Kitabı oku: «The Lions of Al-Rassan»

Guy Gavriel Kay
The Lions of Al-Rassan

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

THE LIONS OF AL-RASSAN. Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay 1995

Guy Gavriel Kay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

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Source ISBN: 9780007342068

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780007352227

Version: 2016-11-18

Dedication

For Harry Karlinsky and Mayer Hoffer,

after thirty-five years

Epigraph

The evening is deep inside me forever.

Many a blond, northern moonrise,

Like a muted reflection, will softly

remind me and remind me again and again.

It will be my bride, my alter ego.

An incentive to find myself. I myself

am the moonrise of the south.

—PAUL KLEE, THE TUNISIAN DIARIES

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Principal Characters

Map

Prologue

It was just past midday, not long before the third…

Part One

Chapter I

Always remember that they come from the desert.

Chapter II

After somehow coping with the disastrous incident at the very…

Chapter III

From within Husari ibn Musa’s chamber late in the afternoon…

Chapter IV

The small-farmers of Orvilla, twelve of them, had come to…

Part Two

Chapter V

“There’s trouble coming,” said Diego, as he ran past the…

Chapter VI

Esteren was a catastrophe of carpenters, masons, bricklayers and laborers.

Part Three

Chapter VII

“Well then,” said Almalik of Cartada, the Lion of Al-Rassan,…

Chapter VIII

Ivories and throngs of people, these were the predominant images…

Chapter IX

The wind was north. Yazir could taste salt in the…

Part Four

Chapter X

Nino di Carrera, young, handsome and adept, the most favored…

Chapter XI

“Where’s Papa now?”

Chapter XII

Towards the end of winter, when the first wildflowers were…

Chapter XIII

“Were you pleased?” the king of Ragosa asked his chancellor,…

Chapter XIV

In fact, it was the cat that found Alvar, late…

Part Five

Chapter XV

The governor of Fezana was a watchful and a cautious…

Chapter XVI

Until the very moment, under the stars and the white…

Chapter XVII

After holding a steady torch over Diego Belmonte in the…

Chapter XVIII

In a reaction to the protracted siege of his city,…

Epilogue

The rapid resettlement of the Kindath community of Sorenica in…

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Guy Gavriel Kay

About the Publisher

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

In Al-Rassan

(All these are Asharite, worshippers of the stars of Ashar, except where noted)

King Almalik of Cartada (“The Lion of Cartada”)

Almalik, his eldest son and heir

Hazem, his second son

Zabira, his favored courtesan

Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais, his principal advisor, guardian of the king’s heir

King Badir of Ragosa

Mazur ben Avren, his chancellor, of the Kindath faith

Tarif ibn Hassan of Arbastro, an outlaw

Husari ibn Musa of Fezana, a silk merchant

Jehane bet Ishak, a physician in Fezana, of the Kindath faith

Ishak ben Yonannon, her father

Eliane bet Danel, her mother

Velaz, their servant

In the Three Kingdoms of Esperaña

(All these are Jaddites, worshippers of the sun-god, Jad)

King Sancho the Fat of Esperaña, now deceased

King Raimundo of Valledo, Sancho’s eldest son, now deceased

In the Kingdom of Valledo (royal city: Esteren)

King Ramiro, son to Sancho the Fat

Queen Ines, his wife, daughter of the king of Ferrieres

Count Gonzalez de Rada, constable of Valledo

Garcia de Rada, his brother

Rodrigo Belmonte (“The Captain”), soldier and rancher, once constable of Valledo

Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, his wife

Ibero, a cleric, tutor to the sons of Rodrigo Belmonte

In the Kingdom of Jaloña

King Bermudo, brother to Sancho the Fat

Queen Fruela, his wife

Count Nino di Carrera, the king’s (and the queen’s) most-favored courtier

In the Kingdom of Ruenda

King Sanchez, youngest son of Sancho the Fat, brother to Ramiro of Valledo

Queen Bearte, his wife

In the Majriti Desert

(Across the southern straits; home of the Muwardi tribes)

Yazir ibn Q’arif, of the Zuhrite Tribe, Lord of the Majriti

Ghalib, his brother, war leader of the tribes

In Countries East

Geraud de Chervalles, a High Cleric of Jad, in Ferrieres

Rezzoni ben Corli, a Kindath physician and teacher; of the city of Sorenica, in Batiara

Map

PROLOGUE

It was just past midday, not long before the third summons to prayer, that Ammar ibn Khairan passed through the Gate of the Bells and entered the palace of Al-Fontina in Silvenes to kill the last of the khalifs of Al-Rassan.

Passing into the Court of Lions he came to the three sets of double doors and paused before those that led to the gardens. There were eunuchs guarding the doors. He knew them by name. They had been dealt with. One of them nodded slightly to him; the other kept his gaze averted. He preferred the second man. They opened the heavy doors and he went through. He heard them swing closed behind him.

In the heat of the day the gardens were deserted. All those still left within the dissolving magnificence of the Al-Fontina would have sought the shade of the innermost rooms. They would be sipping cool sweet wines or using the elaborately long spoons designed by Ziryani to taste sherbets kept frozen in the deep cellars by snow brought down from the mountains. Luxuries from another age, meant for very different men and women from those who dwelt here now.

Thinking such thoughts, ibn Khairan walked noiselessly through the Garden of Oranges and, passing through the horseshoe arch, into the Almond Garden and then, beneath another arch, into the Cypress Garden with its one tall, perfect tree reflected in three pools. Each garden was smaller than the one before, each heartbreaking in its loveliness. The Al-Fontina, a poet once had said, had been built to break the heart.

At the end of the long progression he came to the Garden of Desire, smallest and most jewel-like of all. And there, sitting quietly and alone on the broad rim of the fountain, clad in white, was Muzafar, as had been prearranged.

Ibn Khairan bowed in the archway, a habit deeply ingrained. The old, blind man could not see his obeisance. After a moment he moved forward, stepping deliberately on the pathway that led to the fountain.

“Ammar?” Muzafar said, hearing the sound. “They told me you would be here. Is it you? Have you come to lead me away from here? Is it you, Ammar?”

There were many things that could be said.

“It is,” said ibn Khairan, walking up. He drew his dagger from its sheath. The old man’s head lifted suddenly at that, as if he knew the sound. “I have, indeed, come to set you free of this place of ghosts and echoes.”

With the words he slid the blade smoothly to the hilt in the old man’s heart. Muzafar made no sound. It had been swift and sure. He could tell the wadjis in their temples, if it ever came to such a thing, that he had made it an easy end.

He laid the body down on the fountain rim, ordering the limbs within the white robe to allow the dead man as much dignity as could be. He cleaned his blade in the fountain, watching the waters swirl briefly red. In the teachings of his people, for hundreds and hundreds of years, going back and away to the deserts of the east where the faith of the Asharites had begun, it was a crime without possibility of assuaging to slay one of the god’s anointed khalifs. He looked down at Muzafar, at the round, wrinkled face, sadly irresolute, even in death.

He has not been truly anointed, Almalik had said, back in Cartada. All men know this.

There had been four puppet khalifs this year alone, one other here in Silvenes before Muzafar, one in Tudesca, and the poor child in Salos. It was not a situation that could have been allowed to continue. The other three were already dead. Muzafar was only the last.

Only the last. There had been lions once in Al-Rassan, lions upon the dais in this palace that had been built to make men fall to their knees upon marble and alabaster before the dazzling evidence of a glory beyond their grasp.

Muzafar had, indeed, never been properly anointed, just as Almalik of Cartada had said. But the thought came to Ammar ibn Khairan as he stood in his twentieth year in the Garden of Desire of the Al-Fontina of Silvenes, cleansing his blade of a man’s red blood, that whatever else he did with his life, in the days and nights Ashar and the god saw fit to grant him under the holy circling of their stars, he might ever after be known as the man who slew the last khalif of Al-Rassan.

“You are best with the god among the stars. It will be a time of wolves now,” he said to the dead man on the fountain rim before drying and sheathing his blade and walking back through the four perfect, empty gardens to the doors where the bribed eunuchs waited to let him out. On the way he heard one foolish bird singing in the fierce white light of midday, and then he heard the bells begin, summoning all good men to holy prayer.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Always remember that they come from the desert.

Back in the days before Jehane had begun her own practice, in that time when her father could still talk to her, and teach, he had offered those words to her over and again, speaking of the ruling Asharites among whom they dwelt on sufferance, and labored—as the scattered tribes of the Kindath did everywhere—to create a small space in the world of safety and a measure of repose.

“But we have the desert in our own history, don’t we?” she could remember asking once, the question thrown back as a challenge. She had never been an easy pupil, not for him, not for anyone.

“We passed through,” Ishak had replied in the beautifully modulated voice. “We sojourned for a time, on our way. We were never truly a people of the dunes. They are. Even here in Al-Rassan, amid gardens and water and trees, the Star-born are never sure of the permanence of such things. They remain in their hearts what they were when they first accepted the teachings of Ashar among the sands. When you are in doubt as to how to understand one of them, remind yourself of this and your way will likely be made clear.”

In those days, despite her fractiousness, Jehane’s father’s words had been as text and holy guide for her. On another occasion, after she had complained for the third time during a tedious morning preparing powders and infusions, Ishak had mildly cautioned that a doctor’s life might often be dull, but was not invariably so, and there would be times when she found herself longing for quiet routine.

She was to sharply call to mind both of these teachings before she finally fell asleep at the end of the day that would long afterwards be known in Fezana—with curses, and black candles burned in memory—as The Day of the Moat.

It was a day that would be remembered all her life by Jehane bet Ishak, the physician, for reasons over and above those of her fellow citizens in that proud, notoriously rebellious town: she lost her urine flask in the afternoon, and a part of her heart forever before the moons had set.

The flask, for reasons of family history, was not a trivial matter.

The day had begun at the weekly market by the Cartada Gate. Just past sunrise, Jehane was in the booth by the fountain that had been her father’s before her, in time to see the last of the farmers coming in from the countryside with their produce-laden mules. In a white linen robe beneath the physician’s green and white awning, she settled in, cross-legged on her cushion, for a morning of seeing patients. Velaz hovered, as ever, behind her in the booth, ready to measure and dispense remedies as she requested them, and to ward off any difficulties a young woman might encounter in a place as tumultuous as the market. Trouble was unlikely, however; Jehane was well-known by now.

A morning at the Cartada Gate involved prescribing mostly for farmers from beyond the walls but there were also city servants, artisans, women bargaining for staples at the market and, not infrequently, those among the high-born too frugal to pay for a private visit, or too proud to be treated at home by one of the Kindath. Such patients never came in person; they would send a household woman bearing a urine flask for diagnosis, and sometimes a script spelled out by a scribe outlining symptoms and complaints.

Jehane’s own urine flask, which had been her father’s, was prominently visible on the counter beneath the awning. It was a family signature, an announcement. A magnificent example of the glassblower’s art, the flask was etched with images of the two moons the Kindath worshipped and the Higher Stars of divination.

In some ways it was an object too beautiful for everyday use, given the unglamorous function it was meant to serve. The flask had been made by an artisan in Lonza six years ago, commissioned by King Almalik of Cartada after Ishak had guided the midwives—from the far side of the birthing screen—through the difficult but successful delivery of Almalik’s third son.

When the time had come for the delivery of a fourth son, an even more difficult birth, but also, ultimately, a successful one, Ishak of Fezana, the celebrated Kindath physician, had been given a different, controversial gift by Cartada’s king. A more generous offering in its way, but awareness of that did nothing to touch the core of bitterness Jehane felt to this day, four years after. It was not a bitterness that would pass; she knew that with certainty.

She gave a prescription for sleeplessness and another for stomach troubles. Several people stopped to buy her father’s remedy for headache. It was a simple compound, though closely guarded, as all physicians’ private mixtures were: cloves, myrrh and aloes. Jehane’s mother was kept busy preparing that one all week long in the treatment rooms at the front of their home.

The morning passed. Velaz quietly and steadily filled clay pots and vials at the back of the booth as Jehane issued her directions. A flask of urine, clear at the bottom but thin and pale at the top, told its tale of chest congestion. Jehane prescribed fennel and told the woman to return the next week with another sample.

Ser Rezzoni of Sorenica, a sardonic man, had taught that the essence of the successful physician’s practice lay in inducing patients to return. The dead ones, he’d noted, seldom did. Jehane could remember laughing; she had laughed often in those days, studying in far-off Batiara, before the fourth son of Cartada’s king had been born.

Velaz dealt with all payments, most often in small coin, sometimes otherwise. One woman from a hamlet nearby, troubled by a variety of recurring ailments, brought a dozen brown eggs every week.

The market was unusually crowded. Stretching her arms and shoulders as she glanced up briefly from steady work, Jehane noted with satisfaction the respectable line of patients in front of her. In the first months after she’d taken over her father’s weekly booth here and the treatment rooms at home the patients had been slow to come; now it seemed she was doing almost as well as Ishak had.

The noise level this morning was really quite extraordinary. There had to be some cause for this bustling excitement but Jehane couldn’t think what it might be. It was only when she saw three blond and bearded foreign mercenaries arrogantly shouldering their way through the market that she remembered. The new wing of the castle was being consecrated by the wadjis today, and the young prince of Cartada, Almalik’s eldest son, who bore his name, was here to receive selected dignitaries of subjugated Fezana. Even in a town notorious for its rebels, social status mattered; those who had received a coveted invitation to the ceremony had been preening for weeks.

Jehane paid little attention to this sort of thing, or to any other nuances of diplomacy and war most of the time. There was a saying among her people: Whichever way the wind blows, it will rain upon the Kindath. That pretty well summed up her feelings.

Since the thunderous, echoing fall of the Khalifate in Silvenes fifteen years ago, allegiances and alignments in Al-Rassan had shifted interminably, often several times a year, as petty-kings rose and fell in the cities with numbing regularity. Nor were affairs any clearer in the north, beyond the no-man’s-land, where the Jaddite kings of Valledo and Ruenda and Jaloña—the two surviving sons and the brother of Sancho the Fat—schemed and warred against each other. It was a waste of time, Jehane had long ago decided, to try to keep track of what former slave had gained an ascendancy here, or what king had poisoned his brother there.

It was becoming warmer in the marketplace as the sun climbed upwards in a blue sky. Not a great surprise; midsummer in Fezana was always hot. Jehane dabbed at her forehead with a square of muslin and brought her mind back to the business at hand. Medicine was her training and her love, her refuge from chaos, and it was her link to her father, now and as long as she lived.

A leather worker she did not recognize stood shyly at the front of the line. He carried a chipped earthenware beaker to serve as a flask. Placing a grimy coin on the counter beside her he grimaced apologetically as he proffered the beaker. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, barely audible amid the tumult. “It is all we have. This is from my son. He is eight years old. He is not well.”

Velaz, behind her, unobtrusively picked up the coin; it was considered bad form, Ser Rezzoni had taught, for doctors to actually touch their remuneration. That, he had said waspishly, is what servants are for. He had been her first lover as well as her teacher, during her time living and studying abroad in Batiara. He slept with almost all his women students, and a few of the men it had been rumored. He had a wife and three young daughters who doted upon him. A complex, brilliant, angry man, Ser Rezzoni. Kind enough to her, however, after his fashion, out of respect for Ishak.

Jehane smiled up at the leather worker reassuringly. “It doesn’t matter what container you bring a sample in. Don’t apologize.”

By his coloring he appeared to be a Jaddite from the north, living here because the work for skilled artisans was better in Al-Rassan, most probably a convert. The Asharites didn’t demand conversions, but the tax burden on Kindath and Jaddite made for a keen incentive to embrace the desert visions of Ashar the Sage.

She transferred the urine sample from the chipped beaker to her father’s gorgeous flask, gift of the grateful king whose namesake heir was here today to celebrate an event that further ensured Cartadan dominance of proud Fezana. On a bustling market morning Jehane had little time to ponder ironies, but they tended to surface nonetheless; her mind worked that way.

As the sample settled in the flask she saw that the urine of the leather worker’s son was distinctly rose-colored. She tilted the flask back and forth in the light; in fact, the color was too close to red for comfort. The child had a fever; what else he had was hard to judge.

“Velaz,” she murmured, “dilute the absinthe with a quarter of mint. A drop of the cordial for taste.” She heard her servant withdraw into the booth to prepare the prescription.

To the leather worker she said, “He is warm to the touch?”

He nodded anxiously. “And dry. He is very dry, doctor. He has difficulty swallowing food.”

