Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  Now she was here, on this island that the great Alexander had bound to the land with his causeway, looking up at towers that had stood since the dawn of the world. She had been afraid that the age of the city would crush her. Yet as she came to it, it welcomed her. It drew her in; it bade her rest in the warmth of its arms. And that, she had never expected—not in this city of enemies.

  This was a city much less burdened with darkness than Acre or Jaffa or Caesarea. It was not a city of light—it was too old and world-weary for that—but evil had no power over these stones. Maybe it was that they were still so much a part of the sea. The cord that bound them to the land was narrow, and there were great wards on it: wards that Alexander himself had set, or Alexander’s mages.

  They were still making the purple here, the dye so rich and so rare that in older days it had been reserved for kings. She caught the stink of it on the wind as she was carried off the ship, a sharp reek of the crushed shellfish from which it was made.

  “The stench of wealth,” the captain said. He had taken a liking to her, perhaps out of sympathy for her trapped expression. “Here of all places, there’s no mistaking where the money comes from.”

  “It’s not evil,” Sioned said. “Just strong.”

  “Strong it certainly is,” said Henry. He seemed to be trying not to breathe too deeply. “Do you think Conrad is using it as a weapon?”

  “They say he’ll do anything that serves his purpose.”

  While they spoke, the ship had been settling along the quay. The captain excused himself; Henry had to withdraw among the men, to set them in order and to oversee the unloading of the horses that he and his two companion knights had brought. Sioned was left alone except for the flock of her maids, not one of whom had an intelligent word to say. They were chattering like starlings. Almost, vindictively, Sioned called up the spell that would have made reality of the semblance.

  She caught herself before she succumbed to the temptation. For temptation it was, and not entirely born of her own heart, either. She raised the guard that she had let down on sight of Tyre, and wove the wards more tightly.

  Mustafa was in her shadow again. She had not seen him come, but his presence reassured her considerably. He had squire’s livery now, with the king’s device, and so many weapons about him that the wards hummed in protest. They could stand fast against cold iron, but they did not like it.

  The ship was moored, the men drawn up in ranks, as much as the deck would allow. Their eyes turned toward her.

  Her rank was highest, her position most dignified. She must disembark first, with only a company of guards ahead of her. She had been instructed in proper deportment: she allowed herself to be helped down off the deck, although she was perfectly capable of doing it unassisted, and let herself be bundled into a chair. Her maids would walk: fortunate women. She, the princess, must not set her delicate foot on the common earth.

  Conrad had not met them or sent a delegation to greet them. He would have an excuse, she was sure, but it was a slight, an insult to the king whose envoys she and Henry were.

  That would be dealt with. She, shut in the curtained chair, choking on the heavy perfume that had been favored by the last inhabitant, could only grit her teeth and endure. Her spirit at least was not bound; it was keenly aware of the streets of the city, how they ascended gradually and with many turns and doublings toward the citadel. She heard the hum and bustle of people in those streets, and the tramping of feet: her bearers’ closest, her guards’ farther away. Henry and his knights rode behind, a slow clopping of hooves, with now and then the clang of steel shoe on paving stone.

  Her maids’ chatter had barely paused with their advent on dry land. They had been babbling since Acre, so steadily and incessantly that it was, in its way, a protection.

  Sioned was not yet so far gone as to listen to their nonsense. It was gossip again: follies and scandals, and a heated debate over the best way to arrange a wimple.

  When at long last the chatter died, it heralded a halt in the procession. Sioned could feel the loom of the citadel, the heart of all that was here: ancient, rooted in the rock. The clash of spears, the challenge of guards, seemed somehow trivial before the power of that place.

  Henry answered the challenge in his clear voice, pleasant but with an edge of steel. She half expected him to be turned away, but the guards let them all through.

  They passed under the echoing arch of a gate and into a stone court. Sioned’s chair lowered to the ground. It was all she could do not to leap out of it. She waited instead and impatiently for Mustafa’s slim brown hand to part the curtain and for him to assist her to her feet. After so long in confinement, she needed the supporting hand: the light was dazzling, her body stiff from sitting.

  When she could see again, and when her legs were steady under her, Henry had come to relieve Mustafa of his post. Mustafa retreated softly into his favored place in her shadow. Henry, at ease in the light, smiled at her and said, “Are you ready? The battle waits.”

  She drew a breath and nodded. The courtyard was ringed with armed men, all of them standing still, watching. Her own guard seemed terribly weak and small, her knights a pitiful number.

  She had magic. She had Richard’s strength behind her, the thousands of his army, and the threat of his wrath. She lifted her chin. They were all staring at her. The court in Acre had called her beautiful. Certainly her maids had done their best to make her so. She only had to think that she was—to know that when men looked at her, they were captivated.

  It was alarmingly easy. If she had ever been baptized a Christian, she would have had to confess to the sin of pride. She contented herself with a resolution to end this game quickly and return to her wonted and unpretentious self.

  Whether it was her beauty or his own curiosity that drew him out, Conrad came striding through the ranks of his guards. He was a dark man, not young, not tall, not particularly good to look on; what beauty he had was marred by the pocks and scars of an old sickness. And yet there was strength in him, and a steely determination that made him, if not beautiful, then certainly difficult to forget.

