Alamut (35 page)

His face was set, stubborn, but his eyes betrayed him. Oh, yes, he wanted her. He might not find it as easy as he pretended, to leave her behind.

She kissed him. Lightly at first, defiantly. He stiffened against her; then, all at once, he kindled. Even in her anger she laughed, for he was splendid, and terrifying, and he belonged to her. She commanded him to love her. He was her servant: he obeyed.

oOo

After the storm, the calm. The jangling tension that had awakened Aidan to Joanna's presence even in the garden, had eased. She was as beautiful as she had ever been, lying beside him, warm and richly pleasured. Her face in the lamplight had lost its hard edge of discontent, her eyes dark and soft, her mouth loosed from its taut line. He kissed it. She tangled her fingers in his hair and smiled. “You are beautiful,” she said.

“I was thinking the same of you.”

She shivered slightly, with pleasure. His voice could do that to her, even when she would not believe what it said. “Do you really find me bearable to look at?”

He shook his head between her hands. “Madam, you are not even modest. You are blind, and obstinate, and — yes — beautiful.”

She untangled one hand to run it down from his temple to his jaw. “I see,” she said. “You're behind your face. You don't care how unlovely we all are beside you.”

He silenced her with yet another kiss. “Then it's only my face you love. If I were ugly, you'd never deign to look at me.”

“That's not true!”

He laughed at her indignation. “That's no more than you're saying of me. I'm not mere mindless beauty, ma dama.”

“Of course you're not.” She glared at him. He smiled back. She yielded slowly. “You know what you look like.”

“I can hardly help it.” Nor was he minded to dwell on it. He smoothed the frown from her brow with a light finger, and followed it with kisses, down the taut lines of her face, past her chin to the sweep of neck and shoulder, round the fullness of her breasts. Her heart beat light and swift beneath the warm soft woman-skin. His awareness sank beneath it, spreading slowly through her as he moved downward again, over the curve of her belly to her navel, that poets here would call the jewel in the goblet. He laughed at the thought, a small explosion of breath: a shiver of pleasure for her at the warm brush of it. Her hips flared wide and deep between his hands. Her buttocks filled them to overflowing. He descended to the secret places, dizzy with the scent of them, his power flowing in and through them, filling them. But not his body, not yet. The waiting would make it sweeter. His kisses circled their smoothness — alien even yet, that eastern art of razor and of stripping-paste, but exciting in its strangeness. His mind traced the paths within.
They
were all familiar, all perfectly a woman's.

He paused. Familiar. Surely. But —

It was nothing. A moment's distraction. The call of a nightbird in the garden.

It was there still. Familiarity grown unfamiliar.

Grown, and growing.

He lay utterly still. The fool in him, which was a very large part of his self, denied it; called it delusion. That fleck of awareness which saw only truth, called it what it was.

Joanna stirred, sensing the wrongness in his silence. “What is it? Do you hear something?”

His head shook. He laid it on her belly. Now that he was awake to it, it burned in his mind's eye: not mer soft skin and sparking pleasure, not a path to his own delight, not simply the center of this creature who was Joanna, but woman, and womb.

And in it...

He could have sung for joy. He could have killed them both.

No. Not both. All three.

There was no doubt of it. None at all. What grew in her had been growing for perhaps a pair of months. They had left Jerusalem almost a season ago. She had had no other lover, nor wanted one. And she had not had congress with her husband since before her son was born.

He raised his head. She met his eyes. She saw that he knew. Her fear rose; it smote him to the heart. That she could be afraid of him, because she had conceived. And had he not had as much to do with it as she?

She read his anger at her folly, as anger at her condition. She struck out at him with hands and voice. “Yes. Yes, I'm pregnant. Yes, it's all my fault. Yes, I didn't want to tell you!”

He evaded her hands; he pulled her to him, holding her though she struggled, stroking her until she surrendered, breathing hard, hating him for being so much stronger than she. For being male, and desirable. For getting her with child.

“Why were you afraid to tell me?” he asked her, as gently as he could. “It's mine, too.”

