Authors: Unknown
Khadir looked to the window, where delicate muslin drapes undulated in the hot wind, framing a blue sky. Soon that blue would fade to black and the moon would rise. Tonight was the eclipse. He had been worrying about it for weeks and earlier had insisted that Baybars double his guard for the night and avoid certain foods. But, as Baybars himself had pointed out, the death of a great ruler didn’t have to mean him. The sultan had speculated that it could be an augury for the Ilkhan, Abaga, or any number of rulers: a Frankish king, a prince. Or a high commander. Khadir smiled at the symmetry of it. If the stars demanded blood tonight, then he would give it to them.
Feeling certainty surge through him, he left his room and padded down the corridor. Halfway along, he paused, looking around, then slipped into a narrow archway that led up a flight of steps into a dark riddle of servants’ passages.
It was with trepidation and a quiet thrill that Baraka Khan opened the doors to the throne room, having told the citadel guards outside that his father had ordered him to collect some papers he had left behind. The guards, having been given no command since Baybars had left, almost an hour earlier, let the prince pass without a word.
The two occupants of the airy throne room started as the doors opened. Baraka’s eyes went first to the woman, who was standing in the window, her gold hair, lit from behind by the early afternoon sun, luminous as a halo. Her face was pinched and pale, and her eyes were unblinking as she stared at him. They were an incredible shade of green, which made him think of water, a slow summer river or a mountain lake. Baraka swallowed thickly. Barely glancing at the room’s other inhabitant, he passed an indifferent hand in his direction. “Leave,” he told the eunuch imperiously.
The eunuch hesitated, but his nerves, already set on edge by Baybars’s erratic behavior, got the better of him and he headed quickly for the door. The woman watched him go, then turned her eyes back to Baraka. There was strength in that stare, he now realized, where before he had only seen fear. It checked him and he felt his confidence slip a little. To cover his nervousness, he snapped the door’s bolt into place and crossed to the table where he had been sitting with the governors when the woman was brought in. The surface was littered with papers. He pretended to rustle through them, all the while feeling the woman’s gaze burning into him, making his neck itch and tingle and his face grow warm.
Baraka had no idea what the woman and his father had spoken about, or why she was even still alive. But he had been deeply intrigued when his father had left the throne room, his face wet with tears. Baraka, lingering in the passageway he had slipped into when Baybars had ordered everyone out, had watched his father pass in stunned silence, those tears impossible on his cheeks. Never once, in all his years, had he seen his father cry. Never once had he imagined he would. At first bemused and astonished, he had hunkered down in the passage, trying to guess what could have happened. And the more he thought, the more his mind had returned to the gold-haired woman. When she was brought in by the soldiers, he had been gripped by the look of her and by the animal fear coming off her. But that she had made his father cry? Well, now she had aroused his curiosity also.
Emboldened after Aisha’s death, by his part in it and by the fact that his dalliances were once again safe, Baraka had continued his weekly trysts with the slave girls in earnest, growing all the more brazen in his pursuit of gratification. But just recently he had begun to find himself unsatisfied. The slaves had grown used to his demands, had become docile and compliant. He felt starved of the physical sense of power the act had initially granted him, when the girls were scared and unwilling. He felt the lack like a heat inside him. His wanting made him ache with restless urgency and turned him more bad-tempered and impatient than usual. He had, however, found some moments of satisfaction. Baraka didn’t know why, exactly, he had taken the doll, only that to have it gave him a certain gratifying omnipotence. He wielded his lethal treasure secretly, not only over Khadir, but over every man in his father’s army. At banquets, he had watched them, the phial hot and sweaty in his hand beneath the table, taking greedy delight in the knowledge that they were at his mercy and that, like some unkind god, he could, whenever he wished it, strike down any one of them.
There was a voice behind him and Baraka whipped round. The woman had spoken. But he didn’t understand what she had said.
She spoke again, this time in hesitant Arabic. “Who are you?”
Baraka sucked in a breath. Here was a Christian woman, a prisoner, speaking to him bold as day,
questioning
him indeed in his own tongue! He couldn’t believe her audacity. “Silence!” he snapped, angered by her unwavering stare, and was gratified when she flinched. She was only pretending to be unafraid. In truth, he guessed, she was terrified. The realization gave him a sudden rush and he went toward her, every step thrilling him more and more as she backed away, looking around for escape.
