Devil's Bargain (36 page)

Now that errand Blondel was by no means unwilling to run.
He nodded, bowed just a little too low, and ran once again to do his king’s bidding.

The Archbishop of Canterbury had called the council in the pavilion that they used for such things. It had housed a prince’s harem once; the scent of perfume clung to it, almost overwhelming the homely stink of men in a war camp.

They knew the cause of the council as soon as they saw Richard’s face. “So it’s true,” Henry said. “Saladin is dead.”

“Dead as Moses,” Richard said. Grins flashed around the circle; even the most self-consciously dignified could not suppress the surge of joy. He turned his eye on the Duke of Burgundy. “So, my lord: what will you do? If you turn your back on this and take your loot and march to the sea, I won’t stop you. As for me, I’m marching to Jerusalem.”

Duke Hugh loathed the ground Richard stood on, but two things could supersede that loathing: a sufficient quantity of gold, and his oath of Crusade. “I’m marching to Jerusalem,” he said. “I swore my life to defend the Holy Sepulcher. By God and Saint Denis, I’ll keep that vow.”

“Amen!” It was ragged, but it was a chorus. All the French were with him. The English and Normans and Angevins . . .

Richard willed them not to shame him. Hubert Walter, that good and loyal man, raked them with a glare more suited to a sergeant than an archbishop, and said firmly, “We’ll follow you, sire, to the gates of hell—and beyond, if that’s your command.”

Not all of them agreed, but it was more than any man’s pride was worth to say so. Richard took note of who frowned and who would not meet his eye, and considered which of them he could put in the front of the fight. They would earn their right to the cross of Crusade.

“Sire,” said, of all people, the Grand Master of the Temple. “Not to deter or dissuade you, but have you recollected that there’s no water between here and the city? The sultan broke all the cisterns and poisoned the wells. It’s the driest of dry land—
and my knights remember Hattin, where a king insisted on a march without water, and lost his kingdom for it.”

“Oh, indeed,” purred a baron whose fief had been great once, but who owned nothing now but his armor, his destrier, and an abiding thirst for revenge on the infidels who had robbed him of his domains. “And who incited the king to make that march instead of staying where there was water and a chance of fighting off the infidels? I seem to recall a circle of long wagging beards and blood-red crosses.”

The Grand Master’s cheeks were flushed above his uncut beard. He traced the sign of the cross over the red cross on his breast, and opened his mouth, no doubt to thunder denunciations.

“My lords,” Richard said, cutting him off. “Will you quarrel among yourselves when Jerusalem is ripe for the taking? We’ll move toward evening, my lords, and take with us as much water as our camels can carry. We’ll march by night—in the cool and the dark, we won’t need to drink as much. With luck and God’s goodwill, we’ll break down the gates of Jerusalem before dawn.”

“Jerusalem,” sighed Hubert Walter. “Is it true? Will we see it at last?”

“God willing, when next any of us sleeps in a bed, he’ll sleep in Jerusalem,” Richard said.

“It’s real,” Henry said in wonder. “It’s happening. After all, and after so long.”

Richard watched the wonder touch the rest of them, even the most jaded—even the Duke of Burgundy. Hugh might loathe Richard, but he had a certain liking for Henry. As he swayed, so did they all, even the most determined of the naysayers.

“Jerusalem,” the archbishop said again. “Holy, high Jerusalem.” He swept his glance across them all. “Well, my lords? Shall we capture ourselves a city?”

The roar of assent was not confined to the pavilion. The servants, the squires, the men hanging about and craning to hear, joined in it, a long rolling wave that swept through the camp
and rang to the sky. God help the infidels who heard it, for surely their blood ran cold.

Richard’s own blood was up. At last—the battle he had been waiting for since first he heard of this Crusade. At last, he would look on Jerusalem.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY

I
n the heat of the afternoon, when everything was ready but the mounting and riding, Richard retreated to his tent. He would not linger there for long; it was hot and close, and the air was slightly sweeter outside under his canopy. But if he would rest—and truly he should, for God and Saint Morpheus knew when he would sleep again—then he must do it out of sight of his army.

