“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 th
e 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?
In that innermost, jewel-like garden of the Al-Fontina those long years ago the last blind khalif of Silvenes had greeted him as a welcome visitor, before the blade—from beneath a friend’s cloak—had ended him.
Ammar ibn Khairan drew a breath and shook his head. It might have been useful to have a friend here tonight, but that had never been the way he’d ordered his life, and it would be a weakness to dwell upon it now. Almalik was dead, which was a part, a large part, of the present difficulties.
It had been decided two nights ago—though not yet made generally known—that in two weeks’ time, when the white moon was full, the mercenary army of Ragosa would set out for Cartada, to wrest that city from a parricide. They would march and ride in the name of a small boy, Zabira’s elder son, who had besought the shelter and support of King Badir and the intercession of the holy stars.
Ibn Khairan stood motionless for another moment, then turned away from the water and the boats to walk back. The last time he had been here by the lake late at night Jehane bet Ishak had been waiting by the warehouses and they had met Rodrigo Belmonte at the infirmary and he and Belmonte had left her there, laughing, and gone off to get unexpectedly drunk together. The night of the day he had arrived, the day they had fought side by side.
Something too close there, deeply unsettling.
Jehane had looked remarkably beautiful in the banquet room tonight, he thought, inconsequentially. His steps echoed on the planks of the wharf. He came to the first warehouses and continued on. The streets were empty. He was quite alone.
She’d been gowned in crimson silk, extravagantly, with only lapis jewelry and a white shawl as gestures towards the Kindath clothing laws. It would have been Husari who provided that dress for her, Ammar thought, and ben Avren, probably, the jewels.
Her hair adorned with gems, and the lapis at ears and throat adding brilliance to her eyes, the doctor had caused a palpable stir when she entered the banquet room, though she’d been a fixture here, pragmatic and unpretentious, from the day she arrived. Sometimes, he thought, people reached a point where they wanted to say something different about themselves.
He had teased her this evening, about trying to catch the king’s glance. Alleged she was harboring aspirations to be the first Kindath queen in Al-Rassan. If they start wagering on me again, she’d answered dryly—quick as ever—do let me know: I wouldn’t mind making a little money this time.
He’d looked for her later, after the meal, after the music and all the verses, including his own, but she had already gone. So had Rodrigo Belmonte, it now occurred to him. An idle thought, wispy as a blown cloud across the moon, drifted into his mind.
The two of them, he realized, walking towards the center of the city, were the only people in Ragosa with whom he might have wanted to speak just now. Such an odd conjunction. Jaddite soldier, Kindath woman and physician.
Then he corrected himself. There was a third, actually. One more. He doubted the chancellor of Ragosa was alone, however, and greatly doubted he would be disposed to discuss nuances of poetry just then, so late at night, with Zabira in his bed, accomplished and alluring.
He was both right and wrong, as it happened. He went home alone, in any event, to the house and garden he had leased at the edge of the palace quarter with a small part of the great wealth he had earned in the service of the last king of Cartada.
In the horse-breeding lands of Valledo the next day—the morning of t
he Carnival of Ragosa, in fact—they came for Diego Belmonte at the ranch of his family where he had lived all his short life.
His mother was away at the time, riding the eastern perimeter of Rancho Belmonte, supervising the spring roundup of new foals. This absence on the part of the lady of the estate had not been planned by those who arrived at the ranch house, but they regarded it, nonetheless, as a highly fortuitous circumstance. The lady was known to be headstrong and even violent. She had killed a man here not long ago. Put an arrow through him, in fact. Nor was it assumed by those who arrived that day charged with a particular and delicate mission that Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda would regard them and their task with favor.
Mothers were chancy, at best.
There had not, in fact, been any great press of volunteers in Carcasia for this task, when word came from the castle that one of the sons of Ser Rodrigo Belmonte was to be brought west to join the army as it assembled just north of the tagra lands.
This absence of enthusiasm was accentuated when it became clear that the request for the presence of the young fellow came not from the king directly, but from the Ferrieres cleric Geraud de Chervalles. It was de Chervalles who wanted the boy, for some reason. A messy business, the soldiers agreed, getting tangled in the affairs of foreign clerics. Still, the king had endorsed the request and orders were orders. A company of ten men had been mustered to ride east along the muddy roads to Rancho Belmonte and bring back the lad.
Many of them, it emerged in campfire discussions along the way, had had their own first taste of warfare—against the Asharites or the pigs from Jaloña or Ruenda—at fourteen or fifteen years of age. The boy was said to be almost fourteen now, and as Rodrigo Belmonte’s son . . . well, Jad knew, he ought to be able to fight. No one knew why the army of Valledo needed a boy, but no one put that question openly.
They came to Rancho Belmonte, riding beneath the banner of the kings of Valledo, and were met in a cleared space before the wooden compound walls by several household officials, a small, nervous cleric and two boys, one of whom they were there to claim.
The Lions of Al-Rassan Page 38