Tigana (79 page)

It was for him, and for the men and women like him, the ones who were gone and the ones who yet lived in a broken land, that she was going to do what she would do today. His eyes rested on her searchingly; they were all doing that, but it was under Danoleon’s clear blue gaze that Dianora drew herself up even taller than before. Behind them all, beyond the doors which had not yet been opened, she seemed to see the riselka’s path growing brighter all the time.

She stopped and they bowed to her, all six men putting a straight leg forward and bending low in a fashion of salute not used for centuries. But this was legend, ceremony, an invocation of many kinds of power, and Dianora sensed that she must now seem to them like some hieratic figure out of the tapestry scrolls of the distant past.

‘My lady,’ said d’Eymon gravely, ‘if it pleases you and you are minded to allow us, we would attend upon you now and lead you to the King of the Western Palm.’

Carefully said, and clearly, for all their words were to be remembered and repeated. Everything was to be remembered. One reason the priests were here, and a poet.

‘It pleases me,’ she said simply. ‘Let us go.’ She did not say more; her own words would matter less. It was not what she would
say
today that was to be remembered.

She still could not take her eyes from Danoleon. He was the first man from Tigana, she realized, that she had seen since coming to the Island. In a very direct way it eased her heart that Eanna, whose children they all were, had allowed her to see this man before she went into the sea.

D’Eymon nodded a command. Slowly the massive bronze doors swung open upon the vast crowd assembled between the palace and the pier. She saw people spilling across the square to the farthest ends of the harbour, even thronging the decks of the ships at anchor there. The steady murmur of sound that had been present all morning swelled to a crescendo as the doors swung open, and then it abruptly stopped and fell away as the crowd caught sight of her. A rigid, straining silence seemed to claim Chiara under the blue arch of the sky; and out into that stillness Dianora went.

And it was then, as they moved into the brilliant sunshine along the aisle, the shining path that had been made for her passage, that she saw Brandin waiting by the sea for her,
dressed like a soldier-king, without extravagance, bareheaded in the light of spring.

Something twisted within her at the sight of him, like a blade in a wound.
It will end soon
, she told herself steadily.
Only a little longer now. It will all be over soon enough
.

She went towards him then, walking like a Queen, slender and tall and proud, clad in the colours of the dark-green sea with a crimson gem about her throat. And she knew that she loved him, and knew her land was lost if he was not driven away or slain, and she grieved with all her being for the simple truth that her mother and her father had had a daughter born to them all those years ago.

For someone as small as he was it was hopeless to try to see anything from the harbour square itself, and even the deck of the ship that had brought them here from Corte was thronged with people who had paid the captain for a chance to view the Dive from this vantage point. Devin had made his way over to the mainmast and scrambled up to join another dozen men clinging to the rigging high above the sea. There were compensations inherent in agility.

Erlein was somewhere below amid the crowd on deck. He was still terrified, after three days here, by this enforced proximity to the sorceror from Ygrath. It was one thing, he had said angrily, to elude Trackers in the south, another for a wizard to walk up to a sorceror.

Alessan was somewhere among the crowd in the harbour. Devin had spotted him at one point working his way towards the pier, but couldn’t see him now. Danoleon was inside the palace itself, representing Lower Corte in the ceremony. The irony of that was almost overwhelming, whenever Devin allowed himself to think about it. He tried not to because it made him afraid, for all of them.

But Alessan had been decisive when the courteously phrased request had come for the High Priest to travel north and join men of the other three provinces as formal witnesses to the Ring Dive.

‘You will go, of course,’ the Prince had said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘And we shall be there as well. I need to take the measure of things on Chiara since this change.’

‘Are you absolutely mad?’ Erlein had gasped, not bothering to hide his disbelief.

Alessan had only laughed, though not, Devin thought, with any real amusement. He had become virtually impossible to read since his mother had died. Devin felt quite inadequate to the task of bridging that space or breaking through. Several times in the days following Pasithea’s death he had found himself desperately wishing that Baerd was with them.

‘What about Savandi?’ Erlein had demanded. ‘Couldn’t this be a trap for Danoleon. Or for you, even?’

Alessan shook his head. ‘Hardly. You said yourself, no message was sent. And it is entirely plausible that he was killed by brigands in the countryside as Torre made it seem. The King of the Western Palm has larger things to worry about right now than one of his petty spies. I’m not concerned about that, Erlein, but I do thank you for your solicitude.’ He smiled, a wintry smile. Erlein had scowled and stalked away.

‘What
are
you concerned about?’ Devin had asked the Prince.

But Alessan hadn’t answered that.

High in the rigging of the
Aema Falcon
Devin waited with the others for the palace doors to open, and tried to control the pounding of his heart. It was difficult though; the sense of excitement and anticipation that had been building on the Island for three days had started to become
overwhelming this morning, and had taken an almost palpable shape when Brandin himself had appeared and walked calmly down to the pier with a small retinue, including one stooped, balding old man dressed exactly like the King.

‘Brandin’s Fool,’ the Cortean in the rigging next to him said, when Devin asked, pointing. ‘Something to do with sorcery, the way they do things in Ygrath.’ He grunted. ‘We’re better off not knowing.’

