Alamut

by Judith Tarr

  “You are my husband. You command, and I obey.”

  “But I never — ” He stopped. “Now see here. If your conduct had been honorable to begin with — ”

  She rose in a white heat. Because of Hasan, she did not scream, or spit in his face. “When have I ever been anything but honorable? When?”

  “You are defying me now.”

  She gulped air. “There. There it is. Honor is whatever you choose to call it. I have none; I can have none: no matter what I do, you tell me that I do it wrongly, and without honor. You don’t want a wife, Maimoun. You want a slave.”

  “At least a slave would pretend to be obedient.”

  “Oh?” she asked with vicious sweetness. “It’s not the truth you want, but pretense? Is it as simple as that?”

  His voice rose with his hands. “You know it’s not!”

  “Hush!” she hissed at him. “You’ll wake the baby.”

  He was remarkably in control of himself: he shut his mouth. After a moment, much more softly, he began, “Sayyida.” He swallowed as if it hurt him. “Sayyida, this is ridiculous. We’ve always got on so well. Why have you taken so against me?”

  She stared at him, incredulous. “I, against you? Who was it who started it all?”

  Clearly he was trying to be wise, and prudent, and magnanimous. He must have spent days working up to it. “You must admit that that... woman... is hardly fit company for a young mother of good family.”

  “She was good enough for me when I was only a child of a middling good family.”

  “That was when you were a child.” He reached for her. “Sayyida.” Her name sounded rather pleasant, the way he said it. Even when she was ready to hit him. “A man and his wife should live in harmony. No?”

  “Yes.” His hands were on her, not doing much, simply being warm and solid and inescapably there. She did not know why she should think of shackles. He smiled at her, and she had no power over herself; she felt her lips twitch in response. It was not even that he was a handsome man. He was not. Pleasing, that was all, in youth and smooth skin and clear brown eyes, and in that he was hers.

  She sighed a little. Her arms had found their way about him. His solidity was familiar, the way his bones fit beneath the skin, the scent of him under the sweetness of new bath and rosewater. Her heart swelled just so when she held Hasan. Or, no, not quite so. Her body knew very well the difference between her son and her son’s father.

  They lay down. She did not know which of them thought of it first. When he set hand to the cord of her drawers, she did not stop him. Perhaps she should have. She spared a glance for Hasan, who slept oblivious. Maimoun’s face came between; he had the look he always had in these moments, a little strained, a little abstracted, as if he had forgotten that she was there.

  If he had meant to extract a promise from her, he never came to it. In fact he never finished what he had been leading up to at all; and she was not inclined to remind him.

  When he slept as men did when they had satisfied themselves, cradled on her breast as heedless-heavy as Hasan, she held him and played a little with the curls of his beard, and stared into the dark. Her body was at peace with itself, aching a little, perhaps, but a pleasurable ache. Her mind had shifted not a hair’s width. “I love you,” she said very softly to the weight on her breast, and she meant it, though she had just begun to know it. “I’ll obey you in everything you ask, if only it stays within the bounds of reason. I’ll be your wife and your servant, and be glad. But some things, even you can’t touch. Some things go too deep.”

  Some things were too simple. That was all there was to it; all there needed to be.

  “Someday you’ll understand. You’ll see that I can be myself, and guard my own honor, and still belong to you.” She paused. “Allah willing,” she said.

  21.

  Merchants, thought Aidan sourly. Aleppo was crawling with them. Most seemed to have a hand in Sinan’s pocket, or to owe him loyalty of one sort or another. Though every one owed his first loyalty to his own house.

  It was hard to be a Frank here, and a nobleman, and a witch. Damascus was alien but enchanting, like the music of the east. There was no enchantment in Aleppo. Its walls closed in like prison walls. The need to wait on provisioning, on the finding of mounts and pack-camels, on the propensity of easterners for taking their leisure about anything that did not seem to them to be deathly urgent, wound him about in coils of frustration.

