Tigana (78 page)

‘Let’s go,’ she said again, and turned her face away from him, to begin the long walk through the palace and out into the morning and then down to the sea.

The Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes of Chiara had been the most dramatic single ritual of temporal power in the Peninsula of the Palm. From the very beginning of their dominion on the
Island, the leaders of Chiara had known that theirs was a power granted by and subject to the waters that surrounded them. The sea guarded them and fed them. It gave their ships—always the largest armada in the peninsula—access to trade and plunder, and it wrapped them about and enclosed them in a world within the world. No wonder, as the taletellers said, no wonder it was on the Island that Eanna and Adaon had come together to engender Morian and make the Triad complete.

A world within the world, girdled by the sea.

It was said to have been the very first of the Grand Dukes who had begun the ceremony that became the Ring Dive. It had been different in those early days. Not actually a dive, for one thing, only a ring thrown as a gift into the sea in propitiation and token of acknowledgement, in the days when the world turned its face towards the sun and the sailing season began in earnest.

Then one spring, a long time after that, a woman dived into the sea after the ring when the Grand Duke of that time cast it in. Some said later she had been crazed with love or religious possession, others that she was only cunning and ambitious.

In either case, she surfaced from the waters of the harbour with the ring bright in her hand.

And as the crowd that had gathered to watch the Grand Duke wed the sea shouted and babbled in wild confusion and wonder, the High Priest of Morian in Chiara suddenly cried aloud, in words that would run down through all the years, never to be lost: ‘Look and see! See how the oceans accept the Grand Duke as husband to them! How they offer back the sea-ring as a bride piece to a lover!’

And the High Priest moved to the very end of the pier beside the Duke and knelt to help the woman rise from the sea and so he set in motion everything that followed.
Saronte the Grand Duke was but new to his power and as yet unwed. Letizia, who had come into the city from a farm in the distrada and had done this unprecedented thing, was yellow-haired and comely and very young. And their palms were joined together then and there over the water by Mellidar, that High Priest of Morian, and Saronte placed the sea-ring on Letizia’s finger.

They were wed at Midsummer. There was war that autumn against Asoli and Astibar, and young Saronte di Chiara triumphed magnificently in a naval battle in the Gulf of Corte, south of the Island. A victory whose anniversary Chiara still remembered. And from that time onward, the newly shaped ritual of the Ring Dive was enshrined for use in time of Chiara’s need.

Thirty years later, near the end of Saronte’s long reign, in one of the recurring squabbles for precedence among the Triad’s clergy, a newly anointed High Priest of Eanna revealed that Letizia had been near kin to Mellidar, the priest of Morian who had drawn her from the water and bound her to the Duke. Eanna’s priest invited the people of the Island to draw their own conclusions about the schemes of Morian’s clergy and their endless striving for pre-eminence and power.

A number of events, none of them pleasant, had unfolded among the Triad’s servants in the months following that revelation, but none of these disturbances had come near to touching the bright new sanctity of the ritual itself. The ceremony had taken hold on the imagination of the people. It seemed to speak to something deep within them, whether of sacrifice or homage, of love or danger, or, in the end, of some dark, true binding to the waters of the sea.

So the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes remained, long after all those feuding clergy of the Triad had been lowered to their rest, their names only half-remembered, and only because of their part in the story of the Dive.

What had finally brought an end to the ceremony, in much more recent times, was the death of Onestra, wife to Grand Duke Cazal, two hundred and fifty years ago.

It was not, by any means, the first such death: the women who volunteered to dive for the Grand Dukes always had it made absolutely clear to them that their lives were worth infinitely less than the ring they sought to reclaim from the sea. To come back without the ring left one an exile from the Island for life, known and mocked throughout the whole peninsula. The ceremony was repeated with another woman, another ring, until one of the thrown rings was found and claimed.

