The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

“Tonight you could almost tempt me, Jacinto.”
    “ Jehane? Doctor?” The woman, scented and gaudily bejewelled, stepped closer. “Forgive me! I didn’t recognize you. Who called for you tonight?”
    “No one, actually. Tonight I need your help. The wadjis may be after me, and the Muwardis.”
    “Plague rot them all!” the woman named Jacinto said. “Haven’t they had enough blood for one day?” Jehane’s eyes were accustomed to the night by now, and she could make out the slender figure in front of her, clad only in the thinnest, most revealing wisps of cloth. “What do you need?” Jacinto asked. She was fourteen years old, Jehane knew.
    “Three mules, and your silence.”
    “You’ll have them. Come, I’ll bring you to Nunaya.”
    She had expected that. If anyone exerted any sort of control over this community of women and boys outside the walls it was Nunaya.
    Nunaya was not someone who wasted time, or words. Men in a hurry knew this, too, or they learned it soon enough. A client who came to visit her was likely to be back inside Fezana’s walls within a very short span of time, relieved of certain urges and a sum of money.
    The purchase of the mules was not a difficult transaction. For several years now Jehane—the only woman doctor in Fezana—had been the trusted physician of the whores of the city. First in their district inside the eastern wall and then out here to the north, after they had been pushed by the wadjis beyond the city gates and into one of the straggling suburbs by the river.
    That episode had been but one in a series of irregular, recurring outbursts of pious outrage that punctuated the dealings between the city and those who traded in physical love. The women fully expected to be back inside the walls within a year—and probably back outside them again a year or two after that.
    Given, however, that the women one could buy, and a fair number of boys as well, were now mostly to be found outside the walls, it was not surprising that hidden routes of exit and entry were in existence. No city that had citizens—legitimate or otherwise—dwelling beyond its fortifications could ever be completely sealed.
    Jehane knew a good many of the whores by now, and had, on more than one occasion, slipped out to join them for an evening of food and drink and laughter. Out of courtesy to the doctor who delivered their children or healed their bodies of afflictions or wounds, clients were not welcome at such times. Jehane found these women—and the wise, bitter boys—better company than almost anyone she knew in the city, within the Kindath Quarter or outside it. She wondered, at times, what that suggested about herself.
    It was far from a serene world out here among the dilapidated houses that straggled beside the moat and river, and as often as not Jehane had been urgently summoned to deal with a knife wound inflicted by one woman on another. But although the three religions were all present here, it was obvious to her that when quarrels arose it had nothing to do with whether sun or moons or stars were worshipped. And the wadjis who had forced them out here were the common enemy. Jehane knew she would not be betrayed by these people.
    Nunaya sold them three mules without so much as a question in her heavy-lidded, heavily accentuated eyes. This was not a place where personal questions were asked. Everyone had their secrets, and their wounds.
    Jehane mounted up on one of the mules, Velaz and Husari took the others. A lady was supposed to ride sidesaddle, but Jehane had always found that silly and awkward. Doctors were allowed to be eccentric. She rode as the men did.
    It was summer, the flow of the river was lazy and slow. Moving across, holding her mule on a tight rein, Jehane felt a heavy drifting object bump them. She shivered, knowing what it was. The mule pulled away hard and she almost fell, controlling it.
    They came up out of the water and started north towards the trees. Jehane looked