Tigana (15 page)

And right about then it seemed to Devin that a distant bell began to toll in some recess of his mind. Ringing a warning. As might a village bell in a temple of Adaon, summoning farmers urgently back from the fields. A far bell heard, faint but clear, from over morning fields of waving yellow grain.

‘Brandin knew what had happened immediately through his sorcery,’ Baerd said, his voice like the rasp of a file. ‘He swept back south and west, leaving Alberico a free hand in Ferraut and Certando. He came down with the full weight of his sorcery and his army and with the rage of a father whose son has been slain, and he met the remnant of his last foes where they had waited for him by the Deisa.’

Once more Baerd looked over at Alessan. His face was bleak, ghostly in the moonlight. He said:

‘Brandin annihilated them. He smashed them to pieces without mercy or respite. Drove them helplessly before him back into their own country south of the Deisa and he burned every field and village through which he passed. He took no prisoners. He had women slain in that first march, and children, which was not a thing he’d done anywhere else. But nowhere else had his own child died. So many souls crossed over to Morian for the sake of the soul of Stevan of Ygrath. His father overran that province in blood and fire. Before the summer was out he had levelled all the glorious towers of the city in the foothills of the mountains—the one now called Stevanien. On the coast he smashed to rubble and sand the walls and the harbour barriers of the royal city by the sea. And in the battle by the river he took the Prince who had slain his son and later that year had him tortured and mutilated and killed in Chiara.’

Baerd’s voice was a dry whisper now under the starlight and the light of the single moon. And with it there was still that bell warning of sorrows yet to come, tolling in Devin’s mind, louder now. Baerd said:

‘Brandin of Ygrath did something more than all of this. He gathered his magic, the sorcerous power that he had, and he laid down a spell upon that land such as had never even been conceived before. And with that spell he … tore its name away. He stripped that name utterly from the minds of every man and woman who had not been born in that province. It was his deepest curse, his ultimate revenge. He made it as if we had never been. Our deeds, our history, our very name. And then he called us Lower Corte, after the bitterest of our ancient enemies among the provinces.’

Behind him now Devin heard a sound and realized that Catriana was weeping. Baerd said, ‘Brandin made it come to
pass that no one living could hear and then remember the name of that land, or of its royal city by the sea or even of that high, golden place of towers on the old road from the mountains. He broke us and he ravaged us. He killed a generation, and then
he stripped away our name
.’

And those last words were not whispered or rasped into the autumn dark of Astibar. They were hurled forth as a denunciation, an indictment, to the trees and the night and stars—the stars that had watched this thing come to pass.

The grief in that accusation clenched itself like a fist within Devin, more tightly than Baerd could ever have known. Than anyone could have known. For no one since Marra had died really knew what memory meant to Devin d’Asoli: the way in which it had come to be the touchstone of his soul.

Memory was talisman and ward for him, gateway and hearth. It was pride and love, shelter from loss: for if something could be remembered it was not wholly lost. Not dead and gone forever. Marra could live; his dour, stern father hum a cradle song to him. And because of this, because this was at the heart of what Devin was, the old vengeance of Brandin of Ygrath smashed into him that night as if it had been newly wrought, pounding through to the vulnerable centre of how Devin saw and dealt with the world, and it cut him like a fresh and killing wound.

With an effort he forced himself to steadiness, willing the concentration that would allow him to remember this. All of this. Which seemed to matter more than ever now. Especially now, with the echo of Baerd’s last terrible words fading in the night. Devin looked at the blond-haired man with the leather bands across his brow and about his neck, and he waited. He had been quick as a boy; he was a clever man. He understood what was coming; it had fallen into place.

Older by far than he had been only an hour ago, Devin heard Alessan murmur from behind him, ‘The cradle song I heard you playing was from that last province, Devin. A song of the city of towers. No one not of that place could have learned that tune in the way you told me you did. It is how I knew you as one of us. It is why I did not stop you when you followed Catriana. I left it to Morian to see what might lie beyond that doorway.’

Devin nodded, absorbing this. A moment later he said, as carefully as he could, ‘If this is so, if I have properly understood you, then I should be one of the people who can still hear and remember the name that has been … otherwise taken away.’

Alessan said, ‘It is so.’

Devin discovered that his hands were shaking. He looked down at them, concentrating, but he could not make them stop.

He said, ‘Then this is something that has been stolen from me all my life. Will you … give it back to me? Will you tell me the name of the land where I was born?’

He was looking at Baerd by starlight, for Ilarion too was gone now, over west beyond the trees. Alessan had said it was Baerd’s to tell. Devin didn’t know why. In the darkness they heard the trialla one more time, a long, descending note, and then Baerd spoke, and for the first time in his days Devin heard someone say:

‘Tigana.’

Within him the bell he had been hearing, as if in a dream of unknown summer fields, fell silent. And within that abrupt, absolute inner stillness a surge of loss broke over him like an ocean wave. And after that wave came another, and then a third—the one bearing love and the other a heart-deep pride. He felt a strange light-headed dizzying sensation as of a summons rushing along the corridors of his blood.

Then he saw how Baerd was staring at him. Saw his face rigid and white, the fear transparent even by starlight, and something else as well: bitterest thirst—an aching, deprived hunger of the soul. And then Devin understood, and gave to the other man the release he needed.

‘Thank you,’ Devin said. He didn’t seem to be trembling any more. Around a difficult thickness in his throat he went on, for it was his turn now, his test:

‘Tigana.
Tigana
. I was born in the province of Tigana. My name … my true name is Devin di Tigana bar Garin.’

Even as he spoke, something akin to glory blazed in Baerd’s face. The fair-haired man squeezed his eyes tightly shut as if to hold that glory in, to keep it from escaping into the dispersing dark, to clutch it fiercely to his need. Devin heard Alessan draw an unsteady breath, and then, surprised, he felt Catriana touch his shoulder and then withdraw her hand.

