CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Mustafa was gone. Master Judah’s assistant, with a tentful of sick and wounded to tend through the night, had taken little notice of the infidel in the corner. Mustafa had feigned sleep until the lights were lowered, then when no one was watching, he had slipped away. He was long gone by dawn, when someone finally noticed the empty bed.

No one honestly seemed to care, except Master Judah, for whom losing a patient—to death or escape—was a personal affront, and Sioned, who reckoned herself Mustafa’s friend. She should have taken him into her tent, and not abandoned him among strangers.

They all expected her to tell Richard that his dog had fled. She would rather not, just as she would have preferred not to know where he had gone. If she had been Mustafa, and had been wounded in the heart as he had been, she would have gone back to Islam and left all of Christendom behind.

She turned toward the mountain of books, but it was not the refuge she had hoped for. The camp was rumbling softly, like a lion growling in its sleep. The union of nations was tenuous. They were already quarrelling: resurrecting old battles, beginning new ones.

Richard would have to march within the next handful of days, or his army would disintegrate where it stood. Even the spoils of the caravan could not erase the differences between English and French, Angevin and Burgundian, Pisan and Genoese, or between all of these and the knights of fallen Jerusalem.

She did not delude herself that her brother delayed for her sake, but her failure to find an answer had done nothing to speed him on his way. If the answer was in books, it had not seen fit to present itself. The jinn had found nothing that they saw fit to tell her.

She sat amid the tottering piles and propped her chin on her fists, glaring at the unresponsive air. Something was eluding her. Something perhaps small, but vitally important. A word, a vision, a memory . . .

Ahmad had walked with her in remembrance, recalling his encounters with the Old Man of the Mountain. The first slipped away unnoticed, but the second, the otherworldly garden, teased her with a sense of rightness. The answer was there, somewhere.

Bards in Gwynedd learned to remember every detail of any place they visited. Her training was incomplete and might betray her, but she could test the strength of it.

She settled more comfortably in her nest of books and cleared her mind of distraction. The sounds of the camp dropped away. Her awareness shrank to the compass of her single self.

She walked through worlds within worlds, elaborate edifices of thought and memory. She sought one among the many, a place of elegant arches and airy domes, which might have been a summerhouse in Damascus. That was the memory of Ahmad within her, beautiful and intricate, with its many rooms and gardens.

One garden in particular called to her. A paradise—was that not what the Persians called a garden? This was an eerie and otherworldly beauty, but a serpent coiled in its heart.

Sinan was not there in this memory, but his strange throne grew out of earth in the midst of the garden. In her vision or dream or foreseeing, that stump of broken tree drew her toward it. She could see as she came closer how it was rooted deep. It was not dead, although it had seemed so; at her coming it stirred and unfurled and put forth shoots that became branches. The branches, opening to their fullest extent, grew and thickened and sprouted leaves. The green of those leaves glowed like emerald, and the blossoms that budded and bloomed among them were shimmering pearl, swelling into fruit: blood-red, dusk-purple, sun-gold.

With the tree grew the serpent. It was a jeweled thing, supple and beautiful, with a bright sardonic eye.

“Sardonyx,” Sioned said. “Chalcedony.”

The words startled her back to herself. The garden, the tree, the serpent—she understood at last what and who they were. And one more thing, one last memory, stayed with her as she left the vision behind. The serpent had been coiled about the tree’s heart. It was a stone, a dull thing, nondescript, seeming of no account save that the serpent so subtly protected it.

There was the thing she had been seeking, in the place where, after all, she would have expected it to be. It was the heart of Sinan’s realm, guarded at every point. What hope had she of piercing those manifold walls?

Who else could even try? She yearned for Ahmad, for his power and protection. But he was in Jerusalem, on the other side of the war.

This venture was meant for her. She had found it by Sight and not by art; by instinct rather than by knowledge. Her fault for taking so long to understand; to see that the Sight of her own people was as potent in its way as the eastern books and spells and words of power.

She closed her eyes. The garden was burned in the dark behind the lids. She could see every leaf, every stone, and the one amid them all, brown and lumpen and ordinary. On its face were written words that, as she comprehended them, limned themselves in fire.

The Seal of Solomon was embedded in the trunk of the tree of Paradise. Sinan had taken the garden and a part of the power of the Seal—but not all of it. As to the how and why . . .

She sent out a call without compulsion—her courtesy to the jinn, which set them free to choose their obedience. The one she called came quickly, dancing in the lamp’s flame, wreathing his wings with fire.

“A fair day to you,” she said to the great jinni.

He bowed within the flame. She could never read his face, it was too alien, but she thought his expression was more somber than usual. “Lady of light,” he said. “What would you ask of me?”

“That you carry me,” she said, “if you will, to a certain place. I’ll not ask you to stay there, but only to bring me to it.”

The jinni’s wings spread to their full extent, which caused the flame to stretch most strangely. “You must not go there.”

“I must,” she said.

“It is death.”

“Still I must,” said Sioned.

“None of us can protect you there,” the jinni said. “Those walls—they hold the spell at bay. Once within them, any of us would be bound, compelled to obey the one who rules the stone.”

“I know that,” she said. “Didn’t I ask you simply to bring me to the walls? I’ll find my own way past them. But if you can’t take me that far, I won’t compel you. I won’t ever compel.”

“And so we love you,” the jinni said. “Will you do this?”

“In any way I can,” she said.

The jinni sighed vastly. He sounded like the sighing of waves in a sea cave, faint and far away yet all the more potent for that. “It will kill you.”

