Devil's Bargain

For Harry Turtledove
It’s all your fault.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

T
he sun beat down on the plain of Acre. The heat was like a living thing. The battered walls, the loom of the siege-engines, shimmered faintly like an echo of the sea. Some of the engines bore the burden of names in the tongue of the Franks: Bad Neighbor, Wicked Cousin, God’s Own Sling. They were silent now, their power gone still.

Just after sunrise, the army of the Franks had marched out of the city. They spread now over the plain, as thick as flies on a carcass, but as silent and as eerily motionless as the engines that had broken the city. There was no wind to stir their banners; the horses stood with heads down, hipshot, asleep. They stood in battle lines, in battle array, but made no move to charge against the army of Islam that held the hills.

Al-Malik al-Adil Saif al-Din, born Ahmad the Kurd, sipped sherbet in the shade of the sultan’s canopy, high on a hill above the plain. The sherbet was somewhat sweeter than he liked it—the servants never could understand his taste for lemon barely tamed by sugar—but it was snow-cold. His brother’s goblet languished forgotten except by the servant with the fly whisk, who kept it clean until the sultan should remember it.

Salah al-Din Yusuf was scowling at yet another book of accounts, though he refrained from venting his ire against the clerk who wielded it. “Sire,” the man said, “it’s all very well to be a saint of generosity, but the king of the Franks wants his ransom. Unless you raise a new tax or find a new benefactor, you can’t both pay your troops and pay the king what he asks.”

Saladin, as the Franks called him in their slurred fashion—just as they called Ahmad Saphadin—was pulling at his beard as he only did when he was at wits’ end. “There’s no help for it, then. I’ll have to put him off.”

The clerk held his tongue. Ahmad should have been as wise as that, but he could not keep himself from saying, “Malik Ric is not a patient man.”

“He shall have to be,” Yusuf snapped. “This ransom, to which I never personally agreed, is extortionate. Three thousand men taken captive by the king of the Franks—they could be three thousand kings; I’d buy them back for less.”

Ahmad would have replied to that, but something, some shift in the air, set his hackles to bristling. He laid down the half-emptied cup of sherbet and lifted his head. All that day he had been uneasy, but he had ascribed it to Yusuf’s ill temper and the predicament in which he found himself. Foolish, that, and blind. This war ate at them all; it dulled Ahmad’s senses, which should have been keener than this.

Something was stirring within the walls of the city: an embassy, one could hope, come to demand the ransom on this day of reckoning. That had been prepared for: the sultan’s messengers were waiting, his guards at the ready, prepared either to escort the envoys to their lord, or to beat off an attack.

With a blaring of trumpets, the gates opened. A company of knights rode out. The man at their head was unmistakable: scarlet surcoat embroidered with golden lions, golden horse prancing beneath him, golden crown on his great helm. One hardly needed the lion banner to recognize the King of the English, the terrible warrior, Malik Ric—Richard of Anjou, who was, rumor said, a devil’s descendant.

Behind his company rode a guard of men in the garb of the fighting monks, Templars and Hospitallers. They escorted the garrison of Acre, three thousand strong, roped together like slaves on their way to market. They were naked, many of them, stripped of their turbans, their armor, even their dignity.

The knot in Ahmad’s belly turned to stone. His brother sat rigid, as they all did, all within sight of the field.

The prisoners marched in silence. The army of Franks was a wall of steel, hundreds deep. Those on the outer edges turned as the prisoners advanced, facing outward, shield to shield, bristling with spears. Those within raised swords and spears, axes and maces. The prisoners could not slow as they ran that gauntlet of steel: the guards behind drove them relentlessly.

When the last of them had passed within the armored lines, those lines closed in, and the killing began. It had been inevitable since the army of Christendom rode out of the city, and inescapable since the prisoners appeared outside the walls. And yet the shock of it was like a blow to the heart.

The sultan’s men waited for no command, for no drum or trumpet, but flung themselves headlong upon the army of Franks. They died as their kinsmen died, hacked in pieces by Christian steel.

Saladin made no move to call them back. The prisoners were dead, cut down to a man, a welter of blood in the midst of the Frankish host. His soldiers were dying. He seemed transfixed. The whole weight of war was on him.

Something was there beyond mere bloodlust: something in the earth, that hungered. Blood fed it. Terror swelled it. It drank every drop of blood that was shed on that field, and every scrap of horror in the hearts of those who watched. It reveled in the darkness that drove the Franks to murder.

Ahmad had no memory of falling, but he was lying on carpets with a servant fanning him, laving his cheeks with clean water. No one else had collapsed, however great the shock of the massacre, but no one had moved, either. They were all bound by the thing that fed below.

He staggered up. The servant, a young mamluk as fair as a
Frank, offered a sturdy shoulder to support him. He was not too proud to accept it. His brother was still spellbound, though others had shaken free. He called to the one who seemed most lively. “Fetch the trumpeters. Bid them sound the retreat.”

The man dropped in obeisance. In an instant he was on his feet, running to do Ahmad’s bidding.

Saladin shook himself. His eyes were alive again, and burning with anger. He inclined his head toward Ahmad: all the thanks he would offer, but it was enough. “There will be vengeance,” he said as the trumpets began to bray. “God will exact His price. And I—” He shuddered, hard and deep. “I will sweep every man of them into the sea.”

The royal ladies heard the trumpets from the palace of Acre: first the fanfare that rang the king out of the gate, and not long after that, the distant, alien cry of the Saracen horns. In between, the Lady Sioned knew such a horror as she had never felt, even in the darkest places of Gwynedd where she was born.

