Читать книгу The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay - Страница 14

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.

“My temper is a problem,” he said quietly, breaking the silence in remarkably unaccented Asharic. “I really shouldn’t have whipped him.”

“I don’t see why not,” Jehane said.

He shook his head. “You kill men like that or you leave them alone.”

“Then you should have killed him.”

“Probably. I could have, in the first attack when we arrived, but not after they had surrendered and sued for ransom.”

“Ah, yes,” Jehane said, aware that her bitterness was audible, “the code of warriors. Would you like to ride back and look at that mother and child?”

“I have seen such things, doctor. Believe me.” She did believe him. He had probably done them, too.

“I knew your father, incidentally,” said Rodrigo Belmonte after another silence. Jehane felt herself go rigid. “Ishak of the Kindath. I was sorry to learn of his fate.”

“How … how do you know who my father is? How do you know who I am?” she stammered.

He chuckled. And answered her, astonishingly, in fluent Kindath now. “Not a particularly difficult guess. How many blue-eyed Kindath female physicians are there in Fezana? You have your father’s eyes.”

“My father has no eyes,” Jehane said bitterly. “As you know if you know his story. How do you know our language?”

“Soldiers tend to learn bits of many languages.”

“Not that well, and not Kindath. How do you know it?”

“I fell in love once, a long time ago. Best way to learn a language, actually.”

Jehane was feeling angry again. “When did you learn Asharic?” she demanded.

He switched easily back into that language. “I lived in Al-Rassan for a time. When Prince Raimundo was exiled by his father for a multitude of mostly imagined sins he spent a year in Silvenes and Fezana, and I came south with him.”

“You lived in Fezana?”

“Part of the time. Why so surprised?”

She didn’t answer. It wasn’t so unusual, in fact. For decades, if not centuries, the feuds among the Jaddite monarchs of Esperaña and their families had often led noblemen and their retinues to sojourn in exile among the delights of Al-Rassan. And during the Khalifate not a few of the Asharite nobility had similarly found it prudent to distance themselves from the long reach of Silvenes, dwelling among the Horsemen of the north.

“I don’t know,” she answered his question. “I suppose because I’d have expected to remember you.”

“Seventeen years ago? You would have been little more than a child. I think I might even have seen you once, unless you have a sister, in the market at your father’s booth. There’s no reason for you to have remembered me. I was much the same age young Alvar is now. And about as experienced.”

The mention of the young soldier reminded her of something. “Alvar? The one who took Velaz with him? When are you going to let him in on the stirrup joke you’re playing?”

A short silence as he registered that. Then Rodrigo laughed aloud. “You noticed? Clever you. But how would you know it was a joke?”

“Not a particularly difficult guess,” she said, mimicking his phrase deliberately. “He’s riding with knees high as his waist. They play the same trick on new recruits in Batiara. Do you want to cripple the boy?”

“Of course not. But he’s a little more assertive than you imagine. It won’t harm him to be chastened a little. I intended to let his legs down before we went into the city tomorrow. If you want, you can be his savior tonight. He’s already smitten, or had you noticed?”

She hadn’t. It wasn’t the sort of thing to which Jehane had ever paid much attention.

Rodrigo Belmonte changed the subject abruptly. “Batiara, you said? You studied there? With Ser Rezzoni in Sorenica?”

She found herself disconcerted yet again. “And then at the university in Padrino for half a year. Do you know every physician there is?”

“Most of the good ones,” he said crisply. “Part of my profession. Think about it, doctor. We don’t have nearly enough trained physicians in the north. We know how to kill, but not much about healing. I was raising a serious point with you earlier this evening, not an idle one.”

“The moment I arrived? You couldn’t have known if I was a good doctor or not.”

“Ishak of Fezana’s daughter? I can allow myself an educated guess, surely?”

“I’m sure the celebrated Captain of Valledo can allow himself anything he wants,” Jehane said tartly. She felt seriously at a disadvantage; the man knew much too much. He was far too clever; Jaddite soldiers weren’t supposed to be at all like this.

“Not anything,” he said in an exaggeratedly rueful voice. “My dear wife—have you met my dear wife?”

“Of course I haven’t,” Jehane snapped. He was playing with her.

“My dear wife has imposed strict limitations on my behavior away from home.” His tone made his meaning all too plain, though the suggestion—from what she knew of the northerners—was improbable in the extreme.

