The Lions of Al-Rassan

There lay the wide rich grasslands where the horse herds of Esperaña had run wild for centuries until the first ranchers came and began to tame and breed and ride them. Among those ranchers the most famously arrogant, though far from the largest or wealthiest, were the Belmonte. Garcia knew exactly where he was going. And he also happened to know, from his brother, that the Captain’s troops were quartered at Esteren this summer, nowhere near the ranch.

There ought to have been little danger for Belmonte in leaving his home unguarded. The Asharites had launched no raids north for twenty-five years, since the last brief flourishing of the Khalifate. The army of King Bermudo of Jaloña had been beaten back across the mountains by the Valledans three years before and were still licking their wounds. And no outlaws, however rash or desperate, would dream of provoking the ire of the celebrated Captain of Valledo.

The ranch ought to have been perfectly safe behind its wooden stockade wall, even if guarded by boys with unbroken voices and a cluster of ranch hands deemed unworthy or too old for a place in the fighting company. On the other hand, Rodrigo Belmonte ought not to have ordered the death of a cousin of the de Rada. He ought not to have whipped the constable’s brother. Such actions changed things.

When Garcia and his men had finally stumbled into Lobar, the first of the forts in the tagra lands, he had demanded and received—though with insolent reluctance—mounts and swords for all of them. The sweating commander of the garrison had advanced some feeble excuse about being left without sufficient weapons or horses for their own duties or safety, but Garcia had brooked none of that. The constable of Valledo, he’d said airily, would send them swords and better horses than the swaybacked creatures they were being given. He was in no mood for debate with a borderland soldier.

“That might take a long time,” the commander had murmured obstinately. “All the way from Esteren.”

“Indeed it might,” Garcia had replied frigidly. “And if so?”

The man had bitten his lip and said nothing more. What could he have said? He was dealing with a de Rada, the brother of the constable of the realm.

The garrison’s doctor, an ugly, raspy-voiced lout with a disconcerting boil on his neck, had examined Garcia’s wound and whistled softly. “A whip?” he’d said. “You’re a lucky man, my lord, or else someone extremely skillful was trying only to mark you. It is a clean cut and nowhere near your eye. Who did this?” Garcia had only glared, saying nothing. It was pointless, speaking to certain people.

The man prescribed an evil-smelling salve that stung like hornets, but did cause the swelling on Garcia’s face to recede over the next few days. It was when he looked in a reflecting glass for the first time that Garcia decided that appropriate vengeance required the death of the Belmonte children, as well. After they had been forced to watch him with their mother.

It was the fierce anticipation of revenge that had driven him on from the tagra fort, with only a single day’s rest. He sent four men north to Esteren, to report to his brother and to lay formal complaint before the king. That was important. If what he purposed to do was to have legal sanction, such a complaint had to be lodged against Rodrigo. Garcia was going to do this properly, and he was going to do it.

Two days after his main troop had parted from the four messengers he remembered that he’d forgotten to tell them to have weapons and horses sent back down for the garrison at Lobar. He briefly considered sending another pair of men north, but remembered the commander’s insolence and elected not to bother. There would be time enough to pass on that word when he arrived in Esteren himself. It would do the pampered soldiers good to be short of weapons and mounts for a time. Perhaps someone else’s boot might split at the heel.

Ten days later, in a wood on the land of Rancho Belmonte, rain was falling. Garcia’s stocking was sopping wet through his cracked boot, and so were his hair and scratchy new beard. He’d been growing the beard since Orvilla. He would have to wear it for the rest of his life he’d realized by now; that, or look like a branded thief. Belmonte had intended that, he was certain of it.

Miranda Belmonte, he remembered, was very beautiful; all the d’Alveda women were. Rodrigo, that common mercenary, had made a far better marriage than he deserved. He was about to have visited upon him exactly what he did deserve.

Anticipation made Garcia’s heart pound faster. Soon, now. Boys and stable grooms were the guardians of this ranch. Rodrigo Belmonte was no more than a jumped-up fighting man who had been put back in his proper place since the ascension of King Ramiro. He had lost his rank of constable in favor of Garcia’s brother. That had been only the beginning. He would learn now the cost of a feud with the de Rada. He would learn what happened when you marked Garcia de Rada as a common outlaw. Garcia touched his cheek. He was still using the salve, as instructed. The smell was ferociously unpleasant, but the swelling had subsided and the wound was clean.

