by Judith Tarr
“‘Let be,’ bade my enemy, gently, gently. And they obeyed him; but he took no notice of them. ‘Your power is great, O sultan, and shall grow greater still. I confess that I erred in seeking to put an end to it. I shall not serve you who would raise the banner of the Sunni heresy over the House of Islam, but while you make our world one, while you pursue the Holy War as it is written that you should pursue it, let there be truce between us. I shall not again send my faithful against you, if you will undertake to withdraw from my lands, and to restore what your armies have pillaged and burned.’
“I gaped like a fool. One word only came to my mind. ‘Why?’
“‘I read what Allah has written. I see what you will do in our country. You are better for it than any who might take your place.’
“Blunt words enough, but I sensed the truth in them; or the truth as he chose to see it. I was not swift to yield, but in the end I accepted what he offered. He went away, and took my mamluks with him. In the morning I broke camp. Since then I have let him be, and he has made no move against me. I begin to believe he will keep his word.”
“Sinan is a man of his word,” Aidan said. “As am I. I have sworn to exact payment for a pair of murders; with his own hand he shall pay it.”
Saladin shook his head slowly. “You are as mad as I was.”
“He killed my sister’s son. He cut down a child whose only crime was that he was born of a woman whom Sinan desired. He threatens her daughter, whose guard I am, insofar as I may be where men and women live so endlessly apart.”
“Has he threatened you?”
“Why would he? His feud is only against one certain woman and her blood. But one of that blood was kin to me in the degree which is sacred among my people; the other had made himself my own. Therefore he is my enemy.”
“I think,” said Saladin, “that you are an ill man to cross.” He did not smile as he said it. “Has your lady considered yielding, for her family’s sake?”
“It is for her House’s sake that she refuses. Would you have Sinan at the head of the House of Ibrahim?”
Saladin shivered in the heavy heat. “Allah have mercy on us all! Small wonder then that he withdrew his hand from the lord of Egypt and Syria. He had his eye on larger prey.”
“A Frank would never do that,” said Aidan: “pass by a kingdom for an empire of trade.”
“Assassination is hardly a Frankish weapon, either. When you kill your kings, you prefer to do so openly, in battle if you can. Sometimes I could envy you.”
“You wouldn’t want to,” Aidan said. “You haven’t lived in a Frankish castle.”
“I’ve...heard of them,” said Saladin. He grimaced. “No baths?”
“None. And only one wife at a time. Even the wine,” said Aidan, “is mostly horrible. As for the climate...”
“Ah,” said the sultan: “cold, endlessly. And wet. But green. Do you yearn for green, here where it is as rare as emeralds?”
“Not exactly here,” Aidan said in the whisper of leaves and the ripple of water; but over it the hammer of the sun. He rose again, stretching till it seemed that he could pluck the sun out of the sky. He faced the sultan. “I understand what you’ve been telling me. I never asked or expected that you help me against my enemy. I didn’t ask it of my king in Jerusalem, either. He set me free to do what I must. Will it please your majesty to do the same?”
“What will you do?” asked Saladin, peering up at him, blinking, for he stood against the light.
“Whatever I must. Nothing that will harm you or your kingdom, unless need drives me.”
“Let me see your face,” said Saladin.
Aidan was slow to move. At last he sank to one knee, bringing them eye to eye as the ground bent. The sultan’s breath caught. “You are — not — ”
Aidan smile with terrible gentleness. “My father was a king in the west of the world. My mother was — is — a daughter of sea and stone. My brother is the sea. I am flint that, struck with steel, breeds fire. Are you afraid of me?”
The sultan stiffened, stung to pride. “I am neither child nor fool, to be utterly without fear. You — I had not expected you. What are you?”
Aidan was suddenly very tired. “Half a man,” he said. “All a fool. But what I have sworn, I intend to fulfill. However I may. However I must.”
Now it was the sultan who stood, and Aidan who looked up at him, emptied of either pride or defiance. He could not even care that he was unmasked. “I must ponder this,” said Saladin. “And you.” He stretched out his hand. Aidan did not flinch from it, even when it gripped, sparking pain. “I shall summon you,” the sultan said.
