Tigana (80 page)

And so what came very near to breaking her, as she passed through that multitude of people to the pier, was seeing how ferociously he was struggling not to show what
he was feeling. As if his soul was straining to escape through the doorways of his eyes, and he, being born to power, being what he was, felt it necessary to hold it in, here among so many people.

But he couldn’t hide it from her. She didn’t even have to look at Rhun to read Brandin now. He had cut himself off from his home, from all that had anchored him in life, he was here among an alien people he had conquered, asking for their aid, needing their belief in him. She was his lifeline now, his only bridge to the Palm, his only link, really, to any kind of future here, or anywhere.

But Tigana’s ruin lay between the two of them like a chasm in the world. The lesson of her days, Dianora thought, was simply this: that love was not enough. Whatever the songs of the troubadours might say. Whatever hope it might seem to offer, love was simply not enough to bridge the chasm in
her
world. Which was why she was here, what the riselka’s vision in the garden had offered her: an ending to the terrible, bottomless divisions in her heart. At a price, however, that was not negotiable. One did not bargain with the gods.

She came up to Brandin at the end of the pier and stopped and the others stopped behind her. A sigh, rising and falling away like a dying of wind, moved through the square. With an odd trick of the mind her vision seemed to detach itself from her eyes for a moment, to look down on the pier from above. She could see how she must appear to the people gathered there: inhuman, otherworldly.

As Onestra must have seemed before the last Dive. Onestra had not come back, and devastation had followed upon that. Which was why this was her chance: the dark doorway history offered to release, and to the incarnation of her long dream in the saishan.

The sunlight was very bright, gleaming and dancing on the blue-green sea. There was so much colour and richness
in the world. Beyond Rhun, she saw a woman in a brilliant yellow robe, an old man in blue and yellow, a younger, dark-haired man in brown with a child upon his shoulders. All come to see her dive. She closed her eyes for a moment, before she turned to look at Brandin. It would have been easier not to, infinitely easier, but she knew that there were dangers in not meeting his gaze. And, in the end, here at the end, this was the man she loved.

Last night, lying awake, watching the slow transit of the moons across her window, she had tried to think of what she could say to him when she reached the end of the pier. Words beyond those of the ritual, to carry layers of meaning down through the years.

But there, too, lay danger, a risk of undoing everything this moment was to become. And words, the ones she would want to say, were just another reaching out towards making something whole, weren’t they? Towards bridging the chasms. And in the end that was the point, wasn’t it? There was no bridge across for her.

Not in this life.

‘My lord,’ she said formally, carefully, ‘I know I am surely unworthy, and I fear to presume, but if it is pleasing to you and to those assembled here I will try to bring you the sea-ring back from the sea.’

Brandin’s eyes were the colour of skies before rain. His gaze never wavered from her face. He said, ‘There is no presumption, love, and infinite worthiness. You ennoble this ceremony with your presence here.’

Which confused her, for these were not the words they had prepared. But then he looked away from her, slowly, as if turning away from light.

‘People of the Western Palm!’ he cried, and his voice was clear and strong, a King’s, a leader of men, carrying resonantly across the square and out among the tall ships and the
fishing boats. ‘We are asked by the Lady Dianora if we find her worthy to dive for us. If we will place our hopes of fortune in her, to seek the Triad’s blessing in the war Barbadior brings down upon us. What is your reply? She waits to hear!’

And amid the thunderous roar of assent that followed, a roar as loud and sure as they had known it would be after so much pent-up anticipation, Dianora felt the brutal irony of it, the bitter jest, seize hold of her.

Our hopes of fortune
. In her?
The Triad’s blessing
. Through her?

In that moment, for the first time, here at the very margin of the sea, she felt fear come in to lay a finger on her heart. For this truly was a ritual of the gods, a ceremony of great age and numinous power and she was using it for her own hidden purposes, for something shaped in her mortal heart. Could such a thing be allowed, however pure the cause?

