The Lions of Al-Rassan (68 page)

Slowly, he nodded his head, picturing all this in the eye of his mind. It was Ashar’s will, Ashar’s law: no Kindath was to hold sway over the Star-born. It had been written. And that sorcerer in Ragosa would not be the first, nor would he be the last man—brave or otherwise—to die in the days of blood to come.

The autumn seas were mild and generous the next morning and the next as the children of the desert, veiled before the wonder of the god’s creation, knelt in holy prayer and then sailed on an unfamiliar element to the redeeming of Al-Rassan.

A
little less than a year later two women stood, late on a windy summer’s day on a hilltop near the sad ruins of Silvenes, in the moments before the ending of the world they both had known.

White clouds hurried overhead and laced the western horizon where the sun was low. Banners snapping and blowing, two armies lay beneath them north of the swift and gleaming Guadiara.

The forces of Ashar and Jad had finally come together after a summer and autumn and then a spring of siege and skirmish, bracketing a harsh winter with its enforced inactivity. A great many people had died that winter, of hunger and cold and the illnesses that followed on the heels of hardship and war. It had snowed as far south as Lonza and Ronizza, and Ardeño in the west.

All three cities were Jaddite now.

Rodrigo Belmonte, commanding the joined armies of Ruenda and Valledo and Jaloña, had taken them this spring. At Ardeño—first of the three to fall—he’d led the western part of the Esperañan army himself in a first engagement with the tribesmen, and he had killed Ghalib ibn Q’arif.

No man had so much as wounded Ghalib in combat since he’d ridden east beside his brother more than twenty years ago. Men had lost count of the times he had championed the Zuhrites and Ashar’s visions against the best man of another tribe in the ritual combat before a battle began. There had been no such rituals at Ardeño. Rodrigo Belmonte had singled him out, though, on the difficult side-slipping ground east of the city, and he had broken Ghalib’s helm and shield with a blow, and thrown him from his horse, and then, leaping down, had gashed his thigh to the bone and almost severed one arm before killing him with a swordstroke down through neck and collarbone.

No one in either army had ever seen a man fight like that.

It was understood that Ser Rodrigo’s son had very nearly died in a Muwardi ambush the summer before. It was pointed out that Ardeño marked the first time the new constable of Valledo had been able to confront an army of the veiled ones on open ground.

Leaving the citizens of Ardeño, for the moment, to their fate, the Muwardis had retreated south, though in good order and doing damage to those who pursued too rashly.

They had fallen back towards Silvenes, where Yazir and the bulk of his forces—both those of Al-Rassan, and newly arriving tribesmen—were assembling.

Rodrigo Belmonte had left the king of Ruenda with the western army to pin down the Asharites there. With only his own band of one hundred and fifty men he had raced east towards Lonza and King Ramiro.

The walls of that small city were breached fifteen days after he arrived. Further east, Ronizza on the River Larrios, under siege from Jaloñan forces that had bypassed still-unconquered Ragosa, surrendered immediately when word of the fall of Lonza came.

Ronizza’s gates were not opened, however, until Ser Rodrigo’s own herald arrived with a company of Valledans to accept their surrender. There had been lessons learned from the occupations of Fezana and Salos the year before.

The northern armies left a garrison and a governor in each city. A number of people were executed to promote order but, for the moment, the transitions were calm. There were no burnings. King Ramiro and his constable had firm control of the northern forces now. The armies of Jaloña and Valledo joined ranks and doubled back west to merge with the Ruendans north of Silvenes.

What was left of the Ruendans, that is.

The strong army on its high ground that Belmonte had left behind had been chopped to pieces by a beaten foe.

Yazir ibn Q’arif—visibly shaken by his brother’s death, wearing a grey veil of mourning now—had wasted no time in naming the new leader of the Asharite forces in Al-Rassan. It was not a popular choice among the tribesmen, but Yazir had had a winter and spring to learn the way of things in this peninsula—who knew how to lead, who could be trusted, who needed to be watched—and he did not hesitate once the rites for his brother were done.

