The Lions of Al-Rassan

“You tempt me,” the doctor said, still smiling. “I do like clever men.” Her expression changed. “But Esperaña is no place for a Kindath, Ser Rodrigo. You know that as well as I.”

“It will make no difference with us,” the Captain said. “If you can sew a sword wound and ease a bowel gripe you will be welcome among my company.”

“I can do both those things, but your company, clever as its men may be, is not the wider world.” There was no amusement in her eyes any more. “Do you remember what your Queen Vasca said of us, when Esperaña was the whole peninsula, before the Asharites came and penned you in the north?”

“That was more than three hundred years ago, doctor.”

“I know that. Do you remember?”

“I do, of course, but—”

“Do you?” She turned to Alvar. She was angry now. Mutely, he shook his head.

“She said the Kindath were animals, to be hunted down and burned from the face of the earth.”

Alvar could think of nothing to say.

“Jehane,” the Captain said, “I can only repeat, that was three hundred years ago. She is long dead and gone.”

“Not gone! You dare say that? Where is she?” She glared at Alvar, as if he were to blame for this, somehow. “Where is Queen Vasca’s resting place?”

Alvar swallowed. “On the Isle,” he whispered. “Vasca’s Isle.”

“Which is a shrine! A place of pilgrimage, where Jaddites from all three of your kingdoms and countries beyond the mountains come, on their knees, to beg miracles from the spirit of the woman who said that thing. I will make a wager that half this so-clever company have family members who have made that journey to plead for blessed Vasca’s intercession.”

Alvar kept his mouth firmly shut. So, too, this time, did the Captain.

“And you would tell me,” Jehane of the Kindath went on bitterly, “that so long as I do my tasks well enough it will not matter what faith I profess in Esperañan lands?”

For a long time Ser Rodrigo did not answer. Alvar became aware that the merchant, ibn Musa, had come up to join them. He was standing on the other side of the fire listening. All through the camp Alvar could now hear the sounds and see the movements of men preparing themselves for sleep. It was very late.

At length, the Captain murmured, “We live in a fallen and imperfect world, Jehane bet Ishak. I am a man who kills much of the time, for his livelihood. I will not presume to give you answers. I have a question, though. What, think you, will happen to the Kindath in Al-Rassan if the Muwardis come?”

“The Muwardis are here. They were in Fezana today. In this camp tonight.”

“Mercenaries, Jehane. Perhaps five thousand of them in the whole peninsula.”

Her turn to be silent. The silk merchant came nearer. Alvar saw her glance up at him and then back at the Captain.

“What are you saying?” she asked.

Rodrigo crouched down now beside Alvar and plucked some blades of grass before answering.

“You spoke very bluntly a little while ago about our coming south to take Fezana one day. What do you think Almalik of Cartada and the other kings would do if they saw us coming down through the tagra lands and besieging Asharite cities?”

Again, the doctor said nothing. Her brow was knitted in thought.

“It would be the wadjis, first,” said Husari ibn Musa softly. “They would begin it. Not the kings.”

Rodrigo nodded agreement. “I imagine that is so.”

“What would they begin?” Alvar asked.

“The process of summoning the tribes from the Majriti,” said the Captain. He looked gravely at Jehane. “What happens to the Kindath if the city-kings of Al-Rassan are mastered? If Yazir and Ghalib come north across the straits with twenty thousand men? Will the desert warriors fight us and then go quietly home?”

For a long time she didn’t answer, sitting motionless in thought, and the men around the fire kept silent, waiting for her. Behind her, to the west, Alvar saw the white moon low in the sky, as if resting above the long sweep of the plain. It was a strange moment for him; looking back, after, he would say that he grew older during the course of that long night by Fezana, that the doors and windows of an uncomplicated life were opened and the shadowed complexity of things was first made known to him. Not the answers, of course, just the difficulty of the questions.

“These are the options, then?” Jehane the physician asked, breaking the stillness. “The Veiled Ones or the Horsemen of Jad? This is what the world holds in store?”

“We will not see the glory of the Khalifate again,” Husari ibn Musa said softly, a shadow against the sky. “The days of Rahman the Golden and his sons or even ibn Zair amid the fountains of the Al-Fontina are gone.”

