The Lions of Al-Rassan (10 page)

They came up out of the water and started north towards the trees. Jehane looked back just once. Lanterns burned behind them in watchtowers along the walls and in the castle and the tall houses of Fezana. Candles lit by men and women sheltered behind those walls from the dangers of the dark.

There were headless bodies in the castle moat and the river. One hundred and thirty-nine of them.

The one hundred and fortieth man was beside her now, riding in what had to be acute discomfort but uttering no sound of complaint.

“Look ahead,” Velaz said quietly. It was very dark now all around them under the stars.

Jehane looked where he was pointing and saw the red glow of a fire in the distance. Her heart thumped hard. An unshielded campfire on the grasslands could mean many different things, obviously, but Jehane had no way of deciding what. She was in an alien world now, on this exposed plain at night, with an aging servant and a plump merchant. Everything she knew and understood lay behind her. Even the ragged suburb of whores next to the city walls seemed a secure, safe place suddenly.

“I think I know what that light must be,” said Husari after a moment. His voice was calm, the steady sureness of his manner a continuing surprise. “In fact, I’m certain of it,” he said. “Let us go there.”

Jehane, weary for the moment of thinking, having got them out safely and mounted, was content to follow his lead. It did cross her mind that this adventure, this shared pursuit of vengeance, might end rather sooner than any of them had anticipated. She let her mule follow Husari’s towards the fire burning on the plain.

And so it was that the three of them rode—not long after, just as the white moon was rising—straight into the encampment of Rodrigo Belmonte, the Captain of Valledo, and the fifty men he had brought with him to collect the summer
parias,
and Jehane came to realize that a very long day and night were not yet done.

Four

T
he small-farmers of Orvilla, twelve of them, had come to the city together with their laden mules and they left Fezana together when the market closed at midday. One or two might have been inclined to stay and gawk at the soldiers strolling arrogantly about the town, but that would have meant travelling back to the village without the protection of the larger group. In unsettled country so near to the no-man’s-land, and in unsettled times, the pleasures of loitering in the city—or, in the case of some of the men, visiting an interesting suburb just outside the northern walls—could not outweigh the real need for the security of numbers.

Well before the sundown prayers they had all been safely back in Orvilla with the goods they had obtained at the market in exchange for their weekly produce. As a consequence, none of them had any knowledge of what happened in Fezana that day. They would learn of it later; by then it would matter rather less. They would have a catastrophe of their own to deal with.

The raiders from the north—even ignorant villagers could recognize Jaddite horsemen—swept down upon Orvilla at precisely the moment the blue moon rose to join the white one in the summer sky. It was too precisely calculated not to be a deliberate timing, though to what purpose no one could imagine, after. Perhaps a whim. There was nothing whimsical about what happened when the horsemen—at least fifty of them—broke through or leaped over the wooden fence that encircled the houses and outbuildings of the village. Some twenty families lived in Orvilla. There were a handful of old swords, a few rusting spears. A number of mules. One ox. Three horses. Aram ibn Dunash, whose house was by the water mill on the stream, had a bow that had been his father’s.

He was the first man to die, trying to nock an arrow with shaking hands as a screaming rider bore down upon him. The horseman’s pike took Aram in the chest and carried him into the wall of his own home. His wife, unwisely, screamed from inside. The horseman, hearing that, leaped from his mount and strode into the tiny house. He was already unbuckling his belt as he ducked through the low door.

A number of houses were quickly fired, and the communal barn. There was straw in the barn and in midsummer it was dry. The structure went up in flames with a roar. The fire must have been visible as far away as Fezana.

Ziri ibn Aram, who liked to sleep on the roof of the barn in summer, leaped down just in time. The barn was on the far side of the village from the mill and the stream. He was spared seeing his father die. Nor had he observed the horseman striding into the home where his pregnant mother and sisters were. Ziri was fourteen years old. He would have tried to kill the man with his hands. He would have died, of course. As it was, he landed awkwardly at the feet of a laughing Jaddite who was using the flat of his sword to round up all those not killed in the first moments of the attack. There weren’t very many of them, Ziri realized, looking desperately around for his family amid the smoke. Perhaps twenty people, in all, seemed to be still alive, from a village of more than twice that number. It was difficult to tell amid the flames. Orvilla was being consumed in an inferno of fire.

