Authors: Unknown
“Go, Kalawun,” said Baybars, shaking his head. “Just leave me.”
Backing away, Kalawun reached the doorway. He took one last look at Baybars and the woman, then shut the doors.
As their closing echoed through the cavernous throne room, Elwen started. But through her dread, which had assailed her ever since the door to Andreas’s house had burst open and the soldiers had entered, she felt a jolt of hope. Kalawun, the sultan had called the tall man in the blue cloak. Elwen knew that name. It was the name of Will’s ally in Egypt. She hadn’t missed the worried, almost pained way he had looked at her either. Her gaze lingered on the doors, until she sensed movement and realized Sultan Baybars was standing before her.
Elwen turned her eyes on his huge frame, and as they traveled upward, she saw his hard, lined face and the white star gleaming in his pupil. At once, she recalled all the times she had heard people speak of this man, always in grave or frightened tones. The man they called Crossbow, the Lion of the East. And he was as imposing and terrifying in real life as she had imagined from those stories. Elwen’s hope left her, and she dropped her gaze, expecting him at any second to wrench one of the sabers he wore slung from his belt and strike her down where she stood. She didn’t want to see the end coming, and so she clenched her eyes shut and gritted her teeth.
“Ismik eh?”
The words filtered through her numb shock, alien at first, then suddenly familiar.
He asked my name?
Wonderingly, she raised her head and swallowed thickly.
“Ismi Elwen, Malik,”
she managed to breathe, then bowed her head again.
Baybars’s mouth twitched as she called him king. He lifted his trailing robes and strode up the dais steps to where he sat on his throne, staring down at her. “You will translate for me,” he told the eunuch he had ordered to stay, not taking his eyes off Elwen.
“How long have you been Campbell’s wife?”
As he spoke in Arabic, Elwen bit her lip, failing to understand. But it was repeated in stuttering French a moment later by the eunuch and she realized why he had been made to stay. For a moment, she wondered what she should say; then she decided to keep up the pretense. Just as many Christians would wholly disapprove of her illicit relationship with Will, so too would most Muslims. “Eleven years,” she said, choosing the year Will had proposed to her and glancing at the eunuch, who dutifully repeated her words in Arabic.
“How did he marry you, when he is a Templar?”
This time, after the sultan’s words had been translated, Elwen didn’t look at the eunuch when she replied. “The Temple doesn’t know that we are married.”
“He risked his knighthood for you?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“He must love you.”
Elwen didn’t reply. She thought of Garin, and the pain of regret, still so fresh, engulfed her. She couldn’t speak for the intensity of it.
Baybars, however, didn’t need an answer. “Then I expect you know why he went to the Assassins,” he said, his voice at once harsh and commanding. “Why he wanted me dead.” He stood, looming over her on the dais steps as the eunuch spoke his words. “I want you to tell me these things. Tell me what he told you!”
Finally, Elwen understood why she was here, why the Mamluks had come for Will and had taken her in his place. So far, the shock of it had clouded any serious search for motives for her capture. She didn’t know what to say for the best, but she had no time to falter here. Baybars wanted an answer and he wanted to be satisfied with it. “You killed his father, my Lord Sultan,” she told him, slowly, so the eunuch would be sure to understand her. “At Safed. James Campbell was one of the knights you ordered executed after the siege. That is why he went to the Assassins.”
Baybars frowned, listening to the eunuch, then grew still. Different emotions played across his face. Cognition, anger, triumph. Then, just a profound weariness. He slumped in his throne, his callused hands wrapping around the lions’ heads, grasping them tightly as if they were posts on a quay and he a ship desperate to moor.
He had thought all these years that the attempt on his life had been orchestrated by Frankish rulers in Acre; barons or kings who had wanted him gone to save their territories and positions. It had never entered his head that one man would have come looking for revenge out of the countless thousands he had sent to their deaths, fortress by fortress, city by city. It was vengeance that had ruled Campbell to this end, had led him to the Assassins. And Baybars knew that silvery, incessant call. He knew it well. Many times, its siren song had kept him awake at night. It had sung to him down the years, out of time and memory. Each life he took, each town, each army had been to satisfy that call, to fill the void inside him where it echoed ceaselessly. But nothing ever had.
