Alamut

by Judith Tarr

  “You would never hurt him.”

  Morgiana snatched Hasan from his mother’s arms. Sayyida could not even tighten her grip before he was gone. He woke at the movement, screwed up his face to protest, saw Morgiana and crowed. She buried her face in his swaddlings.

  When she raised it, her cheeks were only slightly damp. She looked angry. Hasan’s brows knit; he patted her chin, which was as high as he could reach. She fixed him with a hard stare. He ventured a smile. She bit her lips until they bled. “I feast on children,” she said to him. “I build castles of their bones. My own master calls me the deadliest weapon in the world. He commands me with my name and with the Name of Allah and with the Seal of Suleiman, and with an oath I swore when I was young and mad; but if I do not obey, he dares not punish me. He thinks that he desires me. He does not know how very much he fears me. He whom all men fear: Sinan the wise, the Sheikh al-Jabal, the Old Man of the Mountain.

  “And you,” she said, “O innocent, find me enchanting.”

  “You are,” said Sayyida.

  Morgiana snarled horribly. Hasan whooped with delight, and snatched. He won her plait; it found its way promptly to his mouth. She did not try to rob him of it. “I could harm him,” she said. “Never doubt that. But whether I would... there lies the limit of Sinan’s power over me. He has learned it. He bade me slay a man whom perhaps you know. Salah al-Din, he calls himself.”

  “Saladin?” Sayyida was proud that she knew the Frankish corruption of his title. “He’s our sultan now. Father made a sword for him once, when he was still only Yusuf the Kurd, Ayyub’s son. You haven’t killed him yet, have you? He’s warring near here somewhere. Father and Maimoun and the rest have been run ragged, keeping the emirs in weapons.”

  “Indeed he has been warring round about,” said Morgiana. “Making himself sultan of Egypt and Syria. I have not killed him. I will not. I am done with murder.”

  “And yet you killed a Christian.”

  Morgiana’s face darkened. “I swore an oath. My folly; Sinan’s desperation. That far and no further he may bind me. At least,” she said, “he was not a Muslim. Even a Sunni heretic.”

  “I am a Sunni heretic,” said Sayyida.

  “You are a woman, and therefore possessed of neither faith nor reason.” Morgiana’s lightness was the lightness of the sword in battle. “And I am less than a woman: an ifritah, of those children of Iblis who have embraced the True Faith. Three orders of beings are set above me: men, women, and males of my kind. I am a slave of slaves of the slaves of Allah.

  “Or so it is said,” said Morgiana. “I know that there is no one like me in this world. If there are afarit, they shun me. I am stronger than any man, and swifter; I have magics beyond human conception. I begin to suspect that I am no one’s slave. Except, of course, Allah’s.”

  “God is great,” said Sayyida, bowing to the Name. “If you grow so weary of killing, why do you stay? Go away from Masyaf. Leave the Assassins to their knives and their terror. You’ve done their bidding for years out of count. Haven’t you done enough?”

  “Perhaps,” said Morgiana. “Perhaps not. Suppose that I could evade my oath; suppose that I left. Where would I go?”

  “Anywhere. You have the whole world to be free in; and even the terrible Assassins won’t find you who were the most terrible of them all. Why,” Sayyida said, “you could even stay here. Father wouldn’t say anything. Maimoun can think that we’ve a cousin visiting. Hasan would be delighted. And I,” she said, “would have some peace while he teethes.”

  Morgiana smiled and shook her head. “The tigress cannot hide herself among gazelles, however fond of them she may be. And to leave Sinan... it has been too long. Or not long enough. I am not his tame dagger; I will take no more Muslim souls. But there are Franks enough to cleanse the world of, and a nest of them in particular, with which I have hardly begun. Apostates; children of one who repudiated the Faith. They have mocked our Mission. I must see to it that they pay.”

  “I’m not sure I like you when you talk like that.”

  Morgiana set a newly drowsy Hasan in Sayyida’s lap and kissed her lightly on the forehead, startling her speechless. “Honesty,” said the ifritah. “That’s what it is. May I darken your door again?”

  “Do you have to go?”

