“Almost two weeks, Ammar. The roads were not good at all.”
“Were you extremely uncomfortable?” Polite questions. Buying time for thoughts to begin to organize themselves. If Almalik of Cartada was taken in Ragosa, the balance of power in Al-Rassan would change, at a stroke.
“Tolerably.” The young man who had been his protégé for three years smiled again. “You never allowed me to grow soft, and I haven’t been king long enough for that to change.” He paused, and Ammar saw, in that hesitation, that the king wasn’t quite as composed as he might want to appear. “You understand that I could only do this tonight.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you could do it at all,” ibn Khairan said frankly. “This is a rather extreme risk, ’Malik.”
He found himself offering thanks to all possible deities that Jehane was out of sight, and praying she could keep quiet enough. Almalik could not possibly afford to be reported here, which meant that anyone who saw him was in mortal danger. Ibn Khairan deferred, for a moment, the question of where this left him.
He said, “I’d best join you inside.”
The king of Cartada stepped back and Ammar walked into his own room. He registered the two Muwardis waiting there. There was an air of unreality to all of this. He was still trying to absorb the astonishing fact that Almalik had come here. But then, suddenly, as he turned to face the king, he grasped what this had to be about and disorientation spun away, to be replaced by something almost as unsettling.
“No one but you,” said the king of Cartada quietly, “calls me ’Malik any more.”
“Forgive me. Old habits. I’ll stop, of course. Magnificence.”
“I didn’t say it offended me.”
“No, but even if it doesn’t . . . you are the king of Cartada.”
“I am, aren’t I?” Almalik murmured. He sank down into the northern-style armchair by the bed; a young man, not particularly graceful, but tall and well-made. “And, can you believe it, the first act of my reign, very nearly, was to exile the man I most needed.”
Which made it all quite explicit.
He had not changed in this, ibn Khairan noted. A capacity for directness was something Almalik had always had, even as a boy. Ammar had never resolved within himself whether it marked a strength, or a tactic of the weak: forcing stronger friends to deal with his declared vulnerabilities. His eyelid was moving, but that was something one hardly noticed after a while.
“You hadn’t even been crowned,” ibn Khairan said softly.
He really wasn’t prepared for this conversation. Not tonight. He had been readying himself, in an entirely different way, for something else. Had stood watching in the street, holding his breath like a boy, while Jehane bet Ishak had gazed upwards at a high, candlelit window, and he had only begun to breathe normally again when she gave the shrug he knew and moved on, a stillness seeming to wrap itself about her amid the tumult of the night.
He had never thought it might require courage to approach a woman.
“I am surprised to find you alone,” Almalik said, a little too lightly.
“You shouldn’t be,” ibn Khairan murmured, being careful now. “Tonight’s encounters lack a certain . . . refinement, wouldn’t you say?”
“I wouldn’t know, Ammar. It seemed lively enough. We spent some time looking for you, and then I realized it was hopeless. It was easier to buy the location of your house and wait.”
“Did you really come to Ragosa expecting to find me in the streets at Carnival?”
“I came here because I could see no other way to speak with you quickly enough. I had only hope, and need, when we set out. There is no company of men with me, by the way. These two, and half a dozen others for safety on the road. No one else. I have come to say certain things. And to ask you to come back to me.”
Ibn Khairan was silent. He had been waiting for this, and latterly, had been afraid of it. He had been the guardian and mentor of this man, the named heir to Cartada’s throne. Had put a great deal of effort into making of Almalik ibn Almalik a man worthy of power. He did not like admitting failure. He wasn’t even certain he had failed. This was going to be ferociously difficult.
He crossed to the sideboard, deliberately brushing past one of the Muwardis. The man did not move, or even spare a glance. They hated him; all of them did. His whole life was a sustained assault upon their grim piety. It was a sentiment he returned: their way of life—single-minded faith, single-minded hatred—affronted all his sensibilities, his perception of what life ought to be.
