Alamut (46 page)

She was always aware of him, as he was of her. Often she followed him. She never tried to catch him. He was being hunted, but the hunter was patient. She seemed content simply to watch him; to know that she had him in her power.

Her mind was open to him. It was trust, implicit and complete. It drove him wild. But not mad, not that. That refuge was lost to him. He had to know how she loved him and wanted him; how deep the wound was, that he would not return the love and the wanting.

Could not.

Would not
. She was certain. Damn that certainty. Damn her years and her strength and her obstinacy.

Stubborn
, she said to him.
Fool.

Murderer
, he thought at her.

She showed him the first man he had ever killed, when he was twelve years old. She showed him the second, the third, the fourth. She showed him years of errantry, battles fought, cities sacked, foemen cut down without mercy in the blood-red exultation of war. The city — the name he had forgotten, had willed to forget — the city hammered down in siege, the gaunt starved women with weapons cobbled out of anything that would strike and kill, the one who charged shrieking upon him, he in his armor, she in filthy rags, and the baby on her back, but he never saw it until he had cloven her, and it, in two. And for a moment he was appalled, but then he shrugged and wiped his blade and went back to what was, after all, war.

She showed him himself crouched over the gazelle which he had hunted and killed as the cheetah does, by running it down, breaking its neck. Great graceful beast of prey with the taste of blood in his mouth, pale cat-eyes narrowed against the light.

“So has God made us,” she said, cross-legged on a jut of stone, gazing down at him. “You no less than I. If you will hate me, then you must hate yourself. We are of the same blood and kind.”

Bile burned his throat. “Would to God that you had never been born!”

“Why? Because I teach you to see the truth?”

“Clever lies. Twisting of what is so, to what you would wish to be so. I'm not your dog, Assassin. Let me go!”

Her head shook. “I am no Assassin now. I have forsaken it. I have no faith left to kill for.”

It sickened him, that one would kill at all, for such a cause.

Something fluttered out of the air. A bit of cloth with a cross sewn on it, scarlet on black.

The silence stretched. She seemed to have turned her mind from him to ponder the ground of his hunt: the city which Alexander had built to the memory of a hound. He left the cloth where the wind had dropped it, and though his gorge rose, set to gutting and cleaning his kill. He had a knife for it, a rough common blade with a middling fair edge. Her presence was a fire on his skin, her inattention a rankling in his middle.

She had an answer for everything. She would not, could not see the difference between cold murder and clean war.

Clean?

He saw Thibaut's body, serene as if in sleep; and the aftermath of bloody battle.

Not hers, that. His mind was locked shut. She had twisted him within as without.

“I make no apology for what I am,” she said. “I only ask that you see it clear, and not as your whim would have it.”

“I see clear enough. I see that it is your time for mating, and I am here, and male, and of the proper kind. There is no more to it than that.”

“In the beginning,” she said, “it was so.”

She was before him in cold and enveloping white, like the Angel of Death. No maiden saint could have been less alluring. There was no seduction in her. She had never known what it was.

She reached. He shied, caught himself. He saw the swift wince of pain, the swifter flicker of a smile. Her hand was warm on his cheek. For defiance, for bitter mockery, he matched the gesture. Smooth; wondrous soft. Flesh of his own kind, subtly yet deeply different from the human. With one breath-light finger he traced the shape of her face. Not cold, her beauty, behind the mask she wore. Oh, no. Not cold at all.

He recoiled. She betrayed no hint of triumph. She turned and went away. Walking, as any creature would. Any female creature. No male had that grace, that suggestion of a sway, even scrambling over stones.

His face burned where she had touched it. He bent back to his fresh-blooded kill, shouldered it. The best way back was the way she took. He was not, he told himself, taking it because she had.

oOo

For all her boldness and her wild ways, Morgiana shared Sayyida's prudery in the matter of sleeping places. The women spread mats in the kitchen; nor would they hear of an exchange. More often than not, Aidan had Hasan for a companion. Even so young, he seemed to recognize that they were males together; and he loved all the cushions and coverlets. “He's turning into a little prince,” his mother said.

