The Lions of Al-Rassan (27 page)

It was cold after dark in Ragosa, this late in the year with a wind blowing. He wanted that cold. He wanted solitude and starlight, the bite of that wind off the lake. His footsteps led him that way, past shuttered shops, then the warehouses, and then, beyond them, walking alone and in silence, to a long pier by the water’s edge. He stopped there finally, breathing deeply of the night air.

Overhead, the stars were very bright, and the moons. He saw how the city walls reached out into the water here like two arms, almost meeting, enclosing the harbor. In the moonlight he watched the single-masted fishing boats and the smaller and larger pleasure craft tossed up and down on the dark, choppy waters of the lake. The slap and surge of waves. Water. What was it about water?

He knew the answer to that.

They came from the desert, his people. From shifting, impermanent dunes and sandstorms and harsh, bleak, sculpted mountains; from a place where the wind could blow forever without being checked or stayed. Where the sun killed and it was the night stars that offered promise of life, air to breathe, a breeze to cool the blistering fever of the day. Where water was . . . what? A dream, a prayer, the purest blessing of the god.

He had no memory of such places himself, unless it was a memory that had come with him into the world. A tribal memory bred into the Asharites, defining them. Ammuz and Soriyya, the homelands, as a presence in the soul. The deserts there. Wider sands, even, than those of the Majriti. He had never seen the Majriti, either. He had been born in Aljais, here in Al-Rassan, in a house with three splashing fountains. Even so, he was drawn to water when distressed, when something within him needed assuaging. Far from the desert, the desert lay inside him like a wound or a weight, as it lay inside them all.

The white moon was overhead, the blue just rising, a crescent. With the city lights behind him the stars were fierce and cold above the lake. Clarity, that was what they meant to him. That was what he needed tonight.

He listened to the waves striking against the pier beneath his feet. Once, a pause, again. The surging rhythm of the world. His thoughts were scattered, bobbing like the boats, refusing to coalesce. He was in some discomfort physically but that wasn’t important. Weariness mostly, some bruises, a gash on one calf that he had simply ignored.

The afternoon’s challenge in the lists had been effortless, in fact. One of the things with which he was having trouble.

There had been five against the two of them, and the Karcher had chosen four of the best captains in Ragosa to join him. There was a visible anger in those men, a grimness, the need to prove a point and not just about wages. It had been contrived as a display, an entertainment for court and city, not to-the-death. But even so, eyes beneath helms had been hard and cold.

It ought never to have been so swift, so much like a dance or a dream. It was as if there had been music playing somewhere, almost but not quite heard. He had fought those five men side-by-side and then back-to-back with Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo, whom he had never seen in his life, and it had been as nothing had ever been before, on a battlefield or anywhere else. It had felt weirdly akin to having doubled himself. To fighting as if there were two hard-trained bodies with the one controlling mind. They hadn’t spoken during the fight. No warnings, tactics. It hadn’t even lasted long enough for that.

On the pier above the cold, choppy waters of Lake Serrana, ibn Khairan shook his head, remembering.

He ought to have been elated after such a triumph, perhaps curious, intrigued. He was deeply unsettled instead. Restless. Even a little afraid, if he was honest with himself.

The wind blew. He stood facing into it, looking north across the lake. On the farther shore lay the
tagra
lands where no one lived, with Jaloña and Valledo beyond. Where the Horsemen of Jad worshipped the golden sun the Asharites feared in their burning deserts. Jad. Ashar. Banners for men to gather beneath.

He had spent his life alone, whether in play or at war. Had never sought a company to command, a coterie of sub-commanders, or even, truthfully, a friend. Companions, hangers-on, acolytes, lovers, these had always been a part of his life, but not real friendship—unless one named the man he had poisoned in Cartada.

Ibn Khairan had come over the years to see the world as a place in which he moved by himself, leading men into battle when necessary, evolving plans and courses for his monarch when asked, crafting his verses and songs whenever the patterns of life allowed space for that, linking and unlinking with a succession of women—and some men.

Nothing for very long, nothing that went too deep. He had never married. Had never wanted to, or been pressured to do so. His brothers had children. Their line would continue.

If pressed, he would probably have said that this cast of mind, this steady, ongoing need for distance, had its origin on a summer’s day when he had walked into the Al-Fontina in Silvenes and killed the last khalif on a fountain rim for Almalik of Cartada.

The old, blind man had praised his youthful verses. Had invited him to visit Silvenes. An aged man who had never wanted to ascend the khalif’s dais. Everyone knew that. How should a blind poet rule Al-Rassan? Muzafar had been only another piece on the board, a tool of the court powers in corrupt, terrified Silvenes. Dark days those had been in Al-Rassan, when the young ibn Khairan had walked past bribed eunuchs and into the Garden of Desire bearing a forbidden blade.

It was not hard, even now, to make a case for what he had done, for what Almalik of Cartada had ordered done. Even so. That day in the innermost garden of the Al-Fontina had marked ibn Khairan. In the eyes of others, in his own eyes.
The man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan.

He had been young then, rich with a sense of his own invulnerability and a dazzled awareness of all the shimmering possibilities the world held in store.

He wasn’t young any more. Even the cold, this keen wind off the water, knifed into him more sharply than it would have fifteen years ago. He smiled at that, for the first time that night, and shook his head ruefully. Maudlin, unworthy thoughts. An old man in a blanket before the fire? Soon enough, soon enough. If he lived. The patterns of life. What was allowed.

Come, brother,
Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo had said today as five hard men with swords had walked forward to encircle the two of them.
Shall we show them how this is done?

They had shown them.

Brother.
A golden disk of Jad on a chain about his throat. Leader of the most dangerous company in the peninsula. One hundred and fifty Horsemen of the god. A beautiful wife, two sons. Heirs to be taught, even loved perhaps. Pious and loyal, and deadly.

