Devil's Bargain (35 page)

“Hush,” said Ahmad. He felt strange, remote, as if walled in glass. The ripple of shock was still advancing through the mosque: men leaping up, craning, staring, crying out.

The sultan’s mamluks closed in, standing on guard—now that it was too late to protect him. None of them belonged to
Sinan. Ahmad made sure of that with a swift and deceptively simple spell. If he had not been a fool—if he had not fallen into complacence—

His brother stirred in his arms. Life was draining out of him. Ahmad called in all the powers he had, all the arts and skills, to stop the blood, to heal the wounds. But the cavity of Yusuf’s chest was filling with blood, seeping from the pierced muscle of the heart. He was drowning inside his own body. Maybe a great master of healers could save him. But not Ahmad, whose gifts lay elsewhere.

People were shouting, struggling. There was fighting: men screaming invective, cursing one another, doing battle over whether the sultan was alive or dead.

That was the sound of an empire crumbling. “Brother,” said Yusuf, barely to be heard. “Whatever you must do, do.”

“You won’t die,” Ahmad said.

“I am dead,” said Yusuf. He drew in a breath; it broke in a spate of coughing. Somehow, through it, he spoke the words of Faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.”

“No,” said Ahmad, but it was an empty sound, without sense or meaning.

No emptier than the body in his arms. With the last of those most sacred words, Yusuf’s soul slipped free. Ahmad could not catch it or stop it. Its face was turned toward Paradise. Already it had forgotten the world of labor and pain.

That world had erupted in tumult. Ahmad should stop it. The emirs, Al-Afdal the heir—none of them had the presence of mind. They were all either gaping in mindless shock or running wild through the mosque and out into the court of the ancient Temple.

But if Ahmad rose and took the reins, he would have to let his brother go. He could not do that. The body was cooling even in the day’s heat. In time it would stiffen, but for the moment it still had the suppleness of life.

He looked down into his brother’s face. The lines of care and fear had smoothed away. Yusuf did not look as if he was
asleep; no sleeper was ever so pale or so still. But he had died in peace.

He had left a house of war. Ahmad laid him down as gently as if he could still feel the jarring of movement on his wounds, and said to the mamluks, “Let no one touch him but the servants of the dead.”

They bowed. One, even as he straightened, whipped about and flattened a shrieking, dancing madman.

Matters were grievously out of hand. The emirs were scattered; Al-Afdal had vanished. One man in mamluk’s dress stood motionless in all that chaos, surrounded by a strange stillness.

Ahmad met Mustafa’s gaze. Mustafa looked down at the sultan, then up again at Ahmad. Ahmad watched the choice take shape. It did not sadden him particularly. A man did what a man must. Had not the sultan bidden Ahmad do precisely that?

Mustafa bowed to them both, the living and the dead. An eddy of confusion passed between. When it cleared, Mustafa was gone.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-NINE

T
he King of the English sat in the shade of a canopy, sipping sherbet cooled with snow from Mount Hermon. He had suffered a bout of fever, the latest of all too many in this pestilential country; it had flattened him for two days. He was mending now, and none too soon, either, but he was still shaky on his feet.

“Your medicines are good,” he said to his physician, “but my sister’s are better. How long are you going to let her lie like a dead thing?”

“It’s not a matter of letting,” Master Judah said. His tone was cool but his lips were tight. “She is alive; the fever is gone. But she doesn’t wake.”

“Will she?” Richard asked. “Can she?”

“I don’t know,” said Master Judah.

Richard scowled. When he had bidden her find the key to the Old Man’s destruction, he had also bidden her leave the fetching to someone else. He should have known that she would ignore the second half of his command. She was as much
a Plantagenet as he was; she did as she pleased, with little enough regard for anyone else’s wishes.

The Seal hung heavy about his neck. It had not left him since she insisted that he take it. Whatever it did, it obviously did not protect him from the ills of the flesh. More than once he had considered shutting it away in his treasury, but he never quite brought himself to do it. She had been so insistent, and she had paid so high—it was a tribute of sorts, and a superstitious hope that as long as he wore the Seal, she would cling to life.

He drained his cup of sherbet. The hand that filled it anew did not belong to his squire. Blondel had been walking very softly since he confessed to accusing Mustafa of treason. Richard had not seen fit to punish him, but with that one, silence was more cruel than blows.

Richard was not ready yet to speak to Blondel. He turned his attention instead to the entertainment that several of his knights had arranged for him, to speed his recovery, they said—and, they did not say, to while away the time until he decided whether to attack Jerusalem. That decision should have been made days ago, but the fever had intervened. If he did not make it soon, he would lose his army. The French were growing fractious again; the English pined for their wet and misty country.

