Alamut

by Judith Tarr

  When he was finished, there was a long sigh. The great circle of courtiers drew back, as if he had not known very well that they were listening, and pretended interest in one another.

  Margaret was silent for a long while. As she pondered, she paced slowly. Aidan and his mamluks followed. Ranulf did not.

  Her pacing led them with apparent aimlessness, yet it ended where surely she must have meant: in a broad bay behind a pair of pillars, where they could converse in privacy. “You did well,” she said at last. She said it slowly, with her eyes on her clasped hands, where the ring of her betrothal to Gereint glittered still. “You did most well. Not to kill Sinan, after all; to demand a price which would win his respect but not, beyond reasonable measure, his enmity. And that his slave is free — I am glad for her. Such servitude can never have been less than cruel.”

  It was like Margaret, to forgive even the one who had wielded the dagger. “She is free now,” Aidan said, “but no danger to you or yours.”

  “I never feared that she would be.” Margaret looked up. “What will you do now?”

  “Keep the last of my promises,” Aidan said. “Offer the king my fealty.”

  “I had thought that you might be weary of us all, and eager to return to your own country.”

  “Not quite yet,” said Aidan.

  She smiled faintly. “And I have insulted your fortitude by implying it. Please, pardon me.”

  “There’s nothing to pardon.” Aidan forgot for a moment where he was, started to prowl, stopped. Margaret’s amusement won from him the flicker of a smile. “I’ve been too long in desert places. I’ve forgotten how to be a prince.”

  “You can never be other than what you are.”

  He stilled. She was calm, meaning no more than she said, and no less.

  “The Hospital speaks for you,” she said after a pause.

  “Do they?” He did not know why he should be surprised.

  Maybe she did. She was amused. “They know the difference between a fortune hunter and an honest soldier of God.”

  “Ah, but am I God’s? Methinks I’d be the devil’s minion.”

  “I would hardly call you a saint. But a devil, no. You are too wretchedly poor a liar.”

  “Have I lied to you?”

  “Never. Nor concealed yourself well from any but the blind and the foolish. There is no doubt that you are what you are. Jerusalem can endure it, I think. It needs you badly.”

  “For my sword-arm? Or for that else I can bring?”

  “There is a parable of lamps and bushels. Though your lamp may be too rare a splendor for common eyes to see.”

  “I do tempt fate, don’t I?”

  “I call it dicing with death. Since you are not his by right, you gamble. Would you have offered yourself in Gereint’s place, if you could?”

  His heart was cold, but he smiled. “Yes. I would.”

  “So,” she said, “would I.” She lifted her chin. “We master it as we may. I shall not marry again, I think. A woman twice widowed is allowed somewhat of the freedom of a man. The power that goes with it, I have the wherewithal to claim.”

  His glance took in the court beyond the bay, the eddy and swirl of great powers about no certain center. “You’ll be sought after,” he said. “You’re still young; you have both wealth and lands.”

  “And I could still bear an heir or three.” There was steel in her voice. “No, my lord. I am done with the burdens of my sex. God be thanked, I need not bear those of yours; except as I deem them necessary.”

  Aidan bowed low, conceding the stroke. He knew what he was doing; as did she. She regarded him with pleasure which was not entirely devoid of desire. He smiled back. “Your grandmother would approve of you,” he said.

  Margaret laughed. It was a startlingly beautiful sound. “I gather that she approved of you.”

  “Insofar as she could, of anything both young and male.” And so indiscreet as to get Joanna with child.

  Margaret did not know of that. He kept his smile and his air of lightness as she said, “You are an ally worth having. I, in return, can aid you in quelling the whispers against you.”

  “Bargains, madam?”

  “Bargains.” She matched his wry face. “Let us say that I prefer to settle now all that should be between us hereafter. I consider us to be kin. I know that you intend to be a power in this realm; I believe that we can profit one another.”

  “I would rather regard it as friendship.”

  “The folk of Islam,” she said, “must have found you refreshing.”