  Morgiana nodded.

  “Come back quickly,” said Sayyida. “And when you’ve had your fill of Christian blood, remember. You have a place to go. If you need one. We — I’ve always thought that I could use another sister.”

  “Such a sister,” Morgiana said wryly. “I will come back. I give you my word.”

  “Go with God,” said Sayyida. As always, Morgiana was not there to hear her. She had winked out like a candle’s flame. As swift as that, and as silent, and as absolute.

  3.

  Aqua Bella had two towers. One, newer and by far the more massive, was a straightforward affair, square and solid; from its battlements one could see Jerusalem. The other was far older and narrower, like a minaret, anchoring a corner of the wall but serving no purpose beyond that. Its lower levels housed the oxen that drove the olive press, and, now, a horse or two belonging to the crowd of mourners who had gathered to see Gereint to his tomb. The upper reaches were empty of aught but spiders, and long forbidden to the castle’s children, for its stair was treacherous.

  They, of course, had found ways round lock and bar; but dust and spiders soon palled, and the stair was merely crumbling stone, easy enough to climb if one were careful. There had been owls in the tower, to swoop and hoot and be deliciously terrifying, but the last had flown away years since and not come back. The children had found other diversions, and left the old tower in peace.

  Thibaut needed to be alone. He had been doing his best to be a man, to honor Gereint’s memory, but a day and a night of it had worn him down. The keep was full of people come to pay their respects and, no doubt, to eye the new and wealthy widow. Their voices grated on Thibaut’s ears; their looks of pity made him want to hit them. What did they know of grief? What did they know of anything but greed and lies and vulgar curiosity?

  He had heard them talking when they thought him out of earshot. “Convenient for the young one, this. He’d not like to share his inheritance with his stepfather’s get, however fond they all pretended to be.”

  Remembering that, even on the dim crumbling stair Thibaut had to stop and drive his fist against the wall. It made him feel no better. He was wept dry. His father had died when he was too young to remember. Gereint had been less a father than an elder brother: at first in Jerusalem where a young knight from the west found time to spare for a very young pullani with an enormous stock of questions, and later in Aqua Bella when the knight had become the lady’s husband. People had always acted as if Thibaut should mind seeing his mother happy. As if he could have done anything but loved Gereint, who always seemed to be laughing or singing, who treated his lady’s children as his own, who even in a temper had always been careful to be just.

  Thibaut’s throat would not stop aching. He picked his way up the last few lengths, grimly, trying not to think at all.

  There was someone up there.

  For a moment Thibaut’s mind was empty indeed. Then it filled, with rage. This was his place. No man in the world had a right to be there, and only one woman; and she was in Acre, being a baroness and maybe not even yet aware that Gereint was dead.

  Then Thibaut saw who it was, and his rage died.

  He seemed unaware of Thibaut’s coming. He had folded his long body into the curve of the parapet, check against the stone, eyes staring away not eastward to Jerusalem as Thibaut might have expected, but north. The sun was full on him, and yet it had not even warmed that impossibly white skin. He should have been flayed alive. He looked as impervious as marble, and as still.

  Thibaut’s heart was beating hard. This was legend, sitting there in Thibaut’s place, as Thibaut himself so often had sat, looking barely older than Thibaut. But much taller. Thibaut,
as his peers of the pure blood were never loth to remind him, was a perfect little Saracen.

  Gereint had never minded. “You’ll never win a battle by weight or length of arm,” he had said on the training field. “But you have grace and speed, and a good seat on a horse. You’ll hold your own.”

  The prince looked like Gereint as a marble image looks like a man. The same long limbs. The same fierce arch of nose. The same black hair, thick and not quite straight. Even the same long pointed chin, though Gereint had been no beauty, and this was beauty to stop the heart.

  He never seemed so alien when he was with people. He pretended. Maybe he cast a glamour, a semblance of human solidity. Alone, he was himself, and that was not a man.

  Then he moved, and he blurred a little. The keenness blunted. The beauty shrank to handsomeness. The light on him was only sunlight, thought powerless still to stain his pallor.

