Alamut (45 page)

“I don't think I've ever felt better.” And it was true. He was fresh; he was strong. His power was the barest trickle yet, but it was swelling.

She did not believe him, but she was sensible: she did not try to quarrel with him. She did insist that he dress — cover himself, as she put it. The clothes she brought were robes of the desert.

His own, cleaned and skillfully mended. But not his weapons. Of course: he would not be allowed those.

There were three linked caverns: the great hall; the small chimneyed chamber which served as a kitchen; the wonder of jeweled walls and flowering stone, with its gently steaming pool. He barely lingered even there. His mind turned outward.

It was morning; his bones knew it. Night's bitter cold was all but gone; the heat of the day had barely begun. All about was desert: sand and stones and sky.

And power. He traced with his own the circle of the ban. It was smaller than that about Masyaf, and stronger to measure. Its meaning was perfectly distinct. Yes, he might explore: for a fair distance, in human paces. But escape, he could not. Not even upward. A more perfect prison for one of his kind, he could not have imagined.

He scaled the crag above the narrow mouth of the cave, welcoming the effort, the toll it took on hands still torn from the crawl to Masyaf. At the summit he dropped down, arms about his knees. The sky was impossibly wide. Away below stretched a ruin of tumbled stones. Earth had covered it, time beat it down, but it was still visibly a work of men's hands.

“That was a city once,” the Assassin said behind him.

He did not leap. He did not even turn. “Persepolis?”

“No. This, Sikandar never burned; he built. They say he made it for his hound, because it died here.”

“Alexander was mad.”

“Surely.” Her shadow touched him; he shuddered away from it. “You are hardly being reasonable, my lord Khalid.”

“Is there any reason in murder?”

That drove her away. He waited a long while; she did not come back. He descended slowly.

The caves were empty of her. Sayyida did something peaceful and womanly in a corner. Hasan wanted to be entertained. Aidan obliged him.

oOo

For all her courage and her forthright tongue, Sayyida was shy. Maybe if he had been a woman she would have opened to him sooner. As it was, she went veiled, and she slept in the kitchen, which she had not been doing before he came. He could not persuade her to share the hall with him, even with its length between them. “It's not decent,” she said.

But she did not shun him in daylight, and she talked to him freely enough.

“You're the swordsmith's daughter?” he cried when it came together into sense. “Ishak's sister?”

She nodded. She was amused.

It was logical, in its own fashion. Morgiana's friend would bear some relation to cold steel.

“Then it was you who watched us, that day when I was your father's guest.”

She nodded again. “I saw you on the street, too.”

“I thought your husband didn't let you go out.”

“He didn't.”

Aidan said nothing to that. It was delicacy, and prudence.

She did not carry it on then, but later she did: talking of the young smith with no family, whom her father had made his apprentice, and to whom he had given his youngest daughter. “Not,” she said, “that he left me out of it. I could have refused. But I liked Maimoun well enough, and I admired his artistry. I thought he'd make a good father for my children.”

There was more to it than that; or there had come to be. “He should trust me,” she said. “He should let me make my own choices.”

“That's hard for a young man,” Aidan said.

She eyed him sidelong. He grinned at her. He looked younger than Maimoun, and he knew it. She unbent into a nod. “Yes: you would know, wouldn't you?”

“It's arrogance, you see. To be a man at last, with all a man's power and pride. What's a woman's will, to that?”

“Implacable.” And she sounded it.

“So he has to learn. It's no easy lesson: that he's a man, and strong, but he's not invincible. That sometimes he has to yield.”

“He can learn it without me. I'll not be beaten for his edification.”

“I'll wager he's sorry now.”

“I hope he is.” There was rare venom in her voice. She held grudges, did Sayyida.

oOo

A beast could go mad in a cage, even one as wide as this. A witch's whelp, on the other hand, could go sane.

He did not want to. Sanity was perilous when one had a hate to nurse. It kept finding reasons for abominations, and excuses for the inexcusable. It made him forget grief and remember the warmth of a body against his own; a body that was made for him.