  “Shocking, more like,” he said. He offered his hand. “Friendship?”

  She took it. Her clasp was firm. “Friendship,” she said.

  oOo

  The barons, deprived of a spectacle, had long since returned to their own concerns. Aidan’s return roused barely a ripple. It was the delicacy of courts; and the fickleness of courtiers.

  The king came in quietly while Aidan exchanged courtesies with a baron from Tripoli, and sat without fanfare. For a long while no one noticed him.

  Aidan knew him the moment he passed the door. The sickness was stronger in him, but he had grown as if to fit it. He was an image of a king, though a king without a face, veiled in the kaffiyah. His eyes were all but hidden in it, yet they followed Aidan, bridling impatience, glinting as they reckoned the mood of the court.

  Aidan met them across the hall. The gladness in them was all the more splendid for that it did not diminish itself with words.

  A tilt of Aidan’s head brought his mamluks to order behind him. They were goggle-eyed at all the brazen, veilless women. The king at least distracted them: a leper, and a king, and no one shrank from him or thought the less of him for what God had inflicted upon him.

  Aidan took the straight path to the king. In front of the throne, he halted. The court had stilled anew. The king waited in thrumming silence. As Aidan bowed, his Saracens went down, offering their own reverence to this one whom their master would call master.

  The king rose. Aidan straightened. Baldwin had grown indeed: they were almost eye to eye. The king neither asked nor offered, except with his eyes.

  Aidan kissed the jeweled glove. The hand within, the good hand, was thinner even than it had been, the fingers drawn into claws with the sickness; but it was steady. The voice was soft, neither deep nor light, simply itself. “My lord. Well met again.”

  “Well met indeed, sire,” Aidan said. “I’ve come to serve you, if you will have me.”

  “Have you?” Baldwin’s voice went up an octave. “You do wish it, then?”

  “With all my heart.”

  The king’s eyes shone. They leaped past Aidan to the row of rumps and turbans, and began to dance. “Would this be your knight’s fee?”

  “If your majesty will accept it.”

  “Does it agree to be paid?”

  “It will hear of nothing else.”

  It most certainly would not, from the flash of eyes under the turbans. Aidan’s hellions had judged this king, and found him worthy of their notice.

  Baldwin sat, not weary, not quite, but careful of his strength. There was a smile in him, a glint of wickedness. “This is scandalous.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Baldwin laughed. “It’s been dull without you, my lord.”

  “A rather lively tedium, I should think,” Aidan said, with a glance at the court.

  “Lively,” said Baldwin, “but never outrageous.”

  “Ah. A definite lack. I do like to know I’m useful.”

  “Always, my lord.” The king was grinning, Aidan suspected. He was transparently delighted. “I’m glad you came today. There’s nothing interesting happening, now that my sister is wedded and bedded. Shall we turn dinner into a celebration of your victory?”

  “My lord is generous,” Aidan said.

  “You really do mean it, then. You’ll enter service in Jerusalem.”

  “With you, my lord, and no other.”

  Bald
win was king; he did not protest his unworthiness. But he was glad, and proud, and a little afraid, as one is when one does something irrevocable.

  Aidan knew. It was the same with him. He knelt suddenly, and held up his hands palm to palm, offering his homage.

  Baldwin looked at them. Aidan gave him gladness, and pride, the free surrender of a vassal to his chosen lord. “You are my king,” Aidan said, “my lord and my liege. I serve you of my own will. I grant you the reverence of liege man to liege lord.”

  “That is high honor,” Baldwin said, “and a royal gift.” His gloved hands settled lightly over Aidan’s bare ones; he drew breath to begin the oath of fealty.

  Aidan was aware of little beyond the king; but his senses kept a watch of their own. He knew that the hall had stilled in a long ripple from the center to the walls. The last of his colloquy with the king had fallen in silence.

  As Baldwin’s hands came together over Aidan’s, the quality of the silence changed. Something had come into it; something unwonted. As the king moved to speak, a clear cold voice forestalled him.

