Tigana (24 page)

Unless,
said the quiet voice of her heart, unless the morning might yet come when she could find a way to do a thing here on the Island that would still, despite all that had happened—despite the intertwining of limbs at night and the sound of her own voice crying aloud in need assuaged—bring back another sound into the world. Into the voices of men and women and children all over the Palm, and south over the mountains in Quileia, and north and west and east beyond all the seas.

The sound of the name of Tigana, gone. Gone, but not, if the goddesses and the god were kind—if there was any love left in them, or pity—not forever forgotten or forever lost.

And perhaps—and this was Dianora’s dream on the nights she slept alone, after Scelto had massaged and oiled her skin and had gone away with his candle to sleep outside her door—perhaps it would come to pass if she could indeed find a way to do this thing, that her brother, far from home, would miraculously hear the name of Tigana spoken by a stranger in
a world of strangers, in some distant royal court or bazaar, and somehow he would know, in a rush of wonder and joy, in the deep core of the heart she knew so well, that it was through her doing that the name was in the world again.

She would be dead by then. She had no doubts as to that. Brandin’s hate in this one thing—in the matter of his vengeance for Stevan—was fixed and unalterable. It was the one set star in the firmament of all the lands he ruled.

She would be dead, but it would be all right, for Tigana’s name would be restored, and her brother would be alive and would know it had been her, and Brandin … Brandin would understand that she had found a way to do this thing while sparing his life on all the nights, the numberless nights, when she could have slain him while he slept by her side after love.

This was Dianora’s dream. She used to be driven awake, tears cold on her cheeks, by the intensity of the feelings it engendered. No one ever saw those tears but Scelto though, and Scelto she trusted more than anyone alive.

She heard his quick light footsteps at the doorway and then briskly crossing the floor towards her balcony. No one else in the saishan moved like Scelto. The castrates were notoriously prone to lassitude and to eating too much—the obvious substitutions for pleasure. Not Scelto, though. Slim as he’d been when she met him, he still sought out those errands the other castrates strove to avoid: trips up into the steep streets of the old town, or even farther north into the hills or partway up Sangarios itself in search of healing herbs or leaves or simply meadow flowers for her room.

He seemed ageless, but he hadn’t been young when Vencel assigned him to Dianora and she guessed that he must be sixty now. If Vencel ever died—a hard thing to imagine, in fact—Scelto was certainly next in line to succeed him as head of the saishan.

They had never spoken about it, but Dianora knew, as surely as she knew anything, that he would refuse the position if it were offered to him, in order to remain bound to her. She also knew—and this was the thing that touched her—that this would be true even if Brandin stopped sending for her entirely and she became merely another ageing ignored item of history in the saishan wing.

And this was the second thing she’d never expected to find when hate had carried her through autumn seas to Chiara on the Tribute Ship: kindness and caring and a friend behind the high walls and ornate screens of the place where women waited among men who had lost their manhood.

Scelto’s tread, rapid even after the long climb up the Great Staircase and then another flight up to the saishan, clicked across the mosaics of the balcony floor behind her. She heard him murmur kindly to the boy and dismiss him.

He took another step forward and coughed once, to announce himself.

‘Is it terribly hideous?’ she asked without turning around.

‘It will do,’ Scelto said, coming to stand beside her. She looked over, smiling to see his close-cropped grey hair, the thin, precise mouth, and the terribly broken hook of his nose. Ages ago, he’d said when she’d asked. A fight over a woman back in Ygrath. He’d killed the other man, who happened to be a noble. Which unfortunate fact had cost Scelto his sex and his liberty and brought him here. Dianora had been more disturbed by the story than he seemed to be. On the other hand, she remembered thinking, it had been new to her, while for him it was only the familiar coinage of his life, from a long time past.

He held up the dark red gown they’d had made in the old town. From his smile which matched her own Dianora knew it had been worth cajoling Vencel for the funds to have this done. The head of the saishan would want a favour later, he
always did, but through such exchanges was the saishan run, and Dianora, looking at the gown, had no regrets.

‘What is Solores wearing?’ she asked.

