by Judith Tarr
They glared at one another, man and beast. The sword, at least, was sheathed.
“Mistress,” said Jaffar, cool and sweet and oblivious. “Come, choose. Will you have halwah or sugared almonds?”
Neither! she wanted to cry.
Khamsin pawed, snorting. He had taken an appalling dislike to the emir.
She tried to apologize with her eyes as she dragged him off. The emir did not follow. His anger was fading: that much mercy he gave her. With an effort that wrenched at her center, she turned away from him.
oOo
Zamaniyah’s shoulder bore a shocking bruise. More shocking still was Jaffar’s response to it. He barely even frowned. He laid cool cloths on it and bade her rest, and never said a word against her stallion.
That hurt worse than any wound. He had stopped caring what happened to her. She had made him hate her.
She cried out in rage and pain. “Damn you, Jaffar! Don’t you turn against me, too.”
He had been withdrawing to his corner. He paused. His face bore no expression at all. “I, mistress? Have I ever given aught but loyal service?”
“Too loyal,” she shot back, “and not loyal enough.”
He bowed at her feet. “I am your servant, mistress.”
Her hand flew up. She caught the blow before it began, seized him instead, pulled him up to face her. “Why do you hate me so much? Because I hit you? I repent it with all that is in me. I swear to you, I’ll never do it again.”
His head shook. He looked surprised; even a little dismayed. She throttled a stab of satisfaction. She was not calculating this. Not altogether. “Mistress,” he said. “I could never hate you.”
“You despise me, then. You torment me with cold courtesy. You make me pay and pay and pay for that one moment’s folly.”
“You make yourself pay. I have done no more than keep you from folly greater still.”
Her lips tightened; she tossed her head. “Stop it, Jaffar. I can’t bear it. That the only friend—the only friend I have in the world—”
She appalled herself. She clutched at him. “Don’t you go, too. Promise me, Jaffar. Promise!”
She was too close to see his face. His voice was quiet. “I promise,” he said. “Never, in life or in death. I will never leave you.”
A small wind traced her spine, waking a shiver. She pulled back. Her shoulder throbbed; she did not heed it. His eyes burned upon her. “Never,” he repeated with all the force of a vow.
oOo
Khamsin paced a restless circle about his mistress’ tent. His mood was black. Part of it, to be sure, was hunger. This body could not fast as a man’s did. He was harming it, his groom had told him. He had to eat or he would sicken. He ate, but not, if he could help it, when the sun was high. The boy was resigned to his feeding at night and in the dawn.
This close to sunset, he was all one great yearning for sustenance. But that, he could bear, if not happily. Something else made him snap and strike at unresisting air.
That man—that popinjay—that mincing Turk with his Persian face. How dared he cast his eye upon Zamaniyah? How dared he dream of touching her?
She was her own woman. She was no rutting man’s.
He stopped, stamped. He would not have it. He would—
What? Challenge the man? Order him off? Claim her for his hooved and speechless self?
He raised his head and cried his helpless rage.
She came out to him. He noticed little more than that she was there; she bridled him, saddled him. Her eunuch watched as if he would object, but said nothing. Nor did she. Even when he attached himself to her stirrup and would not let go.
She did not ride far or fast. She did not even leave the camp. By the sultan’s tent, among the guards and the princes and the petitioners, men with untiring voices chanted the Koran. She stopped to listen.
It mattered little what words they were. They were holy. They comforted.
“‘There is not an animal in the earth,’” sang the clearest of the voices, “‘nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are peoples like unto you. We have neglected nothing in the book of Our decrees. Then unto their Lord they will be gathered...’”
Even what was neither man not beast? he wanted to ask them. Even what had lost its wits for a silly chit of a girl?
Because he had. For all that he was and had been, he was worse than geas-bound. He had never even known that he was falling, until he woke and found himself cast upon his face.
This was worse than lust. Lust could die. This was immortal.
He was hers beyond even wanting to be free.
