Alamut Part 21

Aidan glanced at Farouk. The smith inclined his head. Qui- etly, without haste, Aidan took up the sheathed sword. Its weight was sword-weight, lighter than some, longer than the blade he had brought from Rhiyana. He closed his right hand about the sheath, his left about the hilt. The silver was cool and quiet in his fingers. Slowly he drew the sword.

It shimmered as it drank the light. Its patterns were subtle, wave-patterns, flame-patterns, flowing from the hilt to the dia- mond-glitter of the point. Almost, as he turned it, they van- ished; then they glimmered into clarity. Words flowed together with them.

Verily Vk created man of potter's clay of black mud altered, And the Jinn did W create aforetime of essential fire.

Aidan's fingers convulsed upon the hilt. The sword leaped in his hand like a living thing. It knew him. It tasted his essence.

It was his. 161.

He gave it tribute of his own blood, a drop to sate its thirst when it had danced for him. Maimoun, unnoticed, had brought two things to test it: a billet of wood and a silken cushion. Aidan curled his lip at the wood. With the gentlest of strokes, he clove the cushion in two. The down within barely scattered. One feather rose, met the blade, paned- The air would weep when he wielded that blade. A man might ride against him, be cloven, and never know it until his head slipped free of his body.

Aidan sheathed it reluctantly. Later, he said to it. Wjyr for we.

The others watched it all in the silence of perfect understand- ing. Aidan bowed low to the smith. "You have outdone your- self," he said.

Earouk nodded to plain truth. "I've never wrought a better blade. I may never do as well again. G.o.d was with me; He guided my hand."

"And . - . your choice of verses for the blade?"

"The steel chose," said Earouk. "That is its soul."He spoke the truth as he saw it. Aidan was mute. This was power, a magic deeper and stronger than his own. The forging of steel; the waking of its soul; the binding of them both, each to each. Earth and fire. Mortal and immortal. As the bearer, so the blade.

Aidan bowed over it, lower cven-than before. "Master," he said.

With the sword in its proper place at his side and both gold and tribute well paid to its maker, Aidan eased in body and mind. The city through which he pa.s.sed seemed all made new.

He rode it like a river in flood; he could blunt his senses to it, but not quell them wholly, so that he was not left: blind and deaf. So balanced, so poised, he found strength not only to endure the press of humanity but to move as part of it.

It was a kind of freedom. Not as simple nor as sweet as the silence of the greenwood, but keen-edged tike the hunt's end, when the boar waits, and the hounds have drawn back, and the hunter knows that now he will be master, or he will fall.

He found that he was striding lightly, hardly hindered by the narrowness of the streets or the jostle of people. Now and again he touched the cool smoothness of the swordhilt, for the simple joy of its presence.

He paused once for a napkinful of something deliriously 162 sweet, and once again for a dipper of cool water ofBarada. He heard a street singer with a voice like a mating cat; he nearly fell into a brawl of uncertain beginnings and impressive extent, the center of which appeared to be a Turk and a Kurd.

He was mildly startled to come out of the clamoring dimness of the bazaar and find the sun still high in the sky. He had come out face to face with the eastern gate of the Great Mosque, just as the brazen falcon bent down under its twelve narrow arches to drop the ball of the hour into its basin, and the arch of the second hour past noon vanished behind its shutter. Aidan stood staring at it, though he was cursed for barring the way, and although he had seen it before. Even at night it was a marvel: the falcons continued their sleepless round, and lanterns marked the pa.s.sing of each hour through a circle of blood-red gla.s.s. It made time seem real, a graspable thing, a matter for man's mastery. But he could only measure it; he could not stop it, nor make it run backward.

"Your stars, my lord-shall I read your stars for you?"

Aidan glanced down. A man peered up, crouching on the step, clutching charts and pens and abacus: the tools of the astrologer's trade. He was marginally preferable, Aidan sup- posed, to the sellers of relics who infested Christian churches.

Though there would be a few of those within, keeping their heads low for fear of Sunni wrath, but offering the odd, bold Shi'a pilgrim a glimpse of the casket in which reposed a strandof the Prophet's hair, and beside it one which held the head of the great Shiite martyr Husain. The Sunni did not bow to relics, which they reckoned-like nearly everything else-a kind of idolatry.

They were not fond of astrologers, either; which did not keep the creatures from flocking to the steps of the Gate of the Clock.

