by Judith Tarr
Aidan dragged him up and shook him until he stopped babbling. “You should die? She was in my arms when she was struck. How would you have me pay for that?”
Raihan swallowed audibly. His hands worked, clenching and unclenching. “But, my lord. You were distracted.”
A bark of laughter escaped, for all that Aidan could do. “And why was I distracted? No, Raihan. I won’t punish you. You were bespelled by a demon of great power and cunning. I was merely and unforgivably a fool.”
“My lord!” Raihan protested, outraged.
“Go and sleep,” Aidan said. “We’ve a long ride before us.”
Raihan drew a breath as if to object, but Aidan’s eye was steady. He went away slowly, found his place, lay in it. His sigh was loud and much oppressed; but he seemed a very little less wretched than he had been.
His guilt would pass, if not swiftly. Aidan did not know that his own ever would.
oOo
When the day’s heat had begun to abate, they took the road again. There were few travelers upon it. A shepherd crossing with his flock; a caravan wending its way to Aleppo. The land was quiet, bare brown desert with here and there a glimmer of green. Where green was, people were, villages huddled about a spring or a trickle of river.
They camped well after dark, under a waxing moon. Even the tireless Kipchaks were all but asleep in the saddle. Aidan saw them settled and a guard mounted. He took the first watch himself. They did not like it, but he had no use for sleep. His power was still an emptied cup, although the first trickle of its renewal brightened the edges of his mind. He watched with eyes and ears and nose, as any earthly beast could do. He prowled the edges of their circle. He waited for the slow hours to pass.
He could leave them all and go on alone. But they would follow; while he had no power for aught but gleaning the thoughts of one who stood within his arms’ reach, he could neither fly beyond their compass nor defend them against the demon from Masyaf.
He snarled as he paced. That one. Morgiana. Monster of his own kind. Blind groping beast without heart or soul, only hate, and lust that she called love. Was that the essence of what he was? Without human raising, human taming, to be no more than a wolf or a panther. An animal. A killer without measure and without mercy.
And he had thought her beautiful. He had wanted her; dreamed of her. While she lied and laid traps for him, and lured him to destruction.
He spoke to the air. “Morgiana. Morgiana, hunter in the night. I know you now. I come to you.”
If she heard, he had no power to know. She did not answer.
There would be time and to spare for that. In Masyaf; or, if her steel was swifter than his wrath, in hell.
oOo
Aidan did not know when it dawned on him that he was off his reckoning. His mamluks seemed to find nothing amiss. The cup of his power, filling slowly, tried to persuade him that this road was the proper one, the road to Hama from which he must seek that to Masyaf. It was leading them south and west by sun and moon.
Yet beneath that surety was deep uneasiness. His mother’s haunted Broceliande was just so, subtly treacherous, with a taste on the tongue and a quiver in the skin that spoke of magic. They were being led, and led astray.
He knew it surely on the day when, swiftly as they had traveled, they should have come to Hama. Where before them the wide barren plain should have opened to the winding of the Orontes, was naught but dust and sand and stones. The road stretched away into it, empty and mocking, with a dance of heat-shimmer on it.
They were not in difficulty, yet. They had avoided the larger towns, but in the last of many nameless villages they had filled their waterskins and watered their camels well. Aidan’s prudence. The others had thought him a fool, close as they were to river and city, to prepare as if for the deep desert.
He bade his gelding halt. It ran the reins through his fingers, lowering its head to rub an itch in its foreleg.
Arslan rode up beside him. “Do you see something, my lord?”
“Nothing,” Aidan answered. “Nothing at all.”
Arslan raised a brow. He had taken to doing that of late. Aidan felt his own go up as he realized where the boy had learned it. “My lord?” Arslan inquired.
“I see nothing,” Aidan said. “I ought to see Hama, or at least its river.”
The others came up, drawing in as close as their horses would allow. Timur’s mare, as always, squealed and kicked at his brother’s beast, which, as always, had taken advantage of the halt to make overtures. That it was a gelding seemed never to have dawned on it.
