The Lions of Al-Rassan
Page 46
“That wouldn’t make sense either,” Rodrigo had replied, his brow furrowed. He sounded edgy to Alvar, not exultant at all.
“Does it matter?” Jehane asked sharply. “Come on!”
She had ridden at a soldier’s pace all the way. Indeed, there were times when Rodrigo or ibn Khairan had had to restrain her, lest they ruin the horses with their speed.
Her relationship with ibn Khairan had changed since Carnival. They tried not to show it too plainly on the ride, but it was there to be seen, in the man as much as in the woman. Alvar was making an effort not to let this distract him. He was only partly successful in that. It seemed that life could throw confusion and pain at you from many directions.
They came down from that height to cross the moat and enter the city. Alvar for the first time, Jehane and Husari coming home, ibn Khairan returning to where Almalik I had tried to destroy his reputation and curb his power.
And Rodrigo?
Alvar understood that the Captain was with them, disguised as an Asharite—his moustache shaved off, hair and skin darkened—because he had sworn an oath to Velaz ben Ishak to defend the woman who was here with them. He was not a man who forswore his oaths.
Jehane’s parents were to be delivered from Fezana and a warning given to the other Kindath. That was the immediate task. After, they would have to turn again to sorting out loyalties and the next steps. They were all, as best Alvar understood, still to join the army of Ragosa somewhere west of Lonza, on the way to Cartada.
The dust cloud north of them had probably altered that.
With Jaddites invading Al-Rassan, did Ragosa still make war on Cartada? Asharite against Asharite with the Horsemen down through the tagra? And did the most renowned leader of Jaddite soldiers in the peninsula fight for Ragosa at such a time?
Alvar, one of those Jaddite soldiers, had no idea. On the ride west he had sensed an emerging distance between ibn Khairan and Ser Rodrigo. Not a coldness, certainly, not opposition. It was more like . . . a marshalling of defenses. Each man fortifying himself against what might be coming.
Husari, normally voluble and perceptive, was no help at all in trying to sort this out. He kept his own counsel all the way here.
He had killed his first man in the square at Carnival. Jehane, in one of her few exchanges with Alvar on the ride, said she thought that might be the trouble. Husari had been a merchant, not a warrior. A gentle man, a lazy, soft one, even. He had slain a Muwardi assassin that night, though, smashing his skull with a blow, spilling brains and blood on the cobblestones.
That could shake a man, Alvar thought. Not all were made for a soldier’s life and what came with it.
Truth to tell—though he told no one this—Alvar wasn’t certain any more if he was made for that life, either. That was frightening. If he wasn’t this, what was he? But it appeared that a soldier needed to be able to see things in extremely simple terms and Alvar had come to realize that he wasn’t especially good at that.
On the fourth morning he had broached this much, diffidently, with the Captain. Rodrigo had ridden in silence a long time before answering. Birds had been singing; the spring day was bright.
“You may be too intelligent to be a good soldier,” Rodrigo had said, finally.
Which wasn’t really what Alvar wanted to hear. It sounded like a rejection. “What about you?” he demanded. “You have been, all your life.”
Rodrigo hesitated again, choosing his words. “I grew up in a different age, Alvar, though it was only a little before yours. When the khalifs ruled in Al-Rassan we lived in fear of our lives in the north. We were raided once, sometimes twice, a year. Every year. Even after the raids began to stop, we children were frightened into bed at night with warnings about the infidels coming to take us away if we were bad. We dreamed of miracles, reversals. Of coming back.”
“So did I!”
“But now you can, don’t you see? It isn’t a dream any more. The world has changed. When you can do what you dreamed about, sometimes it isn’t . . . as simple any more.” Rodrigo looked at Alvar. “I don’t know if that makes any sense at all.”
“I don’t either,” Alvar said glumly.
The Captain’s mouth quirked at that, and Alvar realized he hadn’t been very respectful.
“Sorry,” he said quickly. He remembered—it seemed an unbelievably long time ago—the day Rodrigo had knocked him from his horse just outside Esteren for such impertinence.
