Tigana (55 page)

‘Take my horse. There’s a bow in the saddle.’

Devin shook his head. ‘He may notice—and I’m not good enough with the bow anyhow. I’ll do what I can. Can you arrange to be noisy in about twenty minutes?’

‘We can be very noisy,’ said Marius of Quileia. ‘The climb back up and around will be easier to your left as you go down, just past the point where this path bends. I’d very much like this person alive, by the way.’

Devin smiled. Marius suddenly roared with laughter and Alessan followed suit. Erlein was silent as Alessan swept an imperious hand out towards Devin.

‘If you forgot it then you can fetch it, thimble-brain! We’ll be here, enjoying our meal. We
may
leave something for you.’

‘It wasn’t my fault!’ Devin protested loudly, letting his smile fade to petulance. He turned back to where the horses were tethered. Shaking his head, visibly disconsolate, he mounted his grey and rode down the path along which they had come.

As far as the bend in the trail.

He dismounted and tethered the horse. After a moment’s thought he left his sword where it was, hanging from the saddle. He was aware that it was a decision that might cost him his life. He’d seen the wooded slopes beside the pass though; a sword would be awkward and noisy when he began to climb.

Cutting to the west he soon found himself among the trees. He doubled back south and up, as far off the line of the pass as the terrain allowed. It was hard, sweaty going, and he had to hurry, but Devin was fit and he’d always been quick and agile—compensations for a lack of size. He scrambled up the steep slopes, weaving among mountain trees and dark serrano bushes, grasping roots wedged deep into the slanting soil.

Part of the way up, the trees briefly gave out before a short, steep cliff to the south and west. He could go up or he
could go around, angling back towards the pass. Devin tried to guess his bearings but it was difficult—no sounds reached him this far off the trail. He couldn’t be sure if he was already above the place where the Quileian cloth was spread for lunch.
Twenty minutes,
he’d told them. He gritted his teeth, offered a quick prayer to Adaon, and began to climb the rock. It occurred to him that there was something profoundly incongruous about an Asolini farmer’s son from the northern marshes struggling up a cliff-face in the Braccio Range.

He wasn’t an Asolini farmer’s son though. He was from Tigana and his father was, and his Prince had asked him to do this thing.

Devin skittered sideways along the rock-face trying not to dislodge any pebbles. He reached an outcrop of stone, changed grip, hung free for a second, and then boosted himself straight up and on to it. He scrambled quickly across some level ground, dropped flat on his stomach and, breathing hard, looked up to the south.

And then straight down. He caught his breath, realizing how lucky he’d been. There was a single figure hiding behind a boulder almost directly below him. Devin had quite certainly been visible on the last part of his climb where the cliff-face broke clear of the trees. His silence had served him well though, for the figure below was oblivious to him, avidly intent on the group feasting on the path. Devin couldn’t see them, but their voices carried to him now. The sun moved behind a cloud and Devin instinctively flattened himself, just as the assassin glanced up to gauge the change in the light.

For an archer it would matter, Devin knew. It was a long shot, downhill and partly screened by the guards. There would also be time, most likely, for only one arrow. He wondered if the tips were poisoned. Probably, he decided.

Very carefully he started crawling uphill, trying to work his way further around behind the assassin. His brain was racing as he slipped into a higher stand of trees. How was he going to get close enough to deal with an archer?

Just then he heard the sound of Alessan’s pipes followed, a measure later, by Erlein’s harp. A moment after that a number of voices started in on one of the oldest, most rollicking highland ballads of all. About a legendary band of mountain outlaws who had ruled these hills and crags with arrogant impunity until they were surprised and defeated by Quileia and Certando together:

Thirty brave men rode apace from the north

And forty Quileians met them side by side.

There in the mountains each pledged to the other

And Gan Burdash high in his roost defied!

The booming voice of Marius led the others into the refrain. By then Devin had remembered something and he knew what he was going to try to do. He was aware that there was more than an element of lunacy in his planning, but he also knew he didn’t have much time, or many options.

