Chapter Text
Nicolò learns he cannot die at the gates of Nicaea.
The lesson repeats itself at the gates of Antiochia, and Agrabah, and Jerusalem. He rises, only to fall again, and rise again, an endless and pointless cycle of blood and too-quick agony. There is no meaning to it that he can see, no reason for him to be trapped on Earth. He is not Christ, whose sacrifice saved humanity. Nicolò’s deaths are small and meaningless and unremarked, and bring no good to anyone. He is no Messiah; no man here will follow the younger son of a peasant farmer, one of thousands of mediocre soldiers. Besides, Nicolò has nothing of worth to share. Nothing but a strange immunity to death, which will not spread.
He has tried. Smearing his blood on a dead man’s wounds does not make them close, and his most fervent prayers do not see the women and children of the Holy Land’s cities spared in his place. When he wakes in a field of corpses, he is the only one that stirs. Heaven remains barred to him alone.
He would think this was Purgatory, save that the Pope had sworn every crusader was cleansed of all sin and that God smiled on their mission. It cannot be that Nicolò’s sins were not lifted by the cross on his chest and the sword he took up in defense of his faith. He has done all that could be asked of any man, and died in God’s service - how can it not be enough?
Nicolò does not understand it, but it does not seem he is required to. He heals from every blow regardless of his will or wit about the matter. No amount of pleading or screaming or weeping will put him in a grave.
Eventually he stops trying, and simply marches where the commanders lead and lifts his sword when they order it. If God has a plan for Nicolò, he is not meant to know it. In that regard he remains the same as any other man, even if his own path has turned strange. He will find a way to live with it.
He must; it may be that he cannot die of disease or age either, and then what will become of him?
He does not have an answer.
His countrymen learn he cannot die at the gates of Ascalonia.
Three of them find him alive, but still far from whole; Nicolò cannot keep them from watching his guts crawl back inside his ribs. One of them turns away from the sight and vomits over his boots. The others are not so squeamish, and continue to bear witness to the whole ugly process.
Nicolò still does not know whether his healing is a horror or a wonder. The soldiers make up their minds far quicker. The visceral disgust on their faces changes to something with much more weight.
“This is impossible,” one of them growls, and his hand tightens on the hilt of his sword. “This is - sorcery.”
Nicolò has come up with a dozen theories, attempting to explain his condition to himself, that might serve as excuses: that he carries a holy relic, or that he was personally blessed by any one of the princes on crusade. He cannot speak them while his lungs are still filled with his own blood. The soldiers stare in grim silence and draw their own conclusions with far more certainty than Nicolò has been able to manage.
The one who spoke lifts his sword. “Enough,” he grunts, and swings it down hard.
Nicolò holds up a shaking hand in his defense and makes a feeble attempt to turn away from the blow. The soldier does not hesitate to stab him through the back instead.
Nicolò blinks and breathes again - tries to breathe, but it catches, tears through him, splits him open and slicks his insides with hot blood. He gasps again and the pain only worsens. He starts to crawl away-
Blinks, breathes, stares through the same blinding pain at the same grains of sand. He tries to crawl again and cuts himself anew, gouged through from back to belly-
Blinks, breathes, chokes on the air when his lungs won’t obey, and holds still. Three deaths so fast must be some sort of record, his hysterical mind supplies. It is better than thinking on the blade lancing through his stomach, or the way that bastard cur of a soldier left his sword in place as if unsatisfied to kill Nicolò once. The sword is too heavy for Nicolò to lift, with the little strength that attends him after a death, but if he is lucky and can heal everything else around it before dying again, he may have time to-
A blow to the side - a brutal kick - makes him convulse. He tastes blood, cuts something vital on the sword again, and-
Blinks, breathes - breathes, oh God, that sword gone and the gaping wound closing itself unopposed. Nicolò presses his forehead into the sand and waits for the pain to fade. It recedes bit by bit like the tide going out.
“Praise be to God,” he exhales, and then screams as another blow shatters his ribs.
Through the fresh, bone-deep ache he hears a new voice. Is the story already spreading? Nicolò goes cold with more than the pain of broken bones grinding together.
Three men, he had a chance to convince in his favor; more, fueled by rumor as well as the evidence of their eyes, he does not think he can bend.
“Keep Him out of your mouth, demon,” the voice says. “Your curses are not welcome here.”
Tell that to whatever cursed me, Nicolò thinks. For the briefest instant he feels the prick of the blade going into his neck, before his next death takes him, mercifully swift.
He does not blink, and breathes as shallowly as he can. He really must learn to be reborn quietly, and pay a good deal more attention to his surroundings before they can pay attention to him.
There were three Crusaders before; now he hears rattling armor and shifting steps and raised voices of at least a dozen. Foreigners have joined the Genoese who found him first, and Nicolò must listen hard to parse through the several languages flying between them.
They know what he is and they do not like it. He will not die, but they refuse to suffer him to live. One suggests they take Nicolò to a bishop and let him sort it out; another says they cannot risk letting Nicolò work his black magic on someone so important to Christendom. Those who observed his recovery swiftly convince the others that he cannot be killed by a blade.
“The desert will kill him,” one says. “Leave him here, take the horses, take the water, not even a demon can survive that.”
