Devil's Bargain by Judith Tarr Read Free Book Online Page B

fool enough to resent them. She tended the boy’s wounds by feel. Judah, assured that she had matters in hand, had left the circle of shields. She hoped that he was safe without the guards’ protection.
    A roar made her start and nearly miss a stitch. The Hospitallers’ line had broken. It was too soon for Richard’s plan, whatever that had been—but she heard him call out: “Sound it. Sound the charge!”
     
    It was like a great undulating wave, a long whiplash of flesh and steel. Ahmad on the hill, commanding his division of the sultan’s army, saw how it broke. Two knights began it, a Hospitaller inblack and a secular knight in eye-searing green. They sprang out from the massed ranks of the rear guard and fell on the warriors of Islam. The rest of the knights followed, man by man: hundreds, thousands of them.
    There was a terrible beauty in that charge, a deadly glory. Even knowing the inevitable, the fall of the hammer upon the anvil, Ahmad could admire the splendor of it. He had no power to stop it.
    He tried, though he knew it was futile. He could sooner stop the surge of the sea as this tide of men and metal. The power that could have stopped it would have cost him his soul.
    It was a rout, swift and devastatingly complete. Ahmad stood as long as he could, though the earth shook and the mounted mass of the knights came on him like a mountain falling. Other and wiser men had long since fled. His brother was gone, the golden banner streaming far away.
    Calmly, almost leisurely, just before the first rank of knights swept over him, he gathered the remnants of his guard and gave his mare her head. She laid back her little lean ears and snapped at his foot, so that he would be well aware of her thoughts in the matter; then she sprang into flight. The others scrambled to follow.
     
    The army of the Crusade shattered the army of Islam that day at Arsuf. Most of the infidels simply fled, but some of them stood and fought, and they fought hard. Men died; knights fell, hacked in pieces, fallen over the bodies of the men they had killed. The Franks pursued the infidel to the eaves of the wood, but there Richard called them back. They came like hounds to heel, some willingly, some snarling and dragging their feet, but they were obedient. Even through the haze of bloodlust, they bowed to the king’s will.
    The surgeons’ tents were pitched in the green and coolness of the orchards. Master Judah’s tent stood amid a grove of oranges. The fruit was green, but here and there one hinted at ripeness.
    Sioned’s task that day was to judge the wounded: which could be healed and which should be given a comfortable death, and of those who could recover, which was in greatest need of tending. She stitched and bandaged between waves of flotsam from the battlefield. It was a great victory—glorious. The men were drunk with it, even before they got into the wine.
    “Lady.”
    She looked up in mild startlement. She recognized the man, or rather boy; it was one of Richard’s squires. He was blushing furiously, which those children had a habit of doing in front of anything female.
    “Lady,” he said, “please come.”
    Her heart stopped. “The king?” she said.
    The boy shook his head. “No. Oh, no, lady. There’s not a scratch on him. But he wants you to come. Bring your bag, he said.”
    “Of course he did,” said Sioned with the sharpness of relief. The flood of wounded had slowed to a trickle in any case; she could leave the others to it, if the king insisted. She slung her bag over her shoulder—ignoring the boy’s attempt to carry it for her—and after some small negotiation, persuaded him to lead her to the king.
     
    She had been thinking as she went, that if it was not Richard, it did not matter who else it was. But when she came to the gaudy pavilion that must have been looted from an emir, and saw whom Richard cradled in his lap while he made order of the battle’s chaos, she nearly lost her