The Crusading Wizard

CHAPTER 24

“You did not know?” Fortune looked up in surprise. “I had thought that was why you traveled with her! Yes, most certainly all four children are together! After all, both pair were stolen at Arjasp’s behest.”

Lakshmi stared a moment, then turned to Matt. “So it would seem that the Lady Jimena was right, wizard, and our two quests are one.”

“It would seem so, yes.” Matt almost sagged with relief. “Thank Heaven! At least we know where they are now—and, uh, thank you, too, Dame Fortune.” Matt had always trusted his mother’s insights.

“But I thought you knew.” Lakshmi still frowned at him, puzzled. “You said that they were hostages to Fortune.”

“Oh, not to me!” Fortune protested. “To Arjasp, yes, but never to me!” Abruptly, though, she reconsidered, turning away, brow puckered in thought. “Well, yes, I suppose you might say that if you have not built your castle of Security high enough or strong enough, I could knock it over quite easily with a throw of a dart—and since it takes a much bigger castle for a family than for a single person, it is that much harder to build it strong enough to resist me. Therefore those who are married and who are parents must do as Fortune dictates, for their castles are too weak to resist me … Yes, I see. In that sense, your babies are hostages to me—but they will be all your life! For now, the only one who holds them hostage is Arjasp.”

“What do we have to do to get them back?” Matt asked. “Arjasp only required that Alisande leave the Caliph, and she’s done that. Me, I’m trying to track them down, but is that enough?”

“It will be now, yes!” Fortune nodded vigorously. “You have made friends with Fortune, wizard, so you need only keep working, keep striving, and sooner or later some of my darts will favor you.”

“Maybe we could speed that up a little,” Matt said with a slow smile. “How about a game of darts?”

But Fortune only smiled on him with fond pity. “Poor lad, you challenged me to that game the day you were born!”

“Oh?” Matt asked, giving her a leery eye. “How’s my score?”

“Like those of most.” Fortune shrugged. “You have won some and lost some, and won one great score, though it took a great deal of hard work to consolidate what I had sent you—but overall, you are winning.”

“Well, I can’t complain,” Matt said slowly. “I married a queen, and I have two children whom I love. Seems they’re always in peril, though, and that my winnings are very temporary.”

“Everyone’s are, everyone’s are!” Fortune nodded vigorously. “There are one or two who have built enough Security to be safe from my worst darts, but they are rare, rare.”

“And I’m not one of them,” Matt said with a sinking heart.

“You have insisted on true, passionate love, or nothing,” Fortune reminded him. “If you had found nothing, Security would be quite easy to build—but you found true love, and thus set yourself high, where you are exposed to more darts than most. But you have built a different kind of Security, too, not only wealth of belongings, but friends. Indeed, you have helped some people so much that you have become necessary to them—and if they have need of you, they will help you when you have need, and fight to defend you when you are attacked.”

“I haven’t—” But Matt broke off, thinking of Sir Guy, King Rinaldo, Frisson, Sir Gilbert … Could all those people he bad helped have come to depend on him?

Yes. They could.

“You see, your true security is other people.” Fortune smiled upon him. “The more of them who need you, the more who will aid you in your hour of need, even as you have helped this djinna, and she has helped you—so that now you aid one another again.”

Matt and Lakshmi looked at one another as though seeing each other for the first time.

“You, however, have not challenged me,” Fortune said to Balkis. “Come, assume your true form! I know you for what you are; there are no secrets from Fortune.”

Matt looked away, not wanting a queasy stomach after all those Middle Eastern sweets. When he turned back, Balkis stood in human form, glaring out from under her veil at Fortune. “How do all others challenge you at birth, but I did not?”

“Because your mother took your challenge upon her.” A tear formed at the comer of Fortune’s eye. “Poor woman, she died for it.” Balkis looked stricken, and Fortune stared. “You did not know? Poor child, I did not mean to speak so brusquely then! But yes, she died, but before she did, she set you adrift in a basket, begging the water-spirits to care for you—and so they did, and entrusted you to the dryads, who laid a geas upon you that would compel all magical creatures to treat you kindly.”

Lakshmi gave Balkis a sidelong look, reevaluating their relationship.

“So you are one of the few of whom it can be said that you bear a charmed life.” Fortune stepped forward, holding out a dart. “Come, take it! You shall see that you cannot throw it amiss.”

Warily and with every doubt showing, Balkis took the dart.

