Tigana (40 page)

Thinking about it, as fall gave way to winter and the rains and then the snows came, Devin was deeply aware that Alessan was the Prince of a land that was dying a little more with each passing day. Under the circumstances, he decided, the wonder wasn’t that there were places they could not trespass upon but, rather, how far they could actually go before reaching the guarded regions that lay within.

One of the things Devin began to learn during that long winter was patience. He taught himself to hold his questions for the right time, or to restrain them entirely and try to work out the answers for himself. If fuller knowledge had to wait for spring, then he would wait. In the meantime he threw himself, with an unleashed, even an unsuspected passion, into what they were doing.

A blade had been planted in his own soul that starry autumn night in the Sandreni Woods.

He’d had no idea what to expect when they’d set out five days later with Rovigo’s horse-drawn cart and three other horses, bound for Ferraut town with a bed and a number of wooden carvings of the Triad. Taccio had written Rovigo that he could sell Astibarian religious carvings at a serious profit to merchants from the Western Palm. Especially because, as Devin learned, duty was not levied on Triad-related artifacts: part of a successful attempt by both sorcerers to keep the clergy placated and neutralized.

Devin learned a great deal about trade that fall and winter, and about certain other things as well. With his new, hard-won patience he would listen in silence as Alessan and the Duke tossed ideas back and forth on the long roads, turning the rough coals of a concept into the diamonds of polished plans. And even though his own dreams at night were of raising a surging army to liberate Tigana and storm the fabled harbour walls of Chiara, he quickly came to
understand—on the cold paths of day—that theirs would have to be a wholly different approach.

Which was, in fact, why they were still in the east, not the west, and doing all they could—with the small glittering diamonds of Alessan and Sandre’s plans—to unsettle things in Alberico’s realm. Once Catriana confided to him—on one of the days when, for whatever reason, she deemed him worth speaking to—that Alessan was, in fact, moving much more aggressively than he had the year before when she’d first joined them. Devin suggested it might be Sandre’s influence. Catriana had shaken her head. She thought that was a part of it, but that there was something else, a new urgency from a source she didn’t understand.

We’ll find out in the spring, Devin had shrugged. She’d glared at him, as if personally affronted by his equanimity.

It had been Catriana though who’d suggested the most aggressive thing of all as winter began: the faked suicide in Tregea. Along with the idea of leaving behind her a sheaf of the poems that that young poet had written about the Sandreni. Adreano was his name, Alessan had informed them, unwontedly subdued: the name was on the list of the twelve poets Rovigo had reported as being randomly death-wheeled during Alberico’s retaliation for the verses. Alessan had been unexpectedly disturbed by that news.

There was other information in the letter from Rovigo, aside from the usual covering business details. It had been held for them in a tavern in north Tregea that served as a mail drop for many of the merchants in the northeast. They had been heading south, spreading what rumours they could about unrest among the soldiers. Rovigo’s latest report suggested, for the second time, that an increase in taxes might be imminent, to cover the mercenaries’ newest pay demands. Sandre, who seemed to know the Tyrant’s mind astonishingly well, agreed.

After dinner, when they were alone around the fire, Catriana had made her proposal. Devin had been incredulous: he’d seen the height of the bridges of Tregea and the speed of the river waters below. And it was winter by then, growing colder every day.

Alessan, still upset by the news from Astibar, and evidently of the same mind as Devin, vetoed the idea bluntly. Catriana pointed out two things. One was that she had been brought up by the sea: she was a better swimmer than any of them, and better than any of them knew.

The second thing was that—as Alessan knew perfectly well, she said—a leap such as this, a suicide,
especially
in Tregea, would fit seamlessly into everything they were trying to achieve in the Eastern Palm.

‘That,’ Devin remembered Sandre saying after a silence, ‘is true, I’m sorry to say.’

Alessan had reluctantly agreed to go to Tregea itself for a closer look at the river and the bridges.

