by Judith Tarr
“Strange things, your Allah writes, when he has a mind.” Aidan gave up the meat and settled for cheese. Morgiana’s glance was keen. He refused to see it.
He set down the half-nibbled cheese. “Go on, eat. I’m finished.”
They tried to argue with that, but he had no appetite, and they did. While they ate, he withdrew to the bath. It was a wonder to him, to have it there, always, for the taking. And wide enough to swim in.
He dropped his clothes, but he did not go into the pool. Where the stone poured down in a curtain like ice, blue and palest green, he settled on his stomach, chin on folded arms, watching the play of water in the light of the lamp. Idly he made a light that was his own, and shattered it into embers, setting them to dance atop the water.
He yawned, rubbed his cheek against his arm. He was forgetting how it felt to be clean-shaven. Maybe he would go back to it. It would shock the women; it would prove that he was a Frank and a barbarian. And, in body, monstrously young.
Time left no mark on him. Even scars faded and vanished. He had taken a blow to the mouth once, long after he was grown. The stumps of teeth had loosened and fallen; he learned to smile close-mouthed, and contemplated long ages of beauty marred. It was illuminating, and humbling, to know how much it mattered. But a day came when he ran his tongue along the broad ugly gap, and felt a strangeness. In a few months’ time they had all grown back, all the shattered teeth, sharper and whiter than ever. Sometimes in his wilder moods he was tempted to sacrifice a finger, to see if it would grow again without a scar.
He would never do it. He was too tender of his vanity. He troubled little with mirrors, but he liked to know what he would see there. He liked the way people, meeting him, drew back a little and stared, and doubted their eyes. Even the way they judged him, mere empty beauty, with no need to be more. It was always amusing to prove them wrong.
He always knew, now, where Morgiana was, as he knew the whereabouts of his own hand. He said to the water, but in part to her, “I’m a very shallow creature, when it comes to the crux.”
She dropped something over him: a robe of heavy silk, glowingly scarlet. “But very good to look at,” she said, “and no more modest than an animal.”
“Why not? I’ve nothing to hide.”
“The Prophet, on his name be blessing and peace, was a modest man. We follow his example.”
Aidan sat up, wrapping the robe about him. It was lined with lighter silk, pale gold; it was embroidered with dragons. It was perfectly suited to his taste. “Was he ugly, then?”
“Oh, no!” She seemed shocked at the thought. “He was very handsome. He looked a little like you: being noble, and Arab, and slow to show his age.”
“You knew him.”
“I was never so blessed.” She was in green tonight. She looked much better in it than in white. Much warmer; much less inhuman.
She had not denied that she was old enough to have known Muhammad.
“I may be,” she said. “I don’t remember. I was little more than a wind in the desert, until my master found me and made me his own. I remember nothing of being a child. Who knows? Maybe I never was one.”
“My mother was like that,” said Aidan. “A wild thing, nearly empty of self, until a mortal man gave her a reason to live in mortal time.”
“Did she die with him?”
“No. She... faded. She went back into the wood. Us — my brother and me — she left. We were half mortal, and raised mortal, though we knew early enough that we were not. As our sister is.”
“You have a sister?”
It twisted in him, with pain. “Gwenllian. Yes. Ten years younger than I, and growing old. You killed her son.”
“I was oathbound,” she said. “Surely you know what that is.”
He drew up his knees and laid his forehead on them. He was tired. Of fighting. Of hating. Of grieving for human dead.
“It is what humans are. They give us pain.”
“And joy,” he said. “That, too. Surely that is what it is to be alive?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever lived. Empty of self — yes, that is I. I was a dagger and a vow. Now I am less even than that.”
His head flew up. His anger flared, sudden and searing. “You are not!”
He had astonished her. It soured quickly; her mouth twisted. “No. I am something, still. A thing to hate.”
“I don’t — ” He broke off. He could not say it. It would be a lie.
Except ...
He shook himself. “You are more than that! Look about you. Look at your friend; look at Hasan. Aren’t they worth something?”
“One friend,” she said, “in a hundred years.”
“A hundred years of what? Being a dagger and a vow. Serving masters who never saw you as anything else. But you are more; your heart knows it. It found Sayyida, and she had the wits, and the quality, to know you for what you are.”
“A murderer of children.”
It hurt, to have those words cast back in his face. It was not supposed to hurt. It was supposed to be a triumph. “Yes, damn you. And more than that. None of us is simple, my lady.”
“You can say that?”
“You wanted me to see you clearly.”
She stood. She shook; it had the heat of rage. “I wanted you to love me.”
oOo
He cut his beard short, but he did not get rid of it. It was not worth a battle; and his vow was not kept. Not yet.
He decided that he rather liked it, once it was short enough to show the shape of his face. It added years and dignity, both of which he could well use. Besides, as the women said, he was a man, and a man’s beauty could not be perfect without it.
Sometimes Muslim customs made surprising sense.
oOo
Morgiana left them on occasion, walking her paths that no one else could follow, to fetch food, and drink other than water of the spring, and the odd treasure. Once she brought back a jar of wine, and a lute.