A page wielded a fan, which helped somewhat with the heat. Richard stripped and lay naked on his cot. The breeze from the fan cooled the sweat on his skin. A curtain of gauze kept out the myriad stinging flies and some of the dust. It was almost pleasant, and surprisingly restful.

As he lay there with his arm over his eyes, he heard a soft footstep and an even softer shuffle, then a swift scamper as the page took advantage of the reprieve. Richard lay motionless, barely breathing. He had recognized the step; now he caught a hint of musk, which Blondel the singer was girlishly fond of.

Blondel plied the fan for a little while, nearly long enough for
Richard to fall asleep. Then, softly, he began to stroke Richard’s hair.

Richard sighed and lowered his arm, turning to fix the singer with a hard stare. “Trying to worm your way back into favor, then?” he said.

Blondel flushed, then paled. “Will you ever forgive me?”

“If you ever honestly repent,” Richard said, “I might.”

“I do repent,” said Blondel. “Before God, sire, that is the truth.”

“Ah,” Richard said, “but what is it that you’re sorry for? You’d as soon cut my Saracen’s throat as look at him. Jealousy is flattering, boy, but a little of it goes a very long way.”

Blondel’s face was a tumult of emotions: anger, grief, guilt, fear. “I can’t help it, my lord,” he said. “I love you too much.”

“Yes,” said Richard. “You do.”

Blondel gasped. Richard felt no pity for him. It was only just. Jealousy had nearly cost him a loyal and useful servant. Blondel would not indulge in it again, if he hoped to remain in Richard’s favor.

Slowly Blondel drew back. Just as he would have moved out of reach, Richard caught his hand. He froze. Richard drew him in.

Then Richard also froze. Something had changed: a dimming of the sunlight that slanted through the open tent flap, a shift in the currents of the air. Blondel’s musk was strong in his nostrils, but another scent crept through it, a scent as familiar as his own skin. Attar of roses.

Wherever his mother went, that fragrance followed her. A priest had told him once when he was very young, that the odor of sanctity was the scent of roses. He had asked, not entirely innocently, “Does that mean my mother is a saint?” The priest had sputtered and gobbled most satisfactorily.

A shadow came in with the scent, drifting through the flap and the veil. It was a shape of darkness, barely substantial, perhaps not really there at all; but his mother’s presence imbued it with a certain shiver of terror.

The shadow halted just out of reach. It had no face, only darkness, but the tilt of its head was unmistakably Eleanor’s. So too the voice, although it seemed dim and faint, as if it came from very far away. “Tell your boy to leave,” it said. “This is between the two of us.”

Richard bent his head toward Blondel, who crouched staring like a rabbit in a noose. The singer needed no further encouragement. He dropped the fan and fled.

The queen’s shadow sat on the stool that he had vacated. It was eerie to watch it move as she moved: her gestures, her peculiarities of gait and posture. Richard kept it in the corner of his eye: it was less disconcerting. “I suppose you’re here to help me conquer Jerusalem,” he said.

“I have helped you,” his mother said. “The sultan is dead. Now I would thank you to give me the thing you wear about your neck.”

“No,” said Richard. “It was given to me on condition that I keep it and give it to no one.”

The shadow stiffened. “You have no faintest conception of what it is or how to wield it.”

That was true, but he was not about to admit it. “I know enough to understand that it should stay where it was given. The former owner might come calling for it.”

“Yes,” said his mother, “and he’ll blast you where you stand. I have the means to resist him.”

“Do you? You’re that strong, are you? Or have you had help? Have you made another of your bargains with the Devil, Mother?”

The shadow did not stir, not even a fraction, but Richard fought an almost uncontrollable impulse to dive for shelter. Much was bruited about of the black temper of Anjou, but the white-hot passion of Aquitaine was no less potent.

It could not sway him to her will—not now, not with the Seal of Solomon about his neck. Nor did her words, though they were cruel enough to cut. “You stubborn child! You’ll destroy us all with your foolishness.”

“I come by it honestly,” he said.

“Give me the Seal,” said Eleanor.

“No,” said Richard.

