A Wind in Cairo (26 page)

“I went in in a bit of quiet, when the infidels had stopped to eat before the dawn prayer. Once a stallion called, but my mare had manners. She didn't call back.

“I walked up to the sentries without trying to conceal myself. It was light enough by their fire; they could see that I wasn't armed. It should have been obvious that I wasn't an infidel.

“They seized me,” she said, “which I had expected. I asked to be taken to a priest. I said that I had been a prisoner; I asked for sanctuary.” She laughed, too high, too breathless. “Sanctuary! They gave me sanctuary. They called me spy and infidel. Do I look like an infidel, I ask you? They thought I was a man until they decided I was a eunuch; and then one of them had a stroke of genius. He stripped the cloth from my head. He tried to strip the rest of me.

“I told them who I was. I shouted at them. I demanded a priest, a lord, anyone of authority. I threatened them with dire vengeance. I prayed them to remember honor, faith, charity. I invoked every saint I knew, and every devil I could think of. They laughed and fell on me. I was nothing. I was less than nothing. I was female, and there, and they had a bitter defeat to forget. What better way to remember one's manhood than to thrust it upon a woman?”

Her eyes narrowed. She was not seeing the tent, or Zamaniyah's horror, or anything but memory. “I let them think they had me. I lay and cowered and made certain they saw a great deal of me. I was very shakily defiant. ‘Yes,' I cried. ‘I am a spy! Come, what will it be? One at a time? All at once? All the better for my masters, to lead their army past you.'

“I would have laughed if I had been able. Their eyes rolled like animals'. They smelled like animals. They were nothing that I could ever have called kin. And oh, they were terrified of the cruel Saracen! ‘Saladin is here,' I told them. ‘Saladin will roast your ballocks for his dinner.'

“They drew lots. Some went off, snarling, to watch for the terrible sultan. Some stayed. I tried to soften them. ‘Please,' I begged. ‘In God's name. A priest will know me for what I am. Or if not a priest, a Templar, or a Hospitaller. He can give me justice.'

“One or two weakened. ‘She looks like one of us,' they said.

“But others knew no mercy. ‘She belongs to the infidel.'

“‘Then,' said the gentle ones, ‘the fighting monks can judge her.'

“‘But first,' their comrades said, ‘we take a little for ourselves.'

“They were clever,” she said, “those soldiers of the Lord. All the while they decided my fate, they never stopped to think that I was free. No one even stood by to watch me. I slid by anguished inches from the middle of them. Every instant I knew that they would stop me. They never did. They were determining who was entitled to have me first.

“The shadows had me. I slipped, I crept, I bolted.

“I didn't care where I went,” said Wiborada, “if only it was away. From men. From Franks and Saracens. From everyone. Even from life, if God willed it so.” Her eyes blinked, shifted. She turned her head slowly about. She giggled. “See where I came! I walked and I walked, and no one stopped me, and sometimes—I think—I drank, or I ate. I came back to my chains. My sweet golden chains.
My
chains. I'm a Saracen now. Tell me I'm not a Frank. Tell me I'm not an honorless barbarian.”

“You are my sister,” said Zamaniyah.

Wiborada tilted her head, frowning. “We don't look alike,” she said.

Zamaniyah bit her lip until it bled. Her arms were free at last. She clasped Wiborada in them.

“I tried to come,” she said. “Before God, Wiborada, I tried.”

She met Jaffar's eyes over the matted head. He faced her steadily. He grieved; he shared Wiborada's pain; he would bear lifelong the knowledge that he had done nothing to prevent it. But he had done his duty. His mistress had not run headlong and heedless into that same horror. He had no shame of what he had done, and no repentance.

Wiborada had stiffened at Zamaniyah's touch; yet slowly, by infinite degrees, she eased. Her head dropped to Zamaniyah's shoulder. She sighed. It was a long moment before Zamaniyah realized that she was weeping.

She wept silently at first, then more noisily, great racking sobs that swayed them both. Her fists came up and closed in Zamaniyah's coat; she clung there with all her strength.

There were words in it. “Don't tell your father. Please don't tell him.”

Zamaniyah promised her. Not thinking, but not needing to think. Some things went beyond duty. Some things were unspeakable.

She was safe. Zamaniyah told her that, over and over. She was home. She was with her own.