For the raiders, it was a disappointing exercise in some ways. There was, predictably, no one worth ransoming, not even a country wadji, who might have fetched a price. Even the brief flurry of combat had been laughable. The pathetically armed farmers had offered nothing in the way of opposition or training for battle. There were women of course, but one didn’t have to ride this far in the heat of summer to find peasant women for sport. Only when one man suggested spread-eagling the surviving men—the women were being taken back north, of course—did the prospect of a diversion belatedly emerge. This was, after all, Al-Rassan. The half-naked wretches herded together like cattle or sheep were infidels. This raid could almost be seen as an act of piety.

“He’s right!” another man shouted. “Spread the bastards on their own beams, then spread their women another way!” There was laughter.

With some speed and even a measure of efficiency amid the chaos of fire the raiders began gathering and constructing wooden beams. The night had begun to show promise of entertainment. They had plenty of nails. Meant for shoeing any horses they took on the raid, they would do as well for hammering men to wood.

They had just selected the first of the peasants for nailing—a blank-faced boy who would doubtless have grown up to kill innocent men and women north of the
tagra
lands—when someone shrieked a grievously tardy warning.

A whirlwind of men on horses thundered in among them, twisting between the fires, carrying swords and using them. Most of the raiders had dismounted by then, many had laid down their weapons to prepare the diagonal beams for nailing the Asharites. They were easy prey. As easy as the villagers had been for them.

The raiders were men of breeding though, not lice-ridden outlaw brigands. They knew how these things were done, even in Al-Rassan. Peasants were one thing—on both sides of the no-man’s-land—but men of means and status were another. All over the hamlet of Orvilla, Jaddites began throwing up their hands in submission and loudly voicing the well-known cry:
“Ransom! Ransom!”

Those who were killed in the first sweep of the new horsemen must have died in astonished disbelief. This was not supposed to happen. If, before they were dispatched, they realized who had come, that astonishment would likely have been redoubled, but these are not things one can know, with any certainty, of the dead.

*  *  *

Alvar hadn’t given the matter any real thought, but he had certainly never imagined that the first man he killed in Al-Rassan would be from Valledo. The man wasn’t even on his horse at the time. In a way, that didn’t feel right, but Laín Nunez’s instructions had been precise: kill them until you hear the order to stop. Every man was fair game except the stocky, black-haired one who would be leading them. He was to be left for the Captain.

The Captain was in a terrifying state. He had been from the moment the three riders from Fezana came into the camp with their story. The fat merchant—Abenmuza, he called himself—had told them what the king of Cartada had ordered done in Fezana that day. Searching for clues as to how to react, Alvar had looked to his leaders. If Laín Nunez had seemed indifferent to the bloody tale, almost as if he’d expected such foul deeds here in Al-Rassan, Ser Rodrigo’s expression told a different story. He’d said nothing though, when the merchant finished, save to ask the doctor—her name was Jehane—if she had ever served with a military company.

“I have not,” she’d murmured calmly, “though I’d consider it some other time. For now, I have my own route to follow. I’m happy to leave Husari ibn Musa”—which was evidently the right way to say the name—“in your company to pursue his affairs and perhaps your own. I’ll be away, with your leave, in the morning.”

That unhurried answer, elegantly spoken, went some ways to breaking Alvar’s heart. He was already half in love before she spoke. He thought the doctor was beautiful. Her hair—what he could see of it beneath the blue stole wrapped about her shoulders and head—was a rich, dark brown. Her eyes were enormous, unexpectedly blue in the firelight. Her voice was the voice Alvar thought he would like to hear speaking when he died, or for the rest of his life. She was worldly, astonishingly poised, even here in the darkness with fifty riders from the north. She would think him a child, Alvar knew, and looking at her, he felt like one.

They never knew what the Captain would have replied to her, or even if he had been intending a serious invitation that she join them, because just then Martín said sharply, “There’s fire. To the west!”

“What will be there?” the Captain said to the three Fezanans as they all turned to look. The flames were spreading already, and they weren’t very far away.

It was the woman doctor, not the merchant, who answered. “A village. Orvilla. I have patients there.”

“Come then,” said the Captain, his expression even grimmer than before. “You will have more now. Leave the mule. Ride with Laín—the older one. Alvar, take her servant. Ludus, Mauro, guard the camp with the merchant. Come on! That crawling maggot Garcia de Rada is here after all.”

At least half of the Jaddite raiders were slain in a matter of moments before Jehane, sheltering with Velaz at the side of one of the burning houses, heard the man the others called the Captain say clearly, “It is enough. Gather the rest.”

