Joseph Lewis - Halcyon

Qhora stood in the street clutching her dagger and listening to the hidalgo shout and the giant cat roar. Something wooden cracked and the splinters clattered on the ground. And then all was silence.

Lorenzo emerged from the gloom, his sword sheathed and hidden within the folds of his long black coat. “It was nothing, my lady. Atoq must have smelled an animal or the garbage. Although, I…” He looked back.

“You what?”

“I’m sorry. I could have sworn there was someone in that alley,” Lorenzo said.

She saw the strange glint in his eyes as he stared down the street and over the harbor. “You mean your guardian angel said so?”

He exhaled slowly, his breath no longer visible in the darkness. “I thought I might have heard her whisper something, but with the rain and Atoq growling, I suppose I just heard what I wanted to hear. It’s been weeks since I’ve seen Ariel.” He straightened up and folded his hands behind his back, and suddenly he was her hidalgo again. “I’m sorry, my love. Let’s get you out of the rain.”

Atoq trotted out into the street where he stood and stretched, licking his teeth.

Ariel. What use are ghosts if they cannot even warn you of an enemy? Qhora shrugged and resumed walking. She’d only taken a few steps when three men stepped out from the next alleyway down the street. Through the rain and shadows, the three figures appeared only in shades of gray, charcoal men in colorless clothes. Lorenzo’s espada whisked through the air as he drew it and the young hidalgo stepped in front of her for the second time. Qhora yanked her dagger from her belt and glanced behind them. Two more men stepped out with long jagged clubs in their hands.

“Five of them, Enzo,” she said. “We’re surrounded.”

Atoq growled.

“Yes, we are.” Lorenzo called out to the men in Mazigh, “What do you want?”

One of them yelled back over the hiss of the rain, “Everything you have. On the ground. Now. Or we kill you.”

Qhora barely understood the man over the noise. The Mazigh language was not difficult, but after mastering four tongues of the Incan Empire and then Espani, she was finding it harder and harder to learn new ones. And she hadn’t even tried Hellan or Persian yet.

“We have nothing to give you,” Lorenzo answered. “No money. No jewelry.”

The men didn’t answer. Qhora moved to stand back to back with Lorenzo. Atoq paced forward and the two men on the high side of the street hesitated, glancing at each other. Without turning her head, Qhora said Lorenzo, “Can you fight three men at once?”

“Yes.” There was no pride in his voice, only certainty. In Espana, the young hidalgo was counted among the finest diestros of his generation, a fencing prodigy. She had seen him duel and acknowledged his skill with the tiny espada, but this was no duel and an espada could be snapped by a man with the courage to grab it. For a moment, Qhora wished that Xiuhcoatl had been the one to follow her to train station. Even after two years together, and despite everything else she felt for him, she still hesitated to trust Enzo’s skill over other men’s strength.

Lorenzo dashed from her side down the street but she didn’t dare look back. The two men above her raced forward, both angling toward Atoq with their clubs raised. The beast crouched, snarling, and then he leapt. The man on the right vanished under eight hundred pounds of wet fur and fangs. The man on the left stumbled around the cat and swung his broken board at Qhora’s head. With practiced grace, she whirled her soaking feathered cloak at his face to blind him with a sudden spray of water, then whirled back in the opposite direction, ducking under the club and burying her dagger in his throat as he stumbled past. He collapsed to the ground, choking and clawing at his neck. A moment later he lay still and Qhora yanked her dagger free, unable to tell the blood from the black puddles of filthy street water in the darkness. She looked up to see Atoq padding away from his kill with blood dripping from his fangs and she glanced at the remains of the other man, his shredded belly and intestines spilled across the cobblestones. Atoq sat down and began licking his drenched paw to wash his face.

Turning, she saw the dark figure of Lorenzo standing beside three bodies, his sword already sheathed and hidden in the folds of his greatcoat. The rain fell harder and colder, drumming on her bare head. Qhora slipped her dagger back into her belt and pulled her feathered cloak tight around her shoulders as she walked over to him to look at the men. Clad in patched trousers and stained shirts, armed only with scrap wood and rusted pig iron rods, they lay in a neat pile at the side of the road. Briefly, she wondered if Lorenzo had moved the bodies or somehow contrived to kill them in such a way that they all fell on top of each other. Both seemed equally likely as she knew how much Lorenzo valued cleanliness. She asked, “Are you hurt?”

“No. Are you?”

“No. Who are they?”

He paused before saying, “Desperados. Men who can’t find work, I suppose. It’s not uncommon here. We should not be out so late. It isn’t safe.”

Qhora nodded slowly. “I had noticed that.”

They resumed their unhurried walk through the rain to the hotel. Atoq followed behind them, sniffing about in the gutters and puddles along the way.

“Enzo, I owe you an apology,” she said.

Lorenzo stopped abruptly and snatched the wide-brimmed hat from his head. He stared at her, eyes wide with a strange mixture of horror and confusion. She studied his thin, pale face as the rainwater ran down over his sharp nose and cheeks. Once he had worn a tanned skin and a ready smile, and he was as likely to be laughing as singing when she found him. But now he was merely this, merely a thin figure, dark and quiet, anxious and uncertain. The lines around his eyes had deepened so much in the last few months, aging him beyond what had once been a youthful twenty-five. The rough stubble on his cheeks added a few years of their own.

She said, “I’ve been unkind to you, my love. Over the last year, you’ve done nothing but serve me with great skill and greater patience. And I’ve done nothing but complain. I complain about your boring priests and your bland food, your ghost stories, and even the weather.”

He nodded slowly, his face a blank. “It is very cold in Espana, my lady.”

“But what good does it do to complain about it?” Qhora shivered as a trickle of freezing rain snaked down from her hair along the curve of her spine. “I realize that I’ve been comparing Espana to Jisquntin Suyu, which is unfair. Espana is a strange place, but it is beautiful too in its own way. And your people have many fine qualities. Loyalty, devotion, discipline. Beyond that of my own people, I admit.”

“No, my love.” Lorenzo wiped his gloved hand across his face to push his soaked hair back. “We’re only people, no better or worse than any other.”

“Of course you’re better than others.” Qhora tried not to snap too sharply at him. Sometimes his humility goes too far. “You’re better than these Mazighs. You’ve sung their praises to me for the last two weeks, and here I find a filthy city full of vagrants and killers. No. I’m sorry, Enzo. The Espani are a fine and noble people and I am grateful that you took me in when I had no place to go. And I will be just as grateful to be done with this errand and back in Tartessos, listening to your hymns and ghost stories again. And with a much more grateful heart.”

“I know it’s been difficult for you. Maybe, after we go home, we can find a way to make things more comfortable for you.” He smiled faintly as he replaced his hat and they continued walking, the saber-toothed cat always just a few paces away. “Tonight may count as a ghost story, you know. If Ariel hadn’t warned me, we might have been unprepared. We might have been hurt.”