The Lions of Al-Rassan (29 page)

She changed the dressing on his wound, then withdrew to the other side of the room while the attendants helped him pass water into a beaker for her. She poured the urine into her father’s flask and studied it against the candlelight. The top layer, which told of the head, was mostly clear now. He was going to be all right. She told him as much, speaking in his own language. He sank back into slumber.

She decided to snatch a short rest in the infirmary after all. They made up one of the beds for her and drew a screen in front of it for privacy. She removed her boots and lay down in her clothing. She had done this many times. A doctor had to learn to sleep anywhere, in whatever brief snatches of time were allowed.

Just before she dropped off, a thought came to her: she had, it seemed, just agreed to leave the comforts of city and court to go out on a winter campaign—wherever that expedition turned out to be going. She hadn’t even asked them.
Nobody
went on winter campaigns.

“You idiot,”
she murmured aloud, aware that she was smiling in the darkness.

In the morning the Batiaran remembered his mother, knew where he was, the day of the week and the sub-commanders of his company. When she asked, a trifle unwisely, about his father’s name, he flushed a vivid crimson.

Jehane took pains to show no reaction at all, of course. She swore a silent oath to herself, on the spot, in the name of Galinus, father of all physicians, that she would die before telling Ammar ibn Khairan or Rodrigo Belmonte about this.

That oath, at least, she kept.

Nine

T
he wind was north. Yazir could taste salt in the air, though they were half a day’s ride across the Majriti sands from the sea. It was cold.

Behind him he could hear the flapping of the tents as the wind caught and tugged at them. They had come this far north and set up a camp to meet with their visitor.

On the coast, out of sight beyond the high, shifting dunes, lay the new port of Abeneven, whose walls offered shelter from the wind. Yazir ibn Q’arif would rather be dead and with Ashar among the stars than winter in a city. He shrugged deeper into his cloak. He looked up at the sky. The sun, no menace now at the brink of winter so far to the north, was a pale disk in a sky of racing clouds. There was a little time yet before the third summons to prayer. They could continue this discussion.

No one had said a word, however, for some time. Their visitor was clearly unsettled by that. This was good, on the whole; unsettled men, in Yazir’s experience, revealed more of themselves.

Yazir looked over and saw that his brother had pulled down the veil that covered the lower half of his face. He was breaking beetle shells and sucking at the juices inside. An old habit. His teeth were badly stained by it. Their guest had already declined the offered dish. This, of course, was an insult, but Yazir had gained some insight into the manners of their brethren across the straits in Al-Rassan, and was not unduly perturbed. Ghalib, his brother, was a more impetuous man, and Yazir could see him dealing with anger. The visitor would not be aware of this, of course. Their guest, miserably cold, and obviously unhappy with the smell and feel of the camel hair cloak they had presented him as a gift, sat uncomfortably on Yazir’s meeting blanket and sniffled.

He was ill, he had told them. He talked a great deal, their visitor. The long journey to Abirab and then along the coast to this wintering place of the Muwardi leaders had afflicted him with an ailment of the head and chest, he had explained. He was shivering like a girl. Ghalib’s contempt was obvious to Yazir, but this man from across the straits would not see that either, even with Ghalib’s veil lowered.

Yazir had long ago realized—and had tried to make his brother understand—that the softness of life in Al-Rassan had not only turned the men there into infidels, it had also made them very nearly women. Less than women, in fact. Not one of Yazir’s wives would have been half so pathetic as this Prince Hazem of Cartada, his nose dripping like a child’s in the face of a little wind.

And this young man, lamentably, was one of the devout ones. One of the true, pious followers of Ashar in Al-Rassan. Yazir was forced to keep reminding himself of that. The man had been corresponding with them for some time. Now he had come himself to the Majriti, a long way in a difficult season, to speak his plea to the two leaders of the Muwardis, here on a blanket before flapping tents in the vast and empty desert. He had probably expected to meet them in Abirab, or Abeneven at worst, Yazir thought. Cities and houses were what the soft men of Al-Rassan knew. Beds with scented pillows, cushions to recline upon. Flowers and trees and green grass, with more water than any man could use in his lifetime. Forbidden wine and naked dancers and painted Jaddite women. Arrogant Kindath merchants exploiting the faithful and worshipping their female moons instead of Ashar’s holy stars. A world where the bells summoning to prayer were occasion for a cursory nod in the direction of a temple, if that much.

