Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  He thrust himself up, banishing the memory with a hawk and a spit and, for good measure, a quick sign of the cross. Then he bellowed for his servants. “God’s arse! Have you all gone to sleep? We have a war to win!”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Sioned was not dead. She was not alive, either; she was rather well aware of that. Her body lay in the physicians’ tent. Sometimes she hovered above it, watching one of the assistants bathe it or feed it or dose it with potions. The fire of fever died slowly. The child within . . .

  She was still alive. Sioned could see her enfolded in the womb, and something wrapped about her, something that shimmered with a subtle radiance. It was some little while before Sioned realized that it was her own magic. So strong was a mother’s instinct, and so staunch in defense of her child.

  The body guarded its burden. The spirit wandered among the spirits of air, bound to its source by the thinnest of threads. It had a purpose, a reason for wandering, as the body had a reason for clinging to life. The spirit likewise guarded something—a secret, a deception, a sleight and an illusion. In a garden outside of the world, a serpent kept watch over a common stone. The one who claimed the stolen Seal, who had entrusted the great part of his power to it, did not yet know that the Seal was gone. Her spirit, airy thing that it was, sustained the spell that clouded his mind and concealed the loss.

  It could not hold forever. The edges of it frayed continually. The longer she was away from her body, the more difficult it was to knit them up again. If Richard did not take the Seal soon and wield it against the Assassin, both her protections and her deceptions would fail. Then Richard would have no defense against the Old Man’s wrath but his determinedly unmagical self.

  Spirits did not count days. Suns rose and set; time blurred into a single shining present. But events recorded themselves in her awareness. She saw the war winding to its conclusion. She saw the sultan die.

  The sultan was a great and shining creature in this world, a man of power, beloved of his God. The Assassins’ daggers set him gloriously, blindingly free. He never even looked back, but sped on bright wings toward the light of Paradise.

  It was a powerful temptation to follow him, but another, greater power held her to earth. The sultan was glorious, but his brother was pure and gleaming beauty, an edifice of magic so wondrous and so complex that she could only hover above it, rapt.

  He was not aware of her. All his mind and strength were focused on his grief, and on the struggle to make order of chaos. She drifted away, grieving because he grieved, into the wild rejoicing of the Frankish camp.

  Time had folded upon itself. The sun had shifted; the light was different. She heard the king’s council, and saw where each man went thereafter, and what he said to those about him—both those he trusted and those he did not. She would remember each of those later, if she could.

  The spell was fraying badly now, endangering the thread that bound her to her body. Sinan, having disposed of the sultan and so fulfilled his bargain with Eleanor, had begun to suspect that something was amiss. All too soon he would go seeking the source of the wrongness, and find it in the garden.

  If only Richard could take Jerusalem, the city’s power would guard him. Then she could let go. It was incumbent on her, then, to make sure that he did conquer the city—that the Seal was safe and the spell of protection and concealment intact, and the battle free to proceed without interference from Masyaf.

  A small and slightly saner part of her observed that she had taken on far more than her strength could manage. She could not listen to it. She must hold on and be strong, and pray that it was over quickly.

  She had, while she drifted in the aether, been frequently attended by tribes of the jinn. They did not address her or distract her, but their presence held other forces at bay. The great jinni she did not see. He had his own preoccupations, she supposed.

  Sioned was there, riding a dust mote in the shaft of sun through the tent flap, when Richard banished his mother—a bit of boldness for which he would pay dearly later. Much later, she hoped, for his sake.

  She lingered while he dressed and ate and prepared to march. As she hovered near him, one by one the jinn appeared, circling about her, flocking like birds. The great jinni himself came; he said nothing, but settled behind her as if he had been a guard.

  She was not apprehensive. Not exactly. The force of Richard’s determination drew her in its wake, strengthened by the power of the Seal. He did not know how to wield it, no, but it was rousing; it sensed the power in him, the magic that slept deep. Too deep ever to wake, she would have said, but the Seal was no ordinary amulet.

