A/N: Unexplained title change, yes. Sorry, I am bad with titles.

Jubair al-Hakim was a prominent minister, and Tamir's meeting with him must have gone well because not two days later my husband was departing to personally oversee a caravan to Jerusalem. I slipped out of the house that very night, a little giddy with the thought that I would not have to see Tamir for—oh, weeks—as many as three if I were lucky and the roads were bad and business held him longer than usual. I hoped, fervently, for brigands; unkind of me, perhaps, but Tamir was looking to me now for encouragement in a way that was nearly as infuriating as dismissing me out of hand. I had gotten used to his inattention, after all.

The rooftop entrance to the bureau was open. I dropped down into the courtyard, tumbling into a pile of cushions, and the novice on guard duty leaped to his feet at once. He must have been new; I had not seen him before, and he had clearly never seen me, because he was staring me down with his sword drawn and ready.

"You're not allowed—" he began.

"Yes, I am," I said, wondering if he was really going to try to take my head off.

"Oh," said the novice, lowering his sword.

An assassin poked his head through the doorway. "Well, that was a convincing argument," he said dryly. "Hello, Isra." And, to the novice: "You'd best go fetch the rafik before anyone else decides to drop by."

The novice, looking faintly embarrassed, sheathed his sword and hurried off. I blinked at the assassin. "Kaddar," I said, a little surprised to see him. "What are you doing here?"

"Everyone keeps asking me that," Kaddar remarked. "I've been running courier to Acre—hasn't Rasha been complaining about it in her letters?"

Rasha never spoke of him, actually; I rather suspected that it was because she liked him a great deal more than she would ever care to admit, even to me and Sarai. "She hasn't mentioned it," I said "Did you see her when you were in Acre?"

"Yes." He stepped back to allow me into the living quarters. "She's doing very well with the longsword. We're getting married."

I nearly tripped on the threshold. "—what?"

He was grinning. "I don't think she knows yet. It might take her a while to figure out—but she'll have to think that it's her idea, or else she'd never agree to it."

Yes, that sounded exactly like Rasha. I couldn't help but smile. "I hope you're nice to her," I told him, sinking down into a chair. "If you make her unhappy, I'll have you thrown into the river."

"You sound like Sarai," Kaddar said, looking perfectly cheerful despite this multiple threats to his life. "Only she said something along the lines of poisoning my wine. Or perhaps exposing me to the regent and letting him hang me from the city walls—"

"I could get you in trouble with the city garrison," I offered. "They would chase you down and run you through."

"Please, try not to involve the guards in this," the rafik said, emerging from the other end of the room. "There are always the most troublesome investigations afterwards. Isra, I did not expect to see you so soon. Do you have news?"

I bowed to him, brief. "Yes," I said. "Guy de Lusignon is going to lay siege to Acre."

—

It had not been such a fiendishly clever plot to unravel. The King of Jerusalem no longer held the city and he desperately wanted it back; he needed a position from which to assault it, and there were only so many that he could use, and Acre, with its well-protected harbor for his European allies, would make a good start for his campaign. From there he could go south to Arsuf and Jaffa, then east to Jerusalem itself—with his ships, the coast was more easily defended—and in any case Tamir and his associates had been sending weapons in that direction over the past few weeks—

"Kaddar," the rafik said, "I appreciate your enthusiasm, but there is no need to go riding off to Acre this very minute."

"There's going to be a siege," Kaddar said, looking fairly upset. He was on his feet, looming over the map we had drawn up, and, indeed, he looked prepared to go to Acre right now. "The bureau needs to relocate—"

"We have some time." The rafik glanced at me. "How long, Isra?"

"I can't be certain—"

"Your best estimate, then."

I considered. Troop mobilizations and supply lines and logistics—and getting his allies into agreement— "A month," I said at last. "Perhaps until August, even. But we should not delay."

—

August came.

Rasha made it out of Acre before the siege began, and Shadha went to Cairo, and I had an affair with Jubair al-Hakim.

Of the three, perhaps the second was the most surprising. There was little warning; a week after the Crusaders marched on Acre, a message came from Masyaf explaining that Shadha was needed to keep watch over the brewing politics at Salah al-Din's court. I—and Rasha, and Sarai—would report to Al Mualim directly now. Understandable, perhaps, that Al Mualim would want to know what Salah al-Din was planning—still, it seemed a little strange, as much of this planning would be taking place in war camps as his armies marched.

But I supposed that there was Rasha to keep an eye on the war camps now that she did not have a city to oversee.

