Alamut (11 page)

His mother had warned him long ago. “Never let a human touch your heart. That way lies only grief.”

Truly. Even Gereint, who had been blood kin — he had died, and dealt a wound which would not heal. They were all so. It was their nature.

And what was his? He should be cold; he should be soulless. He should be a cat, the beast that walks alone, the hunter in the night. But he was half human, and although perhaps he had no soul, he had a heart; and he had never learned to harden it.

He raised his head. The sun had sunk low. Jerusalem was all gold, a city washed in light.

He watched the light spread wide and fade, and the stars bloom one by one. The others came up in the cool of the dusk, and servants with them, bringing the daymeal. Aidan felt the wards draw in about them. Joanna sat as far from him as she could. It seemed to be her best defense, to pretend that he did not exist. He had rather less strength of will; but the eyes of the mind were not so easily averted as the eyes of the body.

She ate quickly; she fled. He did not linger long.

Thibaut followed him down to his chamber. It was, of course, the boy's place, to attend him as he retired, to ease him out of his clothes, to ready his bed for him. He did not want to be followed. Or waited on. Or, by God, touched. Touch pierced every shield, laid the mind bare in all its aimless, shapeless, maddening humanity.

It did no good to evade him. He pursued, innocently persistent. To Thibaut, even temper was admirable: the famous fire, the flame out of the west. When Aidan snapped at him, he took no offense at all. His lord, he would tell the squires in the High Court, was a hot-tempered man. But bold and high-hearted, and generous with his favor. Altogether a perfect prince.

Aidan thrust him reeling back. “Will you stop that? Will you just stop?”

Thibaut stared, surprised. It had never gone this far before.

“Stop thinking at me!”

The boy stood still where Aidan's arm had cast him, back to the wall, all eyes and astonishment. Aidan made a sound, half growl, half moan. He flung himself down upon the bed. All his shields reared up and locked.

Quiet. Blessed peace. Himself, alone.

His skin knew how Thibaut crept about, doing all his duties, shirking not one. The last was the lamp-cluster, diminished to a single flame. He lay on his pallet across the door. To all appearances, he went directly to sleep.

Muscle by muscle Aidan unknotted. Shame pricked. All this child had ever given him was devotion; and he repaid it with hard words and the back of his hand.

Thibaut was a huddle of sheet, a tousle of black curls, a soft sighing of breath. No weeping there; no hurt that would last the night.

None that passed the walls. Aidan left them, high as they were, and impregnable. This one night, by God's bright blood, he would have peace.

oOo

Silence, stillness. They slept, all of them, even the dog in its kennel. The lady curled like a cat in half of the great curtained bed, and her maid snored beside her where once her husband had been. The daughter slept alone, her tossing stilled, her cheek streaked salt with the track of a tear. The son...

That was not he in the chamber of the crimson tiles, flung naked across the coverlet. He was a brown child, slight and small. This was tall and pale, and a man grown — that, most certainly. He had no blemish on him, save, to Muslim eyes, one: he was not circumcised.

Morgiana shaped herself out of air, standing over him, enchanted. There was no moon tonight, and yet he glowed with its cool pale light. No whiter skin had ever been. Except — her breath caught — her own. Shadow hid his face. Hair, night-black, thick and long.

He stirred, tossing a little. She caught at darkness, to conceal herself, but paused. His hair had fallen back.

Oh, no Frank, not this. Eagle's face, keen as the dagger's blade, without softness, without flaw. He had not even marred it with that ghastly Frankish fashion, the shaving of the beard that was a man's beauty and his pride.

Her hand reached of its own accord, but did not, dared not, touch. Joy welled up in her, and sudden, piercing terror. He was like her. Now that she knew what to see, she saw the light, the sheen of his magic, the power that was of air and fire.

But after joy, after terror, crushing certainty. This house had been barred to her, walled and guarded beyond the world as in it. Tonight, the walls had fallen. He had raised them. He, for what reason she could not know, had cast them down. He was the enemy. He was the lady's demon, as she was her master's.

“No,” she said behind her gritted teeth. He was ifrit, spirit of air. Her kind. Hers.

If one could profess Islam, why not that other faith?

