Alamut (12 page)

She shook her head once, hard, tossing away tears. “What could you have done? That man is the devil himself. You're scarcely even a lesser angel.”

His head snapped up. That was not what he was braced for.

His expression made her laugh, even as she wept. “Oh, yes: how dare I imply that you're not invincible? Grubby mortal I, who should be bowing at your feet.”

“Not... grubby,” he said thickly. His grief rose, choking him. “Oh, God! It was I who let him die.”

“Hush,” she said. “Hush.”

This was not proper. That he should be on his knees in her chamber, weeping. That she should hold him, and rock him, and murmur words of comfort. She was the child, the slave of her temper, headstrong and sullen.

Her breasts were heavy still, aching with milk, that but for her stubborn will would have dried long since. She was a mother. She was not altogether a child or a lackwit or a fool. Whereas he...

“Stop it,” she said, sharp as cold water in the face. But her hand was gentle, stroking his hair, moving down his back.

She knew what she was doing. She saw that he knew. She barely blushed. She drew back, not easily, but firmly enough. “I think,” she said, “that we should try to get what sleep we can. When morning comes, Mother is going to need us both.”

He raised his brows. His bed was occupied. Hers...

She could follow his thoughts with alarming ease, for a woman without magic. Her cheeks burned scarlet. “Not here!” It was too loud. “The roof — if any of the servants will — Dura!”

He rose, retreated past the door. The servant came from God knew where, red-eyed and stiff-backed as they all seemed to be. “Lay a pallet for my lord,” said Joanna, “on the roof, where we used to sleep when we were children.” The woman ducked her head and scuttled past Aidan: a scent of musk, a tang of fear, a heavy mist of grief.

Aidan lingered, unable to make himself go. “You, too,” he said. “Sleep. We're safe enough tonight. They won't strike again until they have your mother's message.”

She understood. The blood drained from her face, but she did not tremble. She kissed him quickly, and chastely enough, on the forehead. Almost he reached, clutched; knowing that if he did, she would not let him go.

His hand fisted at his side. Without a word, he left her.

8.

Masyaf was a fortress, a stronghold. The village that served it, huddling round the knees of its mountain, hoarded every precious scrap of green, cherished every drop of water. But in the castle's heart, as in Alamut its master and its begetter, lay a garden like a many-colored jewel. It was smaller by far than the Garden of Allah in the Nest of Eagles, but perfect of its kind, and more than sufficient for its purpose. From the center of it, so cunningly was it made, one could not see its boundaries.

There, in summer's warmth, the Master of the Assassins of Syria raised his tent. No silken pavilion, that, but a simple dwelling of the desert, woven of goat's hair, black and unadorned. Naught lay within but his worn prayer rug and a single carpet, and the slave who attended his needs.

He had slept briefly after the prayer of the night, and risen again to pray, bowing southward to thrice-holy Mecca. His prayer as always was only that what Allah had willed to be, might be. If Rashid al-Din Sinan willed it also, then praise be to God.

He straightened, raising his face to the stars. Sweetness wafted over him: roses, jasmine, the blossom of orange and citron. The nightingale sang in her secret place.

His heart sang with it, ineffably sweet. “Thanks be to God,” he said, “that He has set me in such a world as this.”

“Thanks be to God,” said a voice out of the night, “that you may take such joy in it.”

That joy withered and died. Such had been her intent, he was certain. He would not admit to fear of the strangest of the slaves of Alamut, the oldest and the strongest and the most inextricably bound to the cause, but it was granted to any man to be wary of such a creature as entered the circle of the lamp's light. The form she wore now was that which she had worn before the first of the Masters of the Assassins, Hasan-i-Sabbah himself, on whose name be peace; and that was nigh a hundred years agone. A woman, it seemed to be, a maiden of some seventeen summers, too slender and cat-faced for beauty as it was reckoned in Persia, but beautiful for all of that, a beauty as fierce as it was strange. A man would want her, inevitably, but he might not be so swift to take her. The houris of Sinan's garden, like those of Alamut, were cast in a gentler mold.

She was more beautiful than ever, more wild and more strange. Sometimes she wore the turban; less often, as now, she let her hair fall as it would, staining her white garments like dark blood.

