The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  Adán laid his hand over mine. “Anything you say.”

  “Will you . . . will you find her?” I tightened my grip on his hand. We both knew I was too damaged to rise from my bed, much less seek her on my own. “See she’s kept safe and whole?”

  “Yes,” Adán agreed.

  “She has an uncle somewhere in Catalunya. They may have taken her there. See she has everything she needs. Shoes for her feet and cloaks for winter. And see no one speaks ill of her name.” My throat closed in on itself and the words halted in my mouth. I choked on all I wanted to give her. Pearls to seed her hair and a swift horse to ride out on whenever she chose, all the books of my library, a place at my side when I wrested control of the caliphate back from Sanchuelo. But without the sight of the courtyard to distract me, my mind unrolled the image of Telo striking her, her head hitting the wardrobe, the look on her face when she saw me stripped of my manhood, abased and unclean, helpless to save either of us.

  “I will,” Adán said. “Anything you say, brother. But if I go, you must be ready when they start to speak of me as your murderer. I won’t be able to set foot in al Andalus so long as they remember your name. I won’t be able to come back for you.”

  God forgive me, God forgive me.

  “I know,” I said. “Go.”

  He rode out on the north road in the cool predawn dark the next morning.

  Some months later, when my bones had healed and my eyes crusted over in a thick stratum of scabs and scar tissue, I asked Nasir to bring me a walking stick. I pushed myself slowly to his front door.

  “Stay,” Nasir pleaded. “There’s no need for you to leave. How will your friend Hadid find you if you go?”

  “He won’t return,” I said. “God grant it, I may go to him some day, but he won’t return.”

  Thus I left the quiet of Nasir’s house for Córdoba, to live in the shadow of what was once my home, to erase myself from all men’s memories, and to pray for word that would lead me back to my beloved and my friend.

  We have reached the wooded no-man’s-land inside the Catalan border, by the chill banks of the river Segre. Our caravan has been shrinking, the imam and the students long since left behind in Madrid, and many of the merchants stopped in smaller cities and towns along the way. Lázaro and his men make up the bulk of the caravan, save Miguel’s wagon and a Christian merchant we picked up, also bound for Catalunya. We file close together over the narrow road. At night, we sleep in the woods. We light no fires. Icy rain patters down on us in the day, heralding autumn in the North country. Even Mencia has fallen under the pall of silence that hovers over us. Although we have traveled beyond the chaos rippling out from Córdoba, unallied highwaymen and Visigoth war bands roam the wilderness in these parts. A fight has broken out among Lázaro’s men about whether to abandon Miguel, Mencia, and me, since traveling with Jews and a Moor so near the Pyrenees places them in danger. But so far, we haven’t woken to find them gone.

  I walk alongside the cart with my hand resting on its upper boards while the mapmaker’s horses strain up a steep grade. Wet rocks bite my feet and several times I slip, but catch myself on the cart’s edge in time to keep from sliding under the wheels. My leg aches at the old break. The crash of whitewater roars up from the river gorge below. Lázaro’s men have ridden ahead, but when we finally crest the hill, we find them stopped.

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  “Shhh.” Miguel quiets me.

  “State your allegiance,” a strange man’s voice, speaking Catalan, booms over the road.

  No one answers.

  “State your allegiance,” the stranger tries again, in Castellano this time. The words are heavy in his mouth. He swallows the ends of them, and it takes me a moment to remember where I’ve heard his accent before. I am ten years old, jacketed in gold brocade and standing in the shadow of my father’s throne. A Visigoth chieftain with a heavy black beard and pale skin stands at the base of the dais, a gilt and sapphire cross glinting in the fox fur at his neck, an emissary from our ancestors’ long-vanquished enemies. . . .

  “State yours,” Lázaro says. The sound of swords drawn from their scabbards rings throughout the group of men arrayed on the path before us.

  “I am Athanric of the Wese. We swear allegiance to his Holiness Pope John XVIII.” The Visigoth shouts to be heard over the river. A fine sleet begins to fall.