16.
Aidan, who knew kings, did not wear himself out in waiting to be summoned either soon or urgently. Which was as well: it seemed that Saladin had forgotten, or elected to forget, his promise. If the caravan left before he remembered, Aidan intended to go with it.
It was close to leaving. Three days at most, Mustafa said. He seemed honestly regretful.
Aidan did not know what he felt. Relief, that he could advance at last out of this stalemate. Regret that he must leave a city so beautiful, and people in it who had become friends. And fear, certainly, leavened with eagerness. Sinan had not moved against Joanna in Saladin’s city. The road would be a different matter. And Aleppo, that was in large part Sinan’s.
Word came to him as he waited, with Ishak to bear it, both eager and proud. “Your sword is ready,” he said.
So soon; so miraculous. Aidan was halfway to the gate before Ishak caught him.
oOo
This time he was not offered the hospitality of Farouk’s table. He did not care. Food and drink were common things, distractions. He had come to claim his sword.
Even the rite of washing feet and hands and face, of greeting and being greeted, of being courteous and receiving courtesy, tried his patience sorely. It was a measure of his acceptance into this world, that he could bear it at all.
He felt Ishak’s amused understanding, Maimoun’s sour dislike, Farouk’s eagerness that was hardly less than his own though infinitely better hidden. They were like libertine monks gabbling the mass, all their minds fixed on the ale that waited in the refectory.
At last civilization was satisfied. Aidan was allowed past the outer courtyard; he was led to a room he had barely noticed before, except as an adjunct to the forge. There he was bidden to wait. Ishak stayed with him, silent for once, looking damnably pleased with himself. Aidan would have liked to hit him. Would have done it, if he had trusted himself not to break the boy’s neck.
The silence lengthened. Aidan’s back was taut. Soon now, God and the smith willing. His fingers itched for the feel of the hilt.
After an eternal while, Farouk came back, with his apprentice dour and silent behind. The master smith carried something wrapped in a cloth. Maimoun spread a carpet hardly wider than his body, hardly longer than a sword, woven of plain dark colors in a pattern as subtle as a hillside in winter. Farouk, kneeling, laid his burden down upon it. With loving care he folded back the cloth.
Aidan did not move, still less reach to touch. The sheath was a beautiful thing, black damascened with gold in the endless curving patterns which the Saracens loved. The hilt was plainer, a hilt made for use, of silver unadorned, but the guard was inlaid with gold, and the pommel was a ruby as Farouk had promised, a great glowing eye in the nest of cloth and carpet.
Aidan glance at Farouk. The smith inclined his head. Quietly, without haste, Aidan took up the sheathed sword. Its weight was sword-weight, lighter than some, longer than the blade he had brought from Rhiyana. He closed his right hand about the sheath, his left about the hilt. The silver was cool and quiet in his fingers. Slowly he drew the sword.
It shimmered as it drank the light. Its patterns were subtle, wave-patterns, flame-patterns, flowing from the hilt to the diamond-glitter of the point. Almost, as he turned it, they vanished; then they glimmered into clarity. Words flowed together with them.
Verily We created man of potter’s clay of black mud altered,
And the Jinn did We create aforetime of essential fire.
Aidan’s fingers convulsed upon the hilt. The sword leaped in his hand like a living thing. It knew him. It tasted his essence. It was his.
He gave it tribute of his own blood, a drop to sate its thirst when it had danced for him. Maimoun, unnoticed, had brought two things to test it: a billet of wood and a silken cushion. Aidan curled his lip at the wood. With the gentlest of strokes, he clove the cushion in two. The down within barely scattered. One feather rose, met the blade, parted.
The air would weep when he wielded that blade. A man might ride against him, be cloven, and never know it until his head slipped free of his body.
Aidan sheathed it reluctantly. Later, he said to it. Wait for me.
The others watched it all in the silence of perfect understanding. Aidan bowed low to the smith. “You have outdone yourself,” he said.
