Alamut (20 page)

oOo

“I think you could teach the Christians a thing or two,” Aidan said.

He was in the palace yet again, accompanying Mustafa on an errand to one of the ministers in the House of Justice: a matter of trade, in which he would admit no interest. As often happened, there was a company drilling in one of the courts, and a gathering of hangers-on to watch and lay wagers. Some of these had found a stranger more engrossing than exercises with spear and sword, and wandered over to make his acquaintance.

In his own country he was no more than respectably tall. Here he towered over all but the tallest. That and his Frankish cotte, and the cross on his breast, made him remarkable.

It was something, to be stared at as a Frank and not as a witch's get. There was no one here to spread rumors of his lineage. He settled in to be what they took him for, a young infidel knight with a taste for travel and a kin-tie with the House of Ibrahim.

They happened to be talking as young men will, not of hospitality but of war. Before he came to Outremer, Aidan had been proud of his handsome longsword; it was a good blade, as good as the west could offer, but here it was only middling.

“Your armor, now,” said one of his new acquaintances, “that's as good as any there is. Your horses are slow, but their weight overwhelms our slender-legged beauties. But when it comes to blades, you could, indeed, learn from us in Islam.”

The others nodded, agreeing. He was the youngest, a bright-eyed youngling just beginning his first beard, and he was somewhat given to the pomposity of youth; but the rest seemed to think he was entitled to it. He raised a finger like a master in a
madrasa,
and went on with his instruction. “The best blades come from India, or from Ch'in. They have arts there, secrets passed down through long ages from master to apprentice. Some say there's magic in it. Certainly there is a power in the forging of fine steel, that comes to reside in the steel itself, and gives the blade a life of its own.”

“Is there truly magic in the working?” Aidan asked.

The boy's mask of solemnity slipped; he grinned. “Didn't I say it was a secret?”

“I've heard tell,” said a slightly older man, “that part of the mystery is the quenching of the blade in blood. Fresh blood, for choice. So every blade, as its first act in the world, pierces the heart of a captive.”

“Maybe,” said the boy. “Maybe not. Maybe only for the very best of all.”

“Therefore,” said Aidan,” magic. A great blade is like a living creature. It has its pride and its temper; it becomes a part of the arm that wields it.”

The boy regarded him with dawning respect. “You know steel.”

“We have a nodding acquaintance. I've worked a blade or two myself: enough to know how exacting a mystery it is.”

The boy's respect deepened, but leavened with a healthy dose of skepticism. “I've never heard that a Frankish baron would set his hand to trade.”

“To an art,” said Aidan,”even a prince might condescend.”

“Did you make that?” the boy asked, indicating Aidan's sword.

Aidan laughed and shook his head. “You flatter me beyond my desserts. A sword is more than I shall ever aspire to; even a dagger taxes my poor skill.” He drew the one he carried and held it up. “You see,” he said.

The boy examined it with every evidence of an expert's eye, from fine-honed point to plain and rather worn silver hilt. “It's not bad. Well balanced; a decent edge. No nonsense about it.”

Aidan welcomed it back, sheathing it. It was not displeased to be judged as it was. “You know steel,” he said, returning the boy's own words.

The boy shrugged. “I know what I was taught.”

“Ishak,” someone explained, “was taught in the best school of all. He's a swordsmith's son.”

Ishak shrugged again. “That's nothing wonderful. I'll never make a smith myself. Allah's jest on our family. I've no gift at all for the making of steel, but I seem to have the glimmer of a talent for wielding it. I can judge it, a little, but as a swordsman does, not as a smith.”

His friends snorted. “Don't listen to him. He's the best swordsman in the company, and the best judge of a blade. His father is the best smith in Damascus.”

That last, at least, Ishak could agree to. “He has the art from his father and his father's father, back to the first of us, who came from India. His blades are as good as any in the world.”

Aidan tensed like a hound on a hot scent. He kept his voice cool, his expression mildly interested. “He must offer his wares only to kings.”

Elegant young lordling though he seemed to be, Ishak had an artisan's scorn for pretty fancies. “Where's the sense in that? Kings aren't thick on the ground here. He's not cheap, it's true, but if a man can pay, my father will give him what he's paid for.”

