The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  Why was Sandy trying to kill him?

  Did it matter?

  He rolled backward with the force of her kick and flipped off the bed. His roll took up the meter and a half between the bed and the wall. He put his good shoulder against the plasterboard and levered himself up, giving his skin a mild burn from abrasion against the wall. The pain from these new injuries distracted him from the great ache in his balls.

  Sandy was off the bed in an instant, hands outstretched and fingertips curved to cut and gouge with her nails.

  Gurden blanked his mind against the pain and launched a picture-perfect sidekick. His knee rose like a bubble of oil, pointing at her face. His toes curled up inside his antique Italian shoe and his instep arched to tighten the ankle, heel, and edge of the foot. His shin swept forward and up like a pendulum. His knee dropped during the last six centimeters of travel. The side of his foot drove like a wedge into her throat.

  He heard the click as her teeth snapped shut. Some of them must have cracked. She stumbled backward.

  Having mastered his pain to deliver that one blow, his body took over and gave her no time to recover.

  Like a dancer stamping a tarantula, the foot that had delivered the blow dropped straight down and slapped the floor. He pivoted on the ball of that foot, turning it from inside to outside, and his weight shifted forward onto that leg. His trailing leg came off the wall in a horizontal roundhouse kick, leg cocking and uncocking across the sweep of the turn. It was a kick that any aware opponent could have ducked or blocked. But Sandy was still recovering her balance, trying to breathe through a bruised larynx, and counting her teeth. The ball of his flying foot caught her solidly in the ribs under her left arm. A properly executed karate kick has no follow-through: it moves at lightning speed, then stops, transferring all its force to the receiving body.

  Sandy cartwheeled away to her right.

  She fetched up under the small breakfast table by the window. Gurden crossed the room in three long strides, his body a machine now, programmed to break and smash. He flipped the table aside and she huddled around the rungs of one of the chairs. He raised his foot, his knee coming up alongside his ear, to stomp down on her bruised ribs.

  That was a mistake.

  She surged upward, caught his foot in her hands, and thrust it up and over. If he had been moving forward at all, advancing instead of simply standing over her, then he might have used the momentum to somersault through and come down in a ready stance. As it was, he topped over backwards. His hands went out and down behind him to break the fall, as he'd been taught. With his hands so occupied, he had nothing to break the force of the kick she sent up between his legs—except a scissoring with his knees. That deflected her boot, but the impact on his thighs awakened the throbbing in his groin.

  His roll to the side was a fraction too slow, and he absorbed a second kick in his own ribs. A third kick glanced off his shoulders before he could get his feet under him and take a stance.

  Tom and Sandy faced each other, bloodied and hurting, across a meter of carpeted space.

  She was breathing hard and still having trouble with her throat. She sagged sideways, limp and slow, and he thought she was fainting. He had almost relaxed, when her hand reached down, fingers curled, into the top of her boot.

  The flash of bright steel wakened him: a blade fourteen centimeters long, double-edged, leaf-shaped. She held it across her right palm like a swordfighter, point out and down. Her empty hand flattened and extended in the same manner. She would, he knew, switch the blade from one hand to the other without warning. She would believe that, unless he paid attention to her hand movements, he would never know which one held the cutting edge.

  Gurden almost laughed.

  What the knife fighter never understands is that the karate or aikido master follows whole-body movements and treats all attacks as equal. A feint was a feint—to be ignored—whether it came with an empty hand, a loose foot, or a blade. A committed move was a potential death blow—to be blocked or countered—no matter that it was made with blade or foot or empty hand. Sandy could shift her weapon about as much as she liked; he would never be cut by a serious move.

  She wove the blade back and forth in a lazy figure-eight.

  He waited.

  She moved a half-pace forward and feinted with the knife to his right side, as if to intimidate him.

  He waited.

  She passed her hands across each other at chest level and—yes—the knife was now in her left hand.

  He waited, impassive, as her whole frame moved just inside his focus.

  She swung her right hip and hand in toward him, flipped the blade down in her left so that it was to the outside, pirouetted around facing backward, and ripped the knife backhand across his throat.

  The blade was at such an angle that any block he threw would intersect its edge and cut him deeply. The only solution was to get inside it. He walked through her pirouette like a tango partner, laying one hand on her left forearm and trailing its momentum around and down behind him. When her arm was at the point of maximum extension, he broke it with a hammer-drop from his elbow.

  Sandy shrieked.

  He raised his elbow again and dropped it hard across the back of her head.

  She fell to the carpet, out cold, with her fingers still twisted around the knife handle. He pried the weapon out of her grip and tossed it across the room.

  Gurden paused.

  He might kill her where she lay—retrieve the knife and sever her spinal cord at the third vertebra while she was helpless—and that would possibly put this whole nightmare out of his life. But a wisp of affection, and a last glimmer of the awe he had once felt before her physical beauty, stayed his hand. Someone else would have to take her life; he could not.

  He might just walk out of the room and hide himself among the layered social strata of Boswash. But for that he needed a head start—longer than the few minutes it would take her to regain consciousness and come after him. So, at the least, he would have to bind and gag her. That seemed the least terminal of his options at the moment.

