Hounds of God (47 page)

It was not an idle question, however idle its asking.
Sayyida shivered slightly. For Hasan she had no fear at all. For his father...

She gave Morgiana the truth. “I am twenty-one years old. All
my sisters were given to husbands as soon as they began their women’s courses.
I was the youngest, the last bitter disappointment before Allah took pity on
our family and granted it a son, the daughter whom against all duty and
propriety my father condescended to love. He let me grow as you’ve seen me
grow, happier than I had any right to be. But the truth is the truth.
For a woman there is but marriage or the tomb.
He
asked me. He never commanded me. He offered Maimoun, and I took him.”

“But are you happy?”

“You’ve seen Maimoun.” Morgiana’s eyes were narrowing, which
was dangerous. Sayyida met them steadily. “He has made me happy.”

Morgiana closed her eyes. Sayyida swayed, freed from the
force of them. It was true, her heart said, beating hard beneath Hasan’s cheek.
Maimoun was nothing like perfection. He was too young to be wise, he was
brilliant and he knew it, he was male. But he was Maimoun. Set on his wedding
night before his wife, looking for the first time at her unveiled face, he had
not been appalled. His face had not even fallen. “Not pretty,” he said to her
later, judicious, a little drunk. “Not ugly, either. Just exactly right for me.”

“Tell me,” Sayyida said to her guest, “where you’ve been
since I saw you last. Aside from Mecca,” she added dryly.

“What! Have you no piety?”

Sayyida bowed as best she could with Hasan to think of. “Verily,
O Hajjin, this Sunni heretic pretends to a modicum of devotion. But not to the
turning of every stone between Damascus and the Qaabah.”

Morgiana laughed: a rarity, and glorious. Hasan left the
breast to stare at her, laughing with her; nor would he rest until he had
regained possession of her lap. Sayyida covered herself demurely and leaned
forward. “Now,” she commanded, “tell.”

“I hear and I obey,” said Morgiana.

Morgiana had been everywhere. Had done, Sayyida was certain,
everything. Things that no woman would dream of doing, and some that even a man
could not encompass. When Sayyida was small she had taken every word of every
tale for purest truth. When she was older she has dismissed it all as tales and
folly. Now she believed it again. Morgiana was Morgiana. She did not need to
spin lies.

She had a gift: a fruit of surpassing strangeness,
brown-furred without, green and glistening and tart-sweet within. It came from
a country even stranger than itself, farther away than Sayyida could conceive
of. “As far as stars?” she asked.

“Not quite so far,” said Morgiana, “nor as far as I have
gone. There are worlds within the world, away over the sea. And people...” She
rocked Hasan, eyes vivid with wonders. “Men the color of earth, who worship the
sun. Black men who dwell in deserts that would slay the grimmest Bedouin, and
they dwell there naked, clothed only in their pride, and all the world to them
is but a shadow in the dreamtime. They were not afraid of me. They found me
gentle, for a spirit of the air.”

Sayyida nibbled the last of the fruit. She had Morgiana’s
knife to cut it with, a beautiful thing, and new. She turned it in her fingers.
“Another of Father’s?”

“Maimoun’s.”

Sayyida’s brows went up. “Not, I hope, for my sake.”

“His work is good,” Morgiana said, “whatever he may think of
me.”

“He doesn’t know the truth.”

“Do you not trust him?”

“Father hasn’t seen fit to tell him. How can I?”

“Your father never saw fit to tell you.”

“He didn’t need to,” Sayyida said. “He still wishes I’d
never learned it for myself. But he’s wise enough, letting Maimoun have his
peace. Maimoun is much too insistent that I be sheltered from all the ills of
the world.”

“Even childbirth?”

Their eyes met in perfect understanding. Sayyida sighed,
shrugged. “It gave me Hasan, didn’t it? He is worth anything. Even teething.”

Morgiana considered him as he drowsed in her arms. “I killed
a Christian this morning,” she said.

Sayyida stilled. She was not thinking of Hasan, or even of
Maimoun. Her eyes were level on Morgiana.

“It was very simple,” said Morgiana. “One thrust, precisely
where it mattered most. His wife never stirred. He forges a good blade, does
your father.”

“I hope you told him so.”

Morgiana went back to her rocking of Hasan. She looked like
a girl, a child, hardly yet a woman. Then she turned her head, and her face had
no humanity in it.

