Hounds of God (45 page)

Alum conquère Moïsès,
Ki gist el munt de Sinaï;
A Saragins nel laisum mais,
Ne la verge dunt il partid
Le Roge Mer tut ad un fais,
Quant le grant pople le seguit;
E pharaon revint après:
El e li suon furent perit.

His eyes asked no pardon of Saracen women, nor ever thought
to need it. Among the leaves a smile flashed, or two, or three. The charger
snorted. Its rider bowed again and wheeled about, cantering up the road to the
castle. The women watched him go. One by one, slowly, they went back to their
washing. In a little while they were singing again. A new song: of morning and
of sunlight, and of a spirit of fire on a Frankish charger, singing the
conquest of their people.

oOo

The road and the song ended together. The knight hailed the
guard at Aqua Bella’s gate, light and glad, offering his lone and splendid and
most assuredly Christian self to a stare both narrow and wary. The wariness was
Outremer, embattled kingdom that it was, with the Saracen snapping at its
throat; and people always stared at him. “Tell your lord,” he said, “that his
kinsman comes to greet him.”

The eyes narrowed to slits. The bay charger stamped, tasting
darkness under the morning’s splendor. The knight shivered in the sun. His
gladness was gone, all at once, irretrievably.

“Brychant!” Young, that voice within, but breaking with more
than youth, though it tried to be steady. “Brychant, who comes?”

No one, the guard was going to answer. The knight watched
the thought take shape. Now was no time for guesting fools, fresh off the boat
from the look of this one, white as a lily in this sun-tormented country,
riding alone and all begauded like a lure to every bandit in the east.

The guard’s mouth was open, the words coming quick and
harsh. But the speaker within had come up beside him. A boy, slender, dark as a
Saracen, with eyes like a wounded fawn. They took in the stranger, once,
quickly, and again more slowly, going impossibly wide. “Prince?” the boy
whispered. “Prince Aidan?” He gathered himself with an effort that shook his
narrow body, and bowed, all courtesy. “Your highness, you honor us. You must
pardon Brychant, we are all amiss, we — ”

Prince Aidan was out of the saddle, Brychant still
glowering, suspicious, but bellowing for lads to tend the stallion and the
mule. The prince spared no thought for anything but the child who was so
perfect a courtier, and who struggled so fiercely against the flooding tears. “Thibaut,”
said Aidan, taking him by the shoulders. “You would be Thibaut.” He was
shaking. Aidan stroked calm into him. “What has happened?”

The tears burst free, and knowledge with them. “No,” said
Aidan very softly. “Oh, no.”

The boy was past hearing. The guard and the servants were
nothing and no one. Aidan’s arms gathered the child; his mind followed where
the darkness led.

oOo

They had laid him out in the hall. A priest muttered over
him. People hovered. They were not, Aidan noticed, either milling or keening.
Their grief smote him, but their fear was stronger. It choked him.

He thrust through it. Somewhere he disposed of the boy. His
arms were empty as he stood over the bier: a table in truth, with a silken
cloth on it, and another over the one who lay there. A man no longer young but
not yet old, sun-dyed as they all were here, but fair under it, bone-pallid
now; black hair early going grey, long nose carved to match the long chin, the
face that had always been so mobile gone suddenly and hideously still.

“Who killed him?” Aidan heard himself say it; he shivered to
hear it. So soft, and so calm, and so very deadly. “Who cut him down?”

“Who are you to ask?”

He spun. Others flinched. This woman did not. He hardly saw
the shape that held the soul. Here was fire to match his fire, grief to rival
his own, and a will as implacable as all heaven. His body thought for him. It
lowered him to one knee, bowed his head. “My lady.”

“Who are you?”

She knew. But she needed to hear him say it. “He was my
sister’s son.” He looked up, into dark eyes. “Who has done this thing?”

“If you are what he said you are,” she said, “you do not
need to ask.”

She was not afraid of him. Even when he stood, tall even for
a westerner, with all the names on him that Gereint had told her of. He went
back to the bier, bent over it, laid his hand on the cold cheek. “Child,” he
said in the tongue of their own people, richer and darker than the rattle of
the
langue d’oeil.
He stroked the silvered
hair. “Gereint, child, what was it that could not wait for me?”

