by Tarr, Judith
A miracle. No, Sayyida thought. Morgiana. The others, even Laila, were wary of her, almost afraid. She was the family legend, and the family secret. A very solid secret, savoring zirbajah, sipping thick sweet kaffé from the silver cup that only came out for a guest of high note.
When she had tasted everything and complimented it duly — gaining from Fahimah the name of the new pastry cook in the bazaar, who had apprenticed in the sultan’s own kitchens — she settled to an age of uncomfortable chatter.
Sayyida had trained herself to see the necessity. She had never been able to train herself to be patient. Morgiana never told her best tales in front of the older women. To them she was an infamous eccentric, endured because their lord and master had bidden them endure her, and accorded hospitality because the Prophet enjoined it upon them. To Sayyida she was simply and most complexly Morgiana. And that was wonder and splendor, and tales that had no equal, because they were the truth.
But she did not tell them to everyone, nor would she cut short the rites of courtesy. Sayyida sat at her feet and tried to remember a matron’s dignity, and struggled not to fidget. Surely Mother knew. She followed Morgiana on every step of every furlong of the pilgrimage to Mecca; questioned her minutely regarding her every companion; counted every stone of every holy place in that holiest of cities.
Laila, of all people, came to the rescue of Sayyida’s sanity. She yawned delicately, like a kitten, and stretched in the manner best suited to the multiplicity of her curves. “I beg our guest’s gracious pardon,” she said, “but my lord husband is coming to me tonight, and I must rest, or I shall hardly be fit to please him.”
Sayyida bit her lip. Mother was above jealousy. Fahimah was oblivious to it. But they were reminded of duties that could not wait. Morgiana would not have them abandon necessity for her sake; no more would she spoil it by naming Sayyida’s name. “I am quite content,” she said, “to wait upon the little prince. If his mother should wish for an hour’s respite...”
“Of course she should not,” Mother said tartly. “Go on, girl. Take the lady to the garden. And mind you bridle your chatter. She has no need to hear the foolishness that passes in you for conversation.”
oOo
Sayyida hugged herself and danced round the rose arbor that was Fahimah’s greatest pride. “O brilliant! O wonderful!” She plucked a blossom and buried her nose in it until she sneezed. Morgiana watched with glinting eyes. Sayyida claimed Hasan, who was hungry, and sat on the grass to feed him. Her grin was anything but matronly. “You planned the whole of it, didn’t you? Even Laila.”
“Laila needs no plotting but her own.” Morgiana shook rose petals upon Sayyida’s head. Hasan laughed at the breast. Morgiana brushed a hand through his curls, light and quick and oddly tender. Odd, because Morgiana was not a gentle creature. She tossed aside her veils and her dark voluminous robe, uncovering what Mother would have been appalled and Laila much interested to see: the dress of a young man of Damascus.
“Is it safe?” Sayyida asked. Foolishly, but she could not help herself.
Morgiana folded her lithe slimness on the grass and plaited her hair with flying fingers, binding it with a bit of green silk, tossing it over her shoulder. Her smile was a white fierce thing. It was not womanly at all, and yet it was utterly female. Very much like the rest of her. “It,” she said, “is quite safe. Ask rather, am I?”
Sayyida thought about it, carefully, with Hasan tugging lustily where she was most tender. She bent her head over him. “I would die for him,” she said almost to herself. She looked up. “And so,” she said, “would you.”
Morgiana’s smile vanished. She leaped up. Sayyida, startled, raised her arm to shield her son. She lowered it without apology. Morgiana expected none. She spun into a sudden wild dance, sun to Sayyida’s awkward shadow, graceful as the panther’s spring, and as passionate, and as deadly.
But not to Hasan. Morgiana dropped down in front of them both. “You trust me too much,” she said.
Sayyida shook her head.
“Obstinate.”
Sayyida smiled.
Morgiana sighed. “Chit of a child. Do you know what your husband knows of me? A rich man of this city, I; rather too fanatic in my piety; and rather too fond of good Damascus blades, for blade of flesh, alas, I have none. He would pity me, if he despised me any less.”
“Ah,” said Sayyida, undismayed. “He’s a man, and newly come to proof of it. Of course he’s insufferable.”