Briskly, she said, “That is understandable. Give him the remedy we are preparing. Half when you arrive home, half at sundown. Do you understand that?” The man nodded. It was important to ask; some of them, especially the Jaddites from the countryside in the north, didn’t understand the concept of fractions. Velaz would make up two separate vials for them.

“Feed him hot soups only today, a little at a time, and the juice of apples if you can. Make him take these things, even if he does not want to. He may vomit later today. That is not alarming unless there is blood with it. If there is blood, send to my house immediately. Otherwise, continue with the soup and the juice until nightfall. If he is dry and hot he needs these things, you understand?” Again the man nodded, his brow furrowed with concentration. “Before you go, give Velaz directions to your home. I will come in the morning tomorrow to see him.”

The man’s relief was evident, but then a familiar hesitation appeared. “Doctor, forgive me. We have no money to spare for a private consultation.”

Jehane grimaced. Probably not a convert then, sorely burdened by the taxes but refusing to surrender his worship of the sun-god, Jad. Who was she, however, to question religious scruples? Nearly a third of her own earnings went to the Kindath tax, and she would never have called herself religious. Few doctors were. Pride, on the other hand, was another matter. The Kindath were the Wanderers, named for the two moons traversing the night sky among the stars, and as far as Jehane was concerned, they had not travelled so far, through so many centuries, only to surrender their long history here in Al-Rassan. If a Jaddite felt the same about his god, she could understand.

“We will deal with the matter of payment when the time comes. For the moment, the question is whether the child will need to be bled, and I cannot very well do that here in the marketplace.”

She heard a ripple of laughter from someone standing by the booth. She ignored that, made her voice more gentle. Kindath physicians were known to be the most expensive in the peninsula. As well we should be, Jehane thought. We are the only ones who know anything. It was wrong of her, though, to chide people for concerns about cost. “Never fear,” she smiled up at the leather worker. “I will not bleed both you and the boy.”

More general laughter this time. Her father had always said that half the task of doctors was to make the patient believe in them. A certain kind of laughter helped, Jehane had found. It conveyed a sense of confidence. “Be sure you know both the moons and the Higher Stars of his birth hour. If I am going to draw blood I’ll want to work out a time.”

“My wife will know,” the man whispered. “Thank you. Thank you, doctor.”

“Tomorrow,” she said crisply.

Velaz reappeared from the back with the medicine, gave it to the man, and took away her flask to empty it into the pail beside the counter. The leather worker paused beside him, nervously giving directions for the morrow.

“Who’s next?” Jehane asked, looking up again.

There were a great many of King Almalik’s mercenaries in the market now. The blond northern giants from far-off Karch or Waleska and, even more oppressively, Muwardi tribesmen ferried across the straits from the Majriti sands, their faces half-veiled, dark eyes unreadable, except when contempt showed clearly.

Almost certainly this was a deliberate public display by Cartada. There were probably soldiers strolling all through town, under orders to be seen. She belatedly remembered hearing that the prince had arrived two days ago with five hundred men. Far too many soldiers for a ceremonial visit. You could take a small city or launch a major raid across the tagra—the no-man’s-land—with five hundred good men.

They needed soldiers here. The current governor of Fezana was a puppet of Almalik’s, supported by a standing army. The mercenary troops were here ostensibly to guard against incursions from the Jaddite kingdoms, or brigands troubling the countryside. In reality their presence was the only thing that kept the city from rising in revolt again. And now, of course, with a new-built wing in the castle there would be more of them.

Fezana had been a free city from the fall of the Khalifate until seven years ago. Freedom was a memory, anger a reality now; they had been taken in Cartada’s second wave of expansion. The siege had lasted half a year, then someone had opened the Salos Gate to the army outside one night as winter was coming, with its enforced end to the siege. They never learned who the traitor was. Jehane remembered hiding with her mother in the innermost room of their home in the Kindath Quarter, hearing screams and the shouts of battle and the crackle of fire. Her father had been on the other side of the walls, hired by the Cartadans a year before to serve as physician to Almalik’s army; such was a doctor’s life. Ironies again.

Human corpses, crawling with flies, had hung from the walls above this gate and the other five for weeks after the taking of the city, the smell hovering over fruit and vegetable stalls like a pestilence.

Fezana became part of the rapidly growing kingdom of Cartada. So, already, had Lonza, and Aljais, even Silvenes itself, with the sad, plundered ruins of the Al-Fontina. So, later, did Seria and Ardeño. Now even proud Ragosa on the shores of Lake Serrana was under threat, as were Elvira and Tudesca to the south and southwest. In the fragmented Al-Rassan of the petty-kings, Almalik of Cartada was named the Lion by the poets of his court.

Of all the conquered cities, it was Fezana that rebelled most violently: three times in seven years. Each time Almalik’s mercenaries had come back, the blond ones and the veiled ones, and each time flies and carrion birds had feasted on corpses spread-eagled on the city walls.

But there were other ironies, keener ones, of late. The fierce Lion of Cartada was being forced to acknowledge the presence of beasts equally dangerous. The Jaddites of the north might be fewer in number and torn amongst themselves, but they were not blind to opportunity. For two years now Fezana had been paying tribute money to King Ramiro of Valledo. Almalik had been unable to refuse, not if he wanted to avoid the risk of war with the strongest of the Jaddite kings while policing the cities of his fractious realm, dealing with the outlaw bands that roamed the southern hills, and with King Badir of Ragosa wealthy enough to hire his own mercenaries.

Ramiro of Valledo might rule a rough society of herdsmen and primitive villagers, but it was also a society organized for war, and the Horsemen of Jad were not to be trifled with. Only the might of the khalifs of Al-Rassan, supreme in Silvenes for three hundred years, had sufficed to conquer most of the peninsula and confine the Jaddites to the north—and that confining had demanded raid after raid through the high plateaus of the no-man’s-land, and not every raid had been successful.

If the three Jaddite kings ever stopped warring amongst each other, brother against uncle against brother, Jehane thought, Cartada’s conquering Lion—along with all the lesser kings of Al-Rassan—might be muzzled and gelded soon enough.

Which would not necessarily be a good thing at all.

One more irony, bitterness in the taste of it. It seemed she had to hope for the survival of the man she hated as no other. All winds might bring rain for the Kindath, but here among the Asharites of Al-Rassan they had acceptance and a place. After centuries of wandering the earth like their moons through heaven, that meant a great deal. Taxed heavily, bound by restrictive laws, they could nonetheless live freely, seek their fortunes, worship as they wished, both the god and his sisters. And some among the Kindath had risen high indeed among the courts of the petty-kings.

No Kindath were high in the counsels of the Children of Jad in this peninsula. Hardly any of them were left in the north. History—and they had a long history—had taught the Kindath that they might be tolerated and even welcomed among the Jaddites when times were prosperous and peaceful, but when the skies darkened, when the rain winds came, the Kindath became Wanderers again. They were exiled, or forcibly converted, or they died in the lands where the sun-god held sway.

Tribute—the parias—was collected by a party of northern horsemen twice a year. Fezana was expensively engaged in paying the price of being too near to the tagra lands.

CHAPTER II

After somehow coping with the disastrous incident at the very beginning of their ride south, Alvar had been finding the journey the most exhilarating time of his life. This did not come as a surprise; he had nourished dreams of this for years, and reality doesn’t invariably shatter a young man’s dreams. Not immediately, at any rate.

Had he been of a slightly less rational nature, he might even have given fuller rein to the fantasy he briefly entertained as they broke camp after the dawn invocation on their fifth morning south of the River Duric: that he had died and arrived, by the grace of Jad, at the Paradise of Warriors, and would be allowed to ride behind Rodrigo Belmonte, the Captain, through the plains and steppes of summer forever.

The river was far behind them, and the walls of Carcasia. They had passed the wooden stockade forts of Baeza and Lobar, small, fledgling outposts in emptiness. The company rode now through the wild, high, bare sweep of the no-man’s-land, dust rising behind and the sun beating down upon them—fifty of Jad’s own horsemen, journeying to the fabled cities of the Asharites at the king of Valledo’s command.

And young Alvar de Pellino was one of those fifty, chosen, after scarcely a year among the riders at Esteren, to accompany the great Rodrigo—the Captain himself—on a tribute mission to Al-Rassan. There were miracles in the world, truly, bestowed without explanation, unless his mother’s prayers on her pilgrimage to holy Vasca’s Isle had been answered by the god behind the sun.

Since that was at least a possibility, each morning now at dawn Alvar faced east for the invocation and offered thanks to Jad with a full heart, vowing anew upon the iron of the sword his father had given him to be worthy of the god’s trust. And, of course, the Captain’s.

There were so many young riders in the army of King Ramiro. Horsemen from all over Valledo, some with splendid armor and magnificent horses, some with lineage going back to the Old Ones who had ruled the whole peninsula and named it Esperaña, who first learned the truths of the sun-god and built the straight roads. And almost every one of those men would have fasted a week, would have forsworn women and wine, would have seriously contemplated murder for the chance to be trained by the Captain, to be under the cool, grey-eyed scrutiny of Rodrigo Belmonte for three whole weeks. To be, if only for this one mission, numbered among his company.

A man could dream, you see. Three weeks might be only a beginning, with more to follow, the world opening up like a peeled and quartered orange. A young horseman could lie down at night on his saddle blanket and look up at the bright stars worshipped by the followers of Ashar. He could imagine himself cutting a shining swath through the ranks of the infidels to save the Captain himself from danger and death, being saluted and marked by Rodrigo in the midst of roaring battle, and then after, victorious, drinking unmixed wine at the Captain’s side, being honored and made welcome among his company.

A young man could dream, could he not?

The problem, for Alvar, was that such immensely satisfying images had been giving way, in the almost-silence of night, or the long rhythms of a day’s hard riding under the god’s sun, to the vivid, excruciating memory of what had happened the morning they set out from Esteren. To a recollection of the moment, in particular, when young Alvar de Pellino—heart’s pride and joy of his parents and three sisters—had chosen the wrong place entirely to unbutton his trousers and relieve himself before the company mounted up to ride.

It ought to have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

They had assembled at dawn in a newly built sidecourt of the palace at Esteren. Alvar, almost giddy with excitement and the simultaneous effort not to reveal it, had been attempting to remain as inconspicuous as possible. He was not a shy or diffident young man by nature, but even now, at the very moment of departure, a part of him feared, with lurid apprehension, that if someone noticed him—Laín Nunez, for example, the Captain’s lean old companion-at-arms—they might declare Alvar’s presence an obvious error of some kind, and he’d be left behind. He would, of course, have no choice but to kill himself if such a thing happened.

With fifty men and their horses and the laden pack mules in the enclosed space of the courtyard it was easy enough to keep a low profile. It was cool in the yard; something that might have deceived a stranger to the peninsula, a mercenary from Ferrieres or Waleska, say. It would be very hot later, Alvar knew. It was always hot in summer. There was a great deal of noise and men were bustling back and forth carrying planks of wood, tools, wheeling barrows of brick: King Ramiro was expanding his palace.

Alvar checked his saddle and saddlebags for the twentieth time and carefully avoided meeting anyone’s eye. He tried to look older than his years, to convey the impression that he was, if anything, a trifle bored by a mission as routine as this one. He was intelligent enough to doubt he was fooling anyone.

When Count Gonzalez de Rada walked unannounced into the courtyard, dressed in crimson and black—even at dawn among horses—Alvar felt his feverish anxiety rise to an even higher level. He had never seen the constable of Valledo before, except at a distance. A brief silence fell over Rodrigo’s company, and when their bustle of preparation resumed it had a subtly altered quality. Alvar experienced the stirrings of inescapable curiosity and sternly tried to suppress them.

He saw the Captain and Laín Nunez observe the count’s arrival and exchange a glance. Rodrigo stepped a little aside from the others to await the man who’d replaced him as constable when King Ramiro was crowned. The count’s attendants stopped at a word and Gonzalez de Rada approached alone. He was smiling broadly. The Captain, Alvar saw, was not. Behind Rodrigo, Laín Nunez abruptly turned his head and spat deliberately into the dirt of the yard.

At this point, Alvar decided that it would be ill-mannered to observe them further, even out of the corner of his eye—as he noticed the others doing while they pretended to busy themselves with their horses or gear. A Horseman of Jad, he told himself firmly, had no business concerning himself with the words and affairs of the great. Alvar virtuously turned his back upon the forthcoming encounter and walked to a corner of the yard to attend to his own pressing business in private, on the far side of a hay wagon.

Why Count Gonzalez de Rada and Ser Rodrigo Belmonte should have elected to stroll together, a moment later, to the shade of that same wagon would forever after remain one of the enduring mysteries of the world Jad had created, as far as Alvar de Pellino was concerned.

The two men were known throughout the three Jaddite kingdoms of Esperaña to have no love for one another. Even the youngest soldiers, new to the king’s army, managed to hear some of the court stories. The tale of how Rodrigo Belmonte had demanded at the coronation of King Ramiro that the new king swear an oath of noncomplicity in the death of his brother before Ser Rodrigo would offer his own oath of allegiance was one that every one of them knew. It was a part of the legend of the Captain.

It might even be true, Alvar had cynically murmured to some drinking companions one night in a soldier’s tavern. He was already becoming known for remarks like that. It was a good thing he knew how to fight. His father had warned him, more than once back on the farm, that a quick tongue could be more of a hindrance than it was an asset in the army of Valledo.

Clever remarks by young soldiers notwithstanding, what was true was that although Rodrigo Belmonte did swear his oath of fealty and King Ramiro accepted him as his man, it was Gonzalez de Rada who was named by the new king as his constable—the office Rodrigo had held for the late King Raimundo. It was, therefore, Count Gonzalez who was formally responsible, among other things, for overseeing the selection and promotion of young men throughout Valledo to posts in the king’s army.

Not that many of the younger horsemen had been observed to deviate greatly from the collective view that if you wanted to be properly trained you did whatever you could to ride with the Captain. And if you wanted to be numbered among the elite soldiers of the peninsula, of the world, you offered money, land, your sisters, your own young body if need be, as a bribe to whomever could get you into Rodrigo’s band.

Not that anyone could get you in, for any of those offerings. The Captain made his own choices, often unexpected ones, with gap-toothed old Laín Nunez his only counsellor. Laín was manifestly uninterested in the alleged pleasures of boys, and the Captain … well, the very thought was near to sacrilege, besides which, Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda was the most beautiful woman in the world. So all the young men in Esteren agreed, though almost none of them had ever seen her.

On the morning he stood pissing against a wagon wheel in a sidecourt of Esteren’s palace and overheard certain things he ought not to have heard, Alvar de Pellino was one of those who had never met the Captain’s wife. He hadn’t met anyone, really. He was less than a year in from a farm in the northwest. He still couldn’t believe they were going to let him ride with them this morning.

He heard footsteps and voices approaching from the far side of the wagon; that was not of great concern. Some men might have to be alone to empty their bladder or bowels; they didn’t last long in an army. But then, on that very thought, Alvar’s groin muscles clenched in a spasm so hard they cut off the splashing flow of his water. He gasped, recognizing the Captain’s wry tones, and then realized that the second man’s voice—the one that sounded like slow honey being poured—belonged to Count Gonzalez.

With a decision to be swiftly made, Alvar de Pellino made what turned out to be the wrong one. Panic-stricken, irrationally preoccupied with remaining unnoticed, Alvar almost injured himself holding in the last of his water and kept silent. He hoped, fervently, that the two men were only here to exchange parting pleasantries.

“I could arrange to have your sons killed and your ranch burned,” Gonzalez de Rada said, pleasantly enough, “if you make any trouble about this.”

Alvar decided that it was by far the wisest course not to breathe for a time.

“Try it,” the Captain said briskly. “The boys could use some practice against assault, however incompetent. But before you leave, do explain how I would be the one making trouble and not your pig of a brother.”

“If a de Rada chooses to go raiding in Al-Rassan, what business is it of yours, Belmonte?”

“Ah. Well. If such is the case, why bother asking me to close my eyes and pretend not to see him?”

“I am merely trying to save you an embarrassing—”

“Don’t assume everyone else is a fool, de Rada. I’m collecting tribute from Fezana for the king. The only legitimacy to such a claim is that Ramiro has formally guaranteed the security of the city and its countryside. Not only from brigands, or his brother in Ruenda, or the other petty-kings in Al-Rassan, but from buffoons in his own country. If your brother wants to play at raiding games for the fun of it, he’d best not do it on my watch. If I see him anywhere in the country around Fezana I’ll deal with him in the name of the king. You’ll be doing him a kindness if you make that clear.” There was nothing wry or ironic, no hint of anything but iron in the voice now.

