Tigana

The worst year of Dianora"s life. Seeing so much of beauty and splendour crumble to rubble and dust or burn down to ashes of loss. She"d been fifteen, then sixteen. Still too young to comprehend the full reality of what was being eradicated. For her father"s death and the destruction of his art-the works of his hands and days-she could mourn bitterly. And so too for the deaths of friends and the sudden terrors of an occupied impoverished city. The larger losses, the implications for the future, she couldn"t really grasp back then.

Many in the city had gone mad that year.

Others had fled, taking their children away to try to shape a life far from the burning, of the memory of burning, of hammers smashing into the statues of the Princes in the long covered loggia of the Palace by the Sea. Some had withdrawn so far into themselves-a madness of another kind-that only the merest spark was left within to make them eat and sleep and somehow walk through the waste s.p.a.ces of their days.

Her mother had been one of those.

On the balcony in Chiara so many years later, Dianora looked up at Scelto and realized, from the blinking concern in his face, that she"d been silent for too long.

She forced a smile. She"d been here for a long time; she was good at dissembling. At smiling when it was needful. Even with Scelto whom she hated to deceive. And especially with Brandin, whom she had to deceive, or die.

"Ia.s.sica is not a concern," she said mildly, resuming the conversation as if nothing had happened. Indeed, nothing had had happened-only old memories come back. Nothing of weight or import in the world, nothing that mattered or could matter. Only loss. happened-only old memories come back. Nothing of weight or import in the world, nothing that mattered or could matter. Only loss.

She said, skilfully laughing, "She is far too unintelligent to divert him and too young to relax him as Solores does. I"m glad of your information though-I think we can use it. Tell me, is Tesios growing weary tending her? Should I speak to Vencel about a.s.signing someone younger? Or perhaps more than one?"

She made him smile, even as he flushed again. It always seemed to go this way. If she could make them smile or laugh it would brush away the clouds like a wind, a springtime or an autumn wind, leaving behind the high clear blue of the sky.

Dianora wished, with an aching heart, that she"d known how to do that eighteen years ago. For her mother and her brother. For both of them so long ago. No laughter then. No laughter anywhere, and the blue skies a mockery, looking down upon ruin.

Vencel, more awesomely obese every time she saw him, approved Solores"s gown, Nesaia"s, Chylmoene"s, and then her own. Only the four of them-experienced enough to know how to cope with the exigencies of a formal reception-were going down to the Audience Chamber. The envy in the saishan during the past week had been acute enough to produce a scent, Scelto had said wryly more than once. Dianora hadn"t noticed; she was used to it.

Vencel"s shrewd eyes widened from deep in the manifold creases of his dark face as he studied her. She had the gem on her brow, set in a band of white gold that held back her hair. Sprawled on his couch of pillows, the head of the saishan played with the billowing folds of his elephantine white robe. The sun shining through the arch of a window behind him glinted distractingly from his bald head.

"I do not recall that stone among our treasures," he murmured in his high, disconcerting voice. It was a voice so utterly inconsequential that it might lead one to underestimate the speaker. Which, as a good many people had discovered over the years, was a serious, sometimes a mortal mistake.

"It isn"t," Dianora replied cheerfully. "Though after we return this afternoon may I ask you to guard it in my name among the other treasures?"

Scelto"s suggestion, that. Vencel could be corrupt and venal about a great many things, but not when it came to the formal aspects of his office. He was too clever for that. Again, a truth some had paid the ultimate price to discover.

He nodded benignly now. "It seems a very fine stone from this distance." Obediently, Dianora stepped nearer and inclined her head graciously to let him see it more clearly. The scent of tainflowers that he always wore after winter"s end enveloped her. It was too sweet, but not unpleasant.

She had feared Vencel once-a fear mixed of physical repulsion at his grossness and rumours of the things he liked to do with the younger castrates and some of the women who were in the saishan for purely political reasons, with no hope of ever seeing the outside world or the west wing of the palace and Brandin"s chambers. Long ago though she and the saishan head had reached their understanding. Solores had the same unspoken pact with Vencel, and out of the delicate balance achieved thereby the three of them controlled, as best they could, their enclosed, over-intense, incense-laden world of idle, frustrated women, and half-men.