“Will you take a glass of wine?” he asked the king of Cartada, deliberately provoking the Muwardis. Unworthy, perhaps, but he couldn’t help this.
Almalik shrugged, nodded his head. Ibn Khairan poured for both of them and carried the glasses over. They saluted each other, top of glass touching bottom, then bottom to top.
“It took courage for you to do this,” Ammar said. It was right that he acknowledge this.
Almalik shook his head, looking up at him from the chair. In the candlelight it could be seen how young he still was. And standing more closely now, ibn Khairan could see the marks of strain.
“It took only an awareness that if you do not return I do not know what I will do. And I understand you very well, Ammar, in some things. What was I to do? Write you pleading letters? You would not have come. You know you would not.”
“Surely the king of Cartada is surrounded by men of wisdom and experience?”
“Now you are jesting. Do not.”
Quick anger flared, surprising him. Before it could be suppressed, ibn Khairan snapped, “It was you who exiled me. Be so good as to remember that, ’Malik.”
A raw wound: the pupil turning upon the teacher in the moment of shared ascendancy. An old story, in truth, but he had never thought it would happen to him. First the father, and then the son.
“I do remember it,” Almalik said quietly. “I made a mistake, Ammar.”
Weakness or strength, it had always been hard to tell. This trait might even be, at different times, a sign of both. The father had never, in twenty years together, admitted to an error.
“Not all mistakes can be undone.” He was stalling, waiting for something to make this clearer for him. Behind, beneath all these words lay a decision that had to be made.
Almalik stood up. “I know that, of course. I am here in the hope that this was not one such. What is it you want, Ammar? What must I say?”
Ibn Khairan looked at him a moment before answering. “What is it I want? To write in peace, I could answer, but that would be dissembling, wouldn’t it? To live my life with a measure of honor—and be seen by the world to be doing so. That would be true enough and that, incidentally, is why I had to kill your father.”
“I know that. I know it better than anyone.” The king hesitated. “Ammar, I believe the Jaddites will be coming south this summer. My brother is with Yazir ibn Q’arif in the desert, still. We have learned they are building ships. In Abeneven. And I don’t know what King Badir intends.”
“So you tried to kill the boys?”
Almalik blinked. It was an unfair thrust, but he was a clever man, very much his father’s son. He said, “Those two men weren’t killed in a tavern brawl, then? I wondered about that.” The king shrugged. “Am I the first ruler in Al-Rassan to try to strengthen himself by dealing with siblings? Were you not my teacher of history, Ammar?”
Ibn Khairan smiled. “Did I criticize?”
Almalik flushed suddenly. “But you stopped them. You saved the boys. Zabira’s sons.”
“Others did. I was a small part of it. I am exiled here, Almalik, remember? I have signed a contract in Ragosa, and have been honoring it.”
“With my enemies!” A young man’s voice now, the control slipping, a boy’s words.
Ibn Khairan felt something twist within him like a soft blade. He knew this part of the man. Of the king. He said, “It seems we live in a world where boundaries are shifting all the time. This makes it
more difficult for a man to do what is right.”
“Ammar, no. Your place is in Cartada. You have always served Cartada, striven for it.” He hesitated, then set down his glass and said, “You killed a khalif for my father, can you not at least come home for me?”
It seemed that with understanding there so often came sadness. This one was measuring himself, still, against a dead man, just as he had when his father lived. He would probably do this all his life, whether long or short. Testing. Comparing allotments of love. Demanding to be cared for as much, and more.
It occurred to ibn Khairan, for the first time, to wonder how the young king had reacted to the lament Ammar had written for his father. Where lesser beasts now gather . . . He also realized, in that same moment, that Zabira had been right: ’Malik would not have suffered the concubine who had loved his father to live.
“I don’t know,” he said, answering the question. “I do not know where my place is now.”