—

Of the three, the third should not have been surprising at all. What else was I to do when Tamir was away so often for business? There were more contracts, contracts that required his extended absence so that he might supervise the transactions in person—contracts that came from a man named Abu'l Nuquod, in fact, who was overseer of the merchants for the Templars here. But I was unaware of such things.

There were things that Tamir kept from his wife. She would not know, for example, that he was smuggling slaves to Jerusalem or opium to the Crusaders; half-prophetic she might be, but Tamir's wife did not have the resources of the Hashshashin at her disposal. There was no Sarai writing to tell her about Talal, no spies to track her husband's caravans, and Tamir might look to me for false assurances but he would hardly burden my delicate constitution with tales of drugs and slave trafficking.

And Tamir would certainly not tell me about Abu'l Nuquod.

Abu'l Nuquod: the Merchant King, he was called, and it was a fitting title; he was a wealthy man, the wealthiest in all of Damascus, and he had almost as much power of the governor himself. There were whispered stories told of the sorts of festivities he enjoyed, this Merchant King—stories of scandals and corruption and secret perversions—the sort of tales that could ruin an ordinary merchant, the sort of tales that were most definitely not the kind Tamir would want his wife to hear of.

Tamir never spoke of his association with the Merchant King, and I was a docile bride and would not go rummaging through his letters for such information, and so when I grew tired of having my husband gone for such long stretches at a time, it was to Jubair that I directed my complaints.

Jubair, at least, was respectable. He might be a Templar, but he was also the head of the scholars of Damascus—and his reputation was above reproach.

—

Tamir departed on another journey a few weeks after the siege began. The day after he left, I summoned my maid and announced that we were going out.

Nadia stared at me. "O—out?" she stammered. "But why—and where—"

"We're going to visit a scholar," I said.

"But—"

"Or you can stay here, if you like."

And of course she could not let me go out alone, so my maid accompanied me—protesting all the way—as I went to the Madrasah al-Kallasah to seek out Jubair. She had never seen me so defiant before. I hoped she wouldn't faint.

The Madrasah's gate was open, but a scholar moved to stop us when we entered. "Hold!" he called out, frowning. "You can't come in here—who are you?"

"My name is none of your business," I said, and tilted up my chin at a haughty angle. "I am here to see Jubair al-Hakim, who has done me a great wrong—"

"What?" The scholar was apparently determined to be difficult. "No, he can't have—"

I let out a wail. The scholar shut his mouth, startled, and I pressed my advantaged before he could recover. "He has taken my husband from me!" I cried, high and shrill and unnecessarily loud. "He is sent out to distant cities, and I might as well be a widow for all that I see him! Ah, is this what you scholars do? You break apart families, and all for some mysterious cause that you will not explain! Will you deny me this justification for what he has done?"

It was an inelegant speech, but the words hardly mattered; I suspected that, to any man, one woman's shrieking sounded the same as any other's. The scholar was looking rather stunned. Nadia was staring at me wide-eyed, doubtless shocked that I cared about Tamir at all.

I gave one last wail and burst into tears.

"Oh, please—please don't—" Now the scholar looked as though he were trying not to panic. "Just—come inside, I'll take you to see him right away—"

—

I stopped crying when I met Jubair. He did not seem the type to be swayed by tears and wailing, though he seemed sympathetic enough as he took me into his study and shut the door behind us. "So you are Tamir's wife," he said, turning back to me. "He has never spoken of you."

I would have been shocked if he had. "Then I have you at a disadvantage," I said. "Tamir has often spoken of you."

His eyebrows went up. "Then surely he must also have explained why he is needed elsewhere?" Jubair asked.

"Hints and vagaries," I said, dismissive, and glanced about. Jubair's study was an imposing room; there was a great arched window directly behind the desk, and to either side the walls were lined with high shelves and crowded with books. "Never a good reason—"

"And what sort of reason would satisfy you?"

"If he were doing this for—for some greater good," I said. "Wealth he has in plenty, but if I knew that he were making this world a better place, then perhaps I could be content with being apart from him for so long."

"Perhaps he is working on something greater than you know," Jubair said, watching me carefully.

I almost smiled. He wore the red-black-gold of the Damascus scholars, gleaming bright in the sun, but beneath it all he was a Templar through and through—and they all had a grand vision, didn't they? Power. Control. All the world beneath their heel, one way or the other, and they would begin by destroying Saladin. "Will you tell me what it is, then?" I asked, coming up to him, close. "You send my husband out on these errands—surely there is some vision you have, some purpose to all of this?"