Sayyida shivered. It was hard sometimes to remember what
Morgiana was. Not a woman. Not even human. She feigned humanity so very well;
and then it would strike, all at once, in a word or a gesture, or a flare of
light in those great cat-eyes. “Ifritah.” Sayyida barely said it aloud. “Spirit
of fire.”

Morgiana blurred into motion, swifter than a mortal could
move; laid Hasan with all gentleness in his mother’s arms; and stilled,
utterly, as nothing human could. She sat on her heels as a servant might, but
she had never done more than play at servility. As she played at being a woman.

“I do not play at killing,” she said.

Sayyida started. “I wish you wouldn’t do that!” She bit her
tongue.

“Do you know,” said Morgiana, “I can say to no one else what
I say to you. Not in all my years. No one else has ever known what I truly am.
What is it, do you think? Do I grow soft in my dotage?”

“You’re not old.”

“Not to look at.” Morgiana’s hands went to her cheeks, as if
she searched for signs of the age that would never beset her. Sayyida did not
know how old she was. But Sayyida’s father had inherited her, like his old and
honored name, like that trade which had begotten it, like the house in which he
had been born. Her blades had always come from that one forge. Her name and her
guise had changed with each appearance, but the smiths had always known the
truth of her. None, Sayyida was assured, had thought of her for more than a
moment as a woman. She was a demon in woman’s shape, a servant of the Angel of
Death, the Slave of Alamut.

“Masyaf, now,” said Morgiana. “Alamut is no longer what it
was.” She laughed, soft and bitter. “When my putative master revealed the
resurrection of the Lost Imam — that being his unworthy and quite unbalanced
self — and declared the Millennium, I left him. There was no place in his new
world for the Slave of Alamut. But Sinan the crafty had carved himself a
kingdom in Syria. He could make good use of an immortal murderer, who cannot be
seen, who cannot be caught, who cannot count the legions of souls whom she has
sent to Iblis in the name of the Faith.” She lowered her hands from her face,
turned them, examining them. “Strange. The blood never shows.” Her eyes flashed
up. “Is that why you let me touch your son?”

“You would never hurt him.”

Morgiana snatched Hasan from his mother’s arms. Sayyida
could not even tighten her grip before he was gone. He woke at the movement,
screwed up his face to protest, saw Morgiana and crowed. She buried her face in
his swaddlings.

When she raised it, her cheeks were only slightly damp. She
looked angry. Hasan’s brows knit; he patted her chin, which was as high as he
could reach. She fixed him with a hard stare. He ventured a smile. She bit her
lips until they bled. “I feast on children,” she said to him. “I build castles
of their bones. My own master calls me the deadliest weapon in the world. He
commands me with my name and with the Name of Allah and with the Seal of
Suleiman, and with an oath I swore when I was young and mad; but if I do not
obey, he dares not punish me. He thinks that he desires me. He does not know
how very much he fears me. He whom all men fear: Sinan the wise, the Sheikh
al-Jabal, the Old Man of the Mountain.

“And you,” she said, “O innocent, find me enchanting.”

“You are,” said Sayyida.

Morgiana snarled horribly. Hasan whooped with delight, and
snatched. He won her plait; it found its way promptly to his mouth. She did not
try to rob him of it. “I could harm him,” she said. “Never doubt that. But
whether I would... there lies the limit of Sinan’s power over me. He has
learned it. He bade me slay a man whom perhaps you know. Salah al-Din, he calls
himself.”

“Saladin?” Sayyida was proud that she knew the Frankish
corruption of his title. “He’s our sultan now. Father made a sword for him
once, when he was still only Yusuf the Kurd, Ayyub’s son. You haven’t killed
him yet, have you? He’s warring near here somewhere. Father and Maimoun and the
rest have been run ragged, keeping the emirs in weapons.”

“Indeed he has been warring round about,” said Morgiana. “Making
himself sultan of Egypt and Syria. I have not killed him. I will not. I am done
with murder.”

“And yet you killed a Christian.”

Morgiana’s face darkened. “I swore an oath. My folly; Sinan’s
desperation. That far and no further he may bind me. At least,” she said, “he
was not a Muslim. Even a Sunni heretic.”

“I am a Sunni heretic,” said Sayyida.