Her shadow contorted with frustration, twisting and deforming like a column of smoke in a sudden wind. Richard watched, fascinated. He knew little of magic and would have been glad to know less, but this much he knew: things of power came with strictures, rules that could not be violated except at great cost. If she had been able simply to take this thing, she would have.

It was an unusual sensation, to hold power over his mother. He found that he enjoyed it a great deal. “I’ll make you a promise,” he said. “When I’m done with this thing, when I’m free to give it as a gift, you’ll have it. It won’t be long now. We’re on our way to Jerusalem.”

“You’ll lose the Seal,” she said. “You’ll lose everything.”

“Maybe,” said Richard. “Maybe not. However that may be, I’m not giving the Seal to you until the war is over.” He rose. “Now if you don’t mind, I have a battle to fight.”

He discovered that he was holding his breath. It was never the wisest choice to defy his mother, and yet it griped his belly to think of giving the Seal to her. Maybe he could not use its power, but some deep part of him did not want his mother to wield it, either. Even to take Jerusalem. Even to destroy the Old Man of the Mountain.

In her own person she might have been able to overwhelm him. In that form, her only power over him was in his memory of old fear. He was a man now, a warrior and a king. He faced his fear; he fell upon it and conquered it.

She gave way. This was not the end of it, he knew very well. But if she let him be until he took Jerusalem, he would be reasonably content.

For a long while after her shadow faded into the hot and dusty air, he sat on his bed and tried not to shake. For all his bold pretenses, he was still to a degree the small and headstrong boy who had looked on his mother in absolute adoration. She
was all that was wonderful and powerful and terrible, and his place in the world was to bow at her feet.

He thrust himself up, banishing the memory with a hawk and a spit and, for good measure, a quick sign of the cross. Then he bellowed for his servants. “God’s arse! Have you all gone to sleep? We have a war to win!”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-ONE

S
ioned was not dead. She was not alive, either; she was rather well aware of that. Her body lay in the physicians’ tent. Sometimes she hovered above it, watching one of the assistants bathe it or feed it or dose it with potions. The fire of fever died slowly. The child within . . .

She was still alive. Sioned could see her enfolded in the womb, and something wrapped about her, something that shimmered with a subtle radiance. It was some little while before Sioned realized that it was her own magic. So strong was a mother’s instinct, and so staunch in defense of her child.

The body guarded its burden. The spirit wandered among the spirits of air, bound to its source by the thinnest of threads. It had a purpose, a reason for wandering, as the body had a reason for clinging to life. The spirit likewise guarded something—a secret, a deception, a sleight and an illusion. In a garden outside of the world, a serpent kept watch over a common stone. The one who claimed the stolen Seal, who had entrusted the great part of his power to it, did not yet know that the Seal was gone. Her spirit, airy thing that it was,
sustained the spell that clouded his mind and concealed the loss.

It could not hold forever. The edges of it frayed continually. The longer she was away from her body, the more difficult it was to knit them up again. If Richard did not take the Seal soon and wield it against the Assassin, both her protections and her deceptions would fail. Then Richard would have no defense against the Old Man’s wrath but his determinedly unmagical self.

Spirits did not count days. Suns rose and set; time blurred into a single shining present. But events recorded themselves in her awareness. She saw the war winding to its conclusion. She saw the sultan die.

The sultan was a great and shining creature in this world, a man of power, beloved of his God. The Assassins’ daggers set him gloriously, blindingly free. He never even looked back, but sped on bright wings toward the light of Paradise.

It was a powerful temptation to follow him, but another, greater power held her to earth. The sultan was glorious, but his brother was pure and gleaming beauty, an edifice of magic so wondrous and so complex that she could only hover above it, rapt.

He was not aware of her. All his mind and strength were focused on his grief, and on the struggle to make order of chaos. She drifted away, grieving because he grieved, into the wild rejoicing of the Frankish camp.

Time had folded upon itself. The sun had shifted; the light was different. She heard the king’s council, and saw where each man went thereafter, and what he said to those about him—both those he trusted and those he did not. She would remember each of those later, if she could.

