The Dagger and the Cross (51 page)

It was in the cloister that Marco found them, and a third
with them, King Guy’s brother as rough-hewn and opaque-eyed as ever, but
looking remarkably pleased with himself. He did not seem to have suffered from
his captivity among the Saracens. As Marco paused to take stock, Messire
Amalric said, “I don’t know that we need to do anything further. We did what we
set out to do. The kingdom is safe from all of them. They’ll be gone before the
month is out, sailing back where they came from.”

“Is that all you care for?” Brother Thomas demanded of him. “That
they be cast out of your garden, even if it be into another’s?”

Messire Amalric refused to be offended. “That’s all I ever pretended
to want. I saw this kingdom threatened by an unholy alliance. We broke it; it
turned to our advantage and freed us from them all. Now let them mate if they
will. They’re no danger to Jerusalem.”

“You would surrender the dispensation, then?” Brother
Richard inquired. “Leave it under a stone, perhaps, and send a bird to guide
them to it? Messer Seco may not like that. He had his heart set on a fat
ransom.”

What Messer Seco could do, in Amalric’s opinion, was not for
sanctified ears to hear. Brother Richard merely smiled. Brother Thomas suffered
in silence.

“We might still reap a little advantage,” Amalric said when
the air had cleared again. “One of us can pretend to lead them to it, and
accept what reward they may choose to offer. A princely one, I don’t doubt.
Whatever their faults, they’ve never failed of generosity.”

“That one of us, of course, being you.” Brother Richard was
amused. He usually was. A good man, Brother Richard, but rather more a cynic
than he ought to be. “Have you won the princess yet, my lord?”

Amalric rubbed his jaw. If Marco had not known better, he
would have thought the man was embarrassed. “Not yet. But soon.”

“Your courage amazes me,” Brother Richard said. “I could
never play both sides as you so boldly do, still less contemplate allying
myself with that family for the rest of my days. What if your guard slips?”

“It won’t.” Amalric was not even arrogant. He simply knew. “You
should give me credit. I’ll save the lady’s soul and snatch her from the arms
of iniquity. A good mortal marriage, a good Christian husband—that will rid her
of the taint that’s on her.”

“And her dowry is improbably rich.” Brother Richard shook
his head. “Bold, my lord. I’ll stop short of calling it foolhardy.”

Marco listened, appalled. It had taken him a while to
understand what they were saying. Messire Amalric was paying court to the
Rhiyanan princess—Marco had seen it on the road to Acre, but he had not known
enough to recognize it. How could he think to marry her, with such blood as she
had? How could he imagine that her kin would let him do it?

Brother Richard saw Marco then, and told the others. Messire
Amalric looked surprised. Brother Thomas did not.

“Your father has a message?” Messire Amalric asked. His
voice was rough. He was never polite when he did not need to be.

Marco shook his head till his hair whipped in his eyes. They
stung; he rubbed them furiously. He had been steady all this time, but now
suddenly he began to shake. He knew he looked every bit the mooncalf his
father—and surely Messire Amalric—thought him.

Brother Thomas was silent. Brother Richard was kind, if
somewhat mocking. “No message? Did you come out of the goodness of your heart,
then?”

Marco shook his head again, not as hard this time. If he
spoke, he knew that he would stammer. But he could not help but speak. He
fought the words through his stumbling tongue. “I—I—I come because I have to
come.” He flung himself down at Brother Thomas’ feet and clung to the monk’s
coarse robe. “Brother, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’d give anything not to have
to tell you, but he’s gone—he’s gone—”

“Back to Genoa without us?”

Brother Thomas fixed his brother monk with a cold eye. “Levity
is hardly called for here,” he said. He turned that same eye, but the merest
shade warmer, upon Marco. “What has he done? ‘He’ being, I presume, your
father?”

“My father, yes,” Marco said. He was calmer now, with the
beginning out of the way, and Brother Thomas’ habit in his hands. It was like
an anchor. “He’s gone to the prince. He wants to ransom the dispensation, I
think.”

“He doesn’t know where it is,” Amalric said so quickly that
he could not have thought at all.

“He knows who has it,” said Brother Richard. He looked as
cool as ever. “We should have watched him more closely. He never lacked for
intelligence, however low its order. He would know that he was being left out
of our counsels.”

“And whose idea was that?” demanded Amalric.

