Tigana (22 page)

‘Oh,’ said Alais, clasping her hands in her lap.

Catriana, who was really much too clever by half, flashed a glance of mingled amusement and malice. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said sweetly, looking pointedly at where Alais’s hands had settled like a barrier. ‘That glove doesn’t fit me.’

Abruptly Alais put her hands to either side of her, blushing furiously.

‘I wasn’t particularly worried,’ she said, trying to sound casual. Then, goaded by the other’s mocking expression, she shot back: ‘What glove
does
fit you, then?’

The other woman’s amusement quickly disappeared. There was a small silence. Then: ‘You do have some spirit in you, after all,’ Catriana said judiciously. ‘I wasn’t sure.’

‘That,’ said Alais, moved to a rare anger, ‘is patronizing. How would you be sure of anything about me? And why would I let you see it?’

Again there was a silence, and again Catriana surprised her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Truly. I’m really not very good at this. I warned you.’ She looked away. ‘As it happens, you hit a nerve and I tend to lash out when that occurs.’

Alais’s anger, as quick to recede as it was slow to kindle, was gone even as the other woman spoke. This was, she reminded herself sternly, a guest in her house.

She had no immediate chance to reply though, or to try to mend the rift, because just then Menka bustled importantly into the room with a basin of water heated over the kitchen fire, followed by the youngest of Rovigo’s apprentices with a second basin and towels draped over both his shoulders. The boy’s eyes were desperately cast downwards in a room containing two women as he carried the basin and the towels carefully over to the table by the window.

The garrulous fuss Menka inevitably stirred up wherever she went broke the mood entirely—both the good and the bad parts of it, Alais thought. After the two servants left, the women washed up in silence. Alais, stealing a glance at the other’s long-limbed body, felt even more inadequate in her own small, white softness and the sheltered life she’d lived. She climbed into bed, feeling as if she’d like to begin the whole conversation over again.

‘Good night,’ she said.

‘Good night,’ Catriana replied, after a moment.

Alais tried to read an invitation to further conversation in her tone, but she wasn’t sure. If Catriana wanted to talk, she decided, she had only to say something.

They blew out their bedside candles and lay silently in the semi-darkness. Alais watched the red glow of the fire, curled her toes around the hot brick Menka had put at the foot of her bed, and thought ruefully that the distance to Selvena’s side of the room had never seemed so great.

Some time later, still unsleeping though the fire was down to its embers, she heard a burst of hilarity from the three men downstairs. The warm, carrying sound of her father’s laughter somehow worked its way into her and eased her distress. He was home. She felt sheltered and safe. Alais smiled to herself in the darkness. She heard the men come upstairs soon after, and go to their separate rooms.

She remained awake for a while, with an ear perked to catch the sound of her sister in the hallway—though she didn’t really believe even Selvena would do that. She heard nothing, and eventually she fell asleep.

She dreamt of lying on a hilltop in a strange place. Of a man there with her. Lowering himself upon her. A mild moonless night glittering with stars. She lay with him upon that windy height amid a scattering of dew-drenched summer flowers, and in the high, unknown place of that dreaming Alais was filled with complex yearnings she could never have named aloud.

It was bitterly cold in the dungeon where they had thrown him at last. The stones were damp and icy, they smelled of urine and faeces. He’d only been allowed to put back on his linen underclothing and his hose. There were rats in the cell. He couldn’t see them in the blackness but he had been able to hear them from the beginning and he’d been bitten twice already as he dozed.

Earlier, he had been naked. The new Captain of the Guard—the replacement for the one who’d killed himself—had permitted his men to play with their prisoner before locking him up for the night. They all knew Tomasso’s reputation. Everyone knew his reputation. He had made sure of that; it had been part of the plan.

So the guards had stripped him in the harsh brightness of the guardroom and they had amused themselves coarsely, pricking him with their swords or with the heated poker from the fire, sliding them around his flaccid sex, prodding him in the buttocks or the belly. Bound and helpless, Tomasso had wanted only to close his eyes and wish it all away.

For some reason it was the memory of Taeri that wouldn’t let him do that. He still couldn’t believe his younger brother was dead. Or that Taeri had been so brave and so decisive at the end. It made him want to cry, thinking about it, but he was not going to let the Barbadians see that. He was a Sandreni. Which seemed to mean more to him now, naked and near the end, than it ever had before.

So he kept his eyes open and he fixed them bleakly on the new captain. He did his best to ignore the things they were doing to him, and the sniggering, brutal suggestions as to what would happen tomorrow. They weren’t very imaginative actually. He knew the morning’s reality was going to be worse. Intolerably worse.

They hurt him a little with their blades and drew blood a few times, but nothing very much—Tomasso knew they were under orders to save him for the professionals in the morning. Alberico would be present then, as well.

This was just play.

Eventually the captain grew tired of Tomasso’s steady gaze, or else he decided that there was enough blood flowing down the prisoner’s legs, puddling on the floor. He ordered his men to stop. Tomasso’s bonds were cut and they gave him back his undergarments and a filthy pest-infested strip of blanket and they took him down the stairs to the dungeons of Astibar and they threw him into the blackness of one of them.

The entrance was so low that even on his knees he’d scraped his head on the stone when they pushed him in.
More blood, he realized, as his hand came away sticky. It didn’t actually seem to matter very much.

He hated the rats though. He’d always been afraid of rats. He rolled the useless blanket as tightly as he could and tried to use it as a feeble club. It was hard though in the dark.

Tomasso wished he were a physically braver man. He knew what was coming in the morning, and the thought, now that he was alone, turned his bowels to jelly.

