In the darkness by the river's steady, murmurous flow, Jehane said, looking down at the water, not at the man beside her, "I was under your window at Carnival. I stood there a long time, looking at your light." She swallowed. "I almost came up to you."
She sensed him turning towards her. She kept her gaze fixed upon the river.
"Why didn't you?" His voice had altered.
"Because of what you told me that afternoon."
"I was buying paper, I remember. What did I tell you, Jehane?"
She did look at him then. It was dark, but she knew those features by heart now. THey had ridden from this hamlet the summer before on the one horse. So little time ago, really.
"You told me how much you loved your wife."
"I see," he said.
Jehane looked away. She needed to look away. They had come to a place too hard for held glances. She said softly, to the river, to the dark, "Is it wrong, or impossible, for a woman to love two men?"
After what seemed to her a very long time, Rodrigo Belmonte said, "No more so than for a man."
Jehane closed her eyes.
"Thank you," she said. And then, after another moment, holding as tightly as she could to the thing suspended there, "Goodbye."
With her words the moment passed, the world moved on again: time, the flowing river, the moons. And the delicate thing that had been in the air between them -- whatever it might have been named -- fell, as it seemed to Jehane, softly to rest in the grass by the water.
"Goodbye," he said. "Be always blessed, on all the paths of your life. My dear." And then he said her name.
They did not touch. They walked back beside each other to the place where Diego and Fernan and Miranda Belmonte lay asleep and, after standing a ong moment gazing down upon his family, Rodrigo Belmonte went towards the king's tent where the strategies of war were being devised.
She watched him go. She saw him lift the tent flap, to be lit briefly by the lanterns lit from inside, then disappear within as the tent closed after him.
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
If it seems that quoting such a passage from near the end of a book would constitute a major spoiler, I'm not sure it really did in this case; when I first read The Lions of Al-Rassan, I had no thought that Jehane would end up with Rodrigo. And besides, the story of Jehane and Rodrigo is far from the novel's most important storyline. That Guy Gavriel Kay would write so fine a scene for a secondary plotline is a testament to his skills.
As I wrote here, The Lions of Al-Rassan is my favorite of GGK's novels, and if I had to pick one of his books to get made into a film, this would be the one. A good thing, that, since it was announced today that a film of The Lions of Al-Rassan is in development.
The team of producer Marshall Herskovitz and director Edward Zwick are behind the project. While I've generally liked Herskovitz's and Zwick's television projects (My So-Called Life, Once and Again) more than their movies, but that's more because their TV work has been so good as opposed to saying that their film work has been of lesser quality, because they've made some awfully good films (Glory, Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai -- although I didn't see that last one yet). These guys do thoughtful work, and I'm glad that they are the ones attached to a project that has a lot of potential pitfalls awaiting it.
Of course, the real questions are: who will play the leads, and who will compose the score?
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