Tigana (73 page)

Her father said nothing for a time. Leaning against him, she could feel his steady breathing. His hands were loosely clasped together over the rail.

He said, ‘That can be done, Alais. If you want it, it can be done. Women run businesses all over the Palm. Widows, most often, but not only them.’ He hesitated. ‘Your mother could keep this going, I think, if she wanted to, if she had good advisors.’ He turned his head to look down at her, but she did not lift hers from his shoulder. ‘It is a sharp, cold life though, my darling. For a woman, for a man, without a hearth at the end of day for warmth. Without love to carry you outward and home.’

She closed her eyes at that. There was something here that went to the heart of things. They had never pressed her, never harried or urged, though she was almost twenty years old and it was time, it was well past time. And she had had that one strange dream many nights through the dark of the winter just past: herself and a shadowy figure against the moon, a man in a high, unknown place, among flowers,
under the arch of stars, his body lowered to her own, her hands reaching to gather him.

She lifted her head, withdrew her arm. Said carefully, looking down at the waves: ‘I
like
Catini. I’m happy for Selvena. She’s ready, she’s wanted this for so long and I think he’ll be good to her. But, father, I need more than what she will have. I don’t know what it is, but I need more.’

Her father stirred then. She watched him draw a deep breath and then slowly let it out. ‘I know,’ she heard him say. ‘I know you do, my darling. If I knew what, or how, and could give it, it would be yours. The world and the stars of Eanna would all be yours.’

She cried then, which she seldom did. But she loved him and had caused him grief, and he had spoken just now, twice, of dying one day, and the white moon on the cliffs and sea after the storm was like nothing she had ever known or was likely to know again.

Catriana couldn’t see the road as she climbed the slope from the dell, but from the distant sounds and the way Baerd and Sandre were both standing, rigidly watchful on the grass at the edge of the trees, she could tell that something was wrong. Men, she had long since concluded, were significantly worse than women at hiding their feelings in situations such as this.

Her hair still wet after bathing in the pond—a favourite place of hers, one they had passed every time they went back and forth between Ferraut and Certando—she hurried up the slope to see what was happening.

The two men said nothing as she appeared beside them. The cart had been pulled into the shade off the north–south road and the two horses let free to graze. Baerd’s bow and quiver were lying in the grass beside the trees, close to hand
if he needed them. She looked at the road and saw the Barbadian troops passing by, marching and riding, raising a heavy cloud of dust all around them.

‘More of the Third Company,’ Sandre said, a cold anger in his voice.

‘It looks like they’re all going, doesn’t it?’ Baerd murmured grimly.

Which was good, it was more than good, it was exactly what they wanted. The anger, the grimness were almost wholly uncalled for; they seemed to be some instinctive male response to the nearness of the enemy. Catriana felt like shaking them both.

It was so clear, really. Baerd himself had explained it to her and Sandre, and to Alienor of Borso on the day Alessan met Marius of Quileia in the mountains and rode west with Devin and Erlein.

And listening that day, forcing herself to be composed in Alienor’s presence, Catriana had finally understood what Alessan had meant, all this time, when he’d said they would have to wait until spring. They had been waiting for Marius to say yes or no. To say if he would risk his own unstable crown and his life for them. And that day in the Braccio Pass he’d said he would. Baerd told them a little, a very little, about why.

Ten days later she and Baerd and Sandre had been on watch in the hills outside Fort Ortiz when the emissaries came riding along the road carrying the Quileian flag and were met with ceremonious honour outside the walls and escorted within by the Barbadians.

Next morning the Quileians had ridden on, not hurrying, down the road to the north. Two hours after their departure the gates of the fort had opened again and six men had ridden out in extreme haste. One of them—it was Sandre who noted it—was Siferval himself, captain of the Third Company.

‘It is done,’ Baerd had said, a kind of awe in his voice. ‘I cannot believe it, but I think we have done it!’

A little more than a week later the first troops had begun to move, and they knew he was right. It wasn’t until some days after that, in an artisans’ village in northern Certando, trading for carvings and finished cloth, that they learned, belatedly, what Brandin of Ygrath had done in Chiara. The Kingdom of the Western Palm.

‘Are you a gambling man?’ Sandre had said to Baerd. ‘The dice are rolling now, and no one will hold or control them until they stop.’ Baerd had said nothing in reply, but something stunned, near to shock, in his expression made Catriana go over and take his hand in hers. Which was not really like her at all.

But everything had changed, or was changing. Baerd was not the same since the Ember Days and their stay at Castle Borso. Something had happened to him there, too, but this part he didn’t explain. Alessan was gone, and Devin—and though she hated to admit it, she missed him almost as much as the Prince. Even their role here in the east had completely altered now.

They had waited in the highlands for the emissaries, in case something should go wrong. But now Baerd kept them moving at speed from town to town and he was stopping to speak to men and to some women Catriana had never even heard about, telling them to be ready, that there might be a summer rising.

And with some of them, not many, only a select few, his message was very specific: Senzio. Head north to Senzio before Midsummer.
Have a weapon with you if you can
.

And it was these last words that brought home to Catriana most sharply, most potently, the fact that the time for action had truly come. It was upon them. No more oblique disruptions or hovering on the edge of events.
Events had a centre now, which was or would soon be in Senzio, and they were going there. What was to happen she didn’t yet know. If Baerd did, he wasn’t telling.

What he did tell her, and Sandre too, were the names of people.

Scores of them. Names he had held in memory, some for a dozen years. People who were with them in this, who could be trusted. Who needed to be told, here in the provinces ruled by Barbadior, that the movement of Alberico’s troops was their own signal to be ready at last. To watch the unfolding of events and be prepared to respond.

