The Lions of Al-Rassan (61 page)

He ordered the withdrawal. Dead Valledans were strewn through the camp. The food and the supply wagons were burning. They rode out to the north and crossed the river by the narrow bridge. The last men chopped it down, just to be sure.

They raced back to Fezana without incident, were known and admitted at the southern gate. Aziz made his report to the governor. Then he and his men were immediately detailed to join others in fighting the fires that had begun in their absence. It appeared that someone had chosen a poor moment to perform an entirely proper act: dealing with the Kindath of the city.

It was mid-morning before Aziz ibn Dabir fell, exhausted, into bed. His shoulder had begun to hurt quite badly during the labors of the long night. He dozed fitfully, despite his fatigue, knowing that word would be traveling south across Al-Rassan and then the straits to the desert all too soon.

Word of how Aziz ibn Dabir had been on the very brink of defeat in combat with a single Valledan and had only been saved by the intercession of men he led. Aziz was painfully aware that the extent of his own contribution to the ambush at Orvilla had been to kill a child and then mutilate a man others had slain for him—which, among the tribes, was woman’s work. Yazir might tolerate this, in a captain of experience, but his brother Ghalib, who commanded the armies of the Majriti for him, was less likely to do so.

And Aziz happened to be one of those who knew the origins of the extremely unusual thong Ghalib ibn Q’arif wore about his neck.

H
e could not remember feeling so pure a terror in all his life. His heart was pounding uncontrollably as he raced over the plain; he thought he might actually lose control of himself, fall off the horse, be trampled to death by those who followed in his wake.

That might be, thought Rodrigo Belmonte, a blessing, the way shooting a horse or a hunting dog with a broken leg was a gift of mercy.

He was a horse or a dog like that.

He was a father trying to outrun the arc of time to his son. Terror was in him, defined him, made his mind a blank of dread.

Nothing like this, ever before. Fear, yes. No honest soldier could truly say he had never known fear. Courage lay in fighting past that, through it, rising above it to do what one had to do. He had faced his own death many times, and feared it, and dealt with that fear. He had never felt what he was experiencing now, in this night of Al-Rassan, hurtling towards Orvilla for the second time in less than a year.

And with that thought, Rodrigo saw the fires burning ahead of him and knew—a soldier, a trained soldier—that he was too late.

He heard a sound in the night. A name, his own voice crying, over and over, the one name. His child’s. It was dark. It was dark under the stars, and there were fires ahead.

The Muwardis—it would have been Muwardi warriors, of course—had left by the time he came racing up to the low stockade and leaped it and flung himself from his horse amid burning wagons and tents and slain, mutilated men he knew.

He found Ibero first. He had no comprehension of how the man had come to be here. The little cleric lay in a pool of his own blood, black in the light of the fires. His hands and feet had been cut off. They lay a little distance from his body, pieces of a child’s torn doll.

Rodrigo smelled burning flesh. Some of their people had been thrown on the cooking fires. He stumbled towards the central green, remembering it from the summer before. Hope gone now, but with no defenses in him against this, he saw the severed head of Gonzalez de Rada and, beside it, the body of the constable, leggings torn off, sprawled obscenely atop the small, face-down figure of a boy.

Rodrigo heard himself make a sound again.

A wordless plea. For mercy, for kindness, for time to run backwards and let him be here soon enough. In time to save his child, or die with Diego if nothing else were allowed.

Sounds, sights, the smell of flesh burning faded away into a distance. He walked over to the two bodies lying there.

As in a dream, his movements impossibly slow, he knelt down and rolled Gonzalez de Rada’s body off the prone figure of his son. He saw then—dreamlike, unbelieving—what else had been done to the constable of Valledo.

Then, gently, gently, as in a dream, he turned Diego over on the blood-soaked ground and saw the blow that had broken his head. He began to weep then, rocking back and forth, for the child in his arms who had gone away.

