Badir, watching him, looked amused. "You're younger than I am, my friend. You've let yourself grow soft. How does that happen during a siege?"
Mazur grimaced as he searched for an easier position. "A touch ... of something in my hip, my lord. It will ease when the rains let up."
"The rains are useful. They must be miserable out there in their tents."
"I do hope so," said ben Avren with fervor. There had been rumors of sickness in the Jalonan camp.
He lifted a hand and the nearest servant hastily brought him a glass of wine. From ben Avren's point of view, it was an extreme relief that his monarch's rejection of things northern had not extended to the better Jaddite wines. He saluted the king, still trying to find a comfortable position. Both men were silent for a time.
It was autumn and the eastern rains had arrived early. Ragosa had been under siege since early summer. It had not fallen, nor had the walls been breached. Under the prevailing circumstances this was remarkable.
Fezana had been taken by the Valledan army in the middle of summer, and recent tidings had come by carrier pigeon that the king of Ruenda had broken through the walls of Salos at the mouth of the Tavares and had put all the adult males to the sword. Women and infants had been burned, in the name of Jad, but the city itself had not been torched: King Sanchez of Ruenda was evidently proposing to winter there. A bad sign, and Badir and his chancellor knew it.
The Valledan army, more bold, had already pushed southeast over the hills towards Lonza. Rodrigo Belmonte, once a captain in Badir's own army, did not seem inclined to rest content with only the one major city taken before winter. The Valledans were said to be meeting with resistance in the hill country, but details, for obvious reasons, were hard to come by in besieged Ragosa.
Given these developments to the west and given the fact that they'd had to release almost half their own army or risk an internal uprising—many of the Jaddite mercenaries had promptly joined the Jalonans outside the walls—Ragosa's holding out was an achievement. A measure, as much as anything else, of the chancellor's prudent marshalling of food reserves and supplies, and the affection and confidence the people of the city vested in their king.
There were, however, limits. To food, to supplies. To support for a beleaguered monarch and his advisor. His Kindath advisor.
If they could last until winter they might survive. Or if Yazir came. There had been no word from the Majriti. They were waiting. Everyone in Al-Rassan was waiting that autumn—Jaddite, Asharite, Kindath. If the tribes came north across the straits everything in the peninsula would change.
Everything had already changed though, and both men knew it. The city they had built together—a smaller, quieter repository of some of the same graces Silvenes had embodied under the khalifs—was already finished, its brief flowering done. However this invasion ended, King Badir's city of music and ivory was lost.
The Jalonans or the Muwardis. One way lay a terrible burning, and the other way ... ?
It was very late. Rain was falling outside, a steady sound on the windows and the leaves. The two men were still in the habit of taking this last glass together; the depth and endurance of friendship marked as much in their silence as in the words.
"There was a report this morning they are building small boats now," Badir said. He sipped from his wine.
"I heard the same thing." Mazur shrugged. "They won't get in through the lake. They could never make craft large enough to carry sufficient men. We would annihilate them from the harbor towers."
"They might stop our fishing boats from going out."
The siege was failing in part because the small craft of Ragosa had been able to go out upon the lake, using care, covered by archers from the harbor walls as they came back in.
"I'd like to see Jaddites try to blockade this harbor in the autumn winds. I have swimmers who could sink any boat they send out there. I'm hoping they try."
"Swimmers? In autumn? You would send someone out with an auger?"
Mazur drank from his glass. "They would fall over themselves volunteering, my lord. We have a city disinclined to yield, I am pleased to say."
It helped that surrender wasn't really a possibility. They'd killed the king of Jalona and one of the High Clerics from Ferrieres even before the siege had begun.
That had been ibn Khairan's doing; his last act in Ragosan employ, just before he left them for Cartada.
He'd taken a dozen of the best men in the city and slipped out one moonless night in two small boats, heading east and north along the lake. The Jalonans, enthusiastically burning villages and farms as they came south around Lake Serrana, were too complacent, and it cost them.
Ibn Khairan and his men surprised a raiding party, which had been their intention. It was purest luck—he had always been said to be a lucky man—that the Jalonan party of thirty riders had included King Bermudo and the cleric.
At twilight on a spring evening ibn Khairan's men had come upon them at a fishing village. They'd waited down the beach, hidden by the boats. They'd had to watch villagers burned alive, and hear them scream as they were nailed to wooden beams. When the wine flasks had emerged among the raiding party the mood became wild and the northerners had turned to the women and young girls.
Thirteen men from Ragosa, acting in cold rage and with specific intent, had come up from the beach in the darkness. They were outnumbered but it didn't matter. Ibn Khairan moved through that burning village like a dark streak of lightning, his men said after, killing where he went.
They slew all thirty men in that raiding party.
The king of Jalona had been cut down by one of the Ragosans before his identity was known. They had wanted to throw him onto the nearest of the fires, but ibn Khairan, swearing like a fisherman when he saw who it was, made them carry King Bermudo's body back to the city. He would have been far more useful alive, but there were still things that could be done.
The cleric from Ferrieres was nailed to one of the wooden beams he had been instrumental in having raised. All of Esperana was coming south, it had by then become evident, and the Ferrieres clerics were stridently invoking a holy war. It was not a time for ransoms or the courtesies normally offered pious men.
There had been a brief flickering of hope in Ragosa that the shocking disappearance of their king might lead the enemy to withdraw. It was not to be.
Queen Fruela, who had insisted on accompanying the invading army, took control of the Jalonan forces with her eldest son, Benedo. By the time that army reached the walls of Ragosa, a great many farmers and fisherfolk had been captured on sweeps through the countryside. These had not been killed. Instead, the besieging army set about mutilating them, one by one, within sight of the city, at sunrise and sundown while the Jaddites prayed to their golden god of light.
After four days of this, it was King Badir who made the decision to show the body of King Bermudo from the city walls. It was indicated by a herald that the corpse would be desecrated if the torturing continued outside. Queen Fruela, afire with holy zeal, appeared inclined to continue nonetheless but her young son, the new king of Jalona, prevailed in this matter. The prisoners outside the walls were all killed the next morning, without ceremony. The body of King Bermudo was burned in Ragosa. The Jaddites, watching the smoke of that pyre rise up, took solace in knowing that since he had died in the midst of a war against the infidels, his soul was already dwelling with the god in light.
As a consequence of all this, it was understood from the beginning of the siege of Ragosa that a negotiated surrender was not an option. No one in the city was going to be permitted to live if it fell. In a way that made things simpler for those inside the walls. It removed an otherwise distracting possibility.