Children of Earth and Sky (28 page)

It is not known what they did with him.

T
here were demons that sought to claim your soul for darkness. There were ghosts and spirits, frequently malevolent. The dead did not always lie quietly.

Followers of all faiths knew these truths. You walked a twilit country path at peril, and when night fell, with or without moons, it was madness to be abroad. You could die in a ditch of a fall, having lost sight of the road.

You lived your life in intimate proximity to its sudden end. Prayers were more intense because of this. Help was needed, under sun, moons, stars—and some reason to hope for what might come after.

Laughter was also necessary, and found, in spite of—or because of—these close and terrible dangers. Simple pleasures. Music and dance, wine, ale, dice and cards. Harvest's end, the taste of berries on the bush, tricking the bees from a hive full of honey. Warmth and play in a bed at night or in the straw of a barn. Companionship. Sometimes love.

There were reasons for fear in every season, however, in every place where men and women tried to shape and guard their lives.

Autumn brought the dread of a killing winter. If it rained too much, if the harvest failed or was limited, some would die in the coming months as surely as a weak, wintry sun would rise to see it happen.

If storms came and smashed the moored fishing boats to wreckage, or sank them amid lightning and wild seas, hunger followed in coastal villages. If enough firewood could not be found and cut and stacked (and defended), people died of cold in the north.

If wolves came gaunt and howling over hard-packed snow and killed the livestock, assuaging their own desperation, people would also die. Disease found men and women (and always children) made weak by lack of food. Starving mothers had no milk for newborns.

Brigands came down from hills or out of dense, black forests. City walls might be proof against all but the worst of these, but what defence had a farmhouse, a lonely retreat, the cabin of a charcoal burner? The silver moon and the blue would swing up the sky and set, while fires took homes and lives. Stars wheeled slowly above snow.

Even in summer there were terrors. If pirates or corsairs, raiding from the Majriti all the way to the harbours of Ammuz, took the longed-for grain convoys, people starved in cities.

Walls, it was often said, could do nothing against famine.

That same summer sun could kill in the south, drying streams and pools, scorching pastures brown and the mountainsides where sheep and goats were herded in the heat.

Plague came in summer (so many times) on merchant ships or with travellers arriving overland. The wealthy fled their cities. Whole villages were savaged by it, bodies left unburied in the sun. White flags by a boundary stone marked a place you did not go.

Summer could be a hungry season, too, before the harvests were in, the last year's granaries (even where leaders had been prudent) trickling towards emptiness. The whole world knew stories of children dying and being eaten, of unwary travellers murdered in their sleep to answer that same need.

You could be robbed of all you had in any season. Your village could be burned to ash, lost to time, forgotten. Your children could be taken into slavery, sold to the galleys—Jaddite or Asharite. All ships of all faiths needed men to row them, chained to their benches, fouling where they sat. The stench of galleys could be smelled from far across the sea if the wind was that way. You rowed until you died, usually, and were discarded into the sea.

And spring? Glorious springtime when the land quickened and the earth was tilled and planted, when wildflowers returned with all their colours and pale-green leaves showed on trees, when desire rose like sap running and whatever hope one had somehow carried deep inside through the cold months and the long nights struggled to emerge again . . . spring, alas, was the season of war.

It was a remarkable letter, the Duke of Seressa had decided. Both the words that were visible and those written in their invisible ink between the lines.

The Council of Twelve was an agitated group this morning. Unsurprisingly. He was bemused by how calm he himself seemed to be. He had slept well last night after reading the letter. Yet none of these tidings were good and some were deeply troubling. Was he becoming too detached from matters of state? Shouldn't he be as disturbed as the others?

He put his spectacles back on. He held the original letter from Dubrava. Copies had been made for the others.

He remembered Leonora Valeri very well, from a late night in this room. It hadn't been so long ago. Jacopo Miucci had been with her, part of their clever devising here. Miucci was now dead. That was openly recounted by the woman.

In the secret ink, revealed by application of the juice of lemons to the pages, she had written:
It is unfortunate, but there can be no
doubt Dubrava will now come to know—and others will be informed by them—of the actions of the last Eldest Daughter here . . . and her associations.

Even in a hidden text she was circumspect. Not writing
association with Seressa.
It revealed a maturity even beyond what she'd shown in this chamber. He reminded himself that he'd meant to learn more about her family.

He read again:
It does appear that she purposed the death of a Senjani woman on this isle, and that purpose was detected, leading to her death. Dubrava has taken possession of concoctions that suggest others might have been similarly dealt with in the past. A trusted male servant of the Eldest Daughter—may she rest with Jad—has been implicated in untimely passings here. He is also dead.

In short, the duke thought, the world would soon know who Filipa di Lucaro had been, and Seressa's role in a long deception practised in a holy retreat.

The High Patriarch would, very surely, be communicating with them, in thunderous terms. He enjoyed thundering. Money, a substantial amount, would be required to ease this wrath. The good news was that money
could
do that with him.

A loud fist banged the table, halfway along. Lorenzo Arnesti's piercing voice followed it in the subsiding of talk. “It is all too clear,” he snapped, “that the Lucaro woman was not capable enough for her position. It was an error, placing her there!”

