The Dagger and the Cross (8 page)

Except that there was nothing immodest in the way he asked
it. He was like a physician, cool, honestly desirous of an answer.

Simply to be outrageous, she gave it to him. “Is that what
that is? Once in a great while, when the moon is waxing? Then I’ve had it a
score of years or so, one a year, maybe, or twice.”

He nodded. “Young, then, no matter the count of your years:
like a maid just come to womanhood. I think we come into ourselves late, and
then we don’t either bear or beget easily. It comes with what we are. If we
were as fecund as humankind, we would overrun the earth.”

“Better we than they.”

“No,” he said. “I think not. How much magic can one world
hold?”

“More by far than is in us.”

“I wonder,” he said. “In a world the humans share... My
brother says that in Islam he is much more welcome than he is among Christians.
Your world allows us, as ours does not. But if it were known, truly, all that
we are, what mortal man would not learn to hate us?”

“There are many who love us. Too well, I sometimes think.”

“Ah, but even they have moments of bitter envy.”

“I envy their fertility. And yes, even their mortality. They
know that there is an end to their living. They will see Paradise long before
us, and be far more welcome there, because they are mortal men, and we are but
spirits of fire.”

“Your Allah does not welcome every soul alike?”

“We are told that He does. But mortals are greater than I:
that also is in His Book.”

“Ours gives us no place at all,” Gwydion said. “Therefore
our priests set us among the devils. They would destroy us if they could, and
count it a holy act.”

She regarded him steadily. “You have your own Crusade.”

“To make my kingdom safe for our kind. Yes. And for any
other who suffers persecution at mortal hands.”

There was a fire in him, all the fiercer for that it was so
quiet. “We call it
jihad,”
she said. “Holy war. War that is just; war in
God’s name.”

“Even if
it is bloodless, as I would keep it?”

“Even then.” She paused. “You are a strange man.”

“Stranger than my brother?”

“My lord is explicable enough. He is fire, that is all:
bright, burning, terrible when he is let run wild. He runs away from
reflection, because it might seduce him into damping his fire. He is most
predictably unpredictable.”

“Most would tell you that I am dull beside him. Plain water,
quiet and rather cold.”

“Water quenches fire; and water, raging, can break stone.
How many have reckoned that they knew you, and striven to deceive you, and
discovered too late that they themselves were deceived?”

“I always tell the truth,” he said.

“All of it?”

His eyes glinted. “All that is necessary for the purpose.”

“I think,” she said, pondering it, “that I may come to like
you, O my brother.”

“Indeed, O my sister?”

“Indeed.” He smiled at her. She grinned, wide and white,
like the boy she seemed to be, and gathered the reins. The stallion began a
dancing canter. As the mare stretched to match him, he leaped into a gallop.
Morgiana flattened herself on his neck, still grinning. The mare was a pale
blur in the corner of her eye. Gaining, by the Prophet’s beard, and her rider
laughing. Aloud. Gwydion. Who would ever believe it?

She laughed with him, light and wild, and gave her mount his
head.

Jerusalem was a city of domes and towers, set upon the
heights, blazing white in the pitiless sun of Outremer. No green betrayed
itself, no garden within those walls, unless it were a garden of stone, and its
own sun blazing out of it: the Dome of the Rock in the west of the city, roofed
with pure gold.

From the Mount of Olives, above the grey-green terraces,
across the bleak dun ravine of Kidron, the pilgrims from Rhiyana looked down
upon the Holy City. Some of them wept. Some prayed on their knees.

Gwydion stood silent. His eyes drank it in: the city that
was there for human eyes to see, and the city that was beyond the mortal city.
Holy, high Jerusalem. The city of peace, for which men had warred for years out
of count.

A tremor rocked him. It came upon him so, not often,
sometimes not for years together; but when it came, there was no stopping it.
He could only brace for the storm, and endure until it passed.

Blood and fire. Armies innumerable, inexorable as the sea,
shrilling their war-cry.
Allah-il-Allah! Allahu akbar!
The walls fell
before them. No army stood against them. A pitiful few of knights rode out,
made what stand they might, were swept away. The muezzin’s voice wailed over
the dome of the Holy Sepulcher.

