The Lions of Al-Rassan (6 page)

The twice-yearly collection of the
parias
from Fezana had become something close to routine now, more an exercise in diplomacy than a military one. It was more important for King Ramiro to dispatch a leader of Ser Rodrigo’s stature than to send an army. They knew Ramiro
could
send an army. The tribute would not be refused, though it might be slow in coming and there was a kind of dance that had to be performed before they could ride back with gold from Al-Rassan. This much Alvar learned during the shifts he rode ahead of the party with Ludus or Martín, the most experienced of the outriders.

They taught him other things, too. This might be a routine expedition, but the Captain was never tolerant of carelessness, and most particularly not so in the no-man’s-land, or in Al-Rassan itself. They were not riding south to give battle, but they had an image, a message to convey: that no one would ever
want
to do battle with the Horsemen of Valledo, and most particularly not with those commanded by Rodrigo Belmonte.

Ludus taught him how to anticipate from the movements of birds the presence of a stream or pond in the windswept plateau. Martín showed him how to read weather patterns in the clouds—the clues were very different here in the south from those Alvar had known in the far north by the sea. And it was the Captain himself who advised him to shorten his stirrups. It was the first time Ser Rodrigo had spoken directly to Alvar since flattening him with that blow on the first morning.

“You’ll be awkward for a few days,” he said, “but not for longer than that. All my men learn to ride like this into battle. Everyone here knows how. There may come a time in a fight when you need to stand up in the saddle, or leap from your horse. You’ll find it easier with the stirrups high. It may save your life.”

They had been in the no-man’s-land by then, approaching the two small forts King Ramiro had built when he began claiming the
parias
from Fezana. The garrisons in the forts had been desperately glad to see them, even if they stayed only a single night in each, to leave letters and gossip and supplies.

It had to be a lonely, anxious life down here in Lobar and Baeza, Alvar had realized. The balance in the peninsula might have begun to shift with the fall of the Khalifate in Al-Rassan, but that was an evolving process, not an accomplished reality, and there had been more than a slight element of provocation in the Valledans placing garrisons, however small, in the
tagra
lands. These were a handful of soldiers in a vast emptiness, perilously near to the swords and arrows of the Asharites.

King Ramiro had tried at the beginning, two years ago, to encourage settlement around the forts. He couldn’t
force
people to make their way down there, but he’d offered a ten-year tax exemption—given the costs of a steadily expanding army, not a trivial thing—and the usual promise of military support. It hadn’t been enough. Not yet. Only fifteen or twenty families, clearly leaving hopeless situations in the north, had been brave or rash or desperate enough to try making lives for themselves here on the threshold of Al-Rassan.

Things might be changing year by year, but the memory of the Khalifate’s armies thundering north through these high plains was a raw one yet. And everyone with a head above the ground knew the king was too fiercely engaged by his brother and uncle in Ruenda and Jaloña to be reckless in support of two speculative garrisons in the
tagra
and the families who huddled around them.

The balance might be shifting, but it was still a balance, and one could ignore that only at peril. Thinking, as they continued south, about the narrowed eyes and apprehensive faces of the men and women he’d seen in the fields beside the two forts, Alvar had decided there were worse things for a farmer to contend with than thin soil and early frosts in the north by the Ruenda border. Even the fields themselves down here had seemed pathetic and frail, small scratchings in the wide space of the otherwise empty land.

The Captain hadn’t seemed to see it that way, though. Ser Rodrigo had made a point of dismounting to speak to each of the farmers they saw. Alvar had been close enough to overhear him once: the talk was of crop rotation and the pattern of rainfall here in the
tagra
lands.

“We aren’t the real warriors of Valledo,” he’d said to his company upon mounting up again after one such conversation. “These people are. It will be a mistake for any man who rides with me to forget that.”

His expression had been unusually grim as he spoke, as if daring any of them to disagree. Alvar hadn’t been inclined to say anything at all. Thinking, he’d rubbed his bruised jaw through the beginnings of a sand-colored beard and kept silent.

The flat, high landscape of the plateau did not change, and there were no border markings of any kind, but late the following afternoon old Laín Nunez said aloud to no one in particular, “We’re in Al-Rassan now.”

Three days later, nearing sundown, the outriders caught a glimpse of the Tavares River and, not long after, Alvar saw for the first time the towers and walls of Fezana, tucked into a northward bend of the river, honey-colored in the westering light.