Rodrigo only shook his head now. The world had changed. “Try this, if it helps,” he said. “How easy do you find it to think of the three people we’re riding with as infidels, vile in their ways and loathsome to the god?”
Alvar blinked. “But we always knew there was honor in Al-Rassan.”
Rodrigo shook his head. “No. Be honest. Think about this. Some of us did, Alvar. The clerics deny it to this day. I have a feeling your mother would. Think of Vasca’s Isle. The very idea of holy war denies it: Asharites and Kindath are an attack upon Jad. Their existence wounds our god. That’s what we’ve all been taught for centuries. No room for acknowledging honor, let alone grandeur in an enemy. Not in a war driven by such beliefs. That’s what I’m trying—badly—to say. It’s one thing to make war for your country, your family, even in pursuit of glory. It’s another to believe that the people you fight are embodiments of evil and must be destroyed for that. I want this peninsula back. I want Esperaña great again, but I will not pretend that if we smash Al-Rassan and all it has built we are doing the will of any god I know.”
It was so difficult. Amazingly difficult. Alvar rode without speaking for a long while. “Do you think King Ramiro feels that way?”
“I have no idea how King Ramiro feels.”
The answer came too quickly. The wrong question to have asked, Alvar realized. It ended the conversation. And none of the others seemed inclined to talk.
He kept thinking about it, however. He had time to think as they passed west through springtime. Nothing emerged clearly.
What had happened to the sunlit world one dreamed of as a child: when all one wanted was a part in the glory of which Rodrigo had spoken—an honorable role in the battling of lions and a share of pride.
The battling of lions. A child’s dreaming. How did that fit in with what Valledan men had done in Orvilla last summer? Or with Velaz ben Ishak—as good a man as Alvar had ever known—dead on the stones of Ragosa? Or, indeed, with what they themselves had done to a Jaloñan party in a valley northwest of Fibaz? Was there glory there? Was there any way to say there was?
He still wore his cool, loose garb of Al-Rassan. Husari had not removed his leather Valledan hat or vest or leggings. Alvar wasn’t sure why, but that meant something to him. Perhaps in the absence of real answers men needed their emblems more?
Or perhaps he did spend too much time on thoughts such as these ever to be a proper soldier. It was a little reassuring to see the Captain struggling as well. But that didn’t resolve anything.
On a hilltop east of Fezana in Al-Rassan, watching a dust cloud stirred up by the horses of his countrymen, in the moments before the five of them rode down towards the city, Alvar de Pellino decided that glory—the fierce, bright purity of it—was hopelessly hard to come by, in fact.
And then, that same evening, he found it after all and a signing of his future as if branded in the burning sky.
Ammar took control when they approached the Gate of the Moat. Jehane had seen it before, on the campaign near Fibaz, how he and Rodrigo seemed to have an effortless interchange of authority as situations altered. This was, she had come to realize, one of the sorrows she was carrying: whatever bond had evolved, whatever unspoken awareness they shared across two worlds—it was going to be severed now.
A Jaddite army in Al-Rassan made certain of that. The two of them were aware of it. Nothing had been said on the hill, watching the dust, but it was known. They were here to take her parents away from danger, and after that . . . ? After that, whatever it was that had begun that autumn day in
Ragosa in a symbolic battle beneath the ramparts would come to an end.
She wanted to talk with Ammar. She needed to talk with him; about this, and so many other things. About love, and whether something could truly begin in a time of deaths, with endings all around in the world they had known.
Not on this ride, though. They had spoken with glances and the briefest exchanges. Whatever was to be resolved, whatever diminished or expanded possibilities the future might encompass in the mingled signs of their stars and moons, would have to be considered afterwards. If time and the world allowed.
She had no doubts of him. It was astonishing in a way, but she’d had none at all from those first moments in the street at Carnival. Sometimes the heart’s arrow found its way to certainty despite the cautionings of a careful nature.
He was what he was and she knew something about that. He had done what he had done, and the stories ran the length of the peninsula.
