Alamut (38 page)

It was a gentle enough magic, subtle and marvelously skilled. It revealed him for what he was, a heedless child, wasteful of the power that was his; prodigal of it when he should be sparing, shutting it in walls when he should let it fly free.

He knew no better. His wars had always been human wars; power had been a game, a gift to use because he had it, never because he had deep need of it. He had never trained it as he would a horse or hound. He had let it train itself, as he needed it, or for his own pleasure.

It was very late to lament his folly. He was walled off from Masyaf; he had neither the strength nor the skill to break down the wall.

But he was oathsworn. He must go. He must break the wall.

Or skirt it.

Or burrow beneath it.

He blinked in surprise. He was lying on his side; he did not remember falling. The image was gone. But it was burned in his memory. He knew where they were, and where they could go. He tried to say it; he could not find the words in Arabic. All his senses were blunted as they had been when he poured his power into Joanna. He was empty, again. He should learn to be wiser.

Later.

Sleep, now. His mamluks wrapped him in blankets — their own,too; he could not speak to upbraid them for it. They heaped about him like puppies. Warmth spread through all of them, and sleep, and blissful certainty. He was their lord. Whatever he set out to do, he could not fail.

He could happily have throttled the lot of them.

25.

It was possible, Aidan discovered, to skirt the edges of the ban, pressing as close to it as its limits would allow. It was like a blankness on the right hand, an inborn incapacity to turn toward Masyaf. Sometimes he tried. He always found himself wandering far out of his way, waking slowly from the conviction that he was on the right road.

They rounded the Lake of Homs and forded the Orontes, and began to angle northward. Aidan's power was waxing, as if the long days of feeling out the borders of the ban had honed and tempered it; he could not turn fully toward Masyaf, but he could edge closer to it.

They were in Frankish lands now, in the County of Tripoli. To Aidan it mattered little. Half of him centered on the grief and wrath that drove him; half, on walking the narrow line between the Assassins' ban and the free earth. There was nothing left to care whether he ate or slept, rode or rested, trod land under Muslim sway or under the shield of Christendom. His mamluks were more in awe of him than ever; that, he could sense. They also thought him quite lost to reason.

As, truly, he was. Often his sight of the world faded, and he saw Joanna where the Assassin had cast her, and the land as his power had limned it, and the ban as a ring of fire. But he who himself was fire, had begun, by inches, to bend it.

On a day without number or name, under a sky as grey as his perception of all that was not the ring and the ban, he snapped erect in the saddle. His mount bucked to a halt. His escort tangled about him.

There was no living will behind the ban. It was wrought by living power, to be sure, but once wrought, it sustained itself: like the wards which he knew how to raise, but far greater. It was a pity, he could reflect, that such a master of power should be so vicious a beast.

But there was something he knew, which she well might not. Wards without constant living guard could be passed. Not easily, not simply, but it could be done. Once he had passed through, if he was skillful, and strong enough in power, the wall would rise again, but he would be within it.

He smiled slowly. He was terrifying his poor lads; but it was nothing that they would understand. He touched his nervous horse to a walk, soothing it with hand and voice.

They were going almost due north on a road that had been old when Rome was young; but Rome had leveled and paved it, and it had endured a thousand years. The ban wanted to nudge them westward; Aidan clenched his mind against it, turned his thoughts from the end of the hunt, focused them only on what was directly before him. The tautness eased. He eased with it, almost into a drowse.

Hoofs clattered on stone. Aidan tensed anew. Timur, who had ranged ahead, careened over the hill and skidded to a stop. He was all but dancing in the saddle. “Riders! A whole army of them. In armor. With lances.”

“Franks?” Aidan asked, although he knew.

“Franks,” said Timur.

The mamluks drew together. One or two drew swords. The Turks reached for their bows.

Aidan stopped them all. “No,” he said. “No fighting.”

It was slow, for some of them. They had forgotten what their master was.

He took the lead, with Arslan in the rear to ensure that swords stayed sheathed and bows unstrung. Not hastily, not slowly, they mounted the hill.

