The Lions of Al-Rassan

by Guy Gavriel Kay

“He will not be.”

  The other man, the Muwardi, had a desert accent and a voice deep as an old grave. She could see none of them. Just out of sight on the double balcony, Jehane felt a grief heavy as a smith’s anvil pulling on her heart. She clenched her fists, nails biting into palms. She could do nothing. She had to wait for them to leave. She wanted to scream.

  “He will come back,” she heard the young king rasp. “He is upset about the Valledan, a comrade-at-arms. I thought he might be, but ibn Khairan is not a man who makes decisions based on such things. He would have been the first to tell me to plan a stroke such as this.”

  “He will not be with you,” the other man said again, blunt, quiet, sure.

  There was a short silence.

  “Kill this man,” said Almalik II of Cartada calmly. “This is a command. You were under orders not to harm ibn Khairan. These orders were violated with that blade. Execute him. Now.”

  Jehane caught her breath. Then, more quickly than she could have imagined, she heard a grunting sound. Someone fell.

  “Good,” she heard the king of Cartada say, after a moment. “At least some of you are loyal. Leave his body. I want Ammar to know I had him killed.” Jehane heard footsteps. The king’s voice came from farther away. “Come. It is time to leave Ragosa. I have done what I could. We can do nothing but wait on Ammar now.”

  “You can kill him,” the second Muwardi said in a soft, uninflected tone. “If he refuses you, why should he be permitted to live?”

  The king of Cartada made no reply.

  A moment later, Jehane heard them going out, and then down the stairs.

  She waited until she heard the front door open and close again, and then she raced to follow—through the second bedroom, and out into the corridor. She spared one quick glance into Ammar’s chamber. There was a man lying on the floor.

  The doctor in her compelled a pause; for too many years this had been an instinct. She rushed in, knelt beside him, felt for a heartbeat. He was, of course, dead. No blade remained, but the wound was in his throat. The Muwardis knew how to kill.

  Rodrigo would have been at his desk. Writing a letter home. Expecting carousing friends, if any knock had come.

  Jehane scrambled to her feet and sped down the stairs into the entranceway. She looked for her mask on the small table. It was not there. She froze.

  Then she understood. Ammar had taken it: that the Cartadans not see an owl mask and surmise the presence of a woman here. For all she knew, King Almalik might even have understood the symbol of the owl as physician: he had been Ammar’s pupil, hadn’t he?

  Which was a part of the grief that now lay like a stone at the center of a spinning night. She pushed open the door and ran out, unmasked now, into the roiling street. She began forcing her way through the crowd towards the barracks. Someone groped for her, playfully. Jehane twisted away and kept moving. It was difficult, people were everywhere, amid torches and smoke. It took her a long time to get through.

  Afterwards, she realized that it was the silence that had warned her.

  When she came back into the square before the barracks, she saw that the huge crowd had grown unnaturally still and had forced itself back towards the perimeter of the square, away from a place where someone lay on the ground.

  By the torches and the one moon, she saw Ammar standing there, unmasked, ashen-faced, with a number of other men she knew extremely well. She pushed her way through the murmuring onlookers and knelt beside the wounded man on the cobblestones. It only took one glance. It was too late for a doctor’s art here. Heartsick, too shocked to speak, she began, helplessly, to weep.

  “Jehane,” whispered the dying man. His eyes had opened and were locked on hers. “Jehane . . . I . . . so very . . .”

  She put her fingers gently to his lips. Then laid her hand against his cheek. There was a Muwardi knife embedded in his chest, and a hideous, pouring sword wound deep in his collarbone, and that was what was going to kill him.

  A moment later, it did. She watched him reach for a last, inadequate breath and then close his eyes, as if in weariness. This was one of the ways men died. She had seen it so many times. Her fingers were still against his cheek when he went away from all of them, to whatever lay in wait beyond the dark.

  “My dear,” she said, brokenly. “Oh, my dear.”

  Was it always like this? That one thought of all the things one so much wanted to say, endlessly too late?

