Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  Thibaut’s throat would not stop aching. He picked his way up the last few lengths, grimly, trying not to think at all.

  There was someone up there.

  For a moment Thibaut’s mind was empty indeed. Then it filled, with rage. This was his place. No man in the world had a right to be there, and only one woman; and she was in Acre, being a baroness and maybe not even yet aware that Gereint was dead.

  Then Thibaut saw who it was, and his rage died.

  He seemed unaware of Thibaut’s coming. He had folded his long body into the curve of the parapet, check against the stone, eyes staring away not eastward to Jerusalem as Thibaut might have expected, but north. The sun was full on him, and yet it had not even warmed that impossibly white skin. He should have been flayed alive. He looked as impervious as marble, and as still.

  Thibaut’s heart was beating hard. This was legend, sitting there in Thibaut’s place, as Thibaut himself so often had sat, looking barely older than Thibaut. But much taller. Thibaut, as his peers of the pure blood were never loth to remind him, was a perfect little Saracen.

  Gereint had never minded. “You’ll never win a battle by weight or length of arm,” he had said on the training field. “But you have grace and speed, and a good seat on a horse. You’ll hold your own.”

  The prince looked like Gereint as a marble image looks like a man. The same long limbs. The same fierce arch of nose. The same black hair, thick and not quite straight. Even the same long pointed chin, though Gereint had been no beauty, and this was beauty to stop the heart.

  He never seemed so alien when he was with people. He pretended. Maybe he cast a glamour, a semblance of human solidity. Alone, he was himself, and that was not a man.

  Then he moved, and he blurred a little. The keenness blunted. The beauty shrank to handsomeness. The light on him was only sunlight, thought powerless still to stain his pallor.

  Thibaut tensed to bolt, found himself picking his way across the narrow space. Aidan had left him Joanna’s place, the crenel that framed the winding of the eastward road. He settled in it. Riders were coming, more vultures to the feast.

  “Templars,” said Aidan, “and a Hospitaller riding with them. Is that a prodigy?”

  It was not impossibly hard to match that light, easy tone. “It’s unusual. The Military Orders must be speaking to one another this week.”

  “They honor our kinsman.”

  Thibaut almost choked. Our. He had said that. But no, it was a manner of speaking. He was royalty, after all.

  Aidan was watching the riders. Thibaut had not seen him move, and yet he was very close. Close enough to see the veins glimmering blue under the moon-white skin; close enough to see what the sun did to his eyes.

  Thibaut could not even be afraid. They had grown up with the tales, he and Joanna. This was real, that was all.

  It retreated slightly. It laid a hand on Thibaut’s shoulder, warm and solid. “Yes,” said Aidan. “I’m flesh and blood. Were you expecting living fire?”

  Thibaut did not like to be mocked. “I was expecting dignity.”

  Aidan laughed. “From me? Oh, come! Dignity is my royal brother. Dignity is a synod of bishops, each more constipated than the last. I’m a hellion from my cradle.”

  “You want — ” Thibaut was having trouble getting it out. “You want to seem... not ordinary. But — less than you are. Somehow.”

  The grey eyes rolled like any ordinary man’s. But there was a stillness behind them. “Oh, to be a legend! Youngling, I’m quite as solid as the next man. If only half as human.”

  Thibaut’s head shook. He did not know where his words were coming from, but they would not stop coming. “You have to shrink and hide, to be safe. But then you hide it again: you dress it in gold and scarlet and act outrageous, and everyone is afraid of you, but it’s a useful fear. It keeps them from thinking. That you are — what you really are.”

  “And what, O sage, is that?”

  Mockery again. Thibaut’s fault, for being so small for his age, and his voice just broken, his cheeks still as smooth as a girl’s. He glared at the prince, but he answered coolly enough. “I think you must be an ifrit. Not a jinni, they are of earth, and you are air and fire.”