There was a silence. Alvar could hear Laín Nunez barking instructions over by the horses. He sounded angry. He often did. It became necessary, despite all his best efforts, to breathe. Alvar did so as quietly as he could.

“Doesn’t it cause you some concern,” Gonzalez de Rada said in a deceptively grave, an almost gentle tone, “to be riding off into infidel lands after speaking so rashly to the constable of Valledo, leaving your poor wife alone on a ranch with children and ranch hands?”

“In a word,” said the Captain, “no. For one thing, you value your own life too much to make a real enemy of me. I will not be subtle about this: if any man I can trace to your authority is found within half a day’s ride of my ranch I will know how to proceed and I will. I hope you understand me. I am speaking about killing you. For another thing, I may have my own thoughts about our king’s ascension, but I believe him to be a fair man. What, think you, will Ramiro do when a messenger reports to him the precise words of this conversation?”

Gonzalez de Rada sounded amused. “You would actually try your word against mine with the king?”

“Think, man,” the Captain said impatiently. Alvar knew that tone already. “He doesn’t have to believe me. But once word of your threat does reach him—and in public, I promise you—what can the king do should any harm befall my family?”

There was a silence again. When de Rada next spoke the amusement was gone. “You would really tell him about this? Unwise. You might force my hand, Belmonte.”

“As you have now forced mine. Consider an alternative, I beg of you. Act the part of an older, wiser brother. Tell that bullying man-child Garcia that his games cannot be allowed to compromise the king’s laws and diplomacy. Is that really too much authority to ask of the constable of Valledo?”

Another silence, a longer one this time. Then, carefully, “I will do what I can to keep him from crossing your path.”

“And I will do what I can to make him regret it if he does. If he fails to respect his older brother’s words.” Rodrigo’s voice betrayed neither triumph nor concession.

“You will not report this to the king now?”

“I will have to think on that. Fortunately I do have a witness should I have need.” With no more warning than that he raised his voice. “Alvar, finish doing what you have to, in the god’s name, you’ve been at it long enough to flood the yard. Come let me present you to the constable.”

Alvar, feeling his heart suddenly lodged considerably higher than it was wont to be found, discovered that he had gone dry as the desert sands. He fumbled to button his trousers and stepped gingerly out from behind the wagon. Crimson with embarrassment and apprehension, he discovered that Count Gonzalez’s features were no less flushed—though what he read in the deep-set brown eyes was rage.

Rodrigo’s voice was bland, as if he was oblivious to the feelings of either of them. “My lord count, please accept the salute of one of my company for this ride, Pellino de Damon’s son. Alvar, make a bow to the constable.”

Confused, horribly shaken, Alvar followed instructions. Gonzalez de Rada nodded curtly at his salute. The count’s expression was bleak as winter in the north when the winds came down. He said, “I believe I know of your father. He held a fort in the southwest for King Sancho, did he not?”

“Maraña Guard, yes, my lord. I am honored you are so good as to call him to mind.” Alvar was surprised his voice was working well enough to manage this. He kept his gaze lowered.

“And where is your father now?”

An innocuous question, a polite one, but Alvar, after what he’d heard from the far side of the wagon, seemed to catch a feathery hint of danger. He had no choice, though. This was the constable of Valledo.

“He was allowed to retire from the army, my lord, after suffering an injury in an Asharite raid. We have a farm now, in the north.”

Gonzalez de Rada was silent a long moment. At length he cleared his throat and said, “He was, if memory serves, a man famous for his discretion, your father.”

“And for loyal service to his leaders,” the Captain interjected briskly, before Alvar could say anything to that. “Alvar, best mount up before Laín blisters you raw for delaying us.”

Gratefully, Alvar hastily bowed to both men and hurried off to the other side of the yard where horses and soldiers awaited, in a simpler world by far than the one into which he’d stumbled by the wagon.

LATE IN THE MORNING of that same day, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte had dropped back from his position near the front of the column and signalled Alvar with a motion of his head to join him.

His heart pounding with the apprehension of disaster, Alvar followed his Captain to a position off one flank of the party. They were passing through the Vargas Hills, some of the most beautiful country in Valledo.

“Laín was born in a village beyond that western range,” the Captain began conversationally. “Or so he says. I tell him it’s a lie. That he was hatched from an egg in a swamp, as bald at birth as he is today.”

Alvar was too nervous to laugh. He managed a feeble grin. It was the first time he’d ever been alone with Ser Rodrigo. The slandered Laín Nunez was up ahead, rasping orders again. They would be taking their midday break soon.

The Captain went on, in the same mild voice, “I heard of a man in Al-Rassan years ago who was afraid to leave the khalif’s banquet table to take a piss. He held it in so long he ruptured himself and died before dessert was served.”

“I can believe it,” Alvar said fervently.

“What ought you to have done back there?” the Captain asked. His tone had changed, but only slightly.

Alvar had been thinking about nothing else since they had left the walls of Esteren behind. In a small voice, he said, “I should have cleared my throat, or coughed.”

Rodrigo Belmonte nodded. “Whistled, sung, spat on a wheel. Anything to let us know you were there. Why didn’t you?”

There was no good, clever answer so he offered the truth: “I was afraid. I still couldn’t believe you were bringing me on this ride. I didn’t want to be noticed.”

The Captain nodded again. He gazed past Alvar at the rolling hills and the dense pine forest to the west. Then the clear grey eyes shifted and Alvar found himself pinned by a vivid gaze. “All right. First lesson. I do not choose men for my company, even for a short journey, by mistake. If you were named to be with us it was for a reason. I have little patience with that kind of thing in a fighting man. Understood?”

Alvar jerked his head up and down. He took a breath and let it out. Before he could speak, the Captain went on. “Second lesson. Tell me, why do you think I called you out from behind the wagon? I made an enemy for you—the second most powerful man in Valledo. That wasn’t a generous thing for me to do. Why did I do it?”

Alvar looked away from the Captain and rode for a time thinking hard. He didn’t know it, but his face bore an expression that used to induce apprehension in his family. His thoughts sometimes took him to unexpected, dangerous places. This, as it happened, was such a time. He glanced over at Ser Rodrigo and then away again, uncharacteristically cautious.

“Say it!” the Captain snapped.

Alvar suddenly wished he were back on the farm, planting grain with his father and the farm hands, waiting for one of his sisters to walk out with beer and cheese and bread, and gossip from the house. He swallowed. He might be back there, soon enough. But it had never been said that Pellino de Damon’s son was a coward or, for that matter, overly shy with his thoughts.

“You weren’t thinking about me,” he said as firmly as he could manage. There was no point saying this if he sounded like a quavering child. “You pulled me out to be a body between Count Gonzalez and your family. I may be nothing in myself, but my father was known, and the constable now realizes that I’m a witness to what happened this morning. I’m protection for your wife and sons.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them it was to see Rodrigo Belmonte grinning at him. Miraculously, the Captain didn’t seem angry. “As I said, there was a reason you were chosen to be tested on this ride. I don’t mind a clever man, Alvar. Within limits, mind you. You may even be right. I may have been entirely selfish. When it comes to threats against my family, I can be. I did make a possible enemy for you. I even put your life at some risk. Not a very honorable thing for a leader to do to one of his company, is it?”

This was another test, and Alvar was aware of it. His father had told him, more than once, that he would do better if he thought a little less and spoke a great deal less. But this was Ser Rodrigo Belmonte himself, the Captain, asking questions that demanded thought. He could dodge it, Alvar supposed. Perhaps he was expected to. But here they were, riding towards Al-Rassan through the pine-clad hills of Vargas, which he had never seen, and he was in this company for a reason. The Captain had just said so. They weren’t going to send him back. Alvar’s customary nature seemed to be returning to him with every passing moment.

Alvar de Pellino said, “Was it an honorable thing to do? Not really, if you want my true thought, my lord. In war a captain can do anything with his men, of course, but in a private feud I don’t know if it’s right.”

For a moment he thought he had gone too far. Then Ser Rodrigo smiled again; there was real amusement in the grey eyes. The Captain stroked his moustache with a gloved hand. “I imagine you caused your father some distress with your frankness, lad.”

Alvar grinned back. “He did caution me at times, my lord. Yes.”

“Cautioned?”

Alvar nodded. “Well, in fairness, I don’t know what more he—”

Alvar was not a small man, and there had been nothing easy about life on a northern farm, and even less that was conducive to softness during a year of service with the king’s army in Esteren. He was strong and quick, and a good rider. Nonetheless, the fist he never saw coming hit the side of his head like a hammer and sent him flying from his horse into the grass as if he’d been a child.

Alvar struggled quickly to a sitting position, spitting blood. One hand went feebly to his jaw, which felt as if it might be broken. It had happened: his father’s warning had just come true. His imbecilic habit of speaking whatever he thought had just cost him the opportunity any young soldier would die for. Rodrigo Belmonte had opened a door for him, and Alvar, swaggering through like the fool he was, had just fallen on his face. Or on his elbow and backside, actually.

Holding a hand to his face, Alvar looked up at his Captain. A short distance away the company had come to a halt and was regarding the two of them.

“I’ve had to do that to my sons, too, once or twice,” Rodrigo said. He was, improbably, still looking amused. “I’ll doubtless have to do it for a few years yet. Third lesson now, Alvar de Pellino. Sometimes it is wrong to hide as you did by the wagon. Sometimes it is equally wrong to push your ideas forward before they are complete. Take a little longer to be so sure of yourself. You’ll have some time to think about this while we ride. And while you are doing so, you might consider whether an unauthorized raid in Al-Rassan by a band of Garcia de Rada’s cronies playing outlaw might take this affair out of the realm of a private feud and into something else. I am an officer of the king of Valledo, and while you are in this company, so are you. The constable attempted to suborn me from my duty to the king with a threat. Is that a private matter, my young philosopher?”

“By the god’s balls, Rodrigo!” came an unmistakable voice, approaching from the head of the column. “What did Pellino’s brat do to deserve that?”

Ser Rodrigo turned to look at Laín Nunez trotting his horse over towards them. “Called me selfish and unfair to my men. Guilty of exploiting them in my private affairs.”

“That all?” Laín spat into the grass. “His father said a lot worse to me in our day.”

“Really?” The Captain seemed surprised. “De Rada just said he was famous for his discretion.”

“Horsepiss,” said Laín Nunez succinctly. “Why would you believe anything a de Rada said? Pellino de Damon had an opinion about anything and everything under the god’s sun. Drove me near crazy, he did. I had to put up with it until I wangled him a promotion to commanding a fort by the no-man’s-land. I was never as happy in my life as when I saw his backside on a horse going away from me.”

Alvar goggled up at both of them; his jaw would have dropped if it hadn’t hurt so much. He was too stunned to even get up from the grass. For most of his life his quiet, patient father had been gently chiding him against the evils of being too outspoken.

“You,” Ser Rodrigo was saying, grinning at the veteran soldier beside him, “are as full of horsepiss as any de Rada I’ve ever met.”

“That, I’ll tell you, is a deadly insult,” Laín Nunez rasped, the seamed and wizened face assuming an expression of fierce outrage.

Rodrigo laughed aloud. “You loved this man’s father like a brother. You’ve been telling me that for years. You picked his son yourself for this ride. Do you want to deny it?”

“I will deny anything I have to,” his lieutenant said sturdily. “But if Pellino’s boy has already driven you to a blow I might have made a terrible mistake.” They both looked down at Alvar, shaking their heads slowly.

“It may well be that you have,” said the Captain at length. He didn’t look particularly concerned. “We’ll know soon enough. Get up, lad,” he added. “Stick something cold on the side of your face or you’ll have trouble offering opinions about anything for a while.”

Laín Nunez had already turned to ride back. Now the Captain did the same. Alvar stood up.

“Captain,” he called, with difficulty.

Ser Rodrigo looked back over his shoulder. The grey eyes regarded him with curiosity now. Alvar knew he was pushing things again. So be it. It seemed his father had been that way too, amazingly. He was going to need some time to deal with that. And it seemed that it wasn’t his mother’s pilgrimage to Vasca’s Isle that had put him in this company, after all.

“Um, circumstances prevented me from finishing my last thought. I just wanted to say also that I would be proud to die defending your wife and sons.”

The Captain’s mouth quirked. He was amused again. “You are rather more likely to die defending yourself from them, actually. Come on, Alvar, I meant it about putting something on your jaw. If you don’t keep the swelling down you’ll frighten the women in Fezana and ruin your chances. In the meantime, remember to do some thinking before next you speak.”

“But I have been thinking—”

The Captain raised a hand in warning. Alvar was abruptly silent. Rodrigo cantered back to the company and a moment later Alvar led his own horse by the reins over to where they had halted for the midday meal. Oddly enough, despite the pain in his jaw, which a cloth soaked in water did only a little to ease, he didn’t feel badly at all.

And he had been thinking, already. He couldn’t help it. He’d decided that the Captain was right about Garcia de Rada’s raid taking the matter out of the area of a private feud and into the king’s affairs. Alvar prided himself that he had always been willing to accept when someone else made a shrewd point in discussion.

ALL THAT was days in the past. A swollen but not a broken jaw had assisted Alvar in the difficult task of keeping his rapidly evolving thoughts to himself.

The twice-yearly collection of the parias from Fezana had become something close to routine now, more an exercise in diplomacy than a military one. It was more important for King Ramiro to dispatch a leader of Ser Rodrigo’s stature than to send an army. They knew Ramiro could send an army. The tribute would not be refused, though it might be slow in coming and there was a kind of dance that had to be performed before they could ride back with gold from Al-Rassan. This much Alvar learned during the shifts he rode ahead of the party with Ludus or Martín, the most experienced of the outriders.

They taught him other things too. This might be a routine expedition, but the Captain was never tolerant of carelessness, and most particularly not so in the no-man’s-land, or in Al-Rassan itself. They were not riding south to give battle, but they had an image, a message to convey: that no one would ever want to do battle with the Horsemen of Valledo, and most particularly not with those commanded by Rodrigo Belmonte.

Ludus taught him how to anticipate from the movements of birds the presence of a stream or pond in the windswept plateau. Martín showed him how to read weather patterns in the clouds—the clues were very different here in the south from those Alvar had known in the far north by the sea. And it was the Captain himself who advised him to shorten his stirrups. It was the first time Ser Rodrigo had spoken directly to Alvar since flattening him with that blow on the first morning.

“You’ll be awkward for a few days,” he said, “but not for longer than that. All my men learn to ride like this into battle. Everyone here knows how. There may come a time in a fight when you need to stand up in the saddle, or leap from your horse. You’ll find it easier with the stirrups high. It may save your life.”

They had been in the no-man’s-land by then, approaching the two small forts King Ramiro had built when he began claiming the parias from Fezana. The garrisons in the forts had been desperately glad to see them, even if they stayed only a single night in each, to leave letters and gossip and supplies.

It had to be a lonely, anxious life down here in Lobar and Baeza, Alvar had realized. The balance in the peninsula might have begun to shift with the fall of the Khalifate in Al-Rassan, but that was an evolving process, not an accomplished reality, and there had been more than a slight element of provocation in the Valledans placing garrisons, however small, in the tagra lands. These were a handful of soldiers in a vast emptiness, perilously near to the swords and arrows of the Asharites.

King Ramiro had tried at the beginning, two years ago, to encourage settlement around the forts. He couldn’t force people to make their way down there, but he’d offered a ten-year tax exemption—given the costs of a steadily expanding army, not a trivial thing—and the usual promise of military support. It hadn’t been enough. Not yet. Only fifteen or twenty families, clearly leaving hopeless situations in the north, had been brave or rash or desperate enough to try making lives for themselves here on the threshold of Al-Rassan.

Things might be changing year by year, but the memory of the Khalifate’s armies thundering north through these high plains was a raw one yet. And everyone with a head above the ground knew the king was too fiercely engaged by his brother and uncle in Ruenda and Jaloña to be reckless in support of two speculative garrisons in the tagra and the families who huddled around them.

The balance might be shifting, but it was still a balance, and one could ignore that only at peril. Thinking, as they continued south, about the narrowed eyes and apprehensive faces of the men and women he’d seen in the fields beside the two forts, Alvar had decided there were worse things for a farmer to contend with than thin soil and early frosts in the north by the Ruenda border. Even the fields themselves down here had seemed pathetic and frail, small scratchings in the wide space of the otherwise empty land.

