Tigana (82 page)

‘Erlein, I’m sorry,’ he said, risking it, trying to struggle upwards from this sorrow.

He braced for a stinging reply, he almost wanted one, but Erlein said nothing at all at first. And when he spoke it was mildly.

‘I think it is time,’ was what he said. ‘Shall we go down and play? Would that help?’

Would that help?
Since when did his people—Erlein, even—need to minister to him so much?

They went back down the stairs. Devin was waiting for them on the makeshift stage at the back of The Trialla. Alessan took up his Tregean pipes. His right hand was hurting and swollen, but it was not going to keep him from making music. He needed music now, very badly. He closed his eyes and began to play. They fell silent for him in the densely crowded room. Erlein waited, his hands motionless on the harp, and Devin did, leaving him a space in which to reach upwards alone, yearning towards that high note where confusion and pain and love and death and longing could all be left behind him for a very little while.

C H A P T E R   1 8

N
ormally when she went up on the ramparts of her castle at sunset it was to look south, watching the play of light and the changing colours of the sky above the mountains. Of late though, as springtime turned towards the summer they had all been waiting for, Alienor found herself climbing to the northern ramparts instead, to pace the guard’s walk behind the crenellations or lean upon the cool rough stone, gazing into the distance, wrapped in her shawl against the chill that still came when the sun went down.

As if she could actually see as far as Senzio.

The shawl was a new one, brought by the messengers from Quileia that Baerd had told them would come. The ones who carried the messages that could, if all went right, turn the whole world upside down. Not just the Palm: Barbadior too, where the Emperor was said to be dying, and Ygrath, and Quileia itself where, precisely because of what he was doing for them, Marius might not survive.

The Quileian messengers had stopped on their way to Fort Ortiz, as was appropriate, to pay their respects to the Lady of Castle Borso and to bring her a gift from the new King of Quileia: an indigo-coloured shawl, a colour almost impossible to find here in the Palm, and one which was, she knew, a mark of nobility in Quileia. It was evident that Alessan had told this Marius a fair bit about her involvement with him over the years. Which was fine. Marius of Quileia, it seemed, was one
of them; in fact, as Baerd had explained it the afternoon after Alessan had ridden into the Braccio Pass and then away west, Marius was the key to everything.

Two days after the Quileians passed through, Alienor began a habit of springtime rides that took her, casually, far enough afield to necessitate one or two overnight stays at neighbouring castles. At which time she relayed a quite specific message to a half a dozen equally specific people.

Senzio. Before Midsummer
.

Not long afterwards, a silk-merchant and then a singer she rather liked came down to Castle Borso with word of tremendous troop movements among the Barbadians. The roads were absolutely clogged with mercenaries marching north, they said. She had raised her eyebrows in quizzical mystification, but had allowed herself more wine than was customary each of those two nights, and had rewarded both men later, after her own fashion.

Up on the ramparts at sunset now, she heard a footstep on the stair behind her. She had been waiting for it.

Without turning, she said, ‘You are almost too late. The sun is nearly gone.’ Which was true; the colour of the sky and the thin, underlit clouds in the west had darkened from pink through crimson and purple most of the way down to the indigo she wore about her shoulders.

Elena stepped out on the parapet.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, inappropriately. She was always apologizing, still uneasy in the castle. She moved to the guard’s walk beside Alienor and looked out over the gathering darkness of the late-spring fields. Her long yellow hair fanned over her shoulders, the ends lifting in the breeze.

Ostensibly she was here to serve as a new lady-in-waiting to Alienor. She had brought her two young children and her few belongings into Borso two mornings after the Ember Days had ended. It was considered a good idea that she be
established here well before the time that might matter. It appeared, incredibly enough, that there could actually come a time when her being here might matter.

Tomaz, the gaunt, aged Khardhu warrior, had said that it would be necessary for one of them to stay here. Tomaz, who was very clearly
not
from Khardhun, and just as clearly unwilling to say who he really was. Alienor didn’t care about that. What mattered was that Baerd and Alessan trusted him, and in this matter Baerd was deferring to the dark, hollow-cheeked man absolutely.

‘One of
whom
, exactly?’ Alienor had asked. The four of them had been alone: herself, Baerd and Tomaz, and the red-headed young girl who didn’t like her, Catriana.

Baerd hesitated a long time. ‘One of the Night Walkers,’ he said finally.

She had raised her eyebrows at that, the small outward gesture serving to show all she was prepared to reveal of her inward astonishment.

‘Really? Here? They are still about?’

Baerd nodded.

‘And that is where you were last night when you went out?’

After a second Baerd nodded again.

The girl Catriana blinked in manifest surprise. She was clever and quite beautiful, Alienor thought, but she still had rather a great deal to learn.

‘Doing what?’ Alienor asked Baerd.

But this time he shook his head. She had expected that. There were limits with Baerd; she enjoyed trying to push towards them. One night, ten years ago, she had found exactly where his boundaries of privacy lay, in one dimension at least. Surprisingly perhaps, their friendship had deepened from that time on.

Now, unexpectedly, he grinned. ‘You could have them all stay here, of course, not just one.’

She had grimaced with a distaste only partly feigned. ‘One will be sufficient, thank you. Assuming it is enough for your purposes, whatever those are?’ She said that last to the old man disguised as a Khardhu warrior. His skin colouring was really very good but she knew all about Baerd’s techniques of disguise. Over the years he and Alessan had shown up here in an effective diversity of appearances.

‘I’m not absolutely sure
what
our purposes are,’ Tomaz had replied frankly. ‘But insofar as we need an anchor for what Baerd wants us to at least be able to try, one of them in this castle should be enough.’

‘Enough for what?’ she’d probed again, not really expecting anything.

‘Enough for my magic to reach out and find this place,’ Tomaz had said bluntly.