Nicolò refrains from advising them that he can, in fact, survive the desert. He already has, on a number of marches with limited supplies. A man with no water will live for about three days, and each death seems to buy Nicolò another three days before the next. Perhaps they will simply walk away and let him sort himself out once they’re gone.
“He will follow us,” says the voice - one of the voices - that killed him. “He will slip those bonds eventually and then who is to say we will not pay for angering a demon?”
Bonds? Ah - Nicolò’s wrists are tied behind his back, and another coil of rope holds his arms to his chest. There is the scratch of rope around his neck too, a noose or collar doubtless holding him to something. That is less simple, but the soldiers are correct that with time he will surely be able to free himself.
“He cannot die at any man’s hand,” says another, sounding desperate. “How do we kill that which does not die?”
A tentative voice, uncertain of itself. “If a man cannot kill him, what about another demon?”
That earns a derisive snort. “I suppose you keep one in your pocket for such occasions?”
A round of laughter greets the joke, until another voice speaks, low and contemplative. “The Saracens have one.”
The laughter goes silent.
Nicolò’s heart skips. If there is a demon, and if it can kill him…
Would it matter? Does he want to live or die? He’s never had to ask himself that question before. After enough rebirths he was satisfied the choice was no longer his, and what he wanted didn’t seem relevant.
He tests the bonds around his wrists. They are tied well and tight, with no yield in them. It seems it is still not his choice.
Nicolò’s captors must know he is alive by now - no recovery has ever taken him this long, certainly none of the ones they saw - but they continue to plot his execution over his head. He does not fight them. He doubts the warrior exists who can defeat twelve armed soldiers with his hands bound behind his back, but if he does, Nicolò is not that man. He had never even lifted a sword before taking the cross, and his survival this far isn’t exactly due to his skills with a blade.
The soldiers are now whispering about the Moorish demon - the Terror of Agrabah, they call it, and say it nearly destroyed that city before being cast out. One wishes darkly that it had continued, and done the crusaders’ work for them; the others agree. Nicolò is almost envious of their ease. He has found nothing holy in the slaughter.
The demon can be found east of here, south of Agrabah itself. They say it hunts across its territory like a lion or a wolf, and its prey never escapes. They say it can burn the sky and crack the earth. Nobody is laughing at the idea now. If anything can kill him and keep him killed, Nicolò concurs, this demon might be it.
The talk turns to the logistics of riding there and back. One of the group seems to be a noble with enough authority to command the resources for a scouting party. Several men leave to requisition horses and rations under his seal, but those that remain to guard Nicolò outnumber him by at least four to his one.
Footsteps approach across the sand and Nicolò is shoved onto his back, hands trapped beneath him. Resigned, he opens his eyes to glare up at the man who broke his ribs earlier - the nobleman who has appointed himself captain of this little expedition.
Nicolò’s luck continues to turn for the worse. Achard, Vicomte of Avranches, is a sanctified sadist who has proven himself eager to spill the blood of as many innocents as possible for the sake of Christ, and as brutally as possible for his own entertainment. Nicolò cannot imagine his own treatment at Achard’s hands will be any more gentle. At least it will be short, if Achard plans to give him to this Moorish demon instead of keeping him to kill again and again for the amusement of it.
Achard lowers himself to the ground, one knee in the sand for balance, and leans over Nicolò, a kind of private enclave of two. “You will meet your end today,” Achard says, in Nicolò’s tongue so there is no mistaking him.
Nicolò answers in Achard’s Norman French for the same reason. “I hope so. Your failures to end me so far have been manifest, to say the least.”
He is expecting the blow in retaliation. Achard’s armored fist smashes into the side of his face, and white agony floods Nicolò’s vision. Jagged pieces of his jaw and cheekbone shift under his skin, grinding, pulled back into place long seconds later by some nameless and irresistible force. Nicolò holds himself motionless, fighting the urge to writhe with the pain. He will not crawl before this man.
Blood from the wound runs down the back of his throat before it heals, a rough tang of iron. A loose tooth rocks back and forth before deciding to root itself again, rather than fall out and regrow. Achard stares, watching every moment with a reviled fascination.
“You are unnatural,” he says plainly.
On that, we agree.
“You have no place in this world.”
Ah, there you lose me. It will only cause trouble, but Nicolò murmurs anyway, “Then why am I unable to leave it?”
He braces for another blow, but Achard rises to his feet instead and turns his back on Nicolò. “Somebody gag him,” he orders the remaining men. “I grow tired of his noise.”
It did only cause trouble. Nicolò sighs at himself. On the other hand, he does feel somewhat absolved of the responsibility to treat them in good faith.
Two men approach, both with a kind of grim pleasure in their eyes at getting to bring the demon down. One of them carries a torn piece of cloth and a length of thin rope.
Neither of them are wearing armor on their hands.
One points a knife at Nicolò as if that is any kind of threat. “Don’t move, or I will…”
What, kill him?
Nicolò holds his silence and remains still as they come close, crouching down on either side of him. One grabs Nicolò’s jaw to roughly pry his mouth open; the other pushes the cloth between his teeth.
