Guy Kay - The Lions of Al-Rassan

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 Martin'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, slashed 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.

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 Esperana 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.