ate the fowl stewed in dates and fruits and spices and resting on mounds of couscous, speaking of small things, none of which Ahmad remembered once the words were spoken. Mustafa was hungry, although he tried to hide it; he did not refuse a second portion, or a third.

  When he had had his fill, and had belched to show his appreciation, Ahmad called a servant to escort him to a room and a bed and rest. The man would also, in response to a glance from his master, determine whether a physician should come to tend the boy’s wounds. Mustafa had said nothing of them, allowed no sign of pain to touch his face, but Ahmad was a hard man to deceive.

  Khalid the servant came to his master much later that evening. Ahmad had found that sleep eluded him. He was reading by lamplight, tracing out the words of old spells. Safiyah had taught them to him when he was much younger; they were full of the memory of her. It was a warm memory, with no sadness in it, even when he reflected that none of these spells would have served the war—unless there was some martial purpose in transforming sow’s udders into silk.

  Cowhides, now . . . enough of those might almost make up for the loss of the silk from the caravan.

  He was growing silly in his exhaustion. Khalid’s coming was a welcome reprieve. The man had training as a physician, although he had found a stronger calling in attending a lord’s needs. “Nothing broken, my lord,” he said, “and nothing irreparably harmed. Whoever did it was a fair journeyman of the trade.”

  “Has he said anything?” Ahmad asked.

  Khalid shook his head. “He’s gone inside himself. Some men will do that when put to the question.”

  “Was it one of ours?”

  “I think not,” said Khalid. “He did say a word or two—he came from Beit Nuba. How he passed the patrols and the city guard, Allah knows.”

  “My thanks,” Ahmad said.

  It was a dismissal. Khalid bowed his head and withdrew.

  Ahmad sat with the book in his lap, but his eyes were not on the crabbed and ancient script. His visitor intended no harm, or he would never have passed the wards on the door. And yet, like the air of this place in this inauspicious season, his presence, his coming here just now, was oddly and indefinably askew.

  It was not in Ahmad to cast him out, even knowing that he might have brought ill fortune. He was a guest, and a guest was sacred.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Mustafa was gone. Master Judah’s assistant, with a tentful of sick and wounded to tend through the night, had taken little notice of the infidel in the corner. Mustafa had feigned sleep until the lights were lowered, then when no one was watching, he had slipped away. He was long gone by dawn, when someone finally noticed the empty bed.

  No one honestly seemed to care, except Master Judah, for whom losing a patient—to death or escape—was a personal affront, and Sioned, who reckoned herself Mustafa’s friend. She should have taken him into her tent, and not abandoned him among strangers.

  They all expected her to tell Richard that his dog had fled. She would rather not, just as she would have preferred not to know where he had gone. If she had been Mustafa, and had been wounded in the heart as he had been, she would have gone back to Islam and left all of Christendom behind.

  She turned toward the mountain of books, but it was not the refuge she had hoped for. The camp was rumbling softly, like a lion growling in its sleep. The union of nations was tenuous. They were already quarrelling: resurrecting old battles, beginning new ones.

  Richard would have to march within the next handful of days, or his army would disintegrate where it stood. Even the spoils of the caravan could not erase the differences between Englis
h and French, Angevin and Burgundian, Pisan and Genoese, or between all of these and the knights of fallen Jerusalem.

  She did not delude herself that her brother delayed for her sake, but her failure to find an answer had done nothing to speed him on his way. If the answer was in books, it had not seen fit to present itself. The jinn had found nothing that they saw fit to tell her.

  She sat amid the tottering piles and propped her chin on her fists, glaring at the unresponsive air. Something was eluding her. Something perhaps small, but vitally important. A word, a vision, a memory . . .

  Ahmad had walked with her in remembrance, recalling his encounters with the Old Man of the Mountain. The first slipped away unnoticed, but the second, the otherworldly garden, teased her with a sense of rightness. The answer was there, somewhere.

  Bards in Gwynedd learned to remember every detail of any place they visited. Her training was incomplete and might betray her, but she could test the strength of it.