This one sighed in Aidan's silence. "Business," he said, "is bad, though I ask barely enough recompense to keep flesh on these worthless bones. Would not my lord be pleased to know what days are propitious for his undertakings?"

"Is that all you can tell me?" Aidan asked him.

"I hardly pretend to foretell the future," the astrologer said.

"Simply to surmise by my science what it is likeliest to hold."

Aidan dropped to the step beside him, caught in spite of himself. "An honest soothsayer! No wonder your business is bad. You should be promising miracles of prophecy." 163.

The man drew his skinny body erect, all offended dignity. "I am not, great lord, a charlatan. I am a student of the stars."

And young under the straggling beard, and painfully earnest.

He clutched his charts to his chest and glared at Aidan's smile.

"You may mock me, 0 sultan, but my science is my science."

"Certainly," said Aidan. "I was merely surprised. What is a true philosopher doing, selling horoscopes on the steps of the Great Mosque?"

"Allah's will," the astrologer replied with humility as striking as all the rest of him, "and necessity. My family is impover- ished; my father is newly dead. G.o.d grant him peace; there is no money to spare for the completion of my studies. Therefore I make what use of them I can, for what little it will bring. Very little," he said, "but anything is better than nothing. And I will not-I will not-beg."

"A man has his pride," Aidan agreed. He paused. "I don't know when I was born according to your calendar."

"Ah," said the astrologer, coming to attention, like a hound on a scent. He peered. "Greek?"

"Frank," Aidan said, "Ah," the astrologer said again, not a whit dismayed. He rimed through his charts. "I think ... yes ... close enough, if I add here, and subtract ..." He trailed off. "The day?"

"May Eve," Aidan said, "nigh midnight."

It meant nothing to a Muslim, except as a number on achart, that Aidan's first sight had been the Beltane fires. "The year?"

Aidan told him.

He scribbled. Stopped. Looked up. "My lord will pardon me, but I think my lord has erred by a decade or four."

"I think not," Aidan said, smiling.

The astrologer blinked. "My lord, you cannot be-"

"I can."

He shivered. He considered, visibly, a number of responses.

With feline delicacy, Aidan set a coin on the step between the astrologer's feet. It glittered gold.

"Numbers," the astrologer said in a dying fall, "arc numbers.

Even ... for a ..."

Another bright bezant appeared beside the first. Aidan had not moved, in body, to put it there.

The astrologer stared at it. He was remarkably calm. An error in mathematics was a shudder in the heart of him. Magic 164.

. . . that was different. He inclined his head, not at all ridicu- lous in his dignity. "My lord," he said. He bent again and peacefully to his calculations.

Aidan waited in rather more patience than some would have believed him capable of. People came and went. The other astrologers were well occupied; their colleagues in the gate, the notaries, plied a lively trade. Some went from one to the other.

First the stars, then the contracts; and if the stars were bad, they pa.s.sed the notaries by and went within, probably to pray for a more auspicious day.

The second falcon dropped its ball with a clinking of metal on metal, like the ringing of a bell. The astrologer muttered over his charts, and gnawed his beard, and scored through a whole line of calculations. He looked up, rumpled and almost fierce. "I have never," he said by way of explanation, "cast a horoscope for a prince of the jinn. You are a prince. I read that properly. No?"

"Yes," Aidan said.

The astrologer was too preoccupied to bow. "It's all most interesting. Incredible, I would say, but you are what you are.

Between Venus and Mars; but Mercury has power in your house. You are as much loved as hated; one who would possess you, would possess you uttcriy- Death rides close to you, but has no dominion over you." His finger, ink-stained, traced theline of the chart. "Sec, there is danger, and there. And great joy, but a great loss. A journey-journeys. Look to your wives.

One is jealous, and will harm the other, unless you take care."

"But I don't have-" Aidan began.

The astrologer did not hear him. "You were born under a singularly brilliant star. You fly with kings; kings look to you- not for guidance- For strength, yes. And the fire of your pres- ence. Where you are, stability seldom is. You move in power, you are power, but you rein it in; you clip its wings. That's not wise, in what you have to face. Learn to wield what you bear, prince, or you will fall. How low, my science is insufficient to foretell. Whether you will rise again ..." He underscored a figure, glared at it. "Venus in the Virgin. Fire in a cold heart.

