“What do you plan?” My father had watched my every move. “You seem to know what you are about.”
“A vain hope. Something learned from an old book. It is something they have done successfully in China.”
“They are a canny folk. I have known men from Cathay.”
Strangely, there was nothing to talk about. There was an odd constraint between us. Why is it much easier to talk to a stranger than one from one’s own family?
He slept, finally, but I did not. Soon searchers would be looking for us, and tonight Khatib, if still alive and free, would come to the meadow by the Shah Rud. We must be there to meet him.
Day came to a clouded land. The peaks were lost in a cottony gray billowing of cloud. No birds sang today in the Valley of the Assassins.
How long before they found us? My father slept, his great muscles relaxed, his strong, hard-boned face strangely gentle in the quietness of sleep. He looked older than I expected, and there were raw scars of burns on his shoulders, as if he had been touched with red-hot iron. The work of Mahmoud, no doubt.
Mahmoud? Where was he? In the fierceness of the fight he must have fled. Had he escaped Alamut? Or was he now in command? Those must have been the men of Sinan who rushed in to attack his guards.
Thunder grumbled sullenly, warning that the storm was not over. The trees in the garden were strangely green in the vague light. Peering around the piles of pipe and building materials that screened us, I could see pomegranate and walnut trees from where we lay. Fountains were playing; did some of them actually run with milk and wine?
The Valley was longer than expected, concealed artfully in hills. Knowing something of mountains I could see there would be no way of looking into the valley from above, for the walls bellied out in such a way that if one tried to walk down to look over one would fall. An observer could only see across the canyon, not into it.
Slipping out, I gathered pears from nearby trees, not the hard wild pears, but great luscious fruit as large as my two fists.
Yet, from all I could see we were trapped. I could see no way out except back through the fortress of Alamut.
55
It was a lowering, sullen day. Many times I had pictured the Valley of the Assassins, and always I saw it in sunlight and the dappled shadow of leaves. Beyond the roof of a pavilion I glimpsed a palace, white and lovely despite the grayness of the day. I ate of a pear and considered the situation without favor.
To return through the fortress was madness, but I saw no alternative.
Rain would restrict movement in the garden, and in this corner where a new palace was to be built there was unlikely to be anyone. How long before they suspected we had escaped through the aqueduct?
It was an unlikely route, and I suspect my father had gone to some difficulty in exploring the way. It was even possible the present rulers of the castle knew nothing of the aqueduct. No doubt it was hundreds of years old.
Somehow, before the day was over, we must plan our escape, and be prepared to move when darkness fell. Until then we must not be found.
My sections of pipe with the prepared dust were not to be trusted. I knew them only from study and not experiment, and I had become a disciple of the trial and error method of the Arabs.
Studying that part of the mountain visible to me, I thought it appeared impossible to climb out. Nor had I any desire to repeat my escape from the castle in Spain, nor to subject my father to such an ordeal.
Once, I heard laughter. Gay laughter, of a young woman or girl, and I heard music. Undoubtedly, the sounds came from a window. No one would be out in this weather.
Shivering, with no fire because of the smoke smell, I waited. My father slept, and no doubt needed it. It was midday when he opened his eyes, immediately alert.
In whispers I explained the situation, and then he began to fill me in. He had only worked in the Valley under the lash of an overseer, yet he had located the various buildings. “There is another aqueduct under the mountain that has steps inside, under the water, but in such a rain as this it is probably running full and with force. It is all enclosed, and I have no idea where it emerges.”
While he ate a pear and finished the chapaties and fragments of meat, I studied the situation. Suppose I were Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah? Suppose, being the first of the Assassins, I took over the fortress of Alamut? Whoever the builders were, and it was built about 830 in our time, he would want an escape route. Any man who locks himself inside a fortress must consider the possibility of the fortress being taken. What then? Obviously, a secret escape route, and I had some familiarity with secret passages.
Such an escape must be easily available, and more than one entrance necessary, in the event he was cut off from other parts of the castle. Surely, there must be an escape from the Valley of the Assassins.
The same problem existed here as at the Castle of Othman, so long ago. Any passage must have a place where the escaper could emerge unseen. Where was Mahmoud? I feared the man. The weak can be terrible when they wish to appear strong, and he was such a man, darkly vengeful and unforgetting. If dying, he would strike out wickedly in all directions to injure all he could to his last breath.
My father gestured toward the filled pipes. “You learned from a book? You read well, then?”
“Latin,” I said, “Greek, Arabic, Persian, and some Sanskrit. In the Frankish tongue I cannot read, but I know of nothing written in that language as yet.”
“You are a physician, as they said?”
“It is something I have learned, and practiced a little, not a profession. All knowledge is related, and I have learned what I could. Much of the sea and the stars, much of history, as well as the structure of land, and something of alchemy.”
“You have been busy,” he said dryly.
Outside, there was a stir of footsteps. A girl or woman wrapped in a burnoose came along a path under the trees, and when close to us she threw back the hood of her burnoose and turned her face up to the soft rain. She stood there a moment, as blond as some of our Frankish girls, lovely as a flower.
We needed help and here it was. The generosity of women was something I had come to trust, the younger ones most of all, for they are less calculating, more romantic. Any girl who turned her face to the rain was a romantic, even if she was in the Valley of the Assassins.
We were alone, and unobserved. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
She turned sharply.
“I am the one who should be afraid,” I said. “I am hiding from them.”
“You hide from Shama?”
“Who is he?”
“You do not know Shama? He is Chief Eunuch. He brought me here.”
“We hide from them all.” Trusting this far, I must trust completely. “My father has been a slave here. I am helping him to escape, and trying to escape myself.”
“I wish you would help me. I wish to escape, too!”
“We can help each other.” I drew her back under the edge of the trees. “We must find a way out. Not the one through the fortress.”
“The gardener takes the leaves beyond the wall for burning. It is a small gate, very strong, hidden in a corner of the wall.”
“Could you take us there? After sundown?”
“We are not allowed in the garden after sundown. Shama himself locks all the doors. That is when the gardeners work and when the chief gardener takes leaves and dead grass outside the wall.”
“He is alone?”
“Two guards are with him. They are huge men, as he is, and very cruel. Everyone warns me I must never be near them. They have killed one girl and several slaves who came too close to that gate.”
Obviously, the gate was important. Why had I not considered the obvious—that in every garden there is debris to be disposed of?
“The eunuch has the key?”
“The only one. It is a very strong lock and a heavy door.”
“Good. Do not be locked in tonight. Get as near to the gate as you can, and wait there.”
“They will kill you!” Her wide blue eyes searched my face. She was young, this one. Too young and tender for such a place as this.