  Only Joanna kept him from riding out alone and bearding Sinan in his lair. He was allowed to see her every day, for as long as either of them could stand it. There were always attendants. The black eunuch, inevitably. Often her maid. Once or twice a veiled and swaddled aunt of impeccable probity. None of them ever said anything. They were simply there, watching, listening with bland patience.

  At night she was guarded like a sultan’s treasury. He dared not even come to her in dreams.

  He prowled instead. About the house; in the gardens. Even in the city, though his old horror of walls and crowding humanity had come back fullfold. It was still better than waiting, endlessly, for the House of Ibrahim to loose him on Masyaf.

  Or for his own will to muster itself to leave Joanna.

  There was the truth. He could not bear to leave her. Even the maddening little he could have of her, here, where her kin stood so strongly on guard over her life and honor.

  One more day, he told himself, more than once. One more day, he would tarry. Then he would go, and be damned to them all.

  He was thinking of it as he came back to his chamber after a wretched few moments with Joanna. She had been unwell, pale and tired, a little green about the edges; and unwontedly sharp with him when he asked if she were ill. Her denial was nothing short of fierce. But worse than that was her visible and palpable rejection of him: of the touch he ventured, guards be damned; of the touch that was more than touch, of which none but she could know. All she wanted of him was his absence.

  He was too shocked to do aught but give her what she wanted. Too shocked at first even to be angry; still less to wield his power, and discover what had turned her so against him.

  The anger was beginning to rise now. He turned in the room, swirling the Bedu robes she was so fond of. Arslan was nowhere about. This morning’s guardhounds, Tuman and Zangi, had prudently drawn off to the balcony. A moment more and he would throw off sparks.

  Someone was at the door. A servant, with a summons. He was wanted. He must come. And yet, the man said with eyes and tone and face, he should not.

  Because it was not anyone in the House who desired his presence. It was the atabeg, the regent of Aleppo. The one who had set the Assassins on Saladin. The ally of Sinan.

  His messenger had ample escort. Nubians, huge and demon-black, bristling with steel. No less a force than Karim endeavored to hold them off.

  Aidan greeted them with his sweetest smile. “I am wanted?” he inquired.

  His mood lightened marvelously. Even when it was made clear that he was to come unarmed and unattended. Even when they searched him to be certain, and were neither gentle nor respectful. They could not object to his leaving his weapons with his mamluks, although they would have liked to. It was the mamluks who raised the protest, which he quelled with a single level glance.

  He was not bound. But, they made it very clear, they would do what they must, to keep him from escaping.

  He had no such intention. Here was danger; it worked in him like wine. Karim thought him bereft of his senses. So he was. He always had been.

  His guards knew only that he was wanted; it was not their office to wonder why. But he could guess. He had made no effort to proclaim abroad who he was, and where he had come from, and why he was here, but neither had he made a secret of it. Any spy worth his wages could have discovered that the House of Ibrahim harbored a Frank sworn to bitter enmity against the Master of Masyaf.

  They set him on a mule, which was not a compliment: it was a small mule, and headstrong even for its
kind. He could do little to lessen the length of his legs, but he could come to an accommodation with the beast. It carried him with only the essential minimum of disgruntlement. He hooked his knee over the pommel and took his ease, and let the atabeg’s servants conduct him to the citadel. His insouciance, he was pleased to see, was fraying their tempers alarmingly.

  “Franks,” one of them muttered.

  Another spat, just aft of the mule’s tail.

  He showed them his fine white teeth. He let it dawn on them that it was not a human smile. There were too many teeth, too white and too long and too sharp.

  If the citadel had been a few furlongs farther than it was, he might have had the atabeg’s dogs in a truly splendid state. For, once they had counted teeth, they would take note of the cast of the face, the pallor of its skin, the gleam of its eyes. And what those eyes were...

  As it was, their own eyes were rolling white, and they were beginning to remember older gods than Allah. They came up the last of the steep winding way, breathing hard with more than exertion, and surrendered him with heartfelt gladness to the guard of the citadel. Turks, all of those, in black livery. He went as quietly as a tiger on a chain. Fear might have been wise, or apprehension at the least. But he was not a wise creature.

