The Lions of Al-Rassan (42 page)

“She was always good to me,” the girl said, with a shrug, trying to seem indifferent. “Don’t see what’s so wrong with calling the moons sisters, anyhow, myself.”

Eliane had to be careful not to smile, despite the fear in her. Fifteen years old. “Some disagree with you, unfortunately,” was all she said.

“I know
that,
” the girl replied. “Jehane’s all right?”

“I think so.” Eliane hesitated. “She’s in Ragosa, working there.”

The girl nodded, satisfied. “I’ll tell Nunaya. Anyhow, that’s all I wanted to say. Nunaya says you should be careful. Think about leaving. She says people here are nervous again because of this claim by that other king in the north . . . from Ruensa?”

“Ruenda,” Eliane said. “About the
parias.
Why should that affect the Kindath?”

“Now you’re asking the wrong person, aren’t you?” The girl shrugged again. “I hear things, but I don’t know much. Nunaya thinks there’s something funny about it, that’s all.”

Eliane stood in silence for a moment, looking at the girl. That shawl really wasn’t at
all
warm enough for this time of year. Impulsively, surprising herself again, she took off her own blue cloak and draped it over the girl. “I have another,” she said. “Will this be stolen from you?”

The girl’s eyes had widened. She fingered the warm, woven cloak. “Not unless someone wants to wake up dead,” she said.

“Good. Thank you for the warning.” Eliane turned to go.

“My lady.”

She stopped and looked back.

“Do you know the toy-maker’s shop, at the end of the Street of Seven Windings?”

“I have seen it.”

“Just past it, by the city wall, there’s a linden tree. There’s bushes behind it, along the wall. There’s a way out there. It’s a small gate, and locked, but the key is hanging from a nail on the tree, on the back side, about my height.” She indicated with her hand. “If you ever need to get out that’s one way that will bring you to us.”

Eliane was silent again, then she nodded her head.

“I am glad my daughter has such friends,” she said, and went back into the sunlight, which did not warm her now, without her cloak.

She decided to forgo the market this morning, though it normally gave her pleasure. One of the servants could go. She was cold. She turned back towards the Kindath Quarter and the house that had been her home for thirty years.

Think about leaving.
Just like that.

The Wanderers. They were always thinking about leaving. Moving like the moons against the fixed and gleaming stars. But brighter, Ishak had liked to say. Brighter than the stars and gentler than the sun. And he and she had had their home here in Fezana for so long now.

She decided to say nothing to him about this.

The very next day a Jaddite leather worker approached her as she walked out in the morning to buy a new cloak—her old one was distinctly frayed, it turned out.

The man had been waiting just outside the guarded gates to the Quarter. He came up as soon as she turned the corner. He was respectful, and evidently afraid. He wasted little time, which was fine with Eliane. His message was the same as that of the girl the day before. He, too, had been a patient of Jehane’s—or his young son had been. Eliane gathered that Ishak’s absinthe dilution, offered for a nominal fee, had broken a dangerous fever the summer before. The man was grateful, had not forgotten. And told her it might be wise for them to leave Fezana for a time, before the spring was much further advanced. Men were talking in the taverns, he said, about matters that did not bode well.

There was anger, he said. And the more fiery of the street corner wadjis were not being kept under control the way they usually were. She asked him directly if he was leaving with his family, if the same dangers applied to the Jaddites. He said he had decided to convert, after resisting for many years. At the first branching of streets he walked away from her without looking back. She never learned his name.

She bought herself a cloak from a small, reliable shop in the Weavers’ Lane, someone she had done business with for a dozen years or more. It might have been her imagination, but the merchant seemed cool, almost brusque with her.

Perhaps business was simply bad, she tried to tell herself. Certainly Fezana had endured grief and then real hardship this past year, with almost all of those who were central to the life of the city dead in the moat last summer.

But to drive the Kindath away because of that?

