What Dreams May Come

In this new life, the nights were the worst. During the days he could occupy himself, trying to learn the ways of this new land and the people he'd fallen in with – their odd, rough language and their odder, rougher habits – but at night there was nothing but the darkness and the damp and the living forest bearing down. It was too easy, at night, to think. Too easy to remember.

Some nights, he stood sentry while the others slept. He did so more for his sake than for theirs, if they had only known. Even with thoughts and memories chasing through the dark, when he was awake he had at least a fair chance of fending them off. He could move silently about the camp, pausing at each object to name it first in his own tongue and then, if he knew the words, in the rude tongue of his new companions; he could study the stars through the shifting forest canopy and try to match them to childhood astronomy lessons; he could listen, and watch the creatures of this place come and go, and learn what they were and how they moved. Anything to stave off sleep. Because when he slept, he dreamed.

His dreams were not pleasant things. Sometimes he dreamed of his homeland, the heat and the dust and the scent of iron, and bodies piled in a low ditch while armoured men on horses galloped away; sometimes he dreamed of a castle, dank-walled and narrow-chambered with the enemy closing in. Sometimes there were the faces of his brothers, calling him on with smiles on their lips and daggers in their hands and death in their eyes. Sometimes there were the faces of the others, the men he had killed, with questions and curses to heap upon him. He could not escape. Always in his dreams he was trapped, always there was blood. Sometimes, there was worse.

This night, there was worse. Blood, and pain, and not all of it his own. Chains and a brutish, stinking cell; a woman keening; an idol of smoke and flame, like a djinn from a story-teller's tale; the jagged, harsh sound of a baby crying, cut off suddenly and far too soon. There was a cup, brimming with blood, and something cold and dead that held him where he was as the cup came to his lips, and from the shadows there was laughter that sounded like the opening of a crypt, and smelled like a wound gone bad. Part memory, part magic – Nasir had tossed in it, fighting, and lurched gasping to his senses in the forest with the trees sighing around him and a cold sweat on his skin.

He sat up carefully, raising an unsteady hand to wipe the moisture from his brow. He could hear the rush and surge of his own heartbeat in his ears, feel the prickle of dread on his skin. Fear, that was, and nothing else. His shirt was sticking to him, unpleasantly clammy in the cool night breeze. He ignored it, waiting for his heart to slow and his blood to settle.

Around him, the others slept on. Even the young tow-headed boy, who had been meant to be on watch, had fallen asleep at the base of a wide tree. Nasir took some solace in that. He had not, at least, woken screaming: he had that much discipline left to him. De Belleme had let him keep that much, in the end – though the man had tried his damnedest to take everything else. Nor had he been gentle about it. The man had known a number of tricks, some more subtle than others. Even now, Nasir was not always sure how far he had managed to resist. He had done things, he knew – there were memories, flashes, half fog and half stone. They left him cold inside.

De Belleme … the very name made him want to curse. The man had visited on him the greatest of indignities, collaring him as one would collar a hound, denying him comfort that even an animal might be given. Food, for one thing. Water. Warmth. And then, when that had not broken him, the baron had gone the other way, given him all of everything. In an echo (intentional, perhaps?) of Nasir's long ago initiation to his one-time Brotherhood, the man had created a twisted paradise in the hell of his dungeons: opiates mixed in the food, fine carpets and willing women, and a numb haze from which Nasir had woken sweating and shivering in a filthy cell as his body purged itself of the last of the drug and simultaneously howled out for more.

"Obey me, serve me, worship me, and you shall have your pleasure every night," the baron had said, in oddly flat Arabic and a tone like honey.

"An old trick," Nasir could remember saying in a voice that rasped in his throat, curling in on himself in a hard, tight knot. "You'll have to do better than that."

"Don't force my hand, fierce one. Your defiance is amusing, but futile. You'll only live to regret it."

"Insha'Allah."

"Inshallah."

After that there had been other things; deprivation, confinement, long days of lightlessness and silence. Physical pain was easy to endure when it was his own, but hell when it was someone else's. That, he could suffer for only so long. It had been that which had extracted his oath from him, in the end: he had sworn to obey, sworn by the Holy Word, by the Kaaba, by his father's name and his own, and de Belleme had had the child, a small grubby thing with great frightened eyes, brought down from over the flames. The child was probably dead now in any case, sacrificed to de Belleme's horrid curiosity and dark spirits, but at least Nasir could say that it was not on his account. He was not sure how far that was a comfort.