The trees were very close together throughout the wood, but the curiously smooth path seemed to wind easily through them, wide enough in places for three men to ride abreast. They passed a pool of water on their right. In the grey afternoon the rain fell gently through the leaves, making droplets and ripples in the still surface of the water. It was said to be a holy place, for some reason. A few men made the god’s sign of the disk as they rode by.

When the first horse fell and lay screaming on the ground with a broken leg, it seemed a malign accident. After two more such accidents, one of which left a rider with a dislocated shoulder, such an interpretation became less certain.

The path curved north through the sodden, dripping trees, and then, a little further on, swung back to the east again. In the grey, pale distance Garcia thought he could see an end to the trees.

He felt himself falling, while still in the saddle.

He had time to throw a startled glance upwards and see the bellies of the two horses that had been pacing on either side of his a moment ago. Then his mount crashed into the bottom of the pit that had been concealed in the center of the path and Garcia de Rada found himself scrambling about trying to dodge the thrashing hooves of a crippled, terrified horse. One man, quicker than the others, dropped to the ground and leaned over the edge of the pit. He extended an arm, and Garcia grabbed it and hauled himself up and out.

They looked down at the flailing horse a moment, then an archer released two arrows and the hooves stopped.

“This is no natural path,” the archer said, after a moment.

“How very clever of you,” said Garcia. He walked past the man, his boots squelching in the mud.

A trip wire claimed two more horses and cracked the skull of one thrown rider, and another pit took down a third stallion before they had reached the eastern end of the woods. They made it, though, and one had to expect some casualties on a raid of this sort.

Open grass lay before them. In the middle distance they could see the wooden wall that surrounded the ranch buildings. It was high but not high enough, Garcia saw. A skilled rider standing on the back of his mount could scale it; so could a foot soldier boosted by another. Only with a proper garrison could the ranch be defended from an attack launched by competent men. As they paused there at the edge of the trees the rain stopped. Garcia smiled, savoring the moment.

“How’s that for an omen from the god?” he said to no one in particular.

He looked up pointedly at the horseman beside him. After a moment the man took his meaning and dismounted. Garcia swung up on the horse. “Straight for the ranch,” he ordered. “First man over the wall has his choice of the women. We’ll get their horses after. They owe us more than horseflesh.”

And then, like the thundering, heroic ancestors of his lineage, Garcia de Rada drew his borrowed sword, thrust it high over his head, and kicked the horse from Lobar into a gallop. Behind him his companions gave a shout and streamed out of the woods into the greyness of the afternoon.

Six died in the first volley of arrows, and four in the second. No arrows came anywhere near Garcia himself, but by the time he was halfway to the walled enclosure of the ranch there were only five riders behind him and five others on foot running desperately across the wet and open grass.

Given such a sobering development it began to seem less and less prudent to be galloping furiously, well ahead of the others, towards the compound walls. Garcia slowed his horse and then, when he saw one of the running men shot in the chest, he reined his mount to a stop, too stupefied to give voice to the rage in his heart.

To his right, south, six horsemen now appeared, riding quickly. He looked back again and saw another group rise up, like wraiths, from two depressions he had not noticed in the level plain. These figures, armed with bows and swords, began walking steadily towards him, not hurrying. On the wall-walk of the ranch he saw a dozen or so people appear, also armed.

It seemed a good time to sheath his sword. The four horsemen left to him hastily did the same. The remaining runners straggled up, one clutching an injured shoulder.

The bowmen from the hollows surrounded them as the six riders drew near, and Garcia saw then, with disgust, that they were mostly boys. It gave him a flicker of hope, though.

“Dismount,” said a well-built, brown-haired boy.

“Not until you say why you have just killed visitors without provocation,” Garcia temporized, his voice stern and repressive. “What sort of conduct is that?”

