Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  They all murmured agreement. The sultan was silent. After a long while he lifted his head and sighed. “You are good men,” he said: “good Muslims. All of Islam looks to you for courage and strength.”

  “We are with you to the death,” said one of the Kurdish emirs. Even the Turks nodded; first one and then another leaped up and prostrated himself and swore his life to the sultan.

  Their loyalty, their love and devotion, acted on him like rain in a desert. The lines of care and pain receded from his face. He stood straighter, held himself more firmly. He almost smiled.

  The smile did not linger past the door of the hall. He was still heartened, still strong, but as he settled once more in his private chamber with his brother and his son, he turned his hand palm up. A bit of paper rested in it, written in a crabbed hand.

  Al-Afdal plucked it from his father’s palm and read aloud: “‘The battalions of the mamluks are against a siege—they fear another disaster such as cost us Acre. They advise battle, as swift and devastating as may be. Then if we have the victory, we gain the lands from here to the sea; if we fail, we have some hope of escape. If you insist upon a siege, sire, the mamluks declare that some one of your kin must remain in the city, or all your forces will break apart—Kurd with Kurd, Turk with Turk, and God forbid that either take orders from the other.’ ” Al-Afdal looked up from the paper. “Father, are our straits that dire? Who wrote this?”

  “It doesn’t matter who wrote it,” the sultan said. “He speaks the truth. But I had hoped to avoid a battle.”

  “It would be better if we forced one,” Al-Afdal said. “There’s no water for the Franks, but we have whole cisterns full. If we can lure them out of their lair and keep them in the dry land, we’ll destroy them as we have so many times before.”

  “We do keep the advantage of water, don’t we?” said the sultan with the flicker of a smile, which swiftly died. “Still, a siege would wear them down without costing us overmuch blood. They can’t starve us out before they give way to thirst. Who knows—their own constant sickness of dissension may conquer them even more quickly than lack of water.”

  “I can stay,” Ahmad said.

  They both looked at him as if they had forgotten he was there. He had been unusually quiet, but then he had had nothing to say.

  “I’ll stay in Jerusalem,” he said, “if you judge it wiser to go. The mamluks will follow me in your name—there are so many from Egypt; we get on well together.”

  “So you do,” said the sultan. He sighed. “Ah, God; despair’s a tenacious thing. I’m sick of fighting. I’m old; I want to rest. Do you think I ever will, except when I’m dead?”

  Al-Afdal’s hand flicked in a warding gesture. “Avert! Father, don’t speak of such things. It’s bad luck.”

  “Everything is written,” said the sultan. “There is no luck; only fate.”

  “If it’s written that you die,” said Ahmad, “you die. But a man should live his life to its fullest, or it’s all been for nothing. Remember joy, brother. Remember victories. You’ll have them both again.”

  “Will I?”

  A prickle ran down Ahmad’s spine. He was the only one of his brothers whom God had given the gift of magic. Yusuf was wise, and he was a leader of men—incontestably. But he was neither mage nor seer.

  Even the least magical of men could sometimes be touched by the hand of God. The sultan was in a strange mood tonight, sunk in despair and yet, in an odd way, exalted. “It ends here,” he said. “One way or another, tomorrow or a month from tomorrow, this war is over.”

  “Maybe so,” said Al-Afdal, “but it’s not lost. We’ll win this, Father. We’re sworn to it.”

  “You are good and loyal men,” the sultan said. “Will you stay with me? You can sleep if you like. I’m minded to pray.”

  His son nodded. Ahmad reckoned that he could stay for a while; there were things that needed doing, but they could wait an hour or two. A little peace would soothe his soul.

  In the end it was nearly dawn before he went back to his lodgings. He had joined his brother and his nephew in prayer; then he had slept a little. He was thinking of an hour in his own bed, then a bath, breakfast, fresh linen, as he passed the mamluk on guard at his door. The man was wide awake, quiet but alert: doing his duty as a good servant should.

