The Lions of Al-Rassan (17 page)

“You bring shame upon us with this,” said his constable bitterly.

When Ramiro of Valledo was angry his face grew white. It did so now. He stood up, taller than almost every man in that clearing. Papers scattered beside him; a cleric hurried to collect them.

“Your brother brought you shame,” the king said icily, “by refusing to accept your own authority, or ours. We do no more than rule upon his actions. Hear us, Gonzalez”—no title, the listeners realized, and wine goblets were lowered all about the clearing—“there will be no feud to follow from this. We forbid it. We make the following decree before these high-born of Valledo: Count Gonzalez de Rada, our constable, will stand surety with his own life for the next two years for the lives and safety of the family of Ser Rodrigo Belmonte. Should death or grievous harm befall any of them from any source during this time we will execute mortal judgment upon his body.”

A buzzing again, and this one did not subside. Nothing remotely like this had ever been heard before.

“Why two years?”

It was Rodrigo. The first time the Captain had spoken since the hearing had begun. The angle of the sun had changed now; his face was in shadow. The question brought a silence, as the king’s gaze turned to Belmonte.

“Because you will not be able to defend them,” Ramiro said levelly, still on his feet. “Officers of the king have a responsibility to exercise control both over their weapons and their words. You failed us twice over. What you did to Ser Garcia, and what you said to him, are direct causes of his death and this hard trouble in our kingdom. Rodrigo Belmonte, you are condemned to a term of exile from Valledo of two years. At the end of such time you may present yourself before us and we will rule upon your case.”

“He goes alone, I take it?” It was Count Gonzalez, reacting quickly. “Not with his company?”

It mattered, all the listeners knew. Rodrigo Belmonte’s company comprised one hundred and fifty of the finest fighting men in the peninsula.

Rodrigo laughed aloud, the sound almost shocking, given the tension among the trees. “You are most welcome,” he said, “to try to stop them from following me.”

King Ramiro was shaking his head. “I will not do so. Your men are yours and blameless in this. They may go or stay as they please. I will ask only for one undertaking from you, Ser Rodrigo.”

“After exiling me from my home?” The question was pointed. Rod-rigo’s face was still in shadow.

“Even so.” It was interesting how calm the king was. A number of men reached the same conclusion at the same time: Ramiro had anticipated almost every point of this exchange. “I do not think you can truly quarrel with our ruling, Ser Rodrigo. Take your company, if you will. We ask only that they not be used in warfare against us.”

Silence again, as every man struggled to think through the implications. It could be seen that Rodrigo Belmonte was staring down at the forest floor, his forehead creased with thought. The king gazed upon him, waiting.

When Rodrigo looked up, his brow had cleared. He lifted his right hand towards the sky overhead, and shaped the sun circle of the god with thumb and fingers. “I swear by holy Jad,” he said formally, “that I will never lead my company in warfare into the lands of Valledo.”

It was almost what the king had asked. Almost, but not quite, and Ramiro knew it.

“And if you find a Valledan army beyond our borders?” he asked.

“I can swear no oath,” Rodrigo said quietly. “Not an honorable one. Not if I am forced to take service elsewhere for my livelihood and that of my company. My lord, this is not,” he added, meeting the king’s gaze squarely, “a departure of my choosing.”

A long stillness.

“Do not take service with Cartada,” said the king at length, his voice extremely soft.

Rodrigo stood motionless, visibly thinking.

“Really, my lord? You will begin so soon? Within two years?” he asked cryptically.

“It may be so,” Ramiro said, no less ambiguously.

Men were struggling to understand, but the two of them seemed to be in the midst of a private exchange.

Rodrigo was nodding his head slowly. “I suppose. I will regret being elsewhere if it does happen.” He paused. “I will not serve Almalik of Cartada. I don’t like what he did in Fezana. I will not serve him there, or anywhere else.”

Fezana.

