They were a match. Both of them had always known it. In a way, the desperate exigencies required to stay alive now were a good thing: they made it harder for the heart to intervene and cripple with its sorrow.
There were reasons for staying alive. There was a woman on a hilltop east of them. There was love. He blocked a low thrust, barely, cut forward with the motion—a difficult thing—and was parried, elegantly. Never a swordsman like this before. Never a match. Could it be called a dance? Should they embrace? Were they not?
One let the body rule here, faster than thought; movements not even imagined, a blurring engaged by the same when blades met. The mind floating just above, out of the way except when it noticed something. A weakness, a faltering.
No faltering here at red sunset. He hadn’t thought there would be.
On that hilltop to the east there was love.
Once, during their campaign for Ragosa, when they’d lured the old bandit ibn Hassan into ambushing the parias party for them, Jehane had joined the company by the fire one night, and had offered a Kindath song.
Who knows love?
Who says he knows love?
What is love, tell me.
“I know love,”
Says the littlest one.
“Love is like a tall oak tree.”
“Why is love a tall oak tree?
Little one tell me.”
“Love is a tree
For the shelter it gives
In sunshine or in storm.”
He stumbled unexpectedly as an attack pushed him back; swore as he felt himself falling. Too careless, distracted. He had seen that rock, had thought of using it.
Twisting desperately, he released his shield—behind him, the grip upwards—and blocked his fall with his freed left arm, palm braced hard on the grass, sword sweeping into position to take the other man’s descending blade and turn it away.
He let himself roll with the weight of that blow to the necessary place, reclaimed the shield and was up again—all in the same smooth motion. In time to blunt the swift second stroke. Dropped to a knee then and slashed across, faster than he should have been able to. Almost got through with that one; almost buried his sword. Didn’t. They were a match. Both of them had known. From first meeting in Ragosa. That garden with the tame stream.
Who knows love?
Who says he knows love?
What is love, tell me.
“I know love,”
Says the littlest one.
“Love is like a flower.”
“Why is love a flower?
Little one tell me.”
“Love is a flower
For the sweetness it gives
Before it dies away.”
It would have been pleasant, the thought came to him, to be able to lay down their weapons on the darkening grass. To walk away from this place, from what they were being made to do, past the ruins, along the river and into the woods beyond. To find a forest pool, wash their wounds and drink from the cool water and then sit beneath the trees, out of the wind, silent as the summer night came down.
Not in this life.
He thought, then, of something he could do with his shield.
It would have been so much better had she been able to hate the man trying to kill Rodrigo. It was this man, though, who had given the warning that saved Diego’s life. He hadn’t had to do that. He was Asharite. He was now the commander of their army, the ka’id.
But she had never, ever heard Rodrigo speak of another man—not even Raimundo, who had died so long ago—the way he’d talked about Ammar ibn Khairan during the long, waiting winter just past. The way the man sat a horse, handled a blade, a bow, devised strategies, jested, spoke of history, geography, the properties of good wine. Even the way he wrote poetry.
“Poetry?” Miranda could remember saying to this last, in the voice she reserved for her most withering sarcasm.
Rodrigo had a liking for verse, an ear for what he heard. She did not, and he knew it. He used to torment her with snatches of lyrics in bed. She’d cover her head with pillows.
“Are you in love with this man?” she’d asked her husband once in Fezana that winter—more than half jealous, if truth were told.
“I suppose I am, in a way,” Rodrigo had replied after a moment. “Isn’t it odd?”
It wasn’t, really, Miranda thought, on that hill by Silvenes. The low sun was making it difficult to see the two of them now. There were moments when she found it impossible to tell them apart. She would have thought she’d know Rodrigo beside any man on earth, but he was in armor now, and far away, a moving shadow against red light, and the two men would come together, circle and turn, very close, before disengaging. It was easy to confuse them in these movements leading to a death.
She wasn’t ready to lose him. To be alone.
It was the wind that was bringing tears to her eyes. She wiped at them with the back of a hand, glancing sidelong at the other woman. Jehane bet Ishak stood dry-eyed, white-faced, never moving her gaze from what was happening below. Miranda thought suddenly: We have had our years. I know what it is I will lose. She hasn’t even had time to gather memories against the dark.
Which was the harder loss to bear? Were there measurements for such things? Did it matter?
“Oh love,” she whispered aloud. And then, to herself, a prayer, “Do not leave me now.”
In that moment she saw one of them throw his shield.
She would never have thought there could be beauty in something so purely terrifying, but she ought to have known, remembering what they could do. Both of them.
She had seen them fight—that challenge in Ragosa, the Emin ha’Nazar, the Kindath Quarter in Fezana. She ought to have expected this.
Most of the time, eyes narrowed against the sun, Jehane could tell them apart. Not always, though, as they overlapped and merged and broke apart. They were silhouettes now, no more than that, against the last red disk of light.
