A good many of those in attendance, especially those from the countryside, were rather hoping King Ramiro would fail in his attempt at resolution. A trial by combat would make this a memorable gathering. Perhaps, some thought optimistically, that was why this was taking place away from the city walls.
“It need hardly be said that Ser Rodrigo is responsible, in law, for the actions of his wife and children, given that they have no legal standing or capacity,” the king said soberly. “At the same time, the sworn and uncontested statements of Ser Rodrigo indicate that the constable was formally put on notice here in Esteren that his brother would not be permitted to do harm in lands paying parias to us. In giving this notice,” the king added, “Ser Rodrigo was acting properly, and as our officer.”
More than one rancher or baron in that forest clearing found this entirely too legalistic for his taste. Why, they wondered, didn’t Ramiro just let them fight it out here under the sun of Jad in the open spaces that best became a man—and have done with this dry-mouthed, dusty verbiage?
Such a pleasing possibility seemed to be becoming less likely with each passing moment. The smug expressions of the three yellow-robed clerics who had moved to stand behind the king indicated as much. Ramiro wasn’t known for his close relations with the clerics of Jad, but these three certainly looked happy enough.
This, a number of the lords of Valledo thought, was what happened when a king became too full of himself, when he started making changes. Even that new throne room back in the palace, with its veined marble pillars: didn’t it look more like something designed for a decadent court in Al-Rassan than a Jaddite warrior hall? What was happening here in Valledo? It was an increasingly urgent question.
“Having considered the words of both parties and the depositions that have been rendered, including one by the Asharite silk merchant Husari ibn Musa of Fezana, we will be brief in our judgment.”
The king’s expression continued to match his stern words. The blunt fact was, if Belmonte and de Rada chose to pursue a blood feud Valledo was likely to be torn apart in the choosing of sides, and Ramiro’s sweeping changes would fall like butchered bodies.
“It is our decision that Garcia de Rada—may his soul reside with Jad in light—violated both our laws and our obligations in his attack upon the village of Orvilla by Fezana. Ser Rodrigo’s interruption of that attack was entirely proper. It was his duty, given the parias being paid to us for protection. It is also our judgment that ordering the death of Parazor de Rada was reasonable, if unfortunate, given the need to demonstrate both our fairness and our authority in Fezana. No blame or criticism falls to Ser Rodrigo for these things.”
Count Gonzalez stirred restlessly, but grew still under the king’s flat gaze. Light fell through the trees, dappling the clearing in bands of brightness and shadow.
“At the same time,” King Ramiro went on, “Ser Rodrigo had no right to wound Garcia de Rada after accepting his surrender. It was not a deed that becomes a man of rank.” The king hesitated and shifted a little on his tree trunk. Rodrigo Belmonte was looking straight at him, waiting. Ramiro met his gaze. “Further,” he said, his voice quiet but extremely clear, “the public accusation he is reported to have made with respect to the death of my lamented brother King Raimundo is a slander beneath the dignity of both a nobleman and an officer of the king.”
A number of men in that forest clearing caught their breath at this point. They had reached a matter that touched perilously near to Ramiro’s position on the throne itself. The extremely abrupt death of his brother had never been satisfactorily explained.
Ser Rodrigo did not move, nor, at this juncture, did he speak. In the slanting sunlight his expression was unreadable, save for the frown of concentration as he listened. Ramiro picked up a parchment from the trunk beside him.
“That leaves us with an attack on women and children at Rancho Belmonte, and then the killing of a man who had sheathed his sword.” King Ramiro looked down at the parchment for a moment and then back up. “Garcia de Rada had formally surrendered in Orvilla, and accepted terms of ransom to be determined. His obligation by his oath was to come straight here to Esteren and await the ruling of our royal heralds. Instead he recklessly stripped our defenses in the tagra lands to pursue a personal attack on Rancho Belmonte. For this,” said the king of Valledo, speaking slowly and carefully now, “I would have ordered his public execution.”