  The wards of the house were untouched. His young guest had not gone out since Ahmad left that morning; he had not even left the room in which he had lain for the past several days. If the sultan was sunk in despair, Mustafa was buried in the deepest reaches of it.

  He was not asleep, although he tried to pretend that he was. Ahmad stood looking down at him. There was little to see but a tight knot under a sheet. After careful consideration, Ahmad plucked the sheet from him.

  He was fully clothed, all but the shoes and the turban. “Leaving so soon?” Ahmad asked him.

  Mustafa’s body unknotted, creaking as he stretched; he hissed at the pain of healing scars. His eyes were calmer than Ahmad had expected, and clearer. “I should never have come here,” he said. “I was angry; I despaired. God will judge me for it.”

  “God judges us all,” said Ahmad.

  Mustafa shook his head. He had the humorlessness and the perfect self-absorption of the very young. “He betrayed me, but who’s to say my betrayal hasn’t been worse? I knew what he was, what he would do—how he is a king first and always—and still I gave way to jealousy and spite. I knew better!”

  “How have you betrayed him?” Ahmad asked. “You’ve said nothing to anyone here.”

  “I came here,” Mustafa said. “I could have chosen any refuge, anywhere. I chose one among his enemies.”

  “You were wounded in the heart,” Ahmad said. “You didn’t choose as unwisely as that; you’ve told us no secrets, and you know we won’t ask. We may be enemies, but we are honorable.”

  “You are more honorable than the Franks,” Mustafa said with a twist of the lip. “Please forgive me if I’ve offended. I’ll leave as soon as the gates open.”

  “Today is the day of prayer,” said Ahmad. “Stay with us; worship Allah in this holy city, and ask for His forgiveness. Then you may go.”

  “Won’t you ask me where I’ll go?” Mustafa demanded.

  Ahmad shook his head. “Some things it were best I not know. Will you bathe? Eat with me? It will be dawn soon; we can say the morning prayer together.”

  Mustafa bowed. Good, thought Ahmad: he was acting and thinking. He must have made good use of his days in seclusion.

  He still had a bruised look to him. It would be a long while before that went away. Perhaps it never would, though Ahmad dared to hope that he was a stronger spirit than that.

  The sultan led the midday prayer in Al-Aqsa, the Father Mosque, that sat beneath its silver dome in the vast court of the Dome of the Rock. Far more splendid prayers rose up to heaven from that glorious golden dome, but he was in a mood for quieter devotions.

  He had come exalted from his night of prayer, but on the ride across the city from the Tower of David to the Dome of the Rock, all his fears and exhaustion and the weight of despair had come crashing down upon him. He wept as he rode. As he took his place in the foremost ranks of the faithful, tears streamed down his face.

  Ahmad caught Al-Afdal’s eye. The boy was scowling. Ahmad was in better control of his face, but he was in no cheerful mood, either. To win a war or to withstand a siege, men needed strength; they needed a certain brightness of spirit. Even the sultan’s most loyal followers could see how beaten down he was. How long could they hold fast, if their lord did not?

  He glanced to his right, where Mustafa stood and bowed and knelt with the rest of the long line of men. He was dressed as a mamluk from one of the Egyptian companies, with Ahmad’s device embroidered on the sleeve.

  It was courageous of him to join in these prayers. Ahmad noticed which of them he did not share; how he refrained with considerable care from invoking Allah’s blessing on the sultan’s cause.


  That was honor, though it had fixed itself on a Christian king. Ahmad could admire it, even understand it. He found himself smiling faintly as he performed one of the many prostrations.

  His mind was not on God. Nor, except peripherally, was it on his brother. This place was suffused with sanctity. He focused on small things, mortal things, to keep his mind from losing itself in light.

  His wards had no strength here. He was reduced to ordinary means of maintaining vigilance: his eyes, his hands, the force of mamluks whom he had placed discreetly all about the sultan.

  There was no warning, no ripple in the pool of holiness. They believed that they were doing God’s work, those mamluks who turned on either side of the sultan. Their eyes were soft as if with sleep; their expressions were rapt. They struck for the glory of God: one for the throat, one for the heart.