Somewhere inside him though, even as he spoke those words, a voice was saying: This is a lie, though once it might have been true. There is something new. The world can change, so can you. The world has changed. And in his mind, amazingly, he could hear her name, as if in the sound of bells. There was a momentary wonder that no one else in the room seemed to notice this.
He went on, straining to concentrate. “May I take it that this visit is intended to convey a rescinding of my exile and an invitation to return to my position?”
He made his words deliberately formal, to pull them back from the raw place where the king’s question had taken them. Can you not come home for me?
The young king opened his mouth and closed it. There was hurt in his eyes. He said, stiffly, “You may take it as such.”
“What position, precisely?”
Another hesitation. Almalik had not been prepared for a negotiating session. That was fine. Ammar had not been prepared for any of this.
“Chancellor of Cartada. Of course.”
Ibn Khairan nodded. “And your formally declared successor, pending marriage and legitimate heirs?” The thought—monstrous thought!—had only come to him in this moment.
One of the Muwardis shifted by the fireplace. Ibn Khairan turned and looked at him. The man’s eyes locked on his this time, black with hatred. Ammar smiled affably and drank slowly from his glass without looking away.
Almalik II of Cartada said, softly, “Is this your condition, Ammar? Is it wise?”
Of course it wasn’t wise. It was sheerest folly.
“I doubt it,” ibn Khairan said carelessly. “Leave that in reserve. Have you begun negotiations for a marriage?”
“Some overtures have been made to us, yes.” Almalik’s tone was awkward.
“You had best accept one of them soon. Killing children is less useful than begetting them. What have you done about Valledo?”
The king picked up his glass again and drained it before answering. “I am receiving useless advice, Ammar. They agonize, they wring their hands. They advise doubling the parias, then delaying it, then refusing it! I took some measures of my own to stir up Ruenda and we have a man there, do you remember him?”
“Centuro d’Arrosa. Your father bought him years ago. What of him?”
“I instructed him to do whatever he had to do to cause a mortal breach between Ruenda and Valledo. You know they were all to be meeting this spring. They may have done so by now.”
Thoughtfully, ibn Khairan said, “King Ramiro doesn’t need his brother’s aid to menace you.”
“No, but what if he is induced to ride against Ruenda, instead of against me?” Almalik’s expression was that of a schoolboy who thinks he has passed a test.
“What have you done?”
King Almalik smiled. “Is it my loyal chancellor who asks?”
After a moment, ibn Khairan returned the smile. “Fair enough. What about Fezana itself, then? Defenses?”
“As best we can. Food storage for half a year. Some of the walls repaired, though money is an issue, as you will know. The additional soldiers in the new wing of the castle. I have allowed the wadjis to stir up anger against the Kindath.”
Ammar felt a coldness as if a wind had come into the room. A woman was hearing this, out on the balcony.
“Why that?” he asked, very quietly.
Almalik shrugged. “My father used to do the same thing. The wadjis need to be kept happy. They inspire the people. In a siege that will matter. And if they do push some of the Kindath out, or kill a few, a siege will be easier to withstand. That seems obvious to me.”
Ibn Khairan said nothing. The king of Cartada looked at him, a close, suspicious glance. “It has been reported to me that you spent time on the Day of the Moat with a Kindath physician. A woman. Was there a reason?”
It seemed that answers to the hardest questions life offered might come in unexpected ways. In the strangest fashion, that cold, narrowed gaze came as a relief to ibn Khairan. A reminder of what had always kept him from truly loving the boy who had become this man, despite a number of reasons for doing so.
“You had my movements traced?”
The king of Cartada was unfazed. “You were the one who taught me that all information helped. I wanted you back. I was searching for ways to achieve it.”
“And spying out my activities seemed a good method of enlisting my willing aid?”
“Aid,” said the king of Cartada, “can come for many reasons and in many guises. I could have kept this a secret from you, Ammar. I have not. I am here in Ragosa, trusting you. Now your turn: was there a reason, Ammar?”