It was Ludus who first noticed the strange thing. An astonishing number of carrion birds seemed to be circling and swooping above the river by the northern wall of the city. Alvar had never seen anything like it. There had to be thousands of them.

“That’s what happens on a battlefield,” Martín said quietly. “When the battle’s over, I mean.”

Laín Nunez, squinting to see more clearly, turned after a moment to look at the Captain, a question in his eyes. Ser Rodrigo had not dismounted, and so none of them had. He stared at Fezana in the distance for a long time.

“There are dead men in the water,” he said finally. “We’ll camp here tonight. I don’t want to go closer, or enter the city, until we know what’s happened.”

“Do you want me to take two or three men and try to find out?” Martín asked.

The Captain shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll have to. We’ll light a good fire tonight. Double the guards, Laín, but I want them to know we’re here.”

Some time later, after the evening meal and after the sunset prayer for the god’s safe night journey, they gathered around the fire while Martín played his guitar and Ludus and Baraño sang under the brilliant stars.

It was just after the white moon had risen in the east, almost full, that three people rode into their camp, with no attempt at concealment.

They dismounted from their mules and were led into the glow of the firelight by the posted guards and, as the music and the singing stopped, Rodrigo Belmonte and his company learned what had happened in Fezana that day.

Three

F
rom within Husari ibn Musa’s chamber late in the afternoon they heard the screaming in the streets. A slave was sent to inquire. Ashen-faced, he brought back word.

They did not believe him. Only when a friend of ibn Musa, another merchant, less successful—which appeared to have saved his life—sent a servant running with the same tidings did the reality become inescapable. Every man who had gone to the castle that morning was dead. Headless bodies were floating in the moat and down the river, carrion for the circling birds. Only thus, the very efficient king of Cartada appeared to have decided, could the threat of a rising in Fezana be utterly dispelled. In one afternoon virtually all of the most powerful figures left in the city had been eliminated.

Jehane’s patient, the luxury-loving silk merchant who was, however improbably, to have been among the corpses in the moat, lay on his bed with a hand over his eyes, trembling and spent in the aftermath of passing a kidney stone. Struggling, not very successfully, to deal with her own churning emotions, Jehane looked at him closely. Her refuge, as ever, was in her profession. Quietly, grateful for the control she seemed to have over her voice, she instructed Velaz to mix a further soporific. Ibn Musa surprised her, though.

“No more, Jehane, please.” He lowered the hand and opened his eyes. His voice was weak but quite clear. “I need to be able to think carefully. They may be coming for me. You had best leave this house.”

Jehane hadn’t thought of that. He was right, of course. There was no particular reason why Almalik’s murderous desert mercenaries would allow an accident of ill-health to deprive them of Husari’s head. And as for the doctor—the Kindath doctor—who had so inconveniently kept him from the palace . . .

She shrugged.
Whichever way the wind blows, it will rain upon the Kindath.
Her gaze met Husari’s. There was something terrible in his face, still growing, a horror taking shape and a name. Jehane wondered how she must look herself, weary and bedraggled after most of a day in this warm, close room, and now dealing with what they had learned. With slaughter.

“It doesn’t matter whether I stay or go,” she said, surprised again at how calmly she said this. “Ibn Khairan knows who I am, remember? He brought me here.”

Oddly, a part of her still wanted to deny that it was Ammar ibn Khairan who had arranged and achieved this wholesale massacre of innocent men. She couldn’t have said why that had any importance to her: he was a killer, the whole of Al-Rassan knew he was. Did it matter that a killer was sophisticated and amusing? That he had known who her father was, and had spoken well of him?

Behind her, Velaz offered the small, discreet cough that meant he had something urgent to say. Usually in disagreement with a view she had expressed. Without looking back at him, Jehane said, “I know. You think we should leave.”

In his subdued tones, her grey-haired servant—her father’s before her—murmured, “I believe the most honorable ibn Musa offers wise counsel, doctor. The Muwardis may learn who you are from ibn Khairan, but there is no great reason for them to pursue you. If they come for the lord ibn Musa, though, and find us here, you are a provocation to them. My lord ibn Musa will tell you the same thing, I am sure of it. They are desert tribesmen, my lady. They are not . . . civilized.”