Ilkhan slapped its neck. “Idiot,” he said to it. And to Aidan: “We can’t see Hama. It’s down in the river’s furrow.”
“So, then: where is the river?”
None of them could answer that. Most seemed not to want to. “We’ve been slower than we thought,” said Dildirim.
“Or taken a wrong turning,” Conrad said.
Andronikos frowned. “Do these look to you like the hills near Hama?”
“What should they look like?” Arslan demanded. His voice was sharp.
He frowned down the road. His frown darkened to a scowl. He cursed in Turkish, short and foul. “Allah!” he answered himself. “Not like these. Where in God’s name are we?”
“South of Aleppo,” said Timur.
Even he could quail before their massed glares.
“I would rather know why than where,” said Andronikos. And when the glares shifted to him: “If we know why we went astray, we can guess where we are.”
Greek logic. It made no sense at all to a Saracen. To a Frankish he-witch, it was eminently sensible. “As to why,” Aidan said, “I can tell you easily enough. We were bespelled.” He met their stares. “Yes, even I. I’m not invincible.”
They protested, loudly. He waited until they tired of out-shouting one another. Then he said, “We’d best search out a camping place. We’ll need rest, and quiet, to think our way out of this.”
They found a place that would do well enough, a low hill topped with the ruins of a very old fortress. One wall rose still almost camel-high; the paving there was solid enough, and there was browse about the hill for the camels, although the well had long since gone dry. As always, Aidan’s presence was proof against snakes and scorpions, and even the flies hesitated to come too close. He was not supposed to know, but his mamluks drew lots for the place closest to him; every night there was a different drowsing warmth at his back.
Tonight, it seemed, Andronikos had won the toss. As the last blaze of sunset faded from the sky, he sat on his heels before Aidan, sniffing the savory scents that rose from the cookpot, prodding the camel-dung fire with his scabbarded sword. Arslan, whose rank entitled him to a nightly place at Aidan’s right hand, stirred the pot abstractedly. It was a deep trouble in him, that they — even they — had fallen prey to a spell. Aidan’s arm about his shoulders hardly comforted him.
They ate in near-silence, with none of their wonted boisterousness. Their eyes kept coming back to Aidan. Clearly, if thinking was needed, it was his place to do it.
His appetite, never remarkable, died altogether. He choked down a last mouthful, and licked the grease from his fingers. He knew what he had to do. He did not know that his power was enough for it.
They all slowed to a halt, staring. He growled at them. They flinched, but they did not stop staring. “God’s bones!” he burst out. “Was there ever such a pack of goggling idiots?”
“No,” someone muttered.
He laughed, sharp and short. “Come, then. It’s not thinking that we need to do. Not quite yet.”
As he spoke, he drew back somewhat from the fire, smoothing dust and scattered stones from the pavement. Where the fire was, it sank into a hollow, but that before him was level and unbroken. He drew a long slow breath, contemplating it. The fire in him burned low, but it burned. His mamluks’ intentness fed it. With great care, he gathered it, cupping it in his palms. It flickered; he breathed on it. It steadied.
He set it on the pavement. It shone like a jewel made of light, ruby in its heart, moonstone about it. He spread his hands above it. It melted and flowed. His will shaped it and gave it substance; made it an image of the world. The east of it swelled and grew and filled the circle between himself and the fire.
There was Aleppo, bone-white city with the lofty jut of its citadel. There, Damascus, green jewel in the desert. And there, Jerusalem, heart of the world, the Dome of the Rock a minute golden spark. Lesser cities came clear one by one as he named them. Shaizar, Hama, Homs, down the meander of the Orontes. Antioch, Tortosa, Tripoli, westward and seaward. And between them in the mountains of Syria, Masyaf.