And by Allah, that popinjay would not have her.
oOo
It was late when Zamaniyah came back to her tent. Jaffar had led Khamsin there long since; she had broken the day’s fast with the sultan, at his insistence. She had had stomach for very little of what he offered her.
Her father had been there. She had not been able to speak to him, lest he ask for his concubine; lest she break, there where everyone could see, and shame them both.
Her tent was warm with lamplight, her pallet spread, her eunuch waiting patiently in his corner. She barely acknowledged him. She wanted to crawl into her blankets and hide from all her follies.
There was someone there, in the shadows, watching. She whipped about. Jaffar had not moved. His eyes were glittering. She would have said that they were angry; but that was over. She had given him no new cause that she knew of.
She turned again, more slowly. The shadow had eyes. Blue eyes, reddened now, black-shadowed.
Zamaniyah leaped. Caught solidity. Pulled Wiborada into the light. She was dusty, draggled, her coat torn, her face bruised and scratched. Zamaniyah clutched her close; thrust her away, holding her at arms’ stretch, shaking her, glaring through a fog of tears. “Why, Wiborada? Why?”
Wiborada’s head shook. Her Arabic had deserted her. She swayed when Zamaniyah loosened her grip.
“Jaffar.” Zamaniyah’s voice was passionate in its stillness, in all that it was willing itself not to say.
He spoke without fear; without emotion altogether. “She won’t let me touch her.”
Zamaniyah eased her down. She went as if she had no will for resistance.
Zamaniyah fought a brief battle with modesty. Damned it. Uncovered her. There was no great wound on her, but bruises in hideous profusion; and her feet won a gasp from Zamaniyah, and a sharp breath from Jaffar who had crept up unheeded. He retreated rapidly.
In a little while he was back with water, cloths, his box of medicines. Some of the water, cool in a jar, was for Wiborada to drink. Zamaniyah cajoled it into her.
Jaffar gave a name to each hurt as he tended it. Perhaps it was his own peculiar kind of atonement. “Walking far in boots meant for riding. Falling on stones. Thorns, stinging flies, the sun’s fire.” He hesitated, said it too levelly. “Men’s hands. A fight.”
Wiborada shuddered. Her head tossed. Her hair was matted and dulled with dust. Slowly, gently, reining in every flicker of grief or anger, Zamaniyah began to comb it out.
Wiborada’s hands clamped shut about her wrists. The blue eyes were wide and staring. She spat out a stream of Frankish.
Zamaniyah sat still through the flood. It stopped abruptly. Wiborada’s face twisted. Her mouth worked. She spoke again, laboriously, in Arabic. “They were not fighting. They wanted—they tried—”
It was hard to comfort her with both hands going numb in her grip. Zamaniyah tried. Her words were feeble, forgotten as she uttered them. Wiborada never heard them. “I left,” she said. “I saw the banners before Hama, and I knew. I was of them. I had no place here. I waited for night. I lied to you. I put on my plainest clothes, I stole a horse from your father’s enemy, I rode away. It was simple to perfection. No one even saw me.”
Zamaniyah tried to speak. Wiborada rode over her, relentless. Tearing Zamaniyah’s soul with the telling, with the proof of all Zamaniyah’s forebodings; gaining from it, perh
aps, some surcease from the pain. “It was a good horse I stole. By dawn it had carried me to the Franks’ lines. They were trying to rest, with infidels harrying them: letting them settle, then raising a clamor out of hell, clashing spears on shields, shrieking war cries, shooting the odd arrow over their heads, but melting away when they tried to strike back.
“I went in in a bit of quiet, when the infidels had stopped to eat before the dawn prayer. Once a stallion called, but my mare had manners. She didn’t call back.
“I walked up to the sentries without trying to conceal myself. It was light enough by their fire; they could see that I wasn’t armed. It should have been obvious that I wasn’t an infidel.
“They seized me,” she said, “which I had expected. I asked to be taken to a priest. I said that I had been a prisoner; I asked for sanctuary.” She laughed, too high, too breathless. “Sanctuary! They gave me sanctuary. They called me spy and infidel. Do I look like an infidel, I ask you? They thought I was a man until they decided I was a eunuch; and then one of them had a stroke of genius. He stripped the cloth from my head. He tried to strip the rest of me.
