Alamut (23 page)

So anchored, Aidan rode well back in the company, singing when he was moved to sing, being princely pleasant to any who would speak to him. Most of the emirs, he knew. A Kurd of the sultan's nation; a Turk keeping well away from him; a Syrian or three. Two of them were almost princes: Masud, the Lady Ismat's brother, who looked little like his sister as Joanna had described her, a heavyset, ungraceful man afoot, but pure beauty ahorse; and Murhaf of Shaizar, the sultan's table companion, nigh as tall and narrow as Aidan, riding with a very old man to whom he offered a degree of respect astonishing in one so haughty. The old man rode well and easily, with the air of one who has spent his life in the saddle; his back was erect, his hand steady on the rein of his mare. Not only Murhaf treated him with deference: even the sultan, falling back once, greeted him as
sheikh
and
father,
and he seemed to accept both as his due.

They hunted rather differently here than in the west: with hawk and hound, yes, but also with cats, lean spotted cheetahs that rode to the hunt on the backs of iron-nerved horses. Drummers rode before the hunters to flush the prey, whatever it might be — birds, rabbits and smaller beasts, a herd of gazelles that burst like winged things out of a thicket. Aidan barely remembered to fly his own falcon at first, for watching the cheetahs. Delicate as they were, somnolent almost to insensibility, when they were let off their mounts they transformed into the swiftest and most deadly of hunters. Whatever they were loosed at, they brought down. Sometimes they had aid: the saker hawks that would fly at anything that drew breath. The saker would strike the prey in the thickets; the prey would flee into the open; the cheetah would bring it down. Or the cheetah would spring upon it in the open spaces, and it would escape, and the saker would pursue it into the reeds. Then the hawk would come back to the lure, the cheetah to its pillion; the hawk would wait in blood-red patience to be loosed again, the cheetah would return to the sleep which seemed to be its natural state.

Aidan's falcon, unhooded, screamed and struck at his gauntlet.
Hunt!
it raged at him.
Hunt!

He laughed and flung it into the air.

oOo

Chance and the pattern of the hunt divided the company, some cleaving to the river and its coverts, others venturing into the hills. Aidan found himself with Murhaf and the old man who must be his father, and Ishak, and their attendants and their falconers, and a hound or two. The drummers were all down by the river, likewise the cheetahs. It was quieter without them. The hounds led them away from the Barada, up the path of a streamlet that fed it: hardly more than a trickle in a stony bed, but the thickets about it were full of birds.

Aidan's bag filled quickly. His falcon was hardly tired; appeased but not sated by a mouthful of its last kill, it circled lazily, not hunting, simply riding the air. It was aware of Aidan, but not as it would of a human man: as a power like wind and sun and the joy of the kill, riding with it, part of it.

Human speech came dim and strange. Words of stopping, resting, sharing water, apples from the orchards, a mouthful of bread.

Aidan wandered a little away from them, following his horse as it grazed. He drank from the stream, slaking the thirst that was his own, but the blunted edge of hunger was the falcon's. He filled his eyes with sun and sky, his mind with the freedom of the air.

The falcon was tiring. Its temper, never sweet, had grown uncertain. It bethought itself of the wideness of the world and the narrowness of its captivity, and remembered that no bond or creance bound it, only the will of the one who flew it.

A dove burst out of cover below it, flaring fear. The falcon stooped upon it, drank its terror with wicked delight, veered aside in the last hurtling instant. The idiot bird darted back into its tree, startling the whole flock into flight. The falcon chose at its royal leisure, sighted, plunged to the kill.

Aidan let it feed, bound lightly with it still, demanding nothing. The falcon quieted as it gorged; it yielded before it knew what it had done, raised its head to his approach, sprang to his fist. He gave it the gift of his pleasure, swift and falcon-fierce.

oOo

The others had eaten and drunk and settled to rest. That it was for the old man's sake, they very well knew, and the old man as well as any. He did not, Aidan noticed, betray that he understood. That was wisdom. It was also kindness: Murhaf, no youth himself and contending with a wound gone bad and still barely healed, was in hardly better case than his father.

