The Lions of Al-Rassan (19 page)

“What else?”

“Two men let their shadows show in the water. With doubled moonlight one has to be careful.”

“Anything else?” Her voice had grown even colder.

He considered it, and decided that two things were enough. He was still trussed up, and she still had an arrow. The other matters could wait.

“Nothing, Miranda. I told you, they did very well.”

She stabbed him again, hard, in the other leg.

“Jad’s light!”
he gasped. “Miranda, will you—”

“Tell truth. What else?”

He drew a breath. “I recognized the whicker of Fernan’s horse when they brought him up outside. They knew too well where my boot knife was. They were too gentle when they tied me. And this whole affair was too precisely located along the stream to be an improvised ambush. It had to be Diego seeing me and knowing which way I was coming. Is that enough, Miranda? May I get up now? May I kiss you?”

“Yes, no, and possibly later,” said his wife. “Have you any idea how angry I am, Rodrigo?”

Bound and bleeding on the earth, Rodrigo Belmonte was able to say, quite truthfully, “Some idea, yes.”

His expression must have been diverting, because his wife, for the first time, showed an indication of being amused.

She suppressed it quickly. “Armed men came for us, you uncaring bastard. You left me with children and range hands thirty years past their usefulness.”

“That isn’t just,” he said. “I’m truly sorry you were frightened. You know I am. I didn’t think even Garcia de Rada would do anything so stupid as an attack here, and I did think you and the boys were equal to whatever might come. I told you that.”

“I told you that,”
she mimicked. “How thoughtful of you.”

“If the boys are going to follow me,” he said levelly, “they will have to learn to handle matters of this sort, Miranda. You know it. They’ll be marked as my sons the minute they join a company—mine or anyone else’s. They’ll be pushed, and challenged. I can’t do anything about that except help make them equal to those challenges when they come. Unless you want them both to take vows and join the clerics?”

“Twenty-four horsemen attacked us, Rodrigo. What if Diego hadn’t seen them?”

He said nothing. The truth was, he’d been having nightmares about that since word of the raid had come to them in Esteren. He didn’t want to say it, but there must have been more in his expression than he thought, because Miranda abruptly tossed her arrow aside and knelt on the earth beside him.

“I see,” she said quietly. “You were frightened, too. All right. Half a mistake, half testing the boys. I can live with that.”

“I’m not sure if I can,” he said, after a moment. “If anything had happened . . .”

“That’s why I shot him. I know you wouldn’t have done it. I know it wasn’t very honorable, but a man who would do what he did . . . He wouldn’t have stopped, Rodrigo. He would have come back. Better I killed him than that you had to,
after
he’d done something to us.”

He nodded his head. It wasn’t easy, bound as he was. She made no movement to release him.

“I’m sorry you had to kill someone.”

She shrugged. “Given who it was, it was easier than I would have thought. The boys had to kill men, too.”

“In the world they are growing into, that was bound to happen.”

“I would have preferred it not be so soon, Rodrigo.”

He said nothing. She settled back a little, looking at him, still making no move to untie his bonds.

“The king called you a frail woman.”

She smiled at that. “You didn’t disagree?”

“I did, actually. I asked them to pray for me because I had to go home and tell you what has happened.”

“We heard. You sent the messenger so I’d have time to calm down, I suppose.”

His mouth crooked. “It doesn’t seem to have worked very well. Untie me, Miranda. I’m stiff and both my legs are bleeding.”

She made no movement. “Two years’ exile? It could have been worse, I suppose. Where will you go?”

“Is this the way to discuss such matters?”

“It will do well enough. Where will you go, Rodrigo?”

He sighed. “Not Jaloña, obviously, and I still wouldn’t be welcome in Ruenda. I could take the company out of the peninsula to Ferrieres or Batiara but I won’t. Things might be starting to happen here, and I don’t want us to be too far away. South, then. Al-Rassan again.”

“Where?” She was concentrating. There seemed to be a rock under the small of his back.

“Ragosa, I think. King Badir can use us. He’s hard-pressed between Cartada and Jaloña and outlaws raiding from the south. There’s money to be made.”

“Isn’t Ragosa where your doctor went?”

He blinked. “Good for you. She isn’t my doctor, but yes, it is where she went. I still want to try to enlist her.”

“I’m sure. She’s very pretty, didn’t you say?”

“I said nothing remotely resembling such a thing. Am I a complete idiot?”

“Yes. Is she?”

“What?”

“Is she pretty?”

