The Dagger and the Cross (40 page)

It was not so ill to have her there. Zoe was not pleased,
but Zoe, like Saladin, had a clearer eye than most. And she knew whose child
Ysabel was. She had been there the night Joanna almost died, long ago in
Aleppo, when Aidan—and, more deadly by far, Morgiana—learned that he had
begotten a child. Joanna was alive because Aidan, who had no power to heal,
still had known what human healers knew of how to remove a dagger from a woman’s
heart, and how not to kill her while he did it; but when that was done, it was
for Zoe to see that she did not die of shock or wound-fever, or lose her baby.

When Ysabel was born, Aidan was there. Zoe had not liked
that, either; it went sorely against her grain to share a birthing with a man.
But Aidan was not to be quarreled with. “Our children are different,” he had
said to Joanna, somewhat before she came to childbed. “For your safety as much
as for her own, I must be with her when she is born.”

That had been a long birth. Longer by far than this one.
Ysabel had fought it, her father said. Witch-children did. They had will for
that, and consciousness. He had been talking to her as his kind did, in
thoughts without words, since she began to move in the womb; he told Joanna
that, well after Ysabel was born, when she could not recoil or grow afraid. But
she had suspected something like it. She had been more aware of Ysabel within
her than of Aimery before her, or than she would be of any of her children
after. She was not shocked when the small, yelling, furious body was laid on
her belly, and its howling stopped, and it opened eyes that, though stunned by
the light, saw her with perfect and wondering clarity. Joanna saw that those
eyes were not human. They accepted this world and her mother as Joanna accepted
her daughter, warily but with growing gladness.

Ysabel-then and Ysabel-now blurred and came together. “Akiva
has the gift,” Ysabel said, envious. “The way the king does. I wish I wasn’t so
young. I wish I had my gifts.”

“But,” said Joanna, gasping it between contractions, “you
have. As your f—your uncle has. He told me so.”

Ysabel did not leap on the slip. Joanna prayed that she had
not noticed it at all; had taken it for a breath drawn awry. Now was no time to
tell her daughter that she had been lied to all her life.

Joanna focused herself narrowly on getting Ranulf’s last
child born alive. Akiva was tiring, or his power was not strong enough yet to
take away the great pains that heralded birth. Each in succession made itself
more strongly felt, though never as strong as if there had been no witch-child
standing by her with sweat running down his face, every atom of his being fixed
on making this birth go as it should. She could not persuade him to give over.
After a while she stopped trying.

“Now,” one of them said. “Once more. Once—
Now!”

o0o

Silence. A prick of fear. Then, blessedly loud, the baby’s
cry.

Zoe lifted it. Her. Clotted with birth-blood, purple-red,
flailing, howling like a banshee: beautiful. Five fingers on each hand, five
toes on each foot, arms and legs as they ought to be, down of damp dark hair,
eyes and nose and mouth, small big-bellied body with the discreet fold of its
sex. She stopped crying soon enough and settled into this new art of breathing.

Joanna let herself sink into the bed and opened her arms.
Zoe laid the child in them, all wet as she was, still bound to her mother by
the cord. “Salima,” Joanna said. The name came out of its own accord; it was
not the one she had chosen some while since. A Muslim name for a child born
under the Muslim sultan. It was a kind of defiance. It meant, not
defeat,
but
peace.
And in peace, hope.

Damascus was ancient and beautiful, a green city in the
endless dun expanse of the desert, a vision of paradise: towers and minarets
above the green of fields and orchards, watered by the myriad streams of
Barada. There was no city older, and few more fair to see.

It was a prison.

Aidan was not, they all kept telling him, a prisoner. He was
ransomed, he was an honored guest, when it was safe he would be permitted to
depart.

“Safe,” he said, spitting it. “For whom? I gave my word. Has
Saladin forgotten all that I am?”

“He remembers,” Morgiana said.

