The Emin ha’Nazar was known for more than echoes. Among the ghostly voices said to resonate in the valley at night were those of men slain here in battles going back for centuries.
The first such encounter had involved Jaddites as well, in the great wave of the Khalifate’s initial expansion, when the boundary between Ashar and Jad had been pushed as far north as it was ever to go. Where it remained now, in fact, just south of the River Duric and the mountains that screened Jaloña.
That savage long-ago campaign had begun—in the endless paradox of things—the centuries-long splendor of Al-Rassan. A brilliant succession of khalifs in the growing Al-Fontina of Silvenes had chosen to name themselves for what they achieved in war: The Conqueror, The Destroyer, Sword of the Star-born, Scourge of the Unbelievers.
They had been those things, there was no hubris in the naming. Those khalifs and their armies, following upon the first reckless, astonishingly successful thrust northward across the straits from the Majriti more than three hundred years ago, had carved and hewed a glorious realm in this peninsula, driving the Esperañans into the farthest north, raiding them twice a year for gold and grain and slaves, and for the sheer pleasure and great glory of doing so in Ashar’s ever-bright name.
It had been called a Golden Age.
Jehane supposed that, as such things were measured, it had been. For the Kindath, treading lightly at all times, the expanding world of the khalifs had offered a measure of peace and fragile security. They paid the heretics’ tax, as did the Jaddites who dwelt in Al-Rassan; they were to worship the god and his sisters in their fashion only behind closed doors; they were to wear blue and white clothing only, as stipulated in Ashar’s Laws. They were forbidden to ride horses, to have intimate congress with Believers, to build the roofs of their sanctuaries higher than any temple of the Asharites in the same city or town . . . there were rules and laws that enclosed them, but there was a life to be found, and the enforcement of laws varied widely through the passing centuries.
A Golden Age. Now gone. The moons waxed and the moons waned. Silvenes was fallen; the petty-kings bristled and sparred against each other. And now the Jaddites were coming south again, on the magnificent horses they bred in the north. Valledo claimed tribute from Fezana. Ruenda was making overtures towards Salos and the towns north of it along the coast, and here now, below them in this valley, was the first parias party from Jaloña, come to share in the banquet, to bring Fibaz gold back to King Bermudo in his drafty castle in Eschalou.
If they could.
High on the slopes above the valley, Jehane lifted her voice again and cried out in Esperañan, in a tone she hoped would convey uncontrollable desire:
“Nino, my golden king, it is Fruela! I am afire for you!”
Screened behind cedar and pine, they saw the young Jaddite commander look up again. He hesitated, then clapped his helmet back on his head.
“That’s it,” said Rodrigo softly. He had stopped laughing. “I think you’ve done it, Jehane.”
“He’s calling back the party he sent up here,” Ammar said, also quietly.
“What have I done?” Jehane asked, careful to whisper now. Neither of them had yet bothered to explain. They had simply asked her to come up here and pretend to be helpless with desire. It had seemed amusing at the time.
“Goaded him,” Rodrigo murmured, not taking his eyes from the valley below. The Horsemen were beginning to move, shifting alignment, turning north. “Nino di Carrera is vain but not a fool. He had outriders ahead and behind. Given a calm space in which to think he would do the intelligent thing and double back. You’ve been taking space and calm away from him. He is not thinking properly because he is humiliated and angry.”
“He is dead,” said Ammar ibn Khairan flatly. He, too, had never stopped scanning the valley. “Look what they’re doing.”
The Jaddites had begun to ride, Jehane saw. High up among the trees in the wind she heard their voices lift in cries of menace and exaltation. Their massed formation looked terrifying to her. The huge thundering of hooves carried up to where they watched. She saw Nino di Carrera lead his company into the shadows at the valley’s end and she lost them there.
“Too fast,” said Rodrigo.
“Much. There will be a spear pit where the canyon bends,” Ammar said grimly.
“And arrows as the horses pile up.”
“Of course. Messy.”
“It works,” said Rodrigo.
