The Lions of Al-Rassan

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  “I have not,” she’d murmured calmly, “though I’d consider it some other time. For now, I have my own route to follow. I’m happy to leave Husari ibn Musa”—which was evidently the right way to say the name—“in your company to pursue his affairs and perhaps your own. I’ll be away, with your leave, in the morning.”

  That unhurried answer, elegantly spoken, went some ways to breaking Alvar’s heart. He was already half in love before she spoke. He thought the doctor was beautiful. Her hair—what he could see of it beneath the blue stole wrapped about her shoulders and head—was a rich, dark brown. Her eyes were enormous, unexpectedly blue in the firelight. Her voice was the voice Alvar thought he would like to hear speaking when he died, or for the rest of his life. She was worldly, astonishingly poised, even here in the darkness with fifty riders from the north. She would think him a child, Alvar knew, and looking at her, he felt like one.

  They never knew what the Captain would have replied to her, or even if he had been intending a serious invitation that she join them, because just then Martín said sharply, “There’s fire. To the west!”

  “What will be there?” the Captain said to the three Fezanans as they all turned to look. The flames were spreading already, and they weren’t very far away.

  It was the woman doctor, not the merchant, who answered. “A village. Orvilla. I have patients there.”

  “Come then,” said the Captain, his expression even grimmer than before. “You will have more now. Leave the mule. Ride with Laín—the older one. Alvar, take her servant. Ludus, Mauro, guard the camp with the merchant. Come on! That crawling maggot Garcia de Rada is here after all.”

  At least half of the Jaddite raiders were slain in a matter of moments before Jehane, sheltering with Velaz at the side of one of the burning houses, heard the man the others called the Captain say clearly, “It is enough. Gather the rest.”

  The Captain. She knew who this was, of course. Everyone in the peninsula knew who was called by that name alone, as a title.

  His words were echoed quickly by two other riders, including the older one who had ridden here with her. The killing stopped.

  There was an interval of time during which the raiders were herded towards the center of the village, an open grassy space. Some of Rodrigo Belmonte’s men were filling buckets at the stream, trying to deal with the fires alongside a handful of the villagers. It was hopeless, though; even to Jehane’s untutored eye it was obviously wasted effort.

  “Doctor! Oh, thank the holy stars! Come quickly, please!”

  Jehane turned, and recognized her patient—the woman who brought her eggs every week at the market.

  “Abirab! What is it?”

  “My sister! She has been terribly hurt. By one of the men. She is bleeding, and with child. And her husband is dead. Oh, what are we to do, doctor?”

  The woman’s face was black with soot and smoke, distorted with grief. Her eyes were red from weeping. Jehane, frozen for a moment by the brutal reality of horror, offered a quick inner prayer to Galinus—the only name she truly worshipped—and said, “Take me to her. We will do what we can.”

  Ziri ibn Aram, standing on the far side of the circle, still did not know what had happened to his father or mother. He saw his aunt approach a woman who had come with the new men. He was about to follow them, but something held him where he was. A few moments ago he had been preparing to die nailed to a beam from the barn. He had spoken the words that offered his soul as a gift to the stars of Ashar. It seemed the stars were not ready for his soul, after all.

  He watched the brown-haired commander of the new arrivals remove a glove and stroke his moustache as he looked down from his black horse at the leader of those who had destroyed Ziri’s village. The man on the ground was stocky and dark. He didn’t seem at all, to Ziri’s eyes, like someone who feared his approaching death.

  “You have achieved your own destruction,” he said with astonishing arrogance to the man on the horse. “Do you know who your louts have killed here?” His voice was high-pitched for a man, almost shrill. “Do you know what will happen when I report this in Esteren?”

  The broad-shouldered, brown-haired man on the black horse said nothing. An older man beside him, extremely tall and lean, with greying hair, said sharply, “So sure you are going back, de Rada?”

