The Lions of Al-Rassan (45 page)

“Not duty,” he said.

And Jehane realized then, belatedly, something important about him.

He walked her home. She invited him in for a midday meal, but he declined, graciously. She ate alone, fish and fruit, prepared by the cook Velaz had hired for them.

Thoughtfully, she went to look in on her patients later in the day, and thoughtfully she came home at twilight to bathe and dress for the banquet at the palace.

Mazur had sent jewelry for her, another generous act. It was a notoriously elegant occasion, she had learned, the king’s banquet on the eve of Carnival. Husari had presented her with her gown, crimson dyed, edged in black. He had flatly refused payment—one argument she had lost, resoundingly. She looked at the gown in her room. It was exquisite. She had never worn anything like it in her life.

The Kindath were supposed to wear blue and white only, and without ostentation. It had been made clear, however, that for tonight—and most certainly for tomorrow—such rules were suspended in King Badir’s Ragosa. She began to dress.

Thinking about Husari, she remembered his speech of the morning. The pompous, lofty style of a mock-scholar. He had been jesting, he said.

But he hadn’t been, or not entirely.

At certain moments, Jehane thought, in the presence of men like Husari ibn Musa or young Alvar, or Rodrigo Belmonte, it was actually possible to imagine a future for this peninsula that left room for hope. Men and women could change, could cross boundaries, give and take, each from the other . . . given enough time, enough good will, intelligence.

There was a world for the making in Esperaña, in Al-Rassan, one world made of the two—or perhaps, if one were to dream, made of three. Sun, stars and the moons.

Then you remembered Orvilla, the Day of the Moat. You looked into the eyes of the Muwardis, or paused on a street corner and heard a wadji demanding death for the foul Kindath sorcerer ben Avren, who drank the blood of Asharite infants torn from their mothers’ arms.

Even the sun goes down, my lady.

Rodrigo had said that.

She had never known a man like him. Or no, that was not quite so. One other, met on the same terrible day last summer. They were like a bright golden coin, those two, two sides, different images on each, one value.

Was that true? Or did it just
sound
true, like the words of one of those pedagogues Husari mocked, all symmetry, no substance?

She didn’t know the answer to that. She missed Nunaya and the women outside the walls of Fezana. She missed her own room at home. She missed her mother.

She missed her father very much. He would have liked to have seen her looking as she did now, she knew. He would never see her again, never see anything again. The man who had done that to him was dead. Ammar ibn Khairan had killed him, and then written his lament. Jehane had been near to tears, hearing that elegy, in the palace where they were dining again tonight, in a room with a stream running through it.

It was very hard, how many things in life you never discovered the answers to, no matter how much you tried.

Jehane stood before her seldom-used looking glass and put on Mazur’s jewelry. She stayed there, looking at herself, for a long time.

Eventually, she heard music approaching outside, and then a knocking at the door downstairs. She heard Velaz going to answer. Mazur had sent an escort for her; strings and wind instruments, it sounded like. She had made him feel guilty last night, it seemed. She ought to be amused by that. She remained motionless another moment, staring at her image in the glass.

She didn’t look like a doctor serving with a military company. She looked like a woman—not young with the extreme freshness of youth, but not so old, either, with quite good cheekbones and blue eyes accentuated now by paint and Mazur’s lapis lazuli at ears and throat. A court lady, about to join a glittering company at a palace banquet.

Looking at the figure in the glass, Jehane offered her small shrug. That, at least, she recognized.

The mask, her real disguise, lay on the table beside the glass. That was for tomorrow. Tonight, in the palace of King Badir, however altered she might seem, everyone would still know she was Jehane. Whatever that meant.

Thirteen

W
ere you pleased?” the king of Ragosa asked his chancellor, breaking a companionable silence. Mazur ben Avren glanced up from the cushions where he reclined. “I ought to be asking you that,” he said.

Badir smiled in his deep, low chair. “I am easily pleased,” he murmured. “I enjoyed the food and the company. The music was splendid tonight, especially the reeds. Your new musician from Ronizza is a discovery. Are we paying him well?”

“Extremely well, I’m sorry to say. There have been other offers for his services.”

The king sipped from his glass, held it to the nearest candle flame and looked, thoughtfully. The sweet wine was pale: as starlight, the white moon, a northern girl. He tried briefly but failed to think of a fresher image. It was very late. “What did you think of the verses tonight?”

The verses were an issue, as it happened.

The chancellor took his time before answering. They were alone again, in the king’s chambers. It occurred to ben Avren to wonder how many times over the years the two of them had sat like this at the end of a night.

Badir’s second wife had died six winters ago, giving birth to his third son. The king had never remarried. He had heirs, and no single overriding political interest had emerged to dictate an obvious union. It was useful at times for a secure monarch to be unattached: overtures came, and negotiations could be spun out a long while. Rulers in three countries had reason to believe their daughter might one day be queen of wealthy Ragosa in Al-Rassan.