Maybe she believed it. Maybe she would learn to. Zamaniyah dared to hope for it. Not in that she had come back to slavery from Frankish cruelty: that could have been mere helpless retreat. But she had stolen the mount of her escape from al-Zaman's great enemy. That was more than expedience, more even than malice borrowed from her master. It was kinship.

Wiborada needed little more than food and sleep and the passing of time to restore her to some semblance of herself. She was quieter than she had been. She stayed close to Zamaniyah; if men crowded too near, she shied away.

She tried to lighten it with mockery. “I'm like a beaten dog,” she said.

“You let me touch you,” said Zamaniyah, putting an arm around her.

“You're not a man.” She glared at her clean and mended self. “What if al-Zaman calls for me? What will I do?”

“Face it when it comes.”

“I hope it never does.” Wiborada covered her face with her hands, briefly, straightening with an audible snap. “No. I'll be brave. That's all we Franks are good for.”

“You're very good at it,” Zamaniyah said mildly. Wiborada stared at her, patently struggling to decide whether she should be offended.

Zamaniyah gave her no time. She yawned, stretched. “Ramadan is hard. Getting up abominably early to eat before the light comes, and not even water all day.”

Wiborada's brows knit. But she had been trained as a courtesan, whether she would or no; and she was not an utter fool. She played the game as Zamaniyah had chosen to play it; perhaps she took some comfort from it. She spoke almost as lightly as Zamaniyah had, and almost as easily. “Can't you take dispensation from fasting? This is war, after all.”

“And make it up later? When I've already lost a week to being a woman? No; better now. It's good for my soul.”

“That's what Christians say.” Zamaniyah bridled. Wiborada smiled. It was her first honest smile since they left Aleppo. “Lent is longer, but we don't have to fast all day; though we can't have meat.”

“Is that how you atone for eating pork?”

“Pork is good. There's nothing better.”

Zamaniyah shuddered, swallowing bile. “They say it tastes like manflesh.”

“Would they know?”

Jaffar, coming with bread and dates and cheese, could not understand why the two of them had so little appetite; or why they laughed at it.

Mosul's armies had left Aleppo, swelled with forces loyal to Prince Ismail. They moved slowly, almost leisurely, as if to mock the pace at which the sultan had taken the same way.

They sent envoys ahead of them. Zamaniyah watched their entry into the camp. They came in princely state, with fine horses ridden and led, and their two commanders haughty under gilded canopies. He of Mosul she did not know, but he of Aleppo was quite high enough to content any defender of the sultan's dignity: the regent himself, Gumushtekin, balancing his bulk upon a great white mule, escorted by a company in Nur al-Din's own colors.

“I at least,” the sultan observed, “have the grace not to claim a dead man's livery.”

She heard him, but faintly; and she was standing very close to him. To the public eye he was all courtesy. They were not a sham, those gracious manners, but they were not all of him. “Diplomacy,” he had told her once, “is the art of lying truthfully.” And, she could have added, of being lied to with wide-eyed sincerity.

It was very slow. It was, most of the time, excruciatingly polite.

She was there because no one forbade her. Wiborada was there because Zamaniyah was there. Zamaniyah wondered, often, what the ambassadors would have done if they had known the truth of the mamluk and the slender girl-faced nobleman. They won glances enough from their own people.

The young emir was there, standing with those of his elders who spoke for southern Syria. His glances were very different from the rest. They warmed her more by far than the sun's heat could account for.

Maybe, she thought, they were not for her. Wiborada's beauty shone even through a mamluk's livery; and Persians did not care whether their lovers were women or boys.

It was good for her, that reflection, like fasting in Ramadan. Even though he was, after all, Abd al-Rahim: she had browbeaten Jaffar into confessing it. As he had confessed that the emir had followed them that day in Hama, and he had known it, but he had said nothing. It was not at all proper that she knew.

Sometimes Jaffar was all too well aware of his office.

She tried to keep her eyes modestly lowered. It was hard. Especially when Abd al-Rahim, by design or chance, stood nearly close enough to touch. She liked to look at him. He was much more comely than the lords in their interminable council.

They were bartering away cities. When she made herself listen, to keep her mind from a pair of dark-lashed eyes, she swallowed an exclamation. “Baalbek,” the sultan was saying, “and Homs and Hama. Those, Aleppo may take. Damascus only shall we keep.”

