Children of Earth and Sky (5 page)

The Dubravae were a pale, circumscribed,
permitted
shadow of Seressa. Seressa was a light like the sun of Jad.

No man who understood the twinned worlds of commerce and courts would compare any other place to this republic. You marked yourself a fool doing so. Not that there weren't fools enough in the world.

Right now, the war galley captains being interrogated, gently enough (thus far), were proving themselves sadly deficient in intelligence. They might know winds and shorelines, but they were lost in this room, the duke thought. He found himself remembering, sadly, the great captains of his youth. That happened too often these days.

Given the humiliating events at Senjan, the fear on display was unsurprising. Fear made some people bluster, as if to outvoice terror, the way men sang coarse wine-shop songs when passing a burial crossroads at night.

Each captain was accusing the other of blundering. Each knew his career, if not his life, was at risk tonight. The council chamber was not a room one came to after dark happily. Their faces were lit by lanterns to either side of where they stood, while shadows obscured the expressions of the duke and council around their U-shaped table. Flame and shadow, in a room that terrified.

They'd had a long time in Seressa to refine their methods. Questions cast from darkness were powerful. And the palace prison, all knew, could be accessed directly from this room: through a door behind the duke, across a small canal by a high, covered stone bridge with iron-barred windows, then down steps of cold stone to cells of cold, wet stone and chambers where skilled men asked hard things.

Everyone in the city could see that bridge whenever they were near the palace and the great sanctuary. Reminders of power were useful. In a world replete with threats, including from within, no leaders could show weakness. They had a duty to the republic not to do so.

And yet . . . and yet it appeared that these two war galleys, sent at considerable cost at the end of winter to blockade and destroy one small town of pirates, had exposed considerable weakness in Seressa and its Council of Twelve, to a degree that might lead to mockery.

It was possible the council had erred in sending them. It would be preferable to blame the captains. Duke Ricci sighed. He was already tired, and they had matters to address after this one.

Both men had been speaking (sometimes at once) of the impossibility of the task they'd been assigned. Waters too shallow. Reefs. Rocks. A dangerous northeast wind. Eccentricities of the current. Orders not to land a force to approach overland because of the emperor in Obravic. The difficulty of enforcing a complete embargo of foodstuffs with no land presence. The eternal problem of mercenaries idle too long on ships . . .

These might even be true, all of them, the duke thought. It was certainly true they'd forbidden a landing. The vipers of Senjan lived (slithered!) behind their walls on lands governed by Jad's Holy Emperor. Seressa's new ambassador in Obravic had sent coded messages back in winter making it clear that Emperor Rodolfo, however eccentric he was, was not inclined (or his advisers were not) to permit the republic to attack a town he ruled.

They couldn't defy that. The raiders were an extreme, a considerable, an
infuriating
menace to trade, but they were not worth a war. The triple border over that way was its own dark, intractable problem. But even so . . .

Even so, the duke was thinking, the humiliation represented by a single person—a
woman
—killing every man in a boat sent out, however recklessly, on a night mission? They were to live now with the world knowing of this? Seven men had died on the water that night, and their long-time informer in the town had been exposed.

That one was in Seressa now, having come home with the galleys. He'd been allowed a chair before the council earlier today because of his condition. His condition was distressing. The barbarians had sent him back lacking both arms below the elbow. They had been cut off and cauterized. It was remarkable that he'd survived. There must be a competent doctor in that Jad-abandoned town, the duke thought, or else their man had simply been fortunate. Although, on reflection,
fortunate
wasn't a word readily applied to him now.

He'd need a small pension, the duke thought. Also orders to keep out of sight. His condition was a reminder of this sorry episode, it would be forever. Perhaps they could send him to Candaria. A good thought. The duke made a note. He preferred to write his own notes.

It was clear why their spy had been allowed to come back with the galleys. The Senjani
wanted
the tale told. It would be in Obravic soon, if it wasn't already, then in the gardens and courtyards of the
grand khalif's palaces in Asharias. The duke winced again, picturing that. It would be in Dubrava already. The story would race to the king of Ferrieres, to Esperaña, Karch, Moskav . . .

It was too good a tale for the world not to tell, and laugh to hear. A woman, a woman alone, had detected a Seressini plot (shaped by those masters of deception and stealth!) and had killed every man sent out. Then she'd taken their boat and brought it ashore with three of the dead men on board, and the others dead in the sea.

When you were lions and there were other lions in the world mockery could be deadly.

They had ordered the war galleys home. They hadn't just failed in their task, they had done so on a level that brought new dangers. The duke tasted a bitterness in his mouth. He tried to remember what he had last eaten. He swallowed a little wine.

A small number of men killed on a night expedition ought to have been trivial in the balancing of the world's affairs. It might not, in the event, be so. It might be that the council really had erred in approving this plan to destroy the vipers in their nest.

Captain Zani, who'd sent out the boat, was still claiming there must have been a major ambush, boatloads of Senjani waiting in the bay. That what had happened was impossible otherwise, that their spy in the town
had
to have been mistaken in his report earlier today—all due credit to the man's courage and suffering, of course.

The other captain, in line with the duke's expectation, endorsed the spy's report and word emerging from Senjan.
He
hadn't sent any foolish boat out at night. He'd dutifully performed his assigned task, blockading the southern channel past Hrak Island.

