LITMIR.BIZ

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mind. He remembered the pride in his mother’s voice the day she recounted the details of her first pilgrimage to seek Blessed Vasca’s intercession for her brave son as he left home for the world of warring men. He remembered her telling how she had gone the last part of the journey on her hands and knees over the stones to kiss the feet of the statue of the queen before her tomb.

      Animals, to be hunted down and burned from the face of the earth.

      He had killed his first man tonight. A good sword blow from horseback, slicing down through the collarbone of a running man. A motion he had practised so many times, with friends or alone as a child under his father’s eye, then drilled by the king’s foul-tongued sergeants in the tiltyard at Esteren. Exactly the same motion, no different at all. And a man had fallen to the summer earth, bleeding his life away.

      The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert.

      He had won himself a splendid horse tonight, and armor better by far than his own, with more to come. The beginnings of wealth, a soldier’s honor, perhaps an enduring place among the company of Rodrigo Belmonte. He had drawn laughter and approval from the man who might truly become his Captain now.

      Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last.

      He had crouched by a fire on this dark plain and heard an Asharite and a Kindath woman of beauty and intelligence far beyond his experience, and Ser Rodrigo himself, as they spoke in Alvar’s presence of the past and future of the peninsula.

      Alvar de Pellino made his decision then, more easily than he would ever have imagined. And he also knew, awake under the stars and a more perceptive man than he had been this same morning, that he would be permitted to do this thing. Only then, as if this resolution had been the key to the doorway of sleep, did Alvar’s mind slow its whirlwind of thought enough to allow him rest. Even then he dreamed: a dream of Silvenes, which he had never seen, of the Al-Fontina in the glorious days of the Khalifate, which were over before he was born.

      Alvar saw himself walking in that palace; he saw towers and domes of burnished gold, marble columns and arches, gleaming in the light. He saw gardens with flower beds and splashing fountains and statues in the shade, heard a distant, otherworldly music, was aware of the tall green trees rustling in the breeze, offering shelter from the sun. He smelled lemons and almonds and an elusive eastern perfume he could not have named.

      He was alone, though, in that place. Whatever paths he walked, past water and tree and cool stone arcade, were serenely, perfectly empty. Passing through high-ceilinged rooms with many-colored cushions on the mosaic-inlaid floors he saw wall hangings of silk and carvings of alabaster and olive wood. He saw golden and silver coffrets set with jewels, and crystal glasses of dark red wine, some filled, some almost empty—as if they had only that moment been set down. But no one was there, no voices could be heard. Only that hint of perfume in the air as he went from room to room, and the music—ahead of him and behind, tantalizing in its purity—alluded to the presence of other men and women in the Al-Fontina of Silvenes, and Alvar never saw them. Not in the dream, not ever in his life.

      Even the sun goes down.

PART TWO

      CHAPTER V

      “There’s trouble coming,” said Diego, as he ran past the stables and looked in briefly on the open stall. A soft rain was falling.

      “What is it?” his mother asked, glancing quickly over her shoulder. She stood up.

      “Don’t know. A lot of men.”

      “Where’s Fernan?”

      “Gone to meet it, with some of the others. I told him already.” Diego, having said what seemed necessary, turned to go.

      “Wait!” his mother called. “Where’s your father?”

      Diego’s expression was withering. “How would I know? Heading for Esteren, I guess, if he isn’t there already. They must have got the parias, by now.”

      His mother, feeling foolish, and irritated because of that, said, “Don’t use that tone with me. You sometimes do know, Diego.”

      “And when I do, I tell you,” he said. “Got to run, Mother. Fernan will need me. He said to lock the gates and get everyone up on the walls.”

      With the swift, lethal grin that left her almost helpless—his father’s smile—Diego was gone.

      I am being ordered about by my sons now, thought Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda. Another adjustment in life, another measure of time passing. It was odd; she didn’t feel old enough for this to be happening. She looked over at the frightened groom who was helping her with the mare.

      “I’ll finish here. You heard what he said. Tell Dario to get everyone up on the wall-walk. Including the women. Bring whatever weapons you can find. Build up the kitchen fires, we’ll want boiling water if this is an attack.” The old groom nodded anxiously and went off, moving as quickly as he could on a bad leg.

      Miranda ran the back of a muddy hand across her forehead, leaving a streak of grime. She turned again, already murmuring to the laboring mare in the stall. The birth of a colt on a Valledan ranch was not a matter that could be superseded. It was the cornerstone of their fortune and their lives, of their whole society, really. The Horsemen of Jad, they were called, and with reason. A moment later the woman said to be the most beautiful in Valledo was on her knees again in the straw, her hands on the mare’s belly, helping to bring another stallion of Belmonte’s breed into the world.

      She was distracted and worried, however. Not surprisingly. Diego was seldom wrong in his warnings, and almost never so when the vision had to do with trouble close to home. They had learned that, over the years.

      When he’d been younger, still a child, and these fore-knowings had begun it had been hard, even for him, to tell them apart from nightmares or childhood fears.

      Once, memorably, he had awakened screaming in the middle of the night, crying that his father was in terrible danger, threatened by ambush. Rodrigo had been campaigning in Ruenda that year, during the bitter War of the Brothers, and everyone in the ranch house had sat awake the rest of a long night watching a shivering, blank-eyed boy, waiting to see if any further visions were vouchsafed him. Just before dawn, Diego’s features had relaxed. “I was wrong,” he’d said, gazing at his mother. “They aren’t fighting yet. He’s all right. I guess it was a dream. Sorry.” He’d fallen fast asleep with the last apologetic word.

      That sort of incident didn’t happen any more. When Diego said he’d seen something, they tended to treat it as absolute truth. Years of living with a boy touched by the god would quell the skeptic in anyone. They had no idea how his visions came and they never spoke of them outside the family or the ranch. Neither his parents nor his brother had anything resembling this … this what? Gift or burden? Miranda had not, to this day, been able to decide.

      There were tales of such people. Ibero, the family cleric, who presided over services in the new chapel Rodrigo had put up even before he’d rebuilt and expanded the ranch house, had heard of them. Timewalkers, he called those with such a vision. He named Diego blessed of Jad, but the boy’s parents both knew that at different times and in different places, those visionaries had been burned, or nailed alive to wooden beams as sorcerers.

      Miranda tried to concentrate on the mare, but her calming words, for the next little while, consisted of repeated, eloquent, curses directed at her absent husband. She had no idea what he’d done this time to bring danger to the ranch while his company was quartered at Esteren and the best of the band were south in Al-Rassan.

      The boys can deal with trouble, his last letter had said breezily, after reporting a grim parting exchange with Count Gonzalez de Rada. Nothing about sending some of the soldiers to her for reinforcement. Of course not. Miranda, taught by Ibero in the first years of her marriage, prided herself on being able to read without assistance. She could also swear like a soldier. She had done so, reading that letter—to the messenger’s discomfiture. She was doing so now, more carefully, not to disturb the mare.

      Her boys

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