The Lions of Al-Rassan (24 page)

She didn’t make that jest about being poisoned to them, of course. Parents were parents, and they would have been afraid for her.

On the autumn morning when Mazur’s messenger brought her tidings from Cartada and bade her follow him to court that jest didn’t seem particularly witty any more.

Someone
had
been poisoned, it appeared.

In the Palace of Ragosa, as Jehane arrived and made her way to the Courtyard of the Streams where the king was awaiting the newly arrived visitor, no one’s thoughts or whispered words were of anything else.

Almalik of Cartada, the self-styled Lion of Al-Rassan, was dead, and lady Zabira—more his widow than anything else—had arrived unannounced this morning, a supplicant to King Badir. She had been accompanied only by her steward in her flight through the mountains, someone whispered.

Jehane, who had made the same journey with only two companions, wasn’t impressed by that. But neither was she even remotely close to sorting out how she felt about the larger tidings. She was going to need a long time for that. For the moment she could only grasp the essential fact that the man she had vowed to kill was somehow dead at Ammar ibn Khairan’s hand—the story was now very clear—and the woman who had birthed a living child and had herself survived only because of Jehane’s father was soon to be entering through the arches at the far end of this garden.

Beyond these two clear facts confusion reigned within her, mingled with something close to pain. She had left Fezana with a sworn purpose, and had proceeded to spend the past months in this city enjoying her work at court, enjoying—if she was honest—the flattering attentions of an immensely civilized man, enjoying the determined skirmishing for her professional services. Taking pleasure in her life. And doing nothing at all about Almalik of Cartada and the promise she’d made to herself on the Day of the Moat.

Too late now. It would always be too late, now.

She stood, as was her custom, on the margin of one bank of the stream, not far from Mazur’s position at the king’s right shoulder on the island. Wind-blown leaves were falling into the water and drifting away. As many times as she’d been in this garden, by daylight and under torches at night, Jehane was still conscious of its beauty. In autumn only the late flowers still bloomed, but the falling leaves in the sunlight and those yet clinging to the trees were brilliant, many-colored. She was aware of the effect this garden could have on someone seeing it for the first time.

The Courtyard of the Streams had been designed and contrived years ago. The same stream that ran through the banquet hall had been further channeled to pass through this garden and to branch into two forks, creating a small islet in the midst of trees and flowers and marble walkways beneath the carved arcades. On the isle, reached by two arched bridges, the king of Ragosa now sat on an ivory bench with his most honored courtiers beside him. Flanking the gently curving path that approached one of the bridges members of Badir’s court waited in the autumn sunshine for the woman who had come to Ragosa.

Birds flitted in the branches overhead. Four musicians played on the far bank of the stream that ran behind the isle. Goldfish swam in the water. It was cool, but pleasant in the sun.

Jehane saw Rodrigo Belmonte on the other side of the garden, among the military men. He had returned from Fibaz two nights before. His eyes met hers, and she felt exposed by the thoughtful look in them. He had no right, on so little acquaintance, to be regarding her with such appraisal. She abruptly remembered telling him, by that fireside on the Fezana plain, that she intended to deal with Almalik of Cartada herself. That made her think of Husari, who had also been there that night, who had shaped the same intention . . . who would be experiencing much the same difficult tangle of thoughts and emotions that she was.

If someone doesn’t do it before either of us,
he had said that night. Someone had.

Husari wasn’t here now. He had no status at court. She hoped there would be a chance to talk with him later. She thought of her father in Fezana, and what had been done to him by the king now slain.

Between coral-colored pillars at the far end of the garden a herald appeared, in green and white. The musicians stopped. There was a brief silence, then a bird sang, one quick trilling run. Bronze doors opened and Zabira of Cartada was announced.

She entered under the arches of the arcade and waited between the pillars until the herald moved aside. She had arrived without ceremony, with only the one man, her steward, two steps behind her for escort. Jehane saw, as the woman approached along the walkway, that there had been nothing at all exaggerated in the reports of her beauty.

Zabira of Cartada was, in a sense, her own ceremony. She was an exquisite supplicant in a crimson-dyed, black-bordered gown over a golden undergown. She had jewelry at wrist and throat and on her fingers, and there were rubies set in the soft, night-black silken cap she wore. They gleamed in the sunlight. With only one man to guard her, it appeared that she had carried an extraordinary treasure through the mountains. She was reckless then, or desperate. She was also dazzling. Fashions, thought Jehane, were about to change in Ragosa if this woman stayed for long.

Zabira moved forward with effortless, trained grace, betraying no wonder at all in this place, and then sank down in full obeisance to Badir. This was not, evidently, a woman for whom a garden or courtyard, even one such as this, held the power to awe. She wouldn’t even blink at the stream running through the banquet room, Jehane decided, just before something took her thoughts in another direction entirely.

Most of the court was staring at Zabira in frank admiration. King Badir had ceased doing so, however, in the moment she lowered herself to the ground before the arched bridge leading to his isle. So, too, even before the king, had his chancellor.

A high cloud slid briefly across the sun, changing the light, lending a swift chill to the air, a reminder that it was autumn. At this moment the newest physician in Ragosa, following the king’s narrowed glance past the kneeling woman, encountered a difficulty with her breathing.

Nor, as it happened, was Zabira of Cartada continuing to hold the attention of the newest and most prominent of the mercenary captains at King Badir’s court.

Rodrigo Belmonte admired beauty and poise in a woman and evidence of courage; he had been married for almost sixteen years to a woman with these qualities. But he, too, was looking beyond Zabira now, gazing instead at the figure approaching the bridge and the isle, two dutiful steps behind her, preserving a palpable fiction for one more moment.

The sun came out, bathing them all in light. Zabira of Cartada remained on the ground, an embodiment of beauty and grace amid the falling leaves. She hardly mattered now.