She suddenly remembered, as if the thought had somehow been given to her, a cold night during that campaign in the east for Mazur and King Badir. She’d heard the company singing by one of the campfires, to the sound of Martín’s guitar. She had come out from her tent, half asleep, wrapped in a cloak. They had made a place for her near the fire. Eventually she had sung a tune her mother used to sing to her in childhood, as Eliane’s own mother had sung it for her. It was such an old song.
Both men had been watching her from across the fire that night, Jehane remembered. A strange memory now, but it had come. She remembered the night, the fire, the song.
“Love is a flower
For the sweetness it gives
Before it dies away.”
The sun, red as a flame, dropped below the western bank of clouds, underlighting them, hanging on the rim of the world. The two men were shadow-figures against it. They circled, came together, circled. She could truly not distinguish them now, the movements were so much the same.
One of them threw his shield.
Hurled it flat like a discus, wrong-handed, straight at the other’s knees. The other man leaped to evade, almost did, was hit, fell awkwardly. Jehane caught her breath. The first one drove straight forward, hard, and they were locked again, entangled.
“Rodrigo,” said Miranda suddenly.
The man without a shield was above the other, who had fought to his knees. The one on the ground blocked the descent of a sword, was thrown back. Hurled himself completely over and away on the grass, letting fall his own shield to do it. They engaged, without defenses now, blades whipping and parrying. One body, almost. A creature of myth, some lost, fabulous beast of long ago. They pushed apart. Two figures again, against the sun’s disk.
Jehane’s hands were up before her mouth. One of the two men threw himself against the other again. Half the sun was gone now, at the end of the world. She could see the shields where they had fallen.
Someone hammered downwards, was blocked. He broke free, feinted a thrust, sla
shed across.
And was not parried. Not this time.
The long blade sank in. They could see it from on the hill. Jehane began to cry. The wounded man pulled free and back, somehow deflected another driving blow. Then he twisted suddenly, one arm held tight against his ribs. Jehane saw him take a quick step to the side and grip his sword in both hands. It was upon them.
Who knows love?
Who says he knows love?
What is love, tell me.
An old song. A child’s song.
And so, at the last, from far away, against the red and failing light, she saw a good man raise his sword and she saw a good man fall.
There came a vast roaring sound from the armies. But though she was aware of this it seemed already distant to Jehane, and moving away, as if a silence was descending to cover the world.
The man who yet stood upright on the plain turned towards the hill where the women were. He let fall his own blade onto the dark, trampled grass. Holding a palm again to his wounded side, he made a gesture—a small, helpless movement—with his free hand.
Then he turned away from them to the man lying on the ground and he sank to his knees beside him as the sun went down.
Soon after that the clouds began rolling in from the west, blanketing the sky.
No sun, no moon, no stars over Al-Rassan.
Epilogue
The rapid resettlement of the Kindath community of Sorenica in Batiara was something that could be regarded in a number of different ways. Burned to the ground nearly twenty years before, on the eve of the disastrous Jaddite campaign against the Asharite homelands in the east, Sorenica had been rebuilt and was thriving again.
Some viewed this as a sad demonstration of the Kindaths’ desperate desire for roots and a home—any kind of home, however precarious. Others saw the speedy restoration of a devastated city as emblematic of endurance in the face of hardships that would have destroyed a people with a lesser heritage to sustain them.
The Kindath physician Alvar ben Pellino, who had been one of the first to settle here in his youth—he had completed his studies at the newly re-established university—had a different perspective from most, and a more pragmatic view.
Men and women of all faiths struggled to find ways to shape a life for themselves and their children. When opportunities emerged they were grasped. Sorenica’s revival was simply such an opportunity being seized.
In the aftermath of their army’s destruction twenty years ago, the Jaddite princes of several kingdoms had been informed by their spiritual advisors that the god had not been pleased by the brutal attack on Sorenica before the fleet sailed. The Kindath had not been the real targets of that holy war, the clerics solemnly decreed, conveniently forgetting their own role in the massacre. Sorenica’s destruction, they decided, had represented a failure of piety, a deviation from proper awareness of the holy mission that lay ahead.
Jad had sent his punishments: storm winds at sea, sickness, murder among princes, deaths in battle in far-off, inhospitable lands.
Those leaders and their followers who finally came home two long years later had wearily agreed to make atonement for the Sorenica massacre. The Kindath had been invited back, royal monies were allocated for the rebuilding of their sanctuaries, markets, houses, the university, the harbor, warehouses, city walls. Taxes were remitted for all who agreed to settle there in those first years. The highest lords of Batiara—many of them the sons of men who had died in the Asharite homelands—put their seals to a long, clerkly document drawn up to attest to the assured safety of Sorenica and its inhabitants.
One did not have to believe such things, Alvar ben Pellino thought, striding quickly past the stalls of the market towards the harbor, to have decided that in an uncertain, violent world, Sorenica offered no more risks than anywhere else and a few benefits not otherwise available.
In his case, more than a few benefits, in that long-ago year when they’d escaped the savagery that was consuming Esperaña and Al-Rassan, tearing the peninsula apart the way wild beasts shred a carcass.
