The Lions of Al-Rassan (9 page)

“Why would you assume I have no plans?” It was curious how quickly he could anger her.

He stopped. “Forgive me.”

“Where?”

She would not have answered Ammar ibn Khairan, for any number of reasons, but she had to tell her father. He had not spoken a word to her in four years before this afternoon.

“Ragosa,” she said quietly.

She had never even thought of it until ibn Khairan had begun his speech, but once the name of the city was spoken it seemed to Jehane as if she had always been heading there, east towards the shores of Lake Serrana, and the river and the mountains.

“Ah,” said ibn Khairan, thoughtfully. He rubbed his smooth chin. “You could do worse than King Badir, yes.”

“And Mazur ben Avren.”

She said it too defiantly. He grinned. “The Prince of the Kindath. Of course. I’d be careful there, Jehane.”

“Why? You know him?”

“We have exchanged letters and verses over the years. Books for our libraries. Ben Avren is an extremely subtle man.”

“And so? That is a bad thing in the principal advisor to the king of Ragosa?”

He shook his head. “Tonight you are asking that particular question of the wrong man, actually. Just be careful if you do get there. Remember I told you.” He was silent a moment, half-turned to the window. “And if you
are
to get anywhere, not to mention myself, we must bring an end to this encounter. I believe I hear voices below. Husari and Velaz, we’d best hope.”

She heard the sounds now, too, and did recognize both voices.

“I’ll leave the way I came, Ser Ishak, with your permission.” Ibn Khairan moved past Jehane to take her father’s hand again. “But I do have one question of my own, if I may. I’ve wondered about something for four years now.”

Jehane felt herself go still. Her father slowly tilted his head up towards ibn Khairan.

Who said, “Tell me, if you will, did you
know
what you risked when you delivered Almalik’s last child in the way you did?”

In the stillness that followed Jehane could hear, from the courtyard below, her mother’s calm voice inviting ibn Musa into their house, as if he were no more than an awaited dinner guest on an ordinary night.

She saw her father nod his head, a sound emerging from the ruined mouth like the release of a long burden. Jehane felt herself suddenly on the edge of tears again.

“Would you do it again?” ibn Khairan asked, very gently.

No delay, this time. Another affirmative nod.

“Why?” asked Ammar ibn Khairan, and Jehane could see that he truly wanted to understand this.

Ishak’s mouth opened and closed, as if testing a word.
“Gareeruh,”
he said finally, then shook his head in frustration.

“I don’t understand,” ibn Khairan said.

“Gareeruss,”
Ishak said again, and this time Jehane saw him place a hand over his heart, and she knew.

“The Oath of Galinus,” she said. It was difficult to speak. “The Physician’s Oath. To preserve life, if it can be done.”

Ishak nodded once, and then leaned back in his chair, as if exhausted by the effort to communicate after so long. Ammar ibn Khairan was still holding his hand. Now he let it go. “I would need time to think, more time than we have, before I would presume to offer any reply to that,” he said soberly. “If my stars and your moons allow, I would be honored to meet with you again, Ser Ishak. May I write to you?”

Ishak nodded his head. After a moment ibn Khairan turned back to Jehane.

“I believe I did say I had two reasons for coming,” he murmured. “Or had you forgotten?” She had, actually. He saw that, and smiled again. “One was a warning of danger, the other was to bring you something.”

He walked past her, back to the window. He swung up on the sill and reached out and around the side to the ledge. Without stepping down again he turned and offered something exquisite to Jehane.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Oh dear.”

It was, of course, her urine flask. Her father’s flask.

“You did leave in rather a hurry from ibn Musa’s,” ibn Khairan said mildly, “and so did Velaz and Husari. I thought you might want the flask, and perhaps make better use of it than the Muwardis when they arrived.”

Jehane swallowed and bit her lip. If they had found this . . .

She stepped forward and took the flask from his hand. Their fingers touched. “Thank you,” she said.

And remained motionless, astonished, as he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. The scent of his perfume briefly surrounded her. One of his hands came up and lightly touched her hair.

“Courier’s fee,” he said easily, leaning back again. “Ragosa is a good thought. But do mention Valledo to ibn Musa—he may do better with King Ramiro.”

Jehane felt the rush of color to her face already beginning to recede. What followed, predictably, was something near to anger. Her father and mother, Velaz, Ser Rezzoni—everyone who knew her well—had always warned her about her pride.

She took a step forward and, standing on tiptoe, kissed Ammar ibn Khairan in her turn. She could feel his sharply intaken breath of surprise. That was better: he had been much, much too casual before.

“Doctor’s fee,” she said sweetly, stepping back. “We tend to charge more than couriers.”

“I
will
fall out of the window,” he said, but only after a moment.

“Don’t. It’s a long way down. You haven’t said, but it seems fairly obvious you have your own plan of vengeance to pursue in Cartada. Falling from a window would be a poor way to begin.” She was gratified to see that he hadn’t been prepared for that either.

He paused a second time. “We shall meet again, I dare hope.”

“That would be interesting,” Jehane said calmly, though her heart was beating very fast. He smiled. A moment later she watched him climb down the rough wall to the courtyard. He went through an archway towards the gates without looking back.

She would have thought she’d won that last exchange, but the smile he’d offered, just before turning to climb down, made her less certain, in the end.

“Care, Jehaa, care,”
her father said, from behind her, echoing her own thoughts.

Feeling frightened again, by many things, Jehane went back to his chair and knelt before it. She put her head in his lap. And after a moment she felt his hands begin to stroke her hair. That had not happened for a long time.