Baerd was lost in a place beyond speech. It was Alessan who said, ‘That is one of the two names taken away, and the deepest. Tigana was our province and the name of the royal city by the sea. The fairest city under Eanna’s lights you would have heard it named. Or perhaps, perhaps only the second most fair.’

A thread of something that seemed to genuinely long to become laughter was in his voice. Laughter and love together. For the first time Devin turned to look up at him.

Alessan said, ‘If you were to have spoken with those from inland and south, in the city where the River Sperion, descending from the mountain, begins its run westward to find the sea, you would have heard it said that second way. For we were always proud, and there was always rivalry between the two cities.’

In the end, hard as he tried, his voice could only carry loss.

‘You were born in that inland city, Devin, and so was I. We are children of that high valley and of the silver running of that mountain river. We were born in Avalle. In Avalle of the Towers.’

There was music in Devin’s mind again, with that name, but this time it was different from the bells he’d heard before. This time it was a music that took him back a long way, all the way to his father and his childhood.

He said, ‘You do know the words then, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do,’ said Alessan gently.

‘Please?’ Devin asked.

But it was Catriana who answered him, in the voice a young mother might have used, rocking her child to sleep on an evening long ago:

Springtime morning in Avalle

And I don’t care what the priests say:

I’m going down to the river today

On a springtime morning in Avalle.

When I’m all grown up, come what may,

I’ll build a boat to carry me away

And the river will take it to Tigana Bay

And the sea even further from Avalle.

But wherever I wander, by night or by day,

Where water runs swiftly or high trees sway,

My heart will carry me back and away

To a dream of the towers of Avalle.

A dream of my home in Avalle.

The sweet sad words to the tune he’d always known drifted down to Devin, and with them came something
else. A sense of loss so deep it almost drowned the light grace of Catriana’s song. No breaking waves now, or trumpets along the blood: only the waters of longing. A longing for something taken away from him before he’d even known it was his—taken so completely, so comprehensively he might have lived his whole life through without ever knowing it was gone.

And so Devin wept as Catriana sang. Small boys, young-looking for their age, learned very early in northern Asoli how risky it was to cry where someone might see. But something too large for Devin to deal with had overtaken him in the forest tonight.

If he understood properly what Alessan had just said, this song was one his mother would have sung to him.

His mother whose life had been ripped away by Brandin of Ygrath. He bowed his head, though not to shield the tears, and listened as Catriana finished that bitter-sweet cradle song: a song of a child defying orders and authority, even when young, who was self-reliant enough to want to build a ship alone and brave enough to want to sail it into the wideness of the world, never turning back. Nor ever losing or forgetting the place where it all began.

A child very much as Devin saw himself.

Which was one of the reasons he wept. For he
had
been made to lose and forget those towers, he’d been robbed of any dream he himself might ever have had of Avalle. Or Tigana on its bay.

So his tears followed one another downward in darkness as he mourned his mother and his home. And in the shadows of that wood not far from Astibar those two griefs fused to each other in Devin and became welded in the forge of his heart with what memory meant to him and the loss of memory: and out of that blazing something took shape in Devin that was to change the running of his life line from that night.

He dried his eyes on his sleeve and looked up. No one spoke. He saw that Baerd was looking at him. Very deliberately Devin held up his left hand, the hand of the heart. Very carefully he folded his third and fourth fingers down so that what showed was a simulacrum of the shape of the Peninsula of the Palm.

The position for taking an oath.

Baerd lifted his right hand and made the same gesture. They touched fingertips together, Devin’s small palm against the other man’s larger, calloused one.

Devin said, ‘If you will have me I am with you. In the name of my mother who died in that war I swear I will not break faith with you.’

‘Nor I with you,’ said Baerd. ‘In the name of Tigana gone.’

There was a rustling as Alessan sank to his knees beside them. ‘Devin, I should be cautioning you,’ he said soberly. ‘This is not a thing in which to move too fast. You can be one with our cause without having to break your life apart to come with us.’

‘He has no choice,’ Catriana murmured, moving nearer on the other side. ‘Tomasso bar Sandre will name you both to the torturers tonight or tomorrow. I’m afraid the singing career of Devin d’Asoli may be over just as it truly begins.’ She looked down on the three men, her eyes unreadable in the darkness.

‘It
is
over,’ Devin said quietly. ‘It ended when I learned my name.’ Catriana’s expression did not change; he had no idea what she was thinking.

‘Very well,’ said Alessan. He held up his own left hand, two fingers down. Devin met it with his right. Alessan hesitated. ‘An oath in your mother’s name is stronger for me than you could have guessed,’ he said.

‘You knew her?’

‘We both did,’ Baerd said quietly. ‘She was ten years older than us, but every adolescent boy in Tigana was a little in love with Micaela. And most of the grown men too, I think.’

Another new name, and all the hurt that came with it. Devin’s father had never spoken it. His sons had never even known their mother’s name. There were more avenues to sorrow in this night than Devin could have imagined.

‘We all envied and admired your father more than I can tell you,’ Alessan added. ‘Though I was pleased that an Avalle man won her in the end. I can remember when you were born, Devin. My father sent a gift to your naming day. I don’t remember what it was.’

‘You
admired
my father?’ Devin said, stunned.

Alessan heard that and his voice changed. ‘Do not judge him by what he became. You only knew him after Brandin smashed a whole generation and their world. Ending their lives or blighting their souls. Your mother was dead, Avalle fallen, Tigana gone. He had fought and survived both battles by the Deisa.’ Above them Catriana made a small sound.

‘I never knew,’ Devin protested. ‘He never told us any of that.’ There was a new ache inside him.
So many avenues
.