Read Online The Dagger and the Cross by Judith Tarr - Free Book Online Page B

wills. My brother thought that he could sire no children, no
more than I; and there is Ysabel.”
    “Her mother is human.”
    “Even so,” said Gwydion. “Perhaps you are too young.”
    She laughed, harsh and brief. “I am, at the very least,
sixscore years old. I think I may be much more than that. How old must I be
before I’m old enough?”
    “When did your courses begin?”
    “My—” She closed her mouth, mastered her shock. She was used
to indelicacy from Franks, and Allah knew, Muslim women could be blunt enough
among themselves. But this went beyond indelicate. It was indecent.
    Except that there was nothing immodest in the way he asked
it. He was like a physician, cool, honestly desirous of an answer.
    Simply to be outrageous, she gave it to him. “Is that what
that is? Once in a great while, when the moon is waxing? Then I’ve had it a
score of years or so, one a year, maybe, or twice.”
    He nodded. “Young, then, no matter the count of your years:
like a maid just come to womanhood. I think we come into ourselves late, and
then we don’t either bear or beget easily. It comes with what we are. If we
were as fecund as humankind, we would overrun the earth.”
    “Better we than they.”
    “No,” he said. “I think not. How much magic can one world
hold?”
    “More by far than is in us.”
    “I wonder,” he said. “In a world the humans share... My
brother says that in Islam he is much more welcome than he is among Christians.
Your world allows us, as ours does not. But if it were known, truly, all that
we are, what mortal man would not learn to hate us?”
    “There are many who love us. Too well, I sometimes think.”
    “Ah, but even they have moments of bitter envy.”
    “I envy their fertility. And yes, even their mortality. They
know that there is an end to their living. They will see Paradise long before
us, and be far more welcome there, because they are mortal men, and we are but
spirits of fire.”
    “Your Allah does not welcome every soul alike?”
    “We are told that He does. But mortals are greater than I:
that also is in His Book.”
    “Ours gives us no place at all,” Gwydion said. “Therefore
our priests set us among the devils. They would destroy us if they could, and
count it a holy act.”
    She regarded him steadily. “You have your own Crusade.”
    “To make my kingdom safe for our kind. Yes. And for any
other who suffers persecution at mortal hands.”
    There was a fire in him, all the fiercer for that it was so
quiet. “We call it jihad,” she said. “Holy war. War that is just; war in
God’s name.”
    “Even ifit is bloodless, as I would keep it?”
    “Even then.” She paused. “You are a strange man.”
    “Stranger than my brother?”
    “My lord is explicable enough. He is fire, that is all:
bright, burning, terrible when he is let run wild. He runs away from
reflection, because it might seduce him into damping his fire. He is most
predictably unpredictable.”
    “Most would tell you that I am dull beside him. Plain water,
quiet and rather cold.”
    “Water quenches fire; and water, raging, can break stone.
How many have reckoned that they knew you, and striven to deceive you, and
discovered too late that they themselves were deceived?”
    “I always tell the truth,” he said.
    “All of it?”
    His eyes glinted. “All that is necessary for the purpose.”
    “I think,” she said, pondering it, “that I may come to like
you, O my brother.”
    “Indeed, O my sister?”
    “Indeed.” He smiled at her. She grinned, wide and white,
like the boy she seemed to be, and gathered the reins. The stallion began a
dancing canter. As the mare stretched to match him, he leaped into a gallop.
Morgiana flattened herself on his neck, still grinning. The mare was a pale
blur in the corner of her eye. Gaining, by the Prophet’s beard, and her rider
laughing. Aloud. Gwydion. Who would ever believe it?
    She laughed with him, light and wild, and gave her mount