Alamut

by Judith Tarr

  A woman thrust past Aidan to snatch the baby out of the nurse’s arms. Her eyes were the same thunderous blue as the child’s; her face had the same furious scowl. She shifted the baby to her hip and struck the nurse backhanded across the face.

  It was brutal, but it was effective. The woman’s blubbering stopped abruptly. The newcomer, having dealt with her, turned her glare on Aidan. “Can’t you ever do anything quietly?”

  He opened his mouth, closed it. It was never the greeting he would have expected. If he had expected one at all.

  Joanna set her fist on her hip. The baby on the other hip had to be Aimery. It hurt to see him; to know what he meant. And yet it was sweet to bear even his mother’s temper, to see her, to know that she was here, and whole, and utterly herself. “If that one” — her chin stabbed toward Arslan, who looked both bruised and cowed — ”had not manhandled me into a corner, I could have stopped this silly nit’s hysterics, got the baby out of the way, and saved you no end of explanation. Now. Are you prepared to explain?”

  Aidan drew himself up. “Madam, I regret that my servant failed so signally to control his horse, and thereby caused you grief. If you require further satisfaction — ”

  “You might,” snapped Joanna, “explain why it took you so damnably long to come back.”

  His teeth clicked together. He had forgotten how utterly, maddeningly unreasonable she could be. “Why in God’s name should I have to — ”

  “The king has been waiting for you. They found a husband for Sybilla; she likes him, and he’s not displeased with her, or with what comes with her: the counties of Jaffa and Ascalon, and maybe the throne of Jerusalem. Baldwin was hoping that you could be here for the wedding. He was disappointed when you weren’t. Do you realize it’s past Martinmas? What kept you so long?”

  “Assassins.”

  That silenced her. She went red, and then white. When she spoke again, she spoke much more softly. “You won. We heard. Great-grandmother sent a message.”

  “You’ve been living with your mother?”

  Her eyes dropped. “No.” They came up, suddenly fierce. “What else could I do?”

  Aidan could not answer. Dared not. He had expected to grieve that he had lost her. He had not expected to hate Ranulf for winning her back.

  She saw, God help her. The color drained from her cheeks. She stood as still as a bird before a snake; she said nothing at all.

  Aimery, neglected, began to fret. The nurse reached for him. Joanna clutched him to her.

  Aidan almost cried aloud. She was afraid of him. That was why she had babbled so; that was why she held so tightly to her son, shielding with him the life that swelled in her womb.

  “You never knew me at all,” he said.

  She gasped.

  “If you can think that I would touch a child...” He choked on it. Suddenly he could not bear it, not for one moment more. He spun away from her.

  His mamluks had made themselves a wall against the thronging city. She caught him as he reached them. Aimery stared, big-eyed, from her hip.

  Her hand was white-knuckled on his arm. She eyed it as if it did not belong to her; opened it, let him go. “I...” Her voice was a croak. “Don’t go.”

  “Why? So that you can flay me further? So that I can learn, in detail, exactly how you have taught yourself to despise me?”

  “Why should I bother? You know it all already.”

  “I can hardly help it, with you shouting it in my face.”

  She flung up her head. “I never said a word!”

  “You thought it.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did.”

  She hit him.

  There was a long, stunned silence. He did not even think to hit her back. He raised his hand, slowly, to his stinging cheek.

  She burst out laughing. “You look — ” she gasped. “You look — so — poleaxed!”

  He could not move for outrage. He could barely speak. “If you are quite done, my lady,” he said, “may I have your leave to go?”

  “No.” Her laughter was gone. “Will you — please — come with me, to somewhere less public? And start again?”

  He tensed to resist, but her eyes held him. He inclined his head the merest fraction of a degree.

  oOo

  There was a church a little distance down the street, small and dim and forgotten by the crowds of pilgrims, with a startling bit of garden, and a trickle of fountain. The water was cool and sweet. Aidan drank a deep draught and laved his face.

  Joanna sat on a bit of fallen column. The others had not followed them so far. Even the nurse was occupied without, giving suck to Aimery and telling her troubles shrilly to Aidan’s mamluks. It was a fitting punishment, he reckoned, for the trouble they had caused.

  Joanna spoke abruptly, rapidly, without preliminary. “I had to do it. For Aimery. For the one who will be born. I don’t expect you to understand, or to forgive. I only ask, if there’s any mercy in you, that you let us be.”

  He laughed then, but in pain. “Is that what you’ve been telling yourself, to make it easier to bear? That after all you’ve known of me, I’m a mere and soulless monster? That I could ever harm anything that you love?”

  “You can’t be that perfect a knight.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” she said, “if you are, I’m going to break down and howl.”

  He rose and stalked the length of the garden and back. He stood over her; he knotted his fists behind his back, to keep from shaking her. “No. I’m not perfect. I’d like to throttle your husband. I’d like to thrash you until you howl for mercy. But I won’t,” he said. “I won’t stoop to it.”

  “You hate me,” she said.

  “Don’t I wish I could?” He dropped beside the fountain again, laid his head in his hands. “Joanna, give it up. You won’t make anything simpler by quarreling.”

