by Judith Tarr
“We do,” she said, “agree on very little.”
If there was irony in that, it was too subtle for his senses.
She drew a deep, shaking breath. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? We’ve begun to live in one another’s skin. I, and an infidel. A Frank. Enemy of enemies. You eat of unclean meats; you drink wine. You pray to three gods when there is only the One. You know nothing of holy Koran.” She reached up to trace the sweep of the brow over his eye. “Barbarian. Unbeliever. Worshipper of devils.”
Her voice was tender. Her hand was light, unwontedly awkward. He sat still, barely breathing. Her beauty caught at his throat.
But she could have had none, and still been Morgiana. The feel of her hand on his brow was perfectly, ineffably right. Those bones, that flesh against his bones and flesh; the fire of life and power within, meeting his own, matching it.
She lowered her hand, knotted it with the other in her lap. “I don’t know... how...”
“May I teach you?”
The shivering came and went in her. She tried to laugh. “Do you think I can learn?”
“I think you hardly need to be taught.”
Her head shook hard. “You don’t understand. When I — when a feeling is too strong, my power masters me. I think — I think when I was born, the shock cast me from my mother’s body, and sent me otherwhere. What if — ”
That gave him pause. But he said, “If it happens, then you can simply come back. I’ll be here. See, I’ll open my mind, so, like a hand, to hold you.”
Her own was like a hand, creeping out slowly, a bare touch at first, then clasping tight. It was as if he had been all his life without one of his senses, and he had never known it, until suddenly, wondrously, it was there.
They reeled. They caught at one another. Was his face as whitely shocked as hers?
“You didn’t know?”
Her voice, her incredulity. They were still separate enough for that. “It’s nothing one can know,” he said, “until it comes. My brother said that. I thought that he was taunting me, because he was chosen and I was not.”
“Did you hit him?”
“Of course I did. He, the mooncalf, only smiled with nauseating sweetness and drifted back to his bed.”
“I can’t imagine you drifting anywhere, for anything.”
He laughed. “No. I’m not the sort of lover who drifts. Or smiles. Or warbles by moonlight.”
“Good. I don’t want to be warbled to. Though a song or two, a real song, with sparks in it...”
“Shall I sing for you?”
She paused, tempted, but shook her head. “Later. Maybe. I think — I want to begin my lessons now.”
He knew how much courage she needed to say that. Slowly, carefully, he took her hand and kissed the palm, and closed her fingers over it. She looked from it to him. “To keep,” he said, “for remembrance, and for a promise. It’s not easy, the first time. There will be pain. There may not be overmuch pleasure. But I will give you as much as I know to give.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“No,” he said. “Not with a maiden.”
She flushed. “I wish I had something of my own to give you. Instead of this — this course of study in a madrasa.
“Hardly there,” he said, biting down on laughter. There was a sweet, headlong joy in this, now that he had embarked on it; now that he could not, for pride, put a stop to it. “As for giving, you will see what you can give me. Come, now, your turban; and your hair — you should never hide it. It’s too beautiful.”
She stood frozen as he stroked it out of its plait, braced against the blind animal pleasure of his touch.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t fight. Think of the dance, how one gives oneself to it. This is the oldest of all dances, and by far the best of them.”
She neither moved nor spoke. He kept on speaking, it little mattered what, letting the rhythm of his words now touch the edge of song, now pass over into it. He began, one by one and slowly, to loosen the garments that swathed her. So many of them, like armor. She suffered him, but she had no pleasure in it, no warming to his touch. She was stiff with terror.
When he came to her chemise and drawers, he paused. “It is usual,” he said, “for the woman to undress the man.”
She started, snatched. For a moment her fingers convulsed in the fabric of his djellaba. He felt the coiling of her power.
She thrust it down. Stiffly, as if by rote, she did as he had done. At shirt and drawers she stopped, hands falling to her sides.
“The rest of it,” he said.
She shook her head once, tightly.
He said it again, gentle but firm. “The rest of it.” And when she would not: “It’s not as if you haven’t seen it before.”
Her power lashed, fierce with temper. He was, quite abruptly and quite without her hands’ touching him, naked. Her eyes slid over and round and about, and locked on her feet.
“You stared hard enough,” he said, “when I wasn’t awake to know it.”
Her glare leaped from her feet to his face. He smiled. Lightly, quickly, he slipped off her chemise. Her hands sprang to cover her breasts. He let them. While they were so occupied, he loosened the cord that held up her drawers. She clutched, too late.
She kept the custom of her people. She was all whitely smooth, like an image carved in ivory. He had been cool, centered on his teaching; but his body remembered, all at once, why it was here.
The catch of her breath was loud in the silence. She had, of course, seen it before. But not truly seen it, as anything that had to do with her.
She was perilously close to flight. He took her hand, touched the palm. “Remember,” he said.
“I can’t.” She was not answering him. “I can’t!”
“Beloved, you can.”
She shuddered, and leaped. Not away. Full upon him, pressed as close as body could press, gripping him with bone-bruising strength. Her skin was cold to burning.
He struggled to breathe, to speak. “Gently, love. Gently.”