  “Then we have no quarrel with you,” Lázaro says. “We go to the court of King Filipe of Roussillon to aid his cause in retaking the southern lands from the Moorish kings.”

  “And yet you travel with a Moor,” Athanric says. He pauses, as if working out a problem in his head. “And Jews?”

  I cannot see, but I feel the gaze of two score pairs of eyes turned on our wagon in the silence that follows.

  “They’re no part of our caravan,” Lázaro replies.

  “Then you will not object if we dispatch them from your company,” the Visigoth says. “We would be remiss in our Christian duty if we did not baptize them here in the river.”

  Lázaro pauses. The cold gush of the river rises in the silence. An uneasy murmur works its way through his men. “No,” Lázaro says. “They’re no concern of ours.”

  Mencia clutches my arm.

  “Good lords.” Miguel raises his voice for the first time, and I am surprised at how strong and clear it is after so much silence. “I am a tradesman. My wife and I travel to Orgañá, no further, and this man is our servant. We are no threat to you.”

  “A Jewish tradesman,” Athanric says. He thumps the flat of his sword against his leg. “And wearing no marks on his clothes.”

  “It is not our custom in the south,” Miguel says quietly.

  “Ah, but it is custom here,” Athanric says. His voice and the rhythmic beat of his sword move closer. “As well as law. And lawbreakers must be punished.”

  Mencia cries out. Her hand jerks from mine. Her husband shouts and there is an awful, thick sound of fists on flesh and scrabbling in the wet dirt. Tearing fabric rips the wet air.

  “Perhaps we will dispense justice here and now,” the Visigoth says.

  Save us, I pray, shaking with cold and furious impotence. Save them. Save her. Don’t let anyone else suffer because I am helpless to stop it.

  Mencia screams, longer this time and more pained.

  This cannot be Your will, I say to God. If it is, I will not bow to it.

  And then there are hoofbeats on the slope behind us, dozens, loud as war drums, kicking up stones and spattering mud as they skid to a stop behind our party.

  “Look what we have today,” a man says. “Athanric of the Wese.” His voice is full of humor and menace in equal parts, and my heart near stops, for I would know it anywhere. It belongs to Adán Hadid. The man who gave up his life in service of mine. Who defied God’s law and rode out to save me on a Shabbat eve.

  “This is none of your concern, de Lanza,” Athanric says.

  “Perhaps,” Adán says, easy with his false name. “But I see you have taken some of my countrymen, so perhaps I will find it is my concern after all.”

  The Visigoth swears in his own tongue. He calls to his men, and their horses stamp as they mount and draw away.

  “Some day I’ll find you outnumbered,” Athanric shouts over the sound of his men’s retreat.

  “Be sure it’s four to one,” Adán calls after him.

  The pounding of their hoofbeats fades into the distance. Mencia cries quietly as her husband murmurs and soothes her. I am frozen, locked still as stone. My heart is the only thing moving. Will Adán recognize me, changed as I must be? And will Lázaro know his quarry by sight, or by name only?

  Adán’s horse clops toward Lázaro’s band, grouped on the side of the road. “Gentlemen, if you’re in need of an escort, my men and I will be happy to accompany you for a small fee. Where are you going?”

  “Roussillon.” Lázaro coughs.

  “What do you say, shall we go to Roussillon?” Adán calls to h
is men.

  “To Roussillon!” they shout in response, and beat their swords on their shields.

  “With your consent, of course,” Adán says to Lázaro.

  “Por supuesto,” Lázaro says, the strain evident in his words. “We would be grateful, sir.”

  Adán spends several moments making sure Miguel’s cart is undamaged, he and his wife secure within it, and calls for a beaver-skin blanket to shield Mencia from the icy rain. Then we are off again, moving through the trees at a steady clip with Adán’s men riding in a protective circle around us.

  I walk on, steadying myself with one hand on the cart. My legs shake with every step.

  A horse veers close to me and slows to my pace. “Do these men know who you are, brother?” Adán says quietly.

  I turn my face up to him, even though all I can see is the hazy, muted green of the damp trees all around us. Joy hits me like a wall, and I stop. The cart rolls on without me. “No,” I say.

