Alamut (31 page)

Sayyida was puzzled, but she could answer. “Yes. I noticed. I wondered how he does it. To stay so perfectly pale. Like — ”

Morgiana's face was still, waiting for Sayyida to see what a blind man could see. How white it was. At long last, comprehension pierced the fogs of her brain. “Then — he's — ”

“His name means
fire,”
Morgiana said, dry and deceptively calm. “He is one of two. Two such faces in the world; imagine it. The other is mage and king. He is mage and knight — emir, we would say. He is, for one of our kind, very young. He thinks himself quite old, and wise enough. He knows that he is beautiful. He thinks — I — ”

Almost, she broke. She caught herself. “He thinks that I am good to look at. He will not love me carnally. He doesn't know me, he says. And if he knew me — ” Her eyes squeezed shut; her fists came up. “O Allah! If he knew me he would hate me beyond any hope of healing.”

“Not if he's like you,” Sayyida said, “and knows you as I know you. He can't be innocent of blood himself, if he's the warrior he looks to be.”

Morgiana laughed. It was horrible, because it was so light and sweet, and so empty of hope. “But you see, it's what blood I'm guilty of. Do you remember the Frank I killed? That was his sister's son. He has sworn to destroy me and the master who sent me. And he thinks...he thinks I may help him find the murderer. He thinks that none of us can harm his own kind.”

“You didn't know,” said Sayyida.

“Do you think that can matter to a vow sworn? When he knows what I am and what I have done, he will raise all his power against me. He will blast me with his hate.”

Sayyida was silent, hunting for words. All the Franks that infested the world, and this should be the one whose kin Morgiana's master had forced her to kill. An ifrit — a Christian ifrit.

She spoke carefully, trying not to be too unkind. He could not help it that he was an infidel. “He'd be a fool to hate you. You only did as you were commanded, under your oath. Surely he's capable of understanding that.”

“Does it matter? I did it. The first — I could talk my way out of that. The second was a child. The third, whom my master has this morning commanded me to take, is a woman. I refused. But my oath is strong, and it tears at me. I don't know how long I can hold against it.” She held out her hands. Steady as they had always been, unerring with a dagger, now they shook. “He will ask again. And again. Until I do it, or I break.”

Sayyida clasped those trembling hands and held them as tightly as she could. “You won't. You'll be strong. He'll learn to see it, your Frankish ifrit. Doesn't his god teach forgiveness?”

“His mother was a pagan. Sometimes it pleases him to remember it.”

“Morgiana,” said Sayyida. “Morgiana, stop it. You've talked to him, haven't you? What has he said to you?”

“Nothing. Air and wind. I,” she said, “have shamed myself utterly. I told him that I loved him.”

Sayyida sucked in a breath. “That was...very brave.” Forward, she almost said.

Morgiana heard it. “Yes, I was presumptuous. I couldn't help myself. He was there, and looking at me, and beginning — beginning — to incline toward me. I fell like a pigeon with an arrow through its heart.”

Sayyida tried to understand. It was all like a story, or a song. She had thought that real people were less passionate than song-people; more sensible. There was always dinner to think of, or the chance of a baby. Though in the middle of it, babies and dinner tended rather to get themselves forgotten.

Morgiana did not look like a princess in a poem. Those were all dark-eyed languid beauties with queenly haunches. But her passion and her despair — those were larger than any life Sayyida had known.

“Does it always strike you so?” Sayyida's tongue asked before she could stop it.

“No!” Morgiana looked less angry than simply wild. “I've never — ” She was blushing like any fool of a girl. “I never wanted a man before.”

“Never? Never at all?”

The turbaned head shook, short and sharp. “Of course you don't believe me. Who would? I always belonged to the Master of Alamut; since he is always male, and I female...” She laughed again, raw and unlovely, like a raven's cry. “What man can touch such a creature as I am, unless I will it? And I never have. I was always — I was cold. Yes. Cold fire, one of them said of me. I was a dagger and a mission, and when the mission failed me, an oath. I was never anything that a man could touch.”

“Until you saw the Frank.”

“Until I saw one who was like me. Who moved in magic. Who was beauty bare. Then I knew what all the singing meant.

