The Dagger and the Cross (22 page)

“You’ll fight your own people?” she asked him when they were
back under Aidan’s roof, or rather on it, where there was a garden and a
spectacle to rival any in the world: the great court of the
Templum Domini
under
the Dome of the Rock. Her maid was near, sweet-natured Gwenneth who was half
deaf and all discreet, engrossed in a bit of needlework.

Raihan leaned at ease against the parapet, but his eyes were
narrowed slightly, fixed on the great golden dome. “I am my lord’s man. Whom he
chooses to fight, is mine to fight also.”

“Even in the name of Christ and the Holy Sepulcher?”

“I fight in my lord’s name.”

She did not know what was in her that she should press him
so, but she could not help herself. “You haven’t thought of converting to
Christianity?”

“No.”

He said it quietly, but there was a snap in it.

“Not for any reason?” she asked him.

“What reason can there ever be for apostasy?”

She looked down abashed. “I—pardon me, I beg you. I shouldn’t
have addressed you so.”

“My lady may address me in any way she pleases.”

Her eyes flashed up. “Even if I excoriate you for a heathen
and a turncoat?”

He straightened. His hand dropped to his swordhilt. But he
said, “My lady may be the best judge of that.”

“You are a perfect knight.” She meant it truly. He did not
think so at first, but under her gaze the blue fire faded from his eyes. She
smiled to see it. “I can see who trained you, sir mamluk.”

“To be a heathen and a turncoat?”

Her smile widened almost into laughter. “My knight may be
the best judge of that.”

“Your—” He blushed crimson. “My lady!”

“So I am,” she said with rich contentment. “And so you
certainly intended, or you would never have let yourself be made my nursemaid.”

“Is that what you think I am?”

“I think that you are my knight. I hear what the others say.
They twit you, don’t they?”

He turned away from her, which was rude, but she forgave it.
His fingers fretted the hilt of his sword. After a moment his shoulders went
back; he drew a deep breath and turned again to face her. “My brothers in the
sword are jealous to a man.”

“They are? What of their wives? What,” she asked with
beating heart, “of yours?”

“I have no wife,” he said.

She looked at him in silence.

“I do not,” he said, not to defend himself, simply to make
it clear to her. “There never seemed to be time; and no one suitable presented
herself.”

“Not even someone unsuitable?”

“I’m not an anchorite.”

That was an unguarded utterance. Elen watched him regret it.
She said, “I never thought you were.”

He was like a cat in the way he kept recovering his balance,
no matter how she upset it. “My lady can never be unsuitable,” he said. “I,
however, am that a thousandfold.”

“I made a suitable match,” she said. “Once, and he is dead.
Perhaps now I may choose to please myself.”

She kept her eyes on his face while she spoke. It was still,
expressionless, but she could not mistake the spark that kindled in it. As she
had hardly dared to hope. As she had feared not to see. She was bold beyond
believing, and he would be well within his rights to rebuke her for it; or
simply to refuse to understand.

He did neither. He said, “Your kinsmen might have somewhat
to say in the matter.”

“A lady’s hand is her family’s to bestow to its best
advantage. Her heart,” said Elen, “is her own.”

“And her body?”

She blushed. “My body is his who holds my heart in his hand.
If I may hold his in my own.”

“You are beautiful,” said Raihan, and it was not an answer,
but then again it was. “You are the falcon stooping out of the sun; the moon
descending upon the water. You are as far above a simple soldier-slave as that
soldier-slave is above the beggar in the bazaar.”

“Does it matter?”

He bit his lip. She saw how young he was, after all, under
the trappings of the warrior. “No,” he said. “Before God, it should. But it
matters not at all.”

Morgiana was gone.

Aidan hunted her down all the ways of the mind, into all the
places he knew, where she might be. A cavern in the desert of Persia. Masyaf of
the Assassins, where the Old Man of the Mountain was lord. A swordsmith’s house
in Damascus, where was the one woman in the world whom Morgiana would call
friend. Even, desperately, in their own castle of Millefleurs. Empty, all
empty. She was gone, cut off from him, in a world that was too wide for his
little power, too empty for his soul to bear.

