Farangis opened her eyes, lowered the flute, and gave Giv a measuring look. “I see. Very well then,” she said, as if answering an unseen speaker. “The jinn[1] say there is no falsehood in your hatred of Lusitania.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Giv replied.
“Of course you don’t.” Farangis’s voice held no warmth. “A baby can hear a voice but not understand its meaning. You are the same. You hear the wind, but you cannot understand the whisper of the jinn within it.”
“So I’m a baby now, is that it?”
“Do not agree so readily. I chose a poor example. You are far too malicious to be a baby.”
A small crystal flute rested between Farangis’s milky fingertips. A tool meant to summon jinn.
“In any case,” Giv said, “you’ve at least acknowledged my sincerity. So what do you say, Miss Farangis? All encounters between people are bound by threads of fate. I would like to travel with you.”
“Do as you like. But only if you pledge loyalty to Prince Arslan as I do.”
“My supply of loyalty is rather limited,” Giv said. “For now, it is fully committed to you, Miss Farangis.”
“I do not need your loyalty.”
“That’s rather cold. And here I thought we had established some sort of rapport.”
“What sort of rapport is that supposed to be?” Farangis’s voice rose, then suddenly went quiet.
Giv fell silent as well, straining his ears. Without exchanging a word, they guided their horses off the road and into a stand of poplars.
From the direction of the capital, a large force of cavalry thundered along the highway, and for several minutes it filled their field of vision.
“That was the army of Marzban Qaran,” Giv murmured.
There was no other force in Pars that marched under Lusitanian banners at its head.
As the drifting dust and the sound of hooves faded under the moonlight, the beautiful kahina said, “There may be someone among them who knows where Prince Arslan is. Shall we find out?”
That day, before dusk, a detachment under Qaran burned down a village and threw more than fifty villagers—men only—into the flames. A warning was left behind among the ashes, hatred, and sorrow: if Prince Arslan and his companions were sheltered again, even women and children would be killed.
There was no turning back now for Qaran. He had to drink the poison to the bottom. Only by repeating such massacres could he tighten the noose around Arslan and earn the full trust of the Lusitanian army.
As the sun went down and the army prepared to make camp, a report arrived. A half-dead man had been found wandering the wasteland, clinging to the back of a horse. He said he had been hired as a porter by Arslan’s group, but when he tried to steal their supplies, he was caught. They beat him severely with whips and planned to kill him the next day, so he fled for his life.
Qaran had the man’s wounds examined. He suspected it might be a trap, fake injuries meant to deceive him. But the countless marks across the man’s body were real.
So Qaran questioned him himself. “How many are in Prince Arslan’s party?”
“Just four,” the man said.
“It’s the truth. And two of them are just children. That’s why they hired me, to carry their loads.”
“And which way did they go?”
“South.”
When the questioning ended, the man demanded payment for his information.
“Very well,” Qaran agreed. Then he drew his sword and sliced the man’s head off, sending it rolling onto the sand. “Fool. Did you really think I would fall for that?”
He then ordered the army to march north, the opposite of what the man had said. He decided the man was a spy sent by Narses to deceive him. The wounds, he thought, were likely part of the trick.
What Qaran did not know was this: Arslan’s group had stopped at a village, deliberately chosen an untrustworthy man as a porter, and hired him. After he was beaten and fled toward Qaran’s troops, they themselves changed direction and moved from south to north. They even made sure their movement toward the north was seen by others.
It was all Narses’s strategy. Qaran led his men, of his own accord, into the northern region, where forests and mountains twisted together like a maze. And night had already fallen. For a large cavalry force, it was an increasingly unfavorable environment.
In the middle of the night, Narses finished all his preparations and watched Qaran’s troops from deep within the forest. They moved in a single line along the mountain road. He smiled faintly. The more intelligent a man was, the more easily he danced on Narses’s palm.
Once the enemy army had passed, he turned back toward the horse he had left tethered nearby. But he suddenly stopped. A presence came rushing toward him.
Narses leaped back. A blade flashed horizontally, grazing his coat and scattering threads into the air.
He sprang back again and drew his sword in the same motion, meeting a silver strike head-on. Steel rang, and sparks flew. The second exchange never came. Both fighters broke off at the same time, unable to find the enemy they had expected.
“You’re not a Lusitanian soldier?”
The young female voice and the faint scent of perfume caught even Narses by surprise.
“Who are you?” he asked, before immediately introducing himself, “I am Narses, in the service of Prince Arslan.”
As he had sensed, the response came quickly.
“I apologize. I am Farangis, a servant of the god Mithra. I came to aid Prince Arslan. I have been following Sir Qaran’s unit for some time.”
“I see.”
Narses received no assistance from the jinn. He trusted Farangis through reason alone. If she had been Qaran’s ally, she would have already raised an alarm and revealed his location.
“So you intend to aid Prince Arslan?”
“Yes.”
“Then help us. We will capture the traitor Qaran and bring him before Prince Arslan.”
“Very well. I have a question. How many currently serve Prince Arslan?”
Narses answered calmly, “Counting you two, it makes five.”
He already knew Giv was behind him.
Someone shouted, and Qaran’s unit stirred. First one finger, then a dozen more pointed up toward the cliff. There, in the pale light of a half-moon, Arslan stood alone on his horse, looking down at the formation.
“It’s Prince Arslan! Kill him! There’s a bounty of 100,000 dinars on his head!”
Arslan could not judge whether that reward was large or small, but to the knights under Qaran it meant more than their lives. They roared with greed and excitement, spurred their horses, and charged up the steep slope. Even the toughest Parsian horses struggled to maintain such a climb, and the formation quickly broke apart. The moment the leading horse reached the top of the cliff, gasping, Arslan’s sword pierced the rider’s chest. The blade came out through the man’s back with such force that the guard struck the buttons of his undergarment.
Arslan pulled the sword free—or rather, the body simply collapsed under its own weight. The corpse rolled down the slope, and a horse trying to avoid it reared up, lost its balance, and fell.
Darkness and the uneven ground threw the attackers into chaos. Arslan served as more than just a decoy. He drew his bow and fired again and again. Qaran’s men were packed too tightly to evade the arrows. Arslan loosed six shots. Four struck their targets, two of them wounding enemy soldiers. The remaining two were aimed at a rider who came charging up the slope with terrifying speed, but his spinning spear knocked them aside.
“Prince!” It was Qaran’s voice.
Arslan’s breath seized. He threw down his bow and faced the traitorous marzban.
“Qaran, I want to ask you something,” he said. He was aware of the tension creeping into his voice. “As a marzban, and even before that, as a warrior of Pars who was never once dishonored, why did you bow to Lusitanian invaders?”
Qaran said nothing.
“I don’t believe it was for greed. If there’s another reason, tell me.”
“You are better off not knowing, cursed son of Andragoras.”
Qaran’s voice carried something far grimmer than mockery. His eyes burned as he glared at Arslan, as if lit by ghostly fire.
“You can perish believing I am nothing more than a vile traitor. Whether you are killed by a loyal subject or by a traitor makes no difference. Death is still death.”
A gust of dread swept away the creeping vines of doubt clinging to Arslan’s mind and body. Qaran’s figure seemed to swell before him. Arslan could see, with his own eyes, the overwhelming disparity in their abilities.
A nervous snort escaped Arslan’s horse, as if it had amplified its rider’s fear and absorbed it.
1. Parsian term for spirits. Based on the Arabic jinn, supernatural beings in Islamic and pre-Islamic Arabian tradition. ↩