The Dagger and the Cross

by Judith Tarr

  “Miraculous,” someone said.

  “Useful,” Raymond observed.

  “Mad,” the bishop protested. “We can’t do this. We can’t call on witches; no matter how benign their powers may seem. We’ll damn ourselves.”

  “Would you rather we lost the battle?” Raymond asked sweetly.

  The bishop sputtered into silence. Aidan regarded him almost with affection. “Excellency, you have every reason to be afraid, but you must believe us when we say that there’s nothing of the devil in us. We don’t work black sorcery. We can’t.”

  “Which is rather a pity,” Amalric said. “If you were evil enchanters, you could call up a horde of devils and sweep the enemy away.”

  “Why not an army of angels?” asked Guy.

  “We’re hardly so well connected,” Aidan said dryly. “Are you, your excellency? Maybe if you put in a word with the Almighty, Saint Michael would send a wing or two.”

  The bishop signed himself with the cross. Before he could burst out in rebuke, Gwydion said, “Peace, brother.” And to the council at large, with great and kingly patience: “We will do what we can. I regret that it is so little. Your strength will decide the day; ours will but bolster it. If you will accept it.”

  Guy glanced about. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to decide. He shifted nervously. “No spells on any of us. Promise us that.”

  Gwydion’s face was quiet, his voice touched with the merest whisper of stiffness. “None but what you yourselves ask for.”

  Guy was still not persuaded, even though he had been the one to do the asking. “You can fight, too? While you’re doing—that?”

  “My brother can,” Gwydion said.

  “Then do it,” Guy said all at once, gasping as if he had run a race. “Do what you can. Help us get out of this trap.”

  This trap into which he had led them. Gwydion bowed his head a fraction and rose to go. No one ventured to stop him.

  o0o

  Aidan stayed until the council wound down. He found Gwydion in front of their tent, lying on a pallet, staring sleepless at the stars. He did not turn when Aidan hunkered down beside him, but said, “They didn’t decide much.”

  “They never do.” Aidan wriggled. He had been in mail for two nights now; it was past being uncomfortable and into excruciating. Gwydion, reckless, was down to his shirt and braies. He looked cool and comfortable and almost clean.

  Aidan decided abruptly. He shed his chausses and his coif, and after a moment the mail-coat and the sweat-sodden gambeson. The air was heaven on his skin. He wished futilely and desperately for a bath; though if he had had one he would have drunk it dry. He settled for a scrubbing with a twist of grass, and the clean shirt and breeches which Aimery, owl-eyed but wide awake, brought him. The boy stayed when Aidan lay down, crouched by the tent pole with his chin on his knees. Aidan let him be. He would sleep soon enough.

  “If your patience weren’t a legend already,” Aidan said, “tonight it would be. What kept you from blasting that idiot where he sat?”

  “Nothing,” said Gwydion. “That’s why I left. Am I a fool, do you think? Should I have stayed and given my temper its head?”

  “No,” Aidan said after a moment. “No, you were wise, as you always are. And clear-sighted. There really is a warding on the enemy: I searched it out while the barons wrangled. It’s subtle. How did you find it?”

  “By being a witch,” Gwydion answered. “Hunting for ways to win us free of this. The sultan is better warded than Guy ever was.”

  “Yes,” Aidan said. He was silent for a while. Stretching his power; touching the edge of a ban, a dome of air and darkness over the armies of the enemy. Then at last he said it. “I know who it is.”

  “So do I.”

  Aidan rubbed his hand over his face, tugging viciously at his beard. “Of course she would be there. I’m here, aren’t I? She was fighting for Islam before we were even born.”

  His eyes blurred. He blinked, furious. He had no water to spare for tears. “And I didn’t know. I didn’t—even—know.”

  Gwydion held him till he finished shaking. It was more shock than grief. And joy, though that was mad. She was there. Fighting for the enemy, hating him, but there. Maybe he would die; maybe she would kill him. But he would see her again.

  “God,” Aidan said. “God, God, God.” He pulled out of his brother’s arms. “I wish we hadn’t gone prowling. Then we’d still be merely desperate, instead of hopeless.”

