Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  They took their leave with barely concealed relief, but the lord Saphadin lingered in the glow of the lamplight. “This isn’t Hattin,” he said. “There’s no dithering fool leading the Franks now. The Lionheart is a general, and he’ll be ready for whatever we can fling at him.”

  “Thirty thousand of us?” The sultan sighed and stretched, wincing as his bones creaked. He was not a young man; he had lived a life of war. He was wise with his years, but tired, too. “We’ll take him in Arsuf, and put an end to his Crusade.”

  “I do hope so,” said Saphadin.

  The sultan shot him a glance. “What is it? Have you had a foreseeing?”

  Saphadin did not answer directly. “You’re well guarded as always. I’ll set wards when I go. By your leave, of course.”

  His brother frowned. “Is it that one again?”

  “Not tonight,” said Saphadin.

  That was all the sultan was going to get: Mustafa could see that he knew it. He was not happy, but he yielded to the inevitable. “Don’t forget to protect yourself while you protect me,” he said.

  Saphadin bowed, but promised nothing. Saladin sighed with a touch of temper, and let him go.

  Mustafa should have left while the sultan and his brother were speaking. There would have been time to slip away, to melt into the dark. But he was too greedy to hear it all. The lord Saphadin came out of the light, murmuring words that raised the circle of protection about the sultan’s tent. Mustafa was caught before he could move, held in bonds that would not yield.

  He would die. The Franks had been victims of the sultan’s revenge, but a deserter who had thrown himself at the Lionheart’s feet . . . his death would not be either easy or slow.

  He did his best to still his hammering heart, and gave himself up to his God. Skeins of prayer drifted through his head: bits of the Koran, scraps of the daily devotions, fragments from his childhood in one of the lesser Berber dialects. The memory of the words comforted him, spoken in his mother’s soft voice, with the lilt that was all her own.

  She was long gone, cut to pieces in a raid, and the rest of his family with her. The pain was old, like the scars of battle and then of slavery. He was whole now, as whole as he could be; though that would not last much longer.

  The lord Saphadin stood over him, looking down at him with eyes that saw clearly in the dark. To Mustafa’s sight he was a shape of shadow limned in a faint silver shimmer, as if he had bathed in moonlight. Mustafa was not afraid. He was beautiful, as the angel of death was said to be. Maybe after all he would be merciful.

  He stooped and raised Mustafa to his feet. The wards held, so that Mustafa could not either drop or run. He could not hide his face, either.

  Saphadin looked him up and down. “A Muslim dog in a Frankish collar,” he said. “You stink of pork.”

  Mustafa said nothing. Defiance might gratify him and quicken his death, but he could not grasp the words long enough to speak them.

  “Go back to your master,” said Saphadin, “and tell him that Islam will abandon this land when God Himself forsakes it.”

  Mustafa swallowed. Go back? He was to live? But—

  Saphadin laid a finger on Mustafa’s brow between the eyes. The touch was light, barely to be felt, and yet it was like a dart of fire piercing his skull. “And tell the other one,” Saphadin said, bending close, speaking softly in his ear, “the great one, the prince of mages, that magic will negate magic. We do not fight in that way here.”

  At last Mustafa found his voice. “But there is no—”

  “Go, betrayer of Islam,” Saphadin said with no rancor in his voice, “before the guards find you. Not all my brother’s servants are as softhearted as I.”

  The bonds were loosed. Mustafa could move. He hardly needed Saphadin’s encouragement to bolt for freedom.

  He came back to Richard’s camp well before dawn, to find it already stirring. He was limping: Saphadin’s dismissal had included no protection, and he had met a spy much like himself, skulking about the edges of the Frankish lines. The man had landed a blow or two before he died.

  It was not cowardice or weakness that brought him to the physicians’ tent rather than the king’s. Richard was asleep and his guards were grimly determined that he not be disturbed. Mustafa reckoned that by the time he had acquired a salve and a bandage or two, the king would be up and about and willing to hear what Mustafa had to tell.

