The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

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 Adan, 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.

“Lazaro!” one of his companions calls from far ahead. “?Andate, cabron!”

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,” Lazaro 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.

“Lazaro!” 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 paso?” the nervous one asks as his steps slow to a quick walk.

“Guuugghn,” Lazaro 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 Lazaro’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. Lazaro’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 Lazaro 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.

Lazaro 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 Adan if he’s dead.

I wet my bottom lip and swallow, try to rouse some of my old self for what I must do. “Lazaro?” 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.

“Lazaro,” I say, “tell me what you know about Adan Hadid.”

“He is a murderer.” Lazaro sounds suddenly lucid, enunciating every word.

“Yes.” I grit my teeth. “And where is he?”

Lazaro’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 Lazaro, estimado Don Lazaro.’”

Disappointment thickens my chest. I take a deep breath and push on. “And the Lady Sofia de Rampion? Have you heard anything of her?”

Lazaro 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 Lazaro 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 mas 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.” Lazaro leans close to confide in me. His breath is swampy. “When I bring the horses.”

I start, my right hand tight on Lazaro’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 won’t speak of it to the vizier.”

My muscles tense at the mention of Sofia’s kinsmen. “Yes,” I agree.

“They are war horses.” Lazaro 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 Lazaro’s shirt sleeve.

Lazaro 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 Adan 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 sorciere 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