The Lions of Al-Rassan

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  “Get some rest,” Jehane whispered to the Jaddite doctor. “I’ll do what’s left of the night.” D’Iñigo nodded and rose. He stumbled a little as he went. They were all bone-weary.

  She looked down at Diego. He lay on his back, head propped on folded blankets. The doctor in her began to assert control again. She knelt and took his wrist, and was immediately encouraged. His pulse was stronger and it had slowed.

  She looked up and gestured. A soldier not far away came nearer with a torch. “Hold it close,” she whispered.

  She lifted the boy’s closed eyelids and watched how the eyes contracted in the light: equally, and both were centered. Again, good. He was extremely pale, but that was to be expected. There was no fever. The dressing was secure.

  He was doing wonderfully well. Despite everything else that had happened, Jehane could not suppress another shiver of pride and disbelief. This boy, by all rights, by everything known, ought to be dead.

  He would have been, if Jehane had been his physician. If Bernart d’Iñigo had; if any doctor she could name had been. He was alive, his pulse was firm and his breathing steady, because Ishak ben Yonannon was still—after five years in darkness—the most courageous and the most gifted surgeon alive. Who, after tonight, would deny it? Who would dare?

  Jehane shook her head. False pride. Did such things matter so much, now? They didn’t, and yet they did. In the presence of war, on the brink of so many deaths to come, Ishak had reclaimed a life that was lost. No physician—and certainly not his daughter—could be immune to the sense of a small, precious victory won back from the dark.

  She nodded and the soldier withdrew with his torch. Jehane settled back beside the unconscious boy. She had ordered Ammar to snatch some rest before morning; she might be able to let herself doze, after all.

  “He is all right?”

  It was the mother. Rodrigo’s wife. Jehane, looking across at her in the darkness, thought of all the elaborately bloodthirsty stories he had told of her. And now here was a small, very beautiful woman lying on the cold ground beside her child, speaking with fear in her voice.

  “He is doing well. He might wake in the morning. He needs to sleep now.”

  Her eyes were adjusting to the dark again. She could make out the other woman a little more clearly, on the far side of Diego.

  “D’Iñigo told me . . . that no one has ever done this surgery.”

  “That is true.”

  “Your father . . . he was blinded for saving someone’s life?”

  “Mother and infant. In childbirth. He touched an Asharite woman to do so.”

  Miranda Belmonte shook her head. “How is it that we do these things to each other?”

  “I have no answer for that, my lady.”

  There was a silence.

  “Rodrigo mentioned you many times,” Miranda said softly. “In his letters. He had nothing but praise for you. His Kindath physician.” Jehane thought she saw the ghost of a smile. “I was jealous.”

  Jehane shook her head. “No one loved as much as you are should ever be jealous.”

  “I know that, actually,” said Miranda Belmonte. “It is the great gift of my life. If Diego lives, because of your father, that will be two such gifts. It is too much. I am not worthy. It makes me afraid.”

  There was a longer silence. A moment later Jehane realized that the other woman had drifted to sleep again.

  She sat beside the sleeping boy, leaning against a heavy sack of dried goods someone kind had placed nearby. She thought of deaths and births, sight and blindness, moons and sun and stars. Ashar and Jad at war, rain falling on the Kindath as they wandered the world. She thought of love and of one day bearing a child of her own.

  She heard footsteps approaching and knew who it was. She had been certain, in fact, somewhere deep within herself, that this last conversation lay waiting in the night.

  “How is he?” asked Rodrigo quietly, crouching beside her. He was looking down at his son. His face was in darkness.

  “As well as we can hope. I told your wife he may wake in the morning.”

  “I’ll want to be here.”

  “Of course.”

  Rodrigo stood up. “Walk with me?”

  She had known. How had she known? How did the heart see what it did?