Ibn Khairan snorted. “Did I want to bed her, you mean? Come on, ’Malik. I went to find that doctor because she was the physician of someone invited to the ceremony. A man who said he was too ill to come. I had no idea who she was until later. She was, incidentally, Ishak ben Yonannon’s daughter. You’ll know that by now. Does it mean anything to you?”
Almalik nodded. “My father’s physician. I remember him. They blinded him when Zabira’s last child was born.”
“And cut out his tongue.”
The king shrugged again. “We have to keep the wadjis happy, don’t we? Or if not happy, at least not preaching against us in the streets. They wanted the Kindath doctor to die. My father surprised me then, I remember.” Almalik gestured suddenly with both hands. “Ammar, I have no weapons against you here. I don’t want a weapon. I want you as my sword. What must I do?”
This had gone on too long, ibn Khairan realized. It was painful, and there was greater danger the longer it lasted. He carried no blade either, save the usual one taped to his left arm. However calm Almalik seemed, he was a man who could be pushed to rashness, and the Muwardi tribesmen would dance under the desert stars if they learned that Ammar ibn Khairan of Aljais had died.
He said, “Let me think on this, ’Malik. I have a contract that ends at the beginning of autumn. Honor may be served by then.”
“By autumn? You swear it? I will have you—”
“I said, let me think. That is all I will say.”
“And what should I do in the meantime?”
Ibn Khairan’s mouth quirked with amusement. He couldn’t help it. He was a man who found many things in life inexpressibly ironic. “You want me to tell you how to govern Cartada? Here and now? In this room, during Carnival?”
After a moment, Almalik laughed, and shook his head. “You would not believe how badly I am served, Ammar.”
“Then find better men! They exist. All over Al-Rassan. Put your labors into that.”
“And into what else?”
Ibn Khairan hesitated. Old habits died very hard. “You are probably right: Fezana is in danger. Whether the Jaddite army in Batiara sails this spring or not, there is a changed mood in the north. And if you lose Fezana, I do not think you can hold your dais. The wadjis will not allow it.”
“Or the Muwardis,” said Almalik, with a glance at the guards in the room. The veiled ones remained impassive. “I have alrea
dy done one further thing about this. Tonight, actually, here in Ragosa. You will approve.”
Odd, odd and sometimes frightening, how a lifetime’s instincts could put the soldier in one on such instantaneous alert.
“Approve of what?’ he asked, keeping his voice calm.
Later, he would realize that he had somehow known, though, even before the king of Cartada answered him.
“As I told you, six others came with me. I’ve had them find and kill the Valledan mercenary Belmonte. He is too dangerous to be permitted to go back to King Ramiro from his own exile. It seems he never left his room tonight; they know where he is, and there is only one guard at the street door.” Almalik of Cartada smiled. “It is a useful blow, Ammar. I hurt Badir and Ramiro both, very badly, by taking this man away from them.”
And me, Ammar ibn Khairan was thinking then, but did not say. And me. Very badly.
They had defeated five men together, in a display last autumn. Rod-rigo would have been alone tonight, however, and not expecting an assault. There were people costumed as Muwardis all over the city. Six silent killers, one frustrated guard at the street door. He could picture how it would have been. It would be over by now.
Even so, there were things one did, movements shaped without actual thought. The drive towards action as a blocking of pain. Even as the king of Cartada finished speaking, ibn Khairan had spun back to the door of his room, and was pulling it open. As he did so, in the same smooth movement, he ducked down low, so the blade thrown at his back embedded itself instead in the dark wood of the door.
Then he was out, running down the corridor, taking the stairs three and then four at a time, knowing that if Almalik had told him about this it was much too late already, but running, running.
Even in his haste, he remembered to do one thing before hurtling out the door and back into the street.
“Fool!” Jehane heard the king of Cartada shout. “What were you doing with that knife? I want him with us, you worm!”