After Omar, that space had simply widened, opening him up to the hollow-ness of a constant appetite that was never sated no matter what he did. He always imagined that the call had begun with her, a slave girl, brutally raped then murdered before him by their master, a former Templar Knight, another life ago in Aleppo. But her violent passing had only stretched the hole already torn when the Mongols invaded his lands, causing his delivery into the hands of the slave traders, changing the course of his entire life. And now vengeance had claimed another victim. But this time, it was him. Under his orders, the Christian’s father had died and to balance those scales, Omar had been taken. All at once, Baybars understood, with absolute clarity, that he would never find retribution for that which had been taken from him. He had been looking for it in all the wrong places. “Allah help me,” he whispered, closing his eyes and gripping the lions as he felt himself swallowed by the emptiness within. “Help me.”
The eunuch decided that he wasn’t supposed to translate this, and the chamber grew silent, the only sounds the whispering of three sets of breaths, Elwen’s fast and shallow, the eunuch’s low and strained, the sultan’s drawn out and trembling.
Finally, Baybars opened his eyes. They were moist and distant, and he didn’t look at Elwen or the eunuch as he moved down the steps of the dais and out of the throne room.
OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF DAMASCUS, SYRIA, 17 JUNE A.D. 1277
Sweat trickled in persistent lines from Will’s brow as he lay flat on a ridge of sand and looked down over the city of Damascus. It was late morning and although there was a haze, the sun’s strength was not diminished. If anything it was fiercer than usual, the world sprawled listlessly beneath it. From the ridge, Will had a good vantage over the city and the surrounding land, with the main road that led west to Acre snaking from the city’s gates. On one side, Damascus was bordered by a broad river, lined with verdant orchards and gardens. In front of the eastern walls, another city, this one composed entirely of tents, covered a large open plain in a riot of color. Squinting into its midst, Will could make out siege engines, and guessed that it must be the camp of the Mamluk Army.
He had been watching the road for almost half an hour and had seen a steady stream of people, camels and carts coming and going through the city gates. Satisfied that he would be able to enter without too much difficulty, he rose and hastened back down to the narrow track where he had left his horse. Mounting, he made his way out of the hills to join the road to the city.
It had been a hard ride from Acre. His plain tunic, which he’d had just enough foresight to exchange his mantle for, was damp and dirty, and there were bluish-gray circles under his eyes from lack of sleep and a merciless anxiety. Back at the preceptory, Simon, his face drawn with guilt, had gathered him an unnecessarily full pack of supplies. But Will had barely eaten a thing. He knew that he should; that he needed all his strength, but the mere sight of food had made him feel sick to his stomach and it had been all he could do to chew a few strips of salted meat the evening before. Images and memories of Elwen, brighter, sweeter than they had ever been in reality, swirled through every waking thought, until he was saturated with her. Thrumming, maddening fear beat within him, constant as a heartbeat.
Will’s eyes traveled over Damascus’s sheer walls, the tilted angles of hundreds of rooftops softened here and there by the globular domes of mosques, all marching upward, street by twisted street, to the crowning citadel, rising solid against the pearlescent sky, topped with banners that hung limp in the heavy air. The sight of it gave his determination a blow. Somewhere in that stone jungle was Elwen. But although he guessed the citadel to be where she would be held, he couldn’t see how on earth he could hope to find her in that giant’s castle, let alone rescue her. Would she even be alive? Was he foolish to hope? He shook his head as if to clear it. He had to hope. It was the only thing keeping him going. His plan was simple. He would find Kalawun, if the commander were here, and beg for his help.
Passing several traders with carts of goods, two women with water jugs poised on their heads and soldiers in chain mail, Will entered the city. Once inside, he was forced to lead his horse through the busy streets. As a major trading city and stop-off point on the pilgrim route to Mecca, Damascus had a population that was as diverse as Acre’s, and as many of the Mamluks themselves were white, Will didn’t look too conspicuous. But he knew he would only be able to rely on this fact for so long. Once in the citadel itself, he would be immediately out of place in his travel-soiled clothes and in danger of being recognized. He needed a disguise.