  Above her the circle of soldiers parted. Someone passed between them and sank to his knees on the other side of the body, heedless of the dark blood soaking the cobblestones. He was breathing quickly, as if he’d been running. Jehane didn’t look up, but then she saw him reach forward and take the dead man by the hand.

  “May there be light waiting for you,” she heard him say, very softly. “More and gentler light than any of us can dream or imagine.”

  She did look up then, through her tears.

  “Oh, Jehane,” said Rodrigo Belmonte. “I am so sorry. This should never have happened. He saved my life.”

  At some point, with all the unmixed wine he had drunk, and the heady smell of incense burning in the room, and the many-colored candles everywhere, and the useful pillows on bed and woven carpet, and the extraordinary ways it seemed that a slender golden leash could be used, Alvar lost track of time and place.

  He moved with this unknown woman, and upon her, and at times beneath her urgency. They had removed their masks when they entered the house. It didn’t matter: she was still a hunting cat tonight, whatever she was by daylight in the customary round of the year. He had raking scratches down his body, as if to prove it. With some dismay he realized that she did, too. He couldn’t remember doing that. Then, a little later, he realized he was doing it again. They were standing, coupled, bending forward against the bed then.

  “I don’t even know your name,” he gasped, later, on the carpet before the fire.

  “And why should that matter tonight, in any possible way?” she had replied.

  Her fingers were long, the painted nails sharp. She was wondrously skilled with her hands, among other things. She had green eyes and a wide mouth. He gathered, through various signs, that he was giving pleasure as well as taking it.

  Some time afterwards she chose to blow out all the candles and leash him in a particularly intimate fashion. They went out together, naked, with the marks of their lovemaking on both of them, to stand on the dark balcony one level above the teeming square.

  She leaned against the waist-high balustrade and guided him into her from behind. Alvar was almost convinced by then that something had been put into his wine. He ought to have been exhausted by this point.

  The night breeze was cool. His skin felt feverish, unnaturally sensitive. He could see past her, look down upon the crowd. Music and cries and laughter came up from below and it was as if they were hovering here, their movements almost a part of the dancing, weaving throng in the street. He had never imagined that lovemaking in such an exposed fashion could be so exhilarating. It was, though. He would be a liar to deny it. He might want to deny many things tomorrow, Alvar thought suddenly, but he was not capable of doing so just now.

  “Only think,” she whispered, tilting her head far back to whisper to him. “If any of them were to look up . . . what they would see.”

  He felt her tug a little on the leash. He had put it about her, earlier. It was on him again. Very much so. His hands, which had been gripping the balustrade beside her, came up and encircled her small breasts. A man was playing a five-stringed lute directly below them. A ring of dancing figures surrounded him. In the center of the ring a peacock was dancing. The peacock was Husari ibn Musa.

  “What do you think?” Alvar heard, tongue at his ear again, the long neck arched backwards. So much like a cat. “Shall we bring a torch out here and carry on?”

  He thought of Husari looking up, and winced. But he didn’t think he was going to be able to deny this woman anything tonight. And he kn
ew, without yet having tested the limits of it, that she would refuse him nothing he might ask of her between now and dawn. He didn’t know which thought excited or frightened him more. What he did know, finally understanding, was that this was the dark, dangerous truth at the heart of the Carnival. For this one night, all the rules of the circling year were changed.

  He drew a long breath before answering her. He looked up from the crowd below them to the night sky: only the one moon, blue among the stars.

  Still within her, moving steadily in their merging rhythms, Alvar looked down again, away from the distant lights in the sky to the nearer ones lit by mortal men and women to chase away the dark.

  Across the square, between torches set into the wall of the barracks, he saw Rodrigo Belmonte falling.

  He had indeed been sitting at the writing desk, parchment before him, ink and quills, a glass of dark wine at one elbow, trying to think of what more there was to say—of tidings, counsels, apprehensions, need.