There came a swiftly rising sound of protest between the trees. This was new, a prodigious assertion of authority.
Ramiro went on, unruffled. “Dona Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda was a frail woman with no men to guard her, fearing for the lives of her young children in the face of an attack by armed soldiers.” The king lifted another document from the tree trunk beside him and glanced at it. “We accept the deposition of the cleric Ibero that Ser Garcia specifically indicated to Dona Miranda that his purpose had been to exact vengeance upon herself and her sons, and not merely to claim horses from Rancho Belmonte.”
“That man is a servant of Belmonte’s!” the constable said sharply. The splendid voice was a shade less controlled than it had been before.
The king looked at him, and those in attendance, observing that glance, were made abruptly mindful that Ramiro was, in fact, a warrior when he chose to be. Cups of wine were raised and men drank thoughtfully.
“You were not invited to speak, Count Gonzalez. We have carefully noted that none of your brother’s surviving men have contradicted this deposition. They appear to confirm it, in fact. We also note that by all accounts the attack was against the ranch itself, not the pastures where the horses were grazing. We are capable of drawing conclusions, especially when supported by the sworn word of a servant of the god. Given that your brother had already broken his parole by attacking the ranch, it is our judgment that Dona Miranda, a frightened, defenseless woman, is not to be censured for killing him and thus protecting her husband’s children and possessions.”
“You bring shame upon us with this,” said his constable bitterly.
When Ramiro of Valledo was angry his face grew white. It did so now. He stood up, taller than almost every man in that clearing. Papers scattered beside him; a cleric hurried to collect them.
“Your brother brought you shame,” the king said icily, “by refusing to accept your own authority, or ours. We do no more than rule upon his actions. Hear us, Gonzalez”—no title, the listeners realized, and wine goblets were lowered all about the clearing—“there will be no feud to follow from this. We forbid it. We make the following decree before these high-born of Valledo: Count Gonzalez de Rada, our constable, will stand surety with his own life for the next two years for the lives and safety of the family of Ser Rodrigo Belmonte. Should death or grievous harm befall any of them from any source during this time we will execute mortal judgment upon his body.”
A buzzing again, and this one did not subside. Nothing remotely like this had ever been heard before.
“Why two years?”
It was Rodrigo. The first time the Captain had spoken since the hearing had begun. The angle of the sun had changed now; his face was in shadow. The question brought a silence, as the king’s gaze turned to Belmonte.
“Because you will not be able to defend them,” Ramiro said levelly, still on his feet. “Officers of the king have a responsibility to exercise control both over their weapons and their words. You failed us twice over. What you did to Ser Garcia, and what you said to him, are direct causes of his death and this hard trouble in our kingdom. Rodrigo Belmonte, you are condemned to a term of exile from Valledo of two years. At the end of such time you may present yourself before us and we will rule upon your case.”
“He goes alone, I take it?” It was Count Gonzalez, reacting quickly. “Not with his company?”
It mattered, all the listeners knew. Rodrigo Belmonte’s company comprised one hundred and fifty of the finest fighting men in the peninsula.
Rodrigo laughed aloud, the sound almost sho
cking, given the tension among the trees. “You are most welcome,” he said, “to try to stop them from following me.”
King Ramiro was shaking his head. “I will not do so. Your men are yours and blameless in this. They may go or stay as they please. I will ask only for one undertaking from you, Ser Rodrigo.”
“After exiling me from my home?” The question was pointed. Rod-rigo’s face was still in shadow.
“Even so.” It was interesting how calm the king was. A number of men reached the same conclusion at the same time: Ramiro had anticipated almost every point of this exchange. “I do not think you can truly quarrel with our ruling, Ser Rodrigo. Take your company, if you will. We ask only that they not be used in warfare against us.”
Silence again, as every man struggled to think through the implications. It could be seen that Rodrigo Belmonte was staring down at the forest floor, his forehead creased with thought. The king gazed upon him, waiting.
