“The de Bourghs hold extensive lands in Kent, including this manor and of course the village of Hunsford. In his capacity as magistrate, the late Sir George de Bourgh was responsible for hanging fourteen poachers in one year. Madam, if you could stop your child from kicking that chair. It was presented to Lady Catherine by Queen Charlotte herself. Observe the painting of Sir Edward de Bourgh as a child, which was saved during the Civil War by being buried under a local pigsty.”
“Tell us about the Wicked Lord!”
“Edward de Bourgh, the Wicked Lord, as he was called at court, was beheaded for his unwanted attentions to King Charles’ mistress, Nell Gwyn . . . ”
Pug and I escape to the garden. When we were children, Fitz was made to learn this tale of folly and bloodshed. No wonder he reads German philosophy. The de Bourghs and the d’Arcys: alchemists, rapists, thieves. Let him have his happy ending.
In the garden, I sit on the edge of the fountain, feeding the fish. These are the living fish, imported from China: orange and white, with an exquisite beauty that their stone cousins cannot match. They rise to nibble the bread that I drop for them. Pug puts his front paws on the edge of the fountain, looks at them, and barks.
A woman and a boy come into the garden.
“What a bad boy you are, Tom,” she says, sighing and sitting down on one of the benches. “Why did you have to kick the furniture? I can’t take you anywhere.”
“I’m bored,” he says, quite reasonably, in my opinion. “I want to see the secret passage. You said there would be a secret passage.”
“Well, there isn’t a secret passage. That Jenkins woman said so. Now will you behave yourself?”
I have no more bread. The fish rise to nibble my fingers. Pug barks and barks, and turns to me, panting, for approval. He looks as though he is laughing.
Madam, I want to say, there is a secret passage. Miss Jenkinson cannot show it to you. But there is, there is.
Rampion
Alexandra Duncan
When the sands whip my face or the rag boys kick my feet out from under me, I ask myself if it was worth going blind, having laid eyes on her. If only I had clapped my hands to my ears when I first heard her singing. Had I not tethered my horse and waded across the river to pluck oranges from the trees growing wild around her estate, I might be riding the country still, surveying my father’s holdings and reveling in the sweet, unformed yearning I felt that day before I crossed the river.
This morning, as all mornings, I grip my walking stick, secure my tattered, sweat-grimed taqiyah on the crown of my head, and pick my way over the swept cobblestones of the Plaza Asad. When I had my eyes, I only cared if the roads were kept well enough to allow my mother’s horse and escort smooth passage, but now each narrow street has its own topography. I navigate by the jutting stones, the smells of marzipan, meat—fresh lamb at the halal butchers, jamón serrano at the Christian shops—and the waft of dank water steaming from the sewers. The fishmongers, newly fetched up from the Guadalquivir, shout over each other. Their voices mix with the clang of steel, the rush and tang of the forge-fire consuming the air, and above all, the distant cry of the muezzin calling us to prayer.
A stone lion crouches by the western spoke of the fountain at the heart of the plaza. I rest one hand on its warm grained head and dip the other into the fountain pool to cup up a drink. Then quickly, I splash another handful over my face and head and hope that will suffice to please God in place of proper ablutions. I can do no better.
A crowd of men mill around me on their way to prayer. A year ago, a throng would have packed the plaza, men and their wives and children meandering down to the mosque together. But today it’s only men’s voices I hear. Most of the women and children hide away indoors; what few there are huddle in dense pockets of silence. A year ago, these men—scribes, poets, merchants—would have talked the price of geldings, the weight of a bolt of cloth. They would have complained about their slow progress translating Sophocles from the Greek, while their wives’ voices bubbled under the din. But today Berber mercenaries ring the plaza, looking out for Northern spies and keeping an eye on our impiety, all at the behest of our vizier, Sanchuelo ibn al-Mansur, who every year tugs another corner of power loose from the caliph. The men speak in low voices of the Christian chieftains’ incursions into Moorish territory, our vizier’s bloody reprisals, and the weakness of the throne.
“ . . . said the Catalan forces took their orders from the Pope . . . ”
“ . . . cut off their hands and feet.”
“ . . . mercenaries set fire to the library . . . ”
And then, in the middle of it, a name drops into my ear like a stone.