He hesitated, wanting to speak but knowing that he should not. Ah, how to draw him out? He was a scholar—the head of the Illuminated, the chief scholar of Damascus—he dealt in knowledge and philosophy of all kinds, and forbade those he thought dangerous—

"—perhaps you are making a new world," I said. "A new republic, where the virtuous will rule over the rest, where the men of gold and silver will watch over those of bronze and clay—"

Close. Close enough to the Templar vision that his eyes were suddenly gleaming. "—and there will be justice in every man and every city," Jubair said, and I could feel his silence crumbling. "You have been reading that heretic Plato."

I did smile this time; it hardly mattered, Jubair would not notice such things now. "Heretic?" I said. "Was he not born far before the time of the Last Prophet? Pagan, I would say—but no heretic. And was he not a man of great vision?"

"There are truer visions than his." There were more words on his tongue; I saw him swallow them back with difficulty. Oh, they had such visions, these Templars—they believed so fervently that they could not fathom how someone else might disagree once they had been shown the truth. "We should not be discussing this—"

I gave him one of the looks that Almas had taught me to use—earnest and wide-eyed and full of longing—and his resolve cracked like delicate porcelain shattering.

"—but what is the harm?" he murmured, almost to himself. Forbidden knowledge; too dangerous for the populace to know, but Jubair was a scholar after all, and how could he resist the temptation for such a debate that might win me to his side? "Come. Give me your name, Tamir's wife, and I shall show you truth unsullied."

—

That was not the last I saw of Jubair al-Hakim. We did have an affair, after all; the very next day an invitation came to visit him again, and another invitation the week after that, and they appeared with discreet regularity every time Tamir was away. Though she was unhappy about it, my maid remembered who paid her wages and kept her silence when I called on her to accompany me—and, in any case, Nadia never did see anything untoward in the things I did with Jubair. We only debated philosophy, after all; what was the harm in that?

Oh, what a game this was! I gave knowledge of the Templars to Tamir, and feigned ignorance to Jubair, and the scholar and the merchant each pretended an alliance with the other that was not there. Tamir was too proud to admit to the world that he looked to his wife to guidance, Jubair too vain of his reputation to let our meetings become public knowledge, and so the two of them wove me elaborate lies about the other and never suspected that they were chasing each other in circles.

"Jubair has ordered that these spices be brought to Tyre," Tamir would say, lying through his teeth about where the order had come. "And afterwards—"

"Afterwards you will be given charge of another caravan," I would reassure him. I had ordered an assassin placed in Abu'l Nuquod's household the moment I discovered that he was a Templar; news of promotions would reach me before Nuquod announced them to Tamir. "You will be well-rewarded for the risks you have taken."

"Good," Tamir would say, and when he had left I would go off to see Jubair who would claim at once that Tamir was delivering a cargo of food to Tiberias.

It was easy enough to resist the temptation to laugh; I had only to remind myself that my life depended upon maintaining this duplicity. But still, the absurdities piled upon themselves like the armies at Acre as the seasons wore on and one year turned into the next—it was such a dangerous thing I was doing, and it could all be undone if Tamir and Jubair spoke even one sentence to the other—but they never did. They never spoke, not for months and months—two years, nearly, and by the time that they suspected that they should, it was already too late for the both of them.

—

I recognized soon enough that Jubair played a larger role in the Templars than I had first imagined; he spoke to me of the finer points of their philosophy, of the power of words and belief to change the course of history, of correspondences he had with scholars in Saladin's court and knights in the Crusader army—things that a mere merchant like Tamir would never know. Jubair was informant and advisor to several high-ranking Templars, and it was unfortunate for me that he was not so naïve as to write their names down on paper.

It took me longer to understand Jubair himself, but in the end the truth was simpler than I could have guessed. Jubair was clever and arrogant; because of the former, he hated fools, and because of the latter, he could not stand those who disagreed with him.

But what he wanted, most of all, was assurance that he was right. He was right, he was, he had to be; and yet, with dangerous books forbidden to the scholars of Damascus, there had been no one worth debating against to whom he could defend his beliefs. What was I, to Jubair? I could hold forth on Aristotle and ibn Sina and eastern philosophy, I had read tracts on history and mathematics and rhetoric, I could write verse as well as any scholar—I sat in his study and listened and argued, and allowed myself to be won over to his side in slow, tantalizing increments, and this hard-fought conversion was not something Jubair could resist.

—

I think he fancied himself in love with me, by the end. I think he might even have told me about the Templars, if there had been time—

But then Acre fell to the Crusaders.

I was nineteen, and news came to Damascus that the city had surrendered, and suddenly all the world was changed.