Ammar ibn Khairan, the newly named ka’id, had regrouped the Muwardis, linked to them a fresh contingent of soldiers from Cartada, and surprised the Ruendans with a two-pronged attack from south and east. The timing, on difficult ground, had had to be flawless, and it was. He had chased the northerners all the way back into Ardeño.

The Muwardis, grieving for Ghalib, had been impossible to control in that pursuit. Prisoners weren’t being taken anywhere in this war, but the captured Ruendans were savagely abused before and after they were killed. When the surviving northerners were safely within the walls of Ardeño, they promptly began nailing men and women to wood and burning them, by way of response.

Rodrigo Belmonte came back west. The Asharites withdrew towards Silvenes again and reinforcements came to them from Cartada and Tudesca and up from Elvira on the coast.

Five hundred men also arrived from the fortress of Arbastro—led by Tarif ibn Hassan himself. The outlaw and his sons had stopped at Cartada to receive formal pardons from the new king. Almalik II, the parricide, had been executed by Yazir—one of his first actions upon arriving the autumn before. His brother Hazem, called One-hand, had been installed in Cartada.

The Ruendan army, what was left of it, emerged from Ardeño again and moved cautiously south, joining the rest of the Esperañan forces near Silvenes.

Silvenes. It seemed that here the seasons of war were to come to an end. Either Yazir and his army of rescue, here in response to the importunities of fleeing kings and panic-stricken wadjis, would bring Ashar back in triumph to this land, or . . . or the Khalifate’s fall a generation ago would be as nothing compared with what came now. The necklace of Al-Rassan had been broken then, the pearls scattering. Now they could be lost.

Heralds met on the ground between two armies.

Yazir ibn Q’arif, weighing possibilities, accustomed to swift decisions, instructed his herald to make a proposal. The representative of King Ramiro, a man clearly too young for his task—he was white-faced with what he heard—carried that message back to Ramiro and his constable.

A short time later, grim and precise, the same young herald rode back and met his counterpart again, bearing a reply.

It was as had been expected.

There had been, in truth, no way to refuse. Not in honor, not in pride, not before a battle such as this one was to be. The weight of centuries had come down.

W
aking in the morning before Ammar, Jehane lay quietly, looking at him, trying to comprehend how time and the gods had brought them to this. From outside the tent, she heard the sounds of men beginning to stir in the camp; the first prayers of the morning would soon begin.

Her last dream before waking had been of Mazur. Prince of the Kindath. Dead now, half a year ago. She was still unable to stop herself from picturing him emerging from the walls of Ragosa and walking to the Jaddite camp. Where did men find it in themselves to do such things?

The Muwardis had landed in Al-Rassan that same season. Later, in winter, they had learned how those two crossings—ben Avren through the walls to his death and Yazir ibn Q’arif across the straits—were linked to each other. Lines of movement, so far apart, joined at their source. Mazur’s last gift to his king and Ragosa.

There had been terrible stories of what Queen Fruela had ordered done to the grey-haired Kindath chancellor after he had walked, unarmed, into her camp. Jehane knew that the worst of them would be true. She also knew, bitter and grieving, that the Muwardis would have done much the same, had they been the ones outside Ragosa’s walls.

Who are my enemies?

How did one rise above hatred at these times?

Ammar slept still. It amazed her that he could. She was tempted to trace his features with a hand—eyes, mouth, ears, the straight nose—like a blind woman, to memorize him. She shook her head, pushing the thought away. His breathing was quiet and slow. One arm lay across his chest, oddly childlike.

He could die today. If he did not, Rodrigo would.

It had come to this. Were mortals only playthings for the gods they worshipped, to be tormented in their dying?

It had been agreed between the heralds of Ashar and Jad that leaders of each army would fight before battle, to invoke the will and the power of their gods. One of the oldest rituals of men at war.