With a surprisingly delicate finger Vencel touched the gem on her brow. He smiled. "A good stone," he said again, this time in judgement. His breath was fragrant. "I must talk to Scelto about it. I know about such things, you see. Vairstones come from the north, you see. From my own land. They are mined in Khardhun. For years and years I used to play with them as trinkets, a monarch"s toys. In the days when I was more than I am now. For as you know, I have been a King in Khardhun."

Dianora nodded gravely. For this too was a part of the unspoken terms of her relationship with Vencel. That however many times he might speak this wild fabrication of a lie-and he said it many times a day, in one variant or another-she was to nod knowingly, reflectively, as if pondering the message hidden in the grandeur of his fall.

Only in her rooms alone with Scelto could she give way to fits of girlish giggling at the very thought of the vasty saishan head being more more than he was now, or at the subversive, deadly imitation Scelto could give of Vencel"s speech and gestures. than he was now, or at the subversive, deadly imitation Scelto could give of Vencel"s speech and gestures.

"You do that wonderfully," she might say innocently, as Scelto dressed her hair, or polished her curved slippers till they shone.

"It is a thing I know about, you see," he would reply if certain they were alone, his voice pitched high above its normal range. He would gesticulate slowly, expansively. "For as you are aware, I have been a King in Khardhun."

She would laugh like a little girl who knew just how naughty she was being, the more out of control because of that very fact.

She had asked Brandin about it once. His Khardhun campaign had been only a marginal success, she learned. He was frank with her about such things by then. There was real magic in Khardhun, in that hot northern land across the sea, beyond the coastal villages and the desert wastes. A magic far greater than anything in the Peninsula of the Palm and equal to the sorcery of Ygrath.

Brandin had taken one city and established a tenuous control over some lands that lay on the fringes of the great desert stretching north. There had been losses though, serious losses, she gathered. The Khardhu had long been celebrated for their skill in battle, nor was this unknown in the Palm: many of them had served as well-paid mercenaries in the warring provinces before the Tyrants had come and made all such feuding irrelevant.

Vencel had been a herald captured late in the campaign, Brandin told her. He"d already been unmanned: a thing they did to messengers in the north, for no reason Brandin had understood. It had been manifestly evident where the castrate belonged when brought back to Ygrath. He had already, Brandin confirmed, been enormous.

Dianora straightened as Vencel withdrew his finger from the red gleam of the vairstone.

"Will you escort us down?" she asked. A ritual.

"I think not," he said judiciously, as if actually giving thought to the matter. "Perhaps Scelto and Hala can manage that office between them. I have some matters that need my attention here this afternoon, you see."

"I understand." Dianora glanced over at Solores and each of them raised a spread palm in respectful salute. In fact, Vencel hadn"t left the saishan wing in at least five years. Even when he toured the rooms on this floor it was on a cleverly contrived rolling platform of cushions. Dianora could not remember the last time she"d actually seen him stand upright. Scelto and Solores"s Hala attended to virtually all the formal out-of-saishan duties. Vencel believed in delegating.

They went down the stairway that led out from the saishan to the world. One flight below they accepted the scrutiny-respectful but careful-of the two guards posted outside the heavy bronze doors that barred access to and from the level where the women were. Dianora responded to their cautious glances with a smile. One of them returned it shyly. The guards were changed often; she didn"t know either of these two, but a smile was a start at bonding and a friend never hurt.

Scelto and Hala, dressed un.o.btrusively in brown, led the four women out of the saishan wing along the main corridor of the palace to the Grand Staircase in the centre. There the two castrates paused to let the women precede them. With some pride but not with hauteur-they were the captives and concubines of a conqueror-Dianora and Solores led the way down the sweeping stair.

They were noticed of course. The women of the saishan were always noticed when they came out. There were a number of people milling about in the marbled vestibule waiting to enter the Audience Chamber; they made way for the four of them. Some of the newer men smiled in a manner that had taken Dianora some time to accept.

Others knew her better and their expressions were rather different. In the arched doorway to the largest of the formal reception rooms she and Solores paused again side by side, this time entirely for effect-the blood-red gown beside the green-and then walked together into the crowded room of state.

As she did so-every single time she did so-Dianora offered an inward voicing of grat.i.tude for the impulse that had led Brandin to change the rules for his saishan here in the colony he now ruled.