They were like that when Velaz came for her, having already packed for the road—for both of them. He had arrived, of course, at his own decision on this matter.

Some time later, when Jehane was gone, and Velaz, and Husari ibn Musa, the silk merchant who had become, however improbably, a declared conspirator against the Lion of Cartada, strange sounds could be heard emanating from the study of Ishak ben Yonannon, the physician.

His wife Eliane stood in the corridor outside his closed door and listened as her husband, silent as death for four long years, practised articulating the letters of the alphabet, then struggled with simple words, like a child, learning what he could say and what he could not. It was fully dark outside by then; their daughter, their only child, was somewhere beyond the walls of civilization and safety, where women almost never went, in the wilderness of the wide world. Eliane held a tall, burning candle, and by its light someone watching could have seen a taut anguish to her still-beautiful face as she listened.

She stood like that a long time before she knocked and entered the room. The shutters were still folded back and the window was open, as Jehane had left them. At the end of a day of death, with the sounds of grief still raw beyond the gates of the Quarter, the stars were serene as ever in the darkening sky, the moons would rise soon, the white one first tonight, and then the blue, and the night breeze would still ease and cool the scorched summer earth where men and women breathed and walked. And spoke.

“Eyyia?”
said her husband, and Eliane bet Danel heard the mangling of her name as music.

“You sound like a marsh frog,” she said, moving to stand before his chair.

By the flickering light she saw him smile.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “My dear. I’ve needed you so much.”

“Eyyia,”
he tried again, and stood up. His eyes were black hollows. They would always be hollows.

He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief.

At approximately the same time, their daughter was just outside the city walls negotiating with a number of whores for the purchase of three mules.

Jehane had known, in fact, of several hidden exits in the city walls. Some of them were too tenuous for a man of Husari’s girth, but there was a place in the Quarter itself, at the northwestern end, where a tree hid a key to a low passage through the stone of the city wall. It was, in the event, a near thing, but Husari was able to squeeze through with help from Velaz.

As they came out and stood up on the grassy space before the river a woman’s voice—a familiar voice, in fact—said cheerfully in the darkness, “Be welcome, pilgrims. May I lead you to a Garden of Delights such as Ashar only offers to the Dead?”

“He doesn’t offer it at all to the Kindath,” Jehane replied. “Tonight you could almost tempt me, Jacinto.”

“
Jehane?
Doctor?” The woman, scented and gaudily bejewelled, stepped closer. “Forgive me! I didn’t recognize you. Who called for you tonight?”

“No one, actually. Tonight I need
your
help. The wadjis may be after me, and the Muwardis.”

“Plague rot them all!” the woman named Jacinto said. “Haven’t they had enough blood for one day?” Jehane’s eyes were accustomed to the night by now, and she could make out the slender figure in front of her, clad only in the thinnest, most revealing wisps of cloth. “What do you need?” Jacinto asked. She was fourteen years old, Jehane knew.

“Three mules, and your silence.”

“You’ll have them. Come, I’ll bring you to Nunaya.”

She had expected that. If anyone exerted any sort of control over this community of women and boys outside the walls it was Nunaya.

Nunaya was not someone who wasted time, or words. Men in a hurry knew this, too, or they learned it soon enough. A client who came to visit her was likely to be back inside Fezana’s walls within a very short span of time, relieved of certain urges and a sum of money.

The purchase of the mules was not a difficult transaction. For several years now Jehane—the only woman doctor in Fezana—had been the trusted physician of the whores of the city. First in their district inside the eastern wall and then out here to the north, after they had been pushed by the wadjis beyond the city gates and into one of the straggling suburbs by the river.

That episode had been but one in a series of irregular, recurring outbursts of pious outrage that punctuated the dealings between the city and those who traded in physical love. The women fully expected to be back inside the walls within a year—and probably back outside them again a year or two after that.

Given, however, that the women one could buy, and a fair number of boys as well, were now mostly to be found outside the walls, it was not surprising that hidden routes of exit and entry were in existence. No city that had citizens—legitimate or otherwise—dwelling beyond its fortifications could ever be completely sealed.

Jehane knew a good many of the whores by now, and had, on more than one occasion, slipped out to join them for an evening of food and drink and laughter. Out of courtesy to the doctor who delivered their children or healed their bodies of afflictions or wounds, clients were not welcome at such times. Jehane found these women—and the wise, bitter boys—better company than almost anyone she knew in the city, within the Kindath Quarter or outside it. She wondered, at times, what that suggested about herself.

It was far from a serene world out here among the dilapidated houses that straggled beside the moat and river, and as often as not Jehane had been urgently summoned to deal with a knife wound inflicted by one woman on another. But although the three religions were all present here, it was obvious to her that when quarrels arose it had nothing to do with whether sun or moons or stars were worshipped. And the wadjis who had forced them out here were the common enemy. Jehane knew she would not be betrayed by these people.

Nunaya sold them three mules without so much as a question in her heavy-lidded, heavily accentuated eyes. This was not a place where personal questions were asked. Everyone had their secrets, and their wounds.

Jehane mounted up on one of the mules, Velaz and Husari took the others. A lady was supposed to ride sidesaddle, but Jehane had always found that silly and awkward. Doctors were allowed to be eccentric. She rode as the men did.

It was summer, the flow of the river was lazy and slow. Moving across, holding her mule on a tight rein, Jehane felt a heavy drifting object bump them. She shivered, knowing what it was. The mule pulled away hard and she almost fell, controlling it.