They greeted Aidan in their various ways, Ishak with guilt and a word about bread. Aidan shrugged it off. He sat in the space they left for him, between Ishak and the old man. His falcon regarded them with a baleful eye. Their own birds waited in bound and hooded silence near the horses, with the falconers watching over them. Aidan stroked his falcon's back with a feather, gentling it. It settled; its eyes blinked shut. Softly he shifted it to the perch that its falconer had set beside him. Unhooded, lightly jessed, content with its hunt and its full belly and his presence, it slid into a drowse.

“You are a falconer,” the old man said.

Aidan bowed his head. Murhaf, belated, a little irascible with his wound and his oversight, named them to one another. The old man was, indeed his father: Usamah of the house of Munqidh in Shaizar. Usamah was hardly awed to greet a king's son of a country he had never heard of, although his courtesy allowed a modicum of respect. It mattered rather more to him that Aidan knew how to hunt with falcons. “They know the art, then, in your country.”

Which, his tone said, was as far away as the moon. Aidan swallowed a smile. “We have some small pretense to knowledge.”

“Do you fly eagles?”

That was a test. Aidan's smile escaped its bonds. “Once. When I was young and mad. I'd rather fly a good goshawk, or a gyrfalcon. The hunting's better, and the weight's less burdensome on the fist.”

“I used to hunt lions,” said Usamah.

The others exchanged glances. The old man's mind was wandering, surely. Aidan, who knew better, said, “I went against a boar barehanded once.”

“How long were you recovering?”

“A whole winter. The boar,” said Aidan, “lived to a ripe old age.”

Usamah laughed. Age had thinned his voice, but it was still rich and deep. “No doubt you took revenge on the tribe of his sons.”

“I tried,” Aidan said. “Sometimes I succeeded.”

“Ah,” said Usamah, “we're all reckless in youth. I went after a serpent once, when it chose to make its nest in our house. In the inner court, mind you, amid the carvings of the portico: hardly a pleasure for anyone who walked beneath. It would sleep with its head hanging over the arch, looking like part of the carvings. When I had had enough of it, I went for a ladder and set it under the nest, with the snake watching every move I made, for though it was asleep its eyes were open, as serpents' always are. Then, while my father watched and did his best not to upbraid me for a fool and so startle the beast, I went at its head with a little dagger. No room up there for a sword, you see, and I never thought of trying my archery. Its face was a bare elbow's length from my own, and as hideous as you may imagine. I sawed at the neck. The body whipped out and wrapped about my arm. And there we were, swaying on the ladder, I sawing for my life, it coiling for its life, and just when I was sure that I would topple, head and body parted, and it was the snake who went down, and not I. It would have been fair justice had the ladder gone down with it and left me clinging to the carving, till the stone let go or my fingers did, and I fell. But Allah was merciful. My father,” said Usamah, “flayed me handsomely thereafter, for risking my neck in front of him.”

“Would he have preferred that you do it out of his sight?” Aidan inquired.

Usamah's eyes glinted. “I think he regretted that he had not thought of it first. I was a wild youth, but my father, given cause, could be wilder than I.”

“Mine had trained himself out of it before I knew him, since he had to be king; but there were many who remembered what he had been before he was crowned. When I drove my tutors to distraction, they would console themselves with remembering. ‘Lathan was worse,' they would say. Until they learned not to do it in my hearing. I could never abide a rival in deviltry, even if it were my father.”

“I should be stern,” the old man said, “and speak of honoring one's elders.”

“So you should, sir,” said Aidan, “and I shall consider myself chastised.”

“You are well-spoken,” said Usamah.

“For a Frank,” said Aidan.

“For a Frank,” the old man conceded, “and for many a Muslim. I have had friends among your people. The best are as good as any man living. The worst are no worse than we, and sometimes less misguided. When I was in Jerusalem on an errand for my lords, I was suffered to do my devotions in the little mosque, the Father Mosque that lies in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock. A Frank who was new come from the west saw me praying south toward Mecca, and could not abide it; he lifted me bodily and flung me down with my face to the east. ‘
This
is how to pray,' he said to me, not at all with hostility but as if he wished to teach me the error of my ways. Nor would he hear aught in opposition, until my friends of the Temple came to escort him out. They were most apologetic, and most courteous.”

“Templars?” Aidan was startled.

“Templars,” said Usamah, much amused.