“Does he make you happy?”
It was not an idle question, however idle its asking. Sayyida shivered slightly. For Hasan she had no fear at all. For his father...
She gave Morgiana the truth. “I am twenty-one years old. All my sisters were given to husbands as soon as they began their women’s courses. I was the youngest, the last bitter disappointment before Allah took pity on our family and granted it a son, the daughter whom against all duty and propriety my father condescended to love. He let me grow as you’ve seen me grow, happier than I had any right to be. But the truth is the truth. For a woman there is but marriage or the tomb. He asked me. He never commanded me. He offered Maimoun, and I took him.”
“But are you happy?”
“You’ve seen Maimoun.” Morgiana’s eyes were narrowing, which was dangerous. Sayyida met them steadily. “He has made me happy.”
Morgiana closed her eyes. Sayyida swayed, freed from the force of them. It was true, her heart said, beating hard beneath Hasan’s cheek. Maimoun was nothing like perfection. He was too young to be wise, he was brilliant and he knew it, he was male. But he was Maimoun. Set on his wedding night before his wife, looking for the first time at her unveiled face, he had not been appalled. His face had not even fallen. “Not pretty,” he said to her later, judicious, a little drunk. “Not ugly, either. Just exactly right for me.”
“Tell me,” Sayyida said to her guest, “where you’ve been since I saw you last. Aside from Mecca,” she added dryly.
“What! Have you no piety?”
Sayyida bowed as best she could with Hasan to think of. “Verily, O Hajjin, this Sunni heretic pretends to a modicum of devotion. But not to the turning of every stone between Damascus and the Qaabah.”
Morgiana laughed: a rarity, and glorious. Hasan left the breast to stare at her, laughing with her; nor would he rest until he had regained possession of her lap. Sayyida covered herself demurely and leaned forward. “Now,” she commanded, “tell.”
“I hear and I obey,” said Morgiana.
Morgiana had been everywhere. Had done, Sayyida was certain, everything. Things that no woman would dream of doing, and some that even a man could not encompass. When Sayyida was small she had taken every word of every tale for purest truth. When she was older she has dismissed it all as tales and folly. Now she believed it again. Morgiana was Morgiana. She did not need to spin lies.
She had a gift: a fruit of surpassing strangeness, brown-furred without, green and glistening and tart-sweet within. It came from a country even stranger than itself, farther away than Sayyida could conceive of. “As far as stars?” she asked.
“Not quite so far,” said Morgiana, “nor as far as I have gone. There are worlds within the world, away over the sea. And people...” She rocked Hasan, eyes vivid with wonders. “Men the color of earth, who worship the sun. Black men who dwell in deserts that would slay the grimmest Bedouin, and they dwell there naked, clothed only in their pride, and all the world to them is but a shadow in the dreamtime. They were not afraid of me. They found me gentle, for a spirit of the air.”
Sayyida nibbled the last of the fruit. She had Morgiana’s knife to cut it with, a beautiful thing, and new. She turned it in her fingers. “Another of Father’s?”
“Maimoun’s.”
Sayyida’s brows went up. “Not, I hope, for my sake.”
“His work is good,” Morgiana said, “whatever he may think of me.”
“He doesn’t know the truth.”
“Do you not trust him?�
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“Father hasn’t seen fit to tell him. How can I?”
“Your father never saw fit to tell you.”
“He didn’t need to,” Sayyida said. “He still wishes I’d never learned it for myself. But he’s wise enough, letting Maimoun have his peace. Maimoun is much too insistent that I be sheltered from all the ills of the world.”
“Even childbirth?”
Their eyes met in perfect understanding. Sayyida sighed, shrugged. “It gave me Hasan, didn’t it? He is worth anything. Even teething.”
Morgiana considered him as he drowsed in her arms. “I killed a Christian this morning,” she said.
Sayyida stilled. She was not thinking of Hasan, or even of Maimoun. Her eyes were level on Morgiana.
“It was very simple,” said Morgiana. “One thrust, precisely where it mattered most. His wife never stirred. He forges a good blade, does your father.”
“I hope you told him so.”
Morgiana went back to her rocking of Hasan. She looked like a girl, a child, hardly yet a woman. Then she turned her head, and her face had no humanity in it.
