The Dagger and the Cross (15 page)

“You don’t have to go,” she said. “You owe Guy no service.”

“Guy, no. But Raymond and the kingdom and the cross—yes,
they bind me.”

She pulled back, the better to see his face. “You only
stayed after Baldwin died, because you had too many debts both owed and owing,
and because you were stubborn; you wanted to marry me in Jerusalem. We were
going back to Rhiyana with Gwydion after the wedding, when we’d settled all our
affairs. As we will, and in as short order as we can: as soon as we find the
dispensation.”

Aidan shook his head. “It’s not that simple now. The war has
come. Gwydion has seen Jerusalem fall; and I, on the wings of his prophecy. How
can I just walk away from it?”

“How can you stay? Baldwin kept you because he loved you.
You made allies enough, even a friend or six. But you also made enemies; and
this puppet king is one of them. They won’t hesitate to turn on you, simply
because there’s a jihad in the way.”

“Guy is an idiot, but he’s not mad. He needs me and he knows
it. I swore to defend the Holy Sepulcher. I can’t break that oath.”

“I find myself wishing,” she said through gritted teeth, “that
you were a little less honorable, and a little more like a Frank. Look at
Reynaud. What was an oath worth to him? He broke it, and he’s rich and he’s
happy. Raymond kept his, and he’s had to crawl at Guy’s feet, because Guy’s
dogs didn’t have the sense to stay out of a battle when they were outnumbered
fifty to one.”

“All the more need for a knight with some vestige of sense.”

“You can’t,” she said. “I let you go before, dreading every
moment of it, and even fighting beside you when I could, because you love a
fight so much. But this isn’t errantry. This is holy war.”

“Yes,” he said.

She seized a double fistful of his hair and pulled his head
down.
“Allah!
Are you mad?”

“I am a Christian and a knight of the cross.”

“Mad,” she said. “Stark mad.”

“You knew what I was when you set your chain on my neck.”

“When did I ever—” Her breath hissed between her teeth. “I
trapped you. Is that what you are saying?”

“I am saying that we had a bargain. You initiated it, and
you held me to it. It was never any part of it, that I should turn my back on
this kingdom and let it fall.”

“
I
started it?
I
held you to it? Did you have
no say in it?”

“Precious little,” his tongue said for him.

Her lip curled. “How like a Frank. Lose a wager, get the
worse of a bargain, and blame it all on the filthy Saracen.”

“As I recall,” he said icily, “it was never I who insisted
on calling us by those names. Or who used them to cut, when no other weapons
were to hand.”

“Frank!”

“Assassin.”

She caught her breath. Her face was bloodless. “There. There
we have it. Maybe our enemies were wise, after all. What did they say,
dispar
—
dispass
—”

“Disparitas cultus.
Disparity indeed, and no hope of
changing it. Do you know how I feel when you grovel at your prayers, five times
a day, every blessed day? Do you know what it does to me when you fast in
Ramadan, and read the Koran daylong, and snap my head off if I venture to touch
you? I gave up eating pork for you, I gave up shaving my beard for you, I did
everything I could to make myself as you would have me. And how did you ever
repay me?”

“By loving you.”

That gave him pause. But his temper was up; it boiled out of
him, all of it, years of it, and with it the bitterness of this day that should
have been the best of his life, and had become the worst. “Loving me? Is that
what you call it? Setting your mark on me, keeping me like a prize stallion,
indulging such of my whims as suit your fancy. Now I have oaths to keep, and
you bid me break them. Do you even care that that would break me?” She said
nothing. Stunned; or afraid to speak. “Did you ever love me? Or was it never
more than ownership?”

“Is that what I have been to you?”

He faltered. That made him angry. “It’s what I’ve been to
you! I—fool that I am, I loved you.”

“And now?”

“And now.” His throat was tight. He forced the words through
it. “I am still a fool. And I will ride in the Crusade.”

“Even if I beg you?”

“When have you ever begged?”

Never, and she knew it. She backed away from him, slowly. “And
I? What will I do?”