“How difficult, for a soldier. She must be fearsome.”

“She is,” said Rodrigo Belmonte, with feeling.

But something—a nuance, a new shade of meaning in the night—had been introduced now, however flippantly, and Jehane was suddenly aware that the two of them were alone in the darkness with his men and Velaz far behind and the camp a long way ahead yet. She was sitting up close to him, thighs against his and her arms looped around him, clasped at his waist. With an effort she resisted the urge to loosen her grip and change position.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a silence. “This isn’t a night for joking, and now I’ve made you uncomfortable.”

Jehane said nothing. It seemed that whether she spoke or kept silent, this man was reading her like an illuminated scroll.

Something occurred to her. “Tell me,” she said firmly, ignoring his comment, “if you lived here for a time, why did you have to ask what was burning, back in camp? Orvilla has been in the same place for fifty years or more.”

She couldn’t see his face, of course, but somehow she knew he would be smiling. “Good,” he said at length. “Very good, doctor. I shall be even sorrier now if you refuse my offer.”

“I have refused your offer, remember?” She wouldn’t allow herself to be deflected. “Why did you have to ask what was burning?”

“I didn’t have to ask. I chose to ask. To see who answered. There are things to be learned from questions, beyond the answers to the question.”

She thought about that. “And what did you learn?”

“That you are quicker than your merchant friend.”

“Don’t underestimate ibn Musa,” Jehane said quickly. “He’s surprised me several times today, and I’ve known him a long time.”

“What should I do with him?” Rodrigo Belmonte asked.

It was, she realized, a serious question. She rode for a while, thinking. The two moons were both high now; they had risen about thirty degrees apart. The angle of a journey, in fact, in her own birth chart. Ahead of them now she could see the campfire where Husari would be waiting with the two men left on guard.

“You understand that he was to have been killed this afternoon with the others in the castle?”

“I gathered as much. Why did he survive?”

“I didn’t let him go. He was passing a kidney stone.”

He laughed. “First time he’ll ever have been grateful for that, I’ll wager.” His tone changed. “Fine, then. He was marked by Almalik to die. What should I do?”

“Take him back north with you,” she said at length, trying to think it through. “I think he wants to do that. If King Ramiro has any thoughts of taking Fezana for himself one day—”

“Wait! Hold, woman! What kind of a thing is that to say?”

“An obvious one, I should have thought,” she said impatiently. “At some point he has to wonder why he’s only exacting parias and not ruling the city.”

Rodrigo Belmonte was laughing again, and shaking his head. “You know, not all obvious thoughts need be spoken.”

“You asked me a question,” she said sweetly. “I am taking it seriously. If Ramiro has any such thoughts—however remote and insubstantial they may be, of course—it can only help to have the sole survivor of today’s massacre with him.”

“Especially if he makes sure everyone knows that man came straight to him from the slaughter and asked him to intervene.” Rodrigo’s tone was reflective; he didn’t bother responding to her sarcasm.

Jehane felt suddenly weary of talking. This was a day that had started at dawn in the market, in the most ordinary of ways. Now here she was, after the slaughter in the city and the attack on Orvilla, discussing peninsular politics in the darkness with Rodrigo Belmonte, the Scourge of Al-Rassan. It began to seem just a little too much. She was going to set out on her own path in the morning, and morning was not far off. “I suppose you are right. I’m a doctor, not a diplomat, you know,” she murmured vaguely. It would be nice to fall asleep, actually.

“Much the same, at times,” he replied. Which irritated her enough to pull her awake again, mostly because Ser Rezzoni had said precisely the same thing to her more than once. “Where are you riding?” he asked casually.

“Ragosa,” she answered, just before remembering that she hadn’t planned to tell anyone.

“Why?” he pursued.

He seemed to assume he had a right to an answer. It must come with commanding men for so long, Jehane decided.

“Because they tell me the courtiers and soldiers there are wondrous skilled in lovemaking,” she murmured, in her throatiest voice. For good measure, she unlinked her hands and slid them from his waist to his thighs and left them there a moment before clasping them demurely again.

He drew a long breath and let it out slowly. She was sitting very close, though; try as he might to hide a response, she could feel his heartbeat accelerate. At about the same moment, it occurred to her that she was playing the most brazen sort of teasing game with a dangerous man.

“This,” said Rodrigo Belmonte of Valledo plaintively, “is distressingly familiar. A woman putting me in my place. Are you sure you’ve never met my wife?”