The Captain.
She knew who this was, of course. Everyone in the peninsula knew who was called by that name alone, as a title.

His words were echoed quickly by two other riders, including the older one who had ridden here with her. The killing stopped.

There was an interval of time during which the raiders were herded towards the center of the village, an open grassy space. Some of Rodrigo Belmonte’s men were filling buckets at the stream, trying to deal with the fires alongside a handful of the villagers. It was hopeless, though; even to Jehane’s untutored eye it was obviously wasted effort.

“Doctor! Oh, thank the holy stars! Come quickly, please!”

Jehane turned, and recognized her patient—the woman who brought her eggs every week at the market.

“Abirab! What is it?”

“My sister! She has been terribly hurt. By one of the men. She is bleeding, and with child. And her husband is dead. Oh, what are we to
do,
doctor?”

The woman’s face was black with soot and smoke, distorted with grief. Her eyes were red from weeping. Jehane, frozen for a moment by the brutal reality of horror, offered a quick inner prayer to Galinus—the only name she truly worshipped—and said, “Take me to her. We will do what we can.”

Ziri ibn Aram, standing on the far side of the circle, still did not know what had happened to his father or mother. He saw his aunt approach a woman who had come with the new men. He was about to follow them, but something held him where he was. A few moments ago he had been preparing to die nailed to a beam from the barn. He had spoken the words that offered his soul as a gift to the stars of Ashar. It seemed the stars were not ready for his soul, after all.

He watched the brown-haired commander of the new arrivals remove a glove and stroke his moustache as he looked down from his black horse at the leader of those who had destroyed Ziri’s village. The man on the ground was stocky and dark. He didn’t seem at all, to Ziri’s eyes, like someone who feared his approaching death.

“You have achieved your own destruction,” he said with astonishing arrogance to the man on the horse. “Do you know who your louts have killed here?” His voice was high-pitched for a man, almost shrill. “Do you know what will happen when I report this in Esteren?”

The broad-shouldered, brown-haired man on the black horse said nothing. An older man beside him, extremely tall and lean, with greying hair, said sharply, “So sure you are going back, de Rada?”

The stocky man didn’t even look at him. After a moment, though, the first horseman, the leader said, very quietly, “Answer him, Garcia. He asked you a question.” The name was used as one might admonish a child, but the voice was cold.

For the first time Ziri saw a flicker of doubt appear in the face of the man named Garcia. Only for a moment, though. “You aren’t a complete fool, Belmonte. Don’t play games with me.”

“Games?” A hard, swift anger in the mounted man’s voice. He swept one hand in a slashing arc, indicating all of Orvilla, burning freely now. Nothing would be saved. Nothing at all. Ziri began looking around for his father. A feeling of dread was overtaking him.

“Would I play a game in the midst of this?” the man on the black horse snapped. “Be careful, Garcia. Do not insult me. Not tonight. I told your brother what would happen if you came near Fezana. I assume he told you. I must assume he told you.”

The man on the ground was silent.

“Does it matter?” said the grey-haired one. He spat on the ground. “This one is offal. He is less than that.”

“I will remember you,” said the black-haired man sharply, turning now to the speaker. He clenched his fists. “I have a good memory.”

“But you forgot your brother’s warning?” It was the leader once more, the one called Belmonte. His voice was calm again, dangerously so. “Or you chose to forget it, shall we say? Garcia de Rada, what you did as a boy on your family estates was no concern of mine. What you do here, as someone who passes for a man, unfortunately is. This village lies under the protection of the king of Valledo whose officer I am. The
parias
I am here to collect was paid in part by the people you have butchered tonight. You have taken the promises of King Ramiro and made him a liar in the eyes of the world.” He paused, to let the words sink in. “Given that fact, what should I do with you?”

It was evidently not a question the man addressed had been expecting. But he was not slow of wit.
“Given that fact,”
he mocked, imitating the tone. “You ought to have been a lawyer not a soldier, Belmonte. A judge in your eastern pastures, making rulings about stolen sheep. What is this, your courthouse?”

“Yes,” said the other man. “Now you begin to understand. That is exactly what it is. We await your reply. What should I do with you? Shall I give you to these people to be spread-eagled? The Asharites nail people to wood as well. We learned it from them. Did you know that? I doubt we’d have trouble finding carpenters.”