The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  But to waste it all on a chit of a girl...

  King Gwydion’s Jew met them near the Temple wall and told them that his son had vanished, too. That gave them two targets to aim for. Ranulf was polite to the Jew, though Aimery would have told him to go back to his prayers and leave the hunt to proper men. The Jew went away toward the cattle market; Ranulf’s party paused, debating. Some were minded to go back and see if Ysabel had come home by herself. Ranulf told them grimly to go on hunting.

  Aimery had time to think. He was angry and he was tired and he was disgusted with all of it, but his mind was clear enough. They were not going about this in the right way. They were thinking like grownfolk; not like a child.

  He kept on thinking, trudging in his father’s wake, peering into doorways and alleys, sometimes calling his sister’s name. Suppose that he was a girl, and Ysabel, and mad at her family for expecting her to act like a properly brought up child. He would want to run away, and do it thoroughly. Which, since she was Ysabel, meant very thoroughly indeed.

  The others were afraid that she might not be staying away of her own will. Aimery doubted that. Another girl, maybe. Not Ysabel. Ysabel never did anything she did not want to do.

  They stopped by Lady Margaret’s house, and the porter was waiting for them with wine and a bite to eat, but no news. Aidan had not been told. Everyone agreed that that was best. He had troubles enough without this; and, said the porter, he had been persuaded to sleep a little, with his brother watching over him. The Lady Morgiana was gone, no one knew where. No one suggested that Ysabel might be with her. Which was as well, thought Aimery. If Morgiana had her, she could be anywhere in the world.

  He preferred to think that she was in Jerusalem. Somewhere no one thought to look. Not in a church—that was not like Ysabel; especially if the Jew’s son was with her.

  The men were starting to stumble. His father was as steady as ever, but Aimery could see that he was tired. He was thinking of giving it up; of waiting for morning.

  Almost as soon as Aimery thought it, Ranulf said it. “Back.” His voice was rough. “It’s no use. She’ll turn up on her own, or we’ll go out again in daylight. God knows, it won’t be the first time.”

  No one tried to argue. Aimery held his tongue. He knew he should say something of what he was thinking, and where he thought Ysabel might be. Maybe his father would agree; maybe he would refuse to listen. It would be out of Aimery’s hands. Just as it always was.

  He kept quiet and followed obediently, the good, dull, unnoticed eldest son, doing what his father told him. His mother was waiting up for them; all she could say was, “No?”

  “No,” said Ranulf heavily.

  She hardly saw Aimery at all. Her thoughts were all for Ysabel. She hugged him gingerly against her bulk, kissed him with a preoccupied air, and said, “Bed, now. You’ve done enough for one day.”

  Just as if he had been a child, and not a favored one, at that. He went where he was bidden, where William was already, sound asleep with the lamp flickering low. He had all the blankets, as usual. Aimery lay down in his clothes. Just for a while, to rest his tired feet. Just until the house went quiet.

  o0o

  He started awake. William was still asleep, still wrapped in blankets. All Aimery could see of him was a tuft of straw-colored hair.

  It was dark beyond the lamp’s light, but the air through the opened window had a tang of morning. Aimery combed his hair with his fingers, groped under the bed for his boots.

  Cook was up, baking bread. Aimery’s stomach growled, but he did not stop to appease it. Hakim the porter, as Aimery had hoped, was snoring in the gate. Aimery stepped gingerly over him and eased the gate open. It creaked; he froze. Hakim’s snores never faltered. Aimery slipped out and eased the gate shut. He pulled on his boots. His heart was thudding hard. He had never done anything like this before. A good boy, people said. No rebellion in him.

  Dull.

  He would show them what he was made of.

  The city, like the Mortmains’ cook, woke early. The devout went to mass at dawn. The hungry went in search of food, and the vendors and the shopkeepers obliged them. The gates opened at sunup with the changing of the guard: the night guards yawning off to bed, the day guards coming bright-eyed to their posts. They were not usually so alert, but there was war in the air. That roused them wonderfully.

