Alamut (58 page)

Baldwin was a devout Christian, but he was also king, and he was young. How young, Aidan tended to forget. This that he must judge was nothing that he could know for himself, or with his sickness would ever know. It set him apart; it gave him distance, such as even a priest could not truly understand. A priest was a man beneath his tonsure, and bound by vows to one path and no other.

“Is it a sin,” Morgiana asked, “to embrace one's husband?”

Her blankness had not been shock. It was the pause before the kill.

Baldwin sat bolt upright. “He married you?”

“No!” cried Aidan.

“No,” Morgiana said. “Not strictly in law. But the deed is enough, if one can prove the intent.”

“I intended nothing but the execution of our bargain.”

“Exactly,” she said.

Baldwin propped his chin on his hand. “It would,” he mused, “be remarkably tidy.”

Aidan hardly heard him. “Is that what you want?” he demanded of Morgiana. “To marry me?”

She blushed not at all. She did not even lower her eyes. “Yes,” she said.

“That was what you bargained for?”

She nodded.

He laughed. It was half a howl. “You never told me.”

“You didn't listen.”

“Where are the go-betweens? Where is the dowry, the land, the promise of alliance? What can you offer me, my lady?”

“Myself.”

He had heard a song once; or maybe it was he who had made it. Her eyes were her dowry. Her eyes, and the witchery behind them.

She took his hands. Her fingers were thin and cold and inhumanly strong. “Is it knightly, my lord, to spurn a lady?”

And he had been thinking that she had no artifice. She was as devious as any woman born.

The king spoke in their silence. “Answer me this, my lord. Tell me truly. Would you find it unbearable, to take this lady as your wife?”

Aidan's mouth opened. No words came. He closed it. His hands were still in hers, the fingers woven almost beyond untangling. His mind beat against its walls, yearning for her. All that stood between was a small, cold core of resistance. Of fear. What humans called love was a feeble thing; a word, a gesture, could end it. This was stronger by far. And if he took it, he could never let it go.

“You don't take it,” Morgiana said, reading him as she always did, with perfect clarity. “It takes you. Look about you. Is that free air? Or don't you recognize the dragon's maw?”

“I don't,” he said, struggling. “I don't hate you. I don't — want — How can I marry you?”

“Easily,” she said. “You say the words. You mean them.”

“But which words?”

“Ours,” said the king. And as they spun to face him: “I am the Defender of the Holy Sepulcher. I have my own vows, and my own obligations. You ask me to judge you, lady. So I do. I grant the merit of your petition. I acknowledge that there is a debt, and that it has yet to be discharged. Are you willing to give up your faith for it?”

“No!” Aidan said it before she could move. “That's not part of any bargain, for her or for me. I am the stake in this game. I say that I will yield — if my lady will wed me by the Christian rite. “

His heart was hammering. The dragon's maw, was this? It was sheer, stark terror. And mad joy. And Morgiana, hand-locked with him, astonished that he should have defended her faith. As if he did not know what it was to her. As if he could not care if he destroyed her.

She searched his face and his mind, fiercely, not daring even yet to trust him. “You love me as much as that?”

“Yes,” he said.

Her joy was almost more than he could bear. “I will marry You,” she said. “I will say the Christian words.” They were only words. It was the spirit that mattered.

He heard the whole of it. His heart was singing; all its walls were fallen. She was in his mind, filling its empty places, healing its scars. Yet she was no sweet, placid presence. She would defy him more often than she yielded to him; she would match him temper for temper. And when the war came at last, when jihad met Crusade, and God chose between them —

“Then God will choose,” she said, “as He has written, and we will do as we must.”

“So says the infidel.”

“Only a Frank would make a mock of fate.”

They glared at one another. “I'll serve my king in spite of you,” he said.

“Why would I object? He's worthy of it.”

“Ah, but am I?”

“You,” she said with a lift of her chin, “are the best knight in the world.”

The best knight in the world looked at the fairest lady in the world, and considered the wisdom of a reply. The court waited breathlessly for him to choose. The lady dared him to contradict her, or to agree with her.