  “Empty wind,” said Aidan, leaning back against the parapet and grinning. His teeth were white and sharp. “I’ll tell you what I am. I am king’s son and king’s brother of a kingdom in the west of the world. Half an hour sooner from the womb, and I would have been king, for which blessing I thank God at every day’s rising. My father was good solid mortal stock, clear back to Ambrosius. My mother was... what she was. She raised my brother to be king. She raised me to be whatever I wanted to be. Both of us were meant to live in our father’s world. There was no other for us, she said. Though even then we knew that we were like her, as our sister was like our father.”

  He did not sound sad, or angry, or afraid. This was an old take he was telling, and all its grief was worn away.

  “You never asked her why?” asked Thibaut.

  “She would never tell us. She was very old, though she looked like a young maid. She had been alone for years beyond count. She was a little mad, I think. She loved our father quite beyond reason. Enough to refuse to be his wife, and to bear and raise us apart from him and his people and his Church that hates our kind. But when he was crowned king and it was noted that he had neither wife nor doxy, and never a bastard to prove his virility, her selflessness found its limits. She could not bear to lose him to any mortal woman. She came to him in his court, and she brought us with him, a pair of yearling whelps with his face. ‘These are yours,’ she said, ‘as am I. If you will have us.’“

  “And he said he would,” said Thibaut, enthralled.

  “It was a great scandal,” Aidan said. “But it was also a marvelous tale, and she was supremely beautiful, and she was prompt to give him a daughter with human eyes. And, to the priests’ disgust, she was quite unmoved by either holy things or cold iron. She would never let them baptize her, but us she sent coolly to the font, and it was no worse than water ought to be in March after a long winter. Even when they sent us to a cloister to be educated, she ventured never a protest. ‘A king’s sons should have learning,’ she said, ‘in all that they may.’ My brother took to it. I,” said Aidan, “was less tractable.”

  “In what? The cloister or the learning?”

  “The cloister,” Aidan admitted after a pause. “The learning was interesting, if sometimes more edifying than I liked. But the walls I was locked in... I thought I would go mad.”

  Even yet the memory could dampen his brow. He tried to laugh it away. “You see. I’m no legend. I’m merely very odd.”

  “Wonderful,” said Thibaut. He would never dare to touch, but he could hug his knees and stare with all his heart. “You came here alone,” he said. “Did you lose your servant?”

  “I had none.”

  Thibaut was incredulous.

  Aidan looked down, shrugging. “Well. I had a few when I began. Some I sent back. Some I set free. I wanted to see this country bare, with no crowds tugging at me.”

  “But now you’re here,” said Thibaut, “and it’s not fitting. You are a prince. You should have an entourage.”

  The prince’s eyes glittered. “I should? And who are you to say so?”

  “Your station says it,” Thibaut said with barely a tremor, “and the dignity you won’t admit. You can’t demean yourself like a hedge-knight from a Frankish byre. You have a name to uphold.”

  For a moment Thibaut knew he would be smitten where he sat. But Aidan’s glare turned to laughter. “God’s bones! What a priest you would make.”

  “I can’t,” said Thibaut. “I’m heir to Aqua Bella.”

  There was no regret in that, but no horror at the prospect of priesthood, either. Thibaut had thought once that he might like to be a Templar, and ride about with a red cross on his breast, and be looked on with holy awe. But he was three parts a Frank and one a Saracen, and that
one was enough. He was no longer bitter about it. He did not fancy sleeping in a stone barn with a hundred other men, and never bathing, and growing his beard to his knees. When he had a beard to grow, which did not look to be soon.

  Aidan, like Gereint, seemed to know by nature what a bath was for. And he did not seem to care that Thibaut’s mother was half a Saracen. His own was all ifritah; or whatever they called her in her own country.

  “I want to be your squire,” said Thibaut.

  Aidan’s brows went up.

  “I’m old enough,” Thibaut said. “I’m trained. I was Gereint’s, before — ” He swallowed, steadied. “I have to be someone’s. It’s expected. I need it. And since you are a prince, and alone, and the best knight in the world — ”

  “No,” said Aidan.

  Thibaut had not heard it. Would not hear it. “You need me. Your rank demands me. I need you. How will I ever make a knight, with my face and my puniness, unless you teach me?”