She loosened her grip. Her hand moved, up his back to the flex of his shoulders, down to his buttocks. She was just as tall as his shoulder. He was keenly, almost painfully aware of her breasts against his ribs.
She tipped her head back. She had no power to smile, but that was triumph, that light in her face. “Your skin is soft,” she said. “And your hair” — tangling her fingers in it. “I thought a man would be all rough.”
“Some are.”
“Not you.” She found the pleasure-places in his back; she started at his shiver of delight, and came back slowly, half fascinated, half afraid. “You are all beautiful, every bit of you.” She was determined to prove it with her hands: bold now with desperation, growing bolder as she learned the shape and the size of him. Where he flexed and purred; where he flinched. How the skin fit over muscle and bone. What sparked in him when she closed her hands about his center, gentle with it as with a captive bird.
She let go abruptly, stepped back. Her cheeks were scarlet.
He brushed them with a finger. “Ladylove, there’s no shame here.”
“Not shame,” she muttered. “Not — Allah! All that to carry, and you can walk, too?”
He nodded stiffly, determined to be amused, struggling not to be indignant.
“By the Hundredth Name, how?”
“I manage.”
She shook her head. “Incalculable are the ways of God.”
“But wonderful. And in you, beautiful.” He had her in his arms before she knew what he did, and laid her among the cushions of the bed. She glowed against the silk. He traced the shape of her with lips and hands. She was all new, each spark of pleasure as fresh to her as to him, each secret a revelation to them both. He made her a gift of his wonder. Every lover was different, every night a new pleasure, but the rarest of rarities was this, to be the first who ever woke a maiden’s body to the splendor that was in it.
She was losing her
fear, warming and easing under his hands. There was fire in her. It kindled his own, almost too well. When she was fully a woman, her fears all put to flight, she would be a lover to make songs of.
All the more cause to go gently with her, although it cost him most of his strength to do it. What was desire with and for a human woman, was nigh a madness now.
Now, she willed him. Now!
There was pain, echoing and reechoing in him as in her, but through it, the fierce and utter rightness of it. He, and she, so. Mind to mind and body to body; hearts beating to one measure. For a long moment he wore a different flesh, knew a different turning of the dance. A deeper, inward pleasure; a subtler urgency.
She rode with him, borne at first on his strength, but finding strength of her own. The end was — improbably — laughter, a great, exultant shout of it.
He dropped down beside her, laughing himself, helplessly.
She swept him onto his back and sat on him, covering his face with kisses. “My lord. Oh, my lord! Love me again.”
He groaned. “Lady, have mercy! My flesh is immortal, but hardly infinite.”
She ascertained as much for herself, to her great disappointment. “That is not how it is in tales.”
“Tales lie.”
She made a most indelicate noise. But there was no denying the truth. She lay beside him, raised on her elbow, and smoothed the damp hair back from his face. He kissed her hand as it passed. She smiled and laid it against his cheek, smoothing his beard. “The tales also have men falling asleep directly, and leaving their poor lovers alone.”
“Human men,” he said.
“Ah.” She arched her back, stretching like a cat. Desire stirred in him, faint as yet, but promising a resurrection.
Her own eagerness was fading. She ached, if pleasurably. Her body, left to itself, eased into languor. He opened his arms. She came with only a moment’s hesitation, and laid her head on his shoulder. She tensed as he folded his arms about her, but again, only for a moment. She shifted closer and sighed. “So,” she said. “This is what it is.”
“Yes.”
She ran her hand idly down his side to his hip. Her pleasure was sharp in him. So different, so wonderful, no curve in it at all. But not so wonderful as what flowered where his legs met.
He shivered lightly under her touch, and gave her back what she had given. The marvel that was woman, and the marvel that was she, alone, of all the women in the world. The silk of her hair, royal crimson; the long subtle curve of her back; the swell of hip and thigh. The scent of her working in him like strong wine. The swift, flaring heat of desire returning fullfold. She met it with startlement that swelled into pleasure.
34.
Morning found them tangled in the heaped cushions. He had slid into a warm half-drowse; he woke as she moved, slipping out of his arms, rising for the dawn prayer. Although they had bathed all over only a little while before, she washed as her Prophet prescribed, and dressed fully, before she began her devotions.
He watched under lowered lids, as if he spied on a secret. Both warmth and sleep fled. She who all that night had been the half of his heart, was separate again, alien and infidel, with the dagger of an Assassin at her side. Only her hair was still her own, tumbling over the shoulders of her coat, rippling down her back as she stood and knelt and bowed toward Mecca.
He could never be to her what her Allah was. It was pain, that knowledge. He had his God, but never so close to his center. That was full of what he loved. His brother; his kin; his lover in Aleppo; his far green country. And Morgiana.
He had given her what she wanted of him, and she was content. The edge of her obsession was blunted, the heat of her passion cooled. But he who had been the lesser in desire, more the beloved than the lover, now paid for what was, after all, his sin. He looked at her and knew that hereafter, no mortal woman would be enough.
She rose from her prayer and smiled at him, wide and wicked, almost a grin. He had never thought before this night, that there could be mischief in her. She dived into the cushions and kissed him until he was like to drown.