“Whatever you please.”

“Even if I
please to fight in the jihad?”

He snapped erect. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because—” Because she belonged to him, as much as he to
her. Because she was a woman, and he was a man, and it was his part to fight,
hers to wait at home and pray for his soul. Except that he did not know if he
had a soul, and her prayers would not be Christian prayers, and she was never
one to wait anywhere, for anything.

“Because I don’t want you to,” he said.

She laughed, sharp and deadly. “What I want is as nothing,
is that not so? But what you want is ever to be obeyed.”

“What does your Prophet say? Our Evangelist says, ‘Wives,
obey your husbands.’”

“How wise of him, and how convenient for you. It’s a pity
that I’m not your wife, and not about to be, as Allah and our enemies have
willed it.”

That was more pain than he could bear to speak of. “If you
fight in the jihad, we will be fighting against one another. Is that what you
want? To kill me, and call it holy war, and go to Paradise?”

She sprang to her feet, wild, so wild that her voice was
hardly more than a whisper. “Yes. That would be like heaven’s black humor, to
make me kill you. But Paradise—no, if I took your life, I would not have that;
for I would kill myself thereafter, and forfeit all right to salvation.” She
held out her hands. Almost—almost beseeching. “My lord. We knew that this would
come, in the way of this world. Yet there is a way to escape it. Millefleurs,
first, to see that our people are taken care of; then Rhiyana. Let the humans
wage their wars. We shall make our own peace, and live in it, for as long as
Allah gives us.”

Peace, yes, and quiet apart from men, and the love that was
between them across all the walls of faith and pride and custom. She would give
up her own war for him, leave this country that was hers, go away to Rhiyana
where even the sky was strange.

He shook his head, though it tore at his heart. “We can’t,”
he said. “Not yet. When this war is settled, then, yes, we can go.”

“But not now.”

“Not now.” He tried to be gentle. “I promised to leave
Outremer when we were wedded; but not before. And if I stay, then I must fight.”

“And I,” she said, inexpressibly bitter, “am a stone about
your neck. But for me, your heart would be whole. You would suffer no whisper
of treachery; nor ever any scandal among your people.”

“You are worth any pain.”

“Yet there is pain,” she said. “You are torn. But not
enough. I am but your lover. Your war is your war.”

“Never mine.”

“No?” She was out of his reach now, mind as well as body.
Her voice sounded dim, as if it came from far away. “Go, then. I’ll not stop
you.”

“But what will you do?”

“What does any woman do? I can hunt. I promise I’ll not kill
until you’ve seen who did this to us.”

“Morgiana—” he began, stretching out his hand.

She departed, for once, as anyone else might: through the
door, and not slowly. By the time he mustered his wits for pursuit, she was
gone.

The brightness had gone out of the world.

Ysabel sat on the bed she shared with her sisters. They were
out doing whatever children did when they did not understand why all the
grownfolk were so grim. She, who understood, who had been part of it until her
mother dragged her away, had gone so far as to shout at her mother for doing
it. This was her punishment: a behind still smarting from the spanking, and
confinement to bed without supper. The dull ache of hunger was nothing to the
great black knot that was her middle.

It had all been so beautiful. Aidan had looked like a prince
out of a story, and Morgiana had been his princess, and both of them so happy
that the whole world seemed to sing. Then the monk read the horrible letter,
the one full of lies instead of the pope’s blessing, and the brightness broke
like a lamp flung on the floor.

Her throat ached. She had been crying, but she was tired of
that. There were hours yet till dark, and then Nurse would come with Mariam and
Lisabet, and she would have to pretend to sleep or be plagued endlessly with
questions and frettings and nonsense. Nurse would want to dose her. She hated
Nurse’s doses. The other children loathed the taste, but never seemed to take
any harm from them. They did odd things to her; sometimes they made her sick.
It was because she was different, Morgiana said.

She hugged her knees, sniffling. Morgiana was different,
too. And Aidan. They were proud of it; glad of it. Even with all the lies about
witchcraft and sorcery and heresy.