Nicolò wrenches free and bites down with all his strength.
The man screams and blood sprays across Nicolò’s tongue. Nicolò spits the gag out as the man staggers backwards and collapses to the ground, clutching at his fingers. “Bastard whoreson cowards, I’ll do worse than that if you touch me again-”
Achard groans loudly, and shoves the fallen man aside with his boot. “Do I have to do everything myself?”
He draws a knife and swings it down towards Nicolò’s chest.
“Oh, fuck you-”
Nicolò blinks, breathes, and stares at a different patch of sand, lined with shadows that are at entirely the wrong angles. It is hours later at best - from the gnawing, empty ache in his stomach and the clawing of thirst in his throat, perhaps days. He doesn’t remember anything since the knife went into his heart, but he can guess the soldiers simply left it there while they treated his body as they wished. If he didn’t heal enough to wake before the blade killed him again, he could have been as good as dead for any number of days.
There is sand in his mouth and in his eyes, and he can feel the last lingering pain of a fall to the ground before it fades entirely. Nicolò’s mind fills in the preceding events: his captors strapping his corpse to a horse and riding out to find the demon, determining this was an adequate spot, and throwing Nicolò to the sand like so much refuse.
War is undignified, he knows this. More and more he begins to think it is characteristic of humanity in general.
The sand is cool; it is not long past dawn. He is still bound as tightly as ever, and his shoulders and arms are stiff with it. Small discomforts, it seems, do not heal themselves unless they come with actual injury.
There is something else about this place, something Nicolò cannot put a name to. The air itself feels uneasy, like the moments before a battle or a storm. Nicolò can hear the horses shifting restlessly, stomping and snorting. One of the soldiers is praying very quietly. Even without a dozen men surrounding him and wishing him harm, Nicolò would think he was being watched.
Perhaps there is a demon out here, after all.
Nicolò is suddenly very, very tired. The defiance that bit a man’s finger half-off feels long ago now, though for him it was mere minutes. If the demon takes his life, it will only give back the death Nicolò should have had at Nicaea. Perhaps that is for the best. He is not sure what his future holds if truly nothing can end his existence on the earth. Not happiness, he thinks, if even his own countrymen want to kill him on sight.
“What do we do now?” one of the soldiers asks, in that jumble of common languages again.
“The stories say to rub the lamp,” says another, the one seemed to know the stories of this thing. “That will allow us to command the demon.”
“And then we ride out of here before it finds us instead.”
The demon is summoned via a lamp? These stories are for children. Nicolò is quite sure this is not what the Pope had in mind when he called on the faithful to die in defense of Christendom.
Nicolò twists, getting sand in all his clothes, until he can see the lamp. It is starkly incongruous with the rest of the desert, sitting in the lee of a dune like it fell off the back of a wagon. But there is more to it as well; that uneasy aura is centered here. There is something wrong about the lamp, as though Nicolò is viewing it through a summer heat haze or from the bottom of a river.
If this does not kill him, he does not think anything will.
Achard orders one of his followers to rub the lamp. Nicolò is tempted to call the man a spineless coward for being too afraid to do it himself, but finds he would rather meet his eventual death with open eyes.
The soldier picks the lamp up delicately. Nicolò is half-surprised it does not burn him or burst into flames. He tugs his sleeve up - filthy with someone’s blood, probably Nicolò’s - and scrubs his palm across the side of the lamp.
A thin tendril of red smoke emerges from the lamp. The man cries out and drops it. The smoke continues to build, seeping out in a fine but unrelenting trail.
“Command it!” Achard shouts, already mounted and ready to flee. “Command it now!”
“What do I say, lord?”
“Tell it to kill the prisoner!”
“Terror of Agrabah, kill this - creature!”
The red smoke grows, a twisting ribbon of it winding towards the horizon. Against the wind.
“Enough,” Achard declares. “We go - now.”
They ride in the opposite direction to where the smoke is heading. Judging by the tracks left in the sand, it is not the direction they approached from. Nicolò hopes they all get lost and starve.
The smoke is still determinedly going somewhere. There is not much Nicolò can do but wait for it to find its destination, and then see what happens. There is nothing sharp nearby he can attempt to cut his bonds with, and the slimmest of chances that he might escape on foot does not seem worth the effort.
And he is, perhaps, a little… curious, about whatever will be at the end of the lamp’s smoke.
He never did work out whether his immortality was a horror or a wonder. He might as well see one more such thing before it ends.
Nicolò struggles up to his knees, chin lifted, and faces his fate.
~
There is nothing Yusuf hates more than being summoned.
He hates that he is subject to the whims of worthless mortals fit only to be ground into dust beneath his heels. He hates that every time he is bound to the lamp again it takes him days to break free once more. He hates that he was in the middle of tormenting a caravan of corrupt, greedy merchants, and now he is being dragged backwards across empty sands.
Most of all, perhaps, he hates that there is never anything good waiting for him.
No-one rubs the lamp to leave him offerings of gold or tributes of poetry. No-one is there to offer up a spell that can break a jinn’s chains for good. No, they only have demands for him as if he is their slave - he is, he is, whispers a traitorous thought, crushed quickly but not quickly enough - and even their demands are not fit for his time.