His heart was pounding. He wiped his hands dry on his breeches and began moving more quickly through the trees along the line of the ridge he’d climbed. Behind him was the singing; beneath him now, perhaps fifteen feet east of this higher ridge and twenty feet below, was an assassin with a bow. The sun came out from behind the clouds.

Devin was above and behind the Quileian now. Had he been carrying a bow and been at all accomplished with one he would have had the other at his mercy.

Instead, what he had was a knife, and a certain pride and trust in his own coordination, and a tall giant of a mountain pine-tree rising all the way up to his ridge from just behind
the boulder that sheltered the archer. He could see the other clearly now, clad in a masking green for the mountain trail, with a strung bow and half a dozen arrows to hand.

Devin knew what he had to do. He also knew—because there had been woods at home, if not mountain passes—that he could not climb down that tree with any hope of silence. Not even with the loud, seriously off-key voices screening his sounds from below.

Which left, so far as he could judge, only the one option. Others might have planned it better, but others weren’t on this ridge. Devin wiped his damp palms very carefully dry again and began concentrating on a large branch that stretched out and away from the others. The only one that might do him any good. He tried to calculate angle and distance as best he could, given an almost total lack of experience at this particular manoeuvre. What he was about to try was not a thing one did for practice, anywhere.

He checked the hang of the dagger in his belt, wiped his hands one last time, and stood up. Absurdly, the flash of memory that came to him then was of the day his brothers had surprised him hanging upside down from a tree, trying to stretch his height.

Devin smiled tightly and stepped to the edge of the cliff. The branch looked absurdly far away, and it was only half of the way down to the level of the pass. He swore an inward oath that if he survived this Baerd was going to teach him how to use a bow properly.

From the path below he heard the ragged voices swirling erratically towards the climax of the ballad:

Gan Burdash ruled in the mountain heights

And with his band he ranged from crag to glen,

But seventy brave men tracked him to his lair

And when the moons had set the peaks were free again!

Devin jumped. Air whistled past his face. The branch flew up to meet him, blurred, very fast. He stretched his hands, clutched it, swung. Only a little. Only enough to change his angle of descent, cut his momentum. Bring him directly down upon the killer behind the rock.

The branch held, but the leaves crackled loudly as he pivoted. He’d known they would. The Quileian flung a startled glance skyward and grappled for the bow.

Not nearly fast enough. Screaming at the top of his lungs, Devin plummeted like some hunting bird of these high places. By the time his target began to move Devin was already there.

Our kick-drop from the twenty-seven tree,
he thought.

Falling, he tilted his torso so that it angled sideways across the upper body of the Quileian and he kicked out hard with both feet as he did. The impact was sickening. He felt his legs make jarring contact, even as he crashed into the other, driving all the air from his own lungs.

They smashed into the ground together, tumbling and rolling away from the base of the boulder. Devin gasped agonizingly for breath, he felt the world sway and rock wildly in his sight. He gritted his teeth and groped for his dagger.

Then he realized it was not necessary.

Dead before we both hit the ground,
Marius had said. With a shuddering heave Devin forced air into his tortured lungs. There was an odd, knifing pain running up his right leg. He forced himself to ignore it. He rolled free of the unconscious Quileian and struggled, gasping and wheezing, for another breath of precious air. And then he looked.

The assassin was a woman. Under all the circumstances, not a great surprise. She was not dead. Her forehead appeared to have glanced off the rock under the impact of his sprawling descent. She was lying on her side, bleeding
heavily from a scalp wound. He had probably broken a number of her ribs with his kick. She had a profusion of cuts and scrapes from their tumble down the slope.

So, Devin noted, did he. His shirt was torn and he was badly scratched again, for the second time in half a day. There was a joke, something that ought to be amusing in that, but he couldn’t reach to it. Not yet.

