Tigana (6 page)

When he grew older he began to sing for some of the other farmers. At weddings or naming days, and once with a travelling priest of Morian he sang counterpoint during
the autumn Ember Days on the ‘Hymn to Morian of Portals’. The priest wanted to bed him, after, but by then Devin was learning how to avoid such requests without giving offence.

Later yet, he began to be called upon in the taverns. There were no age laws for drinking in northern Asoli, where a boy was a man when he could do a day in the fields, and a girl was a woman when she first bled.

And it had been in a tavern called The River in Asoli town itself on a market day that Devin, just turned fourteen, had been singing ‘The Ride from Corso to Corte’ and had been overheard by a portly, bearded man who turned out to be a troupe-leader named Menico di Ferraut and who had taken him away from the farm that week and changed his life.

‘We’re next,’ Menico said, nervously smoothing his best satin doublet over his paunch. Devin, idly picking out his earliest cradle song on one of the spare syrenyae, smiled reassuringly up at his employer. His partner now, actually.

Devin hadn’t been an apprentice since he was seventeen. Menico, tired of refusing offers to buy the contract of his young tenor, had finally offered Devin journeyman status in the Guild and a regular salary—after first making clear how very much the young man owed him, and how loyalty was the only marginally adequate way to repay such a large debt of gratitude. Devin knew that, in fact, and he liked Menico anyway.

A year later, after another sequence of offers from rival troupe-leaders during the summer wedding season in Corte, Menico had made Devin a ten-per-cent partner in the company. After making the same speech, almost word for word, as the last time.

The honour, Devin knew, was considerable; only old Eghano who played drums and the Certandan deep strings,
and who had been with Menico since the company was formed, had another partnership share. Everyone else was an apprentice or a journeyman on short-term contract. Especially now, when the aftermath of a plague spring in the south had every troupe in the Palm short of bodies and scrambling to fill with temporary musicians, dancers, or singers.

A haunting thread of sound, barely audible, plucked Devin’s attention away from his syrenya. He looked over and smiled. Alessan, one of the three new people, was lightly tracing the melody of the cradle song Devin had been playing. On the shepherd pipes of Tregea it sounded unearthly and strange.

Alessan, black-haired, though greying at the temples, winked at him over the busyness of his fingers on the pipes. They finished the piece together, pipes and syrenya, and humming tenor voice.

‘I wish I knew the words,’ Devin said regretfully as they ended. ‘My father taught me that tune as a child, but he could never remember how the words went.’

Alessan’s lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable. As Menico’s partner, that was all that should matter to him. Alessan was seldom around the inn outside of practice-time, but he was always there and punctual for the rehearsals slated.

‘I might be able to dredge them up for you if I thought about it,’ he said, pushing a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. ‘It’s been a long time but I knew the words once.’ He smiled.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Devin said. ‘I’ve survived this long without them. It’s just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it a winter project to try to track them down.’

Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages he’d asked.

The other man’s expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. ‘Old songs and memories of fathers are important,’ he said. ‘Is yours dead then?’

Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.

‘Not last I heard, though I’ve not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaros for me. I don’t go back to the farm.’

Alessan considered that. ‘Dour Asolini stock?’ he guessed. ‘No place for a boy with ambition and a voice like yours?’ His tone was shrewd.

‘Almost exactly,’ Devin admitted ruefully. ‘Though I wouldn’t have called myself ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren’t originally from Asoli in fact. Came there from Lower Corte when I was a small child.’

Alessan nodded. ‘Even so,’ he said.

The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner, Devin decided, but he
could
play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaon’s own mountain in the south.

In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.

‘We’re on!’ Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.

‘We do the “Lament for Adaon” first,’ he announced, telling them something they’d all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the sides of his doublet. ‘Devin, that one’s yours—make me proud, lad.’ His standard exhortation. ‘Then all of us are together on the “Circling of Years”. Catriana my love, you are sure you can go high enough, or should we pitch down?’

‘I’ll go high enough,’ Catriana replied tersely.

Devin thought her tone spoke to simple nervousness, but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized that earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a shore he didn’t know.

‘I’d very much like to get this contract,’ Alessan di Tregea said just then, mildly enough.

‘How extremely surprising!’ Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.

‘I’ll do the best I can,’ Devin said after a moment and for the second time that afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.

In the end, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them—as his father used to say—his best was enough.

The principal auditor was a delicately scented, extravagantly dressed scion of the Sandreni, a man—in his late thirties, Devin guessed—who made it manifest, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed his eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didn’t appear to be much worried about the descendants of Sandre d’Astibar.

Ranged behind this diverting personage were the priests of Eanna and Morian in white and smoke grey. Beside them, vivid by contrast, sat a priestess of Adaon, in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.

It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasn’t surprised by her hair. He
was
surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable—another legacy of his father—but this
wasn’t a situation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from his thoughts.

He focused on the Duke’s elegant son, the only one who really mattered now. He waited, reaching as Menico had taught him for a still point inside himself.

Menico cued Nieri and Aldine, the two thin dancers in their grey-blue, almost translucent, chemises of mourning and their black gloves. A moment later, after their first linked pass across the floor, he looked at Devin.