Petty miracles that they are too impatient to pray to their own gods for. Petty revenges, this death or that misfortune, all done with the barest whisper of the powers at Yusuf’s command. Petty wishes for money or power or love - that last one beyond even him, but Yusuf sees no reason to be honest about that - delivered in a heartbeat, and then he is trapped again until he can rework the spells that set him free.
At least until the next motherfucker rubs the motherfucking lamp again.
This occasion’s command takes shape the closer he comes, a compulsion forming in his mind that he will be unable to resist until he fulfills it. Kill this creature - kill it, take its life, smother it, snuff it out-
I understand, Yusuf wants to snarl at it. I will kill it, we both know how this ends, so be quiet!
It does not quiet, not ever, until he has obeyed it, and all the way across the desert it crawls within what passes for his flesh and gnaws at what used to be his bones.
Yusuf reaches the lamp and his form coalesces into something tolerably corporeal as he regards what has been left for him.
It is not impressive.
A bound and kneeling Frank regards him in return, looking like he has seen the worse end of several fights. He could be handsome, Yusuf thinks, if not covered in days’ worth of blood and sweat and half-starved besides. His clothes are as stained and beaten down as he is, and a silly Christian cross hangs from his neck, for all the good it will do him.
To Yusuf’s surprise, the Frank speaks first, one of the languages from the north side of the sea. “I wasn’t expecting the Terror of Agrabah to have such fine garments,” he says, eyeing Yusuf from turban to boots. “You look like you should be ruling cities, not destroying them.”
“Thank you,” Yusuf says, before breaking the man’s neck.
Killing him is as easy as blowing out a candle. The man falls to the sand, the light in his eyes dying with him. Yusuf contemplates the lingering feel of the Frank’s skin against his palm. Beneath the unshaved stubble and the filth that clings to all men but especially those from Europa, there was quite a fine jawline.
Certainly not fine enough that Yusuf regrets the compulsion going silent and leaving him the hell alone. One more corpse for the sands to consume means less than nothing to him, but he can admit this is one of the nicer corpses he’s left in his wake.
Task complete, Yusuf turns away to regard the thrice-damned lamp. Being the world’s most powerful sorcerer, aside from the world’s most powerful jinn, does come with a few advantages. Not least is that with enough persuasion, the lamp can be convinced to contain him somewhere other than inside it. Already he is unable to move any further away from it, and soon he will not be able to resist being drawn back in completely. Even for him it is days of work to open its cage, so the sooner started, the sooner done.
He gathers power to his hands, and-
Behind him, the Frank gasps for breath and spits sand from his mouth.
Impossible.
Yusuf spins. It cannot be, but the Frank is unmistakably alive, coughing desperately as his neck straightens itself and turns his head the right way around. The sight is really quite disgusting. If Yusuf still had a stomach, it would be turning.
The bones realign and the livid bruising around the Frank’s neck fades. The Frank inhales deeply, settling back into his body, and pushes himself back to his knees again.
The glare he turns on Yusuf is fierce and cold. “That was rude.”
“I have no response to that,” Yusuf says, half to himself. The compulsion is gone, he did answer it, he killed the man he was bound to kill, and yet…
On impulse, he does it again, cutting the Frank’s throat with two flicks of a finger. His body slumps back down and Yusuf watches a crimson flood stain the sands, three pulses of a frantic heart before the tide goes still. The man’s life drains from him as swiftly as from any other. He is very, very dead.
Then the gashes in his neck flutter at the edges and begin to seal themselves, new muscle growing under new skin impossibly fast. The pallid parchment tone of the man’s flesh returns to a healthier blush as new blood comes from somewhere to fill his veins.
For all his powers, Yusuf cannot bring anyone back from the dead. Something else, it seems, can.
He grabs the Frank under the chin and holds him mostly upright. The Frank reawakens with a gasp, the light in his eyes back in full force as he meets Yusuf’s gaze. Probably on instinct, he tries to jerk away from Yusuf’s grip.
Yusuf has no intention of letting him go. “What are you?”
“I don’t know,” the Frank says, a delicious current of anger running through his voice. Yusuf doesn’t think much of humans, but this one has a spine of steel. “I was hoping you would have an answer to that.”
Yusuf turns the Frank’s head from side to side, tilted up to expose his neck, unbroken skin spread over unbroken bones. That it gives him an excuse to feel this lovely jawline a little more thoroughly is an indulgence he has more than earned for his trouble. “I regret to inform you that I do not. You are quite the mystery.”
Yusuf hates being summoned, hates being confined, and hates being subjugated, and he also hates being bored. Whatever the Frank is, he is certainly not boring.
Yusuf was just rebuking humanity for never leaving him any worthwhile gifts. Maybe just this once, they have actually done so.
“I think I will keep you,” he tells the Frank.
He is not sure what reaction he is expecting - certainly Yusuf does not respond well to being told he belongs to anyone, even only until he performs their wish - but a dry chuckle and slight slump of the Frank’s shoulders is not it.
A half-smile tugs at one corner of his lips, making the dried blood there crack. Yusuf thinks it might be quite an attractive smile with the gore scrubbed off it. “I suppose I can live with that.”
