Tigana (35 page)

When they came home that night she and the servant-woman heated water and drew baths for them and afterwards they dealt with the wounds and the black and purpling bruises as best they could.

Later, over dinner, Naddo told them he was leaving. That same night, he said. It was too much, he said, awkwardly twisting in his seat, speaking to Dianora, for her brother had turned his face away at Naddo’s first announcement.

There was no life to be made here, Naddo said with passionate urgency through a torn and swollen mouth. Not with the viciousness of the soldiers and the even more vicious taxes. If a young man, a young man such as himself, was to have any hope of doing something with his life, Naddo said, he had to get away. Desperately his eyes besought her understanding. He kept glancing nervously over to where her brother had now fully turned his back on both of them.

Where will you go? Dianora had asked him.

Asoli, he’d told her. It was a hard, wet land, unbearably hot and humid in summer, everyone knew that. But there was room there for new blood. The Asolini made people welcome, he’d heard, more so than in the Barbadian lands
to the east. He would never ever go to Corte or Chiara. People from Tigana did not go there, he said. Her brother made a small sound at that but did not turn; Naddo glanced over at him again and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.

Three other young men had made plans, he said to Dianora. Plans to slip out from the city tonight and make their way north. He’d known about it for some time, he said. He hadn’t been sure. He hadn’t known what to do. What had happened this morning had made up his mind for him.

Eanna light your path, Dianora had said, meaning it. He had been a good apprentice and then a brave and loyal friend. People were leaving all the time. The province of Lower Corte was a bad place in a very bad time. Naddo’s left eye was completely swollen shut. He might easily have been killed that afternoon.

Later, when he’d packed his few belongings and was ready to leave, she gave him some silver from her father’s hidden store. She kissed him in farewell. He’d begun weeping then. He commended himself to her mother and opened the front door. On the threshold he’d turned back again, still crying.

‘Goodbye,’ he’d said, in anguish, to the figure staring stonily into the fire on the front-room hearth. Seeing the look on Naddo’s face Dianora silently willed her brother to turn around. He did not. Deliberately he knelt and laid another log on the fire.

Naddo stared at him a moment longer, then he turned to look at Dianora, failed to achieve a tremulous, tearful smile, and slipped out into the dark and away.

Much later, when the fire had been allowed to die, her brother went out as well. Dianora sat and watched the embers slowly fade, then she looked in on her mother and went to bed. When she lay down it seemed to her that a
weight was pressing upon her body, far heavier than the quilted comforter.

She was awake when he came in. She always was. She heard him step loudly on the landing as was his habit, to let her know he was safely home, but she didn’t hear the next sound, which should have been the opening and closing of his bedroom door.

It was very late. She lay still for another moment, surrounded and mastered by all the griefs of the day. Then, moving heavily, as if drugged or in a waking dream, she rose and lit a candle. She went to her door and opened it.

He was standing in the hallway outside. And by the flickering of the light she bore she saw the river of tears that was pouring without surcease down his bruised, distorted face. Her hands began to shake. She could not speak.

‘Why didn’t I say goodbye to him?’ she heard him say in a strangled voice. ‘Why didn’t you make me say goodbye to him?’ She had never heard so much hurt in him. Not even when word had come that their father had died by the river.

Her heart aching, Dianora put the candle down on a ledge that once had held a portrait bust of her mother by her father. She crossed the narrow distance and took her brother in her arms, absorbing the hard racking of his sobs. He had never cried before. Or never so that she could see. She guided him into her room and lay down beside him on her bed, holding him close. They wept together, thus, for a very long time. She could not have said how long.

Her window was open. She could hear the breeze sigh through the young leaves outside. A bird sang, and another answered it from across the lane. The world was a place of dreaming or of sorrow, one or both of those. One or both. In the sanctuary of night she slowly pulled his tunic over his head, careful of his wounds, and then she slipped free of her own robe. Her heart was beating like the heart of a captured
forest creature. She could feel the race of his pulse when her fingers touched his throat. Both of the moons had set. The wind was in all the leaves outside. And so.