  Her body was not so far in earthly distance, but impossibly remote in the ways of magic. If she returned to it, she would be subject to its laws—and those, at the moment, were the laws of the deathly ill. Yet she had a sudden, powerful need for earthly substance: to walk in flesh, to ride with the king toward Jerusalem.

  The great jinni stirred, reaching toward her. Come, he willed her. See.

  She went where he led. At first she thought he was leading her to her own body, but he paused just short of it, in her little tent. Mustafa was sitting there, a little wan but upright and conscious. He had just finished dressing himself in the gear of a Frankish sergeant, all but the helmet, which dangled by the strap from his hand. He was in pain, but not terribly so; his wounds of the body were healing.

  Quite without thought, she poured herself into him like water into a cup. He was open and welcoming. Despair had left him; he was at peace with his choices, but in that peace was a singing emptiness. It begged her to fill it.

  So, she thought: this was how demons entered into men.

  It was one way, the jinni observed from his vantage above her. Mustafa had been protected. But she was a pure spirit; she was welcome in his heart.

  He knew that she was there. He was not afraid, or even particularly surprised. If anything, he was glad to know that she lived, although he fretted a little for the safety of her body. She soothed him with the warmth of her surety. She would be well. Would he take her with him into Jerusalem?

  It was strange to feel his nod; to be inside of him, looking out through his eyes, slowly growing aware of the body that he wore: the aches and small persistent pains, the slight gnawing of hunger, the itch between his shoulder blades. Her magic flowed through and over him. The itch, the pains faded. He stared at his arms, which were clean of bruises and burns, and flexed his fingers, even the several that had been broken.

  It was all gone. She was a little dizzy, but his own strength had fed the working; he was tired, somewhat, but food and drink and the prospect of a battle would mend that. He turned in the small crowded space, stretching as high as the roof of the tent would allow, swooping, spinning, whipping out his dagger and plunging it into the heart of a lurking shadow.

  The shadow gibbered and fled from the bite of cold steel. Mustafa retrieved his dignity with his helmet, and stepped out of the tent into the breathless heat of late afternoon.

  The army was forming in ranks, moving slowly, taking its time. Men were filling waterskins from the wells and loading them on camels, burdening them until they groaned in protest. The men and horses would carry a full day’s ration of food and fodder, but no more. Water was the most vital provision, and of that they had as much as their beasts could bear.

  Richard was risking everything in this one stroke. He left the baggage in the camp under guard, and most of the food and supplies. “Jerusalem will provide,” he said as Mustafa rode up behind him on a commandeered horse. He was in his battle mood, brilliant and a little mad; it was a brave man who would cross him now.

  Mustafa’s appearance in his sight might have roused his uncertain temper—since Mustafa was supposedly still prostrate from wounds and exhaustion—but aside from a single hard, measuring glance, Richard ignored him. There was still a great deal to do: orders to give, troops to muster, affairs to settle in the camp and with the court.

  Sion
ed, enfolded in Mustafa’s mind, watched Richard narrowly. The Seal was hidden beneath his armor, its presence veiled by a sort of glamour. She could, if she tried, feel a distant shadow of its power, a subtle drawing of heart and mind toward the man who wore it. Even a powerful mage might think it no more than the magic of his kingship.

  It was easy from so close to maintain the spells, but difficult, too: the Seal’s power tempted her, whispering at her, luring her toward it. Mustafa, bless the gods, was unmoved by it. His magic was different, a thing more of seeing than of doing. He knew that the Seal was there, he saw the shimmer of it on the king, but he was deaf to its blandishments.

  The army began the march just before sundown. The air was still blazingly hot, but the edge was off it. By full dark it had cooled noticeably. The stars were clear overhead, barely blurred by the dust of the army’s passage.

  Richard had disposed the army in much the same order as at Arsuf, with his English and Normans and Angevins in the center, the French in the van, and Henry with the warrior monks and the knights of Outremer in the rear. He rode up and down the lines. Mustafa held a place close behind him, which none of his knights or squires saw fit to challenge.