  He was not the sort of man who could write to his wife about how much he longed to have her in this room with him. How he would unbind her hair, strand by strand, and slip his arms about her and draw her near, after so long. Allow his hands to travel, and then, his own clothing gone, how they might . . .

  He could not write these things. He could think them, however, a kind of punishment. He could sit alone at night in a high room and listen to the sounds of revelry drifting up through the open window and he could picture Miranda in his mind, and imagine her here now, and feel weak with his desire.

  He had made a promise years before, and had renewed it over and again—to her, but more to himself. He was not the kind of man who broke promises. He defined himself, in large part, by that. A man found his honor, Rodrigo Belmonte thought—and his self-respect, and certainly pride—on many different kinds of battlefields. He was on one, or hovering above one, tonight in Ragosa. He didn’t write that to Miranda, either.

  He picked up a quill again and dipped it into the black ink and prepared to resume: something for the boys, he thought, to take his mind from these unsettling channels.

  The boys. Love there, too, sword-sharp; fear and pride as well. Almost men now. Too soon. Riding with him? Would that be best? He thought of the old outlaw Tarif ibn Hassan, in that echoing valley. A cunning, ferocious giant of a man. He had thought about him often since that day in the Emin ha’Nazar. Two sons there, as well. Kept beside him. Both of them fine men, capable and decent, though the one had lost his leg now, which was a misfortune. Alive though, thanks to Jehane. No longer young, either of them. And neither, it could be seen, would ever break free of the father’s wide shade into his own defining sunlight, to cast his own shadow. Not even after Tarif died. It could be seen.

  Would he do that to Fernan and Diego?

  He became aware that he had been holding the pen for a long time over the smooth pale parchment. Writing nothing. Chasing thoughts. The ink had dried. He laid the quill down again.

  There came a knocking at his door.

  Later, tracking events backwards, he would realize what had put him—very slightly—on the alert.

  He had not heard footsteps. Any of his own company come calling—as many of them had promised, or threatened, to do—would have warned him by their noisy progression up the stairs and along the corridor. The Muwardis were too schooled to silence. The stillness of the desert, at night under stars.

  Even so, it was only a partial warning, because he had been expecting some of the men to come up tonight, with more wine, and stories from the streets. He’d even been wondering, feeling a little sorry for himself, what was taking them so long.

  So he called out an easy greeting, and pushed his chair back, rising to let them in.

  And the door burst open.

  He had no weapon to hand: his sword and the rancher’s whip lay across the room, by the bed where he always left them. Moving by sheerest instinct, triggered by that half-doubt at the back of his mind, he twisted desperately away from the first flung dagger. He felt it graze his arm. In the same wrenching motion he seized and hurled the candle from the desk into the face of the first man into the room.

  There were two more behind that one, he had time to see. The sword was hopeless; he would never get to it.

  He heard a cry of pain, but he had already turned. Hurtling straight over the desk, expecting a knife in his back any moment, Rodrigo Belmonte went out the open window.

  The third-floor window. Much too far above the ground for a man to survive a fall to the street.

  He had no intention of falling.

  Laín had taught him a trick years and years ago. Whenever he spent a night in a room well above the ground, whether in castle or palace or barracks hall, Rodrigo would hammer a spike into the wall outside his window and tie a length of rope to that spike. A way out. He always wanted a way out. It had saved his life twice. Once here in Al-Rassan, with Raimundo in the time of exile, once on the Jaloñan campaign.

  He gripped the window ledge as he went through, and used that grip to turn his body to where he knew the rope to be. He let go of the ledge and reached for it.

  The rope wasn’t there.

  Rodrigo fell, knees scraping along the wall. Even as he plummeted, fighting a blind panic, he realized that they must have scouted the location of his room earlier, while he was out, dining with the company. Someone with extremely good eyesight, and equally good with a bow, had shot and severed the coiled rope.

  Figuring this out did nothing whatsoever to break his fall.