“That's why.”

He puzzled out the logic of that. Understanding appalled him. “You thought I'd stop loving you? You thought I'd abandon you?” He shook her hard. “What do you take me for?”

“Male.”

He let her go. He rose; for if he stayed, he would do something regrettable. In his swift pacing he came up against the wall. He leaned against it, letting its coolness sink into him. He was shaking.

He spun. She was sitting up, watching him with eyes wide and burning dry. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders and her breasts. One hid in the mass of it; one peered coyly out, white breast, pink nipple, lovely and maddening. Now that he knew, he saw what bloom was on her, not of a woman with a lover, but a woman with child.

“I suppose,” she said, “that you are kind to all your women. And your bastards.”

He flinched from the venom in her voice. “I have none.”

“That you know of.”

His fist clenched. “I have none. Nor ever have had. I had thought that I could not. There are ways to tell, if one is like me, or like my brother; and I was never...potent...in that way.”

“Potent enough,” she said.

“But I
shouldn't
be!” He reined himself in before he ran wild. “If I had known that I could — if I had thought that I would — ”

“You would have resisted me?”

“I would have been more careful.”

She shook her head. “Then you're wiser than I. I never even thought.”

“I can't understand,” he said, “why, all at once, I should be...I should be able...” He stopped. “Maybe — maybe I was only — as boys are. Sometimes. If they kindle early. Able to love, but not to beget. But now...”

“You hardly look like a boy to me.”

“I'm not a man, either.” He said it again, slowly. “I'm not a man. I'm not human. I don't even know how different I may be.”

Her hands went to her belly. Her eyes were wild. “Then — this — too — ”

It was not fear that leaped in her. It was a white, mad joy. It brought him by no will of his own, drew him down before her; but his hands would not reach, to touch her. “It is.” He had not willed that, either. But it was true. Now his hand would yield to his will. It laid itself over hers, where the spark was, the seed of life that would be another of his kind.

She drew in a long slow breath. Suddenly, as if his touch had had power in it, she was calm; she was herself. “This is going to be very complicated.”

He laughed, half in pain. “What's complicated? I'll be done in Masyaf before you begin to swell. Then we'll go away. We'll have our child together, somewhere where we'll be safe and protected. I'll never take it from you.”

“Will you swear to that?”

Of course she did not trust him. She had reason. It did not hurt the less for that. “I swear.”

She eyed him steadily, under her brows. “Ranulf said it, too. The next one, I could keep. He may even have meant it.”

“No doubt he did.”

Her lips twitched: less a smile than grimace. Her hands turned to clasp his. “I want this baby, Aidan. Never doubt that. For all that it may do to me, for all that it may cost...I want it.”

“And you wonder why I love you.”

“I know that. You like a challenge.”

Her heart was lighter now: free, glad, almost antic, now that fear was proven folly. She pulled him up and spun them both about, laughing. “Oh, my lord! Oh, my love!”

He bent his head to her kiss, laughing with her, soft and deep. “
Ma dama,”
he said.

23.

The black eunuch was dead. He had lunged upon Morgiana, and she had struck harder than she meant, and his neck had snapped. It was of a piece with all the rest of this accursed day. If he had stood still for her ensorcelment, he would be deep asleep but very much alive, hidden in the space beneath the blue pavilion, and she would bear one less burden of guilt.

Her oath was burden enough, and more than enough. Sinan had invoked it yet again, compelled her with it, even dared to threaten her. “Do as I bid,” he had said to her, “and remember well. There are oaths more potent than that which you have taken on yourself, and bindings stronger than this near-freedom of yours. I have your name set within the Seal of Suleiman. Do not tempt me to invoke it.”

She told herself that she did not care; that she was stronger than his mere human magic. But the twisting in her vitals was fear. He held her name, her oath, even her self if he were so minded. He would not spare her for pity or for mercy.

He had tried to feign both. “Take this last sacrifice,” he said with what he dreamed was gentleness. “It is only a Christian, a Frank. And when it is taken, come back to me. Perhaps then I may loose your bonds.”