Finally, he caught her by the window. Her ashen face was now flushed, hectic with alarm. She spoke rapidly in a language he did not understand. He caught a few words of Arabic mixed within it. But he wasn’t listening anymore. Her nearness, her dread, filled him like a drug, blocking out his own concern that he might be caught, blurring his vision of all else except her. He no longer cared what she had done to his father or why he had kept her alive. There was just one thing Baraka wanted.
33
The Citadel, Damascus 17 JUNE A.D. 1277
Back in his chambers, Kalawun poured water into a goblet. Freshly drawn from the citadel’s well, it had a brittle, mineral taste. It was freezing. He drank too quickly, causing a needle stab of pain to shoot through his forehead. He closed his eyes to let it pass and saw again the woman standing alone in the throne room, staring after him as he quietly backed away. With the image came a voice, telling him to go back. He had the sultan’s ear. He could save her. But in truth, he was scared. Scared of angering Baybars and jeopardizing his position, scared of arousing suspicions as to why he wanted her to live. But most of all, scared of the pain the unexpected reminder of his daughter had brought him.
Opening his eyes, Kalawun poured another measure and brought the goblet up to drink, but before it touched his lips, he put it down. On the table beside the water jug was a silver tray of fruit: peaches, grapes, bananas, carved up and sweating in the room’s heat. He glanced at it, wondering if he were hungry, but his pain wouldn’t be ignored or denied so easily, and all of a sudden the fruit was just another expression of a life that was ended. Aisha would never again perch on his knee, her fingers sticky with peach juice, and tell him in swift, intense tones about her day. Kalawun planted his palms on the table, digging his fingers into the wood until they turned white, then with a single, brutal motion, swept the tray and the jug away, sending water and fruit cascading. As the jug smashed and a green hail of grapes hit the floor, Kalawun felt someone at his back. He went to turn. Too late. An arm snaked into view, coming around from behind him in a flash of gold and red. There was a dagger thrust at his throat, a rank smell of dampness and rot.
“Serpent!”
came Khadir’s voice, seething in his ear. “I’ve caught you!”
Kalawun, his eyes flicking left to the closed door of his chambers, realized that Khadir must have come in through the servants’ passage in his bedchamber. He tried to turn his head, but felt a sting as Khadir pressed the blade against his throat, tearing his skin. He stood still. “What are you doing, Khadir?” he murmured, trying to keep his voice calm.
Khadir took no notice of his reasonable tone. “For so long have I waited for this. For so long! Now the bridle you have placed around my master will slacken. He will destroy the infidel Franks as I have foretold and you shall not stop him!”
“Baybars is his own master, Khadir. He made the decision to concentrate on the Mongols rather than the Franks. In the end, it did not matter what I said.”
“Lies!” hissed Khadir. “It
is
your doing. Your actions and words, oh so many,
many
words, led my master from his path. I do not know the reason, but the truth is clear as water. You blinded him, deafened him, turned him to your will, turned him from the Christians. You speak now to save your own skin. All lies!”
“No, Khadir, I—”
“I was planning to poison you,” Khadir cut across him, almost wonderingly, “like I did your daughter.”
Kalawun went rigid. A breath shot through his lips.
“But this way I get to see your fear,” continued Khadir. He inhaled through flared nostrils. “Get to
smell
it.” So absorbed was he in his relish that he didn’t notice the chamber’s main door glide silently open behind him. “This way,
Amir Kalawun
, when you die, I get to feel your soul slip through my fingers!”
“Let him go.”
Khadir’s head snapped around at the voice, his eyes growing huge as he saw a man behind him, brandishing a short sword. The man wore the garments of a royal messenger and had a scroll bag slung over his shoulder, but when he spoke, his Arabic was awkward. A moment after his gaze alighted on the man’s face, Khadir recognized him. He let loose an outraged cry, which quickly became a shriek as Kalawun twisted violently in his grip, throwing him off balance. Khadir flailed, his hand with the dagger in it going wide. Kalawun wrenched himself free. The soothsayer was swift to react, however, and lashed determinedly out. The ruby flashed, catching the light, as the blade sliced across Kalawun’s arm, which he just managed to bring up in defense. There was a ripping of cloth and Kalawun’s face contorted. Khadir uttered another cry of rage and came in again, but this time Kalawun managed to grab hold of his wrist.
