Tigana (27 page)

What she learned from the merchants was that no one from Lower Corte was allowed to dine there. Traders from Corte were cordially greeted, as were those from farther afield, in Asoli or Chiara itself. Any Ygrathen, naturally, soldier, merchant or whoever he might be—come to seek his fortune in the newest colony—was graciously ushered in to salute the portrait of Queen Dorotea that hung on the wall opposite the door. Even those merchants crossing the line that divided the Eastern Palm from the West were more than welcome to leave some of whatever currency they carried in The Queen.

It was only the King’s true enemies, the denizens of Lower Corte, of Stevanien itself, who were forbidden to stain or sully the ambience with their pustulent, heir-murdering presence.

They never did, Dianora learned from a Ferraut trader bound back north and east with leather from Stevanien that he expected to sell at a profit, even with that year’s tariff levels. What the inhabitants of Stevanien had done in response to the ban was simply refuse to work for the new establishment. Not as servers or kitchen help or stable hands, nor even as musicians or artisans to help decorate and maintain the splendid rooms.

The Governor, when he learned what was happening, had vowed in red-faced rage to force the contemptible inhabitants to work wherever they were required by their masters of Ygrath. Force them with dungeon and lash and a death-wheel or three if needed.

The master chef, Arduini, had demurred.

One did not, Arduini had said, in a much-quoted display of artistic temperament, build up and maintain an establishment of quality by using enforced, surly labour. His standards were simply too high for that. Even the stable-boys at
his
restaurant, said Arduini of Ygrath, were to be trained and willing, and to have a certain
style
to them.

There had been widespread hilarity when that was reported: stylish stable-hands, indeed. But, Dianora learned, the amusement had turned to respect quite soon, because Arduini, pretentious or not, did know what he was doing. The Queen, the Ferraut trader told her, was like an oasis amid the deserts of Khardhun. In dispirited, broken Stevanien it cast a warm glow of Ygrathen civility and grace. The merchant lamented, though discreetly on this side of the border, the complete absence of any such traits in the Barbadians who had occupied his own province.

But yes, he said, in response to Dianora’s apparently casual question, Arduini was still struggling with staff problems. Stevanien was a backwater, and a backwater, moreover, in the most oppressively taxed, and militarily subjugated province in the Palm. It was next to impossible to get people to travel there, or stay, and since none of the trickle of adventurers from Ygrath had come so far from home to wash dishes or clear tables or tend to a stable—however stylish a stable it might be—there appeared to be a chronic need for workers from elsewhere in the Palm.

In that moment Dianora had changed every plan she had. She cast the line of her life, with a silent prayer to
Adaon, in the direction of this chance information. She had been intending, with some real apprehension, to go northwest to Corte. That had always been the next-to-last destination in her plans. She had seriously wondered, almost every night as she lay awake, whether three years in Certando would be enough to shake off anyone pursuing the true history of her life. She’d had no good ideas about what else she could do, though.

Now she did.

And so it was that a few nights later, in the largest of the taverns in Fort Sinave, a cheerful crowd of young people watched their new friend drink more than was good for her for the first time since she’d arrived. More than one of the men saw cause for cautious optimism in that, with respect to possibilities later in the evening.

‘You’ve settled it then!’ Dianora cried in her attractive, south-country voice. She leaned for support against the shoulder of a bemused cartwright. ‘Hand to the new plough for me tomorrow. I’m over the border as soon as I can to visit The Queen of Ygrath! Triad bless her days!’

Triad shelter and hold my soul,
she was thinking as she spoke, absolutely sober, cold to her bones with the sense of the words she was so glibly shouting.

They silenced her, laughing uproariously—in part to cover her words. In Barbadian Certando it was a long way from the path of wisdom to thus salute Ygrath’s Queen. Dianora giggled quite endearingly but she subsided. The cartwright and another man tried to see her up to her room afterwards, but found themselves charmingly put off and drinking together amid off-duty mercenaries in the one all-night tavern Fort Sinave possessed.

She was just a little too untutored, too
country,
to succeed in her ambitious hopes, they agreed sagely. They also agreed, a few drinks later, that she had the most
extraordinarily appealing smile. Something about her eyes, what happened to them when she was pleased.

In the morning Dianora was dressed and packed and waiting very early at the main gate of the fort. She struck a bargain for passage to Stevanien with a pleasant-enough middle-aged merchant from Senzio carrying Barbadian spices for the luxury trade. His only reason for going to dreary, flattened Stevanien, she learned as they started west, was the new restaurant, The Queen. She took that coincidence as a good omen, closing the fingers of her left hand over the thumb three times to make the wish come true.

The roads were better than she remembered; certainly the merchants travelling them seemed to feel safer. Rolling along in the cart, she asked the Senzian about it. He grinned sardonically.

‘The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.’ He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. ‘Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.’

Not long after that she saw evidence of what he was talking about: they passed two death-wheels beside the roadway, the bodies of would-be thieves spreadeagled upon them, spiralling lazily in the sun, severed hands rotting in their mouths. The smell was very bad.

The Senzian stopped just across the border to do some dealing in the fort at Forese. He also paid his transit duties there scrupulously, waiting patiently in line to have his cart examined and levied. The death-wheels, he pointed out to her after, in the acerbic Senzian manner, were not reserved for highway thieves and captured wizards.

Thus delayed, they spent the night at a coach-house on the well-travelled road, joining a party of Ferraut traders for
dinner. Dianora excused herself early and went to bed. She’d paid for a room alone and took the precaution of pushing an oak dresser in front of her door. Nothing disturbed her though, except her dreams. She was back in Tigana and yet she wasn’t, because it wasn’t there. She whispered the name to herself like a talisman or a prayer before falling into a restless sleep shot through with images of destruction from the burning year.