Aidan regarded the lute when she laid it in his lap, and gently, most gently, caressed the inlay of its sounding board. “Where did you get this?” he asked her.
Steal, he meant. She refused to be baited. “I went to a place where such things are known, and asked where I might find the best maker of lutes. I went where I was shown. I paid,” she said, “in gold. My own. Fairly and honestly gained.”
He looked down. He had the grace to be ashamed. Lightly, almost diffidently, he plucked a string. The lute was in tune.
“I can’t accept this,” he said.
“Did I say it was a gift?”
He flushed.
“Play for me,” she commanded him.
He was angry enough to obey her, defiant enough to choose a tune from his own country. But she had traveled far; she had learned to find pleasure in modes which were alien to those of the east. This was properly harp-music, bard-music, but he fitted it well to the supple tones of the lute.
She watched him in silence. He was out of practice: he slipped more than once. But he played very well, with the concentration of the born musician, head bending further as the music possessed him, mouth setting in a line, fingers growing supple, remembering the way of it.
When he began to sing, she was almost startled. She did not know why she had expected a clear tenor: his voice in speech was low enough, with the merest suggestion of a purr. In song the roughness vanished, but that new clarity resounded in a timbre just short of the bass. A man’s voice beyond doubt, dark and sweet.
It took all her strength to keep from touching him. He resisted her abominably easily; he had only to remember his Frankish woman, and what she carried. He was not like a human man, to be led about by his privates.
But he watched her. She knew that. He found her good to look at. He was beginning, not at all willingly, to forget how to hate her, if never to love her. And he wanted the power she had, to walk in an eyeblink from the wastes of Persia to the markets of Damascus.
She was pleased to teach him le
sser arts, to hone the power he had never thought of as more than a child’s toy, but that single great art, she would not give him. She knew what he would do with it.
Just this morning, he had tried to trick her out of it. Then when she vanished, she felt the dart of his will, seeking her secret. It was not as easy to elude him as it had been. He was a clever youngling, and he was growing strong.
The lutestrings stilled. He raised his head. His eyes were dark, the color of his northern sea. “Why?” he asked her. “Why teach me at all?”
“Why not?”
“What if I grow stronger than you?”
She laughed, which pricked his pride terribly. “I don’t think I need to fear that. But that we may be equals... that, I think very possible. I would welcome it.”
“Even knowing what I would do then?”
“Ah, but would you do it?”
He was mute, furious.
“My sweet friend,” she said, “if you were half as wise as you like to imagine, you would know what it means, that we move so easily in one another’s thoughts.”
“It means that you will it, and I have no skill to keep you out.”
She shook her head and smiled. “You know better than I what it is. Remember your brother and his queen.”
He surged to his feet. “We are not so mated!”
He took care to lay the lute where it would be safe, before he flung himself away from her. She saw that; she saw quite enough apart from it. She allowed herself a long, slow smile.
32.
He had to get out. He had been holding up well; he had learned to live in his cage. But four of them were too many. And she — she pressed on him from all sides. Wherever he turned, she was there, not even watching, simply and inescapably present.
The worst of it was that he could not loathe the sight of her. Flatly, utterly, could not. When she was gone about her marketing — improbable domesticity, flitting about the world in search of a dainty or a bauble — he was restless; he could sit even less still than he usually did. And he was like that until she came back, when the knot in him loosened, and the world was in its proper place again.
He was like a man enslaved to a drug. He hated it, and he could not live without it.
She had done it to him. She, the witch, the spirit of air. Murderer, he could no longer call her. The word filled his hands with blood and his mind with memories it had long since buried.
He tried to turn her against him. He honed the memories; he gave them to her in hideous detail, heedless of what they did to his sanity. He taunted her with his body. He used her teaching, transparently, to seek out paths of escape.
Sometimes, to be sure, he made her angry, but never angry enough. Mostly, she only smiled.
oOo
He did not know what that smile cost her. She knew as well as he, that she could not keep him so. He was not to be tamed in a cage. It was a hard lesson to learn, and bitter to face.
Sayyida understood. “Ishak told me about falcons,” she said. “The taming is never complete until the falconer flies his bird free, and it comes back. You’ve caught this one, you’ve taught him to endure the jesses and the hood. You’ve been letting him fly a little, on the line.”
“The creance,” said Morgiana, but abstractedly, listening hard. “How can I let him fly? I know he won’t come back.”
“Then you’ll have to find a lure for him, won’t you? What will win him for you?”
Sayyida’s eyes narrowed. “Do you remember when you told me about him, and we talked about how a woman wins a man?”
“What good is that? I’m not a woman.”
“But you are! Isn’t that the whole of your trouble? What have you done to show him that you’re worth desiring?”
Morgiana shrugged angrily. “What can I do? He can see me. He can hear me. He knows what I want of him.”
“Of course he does. Do you think he likes to feel like a stud bull?”
Morgiana gasped at the coarseness of it. Sayyida went on unruffled. “If that’s all you want, there are other and easier people to get it from. If you want more — if you want him — you’re going to have to let him know that you’re a woman.”
Morgiana looked down at herself. “It isn’t obvious?”
Sayyida laughed, but she was a little annoyed. “Morgiana, you are so dense! Come with me.”