Farouk nodded to plain truth. “I’ve never wrought a better blade. I may never do as well again. God was with me; He guided my hand.”
“And...your choice of verses for the blade?”
“The steel chose,” said Farouk. “That is its soul.”
He spoke the truth as he saw it. Aidan was mute. This was power, a magic deeper and stronger than his own. The forging of steel; the waking of its soul; the binding of them both, each to each. Earth and fire. Mortal and immortal. As the bearer, so the blade.
Aidan bowed over it, lower even than before. “Master,” he said.
oOo
With the sword in its proper place at his side and both gold and tribute well paid to its maker, Aidan eased in body and mind. The city through which he passed seemed all made new. He rode it like a river in flood; he could blunt his senses to it, but not quell them wholly, so that he was not left blind and deaf. So balanced, so poised, he found strength not only to endure the press of humanity but to move as part of it.
It was a kind of freedom. Not as simple nor as sweet as the silence of the greenwood, but keen-edged like the hunt’s end, when the boar waits, and the hounds have drawn back, and the hunter knows that now he will be master, or he will fall.
He found that he was striding lightly, hardly hindered by the narrowness of the streets or the jostle of people. Now and again he touched the cool smoothness of the swordhilt, for the simple joy of its presence.
He paused once for a napkinful of something deliriously sweet, and once again for a dipper of cool water of Barada. He heard a street singer with a voice like a mating cat; he nearly fell into a brawl of uncertain beginnings and impressive extent, the center of which appeared to be a Turk and a Kurd.
He was mildly startled to come out of the clamoring dimness of the bazaar and find the sun still high in the sky. He had come out face to face with the eastern gate of the Great Mosque, just as the brazen falcon bent down under its twelve narrow arches to drop the ball of the hour into its basin, and the arch of the second hour past noon vanished behind its shutter. Aidan stood staring at it, though he was cursed for barring the way, and although he had seen it before. Even at night it was a marvel: the falcons continued their sleepless round, and lanterns marked the passing of each hour through a circle of blood-red glass. It made time seem real, a graspable thing, a matter for man’s mastery. But he could only measure it; he could not stop it, nor make it run backward.
“Your stars, my lord — shall I read your stars for you?”
Aidan glanced down. A man peered up, crouching on the step, clutching charts and pens and abacus: the tools of the astrologer’s trade. He was marginally preferable, Aidan supposed, to the sellers of relics who infested Christian churches. Though there would be a few of those within, keeping their heads low for fear of Sunni wrath, but offering the odd, bold Shi’a pilgrim a glimpse of the casket in which reposed a strand of the Prophet’s hair, and beside it one which held the head of the great Shiite martyr Husain. The Sunni did not bow to relics, which they reckoned — like nearly everything else — a kind of idolatry.
They were not fond of astrologers, either; which did not keep the creatures from flocking to the steps of the Gate of the Clock.
This one sighed in Aidan’s silence. “Business,” he said, “is bad, though I ask barely enough recompense to keep flesh on these worthless bones. Would not my lord be pleased to know what days are propitious for his undertakings?”
“Is that all you can tell me?” Aidan asked him.
“I hardly pretend to foretell the future,” the astrologer said. “Simply to surmise by my science what it is likeliest to hold.”
Aidan dropped to the step beside him, caught in spite of himself. “An honest soothsayer! No wonder your business is bad. You should be promising miracles of prophecy.”
The man drew his skinny body erect, all offended dignity. “I am not, great lord, a charlatan. I am a student of the stars.”
And young under the straggling beard, and painfully earnest. He clutched his charts to his chest and glared at Aidan’s smile. “You may mock me, O sultan, but my science is my science.”
“Certainly,” said Aidan. “I was merely surprised. What is a true philosopher doing, selling horoscopes on the steps of the Great Mosque?”
“Allah’s will,” the astrologer replied with humility as striking as all the rest of him, “and necessity. My family is impoverished; my father is newly dead, God grant him peace; there is no money to spare for the completion of my studies. Therefore I make what use of them I can, for what little it will bring. Very little,” he said, “but anything is better than nothing. And I will not — I will not — beg.”
