Devil's Bargain (29 page)

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-ONE

S
ioned came back from the heart of the flame to find her tent heaped with books and scrolls: a mage’s trove of them, some in languages that she had never seen or imagined. There was a small jinni sitting on the heap of those, looking rather like a tasseled and turbaned frog; yet its voice when it spoke was as rich and orotund as a bishop’s. “I serve you,” it said, bowing low.

She bowed in return, less deeply. “You are welcome in my tent,” she said. “May I offer you—”

“Peace,” said the jinni, “and ink and pens and parchment. If you will, bright lady.”

She sent one of Richard’s pages to fetch what the jinni had asked for. She could give it peace easily enough: she needed sleep, however little of it she might manage. The jinni was deep in scrolls by the time the ink and pens arrived; it reached blindly for them and went on reading, its big round eyes barely blinking.

She should be reading those books which she could understand. But first, sleep. She scaled a mountain of books to find her bed on the other side, open and welcoming.

It was three days before Sioned mustered the courage to face Ahmad. Henry still had not come. He was close, the scouts kept insisting, but the Saracens knew it and were harrying him. Richard sent out a company to find and help him, then after half a day of pacing, snarling, and trying everyone’s patience, he gathered another troop of knights and set out himself.

The camp without him was no quieter. He had left the Archbishop of Canterbury in command; Hubert Walter, though a quiet and clerkly-looking man, had a will of iron, and he was determined that the army be well ready to rise and march as soon as Richard came back. If Saladin took it into his head to leave off fortifying Jerusalem and fall on the Franks in their king’s absence, he would find no easy enemy.

Sioned waited until after nightfall to begin the spell. The scholar-jinni was deeply engrossed in a book of many strange leaves, tall and narrow and written in a tongue that was spoken, it said, on the roof of the world. Its presence was more a comfort than a distraction.

Sioned hardly needed to speak the word of power or to kindle the flame. He was present in her heart, rousing as if from sleep, smiling as he grew aware of her. She could see a little of where he was: a room of stone, warm with hangings, soft-lit with lamplight. One of his sons was asleep at the foot of the bed on which he was sitting. He had a scroll open on his knees, but something in the way he sat told her that he had not been reading it even before she intruded on his solitude.

He was in Jerusalem. She could feel the power of the place even through the veil of the flame. It was not the power she had expected, even camped so close to it. She had thought to find more light and less darkness; more peace and less throbbing discord. It was so old, this city, and so heavily imbued with sanctity, that it could scarcely sustain the weight of itself.

He seemed undismayed by the paradoxes of the city, and glad almost beyond bearing to sense her presence. “Beloved,” he said.

She almost wept at the word; her tongue had echoed it before her mind was aware. She would have fallen through the flame if she could, into his arms, but that power was not given her—and well for them both. They were in the places in which they were most needed.

Time was short. Something hunted them—something that she feared she knew, a power that rode on the winds of magic as a vulture circled the mortal sky. “I need to know,” she said. “To destroy our common enemy. Your lady said—”

“She told me,” Ahmad said. “I’ve searched through all I know, and everything that I can call to memory. I found the same old tales, the same legends, but nothing of use.”

“She said that it’s something you know,” said Sioned. “Something maybe you found when you helped your brother to besiege the castle, or something you discovered when you went to him again.”

“Or anything I could have read or thought or seen in the years between,” he said with a wry twist. “No, don’t frown; I trust your instinct and hers. Will you walk in memory with me? It may be this needs another eye, a fresher mind.”

“Gladly,” she said, “but how—”

“Swiftly,” he said. “Come.”

The thing that stalked the edges of awareness was drawing closer, but he seemed unaware of it. He caught her and drew her in, spinning through a whirl of darkness and flame.

His eyes were at the heart of them. They opened on his house outside of Damascus, a place she had come to love better than anywhere in the world. Its gardens were rich with summer, the light in them golden, but the rooms within shifted from sunlight to moonlight and back again, through all the phases of night and day.

They were rooms of memory, places he had been and seen. They passed in rapid succession, dizzying in their multitudes, until one caught, wavered, paused.

An army besieged a fortress on a high crag. The force was strong, its engines powerful, but the fortress stood unmarred. It mocked them with its changelessness.

Sioned recognized the man who commanded the army, although she had never seen him face to face. He looked like Ahmad, but somewhat smaller, somewhat thinner, and somewhat finer drawn. He had no magic, but his spirit shone with a white light, such purity as the jinn would have bowed down and worshipped.

He was, in that moment of memory, on the raw edge of frustration. He had given the command to retreat; the engines were being taken down, the camp disbanded. It was a wise decision, but he was not at all happy to have made it. “Allah! Why can’t I be the end of him?”