A moment later Jehane heard the screaming begin.
The two men looked at each other. They had shaped events to achieve exactly this, Jehane understood that much. What they were striving towards, she did not yet know. There were deaths involved, though; she could hear men dying.
“First part done,” Ammar said calmly. “We ought to go down.”
She looked from him to Rodrigo, who had been the one to suggest the performance as Queen Fruela. “You aren’t going to explain this, are you?”
“Later, Jehane, I promise,” Rodrigo said. “No leisure now. We need our own swords to be ready, and then a doctor’s labors, I fear.”
“There’s Laín already,” ibn Khairan said, pointing to the other end of the valley bowl. Jehane saw their own men coming up from the south towards the shadows where the Jaloñans had disappeared.
“Of course,” Rodrigo said. She detected a note of complacency. “He knows how to do this. What do you think we are?”
Ammar grinned at that, the white teeth flashing. “Valiant Horsemen of Jad,” he said. “The same as the ones being butchered down below.”
“Not quite,” Rodrigo replied, refusing to be baited. “Not quite the same. You’ll see. Come on, Jehane. Can you control your smoldering enough to get down from here?”
She would have hit him with something, but by then the sounds of men and their horses in the darkness beyond the north end of the valley were appalling and she followed her two companions down in silence.
* * *
“We kill anyone who comes out from the defile,” Laín Nunez said flatly when he gave the command to ride. “No surrender accepted. Treat both parties as enemies. We are seriously outnumbered here.”
Alvar was intimidated by the grimness in the old warrior’s face as he gave his orders. It was no secret that Laín had always thought this intricate, many-layered plan to be foolish and unworkable. But with Mazur ben Avren in Ragosa, Ser Rodrigo and Ammar ibn Khairan all vying to outdo each other in subtlety the scheme had acquired so many nuances as to be almost incomprehensible. Alvar had long ago given up trying to follow what was happening.
He understood no more than the essence: they had made certain that a notorious outlaw leader knew about the Fibaz gold. They wanted him to come after the parias. King Badir had delayed agreeing to payment of the gold to Jaloña until as late in the year as possible to give this outlaw time to act, if he chose.
Then, after a lone messenger had arrived from the south one night, Rodrigo and ibn Khairan had led fifty of the Valledans out from Ragosa the next morning in a cold rain on the brink of winter. No banners, no identifying emblems, not even their own horses—they rode nondescript mounts from Ragosa. They had passed like ghosts through the countryside, heading east, twenty of them at any time scattering to watch for the movement of companies of men.
It was Martín, predictably, who had spotted the outlaw band coming north. The Captain and ibn Khairan had smiled then; old Laín had not. From that point on the bandit chieftain’s progress had been carefully monitored all the way to this valley. He had about eighty men.
The Jaloñans, led by a Count Nino di Carrera—not a name Alvar knew—were already in Fibaz, east and south of where the outlaws waited. Di Carrera had a hundred men, superbly mounted, by report.
When word came of where the ambush was being laid, Ammar ibn Khairan had smiled again. Rain had been falling that day too, dripping from hat brims and into the collars of overtunics and cloaks. The cart roads and fields were already turning to winter’s thick mud,
treacherous for the horses.
“The Emin ha’Nazar? That old fox,” ibn Khairan had said. “He would do it in the valley. Truly, I shall be a little sorry if we must kill him.”
Alvar was still not sure how he felt about the lord Ammar ibn Khairan.
Jehane liked him, he was fairly certain of that—which complicated matters. Her presence on this ride was complication enough. He worried about her in the cold and the rain, sleeping in a tent on damp or frozen ground, but she said nothing, offered no complaint, rode a horse—normally forbidden the Kindath, of course—surprisingly well. She had learned in Batiara, he discovered. It appeared that in Batiara any number of normally forbidden things could be done.
“What is that valley?” Rodrigo had asked ibn Khairan. “Tell me all you know about it.”