And Devin gave him, gave them all, the lament for Adaon’s autumnal dying among the mountain cypresses, as he never had before.

Alessan di Tregea was with him all the way with the high, heart-piercing grief of the shepherd pipes and together the two of them seemed to lift and carry Nieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently swept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the ‘Lament’ demanded and was so rarely granted.

When they finished, Devin, travelling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from the cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the god had died—and where he died again each and every autumn—saw that Sandre d’Astibar’s son was weeping. The tracks of his tears had smudged the carefully achieved shadowing around his eyes—which meant, Devin realized abruptly, that he hadn’t wept for any of the three companies before them.

Marra, young and intolerantly professional, would have been scornful of those tears, he knew: ‘Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?’ she would say when their mourning rituals were interrupted or marked by displays from their patrons.

Devin had been less stern back then. And was even less so now since she’d died and he had found himself rather
desperately fighting back a shameful public grief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Certando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.

Devin also knew, by the smouldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morian’s fat-fingered priest—why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!—that though they might have just won the Sandreni contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.

They
had
won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the ‘Lament’. Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when Sandre’s son asked to meet him. He turned out to be the middle son of three, named Tomasso. The only one, he explained huskily, holding one of Devin’s hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for music and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august an occasion as his father’s funeral rites.

Devin, used to this, politely retrieved his fingers, grateful for Menico’s experienced tact: presented as a partner he had some slight immunity from overly aggressive wooers, even among the nobility. He was introduced to the clergy next, and promptly knelt before Adaon’s priestess in red.

‘Your sanction, sister-of-the-god, for what I sang, and for what I am asked to do tomorrow.’

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the priest of Morian clench his chubby, ringed fingers at his sides. He accepted the blessing and protection of Adaon—the priestess’s index finger tracing the god’s symbol on his brow—in the knowledge that he had successfully defused one priest’s burgeoning desire. When he rose and turned, it was to catch a wink—dangerous in that room and among that company—from
Alessan di Tregea, at the back with the others. He suppressed a grin, but not his surprise: the shepherd was disconcertingly perceptive.

Menico’s first price was immediately accepted by Tomasso d’Astibar bar Sandre, confirming in Devin’s mind what a sorry creature he was to bear such a magnificent name and lineage.

It would have interested him—and led him a step or two further down the hard road towards maturity—to learn that Duke Sandre himself would have accepted the same price, or twice as much, and in exactly the same manner. Devin was not quite twenty though, and even Menico, three times his age, would loudly curse himself back at the inn amid the celebratory wine for not having quoted even more than the extortionate sum he had just received in full.

Only Eghano, aged and placid, softly drumming two wooden spoons on their trestle table, said, ‘Leave well enough. We need not hold out a greedy palm. There will be more of these from now on. If you are wise you’ll leave a tithe at each of the temples tomorrow. We will earn it back with interest when they choose musicians for the Ember Days.’

Menico, in high good humour, swore even more magnificently than before, and announced a set intention to offer Eghano’s wrinkled body as a tithe to the fleshy priest of Morian instead. Eghano smiled toothlessly and continued his soft drumming.

Menico ordered them all to bed not long after the evening meal. They’d have an early start tomorrow, pointing towards the most important performance of their lives. He beamed benevolently as Aldine led Nieri from the room. The girls would share a bed that night, Devin was sure, and for the first time, he suspected. He wished them joy of each other, knowing that they had come together magically as
dancers that afternoon and also knowing—for it had happened to him once—how that could spill over into the candles of a late night in bed.

He looked around for Catriana but she had gone upstairs already. She’d kissed him briefly on the cheek though, right after Menico’s fierce embrace back in the Sandreni Palace. It was a start; it might be a start.

He bade good night to the others and went up to the single room that was the one luxury he’d demanded of Menico’s tour budget after Marra had died.

He expected to dream of her, because of the mourning rites, because of unslaked desire, because he dreamt of her most nights. Instead he had a vision of the god.

He saw Adaon on the mountainside in Tregea, naked and magnificent. He saw him torn apart in frenzy and in flowing blood by his priestesses—suborned by their womanhood for this one autumn morning of every turning year to the deeper service of their sex. Shredding the flesh of the dying god in the service of the two goddesses who loved him and who shared him as mother, daughter, sister, bride, all through the year and through all the years since Eanna named the stars.

Shared him and loved him except on this one morning in the falling season. This morning that was shaped to become the harbinger, the promise of spring to come, of winter’s end. This one single morning on the mountain when the god who was a man had to be slain. Torn and slain, to be put into his place which was the earth. To become the soil, which would be nurtured in turn by the rain of Eanna’s tears and the moist sorrowings of Morian’s endless underground streams twisting in their need. Slain to be reborn and so loved anew, more and more with each passing year, with each and every time of dying on these cypress-clad heights. Slain to be lamented and then to rise as a god rises, as a man does, as the wheat of summer fields. To rise and then lie down with
the goddesses, with his mother and his bride, his sister and his daughter, with Eanna and Morian under sun and stars and the circling moons, the blue one and the silver.