The Lions of Al-Rassan (22 page)

“I have been accused of many things, but never that,” he said, parrying for time.

She granted him none. “Good, then,” said Zabira of Cartada, and rising on her toes, she kissed him upon the lips, slowly and with considerable expertise.

Someone else did this to me, not long ago,
ibn Khairan thought, before all such associations were chased away. The woman on the terrace with him stepped back, but only to begin—silk sleeves falling away to reveal the white skin of her arms—unbinding her black hair.

He stared, mesmerized, words and thoughts scattering in disarray. He watched her hands descend to the pearl buttons of her overtunic. She undid two of them, and paused. It was not an overtunic. She wore nothing beneath. In the extremely clear, soft light he glimpsed the pale, pear-like curves of her breasts.

His throat was suddenly dry. His voice husky in his own ears, ibn Khairan said, “My rooms are just here.”

“Good,” she said again. “Show me.”

It did occur to him just then that she might have come here to kill him.

It did not occur to him to do anything about it. He had, truly, never been accused of being immune to enticement. He lifted her up; she was small-boned and slender, no real weight at all. The scent of her surrounded him, dizzying for a moment. He felt her mouth at the lobe of one ear. Her fingers were about his neck. His blood loud within him, ibn Khairan carried her through a doorway and into his bedchamber.

Is it the possibility of dying that does this?
he wondered, his first and last such clear thought for some time.
Is that what excites me so?

His bed, in a large room hung with Serian tapestries, was low to the ground, covered with cushions and pillows in a diversity of shapes and sizes, as much for love-play as for color and texture. Crimson-dyed squares of silk hung from copper rings on the wall above the bed and set into the carved wooden foot. Ammar preferred freedom of movement in his lovemaking, the slide and traverse of bodies, but there had been those among his guests in this room who derived their keenest pleasures otherwise, and over the years he had earned a reputation as a host solicitous of all of his guests’ desires.

Even so, even with almost twenty years of nuanced experience in erotic play, ibn Khairan was swiftly made aware—though not, in truth, with any great surprise—that a woman trained as Zabira had been knew some things he did not. Even, it began to emerge, things about his own nature and responses.

Unclothed among the pillows some time later, he felt her fingers teasing and exploring him, winced at a bite and felt his sex grow even more rigid amid the growing shadows of the room as her mouth came back to his ear and she whispered something quite shocking in the exquisite, celebrated voice. Then his eyes grew wide in the darkness as she proceeded to perform precisely what she had just described.

All the training mistresses and castrates of Almalik’s court had come over the wide seas from the homelands of the east, where such skills had been part of courtly life for hundreds of years before Ashar’s ascetic vigil in the desert. It was possible, Ammar’s drifting thoughts essayed, that a journey to Soriyya might have more to offer than he’d imagined. He felt a breathless laugh escape him.

Zabira slipped further downward, her scented skin gliding along his, her fingernails offering counterpoint where they touched. Ibn Khairan heard a sigh of helpless pleasure and realized that, improbably, he had made that sound himself. He attempted to rise then, to turn, to begin the sharing, the flowing back-and-forth of love but he felt her hands, delicately insistent, pushing him down. He surrendered, closed his eyes, let her begin, her voice exclaiming in delight or murmuring in commentary, to minister to him as he had ministered to so many people in this room.

It went on, astonishingly varied and inventive, for some time. The sun had set. The room was encased in darkness—they had paused to light no candles here—before his sensibilities began, as a swimmer rises from green depths of the sea, to reassert themselves. And slowly, feeling almost drugged with desire, ibn Khairan came to understand something.

She was beside him just then, having turned him on his side. One of her legs was wrapped about his body, she had him enclosed within her sex, and her movements were indeed those of sea tides in their insistent, unwavering rise and fall.

He brushed a nipple with his tongue, testing his new thought. Without pause in her rhythm—which was, intuitively, his own deepest rhythm—she caressed his head and tilted it away.

“Zabira,” he whispered, his voice distant and difficult.

“Hush,” she murmured, a tongue to his ear again. “Oh, hush. Let me carry you away.”

“Zabira,” he tried again.

