Alamut Part 6

She had given him what he wanted. It seemed that he wanted no more of her.

For once, it seemed, they had agreed on something. She told herself that she was glad. She forced her mind away from him. He had refused her right to her own child. So would she 49.

refuse to be wife as well as mother. She was Hautecourt again, and Hautecourt only. She had forgotten his name.

She swore it to herself, alone, sitting on the fountain's rim in the inner court. It was early yet, barely past dawn; the air was cool, the spray cold on her cheek. The bright fish swirled un- der her hand, seeking the crumbs she cast for them.

Odd how one could feel a presence, even without sun to cast a shadow, even without sound of step on stone. She stiffened, but she would not turn. In the three days since he came, she had not seen him. He had been elsewhere, riding out in the city; she had been in her bed or moving slowly about the house, taking her meals alone or, once, with her brother. Who had been full of him, and worthless for talking about anything else.

She willed him to go away. She did not want him to see her as she was now: pallid, lank-haired, shapeless with childbcar- ing; used and discarded, and swom not to care. When she was young and full of Gereint's tales, she had dreamed it all other- wise: she high and proud, a great lady like her mother, and he princely as westerners almost never were, bowing over her hand. He had bowed when he met her, but she had blushed and stammered and been a perfect idiot.

Great lady, indeed. She had acknowledged long since thatshe had no beauty. She had no greatness, either. Only obsti- nacy. With that, she was most richly gifted.

It fixed her eyes on the fish. Even when a hand filled itself from her bowl, and cast as she had cast, rousing them to a new dance. For him they leaped high, even into the air, as if they would fill his hands with their living gold. Even they knew what he was.

Still she would not look at him, except in glances. He wore all black now, for Gercint- But he was clever: he kept a little scarlet still, in the cross sewn on the shoulder of his cotte. No doubt he knew what the starkness did to his pallor. He looked no more canny than the cat that purred and wove about his ankles.

He gathered it up, meeting its steady, predator's stare. They had the same eyes.

"Your familiar?" she asked. It was easy, if she did not look at him.

"My distant kin," he answered, lightly, taking no offcnse that she could perceive.

"She wants you to bewitch a fish into her claws."

50 "So she does," he said. "But not these. I'm not one to betray a trust."

The cat yawned its opinion of honor among rwo-legged folk, but it went on purring, content to be held and stroked and promised other, more licit prey. Joanna watched the long white fingers trace that sleek, striped length. She had never seen fingers so long, so delicate and yet so strong. They looked cold. How warm they were, she well remembered.

"Joanna!"

She looked up, startled; and angry. It was an old trick. And she a fool, for falling to it.

She had known what would happen. Once she looked, she lost all power to look away.

Sometimes a man was too beautiful. It was absurd; it was faintly repellent. It made the eye dart, hunting for flaws.

This went beyond it. There was nothing pretty in it. Noth- ing comforting, to sneer at. Nothing human.

He had been smiling. He was no longer.

"You shouldn't have done that," she said, light now and heedless, because she had lost her battle.

His lips thinned. She needed no magic to know what he was thinking. Mortals were always easy prey for his kind. Too easy.It was the beauty and the strangeness, and the spark of fear.

She looked straight into his eyes, not caring if she drowned there. They were clear grey, with no blue in them; level, a little blank, like a cat's, and a green flare in the back of them. They would hunt best by night, his kind. like a.s.sa.s.sins.

"The sun is no friend to you," she said.

His head shook, a flicker, barely to be seen. "We have an accommodation. It lets me be. I accord it due respect."

"That could be your downfall, here. You should cast a deeper glamour."

He was not surprised that she knew. She wondered if he was ever truly surprised at anything. "I choose not to," he an- swered her.

"Why?"

"Because I choose."

Stubbornness. She could understand that. And vanity. There was another glamour he could cast, that would spare him insult and suspicion and deadly certainty; but that would raddle his beauty and grey his hair, and give him the proper count of his years.

"TOwld you like that?" he asked, reading her without shame. 51.

"What would you do if I said I would?"

She gasped. He laughed aloud, out of the face he should have worn. Even mortal, even lined and greyed, he would never have lost his wickedness.

Or his beauty.

"Well?" He had changed even his voice. It was thicker; it had lost its edge of clarity. "Shall I stay so?"

"Would you?"

He turned his hands, knotted as they were, gnarled, seamed with old scars. There was another on his check, under the iron- grey beard. "G.o.ddess. I had forgotten those." He did not seem to notice what he had sworn by, he with the cross on his shoulder. He flexed it; winced.

"It's as complete as that?"

"To convince, I must convince myself."

"Then, if it went on long enough, would you . . . die?"

The word was as hard to hear as to say, but he seemed un- moved, preoccupied. "I don't know. Perhaps. Which wouldmean, when I go beyond the mortal span-" He s.h.i.+vered. "Do you remember t.i.thonus?"