“Adán Hadid.”
I lock to the voice that said it, a man’s lilting, nasal tone that catches behind the speaker’s teeth. My ear marks him a Castellano, ruby-blond and reedy, with pale skin, like all men from the North. Trolling the plaza for gossip and bargains, keeping friendly with the Jewish and Moorish merchants so his trade name stays good. Before I lost my sight, I had friends like him, advisors and artisans of his faith in my employ. My mother and I strolled with them by the tinkling garden pools at the palace of Madinat al-Zahra, played ajedrez with them, presented their wives with gilt and mother-of-pearl fans, took down the tapestry maps in our halls so they could examine them. I brought Northerners to tea shops in the city where the air hung full of smoke and spice and men’s voices, the floor was soft with raw-silk pillows, and the proprietors kept my comings and goings to themselves. And always, the captain of my guard, Adán Hadid, stood silent in the shadows of the room with his hand on the pommel of his sword.
“Hadid, I heard the caliph laid a death sentence on him,” the Castellano says. “If he’s ever found.”
“Are they saying the Umayyad prince is dead now? Are they sure?” asks another man, a native Córdoban by his accent.
A third man, older, makes a sputtering noise with his lips. “What do you think? They found his horse with its throat gored out.”
“And Hadid never seen since that day,” the Castellano adds. He clucks his teeth. “He’s a Jew. What else do you need to know?”
“I heard,” the older man says. He lets his voice sink even lower. “Hadid was acting on orders from the vizier.”
“No?” the Castellano says, urging him on.
“Yes,” he says. “Think on it. Without an heir, who does the caliph name as successor?”
“He’ll never agree to it,” the Córdoban puts in. “I heard the caliph’s turned stubborn since the prince disappeared. Told the vizier to send some of his Berbers back.”
I push myself to my feet, my blood hot and calling me to fight. I want to grab the Castellano by his shirtfront, shout out my name to the crowd. But in my blindness, I stumble. Misery and shame flare up in my old wounds, and I remember how I brought this fate on myself, on Adán, on her. Why I must forever bite my tongue. I grip my walking stick and hobble into the crowd, away from the gossip blackening Adán Hadid’s good name. My arms and back tremble with unspent rage, as if I am bearing a terrible weight. This talk of the prince dead, my—his horse dead, makes me feel naked to the world.
I am so tired. I speak to God, though I don’t know whether the words leave my mouth. I should be riding out to hunt, walking with my young wife through the topiary gardens, teaching our child the curve of his first letters. But none of those things have come to pass, and my youth crumbles.
The crowd pulls me to the courtyard of orange trees outside the Great Aljama Mosque. I let the flow of men carry me inside. There, I can crouch to pray in the soft dark without drawing the pity or stares that dog my footsteps in the daylight, only another man among thousands kneeling in the mosque’s candlelit womb.
Afterward, when I feel my way back into the sunlight, it is like being born. In my good eye, I see light, sometimes, and blurred colors, but mostly light, and it is never so bright as when I step out of the cool dark into the grit and glare of the everyday world. I siph
on a bit of peace from the thought that no one has found Adán, not yet, and that means he is safe. And perhaps even she is safe, and maybe he is with her.
That night, I dream of killing my horse, my Anadil. My hands are steady as I draw the blade across her throat. She is hurt; it is a mercy killing. After it’s done, I cradle her head in my lap. But when her blood pools hot in my hands, I see she isn’t injured after all. She is whole, except for the gaping line of red at her throat. Anadil rolls her eyes up at me. I try to hold her flesh together, but it’s too late. Her black coat is thick with blood and my hands are slick with it. There is nothing to be done but to watch her bleed into the dirt.
I wake with my heart hammering. The open night hangs black around me, heavy and tight with a wet chill that signals the hour farthest from dawn. My bad leg pains me. I reach inside my shirt and clutch the thin braid of hair I wear tied around my neck, stroke it with my thumb. Even after all this time, it is still silk-whisper smooth, though I am beginning to forget its color. Is it tawny brown, the way I remember her hair spread over the bed cushions? Or bright as copper when the sun beams through it, as it was the day we met, when she leaned from her window and it fell loose around her shoulders? Or does it shine like burnished gold in the candlelight, elegantly twined, as on the night she first brought me to her bed? I am even beginning to forget her face. We have no images of each other, exchanged no portraits, and even if we had, I could not stoke my memory with her likeness. Is it possible, then, she remembers me at all?
