Devil's Bargain (3 page)

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

H
owever terrible the armies of Islam might be, as the march went on, the soldiers of the Crusade came to an inescapable conclusion: the land was worse. Blazing heat by day, so that the army could only march in the cool of the morning and must lie gasping in what shade it could find from midmorning until dusk. Blessed cool by night, and God be thanked for it, but men were not the only creatures who came out to bask in the darkness.

People called them serpents for their poisonous sting, but Sioned had seen them crawl out of holes in the sand: huge spiders, bristling with hair. There were armies, legions of them. They crept into cracks in armor and slid beneath shirts and leggings; their bite was fierce, if not usually deadly. As soon as the sun had set and the dusk fallen, they went hunting, and too many of them tried to dine on manflesh.

There was little the doctors could do for the great swollen bites; ointments and poultices did nothing for the itching, and bandages only made it easier to claw the swellings bloody. Some enterprising soul, driven half mad by the infestation, found a
cure: an ungodly clamor of noise that drove the spiders—and everything else within earshot—into retreat.

Master Judah was in as much comfort as anyone could be: his tent was thickly floored with carpets, and he had blocked his ears with balls of cotton so that he could rest for an hour or two between onslaughts of stung and bitten soldiers. Sioned, whose tiny tent adjoined his, had gone there near midnight of the second night to fetch a bag of herbs; it was all she could do not to crawl into her blankets, stuff the ends of them into her ears, and give herself a few moments of blessed quiet. The clangor of cookpots and steel blades, hammers and anvils, spears and shields, rolled in waves up and down the army, interspersed with cries and curses.

As she came out of the tent with the bag in her hand, she collided with an all too familiar figure. Richard had put aside his gold-washed mail for a yeoman’s leather coat, and covered his head with a cap. He grunted as they crashed together, caught her with effortless strength and set her firmly aside, but then paused. He could hardly have recognized her in the dark; he had no such senses as his mother had. He stooped, peering close, and said, “I’m looking for Master Judah.”

“He’s asleep,” Sioned said. She gave him no title, since he did not seem to be claiming one. “Is there something you need? Have you been bitten? I can—”

He shrugged her off. “I’ll live. Go, wake him for me.”

“No,” she said. “He’s been awake since the army left Acre, stitching wounds and salving bites. He needs his sleep. What can he do that no other physician can?”

Richard hissed. His anger was up, a swift flare, but he neither knocked her flat nor stamped off in a temper. “I need something other than useless potions or this God-awful racket,” he said—from the sound of it, through clenched teeth. “I need the arts he has. For the last time, will you wake him or will I have to pull his tent down?”

“I will not wake him,” she said. “I can tell you what he’ll say if you try. There isn’t an herb or a potion that will protect a whole army from the children of earth.”

“Can’t you just ask the bloody things to leave?” Richard demanded.

“We have asked,” she said. “So have the men—loud, long, and to no lasting effect. They’ve declined to oblige.”

“They’re as bad as Saracens,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose you can exorcise them, either.”

“They’re not devils,” she said. “They’re creatures of this land. They’re no more evil than the heat or the stones.”

“Those are evil enough.”

“You can pray,” she said. “Isn’t a king’s prayer stronger than any common man’s?”

“So they said,” he said without conviction. “Is that all you have to offer? What use are you, then?”

That stung her. She lashed him with the magic that was in her, little as he would ever notice or understand it, and said with a distinct edge, “You could at least try.”

He shuddered all over, a deep quiver in the skin, and growled in his throat. Her heart clenched, but he did not denounce her for poisoning him with sorcery. He turned, almost stumbling, and went away, back toward the camp’s center.

He would use the gift she had given him, of comfort and of healing. She had given it in full knowledge and acceptance of what he was; she had set strict limits on it. It would not serve his baser self or work to his royal advantage, except insofar as it made his men more fit to wage his war. But it had a life of its own, and a will that she had laid on it. Richard would do his kingly duty in spite of himself.

Sioned’s knees gave way. She sprawled for a while in front of her tent, conscious and aware, but altogether incapable of moving. She was only glad that no children of earth came to sting her; the sand was cool, empty of inhabitants, and she was not at all uncomfortable. She had given Richard most of what she had in her after two nights and a day of labor among the physicians. It would come back; the earth was feeding it already, a trickle of strength to fill her emptiness.

With a grunt of effort, she thrust herself up. There were men to tend, not only those bitten and stung but those struck down
by the heat of the sun. Even without her gift of magic, she had skill enough to smooth on ointments, lance boils, bathe bodies burning with fever. She found her packet of herbs where she had dropped it, and turned toward the physicians’ tent.

In four days of brutal marching, the army traversed little more than three leagues. The dead were already reckoned in dozens; heat killed them far more often than infidel arrows. Richard buried them where they fell, and sent the most severely prostrated of the survivors to the ships, so that the enemy would not guess how badly this climate had weakened them.

After the fourth day they rested for two days, and Richard acted on the lesson he had learned from this bitter country. His men could not both march and play at being pack mules. He ordered them to abandon anything that could be abandoned; to travel as light as they could. The road in their wake was like the aftermath of a tempest, treasures both greater and lesser dropped wherever they happened to fall.

They traveled a little easier after that, but still with crawling slowness, and still beset by mobs of shrieking Turks. Richard rode up and down tirelessly, exhorting them, bullying them, putting heart into them. “Don’t break ranks. Don’t break discipline. That’s what he wants, the infidel sultan. If he can divide us, he’ll conquer. We’ll never see Jerusalem.”

