Alamut (16 page)

No matter. He looked at her strong-boned, stubborn-chinned, inarguably Frankish face, and lost all will and wit.

“It's her spirit,” he told his horse as he tended it in the evening. “Her high heart. Her adamant refusal to either bend or break. Grief only makes her stronger. And yet,” he said, “that's not all of it. Her mother is the same; but the Lady Margaret is sufficient unto herself. One can admire her; respect her; serve her. But love her...no. Not I. Her circle is complete. There's no place in it for me.”

The gelding was mercifully removed from such follies. He lipped up the last sweet grain of barley, and cocked an ear. Would there, perhaps, be more?

“Gluttony is a cardinal sin,” said Aidan severely. He leaned against the accommodating shoulder, working a tangle out of the pale mane. “Yes, my friend, it's a fool I am, and too well I know it. She sees this damnable face and this damnable reputation of mine, and of course she thinks that she loves me. I who am thrice her age, I who have years and rank and power enough to grant me wisdom nine times over, I should know better. Dear God, I've oaths enough on my head, vengeance to take, a king to come back to or be forsworn; and I pine for a fair young body. Is it senility, do you think? Am I, after all, about to fall into my dotage?”

The gelding was hardly the one to answer that. He rubbed an itch out of his cheek and sighed. Aidan laid his own cheek against the warm satin neck, sighing his own deep sigh. they camped tonight on a stony level, having found the caravanserai full but no rumor of robbers near about. No one else hung about the horselines. They had all gone to fee themselves, as he should do soon, for his body's sake.

He felt the eyes upon him. He knew what they were. Clear green cat-eyes, his soul's shape cast in flesh. He bore it as long as he might, until he must turn or run wild. Running seemed, for a moment, the wiser course.

He turned.

She was beautiful in the dusk, more real than real itself, more solidly there than the horse at his side. Her head came just to his chin.

She saw that he had changed his manner of dress. He felt her surprise as his own, and her pleasure. How not? She was his dream.

Her lips curved in the beginning of a smile. It could not be something she did often; she seemed to pause, searching out the way of it. It touched her eyes and sparked in them.

It smote him with such force that he staggered. “You are,” he said. “You
are.”
He darted. She was solid in his hands, supple, inhumanly strong.

All at once, she ceased her struggle. she was rigid, her eyes wide and wild. He laid his hand on her cheek. she trembled deep within. Her scent flooded him. Sweet, impossibly sweet: scent of his own people, that was like nothing else under the moon.

Her arms locked about his neck. Oh, she was strong; wonderfully, splendidly strong. His head bent down and down. Her eyes were all his world. A moment more, and he would drown in them.

They closed against him. She let him go, thrusting him away. “God,” she said. Her voice was hauntingly sweet, and heavy with despair. “God, God, God.”

Allah, Allah, Allah.

Arabic.

He fitted his mind and tongue to the way of it, aware of his gift as he almost never was. “Tell me, lady. Who are you?”

Step by step she backed away. He caught her hands. She tensed but did not resist.

“Lady.” The words came faster now. “Lady, stay. Tell me your name. How did you come here? Where do you go? How did you find me?”

Her lips set. Her head shook, tossing.

“Please, my lady. Your name. Only that.”

She twisted free, spun. The word escaped, flung over her shoulder. “Morgiana.”

The air was empty. His heart cried its abandonment.

oOo

Morgiana.

She was a living creature. She was no dream, nor ever a midnight fancy. And yet, that power of hers, to be there, and then to be gone...

Aidan spoke her name in the night's silence. “Morgiana.” Saracen name, Saracen face beneath the cast of his people. He yearned for her, and yet, deep in his soul, he feared her. There was a wildness in her, a power both old and strong. He was half a mortal man. She was nothing that had ever been human.

His mother had been mad, but even she had not been as mad as this. Was this the old true blood? Half mad, half demon: spirit of air and fire.

All the questing of his power found no trace of her. She was gone as if she had never been. Power, that, and stronger far than his own.

He shivered on his mat before Joanna's tent, and not alone with the cold of night in the desert. He had thought himself as fine a witch as ever raised the power. Beside this he was the merest child, a feeble halfling thing who only played at magery.

