by Judith Tarr
A strangled sound brought him about. Morgiana was there, struggling valiantly not to laugh.
She had been nowhere in the courtyard a moment ago; nor anywhere in the house.
Her face glistened with spray; sparks of it glinted in her hair. He blushed. The laughter burst out of her. “Why, brother! You’re no more dignified than Aidan is.”
“That is a secret I would rather you kept.”
His stiff reply made her grin. She danced round the fountain, as graceful and fierce as a she-leopard on the hunt, and whirled to a halt on the rim beside him. Her cheeks were nigh as brilliant as his; her eyes brimmed with mirth. “Three more days,” she said.
“Only three.”
“Three too many.” She hugged herself and rocked. “Do you know what I ran away from? Harpies! I can prepare myself quite satisfactorily. Why in the world do I need an army of servants to help me do it?”
“Because your betrothed is a prince,” Gwydion said, “and you will therefore be a princess.”
“Ya Allah! Is that what a princess is? Shepherd to a flock of bleating women?”
“You might say that.”
She hissed through her teeth. “Then I suppose I should endure it.” Her brows knit. “It’s not that I mind women’s talk. It’s that they think they own me. I am my own woman!”
“And theirs, if you would wed their prince.”
She reached out with perfect ease and worried a tangle out of his hair. “Before it dries,” she said, “and sets in knots.” She set to work on the rest with a comb plucked out of the air, and a light deft hand.
His hair was thick and not quite straight; it loved to knot and tangle, and it never submitted meekly to discipline. Morgiana muttered over it, but happily enough; it was something else which put the growl in her voice. “I’m not to see my lord again until the wedding. For propriety, they tell me.”
“And because he has been seized and sequestered by the hordes of his servants.”
“That would never stop me,” she said.
“Why not, for the game’s sake?”
“What if I wake in the night and want him?”
“In three days’ time you shall have him, and no force in earth or heaven shall sunder you.”
“As Allah wills it.” It was a sigh. She smoothed the last stubborn knot. “It might be good for my lord, at that. He can cleanse his soul with self-denial.”
“That is a suitably Christian penance,” said Gwydion.
She laughed. “For him, certainly. For me...what grace is in heaven, that I have two such faces to look at, and one is not forbidden me.” She paused. “Or is it?”
“Only if you want to do more than look.”
“Would you let me?”
“As I love my brother,” he said, “no. Or would you have the priests forbid you ever to marry him at all?”
“They wouldn’t dare.”
“If they could prove that we had been more than brother and sister, they would not merely dare. They would bind us with it.”
“Allah!” She looked at him, bare but for his braies and hose, and at herself in chemise and drawers such as a Muslim woman wore in privacy, and went gloriously scarlet.
He brushed her cheek with a finger, cooling the fire in it. She raised a hand to it, surprised. “How did you do that?”
He showed her. There were no words for it. One sensed the hurt, so; one reached, so; and it was done.
“Ah,” she said in sudden understanding. She reached, so; and went out like a candle’s flame.
His mind snatched at the emptiness where she had been, a stroke of pure terror.
She staggered out of air and fell into his arms.
He steadied her carefully. She barely noticed. Her eyes were furious. “That,” she said, “was not what I meant to do.”
“What did you do?”
She showed him. One focused oneself, so; one reached, so.
If one had the gift.
“I can ease pain, a little,” she said.
“I can only vanish as humans do, by being quick and quiet.”
She measured him, narrow-eyed. “Aidan can do it if he tries. It makes him ill.”
“He told me,” said Gwydion, “when he wanted to come to Rhiyana, if only for a night, and found that he couldn’t.”
“Poor love, he wanted so much to have the art, and the price on it is too high.”
“Yet you do it as you breathe.”
“That is not always an advantage.”
“No,” he said. “I can see that it is not.”
“One is never solid,” she said. “The earth is always shifting. One dreams a place, and wakes in it, and sometimes the people there are not pleased.”
“It might startle them somewhat,” he said with a touch of irony.
She nodded. “They shriek, you see. Even the men. And snatch bedclothes, if they have any.”
“And send thanks up to heaven for sending them so splendid a dream.”
“Some of them,” she said. “Your brother did, before he knew me.”
“And often since.”
“He curses me, too, sometimes, and wonders what he did to deserve me.”
“Every man should do penance for his sins.”
“So he says. So should I do: the better to sin hereafter.” She swooped toward him. Her kiss was brief, but it burned. “For remembrance,” she said.
She was gone. He was speechless. And, he discovered, no longer sunk in gloom. Whether he wanted to laugh or to curse her, he had lost the fine edge of his melancholy. He was almost fit for human company again.
Or at least for Aidan’s. The prince did not know yet that his bride had decided, late as it was, to be properly chaste. When he learned it, he might need his brother’s steadying hand.
Gwydion knew duty when it beckoned. He put on shirt and cotte, and followed where it led.
8.
By the morning of his wedding, Aidan had reached a fine pitch of temper. Morgiana was taken away from him, walled up in Lady Margaret’s house. He should have had diversions enough, with all the mischief the young bloods of court and city could devise for a new bridegroom, but he did not want mischief. He wanted Morgiana.