  He bowed over Sioned’s hand. Henry he barely acknowledged; the rest he left to his men. “Lady,” he said. “Where has your brother been hiding such a jewel?”

  She bit her tongue on the quick rejoinder, lowered her eyelids and watched him through the lashes. The corner of her mouth turned up just a fraction, because he would have been shocked to know what she was when she was not playing the demure princess.

  He tucked her hand under his arm. “Come, lady,” he said. “Be welcome in my city.”

  She dipped in a curtsey, but not too low: she was, after all, a king’s daughter, and he but a marquis with pretensions. He seemed to take no umbrage. Maybe it was true, then, that a woman could do whatever she chose, if only she was beautiful.

  What Conrad’s court lacked in sparkle, it gained in martial spirit. The French were indeed here in force, with Hugh of Burgundy at their head. So too were too many of the knights of Outremer, and some of the Germans who still remained.

  Hugh did not recognize Sioned. She had not expected such satisfaction as she felt when Conrad presented her to him, and at first he did not recall her name; then it dawned on him. His expression was most gratifying. Shock; astonishment. A flash of fear, as clear as if he had spoken the words. What knowledge had she brought with her? What secrets was she privy to? Did she belong to Richard, or to Eleanor?

  So: he was afraid of the queen, too. Sioned began to wonder if Eleanor’s terror, like her own beauty, was an artifact; if there honestly was nothing beneath it.

  She brought her thoughts firmly to order and smiled at the duke. He could not manage a smile in return, although he had the wits to kiss her hand.

  She was discovering the uses of silence. People had a compulsion to fill it. They raised whole edifices of conversation, while she had only to nod and occasionally smile, or frown if the occasion called for it. Hugh betrayed no secre
ts—yet—but several of his barons let her know that, as irked as they were with Richard, they had seen no more pay for their army from Conrad than they had from the English king; the King of France, safe in Paris, had sent nothing at all. “I do swear,” said one, “that my men will take whatever they can get, and gladly enough, if only they get something.”

  She nodded; she smiled. She tempted them to new spates of words.

  The ladies did not like her. That was a hazard of beauty; she had learned as much in Acre. When the men flocked about her, they ignored the ladies who belonged to them, or who had ambitions in that direction.

  Sioned took note of them. Most were women of this country; chief of them was the royal lady of Jerusalem, the famous beauty, Isabella. She was everything that Sioned was not: tall, fair, with hair the color of beaten gold and skin as white as milk. The blood of the old Crusader kings ran strong in her. She was half a head taller than her husband, Conrad, and half again as broad.

  Her sister Sybilla had been as much a fool as the man she had chosen to be consort and king, the beautiful idiot Guy de Lusignan. This younger sister hid behind beauty as Sioned happened to be doing, but when Sioned met those wide-set blue eyes, she saw there an intelligence quite as keen as her own.

  Isabella was no fool, and no empty chatterer, either. She left that to her ladies. If she was jealous of the attention that Sioned had drawn, she did not show it. She studied it and Sioned; she kept her counsel.

  This was a mind as keen as Conrad’s. Sioned could not tell whether it was friendly or hostile. She thought it might be reserving judgment.

  Henry had left her side to move among the court, scouting the battlefield. He crossed Isabella’s path, engaged in conversation with a knight from France with whom he had struck up a friendship on the Crusade. The lady’s eyes followed him as if drawn irresistibly.

  He was as lovely as she, and in much the same mode, tall and fair. From where Sioned stood, seeing them briefly side by side, caught in a shaft of light, they were like images in a shrine.

  Conrad moved in between them, intentionally or otherwise: a shadow, dark and stunted. Sioned shivered. For a moment he had no face, no living semblance, only the lightless dark.

  Someone was babbling at her, heaping her with flattery, calling her a glory among women. She fixed her eyes on her feet and bit her tongue until she tasted blood.

  At last she was allowed to retreat from the field. A servant was waiting, offering not only a room crowded with maids and baggage and a bed which she need not invite anyone to share, but a bath.

  The maids declined, protesting that it was a sin to bathe in winter. Sioned leaped at the chance to be clean and briefly free of her entourage. They would have hovered and fretted and been conspicuously bored, but she sent them on ahead. She did not need to press them overly hard. They were as weary as she.

  As she had hoped, the bath here was in the eastern style, and had been decently maintained—at Princess Isabella’s insistence, one of the servants told her. “A blessing on the princess,” she said, and meant it.

  When she was clean, she went up to her room, attended by the servant and the silent, all but invisible Mustafa. She met one or two people on the way, but nearly everyone was in the hall. There were stretches of hall and stair, barely lit by lamps or torches, in which she and her tiny escort were the only signs of human life.

  They were not the only things that moved there. Spirits she expected; the world was full of them. But this place quivered with shadows. Most were harmless, drifts of darkness passing through, ghosts or memories from long ago. A few raised her hackles. They watched as she went by, eyeless, faceless, but intensely aware of her.

