Devil's Bargain (4 page)

“The weather,” Saphadin said. “The road. The armies that infest it. The inevitable truth: that this is our land. Even if you win as far as Jerusalem, how will you hold it? As soon as you sail away again, we’ll take it back. You are this Crusade, King of the English. Without you, it has no one strong enough to lead it.”

“There are a fair few lords of Outremer who might beg to differ,” Richard said with remarkable lack of temper. “You speak hard words, lord. But they say I’m a hard man. I’ve sworn oaths; I intend to keep them. I won’t stop until the Holy Sepulcher is back in Christian hands.”

Saphadin rose. He was smiling, but very faintly. “And we will do everything in our power to stop you.”

“You can try,” Richard said, as exquisitely polite as his mother could have been. “I’ll even give you peace—if you will go back to your own country. Do that, and swear never to wage war against us again, and I’ll honor my half of the bargain.”

Saphadin turned on his heel without a word. The shock of his rudeness startled even his own men; one or two of Richard’s knights lurched forward, ready to throttle him where he stood. But Richard held them with a glance. “Let him go,” he said. “He wants a battle as much as we do. Will you stop him from getting it ready?”

They yielded to that. Saphadin, who was not known to speak the dialect of Anjou, ignored them all. He sprang into his mare’s saddle without touching the stirrup. Even as he settled on her back, she was off at a gallop.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

S
ioned had come to see the sultan’s embassy not for any power or prescience, but because she was curious. There were no sick or wounded to look after just then, and she was still too restless from marching to retreat to her tent. She wandered toward the camp’s edge, expecting nothing in particular. Saracens were all too familiar a sight by now, with their dark faces and their beards and their turbans. They had faded from the exotic to the almost commonplace.

In that idle frame of mind, she saw the doubled guard of Templars and Turks and the lordly ones they protected, and was transfixed.

Magic—true magic—was everywhere: in the earth, in sea and sky, even in the works of men’s hands. The world was full of it. And yet in mortal men it was not so common at all. Mages were as rare as jewels in the earth.

She was bred to magic, raised and nurtured in it. Her knowledge was not what she would have liked it to be. She was a young mage, more promise still than fulfillment.

This lord of the Saracens was a mage of beauty and power.
There were handsomer men in the world, though this one was hardly ill to look at: a narrow face, fine-drawn but strong, and a body like a steel blade, slender and erect. He had a beautiful seat on a horse. He was not in first youth, but old age was years away yet. He carried himself without arrogance but as one who had been born to rule—like a prince, as indeed he must be.

A long sigh escaped her. Princes were seldom mages; when they were, they could be deadly dangerous. She had only to think of Eleanor, left behind, thank the gods, in Acre.

She could sense no taint of darkness on this one. There was a flavor to his magic that she recognized from elsewhere: a richness and depth to it that spoke of the ancient lore of Egypt. The sultan had been lord of Egypt before he was sultan of Syria, and this one of his brothers had ruled it for a goodly while after Saladin went on to Damascus.

What she felt was lust, pure and simple—to know what he knew; to match her magic to the living fire of his. She had never known a yearning so strong or a desire so irresistible. It was all she could do to stand still, be quiet, watch and listen. This was no time or place to indulge the cravings of her magical self.

As he rode out with that light arrogant carriage, as if daring one of the crossbowmen to put a bolt in his back, she thought for an instant that he paused; that he glanced toward her. Her heart stumbled to a halt, then began to beat very hard.

The moment passed. He did not seem to recognize her after all, or to see what or who she was. He rode away, back to his brother and his side of the war.

The forest beyond the river was called Arsuf, which was also the name of the fortress on the other side of it. It was a freak of nature, a forest in an all but treeless country, but few men from the western forests found any comfort in this one. There was no easy way around it: on the right hand it stretched toward the sea, and on the left it spread through a torn and tumbled country, too rough for an army this large to pass. The only practical
way was to go through it, and try to angle toward the open land beside the sea.

