Alamut (43 page)

She had, she realized, been lonely. She lay on her mounded cushions, with the wind blowing cold without and the lamps flickering warmly within, and watched Hasan play on the floor. His mother sat near him, her smooth dark head bent over the coat which she was making for him. There was always a darkness in her now, a hard cold knot of obstinacy, but her surface was placid, even content.

She looked up and smiled. Morgiana smiled back. Neither said anything. They did not need to. That was friendship, that silence.

Much later, Morgiana woke. Hasan slept peacefully. Sayyida seemed to, but beneath the stillness, the tears flowed soft and slow.

oOo

It was time, Morgiana knew, to wake again from being to doing. Sayyida was in as much comfort as she could be. When Morgiana left, she was in the innermost cave with Hasan, availing herself of its great treasure: the hot spring that welled into a pool side by side with one both cold and pure.

Morgiana smiled and stepped
round
and
through
, into another air altogether.

The Banu Nidal were in ferment. Half of them seemed to be trying to break camp; half, to be milling about aimlessly, wringing their hands. The sheikh stood in their midst, holding the rein of a spent and trembling camel.

He did not even start when Morgiana stepped out of the air, although his face went a little greyer. He nearly fell as he went down in obeisance.

She pulled him to his feet with rough mercy. There was, she noticed, a wide and silent circle around them, widening as the moments passed. People seemed unusually intent on making themselves scarce.

“I am to blame,” the sheikh said. “Mighty spirit, daughter of fire, the fault is entirely mine. Take me and welcome, but spare my people.”

She was slower than she should have been: she had only begun to understand. Her power darted, proving it. She seized him by the throat. “
Where is he
?”

He gasped, gagged. She loosened her fingers a fraction. “Great lady, we do not know. We have been hunting him. But nowhere — nowhere — ”

Someone thrust in between them: his senior wife, fiercely defiant. “You never told us that he was a son of Iblis!”

Morgiana drew back a step. It was not a retreat.

Nor did the woman read it as such; but it fed her courage.”You should have told us,” she said. “We guarded him exactly as you commanded, as the mortal man he seemed to be. How were we to know that he was no mortal at all?”

It was new, and strange: to be put to shame by a human woman. Morgiana was, for the moment, beyond anger. “Tell me,” she said.

She gained it in more than words. Evening; the sunset prayer past, the women bent over the fires, scents of the nightmeal hanging heavy in the air. The guard was vigilant by the prisoner's tent, and prudence had tethered the bull camel behind where a clever captive might think to escape.

He strolled out past the stunned and helpless guard, dangling the cords in his hand. One of the sheikh's sons leaped to seize him; he spoke a word, and the boy stood rooted, staring. He went straight to the sheikh and bowed, and thanked him graciously for his hospitality.

“And then,” said the sheikh's wife, “he spread wings and flew away.”

Morgiana saw it as they had seen it. He was never so tall as they imagined, his face never so white a splendor, but the mantle of fire was power for a surety; and the wings that he spread, part shadow and part glamour, with a shimmer of red-gold fire.

The Banu Nidal wasted little time in gaping after him. They took to their camels and set out in pursuit; but he was too swift, and he left no earthly trail. She, who could have tracked him with power, did battle in Damascus on Sayyida's behalf, and dallied thereafter, complacent in her lair.

The Banu Nidal waited in dread of her silence. They could not know how she flogged herself. He was young; he was a fool; he was certainly mad. But he was ifrit to her ifritah, and she had committed the worst of sins. She had underestimated him.

She whirled in a storm of wrath. The tribesfolk fell away from her. Their terror did not comfort her. She spread wings of blood and darkness, and hurtled into the sky.

29.

The warden of the gate of Masyaf looked out upon the morning. The mountains marched away before him, bleak and bare. Below lay the fields that fed the castle, fallow now with the harvest's ending but bearing a memory and a promise of green. They had suffered in the sultan's war; wind and the autumn rains had begun to blur the remnants of the siegeworks.

He would not come back. Allah, and Sinan, had seen to that. The warden murmured a prayer of thanks, secure in his faith and his righteousness. Was he not the guardian of the Gate of Allah? Was he not assured of Paradise?