What was a comfort, though, was that even for the worst of de Belleme's torments, Nasir had not broken. Even at his darkest moments, he had held to the only two things in the world that he could still claim as his own, the things he would not renounce: his pride, and his faith. There had been days (or nights? Nasir could not say) when only the Shahadah, repeated so many times that his voice had worn to a whisper, had kept him sane, and the mad baron had screamed at him to stop, to be silent or lose his tongue, or his eyes, or his life, but Nasir had held to those words

La ilaha ill'Allah, wa-Mohammadan rasul Allah

as to a life line in a high sea, or water in a desert, and refused to bend either neck or knee to the things that gibbered at him out of the shadows. Even de Belleme – sun-crazed spawn of a rabid cur, may Iblis take him – had, finally, had to accept that he could have his Saracen slave alive or he could have him dedicated to the Darkness, but he could not have both.

He had been treated well enough, once the baron had pried his oath from him – if any man whose life belonged to another could be said to be well treated. There was no escaping from it, though, not when he had given his word. An oath given under duress was no oath at all, but de Belleme had known that: he had never asked Nasir to swear to anything. Once he had done so though, and of his own volition, the baron had understood enough of honour to know that Nasir was bound. There had been no chains after that, and a measure of liberty, but not enough to matter. A slave was still a slave, no matter how loose his leash. Nasir had obeyed as he had sworn to, following the baron's commands to the word and not beyond, and let his hatred show. De Belleme had found that amusing. He had not wanted his Saracen slave an empty shell, like the wretches he used to summon his shadows and carry his wine. It had suited the man's perverse nature to surround himself with dangerous things, and an untamed Saracen with an arsenal of fine steel and quick killer's eyes was dangerous enough. If de Belleme could have kept an unmuzzled lion on a chain of gold, he would have done that too.

"Will you join me for a drink, now that we've settled things between us?" The baron gestured to a cup, the gracious host to the soles of his boots. "Only water, I assure you, but sweet and fresh."

"No."

The baron smiled at his slave's refusal, as he might have smiled at a pretty girl too modest to accept an invitation to dance. "Oh, come. We have much to talk about. The things you know, the things you've seen … I'm sure you could answer many questions."

"No."

"I have a book here you might …"

"No."

"It speaks of names, the power of names. Nasir." The baron spoke the word as if tasting it. "'Protector'. A name you earned, isn't it? Not one you were born to. What is your true name?"

"Nasir is name enough."

"Never mind. You'll tell me. We'll have years together. Years. You know, my fierce friend, the Emperors of Rome often trusted no one so much as their slaves. We are like those old Romans, wouldn't you say?"

"No. And we are not friends."

The baron smiled again, delighted. It was enough to make a man wish for death.

The baron had, of course, been utterly insane. Nasir had known that almost from the first. The abominations the man indulged in only set that knowledge in stone. Blood drinking, sacrifices and idolatry, and the women … Ya Allah, the things he had done to his women. If there was anything in his life that Nasir wished he could unsee, it was that – and he had seen a good many unpleasant things, a good many bloody deaths. Eternal life, the Baron had wanted – and he had seemed to think that stealing life from others would bring him closer to his goal. In another man, Nasir might have been inclined to think that perhaps the desert sun had stolen his senses, or that he had been struck once too often on the head, but de Belleme's madness was something else. There was nothing passing about it, no tragedy of time and place. It was a part of him, a thing that had grown in him like a cancer until it was all that was left.

In truth, Nasir had seen that kind of madness before, and even served it until he had finally been able to face what it was. Rashid ad-Din Sinan, called the Old Man of the Mountain, had not been entirely sane, and Nasir had recognised the same maniacal, obsessive gleam in the baron's eyes as he had seen in ad-Din Sinan's

(If you are faithful, you will destroy him

But … he's my teacher, my Brother …

Do not question. Destroy him)

on that last day in Masyaf. For men like those, the world existed only as they wanted it to exist, all in shades of darkest black or brilliant white, with themselves at the very centre and all else purely expendable. There had been a time when Nasir himself could have been lead to think that way, save for the impediment of his own sense of morality and an alarming tendency to explore, to question, that not all the indoctrination in the world could remove. Now he had a better sense of who he was and the things he would fight for, and he had only had to turn his back on one madman and escape another to gain it. That made his lips twitch in almost a smile, though there was nothing mirthful in it. Ah, Malik Kemal, you always were one for learning things the hard way.

And now here he was, sleeping rough in an English forest with only infidels and barbarians for company, and their leader was a young man with a ready smile and a cause, and Nasir was not sure that he was not mad too. Certainly he had courage beyond the normal measure of things – facing down the Nottingham garrison with no more than a longbow and a bright stare, marching alone into de Belleme's castle with all of his faith in a sword he could barely use and a pretty pagan trinket. Robin, they called him, as if that was name enough. In fact, none of them had names beyond what one might give a horse, or a favoured dog – Will, John, Much – and when he'd offered his own with his lineage and honorifics, they'd looked at him like he'd grown a second head.