  “There is hope,” said Gwydion.

  “I don’t know if I want any.” Aidan flung back his head. The stars stared down. He glared back. “Damn her. Damn both of us.”

  o0o

  Around midnight, as the camp lay in uneasy sleep, the enemy moved. More sorties; more flights of arrows. None found a target. None was meant to. For with them came a clamor to wake the dead. Trumpets; kettledrums; the clatter of the nakers that were the sultan’s alone; the blare of brass and the shrilling of pipes, and all the hideous tumult of the Saracens’ battle music. And voices with it, war-cries, shouts and mockery and the ululation of the faithful: Allah-il-allah! Allahu akbar!

  They swept in upon the camp; they brought the Christians to their feet, swords in hand, braced for battle. And then abruptly they stopped. No attack came. The camp subsided slowly, shaking with reaction. Horses needed to be soothed, men to be bullied back to what rest they could muster.

  Just as they settled, it came again. Again they were beaten out of sleep; again they braced for an assault that never came. Again the enemy ended it and withdrew.

  And so it went, all night long. Aidan’s senses, keen as they were, were in torment. After the third feint he gave up any hope of sleep and struggled into his armor again, hating the way it weighed upon him. It did not stink as a human man’s would; but that was little comfort when everyone about him, except for Gwydion, was human and filthy and reeking to high heaven.

  By the dark before dawn, the Franks were too exhausted even to stir when the enemy burst shrilling out of the night. Saladin let them be after that. He had gained what he wanted, which was to add sleeplessness to thirst and hunger. What little rest they could manage between the end of his last sortie and sunrise was hardly enough to go to battle on.

  When the sun was full up, promising a day as scorchingly hot as the one before it, the trumpets roused the Franks to choke down what they could of dry rations, and to arm and break camp. Word went among the commanders: They would try again for the wells at Hattin.

  The army gathered together as well as it might on the broken ground. The ridge was empty of Saracens. The plain was ringed with them, camped at their ease in their bright tents, idling about and, no doubt, laughing at the poor driven sheep of unbelievers.

  The trumpets sang the command to march. The army seemed to take life and strength from the sound and from the prospect of battle, with water to be won at the end of it. They took the formation which was most deadly to the enemy: a shield-circle of infantry, bristling with spears, and the cavalry within, to be flung like a dart when it was most needed. Like one great, deadly creature, they began to move.

  Saladin was waiting for them, a wall of men and horses athwart the way to the wells. The Franks barely paused. They came on at a steady pace, step by step.

  The clamor that had driven them mad all night, began again under the sun: a booming of drums, a braying of trumpets, a skirling of pipes. The great line of Islam began to move. The center held its place with the sultan in the back of it, settled on an eminence with a canopy over him, ruling the battle. The wings closed upon the Franks, with a hail of arrows before it and a thunder of hoofs and the cries of men and horses.

  The Franks ground to a halt. Arrows gave way to flung spears and then to swords, as the Saracens closed in. The infantry dug in their heels, standing like stones in the millrace of Islam.

  The first to reach them was one from the very center: a man alone, all undefended, in the yellow coat of the sultan’s mamluks. He c
ame singing, gloriously reft of his senses, emptying his quiver and then flinging his spears and then, with a clear cry to his God, drawing his sword and falling on the line. A spear spitted his horse. A Christian sword hewed him down.

  His army descended, howling for revenge.

  The knights, penned in, broiling slowly in the sun, were like to go mad with idleness. The Master of the Templars sent again and again to the king. A charge, he begged. Let us make a charge. Again and again the king sent back: No. Wait. You’ll have your time.

  The sun crawled up the sky. The footsoldiers fought against wave after wave of Saracens. Each broke, poured round the army’s flanks, sought gaps and hollows, flooded past the rear and then away, back to their sultan on his hill. A full third of his army, his own picked men, had not fought at all. They rode their horses up and down, easily, or leaned on their spears, or drank often and deeply from flasks which were refilled as often as they emptied.

