The Lions of Al-Rassan (43 page)

“Excellent,” Jehane pronounced. “Buy it.”

Alvar winced, behind the mask, at the quoted price, but Husari did the bargaining for him, and the cost came down by half. Husari, amused and witty this morning, led them onward, elbowing through the crowd, and a little further along he pounced with a cry upon a spectacular rendition of a peacock’s head and plumage. He put it on, not without difficulty. People had to press backwards to make room. The mask was magnificent, overwhelming.

“No one,” said Jehane, stepping back to get a better look at him, “will be able to get anywhere close to you.”

“I might!” a woman cried from the cluster of onlookers. There was a roar of ribald laughter. Husari carefully sketched a bow to the woman.

“There
are
ways around such dilemmas, Jehane,” Husari said, his voice resonating oddly from behind the close-fitting headpiece and spectacular feathers. “Given what I know about this particular festival.”

Alvar had heard the stories too. The barracks and taverns and the towers of the night watch had been full of them for weeks. Jehane tried, unsuccessfully, to look disapproving. It was hard to disapprove of Husari, Alvar thought. The silk merchant seemed to be one of those men whom everyone liked. He was also a man who had entirely changed his life this past year.

Once portly and sedentary, and far from young, ibn Musa was now fully accepted in Rodrigo’s company. He was one of those with whom the Captain took counsel, and gruff old Laín Nunez—Jaddite to the tips of his fingers, for all his profane impieties—had adopted him as a highly unlikely brother.

With the assistance of the artisan, Husari removed the mask. His hair was disordered and his face flushed when he emerged.

“How much, my friend?” he asked. “It is an almost passable contrivance.”

The artisan, eyeing him closely, quoted a price. Ibn Musa let out a shriek, as of a man grievously wounded.

“I think,” Jehane said, “that this particular negotiation is going to take some time. Perhaps Ziri and I will proceed alone from here, with your indulgence? If I’m going to be disguised it does seem pointless for everyone to know what I’m wearing.”

“We aren’t
everyone,
” Husari protested, turning from the opening salvos of the bargaining session.

“And you know our masks already,” Alvar added.

“I do, don’t I?” Jehane’s smile flashed. “That’s useful. If I need either of you during the Carnival I’ll know to look in the aviary.”

“Don’t be complacent,” Husari said, wagging a finger. “Alvar may well be in a mountain cat’s lair.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Jehane said.

Husari laughed. Jehane, after a brief hesitation, and a glance at Alvar, turned and walked on. Clutching his eagle visage, Alvar watched her go until she and Ziri were swallowed by the crowd.

Husari, after a negotiating exercise so animated it drew another cluster of people around them for the entertainment, bought the peacock mask at a sum that represented most of a year’s income for a professional soldier. The artisan agreed to deliver it later, when the crowds had thinned.

“I believe I need a drink,” ibn Musa declared. “Holy Ashar forgive us all our sins in this world.”

Alvar, for whom it wasn’t a sin, decided he wanted one too, though it was early in the day for him. They had several flagons, in the event, before leaving the tavern.

“Mountain cats,” Husari said musingly at one point, “are said to be ferocious in their coupling.”

“Don’t
tell
me things like that!” Alvar groaned.

Husari ibn Musa—silk merchant, soldier, Asharite, friend—laughed and ordered another flask of the good red wine.

Walking alone through the crowd past the mask-makers’ stalls, Jehane told herself sternly that the deception was minor and that she’d every right to her privacy. She didn’t like dissembling, however, and she cared for both men very much. She’d even surprised herself with a twinge of what was unmistakably jealousy when that long-legged Asharite creature with the mountain cat mask had smiled at Alvar in a way that left little room for ambiguity.

Still, it really wasn’t any of Alvar’s business or Husari’s that she already had a mask for the Carnival, courtesy of the chancellor of Ragosa. She was wearied and irritated by the constant speculation that surrounded their relationship. The more so since the arrival of the alluring figure of Zabira of Cartada had rendered Mazur’s pursuit of Jehane almost entirely ritualized.

It was inconsistent to be as bothered by his largely abandoned attempts at conquest as she had been by his earlier assumption that her surrender was merely a matter of time, but Jehane was acutely conscious that this was exactly how she felt.

She sighed. She could imagine what Ser Rezzoni in Batiara would have said about all of this. Something about the essential nature of womankind. The god and his sisters knew, they’d argued about
that
often enough during her years in Batiara. She’d written him since learning the news of Sorenica. No reply, as yet. He was there most of the time, but not always. He often took his family north with him, while he lectured at some of the other universities. He might be dead, though. She tried very hard to avoid thinking about that.

Looking around, she spotted Ziri moving through the crowd a short distance away. For a time after she and Velaz had been abducted in the attempt on the life of the two children, Jehane had had to stave off a flicker of anxiety every time she went into the streets. She had come to realize, quickly enough, that Ziri was
always
nearby; her lithe shadow, learning—far too young—how to hide knives on his person and use them to deadly effect. He had killed a man to save her life.

They’d summoned her to the barracks one night to attend to Ziri. He’d appeared deathly ill when she first saw him: white-faced, vomiting convulsively. It had only been wine, though. Rodrigo’s men had taken him to a tavern for the first time. She’d chided them angrily for that, and they’d allowed her to do so, but in truth, Jehane knew they were initiating him into a life that offered so much more than the one he would have had in Orvilla. Would it be a better fate, a happier one? How could a mortal answer that?

You touched people’s lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever. That was a hard thing to deal with sometimes.

Ziri would realize soon enough, if he hadn’t already, that she wasn’t really buying a mask this morning. That didn’t matter. He would be torn apart between stallions before he said a word to a living soul that might betray anything he knew about her.

