Tigana (94 page)

Dianora saw a man raise his sword on that hill. She turned her head away so she would not see Rhamanus die. There was an ache in her, a growing void; she felt as if all the chasms of her life were opening in the ground before her feet. He had been an enemy, the man who had seized her to be a slave. Sent to claim tribute for Brandin, he had burned villages and homes in Corte and Asoli. He had been an Ygrathen. Had sailed to the Palm in the invading fleet, had fought in the last battle by the Deisa.

He had been her friend.

One of her only friends. Brave and decent and loyal all his life to his King. Kind and direct, ill-at-ease in a subtle court …

Dianora realized that she was weeping for him, for the good life cloven like a tree by that stranger’s descending sword.

‘They have failed, my lord.’ It was d’Eymon, his voice actually showing—or was she imagining it?—the faintest hint of emotion. Of sorrow. ‘All of the Guards are down, and Rhamanus. The wizards are still there.’

From his chair under the canopy Brandin opened his eyes. His gaze was fixed on the valley below and he did not turn. Dianora saw that his face was chalk-white now with strain, even in the red heat of the day. She wiped quickly at her tears: he must not see her thus if he should chance to look. He might need her; whatever strength or love she had to give. He must not be distracted with concern for her. He was one man alone, fighting so many.

And more, in fact, than she even knew. For the wizards had reached the Night Walkers in Certando by now. They
were linked, and they were all bending the power of their minds to Alberico’s defence.

From the plain below there came a roar, even above the steady noise of battle. Cheering and wild shouts from the Barbadians. Dianora could see their white-clad messengers sprinting forward from the rear where Alberico was. She saw that the men of the Western Palm had been stopped in their advance. They were still outnumbered, terribly so. If Brandin could not help them now then all was done, all over. She looked south towards that hill where the wizards were, where Rhamanus had been cut down. She wanted to curse them all, but she could not.

They were men of the Palm. They were her own people. But her own people were dying in the valley as well, under the heavy blades of the Empire. The sun was a brand overhead. The sky a blank, pitiless dome.

She looked at d’Eymon. Neither of them spoke. They heard quick footsteps on the slope. Scelto stumbled up, fighting for breath.

‘My lord,’ he gasped, dropping to his knees beside Brandin’s chair, ‘we are hard-pressed … in the centre and on the right. The left is holding … but barely. I am ordered … to ask if you want us to fall back.’

And so it had come.

I hate that man,
he had said to her last night, before falling asleep in utter weariness.
I hate everything he stands for
.

There was a silence on the hill. It seemed to Dianora as if she could hear her own heartbeat with some curious faculty of the ear, discerning it even above the sounds from below. The noises in the valley seemed, oddly, to have receded now. To be growing fainter every second.

Brandin stood up.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We do not fall back. There is nowhere to retreat, and not before the Barbadian. Not ever.’
He was gazing bleakly out over Scelto’s kneeling form, as if he would penetrate the distance with his eyes to strike at Alberico’s heart.

But there was something else in him now: something new, beyond rage, beyond the grimness of resolution and the everlasting pride. Dianora sensed it, but she could not understand. Then he turned to her and she saw in the depths of that grey gaze a bottomless well of pain opening up such as she had never seen in him. Never seen in anyone, in all her days.
Pity and grief and love,
he had said last night. Something was happening; her heart was racing wildly. She felt her hands beginning to shake.

‘My love,’ Brandin said. Mumbled, slurred it. She saw death in his eyes, an abscess of loss that seemed to be leaving him almost blind, stripping his soul. ‘Oh, my love,’ he said again. ‘What have they done? See what they will make me do. Oh, see what they make me do!’

‘Brandin!’
she cried, terrified, not understanding at all. Beginning again to weep, frantically. Grasping only the open sore of hurt he had become. She reached out towards him, but he was blind, and already turning away, east, towards the rim of the hill and the valley below.

‘All right,’ said Rinaldo the Healer, and lifted his hands away. Devin opened his eyes and looked down. His wound had closed; the bleeding had stopped. The sight of it made him feel queasy; the unnatural speed of the healing, as if his senses still expected to find a fresh wound there. ‘You are going to have an easy scar for women to know you by in the dark,’ Rinaldo added drily. Ducas gave a bark of laughter.