He heard, as from a distance, others coming up now. Horses. Footsteps. Running, then walking. They stopped. Somehow a thought came to him. Not looking up, unable to look up, he said, to whoever was near, “Fernan. Stop Fernan. Don’t let him see this.”

“It is me, Papa. Oh, Papa, is he
dead
?”

He looked up then. He forced himself. He had a living child. Twin to this one. Bonded souls. Different all their lives, but one birth, one face. Together, always, against what the world had brought them. Not any more. Fernan would be feeling a nakedness now, Rodrigo thought, an icy wind blowing right through him in the place where his brother had been.

By the light of burning wagons he saw Fernan’s face. And Rodrigo Belmonte knew, in that moment, that the boy would never entirely move past this image of seeing his dead brother in his father’s arms. It would shape him and define his life to come and there was nothing Rodrigo could do to alter that.

He had to stop weeping, though. He had to try.

Ammar ibn Khairan was here, just behind Fernan. His had been the warning, immediate but too late. He, too, would have seen slaughters like this in his time. Killings and desecrations meant to convey a message, a warning. Rodrigo remembered, suddenly, the Day of the Moat and what ibn Khairan had done to the king of Cartada in the aftermath of that. Killing. An answer, of a kind.

He realized that he was close to losing all control. “Ammar, please take him away,” he whispered. “He ought not to be seeing this. Go with this man, Fernan.
Please.
”

“Is he dead?” Fernan asked again, ignoring or unable to register the mute, terrible evidence of the shattered and bleeding skull.

“Come, Fernan,” said ibn Khairan gently, a poet’s voice. “Let us walk over to the river and sit a moment. Perhaps we can each pray, after our own fashion. Will you do that with me?”

In the distant, muffled place to which he seemed to have come, Rod-rigo watched his son walk away with Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais. An Asharite. An enemy.
Guard him,
he wanted to say to Ammar, but there was no need now, and it was too late. The damage had been done.

He looked down again at the child he was holding. Diego. Little one. Poets everywhere wrote about hearts breaking for love. He wondered if they really knew. He felt, absurdly, as if there was an actual crack running straight down through his own heart and that crack would never be mended, never become healed and whole. The world had entered in and broken him past repair.

There was an army here, with the king. An army in Al-Rassan. He wondered, vaguely, how much killing he was about to undertake, in an effort—hopeless before it ever began—to avenge and assuage this moment. This small, limp figure in his arms. Diego.

He wondered if anything would ever reach through to him again.

“Oh, dear Jad,”
he heard someone say sharply. Ramiro, the king of Valledo. “Oh, not this, in the name of what is holy!”

Rodrigo looked over. Something in the king’s voice.

New torches, more riders approaching. From the north. Not the king’s party that had met them by the river and the walls. The other direction. Valledan banners, lit by flames.

They came nearer and stopped. He saw the queen of Valledo, Ines.

He saw his wife dismount to stand there, looking straight towards him, motionless. Without defense.

He had no idea why Miranda was here. Why any of them were here. He had to move, though, to try to spare her a small part of this, at least. If he could.

Gently, gently, he laid Diego down again on the cold ground and rose, stumbling, blood soaking his clothing, and went towards Miranda between the fires and slain men.

He rubbed at his eyes, his face. His hands seemed to belong to someone else. There were words needed now, but he didn’t have them. It was a dream. He would never wake from this.

“Please tell me he is only hurt,” his wife said very quietly. “Rodrigo, please say he is only hurt.”

He opened his mouth and closed it. He shook his head.

Miranda screamed then. The name. Only the name. The same as he had done. It went into him the way a spear enters.

He reached out to take her in his arms. She went past him, running, to where Diego lay. There were other people around him now, Rodrigo saw, turning. Jehane had come up. She was kneeling beside his son. Another man from the queen’s party, someone he didn’t recognize, was on the other side. Miranda stopped beside them.

“Oh, please?” she said, in a small voice he had never heard before. “Please?”

She knelt beside Jehane and gathered Diego’s hands between her own.