“Surely he's much in demand.”

“He has as much work as he wants to do.

Aidan nodded, smiling. “Someday I'd like to see a blade from his forge.”

“That's easy,” said Ishak. “Come and visit it.”

“Ah,” Aidan said. “Surely — his valuable time — his secrets — ”

“He's always glad to talk to a man who knows steel. Even — ” He caught himself.

Even a Frank.
Aidan's smile did not waver. “Maybe I will come,” he said,”one day. To talk about steel.”

Ishak was delighted. “Then let it be soon! Come — ” He paused, struck with a thought. “Come tomorrow. I've a day's leave then. I'm with the Emir Masud; everyone knows where his house is. Meet me there after the morning prayer.”

oOo

As easily as that. Aidan presented himself when and where he was bidden, and found that he was expected. He had chosen not to be a Frank today; Ishak grinned at the Arab nobleman who seemed to be calling on him, and embraced him as if they had been brothers. “Sir Frank! You make a fine soldier of the Faith.”

Ishak, it seemed, reserved his solemnity for strangers. He linked arms with Aidan and bore him out of the emir's house, calling farewells to his poor imprisoned comrades.

He was older than Thibaut had been, and there was not a grain of shyness in him. Yet, slight and dark and slender as he was, delighting in his possession of such a prize as Aidan, he was painfully like the boy who was gone. Even his standing in the world. He was like a squire, a youth in training for war under a knight, the Emir Masud who was the sultan's friend and champion. It had been a gift, he said, a favor to a kinsman; the emir did not seem to regretting the bargain. “My lord got a sword out of it, and my father got rid of an embarrassment. Nine generations of smiths like no others in the world, and I had to be worthless even for shoeing horses.”

“You're the only son?”

“As Allah willed,” said Ishak, not too mournfully. “By God's good fortune, blessed be He, my father found an apprentice with every bit of the talent I lack, and he was of an age and an inclination to marry my youngest sister and get her a son. The house and the art are safe, and I'm free to be what God ordained me to be. God,” he said as one who knew,”is very great.”

“Amen,” said Aidan, catching himself before he signed the cross.

Ishak skipped round a beggar, and flashed his teeth at a whore who was either excessively late to bed or unwontedly early to rise. “I'm not expected home till after the noonday sermon. There are places where a man can go, if a man be a Muslim...” His eyes danced sidelong. “Are you a hellion, sir Frank?”

Aidan laughed aloud. “From the cradle.”

Ishak clapped his hands. “Wonderful!” He tilted his head. “You need a name. In case, you know...I can't be calling you Sir Frank, or Aidan.” He said it as oddly as Morgiana had. “So, then. What shall we call you?”

“Khalid,” said Aidan promptly, barely checking even after he had said it.

“Khalid,” said Ishak, approving. “Friend Khalid, I do believe I like you.”

It was impossible to dislike this young imp with no talent for smithing. Aidan had come for the father's sake. He was amply pleased, now, for the son's. Even if he gained no blade from this, he had gained a friend.

oOo

It was Friday, the Muslim sabbath. Therefore every true believer was enjoined to purify himself in the bath, the
hammam
that was one of the wonders of the eastern world.

Under the name Morgiana had given him, Aidan was reminded of her as he stripped to bathe. Muslims were modest: they covered their bodies, always, from navel to knee. It served well for the concealment of an uncircumcised Frank.

They took Ishak away for the more arcane rites of the bath. Aidan lacked the courage for them. He lingered in the outer room, watching the men who came and went, listening to their talk. He attracted hardly a glance. They were plain folk here, no princes, no beggars; solid, respectable citizens, their sons, occasionally their servants. Here he heard pure the grace of speech that was Damascus — mincing, an Aleppan would say, with resort to the proverb:
Aleppans have the tongues of men; Damascenes, of women.
To which a Damascene would reply with reference to the boorishness of Aleppo.

There was a lute-player in a corner, and a player on a drum, and a blind singer with a voice of that mingling of strength and purity which only eunuchs can attain. There seemed to be no words to his song, only the stream of pure notes.