  40.

  “Lord king, if you would take yon knight into your service, will you take also his debts?”

  The echoes ran up to the roof and faded. No one said a word.

  Aidan knelt immobile. His heart had done an appalling thing: it had leaped up and begun to sing.

  He marked her passage in murmurs, and in the gleam of the king’s eyes. In a moment he would break, and turn, even knowing what he would see. No escort at all, no mark of station, only the lone slender figure born out of air, swathed in veils and speaking, defiantly, in the langue d’oeil. Her accent was enchanting.

  Morgiana halted close behind him. Her presence throbbed like pain; her shape was drawn in fire on his skin. To human eyes she was a human woman, a Saracen of rank in gold and silk, wrapped and shrouded in veils.

  She bowed to the king: a swelling murmur, as she went down among the mamluks and showed them all both her grace and her foreignness. The murmur followed her back to her feet, but died as she spoke. “My lord of Jerusalem, this man will tell you that he comes unencumbered, freed of all debts and promises. I submit that he does not.”

  Aidan’s hands dropped from the king’s clasp. He turned, but slowly.

  Her veils were green. They enveloped all of her but one white hand.

  “Did you plot this from the beginning?” he asked her.

  She took no notice of him. “He owes me a debt, lord king, which he may do well to discharge before you accept his fealty.”

  “I paid it,” Aidan said, “in every particular.” Damn you, he cursed her where only she could hear. Damn you for doing this to me.

  He might not have been there at all. She sank to her knees and beseeched the king. “Lord, will you hear me?”

  Baldwin glanced at Aidan. Aidan kept his eyes on Morgiana. “I will hear you,” the king said.

  She bent her head. “You are gracious, lord, to one who was a slave. I am called Morgiana; I served the masters of Alamut, and after them the lord of Masyaf.”

  The court had been diverted by her presence. Now it was fiercely intent. Aidan tensed. Not, God help him, for himself. Could even Morgiana escape, if the High Court rose up against her?

  She was not aware of them at all. “I was the Slave of Alamut,” she said. “Now I am free, and in part I owe it to this knight. We struck a bargain. I brought him before my master, and protected him, and won for him all that he sought, and my freedom with it.”

  “And the prince?” the king asked. “Dare I ask what he gave in return?”

  “No,” Aidan said.

  “Yes,” said Morgiana, “lord king. I am but an ignorant Saracen, yet I know somewhat of your knights. Their honor; their loyalty; their prowess in the field. Their mastery of the arts of love.”

  Aidan’s cheeks flamed. God be thanked that he had kept his beard; it hid the worst of it.

  She could see. He felt her mockery.

  “I thought,” she said, “that I would find myself a knight, for surely he would honor me, and serve me in all humility. And lo! Allah sent me not any knight, but a flower of chivalry, a trueborn prince, a moon among the stars of his firmament. I laid my nets for him, I confess it. I took him captive, not in my master’s name, but in my own.”

  “Yet serving your master, surely,” Baldwin said.

  It was a little uncanny to be caught between them: veiled ifritah and veiled king, voices without faces, masks about the glitter of eyes. Morgiana answered strongly, with a toss of her shrouded head. “By then I had no master, except in name. What I had done for the one who held my oath, I now repented. But my knight would not believe me, nor forgive me, on my simple word. I undertook to prove it to him. I offered to give him his vengeance on my master, but for a price.”

  “Was that honorable, to ask for payment?”

  “It was necessary,” she said. “I loved him, you see. I had loved him since first I saw him. He would not permit himself to love me. I saw that he never would, unless I bound him to it.”

  “Therefore you bargained,” said the king.

  “Therefore I bargained. He would have his revenge. I would have him.”

  “Until I satisfied you,” said Aidan. “No longer.”

  “And no shorter,” she said.

  No one laughed, or even smiled. No one dared.

  “I gave you what I had to give,” Aidan said. “I took the freedom which I had won. There is no debt owing.”

  “You never asked if that were so.”