A moment later, very much against her will and any reasonable expectations, Jehane began to laugh. And then, perhaps because she was laughing, genuinely amused, she remembered again what she’d seen in that small hut in Orvilla, and then it came back to her that her father had spoken his first words in four years tonight, and she was leaving him and her mother, perhaps forever.

She hated crying. Laughter and tears, Ishak used to say, were the nearest of kin. It wasn’t a physician’s observation, that one. His mother had told him that, and her mother had told her. The Kindath had survived a thousand years; they were laden with such folk wisdom, carrying it like their travelling baggage, well-worn, never far from reach.

So Jehane fought against her tears on Rodrigo Belmonte’s black horse, riding east under moons that spelled a journey for her, against the backdrop of the summer stars, and the man with whom she rode kept blessedly silent until they reached the camp and saw that the Muwardis had been there.

FOR ALVAR, a good part of the considerable strain of that night came from feeling so hopelessly behind what was happening. He had always thought of himself as clever. In fact, he knew he was intelligent. The problem was, the events unfolding tonight in Al-Rassan were so far outside the scope of his experience that cleverness was not nearly enough to show him how to deal with what was taking place.

He understood enough to know that with his share of the ransom to be negotiated for Garcia de Rada and his surviving men he was already wealthier than he had ever imagined becoming in his first year as a soldier of the king in Esteren. Even now, before any further negotiations took place, Alvar had been assigned a new horse and armor by Laín Nunez—and both of them were better than his own.

This was how soldiers rose in the world, if they did, through the plunder and ransom of war. Only he had really not expected to take that wealth from fellow Valledans.

“Happens all the time,” Laín Nunez had said gruffly as they divided the spoils in the village. “Remind me to tell you of the time Rodrigo and I served as privately hired mercenaries of the Asharites of Salos downriver. We raided into Ruenda for them more than once.”

“But not into Valledo,” Alvar had protested, still troubled.

“All one back then, remember? King Sancho was still on the throne of united Esperaña. Three provinces of one country, lad. Not the division we’ve got now.”

Alvar had thought about that on the way back to the camp. He was struggling with so many difficult things—including his own first killing—that he didn’t even have a chance to enjoy his spoils of battle. He did notice that Laín Nunez was careful to allocate a substantial share of the ransomed weapons and mounts to the survivors of the village, though. He hadn’t expected that.

Then, back at the camp, where the Captain and the Kindath doctor were waiting for them, Alvar saw the chests and sacks and barrels, and came to understand that this was the summer parias from Fezana, delivered by the Muwardis—the Veiled Ones—out here at night on the plain.

“The merchant?” Laín Nunez asked urgently, swinging down from his horse. “They came for him?” And Alvar abruptly remembered that the plump Asharite had been marked to die in Fezana’s castle that day.

The Captain was shaking his head slowly. “The merchant,” he said, “is no more.”

“Rot their souls!” Laín Nunez swore violently. “By Jad’s fingers and toes, I hate the Muwardis!”

“Instead of the merchant,” the Captain went on placidly, “we appear to have a new outrider to join Martín and Ludus. We’ll have to work some weight off him before he’s much use, mind you.”

Laín Nunez gave his sharp bark of laughter as a ponderous figure rose from the far side of the fire, clad—barely—in the garb of a Jaddite Horseman. Husari ibn Musa seemed, improbably, quite at ease.

“I’ve been a wadji already today,” he said calmly, speaking passable Esperañan. “This is no more of a stretch, I suppose.”

“Untrue,” the Captain murmured. “Looking at Ramon’s clothing on you, I’d call it a big stretch.” There was laughter. The merchant smiled, and patted his stomach cheerfully.

Alvar, joining uncertainly in the amusement, saw the Kindath doctor, Jehane, sitting on a saddle blanket by the fire, hands about her drawn-up knees. She was looking into the flames.

“How many of the desert dogs were here?” Laín Nunez asked.

“Only ten, Martín says. Which is why they didn’t come to Orvilla.”

“He told them we were dealing with it?”

“Yes. They are obviously under orders to give us our gold and hope we leave quickly.”

Laín Nunez removed his hat and ran a hand through his thinning grey hair. “And are we? Leaving?”

“I think so,” the Captain said. “I can’t think of a point to make down here. There’s nothing but trouble in Fezana right now.”