Alvar de Pellino could not have said why this saddened him so much. He had spent his childhood playing games of imagined conquest among the evil Asharites, dreaming of the sack of Silvenes, dreading the swords and short bows of Al-Rassan. Rashid ibn Zair, last of the great khalifs, had put the Esperañan provinces of Valledo and Ruenda to fire and sword in campaign after campaign when Alvar’s father was a boy and then a soldier. But here under the moons and the late night stars the sad, sweet voice of the silk merchant seemed to conjure forth resonances of unimaginable loss.

“Could Almalik in Cartada be strong enough?” The doctor was looking at the merchant, and even Alvar, who knew nothing of the background to this, could see how hard this particular question was for her.

Ibn Musa shook his head. “He will not be allowed to be.” He gestured to the chests of gold and the mules that had brought them into the camp. “Even with his mercenaries, which he can scarcely afford, he cannot avoid the payment of the parias. He is no lion, in truth. Only the strongest of the petty-kings. And he already needs the Muwardis to keep him that way.”

“So what you intend to do, what I hope to do … are simply things that will hasten the end of Al-Rassan?”

Husari ibn Musa crouched down beside them. He smiled gently. “Ashar taught that the deeds of men are as footprints in the desert. You know that.”

She tried, but failed, to return the smile. “And the Kindath say that nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. That we who call ourselves the Wanderers are the symbol of the life of all mankind.” She turned then, after a moment, to the Captain. “And you?” she asked.

And softly Rodrigo Belmonte said, “Even the sun goes down, my lady.” And then, “Will you not come with us?”

With a queer, unexpected sadness, Alvar watched her slowly shake her head. He saw that some strands of her brown hair had come free of the covering stole. He wanted to push them back, as gently as he could.

“I cannot truly tell you why,” she said, “but it feels important that I go east. I would see King Badir’s court, and speak with Mazur ben Avren, and walk under the arches of the palace of Ragosa. Before those arches fall like those of Silvenes.”

“And that is why you left Fezana?” Ser Rodrigo asked.

She shook her head again. “If so, I didn’t know it. I am here because of an oath I swore to myself, and to no one else, when I learned what Almalik had done today.” Her expression changed. “And I will make a wager with my old friend Husari—that I will deal with Almalik of Cartada before he does.”

“If someone doesn’t do it before either of us,” ibn Musa said soberly.

“Who?” Ser Rodrigo asked. A soldier’s question, pulling them back from a mood shaped of sorrow and starlight. But the merchant only shook his head and made no reply.

“I must sleep,” the doctor said then, “if only to let Velaz do so.” She gestured and Alvar saw her old servant standing wearily a discreet distance away, where the firelight died in darkness.

All around them the camp had grown quiet as soldiers settled in for the night. The doctor looked at Rodrigo. “You said you are sending men to attend to the dead of Orvilla in the morning. I will ride with them, to do what I can for the living, then Velaz and I will be on our way.”

Alvar saw Velaz gesture to Jehane, and then noticed where the servant had made up a pallet for her. She walked over towards it. Alvar, after a moment, sketched an awkward bow she did not see, and went the other way, to where he usually slept near Martín and Ludus, the outriders. They were wrapped in their blankets, asleep.

He unfolded his own saddle blanket and lay down. Sleep eluded him. He had far too many things chasing and tumbling through his mind. He remembered the pride in his mother’s voice the day she recounted the details of her first pilgrimage to seek Blessed Vasca’s intercession for her brave son as he left home for the world of warring men. He remembered her telling how she had gone the last part of the journey on her hands and knees over the stones to kiss the feet of the statue of the queen before her tomb.

Animals, to be hunted down and burned from the face of the earth.

He had killed his first man tonight. A good sword blow from horseback, slicing down through the collarbone of a running man. A motion he had practised so many times, with friends or alone as a child under his father’s eye, then drilled by the king’s foul-tongued sergeants in the tiltyard at Esteren. Exactly the same motion, no different at all. And a man had fallen to the summer earth, bleeding his life away.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert.