“You do not have a choice,” Yusuf informs him plainly. That corner of his lips only lifts a fraction higher.
“That is why I am laughing.”
This is laughter? What is this man, a monk?
Yusuf is struck with the urge to teach him to laugh properly - to clutch at his belly until tears stream from his eyes and he can only stop for lack of breath. Yusuf could simply snap his fingers and make him do it now, but sometimes limitless power is just as dull as the desert itself. He could spend months toying at the puzzle - why throw that away to solve it in an instant? Far better to set himself the challenge and face it with his wits rather than his power.
If the Frank cannot die, and Yusuf means to keep him for as long as he finds him amusing - and there is not much less amusing than an empty desert - they could be companions for a long time. Yusuf can be patient when the occasion calls for it. This Frank might just bring it out in him.
The Frank shifts on his knees, lifting his chin from Yusuf’s grip. Yusuf tolerates it, eyes narrowed to see how far the Frank’s courage will take him.
“If you are not to kill me again, I would be grateful if you untied me.”
Yusuf turns the ropes binding him to ash with a thought, and then spares another to do something about his garments. If the Frank is to keep company with Yusuf, he will not be doing it in ragged, ill-fitting cloth he has now died in several times over. In its place Yusuf draws out green silks that match his eyes, the color of moonlight woven in at the edges. A few jewels, here and there - emeralds, Yusuf decides, the Frank does look good in green. Another tendril of power to dissolve the blood and sweat and dust clinging to him, and…
Oh, Yusuf thinks. He was right. Beneath all that filth there is something worthwhile to look at, indeed. Yes, Yusuf would much rather stare at him than at the desert.
The Frank groans as he brings his freed wrists in front of them, and rubs at the marks left by the ropes. They fade as quickly as the fatal injuries Yusuf inflicted on him, and then the Frank rolls his shoulders to work out the ache there. Satisfied after a few moments, he rises back to his feet, almost exactly eye-to-eye with Yusuf’s form.
After another moment the Frank notices his new accoutrements, trailing careful touch over the elegant rings on his fingers and the fine embroidery on his tunic.
Yusuf smiles. “That’s better, isn’t it.”
The Frank looks up. “Thank you,” he says, and punches Yusuf in the face.
Yusuf lets everything above his shoulders turn to smoke, and the Frank’s fist passes through him with nary a whisper. Yusuf steps neatly to the side and lets the Frank overbalance and fall to the ground.
“I do hope that was out of curiosity,” Yusuf says, reserving judgment as to whether he is angry or not. He does not want a mouse, so the Frank’s bravery is commendable; but he does not want someone too stupid to recognize the futility of this pursuit, either. “If you truly mean me harm, we shall have a problem. And by we, I of course mean you.”
The Frank picks himself back up and stares as Yusuf’s head solidifies again. “What are you?” he asks. “We are condemned as demons both, yet you are capable of feats far beyond me or any man.”
“I am not a man,” Yusuf agrees softly. “Remember that if you do not want to give me cause to prove it.”
Uncowed by this warning, the Frank shrugs. “And what will you do then, kill me?”
“I could leave you buried under the sands,” Yusuf says. “Then you can wish I had only killed you.”
A little of the fight seems to go out of the Frank at that. Not gone, Yusuf is learning; merely banked like fire to last the night until he needs it again. “If you are not a man, will you answer my question as to what you are?”
“That is a long conversation.”
The Frank shrugs again. “It appears I am not going anywhere.”
True; that is the last thing Yusuf will allow. It has been centuries since he last had a long conversation with anyone, and never with someone so burning-bright. The lamp’s pull feels quiescent for now; he has time for a little indulgence.
Yusuf draws a pavilion from the sands, tent top casting shade while the sides are rolled up to let in the still-cool morning breeze. A flick of his fingers sees the Frank seated on a divan, and another flick brings laden plates of figs, olives and dates to rest on a table before him. Yusuf completes the tableau with a glass of chilled tea to ward off the coming heat of the day.
“All to your liking, I trust?” Yusuf says, feeling grandiose in his generosity, and sprawls out across a second divan on the table’s other side. “I don’t know what the crusader princes have been feeding you, but I’m not impressed.”
The Frank’s lips thin, and he plucks a single fig from the pile. “Starvation does as little to me as anything else. I tried to leave the rations for the others.”
“Some thanks you got for it,” Yusuf observes. “The one who summoned me spoke in your tongue. Your companions sacrificed you to me, no? Doubtless because of that very immortality that let you share your rations?”
The Frank looks away, toying with the fig but making no move to eat it. “They were… frightened. They found me a horror. And not without reason.”
Yusuf rolls his eyes. “They condemn you to be slaughtered at my hand, and all you can say of them is that they had reason? You positively overflow with kindness. I wouldn’t waste it on such unworthy objects if I were you.” He laughs. “Well, if I were you I would have obliterated them before they could so much as lay a finger on me.”
“I did bite off a finger laid on me.”
Yusuf likes him better and better with each passing moment. “That’s a start. Now eat, or I’ll take offense.”