They would sit together at night, the three of them, around a campfire under stars or in a secluded corner of an inn in some hamlet or village, and Baerd would recite for them the names they needed to know.

It was only on the third night, falling asleep afterwards, that Catriana belatedly realized that the reason they needed to be told this was if Baerd were to die, with Alessan away in the west.

‘Ricaso bar Dellano,’ Baerd would say. ‘A cooper in Marsilian, the first village south of Fort Ciorone. He was born in Avalle. Could not go to war because of a lame foot. Speak to him. He will not be able to come north, but knows the others near by and will spread the word and lead our people in that district if the need for a rising comes.’

‘Ricaso bar Dellano,’ she would repeat. ‘In Marsilian.’

‘Porrena bren Cullion. In Delonghi, just inside the Tregean border on the main road from Ferraut. She’s a little older than you, Catriana. Her father died at the Deisa. She knows who to speak to.’

‘Porrena,’ Sandre would murmur, concentrating, his bony, gnarled hands clasped together. ‘In Delonghi.’ And Catriana marvelled at how many names there seemed to be, how many lives Baerd and Alessan had touched in
their travels through a dozen years since returning from Quileia, readying themselves and these unknown others for a time, a season, a moment in the future—which was now. Which they had lived to see. And her heart was filled with hope as she whispered the names over and over to herself like talismans of power.

They rode through the next weeks, through the flowering of spring, at an almost reckless pace, barely simulating their role as merchants. Making bad, hasty transactions where they stopped, unwilling to linger to bargain for better ones. Pausing only long enough to find the man or woman who was the key in that village or this cluster of farms, the one who knew the others and would carry the word.

They were losing money, but they had astins to spare from Alienor. Catriana, being honest with herself, realized that she was still reluctant to acknowledge the role that woman had played in Alessan’s doings for so many years. Years in which she herself had been growing up in ignorance, a child in a fishing village in Astibar.

Once, Baerd let her make the contact in a town. The woman was a weaver, widely known for her skill. Catriana had found her house at the edge of the village. Two dogs had barked at her approach and had been stilled by a mild voice from within. Inside, Catriana had found a woman only a little younger than her mother. She had made certain they were alone, and then, as Baerd had instructed, had shown her dolphin ring and given Alessan’s name and had spoken the message. The same message of readiness as everywhere else. Then she carefully named two men and spoke Baerd’s second message:
Senzio. Midsummer. Tell them to be armed if they can
.

The woman had gone pale, standing up abruptly as Catriana began to speak. She was very tall, even more so than Catriana herself. When the second message was done
she had remained motionless a moment and then stepped forward to kiss Catriana on the mouth.

‘Triad bless you and keep you and the both of them,’ she had said. ‘I did not think I would live to see this day.’ She was crying; Catriana tasted salt on her lips.

She had walked out into the sunshine and back to Baerd and Sandre. They had just finished a purchase of a dozen barrels of Certandan ale. A wretched transaction.

‘We’re going
north
, you fools,’ she had exclaimed, exasperated, her trade instincts taking over. ‘They don’t
like
ale in Ferraut! You
know
that.’

‘Then we’ll have to drink it ourselves,’ Sandre said, swinging up on his horse and laughing. Baerd, who so rarely used to laugh, but who had changed since the Ember Days, began to chuckle suddenly. And then, sitting beside him on the cart as they rode out of town, so did she, listening to the two of them, feeling the clean freshness of the breeze blowing through her hair, and, as it seemed, through her heart.

It was that same day, early in the afternoon, that they came to the dell she loved and Baerd, remembering, pulled the cart off the road to let her go down to the pool and bathe. When she climbed back up neither man was laughing or amused any more, watching the Barbadians go by.

It was the way the two of them were standing that caused the trouble, she was sure of it. But by the time she came up beside them it was already too late. It would have been mostly Baerd whose look drew their attention. Sandre in his Khardhu guise was a matter of almost complete indifference to the Barbadians.

But a merchant, a minor trader with a single cart and a second scrawny horse, who stood gazing at an army passing in the way that this one did, coldly, his head arrogantly high, not even remotely submissive or chastened let alone showing any of the fear proper to such a situation …

The language of the body, Catriana thought, could be heard far too clearly sometimes. She looked at Baerd beside her, his dark eyes fixed in stony appraisal of the company passing by. It wasn’t arrogance, she decided, not just a male pride. It was something else, something older. A primitive response to this display of the Tyrant’s power that he could no more hide than he could the dozen barrels of ale they carried on the cart.

‘Stop it!’ she whispered fiercely. But even as she did she heard one of the Barbadians bark a terse command and half a dozen of them detached from the moving column of men and horses and galloped over towards them. Catriana’s mouth went dry. She saw Baerd glance over to where his bow lay in the grass. He shifted his stance slightly, to balance himself better. Sandre did the same.

‘What are you doing?’ she hissed. ‘Remember where we are!’

She had time for no more. The Barbadians came up to them, huge men on their horses, looking down on a man and a woman of the Palm and this gaunt, grey-haired relic from Khardhun.

‘I don’t like the look of your face,’ the leader said, staring at Baerd. The man’s hair was darker than that of most of the others, but his eyes were pale and hard.

Catriana swallowed. This was the first time in a year they’d had a confrontation so direct with the Barbadians. She lowered her eyes, willing Baerd to be calm, to say the right things.

What she did not know, for no one who had not been there could know, was what Baerd was seeing in that moment.

Not six Barbadians on horses by a road in Certando, but as many Ygrathen soldiers in the square before his father’s house long ago. So many years, and the memory still sharp as a wound from only yesterday. All the normal measures of
time seemed to fall apart and blow away in moments such as this.