He did not go mad, or run wild, or shatter into a million
shards. He had already done all of that, and it had cost him Morgiana. He sat
in his chamber in a dawn as bleak as his heart, and knew beyond hope of
argument what he had done.

She was older than he, and stronger in power, and better by
far at holding a grudge. While she did not wish to be found, he would not find
her. And that could be never.

There were no tears in him. There was nothing at all but
emptiness.

He lay, first on his face, then on his back, and watched the
light grow in the room. He heard the house rising about him: the cooks to their
cooking, the mamluks to their prayers and then to their exercises in the
practice-court, the Rhiyanans to prepare for Mass. He was on all their minds in
greater or lesser degree. They did not know, yet, how utterly Morgiana was
gone.

“She is gone.” Saying it aloud lent it solidity. He covered
his face with his hands. His fingers tensed to claw; with an effort he relaxed
them. He made himself rise, put off his sorely rumpled garments, wrap himself
in the robe which he always wore to bathe. It was silk, and scarlet,
embroidered with dragons. She had given it to him.

He flung it away from him. Everything in that room was her
gift, or whispered of her presence. He snatched a cloak that reeked more of
horses than of her, and went blindly where he had meant to go.

o0o

Gwydion was in the bath before him, alone without servants
amid the sea-colored tiles, pouring his own water into the basin. Aidan almost
turned on his heel and fled. He caught himself against the doorframe, clung to
it as if without it he would fall.

Gwydion glanced over his shoulder, a flash of cat-green in
the light that was, Aidan realized, witchlight. “Your bath is almost ready,” he
said.

Aidan hated him with sudden passion. If not for him—if not
for that he had warmed so fully to Morgiana—

No. That was the madness speaking, and the devil behind the
madness. Aidan was sane now, because Gwydion was here, with his calm, with his
strength, with all that he was, that was the other half of Aidan.

The water was exactly as he liked it: hot almost to burning,
and scented with green herbs. Aidan sank slowly into it. Gwydion knelt by the
basin and began to wash him. At first he only allowed it because he would not
quarrel again while he could help it. But those fingers, of all there were in
the world, knew where to find the knots, and how to loosen them.

“She is gone,” Aidan said when the water began to cool, when
he was clean but unable to move, to rise and face the world.

“I felt her go,” said Gwydion.

“Do you know why she went?”

“I know what the king’s knights wanted with you yesterday.”

“It’s not true. Is it?”

“No.”

Aidan sank down until the water covered him. He could
breathe in it if he wished to. Or drown, if his will allowed it.

He rose out of it. Gwydion was there with the cloth,
wrapping it about him, rubbing away the wet and the tautness and perhaps
something more than that. “I never thought that it was true,” Aidan said. “And
I acted as if it were. She repaid me exactly as I deserved.”

Gwydion did not offer empty comfort. He held out a clean
shirt. Aidan struggled into it. “I won’t let them break me,” he said. “I won’t
give them the satisfaction.”

“I never thought you would.”

Aidan stood, swaying a little. Half of him was an open
wound. The other half stood in front of him. He laid hands on his brother’s
shoulders, perhaps to embrace him, perhaps to fling him away. “But for you,”
said Aidan, “they would have had no power against me. But for you I would be
wholly in their power. You were the flaw in my armor. You are all that arms me
now against the dark.”

“So have you always been to me,” said the voice that was the
echo of his own, out of the face that was the image of his own.

Aidan drew a shuddering breath. He would not break. He would
be strong, though half his strength was gone and half was not his own. And one
day—one day soon, by God, he would win her back.

He reached for braies and hose, pulled them on. With them he
put on a semblance of his wonted self. The world had not ended because he had
lost his lover. He tied the lacings with meticulous care, as if to bind the
cords of mind and will, and found the words with which he must go on. “We’ve
much to do if we’re to be ready for the muster.” He looked up. “You are
fighting, aren’t you?”

Gwydion could not but see through Aidan’s seeming. His brow
went up, but his voice was cool, light, accepting what his brother had chosen. “I
shall fight,” he said. “How could I not?”

Aidan shrugged. “It’s not your kingdom, and it’s not your
quarrel.”

Gwydion cuffed him, spilling him into the tangle of his
discarded robe. “Don’t you start on me, too,” he said. “I’ll fight because I
choose to fight. And,” he said, “because there’s no keeping you from it, and
someone should be there to keep an eye on you.”