“It’s not his time,” Ahmad said. They were standing side by side on an outcropping of stone, not far from the dismantling of the siege-engines. He was still quite a young man, and his magic was just beginning to know itself, yet he was still beyond question the man she knew. He had the same cool composure; the same air of quiet self-restraint.

“If it’s not his time now,” Saladin demanded, “then when will it be?”

Ahmad lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “God knows,” he said.

“God keeps His counsel,” Saladin muttered. “I need a source that is more forthcoming.”

“All men are mortal,” Ahmad said. “Even sorcerers like that one can be destroyed.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” said Ahmad.

“Find a way,” Saladin said.

Ahmad bowed. The memory melted into a blur of speeding days.

Some Sioned almost caught—almost remembered. The rest passed far too quickly to grasp. Only one slowed enough to be understood.

An old man sat in an eerie and beautiful garden. Its flowers were too strange, its greenery too bright for earth. The man was human enough, or so it seemed. She knew his face all too well, though he was younger here and stronger than he had been in his passages of magic with the queen.

He did not speak. The chair in which he sat was peculiar, like the stump of an ancient and twisted tree. It grew out of the otherworldly soil, writhing its stunted branches, grappling the dirt with its roots.

It was, in its way, the image of the man who sat in it. She sensed no stronger magic in it than anywhere else in the garden, no evidence that Sinan had set the heart of his power there. And yet as the memory faded, she held on to that tormented shape.

And something more. Something very close by it; a glimmer, half-seen, barely remembered, and yet . . .

Darkness roared upon her. The stalker had found her. She had been on guard, or so she thought; she had had wards. They crumpled like parchment.

Ahmad was nowhere within reach. She could not go hunting him—that would bring the stalker down on him. She turned as best she could and fled.

She was bleeding magic. Her wards were in tatters. The flame of her conjuring was lost in the swirl of darkness.

It did not know her name, in which was the greatest power and the strongest binding. It groped, clawing at her unprotected self, seeking the word that would grant it power over her. She guarded it with all the strength that she had left, and as she guarded it, she ran.

A clear voice rang across the starless sky. It brought the hunter wheeling about, jaws opening wide, fangs dripping pallid light. Safiyah stood in a gleaming gate, wrapped in white. She spoke again in a tongue of which Sioned knew only a little, words of summoning and of irresistible temptation.
Come to me. Conquer me. Make me your slave.

The hunter knew her name and the measure of her power. It abandoned Sioned to fall on that great queen of mages.

Sioned gasped in protest and tried to catch it, but she was too weak, her movement too slow.

“Now!” cried Safiyah as the hunter fell upon her. “Run!”

The gate was open. Safiyah had sprung aside from it, leaping to meet the hunter. Sioned veered, but a buffet of power flung her aside. The gate caught her and spun her down and down,
out of darkness into light, and into shadowed dimness—the dimness of a tent heaped high with books, lit by a single lamp.

Sioned’s body was cold, but never as cold as her heart. The door of the spirit was closed to her. Safiyah was trapped on the other side of it, sundered from all help both mortal and otherwise, doing battle with the hunter.

The armies of the jinn could not come to her, not through those walls of power; Sioned’s little bit of magic was helpless to defend her. The hunter would kill her, and there was nothing Sioned could do. Not one thing—except lie in her chill bed and remember: every word, every image. Over and over. Seeking the thing, the one thing, that would give her the answer. If there was an answer at all.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-TWO

I
n a lifetime of raiding caravans, Mustafa had never seen one larger than the great riding that wound up through the stony hills from Bilbais in Egypt to the sultan in Jerusalem. Heat-shimmer made the line seem endless. Hundreds, thousands of camels rocked and swayed under massive burdens. The stink of them rose with the dust, and the sound of their passing was unmistakable: the rumbling of bellies and the chorus of moaning and squealing that proclaimed their opinion of this labor that had been forced upon them. Horses and mules crowded all through the line of them, so many as to be beyond counting. Together they were as vast as an army.

If the size of the caravan had not been proof enough of its value, the size of its defending force left no doubt whatever. Mustafa counted three thousand men both armed and afoot, Turks and Bedouin for the most part, intermixed with the small brown men of Egypt. They bristled with weapons; companies of them rode up and down the line on their fast little horses.

A riper or more tempting fruit had never begged to be plucked. Mustafa followed the caravan for the better part of a
day, counting its beasts of burden as best he could, and reckoning the quality of its defenders. They never knew he spied on them. When he came close enough to see the face of the guards’ commander, his brows rose to his turban.

“Falak al-Din,” he said to Richard: “the lord Saphadin’s brother. He has none of his brother’s wit or charm. He’s a plodder; he does as he’s told. Now there’s no one to tell him what to do, and a caravan the like of which I’ve never seen.”