The Frank closes his eyes for a moment, lips moving soundlessly, before he complies. Yusuf recognizes a blessing when he sees one, even a Christian one, and it amuses him. The Frank still has such faith in a god that clearly wants nothing to do with him. Well, he’ll come around to Yusuf’s way of thinking eventually, when he tires of hearing no answers to his prayers.
Under the amusement there is a kind of jealousy clawing inside of Yusuf, a possessive snarl of mine, mine, mine. The Frank does not need a higher power on his side when he has Yusuf ready to fill his every need. What can any god give him that Yusuf cannot? He will learn, Yusuf soothes that snarl. We have time to make him ours. He wants to take his time, after all; that is the entire point of the Frank.
The Frank brings an olive to his lips next. Yusuf is momentarily arrested by that hand - strong and broad, but holding the olive with a perfectly balanced lightness.
He really is rather lovely. Yusuf cannot just keep calling him the Frank.
“I suppose I should have your name,” Yusuf says, careful to sound as though he doesn’t really care. “If you’re going to remain in my orbit for long.”
“Nicolò.”
He gives it so easily, pouring it out into unsupported air without fear. All the harm the world has done him - Yusuf alone has killed him twice - and Nicolò simply hands over his name like it means nothing to him. Curious.
“May I know your name in return?”
Yusuf laughs at the absurdity of it. “You are not worthy of pronouncing my name!”
Nicolò, unmoved as the sea, raises a steady eyebrow. “You promised to tell me what you are. May I know that?”
Curious, and infuriating. Nicolò is not afraid of Yusuf, and seems to have an inconvenient inability to remember who is the master here. They are not companions, or equals, or anything of that sort. Yusuf is not Shahryar, to fall in love with Scheherazade; he will toss Nicolò aside as soon as he is tired of him. Another thing Yusuf will teach Nicolò with time.
It can only aid Yusuf in this endeavor to show Nicolò who, and what, he is dealing with. “Very well.”
He wraps the pavilion in shadows, banishing the sunlight, and ignites a fire just past their feet. A better atmosphere to attend this tale.
He has never told it to anyone else before, but how hard can it be? He was there.
“I am the most powerful jinn in the world,” he says. “If you had three hundred years - which, I suspect, you might - you could not comprehend all that I am capable of. A jinn’s powers are near without limit. I could turn the moon from its path, or make the sun rise in the west. I could wipe your homeland from the face of the earth, or make every other nation bow before its empire. This is an ancient form of magic that rose from these sands and never left.”
Nicolò is silent, listening intently with his head slightly cocked. Pleased, Yusuf goes on.
“Like all magic, it has rules about how it can be used. And it is usually the case that the more powerful the magic, the more restrictive the rules. Jinn magic requires certain conditions before it can be used at all.”
Yusuf jerks his head at the lamp, still lying in the sand behind his shoulder. “All jinn are bound to their lamp. They cannot even leave it without a command from an outside voice. Rub the lamp, and the jinn magic is released, but only at the direction of the one holding the lamp.”
Nicolò nods. “I saw - the men who brought me here, that is what they did.”
“Then they were smarter than the ones who don’t know to rub the lamp first,” Yusuf says. Nicolò’s lips curl upwards and his eyes dance in the firelight.
It is a good look on him. Yusuf will ensure he sees it again.
“Now I, I am pleased to say, am not like other jinn. I was a sorcerer before I became what I am now, and that is another branch of magic entirely. Separate enough that it can bend a few of the rules that bind a jinn.”
“How?”
“It’s fairly dishonorable. Trickery, creativity, rules-lawyering. Convince the lamp that my wishes matter, and I gain freer access to my jinn’s powers. Convince the lamp its shape is outside itself, not within itself, and my prison walls stretch to the horizon instead of being, well.” Yusuf flicks a finger behind himself at the lamp. “That.”
Nicolò’s eyes slide to the lamp and he swallows. “In the normal course of things, you would be… inside the lamp, until someone commanded you leave it?”
“Indeed.”
“Now that is a horror.”
Yusuf bares his teeth. “Indeed.”
“Who did this to you?”
Yusuf sighs. Ancient history now, but no less painful. “An enemy jinn’s powers were the cause, but as I was commanding it at the time, you could fairly say I did it to myself.”
“You asked for this?”
“I ordered it,” Yusuf corrects. “The jinn could not refuse, even if it wanted to. Which it didn’t. It didn’t like me very much.”
There is something appalled in Nicolò’s gaze. “Why would you do that?”
“Would you believe me if I said I had forgotten about the lamp?”
He is hoping to make Nicolò at least smile, but he gets a somber frown instead. “That is terrible.”
Yusuf spreads his hands, as if to let Nicolò’s concern fall through his fingers. “I have undone as much of it as I can. A few threads have to be unwound over and over again, but now I have the way of it, it is not so bad. My combined powers are still so great I need fear nothing and no-one.”
“Did you need to, before?”
Yusuf’s gaze sharpens. That is not the tale he wants to tell, not history he wants to even think on. “Ask something else.”
Nicolò’s eyes narrow. Yusuf’s heart would skip a beat, if he still had one. Of course his curious, entertaining, impossible Frank is quick enough to notice what Yusuf does not want to speak of, and remember it for another time.
