The Lions of Al-Rassan (66 page)

She wondered what had been said. What did surprise her was to encounter no protest. Her mother had never been hesitant with objections. Yet now Jehane was about to ride off through a land at war, with an Asharite, towards a future only the moons knew—and her mother was accepting that.

It was, Jehane thought, another measure of how much had changed.

Mother and daughter embraced. Neither wept, but Jehane did do so when her father held her in his arms just before she mounted the horse provided for her.

She looked at Alvar de Pellino standing silently nearby, his heart in his eyes, as ever. She looked at Husari. At Rodrigo.

She looked at Ammar ibn Khairan beside her on his mount and nodded her head and they rode away together. East towards Fezana and then past it, well north of the river, watching the plumes of smoke still coiling up from the city into the brightening sky.

She looked back only once, but Orvilla was already out of sight and she had stopped crying by then. She had set out on this same path a summer ago, riding with Alvar and Velaz. She had only one man with her now, but he was worth a hundred and fifty, by one measure.

He was worth infinitely more than that, by the measuring of her heart.

She moved her horse nearer to his, and held out a hand and he removed his glove and laced his fingers through hers. They rode through much of the morning like that as the clouds ahead of them slowly lifted and grey became blue towards the sun.

At one point, breaking the long silence, she said, comically,
“A camel herder in the Majriti?”
And was rewarded to hear his swift laughter fill the wide spaces around them.

Later, in a different voice, she asked him, “What did you say to my father? Did you ask his blessing?”

He shook his head. “Too much to ask. I told them I loved you, and then I asked their forgiveness.”

She rode in silence, dealing with this. Finally, very quietly, she said, “How much time are we going to be allowed?”

And gravely he replied, “I truly don’t know, love. I will do all I can to give us enough.”

“It will never be enough, Ammar. Understand that. I will always need more time.”

Their lovemaking each night, after they made camp, had an urgency Jehane had never known.

After ten days of riding they intercepted the army of Ragosa heading towards Cartada, and time, in Al-Rassan the Beloved, began to run, swift as horses, towards its end.

Eighteen

I
n a reaction to the protracted siege of his city, King Badir of Ragosa had ordered the northern-style wooden chairs removed from his private chambers in the palace. They had been replaced by additional pillows. The king had just lowered himself—with some care for his wine glass—into a nest of cushions by the fire.

Mazur ben Avren, his chancellor, did the same, not bothering to hide a wince of pain. Personally, he regarded the king’s abjuring of northern furnishings as an entirely unnecessary gesture. Descending to the floor to recline seemed a more difficult exercise every time he did it.

Badir, watching him, looked amused. “You’re younger than I am, my friend. You’ve let yourself grow soft. How does that happen during a siege?”

Mazur grimaced as he searched for an easier position. “A touch . . . of something in my hip, my lord. It will ease when the rains let up.”

“The rains are useful. They must be miserable out there in their tents.”

“I do hope so,” said ben Avren with fervor. There had been rumors of sickness in the Jaloñan camp.

He lifted a hand and the nearest servant hastily brought him a glass of wine. From ben Avren’s point of view, it was an extreme relief that his monarch’s rejection of things northern had not extended to the better Jaddite wines. He saluted the king, still trying to find a comfortable position. Both men were silent for a time.

It was autumn and the eastern rains had arrived early. Ragosa had been under siege since early summer. It had not fallen, nor had the walls been breached. Under the prevailing circumstances this was remarkable.

Fezana had been taken by the Valledan army in the middle of summer, and recent tidings had come by carrier pigeon that the king of Ruenda had broken through the walls of Salos at the mouth of the Tavares and had put all the adult males to the sword. Women and infants had been burned, in the name of Jad, but the city itself had not been torched: King Sanchez of Ruenda was evidently proposing to winter there. A bad sign, and Badir and his chancellor knew it.

The Valledan army, more bold, had already pushed southeast over the hills towards Lonza. Rodrigo Belmonte, once a captain in Badir’s own army, did not seem inclined to rest content with only the one major city taken before winter. The Valledans were said to be meeting with resistance in the hill country, but details, for obvious reasons, were hard to come by in besieged Ragosa.

Given these developments to the west and given the fact that they’d had to release almost half their own army or risk an internal uprising—many of the Jaddite mercenaries had promptly joined the Jaloñans outside the walls—Ragosa’s holding out was an achievement. A measure, as much as anything else, of the chancellor’s prudent marshalling of food reserves and supplies, and the affection and confidence the people of the city vested in their king.