The duke had placed her there. His detached state vanished. Arnesti could do that to him. He removed his spectacles, cleaned the lenses, taking his time, decided something was now necessary.

He said, quietly, but clearly, “You behave like the son of a donkey and a brothel-keeper, Signore Arnesti. You embarrass us. Remind me why you are permitted in this room?”

Shocking. But it pleased him to say it. The words established a fraught, frightened silence. The councillors were like a sculpted frieze around the table now, the duke thought.

He had a wider intent, given the manœuvring for position taking place of late. Arnesti purpled, so outraged he couldn't speak. For once. The duke was happy with his phrasing. He had never offered that particular insult before. If they had been younger men, there would likely have been a challenge and a duel.

He said, “Signora di Lucaro served us ably for years. From a time before any man here but myself sat on this council. She provided regular, accurate information from reliable sources, even on the rectors' councils. She dealt with people we needed dealt with, and did so with discretion. Does any other fool in this room desire to malign her now that she is dead?”

No one appeared to so desire. Glances were lowered, throats cleared, chairs scraped. One man made the sign of the sun disk.

Only Arnesti spoke again, reclaiming his voice. “You have insulted me mortally, my lord duke! I demand a retraction!”

“Retracted,” said the duke promptly. (Some things were too easy.)

Arnesti opened his mouth and closed it. He
was
a fool. Too nakedly ambitious, manifestly thoughtless, all posture and bullying. He might buy a certain number of votes in any election, but he had enemies—and would have more before an election began, if the duke had anything to do with it.

“What follows now?” It was Amadeo Frani, on his left.

Frani was a steady, humourless man. His younger son, who liked boys a little too visibly, had been posted away—to Dubrava, in fact—with the duke's blessing and support. Since then, Amadeo Frani would follow him in anything.

“It will cost money,” Duke Ricci said. He smiled, to take away that eternal sting, let them know he had thought this through. The council needed reassurance at times such as this. They wanted the seas as safe as they could be, ports open, profits coming in. Everything else was incidental for most of these men. It was the duke who tried to look to the wider world and a longer stretch of time.

He had grown weary doing so. There was an isle in the lagoon, a small chapel, he saw a garden . . .

He said, “We'll pay Dubrava a sum, and send a gift for their main sanctuary, new windows, something of the sort. Perhaps a Blessed Victim relic. They owe us compensation for the doctor's death on their ship. This can be sorted. We'll also have to make amends to the Patriarch for using a holy office for our own purposes.”

“Amends being money?” Frani didn't smile.

“Well, he may demand that one of us be hanged.”

“
What?
”

“Or we might have to make a pilgrimage together. Go on our knees to Rhodias.”

“My lord duke . . . !”

Humourless man. Duke Ricci refrained from grimacing. “I am jesting, only jesting, Signore Frani. It will be a sum of money, with a letter of contrition. I am sure of it.”

Amadeo Frani had paled. It ought to have been amusing. The man swallowed, nodded. “And Obravic? The emperor?”

The others were letting Frani ask the questions. Interesting.

“He won't matter. He owes us for loans. He'll need more. He'll also send a letter, but will wait to see what the Patriarch does. They'll enjoy our embarrassment. We could send him another clock.” He saw his principal clerk make a note.

Frani nodded again. If he'd had a little more imagination, the duke thought, he might even have made a competent successor. But he didn't have that, and he wouldn't be.

“And the woman writing us? Signora Miucci, as Dubrava believes her to be?”

“Leonora Valeri seems to have solved that problem herself,” the duke said. “We appear to be fortunate in her.”

“They will permit her to become Eldest Daughter?”

“You read the letter. They already have. I imagine the empress played a role.”

“Ah. Yes, yes. The empress.” It was clear that Frani had no idea what this meant. He said, “This woman won't be able to do for us what the other one did.”

“No, of course not.”

“Then we might give thought to placing someone else in Dubrava.”

Duke Ricci smiled encouragingly. Frani did have his moments.

“Let us do that,” he said.

Before setting out from Seressa to take up his post in Obravic, as envoy to the imperial court, Orso Faleri had, of course, reviewed the dossier of letters sent by his predecessor.

He had also consulted, on arrival, with the staff at the Seressini residence, who were, in at least two instances, more acute than ordinary servants would be. They'd be watching him as much as helping him. Seressa trusted few people, including its envoys.

Before leaving home he had also sat through two sessions in the ducal palace with that same predecessor, Guibaldo Piccati.

Unfortunately, the Faleri and Piccati families, equally respected, had a feud going back to a night in a celebrated brothel. A Faleri had been a little too amusing about the dubious parentage of a Piccati in the room, the suggestion being that the young man's father had been the artist commissioned to paint his mother. It did happen on occasion, and there was (alas) a resemblance.

Although it had been fifty years ago, the incident had effects that lingered, including some violence. This made the meeting between the returned and the outbound ambassadors less cordial and useful than it might have been. In truth, this wasn't unknown even without a feud: a dramatic success by a new envoy could reflect badly on the preceding one who had failed to achieve whatever the triumph might be.