  “Not far from him,” she murmured, but rose and they walked a little apart, past the soldier with the torch. They stopped by the river, near a small hut Jehane remembered. One of the few that hadn’t burned last year. Garcia de Rada’s cousin had killed a woman here, and an unborn child. Her life seemed to have circled back to this place. She had met Rodrigo that night and Ammar that day. Both of them.

  It was very quiet. They listened to the river. Rodrigo said, “You know your parents are safe with us. This is . . . the best possible place for them right now.”

  “I believe that.”

  “Jehane. It is . . . probably the best place for you, as well.”

  She had known he would say that. She shook her head. “Safest, perhaps. Not best.” She left the deeper words unsaid, but with Rodrigo they didn’t have to be spoken.

  Another silence. The moons had swung west, and the slow stars. The river murmured below.

  “I’ve asked Husari to stay with me. He has agreed. I told the king a small lie tonight.”

  “I guessed. You don’t really think Laín and Martín will be unable to get the company out, do you?”

  “Not really. And Husari, in his way, may be as good a governor—in Fezana, or elsewhere—as Ammar would have been.”

  “Will he do it?”

  “I believe so. He will not serve the Muwardis. And he, at least, trusts me, if Ammar does not.”

  She heard the bitterness. “It isn’t a question of trust. You know that.”

  “I suppose.” He looked at her. “I wanted to be sure he could leave, if he insisted, so I made up that story about my company trapped in Ragosa.”

  “I know that, Rodrigo.”

  “I didn’t want him to go.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “I don’t want you to go, Jehane. There is no place in Al-Rassan for you, for either of you, when the Muwardis come.”

  “We’ll have to try to make a place,” she said.

  Stillness. He was waiting, she realized, and so she did say it, after all. “I will not leave him, Rodrigo.”

  She heard him release his breath.

  In the darkness by the river’s steady, murmurous flow, Jehane said, looking down at the water, not at the man beside her, “I was under your window at Carnival. I stood there a long time, looking at your light.” She swallowed. “I almost came up to you.”

  She sensed him turning towards her. She kept her gaze fixed upon the river.

  “Why didn’t you?” His voice had altered.

  “Because of what you told me that afternoon.”

  “I was buying paper, I remember. What did I tell you, Jehane?”

  She did look at him then. It was dark, but she knew those features by heart now. They had ridden from this hamlet the summer before on the one horse. So little time ago, really.

  “You told me how much you loved your wife.”

  “I see,” he said.

  Jehane looked away. She needed to look away. They had come to a place too hard for held glances. She said softly, to the river, to the dark, “Is it wrong, or impossible, for a woman to love two men?”

  After what seemed to her a very long time, Rodrigo Belmonte said, “No more so than for a man.”

  Jehane closed her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said. And then, after another moment, holding as tightly as she could to the thing suspended there, “Goodbye.”

  With her words the moment passed, the world moved on again: time, the flowing river, the moons. And the delicate thing that had been in the air between them—whatever it might have been named—fell, as it seemed to Jehane, softly to rest in the grass by the water.

  “Goodbye,” he said. “Be always bless
ed, on all the paths of your life. My dear.” And then he said her name.

  They did not touch. They walked back beside each other to the place where Diego and Fernan and Miranda Belmonte lay asleep and, after standing a long moment gazing down upon his family, Rodrigo Belmonte went towards the king’s tent where the strategies of war were being devised.

  She watched him go. She saw him lift the tent flap, to be lit briefly by the lanterns from inside, then disappear within as the tent closed after him.

  Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

  Jehane saw Diego’s eyes open in the greyness before sunrise.

  He was weak, and in considerable pain, but he recognized his father and mother, and managed the beginnings of a smile. It was Fernan who knelt beside him, though, gripping both his hands. Bernart d’Iñigo stood behind them all, grinning ferociously, then Ishak came out to see his patient, to take his pulse and feel the shape of the wound.