He had at least got rid of most of the army that had haled him out of bed. There were enough still to make a princely number, first in the bath, then to cut his hair and beard and to be growled at when they would have curled and scented one or both, and to stand over him while he resisted a sop of fine white bread in wine and spices.
“Eat it,” said Gwydion, sitting by him and taking his own advice. “You may not want it now, but your stomach is sure to object, loudly, when you most need it to be still.”
“What, do you think I’ve never been out in public before?” But Aidan took the bowl, regarded its contents without favor, choked down a bite or two. His stomach clenched.
Gwydion came round behind him and worked deft, merciless fingers into the knots of neck and shoulders and back. His stomach settled, only a little, but enough to accept what he fed it. There was cheese with the bread, and an orange from his own trees. He found that he had an appetite after all.
Gwydion’s approval flowed warm and tingling through Aidan’s skin. “You were always more sensible than I,” he said.
Aidan slanted a glance over his shoulder.
“Truly,” said Gwydion. “Do you remember the morning of my wedding?”
Aidan snorted. “Remember it? How could I forget? You drank enough wine at dinner the night before to sink the fleet, and never mind that it was no more to you than a moment’s dizziness; then you refused to sleep, because, you said, if you did you might wake and find it all a dream; and when we came to dress you, you had decided that Christian marriage was not what you wanted at all, and you tried to convince me that I should take the crown and you should elope with the lady. I proposed an exchange—you keep the crown, I take the lady—and you did your best to throttle me. You wouldn’t eat, either. Or sit still. Or let anyone nea
r enough to you to dress you. You were almost late to the wedding.”
“You see? Now, you have sense. You drank no more than you should, you roistered only halfway till cockcrow, then you actually slept. And here you sit as calmly as you ever can, with breakfast in you.”
“It would serve you right,” Aidan muttered, “if I lost it all over you.” He swallowed. “Gwydion, do you think we need all this? Muslim marriage is so much simpler. One calls the qadi, he approves the contract, one says the words, it’s over.”
“That’s no more than Christian marriage is,” Gwydion said. “As this is, under the pageantry. Come, brother, would you disappoint all the people who have come to see you wedded?”
“You above all,” Aidan said. “No, I can’t turn coward now, can I? The Patriarch would be too purely delighted.” His smile was ripe with malice. “That’s one pleasure I shouldn’t forgo: to make Heraclius say the words he least likes to say, with the Holy Father’s bidding on him, binding him to it. And knowing all the while that I know what he is; how he intrigued to dispose of my lord Baldwin and set Guy in his place. He failed then; it took Baldwin’s death to give him his victory. But I don’t forget.”
“You are not the most charitable of men,” Gwydion said.
“Why should I be? I’m not a man.” Aidan stood, stretched. His back had tensed again, but the knots were out of it. It was a pleasurable tension, an edge of excitement. “It’s time,” he said in dawning delight. “It’s really time. I’m going to have her as I wanted her, for all the world to see.”
o0o
Morgiana knew no barrier to her own gladness. She could even endure the flutter of women about her, because soon it would be over, and she would be as beautiful as she could be. The maids shared her mood. They loved to be in on the secret; not one had betrayed it, though it was a sore temptation. The Rhiyanan, the princess, who never needed to remind herself not to be afraid of the infamous lady of the Assassins, caught Morgiana’s eye in the mirror and grinned, as wide and white and irrepressible as Aidan himself.
“He is going to fall in love with you all over again,” Elen said.
One of the others giggled. “As if he needed to! My husband tells me he was pawing the ground last night like a stag in rut, and threatening to storm the house and snatch you away. I wish he had,” she said wistfully. “It would have been a sight to see.”
“So would he, when I was finished with him.” Morgiana turned her head from side to side, frowning. “Are you sure I should have my hair in all these braids?”
Elen smoothed the last one into its coil and beckoned. Two of the deftest maids came with the veil, a drift of the finest cobweb silk, and settled it over the woven intricacy of Morgiana’s hair. “You look like a queen,” Elen said. Her grey eyes glinted, wicked. “Only think. How delighted he will be, to take it all down.”
Morgiana blushed. The others laughed. They all knew what a wedding was in aid of; and they all, even those who had husbands with whom they were well content, were a little in love with her prince. The young moon in Ramadan, the Muslims said of him. The fairest knight in the world, the Franks decreed. Even beautiful, hollow King Guy was no threat to his sovereignty.
By the noon prayer it would be done. He would belong to her and she to him, before God and man. God knew it already. Man, being slower to understand, needed proof: this rite and this panoply.
The veil was settled to the maids’ satisfaction. Morgiana met her own eyes in the silver mirror as if they had been a stranger’s. They had decided not to paint her face, after some discussion: it was too pure an ivory, paint would only sully it. There was paint about her eyes, a shimmer only, a whisper of kohl.
She looked like a queen. She, the nameless spirit out of Persia, the Assassin’s servant, the Slave of Alamut. She shivered, cold in her splendor. What was she doing? How had she let it come to this? He was Frank, prince, infidel. He had hated her before she taught him to love her; before he learned to forgive her the murder of his kin. Did he love her now? Or did he only bow to the inevitable?