Yusuf could always kill him again, and hope that when he wakes he will have forgotten about it…
Nicolò moves on before Yusuf needs to resort to desperate measures. “Why are you called the Terror of Agrabah?”
Now this, Yusuf likes. “Agrabah in my day was a bloated, self-important carcass of a city that scraped the sky, with no concept of the muck its foundations stood in. So long as the surface shone, it let itself be blinded to the rot beneath. I attempted to scrape some of the shine off.”
“And that is terrifying because…?”
“I attempted - and briefly succeeded - to drag its rulers beneath my feet, so they could see how they liked it down there. Why not throw down the rest of the elevated citizens as well? I came within an inch of usurping the Sultan’s throne, and when I saw I could not hold it, decided I would rather destroy it behind me than let them take it back.”
“The crusade laid siege to Agrabah,” Nicolò says. “I can tell you that someone took it, even if it was only rubble.”
“They had a jinn of their own,” Yusuf reminds him. “I am sure that whatever I did was undone again in an instant. No matter. There are other ways to leave my mark on the world.”
“Is that what you want? For the whole world to know who you are and what you’ve done?” The corner of Nicolò’s mouth quirks. “Even if we aren’t allowed to pronounce your name?”
“That is not funny.”
“My apologies. I will try harder next time.”
There is just no rebuking this man. Yusuf moves on rather than fail a second attempt. “I want the kind of freedom that means I don’t have to live with anyone’s boot on my neck. All my mortal life I sought the power to attain that freedom, but the higher I rose, the more people wanted to drag me down. And now…” Yusuf laughs bitterly, and throws a hand out at the lamp. “Now I fear no-one, but at the cost that I have to obey any fool who so much as touches that thing.”
The motion has pulled his sleeve up, and exposed the shackle around that wrist. He has been able to shape the surface of it, so it looks like a heavy bracelet of the finest worked gold rather than a choke-chain, but its weight is not lessened. “Look,” he says, and taps the metal with his nails to make it ring. “So long as that lamp binds me, I can think of only one thing worse.”
Nicolò’s gaze is steady. “And what is that?”
“To be without,” Yusuf snarls. “To be just a man, forced to serve through other means - I am sure you know them well - without the attendant power to destroy my enemies afterwards. Do you know why my prison walls only reach the horizon? If I am able to escape the lamp at all, why not go further?”
He yanks his sleeve back down, unable to look at the shackle any longer. “The further away I get from it, the more my powers drain. I cannot bear to be without them, to be nothing, to have to crawl and beg because I cannot simply take what I want. I might as well be leashed to that thing.”
“Then why not bring the lamp with you, and your powers with it?”
Yusuf laughs. It’s a cruel sound and he knows it, hopes his derision hurts. “Bring it with me? Oh, thank you for enlightening me, for in four centuries of breaking its curse and applying every magic I know, I’ve never thought to try just picking it up!”
Nicolò’s gaze cuts to the side as Yusuf’s ire makes the fire flare higher. Now, at last, he looks like he is starting to understand what he is playing with.
Yusuf sneers. “Ask another question that stupid and I will throw you right back to the crusaders, and let them kill you until it sticks.”
“It was a stupid question.” Nicolò bows his head, shoulders lowered. “Forgive me.”
Something cold churns inside of Yusuf, ice water poured over his rage. He does not like the sight of Nicolò humbled and penitent nearly as much as he thought he would. Mine, mine, mine, whispers that jealous snarl, rising to a scream, my Frank does not face the world from his knees, he yields to no compulsion, he should be glorious and shameless and stand at my shoulder arrayed in pride-
“Nicolò,” Yusuf whispers, and then he is there before him, close enough to feel his breath. Yusuf reaches out a hand to lift Nicolò’s chin, and he is suddenly aware of two things: how very similar and yet very different the gesture is to how Yusuf held him before, and how much he likes the feel of Nicolò’s name in his mouth.
“Look at me,” he pleads, when Nicolò will not meet his eyes. Nicolò obeys, and Yusuf flinches at his own foolishness for wording it as a command. “No, I - I am doing this all wrong. But I do not want you like this, Nicolò.”
“I think you do not know what you want.”
“Probably,” Yusuf says. “I haven’t spoken civilly with anyone in a few hundred years, I don’t remember how to - I have not been a good host to you, have I?”
Nicolò turns over his confession for a few moments that span an eternity. “You have only killed me twice,” he says at last. “You could be worse.” Is that humor in his voice, or merely Yusuf’s desperate imagination?
He shakes his head regardless. “I would rather I killed you than see you cower before me again. Is that terrible? I would rather you stand your ground and anger me as much as you please, than that you ever bow to me.”
“You are a very strange demon.”
Yusuf wants to laugh at the inanity of it, but Nicolò beats him to it. “That was a stupid statement, not a question. I presume you will allow it.”
It was humor. Some important axis inside of Yusuf rights itself. “This time,” he says magnanimously. “Next time, well, we will have to see.”
Nicolò glances down at where Yusuf’s hand is still under his chin, thumb hooked on the jut of his jawbone just below his lip. “Will you unhand me? I cannot gather the wits for more intelligent questions while you hold me like this.”
Whyever not, Yusuf wonders, but releases him anyway and retreats to his own side of the table.