The woman’s companion, her sole companion, the man who had been announced as her steward, was Ammar ibn Khairan.

For a handful of extremely subtle people in that garden further elements of the death of King Almalik were now explained. And for them, although the woman might be the most celebrated beauty in Al-Rassan, clever and gifted in herself and the mother of two enormously important children, the man was who he was, and had done—twice now, it seemed—what he had done.

He was undisguised, the signature pearl gleaming in his right ear, and Rodrigo knew him by the report of that. The black steward’s robe only accentuated his natural composure. He was smiling—not very deferentially, not very much like a steward—as he scanned the assembled court of King Badir. Rodrigo saw him nod at a poet.

Ibn Khairan bowed to the king of Ragosa. When he straightened, his gaze met the chancellor’s briefly, moved to Jehane bet Ishak—as the smile returned—and then he appeared to become aware that one of the Jaddite mercenaries was staring at him, and he turned to the man and knew him.

And so did Ser Rodrigo Belmonte, the Captain of Valledo, and the lord Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais stand in the Courtyard of the Streams of Ragosa on a bright morning in autumn and look upon each other for the first time.

Jehane, caught in the whirlwind of her own emotions, was there to see that first look exchanged. She turned from one man to the other and then she shivered, without knowing why.

Alvar de Pellino, just then entering through a door at the far end of the arcaded walkway—sanctioned by his link to both the Captain and Jehane and a hasty lie about a message for Rodrigo—was in time to see that exchange of glances as well, and though he had not the least idea who the black-robed Cartadan steward with the earring was, he knew when Rodrigo was roused to intensity, and he could see it then.

Narrowing his eyes against the sun’s brightness, he looked for and found Jehane and saw her looking back and forth from one man to the other. Alvar did the same, struggling to understand what was happening here. And then he, too, felt himself shiver, though it wasn’t really cold and the sun was high.

Back home, on their farm in the remotest part of Valledo, the kitchen women and the serving women, most of whom had been still half pagan, so far in the wild north, used to say that such a shiver meant only one thing: an emissary of death had just crossed into the realms of mortal men and women from the god’s own lost world of Fiñar.

In silence, unaccountably disturbed, Alvar slipped through the crowd in the garden and took his place among the mercenaries on the near bank of the stream before the island.

Rodrigo and the black-clad Cartadan steward still had not taken their eyes from each other.

Others began to notice this now—there was something in the quality of the stillness possessing both of them. Out of the corner of his eye Alvar saw Mazur ben Avren turn to look at Rodrigo and then back to the steward.

Still trying to take his bearings, Alvar looked for anger in those two faces, for hatred, respect, irony, appraisal. He saw none of these things clearly, and yet elements of all of them. Hesitantly he decided, in the moment before the king of Ragosa spoke, that what he was seeing was a kind of recognition. Not just of each other, though there had to be that, but something harder to name. He thought, still minded of the night tales told at home, that it might even be a kind of foreknowing.

Alvar, a grown man now, a soldier, amid a gathering of people on a very bright morning, suddenly felt fear, the way he used to feel it as a child at night after hearing the women’s stories, lying in his bed, listening to the north wind rattling at the windows of the house.

“You are most welcome to Ragosa, lady,” the king of Ragosa murmured.

If he had sensed any of this growing tension, he did not betray it. There was genuine appreciation in his voice and manner. King Badir was a connoisseur of beauty in all shapes and guises. Alvar, struggling with his sudden dark mood and protected by the simple fact of love, thought the Cartadan lady fetching but overly adorned. She was flawless in her manner, however. Only after Badir spoke did she rise gracefully from the walkway and stand before the king’s isle.

“Is this a mother’s visit?” Badir went on. “Have you come to judge our royal care of your children?”

The king knew it was more than that, Alvar realized, having learned a great deal himself in three months. This was a gambit, an opening.

“There is that, Magnificence,” said Zabira of Cartada, “though I have no fears regarding your attentiveness to my little ones. I am here, though, with more import to my visit than a mother’s fond doting.” Her voice was low but clear, a musician’s, trained.

She said, “I have come to tell a tale of murder. A son’s murder of his father, and the consequences of that.”

There was near silence in the garden again; only the one bird still singing overhead, the breeze in the leaves of the trees, the steady lapping of the two streams around the isle.

In that quiet, Zabira said, “By the holy teachings of Ashar it is given to us as law that a murderer of his father is eternally unclean, to be shunned while alive, to be executed or driven from all gatherings of men, accursed of the god and the stars. I ask the king of Ragosa: shall such a man reign in Cartada?”

“Does he?” King Badir was a sensualist, known to be self-indulgent, but no one had ever impugned the quality of his mind.

“He does. A fortnight ago the Lion of Cartada was foully slain, and his murdering son now bears the scepter and the glass, and styles himself Almalik II, Lion of Cartada, Defender of Al-Rassan.” There was a sound in the garden then, for all the details were news: she had crossed the mountains faster than messengers. Zabira drew herself up straight and raised her voice with deliberate intent. “I am come here, my lord king, to beg you to free the people of my dear city from this father-killer and regicide. To send your armies west, fulfilling the precepts of holy Ashar, to destroy this evil man.”

Another ripple of sound, like the breeze through the leaves.

“And who then shall reign in glorious Cartada?” Badir’s expression gave away nothing at all.

For the first time the woman hesitated. “The city is in peril. We have learned that the usurper’s brother Hazem is away to the south across the straits. He is a zealot, and seeks aid and alliance from the tribes in the Majriti deserts. He has been in open defiance of his father and was formally disinherited years ago.”

“That last we know,” Badir said softly. “That much all men know. But who then should reign in Cartada?” he asked again. By now even Alvar could see where this was going.