Tigana (32 page)

She said it, looking him in the eyes, articulating carefully:

‘After all, my lord, at your age you should marshal your strength. You
did
run partway up a hill this morning.’

An instant later, for the second time, the Chiaran court of Brandin of Ygrath saw their King throw back his handsome, bearded head and they heard him laugh aloud in delight. Not far away, Rhun the Fool cackled in simultaneous glee.

‘Isolla of Ygrath!’

This time there were trumpets and a drum, as well as the herald’s staff resounding as it struck the floor by the double doors at the southern end of the Audience Chamber.

Standing most of the way towards the throne, Dianora had time to observe the stately progress of the woman
Brandin had called the finest musician in Ygrath. The assembled court of Chiara was lined several rows deep, flanking the approach to the King.

‘A handsome woman still,’ murmured Neso of Ygrath, ‘and she’s fifty years old if she’s a day.’ Somehow he had managed to end up next to her in the front row.

His unctuous tone irritated her, as always, but she tried not to let it show. Isolla was clad in the simplest possible robe of dark blue, betted at the waist with a slender gold chain. Her hair, brown with hints of grey, was cut unfashionably short—although the spring and summer fashion might change after today, Dianora thought. The colony always took its cue in these matters from Ygrath.

Isolla walked confidently, not hurrying, down the aisle formed by the courtiers. Brandin was already smiling a welcome. He was always immensely pleased when one or another of Ygrath’s artists made the long, often dangerous, sea voyage to his second court.

Several steps behind Isolla, and carrying her lute in its case as if it were an artifact of immeasurable worth, Dianora saw—with genuine surprise—the poet Camena di Chiara, clad in his ubiquitous triple-layered cloak. There were murmurs from the assembly: she wasn’t the only one caught off-guard by this.

Instinctively she threw a glance across the aisle to where Doarde stood with his wife and daughter. She was in time to see the spasm of hate and fear that flickered across his face as his younger rival approached. An instant later the revealing expression was gone, replaced by a polished mask of sneering disdain at Camena’s vulgar lowering of himself to serve as porter for an Ygrathen.

Still, Dianora considered, this
was
an Ygrathen court. Camena, she guessed in a flash of intuition, had probably had one of his verses set to music. If Isolla was about to sing
a song of his it would be a dazzling coup for the Chiaran poet. More than sufficient to explain why he would offer to further exalt Isolla—and Ygrathen artists—by serving as a bearer for her.

The politics of art, Dianora decided, was at least as complex as that of provinces and nations.

Isolla had stopped, as was proper, about fifteen steps from the dais of the Island Throne, very close to where Dianora and Neso stood.

Neatly she proceeded to perform the triple obeisance. Very graciously—a mark of high honour—Brandin rose to his feet to bid her welcome. He was smiling. So was Rhun, behind him and to his left.

For no reason she would ever afterwards be able to name or explain Dianora turned from monarch and musician back to the poet bearing the lute. Camena had stopped a further half a dozen paces behind Isolla and had knelt on the marble floor.

What detracted from the grace of the tableau was the dilation of his eyes.
Nilth leaves,
Dianora concluded instantly.
He’s drugged himself
. She saw beads of perspiration on the poet’s brow. It was not warm in the Audience Chamber.

‘You are most welcome, Isolla,’ Brandin was saying with genuine pleasure. ‘It has been far too long since we have seen you, or heard you play.’

Dianora saw Camena make a small adjustment in the way he held the lute. She thought he was preparing to open the case. It did not look like an ordinary lute though. In fact—

Afterwards she was able to know one thing only with certainty: it had been the story of the riselka that made her so sharp to see. The story, and the fact that Brandin wasn’t certain if the second man—his guard—had seen her or not.

One man meant a fork in the path. Two men meant a death.

Either way, something was to happen. And now it did.

All eyes but hers were on Brandin and Isolla. Only Dianora saw Camena slip the velvet cover off the lute. Only Dianora saw that it was not, in fact, a lute. And only she had heard Brandin’s tale of the riselka.

‘Die, Isolla of Ygrath!’
Camena screamed hoarsely; his eyes bulged as he hurled the velvet away and levelled the crossbow he carried.