The Captain hadn’t seemed to see it that way, though. Ser Rodrigo had made a point of dismounting to speak to each of the farmers they saw. Alvar had been close enough to overhear him once: the talk was of crop rotation and the pattern of rainfall here in the tagra lands.

“We aren’t the real warriors of Valledo,” he’d said to his company upon mounting up again after one such conversation. “These people are. It will be a mistake for any man who rides with me to forget that.”

His expression had been unusually grim as he spoke, as if daring any of them to disagree. Alvar hadn’t been inclined to say anything at all. Thinking, he’d rubbed his bruised jaw through the beginnings of a sand-colored beard and kept silent.

The flat, high landscape of the plateau did not change, and there were no border markings of any kind, but late the following afternoon old Laín Nunez said aloud to no one in particular, “We’re in Al-Rassan now.”

THREE DAYS LATER, nearing sundown, the outriders caught a glimpse of the Tavares River and, not long after, Alvar saw for the first time the towers and walls of Fezana, tucked into a northward bend of the river, honey-colored in the westering light.

It was Ludus who first noticed the strange thing. An astonishing number of carrion birds seemed to be circling and swooping above the river by the northern wall of the city. Alvar had never seen anything like it. There had to be thousands of them.

“That’s what happens on a battlefield,” Martín said quietly. “When the battle’s over, I mean.”

Laín Nunez, squinting to see more clearly, turned after a moment to look at the Captain, a question in his eyes. Ser Rodrigo had not dismounted, so none of them had. He stared at Fezana in the distance for a long time.

“There are dead men in the water,” he said finally. “We’ll camp here tonight. I don’t want to go closer, or enter the city, until we know what’s happened.”

“Do you want me to take two or three men and try to find out?” Martín asked.

The Captain shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll have to. We’ll light a good fire tonight. Double the guards, Laín, but I want them to know we’re here.”

Some time later, after the evening meal and after the sunset prayer for the god’s safe night journey, they gathered around the fire while Martín played his guitar and Ludus and Baraño sang under the brilliant stars.

It was just after the white moon had risen in the east, almost full, that three people rode into their camp, with no attempt at concealment.

They dismounted from their mules and were led into the glow of the firelight by the posted guards and, as the music and the singing stopped, Rodrigo Belmonte and his company learned what had happened in Fezana that day.

CHAPTER III

From within Husari ibn Musa’s chamber late in the afternoon they heard the screaming in the streets. A slave was sent to inquire. Ashen-faced, he brought back word.

They did not believe him. Only when a friend of ibn Musa, another merchant, less successful—which appeared to have saved his life—sent a servant running with the same tidings did the reality become inescapable. Every man who had gone to the castle that morning was dead. Headless bodies were floating in the moat and down the river, carrion for the circling birds. Only thus, the very efficient king of Cartada appeared to have decided, could the threat of a rising in Fezana be utterly dispelled. In one afternoon virtually all of the most powerful figures left in the city had been eliminated.

Jehane’s patient, the luxury-loving silk merchant who was, however improbably, to have been among the corpses in the moat, lay on his bed with a hand over his eyes, trembling and spent in the aftermath of passing a kidney stone. Struggling, not very successfully, to deal with her own churning emotions, Jehane looked at him closely. Her refuge, as ever, was in her profession. Quietly, grateful for the control she seemed to have over her voice, she instructed Velaz to mix a further soporific. Ibn Musa surprised her, though.

“No more, Jehane, please.” He lowered the hand and opened his eyes. His voice was weak but quite clear. “I need to be able to think carefully. They may be coming for me. You had best leave this house.”

Jehane hadn’t thought of that. He was right, of course. There was no particular reason why Almalik’s murderous desert mercenaries would allow an accident of ill-health to deprive them of Husari’s head. And as for the doctor—the Kindath doctor—who had so inconveniently kept him from the palace …

She shrugged. Whichever way the wind blows, it will rain upon the Kindath. Her gaze met Husari’s. There was something terrible in his face, still growing, a horror taking shape and a name. Jehane wondered how she must look herself, weary and bedraggled after most of a day in this warm, close room, and now dealing with what they had learned. With slaughter.

“It doesn’t matter whether I stay or go,” she said, surprised again at how calmly she said this. “Ibn Khairan knows who I am, remember? He brought me here.”

Oddly, a part of her still wanted to deny that it was Ammar ibn Khairan who had arranged and achieved this wholesale massacre of innocent men. She couldn’t have said why that had any importance to her: he was a killer, the whole of Al-Rassan knew he was. Did it matter that a killer was sophisticated and amusing? That he had known who her father was, and had spoken well of him?

Behind her, Velaz offered the small, discreet cough that meant he had something urgent to say. Usually in disagreement with a view she had expressed. Without looking back at him, Jehane said, “I know. You think we should leave.”

In his subdued tones, her grey-haired servant—her father’s before her—murmured, “I believe the most honorable ibn Musa offers wise counsel, doctor. The Muwardis may learn who you are from ibn Khairan, but there is no great reason for them to pursue you. If they come for the lord ibn Musa, though, and find us here, you are a provocation to them. My lord ibn Musa will tell you the same thing, I am sure of it. They are desert tribesmen, my lady. They are not … civilized.”

And now Jehane did wheel around, aware that she was channelling fear and anger onto her truest friend in the world, aware that this was not the first time. “So you would have me abandon a patient?” she snapped. “Is that what I should do? How very civilized of us.”

“I am recovering, Jehane.”

She turned back to Husari. He had pushed himself up to a sitting position. “You did all a physician could be asked to do. You saved my life, though not in the way we expected.” Amazingly, he managed a wry smile. It did not reach his eyes.

His voice was firmer now, sharper than she could ever remember. She wondered if some disordered state had descended upon the merchant in the wake of overwhelming horror; if this altered manner was his way of reacting. Her father would have been able to tell her.

Her father, she thought, would not tell her anything again.

There was a good chance the Muwardis would be coming for Husari, that they might indeed take her if they found her here. The tribesmen from the Majriti were not civilized at all. Ammar ibn Khairan knew exactly who she was. Almalik of Cartada had ordered this butchery. Almalik of Cartada had also done what he had done to her father. Four years ago.

There are moments in some lives when it can truly be said that everything pivots and changes, when the branching paths show clearly, when one makes a choice.

Jehane bet Ishak turned back to her patient. “I’m not leaving you here to wait for them alone.”

Husari actually smiled again. “What will you do, my dear? Offer sleeping draughts to the veiled ones when they come?”

“I have worse than that to give them,” Jehane said darkly, but his words forced her to pause. “What do you want,” she asked him. “I am running too fast, I’m sorry. It is possible they are sated. No one may come.”

He shook his head decisively. Again, she registered the change in manner. She had known ibn Musa for a long time. She had never seen him like this.

He said, “I suppose that is possible. I don’t greatly care. I don’t intend to wait to find out. If I am going to do what I must do, I will have to leave Fezana, in any case.”

Jehane blinked. “And what is it you must do?”

“Destroy Cartada,” said the plump, lazy, self-indulgent silk merchant, Husari ibn Musa.

Jehane stared at him. This was a man who liked his dinner meat turned well, so he need not see blood when he ate. His voice was as calm and matter-of-fact as it was when she had heard him talking with a factor about insuring a shipment of silk for transport overseas.

Jehane heard Velaz offer his apologetic cough again. She turned. “If that is so,” Velaz said, as softly as before, his forehead creased with worry now, “we cannot be of aid. Surely it will be better if we are gone from here … so the lord ibn Musa can begin to make his arrangements.”

“I agree,” Husari said. “I will call for an escort and—”

“I do not agree,” Jehane said bluntly. “For one thing, you are at risk of fever after the stones pass and I have to watch for that. For another, you will not be able to leave the city until dark, and certainly not by any of the gates.”

Husari laced his pudgy fingers together. His eyes held hers now, the gaze steady. “What are you proposing?”

It seemed obvious to Jehane. “That you hide in the Kindath Quarter with us until nightfall. I’ll go first, to arrange for them to let you in. I’ll be back at sundown for you. You ought to be in some disguise, I think. I’ll leave that to you. After dark we can leave Fezana by a way that I know.”

Velaz, pushed beyond discretion, made a strangled sound behind her.

“We?” said ibn Musa carefully.

“If I am going to do what I must do,” said Jehane deliberately, “I, too, will have to leave Fezana.”

“Ah,” said the man in the bed. He gazed at her for a disquieting moment, no longer a patient, in some unexpected way. No longer the man she had known for so long. “This is for your father?”

Jehane nodded. There was no point dissembling. He had always been clever.

“Past time,” she said.

THERE WAS A GREAT DEAL to be done. Jehane realized, walking quickly through the tumult of the streets with Velaz, that it was only the mention of her father that had induced Husari to accept her plan. That wasn’t a surprising thing, if one looked at the matter in a certain light. If there was anything the Asharites understood, after centuries of killing each other in their homelands far to the east, and here in Al-Rassan, it was the enduring power of a blood feud, however long vengeance might be deferred.

No matter how absurd it might appear—a Kindath woman declaring her intention of taking revenge against the most powerful monarch to emerge since the Khalifate fell—she had spoken a language even a placid, innocuous Asharite merchant could understand.

And, in any case, the merchant was not so placid any more.

Velaz, seizing the ancient prerogative of longtime servants, was blistering her ears with objections and admonitions. His voice was, as always, appreciably less deferential than it was when others were with them. She could remember him doing this to her father as well, on nights when Ishak would be preparing to rush outside to a patient’s summons without properly clothing himself against rain or wind, or without finishing his meal, or when he drove himself too hard, reading late into the night by candlelight.

She was doing a little bit more than staying up too late, and the frightened concern in Velaz’s voice was going to erode her confidence if she let him go on. Besides which, she had a more difficult confrontation waiting at home.

“This has nothing to do with us,” Velaz was saying urgently, in step with her and not behind, which was completely uncharacteristic, the surest sign of his agitation. “Except if they find a way to blame the Kindath for it, which I wouldn’t be surprised if—”

“Velaz. Enough. Please. We are more than Kindath. We are people who live in Fezana, and have for many years. This is our home. We pay taxes, we pay our share of the filthy parias to Valledo, we shelter from danger behind these walls, and we suffer with others if Cartada’s hand—or any other hand—falls too heavily on this city. What happened here today does matter to us.”

“We will suffer no matter what they do to each other, Jehane.” He was as stubborn as she was and, after years with Ishak, as versed in argument. His normally mild blue eyes were intense. “This is Asharite killing Asharite. Why let it throw our own lives into chaos. Think what you are doing to those who love you. Think—”

Again she had to interrupt. He sounded too much like her mother for comfort now. “Don’t exaggerate,” she said, though he wasn’t, actually. “I am a physician. I am going to look for work outside the city. To expand my knowledge. To make a name. My father did that for years and years, riding with the khalif’s armies some seasons, signing contracts at different courts after Silvenes fell. That’s how he ended up in Cartada. You know that. You were with him.”

“And I know what happened there,” Velaz shot back.

Jehane stopped dead in the street. Someone running behind them almost crashed into her. It was a woman, Jehane saw, her face blank, a mask, as at the spring Processional. But this was a real face, and what lay behind the appearance of a mask was horror.

Velaz was forced to stop as well. He looked at her, his expression angry and afraid. A small man, and not young; nearly sixty years of age now, Jehane knew. He had been with her parents for a long time before her own birth. A Waleskan slave, bought as a young man in the market at Lonza; freed after ten years, which was the Kindath practice.

He could have gone anywhere then. Fluent in five languages after the years abroad with Ishak in Batiara and Ferrieres, and at the khalifs’ courts in Silvenes itself, trained flawlessly as a physician’s aide, more knowledgeable than most doctors were. Discreet, fiercely intelligent, Velaz would have had opportunities all over the peninsula or beyond the mountains east. The Al-Fontina of the khalifs, in those days, had been largely staffed and run by former slaves from the north, few of them as clever or versed in nuances of diplomacy as Velaz had been after ten years with Ishak ben Yonannon.

Such a course seemed never even to have been contemplated. Perhaps he lacked ambition, perhaps he was simply happy. He had converted to the Kindath faith immediately after being freed. Had willingly shouldered the difficult weight of their history. He prayed after that to the white and blue moons—the two sisters of the god—rather than invoking the images of Jad from his boyhood in Waleska or the stars of Ashar painted on the domed temple ceilings of Al-Rassan.

He had stayed with Ishak and Eliane and their small child from that day until this one, and if anyone in the world besides her parents truly loved her, Jehane knew it was this man.

Which made it harder to look at the apprehension in his eyes and realize that she really couldn’t clearly explain why the path of her life seemed to have forked so sharply with the news of this massacre. Why it seemed so obvious what she now had to do. Obvious, but inexplicable. She could imagine what Ser Rezzoni of Sorenica would have said in response to such a conjunction. She could almost hear her father’s words, as well. “An obvious failure to think clearly enough,” Ishak would have murmured. “Start at the beginning, Jehane. Take all the time you need.”

She didn’t have that much time. She had to get Husari ibn Musa into the Kindath Quarter tonight, and do something even harder before that.

She said, “Velaz, I know what happened to my father in Cartada. This isn’t a debate. I can’t explain fully. I would do so if I could. You know that. I can only say that past a certain point accepting the things Almalik has done feels like sharing in them. Being responsible for them. If I stay here and simply open the treatment rooms in the morning and then the next day and the next, as if nothing has happened, that’s how I’ll feel.”

There was a certain quality to Velaz, one of the measures of the man: he knew when what he heard was final.

They walked the rest of the way in silence.

AT THE HEAVY, unadorned iron gates that marked the enclosed Kindath Quarter of Fezana, Jehane breathed a sigh of relief. She knew both of the men posted there. One had been a lover, one a friend for much of her life.

She was as direct as she could afford to be. There was very little time. “Shimon, Bakir, I need your help,” she said to them, even before they had finished unlocking the gates.

“You have it,” Shimon grunted, “but hurry up and get inside. Do you know what is happening out there?”

“I know what has happened, yes, which is why I need you.”

Bakir groaned as he swung the gate open. “Jehane, what have you done now?”

He was a big, broad-shouldered man, undeniably handsome. They had begun to bore each other within weeks of their liaison’s beginning. Fortunately they had parted soon enough for affection to linger. He was married now, with two children. Jehane had delivered both of them.

“Nothing I could avoid, given my doctor’s Oath of Galinus.”

“Burn Galinus!” Shimon said bluntly. “They are killing people out there.”

“That’s why you have to help me,” Jehane said quickly. “I have a patient in the city to whom I must attend tonight. I don’t think I’m safe outside the Quarter—”

“You most certainly aren’t!” Bakir interrupted.

“Fine. I want you to let me bring him in here in a little while. I’ll put him to bed in our house and treat him there.”

They looked at each other.

Bakir shrugged. “That’s all?”

Shimon still looked suspicious. “He’s an Asharite?”

“No, he’s a horse. Of course he’s an Asharite, you idiot. Why else would I be asking permission of the stupidest men in the Quarter?” The insult, she hoped, would distract them enough to end the questioning. Velaz was blessedly silent behind her.

“When will you bring him?”

“I’ll go fetch him immediately. I have to ask my mother’s permission first. Which is why I came ahead.”

Bakir’s dark eyes narrowed further. “You are being awfully proper about this, aren’t you. That isn’t like you, Jehane.”

“Don’t be more of a fool than you have to be, Bakir. You think I’m going to play games after what’s happened this afternoon?”

Again they looked at each other.

“I suppose not,” Shimon said grudgingly. “Very well, your patient can come in. But you aren’t leaving the Quarter again. Velaz can bring him, although I certainly won’t be the one to order him to do it.”

“No, that’s fine,” said Velaz quickly. “I’ll go.”

Jehane had thought that might happen. It was all right. She turned to Velaz. “Go now, then,” she murmured. “If my mother makes a fuss—I’m certain she won’t—we’ll put him in one of the travellers’ inns. Go quickly.”

She turned back to the two guards and offered her best smile. “Thank you, both of you. I won’t forget this.”

“I’d rather you did,” said Shimon virtuously. “You know how irregular this is.”

He was being pompous. It was irregular, but not greatly so. Asharites often came quietly into the Quarter, on business or in pursuit of pleasure. The only trick—and not a hard one—was to make sure the wadjis didn’t know about it outside, or the Kindath high priests inside the gates. Jehane didn’t think it was an appropriate time to get into a dispute with Shimon, however.

