The Lions of Al-Rassan (65 page)

Ammar’s expression had grown sober. “You believe Mazur would propose this?”

Rodrigo said, “Ben Avren, or one of the others. Remember? Last autumn? Badir valued you at your named price—equal, in yourself, to me and all my company. By that measure, he does a lesser thing in destroying them than we would in killing you.”

“You are playing with words. That isn’t a true measure, Rodrigo.”

“What is? In wartime? They are in mortal danger. I must try to deal with that. You are my best—at the moment my only way. The price of your freedom is this: you ensure, upon your oath and your honor, that my men are allowed to leave that army and come here.”

“And if I cannot?”

It was the king who answered. His anger had passed. “You agree to return, on your oath and honor, and submit to my judgment. True measure, or not, if King Badir accepted such a value for your service, so will I.”

It was monstrous, Jehane thought, monstrous, and somehow inevitable, as if the careless banter about mercenary wages that bright, autumn day in Ragosa had led straight to this moment on a dark plain. She heard sounds from the camp behind them, and the wind blowing.

“It is agreed,” said Ammar quietly.

“You can free them
and
come back,” Rodrigo added quickly. He was not a man who surrendered easily, if at all, Jehane realized. And he would not stand on pride. There was a plea in his voice.

Ammar, she saw, heard it too. He
had
to hear it. Again the two men looked at each other, but by now the horses were long gone, far apart in a too wide, too dark night. It was over.

Ammar said softly, “We refused to fight each other that day in Ragosa.”

“I remember.”

“It was an entertainment they proposed. It is a different place now, the world,” said ibn Khairan, unwontedly awkward. “I . . . deeply regret to say this. More than I can tell you. Rodrigo, I could wish . . .” He thought for a moment, then spread his hands and fell silent.

“You have a choice,” Rodrigo said. “You are making a choice tonight. You have had an offer from us.”

Ammar shook his head, and when he spoke, for the first time there was something desperate in his voice, too. “Not
really
a choice,” he said. “Not in this. I cannot turn my back on this land, now that it has come to such bitter grief. Don’t you understand? Rodrigo, you of all men must
surely
understand.” They heard his small, known, self-mocking laugh. “I’m the man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan.”

And hearing those words, Rodrigo Belmonte bowed his neck, as if to accept the descent of a sword. Jehane saw Ammar lift a hand, as if he would touch the other man, but then he let his hand fall.

Beside her, she realized that Alvar de Pellino was weeping. She would remember that after, and love him for it.

H
er parents were asleep, and the two children as well, in tents provided by the queen. Jehane looked in on them briefly, and then went, as promised, to relieve Bernart d’Iñigo beside their patient. She ought to have been sleeping during this time, but it was not, evidently, to be a night for sleep. Not for her.

She was used to this. Doctors often had to deal with nights of vigil beside those who depended upon them to fight back the coming of final darkness. In another way, though, this night was unlike any she had known. It marked an ending, in a real sense, to everything she
had
ever known.

Bernart d’Iñigo smiled tiredly at her as she walked up. He held a finger to his lips. Jehane saw that Fernan had fallen asleep on the ground beside his brother. So, too, on a pillow, covered by a small blanket, had his mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He is all right?”

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

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

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

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

“That is true.”

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

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

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

“I have no answer for that, my lady.”

There was a silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll want to be here.”

“Of course.”

Rodrigo stood up. “Walk with me?”

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

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

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

“I believe that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will he do it?”

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

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

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

“I know that, Rodrigo.”

“I didn’t want him to go.”

“I know that, too.”

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

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

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

She heard him release his breath.

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

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

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

“Because of what you told me that afternoon.”

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

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

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

“I see,” he said.

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

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

Jehane closed her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

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

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

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

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