  Some of the Franks had hoarded wine from God knew where. It was potent without water to thin it, and the more so for that they were so dry, but those who had it were stronger than those who did not.

  Horses could not drink wine. Aidan feared for his mounts: the grey that carried him on the march, the bay that was his battle charger, the remounts in their herd with the others under the heaviest guard. He held the grey’s bridle himself, waiting out the battle, while Aimery stood with the bay. Both were livelier than some: they nosed at the sere brown grass, and nibbled at it without pleasure.

  His men were in good order. None of his foot had gone down, though there were wounds. Gwydion tended those under a tent made of spears and someone’s cloak. The field surgeon, passing by, had taken a long look at the king’s ministrations, crossed himself, and gone away muttering. Men who came under the Elvenking’s hand did not come away simply dosed or bandaged. They came away healed, able to fight unless the wound had been very bad, and then all they needed was sleep and—worse—water. Gwydion had a skin of wine for those, which he was rationing out as tenderly as if it had been the elixir of life.

  Someone tried to steal it. Once. Gwydion looked at him. Simply looked. He fled empty-handed.

  Aidan glanced back. Aimery’s face was white under the dirt, but he was steady. This was his first battle. He shied a little when a stray arrow went over; more than that, he did not do. Aidan smiled at him. His answering smile was more a grimace, but brave enough.

  There was little enough to smile at. The infantry, driven mad with thirst and beaten down by wave on wave of fighting, broke at last and ran. The cavalry stood alone, stripped bare. Knights and mounted sergeants scrambled together, snatching horses, goaded by drum and trumpet. Form ranks. Hold the line.

  It was meant for the foot as for the horse; but the foot had reached their limit. They would die if they had no water. Water was before them, a whole blue sea of it. They clumped together at the run, heedless of rank or file, scrambling and struggling up one of the Horns of Hattin.

  The king’s trumpets bellowed at them, commanding them to come back, form ranks, defend the horsemen. There on the hill, ringed in Saracens, they threw down their weapons and would not fight.

  Still the king would not allow a charge. The lion of battle was become a hedgehog, a tight, bristling circle. Aidan worked his way to the outside of it, though the knights were bidden to hold back, to let the Turcopoles and the light horsemen defend them as the infantry had refused to do. He had had enough of waiting. His foot-soldiers had held, but they were pitifully few; he ordered them back to guard the remounts. They went none too reluctantly, but keeping their heads up, for they were no cowards and now the world knew it.

  Aidan’s mamluks, set on guard where the foot-soldiers had been, were hardly delighted to spend their arrows from a standstill, but it was better than nothing. At Aidan’s command they took turn and turn about: one of a pair on guard with lance couched against the onrush of the enemy, the other sending forth a volley of arrows; then the lancer would reach for his bow and the archer lower his lance, and so they spelled one another, sparing their strength as best they could.

  The sun touched the summit of noon. The enemy stopped, every man of them, and drew back, and bowed to pray. The latest of Ridefort’s messengers went past, looking heartily sick of his round. Even before he reached the king’s banner where it was set in the center, a trumpet rang.

  Raymond already had his command. He had not passed it to the Rhiyanans, or to the lord of Millefleurs. Even without them he had tenscore knights, and among them Balian of Ibelin and Reynaud Prince of Sidon, who shared his name if not his spirit with the lord of Kerak. They were ahorse already, straining at the leash. The trumpet’s note had hardly begun when they moved. The infantry who guarded the van folded back with an audible sigh. The knights sent up a shout. “Holy Sepulcher!”

  The charge was always slow at first, as the horses found their feet, as the men fell into place, as the sheer weight of them transmuted from hindrance into unstoppable force. The enemy knotted and tangled before them, scrambling up from prayer, snatching at bridles, sweeping out swords. Their commander’s banner was one which Aidan knew well: a pair of trousers, gold on white. It was nothing to smile at. Taqi al-Din, brother’s son to Saladin, was a great lord of Islam, a king indeed, and high in the sultan’s counsels. His troops were mamluks of his royal uncle, nigh a thousand strong under yellow banners, and for each company its own pennant: scarlet, blue, green, black, white, russet.