They went into the bath, drawing the curtain that would warn Aidan not to intrude if he came back from prowling the limits of his cage. Sayyida was ruthless. She made Morgiana strip, to the skin, and no pauses for modesty. No one had ever seen Morgiana naked, except the attendants in the baths, who were trained to see only what needed cleaning or stripping.
Sayyida examined her with a hard clear eye. “You’re not as shapely as Laila,” she said, “but you’ll do. Yes, the way Franks are made, and the way they admire thinness, you’ll definitely do. Laila would kill for your skin. And your hair. Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”
“I look like a starved cat.”
“Does he think so?”
Her teeth clicked together. “He never even looks.”
“I think he does.” Sayyida plumped Hasan at her feet. “Watch him. I’ll be back directly.”
It was rather longer than that. Morgiana rubbed her arms, not for the chill — the cavern was richly warm — but for the feel of air on her bare skin.
Small arms circled her leg. Hasan grinned up at her. He liked her this way.
“You are certainly male,” she said to him, sweeping him up. He did not want to be held; he wanted to try this new art of walking. She mounted guard over the pool, lest he fall in, and let him try his legs among the shimmering pillars.
She sat by the pool and, for something to do, combed out her hair. Once in a great while she cut it, to get it out of the way, but it seemed most comfortable when it was knee-long. Its color always made people stare. She would have been happier if it were black. Like his, thick and glossy, with blue lights. But she liked her skin well enough, purest ivory to his moon-pallor. Her lips were redder than his, her nipples a tender pink like light through a shell. Were her breasts small? They were large enough to fill her hands. And shapely. Not like the Frank’s heavy swaying udders, with the blue veins thick in them, and their broad dark nipples, and the weight of milk dragging them down.
“Cow,” she said.
“Cow,” said Hasan, obligingly.
She laughed in spite of herself. There was little merriment in her, and a great burden of jealousy. That he could love that, and not this. That it should carry his child.
She could not bind him so. She knew it starkly, beyond hope of denial. They had not the human fragility, her kind, but neither had they human fecundity.
And could she wait until the woman died of her own humanity?
Or kill her.
No. That would lose him surely and eternally.
Sayyida came back laden with brightness: the sheerest of all the silks which Morgiana’s fancy had gathered.
“No,” said Morgiana, growing alarmed. “I won’t.”
“Do you want him or don’t you?”
Morgiana bit her tongue. “But this — ”
“This is how to let him know that you’re a woman. Men don’t take to telling, haven’t you noticed? You have to show them.”
“If he cares enough to notice,” she muttered.
“When I’m done with you, he will. Now stand still,”
oOo
The women were up to something. When Aidan came back from a long day’s prowl among the ruins, Morgiana was nowhere to be seen or sensed, and Sayyida labored in the kitchen over what smelled and, from what he was allowed to see, looked like a feast. She came out only to thrust Hasan into his arms and command, “Play with him.”
He was glad enough to obey her. He went to wash, reconsidered, bathed all over, and Hasan too. Somewhere in the middle, his power twitched, too quick to catch, too light to be sure of. But he came out to find his Bedu rags gone,
and in their place the silks and linen and fine muslin of a Saracen prince, with the dragon robe folded and laid under them all.
He could have demanded his own clothes back, but he chose to play their game. He put on what he was expected to put on, with Hasan for a small but highly appreciative audience. It was all white and gold but the long loose coat; there were rubies sewn with gold thread in the slippers and the cap.
A box appeared next to his hand as he reached for the cap. He stifled a start. Cautiously, though he sensed no danger, he lifted the lid. Jewels — a prince’s ransom, at least, in rubies and pearls, gold and diamond.
“This is too much,” he said to the air.
It did not answer.
He hesitated, but the glow of the stones was more than he could resist. He chose a ring, ruby set in gold, and an armlet with a pattern of horses and trousered riders. The rest, he let be. He was gaudy enough as he was.
He came out warily. The lamps were lit in the hall, a cloth spread, dishes of silver laid out on it. Still there was no sign of Morgiana. Sayyida claimed Hasan and bore him away; not without a moment’s pause to admire Aidan’s splendor. It warmed him, the halt, the half-turn, the widening of the round brown eyes.
He sat on the cushion that had been set for him. He did not know what he was supposed to think, or do.
Except eat. He did that willingly, if nor entirely happily. Sayyida waited on him; her mind was silent. Veiled from him; as was, always, her face.
“You would think,” he said to her, “that by now I’d count as family.”
She continued calmly to fill his cup with honeyed wine. When she laid down the pitcher, she seemed to come to a decision. She let her veil fall.
She looked like Ishak. She had his profile, his slightly curved nose; even, suddenly, his smile. Aidan supposed that a Saracen would call her plain. He found her quite handsome.
He said so; she blushed furiously.
He never ate enough to make a human happy, although tonight he tried. He helped her afterward to clear it all away: she disliked it when he did that, especially now that she remembered his rank, but she had learned to put up with it. She all but dragged him out of the kitchen before he could begin the washing — ”In those clothes!” She was horrified. She was also determined to stay with him, to keep him sensible.