by Judith Tarr
“I don’t.”
“Liar.”
Her breath caught: a sob. “Don’t call me that.”
“I’ll call you anything I please.”
She could not hold it in any longer. She was sorry. She did not want it. But it was too big; it was too strong. It was rage.
It came softly, softly. “You will not,” it said to him.
He shook her, rocking her head on her neck. “I will. Liar.” Shake. “Liar.” Shake. “Liar!”
Her hand tore free and smote him with all the force of rage and grief and betrayal.
He clubbed her down.
oOo
“That,” said a voice as soft as the voice of Sayyida’s rage, “was not wise.”
At first he seemed not to hear it. He gaped down at Sayyida, as if he could not understand how she had got there, sprawled at his feet. She stared up. What opened in her, she knew with cold certainty, was hate.
Morgiana stepped between them. She was in white. She looked like a flame before Maimoun’s dark solidity; there was nothing human in her. Hasan clung huge-eyed to her neck.
She took no notice of him at all. “Shall I kill him?” she asked.
Sayyida swallowed painfully. Her lip was split; she tasted blood. “No,” she said. “No, he’s not worth killing.” She paused. “You haven’t done anything to Laila, have you?”
The ifritah smiled with terrible contentment. “No. Nothing. Except...” Her voice trailed off.
“What did you do?”
Her apprehension made Morgiana laugh. “Nothing criminal, I trust. I simply laid a wishing on her. To her husband, she must speak the truth, and only the truth, as she thinks it, without embellishment. It was,” she said, “illuminating for all concerned.”
Sayyida could not laugh, She did not think that she would ever laugh again. But she mustered a smile. “I can imagine.”
Morgiana’s eyes sharpened; she leaned toward Sayyida. Her finger brushed the throbbing lip. She hissed. “He struck you.”
It was nothing, Sayyida was going to say. Not for love of Maimoun. Simply because she did not want any human creature to die on her account.
But he spoke first, blustering, blind to any good sense, seeing only that he was male and this, even this, was female. “Yes, I struck her. She is my wife. She is mine to do with as I please.”
“She is?” Gentle, that. Maiden-soft, maiden-sweet. Deadly dangerous.
He heard only the softness. His chest swelled. “She is.” He held out his hands. “Give me my son, and get out.”
Hasan’s face was buried in Morgiana’s shoulder. She looked from him to his father. Her nostrils flared. “What will you do if I refuse? Hit me?”
“A beating would do you good.”
“You think so?” She was all wide eyes and maidenly astonishment. “You really think so?”
Even he could hardly be as great a fool as to be taken in by that. He paused, eyes narrowing. She laid her cheek against Hasan’s curls. One arm cradled the child. The other settled about Sayyida’s shoulders.
His hands came up. One, a fist, wavered between the women. The other snatched at Hasan.
Morgiana recoiled. Sayyida leaped. Which of them she meant to defend, she never knew. His blow, too well begun, caught the side of her head and flung her against the ifritah. Morgiana cried out. Sayyida tried to. “No! Don’t kill. Don’t kill — ”
oOo
Silence.
Sayyida sat down hard. Her rump protested: it knew stone. Her head reeled, not only with the blow.
This was no room she knew.
She clutched. Yes, stone. A carpet over it, rich and jewel-beautiful. Lamps in a cluster; hangings of silk, flame-red, flame-blue, flame-gold.
Morgiana, white and crimson and fierce cat-green, with Hasan staring about in grave astonishment.
Sayyida held out her arms. He filled them; she held him tight and tried not to shake. Very, very soon, she was going to break into screaming hysterics. “Where,” she managed to ask. “Where are we?”
“Away.” Morgiana knelt in front of her. “This is my place, my secret.”
“Is it where you go, when you go away?”
“Sometimes.”
Sayyida clung to Hasan and rocked. She was cold; she was all bleak inside. More had broken tonight than her patience. “You didn’t — you didn’t kill him. Did you?”
“You told me not to.” Morgiana hesitated. She looked — of all things, she looked uncertain. “I left him goggling and yelling for you to come back.”
