Tigana (68 page)

As he spoke those last words, Alessan held up his left palm with two fingers curled down. Danoleon looked quickly at Erlein, and then back to the Prince. He had grown pale, and Devin was suddenly made aware that the High Priest was a very old man.

‘Eanna guard us all,’ Torre whispered from behind them.

Alessan looked pointedly around at the open archways to the porches. ‘This particular patient is near death then, I take it?’

Danoleon’s gaze, Devin thought, seemed to be devouring Alessan. There was an almost palpable hunger in it, the need of a starving man. ‘I’m afraid she is,’ he said, keeping his tone steady only with an obvious effort. ‘I have given her my own chamber that she might be able hear the prayers in the temple. The infirmary and her own rooms are both too far away.’

Alessan nodded his head. He seemed to have himself on a tightly held leash, his movements and his words rigidly controlled. He lifted the Tregean pipes in their brown leather sheath and looked down at them.

‘Then perhaps we should go in and make music for her. It sounds as if the afternoon prayers are done.’

They were. The chanting had stopped. In the fields behind the house the boys of the outer school were still running and laughing in the sunlight. Devin could hear them through the open doorways. He hesitated, unsure of himself, then coughed awkwardly and said: ‘Perhaps you might like to play alone for her? The pipes are soothing, they may help her fall asleep.’

Danoleon was nodding his head in anxious agreement, but Alessan turned back to look at Devin, and then at Erlein. His expression was veiled, unreadable.

‘What?’ he said at length. ‘Would you abandon me so soon after our company is formed?’ And then, more softly: ‘There will be nothing said that you cannot know, and some things, perhaps, that you should hear.’

‘But she is dying,’ Devin protested, feeling something wrong here, something out of balance. ‘She is dying and she is—’ He stopped himself.

Alessan’s eyes were so strange.

‘She is dying and she is my mother,’ he whispered. ‘I know. That is why I want you there. There seems to be some news, as well. We had better hear it.’

He turned and walked towards the bedroom door. Danoleon was standing just before it. Alessan stopped before the High Priest and they looked at each other. The Prince whispered something Devin could not hear; he leaned forward and kissed the old man on the cheek.

Then he went past him. At the door he paused for a moment and drew a long steadying breath. He lifted a hand as if to run it through his hair but stopped himself. A queer smile crossed his face as if chasing a memory.

‘A bad habit, that,’ he murmured, to no one in particular. Then he opened the door and went in and they followed him.

The High Priest’s bedchamber was almost as large as the sitting-room in the front, but its furnishings were starkly simple. Two armchairs, a pair of rustic, worn carpets, a washstand, a writing desk, a trunk for storage, a small privy set apart in the southeastern corner. There was a fireplace in the northern wall, twin to the one in the front room, sharing the same chimney. This side was lit, despite the mildness of the day, and so the room was warmer though both windows were open, curtains drawn back to admit some slanting light from under the eaves of the porticoes to the west.

The bed on the back wall under the silver star of Eanna was large, for Danoleon was a big man, but it too was simple and unadorned. No canopy, plain pinewood posts in the four corners, and a pine headboard.

It was also empty.

Devin, nervously following Alessan and the High Priest through the door, had expected to see a dying woman there. He looked, more than a little embarrassed, towards the door of the privy. And almost jumped with shock when a voice spoke from the shadows by the fire, where the light from the windows did not fall.

‘Who are these strangers?’

Alessan himself had turned unerringly towards the fire the moment he entered the room—guided by what sense, Devin never knew—and so he appeared controlled and unsurprised when that cold voice spoke. Or when a woman moved forward from the shadows to stand by one of the armchairs, and then sit down upon it, her back very straight, her head held high looking at him. At all of them.

Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi, wife to Valentin the Prince. She must have been a woman of unsurpassed beauty in her youth, for that beauty still showed, even here, even now, at the threshold of the last portal of Morian. She was tall and very thin, though part of that, clearly, was due to the illness wasting her from within. It showed in her face, which was pale almost to translucence, the cheekbones thrust into too-sharp relief. Her robe had a high, stiff collar which covered her throat; the robe itself was crimson, accentuating her unnatural, other-worldly pallor—it was as if, Devin thought, she had already crossed to Morian and was looking back at them from a farther shore.