  The stocky man didn’t even look at him. After a moment, though, the first horseman, the leader said, very quietly, “Answer him, Garcia. He asked you a question.” The name was used as one might admonish a child, but the voice was cold.

  For the first time Ziri saw a flicker of doubt appear in the face of the man named Garcia. Only for a moment, though. “You aren’t a complete fool, Belmonte. Don’t play games with me.”

  “Games?” A hard, swift anger in the mounted man’s voice. He swept one hand in a slashing arc, indicating all of Orvilla, burning freely now. Nothing would be saved. Nothing at all. Ziri began looking around for his father. A feeling of dread was overtaking him.

  “Would I play a game in the midst of this?” the man on the black horse snapped. “Be careful, Garcia. Do not insult me. Not tonight. I told your brother what would happen if you came near Fezana. I assume he told you. I must assume he told you.”

  The man on the ground was silent.

  “Does it matter?” said the grey-haired one. He spat on the ground. “This one is offal. He is less than that.”

  “I will remember you,” said the black-haired man sharply, turning now to the speaker. He clenched his fists. “I have a good memory.”

  “But you forgot your brother’s warning?” It was the leader once more, the one called Belmonte. His voice was calm again, dangerously so. “Or you chose to forget it, shall we say? Garcia de Rada, what you did as a boy on your family estates was no concern of mine. What you do here, as someone who passes for a man, unfortunately is. This village lies under the protection of the king of Valledo whose officer I am. The parias I am here to collect was paid in part by the people you have butchered tonight. You have taken the promises of King Ramiro and made him a liar in the eyes of the world.” He paused, to let the words sink in. “Given that fact, what should I do with you?”

  It was evidently not a question the man addressed had been expecting. But he was not slow of wit. “Given that fact,” he mocked, imitating the tone. “You ought to have been a lawyer not a soldier, Belmonte. A judge in your eastern pastures, making rulings about stolen sheep. What is this, your courthouse?”

  “Yes,” said the other man. “Now you begin to understand. That is exactly what it is. We await your reply. What should I do with you? Shall I give you to these people to be spread-eagled? The Asharites nail people to wood as well. We learned it from them. Did you know that? I doubt we’d have trouble finding carpenters.”

  “Don’t bluster,” said Garcia de Rada.

  Jehane, walking back towards the knot of men in the midst of the burning village, with a little girl’s hand in each of hers and a black rage in her heart, saw only the blurred motion of Rodrigo Belmonte’s right arm. She heard a crack, like a whip, and a man cried out.

  Then she realized it had been a whip, and saw the black line of blood on Garcia de Rada’s cheek. He would be scarred for life by that, she knew. She also knew she wanted his life to end tonight. The fury in her was as nothing she had ever felt before; it was huge, terrifying. She felt she could kill the man herself. It was necessary to breathe deeply, to try to preserve a measure of self-control.

  When her father had been marred in Cartada it had come to Jehane and her mother as rumor first and then report, and then they had lived with the knowledge for two days before they were allowed to see what had been done and take him away. What she had just seen in the one-room hut by the river was raw as salt in an open sore. Jehane had wanted to scream. What was medicine, what was all her training, her oath, in the face of an atrocity such as this?

  Anger made her reckless. Leading the two children, she walked straight in to stand between Rod
rigo Belmonte and the leader of the Jaddite raiders, the man he’d called Garcia and had just scarred with a whip.

  “Which one was it?” she said to the children. She pitched her voice to carry.

  There was abruptly a silence around them. A young man, fourteen, fifteen perhaps, began hurrying towards her. The two girls had said there might be an older brother still alive. The mother’s sister, Abirab, who used to request endless salves and infusions of Jehane at the market for foot pains or monthly cramps or sleeplessness, was still in the hut trying to do something impossible—to smooth the horror of a dead, viciously mutilated woman and the stillborn child that had spilled from her.

  The young man rushed up to them and knelt beside his sisters. One of them collapsed, weeping, against his shoulder. The other, the older, stood very straight, her face grave and intent, looking around at the raiders. “He wore a red shirt,” she said quite clearly, “and red boots.”