Sayyida’s heart clenched.
“I can take you,” said Morgiana. “If you want it.”
“No.” Sayyida had not meant to say it. But her tongue had a will of its own. “No. He called me a liar. He grants me no trust and no honor. He cages me. I won’t go back to that.”
“I won’t make you.”
Sayyida thrust words past the knot in her throat. “Will you let me stay here?”
“As long as you need,” Morgiana said.
Forever! Sayyida almost cried. But she was not as far gone as that, even yet. “For ... for a while,” she said. “Until I know what I want. If you don’t — ”
“How can I mind? I brought you here.”
Sayyida laughed, because if she did not, she would burst into tears. “It’s like a story. The princess in distress, swept away to the enchanter’s castle. Do all stories come down to as little as this?”
Morgiana touched the mark of Maimoun’s fist. “Not so little,” she said.
The tears came then, for all that Sayyida could do. Morgiana eased the whimpering Hasan out of her arms. She lay on her face and wept herself dry.
oOo
When Sayyida set her mind on something, she held to it, though it tore her to the heart. She would not hear of her family; she would not speak of what had happened. She settled in Morgiana’s lair, with the baby to keep her busy, and a thousand small tasks such as Morgiana would never think of, still less find worth doing. They did, Morgiana admitted, make a difference, albeit a subtle one. Sayyida claimed a corner of the hall for herself and Hasan, heaped rugs and cushions there, and tried to keep in it the toys and baubles that Morgiana brought for the baby. In the lesser cavern, where was an ancient and blackened hearthstone and where the roof made itself a chimney to the distant sky, she established her kitchen. The rest she kept clean and tidy; she exiled the lizards and the spiders to a quarter near the cavemouth, and the mice with them, since Morgiana would not hear of their expulsion.
Morgiana had no delusions about her prowess as a housewife, but before a master of the art, she felt keenly all that she lacked. It dismayed her a little. It amused her considerably. She was — yes, more than anything, she was pleased to have these interlopers here, living in her secret place, changing it to suit their pleasure.
She had, she realized, been lonely. She lay on her mounded cushions, with the wind blowing cold without and the lamps flickering warmly within, and watched Hasan play on the floor. His mother sat near him, her smooth dark head bent over the coat which she was making for him. There was always a darkness in her now, a hard cold knot of obstinacy, but her surface was placid, even content.
She looked up and smiled. Morgiana smiled back. Neither said anything. They did not need to. That was friendship, that silence.
Much later, Morgiana woke. Hasan slept peacefully. Sayyida seemed to, but beneath the stillness, the tears flowed soft and slow.
oOo
It was time, Morgiana knew, to wake again from being to doing. Sayyida was in as much comfort as she could be. When Morgiana left, she was in the innermost cave with Hasan, availing herself of its great treasure: the hot spring that welled into a pool side by side with one both cold and pure.
Morgiana smiled and stepped round and through, into another air altogether.
The Banu Nidal were in ferment. Half of them seemed to be trying to break camp; half, to be milling about aimlessly, wringing their hands. The sheikh stood in their
midst, holding the rein of a spent and trembling camel.
He did not even start when Morgiana stepped out of the air, although his face went a little greyer. He nearly fell as he went down in obeisance.
She pulled him to his feet with rough mercy. There was, she noticed, a wide and silent circle around them, widening as the moments passed. People seemed unusually intent on making themselves scarce.
“I am to blame,” the sheikh said. “Mighty spirit, daughter of fire, the fault is entirely mine. Take me and welcome, but spare my people.”
She was slower than she should have been: she had only begun to understand. Her power darted, proving it. She seized him by the throat. “Where is he?”
He gasped, gagged. She loosened her fingers a fraction. “Great lady, we do not know. We have been hunting him. But nowhere — nowhere — ”
Someone thrust in between them: his senior wife, fiercely defiant. “You never told us that he was a son of Iblis!”
Morgiana drew back a step. It was not a retreat.
Nor did the woman read it as such; but it fed her courage.”You should have told us,” she said. “We guarded him exactly as you commanded, as the mortal man he seemed to be. How were we to know that he was no mortal at all?”