But today he would not think of that. He would watch what promised to be a very good fight: the settling of a dispute between a knight from Burgundy and a knight from Poitou. The exact details of the disagreement were not particularly clear, but they hardly mattered.

So far the Burgundian was getting the worst of it. He was not as young or by any means as thin as his adversary, and the heat, even this early in the morning, was taking its toll.

Richard watched with professional interest, because the Poitevin was a jouster of some renown; but when he laid a wager, he laid it on the Burgundian. The lesser fighter had the better horse, lighter and quicker and, though it sweated copiously, less visibly wilted by the heat. The Poitevin’s coal-black
charger was enormous even by the standard of the great horses of Flanders, and although it lumbered and strained through the turns and charges of the joust, no sweat darkened its heavy neck.

Having handed his gold bezant to the clerk who was keeping track of the wagers, Richard let his mind wander even as his eye took in the strokes of the fight. He liked to do that: it helped him think.

He would not camp in sight of Jerusalem. If it happened he must ride where he could see the city, he had a squire hold up a shield in front of his eyes. He had sworn an oath: he would not look on those walls and towers or the golden blaze of the Dome of the Rock until he had come to take it for God and the armies of Christendom. But scouts who kept the city in sight said that it had been boiling like an anthill since the evening before.

None of his spies had come in with reliable news. He missed his dog of a Saracen, and God help Blondel if the boy had either died or turned traitor in fact as well as in name. Mustafa would have known the cause of the turmoil in Jerusalem. These idiots had only been able to report that all the infidel raiding parties had begun to swarm back toward the city, and messengers—all of whom, damn them, had escaped pursuit—had ridden out at a flat gallop on the roads to the north and east and south.

God knew, there were rumors enough on the roads and in the villages. The sultan was preparing a killing stroke against the Franks; Islam was under siege from some hitherto unforeseen enemy; Jerusalem had been invaded in the night as Tyre had been, by an army of jinn and spirits of the air. There was even a rumor that no one credited: that Saladin himself was ill or wounded or dead.

Richard had prayed for that. He was not fool enough to expect that it was true. God only answered prayers when it suited His convenience.

The fever was still in him, making him giddy at odd moments. He focused once more on the fight.

The Poitevin was winning, curse him—the Burgundian was
near done for. The knights who had wagered on the champion were reckoning their winnings already.

The Poitevin’s horse collapsed abruptly. In the same instant the Burgundian flailed desperately at the Poitevin’s head. The heavy broadsword struck the helm with a thunderous clang. The Poitevin dropped like a stone.

The horse was dead—boiled in its own skin without the relief of sweat to cool it. The knight was alive but unconscious. The unexpected victor sat motionless astride his heaving and sweat-streaming destrier, until his squire came running to get him out of the stifling confinement of the helm and lead him dazedly off the field. His face in its frame of mail was a royal shade of purple.

As men from the cooks’ tents hauled the fallen horse off to the stewpots, a different disturbance caught Richard’s attention. “See what it is,” he said at random, waving off the clerk and the winnings of his wager. Several of the knights and squires nearby sprang up to obey, but Blondel was quickest on his feet.

Richard’s eyes followed him as he ran. Whatever his sins of jealousy and spite, he had the grace of a gazelle.

He came back so swiftly that he seemed to fly, and with such an expression on his face that Richard rose in alarm, half-drawing his sword. “Sire,” he said. “My lord, come. Please come.”

Richard only paused to order his attendants to stay where they were. They did not like the order, but they obeyed it. With Blondel for guide and escort, Richard strode toward the camp’s edge.

One of his scouting parties had come in with a captive: a slender man in the robes of the desert, with the headcloth drawn over his face. He seemed not to care where he was or who had caught him. He sat on the rocky ground, cross-legged in the infidel fashion; his head was bent, his shoulders bowed.

“He was headed here, sire,” the sergeant said. “He didn’t resist at all, except to stick a knife in Bernard when he tried to pull off the face veil.”

Bernard nursed a bandaged hand, but Richard could see that he would live. Of the infidel, Richard was not so sure. He reached out; his men tensed, on the alert, but the infidel made no move to attack.

He drew the veil aside from a face he knew very well indeed. He heard the hiss of Blondel’s breath, but the singer knew better than to say a word.

“Mustafa,” Richard said. His heart overflowed with joy and deep relief. “Thank God—Mustafa.”