“Step up to the line, now.” Fortune took her by the elbows and led her into position. “There, now! Throw!”

Still hesitant, Balkis drew her arm back, then hurled the dart. It bit deep into wood, and Fortune bustled over to inspect the wheel in which it had landed. She nodded briskly. “Even as I foretold! You have determined where the three of you will go next.” She turned, smiling broadly as though at some inner joke. “Go, then! Off to find your children, parents—and child, off to discover your destiny!”

Balkis still looked wary, but Matt was glad of a way out. He caught her hand and started to turn away—but a pang of sympathy kept him from turning his back on Fortune. “You could, you know … if you wanted … come with us …”

Lakshmi looked alarmed, and Balkis shrank down into a ball, but Fortune backed away in sheer terror. “Go … out? Out of this cavern, you mean? Oh, no, I could not! I dare not, all manner of things might come at me out there, Heaven alone knows what monsters await! Go out? No, never, nay!”

Her voice ended in a scream; she backed up against a wall of rough stone, arms spread wide, fingers clutching at its niches and crevices.

“Okay, okay, it was just a suggestion! An invitation, I mean!” Matt knew a case of agoraphobia when he saw one, even if he’d never seen one before. “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to make you come with us. You’re safe, you can stay here.”

“Can I?” Fortune thawed a bit, at least enough to bring her arms down. “I can remain in my cavern, then? But, oh, I miss the outdoors, the wide sky and the rolling plains!” Tears gathered in her eyes. “I so long to see them again—but I dare not.”

“You used to live out in the open?” Matt asked, surprised.

“Oh, aye! The herding folk, they thought me a goddess, and every tribe had a hearth for me in their camps. But they ceased, yes, gobbled up by those same barbarians who even now threaten the Caliph, or settled down by a river-fork and built themselves cities, then forgot me. There was no more hearth for Fortune, no more meal-cakes or puddings assured, so I hid myself away here, yes, and made myself wheels to spin, through which I could watch the endless pageant of humankind.” She stepped away from the wall, eyes damp with reminiscence. “You are a wonderful species, you know, combining wisdom and folly, courage and cowardice, nobility and vulgarity, and all steps in between.” She took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh as she shook herself—spilling her coiffure into frowzy curls and gaining a dozen pounds again—and said regretfully, “No thank you, my friends. I shall stay here.”

“As you wish,” Lakshmi said, with a smile of sympathy. “We shall try our best to visit again, when we return.”

“Yes, do!” Fortune nodded vigorously. “I shall look forward to it. But now, good-bye!” She stepped over to the wall of wheels, stopped one particular disk from its spinning, and stabbed a dart into it without even letting go. A huge blast of wind caught the companions, and Lakshmi barely had time to catch Matt and Balkis to her breast before she was whirling about and about in the wind, and the world turned into a kaleidoscope of churning colors again.

When the Technicolor tornado stopped spinning, Matt looked up and saw down. He was rushing head first toward the sharpened peaks of the Hindu Kush Mountains again.

“Yikes!” Matt shouted. “This is no improvement! At least when we left, we were flying level!”

“Oh, be not such a babe!” Lakshmi snapped, disregarding how she was holding him. Her flight path began to curve and she called out to her husband, “Marudin! Fly due north!”

The djinni only nodded, lifting his head and, thereby, his torso, then the rest of his body, swooping in a great curve and steadying on his new heading.

The mountainside swung from in front of Matt’s forehead down to under his chest, and “before” suddenly became “below” again. His stomach tried to stick by its preconceptions and stay where it had been, but he choked down the nausea, accepting it gladly as the lesser of two evils.

He gave the new heading ten minutes or so while he developed the shakes and let them run down, leaving his body limp as spaghetti. Then he called up to Lakshmi, “Any idea where we’re going?”

“To find this Arjasp’s capital,” she told him, “or should I call it a mere headquarters?”

Matt thought it over. “Considering most of his warriors are nomads, we’re probably looking for a collection of tents large enough to be a small city. The direct route seems a little hazardous to me, though.”

“Filled with hazards? What do you mean?” Lakshmi demanded.

“He knows we’re going to be looking for him,” Matt explained, “or at the very least, ought to be suspecting it and be on the watch for it. He’ll have spies on the lookout, maybe even wizards scrying.”

“You think he will see us coming, and prepare to defend against our magic.” Lakshmi turned thoughtful. “Still, we must go where he is. How do you suggest we mislead him?”