Devin had gazed for the first time at the man who had destroyed Tigana and tried to imagine what it would be like to have a bow in his hands right now and Baerd’s or Alessan’s skill at archery. It was a long, but not an impossible shot, down, and across a span of water to strike a single soberly clad, bearded man standing by the sea.

Imagining the flight of that arrow in the morning sun, he remembered another conversation with Alessan, at the rail of the
Falcon
the night they reached Chiara.

‘What do we
want
to happen?’ Devin had asked.

Word had reached the Gulf of Corte just before they sailed that most of the Second Company of Alberico’s Barbadian mercenaries had now been pulled back from the border forts and cities in Ferraut and were marching with the other armies towards Senzio. Hearing that, Alessan’s face had gone pale, and there was a sudden hard glitter in his grey eyes.

Much like his mother’s, Devin had thought, but would not dream of saying.

On the ship Alessan had turned to him briefly at the question and then looked back out to sea. It was very late, nearer dawn than midnight. Neither of them had been able to sleep. Both moons were overhead and the water gleamed and sparkled with their mingled light.

‘What do we want to happen?’ Alessan repeated. ‘I’m not completely sure. I think I know, but I can’t be certain yet. That’s why we’re going to watch this Dive.’

They listened to the sounds of the ship in the night sea. Devin cleared his throat.

‘If she fails?’ he asked.

Alessan was silent for so long Devin didn’t think he was going to answer. Then, very softly, he said, ‘If the Certandan woman fails Brandin is lost I think. I am almost sure.’

Devin looked quickly over at him. ‘Well then, that means …’

‘That means a number of things, yes. One is our name come back. Another is Alberico ruling the Palm. Before the year is out, almost certainly.’

Devin tried to absorb that.
If we take them then we must take them both
, he remembered the Prince saying in the Sandreni lodge, with Devin hiding in the loft above.

‘And if she succeeds?’ he asked.

Alessan shrugged. In the blue and silver moonlight his profile seemed more marble than flesh. ‘You tell me. How many people of the provinces will fight against the Empire of Barbadior for a king who has been wedded to the seas of the Palm by a sea-bride from this peninsula?’

Devin thought about it.

‘A lot,’ he said at length. ‘I think a lot of people would fight.’

‘So do I,’ said Alessan. ‘Then the next question becomes, who would win? And the one after that is: Is there something we can do about it?’

‘Is there?’

Alessan looked over at him then and his mouth crooked wryly. ‘I have lived my life believing so. We may find it put to the test very soon.’

Devin stopped his questions then. It was very bright with the two moons shining. A short while later Alessan touched his shoulder and pointed with his other hand. Devin looked and saw a high, dark mass of land rising from the sea in the distance.

‘Chiara,’ said Alessan.

And so Devin saw the Island for the first time.

‘Have you ever been here before?’ he asked softly.

Alessan shook his head, never taking his eyes from that dark, mountainous shape on the horizon.

‘Only in my dreams,’ he said.

‘She’s coming!’
someone shouted from the topmost rigging of the Asolini ship anchored next to them; the cry was immediately picked up and strung from ship to ship and along the harbour, peaking in a roar of anticipation.

And then falling away to an eerie, chilling silence as the massive bronze doors of Chiara Palace swung fully back to reveal the woman framed within.

Even when she began to walk the silence held. Moving slowly, she passed among the throngs assembled in the square, seeming almost oblivious to them. Devin was too far away to see her face clearly yet, but he was suddenly conscious of a terrible beauty and grace.
It is the ceremony
, he told himself; it is only because of where she is. He saw Danoleon behind her, moving among the other escorts, towering above them.

And then, moved by some instinct, he turned from them to Brandin of Ygrath on the pier. The King was nearer to him and he had the right angle. He could see how the man watched the woman approach. His face was utterly expressionless. Icy cold.

He’s calculating the situation, Devin thought. The numbers, the chances. He’s
using
all of this—the woman, the ritual, everyone gathered here with so much passion in them—for a purely political end. He realized that he despised the man for that, over and above everything else: hated him for the blank, emotionless gaze with which he watched a woman approach to risk her life for him. By the Triad, he was supposed to be in love with her!

Even the bent old man beside him, Devin saw, the King’s Fool, dressed exactly like Brandin, was wringing his hands over and about each other in obvious apprehension, anxiety and concern vivid in his face.

By contrast, the face of the King of the Western Palm was a frigid, uncaring mask. Devin didn’t even want to look at him any more. He turned back to the woman, who had come much nearer now.

And because she had, because she was almost at the water’s edge, he could see that his first sense had been right and his glib explanation wrong: Dianora di Certando clad in the sea-green robes of the Ring Dive was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in all his life.

What do we want to happen?
he had asked Alessan three nights ago, sailing to this Island.

He still didn’t know the answer. But looking down at the woman as she reached the sea a sudden fear rose in him, and an entirely unexpected pity. He grasped the rigging tightly and set himself to watch from high, high above.

She knew Brandin better than she knew anyone alive; it had been necessary, in order to survive, especially in the beginning, in order to say and do the right things in a mortally dangerous place. Then as the years slipped by necessity had somehow been alchemized into something else. Into love, actually, bitterly hard as that had been to acknowledge. She had come here to kill, with the twin snakes of memory and hatred in her heart. Instead, she had ended up understanding him better than anyone in the world because there was no one else who mattered half so much.