Tigana (84 page)

Every time a messenger arrived from back in Astibar something in him leaped with hope. If the Emperor had died …

If the Emperor had died he and his men were gone. Away from this blighted peninsula, home to claim an Emperor’s Tiara in Barbadior.
That
was his war, the one he wanted to fight. The one that mattered, the only thing that had really mattered all these years. He would sail home with three armies and wrest the Tiara from the court favourites hovering there like so many ineffectual, fluttering moths.

And after
that
he could make war back here, with all the gathered might of Barbadior. Then let Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, whatever he chose to name himself,
then
let him try to stand before Alberico, Emperor of Barbadior.

Gods, the sweetness of it …

But no such message came from the east, no such glittering reprieve. And so the bald reality was that he found himself camped with his mercenaries here on the border between Ferraut and Senzio, preparing to face the armies of Ygrath and the Western Palm, knowing that the eyes of the entire world would be upon them now. If he lost, he lost everything. If he won … well that depended on the cost. If
too many of his men died here, what kind of an army would he have to lead home?

And too many men dying was a vivid prospect now. Ever since what had happened in the harbour of Chiara. Most of the Ygrathen army had indeed sailed home, exactly as anticipated, leaving Brandin crippled and exposed. Which is why Alberico had moved, why the three companies were here and he with them. The flow and shape of events had seemed to be on their side, in the clearest possible way.

Then the Certandan woman had fished a ring from the water for Brandin.

She haunted his dreams, that never-seen woman. Three times now she’d surfaced like a nightmare in his life. Back when Brandin had first claimed her for his saishan she had nearly drawn him into an insane war. Siferval had wanted to fight, Alberico remembered. The Third Company captain had proposed storming across the border into Lower Corte and sacking Stevanien itself.

Gods. Alberico shuddered even now, long years after, at the thought of such a war far to the west against the Ygrathens in all their power. He had swallowed his bile and absorbed all the mocking jibes Brandin sent east. Even then, long ago, he had preserved his discipline, kept his eyes on the real prize back home.

But he might have had the Peninsula of the Palm without effort this spring, a pure gift fallen from the sky, if that same Dianora di Certando had not saved the Ygrathen’s life two months ago. It had been there for him, gently floating down: with Brandin assassinated the Ygrathens would have all sailed home and the western provinces would have lain open before him like so much ripe fruit.

Quileia’s crippled King would have hobbled across the mountains to abase himself before Alberico,
begging
for the trade he needed. No elaborate letters then about fearing
the mighty power of Ygrath. It would all have been so easy, so … elegant.

But it was not so, because of the woman. The woman from one of his own provinces. The irony was coruscating, it was like acid in his soul. Certando was
his
and Dianora di Certando was the only reason Brandin was alive.

And now—her third time in his life—she was the only reason there was an army from the west, a flotilla anchored in the Bay of Farsaro, waiting for Alberico to make the slightest move.

‘They are fewer than us,’ his spies reported daily. ‘And not as well armed.’

Fewer
, the three captains echoed each other in mindless litany.
Not as well armed
, they gibbered.
We must move
, they chorused, their imbecilic faces looming in his dreams, set close together, hanging like lurid moons too near the earth.

Anghiar, his emissary in the Governor’s Castle at Senzio, sent word that Casalia still favoured them; that the Governor realized that Brandin was not as strong as they. That he had been persuaded to see the virtue of tilting even further towards Barbadior. The emissary from the Western Palm, one of the few Ygrathens who had decided to stay with Brandin, was having a more difficult time each passing day gaining audience with the Governor, but Anghiar dined with plump, sybaritic Casalia almost every night.

So now even Anghiar, who had grown lazy and self-indulgent, morally corrupt as any Senzian during his years there, was saying the same thing as all the others:
Senzio is a vineyard ripe for harvesting. Come!

Ripe for harvesting? Didn’t they understand? Didn’t any of them realize that there was
sorcery
to reckon with?

He
knew
how strong Brandin was; he had probed and backed quickly away from the Ygrathen’s power in the year they had both come here, and that had been when he himself
was in his prime. Not hollow and weakened, with a bad foot and a drooping eye after almost being killed in that cursed Sandreni lodge last year. He was not the
same
any more; he knew it, if none of the others did. If he went to war it had to be a decision made in the light of that. His military edge had to be enough to offset the Ygrathen’s sorcery. He needed to be
certain
. Surely any man not a fool could see that that had nothing to do with cowardice! Only with a careful measuring of gains and losses, risks and opportunities.

In his dreams in his tent on the border he thrust the vacuous moon faces of his captains back up into the sky, and under five moons, not two, he slowly dismembered and defiled the staked-out body of the woman from Certando.

Then the mornings would come. Digesting messages like rancid food, he would begin to wrestle again, endlessly, with the other thing that was nagging him this season like an infected wound.

Something felt wrong. Entirely wrong. There was an aspect about this whole chain of events—from the autumn onwards—that jarred within him like a jangling, dissonant chord.

Here on the border with his army all around him he was supposed to feel as if
he
were calling the measure of the dance. Forcing Brandin and the entire Palm to respond to his tune. Seizing control again after a winter of being impacted upon in all those trivial, disconcerting, cumulative ways. Shaping events so that Quileia would have no choice but to seek him out, so that back home in the Empire they could not mistake his power, the vigour of his will, the glory of his conquests.