And now Jehane did wheel around, aware that she was channelling fear and anger onto her truest friend in the world, aware that this was not the first time. “So you would have me abandon a patient?” she snapped. “Is that what I should do? How very civilized of us.”

“I am recovering, Jehane.”

She turned back to Husari. He had pushed himself up to a sitting position. “You did all a physician could be asked to do. You saved my life, though not in the way we expected.” Amazingly, he managed a wry smile. It did not reach his eyes.

His voice was firmer now, sharper than she could ever remember. She wondered if some disordered state had descended upon the merchant in the wake of overwhelming horror: if this altered manner was his way of reacting. Her father would have been able to tell her.

Her father, she thought, would not tell her anything again.

There was a good chance the Muwardis would be coming for Husari, that they might indeed take her if they found her here. The tribesmen from the Majriti were not civilized, at all. Ammar ibn Khairan knew exactly who she was. Almalik of Cartada had ordered this butchery. Almalik of Cartada had also done what he had done to her father. Four years ago.

There are moments in some lives when it can truly be said that everything pivots and changes, when the branching paths show clearly, when one does make a choice.

Jehane bet Ishak turned back to her patient. “I’m not leaving you here to wait for them alone.”

Husari actually smiled again. “What will you do, my dear? Offer sleeping draughts to the veiled ones when they come?”

“I have worse than that to give them,” Jehane said darkly, but his words forced her to pause. “What do
you
want?” she asked him. “I am running too fast, I’m sorry. It is possible they are sated. No one may come.”

He shook his head decisively. Again, she registered the change in manner. She had known ibn Musa for a long time. She had never seen him like this.

He said, “I suppose that is possible. I don’t greatly care. I don’t intend to wait to find out. If I am going to do what I must do, I will have to leave Fezana, in any case.”

Jehane blinked. “And what is it you must do?”

“Destroy Cartada,” said the plump, lazy, self-indulgent silk merchant, Husari ibn Musa.

Jehane stared at him. This was a man who liked his dinner meat turned well, so he need not see blood when he ate. His voice was exactly as calm and matter-of-fact as it was when she had heard him talking with a factor about insuring a shipment of silk for transport overseas.

Jehane heard Velaz offer his apologetic cough again. She turned. “If that is so,” Velaz said, as softly as before, his forehead creased with worry now, “we cannot be of aid. Surely it will be better if we are gone from here . . . so the lord ibn Musa can begin to make his arrangements.”

“I agree,” Husari said. “I will call for an escort and—”

“I do not agree,” Jehane said bluntly. “For one thing, you are at risk of fever after the stones pass and I have to watch for that. For another, you will not be able to leave the city until dark, and certainly not by any of the gates, in any case.”

Husari laced his pudgy fingers together. His eyes held hers now, the gaze steady. “What are you proposing?”

It seemed obvious to Jehane. “That you hide in the Kindath Quarter with us until nightfall. I’ll go first, to arrange for them to let you in. I’ll be back at sundown for you. You ought to be in some disguise, I think. I’ll leave that to you. After dark we can leave Fezana by a way that I know.”

Velaz, pushed beyond discretion, made a strangled sound behind her.

“We?” said ibn Musa carefully.

“If I am going to do what I must do,” said Jehane deliberately, “I, too, will have to leave Fezana.”

“Ah,” said the man in the bed. He gazed at her for a disquieting moment, no longer a patient, in some unexpected way. No longer the man she had known for so long. “This is for your father?”

Jehane nodded. There was no point dissembling. He had always been clever.

“Past time,” she said.

There was a great deal to be done. Jehane realized, walking quickly through the tumult of the streets with Velaz, that it was only the mention of her father that had induced Husari to accept her plan. That wasn’t a surprising thing, if one looked at the matter in a certain light. If there was anything the Asharites understood, after centuries of killing each other in their homelands far to the east, and here in Al-Rassan, it was the enduring power of a blood feud, however long vengeance might be deferred.

No matter how absurd it might appear—a Kindath woman declaring her intention of taking revenge against the most powerful monarch to emerge since the Khalifate fell—she had spoken a language even a placid, innocuous Asharite merchant could understand.

And, in any case, the merchant was not so placid any more.