  “We’ll move faster if we place this man on a horse,” Adán calls up to Lázaro. “And bring him some spare boots.”

  Lázaro mutters to himself, but sends one of his men to the back of the line with an older mare and a pair of worn riding boots. Adán dismounts and helps me up onto her back, then ties my horse’s reins to his own. They trot side by side. It is all I can do not to reach out and take Adán’s hand.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you?” Adán says.

  “I didn’t know if you were alive,” I say. “My father laid a death sentence on you before the vizier seized control, and that man Lázaro is looking for you.”

  “I have more men than he,” Adán says. “And better trained. Though I do ask myself what you’re doing following him into Catalunya.”

  “Sofia,” I say. “He’s bringing these horses to her uncle in Roussillon. She’s there with them.”

  We ride in silence for several minutes. The air is full of the steady grate of hooves on loose stone.

  “So that’s where they’ve been keeping her,” Adán says.

  “You couldn’t find her?” My last memory of her, bleeding and wild-eyed, unfurls before me again.

  “I’m sorry.” Adán leans over in the saddle and grips my wrist. “I tracked them as far as the Pyrenees, but I didn’t know how deep they’d gone. It isn’t friendly territory for Jews, even those with their own war bands.”

  Silence laps over us again. The sleet falls steadily, but my horse’s heat steams away some of the cold.

  “What will you do when you find her?” Adán asks after a time. “I don’t suppose her grandmother and brothers will usher you into her arms.”

  “No,” I say. “I had only figured out the part where I lived to come this far.”

  “You were always terrible at strategy.” I can hear the boyish smirk in Adán’s words.

  “I’m out of practice,” I say.

  “When this is done, I’m tutoring you.”

  A piece of my youth flexes in my chest. Maybe it is the feel of a horse beneath me again, the way my body remembers and responds to its sway, keeps me righted. Maybe it is that I am riding closer to Sofia, and the invisible cord between us is tightening, transmitting the vibration of our hearts. Or maybe it is that my friend is at my side again, speaking to me as a man, and he has always carried some piece of me wherever he goes.

  After another run-in on the road, with common thieves this time, Lázaro decides to keep Adán and his men on. Lázaro suggests the party will travel faster if they leave Miguel, Mencia, and me to find our own way while they go on to Roussillon, but Adán won’t hear it. And so we deliver the mapmaker and his wife to Orgañá, where we buy furs for the journey higher into the Pyrenees.

  As we prepare to go, Miguel hurries to push a folded square of vellum into Adán’s hand. “A map of Roussillon,” he says. “In case you find some difficulty leaving.”

  While we ride, Lázaro’s men talk of the vats of mulled wine awaiting us at Filipe’s castle, venison on spits, the sweet crackle of pine logs on the hearths in the great hall. The mountain road slopes sharply. It whips around corners and narrows so we must ride single file. On the fourth day of our trek, we wake to a fine glaze of frost stiffening our blankets and the mat of fallen leaves where we made our bed the night before. The clouds hang low and chill in a fog across the road. And then, on the twelfth day, the men at the front of the line shout that they’ve sighted the timber barricades circling Filipe’s thatch-roof fortress.

  “I can’t go in,” I say to Adán under my breath. My horse jerks her head, picking up on the fear seeping from my body. “Lamia, Sofia’s brothers—”

  “Hang back.” Adán reins in my horse.

  We slow until the last of Adán’s men pass us. “Ride on,” Adán tells them. “I’ll catch up.”

  We veer into the trees, Adán leading my horse, and wend our way deeper until we come to a dense thicket. Adán wraps me in skins and furs, pushes a knife into my hand.

  “Stay here,” he says. “I’ll see what I can find and bring you word.” He hurries to his horse. Its hoofbeats disappear into the silence.

  I shiver under the skins and chafe my arms for warmth. Cold burns in the fissure where Sofia’s brothers broke my leg nearly two years past. I am afraid to warm myself by walking, in case I should become lost in the woods and Adán come back to find the thicket empty. I sit and rock instead.