The two of them had walked off together into the mist, talking quietly, so Alvar heard no more. He had happened to be watching Laín Nunez’s face, and from the older man’s expression had grasped a part of why Laín was so unhappy on this winter expedition. Alvar wasn’t the only man here feeling displaced by recent developments.
Nonetheless, Laín’s disapproval seemed unwarranted in the end. Even with all the complexity and the need for absolute secrecy of movement, it had all come together after all, here at this strange, high, echoing valley. There was even sunshine today; the air bright and very cold.
Alvar had been part of the first small group that had run up—no horses allowed, by ibn Khairan’s orders—to close the southern entrance to the valley after the Jaloñans had gone through. They were posing as outlaws, he understood that much: as part of the same band lying in ambush to the north. And they were meant to be seen by the Jaloñan outriders.
They were. Martín spotted the two scouts in plenty of time to have killed them had they wanted to. They didn’t want to. For whatever reason in this indecipherable scheme, they were to allow the scouts to see them and then race back into the valley to report. It was very hard to puzzle out. It was made even harder for Alvar because all through the tense movements of the morning he had been forced to listen to Jehane’s voice from high on the slopes as she moaned her desire for the yellow-haired Jaloñan commander in the valley ahead of them. He didn’t like that part at all, though most of the others seemed to find it killingly funny.
By the time Laín Nunez gave the order to ride—the horses had been brought up the moment the two scouts left—Alvar was in a mood to do injury to someone. It did cross his mind, as they galloped north in the wintry sunlight, that he was about to kill Jaddites in an Asharite cause. He tried not to let that bother him. He was a mercenary, after all.
Nino was wearing good armor. One arrow hit his chest and was turned away, another grazed his unprotected calf, drawing blood. Then his horse, moving too quickly, trod on emptiness and fell into a pit.
It screamed as it impaled itself upon the forest of stakes below. The screaming of a horse is a terrible sound. Nino di Carrera, lithe and desperate, hurled himself from the saddle even as the horse was falling. He grabbed for the near wall of the pit, clutched, held, and hauled himself out. Just in time to be nearly trampled by the mount of one of his men, veering frantically around the death pit.
He took a kick in the ribs and sprawled on the frozen ground. He saw another horse coming and rolled, agonizingly, away from flailing hooves. He fought for air. The breath had been knocked out of him and his ears were ringing, but Nino found that all limbs were intact. Gasping, wheezing, he could move. He scrambled to his feet, only to discover that he’d lost his sword in the pit. There was a dead man beside him with an arrow in his throat. Nino seized the soldier’s blade, ignoring the pain in his ribs, and looked around for someone to kill.
No shortage of candidates. Outlaws were pouring down from the slopes on either side of the defile. At least thirty of Nino’s men—probably more—were down, dead or crippled by the spear trap and the volley of arrows. That still left a good number of Horsemen, though, and these were Asharite bandits opposing them, offal, dogs, food for dogs.
Holding a hand to his side, Nino roared his defiance. His men heard him and cheered. He looked around for Edrique. Saw him battling three men, fighting to maneuver his horse in the narrow space. Even as Nino watched, one of the bandits ducked in under the legs of Edrique’s mount and stabbed upwards. A peasant’s way to fight, knifing horses from below. It worked, though. Edrique’s stallion reared up on its hind legs, screaming in pain as the man with the short sword scrambled away.
Nino saw his second-in-command beginning to slide in the saddle. He was already sprinting towards him. The second outlaw, waiting for Edrique to fall, never knew what killed him. Nino’s swinging sword, white rage driving it, hewed the man’s unhelmed head from his shoulders. It landed in the grass a distance away and rolled like a ball. The blood that fountained from the headless torso spattered them all.
Nino roared in triumph. Edrique swung his feet free of the stirrups to fall free of the maimed horse. He was up on his feet instantly. The two men exchanged a fierce glance, then fought together, side by side in that dark defile, two of Jad’s holy warriors against legions of the infidels.
Against bandits, really, and as he swung his sword again and again and strove to carve a space to advance, Nino abruptly reclaimed the thought he had found and then lost earlier.
