Tigana (46 page)

And before the night was over, before the half of it had passed, with the last candles of winter burning down, she had proven herself right, terribly, over and over again. And at the end even, she was the one who lay bound and open between the four pillars of the world that was her bed and Devin was no longer quite sure of who he was that he should be doing to her the things he was. The things that made her whisper and then cry aloud his name as she did, over and again. But he did know that she had changed him and had found a place within him where his need to seek oblivion was equal to her own.

The candle on his side of the bed burned out some time later. There was a small, scented drifting of smoke. The pattern of light and shade in the room changed; neither of them was
asleep, they both noticed it. The fire was down to its embers; the dog still lay before it, its magnificent head stretched out on its paws.

‘You had better go,’ Alienor said, stroking his near shoulder absently. ‘While there’s a candle for you to carry. It is easy to lose your way in the dark.’

‘You observe the Ember Days?’ he asked, a little surprised at such piety. ‘No fires?’

‘No fires,’ she said ruefully. ‘Half my household staff would leave me, and I don’t even want to guess at what the tenant farmers or the villagers would do. Storm the castle. Call down some ancient curse with ears of corn soaked in blood. These are the southern highlands, Devin—they take their rites seriously up here.’

‘As seriously as you take yours?’

She smiled at that and stretched like a cat. ‘I suppose so. The farmers will do things tonight and tomorrow that I prefer not to know about.’ With a sinuous motion she curled downwards towards the foot of the bed and reached for something on the carpet by the bedposts. Her body was a smooth, candlelit curve of white flesh, with the marks he had made on her still showing red.

She straightened and handed him his breeches. It felt abrupt, a dismissal, and Devin gave her a long stare, not moving. She met the look, but her eyes were neither hard nor dismissive.

‘Don’t be angry,’ Alienor said softly. ‘You were too splendid to be leaving in anger. I’m telling you truths: I do observe the Ember rites and it
is
hard to find your way back without a light.’ She hesitated a moment, then added, ‘And I have always slept alone since my husband died.’

Devin said nothing. He rose and dressed. His shirt he found halfway between the bed and the doors. It was shredded so badly it should have been amusing. He wasn’t
amused though. In fact, he
was
angry—or some feeling beyond anger, or beside it, a more complex thing. Lying naked and uncovered among the scattered pillows of her bed, Alienor watched him clothe himself. He looked at her, marvelling still at her feline magnificence and even—despite the change of mood—even aware of how easy it would be for her to stir his desire again.

But as he gazed at her a dormant thought surfaced from wherever thought had been driven in the primitive frenzy of the last few hours. He arranged the shirt as best he could and walked over to claim one of the candles in a brass holder.

She had turned on her side to follow his movements, her head now resting on one hand, the black hair tumbling about her, her body offered to his sight as a gift, a glory in the shifting light. Her eyes were wide and direct, her smile generous, even kind.

‘Good night,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether you know it, but you are welcome back should you choose to come one day.’

He hadn’t expected that. He knew, without having to be told, that she was honouring him with this. But his thought, his disquiet from before was strong now and intermingled with other images, so that, although he smiled in return and nodded, it was neither pride nor honour that he felt.

‘Goodnight,’ he said and turned to go.

At the doors he stopped and, as much because he had remembered Alessan saying that the blue wine had begun with her as for any other single reason that he knew—then or later—Devin turned back to her. She had not moved. He looked, drinking in the opulence of the chamber and the proffered beauty of the woman on the bed. Even as he stood there another candle died on the far side of the room.

‘Is this what happens to us?’ Devin said then, quietly,
reaching for words to frame this new, hard thought. ‘When we are no longer free. Is this what happens to our love?’

He could see her eyes change, even from this distance and in this wavering of light and dark. For a long time she looked back at him.

‘You are clever,’ she said finally. ‘Alessan has chosen well in you.’

He waited.

