Tigana (39 page)

The Khardhu’s smile faded. His eyes locked on those of the other man and Ettocio was suddenly very glad the warrior’s curved sword was checked with all the other weapons behind the bar.

‘I’ve been here some thirty years,’ the black man said softly. ‘About as long as you’ve been alive, I’d wager. I was guarding merchant trains on this road when you were wetting your bed at night. And if I
am
a foreigner, well … last time I inquired, Khardhun was a free country. We beat back our invader, which is more than anyone here in the Palm can say!’

‘You had magic!’ the young fellow at the bar suddenly burst out, over the outraged din that ensued. ‘We didn’t! That’s the only reason! The only reason!’

The Khardhu turned to face the boy, his lip curling in contempt. ‘You want to rock yourself to sleep at night thinking that’s the only reason, you go right ahead, little man. Maybe it’ll make you feel better about paying your taxes this spring, or about going hungry because there’s no grain here in the fall. But if you want to know the truth I’ll give it to you free of charge.’

The noise level had abated as he spoke, but a number of men were on their feet, glaring at the Khardhu.

Looking around the room, as if dismissing the boy at the bar as unworthy of his attention, he said very clearly, ‘We beat back Brandin of Ygrath when he invaded us because Khardhun fought as a country. As a whole. You people got whipped by Alberico and Brandin both because you were too busy worrying about your border spats with each other, or which Duke or Prince would lead your army, or which priest or priestess would bless it, or who would fight on the centre and who on the right, and where the battlefield would be, and who the gods loved best. Your nine provinces ended up going at the sorcerers one by one, finger by finger. And they got snapped to pieces like chicken-bones. I always used to think,’ he drawled into what had become a quiet room, ‘that a hand fought best when it made a fist.’

He lazily signalled Ettocio for another drink.

‘Damn your insolent Khardhu hide,’ the grey-eyed man said in a strangled voice. Ettocio turned from the bar to look at him. ‘Damn you forever to Morian’s darkness for being right!’

Ettocio hadn’t expected that, and neither had the others in the room. The mood grew grimly introspective. And, Ettocio realized, more dangerous as well, entirely at odds with the brightness of the spring outside, the cheerful warmth of the returned sun.

‘But what can we do?’ the young fellow at the bar said plaintively, to no one in particular.

‘Curse and drink and pay our taxes,’ said the wool-merchant bitterly.

‘I must say, I do sympathize with the rest of you,’ said the lone trader from Senzio smugly.

It was an ill-advised remark. Even Ettocio, notoriously slow to rouse, was irritated.

The young man at the bar was positively enraged.

‘Why you, you … I don’t believe it! What right do
you
have—’ He hammered the bar in incoherent fury. The plump Senzian smiled in the superior manner all of them seemed to have.

‘What right indeed!’ The grey eyes were icy as they returned to the fray. ‘Last time I looked, Senzio traders all had their hands jammed so deep in their pockets paying tribute money east
and
west that they couldn’t even get their equipment out to please their wives!’

A raucous, bawdy shout of laughter greeted that. Even the old Khardhu smiled thinly.

‘Last
I
looked,’ said the Senzian, red-faced, ‘the Governor of Senzio was one of our own, not someone shipped in from Ygrath or Barbadior!’

‘What happened to the Duke?’ the Ferraut merchant snapped. ‘Senzio was so cowardly your Duke demoted himself to Governor so as not to upset the Tyrants. Are you
proud
of that?’

‘Proud?’ the lean merchant mocked. ‘He’s got no time to be proud of anything. He’s too busy looking both ways to see which emissary from which Tyrant he should offer his wife to!’

Again, coarse, bitter laughter.

‘You’ve a mean tongue for a conquered man,’ the Senzian said coldly. The laughter stopped. ‘Where are you from that you’re so quick to cut at other men’s courage?’

‘Tregea,’ said the other quietly.

‘
Occupied
Tregea,’ the Senzian corrected viciously. ‘Conquered Tregea. With its Barbadian Governor.’

