Alamut (25 page)

The air would weep when he wielded that blade. A man might ride against him, be cloven, and never know it until his head slipped free of his body.

Aidan sheathed it reluctantly.
Later,
he said to it.
Wait for me.

The others watched it all in the silence of perfect understanding. Aidan bowed low to the smith. “You have outdone yourself,” he said.

Farouk nodded to plain truth. “I've never wrought a better blade. I may never do as well again. God was with me; He guided my hand.”

“And...your choice of verses for the blade?”

“The steel chose,” said Farouk. “That is its soul.”

He spoke the truth as he saw it. Aidan was mute. This was power, a magic deeper and stronger than his own. The forging of steel; the waking of its soul; the binding of them both, each to each. Earth and fire. Mortal and immortal. As the bearer, so the blade.

Aidan bowed over it, lower even than before. “Master,” he said.

oOo

With the sword in its proper place at his side and both gold and tribute well paid to its maker, Aidan eased in body and mind. The city through which he passed seemed all made new. He rode it like a river in flood; he could blunt his senses to it, but not quell them wholly, so that he was not left blind and deaf. So balanced, so poised, he found strength not only to endure the press of humanity but to move as part of it.

It was a kind of freedom. Not as simple nor as sweet as the silence of the greenwood, but keen-edged like the hunt's end, when the boar waits, and the hounds have drawn back, and the hunter knows that now he will be master, or he will fall.

He found that he was striding lightly, hardly hindered by the narrowness of the streets or the jostle of people. Now and again he touched the cool smoothness of the swordhilt, for the simple joy of its presence.

He paused once for a napkinful of something deliriously sweet, and once again for a dipper of cool water of Barada. He heard a street singer with a voice like a mating cat; he nearly fell into a brawl of uncertain beginnings and impressive extent, the center of which appeared to be a Turk and a Kurd.

He was mildly startled to come out of the clamoring dimness of the bazaar and find the sun still high in the sky. He had come out face to face with the eastern gate of the Great Mosque, just as the brazen falcon bent down under its twelve narrow arches to drop the ball of the hour into its basin, and the arch of the second hour past noon vanished behind its shutter. Aidan stood staring at it, though he was cursed for barring the way, and although he had seen it before. Even at night it was a marvel: the falcons continued their sleepless round, and lanterns marked the passing of each hour through a circle of blood-red glass. It made time seem real, a graspable thing, a matter for man's mastery. But he could only measure it; he could not stop it, nor make it run backward.

“Your stars, my lord — shall I read your stars for you?”

Aidan glanced down. A man peered up, crouching on the step, clutching charts and pens and abacus: the tools of the astrologer's trade. He was marginally preferable, Aidan supposed, to the sellers of relics who infested Christian churches. Though there would be a few of those within, keeping their heads low for fear of Sunni wrath, but offering the odd, bold Shi'a pilgrim a glimpse of the casket in which reposed a strand of the Prophet's hair, and beside it one which held the head of the great Shiite martyr Husain. The Sunni did not bow to relics, which they reckoned — like nearly everything else — a kind of idolatry.

They were not fond of astrologers, either; which did not keep the creatures from flocking to the steps of the Gate of the Clock.

This one sighed in Aidan's silence. “Business,” he said, “is bad, though I ask barely enough recompense to keep flesh on these worthless bones. Would not my lord be pleased to know what days are propitious for his undertakings?”

“Is that all you can tell me?” Aidan asked him.

“I hardly pretend to foretell the future,” the astrologer said. “Simply to surmise by my science what it is likeliest to hold.”

Aidan dropped to the step beside him, caught in spite of himself. “An honest soothsayer! No wonder your business is bad. You should be promising miracles of prophecy.”

The man drew his skinny body erect, all offended dignity. “I am not, great lord, a charlatan. I am a student of the stars.”

And young under the straggling beard, and painfully earnest. He clutched his charts to his chest and glared at Aidan's smile. “You may mock me, O sultan, but my science is my science.”

“Certainly,” said Aidan. “I was merely surprised. What is a true philosopher doing, selling horoscopes on the steps of the Great Mosque?”

“Allah's will,” the astrologer replied with humility as striking as all the rest of him, “and necessity. My family is impoverished; my father is newly dead, God grant him peace; there is no money to spare for the completion of my studies. Therefore I make what use of them I can, for what little it will bring. Very little,” he said, “but anything is better than nothing. And I will not — I will not — beg.”