  They had no need of her. Jehane used the moment to walk a little apart with her mother and tell her what she was about to do, and why. It did not greatly surprise her to discover that Eliane and Ishak had already learned most of this from Ammar.

  It appeared he had been waiting outside their tent when they woke. She had a memory of him kneeling before Ishak the summer before. The two of them had known each other a long time, she’d realized that day, and Ammar ibn Khairan was not a man to ride away with their daughter without a word of his own spoken.

  She wondered what had been said. What did surprise her was to encounter no protest. Her mother had never been hesitant with objections. Yet now Jehane was about to ride off through a land at war, with an Asharite, towards a future only the moons knew—and her mother was accepting that.

  It was, Jehane thought, another measure of how much had changed.

  Mother and daughter embraced. Neither wept, but Jehane did do so when her father held her in his arms just before she mounted the horse provided for her.

  She looked at Alvar de Pellino standing silently nearby, his heart in his eyes, as ever. She looked at Husari. At Rodrigo.

  She looked at Ammar ibn Khairan beside her on his mount and nodded her head and they rode away together. East towards Fezana and then past it, well north of the river, watching the plumes of smoke still coiling up from the city into the brightening sky.

  She looked back only once, but Orvilla was already out of sight and she had stopped crying by then. She had set out on this same path a summer ago, riding with Alvar and Velaz. She had only one man with her now, but he was worth a hundred and fifty, by one measure.

  He was worth infinitely more than that, by the measuring of her heart.

  She moved her horse nearer to his, and held out a hand and he removed his glove and laced his fingers through hers. They rode through much of the morning like that as the clouds ahead of them slowly lifted and grey became blue towards the sun.

  At one point, breaking the long silence, she said, comically, “A camel herder in the Majriti?” And was rewarded to hear his swift laughter fill the wide spaces around them.

  Later, in a different voice, she asked him, “What did you say to my father? Did you ask his blessing?”

  He shook his head. “Too much to ask. I told them I loved you, and then I asked their forgiveness.”

  She rode in silence, dealing with this. Finally, very quietly, she said, “How much time are we going to be allowed?”

  And gravely he replied, “I truly don’t know, love. I will do all I can to give us enough.”

  “It will never be enough, Ammar. Understand that. I will always need more time.”

  Their lovemaking each night, after they made camp, had an urgency Jehane had never known.

  After ten days of riding they intercepted the army of Ragosa heading towards Cartada, and time, in Al-Rassan the Beloved, began to run, swift as horses, towards its end.

  Eighteen

  In a reaction to the protracted siege of his city, King Badir of Ragosa had ordered the northern-style wooden chairs removed from his private chambers in the palace. They had been replaced by additional pillows. The king had just lowered himself—with some care for his wine glass—into a nest of cushions by the fire.

  Mazur ben Avren, his chancellor, did the same, not bothering to hide a wince of pain. Personally, he regarded the king’s abjuring of northern furnishings as an entirely unnecessary gesture. Descending to the floor to recline seemed a more difficult exercise every time he did it.

  Badir, watching him, looked amused. “You’re younger than I am, my friend. You’ve let yourself grow soft. How does that happen during a siege?”

  Mazur grimaced as he searched for an easier position. “A touch . . . of something in my hip, my lord. It will ease when the rains let up.”

  “The rains are useful. They must be miserable out there in their tents.”

  “I do hope so,” said ben Avren with fervor. There had been rumors of sickness in the Jaloñan camp.

  He lifted a hand and the nearest servant hastily brought him a glass of wine. From ben Avren’s point of view, it was an extreme relief that his monarch’s rejection of things northern had not extended to the better Jaddite wines. He saluted the king, still trying to find a comfortable position. Both men were silent for a time.

  It was autumn and the eastern rains had arrived early. Ragosa had been under siege since early summer. It had not fallen, nor had the walls been breached. Under the prevailing circumstances this was remarkable.

