Devil's Bargain (41 page)

She took Ahmad’s hands and pressed them to her belly. “Your daughter,” she said, “will be born at the winter solstice.” She was aware out of the corner of her eye of Eleanor reckoning times and spans, and Richard gaping with beautiful
astonishment. “Remember: if you agree to this marriage, she is mine, just as she would be if I had never told you of her at all.”

Ahmad sat unmoving. He was a mage, however trammeled his power. He could well see what drifted and dreamed inside her. “
Ya Allah
!” he breathed. “What a wonder she is.” His eyes flashed up into Sioned’s face. “But no more so than her mother.”

Sioned wanted desperately not to blush, but she had never had that power in his presence.

“God’s ballocks!” Richard burst out. “You two have been at it since—”

“I was not in a convent when I was rapt out of Tyre,” Sioned said as gently as she could bear to.

Ahmad was gentler still. “I do cry your pardon, my lord. From the moment I saw her, I loved her. She was not pleased that you offered her elder sister as my bride, nor, at all, that I would entertain the offer. She—”

“
That
long?” Richard flung up his hands. “Christ and the leper! Was I blind?”

“Not particularly,” said Sioned. “We didn’t mean to deceive you; the time was never right, and what could we say? It didn’t make sense then to offer me instead of Joanna when he was still a sultan’s right hand. Then there was the matter of the war, and Assassins, and too many preoccupations all at once.”

“But now,” Ahmad said, “it’s an eminently satisfactory solution, is it not? I do love her, with all my heart, and she seems inclined to tolerate me. I’ll be quite effectively snared, and quite happily, too, when we come to the end of it.”

Richard’s head shook, somewhat more in amazement than in exasperation. His temper had cooled; he was beginning to see the humor in it. He had already seen the use of binding this prince of Islam in kinship. “You played me, you two. You played me like a lute. If I didn’t need you, I’d kill you.”

“Certainly you would,” Ahmad said. “And we do deserve it.”

“Ah,” said Richard, tossing off the whole of it: his temper, Ahmad’s veiled apology, even Sioned’s conspicuous silence. “I
can’t kill you now. That would be fratricide. In my family, brothers may hate each other cordially and do everything in their power to trap and betray and maim the rest both singly and together, but we don’t commit the sin of Cain. You’re safe from that, at least.”

“Indeed I am grateful,” Ahmad said.

His eastern grace was all the more striking in the face of Richard’s Frankish bluntness. And yet, Sioned thought, they were not as different as one might think. They were alike in spirit: proud men, strong-willed, and fiercely loyal to those they loved.

Well then, so was she. A fine nest of eagles, they, and a fine war they had waged—and, no doubt, would wage again. Peace never endured for long in the City of Peace.

Today was enough. Tomorrow would look after itself. She sat between her brother and her lover, and took a hand of each, and was—no, not content. That was too tepid a word. She was happy. Gloriously, brilliantly, extravagantly happy. And if the gods begrudged it, then they were poor envious things, and she would find other gods to worship.

Richard would never understand why she laughed. Ahmad would when she told him of it—later, when they could be alone, with no more secrets. No more hiding. And that was best of all.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

T
he story of Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, and the Third Crusade is one of the great adventure stories of history—but unlike the fictional stories which it otherwise so closely resembles, it dribbles away at the end. There is no satisfying conclusion, not even a grand defeat. Richard gave up his war in the very moment when he might have won it. Saladin lived to claim the victory, but he was exhausted, in many ways a broken man. He died not long after Richard sailed back into the west, leaving heirs who could not maintain the empire that he had built.

Richard for his part was shipwrecked on his way home and captured by the Grand Duke of Austria, whose enmity he had won during the Crusade, and held for ransom. His kingship, like his Crusade, frittered itself away into nothing, until he died as a result of a foolish attack on a minor castle.

Alternate history relies on turning points—on moments of multiple possibilities. There were many such in the Third Crusade, of which one of the most crucial was the battle of the Round Cistern, when Richard captured Saladin’s great
Egyptian caravan. He could have forced matters then and taken Jerusalem—if he had not simply thrown it all away.

Certainly he had his reasons. His brother John was causing considerable difficulties in England and Normandy, and the King of France, who was no friend at all to Richard, was egging him on. Queen Eleanor in fact had left Richard in Cyprus before he set sail for Acre, and turned back toward home, in large part to keep John under control. Richard was in very real danger of losing his western possessions unless he hastened home to defend them.

Suppose that John had somehow been restrained, and Philip of France with him; suppose that Eleanor, with her powerful will and her relentless pursuit of her favorite son’s advantage, had gone with him on Crusade. Suppose further that the Old Man of the Mountain had succeeded in assassinating Saladin, who was his avowed enemy. The way would then have been clear for Richard to win his Crusade.

I am indebted to a large number of sources for the background of this book. Most important however are the following: on the side of Islam, Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson,
Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War
(Cambridge, 1982), and on the side of the Crusade, Geoffrey Regan,
Lionhearts: Saladin, Richard I, and the Era of the Third Crusade
(New York, 1998).

Judith Tarr
is a World Fantasy Award nominee and the bestselling author of the highly acclaimed novels
Pride of Kings
and
Kingdom of the Grail
. A graduate of Yale and Cambridge Universities, she holds degrees in ancient and medieval history, and breeds Lipizzan horses at Dancing Horse Farm, her home in Vail, Arizona. You can find her on the Internet at
http://www.sff.net/people/judith-tarr.