‘Ah!’ said Alienor throatily, simulating astonishment. ‘He actually wants an answer. A true answer from a lady in her castle at the edge of the world.’ It may have been a trick of the uncertain light, but she seemed to look away then, beyond where Devin stood, even beyond the tapestried walls of her room.

‘It is one of the things that happens to us,’ she said at last. ‘A kind of insurrection in the dark that somehow stands against the laws of day that bind us and cannot be broken now.’

Devin thought about it.

‘Possibly that,’ he agreed softly, working it through. ‘Or else an admission somewhere in the soul that we deserve no more than this, nothing that goes deeper. Since we are not free and have accepted that.’

He saw her flinch then, and close her eyes.

‘Did I deserve that?’ she asked.

A terrible sadness passed over Devin. He swallowed with some difficulty. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you didn’t.’

Her eyes were still closed when he left the room.

He felt heavy and burdened, beyond merely tired; leaden with the weight of his thoughts, slowed by them. He stumbled going down the stairwell and had to fling out his free hand to brace himself against the stone wall. The motion left the candle unguarded and it went out.

It was very dark then. The castle was utterly still. Moving carefully, Devin reached the bottom of the stairs and he put the spent flame down on a ledge there. At intervals, high in the walls, tall thin windows let slanting moonlight fall across the corridor but the angle and the hour did not allow for any real illumination.

Briefly he considered going back for another candle but then, after standing still a moment to let his eyes adjust, Devin set out along what he thought to be the way they had come.

He was lost very soon, though not really alarmed. In his present mood there seemed to be something apposite about padding thus silently down the darkened hallways of this ancient highland castle in the dead of night, the stones cold against his feet.

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

Who had told him that? The words had come unbidden to his mind from some recess of memory. He turned into an unfamiliar corridor and passed through a long room hung with paintings. Part of the way through, he found a voice for the words: it had been the old priest of Morian at the goddess’s temple by his family’s farm in Asoli. He had taught the twins and then Devin how to read and do sums, and when it appeared that the youngest boy, the small one, could sing he had given Devin his first lessons in the rudiments of harmony.

No wrong turnings,
Devin thought again. And then, with a shiver he could not suppress, he remembered that this was not just the nadir of a night, it was the end of winter, the first of the Ember Days—when the dead were said to walk abroad.

The dead. Who were his dead? Marra. His mother, whom he had never known. Tigana? Could a country, a province,
be said to have died? Could it be lost and mourned like a living soul? He thought of the Barbadian he had slain in the Nievolene barn.

He did quicken his pace then, over the dark, sporadically moonlit stones of the vast and silent castle.

It seemed to Devin that he walked for an endless time—or a time outside of time—passing no one, hearing nothing save for his own breathing or the soft tread of his feet, before he finally recognized a statue in an alcove. He had admired it by torchlight earlier in the evening. He knew his room was just ahead and around a corner to the right. Somehow he had come entirely the wrong way along the whole far wing of Castle Borso.

He also knew, from earlier in the evening, that the room directly opposite the small fine statue of the bearded archer drawing a bow, was Catriana’s.

He looked up and down the corridor but saw only greater and lesser shadows among the bands of white moonlight falling from above. He listened, and heard no sound. If the dead were abroad they were silent.

No wrong turnings,
Ploto the priest had told him long ago.

He thought of Alienor, lying with her eyes closed among her bright cushions and all her candles, and he was sorry for what he’d said to her at the end. He was sorry for many things. Alessan’s mother was dying. His own was dead.

Ice is for deaths and endings,
Alienor had said to Catriana in the hall.

He was cold, and very sad. He moved forward and ended the silence, knocking gently on Catriana’s door.

She’d had a restless night, for many reasons. Alienor had disturbed her: both the unbridled sensuousness that emanated from the woman, and the obviously close, unknown past she shared with Alessan and Baerd.

Catriana hated unknown things, information hidden from her. She
still
didn’t know what Alessan was going to do tomorrow, what this mysterious meeting in the highlands was all about, and ignorance made her uneasy and even, on a less acknowledged level, afraid.

