Tigana (83 page)

This particular afternoon the patrons enjoying the young tenor’s rousing rendition of a Certandan ballad were rudely snapped out of their bar-pounding rhythm when the doors to the street were pushed open, revealing a largish cluster of new customers. Nothing of note in that, of course. Or not until the singer cut himself off in the middle of a chorus with a shouted greeting, the piper quickly laid down his pipes and leaped off the stage, and the harper lowered his own instrument and followed, if more slowly.

The enthusiasms of the reunion that ensued would have led to predictably cynical conclusions about the nature of the men involved, given the way of such things in Senzio, had the new party not included a pair of exceptionally attractive young women, one with short red hair, one with raven-dark. Even the harper, a dour, unsmiling fellow if ever there was one, was drawn almost against his will into the circle, to be crushed against the bony breast of a cadaverous-looking Khardhu mercenary who towered over the rest of the party.

A moment later another kind of reunion occurred. One with a different resonance that even stilled the excitement of the newly mingled group. Another man rose and walked diffidently over to the five people who had just arrived. Those who looked closely could see that his hands were trembling.

‘Baerd?’ they heard him say.

There followed a moment of silence. Then the man whom he’d addressed said
‘Naddo?’
in a tone even the most innocent Senzian could interpret. Any lingering doubts about that were laid to rest a second later by the way the two men embraced each other.

They even wept.

More than one man, eyeing the two women with frank admiration, decided that his chances of a conversation, and who knew what else, might be better than they’d first appeared if the men were all like that.

Alais had been moving through the days since Tregea in a state of excitement that brought an almost continuous flush to her pale skin and made her more delicately beautiful than she knew. What she
did
know is why she had been allowed to come.

From the moment the
Sea Maid’s
landing-boat had silently returned to the ship in the moonlit harbour of Tregea, bearing her father and Catriana and the two men they’d gone to meet, Alais had been aware that something more than friendship was involved here.

Then the dark-skinned man from Khardhu had looked at her appraisingly, and at Rovigo with an amused expression on his lined face, and her father, hesitating for only a moment, had told her who this really was. And then, quietly, but with an exhilarating confidence in her, he’d explained what these people, his new partners, were really doing here, and what he appeared to have been doing in secret with them for a great many years.

It appeared that it had not been entirely a coincidence after all that they’d met three musicians on the road outside their home during the Festival of Vines last fall.

Listening intently, trying not to miss a syllable or an implication, Alais measured her own inward response to all of this and was pleased beyond words to discover that she was not afraid. Her father’s voice and manner had much to do with that. And the simple fact that he was trusting her with this.

It was the other man—Baerd, they named him—who said to Rovigo, ‘If you are truly set on coming with us to Senzio, then we will have to find a place on the coast to put your daughter ashore.’

‘Why, exactly?’ Alais had said quickly before Rovigo could answer. She could feel her colour rising as all eyes turned to her. They were down below deck, crowded in her father’s cabin.

Baerd’s eyes were very dark by candlelight. He was a hard-looking, even a dangerous-seeming man, but his voice when he answered her was not unkind.

‘Because I don’t believe in subjecting people to unnecessary risks. There is danger in what we are about to do. There are also reasons for us to face those dangers, and your father’s assistance and that of his men if he trusts them, is important to us. For you to come would be a danger without necessity. Does that make sense?’

She forced herself to be calm. ‘Only if you judge me a child, incapable of any contribution.’ She swallowed. ‘I am the same age as Catriana and I think I now understand what is happening here. What you have been trying to do. I have … I can say that I have the same desire as any of you to be free.’

‘There are truths in that. I think she should come.’ It was, remarkably, Catriana. ‘Baerd,’ she went on, ‘if this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.’

Baerd looked at Catriana for a long time but said nothing. He turned to Rovigo, deferring to him with a gesture. In her father’s face Alais could see worry and love warring with his pride in her. And then, by the light of the candles, she saw that inner battle end.

‘If we get through this alive,’ Rovigo d’Astibar said to his daughter, his life, his joy in life, ‘your mother will kill me. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I’ll try to protect you,’ Alais said gravely, though her heart was racing like a wild thing.

It had been their talk at the railing of the ship, she knew. She knew it absolutely. The two of them looking at the cliffs under moonlight after the storm.

I don’t know what it is
, she had said,
but I need more
.

I know
, her father had replied.
I know you do. If I could give it, it would be yours. The world and the stars of Eanna would all be yours
.

It was because of that, because he loved her and meant what he had said, that he was allowing her to come with them to where the world they knew would be put into the balance.

Of that journey to Senzio she remembered two things particularly. Standing at the rail early one morning with Catriana as they moved north up the coast of Astibar. One tiny village, and then another and another, the roofs of houses bright in the sun, small fishing boats bobbing between the
Sea Maid
and the shore.

‘That one is my home,’ Catriana said suddenly, breaking a silence, speaking so softly only Alais could hear. ‘And that boat with the blue sail is actually my father’s.’ Her voice was odd, eerily detached from the meaning of the words.