By contrast, the woman who carried a sea-ring back to the pier was acclaimed as the luck of Chiara and her fortune was made for life. Wealth and honour, an arranged marriage into nobility. More than one had borne a child to her Grand Duke. Two had followed Letizia to the consort’s throne. Girls from families of little prospect were not chary about risking their lives for such a glittering, hallucinatory future.

Onestra di Chiara had been different, and because of her and after her everything had changed.

Beautiful as a legend and as proud, Grand Duke Cazal’s young bride had insisted on doing the Ring Dive herself, scorning to allocate such a glittering ceremony to some ill-bred creature from the distrada on the eve of a dangerous war. She had been, all the chroniclers of the day agreed, the most beautiful vision any of them had ever seen as she walked down to the sea in the dark-green of ritual.

When she floated, lifeless, to the surface of the water some distance from the shore, in full sight of the watching throng, Duke Cazal had screamed like a girl and fainted dead away.

After which there had been rioting and a terrified pandemonium unmatched before or since on the Island. In one isolated temple of Adaon on the north shore, all the
priestesses had killed themselves when one of their number brought back the news. It was the wrath of the god that was coming, so the portents were read, and Chiara almost strangled on its fear.

Duke Cazal, foolhardy and broken, was slain in battle that summer against the joined armies of Corte and Ferraut, after which Chiara endured two generations of eclipse, rising to power again only after the bitter, destructive war fought between the erstwhile allies who had beaten it. Such a process, of course, was hardly noteworthy. It had been the way of things in the Palm as far back as the records went.

But no woman had done the Ring Dive since Onestra died.

All the symbols had changed with her, the stakes had risen too high. If another woman were to die in the Dive, with that legacy of chaos and defeat.

It was far too dangerous, successive Grand Dukes declared, the one after the other, and they found ways to keep the Island safe in its sea-girt power without the sanction of that most potent ceremony.

When the Ygrathen fleet had been sighted nineteen years ago the last Grand Duke of Chiara had killed himself on the steps of Eanna’s temple, and so there had been no one to cast a ring into the sea that year, even had there been a woman willing to dive for it, in search of Morian’s intercession and the god’s.

It was eerily silent in the saishan when she and Scelto left her rooms. Normally at this hour the corridors would be loud with the stir and bustle of the castrates, fragrant and colourful with the scented presence of women moving languorously to the baths or to their morning meal. Today was different. The hallways were empty and still save for their own footsteps. Dianora suppressed a shiver, so strange did the deserted, echoing saishan seem.

They passed the doorway to the baths and then the entrance to the dining rooms. Both were empty and silent. They turned a corner towards the stairway that led down and out of the women’s wing, and there Dianora saw that one person at least had remained, and was waiting for them.

‘Let me look at you,’ Vencel said, the usual words. ‘I must approve you before you go down.’

The saishan head was sprawled as always among the many-coloured pillows of his rolling platform. Dianora almost smiled to see his vast bulk, and to hear the familiar words spoken.

‘Of course,’ she said, and slowly turned full circle before his scrutiny.

‘Acceptable,’ he said at length. The customary judgement, though his high distinctive voice sounded more subdued than she had ever heard it. ‘But perhaps … perhaps you would like to wear that vairstone from Khardhun about your throat? For luck? I brought it with me for you, from the saishan treasures.’

Almost diffidently Vencel extended a large soft hand and she saw that he was holding the red jewel she had worn the day Isolla of Ygrath had tried to kill the King.

She was about to demur when she remembered that Scelto had brought this back for her as something special for that day, just before she had dressed to go down. Remembering that, and moved by Vencel’s gesture, she said, ‘Thank you. I would be pleased to wear it.’ She hesitated. ‘Would you put it on for me?’

He smiled, almost shyly. She knelt before him and with his deft and delicate fingers the enormous saishan head clasped the jewel on its chain about her neck. Kneeling so near she was overwhelmed by the scent of tainflowers that he always wore.

Vencel withdrew his hands and leaned back to look at her. In his dark face his eyes were unwontedly soft. ‘In
Khardhun we used to say to someone going on a journey,
Fortune find you there and guide you home
. Such is my wish today.’ He hid his hands in the billowing folds of his white robe and looked away, down the empty corridor.