Richard’s grin was as wide and white as a wolf’s. Mustafa had ridden nightlong to find him, and had caught him just at dawn on a raid not far from the castle of Blanchegarde. There were a score of Turkish heads on pikes around the perimeter of his camp, trophies of his latest skirmish, but this news that Mustafa brought paled his raid to insignificance.

“How close is it?” he asked Mustafa.

“If you muster and ride today,” Mustafa said, “you can ambush it in the hills of Judea, well before it reaches Jerusalem.”

Richard’s eyes narrowed as he calculated. He no longer needed a map, though his sleepy clerk had one at hand if he asked for it. He knew this country as well as many who were born in it. “Three thousand men to guard it, you say?”

“Maybe a little fewer than that, my lord,” Mustafa said.

“Close enough,” said Richard. “Are you up for another ride? I’d not ask it of you, but I need someone I can trust.”

“Give me a fresh horse,” Mustafa said, “and I’ll ride to the world’s end.”

Richard laughed and pulled him close, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Good man! Stop for a bite and a sip, then take your pick of the horses. You’ll find the Duke of Burgundy in Blanchegarde, snugged up with as many buxom ladies as he can get his hands on. Wake him up and haul him out—but nicely. Tell him he can have a third share of the loot if he’ll lend his forces to this venture.”

Mustafa bowed to the floor of the king’s tent. When he straightened, Richard caught him and kissed him again, on the
lips this time, laughing at the prospect of a battle, and loving Mustafa for bringing him the news of it.

There was no time to stop, or even to pause. Mustafa slipped free of the king’s hands and ran to find the food and drink that he had been promised, and then to choose himself a horse.

He was exhausted but intensely alert. He saw the figure in the shadows outside the tent, the pale gleam of dawn on hair so fair it was nearly white. Blondel was watching, and he was not smiling.

Mustafa put him out of mind. There was a battle coming—a splendid one, for glorious spoils. The French would join it; how could they not? They were grumbling again, threatening yet again to abandon this tedious war, but the promise of gold would bring them running.

Even as swiftly as Richard moved, Saladin’s spies were swifter. Half a thousand men rode in haste from Jerusalem to warn the caravan. They had been wary before, but now they were at the height of alertness, sending scouts out on all sides. The new forces allowed them to double the active guard on the caravan, without sacrificing overmuch sleep.

Richard heard the news without dismay. He had close to a thousand knights, a thousand Turcopoles, and a thousand infantry; he could match the enemy closely enough in numbers, and every man under his command was whipped to a froth of eagerness. He had promised each one of them a fair share of whatever they won, which if the caravan was as rich as they all suspected, would make them wealthy men.

He laid his ambush carefully. The enemy expected it in a broad dry riverbed that came down from the spine of the mountains: they sent a strong company of scouts through it to overturn every stone. Mustafa watched them from above, sharing an outcropping of stones with a handful of Richard’s tame Bedouin. They were brothers, and apostate to Islam. Mustafa did not trust them, but they were as dazzled by the prospect of riches as any of the Franks. They would be loyal until it came time to divide the spoils.

The caravan’s scouts took a long time to be sure the wadi was clear of enemies. When at last they rode back to their commanders, Mustafa sent one of the brothers to Richard to tell him the way was clear. It was a fine place for an ambush: broad enough and clear enough to grant passage to the caravan, but walled steeply on either side, and narrowing as it rose up toward the mountains.

The sun had reached its zenith while Mustafa waited for the enemy’s scouts to finish their explorations. The heat was like a living thing. He was glad of the desert robes he had put on for this venture; they made a rather acceptable tent, propped up with a camel goad. He sipped water sparingly as he waited, ears sharpened, watching for signs of the caravan’s coming.

It advanced like a dust storm, coming on slowly, held to the pace of the mules and the camels. It would have to stop either within the wadi or just outside of it; it would go no farther than that before nightfall.

Unless, Mustafa thought, it went on in the dark. It might; it could hope to outstrip Richard and escape toward Hebron, where Saladin’s forces were much stronger and Richard’s far weaker.

If he could spy on the commanders . . .

For that he would have to penetrate the wall of guards and spy close in. In a smaller caravan he could not have dared it: there, all the guards knew one another. But in this one, thousands strong, he might pass unnoticed, with his Berber face and his nondescript robes.

Two of the brothers went with him. He would have preferred to go alone, but they were insistent. “Are we not as skilled as you? Have we not spied in worse places than this? Will you not need someone to take the message to Malik Ric, if there’s need of swift action?”

That last was all too convincing. He left the rest of the brothers to do as they saw fit, and took the two young rakehells with him, slipping from shadow to shadow, making themselves one with the dust that shrouded everything in the caravan’s wake.