“A man has his pride,” Aidan agreed. He paused. “I don't know when I was born according to your calendar.”

“Ah,” said the astrologer, coming to attention, like a hound on a scent. He peered. “Greek?”

“Frank,” Aidan said.

“Ah,” the astrologer said again, not a whit dismayed. He riffled through his charts. “I think...yes...close enough, if I add here, and subtract...” He trailed off. “The day?”

“May Eve,” Aidan said, “nigh midnight.”

It meant nothing to a Muslim, except as a number on a chart, that Aidan's first sight had been the Beltane fires. “The year?”

Aidan told him.

He scribbled. Stopped. Looked up. “My lord will pardon me, but I think my lord has erred by a decade or four.”

“I think not,” Aidan said, smiling.

The astrologer blinked. “My lord, you cannot be — ”

“I can.”

He shivered. He considered, visibly, a number of responses.

With feline delicacy, Adian set a coin on the step between the astrologer's feet. It glittered gold.

“Numbers,” the astrologer said in a dying fall, “are numbers. Even... for a...”

Another bright bezant appeared beside the first. Aidan had not moved, in body, to put it there.

The astrologer stared at it. He was remarkably calm. An error in mathematics was a shudder in the heart of him. Magic... that was different. “My lord,” he said. He bent again and peacefully to his calculations.

Aidan waited in rather more patience than some would have believed him capable of. People came and went. The other astrologers were well occupied; their colleagues in the gate, the notaries, plied a lively trade. Some went from one to the other. First the stars, then the contracts; and if the stars were bad, they passed the notaries by and went within, probably to pray for a more auspicious day.

The second falcon dropped its ball with a clinking of metal on metal, like the ringing of a bell. The astrologer muttered over his charts, and gnawed at his beard, and scored through a whole line of calculations. He looked up, rumpled and almost fierce. “I have never,” he said by way of explanation, “cast a horoscope for a prince of the jinn. You are a prince. I read that properly. No?”

“Yes,” Aidan said.

The astrologer was too preoccupied to bow. “It's all most interesting. Incredible, I would say, but you are what you are. Between Venus and Mars; but Mercury has power in your house. You are as much loved as hated; one who would possess you, would possess you utterly. Death rides close to you, but has no dominion over you.” His finger, ink-stained, traced the line of the chart. “See, there is danger, and there. And great joy, but a great loss. A journey — journeys. Look to your wives. One is jealous, and will harm the other, unless you take care.”

“But I don't have — ” Aidan began.

The astrologer did not hear him. “You were born under a singularly brilliant star. You fly with kings; kings look to you — not for guidance. For strength, yes. And the fire of your presence. Where you are, stability seldom is. You move in power, you are power, but you rein it in; you clip its wings. That's not wise, in what you have to face. Learn to wield what you bear, prince, or you will fall. How low, my science is insufficient to foretell. Whether you will rise again...” He underscored a figure, glared at it. “Venus in the Virgin. Fire in a cold heart. Death. Even a jinni may die, prince. Remember that.”

“I never forget,” Aidan said.

The astrologer fretted with his beard. “It's bad. I don't pretend to deny it. But there's hope. There's always hope. What can kill you, can save you. It's a matter of proportion.”

“It's all dark before me, then?”

“I didn't say that.” The astrologer held to his patience with difficulty. “You've been blessed with a royal share of good fortune. Now you're asked to pay for it. If you are wise, and move carefully, and forbear to tempt heaven, you will end more blessed than before. Look, here, you can see it. All the paths come together; they seem dark, because of their density. Either they end here, in an inextricable knot, or they unravel again under fortunate stars. The choice is yours to make, in the sum of your choices.”

“Thereby,” said Aidan, “encompassing both destiny and free will.”

“Exactly,” the astrologer said, oblivious to irony. He looked like a very young bird, hunched bright-eyed in his nest of charts. “I've never done a more interesting horoscope. So many choices — take mortality out of it, and you touch infinity. It's a fascinating way to go mad.”

“God be thanked, then, that you did not.”

The astrologer flushed slightly. “I confess, I kept myself within very limited bounds. I used the quickest calculations wherever I could. It's not a wonderful horoscope, my lord. It's barely even adequate. There are a few paths...if I'd followed them, instead of...”