“You are a woman, and therefore possessed of neither faith
nor reason.” Morgiana’s lightness was the lightness of the sword in battle. “And
I am less than a woman: an ifritah, of those children of Iblis who have
embraced the True Faith. Three orders of beings are set above me: men, women,
and males of my kind. I am a slave of slaves of the slaves of Allah.

“Or so it is said,” said Morgiana. “I know that there is no
one like me in this world. If there are afarit, they shun me. I am stronger
than any man, and swifter; I have magics beyond human conception. I begin to
suspect that I am no one’s slave. Except, of course, Allah’s.”

“God is great,” said Sayyida, bowing to the Name. “If you
grow so weary of killing, why do you stay? Go away from Masyaf. Leave the
Assassins to their knives and their terror. You’ve done their bidding for years
out of count. Haven’t you done enough?”

“Perhaps,” said Morgiana. “Perhaps not. Suppose that I could
evade my oath; suppose that I left. Where would I go?”

“Anywhere. You have the whole world to be free in; and even
the terrible Assassins won’t find you who were the most terrible of them all.
Why,” Sayyida said, “you could even stay here. Father wouldn’t say anything.
Maimoun can think that we’ve a cousin visiting. Hasan would be delighted. And
I,” she said, “would have some peace while he teethes.”

Morgiana smiled and shook her head. “The tigress cannot hide
herself among gazelles, however fond of them she may be. And to leave Sinan...
it has been too long. Or not long enough. I am not his tame dagger; I will take
no more Muslim souls. But there are Franks enough to cleanse the world of, and
a nest of them in particular, with which I have hardly begun. Apostates;
children of one who repudiated the Faith. They have mocked our Mission. I must
see to it that they pay.”

“I’m not sure I like you when you talk like that.”

Morgiana set a newly drowsy Hasan in Sayyida’s lap and
kissed her lightly on the forehead, startling her speechless. “Honesty,” said
the ifritah. “That’s what it is. May I darken your door again?”

“Do you have to go?”

Morgiana nodded.

“Come back quickly,” said Sayyida. “And when you’ve had your
fill of Christian blood, remember. You have a place to go. If you need one. We
— I’ve always thought that I could use another sister.”

“Such a sister,” Morgiana said wryly. “I will come back. I
give you my word.”

“Go with God,” said Sayyida. As always, Morgiana was not
there to hear her. She had winked out like a candle’s flame. As swift as that,
and as silent, and as absolute.

3.

Aqua Bella had two towers. One, newer and by far the more
massive, was a straightforward affair, square and solid; from its battlements
one could see Jerusalem. The other was far older and narrower, like a minaret,
anchoring a corner of the wall but serving no purpose beyond that. Its lower
levels housed the oxen that drove the olive press, and, now, a horse or two
belonging to the crowd of mourners who had gathered to see Gereint to his tomb.
The upper reaches were empty of aught but spiders, and long forbidden to the
castle’s children, for its stair was treacherous.

They, of course, had found ways round lock and bar; but dust
and spiders soon palled, and the stair was merely crumbling stone, easy enough
to climb if one were careful. There had been owls in the tower, to swoop and
hoot and be deliciously terrifying, but the last had flown away years since and
not come back. The children had found other diversions, and left the old tower
in peace.

Thibaut needed to be alone. He had been doing his best to be
a man, to honor Gereint’s memory, but a day and a night of it had worn him
down. The keep was full of people come to pay their respects and, no doubt, to
eye the new and wealthy widow. Their voices grated on Thibaut’s ears; their
looks of pity made him want to hit them. What did they know of grief? What did
they know of anything but greed and lies and vulgar curiosity?

He had heard them talking when they thought him out of
earshot. “Convenient for the young one, this. He’d not like to share his
inheritance with his stepfather’s get, however fond they all pretended to be.”

Remembering that, even on the dim crumbling stair Thibaut
had to stop and drive his fist against the wall. It made him feel no better. He
was wept dry. His father had died when he was too young to remember. Gereint
had been less a father than an elder brother: at first in Jerusalem where a
young knight from the west found time to spare for a very young
pullani
with an enormous stock of questions, and
later in Aqua Bella when the knight had become the lady’s husband. People had
always acted as if Thibaut should mind seeing his mother happy. As if he could
have done anything but loved Gereint, who always seemed to be laughing or
singing, who treated his lady’s children as his own, who even in a temper had
always been careful to be just.