The Lions of Al-Rassan (18 page)

I will have to atone,
she told herself as their lips met.

He began unraveling the cloth that bound the coils of her red hair. She would seek holy counsel and support later. Her own hands, unbidden, as if bearing weights, came up along his robe, feeling the hard body beneath. Ramiro drew back, then lowered his head again hungrily. He bit at the corner of her lip.

There would surely be wise, consoling thoughts from her advisors of the soul later, the queen told herself. Her fingers seemed now to be laced behind his head. She pulled his hair, not gently at all. The king laughed. He smelled of some eastern spice. That, too, was unsettling. It was unfair. She would need such a great deal of help to guide her back to the pure realm of the spirit. For the moment, though, as her husband smoothly lifted and then carried her over to the wide couch he’d had brought into her new suite of rooms, the queen of Valledo was rather more preoccupied, to her great and enduring confusion, with increasingly explicit matters of the flesh.

At one point she cried his name aloud, and at another, suffused with her eternal mixture of desire and shame, she found herself riding above his supine form, knowing that this mode of congress was yet another decadent legacy of Al-Rassan, but unable to stop herself from gasping aloud with the pleasure it gave her. Pleasure of the world, she told herself, somewhat desperately, moving up and down upon him while his fingers teased and circled her breasts. Of the world.
Only
of the world. The realm of the god was otherwise. It was eternal, holy, golden, transcendent, shining, not bound to the mortal bodies of frail—

“Oh
my
!” said the queen of Valledo then, as if in great surprise, and held herself extremely still.

The second cry that escaped her a moment later was, in its own way, an admission.

“Tell me about what happened,” she said, some time after.

He liked to lie with her, entangled indecently, after congress. That much, at least, she was able to deny him. Ines had donned a robe and had forced him to clothe himself as well, before summoning one of her women with refreshments. Amused, satiated, Ramiro had obeyed.

The woman brought ale for him and a pear infusion for the queen and then withdrew. Now Ramiro lay indolently upon the couch while Ines sat on a nearby bench, needlework in hand. She was making a new pouch for her sun disk, to hang from her belt.

“It went surprisingly well,” Ramiro said, turning on his side, his head propped on one hand. He looked at her with such frank admiration it brought color to her cheeks again. “Thank you, by the way. I do prefer it when you leave your hair down,” he said.

She hadn’t intended to. An oversight. She was wrongfully proud of her hair, and as a penance kept it tied tightly back almost all the time. Self-consciously she pushed a strand from her eyes. He would laugh at her if she began binding it up now, she knew.

“This morning,” she said firmly. “We are talking about this morning.”

He grinned. Sipped from his flagon. The noise outside and below stairs continued. Among other things, he was expanding the palace baths, after the Al-Rassan fashion, with hot and cold pools, and a massage room. It was a scandal.

“They both accepted my judgment,” he said. “There was a bit of noise when I said I would have executed Garcia, but no one actually spoke out. Count Gonzalez is now bound by oath to defend Belmonte’s family for two years. No blood feud. He has sworn it in public.”

“You announced he would die if they died?” He had discussed this with her some days before. In fairness, she had to concede that he was never reluctant to confide in her. They had even discussed, all those years ago, his move into Valledo from Jaloña. He spent a fair bit of time in her rooms, telling her his thoughts. Certainly more than her father had ever confided in her mother.

In fact, Ines suddenly realized, looking at the man on her couch, if he hadn’t been so much an infidel in the most important matters, she might have been able to name her husband a paragon among men.

Her expression must have softened. He looked amused again. “I meant to tell you earlier. I love looking at your breasts from below,” he said. “They change from pears to melons, did you know?”

“I really hadn’t noticed,” she said tartly. “Must we expound upon it? Is the constable to die if a Belmonte does?”

Ramiro shook his head. “I proclaimed it, and the count would have accepted, I think, but then Rodrigo asked me to withdraw that sanction. Said if Gonzalez swore to their defense it was enough for him. I wonder . . . could he be tired of his wife, do you think? They’ve been married a long time.”

“Less long than we have,” Ines replied. “And if you think he’s tired of her you are a great fool. It is simply that Ser Rodrigo Belmonte is a pious man, a believer in the power of the god, and he was willing to trust to Jad’s will and Gonzalez’s public oath. It doesn’t seem surprising to me at all.”

Ramiro made no reply for a moment. “Actually, what he said was that he didn’t want our enemies able to force me to execute the constable by harming Rodrigo’s family. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Neither had Ines. She’d had years of this sort of dialogue, though. “He just said that because you wouldn’t have listened if he offered a reason to do with faith.”

“Probably not,” Ramiro agreed, far too placidly. He looked at her happily. “I still think he may be tired of his wife. He asked us to pray for him because he had to go home.”

“You see?” said Ines swiftly. “He believes in the power of prayer.”

The king spoiled her triumph by laughing aloud.

Outside, the banging and rumbling noises of construction continued unabated. Esteren’s castle was being turned into a veritable palace, fashioned, all too clearly, after the courts of the south. In a way it was an insult to the god. She did like the plans for her expanded quarters though.

“Again, my lady?” the king of Valledo asked his wife.

She bit at her lip. “If you come to chapel with me, after.”

“Done,” he said, rising from the couch.

“And speak the prayers aloud with me,” she added quickly.

“Done.” He came over to stand above her seat, but then he sank to his knees before her, reaching up with one hand to touch her hair.

“And you will not make any clever comments about the liturgy.”

“Done. Done. Done, Ines.”

