Knights of the Black and White (45 page)

The only possible means of identifying the miscreant had been provided by an earring, found in Farrah’s clenched fist. It was of gold, and it bore traces of blood, indicating that she had ripped it from her assailant’s earlobe.

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Alice had let her fury be known, offering a substantial reward for any information leading to the capture of the rapist, but nothing had come of it until she visited Hassan’s encampment almost a month later, when he next returned to Edessa. There, while sitting in his tent, discussing the points of a particularly fine horse, he had offered her a small box, removing the lid to show her a carefully folded scrap of velvet cloth. Alice had reached for it, to unfold the cloth, but Hassan stopped her, waving a finger in warning, then tipped the box upside down so that its contents fell to the tabletop. It took Alice several moments to recognize what lay there as two severed human ears, one of them with a lobe that was still torn and scabbed over, while the other bore a solid-gold earring.

Her initial shock had been followed by a surge of nausea that she fought down stubbornly, already aware of the exultation that was swiftly replacing everything else within her. There, on the tabletop in front of her, lay her vengeance and her vindication for seeking it when everyone she knew, it seemed, had been urging her to forget the episode. Gritting her teeth, she had forced herself to lean forward and pick up the ear that held the ring. It felt like nothing she had ever handled before, hard and cold and lacking in any kind of texture that would suggest it had ever been human or warm and alive. When she opened her fingers and let it fall to the tabletop again, the ring made a heavy, clacking sound. She sat back and looked at Hassan.

“Where is he? Where are you holding the rest of 430

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him?” She forced herself to look and sound moved, asking the question flatly, without emphasis, in the flawless Arabic she preferred to her father’s native language.

A tiny tic that might have been the beginnings of a still-born smile flickered at one side of Hassan’s mouth, but he shook his head and no trace of humor materialized. “I am not. The man is dead, killed while being taken. That was some time ago.” He wiggled a thumb to indicate the ears. “These were brought to me yesterday, packed in salt.”

Careful to keep her face expressionless, Alice nodded her head once. “I will have the reward sent to you this afternoon.”

“There is no need. I seek no reward. I have no need of money.”

“Perhaps not, but the man who brought this about probably does.”

Hassan’s headshake was small but decisive. “He has been paid already. I rewarded him when he delivered the evidence.”

“I see. You mean he did this for you, not for me or my reward.” It was a statement, not a question, and when the Muslim inclined his head in agreement, Alice sat up straighter. “Then why did you order this? What do you want from me?”

Now Hassan smiled. “I want nothing from you, Princess Alice … nothing.” When he saw that she was about to speak again, he resumed smoothly. “You are an entirely remarkable young woman for your years, Princess Alice, and I anticipate that you are destined to gen-

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erate great change in these lands, for both Muslim and Christian. In the course of time, I feel convinced, you will replace your able father as ruler here, for there is nothing anywhere to forbid the ruler of any of your Frankish lands from being a woman. And I believe you will be a finer, stronger ruler even than he.”

“I will be. You may rely on that.” Her voice had been deadly serious, and her listener gave no sign of doubting her as she continued. “But how, or why, should that have any significance to you, a Muslim and a trader in horse flesh?”

“Because I am far more than either one of those.”

Alice’s brows had drawn together in a frown, but Hassan was grinning broadly. “To do what I must truly do in Allah’s holy name, I am required to be a student of humanity. Thus, when I see you frown and your eyes flash the way they did a moment ago, I have great hope for the future, because you are not afraid to do what you perceive needs to be done.” His finger flicked idly towards the ears on the tabletop. “You have no fear of speaking the truth, no fear of demanding and taking what you want and what you believe to be right. That makes you unique among the others who surround you, most of whom would rather suffer shame and swallow insults than speak up and utter truths that might later come back to cause them discomfort. Within a society where compromise and corruption are commonplace, you represent, even at your very young age, a cleansing breeze. A fresh wind, in fact.”

Hassan’s face was sober now, no vestige of levity or humor to be seen in it. “You will find, as you pass 432

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through life, that there will be people who will offend you, grieve you, inconvenience you, and infuriate you.

Some of them will thwart you, undermine you and your reputation, work to confound your best efforts and designs, and generally make nuisances of themselves. Many of those you will be able to deal with on your own terms.

I have no doubt that you have already mastered the means of keeping most of such people firmly in their places. But there will always be a few, Princess, who will prove to be intolerable, their enmity a constant source of aggravation and frustration.” He indicated the severed ears again. “The owner of those adornments will never be seen again. He has vanished from the earth and from the awareness of men.”

Hassan paused again, and then said, deliberately, so that there could be no ambiguity or misunderstanding,

“Anyone can vanish, Princess. Anyone. There is no person alive in the world today who cannot be made to disappear, suddenly, completely, and mysteriously. But it is also true that there is no person alive in the world today who cannot be made to die violently and shockingly, and highly visibly, in any public place at any hour of the day.”

Alice’s mouth had gone dry and she had to moisten her lips before she could respond, for she understood exactly what he was saying. “You mean, killed for the effect the killing will create.”

“Precisely.”

“Like the Assassins. They kill for effect, and to spread terror.”

Hassan shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “It surprises The Temptress

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me that you should know the name, but yes, if you so wish, like the Assassins. The Hashshashin. But it is most unwise to speak openly of the Hashshashin or their activities. And it is also unnecessary. Mothers use their name to frighten their children and make them behave, but most people do not really believe that the Hashshashin truly exist.

“Between us two, however, conversing alone and privately, suffice it to say that such matters as we have discussed are simple to arrange, and highly effective in their execution. You need simply call on me, at any time, and the matter is concluded.”