Late the day after Saphadin came to Richard’s camp, the Franks marched with deep relief out of the wilderness of trees. They had had a grim time of it in the forest, marching in terror that the infidels would set the wood afire. But Richard’s will had held them to their ranks. Now they had come to the mouth of a river not far from the sea. The forest loomed behind them and spread in a dark shadow along the hills to the east. There was open land ahead, a waste of sand and scrub, blessedly naked to the sky.

They slept under stars in tents huddled close together under heavy guard. Tomorrow’s march would be hard, but there were walls ahead, and the protection of the stronghold, with its gardens and orchards to feed them and give them rest. The cantor’s call soared up:
Holy Sepulcher, defend us!
Then silence fell, and the swift dark.

Mustafa was having an interesting night. Richard’s scouts were idiots, in his estimation; either they trampled so loudly that half of Islam could hear them, or they lost their way and stumbled headlong into the sultan’s own scouting parties. Mustafa, on the other hand, could move as soft as a shadow when it pleased him, and he could track a man by the memory of his passing in the air. There had been many such passings not long ago—an army’s worth, and not a small army, either.

When the king’s army camped by the River of Salt just beyond the forest’s edge, he went back into the wood, hunting the sultan’s men. He had a feeling in his bones; that uneasiness drew him out and sent him spying when, like the rest of Richard’s servants, he should have been asleep.

The army of Islam was somewhat closer than he had expected. The sultan’s sentries were alert: he nearly fell afoul of a party of scouts. The snort of a horse warned him; he scrambled into the feeble cover of a downed tree.

In daylight that would have been useless, but in the dark
they rode past him. He caught a snatch of conversation, a mutter of Turkish dialect. It was only a few words, but it guided him along the way they had come.

The camp began just over the hill, spreading far out under the trees. Mustafa made no effort to count the fires. There were too many. The whole army of Islam was here, the massed strength of the jihad.

He should have left as soon as he knew that, gone back to the Frankish camp and told Richard what he knew and taken his well-earned rest. But it was barely midnight, and Mustafa had a desire to see how far the camp extended. He did not doubt at all that by morning it would have melted away, and the sultan’s army would be up and in arms, awaiting the signal to destroy the Franks.

He crept toward the camp, moving as soft as a breath of air through the trees. At a sudden clatter, he froze.

His senses were at fever pitch. A stone had rattled on another. A twig snapped, as loud as a shout. Two burly figures paused at the summit of the hill, silhouetted against the starlit sky, before continuing with their efforts at stealth.

Franks, of course. They advanced at a crouch, catching every twig and stone, and when that failed, rustling in the undergrowth. Mustafa could have stood upright and walked in his normal fashion behind them, and been both quieter and more difficult to detect.

The sultan’s sentries caught them beyond the first ring of campfires. Once more Mustafa melted into the darkness. The prisoners would be taken into the camp, he supposed, and held until there could be an exchange, perhaps after the battle. He would wait a little while, then conceal himself in plain sight, walking in his turban and his coat of scale armor among an army of men who looked and dressed much the same as he.

The sentries bound their captives and flung them down roughly, and without a word exchanged among them, hacked the heads from the men’s shoulders. They left the bodies to bleed out in the forest mould, and took the heads with them into the camp.

Mustafa lay for a long while with the stink of blood and death in his nostrils and a coldness in his heart. Why he should be so startled, he did not know. War was brutal, and the sultan’s men had not forgiven Richard the massacre of prisoners at Acre. These two were poor recompense, but they were a beginning.

When he could trust his knees not to buckle, he rose. His face was turned toward the camp. If he was caught, he would die as the Franks had. He cared—a great deal. But he could not seem to do anything about it.

Curiosity was his besetting fault, and would be the death of him—but not tonight. He walked calmly, without stealth, among the lines and curves of tents.

There was no wine in this camp, unless it was very well concealed, and no carousing. The men slept in comfort, well fed and well supplied with water. Those who were awake were praying in a murmur of holy words.