  He was made to wait, and wait long. He suffered it in patience. This was battle, and in battle he knew how to stand fast. He amused himself in watching people come and go through the anteroom in which he was set. Most, seeing the robes, took him for a desert tribesman. Some wondered at the guard about him. A bandit, they concluded; a criminal brought to justice. He took them aback with a smile, lounging where he had been bidden to sit, composing a satire on the Master of the Assassins. That most deadly of bardic arts fitted itself surprisingly well to the eastern modes; and Arabic was God’s own gift to the connoisseur of curses.

  He had not been so light of heart since the tournament in Acre. A battle, that was what he had needed. The prospect of an open adversary; the sweet savor of danger. It was all about him here. He almost regretted that he had not worn his robe of honor. Saladin’s name was not spoken with love in this place. A man who wore it on his sleeve might find all the fighting he could wish for.

  “What are you singing?” someone asked.

  Aidan turned his head. One bold soul had pierced his wall of guards. A very young one. Baldwin’s age; Thibaut’s. He looked, mercifully, like neither of them. He was a Turk, handsome as they would reckon it, plump and soft to Aidan’s eyes, dressed as plainly as a servant. But no servant would carry his head at that arrogant angle.

  “What are you singing?” he repeated, clear and imperious.

  “Scurrilities,” Aidan answered him, “hardly fit for young ears to hear.”

  “And who are you, to be the judge of that?”

  “Who are you, to question me?”

  The boy’s narrow eyes went wide. No one, it was readily apparent, had ever dared to address him so. He tossed his oiled braids. “I am the Prince Ismail. Who are you?”

  “Ah; so you’re a king’s son, too? That makes two of us.”

  “How can you be the son of a king?”

  “As easily as you,” said Aidan.

  “You are insolent,” Prince Ismail said, as if he must say it in order to believe it.

  “I only give back what I am given. It’s a failing, if you like. I suppose I was badly brought up.”

  “I think you were,” said the boy. “Why won’t you tell me your name?”

  “You haven’t given me the chance. My name,” said Aidan, “is Aidan.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  Aidan laughed. “What kind of name is Ismail? I come from Rhiyana, where everyone has a name like mine. I have others that may suit you better. I’m Lathan, for my father, and Gereint, for my father’s brother, and Michael, because I have to be called something that sounds Christian, and — ”

  “You are a Christian?” A horned devil, he might have said, in that tone.

  “I’m worse than that. I’m a Frank.”

  Aidan had not thought those eyes could widen any further. They were almost round, black and shiny as olives, and completely unafraid. “A Frank.” Ismail let his breath out slowly. “So that is what a Frank looks like. Your hair is the wrong color. It ought to be yellow.”

  “Rhiyanans are dark. We’re black Celts, you see. It’s true Franks you’re thinking of, and Northmen. We’re the old people, the folk they tried to drive into the sea.”

  That meant nothing to a Seljuk prince whose cousins still rode wild in the outlands of the east: the drivers, and never the driven. He looked at Aidan as one looks at an exotic beast in a cage, and sighed in pleasure. Clearly he had not been so well diverted in time out of mind. “Now I see why you have no manners. You know no better. You should learn, if you want to leave with a whole skin. My atabeg is very strict.”

  “Maybe he makes exceptions for princes.”

  “But you see, you aren’t a real prince. Real princes are civilized.”

  “Truly?” Aidan asked. “Is that what it is to be civilized? To be rude to strangers?”

  “You’re mad, I think,” said Ismail, as if it explained everything.

  “My thanks,” Aidan said.

  “Mad,” Ismail repeated. He leaned closer. “Why are your eyes like that?”

  Aidan veiled them, unthinking; but his will opened them wide. He smiled. “I was born so.”

  “Are you human?”

  “No.”

  Ismail nodded as he had expected it. Aidan was sure of it then. The boy was simple. No idiot, certainly, nor by any means dull-witted, but something in him had not grown as it should. He knew, from training, when to be wary, but it made no mark on him. He regarded Aidan in open and fearless fascination. “Franks are very strange,” he said.

  “I’m strange for a Frank.”