It was new, and strange: to be put to shame by a human woman. Morgiana was, for the moment, beyond anger. “Tell me,” she said.
She gained it in more than words. Evening; the sunset prayer past, the women bent over the fires, scents of the nightmeal hanging heavy in the air. The guard was vigilant by the prisoner’s tent, and prudence had tethered the bull camel behind where a clever captive might think to escape.
He strolled out past the stunned and helpless guard, dangling the cords in his hand. One of the sheikh’s sons leaped to seize him; he spoke a word, and the boy stood rooted, staring. He went straight to the sheikh and bowed, and thanked him graciously for his hospitality.
“And then,” said the sheikh’s wife, “he spread wings and flew away.”
Morgiana saw it as they had seen it. He was never so tall as they imagined, his face never so white a splendor, but the mantle of fire was power for a surety; and the wings that he spread, part shadow and part glamour, with a shimmer of red-gold fire.
The Banu Nidal wasted little time in gaping after him. They took to their camels and set out in pursuit; but he was too swift, and he left no earthly trail. She, who could have tracked him with power, did battle in Damascus on Sayyida’s behalf, and dallied thereafter, complacent in her lair.
The Banu Nidal waited in dread of her silence. They could not know how she flogged herself. He was young; he was a fool; he was certainly mad. But he was ifrit to her ifritah, and she had committed the worst of sins. She had underestimated him.
She whirled in a storm of wrath. The tribesfolk fell away from her. Their terror did not comfort her. She spread wings of blood and darkness, and hurtled into the sky.
29.
The warden of the gate of Masyaf looked out upon the morning. The mountains marched away before him, bleak and bare. Below lay the fields that fed the castle, fallow now with the harvest’s ending but bearing a memory and a promise of green. They had suffered in the sultan’s war; wind and the autumn rains had begun to blur the remnants of the siegeworks.
He would not come back. Allah, and Sinan, had seen to that. The warden murmured a prayer of thanks, secure in his faith and his righteousness. Was he not the guardian of the Gate of Allah? Was he not assured of Paradise?
A black bird flapped down amid the stubble of a field. It was very large and most ungainly, staggering and struggling as if it bore a wound. And yet there was no archer in the fields, nor lad any shot from the walls; and the bird flew alone.
It blurred and shifted in the watcher’s sight. Large, indeed. Man-high, and a tall man at that. Its wings shrank to tattered robes. It raised a white face, eyes enormous in it, black-shadowed; black hair in a wild tangle, black beard, nose curved fiercely and keenly enough but patently no bird’s.
Even yet, the warden hesitated to call it human. Human-shaped, certainly, and male beyond a doubt. But as it struggled toward the castle, it grew more strange and not less.
It — he — was quite evidently and quite starkly mad. The steepness of the slope drove him to his knees. As often as he fell, he dragged himself erect again, inching toward the gate. His robe was torn; blood glistened on it. His face was serene, even exalted.
The gate was shut. He swayed on the edge of the ditch, smiling. For an instant his eyes seemed to meet the warden’s, though that could not be: the warden was hidden in the shadow of the battlement. He raised his long white hands, still smiling, and smote them together. The gate rocked; stilled.
The faintest of frowns marred his brow. Had he expected the gate to fall? His eyes rolled up. Gently, with dreamlike slowness, he crumpled.
oOo
The warden would have left him to die, if he was capable of it, but the Master would not have it. They brought him in and tended him. He was filthy, battered, worn to a shadow; he desperately needed water and sleep. But he was in no imminent danger of death. They saw that he was no Muslim. They surmised that he was no mortal.
Sinan contemplated him with great interest and no little wonder. The physician offered him the proof: the eyelid lifted, the eye rolling senseless but, when the light struck it, performing its office. A grey-eyed man who was no human man.
The Master of the Assassins could not wait by a stranger’s bedside, however intriguing that stranger might be. He posted guards and bound them with his commands, and returned to duties more pressing, if never so intriguing.
oOo
Aidan woke in rare and perfect clarity. He knew where he was. He knew, and guessed, how he had come there. He knew that he was nothing approaching sane.