He gasped, shuddering. The sun blinded him. Christian voices
babbled about him; somewhere, someone was chanting a psalm.
Deliver me, O
Lord, from evil men, preserve me from violent men...

His brother’s shoulder braced him; his brother’s voice
sounded in his ear, soft and blessedly calm. “Peace; it’s past.”

The humans had not seen, or else had taken it for simple
excess of emotion. His own folk stood round him like guards, his brother
closest, Morgiana at his back, Akiva in front of him with Ysabel. None of them
had thought; they had simply chosen their places. They moved apart as the
moment passed, with no word spoken, no thought exchanged.

There was something in that, something potent. There had
never been so many of them together, in such a place. Almost without willing it,
he could reach, draw them together, make of them—

They scattered. The world burst upon him. People waited,
human and otherwise, because he was king, and where he went, they must follow.
For a moment he could not. Would not.

But that passed. Years and training rose up in him and
mastered him. He led them down from the Mount.

o0o

The entry of the King of Rhiyana into Jerusalem was not the
quiet passage he might have wished for. His knights, his squires, his
men-at-arms, his servants, the pilgrims afoot and on muleback, the priests and
the monks and the pope’s legate, Aidan’s small army of Saracens and his
Christian soldiers and servants, the whole tribe of Mortmain: they were a royal
procession, and they received a royal welcome.

Aidan had a house near the Dome of the Rock; so near that
the great golden dome cast light upon it after the sun had left the rest of the
city. From its roof and from some of the upper chambers, one could look down
into the jeweled beauty of the courtyard and see the Knights of the Temple in
their white robes and red crosses, going about their duties.

“We’ve given his majesty something to think of,” Aidan said
with considerable pleasure as he sat with his brother on the roof, watching the
sun go down. The house hummed below them, full to bursting with all the people
they had brought to it; and that not even all of them. The Mortmains had their
own house near the Holy Sepulcher, and the priests had lodgings in the
Patriarch’s quarter.

Gwydion turned an orange in his hands. He was quieter even
than usual, had been since he left the Mount of Olives. His mood did not
lighten to match Aidan’s. He said somberly, “Yes, his majesty will think. So
will his less contented barons. There is another king in the kingdom; another
stallion in the herd. And I wait to greet him. I choose the company of my kin,
and make no haste to seek a palace that is not my own.”

“He can’t touch you,” said Aidan. “Or fault you for wanting
a day to settle yourself. He’d do worse than that if
he were the
stranger in the city.” He leaped up from his seat and began a circuit of the
roof, skirting the orange trees in their basins, the rose-briars that twined
into a bower for summer evenings, the jasmine waking with the sunset to send
forth its sweet strong scent. He plucked a handful of blossoms and scattered
them on his brother’s head. Gwydion made no move to shake them off; made no
move at all. “Gwydion
bach,
our noble king is just capable of doing up
his own hose, if
someone shows him how. He’s no match at all for you.”

“What is he for Jerusalem?”

The pain in Gwydion’s voice gave even Aidan pause. He
dropped down at his brother’s feet, took the white cold hands in his. “I saw,
too,” he said. “I saw Jerusalem fall. But I won’t believe that it must be. Not
while we live to forestall it.”

Gwydion shuddered once, deeply. His hands tightened on Aidan’s
with sudden, bruising force. “Would to God I had your faith.”

“It’s not faith. It’s blind obstinacy.” Aidan grinned up at
the face that was his own. The stars of jasmine were caught in the blue-black
hair. They were not, somehow, incongruous, even as grim as he was, even as
fiercely inhuman as those bones were, with no glamour to soften them.

“This kingdom was founded on the sword’s edge,” Aidan said. “It
has endured a hundred years against odds no sane man would contemplate. One
thin line of fortresses from Kerak to Banias: that is all that stands between
us and the infidel. More than any kingdom in the world, this is a camp of war,
held by folk to whom war is their life’s breath. They will not yield while
there is strength in them to fight.”

“God grant,” said Gwydion.

o0o

“Would it be so terrible if he saw true?”

Aidan raised his head from Morgiana’s breast. “How can you
say that?”

