Tigana (12 page)

Devin fervently seconded the sentiments of the insult and wished the steward a long and lucrative existence. For the tenth time since the Sandreni servants had entered the lower room he cursed Catriana, and for the twentieth time, himself. The ratio seemed about right.

Finally the servants left; heading back for Astibar to bear the Duke’s body here. The steward’s instructions were painstakingly explicit. With idiots like Goch around, Devin thought spitefully, they had to be.

From where he lay, Devin could see the daylight gradually waning towards dusk. He found himself softly humming his old cradle song. He made himself stop.

His mind turned back to the morning. To the long walk through empty, dusty rooms of the palace. To the hidden closet at the end. The sudden silken feel of Catriana when her gown had drifted above her hips. He made himself stop that too.

It grew steadily darker. The first owl called, not far away. Devin had grown up in the country; it was a familiar sound. He heard some forest animal rooting in the underbrush at the edge of the clearing. Once in a while a gusting of the wind would set the leaves to rustling.

Then, abruptly, there came a shining of white light through one of the drawn window curtains and Devin knew that Vidomni was high enough to look down upon this clearing amid the tall trees of the wood, which meant that blue Ilarion would be rising even now. Which meant it would not be very much longer.

It wasn’t. There was a wavering of torchlight and the sound of voices. The lock clinked, rattled, and the door swung open. The steward led in eight men carrying a bier. Eye glued to his crack in the floor, breathing shallowly, Devin saw them lay it down. Tomasso came in with the two lords whose names and lineage Devin had learned in The Paelion.

The servants uncovered and laid out the food and then they left, Goch stumbling on the threshold and banging his shoulder pleasingly on the doorpost. The steward, last to go, shrugged a discreet apology, bowed, and closed the door behind him.

‘Wine, my lords?’ said Tomasso d’Astibar in the voice Devin had heard from the secret closet. ‘We will have three others joining us very shortly.’

And from then on they had said what they said and Devin heard what he heard, and so gradually became aware of the magnitude of what he had stumbled upon, the peril he was in.

Then Alessan appeared at the window opposite the door.

Devin couldn’t, in fact, see that window but he knew the voice immediately and it was with disbelief bordering on stupefaction that he heard Menico’s recruit of a fortnight ago deny being from Tregea at all and then name Brandin, King of Ygrath, as the everlasting target of his soul’s hate.

Rash, Devin certainly was, and he would not have denied that he carried more than his own due share of impulsive foolishness, but he had not ever been less than quick, or clever. In Asoli, small boys had to be.

So by the time Alessan named him, and invited him to come down, Devin’s racing mind had put two more pieces of the puzzle together and he adroitly took the path offered him.

‘All quiet, since mid-afternoon,’
he called out, extricating himself from his corner and stepping past the corbin’s antlers to the edge of the half-loft. ‘Only the servants were here, but they didn’t do much of a job when they chained the door—the lock was easy to pick. Two thieves and the Emperor of Barbadior could have been up here without seeing each other or anyone down there being the wiser.’

He said it as coolly as he could. Then he lowered himself, with a deliberately showy flip, to the ground. He registered the looks on the faces of five of the men there—all of whom most certainly recognized him—but his concentration, and his satisfaction, lay in the brief smile of approval he received from Alessan.

For the moment his apprehension was gone, replaced by something entirely different. Alessan had claimed him, given him legitimacy here. He was clearly linked to the man who was controlling events in the room. And the events were on a scale that spanned the Palm. Devin had to fight hard to control his growing excitement.

Tomasso went over to the sideboard and smoothly poured a glass of wine for him. Devin was impressed with the composure of the man. He was also aware, from the exaggerated courtesy and the undeniable sparkle in bar Sandre’s accentuated eyes, that although the fluting voice might be faked, Tomasso, in certain matters and propensities, was still very much what he was said to be. Devin accepted the glass, careful not to let their fingers touch.

‘I wonder now,’ drawled Lord Scalvaia in his magnificent voice, ‘are we to be treated to a recital here while we pass our vigil? There does seem to be a quantity of musicians here tonight.’

Devin said nothing, but following Alessan’s example did not smile.

‘Shall I name you a provincial grower of grapes, my lord?’ There was real anger in Alessan’s voice. ‘And call Nievole a grain-farmer from the southwestern distrada? What we do outside these walls has little to do with why we are here, save in two ways only.’

He held up a long finger. ‘One: as musicians we have an excuse to cross back and forth across the Palm, which offers advantages I need not belabour.’ A second finger shot up beside the first. ‘Two: music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of detail. The sort of precision, my lords, that would have precluded the carelessness that has marked tonight. If Sandre d’Astibar were alive I would discuss it with him, and I might defer to his experience and his long striving.’

He paused, looking from one to another of them, then said, much more softly: ‘I might, but I might not. It is a vanished tune, that one, never to be sung. As matters stand I can only say again that if we are to work together I must ask you to accept my lead.’

He spoke this last directly to Scalvaia who still lounged, elegant and expressionless, in his deep chair. It was Nievole who answered, though, blunt and direct.

‘I am not in the habit of delaying my judgement of men. I think you mean what you say and that you are more versed in these things than we are. I accept. I will follow your lead. With a single condition.’

‘Which is?’

‘That you tell us your name.’

Devin, watching with rapacious intensity, anxious not to miss a word or a nuance, saw Alessan’s eyes close for an instant, as if to hold back something that might otherwise have shown through them. The others waited through the short silence.

Then Alessan shook his head. ‘It is a fair condition, my lord. Under the circumstances it is entirely fair. I can only pray you will not hold me to it though. It is a grief—I cannot tell you how much of a grief it is—but I am unable to accede.’

