Tigana (11 page)

‘Nothing in himself,’ the other corrected. ‘Will you allow
me?’ Without waiting for a reply he lifted himself down from the ledge and walked over to the wine.

‘Please,’ said Tomasso, belatedly.

The man poured himself a generous glass of the vintage red. He drained it, and poured another. Only then did he turn back to address the five of them. Herado’s eyes, watching him, were enormous.

‘Two facts,’ the man called Alessan said crisply. ‘Learn them if you are serious about freedom in the Palm. One: if you oust or slay Alberico you will have Brandin upon you within three months. Two: if Brandin is ousted or slain Alberico will rule this peninsula within that same period of time.’

He stopped. His eyes—grey, Tomasso noticed now—moved from one to the other of them, challenging. No one spoke. Scalvaia toyed with the handle of his cane.

‘These two things must be understood,’ the stranger went on in the same tone. ‘Neither I in my own pursuit, nor you in yours, can afford to lose sight of them. They are the core truths of the Palm in our time. The two sorcerers from overseas are their own balance of power and the
only
balance of power in the peninsula right now, however different things might have been eighteen years ago. Today only the power of one keeps the magic of the other from being wielded as it was when they conquered us. If we take them then we must take them both—or make them bring down each other.’

‘How?’ Taeri asked, too eagerly.

The lean face under the prematurely silvering dark hair turned to him and smiled briefly. ‘Patience, Taeri bar Sandre. I have a number of things yet to tell you about carelessness before deciding if our paths are to join. And I say this with infinite respect for the dead man who seems—remarkably enough—to have drawn us here. I’m afraid you are going to have to agree to submit yourselves to my guidance or we can do nothing together at all.’

‘The Scalvaiane have submitted themselves willingly to nothing and no one in living memory or recorded history,’ that vulpine lord said, the texture of velvet in his voice. ‘I am not readily of a mind to become the first to do so.’

‘Would you prefer,’ the other said, ‘to have your plans and your life and the long glory of your line snuffed out like candles on the Ember Days because of sheer sloppiness in your preparations?’

‘You had better explain yourself,’ Tomasso said icily.

‘I intend to. Who was it who chose a double-moon night at double moonrise to meet?’ Alessan retorted, his voice suddenly cutting like a blade. ‘Why are no rear guards posted along the forest path to warn you if someone approaches—as I just did? Why were no servants left here this afternoon to guard this cabin? Have you even the faintest awareness of how dead the five of you would be—severed hands stuffed into your throats—were I not who I am?’

‘My father … Sandre … said that Alberico would not have us followed,’ Tomasso stammered furiously. ‘He was absolutely certain of that.’

‘And he is likely to have been absolutely right. But you cannot let your focus be so narrow. Your father—I am sorry to have to say it—was alone with his obsession for too long. He was too intent upon Alberico. It shows in everything you have done these past two days. What of the idly curious or the greedy? The petty informer who might decide to follow you just to see what happened here? Just to have a story to tell in the tavern tomorrow? Did you—or your father—give even half a thought to such things? Or to those who might have learned where you planned to come and arranged to be here before you?’

There was a hostile silence. A log on the smaller fire settled with a crack and a shower of sparks. Herado jumped involuntarily at the sound.

‘Will it interest you to know,’ the man called Alessan went on, more gently, ‘that my people have been guarding the approaches to this cabin since you arrived? Or that I’ve had someone in here since mid-afternoon keeping an eye on the servants setting up, and who might follow them?’

‘What?’ Taeri exclaimed. ‘In here! In our hunting lodge!’

‘For your protection and my own,’ the other man said, finishing his second glass of wine. He glanced upwards to the shadows of the half-loft above, where the extra pallets were stored.

‘I think that should do it, my friend,’ he called, pitching his voice to carry. ‘You’ve earned a glass of wine after so long dry-throated among the dust. You may as well come down now, Devin.’

It had actually been very easy.

Menico, purse jingling with more money than he had ever earned from a single performance in his life, had graciously passed their concert at the wine-merchant’s house over to Burnet di Corte. Burnet, who needed the work, was pleased; the wine-merchant, angry at first, was quickly mollified upon learning what Menico’s hitherto unfinalized tariff would now have been in the aftermath of the sensation they’d caused that morning.

So, in the event, Devin and the rest of the company had been given the rest of the day and evening off. Menico counted out for everyone an immediate bonus of five astins and benevolently waved them away to the various delights of the Festival. He didn’t even offer his usual warning lecture.

Already, just past noon, there were wine-stands on every corner, more than one at the busier squares. Each vineyard in Astibar province, and even some from farther afield in Ferraut or Senzio, had its vintages from previous years
available as harbingers of what this year’s grapes would offer. Merchants looking to buy in quantity were sampling judiciously, early revellers rather less so.

Fruit-vendors were also in abundance, with figs and melons and the enormous grapes of the season displayed beside vast wheels of white cheeses from Tregea or bricks of red ones from northern Certando. Over by the market the din was deafening as the people of the city and its distrada canvassed the offerings of this year’s itinerant tradesmen. Overhead the banners of the noble houses and of the larger wine estates flapped brightly in the autumn breeze as Devin strode purposefully towards what he’d just been told was the most fashionable khav room in Astibar.

There were benefits to fame. He was recognized at the doorway, his arrival excitedly announced, and in a matter of moments he found himself at the dark wooden bar of The Paelion nursing a mug of hot khav laced with flambardion—no awkward questions asked about anyone’s age, thank you very much.