But there were golden rings, very much of this world, on her long fingers, and one dazzling blue gem gleamed from a necklace that hung down over her robe. Her hair was
gathered and bound up in a black net, a style long out of fashion in the Palm. Devin knew with absolute certainty that current fashion would mean nothing, less than nothing, to this woman. Her eyes looked at him just then with swift, unsettling appraisal, before moving on to Erlein, and then resting, finally, upon her son.

The son she had not seen since he was fourteen years old.

Her eyes were grey like Alessan’s, but they were harder than his, glittering and cold, hiding their depths, as if some semi-precious stone had been caught and set just below the surface. They glinted, fierce and challenging, in the light of the room, and just before she spoke again—not even waiting for an answer to her first question—Devin realized that what they were seeing in those eyes was rage.

It was in the arrogant face, in the high carriage and the fingers that held hard to the arms of her chair. An inner fire of anger that had passed, long ago, beyond the realm of words or any other form of expression. She was dying, and in hiding, while the man who had killed her husband ruled her land. It was there, it was all there, for anyone who knew but half the tale.

Devin swallowed and fought an urge to draw back towards the door, out of range. A moment later he realized that he needn’t bother; as far as the woman in the chair was concerned he was a cipher, a nothing. He wasn’t even there. Her question had not been meant to be answered; she didn’t really care who they were. She had someone else to deal with.

For a long time, a sequence of moments that seemed to hang forever in the silence, she looked Alessan up and down without speaking, her white, imperious features quite unreadable. At last, slowly shaking her head, she said: ‘Your father was such a handsome man.’

Devin flinched at the words and the tone, but Alessan seemed scarcely to react at all. He nodded in calm agreement.
‘I know he was. I remember. And so were my brothers.’ He smiled, a small, ironic smile. ‘The strain must have run out just before it got to me.’

His voice was mild, but when he finished he glanced sharply at Danoleon, and the High Priest read a message there. He, in turn, murmured something to Torre who quickly left the room.

To stand guard in front, Devin realized, feeling a chill despite the fire. Words had just been spoken here that could kill them all. He looked over at Erlein and saw that the wizard had slipped his harp out of its case. His expression grim, the Senzian took a position near the eastern window and quietly began tuning his instrument.

Of course, Devin thought: Erlein knew what he was doing. They had come in here ostensibly to play for a dying woman. It would be odd if no music emerged from this room. On the other hand, he didn’t much feel like singing just now.

‘Musicians,’ the woman in the chair said with contempt to her son. ‘How splendid. Have you come to play a jingle for me now? To show me how skilful you are in such an important thing? To ease a mother’s soul before I die?’ There was something almost unbearable in her tone.

Alessan did not move, though he too had gone pale now. In no other way did he betray his tension though, save perhaps in the almost too-casual stance, the exaggerated simulation of ease.

‘If it would please you, my lady mother, I will play for you,’ he said quietly. ‘There was time I can remember when the prospect of music would indeed have brought you pleasure.’

The eyes of the woman in the chair glittered coldly. ‘There was a time for music. When we ruled here. When the men of our family were men in more than name.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Alessan, a little sharply. ‘True men and wondrous proud, all of them. Men who would have stormed the ramparts of Chiara alone and killed Brandin long ago, if only through his abject terror at their ferocious determination. Mother, can you not let it rest, even now? We are the last of our family and we have not spoken in nineteen years.’ His voice changed, softened, grew unexpectedly awkward. ‘Must we wrangle yet, can our speech be no more than the letters were? Did you ask me here simply to say again what you have written so many times?’

The old woman shook her head. Arrogant and grim, implacable as the death that had come for her.

‘No, not that,’ she said. ‘I have not so much breath in me to waste. I summoned you here to receive a mother’s dying curse upon your blood.’

‘No!’ Devin exclaimed before he could stop himself.