Ojalá que me recuerde. God will it she remember.
From the mouth of the alley, the sound of a man pissing on the brickwork trickles its way to me. I press my body against the wall, trying to make myself small and unseen.
“ . . . por la zorra que me mató la alma,” the man sings, hushed and then suddenly loud, the way drunks do. At first, I don’t recognize the voice.
“Eh, Gemel, Lope, hermanos, ¿adonde vaís?” he calls after someone on the street.
The Castellano.
I hear him tugging on the belt of his trousers, and then the stumble-step of his footfalls. I pull myself up by the wall and feel my way after him. I don’t know why I follow. Maybe it’s the hope of hearing more news of Adán, or maybe I want to bash his head against the paving stones for naming my friend a traitor. I don’t know, but I follow.
“Esperad, hijos de puta, esperad,” the Castellano mutters. His voice sticks, foggy and rough with drink.
“Lázaro!” one of his companions calls from far ahead. “¡Andate, cabrón!”
We’ve reached the mouth of the alley. I can tell by the way the air opens up around me and, through my better eye, the muddy red glow from the braziers that line the street.
“Vengo, vengo. Santa Madre,” Lázaro says under his breath. And then a heavy sound follows, like a water cask tumbling on its side or a whole bolt of damask dropped to the floor.
I stumble back into the wall behind me and feel my way to the corner of the building’s stone stairwell. I know a body hitting the ground when I hear it.
“Lázaro!” the Castellano’s companions call. One of them is laughing, but the other has a nervous waver in his voice as he jogs back along the street.
“¿Que te pasó?” the nervous one asks as his steps slow to a quick walk.
“Guuugghn,” Lázaro says. He pauses to draw breath. Something wet splashes on the paving stones and the smell of bile leaks into the air.
“Christ,” his other friend says, coming upon the scene. His coat sleeve muffles his voice. “Drunk again.”
“What do we do?” the nervous one asks.
“Leave him for the Berbers,” the other mutters darkly. The vizier’s mercenaries are so pious, they not only abstain from drink themselves, but flog anyone caught in public drunkenness.
“We can’t,” the nervous one says. “Who’ll do for the horses come morning?”
“Maldito sea.” The other man pauses, thinking. “All right. We’ll go for Delgado and the cart, and we’ll have Delgado help us take him to the rooming house.”
“I’ll go,” the nervous one says.
“The hell you will. You’re half as bad as him. You and Delgado will start drinking, and then you’ll forget and leave me cold on the street,” the other one says.
“I won’t.”
“You will. I haven’t forgotten that time before Semana Santa.”
They both fall silent. I hear nothing but the shuffle of their feet on the sandy stones and the deep, heavy breath rising out of Lázaro’s prone form.
“Look,” one of them mutters suddenly, and they go silent again. The hairs on my forearms and shoulders rise up, as if a magnet has swept over them. A terrible foreboding hits me: they’ve seen me hunched in the shadow of the stairs.
“Help me,” the least-drunk one says.
The other grunts and the sound of something heavy sliding over the stones shushes toward me. I feign sleep, thinking maybe they’ll leave me in peace if they see me unconscious. Lázaro’s hot, heavy form drops down next to me and slumps against my shoulder. His friends laugh like a clutch of newly betrothed girls.
“Watch him for us, good sir,” the drunk one quips.
“See he doesn’t fall into the wrong hands,” the other calls as they hurry away.
I had pictured Lázaro a reedy man, but he is not. The mass of dead weight leaning on my shoulder proves him thick in the middle and meaty everywhere else. I can see why his friends didn’t think they could lift him alone. When I’m sure they are gone, I shove him away.
Lázaro groans. “¿Gemel, que haces?”
My heart picks up speed. My blood still wants violence, but my years of learning, my training in logic, stay my hand. The Castellano can tell me nothing of Adán if he’s dead.
I wet my bottom lip and swallow, try to rouse some of my old self for what I must do. “Lázaro?” I lean close to his ear, speaking low.