“What did
you
think of the verses, my lord?”

It was unlike the chancellor to deflect a question back. Badir raised one eyebrow. “Are you being careful, old friend? With me?”

Mazur shook his head. “Not careful. Uncertain, actually. I may be . . . prejudiced by my own aspirations in the realm of poetry.”

“That gives me most of an answer.”

Mazur smiled. “I know.”

The king leaned back and put his feet up on his favorite stool. He balanced his wine on the wide arm of the chair.

“What do I think? I think most of the poems were indifferent. The usual run of images. I also think,” he added, “that our friend ibn Khairan betrayed a conflict in his verse—either deliberately, or something he would rather have kept hidden.”

The chancellor nodded slowly. “That seems exact. You will think I am flattering, I fear.” King Badir’s glance was keen. He waited. Mazur sipped from his wine. “Ibn Khairan’s too honest a poet, my lord. He might dissemble in speech and act, but not easily in verse.”

“What do we do about it?”

Mazur gestured gracefully. “There is nothing to do. We wait and see what he decides.”

“Ought we to try to influence that decision? If we know what our own desires are?”

Mazur shook his head. “He knows what he can have from you, my lord.”

“Does he?” Badir’s tone sharpened. “I don’t. What is it he can have from me?”

The chancellor laid his glass down and sat up straighter. They had been drinking all night—during the banquet, and now alone. Ben Avren was weary but clear-headed. “It is, as ever, yours to decide, my lord, but it is my view that he can have whatever it is he wants, should he choose to remain with us.”

A silence. It was an extraordinary thing to have said. Both men knew it.

“I need him so much, Mazur?”

“Not if we choose to stay as we are, my lord. But if you wish to have more, then yes, you need him that much.”

Another reflective stillness.

“I do, of course, wish to have more,” said King Badir of Ragosa.

“I know.”

“Can my sons deal with a wider realm when I’m gone, Mazur? Are they capable of such?”

“With help, I think so.”

“Will they not have you, my friend, as I have?”

“So long as I am able. We are much the same age, as you know, my lord. That,” said the chancellor of Ragosa, “is actually the point of what I am saying.”

Badir looked at him. He held up his almost empty glass. Mazur rose smoothly and went to the sideboard. He took the decanter and poured for the king and then, at a gesture, for himself. He replaced the decanter and returned to his cushions, subsiding among them.

“It was an
extremely
short poem,” said the king of Ragosa.

“It was.”

“Almost . . . perfunctory.”

“Almost. Not quite.” The chancellor was silent a moment. “I think he was giving you a compliment of an unusual kind, my lord.”

“Ah. How so?”

“He let you
see
that he is struggling. He did not hide the fact behind some bland, elaborate homage.”

The king’s turn to be silent again. “Let me understand you,” he said at length. There was a trace of irritation in his voice now, a rare thing. He was tired. “Ammar ibn Khairan, asked to offer a verse for my birth day, recites a quick little piece about there always being water from a pool or wine in my cup. That is all. Six lines. And my chancellor, my poet, says this is to be construed as a compliment?”

Mazur looked undisturbed. “Because he could so easily have done more, my lord, or at the least, have claimed his inspiration was inadequate to the magnitude of the occasion. He is too experienced not to have done so, had he felt the slightest need to play a courtier’s game. Which means he wanted you—and me, I suppose—to understand that he is being and will be honest with us.”

“And that is a compliment?”

“From a man such as this, I believe it is. He is saying he believes we are thoughtful enough to read that message in his six lines, and wait for him.”

“And we
will
wait for him, Mazur?”

“It is my counsel, my lord.”

The king stood up then, and so the chancellor did the same. Badir strode, in jewelled slippers on the carpet and the marble floor, to a window. He turned the latch and pushed open both panes of beautifully etched glass. He stood overlooking a courtyard with almond and lemon trees and a fountain. Torches had been left burning below to light the play of water.

From beyond the palace the streets of the city were quiet. They would not be tomorrow night. In the distance, faintly, could be heard the sound of a stringed instrument, and then a voice, yearning. The blue moon was overhead, shining through the open window and upon the splashing fountain and the grass. Stars glittered around the moon and through the branches of the tall trees.

“You think a great deal of this man,” King Badir said finally, looking out at the night.

“What I think,” said his chancellor, “if you will allow me to pursue a poet’s conceit and imagine men as bodies in the heavens, is that we have the two most brilliant comets in the sky here in Ragosa this spring.”

Badir turned back to look at him. After a moment, he smiled.

“And where would you put yourself, old friend, in such a glittering firmament?”

And now the chancellor, too, smiled.

“That is easy, in truth. I am a moon at your side, my good lord.”