“There,” said Elen. “There now, it’s perfectly proper to be afraid; and better now than in front of the priest. Cry, even, if you need to. There’s time yet.”
“I can’t cry. I’ll smear the paint.”
“Then we’ll simply put it back on again.”
“No,” said Morgiana, stiffening her back. “I’m no quaking virgin. He will still be he, when we speak the words; and I will still be I. This was decided the first time I saw him. There’s no changing it.”
“Nor do you want to,” said Elen as if she had power and could know. She set a kiss on Morgiana’s cheek, light and warm. “For luck, and for kinship. I’m pleased to have you in our family.”
Morgiana almost broke then. But her temper was stronger than tears. She quelled them with a formidable scowl, and then with the shaky beginning of a smile. “I’m pleased to be in it,” she said.
o0o
No one, seeing the Prince of Caer Gwent ride in procession to his wedding, would have suspected the depth of his morning terrors. They were still there, but buried deep, with his foot set firmly on them. He was all royal, and he knew what beauty he had, he in scarlet silk and cloth of gold, crowned not with gold but with flowers. His mount was a wedding gift from the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, from Saladin himself, a blood-bay mare of the Arab blood, rare for both her height and her quality; she danced beneath him, tossing her head, so that the bells on her caparisons sang silver-sweet. The canopy over him was gold, the bearers his mamluks in scarlet and gold, the rest before him to open his way, and behind him the riding of his friends and his allies and his kinsfolk. He had been astonished to see how many they were. Conrad was up to his tricks again: he had found the best voices among them, men and boys both, and prevailed upon those to ride together, singing. A moment ago it had been a song to set his ears to burning. Now they were chanting as slow and sweet and solemn as monks, and it was good Scripture, but it was hardly meant to cool his blood.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee...
And that was only the beginning of it. Someone had got at Conrad; he knew nothing of Scripture, only holy Koran. Someone was going to pay, and dearly.
Even, he said in his mind, if that someone is my brother.
Gwydion’s laughter, as silent as the words, was all the answer Aidan won.
And after all it was a wedding procession, with all of Jerusalem come to see it pass, and beggars and pilgrims scrambling for the largesse which the pages cast. Copper only, for the ride to the Holy Sepulcher. When he came back with his lady beside him, it would be silver, and at the wedding feast, gold.
Even copper was something to be glad of, if one were a penniless pilgrim. That gladness warmed him; and the blessings that came with it. Simple folk were not as given to cursing him, or to calling him witch and infidel, as were their alleged betters.
He was marveled at, exclaimed over, even loved. It startled him, how many of them had more than liking for him. He did no more for them than a prince should, if certainly no less.
They came down the Street of the Temple and through the market that paused to see them pass, and into David’s Street, and turned right on the Street of the Patriarch, with the dome of Holy Sepulcher high on its hill before them. Another company advanced toward them, singing as they sang, but in the high sweet voices of women.
Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy beloved turned aside? that we may seek him with thee.
My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.
I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.
Aidan’s heart leaped. She was there under a canopy which was the mate of his, on her blood-bay stallion that for looks could have been the brother o
f his mare: a shimmer of green in the bright field of her women, wrapped in veils as she always was, and closed away from his mind. She wanted to come to him all new, as a maiden would; as she had come that first night, and come through fear to lasting joy.
It was all Aidan could do not to spur toward her, scatter all their attendants, sweep her away. His mare would have been glad to do it. She had no more love than he did for this crawling pace.
There was only a little more of it. The hill of Calvary waited, and a path opened for them, cleared of pilgrims; though there were throngs enough of them about, gluttonous for spectacle. He reached it first, as was proper, and left his horse there, and mounted up to the most holy precinct in Christendom.
He hardly saw it, or the great ones crowded into it. His mind, and then his eyes, were all for the figure which guarded the inner gate: the Patriarch of Jerusalem in splendor to rival his own, in a phalanx of acolytes. He was not, despite appearances, forbidding entry to the church. Those who would wed must wed before the door, since what they would do was reckoned both sin and sacrament. Once they had spoken their vows and received the blessing, then they were permitted within. Aidan had insisted on that. There could be no nuptial mass for a bride who was an infidel, but she could hear the day’s mass, and share as much of it with him as her faith would allow.
Heraclius was making the best of it. He was not smiling, but neither was he scowling as blackly as he usually did on sight of Aidan. Aidan loathed him cordially, but today he almost—almost—could love him, because he was going to say the words which Aidan had done ten years’ battle to hear.
Aidan paused in front of him and bowed, and kissed his ring. Heraclius endured it with rigid composure. He did not give Aidan the blessing. Aidan, for the moment, forgave him.
Morgiana had mounted the steep hill and passed through the outer gate between the pillars from Byzantium. Her women fell in about her, but she walked as if she were alone, very small and very erect in that most Christian of holy places, wrapped in her veils. Even her hands and her eyes were hidden. The women’s voices wove through the heavy air, chanting softly now, but clearly.