His hand slid from the head to the stiff shoulder to the
silenced heart. Ten years. So little a time. The boy had gone because he must.
As Aidan had lingered, because he must. Cares; a kingdom; a little matter of
wars and embassies. Gereint had wanted glory, and Jerusalem.

He had had both. And a lady of the kingdom beyond the sea,
and a demesne scant hours’ march from the Holy City, and death in the morning
when at last his kinsman came to fulfill the promise made before he went away.

Under the pall they had robed him in eastern silks. But
Aidan was what he was. He saw the narrow wound, so thin to be so terrible,
through which the blade had pierced the heart. Gereint had never waked to feel
it. Asleep beside his lady, he died, and she slept on oblivious, and woke to
find him dead. And on the pillow between them, a cake. Round, savory, warm yet
from the baking. Such cakes were not made in that house, nor in any save one.

Hashishayun.
Aidan had
heard of them, as a legend, a tale to frighten children. Infidels, madmen,
fanatics out of Alamut in the black heart of Persia. They came like spirits in
the night, killed as their masters commanded them to kill, vanished into air.
If by God’s grace a man could catch one, the murderer turned his weapon on
himself and died in a madness of joy, singing the praises of his unholy god.

Aidan’s head came up. He was smiling. Hands flickered. Someone
had crossed herself. His smile widened. Alamut was mighty, so they all said.
Alamut was invincible. But this, he was willing to wager. It had never had to
face the like of the Prince Aidan of Rhiyana.

He turned to the woman. Margaret de Hautecourt, he named her
in his mind. Gereint’s lady, with whom he had confessed himself quite besotted,
laughing even though the formal phrases of his letters. No great beauty, she. A
little round dumpling of a woman, older than her husband and showing it, and no
sign in her of her Frankish father. She could have been full sister to the
women by the stream. Infidel. Saracen.
Pullana
as they would call her here, half-blood, powerful and yet despised.

His head shook once, invisible. Not despised. Not she. She
knew what he was, and she understood what it meant, and she had no fear of him
at all.

He spoke to her, measuring each word. “For what they have
done,” he said, “they shall pay. By my name I swear it.”

She startled him. She touched his hand; she said, “No. This
is my doing. I will not drag you in the mire of it.”

“He was more than kin to me. He was my sister-son. I was
with him when he was born.”

More signs of the cross. Margaret turned. Her voice never
rose, but the oglers scattered. The castle woke, shaking off its shock,
becoming again a strong holding.

And all for a few soft words. Aidan let them rule him. He
accepted servants, service, a bath of eastern length and luxury. The clothing
spread for him was stark, black and white, and rich in its plainness: Arabian silk,
and something softer than linen, finer, miraculously cool. “Cotton,” said the
man who waited on him, a Saracen himself, bearded and turbaned and exquisitely
courteous. He offered food, wine. He provided escort to the solar, where the
lady sat with one lone, drowsing attendant for propriety’s sake, ruling Aqua
Bella with a firm hand.

And ruling herself. For an hour she had forgotten everything
but death. Now she remembered who she was. She greeted Aidan as a great lady
should greet an outland prince, veiling grief with courtliness. “I regret that
we must meet under such a shadow,” she said in that soft voice which made him
think of silk over steel. “Gereint was like a boy, waiting for you to come.
Every morning he would say, ‘Today. Maybe it will be today.’ And laugh, because
he was a man grown and a baron of the High Court of the Kingdom of Jerusalem,
and he was eager as a child to see his kinsman again.”

“And before I passed your gate, you grew most heartily sick
of me.”

She laughed, startling herself. “I did wonder that any man
could be such a paragon. Greatest knight in the west of the world, and sweetest
singer, and fairest and most courtly of men, and — ”

“Lady, stop! I cry you mercy!” He was laughing, through
tears, as she did. “Where Gereint loved, he loved immeasurably. I have some
little fame, and of fortune enough, but I am a man like any other.”

“Not quite,” said Margaret, soft again and steady.

He looked at his hands. Long hands, too slender for their
strength, too white and too smooth and too young. He raised his eyes. Margaret
was looking for truth. He gave it. She did not flinch from it. “My father was
mortal,” he said.

“Your mother was not.”

“Her daughter was.”

“And her daughter’s son.” There was no bitterness in
Margaret’s voice. “Gereint was proud of his lineage, though the magic had
passed him by. He was the kin of white enchanters; he carried splendor in his
blood. And yet, he said, he was glad to be mortal. He was not made to bear the
greater burden. The beauty, or the deathlessness.”