‘Hala wouldn’t tell me,’ Scelto murmured regretfully.

Dianora laughed aloud at the straight face he managed to maintain. ‘I’m quite sure he wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘What is she wearing?’

‘Green,’ he said promptly. ‘High waisted, high neck. Two shades in pleats below the waist. Gold sandals. A great deal of gold everywhere else. Her hair will be up, of course. She has new ear rings.’

Dianora laughed again. Scelto allowed himself a tiny smile of satisfaction. ‘I took the liberty,’ he added, ‘of purchasing something else while I was in town.’

He reached into a fold of his tunic and handed her a small box. She opened it and wordlessly held up the gem inside. In the bright morning light of the balcony it dazzled and shone like a third red moon to join Vidomni and blue Ilarion.

Scelto said, ‘I thought it would be better with the gown than anything Vencel would offer you from the saishan jewels.’

She shook her head wonderingly. ‘It is beautiful, Scelto. Can we afford this? Will I have to go without chocolate for all of the spring and summer?’

‘Not a bad idea,’ he said, ignoring her first question. ‘You ate two pieces this morning while I was gone.’

‘Scelto!’ she exclaimed. ‘Stop that! Go spy on Solores and see what she’s spending her chiaros on. I have my habits and my pleasures, and none of them, so far as I can see, are particularly evil. Do I look fat to you?’

Almost reluctantly he shook his head. ‘I have no idea why not,’ he murmured ruefully.

‘Well you keep thinking about it till you figure it out,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘In the meantime, that
reminds me—the boy this morning was fine, except that the khav was very weak. Will you speak to him about how I like it?’

‘I did. I told him to make it a little weak.’

‘You
what?
Scelto, I absolutely—’

‘You always begin drinking more khav at the end of winter, when the weather begins to turn, and every spring you always have trouble sleeping at night. You know this is true, my lady. Either fewer cups or weaker khav. It is my duty to try to keep you rested and tranquil.’

Dianora was speechless for a second. ‘Tranquil!’ she finally managed to exclaim. ‘I might have frightened that poor child to the tips of his fingernails. I would have felt
terrible!
’

‘I had told him what to say,’ Scelto said placidly. ‘He would have blamed it on me.’

‘Oh, really. And what if I’d reported it directly to Vencel, instead?’ Dianora retorted. ‘Scelto, he would have had that boy starved and lashed.’

Scelto’s dignified little sniff conveyed quite clearly what he thought about the likelihood of her having done any such thing.

His expression was so wryly knowing that, against her will, Dianora found herself laughing again. ‘Very well,’ she said, surrendering. ‘Then let it be fewer cups, because I do like it strong, Scelto. It isn’t worth the drinking otherwise. Besides, I don’t think that’s why I can’t sleep at night. This season simply makes me restless.’

‘You were taken as Tribute in the spring,’ he murmured. ‘Everyone in the saishan is restless in the season they were taken.’ He hesitated. ‘I can’t do anything about that, my lady. But I thought perhaps the khav might be making it worse.’ There was concern and affection in his brown eyes, almost as dark as her own.

‘You worry too much about me,’ she said after a moment.

He smiled. ‘Who else should I worry about?’

There was a little silence; Dianora could hear the noises from far below in the square.

‘Speaking of worrying,’ said Scelto in a transparent effort to change the mood, ‘we may be concentrating too much on what Solores is doing. We may want to start keeping an eye on the young one with the green eyes.’

‘lassica?’ Dianora said, surprised. ‘Whatever for? Brandin hasn’t even called her to him and she’s been here a month already.’

‘Exactly,’ said Scelto. He paused, somewhat awkwardly, which piqued her curiosity.

‘What are you saying, Scelto?’

‘I, um, have been told by Tesios who has been looking after her that he has never seen or heard of a woman in the saishan with such … control of her body or such … capacity for the climax of love.’

He was blushing furiously, which made Dianora abruptly self-conscious too. It was a standard practice—with some quite unstandard variations—for the women of the saishan to use their castrates to give them physical release if too much time went by between summonses to the other wing.