Mustafa tracked Falak al-Din by feel more than by sight. The emir had been traveling in the rear, but as the day wore on, he moved up toward the van, peering ahead as if he could see the army of the Franks waiting in the hills at the wadi’s end. The slopes were empty even of birds.

Saladin’s commander had ridden ahead with a handful of his men, but came back as Falak al-Din reached the head of the caravan. They greeted one another curtly. Mustafa would have liked to know the root of that, but he could hardly abandon his posture of camel driver to ask questions. Maybe it was only that Falak al-Din was a Kurd and the other was a Turk. There was no love between those two nations.

“No Franks ahead,” said the commander, whose name was Aslam. “The road’s clear. If we stay on it into the night, we may give them the slip.”

“What, try to march in the dark?” Falak al-Din said. “It’s easy to see you haven’t done much traveling with caravans. These aren’t soldiers. If they’re not herded like their own camels, they’ll wander off Allah knows where. We need the daylight to keep them all on the road.”

“If you stop,” said Aslam, “the Franks will catch you.”

“I don’t believe that,” Falak al-Din said. “If he were that close, he’d be in the wadi, and there’s nothing there. He’s a day behind us at least, I’ll lay wagers on it.”

“You’ll wager, sure enough,” said Aslam. “The stakes will be your life.”

Falak al-Din’s beard jutted with the stubborn set of his jaw. “We’re camping as soon as we reach the mountain—there’s water there, at the Round Cistern. We’ll march immediately after the dawn prayer. Will that at least begin to content you?”

“No,” said Aslam, biting off the word.

“Then live with it,” said Falak al-Din, turning his shoulder to the emir.

Aslam looked as if he would have dearly loved to sink a dagger into the idiot’s back, but he was too civilized a man—and perhaps too well aware that, fool or no, this was the sultan’s kinsman. He swallowed his temper and spurred his horse back
to the body of his troops, who were riding somewhat ahead, bristling with weapons.

Mustafa thought Aslam might ride on at nightfall, but when the caravan camped by the great stone water basin that gave the place its name, Aslam camped also, high on the hill above the rest. From there at least he would see any enemy that came—if that enemy came with lights in the dark.

When the sun had set but there was still a little light left in the sky, Mustafa left the camels he had been driving to the care of those whose proper task it was. There were sentries all along the rim of the camp, and troops of guards roving as far afield as the terrain allowed. Mustafa, wrapped in his dusty djellaba, with the two Bedouin soft-footed behind, crept out as he had crept in.

They almost eluded the guards. Young Ali’s misstep betrayed them: he slipped in the last of the light and sent a fall of rock down the slope onto a guard’s head. Daoud bolted like a rabbit, full on a waiting spear. Ali had better luck; he disappeared into the dark. Mustafa tried, but there was a guard at every turn.

He circled, a dagger in each hand. One of the guards had ripped the djellaba from him; another had lit a torch, the better to see the fight. They were treating it as sport, laughing and mocking him in one of the more guttural Turkish dialects. The sight of his face made them whistle and whoop.
Flower of steel,
they called him, and
Beauty in the night.

It was unlikely that they knew he was a spy for the Franks. A caravaneer might be fool enough to go wandering about after dark, and these men were not above a little casual rape.

Wrath howled out of the night, a whirlwind of deadly steel. Blood sprayed black-crimson in the torchlight. Turks shrieked and died. An iron hand heaved Mustafa up and flung him over a saddlebow. He clung blindly as the horse reared and spun.

When the world went still again, the camp was out of sight. Mustafa’s captor let his horse fall from a flat gallop to a jarring
trot, then a walk and a hard-breathing halt. Others came up around him, maybe a dozen from the sound of them.

“Well, men,” said Richard in a voice meant to carry no farther than the circle, “we’ve got what we came for. First one back to camp wins his pick of the loaded camels.”

Grins flashed in starlight. Richard’s was as wide as any. Mustafa clutched the saddle before he could be flung off into space.

They did not go far. A little distance down the wadi, which the caravan’s scouts had been sure was free of enemies, Richard’s army was making its stealthy way toward the caravan. He stopped in the midst of it and set Mustafa dizzily on his feet, stripping off the djellaba that had concealed him. He was dressed in mail beneath.

There was water for Mustafa, and bread that must have been baked the morning before. He had eaten in the caravan and drunk water from the cistern, but he had learned never to refuse a meal: Allah knew when he would find another.

Richard would have sent him back to Blanchegarde. That was ridiculous; he pretended not to hear. He persuaded the master of horse to give him a mount and the master of arms to equip him with a Turcopole’s weapons, and joined the march, back the way he had come.