It was not her house in which the brothers and their
companions were kept. This belonged to an emir who rode now with Saladin. His
wives kept apart in the harem, but his servants were assiduous in seeing to the
guests’ comfort. They all knew Morgiana: the emir, whose name was Ishak ibn
Farouk, had inherited her by way of his father, whom she reckoned the best swordsmith
in Syria and perhaps in the world. Farouk, and his father and grandfather
before him, had always forged her blades. Ishak had none of their gift; he was
born not to forge blades but to wield them. His sister’s husband pursued the
family’s calling, and his sister’s sons showed signs of taking after their
father. The succession, as Ishak liked to say, was secure. He could settle with
a clear conscience to the life of a knight of Islam.

Ishak was with Saladin. He had been at the capture of Acre.
He was part of the vast locust-swarm that swept over Outremer, devouring all
before it.

Aidan prowled the tiled halls and the fountained courtyards
as if they had been a cage. Each castle that fell, each city that surrendered,
stabbed his heart to fresh pain. And he could do nothing. His word was given.
He could not escape, he could not arm himself, he could not fight.

Morgiana gave him no comfort. He could not help but know
what it meant that she was here and not with her sultan. She too had made
choices.

But she kept him here. She tried to distract him. She walked
or rode with him through the city; she took him hunting among the orchards; she
took him with honest joy to her bed.

He cherished every moment of her presence, but it was
driving him mad. Even Aimery was a better prisoner than Aidan. And why not?
Aimery was biding his time. When he was freed, he would go back to war against
the infidel.

Gwydion sank into deepening quiet. He too waited, not to be
freed to fight, but to return to his own kingdom. Aidan’s prowling and snarling
barely ruffled his calm.

His calm ruffled Aidan more than enough. “O serenity! Who
would guess that you turn madman in a battle?”

“I do not,” said Gwydion. “I lose my temper. No more than
that.”

“So does the sea lose its temper when it swallows the fleet.
Why do you bottle yourself up now? Why aren’t you acting like a reasonable
being, instead of making sure it will all come out again when you least want it
to? When there’s a sword in your hand and an enemy in front of you, and you go
blood-mad.”

“I,” said Gwydion with the barest hint of tightness, “am a
reasonable being.”

“Now you are.” Aidan turned away in disgust. Gwydion would
never give him a decent fight. This was the best one he could ever get out of him: a suggestion of displeasure, a hint of ripple in his calm.

Morgiana would not fight, either. “Last time was enough,” she said.

“Then let me out,” he said. “Let me out of this trap.” She
would not. No more than she would fight.

o0o

There were other knightly prisoners in Damascus, and some
had been there unransomed far longer than Aidan. The king and the Grand Master
of the Templars, once they had recovered fully from the ravages of the battle,
were taken out of the city and compelled to ride with Saladin, living trophies
of his victory. Humphrey of Toron rode with them to serve as their interpreter.

The king’s brother remained under guard in the citadel.
Aidan was permitted to call on him, and did, for charity; but Aidan had never
been overfond of Messire Amalric de Lusignan. As a fellow in suffering, he left
somewhat to be desired.

Most bitter of all was what had become of the lesser folk of
the army. Twenty-five thousand lived and were taken prisoner. Those who did not
die of wounds or ill-treatment were sold in the slave market of Damascus.

Aidan could not buy them all. Morgiana would not let him buy
even one. “No,” she said in front of one of many blocks with Franks chained to
it, sullen or snarling or numb with shock. “What Allah has written, Allah has
written. You have your mamluks who are left. Be content with them.”

He would have bid for some of them in spite of her, but she
had the purse and would not give it up. Her eyes, level on him, commanded him
to see sense. If he beggared himself, well and good. But what of his mamluks
here, his people in Millefleurs, his kin who had need of his wealth and his
strength? What would become of them?

A prince, even a prince who was a witch, could not cure all
the ills of the world. So should he have learned long ago.

“But some of them,” he said with sudden passion, “some of
them I can mend. However poorly. For however little a while.”

Morgiana narrowed her eyes. After a moment she handed him
the purse.

He bought as many of the captives as he could, and set them
free; and they were properly grateful, most of them, if they still had wits
left for it. But there were always more. There would never be an end to them.

o0o

“That man,” Morgiana said, “is the worst captive I have ever
seen or heard of.”

“Then let him go,” said Gwydion.