And so in all that darkness, dark over and about and close-gathered around them, the full dark of moonless night and the darkness of their days, the two of them sought a pitiful illicit shelter in each other from the ruin of their world.

‘What are we doing?’
her brother whispered once.

And then, a space of time later when pulse-beats had slowed again, leaving them clinging to each other in the aftermath of a headlong, terrifying need, he had said, one hand gentle in her hair, ‘What have we done?’

And all these long years later, alone in the saishan on the Island as this most hidden memory came back, Dianora could remember her reply.

‘Oh, Baerd,’ she’d said. ‘What has been done to us?’

It lasted from that first night through the whole of spring and into the summer. The sin of the gods, it was named, what they did. For Adaon and Eanna were said to have been brother and sister at the beginning of time, and Morian was their child.

Dianora didn’t feel like a goddess, and her mirror offered no illusions: only a too-thin face with enormous, staring eyes. She knew only that her happiness terrified her, and consumed her with guilt, and that her love for Baerd was the whole of her world. And what frightened her almost as much was seeing the same depth of love, the same astonished passion in him. Her heart misgave her constantly, even as they reached for their fugitive joy: too bright this forbidden flame in a land where any kind of brightness was lost or not allowed.

He came to her every night. The woman slept downstairs; their mother slept—and woke—in her own world. In the dark of Dianora’s room they escaped into each other,
reaching through loss and the knowledge of wrong in search of innocence.

He was still driven to go out some nights to walk the empty streets. Not as often as before, for which she gave thanks and sought a kind of justification for herself. A number of young men had been caught after curfew and killed on the wheels that spring. If what she was doing kept him alive she would face whatever judgement lay in wait for her in Morian’s Halls.

She couldn’t keep him every night though. Sometimes a need she could not share or truly understand would drive him forth. He tried to explain. How the city was different under the two moons or one of them or the stars. How softer light and shadow let him see it as Tigana again. How he could walk silently down towards the sea and come upon the darkened palace, and how the rubble and ruin of it could somehow be rebuilt in his mind in darkness towards what it had been before.

He had a need for that, he said. He never baited the soldiers and promised her he never would. He didn’t even want to see them, he said. They crashed into the illusions he wanted. He just needed to be abroad inside his memory of the city that had gone. Sometimes, Baerd told her, he would slip through gaps he knew in the harbour walls and walk along the beach listening to the sea.

By day he laboured, a thin boy at a strong man’s job, helping to rebuild what they were permitted to rebuild. Rich merchants from Corte—their ancient enemies—had been allowed to settle in the city, to buy up the smashed buildings and residential palaces very inexpensively, and to set about restoring them for their own purposes.

Baerd would come home at the end of a day sometimes with gashes and fresh bruises, and once the mark of a whip across his shoulders. She knew that if one company of
soldiers had ended their sport with him there were others to pick it up. It was only happening here, she’d heard. Everywhere else the soldiers restrained themselves and the King of Ygrath was governing with care, to consolidate his provinces against Barbadior.

In Lower Corte they were special, though. They had killed his son.

She would see those marks on Baerd and she had not the heart to ask him to deny himself his lost city at night when the need rose in him. Even though she lived a hundred terrors and died half a hundred deaths every time the front door closed behind him after dark—until she heard it open again and heard his loved, familiar footstep on the stairs, and then the landing, and then he came into her room to take and hold her in his arms.

It went on into summer and then it ended. It all ended, as her knowing heart had forewarned her from that first time in darkness, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the trees outside.

He came home no later than he usually did from walking abroad one night when blue Ilarion had been riding alone through a high lacework of clouds. It had been a beautiful night. She had sat up late by her window watching the moonlight falling on the rooftops. She’d been in bed when he came home though, and her heart had quickened with the familiar intermingling of relief and guilt and need. He had come into her room.