“I told them who I was. I shouted at them. I demanded a priest, a lord, anyone of authority. I threatened them with dire vengeance. I prayed them to remember honor, faith, charity. I invoked every saint I knew, and every devil I could think of. They laughed and fell on me. I was nothing. I was less than nothing. I was female, and there, and they had a bitter defeat to forget. What better way to remember one’s manhood than to thrust it upon a woman?”
Her eyes narrowed. She was not seeing the tent, or Zamaniyah’s horror, or anything but memory. “I let them think they had me. I lay and cowered and made certain they saw a great deal of me. I was very shakily defiant. ‘Yes,’ I cried. ‘I am a spy! Come, what will it be? One at a time? All at once? All the better for my masters, to lead their army past you.’
“I would have laughed if I had been able. Their eyes rolled like animals’. They smelled like animals. They were nothing that I could ever have called kin. And oh, they were terrified of the cruel Saracen! ‘Saladin is here,’ I told them. ‘Saladin will roast your ballocks for his dinner.’
“They drew lots. Some went off, snarling, to watch for the terrible sultan. Some stayed. I tried to soften them. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘In God’s name. A priest will know me for what I am. Or if not a priest, a Templar, or a Hospitaller. He can give me justice.’
“One or two weakened. ‘She looks like one of us,’ they said.
“But others knew no mercy. ‘She belongs to the infidel.’
“‘Then,’ said the gentle ones, ‘the fighting monks can judge her.’
“‘But first,’ their comrades said, ‘we take a little for ourselves.’
“They were clever,” she said, “those soldiers of the Lord. All the while they decided my fate, they never stopped to think that I was free. No one even stood by to watch me. I slid by anguished inches from the middle of them. Every instant I knew that they would stop me. They never did. They were determining who was entitled to have me first.
“The shadows had me. I slipped, I crept, I bolted.
“I didn’t care where I went,” said Wiborada, “if only it was away. From men. From Franks and Saracens. From everyone. Even from life, if God willed it so.” Her eyes blinked, shifted. She turned her head slowly about. She giggled. “See where I came! I walked and I walked, and no one stopped me, and sometimes—I think—I drank, or I ate. I came back to my chains. My sweet golden chains. My chains. I’m a Saracen now. Tell me I’m not a Frank. Tell me I’m not an honorless barbarian.”
“You are my sister,” said Zamaniyah.
Wiborada tilted her head, frowning. “We don’t look alike,” she said.
Zamaniyah bit her lip until it bled. Her arms were free at last. She clasped Wiborada in them.
“I tried to come,” she said. “Before God, Wiborada, I tried.”
She met Jaffar’s eyes over the matted head. He faced her steadily. He grieved; he shared Wiborada’s pain; he would bear lifelong the knowledge that he had done nothing to prevent it. But he had done his duty. His mistress had not run headlong and heedless into that same horror. He had no shame of what he had done, and no repentance.
Wiborada had stiffened at Zamaniyah’s touch; yet slowly, by infinite degrees, she eased. Her head dropped to Zamaniyah’s shoulder. She sighed. It was a long moment before Zamaniyah realized that she was weeping.
She wept silently at first, then more noisily, great racking sobs that swayed them both. Her fists came up and closed in Zamaniyah’s coat; she clung there with all her strength.
There were words in it. “Don’t tell your father. Please don’t tell him.”
Zamaniyah promised her. Not thinking, but not needing to think. Some things went beyond duty. Some things were unspeakable.
She was safe. Zamaniyah told her that, over and over. She was home. She was with her own.
Maybe she believed it. Maybe she would learn to. Zamaniyah dared to hope for it. Not in that she had come back to slavery from Frankish cruelty: that could have been mere helpless retreat. But she had stolen the mount of her escape from al-Zaman’s great enemy. That was more than expedience, more even than malice borrowed from her master. It was kinship.