A black bird flapped down amid the stubble of a field. It was very large and most ungainly, staggering and struggling as if it bore a wound. And yet there was no archer in the fields, nor lad any shot from the walls; and the bird flew alone.

It blurred and shifted in the watcher's sight. Large, indeed. Man-high, and a tall man at that. Its wings shrank to tattered robes. It raised a white face, eyes enormous in it, black-shadowed; black hair in a wild tangle, black beard, nose curved fiercely and keenly enough but patently no bird's.

Even yet, the warden hesitated to call it human. Human-shaped, certainly, and male beyond a doubt. But as it struggled toward the castle, it grew more strange and not less.

It — he — was quite evidently and quite starkly mad. The steepness of the slope drove him to his knees. As often as he fell, he dragged himself erect again, inching toward the gate. His robe was torn; blood glistened on it. His face was serene, even exalted.

The gate was shut. He swayed on the edge of the ditch, smiling. For an instant his eyes seemed to meet the warden's, though that could not be: the warden was hidden in the shadow of the battlement. He raised his long white hands, still smiling, and smote them together. The gate rocked; stilled.

The faintest of frowns marred his brow. Had he expected the gate to fall? His eyes rolled up. Gently, with dreamlike slowness, he crumpled.

oOo

The warden would have left him to die, if he was capable of it, but the Master would not have it. They brought him in and tended him. He was filthy, battered, worn to a shadow; he desperately needed water and sleep. But he was in no imminent danger of death. They saw that he was no Muslim. They surmised that he was no mortal.

Sinan contemplated him with great interest and no little wonder. The physician offered him the proof: the eyelid lifted, the eye rolling senseless but, when the light struck it, performing its office. A grey-eyed man who was no human man.

The Master of the Assassins could not wait by a stranger's bedside, however intriguing that stranger might be. He posted guards and bound them with his commands, and returned to duties more pressing, if never so intriguing.

oOo

Aidan woke in rare and perfect clarity. He knew where he was. He knew, and guessed, how he had come there. He knew that he was nothing approaching sane.

The bed was hard but the coverlets warm and soft. He was clean; his bruises ached, his cuts stung, but gently. Worse was the ache of his sore-taxed power. He had demanded all that it could give, and then as much again. And it had obeyed him.

It throbbed like a wound. Even to shield it was pain.

He did not care. He was in Masyaf.

He sat up gingerly. Muslim modesty had clothed him in shirt and drawers; they were plain but well sewn, and they fit not badly.

The chamber was small but not ascetic: walls of stone softened with silk, a good carpet, even a window. The door was barred, with a seal like a star set in the lintel. The window looked out upon a precipice.

There was a low table, and a jar, and in it clean water; beside it a plate of cakes, a cheese, a pomegranate. He remembered an old lesson among the monks, and smiled.

Under the window stood a chest of cedarwood, beautifully carved. There were garments in it: white and, like his shirt, plain but of excellent quality. Assassins' garb. He put them on. The room was cold and he was mad, but he was no fool,to refuse warmth when it was offered.

He ate, drank. The cakes were Assassins' cakes; they were good to the taste, without blood to taint them. The pomegranate spilled its jewels, staining his fingers scarlet.

He raised his eyes to the man who stood in the door. He did not know what he had expected. An old man, yes. Old and strong, worn thin with years of austerity. His beard was long and silver, his eyes dark and deep. Perhaps it was not beauty that he had, but it was a strong face, cleanly carved, a face out of old Persia. His kind had waged war against the west for twice a thousand years.

There was no softness in him. Mercy and compassion, his face said, were for Allah. He, mere mortal man, could not aspire to them.

He came unarmed and alone. Wise man. Guards, blades, violence, Aidan could have met in kind. This fierce harmlessness held him rooted.

“I have had your message,” said the Master of Masyaf.

Aidan had to pause to remember it. “And the messenger?” he asked.

“Dead,” said Sinan.
Of course
, his tone said.

Aidan could not prevent himself from regretting that. A little. His quarrel was with Sinan, and with Sinan's tame demon. “A pity,” he said. “He was useful.”