  Blondel might have ventured it, but he was still in fear of Richard’s wrath. Richard marked him among the men of Anjou, riding with a company of mounted archers. He would have been just another anonymous shape in the dark, but as Richard glanced in his direction, he took off his helmet for a moment and raked fingers through the pale glimmer of his hair in a gesture that was achingly familiar. Richard had to admire him for riding to the battle when he could have stayed safe and at ease in camp. The singer did not lack for courage, whatever his faults.

  The hills around Jerusalem were deserted, empty of scouts and patrols. They met only one troop of defenders, a party of Turks who had been late in receiving word of the sultan’s death. They were riding headlong to the city, apparently unaware that the Franks were on the march across their track.

  Richard loosed the Templars on them. The warrior monks cut them apart with holy glee.

  The Turks died on the slopes of the hill called Montjoie, from which the first Crusaders had had their first sight of Jerusalem. Richard was with the rear guard then—as if to thrust himself to the van would turn all this to mist and dream: he would wake and find himself prostrate with another fever, and Saladin still alive, and no hope of winning the prize he had dreamed of for so long. But even as slowly as he rode, in the end he rode past the hacked and bloodied bodies of the Turks, up the stony ascent to the summit.

  There he paused. The Holy City spread itself before him, sprawling over barren hills and valleys so holy that they could barely support the weight of living green. On this night full of stars, it was a darkness on darkness, shot with streaks of fire.

  When he looked down, he found his army more by feel than sight. There was no moon; the stars were far and faint through a haze of dust. His skin was gritty with it under the weight of padding and mail.

  The horse Fauvel snorted softly, pawing with impatience. His steel-shod hoof sent up a shower of sparks.

  In almost the same moment, a comet of fire arched up over Jerusalem. Then at last Richard saw the outline of walls and towers and the golden flame of the Dome of the Rock. He also, with astonishment, saw David’s Gate open below the loom of its tower. There were no lights visible in the tower, no sign of guards on the wall or in the gate. Torchlight gleamed within, casting a golden glow across the meeting of roads that led up to the gate.

  It could be a trap. Richard had meant his attack to focus on the gate, though the rams would not be needed after all. In their place he sent a company of crossbowmen. They took their positions out of ordinary bowshot, and sent a barrage of bolts into the open gate.

  Nothing moved inside it. No hidden troops fell screaming from the towers. The gate was empty, open and inviting.

  Richard turned on Mustafa. “Is this your doing?” he demanded.

  The boy shook his head. “Not mine, sire,” he said. “There’s no ambush—I can feel it. It’s empty.”

  “Someone is giving us the city on a salver,” Richard muttered. He rubbed the scar under his beard, frowning. Whoever had given him this gift must expect a payment—and the price would not be cheap.

  His army was growing restless, waiting for him to make up his mind. The Templars, hotheads always, were all too eager to slip the leash.

  Abruptly Richard shut off doubts and fears. War was a gamble. Let him cast the dice, then. With his eyes fixed on the open and beckoning gate, he said to the chief of his heralds, “Now.”

  The man leaped to obey. His clear voice echoed through the hills and resounded from the walls. With a cry of trumpets and a thunder of drums, the first wave of the attack swarmed out of the hills and fell upon Jerusalem.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Richard had intended to go in with the rear guard, but as the vanguard surged toward the gate, he could not bear to hang back so long. He clapped spurs to Fauvel’s sides. It hardly mattered if anyone went with him; his eyes and soul were fixed on the flicker of torchlight within the open gate.

  He was neither the first to pass beneath that echoing gate, nor by far the last. Although he had never been in the city, he had committed its ways to heart against just such a day, praying every night and every morning that it would come to pass.