At the mention of the name a few men began to nod their heads, looking at their tall, proud king. A glimmering of what this seemed to be about began to come to them, like shafts of the god’s sunlight falling into the clearing. Ramiro wasn’t a jurist or a cleric, after all, and there might be more than hunting in the days to come.

“I accept your oath,” said the king of Valledo calmly. “We have never found you lacking in honor, Ser Rodrigo. We see no reason to doubt it now.”

“Well, I am grateful for that,” said the Captain. It was impossible to tell if there was mockery in his voice. He took a step forward, fully into the light. “I do have a request of my own.”

“Which is?”

“I will ask Count Gonzalez to swear before the god to guard my family and possessions as if they were his own while I am away. That is enough for me. I need no binding of his death. The world is a dangerous place, and the days to come may make it more so. Should accident befall a Belmonte, Valledo could ill afford to lose its constable as well. I am content with his sworn word, if it pleases the king.”

He was looking at the constable as he spoke. It could be seen that de Rada was taken by surprise.

“Why?” he asked softly; an intimate question in a very public space. The two men faced each other for the first time.

“I believe I just told you,” Rodrigo replied. “It isn’t so difficult. Valledo has enemies in all directions. With your life in bond someone might strike at this kingdom through my family. I would not want the king bound to your death in such a cause. I think it places them more at risk, not less. I need not like you, de Rada, to trust your word.”

“Despite my brother?”

The Captain shrugged. “He is being judged by Jad.”

It wasn’t an answer, and yet it was. After another brief silence, in which the sound of birdsong could clearly be heard from the trees around, the constable raised his right hand in the same gesture Rod-rigo had used.

“Before Jad, and before my lord the king of Valledo, and before all men here, I make oath that the family of Rodrigo Belmonte shall be as my own from this day until his return from exile. I take this upon my honor and that of my lineage.” The sonorous voice filled and defined the forest space.

Both men turned back to the king. Unsmiling, standing very tall, he looked down upon them. “I am unused to having my decrees superseded by the parties involved,” he murmured.

“Only you can do that,” Rodrigo said. “We merely offer an alternative for the king to accept or reject.”

And now it could be seen that Ramiro smiled at the man he had just condemned to exile. “So be it,” he said. “We accept these oaths.”

Both men bowed. Rodrigo straightened and said, “Then, with your permission, my lord, I will make immediate arrangements to depart, much as I might enjoy continuing to hunt with you.”

“One moment,” said the king. “Where
will
you go?” His voice betrayed, for the very first time, a shadow of doubt.

Rodrigo Belmonte’s grin, caught by the falling sunlight, was wide, and unmistakably genuine. “I haven’t the least idea,” he said. “Though on my way to wherever I go I’ll have to stop and deal with a frail and terrified woman first.” His smile faded. “You might all pray for me,” said the Captain of Valledo.

Then he turned, collected his horse’s reins from a groom, mounted up and rode alone from the clearing back the way they had come through the trees.

I
nes, the queen of Valledo, was clasping a well-worn sun disk and listening, eyes devoutly closed, as her favorite cleric read aloud from the Book of the Sons of Jad—the passage about the end of the world, as it happened—when her husband’s messenger arrived and indicated the king would presently be with her.

Apologetically, she bade her religious counsellor suspend his reading. The man, not unused to this, marked her Book and laid it aside. With a sigh, a pointed glance and a bow to the queen he withdrew from the chamber through an inner doorway. It was well known that King Ramiro was uneasy with intensities of faith, and the queen’s best efforts over many years had done nothing to amend this unfortunate circumstance.

It had everything to do, Ines had long since decided, with the time when he had lived among the infidels. All three of the difficult, ambitious sons of King Sancho had spent time exiled among the Asharites, but only Ramiro seemed to have come back with a taste for the ways of Al-Rassan and a suspicious softness in matters of faith. It was perhaps an irony, and perhaps not, that his father had arranged a marriage for him with the pious younger daughter of the king of Ferrieres across the mountains to the east.