The bed was hard but the coverlets warm and soft. He was clean; his bruises ached, his cuts stung, but gently. Worse was the ache of his sore-taxed power. He had demanded all that it could give, and then as much again. And it had obeyed him.
It throbbed like a wound. Even to shield it was pain.
He did not care. He was in Masyaf.
He sat up gingerly. Muslim modesty had clothed him in shirt and drawers; they were plain but well sewn, and they fit not badly.
The chamber was small but not ascetic: walls of stone softened with silk, a good carpet, even a window. The door was barred, with a seal like a star set in the lintel. The window looked out upon a precipice.
There was a low table, and a jar, and in it clean water; beside it a plate of cakes, a cheese, a pomegranate. He remembered an old lesson among the monks, and smiled.
Under the window stood a chest of cedarwood, beautifully carved. There were garments in it: white and, like his shirt, plain but of excellent quality. Assassins’ garb. He put them on. The room was cold and he was mad, but he was no fool,to refuse warmth when it was offered.
He ate, drank. The cakes were Assassins’ cakes; they were good to the taste, without blood to taint them. The pomegranate spilled its jewels, staining his fingers scarlet.
He raised his eyes to the man who stood in the door. He did not know what he had expected. An old man, yes. Old and strong, worn thin with years of austerity. His beard was long and silver, his eyes dark and deep. Perhaps it was not beauty that he had, but it was a strong face, cleanly carved, a face out of old Persia. His kind had waged war against the west for twice a thousand years.
There was no softness in him. Mercy and compassion, his face said, were for Allah. He, mere mortal man, could not aspire to them.
He came unarmed and alone. Wise man. Guards, blades, violence, Aidan could have met in kind. This fierce harmlessness held him rooted.
“I have had your message,” said the Master of Masyaf.
Aidan had to pause to remember it. “And the messenger?” he asked.
“Dead,” said Sinan. Of course, his tone said.
Aidan could not prevent himself from regretting that. A little. His qu
arrel was with Sinan, and with Sinan’s tame demon. “A pity,” he said. “He was useful.”
“Not,” said Sinan, “once he was unmasked.” He regarded Aidan with the shadow of a smile. “Come,” he said. “Walk with me.”
He was not without fear. Aidan scented it, faint and acrid. But Sinan would be one who reveled in terror; whose greatest pleasure lay in defying it. He walked as a man walks who thinks to tame a leopard, not touching Aidan, not venturing so far, but walking well within his reach. He was a middling man for a Saracen, which was small for a Frank, and thin; Aidan could have snapped his neck with one hand.
They walked seemingly without destination, wandering through the castle. It was small after Krak, but the feel of it was much the same: a house of war, consecrated to God. Its people moved in the silence of those whose purpose is known, and firm. They greeted Sinan with deep reverence and his companion with brief incurious stares. One did not ask questions here, or think them; not before the Master. What they knew or guessed, they kept to themselves.
Sinan said little, and that to the purpose: the use of a chamber, the choice of a turning. We have no secrets, his manner said. See, it is all open, no hidden places, no shame kept chained in shadow.
Yes, Aidan thought. Sinan needed no secrets here. Those were all in the world without, among his spies and his servants.
The garden was fading toward winter, but in its sheltered places the roses bloomed still. Under a canopy of white and scarlet, Sinan sat to rest. “Is it true,” Aidan asked him, “that in Alamut the roses never fade?”
“Would you like it to be true?”
Aidan bared his teeth. “In my city there is such a garden. But she who tends it is no mortal’s slave.”
Did the Assassin tense? His face wore no expression. “No slave in Alamut has such a power.”
“And in Masyaf?”
The thin hand rose, plucked petals from a blown blossom, let them fall. “In Masyaf, death and life pass as Allah has ordained.”
“Or as you choose to command.”
“I but serve the will of Allah.”
“You believe that,” Aidan said. He was not surprised. A cynic, or a hypocrite, would have been less perilous.