by Judith Tarr
“But aren’t you already given to Count Raymond?” she asked.
He shook his head, sharp and short. “That’s not what it is. My lady. That’s the allegiance of the world. This is a higher thing. Like—riding in tournaments, and wearing your token on my helm, and making you Queen of Beauty if I win.”
Ah, she thought. He had been listening to troubadours. “My prince might object.”
He wilted visibly. “Yes. He would, wouldn’t he? And he always wins.”
“There will be a lady for you,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
“But never one as fair as you.”
“Beauty is greatest in a lover’s eye.” She did not expect him to understand; she hoped that he would remember. She rose again, held out her hand. “Come, messire. It’s time we went back to Acre.”
2.
The merchants of Genoa had their own quarter in Acre, like a city within the city, warded by its own wall and closed off by its own gate. Where the citizens of St. Mark and the trader princes of Pisa had little more in their quarters than a hostelry and a church or two, the Genoese, who had aided the armies of the first Crusade in the capture of the city, had taken the best of it and made it their own.
In the heart of the quarter, in a house that had sheltered merchant princes since the city was young, five men gathered, ostensibly to examine a new shipment of spices. Jars and vials and packets waited on the table under the awning, should anyone happen upon their meeting.
“Wine?” asked the master of the house.
There were no takers. The youngest of them, who was his son, looked longingly toward the pitcher, but knew better than to ask. The wizened man in the monk’s habit sniffed disapprovingly. His companion seemed asleep. The man in mail had a cup half-full, which he set down to pace along the portico. The others watched him warily. He had an odd, unfinished look, as if there should have been more to him: not quite handsome, not quite ugly; neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair, neither remarkable nor rightly nondescript. One would lose him in a crowd, unless it suited him to be noticed. Then he could draw every eye.
He paused by the table, crumbled a bit of saffron in his fingers, chose a clove and set it on his tongue. He came back still engrossed in the sharp, pungent taste, and sat where he had been before, lapsing into immobility.
Guillermo Seco, merchant of Genoa, shook himself as if from a doze. “So, then, sirs. Are we agreed?”
The plumper of the monks opened an eye. There was no sleep in it, and a fair degree of mockery. “When have human men ever agreed on anything? Be polite, Guillermo. Tell Brother Thomas what we do here.”
“You were to tell him—” Seco broke off. “Very well. As kind as you are to come here so soon, reverend Brother, with your ship barely moored at the quay, you are kinder still to lend us your aid in what we propose.”
“Not exactly,” said the wizened monk. “I said that I would consider your proposal. I never promised to accept it.”
Seco stiffened, but he kept his smile. “Indeed, Brother. Indeed. You know why we are here?”
“Suppose that you enlighten me,” said Brother Thomas.
Seco’s eyes narrowed. He drew a breath, and let it out, focusing his irritation in the words which he intended to say. “We stand against a common enemy: a rival in war and in commerce, and no friend to the King of Jerusalem. If you choose to call us a conspiracy, you may. I prefer to call it a defense of the kingdom against a subtle and deadly threat.”
“Subtle?” the plump monk said. “There are many things which I would call the Prince Aidan, but that is not one of them.”
“Subtle,” said Seco, “in his very unsubtlety. All the world knows what he is and where his sympathies lie, yet no one has ever dared to touch him. While the leper was king, he was the leper’s sworn brother, and no man was permitted to speak against him. When the leper died, when our lord Guy was the rightful regent—husband as he was and is to the Princess Sybilla, and stepfather to the child king—the leper’s favorite cast in his lot against us, and favored the regency of the Count of Tripoli. When the child died, would he acknowledge Sybilla queen, or Guy king by right of law and marriage? He would not. He has made no secret of his contempt. He will not swear fealty to a king who has, he professes for any to hear, no more substance than a poppet on a pole.”
Seco’s son stared. “He actually said that?”
“Word for word,” said the man in mail, “to my brother’s face.”
“He’s mad,” the boy said, awed.
