The Lions of Al-Rassan (34 page)

Alvar had been part of the first small group that had run up—no horses allowed, by ibn Khairan’s orders—to close the southern entrance to the valley after the Jaloñans had gone through. They were posing as outlaws, he understood that much: as part of the same band lying in ambush to the north. And they were meant to be seen by the Jaloñan outriders.

They were. Martín spotted the two scouts in plenty of time to have killed them had they wanted to. They didn’t want to. For whatever reason in this indecipherable scheme, they were to allow the scouts to see them and then race back into the valley to report. It was very hard to puzzle out. It was made even harder for Alvar because all through the tense movements of the morning he had been forced to listen to Jehane’s voice from high on the slopes as she moaned her desire for the yellow-haired Jaloñan commander in the valley ahead of them. He didn’t like that part at all, though most of the others seemed to find it killingly funny.

By the time Laín Nunez gave the order to ride—the horses had been brought up the moment the two scouts left—Alvar was in a mood to do injury to someone. It did cross his mind, as they galloped north in the wintry sunlight, that he was about to kill Jaddites in an Asharite cause. He tried not to let that bother him. He was a mercenary, after all.

Nino was wearing good armor. One arrow hit his chest and was turned away, another grazed his unprotected calf, drawing blood. Then his horse, moving too quickly, trod on emptiness and fell into a pit.

It screamed as it impaled itself upon the forest of stakes below. The screaming of a horse is a terrible sound. Nino di Carrera, lithe and desperate, hurled himself from the saddle even as the horse was falling. He grabbed for the near wall of the pit, clutched, held, and hauled himself out. Just in time to be nearly trampled by the mount of one of his men, veering frantically around the death pit.

He took a kick in the ribs and sprawled on the frozen ground. He saw another horse coming and rolled, agonizingly, away from flailing hooves. He fought for air. The breath had been knocked out of him and his ears were ringing, but Nino found that all limbs were intact. Gasping, wheezing, he could move. He scrambled to his feet, only to discover that he’d lost his sword in the pit. There was a dead man beside him with an arrow in his throat. Nino seized the soldier’s blade, ignoring the pain in his ribs, and looked around for someone to kill.

No shortage of candidates. Outlaws were pouring down from the slopes on either side of the defile. At least thirty of Nino’s men—probably more—were down, dead or crippled by the spear trap and the volley of arrows. That still left a good number of Horsemen, though, and these were Asharite bandits opposing them, offal, dogs, food for dogs.

Holding a hand to his side, Nino roared his defiance. His men heard him and cheered. He looked around for Edrique. Saw him battling three men, fighting to maneuver his horse in the narrow space. Even as Nino watched, one of the bandits ducked in under the legs of Edrique’s mount and stabbed upwards. A peasant’s way to fight, knifing horses from below. It worked, though. Edrique’s stallion reared up on its hind legs, screaming in pain as the man with the short sword scrambled away.

Nino saw his second-in-command beginning to slide in the saddle. He was already sprinting towards him. The second outlaw, waiting for Edrique to fall, never knew what killed him. Nino’s swinging sword, white rage driving it, hewed the man’s unhelmed head from his shoulders. It landed in the grass a distance away and rolled like a ball. The blood that fountained from the headless torso spattered them all.

Nino roared in triumph. Edrique swung his feet free of the stirrups to fall free of the maimed horse. He was up on his feet instantly. The two men exchanged a fierce glance, then fought together, side by side in that dark defile, two of Jad’s holy warriors against legions of the infidels.

Against bandits, really, and as he swung his sword again and again and strove to carve a space to advance, Nino abruptly reclaimed the thought he had found and then lost earlier.

It chilled him, even amid the clotted, sweating chaos of battle: whoever his outriders had seen coming up south of the valley
couldn’t
have been part of this ambush. It was so obvious. Where had his mind been?
No one
laid a death trap like this and then split his forces.