Rodrigo drew another careful breath, not easy given his position. “Miranda, I am married to the most beautiful woman I know. I am not a man to fairly judge such things in others. She’s comely enough. Blue eyes, rare for a Kindath.”

“I see. You noticed them?”

“Miranda.”

“Well, you did.” Her expression was deceptively mild. He had learned to mistrust that expression. The rock under his back seemed, improbably, to have grown larger.

“I am trained to notice things, Miranda. About men and women. If I had been better trained fifteen years ago I would have noticed you were a cruel and ungenerous woman.”

“Perhaps,” she said placidly. “Too late now. Tell me, what do I always say when you go away?”

“Oh, Jad! Don’t start again. I
know
what you always—”

“Say it. Or I’ll find my arrow again. I promised myself I’d put an arrow in you the day I shot Garcia de Rada. Two pinpricks hardly count.”

“Yes they do,” he said. “And those weren’t pinpricks.” He stopped at what he read in her expression, then said quietly, “I know what you tell me. That if I bed another woman you’ll either bed another man or kill me.”

She was smiling, as if encouraging a child’s display of memory. “Good. And since I don’t want to bed another man . . . ?” she prompted.

Rodrigo sighed. “You’ll kill me. Miranda, I
know
this. Will you let me up?”

She seemed to be thinking about it at least, which was a positive development.

“No,” she said, at length. “Not yet. I think I like you this way.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, alarmed.

But she had shifted forward from where she was, beside him on her knees. She looked appraisingly down at him a moment, then calmly tore open his shirt. His eyes widened. Her hands seemed to be busy with the points and drawstrings of his trousers. It became difficult to breathe.

“Miranda,” he said, “there’s a rock under my back.”

“Oh well,” she murmured with exaggerated solicitude, “we can’t have that, can we?” But she did reach under to remove what turned out to be a laughably small stone.

“Untie me, love. We’ll do better if I’m free.”

“No, we won’t,” said his joy, his torment, his wife, the fierce bright light of his days. “We’ll do very well with you exactly as you are.”

She had finished with his garments. She began removing her own.

“See what I mean?” she said, smiling down at his sex. As she spoke, she slipped off her black tunic. She was wearing nothing beneath. Her small breasts were smooth and firm in the torchlight.

“You see?” she said again. He did, of course.

Eventually he closed his eyes, but not before an interval had passed during which a number of movements on her part took place, bringing him to a point where he couldn’t have judged the passage of time, or anything else for that matter.

The torch had burned out by then, he knew that much. There was nothing to see. Only to feel. Mouth and fingers. Her teeth, in unexpected places. The close, perfect shelter of her sex after so long.

“Shall I let you go?” she asked eventually, a breath in his ear.

“Never,” said Rodrigo, eyes still closed.

Still later, the white moon, descending, slanted through a wide chink in the wall boards and a beam of light fell upon them both. He lay with Miranda upon him, her head on his chest, her dark hair loose, cloaking them both. He felt the rise and fall of her breathing, and drew in the scent and the feel of her—intoxicating as unmixed wine.

“Oh, well,” she murmured, as if continuing a dialogue. “I suppose we
could
use a good doctor.”

“I certainly could,” he said, with feeling.

That made her laugh. At some point, though it was hard to mark the change, the laughter turned to tears. He could feel them falling on his chest.

“Two years is a long time,” she said. “Rodrigo, am I being unfair to you?”

“I don’t expect to be two years without you,” he said. “One way or another.”

She said nothing. Her tears fell in silence. He hesitated, then finally brought down his arms—he had worked free of the bonds in the first moments after being tied—and wrapped them around her.

“Oh, burn you, Rodrigo,” she whispered, when she realized what he’d done, but she didn’t say it severely this time. A moment later, she murmured, dealing with the hardest sorrow of time passing, “They are so young.”

He stroked her hair, down and down her back.

“I know,” he whispered gently. “I know, my love.”

He had killed his own first man when he was twelve. He didn’t tell her that. Not now.

A
re they still in the hut?” Fernan asked.

“Uh-huh,” said Diego.

“What do you think they’re doing?”

“Now, now,” said Ibero the cleric hastily. “That isn’t a proper question!”

“I couldn’t answer it, anyhow,” said Diego, laughing. “Ibero, you look genuinely formidable, by the way.”

Their longtime cleric’s expression was uncertain for a moment, then guardedly pleased. He was indeed remarkably altered: his face daubed with mud under a black hat, garbed like an outlaw, with inserts in new riding boots to make him taller.