And he had said he loved her and she believed him, and there was no need for fear. Not of him. Of the world, perhaps; of darkness, blood, fire; but not of this man who was, it seemed, amazingly, the destination of her soul.
They entered Fezana in the midst of a milling, terrified mass of people from the countryside fleeing the advance of the Jaddite army. Wagons and pushcarts clogged the road into the city and the bridge before the wall, blocking the gates. They were enmeshed among crying children, barking dogs, mules, chickens, shouting men and women; Jehane saw all the signs of a general panic.
Ammar looked over at Rodrigo. “We may be just in time. There could be violence here tonight.” He said it quietly. Jehane felt fear, like the pounding of a drum inside her.
“Let’s get inside,” Belmonte said.
Ammar hesitated. “Rodrigo, you may be trapped in a city your army is besieging.”
“My army is in Ragosa, preparing to set out for Cartada, remember?” Rodrigo’s voice was grim. “I’ll deal with changes as they arise.”
The other man hesitated again, as if about to add something, but merely nodded his head. “Cloak yourself, then. You’ll be slain on the spot if they know you for a Valledan.” He looked over at Alvar and then, improbably, flashed the grin they all knew. “You, on the other hand, look more like a native than I do.”
Alvar returned the smile. “Worry about Husari,” he said in effortless Asharic. “He’ll get us all killed with his hat.” He looked over at Jehane and smiled. “We’ll get them out.”
She managed to nod her head. It was extraordinary what the passage of less than a year had done to him. Or perhaps not so: there had been steel and a mind in Alvar de Pellino from the beginning and he had spent much of this year in the company of two of the most exceptional men in their world. He was on the way, Jehane thought suddenly, to becoming something out of the ordinary himself.
Husari and Ammar led them, urging their horses steadily through the crowd. Stumbling out of their path, men swore at them, but not loudly. They were armed and mounted, and that was enough. They forced a way through.
There were guards at the gate but they were overwhelmed by the clamor and chaos. No one took note of them, no one stayed their course. Late in the afternoon of the day the Valledans arrived, Jehane came back into the city where she had been born and raised.
They reached the Kindath Quarter just ahead of the mob bearing weapons and brands of fire.
Since Ishak had begun to talk again, Eliane had discovered that her husband’s hearing was extremely good. It was he who first heard the sounds from outside the Quarter and drew her attention to them. She could understand him almost perfectly now: the mangled words, because they were his, were to her as water in a dry place.
She put down the letter she had been reading him—Rezzoni ben Corli had written from Padrino where he was living now with his family. He had sent news of Batiara in the aftermath of the massacre in Sorenica.
She was to remember, later, that this was what she had been reading when Ishak said he heard a noise outside. Crossing to the window, Eliane opened it and stood listening. An angry sound, a crowd in the distant streets.
The window of Ishak’s study overlooked a common courtyard shared by a dozen of the larger homes in the Quarter. Looking down, Eliane saw a number of people below, talking nervously, gesticulating. Someone ran into the courtyard: her friend Nasreh bet Rivek’s younger son.
“They are coming!” he shouted. “They’ve killed Mezira ben Mores! They are coming for us with fire!”
Someone screamed from a window across the way. Eliane closed her eyes, clutching the ledge. She was briefly afraid she would fall. She had been warned of this, explicitly. They had been making plans to leave, hard as it was to abandon a home at their age. It seemed they had waited too long.
There was a scraping sound as Ishak rose from his chair behind her. Eliane opened her eyes and looked out, drawing a ragged breath. Faces appeared at windows, people ran into the courtyard. The sun was westering, the cobblestones sliced by a diagonal line of shadow. Frightened men and women crossed in and out of the light. Someone appeared carrying a spear—Nasreh’s older son. Frenzied movement in a once-quiet place, a babble of sound. The huge noise was nearer now. Was this, then, how the world ended?
Ishak spoke her name. She started to turn back to him, but in that moment, blinking in disbelief, she realized that one of the people running into the courtyard below was her daughter.