  Something else did: the fact that Laín Nunez—with the privileges of age and rank—had taken the corner room directly below him, and had done the same thing outside his own chamber.

  They hadn’t bothered to shoot the lower rope. Hurtling down between moon and torches, Rodrigo reached out as he saw Laín’s window rush up towards him and he clutched for—and found—the rope tied to a spike outside it.

  It tore through his hands, shredding his palms. But it held, and he held on at the bottom, though his shoulders were almost pulled from their sockets. He ended up swinging back and forth between two torches on the barracks wall, one flight above the crowded square. No one seemed even to have noticed.

  Or, no one not actually watching for him from below.

  Rodrigo took a knife in the left arm, flung up from the street. No chance to quietly maneuver into a first-floor room. He let go, jerking the Muwardi dagger out as he fell. He landed hard, rolling immediately—and so went under the sword sweeping at him.

  He rolled again on the cobblestones and then was up and spinning. A veiled Muwardi appeared before him, sword up. Rodrigo feinted left and then cut back the other way. The descending blade missed him, striking sparks on the stones. Rodrigo pivoted, swinging his knife at the back of the Muwardi’s head. It sank into his neck. The man grunted and toppled over. Rodrigo grappled for the sword.

  He ought to have died in that moment.

  For all his celebrated prowess, his valor and experience, he ought to have died and left the world of men to meet his god behind the sun.

  He was armed with only a knife, wounded already, and without armor. The assassins in the square had been hand-picked from among the desert warriors in Cartada for the task of killing him.

  He would have died in Ragosa that night, had someone in that square not looked up to see him falling along the wall, and known him, and reacted to the sight of an upward-flung dagger in the night.

  The third Muwardi, rushing up as Belmonte reached for that life-preserving sword, had his weapon out and slashing to kill.

  His blade was intercepted and deflected by a wooden stave. The Muwardi swore, righted himself and received a hard blow on the shin from the staff. He wheeled, ignoring pain as a warrior had to and, raising the sword high, towards the holy stars, brought it sweeping downwards against the accursed interloper.

  The man before him, alert and balanced, moved to parry this. The stave came up, crosswise, in precisely the rig
ht fashion. It was light wood, though, only part of a Carnival costume, and the descending Muwardi sword was real as death. The blade sheared through the staff as if it wasn’t there and bit deep into the intruder’s collarbone in the same moment that another dagger, flung by the third of the assassins, sank into the man’s breast.

  The nearer Muwardi grunted with satisfaction, ripped his sword roughly free, and died.

  Rodrigo Belmonte, with that moment’s respite granted—one of those moments that defined, with precision, the narrow space between living and lying dead on stone—had a Muwardi blade in his hand and a black rage in his heart.

  He drove the sword straight into the chest of the Muwardi, tore it out, and turned to confront the third man. Who did not run, or visibly quail, though there was reason now to do both. They were brave men, however. Whatever else there was to say about them, the warriors of the sands were as courageous in battle as any men who walked the earth. They had been promised Paradise if they died with a weapon in hand.

  The two swords met with a grinding and then a quick, clattering sound. A woman suddenly screamed, and then a man did the same. The crowd around them began frantically spilling away from this abrupt, lethal violence.

  It didn’t last long. The Muwardi had been chosen for his skill in causing other men to die, but he was facing Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo on even terms in a cleared space, and Belmonte had not been bested in single combat since he crossed out of boyhood.

  Another clanging of metal, as Belmonte drove hard for the other man’s knees. The Muwardi parried, retreated. Rodrigo feinted on the backhand, high, moving forward with a long stride. Then he dropped swiftly, unexpectedly, to one knee and slashed his sword into the Muwardi’s thigh. The man cried out, staggered sideways, and died as the sword bit a second time, cleanly in his throat.

  Rodrigo turned, without pausing. He saw what he had expected to see: three more of them—the ones who had burst into his room—racing out the door of the barracks, fanning apart. He knew that whichever of his men had drawn the short straw for this watch was dead in that doorway. He didn’t know who it had been.