  She settled more comfortably in her nest of books and cleared her mind of distraction. The sounds of the camp dropped away. Her awareness shrank to the compass of her single self.

  She walked through worlds within worlds, elaborate edifices of thought and memory. She sought one among the many, a place of elegant arches and airy domes, which might have been a summerhouse in Damascus. That was the memory of Ahmad within her, beautiful and intricate, with its many rooms and gardens.

  One garden in particular called to her. A paradise—was that not what the Persians called a garden? This was an eerie and otherworldly beauty, but a serpent coiled in its heart.

  Sinan was not there in this memory, but his strange throne grew out of earth in the midst of the garden. In her vision or dream or foreseeing, that stump of broken tree drew her toward it. She could see as she came closer how it was rooted deep. It was not dead, although it had seemed so; at her coming it stirred and unfurled and put forth shoots that became branches. The branches, opening to their fullest extent, grew and thickened and sprouted leaves. The green of those leaves glowed like emerald, and the blossoms that budded and bloomed among them were shimmering pearl, swelling into fruit: blood-red, dusk-purple, sun-gold.

  With the tree grew the serpent. It was a jeweled thing, supple and beautiful, with a bright sardonic eye.

  “Sardonyx,” Sioned said. “Chalcedony.”

  The words startled her back to herself. The garden, the tree, the serpent—she understood at last what and who they were. And one more thing, one last memory, stayed with her as she left the vision behind. The serpent had been coiled about the tree’s heart. It was a stone, a dull thing, nondescript, seeming of no account save that the serpent so subtly protected it.

  There was the thing she had been seeking, in the place where, after all, she would have expected it to be. It was the heart of Sinan’s realm, guarded at every point. What hope had she of piercing those manifold walls?

  Who else could even try? She yearned for Ahmad, for his power and protection. But he was in Jerusalem, on the other side of the war.

  This venture was meant for her. She had found it by Sight and not by art; by instinct rather than by knowledge. Her fault for taking so long to understand; to see that the Sight of her own people was as potent in its way as the eastern books and spells and words of power.

  She closed her eyes. The garden was burned in the dark behind the lids. She could see every leaf, every stone, and the one amid them all, brown and lumpen and ordinary. On its face were written words that, as she comprehended them, limned themselves in fire.

  The Seal of Solomon was embedded in the trunk of the tree of Paradise. Sinan had taken the garden and a part of the power of the Seal—but not all of it. As to the how and why . . .

  She sent out a call without compulsion—her courtesy to the jinn, which set them free to choose their obedience. The one she called came quickly, dancing in the lamp’s flame, wreathing his wings with fire.

  “A fair day to you,” she said to the great jinni.

  He bowed within the flame. She could never read his face, it was too alien, but she thought his expression was more somber than usual. “Lady of light,” he said. “What would you ask of me?”

  “That you carry me,” she said, “if you will, to a certain place. I’ll not ask you to stay there, but only to bring me to it.”

  The jinni’s wings spread to their full extent, which caused the flame to stretch most strangely. “You must not go there.”

  “I must,” she said.

  “It is death.”

  “Still I must,” said Sioned.

  “None of us can protect you there,” the jinni said. “Those walls—they hold the spell at bay. Once within them, any of us would be bound, compelled to obey the one who rules the stone.”

  “I know that,” she said. “Didn’t I ask you simply to bring me to the walls? I’ll find my own way past them. But if you can’t take me that far, I won’t compel you. I won’t ever compel.”

  “And so we love you,” the jinni said. “Will you do this?”

  “In any way I can,” she said.

  The jinni sighed vastly. He sounded like the sighing of waves in a sea cave, faint and far away yet all the more potent for that. “It will kill you.”

  “I hope not,” she said.

  “Then I will take you,” said the jinni. “If you must, and if you will not be turned away, I will go. I will keep you as safe as I can.”

  “If you do that,” she said, “I’ll free you from your service.”

  “You cannot free me,” said the jinni. “What I give you, I give of my free will. Only promise to live as long as you may.”