  The sultan sank slowly down. Ahmad leaped, not caring if he fell on a blade. But the loyal mamluks were faster than he. A scarce heartbeat after they rose up against their lord, the traitors were dead.

  The sultan sagged in Ahmad’s arms, dragging him down to the floor. He was still breathing. Certainly he was wounded, but maybe—maybe—

  He gripped Ahmad’s hand with all his strength. The bones ground together; the pain made his breath catch. But he did not try to free himself.

  “Brother,” said the sultan. “Brother, try—a siege—you must—”

  “Hush,” said Ahmad. He felt strange, remote, as if walled in glass. The ripple of shock was still advancing through the mosque: men leaping up, craning, staring, crying out.

  The sultan’s mamluks closed in, standing on guard—now that it was too late to protect him. None of them belonged to Sinan. Ahmad made sure of that with a swift and deceptively simple spell. If he had not been a fool—if he had not fallen into complacence—

  His brother stirred in his arms. Life was draining out of him. Ahmad called in all the powers he had, all the arts and skills, to stop the blood, to heal the wounds. But the cavity of Yusuf’s chest was filling with blood, seeping from the pierced muscle of the heart. He was drowning inside his own body. Maybe a great master of healers could save him. But not Ahmad, whose gifts lay elsewhere.

  People were shouting, struggling. There was fighting: men screaming invective, cursing one another, doing battle over whether the sultan was alive or dead.

  That was the sound of an empire crumbling. “Brother,” said Yusuf, barely to be heard. “Whatever you must do, do.”

  “You won’t die,” Ahmad said.

  “I am dead,” said Yusuf. He drew in a breath; it broke in a spate of coughing. Somehow, through it, he spoke the words of Faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.”

  “No,” said Ahmad, but it was an empty sound, without sense or meaning.

  No emptier than the body in his arms. With the last of those most sacred words, Yusuf’s soul slipped free. Ahmad could not catch it or stop it. Its face was turned toward Paradise. Already it had forgotten the world of labor and pain.

  That world had erupted in tumult. Ahmad should stop it. The emirs, Al-Afdal the heir—none of them had the presence of mind. They were all either gaping in mindless shock or running wild through the mosque and out into the court of the ancient Temple.

  But if Ahmad rose and took the reins, he would have to let his brother go. He could not do that. The body was cooling even in the day’s heat. In time it would stiffen, but for the moment it still had the suppleness of life.

  He looked down into his brother’s face. The lines of care and fear had smoothed away. Yusuf did not look as if he was asleep; no sleeper was ever so pale or so still. But he had died in peace.

  He had left a house of war. Ahmad laid him down as gently as if he could still feel the jarring of movement on his wounds, and said to the mamluks, “Let no one touch him but the servants of the dead.”

  They bowed. One, even as he straightened, whipped about and flattened a shrieking, dancing madman.

  Matters were grievously out of hand. The emirs were scattered; Al-Afdal had vanished. One man in mamluk’s dress stood motionless in all that chaos, surrounded by a strange stillness.

  Ahmad met Mustafa’s gaze. Mustafa looked down at the sultan, then up again at Ahmad. Ahmad watched the choice take shape. It did not sadden him particularly. A man did what a man must. Had not the sultan bidden Ahmad do precisely that?

  Mustafa bowed to them both, the living and the dead. An eddy of confusion passed between. When it cleared, Mustafa was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The King of the English sat in the shade of a canopy, sipping sherbet cooled with snow from Mount Hermon. He had suffered a bout of fever, the latest of all too many in this pestilential country; it had flattened him for two days. He was mending now, and none too soon, either, but he was still shaky on his feet.

  “Your medicines are good,” he said to his physician, “but my sister’s are better. How long are you going to let her lie like a dead thing?”

  “It’s not a matter of letting,” Master Judah said. His tone was cool but his lips were tight. “She is alive; the fever is gone. But she doesn’t wake.”

  “Will she?” Richard asked. “Can she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Master Judah.