There were, however, limits. To food, to supplies. To support for a beleaguered monarch and his advisor. His Kindath advisor.

If they could last until winter they might survive. Or if Yazir came. There had been no word from the Majriti. They were waiting. Everyone in Al-Rassan was waiting that autumn—Jaddite, Asharite, Kindath. If the tribes came north across the straits everything in the peninsula would change.

Everything had already changed though, and both men knew it. The city they had built together—a smaller, quieter repository of some of the same graces Silvenes had embodied under the khalifs—was already finished, its brief flowering done. However this invasion ended, King Badir’s city of music and ivory was lost.

The Jaloñans or the Muwardis. One way lay a terrible burning, and the other way . . . ?

It was very late. Rain was falling outside, a steady sound on the windows and the leaves. The two men were still in the habit of taking this last glass together; the depth and endurance of friendship marked as much in their silence as in the words.

“There was a report this morning they are building small boats now,” Badir said. He sipped from his wine.

“I heard the same thing.” Mazur shrugged. “They won’t get in through the lake. They could never make craft large enough to carry sufficient men. We would annihilate them from the harbor towers.”

“They might stop our fishing boats from going out.”

The siege was failing in part because the small craft of Ragosa had been able to go out upon the lake, using care, covered by archers from the harbor walls as they came back in.

“I’d like to see Jaddites try to blockade this harbor in the autumn winds. I have swimmers who could sink any boat they send out there. I’m hoping they try.”

“Swimmers? In autumn? You would send someone out with an auger?”

Mazur drank from his glass. “They would fall over themselves volunteering, my lord. We have a city disinclined to yield, I am pleased to say.”

It helped that surrender wasn’t really a possibility. They’d killed the king of Jaloña and one of the High Clerics from Ferrieres even before the siege had begun.

That had been ibn Khairan’s doing; his last act in Ragosan employ, just before he left them for Cartada.

He’d taken a dozen of the best men in the city and slipped out one moonless night in two small boats, heading east and north along the lake. The Jaloñans, enthusiastically burning villages and farms as they came south around Lake Serrana, were too complacent, and it cost them.

Ibn Khairan and his men surprised a raiding party, which had been their intention. It was purest luck—he had always been said to be a lucky man—that the Jaloñan party of thirty riders had included King Bermudo and the cleric.

At twilight on a spring evening ibn Khairan’s men had come upon them at a fishing village. They’d waited down the beach, hidden by the boats. They’d had to watch villagers burned alive, and hear them scream as they were nailed to wooden beams. When the wine flasks had emerged among the raiding party the mood became wild and the northerners had turned to the women and young girls.

Thirteen men from Ragosa, acting in cold rage and with specific intent, had come up from the beach in the darkness. They were outnumbered but it didn’t matter. Ibn Khairan moved through that burning village like a dark streak of lightning, his men said after, killing where he went.

They slew all thirty men in that raiding party.

The king of Jaloña had been cut down by one of the Ragosans before his identity was known. They had wanted to throw him onto the nearest of the fires, but ibn Khairan, swearing like a fisherman when he saw who it was, made them carry King Bermudo’s body back to the city. He would have been far more useful alive, but there were still things that could be done.

The cleric from Ferrieres was nailed to one of the wooden beams he had been instrumental in having raised. All of Esperaña was coming south, it had by then become evident, and the Ferrieres clerics were stridently invoking a holy war. It was not a time for ransoms or the courtesies normally offered pious men.

There had been a brief flickering of hope in Ragosa that the shocking disappearance of their king might lead the enemy to withdraw. It was not to be.

Queen Fruela, who had insisted on accompanying the invading army, took control of the Jaloñan forces with her eldest son, Beñedo. By the time that army reached the walls of Ragosa, a great many farmers and fisherfolk had been captured on sweeps through the countryside. These had not been killed. Instead, the besieging army set about mutilating them, one by one, within sight of the city, at sunrise and sundown while the Jaddites prayed to their golden god of light.

After four days of this, it was King Badir who made the decision to show the body of King Bermudo from the city walls. It was indicated by a herald that the corpse would be desecrated if the torturing continued outside. Queen Fruela, afire with holy zeal, appeared inclined to continue nonetheless but her young son, the new king of Jaloña, prevailed in this matter. The prisoners outside the walls were all killed the next morning, without ceremony. The body of King Bermudo was burned in Ragosa. The Jaddites, watching the smoke of that pyre rise up, took solace in knowing that since he had died in the midst of a war against the infidels, his soul was already dwelling with the god in light.