He had won himself a splendid horse tonight, and armor better by far than his own, with more to come. The beginnings of wealth, a soldier’s honor, perhaps an enduring place among the company of Rodrigo Belmonte. He had drawn laughter and approval from the man who might truly become his Captain now.

Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last.

He had crouched by a fire on this dark plain and heard an Asharite and a Kindath woman of beauty and intelligence far beyond his experience, and Ser Rodrigo himself, as they spoke in Alvar’s presence of the past and future of the peninsula.

Alvar de Pellino made his decision then, more easily than he would ever have imagined. And he also knew, awake under the stars and a more perceptive man than he had been this same morning, that he would be permitted to do this thing. Only then, as if this resolution had been the key to the doorway of sleep, did Alvar’s mind slow its whirlwind of thought enough to allow him rest. Even then he dreamed: a dream of Silvenes, which he had never seen, of the Al-Fontina in the glorious days of the Khalifate, which were over before he was born.

Alvar saw himself walking in that palace; he saw towers and domes of burnished gold, marble columns and arches, gleaming in the light. He saw gardens with flower beds and splashing fountains and statues in the shade, heard a distant, otherworldly music, was aware of the tall green trees rustling in the breeze, offering shelter from the sun. He smelled lemons and almonds and an elusive eastern perfume he could not have named.

He was alone, though, in that place. Whatever paths he walked, past water and tree and cool stone arcade, were serenely, perfectly empty. Passing through high-ceilinged rooms with many-colored cushions on the mosaic-inlaid floors he saw wall hangings of silk and carvings of alabaster and olive wood. He saw golden and silver coffrets set with jewels, and crystal glasses of dark red wine, some filled, some almost empty—as if they had only that moment been set down. But no one was there, no voices could be heard. Only that hint of perfume in the air as he went from room to room, and the music—ahead of him and behind, tantalizing in its purity—alluded to the presence of other men and women in the Al-Fontina of Silvenes, and Alvar never saw them. Not in the dream, not ever in his life.

Even the sun goes down.

PART TWO

CHAPTER V

“There’s trouble coming,” said Diego, as he ran past the stables and looked in briefly on the open stall. A soft rain was falling.

“What is it?” his mother asked, glancing quickly over her shoulder. She stood up.

“Don’t know. A lot of men.”

“Where’s Fernan?”

“Gone to meet it, with some of the others. I told him already.” Diego, having said what seemed necessary, turned to go.

“Wait!” his mother called. “Where’s your father?”

Diego’s expression was withering. “How would I know? Heading for Esteren, I guess, if he isn’t there already. They must have got the parias, by now.”

His mother, feeling foolish, and irritated because of that, said, “Don’t use that tone with me. You sometimes do know, Diego.”

“And when I do, I tell you,” he said. “Got to run, Mother. Fernan will need me. He said to lock the gates and get everyone up on the walls.”

With the swift, lethal grin that left her almost helpless—his father’s smile—Diego was gone.

I am being ordered about by my sons now, thought Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda. Another adjustment in life, another measure of time passing. It was odd; she didn’t feel old enough for this to be happening. She looked over at the frightened groom who was helping her with the mare.

“I’ll finish here. You heard what he said. Tell Dario to get everyone up on the wall-walk. Including the women. Bring whatever weapons you can find. Build up the kitchen fires, we’ll want boiling water if this is an attack.” The old groom nodded anxiously and went off, moving as quickly as he could on a bad leg.

Miranda ran the back of a muddy hand across her forehead, leaving a streak of grime. She turned again, already murmuring to the laboring mare in the stall. The birth of a colt on a Valledan ranch was not a matter that could be superseded. It was the cornerstone of their fortune and their lives, of their whole society, really. The Horsemen of Jad, they were called, and with reason. A moment later the woman said to be the most beautiful in Valledo was on her knees again in the straw, her hands on the mare’s belly, helping to bring another stallion of Belmonte’s breed into the world.

She was distracted and worried, however. Not surprisingly. Diego was seldom wrong in his warnings, and almost never so when the vision had to do with trouble close to home. They had learned that, over the years.

When he’d been younger, still a child, and these fore-knowings had begun it had been hard, even for him, to tell them apart from nightmares or childhood fears.