It made no sense. The taxes paid by the unbelievers—Kindath and Jaddite, both—went a long way towards supporting the wadjis and the temples, fortifying the walls and supplying the
parias
Fezana sent north to Valledo. Surely the new young king in Cartada understood that, or his advisors did? Surely they were aware of the economic impact if the Kindath Quarter of Fezana was emptied by a migration to some other city?

Or by something worse than that.

This time she told Ishak about the warnings. She thought she knew exactly what he would say, in the mangled sounds she had learned to understand since last summer.

He surprised her, though. After all these years he could still surprise her. It was the tidings from Sorenica, he explained, laboring to be clear. Something to be read in that: a new mood in the world, a swinging again, like a pendulum. Change in the air, in the winds.

The two of them, with their household, began quietly preparing to leave for Ragosa, and Jehane.

They weren’t quite fast enough, however.

T
heir daughter, in the same week her mother received these warnings of danger—which was the same week Ines of Valledo nearly died—was, with more anticipation than she liked to admit, preparing for Carnival in Ragosa.

Alvar de Pellino, off-duty and walking up to meet her on a crowded street corner one morning, with Husari beside him and trailed by the watchful figure of young Ziri, privately decided that Jehane had never looked more beautiful. Husari, to whom he had impulsively confided his feelings about her one night, had warned him that springtime did this sort of thing to young men.

Alvar didn’t think it was the season. Much had changed in his life since the summer before, and changes were still taking place, but what he had felt for Jehane before the end of that first night by the campfire north of Fezana had not altered, and was not about to. He was quietly certain of that. He was aware that there was something strange about such certainty, but it was there.

Physician to a court and a military company, Jehane bet Ishak was surrounded by brilliant and accomplished men. Alvar could deal with that. He had few expectations of any kind. So long as he was able to play a role, to be nearby, he would be content, he told himself.

Most of the time that was true. There were nights when it wasn’t, and he’d had to admit—though not to pragmatic Husari—that the return of the spring flowers and the gentling of the evening breezes off the lake had made those nights more frequent. Men were singing in the streets now at night under the windows of women they desired. Alvar would lie awake listening to the music as it spoke of longing. He was aware at such times of how far he had come from a farm in the northlands of Valledo. He was also aware—how could he not be?—that he would be going back north one day, when the Captain’s exile ended.

He tried not to dwell upon that.

They came up to Jehane and greeted her, each in his fashion: Husari with a grin and Alvar with his rapidly improving Asharite court bow. He’d been practicing, for amusement.

“In the name of the moons, look at the two of you!” Jehane exclaimed. “You look as if you’re already in costume. What would your poor mothers say?”

The two men regarded each other complacently. Alvar was dressed in a wide-sleeved linen overshirt, ivory-colored, loosely belted at the waist, over hose of a slightly darker shade and Asharite city slippers, worked with gold thread. He wore a soft cloth cap, crimson-colored, bought in the market the week before. He rather liked the cap.

Husari ibn Musa, silk merchant of Fezana, wore a plain brown Jaddite soldier’s shirt under a stained and well-worn leather vest. There were knives tucked into his wide belt on both sides. His horseman’s trousers were tucked into high black boots. On his head he wore, as always, a brown, wide-brimmed leather hat.

“My sadly departed mother would have been diverted, I hope,” Husari said. “She had a gift of laughter, may Ashar guard her spirit.”

“
Mine
would be appalled,” Alvar said in his most helpful voice. Husari laughed.

Jehane struggled not to. “What would
any
rational person say, looking at you two?” she wondered aloud. Ziri had drifted apart from them; he did his guarding from a distance.

“I think,” Husari murmured, “such a person—if we could find one in Ragosa this week—might say we two represent the best this peninsula has to offer. Brave Alvar and my poor self, as we stand humbly before you, are proof that men of different worlds can blend and mingle those worlds. That we can take the very finest things from each, to make a new whole, shining and imperishable.”