He didn’t come to bed. Instead, he sank into the chair she’d sat in by the window. With a queer, numb feeling of dread she had struck tinder and lit her candle. She sat up and looked at him. His face was very white, she could see that even by candlelight. She said nothing. She waited.

‘I was on the beach,’ Baerd said quietly. ‘I saw a riselka there.’

She had always known it would end. That it had to end.

She asked the instinctive question. ‘Did anyone else see her?’

He shook his head.

They looked at each other in silence. She was amazed at how calm she was, how steady her hands were upon the comforter. And in that silence a truth came home to her, one she had probably known for a long time. ‘You have only been staying for me, in any case,’ she said. A statement. No reproach in it. He had seen a riselka.

He closed his eyes. ‘You knew?’

‘Yes,’ she lied.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at her. But she knew that this would be easier for him if she were able to hide how new and deathly cold this actually was for her. A gift; perhaps the last gift she would give him.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she murmured, her hands lying still, where he could see them. ‘Truly, I understand.’ Truly, she did, though her heart was a wounded thing, a bird with one wing only, fluttering in small circles to the ground.

‘The riselka—’ he began. And halted. It was an enormous, frightening thing, she knew.

‘She makes it clear,’ he went on earnestly. ‘The fork of the prophecy. That I
have
to go away.’

She saw the love for her in his eyes. She willed herself to be strong enough. Strong enough to help him go away from her.
Oh, my brother,
she was thinking.
And will you leave me now?

She said, ‘I know she makes it clear, Baerd. I know you have to leave. It will be marked on the lines of your palm.’ She swallowed. This was harder than she could ever have imagined. She said, ‘Where will you go?’
My love,
she added, but not aloud, only inside, in her heart.

‘I’ve thought about that,’ he said.

He sat up straighter now. She could see him taking strength from her calm. She clung to that with everything she had.

‘I’m going to look for the Prince,’ he said.

‘What, Alessan? We don’t even know if he’s alive,’ she said in spite of herself.

‘There’s word he is,’ Baerd said. ‘That his mother is in hiding with the priests of Eanna, and that the Prince has been sent away. If there is any hope, any dream for us, for Tigana, it will lie with Alessan.’

‘He’s fifteen years old,’ she said. Could not stop herself from saying.
And so are you,
she thought.
Baerd, where did our childhood go?

By candlelight his dark eyes were not those of a boy. ‘I don’t think age matters,’ he said. ‘This is not going to be a quick or an easy thing, if it can ever be done at all. He will be older than fifteen when the time comes.’

‘So will you,’ she said.

‘And so will you,’ Baerd echoed. ‘Oh, Dia, what will you do?’ No one else but her father ever called her that. Stupidly it was the name that nearly broke her control.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘Look after mother. Marry. There is money for a while yet if I’m careful.’ She saw his stricken look and moved to quell it. ‘You are not to worry about it, Baerd. Listen to me:
you have just seen a riselka!
Will you fight your fate to clear rubble in this city for the rest of your days? No one has easy choices any more, and mine will not be as hard as most. I may,’ she had added, tilting her head defiantly, ‘try to think of some way to chase the same dream as you.’

It astonished her, looking back, that she had actually said this on that very night. As if she herself had seen the riselka and her own path had been made clear, even as Baerd’s forked away from her.

Lonely and cold in the saishan she was not half so cold or alone as she had been that night. He had not lingered once she’d given her dispensation. She had risen and dressed
and helped him pack a very few things. He had flatly refused any of the silver. She assembled a small satchel of food for his first sunrise on the long road alone. At the doorway, in the darkness of the summer night, they had held each other close, clinging without words. Neither wept, as if both knew the time for tears had passed.

‘If the goddesses love us, and the god,’ Baerd said, ‘we will surely meet again. I will think of you each and every day of my life. I love you, Dianora.’