And it looked at Sayyida, and at her son, and could not reconcile the Morgiana they loved with the Morgiana he hated.

Sayyida was hardly blind to what Morgiana was. Better even than Aidan, she knew it. Yet she called the demon friend, and thought of her as a sister. Hasan adored her. In his mind she was a wonder and a marvel, a great shining creature with the most wonderful hair in the world. He thought of Aidan as a part of her. One as tall as the sky, who could sing by the hour, and who taught him new words to make his mother laugh and clap her hands and call him her little king. Who took him out in the wide world, and showed him birds and beasts and rooted things that grew valiantly in the waste; who, one glorious morning, flew with him up to the very summit of the ban.

Aidan came down to find Sayyida in a white fury. “Don't,” she said, shaking with the effort of saying it quietly. “Don't you ever — ever again — ”

“I didn't mean to frighten you.”

She snatched her son out of his arms. “No. You didn't. Did you?”

“Sayyida, I didn't think — ”

“Men never do.” Her scorn was absolute. She turned her back on him. He stood abandoned, in remorse and in growing indignation.

“Women never understand!” he shouted after her.

She stopped, spun. “Women understand too much!”

“Maybe they do!”

There was no door to slam, but she managed very well without. He flew to the top of the rock, to spite her, and crouched there, brooding on the unreasonableness of women. She was down below, brooding on the idiocy of males. They were carrying on, one of them thought — he was not even sure which — exactly like kin.

It did not appall her. He... he wanted to laugh, which was deadly to his dudgeon.

He turned his face to the sky. “Now I see,” he said. “You'll soften me with this girlchild; you'll seduce me with her baby. Then you'll find me tamed and gentle, and ripe for your taking.

“But I won't,” he said. “I won't give in to you. You murdered my kin. God may forgive you. I,” he said, “will not.”

31.

When Morgiana came back from wherever she had been, she found a scene of striking domesticity. Sayyida sat on a cushion, plying her inevitable needle. Aidan was on the floor with Hasan. The baby wanted to walk, but he could not quite find his balance. And there were greater fascinations in his companion, whose hair, long uncut, hung down enticingly, and whose beard begged fingers to tangle in it. His mother rebuked him, but she was trying not to laugh. Aidan did not even try. He unraveled the impudent fingers and pretended to gnaw on them. Hasan whooped with mirth.

Sayyida saw her first. Morgiana set a finger to her lips. Even with the warning, Sayyida could not keep her laughter from fading into apprehension.

Aidan was engrossed in the game. It was Hasan who betrayed them with a cry of gladness. “‘Giana!”

Very slowly Aidan lowered Hasan's hands from his cheeks, and drew himself up. No more than he had on the clifftop, would he turn to face Morgiana.

Hasan, freed, pulled himself to his feet and plunged toward her. She caught him before he fell. He wound his fingers in her hair and grinned, deliriously happy. “‘Giana,” he said. “Mama. Khalid. Rug, pot, couch, water, sky!”

She heard him in amazement. “He's learning to talk!” And when his mother nodded, proud even through her tension: “He has an Aleppan accent.”

Aidan's back was rigid. The lamp caught blue lights in his hair. She wanted to stroke it, to smooth the tangles out of it, to slip her hand beneath and ease the tautness from his shoulders.

I would rather die
, he said within, low and bitter cold.

She was, when it came to it, a coward. Or why had she left it to Sayyida for so long, to begin his taming? She shrank from the implacability of his hate. She flickered from the cavern, otherwhere.

And flickered back. No more hiding; no more running away. This was her place. Let him see that she did not intend to leave it, or him, until she had won him.

“Then we will be here until the stars fall,” he said, tightly, through clenched teeth.

“Not so long, I think.” She came round to face him. He refused to play the child: he held still. His eyes were burning pale. Yet for all of that, he did not have the look of one who gnaws himself in captivity. While she had him to toy with, his kin were safe from her.

She nodded, unsmiling. “Your eye is clear enough. What would it take to convince you that I never willingly worked harm to you or yours?”