“I hope not,” she said.

“Then I will take you,” said the jinni. “If you must, and if you will not be turned away, I will go. I will keep you as safe as I can.”

“If you do that,” she said, “I’ll free you from your service.”

“You cannot free me,” said the jinni. “What I give you, I give of my free will. Only promise to live as long as you may.”

“I can always promise that,” she said a little shakily.

The jinni bowed to the ground of whatever otherworldly place he inhabited, then straightened and stepped through the flame. She met him midway, for if she hesitated, or allowed herself to think, she would lose her courage.

 

For this journey the jinni was no larger than a large horse. She rode on his shoulders ahead of the great beating wings, clinging to the tendrils of his hair. It was like a horse’s mane, strong and thick; the wind whipped it over her wrists and arms. When she looked down, she saw the earth far below: the mountains of Syria, and on the world’s rim the blue gleam of the sea.

She had come without weapons, without even a book of spells, dressed for a day’s labor in a tent. She dared not conjure herself a cloak or a grimoire, still less a bow and quiver or a dagger. If she was to reach the garden undetected, she could not blazon her magic across the firmament.

The jinni, being made of essential fire, was warm enough and to spare. The chill of the upper air was almost pleasant after the heat of summer below. She determined to take pleasure in the sensation, and so hold fear at bay.

All too soon the sky changed. Its lucent blue darkened to Tyrian purple and thence to black, but there was no light of stars. They were in the world and out of it, both at once, flying between the real and the unreal, the mortal and the magical. The jinni was warm under her, and alive, though not as humans were. She fought the urge to cling tighter.

Here in the between-place, the wards of the garden had little strength. Yet as they drew closer to that place of power, there was enough to shudder in her skin. The jinni began to labor in his flight, buffeted by currents in the air. Often he rocked and swayed; once he dropped with sickening speed, plummeting like a stone, and just as abruptly swooped upward again. She clamped her eyes shut, though it did no good in the dark, and hid her face in the jinni’s mane.

The air’s tumult grew worse as the jinni struggled onward. In the mortal world the wards would have been deadly. Here they could not kill, but they could make it brutally difficult for anything to pass the walls.

She fed the jinni what strength she could, seeping through her hands into his shoulders, until he hissed and snapped at her. “Don’t! You waste magic.”

“But—” she began.

“Silence,” he said.

Her teeth clicked together. The jinni was wiser than she, much as she hated to admit it, and he knew this between-world as she did not. He needed every grain of strength he had for this struggle. Even her brief distraction had sent him reeling back, losing time and speed, so that his flight was more labored than before.

She must not despair. She must trust her mount and guide, and nurture her magic, gathering it inside her, feeding it in whatever way she could: with the strength of her spirit and the knowledge she had drunk since she came across the sea. The life in her womb, as young and small as it still was, nonetheless succeeded in making her stronger. She who had been one, now was two. Even in guarding the second, she fed her power.

It would be a mage, this child. She was deeply glad, even as she wondered whether its father would share her joy.

At length the jinni hung motionless in the dark, straining every sinew simply to keep from tumbling backward. Sioned drew a breath, prepared to unleash her magic—but before she could betray them both, there was a sound like the cracking of a stone. The jinni fell out of the dark into the fierce dazzle of sunlight.

Once more he plummeted, but this time she forced her eyes open. He was making no effort to brake his fall; his wings were tightly furled, his body slack.

She must not doubt. Doubt slew magic. She must believe, and trust, that the jinni would not let either of them be destroyed.

With a ripping crack, the great wings snapped to their fullest extent. The air keened as the jinni’s descent slowed. At last Sioned dared look down.

The garden lay below, a jewel amid a wilderness of jagged stones. The stones were mountains; the garden lay in the heart of them. Without magic there was no coming to it: the sides of its walls were sheer, the waste beyond unmarred by any track.

Sioned looked for the angel with the flaming sword, but it seemed that was a myth or a memory. There was a wall of fire—magical fire—but no living being stood in the midst of it.

The jinni came to earth outside the wall. His body shuddered, buffeted by the power of the garden and its protections. That he could speak at all amazed her; she was awed that he could speak clearly, even serenely. “I cannot pass the wall or the gate. The Seal within—it would bind me. I do not wish to be bound.”

“Nor should you be,” she said. “Will you wait for me? Can you?”

The wide shoulders hunched; the wings drew in tight. “I will wait as close as I can bear to be.”

“Don’t stay so close that you’re caught,” she said.

The jinni’s lips drew back from a formidable array of teeth. “Such care you have, bright lady, for my poor self.”

“How will I escape,” she asked, “unless you help me?”

“Your soul has wings,” the jinni said. He bowed before her as he so often insisted on doing, but as he rose again, he did not retreat at once. He lingered, hovering. Insofar as a creature so fierce and so inhuman could be said to fret, he was fretting. “I do not like to leave you here.”

She did not like to be left here, but she had made her choice. “Wait for me,” she said to the jinni.

She paused briefly, gathering the last scraps of her courage. Without the jinni there was no escape: the slope of the mountain dropped away sheer. The garden glowed before her, illumining on a low and ominous sky.

To pass the wall and the wards, she must seem perfectly harmless: a waft of wind, a ray of light, a dust mote drifting innocuously into the garden. Her mind emptied of thought. She felt nothing, knew nothing, was nothing but softly shifting air.

It was dangerous, that working. A spirit could lose its knowledge of self and become in truth what it seemed to be. Yet she could not cling to any part of her awareness, lest the wards find it and destroy her.