Among other things, the longer they talked the more it was possible that he might inquire as to the identity of her patient. And if he asked and she had to tell, he might know that Husari ibn Musa was one of those who was to have been in the castle that day. If Shimon and Bakir discovered this was a man the Muwardi assassins might be seeking there was no way under the moons that Husari would be allowed into the Kindath Quarter.

She was putting her own people at risk with this, Jehane knew. She was young enough to have decided the risk was an acceptable one. The last Kindath massacres in Al-Rassan had taken place far to the south, in Tudesca and Elvira years before she was born.

HER MOTHER, AS EXPECTED, raised no objection. Wife and mother of physicians, Eliane bet Danel was long accustomed to adapting her home to the needs of patients. The fact that this disruption was occurring during the most violent day Fezana had known in a long time was not something that would ruffle her. The more so, because in this case Jehane made a point of telling her mother that the patient was ibn Musa. Eliane would have recognized him when he came. Husari had had Ishak as a dinner guest on several occasions and more than once the silk merchant had discreetly entered the Quarter to grace their own table—defying the wadjis and the high priests, both. Fezana was not a particularly devout city.

Which had probably done nothing but add to the pleasure of the fiercely pious Muwardis as they killed innocent men, Jehane thought. She was standing on the upstairs landing, one hand poised to knock on a door, a burning candle in her other hand.

For the first time in this long day she trembled, hesitating there, thinking of what she was about to do. She saw the flame waver. There was a tall window at the far end of the corridor, overlooking their inner courtyard. The rays of the setting sun were slanting through, reminding her that time mattered here. She had told her mother she would be leaving later that night and had braced herself for the fury of a storm that never came.

“It is not such a bad time to be out of this city,” Eliane had said calmly after a moment’s thought. She’d looked at her only child thoughtfully. “You will find work elsewhere. Your father always said it was good for a doctor to have experience of different places.” She’d paused, then added, without smiling, “Perhaps you’ll come back married.”

Jehane had grimaced. This was an old issue. Nearing her thirtieth year she was past prime age for marrying and had essentially made her peace with that. Eliane had not.

“You’ll be all right?” Jehane had asked, ignoring the last remark.

“I don’t see why not,” her mother had replied briskly. Then her stiffness was eased by the smile that made her beautiful. She had been wed herself, at twenty, to the most brilliant man among the brilliant Kindath community of Silvenes, in the days of the last bright flowering of the Khalifate. “What should I do, Jehane? Fall to my knees and clutch your hands, begging you to stay and comfort my old age?”

“You aren’t old,” her daughter said quickly.

“Of course I am. And of course I won’t hold you back. If you aren’t raising my grandchildren in a house around the corner by now, I have only myself and your father to blame for the way we brought you up.”

“To think for myself?”

“Among other things.” The smile again, unexpectedly. “To try to think for almost everyone else, I fear. I’ll pack some things for you and order a place set for Husari at table. Is there anything he shouldn’t eat tonight?”

Jehane had shaken her head. Sometimes she found herself wishing her mother would give vent to her emotions, that there might be a storm, after all. But mostly she was grateful for the nearly unbroken control that Eliane had displayed since that terrible day in Cartada four years ago. She could guess at the price of that restraint. She could measure it within herself. They weren’t so very different, mother and daughter. Jehane hated to cry; she regarded it as a defeat.

“You’d better go upstairs,” Eliane had said.

She had come upstairs. It was usually like this. There was seldom any pain in talking with her mother, but it never seemed as if the things that needed to be said were said. This afternoon, though, was not the time to be addressing such matters. Something very hard was still to come.

She knew that if she hesitated too long her resolve to leave might yet falter on this, the most difficult threshold of the day, of all her days. Jehane knocked twice, as was her habit, and entered the shuttered darkness of her father’s study.

The candle lent its necessary glow to the books bound in leather and gold, the scrolls, the instruments and sky charts, the artifacts and mementos and gifts of a lifetime of study and travel and work. Its light fell, no longer wavering in her hand, upon a desk, a plain northern-style wooden chair, cushions on the floor, another deep chair—and the white-bearded man in the dark blue robe sitting motionless there, his back to the door and his daughter and the light.

Jehane looked at him, at the spear-like rigidity of his posture. She noted, as she noted every single day, how he did not even turn his head to acknowledge her entry into the room. She might as well not have entered, with her light and the tale she had to tell. It was always this way, but this afternoon was different. She had come to say goodbye and, looking at her father, the long sword of memory lay in Jehane’s mind, hard and bright and terrible as the knives the Muwardis must have used.

Four years ago, the fourth son of King Almalik of Cartada had been twisted around his own birth cord in the womb of his mother. Such infants died and, almost invariably, the mother did as well. Physicians knew the signs well enough to be able to warn of what was coming. It happened often enough; no blame would attach. Childbirth was one of the dangerous things in the world. Doctors could not do the miraculous.

But Zabira of Cartada, the musician, was the favored courtesan of the most powerful of all the city-kings in Al-Rassan, and Ishak of Fezana was a brave and a brilliant man. After consulting his charts of the heavens, and sending word to Almalik that what he was about to try offered only the slimmest hope, Ishak had performed the only recorded delivery of a child through an incision in the mother’s belly while preserving the life of the mother at the same time.

Not Galinus himself, the source and fount of all medical knowledge, not Uzbet al-Maurus, not Avenal of Soriyya in the Asharite homelands of the east—not one of them, or any who had followed after, had reported successfully doing such a thing, though these three had noted the procedure, and each of them had tried.

No, it was Ishak ben Yonannon of the Kindath who first delivered a living child in such a way, in the palace of Cartada in Al-Rassan in the second decade after the fall of the Khalifate. And then he had healed the mother of her wound and tended her after, so that she rose from her bed one morning, very pale but beautiful as ever, to reclaim her four-stringed lute and take her accustomed place in Almalik’s reception hall and his gardens and private chambers.

For this act of courage and skill on a scale never before known, Almalik of Cartada had gratefully offered a quantity of gold and a gift of property such as to leave Ishak and his wife and daughter secure for the rest of their lives.

Then he had ordered the physician’s eyes put out and his tongue cut off at the root, that the forbidden sight of an Asharite woman’s nakedness be atoned for, that no man might ever hear a description of Zabira’s milk-white splendor from the Kindath doctor who had exposed her to his cold glance and his scalpel.

It was an act of mercy, of a sort. The ordained punishment for a Jaddite or a Kindath who feasted lecherous eyes on the unclothed figure of an Asharite woman who was bride or concubine to another man was, as everyone knew, the death between horses. And this woman belonged to a king, the successor to khalifs, the Lion of Al-Rassan, from whose presence all lesser kings fled.

The wadjis, seeing an opportunity, had begun demanding that death in temple and marketplace the moment the story of the birth escaped the palace. Almalik, however, was genuinely grateful to his Kindath physician. He had always disliked the wadjis and the demands they made of him and he was—by his own assessment, at any rate—a generous man.

Ishak lived, blind and mute, sunken far into the stony depths of an inwardness his wife and only child could not reach. Not in those first days, not after, could he be roused to any response.

CHAPTER IV

The small-farmers of Orvilla, twelve of them, had come to the city together with their laden mules and they left Fezana together when the market closed at midday. One or two might have been inclined to stay and gawk at the soldiers strolling arrogantly about the town, but that would have meant travelling back to the village without the protection of the larger group. In unsettled country so near to the no-man’s-land, and in unsettled times, the pleasures of loitering in the city—or, in the case of some of the men, visiting an interesting suburb just outside the northern walls—could not outweigh the real need for the security of numbers.

Well before the sundown prayers they had all been safely back in Orvilla with the goods they had obtained at the market in exchange for their weekly produce. As a consequence, none of them had any knowledge of what happened in Fezana that day. They would learn of it later; by then it would matter rather less. They would have a catastrophe of their own to deal with.

The raiders from the north—even ignorant villagers could recognize Jaddite horsemen—swept down upon Orvilla at precisely the moment the blue moon rose to join the white one in the summer sky. It was too precisely calculated not to be a deliberate timing, though to what purpose no one could imagine, after. Perhaps a whim. There was nothing whimsical about what happened when the horsemen—at least fifty of them—broke through or leaped over the wooden fence that encircled the houses and outbuildings of the village. Some twenty families lived in Orvilla. There were a handful of old swords, a few rusting spears. A number of mules. One ox. Three horses. Aram ibn Dunash, whose house was by the water mill on the stream, had a bow that had been his father’s.

He was the first man to die, trying to nock an arrow with shaking hands as a screaming rider bore down upon him. The horseman’s pike took Aram in the chest and carried him into the wall of his own home. His wife, unwisely, screamed from inside. The horseman, hearing that, leaped from his mount and strode into the tiny house. He was already unbuckling his belt as he ducked through the low door.

A number of houses were quickly fired, and the communal barn. There was straw in the barn and in midsummer it was dry. The structure went up in flames with a roar. The fire must have been visible as far away as Fezana.

Ziri ibn Aram, who liked to sleep on the roof of the barn in summer, leaped down just in time. The barn was on the far side of the village from the mill and the stream. He was spared seeing his father die. Nor had he observed the horseman striding into the home where his pregnant mother and sisters were. Ziri was fourteen years old. He would have tried to kill the man with his hands. He would have died, of course. As it was, he landed awkwardly at the feet of a laughing Jaddite who was using the flat of his sword to round up all those not killed in the first moments of the attack. There weren’t very many of them, Ziri realized, looking desperately around for his family amid the smoke. Perhaps twenty people, in all, seemed to be still alive, from a village of more than twice that number. It was difficult to tell amid the flames. Orvilla was being consumed in an inferno of fire.

For the raiders, it was a disappointing exercise in some ways. There was, predictably, no one worth ransoming, not even a country wadji, who might have fetched a price. Even the brief flurry of combat had been laughable. The pathetically armed farmers had offered nothing in the way of opposition or training for battle. There were women of course, but one didn’t have to ride this far in the heat of summer to find peasant women for sport. Only when one man suggested spread-eagling the surviving men—the women were being taken back north, of course—did the prospect of a diversion belatedly emerge. This was, after all, Al-Rassan. The half-naked wretches herded together like cattle or sheep were infidels. This raid could almost be seen as an act of piety.

“He’s right!” another man shouted. “Spread the bastards on their own beams, then spread their women another way!” There was laughter.

With some speed and even a measure of efficiency amid the chaos of fire the raiders began gathering and constructing wooden beams. The night had begun to show promise of entertainment. They had plenty of nails. Meant for shoeing any horses they took on the raid, they would do as well for hammering men to wood.

They had just selected the first of the peasants for nailing—a blank-faced boy who would doubtless have grown up to kill innocent men and women north of the tagra lands—when someone shrieked a grievously tardy warning.

A whirlwind of men on horses thundered in among them, twisting between the fires, carrying swords and using them. Most of the raiders had dismounted by then, many had laid down their weapons to prepare the diagonal beams for nailing the Asharites. They were easy prey. As easy as the villagers had been for them.

The raiders were men of breeding though, not lice-ridden outlaw brigands. They knew how these things were done, even in Al-Rassan. Peasants were one thing—on both sides of the no-man’s-land—but men of means and status were another. All over the hamlet of Orvilla, Jaddites began throwing up their hands in submission and loudly voicing the well-known cry: “Ransom! Ransom!”

Those who were killed in the first sweep of the new horsemen must have died in astonished disbelief. This was not supposed to happen. If, before they were dispatched, they realized who had come, that astonishment would likely have been redoubled, but these are not things one can know, with any certainty, of the dead.

ALVAR HADN’T GIVEN the matter any real thought, but he had certainly never imagined that the first man he killed in Al-Rassan would be from Valledo. The man wasn’t even on his horse at the time. In a way, that didn’t feel right, but Laín Nunez’s instructions had been precise: kill them until you hear the order to stop. Every man was fair game except the stocky, black-haired one who would be leading them. He was to be left for the Captain.

The Captain was in a terrifying state. He had been from the moment the three riders from Fezana came into the camp with their story. The fat merchant—Abenmuza, he called himself—had told them what the king of Cartada had ordered done in Fezana that day. Searching for clues as to how to react, Alvar had looked to his leaders. If Laín Nunez had seemed indifferent to the bloody tale, almost as if he’d expected such foul deeds here in Al-Rassan, Ser Rodrigo’s expression told a different story. He’d said nothing, though, when the merchant finished, save to ask the doctor—her name was Jehane—if she had ever served with a military company.

“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 Rodrigo 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 frighten 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 last 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.

With a roar, another of the houses collapsed. The fire had spread as far as it could. There was no more wood to ignite. Orvilla would be cinder and ash by morning, when the survivors would have to attend to the dead and the process of living past this night.

“Take your men and go,” Rodrigo Belmonte said to the man who had done this thing.

“Return our horses and weapons and we ride north on the instant,” said Garcia de Rada promptly.

Jehane looked back and saw that Rodrigo’s cold smile was gone. He seemed tired now, drained of some vital force by this last exchange. “You sued for ransom,” he said. “Remember? There are witnesses. Full price will be settled at court by the heralds. Your mounts and weapons are a first payment. You are released on your sworn oaths to pay.”

“You want us to walk back to Valledo?”

“I want you dead,” said Rodrigo succinctly. “I will not murder a countryman, though. Be grateful and start walking. There are five hundred new Muwardi mercenaries in Fezana tonight, by the way. They’ll have seen these fires. You might not want to linger.”

He was going to let them go. Privileges of rank and power. The way the world was run. Dead and mutilated farmers could be redeemed by horses and gold for the rescuers. Jehane had a sudden image—intense and disorienting—of herself rising smoothly from the brown, parched grass, striding over to that young soldier, Alvar, and seizing his sword. She could almost feel the weight of the weapon in her hands. With eerie clarity she watched herself walk up to Garcia de Rada—he had even turned partially away from her. In the vision she heard Velaz cry “Jehane!” just as she killed de Rada with a two-handed swing of the Jaddite sword. The soldier’s blade entered between two ribs; she heard the dark-haired man cry out and saw his blood spurt and continue to spill as he fell.

She would never have thought such images could occur to her, let alone feel so urgent, so necessary. She was a doctor, sworn to defend life by the Oath of Galinus. The same oath her father had sworn, the one that had led him to deliver a child, aware that it could cost him his own life. He had said as much to ibn Khairan, earlier this same day. It was hard to believe it was the same day.

She was a physician before she was anything else, it was her holy island, her sanctuary. She had already caused one man to be killed tonight. It was enough. It was more than enough. She stood up and took a single step towards Garcia de Rada. She saw him look at her, register the Kindath-style drape of the stole about her head and shoulders. She could read contempt and derision in his eyes. It didn’t matter. She had sworn an oath, years ago.

She said, “Wash that wound in the river. Then cover it with a clean cloth. Do that every day. You will be marked, but it might not fester. If you can have a doctor salve it soon, that will be better for you.”

She would never have imagined it would be so difficult to speak such words. At the perimeter of the open space, half in the ruined shadows, she suddenly saw her patient, Abirab, with the two little girls held close to her. Their brother, Ziri, had stepped forward a little and was staring at her. Enduring his gaze, Jehane felt her words as the most brutal form of betrayal.

She turned away and, without looking back, without waiting for anyone, began walking from the village, between the burning houses and then out through a gap in the fence, feeling the heat of the fires on her face and in her heart as she went, with no prospect of anything to cool her grief.

She knew Velaz would be following. She had not expected to hear, so soon, the sound of a horse overtaking her.

“The camp is too far to walk,” said a voice. Not Laín Nunez this time. She looked up at Rodrigo Belmonte as he slowed the horse beside her. “I think we each did something that cut against our desire back there,” he said. “Shall we ride together?”

She had been awed by him at first, by the scale of his reputation, then, briefly, afraid, then angry—though unfairly so, perhaps. Now she was simply tired, and grateful for the chance to ride. He leaned over in the saddle and lifted her up, effortlessly, though she wasn’t a small woman. She arranged her skirts and undertunic and swung a leg across the horse behind him. She put her arms around his waist. He wasn’t wearing armor. In the silence of the night, as they left the fires behind, Jehane could feel the beating of his heart.

They rode in that silence for a time and Jehane let the stillness and the dark merge with the steady drumming of the horse’s hooves to guide her back towards a semblance of composure.