As she played with him, feigning shyness, letting him think her a dream. Surely she laughed at him now. They were cold, the afarit, and treacherous. Their honor was demons' honor.

But ah, she was beautiful.

oOo

He started. A shape stood over him. For an instant he hoped, feared —

No. Its scent was human, sharp and pungent. Always, beneath it, lay a hint of corruption, the promise of mortality; but seldom strong enough to be sure of. Tonight it caught at his throat.

Joanna squatted beside him, her face a blur without beauty, her hair straggling out of her hood. She was utterly human, utterly mortal. “I couldn't sleep,” she said. Rough, barely musical, blessedly human voice. “Did I wake you?”

“No.”

“Good.” She rocked on her heels. Her bones creaked; she laughed, little more than a cough, and sat more sturdily on the edge of his mat. “Do I look appallingly clumsy to you?”

“No,” he said. Truth. It was not appalling; it was endearing. Like a foal, or a wolfhound pup.

“I'm not a delicate lady. I'm a great Frankish cow.”

He raised himself on his elbow. “Who says that?”

“I do.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “It's true. Thibaut got all the pretty. I got the Norman reiver. I should have been a man.”

“I for one am glad you're not.”

“You don't have to be polite tonight. I can bear the truth.”

“That is the truth.” He paused. “My inclination is not toward men. Or even pretty boys.”

“I should hope not.”

She could not have read his face in the darkness, but hers was as clear to his eyes as in the first fading of dusk. What he saw there made him reach for her. There was no volition in it.

No more in her, who came as if to haven. She was warm and solid, an ample armful, nigh as tall as he and fully as broad. A fine figure of a woman, they would say in Rhiyana.

They lay together like children, content with simple presence, with the warmth of body and body. She stroked his beard, playing with it, taking pleasure in the feel of it against her palm. It shivered in him, that pleasure, even more than the touch of her hand upon his cheek.

She laughed into his shoulder. “You're purring!”

“I am.” He was surprised. “I didn't know I could.”

Nor could he, once he was aware of it. She settled again, the long lush curve of her fitted to his curvelessness. It was a wonder, how they were made, male and female wrought perfectly for one another.

But not he for she. He knew it very well. She was Ranulf's in the eyes of God and man.

It was hard to care, here in the mantling night. She would have been astonished to know how close he was to innocent; how seldom he had wanted a woman enough to do what men and women did. They kindled slowly, his kind. But once they had begun...

“We should,” he tried to say. “We should not—”

Her eyes, wide blue-grey mortal eyes, drank his words and left him dry. They were on their feet. He had no memory of rising.

She set a kiss on his cheek where her hand had been, chaste as a sister's. He watched, mute, as she turned and left him. Wise lady.

Wiser than he. He could not stand erect in her tent. She could, just barely.

Her maid was not there. Design? Accident?

He doubted that Joanna knew, either. “This is mad,” he said.

She nodded. She let her cloak fall, stood in her shift.

A fine figure of a woman. Not a maid, not any longer. Her body had ripened; what it lost in firmness, it gained in sweetness. None of his kind could ever be as she was, full mortal summer, with spring in it still, and the shadow of a shadow of winter.

She shivered. He brought his warmth to her. Her heart was beating hard. She pulled away; she clung. “Here,” she said, “damn it. We've got to—stop—Hold me!”

He was her knight. He could do no other than obey her.

“I don't care,” she whispered fiercely. “I don't
care.”
She threw her head back, glaring into his face. “Do you despise me?”

“I—” He swallowed painfully. “I think I love you.”

She froze. All but her tongue. “Don't mock me. At least spare me that.”

“I don't lie. Ever. Or mock. Not where I love.”

“But you can't—I'm not even pretty!”

“That should matter?”

“You,” she said with trembling control, “are beautiful beyond any measure of mortal kind. Whereas I—”

“I am simply as I was made. You are yourself and no other, and I have loved you since first I saw you, ruffled and scowling like a wounded eagle. Your spirit is a white light, my lady, and mine beside it is a dim and faltering thing.”

