Free Alamut by Judith Tarr Page B

that it be immortal youth. He withered. He never stopped withering. And he would never die.”
    Aidan was on his feet. The magic dropped from him like dust and darkness. His hand was strong and smooth and young, pulling her up. She was tall enough to meet him eye to eye. That startled him a little; then he laughed. “See how we maunder! Come, show me your city.”
    As if Thibaut had not shown him every inch of it already. But his eagerness was irresistible; even when she knew what he was running from. Not death, but deathlessness.
    She looked at her rag of a dress; touched her hair. “Like this?” she had asked before she thought.
    No mere man, he. He understood. “Go on, then. But be quick.”
    oOo
    As quick as she and Dura between them could be. She put on the blue dress again; a light mantle over it; a veil for her hair. No jewels but her silver cross, since she was in mourning. Severity did not suit her, but it suited propriety.
    She did not stoop to ask how she could walk far, who had been ill so long. He had not troubled to. Her mare was saddled for her, and the tall gelding that had been Gereint’s, and a mule for Dura. His manner declared that he, a knight and a prince, did not intend to walk where he could ride. He set her lightly in her saddle, his touch as cool as Gereint’s had been, like a brother’s, or a father’s. Or course it would be. They were kin. And she was a married woman.
    She gathered the reins. Her mare was restive, in season. Wise of him to choose the gelding over his stallion. Dura shied away from him, clambering onto the mule by herself, watching him with great wary eyes. It was fear, but clean, as of a storm in the desert: something to be feared and evaded, but never hated. Hatred was beneath it.
    No doubt he was as accustomed to that as to a silly girl’s vaporings. He mounted with that grace of his that was more beast than human, and rode ahead of them into the street.
    oOo
    Aidan had not thought, before he dragged Joanna out with him. It was impulse, which he was given to, and not wisely, either. She had been ill and was still not as strong as she should have been. But her pleasure was warm; her anger had sunk down deep. There was color in her cheeks. She was — not pretty, no. God’s whim had kept that for her brother. But handsome, certainly, and when she smiled, which she almost never did, she blazed into beauty.
    He was blinking in the light of it, barely noticing where they were, until his nose told him. The street named, wittily enough, the Street of the Bad Cooks. Pilgrims found their sustenance here, at ruinous prices, and saints alone knew what cost to their stomachs. His own heaved gently, once, and subsided.
    They had left the horses at the crossing, and paid a boy to look after them. Joanna’s choice. The boy would not abscond with the merchandise: Aidan’s doing. He did not need to be told how it was, here. The Temple was a den of thieves still, after a thousand years.
    Joanna who knew this city as he knew his own sea-scented Caer Gwent, led him with the silent maid down a passage that might have been a cavern for all the light there was in it. Cities were like this in the east: covered against the sun, often vaulted as was this into which they entered, lit like churches through louvers above and with lamps below, airy and astonishingly cool. Here the stink of human habitation was overlaid with sweetness, herbs and fruits and flowers; and clamor enough to set him reeling. Fiercely he damped his senses. How the cats in the gutters bore it, he would never know.
    â€œBorn to it,” said Joanna. He had spoken aloud without intending to: sure sign of his confusion. She eyed him. “You haven’t been out before.”
    He glared. She did not have the grace to be abashed. “Only to the gate and the plain,” he admitted, snapping it, because she would stare until he did. “To get out. To ride where the