The Lions of Al-Rassan. Guy Gavriel Kay

be allowed into the Kindath Quarter.

      She was putting her own people at risk with this, Jehane knew. She was young enough to have decided the risk was an acceptable one. The last Kindath massacres in Al-Rassan had taken place far to the south, in Tudesca and Elvira years before she was born.

      HER MOTHER, AS EXPECTED, raised no objection. Wife and mother of physicians, Eliane bet Danel was long accustomed to adapting her home to the needs of patients. The fact that this disruption was occurring during the most violent day Fezana had known in a long time was not something that would ruffle her. The more so, because in this case Jehane made a point of telling her mother that the patient was ibn Musa. Eliane would have recognized him when he came. Husari had had Ishak as a dinner guest on several occasions and more than once the silk merchant had discreetly entered the Quarter to grace their own table—defying the wadjis and the high priests, both. Fezana was not a particularly devout city.

      Which had probably done nothing but add to the pleasure of the fiercely pious Muwardis as they killed innocent men, Jehane thought. She was standing on the upstairs landing, one hand poised to knock on a door, a burning candle in her other hand.

      For the first time in this long day she trembled, hesitating there, thinking of what she was about to do. She saw the flame waver. There was a tall window at the far end of the corridor, overlooking their inner courtyard. The rays of the setting sun were slanting through, reminding her that time mattered here. She had told her mother she would be leaving later that night and had braced herself for the fury of a storm that never came.

      “It is not such a bad time to be out of this city,” Eliane had said calmly after a moment’s thought. She’d looked at her only child thoughtfully. “You will find work elsewhere. Your father always said it was good for a doctor to have experience of different places.” She’d paused, then added, without smiling, “Perhaps you’ll come back married.”

      Jehane had grimaced. This was an old issue. Nearing her thirtieth year she was past prime age for marrying and had essentially made her peace with that. Eliane had not.

      “You’ll be all right?” Jehane had asked, ignoring the last remark.

      “I don’t see why not,” her mother had replied briskly. Then her stiffness was eased by the smile that made her beautiful. She had been wed herself, at twenty, to the most brilliant man among the brilliant Kindath community of Silvenes, in the days of the last bright flowering of the Khalifate. “What should I do, Jehane? Fall to my knees and clutch your hands, begging you to stay and comfort my old age?”

      “You aren’t old,” her daughter said quickly.

      “Of course I am. And of course I won’t hold you back. If you aren’t raising my grandchildren in a house around the corner by now, I have only myself and your father to blame for the way we brought you up.”

      “To think for myself?”

      “Among other things.” The smile again, unexpectedly. “To try to think for almost everyone else, I fear. I’ll pack some things for you and order a place set for Husari at table. Is there anything he shouldn’t eat tonight?”

      Jehane had shaken her head. Sometimes she found herself wishing her mother would give vent to her emotions, that there might be a storm, after all. But mostly she was grateful for the nearly unbroken control that Eliane had displayed since that terrible day in Cartada four years ago. She could guess at the price of that restraint. She could measure it within herself. They weren’t so very different, mother and daughter. Jehane hated to cry; she regarded it as a defeat.

      “You’d better go upstairs,” Eliane had said.

      She had come upstairs. It was usually like this. There was seldom any pain in talking with her mother, but it never seemed as if the things that needed to be said were said. This afternoon, though, was not the time to be addressing such matters. Something very hard was still to come.

      She knew that if she hesitated too long her resolve to leave might yet falter on this, the most difficult threshold of the day, of all her days. Jehane knocked twice, as was her habit, and entered the shuttered darkness of her father’s study.

      The candle lent its necessary glow to the books bound in leather and gold, the scrolls, the instruments and sky charts, the artifacts and mementos and gifts of a lifetime of study and travel and work. Its light fell, no longer wavering in her hand, upon a desk, a plain northern-style wooden chair, cushions on the floor, another deep chair—and the white-bearded man in the dark blue robe sitting motionless there, his back to the door and his daughter and the light.

      Jehane looked at him, at the spear-like rigidity of his posture. She noted, as she noted every single day, how he did not even turn his head to acknowledge her entry into the room. She might as well not have entered, with her light and the tale she had to tell. It was always this way, but this afternoon was different. She had come to say goodbye and, looking at her father, the long sword of memory lay in Jehane’s mind, hard and bright and terrible as the knives the Muwardis must have used.

      Four years ago, the fourth son of King Almalik of Cartada had been twisted around his own birth cord in the womb of his mother. Such infants died and, almost invariably, the mother did as well. Physicians knew the signs well enough to be able to warn of what was coming. It happened often enough; no blame would attach. Childbirth was one of the dangerous things in the world. Doctors could not do the miraculous.

      But Zabira of Cartada, the musician, was the favored courtesan of the most powerful of all the city-kings in Al-Rassan, and Ishak of Fezana was a brave and a brilliant man. After consulting his charts of the heavens, and sending word to Almalik that what he was about to try offered only the slimmest hope, Ishak had performed the only recorded delivery of a child through an incision in the mother’s belly while preserving the life of the mother at the same time.

      Not Galinus himself, the source and fount of all medical knowledge, not Uzbet al-Maurus, not Avenal of Soriyya in the Asharite homelands of the east—not one of them, or any who had followed after, had reported successfully doing such a thing, though these three had noted the procedure, and each of them had tried.

      No, it was Ishak ben Yonannon of the Kindath who first delivered a living child in such a way, in the palace of Cartada in Al-Rassan in the second decade after the fall of the Khalifate. And then he had healed the mother of her wound and tended her after, so that she rose from her bed one morning, very pale but beautiful as ever, to reclaim her four-stringed lute and take her accustomed place in Almalik’s reception hall and his gardens and private chambers.

      For this act of courage and skill on a scale never before known, Almalik of Cartada had gratefully offered a quantity of gold and a gift of property such as to leave Ishak and his wife and daughter secure for the rest of their lives.

      Then he had ordered the physician’s eyes put out and his tongue cut off at the root, that the forbidden sight of an Asharite woman’s nakedness be atoned for, that no man might ever hear a description of Zabira’s milk-white splendor from the Kindath doctor who had exposed her to his cold glance and his scalpel.

      It was an act of mercy, of a sort. The ordained punishment for a Jaddite or a Kindath who feasted lecherous eyes on the unclothed figure of an Asharite woman who was bride or concubine to another man was, as everyone knew, the death between horses. And this woman belonged to a king, the successor to khalifs, the Lion of Al-Rassan, from whose presence all lesser kings fled.

      The wadjis, seeing an opportunity, had begun demanding that death in temple and marketplace the moment the story of the birth escaped the palace. Almalik, however, was genuinely grateful to his Kindath physician. He had always disliked the wadjis and the demands they made of him and he was—by his own assessment, at any rate—a generous man.

      Ishak lived, blind and mute, sunken far into the stony depths of an inwardness his wife and only child could not reach. Not in those first days, not after, could he be roused to any response.

      They brought him home from Cartada to their house in his long-since chosen city of Fezana. They had more than enough to sustain themselves; indeed, by any measure at all they were wealthy.