With the lightning reaction of a man half his years Brandin reflexively threw out his hand to cast a sorcerer’s shield around the threatened singer.

Exactly as he was expected to, Dianora realized.

‘Brandin, no!’
she screamed.
‘It’s you!’

And seizing the gape-mouthed Neso of Ygrath by the near shoulder she propelled herself and him both into the aisle.

The crossbow bolt, aimed meticulously to the left of Isolla on a line for Brandin’s heart, buried itself instead in the shoulder of a stupefied Neso. He shrieked in pain and shock.

Her momentum drove Dianora stumbling to her knees beside Isolla. She looked up. And for the rest of her days never forgot the look she met in the singer’s eyes.

She turned away from it. The emotion, the hatred was too raw. She felt physically ill, trembling with aftershock. She forced herself to stand; she looked at Brandin. He hadn’t even lowered his hand. There was still the shimmer of a protective barrier around Isolla.

Who had never been in danger at all.

The guards had Camena by now. He’d been dragged to his feet. Dianora had never seen anyone look so white. Even his eyes were white, from the drug. For a moment she thought he was going to faint, but then Camena threw his head back as far as he could in the iron grip of the Ygrathen soldiers. He opened his mouth, as if in agony.

‘Chiara!’
he cried once, and then,
‘Freedom for Chiara!’
before they silenced him, brutally.

The echoes rang for a long time. The room was large and the stillness was almost absolute. No one dared to move. Dianora had a sense that the court wasn’t even breathing. No one wanted the slightest attention drawn to them.

On the mosaic-inlaid floor Neso moaned again in fear and pain, breaking the tableau. Two soldiers knelt to tend to him. Dianora was still afraid she was going to be sick; she couldn’t make her hands stop trembling. Isolla of Ygrath had not moved.

She
could
not move, Dianora realized: Brandin was holding her in a mindlock like a flower pressed flat on a sheet. The soldiers lifted Neso and helped him from the room. Dianora stepped back herself, leaving Isolla alone before the King. Fifteen very proper paces away.

‘Camena was a tool,’ Brandin said softly. ‘Chiara has virtually nothing to do with this. Do not think that I am unaware of that. I can offer you nothing now but an easier death. You must tell me why you did this.’ His voice was rigidly measured, careful and uninflected. Dianora had never heard such a tone from him. She looked at Rhun: the Fool was weeping, tears streaking his distorted features.

Brandin lowered his hand, freeing Isolla to move and speak.

The blazing flash of hatred left her features. In its place was a defiant pride. Dianora wondered if she had actually thought the deception would work. If after the King had been slain she had really expected to walk freely from this room. And if not—if she had not expected to do so—what did that mean?

Holding herself very straight, Isolla gave part of an answer. ‘I am dying,’ she said to Brandin. ‘The physicians have given me less than a season before the growth inside
reaches my brain. Already there are songs I can no longer remember. Songs that have been mine for forty years.’

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ said Brandin formally, his courtesy so perfect it seemed a violation of human nature. He said, ‘All of us die, Isolla. Some very young. Not all of us plot the death of our King. You have more to tell me before I may grant you release from pain.’

For the first time Isolla seemed to waver. She lowered her gaze from his eerily serene grey eyes. Only after a long moment did she say, ‘You had to have known that there would be a price for what you did.’

‘Exactly what is it that I did?’

Her head came up. ‘You exalted a dead child above the living one, and revenge above your wife. And more highly than your own land. Have you spared a thought, a fraction of a thought, for any of them while you pursued your unnatural vengeance for Stevan?’

Dianora’s heart thudded painfully. It was a name not spoken in Chiara. She saw Brandin’s lips tighten in a way she had seen only a handful of times. But when he spoke his voice was as rigidly controlled as before.

‘I judged that I had considered them fairly. Girald has governance in Ygrath as he was always going to have. He even has my saishan, as a symbol of that. Dorotea I invited here several times a year for the first several years.’

‘Invited here that she might wither and grow old while you kept yourself young. A thing no Sorcerer-King of Ygrath has ever done before, lest the gods punish the land for that impiety. But for Ygrath you never spared a thought, did you? And Girald? He is no King—his father is. That is
your
title, not his. What does the key to a saishan mean against that reality? He is even going to die before you, Brandin, unless you are slain. And what will happen then? It is unnatural! It is all unnatural, and there is a price to be paid.’