“Then he is in proper company,” said Morgiana.

Aidan, picking without appetite at a bit of roast gazelle, looked up in time to catch Sayyida's look of comic dismay. “Ya Allah! I'd completely forgotten.”

His smile was wry. “Don't bow. You'll fall in the pot.”

“I had no intention of — I mean — I — ” Sayyida stopped in confusion.

“It's not as if I were real royalty,” he said. She opened her mouth, indignant. He laughed. “I know I'm not. I've been told it on excellent authority. How can I be insulted by the truth?”

“That's nonsense,” said Sayyida. “Royal is royal. And I never even thought. Ishak told me once — he was full of it. I didn't trouble to remember. What was a prince to me? I'd never come any closer to one than I already had.”

“Strange things, your Allah writes, when he has a mind.” Aidan gave up the meat and settled for cheese. Morgiana's glance was keen. He refused to see it.

He set down the half-nibbled cheese. “Go on, eat. I'm finished.”

They tried to argue with that, but he had no appetite, and they did. While they ate, he withdrew to the bath. It was a wonder to him, to have it there, always, for the taking. And wide enough to swim in.

He dropped his clothes, but he did not go into the pool. Where the stone poured down in a curtain like ice, blue and palest green, he settled on his stomach, chin on folded arms, watching the play of water in the light of the lamp. Idly he made a light that was his own, and shattered it into embers, setting them to dance atop the water.

He yawned, rubbed his cheek against his arm. He was forgetting how it felt to be clean-shaven. Maybe he would go back to it. It would shock the women; it would prove that he was a Frank and a barbarian. And, in body, monstrously young.

Time left no mark on him. Even scars faded and vanished. He had taken a blow to the mouth once, long after he was grown. The stumps of teeth had loosened and fallen; he learned to smile close-mouthed, and contemplated long ages of beauty marred. It was illuminating, and humbling, to know how much it mattered. But a day came when he ran his tongue along the broad ugly gap, and felt a strangeness. In a few months' time they had all grown back, all the shattered teeth, sharper and whiter than ever. Sometimes in his wilder moods he was tempted to sacrifice a finger, to see if it would grow again without a scar.

He would never do it. He was too tender of his vanity. He troubled little with mirrors, but he liked to know what he would see there. He liked the way people, meeting him, drew back a little and stared, and doubted their eyes. Even the way they judged him, mere empty beauty, with no need to be more. It was always amusing to prove them wrong.

He always knew, now, where Morgiana was, as he knew the whereabouts of his own hand. He said to the water, but in part to her, “I'm a very shallow creature, when it comes to the crux.”

She dropped something over him: a robe of heavy silk, glowingly scarlet. “But very good to look at,” she said, “and no more modest than an animal.”

“Why not? I've nothing to hide.”

“The Prophet, on his name be blessing and peace, was a modest man. We follow his example.”

Aidan sat up, wrapping the robe about him. It was lined with lighter silk, pale gold; it was embroidered with dragons. It was perfectly suited to his taste. “Was he ugly, then?”

“Oh, no!” She seemed shocked at the thought. “He was very handsome. He looked a little like you: being noble, and Arab, and slow to show his age.”

“You knew him.”

“I was never so blessed.” She was in green tonight. She looked much better in it than in white. Much warmer; much less inhuman.

She had not denied that she was old enough to have known Muhammad.

“I may be,” she said. “I don't remember. I was little more than a wind in the desert, until my master found me and made me his own. I remember nothing of being a child. Who knows? Maybe I never was one.”

“My mother was like that,” said Aidan. “A wild thing, nearly empty of self, until a mortal man gave her a reason to live in mortal time.”

“Did she die with him?”

“No. She... faded. She went back into the wood. Us — my brother and me — she left. We were half mortal, and raised mortal, though we knew early enough that we were not. As our sister is.”

“You have a sister?”