  They took no notice of Aimery. He was not the only one going out. The first eager pilgrims were straining at the leash, and from the look of them had been doing it for half the night. “We have to do it now,” he heard one of them say in some agitation. “Before the Saracens come and kill us all.”

  He could have thought better of the chivalry of Outremer, Aimery thought. He did not trouble to say it. It never did any good to tax pilgrims with truth.

  Aimery’s step was light as he started up the Mount of Olives and took the turn that led to Gethsemane. He outdistanced the pilgrims soon enough: they kept stopping to marvel, or to burst into tears, or to pray. He was born in this country. He knew how holy it was, but he had to keep on living in it. And, now, hunting for his sister.

  She was not where he had thought she would be. He sagged. He had been so sure. It was what he would have done, and where he would have gone, if he had been Ysabel.

  A sound brought him about. He had his dagger out before he thought.

  The Jew’s son blinked at him sleepily. The head on his shoulder was sound asleep, hopelessly tangled, and indisputably Ysabel’s.

  Aimery let his breath out slowly. They had taken shelter under a tree, half-hidden behind it. Clever of them. He wondered which had thought of it.

  He sheathed his knife and stood over them. He ignored the Jew. He dug his toe into his sister’s side. “Wake up,” he said.

  She came up spitting. Aimery got out of the way. Akiva got hold of her skirt and pulled her down again, and sat on her.

  She settled quickly enough, once she had a chance to wake up. Akiva let her go. She glared at them both, but especially at Aimery. “Where did you come from?”

  “Where do you think?” He planted his fists on his hips. “We’ve been hunting all night. Father is worn to a rag. Mother is furious. Couldn’t you have picked a better time to run away?”

  She went red. Good: he had scored a hit. “They locked me up. I couldn’t stand it.”

  “And why did they lock you up? Because you were acting like a spoiled brat.”

  She scrambled up. “I was not!”

  “You were. You couldn’t think of anybody but yourself.”

  “Was not!”

  “Was.” Aimery curled his lip. “You made a bad day worse. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  He thought she might leap at him; but she stood still, shaking, with her fists at her sides. “I hate you,” she said.

  “Not half as much as I despise you.” He turned his back on her. “You can stay here for all I care. I’ll tell Mother where you are.”

  “That’s all you want, isn’t it? To get some attention from her.”

  His back snapped straight. “Maybe it is. At least I don’t do it by keeping her up all night and making her afraid I’ve been kidnapped. Or worse.”

  He started walking then, toward the city. He refused to look back.

  She caught up with him halfway down. The Jew came more slowly, moving as if he was stiff with sleeping in the open. Aimery ignored them both.

  Ysabel stayed next to him, glaring at the ground in front of her feet. He hoped she felt good and guilty. He doubted she did. She looked purely angry.

  “You don’t hate me,” she said.

  “I didn’t say I did.”

  She let that go for a step or ten. Then: “I don’t like to be despised.”

  “Then stop doing things to earn it.”

  “You’re horrible.”

  “You’re a spoiled baby.”

  “I’m not,” she said. Not as loudly as she had before; not as furiously. “You don’t know what I am. You do
n’t know—why—” She stopped. “You don’t understand.”

  He would have liked to hit her for sounding so condescending. “Maybe I don’t want to.”

  “You never liked me. Not from the first, when you stopped having Mother all to yourself.”

  He would not answer that. She was baiting him; she was pricking his scars to see if he would bleed. He would not give her the satisfaction. He would not even walk faster, to get away from her.

  “She doesn’t love me any more than she loves you. You’re the good one. The one who never gives her trouble. The one she always throws in my face. ‘Aimery listens,’ she says. ‘Aimery knows how to behave. Aimery is what a child ought to be.’”

  Aimery set his teeth. “And of course you would never want to be like that.”

  “I try.” She even sounded as if she meant it. “We aren’t all born good. Some of us have to work at it.”

  “Not very hard, from the looks of it.”

