“I thank you, mi corazon,” Mama said, “but I doubt we could have withstood this battle without your rescue.”
“Oh, you would have found a way.” Papa smiled down at her. “You always do.”
They gazed into one another’s eyes, mightily content after their celebration of their reunion. Slowly, Papa lowered his head for a long and lingering kiss.
Finally, Mama sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Must you leave tomorrow with the king, then?”
“I must,” Papa said, “for he says he cannot leave Queen Alisande to fight the Mahdi alone… and I am his wizard now, at least for this campaign. Besides, we cannot leave our new daughter-in-law to face her enemies without our help.”
Mama looked up. “… We’?”
“Yes, both of us, if you are willing. I have spoken with Saul, and he is confident of his ability to hold the castle without you, now that the Moors are beaten.”
“Do you not fear having me ride into danger with you?”
“I do not think it will be so very dangerous now… at least, not if you are with me.”
Mama smiled and gave him another lingering kiss. Then she said, “The Moors will still outnumber both armies by at least a third.”
“Perhaps,” Papa said, “but they will find they have much less strength than that to which they have become accustomed.” He told her where the real power behind the throne had been coming from, and how Matt had gone to shut it off.
“We must go to save him!” Mama cried.
But Papa shook his head. “He must have won, or we would not have triumphed here.”
“But so much more time passes here than there!”
“Yes,” Papa said. “A whole night has passed, in this universe… weeks, since I left Matthew. Our son has either won or lost… and if he had lost, I doubt that we could have conquered the Moors’ magic.”
“There is sense in that,” Mama said, frowning.
“Besides,” Papa said, “he had the help of a good woman.” And he told her about Lakshmi.
Mama eyed him sidelong. “Was Matthew the only one with whom this female of the djinn was infatuated?”
“She seemed to feel I would be an acceptable substitute,” Papa admitted, “but I explained her error.”
Mama had seen how Papa had made such explanations in the past. She smiled, feeling very smug, and turned to look out over the battlefield, leaning her head against his shoulder again. “It is amazing how many friends our son has made here. He was never so popular at home.”
“He has found the world that is right for him, my dear,” Papa said, “and perhaps right for us, too.”
“So it would seem,” Mama agreed, “and his friends are such excellent people.”
“Most admirable,” Papa agreed. He beamed down into Mama’s eyes and added, “I think they like us, too.”
The next day, they rode off between Sir Guy and Rinaldo. Back atop the city’s wall, Saul eyed the thousands and thousands of Moorish prisoners roaming their invisible cage restlessly, and wished he hadn’t been quite so cavalier about letting Mama go. “Well, it’s up to you and me now, Sir Gilbert.”
“Indeed it is, Witch Doctor.” The Moncairean didn’t seem at all distressed about it. “Can your magic bring food for this many?”
“Oh, sure,” Saul said, then frowned in thought. “Might have a bad effect on market prices in Morocco, though.”
In the shelter of a low, wide-spreading tree atop a hill, Alisande watched the Mahdi’s troops file out of the mountain pass. She couldn’t see individual people at that distance, of course… just a moving, multicolored stream that glittered in the sun. It would have seemed pretty if she hadn’t known the glitter came from steel, polished by honing and use.
“How long, Majesty?” Lord Gautier asked.
“When their vanguard nears this mount, milord,” Alisande answered. She turned her head a little, listening to horses stamping restlessly in the grove behind the hill. “Tell the squires to be sure their masters’ horses do not neigh as the Moors come nigh.”
Lord Gautier nodded at his own squire, who left to tell the others.
Alisande frowned, raising a hand to shade her eyes and squinting. “What is that flicker of white so high on the mountain above them?”
Ortho the Frank peered, then shrugged. “It could only be a sorcerer who stands ready to defend them, and I am loath to use magic that might make him aware of our presence.”
“Then do not,” Alisande directed. “Our only strength is in surprise.”
They waited impatiently, suspense building as the Moorish column inched closer. Here and there in the fields, peasants bent double with mattock and hoe, but looked up at the invaders, or at the little hill, then turned back to their work again. A perceptive man might have noticed that there was a tremendous number of peasants tilling the earth in this region, but that person would have had to know both agriculture and this province very well, and the Mahdi had been a shepherd in semi-arid hill country.
Besides, peasants were as much a part of the landscape as bushes or cattle… no one really noticed them except other peasants, and officers rarely listened to troopers.
On the Moors came, and when their vanguard was perhaps two hundred yards from the hill, Alisande snapped, “We ride!” She turned her warhorse to make its way down the back of the hill to her knights. A surge of yearning struck, yearning to have her husband beside her, protecting her with his magic, but she thrust it down.
She reined in before her troops and shouted, “Charge!,” then waved her troops on in one circling movement that ended with spurring her horse. The Percheron turned and rumbled into faster motion, gathering speed as it moved from walk to trot to canter.
Behind her, the phalanx of knights followed, shushing each other.
Out from behind the hill Alisande burst, kicking her horse up to a gallop and leveling her lance.
“The queen rides out by herself!” Lord Gautier cried. “After her, quickly! She must not come to the Moors alone!”
The other knights answered with a shout and spurred their warhorses. They ran flat-out, lances level and unwavering, racing one another to catch up with the queen and protect her with their bodies.
In the fields, the peasants looked up and saw the rider in advance of the others with golden hair flying out from beneath her helmet. They dropped their mattocks and threw off their tunics, then caught up the pikes and halberds they had hidden in the furrows and charged the line of Moors in desperate silence, as their queen had ordered them.
The Moors saw the knights coming… and never thought to look at the peasants in the fields. They set up a wild ululation and kicked their horses into a charge.
ChapterTwenty-Seven
The Moors, in their lighter army and more agile horses, tried to swing wide to catch the knights from the sides… but the road fell into a ditch on one side and rose sharply into the hillside on the other. Funneled into staying on the road, lightly armored Moors rode against veritable human tanks, howling with rage at the trick, never thinking to flee or shrink.
Fifty feet from their leader, Alisande shouted her war cry, “For God, St. Moncaire, and St. Iago!”
“St. Moncaire!” the knights echoed.
The Moors called upon Allah to witness their valor and rode harder.
The two armies met with a crash. A few knights fell, but their comrades crushed hundreds of Moors in front of them, up against the hillsides, down into the ditch… where “peasants” coming up from the fields struck down hard with their pikes, and Moorish warriors died screaming with the Name on their lips.