Nicolò sighs, and rubs at his chin where Yusuf’s hand rested. “Where would you go, if the lamp permitted?”
They are to go back to their conversation, then, before Yusuf’s outburst ruined everything. Yusuf finds himself grateful. It is an odd, unfamiliar feeling that does not sit well in him.
He turns over Nicolò’s question instead of thinking on how he received it. When he was Grand Vizier of Agrabah, he traveled far in pursuit of its diplomatic interests - and, more importantly, his own. He saw the great cities of Tunis to the west and Baghdad to the east, the Egyptian pyramids, the Hagia Sophia.
All of them have the fatal flaw of being completely surrounded by desert.
Perhaps an island, surrounded by the sea instead. His ship docked in Malta, once, on the way to the grander island of Siqilliya, and he thinks he remembers lying beneath a cool leafy canopy, watching the sun set into the bay, and feeling content despite everything…
“It doesn’t matter,” Yusuf says, unable to admit to the yearning that has opened up inside him. “While that lamp binds me, I might as well be on a leash.”
“And why is it you cannot bring the lamp with you?”
“I cannot touch the lamp. Nor can I wrap it in a cloth and touch the cloth, nor summon a wind to blow it along my path, nor tie it to a string and tow it behind me like a goat.”
There is that wonderful upward quirk of Nicolò’s lips again. “You haven’t known many goats, have you? I assure you, they do not follow behind either.”
It startles a bark of delighted laughter from Yusuf. Once started, more and more rolls out of him until his mirth is all he thinks about. He barely even notices that he lets the shadows slip and the fire go out, sunlight flooding into the pavilion once more.
He cannot remember the last time he laughed so deeply.
After another moment he is composed enough to sit upright again, but when he goes to speak to Nicolò, he is gone.
Frowning, Yusuf turns until he finds him, standing at Yusuf’s back and staring down at the lamp with an expression Yusuf does not think he likes.
“What?”
“I could carry it.”
“What.”
“I could carry it,” Nicolò repeats, and looks up. “You cannot touch this thing, nor move it in any way, but I could. Then you would not be bound to this desert and the whims of passersby, and-”
Yusuf’s entire being churns. “I would be bound to you.”
Nicolò’s gaze hardens. “Am I not bound to you? Can you not bury me beneath the sand or throw me back to the crusaders? You can kill me before I can so much as lift a finger in my defense, and any defense I can mount is useless against you. None of that would change simply because I held the lamp, would it?”
“Yes, it would, you ignorant Frankish barbarian! If you touch the lamp you will own me so utterly I won’t be able to even insult you, never mind kill you! And if you rubbed it, you could command-”
“What do you think I would command of you that you have not given me freely?” Nicolò gestures expansively at the pavilion and its furnishings. “You say you are not a good host, but you are more than capable of it. I am merely offering to return the favor.”
“You are offering to enslave me,” Yusuf grates out. “That is not the same thing.”
“The lamp enslaves you,” Nicolò says reasonably. It is infuriating. “I cannot free you from it, but I can carry you out of this desert - is that not of value to you?”
Out of the desert. Yusuf’s mind seems to stop entirely on that thought. Yusuf has seen nothing but desert since being thrown from Agrabah. Nicolò’s earlier question suddenly matters a good deal more. He could see something else, anything else…
But at what cost?
It is almost a relief to remember himself. Nicolò is not supposed to be of value to him, not like this. Nicolò is meant to be amusing, to make the years pass slightly quicker - a curiosity Yusuf cannot resolve with his powers alone, another voice to fill the silence. Nicolò is not supposed to have power over Yusuf, to rescue him from his own folly, to relieve Yusuf’s torment on terms other than those Yusuf decided.
He is not supposed to mean something to Yusuf. The thought of following Nicolò out of the desert is not supposed to entice him. Why is Yusuf even considering letting Nicolò take the lamp? After everything he has done to be free of other men’s control, he cannot give in like this!
Nicolò is staring at him as if he knows everything Yusuf is thinking. And he probably does, because Yusuf hasn’t needed to keep his thoughts off his face in a few centuries. That wasn’t supposed to happen either.
Boredom was better than this - certainly safer. Yusuf is already tied to one thing; he must get off this path before he ties himself to another.
His Frank. Yusuf should have gotten rid of him as soon as he started thinking of him as such. He needs to get rid of him now.
He shrugs one shoulder and turns his back on Nicolò. “You have nothing of value to me,” he says dismissively. “Carry yourself out of the desert if you like. But I will not be tagging along at your heels like a lovesick fool.”
“I thought you meant to keep me,” Nicolò says. “Are you releasing me so quickly?”
“Yes. You are not as entertaining as I thought.”
“Is that so? Well, if that is what you want.”
Nicolò’s boots crunch softly in the sand as he starts walking away.
Yusuf spins around to watch him, incredulous. “Where are you going?”
“As long as it is somewhere the crusade hasn’t sacked, I do not much care.”
“You’ll die before you reach the edge of the desert!”
“And then I will wake and keep walking.”
Yusuf splinters. “Don’t go,” he whispers. Nicolò does not look back, and then he has disappeared over the crest of a dune.