This is my day for meeting famous men, she thought suddenly.

It could almost have been amusing, if so much tragedy had not been embedded in the day. The realization, though, was inescapable. The man she was riding behind had been known, for almost twenty years—since the late days of the Khalifate—as the Scourge of Al-Rassan. The wadjis still singled him out by name for cursing in the temples at the darkfall prayers. She wondered if he knew that, if he prided himself upon it.

Alvar saw himself walking in that palace; he saw towers and domes of burnished gold, marble columns and arches, gleaming in the light. He saw gardens with flower beds and splashing fountains and statues in the shade, heard a distant, otherworldly music, was aware of the tall green trees rustling in the breeze, offering shelter from the sun. He smelled lemons and almonds and an elusive eastern perfume he could not have named.

He was alone, though, in that place. Whatever paths he walked, past water and tree and cool stone arcade, were serenely, perfectly empty. Passing through high-ceilinged rooms with many-colored cushions on the mosaic-inlaid floors he saw wall hangings of silk and carvings of alabaster and olive wood. He saw golden and silver coffrets set with jewels, and crystal glasses of dark red wine, some filled, some almost empty—as if they had only that moment been set down. But no one was there, no voices could be heard. Only that hint of perfume in the air as he went from room to room, and the music—ahead of him and behind, tantalizing in its purity—alluded to the presence of other men and women in the Al-Fontina of Silvenes, and Alvar never saw them. Not in the dream, not ever in his life.

Even the sun goes down.

PART TWO

CHAPTER V

“There’s trouble coming,” said Diego, as he ran past the stables and looked in briefly on the open stall. A soft rain was falling.

“What is it?” his mother asked, glancing quickly over her shoulder. She stood up.

“Don’t know. A lot of men.”

“Where’s Fernan?”

“Gone to meet it, with some of the others. I told him already.” Diego, having said what seemed necessary, turned to go.

“Wait!” his mother called. “Where’s your father?”

Diego’s expression was withering. “How would I know? Heading for Esteren, I guess, if he isn’t there already. They must have got the parias, by now.”

His mother, feeling foolish, and irritated because of that, said, “Don’t use that tone with me. You sometimes do know, Diego.”

“And when I do, I tell you,” he said. “Got to run, Mother. Fernan will need me. He said to lock the gates and get everyone up on the walls.”

With the swift, lethal grin that left her almost helpless—his father’s smile—Diego was gone.

I am being ordered about by my sons now, thought Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda. Another adjustment in life, another measure of time passing. It was odd; she didn’t feel old enough for this to be happening. She looked over at the frightened groom who was helping her with the mare.

“I’ll finish here. You heard what he said. Tell Dario to get everyone up on the wall-walk. Including the women. Bring whatever weapons you can find. Build up the kitchen fires, we’ll want boiling water if this is an attack.” The old groom nodded anxiously and went off, moving as quickly as he could on a bad leg.

Miranda ran the back of a muddy hand across her forehead, leaving a streak of grime. She turned again, already murmuring to the laboring mare in the stall. The birth of a colt on a Valledan ranch was not a matter that could be superseded. It was the cornerstone of their fortune and their lives, of their whole society, really. The Horsemen of Jad, they were called, and with reason. A moment later the woman said to be the most beautiful in Valledo was on her knees again in the straw, her hands on the mare’s belly, helping to bring another stallion of Belmonte’s breed into the world.

She was distracted and worried, however. Not surprisingly. Diego was seldom wrong in his warnings, and almost never so when the vision had to do with trouble close to home. They had learned that, over the years.

When he’d been younger, still a child, and these fore-knowings had begun it had been hard, even for him, to tell them apart from nightmares or childhood fears.

Once, memorably, he had awakened screaming in the middle of the night, crying that his father was in terrible danger, threatened by ambush. Rodrigo had been campaigning in Ruenda that year, during the bitter War of the Brothers, and everyone in the ranch house had sat awake the rest of a long night watching a shivering, blank-eyed boy, waiting to see if any further visions were vouchsafed him. Just before dawn, Diego’s features had relaxed. “I was wrong,” he’d said, gazing at his mother. “They aren’t fighting yet. He’s all right. I guess it was a dream. Sorry.” He’d fallen fast asleep with the last apologetic word.

That sort of incident didn’t happen any more. When Diego said he’d seen something, they tended to treat it as absolute truth. Years of living with a boy touched by the god would quell the skeptic in anyone. They had no idea how his visions came and they never spoke of them outside the family or the ranch. Neither his parents nor his brother had anything resembling this … this what? Gift or burden? Miranda had not, to this day, been able to decide.

There were tales of such people. Ibero, the family cleric, who presided over services in the new chapel Rodrigo had put up even before he’d rebuilt and expanded the ranch house, had heard of them. Timewalkers, he called those with such a vision. He named Diego blessed of Jad, but the boy’s parents both knew that at different times and in different places, those visionaries had been burned, or nailed alive to wooden beams as sorcerers.

Miranda tried to concentrate on the mare, but her calming words, for the next little while, consisted of repeated, eloquent, curses directed at her absent husband. She had no idea what he’d done this time to bring danger to the ranch while his company was quartered at Esteren and the best of the band were south in Al-Rassan.

The boys can deal with trouble, his last letter had said breezily, after reporting a grim parting exchange with Count Gonzalez de Rada. Nothing about sending some of the soldiers to her for reinforcement. Of course not. Miranda, taught by Ibero in the first years of her marriage, prided herself on being able to read without assistance. She could also swear like a soldier. She had done so, reading that letter—to the messenger’s discomfiture. She was doing so now, more carefully, not to disturb the mare.

Her boys were still boys, and their blithe, careless father and his men were far away.

By Jad’s grace the foal was born healthy not long after that. Miranda waited to see if the mare accepted him, then she left the stall, grabbed an old spear propped in a corner of the stable, and hurried out into the rain to join the women and their half a dozen ranch hands on the wall-walk behind the wooden barricade.

As it turned out, it was just the women, Ibero the cleric and lame old Rebeño the groom that she joined. Fernan had already taken the ranch hands with him outside the walls. For an ambush, one of the house women said, hesitantly. Miranda, with no precious horses nearby, permitted herself a stream of entirely unmitigated profanity. Then she swiped at her brow again and climbed the wet steps to the high walk along the western side of the wall, to watch and wait. Someone offered her a hat to keep the rain from her eyes.

After a while she decided the spear was a waste of time, and exchanged it for a bow and a quiver full of arrows, taken from one of the six small guard shelters along the wall. There were no guards in the shelters. All the soldiers were in Esteren, or with Rodrigo.

The boys can handle trouble, he had written. Blithely.

She imagined seeing her husband riding home just then, emerging from the trees into the wide, grassy space before their walls. She imagined shooting him as he rode up.

The land around the Belmonte ranch was level and open in all directions, save to the west and southwest where Rodrigo’s father and his grandfather before him had left a stand of oak and cedar undisturbed. Rodrigo hadn’t touched the trees, either, though for a different reason.

There were holy associations with that wood, and with the pool in the midst of it, but young Fernan Belmonte had been taught by his father years ago, when he could first ride a proper horse, that the forest was deceptively useful for defense, as well.

“Think about it,” he could remember his father saying. “If you wanted to attack this place unseen, which way would you approach?”

Fernan had looked around at the exposed grassland stretching in all directions. “Have to come through the trees to get close,” he’d said. It was an easy answer.

“So we can be almost certain any attack will come that way, because otherwise, if our outriders aren’t asleep, we’ll be able to observe anyone’s approach, won’t we?”

“Or if Diego sees something,” Fernan had added, “even if they come through the woods.”

“That’s true,” his father had agreed briefly, though not happily.

In those early days his father and mother were still struggling to come to terms with what Diego could see and do. Fernan didn’t have any such problems, but he knew Diego best of all, of course.

Years later, on a morning of soft, unseasonable summer rain he was with two of their friends and the six ranch hands in the twin gullies on either side of the natural exit from the woods. The gullies weren’t natural, of course. Rodrigo’s soldiers had hollowed them out in the grassy plain to make a place where they could lie unseen and watch anyone coming out of the trees.

Fernan had four other boys with bows posted halfway between the ranch buildings and the southern pastures where the mares and foals were that morning. There were two messengers with these four, to bring word if anyone appeared from the south. A last horseman was alone east of the ranch, just in case.

Diego, riding up breathlessly a few moments before, reported that he’d relayed instructions to their mother, who would be up on the wall, then, with the other women. She knew what to do. They were as ready as they could be. Fernan turned up his collar against the rain and sat in the gully under the wide brim of his hat, waiting.

There were two possibilities. If someone was approaching Rancho Belmonte with ill intent, they might be coming for the ranch compound and the people inside the walls or, more likely, they were here for the horses. Or both, Fernan corrected himself. But that would mean quite a lot of men, and in that case they might actually be in trouble. He didn’t think that was the case. He wasn’t much worried, in fact. He was thirteen years old.

“I have them,” he heard his brother say softly. “They just entered the trees. I know who this is,” Diego said.

“De Rada?” Fernan asked calmly. “The younger one?”

Diego nodded. They had both read their father’s last letter.

Fernan swore. “That means we can’t kill him.”

“Don’t see why not,” said Diego matter-of-factly.

“Bloodthirsty child,” Fernan grinned.

An identical grin on an identical face showed through the softly falling rain. Fernan was fifteen minutes older. He liked reminding Diego of that. Diego was hard to tease, however. Very little seemed to bother him.

“About twenty men,” he said. “They’re on the path in the woods now.”

“Of course they are,” said Fernan. “That’s why the path is there.”

He had lost his hat at some point, and during the period of walking north one of Garcia de Rada’s boots had split at the heel. He was, accordingly, wet at crown and sole, riding through the copse of trees west of the Belmonte ranch compound. There seemed to be a rough trail leading through the wood; the horses were able to manage.

Despite his discomfort, he was fiercely happy, with a red, penetrating joy that made the long journey here seem as nothing now. His late, unlamented cousin Parazor had been a pig and a buffoon, and far too quick to voice his own thoughts on various matters. Thoughts that seemed all too frequently to differ from Garcia’s own. Nonetheless, during the trek north from Al-Rassan, Garcia had been sustained in his spirit by a sense of gratitude to his slain cousin. Parazor’s death at the hands of a lice-ridden Asharite peasant boy in a hamlet by Fezana was the event that would deliver Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda into Garcia’s hands. And not only his hands.

Once Rodrigo Belmonte had recklessly ordered a de Rada of rank to be executed by a peasant child, against all codes of conduct among gentlemen in the three Jaddite kingdoms of Esperaña, he had exposed himself—and his family—to the response that blood demanded for such an insult.

The king could and would do nothing, Garcia was certain, if the de Rada took their just measure of revenge for what Rodrigo had done. The just measure was easy enough to calculate: horses for their own horses taken, and one woman taken in a rather different way for the execution of a de Rada cousin after he had sued for ransom. It was entirely fair. There were precedents in the history of Esperaña for a great deal more, in fact.

Garcia had resolved upon his course even while walking and stumbling north through darkness after the raid on Orvilla. Blood dripping from his torn cheek, he had kept himself going by visualizing the naked figure of Miranda Belmonte twisting beneath him, while her children were made to watch their mother’s defilement. Garcia was good at imagining such things.

Twenty-four of his men survived Orvilla, with a dozen knives and assorted other small weapons. They took six mules late the next day from another hamlet, and a broken-backed nag from a small-farmer in an imprudently isolated homestead. Garcia claimed the horse, miserable as it was. He left the Asharite farmer and his wife and daughter for his companions. His own thoughts were a long way north and east already, over the border in Valledo, in the lands between the River Duric’s source and the foothills of the Jaloña mountains.

There lay the wide rich grasslands where the horse herds of Esperaña had run wild for centuries until the first ranchers came and began to tame and breed and ride them. Among those ranchers the most famously arrogant, though far from the largest or wealthiest, were the Belmonte. Garcia knew exactly where he was going. And he also happened to know, from his brother, that the Captain’s troops were quartered at Esteren this summer, nowhere near the ranch.

There ought to have been little danger for Belmonte in leaving his home unguarded. The Asharites had launched no raids north for twenty-five years, since the last brief flourishing of the Khalifate. The army of King Bermudo of Jaloña had been beaten back across the mountains by the Valledans three years before and were still licking their wounds. And no outlaws, however rash or desperate, would dream of provoking the ire of the celebrated Captain of Valledo.

The ranch ought to have been perfectly safe behind its wooden stockade wall, even if guarded by boys with unbroken voices and a cluster of ranch hands deemed unworthy or too old for a place in the fighting company. On the other hand, Rodrigo Belmonte ought not to have ordered the death of a cousin of the de Rada. He ought not to have whipped the constable’s brother. Such actions changed things.

When Garcia and his men had finally stumbled into Lobar, the first of the forts in the tagra lands, he had demanded and received—though with insolent reluctance—mounts and swords for all of them. The sweating commander of the garrison had advanced some feeble excuse about being left without sufficient weapons or horses for their own duties or safety, but Garcia had brooked none of that. The constable of Valledo, he’d said airily, would send them swords and better horses than the swaybacked creatures they were being given. He was in no mood for debate with a borderland soldier.

“That might take a long time,” the commander had murmured obstinately. “All the way from Esteren.”

“Indeed it might,” Garcia had replied frigidly. “And if so?”

The man had bitten his lip and said nothing more. What could he have said? He was dealing with a de Rada, the brother of the constable of the realm.

The garrison’s doctor, an ugly, raspy-voiced lout with a disconcerting boil on his neck, had examined Garcia’s wound and whistled softly. “A whip?” he’d said. “You’re a lucky man, my lord, or else someone extremely skillful was trying only to mark you. It is a clean cut and nowhere near your eye. Who did this?” Garcia had only glared, saying nothing. It was pointless, speaking to certain people.

The man prescribed an evil-smelling salve that stung like hornets, but did cause the swelling on Garcia’s face to recede over the next few days. It was when he looked in a reflecting glass for the first time that Garcia decided that appropriate vengeance required the death of the Belmonte children, as well. After they had been forced to watch him with their mother.

It was the fierce anticipation of revenge that had driven him on from the tagra fort, with only a single day’s rest. He sent four men north to Esteren, to report to his brother and to lay formal complaint before the king. That was important. If what he purposed to do was to have legal sanction, such a complaint had to be lodged against Rodrigo. Garcia was going to do this properly, and he was going to do it.

Two days after his main troop had parted from the four messengers he remembered that he’d forgotten to tell them to have weapons and horses sent back down for the garrison at Lobar. He briefly considered sending another pair of men north, but remembered the commander’s insolence and elected not to bother. There would be time enough to pass on that word when he arrived in Esteren himself. It would do the pampered soldiers good to be short of weapons and mounts for a time. Perhaps someone else’s boot might split at the heel.

Ten days later, in a wood on the land of Rancho Belmonte, rain was falling. Garcia’s stocking was sopping wet through his cracked boot, and so were his hair and scratchy new beard. He’d been growing the beard since Orvilla. He would have to wear it for the rest of his life he’d realized by now; that, or look like a branded thief. Belmonte had intended that, he was certain of it.

Miranda Belmonte, he remembered, was very beautiful; all the d’Alveda women were. Rodrigo, that common mercenary, had made a far better marriage than he deserved. He was about to have visited upon him exactly what he did deserve.

Anticipation made Garcia’s heart pound faster. Soon, now. Boys and stable grooms were the guardians of this ranch. Rodrigo Belmonte was no more than a jumped-up fighting man who had been put back in his proper place since the ascension of King Ramiro. He had lost his rank of constable in favor of Garcia’s brother. That had been only the beginning. He would learn now the cost of a feud with the de Rada. He would learn what happened when you marked Garcia de Rada as a common outlaw. Garcia touched his cheek. He was still using the salve, as instructed. The smell was ferociously unpleasant, but the swelling had subsided and the wound was clean.

The trees were very close together throughout the wood, but the curiously smooth path seemed to wind easily through them, wide enough in places for three men to ride abreast. They passed a pool of water on their right. In the grey afternoon the rain fell gently through the leaves, making droplets and ripples in the still surface of the water. It was said to be a holy place, for some reason. A few men made the god’s sign of the disk as they rode by.

When the first horse fell and lay screaming on the ground with a broken leg, it seemed a malign accident. After two more such accidents, one of which left a rider with a dislocated shoulder, such an interpretation became less certain.

