The Lions of Al-Rassan (26 page)

Jehane had not actually known he could be cruel. She abruptly remembered that it had been ibn Khairan, in her father’s chambers, who had warned her to be careful with Mazur. And with the thought she realized that he was looking at her. She felt herself flush, as if discovered at something. His own expression thoughtful, Ammar turned back to the chancellor.

“As you wish,” he said simply. “It is a worthy subject.”

The poem he offered them that night, after the banquet dishes and cups had been cleared away, after the afternoon’s extraordinary encounter in the lists beneath the city walls, was to travel the length and breadth of the peninsula, even on the bad roads of winter.

By spring it had made people weep—more often than not against their will—in a score of castles and as many cities and towns, notwithstanding the fact that Almalik of Cartada had been the most feared man in Al-Rassan. It is an old truth that men and women sometimes miss what they hate as much as what they love.

On the night that lament was first offered, in the banquet room of Ragosa by a man who still preferred to name himself a poet before anything else, it had already been decided that war with Cartada would be premature, whatever the dead king’s woman might desire for her sons. There was no real dissent. Winter was coming; not a time for armies. Spring would doubtless open a course of wisdom to them, much as flowers would open in the gardens and the countryside.

Guarding Zabira’s two boys had become rather more important than hitherto; everyone agreed on that as well. Princes were useful, especially young ones. One couldn’t have too many royal pawns. It was another old truth.

At the very end of that extremely long day and night—after the meeting, after the passage of arms, after the banquet, after the verses and the toasts and the last lifted glasses of wine in the splendid room where the stream ran—two men remained awake, speaking together in the king of Ragosa’s private chambers with only the servants, lighting candles, in the room with them.

“I don’t feel easy at all,” said Mazur ben Avren to his king.

Badir, leaning back in a low chair—an exquisite thing, Jaddite in style but made of Tudescan redwood, with ivory legs in the shape of lions’ feet—smiled at his chancellor and stretched out his legs upon a stool.

The two men had known each other a long time. Badir had taken a huge risk at the very outset of his reign in appointing a Kindath chancellor. The texts of Ashar were explicit: no Kindath or Jaddite could hold sovereign authority of any kind over the Star-born. No Asharite could even be employed by them. The penalty, if one followed the desert code, was the death by stones.

Of course no one who mattered in Al-Rassan followed the desert code. Not during the Khalifate, not after. The glass of wine in the king’s hand was the most current evidence of that. Even so, a Kindath chancellor had been a very large thing—a gamble that the wadjis would complain as usual but be able to do no more. There was a chance that roll of dice might have cost Badir his newly claimed crown and his life if the people had risen in righteous wrath. In return for that risk taken, Mazur ben Avren, the so-called Prince of the Kindath, had made Ragosa not only independent, but the second most powerful kingdom in Al-Rassan in the turbulent years after the Khalifate’s fall. He had guided the city and her king through the dangerous shoals of a swiftly changing world, had kept Ragosa free and solvent and proud.

He had ridden with the army himself in the first years, in campaigns to the south and east, and had directed it in the field, triumphantly. His mount had been a mule, not a forbidden horse; Mazur knew enough to offer the wadjis their necessary symbols of deference. Nonetheless, the simple truth was that Mazur ben Avren was the first Kindath to command an army in the western world in five hundred years. Poet, scholar, diplomat, jurist. And soldier. More than anything else, those early military triumphs had ensured his survival and Badir’s. Much could be forgiven if a war went well and an army came home with gold.

Much
had
been forgiven, thus far. Badir ruled, ben Avren beside him, and together they had shared another dream: a desire to make Ragosa beautiful as well as free. A city of marble and ivory and gardens of exquisite detail. If Cartada to the west under the hated and feared Almalik had inherited the larger portion of the power of the khalifs, Ragosa on Lake Serrana was an emblem of other things Silvenes once had been in the lost days of splendor.

They were an old team by now, the king and his chancellor, deeply familiar with each other, without illusions. Each of them knew that an ending could come at any time, from any number of directions. The moons waxed and waned. The stars could be hidden by clouds, or burned away by the sun.

If Silvenes and the Al-Fontina could fall, if that city and palace could be sacked and fired and left as nothing more than wind-borne ashes of glory, any city, any kingdom could be brought down. It was a lesson learned by all who claimed any measure of power in the peninsula after the death of the last khalif.

“I know you’re uneasy,” King Badir said, glancing up at his chancellor. He gestured. “For one thing, you haven’t touched your glass. You don’t even know what I’ve poured for us.”

Mazur smiled briefly. He picked up his golden wine, looked at it in the candlelight and then sipped, eyes closed.

“Wonderful,” he murmured. “Ardeño vineyards, and a late growth, surely? When did this come?”

“When do you think?”

The chancellor sipped again, with real pleasure. “Of course. This morning. Not from the woman, I’d imagine.”

“They said it was.”

“Of course they did.” There was a silence.

“That was a remarkable poem we heard tonight.” The king’s voice, resuming, was low.

Ben Avren nodded. “I thought so.”

King Badir looked at his chancellor for a moment. “You’ve done as well, in your time.”

Mazur shook his head. “Thank you, my lord, but I know my limits there.” Another pause. Mazur stroked his carefully trimmed beard. “He’s an extraordinary man.”

The king’s gaze was direct. “Too much so?”

Ben Avren shrugged. “On his own, perhaps not, but I’m not entirely sure of being able to control events through a winter with the two of them here.”

Badir nodded, sipped his wine. “How are those five men, from this afternoon?”

“All right, I am told. Jehane bet Ishak is looking after them tonight. I took the liberty of asking her to do that in your name. One broken arm. One who is apparently uncertain of his name or where he is.” The chancellor shook his head ruefully. “The one from Karch who proposed the challenge is the one whose arm was fractured.”