‘There is always a price,’ he said softly. ‘A price for everything. Even for living. I had not expected to pay it in my own family.’ There was a silence. ‘Isolla, I must extend my years to do what I am here to do.’

‘Then you pay for it,’ Isolla repeated, ‘and Girald pays and Dorotea. And Ygrath.’

And Tigana,
Dianora thought, no longer trembling, her own ache come back like a wound in her.
Tigana pays too— in broken statues and fallen towers, in children slain and a name gone
.

She watched Brandin’s face. And Rhun’s.

‘I hear you,’ the King said at length to the singer. ‘I have heard more than you have chosen to say. I need only one thing further. You must tell me which of them did this.’ It was said with visible regret. Rhun’s ugly face was screwed up tightly, his hands gestured with a random helplessness.

‘And why,’ said Isolla, drawing herself up and speaking with the frigid hauteur of one who had nothing left to lose, ‘should you imagine their purposes to be at odds in this? Why the one or the other, King of Ygrath?’ Her voice rang out, harsh as the message it bore.

Slowly he nodded. The hurt was clear in him now; Dianora could see it in the way he stood and spoke, however much he controlled himself. She didn’t even need to look at Rhun.

‘Very well,’ Brandin said. ‘And you, Isolla? What could they have offered to make you do this thing? Can you really hate me so much?’

The woman hesitated only for an instant. Then, as proudly, as defiantly as before, she said, ‘I can love the Queen so much.’

Brandin closed his eyes. ‘How so?’

‘In all the ways that you forsook when you chose exile here and love of the dead over the heart and the bed of your wife.’

In any normal, any halfway normal time there would have been a reaction to this from the court. There would have had to be. Dianora heard nothing though, only the sound of a great many people breathing carefully as Brandin opened his eyes again to look down upon the singer. There was an unveiled triumph in the Ygrathen woman’s face.

‘She was invited here,’ he repeated almost wistfully. ‘I could have compelled her but I chose not to do so. She had made her feelings clear and I left the choice to her. I thought it was the kinder, fairer action. It would appear that my sin lies in not having ordered her to take ship for this peninsula.’

So many different griefs and shapes of pain seemed to be warring for pre-eminence within Dianora. Behind the King she could see d’Eymon; his face was a sickly grey. He met her eyes for only an instant then quickly looked away. Later she might think of ways to use this sudden ascendancy over him but right now she felt only pity for the man. He would offer to resign tonight, she knew. Offer, probably, to kill himself after the old fashion. Brandin would refuse, but after this nothing would be quite the same.

For a great many reasons.

Brandin said, ‘I think you have told me what I had need to know.’

‘The Chiaran acted alone,’ Isolla volunteered unexpectedly. She gestured at Camena, in the bone-cracking grip of the soldiers behind her. ‘He joined us when he visited Ygrath two years ago. Our purposes appeared to march together this far.’

Brandin nodded. ‘This far,’ he echoed quietly. ‘I thought that might be the case. Thank you for confirming it,’ he added gravely.

There was a silence. ‘You promised me an easy death,’ Isolla said, holding herself very straight.

‘I did,’ Brandin said. ‘I did promise you that.’

Dianora stopped breathing. The King looked at Isolla without expression for what seemed an unbearably long time.

‘You can have no idea,’ he said at last, in a voice little above a whisper, ‘how happy I was that you had come to make music for me again.’

Then he moved his right hand, in exactly the same casual gesture he would use to dismiss a servant or a petitioner.

Isolla’s head exploded like an overripe fruit smashed with a hammer. Dark blood burst from her neck as her body collapsed like a sack. Dianora was standing too near; the blood of the slain woman spattered thickly on her gown and face. She stumbled backwards. A hideous illusion of reptilian creatures was coiling and twisting in the place where Isolla’s head had been mashed to a formless, oozing pulp.

There was screaming everywhere and a pandemonium as the court backed away. One figure suddenly ran forward. Stumbling, almost falling in its haste, the figure jerked out a sword. Then awkwardly, with great clumsy two-handed slashes, Rhun the Fool began hacking at the dead body of the singer.