Free The Dagger and the Cross by Judith Tarr Page B

his
face, ruffled and then smoothed his beard. He shivered lightly under her touch.
He was the first lover she had ever had, and the only one. She had never lost
that edge of wondering joy, to find him so different from herself, and yet so
perfectly matched. Made for her. Man to her woman; heart to her heart.
    “So beautiful,” she said, marveling, as ifshe had
never seen him before.
    “You are insatiable.”
    She laughed and tumbled him onto his back. “What, sir! Am I
too much for you?”
    “Ten men would barely be enough.”
    “Ah,” she said. Her eyes gleamed. “Now there’s a thought.”
    “Good. Then I could sleep.”
    She stopped short; she hissed. “You wouldn’t.”
    “I might wake up later,” he mused, “and dismember them one
by one.”
    “I hope so,” she said. “I’d hate to think that you’d let
anyone else touch me.”
    “Touch you, maybe, if you didn’t take his hand off for
trying. Keep you, no. I’m not that magnanimous.”
    She shook her head. Her hair was a curtain about them both,
cool and silken-soft. “Frankish honor,” she said. “Any decent Muslim would kill
a man for looking at me.”
    “He can look all he likes, and envy me as much as he
pleases. If you ever deign to show your face.”
    “I shall do that,” she said calmly, “when I am your properly
wedded wife, and it is your right to command me.”
    It was growing difficult to think, with her astride him so,
and her face above him, and her lovely round breasts, and her strong smooth
thighs. “What if I won’t command you?”
    “Then I shall do it because I choose.”
    She bent. Her face filled his world. All Persia was in it:
the elegant oval, the cheekbones curved high, the long nose with its suggestion
of arch, the lips fine-molded and astonishingly tender. Yet it, and she, was
nothing human. The tilt of the wine-dark brows; the great eyes beneath them
with their pupils wide now, green-gleaming within, that would slit narrow when
the sun was high; the moonlit ivory of her skin. The scent that was on her,
imperceptible to human senses, dizzyingly sweet to his own. The light in her,
the sheen of her power, woven with his beyond any unweaving.
    She shifted above him, poising. He knew better than to
snatch. She took him joyfully, fierce as a cat and fully as wanton.
    Just before she fell asleep, she said, “It would not be so
ill at all, if Allah had Jerusalem.”

6.
    Courtesy commanded that a king, in another king’s city,
should pay his respects to that monarch. Gwydion was nothing if not courteous.
    Aidan loved to look splendid, but he had little patience
with the madder extravagances of court dress. Gwydion had both patience and,
when he chose, the flair to carry it off. Blue and silver were his colors,
eastern silk and western silver, and a great cloak like a field of stars, lined
with ermine, and belt and chain of silver set with sapphires, and a sword in a
damascened scabbard—almost plain, that, wrought for use, its blade forged by
the prince of smiths who had made Aidan’s own—with a sapphire in the pommel,
carved with the seabird crowned. His crown was on his head, the great state
crown of his father, silver and sapphire, with a glimmer of moonstone and
diamond.
    Aidan, in the black coat which Saladin had given him, and
all the rest scarlet, and a golden coronet, for once was almost pleased to
efface himself. “You look,” he told his brother, “like the night in full
flower.”
    Gwydion was amused, though he tried not to be. The monks who
had failed signally with Aidan had triumphed with him. He was modest. It was
not vanity of his beauty but pride of his kingship that kept his head so high
under the cruel weight of the crown. If he wearied of it on the slow ride from
the Dome of the Rock to the Tower of David, even Aidan was not to know. He
dismounted with a panther’s grace despite all his encumbering splendor, and
waited serenely for the pages to straighten his cloak, smooth his robes,