“And trouble heading home.”

“Well, walking home.”

“They’ll get there eventually.”

Rodrigo grimaced. “What would you have had me do?”

His lieutenant shrugged, and then spat carefully into the grass. “We leave at first light, then?” he asked, without answering the question.

The Captain looked at him closely for a moment longer, opened his mouth as if to say something more, but in the end he merely shook his head. “The Muwardis will be watching us. We leave, but not in any hurry. We can take our time about breaking camp. You can pick a dozen men to ride back to Orvilla in the morning. Spend the day working there and catch us up later. There are men and women to be buried, among other things.”

Alvar dismounted and walked over to the fire where the doctor was sitting. “Is there … can I help you with anything?”

She looked very tired, but she did favor him with a quick smile. “Not really, thank you.” She hesitated. “This is your first time in Al-Rassan?”

Alvar nodded. He sank down on his haunches beside her. “I was hoping to see Fezana tomorrow,” he said. He wished he spoke better Asharic, but he tried. “I am told it is a city of marvels.”

“Not really,” she repeated carelessly. “Ragosa, Cartada … Silvenes, of course. What’s left of it. Those are the great cities. Seria is beautiful. There is nothing marvellous about Fezana. It has always been too close to the tagra lands to afford the luxury of display. You won’t be seeing it tomorrow?”

“We’re leaving in the morning.” Again, Alvar had the unpleasant sense that he was struggling to stay afloat in waters closing over his head. “The Captain just told us. I’m not sure why. I think because the Muwardis came.”

“Well, of course. Look around you. The parias gold is here. They don’t want to open the gates tomorrow, and they particularly won’t want Jaddite soldiers in the city. Not with what happened today.”

“So we’re just going to turn around and—”

“I’m afraid so, lad.” It was the Captain. “No taste of decadent Al-Rassan for you this time.” Alvar felt himself flushing.

“Well, the women are mostly outside the walls this year,” the doctor said, with a demure expression. She was looking at Ser Rodrigo, not at Alvar.

The Captain swore. “Don’t tell my men that! Alvar, you are bound to secrecy. I don’t want anyone crossing the river. Any man who leaves camp walks home.”

“Yes, sir,” Alvar said hastily.

“Which reminds me,” the Captain said to him, with a sidelong glance at the doctor, “you might as well lower your stirrups now. For the ride back.”

And with those words, for the first time in a long while, Alvar felt a little more like his usual self. He’d been waiting for this moment since they’d left Valledo behind.

“Must I, Captain?” he asked, keeping his expression innocent. “I’m just getting used to them this way. I thought I’d even try bringing them up a bit higher, with your approval.”

The Captain looked at the doctor again. He cleared his throat. “Well, no, Alvar. It isn’t really … I don’t think …”

“I thought, if I had my knees up high enough, really high, I might be able to rest my chin on them when I rode, and that would keep me fresher on a long ride. If that makes sense to you, Captain?”

Alvar de Pellino had his reward, then, for uncharacteristic silence and biding his time. He saw the doctor smile slowly at him, and then look with arched eyebrows of inquiry at the Captain.

Rodrigo Belmonte was, however, a man unlikely to be long discomfited by this sort of thing. He looked at Alvar for a moment, then he, too, broke into a smile.

“Your father?” he asked.

Alvar nodded his head. “He did warn me of some things I might encounter as a soldier.”

“And you chose to accept the stirrup business nonetheless? To say nothing at all?”

“It was you who did it, Captain. And I want to remain in your company.”

The Kindath doctor’s amusement was obvious. Ser Rodrigo’s brow darkened. “In Jad’s name, boy, were you humoring me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Alvar happily.

The woman he had decided he would love forever threw back her head and laughed aloud. A moment later, the Captain he wanted to serve all his days did exactly the same thing.

Alvar decided it hadn’t been such a terrible night, after all.

“Do you see how clever my men are?” Rodrigo said to the doctor as their laughter subsided. “You are quite certain you won’t reconsider and join us?”

“You tempt me,” the doctor said, still smiling. “I do like clever men.” Her expression changed. “But Esperaña is no place for a Kindath, Ser Rodrigo. You know that as well as I.”

“It will make no difference with us,” the Captain said. “If you can sew a sword wound and ease a bowel gripe you will be welcome among my company.”