In the same second Danoleon took a long stride forward. ‘My lady, no indeed,’ he said, anguish in his deep voice. ‘This is not—’

‘I am dying,’ Pasithea bren Serazi interrupted harshly. There were spots of bright unnatural colour in her cheeks. ‘I do not have to listen to you any more, Danoleon. To anyone.
Wait,
you told me, all these years.
Be patient,
you said. Well, I have no more time for patience. I will be dead in a day. Morian waits for me. I have no more time to linger while my craven child gambols about the Palm playing ditties at rustic weddings.’

There came a discordant jangling of harpstrings.

‘That,’ said Erlein di Senzio from the eastern window, ‘is ignorant and unfair!’ He stopped, as if startled by his own outburst. ‘Triad knows, I have no cause to love your son. And it is now more than clear to me whence his arrogance comes and his lack of care for other lives, for anything but his own goals. But if you name him a coward simply for not
trying to kill Brandin of Ygrath then you are dying a vain, foolish woman. Which, to be perfectly frank, does not surprise me at all in this province!’

He leaned back against the ledge, breathing hard, looking at no one. In the silence that followed Alessan finally moved. His stillness had seemed inhuman, unnatural, now he sank to his knees beside his mother’s chair.

‘You have cursed me before,’ he said gravely. ‘Remember? I have lived much of my life in the shadow of that. In many ways it would have been easier to die years ago: Baerd and I slain trying to kill the Tyrant in Chiara … perhaps even killing him, through some miracle of intervention. Do you know, we used to speak of it at night, every single night, when we were in Quileia, still boys. Shaping half a hundred different plans for an assassination on the Island. Dreaming of how we would be loved and honoured after death in a province with its name restored because of us.’

His voice was low, almost hypnotic in its cadence. Devin saw Danoleon, his face working with emotion, sink back into the other armchair. Pasithea was still as marble, as expressionless and cold. Devin moved quietly towards the fire, in a vain attempt to quell the shivering that had come over him. Erlein was still by the window. He was playing his harp again, softly, single notes and random chords, not quite a tune.

‘But we grew older,’ Alessan went on, and an urgency, a terrible need to be understood had come into his voice. ‘And one Midsummer’s Eve Marius became Year King in Quileia, with our aid. After that when we three spoke the talk was different. Baerd and I began to learn some true things about power and the world. And that was when it changed for me. Something new came to me in that time, building and building, a thought, a dream, larger and deeper than trying to kill
a Tyrant. We came back to the Palm and began to travel. As musicians, yes. And as artisans, merchants, athletes one time in a Triad Game year, as masons and builders, guards to a Senzian banker, sailors on a dozen different merchant-ships. But even before those journeys had begun, Mother, even before we came back north over the mountains, it had all changed for me. I was finally clear about what my task in life was to be. About what had to be done, or tried. You know it, Danoleon knows; I wrote you years ago what my new understanding was, and I begged your blessing for it. It was such a simple truth: we had to take both Tyrants together, that this whole peninsula might again be free.’

His mother’s voice overrode his steady passion then, harsh, implacable, unforgiving: ‘I remember. I remember the day that letter came. And I will tell you again what I wrote you then to that harlot’s castle in Certando: you would buy Corte’s freedom, and Astibar’s and Tregea’s at the price of Tigana’s name. Of our very existence in the world. At the cost of everything we ever had or were before Brandin came. At the price of vengeance and our pride.’

‘Our pride,’ Alessan echoed, so softly now they could barely hear. ‘Oh, our pride. I grew up knowing all about our pride, Mother. You taught me, even more than Father did. But I learned something else, later, as a man. In my exile. I learned about Astibar’s pride. About Senzio’s and Asoli’s and Certando’s. I learned how pride had ruined the Palm in the year the Tyrants came.’

‘The Palm?’ Pasithea demanded, her voice shrill. ‘What is the Palm? A spur of land. Rock and earth and water. What is a
peninsula
that we should care for it?’

‘What is Tigana?’ Erlein di Senzio asked bluntly, his harp silent in his hands.

Pasithea’s glance was withering. ‘I would have thought a bound wizard should know that!’ she said corrosively,
meaning to wound. Devin blinked at the speed of her perception; no one had told her about Erlein, she had deduced it in minutes from a scattering of clues.