Jehane was learning to accept that people besides her mother and father might love her, and do certain things because of that. Another hard lesson, oddly enough. She had not been beautiful or particularly endearing as a child; contrary and provocative were closer to truth. Such people didn’t discover young how to deal with being loved, she thought. They didn’t get enough practice.

She slowed to admire some of the handiwork on display. It was remarkable how even the most unlikely masks—a badger, a boar, a whiskered grey mouse’s head made of softest leather—were crafted in such a fashion as to be sensuous and attractive. How could the head of a boar be sensuous? She wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t an artisan, either. The masks would be even more alluring, she realized, tomorrow night under torchlight and the risen moons, with wine running in the streets and lanes of the city, mingling anonymity with desire.

Mazur had invited her to dine with him the evening before, for the first time in a long while, and at the end of the meal had presented her, courteous and assured as ever, with a gift.

She’d opened the offered box. Even the container was beautiful: ivory and sandalwood, with a silver lock and key. Inside, lying on crimson silk, had been the mask of a white owl.

It was the doctor’s owl, Jehane knew, sacred to the white moon and the pursuit of knowledge, a pale light flying down the long paths of the dark. Galinus, father of all physicians, had had an owl carved at the head of his staff. Not many people knew about that. Mazur, evidently, was one who did.

It was a generous, thoughtful gift, from a man who had never been less than generous or thoughtful with her.

She looked at him. He smiled. The problem with Mazur ben Avren, she had decided in that moment, was that he always
knew
he was being perceptive; that when he offered a gift it was the precise gift that ought to be offered. There was no uncertainty in him, no waiting to see if approval might come.

“Thank you,” she said. “It is beautiful. I will be honored to wear it.”

“It should become you,” he said gravely, reclining at ease on the couch opposite hers, a glass of wine in one hand. They were alone; the servants had been dismissed when the meal was done.

“Tell me,” Jehane added, closing the box and turning the delicate key in its lock, “what have you chosen for the Lady Zabira? If the question is not over-bold?” Contrary, provocative. Why should one be expected to change? And it was always a pleasure—such a rare pleasure—to cause this man to blink and hesitate, if only for a moment. Almost childish, she knew, but surely not everything childlike was a bad thing?

“It would be ungracious of me to reveal her disguise, would it not? Just as it would be wrong for me to tell her what I have offered you.”

He did have a way of making you feel foolish.

Her response to that, though, was much the same as it had been all her life. “I suppose,” she said lightly. “How many of us will you have personally disguised for Carnival, so no one but you knows who we are?”

He hesitated again, but not from discomfiture this time. “Two, Jehane. You and Zabira.” The pale wine in his glass caught the candlelight. He smiled ruefully. “I am not so young as I once was, you know.”

He was not above duplicity in this sort of thing, but she had a sense he was speaking the truth here. She was touched, and a little guilty.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged. “Don’t be. Five years ago, even two years ago, I would have deserved that.” He smiled again. “Though I must say, no other woman would have asked the question.”

“My mother would be horrified to hear you say that.”

He shook his head slightly. “I think you malign her. I think she would be pleased her daughter was a match for any man.”

“I’m hardly that, Mazur. I’m just prickly. It gets in the way, sometimes.”

“I know,” he said, making a face. “That I do know.”

She smiled, and stood up then. “It is late for a working doctor,” she’d said. “May I thank you again, and take my leave?”

He’d risen as well, still graceful, save for the hip that sometimes troubled him in rain. Not nearly so old and infirm as he might want, for the moment, to suggest. There was always a purpose to what Mazur said. Ammar ibn Khairan—who was, of course, exactly the same in this—had warned her about that.

Sometimes one didn’t want to track through all the layers of meaning or implication. Sometimes one wanted to simply
do
a certain thing. Jehane walked towards Mazur and kissed him softly upon the mouth for the first time.

And
that
surprised him, she realized. He didn’t even lift his arms to hold her. She’d done the same thing to ibn Khairan once, in Fezana. She was a terrible woman.

“Thank you,” she’d said to the chancellor of Ragosa, withdrawing. “Thank you for my mask.”

Walking home, with an escort, she realized that she’d forgotten to ask what
he
would be wearing at Carnival.

Amid the morning sunlight and the crowds, thinking about that evening, Jehane discovered that she had reached the end of the long street of stalls. She turned left, towards the lake, where it was quieter. Knowing that Ziri was following unobtrusively behind her, she strolled, without real purpose or destination.

She could go back to the infirmary. She had three patients there. There was a woman near her delivery time who could be looked in on at her home. None of them needed her particularly this morning, however, and it was pleasant to be abroad in springtime without immediate responsibilities.

It occurred to her then that what she really lacked here in Ragosa was a woman to befriend. She was surrounded by so many accomplished, even brilliant men, but what she missed just now was the chance to go outside the walls on this bright morning filled with birdsong to sit beside a tumbledown hut with Nunaya and some of the other street women, drinking something cool and laughing at their ribald, caustic stories. Sometimes you needed to be able to laugh at men and their world, Jehane thought.

She had spent—what was it, much of a year?—being serious and professional in a man’s world. Sleeping in a tent in winter in the midst of a military company. They had respected her for that, had accepted her skills, trusted her judgment, and some of them even loved her, Jehane knew. But there were no other women with whom she could simply laugh, or shake her head in shared bemusement at the follies of soldiers and diplomats. Or perhaps even confide certain night-time struggles, when she lay awake in bed listening to stringed music played for other women from the dark streets below.

For all its pleasures and satisfactions there had been unexpected stresses to this life away from home, beyond the ones that might have been predicted. Perhaps, thought Jehane, it wasn’t such a bad thing that this notorious Carnival was coming, when no one but Mazur ben Avren would know for certain who she was. An edge of excitement came with that thought, and, inevitably, some anxiety.