  After a time, the pale gray light I can detect through my left eye recedes into darkness, and the very air I breathe burns like swallowing live coals. Fat snowflakes filter through the canopy of trees. Wolves keen high in the woods above me, answered by their mates somewhere deeper in the vales below. A small creature cries out, an unearthly strangled noise, almost human. I pile leaves and pine needles in a nest and burrow beneath them like an animal, hoping they will hide my scent.

  “I am come for her.” I speak aloud to God, as though He might be hovering in the frozen air, sitting impassive at the edge of the thicket. Here in the vast, rough expanse of mountain range that holds my beloved in its teeth, it is easy to imagine Him a different, more savage being than the God of my childhood.

  The wolves’ voices melt together in one long howl. It sounds as though the earth itself is moaning, and I shiver again as the thought of Lamia passes before me. Lamia, roving the hills below, calling up all the wild and pale-toothed things of the earth against me. The wind her skirts, churning the dead leaves to fall anew.

  “I am come for her,” I repeat, and it makes me feel more human to hear the words falling back to my ear, muted by the soft snow. I curl into the leaves and try to imagine they are Sofia’s body pressed close, the backs of her knees tucked against mine, her hair soft on my face, safe.

  The squeak of boots on snow starts me awake. I freeze, rigid and alert beneath the layers of leaves and animal skins. I tighten my grip on the knife.

  “Ishaq?” Adán calls quietly. “Where are you?”

  I push myself up. “Here.”

  “Ishaq.” Adán hurries to me and crouches at my side. “Are you well?”

  “Cold,” I say. My teeth knock against each other.

  “I’ll build a fire,” he says. He clears an empty space on the ground and digs a trench around it. I hear him snapping branches and the tap-click of his flints striking flame into the kindling.

  Warm, red light flares in my good eye, and I think for a moment I can even make out the shadow of Adán’s body as he moves between me and the flames. Waves of heat push the cold from my face and hands. Adán sits beside me and wraps us together in the same bearskin so we can share warmth. We wait in silence for our bodies to stop shaking.

  “I saw her,” he says.

  My heart jolts. “Is she . . . ? Have they . . . ?”

  “They’ve married her to Henri du Cerét, one of her uncle’s knights.”

  I feel as though someone has sprinkled salt on my heart. The fire pops and sizzles as snowflakes turn to vapor in its flames.

  “She served our
meal, but she wouldn’t speak to any of us,” Adán says.

  I swallow. “And Lamia?”

  “She was there, at the seat nearest the fire,” Adán says. “She seemed . . . I don’t know, sick, diminished. Not at all as you described her. They had her wrapped in furs, and she was coughing so hard, she could barely hold the wine cup to her lips. They say some sickness has entered her lungs.”

  The shock of his words saps all the feeling from my limbs. I had imagined Lamia ever as she was, clear-eyed and cruel in her command of man and earth. I know if I were righteous, I would ask God to show mercy, true mercy, even to this, my enemy. But in truth the only feeling I can muster is relief. So she is not afoot beneath the moon, in communion with the wolves and winds. She is flesh and blood after all, and I am glad of it.

  Adán clears his throat. “There’s more.”

  “What more?” I ask.

  “They say Sofia has two children.”

  “Children?” I hear myself say, although it sounds as if someone else is speaking those words from the far side of the thicket.

  “Twins,” Adán says. “A boy and a girl, a little over a year old.”

  The earth moves too fast, and my body is spinning opposite its turn. I see Sofia laid out on the bed, under some other man. I shove the knife Adán gave me down to its hilt in the mossy soil.

  “Ishaq.” Adán repeats the words slowly. “Over a year old.”

  I force myself calm enough to figure what he means. I count the months. Four for my journey from al Andalus to Roussillon. Close to a year on the streets of Córdoba. Six months lost to healing in the doctor’s home. A year and ten months in all since I last lay with Sofia. I grab Adán’s arm and stand. The bearskin falls to the dirt at our feet.

  Adán tries to hide a laugh. “They say her children have dark hair, and they share their mother’s eyes, but not her complexion. There are whispers Henri du Cerét might have been cuckolded before he was even wed.”