Yazir dreamed at night of fire. A great burning in Al-Rassan and north of it, among the kingdoms of Esperaña, where they worshipped the killing sun in mockery of the Star-born children of the desert. He dreamed of a purging inferno that would leave the green, seductive land scorched back towards sand but pure again, ready for rebirth. A place where the holy stars might shine cleanly down and not avert their light in horror from what men did below in the cesspools of their cities.

He was a cautious man, though, Yazir ibn Q’arif of the Zuhrite tribe. Even before the foul murder of the last khalif in Silvenes wadjis had been coming across the straits to him and his brother, year after year, beseeching that the tribes sweep north across the water to a burning of infidels.

Yazir didn’t like boats; he didn’t like water. He and Ghalib had more than enough on their hands controlling the desert tribes. He had elected to roll small dice only behind his veil—akin to a cautious play in the ancient bone game of the desert—and had allowed some of his soldiers to go north as mercenaries. Not to serve the wadjis either, but the very kings they opposed. The petty-kings of Al-Rassan had money, and paid it for good soldiers. Money was useful; it bought food from north and east in hard seasons, it hired masons and shipbuilders—men Yazir had reluctantly come to realize he needed, if the Muwardis were to have any more permanence than the drifting sands.

Information was useful, too. His soldiers sent home all their wages, and with these sums came tidings of affairs in Al-Rassan. Yazir and Ghalib knew a great deal. Some of it was comprehensible, some was not. They learned that there were courtyards within the palaces of the kings, and even in the public squares of cities, where water was permitted to burst freely from pipes through the mouths of sculpted animals—and then to run away again, unused. This was almost impossible to credit, but the tale had been reported too many times not to be true.

One report—this one a fable, obviously—even had it that in Ragosa, where a Kindath sorcerer had bewitched the feeble king, a river ran through the palace. It was said that there was a waterfall in the sorcerer’s bedchamber, where the Kindath fiend bedded helpless Asharite women, ripping their maidenheads and laughing at his power over the Star-born.

Yazir stirred restlessly within his cloak; the image filled him with a heavy rage. Ghalib finished cracking beetles, pushed the earthenware dish away, pulled up his veil and mumbled something under his breath.

“I’m sorry?” the Cartadan prince said, leaping at the sound. He sniffled. “My ears. I’m sorry. I failed to hear. Excellence?”

Ghalib looked at Yazir. It was increasingly evident that he wanted to kill this man. That was understandable, but it remained a bad idea, in Yazir’s view. He
was
the older brother. Ghalib would follow him, in most things. He narrowed his eyes in warning. Their visitor missed this of course; he missed everything.

On the other hand, Yazir abruptly reminded himself, Ashar had taught that charity towards the devout was the highest deed of earthly piety, short of dying in a holy war, and this man—this Hazem ibn Almalik—was as close to being truly devout as any prince of Al-Rassan had been in a long time. He was here, after all. He had come to them. They had to take note of that. If only he wasn’t such a sorry, emasculated excuse for a man.

“Nothing,” Yazir grunted.

“What? I beg—”

“My brother said nothing. Do not trouble yourself so.” He tried to say it kindly. Kindness did not come naturally to him. Neither did patience, though that he had been at pains to teach himself over the years.

His world was different now from when he and Ghalib had led the Zuhrites out of the west and swept all the other tribes before them, leaving the sands blood-red where they passed. More than twenty years ago that was. They had been young men. The khalif in Silvenes had sent them gifts. Then the next khalif, and the next, until the last one was slain.

There was still blood on the sands, most years. The tribes of the desert had never taken easily to authority. Twenty years was a very long time to have held sway. Long enough even to build two cities on the coast, with shipyards now and warehouses, and three more cities inland, with markets, where the gold of the south could be assembled and dispersed in the long caravans. Yazir hated settlements, but they mattered. They were marks of endurance on the shifting face of the desert. They were a beginning to something larger.

The next stage of permanence for the Muwardis, though, lay beyond the sands. That much was becoming more and more clear to Yazir as the seasons and the stars turned.

Ghalib flatly rejected the very thought of leaving the desert life he knew, but not the idea of a holy war across the straits. That idea he liked. Ghalib was good at killing people. He was not a man well-suited to leading the tribes in peacetime, or to building things that might remain after him, for his sons and his sons’ sons. Yazir, who had come out of the west those long years ago with a string of camels and a sword, with five thousand warriors and a bright, hard vision of Ashar, was trying to become such a man.