“You can ask?”

Their eyes met, clashed, disengaged. He sat up. She lay
unmoving, slender ivory body, cloak of wonderful, improbable hair. In lamplight
it was almost black, with ruddy lights; in sunlight, the color of wine. She was
heartbreakingly beautiful.

And utterly maddening. “We are,” he said, “defenders of this
kingdom.”

“You are. Are you going to swear fealty to Guy, after all?”

“Not if I can help it.”

She stretched, sinuous, and coiled on her side, head propped
on hand. The lamplight struck fire in her eyes. “Well then. Suppose that the
sultan takes Jerusalem. He’s a better king by far than Sybilla’s fancy man.”

“He’s an infidel,” Aidan said.

“So am I.”

“I’m not marrying him.”

“I should hope not.” She traced an idle, tingling pattern on
his thigh. “Why should it matter which God a man prays to, if he rules well?”

“It does matter,” he said. “Here of all places in the world.
This is our holy land; our Christ who lay in the Sepulcher. We defend it for
his sake.”

“What of us? That is our Dome out yonder, which your
Templars have outraged by setting a cross atop it; our Rock from which the
Prophet, on his name be blessing and peace, went up to heaven. It’s our land,
too, our holy place.”

“And Simeon would tell you that your Dome is built on the
Temple of Solomon. Maybe we should give all this country back to the Jews, and
have done.”

“God forbid!”

“God probably will. Allah, too. If He’s all the same, who’s
to say that even He knows which of us has the most right to this city?”

“You are appalling,” she said.

He bent to kiss her. She caught him as he drew back, wound
her fingers in his hair. “Uncounted multitudes of Muslims,” she said, “and any
one of them more than willing to taste my sweet white body; and with what
should I fall in love? A howling infidel.”

“Whereby we know that God can laugh.”

Her fingers unwound from his hair, traced the shape of his
face, ruffled and then smoothed his beard. He shivered lightly under her touch.
He was the first lover she had ever had, and the only one. She had never lost
that edge of wondering joy, to find him so different from herself, and yet so
perfectly matched. Made for her. Man to her woman; heart to her heart.

“So beautiful,” she said, marveling, as if
she had
never seen him before.

“You are insatiable.”

She laughed and tumbled him onto his back. “What, sir! Am I
too much for you?”

“Ten men would barely be enough.”

“Ah,” she said. Her eyes gleamed. “Now there’s a thought.”

“Good. Then I could sleep.”

She stopped short; she hissed. “You wouldn’t.”

“I might wake up later,” he mused, “and dismember them one
by one.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I’d hate to think that you’d let
anyone else touch me.”

“Touch you, maybe, if you didn’t take his hand off for
trying. Keep you, no. I’m not that magnanimous.”

She shook her head. Her hair was a curtain about them both,
cool and silken-soft. “Frankish honor,” she said. “Any decent Muslim would kill
a man for looking at me.”

“He can look all he likes, and envy me as much as he
pleases. If you ever deign to show your face.”

“I shall do that,” she said calmly, “when I am your properly
wedded wife, and it is your right to command me.”

It was growing difficult to think, with her astride him so,
and her face above him, and her lovely round breasts, and her strong smooth
thighs. “What if I won’t command you?”

“Then I shall do it because I choose.”

She bent. Her face filled his world. All Persia was in it:
the elegant oval, the cheekbones curved high, the long nose with its suggestion
of arch, the lips fine-molded and astonishingly tender. Yet it, and she, was
nothing human. The tilt of the wine-dark brows; the great eyes beneath them
with their pupils wide now, green-gleaming within, that would slit narrow when
the sun was high; the moonlit ivory of her skin. The scent that was on her,
imperceptible to human senses, dizzyingly sweet to his own. The light in her,
the sheen of her power, woven with his beyond any unweaving.

She shifted above him, poising. He knew better than to
snatch. She took him joyfully, fierce as a cat and fully as wanton.

Just before she fell asleep, she said, “It would not be so
ill at all, if Allah had Jerusalem.”

Courtesy commanded that a king, in another king’s city,
should pay his respects to that monarch. Gwydion was nothing if not courteous.