‘We have to stop, then!’ Alais had murmured urgently. ‘I’ll tell my father! He’ll—’

Catriana laid a hand on her arm.

‘Not yet,’ she’d said. ‘I can’t see him yet. After. After Senzio. Perhaps.’

That was one memory. The other, very different, was of rounding the northern tip of Farsaro Island early in the morning and seeing the ships of Ygrath and the Western Palm anchored in the harbour there. Waiting for war. She
had
been afraid then, as the reality of what they were sailing towards was brought home to her in that vision, at once brightly colourful and forbidding as grey death. But she had looked over at Catriana, and her father, and then at the old Duke, Sandre, who named himself Tomaz now, and she had seen shadings of doubt and anxiety in each of them as well. Only Baerd, carefully counting the flotilla, had a different kind of expression on his face.

If she’d been forced to put a name to that look she would have said, hesitantly, that it was desire.

The next afternoon they had come to Senzio, and had moored the
Maid
in the crowded harbour and gone ashore, and so had come, at the end of the day, to an inn all the others seemed to know about. And the five of them had walked through the doors of that tavern into a flashing of joy bright and sudden as the sun come up from the rim of the sea.

Devin embraced her tightly and then kissed her on the lips, and then Alessan, after a moment’s visible anxiety at her presence and a searching glance at her father, did exactly the same. There was a lean-faced grey-haired man named Erlein with them, and then a number of other men in the tavern came up—Naddo was one name, Ducas another, and there was an older blind man with those two whose name she never caught. He walked with the aid of a magnificent stick. It had the most extraordinary carved eagle’s head, with eyes so piercing they seemed almost to be a compensation for the loss of his own.

There were others as well, from all over, it seemed. She missed most of their names. There was a great deal of noise. The innkeeper brought them wine: two bottles of Senzio green and a third one of Astibar’s blue wine. She had a small, careful glass of each, watching everyone, trying to sort through the chaotic babble of all that was said. Alessan and Baerd drew briefly apart for a moment, she noticed; when they returned to the table both men looked thoughtful and somewhat grim.

Then Devin and Alessan and Erlein had to go back and make their music for an hour while the others ate, and Alais, flushed and terribly excited, inwardly relived the feel of the two men’s lips upon hers. She found herself smiling shyly at everyone, afraid that her face was giving away exactly what she was feeling.

Afterwards they made their way upstairs behind the broad back of the innkeeper’s wife to their rooms. And later, when it was quiet on that upper level Catriana led her from the room they were put in, down the hall to the bedroom Devin and Alessan and Erlein shared.

They were there, and a number of other men—some of the ones she’d just met, and a few who were strangers. Her father entered a moment later with Sandre and Baerd. She and Catriana were the only women there. She had a moment to feel a little strange about that, and to think about how far she was from home, before everyone fell silent as Alessan pushed a hand through his hair and began to speak.

And as he did, Alais, concentrating, gradually came to understand with the others the dimensions, the truly frightening shape, of what he proposed to do.

At a certain point he stopped and looked at three men one by one. At Duke Sandre first, then at a round-faced Certandan named Sertino sitting with Ducas, and finally, almost challengingly, at Erlein di Senzio.

The three of them were wizards, she understood. It was a hard thing to come to terms with. Especially Sandre. The exiled Duke of Astibar. Their neighbour in the distrada all her life.

The man called Erlein was sitting on his bed, his back against the wall, hands crossed over his breast. He was breathing hard.

‘It is clear to me now that you
have
lost your mind,’ he said. His voice shook. ‘You have lived in your dreams so long you’ve lost sight of the world. And now you are going to kill people in your madness.’

Alais saw Devin open his mouth and then snap it shut without speaking.

‘All of this is possible,’ Alessan said, with an unexpected mildness. ‘It is possible I am pursuing a path of madness, though I think not. But yes, there are likely to be a great many people killed. We always knew that; the real madness would have been in pretending otherwise. For the moment though, compose your spirit and ease your soul. You know as well as I do, nothing is happening.’

‘Nothing? What do you mean?’ It was her father.

Alessan’s expression was wry, almost bitter. ‘Haven’t you noticed? You were in the harbour, you walked through the town. Have you seen any Barbadian troops? Any Ygrathens, soldiers from the west?
Nothing is happening
. Alberico of Barbadior has his entire army massed on the border, and the man refuses to order them north!’

‘He is afraid,’ said Sandre flatly in the silence that followed. ‘He’s afraid of Brandin.’

‘Perhaps,’ her father said thoughtfully. ‘Or else he is just cautious. Too cautious.’

‘What do we do then?’ asked the red-bearded Tregean named Ducas.

Alessan shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t
know. This is one thing I never expected. You tell me,’ he said. ‘How do we make him cross the border? How do we bring him to war?’ He looked at Ducas and then at each of the others in the room.

No one answered him.

They would think he was a coward. They were fools. They were all fools. Only a fool went lightly into war. Especially a war such as this, that risked everything for a gain he hardly cared about.
Senzio? The Palm?
What did they matter? Should he throw twenty years away for them?