Tigana (75 page)

‘Forgive me,’ whispered Alais bren Rovigo, kneeling beside her. ‘My father says your hair might give you away when we leave.’ She held up the scissors she carried.

Catriana went rigid for a moment, then, closing her eyes without a word, she slowly turned her back on the other woman. A moment later she felt her long red tresses gathered and pulled. And then the long sharp cloth-cutter’s scissors rasped cleanly through in a line above her shoulders, severing a decade’s growth in a moment in the shadows.

There was a burst of noise outside, a clatter and hoarse shouting. It approached, reached them, went loudly past. Catriana realized that she was shaking; Alais touched her shoulder and then diffidently withdrew her hand. On the other side of the counter the old woman moved placidly about in the shadows of her shop. Rovigo was nowhere to be seen. Catriana’s breath came in ragged scourings of air and her right side ached; she must have crashed into something in her wild careen. She had no memory of doing so.

There was something lying on the ground beside her feet. She reached down and gathered the thick red curtain of her severed hair. It had happened so fast she’d hardly had time to realize what was being done.

‘Catriana, I’m so sorry,’ Alais whispered again. There was real grief in her voice.

Catriana shook her head. ‘Nothing … this is less than nothing,’ she said. It was difficult to speak. ‘Only vanity. What does it matter?’ She seemed to be weeping. Her ribs hurt terribly. She put a hand up and touched the shorn remains of her hair. Then she turned sideways a little, on the floor of the shop, down behind the counter, and leaned her head wearily
against the other woman’s shoulder. Alais’s arms came up and around her then, holding her close while she cried.

On the other side of the counter the old woman hummed tunelessly to herself as she folded and sorted cloth of many colours and as many different textures, working by the wan light of afternoon as it filtered down to the street in a quarter where the leaning houses mostly blocked the sun.

Baerd lay in the mild darkness by the river, remembering how cold it had been the last time he was here, waiting with Devin at winter twilight to see if Catriana would come floating down to them.

He had lost the pursuit hours ago. He knew Tregea very well. He and Alessan had lived here for more than a year off and on after their return from Quileia, rightly judging this wild, mountainous province as a good place to seek out and nurture any slow flames of revolution.

They had been principally looking for one man they had never found, a captain from the siege of Borifort, but they had discovered others, and spoken to them, and bound them to their cause. And they had been back here many times over the years, in the city itself and in the mountains of its distrada, finding in the harsh simple life of this province a strength and a clean directness that helped carry them both through the terribly slow, twistingly indirect paths of their lives.

He had known the city’s maze of streets infinitely better than the Barbadians who were barracked here. Known which houses could be quickly climbed, which roofs led to others, and which to avoid as dangerous dead-ends. It had been important, in the life they’d led, to know such things.

He’d cut south and then east from the market, and then scrambled up to the roof of The Shepherd’s Crook, their old
tavern here, using the slanting cover of the adjacent woodpile as a springboard. He remembered doing the same thing years ago, dodging the night watch after curfew. Running low and quickly he crossed two roofs and then spanned a street by crawling along the top of one of the ramshackle covered bridges that linked houses on either side.

Behind him, far behind him very soon, he heard the sounds of pursuit being balked by seemingly inadvertent things. He could guess what those things might be: a milk-cart with a loose wheel, a quickly gathered crowd watching two men brawl in the street, a keg of wine spilled as it was wheeled into a tavern. He knew Tregea, which meant knowing the spirit of its people too.

In a short time he was a long way from the market square, having covered the distance entirely from roof to roof, flitting light-footed and unseen. He could have almost enjoyed the chase had he not been so worried about Catriana. At the higher, southern fringes of Tregea the houses grew taller and the streets wider. His memory did not fail him though; he knew which ways to angle in order to continue working upwards till he came to the house he sought and leaped to land on its roof.

He remained there for several moments, listening carefully for sounds of alarm in the street below. He heard only the ordinary traffic of late afternoon though, and so Baerd slipped the key out from its old hiding-place under the one burnt shingle, unlocked the flat trapdoor, and slipped down, noiselessly, into Tremazzo’s attic.

He lowered the door behind him and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Down below, in the apothecary’s shop itself he could hear voices quite clearly, and he quickly made out the unmistakable rumble of Tremazzo’s bass tones. It had been a long time, but some things seemed never to change. Around him he could smell soaps and perfumes,
and the odours, astringent or sweet, of various medications. When he could see a little in the gloom he found the tattered armchair that Tremazzo used to leave up here for them and sank down into it. The very action brought back memories from years ago. Some things did not change.

Eventually the voices below fell silent. Listening carefully he could make out only the one distinctive, heavy tread in the shop. Leaning over, Baerd deliberately scratched the floor, the sound a rat might make in an attic room. But only a rat that could scratch three times quickly, and then once again. Three for the Triad as a whole, and one more for the god alone. Tregea and Tigana shared an ancient link to Adaon, and they had chosen to mark it when they devised their signal.

He heard the footsteps below stop, and then, a moment later, resume their measured tread, as if nothing had happened. Baerd leaned back in the chair to wait.

It didn’t take long. It was late in the day by now, nearly time to close up shop in any case. He heard Tremazzo sweeping the counter and floor and then the bang of the front door being shut and the click of the bolt driven home. A moment later the ladder was moved into place, footsteps ascended, the lower door swung back, and Tremazzo came into the attic, carrying a candle. He was puffing from exertion, bulkier than ever.

He set the candle on a crate and stood, hands on wide hips, looking down at Baerd. His clothes were very fine, and his black beard was neatly trimmed to a point. And scented, Baerd realized a second later.