“Don't lie to me. You were glad to murder Gereint. You took Thibaut without a qualm. My warriors of Allah are all gone. Joanna — Joanna you would happily have rent limb from limb.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “That great cow. What in Allah's name do you see in her?”

He uncoiled. It was splendid, how tall he was, how panther-supple; how oblivious he was to it. His anger rocked her. He would have struck her, but for Hasan; or so it pleased him to think. “What do I see in her? What can you know, you demon, you murderer of children? What do you see in me but what any bitch sees when she is in heat?”

It was brutal, that directness, and so he meant it to be. She told herself that. She said, “Very well. So it is jealousy, and the fire of the body. That was hardly a monk's cell in which I found you, or a monk's abstinence.”

His skin was whiter even than her own; a blush was all the brighter for it. “And you think that I can possibly want you, after that? Or forgive you?”

“I didn't kill her.”

“Not for lack of trying.”

“But for you, I would never have tried at all.” That stopped his tongue. Sayyida came quietly, relieved her of Hasan, crept away. Neither paused to notice. Morgiana lifted her chin, glaring up at him. The blood drained from his face. “I was commanded on my sacred oath and bound with words of great power to take her life. I had determined to break that oath; to find her, only, to see her face, perhaps to wound her lightly for my master's sake, then to go away. And how did I find her? That she took pleasure where she could — I could hardly fault her for that. Until I saw with whom she did it.”

He knew madness, and jealousy. He had to acknowledge the truth of it. But he would not soften for that. “You regret that you did it; but not for her sake. Because by it you lost me.”

“She is human,” said Morgiana.

His body snapped erect; his eyes glittered. “Then you'll never grieve if I break yon cubling's neck.”

“You would not dare.”

“He is human,” Aidan said. The exact tone; the exact, subtle air of contempt.

Her fists clenched. He had her there; too well he knew it. There were humans, and there were one's own humans. But that that great lumbering creature should be his... it was unbearable.

“You think that you would stop at murdering infants,” he said. “And yet that is what you nearly did. She carries my child.”

 The words refused to make sense. Of course a mortal woman would not... how could he...

He advanced on her, striking again, deeper, twisting the blade in the wound. “She was afraid to tell me; she feared that I would cast her off. And when she knew that I would not, that after the shock of it I was glad, that I welcomed her, and the child, and anything that might come of it, she was so happy, the air itself seemed to sing.

“Then,” he said. “Then you came. You saw, and you struck. You killed any hope of winning me.”

She would not weep or rage or cry denial. She was too proud. “Mortal women grow old,” she said. “They die.”

His face twisted. “Oh, you are cruel, and you are cold. You are nothing that human warmth can touch.”

“No more than you,” she said.

That struck home. He flinched; his lips set tight.

“I cannot help what the years have made me,” she said. “I was alone; I made myself a slave, to lend some purpose to the long days. My folly, and my grief. How could I know what Allah had written for me and for you?”

He had heard all that he could bear to hear. He turned away from her without a word, and strode out of the cave.

She let him go. He could not escape, he knew it as well as she. He did not know, perhaps, that he did not want to. Much of his resistance was rebellion against its opposite.

How well you lie to yourself
. His voice in her mind, bitter with scorn. She sent it back to him without the scorn. His mind closed like a gate shutting.

oOo

The three of them had made a world for themselves, small but complete. This most unwelcome fourth had burst it asunder.

The girl and the child never minded. He was the interloper, after all, the grown male, the stranger. He had to see how Hasan delighted in Morgiana's simple presence, and how Sayyida opened to her, close and warm as kin. What he had not chosen to see, was now painfully obvious. He had been accepted not as himself, but as Morgiana's.

He took to going out and staying there until hunger drove him in; and sometimes not even then. There was a little hunting, if he was patient. He began to test the edges of the ban, as he had in moving on Masyaf; but this would not yield at all. Its maker was within it, to sustain it, and she knew him now. Better by far, he suspected, than he knew her.