“Let him think we’re looking for another destination. Land at some city that’s on the way, if you can find one.”

“Of course—there is Samarkand.” Lakshmi nodded, no longer uncertain. “We shall stop there and visit. Certainly some there will know where this Arjasp’s city can be found, and perhaps we can contrive some sort of disguise.”

“Maybe we can.” But Matt wasn’t thinking about the disguise—he was fired with the wonder of it all. Samarkand! One of the fabled cities of the East, rich with the trade of the Silk Road, the caravan route across Central Asia, and he was actually going to see it!

They landed on a hill overlooking the city. It glistened in the morning sun as though it were made all of ivory—cubes of ivory, boxes of ivory, domes of ivory decorated with gold.

Some of those were the bulging and pointed domes of mosques, but others were the half-globe shapes of Christian churches. There were several minarets, but also several steeples, too, and Matt was sure he saw the tiers of a pagoda and the beehive shape of a Buddhist stupa.

“Samarkand!” Matt breathed. “The crossroads of Asia, and it sure looks like it!” He turned to his companions. “Come on, let’s get down there and visit!”

“There is a small matter of disguise,” Lakshmi pointed out.

“What disguise?” Matt asked. “I’m still dressed as a Persian.”

“Indeed!” Lakshmi said archly. “And are Marudin and I to go into that city dressed as we are?”

“Why not?” Matt countered. “You can’t be the first Arabs they’ve seen. If you’re worried about the proprieties, don’t be—this is Samarkand, not Tehran. Even Muslim women don’t have to wear the complete veil here.”

“Indeed,” Lakshmi said dryly. “What of these spies you spoke of?”

That gave Matt pause.

“She speaks truth,” Marudin said. “Surely Arjasp knows that djinn can shrink or grow to any size we wish. His spies will have been told to look for an Arab man and woman clad as a Mameluke and a dancing girl.”

“As well as a Frank,” said Lakshmi, “but you are right in that you are well enough disguised, and Balkis has always her own guise with her.”

Balkis meowed confirmation. Looking down, Matt saw she was pussyfooting around again. Absently, he reached down, holding his palm horizontal, and she flowed under it back and forth for automatic petting. “She’s got the best disguise of any of us,” he agreed. “Arjasp probably can’t keep up with her shifts in color and markings. But as to you two … Let’s see, I suppose I could pass for a merchant; we could claim I’m carrying semiprecious stones in my robe …” He patted the wand in his sash. “You could, too, Princess, and Marudin could be our bodyguard. Persian robes all around—okay?”

“That ‘okay’ is certainly one of the strangest words in your language,” Lakshmi complained, “but I take its meaning in this case: ‘Is it acceptable?’ “

“Close enough,” Matt said. “Is it?”

For answer, Lakshmi made a gesture as though drawing a curtain over herself, and as her hand passed downward, her bolero jacket became a yellow robe, her harem pants turned into the ankle-length skirt of a light blue under-robe, her slippers became stout boots, and a turban sprouted from her long silky tresses. Marudin gave himself a similar gesture and stood forth in a costume matching hers, except that he wore a yellow shirt and trousers with a crimson sash instead of a dress and a sky-blue robe over them.

Matt stood back and eyed them critically. “Okay, I guess we’ll pass. Let’s … uh, join the traffic into the city.” He had almost said “Let’s hit the road,” but then remembered that Lakshmi might take him literally.

They passed through the gate, and Matt inhaled the rich aromas of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and others he couldn’t identify. “Certainly are spice traders here. Well, let’s have a look around, folks.”

The “look around” lasted two hours. Even the djinn seemed amazed at the richness and variety of their surroundings. Far Eastern architecture stood side by side with Persian and Indian. The bazaar held booth after booth filled with silken cloth and Chinese carvings; Indian puppeteers acted out stories from the Mahabharata, and the turbans and caftans of Western Asia mingled freely with the trousers and tunics of the steppe barbarians, the pyjamas and saris of India, and the silken robes of China. Booths of lath and canvas stood in the shadows of buildings of alabaster trimmed with gilt and archways decorated with tiles in geometric designs.