She wished she could be more like Devin sometimes, matching his seemingly tranquil acceptance of what he could or could not know. She had seen him storing away the pieces of what he did learn and patiently waiting to receive another piece, and then putting them together like the tiles of a children’s puzzle game.

Sometimes she admired that, sometimes it made her wild and contemptuous to see him so accepting of Alessan’s occasional reticence or Baerd’s chronic reserve. Catriana needed to
know
. She had been ignorant for so much of her life, shielded from her own history in that tiny fishing village in Astibar. She felt that there was so much lost time to be regained. Sometimes it made her want to weep.

That was how she’d been feeling this evening before drifting into a shallow, uneasy sleep and a dream of home. She often dreamt of home since she’d left, especially of her mother.

This time she saw herself walking through the village just after sunrise, passing the last house—Tendo’s, she even saw his dog—and then rounding the familiar curve of the shore to where her father had bought a derelict cottage and repaired it and raised a family.

In her dream she saw the boat already far out, trawling among the early-morning swell of the sea. It seemed to be springtime. Her mother was in the doorway of the cottage mending nets in the good light of the sunrise. Her eyes had been going bad for years and it was hard for her to work with her needle in the evenings. Catriana had gradually taken over the nightime needlework in her last year at home.

It was a beautiful morning in the dream. The stones of the beach gleamed and the breeze was fresh and light off the water. All the other boats were out as well, taking advantage of the morning, but it was easy to tell which one was their own. Catriana walked up the path and stood by the newly mended porch, waiting for her mother to look up and see her and leap to her feet with a cry, and fold her daughter in her arms.

Her mother did glance up from her work, but only to gaze seaward, squinting towards the light, to check the position of their boat. An old habit, a nervous one, and one that had probably done much to hurt her eyes. She’d a husband and three sons in that small boat though.

She didn’t see her daughter at all. Catriana realized with a queer pain that she was invisible here. Because she had gone, because she had left them and wasn’t there any longer. There was more grey, she saw, in her mother’s hair, and her heart ached as she stood there in mild sunlight to see how worn and hard her mother’s hands were, and how tired the kind face was. She had always thought of her mother as a young woman, until Tiena, the baby, had died in the plague six years ago. Things had changed after that.

It isn’t fair,
she thought, and in the dream she cried aloud and was not heard.

Her mother sat on a wooden chair on the porch in the early light, working on the nets, occasionally looking up to check the position of one small boat among so many bobbing on this alien eastern sea so far from the one she’d loved.

Catriana woke, her body twisting violently away from all the hurts embedded in that image. She opened her eyes, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, lying under several blankets in a room in Castle Borso. Alienor’s castle.

Alienor, who was the same age as Catriana’s worn, tired mother. It truly was not fair. Why should she be carrying
such guilt, seeing such sad, hurtful images in her sleep, for having gone away? Why, when it was her mother who had given her the ring when she was fourteen, in the year the baby died. The ring that marked her as from Tigana and by the sea for anyone who knew the ancient symbols, and for no one else.

The ring that had so marked her for Alessan bar Valentin two years ago when he and Baerd had seen her selling eels and fresh-caught telanquy in Ardin town just up the coast from the village.

She had not been a trusting person at eighteen. She could not have said, then or now, why she’d trusted the two of them and joined them for that walk upriver out of town when the market was done. If pushed to an answer she would have said that there was something about Baerd that had reassured her.

It was on that walk that they had told her about her ring and about Tigana, and the axis of her life had tilted another way. A new running of time had begun from that moment, and with it the need to know.

At home that evening after dinner, after the boys had gone to bed, she told her parents that she now knew where they were from, and what her ring meant. And she asked her father what he was going to do to help her bring Tigana back, and what he had been doing all these years. It was the only time in her life she’d ever seen her mild, innocuous father in a rage, and the only time he’d ever struck her.