The Lions of Al-Rassan

“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.