  Fezana had been taken by the Valledan army in the middle of summer, and recent tidings had come by carrier pigeon that the king of Ruenda had broken through the walls of Salos at the mouth of the Tavares and had put all the adult males to the sword. Women and infants had been burned, in the name of Jad, but the city itself had not been torched: King Sanchez of Ruenda was evidently proposing to winter there. A bad sign, and Badir and his chancellor knew it.

  The Valledan army, more bold, had already pushed southeast over the hills towards Lonza. Rodrigo Belmonte, once a captain in Badir’s own army, did not seem inclined to rest content with only the one major city taken before winter. The Valledans were said to be meeting with resistance in the hill country, but details, for obvious reasons, were hard to come by in besieged Ragosa.

  Given these developments to the west and given the fact that they’d had to release almost half their own army or risk an internal uprising—many of the Jaddite mercenaries had promptly joined the Jaloñans outside the walls—Ragosa’s holding out was an achievement. A measure, as much as anything else, of the chancellor’s prudent marshalling of food reserves and supplies, and the affection and confidence the people of the city vested in their king.

  There were, however, limits. To food, to supplies. To support for a beleaguered monarch and his advisor. His Kindath advisor.

  If they could last until winter they might survive. Or if Yazir came. There had been no word from the Majriti. They were waiting. Everyone in Al-Rassan was waiting that autumn—Jaddite, Asharite, Kindath. If the tribes came north across the straits everything in the peninsula would change.

  Everything had already changed though, and both men knew it. The city they had built together—a smaller, quieter repository of some of the same graces Silvenes had embodied under the khalifs—was already finished, its brief flowering done. However this invasion ended, King Badir’s city of music and ivory was lost.

  The Jaloñans or the Muwardis. One way lay a terrible burning, and the other way . . . ?

  It was very late. Rain was falling outside, a steady sound on the windows and the leaves. The two men were still in the habit of taking this last glass together; the depth and endurance of friendship marked as much in their silence as in the words.

  “There was a report this morning they are building small boats now,” Badir said. He sipped from his wine.

  “I heard the same thing.” Mazur shrugged. “They won’t get in through the lake. They could never make craft large enough to carry sufficient men. We would annihi
late them from the harbor towers.”

  “They might stop our fishing boats from going out.”

  The siege was failing in part because the small craft of Ragosa had been able to go out upon the lake, using care, covered by archers from the harbor walls as they came back in.

  “I’d like to see Jaddites try to blockade this harbor in the autumn winds. I have swimmers who could sink any boat they send out there. I’m hoping they try.”

  “Swimmers? In autumn? You would send someone out with an auger?”

  Mazur drank from his glass. “They would fall over themselves volunteering, my lord. We have a city disinclined to yield, I am pleased to say.”

  It helped that surrender wasn’t really a possibility. They’d killed the king of Jaloña and one of the High Clerics from Ferrieres even before the siege had begun.

  That had been ibn Khairan’s doing; his last act in Ragosan employ, just before he left them for Cartada.

  He’d taken a dozen of the best men in the city and slipped out one moonless night in two small boats, heading east and north along the lake. The Jaloñans, enthusiastically burning villages and farms as they came south around Lake Serrana, were too complacent, and it cost them.

  Ibn Khairan and his men surprised a raiding party, which had been their intention. It was purest luck—he had always been said to be a lucky man—that the Jaloñan party of thirty riders had included King Bermudo and the cleric.

  At twilight on a spring evening ibn Khairan’s men had come upon them at a fishing village. They’d waited down the beach, hidden by the boats. They’d had to watch villagers burned alive, and hear them scream as they were nailed to wooden beams. When the wine flasks had emerged among the raiding party the mood became wild and the northerners had turned to the women and young girls.

  Thirteen men from Ragosa, acting in cold rage and with specific intent, had come up from the beach in the darkness. They were outnumbered but it didn’t matter. Ibn Khairan moved through that burning village like a dark streak of lightning, his men said after, killing where he went.