His father quelled him with a look. “‘Mad’ hardly begins to describe him. He lairs in his castle on the border of Syria, among his heathens and Saracens, with infidels in his hall and an Assassin in his bed. The Sultan of Syria is his boon companion; the Old Man of the Mountain has struck bargains with him, and sealed them with the witch’s body.”
“He is also,” drawled the portly monk, “unconscionably rich.”
“The devil’s riches,” Seco said. “He has his hand in the river of Saracen gold.”
“And when you would have dipped your own finger in it, he laughed in your face.” The portly monk yawned. “Leave the sermons to us, Messer Seco. You hate him because he has what you would give your soul to have; what you strive for endlessly but never win, he gains simply by being what he is.”
“A king’s son,” said the boy. “Kin to the House of Ibrahim, who are merchant kings.”
His father did not strike him, but he shrank, paling. “If that were all he was,” Seco said through clenched teeth, “he would be easy prey. Even if he were only a damned traitor, we would know how to deal with him. The Master of the Assassins has never been one to let a prior commitment interfere with present expedience.”
“I gather you tried it,” the portly monk observed.
Seco’s face was crimson; yet he smiled. “I did, Brother Richard. Would you have dared?”
Brother Richard shuddered. “I leave daring to you men of the world. What did the Old Man say?”
“Sinan,” said Seco, “was not minded to interfere. There were reasons, he said. Such as that no wise infidel will cross wits willingly with the jinn.”
“Now we come to it,” Brother Richard said. “You believe that this prince and his tamed Assassin are—what? Minor devils?”
“I know what they are.” They all stared at Brother Thomas, even the motionless and hitherto impervious knight. He swelled under their regard, lifting his narrow chin. “They are,” he repeated. “Devils, witches, unnatural creatures. I know them. I have seen what they can do.”
Seco leaned forward. “Have you, Brother? Have you, indeed?”
“I have studied them,” Brother Thomas said, “since I was sent into Rhiyana as a young man, when Abbot Boniface was the pope’s legate to the Rhiyanan king. I have returned there often since, and observed them as closely as any man may. They are witches, sirs. Have no doubt of that. In their own country they make no secret of it. Any child can see what their king is. I came to Rhiyana as a youth of two-and-twenty, and so did the king seem when first I saw him. Now I count twice that and more, and how does the king seem? As his brother does, sirs. A pretty lad of two- or three-and-twenty.”
“We notice that,” the boy said. “They never change. You’d think they’d have the sense to pretend.”
“Why should they?” said Brother Richard. “They must be, by my reckoning, a good threescore and ten. Or a bad, if you prefer; and the Assassin is older than that. Who has ever touched them?”
“A few have tried,” Brother Thomas said. “None has succeeded. Their people surround them; even their Church defends them. And they have their magic.”
“You talk of it.” The knight sounded eminently bored. “I see no use in it—and no terror, either. The dog and his bitch are devilish young for the years they’re given: granted. Maybe he has help to be as good on the field as he is; maybe she is as deadly with a dagger as rumor makes her. What does that make them but comfortably dangerous? I want that tho
rn out of the kingdom’s side, before it tears a hole wide enough to let the Saracen in. Unfortunately the two of them are powerful enough to make removal difficult unless we catch them in outright treason; and even then we’ll still need them, and the men they can bring to the field.”
“If they bring them at all,” said Seco. “My lord. That is what we do here. If we can separate them from their power, show them to be witches and worse, remove the threat of treachery...”
“A perfectly ordinary impossibility,” said the knight. He stretched out his legs, hands folded over his belt. He did not, for all of that, look like a man at ease. “You want to draw his fangs: well and good. I fail to see what witchcraft has to do with it.”
“Everything,” said Brother Thomas.
The knight’s brows went up.
“Everything,” the monk said again. “What you want, yes, that I can see. The prince and his Assassin may endanger your kingdom; they certainly endanger your king, whose right to the throne they are not eager to accept. Now the brother comes, and he is a crowned king: an all too plausible rival, should he choose to become one. I hear that King Guy is a fair knight but no general, and a wretched statesman. Gwydion of Rhiyana is knight and general and statesman, and enchanter besides.