It had been one woman, he agreed. Alone in a little craft. Arrows in the dark, as stated. Little more than a child, apparently.
A girl
, as some might say, had shamed Seressa. They would say that, the duke knew. They would be saying it already. There would be a need to address that aspect of this. But for tonight . . .

He still controlled his council. That hadn't been so for every elected duke of Seressa, but he knew how to maintain allegiances and becalm potential adversaries. It helped to know who those were. Who was most eagerly waiting for him to step down.

He cleared his throat. He lifted a hand, he spoke. His proposals were straightforward. The Council of Twelve took little time in ordering Captain Zani to be punished appropriately and for Captain Erilli to be confirmed in his captaincy and commended for proper conduct.

Together, these rulings served to limit responsibility to one person, which mattered. Any power could have servants who made mistakes. They were all mortal, in a world surrounded by the dark. The measure of leaders was what they did when they discovered failures.

The duke thought the rest of his devising tidy enough. It had come to him as he'd begun to speak. Captain Zani was to have both hands cut off, for grievous errors and the lamentable deaths of good men at the hands of savages. The duke did hope the captain would survive. This one
needed
to be seen or the point being made would be lost. His punishment was to balance and nullify what the Senjani had done, or tried to do, maiming the spy.

You might choose to set yourself against Seressa. It was not wise. That needed to be understood by the world, whether it worshipped Jad or the stars of Ashar, or even the Kindath moons. Whatever triumph you might find in a short run of events could turn and damage you terribly in less time than you might ever have guessed.

That was the message that needed to go from this room.

The two captains were removed, in opposite directions: one escorted from the palace into Jad's Square, the other through that small door behind the duke, across the bridge, and down. Both were blessedly silent. Zani in blank, desperate horror, stunned like a heifer by a hammer, the other man, very likely, in a cold
awareness of what his own fate might easily have been. He would walk into a spring night and look up at the moons through clouds. He would probably go into a sanctuary and pray.

There was a pause in the chamber, low voices, release of strain. There were men on his council who would be thinking about what was to happen across that bridge with the barred windows. Around the table men stood up, stretched. The duke looked at his privy clerk.

The clerk signalled discreetly and doors opened to admit servants bearing food and more wine. The Council of Twelve didn't meet regularly at night, of course, but there were enough occasions that a pattern was established. They would eat before they ordered the next man brought in.

Unfortunately, according to the privy clerk, a whisper at the duke's elbow, there appeared to be a difficulty with that next man. He had not yet arrived.

The clerk whispered a suggestion: they might amend the order of business being attended to, bring in the other man who had been summoned.

More carelessness. The Duke of Seressa gathered displeasure about himself like a cloak. Unhappily, carefully eating olives harvested near Rhodias (where the best were grown), he accepted this amendment.

Nineteen years
, he was thinking as he adjusted his papers to bring forward the notes on the doctor now about to enter. He put on his new eyeglasses again, fitting the irritating loops behind his ears. He gestured for a light.

He studied his notes amid the sounds of the council talking among themselves. Eventually he nodded and the servants began removing plates of food, though not the wine. Men took their seats. Chairs scraped. Another nod from the duke and the doors opened at the far end of the chamber. Two people were ushered in.
He'd forgotten there would be two. Careless. He wondered why the man in the other matter was not yet here. He didn't like it when the sequence of a night had to be changed. Was everything slipping? Was he?

Perhaps nineteen years is enough
, he thought. Then he thought about his republic which, in spite of everything, he loved.

He knew, perhaps because he was old, what others did not always know, or admit to themselves, along the canals, in palaces, sanctuaries, warehouses, shops, in the bordellos with their music, the studios of artists making images of the city and the sea.

Seressa, on its silted marshland by the water, wedded to the sea as a bride, was dependent on it for everything. But the duke also knew that such an existence was transitory, precarious as wind, clouds, as a dream vivid and bright, and gone when morning comes.

An image in his mind, not for the first time: a small religious retreat, an old mosaic behind the altar, perhaps, an attached dwelling (good walls and roof, reliable fireplaces for winter), on one of the outlying islands of the lagoon. He saw a walled garden, fruit trees, a bench in summer shade, holy men surrounding him, leading prayers at proper hours, reading sacred texts together, discussing matters of faith and wisdom in voices that were never too loud.

In most cities, painters tended to live and work in the less expensive districts, for obvious reasons.

Those overcrowded areas often lay where activities such as tanneries or dyeworks were located, the smells having a downward effect on the cost of a small room and studio. This was very much true in Seressa, which had never been the most pleasingly scented of cities in any case. Port towns rarely were, and Seressa in its lagoon was the queen of all ports.

On the other hand, those who bound and sold books—and Seressa was queen of that trade, too—were naturally unwilling to have their shops and binderies located where noxious odours could penetrate and infuse their product. They paid, of necessity, a higher rent to be in more salubrious districts.

Which was why the young artist Pero Villani was making his way home through dark streets on a windy night at the beginning of spring. He had been at the bookshop and bindery where he worked most days—to make a feed-himself wage, and for access to the books.

He'd been binding an edition of
The
Book of the Sons of Jad
in red leather for a buyer from Varena. He had finished towards sundown, the shutters open and the light still adequate. After, he'd lingered in the shop, as usual, with the owner's permission (Alviso Sano was a good man), under instructions to lock up when he was done. He was studying the sheets (as yet unbound—they only bound them when an order was placed) of a new, magnificent text on anatomy.