  Richard scowled. When he had bidden her find the key to the Old Man’s destruction, he had also bidden her leave the fetching to someone else. He should have known that she would ignore the second half of his command. She was as much a Plantagenet as he was; she did as she pleased, with little enough regard for anyone else’s wishes.

  The Seal hung heavy about his neck. It had not left him since she insisted that he take it. Whatever it did, it obviously did not protect him from the ills of the flesh. More than once he had considered shutting it away in his treasury, but he never quite brought himself to do it. She had been so insistent, and she had paid so high—it was a tribute of sorts, and a superstitious hope that as long as he wore the Seal, she would cling to life.

  He drained his cup of sherbet. The hand that filled it anew did not belong to his squire. Blondel had been walking very softly since he confessed to accusing Mustafa of treason. Richard had not seen fit to punish him, but with that one, silence was more cruel than blows.

  Richard was not ready yet to speak to Blondel. He turned his attention instead to the entertainment that several of his knights had arranged for him, to speed his recovery, they said—and, they did not say, to while away the time until he decided whether to attack Jerusalem. That decision should have been made days ago, but the fever had intervened. If he did not make it soon, he would lose his army. The French were growing fractious again; the English pined for their wet and misty country.

  But today he would not think of that. He would watch what promised to be a very good fight: the settling of a dispute between a knight from Burgundy and a knight from Poitou. The exact details of the disagreement were not particularly clear, but they hardly mattered.

  So far the Burgundian was getting the worst of it. He was not as young or by any means as thin as his adversary, and the heat, even this early in the morning, was taking its toll.

  Richard watched with professional interest, because the Poitevin was a jouster of some renown; but when he laid a wager, he laid it on the Burgundian. The lesser fighter had the better horse, lighter and quicker and, though it sweated copiously, less visibly wilted by the heat. The Poitevin’s coal-black charger was enormous even by the standard of the great horses of Flanders, and although it lumbered and strained through the turns and charges of the joust, no sweat darkened its heavy neck.

  Having handed his gold bezant to the clerk who was keeping track of the wagers, Richard let his mind wander even as his eye took in the strokes of the fight. He liked to do that: it helped him think.

  He would not camp in sight of Jerusalem. If it happened he must ride where he could see the city, he had a squire hold up a shield in front of his eyes. He had sworn an oath: he would not look
on those walls and towers or the golden blaze of the Dome of the Rock until he had come to take it for God and the armies of Christendom. But scouts who kept the city in sight said that it had been boiling like an anthill since the evening before.

  None of his spies had come in with reliable news. He missed his dog of a Saracen, and God help Blondel if the boy had either died or turned traitor in fact as well as in name. Mustafa would have known the cause of the turmoil in Jerusalem. These idiots had only been able to report that all the infidel raiding parties had begun to swarm back toward the city, and messengers—all of whom, damn them, had escaped pursuit—had ridden out at a flat gallop on the roads to the north and east and south.

  God knew, there were rumors enough on the roads and in the villages. The sultan was preparing a killing stroke against the Franks; Islam was under siege from some hitherto unforeseen enemy; Jerusalem had been invaded in the night as Tyre had been, by an army of jinn and spirits of the air. There was even a rumor that no one credited: that Saladin himself was ill or wounded or dead.

  Richard had prayed for that. He was not fool enough to expect that it was true. God only answered prayers when it suited His convenience.

  The fever was still in him, making him giddy at odd moments. He focused once more on the fight.

  The Poitevin was winning, curse him—the Burgundian was near done for. The knights who had wagered on the champion were reckoning their winnings already.

  The Poitevin’s horse collapsed abruptly. In the same instant the Burgundian flailed desperately at the Poitevin’s head. The heavy broadsword struck the helm with a thunderous clang. The Poitevin dropped like a stone.

  The horse was dead—boiled in its own skin without the relief of sweat to cool it. The knight was alive but unconscious. The unexpected victor sat motionless astride his heaving and sweat-streaming destrier, until his squire came running to get him out of the stifling confinement of the helm and lead him dazedly off the field. His face in its frame of mail was a royal shade of purple.