  “You must see well in the dark.”

  “Quite well,” said Aidan.

  “I should like to be able to see like that,” Ismail said. “Can you do magic, too? My nurse used to tell me that Franks are sorcerers, and that they take their powers from Iblis. Are you a slave of Iblis?”

  “Certainly not,” Aidan said, but without heat. “The last of my names is for the archangel who defeated him. I’m not likely to bow down before him.”

  Ismail was disappointed. “People always talk about magic, but nobody ever does any. Sometimes they pretend, but I can see. It’s all a trick.”

  “Not all of it,” said Aidan. “I didn’t say I couldn’t do any. Only that I have no pact with the devil.”

  “But that’s where it comes from.”

  “Not mine.”

  Ismail eyed him, wanting to be convinced, unwilling to be gulled yet again. Aidan gave him a handful of fire.

  oOo

  “Ismail!”

  The voice was high, but it was not a woman’s. Ismail looked round sullenly but with trained obedience. The creature who swept down upon him was as attenuated as a Byzantine angel, sweet-scented as a woman, bearing the remnants of what might have been a remarkable beauty. But it was all stunted and soured, like a frostbitten fruit.

  It was not the atabeg. After the first shock, Aidan saw that clearly enough. He quenched a sudden surge of pity. For Ismail; for the people whom Ismail had been bred to rule.

  The eunuch snatched his charge away, sparing Aidan only a single, outraged glance. Ismail seemed to lack the will for resistance. All his self was bent upon the fist which he pressed to his heart, and to the cool strange fire that quivered in it. It would fade, but not for a while. And he would always remember that he had had it; that he had held magic in his hand.

  As the boy disappeared through an inner door, Aidan’s own summons came at last. He did not think that the coincidence was intentional. The child had escaped his wardens and wandered out of his accustomed bounds. Aidan hoped that his punishment would not be too cruel.

  For his own, he cared little. He rose as the chamberlain beckone
d, his guards rising with him, their glances as darting-wild as the Nubians’ had been. They had heard his colloquy with Ismail; some had the wits to understand it. He smiled at them and followed in the chamberlain’s wake.

  The regent of Aleppo was, like Ismail, a Turk: amply and impressively fleshed, but solid for all of that, and strong. There was a sword across his knees as he sat in his hall of audience; the hand that rested on its hilt bore the calluses of a swordsman.

  And yet the weapon itself was almost too rich for the wielding, crusted with gems and gold. Likewise the atabeg. His splendor put even Joanna’s Uncle Karim to shame; Aidan’s eyes were dazzled. One jewel alone, the ruby that burned in his turban, could have purchased a respectable fief in Francia.

  It said something for the man, that Aidan had seen his splendor second, after his face and his warrior’s hands. And only after all that, did Aidan recall the significance of a Muslim without a beard. Gumushtekin, like Ismail’s nursemaid, was a eunuch.

  His voice might have been a light tenor: male enough, and deep enough, for the purpose. His eyes held none of the mute endurance which Aidan had begun to regard as the mark of his kind. They were clear, hard, and subtly bitter, facing this world which had robbed him of his manhood, and daring it to master him. Indeed, he had mastered it. He who could have no sons of his own, was father in all but fact to the rightful Sultan of Syria. And if that sultan lacked aught of will or wit, then Gumushtekin would supply it, and rule as he chose in the child’s name. Higher than that, no eunuch might hope to rise.

  Aidan shivered. There were no eunuchs in Rhiyana. He was too keenly aware, now, of how delicate a creature a man was, how easily he could be unmanned.

  Perhaps Gumushtekin comprehended Aidan’s discomfiture. Having dismissed all but two of the phalanx of guards, he seemed to forget that he had summoned the Frank, and turned back to the attendants who waited upon his pleasure.

  That, Aidan could understand, and easily contend with. He sat unbidden, at his ease, letting his eyes take in the beauties of the chamber. Its tiles were gold and blue and sea green; its pillars were like young trees wound with vines; high on its walls flowed a surah of the Koran, wrought in black and gold on silver tiles. He puzzled it out, word by word.