He heard a sound, and realized a moment later that he was whimpering. He fought to keep control of himself. He was alone though, and in freezing darkness in the hands of his enemies, and there were rats. He couldn’t entirely keep the sounds from coming. He felt as if his heart was broken, as if it lay in jagged pieces at odd angles in his breast. Among the fragments he tried to assemble a curse for Herado and his betrayal, but nothing seemed equal to what his nephew had done. Nothing seemed large enough to encompass it.

He heard another rat and lashed out blindly with his rolled weapon. He hit something and heard a squeal. Again and again he pounded at the place of that sound. He thought he had killed it. One of them. He was trembling, but the frenzy of activity seemed to help him fight back his weakness. He didn’t weep any more. He leaned back against the damp slime of the stone wall, wincing because of his open cuts. He closed his eyes, though he couldn’t see in any case, and he thought of sunlight.

It was then that he must have dozed, because he woke suddenly with a shout of pain: one of the rats had bitten viciously at his thigh. He flailed about with the blanket for a few moments, but he was shivering now and beginning to feel genuinely ill. His mouth was swollen and pulpy from Alberico’s blow in the cabin. He found it painful to swallow. He felt his forehead and decided he was feverish.

Which is why, when he saw the wan light of a candle, he was sure he was hallucinating. He was able to look around though by its glow. The cell was tiny. There was a dead rat near his right leg and there were two more living ones—big as cats—near the door. He saw, on the wall beside him, a scratched-out image of the sun with notches for days cut into the rim. It had the saddest face Tomasso could ever remember seeing. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked back towards the glowing light and realized with certainty that this
was
a hallucination, or a dream.

His father was holding the candle, dressed in the blue-silver robe of his burial, looking down with an expression different from any Tomasso could ever remember seeing on his face.

The fever must be extreme, he decided; his mind was conjuring forth in this abyss an image of something his shattered heart so desperately desired. A look of kindness—and even, if one wanted to reach for the word, even of love—in the eyes of the man who’d whipped him as a child and then designated him as useful for two decades of plotting against a Tyrant.

Which had ended tonight. Which would truly end, most horribly, for Tomasso in the morning, amid pain he didn’t even have the capacity to imagine. He
liked
this dream though, this fever-induced fantasy. There was light in it. It kept the rats away. It even seemed to ease the bone-numbing cold of the wet stones beneath him and against his back.

He lifted an unsteady hand towards the flame. Through a dry throat and torn, puffy lips he croaked something. What he wanted to say was,
‘I’m sorry,’
to the dream-image of his father, but he couldn’t make the words come right.

This was a dream though, his dream, and the image of Sandre seemed to understand.

‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ Tomasso heard his dream-father say. So gently. ‘It was my fault and only mine. Through all those years and at the end. I knew Gianno’s limitations from the start. I had too many hopes for you as a child. It … affected me too much. After.’

The candle seemed to waver a little. A part of Tomasso, a corner of his heart, seemed to be knitting itself slowly back together, even though this was only a dream, only his own longing. A last feeble fantasy of being loved before they flayed him.

‘Will you let me tell you how sorry I am for the folly that has condemned you to this? Will you hear me if I tell you I have been proud of you, in my fashion?’

Tomasso let himself weep. The words were balm for the deepest ache he knew. Crying made the light blur and swim though, and so he raised his shaking hands, and kept trying to wipe the tears away. He wanted to speak but his shattered mouth could not form words. He nodded his head though, over and over. Then he had a thought and he raised his left hand—the heart hand, of oaths and fidelity—towards this dream of his father’s ghost.

And slowly Sandre’s hand came down, as if from a long, long way off, from years and years away, seasons lost and forgotten in the turning of time and pride, and father and son touched fingertips together.

It was a more solid contact than Tomasso had thought it would be. He closed his eyes for a moment, yielding to the intensity of his feelings. When he opened them his father’s image seemed to be holding something out towards him. A vial of some liquid. Tomasso did not understand.

‘This is the last thing I can do for you,’ the ghost said in a strange, unexpectedly wistful voice. ‘If I were stronger I could do more, but at least they will not hurt you in the morning now. They will not hurt you any more, my son.
Drink it, Tomasso, drink it and this will all be gone. All go away, I promise you. Then wait for me, Tomasso, wait if you can in Morian’s Halls. I would like to walk with you there.’

Tomasso still did not understand, but the tone was so mild, so reassuring. He took the dream-vial. Again it was more substantial than he’d expected it to be.

His father nodded encouragement. With trembling hands Tomasso fumbled and removed the stopper. Then with a last gesture—a final mocking parody of himself—he raised it in a wide, sweeping, elaborate salute to his own powers of fantasy and he drained it to the dregs, which were bitter.

His father’s smile was so sad. Smiles are not supposed to be sad, Tomasso wanted to say. He had said that to a boy once, in a temple of Morian at night, in a room where he was not supposed to be. His head felt heavy. He felt as if he were about to fall alseep, even though he already
was
asleep, and dreaming in his fever. He really didn’t understand. He especially didn’t understand why his father, who was dead, should ask
him
to wait in Morian’s Halls.

He looked up again, wanting to ask about that. His vision seemed to be going completely strange on him though.

He knew this was so, because the image of his father, looking down upon him, seemed to be crying. There were tears in his father’s eyes.

Which was impossible. Even in a dream.

‘Farewell,’ he heard.

Farewell,
he tried to say, in return.

He wasn’t sure if he’d actually managed to form the word, or if he’d only thought it, but just then a darkness more encompassing than he had ever known came down over him like a blanket or a mantle, and the difference between the spoken and the unspoken ceased to matter any more.