the-secret-crusade-oliver-bowden

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Altaïr would make camp at wells, waterholes or fountains on his travels;
anywhere there was water and shade from palms, where he could rest
and his mount graze on the grass, untethered. It was often the only patch
of green as far as the eye could see so there was little chance of his horse
wandering off.
That night he found a fountain that had been walled and arched to
prevent the desert swallowing the precious water spot, and he drank
well. Then he lay down in its shelter, listening to dripping from the other
side of the rough-hewn stone and thinking of the life ebbing away from
Talal. His thoughts went even further back, to the corpses in his past. A
life punctuated by death.
As a young boy he had first encountered it during the siege. Assassin
and Saracen and, of course, his own father, though mercifully he had
been spared the sight of that. He had heard it, though, heard the sword
fall, followed by a soft thump, and he’d darted towards the wicket gate,
wanting to join his father, when hands had gripped him.
He had squirmed, screaming, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’
‘No, child.’ And Altaïr saw that it was Ahmad, the agent whose life
Altaïr’s father had traded for his own. And Altaïr stared at him, eyes
burning with hatred, not caring that Ahmad had been delivered from his
ordeal battered and bloody and barely able to stand, his soul scarred