When Rodrigo looked up, his brow had cleared. He lifted his right hand towards the sky overhead, and shaped the sun circle of the god with thumb and fingers. “I swear by holy Jad,” he said formally, “that I will never lead my company in warfare into the lands of Valledo.”
It was almost what the king had asked. Almost, but not quite, and Ramiro knew it.
“And if you find a Valledan army beyond our borders?” he asked.
“I can swear no oath,” Rodrigo said quietly. “Not an honorable one. Not if I am forced to take service elsewhere for my livelihood and that of my company. My lord, this is not,” he added, meeting the king’s gaze squarely, “a departure of my choosing.”
A long stillness.
“Do not take service with Cartada,” said the king at length, his voice extremely soft.
Rodrigo stood motionless, visibly thinking.
“Really, my lord? You will begin so soon? Within two years?” he asked cryptically.
“It may be so,” Ramiro said, no less ambiguously.
Men were struggling to understand, but the two of them seemed to be in the midst of a private exchange.
Rodrigo was nodding his head slowly. “I suppose. I will regret being elsewhere if it does happen.” He paused. “I will not serve Almalik of Cartada. I don’t like what he did in Fezana. I will not serve him there, or anywhere else.”
Fezana.
At the mention of the name a few men began to nod their heads, looking at their tall, proud king. A glimmering of what this seemed to be about began to come to them, like shafts of the god’s sunlight falling into the clearing. Ramiro wasn’t a jurist or a cleric, after all, and there might be more than hunting in the days to come.
“I accept your oath,” said the king of Valledo calmly. “We have never found you lacking in honor, Ser Rodrigo. We see no reason to doubt it now.”
“Well, I am grateful for that,” said the Captain. It was impossible to tell if there was mockery in his voice. He took a step forward, fully into the light. “I do have a request of my own.”
“Which is?”
“I will ask Count Gonzalez to swear before the god to guard my family and possessions as if they were his own while I am away. That is enough for me. I need no binding of his death. The world is a dangerous place, and the days to come may make it more so. Should accident befall a Belmonte, Valledo could ill afford to lose its constable as well. I am content with his sworn word, if it pleases the king.”
He was looking at the constable as he spoke. It could be seen that de Rada was taken by surprise.
“Why?” he asked softly; an intimate question in a very public space. The two men faced each other for the first time.
“I believe I just told you,” Rodrigo replied. “It isn’t so difficult. Valledo has enemies in all directions. With your life in bond someone might strike at this kingdom through my family. I would not want the king bound to your death in such a cause. I think it places them more at risk, not less. I need not like you, de Rada, to trust your word.”
“Despite my brother?”
The Captain shrugged. “He is being judged by Jad.”
It wasn’t an answer, and yet it was. After another brief silence, in which the sound of birdsong could clearly be heard from the trees around, the constable raised his right hand in the same gesture Rod-rigo had used.
“Before Jad, and before my lord the king of Valledo, and before all men here, I make oath that the family of Rodrigo Belmonte shall be as my own from this day until his return from exile. I take this upon my honor and that of my lineage.” The sonorous voice filled and defined the forest space.
Both men turned back to the king. Unsmiling, standing very tall, he looked down upon them. “I am unused to having my decrees superseded by the parties involved,” he murmured.
“Only you can do that,” Rodrigo said. “We merely offer an alternative for the king to accept or reject.”
And now it could be seen that Ramiro smiled at the man he had just condemned to exile. “So be it,” he said. “We accept these oaths.”
Both men bowed. Rodrigo straightened and said, “Then, with your permission, my lord, I will make immediate arrangements to depart, much as I might enjoy continuing to hunt with you.”
“One moment,” said the king. “Where will you go?” His voice betrayed, for the very first time, a shadow of doubt.
Rodrigo Belmonte’s grin, caught by the falling sunlight, was wide, and unmistakably genuine. “I haven’t the least idea,” he said. “Though on my way to wherever I go I’ll have to stop and deal with a frail and terrified woman first.” His smile faded. “You might all pray for me,” said the Captain of Valledo.