  He felt her battle to keep from touching him; to stand so close, and come no closer, nor take refuge in flight. Her voice came low and hard. “No. It doesn’t work, does it? It will never work.”

  “It never did. We pretended — sometimes, well enough to deceive ourselves.”

  Her hand brushed his hair, light as a breath. He sat still. She backed out of his reach, arms clasped about herself, shivering. “I thought I could do it. When I saw you in the street, and that she-demon of Timur’s started raising her particular kind of devilment, and Aimery was in the middle of it, and there was no escaping it, or you. Confront you. Catch you off guard. Drive you away. Put an end to it.” Her face twisted. “As if it could ever be that easy. Someone will guess. Someone will be able to count.”

  “I was nigh a year in the womb.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it. “That’s not possible.”

  “I’m not human.”

  “Then — ”

  “Then.”

  He could forgive her the sudden, incredulous joy. She had been so terribly afraid, locked in her net of deception, knowing it necessary, hating it; and not even the certainty that it would come to anything. She might still have to explain a black-haired child; it would be of his kind. But humans — and Ranulf most of all — would count to nine and be, perforce, content.

  “I can help you,” he said. “If you will let me.”

  “Do I dare?”

  “You don’t dare not to. Witch-children are different. They need the touch of power to guide them, lest they guide themselves.”

  She searched his face, as if she could see through to the mind behind it. “You want this baby, too.”

  “I won’t take it away from you.”

  Her eyes filled. She rubbed them, angrily. “You are so damnably noble.”

  “I’m not. I’m devious. I can cast a glamour, if you need one. I can rein in the little one’s magic. I can help you where no one else can. I can be everything that a proper royal uncle should be. All to have my share in the only child I’m likely to get in this age of the world.”

 
“How do you know that?”

  “I feel it in my bones.”

  She made an indelicate noise. “We’ll see what you feel when you lay eyes on another woman.”

  He stiffened as if she had struck him.

  It was only the fraction of an instant, but she was a woman, and she had a share of his magic. She looked at him and knew. “You have. Haven’t you?”

  He saw the utter absurdity of it. They could not be lovers again. She had her husband, her son, her whole world. He had one night, little more than a whore’s bargain. And he could not say a word.

  She leaped into his silence. “Who is she? Couldn’t you even wait for — how could you — who is she?”

  “Morgiana.”

  That stopped her cold. She could not have expected the truth, even from him. Not so soon. “Morgiana?”

  “The Assassin.”

  She laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  “How in the world...” She trailed off. “She’s like you. She’s... like... you.”

  “Yes.”

  “God,” said Joanna. “That hurts.” She pressed her hand to her side, below the heart. “That hurts like fire.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  She did not flinch. She even tried to laugh. “No wonder you’ve been so magnanimous.”

  “I might have managed that by myself.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. And, after a little: “It’s true, then. What people are saying. She turned on her master. She did it for you, didn’t she?”

  “She said not.”

  Joanna shook her head. “Of course she would. She’d have her pride. I’d have said the same; and done the same.” Again, she paused. “Is she as beautiful as they say?”

  “More.”

  Joanna smiled painfully: almost a grimace. “I never saw her. She was jealous, wasn’t she? Or she’d never have missed.”

  “One would think you knew her.”

  “I know myself.”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” he said.

  “No. No, it doesn’t, does it? Will you marry her?”

  “I left her.”

  Joanna’s teeth clicked together. “You did what?”

  “She is a devout Muslim. She loathes everything I stand for.”

  “I doubt that,” Joanna said.

  “I can’t forgive her for what she did to Gereint and Thihaut. And to you.”

  “There is that,” she said. “If you’d done the killing, it might have been easier. Women learn to live with such things.”

  He looked narrowly at her. She did not seem to be mocking him. Certainly she had no love for the Assassin; and her heart still stung, that he could have turned to anyone else, so soon, before he could have known that she was leaving him.

  He wondered how Muslims did it. Morgiana, who was one, was as fiercely jealous as any creature he had ever heard of. Joanna was less murderous, but she was not inclined to share him.

  Maybe the men did not know, and took care not to ask. Keeping their women in harems would be useful for that; and raising them to be submissive.

  What would Sayyida do if Maimoun took another wife?

  Questions, again. Maybe he should become a Hospitaller and forswear women altogether.

  He had said it aloud. Joanna leaped to protest. “Don’t do that! You know how you are about your given word.”

  He shivered. She had too much sense; she knew him too well. To bind himself to monk’s vows, for as long as he had to live — he could not do it. He could hardly endure to think of it.

  She touched him again, but differently, as a sister would: clasping his shoulder, shaking him lightly. He knew what it cost her. “It won’t stay as hard as this. We won’t let it.”

  “Both of us.”

  “All of us,” she said. “God, too. I’ve given Him a talking to.”

  “It’s time that someone did.”

  For a moment she wavered. She looked ready to cry. “Oh, God! I wish we didn’t have to lie.”

  “We could tell the truth and take what comes.”

  She folded her arms about her middle. “No. I won’t chance it. What I would pay — I don’t care. But not my baby. God witness it: not my baby.”