As a consequence of all this, it was understood from the beginning of the siege of Ragosa that a negotiated surrender was not an option. No one in the city was going to be permitted to live if it fell. In a way that made things simpler for those inside the walls. It removed an otherwise distracting possibility.

It had, in fact, been ibn Khairan who foretold this. “If it comes to an ending,” he had said to Mazur ben Avren on the spring morning he rode back west with Jehane bet Ishak, “try, any way you can, to surrender to Valledo.”

Unexpected words, and both the king and his chancellor saw them as such, but they became rather more explicable after the very different occupations of Fezana and Salos later that summer.

Unfortunately, there seemed no obvious way to negotiate such a surrender, and ibn Khairan himself—the ka’id of Cartada’s armies now—was engaged in making life as miserable as he could for the Valledans as they approached Lonza. If King Ramiro had begun this invasion in a tolerant cast of mind, he might well be abandoning that attitude by now, under the deadly, morale-sapping raids of Cartada’s brilliant commander, and with autumn and the rains coming on.

King Badir’s servant built up the fire again and then deftly refilled the glasses of both men. They could still hear the rain outside. A companionable silence descended.

The chancellor felt his thoughts drifting. He found himself taking note of the trappings of this, the king’s most private room. He looked, as if for the first time, at the fireplace with its mantel carved in a pattern of grapes and leaves. He gazed at the wine itself, and the beautifully worked goblets, at the white candles in their gold sconces, the tapestries from Elvira, the carved ivory figures on sideboard and mantelpiece. He smelled the incense imported from Soriyya, burning in a copper dish, observed the etched windows over the garden, the gilt-edged mirror on the opposite wall, the intricately woven carpets . . .

In a way, Mazur ben Avren thought, all these delicate things were bulwarks, the innermost defenses of civilized man against the rain and dark, and ignorance.

The Jaddites outside the walls did not understand that. Neither, to an even greater degree, did the veiled ones from the desert—the longed-for saviors of everyone’s prayers.

It was too bitter a truth even for irony. These things in Badir’s room—these measures of having found the space to strive for and value beauty in the world—were seen by those to north and south as the markers of corruption, decadence, frivolity. Impiety. Dangerous earthly distractions from a properly humble, cringing appeasement of a blazing god of the sun, or a far, cold deity behind the stars.

“The lady Zabira,” he said, shifting position to ease his hip, “has offered to present herself as a gift to the young king of Jaloña.”

Badir looked up. He had been gazing into the fire.

“She believes she might be able to kill him,” ben Avren added, by way of explanation.

King Badir shook his head. “No point. A brave offer, but that young man means little to his army. What is he, sixteen? And his mother would have Zabira torn apart before she came anywhere near the boy.”

“My thought as well, my lord. I thanked her and declined, on your behalf.” He smiled. “I told her she could present herself to you, instead, but that I needed her more with winter coming.”

The king returned the smile, briefly.

“Do we make it to the winter?” he asked.

Ben Avren sipped his wine before answering. He had been hoping this would not be asked. “I would rather we didn’t have to, to be honest. It will be a near thing. We need an army from the desert to at least land in Al-Rassan, to put the Jaloñans on warning that they are at risk of being trapped outside walls and shelter. They might withdraw then.”

“They should have taken Fibaz before besieging us.”

“Of course they should have. Give thanks to Ashar and I’ll offer a libation to the moons.”

The king didn’t smile this time. “And if the Muwardis don’t land?”

Ben Avren shrugged. “What can I say, my lord? No city is ever safe from betrayal. Especially as supplies begin to dwindle. And you
do
have a principal advisor who is one of the hated, evil Kindath. If the Jaloñans ever offer a measure of clemency . . .”

“They will not.”

“But if they did? If we then had something to offer back to them, in partial redress of their king’s death . . . ?”

Badir scowled. “We have been through this. Do not vex me again. I will not accept your resignation, your departure, your sacrifice . . . none of these things. What am I clinging to, so desperately, that I would allow myself to lose you?”

“Life? The lives of your people?”

Badir shook his head. “I am too old to clutch like that. If the veiled ones come, my people may survive . . . after a fashion. This city—as we built it—will not.”

He gestured around the room. “We made this together, my friend. If it goes, one way or another, I will make an end drinking my wine with you. Do not speak of this again. I regard the subject as a . . . betrayal.”

Ben Avren’s expression was grave. “It is not that, my lord.”