“We can die,” said Aidan. “If the blade be keen enough. If
the heart be torn, or the spine severed. We can be slain.”

“As easily as he was slain?”

His head came up. “It was a mortal man who killed him.” His
throat closed. He was cold, suddenly. “Tell me why.”

He thought that she would not. Her face had gone stark.

She fixed him with eyes that were beautiful in the round
plain face. There was no softness in them. Such eyes had faced him across bared
steel, and at the council table, and in the courts of kings. They were, at
least, human. His own were not.

“Tell me,” he said.

“It was none of his doing.” She did not wring her hands like
a weak woman. They were fists in her lap; she studied them as if they
fascinated her. “Did he tell you all that I am? Hautecourt of Aqua Bella, yes.
Baroness born in Outremer. But born also on the other side of the wall. My
mother was a daughter of the House of Ibrahim. In the west that is nothing: a
merchant house, and infidel besides. But in Aleppo it is as close to nobility
as makes no matter. Among the kingdoms of trade, my mother was a princess, the
daughter of a queen. The House of Ibrahim is known wherever caravans go; it has
kin and allies and servants from London to Samarkand, from Genoa to Byzantium,
from Rus to Nubia. The silk roads, the spice roads, the roads of gold and salt
and furs — it has power over them all.

“And power, as you who are a king’s son know, begets
jealousy. Children of the House have always traveled far to seal alliances, and
sometimes have forsaken the Faith of the Prophet for the House’s sake, as long
ago they forsook the faith of Moses. So did my mother do.

“I was her only child. She raised me in two worlds; and my
father allowed it. He was an odd man, my father. Much older than his lady, and
a rough soldier to look at, a famous fighter, and yet he had been a monk. Not
even a fighting monk; a Cluniac, a cloistered ascetic. He left, none of us ever
knew why; came Crusading; served the King of Jerusalem, won his demesne, took a
wife from the House of Ibrahim. People said he had gone infidel. I think it was
only that, at heart, he was a civilized man.” She looked at her guest, new come
from the wildest west, and shook her head once, sharply, as if to clear it.
When she began again, she seemed to be speaking of something else altogether. “What
do you know of the
Hashishayun?”

She said the word calmly, without the hiss of hate and fear
that Aidan had always heard in it. As if it were only a name.

It was sublimer than contempt. Aidan gave it what tribute he
could muster. “They are the Assassins. Madmen, drugged or possessed, trained to
kill in utmost silence and with utmost dispatch. They believe that murder is
their path to Paradise. They obey a mad king, or kings. There is some doubt
that they are human.”

“They are quite human,” said Margaret with only the barest
hint of irony. “They are schismatics, heretics as Christians would say, fanatic
followers of one whom they call the Lost Imam. Their heart and center is in
Aluh Amut, Alamut, the Nest of Eagles in Persia; but they are strong through
the lands of Islam. They are very strong in Aleppo, where is the House of
Ibrahim. And they are strongest in Masyaf in Syria, so that some are calling
that fortress Alamut the lesser, or simply Alamut.

“Their faith is simple enough. They wait for the return of
their Imam who was lost long ago. They live by strictest laws. All other faiths
are false, and false believers are their prey. They work their will through
terror; murder is, indeed, their road to salvation. They have slain caliphs and
sultans, lords of Islam and of Christendom, priests and mullahs and ascetics:
any who has set himself against their mission or their lord.

“The greatest of their chieftains in Syria is the lord of
Masyaf. Sinan is his name. Sinan ibn Salman ibn Muhammad, who calls himself
Rashid al-Din; whom others call Sheikh al-Jabal, the Old Man of the Mountain.
He professes loyalty to the lord in Alamut, and yet it is an open secret that
he serves himself foremost. The Assassins of Syria pay lip service to Alamut
and do the bidding of Masyaf. In Aleppo they do not even trouble to bow to
Alamut.

“You know what power is,” said Margaret. “Never too sweet,
and never enough. Sinan bids fair to command all his sect, and through it to
sway most of Syria and Outremer to his will. But
most
is not
all
. He would have more. In order to
win it, he needs eyes and ears in every city; he needs allies, servants,
slaves. He thinks,” said Margaret, “that he needs the House of Ibrahim.”