He saw Fernan coming back from the river with ibn Khairan. He would have heard his mother scream. Fernan was crying now, his face distorted. A wind, blowing right through him.

Only this morning, riding towards Fezana, Rodrigo Belmonte would have said, if asked, that the world was a hard place but an interesting one, and he would have named himself a man blessed beyond his worth by the god, with love and companionship and tasks worthy of a man.

He’d had two sons this morning, though.

He came back to where Diego lay. Someone—the king, it appeared—had placed his own cloak over the mutilated body of Gonzalez de Rada nearby. Fernan was standing behind his mother. He was not asking for comfort, Rodrigo saw. He was keeping very still, weeping, with a hand on Miranda’s shoulder, looking down at his brother. He was thirteen years old.

Jehane finished what she was doing. She looked up at Rodrigo. “He isn’t dead but I’m afraid he’s dying.” Her face was white. Her clothing was still wet from the river, he saw. It was all so dreamlike. “Rodrigo, I’m so sorry. The blow has broken his head, here. There is too much pressure. He will not wake up. It will not be long.” She looked at the other woman beside her, the child’s hands in hers. “He is . . . he is not in pain now, my lady.”

He’d had a dream once in Ragosa, such a strange one, of the two of them—Miranda and Jehane—standing at sunset somewhere. Not speaking, no clear details, only standing together at the end of a day.

It was dark here, however, and they were kneeling on the ground. Miranda said nothing at all, made no movement, eyes on her child. Then she did move, freeing one of her hands and laying it, so softly, against the broken place on Diego’s head.

Jehane looked up at him again, and Rodrigo saw the sorrow in her eyes, and the rage. The physician’s rage at what they could not defeat, the things that claimed human lives too soon, leaving doctors helpless. She looked across Diego’s body at the other man.

“You are a doctor?” she asked.

He nodded. “To the queen, formerly with the army.”

“I will aid you here, then,” she said quietly. “There may be others who need our services. Surely they are not all dead. There may be some we can save.”

“You would do this?” the man asked. “For a Jaddite army?”

A spasm of impatience crossed Jehane’s face. “As to that,” she said, “I am physician to the company of Rodrigo Belmonte. After tonight, I have no idea, but for the moment I am yours to command.”

“May I hold him?” Miranda, whispering, to Jehane. As if no one else had spoken.

Rodrigo took another step forward, helplessly.

“You can do no harm to him at all, my lady.” Jehane’s voice was as gentle as he had ever heard it. “Of course you may hold him.” She hesitated, then repeated, “He is not in pain.”

She made as if to rise.

“Jehane, wait.” Another voice, from behind them. A woman’s voice. Rodrigo turned, very slowly. “Your father wishes to examine the boy,” said Eliane bet Danel.

In Al-Rassan, in Esperaña, Ferrieres, Karch, Batiara—even, in time, in the far-off eastern homelands of the Asharites—what happened that night in a burning hamlet near Fezana became legend, told so often among physicians, courts, military companies, in universities, taverns, places of worship, that it became imbued with the aura of magic and the supernatural.

It was not, of course, supernatural. What Ishak ben Yonannon did—blind under the white moon and stars and the torches brought for those who assisted him—was as precise and carefully worked out as what he had done five years before in Cartada, delivering the last child of Almalik I, and it was as wondrous as that.

Indeed, it was more than that had been. Sightless, unable to communicate except through his wife who understood every mangled syllable he spoke, handling a surgeon’s blades and implements for the first time since his blinding, working by touch and memory and instinct, ben Yonannon did something even Galinus had only hinted might possibly be done.

He carved an opening in the skull of Diego Belmonte, around the place where the Muwardi blow had broken the boy’s head, and he drew forth the shattered bone that had been driven down into what was shockingly exposed beneath the peeled-back scalp and the opened skull. The intruded fragment of bone that would have killed Rodrigo’s son before the blue moon joined the white one in the sky.