Velaz, seizing the ancient prerogative of longtime servants, was blistering her ears with objections and admonitions. His voice was, as always, appreciably less deferential than it was when others were with them. She could remember him doing this to her father as well, on nights when Ishak would be preparing to rush outside to a patient’s summons without properly clothing himself against rain or wind, or without finishing his meal, or when he drove himself too hard, reading late into the night by candlelight.

She was doing a little bit more than staying up too late, and the frightened concern in Velaz’s voice was going to erode her confidence if she let him go on. Besides which, she had a more difficult confrontation waiting at home.

“This has nothing to do with us,” Velaz was saying urgently, in step with her and not behind, which was completely uncharacteristic, the surest sign of his agitation. “Except if they find a way to blame the Kindath for it, which I wouldn’t be surprised if—”

“Velaz. Enough. Please. We are more than Kindath. We are people who live in Fezana, and have for many years. This is our home. We pay taxes, we pay our share of the filthy
parias
to Valledo, we shelter from danger behind these walls, and we suffer with others if Cartada’s hand—or any other hand—falls too heavily on this city. What happened here today
does
matter to us.”

“We will suffer no matter what they do to each other, Jehane.” He was as stubborn as she was and, after years with Ishak, as versed in argument. His normally mild blue eyes were intense. “This is Asharite killing Asharite. Why let it throw our own lives into chaos? Think what you are doing to those who love you. Think—”

Again she had to interrupt. He sounded too much like her mother for comfort now. “Don’t exaggerate,” she said, though he wasn’t, actually. “I am a physician. I am going to look for work outside the city. To expand my knowledge. To make a name. My father did that for years and years, riding with the khalif’s armies some seasons, signing contracts at different courts after Silvenes fell. That’s how he ended up in Cartada. You know that. You were with him.”

“And I know what happened there,” Velaz shot back.

Jehane stopped dead in the street. Someone running behind them almost crashed into her. It was a woman, Jehane saw, her face blank, a mask, as at the spring Processional. But this was a real face, and what lay behind the appearance of a mask was horror.

Velaz was forced to stop as well. He looked at her, his expression angry and afraid. A small man, and not young; nearly sixty years of age now, Jehane knew. He had been with her parents for a long time before her own birth. A Waleskan slave, bought as a young man in the market at Lonza; freed after ten years, which was the Kindath practice.

He could have gone anywhere then. Fluent in five languages after the years abroad with Ishak in Batiara and Ferrieres, and at the khalifs’ courts in Silvenes itself, trained flawlessly as a physician’s aide, more knowledgeable than most doctors were. Discreet, fiercely intelligent, Velaz would have had opportunities all over the peninsula or beyond the mountains east. The Al-Fontina of the khalifs, in those days, had been largely staffed and run by former slaves from the north, few of them as clever or versed in nuances of diplomacy as Velaz had been after ten years with Ishak ben Yonannon.

Such a course seemed never even to have been contemplated. Perhaps he lacked ambition, perhaps he was simply happy. He had converted to the Kindath faith immediately after being freed. Had willingly shouldered the difficult weight of their history. He prayed after that to the white and blue moons—the two sisters of the god—rather than invoking the images of Jad from his boyhood in Waleska or the stars of Ashar painted on the domed temple ceilings of Al-Rassan.

He had stayed with Ishak and Eliane and their small child from that day until this one, and if anyone in the world besides her parents truly loved her, Jehane knew it was this man.

Which made it harder to look at the apprehension in his eyes and realize that she really couldn’t clearly explain why the path of her life seemed to have forked so sharply with the news of this massacre. Why it seemed so obvious what she now had to do. Obvious, but inexplicable. She could imagine what Ser Rezzoni of Sorenica would have said in response to such a conjunction. She could almost hear her father’s words, as well. “An obvious failure to think clearly enough,” Ishak would have murmured. “Start at the beginning, Jehane. Take all the time you need.”

She didn’t have that much time. She had to get Husari ibn Musa into the Kindath Quarter tonight, and do something even harder before that.

She said, “Velaz, I
know
what happened to my father in Cartada. This isn’t a debate. I can’t explain fully. I would do so if I could. You know that. I can only say that past a certain point accepting the things Almalik has done feels like
sharing
in them. Being responsible for them. If I stay here and simply open the treatment rooms in the morning and then the next day and the next, as if nothing has happened, that’s how I’ll feel.”

There was a certain quality to Velaz, one of the measures of the man: he knew when what he heard was final.