He was giving up everything. He had fought for it; he had won it; he held it firmly in his hand. How could he let it go?

He smiled sweetly at the ambassadors. He looked much younger than he was, and much less kingly. He looked somewhat of a fool.

They were as startled as she; but she saw no suspicion in them. They did not know that glint in his eye.

“Baalbek,” mused the emissary of Mosul. “Homs. Hama. That is most of Syria.”

The sultan bowed his head. His simplicity of dress, his plain turban and his worn coat and the glint of mail under it, shrank beneath their eyes, dwindled into shabbiness. Even his army—that, surely, would melt away without gold to hold it. Had he not left Aleppo because his coffers were empty? And the Franks had given him no battle, and thus no booty; only a prisoner or two, none worth more than a few dinars in ransom.

Zamaniyah shook herself. He played it wondrous well: with never a word, he had befuddled even her who knew him.

The Mosuli stroked his handsome beard and pondered. The Aleppan, who had no beard to stroke, lowered his heavy lids, and raised them slowly. His eyes were full of lazy malice, like a cat's as it drowses in the sun. “You will not give up Damascus?”

“Damascus is dear to me,” said the sultan. “I would keep it to console me.

“Can you hold it?” asked the Mosuli.

“I can try,” he answered with the merest quiver of doubt, set clear where they could hear.

“If we accept the cities which you offer,” said Gumushtekin, “we should take also what lies beyond and about them. One fief, to take a plain example. One small holding north and east of Aleppo, in which we have discovered your people: al-Rahba that lies on the Euphrates. Since you will hold nothing north of Damascus, surely then al-Rahba should be ours.”

The sultan paused. A secretary murmured rapidly in his ear. His eyes flickered. His mouth twitched just visibly, stilled. “Ah,” he said. “Ah, sir. Haven't I offered you enough?”

“Al-Rahba,” Gumushtekin pointed out with ponderous delicacy, “lies deeper in the north of Syria than Aleppo itself. How can you hold it from Damascus? How can we allow it? So would the commander of a fortress set his enemy on guard at the postern gate.”

The sultan seemed most grievously distressed. “Alas, my lord Gumushtekin, of all the fiefs which you might have asked for, al-Rahba is one which I cannot surrender. This my loyal servant, my
qadi,
his excellency Imad al-Din ibn Muhammad, begs me to remember that the lord Nur al-Din, on whom be peace, granted it to my kinsman, my uncle's son, who regrettably is not here to speak for it. I cannot strip it from him without cause, without even a word of warning.”

“Cannot or will not?” demanded the Mosuli.

The sultan frowned. “Do you question my good faith?”

The Mosuli stiffened. Gumushtekin sat back at his ease. “If it comes to that,” he said, “yes. Your men are holding al-Rahba: that is fact, and proven. Your cousin's right to it is no right at all. When you seized Egypt, O servant of my departed master, that same master relieved you and all who followed you of your holdings in Syria. I do not recall that you objected. Egypt, I was given to understand, held recompense enough.”

The sultan rose. His face was thunderous.

“My lords!” It was one of the sultan's Syrians, bold with age and fearful of bloodshed here in council. “My lords, need we quarrel? Three strong cities will pass into Aleppo's hands. Surely one town with its lands is little enough price to pay: far as it is, and weak, and surrounded by Aleppo's allies.”

“So is a worm small and weak and hemmed in; but it devours the apple,” said Gumushtekin.

“Shall I speak of worms?” the sultan asked with vicious softness. “Shall I speak of your pact with the infidels? You paid them well, did you not? To lure me from Aleppo. To destroy me if they could.”

“Thereby sending you direct to Paradise,” Gumushtekin pointed out, “as is promised any Muslim who falls in holy war.”

“Holy! How holy is treachery? You bargain even yet. You promise them my captives in return for those of yours whom they hold. You sell them back the lands which Muslim blood has won. You give them hostages for my defeat. You are traitors to Islam.”

Gumushtekin was on his feet, bulking huge before the slender figure of the sultan. The sultan faced him undismayed. The regent's lip curled. “You were a cringing pup when your master was alive. You are a bold cur, now that he is dead. Grant us al-Rahba and we suffer you to keep Damascus. Refuse us and we take all, and your life with it.”