  “There, then,” said the man called Laín Nunez after a moment, pointing. “Bring him forward, Alvar.”

  A younger member of the band, the one with the oddly high stirrups on his horse, leaped from his mount. From the ranks of the surviving raiders he pushed someone into the open space. Jehane was still too consumed by her rage to give more than a brief thought to how they had all stopped what they’d been doing, for her.

  It wasn’t for her. She looked down at the boy kneeling with his weeping sister in his arms. “Your name is Ziri?”

  He nodded, looking up at her. His dark eyes were enormous in a white face.

  “I am sorry to have to tell you your mother and father are dead. There is no easy way to say it tonight.”

  “A great many people are dead here, doctor. Why are you interrupting?” It was Belmonte, behind her, and it was a fair question, in its way.

  But Jehane’s anger would not let her go. This man was a Jaddite, and the Jaddites had done this thing. “You want me to say it in front of the children?” She did not even look back at him.

  “No one here is a child after tonight.”

  Which was true, she realized. And so Jehane pointed to the man in the red shirt and said, though later she would wish she had not, “This man raped the mother of these children, near to term with another child. Then he put his sword inside her, up inside her, and ripped it out, and left her to bleed to death. When I arrived the child had already spilled out of the wound. Its head had been almost severed. By the sword. Before it was born.” She felt sick, speaking the words.

  “I see.” There was a weariness in Rodrigo Belmonte’s voice that caused her to turn back and look up at him. She could read nothing in his features.

  He sat his horse for a moment in silence, then said, “Give the boy your sword, Alvar. This we will not accept. Not in a village Valledans are bound to defend.”

  Where would you accept it? Jehane wanted to demand, but kept silent. She was suddenly afraid.

  “This man is my cousin,” the man called Garcia de Rada said sharply, holding a piece of grimy cloth to his bleeding face. “He is Parazor de Rada. The constable’s cousin, Belmonte. Remember who—”

  “Keep silent or I will kill you!”

  For the first time Rodrigo Belmonte raised his voice, and Garcia de Rada was not the only man to flinch before what he heard there. Jehane looked again into the face of the man they called the Captain, and then she looked away. Her fury seemed to have passed, leaving only grief and waves of sickness.

  The young soldier, Alvar, came obediently up to the boy who was still kneeling beside her, holding both his sisters now. Alvar offered his sword, hilt foremost. The boy, Ziri, looked past Jehane at Rodrigo Belmonte on his black horse above them.

  “You have this right. I grant it to you before witnesses.”

  Slowly the boy stood up and slowly he took the sword. The man called Alvar was as ashen-faced as Ziri, Jehane saw—and guessed that tonight would have been his own first taste of battle. There was blood on the blade.

  “Think what you are doing, Belmonte!” the man in the red shirt and boots suddenly cried hoarsely. “These things happen in war, on a raid. Do not pretend that your own men—”

  “War?” Rodrigo’s voice knifed in savagely. “What war? Who is at war? Who ordered a raid? Tell me!”

  The other man was still a long moment. “My cousin Garcia,” he finally said.

  “His rank at court? His authority? His reason?”

  No answer. The crackle and crash of the fires was all around them. The light was lurid, unholy, dimming the stars and even the moons. Jehane heard weeping now, the keening sounds of grief, from shadows at the edges of the flames.

  “May Jad forgive you and find a place for your soul in his light,” said Rodrigo Belmonte, looking at the red-shirted man, speaking in a very different voice.

  Ziri looked up at him one last time, hearing that, and evidently saw what he needed to see. He turned and stepped forward, with the unfamiliar blade.

  He will never have held a sword in his life, Jehane thought. She wanted to close her eyes, but something would not let her do that. The red-shirted man did not turn or try to flee. She thought it was courage, at the time, but later decided he might have been too astonished by what was happening to react. This simply did not happen to noblemen playing their games in the countryside.