Jehane had known the guards at the iron gates to the Quarter. They let her enter with the men accompanying her. They had heard and seen the mob gathering by the market square. The Kindath guards were armed—against regulations—and composed. No signs of panic that Alvar could see. They knew what was coming. They knew about the Jaddites too.
Jehane hesitated just inside the gates. Alvar saw her look at Ammar ibn Khairan. And in that moment—not before, in fact—he finally understood something. He felt a quick, hard pain, much like a blade, then it was gone. A different feeling lingered, nearer to sorrow.
He had never really imagined she might be for him.
“Ser Rodrigo, you take her in,” ibn Khairan said quickly. “You’re still a danger if you are seen. Husari and Alvar and I will help out at this gate. We may be able to do something. We can gain you time, if nothing else.”
If nothing else. Alvar knew what that meant.
Jehane said, “Ammar, it isn’t just my parents any more.”
“I know that. We’ll do all we can. Go get them. I know the house. Be downstairs. If we can, we’ll be with you.” He turned to Rodrigo. “If you hear we’ve broken, get them out.” He paused, blue eyes on grey in the light of late afternoon. “I charge you with this,” he said.
Belmonte said nothing. Only nodded.
Jehane and the Captain left them. No time for more words, of farewell or otherwise. It didn’t seem as if the world was allowing any space for such things. The noise from the streets was louder now. Alvar felt fear touch him then, a quick finger beneath the skin. He had never dealt with a mob, he had never even seen one.
“They have already killed three of us,” one of the Kindath guards said grimly.
The gates to the Kindath Quarter were recessed into a narrow laneway. The crowd would be channelled and backed up here when they arrived. That would have been deliberate, Alvar realized. The Kindath had experience with these things. A terrible truth. It occurred to him that Queen Vasca, whom his mother worshipped as holy, would have been urging on the people that were coming now.
Eyes on the open space before the gates, Alvar lifted the round shield from his back, looped his left arm through the strap and drew his sword. Ammar ibn Khairan did the same. Husari touched his weapon, then let it go.
“Give me a moment, first,” he said; his words were quiet, scarcely audible over the rising volume of sound from beyond. Husari stepped out from behind the gates into the open space.
Seeing him do so, Alvar instinctively did the same—in the precise moment Ammar ibn Khairan also moved forward and out.
The guards didn’t need instructions. Alvar heard the clang of metal behind him, and a key turning. He looked back and up: four more Kindath guards stood on a platform above and behind the double gates. They had bows to hand, nocked with arrows. All weapons were forbidden to the Kindath in Al-Rassan. He didn’t think these men were greatly concerned with such laws at this moment.
He stood with Husari and Ammar ibn Khairan, exposed and alone in the narrow lane. The gates were locked behind them; there was nowhere to run. Ibn Khairan glanced at Husari and then at Alvar. “This,” he said lightly, “may not be the most intelligent thing we have ever done.”
The rumble became a roar and then the mob was there.
The first things Alvar registered, sickeningly, were the three severed heads on spears. The noise was huge, a wall of sound that did not seem entirely human. The howling, screaming press of people spilled around the corner into the space before the gates, and then, seeing three men standing there, the vanguard drew to a skidding halt, pushing back hard against those behind them.
There were half a hundred torches. Alvar saw swords and pikes, wooden cudgels, knives. Faces were contorted, filled with hatred, but what Alvar sensed was fear more than rage. His gaze kept returning to those severed, dripping heads. Terror or anger: it didn’t much matter, did it? This crowd had already killed. After the first deaths others would come easily.
In that moment Husari ibn Musa stepped forward, moving from the shadow of the gates into the last of the afternoon sunlight. He lifted both hands, showing them empty. He still wore his Jaddite hat, recklessly.
There was a gradual spilling backwards of silence. They were going to let him speak, it seemed. Then Alvar caught a glint of sunlight on a moving blade. He moved, without conscious thought.
His shield, thrust in front of Husari, blocked the flung knife, a butcher’s heavy blade. It fell with a clatter to the stones. There was blood on that knife, Alvar saw. He heard a flurry of shouts, and then stillness again.