The djinn wandered through the town, amazed by its opulence and its poverty both. Matt had to explain who those yellow-skinned, slant-eyed people were, then guess at the differences between Mongols and Chinese. He was able to tell a Turk from a Russian and did, but had difficulty explaining the people of mixed strains, of whom there seemed to be many—people who’d had both Chinese and Turkish parents, like the great Chinese poet Li Po, or Turkish and Mongol forbearers, like Tamurlane, or any of the other rich varieties of people he saw. He was able to identify Hindu traders and distinguish them from Sikh guards, and his recent experiences in India made him able to tell the difference between a Parsi trader and his Guebre cousin, but there were others that put him completely at a loss.

Finally Lakshmi said, “I am wearied, wizard, and dazed with so much looking. We must rest.”

“Museum fatigue,” Matt identified. “Okay, let’s try to find some nice, quiet little residential square where somebody has a booth selling sherbets.”

They took to the twisting alleyways, Balkis padding silently along, now in front, now behind, nose twitching at the wealth of scents and, no doubt, trying to find the track of a mouse that hadn’t been overlaid with curry. In a few minutes they came out into just such a small, quiet court as Matt had hoped for, one whose quiet was broken only by the merry calls of children at play and the more subdued cry of a sherbet vendor. It was surrounded by dwellings with large patches of stucco missing—and on the side across from the alleyway, a building whose cross over a double door proclaimed it to be a church.

But what a church! Its architecture was definitely Asian, not European. Matt stared. “What kind of Christians worship in there?”

“Go in and find out, Frank,” Marudin sighed as he sat down cross-legged in the shade. “But before you do, buy us sherbets, will you not?”

“Me?” Matt fought righteous indignation. “What makes me the waiter here?”

“Because you have coins,” Marudin explained, “whereas we should have to conjure some up, and by your leave, we are rather wearied.”

“Wearied from having carried you across half a continent,” Lakshmi said pointedly.

“Okay, you win.” Matt strolled over to the booth and bought three sherbets with his smallest silver coin, and by the grin on the vendor’s face, he had obviously overpaid again. He brought them back to the djinn couple, ate a few spoonfuls of his own, then set it down next to Balkis’ nose and turned away to go to church.

The interior was dim and cool, the decorations unfamiliar and Asiatic, but there was a cross over a stone table that was recognizably an altar, and racks of votive candles that might as easily have come from a Chinese temple as from a Catholic church. There were no pews, but Matt knelt anyway and said a few silent prayers of thanks for their safety, and for success in rescuing the children. As he was climbing to his feet again, he saw a man with a gray beard come out by the altar. The man glanced at him, then turned and stared.

So did Matt. The tall hat and dark robe looked suspiciously like those of a priest of Ahriman!

Then Matt blinked, clearing away the illusion. There was a resemblance, yes, but that hat was a cylinder, not a cone with a rounded top, and the long beard looked very familiar. Matt had a sudden memory of a Coptic bishop he had seen on a television documentary. He relaxed—somewhat.

The priest came toward him, puzzled and with an energy that belied his gray hairs. “Good day, Christian.”

He spoke a dialect Matt had never heard before, but his translation spell was still working. He hoped it would still work in reverse, and said, “Good day, Reverend Sir. I am not familiar with your sect. Can you tell me what manner of Christian church this is?”

“Ah.” The priest relaxed, smiling, as though Matt’s words had removed his own question. “Ours is the sect founded by Bishop Nestorius, young man.”

“Nestorians!” That explained a lot. Matt had heard that the Nestorian brand of Christianity was widely spread through Asia, though scattered—that there had even been some churches in China, though most of them were in Central Asia.

“And yourself?”

Matt thought fast, not wanting to give any more clues to his identity than he had to. “I learned my religion from a Christian who came from the Far West, reverend.”

“Ah! A Frank! Then your sect are those who follow the Bishop of Rome.” The priest nodded. “I have heard of them. Distant and fabled lands, they are. I have seen one or two Franks in the marketplace, but I have never met one before.” He frowned, looking more closely at Matt. “You have not the Frankish look, though.”

“I have traveled widely,” Matt said vaguely. “Tell me, reverend—are there many of your churches in these lands?”

“Some,” the priest said, “not many—at least, not this far south. Most of us dwell in the kingdom to the north, where a priest of our own faith rules the land.”

“A Christian priest-king?” Matt stared, then caught himself. “Your pardon, reverend. The only Christian priest I’ve heard of who rules a land is the Pope, whose holdings are small and who never calls himself a king. Who is he who rules this northern land, then?”

“He is called Prester John,” the priest said.