Grinning, he rose to his feet and gestured at Tremazzo’s finery, pretending to sniff the air. The apothecary grimaced. ‘Customers,’ he grunted. ‘It is the fashion of the day. What they expect now in a shop like this. Soon we’ll be as bad as Senzio. Was it you that caused all the hue and cry this afternoon?’ No more than that; no greeting, no effusions.
Tremazzo had always been thus, cool and direct as a wind out of the mountains.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Baerd replied. ‘Did the soldier die?’

‘Hardly,’ Tremazzo said in his familiar, dismissive tones. ‘You aren’t strong enough for that.’

‘Was there word of a woman caught?’

‘Not that I heard. Who is she?’

‘One of us, Tremazzo. Now listen, there is real news, and I need you to find a Khardu warrior and give him a message from me.’

Tremazzo’s eyes widened briefly as Baerd began, then narrowed with concentration as the story unfolded. It didn’t take long to explain. Tremazzo was nothing if not quick. The bulky apothecary was not a man to venture north to Senzio himself, but he could contact others who were and let them know. And he should be able to find Sandre at their inn. He went down the ladder once more and returned, puffing, with a wheel of bread and some cold meat, and a flask of good wine to go with them.

They touched palms briefly, then he left in search of Sandre. Sitting among the sundry items stored above an apothecary’s shop, Baerd ate and drank, waiting for darkness to fall. When he was sure the sun had set he slipped out on to the roof again and started back north through the town. After a while he worked his way down to the ground and, careful of the torches of the watch, threaded eastward through the winding streets to the place at the edge of the city where Catriana had come ashore from her winter leap. There, he sat down in the grass by the river in the almost windless night and settled himself to wait.

He had never really feared he would be caught. He’d had too many years of living this way, body honed and hardened, senses sharpened, mind quick to remember things, to seize and act upon opportunity.

None of which explained or excused what he’d done to get them into this in the first place. His impulsive blow at the drunken Barbadian had been an act of unthinking stupidity, regardless of the fact that it was also something that most of the people in that square had longed to do themselves at one time or another. In the Palm of the Tyrants today one suppressed such longings or died. Or watched people one cared for die.

Which led him back to Catriana. In the starry spring darkness he remembered her emerging like a ghost from winter water. He lay silent in the grass thinking of her, and then, after a time, perhaps predictably, of Elena. And then, always and forever, certain as dawn or dusk or the turning of the seasons, of Dianora who was dead or lost to him somewhere in the world.

There was a rustle, too small to be alarming, in the leaves of a tree behind him. A moment later a trialla began to sing. He listened to it, and to the river flowing, alone and at home in the dark, a man shaped and defined by his need for solitude and the silent play of memory.

His father, as it happened, had done the same thing by the Deisa, the night before he died.

A short time later an owl called from along the riverbank just west of him. He hooted softly in reply, silencing the trialla’s song. Sandre came up silently, scarcely disturbing the grass. He crouched down and then sat, grunting slightly. They looked at each other.

‘Catriana?’ Baerd murmured.

‘I don’t know. Not caught though, I think. I would have heard. I lingered in the square and around it. Saw the guards come back. The man you hit is all right. They were laughing at him, after. I think this will pass.’

Baerd deliberately relaxed his tensed muscles. He said, conversationally, ‘I am a very great fool sometimes, had you noticed?’

‘Not really. You’ll have to tell me about it sometime. Who was the extremely large man who accosted me?’

‘Tremazzo. He’s been with us for a long while. We used his upper storage room for meetings when we lived here, and after.’

Sandre grunted. ‘He came up to me outside the inn and offered to sell me a potion to ensure the lust of any woman or boy I desired.’

Baerd found himself grinning. ‘Rumours of Khardu habits precede you.’

‘Evidently.’ Sandre’s teeth flashed white in the darkness. ‘Mind you, it was a good price. I bought two vials of the stuff.’

Laughing quietly, Baerd felt a curious sensation, as if his heart were expanding outwards towards the man here with him. He remembered Sandre the night they had met, when all the plans of his old age had been undone, when a final, savage end had come for the whole Sandreni family. A night that had not come to an end until the Duke had used his magic to go into Alberico’s dungeons and kill his own son. Tomasso.
Any woman or boy I desired
.

Baerd felt humbled by the strength of the old man with him. Not once in half a year and more of hard travelling, through the bitter cold and rutted tracks of winter, had Sandre breathed so much as a request for a halt or an easier pace. Not once had he balked at a task, shown weariness, been slow to rise in the predawn dampness of the road. Not once given any sign of the rage or the grief that must have choked him whenever word reached them of more bodies death-wheeled in Astibar. He had given them a gift of all he had, his knowledge of the Palm, the world, and especially of Alberico; a lifetime’s worth of subtlety and leadership, offered without arrogance and without reserve, nothing held back.

It was men such as this, Baerd thought, who had been the glory and the grief of the Palm in the days before it fell. Glory in the grandeur of their power, and grief in their hatreds and their wars that had let the Tyrants come and take the provinces one by one in their solitary pride.

And sitting there by the river in darkness Baerd felt again, with certainty, in the deep core of his heart, that what Alessan was doing—what he and Alessan were doing—was right. That theirs was a goal worth the striving for, this reaching out for wholeness in the Palm, with the Tyrants driven away and the provinces bound together in a sharing of the years that would come. A goal worth all the days and nights of a man’s life, whether or not it was ever reached, could ever be made real. A goal that lay beside and was bound together with the other vast and bitter thing, which was Tigana and her name.

Certain things were hard for Baerd bar Saevar, almost impossible in fact, and had been since his youth had been torn away from him in the year Tigana fell. But he had lain with a woman on an Ember Night just past, in a place of deepest magic, and had felt in that green darkness as if the stern bindings that wrapped and held his heart were loosening. And this was a dark place too, a quiet one with the river flowing, and things had begun to take shape in the Palm that he had feared would never happen while he lived.