Almost, in pain, she laughed. She had come to kill. She had found — not a brother. No. Most certainly not a brother, if Allah was indeed merciful.

Their eyes met. His were blurred, full of sleep. Grey eyes, like rain. Green flare where the light struck. He frowned a very little; yet, at the same time, marveling, he smiled. The word he spoke was none she knew, and yet she knew it. “Beautiful,” he said. “So beautiful.”

The terror rose up and drowned her. It raised the power; it smote him all unwitting, deep into sleep.

She had come to kill. There by the door, laid across it as if any mortal child could guard against this horror that she was, slept the one to whom she had been sent. Small, slight, dark. A child, but almost a man.

Her hand struck of its own will, swift and clean. The heart throbbed against the blade: struggling, protesting. She thrust the dagger home.

He was dead before he knew that he had died. The last of his dream fled past her. Light, a snatch of song, a keen eagle-face. Love that touched the edge of worship; joy; pride.
I am his. He is my lord.
A flicker of shadow.
Even when he thinks he does not want me.

It drove her to her knees.
Out,
her mind clamored at her.
Out, go!

Always before, implacable as the Angel of Death, she had come, killed, vanished. Remorse came after, and the dark thoughts, and the horror of her bloodied hands. Not now. Not in the house of the enemy. With power behind her, working free of its bonds; the dead before her, cooling slowly, lying as if he slept. A boy. A child. An innocent. And she had murdered him.

A great cry welled in her, filling her, till surely she must burst asunder. It swept her up. It cast her into the night.

oOo

Aidan started awake. He had been dreaming. A wailing like wind in empty places; terrible, heart-searing grief, grief like madness, sweeping him down into the dark.

It was quiet. Memory swam through the darkness. Behind the dream, another. Faint, indefinable sweetness. A shimmer of light. A face. A white, wild beauty; hair that could only be a dream, rivers of it, red as wine. Eyes —

Eyes like his own, fixed on him as if they would devour him.

His manhood was heavy on his belly, stiff and aching. Wise fool, he mocked himself. Run cowering from a human woman, dream one of his own kind. And not even the one he knew, his brother's slender ivory queen. Ah, no. He must dream one who did not even exist, a fierce cat-woman all in white, whose beauty touched the edge of pain.

His own ache, unappeased, began to subside. He sat up, running his hands through his hair, worrying out the tangles. His mind snatched, struck walls. Reckless with sleep and the dream and the last rags of the darkness, he cast them down.

Silence. Utter stillness. No sound, no breath, no scent of alien presence. Thibaut lay in his blanket, unmoving. His mind —

Silence.

“Thibaut,” said Aidan. Louder: “Thibaut!”

Nothing.

Aidan knew. He refused it. It could not be.

The dark head rolled as Aidan shook the boy's shoulder. The eyes were open, wide and black and empty even of surprise. Thibaut was gone. Emptied.

Dead.

In the smooth brown flesh above his heart, silver glimmered: the hilt of a Saracen dagger. And beside his body, still warm from the fire, the cake which was baked upon no hearth but one.

Aidan flung back his head and howled.

He had not, for all of that, gone made. God had no such mercy. He had fretted over a woman. Fretting, he had brought down the wards. And the Assassin had come into his very chamber, while he dreamed and tossed and lusted after shadows, and taken Thibaut's life, and vanished away.

Utterly. No memory remained. The dagger was a lifeless thing, cold steel without scent or sense of its wielder. The cake was flour and water and honey, and no more in it of its maker than if it had made itself.

Thibaut's blood had stained it. So little blood, to mean so much. Aidan took a morsel in his mouth. He did not think why, only that he must. It was sweet.

He raised his eyes to a blur of faces. Mute, all of them; dazed; horrified. His mind, opened wide, reeled with grief, and grief, and grief resounding down every hall of memory. And fear. They were afraid of the hunter in the night. Of the white beast with its mad cat-eyes, crouched over Thibaut's body, his mouth full of honey and of blood.

Some of them knew then, and shrank from what they knew: the stranger in their house, the tale that was half open to the sun, half whispered in the dark. He had come singing on the wings of death. Now he held it in his hands. He had wrought, he and no other.

“No,” said Margaret. She held out her hand. It was frighteningly steady.