The boy so addressed blinked, as if in surprise. Then he nodded his head briefly. Three archers shot Garcia’s horse from under him. Kicking his feet out of the stirrups, de Rada leaped free just in time to avoid being crushed by the falling horse. He stumbled to one knee in the wet grass.

“I don’t like having to kill horses,” the boy said calmly. “But I can’t remember the last time visitors approached us unannounced at full gallop with swords drawn.” He paused, then smiled thinly. The smile was oddly familiar. “What sort of conduct is that?”

Garcia de Rada could think of nothing to say. He looked around. They had been bested by children and stable hands and it hadn’t even been a fight.

The boy who was evidently leader here glanced at Garcia’s riders. With unbecoming celerity they threw down their weapons and sprang from their mounts.

“Let’s go,” said a second boy.

Garcia glanced over at him, and then quickly back at the first one. The same face, exactly. And now he realized where he had seen that smile before.

“Are you Belmonte’s sons?” he asked, trying to control his voice.

“I wouldn’t bother with questions, were I you,” said the second boy. “I’d spend my time preparing answers. My mother will want to speak with you.”

Which was an answer to his question, of course, but Garcia decided it would be unwise to point that out. Someone gestured with a sword and Garcia began walking towards the compound. As he approached he realized, belatedly, that the figures on the wall holding bows and spears were women. One of them, wearing a man’s overtunic and breeches, with mud stains on her cheeks and forehead, came along the wall-walk to stand above them, looking down. She had long, dark brown hair under a leather hat. She held a bow with an arrow nocked.

“Fernan, please tell me who this sorry figure is.” Her voice was crisp in the grey stillness.

“Yes, Mother. I believe it is Ser Garcia de Rada. The constable’s brother.” It was the first of the boys who answered, the leader.

“Is it so?” the woman said icily. “If he is indeed of rank I will consent to speak with him.” She looked directly at Garcia.

This was the woman he had been imagining pinned and naked beneath him since they’d left Orvilla. He stood in the wet grass, water seeping through his split boot, and looked up at her. He swallowed. She was indeed very beautiful, even in man’s garb and stained with mud. That was, for the moment, the least of his concerns.

“Ser Garcia, you will explain yourself,” she said to him. “In few words and very precisely.”

The arrogance was galling, bitter as a wound. Garcia de Rada had always been quick-witted though, nor was he a coward. This was a bad situation, but no worse in its way than Orvilla had been, and he was back in Valledo now, among civilized people.

“I have a grievance with your husband,” he said levelly. “He took horses belonging to my men and myself in Al-Rassan. We were coming to square that account.”

“What were you doing in Al-Rassan?” she asked. He hadn’t expected that.

He cleared his throat. “A raiding party. Among the infidels.”

“If you met Rodrigo you must have been near Fezana, then.”

How did a woman know these things? “Somewhat near,” Garcia agreed. He was becoming a little uneasy.

“Then Rodrigo was dealing with you as the king’s officer responsible for protecting that territory in exchange for the parias. On what basis do you claim a right to steal our horses?”

Garcia found himself unable, for the moment, to speak.

“Further, if you were captured and released without your mounts you will have given him your parole in exchange for a ransom to be determined by the heralds at court. Is that not so?”

It would have been pleasant to be able to deny this, but he could only nod.

“Then you have broken your oath by coming here, have you not?” The woman’s voice was flat, her gaze implacable.

This was becoming ridiculous. Garcia’s temper flared. “Your husband ordered a cousin of mine slain, after we surrendered and sued for ransom!”

“Ah. So it is more than horses and armor, is it?” The woman on the wall smiled grimly. “Would it not be the king’s task to judge whether his officer exceeded authority, Ser Garcia?” Her formality, in the circumstances, felt like mockery. He had never in his life been so spoken to by a woman.

“A man who slays a de Rada must answer for it,” he said, glaring up at her, using his coldest voice.

“I see,” the woman said, undisturbed. “So you came here to make him answer for it. How?”

He hesitated. “The horses,” he replied finally.

“Just the horses?” And abruptly he realized where this questioning was going. “Then why were you riding towards these walls, Ser Garcia? The horses are pastured south of us; they are not hard to see.”