Perhaps. Her lip curled. She knew the royal perhaps. It was tantamount to never.

The eunuch's body was hidden beneath the pavilion. Time and men's noses would uncover him, but not until she was long gone.

The Frank had been in the garden when Morgiana came. No longer. Her scent led not toward the house but away from it, toward the wall. Morgiana raised her brows. So: she would escape? Wise woman. It was a pity that her hunter was not human, to be foiled by human sleights. And that that hunter, under the chains of her oath, could not let her go.

The scent was growing cold. It had taken an unconscionable while to subdue the eunuch, and then to dispose of the carrion. Iblis had beset her with a gaggle of chattering women, and a dog that barked and howled until she silenced it with power, and a child playing with a ball and a stick. She had not been under bond to kill any of them; therefore she would not. Now the garden was empty and she was free to hunt, but her quarry was gone.

oOo

Morgiana found the gate, and the thorns. She could admire the Frank. For such a large woman, she left a remarkably slender trail.

And an interestingly direct one; and not toward the outer wall as Morgiana might have expected. Had she a lover, then? One of her kinsmen; or maybe one of her ifrit's mamluks who were so notorious in the city. One of them was born a Frank, and not ill to look at.

It was not he on guard where the woman's scent led, but one fairer by far to eastern eyes, a slender dark beauty like an Arab stallion, with a stare as startling as it was startled: water-blue, gem-blue, sky-blue. He heard nothing of Morgiana's passage up the trellis, nor felt aught of her presence, until he crumpled into her arms.

The door was shut, but she heard them clearly enough. Voices: a woman's and a man's. They spoke Frankish, which she did not trouble to make sense of. She knew the sound of lovers at war. She set hand to the door. Confident, they were: it was unbarred. She eased it open.

The lamplight flickered, dazzling her eyes after the dark of the night. They were shadows, two tall dark shapes twined about one another. They had, it seemed, declared a truce. The woman laughed, half mirthful, half reluctant.

Morgiana's dagger was in her hand, new and keen and eager for blood. Maybe — maybe, after all, she would not use it.

It was revelation, that opening of her mind, that awakening of subtlety. Nothing in her given word had stipulated that she must slay the woman tonight, least of all with her lover as witness. Perhaps it would be enough to frighten her, and to betray her transgression to her kin. Sinan had demanded a sacrifice. He had not specified that it be in blood, although he had certainly meant as much. This woman's honor might be enough, and the honor of her house.

Sinan might even accept it. He was a subtle serpent himself, and he was no fool. What might it do the woman he wanted, that her daughter disported herself with a man not her husband?

The air was heavy with the scents of passion, musk and sweat and the rank sweetness of a woman in heat. Morgiana's nostrils flared. There was an ache between her own thighs, a trembling in her body. She had spied on lovers enough, and killed when weariness cast them into sleep, but none had aroused her as did these two. Perhaps it was that she had never been commanded to slay the woman and not the man; and that she had no desire to kill at all.

They spoke, laughing. The woman's arms were about her lover's neck. His head bent to the kiss. “
Ma dama,”
he said.

Morgiana froze. She knew that voice. She had been refusing to know it. And the face that lifted, all besotted, all rank with the stink of mortal flesh.

She moved without knowing that she moved, as a cat will, flowing from shadow to shadow.

The woman locked legs about her lover's middle and mounted him, there, with abandon that would have put a whore to shame. His breath caught in startled pleasure. He laughed low in his throat. His arms were full of her. His mind held nothing that was not she.

Morgiana's lips drew back from her teeth. She had never hated. She had never had cause. The deaths she dealt were justice only; execution.

oOo

Aidan sensed the strangeness in the air, even in the surging of pleasure that was Joanna's as much as his. Her weight bore him back and down in a sidewise tangle; but light, light, for his power made the air a bed for them. She never knew, nor cared. She buried her face in his shoulder, drunk on his scent, riding him with mounting urgency. It carried him, even as he looked through the tousle of her hair, into eyes that burned green.