The Lions of Al-Rassan (41 page)

In such a fashion, very often, had the course and destiny of nations both lesser and greater than Valledo been shaped and devised.

The doctor gave Ines his compound one more time. He explained that the body expelled it more swiftly than the poison it fought. Painful as it was, the substance was the only thing that might save her. The queen nodded her understanding, and drank.

Again she swam towards oblivion, but it wasn’t quite so bad this time. She always knew where she was.

In the middle of the night her fever broke. The king was dozing in an armchair by the bed, the lady-in-waiting on a pallet by the fire. The doctor, unsleeping, was attending upon her. When she opened her eyes his harsh features seemed beautiful to her. He reached for her good hand and pinched it.

“Yes,” the queen said. The doctor smiled.

When King Ramiro woke it was to see his wife gazing at him by the light of several candles. Her eyes were clear. They looked at each other for a long time.

“I had a sun disk, at one point,” she said finally, a pale whisper, “but what I also remember, when I remember anything, is you beside me.”

Ramiro moved to kneel beside the bed. He looked a question across it at the physician, whose fatigue was now evident.

“I believe we have passed through this,” the man said. The long, unfortunate face was creased by a smile.

Ramiro said, huskily, “Your career is made, doctor. I do not even know your name, but your life is made by this. I was not ready to let her go.” He looked back at his queen, his wife, and repeated softly, “I was not ready.”

Then the king of Valledo wept. His queen lifted her good hand, hesitated a moment, and then lowered it to stroke his hair.

Earlier that same night, as King Ramiro lingered by the bedside of his queen, harsh words had been exchanged at dinner by the men of the Valledan court with those who served King Sanchez of Ruenda. Accusations, savage and explicit, were leveled. Swords were drawn in the castle hall.

Seventeen men died in the fighting there. Only the courageous intervention of the three clerics from Ferrieres, striding unarmed and bare-headed into the midst of a bloody melee, their sun disks held high, prevented worse.

It was remembered, afterwards, that the party from Jaloña had dined by themselves that evening, conspicuously absent from the scene of the affray, as if anticipating something. Wholesale slaughter among the courtiers of the other two kings could only be of benefit to King Bermudo, it was agreed sourly. Some of the Valledans offered darker thoughts, but there was nothing to substantiate these.

In the morning Bermudo of Jaloña and his queen sent a herald to King Ramiro with a formal leavetaking and their prayers for the survival of the queen—word was, she had not yet passed to the god. Then they rode towards the rising sun with all their company.

The king and queen and surviving courtiers of Ruenda had already left—in the middle of the night, after the fighting in the hall. Stealing guiltily away like horse thieves, some of Ramiro’s courtiers said, though the more pragmatic noted that they had been on Valledan ground here and in real peril of their lives. It was also pointed out, by some of the most level-headed, that hunting accidents were a fact of life, and that Queen Ines was far from the first to be wounded in this fashion.

A majority, however, among the courtiers of Valledo were ready to pursue the Ruendan party west along the Duric’s banks as soon as the word was given—but the constable gave no such order, and the king was still closeted with his queen and her new physician.

Those who attended upon them reported that the queen appeared much improved—that she was likely to survive. There was, however, a new report that poison had been used on the arrow.

All things considered, King Ramiro’s ensuing behavior—it was three days before he showed his face outside the queen’s bedchamber or the adjoining room, which he used as a temporary counsel chamber—was viewed as erratic and even unmanly. It was clearly time to order a pursuit of the Ruendan party before they reached the nearest of their own forts. Notwithstanding the presence of the clerics, there was enough, surely, to suggest that Ruendan fingers had drawn that bow, and holy Jad knew that revenge needed little excuse in Esperaña.

Among other things, it had come to light by then—no one was certain how—that King Sanchez had had the audacity to draft a letter asserting authority over and demanding tribute from Fezana. That letter had not, apparently, been sent yet—winter had barely ended, after all—but rumor of the demand was rife in Carcasia in the days following the Ruendan departure. The city of Fezana paid
parias
to Valledo and every person in the castle knew the implications of a counter-demand.

It was also pointed out by observant men that King Sanchez himself—known to be one of the finest archers in the three kingdoms—had been conspicuously errant with his own arrows for the two days before the morning of falconry. Could that unwonted incompetence have been a screen? A deliberate contrivance, in the event someone did trace a lethal arrow back to him?

Had the arrow been meant for his brother? Had those days of poor shooting produced a last aberrant flight when a true one had finally been intended? It would not, the most cynical found themselves thinking, necessarily have been the first time one of the sons of Sancho the Fat had slain another. No one voiced that particular thought, however.

The untimely death of Raimundo, the eldest son, was not something that could yet be forgotten. It was remembered that among a grimly silent gathering of courtiers that day long ago, the hard questions raised by young Rodrigo Belmonte, Raimundo’s constable, had been specific, shocking.

Ser Rodrigo was far away now, exiled among the infidels. His well-born wife and young sons had, in fact, been invited to be among the Valledan company here, but Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda had declined, pleading distance and responsibilities in the absence of her lord. De Chervalles, the cleric from Ferrieres, had expressed some disappointment at this news when it came. He was said to be a connoisseur of women and Ser Rodrigo’s wife was a celebrated beauty.

Jad alone knew what the Captain would have said and done today had he been here. He might have told the king this injury to the queen was the god’s punishment for Ramiro’s own evildoing years ago. Or he might as easily have pursued the king of Ruenda—alone, if necessary—and brought his head back in a sack. Rodrigo Belmonte had never been an easy man to anticipate.

Neither was Ramiro of Valledo, mind you.