As he walked, Will’s eyes drifted over the people he passed: merchants, laborers, children, beggars. His gaze lingered longest on two Bahri warriors in their distinctive robes, but he stopped himself from following, knowing that he couldn’t overpower both of them. He walked for some time, going deeper into the city, becoming increasingly impatient, until at last he came to a shaded market, where he slumped against a wall. He straightened after a moment and was about to lead his horse to a busy water trough in one corner of the square when his eyes fell on a lone man coming out of a building on the western edge of the market. He was clad in a violet cloak, trimmed with black and gold braid, with a matching turban wound around his head. Will had seen such garments before. It was the uniform of the Mamluk royal messengers. The man had gone to a horse that was tethered near the mouth of a street winding off from the square and was knelt down, tightening his mount’s girth. Will headed toward him.
THE CITADEL, DAMASCUS, 17 JUNE A.D. 1277
With a frustrated hiss, Khadir crouched, panting, in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by a tangle of silk cushions, overturned furniture and disheveled rugs. It was no use. However much he willed it otherwise, she wasn’t here. He had searched every room, every corner he had occupied since their return, to no avail. The doll was gone. Snatching up a cushion and kneading it between his hands, Khadir squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember when he had last seen her. But only a mocking blackness greeted him. He made a high, keening noise.
For several years, he had struggled with his memory, able in one instant to recall events from his childhood, yet unable to summon to whom he had been speaking just hours earlier. There were holes in his mind, missing days, empty moments. And it was getting worse. Struggle as he might, he could not remember whether he had brought the doll with him on the campaign. Was she still in the grain store back in Cairo, sitting pretty and useless five hundred miles away?
Khadir had planned to do the deed in Aleppo, months ago. Baybars had held a banquet the night before the cavalry had left for Anatolia, and he had thought to slip a few lethal drops into Kalawun’s drink, until he had discovered that the doll was missing. That night he had searched the camp frantically, but there was still no sign of her by the time dawn broke, and an embittered Khadir had been forced to watch from Aleppo’s ramparts as Kalawun and Baybars rode out of the gates at the vanguard. Deciding he must have left the doll in Damascus, he had called upon all the curses he could think of, spitting them over and over into his fists each night Kalawun was gone, demanding death by a stray Mongol arrow, a slip on a mountain pass, a snake coiling from the undergrowth. But the commander had returned with the army, alive and well.
As they had set out for Damascus, Khadir had gradually brought himself round to the conclusion that it was better this way. An unfortunate accident was too random, too purposeless. He wanted to witness Kalawun’s death: to be the master of the end of the man who had so consistently ruined all his plans. Then he would truly be able to savor it as a victory. But all his fevered scheming had come to nothing when he had returned to Damascus to find that his memory had failed him yet again and the doll was simply nowhere to be found. A vague sense of worry had begun to creep in through his frustration. It was one thing to be thwarted in his attempt to murder Kalawun, but to have the only piece of evidence that could connect him to Aisha’s death, which her father still believed to be his doing, go missing was another.
Abruptly, Khadir rose. None of this mattered. It was all noise in his head, confusing, pointless noise. There was only one thing he needed to do and quickly. Baybars had been stirred by the proof that the Franks had indeed tried to kill him, but Kalawun was already disrupting things and the soothsayer knew that Baybars would listen, as always, to the commander’s cautious, measured response. Khadir could do it without the use of poison. His hand went to the gold-handled dagger, embedded with its blood-red ruby. A true Assassin’s death. The murder would be apparent and an investigation launched, but it would keep Baybars in Damascus for longer, and with Kalawun gone, Khadir could make sure the sultan wouldn’t head for Cairo when their time here was done, but would turn the full might of his army on Acre. Khadir did not mind that the finger of blame for Kalawun’s murder might be laid on him. Baybars would never kill him; he was too afraid of putting his own life in danger by doing so. Khadir had long ago sown the seeds of fear in the sultan that their lives were irrevocably connected and that what affected one would affect the other. He might imprison him, but that thought did not concern Khadir overtly. After months of subtle pushing on both their parts, Baraka had finally pressed his way back into his father’s trust and would, Khadir was sure, be able to secure his release. Not only that, but the youth’s ambition had been awoken this past year and Khadir knew he was now ready to help steer his father in the right direction.