The path curved north through the sodden, dripping trees, and then, a little further on, swung back to the east again. In the grey, pale distance Garcia thought he could see an end to the trees.

He felt himself falling, while still in the saddle.

He had time to throw a startled glance upwards and see the bellies of the two horses that had been pacing on either side of his a moment ago. Then his mount crashed into the bottom of the pit that had been concealed in the center of the path and Garcia de Rada found himself scrambling about trying to dodge the thrashing hooves of a crippled, terrified horse. One man, quicker than the others, dropped to the ground and leaned over the edge of the pit. He extended an arm, and Garcia grabbed it and hauled himself up and out.

They looked down at the flailing horse a moment, then an archer released two arrows and the hooves stopped.

“This is no natural path,” the archer said, after a moment.

“How very clever of you,” said Garcia. He walked past the man, his boots squelching in the mud.

A trip wire claimed two more horses and cracked the skull of one thrown rider, and another pit took down a third stallion before they had reached the eastern end of the woods. They made it, though, and one had to expect some casualties on a raid of this sort.

Open grass lay before them. In the middle distance they could see the wooden wall that surrounded the ranch buildings. It was high but not high enough, Garcia saw. A skilled rider standing on the back of his mount could scale it; so could a foot soldier boosted by another. Only with a proper garrison could the ranch be defended from an attack launched by competent men. As they paused there at the edge of the trees the rain stopped. Garcia smiled, savoring the moment.

“How’s that for an omen from the god?” he said to no one in particular.

He looked up pointedly at the horseman beside him. After a moment the man took his meaning and dismounted. Garcia swung up on the horse. “Straight for the ranch,” he ordered. “First man over the wall has his choice of the women. We’ll get their horses after. They owe us more than horseflesh.”

And then, like the thundering, heroic ancestors of his lineage, Garcia de Rada drew his borrowed sword, thrust it high over his head, and kicked the horse from Lobar into a gallop. Behind him his companions gave a shout and streamed out of the woods into the greyness of the afternoon.

Six died in the first volley of arrows, and four in the second. No arrows came anywhere near Garcia himself, but by the time he was halfway to the walled enclosure of the ranch there were only five riders behind him and five others on foot running desperately across the wet and open grass.

Given such a sobering development it began to seem less and less prudent to be galloping furiously, well ahead of the others, towards the compound walls. Garcia slowed his horse and then, when he saw one of the running men shot in the chest, he reined his mount to a stop, too stupefied to give voice to the rage in his heart.

To his right, south, six horsemen now appeared, riding quickly. He looked back again and saw another group rise up, like wraiths, from two depressions he had not noticed in the level plain. These figures, armed with bows and swords, began walking steadily towards him, not hurrying. On the wall-walk of the ranch he saw a dozen or so people appear, also armed.

It seemed a good time to sheath his sword. The four horsemen left to him hastily did the same. The remaining runners straggled up, one clutching an injured shoulder.

The bowmen from the hollows surrounded them as the six riders drew near, and Garcia saw then, with disgust, that they were mostly boys. It gave him a flicker of hope, though.

“Dismount,” said a well-built, brown-haired boy.

“Not until you say why you have just killed visitors without provocation,” Garcia temporized, his voice stern and repressive. “What sort of conduct is that?”

The boy so addressed blinked, as if in surprise. Then he nodded his head briefly. Three archers shot Garcia’s horse from under him. Kicking his feet out of the stirrups, de Rada leaped free just in time to avoid being crushed by the falling horse. He stumbled to one knee in the wet grass.

“I don’t like having to kill horses,” the boy said calmly. “But I can’t remember the last time visitors approached us unannounced at full gallop with swords drawn.” He paused, then smiled thinly. The smile was oddly familiar. “What sort of conduct is that?”

Garcia de Rada could think of nothing to say. He looked around. They had been bested by children and stable hands and it hadn’t even been a fight.

The boy who was evidently leader here glanced at Garcia’s riders. With unbecoming celerity they threw down their weapons and sprang from their mounts.

“Let’s go,” said a second boy.

Garcia glanced over at him, and then quickly back at the first one. The same face, exactly. And now he realized where he had seen that smile before.

“Are you Belmonte’s sons?” he asked, trying to control his voice.

“I wouldn’t bother with questions, were I you,” said the second boy. “I’d spend my time preparing answers. My mother will want to speak with you.”

Which was an answer to his question, of course, but Garcia decided it would be unwise to point that out. Someone gestured with a sword and Garcia began walking towards the compound. As he approached he realized, belatedly, that the figures on the wall holding bows and spears were women. One of them, wearing a man’s overtunic and breeches, with mud stains on her cheeks and forehead, came along the wall-walk to stand above them, looking down. She had long, dark brown hair under a leather hat. She held a bow with an arrow nocked.

“Fernan, please tell me who this sorry figure is.” Her voice was crisp in the grey stillness.

“Yes, Mother. I believe it is Ser Garcia de Rada. The constable’s brother.” It was the first of the boys who answered, the leader.

“Is it so?” the woman said icily. “If he is indeed of rank I will consent to speak with him.” She looked directly at Garcia.

This was the woman he had been imagining pinned and naked beneath him since they’d left Orvilla. He stood in the wet grass, water seeping through his split boot, and looked up at her. He swallowed. She was indeed very beautiful, even in man’s garb and stained with mud. That was, for the moment, the least of his concerns.

“Ser Garcia, you will explain yourself,” she said to him. “In few words and very precisely.”

The arrogance was galling, bitter as a wound. Garcia de Rada had always been quick-witted though, nor was he a coward. This was a bad situation, but no worse in its way than Orvilla had been, and he was back in Valledo now, among civilized people.

“I have a grievance with your husband,” he said levelly. “He took horses belonging to my men and myself in Al-Rassan. We were coming to square that account.”

“What were you doing in Al-Rassan?” she asked. He hadn’t expected that.

He cleared his throat. “A raiding party. Among the infidels.”

“If you met Rodrigo you must have been near Fezana, then.”

How did a woman know these things? “Somewhat near,” Garcia agreed. He was becoming a little uneasy.

“Then Rodrigo was dealing with you as the king’s officer responsible for protecting that territory in exchange for the parias. On what basis do you claim a right to steal our horses?”

Garcia found himself unable, for the moment, to speak.

“Further, if you were captured and released without your mounts you will have given him your parole in exchange for a ransom to be determined by the heralds at court. Is that not so?”

It would have been pleasant to be able to deny this, but he could only nod.

“Then you have broken your oath by coming here, have you not?” The woman’s voice was flat, her gaze implacable.

This was becoming ridiculous. Garcia’s temper flared. “Your husband ordered a cousin of mine slain, after we surrendered and sued for ransom!”

“Ah. So it is more than horses and armor, is it?” The woman on the wall smiled grimly. “Would it not be the king’s task to judge whether his officer exceeded authority, Ser Garcia?” Her formality, in the circumstances, felt like mockery. He had never in his life been so spoken to by a woman.

“A man who slays a de Rada must answer for it,” he said, glaring up at her, using his coldest voice.

“I see,” the woman said, undisturbed. “So you came here to make him answer for it. How?”

He hesitated. “The horses,” he replied finally.

“Just the horses?” And abruptly he realized where this questioning was going. “Then why were you riding towards these walls, Ser Garcia? The horses are pastured south of us; they are not hard to see.”

“I am tired of answering questions,” Garcia de Rada said, with as much dignity as he could manage. “I have surrendered and so have my men. I am content to let the king’s heralds in Esteren determine fair ransom.”

“You already agreed to that in Al-Rassan with Rodrigo, yet you are here with drawn swords and ill intent. I regret to say I cannot accept your parole. And tired or not, you will answer my question. Why were you riding towards these walls, young fellow?”

It was a deliberate insult. Humiliated, seething with rage, Garcia de Rada looked up at the woman on the wall above him, and said, “Your husband must learn that there is a price to be paid for certain kinds of action.”

There was a murmur from the boys and ranch hands. It fell away into silence. The woman only nodded her head, as if this was what she had been waiting to hear.

“And that price was to have been exacted by you?” she asked calmly.

Garcia said nothing.

“Might I guess further, that it was to have been exacted upon myself and my sons?”

There was silence in the space before the walls. Overhead the clouds were beginning to lift and scatter as a breeze came up.

“He had a lesson to learn,” said Garcia de Rada grimly.

She shot him then. Lifting the man’s bow smoothly, drawing and releasing in one motion, with considerable grace. An arrow in the throat.

“A lesson to learn,” said Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, thoughtfully, looking down from the wall at the man she had killed.

“The rest of you may go,” she added, a moment later. “Start walking. You will not be harmed. You may give report in Esteren that I have executed an oath-breaker and a common brigand who threatened a Valledan woman and her children. I will make answer directly to the king should he wish me to do so. Say that in Esteren. Diego, Fernan, collect their mounts and arms. Some of the horses look decent enough.”

“I don’t think Father would have wanted you to shoot him,” Fernan ventured hesitantly.

“Be silent. When I wish the opinions of my child I will solicit them,” his mother said icily. “And your father may consider himself fortunate if I do not loose a like arrow at him when he ventures to return. Now do what I told you.”

“Yes, Mother,” said her two sons, as one.

As the boys and ranch hands hastened to do her bidding and Garcia de Rada’s surviving companions began stumbling away to the west, the afternoon sun broke through the clouds overhead and the green grass grew bright, wet with rain in the branching light.

CHAPTER VI

Esteren was a catastrophe of carpenters, masons, bricklayers and laborers. The streets were nearly impassable, certainly so for a horse. The palace and the square in front of it resounded to the sounds of hammers, saws and chisels, shouted curses and frantic instructions. Complex, dangerous-looking equipment was being swung overhead or carried this way and that. It was widely reported that five workers had already died this summer. Nor was it overlooked by even the marginally observant that at least half of the project supervisors were Asharites brought north from Al-Rassan for this endeavor, at considerable cost.

King Ramiro was expanding his capital and his palace.

There had been a time, not very long ago, in fact, when the precarious kings of Esperaña—whether it was a whole country or divided as it now was again—ruled on the move. Cities were little more than hamlets; palaces a mockery of the name. Horses and mules, and heavy carts on the better-preserved of the ancient roads, were the trappings of monarchy as the courts settled in one town or castle after another through the round of the year. For one thing, the kings were constantly putting out brushfires of rebellion, or hurrying to try at least to limit the predatory incursions of Al-Rassan. For another, resources in the hard-pressed Jaddite kingdoms in the glory years of the Silvenes Khalifate were scarcely such as to allow the monarchs to feed themselves and their retinues without spreading the burdens imposed by their presence.

Much had changed in twenty years; much, it was evident, was still changing here in Valledo, wealthiest and most fertile of the three kingdoms carved out of Esperaña for his sons by King Sancho the Fat. The current frenzy of construction in the royal city was only a part of it, funded by the infusion of parias money and, equally important, the absence of raiding from the south. It seemed that King Ramiro was now pursuing an entirely new definition of monarchy. Over and above everything else, this past year he had made it clear that he expected all the major nobility and clerics to show up in Esteren twice a year for his assizes, when law and policy were to be resolved and promulgated. It was rapidly becoming evident, as the new city walls grew higher, that Esteren was going to be more than merely the most established of his court residences.

And this business of assizes—a foreign word, Waleskan apparently—was more than slightly galling. Without his standing army it was unlikely in the extreme that Ramiro would have been able to compel attendance from his country nobility. But the army was here, well-paid and well-trained, and this particular summer almost every figure of importance in Valledo had elected to follow the path of prudence and show up.

Curiosity, among other things, could lead a man to travel. So could the promise of wine and food at court, and women for hire in increasingly urbanized Esteren. The dust and noise and the symbolism of a public submission to Ramiro’s will were the prices to be paid. Given the turbulent and usually brief tenures of kings in Esperaña there was some reason to believe that the ambitions of King Sancho’s most complex son might not trouble the world for too much longer.

In the meantime, it had to be conceded that he was offering entirely adequate entertainment. On this particular day Ramiro and his court and the visiting country lords were hunting in the king’s forest southwest of Esteren, within sight of the Vargas Hills. Tomorrow they were all to attend the assizes at Ramiro’s court of justice. Today they rode in summer fields and forests killing deer and boar for sport.

There was nothing, short of actual warfare, that the nobility of Esperaña could be said to enjoy more than a good hunt on a fair day. Nor could it be overlooked that the king, for all his modern, unsettling notions, was among the best of the riders in that illustrious company.

Sancho’s son, after all, men could be overheard murmuring to each other in the morning sunshine. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

When King Ramiro dismounted to plant first spear in the largest boar of the day as it charged from the thicket where they had tracked it, even the most independent-minded and aggrieved of the rural lords could be seen banging swords or spears in approval.

When the boar was dead, the king of Valledo looked up and around at all of them. Covered in blood, he smiled. “As long as we are all gathered here,” he said, “there is one small matter we might as well attend to now, rather than as part of the assizes tomorrow.”

His courtiers and the country lords fell silent, looking sidelong at each other. Trust Ramiro to do something devious like this. He couldn’t even let a hunt be a hunt. Looking around, a number of them realized, belatedly, that this clearing seemed carefully chosen, not merely a random place where a wild beast had gone to ground. There was space enough for all of them, and even a conveniently fallen log to which the king now strode, removing bloodied leather gloves and casually sitting down, very much as if on a throne. The outriders began dragging the boar away, leaving a smeared trail of blood on the crushed grass.

“Will Count Gonzalez de Rada and Ser Rodrigo Belmonte be so good as to attend upon me?” Speaking these words, King Ramiro used the language of high court formality, not of hunt and field, and with that the tenor and shape of the morning changed.

The two men named could be seen dismounting. Neither betrayed, by so much as a flicker of expression, whether this development had been anticipated, or whether it was as much a surprise to them as to those assembled.

“We have all the witnesses we require,” the king murmured, “and I am loath to submit men such as yourselves to a court hearing in the palace. It seems fitting to me that this affair be dealt with here. Does anyone object? Speak, if so.”

Even as he was talking, two court officials could be seen approaching the tree trunk upon which the king was seated. They carried satchels and when these were opened parchments and scrolls were set down near the king.

“No objection, my liege,” said Count Gonzalez de Rada. His smooth, beautiful voice filled the clearing. Servants were moving about now, pouring wine from flasks into what appeared to be genuine silver drinking goblets. The hunters exchanged glances yet again. Whatever else might be said of him, Ramiro was not stinting on the largess appropriate to a royal host. Some dismounted and handed their reins to the grooms. Others preferred to remain on horseback, reaching down for their wine and drinking in the saddle.

“I would never dream,” said Rodrigo Belmonte, “of putting so many of the king’s people to such a deal of preparation without acceding to whatever the king proposed.” He sounded amused, but he often did, so that meant little.

“The allegations,” said the king of Valledo, ignoring Ser Rodrigo’s tone, “are substantial.” King Ramiro, tall, broad-shouldered, prematurely greying, now wore an expression appropriate to a monarch faced with lethal hostility between two of the most important men in his realm. The festive, careening mood of the morning was gone. The gathered aristocracy, as they gradually came to terms with what was happening, were more intrigued than anything else; this sort of possibly mortal conflict provided the best entertainment in the world.

In the open space before the king’s fallen tree Belmonte and de Rada stood side by side. The former constable of the realm and the man who had succeeded him when Ramiro took the throne. The two men had placed themselves a careful distance apart. Neither had deigned to glance at the other. Given what was known about what had happened earlier this summer, the possibility of bloodshed was strong, whatever efforts the king might expend to avoid it.

A good many of those in attendance, especially those from the countryside, were rather hoping King Ramiro would fail in his attempt at resolution. A trial by combat would make this a memorable gathering. Perhaps, some thought optimistically, that was why this was taking place away from the city walls.

“It need hardly be said that Ser Rodrigo is responsible, in law, for the actions of his wife and children, given that they have no legal standing or capacity,” the king said soberly. “At the same time, the sworn and uncontested statements of Ser Rodrigo indicate that the constable was formally put on notice here in Esteren that his brother would not be permitted to do harm in lands paying parias to us. In giving this notice,” the king added, “Ser Rodrigo was acting properly, and as our officer.”

More than one rancher or baron in that forest clearing found this entirely too legalistic for his taste. Why, they wondered, didn’t Ramiro just let them fight it out here under the sun of Jad in the open spaces that best became a man—and have done with this dry-mouthed, dusty verbiage?