She shifted then, sinuous and smooth, and was above him now, more urgently, his manhood still within her, sheathed in liquescence. Her mouth descended, covered his. Her breath was scented with mint, her kisses a kind of threading fire. She stopped his speech, her tongue like a hummingbird. Her nails raked downward along his side. He gasped.

And turned his head away.

He lifted his hands then, with some effort, and grasped her by the arms; gently, but so she could not twist away again. In the darkness he tried to see her eyes but could discern only the heartshaped shadow of her face and the curtain of her black hair.

“Zabira,” he said, an utterly unexpected kind of pain within him, “you need not punish yourself, or hold back sorrow. It is all right to mourn. It is allowed.”

She went stiff with shock, as if slapped. Her body arched backwards in the first uncontrolled movement she had made all evening. For a long moment she remained that way, rigid, motionless, and then, with real grief and a simultaneous relief, Ammar heard her make one harsh, unnatural sound as if something had been torn in her throat, or in her heart.

He drew her slowly down until she lay along the length of him, but in a different fashion from all their touchings of before. And in the dark of that room, notorious for the woven patterns of desire it had seen, Ammar ibn Khairan held the woman beloved of the man he’d killed, and offered what small comfort he could. He granted her the courtesy and space of his silence, as she finally permitted herself to weep, mourning the depth of her loss, the appalling disappearance, in an instant, of love in a bitter world.

A bitter, ironic world, he thought, still struggling upwards as through those scented, enveloping green waters. And then, as if he had, truly, broken through to some surface of awareness, ibn Khairan confronted and accepted the fact that she had, indeed, been right in what she’d said on the terrace as the sun set.

He’d killed a hard, suspicious, brilliant, cruelly ambitious man today. And one whom he had loved.

When the Lion at his pleasure comes

To the watering place to drink, ah see!

See the lesser beasts of Al-Rassan

Scatter, like blown leaves in autumn,

Like air-borne seedlings in the spring,

Like grey clouds that part to let the first star

Of the god shine down upon the earth.

Lions died. Lovers died, or were slain. Men and women moved in their pride and folly through deeds of pity and atrocity and the stars of Ashar looked down and did or did not care.

The two of them never left his room that night. Ammar had trays brought again, with cold meats and cheeses and figs and pomegranates from his own groves. They ate by candlelight, cross-legged upon the bed, in silence. Then they removed the trays and blew out the candles and lay down together again, though not in the movements of desire.

They were awake before dawn. In the grey half-light that slowly suffused the room she told him, without his asking, that at the end of the summer her two sons had been quietly sent for fostering, after the old fashion, to King Badir of Ragosa.

Ragosa. She had made that decision herself, she said quietly, immediately after ibn Khairan’s poem had arrived in Cartada, lampooning and excoriating the king. She had always tried to stay ahead of events, and the poem had offered more than a hint of change to come.

“Where will you go?” she asked him. Morning light had entered the chamber by then. They could hear birds outside and from within the house the footsteps of busy servants. She was sitting up, cross-legged again, wrapped in a light blanket as in a shepherd’s cloak, her face paint streaked with the tracks of her night tears, hair tumbling in disarray.

“I haven’t, to be honest, had time to think about it. I was only ordered into exile yesterday morning, remember? And then I had a somewhat demanding guest awaiting me when I came home.”

She smiled wanly, but made no movement, waiting, her dark eyes, red-rimmed, fixed on his.

He truly
had
not thought about it. He had expected to be triumphantly home in Cartada as of yesterday morning, guiding the policies and first steps of the new king and the kingdom. A man could make plans, it seemed, but he could not plan for everything. He hadn’t even allowed himself, through the course of the night just past, to think much about Almalik ibn Almalik, the prince—the king, now—who had so decisively turned on him. There would be time for that later. There would have to be.

In the meantime, there was a whole peninsula and a world beyond it full of places that were not Cartada. He could go almost anywhere, do so many different things. He had realized that much yesterday, riding here. He was a poet, a soldier, a courtier, a diplomat.

