The Codex Lacrimae: The Book of Tears

Chapter 5: Saladin and Fafnir: A Survivor Revealed

As the day aged outside the walls of the Krak des Chevaliers and the al-Ansariyah Mountains purpled into dusk, Saladin knew fear.

It didn't matter to the emir that his fifty-man, mounted honor guard waited nearby, nor that the rest of his army made the final siege preparations on flatlands where the Homs Gap opened onto the Orontes River Valley; Saladin was a seasoned enough veteran to know trouble when he saw it, and this eastern commander known only as 'Fafnir' was definitely trouble.

The shadows of the easterner's cloak flowed wildly in the breeze, making it unclear where the material ended and the horse began, but it evoked an unmistakable menace. Every few moments, those same desultory air currents carried a foul odor across the space between Fafnir and Saladin, its repulsive smell making the sultan almost gag and his eyes water.

When Fafnir spoke, his deep and resonant voice rumbled across the space like distant thunder that promises a storm impossible to outrace, the sound audible both in Saladin's ears and, he imagined, his mind.

It seemed to Saladin as if it weren't a man astride a horse before him, but a strange, four-legged, creature. A winged shape crouched languidly on the bluff, whose pinion length couldn't be measured in distance, but rather by the radius of the putrescent odor it cast.

Worst of all, besides arriving at the rendezvous upon a carrion wind, the enigmatic commander hadn't even lowered his cowl upon first meeting Saladin—an insulting display of arrogance!

Saladin considered himself a modest man, but knew that his was the modesty of the powerful. It had been almost twenty years since anyone approached him with Fafnir's kind of casual demeanor. Didn't the eastern ruler realize the prominence Saladin held in the Levant and Middle East? That Saladin himself controlled Egypt? That he had personally abolished the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo, an empire that had endured in these regions for over two hundred and fifty years? Didn't Fafnir know that for the past five years Saladin had been hounding the Crusaders up and down the Levant, rallying thousands of Arabs by the promise of driving the Frankish occupiers into the Great Sea and back to their own lands?

No. This eastern ruler seemed to know none of these things, or perhaps they simply didn't impress him. As it was, Fafnir had amplified the insult of not lowering his cowl by offering a strange token of friendship: a leather bag filled with Frankish scalps. Disgusted, Saladin hadn't touched the bag, letting an adjunct take it as he glared at his military counterpart.

"Lord Fafnir, I appreciate the ... goodwill gesture, but I am not Shīrkuh," he'd said, referring to his uncle, who'd once received a similar sack of battle trophies. "And you're certainly not Nur ad-Din."

"Perhaps not," Fafnir agreed, his hand stretched vaguely behind him, "but, as with Nur ad-Din, I, too, come with military aid in your time of need."

"You know something of my family's past, Lord Fafnir, but this isn't the Battle of Bilbays." Saladin tightened the gloves on his hands and adjusted the rein on his stallion, as if making ready to leave. "Further, in this instance, I'd remind you that I'm the one besieging the franj, and unlike my uncle, not waiting months in northern Egypt for a relief force."

He didn't mention the fact that the bag of nazaro skull-skins seemed a small amount in comparison to the number who'd fall in his jihad against the Crusaders.

Instead, he merely said, "In any event, I don't approve of such tokens."

"Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb ..." Fafnir began patiently. "May I call you Yūsuf?"

"No, I think not."

"Ah." A moment's pause, then Fafnir resumed. "To business, then. You say that Morpeth and Farbauti are no longer with you? That they poisoned your brother?