The spell was fraying badly now, endangering the thread that bound her to her body. Sinan, having disposed of the sultan and so fulfilled his bargain with Eleanor, had begun to suspect that something was amiss. All too soon he would go seeking the source of the wrongness, and find it in the garden.

If only Richard could take Jerusalem, the city’s power would
guard him. Then she could let go. It was incumbent on her, then, to make sure that he did conquer the city—that the Seal was safe and the spell of protection and concealment intact, and the battle free to proceed without interference from Masyaf.

A small and slightly saner part of her observed that she had taken on far more than her strength could manage. She could not listen to it. She must hold on and be strong, and pray that it was over quickly.

She had, while she drifted in the aether, been frequently attended by tribes of the jinn. They did not address her or distract her, but their presence held other forces at bay. The great jinni she did not see. He had his own preoccupations, she supposed.

Sioned was there, riding a dust mote in the shaft of sun through the tent flap, when Richard banished his mother—a bit of boldness for which he would pay dearly later. Much later, she hoped, for his sake.

She lingered while he dressed and ate and prepared to march. As she hovered near him, one by one the jinn appeared, circling about her, flocking like birds. The great jinni himself came; he said nothing, but settled behind her as if he had been a guard.

She was not apprehensive. Not exactly. The force of Richard’s determination drew her in its wake, strengthened by the power of the Seal. He did not know how to wield it, no, but it was rousing; it sensed the power in him, the magic that slept deep. Too deep ever to wake, she would have said, but the Seal was no ordinary amulet.

Her body was not so far in earthly distance, but impossibly remote in the ways of magic. If she returned to it, she would be subject to its laws—and those, at the moment, were the laws of the deathly ill. Yet she had a sudden, powerful need for earthly substance: to walk in flesh, to ride with the king toward Jerusalem.

The great jinni stirred, reaching toward her.
Come
, he willed her.
See
.

She went where he led. At first she thought he was leading her to her own body, but he paused just short of it, in her little
tent. Mustafa was sitting there, a little wan but upright and conscious. He had just finished dressing himself in the gear of a Frankish sergeant, all but the helmet, which dangled by the strap from his hand. He was in pain, but not terribly so; his wounds of the body were healing.

Quite without thought, she poured herself into him like water into a cup. He was open and welcoming. Despair had left him; he was at peace with his choices, but in that peace was a singing emptiness. It begged her to fill it.

So, she thought: this was how demons entered into men.

It was one way, the jinni observed from his vantage above her. Mustafa had been protected. But she was a pure spirit; she was welcome in his heart.

He knew that she was there. He was not afraid, or even particularly surprised. If anything, he was glad to know that she lived, although he fretted a little for the safety of her body. She soothed him with the warmth of her surety. She would be well. Would he take her with him into Jerusalem?

It was strange to feel his nod; to be inside of him, looking out through his eyes, slowly growing aware of the body that he wore: the aches and small persistent pains, the slight gnawing of hunger, the itch between his shoulder blades. Her magic flowed through and over him. The itch, the pains faded. He stared at his arms, which were clean of bruises and burns, and flexed his fingers, even the several that had been broken.

It was all gone. She was a little dizzy, but his own strength had fed the working; he was tired, somewhat, but food and drink and the prospect of a battle would mend that. He turned in the small crowded space, stretching as high as the roof of the tent would allow, swooping, spinning, whipping out his dagger and plunging it into the heart of a lurking shadow.

The shadow gibbered and fled from the bite of cold steel. Mustafa retrieved his dignity with his helmet, and stepped out of the tent into the breathless heat of late afternoon.

The army was forming in ranks, moving slowly, taking its time. Men were filling waterskins from the wells and loading them on camels, burdening them until they groaned in protest.
The men and horses would carry a full day’s ration of food and fodder, but no more. Water was the most vital provision, and of that they had as much as their beasts could bear.

Richard was risking everything in this one stroke. He left the baggage in the camp under guard, and most of the food and supplies. “Jerusalem will provide,” he said as Mustafa rode up behind him on a commandeered horse. He was in his battle mood, brilliant and a little mad; it was a brave man who would cross him now.