At the sound of his name, Mustafa stiffened slightly. His skin had the waxy look of a man who has taxed his strength to the utmost. His eyes were blank, blind. He was not truly conscious; all that held him up was the warrior’s training that let him sleep upright wherever he happened to find himself.

Richard called for his men to fetch a litter. While they did that, he sent Blondel to fetch Master Judah. “Tell him to attend me in my tent. And tell him why.”

Blondel flinched as if Richard had struck him. For a moment Richard wondered if he would offer defiance, but instead he bowed and spun and ran.

This time Richard did not pause to watch him. The litter was taking too cursed long. Richard lifted Mustafa in his arms and carried him back through the camp. People stared, but Richard paid them no attention. Let them gape and wonder. It would keep them occupied.

Master Judah was waiting in Richard’s tent. Even as quickly as Richard had come there, the master already had a bed made and a bath waiting and all made ready for the care of a wounded man.

That at least was not Mustafa’s trouble—not more recently than his encounter with the Duke of Burgundy. Those hurts were healing well, with fewer scars than Richard might have expected.

As Master Judah examined him, Mustafa began to struggle, as if swimming upward through deep water. This time when his
eyes opened, they saw Richard. They saw precious little else, but they fixed on his face with feverish clarity. “Malik Ric,” he said. “My lord king.
My
 . . . lord king. It was a choice, you see. I made it. It may kill me, but I couldn’t make any other. In the end. When—”

“There,” said Richard, gentling him as if he had been a panicked horse. “There. You’re safe here. You have my word. No one under my command will lay a hand on you again.”

Mustafa did not hear him. “Sire,” he said. “The sultan is dead.”

How peculiar, Richard thought with the cool remoteness of shock. It never occurred to him to doubt the truth of it, if Mustafa said it. Mustafa never lied.

The one rumor everyone had discounted, and it was true. “Assassins?”

Mustafa nodded.

Richard drew a breath, then let it out. The Seal was heavy and cold against his breast. He sat beside the bed, leaning toward Mustafa.

The boy groped for his hand and clutched it with strength enough to bruise. With that for a lifeline, he said, “Sire, I need your forgiveness.”

“
You
need
my
—” Richard broke off. “What on earth for?”

“I left you,” Mustafa said. “I was angry. I was hurt; I wanted to hurt in return. I went to Jerusalem. The lord Saphadin took me in as a guest. I thought I could serve him; he’s an honorable man, and he was kind to me. But when my anger went away, I couldn’t do it. My loyalty is given, and can’t be taken away.” He sucked in a breath, shuddering. “I saw it,” he said. “I saw the sultan die. I was going to leave sooner, but the lord Saphadin asked me to stay through the day of prayer. He took me with him to the Father Mosque, where his brother was leading the prayer. In the midst of it, as we all performed the prostrations toward Mecca, two of the sultan’s mamluks, the most trusted of his servants, whom he had loved like sons, rose up and killed him.

“I was there beside him, my lord,” Mustafa said. “I killed one of the Assassins. Another mamluk killed the other.”

That did not surprise Richard. Mustafa never boasted of his prowess in war, but he was as sublime a predator as any cat. He killed fast and clean, and altogether without compunction.

“So you avenged the sultan,” Richard said. “You weren’t paid well for the service, from the look of you.”

Mustafa shook his head. “I didn’t give anyone time to be grateful. The city was in terrible disorder. The lord Saphadin was doing what he could, but it was like a madness. People were running wild, shrieking and striking at one another—crying out that every man was an Assassin. They set fire to a street of houses near the Wailing Wall, and tried to loot the storehouses, but the garrisons were able to stop that. I escaped when the messengers went out to summon the sultan’s emirs and his brothers and his sons—all but the eldest, who was there already. I came to you as fast as I could. I would have been faster, but my horse was shot from under me, and it took a while to steal another.”

Mustafa fell silent, as if he had run out of strength. Master Judah’s glare promised dire things if Richard pressed him much harder.

Richard rubbed an old scar that ran along his jaw under his beard, letting that narrow dark face fill his vision while the tale filled his mind.

Blondel had crept into the tent while Mustafa spoke—not excessively wise of him, but he never had been able to keep his curiosity in check. His round blue eyes were narrow, his full mouth tight, as they always were when he saw Richard with Mustafa. It was a pity, Richard thought, that two of the people he trusted most in the world were so confirmed in enmity.

“Blondel,” he said in a tone that he knew would catch and hold the singer’s attention. “Go to Hubert Walter. Tell him what you’ve heard here. Have him call the war council, and quickly. There’s no time to waste.”