  This was David’s Gate, the gate of the north and west, guarded by the Tower of David in which the kings of Jerusalem had lived and ruled and fought. The Tower seemed deserted, empty of troops and even of noncombatants. The Street of David that ran inward from it, nearly straight through the middle of the city until it reached the Beautiful Gate of the Temple on the other side, was as empty as the Tower, but for crumpled shapes that proved to be bits of abandoned baggage: an empty sack, a heap of broken pots, a chest with its lid wrenched off and nothing within but a scent of sandalwood.

  Richard was deeply, almost painfully aware of the holiness of this place, the sanctity of every stone. The thing he wore about his neck, which he tried not to think of too often, had grown inexplicably heavy, as if its worn and friable stone had transmuted into the cold heaviness of lead.

  He shook off the creeping distraction—it was not quite ghastly enough to be horror—and focused on the city about him. He was neither priest nor magician but a fighting man, and there was a fight ahead—that, he was sure of. But where? Not, he hoped, in every street and alley of this ancient and convoluted place.

  There were signs of struggle along the street as he advanced, remnants of rioting, but as yet no bodies. He ordered his men to be on guard against ambush, sending a troop of them up to the roofs and walls and dispersing another through the alleys that converged on this broader thoroughfare. He had begun to suspect where the infidels had gone.

  The Dome of the Rock was a great holy place of Islam. It stood where the Temple of Solomon had once stood, and protected the stone from which the Prophet Muhammad had been lifted up to heaven. It was not the heart and soul of their faith—that was in Mecca—but it, and the city in which it stood, were most holy and most revered in their religion.

  It was also a great fortress and storehouse, built as a mosque and then transformed into the stronghold of the Knights Templar: the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. Saladin had died within the confines of its wall. It could withstand a lengthy siege, even if the rest of Jerusalem fell—and then, surely, the defenders would look for hordes of reinforcements from the sultan’s kin in Damascus and in Egypt.

  It had to fall quickly. Richard could not afford a siege.

  He sent his vanguard ahead, with the second wave behind it, his own men from his own domains. The third rank, Henry’s troops and the knights of Outremer, would go in after a pause and sweep the city behind the rest, taking it street by street if need be.

  They all had their orders, their plan of battle. It was in their hands now, and in God’s.

  A quarter of the way between David’s Tower and
the Temple, at last they met opposition: a barricade across the broad street and turbaned Saracens manning it. The Norman destriers ran over them. It cost a horse, gut-slit by an infidel who died under the battering hooves of the beast he slew, but none of Richard’s men fell, even when archers began to shoot from the rooftops. They were ready for that: shields up, interlocked as they pressed forward. Somewhat belatedly, the archers began to drop: the men Richard had sent to the roofs had finally come this far.

  There were two more barricades between David’s Tower and the Latin Exchange, where half a dozen skeins of streets met and mingled. One barricade they broke as they had the first, but at higher cost: there were more men here, and more archers. They lost a man-at-arms there, arrow-shot in the eye.

  The third barricade was broken when they came to it, all of its defenders dead. Either there was dissension within the late sultan’s army, or the citizenry had made their choice as to whom they wished to lead them. Past the fallen barrier, as they marched warily around the looming bulk of the Khan al-Sultan, they found the way clear, with only dead men to bar it. Walls on either side rose high and blank, windows shuttered, gates locked and bolted.

  Richard was preternaturally aware of the force he led, as if it had been a part of his own body. He felt as much as heard the troop of Germans who ventured to creep off and begin the sack before the city was won. An English voice called a halt to them, and English troops barred their way. They snarled like a pack of dogs, but they were quelled, for the moment.

  Morning was coming. The sky was growing lighter. He could see the Dome of the Rock floating above the walls and roofs of the city, seeming no part of earth at all.

  No time for awe. Not yet. The Beautiful Gate was heavily manned. There were turbaned helmets all along the wall, archers with bows bent and aimed downward at Richard’s army.

  He rolled the dice one last time. He sent for the rams, but while his messenger sped off toward the rear, he brought up the heaviest of his heavy cavalry, the German and Flemish knights on their massive chargers. The beasts were as fresh as they could be on this side of the sea, with the cool of the dawn and the cautious slowness of their progress through the city.