  Thibaut tensed to bolt, found himself picking his way across the narrow space. Aidan had left him Joanna’s place, the crenel that framed the winding of the eastward road. He settled in it. Riders were coming, more vultures to the feast.

  “Templars,” said Aidan, “and a Hospitaller riding with them. Is that a prodigy?”

  It was not impossibly hard to match that light, easy tone. “It’s unusual. The Military Orders must be speaking to one another this week.”

  “They honor our kinsman.”

  Thibaut almost choked. Our. He had said that. But no, it was a manner of speaking. He was royalty, after all.

  Aidan was watching the riders. Thibaut had not seen him move, and yet he was very close. Close enough to see the veins glimmering blue under the moon-white skin; close enough to see what the sun did to his eyes.

  Thibaut could not even be afraid. They had grown up with the tales, he and Joanna. This was real, that was all.

  It retreated slightly. It laid a hand on Thibaut’s shoulder, warm and solid. “Yes,” said Aidan. “I’m flesh and blood. Were you expecting living fire?”

  Thibaut did not like to be mocked. “I was expecting dignity.”

  Aidan laughed. “From me? Oh, come! Dignity is my royal brother. Dignity is a synod of bishops, each more constipated than the last. I’m a hellion from my cradle.”

  “You want — ” Thibaut was having trouble getting it out. “You want to seem... not ordinary. But — less than you are. Somehow.”

  The grey eyes rolled like any ordinary man’s. But there was a stillness behind them. “Oh, to be a legend! Youngling, I’m quite as solid as the next man. If only half as human.”

  Thibaut’s head shook. He did not know where his words were coming from, but they would not stop coming. “You have to shrink and hide, to be safe. But then you hide it again: you dress it in gold and scarlet and act outrageous, and everyone is afraid of you, but it’s a useful fear. It keeps them from thinking. That you are — what you really are.”

  “And what, O sage, is that?”

  Mockery again. Thibaut’s fault, for being so small for his age, and his voice just broken, his cheeks still as smooth as a girl’s. He glared at the prince, but he answered coolly enough. “I think you must be an ifrit. Not a jinni, they are of earth, and you are air and fire.”

  “Empty wind,” said Aidan, leaning back against the parapet and grinning. His teeth were white and sharp. “I’ll tell you what I am. I am king’s son and king’s brother of a kingdom in the west of the world. Half an hour sooner from the womb, and I would have been king, for which blessing I thank God at every day’s rising. My father was good solid mortal stock, clear back to Ambrosius. My mother was... what she was. She raised my brother to be king. She raised me to be whatever I wanted to be. Both of us were meant to live in our father’s world. There was no other for us, she said. Though even then we knew that we were like her, as our sister was like our father.”

  He did not sound sad, or angry, or afraid. This was an old take he was telling, and all its grief was worn away.

  “You never asked her why?” asked Thibaut.

  “She would never tell us. She was very old, though she looked like a young maid. She had been alone for years beyond count. She was a little mad, I think. She loved our father quite beyond reason. Enough to refuse to be his wife, and to bear and raise us apart from him and his people and his Church that hates our kind. But when he was crowned king and it was noted that he had neither wife nor doxy, and never a bastard to prove his virility, her selflessness found its limits. She could not bear to lose him to any mortal woman. She came to him in his court, and she brought us with him, a pair of yearling whelps with his face. ‘These are yours,’ she said, ‘as am I. If you will have us.’“

  “And he said he would,” said Thibaut, enthralled.

  “It was a great scandal,” Aidan said. “But it was also a marvelous tale, and she was supremely beautiful, and she was prompt to give him a daughter with human eyes. And, to the priests’ disgust, she was quite unmoved by either holy things or cold iron. She would never let them baptize her, but us she sent coolly to the font, and it was no worse than water ought to be in March after a long winter. Even when they sent us to a cloister to be educated, she ventured never a protest. ‘A king’s sons should have learning,’ she said, ‘in all that they may.’ My brother took to it. I,” said Aidan, “was less tractable.”

  “In what? The cloister or the learning?”

  “The cloister,” Aidan admitted after a pause. “The learning was interesting, if sometimes more edifying than I liked. But the walls I was locked in... I thought I would go mad.”