“I can do both those things, but your company, clever as its men may be, is not the wider world.” There was no amusement in her eyes any more. “Do you remember what your Queen Vasca said of us, when Esperaña was the whole peninsula, before the Asharites came and penned you in the north?”

“That was more than three hundred years ago, doctor.”

“I know that. Do you remember?”

“I do, of course, but—”

“Do you?” She turned to Alvar. She was angry now. Mutely, he shook his head.

“She said the Kindath were animals, to be hunted down and burned from the face of the earth.”

Alvar could think of nothing to say.

“Jehane,” the Captain said, “I can only repeat, that was three hundred years ago. She is long dead and gone.”

“Not gone! You dare say that? Where is she?” She glared at Alvar, as if he were to blame for this, somehow. “Where is Queen Vasca’s resting place?”

Alvar swallowed. “On the Isle,” he whispered. “Vasca’s Isle.”

“Which is a shrine! A place of pilgrimage, where Jaddites from all three of your kingdoms and countries beyond the mountains come, on their knees, to beg miracles from the spirit of the woman who said that thing. I will make a wager that half this so-clever company have family members who have made that journey to plead for blessed Vasca’s intercession.”

Alvar kept his mouth firmly shut. So, too, this time, did the Captain.

“And you would tell me,” Jehane of the Kindath went on bitterly, “that so long as I do my tasks well enough it will not matter what faith I profess in Esperañan lands?”

For a long time Ser Rodrigo did not answer. Alvar became aware that the merchant, ibn Musa, had come up to join them. He was standing on the other side of the fire listening. All through the camp Alvar could now hear the sounds and see the movements of men preparing themselves for sleep. It was very late.

At length, the Captain murmured, “We live in a fallen and imperfect world, Jehane bet Ishak. I am a man who kills much of the time, for his livelihood. I will not presume to give you answers. I have a question, though. What, think you, will happen to the Kindath in Al-Rassan if the Muwardis come?”

“The Muwardis are here. They were in Fezana today. In this camp tonight.”

“Mercenaries, Jehane. Perhaps five thousand of them in the whole peninsula.”

Her turn to be silent. The silk merchant came nearer. Alvar saw her glance up at him and then back at the Captain.

“What are you saying?” she asked.

Rodrigo crouched down now beside Alvar and plucked some blades of grass before answering.

“You spoke very bluntly a little while ago about our coming south to take Fezana one day. What do you think Almalik of Cartada and the other kings would do if they saw us coming down through the tagra lands and besieging Asharite cities?”

Again, the doctor said nothing. Her brow was knitted in thought.

“It would be the wadjis, first,” said Husari ibn Musa softly. “They would begin it. Not the kings.”

Rodrigo nodded agreement. “I imagine that is so.”

“What would they begin?” Alvar asked.

“The process of summoning the tribes from the Majriti,” said the Captain. He looked gravely at Jehane. “What happens to the Kindath if the city-kings of Al-Rassan are mastered? If Yazir and Ghalib come north across the straits with twenty thousand men? Will the desert warriors fight us and then go quietly home?”

For a long time she didn’t answer, sitting motionless in thought, and the men around the fire kept silent, waiting for her. Behind her, to the west, Alvar saw the white moon low in the sky, as if resting above the long sweep of the plain. It was a strange moment for him; looking back, after, he would say that he grew older during the course of that long night by Fezana, that the doors and windows of an uncomplicated life were opened and the shadowed complexity of things was first made known to him. Not the answers, of course, just the difficulty of the questions.

“These are the options, then?” Jehane the physician asked, breaking the stillness. “The Veiled Ones or the Horsemen of Jad? This is what the world holds in store?”

“We will not see the glory of the Khalifate again,” Husari ibn Musa said softly, a shadow against the sky. “The days of Rahman the Golden and his sons or even ibn Zair amid the fountains of the Al-Fontina are gone.”

Alvar de Pellino could not have said why this saddened him so much. He had spent his childhood playing games of imagined conquest among the evil Asharites, dreaming of the sack of Silvenes, dreading the swords and short bows of Al-Rassan. Rashid ibn Zair, last of the great khalifs, had put the Esperañan provinces of Valledo and Ruenda to fire and sword in campaign after campaign when Alvar’s father was a boy and then a soldier. But here under the moons and the late night stars the sad, sweet voice of the silk merchant seemed to conjure forth resonances of unimaginable loss.