The king thought about that. He shook his head. “Inexact, Mazur. Moons wander. Your people are named for that. But you have not. You have been steadfast.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

The king crossed his arms, still musing. “A moon is also brighter than comets in the dark,” he said. “Though being familiar, perhaps it occasions less note.”

Mazur inclined his head but said nothing.

“Will you be going abroad tomorrow night?”

Mazur smiled. “I always do, my lord. For a little time. Carnival is useful, to walk about unknown, and gauge the mood of the city.”

“And it is solely duty that takes you out, my friend? You find no pleasure in the night?”

“I would never say that, my lord.”

The two men shared the smile this time.

After a moment, Badir asked, bemusedly, “Why plain water from a pool, though, Mazur. In his verse. Why not just a rich red wine?”

And this, too, his chancellor explained to him.

A little later, Mazur ben Avren took leave of his king. When, at length, he reached his own quarters in the palace, the Lady Zabira was waiting.

She had been very much present at the banquet, of course, and had all the questions of someone who understood royal courts very well and wished to rise in this one. She also displayed, gracefully, a continuing desire to minister to whatever needs the chancellor of Ragosa might have—in a fashion that might surpass anyone who had come before her.

As it happened, she had been doing just that through the winter, to his pleasure and surprise. He had thought he was too old for such a thing to happen.

Later that night, when he was drifting towards the shores of sleep, feeling her youthful nakedness against his body, soft as a cat, warm as a pleasant dream, Mazur heard her ask one last question. “Did the king understand what ibn Khairan meant in his poem tonight? About the water at the drinking place?”

She was clever too, this lady from Cartada, sharp as a cutting edge. He would do well to remember that. He was getting old; must not allow it to render him vulnerable. He had seen that happen to other men.

“He understands it now,” he murmured, eyes closed.

He heard her laugh then, softly. Her laughter seemed to ease him wonderfully, a caressing sound. One of her hands slid across his chest. She turned herself a little, to fit more closely to him.

She said, “I was watching Ammar tonight. I have known him for many years. I believe he is troubled by something beyond . . . divided loyalty. I don’t think he understands it himself yet. If I am right, it would be amusing, in truth.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her, waiting. And then she told him something he would never have even contemplated. Women, Mazur ben Avren had long thought, had an entirely different way of seeing the world. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed their company so much.

Soon after that she fell asleep. The chancellor of Ragosa lay awake for a long time, however, considering what she had said, turning it over and over in his mind, as a stone in the hand, or the different possible endings for a verse.

For the bright lord of Ragosa,

Long-tenured on his dais,

Much-loved, and deservedly,

May there always be in times to come

Cool water from the moonlit pool

And wine in the drinking glass.

He could perhaps have said,
alone by the pool,
Ammar ibn Khairan reflected, but that would have had a flavor of sycophancy, however subtle, and he wasn’t ready—so soon after the elegy for Almalik—to give so much to Badir of Ragosa in a verse. Almost, but not quite. That was the problem.

It was lions, of course, who were alone when they came down to the water to drink.

He wondered if the king had been offended by his brevity, which would be a pity. The banquet tables had barely settled themselves to silence when ibn Khairan, given pride of place, first recital, had already finished speaking his brief verse. The lines were as simple as he could make them, more a well-wishing than an homage. Save for the hint . . . the moonlit waters. If Badir understood. He wondered.

I am too old, Ammar ibn Khairan said to himself, justifying, to abuse my craft.

Any of your crafts?

The inner voice always had the hard questions. He was a soldier and a diplomat as well as a poet. Those were the real crafts of his living here in Ragosa, as they had been in Cartada. The poetry? Was for when the winds of the world died down.

What ought a man honorably to do? To aspire towards? Was it the stillness of that pool—dreamed of, and written about—where only the one beast dared stalk from the dark trees to drink in the moonlight and under the stars?

That stillness, that single image, was the touchstone of verse for him. A place out of the wind, for once, where the noise of the world and all the brilliant color—the noise and color he still loved!—might recede and a deceptively simple art be conjured forth.

Standing, as he had stood one night before—the night he’d first come here—by the waters of Lake Serrana, ibn Khairan understood that he was still a long way from that dark pool. Water and water. The dream of the Asharites. The water that nourished the body and the waters the soul craved. If I am not careful, he told himself, I’ll end up being good for nothing but mumbled, cryptic teachings under some arch in Soriyya. I’ll let my beard and hair grow, walk barefoot in a torn robe, let my students bring me bread and water for sustenance.

Water the body needed, waters the soul desired.

There were lanterns in the rigging of all the fishing boats, he saw by the blue moonlight. They were not yet alight. That would come tomorrow. Carnival. Masks. Music and wine. Pleasures of torchlight. A brilliance until dawn.

Sometimes the darkness needed to be pushed back.

Beloved Al-Rassan,
the thought came to him in that moment, sharp and unexpected as a blade from beneath a friend’s cloak,
shall I live to shape your elegy as well?