  Ziri ibn Aram took two steady steps forward and then thrust the borrowed blade—awkwardly, but with determination—straight through the heart of the man who had killed his mother and his father. The man screamed as the blade went in, a terrible sound.

  Too late, Jehane remembered the two girls. She ought to have turned their faces away, covered their ears. Both had been watching. Neither was crying now. She knelt and gathered them to her.

  I caused this death, she was thinking. With rage no longer driving her, it was an appalling thought. She was abruptly mindful of the fact that she was out here beyond the walls of Fezana with the purpose of causing another.

  “I will take them now, doctor.”

  She looked up and saw the boy, Ziri, standing beside her. He had given the sword back to Alvar. There was a bleakness in his eyes. She wondered if, later, it would help him at all to have taken his revenge. She had to wonder that.

  She released the two girls and watched their brother lead them away from the open space. She didn’t know where they were going amid all the fires. She doubted he did either. She remained kneeling on the ground, looking at Garcia de Rada.

  “My cousin was a pig,” he said calmly, turning from the dead man to look up at Rodrigo Belmonte. “What he did was disgusting. We are well rid of him, and I will say as much when we all return home.”

  There was a bark of disbelieving laughter from Laín Nunez. Jehane could hardly believe the words, herself. Somewhere inside she was forced to acknowledge that the man had courage of a sort. He was a monster, though. A monster from the tales used by mothers to fright their children into obedience. But here in Orvilla the monster had come, after all, and children had died. One had been stabbed by a sword before entering the world.

  She looked over her shoulder again, and saw Rodrigo Belmonte smiling strangely as he looked down at de Rada. No one in the world could have taken any comfort in that expression.

  “Do you know,” he said, his voice quiet again, almost conversational, “I have always thought you poisoned King Raimundo.”

  Jehane saw a startled apprehension in the craggy face of Laín Nunez. He turned sharply to Rodrigo. This, clearly, had not been expected. He moved his horse nearer to the Captain’s. Without turning to him, Rodrigo lifted a hand and Laín Nunez stopped. Turning back the other way, Jehane saw Garcia de Rada open his mouth and then close it again. He was clearly thinking hard, but she could see no fear in the man, not even now. Blood was dripping from the wound on his face.

  “You would not dare say such a thing in Esteren,” he said at length.

  His own voice was softer now. A new thread of tension seemed to be running through all the Jaddites. The l
ast king of Valledo had been named Raimundo, Jehane knew that. The oldest of the three brothers, the sons of Sancho the Fat. There had been rumors surrounding Raimundo’s death, a story involving Rodrigo Belmonte, something about the present king of Valledo’s coronation. Ammar ibn Khairan could have told her, Jehane suddenly thought, and shook her head. Not a useful line of thinking.

  “Perhaps I might not,” Rodrigo said, still mildly. “We aren’t in Esteren.”

  “So you feel free to slander anyone you choose?”

  “Not anyone. Only you. Challenge me.” He still had that strange smile on his face.

  “Back home I will. Believe it.”

  “I do not. Fight me now, or admit you killed your king.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Jehane saw Laín Nunez make a curiously helpless gesture beside Rodrigo. The Captain ignored him. Something had altered in his manner and Jehane, for the first time, found herself intimidated by him. This issue—the death of King Raimundo—seemed to be his own open wound. She realized that Velaz had come up quietly to stand protectively beside her.

  “I will do neither. Not here. But say this again at court and observe what I do, Belmonte.”

  “Rodrigo!” Jehane heard Laín Nunez rasp. “Stop this, in Jad’s name! Kill him if you like, but stop this now.”

  “But that is the problem,” said the Captain of Valledo in the same taut voice. “I don’t think I can.”

  Jehane, struggling for understanding amid the rawness of her own emotions, wasn’t sure if he meant that he couldn’t kill, or he couldn’t stop what he was saying. She had a flashing sense that he probably meant both.