Riders, indeed. Riders in black, with white crosses on shields and shoulders. A pair of Knights Hospitaller with novice-squires and a company of men-at-arms. They had seen Timur: they were in marching order, the knights helmed for battle. At sight of Aidan, the knight who led raised a hand. The Franks halted, barring the road.

Aidan brought his own company to a halt, mildly startled and beginning, dangerously, to be amused. If his mamluks had forgotten that he was a Frank, so had he forgotten how he would seem to a knight of Outremer: a Saracen in a pack of Saracens, he in Bedu robes, they in their scarlet livery, as exotic as a flock of cock pheasants; and arrogant with it, to ride armed on the open road where the Frank was lord.

The Hospitaller called out in appalling Arabic, his voice booming in the still air. “Who are you? Why are you riding here?”

Aidan rode forward, waving his mamluks back. They obeyed, ready to leap at the slightest hint of threat. The Franks tensed. He kept his hands well away from his weapons, his face quiet, his laughter tight bound behind his eyes. He spoke in his most exquisite langue d'oc, as sweetly as ever he had wooed his lady in Carcassonne. “A good day to you, reverend brother, and to all your company.”

If the Hospitaller was shocked to find knightly courtesy in a wolf of the desert, he did not pause to indulge it. He shifted to his native tongue with evident relief. His accent was no purer than Aidan's own. “A day is only as good as the man who lives it. Who are you, and what business have you in our lands?”

“I am,” said Aidan, “a middling fair Christian and a knight of the west who hopes to become one of Jerusalem, and if I trespass, I pray you forgive me, I had thought this road open to any who has need of it.”

“That depends on the nature of the need.”

Aidan smiled. “Have no fear,reverend brother. It's nothing to do with you or yours.”

“You can hardly expect me to believe that.”

They were all, spokesman and silent company, glaring at Aidan's escort, which glared back with fine fierceness.

He smiled wider. “Ah,” he said. “I see. Your pardon, sir. These will do you no harm. They are mine; they'll do as I bid them.”

“Since when,” the Hospitaller asked acidly, “has a pack of Saracens done the bidding of a Christian knight?”

“Since the sultan in Damascus gave them to me,” Aidan answered.

A mutter ran through the ranks.

Aidan stiffened at the import of it. “Recreant, you think me? And have you yourselves never entered alliance with the House of Islam?”

You would,” said the Hospitaller, “do well to come with me, If you are indeed all that you say, then you may offer proof to those better fit to judge than I.”

And if not, it was clear, he would be dealt with as he deserved.

He glanced back. His mamluks watched, beast-taut, beast-wary. Only one or two of them could understand what had been said, but they all knew tones and faces, and they knew hostility when they felt it. The Hospitallers waited in patience that bade fair to break, and soon. Behind, where they would take him, was their castle.

It lay within the ban, near a road that ran nigh straight to Masyaf. Aidan considered the weight and number of human minds about him, and the power that was in them to veil his strangeness. It might, just possibly, be enough.

He sent a prayer of thanks to the good angel who had set the Hospitallers in his path, and said, “I would be pleased to accept your hospitality.”

They took it for irony. He lacked the will to enlighten them. He let them fall in about his smaller company, holding his hellions back from the edge of violence, ruling them with word and glance. Timur was bold enough to say what they all ought, fiercely, just above a whisper: “But we're
prisoners
!”

“Guests,” said Aidan, princely certain, “and allies.”

None of them believed it. But they held their peace. They had not been disarmed, which they should have noticed. They were simply prevented from going anywhere but where the Hospitallers led.

And that was full upon the ban, blind to it, unmoved by it. Aidan, trapped in their midst, could not escape it. He was a straw in a millrace; and no matter that he willed to pass the wall. All the force of his power was not enough, even quelled, even buried deep in human minds, even damped almost to oblivion. He was not strong enough. He was not skilled enough. He would break. He would bolt. He would —

Just precisely when he knew that he could not endure it, when it seemed that his brain would boil in his skull and his blood turn molten in his veins, the wall stretched and wavered and, for the flicker of a moment, broke.

He was past it. He swayed heavily against the pommel of his saddle, and clung there for a long moment, dizzy and sick.