  “You did well enough before I came.”

  “That was before,” said Thibaut. “Now I’ll never be satisfied with less.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that that is impudence?”

  Thibaut blushed, but faintly. “It’s true.” After a moment he added, “My lord.”

  Aidan smiled. For him, that was restraint. He laid his hands on Thibaut’s shoulders and looked him in the eyes. Thibaut stared, fascinated. Aidan shook him with a whisper of his true strength; even that was enough to rattle Thibaut’s bones. “Listen to me, Thibaut. Listen well. I am honored that you think me worthy of your service. I would be honored to accept it. But I cannot.”

  “Why?”

  Aidan’s breath hissed. He seemed as much amused as angry. But through it he was somber, and that somberness quelled Thibaut utterly. “Because, Thibaut. Yesterday I swore an oath, and that oath binds me. I cannot — dare not — allow another to share it.” He paused, as if he waited for Thibaut to ask, but Thibaut could not. “I swore to exact payment for Gereint’s death. I swore to exact it from the Lord of the Assassins himself, in his own person, and to stop at nothing until I should have done it.”

  His hands tightened on Thibaut’s shoulders. Thibaut gasped, but he was strong. He did not cry out. “Now do you understand?” Aidan demanded of him. “Now do you comprehend why I must be alone?”

  “No,” said Thibaut.

  Aidan let him go so suddenly that he fell against the parapet. He righted himself, shaking, but trying to hide it. His voice came out as a squeak, until it steadied somewhere between alto and high tenor. “He was never of my blood, but he was my kin. He was all the father I ever knew. It is my right to share in taking his blood-price.”

  Aidan looked at him. Thibaut knew what he saw.

  The prince’s face twisted. “You’ll make a man,” he said, as if to himself. But then: “No, Thibaut. I have defenses against Assassins. You have none. And they will strike you. Believe me, Thibaut. They will.”

  “That’s so whether I stay with you or no. Mother won’t tell me, but I know. I’m marked. They’ll come against me next. At least, with you, I’ll have a little hope. Of defending myself. Of taking revenge for Gereint.”

  “You should have been a scholar,” said Aidan. “You argue like one.” He rose abruptly. “Your mother will have my hide.”

  And Thibaut’s. But Thibaut was too rapt in bliss to care. He had what he had wanted since he was old enough to understand Gereint’s stories.

  He did not want to be alone any longer. He smiled at the prince’s black scowl, and knelt there in the sun on the broken tower. He laid his hands on Aidan’s knees; he said the words that made him the liege man of the Prince of Caer Gwent. The Prince of Caer Gwent accepted them. He did it roughly, without pleasure, but he did it. “And on your head be it,” he said.

  oOo

  It was true, Thibaut saw to his own satisfaction. Aidan looked different when he was by himself, or with people who knew what he was. In hall, among strangers, he seemed remarkable still, but humanly remarkable: a tall young man with a strikingly handsome face. Even his pallor was dimmed, that that would never be anything but startling in a country where every man was burned either black or scarlet by the sun.

  “He’s as white as a maid,” someone said in Thibaut’s hearing.

  “God knows, he doesn’t fight like one,” said someone else.

  “Why, have you seen him?”

  “Seen him? He’s knocked me clean over the crupper.” The man sounded anything but ashamed to confess it. “Here, I forget — you’ve been mewed up in court. We had a bit of tourney in Acre, a sennight back. Nothing of consequence, merely a handful of challengers and a few wagers made. There’s been the usual crop of tyros on the boat from Saint Mark, cocky as they always are, and stinking to high heaven. But that one was as fresh as a girl, and someone remarked on it as you did, and someone else took it up, and one way and another we were all hot to muss his pretty curls for him.

  “We had pity on his innocence. We matched the weakest of us with him. You can imagine what happened.”

  The other apparently could not. His eyes were on the slender figure in black, bending over a lady’s hand, dwarfed beside her great blond-bearded consort.

  “It was,” said the knight from Acre, “surprising, if not incontestable. Yet. It could have been blind luck. He was holding back, we found out soon enough. And he kept on doing it. I dared to think I had him, till I found myself flat on my back, staring at the sky.