“Not,” said Sinan, “once he was unmasked.” He regarded Aidan with the shadow of a smile. “Come,” he said. “Walk with me.”

He was not without fear. Aidan scented it, faint and acrid. But Sinan would be one who reveled in terror; whose greatest pleasure lay in defying it. He walked as a man walks who thinks to tame a leopard, not touching Aidan, not venturing so far, but walking well within his reach. He was a middling man for a Saracen, which was small for a Frank, and thin; Aidan could have snapped his neck with one hand.

They walked seemingly without destination, wandering through the castle. It was small after Krak, but the feel of it was much the same: a house of war, consecrated to God. Its people moved in the silence of those whose purpose is known, and firm. They greeted Sinan with deep reverence and his companion with brief incurious stares. One did not ask questions here, or think them; not before the Master. What they knew or guessed, they kept to themselves.

Sinan said little, and that to the purpose: the use of a chamber, the choice of a turning. We have no secrets, his manner said. See, it is all open, no hidden places, no shame kept chained in shadow.

Yes, Aidan thought. Sinan needed no secrets here. Those were all in the world without, among his spies and his servants.

The garden was fading toward winter, but in its sheltered places the roses bloomed still. Under a canopy of white and scarlet, Sinan sat to rest. “Is it true,” Aidan asked him, “that in Alamut the roses never fade?”

“Would you like it to be true?”

Aidan bared his teeth. “In my city there is such a garden. But she who tends it is no mortal's slave.”

Did the Assassin tense? His face wore no expression. “No slave in Alamut has such a power.”

“And in Masyaf?”

The thin hand rose, plucked petals from a blown blossom, let them fall. “In Masyaf, death and life pass as Allah has ordained.”

“Or as you choose to command.”

“I but serve the will of Allah.”

“You believe that,” Aidan said. He was not surprised. A cynic, or a hypocrite, would have been less perilous.

“And you? What do you believe?”

“That Allah is a goodly name for one man's avarice.”

Sinan was unoffended. “So? What do you call your own?”

“I have none. My sins are pride and wrath. I call them by their names.”

“Proud,” said Sinan, “indeed.” He cupped a single blood-red petal in his palm, regarding it gravely. His eyes lifted. “What would you have of me?”

Directness was an artifice, in a Saracen. Aidan showed him directness bare. “Surrender.”

A lesser man would lave burst into laughter. Sinan said,”Is there perhaps some doubt as to who is in whose power?” He gestured: a flick of the fingers. Out of the coverts and shadows of the garden and round its corners stepped men in white. Every one bore a strung bow, every arrow fixed unwaveringly on its target.

Aidan smiled. “Oh,no,” he said. “No doubt at all. You asked what I would have. My heart's desire would be your life, but that would not bring back my kin. I would rest content with your surrender; with your solemn oath that you will cease to torment the Lady Margaret, and the payment of reparation for the lives which you have taken.”

The Master of Masyaf looked at him with the beginning of respect. “Ah, sir. I see that you are a civilized man.”

“Hardly,” Aidan said. “The price I set will not be low. And you must abandon forever any hope of gaining power in the House of Ibrahim.”

“There are other houses.”

“Merchant houses. And merchants have no love for would-be kinsmen who resort to the crudity of murder. No,” said Aidan. “With your tactics in this battle, you have lost the war.”

“That supposes that I intend to surrender. What if I should simply seize the lady and compel her?”

“She'd die first,” Aidan said. “And you might find that I am a larger obstacle than I look.”

“Large enough,” said Sinan, measuring his inches, “and strong, certainly. Yet Allah has made your kind subject to certain compulsions.” He took from his coat a small thing: a circle of iron on a chain, engraved with a star of six points, written about in Arabic and in what must surely be Hebrew. With a small shock of recognition, Aidan recalled the carving n the lintel of his cell.

“The Seal of Suieiman,” said Sinan, “with which he bound he races of the jinn. I have set your name in it.”

“But,” Aidan said, “I am not a Muslim.”

“Nor was Suleiman.”

Aidan plucked the Seal out of Sinan's hand. The archers tensed, but none loosed an arrow. He turned the thing in his fingers. There was no power in it but the cold stillness of iron and the heat of human wishing.