Sayyida shivered. It was hard sometimes to remember what Morgiana was. Not a woman. Not even human. She feigned humanity so very well; and then it would strike, all at once, in a word or a gesture, or a flare of light in those great cat-eyes. “Ifritah.” Sayyida barely said it aloud. “Spirit of fire.”
Morgiana blurred into motion, swifter than a mortal could move; laid Hasan with all gentleness in his mother’s arms; and stilled, utterly, as nothing human could. She sat on her heels as a servant might, but she had never done more than play at servility. As she played at being a woman.
“I do not play at killing,” she said.
Sayyida started. “I wish you wouldn’t do that!” She bit her tongue.
“Do you know,” said Morgiana, “I can say to no one else what I say to you. Not in all my years. No one else has ever known what I truly am. What is it, do you think? Do I grow soft in my dotage?”
“You’re not old.”
“Not to look at.” Morgiana’s hands went to her cheeks, as if she searched for signs of the age that would never beset her. Sayyida did not know how old she was. But Sayyida’s father had inherited her, like his old and honored name, like that trade which had begotten it, like the house in which he had been born. Her blades had always come from that one forge. Her name and her guise had changed with each appearance, but the smiths had always known the truth of her. None, Sayyida was assured, had thought of her for more than a moment as a woman. She was a demon in woman’s shape, a servant of the Angel of Death, the Slave of Alamut.
“Masyaf, now,” said Morgiana. “Alamut is no longer what it was.” She laughed, soft and bitter. “When my putative master revealed the resurrection of the Lost Imam — that being his unworthy and quite unbalanced self — and declared the Millennium, I left him. There was no place in his new world for the Slave of Alamut. But Sinan the crafty had carved himself a kingdom in Syria. He could make good use of an immortal murderer, who cannot be seen, who cannot be caught, who cannot count the legions of souls whom she has sent to Iblis in the name of the Faith.” She lowered her hands from her face, turned them, examining them. “Strange. The blood never shows.” Her eyes flashed up. “Is that why you let me touch your son?”
“You would never hurt him.”
Morgiana snatched Hasan from his mother’s arms. Sayyida could not even tighten her grip before he was gone. He woke at the movement, screwed up his face to protest, saw Morgiana and crowed. She buried her face in his swaddlings.
When she raised it, her cheeks were only slightly damp. She looked angry. Hasan’s brows knit; he patted her chin, which was as high as he could reach. She fixed him with a hard stare. He ventured a smile. She bit her lips until they bled. “I feast on children,” she said to him. “I build castles of their bones. My own master calls me the deadliest weapon in the world. He commands me with my name and with the Name of Allah and with the Seal of Suleiman, and with an oath I swore when I was young and mad; but if I do not obey, he dares not punish me. He thinks that he desires me. He does not know how very much he fears me. He whom all men fear: Sinan the wise, the Sheikh al-Jabal, the Old Man of the Mountain.
“And you,” she said, “O innocent, find me enchanting.”
“You are,” said Sayyida.
Morgiana snarled horribly. Hasan whooped with delight, and snatched. He won her plait; it found its way promptly to his mouth. She did not try to rob him of it. “I could harm him,” she said. “Never doubt that. But whether I would... there lies the limit of Sinan’s power over me. He has learned it. He bade me slay a man whom perhaps you know. Salah al-Din, he calls himself.”
“Saladin?” Sayyida was proud that she knew the Frankish corruption of his title. “He’s our sultan now. Father made a sword for him once, when he was still only Yusuf the Kurd, Ayyub’s son. You haven’t killed him yet, have you? He’s warring near here somewhere. Father and Maimoun and the rest have been run ragged, keeping the emirs in weapons.”
“Indeed he has been warring round about,” said Morgiana. “Making himself sultan of Egypt and Syria. I have not killed him. I will not. I am done with murder.”
“And yet you killed a Christian.”
Morgiana’s face darkened. “I swore an oath. My folly; Sinan’s desperation. That far and no further he may bind me. At least,” she said, “he was not a Muslim. Even a Sunni heretic.”
“I am a Sunni heretic,” said Sayyida.