  “I can always promise that,” she said a little shakily.

  The jinni bowed to the ground of whatever otherworldly place he inhabited, then straightened and stepped through the flame. She met him midway, for if she hesitated, or allowed herself to think, she would lose her courage.

  For this journey the jinni was no larger than a large horse. She rode on his shoulders ahead of the great beating wings, clinging to the tendrils of his hair. It was like a horse’s mane, strong and thick; the wind whipped it over her wrists and arms. When she looked down, she saw the earth far below: the mountains of Syria, and on the world’s rim the blue gleam of the sea.

  She had come without weapons, without even a book of spells, dressed for a day’s labor in a tent. She dared not conjure herself a cloak or a grimoire, still less a bow and quiver or a dagger. If she was to reach the garden undetected, she could not blazon her magic across the firmament.

  The jinni, being made of essential fire, was warm enough and to spare. The chill of the upper air was almost pleasant after the heat of summer below. She determined to take pleasure in the sensation, and so hold fear at bay.

  All too soon the sky changed. Its lucent blue darkened to Tyrian purple and thence to black, but there was no light of stars. They were in the world and out of it, both at once, flying between the real and the unreal, the mortal and the magical. The jinni was warm under her, and alive, though not as humans were. She fought the urge to cling tighter.

  Here in the between-place, the wards of the garden had little strength. Yet as they drew closer to that place of power, there was enough to shudder in her skin. The jinni began to labor in his flight, buffeted by currents in the air. Often he rocked and swayed; once he dropped with sickening speed, plummeting like a stone, and just as abruptly swooped upward again. She clamped her eyes shut, though it did no good in the dark, and hid her face in the jinni’s mane.

  The air’s tumult grew worse as the jinni struggled onward. In the mortal world the wards would have been deadly. Here they could not kill, but they could make it brutally difficult for anything to pass the walls.

  She fed the jinni what strength she could, seeping through her hands into his shoulders, until he hissed and snapped at her. “Don’t! You waste magic.”

  “But—” she began.

  “Silence,” he said.

 
Her teeth clicked together. The jinni was wiser than she, much as she hated to admit it, and he knew this between-world as she did not. He needed every grain of strength he had for this struggle. Even her brief distraction had sent him reeling back, losing time and speed, so that his flight was more labored than before.

  She must not despair. She must trust her mount and guide, and nurture her magic, gathering it inside her, feeding it in whatever way she could: with the strength of her spirit and the knowledge she had drunk since she came across the sea. The life in her womb, as young and small as it still was, nonetheless succeeded in making her stronger. She who had been one, now was two. Even in guarding the second, she fed her power.

  It would be a mage, this child. She was deeply glad, even as she wondered whether its father would share her joy.

  At length the jinni hung motionless in the dark, straining every sinew simply to keep from tumbling backward. Sioned drew a breath, prepared to unleash her magic—but before she could betray them both, there was a sound like the cracking of a stone. The jinni fell out of the dark into the fierce dazzle of sunlight.

  Once more he plummeted, but this time she forced her eyes open. He was making no effort to brake his fall; his wings were tightly furled, his body slack.

  She must not doubt. Doubt slew magic. She must believe, and trust, that the jinni would not let either of them be destroyed.

  With a ripping crack, the great wings snapped to their fullest extent. The air keened as the jinni’s descent slowed. At last Sioned dared look down.

  The garden lay below, a jewel amid a wilderness of jagged stones. The stones were mountains; the garden lay in the heart of them. Without magic there was no coming to it: the sides of its walls were sheer, the waste beyond unmarred by any track.

  Sioned looked for the angel with the flaming sword, but it seemed that was a myth or a memory. There was a wall of fire—magical fire—but no living being stood in the midst of it.

  The jinni came to earth outside the wall. His body shuddered, buffeted by the power of the garden and its protections. That he could speak at all amazed her; she was awed that he could speak clearly, even serenely. “I cannot pass the wall or the gate. The Seal within—it would bind me. I do not wish to be bound.”