“You could charm the birds out of the trees.” Her voice both mocked him and caressed him. Her hands had found the fastenings of his robes. She wanted to see. Just to see. Truly.

It was worth seeing. He knew that; he had never been able to be ashamed of it. Humility was a monk's vice. He was royal born, and no mortal man.

oOo

He was more alien when there was all of him to see, and more beautiful. His pallor glowed in the lamplight, whiteness less like living flesh than stone enchanted to life: moonstone, alabaster, marble. As white as that, and as smooth, no rough human pelt to mar it. Flesh like satin over steel, smoother than a man's, yet never like a child's. Oh, no. No child, this.

He was not a man, but he was male enough. Not appallingly so, for all the legends of the afarit. He was cut to human measure; he warmed in human wise. She watched in fascination. Ranulf had never given her time to see. To look, and wonder, and try to understand this mystery that was the other half of what she was.

Her eyes squeezed shut. Her cheeks were afire. Dear God, what was she doing? And he was letting her.

“Not letting,” he said, soft and beautifully deep. “Wanting.”

Bitterness flooded her. “Wanting. Anything female, yes? Anything at all.”

“No.”

Her eyes snapped open.

“No,” he said again. “I haven't wanted a woman since before you were born.”

Her lip curled.

He was not Ranulf. He did not wither before her contempt. “Believe me, or not. It changes nothing.”

She tossed her head. Half of her was pain. Half of her was cold white anger. “Oh, come. I don't need to be lied to. Who was she, that night in Aqua Bella? Was she pretty under the veils? Did she give you pleasure?”

He laughed, shocking her into stillness. He was a long time about it. When he could speak, it came in gusts. “You—she—Joanna, ladylove, that was not she but he.”

Her heart chilled and shrank. He saw. Damn him, he saw what her mind had leaped to. He seized her shoulders and shook them, not gently. “Joanna! Is that what you think love is?”

“How can I know what it isn't?”

“The heart knows.” He set his finger under her chin, tilting it up. “My dear sweet lady, what your so-faithful friend saw was a bit of youthful mischief. That was no lover of mine or any mortal's. That was the king.”

She gasped, and flushed. His hand was light, but she could no more have escaped it than if it had been iron.

He kissed her, light and swift. And, for all his protestations, with effortless skill.

She regarded him in something close to despair. She had no more grace in this than in anything else she ever did. She wanted him, all of him; but there was too much of him. She was like a child. Wanting every sweetmeat in the bowl, gorging on them, sickening with them; howling because they were so much and she so little.

Measure, she thought. Restraint. He was here. God knew why, God knew how, but he had chosen her; or been chosen for her. He did not look ancient or august or wise. He looked like a very young man who…sweet saints, who thought he loved her.

Her heart was a cold clenched thing, a knot of ice beneath her breastbone. All at once, as she stood staring at him, it melted. Flowed. Opened. Swelled and bloomed and sang. She could not breathe. She could hardly see.

Joy. This was joy. She laughed; it was like water bubbling, a spring bursting forth in the desert.

He knew. That was the beauty of him. He would always know.

They tumbled down into her blankets. He was laughing with her, quite as wild as she, and quite as deliciously mad. It was the greatest jest in all the world. He, and she, and sin and sanctity, and sanity, and how little, how very little, it mattered.

11.

Joanna had not fallen into mortal sin. She had leaped into it with both eyes open, welcoming it with all her heart. And she could not make herself repent it. When she tried, a small demon-voice observed,
Men never do. Ranulf never has.
And:
How can it be evil? It's all joy.

The world would destroy her if it knew. She was discreet; or he was. In daylight they were the lady and her knight, the princess and her guardsman. At dusk, in camp or in the caravanserai, she ate in her royal solitude and he among the guards. But in the deep hours between full dark and dawn, the masks fell. He had no more will than she, to end what they had begun.

Dura could not help but know. She was mute but not deaf, and she was far from blind. But she gave no sign. Her manner toward Joanna changed not at all; no more did her fear of Aidan. Sometimes Joanna wondered what she was thinking. There was a way to learn, but Joanna would not resort to it. It was too much like betrayal. Of Dura; of Aidan who could know her mind.