She made a mirror out of air, which was her art and her
secret, and even Aidan did not know about it. It was easy to do. She made a
circle with her hands, and told the air to gather there, and brought in a
little fire and a whisper of earth. It hung where she put it, just in front of
her face. She passed her palm over it, and it quivered and glimmered and
flowed, and there was a circle, all silver and perfectly smooth, with her face
in it. She was even less pretty than usual, with her nose red and her eyes
swollen with crying. Aidan said she would be beautiful when she grew up, the way
Morgiana was, and Gwydion, and himself. None of them had looked like anything
when he was a child; they were all eyes and knees and elbows, and much too pale
for comfort. Just as she was. Even if he was not simply telling her that to
make her feel better, she had a long way to go yet.

She glowered at her reflection. Nurse said her skin was
something to be proud of, so perfectly white, and never a splotch or a freckle,
no matter how much time she spent in the sun. Nurse did not know how Aidan had
taught her to make a second skin out of power, when she was old enough to know
how to do it for herself, as he had done for her since she was born; or how he
had shown her what the sun could do to her. They were moonlight-and-darkness
people. The sun was their enemy. It would flay them alive if they let down
their guard.

She narrowed her too-big eyes and called light, to make them
do what they always did; go all blue, with only slits for pupils. Cat-eyes.
That was another thing she had had to learn when she was old enough to do it
for herself: not to let people see what the light did to her eyes. She dimmed
it, and watched her pupils go wide and round and eat up all the blue; but that
was not safe, either, because when the blue was gone, the red came out. It was
green in the others. She was different even from them. But they all had
night-eyes, like animals. She could see perfectly well in the dark, when other
people stumbled and cursed and groped blindly at nothing.

She made a fierce cat-face. It would have been more
impressive if she had not been in between her milk teeth and her grown teeth.
The best ones were just growing in, or were half there or not there at all.
When they did come in, they would be very white and very sharp—”Don’t bite your
tongue too often for a while,” Aidan said, laughing but meaning it—and some of
them would be longer and more pointed than human teeth. Aidan knew how to
horrify troublesome people simply by smiling at them, and giving them time to
notice that there was something odd about the smile.

She swept her hand through the mirror, scattering it into
nothing. “It’s not
fair
to make him so unhappy!”

Suddenly she could not bear to be shut up in walls, not for
one more instant. She pulled a cotte on over her shift, barely noticing which
one it was, and called her shoes. They ran from under the bed and onto her
feet. She snatched a cloak; by good luck it was the one with the hood sewn on
it, one of her mother’s more useful oddities.

It was never hard to slip out when one was determined, and had
power to hide behind. She could have walked boldly out the front gate, and no
one would have noticed. But there was no bravado in her now. She went out the
back way, through the garden and over the wall. By the time she came out of the
alley onto a wider street, she had begun to cry again. She pulled the hood over
her head and went where her feet took her.

In a while which she did not measure, she found herself near
the Temple. Aidan’s house was not far from there, but he was not in it. She
thought of finding one of her hiding places there, almost decided to do it,
then stopped. It was no good without Aidan. Nothing in the world was better
than to climb into his lap and feel his arms close about her, warm and strong,
and know that he was there and that he loved her and that he would never let
her come to harm. But he was in her grandmother’s house because he could not
bear to be in his own, and he was even more miserable than she was. He would
have no comfort to offer her.

There was a gate in the wall, not far from where she was. A
Templar stood guard in it in his mail and his surcoat with the red cross on his
breast. He was young: his beard was thin and wispy and hardly longer than his
jaw, and he gangled in all directions. He also stank to heaven. Templars always
did.

“Do they think it’s holy to be filthy?”

Ysabel jumped like a cat, a good yard high, and came down
spitting. Akiva backed away to a prudent distance, but he could not keep the
grin off his face. “Where did you come from?” she snapped at him.

“I wanted to see the Temple,” he said. “Or what’s left of
it.”

“And pray at the wall?”

“And pray at the wall.” He paused. “Do you think they’ll let
me in?”