For the first time he appeared to be reaching for words, choosing them carefully. ‘Names are power, as you know. As the two tyrant-sorcerers from overseas most certainly know. And as I have been made to know in the bitterest ways there are. My lord, you will learn my name in the moment of our triumph if it comes, and not before. I will say that this is imposed upon me; it is not a choice freely made. You may call me Alessan, which is common enough here in the Palm and happens to be truly the name my mother gave me. Will you be gracious enough to let that suffice you, my lord, or must we now part ways?’

The last question was asked in a tone bereft of the arrogance that had infused the man’s bearing and speech from the moment of his arrival.

Just as Devin’s earlier fear had given way to excitement, so now did excitement surrender to something else, something he could not yet identify. He stared at Alessan. The man seemed younger than before, somehow—unable to prevent this almost naked showing of his need.

Nievole cleared his throat loudly, as if to dispel an aura, a resonance of something that seemed to have entered the room like the mingled light of the two moons outside. Another owl hooted from the clearing. Nievole opened his mouth to reply to Alessan.

They never knew what he would have said, or Scalvaia.

Afterwards, on nights when sleep eluded him and he watched one or both moons sweep the sky or counted the stars in Eanna’s Diadem in a moonless dark, Devin would let his clear memory of that moment carry him back, trying—for
reasons he would have found difficult to explain—to imagine what the two lords would have done or said had all their briefly tangled fate lines run differently from that lodge.

He could guess, analyse, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never
know
. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna’s lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

The paths that each of the men in that lodge were to walk, through their own private portals to endings near or far, were laid down by the owl that cried a second time, very clearly, just as Nievole began to speak.

Alessan flung up his hand. ‘Trouble!’ he said sharply. Then:
‘Baerd?’

The doorway banged open. Devin saw a large man, his very long, pale-yellow hair held back by a leather band across his brow. There was another leather thong about his throat. He wore a vest and leggings cut in the fashion of the southern highlands. His eyes, even by firelight, gleamed a dazzling blue. He carried a drawn sword.

Which was punishable by death this close to Astibar.

‘Let’s go!’ the man said urgently. ‘You and the boy. The others belong here—the youngest son and the grandson have easy explanations. Get rid of the extra glasses.’

‘What is it?’ Tomasso d’Astibar asked quickly, his eyes wide.

‘Twenty horsemen on the forest path. Continue your vigil and be as calm as you can—we won’t be far away. We’ll return after. Alessan,
come on!
’

The tone of his voice pulled Devin halfway to the door. Alessan was lingering though, his eyes for some reason
locked on those of Tomasso, and that look, what was exchanged in it, became another one of the things that Devin never forgot, or fully understood.

For a long moment—a very long moment, it seemed to Devin, with twenty horsemen riding through the forest and a drawn sword in the room—no one spoke. Then:

‘It seems we will have to continue this extremely interesting discussion at a later hour,’ Tomasso bar Sandre murmured, with genuinely impressive composure. ‘Will you take a last glass before you go, in my father’s name?’

Alessan smiled then, a full, open smile. He shook his head though. ‘I hope to have a chance to do so later,’ he said. ‘I will drink to your father gladly, but I have a habit I don’t think even you can satisfy in the time we have.’

Tomasso’s mouth quirked wryly. ‘I’ve satisfied a number of habits in my day. Do tell me yours.’

The reply was quiet; Devin had to strain to hear.

‘My third glass of a night is blue,’ Alessan said. ‘The third glass I drink is always of blue wine. In memory of something lost. Lest on any single night I forget what it is I am alive to do.’

‘Not forever lost, I hope,’ said Tomasso, equally softly.

‘Not forever, I have sworn, upon my soul and my father’s soul wherever it has gone.’

‘Then there will be blue wine when next we drink after tonight,’ said Tomasso, ‘if it is at all in my power to provide it. And I will drink it with you to our fathers’ souls.’

‘Alessan!’ snapped the yellow-haired man named Baerd. ‘In Adaon’s name, I said twenty horsemen!
Will you
come?’

‘I will,’ said Alessan. He hurled his wineglass and Devin’s through the nearest window into the darkness. ‘Triad guard you all,’ he said to the five in the room. Then he and Devin followed Baerd into the moonlit shadows of the clearing.

With Devin in the middle they ran swiftly around to the side of the cabin farthest from the path that led to the main road. They didn’t go far. His pulse pounding furiously, Devin dropped to the ground when the other two men did so. Peering cautiously out from under a cluster of dark-green serrano bushes they could see the lodge. Firelight showed through the open windows.

A moment later Devin’s heart lurched like a ship caught by a wave across its bows, as a twig cracked just behind him.

‘Twenty-two riders,’ a voice said. The speaker dropped neatly to the ground on Baerd’s other side. ‘The one in the middle of them is hooded.’

Devin looked over. And by the mingled light of the two moons saw Catriana d’Astibar.

‘Hooded?’ Alessan repeated, on a sharply taken breath. ‘You are certain?’

‘Of course I am,’ said Catriana. ‘Why? What does it mean?’

‘Eanna be gracious to us all,’ Alessan murmured, not answering.

‘I wouldn’t be counting on it now,’ the man named Baerd said grimly. ‘I think we should leave this place. They will search.’

For a moment Alessan looked as if he would demur, but just then they heard a jingling of many riders from the path on the other side of the lodge.

Without another word spoken the four of them rose and silently moved away.

‘This evening,’ murmured Scalvaia, ‘grows more eventful by the moment.’