“Yours.” Brother Richard rattled the beads that threaded his
cincture, seeming to take an innocent pleasure in the sound. “So, then. The rat
has gone to the cat. What do we do about it?”

“Pray,” said Brother Thomas.

Amalric curled his lip. “That’s easy for you to say. The
king knew nothing of this when I saw him just this hour past. If we’re lucky,
he won’t be home yet, and the Assassin will be hunting somewhere safely
distant, and it will only be the prince.”

“The most dangerous of them,” said Brother Thomas, “and the
one with least cause to love us for what we have done.”

“You call him dangerous? More even than the Assassin?”

“The Assassin kills cleanly, with a dagger in the heart. The
other is Christian and a Celt. He may favor teeth and claws.”

“More likely he will challenge my lord Amalric to a passage
in the lists.” Brother Richard seemed to like the sound of that.

Amalric went faintly green. “I wasn’t talking about mortal
combat,” he said.

“True,” mused Brother Richard, “he is the least of them in
name for witchery. I doubt that that makes him less than either of the others;
simply more inclined toward battles of the body, and more adept in them. He, of
them all, seems most fond of seeming to be human.”

“He pretends badly,” Brother Thomas said. “He is a warrior
both of his hands and of the darker arts. The king would pause for conscience.
The Assassin has none. He who falls between—him, truly, I fear.”

“They’ll hunt us wherever we go,” Amalric said. “They’ll
find us wherever we hide, by our spoor among our kind.”

“A hermitage in the desert might be good for all our souls,”
said Brother Richard.

“You may go,” Brother Thomas said, “and hide if you can.
You, my lord, have little to fear, I think; they lived and fought and suffered
the grim defeat with you, and never marked you for their prey.”

“And you?” said Amalric.

“I am the one they seek. I wrote the dispensation as it was
read before them. When they have me, they will hunt no lesser quarry.”

“A martyr,” said Amalric, half in wonder, half in scorn. “A
holy Christian martyr.”

Brother Thomas took no notice of his mockery. “If you will
go, you had best go now: I doubt that they will tarry, once they know where I
am.”

Messire Amalric barely hesitated. Nor did he thank the man
who would suffer for his sake. He turned on his heel and left them, walking
swiftly.

“A prudent man,” Brother Richard observed, “and, thereby, a
safe one.” He shrugged, sighed. “I was never overfond of prudence.”

“Nor I!” Marco cried. “I’ll stay, Brother. I can’t do much,
I know that, I’m not good for much of anything, but maybe I can die for you.”

Brother Thomas looked down at him in mild surprise. No
contempt, Marco saw that. Wonder, a little, and a dawning of respect. “I am
hardly worth dying for,” Brother Thomas said.

“God is.”

Brother Thomas nodded. The respect was clearer now, and the
wonder. “I see that I have underrated you.”

Marco shrugged, miserably embarrassed. “I’m nothing. Except
maybe a shield for you.”

Brother Thomas reached down and pulled him up, brushing him
off with his own frail saintly hands and holding him by the shoulders and
looking deep into his eyes. “Messer Marco, have you a vocation?”

“Yes.” Marco’s voice was hardly more than a squeak. “At
least, I think so. All I ever wanted was to belong to God.”
And you,
he
added in his heart, but Brother Thomas did not want to hear that “My father
doesn’t like it. He’s a good man, Brother, you have to believe that. But he’s
of the world. He doesn’t understand.”

A great light kindled in Brother Thomas’ eyes. It dazzled
Marco; it made him blink and his heart swell. “We shall have to see,” said
Brother Thomas, “what can be done about that.”

He let Marco go. Marco almost fell. “But now,” Brother
Thomas said, “we gird for battle. Shall we pray together, Brother, Messer
Marco?”

As Aidan, with Ysabel and Akiva and a reluctant Seco in his
wake, prepared to leave the caravanserai in pursuit of Brother Thomas, he met
Gwydion coming in. Collided with him for a fact, as he strode blindly down the
passage in a rare and inscrutable temper. Aidan would have wished to know what
had caused it, but his own temper was rarer and more terrible. He caught his
brother in a light strong grip and held him when he struggled, and shook him
into something resembling consciousness.

Gwydion blinked at him, eyes pale and strange. Aidan gave it
to him whole, as only witchfolk could.