Fernan had made Ibero practice speaking in deep tones and walk around in those boots for days, to get used to the speech and the movement. Their cleric and tutor had been, improbably, the leader of the band that captured Rodrigo. The boys had remained out of sight, downriver with the horses. The other outlaws had been ranch hands, disguised as Ibero had been, under orders not to speak a word. They had gone back to the compound already. Now the three of them, two boys and a holy man, sat together on the dark grass under two moons and the stars of the summer night.

“You really think we deceived him?” the cleric asked.

“What? Papa? Don’t be silly,” said Fernan, with an amused glance.

“He’ll have figured it out from at
least
half a dozen things we missed,” said Diego happily. The boys smiled at each other.

The cleric’s face fell. “He will have known us? Then what was the point of the deception?”

“He’ll tell us the half a dozen things. We’ll know better next time,” Fernan explained.

“Besides,” said Diego, “Mother wanted to stab him with an arrow.”

“Ah,” said the cleric. “That’s right. I forgot.” He had been with this family a long time.

They decided to ride back to the ranch house. There was no telling how long Rodrigo and Miranda would remain in that hut. On the way back Fernan began, predictably, to sing. He had an atrocious voice, normally cause for decisive quelling, but neither of the others complained that night. Under the two moons the huge darkness was eased and made welcoming. They could see the mountains far in the distance and the wide stretch of the plain to north and south and rolling west behind them and then, a little later, they caught sight of the torches left burning on the wall around the compound, to bring them all home from the night.

Part III

Seven

W
ell then,” said Almalik of Cartada, the Lion of Al-Rassan, “where is he?”

The king was angry. The signs were obvious to those in the vast and vaulted chamber. Beneath the horseshoe arches with their red and amber interplay of stone, men exchanged uneasy glances. Courtiers and artists in attendance upon a monarch known for his changing moods learned quickly how to read those changes. They watched as the king snatched an orange from a basket held by a slave and began rapidly peeling it himself with his large, capable hands. Those same hands had swung the sword that killed Ishlik ibn Raal not three months ago in this very room, spattering the poet’s blood across the mosaic tiles and marble pillars and the clothing of those standing too close that day.

The young, increasingly acclaimed Tudescan poet had made the mistake of inserting two lines from another man’s writing in his own verse, and then denying that he’d done so deliberately. Almalik of Cartada, however, knew his poetry and prided himself upon that. In the Al-Rassan of the city-kings after the fall of the Khalifate a distinguished poet could confer anxiously sought credibility upon a monarch.

And for fifteen years, Almalik’s principal counsellor, and then the formally declared advisor and guardian of his eldest son and heir, had been that paragon of many arts, Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais. Who had written, most unfortunately for Ishlik ibn Raal, the two stolen lines in question. And of whom, at this precarious moment, three months after, the king was speaking.

“Where is he?” Almalik asked again.

The attendant court figures, some thirty of them on this particular morning, found much to interest them in the geometries of the ceiling decoration or the mosaics of the floor. No one in the room was looking directly at the king, or at the man to whom he spoke. Only the one woman there, sitting among brightly colored cushions arranged near those of the king’s dais, preserved an unperturbed demeanor, lightly plucking at her lute.

The stocky, white-haired commander of the Cartadan army, a man who had seen almost forty years of warfare under the khalifs and after their fall, remained on his knees, his own gaze fixed on the carpet before the dais.

The carpet was magnificent, as it happened, woven and dyed by artisans in the Soriyyan homelands centuries ago, rescued by Almalik from the looting of the Al-Fontina in Silvenes fifteen years before. The echo of the khalifs’ imperial splendor here in Cartada was, of course, entirely deliberate.

Despite his efforts to hide the fact, the kneeling general was visibly afraid. The plagiarizing poet was not the only man to have been killed by the king in his audience chamber, he was only the most recent. Almalik had been a military leader before he was a governor and then a monarch; it was not a thing he allowed his people to forget. The blade that rested in its sheath by the dais was no ornament.

Without lifting his head, the kneeling ka’id murmured, “He is not in Fezana, Magnificence. No man has seen him since . . . the disciplining in that city.”

“You just told me that,” Almalik of Cartada said, his voice close to a whisper now. This was a bad sign, one of the worst. None of the courtiers ranged near the dais or standing between the pillars dared even glance at each other now. “I asked a different question, ibn Ruhala. I asked the supreme ka’id of all my armies where one exceedingly well-known figure is at this moment. Not where he is not. Am I deficient in expressing myself, of late?”