  He bent his head. He could not judge it a sin, either, to protect his own child. But —

  “We’re going to have to be seen together,” he said. “Often, if I’m to do the little one any good. We’ll never be able to tell the truth; we’ll never dare to hint at it. We’ll have to pretend, perfectly, that we are no more to one another than kin and, betimes, friends. Have you stopped to think how hard that will be?”

  “Constantly,” she said. She drew a deep breath, as if to gather her forces, and clasped him in an embrace as chaste as it was defiant. “You see? It’s possible. Give us time, and it will be easy.”

  He slipped out of her arms before either of them could break, and made himself smile. “Possible,” he said, “yes. Easy . . God grant it.”

  “He doesn’t have a choice,” Joanna said.

  39.

  Joanna did not want an escort to her husband’s house, but she had one, and a mount into the bargain: Aidan’s own grey gelding. It was revenge, of a sort, for the choices which she had forced upon them both. It was the sign of how they meant to go on.

  Aidan left her standing in the gate, the hand which he had kissed in farewell clenched at her side, and Aimery raising a new wail. He wanted the horses back again, and the men with their scarlet coats, and the jangle and clatter of their passage through the city. He was his mother’s son, that one.

  For all that it had done to Aidan’s peace of mind, the diversion had cost him a scarce hour. It was still somewhat short of noon. He was hardly farther from his destination than when he began, and by rather less difficult a way. It could almost have been good fortune which sent Joanna in flight from her mother’s house at the news of his return, and cast her full in his path.

  Almost.

  He turned his face away from the gate and the woman in it, toward the Tower of David.

  oOo

  The High Court of the Kingdom of Jerusalem had barely begun to disperse after the princess’ wedding. The barons lingered still, pondering new intrigues now that there was a new lord in the realm, watching their king narrowly for signs of either enmity or excessive amity toward his sister’s husband. There was little enough to see, as yet: the wedded couple were gone to their new demesne of Jaffa and Ascalon, and Baldwin kept his place in Jerusalem, ruling his realm in what quiet the court would allow.

  Aidan gave them something new to talk of: riding in at the head of his troop of Saracens, in his Saracen robe, with his Saracen sword, making truth of all the tales and rumors that had run before him. Even as a lad came to take his horse, the tide broke upon him. His mamluks bristled; he called them to heel, meeting the flurry of questions with a grin and a flourish. “Come now, won’t you let me pass the door before I sing for my supper?”

  “Pass it, then,” someone cried, “and be swift, before we die of curiosity!”

  He laughed and strode forward. A way opened for him; his hellions fell into step behind him. He would not, for dignity, glance back, but he knew how they swaggered, hands on hilts, heads held high under their turbans.

  The hall was splendid with the new hangings which had graced Sybilla’s wedding, thronged with the great ones of the kingdom. They paused for his coming. The murmur of voices quieted. The thud of his feet was distinct, and the clink of his mamluks’ finery, and the breath that ran with them, drawn long and slow.

  The High Court had seen such a spectacle before, in embassies from the infidel. But never with one of their own at its head. Aidan was that, visibly enough. His robe was Saracen, but he wore it as a Frankish cone, with the air of one who deigns to set a fashion. His hair was cut in the western manner, but he had kept his beard. He wore no turban, but a cap that could have been of either west or east.

  He knew how he looke
d. He made the most of it as he crossed the field of many battles that was the High Court. They were all here, all who mattered in the kingdom, not only Baldwin’s vassals but the great lords of Antioch and Tripoli, and embassies from both east and west, and the papal legate with his train, and a gathering of knights from over the sea: a portion of those who had sailed with the new count of Jaffa and Ascalon.

  He took little notice of them, beyond the most essential courtesies. Lady Margaret was there, with her daughter’s husband for escort. Ranulf greeted Aidan with honest pleasure. There was less pain in the sight of him than Aidan had expected, and after all, no hate. He was a good enough man, no great marvel of intellect, but wise enough in his way. He knew what his wife was worth; he loved her. He had the look of a happy man.

  Margaret, beside him, was no more beautiful than Aidan remembered, and no less. Perhaps he could see a little more clearly through her serenity to the woman within. He had seen the Lady Khadijah: he knew what she endeavored to be. Would be, he was certain. She was of that quality.

  She was glad to see him. That warmed him. When he would have bowed to her, she turned it into an embrace and the kiss of close kin. “Welcome,” she said. “Welcome home.”

  He brushed a tear from her cheek. “As glad as that, my lady?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “You were a part of us before we ever saw you. How could I not be glad to see you safe and whole?”

  “And I look like him.”

  “And you look like him,” she said. “And I find that I can I forgive you. How many men will endure in living memory, for as long as Gereint will?”

  Aidan could not answer her.

  She gathered herself, firmly, and regarded him with a clear cold eye. “Tell me,” she said.

  He told her all of it, except what was not wholly his to tell: Joanna; that last night with Morgiana. That he had had a bargain with the ifritah, he did not conceal. He did not judge it proper, in this place, to explain how he had paid it. Nor did Margaret judge it proper to ask. Perhaps she guessed. Perhaps she reckoned that remorse, and atonement for murder, and escape from slavery, had been enough.