Alamut Part 40

"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. "Ties: you would know, wouldn't you?"

"It's arrogance, you sec. 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 leam. 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 edifica- tion."

"Ill wager he's sorry now."

"I hope he is." There was rare venom in her voice. She held grudges, did Sayyida. 297.

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 s.h.i.+ning creature with the most wonderful hair in the world. He thought of Aidan as a part other. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 with- out. 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 carry- ing 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 298 soften me with this girlchild; you'll seduce me with her baby.

Then youll find me tamed and gentle, and ripe for your taking.

"But I won't," he said. "I won't give in to you. You mur- dered my kin. G.o.d 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 cus.h.i.+on, 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 compan- ion, whose hair, long uncut, hung down enricingly, 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 be- trayed 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 cliffcop, 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 herhair 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 shoul- ders.

/ 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 299.

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 sec in me but what any b.i.t.c.h 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 thebrighter 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, glar- ing up at him. The blood drained from his face. "I was com- manded 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?

300 ^fwfith' Tarr 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 arc 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 ftom 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. 301.

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

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

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 ac- cepted 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 hunt- ing, 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.

She was always aware of him, as he was of her. Often she followed him. She never tried to catch him. He was being hunted, but the hunter was patient. She seemed content simply to watch him; to know that she had him in her power.

Her mind was open to him. It was trust, implicit and com- plete. It drove him wild. But not mad, not that. That refuge was lost to him. He had to know how she loved him and wanted him; how deep the wound was, that he would not return the love and the wanting.

Could not.

Would not. She was certain. d.a.m.n that certainty. d.a.m.n her years and her strength and her obstinacy.

Stubborn, she said to him. Fool.Murderer, he thought at her.

She showed him the first man he had ever kilted, when he was twelve years old. She showed him the second, the third, the fourth. She showed him years of errantry, battles fought, dries sacked, foemen cut down without mercy in the blood-red exultation of war. The city-the name he had forgotten, had willed to forget-the city hammered down in siege, the gaunt starved women with weapons cobbled out of anything that would strike and kill, the one who charged shrieking upon him, he in his armor, she in filthy rags, and the baby on her back, but he never saw it until he had cloven her, and it, in 302 two. And for a moment he was appalled, but then he shrugged and wiped his blade and went back to what was, after all, war.

She showed him himself crouched over the gazelle which he had hunted and killed as the cheetah does, by running it down, breaking its neck. Great graceful beast of prey with the taste of blood in his mouth, pale cat-eyes narrowed against the light.

"So has G.o.d made us," she said, cross-legged on a jut of stone, gazing down at him. "You no less than I. If you will hate me, then you must hate yourself. We are of the same blood and kind."

Bile burned his throat. "Wauld to G.o.d that you had never been bom!"

"Why? Because I teach you to see the truth?"

"Clever lies. Twisting of what is so, to what you would wish to be so. I'm not your dog. a.s.sa.s.sin. Let me go!"

Her head shook. "I am no a.s.sa.s.sin now. I have forsaken it. I have no faith left to kill for."

It sickened him, that one would kill at all, for such a cause.

Something fluttered out of the air. A bit of cloth with a cross sewn on it, scarlet on black.

The silence stretched. She seemed to have turned her mind from him to ponder the ground of his hunt: the city which Alexander had built to the memory of a hound. He left the cloth where the wind had dropped it, and though his gorge rose, set to gutting and cleaning his kill. He had a knife for it, a rough common blade with a middling fair edge- Her presence was a fire on his skin, her inattention a rankling in his middle.

She had an answer for everything. She would not, could not sec the difference between cold murder and clean war.

Clean?

He saw Thibaut's body, serene as if in sleep; and the after- math of b.l.o.o.d.y battle.Not hers, that. His mind was locked shut. She had twisted him within as without.

"I make no apology for what I am," she said. "I only ask that you see it clear, and not as your whim would have it."

"I see clear enough. I sec that it is your time for mating, and I am here, and male, and of the proper kind- There is no more to it than that." I "In^ the beginning," she said, "it was so."

Sh< was="" before/mm="" in="" cold="" and="" enveloping="" white,="" like="" the="" angel="" ^(dcath^no="" maiden="" saint="" could="" have="" been="" less="" alluring.="">

ALAMtJT There was no seduction in her. She had never known what it was.

She reached. He s.h.i.+ed, caught himself. He saw the swift wince of pain, the swifter d.i.c.ker of a smile. Her hand was warm on his cheek. For defiance, for bitter mockery, he matched the gesture. Smooth; wondrous soft. Flesh of his own kind, subtly yet deeply different from the human. With one breath-light finger he traced the shape of her face. Not cold, her beauty, behind the mask she wore. Oh, no. Not cold at all.

He recoiled. She betrayed no hint of triumph. She turned and went away. Walking, as any creature would. Any female creature. No male had that grace, that suggestion of a sway, even scrambling over stones.