He seemed to have survived though. And to have done what he’d been asked to do. He managed to draw one full, steadying breath just as Alessan and one of the Quileian soldiers came sprinting up the path. Erlein was just behind them, Devin saw with surprise.

He started to stand, but the world spun erratically and he had to be braced by Alessan. The Quileian guard flipped the assassin over on her back. He stood staring down upon her and then spat, very deliberately, into her bleeding face.

Devin looked away.

His eyes met Alessan’s. ‘We saw you jump from down there. You’re really supposed to have wings before trying that sort of thing,’ the Prince said. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you?’

The expression in the grey eyes belied the lightness of his tone. ‘I feared for you,’ he added softly.

‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do,’ Devin said apologetically. He was aware of a deep pride beginning to well up within him. He shrugged. ‘The singing was driving me mad. I had to do something to stop it.’

Alessan’s smile widened. ‘He reached an arm around and squeezed Devin’s shoulder. Baerd had done that too, in the Nievolene barn.

It was Erlein who laughed at the joke. ‘Come back down,’ the wizard said. ‘I’ll have to clean out those cuts for you.’

They helped him descend the slope. The Quileian carried the woman and her bow. Devin saw that it was made of a very
dark wood, almost black, and was carved into a semblance of a crescent moon. From one end of it there hung a gathered and twisted lock of greying hair. He shivered. He had a fair idea of whose it would be.

Marius was on his feet, one hand on the back of his chair, as he watched them come down. His eyes barely flicked over the four men and the carried assassin. They locked, cold and grim, on the black curve of the moon bow. He looked frightening.

And the more so, Devin thought, because not at all afraid.

‘I think we are past the need to dance in words around each other,’ Alessan said. ‘I would like to tell you what I need and you will tell me if you can do it and that will be all we need say.’

Marius held up a hand to stop him.

He had now joined the three of them among the cushions on the golden cloth. The dishes and baskets had been cleared away. Two of the Quileians had taken the woman back up over the pass to where the rest of their company waited. The other four were posted some distance away. The sun was high, as high as it would get at noon this far south, this early in the spring. It had turned into a mild, generous day.

‘This Bear is a very bad word-dancer, Pigeon,’ the King of Quileia said soberly. ‘You know that. You probably know something else: how much it will grieve me to deny you any request at all. I would like to do this differently. I would like to tell you what I cannot do, so you will not ask it and force me to refuse.’

Alessan nodded. He remained silent, watching the King.

‘I cannot give you an army,’ Marius said flatly. ‘Not yet, and perhaps never. I am too green in power, too far from the stability I need at home to lead or even order troops over these mountains. There are several hundreds of years of
tradition I have to set about changing in very little time. I am not a young man any more, Pigeon.’

Devin felt a leap of excitement within himself and struggled to master it. This was too serious an occasion for childlike feelings. He could hardly believe he was here, though, so close to—at the very heart of—something of this magnitude. He stole a sidelong glance at Erlein and then looked more closely: the same quick spark of interest was in the other’s face. For all his years and his long travels, Devin seriously doubted if the troubadour-wizard had ever been so near to great events.

Alessan was shaking his head. ‘Bear,’ he said, ‘I would never ask you for that. For our sake as much as for your own. I will not have my name remembered as the man who first invited the newly awakened might of Quileia north into the Palm. If an army ever ventures from Quileia through these passes—and I hope we are both long dead before such a day—the wish of my heart will be for it to be slaughtered and driven back with losses so bloody that no King in the south ever tries again.’

‘If there is a King in the south and not another four hundred years of the Mother and her priestesses. Very well,’ Marius said, ‘then tell me what it is you do need.’

Alessan’s legs were neatly crossed, his long fingers laced in his lap. He looked for all the world as if he was discussing nothing of greater moment than, perhaps, the sequence of songs for an evening’s performance.

Except that his fingers, Devin saw, were so tightly squeezed together they were white.

‘A question first,’ Alessan said, controlling his voice. ‘Have you received letters offering to open trade?’