“A man has his pride,” Aidan agreed. He paused. “I don’t know when I was born according to your calendar.”
“Ah,” said the astrologer, coming to attention, like a hound on a scent. He peered. “Greek?”
“Frank,” Aidan said.
“Ah,” the astrologer said again, not a whit dismayed. He riffled through his charts. “I think...yes...close enough, if I add here, and subtract...” He trailed off. “The day?”
“May Eve,” Aidan said, “nigh midnight.”
It meant nothing to a Muslim, except as a number on a chart, that Aidan’s first sight had been the Beltane fires. “The year?”
Aidan told him.
He scribbled. Stopped. Looked up. “My lord will pardon me, but I think my lord has erred by a decade or four.”
“I think not,” Aidan said, smiling.
The astrologer blinked. “My lord, you cannot be — ”
“I can.”
He shivered. He considered, visibly, a number of responses.
With feline delicacy, Adian set a coin on the step between the astrologer’s feet. It glittered gold.
“Numbers,” the astrologer said in a dying fall, “are numbers. Even... for a...”
Another bright bezant appeared beside the first. Aidan had not moved, in body, to put it there.
The astrologer stared at it. He was remarkably calm. An error in mathematics was a shudder in the heart of him. Magic... that was different. “My lord,” he said. He bent again and peacefully to his calculations.
Aidan waited in rather more patience than some would have believed him capable of. People came and went. The other astrologers were well occupied; their colleagues in the gate, the notaries, plied a lively trade. Some went from one to the other. First the stars, then the contracts; and if the stars were bad, they passed the notaries by and went within, probably to pray for a more auspicious day.
The second falcon dropped its ball with a clinking of metal on metal, like the ringing of a bell. The astrologer muttered over his charts, and gnawed at his beard, and scored through a whole line of calculations. He looked up, rumpled and almost fierce. “I have never,” he said by way of explanation, “cast a horoscope for a prince of the jinn. You are a prince. I read that properly. No?”
“Yes,” Aidan said.
The astrologer was t
oo preoccupied to bow. “It’s all most interesting. Incredible, I would say, but you are what you are. Between Venus and Mars; but Mercury has power in your house. You are as much loved as hated; one who would possess you, would possess you utterly. Death rides close to you, but has no dominion over you.” His finger, ink-stained, traced the line of the chart. “See, there is danger, and there. And great joy, but a great loss. A journey — journeys. Look to your wives. One is jealous, and will harm the other, unless you take care.”
“But I don’t have — ” Aidan began.
The astrologer did not hear him. “You were born under a singularly brilliant star. You fly with kings; kings look to you — not for guidance. For strength, yes. And the fire of your presence. Where you are, stability seldom is. You move in power, you are power, but you rein it in; you clip its wings. That’s not wise, in what you have to face. Learn to wield what you bear, prince, or you will fall. How low, my science is insufficient to foretell. Whether you will rise again...” He underscored a figure, glared at it. “Venus in the Virgin. Fire in a cold heart. Death. Even a jinni may die, prince. Remember that.”
“I never forget,” Aidan said.
The astrologer fretted with his beard. “It’s bad. I don’t pretend to deny it. But there’s hope. There’s always hope. What can kill you, can save you. It’s a matter of proportion.”
“It’s all dark before me, then?”
“I didn’t say that.” The astrologer held to his patience with difficulty. “You’ve been blessed with a royal share of good fortune. Now you’re asked to pay for it. If you are wise, and move carefully, and forbear to tempt heaven, you will end more blessed than before. Look, here, you can see it. All the paths come together; they seem dark, because of their density. Either they end here, in an inextricable knot, or they unravel again under fortunate stars. The choice is yours to make, in the sum of your choices.”
“Thereby,” said Aidan, “encompassing both destiny and free will.”
“Exactly,” the astrologer said, oblivious to irony. He looked like a very young bird, hunched bright-eyed in his nest of charts. “I’ve never done a more interesting horoscope. So many choices — take mortality out of it, and you touch infinity. It’s a fascinating way to go mad.”