“No,” Thomas said before the knight could interrupt, “you do not see it. You see only what they wish to reveal. Their beauty and their agelessness—that is the very least of what they are. Even that may be enough in such a kingdom as this is, balanced on the sword’s edge. If the devil raised an army against the Saracen, would you accept it?”
The knight shrugged. “That would depend on the price. If it cost my brother his throne, then no, I wouldn’t. Guy may not be much better than the idiot your witch-prince calls him, but he’s my idiot. I prefer to keep him.”
“Then, my lord, you must take thought for witchery. I know—I know for a certainty—that if one of them wishes to know what we do and say here, then he will know. They can walk in your mind, my lord. They can read your every thought.”
The boy gasped. His father was green-pallid and had begun to sweat. Even Brother Richard seemed uncomfortable.
The knight shivered, but his expression was skeptical. “Why conspire at all, then, if the enemy is omniscient?”
“They are not God,” Thomas said frigidly. “There are ways to elude their scrutiny. Prayer is one. Knowledge is another—if it comes without fear. Their powers are great, but hardly infinite; they are not easily deceived, but they can be distracted. As they must be, if this plot of yours is to succeed.”
“How do you know,” demanded the knight, “that they aren’t spying on us at this very moment?”
“I do not.” Thomas was calm. “I trust in God that they are well occupied with the king’s arrival in the city; too well to care what mere mortals do.”
“Yes,” the knight mused. “They would be that arrogant.” He fixed the monk with a hard stare. “If you’re telling the truth.”
“He is,” Brother Richard said.
“Even so,” said Seco. His voice shook; he struggled to steady it. Bad enough that the one he wanted to break was a witch. It had never occurred to him that that witchery could come to him from far away, and strip his mind bare, and leave him shivering in the dark. Now he understood all his failures, and his enemy’s scorn. The memory burned. “Even so, we have to try. That is why the good Brother is here; apart from his other skills. To teach us how to stand against the sorcerers.”
“If I agree,” said Thomas. “You may escape them if you fail. I must live within their reach.”
“You’ve done it for years already,” the knight said.
“Never so close. Never with so much at stake.”
“True,” said Brother Richard. “You have to consider what this will win you. Death if you fail. If you succeed...maybe only the Elvenking’s discomfiture and his brother’s enmity. Prince Aidan is a bad enemy. His Assassin is worse.”
Seco’s temper flared. “Are you with us or against us?”
“With you, of course,” the monk said placidly. “Someone should be the voice of reason, no? Even with my lord Amalric to help.”
“I admit,” said Amalric, “that I fail to see what you can gain from this. Messer Seco wants profit. I want a threat removed from the kingdom. Your brother monk has his long campaign and, I judge, an old score to settle. What have you?”
“The pleasure of the hunt,” Richard answered him. “And a certain degree of greed. I have a way to make in the world and in the Church. This may make it for me. I found Brother Thomas for you, did I not? Is he or is he not more than you ever dared to hope for?”
“Only if he throws in his lot with us, and sticks to it.”
Brother Thomas sat still under their eyes, refusing to be hurried. “What you ask me to do, I can do, if you will supply me with the wherewithal. Whether I will do it...I have lived my life to bring these demons to the justice of holy Church. Should I chance defeat by striking too soon?”
“It will be a worse defeat if you strike too late.” Amalric measured him. “Whatever the King of Rhiyana may be, you’re no boy. Would you wait so long for just the right moment, that it never comes at all?”
Brother Thomas stiffened. That blow had struck home. Amalric’s mouth stretched with the beginnings of a smile. “They never grow old; they may never die. Can you outwait them?”
“I can judge my moment,” Thomas snapped. “Very well. You can do nothing without me, innocents that you are in the ways of witchkind. For Christian charity, I will help you.”