Had they somehow guessed that this day might come, the two of them? Had that been the terrible foreknowing that lay beneath the last words they had spoken in the darkness of Orvilla? Or even earlier: in Ragosa, staring at each other that first morning in the brightness of the king’s garden with the stream running through it? They had refused to fight each other. There, they could refuse. There, they could fight side by side.

Jehane made herself a promise at that moment, watching her lover sleep, hearing the camp coming awake outside: she would do all she could not to weep. Tears were an easy refuge. What was to happen today demanded more of her.

Ammar’s eyes opened without warning, vivid and blue, the same color as her own. He looked at her. She watched him settle into an awareness of the day, what morning it was.

He said, first words, “Jehane, if I fall, you must go with Alvar. He can take you to your parents. There will be nowhere else, my love.”

She nodded her head, not speaking. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She leaned across and kissed him on the lips. Then she laid her head down on his chest, listening to the beating of his heart. When they spoke afterwards, outside, it was about inconsequential things. The absurd pretense that the world was a normal place that day.

There will be nowhere else, my love.

A
lternately hot and cold as the setting sun slipped behind and then out from the swift clouds in the west, Jehane stood on a windy height beside Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, looking down on a plain between armies.

Alvar de Pellino, a herald of Valledo, garbed in white and gold, was with them as escort to Miranda. So was Husari—granted leave by King Ramiro to accompany his herald.

Husari was the governor of Fezana now, serving Valledo. Jehane did not begrudge him that. He had chosen Ramiro over the Muwardis, making his choice of evils in a time that forced such choices upon all of them. Ziri had decided otherwise, it seemed. He had not left Ragosa with Rodrigo’s men. Jehane understood. He would not fight under the banners of the god whose followers had killed his parents. She had no idea what had happened to him. You lost people in war.

She looked down. The armies below were roughly balanced. The ground was even. Neither leader would have been here with his forces had it been otherwise.

The temporarily united Jaddite troops could not remain in the field another winter, and the tribesmen had no disposition for a war of siege and attrition so far from their sands. Tomorrow would see a battle on open ground. A rare thing. There might even be a decisive result, or this could go on and on. Slow, bitter years of fire and sword, disease and hunger and cold, in the breaking of a world.

But before tomorrow could come, with its armies in that plain beneath banners of blue-and-gold or silver-on-black, there had first to be this evening’s sunset. Jehane reminded herself that she had vowed not to weep.

Ceremonial battles between Ashar and Jad took place at dawn or at day’s end, in the balancing moments between sun and stars. There was one moon in the eastern sky—the white one, nearly full. It was, Jehane thought bitterly, irrelevant to the duality so harmoniously shaped and decreed.

A handful of soldiers from each army were on opposite sides of the slope below them. She knew the Jaddites. Rodrigo’s men: Laín, Martín, Ludus. They were not really needed as guards, for Alvar was on the hill and the traditions of heralds were being honored in this campaign.

Men were like that, Jehane thought, unable to check the bitterness from rising again. This was warfare as savage as could be imagined, but the soldiers—even the Muwardis—would defer to the herald’s banner and staff.

And they would watch now like boys—enraptured, overawed by the ancient symbolism—what was to happen on the plain between armies. A challenge of gods! Each faith with its great champion, its holy lion of the battlefield! Poets would write verses and songs, chant them at feasts or in taverns or in the dark under desert stars.

“Will there ever be a time when it is not a curse to be born a woman?” Miranda had spoken without turning her head. “When we can do more,” she added, staring down at the plain, “than stand by and be extremely brave and watch them die?”

Jehane said nothing. She could think of no answer that was adequate. She would not, before today, have called her own womanhood a burden, aware that she’d been luckier than most—in her family, friends, in her profession. She didn’t feel very fortunate today. Today she thought she could agree with Miranda Belmonte. Standing on this windy height, it was easy to agree.