  He swallowed, dry-throated. His voice came hard and harsh. “I had reason to believe that it was.”

  She shook her head. “You never listened, did you? Or thought. Or did anything but run, and pray that I would not follow.”

  “Are you calling me a coward?”

  “No,” she said. Simply, as she always did. She had no artifice at all. “I call you thoughtless. Obstinate. Cruel, perhaps. A man can be cruel, when his selfishness is threatened.”

  He drew a deep, steadying breath, and made himself speak calmly. “My lady, part of our bargain was my freedom. From you, as from your master. Have you forgotten?”

  “Cruel,” she said, as if to herself.

  “Are you any less? To come to me now, to shame me before the chivalry of Outremer — are you content? Will you let me go?”

  She swayed a little under the force of his temper. She said, “I am not content.”

  He flung up his hands. “Then what will satisfy you?”

  “You.”

  His hands clenched into fists.

  He was not dismayed. He was not angry — not any more than he should be, in such a time and such a place as she had chosen to call him to account. What was welling up in him was shockingly close to joy. The hawk, netted at last, found himself longing for the jesses.

  But he was a wild thing still. He would not submit, even to Morgiana. “You have had me,” he said, and no matter what their avid audience made of that. “Did I fail to please you?”

  “You pleased me,” she said. “Too well. Did you truly believe that fire could quench fire?”

  “I was a greater fool than that. I thought that a woman could be satisfied.”

  She laughed, light and piercingly sweet. “Oh, my lord! You are growing wise.”

  His temper snapped. He sprang. He meant to rend her veil. To do to her precious modesty what she had done to his pride, but his hand would not obey him. The silk was cool; her eyes were burning. Veil and headdress slipped free and fell. He heard the long sigh as her hair tumbled down; and, behind him, the catch of the king’s breath. Aidan was not breathing at all. His only thought was a dim surprise. She was eerily, improbably beautiful.

  His hand knew where it belonged: fitted to the curve of her cheek. He stared at it, willed it to fall. “We don’t even believe in the same God,” he said.

  “There is no god but God.” Soft, pure, and absolute.

  He sucked in a breath, filling his emptied
lungs. “There is blood between us.”

  “Does not your faith preach forgiveness of one’s enemies?” She tossed her hair out of her face, and turned the fire of her eyes on Baldwin. “Lord, you are king here. I bid you judge. This man promised himself to me. He fulfilled only the barest beginning of that promise. Shall he then go free? Must I surrender my claim to him?”

  Aidan wheeled to face the king. “Must I surrender my freedom again? Must I pay a price which I have long since paid?”

  The king looked from one to the other. Without even knowing it, Aidan had stopped shoulder to shoulder with Morgiana, as if they were together in this battle, and not bitterly opposed.

  Baldwin’s glance acknowledged the irony. After a moment he said, “A bargain is a weighty thing; the more so when the principals cannot agree on its completion. Tell me honestly, my lady. Do you desire this man? Will you do anything to win him?”

  “Within the bonds of faith and reason,” she said, “yes.”

  The king nodded slightly. “And you, my lord. Does this woman revolt you? Do you despise her?”

  “No.” Aidan bit off the word.

  “Then your objections are entirely religious?”

  “No.”

  Baldwin waited. Would wait, it was clear, until Aidan spoke again. Aidan gave him what he wanted. “Do you think I have no pride?”

  “Quite the opposite,” said the king. He was enjoying himself, Aidan could see. Damn the boy. Had he and the Assassin plotted it between them?

  Aidan reined himself in. He needed his wits about him: more, maybe, than he ever had in his life. “I have my pride,” he said, “and, yes, my faith. And my certainty that I owe this lady nothing, except my forgiveness. I give it. I absolve her of all that she has done to me and mine.”

  “And what you have done to me?” she asked. “Will you absolve yourself of that, too?”

  “Do I need to be forgiven for loving you?”

  “No,” she said. “Only for leaving me.”

  “You might also,” said Baldwin, “consider the sin.”