“For Christian charity,” said Amalric, nodding sagely. “Yes. Indeed. How else?”
Thomas’ look was not kind, but he was a man of God, and a man of his word. He held his peace.
3.
The cloth was on the table at last, the hall hung with silk and scented with rosewater, the servants in fresh livery and the children in their best clothes. The dogs were banished to the kennels, Ranulf’s falcon to the mews. Ranulf himself was caught, scrubbed, and bullied into a cotte befitting a baron of Acre. He looked well in it, if not precisely comfortable. Age-softened wool and well-worn leather would always suit him better than silk.
Joanna, whose own rich gown was rather tighter in the middle than she would have liked, gave it a last, exasperated tug, and turned to her husband. “How terrible is it?” she asked.
Ranulf looked her over. “You look,” he said, “magnificent.”
“Angry, you mean. Like a sausage in a casing.”
“Sausages look angry?”
He was laughing at her. She aimed a cuff at his head, stopped short of ruffling his newly combed hair. It was thinner than it had been, and the gold was fading to dun and grey, but he was still a handsome man. She bared her teeth at him. “And it’s all your fault, sir.”
“I’m doing penance for it,” he said, flexing his shoulders in the cotte. “Don’t you think—”
“No! I don’t, and you won’t. Quick, out, or they’ll be here before we’re ready for them.”
As it happened, they were not. The lord and lady of Mortmain were in the courtyard when their guests rode in, as calm to look at as if a king dined at their table every day. Aimery, stiffer with pride than with his new cotte, was there to take the king’s bridle. Joanna took note that he did not stare, though there was plenty to stare at.
It was true. They were exactly alike. It was dizzying to see one on the tall grey gelding and the other on the tall grey mare; one in the Saracen coat and one in blue embroidered with silver; one bareheaded, the other with his hood on his shoulders. They had the same long-limbed grace, the same light touch on the rein, the same effortless ease in the saddle.
Joanna’s knees wanted to melt. Twins were nothing uncanny. Aidan’s Kipchaks were imps out of Hades, but they were human enough for all that.
These looked it, well enough: tall, white-skinned, black-haired young men with eagles’ faces. There was a glamour on them, blurring their fierce alien beaut
y, dimming the light that shone out of them. But she knew. She saw what they were, with doubled intensity.
One of them smiled at her. That was Aidan. It caught her breath in her throat, and then it steadied her.
How had she imagined that they were indistinguishable? The other was quiet, almost muted, with a fierce edge beneath; fiercer maybe than Aidan’s own. He dismounted without the flourish that his brother put into it, and greeted her in a voice, with an accent, so like the other’s that she glanced aside, half expecting trickery.
The king’s eyes glinted. She smiled before she knew it, and sank down in the best curtsy she was capable of. His hands as he raised her were narrow and uncannily strong. Familiar, and utterly different.
Then he was past, greeting Ranulf, Margaret, the children in order. There was a gap in the ranks; she looked harder, and it was filled. Ysabel seemed flushed and a little breathless. Later, Joanna promised herself, she would find out what the child had been up to.
“Don’t trouble,” Aidan said in her ear. She started, caught herself. He was at his ease, damn him, and so happy that he shone. “She was with us.”
“All this time? But—”
“But.” He leaned a fraction closer. Not quite touching. He never, quite, touched. “No harm done, though one fine day I’ll take a strap to her. She’s getting too clever for her own good.”
Ysabel, demure between her smaller, plumper sisters, was engrossed in the king’s greeting. Joanna’s brows lowered. “I never even knew that she was gone.”
“You were busy.” Aidan sighed a little, shrugged. “She did want to see my brother. I expect she’ll behave herself now that she’s done it. For a while.”
“For just as long as it takes her to find some new bit of mischief.” Joanna drew herself up. Her back was aching. Again. “Enough of that. Where’s Aimery? Ah. Here, sir, run to the hall and tell the steward to be ready. We’ll be in directly.”
She was running away, and he had to know it as well as she. He did not try to stop her. He never did.