Ibn Rashid, the ascetic, the wadji who had come to the westernmost Zuhrite tribes bearing the teachings of Ashar from the so-called homelands none of the Muwardis had ever seen, would have approved, Yazir knew that much.

The wadji, gaunt and tall, with his unkempt white beard and hair and his black eyes that read souls, had settled with six disciples in a cluster of tents among the wildest people of the desert. Yazir and his brother, the sons of the Zuhrite chieftain, had come one day to laugh at this new, harmless madman in his settlement, where he preached the visions of another madman in another desert in a far land named Soriyya.

Their lives had changed. The life of the Majriti had changed.

Ashar’s truths had been moving through the desert for some time before ibn Rashid came west, but none of the other tribes had accepted those truths and pursued them as resolutely as the Zuhrites were to do when Yazir and Ghalib led them east—all of them veiled now like ibn Rashid—in holy, cleansing war.

Yazir had spent almost half of his life trying to earn his wadji’s approval, even after ibn Rashid had died and only his rattling bones and skull accompanied Yazir and Ghalib in their journeys. He still tried to measure his deeds by what the wadji’s eyes would have seen in them. It was difficult, trying to change from a simple warrior, a son of the desert and stars, to a leader in a slippery world of cities and money, of diplomats and emissaries from across the straits or far to the east. It was very difficult.

He needed scribes now, men who could decipher the messages brought him from those other lands. In scratchings on parchment lay the deaths of men and the fulfillment or rejection of Ashar’s starry visions. That was a hard thing to accept.

Yazir often envied his brother his clear approach to all things. Ghalib had not changed, saw no reason to change. He was a Zuhrite war leader still, direct and unblunted as a wind. This man sitting before them, for example. For Ghalib he was less than a man, and he sniffled, and insulted them by refusing to eat food they offered. He ought, therefore, to be slain. He would provide some amusement then, at least. Ghalib had a number of ways of killing men. This one, Yazir thought, would probably be castrated, then given to the soldiers—or even the women—to be used. Ghalib would see such a death as an obvious one.

Yazir, a son of the hard desert himself, half-inclined to agree, continued his long struggle towards a different view of things. Hazem ibn Almalik was a prince from across the water. He could rule Cartada if circumstances changed only slightly. He was here to ask Yazir and Ghalib to change those circumstances. That would mean, he had told them, a true believer on the dais of the most powerful kingdom in Al-Rassan. He would even don the half-veil of the Muwardis, he told them.

Yazir didn’t know what a dais was, but he did understand what was being asked of him. He was fairly certain his brother understood as well, but Ghalib would have a different attitude. Ghalib would hardly care who ruled Cartada in Al-Rassan. Whether this man adopted the veil ibn Rashid had ordained for the tribes—to screen and hold back impieties—would be a matter of uttermost indifference to Ghalib. He would simply want the chance to go to war again in the name of Ashar and the god. War was good, a holy war was the best thing in the world.

Sometimes, though, a man striving to shape a divided, tribal people into a nation, a force in the world, something more than drifts of sand, had to try to hold back his desires, or rise above them.

Yazir, on his blanket in the north wind, with winter coming, felt a deep uncertainty gnawing at his vitals. No one had ever warned him that leadership, this kind of leadership, was bad for the stomach.

He had begun losing his hair years ago. His scalp, though usually covered, had burned the same hue as the rest of his face over the years. Ghalib, with no concerns save how to keep his warriors killing enemies and not each other, still had his long dark mane. He wore it tied back, to keep it from his eyes and he still wore his thong about his neck. Men sometimes asked about that. Ghalib would smile and decline to answer, inviting speculation. Yazir knew what the thong was. He was far from a squeamish man, but he didn’t like thinking about it.

He looked up at the wan sun again. There remained only a little time before prayers. There was information their visitor lacked. He had been a long time journeying here; others had left after him and come before. Yazir was still unsure how to make use of this.

“What about the Jaddites?” he asked, by way of a beginning.

Hazem ibn Almalik jerked like a snared creature at the words. He flashed Yazir a startled, revealing glance. It was the first concrete question either of the brothers had put to him. The wind whistled, sand blew.

“The Jaddites?” the man repeated blankly. He was, Yazir, concluded, very nearly simple-minded. It was a pity.

“The Jaddites,” Yazir repeated, as if to a child. Ghalib glanced at him briefly and then away, saying nothing. “How strong are they? We are told Cartada allows payment of tribute to the Horsemen. This is forbidden by the Laws. If such tribute is paid there must be a reason. What is the reason?”