They had a litany as they marched.
Caesarea—Jaffa—Jerusalem.
Every night the priest with the loudest and clearest voice chanted a single prayer: “Holy Sepulcher, defend us!”

By God’s grace, as the priests declared, they came safe enough to Caesarea, the old Roman city on the edge of the sea. The Saracens had been no more trouble to them, if no less, than the spiders in the sand.

But beyond Caesarea the road went from bad to worse. The infantry had been taxed enough before, but on this steep, rock-studded, thorny track, the cavalry found themselves forced afoot more often than not. Through thickets of clawing brambles, slipping and sliding, slowed and too often
halted by lamed and staggering horses, they fought their grim way onward.

The Saracens took to target practice here, picking off horses with abominable ease. A knight unhorsed was a fair-to-middling useless thing, and the great warhorses that were such a terror in open battle were clumsy and near helpless in this forest of thorns. Nor, unlike the enemy’s own little quick horses, could they be easily replaced if they were lost. This country did not grow such beasts. Each of them was worth a barony, even before it was brought at great cost from England or Germany or France.

“Dinner,” said a soldier just ahead of Mustafa on the track, as a scream and a crash farther up marked another destrier down.

The young knight behind him looked ready to burst into tears. He had lost his horse a day or two ago and was struggling gamely onward in his armor, dragging his lance, with a flinching gait that told Mustafa his feet were a mass of blisters. Mustafa was not the happiest of foot soldiers, either, but he had given his horse to a man with an arrow in the foot. It was an act of charity that Allah would no doubt reward.

Meanwhile, he walked. After a while, an hour perhaps, the thickets of brambles opened up; he could see through the trees how the land sloped downward to a river of reeds and sand and sudden sharp patches of stone, that smelled less of sweet water than of the sea. The king’s banner rose on its bank, and a camp was taking shape around it.

With respite at hand, the pace of the march quickened. Rumor traveled back through the lines. The king had reason to suspect that the sultan wanted to sue for peace. “He’s been chasing and chasing us,” the story went, “and we just won’t break. His troops are getting restless. They want to go home.”

“And so do we!” someone roared back.

That won a gust of laughter, even as the rest of the word came back from the camp: “The king’s sent Lord Humphrey to ask for a parley. He’s to bring the sultan’s envoy back, and they’ll talk. Who knows? That could be the end of the war.”

The greater idiots whooped and cheered. Mustafa was a
more jaded spirit. No war ever ended that easily. More likely the sultan had a plan, and that plan included a delay while he drew up his troops in the forest that lay beyond the river.

By the time Mustafa reached the now much enlarged camp, the young lord Humphrey had come back with his guard of Templars, escorting another, equal guard of turbaned infidels. The man who rode in the midst of them was a deceptively simple personage, a slender man in good but unostentatious scale armor, mounted on a mare whose plainness of face was no doubt more than matched by the quality of her spirit.

Mustafa did not need to see the banner to recognize one of the sultan’s brothers, the lord al-Adil, whom the Franks called Saphadin. He had shown himself often enough in the army of Islam, commanding strong forces in the sultan’s name. But Saladin had numerous kinsmen and a good number of generals. What he had much fewer of were men of magic—and this brother of his was a rioting fire of it. If he was here, then Saladin had something momentous in mind. Mustafa still did not think that it was a treaty of peace.

The lord Saphadin paused on the edge of the camp. Either Richard had been waiting, or some signal passed that Mustafa was not aware of: he came out with a few of his lords and squires, and welcomed the sultan’s brother with open arms. Saphadin’s smile was wide and apparently sincere; he closed the embrace with no sign of reluctance.

As Mustafa moved in closer, he caught another doing much the same. What the Lady Sioned was doing so far from the physicians’ tents, he did not know, but she was there in the crush of men, in her veil and surcoat. She was indistinguishable from any number of young
pullani
, the half-blood whelps of the nobles of Outremer, but Mustafa would always know her by the magic that was in her.

Maybe that had called her out. Magic called to magic, and she seemed transfixed by the sight of the sultan’s brother. As his escort pitched a small camp of his own outside the Frankish camp, with a pavilion of saffron silk in the midst of it, Sioned edged closer and ever closer. The color of her magic was
changing, brightening; Mustafa almost could not keep his eyes on her.

The council of king and prince was mortal enough on the face of it. Neither called out sorcerers, or even a priest or an imam to invoke the powers of heaven. Lord Humphrey served as interpreter—ably, Mustafa conceded; his Arabic was fluent and nearly without accent. With his fine dark features and his wide-set dark eyes, he could have been a man of Islam himself.

He was quite beautiful, for a shaven Frank, but Sioned had no eyes for him at all. Mustafa doubted that she saw anyone in that place but the man who sat opposite Richard, drinking sherbet made with peaches and mountain snow, and making it clear soon and unambiguously that he had not come to sue for peace. “If you turn back toward Acre,” he said, “we will offer no resistance; we will even provide such aid as you need, to return to your ships and sail back to your own country.”

Richard burst out laughing. Saphadin was neither startled nor visibly offended, which was well, for the king seemed unable to stop once he had begun. At length, wiping tears from his cheeks, he said, “My lord, you have a wicked sense of humor. What in God’s name makes you think we’re likely to turn back?”