  She kicked a pebble viciously. It skipped down the hill, over a pilgrim’s foot, into a tuft of grass. “Why don’t you just shut up?”

  He shut up. They went the rest of the way in silence, with Akiva trailing behind, offering no intercession. Wise of him. Between the two of them, just as between the Christians and the Saracens, there would never be more than an armed truce.

  13.

  Aidan flung the pen across the room. It pierced the plastered wall as if it had been a dagger, with a splatter of ink raying out from it. He thrust himself up and away from the table with its ledgers, its rollbooks, its manifold minutiae of a prince’s preparation for war.

  His seneschal watched him, a little pale about the eyes, but carefully calm.

  And that drove him as wild as any of the rest of it. They were all indulging him with heroic patience. Coaxing him back to his house; giving him ample tasks to occupy his mind; sitting quiet through his blasts of temper. Time would settle him, they told one another sagely. Time and a good fight, which he would get, once the king had called up the levies. His portion of which he was purportedly attending to now, this morning that should have been the morning after his wedding night, with his wedding denied him and his lady hunting without him and only the war left to console him.

  Aidan stalked from table to wall and back, snatching the pen as he passed, dropping it under Master Gilbert’s nose. “What in the world can I do here,” he demanded, “that you cannot do better?”

  “Wield the authority of your position,” Master Gilbert answered, “my lord.”

  Aidan snarled at him. “What authority? What position? What do I have at all, that matters in the slightest?”

  “Your life.” That was not Gilbert, and well for him that it was not, or he would have taken a stroke for it.

  Aidan turned on his brother. Gwydion had a look about him that Aidan almost welcomed: of patience carefully sustained, and calm that had nothing in it of passivity.

  “You need,” said Gwydion judiciously, “to hit something. Will I do?”

  Aidan regarded him, narrow-eyed. Something was blooming in him; something black, with fire in it. “A match, brother?”

  Gwydion inclined his head. “A match.”

  o0o

  They could have done it naked, without weapons, as they often had: wrestling to a fall, or dancing to best of three. But Aidan’s mood wanted something deadlier, and Gwydion was minded to oblige him. It was not, by God’s bones, indulgence. It was temper needing to match itself with temper, and body with body, more perfectly equal than any other in the world.

  They put on mail and took up the heavy practice swords, blunt beside the fine steel of their Damascus blades but quite lethal enough. Neither was minded to ward his head with a helm, though they wore the padded cap under the mail-coif. Image looked at image and grinned, white and fierce. “Already I feel better,” Aidan said.

  Gwydion smiled. “We’ll see how you feel when I’m done with you.”

  “I’ll try not to gloat over my victory.”

  “Victory, would it be? En garde, then, braggart, and may the devil take the hindmost!”

  Aidan laughed and fell to.

  o0o

  The sound of blade clashing on blade would have been guide enough, even without the mask-faced Saracen who had conducted them from the door. Evrard de Beaumarchais, who considered himself King Guy’s friend, glanced at the brace of lordlings who accompanied him, and then ahead, to the light at the end of the passage and the bare swept courtyard and the two who fought in it. There were others about: more Saracens, a Rhiyanan or three, a scatter of servants.

  Evrard neither liked nor disliked the lord of Millefleurs. This was a kingdom of fighting men, and Prince Aidan was as good a fighting man as any in it. That made him worthy of respect, whatever else he was; and whatever he chose to share his bed and his board.

  He was in fine form this morning. Both of him.

  Evrard blinked and shook his head. Of course the other would be his twin, the Rhiyanan king. It was like watching a man and his shadow, or a battle of mirrors. Without blazons to mark them, without any distinction of expression or movement or skill with the sword, there was no telling which was Aidan and which was Gwydion.

  This was no simple practice bout. There was real force in those sweeping blows. Almost, Evrard would have said, real anger; real enmity. Neither held back, and neither gave quarter. They were faster than anything natural should have been, weighted down with mail in the sun, and wielding the great coarse cudgels that were the two-handed broadswords. Even as Evrard stared, one of them melted from beneath a stroke that should have cloven him, and slashed round as quick as a cat, and struck at the other’s neck. But there was cold steel between, and eyes the color of steel, and a smile like a sword’s edge. They froze so, blade crossing blade, eye crossing eye. “Yield?” said one.