Now, looking back on that conversation, Alice reflected that she had come to know the man himself well enough that she would not hesitate to call upon him should the need ever arise. He was unlike any other man of her acquaintance. From the outset of their relationship, he had clearly decided to trust Alice implicitly, for reasons of his own that he never explained to her—she was, after all, a woman
and
a Christian Frank, both of which should have precluded any interaction between the two of them—and she had always been deeply aware of the honor he had accorded her in the doing of it. And she respected and admired him greatly, ignoring the fact that her father would have had him executed out of hand had he known Hassan’s true identity. His name, for one thing, was not really Hassan. That was merely a title, indicating his rank and status to those who knew anything of the organization to which he belonged. He was, as she had suspected, an Assassin, the senior member of that secretive and greatly feared organization in the Frankish lands of 434

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Outremer. An Ismaili Shi’ite Muslim, he had been born in the Yemen, like the founder of his organization centuries earlier, and had been raised to be one of the fedayeen, zealots prepared to sacrifice their lives for the cause in which they believed and for which they fought.

He told her that he had taken the name Hassan in honor of Al-Hassan, Hasan-I Sabbah, the Sheikh of Alamut, who was spoken of nowadays in hushed, awe-stricken tones as the Old Man of the Mountain, founder of the Assassins.

The cult had existed since the eighth century, but in recent years, after the fall of the Alamut fortress, the charismatic Al-Hassan had reorganized his followers as single-mindedly religious enforcers, dedicated to the destruction of ruling Sunni Abbasid caliphs. Since that time, the Shiite Assassins had pursued a campaign of ruthless terror centered around fearlessly executed public murders of prominent Sunni figures. Their weapon of choice was a dagger, and they were meticulous in killing only the targeted individual, and they often performed their murders in mosques.

The fact that they used only daggers ensured that their killings were always sudden, unexpected, and violent, and their attacks had the appearance of being inescapable.

The killer would frequently wear a disguise, enabling him to penetrate close to the target, and the subsequent murder would spread terror and confusion among the enemy. Because they were so close to their victim, the killers were frequently unable to escape the scene of their crime, but faced with certain death, the Assassins never committed suicide. They much preferred the notoriety attached to being killed by their captors.

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Hassan explained to Alice that their name, the Hashshashin, which the Franks had corrupted to Assassins, supposedly meant “the eaters of hashish,” and it was commonly believed to have been given to them by their implacable enemies, the Sunni Muslims. The eaters of hashish, the orthodox Sunni claimed, defiled their bodies by polluting themselves with drugs in order to induce the trancelike state that permitted them to kill with such cold-blooded savagery and lack of conscience, even in holy places.

Hassan rejected the Sunni contention as ludicrous, saying that it was demonstrably political and self-serving.

He admitted readily that his people used hashish, but he maintained that they used it for religious reasons, as part of their initiation ritual when they joined the ranks of the secretive organization, and thereafter as an aid to meditation. He reminded Alice of her own experiences under the influence of the drug, which his people supplied regularly for her own use. It was a relaxant, not a stimulant, and its users were generally rendered comatose to some extent, and certainly incapable of violence. The Assassins did not use it, in any sense, to bolster their courage or their dedication in any of their endeavors, and no one who knew anything about the noble and austere Al-Hassan, he told Alice, could ever believe that the devout sheikh would indulge in the taking of debilitating drugs.

Hassan’s own belief was that the name Hashshashin had originally meant “the followers of Al-Hassan” in the dialect of the Ismailis of the Yemen.

Alice had no illusions about Hassan’s openness with 436

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her; she knew that he had something in mind in courting her goodwill the way he had, something that would work to his advantage and fit his agenda at some time in the future. That was to be expected in the world in which she lived, and it bothered her not at all. Everyone in power, anywhere, worked constantly towards safeguarding and increasing that power. Besides, knowing what she knew about who and what Hassan was, she was also fore-warned, and therefore forearmed against anything he might attempt in the future, and she knew he was fully aware of that.

Now she heard the swish and click of beaded curtains at her back and turned to face her visitor.

“You sent for me, Princess. How may I serve you?”

“As well as you always do. Be seated, Hassan, and hear what I have to say. I have a problem that I do not think I can resolve without your help—” She saw the flare of interest in his eyes and quickly held up a hand, smiling.

“No, I do not desire to have someone vanish, but there is an individual—a man—with whom I need specific help.”

Hassan’s grin was instantaneous. “
You
need help with a man?”

Alice ignored his raillery and proceeded to tell him about the knight monk St. Clair and how he had proved to be immune to the power of her regular hashish. She was careful to give Hassan no indication that what she sought from the monk was information, merely asking him if he knew of any drug, or combination of drugs, that would render a man incapable of remembering what The Temptress

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happened to him while he was drugged. She was more than content to leave Hassan to draw whatever lascivious conclusions he wished from what she was asking, and after a while he stood up and bowed deeply to her, waving his hand in salaam, from his forehead, to his lips, to his heart. He left then as silently as he had appeared, but Alice was content knowing that by the same hour of the following day she would have in her possession the means to overcome all conceivable resistance on the part of Brother Stephen St. Clair.

EIGHT

St. Clair was dreaming, a very pleasant, lethargic yet somehow frightening dream that had him struggling for wakefulness. It was not the woman in his dream who was causing him the concern, for he could see practically nothing of her, muffled in heavy garments as she was, and his only physical contact with her was the painful grip she had on his wrist, pulling him along behind her faster than he wanted to move, so that he staggered occasionally, unable to keep pace. He knew, vaguely, that she had a comely face, dark skinned with enormous brown eyes, but had anyone asked him how he knew that, he could not have told them.

This dream woman had come to him in a darkened room, shaking him into semi-wakefulness and talking unintelligibly in tones of great urgency, tugging and pulling at him all the while until he arose from the bed. He sus-438