‘We were the last to fall,’ the Tregean said a little too defiantly. ‘Borifort held out longer than anywhere else.’

‘But it fell,’ the Senzian said bluntly, sure of his advantage now. ‘I wouldn’t be so quick to talk about other men’s wives. Not after the stories we all heard about what the
Barbadians did there. And I also heard that most of your women weren’t that unwilling to be—’

‘Shut your filthy mouth!’
the Tregean snarled, leaping to his feet. ‘Shut it, or I’ll close it for you permanently, you lying Senzian scum!’

A babble of noise erupted, louder than any before. Furiously clanging the bell over the bar, Ettocio fought to restore order.

‘Enough!’ he roared. ‘Enough of this, or you’re all out of here right now!’ A dire threat, and it quelled them.

Enough for the Khardhu warrior’s sardonic laughter to be audible again. The man was on his feet. He dropped coins on the table to pay his account, and surveyed the room, still chuckling, from his great height.

‘See what I mean?’ he murmured. ‘All these stick-like little fingers jabbing and poking away at each other. You’ve always done that, haven’t you? Guess you always will. Until there’s nothing left here but Barbadior and Ygrath.’

He swaggered to the bar to claim his sword.

‘You,’ said the grey-eyed Tregean suddenly, as Ettocio handed over the curved, sheathed blade. The Khardhu turned slowly.

‘You know how to use that thing as well as you use your mouth?’ the Tregean asked.

The Khardhu’s lips parted in a mirthless smile. ‘It’s been reddened once or twice.’

‘Are you working for anyone right now?’

Insolently, appraisingly, the Khardhu looked down on the other man. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve just changed my plans,’ the other replied. ‘There’s no money to be made up in Ferraut town. Not with double duties to be paid. I reckon I’ll have to go farther afield. I’ll give you going rates to guard me south to the Certandan highlands.’

‘Rough country there,’ the Khardhu murmured reflectively. The Tregean’s face twitched with amusement. ‘Why do you think I want you?’ he asked.

After a moment the smile was returned. ‘When do we go?’ the warrior said.

‘We’re gone,’ the Tregean replied, rising and paying his own account. He claimed his own short sword and the two of them walked out together. When the door opened there was a brief, dazzling flash of sunlight.

Ettocio had hoped the talk would settle down after that. It didn’t. The youngster at the bar mumbled something about uniting in a common front—a remark that would have been merely insane if it wasn’t so dangerous. Unfortunately—from Ettocio’s point of view, at any rate—the comment was overheard by the Ferraut wool-trader, and the mood of the room was so aroused by then that the subject wouldn’t die.

It went on all afternoon, even after the boy left as well. And that night, with an entirely different crowd, Ettocio shocked himself by speaking up during an argument about ancestral primacy between an Astibarian wine-dealer and another Senzian. He made the same point the tall Khardhu had made—about nine spindly fingers that had been broken one by one because they never formed a fist. The argument made sense to him; it sounded intelligent in his own mouth. He noticed men nodding slowly even as he spoke. It was an unusual, flattering response—men had seldom paid any attention to Ettocio except when he called time in the tavern.

He rather liked the new sensation. In the days that followed he found himself raising the point whenever the opportunity arose. For the first time in his life Ettocio began to get a reputation as a thoughtful man.

Unfortunately, one evening in summer he was overheard by a Barbadian mercenary standing outside the open window. They didn’t take away his licence. There was a very
high level of tension across the whole of the Palm by then. They arrested Ettocio and executed him on a wheel outside his own tavern, with his severed hands stuffed in his mouth.

A great many men had heard the argument by then, though. A great many had nodded, hearing it.

Devin joined the other four about a mile south of the crossroads inn on the dusty road leading to Certando. They were waiting for him. Catriana was alone in the first cart but Devin climbed up beside Baerd in the second.

‘Bubbling like a pot of khav,’ he said cheerfully in response to a quizzical eyebrow. Alessan rode up on one side. He’d buckled on his sword, Devin saw. Baerd’s bow was on the cart, just behind the seat and within very quick reach. Devin had had occasion, several times in six months, to see just how quick Baerd’s reach could be. Alessan smiled over at him, riding bareheaded in the bright afternoon.