Ines, whose childhood aspiration had been to be accepted among the Daughters of Jad in one of the great retreats, had accepted her betrothal only upon the advice of her spiritual counsellors, including the High Clerics of Ferrieres. It was a great opportunity, they had told her. A chance to be of service to the god and to her country both. The young man she was marrying would likely one day rule a part, at least, of Esperaña, and Ines could use her position to influence the path of worship in that troubled land.

The clerics had looked entirely prescient when Ramiro was named ruler of mountainous Jaloña in the three-way division of his father’s last testament. And then even more so when, after the mysterious death of his brother Raimundo, her husband had quickly moved west and claimed the crown of Valledo as well. He hadn’t been able to hold both kingdoms—not yet, at least—for his uncle Bermudo had promptly risen in Jaloña and seized that throne, but Valledo, as everyone knew, was the greater prize.

What the clerics hadn’t told her—because they hadn’t known—was that the young man she was marrying was fiercely intelligent, ambitious, luridly imaginative in carnal acts and so much a pragmatist in what ought to have been firm doctrines of holy faith that he might as well have been an infidel.

As if on cue to this distressing line of thought, the king appeared in her doorway, his hair and clothing still damp as further evidence of her last reflection: what self-respecting man bathed as often as King Ramiro did? Not even the Asharites in their far-off eastern homelands did so. Self-indulgent bathing rituals were characteristic only of the sybaritic courts of Al-Rassan where they had not even the decency to observe the ascetic strictures of their own faith.

Too much time in the courts of the south, Queen Ines thought again, and at a point in life when he had been young and impressionable. She glanced sidelong at her husband, not wishing to encourage him with a fuller appraisal. It was a very handsome man who filled her doorway, no one could deny that much. Tall, well-built, square-jawed. If his hair was greying early, his moustache was yet black and there was no evidence of faltering reserves of martial or political stamina or subtlety.

Or of faltering in more private dimensions, either.

With a brief gesture, if a courteous one, the king dismissed her maidservants and slaves and the two guards by the doors. Ramiro waited until they had all taken their leave, then strode across the new carpet to stand before Ines’s low seat. He was grinning. She knew that smile.

“Come, my wife,” he said. “Events of this morning have made me amorous.”

Ines refused to meet his eyes. Almost everything made him amorous, she had learned. Clutching her sun disk like a small shield, she murmured, “I’m sure it was a comely boar you slew. But was there no one of my lord’s concubines who might have assuaged his appetites before he came to trouble me?”

Ramiro laughed. “Not today. Today I have a desire to see and touch the body of my life’s own companion as consecrated by our most holy god. Come, Ines, let us make sport, then after I will tell you what happened in the wood.”

“Tell me now.”

Her problem, as she had all too often been forced to admit to her intimate counsellors, was that Ramiro was a difficult man to deny. They had urged her to use his desire for her as a means of drawing him towards a truer faith but, to the queen’s endless chagrin, the effect of such encounters was rather the opposite: whether it was his natural fervor or the skills he had learned—most probably among the courtesans of Al-Rassan—Ramiro was dismayingly adept at subverting her best intentions.

Even now, in the middle of a hot summer’s day, with carpenters hammering and a barrage of shouting outside, and with the stern words of the world’s end still echoing in her ears, Queen Ines found herself breathing a little more quickly at the images her husband’s presence had conjured forth within her. After almost twenty years and with the full knowledge of the impious evil of his ways, this was still true. And Ramiro could read it in her as easily as her clerics could read from Jad’s most holy Books. He reached down now, not ungently, and plucked the god disk from her clasp.

“Hold me like that,” he murmured, laying the disk aside and lifting her to her feet with his strong hands. “Love me the way you love the god.” Then he slipped his arms around her and drew her close so that she was made inescapably aware that the king of Valledo was wearing nothing at all beneath his white silk robe. And that pressing awareness, as he tilted her head to meet his kiss, brought back for Ines all the wildly disturbing sensations she always felt when this happened.