  Bind her with what? Her belt, for a start. The towels in the bathroom. The sheets from the bed.

  He rolled Sandy's body on its side and unclasped the buckle on her wide leather belt. As he loosened it and pulled it free, a narrow black box like a pencil case fell out of the waistband of her riding pants. It was the same "weapon" she had taken from the body of the old Templar. He put it in his back pocket.

  Now he had to find a sturdy vertical object that she could be tied to. He wanted nothing as flimsy and movable as one of the breakfast chairs.

  The bathroom offered the minimum in luxury: an old-fashioned separate sink and commode, instead of a hydraulic recycling console. The sink jutted out of the wall, with exposed pipes for potable and brackish water and a larger drain underneath. The drain would hold her down for an hour or more.

  He dragged her body into the bathroom, arranged her face down on the tiles, and passed the bight of the belt around her neck. He threaded the ends through the U-joint of the drain pipe, pulled them tight, and rebuckled it. As he tightened it, the force hoisted her head up beside the pipe. The width of the belt kept her from strangling, although she would have to breathe shallowly and not struggle much until someone untied her.

  Gurden used a strip of the bed's bottom sheet to bind Sandy's hands and forearms together, elbows touching behind her, like a trussed Christmas turkey. It would hurt to hang like that from her wounded jaw, but the prospect of her pain did not bother him. He was wrapping a bath towel around her legs, making ties out of serial cuts in its edge, when she revived.

  "Whut rr you do-ung, Tom?"

  "Making sure you don't come after me again."

  "You shud ghill me."

  "I can't do that."

  "Why not? Uh've done ut to you. Lotsa times."

  "What?"

  Sandy moved her head to look back at him. He
r face screwed up with pain as the belt bit into the bruised and purpling flesh around her jaw. She let her head hang.

  "Whoo d'you thenk fingered you f'r the gunnmun?"

  "What gunman? What are you talking about?"

  "Un the preacher's tent, up'en Ark'nsaw."

  "That was ... more than a hundred and fifty years ago."

  "M'oldern you thenk, Tom. Lots older."

  "I never told you about those dreams."

  "You di'unt have to. Uh waz th'ar."

  "How—? What—?"

  " 'Ntie mee. Und ah'll tell you all."

  Gurden considered the notion and then discarded it. How much of Scheherazade was there in any woman? She would tell him stories until her violent helpers came to subdue him and release her.

  "Some other time, Sandy." He finished securing her legs. He took a hand towel and moved around to her head. He began twisting the terrycloth into a hard rope.

  She eyed him with a wicked, half-lidded leer that was meant to be threatening.

  "I'll have to gag you now. I know you've got some broken teeth, and I'm sorry about the pain this will cause."

  "Dunt worry," she grunted, still eyeing him. "They'll grow back." Her laugh was a strangled cackling that took most of her restricted breath. For an instant he thought she was convulsing, but he didn't loosen her bonds.

  Despite the chill that ran up his arms, he stopped her laughing by forcing the towel, as gently as he could, between her lips and teeth, tying it behind the nape of her neck, over the belt's buckle.

  Gurden closed the bathroom door on her and straightened the room as best he could, so that a casual glance from the hall doorway would show it unoccupied. He put her boot knife in his back pocket beside the pencil box. He fetched her purse from near the door, retrieved the key and pocketed that, then stuffed the purse into the bottom of the closet.

  He opened the door a crack and listened.

  No sounds came from the hallway, not even the rustle of other lodgers behind their own doors.

  None came from the bathroom, not even the whistle of Sandy's breathing through a bloodied nose.

  Tom Gurden stepped out, closed the room door, locked it, and pocketed the key.

  Should he turn left or right? The elevator or the fire stairs?

  He made his choice and fled the building.

  * * *

  Sura 6

  By Hattin's Horns, By Galilee's Shore

  The ball no question makes of ayes or noes,

  But here or there as strikes the player goes;

  And he that toss'd you down into the field,

  He knows about it all—he knows—he knows!

  —Omar Khayyam

  * * *

  Two guardian rocks, curved pillars of bare stone, rose a hundred feet above the shallow plateau that harbored the well at Hattin. At least it looked like a well on the map: a circle with a cross through it.

  What maps the Templars had of the area—pitiful things, a few wavy lines and small marks inked on a new parchment—showed no other water. The Franks who had been mustered from nearby Tiberias said they knew nothing of this land, and knew of no water at all in most directions. The only thing they were sure about was that due east a half-day's ride would bring them to the shore of the Galilee.

  Gerard de Ridefort held the parchment in both hands, letting the reigns of his warhorse ride loose on its neck. He squinted at the coded squiggles near each cross and line. His copy, made in haste at Jerusalem as the King's spies passed messages to the King's scribes about the route Saladin might take, was short on legends.

  "A ... Q ... C ... L ..." he read aloud. "Now what might that mean?"

  "Aquilae!" pronounced the Count of Tripoli, who was now riding in the van with the King and the Grand Master. "That means we may find eagles here."