Death. Even a jinni may die, prince. Remember that."

"I never forget," Aidan said.

The astrologer fretted with his beard. "It's bad. I don't pre- tend to deny it. But there's hope. There's always hope. What can kill you, can save you. It's a matter of proportion."

"It's all dark before me, then?" 165.

"I didn't say that." The astrologer held to his patience with difficulty. "You've been blessed with a royal share of good for- tune. Now you're asked to pay for it. If you are wise, and move * carefully, and forbear to tempt heaven, you will end more , blessed than before. Look, here, you can see it. All the paths come together; they seem dark, because of their density. Either they end here, in an inextricable knot, or they unravel again under fortunate stars. The choice is yours to make, in the sum of your choices."

"Thereby," said Aidan, "encompa.s.sing both destiny and free will."

"Exactly," the astrologer said, oblivious to irony. He looked like a very young bird, hunched bright-eyed in his nest of charts. "IVe never done a more interesting horoscope. So many choices-take mortality out of it, and you touch infinity.

It's a fascinating way to go mad."

"G.o.d be thanked, then, that you did not."

The astrologer flushed slightly. "I confess, I kept myself t- within very limited bounds. I used the quickest calculations } wherever I could. It's not a wonderful horoscope, my lord. It's ^ barely even adequate. There are a few paths ... if I'd fol- lowed them, instead of . . ."

"Enough!" cried Aidan, "or you really will go mad, and it will all be on my head."

"You should have thought of that," the astrologer said se- verely, "before you let me cast the horoscope."His illogic was sublime; it touched the edge of perfect logic.

Dark as his foreseeings had been, Aidan could not, for the moment, be cast down. He had a lover and not the warring wives of his stars, and in a little while he would see her; and in a day or two they would leave the city. He had grief enough, as the astrologer had seen, but there was joy in it. He filled the man's hands with gold, all he had in his purse-all, maybe, that he had in the world, but he did not care. There was too much joy in it, in seeing the eyes go round in the thin face, and the narrow brilliant mind open wide in astonishment, protest, guilty delight. "But," the astrologer said, "but this is an un- lucky day for me."

"Certainly it is," Aidan said: "for your career as a street- comer astrologer. You, my fine philosopher, are going to go back to your schooling, and prosper at it, and end the master of your own school. Promise me youll do that."

"But," the astrologer said. "But-"

166 "Promise!"

"I promise- I-" He swallowed audibly. "My lord, I foretold disaster!"

"You gave me fair warning. Which I shall remember." Aidan rose, smiling. "May G.o.d prosper you."

As Aidan turned away, the astrologer still babbling but be- ginning, incredulously, to praise his G.o.d and his benefactor, he nearly collided with a figure in a scarlet coat. A youth, a Turk with his long braids and his necklaces and the heavy rings in his cars, wearing an expression half of triumph and half of patience taxed to its limit. When Aidan stopped, beginning an apology, the Turk's face smoothed itself flat, though his nar- row black eyes were glittering still. "Sir Irank," he said, "the sultan asks you to attend him."

And the hunt, it was readily apparent, had taken most of the day. Aidan forbore to blush, but he moved quickly where the messenger led. There was a horse waiting, with a very small page holding her bridle, and a pony which, on sight of the Turk, lifted its blocky head and neighed. The mare, tall for an Arab and most well aware of her beauty, regarded Aidan with wary respect. Beasts always knew him; beasts of mettle were sometimes slow to trust him, because they saw his power, and knew what it could do to them.

This one had courage. She barely flinched from his hand on her neck. Her great nostrils flared; her lean ears quivered. "By your leave," he said to her, setting foot to stirrup. She jibbed, stilled. He stroked her sleek bay neck. It arched; she pawed the ground. The page clambered nimbly up behind, quick as a monkey and no more inclined to ask whether he was welcome.

Once the child was settled, the sultan's messenger kicked his pony into a trot. The mare, insulted, sprang into a dancing canter.Aidan was sorry to part with the mare whose gaits were fire and silk. But the sultan was waiting, and the messenger was not minded to linger. They left horses and page in the outer court of the citadel and pa.s.sed within, going deeper than Aidan had ever gone before: past the public portions into regions less meticulously splendid. Opulent still, certainly, but rime had been allowed to tread here. Paint and gilding grew worn and faded, riles cracked, staircases hollow with use. But the garden into which they emerged was most well tended, heavy like all of 167.