A/N: Wanted to get this up before I announce a lull. Not—really—a hiatus? But everyone knows what happens when Acre falls, and I want to make sure I've got all the kinks worked out before I slip up and make a really silly mistake. (If any of you catch any silly plotting mistakes, do let me know.)

Notes: Sieges sucked. They lasted a long, long time—months, maybe years, like the one at Acre—and if you were stuck inside the city, there was the obvious question of what the hell you were going to eat while the enemy army wailed away at your walls. Running out of food meant mass starvation, which meant riots, lots and lots of death, chaos, upheaval, and (gasp!) surrender. And meanwhile, you had to look outside and see the enemy burning your fields—that was also a pretty common tactic. Beyond the "starving to death" issue, there was the "plague and pestilence" issue. Medieval times, poor hygiene—you can see where this is going, especially if the enemy is intentionally sabotaging your water supply (like putting rotting corpses in it) or trying to spread disease (like flinging rotting corpses into the city with siege weapons), or even if they're not really trying at all (you're hungry, and there's a rotting corpse outside). And then, even if you did surrender, there was no guarantee that the enemy wouldn't just behead a whole bunch of people when they took the city. At Acre, for example, the Crusaders beheaded the Muslim garrison that Saladin had offered to ransom—though to be fair, in retaliation Saladin had all of the Christian prisoners executed, too—so I guess it was both sides being jerks about the whole thing.

The siege of Acre lasted from August 1189 to July 1191. At Acre, a pretty interesting thing happened where the Crusader army besieging the city got surrounded by Saladin's army that started to besiege them; Isra's reference to the armies piling up is pretty much

a) Guy de Lusignon arrives with his allies and sets up camp

b) Saladin brings not-big-enough-of-an-army-to-liberate-Acre and sets up camp after an unsuccessful battle

c) more Crusaders arrive, which means

d) Saladin brings in more troops to siege them

e) and lather, rinse, and repeat for the next year or so (seriously, I'm not kidding here, armies are piling up like dead bodies in a horror flick)

until finally the French (!) under King Phillip and the British (under King Richard, remember him as that big guy on that horse that yells at Conrad?) arrive by sea, make some decent siege weapons, and force the garrison at Acre into surrendering.

Not that things were so happy for the Crusaders even then; they had been under siege too, and they also had food and disease problems, and lots of important people died. Like, the Queen of Jerusalem. Remember how Guy was only a king-by-marriage? Well, for some reason he thought it would be a good idea to take his wife (and his daughters) along into a period of extended warfare with bad food, bad water, and lots of rotting corpses, and then they all died he lost his claim to the throne. Which, predictably, had led to a lot of bickering in the Crusader camp over the succession—you know, in between bouts of starvation and disease—and this continued for pretty much the rest of the war.

And that is why Kaddar doesn't want his girlfriend to be stuck in Acre during a siege.

Less depressing than rotting corpses: In the conversation between Isra and Jubair, they reference Plato's Republic, which is a book about how people should be just and virtuous men (men of precious metals like gold and silver, apparently) should rule over everyone else. It's actually very, very dull, but for some reason medieval Islamic scholars were fascinated with Greek philosophers—and lots of other philosophers, to be fair—and translated a whole bunch of stuff into Arabic. For the longest time that was how lots of culture came to Europe—they got translated into Arabic, cities got sacked in the crusades, the translations got shipped off to be translated into Latin, and that is why we have weird things like 'neoplatonism' developing in Europe that sound very little like Plato. The Greek originals wouldn't be directly translated into English for centuries, I think. A lot of culture and philosophy and science at that time came through the Islamic empires. Neoplatonism, for example, has something in it about souls divided in two and each half is looking for the other—which I think comes from something in Plato's Symposium where a guy tells a story about how people used to have four arms and four legs and two heads and then Zeus chopped them in half, and that's why we go looking for other halves. And originally some of these 'people' had two sets of male genitalia, and some had two sets of female genitalia, and some were hermaphrodites, which is why today we have men who cleave unto men, and lesbians, and straight people. Please don't quote me on the Neoplatonism part, I am hardly an expert on medieval philosophy (although feel free to quote me on the Symposium—every word of that description is true).

Ibn Sina is also known as Avicenna, and he was an influential Islamic thinker living in the 11th century.

…I can't believe I wrote such long notes. They are so…long. And they feel kind of unwieldy tacked onto the end of a chapter, but I don't know where else to put them. Suggestions welcome from anyone who has a clue. Also, if you've read this far through my self-indulgent ramblings on history and dead Greeks, then you definitely deserve a pat on the back.