Ben Pellino was well-known and well-loved in Sorenica. Hasten as he might, his progress towards the harbor was slow. Every few steps he was forced to stop and exchange pleasantries with someone or another. A surprising number of men and women wished him the moons’ blessing on his fortieth birth day. The Kindath, with their charts of birth, paid more attention to such days than his own people had: a small adjustment among larger ones.
It was his daughters, Alvar gradually understood, who had been busily informing everyone. Ruefully smiling, he acknowledged all the good wishes, agreeing with cheerful suggestions that his youth was now behind him.
He’d had a highly dramatic life in his early years and people knew something of that. He’d been a Horseman and even a royal herald in Valledo, before coming away from that peninsula, adopting the Kindath faith and beginning his training in medicine.
He was much sought after and trusted as a physician: calm, learned, reassuring. A steady hand and eye in surgery. His services had once been in demand among the mercenary armies of Batiara but he had never gone with the soldiers, ever. A season’s summons to a princely court he would accept—to deliver children, attend to gout, couch cataracts—but never a position with an army in the field. Had he wanted to tread or ride a battlefield, ben Pellino said calmly to all who asked, he would still be a Horseman in the army of Ramiro the Great of Esperaña.
He was a doctor, he said, and his labor was preserving and easing life. He would not, given a choice, freely venture into death’s own domain of war.
His wife did so, however. Also a physician—an even better one in the view of some, since she’d been trained from childhood by her celebrated father—she was not averse to a campaign or two among the armies. One saw injuries and ailments in the field that could only serve to broaden and deepen a doctor’s knowledge. Her father had done the same thing in his day.
Alvar, disengaging from yet another well-wisher, made a mental note to chastise his daughters when he returned home. They’d no business proclaiming his advancing years to the whole community! He didn’t look forty; everyone said as much. He wasn’t ready to be venerable and sage; unless it helped in disciplining two girls hovering precariously on the brink of womanhood. In the case of his daughters Alvar rather doubted anything would greatly help.
On the other hand, they were the ones who had decided to have a celebration today, and who’d been busy all week preparing it. They’d ordered the cook out of the kitchen. They had been making the confections themselves. His wife, more sympathetic to his desire to pass the day quietly, had tried to deter them—to no avail. When the two girls acted in tandem, the idea of deterrence was naive.
Knowing he was expected home by now for the celebration, Alvar hurried along the slip where ships from all over the world were loading or off-loading cargoes. He looked for and found the one with an Esperañan flag: yellow sun on a pale blue field, Queen Vasca’s crown above it.
A boy from the docks had run a message to their treatment rooms. A letter was waiting for them, entrusted to the captain. Alvar had finished with his patients first and had come to collect it.
He didn’t recognize the captain who granted him permission to board the ship. They exchanged pleasantries.
He did know the writing and the seal, and he took a deep breath when he accepted the salt-stained packet from the man. It was addressed to him and Jehane both, so after offering his thanks and a silver coin and striding back down to the wooden planks of the wharf, Alvar opened it. Normally he let Jehane read their mail from Esperaña first, but today was his birth day, after all, and he allowed himself this much luxury. He was immediately sorry.
My dear Jehane, my dear Alvar, he read, may the god and his sisters guard and preserve you and all your loved ones. We are well, though events, as you will have heard from others by now, have been turbulent this summer . . .
Alvar stopped reading, his heart thudding. They hadn’t heard
anything from others. He turned back to the ship. He called out. The captain turned at the rail to look down at him.
“What’s happened in the peninsula?” Alvar shouted up. He spoke in Esperañan. Heads turned towards him.
“You don’t know?” the captain cried.
“You’re the first Esperañan ship here in a month.”
“Then I can be tale teller!” the captain said, visibly pleased. He brought his two hands together above his eyes, making the sign of the god’s disk. “Belmonte took Cartada and Aljais this summer, and then Tudesca surrendered to him! Ramiro the Great has ridden his black horse into the sea at the mouth of the Guadiara. Jad has reconquered Al-Rassan! The peninsula belongs to Esperaña again!”
There was a babble of noise along the harbor. The news would be all over Sorenica by the time Alvar got home if he didn’t hurry.
He began moving quickly, almost running, barely pausing to throw a thank you over his shoulder. He didn’t want this news to come from the street. There were those at his house today who would need a warning, some shelter from this.
He needed that himself, in truth.
Even as he hurried back through the market, Alvar was remembering a long-ago night north of Fezana, when King Ramiro had told him and Ser Rodrigo of his firm intent to ride into the seas surrounding Al-Rassan and claim all the lands that touched them for his own.
He’d done it now. Ramiro the Great. Nearly twenty years after, but he’d done it. He was king of Esperaña. Of Valledo, Ruenda, Jaloña. Of Al-Rassan, though that name would be gone now. From this summer forward, that name was a word for poets and historians.
Clutching the letter, Alvar broke into a run. People looked at him curiously, but there were other running figures in the street now, carrying the same tidings. He cut along a laneway and past their treatment rooms. Closed. Everyone would be at his house by now. For the party. His happy celebration.