20
Wiborada needed little more than food and sleep and the passing of time to restore her to some semblance of herself. She was quieter than she had been. She stayed close to Zamaniyah; if men crowded too near, she shied away.
She tried to lighten it with mockery. “I’m like a beaten dog,” she said.
“You let me touch you,” said Zamaniyah, putting an arm around her.
“You’re not a man.” She glared at her clean and mended self. “What if al-Zaman calls for me? What will I do?”
“Face it when it comes.”
“I hope it never does.” Wiborada covered her face with her hands, briefly, straightening with an audible snap. “No. I’ll be brave. That’s all we Franks are good for.”
“You’re very good at it,” Zamaniyah said mildly. Wiborada stared at her, patently struggling to decide whether she should be offended.
Zamaniyah gave her no time. She yawned, stretched. “Ramadan is hard. Getting up abominably early to eat before the light comes, and not even water all day.”
Wiborada’s brows knit. But she had been trained as a courtesan, whether she would or no; and she was not an utter fool. She played the game as Zamaniyah had chosen to play it; perhaps she took some comfort from it. She spoke almost as lightly as Zamaniyah had, and almost as easily. “Can’t you take dispensation from fasting? This is war, after all.”
“And make it up later? When I’ve already lost a week to being a woman? No; better now. It’s good for my soul.”
“That’s what Christians say.” Zamaniyah bridled. Wiborada smiled. It was her first honest smile since they left Aleppo. “Lent is longer, but we don’t have to fast all day; though we can’t have meat.”
“Is that how you atone for eating pork?”
“Pork is good. There’s nothing better.”
Zamaniyah shuddered, swallowing bile. “They say it tastes like manflesh.”
“Would they know?”
Jaffar, coming with bread and dates and cheese, could not understand why the two of them had so little appetite; or why they laughed at it.
oOo
Mosul’s armies had left Aleppo, swelled with forces loyal to Prince Ismail. They moved slowly, almost leisurely, as if to mock the pace at which the sultan had taken the same way.
They sent envoys ahead of them. Zamaniyah watched their entry into the camp. They came in princely state, with fine horses ridden and led, and their two commanders haughty under gilded canopies. He of Mosul she did not know, but he of Aleppo was quite high enough to content any defender of the sultan’s dignity: the regent himself, Gumushtekin, balancing his bulk upon a great white mule, escorted by a company in Nur al-Din’s own colors.
; “I at least,” the sultan observed, “have the grace not to claim a dead man’s livery.”
She heard him, but faintly; and she was standing very close to him. To the public eye he was all courtesy. They were not a sham, those gracious manners, but they were not all of him. “Diplomacy,” he had told her once, “is the art of lying truthfully.” And, she could have added, of being lied to with wide-eyed sincerity.
It was very slow. It was, most of the time, excruciatingly polite.
She was there because no one forbade her. Wiborada was there because Zamaniyah was there. Zamaniyah wondered, often, what the ambassadors would have done if they had known the truth of the mamluk and the slender girl-faced nobleman. They won glances enough from their own people.
The young emir was there, standing with those of his elders who spoke for southern Syria. His glances were very different from the rest. They warmed her more by far than the sun’s heat could account for.
Maybe, she thought, they were not for her. Wiborada’s beauty shone even through a mamluk’s livery; and Persians did not care whether their lovers were women or boys.
It was good for her, that reflection, like fasting in Ramadan. Even though he was, after all, Abd al-Rahim: she had browbeaten Jaffar into confessing it. As he had confessed that the emir had followed them that day in Hama, and he had known it, but he had said nothing. It was not at all proper that she knew.
Sometimes Jaffar was all too well aware of his office.
She tried to keep her eyes modestly lowered. It was hard. Especially when Abd al-Rahim, by design or chance, stood nearly close enough to touch. She liked to look at him. He was much more comely than the lords in their interminable council.
They were bartering away cities. When she made herself listen, to keep her mind from a pair of dark-lashed eyes, she swallowed an exclamation. “Baalbek,” the sultan was saying, “and Homs and Hama. Those, Aleppo may take. Damascus only shall we keep.”