“No, Magnificence! Not at all. Never. The deficiency is mine. I have sent my personal cadre of guards and the best of the Muwardis throughout the country, Magnificence. We have put the most extreme questioning to all who might be privy to ibn Khairan’s whereabouts. Some of these people have died, Magnificence, so zealous were their interrogations. But no one knew, no one knows. Ammar ibn Khairan has disappeared . . . from the face of the earth.”

There was a silence.

“What a dreadfully tired phrase,” said the Lion of Al-Rassan.

Morning sunlight entered the chamber through the high windows, spilling down past upper galleries through the dancing motes of dust. It could be seen that the woman on the pillows smiled at the king’s remark, and that Almalik noted her smile and was pleased. One or two courtiers drew slightly deeper breaths at that. One or two risked smiles of their own, and approving nods.

“Forgive me, Magnificence,” murmured the ka’id, head still lowered. “I am only an old soldier. A loyal, plain man of the battlefield, not an artist with a tongue for honeyed phrases. I can say only what I have found to be true, in the simplest way I know.”

“Tell me,” the king said, biting into a wedge of the orange, “has Prince Almalik been put to the extreme questioning you mentioned?”

The ka’id’s white head went straight down to the floor. It could be seen that his hands had begun to tremble. The woman on the pillows looked up at the dais, her expression grave. Her fingers hesitated upon the strings of the lute and then resumed their movement, though with less attentiveness than before.

There was not a man in the room who did not know that if Prince Almalik was no longer the king’s heir, the two young children of this woman would be living in greatly enhanced circumstances. With Hazem ibn Almalik, the king’s second son, given over to religious extremes and disgraced there would be, effectively, no one between the older of the two boys and succession to the kingship.

“We have asked . . . aid of the prince,” the general stammered into the carpeting. “Of course he was treated with the utmost deference and he . . . he told us what he could. He expressed a great hope that the lord Ammar ibn Khairan would soon be found and returned, that he would be among us all once more. As he had been . . . among us in the past.”

The ka’id’s babbling was manifestly unsuitable for a man of his rank. This was no mere field soldier, this was the commander of the army of Cartada. No one in the room imagined, however, that he would have acquitted himself with greater aplomb in the same circumstances. Not at this juncture. Not in response to that particular question. Those who had smiled were urgently praying to their birth stars that their expressions of levity had passed unnoticed.

Only the four Muwardis, two by the entrance doors and two behind the dais, appeared undisturbed behind their half-veils, watching everything and everyone with inimical eyes, despising them all, not troubling to hide the fact.

The king bit into another section of his orange. “I ought to have the prince summoned,” he said thoughtfully. “But I am certain he knows nothing. Ibn Khairan wouldn’t bother telling such a fool of his plans. Is his eye still dropping like a leper’s, by the way?”

Another silence. Evidently the ka’id ibn Ruhala was nursing a vain hope that someone else might reply to this. When the stillness continued, the general, only the back of his head visible to the king on his dais, so prostrate was he, said, “Your most noble son still suffers, alas, from that affliction, Magnificence. Our prayers are with him.”

Almalik made a sour face. He dropped the remaining section of orange beside his pillows and held up his fingers delicately. The slave, swift and graceful, appeared before the dais with a muslin towel to wipe the juice from the king’s fingers and mouth.

“He looks ridiculous,” Almalik said when the slave had withdrawn. “Like a leper,” he repeated. “He disgusts me with his weakness.”

The woman was no longer even pretending to play at her lute. She watched the king with careful attention.

“Get up, ibn Ruhala,” Almalik said abruptly. “You are becoming an embarrassment. Leave us.”

With unseemly alacrity, the old general scrambled to his feet. He was crimson-faced from keeping his head lowered for so long. He made the quadruple obeisance and began retreating hastily backwards, still bowing, towards the doors.

“Hold,” said Almalik absently. Ibn Ruhala froze, half-bent, like a grotesque statue. “You have made inquiries in Ragosa?”

“Of course, Magnificence. From the moment we began searching in summer. King Badir of Ragosa was our first thought.”

“And south? In Arbastro?”

“Our very second thought, Magnificence! You will know how difficult it is to obtain information from those who live in the lands menaced by that dung-eating outlaw Tarif ibn Hassan. But we have been diligent and uncompromising. It does not appear that anyone has seen or heard of ibn Khairan in those places.”