Joanna nodded, s.h.i.+vering herself. "The pagan. He had im- mortality, but forgot to ask that it be immortal youth. He withered. He never stopped withering. And he would never die."

Aidan was on his feet. The magic dropped from him like dust and darkness. His hand was strong and smooth and young, pulling her up. She was tall enough to meet him eye to eye. That startled him a little; then he laughed. "See how we maunder! Come, show me your city."

As if Thibaut had not shown him every inch of it already.

But his eagerness was irresistible; even when she knew what he was running from. Not death, but deathlessness, She looked at her rag of a dress; touched her hair. "like this?" she had asked before she thought.

No mere man, he. He understood. "Go on, then. But be quick."

As quick as she and Dura between them could be. She put on the blue dress again; a light mantle over it; a veil for her hair. No jewels but her silver cross, since she was in mourning.

Severity did not suit her, but it suited propriety.

She did not stoop to ask how she could walk far, who had been ill so long. He had not troubled to. Her mare was saddled 52 for her, and the tall gelding that had been Gereint's, and a mule for Dura. His manner declared that he, a knight and a prince, did not intend to walk where he could ride. He set her lightly in her saddle, his touch as cool as Gereint's had been, like a brother's, or a father's. Of course it would be. They were kin. And she was a married woman.

She gathered the reins. Her mare was restive, in season. Wise of him to choose the gelding over his stallion. Dura s.h.i.+ed away from him, clambering onto the mule by herself, watching him with great wary eyes. It was fear, but clean, as of a storm in the desert: something to be feared and evaded, but never hated.

Hatred was beneath it.

No doubt he was as accustomed to that as to a silly girl's vaporings. He mounted with that grace of his that was more beast than human, and rode ahead of them into the street.

Aidan had not thought, before he dragged Joanna out with him. It was impulse, which he was given to, and not wisely, either. She had been ill and was still not as strong as she should have been. But her pleasure was warm; her anger had sunk down deep. There was color in her cheeks. She was-not pretty, no. G.o.d's whim had kept that for her brother. But handsome, certainly, and when she smiled, which she almost never did, she blazed into beauty.He was blinking in the light of it, barely noticing where they were, until his nose told him. The street named, wittily enough, the Street of the Bad Cooks. Pilgrims found their sustenance here, at ruinous prices, and saints alone knew what cost to their stomachs. His own heaved gently, once, and sub- sided.

They had left the horses at the crossing, and paid a boy to look after them. Joanna's choice. The boy would not abscond with the merchandise: Aidan's doing. He did not need to be told how it was, here. The Temple was a den of thieves still, after a thousand years.

Joanna, who knew this city as he knew his own sea-scented Cacr Gwent, led him with the silent maid down a pa.s.sage that might have been a cavern for all the light there was in it. Cities were like this in the east: covered over against the sun, often vaulted as was this into which they entered, lit like churches through louvers above and with lamps below, airy and aston- is.h.i.+ngly cool. Here the stink of human habitation was overlaid with sweetness, herbs and ftuits and flowers; and clamor 53.

enough to set him reeling. Fiercely he damped his senses. How the cats in the gutters bore it, he would never know.

. "Bom to it," said Joanna. He had spoken aloud without ' intending to: sure sign of his confusion. She eyed him. "You haven't been out before."

He glared. She did not have the grace to be abashed. "Only to the gate and the plain," he admitted, snapping it, because she would stare until he did. "To get out. To ride where the wind is free. I don't ... do well in cities. This . . ." His brow was damp. d.a.m.n it.

"Do you want to go home?"

"No!"

She barely flinched. His weakness seemed to make her ttronger. She did not presume to take his hand, but she said, *Tfou must have found Acre appalling."

"And Saint Mark. And Rome. And Ma.r.s.eilles. And Paris."

Naming them exorcised them, a little. "Acre was worse. After the sea; and so large. Jaffa I could almost bear. This is merely uncomfortable." If she reckoned that a lie, she did not say so.

"Are you hungry?"

He had caught her off guard. She recovered quickly, which he could admire. He had discovered a pa.s.sion for the fruits of the east: oranges, lemons, yellow apples of paradise. With these, and cheese from the market beyond, and wine from a tavern in the shadow of Holy Sepulcher, they made a feast.

Joanna forgot, or at least chose not to remember, that her legend was a coward within the walls of a city.

Some of his acquaintance might have confined that to thisdry: to the holiness that lay on it like its mantle of dust. He might almost have been fool enough to credit it, restive as he was, trapped in the center of so much humanity.

He looked up at the dome as they approached it. It had no such blazing beauty as that other in the Temple's heart, the Dome of the Rock that rose like a sun out of the east of Jerusa- lem. This was a blunter grandeur; the center of every vow of every man who had taken the cross. From it the King of Jerusa- lem took his t.i.tle, and every knight who rode under his banner: Defender of the Holy Sepulcher.