His warriors were staring, beginning to be afraid. He drew himself up with an effort, composed his face. Behind them all, the ban had restored itself. Nothing came hunting; no sign in earth or sky betrayed that the wielder of the wards had marked their breaking.

He laughed as much for defiance as for joy, and touched his gelding to a canter.

oOo

He would happily have shed his escort and taken the straight road to Masyaf, but some last remnant of circumspection kept him where he was. Night was coming; his horse was tired. As, for a very surety, was he. What matter if he rested in camp or in a Hospitaller stronghold?

To Arslan and his companions it was Hisn al-Akrad, Castle of the Kurds; but to the Franks who surrounded him, Krak des Chevaliers, Krak of the Knights, that warded the marches of Tripoli. It loomed on its crag, wall and tower, rampart and keep, vast and impregnable. Nothing in the west could match it; in the east, none that Aidan knew.

It was beautiful against the pitiless sky, beautiful and terrible. But Aidan could have no fear of it. It was not Masyaf.

His mamluks tried to imitate his calm. Even through the vast echoing gate. Even in the courtyard which could have swallowed a whole castle in Francia, where they must leave their horses and, at last, surrender their weapons. Aidan let a grim-faced sergeant disarm him and search him, saying with hard-won lightness, “Mind where you put these. I'll be wanting them back.”

“That's for the castellan to say,” the sergeant said. He handed Aidan's daggers and his sword to a lay brother, and turned toward his commander. “He's clean, sir.”

The knight nodded. His helm was off, his coif on his shoulders, baring a weathered, ageless face, greying hair cropped short round the tonsure, beard grown long after the custom of the warrior monks. Here in his own place, among his own people, he could ease a little, allow himself to wonder if perhaps, after all, this oddity of the road spoke the truth. “You'll come with me,” he said, still giving no honor and no title, but offering no enmity, either.

Aidan did not move. “Alone?”

The knight frowned slightly. “One other, then.”

“And the rest?”

The frown deepened. “They'll be looked after.”

“As guests?”

Aidan walked a thin and dangerous line, and he knew it. But it seemed that the Hospitaller saw no profit in anger, “As guests,” he said. “Until you are proven otherwise.”

Aidan inclined his head to courtesy. In Arabic, to his mamluks, he said, “I'm going with this man. You are guests; conduct yourselves as such, or you'll answer to me. Raihan, you come.”

He was aware, as they were, that his words and their obedience were watched and weighed. For that, they bowed all together, with grace and pride and no little defiance, and went where Hospitaller servants led them. Raihan stayed, wanting to cry his unworthiness, but too proud to do it before so many Frankish faces. Aidan laid an arm about his shoulders and grinned at him. “Well, younger brother. Shall we show these people what we're made of?”

That stiffened his back for him. He would never forget that he had failed of his guard when he was most needed, but he was learning to forgive himself. Aidan smiled, satisfied. He let the boy fall back to the guardsman's place, a pace or two behind, and followed their guide into the inner places of the castle.

Eastern custom held even here, where God's knights stood guard against the Saracen. Although the austerity of bare stone and dim-lit passages was all of the monastery and the west, there were signs of a gentler world: a carpet, a hanging, a chapel with an altar cloth of Byzantine silk. Aidan was offered a bath, food and drink, fresh garments. That they were a test, he well knew. He greeted the wine with heartfelt joy, warned Raihan from the pork roasted in spices, left him to choose bread and mutton and clean water. But Raihan had let the servant dress him as a Frank, taking a wicked pleasure in it, which he shared with his master. Aidan had seen young lords in Jerusalem who wore cotte and hose less convincingly than this, and with less grace.

When they had eaten, they began to test the limits of their freedom. They were not, it would seem, either prisoners or guarded, unless the silent and ubiquitous servant counted as such. Raihan tried the door; the servant watched him carefully, but made no move. Boldly then he strode into the passage. His steps receded, light but firm, and no hesitation in them.

He came back with escort. A Hospitaller knight, again, but not the one who had brought them to Krak. At first Aidan did not know him. It was a long black while since a knight of the Hospital had come to see Gereint laid in his tomb.