There was silence again. The woman on the pillows by the dais held her lute but did not play. The room was very still. The colored water in the great alabaster bowl in the central aisle showed not a ripple of movement. Only the dust was dancing, where the slanting sunlight fell.

“Diligent and uncompromising,” the king repeated thoughtfully. He shook his head, as if in sorrow. “You have thirty days to find him, ibn Ruhala, or I will have you castrated and disembowelled and your odious face stuck on a pike in the middle of the market square.”

There was a collective intaking of breath, but it was as if this had been expected; the necessary finale to the scene just played.

“Thirty days. Thirty. Yes. Thank you, Magnificence. Thank you,” said the ka’id. He sounded absurd, fatuous, but no one could think of what else he might have said.

In silence, as ever, the two Muwardis opened the double doors and the general withdrew, facing the dais, still bowing. The doors swung closed. The sound echoed in the stillness.

“The poem, Serafi. We will hear that verse again.” Almalik had taken another orange from the attendant slave and was absently peeling it.

The man addressed was a minor poet, no longer young, honored more for his recitations and his singing voice than for anything he himself had ever written. He stepped hesitantly forward from where he had been standing, half-hidden behind one of the fifty-six pillars in the room. This was not a moment when one wished, particularly, to be singled out for attention. In addition to which, “that poem” was, as everyone knew by now, the last communication to the king from the notorious and celebrated man the ka’id was so unsuccessfully seeking across the whole of Al-Rassan. Under the circumstances, Serafi ibn Dunash would have greatly preferred to be elsewhere at that moment.

Fortunately, he was sober; not a reliable state of affairs for ibn Dunash. Alcohol was forbidden to Asharites of course, but so were Jaddite and Kindath women, boys, dancing, non-religious music and a variety of excellent foods. Serafi ibn Dunash did not dance any more. He relied on that to serve him in good stead with the wadjis, should any of them upbraid him for the laxity of his morals.

It wasn’t the wadjis he was afraid of at the moment, however. In the Cartada of King Almalik it was the secular arms of power that were more greatly to be feared. The secular arms, at the moment, rested lightly on the king’s knees as he awaited Serafi’s recitation. The verses were not flattering, and the king was in an evil mood. The omens were not even remotely auspicious. Nervously, the poet cleared his throat and prepared to begin.

For some reason the slave with the basket of oranges chose this moment to move towards the dais again. He stood directly between Serafi and the king, and then knelt before Almalik. Serafi’s view was blocked, but others in the room now noticed what the slave seemed to have been the first to discern: the king appeared to be in sudden and intense distress.

The woman, Zabira, quickly laid aside her instrument and stood up. She took one step towards the dais and then remained extremely still. The king, in that same moment, slipped awkwardly sideways among his cushions and ended up propping himself up on one hand. His other hand was spasmodically clenching and squeezing over his heart. His eyes were wide open, staring at nothing. The slave, nearest to him by far, seemed paralyzed, frozen in position directly in front of Almalik. He had laid aside the basket of oranges but made no other motion. The king opened his mouth; no sound came out.

It is, in fact, a well-known characteristic of the poison
fijana
that it locks shut the throat just before it reaches the heart. As a consequence, no one in the room save the man kneeling directly in front of him was able to say, afterwards, if the dying king of Cartada realized, before he lost consciousness and life and went to join Ashar among the stars, that the slave who had been offering him oranges all morning had remarkably blue, quite distinctive eyes.

The king’s arm suddenly buckled and Almalik, mouth gaping wide, fell soundlessly amid a scatter of bright pillows. Someone screamed then, the sound echoing among the columns. There was a babble of terrified noise.

“Ashar and the god are merciful,” said the slave, rising from his position and turning to face the courtiers and the stupefied poet in front of the dais. “I really didn’t want to hear that poem again.” He gestured apologetically. “I wrote it in a great hurry, you see, and there are infelicities.”

“Ammar ibn Khairan!” stammered Serafi somewhat unnecessarily.

The erstwhile slave was calmly unwinding his saffron-colored headcloth. He had darkened his skin but had essayed no further disguise: no one ever looked closely at slaves.
“Ammar ibn Khairan!”
stammered Serafi somewhat unnecessarily.

“I do hope he recognized me,” said ibn Khairan in a musing tone. “I think he did.” He dropped the slave’s headcloth among the pillows. He seemed utterly relaxed, standing before the dais on which the most powerful monarch in Al-Rassan lay sprawled in slack-jawed, untidy death.