“You are a woman, and therefore possessed of neither faith nor reason.” Morgiana’s lightness was the lightness of the sword in battle. “And I am less than a woman: an ifritah, of those children of Iblis who have embraced the True Faith. Three orders of beings are set above me: men, women, and males of my kind. I am a slave of slaves of the slaves of Allah.
“Or so it is said,” said Morgiana. “I know that there is no one like me in this world. If there are afarit, they shun me. I am stronger than any man, and swifter; I have magics beyond human conception. I begin to suspect that I am no one’s slave. Except, of course, Allah’s.”
“God is great,” said Sayyida, bowing to the Name. “If you grow so weary of killing, why do you stay? Go away from Masyaf. Leave the Assassins to their knives and their terror. You’ve done their bidding for years out of count. Haven’t you done enough?”
“Perhaps,” said Morgiana. “Perhaps not. Suppose that I could evade my oath; suppose that I left. Where would I go?”
“Anywhere. You have the whole world to be free in; and even the terrible Assassins won’t find you who were the most terrible of them all. Why,” Sayyida said, “you could even stay here. Father wouldn’t say anything. Maimoun can think that we’ve a cousin visiting. Hasan would be delighted. And I,” she said, “would have some peace while he teethes.”
Morgiana smiled and shook her head. “The tigress cannot hide herself among gazelles, however fond of them she may be. And to leave Sinan... it has been too long. Or not long enough. I am not his tame dagger; I will take no more Muslim souls. But there are Franks enough to cleanse the world of, and a nest of them in particular, with which I have hardly begun. Apostates; children of one who repudiated the Faith. They have mocked our Mission. I must see to it that they pay.”
“I’m not sure I like you when you talk like that.”
Morgiana set a newly drowsy Hasan in Sayyida’s lap and kissed her lightly on the forehead, startling her speechless. “Honesty,” said the ifritah. “That’s what it is. May I darken your door again?”
“Do you have to go?”
Morgiana nodded.
“Come back quickly,” said Sayyida. “And when you’ve had your fill of Christian blood, remember. You have a place to go. If you need one. We — I’ve always thought that I could use another sister.”
“Such a sister,” Morgiana said wryly. “I will come back. I give you my word.”
“Go with God,” said Sayyida. As always, Morgi
ana was not there to hear her. She had winked out like a candle’s flame. As swift as that, and as silent, and as absolute.
3.
Aqua Bella had two towers. One, newer and by far the more massive, was a straightforward affair, square and solid; from its battlements one could see Jerusalem. The other was far older and narrower, like a minaret, anchoring a corner of the wall but serving no purpose beyond that. Its lower levels housed the oxen that drove the olive press, and, now, a horse or two belonging to the crowd of mourners who had gathered to see Gereint to his tomb. The upper reaches were empty of aught but spiders, and long forbidden to the castle’s children, for its stair was treacherous.
They, of course, had found ways round lock and bar; but dust and spiders soon palled, and the stair was merely crumbling stone, easy enough to climb if one were careful. There had been owls in the tower, to swoop and hoot and be deliciously terrifying, but the last had flown away years since and not come back. The children had found other diversions, and left the old tower in peace.
Thibaut needed to be alone. He had been doing his best to be a man, to honor Gereint’s memory, but a day and a night of it had worn him down. The keep was full of people come to pay their respects and, no doubt, to eye the new and wealthy widow. Their voices grated on Thibaut’s ears; their looks of pity made him want to hit them. What did they know of grief? What did they know of anything but greed and lies and vulgar curiosity?
He had heard them talking when they thought him out of earshot. “Convenient for the young one, this. He’d not like to share his inheritance with his stepfather’s get, however fond they all pretended to be.”
Remembering that, even on the dim crumbling stair Thibaut had to stop and drive his fist against the wall. It made him feel no better. He was wept dry. His father had died when he was too young to remember. Gereint had been less a father than an elder brother: at first in Jerusalem where a young knight from the west found time to spare for a very young pullani with an enormous stock of questions, and later in Aqua Bella when the knight had become the lady’s husband. People had always acted as if Thibaut should mind seeing his mother happy. As if he could have done anything but loved Gereint, who always seemed to be laughing or singing, who treated his lady’s children as his own, who even in a temper had always been careful to be just.