Aidan shook his head. “No one in my country would ever believe it. It's so very simple there. Enmity pure, without taint of expedience. Or of plain courtesy.”

“So it is often here. I had occasion to learn otherwise. Men are men, in the end, whatever their faith.”

“Do you regret your battles, then?”

Usamah's eyes were clouded with age, but the fire behind them was as fierce as a boy's. “I do not. War is the one great test of a man. Without it he is but a woman, or a woman's toy. And you, king's son? Are you a child of peace?”

Aidan laughed, full and free. He had to pause to breathe, to muster words. “Your pardon, sir. It is only...my people say that I am too well named. I'm the fire in the dry wood, the hawk of battle. For that there was no war at home, I came here seeking one.”

“Have you found it?”

Aidan lowered his lids over his eyes, lest the glamour fail and bare the wild green light. “I have found it.”

“May God give you good fortune,” said Usamah.

oOo

While they spoke, Aidan had been aware of hoofs on the stones of the watercourse, the ring of bit and bridle bell, the approach of a small party riding without haste. He looked up unsurprised as two men in golden coats came up side by side, and behind them one in black, with one lone falconer. The hounds leaped up baying; the huntsman whipped them down.

The sultan swung lightly from the saddle, returning Usamah's calm greeting, Murhaf's sketched bow. Ishak was all eyes and awe. Aidan sat unmoving, and let this lord of the Saracens choose how he would greet a Frankish prince. That this had been intended, he could well see. It was like these people's subtlety.

Saladin regarded him with eyes as clear as a child's, taking in the whole exotic length of him; fascinated, and delighted with that fascination.

“There was once a king in the west,” Aidan said, “who would not dine of a festival, until he had seen a marvel. Has my lord dined yet today?”

The sultan laughed. “Now I think I may. We are well met, sir prince. How fares your hunt?”

“Well, my lord, and well companioned.”

“I had thought you might take pleasure in their company.” Saladin sat by Aidan with the ease of all these easterners, to whom a chair was a useless inconvenience. He was smaller than Aidan had expected, and slighter even in mail, and although sun and war and the livid new scar had aged his face, he still seemed younger than his years. It was his manner. He had no hauteur; he saw no need of it.

With a small cold shock, Aidan realized that this was a rarity indeed: a man whom the glamour could not touch. He saw Aidan as he was. All the strangeness, but for the eyes, which Aidan would not give him. And more than that. He did not see youth in the white smooth face. He saw no age at all.

It was most strange, not to be looked on as a raw boy; to be granted from the first the respect due a man's years. Aidan knew a moment's emptiness; even a flicker of resentment. Where was the pleasure here, in indulging a mortals' folly?

Joanna would have had a word or two to say to that. Aidan settled against a tree-bole, because he must move, however little, and it was no courtesy to leap up and stride away from a king. Even Ishak had more native quiet; the sultans' presence had frozen him where he sat.

Saladin beckoned to the nearer of his guards. The man — youth, more nearly, blue-eyed and ruddy-fair, which was startling under the turban of a Muslim — brought forth a flask and a pair of silver cups, which he filled. The sultan took one with simplicity that was almost ceremony, and held it out to Aidan. “Drink,” he said.

That was more, far more, than courtesy. A Muslim should not share nourishment with an unbeliever, lest his purity be polluted. Ishak had sinned in setting Aidan at his father's table; youth and recklessness and the witchery of Aidan's presence barely excused him. But the sultan, the king and defender, the rectifier of the Faith, could never do so lightly what a swordsmith's son had done.

A certain form was observed. Saladin waited until Aidan had drained his cup of water freshened with lemon, before he set lips to his own. The cup, he bade Aidan keep. It was ruined, certainly, for further use by a Muslim, but it was a beautiful cup, and a generous gift.

It always took these people an age to come to any point, and Saladin, though Kurdish born, was raised a Damascene. He could discourse, it seemed, for hours on the weather, the virtues and vices of falcons, the quality of the hunting; anything but what a Frankish prince was doing in Damascus. He honestly did not seem to care. It would be a release for him, this long drowsing noon away from the cares of his kingdom. Usamah had actually gone to sleep; Murhaf's beard was on his breast, his awareness half in a dream. Guards and servants had sunk into quiet watchfulness. Even Ishak was nodding.