Alamut Part 41

His face burned where she had touched it. He bent back to his fresh-blooded kill, shouldered it. The best way back was the way she took. He was not, he told himself, taking it because she had.

For all her boldness and her wild ways, Morgiana shared Sayyida's prudery in the matter of sleeping places. The women spread mats in the kitchen; nor would they hear of an ex- change. More often than not, Aidan had Hasan for a compan- ion. Even so young, he seemed to recognize that they were males together; and he loved all the cushions and coverlets.

"He's turning into a little prince," his mother said.

"Then he is in proper company," said' Morgiana.

Aidan, picking without appet.i.te at a bit of roast gazelle, looked up in time to catch Sayyida's look of comic dismay. "Ya Allah! I'd completely forgotten."

His smile was wry. "Don't bow. Youll fall in the pot."

"I had no intention of-I mean-1-" Sayyida stopped in confusion."It's not as if I were real royalty," he said. She opened her mouth, indignant. He laughed. "I know I'm not. I've been told it on excellent authority. How can I be insulted by the truth?"

"That's nonsense," said Sayyida. "Royal is royal. And I never even thought. Ishak told me once-he was full of it. I didn't trouble to remember. What was a prince to me? I'd never come any closer to one than I already had."

"Strange things, your Allah writes, when he has a mind."

Aidan gave up the meat and settled for cheese. Morgiana's glance was keen. He refused to see it.

304.

Judith Tan- He set down the half-nibbled cheese. "Go on, eat. I'm fin- ished."

They tried to argue with that, but he had no appet.i.te, and they did. While they ate, he withdrew to the bath. It was a wonder to him, to have it there, always, for the taking. And wide enough to swim in.

He dropped his clothes, but he did not go into the pool.

Where the stone poured down in a curtain like ice, blue and palest green, he settled on his stomach, chin on folded arms, watching the play of water in the light of the lamp. Idly he made a light that was his own, and shattered it into embers, setting them to dance atop the water.

He yawned, rubbed his cheek against his arm. He was forget- ting how it felt to be clean-shaven. Maybe he would go back to it. It would shock the women; it would prove that he was a Prank and a barbarian. And, in body, monstrously young.

Time left no mark on him. Even scars faded and vanished.

He had taken a blow to the mouth once, long after he was grown. The stumps of teeth had loosened and fallen; he learned to smile close-mouthed, and contemplated long ages of beauty marred. It was illuminating, and humbling, to know how much it mattered. But a day came when he ran his tongue along the broad ugly gap, and felt a strangeness. In a few months' rime they had all grown back, all the shattered teeth, sharper and whiter than ever. Sometimes in his wilder moods he was tempted to sacrifice a finger, to see if it would grow again without a scar.

He would never do it. He was too tender of his vanity. He troubled little with mirrors, but he liked to know what he would see there. He liked the way people, meeting him, drew back a little and stared, and doubted their eyes. Even the way they judged him, mere empty beauty, with no need to be more. It was always amusing to prove them wrong.

He always knew, now, where Morgjana was, as he knew the whereabouts of his own hand. He said to (he water, but in part to her, "I'm a very shallow creature, when it comes to thecrux."

She dropped something over him: a robe of heavy silk, glow- ingly scariet. "But very good to look at," she said, "and no more modest than an animal."

"Why not? I've nothing to hide."

"The Prophet, on his name be blessing and peace, was a modest man. We follow his example." 305.

Aidan sat up, wrapping the robe about him. It was lined with lighter silk, pale gold; it was embroidered with dragons. It was perfectly suited to his taste. "Was he ugly, then?"

"Oh, no!" She seemed shocked at the thought. "He was very handsome. He looked a little like you: being n.o.ble, and Arab, and slow to show his age."

"You knew him."

"I was never so blessed." She was in green tonight. She looked much better in it than in white. Much warmer; much less inhuman.

She had not denied that she was old enough to have known Muhammad- "I may be," she said. "I don't remember. I was little more than a wind in the desert, until my master found me and made me his own. I remember nothing of being a child. Who knows? Maybe I never was one."

"My mother was like that," said Aidan. "A wild thing, nearly empty of self, until a mortal man gave her a reason to live in mortal rime."

"Did she die with him?"

"No. She . . . faded. She went back into the wood. Us- my brother and me-she left. We were half mortal, and raised mortal, though we knew early enough that we were not. As our sister is."

"You have a sister?"

It twisted in him, with pain. "Gwenllian. Yes. Ten years younger than I, and growing old. You killed her son."

"I was oathbound," she said. "Surely you know what that is."

He drew up his knees and laid his forehead on them. He was tired. Of fighting. Of hating. Of grieving for human dead.

"It is what humans are. They give us pain.""And joy," he said. "That, too. Surely that is what it is to be alive?"

"I don't know. I don't think I've ever lived. Empty of self- yes, that is I. I was a dagger and a vow. Now I am less even than that."

His head flew up. His anger flared, sudden and searing. "You are not!"

He had astonished her. It soured quickly; her mouth twisted. "No. I am something, still. A thing to hare."

"I don't-" He broke off. He could not say it. It would be a lie.

306 Judith Tmr Except . . .

He shook himself. "You are more than that! Look about you- Look at your friend; look at Hasan. Aren't they worth something?"

"One friend," she said, "in a hundred years."

"A hundred years of what? Being a dagger and a vow. Serv- ing masters who never saw you as anything else. But you are more; your heart knows it. It found Sayyida, and she had the wits, and the quality, to know you for what you are."

