Alamut (50 page)

oOo

Almost before it was begun, it ended. He gasped and nearly fell. Morgiana caught him, held him with effortless strength.

The Old Man of the Mountain sat in his barren garden, serene as if he had been waiting for them. His
fidais
stood guard about him: an arc of youths in white with eyes that saw only Paradise; and the gate to it was death.

She granted him no obeisance, no mark of honor or respect. He looked at her and, almost, smiled. “You did well,” he said, “to keep my captive for me.”

Aidan started forward, but her hand stopped him. He stood in clenched-fist stillness. “He was mine,” she said, “before he was yours.”

“What is the servant's, is the master's property.”

“I am not your servant.”

“My slave, then. As you have long seen fit to call yourself.”

“I abjure it. A Muslim may not enslave a Muslim.”

“As I remember,” he said, “you all but compelled me to accept you.”

“Such compulsion: I set all my power in your hands, and called you master, if you would wield me for the Mission as those in Alamut no longer knew how to do. They,” she said, harsh with scorn, “were much too deeply engrossed in hailing the advent of the Millennium. In wine and coupling and madness they did it, in mockery of all that our order should be.”

“And have I so mocked what we hold sacred?”

“No,” she said. “Not so openly. Not until you loosed me against the Frankish woman. That she had an ifrit of her own, you discovered soon enough; and he was so obliging as to come to you. I see your mind, Sinan ibn Salman. If I escape you, the other must remain, infidel to be sure, but male, and amenable to your persuasion.”

“He has kin,” said Sinan.

She clapped her hands. “Spoken like a true bandit! What will his ransom be?”

“His life in my service.”

“Of course.” She slanted a glance at Aidan. “You may not find him as useful a slave as I. His kind serve badly, if they will serve at all.”

“As to the matter of his will, that has been seen to.”

Aidan could keep silent no longer. “With words and iron? Old man, that was never more than mummery.”

Sinan did not believe him. The Seal of Solomon gleamed in his hand. Aidan laughed and woke the fire in it.

Sinan cursed shockingly and cast away the smoldering thing. It melted as it fell, spattering the earth with molten iron.

But he was never so easily defeated. “You have kin,” he said again, through teeth clenched with pain. “Will you consider them?”

Aidan went cold.

Morgiana spoke beside him. “Indeed, he has kin. What have you?”

“Your name in the Seal of power. This one is protected by his unfaith. You are not.”

A second Seal lay in Sinan's lap. Aidan's power, tensed to destroy it, froze. She was in it, entwined with it: her oath, her long years of slavery, the core of her belief. Morgiana had given it power. Now none but Morgiana could take it away. And if it burned, so too would she.

Her brow was damp. Her eyes were too wide, too pale. He willed her to see what he saw. That the bonds were none but her own. That she could break them; that she had the will, and the strength. If only she would see. If only she would believe.

But to believe that, she must deny all that she had done and sworn and held to. She must sunder herself from herself. She must be other than Morgiana.

No
, he thought at her.
Morgiana is always Morgiana. Is the serpent less the serpent, because he sheds his outworn skin?

She clenched against him; but she could not be free of him. Not any longer. He stood in the heart of her and showed her herself. Morgiana. Free and strong and glad. No slave to any mortal man, never again.

She wanted to see it. And yet she wanted to cling to what she knew, whatever its pain, whatever its cost to life and sanity.

Sinan spoke in their silence, softly, each word the link of a chain. “You are mine. Your will is my will, your life my life, unless I choose to let them go. Serve me, and I may set you free. Defy me, and I bind you for all eternity.”

“Are you Allah Himself,” she demanded of him, gasping it, struggling against bonds and oaths and geas, “that you should so compel me?”

“I am Allah's servant; I wield the power of Suleiman.”

Her body shook; her fists clenched convulsively. “I — do — defy you. I
can
.” She sucked in her breath, battling. “I can. I can!”

Freer, each word; stronger. He saw it. “Can you,” he asked her, “defend all that is dear to you, for every moment of every day, until you yield or they are all lost?”