She pulled back abruptly. He lay and tried to breathe. Her bright mood dimmed. She laid her hand over his heart as if to convince herself that it was there, beating strongly where a human man’s could not be. Her eyes took in his body, slowly, flinching from no pan of it. “So beautiful,” she murmured.
She tugged him to his feet, thrust a bundle into his arms. His clothes. While he dressed, she fetched food in which she forced him to take interest: the eternal bread and dates and cheese of the desert, and for him watered wine, for herself plain water from the spring. “You need your strength,” she said, “to face Sinan.”
He choked on a mouthful of wine. She did not notice. She ate like a soldier before a battle, grimly, scowling at the air.
“But,” he said. “So soon — we’ve hardly — we can’t do it now!”
“We can.”
It should have struck him long before it did. She was the Slave of Alamut. For the keeping of a Frank’s oath, she would break the vows which she had sworn to a hundred years of masters. No matter that she had gone willingly into servitude, and freed herself more than willingly from it. What this was to him after months of striving, to her was infinitely more.
“Never delude yourself,” she said. “Long before I saw you, I wearied of my enslavement. You see merely the end of it, a rebellion to which I have been coming since I left Alamut.”
“But,” he said, “to do it for me, an infidel — ”
“For a creature of my own kind, with whom I have made a bargain.”
Cold, all of her, and hard. He set aside the emptied bowl, and stood.
She set something in his hands, A belt which he knew well, and a sword hung on it, and a pair of daggers. He donned them slowly. His finger brushed the hilt of the sword that, returned, was like a part of his body; and, less joyfully, the dagger which he had taken out of Joanna’s heart. “This is yours,” he said.
Her head shook once. “No. You won it. Let him see it and know that even I am not infallible.”
Aidan’s fist clenched about the dagger’s hilt. He willed his fingers to unlock. Morgiana waited. He drew a deep breath and stepped to her side. Her hand caught his, not for tenderness; but as his fingers laced with hers, for an instant her clasp tightened.
Her power unfolded. There was a flicker of will, a pause at the center; a step, a turn, a shift of flesh and spirit, round and inabout.
oOo
Almost before it was begun, it ended. He gasped and nearly fell. Morgiana caught him, held him with effortless strength.
The Old Man of the Mountain sat in his barren garden, serene as if he had been waiting for them. His fidais stood guard about him: an arc of youths in white with eyes that saw only Paradise; and the gate to it was death.
She granted him no obeisance, no mark of honor or respect. He looked at her and, almost, smiled. “You did well,” he said, “to keep my captive for me.”
Aidan started forward, but her hand stopped him. He stood in clenched-fist stillness. “He was mine,” she said, “before he was yours.”
“What is the servant’s, is the master’s property.”
“I am not your servant.”
“My slave, then. As you have long seen fit to call yourself.”
“I abjure it. A Muslim may not enslave a Muslim.”
“As I remember,” he said, “you all but compelled me to accept you.”
“Such compulsion: I set all my power in your hands, and called you master, if you would wield me for the Mission as those in Alamut no longer knew how to do. They,” she said, harsh with scorn, “were much too deeply engrossed in hailing the advent of the Millennium. In wine and coupling and madness they did it, in mockery of all that our order should be.”
“And have I so mocked what we hold sacred?”
“No,” she said. “Not so openly. Not until you loosed me against the Frankish woman. That she had an ifrit of her o
wn, you discovered soon enough; and he was so obliging as to come to you. I see your mind, Sinan ibn Salman. If I escape you, the other must remain, infidel to be sure, but male, and amenable to your persuasion.”
“He has kin,” said Sinan.
She clapped her hands. “Spoken like a true bandit! What will his ransom be?”
“His life in my service.”
“Of course.” She slanted a glance at Aidan. “You may not find him as useful a slave as I. His kind serve badly, if they will serve at all.”
“As to the matter of his will, that has been seen to.”
Aidan could keep silent no longer. “With words and iron? Old man, that was never more than mummery.”
Sinan did not believe him. The Seal of Solomon gleamed in his hand. Aidan laughed and woke the fire in it.
Sinan cursed shockingly and cast away the smoldering thing. It melted as it fell, spattering the earth with molten iron.
But he was never so easily defeated. “You have kin,” he said again, through teeth clenched with pain. “Will you consider them?”
Aidan went cold.
Morgiana spoke beside him. “Indeed, he has kin. What have you?”
“Your name in the Seal of power. This one is protected by his unfaith. You are not.”
A second Seal lay in Sinan’s lap. Aidan’s power, tensed to destroy it, froze. She was in it, entwined with it: her oath, her long years of slavery, the core of her belief. Morgiana had given it power. Now none but Morgiana could take it away. And if it burned, so too would she.
Her brow was damp. Her eyes were too wide, too pale. He willed her to see what he saw. That the bonds were none but her own. That she could break them; that she had the will, and the strength. If only she would see. If only she would believe.
But to believe that, she must deny all that she had done and sworn and held to. She must sunder herself from herself. She must be other than Morgiana.
No, he thought at her. Morgiana is always Morgiana. Is the serpent less the serpent, because he sheds his outworn skin?