She bowed as was proper, kissing the earth between her hands. “It is done,” she said.

His breath left him in a long sigh. “So. Is it well done?”

She raised her eye. He met them, knowing that he was strong, that she could not match his will. Such eyes, green as emeralds, clear as glass, drawing him in, down and down and down. And at the bottom of them, a light: a face, a body, a boy of rather exceptional beauty. But to those eyes, nothing at all, save only prey. A heart, beating. A life for the taking. He took it, he who for this eternal instant was she; and he tasted its sweetness, and its gagging bitterness.

“He was,” said Morgiana, voice without substance, clear as water, and as cold, and as still, “thirteen years old. Yesterday he confessed to his priest a terrible sin: he had exchanged sharp words with his sister. Such a tender lamb; it was almost a pity to rid the world of him.”

Sinan reeled. He was free, in his own self, in his own garden where he and no other was lord. His slave knelt at his feet, and again her eyes were lowered, their power bound and hidden, as if it had never been.

Perhaps, after all, he had dreamed it. She was ifritah and undying, spirit of air and fire, but above all, she was his. His slave, utterly, without will save what was his, without self save what he granted her.

Or so she had been. She had risen up not long ago, as shocking as if Masyaf itself had stirred and stood and begun to speak, and announced that she would shed no more Muslim blood. She had not spoken as if she expected to be refused. Sinan, taken aback, had set her on Christians instead, and she had seemed content.

Yet now he might almost have thought that she was bitter; that the glitter in her eyes was tears. Could an ifritah weep?

Her eyes lifted once more. He flinched; but there was no power in them. They were hard and flat, green-gleaming like a cat's. “That is the last of my murders,” she said. “Now you will set me free.”

For a moment Sinan could not comprehend plain Arabic. “Will? I? Set you free?”

“Release me from my oath. Let me go.”

Yes. She had said it. “But,” he said, “this is not the last of them. A daughter remains, and the mother herself.”

“This is the last life I will take. I am done with killing. Set me free.”

Sinan stood wordless in the face of such insolence. She did not even bow her head, still less address him as she always had, with deep and humble respect. She held herself as straight as a man, and spoke in a clear voice, not loud, simply telling him what she would have.

He had her name, and his own name written on the seal about her neck, the Seal of Suleiman which bound all races of the jinn. He had no fear of her. So he told himself, as he faced her and said, “No. You are not done.”

She went whiter than he would have believed possible. He tensed. Seal or no Seal, she was deadly, always; and never more than now. But she did not move. She was utterly still.

“When this game is over,” he said, “I will consider your plea. You have labored long on our behalf; I shall remember.”

“Memory sets no slave free.”

Sinan rose. He was growing angry. “Go, in the name of Suleiman, on whom be peace; by whom thy race was bound. Come not back until I summon thee.”

In that much still he could command her obedience. She did not bow, but she obeyed.

Sinan shivered. Death was no stranger to his presence, and for his Faith he was ruthless; it was, after all, his Faith. But this was more than he had bargained for. The ifritah was gone. Not so the face with which she had branded his soul. The boy whom she had slain — whose death Sinan had willed.

Sinan faced him steadily, refusing fear, refusing regret; mastering him with strength of will. He was younger than Sinan had thought. He had been reported as a well-grown stripling, albeit small for a Frank; he had shown promise in the arts of war. The leper king had been crowned at his age, and ruled under the lightest of regencies, soon to be dissolved. Margaret de Hautecourt would have contrived the same for her son.

A strong woman, though her beauty was long and sadly gone. If she would but see the sense in what Sinan proposed... but no. She must resist. Her mother's apostasy from Islam had become, in her, crusading zeal.

What an Assassin she would make, who could sacrifice her only son for her faith. Pray Allah that now she would see sense, while she still had a daughter to be her comfort. And a grandson, it was said. A first grandson would be most precious to a widow without a son.

The dead face stared levelly back into Sinan's own, naming fidelity obsession, and just execution murder, and faith mere selfish greed. Sinan flung truth against it. The Faith demanded this, that any who opposed it be recompensed with death. The Mission was hindered while this child's mother held to her obstinacy.