She glared at him. He had barely interrupted his reading to
speak to her. He was reading holy Koran. To understand it, he said, inasmuch as
he could with his imperfect Arabic.

“How can I let him go?” she demanded. “He’ll only ride
hell-for-leather for the war, and tear himself apart wanting to fight in it.”

“Not if you go with him.”

Her lip curled. “Yes. Then he’ll simply tear me apart. I can’t
trust him, brother my lord.”

“And why can’t you trust him?” He did not wait for her to
answer. “Because, sister my lady. He knows how little trust you place in his
given word.”

“I trust his word!”

“Then let him go.”

She stood in thrumming silence. Gwydion went back to his
reading. His lips moved slowly, puzzling out the intricacies of the Prophet’s
Arabic. He stopped, frowning faintly.

“‘Folly,’” she said harshly. “‘Folly’ is the word you want.”

He bowed his thanks. She left him to it.

o0o

Her friend the swordsmith’s daughter had no time for her:
one of the children was ailing, and it was not anything Morgiana could heal,
nor anything deadly enough to shock the household by dragging Gwydion into it.
She passed from place to place as her power moved her. None of them lightened
her mood. Her cavern in Persia made it worse by far. There were too many
memories in it. The swordsmith’s daughter, Ishak’s sister, estranged from her
husband and given sanctuary there with her eldest son, who was now a well-grown
lad apprenticed to his father; and Aidan, held captive then as now, and
considerably less well disposed toward his captor. He had wanted her blood
then. And so he had had it, if never in the way he had expected: not heart’s
blood but maiden blood. He had been startled to find her truly virgin. Startled
and, somewhat to his credit, abashed. It was not in Aidan to be a ravisher of
maidens.

Then, he had hated her, but he had endured his captivity
because he thought that it accomplished something: it kept her from endangering
his kin. Now he had no such comfort. He knew that Joanna and her children had
been in Acre when it fell. He knew of her newborn daughter and of her
departure, the moment she was allowed out of her bed, for Tyre.

Morgiana spun like a devil-wind, loathing that great, fecund
cow of a Frank. But thinking clearly for all of that, and seeing by degrees
what had been eluding her.

Tyre was safe. It was no more or less impregnable than Acre,
but it was full of men who knew how to fight. They had all gone there, fleeing
the sultan, Raymond of Tripoli first, but he left too soon and sought his own
city. He thought Tripoli more easily defended than Tyre, less likely to tempt
the sultan to attack it. So it was. But he reckoned without the one who came to
Tyre after him.

Conrad of Montferrat, son of the marquis who had been taken
at Hattin, kinsman to the kings of Jerusalem, was young but he was wily, and he
had studied in the best school of intrigue in the world: at the court of the
emperor in Constantinople. He had, unfortunately, outsmarted himself; someone
died who had influence in high places, and Conrad’s hand was evident in it. He
left the City in haste, sailing well ahead of the news of Hattin. He brought
his ship to harbor in Acre just after Saladin left it, but it was clear who
held the city. If Saladin’s son had been only a little wiser in the ways of
war, Conrad would have been taken prisoner. But al-Afdal moved too slowly.
Conrad escaped and sailed headlong for Tyre.

He found it on the brink of surrender. He was whitely
furious to see the kingdom fallen so far; he disposed of Reynaud of Sidon, who
had been in command of the city and who was about to hand it over uncontested
to the enemy. He took command himself, drove the garrison to the ramparts, and
made it clear that Tyre would not surrender without a fight.

Saladin was not minded to give it one. He had the rest of
Outremer to occupy him. If all the rats chose to gather in that single
bolthole, then so much the better; he could trap them at his leisure.

“Not when they have the sea at their backs and ships to sail
on it,” Morgiana said. The echoes of her voice rang faintly to the roof of the
cavern. She could, if she willed it, step from this hidden place in Persia to
the heart of the sultan’s camp, and warn him that even rats were deadly under a
strong king. Conrad wanted to be that. Morgiana could read him with ease,
simply from what was said of him.

She did not move. She had left the sultan’s service after
Hattin. “You need me no longer,” she had said. “Those against whom I defended
you are in your power. Hereafter you need no more aid than mortal men can give.”