Mutely Aidan set the dagger in it. She barely flinched from the blood. “Damascus work,” she said, soft and cool. “See, how the hilt is ornamented, and the blade. But the steel is too good for western forging — Indian, surely, and that of the best. It seems new.”

“For each new murder,” Aidan said, “a new blade.” He rose with Thibaut in his arms. The boy's head lolled against his shoulder. He was as light as a leaf, and as heavy as a world.

They stared. Joanna above all mute with horror: she could not take her eyes from her brother's face.

“Maybe he's not dead,” she said. “Maybe he's only stunned. Maybe he'll wake. Maybe — ”

“He is dead.” Aidan's voice was flat.

Her hand went to her mouth, stemming the tide of words. One of the serving women began to wail. Joanna whipped about. “Out, all of you.
Out!
”

They wavered. Margaret seemed oblivious. She turned the dagger in her fingers, staring at it, spellbound. Joanna lurched forward a step. The servants broke and fled.

She turned ungracefully back. Margaret had not moved. Aidan could not muster the will. The servants would let it out in keening and in rousing this whole quarter of the city. They three had only silence. Gereint was grief. This was grief on grief. It went beyond words and almost beyond pain. It numbed the soul.

“God is great,” said Margaret in a low and dreaming voice, in Arabic.

The others stared, speechless.

She had not broken. Not quite yet. “It says so,” she said, “here, on the blade. Most devout, our Assassin, and most like to his God. He fattens on the blood of innocents.”

Her hate was diamond-pure, diamond-hard. “Joanna,” she said. “Fetch Godefroi, if he has had his fill of wailing and gnashing his teeth. Bid him bring my writing-case.”

Joanna did not even begin to argue. She went.

Leaving Aidan and Margaret alone. With all the gentleness in the world, Aidan laid Thibaut in the high curtained bed, closed the wide and staring eyes, covered the lifeless body. He straightened slowly, turned. Margaret regarded him with interest, and with a certain amount of pleasure.

This was her defense, this bitter calm. He spoke in it. “The blame is mine. My vigilance failed. His blood is on my head.”

Her head shook infinitesimally. “I knew that he would be the next to fall, and I held fast to my resistance. We share this, you and I. But I the more. He was blood of my blood.”

Aidan's heart spasmed. Thibaut, gentle Thibaut who had never spoken ill of any man. “Leave me my guilt,” he said, low and raw.

“There is enough for us all.”

Briefly he wanted to scream aloud, seize her, shake her, beat her into acting as a mother should act who has lost her only son. She stood where she had stood since she came, a small round woman in a loose dark robe. Her face was grey and old. She let the dagger fall. It pierced the Assassin's cake, breaking it. “I bore five sons,” she said. “One only lived past his birth. Daughters I had none, except Joanna. If she dies,” said Margaret, “I shall not want to live.”

“Will you surrender, then?”

Her eyes lifted, black and wide. She smiled. He had never seen any face so terrible. “Surrender? Only,” she said, “if I might be certain that, the night he bedded with me, he would die of yon dagger in his back.”

So she wrote when Godefroi came, in Arabic but in the bare unvarnished phrases of the Frank. “Let him see for himself,” she said, “that in taking from me my husband and my son, he has taken all that might persuade me to yield.” She folded and sealed the letter, and gave it to her seneschal. “There will no doubt be a bird on the roof, with the mark of Masyaf on its leg. Give it what it waits for.”

Godefroi's eyes were red with weeping, but he held himself stiffly erect. He bowed and went to do her bidding.

For her now there would be no tears, and no sleep. She set herself beside the bed. “Look after my daughter,” she said to Aidan. Simply that. Even as she spoke, she turned her eyes and mind from him, toward her son.

Aidan moved without thinking, gathering up what garment came to hand: his cloak. He flung it over himself. Joanna had turned already. He followed her.

Just within the door of her chamber, she spun on her heel. Aidan stood just without. She spoke abruptly. “I can look after myself.”

“I don't doubt it,” he said.

Joanna's lip curled. “You haven't been much good so far, have you?”

It was pain, that was all. She needed to lash out. He was there, the best of targets, and the closest. He set himself to endure it. It was no more than he deserved.