“And he was born to be my enemy.”

Sayyida was still holding Morgiana's hands. She kissed them, to stop their bitter, bone-deep trembling. “Sister,” she said. “Sister, trust in God. If He brought him to you, surely He will show him the truth. Are you any less oathbound than he?”

Morgiana pulled free. “Oh, to be so wise! I who am as old as hills, I who walk arm in arm with the Angel of Death, I know nothing of love, except that it is pain.”

“Not always,” said Sayyida. “Even for you.”

“Then pray for me, child. I have no prayer left.”

She was never one to linger for farewells. Sayyida stared at the emptied air, and sighed.

As if Morgiana's going had broken a spell, Hasan woke and began to fret. Sayyida gathered him up. For a miracle, he quieted, sucking his fist with an angry ferocity that was like nothing so much as Morgiana's own. Sayyida kissed his hair. It was damp, but his brow beneath them was cool.

Her heart leaped. He
was
cool. She clasped him close, until he squawked in protest. “Oh, love!” she sang to him. “Oh, light of my eyes! Thanks be to Allah!”

It seemed all a part of her joy that she should look up to see Maimoun standing by the wall, staring at her. She scrambled up with Hasan in her arms. “Maimoun! He had a fever, it was so fierce, I was so scared, but now, look, it's gone.”

Maimoun said nothing. Something in his face made her stop. Hasan's weight dragged at her. She shifted him to her hip. “What is it? Is there trouble? Is it — is it Father? Or Ishak? Or — ”

“No.” He said it coldly, more to silence her, it seemed, than to ease her fears.

Maimoun was never cold. Sullen, yes, sometimes. Dour when he encountered someone, or something, whom he did not approve of; because he had been trained, rigorously, to be polite, and politeness was not his native condition. Maimoun always wanted to say exactly what he thought.

It was frightening to see him so still, not even frowning; looking at her as if she had no honest place in his world. “I thought,” he said, “that she was lying. Because of Hasan.”

“What — ” Sayyida was baffled. And, more than ever, afraid. “Who — ”

“She envies you,” said Maimoun reflectively. “I think she hates you, at least a little. You have a son. She has none.”

Hasan began to struggle on Sayyida's hip. She held him more tightly, hardly aware of him, intent on his father. “Are you talking about Laila?”

“Or maybe,” he went on as if she were not there, “it honestly is concern for me, and for the family's honor. Even she might be moved to think of such things, under sufficient provocation. Such as” — and now he was not so cold; his breath came faster, his cheeks flushed in hectic patches, as in a fever — ”such as that my wife disports herself in our own garden with — with — ”

Sayyida heard him in growing horror. But more than that, in anger. Neither was something she was used to. She was — yes, on the whole, she was a placid person, happy with the gifts that Allah gave her, not inclined to rebel against the life He ordained for her, except once in a great while, when Morgiana —

She heard herself say with perfect calm, “Disporting myself, Maimoun? With whom? Or what?”

Maimoun choked on it. “With
what,
indeed. A man, Sayyida — a man, I could almost endure. But
that — ”

“Are you telling me,” she asked carefully, “that I am not to entertain friends in my father's garden?”

He laughed. It tried to be light and wild. It sounded merely strangled. “Friends. Oh, friends, indeed. Did they leave him anything when they cut him? Is he better at it than I?”

She drew herself up, heedless of Hasan who had begun to wail. “He?” she asked. “Him? No man but you or Father or Ishak has ever entered out garden; at least, to talk to me.”

“No man, no.”

“Ah,” she said, letting herself understand at last. “You thought — yes, it would look like that, wouldn't it? Especially if your mind was prepared.” She shook her head. “You know Laila. You shouldn't let her chaff you.”

“Was it chaffing that set you here, locked in passionate embrace with Bahram the eunuch?”

The wilder he was, the colder she became. “So; that's what she calls herself. I never thought to ask.”

“Then you don't deny it?”

“What's to deny? Except the embrace. I was only holding her up; and even at that, Hasan was between us.”