A knight knew when to speak. He also knew when to be silent. Aidan bowed low and offered her a smile.

She considered it with care. She weighed it, measured it, assayed it. She tilted a brow.

He broadened the smile by a little.

The other brow went up.

Merchants all, these easterners. He would have to watch her when it came to the marriage vows, that she did not try to haggle with the priest.

She sparked at that. He caught her before she could burst into speech, and kissed her soundly.

Frankish directness, he reflected, could be useful in taming Saracens.

She laughed. Cruel, she; no mercy in her for his poor battered pride. But he forgave her. He was, after all, the best knight in the world.

The events of
Alamut
are fairly equally divided between history and fantasy. Prince Aidan and his Assassin are, of course, imaginary, as is the kingdom of Rhiyana; likewise the House of Ibrahim and its dependents, and the family of the swordsmith in Damascus. The rest of the
dramatis
personae
, however, are quite solidly historical, including the emir Usamah ibn Munqidh and his son Murhaf. The tales which Usamah tells are authentic, taken from his memoirs; these are available in English, in
An Arab-Syrian Gentleman
and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades
, tr. P. K. Hitti (New York, 1929). Likewise the tale told by King Baldwin's tutor, Archdeacon (later Archbishop) William of Tyre, of his discovery of Baldwin's leprosy, is William's own; it can be found in volume two of his
A History of Deeds Done
Beyond the Sea
, tr. Emily Babcock and A. C. Krey (New York, 1943).

I have built a castle in place of the ruined manor house at Aqua Bella, and given it to the fictitious family of the Hautecourts. The original manor, it may be noted, was a holding of the Knights Hospitaller, who also held the great castle of Krak des Chevaliers. Krak was restored earlier in this century by the French, and has served, most recently and most ironically, as one of the chief strongholds of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem was indeed a leper, and his sickness was indeed accepted by those whom he ruled as king; there was never any question of his right to the throne of his uncle, Baldwin III, and of his father, Amaury I. At the time of the novel (summer and autumn, A.D. 1176) he was about sixteen years old, and had been king since the age of thirteen. He was a military strategist of no small ability, and while his health allowed, he ruled firmly and well. The next year, at seventeen, he would deal Saladin his single worst defeat, at the battle of Montgisard. He died in 1185, blind, faceless, his hands and feet eaten away by his sickness, but even in the last year of his life he led his armies against the Saracen sultan, borne to the field in a litter. He died in his bed, of a fever, and was buried in Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Baldwin's sister, the Princess Sybilla, had neither his intelligence nor his sense of proportion. The husband who had been found for her, William Longsword, Marquis of Montferrat, was an admirable choice: young, attractive, a good soldier and a skillful politician. Tragically, he fell ill of a fever and died the following year; his son and heir, named Baldwin after the king and called Baudouinet, “Little Baldwin,” was born some months after William's death. Sybilla seems to have mourned him sincerely, but she soon found consolation: a French knight of no particular distinction, but strikingly handsome and adept with the ladies, Guy de Lusignan, whom she marned in 1179 over the objections of the magnates of the kingdom. Her brother, enfeebled with his illness, permitted the marriage; he soon regretted it, however. Guy was more weak than truly treacherous, but Baldwin knew that the throne of the embattled kingdom should never be allowed to pass into the hands of a man who was constitutionally incapable of making a decision. When the leper king died, his nephew, the child Baldwin V, was crowned in his place, under the regency of Count Raymond of Tripoli. This was a direct slight to Guy, and Guy treated it as such; he rebelled against the regency and, when Baldwin V died after a year of kingship, seized the throne for himself. A year later, on 4 July 1187, Guy lost the greater part of his kingdom to Saladin in the battle of the Horns of Hattin. By the autumn of 1187, Saladin ruled as lord in Jerusalem. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in 1099 after the capture of Jerusalem by a western army under the command of, among others, Count Godfrey of Bouillon, had fallen; it would never recover. Nor would any subsequent Crusade succeed in winning back Jerusalem from the infidel.