He looked at the woman on his bed, and read the question she was trying so hard not to ask. At length he smiled, savoring all the ironies that seemed to be emerging like flower petals in the light, and he accepted the burden that came not from killing, but from allowing someone to take comfort with him when no comfort had been expected or thought to be allowed. She was a mother. He had known that, of course, but had never given any thought to what it might mean for her.

“Where will I go? Ragosa, I suppose,” he said, as if carelessly, and was humbled by the radiance of her smile, bright as the morning sunlight in the room.

Eight

I
vories and throngs of people, these were the predominant images Alvar carried after three months in Ragosa.

He had been born and raised on a farm in the far north. For him, a year before, Esteren in Valledo had been fearfully imposing. Esteren, he now understood, was a village. King Badir’s Ragosa was one of the great cities of Al-Rassan.

He had never been in a place where so many people lived and went about their business, and yet, amid the bustle and chaos, the swirling movements, the layers of sound, somehow still a sense of grace hovered—a stringed instrument heard in an archway, a splashing fountain half-glimpsed beyond the flowers of screening trees. It was true, what he had been told: the Star-born of Al-Rassan inhabited an entirely different world than did the Horsemen of Jad.

Every second object in the palace or the gracious homes he had seen seemed to be made of carved and polished ivory, imported by ship from the east. Even the handles of the knives used at some tables. The knobs on the palace doors. Despite the slow decline of Al-Rassan since the fall of Silvenes, Ragosa was a conspicuously wealthy city. In some ways it was
because
of the fall of the khalifs, actually.

Alvar had had that explained to him. Besides the celebrated workers in ivory there were poets and singers here, leather workers, woodcarvers, masons, glassblowers, stonecutters—masters of a bewildering variety of trades who would never have ventured east across the Serrana Range in the days when Silvenes was the center of the western world. Now, since the Khalifate’s thunderous fall, every one of the city-kings had his share of craftsmen and artists to exalt and extol his virtues. They were
all
lions, if one could believe the honey-tongued poets of Al-Rassan.

One couldn’t, of course. Poets were poets, and had a living to earn. Kings were kings, and there were a score of them now, some foundering in the ruin of their walls, some festering in fear or greed, a few—a very few—conceivably heirs to what Silvenes had been. It seemed to Alvar, on little enough experience, that King Badir in Ragosa had to be numbered among those in the last group.

Amid all the strangeness surrounding him—the unknown, intoxicating smells from doorway and courtyard and food stall, the bells summoning the devout to prayer at measured intervals during the day and night, the riot of noise and color in the marketplace, Alvar was grateful that here in Al-Rassan they still measured the round of the year by the white moon’s cycling from full to full as they did back home. At least
that
hadn’t changed. He could say exactly how long he’d been here, in another world.

On the other hand, it felt like so much more than three months, when he paused to look back. His year in Esteren seemed eerily remote, and the farm almost unimaginably distant. He wondered what his mother would say, could she have seen him in his loosely belted, flowing Asharite garb during the summer past. Actually, he didn’t wonder: he was fairly certain he knew. She’d have headed straight back to Vasca’s Isle, on her knees, in penance for his sins.

The fact was, though, summer was hot here in the south. One
needed
a headcovering in the white light of midday, one less cumbersome than a stiff leather hat; and the light-colored cotton tunics and trousers of Al-Rassan were far more comfortable in the city streets than what he had been wearing when they arrived. His face was darkened by the sun; he looked half Asharite himself, Alvar knew. It was an odd sensation, gazing in a glass and seeing the man who looked back. There were mirrors everywhere, too; the Ragosans were a vain people.

Autumn had come in the meantime; he wore a light brown cloak over his clothing now. Jehane had picked it out for him when the weather began to change. Twisting and pushing—expertly now—through the crowds of the weekly market, Alvar could hardly believe how little time had really passed since the two of them and Velaz had come through the mountain pass and first seen the blue waters of the lake and the towers of Ragosa.

He had been at pains to conceal his awe that day, though looking back from his newly sophisticated vantage point he suspected that his two companions had simply been generous enough to pretend not to notice. Even Fezana had intimidated him from a distance. Ragosa dwarfed it. Only Cartada itself now—with Silvenes of the khalifs looted and gutted years ago—was a more formidable city. Next to this high-walled, many-towered magnificence, Esteren was as the hamlet of Orvilla, where Garcia de Rada had come raiding on a night in summer.