He seized on it as Aidan had hoped, and came fully into the
world again. “Truly?” he whispered. “Truly, at last?”

“Truly and inarguably.” Aidan grinned at him. “Will you hunt
with us?”

His answer was to turn and stride before them.

o0o

The pope’s legate greeted them with honest pleasure,
unperturbed by the grimness of their faces or the white terror of Seco’s. Aidan
would not have brought Abbot Leo into it, but Gwydion was insistent. “For
courtesy,” he said. “And for a witness whom none will question.”

It was Gwydion who told the tale as Aidan had given it to him:
shock on shock for Seco, who was learning much too late what power could do.
Abbot Leo listened in stainless quiet. At Brother Thomas’ name, a shadow
crossed his face. Pain, perhaps; sorrow. “He is the most promising of my
servants,” the abbot said when Gwydion was done. “Alas for his soul! What
brought him so low?”

“Sanctity,” Aidan replied. “Good men of God have forged lies
before in holy Church’s name. He thinks that he preserves it from the evil that
we are, by committing a lesser sin.”

“Hell has been bought for less,” said Gwydion. He was all
hunter now, and all implacable. Aidan eyed him narrowly and resolved to fathom
his trouble. Soon.

Abbot Leo rose stiffly, refusing the proffered hands. He did
not hate the brothers for being older than he yet knowing none of the frailty
that beset him, but he had his pride. Aidan let him keep it. It was small price
to pay for such a witness, and time was fleeting.

There was no joy like the joy of the chase, with the scent
hot and rich in one’s nose, and the quarry in sight, and the hunt closing in
for the kill. Such a chase as this, across all of Outremer, through war and
defeat, was sweeter yet, and its end more glorious when it came. Soon now he
would taste blood. Soon he would hold the quarry between his claws, and sink
his teeth in its throat.

Guillermo Seco, poor mortal craven, was paralytic with
terror. The children half-carried him between them, which only made his terror
worse: grown witchfolk were ill enough to bear, but their young were appalling.
Aidan showed him a smile much too full of teeth, and paused on the threshold of
the monks’ chapel. The prey was within. He had tracked it by its absence,
through the memories in men’s minds: a servant who saw them pass, a monk who
left the chapel as they entered it, a sacristan who saw them kneel within to
pray.

The wall of nothingness which had so frightened the children
was stronger and stranger than ever. It beckoned. It seduced. It lured the
power down into its lightless dark. There was nothing of his own kind about it.
It was a human thing; a mortal horror. Not power, but its utter, boundless
absence.

Gwydion’s presence surrounded him before he could fray and
scatter. The children wove themselves within it. And all about it like a thread
of silver and steel, the purest of all presences, stronger than any and more
skilled, and furious that he had thought to leave her out of it

Protection! she spat at him where none but he could hear.
Idiot! Brainless fool! Where would you be at all, if I were not here to protect
you?

Actually,
he said,
I was
protecting our
prey.
That stopped her. He smiled as she shaped herself out of air, and
kissed her before she could toss him off.

All together they were a thing of light and splendor, a
weaving of magic more potent than any one of them apart, or any five of them
unwoven. What Gwydion had seen on the Mount of Olives before his entry into
Jerusalem, now shaped itself into solidity.

They braced themselves. Aidan drew his sword with a soft
hiss of steel. Morgiana’s dagger was in her hand. Gwydion and the children bore
no weapon but their power; but that would be enough.

“Now,” said Aidan.

The wall of not-power swayed before the assault; stiffened;
held. Aidan smote it with all their conjoined strength.

It shattered; and the door with it, in a rain of stinging
shards.

They sprang through the splintered door, Aidan in the van,
Morgiana hard upon his heels. He was a tower of light, she a leaping flame.

They came like the wrath of God. No weapons met them; no
last desperate stroke of not-power. Only silence and stillness and the scent of
incense.

The monks’ chapel was rather a part of the cloister than of
the cathedral, small and almost bare, although its shape was beautiful: an
aisle and a graceful curved bay with the altar set in it, and columns from old
Rome holding up the roof, red stone polished bright beneath the flowering
capitals, and a floor of colored marble. The hand of Islam had struck the faces
from the mosaics above the altar, and the Frankish archbishops had done nothing
to restore them. There was an odd power in the stiff elongated figures,
faceless as they were, veiled as if in clouds of awe.