“Enough!” cried Aidan, “or you really will go mad, and it will all be on my head.”

“You should have thought of that,” the astrologer said severely, “before you let me cast the horoscope.”

His illogic was sublime; it touched the edges of perfect logic. Dark as his foreseeings had been, Aidan could not, for the moment, be cast down. He had a lover and not the warring wives of his stars, and in a little while he would see her; and in a day or two they would leave the city. He had grief enough, as the astrologer had seen, but there was joy in it. He filled the man's hands with gold, all he had in his purse — all, maybe, that he had in the world, but he did not care. There was too much joy in it, in seeing the eyes go round in the thin face, and the narrow brilliant mind open wide in astonishment, protest, guilty delight. “But,” the astrologer said, “but this is an unlucky day for me.”

“Certainly it is,” Aidan said: “for your career as a street-corner astrologer. You, my fine philosopher, are going to go back to your schooling, and prosper at it, and end the master of your own school. Promise me you'll do that.”

“But,” the astrologer said. “But — ”

“Promise!”

“I promise. I — ” He swallowed audibly. “My lord, I foretold disaster!”

“You gave me fair warning. Which I shall remember.” Aidan rose, smiling. “May God prosper you.”

oOo

As Aidan turned away, the astrologer still babbling but beginning, incredulously, to praise his God and his benefactor, he nearly collided with a figure in a scarlet coat. A youth, a Turk with his long braids and his necklaces and the heavy rings in his ears, wearing an expression half of triumph and half of patience taxed to its limit. When Aidan stopped, beginning an apology, the Turk's face smoothed itself flat, though his narrow black eyes were glittering still. “Sir Frank,” he said, “the sultan asks you to attend him.”

And the hunt, it was readily apparent, had taken most of the day. Aidan forbore to blush, but he moved quickly where the messenger led. There was a horse waiting, with a very small page holding her bridle, and a pony which, on sight of the Turk, lifted its blocky head and neighed. The mare, tall for an Arab and most well aware of her beauty, regarded Aidan with wary respect. Beasts always knew him; beasts of mettle were sometimes slow to trust him, because they saw his power, and knew what it could do to them.

This one had courage. She barely flinched from his hand on her neck. Her great nostrils flared; her lean ears quivered. “By your leave,” he said to her, setting foot to stirrup. She jibbed, stilled. He stroked her sleek bay neck. It arched; she pawed the ground. The page clambered nimbly up behind, quick as a monkey and no more inclined to ask whether he was welcome. Once the child was settled, the sultan's messenger kicked his pony into a trot. The mare, insulted, sprang into a dancing canter.

oOo

Aidan was sorry to part with the mare whose gaits were fire and silk. But the sultan was waiting, and the messenger was not minded to linger. They left horses and page in the outer court of the citadel and passed within, going deeper than Aidan had ever gone before: past the public portions into regions less meticulously splendid. Opulent still, certainly, but time had been allowed to tread here. Paint and gilding grew worn and faded, tiles cracked, staircases hollowed with use. But the garden into which they emerged was most well tended, heavy like all of Damascus with the scent of roses, sweet with the sound of falling water.

Beyond the fountain was a pavilion nigh as large as a king's hall, its columns twined with roses, its doors all open to the garden, so that one could scarcely tell where inside began and outside ended. Cool airs played through it; a fingerling of Barada filled the pool in its center and bubbled away beneath the tiles of the floor.

By the pool a circle of attendants sat the sultan. He had been at work: a pair of secretaries scribbled amid a tottering heap of charters and registers and dispatches. The man nearest him, young to bear as great a weight of dignity as he patently did, wore the robes of a
qadi,
a judge, and scribbled as assiduously as either of the secretaries. The emirs beyond him, by contrast, looked as fiercely out of place as falcons in a dovecote. Aidan knew Murhaf ibn Usamah, and Ishak's lord Masud; the third was a stranger, a haughty personage who, beneath robes of dazzling extravagance, bore a marked resemblance to the sultan. It was he who seemed most ill at ease in the scratching of pens and the riffling of pages; even the peace of the garden seemed to give him no pleasure. Left to himself, he would have disposed of the busy scribblers and called for dancing girls.