Will moved in to help.
“No!” shouted Kalawun. “He is mine!” There was a tear in his sleeve and blood was pumping steadily from somewhere within, but even though the effort caused him obvious agony, he seized the soothsayer in a savage grip. His face apoplectic, spittle flecking white from his mouth, he turned Khadir’s wrist around until the dagger’s tip was pointed inward.
Khadir, his own face bulging with the strain, tried to fight him. But although the former Assassin was agile for his years, he was no match for Kalawun’s strength. Slowly but surely, the dagger tip edged toward him, inch by inch. Khadir gasped, his face going purple and veins standing out like cords on his neck. He kicked out ruthlessly with his bare feet, but Kalawun’s hold didn’t falter. All of a sudden, Khadir’s strength failed. His jaw went slack with shock. With the soothsayer’s skeletal, liver-spotted hand still wrapped around the hilt, Kalawun slammed the blade home with a yell. It punched into Khadir’s throat and drove right through, on up to the base of his skull, where it emerged in shining silver victory. Blood sprayed from the old man’s mouth, splattering Kalawun’s face. The soothsayer gurgled, choked, reared back in Kalawun’s grip. His eyes were twin moons of horror as he fought against the death. A foul stench rose as his bladder and bowels gave way and voided themselves in a fetid rush. Then his spasms ceased and he collapsed.
Kalawun let go of him and slumped against the table, straining for breath and clutching his forearm, which was bleeding profusely. He looked at Will, who met his gaze in silence, then back at Khadir, sprawled crookedly amidst the debris of blood-splattered fruit and splinters of clay. The soothsayer’s eyes were open and his mouth and his chest and the floor around him were awash with blood. The ruby in the dagger was glazed with it. “He’s dead,” said Kalawun flatly; then he staggered.
Will went forward and caught him. “Your wound is serious.”
“I will live.” Kalawun wiped a hand across his mouth, smearing into thin red lines droplets of the soothsayer’s blood. He looked at Will. “You shouldn’t have come. They will kill you.”
“I had to come.”
Kalawun sighed roughly and pressed his hand tighter to his wound, grimacing with pain. “I sent an officer of mine to warn you, but he did not reach you in time.” He paused. “Despite the circumstances, I am glad to see you. I wasn’t sure what happened at Mecca, or whether you ...” He trailed off, looking down at Khadir’s body.
“Why didn’t you warn us that you were sending your own forces to protect the Stone?” Will asked him, unable to keep the anger from his tone. “Did you not think you might endanger the lives of me and my men?”
“You told me nothing of your plans in your message. I did not know what you were doing to stop it.”
“I couldn’t risk exposing that information in a letter. I had to—”
“I realize that,” Kalawun cut across him, “and did not wish to deceive you, truly. But you have to understand that I couldn’t rely on your promise alone, not for the holiest relic of my people. Any risk to your men, even to you, was outweighed by the need to keep it safe, for your people as well as mine. I am sorry, William. It was just one more sacrifice.” He leaned heavily against the table, feeling the blood trickling hotly down his arm. “You understand?”
Will nodded after a moment. He did.
Kalawun laughed suddenly, a pained, breathless sound. “I sometimes wonder if any of this is worth what we pay for it, you and I. I sometimes think ...” He fell silent as faint but clear through the open door came a woman’s screams. “Your wife,” he said quickly.
Baybars was making his way to the throne room, pensive and preoccupied, when he heard the screams. His head jerked up and he strode down the passage, breaking into a run as he saw the palace guards he had left outside hammering on the doors. “Open them!” he barked as he reached them.
“They’re locked, my lord,” said one guard, stepping away at his approach. From inside came another scream, which was quickly cut off, then followed by the sound of things falling, a muffled thud and a tinkling of glass.
“Move,” snapped Baybars, ramming the doors with his shoulder. The stout wood shuddered but didn’t budge. “Who locked them?” he demanded, bracing himself and trying again.