Struggling for understanding again, Nino tried to get some sense of what was happening, but the narrow ground between the steep slopes meant that the fighting was desperately close, hand-to-hand, fists and knives and shoulders as much as swords. No chance to step back and evaluate anything. They were spared the arrows now. With their own men entangled with the Jaddites, the bandits could not shoot.

The mules!
Nino suddenly remembered the gold. If they lost that there was no point to anything else. He hammered his metal-clad forearm into a bandit’s face and felt bones crunch with the blow. With a moment’s respite he looked quickly around and spotted a cluster of his men ringing the gold. Two of the mules were down: the cowards had shot at the animals again.

“Over there!” he shouted to Edrique, gesturing. “Fight over that way!”

Edrique nodded his head and turned. Then he fell. Someone jerked a sword out from his ribs.

In the space where his second-in-command had stood a moment before, a brave, competent, living man, Nino saw an apparition.

The man who had killed Edrique had to be at least sixty years old. He was built like an ox, though, massive and thick-muscled, broad-shouldered, heavy-browed, a huge, ugly head. He was dripping with blood. His long, snarled white beard was dyed and clotted with it; blood streamed from his bald head and had soaked the dun-colored clothing and leather armor he wore. The man, eyes wild with battle lust, leveled his red sword at Nino.

“Surrender or you will die!”
he roared in crude Esperañan. “We grant ransoming if you yield!”

Nino glanced past the outlaw. Saw the ring of his men still holding around the mules. Many dead, but more of their foes fallen in front of them—and his company were soldiers, the best Jaloña had. The old man was bluffing, taking Nino for a coward and a fool.

“Jad rot you!”
Nino screamed, his throat scraped raw. He cut viciously on the backhand against the other man’s blade and drove the blood-soaked figure back a step with the sheer force of his rage. Another outlaw rushed up on Nino’s left; Nino twisted under his too-high sword stroke and swept his own blade back across and down. He felt it bite into flesh. A red joy filled him. His victim made a sloppy, wet sound and fell to the frosted earth.

The white-bearded outlaw froze for a moment, screaming a name, and Nino used that hesitation to ram straight into him and then past, as the man gave way, to where most of his remaining men were ferociously defending the gold. He stumbled into their ranks, greeted with glad, fierce cries, and he turned, snarling, to fight again.

Surrender? To these? To be ransomed by the king from Asharite bandits, with the
parias
lost? There were worse things than dying, far worse things.

This is not war as I dreamed it,
Alvar was thinking.

He was remembering the farm, childhood, an eager boy, a soldier’s only son, with a wooden sword always by his bed at night. Images of glory and heroism dancing beyond the window in the starry dark after the candles had been blown out. A long time ago.

They were waiting in pale cold sunlight at the north end of the valley.

Kill anyone who comes out, Laín Nunez had said. Only two men had. They had been battling each other, grappled together, grunting and snorting like animals. Their combat had carried them right out of the defile, tumbling and rolling, fingers clawing at each other’s eyes. Ludus and Martín, efficient and precise, had moved their horses over and dispatched both men with arrows. The two bodies lay now, still intertwined, on the frosted grass.

There was nothing remotely heroic or even particularly dangerous about what they were doing. Even the night sweep into the burning hamlet of Orvilla last summer had had more intensity, more of a sense of real warfare, than this edgy waiting while other men killed each other out of sight in the dark space north of them.

Alvar glanced over his shoulder at a sound and saw the Captain riding up, with Jehane and ibn Khairan. Jehane looked anxious, he thought. The two men appeared calm, unconcerned. Neither spared a glance for the two dead men on the grass. They cantered their horses up to Laín Nunez.

“It goes well?” Rodrigo asked.

Laín, predictably, spat before answering. “They are killing each other for us, if that is what you mean.”

Ammar ibn Khairan grinned at the tone. Rodrigo offered a level glance at his second-in-command. “You know what this is about. We’ve had our real battles and we’ll have them again. We’re trying to achieve something here.”

Laín opened his mouth to reply, then shut it firmly. The expression in the Captain’s face was not conducive to argument.