  The king’s physician was awake and overseeing the rolling of bandages and the packing of medicines. Master Judah was always a bit of a surprise—not only a Jew alive and whole in an army of Englishmen, but a young one at that, tall and strong. Mustafa had reason to know that sometimes he walked about in the garb of a Christian, and people took him for one of the knights.

  In this very early morning, he wore the skullcap and the loose gown of his people, moving with easy grace among his assistants and apprentices. They were almost done; the boxes and bags were packed, the beds folded into bundles that men could carry. Already some of them were moving to strike the tent.

  The master himself gave Mustafa the salve and the bandages, working quickly and deftly, and offering no commentary on the nature or provenance of the wounds. He only said, “Keep the bandages clean. If any of the wounds festers, come back to us.”

  Mustafa bowed. Master Judah had already forgotten him.

  Sioned had not been among the physicians. Her tent was already struck and packed in the baggage. He found her baking bread in the coals of a campfire, sharing it with a pair of wolfhounds and a squire or two. The boys were more wary than the dogs as Mustafa squatted beside her. They were ill-raised and ill-schooled children from some remote northern castle, to whom every man in a turban must be a devil, and all Islam was a nightmare of hell.

  Sioned was paying them no heed; nor did Mustafa. He said to her in French that the boys could understand if they tried, “I bring you a message from the lord Saif al-Din.”

  Her eyes widened just a little; it was hard to tell in firelight, but he thought a flush stained her cheeks. “Saphadin? Al-Malik al-Adil? But—”

  “He thought you were a prince,” said Mustafa. “He said that magic negates magic. They don’t fight that way here.”

  “What way is that? And why—”

  “I don’t know,” Mustafa said. “Maybe he meant the king’s mother instead? She wasn’t there, but if I can see what she is, then surely he . . .”

  She shook her head. Her face, usually so mobile, was perfectly still. “He saw me. After all. And thought—” A breath of laughter escaped her. “He gave me far more credit than I deserve. Did he seem angry? Annoyed? Frightened?”

  “He seemed calm. As if he were instructing you in the law. Which I suppose he was. Do you think sorcerers actually fight wars somewhere in the world?”

  “I’m sure it’s possible,” she said. “Master Judah says that if there’s a law against it, you can be almost certain that people have done it. Probably a great deal of it, too, if it’s particularly tempting.”

  Mustafa snorted softly. “That almost makes me want to study law.”

  “I think I’d go direct to debauchery,” she said.

  The bread was done: the fragrance of it reminded Mustafa that his stomach was empty. She retrieved the flat loaves from the coals, shook off the crust of ash, and divided them among them all, even the wide-eyed and speechless boys. Their conversation was an earful, Mustafa supposed, if one were innocent and unlettered and bred in some dank castle far away.

  They were in love with her, or they would have turned tail and fled. She treated them as she did the dogs: with amused tolerance and a pat here and there.

  “He really did remember me,” she said, sitting with her breakfast half-eaten in her hand. Her face darkened. “He must think we have no art in the west, as well as no honor. To take me for a master of the art—does he reckon us all fools?”

  “I doubt he knows what reckoning to put on you,” Mustafa said. “He couldn’t even tell that you are a
woman, and that should be obvious to a blind man.”

  “Magic tricks the eye,” she said, “and clouds the mind. He has a great deal of it. Maybe he has too much. Too much magic—can you imagine that? Even that is extravagant here.”

  “It seems he won’t be using it in tomorrow’s battle,” Mustafa said.

  She was just finishing her bit of bread. She ate the last of it, chewing deliberately, and dusted her hands over the embers of the fire. Then she said, “It is tomorrow, then.”

  “Thirty thousand of them, the sultan said. Waiting in the wood, to fall on us as we march toward Arsuf.”

  “Have you told my brother?”

  “He’s asleep,” said Mustafa.

  A smile curved the corners of her lips. She was a delectable thing, like a damask plum: dark and round and sweet. He did not think she knew that she was beautiful. She had none of the preoccupations that obsessed her sex; she took little notice of her appearance except to be clean and more or less tidy, and he had never known her to blush and giggle over a man.