“You are civilized,” said Ishak, appearing beside Aidan, smooth as an egg but for his brows and his long lashes and the tentative foray of his beard. Aidan had to labor not to stare. He was not, mercifully, the only long-haired man in the
hammam.
Here and there was a Turk with his braids hanging down his back, or a curly-headed boy, or, once, an Arab with the look of the desert, tense as a wolf in a cage.

A tension which Aidan could well comprehend. He followed Ishak through the stages of the bath, strange as they were, but a wonder to his skin. He could learn very quickly to find this luxury a necessity.

“You have none at home?” Ishak was appalled. “What do you do?”

“Little enough,” Aidan admitted. “Rivers in summer, or the sea. Water in tubs in the winter, if we insist on it; though it's said to court one's death of cold. In my city there's still a Roman bath, but we've long since lost the full rite of it. We swim in the pools. Sometimes we fire the furnace and have a festival.”

Ishak shook his head, incredulous. “No
hammam.
I can't conceive of it.”

He was still shaking his head when they came out, purified to their fingers' ends. Aidan had decided what he would do when he came home again: revive the Roman rite, or as close to it as he could manage. The priests would howl. He could hardly wait to hear them.

oOo

They would howl louder yet if they could see him now. Full of Saracen meat and bread, beside a Saracen whelp, in a Saracen mosque. Not the Mosque of the Umayyads that was the greatest in the world, in which the sultan would pronounce the sermon; Ishak was a man of lesser pretensions. There were half a thousand smaller mosques in Damascus: many, like this one, the gift of a rich man's piety. A court, a fountain in which the faithful cleansed themselves for prayer, a minaret from which the muezzin called them to it, and within, the wide, empty, carpeted expanse with its many hanging lamps, its carven pulpit, and its
mirhab,
the niche of prayer facing south toward Mecca. No image, no icon, no shape of living thing in paint or glass or stone; not even an altar. An elder led the prayer, but he was no priest as a Christian would understand it; he merely guided where any could follow.

Aidan's back stiffened in revolt. What was he doing here? What madness was this, this dance of standing, kneeling, groveling before an alien god?

And he had been shocked that the Knights Hospitaller could enter a pact with the Saracen sultan. They at least kept their faith unsullied. They did not bow before Allah, even in show.

“All one has to do,” Ishak had told him, “to profess Islam is to utter with a pure heart the words of faith.”

There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.

No. Aidan did as Muslims did, here in their place of worship where no infidel should come, but the prayers he murmured were not the prayers of Islam. His Church had no love for such a creature as he was, but it was his Church. He would not forsake it for the preachings of a madman out of Arabia.

To be sure, it was a splendid game. Ishak's youth was infectious. He was, Aidan realized, a season or two older than Joanna; yet, for all of that, years younger. He was a child still, with a child's lively sense of mischief.

And he did not know what Aidan was. A Frank was alien enough; he was amply content, and quite wickedly eager to present his father with it. His father, Aidan could hope, would survive the shock.

14.

“Are you ripe for mischief?”

Sayyida almost dropped the jar of oil which she was fetching from the storeroom. Hasan, who had followed her ably on all fours, rolled to his fat rump and crowed. Morgiana swept him up, to his high delight, but her eyes were on Sayyida. “Well?”

That was utterly like her. Gone without a word for however long she pleased, then back without a word of greeting, proposing some new deviltry. Sayyida, for whom the month between had not been of the best, was sorely tempted. But...

“I can't,” she said. “What will I do with Hasan?”

“Bring him with us.”

“Where?”

It had slipped out, past a stronger refusal. Morgiana's eyes sparkled. “Out. To the bazaar. To the mosque. When did you last hear a Friday sermon?”

“I can't,” said Sayyida, taking a firmer grip on the jar and setting off for the kitchen.

Morgiana let her deliver the oil to Fahimah and discover that she would not be needed again for yet a while. “Go,” said her father's wife, who always spoiled Sayyida when Mother and Laila were not there to restrain her. “Take the baby and have a little rest in the garden.”