Rodrigo turned to Martín. “Take a quick look. I need the numbers in there. We don’t want the Jaloñans to win, of course. If they are, we’ll have to move in, after all.”

Alvar, vainly trying to follow, was made edgy again by his ignorance. Laín might know what was going on, but no one else did. Was it always this way in war? Didn’t you usually know that your enemy was ahead of you and your task was to be braver and stronger? To kill before you were killed? He’d a feeling Laín felt the same way.

“He’s already been in there,” Laín said sourly. “I do know what I’m doing. It is balanced, about thirty of each left. The outlaws will break soon.”

“Then we have to go in.”

It was ibn Khairan who spoke, looking at Rodrigo. “The Jaloñans are good. You said they would be.” He glanced at Laín. “You get your battle, after all.”

Jehane, beside him, still looked worried. It was difficult to relate her expression to the intoxicated words Alvar had heard her crying from among the trees.

“Your orders, Captain?” Laín was staring at Rodrigo. His tone was formal.

For the first time Rodrigo Belmonte looked unhappy, as if he’d rather have heard different tidings from the defile. He shrugged his shoulders, though, and drew his sword.

“Not much choice, though this won’t be pretty. We’ve wasted our time if di Carrera fights free or the outlaws break.”

He lifted his voice then, so fifty men could hear him. “We’re going in. Our task is exact: we are joining the bandits. Not a man of the Jaloñans leaves that defile. No ransom. Once they see us and know we are here we have no choice about that. If even one of them makes it back to Eschalou and reports our presence this has all been for nothing and worse than that. If it helps at all, remember what they did at Cabriz in the War of Three Kings.”

Alvar did remember that. Everyone in Valledo did. He had been a bewildered child, watching his father weep when tidings came to the farm. King Bermudo had besieged the city of Cabriz, promised amnesty on surrender, then slaughtered every Valledan fighting man when they rode out under the banner of truce. The Asharites were not the only ones with a grasp of savagery.

Even so, this was still not war as he had imagined it. Alvar looked towards Jehane again. She had turned away. In horror, he thought at first, then saw that she was gesturing to someone near the back of their ranks. Velaz came forward, calm and brisk as ever, with her doctor’s implements. Alvar felt ashamed: she wasn’t reacting emotionally, as a woman, she was simply readying herself, physician of a company about to go into battle. He had no business doing less than the same. No one had ever said a soldier’s life was designed to give fulfillment to a child’s dreams.

Alvar drew his sword, saw others doing the same. A few shaped the sign of the sun disk as they did, whispering the words of the soldier’s invocation:
Jad send us Light, and let there be Light waiting for us.
The archers fitted arrows to strings. They waited. Rodrigo looked back at them, nodded his approval. Then he lifted and dropped his hand. They rode out of the sun into the defile where men were killing each other in the cold.

Nino di Carrera knew that he was winning. There came a moment in every battle when one could sense the rhythm changing and he had felt it now. The outlaws had needed to defeat them quickly, with the chaos of the spear pit and the shock of their archers’ ambush. Once those had been survived—if barely—this became a clash of roughly even forces and could have only one result. It was only a question of time before the Asharites broke and fled; he was mildly surprised they hadn’t done so by now. Even as he fought, shoulder to shoulder with his men in the ring around the gold, Nino was beginning to calculate his next course of action.

It would be pleasant to pursue this rabble when they ran, exceedingly pleasant to burn them alive for the deaths of so many men and so many purebred horses. There was the woman, too, if she could still be found on the slopes. A burning would go a long way towards addressing the grievances of this morning.

On the other hand, he was likely to emerge from this evil place with no more than twenty men and a long way yet to travel through hostile country with the gold of Jaloña’s future. He simply could not afford to lose any more soldiers after this. They were going to have to travel at speed, Nino realized; no rest except what was utterly necessary, riding by night as well. They could travel with two horses, at least, for each man left, which would spare the beasts, if not the riders.