Once, memorably, he had awakened screaming in the middle of the night, crying that his father was in terrible danger, threatened by ambush. Rodrigo had been campaigning in Ruenda that year, during the bitter War of the Brothers, and everyone in the ranch house had sat awake the rest of a long night watching a shivering, blank-eyed boy, waiting to see if any further visions were vouchsafed him. Just before dawn, Diego’s features had relaxed. “I was wrong,” he’d said, gazing at his mother. “They aren’t fighting yet. He’s all right. I guess it was a dream. Sorry.” He’d fallen fast asleep with the last apologetic word.

That sort of incident didn’t happen any more. When Diego said he’d seen something, they tended to treat it as absolute truth. Years of living with a boy touched by the god would quell the skeptic in anyone. They had no idea how his visions came and they never spoke of them outside the family or the ranch. Neither his parents nor his brother had anything resembling this … this what? Gift or burden? Miranda had not, to this day, been able to decide.

There were tales of such people. Ibero, the family cleric, who presided over services in the new chapel Rodrigo had put up even before he’d rebuilt and expanded the ranch house, had heard of them. Timewalkers, he called those with such a vision. He named Diego blessed of Jad, but the boy’s parents both knew that at different times and in different places, those visionaries had been burned, or nailed alive to wooden beams as sorcerers.

Miranda tried to concentrate on the mare, but her calming words, for the next little while, consisted of repeated, eloquent, curses directed at her absent husband. She had no idea what he’d done this time to bring danger to the ranch while his company was quartered at Esteren and the best of the band were south in Al-Rassan.

The boys can deal with trouble, his last letter had said breezily, after reporting a grim parting exchange with Count Gonzalez de Rada. Nothing about sending some of the soldiers to her for reinforcement. Of course not. Miranda, taught by Ibero in the first years of her marriage, prided herself on being able to read without assistance. She could also swear like a soldier. She had done so, reading that letter—to the messenger’s discomfiture. She was doing so now, more carefully, not to disturb the mare.

Her boys were still boys, and their blithe, careless father and his men were far away.

By Jad’s grace the foal was born healthy not long after that. Miranda waited to see if the mare accepted him, then she left the stall, grabbed an old spear propped in a corner of the stable, and hurried out into the rain to join the women and their half a dozen ranch hands on the wall-walk behind the wooden barricade.

As it turned out, it was just the women, Ibero the cleric and lame old Rebeño the groom that she joined. Fernan had already taken the ranch hands with him outside the walls. For an ambush, one of the house women said, hesitantly. Miranda, with no precious horses nearby, permitted herself a stream of entirely unmitigated profanity. Then she swiped at her brow again and climbed the wet steps to the high walk along the western side of the wall, to watch and wait. Someone offered her a hat to keep the rain from her eyes.

After a while she decided the spear was a waste of time, and exchanged it for a bow and a quiver full of arrows, taken from one of the six small guard shelters along the wall. There were no guards in the shelters. All the soldiers were in Esteren, or with Rodrigo.

The boys can handle trouble, he had written. Blithely.

She imagined seeing her husband riding home just then, emerging from the trees into the wide, grassy space before their walls. She imagined shooting him as he rode up.

The land around the Belmonte ranch was level and open in all directions, save to the west and southwest where Rodrigo’s father and his grandfather before him had left a stand of oak and cedar undisturbed. Rodrigo hadn’t touched the trees, either, though for a different reason.

There were holy associations with that wood, and with the pool in the midst of it, but young Fernan Belmonte had been taught by his father years ago, when he could first ride a proper horse, that the forest was deceptively useful for defense, as well.

“Think about it,” he could remember his father saying. “If you wanted to attack this place unseen, which way would you approach?”

Fernan had looked around at the exposed grassland stretching in all directions. “Have to come through the trees to get close,” he’d said. It was an easy answer.

“So we can be almost certain any attack will come that way, because otherwise, if our outriders aren’t asleep, we’ll be able to observe anyone’s approach, won’t we?”

“Or if Diego sees something,” Fernan had added, “even if they come through the woods.”

“That’s true,” his father had agreed briefly, though not happily.

