on a cushion in the midst of the courtyard, each of the guests was sweepingly beheaded by one of two Muwardi tribesmen standing on either side of the tunnel’s arch.
The Muwardis, not really strangers to this sort of thing, enjoyed their labors perhaps more than they ought to have done. There were, of course, no wadjis waiting in the courtyard; the castle wing was receiving a different sort of consecration.
One by one, through the course of a scorching hot, cloudless summer’s afternoon, the elite of Fezanan society made their way along that dark, cool tunnel, and then, dazzled by the return to sunlight, followed the herald’s ringing proclamation of their names into the white courtyard where they were slain. The Muwardis had been carefully chosen. No mistakes were made. No one cried out.
The toppling bodies were swiftly seized by other veiled tribesmen and dragged to the far end of the courtyard where a round tower overlooked the new moat created by diverting the nearby Tavares River. The bodies of the dead men were thrown into the water from a low window in the tower. The severed heads were tossed carelessly onto a bloody pile not far from where the prince of Cartada sat, ostensibly waiting to receive the most prominent citizens of the most difficult of the cities he was one day to rule, if he lived long enough.
As it happened, the prince, whose relations with his father were indeed not entirely cordial, had not been informed about this central, long-planned aspect of the afternoon’s agenda. King Almalik of Cartada had more than one purpose to what he was doing that day. The prince had, in fact, asked where the wadjis were. No one had been able to answer him. After the first man appeared and was slain, his severed head landing some distance from his toppling body, the prince offered no further questions.
Part of the way through the afternoon’s nearly silent, murderous progression under the blazing sun, around the time the carrion birds began to appear in numbers, circling above the water, it was noted by some of the soldiers in the increasingly bloody courtyard that the prince seemed to have developed an odd, disfiguring twitch above his left eye. For the Muwardis, this was a contemptible sign of weakness. He did stay on his cushion though, they noted. And he never moved, or spoke, through the entirety of what was done. He watched one hundred and thirty-nine men die doing formal obeisance to him.
He never lost that nervous tic. During times of stress or elation it would return, an infallible signal to those who knew him well that he was experiencing intense emotion, no matter how he might try to hide the fact. It was also an inescapable reminder—because all of Al-Rassan was soon to learn this story—of a blood-soaked summer afternoon in Fezana.
The peninsula had seen its share of violent deeds, from the time of the Asharite conquest and before, but this was something special, something to be remembered. The Day of the Moat. One of the legacies of Almalik I, the Lion of Cartada. Part of his son’s inheritance.
The slaughter did not end until some time after the fifth bells had called the pious again to their prayers. By then the number of birds over the river and moat had made it evident that something untoward was taking place. A few curious children had gone outside the walls and circled around to the north to see what was bringing so many birds. They carried word back into the city. There were headless bodies in the water. Not long after that the screaming began in the houses and the streets of Fezana.
Such distracting sounds did not penetrate the castle walls of course, and the birds could not be seen from within the handsome, arcaded refectory. After the last of the assembled guests had made his way from there along the tunnel, Ammar ibn Khairan, the man who had killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan, went alone down that corridor to the courtyard. The sun was over to the west by then, the light towards which he walked through a long, cool darkness was gentle, welcoming, almost worthy of a poem.
CHAPTER II
After somehow coping with the disastrous incident at the very beginning of their ride south, Alvar had been finding the journey the most exhilarating time of his life. This did not come as a surprise; he had nourished dreams of this for years, and reality doesn’t invariably shatter a young man’s dreams. Not immediately, at any rate.
Had he been of a slightly less rational nature, he might even have given fuller rein to the fantasy he briefly entertained as they broke camp after the dawn invocation on their fifth morning south of the River Duric: that he had died and arrived, by the grace of Jad, at the Paradise of Warriors, and would be allowed to ride behind Rodrigo Belmonte, the Captain, through the plains and steppes of summer forever.
The river was far behind them, and the walls of Carcasia. They had passed the wooden stockade forts of Baeza and Lobar, small, fledgling outposts in emptiness. The company rode now through the wild, high, bare sweep of the no-man’s-land, dust rising behind and the sun beating down upon them—fifty of Jad’s own horsemen, journeying to the fabled cities of the Asharites at the king of Valledo’s command.
And young Alvar de Pellino was one of those fifty, chosen, after scarcely a year among the riders at Esteren, to accompany the great Rodrigo—the Captain himself—on a tribute mission to Al-Rassan. There were miracles in the world, truly, bestowed without explanation, unless his mother’s prayers on her pilgrimage to holy Vasca’s Isle had been answered by the god behind the sun.
Since that was at least a possibility, each morning now at dawn Alvar faced east for the invocation and offered thanks to Jad with a full heart, vowing anew upon the iron of the sword his father had given him to be worthy of the god’s trust. And, of course, the Captain’s.
There were so many young riders in the army of King Ramiro. Horsemen from all over Valledo, some with splendid armor and magnificent horses, some with lineage going back to the Old Ones who had ruled the whole peninsula and named it Esperaña, who first learned the truths of the sun-god and built the straight roads. And almost every one of those men would have fasted a week, would have forsworn women and wine, would have seriously contemplated murder for the chance to be trained by the Captain, to be under the cool, grey-eyed scrutiny of Rodrigo Belmonte for three whole weeks. To be, if only for this one mission, numbered among his company.
A man could dream, you see. Three weeks might be only a beginning, with more to follow, the world opening up like a peeled and quartered orange. A young horseman could lie down at night on his saddle blanket and look up at the bright stars worshipped by the followers of Ashar. He could imagine himself cutting a shining swath through the ranks of the infidels to save the Captain himself from danger and death, being saluted and marked by Rodrigo in the midst of roaring battle, and then after, victorious, drinking unmixed wine at the Captain’s side, being honored and made welcome among his company.
A young man could dream, could he not?
The problem, for Alvar, was that such immensely satisfying images had been giving way, in the almost-silence of night, or the long rhythms of a day’s hard riding under the god’s sun, to the vivid, excruciating memory of what had happened the morning they set out from Esteren. To a recollection of the moment, in particular, when young Alvar de Pellino—heart’s pride and joy of his parents and three sisters—had chosen the wrong place entirely to unbutton his trousers and relieve himself before the company mounted up to ride.
It ought to have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
They had assembled at dawn in a newly built sidecourt of the palace at Esteren. Alvar, almost giddy with excitement and the simultaneous effort not to reveal it, had been attempting to remain as inconspicuous as possible. He was not a shy or diffident young man by nature, but even now, at the very moment of departure, a part of him feared, with lurid apprehension, that if someone noticed him—Laín Nunez, for example, the Captain’s lean old companion-at-arms—they might declare Alvar’s presence an obvious error of some kind, and he’d be left behind. He would, of course, have