This time it was she who blinked and Catriana who looked unruffled and superior. Which was unfair, Alienor decided afterwards; the girl must have
known
the old man was a wizard. That was why she hadn’t reacted. Alienor had enough of a sense of humour to find their byplay amusing, and even to feel a little regretful when Catriana had gone.

Two days afterwards Elena had come. Baerd had said it would be a woman. He had asked Alienor to take care of her. She had raised her eyebrows at that as well.

On the northern ramparts she glanced over in the twilight. Elena had come up without a cloak; her hands were cupping her elbows tightly against her body. Feeling unreasonably irritated, Alienor abruptly removed her shawl and draped it over the other’s shoulders.

‘You should know better by now,’ she said sharply. ‘It gets cold up here when the sun goes down.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Elena said again, quickly motioning to remove the shawl. ‘But you’ll be chilled now. I’ll go down and get something for myself.’

‘Stay where you are!’ Alienor snapped. Elena froze, apprehension in her eyes. Alienor looked out past her, past the darkening fields and the emerging flickers of light where night candles and fires were being lit in houses and farms below. She looked beyond all these under the first stars of the evening, her eyes straining north, her imagination winging far beyond her sight to where the others would all be gathering now, or soon.

‘Stay here,’ she said, more gently. ‘Stay with me.’

Elena’s blue eyes widened in the darkness as she looked over. Her expression was grave, thoughtful. Unexpectedly, she smiled. And then, even more astonishingly, she moved nearer and drew her arm through Alienor’s, pulling her close. Alienor stiffened for a second, then allowed herself to relax against the other woman. She had asked for companionship. For the first time in more years than she could remember, she had asked for this. A completely different kind of intimacy. It felt, of late, as if something rigid and hard was falling away inside her. She had waited for this summer, for what it might mean, for so many years.

What had the young one said, Devin? About being allowed more than the transience of desire, if only one believed it was deserved. No one had ever said such a thing to her in all the years since Cornaro of Borso had died fighting Barbadior. In which dark time his young widow, his bride, alone in a highland castle with her grief and rage, had been set upon the road towards what she had become.

He had gone with Alessan, Devin. By now, they would probably be in the north as well. Alienor looked out, letting her thoughts stream like birds arrowing away through darkness, across the miles between, to where all of their fates would be decided when Midsummer came.

Dark hair and light blown back and mingled by the wind, the two women stood together in that high place for
a long time, sharing warmth, sharing the night and the waiting time.

It had long been said, sometimes in mockery, sometimes with a bemusement that bordered on awe, that as the days heated up in summer, so did the nighttime passions of Senzio. The hedonistic self-indulgence of that northern province, blessed with fertile soil and gentle weather, was a byword in the Palm and even over the seas. You could get whatever you wanted in Senzio, it was said, provided you were willing to pay for it. And fight someone to keep it, the initiated often added.

Towards the end of spring that year it might have been thought that burgeoning tensions and the palpable threat of war would have dampened the nocturnal ardour of the Senzians—and their endless flow of visitors—for wine, for love-making in diverse combinations, and for brawling in the taverns and streets.

Someone might indeed have thought such a thing, but not anyone who knew Senzio. In fact, it actually seemed as if the looming portents of disaster—the Barbadians massed ominously on the Ferraut border, the ever-increasing numbers of ships of the Ygrathen flotilla anchored at Farsaro Island off the northwestern tip of the province—were simply spurs to the wildness of night in Senzio town. There were no curfews here; there hadn’t been for hundreds of years. And though emissaries of both invading powers were prominently housed in opposite wings of what was now called the Governor’s Castle, Senzians still boasted that they were the only free province in the Palm.

A boast that began to ring more hollow with each passing day and sybaritic night as the entire peninsula braced itself for a conflagration.

In the face of which onrushing intrusion of reality Senzio town merely intensified the already manic pace of its dark hours. Legendary watering-holes like The Red Glove or Thetaph were packed with sweating, shouting patrons every night, to whom they dispensed their harsh, overpriced liquors and a seemingly endless stream of available flesh, male or female, in the warrens of airless rooms upstairs.

Those innkeepers who had elected, for whatever reasons, not to trade in purchased love had to offer substantially different inducements to their patrons. For the eponymous owner of Solinghi’s, a tavern not far from the castle, good food, decent vintages and ales, and clean rooms in which to sleep were assurances of a respectable if not an extravagant living, derived primarily from merchants and traders disinclined to traffic in the carnality of night, or at least to sleep and eat amid that overripe corruption. Solinghi’s also prided itself on offering, by day or night, the best music to be found in the city at any given time.

At this particular moment, shortly before the dinner-hour one day late in the spring, the bar and table patrons of the almost full tavern were enjoying the music of an unlikely trio: a Senzian harper, a piper from Astibar, and a young Asolini tenor who—according to a rumour started a couple of days before—was the singer who had disappeared after performing Sandre d’Astibar’s funeral rites last fall.

Rumours of every kind were rife in Senzio that spring, but few believed this one: such a prodigy was unlikely in the extreme to be singing in a put-together group like this. But in fact the young tenor had an exceptional voice and he was matched by the playing of the other two. Solinghi di Senzio was immensely pleased with their effect on business over the past week.

The truth was, he would have given them employment and a room upstairs if they had made music like boarhounds
in lust. Solinghi had been a friend of the dark-haired man who was now calling himself Adreano d’Astibar for almost ten years. A friend, and more than that; as it happened, almost half the patrons of the inn this spring were men who had come to Senzio expressly to meet the three musicians here. Solinghi kept his mouth shut, poured wine and beer, supervised his cooks and serving-girls, and prayed to Eanna of the Lights every night before he went to sleep that Alessan knew what he was doing.