  “Never,” said the other.

  The first laughed. The second smiled. They lowered their blades and closed in a sudden, breathless embrace.

  Still with their arms about one another’s shoulders, bright-eyed, streaming with sweat, they thrust back coifs and caps from wetly matted heads, and seemed for the first time to notice that they were not alone. The one who had smiled raised a brow. The one who had laughed shook his hands out of their sheaths of mail and ran them through his hair. Both his brows went up. “Sir Evrard. Sir Thierry; Sir Wulfram. To what do I owe the honor?”

  Evrard was surprised to realize how much it mattered that he know which of them was which. Now that they were still, he could see how truly still the king was, and how subtly restless the prince, like a flame in a windowless room. He bowed to the elder first, but it was to the younger that he spoke. “We give you greeting, my lord prince. Perhaps you would prefer to recover yourself before we speak? Privily,” he added with a glance about, but not quite at the king.

  Aidan’s frown deepened, and Evrard went briefly cold. If the tales were true—if he could know without being told—

  But he seemed quiet enough, and while he was not visibly delighted, he was sufficiently courteous. He saw them settled in a cool and airy room with wine and cakes and sherbet and a servant to wait on them, while he went to divest himself of his armor.

  He did not keep them waiting unduly long: only long enough to wash and put on cotte and hose, plain enough both, but rich enough not to insult their dignity. He brought no one with him; once he had accepted a cup of sherbet, he sent the servant away. He raised the cup to his lips, but barely drank before he set it down. “Well?” he said.

  Evrard cleared his throat. It had seemed a wise course when he was persuaded to follow it. Now, he was not so certain. He found himself wondering why he was chosen, and not someone of greater rank; not one of those who had contrived the message. He was good with words, he knew that. He was not notably inclined to cowardice. And yet...

  He had commanded troops in the field. He knew what he was being used for. His folly for being so blinded by the honor that he could not see it sooner.

&
nbsp; Whatever else he was, he was no coward. He clung to that as he looked into the white hawk-face. He had never seen it so close or so clear. It was not so young after all. Or so pretty. There was something disturbing in the cast of it; in the set of the eyes in it, in the way they looked out from under the slanting brows.

  He swallowed hard and made himself speak. “My lord prince, I come with these my fellows, not as a single man—though I believe in what I have to say—but as one who speaks for a number of those in the High Court. A very fair number, my lord. You may be assured of that.”

  The prince waited. It was not patience.

  “We share your distress in what has befallen you, and regret that it should have come upon you. We deplore the deception, if deception it is. Yet, for all of that...” Evrard paused to draw a breath. Still the prince did not move or speak. “For all of that, my lord, under the circumstances, might it not be for the best? You must be aware of what is said by those of little wisdom and less perception, but more power in the kingdom than can readily be ignored. That a great lord should be so closely allied with the Saracen; that he should have tamed an Assassin. That there might be more than alliance. That there might be—” Almost, he could not say it. “That there might be treachery.”

  The prince laughed. It was a sound exactly like that of his blade upon his brother’s. “Yes, I know what people say. More maybe than you think. What you’re admitting to—that is a lie.”

  “No doubt,” said Evrard uneasily. “On your side, no doubt at all. On another... My lord. This is not a pleasure, you must believe me. But that it is necessary—that I know.”

  “Then why don’t you come out and say it, and get it over?”

  Sweet, those words; one remembered that the one who spoke them was a singer. One also remembered that he was the best knight in Outremer. And maybe more than that. Very likely more than that.

  Evrard did as he was told. “My lord, I speak no word of betrayal, not without proof. That is, of betrayal of the kingdom. What else there may be—my lord, it has been brought to our notice by those whose veracity can be tested, that there may be more than the impediment of religion between yourself and your betrothed. That she may be—”