Here.

Mortal stone, first. A simple tomb, bare and unadorned, empty. Three days only had it held a body, and then that body was gone.

Piety had built the shrine over it. Zeal had raised up the 54 basilica in all its splendor, with its satellites about it: the lesser churches, the palace of the Patriarch, the cloister, the priory, the houses of monks and pilgrims and defenders. Chanting echoed out of it, and prayer, and the cries of the vendors who even here could ply their trade without heed to the holiness of the place.

They ascended the steep hill and pa.s.sed the gate with its columns from Byzantium, all three pressed together in the flood of pilgrims. Aidan perceived anew Joanna's height, a bare hand-width less than his own, and a solidity that astonished him- Her limbs were long, but her shoulders were wide, and her hips; her breast was deep and fall.

She was not aware of him, except as a presence at her side.

With an impatient mutter she broke free of the press, pausing in the court. Her veil had slipped. Even severely bound, her hair had a fancy to curl, to meet the sun with red lights and gold, and the rich red brown ofcherrywood.

The maid covered it with laudable, and annoying, alacrity.

Joanna hardly noticed. "See," she said. "There."

Two portals; and a third, rightward, that led to the chapel of Calvary. Leftward, high and square, the bell tower, silent now, domed as everything seemed to be where Islam or Byzantium had been. Behind it, the high strange roof of the Sepulcher, and the dome that was new and holy, and a little farther from them all, the lantern and the little dome of St. Helena's chapel.

There was a glitter on it all, and not all of it was holiness. They had made it rich, all they who wors.h.i.+pped hero at the Navel of the World.

For all the crush of people, the weight of sun and sanct.i.ty, the city-sickness that had beset him since he entered David's Gate, he was steadier here than anywhere but under open sky.

He would have liked to shout it aloud. See' Is there any holierplace than this? See haw it welcomes met Joanna did not ask him what he wanted. She took a place in the line of pilgrims, and he took his own behind her. She was barely tiring, seeing all this familiarity with eyes made new be- cause he was new to it. The pavement under their feet. The columns that held up the roof- The circle of pillars that rounded the Sepulcher, and over them the rotunda open to the sky. And all about that splendor of G.o.d, the splendor of man in mosaicwork: the Virgin; the Angel of the Annunciation; the apostles; the Emperor of the Romans, Constanrinc in his glory; Saint Michael of the sword; the prophets; Saint Helena 55.

bearing the True Cross; and focus of them all, the child Jesus for whom it had all been made.

But the tomb was hidden. In all that loftiness, it lay beneath a stone, a low lintel over it, and a priest on guard, directing each pilgrim downward to his heart's desire. King or com- moner, knight or monk, slave or free, hero it was all the same.

Even human, or not.

He could have fled. If the priest had known what descended under his brusque and tireless hand ... a flicker of thought as it touched: Half an hour more, and Marhod to rvUeve me, and, G.o.d's bones, if he stands a moment longer between me and the privy- He did not even see the unmasked face, the eyes opened wide to dimness, the green cat-flare of the lamplight in them. Aidan bent them down and crossed himself, and de- scended into stone-cool darkness. Empty; and for that, they wors.h.i.+pped it. He laid his brow against the stone. Empty.

Even prayer was silent here. It simply was.

He spoke his vow in silence, as he was bound to do. To defend this place with sword, tongue, life. But first, the other.

One word escaped him, a whisper in the gloom. "Alamut."

"Come," said the priest, sharp, shattering vow and sanct.i.ty- crime's up. Out."

And if he rose up in a tower of flame, what would this earth- bound idiot do?

He came quietly, head bowed, meek as any proper pilgrim.

Joanna was waiting. Her smile flickered.'Her hand slid into his, simple as a child's. She was thinking of wine lately drunk, and of a privy.

She would never understand why he laughed. Softly; but heads turned. He met glares with a cloying show of humility and a devout sign of the cross.

Thibaut was farious. "You went out without me. You went into the city, and you didn't tell me. I went half mad, looking for you."

Aidan refused to be contrite. Joanna was disgustingly smug.

"So," she said. "Next time, don't lie abed so late. It's your ownfault for being so lazy."

If Aidan had not been there, Thibaut would have leaped at her. Not that he could ever have won a fistfight-d.a.m.n her, she was still stronger than he was, and had the reach of him besides-but he was more than half mad, and she was smiling.

Simpering. Daring him to do it.

56 JwUth Tun- Therefore, by G.o.d's bones, he would not. He folded his arms till they hurt, and lifted his chin, "I may be lazy, but Vm ready to go to court. You won't even have time for a bach. You smell," he said, "like a horse. On a dunghill- In a garlic field."

She had no scruples about audiences. She screeched and sprang.