“You brought my son — into — ”

“My son,” she said with pointed emphasis, “and my friend whose name is Morgiana, and who is admittedly rather eccentric, are on the best of terms. I see no objection in it. A woman, after all, should understand babies, for when she has her own.”

“A woman? That?” Maimoun folded his arms tightly across his chest, as if to keep himself from hitting her. “What do you take me for? That is Bahram the eunuch, who came this morning for a dagger with a silver hilt. He has a predilection for them. As, it would seem, for men's wives.”

Between frustration and plain tiredness, Sayyida almost burst into tears. “She does
not!
She is my friend. She has been my friend since I was a child.”

He went white, and then scarlet. “You are lying.”

Maybe he lacked somewhat of conviction. She was too far gone to care. “I do not lie. That is Morgiana. Morgiana is my friend. I will not be held guilty of a sin which I have never committed, nor wanted to commit.”

Maimoun swallowed visibly, and pulled at his beard as he always did when he was caught in the wrong: as if to assure himself that he was still the man; he was still her lord and master.

As he was, as Allah had willed it. She was finding it very hard to be a good Muslim. She kept wanting to damn all boys and their idiocies.

“Morgiana is my friend,” Sayyida's temper said for her. “Laila is corroded with envy. What kind of man are you, that you believe a known and notorious twister of the truth, over your own wife?”

Maimoun snapped erect. She had gone too far. Soon, she was even going to care. “Hereafter,” he said, “hereafter, you will keep to the house; you will attend to your duties; you will not idle you days away in the garden with creatures of dubious gender and still more dubious reputation. Do you hear me, woman? I forbid you to see her. I forbid you to speak with her. I forbid you to hold converse with any but your most immediate kin. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you,” she said. Hasan began to howl in earnest. She jogged him on her hip, to small effect. “Will my lord permit his humble slave to depart for the duties to which he has confined her?”

He had to know that he was being mocked; but he was male, and glorious in his lordship over the lowly female. He raised his chin. “Go,” he commanded her.

oOo

Maybe Iblis had a hand in it. Sayyida could not make herself regret what she had said. Any of it.

Maimoun did not know how right he was, to forbid her Morgiana's company. Morgiana made her think at angles; made her forget that she was woman and wife. She had never disobeyed Maimoun, however strangling-close he kept her, except for Morgiana's sake.

Some things, even her husband was wise not to touch.

He had called her a liar. She had sins in plenty to her account, but lying had never been one of them. Even he should have been able to see that.

“Arrogant,” she muttered to Hasan in the stifling room that would, if Maimoun had his way, be her prison. “Pompous. Self-righteous.
Child.
Everything must be his way and no other. The Prophet — may Allah bless him — said that my husband must be my protector. He never said anything of my being my husband's slave.”

Hasan, nursing with vigor, took no notice of his mother's troubles.

“No, and what should it matter to you? You're blessed of Allah. You can do and be whatever your soul conceives of. And if it suits your whim to rule your wife's every utterance...” She wound her fingers in his hair, tugging very lightly. “You'll not do that, at least. Not if I can help it.
You
will trust your wife; you will let her bear the weight of her own honor. She can, you know. She's a woman, and maybe she has neither faith nor reason, but she does understand plain good sense. If,” she said, “she is allowed.”

oOo

It was possible, without being overly conspicuous, to avoid going near Maimoun at all. Since Sayyida grew big with Hasan, and then while she nursed him, Maimoun had slept apart from her, except when he simply wanted to be with her. She did not want to remember how pleased she had been, to see how often he came and lay beside her and did not try to do what men did with their wives: holding her, only, and Hasan warmly content between them. Now, she kept the door shut, and if he knocked, she did not hear. And since Shahin and Rafiq were sufficient to wait on guests, Sayyida did not see need to wait on her father and her husband when they were alone. She had duties enough elsewhere.

She told herself that she hardly missed him. What had he ever done but bind her with caprice, and call it duty and honor?

oOo

Tonight he did not knock. He came in as if he had a right to trespass, and not as if he tried to be circumspect about it. Sayyida had her back to the door; she stiffened it. Hasan had been slow to fall asleep. Now that he was quiet, she had no desire at all to wake him for his father's sake.