‘Thank you,’ she said again, afraid to say more. She rose and glanced over at Scelto; there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them hastily away and moved to lead her down the stairs. Halfway down she looked back at Vencel, an almost inhumanly vast figure, draped in billowing white. He was gazing expressionlessly down after them, from among the brilliantly coloured panoply of his pillows, an exotic creature from another world entirely, somehow carried ashore and stranded here in the saishan of Chiara.

At the bottom of the stairs she saw that the two doors had been left unbarred. Scelto would not have to knock. Not today. He pushed the doors open and drew back to let her pass.

In the long hallway outside, the priests of Morian and the priestesses of Adaon were waiting for her. She saw the scarcely veiled triumph in their eyes, a collective glittering of expectation.

There was a sound, a drawing of breath, as she came through the doors in the green robes of a rite that had not been performed in two and a half hundred years, her hair drawn back and bound in a net green as the sea.

Trained to control, being what they were, the clergy quickly fell silent. And in silence they made way for her, to follow behind in orderly rows of crimson and smoke-grey.

She knew they would make Scelto trail behind them. He could not be part of this procession of the rites. She knew she had not properly said farewell to him. Hers was not a life meant to be made whole.

They went west down the corridor to the Grand Staircase. At the top of the wide marble stairs Dianora
paused and looked down, and she finally understood why the saishan had been so silent. All the women and the castrates were gathered below. They had been allowed out, permitted to come this far to see her pass by. Holding her head very high and looking neither left nor right she set her foot on the first stair and started down. She was no longer herself, she thought. No longer Dianora, or not only Dianora. She was merging further into legend with every step she took.

And then, at the bottom of the staircase, as she stepped onto the mosaic-inlaid tiles of the floor, she realized who was waiting by the palace doors to escort her out and her heart almost stopped.

There was a cluster of men there. D’Eymon, for one, and Rhamanus as well, who had stayed in the Palm as she’d been sure he would, and had been named as Brandin’s First Lord of the Fleet. Beside them was Doarde the poet, representing the people of Chiara. She had expected him: it had been d’Eymon’s clever idea that the participation of one Island poet could help counterbalance the crime and death of another. Next to Doarde was a burly, sharp-faced man in brown velvet hung about with a ransom’s worth of gold. A merchant from Corte, and a successful one clearly enough; very possibly one of the ghouls who had made their fortune preying on the ruins of Tigana two decades ago. Behind him was a lean grey-clad priest of Morian who was obviously from Asoli. She could tell from his colouring, the native Asolini all had that look about them.

She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her there was from Lower Corte and she knew him. A figure from her own internal legends, from the myths and hopes that had sustained her life this far. And this was the one whose presence here almost froze the blood in her veins.

In white of course, majestic as she remembered him from when she was a girl, gripping the massive staff that had always been his signature, and towering over every man there, stood Danoleon the High Priest of Eanna in Tigana.

The man who had taken Prince Alessan away to the south. So Baerd had told her the night he saw his own riselka and went away to follow them.

She knew him, everyone had known Danoleon, his long-striding, broad-shouldered pre-eminence, the deep, glorious instrument that was his voice in temple services. Approaching the doors Dianora fought back a moment of wild panic before sternly controlling herself. There was no way he could recognize her. He had never known her as a child. Why should he have—the adolescent daughter of an artist loosely attached to the court? And she had changed, she was infinitely changed since then.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him though. She had known d’Eymon was arranging for someone to be there from Lower Corte, but had never expected Danoleon himself. In the days when she had worked in The Queen in Stevanien it was well-known that Eanna’s High Priest had withdrawn from the wider world into the goddess’s Sanctuary in the southern hills.

Now he had come out, and was here, and looking at him, drinking in his reality, Dianora felt an absurd, an almost overwhelming swell of pride to see how he seemed to dominate, merely by his presence, all the people assembled there.