When the king finally emerged from his meetings with Geraud de Chervalles and Count Gonzalez and a number of his military captains anticipation ran wild in Carcasia. Finally, they might be going after the Ruendan scum. The provocation was there: even the clerics could be made to see that. It was past time for Valledo to move west.

No commands came.

Ramiro appeared from those meetings with a sternly resolute expression. So did the men with whom he had been speaking. No one said a word, though, as to what had transpired. It was noted that de Chervalles, the cleric, shocked and sobered as he might be by what had happened, did not look censorious.

King Ramiro seemed subtly changed, with a new manner that unsettled his courtiers. He appeared to be reaching inward for strength or resolution. Perhaps he was nurturing the desire for bloodshed, someone suggested. Men could understand that. Spring was the time for war in any case, and war was where a brave man found his truest sense of life.

Still no one was certain what was afoot. The king showed no signs of leaving Carcasia for Esteren. Messengers went out in all directions. A single herald was sent west along the river towards Ruenda. Only a herald. No army. Men cursed in the taverns of Carcasia. No one knew what message he carried. Another small party set out east. One of them told a friend they were bound for the ranching lands where the horses of Valledo were bred. No one knew what to make of that either.

Through the ensuing days and then weeks, the king remained inscrutable. He hunted most mornings, though in a distracted fashion. He spent a great deal of time with the queen, as if her passage near to death had drawn the two of them closer. The constable was a busy man, and he too offered no hint, by word or expression, of what was happening. Only the High Cleric from Ferrieres could be seen to be smiling when he thought he was unobserved, as if something he’d thought lost had been unexpectedly found.

Then, as the spring ripened and flowers bloomed in the meadows and the forest clearings, the Horsemen of Valledo began to ride into Carcasia.

They were the finest riders in the world, on the finest horses, and they came armed and equipped for war. As more and more of them appeared, it slowly became apparent, to even the dullest courtier in Carcasia, what was taking place.

An air of disbelief mingled with a trembling excitement began to pervade the city and castle as the soldiers continued to gather, company after company. Men and women who had been markedly lax in their observances for some time, if not all their lives, began to be seen at the services in Carcasia’s ancient chapel, built in those long-ago days when Esperaña had ruled all of the peninsula, not just the northlands.

At those services, frequently led by the High Cleric from Ferrieres, the king of Valledo and, after she was allowed to leave her rooms, his queen were present, morning and evening, kneeling side by side in prayer, sun disks of the god clasped in their hands.

Over a span of centuries, the golden, fabulously wealthy khalifs of Al-Rassan had led their armies thundering north, irresistible as the sea, to raid and enslave the Jaddites cowering at the hard fringes of a land that had once been their own. Year after year after year, back beyond the memories of men.

The last, weak puppet khalif in Silvenes had been slain, though, nearly sixteen years ago. There were no khalifs any more.

It was time to start rolling back the tide the other way, in Jad’s fierce, bright, holy name.

E
liane bet Danel, wife to a physician and mother of one, was not unused to strangers speaking to her in the street. She was known in the city, and her husband and daughter had both had a great many patients over the years here in Fezana. Some might wish to express gratitude, others to seek a speedy or a less expensive access to the doctor. Eliane had learned to deal briskly with both sorts.

The woman who stopped her on a cool market morning in the early spring of that year fell into neither category. In fact, Eliane was later to reflect, this marked the first time in her life she’d ever been accosted by a prostitute of either sex.

“My lady,” the woman said, without stepping from the shaded side of the lane, and speaking much more politely than was customary for an Asharite addressing a Kindath, “might I have a moment only of your time?”

Eliane had been too surprised to do more than nod and follow the woman—a girl, truly, she realized—further back into the shadows. A small alleyway ran off the lane. Eliane had come this way twice a week for much of her life and had never noticed it. There was a smell of decay here, and she saw what she hoped were small cats moving quickly about further along the alley. She wrinkled her nose.

“I hope this isn’t where you do business,” she said in her crispest tones.

“Used to be, up above,” the girl said carelessly, “before they moved us outside the walls. Sorry about the smell. I won’t keep you long.”

“I’m sure,” Eliane said. “How may I help you?”

“You can’t. Your daughter has, though, most of us, one way or another. That’s why I’m here.”

Eliane liked things to be as clear as possible. “Jehane, my daughter, has treated you medically, is that what you are saying?”

“That’s it. And she’s been good to us, too. Almost a friend, if that doesn’t shame you.” She said it with a youthful defiance that touched Eliane unexpectedly.

“It doesn’t shame me,” she said. “Jehane has good judgment in whom she befriends.”

That surprised the girl. As Eliane’s eyes adjusted further to the darkness here, she saw that the woman with whom she spoke was thin-boned and small, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, and that she was wrapped only in a torn shawl over a faded green knee-length tunic. Not nearly enough for a day this cold and windy. She almost said something about that, but kept silent.

“I wanted to tell you, there’s trouble coming,” the girl said abruptly. “For the Kindath, I mean.”

Eliane felt something icy slide into her. “What does that mean?” she said, involuntarily looking over her shoulder, back where the sunlight was, where people were moving, and might be listening.

“We’re hearing things, outside. From the men that come. There’s been sheets posted on walls. A nasty poem. A . . . what do they call it . . . an allegation. About the Kindath and the Day of the Moat. Nunaya thinks something’s being planned. That the governor may be under orders.”

“Who is Nunaya?” Eliane realized that she had begun to shiver.

“Our leader. Outside the walls. She’s older. Knows a lot.” The girl hesitated. “She’s a friend of Jehane’s. She sold her mules when Jehane left.”

“You know about that?”

“I took her to Nunaya myself that night. We wouldn’t have let Jehane down.” Defiance again, a note of pride.

“Thank you, then. I’m sure you wouldn’t have let her down. I told you, she knew where to choose her friends.”