She looked back then at the palace and the mountains that had defined her life for so long. The snows were gone from the peak of Sangarios. It was on that summit that Eanna was said to have made the stars. And named them all. Dianora looked away and down, and she saw Danoleon gazing at her from his great height. She looked into the calm, mild blue of his eyes and felt herself reach out and back through time to take strength and sureness from his quietude.

Her fear fell away like a discarded garment. It was for Danoleon, and for those like him who had died, for the books and the statues and the songs and the names that were lost that she was here. Surely the Triad would understand that when she was brought to her final accounting for this heresy? Surely Adaon would remember Micaela by the sea? Surely Eanna of the Names would be merciful?

Slowly then, Dianora nodded her head as the roar of sound finally receded; seeing that, the High Priestess of the
god came forward in her crimson gown and helped her free of the dark-green robe.

Then she was standing by the water, clad only in the thin green undertunic that barely reached her knees, and Brandin was holding a ring in his hand.

‘In the name of Adaon and of Morian,’ he said, words of ritual, rehearsed and carefully prepared, ‘and always and forever in the name of Eanna, Queen of Lights, we seek nurture here and shelter. Will the sea welcome us and bear us upon her breast as a mother bears a child? Will the oceans of this peninsula accept a ring of offering in my name and in the name of all those gathered here, and send it back to us in token of our fates bound together? I am Brandin di Chiara, King of the Western Palm, and I seek your blessing now.’

Then he turned to her, as a second murmur of astonishment began at his last words, at what he’d named himself, and beneath that sound, as if cloaked and sheltered under it, he whispered something else, words only she could hear.

Then he turned towards the sea and drew back his arm, and he threw the golden ring in a high and shining arc up towards the brightness of the sky and the dazzling sun.

She saw it reach its apex and begin to fall. She saw it strike the sea and she dived.

The water was shockingly cold, so early in the year. Using the momentum of the dive she drove herself downwards, kicking hard. The green net held her hair so she could see. Brandin had thrown the ring with some care but he had known he could not simply toss it near to the pier—too many people would be looking for that. She propelled herself forward and down with half a dozen hard, driving strokes, her eyes straining ahead in the blue-green filtered light.

She might as well reach it. She might as well see if she could claim the ring before she died. She could carry it as an offering, down to Morian.

Her fear, amazingly, was entirely gone. Or perhaps it was not so amazing after all. What was the riselka, what did its vision offer if not this certainty, a sureness to carry her past the old terror of dark waters, to the last portal of Morian? It was ending now. It should have ended long ago.

She saw nothing, kicked again, forcing herself deeper and further out, towards where the ring had fallen.

There
was
a sureness in her, a brilliant clarity, an awareness of how events had shaped themselves towards this moment. A moment when, simply by her dying, Tigana might be redeemed at last. She knew the story of Onestra and Cazal; every person in this harbour did. They all knew what disasters had followed upon Onestra’s death.

Brandin had gambled all on this one ceremony, having no other choice in the face of battle brought to him too soon. But Alberico would take him now; there could be no other result. She knew exactly what would follow upon her death. Chaos and shrill denunciation, the perceived judgement of the Triad upon this arrogantly self-styled King of the Western Palm. There would be no army in the west to oppose the Barbadian. The Peninsula of the Palm would be Alberico’s to harvest like a vineyard, or grind like grain beneath the millstones of his ambition.

Which was a pity, she supposed, but redressing that particular sorrow would have to be someone else’s task. The soul’s quest of another generation. Her own dream, the task she’d set herself with an adolescent’s pride, sitting by a dead fire in her father’s house long years ago, had been to bring Tigana’s name back into the world.

Her only wish, if she was allowed a wish before the dark closed over her and became everything, was that Brandin would leave, would find a place to go far from this peninsula, before the end came. And that he might somehow come to know that his life, wherever he went, was a last gift of her love.