Four evenings later Devin and Baerd had found themselves crouched amid twilight shadows along the riverbank in Tregea town, at a point that seemed to Devin terribly far away from the bridge Catriana had chosen. Especially in the windy cold of winter, in the swiftly gathering dark, beside the even more swiftly racing waters that were rushing past them, deep and black and cold.

While they waited, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to sort out his complex mixture of feelings about Catriana. He was too anxious though, and too cold.

He only knew that his heart had leaped, moved by some odd, tripled conjunction of relief and admiration and envy when she swam up to the bank, exactly where they were. She even had the wig in one hand, so it would not be tangled up somewhere and found. Devin stuffed it into the satchel he carried while Baerd was vigorously chafing Catriana’s shivering
body and bundling her into the layers of clothing they’d carried. As Devin looked at her—shaking uncontrollably, almost blue with the cold, her teeth chattering—he had felt his envy slipping away. What replaced it was pride.

She was from Tigana, and so was he. The world might not know it yet, but they were working together—however elliptically—to bring it back.

The following morning their two carts had slowly rattled out of town, going north and west to Ferraut again with a full load of mountain khav. A light snow had been falling. Behind them the city was in a state of massive ferment and turmoil because of the unknown dark-haired girl from the distrada who had killed herself. After that incident Devin had found it increasingly hard to be sharp or petty with Catriana. Most of the time. She did continue to indulge herself in the custom of deciding that he was invisible every once in a while.

It had become difficult for him to convince himself that they had actually made love together; that he had really felt her mouth soft on his, or her hands in his hair as she gathered him into her.

They never spoke of it, of course. He didn’t avoid her, but he didn’t seek her out: her moods swung too unpredictably, he never knew what response he’d get. A newly patient man, he let her come to ride a cart or sit before a tavern fire with him when she wanted to. She did, sometimes.

In Ferraut town that winter for the third time, after the leap in Tregea, they had all been wonderfully fed by Ingonida—still in raptures over the bed they’d brought her. Taccio’s wife continued to display a particularly solicitous affection for the Duke in his dark disguise—a detail which Alessan took some pleasure in teasing Sandre about when they were alone. In the meantime, the rotund, red-faced Taccio copiously wined them all.

There had been another mail packet waiting from Rovigo in Astibar. Which, when opened, proved to contain two letters this time, one of which gave off—even after its time in transit—an extraordinary effusion of scent.

Alessan, his eyebrows elaborately arched, presented this pale-blue emanation to Devin with infinite suggestiveness. Ingonida crowed and clasped her hands together in a gesture doubtless meant to signify romantic rapture. Taccio, beaming, poured Devin another drink.

The perfume, unmistakably, was Selvena’s. Devin’s expression, as he took cautious possession of the envelope, must have been revealing because he heard Catriana giggle suddenly. He was careful not to look at her.

Selvena’s missive was a single headlong sentence—much like the girl herself. She did, however, make one vivid suggestion that induced him to decline when the others asked innocently if they might peruse his communication.

In fact, though, Devin was forced to admit that his interest was rather more caught by the five neat lines Alais had attached to her father’s letter. In a small, businesslike hand she simply reported that she’d found and copied another variant of the ‘Lament for Adaon’ at one of the god’s temples in Astibar and that she looked forward to sharing it with all of them when they next came east. She signed it with her initial only.

In the body of the letter Rovigo reported that Astibar was very quiet since the twelve poets had been executed among the families of the conspirators in the Grand Square. That the price of grain was still going up, that he could usefully receive as much green Senzian wine as they could obtain at current prices, that Alberico was widely expected to announce, very soon, a beneficiary among his commanders for the greater part of the confiscated Nievolene lands, and that his best information was that Senzian linens were still underpriced in Astibar but might be due to rise.

It was the news about the Nievolene lands that triggered the next stage of spark-to-spark discussion between Alessan and the Duke.

And those sparks had led to the blaze.

The five of them did a fast run along the well-maintained highway north to Senzio with more of the religious artifacts. They bought green wine with their profit on the statuettes, bargained successfully for a quantity of linens—Baerd, somewhat surprisingly, had emerged as their best negotiator in such matters—and doubled quickly back to Taccio, paying the huge new duties at both the provincial border forts and the city-walls.