“I saw that. Deliberate?”

The chancellor shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

“I’m still not certain how that was done to him.”

“Neither is he,” ben Avren said.

The king grinned and after a moment so did his chancellor. The two attendant servants had finished with the candles and the fire by now. They stood, motionless as statues, by the doors to the room.

“They fought as if they had been together all their lives,” Badir said musingly, setting down his glass. He looked at his chancellor. Mazur gazed back without speaking. A moment later the king said, “You are thinking about how best to use them. About Cartada?”

The chancellor nodded. Their glances held for a long time. It was as if they had exchanged a dialogue without words. Mazur nodded again.

The king’s expression was sober in the candlelight. “Did you see how they stared at each other this morning, in the garden?”

“That would have been difficult to miss.”

“You think the Valledan’s a match for ibn Khairan?”

Mazur’s finger came up and stroked his beard again. “Very different men. You saw them, my lord. He may be. He may actually . . . I don’t know
what
I think about that, my lord, to be honest. I do know there’s too much power gathering here, and I don’t think the wadjis, among others, will like
any
of it. Jaddite soldiers from Valledo now, to go with those from across the mountains, the princely sons of a courtesan, a female Kindath doctor to go with a Kindath chancellor, and now the most notoriously secular man in Al-Rassan . . .”

“I thought
I
was that last,” King Badir said with a wry expression.

Mazur’s mouth quirked. “Forgive me, my lord. The
two
most notorious, then.”

Badir’s expression grew reflective again. He’d had a great deal of wine, without evident effect. “Zabira said Almalik’s second son had gone across the straits. To speak with the Muwardi leaders, she said.”

“Hazem ibn Almalik, yes. I knew that, actually. He went some time ago. Stopped for a while in Tudesca with the wadjis there.”

Badir absorbed this. The range and depth of ben Avren’s information was legendary. Not even the king knew all his sources.

“What do you make of it?”

“Nothing good, my lord, to be truthful.”

“Have we sent our gifts to the desert this year?”

“Of course, my lord.”

Badir lifted his glass and drank. Then his mouth twitched again, the same wry amusement as before. “There was never an assurance of anything good from the time we began, was there? We’ve had a long run, my friend.”

“It isn’t over.”

“Nearly?” The king’s voice was soft.

The chancellor shook his head grimly. “Not if I can help it.”

Badir nodded, relaxed in his chair, sipping the good wine. “It will be as the stars dispose. What do we do, in the meantime, with these . . . lions in my city this season?”

“Send them out, I think.”

“In winter? Where?”

“I do have an idea.”

The king laughed. “Don’t you always?”

They smiled at each other. King Badir raised his glass and silently saluted his chancellor. Mazur rose and bowed, setting down his own wine.

“I will leave you,” he said. “Good night, my lord. The stars and Ashar’s spirit guide you safely through to dawn.”

“And your moons ease the dark for you, my friend.”

The chancellor bowed a second time and went out. The nearer of the servants closed the door after him. The king of Ragosa did not go immediately to bed, however. He sat in his chair for a long time, unmoving.

He was thinking of how kings died, of how their glory came and lingered a while, and went. Like the taste of this good wine, he thought. This gift of Ammar ibn Khairan, who had killed his own king a little time ago. What did a king leave behind? What did
anyone
leave behind? And that led him circling back to the words they’d heard recited after dinner, while lying at ease on their couches in the banquet room with the tame stream running through it, rippling quietly, a murmurous background to the spoken words.

Let only sorrow speak tonight.

Let sorrow name the moons.

Let the pale blue light be loss

And the white one memory.

Let clouds obscure the brightness

Of the high, holy stars,

And shroud the watering place

Where he was wont to slake his thirst.

Where lesser beasts now gather

Since the Lion will come no more . . .

Badir of Ragosa poured, deliberately, the last of the sweet, pale wine and drank it down.

S
omeone else was late to bed in the palace of Ragosa, for all that it had been an eventful day and night, even for a man accustomed to such things.

Caught in the difficult space between physical fatigue and emotional unrest, the lord Ammar ibn Khairan finally left the elegant quarters assigned him for the night to go out into the streets long after dark.

The night guards at the postern doors knew him. Everyone seemed to know him already. Nothing unusual there. He was a man who needed to be disguised to pass unnoticed in Al-Rassan. Anxious and overexcited, they offered him a torch and an escort. He declined both with courtesy. He wore a sword for protection, which he showed them. He made a jest at his own expense; they laughed eagerly. After the afternoon’s engagement they could hardly doubt his ability to defend himself. One of them, greatly daring, said as much. Ibn Khairan gave him a silver coin and then, with a smile, offered the same to the other two guards. They almost fell over each other opening the doors.

He went out. He had wrapped himself in a fur-lined cloak over his own clothing. He wore his rings again. No point to the steward’s disguise any more. That had served its purpose on the road, in the inns between Cartada and here. They had been traveling with a kingdom’s worth of gems in the two coffers he had allowed Zabira; over the years Almalik had not been less than generous with the woman he loved. It had been necessary therefore, traveling here, to appear both unconcerned and unimportant. It was not necessary any more.

He wondered where Zabira was tonight, then dismissed the thought as unworthy. She would captivate someone here soon enough—the king, the chancellor, perhaps both—but not yet. Tonight she would be with her sons. The young princes. Pieces on the board in the new, larger game. That much had been decided at the meeting before the challenge in the lists. He had begun, during that crisp discussion, to grasp precisely how shrewd Mazur ben Avren was. Why Badir had risked so much to keep his Kindath chancellor by him. There had been a reputation, of course. One formal encounter. Letters exchanged, over the years, and clever poems read. Now he had met the man. A different sort of challenge. Much to think about. It had been a fully engaged day, truly.