It twisted in him, with pain. “Gwenllian. Yes. Ten years younger than I, and growing old. You killed her son.”

“I was oathbound,” she said. “Surely you know what that is.”

He drew up his knees and laid his forehead on them. He was tired. Of fighting. Of hating. Of grieving for human dead.

“It is what humans are. They give us pain.”

“And joy,” he said. “That, too. Surely that is what it is to be alive?”

“I don't know. I don't think I've ever lived. Empty of self — yes, that is I. I was a dagger and a vow. Now I am less even than that.”

His head flew up. His anger flared, sudden and searing. “You are not!”

He had astonished her. It soured quickly; her mouth twisted. “No. I am something, still. A thing to hate.”

“I don't — ” He broke off. He could not say it. It would be a lie.

Except ...

He shook himself. “You
are
more than that! Look about you. Look at your friend; look at Hasan. Aren't they worth something?”

“One friend,” she said, “in a hundred years.”

“A hundred years of what? Being a dagger and a vow. Serving masters who never saw you as anything else. But you are more; your heart knows it. It found Sayyida, and she had the wits, and the quality, to know you for what you are.”

“A murderer of children.”

It hurt, to have those words cast back in his face. It was not supposed to hurt. It was supposed to be a triumph. “Yes, damn you. And more than that. None of us is simple, my lady.”

“You can say that?”

“You wanted me to see you clearly.”

She stood. She shook; it had the heat of rage. “I wanted you to love me.”

oOo

He cut his beard short, but he did not get rid of it. It was not worth a battle; and his vow was not kept. Not yet.

He decided that he rather liked it, once it was short enough to show the shape of his face. It added years and dignity, both of which he could well use. Besides, as the women said, he was a man, and a man's beauty could not be perfect without it.

Sometimes Muslim customs made surprising sense.

oOo

Morgiana left them on occasion, walking her paths that no one else could follow, to fetch food, and drink other than water of the spring, and the odd treasure. Once she brought back a jar of wine, and a lute.

Aidan regarded the lute when she laid it in his lap, and gently, most gently, caressed the inlay of its sounding board. “Where did you get this?” he asked her.

Steal
, he meant. She refused to be baited. “I went to a place where such things are known, and asked where I might find the best maker of lutes. I went where I was shown. I paid,” she said, “in gold. My own. Fairly and honestly gained.”

He looked down. He had the grace to be ashamed. Lightly, almost diffidently, he plucked a string. The lute was in tune.

“I can't accept this,” he said.

“Did I say it was a gift?”

He flushed.

“Play for me,” she commanded him.

He was angry enough to obey her, defiant enough to choose a tune from his own country. But she had traveled far; she had learned to find pleasure in modes which were alien to those of the east. This was properly harp-music, bard-music, but he fitted it well to the supple tones of the lute.

She watched him in silence. He was out of practice: he slipped more than once. But he played very well, with the concentration of the born musician, head bending further as the music possessed him, mouth setting in a line, fingers growing supple, remembering the way of it.

When he began to sing, she was almost startled. She did not know why she had expected a clear tenor: his voice in speech was low enough, with the merest suggestion of a purr. In song the roughness vanished, but that new clarity resounded in a timbre just short of the bass. A man's voice beyond doubt, dark and sweet.

It took all her strength to keep from touching him. He resisted her abominably easily; he had only to remember his Frankish woman, and what she carried. He was not like a human man, to be led about by his privates.

But he watched her. She knew that. He found her good to look at. He was beginning, not at all willingly, to forget how to hate her, if never to love her. And he wanted the power she had, to walk in an eyeblink from the wastes of Persia to the markets of Damascus.

She was pleased to teach him lesser arts, to hone the power he had never thought of as more than a child's toy, but that single great art, she would not give him. She knew what he would do with it.

Just this morning, he had tried to trick her out of it. Then when she vanished, she felt the dart of his will, seeking her secret. It was not as easy to elude him as it had been. He was a clever youngling, and he was growing strong.