It seemed a fair bargain for a summer’s day. She laid her needlework aside. She even granted him a smile. The work of Jad here in Esperaña had turned out to be long and unexpectedly complex. It had led her down paths she could never have foreseen back at home in Ferrieres twenty years ago, a girl dreaming at night not of a man but a god. She slid from the bench to join her husband on the newly carpeted floor. She liked the carpet, too. It had come all the way north from Seria, in Al-Rassan.

S
omewhat rashly, in view of all the circumstances, Rodrigo Belmonte elected to ride on alone through the last night in order to arrive home at dawn, ahead of his company, which had traveled with him from Esteren.

He was one of the most formidable fighting men in the peninsula, and the country here was about as safe as any open country was in thinly populated Valledo, which is to say it was not, in fact, particularly safe at all.

Both of the wandering moons the Kindath named as sisters of the god were in the sky, and both were close to full. In the far distance, beyond the ranches and the rising foothills, the faint outline of the mountains of Jaloña could be seen. Given bright moonlight and a brilliantly clear sky, Rodrigo would have been easily visible from a long way off as he rode alone over the grazing lands where the horses of Valledo still ran wild.

Of course that meant he should have been able to see trouble coming from equally far off, and his black horse was able to outrun anything on that plain. If anyone was foolish enough to attack him, once they realized who he was.

Someone, therefore, would have had to have been almost insanely reckless, and the Captain uncharacteristically lost in night thoughts, for him to be ambushed by moonlight so near to home.

They waited until his horse was in the middle of the stream—the Carriano—that formed the western boundary of Rancho Belmonte. He was, in fact, almost on his own land.

In late summer the stream ran shallow, not even up to the black horse’s withers at the deepest point. They were walking across, not swimming. But when bowmen rose up, like ghosts of the dead, from the reeds at the river’s edge, Rodrigo knew that someone had given thought to this. Swift as his mount was, the water was going to slow him for the first few seconds. Against archers that would be enough.

With the first words spoken his thought was confirmed.

“We will shoot the horse, Ser Rodrigo. Do not try to run.”

He didn’t want them to shoot the horse.

He looked around. A dozen men, all with kerchiefs pulled up and hat brims low to disguise their faces. He couldn’t see their mounts. Downstream probably.

“Dismount. In the water.” The same man spoke again, his voice muffled behind the kerchief.

“If you know my name you know you are dead if you pursue this folly,” Rodrigo said softly. He didn’t get off his horse yet, but nor did he let it move.

“Your horse is dead if you remain astride. Get down.”

He did so, swinging forward deliberately, where it was shallower. The water was up to his waist.

“Throw your sword on the bank.”

He hesitated.

“We will not shoot you, Ser Rodrigo. We will kill the horse. Throw your sword.”

“There are close to one hundred and fifty men behind me,” Rodrigo said levelly, but he was removing his sword belt as he spoke.

“They are half a night’s ride behind you.”

The speaker seemed remarkably well informed. Rodrigo tossed his sword and belt into the grass, carefully clear of the stream. He marked where they landed, but then someone moved to pick them up, so it didn’t matter.

“Now walk. Towards us. Leave the horse where he is. Someone will take him.”

“He won’t take kindly to another hand,” Rodrigo warned.

“That is our difficulty, then,” the spokesman said. “We are accustomed to dealing with horses. Come.”

He went, sloshing out of the stream and through the reeds to the grass. They took him, insultingly, further east onto his own lands. There was no one about, however, not at the very perimeter of the estate, and not in the middle of the night. They led him for several hundred paces, bows leveled constantly, though at the horse not at him. Someone was clever here.

They came to one of the range huts. Like all the huts it was small, unfurnished, no more than a primitive shelter for the herders from rainstorms or the snows that sometimes came in winter.

Someone lit a torch. They pushed him inside. Six of them came with him, faces hidden, not speaking save for the leader. They took both his knives: the one in his belt and the one in his boot. They bound his hands in front of him, and then someone hammered a stake into the packed earth floor of the hut and they forced him to lie down and pulled his bound hands up over his head and looped the thongs through the stake. They pulled off his boots and tied his ankles together the same way. Another stake was driven and the cord that bound his feet was looped across this. He was unable to move, hands high over his head, legs bound together and pinned to the earth.

“What do you think will happen,” Rodrigo said, breaking the silence, “when my company comes to this ranch tomorrow and learns I have not arrived?”

The leader, standing by the doorway watching all that was being done, merely shook his head. Then he gestured to the others. The long torch was planted in the ground and they left him there in the hut, trussed like a sacrifice.

He heard footsteps receding, then the sound of horses coming up and then being ridden away. Pinned helplessly to the earth on his own land, Rodrigo Belmonte lay in silence for a few moments, listening to the horsemen riding off. And then, helplessly, but in an entirely different sense, he began to laugh. It was difficult to catch his breath with his hands pulled up so high; he whooped, he gasped, tears streamed from his eyes.

“The god burn you, Rodrigo!” said his wife, storming into the hut.
“How did you know?”

He went on laughing. He couldn’t stop. Miranda carried, of all things, an arrow in one hand. She was dressed in black, in the mannish clothing that was her custom on the ranch. She glared at him in fury as he howled. Then she stepped closer and stabbed him in the thigh with her arrow.

“Ouch!” exclaimed the Captain of Valledo. He looked down and saw blood welling through the rip in his trousers.

“I hate when you laugh at me,” she said. “Now, how did you know? Tell me, or I’ll draw blood again.”

“I have no doubt,” Rodrigo said, struggling to regain his self-control. He had not seen her in almost half a year. She looked unfairly magnificent. She was also, quite evidently, in a substantial rage. He concentrated, for his own safety, on her question.

“The boys did well, actually. A few things. Corrado heard other horses as we came up to the stream. I didn’t, their mounts were left far enough away to avoid that, but a war-horse can be trained to give warning.”