Mustafa’s appearance in his sight might have roused his uncertain temper—since Mustafa was supposedly still prostrate from wounds and exhaustion—but aside from a single hard, measuring glance, Richard ignored him. There was still a great deal to do: orders to give, troops to muster, affairs to settle in the camp and with the court.

Sioned, enfolded in Mustafa’s mind, watched Richard narrowly. The Seal was hidden beneath his armor, its presence veiled by a sort of glamour. She could, if she tried, feel a distant shadow of its power, a subtle drawing of heart and mind toward the man who wore it. Even a powerful mage might think it no more than the magic of his kingship.

It was easy from so close to maintain the spells, but difficult, too: the Seal’s power tempted her, whispering at her, luring her toward it. Mustafa, bless the gods, was unmoved by it. His magic was different, a thing more of seeing than of doing. He knew that the Seal was there, he saw the shimmer of it on the king, but he was deaf to its blandishments.

The army began the march just before sundown. The air was still blazingly hot, but the edge was off it. By full dark it had cooled noticeably. The stars were clear overhead, barely blurred by the dust of the army’s passage.

Richard had disposed the army in much the same order as at Arsuf, with his English and Normans and Angevins in the center, the French in the van, and Henry with the warrior monks and the knights of Outremer in the rear. He rode up and down
the lines. Mustafa held a place close behind him, which none of his knights or squires saw fit to challenge.

Blondel might have ventured it, but he was still in fear of Richard’s wrath. Richard marked him among the men of Anjou, riding with a company of mounted archers. He would have been just another anonymous shape in the dark, but as Richard glanced in his direction, he took off his helmet for a moment and raked fingers through the pale glimmer of his hair in a gesture that was achingly familiar. Richard had to admire him for riding to the battle when he could have stayed safe and at ease in camp. The singer did not lack for courage, whatever his faults.

The hills around Jerusalem were deserted, empty of scouts and patrols. They met only one troop of defenders, a party of Turks who had been late in receiving word of the sultan’s death. They were riding headlong to the city, apparently unaware that the Franks were on the march across their track.

Richard loosed the Templars on them. The warrior monks cut them apart with holy glee.

The Turks died on the slopes of the hill called Montjoie, from which the first Crusaders had had their first sight of Jerusalem. Richard was with the rear guard then—as if to thrust himself to the van would turn all this to mist and dream: he would wake and find himself prostrate with another fever, and Saladin still alive, and no hope of winning the prize he had dreamed of for so long. But even as slowly as he rode, in the end he rode past the hacked and bloodied bodies of the Turks, up the stony ascent to the summit.

There he paused. The Holy City spread itself before him, sprawling over barren hills and valleys so holy that they could barely support the weight of living green. On this night full of stars, it was a darkness on darkness, shot with streaks of fire.

When he looked down, he found his army more by feel than sight. There was no moon; the stars were far and faint through a haze of dust. His skin was gritty with it under the weight of padding and mail.

The horse Fauvel snorted softly, pawing with impatience. His steel-shod hoof sent up a shower of sparks.

In almost the same moment, a comet of fire arched up over Jerusalem. Then at last Richard saw the outline of walls and towers and the golden flame of the Dome of the Rock. He also, with astonishment, saw David’s Gate open below the loom of its tower. There were no lights visible in the tower, no sign of guards on the wall or in the gate. Torchlight gleamed within, casting a golden glow across the meeting of roads that led up to the gate.

It could be a trap. Richard had meant his attack to focus on the gate, though the rams would not be needed after all. In their place he sent a company of crossbowmen. They took their positions out of ordinary bowshot, and sent a barrage of bolts into the open gate.

Nothing moved inside it. No hidden troops fell screaming from the towers. The gate was empty, open and inviting.

Richard turned on Mustafa. “Is this your doing?” he demanded.

The boy shook his head. “Not mine, sire,” he said. “There’s no ambush—I can feel it. It’s empty.”

“Someone is giving us the city on a salver,” Richard muttered. He rubbed the scar under his beard, frowning. Whoever had given him this gift must expect a payment—and the price would not be cheap.

His army was growing restless, waiting for him to make up his mind. The Templars, hotheads always, were all too eager to slip the leash.