The Sultan Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) was indeed in Damascus in the late summer of 1176, after his abortive attack on Masyaf; he married the Lady Ismat, widow of the Seljuk sultan Nur ai-Din, somewhat later than I have indicated, in the autumn before returning to his second sultanate in Cairo. His elder brother, Turan-Shah, remained as regent in Damascus. He would return some years later, to strengthen his power in Syria and to extend it to Aleppo. The Prince al-Salih Ismail, son of Nur al-Din by another wife than Ismat, died in 1181, at the age of nineteen; in 1182, the city fell to Saladin. For an excellent and highly detailed biography of the sultan, see M. C. Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson,
Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War
(Cambridge, 1982).

The Islamic sect of the Assassins (more accurately, the Ismailis), founded in the late eleventh century by the warrior and mystic Hasan-i-Sabbah, was an extremist form of Shiite Islam, devoted to the principle of domination by means of assassination. Its central stronghold was in Alamut, the Nest of Eagles, in the Elburz Mountains in what is now Iran; Aleppo was a strong supporter of its policies. Sinan ibn Salman, the Old Man of the Mountain, was the greatest of the Assassins in Syria; born the son (he said) of a nobleman in Basra, he made his way to Alamut and swore fidelity to its master, Kiya Muhammad, and was raised and educated with the master's heirs. In 1162 Sinan was sent to propagate the faith in Syria. In 1164 Kiya Muhammad's son and heir, Hasan, declared the Resurrection of the Lost Imam and the advent of the Millennium; Sinan allegedly supported the violence done to the ascetic law of the sect, but then repudiated it. For the next thirty years he ruled all but absolutely in Syria; his final accomplishment was the murder of the would-be claimant to the throne of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat — perhaps with the collusion of King Richard the Lionheart of England. Bernard Lewis provides a brief but thorough history of the sect in
The Assassins: A
Radical Sect in Islam
(New York,1967).

Although Alamut was destroyed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Assassins themselves reduced to a minor sect of Islam, the line of the last Master has survived into the twentieth century. His direct lineal descendant is the Aga Khan.

oOo

The writing of a historical novel can, and does, involve as much sheer slog through the library as a doctoral dissertation; it is a considerable challenge to distill the mountain of research into a seamless story. My story could not have been what it is without the help of the books listed above. In addition, I am indebted for drama and for local color to Robert Payne,
The Dream and the Tomb: A History of the Crusades
(New York, 1984) — it was his section heading, “The Young King's Valor and the Fall of Jerusalem,” which brought me first to the leper king; to C. R. Conder,
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: 1099-1291 A.D.
(London, 1897), despite some errors of fact; and to Colin Thubron, whose
Mirror to Damascus
(Boston, 1967) guided me through the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and gave me the setting for the Damascene portion of the novel.

oOo

The song which Prince Aidan sings at the beginning of Chapter 1 is an authentic song of the Crusades, a rallying cry for the Second Crusade of 1147. The Old French text and music are taken from Joseph Bedier and Pierre Aubry,
Les
Chansons de Croisade
(Paris, 1909); the English translation is my own. A good modern recording of the song as sung by baritone solo and chorus is that of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London in
Songs of Love and War:
Music of the Crusades
(Argo).

 

Chevalier, mult estes guariz

 

Knight, you are most fortunate,

For God has set before you His complaint

Against the Turks and the Almoravids,

Who have done Him such great dishonor.

For by deception have they seized His faithful;

Well may we grieve for this,

For in that land was God first worshipped,

And known as Lord.

 

He who will go with Louis

Need have no fear of hell,

For his soul will go to Paradise

With the angels of our Lord.

 

Let us go and conquer Moses,

Who sleeps on Mount Sinai;

Let us leave him no longer among the Saracens,

Nor the rod with which with a single blow

He parted the Red Sea,

And the great throng followed him;

And Pharaoh came after them:

He and all his people perished.