They spent the second night at another inn beside the river, just outside the walls of Stevanien, having arrived after sundown curfew closed the city gates. They ate alone this time, and she talked to the Senzian until late. He was decent and sober, belying the clichés about his decadent province, and it was clear that he liked her. She enjoyed his company, and she was even attracted to his dry, witty manner. She went to bed alone though. This was not the village in Certando: she had no obligations.

Or not those kinds of obligations. And as for pleasure, or the ordinary needs of human interaction … she would have been honestly uncomprehending if anyone had mentioned them to her.

She was nineteen years old and in Tigana that-had-been.

In the morning, just inside the city walls, she bade farewell to the Senzian, touching palm to palm only briefly. He seemed somewhat affected by the night before but she turned and walked away before he could find whatever words his eyes were reaching for.

She found a hostelry not far away, one where her family had never stayed. She wasn’t really worried about being recognized though; she knew how much she had changed and how many girls named Dianora there were scattered across the Palm. She paid in advance for three nights’ lodging and left her belongings there.

Then she walked out into the streets of what had been Avalle of the Towers not very long ago. Avalle, on the green
banks of the Sperion just before the river turned west to find the sea. There was an ache building in her as she went, and what hurt most of all, she found, was how much the same a place could be after everything had changed.

She went through the leather district and the wool district. She could remember skipping along beside her mother when they had all come inland to Avalle to see one of her father’s sculptures ceremoniously placed in some square or loggia. She even recognized the tiny shop where she’d purchased her first grey leather gloves, with coins hoarded from her naming day in the summer for just such a thing.

Grey was a colour for grown young women, not for little girls, the red-bearded artisan had teased.
I know,
six-year-old Dianora had said proudly that autumn long ago. Her mother had laughed. Once upon a time her mother had been a woman who laughed. Dianora could remember.

In the wool quarter she saw women and girls working tirelessly, carding and spinning as they had for centuries in doorways open to the early-summer early-morning light. Over by the river she could see and smell the dyeing sheds and yards.

When Quileia beyond the mountains to the south had folded inward upon its matriarchy, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, Avalle had lost a great deal. More perhaps than any other city in the Palm. Once poised directly on one of the two main trade routes through the mountains, it had found itself in danger of sudden inconsequentiality. With a collective ingenuity bordering on genius the city had decisively shifted its orientation and focus.

Within a generation that city of banking and trade to north and south had become the principal centre in all of the Palm for works in leather and for sumptuously dyed wool.

Hardly missing a beat, Avalle pursued its new prosperity and its pride. And the towers kept rising.

With a catch to her heart Dianora finally acknowledged that she had been carefully working her way around the edges of Stevanien, the outlying districts, the artisans’ quarters, looking outwards only and into doorways. Not into the centre, up towards the hill. Where the towers were gone.

And so, realizing that, she did look, standing stock still in the middle of a wide square at the bottom of the street of the Woolguild. There was a small, very beautiful temple of Morian fronting the square, done in marble of a muted rose colour. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up and beyond.

And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.

The wide beautiful streets seemed even wider than before. But that was because they were almost empty. There was a muted swell of noise over to her left where the riverside market still was, but the sound was not a fraction, her memory told her, not a fraction of what it had been in mornings that were lost.

There were too few people. Too many were gone, or dead, and the Ygrathen soldiers were all the more visible because of how empty the streets were. Dianora let her gaze travel past the temple up the line of the broad boulevard beside it towards the heart of the city.

We can and we will build wide and straight,
the people of Avalle had said; even in the very beginning, when towns everywhere else were tortuous warrens of twisty alleys and crooked lanes easy to defend.
There will be no city like ours in all the world, and if need comes for defence we will defend ourselves from our towers.

Which were gone. The squat ugly skyline jarred Dianora with a painful discontinuity. It was as if the eye was tricked, looking ceaselessly for something it
knew
had to be there.

From the earliest days of that broad, elegant city on the banks of the Sperion towers had been associated with Avalle. Assertions of Tiganese pride—sheer arrogance they called it in the provinces of Corte and Chiara and Astibar. They were symbols of internecine rivalry as well—as each noble family or wealthy guild of bankers or traders or artisans thrust its own tower as high as and then higher than they could truly afford. Graceful or warlike, red stone or sandy or grey, the towers of Avalle pushed up towards Eanna’s heaven like a forest within the city walls.

The domestic conflicts had actually become dangerous for a time, with murder and sabotage not nearly uncommon enough, and the best masons and architects claiming stupefying fees. It had been the third Prince Alessan in Tigana by the sea who had put an end to the insanity in the simplest possible way more than two hundred years ago.

He commissioned Orsaria, the most celebrated of the architects, to build for him a palace in Avalle. And that palace was to have a tower, said Prince Alessan, that would be—and would remain, by force of law—the highest in the city.

So it had been. The spire of the Prince’s Tower, slender and graceful, wrapped in bands of green and white to serve as a memory of the sea this far inland, put an end to the competition for the summit of Avalle. And from then on also, by that Prince Alessan’s example which became custom and then tradition, the princes and princesses of Tigana were born in Avalle, in the palace beneath that spire, to mark them as belonging to both of the cities: to Tigana of the Waves and Avalle of the Towers.

There had been over seventy towers once, Dianora knew, crowned in glory by that green and white pre-eminence. Once?
Four years ago.

What, Dianora thought, her vision hurting for that absence, is a person who moves through her days as she has always moved, who speaks and walks and labours, eats, makes love, sleeps, sometimes even finds access to laughter, but whose heart has been cut out from her living body? Leaving no scar at all to be seen. No wound by which to remember the sliding blade.