  "Or that a Roman legion once planted its standards at this spot," Reynald de Chatillon observed. He had ridden north with two hundred knights a few days after Saladin had lifted his siege to the fortress of the Kerak and had moved on toward Tiberias. Prince Reynald's small band, by following in the wake of King Guy's army, had caught up with them a dozen miles short of this spot.

  "A Roman legion," King Guy repeated thoughtfully. "That would be most appropriate. The C-and-L part could mean the Hundredth Legion. If there was a One-Hundredth Roman Legion ... ?"

  "Surely our spiritual forebears in this land must have fielded so great a fighting force, My Lord," Reynald replied smoothly.

  "Master Thomas would know," Gerald muttered. "I do wish he had not wandered out of camp like that."

  "Run away, you mean," Reynald accused.

  "Thomas Amnet feared nothing that rode on horseback. Do you not know that, when he was captured on the road to Jaffa, he was brought before Saladin? He should have been killed out of hand, for that is the Saracen general's way. Yet he survived, and he never once mentioned the encounter."

  "Then how do you know about it?"

  "His apprentice has a ready tongue, name of Leo... Ah-hah!" Gerard exclaimed and turned to a Templar riding at his right hand. "Fetch the young Turcopole who has attended Master Amnet."

  The Templar nodded once and rode aside toward the line of baggage carts.

  "Is it even Latin?" asked the King.

  "What, Sire?"

  "The writing on your map."

  "We must ask this Leo. I believe he may have attended your scribes, My Lord."

  King Guy grunted in reply, and the army went on.

  After a moment, a brown-faced boy on a shambling mare rode up. in the dust of the knight that Gerard had sent.

  "Here is the apprentice," the Count of Tripoli observed.

  "Ah, Leo! Tell us, what has become of Master Thomas?"

  "He walked into the desert, sir."

  "What? Alone?" the King asked.

  "Everything Master Thomas did, sir, he did alone."

  "That's true enough," Gerard grumbled. "Now, this map here. You've seen copies like it—"

  "Yes, M'Lord. Master Thomas had me study the art."

  "What language is it written in?"

  "Oh, Latin, sir."

  "And what does this mean?" The Grand Master showed him the letters under discussion.

  Leo frowned at them.

  "Aqua clara, sir. That would mean we can expect fresh water at this well, under Hattin."

  "Well done!" the King cried. "With this heat, I could do with a drink, even if it was only water."

  The nobility and the other Templars riding within earshot of the King's vanguard position seemed to relax in their saddles and smile at one another. The sun was high and the water in their skins was low.

  "And what is this wavy line, then?" Gerard held the map under Leo's nose.

  "A cliff or an embankment, My Lord. Not a high one, although none of us in the scriptorium knew exactly how to interpret some of the old maps. They conflicted in the details. We could not tell if the slope was gentle or steep. Possibly it is the one in one place and the other in another."

  "How's that again?" the King asked.

  "He's saying that the nature of the land ahead is unclear, Sire," Gerard interpreted.

  "Nonsense," King Guy snapped. "The plateau's as flat as my hand."

  "Yes, but—"

  "But, but, but! We have water here, and a level space to pitch our tents and picket the horses. What more do you want?"

  "I'd like a sight of the Moslems before we settled in," whispered the Templar who had fetched the apprentice. No one heard this remark except Gerard, and he silenced the man with a glance.

  "I shall have my tent set up beside the well," the King commanded. "Gerard, see to the bucket brigade that will make a pond for the horses."

  "Yes, Sire." The Grand Master turned to the apprentice. In a low voice he asked: "And what do these crosshatchings, here on three sides, what do they mean?"

  "A valley, M'Lord?" Leo shrugged. "It might mean croplands. But th
e best map we were working from had been drawn two score or more years ago. The land could all be sand there now. Most of the maps showed that—a curving wadi of bare sand, that is—and they were older."

  Gerard stared at the treacherous piece of parchment. A map that was wrong, he was suddenly realizing, might be more dangerous than no map at all.

  "And you know nothing of Master Thomas?"

  "He waved for me to go along with the army, My Lord. He had his 'vision look' about him."

  "And that's when he left us ..."

  "Indeed it was, M'Lord."

  * * *

  The well at the Horns of Hattin had been broken. It flowed from a natural spring that normally fed a shallow pool. The hand of man once had made a wall of fitted stones to guard the pool and increase its depth. Now, in a dry year, the hand of man had scattered that wall and cut trenches around the pool's edges until all the water had run away. The merest trickle oozed out from the rock and across the mud, and this was backed up into a puddle by the bloated carcass of a dead sheep.

  Gerard de Ridefort contemplated the sheep, judging the advancement of death over it. In this heat, the animal had been dead at least two days but no more than three. However, the softness of the mud in the trenches said they had been cut no earlier than the day before. Ergo, someone had dragged the sheep here, for an insult.

  While the Templar was working this out, scouts rode up from east, west, and north. They came out of the body of the army, which had circled around the well and filled in the surface of the plateau.

  "My Lords!"

  "Hear us!"

  "On all sides!"

  "Below the cliffs!"

  "They wait!"

  "They lurk!"

  King Guy lifted his head, like a hunting hound that scents the wind. Gerard whirled from his contemplation of the dead animal.

  "Who waits?" Guy asked.