He stirs. “Gemel?”
“No,” I say. “You address Ishaq ibn Hisham, of the Umayyad line.”
His throat makes a series of little sucking noises. I can picture him blinking his eyes, trying to make them focus well enough to see me. “You’re dead,” he says.
“Lázaro,” I say, “tell me what you know about Adán Hadid.”
“He is a murderer.” Lázaro sounds suddenly lucid, enunciating every word.
“Yes.” I grit my teeth. “And where is he?”
Lázaro’s voice drops and quavers. “I don’t know.” He sounds genuinely forlorn, but then his tone turns again, just as quickly. “But if I find him, the caliph will pay me in gold and horses and I will be a lord and everyone will say, ‘At your pleasure, Don Lázaro, estimado Don Lázaro.’ ”
Disappointment thickens my chest. I take a deep breath and push on. “And the Lady Sofia de Rampion? Have you heard anything of her?”
Lázaro pauses. I wish to God I could see his face so I could know if it showed bewilderment, or careful thought, or sudden, clear-eyed suspicion.
And then Lázaro laughs. He taps my shoulder with his index finger. “Oh, prince, I’ve heard about you. Sofia de Rampion is beautiful, the most beautiful, la flor más bella del mundo Cristiano. ¿Me entiendes? But you can’t have her, no, no. Her brothers have taken her north to the Pyrenees, to the care of her uncle, King Filipe of Roussillon de Catalunya, where the Moors can’t touch her.”
My heart is ablaze and then dust, all in a moment. Sofia is alive. But I would fear to travel to Roussillon with both my eyes and my horse alive again. The whole kingdom of Castilla separates us, and then a mountain range of petty warlords.
“But I, I will see her for myself.” Lázaro leans close to confide in me. His breath is swampy. “When I bring the horses.”
I start, my right hand tight on Lázaro’s loose sleeve. “When you bring the horses?”
“Yes, the horses for her brothers and her uncle’s men.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “I would never tell you this, except you’re dead and you wo
n’t speak of it to the vizier.”
My muscles tense at the mention of Sofia’s kinsmen. “Yes,” I agree.
“They are war horses.” Lázaro slaps my arm. “Can you believe it? My horses, bearing the soldiers of Christ on their backs as they retake al Andalus? Crushing the Moors’ skulls beneath their hooves.” He laughs.
My body sings for me to run, to fight, but I am trapped by the darkness around me. I make myself release Lázaro’s shirt sleeve.
Lázaro slumps against the wall with a muted thud. He sighs. “They say her voice is like birdsong painted in honey and her hair is so long you could scale the curtain wall of an alcazar with it. They say her maids must walk behind her to keep it from trailing in the dust.”
Her voice comes back to me all at once, like a basin of cold water emptied over my head. I hear it anew, mixed with the steady tambour of my horse’s hooves over the dusty road by the far side of a shaded tributary. That day, I left Adán and the rest of my men behind at the river mouth to pray and rest through the midday, while I rode out alone into the silent heat of the countryside. When the peaked towers of the Rampion manor came into view over the orange groves surrounding their land, I slowed my horse.
Common wisdom held one should ride slow and quiet when their gabled roof showed above the trees, for then a man was close enough to call the eye of Lamia de Rampion, the matriarch of the family. She was said to be a sahhaar, a bruja, a sorcière come down to us from the North. Since I was a small boy, I had listened in on the stories told at court by lamplight. No one had seen her ride in, but one day in winter, on the eve of a bitter, snapping frost, a drover sighted her in the courtyard before the abandoned Rampion house, straight-backed in her black dress, with two boys at her skirts and a white-swaddled babe in her arms. Ismail Almendrino, whose lands met hers to the south, went up to find what might be her claim on the land. She recited her lineage for him back to the rule of the Visigoth chieftains, saying she was the grandniece of old Osoro de Rampion, who had died childless and left the manor vacant some ten years before my birth. She had come south with her grandchildren, recently orphaned, to reclaim the lands for her grandsons. Almendrino said she spoke Castellano and some Arabic, but her accent was the French of the Pyrenees and her bearing that of one who cradles power in her hands and tongue.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 32