“Could Almalik in Cartada be strong enough?” The doctor was looking at the merchant, and even Alvar, who knew nothing of the background to this, could see how hard this particular question was for her.

Ibn Musa shook his head. “He will not be allowed to be.” He gestured to the chests of gold and the mules that had brought them into the camp. “Even with his mercenaries, which he can scarcely afford, he cannot avoid the payment of the parias. He is no lion, in truth. Only the strongest of the petty-kings. And he already needs the Muwardis to keep him that way.”

“So what you intend to do, what I hope to do … are simply things that will hasten the end of Al-Rassan?”

Husari ibn Musa crouched down beside them. He smiled gently. “Ashar taught that the deeds of men are as footprints in the desert. You know that.”

She tried, but failed, to return the smile. “And the Kindath say that nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. That we who call ourselves the Wanderers are the symbol of the life of all mankind.” She turned then, after a moment, to the Captain. “And you?” she asked.

And softly Rodrigo Belmonte said, “Even the sun goes down, my lady.” And then, “Will you not come with us?”

With a queer, unexpected sadness, Alvar watched her slowly shake her head. He saw that some strands of her brown hair had come free of the covering stole. He wanted to push them back, as gently as he could.

“I cannot truly tell you why,” she said, “but it feels important that I go east. I would see King Badir’s court, and speak with Mazur ben Avren, and walk under the arches of the palace of Ragosa. Before those arches fall like those of Silvenes.”

“And that is why you left Fezana?” Ser Rodrigo asked.

She shook her head again. “If so, I didn’t know it. I am here because of an oath I swore to myself, and to no one else, when I learned what Almalik had done today.” Her expression changed. “And I will make a wager with my old friend Husari—that I will deal with Almalik of Cartada before he does.”

“If someone doesn’t do it before either of us,” ibn Musa said soberly.

“Who?” Ser Rodrigo asked. A soldier’s question, pulling them back from a mood shaped of sorrow and starlight. But the merchant only shook his head and made no reply.

“I must sleep,” the doctor said then, “if only to let Velaz do so.” She gestured and Alvar saw her old servant standing wearily a discreet distance away, where the firelight died in darkness.

All around them the camp had grown quiet as soldiers settled in for the night. The doctor looked at Rodrigo. “You said you are sending men to attend to the dead of Orvilla in the morning. I will ride with them, to do what I can for the living, then Velaz and I will be on our way.”

Alvar saw Velaz gesture to Jehane, and then noticed where the servant had made up a pallet for her. She walked over towards it. Alvar, after a moment, sketched an awkward bow she did not see, and went the other way, to where he usually slept near Martín and Ludus, the outriders. They were wrapped in their blankets, asleep.

He unfolded his own saddle blanket and lay down. Sleep eluded him. He had far too many things chasing and tumbling through his mind. He remembered the pride in his mother’s voice the day she recounted the details of her first pilgrimage to seek Blessed Vasca’s intercession for her brave son as he left home for the world of warring men. He remembered her telling how she had gone the last part of the journey on her hands and knees over the stones to kiss the feet of the statue of the queen before her tomb.

Animals, to be hunted down and burned from the face of the earth.

He had killed his first man tonight. A good sword blow from horseback, slicing down through the collarbone of a running man. A motion he had practised so many times, with friends or alone as a child under his father’s eye, then drilled by the king’s foul-tongued sergeants in the tiltyard at Esteren. Exactly the same motion, no different at all. And a man had fallen to the summer earth, bleeding his life away.

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert.

He had won himself a splendid horse tonight, and armor better by far than his own, with more to come. The beginnings of wealth, a soldier’s honor, perhaps an enduring place among the company of Rodrigo Belmonte. He had drawn laughter and approval from the man who might truly become his Captain now.

Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last.

He had crouched by a fire on this dark plain and heard an Asharite and a Kindath woman of beauty and intelligence far beyond his experience, and Ser Rodrigo himself, as they spoke in Alvar’s presence of the past and future of the peninsula.

Alvar de Pellino made his decision then, more easily than he would ever have imagined. And he also knew, awake under the stars and a more perceptive man than he had been this same morning, that he would be permitted to do this thing. Only then, as if this resolution had been the key to the doorway of sleep, did Alvar’s mind slow its whirlwind of thought enough to allow him rest. Even then he dreamed: a dream of Silvenes, which he had never seen, of the Al-Fontina in the glorious days of the Khalifate, which were over before he was born.

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.