Such a pleasing possibility seemed to be becoming less likely with each passing moment. The smug expressions of the three yellow-robed clerics who had moved to stand behind the king indicated as much. Ramiro wasn’t known for his close relations with the clerics of Jad, but these three certainly looked happy enough.

This, a number of the lords of Valledo thought, was what happened when a king became too full of himself, when he started making changes. Even that new throne room back in the palace, with its veined marble pillars: didn’t it look more like something designed for a decadent court in Al-Rassan than a Jaddite warrior hall? What was happening here in Valledo? It was an increasingly urgent question.

“Having considered the words of both parties and the depositions that have been rendered, including one by the Asharite silk merchant Husari ibn Musa of Fezana, we will be brief in our judgment.”

The king’s expression continued to match his stern words. The blunt fact was, if Belmonte and de Rada chose to pursue a blood feud Valledo was likely to be torn apart in the choosing of sides, and Ramiro’s sweeping changes would fall like butchered bodies.

“It is our decision that Garcia de Rada—may his soul reside with Jad in light—violated both our laws and our obligations in his attack upon the village of Orvilla by Fezana. Ser Rodrigo’s interruption of that attack was entirely proper. It was his duty, given the parias being paid to us for protection. It is also our judgment that ordering the death of Parazor de Rada was reasonable, if unfortunate, given the need to demonstrate both our fairness and our authority in Fezana. No blame or criticism falls to Ser Rodrigo for these things.”

Count Gonzalez stirred restlessly, but grew still under the king’s flat gaze. Light fell through the trees, dappling the clearing in bands of brightness and shadow.

“At the same time,” King Ramiro went on, “Ser Rodrigo had no right to wound Garcia de Rada after accepting his surrender. It was not a deed that becomes a man of rank.” The king hesitated and shifted a little on his tree trunk. Rodrigo Belmonte was looking straight at him, waiting. Ramiro met his gaze. “Further,” he said, his voice quiet but extremely clear, “the public accusation he is reported to have made with respect to the death of my lamented brother King Raimundo is a slander beneath the dignity of both a nobleman and an officer of the king.”

A number of men in that forest clearing caught their breath at this point. They had reached a matter that touched perilously near to Ramiro’s position on the throne itself. The extremely abrupt death of his brother had never been satisfactorily explained.

Ser Rodrigo did not move, nor, at this juncture, did he speak. In the slanting sunlight his expression was unreadable, save for the frown of concentration as he listened. Ramiro picked up a parchment from the trunk beside him.

“That leaves us with an attack on women and children at Rancho Belmonte, and then the killing of a man who had sheathed his sword.” King Ramiro looked down at the parchment for a moment and then back up. “Garcia de Rada had formally surrendered in Orvilla, and accepted terms of ransom to be determined. His obligation by his oath was to come straight here to Esteren and await the ruling of our royal heralds. Instead he recklessly stripped our defenses in the tagra lands to pursue a personal attack on Rancho Belmonte. For this,” said the king of Valledo, speaking slowly and carefully now, “I would have ordered his public execution.”

There came a swiftly rising sound of protest between the trees. This was new, a prodigious assertion of authority.

Ramiro went on, unruffled. “Dona Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda was a frail woman with no men to guard her, fearing for the lives of her young children in the face of an attack by armed soldiers.” The king lifted another document from the tree trunk beside him and glanced at it. “We accept the deposition of the cleric Ibero that Ser Garcia specifically indicated to Dona Miranda that his purpose had been to exact vengeance upon herself and her sons, and not merely to claim horses from Rancho Belmonte.”

“That man is a servant of Belmonte’s!” the constable said sharply. The splendid voice was a shade less controlled than it had been before.

The king looked at him, and those in attendance, observing that glance, were made abruptly mindful that Ramiro was, in fact, a warrior when he chose to be. Cups of wine were raised and men drank thoughtfully.

“You were not invited to speak, Count Gonzalez. We have carefully noted that none of your brother’s surviving men have contradicted this deposition. They appear to confirm it, in fact. We also note that by all accounts the attack was against the ranch itself, not the pastures where the horses were grazing. We are capable of drawing conclusions, especially when supported by the sworn word of a servant of the god. Given that your brother had already broken his parole by attacking the ranch, it is our judgment that Dona Miranda, a frightened, defenseless woman, is not to be censured for killing him and thus protecting her husband’s children and possessions.”

“You bring shame upon us with this,” said his constable bitterly.

When Ramiro of Valledo was angry his face grew white. It did so now. He stood up, taller than almost every man in that clearing. Papers scattered beside him; a cleric hurried to collect them.

“Your brother brought you shame,” the king said icily, “by refusing to accept your own authority, or ours. We do no more than rule upon his actions. Hear us, Gonzalez”—no title, the listeners realized, and wine goblets were lowered all about the clearing—“there will be no feud to follow from this. We forbid it. We make the following decree before these high-born of Valledo: Count Gonzalez de Rada, our constable, will stand surety with his own life for the next two years for the lives and safety of the family of Ser Rodrigo Belmonte. Should death or grievous harm befall any of them from any source during this time we will execute mortal judgment upon his body.”

A buzzing again, and this one did not subside. Nothing remotely like this had ever been heard before.

“Why two years?”

It was Rodrigo. The first time the Captain had spoken since the hearing had begun. The angle of the sun had changed now; his face was in shadow. The question brought a silence, as the king’s gaze turned to Belmonte.

“Because you will not be able to defend them,” Ramiro said levelly, still on his feet. “Officers of the king have a responsibility to exercise control both over their weapons and their words. You failed us twice over. What you did to Ser Garcia, and what you said to him, are direct causes of his death and this hard trouble in our kingdom. Rodrigo Belmonte, you are condemned to a term of exile from Valledo of two years. At the end of such time you may present yourself before us and we will rule upon your case.”

“He goes alone, I take it?” It was Count Gonzalez, reacting quickly. “Not with his company?”

It mattered, all the listeners knew. Rodrigo Belmonte’s company comprised one hundred and fifty of the finest fighting men in the peninsula.

Rodrigo laughed aloud, the sound almost shocking, given the tension among the trees. “You are most welcome,” he said, “to try to stop them from following me.”

King Ramiro was shaking his head. “I will not do so. Your men are yours and blameless in this. They may go or stay as they please. I will ask only for one undertaking from you, Ser Rodrigo.”

“After exiling me from my home?” The question was pointed. Rodrigo’s face was still in shadow.

“Even so.” It was interesting how calm the king was. A number of men reached the same conclusion at the same time: Ramiro had anticipated almost every point of this exchange. “I do not think you can truly quarrel with our ruling, Ser Rodrigo. Take your company, if you will. We ask only that they not be used in warfare against us.”

Silence again, as every man struggled to think through the implications. It could be seen that Rodrigo Belmonte was staring down at the forest floor, his forehead creased with thought. The king gazed upon him, waiting.

When Rodrigo looked up his brow had cleared. He lifted his right hand towards the sky overhead, and shaped the sun circle of the god with thumb and fingers. “I swear by holy Jad,” he said formally, “that I will never lead my company in warfare into the lands of Valledo.”

It was almost what the king had asked. Almost, but not quite, and Ramiro knew it.

“And if you find a Valledan army beyond our borders?” he asked.

“I can swear no oath,” Rodrigo said quietly. “Not an honorable one. Not if I am forced to take service elsewhere for my livelihood and that of my company. My lord, this is not,” he added, meeting the king’s gaze squarely, “a departure of my choosing.”

A long stillness.

“Do not take service with Cartada,” said the king at length, his voice extremely soft.

Rodrigo stood motionless, visibly thinking.

“Really, my lord? You will begin so soon? Within two years?” he asked cryptically.

“It may be so,” Ramiro said, no less ambiguously.

Men were struggling to understand, but the two of them seemed to be in the midst of a private exchange.

Rodrigo was nodding his head slowly. “I suppose. I will regret being elsewhere if it does happen.” He paused. “I will not serve Almalik of Cartada. I don’t like what he did in Fezana. I will not serve him there, or anywhere else.”

Fezana.

At the mention of the name a few men began to nod their heads, looking at their tall, proud king. A glimmering of what this seemed to be about began to come to them, like shafts of the god’s sunlight falling into the clearing. Ramiro wasn’t a jurist or a cleric, after all, and there might be more than hunting in the days to come.

“I accept your oath,” said the king of Valledo calmly. “We have never found you lacking in honor, Ser Rodrigo. We see no reason to doubt it now.”

“Well, I am grateful for that,” said the Captain. It was impossible to tell if there was mockery in his voice. He took a step forward, fully into the light. “I do have a request of my own.”

“Which is?”

“I will ask Count Gonzalez to swear before the god to guard my family and possessions as if they were his own while I am away. That is enough for me. I need no binding of his death. The world is a dangerous place, and the days to come may make it more so. Should accident befall a Belmonte, Valledo could ill afford to lose its constable as well. I am content with his sworn word, if it pleases the king.”

He was looking at the constable, as he spoke. It could be seen that de Rada was taken by surprise.

“Why?” he asked softly; an intimate question in a very public space. The two men faced each other for the first time.

“I believe I just told you,” Rodrigo replied. “It isn’t so difficult. Valledo has enemies in all directions. With your life in bond someone might strike at this kingdom through my family. I would not want the king bound to your death in such a cause. I think it places them more at risk, not less. I need not like you, de Rada, to trust your word.”

“Despite my brother?”

The Captain shrugged. “He is being judged by Jad.”

It wasn’t an answer, and yet it was. After another brief silence, in which the sound of birdsong could clearly be heard from the trees around, the constable raised his right hand in the same gesture Rodrigo had used.

“Before Jad, and before my lord the king of Valledo, and before all men here, I make oath that the family of Rodrigo Belmonte shall be as my own from this day until his return from exile. I take this upon my honor and that of my lineage.” The sonorous voice filled and defined the forest space.

Both men turned back to the king. Unsmiling, standing very tall, he looked down upon them. “I am unused to having my decrees superseded by the parties involved,” he murmured.

“Only you can do that,” Rodrigo said. “We merely offer an alternative for the king to accept or reject.”

And now it could be seen that Ramiro smiled at the man he had just condemned to exile. “So be it,” he said. “We accept these oaths.”

Both men bowed. Rodrigo straightened and said, “Then, with your permission, my lord, I will make immediate arrangements to depart, much as I might enjoy continuing to hunt with you.”

“One moment,” said the king. “Where will you go?” His voice betrayed, for the very first time, a shadow of doubt.

Rodrigo Belmonte’s grin, caught by the falling sunlight, was wide, and unmistakably genuine. “I haven’t the least idea,” he said. “Though on my way to wherever I go I’ll have to stop and deal with a frail and terrified woman first.” His smile faded. “You might all pray for me,” said the Captain of Valledo.

Then he turned, collected his horse’s reins from a groom, mounted up and rode alone from the clearing back the way they had come through the trees.

Ines, the queen of Valledo, was clasping a well-worn sun disk and listening, eyes devoutly closed, as her favorite cleric read aloud from the Book of the Sons of Jad—the passage about the end of the world, as it happened—when her husband’s messenger arrived and indicated the king would presently be with her.

Apologetically, she bade her religious counsellor suspend his reading. The man, not unused to this, marked her Book and laid it aside. With a sigh, a pointed glance and a bow to the queen he withdrew from the chamber through an inner doorway. It was well known that King Ramiro was uneasy with intensities of faith, and the queen’s best efforts over many years had done nothing to amend this unfortunate circumstance.

It had everything to do, Ines had long since decided, with the time when he had lived among the infidels. All three of the difficult, ambitious sons of King Sancho had spent time exiled among the Asharites, but only Ramiro seemed to have come back with a taste for the ways of Al-Rassan and a suspicious softness in matters of faith. It was perhaps an irony, and perhaps not, that his father had arranged a marriage for him with the pious younger daughter of the king of Ferrieres across the mountains to the east.

Ines, whose childhood aspiration had been to be accepted among the Daughters of Jad in one of the great retreats, had accepted her betrothal only upon the advice of her spiritual counsellors, including the High Clerics of Ferrieres. It was a great opportunity, they had told her. A chance to be of service to the god and to her country, both. The young man she was marrying would likely one day rule a part, at least, of Esperaña, and Ines could use her position to influence the path of worship in that troubled land.

The clerics had looked entirely prescient when Ramiro was named ruler of mountainous Jaloña in the three-way division of his father’s last testament. And then even more so when, after the mysterious death of his brother Raimundo, her husband had quickly moved west and claimed the crown of Valledo as well. He hadn’t been able to hold both kingdoms—not yet, at least—for his uncle Bermudo had promptly risen in Jaloña and seized that throne, but Valledo, as everyone knew, was the greater prize.

What the clerics hadn’t told her—because they hadn’t known—was that the young man she was marrying was fiercely intelligent, ambitious, luridly imaginative in carnal acts and so much a pragmatist in what ought to have been firm doctrines of holy faith that he might as well have been an infidel.

As if on cue to this distressing line of thought, the king appeared in her doorway, his hair and clothing still damp as further evidence of her last reflection: what self-respecting man bathed as often as King Ramiro did? Not even the Asharites in their far-off eastern homelands did so. Self-indulgent bathing rituals were characteristic only of the sybaritic courts of Al-Rassan, where they had not even the decency to observe the ascetic strictures of their own faith.

Too much time in the courts of the south, Queen Ines thought again, and at a point in life when he had been young and impressionable. She glanced sidelong at her husband, not wishing to encourage him with a fuller appraisal. It was a very handsome man who filled her doorway, no one could deny that much. Tall, well-built, square-jawed. If his hair was greying early, his moustache was yet black and there was no evidence of faltering reserves of martial or political stamina or subtlety.

Or of faltering in more private dimensions either.

With a brief gesture, if a courteous one, the king dismissed her maidservants and slaves and the two guards by the doors. Ramiro waited until they had all taken their leave then strode across the new carpet to stand before Ines’s low seat. He was grinning. She knew that smile.

“Come, my wife,” he said. “Events of this morning have made me amorous.”

Ines refused to meet his eyes. Almost everything made him amorous, she had learned. Clutching her sun disk like a small shield, she murmured, “I’m sure it was a comely boar you slew. But was there no one of my lord’s concubines who might have assuaged his appetites before he came to trouble me?”

Ramiro laughed. “Not today. Today I have a desire to see and touch the body of my life’s own companion as consecrated by our most holy god. Come, Ines, let us make sport, then after I will tell you what happened in the wood.”

“Tell me now.”

Her problem, as she had all too often been forced to admit to her intimate counsellors, was that Ramiro was a difficult man to deny. They had urged her to use his desire for her as a means of drawing him towards a truer faith but, to the queen’s endless chagrin, the effect of such encounters was rather the opposite: whether it was his natural fervor or the skills he had learned—most probably among the courtesans of Al-Rassan—Ramiro was dismayingly adept at subverting her best intentions.

Even now, in the middle of a hot summer’s day, with carpenters hammering and a barrage of shouting outside, and with the stern words of the world’s end still echoing in her ears, Queen Ines found herself breathing a little more quickly at the images her husband’s presence had conjured forth within her. After almost twenty years and with the full knowledge of the impious evil of his ways, this was still true. And Ramiro could read it in her as easily as her clerics could read from Jad’s most holy Books. He reached down now, not ungently, and plucked the god disk from her clasp.

“Hold me like that,” he murmured, laying the disk aside and lifting her to her feet with his strong hands. “Love me the way you love the god.” Then he slipped his arms around her and drew her close so that she was made inescapably aware that the king of Valledo was wearing nothing at all beneath his white silk robe. And that pressing awareness, as he tilted her head to meet his kiss, brought back for Ines all the wildly disturbing sensations she always felt when this happened.

I will have to atone, she told herself as their lips met.

He began unravelling the cloth that bound the coils of her red hair. She would seek holy counsel and support later. Her own hands, unbidden, as if bearing weights, came up along his robe, feeling the hard body beneath. Ramiro drew back, then lowered his head again hungrily. He bit at the corner of her lip.

There would surely be wise, consoling thoughts from her advisors of the soul later, the queen told herself. Her fingers seemed now to be laced behind his head. She pulled his hair, not gently at all. The king laughed. He smelled of some eastern spice. That, too, was unsettling. It was unfair. She would need such a great deal of help to guide her back to the pure realm of the spirit. For the moment, though, as her husband smoothly lifted and then carried her over to the wide couch he’d had brought into her new suite of rooms, the queen of Valledo was rather more preoccupied, to her great and enduring confusion, with increasingly explicit matters of the flesh.