It chilled him, even amid the clotted, sweating chaos of battle: whoever his outriders had seen coming up south of the valley couldn’t have been part of this ambush. It was so obvious. Where had his mind been? No one laid a death trap like this and then split his forces.
Struggling for understanding again, Nino tried to get some sense of what was happening, but the narrow ground between the steep slopes meant that the fighting was desperately close, hand-to-hand, fists and knives and shoulders as much as swords. No chance to step back and evaluate anything. They were spared the arrows now. With their own men entangled with the Jaddites, the bandits could not shoot.
The mules! Nino suddenly remembered the gold. If they lost that there was no point to anything else. He hammered his metal-clad forearm into a bandit’s face and felt bones crunch with the blow. With a moment’s respite he looked quickly around and spotted a cluster of his men ringing the gold. Two of the mules were down: the cowards had shot at the animals again.
“Over there!” he shouted to Edrique, gesturing. “Fight over that way!”
Edrique nodded his head and turned. Then he fell. Someone jerked a sword out from his ribs.
In the space where his second-in-command had stood a moment before, a brave, competent, living man, Nino saw an apparition.
The man who had killed Edrique had to be at least sixty years old. He was built like an ox, though, massive and thick-muscled, broad-shouldered, heavy-browed, a huge, ugly head. He was dripping with blood. His long, snarled white beard was dyed and clotted with it; blood streamed from his bald head and had soaked the dun-colored clothing and leather armor he wore. The man, eyes wild with battle lust, leveled his red sword at Nino.
“Surrender or you will die!” he roared in crude Esperañan. “We grant ransoming if you yield!”
Nino glanced past the outlaw. Saw the ring of his men still holding around the mules. Many dead, but more of their foes fallen in front of them—and his company were soldiers, the best Jaloña had. The old man was bluffing, taking Nino for a coward and a fool.
“Jad rot you!” Nino screamed, his throat scraped raw. He cut viciously on the backhand against the other man’s blade and drove the blood-soaked figure back a step with the sheer force of his rage. Another outlaw rushed up on Nino’s left; Nino twisted under his too-high sword stroke and swept his own blade back across and down. He felt it bite into flesh. A red joy filled him. His victim made a sloppy, wet sound and fell to the frosted earth.
The white-bearded outlaw froze for a moment, screaming a name, and Nino used that hesitation to ram straight into him and then past, as the man gave way, to where most of his remaining men were ferociou
sly defending the gold. He stumbled into their ranks, greeted with glad, fierce cries, and he turned, snarling, to fight again.
Surrender? To these? To be ransomed by the king from Asharite bandits, with the parias lost? There were worse things than dying, far worse things.
This is not war as I dreamed it, Alvar was thinking.
He was remembering the farm, childhood, an eager boy, a soldier’s only son, with a wooden sword always by his bed at night. Images of glory and heroism dancing beyond the window in the starry dark after the candles had been blown out. A long time ago.
They were waiting in pale cold sunlight at the north end of the valley.
Kill anyone who comes out, Laín Nunez had said. Only two men had. They had been battling each other, grappled together, grunting and snorting like animals. Their combat had carried them right out of the defile, tumbling and rolling, fingers clawing at each other’s eyes. Ludus and Martín, efficient and precise, had moved their horses over and dispatched both men with arrows. The two bodies lay now, still intertwined, on the frosted grass.
There was nothing remotely heroic or even particularly dangerous about what they were doing. Even the night sweep into the burning hamlet of Orvilla last summer had had more intensity, more of a sense of real warfare, than this edgy waiting while other men killed each other out of sight in the dark space north of them.
Alvar glanced over his shoulder at a sound and saw the Captain riding up, with Jehane and ibn Khairan. Jehane looked anxious, he thought. The two men appeared calm, unconcerned. Neither spared a glance for the two dead men on the grass. They cantered their horses up to Laín Nunez.
“It goes well?” Rodrigo asked.
Laín, predictably, spat before answering. “They are killing each other for us, if that is what you mean.”