  “I’ll beard the lion in his den,” she said. “You go, and get what rest you can. If there’s fighting, you’ll want to be near the king.”

  He pondered that for a moment. Then he nodded. He was not afraid of Richard, even new-waked and snarling, but he was a little tired. As for the fact that Richard most likely did not know she had been riding with the army . . . well, he thought, she was old Henry’s daughter. He would give her even odds against her brother the Lionheart.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Thirty thousand?” Richard asked. “He’s sure of that?”

  “He heard the sultan say it,” Sioned said.

  Her brother had roused instantly at her touch, neither startled nor dismayed to find her bending over him in the dimness of his tent. His squires were deep asleep near the walls, and Blondel the singer snored softly at his feet.

  She did not tell him how she had got in past the guards, and he did not ask. Still less did either of them mention that the last he knew, she had been safe among the ladies in Acre. It would have been belaboring the obvious for her to point out that there was no sending her back now—she would have had to ride through the whole army of Islam.

  She would pay that piper later, she knew very well. For now, she was safe. She sat on her heels beside his cot. “They’re in the wood,” she said, “waiting for the dawn.”

  “And then they’ll surround us,” Richard said. He ran hands over the soft new growth of his hair, frowning. “There’s the sea—we can use that. If we keep formation—if I can keep the hotheads from charging too soon . . . the Hospitallers are a little less headlong than the Templars . . . if I set them in the rear . . .”

  He had forgotten her existence. She left the same way she had come, ghosting past men who never saw or sensed her. There was not much time now; if she knew Richard, the trumpets would call within the hour, and the army would begin to move.

  They left the river in close formation, marching through the sand, as close to the sea as the land would allow. The knights of the Hospital held the rear in their black cloaks and white crosses. The Templars, who were considerably less amenable to discipline, led the vanguard, supported by the Turcopoles: mounted fighters from this country, armed and mounted very like the Saracens, on small swift horses that could match the enemy’s mounts stride for stride. The nations of the Crusade rode or marched between: men of Anjou and Brittany, Poitou and England and Normandy, then the knights of France, and last of all, ahead of the rear guard, the battle-hardened knights of Syria. The infantry marched in ranks beside them within a wall of crossbowmen, thickest and strongest in the rear, where the enemy could be expected to strike hardest.

  Richard for once did not rove the lines, looking for a fight. The Duke of Burgundy and the pick of the knights took his place. They were not such fools as to waste the strength of their destriers so early in the day: they rode up and down at an easy trot, saving the force of the charge for later. Richard rode in the center under his great standard, patient as he never was except when he rode to battle.

  Master Judah had dispersed the physicians as Richard had the fighting men, by nation and company. He was riding not far from Richard in a coat of mail and a light helmet, as Sioned was—for safety’s sake; he carried no weapon. She had a sword and a Turkish bow, made for a boy’s hand, light and not too difficult to string, but strong and with an impressive range.

  She had seen fighting enough—one did, in this world—but this was her first march to battle. Her heart was beating hard. She could see very little from where she rode, except the king’s standard and the banners of the knights and the infantry companies. The ranks were so close that she rode knee to knee with Master Judah on one side and one of the king’s clerks on the other; others pressed behind, and her mare walked with her nose against the tail of the horse ahead.

  Sometimes a horse took umbrage; a squeal and a curse, and now and then the thud of a kick finding a target, broke the near-silence of the army as it advanced. Trumpet calls and swift-riding couriers told the king what he needed to know: that the divisions were holding together, that the men were keeping formation—and, as the sky greyed with dawn, that the enemy had begun to come out of the forest.

  They fell on the rear guard first, as everyone had expected. The Hospitallers were ready for them. Richard had given strict orders: no knight was to break formation until the trumpet rang the charge. They must be a wall and a moving fortress, bristling with crossbow quarrels. The enemy could batter himself senseless upon them.