This time, his smile was a steadier thing, brief but true. He felt better, calmer now that the claws of the dream had let him loose, the horror fading. He was glad none of his new companions had been awake to see him so stricken; with any luck, this weakness would pass as others had passed before, and remain between himself and Allah the All-Knowing. Strange, to be so unmanned by dream and memory, when he would gladly face any enemy in the flesh … but then, had he not always been taught that a man's struggle with his own weakness was a harder and truer battle than anything that could be won with a sword?

Well, perhaps this was his lesson, and his struggle. Allah had brought him to this for a reason, after all; to de Belleme and his lunacy, to this damp green land, to these mismatched rebels. Not that Nasir would presume to guess at what that reason might be; who was he to know the mind of the Almighty? All he knew was that he had fought as his beliefs had driven him to fight, and that he fought still, inside and out … though look now who he had been given to fight beside.

The giant he knew a little from his time with de Belleme, though the man had been tormented by demons then. Still, he seemed solid enough, gentle in spite of his great size and willing to let a man's actions speak for him. The hellion with the fierce stare had been a soldier, but his anger rode him like an ifrit, blurring his focus and making him lash out at anything – he would take some watching, or his fury would drag them all into danger. The boy seemed simple, harmless, like a puppy bumbling underfoot. Still, even a puppy could show its teeth, if it had to. From the friar, Tuck, Nasir had been braced for a deal of hostility, but he had found only an honest interest instead. Nasir had not had fond experiences with men of the Church, but this one seemed different – less inclined to corruption for a start, and seemingly more intent on food than prayer. And then there was the woman, running loose in the forest like a young animal, with no care for reputation or honour … but she had greeted him with a shy smile and a smattering of awkward Arabic, blessing him backwards but making an honest fist of it. All of them different, and all of them drawn by whatever powers they named to the young one who led them, Robin with his forest green eyes and his peculiar pagan ways. They had no discipline, no reserve, no idea of what they might do, only a great and burning drive to do something … and barely a trained fighter amongst them. It was not what Nasir was used to, certainly not what he would have chosen. It was, in fact, enough to make a camel laugh.

Nasir gave a mental shrug at that. If it was Allah's will that he should throw in his lot with a handful of unbelievers and whatever cause they called their own, then so it would be. After all, he owed his freedom to Robin – the oath he'd sworn to de Belleme had died the moment that the man himself had, and that had been Robin's doing. Honour demanded that he make some recompense for that. Perhaps he could be of use to them in whatever battle this was that they had taken on: he had skills that went beyond swinging a blade, if anyone cared to ask.

It was still dark, but falling towards dawn. Nasir considered trying to go back to sleep, but the dream and its flexing claws were not far enough away for that, not yet. Much had abandoned his watch, in an act of carelessness that might have meant death in a more rigid company than this: Nasir supposed he might as well pick it up. Climbing slowly to his feet, he padded to where the boy lay curled on the ground and lifted the tattered cloak Much had been using for a blanket to rest more comfortably about the lad's shoulders, then wandered back to the fire to stir the slow embers back to life. Behind him, Much muttered and yawned, then settled deeper into slumber. John lay like a mountain under his shaggy jerkin, sleeping the sleep of the righteous. Will, on the other hand, was no calmer at rest than he was awake, twitching and growling softly like a dog dreaming of the hunt. Tuck snored deeply on the other side of the fire, and a little apart from the rest, Robin and Marion shared a blanket of cured hides, curled together like kittens. Nasir watched them briefly, wondering what they dreamed of, then tipped his face to the sky.

Finally, a faint grey light broke through the trees. Nasir welcomed it, letting the familiar strains of the adhan float through his mind. There would be no muezzin's call in this land – how long since he had heard it proper? He couldn't say – but even the memory of the words brought comfort. Come to prayer, ye faithful, come to sanctuary. Oh, yes, he needed that.

Standing, Nasir stretched and surveyed the camp again, taking in the sight of his sleeping companions. They were strangers still, but they were all he had to pledge his loyalty to in this land, save for himself and the faith that had nurtured him. It was Allah's will he was here, so far from his home and all he knew. And if it was Allah's will that the least and most unworthy of his servants should one day return to his own land with all its comforts and conflicts, then that would come as it may. Until then, he would make the best of it.

And, maybe, learn to be stronger than what dreams may come.