In those early days his father and mother were still struggling to come to terms with what Diego could see and do. Fernan didn’t have any such problems, but he knew Diego best of all, of course.

Years later, on a morning of soft, unseasonable summer rain he was with two of their friends and the six ranch hands in the twin gullies on either side of the natural exit from the woods. The gullies weren’t natural, of course. Rodrigo’s soldiers had hollowed them out in the grassy plain to make a place where they could lie unseen and watch anyone coming out of the trees.

Fernan had four other boys with bows posted halfway between the ranch buildings and the southern pastures where the mares and foals were that morning. There were two messengers with these four, to bring word if anyone appeared from the south. A last horseman was alone east of the ranch, just in case.

Diego, riding up breathlessly a few moments before, reported that he’d relayed instructions to their mother, who would be up on the wall, then, with the other women. She knew what to do. They were as ready as they could be. Fernan turned up his collar against the rain and sat in the gully under the wide brim of his hat, waiting.

There were two possibilities. If someone was approaching Rancho Belmonte with ill intent, they might be coming for the ranch compound and the people inside the walls or, more likely, they were here for the horses. Or both, Fernan corrected himself. But that would mean quite a lot of men, and in that case they might actually be in trouble. He didn’t think that was the case. He wasn’t much worried, in fact. He was thirteen years old.

“I have them,” he heard his brother say softly. “They just entered the trees. I know who this is,” Diego said.

“De Rada?” Fernan asked calmly. “The younger one?”

Diego nodded. They had both read their father’s last letter.

Fernan swore. “That means we can’t kill him.”

“Don’t see why not,” said Diego matter-of-factly.

“Bloodthirsty child,” Fernan grinned.

An identical grin on an identical face showed through the softly falling rain. Fernan was fifteen minutes older. He liked reminding Diego of that. Diego was hard to tease, however. Very little seemed to bother him.

“About twenty men,” he said. “They’re on the path in the woods now.”

“Of course they are,” said Fernan. “That’s why the path is there.”

He had lost his hat at some point, and during the period of walking north one of Garcia de Rada’s boots had split at the heel. He was, accordingly, wet at crown and sole, riding through the copse of trees west of the Belmonte ranch compound. There seemed to be a rough trail leading through the wood; the horses were able to manage.

Despite his discomfort, he was fiercely happy, with a red, penetrating joy that made the long journey here seem as nothing now. His late, unlamented cousin Parazor had been a pig and a buffoon, and far too quick to voice his own thoughts on various matters. Thoughts that seemed all too frequently to differ from Garcia’s own. Nonetheless, during the trek north from Al-Rassan, Garcia had been sustained in his spirit by a sense of gratitude to his slain cousin. Parazor’s death at the hands of a lice-ridden Asharite peasant boy in a hamlet by Fezana was the event that would deliver Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda into Garcia’s hands. And not only his hands.

Once Rodrigo Belmonte had recklessly ordered a de Rada of rank to be executed by a peasant child, against all codes of conduct among gentlemen in the three Jaddite kingdoms of Esperaña, he had exposed himself—and his family—to the response that blood demanded for such an insult.

The king could and would do nothing, Garcia was certain, if the de Rada took their just measure of revenge for what Rodrigo had done. The just measure was easy enough to calculate: horses for their own horses taken, and one woman taken in a rather different way for the execution of a de Rada cousin after he had sued for ransom. It was entirely fair. There were precedents in the history of Esperaña for a great deal more, in fact.

Garcia had resolved upon his course even while walking and stumbling north through darkness after the raid on Orvilla. Blood dripping from his torn cheek, he had kept himself going by visualizing the naked figure of Miranda Belmonte twisting beneath him, while her children were made to watch their mother’s defilement. Garcia was good at imagining such things.

Twenty-four of his men survived Orvilla, with a dozen knives and assorted other small weapons. They took six mules late the next day from another hamlet, and a broken-backed nag from a small-farmer in an imprudently isolated homestead. Garcia claimed the horse, miserable as it was. He left the Asharite farmer and his wife and daughter for his companions. His own thoughts were a long way north and east already, over the border in Valledo, in the lands between the River Duric’s source and the foothills of the Jaloña mountains.