‘I take it you stirred the pot a little after we left?’

Devin grinned. ‘Didn’t need much stirring. The two of you have that routine down like professional players by now.’

‘So do you,’ said the Duke, cantering up on the other side of the cart. ‘I particularly admired your spluttering anger this time. I thought you were about to throw something at me.’

Devin smiled up at him. Sandre’s teeth flashed white through the improbable black of his skin.

Don’t expect to recognize us,
Baerd had said when they’d parted in the Sandreni woods half a year ago. So Devin had been prepared. Somewhat, but not enough.

Baerd’s own transformation had been disconcerting but relatively mild: he’d grown a short beard and removed the padding from the shoulders of his doublet. He wasn’t as big a man as Devin had first thought. He’d also somehow
changed his hair from bright yellow to what he said was his natural dark brown. His eyes were brown now as well, not the bright blue of before.

What he had done to Sandre d’Astibar was something else entirely. Even Alessan, who’d evidently had years to get used to this sort of thing, gave a low whistle when he first saw the Duke. Sandre had become—amazingly—an ageing black fighting man from Khardhun across the northern sea. One of a type that Devin knew had been common on the roads of the Palm twenty or thirty years ago in the days when merchants went nowhere except in company with each other, and Khardhu warriors with their wickedly curved blades were much in demand as insurance against outlaws.

Somehow, and this was the uncanny thing, with his own beard shaven and his white hair tinted a dark grey, Sandre’s gaunt, black face and deep-set, fierce eyes were exactly those of a Khardhu mercenary. Which, Baerd had explained, had been almost the first thing he’d noticed about the Duke when he’d seen him in daylight. It was what had suggested the rather comprehensive disguise.

‘But
how?
’ Devin remembered gasping.

‘Lotions and potions,’ Alessan had laughed.

It turned out, as Baerd explained later, that he and the Prince had spent a number of years in Quileia after Tigana’s fall. Disguises of this sort—colourings for skin and hair, even tints for eyes—were a perfected, important art south of the mountains. They assumed a central role in the Mysteries of the Mother Goddess, and in the less secret rites of the formal theatre, and they had played pivotal, complex parts in the tumultuous religion-torn history of Quileia.

Baerd did not say what he and Alessan had been doing there, or how he had come to learn this secret craft or possess the implements of it.

Catriana didn’t know either, which made Devin feel somewhat better. They’d asked Alessan one afternoon, and had received, for the first time, an answer that was to become routine through the fall and winter.

In the spring,
Alessan told them. In the spring a great deal would be made clearer, one way or another. They were moving towards something of importance, but they would have to wait until then. He was not going to discuss it now. Before the Ember Days of spring they would leave their current Astibar–Tregea–Ferraut loop and head south across the wide grainlands of Certando. And at that point, Alessan had said, a great many things might change. One way or another, he’d repeated.

He hadn’t smiled, saying any of this, though he was a man with an easy smile.

Devin remembered how Catriana had tossed her hair then, with a knowing, almost an angry look in her blue eyes.

‘It’s Alienor, isn’t it? she demanded, virtually an accusation. ‘It’s that women at Castle Borso.’

Alessan’s mouth had twisted in surprise and then amusement. ‘Not so, my dear,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll stop at Borso, but this has nothing to do with her at all. If I didn’t know better, if I didn’t know your heart belonged only to Devin, I’d say you sounded jealous, my darling.’

The gibe had entirely the desired effect. Catriana had stormed off, and Devin, almost as embarrassed himself, had quickly changed the subject. Alessan had a way of doing that to you. Behind the deep, effortless courtesy and the genuine camaraderie, there existed a line they learned not to try to cross. If he was seldom harsh, his jests—always the first measure of control—could sting memorably. Even the Duke had discovered that it was best not to press Alessan on certain subjects. Including this one, it emerged: when asked, Sandre said he knew as little as they did about what would happen come spring.