Aidan struggled up on his elbows, glaring through a tangle
of hair. “An eye, you say? And which of us is the known and notorious glutton
for battles?”

“That’s why,” said Gwydion, reaching to draw him up. Aidan
got a solid grip on his brother’s hand, and pulled. Gwydion toppled as
ignominiously as he had, but rather less painfully: he made certain to fall on
top of Aidan.

They rolled and tumbled like lion cubs, until they fetched
up, abruptly, at someone’s feet.

Aidan, on the bottom, recognized the captain of his mamluks.
Arslan was properly appalled. Aidan bared his teeth at him. But a little
longer, and it might have been an honest grin. “Am I wanted for something?” he
asked.

Arslan swallowed hard. He took a fair bit of time about it. “No,”
he said, “my lord. Nothing. I heard—that is—”

“You thought we were killing one another.” Gwydion rose with
impressive dignity, shaking his hair out of his face. This time Aidan let him
draw him up.

Aidan laid his arm about his brother’s shoulders. “It was a
massacre,” he said. “Go, we’ll clear away the bodies. I’ll be with you
directly.”

Arslan obeyed. He was, in spite of himself, amused.
Just
like a brace of wild boys,
he thought indulgently as he went to his duties.

The brothers heard the thought, as they were meant to. They
looked at one another. Suddenly, out of nowhere that he could name, Aidan began
to laugh.

o0o

Aidan made a tendril of power, divided it, set it like a
snare in the places to which Morgiana would most likely return. He would not
weep or rage. His pride would not allow it. He sent his call echoing through
the mind-world, a great ringing cry that surely she must hear; that surely she
would answer. Yet there was only silence. She might never have been. He was all
hollow; all empty. All forsaken.

People knew soon enough that she was gone. Why she had gone,
they did not dare to ask. Most supposed that she had withdrawn to Millefleurs.
A few suspected that she had returned to her own people. A fair faction hoped
that Aidan himself had put her away. He did not speak to them nor they to him,
nor did they venture to look on him with either pity or vindication.

It mattered little to a kingdom readying for war. She was a
woman, and women were only to be thought of when there were walls to guard.

Ysabel was harder to deceive. She wanted explanations. Aidan
gave her what he could, but lovers’ wars were as far beyond her as the moon.
She understood only that Morgiana was gone, and that Aidan grieved, and that it
should not be so. She decided that he needed her; that, in short, she must go
with him to Acre.

“I want to go,” she said. She had come to Lady Margaret’s
house with one of her mother’s women scowling in her wake, ostensibly to see
her grandmother, actually to catch Aidan as he settled matters that needed
settling if his holdings were to be secure in the midst of the war. “Lady Elen
is going. So is Aimery. They can take care of me.”

Aidan regarded her narrowly. The little minx had it all
plotted, that was clear to see. “I would rather that your mother looked after
you,” he said, “here where it’s safest.”

“Jerusalem isn’t safe,” said Ysabel. “Not if the sultan
beats you on the field. This is the first place he’ll aim for, and the first
place he’ll want to take.”

“Who has been telling you that?” Aidan asked her with a
touch of sharpness.

“People are talking,” she said, “all over the city. The
pilgrims are scared.”

“The pilgrims are wise,” said Aidan. “But not as wise as
they might be. Jerusalem won’t be the first to fall. It’s too deep in the
kingdom, and too well defended, even if we strip every other place bare to make
up the army. Acre is much more likely to be a target, because it faces on the
sea, and the pilgrims’ ships are there, and the king’s winter palace, and the
cream of the trade. What would you do there? There won’t be any children to
play with. Simeon is staying here to look after the women; Akiva will stay with
him.”

He had scored a hit there, but she was well dug in and
determined to fight. “If you mean Mother and Grandmother, it’s not Rabbi Simeon
who will be doing the looking after, but the other way round. Akiva can’t even
fight.” She did not say it with contempt, he was glad to notice. It was a fact,
that was all. “Mother says she’s staying here because she’s so big with the
baby, but it’s really because Grandmother is here and doesn’t want to leave.
Mother will go to Acre later if she can, you wait and see. She hates to stay in
one place when her men are out fighting wars.”