She smiled. Not triumphant, not yet. But she had seen the chains about her, and they were chains of air, She was beginning to comprehend it; to believe it. “Can you,” she asked her master, “hope to rule a realm under such persecution as I will visit upon it, if you touch anything that is mine?”

“You are powerless. You can only threaten.”

She faltered. He was her master. His words tangled about her, dulled her wits, sapped her strength.

“No!” Aidan cried, not caring who heard. “It's he who is powerless; it's he who has nothing left but threats. Open your mind and your senses. Look at him!”

She looked. She saw power, terror.

Mortality.

Fear.

Fear?

“Fear!” Aidan said, loud in Sinan's silence. “He's afraid of you. He knows what you can do — what we can both do, if he presses us too far.”

She was whiter than he had ever seen her, white as death. She would die; she could die, if she willed it, if she clenched her power about her heart, like a fist, just so. Just —

Will and body convulsed together. A sound escaped her, raw animal noise; but strength in it, and will, and — at last — understanding. Her hand swept up, out.

Sinan sat uncomprehending; but slowly he saw what he must see. More slowly still, he began to understand it. His
fidais
were gone. All but one, who stood bewildered and alone. And Morgiana was smiling, a white wild smile, the joy of the falcon that flings itself free into the sky.

She turned that smile on the lone
fidai
; she beckoned. He came, eyes locked in hers. “Child,” she purred, “are you a faithful follower of our way?”

He nodded vigorously.

“Do you see that man?” Her finger stabbed at Sinan.

The boy nodded again.

“He has betrayed our Mission. He lusts after a woman of the infidels; he takes an infidel for his servant. Who is to say that he will not command us all to worship the three false gods of the Franks?”

The boy's lips drew back from his teeth.

“Just so,” she said, all but crooning it. “Take him now,
fidai
, warrior of the Faith. Hold him until I bid you slay him.”

Sinan struggled in a grip too strong to break. His captor wore an expression of perfect and implacable determination. It would not yield for any word of his, any threat or command or pleading.

“Now,” said Morgiana, and her voice was deadly gentle. “Are you prepared to hear us?”

Sinan would not bend; he did not seem inclined to break. He eased in the
fidai'
s hands. “I will hear you,” he said.

She nodded, eyes steady on him. She was half-drunk with freedom, with the first sweet taste of victory. That drunkenness could be deadly; could lose them all that they had gained.

But her voice was as steady as her eyes, no hint in it of weakness. “I recall that you have wrought well for the Mission. I expect that you will continue to do so. But that must be accomplished without the aid of either a Frankish baroness or an Aleppan merchant house. They gain nothing for the Mission; they only feed your avarice.”

“And my pride,” he said calmly. “Be so kind as to remember that. But even I am wise enough to know when I have failed.”

“Which wisdom did not wake in you until you saw a greater profit in yon captive Frank.”

“That is no less than you have done yourself.”

“I make no pretense of sanctity.”

The black eyes glanced from Morgiana to Aidan and back again. They understood much too much. “He is of your race,” said Sinan, as if he had only begun to perceive its meaning. “Yet for him you would turn against us? For an infidel you would betray the Mission?”

Morgiana's eyes began to glitter. “I turn you back to the way of Hasan-i-Sabbah, on his name be peace, and remove the temptation to stray. In earnest of it, I ask more than your bare word. The blood-price of a baron and an heir to a barony, and the price for the wounding of a baroness-”

Sinan went pale. Now at last she had struck him, and struck deep.

“You will pay,” said Morgiana, “as we decree.”

He could not speak: the dagger pricked too close. She summoned his servants. They came to her bidding. They heaped gold into the great chest which she bade them set at Aidan's feet; atop the gold they poured a glittering stream of jewels. It was pleasure, that warmth under his breastbone, under even the anger. It was honey-sweet to watch the Master of Masyaf bleed wealth that was more precious to him than blood, and to know that he knew all that he lost with it: his slave who was, his slave who might have been, his certainty that no man in the world was feared as greatly as he. He was master of Syria, more truly than the man who ruled in Damascus, but he could not master the Slave of Alamut. He sat in his own garden, with the dagger of his own
fidai
at his throat, and paid as he was bidden to pay.