Then he turned, collected his horse’s reins from a groom, mounted up and rode alone from the clearing back the way they had come through the trees.
Ines, the queen of Valledo, was clasping a well-worn sun disk and listening, eyes devoutly closed, as her favorite cleric read aloud from the Book of the Sons of Jad—the passage about the end of the world, as it happened—when her husband’s messenger arrived and indicated the king would presently be with her.
Apologetically, she bade her religious counsellor suspend his reading. The man, not unused to this, marked her Book and laid it aside. With a sigh, a pointed glance and a bow to the queen he withdrew from the chamber through an inner doorway. It was well known that King Ramiro was uneasy with intensities of faith, and the queen’s best efforts over many years had done nothing to amend this unfortunate circumstance.
It had everything to do, Ines had long since decided, with the time when he had lived among the infidels. All three of the difficult, ambitious sons of King Sancho had spent time exiled among the Asharites, but only Ramiro seemed to have come back with a taste for the ways of Al-Rassan and a suspicious softness in matters of faith. It was perhaps an irony, and perhaps not, that his father had arranged a marriage for him with the pious younger daughter of the king of Ferrieres across the mountains to the east.
Ines, whose childhood aspiration had been to be accepted among the Daughters of Jad in one of the great retreats, had accepted her betrothal only upon the advice of her spiritual counsellors, including the High Clerics of Ferrieres. It was a great opportunity, they had told her. A chance to be of service to the god and to her country both. The young man she was marrying would likely one day rule a part, at least, of Esperaña, and Ines could use her position to influence the path of worship in that troubled land.
The clerics had looked entirely prescient when Ramiro was named ruler of mountainous Jaloña in the three-way division of his father’s last testament. And then even more so when, after the mysterious death of his brother Raimundo, her husband had quickly moved west and claimed the crown of Valledo as well. He hadn’t been able to hold both kingdoms—not yet, at least—for his uncle Bermudo had promptly risen in Jaloña and seized that throne, but Valledo, as everyone knew, was the greater prize.
What the clerics hadn’t told her—because they hadn’t known—was that the young man she was marrying wa
s fiercely intelligent, ambitious, luridly imaginative in carnal acts and so much a pragmatist in what ought to have been firm doctrines of holy faith that he might as well have been an infidel.
As if on cue to this distressing line of thought, the king appeared in her doorway, his hair and clothing still damp as further evidence of her last reflection: what self-respecting man bathed as often as King Ramiro did? Not even the Asharites in their far-off eastern homelands did so. Self-indulgent bathing rituals were characteristic only of the sybaritic courts of Al-Rassan where they had not even the decency to observe the ascetic strictures of their own faith.
Too much time in the courts of the south, Queen Ines thought again, and at a point in life when he had been young and impressionable. She glanced sidelong at her husband, not wishing to encourage him with a fuller appraisal. It was a very handsome man who filled her doorway, no one could deny that much. Tall, well-built, square-jawed. If his hair was greying early, his moustache was yet black and there was no evidence of faltering reserves of martial or political stamina or subtlety.
Or of faltering in more private dimensions, either.
With a brief gesture, if a courteous one, the king dismissed her maidservants and slaves and the two guards by the doors. Ramiro waited until they had all taken their leave, then strode across the new carpet to stand before Ines’s low seat. He was grinning. She knew that smile.
“Come, my wife,” he said. “Events of this morning have made me amorous.”
Ines refused to meet his eyes. Almost everything made him amorous, she had learned. Clutching her sun disk like a small shield, she murmured, “I’m sure it was a comely boar you slew. But was there no one of my lord’s concubines who might have assuaged his appetites before he came to trouble me?”
Ramiro laughed. “Not today. Today I have a desire to see and touch the body of my life’s own companion as consecrated by our most holy god. Come, Ines, let us make sport, then after I will tell you what happened in the wood.”