Dianora had never asked Scelto for such a service. Something about the very idea disturbed her: it seemed an abuse, in a way she couldn’t articulate. He had been a man, she reminded herself frequently, who had killed someone for love of a woman. Their relationship, close as it was, had never entered that dimension. It was strange, she thought, even amusing, how shy they could both become at the very mention of the subject—and Triad knew it came up often enough in the hothouse atmosphere of the saishan.

She turned back to the railing, looking down through the screen, to give him time to regain his composure. Thinking about what he’d said though, she found herself feeling a
certain amusement after all. She was already working out how and when to tell Brandin about this.

‘My friend,’ she said, ‘you may know me well, but in exactly the same way and for many of the same reasons I know Brandin very well.’

She glanced back at her castrate. ‘He is older than you, Scelto—he is almost sixty-five—and for reasons I don’t entirely understand he has said he must live here in the Palm another sixty years or so. All the sorcery in the world would surely not avail him to prolong his life that long if Iassica is as … exceptional as Tesios suggests. She would wear him out, however pleasantly, in a year or two.’

Scelto blushed again, and glanced quickly back over his shoulder. They were quite alone though. Dianora laughed, partly out of genuine amusement, but more specifically to mask the recurring sorrow she felt whenever this one lie had to be told: the thing she still kept from Scelto. The one secret that mattered.

Of
course
she knew why Brandin needed to stay here in the Palm, why he needed to use his sorcery to prolong his life here in what was surely a place of exile for him in a land of grief.

He had to wait for everyone born in Tigana to die.

Only then could he leave the peninsula where his son had been slain. Only then would the full measure of the vengeance he had decreed be poured out on the bloodied ground. For no one would be left alive in the world who had any true memory of Tigana before the fall, of Avalle of the Towers, the songs and the stories and the legends, all the long, bright history.

It would truly be gone then. Wiped out. Seventy or eighty years wreaking as comprehensive an obliteration as millennia had on the ancient civilizations no one could now recall. Whole cultures that were now only an awkwardly
pronounced name of a place, or a deciphered, pompous title—Emperor of All the Earth—on a broken pottery shard.

Brandin could go home after sixty years. He could do whatever he chose. By then she would be long dead and so too would be those from Tigana even younger than her, those born up to the very year of the conquest—the last inheritors.

The last children who could hear and read the name of the land that had been their own. Eighty years, Brandin was giving himself. More than enough, given lifespans in the Palm.

Eighty years to oblivion. To the broken, meaningless pottery shard. The books were gone already, and the paintings, tapestries, sculptures, music: torn or smashed or burned in the terrible year after Valentin’s fall when Brandin had come down upon them in the agony of a father’s loss, bringing them the reciprocal agony of a conqueror’s hate.

The worst year of Dianora’s life. Seeing so much of beauty and splendour crumble to rubble and dust or burn down to ashes of loss. She’d been fifteen, then sixteen. Still too young to comprehend the full reality of what was being eradicated. For her father’s death and the destruction of his art—the works of his hands and days—she could mourn bitterly. And so too for the deaths of friends and the sudden terrors of an occupied impoverished city. The larger losses, the implications for the future, she couldn’t really grasp back then.

Many in the city had gone mad that year.

Others had fled, taking their children away to try to shape a life far from the burning, of the memory of burning, of hammers smashing into the statues of the Princes in the long covered loggia of the Palace by the Sea. Some had withdrawn so far into themselves—a madness of another kind—that only the merest spark was left within to make them eat and sleep and somehow walk through the waste spaces of their days.

Her mother had been one of those.

On the balcony in Chiara so many years later, Dianora looked up at Scelto and realized, from the blinking concern in his face, that she’d been silent for too long.

She forced a smile. She’d been here for a long time; she was good at dissembling. At smiling when it was needful. Even with Scelto whom she hated to deceive. And especially with Brandin, whom she had to deceive, or die.

‘Iassica is not a concern,’ she said mildly, resuming the conversation as if nothing had happened. Indeed, nothing
had
happened—only old memories come back. Nothing of weight or import in the world, nothing that mattered or could matter. Only loss.