  Proud though they were in their golden coats, they folded back before the power of the charge. But they took toll with their archery, and it was high. Aidan saw knight after knight go down, killed or taken.

  Raymond, under the banner of Galilee, broke free. A bare handful of men rode with him.

  He reined in his horse. There was no telling his expression behind coif and helmet; no reading his mind through the wards that were on the infidels.

  He sat for a long moment while the enemy gathered to strike. He spurred forward. But they were too many. They drove him back with the sheer weight of their numbers.

  His horse stumbled and nearly fell. He hauled it up. That, it seemed, was omen enough, and warning. With the last remnant of his knights, he spurred north and west, away to water and safety, out of the battle and the defeat.

  For it was that. The infantry was gone beyond retrieving: the enemy had mounted their hill and slain or taken them as effortlessly as a child herds geese in a meadow. Tenscore knights were lost or fled; and more from the rear, Templars who, under cover of Raymond’s diversion, broke for freedom. Of an army of thirty thousand, a bare two thousand were left: knights and light horses and a dozen mamluks against a hundred thousand infidels.

  That was no wind to yield to any enchanter’s asking. Aidan tried with all the power that was left in him. The wind only laughed. It was at the enemy’s backs, blowing out of the west, a hot blast in the Christians’ faces. Now the Saracens made it hot indeed: they kindled torches, and as the Franks looked on appalled, set fire to the grass.

  The wind seized the flames and drove them toward the ranks. But worse than the flames were the clouds of bitter smoke. Sun, fire, smoke, battle, wrung every drop of water from them. Their eyes could not even weep. They coughed, convulsing in pain, trying still to fight, to keep their horses from running mad with terror of the fire, to hold the line their king had set for them. He was in the heart of it, fighting as valiantly as they: never for him the lordly isolation of the sultan, to stand above the battle and rule it as one who did not himself take part in it, save when his position itself was attacked.

  The fire broke the strength of all too many men. A handful of them abandoned the ranks and rode toward the Saracens, gasping out the words of faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God!’”

  Even Aidan was appalled. It was one thing to accept Muslims in one’s army. It was another altogether to desert in the middle of a battle and turn apostate.

  “Cowards,” said Conrad, his sweet
singer’s voice thinned to a dry rasp. His quiver was empty, his spears all cast and lost. He was down to his sword, and giving a good account of himself. They all were, all Aidan’s faithful infidels.

  The Saracens did not take so dim a view of converts. They took in the deserters, clear for the Christians to see, and gave them water, poured it over them if they wanted it, and led them away to shade and food and blessed rest.

  No one weakened so far as to follow them. Guy had them moving at last, step by bitterly contested step, up the double-horned hill of Hattin. There, with the fire still burning its way toward them and the wind blowing the smoke in their faces, but the enemy stymied for the nonce by the steepness of the hill, they made their stand. Guy was in their center among the Templars and the Hospitallers. The knights spread out on either side. The order was out: Charge at will. Fight as you may.

  They charged. Out, down the hill with its slope lending them weight and speed, into the horde of the enemy, hewing, straining, pelted with arrows. Driving them back clear to the sultan under his canopy, close enough to see him standing under it with a youth beside him, his son in a golden coat, and to see how he was ashen pale with fear for his victory, his hand a fist in his beard; but never quite breaking through the guard about him. Losing the horse more often than the man, as often to the treacherous, knife-edged, hoof-rending stones beneath the grass as to the Saracens; but once the man was down, he was lost, inundated with infidels, however hard he fought, however bitterly he cursed his enemies. But if he could escape, if his horse took a small wound or none, or if he could seize another before the enemy pulled him down, he spurred away, hacking through an ever-growing thicket of swords, spears, yelling faces, back to the hill and almost-quiet and vanishingly brief safety.

  Aidan’s bay went down in the second charge, but Aimery was there—God love the boy, was he mad?—and he was on a leggy roan and leading a bow-nosed chestnut that Aidan had never seen before. God still had a soft heart for fools: the child had a sword but no hand free to wield it, yet no one had touched him or so much as threatened him.