  The ranks held, all of them, from van to rear. The advance was steady, step by step. Now and then an infidel arrow arced overhead. Burgundy’s knights picked up their pace and began a series of short charges. They meant to draw out the enemy, and they succeeded: a horde of shrieking, galloping Turks swarmed about them, beating against them with sheer force of numbers.

  “They’re holding,” Richard said in the almost eerie quiet of the center. He had an ear cocked to the various trumpet calls. “We’ll make Arsuf by terce, at this pace. Then the real fighting will begin.”

  “This isn’t real fighting?” one of the clerks muttered. Fortunately for him, Richard did not hear: he was absorbed in colloquy with a courier from the young lord Henry, who commanded the Syrian knights in the rear. From that vantage, though sorely beset by the enemy, he could see the line of the army, both cavalry and infantry.

  “Tell him to keep on holding,” Richard said to the courier. “We’ll need to draw up even closer just ahead—the sand’s slowing down the Turks’ horses now, but when we get in below the hills, they’ll have the high ground and the faster footing. Saladin will wait to catch us there.”

  The man ducked his head in respect and wheeled his little Arab horse about. As he spurred her back down the line, his glance crossed Sioned’s. She started a little. It was Mustafa, in the dress and armor of a Turcopole, but with no cross of Crusade on his shoulder. She would have expected him to keep close to Richard, but it seemed he had decided to follow Richard’s nephew Henry instead.

  It had a logic of sorts—Mustafa-logic. He was protecting Richard, and fighting the war in his own way.

  So was she, if she stopped to think. She made sure her sword was loose in its sheath, and her bow and its string were close to hand. The sun was climbing, and the heat with it. The hills rose on the left hand, swarming with Saracens. Somewhere up there, Saladin was standing—and, she was sure, that other. The heat that surged in her had nothing to do with the sun.

  Grimly she thrust it aside and made herself think clearly. More and more of the enemy were pouring out of the wood and swooping down from the hills. The fortress of Arsuf was close—the van had nearly reached the gardens and orchards that surrounded it. They were pitching camp: she knew that bright shrilling of trumpets. It was a physical pain to think of cool airs and greenery, water that did not taste of leather, and peace—no swarms of arrows, no hordes of Saracens.

  The urge to break f
ree of the crush, to gallop into the open, was almost overwhelming. Couriers came again and again from the rear—Mustafa only the once; she prayed that he was still alive. They brought steadily more desperate word: “The enemy is relentless. Let us charge! If we can but break him—”

  “Stand fast,” Richard said, implacable. “Hold for my signal.”

  When even Sioned, a small woman on a small horse, could see the trees of the orchards ahead, a massive figure rode up from the rear with a lone squire for escort: the Grand Master of the Hospitallers himself. He barely bowed to the king, and never paused to take off the great casque of his helm. His voice boomed out of it. “Lord king, we must charge! They’re killing the horses. If we don’t break the line soon, there won’t be any of us left to do it.”

  “Patience, my lord,” Richard said. “I need you where you are, and I need your strength. Hold on just a little longer.”

  The Grand Master snarled in his helm, wheeled his destrier and lumbered back down the line in a hail of Turkish arrows. One or two caught in his mantle and tore it, but he took no notice.

  The advance had slowed. The enemy smote the rear again and again, striving to separate it from the rest, and so annihilate it. The arrows that had flown against the Hospitaller were forerunners; a horde of archers descended from the hills. The air was black with arrows; they buzzed and swarmed.

  The whole of the army was beset, but the rear most of all. The last courier who came to Richard gasped out, “The infantry are marching backward—the Turks are everywhere. Lord king, we can’t hold much longer!”

  Master Judah was there to catch him as he collapsed, and Sioned with her kit for field surgery. Richard’s guard closed in, raising shields above them. Arrows rattled like sleet.

  The shields blocked the light, but Sioned was not fool enough to resent them. She tended the boy’s wounds by feel. Judah, assured that she had matters in hand, had left the circle of shields. She hoped that he was safe without the guards’ protection.