  Even yet the memory could dampen his brow. He tried to laugh it away. “You see. I’m no legend. I’m merely very odd.”

  “Wonderful,” said Thibaut. He would never dare to touch, but he could hug his knees and stare with all his heart. “You came here alone,” he said. “Did you lose your servant?”

  “I had none.”

  Thibaut was incredulous.

  Aidan looked down, shrugging. “Well. I had a few when I began. Some I sent back. Some I set free. I wanted to see this country bare, with no crowds tugging at me.”

  “But now you’re here,” said Thibaut, “and it’s not fitting. You are a prince. You should have an entourage.”

  The prince’s eyes glittered. “I should? And who are you to say so?”

  “Your station says it,” Thibaut said with barely a tremor, “and the dignity you won’t admit. You can’t demean yourself like a hedge-knight from a Frankish byre. You have a name to uphold.”

  For a moment Thibaut knew he would be smitten where he sat. But Aidan’s glare turned to laughter. “God’s bones! What a priest you would make.”

  “I can’t,” said Thibaut. “I’m heir to Aqua Bella.”

  There was no regret in that, but no horror at the prospect of priesthood, either. Thibaut had thought once that he might like to be a Templar, and ride about with a red cross on his breast, and be looked on with holy awe. But he was three parts a Frank and one a Saracen, and that one was enough. He was no longer bitter about it. He did not fancy sleeping in a stone barn with a hundred other men, and never bathing, and growing his beard to his knees. When he had a beard to grow, which did not look to be soon.

  Aidan, like Gereint, seemed to know by nature what a bath was for. And he did not seem to care that Thibaut’s mother was half a Saracen. His own was all ifritah; or whatever they called her in her own country.

  “I want to be your squire,” said Thibaut.

  Aidan’s brows went up.

  “I’m old enough,” Thibaut said. “I’m trained. I was Gereint’s, before — ” He swallowed, steadied. “I have to be someone’s. It’s expected. I need it. And since you are a prince, and alone, and the best knight in the world — ”

  “No,” said Aidan.

  Thibaut had not heard it. Would not hear it. “You need me. Your rank demands me. I need you. How will I ever make a knight, with my face and my puniness, unless you teach me?”

  “You did well enough be
fore I came.”

  “That was before,” said Thibaut. “Now I’ll never be satisfied with less.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that that is impudence?”

  Thibaut blushed, but faintly. “It’s true.” After a moment he added, “My lord.”

  Aidan smiled. For him, that was restraint. He laid his hands on Thibaut’s shoulders and looked him in the eyes. Thibaut stared, fascinated. Aidan shook him with a whisper of his true strength; even that was enough to rattle Thibaut’s bones. “Listen to me, Thibaut. Listen well. I am honored that you think me worthy of your service. I would be honored to accept it. But I cannot.”

  “Why?”

  Aidan’s breath hissed. He seemed as much amused as angry. But through it he was somber, and that somberness quelled Thibaut utterly. “Because, Thibaut. Yesterday I swore an oath, and that oath binds me. I cannot — dare not — allow another to share it.” He paused, as if he waited for Thibaut to ask, but Thibaut could not. “I swore to exact payment for Gereint’s death. I swore to exact it from the Lord of the Assassins himself, in his own person, and to stop at nothing until I should have done it.”

  His hands tightened on Thibaut’s shoulders. Thibaut gasped, but he was strong. He did not cry out. “Now do you understand?” Aidan demanded of him. “Now do you comprehend why I must be alone?”

  “No,” said Thibaut.

  Aidan let him go so suddenly that he fell against the parapet. He righted himself, shaking, but trying to hide it. His voice came out as a squeak, until it steadied somewhere between alto and high tenor. “He was never of my blood, but he was my kin. He was all the father I ever knew. It is my right to share in taking his blood-price.”

  Aidan looked at him. Thibaut knew what he saw.

  The prince’s face twisted. “You’ll make a man,” he said, as if to himself. But then: “No, Thibaut. I have defenses against Assassins. You have none. And they will strike you. Believe me, Thibaut. They will.”