She had known that something was afoot, but she had been too captivated by the wonders of this country to pay attention. That there were prisoners, and that they were a matter of contention, she knew. Richard had set a ransom that, his spies assured him, would place the sultan in difficulty. Saladin, unlike the King of the English, was not a practical man. Not only were his armies enormous, he was generous to a fault. Any wealth that he won, he quickly gave away. He was more true to the Lord Christ’s teachings in that respect, if truth be told, than most of those who had taken the cross against him.

The ransom should have come in today. But the army of the infidel had not moved, and no embassy had come from it to offer gold or beg for indulgence. Richard had betrayed no surprise, and no impatience, either. He had sent his armies out soon after dawn. Late in the morning he followed them.

Sioned was on the wall when he rode out. She had been in the newly restored market, searching rather desultorily for herbs and simples to add to her store of medicaments, but a
quiver of unease had drawn her toward the city’s edge. Something was stirring, something new, and there was nothing in it of either justice or mercy.

It was a darkness in the spirit, a power in the earth, but deeper, stronger than any she had known before. It craved the blood of life. And Richard fed it. He sat the golden stallion that he had taken from the conquered lord of Cyprus, and watched unmoving as his men destroyed the hostages.

Sioned gripped the mended stone of the wall. War was ugly, and holy war was ugliest of all. But this was different. Infidels the prisoners might be, but they had been men. This thing that drank their blood had swallowed their souls. There would no Paradise for them, no heaven of beautiful maidens, no bliss of their God. The dark had taken them.

She had no memory of leaving the wall or of turning back through the city. Maybe she had not traversed those ways at all, but stepped directly into the ladies’ solar of the palace.

The sun shone through the high windows, casting a pattern of latticework on the tiled floor. A fountain played; roses filled the air with sweetness. Richard’s sallow little queen, Berengaria, sat side by side with his sister the Queen of Sicily, leaning close together, the dark head and the red-gold, stitching an altar cloth for the cathedral. The little princess from Cyprus, taken with the rest of the island’s booty on the way to the Crusade, played on a lute and sang in her sweet tuneful voice. It was a song of flowers and spring, so innocent as to be almost vacuous. The queens’ maids listened as if they had no other concern in the world.

Indeed they might not, since the third of the queens—and by far the most terrible—was not there. Queen Eleanor, it seemed, had chosen to entertain herself elsewhere.

If Sioned had been wise, she would have found a corner and slipped into it, and striven for the same willful ignorance that protected all of these noble ladies. But the horror of what she had seen was sunk deep in her heart.

Eleanor had something to do with it. She knew that in her bones where the magic was, and the knowledge that was born
in her of the old blood of Gwynedd. What she could do about it, there was no telling, but neither could she sit by in silence.

The queen’s most trusted servant met her on the stair to Eleanor’s apartments. Petronilla was not a demonstrative woman, but she crossed herself at sight of Sioned and said, “Lady Sioned! Thank the saints. Where is your bag of simples? Never mind, I’ll send the page for it. You come with me.”

It was like being swept up in a whirlwind. Sioned allowed it: it took her where she had wanted to be in any case, and under excellent pretext. They passed the guard almost without waiting for him to open the door.

The room beyond was dim, the shutters drawn. The air was thick and close, with a faint scent of burning, like hot metal. Sioned made her way through a clutter of furnishings to stand over the bed in which Eleanor lay.

She was neither asleep nor unconscious. Her eyes were closed, but Sioned could feel the heat of her awareness. The hot-metal scent was strongest close by her, as if she had been riding all day in the sun, sheathed in armor. But Sioned knew for a fact that she had not left these chambers since yesterday.

Her hands were cold. There was no strength in them. She breathed shallowly. The black-eyed beauty of Aquitaine was long gone, but those bones were still elegant, the face still pleasing in its long lines and clean planes.

Sioned was warded; she would never go near that great sorceress otherwise. But wards could not hold back the storm of the Sight, which seized her and engulfed her before she could stop it.

She walked in Eleanor’s memory, in a place of shadows and whispers. On an altar of crumbling stone lay the carcass of a black goat. Its blood was hot on her hands, cooling slowly.

A shape hovered above the altar, light in the air as a spirit is, but there was that about it which spoke of greater substance elsewhere. She addressed it in French, in the liquid accents of the south. The shade spoke in a man’s voice, deep and rather
harsh, in Arabic with a strong flavor of Persia. In the way of mages, they understood one another—not perfectly, for that required a true meeting of minds, but well enough, all things considered.

Sioned strained to see the one to whom the queen spoke, but he was remarkably resistant to the Sight. He resolved himself at best into a blur of white and pair of eyes that opened on darkness absolute. Only one part of him was clear: the dagger that he held in his shadowy hand. Its blade was black, with a sheen on it like oil on water.

The queen’s voice was soft and deceptively gentle, the voice of a woman who knew well her own power. “You ask why you should bargain with me? Because, lord of knives, we can be of great use and profit to one another. Your enemy is our enemy. If we destroy him, it serves us both.”

“I know the honor of the Franks,” said the shade. “An oath sworn to an infidel is no oath at all.”

“My honor is the honor of our art,” she said. “I swear to you by the honor of mages that whatever bargain we strike, I will keep to my half of it.”

There was a pause. The shade coiled like smoke, thinning and fading about the edges. Its voice when it spoke was still strong, though with a hint of an echo. “The honor of mages I will accept—for if you betray it, it will destroy you. What would you have of me, then? And what will you do in return?”