It was the work of half an hour to find out what he needed to know about Sandre d’Astibar. His questions seemed entirely natural, coming from the tenor who had just sung the Duke’s funeral lament. Devin learned about Sandre’s long rule, his feuds, his bitter exile, and his sad decline in the last few years into a blustering, drunken hunter of small game, a wraith compared to what he once had been.

In that last context, rather more specifically, Devin asked about where the Duke had liked to hunt. They told him. They told him where his favourite hunting lodge had been. He changed the subject to wine.

It was easy. He was a hero of the hour and The Paelion liked heroes, for an hour. They let him go eventually: he pleaded an artist’s strained sensitivity after the morning’s endeavours. With the benefit of hindsight he now attached a
deal more importance than he had at the time to glimpsing Alessan di Tregea at a booth full of painters and poets. They were laughing about some wager concerning certain verses of condolence that had not yet arrived from Chiara. He and Alessan had saluted each other in an elaborately showy, performers’ fashion that delighted the packed room.

Back at the inn, Devin had fended off the most ardent of the group who had walked him home and went upstairs alone. He had waited in his room, chafing, for an hour to be sure the last of them had gone. Having changed into a dark-brown tunic and breeches, he put on a cap to hide his hair and a woollen overshirt against the coming chill of evening. Then he made his way unnoticed through the now teeming crowds in the streets over to the eastern gate of the city.

And out, among several empty wagons, goods all sold, being ridden back to the distrada by sober, prudent farmers who preferred to reload and return in the morning instead of celebrating all night in town spending what they’d just earned.

Devin hitched a ride on a cart part of the way, commiserating with the driver on the taxes and the poor rates being paid that year for lamb’s wool. Eventually he jumped off, feigning youthful exuberance, and ran a mile or so along the road to the east.

At one point he saw, with a grin of recognition, a temple of Adaon on the right. Just past it, as promised, was the delicately rendered image of a ship on the roadside gate of a modest country house. Rovigo’s home—what Devin could see of it, set well back from the road among cypress and olive trees—looked comfortable and cared-for.

A day ago, a different person, he would have stopped. But something had happened to him that morning within the dusty spaces of the Sandreni Palace. He kept going.

A half mile further on he found what he was looking for. He made sure he was alone and then quickly cut to his right,
south into the woods, away from the main road that led to the east coast and Ardin town on the sea.

It was quiet in the forest and cooler where the branches and the many-coloured leaves dappled the sunlight. There was a path winding through the trees and Devin began to follow it, towards the hunting lodge of the Sandreni. From here on he redoubled his caution. On the road he was simply a walker in the autumn countryside; here he was a trespasser with no excuse at all for being where he was.

Unless pride and the strange, dreamlike events of the morning just past could be called adequate excuses. Devin rather doubted it. At the same time, it remained to be seen whether he or a certain manipulative red-headed personage was going to dictate the shape and flow of this day and those to come. If she were under the impression that he was so easy to dupe—a helpless, youthful slave to his passions, blinded and deafened to anything else by the so-gracious offer of her body—well it was for this afternoon and this evening to show how wrong an arrogant girl could be.

What else the evening might reveal, Devin didn’t know; he hadn’t allowed himself to slow down long enough to consider the question.

There was no one there when he came to the lodge, though he lay silently among the trees for a long time to be certain. The front door was chained but Marra had been very good with such devices and had taught him a thing or two. He picked the lock with the buckle of his belt, went inside, opened a window, and climbed out to relock the chain. Then he slipped back in through the window, closed it, and took a look around.

There was little option, really. The two bedchambers at the back would be dangerous and not very useful if he wanted to hear. Devin balanced himself on the broad arm of
a heavy wooden chair and, jumping, managed to make it up to the half-loft on his second attempt.

Nursing a shin bruised in the process he took a pillow from one of the pallets stored up there and proceeded to wedge himself into the remotest, darkest corner he could find, behind two beds and the stuffed head of an antlered corbin stag. By lying on his left side, eye to a chink in the floorboards, he had an almost complete view of the room below.

He tried to guide himself towards a mood of calm and patience. Unfortunately, he soon became irrationally conscious of the fact that the glassy eye of the corbin was glitteringly fixed upon him. Under the circumstances it made him nervous. Eventually he got up, turned the chestnut head to one side and settled in to his hiding-place again.

And right about then, as the grimly purposeful activities of the day gave way to a time when he could do nothing but wait, Devin began to be afraid.

He was under no real illusions: he was a dead man if they found him here. The secrecy and tension in Tomasso bar Sandre’s words and manner that morning made that clear enough. Even without what Catriana had done in her own effort to overhear those words, and then to prevent him from doing so. For the first time Devin began to contemplate where the rash momentum of his wounded pride had carried him.

When the servants came half an hour later to prepare the room they gave him some very bad moments. Bad enough, in fact, to make him briefly wish that he was back home in Asoli guiding a plough behind a pair of stolid water buffaloes. They were fine creatures, water buffaloes, patient, uncomplaining. They ploughed fields for you, and their milk made cheese. There was even something to be said for the predictable grey skies of Asoli in autumn and the equally
predictable people. None of their girls, for example, were as irritatingly superior as Catriana d’Astibar who had got him into this. Nor would any Asolini servant, Devin was quite certain, ever have volunteered, as one Triad-blighted fool below was doing even now, to bring down a pallet from the half-loft in case one of the vigil-keeping lords should grow weary.

‘Goch, don’t be more of a fool than you absolutely must be!’ the steward snapped officiously in reply. ‘They are here to keep a waking watch all night—a pallet in the room is an insult to them both. Be grateful you aren’t dependent on your brain to feed your belly, Goch!’