The sultan was awake, and with him the fire of magic that was his brother. They held a late council with a handful of emirs who had come in to complete the army. The flap of the tent was up, the only wall the curtain of gauze that kept out the night insects. Lamplight glowed like a pearl behind it.

Mustafa crept so close that he lay against the tent’s wall, deep in shadow but almost within reach of the light. The sultan’s guards watched the front, where the light was, but never thought to circle round into the dark.

The gathering was nearly finished. The cups of sherbet were empty, the emirs shifting, clearing their throats, hinting at dismissal. The sultan took pity on their weakness: he said, “Go, sleep. It will be an early dawn, and God willing, a victorious day.”

They took their leave with barely concealed relief, but the lord Saphadin lingered in the glow of the lamplight. “This isn’t Hattin,” he said. “There’s no dithering fool leading the Franks now. The Lionheart is a general, and he’ll be ready for whatever we can fling at him.”

“Thirty thousand of us?” The sultan sighed and stretched, wincing as his bones creaked. He was not a young man; he had
lived a life of war. He was wise with his years, but tired, too. “We’ll take him in Arsuf, and put an end to his Crusade.”

“I do hope so,” said Saphadin.

The sultan shot him a glance. “What is it? Have you had a foreseeing?”

Saphadin did not answer directly. “You’re well guarded as always. I’ll set wards when I go. By your leave, of course.”

His brother frowned. “Is it
that
one again?”

“Not tonight,” said Saphadin.

That was all the sultan was going to get: Mustafa could see that he knew it. He was not happy, but he yielded to the inevitable. “Don’t forget to protect yourself while you protect me,” he said.

Saphadin bowed, but promised nothing. Saladin sighed with a touch of temper, and let him go.

Mustafa should have left while the sultan and his brother were speaking. There would have been time to slip away, to melt into the dark. But he was too greedy to hear it all. The lord Saphadin came out of the light, murmuring words that raised the circle of protection about the sultan’s tent. Mustafa was caught before he could move, held in bonds that would not yield.

He would die. The Franks had been victims of the sultan’s revenge, but a deserter who had thrown himself at the Lionheart’s feet . . . his death would not be either easy or slow.

He did his best to still his hammering heart, and gave himself up to his God. Skeins of prayer drifted through his head: bits of the Koran, scraps of the daily devotions, fragments from his childhood in one of the lesser Berber dialects. The memory of the words comforted him, spoken in his mother’s soft voice, with the lilt that was all her own.

She was long gone, cut to pieces in a raid, and the rest of his family with her. The pain was old, like the scars of battle and then of slavery. He was whole now, as whole as he could be; though that would not last much longer.

The lord Saphadin stood over him, looking down at him with eyes that saw clearly in the dark. To Mustafa’s sight he was a shape of shadow limned in a faint silver shimmer, as if he had bathed in moonlight. Mustafa was not afraid. He was beautiful, as the angel of death was said to be. Maybe after all he would be merciful.

He stooped and raised Mustafa to his feet. The wards held, so that Mustafa could not either drop or run. He could not hide his face, either.

Saphadin looked him up and down. “A Muslim dog in a Frankish collar,” he said. “You stink of pork.”

Mustafa said nothing. Defiance might gratify him and quicken his death, but he could not grasp the words long enough to speak them.

“Go back to your master,” said Saphadin, “and tell him that Islam will abandon this land when God Himself forsakes it.”

Mustafa swallowed. Go back? He was to live? But—

Saphadin laid a finger on Mustafa’s brow between the eyes. The touch was light, barely to be felt, and yet it was like a dart of fire piercing his skull. “And tell the other one,” Saphadin said, bending close, speaking softly in his ear, “the great one, the prince of mages, that magic will negate magic. We do not fight in that way here.”

At last Mustafa found his voice. “But there is no—”

“Go, betrayer of Islam,” Saphadin said with no rancor in his voice, “before the guards find you. Not all my brother’s servants are as softhearted as I.”

The bonds were loosed. Mustafa could move. He hardly needed Saphadin’s encouragement to bolt for freedom.