There had been another letter waiting. Among the various masking pieces of business news, Rovigo reported that an announcement on the Nievolene lands was expected by the end of the week. His source was reliable, he added. The letter had been written five days before.

That night Alessan, Baerd and Devin had borrowed a third horse from Taccio—who was deeply happy to be told nothing of their intentions—and had set out on the long ride to the Astibar border and then across to a gully by the road that led to the Nievolene gates.

They were back seven days later with a new cart and a load of unspun country wool for Taccio to sell. Word of the fire had preceded them. Word of the fire was everywhere, Sandre reported. There had already been a number of tavern brawls in Ferraut town between men of the First and Second Companies.

They left the new cart with Taccio and departed, heading slowly back towards Tregea. They didn’t need three carts. They were partners in a modest commercial venture. They made what slight profit they could, given the taxes and duties that trammelled them. They talked about those taxes and duties a great deal, often in public. Sometimes more frankly than their listeners were accustomed to hearing.

Alessan quarreled with the sardonic Khardhu warrior in a dozen different inns and taverns on the road, and hired him a dozen different times. Sometimes Devin played a role, sometimes Baerd did. They were careful not to repeat the performance anywhere. Catriana kept a precise log of where they had been and what they had said and done there. Devin had assured her they could rely on his memory, but she kept her notes none the less.

In public the Duke now called himself ‘Tomaz’. ‘Sandre’ was an uncommon-enough name in the Palm, and for a mercenary from Khardhun it would be sufficiently odd to be a risk. Devin remembered growing thoughtful when the Duke had told them his new name back in the fall. He’d wondered what it was like to have had to kill his son. Even to outlive his sons. To know that the bodies of everyone even distantly related to himself were being spreadeagled alive on the death-wheels of Barbadior. He tried to imagine how all of that would feel.

Life, the processes of living and what it did to you, seemed to Devin to grow more painfully complex all through that fall and winter. Often he thought of Marra, arbitrarily cut off on the way to her maturity, to whatever she had been about to become. He missed her with a dull ache that could grow into something heavy and difficult at times. She would have been someone to talk to about such things. The others had their own concerns and he didn’t want to burden them. He wondered about Alais bren Rovigo, if she would have understood these things he was wrestling with. He didn’t think so; she had lived too sheltered, too secluded a life for such thoughts to trouble her. He dreamt of her one night though, an unexpectedly intense series of images. The next morning he rode beside Catriana in the lead cart, unwontedly quiet, stirred and unsettled by the nearness of her, the crimson fall of her hair in the pale winter landscape.

Sometimes he thought about the soldier in the Nievolene barn—who had lost a roll of dice and carried a jug of wine to a lonely place away from the singing, and had had his throat slit there while he slept. Had that soldier been born into the world only to become a rite of passage for Devin di Tigana?

That was a terrible thought. Eventually, mulling it over through the long, cold winter rides, Devin worked his way through to deciding it was untrue. The man had interacted with other people through his days. Had caused pleasure and sorrow, doubtless, and had surely known both things. The moment of his ending was not what defined his journey under Eanna’s lights, or however that journey was named in the Empire of Barbadior.

It was difficult to sort out though. Had Stevan of Ygrath lived and died so that his father’s grief might work the destruction of a small province and its people and their memories? Had Prince Valentin di Tigana been born only to swing the killing blade that caused this to happen? And what about his youngest son then?

And what about the youngest son of the Asolini farmer who had fled from Avalle when it became Stevanien? Truly, it was hard to puzzle through.

In Senzio one morning, with the first elusive hints of spring softening the northern air, Baerd had come back from the celebrated weapons market with a bright, beautifully balanced sword for Devin. There was a black jewel in the hilt. He offered no explanation, but Devin knew it had to do with what had happened in the Nievolene barn. The gift did nothing to answer any of his new questions, but it helped him none the less. Baerd began giving him lessons during their midday breaks on the road.