“I am tired of answering questions,” Garcia de Rada said, with as much dignity as he could manage. “I have surrendered and so have my men. I am content to let the king’s heralds in Esteren determine fair ransom.”

“You already agreed to that in Al-Rassan with Rodrigo, yet you are here with drawn swords and ill intent. I regret to say I cannot accept your parole. And tired or not, you will answer my question. Why were you riding towards these walls, young fellow?”

It was a deliberate insult. Humiliated, seething with rage, Garcia de Rada looked up at the woman on the wall above him, and said, “Your husband must learn that there is a price to be paid for certain kinds of action.”

There was a murmur from the boys and ranch hands. It fell away into silence. The woman only nodded her head, as if this was what she had been waiting to hear.

“And that price was to have been exacted by you?” she asked calmly.

Garcia said nothing.

“Might I guess further, that it was to have been exacted upon myself and my sons?”

There was silence in the space before the walls. Overhead the clouds were beginning to lift and scatter as a breeze came up.

“He had a lesson to learn,” said Garcia de Rada grimly.

She shot him then. Lifting the man’s bow smoothly, drawing and releasing in one motion, with considerable grace. An arrow in the throat.

“A lesson to learn,” said Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, thoughtfully, looking down from the wall at the man she had killed.

“The rest of you may go,” she added, a moment later. “Start walking. You will not be harmed. You may give report in Esteren that I have executed an oath-breaker and a common brigand who threatened a Valledan woman and her children. I will make answer directly to the king should he wish me to do so. Say that in Esteren. Diego, Fernan, collect their mounts and arms. Some of the horses look decent enough.”

“I don’t think Father would have wanted you to shoot him,” Fernan ventured hesitantly.

“Be silent. When I wish the opinions of my child I will solicit them,” his mother said icily. “And your father may consider himself fortunate if I do not loose a like arrow at him when he ventures to return. Now do what I told you.”

“Yes, Mother,” said her two sons, as one.

As the boys and ranch hands hastened to do her bidding and Garcia de Rada’s surviving companions began stumbling away to the west, the afternoon sun broke through the clouds overhead and the green grass grew bright, wet with rain in the branching light.

CHAPTER VI

Esteren was a catastrophe of carpenters, masons, bricklayers and laborers. The streets were nearly impassable, certainly so for a horse. The palace and the square in front of it resounded to the sounds of hammers, saws and chisels, shouted curses and frantic instructions. Complex, dangerous-looking equipment was being swung overhead or carried this way and that. It was widely reported that five workers had already died this summer. Nor was it overlooked by even the marginally observant that at least half of the project supervisors were Asharites brought north from Al-Rassan for this endeavor, at considerable cost.

King Ramiro was expanding his capital and his palace.

There had been a time, not very long ago, in fact, when the precarious kings of Esperaña—whether it was a whole country or divided as it now was again—ruled on the move. Cities were little more than hamlets; palaces a mockery of the name. Horses and mules, and heavy carts on the better-preserved of the ancient roads, were the trappings of monarchy as the courts settled in one town or castle after another through the round of the year. For one thing, the kings were constantly putting out brushfires of rebellion, or hurrying to try at least to limit the predatory incursions of Al-Rassan. For another, resources in the hard-pressed Jaddite kingdoms in the glory years of the Silvenes Khalifate were scarcely such as to allow the monarchs to feed themselves and their retinues without spreading the burdens imposed by their presence.

Much had changed in twenty years; much, it was evident, was still changing here in Valledo, wealthiest and most fertile of the three kingdoms carved out of Esperaña for his sons by King Sancho the Fat. The current frenzy of construction in the royal city was only a part of it, funded by the infusion of parias money and, equally important, the absence of raiding from the south. It seemed that King Ramiro was now pursuing an entirely new definition of monarchy. Over and above everything else, this past year he had made it clear that he expected all the major nobility and clerics to show up in Esteren twice a year for his assizes, when law and policy were to be resolved and promulgated. It was rapidly becoming evident, as the new city walls grew higher, that Esteren was going to be more than merely the most established of his court residences.