Her own death didn’t matter. They killed women who slept with conquerors. They named them traitors and they killed them in many different ways. Drowning would do.

She wondered if she would see the riselka here, sea-green creature of the sea, agent of destiny, guardian of thresholds. She wondered if she would have some last vision before the end. If Adaon would come for her, the stern and glorious god, appearing as he had to Micaela on the beach so long ago. She was not Micaela though, not bright and fair and innocent in her youth.

She didn’t think that she would see the god.

Instead, she saw the ring.

It was to her right and just above, drifting like a promise or an answered prayer down through the slow, cold waters so far below the sunlight. She reached out, in the dreamlike slowness of all motion in the sea, and she claimed it and put it on her finger that she might die as a sea-bride with sea-gold upon her hand.

She was very far under now. The filtered light had almost disappeared this far down. She knew her last gathered air would soon be gone as well, the need for the surface becoming imperative, reflexive. She looked at the ring, Brandin’s ring, his last and only hope. She brought it to her lips, and kissed it, and then she turned her eyes, her life, her long quest, away from the surface and the sunlight, and love.

Downward she went, forcing herself as deep as she could. And it was then, just then, that the visions began to come.

She saw her father in her mind, clearly, holding his chisel and mallet, his shoulders and chest covered with a fine powder of marble, walking with the Prince in their courtyard, Valentin’s arm familiarly thrown about his shoulders, and then she saw him as he had been before he rode away, awkward and grim, to war. Then Baerd was in her mind: as a boy, sweet-natured, seemingly always laughing. Then
weeping outside her door the night Naddo left them, then wrapped close in her arms in a ruined moonlit world, and lastly in the doorway of the house the night he went away. Her mother next—and Dianora felt as if she were somehow swimming back through all the years to her family. For all these images of her mother were from before the fall, before the madness had come, from a time when her mother’s voice had seemed able to gentle the evening air, her touch still soothe all fevers away, all fear of the dark.

It was dark now, and very cold in the sea. She felt the first agitation of what would soon be a desperate need for air. There came to her then, as on a scroll unrolling through her mind, vignettes of her life after she’d left home. The village in Certando. Smoke over Avalle seen from the high and distant fields. The man—she couldn’t even remember his name—who had wanted to marry her. Others who had bedded her in that small room upstairs. The Queen in Stevanien. Arduini. Rhamanus on the river galley taking her away. The opening sea before them. Chiara. Scelto.

Brandin.

And so, at the very end, it was he who was in her mind after all. And over and above the hard, quick images of a dozen years and more Dianora suddenly heard again his last words on the pier. The words she had been fighting to hold back from her awareness, had tried not to even hear or understand, for fear of what they might do to her resolve. What he might do.

My love
, he’d whispered,
come back to me. Stevan is gone. I cannot lose you both or I will die
.

She had not wanted to hear that; anything like that. Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

Or I will die
, he had said.

And she knew, could not even try to deny within herself that it was true. That he
would
die. That her false, beneficent
vision of Brandin living somewhere else, remembering her tenderly, was simply another lie in the soul. He would do no such thing.
My love
, he had called her. She knew, gods how she and her home had cause to know, what love meant to this man. How deep it went in him.

How deep. There was a roaring sound in her ears now, a pressure of water so far below the surface of the sea. Her lungs felt as if they were going to burst. She moved her head to one side, with difficulty.

There seemed to be something there, beside her in the darkness. A darting figure further out to sea. A glimmer, glimpse of a form, of a man or a god she could not say. But it could not be a man down here. Not so far below the light and the waves, and not glowing as this form was.

Another inward vision, she told herself. A last one, then. The figure seemed to be swimming slowly away from her, light shining around it like an aureole. She was spent now. There was an aching in her, of longing, a yearning for peace. She wanted to follow that gentle, impossible light. She was ready to rest, to be whole and untormented, without desire.