She knew to the last dirham how much he could spare, and how much would cause him pain. He had to see Aidan claim it, and their bargain written and signed and sealed with immortal fire.

When it was done, the dagger lowered from his throat. “So, then, sir Frank,” he said. His voice was calm; his eyes were terrible. “Are you content?”

“No,” Aidan said.

Sinan smiled. That was the power of the man: even defeated, even humiliated, to lose none of his faith in himself. “Slay me, then,” he said. “Shed my blood as your heart longs to do. Rid the world of me.”

It was mockery, and it was not. Sinan had no fear of death. Life to him was sweet, with the savor of power in it, the web of spies and servants through whom he worked his will in the east. But he would die content, knowing that his death had made his people stronger.

“Therefore,” said Aidan, “I let you live.”

“Cruel,” said Sinan. “Just, in its fashion. You would have made a passable
fidai
.” He paused. “Would you, perhaps, consider... ?”

“No!” Too loud, too quick. Aidan struggled to recover himself. “I am no man's tame murderer.”

“A pity. You would be welcome here, your talents known and used to their fullest. Where you go, you may find that neither is so.”

“I have promises to keep.”

“Indeed? And what will you receive in return? I am told,” said Sinan, “that Jerusalem stops just short of denouncing you for the deaths of your kin; and that rumor credits you with worse.”

“Then the sooner I keep my promises, the sooner I clear my name.”

“Or burn for it.”

“I am a spirit of fire. What harm can I take in my element?”

“Even in the fires of hell?”

“If I can know them, then I have a soul and can hope also for Paradise. If I have no soul, then death for me is only oblivion; and mortal fire cannot touch me.”

“Ah,” said Sinan. “A theologian.”

“A madman,” said Morgiana. “He will not serve you, Sinan ibn Salman, nor can you lure him into your trap. Let him go; surrender him.”

“As I am to surrender you?”

“Even so,” she said.

He looked long at her. She stood still, enduring it. “What is there for you without us?” he asked her. “Will you turn infidel and run at this one's heel? Can you forsake all that you have been and done, and betray your faith and your given word, and turn against those whom you have served for so long? Will you not reconsider? Will you not come back to me? Free, now; freed from the order of the dagger, set above it as its commander, with no other above you, save only myself.”

They were not empty words. He meant them. He was subtler than any serpent. Even truth was his to wield, to twist to his own ends.

“I did ill to keep you so long enslaved,” he said. “Now I would amend it. Will you accept what I offer?”

She was silent. Her face was still. So quenched, it lost its vivid beauty; it was only alien.

When she spoke, she spoke slowly, as if to weigh each word before she let it go. “I who have been a slave in defiance of my will, do not trust easily any man's promises, still less those of the one who enslaved me. Yet that you are a man of honor, as you see it, I cannot deny. Is there a price on this freedom which you offer?”

“None but what you have already paid.”

She drew a careful breath. “And this that we have settled here — the blood-price, the freeing of the Frank — is it to hold firm?”

“Before Allah I swear it.”

“So,” She straightened, as if a great weight had fallen from her; the breath which she drew now was deep. Free. “No. No, I will not serve you. Even free; even in a place of power. I am done with servitude.”

Even yet Sinan would not concede defeat. “Are you therefore done with Islam? For what is that but perfect submission to God?”

“God,” she said very gently, “is not Sinan ibn Salman,” And as he stiffened, enraged: “There is no god but God. It is time I learned to serve Him alone, and not at the whim of a mortal man.” She bowed, low and low, as a slave might; but it was never submission. “May God keep you, O my master who was, and may He grant you wisdom.”

oOo

“I should have taken what he offered,” Morgiana said.

Aidan did not know where they were. The wealth of Masyaf was with them; the light was dim about them, wan and grey, The air smelled strange. He saw sand and stone, the bulk of a tree, a glint of water. For all he knew, they were in the land of the jinn.