  “Then he lost his temper. I don’t know precisely what set him off: I was still taking inventory of my bones. I think someone accused him of mocking us, and challenged him to show us what he could do.

  “Now, mind, we were limping and groaning and sweating from the heat, but he was as fresh and cool as a flower in a lady’s garden. He’d changed horses twice, taking offers of mounts more used to the climate than the one he’d brought from the west. They were good horses, not nags or rogues: we were fools, but we were honest fools. I remember, he had Riquier’s big grey, and Riquier rides him on a bit-shank a span long, but our lad had the reins on the beast’s neck and was guiding him with his shins. He rode down the lists with his lance in rest, and though he had his helm on we knew he was glaring at us. Then he lowered his lance at the one who’d armed to keep us company, but who’d never meant to fight, and no one was minded to challenge him.”

  “Balian, of course,” said the other.

  “Balian,” the knight agreed. “Of course. We’ve all done our share of listening to troubadours. So, obviously, had the boy from the west. Of course we tried to talk the young fool out of it. Balian is a man in his full strength, Balian is seasoned, Balian is the unconquered champion of Outremer.

  “‘Therefore,’ said the westerner, ‘I will fight with him.’

  “He meant it. Lances first, then if neither would yield, swords, until one either yielded or was hurt too badly to go on. Balian was hardly willing. He’s a gentle enough soul, when he’s not breaking lances. But a challenge is a challenge, and Balian understands young men’s hunger for honor. He could give that even with defeat.

  “You know how it goes in any tourney. The knights take their places at the ends of the lists. The destriers champ and snort and shake the ground with their pawing. The world holds its breath. Then the lord raises his hand. The lances come down. The shields come up. The horses lumber into motion. It’s dream-slow; then it’s blurringly fast.

  “Even before the lances met, we knew what we were seeing. God knows, there are no knights in the world to compare with ours in Outremer; and often we’ve seen it proven, with every ship that comes out of the west, and every sunstruck cockerel who fancies himself a champion.

  “This one was cockerel enough, but he could ride a joust. He broke his lance on Balian’s shield, and Balian broke his on the westerner’s, and neither even swayed in the saddle. They’d been testing, we could see. Neither said a word that we could hear, but they stopped in the same instant, dismounte
d, and set to with swords.

  “Now, Balian can ride, but it’s with the sword that he excels, and it’s with the sword that he’s held his title so long. His arm is made of iron and his wind is unbreakable, and he has an eye like a Cairene cutpurse. There are men who’d swear that he sees a stroke coming before his opponent has even thought of it.

  “And here he’d met his match. Soon enough they had their helms off, and they were grinning like boys on a lark, but going at it with all they had. Or Balian was. The other was still — still! — holding back. Till Balian saw, and his grin went wild, and he struck in grim earnest. Struck, if the other slipped the merest degree, to kill.

  “And the other saw, and he smile never wavered, but I saw the glitter in his eye. He turned that stroke, and he sent the sword spinning out of Balian’s hands, and he laid his point against Balian’s throat, gentle as a mother’s kiss. ‘You’ll make a swordsman,’ he said.”

  There was a long pause, with breaths drawn sharply in it. Then: “By the Cross! Did Balian kill him for it?”

  “Balian? Balian cursed him in three languages, and then asked him if he’d mind taking on a pupil.”

  Thibaut grinned to himself. The tale had won an audience, and they were all trying not to goggle. No one was suggesting, Thibaut noticed, that the young cockerel was not as young as he seemed. Rhiyana was small and very far away, and played little part in western wars and none in those of the east. No one here knew what its king was. And as for his brother...

  People would believe what they wanted to believe. That had always been Gereint’s wisdom and his safety. His lineage was not a thing to speak of where a stranger could hear it. He had been a little afraid, sometimes, when he talked of his uncle’s coming, though he laughed at himself. “He’s older than I, and wiser, and he’s long learned to seem, if not ordinary, at least human. And yet... he is what he is. He never lies about it. If someone asks him direct...”