Alvar’s life had forked like a branch that night, his path in the morning running east through Al-Rassan and across the Serrana Range to these walls with Jehane bet Ishak, instead of north and home with the Captain.

His own choice, too, endorsed by Rodrigo and accepted, if grudgingly at first, by Jehane. She would need a guard on the road, Alvar had declared in the morning after a memorable campfire conversation. A soldier, he’d added, not merely a servant, however loyal and brave that servant might be. Alvar had offered to be that guard, with the Captain’s permission. He would see her settled in Ragosa, then make his way home.

He hadn’t told them he was in love with her. They wouldn’t have let him come if they had known, he was sure of that much. He was also ruefully certain Jehane had realized the truth early in their journey. He wasn’t particularly good at hiding what he felt.

He thought she was beautiful, with her dark hair and her direct, unexpectedly blue gaze. He knew she was clever, and more than that: trained, accomplished, calmly professional. Amid the fires of Orvilla he had seen her courage, and her anger, holding the two young girls in her arms. She was a woman entirely outside the range of his life. She was also a Kindath, of the Wanderers, the god-diminishing heretics the clerics thundered against as loudly as they cursed the Asharites. Alvar tried not to let that matter, but the truth was, it did: it made her seem mysterious, exotic, even a little dangerous.

She wasn’t, actually. She was sharp and practical and direct. She’d taken him to her bed for one single night, not long after their arrival in Ragosa. She had done it kindly, without guile or promise. She had almost certainly intended that such a matter-of-fact physical liaison would cure him of his youthful longings. Alvar, clever in his own right, was quite clear about that. She allowed him no candlelit illusions at all about what a night together meant. She felt kindly towards him, Alvar knew. Though the journey had proved uneventful, she’d been grateful for his company, found him reliable and trustworthy, his energy diverting. He had come to understand, being observant in his own way, that she, too, was embarking on something new and strange without being sure of her way.

He also knew she did not love him at all, that beyond the physical act, the night’s harmony of two young bodies far from their homes, their union made no sense. But far from purging him of love, that night in her room had set a seal, as in heated wax, on his feelings.

In the old stories the kitchen women used to tell around the fire after the evening meal on the farm, brave Horsemen of the god loved endangered maidens on first sight and for life. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way in the fallen, divided world in which they really lived. It had, for Alvar de Pellino.

He didn’t make a great issue of it. He loved Jehane bet Ishak, the Kindath physician. It was a fact of existence, as much as where the god’s sun rose in the morning, or the proper way to parry a left-handed sword stroke towards one’s knees. Walking the crowded streets of Ragosa, Alvar felt much older than he had when he rode south with Rodrigo Belmonte to collect the summer
parias.

It was autumn now. The breeze from the north off Lake Serrana was cool in the morning and sometimes sharply cold at night. All the soldiers wore cloaks, and two layers of clothing under them if they were on duty after sunset. Not long ago, at dawn after a night on the northwestern wall, Alvar had seen the masts and spars of the fishing boats in the harbor rimed with pale frost under the full blue moon.

In the first sunlight of the next morning the leaves of the oaks in the eastern forests had gleamed red and gold, a dazzle of brilliance. To the west, the Serrana mountains that guarded Ragosa from Cartada’s armies and had screened her from Silvenes in the days of the Khalifate had been capped with snow on the higher slopes. The snow would last until spring. The pass through which he and Jehane and Velaz had come was the only one open all year. Friends had told him these things in the Jaddite taverns of the city or the food stalls of the marketplace.

He had friends here now. He hadn’t expected that, but shortly after their arrival it had become obvious that he was far from the only Jaddite soldier in Ragosa. Mercenaries went where there was money and work, and Ragosa offered both. For how long, no one knew, but that summer and fall the city on Lake Serrana was home to an eclectic array of fighting men from Jaloña and Valledo, and further afield: Ferrieres, Batiara, Karch, Waleska. Blond, bearded Karcher giants from the far north mingled—and frequently brawled—with lean, smooth-shaven, dagger-wielding men from the dangerous cities of Batiara. One heard half a dozen languages in the marketplace of a morning. Alvar’s Asharic was increasingly fluent now and he could swear in two Karcher dialects.