Damascus with the scent of roses, sweet with the sound of falling water.

Beyond the fountain was a pavilion nigh as large as a king's hall, its columns twined with roses, its doors all open to the garden, so that one could scarcely tell where inside began and outside ended. Cool airs played through it; a fingcrling of Barada filled the pool in its center and bubbled away beneath the riles of the floor.

By the pool in a circle of attendants sat the sultan. He had been at work: a pair of secretaries scribbled amid a tottering heap of charters and registers and dispatches. The man nearest him, young to bear as great a weight of dignity as he patently did, wore the robes of a qadi, a judge, and scribbled as a.s.sidu- ously as either of the secretaries. The emirs beyond him, by contrast, looked as fiercely out of place as falcons in a dove- cote. Aidan knew Murhaf ibn Usamah, and Ishak's lord Masud; the third was a stranger, a haughty personage who, beneath robes of dazzling extravagance, bore a marked resem- blance to the sultan. It was he who seemed most ill at ease in the scratching of pens and the riming of pages; even the peace of the garden seemed to give him no pleasure. Left to himself, he would have disposed of the busy scribblers and called for dancing girls.

Saladin, thin and dark and clerkly in-spite of the sword at his side, seemed in his element. He caught Aidan in the midst of a low and careful obeisance, embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks. "My lord prince! Well met, and welcome. I'd begun to fear that you had left the city."

"Not quite yet, sire," Aidan said, recovering himself quickly enough once he had recalled the eastern propensity for effu- sion. "I fear I gave your man a hard chase. I was dallying about the city, and taking little enough notice of where I went. It's a miracle he found me."

"Arslan is a better hunter than most," said Saladin, smiling.

The young Turk, catching his eye, bowed low and took himself elsewhere.

The sultan's smile broadened to take in Aidan. "Come, sit, be at case. You came in a good hour; I'd all but finished here. A moment longer, of your charity . . .w Aidan inclined his head. A servant appeared with sherbet, fruit, a plateful of bread sprinkled with salt. Aidan understoodthe significance of that; and if he was not hungry, he had a respectable thirst. He nibbled a bit of the flat unleavened 168.

Judith Ton- bread, finding it good; drank deep of the sherbet that was cooled with snow from Mount Hennon. The sultan bent to- ward his yeuii, intent on the wording of a letter. His emirs waited in varying degrees of patience. Murhafs head was bowed; his lips moved: reciting the Koran as a Christian would tell his beads. Masud observed the pattern of rose-leaves against the twining arabesques of the riles. The third emir, who was Saladin's brother Turan-Shah, watched Aidan.

Not with hostility, Aidan took note. Not quite- Measuring.

Pondering his usefulness.

This man had not his brother's simplicity. Saladin was no more and no less than what he was. Turan-Shah was the elder, born to rule among the sons of Ayyub, condemned by the fortune that had left him behind while his brother forayed into Egypt, to sec one younger and, in his mind, lesser, made king twice over, while he remained but the servant of a king. He who coveted splendor saw his brother spurn it as if it were dust; he who would have ruled like a proper emperor, muse bow to a man who could not even keep order in his council.

Who-his eyes began to glitter-entertained Franks as if they had been decent Muslims, and never gave a thought to the propriety of his station.

Aidan struggled free of that small cold mind, clinging to his cup as to an anchor, fighting a fit of trembling. Dear G.o.d, who had this Ayyub been,, that his sons should come so close to power? Saladin, who could see through any veil of glamour.

Turan-Shah, whose mind was more than open; who drew the power in and all but drowned it.

They were mortal enough. There was grey in Turan-Shah's beard; his face bore the marks of rime and war and self-indul- gence. His scent was man-scent, heavy with eastern musk.

Aidan breathed deep of it, little comforted by it. He traced the cross on the hilt of his dagger, for strength, and for remem- brance. Of what he was; of what he was sworn to.

The qadi withdrew at last, taking the secretaries with him.

Saladin sighed and stretched and rubbed his eyes. "Allah be my witness, I could never be a scholar." He captured an apple from the bowl which Aidan had not touched, and bit into it with every expression of pleasure. His eyes on Aidan were bright and appallingly clear, but his mind laid no traps for unwary power.