And this business of assizes—a foreign word, Waleskan apparently—was more than slightly galling. Without his standing army it was unlikely in the extreme that Ramiro would have been able to compel attendance from his country nobility. But the army was here, well-paid and well-trained, and this particular summer almost every figure of importance in Valledo had elected to follow the path of prudence and show up.

Curiosity, among other things, could lead a man to travel. So could the promise of wine and food at court, and women for hire in increasingly urbanized Esteren. The dust and noise and the symbolism of a public submission to Ramiro’s will were the prices to be paid. Given the turbulent and usually brief tenures of kings in Esperaña there was some reason to believe that the ambitions of King Sancho’s most complex son might not trouble the world for too much longer.

In the meantime, it had to be conceded that he was offering entirely adequate entertainment. On this particular day Ramiro and his court and the visiting country lords were hunting in the king’s forest southwest of Esteren, within sight of the Vargas Hills. Tomorrow they were all to attend the assizes at Ramiro’s court of justice. Today they rode in summer fields and forests killing deer and boar for sport.

There was nothing, short of actual warfare, that the nobility of Esperaña could be said to enjoy more than a good hunt on a fair day. Nor could it be overlooked that the king, for all his modern, unsettling notions, was among the best of the riders in that illustrious company.

Sancho’s son, after all, men could be overheard murmuring to each other in the morning sunshine. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

When King Ramiro dismounted to plant first spear in the largest boar of the day as it charged from the thicket where they had tracked it, even the most independent-minded and aggrieved of the rural lords could be seen banging swords or spears in approval.

When the boar was dead, the king of Valledo looked up and around at all of them. Covered in blood, he smiled. “As long as we are all gathered here,” he said, “there is one small matter we might as well attend to now, rather than as part of the assizes tomorrow.”

His courtiers and the country lords fell silent, looking sidelong at each other. Trust Ramiro to do something devious like this. He couldn’t even let a hunt be a hunt. Looking around, a number of them realized, belatedly, that this clearing seemed carefully chosen, not merely a random place where a wild beast had gone to ground. There was space enough for all of them, and even a conveniently fallen log to which the king now strode, removing bloodied leather gloves and casually sitting down, very much as if on a throne. The outriders began dragging the boar away, leaving a smeared trail of blood on the crushed grass.

“Will Count Gonzalez de Rada and Ser Rodrigo Belmonte be so good as to attend upon me?” Speaking these words, King Ramiro used the language of high court formality, not of hunt and field, and with that the tenor and shape of the morning changed.

The two men named could be seen dismounting. Neither betrayed, by so much as a flicker of expression, whether this development had been anticipated, or whether it was as much a surprise to them as to those assembled.

“We have all the witnesses we require,” the king murmured, “and I am loath to submit men such as yourselves to a court hearing in the palace. It seems fitting to me that this affair be dealt with here. Does anyone object? Speak, if so.”

Even as he was talking, two court officials could be seen approaching the tree trunk upon which the king was seated. They carried satchels and when these were opened parchments and scrolls were set down near the king.

“No objection, my liege,” said Count Gonzalez de Rada. His smooth, beautiful voice filled the clearing. Servants were moving about now, pouring wine from flasks into what appeared to be genuine silver drinking goblets. The hunters exchanged glances yet again. Whatever else might be said of him, Ramiro was not stinting on the largess appropriate to a royal host. Some dismounted and handed their reins to the grooms. Others preferred to remain on horseback, reaching down for their wine and drinking in the saddle.

“I would never dream,” said Rodrigo Belmonte, “of putting so many of the king’s people to such a deal of preparation without acceding to whatever the king proposed.” He sounded amused, but he often did, so that meant little.

“The allegations,” said the king of Valledo, ignoring Ser Rodrigo’s tone, “are substantial.” King Ramiro, tall, broad-shouldered, prematurely greying, now wore an expression appropriate to a monarch faced with lethal hostility between two of the most important men in his realm. The festive, careening mood of the morning was gone. The gathered aristocracy, as they gradually came to terms with what was happening, were more intrigued than anything else; this sort of possibly mortal conflict provided the best entertainment in the world.