He swayed; his eyes dimmed. The image wavered as beneath a ripple of water. Its edges were clear. Slowly he traced the line between: the shape of the power which flowed out of Masyaf. Its limit followed roads where it could, feigned them where it must, leading his eye as it had led his body. South and west, yes, but wide of the mark, into the desert. Hama was a long day’s journey west. The Orontes, they would come to, but south of Homs, on the shores of its lake. Then, if they would, into the mountains, but never to Masyaf; road and power would cast them up in Tripoli, among the Franks.
It was a gentle enough magic, subtle and marvelously skilled. It revealed him for what he was, a heedless child, wasteful of the power that was his; prodigal of it when he should be sparing, shutting it in walls when he should let it fly free.
He knew no better. His wars had always been human wars; power had been a game, a gift to use because he had it, never because he had deep need of it. He had never trained it as he would a horse or hound. He had let it train itself, as he needed it, or for his own pleasure.
It was very late to lament his folly. He was walled off from Masyaf; he had neither the strength nor the skill to break down the wall.
But he was oathsworn. He must go. He must break the wall.
Or skirt it.
Or burrow beneath it.
He blinked in surprise. He was lying on his side; he did not remember falling. The image was gone. But it was burned in his memory. He knew where they were, and where they could go. He tried to say it; he could not find the words in Arabic. All his senses were blunted as they had been when he poured his power into Joanna. He was empty, again. He should learn to be wiser.
Later.
Sleep, now. His mamluks wrapped him in blankets — their own,too; he could not speak to upbraid them for it. They heaped about him like puppies. Warmth spread through all of them, and sleep, and blissful certainty. He was their lord. Whatever he set out to do, he could not fail.
He could happily have throttled the lot of them.
25.
It was possible, Aidan discovered, to skirt the edges of the ban, pressing as close to it as its limits would allow. It was like a blankness on the right hand, an inborn incapacity to turn toward Masyaf. Sometimes he tried. He always found himself wandering far out of his way, waking slowly from the conviction that he was on the right road.
They rounded the Lake of Homs and forded the Orontes, and began to angle northward. Aidan’s power was waxing, as if the long days of feeling out the borders of the ban had honed and tempered it; he could not turn fully toward Masyaf, but he could edge closer to it.
They were in Frankish lands now, in the County of Tripoli. To Aidan it mattered little. Half of him centered on the grief and wrath that drove him; half, on walking the narrow line between the Assassins’ ban and the free earth. There was nothing left to care whether he ate or slept, rode or rested, trod land under Muslim sway or under the shield of Christendom. His mamluks were more in awe of him than ever; that, he could sense. They also thought him quite lost to reason.
As, truly, he was. Often his sight of the world faded, and he saw Joanna where the Assassin had cast her, and the land as his power had limned it, and the ban as a ring of fire. But he who himself was fire, had begun, by inches, to bend it.
On a day without number or name, under a sky as grey as his perception of all that was not the ring and the ban, he snapped erect in the saddle. His mount bucked to a halt. His escort tangled about him.
There was no living will behind the ban. It was wrought by living power, to be sure, but once wrought, it sustained itself: like the wards which he knew how to raise, but far greater. It was a pity, he could reflect, that such a master of power should be so vicious a beast.
But there was something he knew, which she well might not. Wards without constant living guard could be passed. Not easily, not simply, but it could be done. Once he had passed through, if he was skillful, and strong enough in power, the wall would rise again, but he would be within it.
He smiled slowly. He was terrifying his poor lads; but it was nothing that they would understand. He touched his nervous horse to a walk, soothing it with hand and voice.
They were going almost due north on a road that had been old when Rome was young; but Rome had leveled and paved it, and it had endured a thousand years. The ban wanted to nudge them westward; Aidan clenched his mind against it, turned his thoughts from the end of the hunt, focused them only on what was directly before him. The tautness eased. He eased with it, almost into a drowse.
Hoofs clattered on stone. Aidan tensed anew. Timur, who had ranged ahead, careened over the hill and skidded to a stop. He was all but dancing in the saddle. “Riders! A whole army of them. In armor. With lances.”