  She warded herself as best she could. The less of the truth they saw, the better. She turned her every outward thought to her body’s comfort: how clean and sweet it was, and how beautiful, and how she would break even more hearts tomorrow, and make even more ladies jealous, and what a wicked pleasure that would be.

  The shadows’ intensity weakened. Their focus faded; they slid away. She wanted to stop, to prop herself against a wall before her knees gave way, but it was only a little farther to her room. She set her teeth and pressed on.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Saphadin was not in Tyre. Sioned would have been surprised if he had been, but her heart persisted in being disappointed.

  She made do as best she could with the court that had gathered in opposition to Richard. They were making no secret of that hostility, nor of their search for an excuse to provoke a fight. They had had hopes of one while Hugh was still in Acre, but Eleanor had driven him out of the city before he could seize it and hold it against her son.

  Eleanor was no one’s best-beloved queen here. Bitch goddess and queen of harlots were the kindest words that Sioned heard. Everyone undertook to remember that she had been Queen of France first, until she had run off with a young upstart a dozen years younger than she, who had battled and intrigued his way to the throne of England. It was conveniently forgotten that the King of France had annulled the marriage on grounds that his queen had given him only daughters—and therefore, in the reckoning of kings, no issue at all.

  People did not hold their tongues where Sioned was. They all knew that she was no child of Eleanor, and no friend to her, either. Some even went so far as to think that she had come to join them, to make common cause against the queen and her arrogant lout of a son. To them she had not existed before she appeared in the guise of a princess; they knew nothing of the nobody in Turkish trousers, the physician in Richard’s army. Such a creature was as far beneath their notice as a mouse creeping across the floor.

  It was better than she had hoped for, that people spoke freely; but she had come here to draw Conrad’s fangs. He was a dour and secret spirit, who trusted no one.

  Yet insofar as he could trust a living soul, he trusted his wife. Sioned sought her out on the third day, requesting an audience after morning Mass. Slightly to her surprise, the request was granted.

  Isabella received her in the hushed chill of the chapel. A young monk was clearing the altar of its furnishings, but except for him, and for a maid who never looked up while Sioned was there, she was alone.

  Sioned had eluded her maids but brought Mustafa. He was as demure as Isabella’s companion, and more useful; the dagger he wore at his belt was only a fraction of his arsenal.

  Sioned greeted Isabella with a bow, princess to princess. Isabella inclined her head in return. Sioned might be a king’s daughter, that nod said, but Isabella was a queen.

  Not yet, thought Sioned. “Lady,” she said.

  “Ah,” said Isabella. “So you do have a voice. There are wagers in the court that you may be mute.”

  “I’ve become aware of the uses of silence,” Sioned said.

  “Yet now you see a use in speech.”

  “I would ask you something,” Sioned said.

  “Ask,” said Isabella.

  Sioned did not speak at once. She had had words marshaled and ready to ride, but under this level blue stare, they seemed feeble and overly transparent. Yet she could not think of any that would serve better. After a long moment she said, “It’s being said that I came to swear allegiance to your husband. Do you believe this?”

  Isabella was as careful with her words as Sioned. “I believe,” she said, “that you will do whatever seems to you to be wisest.”

  “You credit me with wisdom?”

  “I credit you with more intelligence than you might like.” Isabella smiled faintly at Sioned’s expression. “I asked questions of those who would know. You trained as a physician. You speak Greek and Arabic. We can use you, if you throw in your lot with us.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You travel under an envoy’s banner. My husband is not above sending a messenger home with his head in a bag, but he has an eye for a beautiful woman. More likely he’ll give you a noble escort and order them to kill you if you set foot again within his borders.”


  “That’s sensible,” Sioned said. “And you? Would you listen if I asked you to consider my brother’s cause?”

  “I am married to Conrad,” Isabella said.

  “You were married to Lord Humphrey,” said Sioned. “Now you are not. You’ve been passed back and forth like a sack of wool. You’ll be passed again if enough men in power decide there’s need.”

  “To whom?” Isabella inquired. “Richard? Is his queen so easily disposed of?”

  “No more or less than any other queen,” Sioned said.

  “Conrad would object,” said Isabella. “He hates to let go of anything that he considers to be his.”

  “Are you his?”

  “He considers me so,” said Isabella.

  Sioned shook her head slightly. “I asked if you were his—not if he laid claim to you.”

  “It would hardly be wise for me to deny it.”

  “What does he do,” asked Sioned, “to men on whom you cast your eye? Will he maim or kill them?”

  “I make sure that he never observes my eye on any man but his noble self.”

  “Wise,” said Sioned, “but is it true?”

  “I see now why you make a habit of silence,” Isabella said without perceptible rancor. “Did you come to court me for your brother?”

  “That,” said Sioned, “no. My brother is not looking for another queen. Nor—before you ask it—is his mother. They are both looking for an ally.”

  “Of course they would be,” Isabella said. “Why do they think that I might throw in my lot with them? I do believe that my husband is a strong and capable ruler, whatever his faults.”

  “Do you believe in the Crusade?” Sioned asked her. “Do you believe that Jerusalem should be in Christian hands?”