Ibn Khairan knew about that last, now. Only stories before. Nothing like it, ever, in a lifetime of combat. Five men against them. Trained, magnificent fighters, the best mercenaries in Ragosa. And in no time at all, really, they were down, it was over. A dance.

Usually he could remember each individual movement, every feint and parry and thrust of a battle for a long time afterwards. His mind worked that way, breaking down a larger event into its smaller parts. But this afternoon was already a blur. Which was a part of why he was so unsettled now.

He had looked at Belmonte after, and had seen—with relief and apprehension, both—a mirror image of that same strangeness. As if something had gone flying away from each of them and was only just coming back. The Valledan had looked glazed, unfocused.

At least,
Ammar had thought,
it isn’t only me.

There had been uncontrolled noise by then, delirious, deafeningly loud. Screaming from up on the walls and from the royal stand by the lists. Hats and scarves and gloves and leather flasks of wine sailing through the air to land about them. It had all seemed to be coming from a long way off.

He had tried, out of habit, to be sardonic. “Shall we kill each other for them now, to set a seal on it?” he’d said.

The men they’d defeated were being helped to their feet, those who could rise. One man, the Karcher, had a broken arm from the flat of a sword. Another was unable to stand; they were carrying him away on a litter. A woman’s pale blue scarf, drifting down through the sunlight, had fallen across his body. Ammar could only vaguely remember having faced the man with the broken arm. It had been at the very outset. He could not clearly recall the blow, the sequence of it. Too strange, that was.

Rodrigo Belmonte had not laughed at his attempted jest, or smiled, standing beside him amid that huge and distant noise.

“Do we want a seal on it?” he’d asked.

Ammar had shaken his head. They had stood alone in the middle of the world. A small, still space. Dreamlike. Clothing, flowers now, more wine flasks, flying through the autumn air. So much noise.

“Not yet,” he’d said. “No. It may come, though. Whether we want it or not.”

Rodrigo had been silent a moment, the grey eyes calm beneath an old helm with the figure of an eagle on it. From the king’s stand a herald was approaching, formally garbed, gracious, deeply deferential.

Just before he reached them, the Valledan had said softly, “If it comes, it comes. The god determines all. I never did anything like this, though, in all my life. Not fighting beside another man.”

A star fell into the darkness of the hills west of the lake. Ibn Khairan heard footsteps behind him. They paused, and then withdrew. One person. A watchman. No danger. There wouldn’t be danger here, in any case.

He was very tired, but his mind would not allow him rest. The high white moon laid a shining, rippled track on the water, the blue crescent cast a faint one from the east. They met where he stood. This was a property of water at night. Light flowed along it to where one stood.

I earned a goodly portion of my wages today,
he thought. Wages. He was a mercenary soldier now, in the service of a king who would be happy to see Cartada in ruins. Who might decide to send an army west to achieve that in the spring. Ammar, by his contract, would be a part of that army, a leader of it. He wasn’t used to such shiftings of allegiance.

He had killed Almalik. Twenty years’ companion. The slow rise and then the swift rise to power together. Men changed over the years. Power ebbed and flowed, and did things to them. Time and the stars turned and men changed.

The man he’d slain was the only person he could ever have called a friend in the world, even though one didn’t use that word of kings. He’d sung his lament tonight. Mazur ben Avren’s request, meant to wound. A subtle mind, that. But he’d already been working on the verses during the ride east with Zabira. Had offered them this evening to a banquet hall of Cartada’s enemies. A room with a stream running through it. Water again. Ashar’s dream amid the desert sands. It was an affectation, that banquet room, but impressive nonetheless, and tastefully done. He could come to like Badir of Ragosa, he told himself, could respect Mazur ben Avren. There was a life beyond Cartada, with scope and sweep.

Where lesser beasts now gather . . .

He shook his head. Turned away from the lake and started back, with the wind and the moons behind him now.

From the shadows by the oak-timbered wall of a warehouse she saw him leave the water’s edge and the outthrust arms of the city walls. She had retreated here to wait, after walking almost to the pier. As he approached she saw—her eyes by now adjusted to the moonlight—an odd, inward look to his face and she was half-inclined to let him pass. But even as that thought formed she realized that she had stepped forward into the street after all.

He stopped. His hand moved to his sword and then she saw that he knew her. She expected something ironic, a jest. Her heart was beating rapidly.

“Jehane bet Ishak. What are you doing abroad at night?”

“Walking,” she said. “The same as you.”

“Not the same at all. It isn’t safe for a woman. There’s no point to being foolish.” She felt a useful flare of anger.

“I do wonder how I’ve survived this long in Ragosa without your guidance.”

He was silent. He still had that strange look to him. She wondered what had driven him to the lake. She hadn’t come out to quarrel, although she couldn’t have said why she
had
come. She changed her tone. “I am known here,” she murmured. “There is no real danger.”

“In the dark? On the waterfront?” He raised his eyebrows. “You could be killed for your cloak or merely because of your religion. Where’s your servant?”

“Velaz? Asleep, I hope. He’s had a long day and night.”

“And you?”

“Long enough,” she said. “Where you injured I tried to heal. I’ve come from the infirmary.” What was it, she asked herself, that kept causing her to challenge him?

He looked at her. The steady, unrevealing gaze. The pearl in his ear gleamed palely in the moonlight. He said, “It’s too cold to stand here. Come.” He started walking again, back towards the center of the city.

She fell into stride. The wind was behind them, cutting through her cloak. It
was
cold, and despite what she’d implied, Jehane was unused to being abroad this late. In fact, the last time had been the night of the day she met this man. The Day of the Moat. She had thought it had been his savage device, that slaughter of innocent men. All of Al-Rassan had thought so.