“Franks?” Aidan asked, although he knew.
“Franks,” said Timur.
The mamluks drew together. One or two drew swords. The Turks reached for their bows.
Aidan stopped them all. “No,” he said. “No fighting.”
It was slow, for some of them. They had forgotten what their master was.
He took the lead, with Arslan in the rear to ensure that swords stayed sheathed and bows unstrung. Not hastily, not slowly, they mounted the hill.
Riders, indeed. Riders in black, with white crosses on shields and shoulders. A pair of Knights Hospitaller with novice-squires and a company of men-at-arms. They had seen Timur: they were in marching order, the knights helmed for battle. At sight of Aidan, the knight who led raised a hand. The Franks halted, barring the road.
Aidan brought his own company to a halt, mildly startled and beginning, dangerously, to be amused. If his mamluks had forgotten that he was a Frank, so had he forgotten how he would seem to a knight of Outremer: a Saracen in a pack of Saracens, he in Bedu robes, they in their scarlet livery, as exotic as a flock of cock pheasants; and arrogant with it, to ride armed on the open road where the Frank was lord.
The Hospitaller called out in appalling Arabic, his voice booming in the still air. “Who are you? Why are you riding here?”
Aidan rode forward, waving his mamluks back. They obeyed, ready to leap at the slightest hint of threat. The Franks tensed. He kept his hands well away from his weapons, his face quiet, his laughter tight bound behind his eyes. He spoke in his most exquisite langue d’oc, as sweetly as ever he had wooed his lady in Carcassonne. “A good day to you, reverend brother, and to all your company.”
If the Hospitaller was shocked to find knightly courtesy in a wolf of the desert, he did not pause to indulge it. He shifted to his native tongue with evident relief. His accent was no purer than Aidan’s own. “A day is only as good as the man who lives it. Who are you, and what business have you in our lands?”
“I am,” said Aidan, “a middling fair Christian and a knight of the west who hopes to become one of Jerusalem, and if I trespass, I pray you forgive me, I had thought this road open to any who has need of it.”
“That depends on the nature of the need.”
Aidan smiled. “Have no fear,reverend brother. It’s nothing to do with you or yours.”
“You can hardly expect me to believe that.”
They were all, spokesman and silent company, glaring at Aidan’s escort, which glared back with fine fierceness.
He smiled wider. “Ah,” he said. “I see. Your p
ardon, sir. These will do you no harm. They are mine; they’ll do as I bid them.”
“Since when,” the Hospitaller asked acidly, “has a pack of Saracens done the bidding of a Christian knight?”
“Since the sultan in Damascus gave them to me,” Aidan answered.
A mutter ran through the ranks.
Aidan stiffened at the import of it. “Recreant, you think me? And have you yourselves never entered alliance with the House of Islam?”
You would,” said the Hospitaller, “do well to come with me, If you are indeed all that you say, then you may offer proof to those better fit to judge than I.”
And if not, it was clear, he would be dealt with as he deserved.
He glanced back. His mamluks watched, beast-taut, beast-wary. Only one or two of them could understand what had been said, but they all knew tones and faces, and they knew hostility when they felt it. The Hospitallers waited in patience that bade fair to break, and soon. Behind, where they would take him, was their castle.
It lay within the ban, near a road that ran nigh straight to Masyaf. Aidan considered the weight and number of human minds about him, and the power that was in them to veil his strangeness. It might, just possibly, be enough.
He sent a prayer of thanks to the good angel who had set the Hospitallers in his path, and said, “I would be pleased to accept your hospitality.”
They took it for irony. He lacked the will to enlighten them. He let them fall in about his smaller company, holding his hellions back from the edge of violence, ruling them with word and glance. Timur was bold enough to say what they all ought, fiercely, just above a whisper: “But we’re prisoners!”
“Guests,” said Aidan, princely certain, “and allies.”
None of them believed it. But they held their peace. They had not been disarmed, which they should have noticed. They were simply prevented from going anywhere but where the Hospitallers led.