Walking a little distance aside with him on the day they had parted, Ser Rodrigo had told Alvar that he need not hurry home. He gave him leave to linger in Ragosa, with orders to post letters of report with any tradesmen heading towards Valledo.

A captain of King Badir’s army had summoned Alvar on the third day after their arrival. It was a well-run, highly disciplined army, for all its diversity. He had been marked as soon as they passed through the gates. The horse and armor he’d won at Orvilla were too good for him not to be noted. He was closely interviewed, enlisted at a salary and placed in a company. He was also, after a few days, permitted to leave the barracks and live with Jehane and Velaz in the Kindath Quarter, which surprised him. It wouldn’t have happened in Esteren.

It was because of Jehane’s position. She had been immediately installed at court, newest of the physicians to the king and his notorious Kindath chancellor, Mazur ben Avren. Her formal place in a palace retinue—in Ragosa, as everywhere else in the world—carried with it certain perquisites.

None of which had stopped Alvar from being embroiled in three fights not of his choosing during the first fortnight after he left the barracks and went to live in their house. That much was also the same everywhere: soldiers had their own codes, whatever royal courts might decree, and young fighting men granted special privileges had to be prepared to establish their right to those.

Alvar fought. Not to the death, for that was forbidden in a city that needed its mercenaries, but he wounded two men, and took a cut on the outside of his sword arm that had Jehane briefly worried. The sight of her concern was worth the wound and the scar that remained when it healed. Alvar expected wounds and scars; he was a soldier, such things came with his chosen course of life. He was also here in Ragosa as a known representative of Rodrigo Belmonte’s company, and when he fought it was with a consciousness that he was upholding the pride of the Captain’s men and their eminence among the companies of the world. It was a role he shouldered alone, with an anxious sense of responsibility.

Until, at the very end of that same summer, Ser Rodrigo had come himself through the pass to Ragosa on his black horse with one hundred and fifty soldiers and a silk merchant, the banners of Belmonte and Valledo flapping in the wind as they rode up to the walls along the shore of the lake.

Things changed then. Things began to change everywhere.

“By the eyeteeth of the holy god,” Laín Nunez had cackled in horror when Alvar reported to them that first day, “will you look at this! The boy’s gone and converted himself! What will I tell his poor father?”

The Captain, scrutinizing Alvar’s clothing with amusement, had said only, “I’ve had three reports. You appear to have done well by us. Tell me exactly how you were wounded and what you would do differently next time.”

Alvar, grinning for all he was worth, a warm glow rising in him as from drinking unmixed wine, had told him.

Now, some time later, running through the market under the blue skies of a crisp autumn morning to find Jehane and give her the day’s huge tidings, he knew himself to be recognized, envied, even a little feared.

No one challenged him to duels any more. The celebrated Ser Rod-rigo of Valledo, in exile, had accepted a huge contract with King Badir, with the full year paid in advance, which was almost unheard of.

Rodrigo’s men were soldiers of Ragosa now, the vanguard of a fighting force that was to enforce order in city and countryside, to hold back newly ambitious Jaloña, and Cartada, and the worst incursions of the outlaw chieftain ibn Hassan from his southern fortress of Arbastro. Life was complex in Ragosa, and dangers many-faceted.

Life seemed an entirely splendid affair to young Alvar de Pellino that morning, and the brilliant, cultured Ragosa of King Badir was—who would dream of denying it?—the most civilized place in the world.

Alvar had been to the palace with Jehane, and several times with Rodrigo. There was a stream running right through it, watering some of the inner gardens and courtyards and passing, by a means Alvar could not grasp, through the largest of the banquet rooms.

At the most sumptuous of his feasts King Badir—sensuous, self-indulgent, undeniably shrewd—liked to have the meal floated along this stream in trays, to be collected from the water by half-naked slaves and presented to the king’s guests as they reclined on their couches in the ancient fashion. Alvar had written a letter to his parents mentioning this; he knew they wouldn’t believe him.