“I’m not actually sure that vest of yours is the very finest Valledo has to offer,” Alvar said with a frown, “but we’ll let that pass.”

“And I’m not sure I wanted a serious answer to my question,” Jehane said. Blue eyes narrowed thoughtfully, she looked closely at Husari.

He grinned again. “Did I give you one? Oh, dear. I was trying my pedant’s manner. I’ve been asked to give a lecture on the ethics of trade at the university this summer. I’m in training. I have to give long, sweeping answers to
everything.
”

“Not this morning,” Jehane said, “or we’ll never do what we have to do.” She began walking; the men fell into step on either side of her.

“
I
thought it was a good answer,” Alvar said quietly.

They both glanced at him. There was a little silence.

“So did I,” said Jehane, finally. “But we shouldn’t be encouraging him.”

“Encouragement,” Husari said grandly, striding along in his black boots, “never matters to the true scholar, filled with zeal and vigor in his pursuit of truth and knowledge, his solitary quest, on roads apart from the paths trod by lesser men.”

“See what I mean,” Jehane said.

“Let’s try,” said Alvar, “to find him a better vest.”

They turned a corner, into a street they’d been told to look for, and then all three of them stopped in their tracks. Even Husari, who had seen many cities in his time.

Ragosa was always vibrant, always colorful. When the sun shone and the sky and the lake were blue as a Kindath cloak the city could almost be said to gleam in the light: marble and ivory and the mosaics and engravings of arch and doorway. Even so, nothing in half a year had prepared Alvar for this.

Along the length of the narrow, twisting laneway temporary stalls had been hastily thrown together, scores of them, their tables laden with masks of animals and birds, real and fabulous, in a riot of colors and forms.

Jehane laughed in delight. Husari shook his head, grinning. On the other side of the laneway, young Ziri’s mouth hung open; Alvar felt like doing the same thing.

He saw a wolf’s head, a stallion, a saffron-bright sunbird, an extraordinarily convincing, appalling fire ant mask—and these were all on the first table of the lane.

A woman approached them, walking the other way, beautifully dressed and adorned. A slave behind her carried an exquisite creation: a leather and fur mask of a mountain cat’s head, the collar encrusted with gems. There was a loop on the collar for a leash; the woman was carrying the leash, Alvar saw: it looked like beaten and worked gold. That ensemble must have cost a fortune. It must have taken half a year to make. The woman slowed as she came up to the three of them, then she smiled at Alvar, meeting his eyes as she went by. Alvar turned to watch her go. Ibn Musa laughed aloud, Jehane raised her eyebrows.

“Remember that mask, my friend!” Husari chortled. “Remember it for tomorrow!” Alvar hoped he wasn’t blushing.

They had met on this mild, fragrant morning to buy disguises of their own for the night when torches would burn until dawn in the streets of Ragosa. A night when the city would welcome the spring—and celebrate the birth day of King Badir—with music and dancing and wine, and in other ways notably distant from the ascetic strictures of Ashar. And from the teachings of the clerics of Jad, and the high priests of the Kindath, too, for that matter.

Notwithstanding the clearly voiced opinions of their spiritual leaders, people came to Ragosa from a long way off, sometimes traveling for weeks from Ferrieres or Batiara—though there was still snow in the passes east—to join the Carnival. The return of spring was always worth celebrating, and King Badir, who had reigned since the Khalifate fell, was a man widely honored, and even loved, whatever the wadjis might say about him and his Kindath chancellor.

They strolled through the thronged lane, twisting and turning to force a passage. Alvar kept a hand on the wallet at his belt. A place such as this was Paradise on earth for a cut-purse. At the first mask-maker’s stall at which they stopped, Alvar picked up an eagle’s visage, in homage to the Captain. He donned it and the craftsman, nodding vigorous approval, held up a seeing glass. Alvar didn’t recognize himself. He looked like an eagle. He looked dangerous.