Devin winced and carefully avoided meeting Alais’s eye. She was right beside him, wrapping a roll of linen around his
torso to bind the wound. He looked at Ducas instead, whose own cut above his eye had been closed by Rinaldo in the same way. Arkin, who had also survived the skirmish down below, was bandaging it. Ducas, his red beard matted and sticky with blood, looked like some fearful creature out of childhood night terrors.

‘Is that too tight?’ Alais asked softly.

Devin drew a testing breath and shook his head. The wound hurt, but he seemed to be all right.

‘You saved my life,’ he murmured to her. She was behind him now, tying up the ends of his bandage. Her hands stopped for a moment and then resumed.

‘No I didn’t,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘He was down. He couldn’t have hurt you. All I did was kill a man.’ Catriana, standing near them, glanced over. ‘I … I wish I hadn’t,’ Alais said. And began to cry.

Devin swallowed and tried to turn, to offer comfort, but Catriana was quicker than he, and had already gathered Alais in her arms. He looked at them, wondering bitterly what real comfort there could be to offer on this bare ridge in the midst of war.

‘Erlein! Now! Brandin is standing!’
Alessan’s cry knifed through all other sounds. His heart suddenly thumping again, Devin went quickly towards the Prince and the wizards.

‘It is upon us then,’ said Erlein, in a hard, flat voice to the other two. ‘I will have to pull out now, to track him. Wait for my signal, but
move
when I give it!’

‘We will,’ Sertino gasped. ‘Triad save us all.’ Sweat was pouring down the pudgy wizard’s face. His hands were shaking with strain.

‘Erlein,’ Alessan began urgently. ‘He must use it all. You know what you—’

‘Hush! I know exactly what I must do. Alessan, you have set this in motion, you brought us all here to Senzio, every
single person, the living and the dead. Now it is up to us. Be still, unless you want to pray.’

Devin looked north to Brandin’s hill. He saw the King step forward from under his canopy.

‘Oh, Triad,’ he heard Alessan whisper then in a queerly high voice. ‘Adaon, remember us. Remember your children now!’ The Prince sank to his knees. ‘Please,’ he whispered again. ‘Please, let me have been right!’

On his hill to the north of them Brandin of Ygrath stretched forth one hand and then the other under the burning sun.

Dianora saw him move forward to the very edge of the hill, out from the canopy into the white blaze of the light. Scelto scrambled away. Beneath them the armies of the Western Palm were being hammered back now, centre and left and right. The cries of the Barbadians had taken on a quality of triumphant malice that fell like blows upon the heart.

Brandin lifted his right hand and levelled it ahead. Then he brought up his left beside it so that the palms were touching each other, the ten fingers pointing together. Pointing straight to where Alberico of Barbadior was, at the rear of his army.

And Brandin of the Western Palm, who had been the King of Ygrath when he first came to this peninsula, cried aloud then, in a voice that seemed to flay and shred the very air:

‘Oh, my son! Stevan, forgive me what I do!’

Dianora stopped breathing. She thought she was going to fall. She reached out a hand for support and didn’t even realize it was d’Eymon who braced her.

Then Brandin spoke again, in a voice colder than she had ever heard him use, words none of them could understand. Only the sorcerer down in the valley would know, only he could grasp the enormity of what was happening.

She saw Brandin spread his legs, as if to brace himself. Then she saw what followed.

‘Now!’
Erlein di Senzio screamed. ‘Both of you! Get the others out! Cut free
now!
’

‘They’re loose!’ Sertino cried. ‘I’m out!’ He collapsed in a heap to the ground as if he might never rise again.

Something was happening on the other hill. In the middle of day, under the brilliant sun, the sky seemed to be changing, to be darkening where Brandin stood. Something—not smoke, not light, some kind of change in the very nature of the air—seemed to be pouring from his hands, boiling east and down, disorienting to the eye, blurred, unnatural, like a rushing doom.

Erlein suddenly turned his head, his eyes widening with horror.

‘Sandre, what are you doing?’
he shrieked, grabbing wildly at the Duke. ‘Get out, you fool! In Eanna’s name,
get out!
’

‘Not … yet,’ said Sandre d’Astibar, in a voice that carried its own full measure of doom.