What have I ever done but be, and be my mother's son?

His words, but the ifritah's voice, clear and hard.

You care nothing for our Mission. You wanted a woman; she refused you. Therefore you take revenge as your power allows. There is no holiness in it. Only avarice.

Sinan flung up his hand, letting the wrath burn white and fierce. “Be silent, by the Seal that binds thee!”

She was, within and without. The boy's face faded. Sinan shivered in the cold of the mountains before dawn; but his heart was colder yet. Cold and implacable. He had done what he had done. No demon's spawn would trick him into regretting it.

oOo

Morgiana was all strange to herself. She had a chamber in the castle, high and apart, with the women's quarters between itself and the press of male humanity. But even that, now, was no refuge. Its walls closed in upon her. Its slit of window mocked her with the specter of freedom.

She stripped off her garments with their reek of death, not caring what tore, or what could not be mended. The blood on her soul was not so easily disposed of. She clawed at herself in a passion of revulsion.

A last glimmer of sanity set in her mind the image of a bath in Aleppo, where the service was both silent and impeccable, and where the attendants were all faithful to the cause. It was always they who cleansed her of the blood of execution; they knew her, and they knew what she was.

And they feared her, and hated her in silence, as they all did, all the mortal men to whom her oath had bound her. Only Hasan, Hasan-i-Sabbah the wise in the white light of his faith — only he had had no fear of her. Had, in his way, loved her. He had asked no oath or binding, only her fidelity to the Mission which his God had set so clearly in his soul. It was she, blind fool, who had insisted on an oath; who, in the flame of zeal, had begged him to make her his servant. The slave's bond had come later, when he was dead and she was prostrate with grief. She had laid her freedom on his tomb, her last gift to him, and let herself be bound in body as in spirit. There was a fierce purity in it, a perfection of selflessness, a blessed certainty. She was nothing, no thing, no creature of her own, but utterly the Slave of Alamut.

She stood on the bare stone of the floor, in the cell that had always sufficed for her few hours of sleep, and saw it as a stranger would see it. Bare stone, plain box for what belongings she had, sleeping mat rolled and laid in a corner. It was as empty as her soul.

 She fled it as she alone knew how to do: that eerie, inward twist of mind and power, threading the world like a needle through silk, stepping from breath in Masyaf to breath otherwhere. Here, her own place, her secret.

Once, long ago, it had been a hermit's cell. His bones had been there when she found it, bare and clean and somehow welcoming. Though he had been a Christian and therefore an enemy, she had buried him with honor on the hill above the cave and its spring and its gnarled and ancient fig tree. From there his emptied eyes could gaze across the bleak and barren waste, the desert without life or water, save only here. Miracles must have fed him: apart from the fig tree and a blade or two of grass, there was nothing green or growing; and surely the lizards and the odd desert mouse could not have sustained him.

But the narrow mouth of his cave had hidden splendor. The way to it was dark and uninviting, a tunnel in the crag, but opening on a high vaulted space like the hall of a king. A smaller cavern abutted it; beyond it lay its secret: a chamber of flowering stone, and like a jewel in it, a pool of warm and ever-flowing water.

She, who needed but to step from the cave into the heart of any bazaar in the world, had made a refuge. Carpets covered the stone of the floor and hung from the rough walls. Chests, richly carved and inlaid with silver, held treasures from her wanderings. A divan stood against the wall, heaped with silken cushions; a table stood beside it, and on that a gleam of copper, all the proper instruments for the making and the serving of kaffé. The box beside them held within its ornamented protection her most precious possession, her copy of the Koran.

She entered warily, like a beast, as strange to it as it was to her. Years had passed since last she came here. A lizard scuttled under her foot. A mouse had nested in the cushions. But the rest had not changed, save to gather a veiling of dust, an air of emptiness.

It fit her soul. She scorned the hidden pool to scour herself in the biting cold of the spring, welcoming the pain, the outrage of skin accustomed to warm water and scented oils. She let the wind dry her, the cold wind of dawn. What matter how deep it cut? She was demon-born. She could not fall ill and die.