"A murderer of children."

It hurt, to have those words cast back in his face. It was not supposed to hurt. It was supposed to be a triumph. "Yes, d.a.m.n you- And more than that. None of us is simple, my lady."

"You can say that?"

"^bu wanted me to see you clearly."

She stood. She shook; it had the heat of rage- "I wanted you to love me."

He cut his beard short, but he did not get rid of it. It was not worth a battle; and his vow was not kept. Not yet.

He decided that he rather liked it, once it was short enough to show the shape of his face. It added years and dignity, both of which he could well use. Besides, as the women said, he was a man, and a man's beauty could not be perfect without it.

Sometimes Muslim customs made surprising sense.

Morgiana left them on occasion, walking her paths that no one else could follow, to fetch food, and drink other than water of the spring, and the odd treasure. Once she brought back a jar of wine, and a lute.

Aidan regarded the lute when she laid it in his lap, andgently, most gently, caressed the inlay of its sounding board.

"Where did you get this?" he asked her.

Steal, he meant. She refused to be baited. "I went to a place where such things are known, and asked where I might find the best maker of lutes. I went where I was shown. I paid," she said, "in gold. My own. Fairly and honestly gained."

He looked down. He had the grace to be ashamed. Lightly, almost diffidently, he plucked a string. The lute was in tune.

"I can't accept this," he said.

"Did I say it was a gift?"

He flushed.

"Play for me," she commanded him..

307.

He was angry enough to obey her, defiant enough to choose a tune from his own country. But she had traveled far; she had learned to find pleasure in modes which were alien to those of the cast. This was properly harp-music, bard-music, but he fit- ted it well to the supple tones of the lute.

She watched him in silence. He was out of practice: he slipped more than once. But he played very well, with the concentration of the bom musician, head bending further as the music possessed him, mouth setting in a line, fingers grow- ing supple, remembering the way of it.

When he began to sing, she was almost startled. She did not know why she had expected a clear tenor: his voice in speech was low enough, with the merest suggestion of a purr. In song the roughness vanished, but that new clarity resounded in a timbre just short of the ba.s.s. A man's voice beyond doubt, dark and sweet.

It took all her strength to keep from touching him. He resisted her abominably easily; he had only to remember his Prankish woman, and what she carried. He was not like a hu- man man, to be led about by his privates.

But he watched her. She knew that. He found her good to look at. He was beginning, not at all willingly, to forget how to hate her, if never to love her. And he wanted the power she had, to walk in an eyeblink from the wastes of Persia to the markets of Damascus.

She was pleased to teach him lesser arts, to hone the power he had never thought of as more than a child's toy, but that single great art, she would not give him. She knew what he would do with it.

Just this morning, he had tried to trick her out of it. Then when she vanished, she felt the dart of his will, seeking hersecret. It was not as easy to elude him as it had been. He was a clever youngling, and he was growing strong.

The lutestrings stilled. He raised his head. His eyes were dark, the color of his northern sea. "Why?" he asked her. "Why teach me at all?"

"Why not?"

"What if I grow stronger than you?"

She laughed, which p.r.i.c.ked his pride terribly. "I don't think I need to fear that. But that we may be equals . . . that, I think very possible. I would welcome it,"

"Even knowing what I would do then?"

"Ah, but would you do it?"

308 Judith Tan- He was mute, furious.

"My sweet friend," she said, "if you were half as wise as you like to imagine, you would know what it means, that we move so easily in one another's thoughts."

"It means that you will it, and I have no skill to keep you ,<->

out.

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She shook her head and smiled. "You know better than I what it is. Remember your brother and his queen."

He surged to his feet. "We are not so mated!"

He took care to lay the lute where it would be safe, before he flung himself away from her. She saw that; she saw quite enough apart from it. She allowed herself a long, slow smile.

32.

He had to get out. He had been holding up well; he had learned to live in his cage. But four of them were too many.

And she-she pressed on him from all sides. Wherever he turned, she was there, not even watching, simply and inescap- ably present.

The worst of it was that he could not loathe the sight other.

Flatty, utterly, could not. When she was gone about her mar- keting-improbable domesticity, flitting about the world in search of a dainty or a bauble-he was restless; he could sit even less still than he usually did. And he was like that until she came back, when the knot in him loosened, and the world was in its proper place again.He was like a man enslaved to a drug. He hated it, and he could not live without it.

She had done it to him. She, the witch, the spirit of air.

Murderer, he could no longer call her. The word filled his hands with blood and his mind with memories it had long since buried.

He tried to turn her against him. He honed the memories; he gave them to her in hideous derail, heedless of what they did to his sanity. He taunted her with his body- He used her teaching, transparently, to seek out paths of escape, Sometimes, to be sure, he made her angry, but never angry enough. Mostly, she only smiled- 309.

He did not know what that smile cost her. She knew as well as he, that she could not keep him so. He was not to be tamed in a cage. It was a hard lesson to learn, and bitter to face.

Sayyida understood. "Ishak told me about falcons," she said.

"The taming is never complete until the falconer flies his bird free, and it comes back. You've caught this one, you've taught him to endure the jesses and the hood. You've been letting him fly a little, on the line."

"The creance," said Morgiana, but abstractedly, listening hard. "How can I let him fly? I know he won't come back."

"Then you'll have to find a lure for him, won't you? What will win him for you?"

"I don't know!" Morgiana cried.