That was how he was
supposed
to feel. How he had indeed briefly felt the morning he’d heard that Brandin had abdicated in Ygrath. When he’d ordered his three armies north to the border of Senzio.

But something had changed since that day and it was more than just the presence of opposition now waiting in the
Bay of Farsaro. There was something else, something so vague and undefined he couldn’t even talk about it—even if he’d had anyone to talk to—couldn’t even pin it down, but it was there, nagging at him like an old wound in rain.

Alberico of Barbadior had not got to where he was, achieved this power base from which a thrust for the Tiara was imminent, without subtlety and thoughtfulness, without learning to trust his instincts.

And his instincts told him, here on the border, with his captains and his spies and his emissary in Senzio literally begging him to march, that something was wrong.

That he was
not
calling the tune. Someone else was. Somehow, someone else was guiding the dangerous steps of this dance. He had truly no idea who it could be, but the feeling was there each morning when he woke and it would not be shaken off. Neither would it come clear for him under the spring sun, in that border meadow bright with the banners of Barbadior, with irises and asphodels, and fragrant with the scent of the surrounding pines.

So he waited, praying to his gods for word of a death back home, agonizingly aware that the world might soon be laughing at him if he drew back, knowing, as spies kept hastening south in relays, that Brandin was getting stronger in Farsaro every day, but held there on the border by his craftiness, his instinct for survival, by that ache of doubt. Waiting for something to come clear.

Refusing, as the days slipped past, to dance to what might be someone else’s tune, however seductively the hidden pipes might play.

She was numbingly afraid. This was worse, infinitely worse than the bridge in Tregea. There she had embraced and accepted danger because there was more than a hope of
surviving the leap. It had been only water down below, however frigid it might be, and there had been friends waiting in the darkness around the bend to claim her from the river and chafe her back to life.

Tonight was different. Catriana realized with dismay that her hands were shaking. She stopped in the shadows of a lane to try to steady herself.

She reached up nervously to adjust her hair under the dark hood, fingering the jewelled black comb she’d set in it. On the ship coming here Alais, who had said she was used to doing so for her sisters, had evened and shaped her original swift cropping on the floor of the shop in Tregea. Catriana knew her appearance was perfectly acceptable now—more than that, actually, if the reactions of men in Senzio these past days meant anything.

And they had to mean something. For that was what had brought her out here in the darkness alone, pressed against a rough stone wall in a lane, waiting now for a noisy swarm of revellers to pass by in the street before her. This was a better part of town, so near the castle, but there was no truly safe quarter of Senzio for a woman alone in the streets at night.

She wasn’t out here for safety though, which is why none of the others knew where she was. They would never have let her come. Nor would she, being honest with herself, have knowingly let any of them undertake anything like this.

This was death. She was under no illusions.

All afternoon, walking through the market with Devin and Rovigo and Alais, she had been shaping this plan and remembering her mother. That single candle always lit at sunset on the first of the Ember Days. Devin’s father had done the same thing, she remembered him saying. Pride, he’d thought it was: withholding something from the Triad because of what they had allowed to happen. Her mother wasn’t a proud woman, but neither had she permitted herself to forget.

Tonight Catriana saw herself as being like one of her mother’s forbidden candles on those Ember Nights while all the rest of the world lay shrouded in darkness. She was a small flame, exactly like those candles; one that would not last the night, but one that, if the Triad had any love at all for her, might shape a conflagration before she went out.

The drunken revellers finally staggered by, heading in the direction of the harbour taverns. She waited another moment and then, muffled in her hood, went quickly into the street, keeping to the side of it and started the other way. Towards the castle.

It would be much better, she thought, if she could somehow make her hands be still and slow her racing heart. She should have had a glass of wine back at Solinghi’s before slipping away, using the outside back stairs so that none of the others would see her. She’d sent Alais down to dinner alone, pleading a woman’s illness, promising to follow soon if she could.

She had lied so easily, had even managed a reassuring smile. Then Alais was gone and she was alone, realizing in that precise instant, as the room door gently closed, that she would never see any of the others again.

In the street she shut her eyes, feeling suddenly unsteady; she put her hand on a shop-front for support, drawing deep breaths of the night air. There were tainflowers not far away, and the unmistakable fragrance of sejoia trees. She was near to the castle gardens then. She bit her lips, to force colour into them. Overhead the stars were bright and close. Vidomni was already risen in the east, with blue Ilarion to follow soon. She heard a sudden peal of laughter from the next street over. A woman’s laughter followed by shouting. The voice of a man. More laughter.

They were going the other way. As she looked up a star fell in the sky. Following its track to her left she saw the
garden wall of the castle. The entrance would be further around that way. Entrances and endings, faced alone. But she had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends. Devin and Alais only the latest of those who had tried. There had been others back home in the village before she left. She knew her mother had grieved for her proud solitude.

Pride. Again.

Her father had fled Tigana before the battles at the river
.

There it was. There it was.

Carefully she drew back her hood. With real gratitude she discovered that her hands were steady now. She checked her earrings, the silver band about her throat, the jewelled ornament in her hair. Then she drew on to her hand the red glove she’d bought in the market that afternoon and she walked across the street and around the corner of the garden wall into the blaze of light at the entrance to the Governor’s Castle of Senzio.