In Ygrath, she knew, this would never have been allowed. For a man other than the King or one of the castrates to see, let alone hold converse with a saishan woman was death for both of them. And, Vencel had told her once, for the head of the saishan wing as well.

Things had been different here in Chiara almost from the start. Over the years Dianora had learned enough to know that some of her grat.i.tude should go to Dorotea, Queen of Ygrath, and her decision to remain there with Girald, her elder son, and not accompany her husband into his self-imposed exile abroad. Dorotea"s choice, or, depending on to whom one listened, Brandin"s decision not to demand the company of his Queen.

Somewhat instinctively Dianora always preferred the latter version of the story, but she was wise enough to know why that was so, and this was one of the things she never spoke about with Brandin. Not that the matter was taboo; he wasn"t that kind of man. It was simply that she wasn"t sure if or how she could deal with whatever answer he gave her if the question was ever asked.

In any case, with Dorotea remaining in Ygrath there were few high-born court ladies willing to risk the seas and the Queen"s displeasure in journeying to the colony in the Palm. Which meant an extreme scarcity of women at Brandin"s new court in Chiara, and this, in turn, led to a change in the role of the saishan. The more so since-especially in the early years-Brandin had deliberately ordered the Tribute Ships to search out daughters of distinguished houses in Corte or Asoli. On Chiara he made the choices himself. From Lower Corte, which had once borne a different name, he took no women at all, as a matter of absolute policy. The hatred there ran both ways and too deep, and the saishan was not a place to let it fester.

He"d sent for only a few of the women from his saishan in Ygrath, leaving it largely intact. The politics were straightforward: control of the saishan was a symbol that would confirm the status and authority of Girald, now ruling as Regent of Ygrath in his father"s name.

With such changes here in the colony, the new saishan was a very different place from the old; Vencel and Scelto had both told her that. It had another kind of mood to it, a different character entirely.

It also had, among all those women from Corte and Chiara and Asoli and the handful from Ygrath, one woman named Dianora, from Certando. From Barbadian-ruled Certando.

Or so everyone in the palace thought.

It had almost started a war, Dianora remembered.

In the days after her brother left home, sixteen-year-old Dianora di Tigana, daughter of a sculptor who had died in the war, and of a mother who had scarcely spoken since that day, resolved that she would point her own life towards the killing of the Tyrant on Chiara.

Hardening herself, the way she heard that men in battle were forced to do-the way her father must have tried to do by the Deisa-she had begun preparing to leave her mother in the hollow, echoing house that had once been a place crowded with joy. Where the Prince of Tigana had walked in their courtyard, an arm flung about her father"s shoulders, discussing and praising the works in progress there.

Dianora could remember.

Entering the Audience Chamber she checked and approved her reflection in the wall of gold-plated mirrors on the far side of the room, then her eyes sought, instinctively, those of d"Eymon of Ygrath, the Chancellor. The second most powerful man in the court.

He was, predictably, already looking towards Solores and herself, his glance precisely as bleak as it always was. It was a look that had bothered Dianora when first she came. She"d thought d"Eymon had taken a dislike to her, or, worse, that he somehow suspected her. It wasn"t long before she realized that he disliked and suspected virtually every person who entered this palace. Everyone received the same glacial, appraising scrutiny. It had been exactly so, she gathered, in Ygrath as well. D"Eymon"s loyalty to Brandin was fanatical and unwavering, and so was his zeal in protecting his King.

Over the years Dianora had developed a respect, grudging at first, and then less so, for the grim Ygrathen. She counted it as one of her own triumphs that he seemed to trust her now. For years now-in fact-or she would never have been allowed to spend a night in Brandin"s bed while he slept.

A triumph of deception, she thought, with an irony whose teeth were all directed inward against herself.

D"Eymon made an economical circling motion with his head and then repeated the gesture for Solores. It was what they had expected: they were to mingle and converse. Neither of them was to take the chair set beside the Island Throne. They did sometimes-and so had the beautiful, unlamented Chloese before her surprising, untimely death-but Brandin was quite punctilious when guests from Ygrath were among them. At such times the seat beside him stood pointedly empty. For Dorotea, his Queen.

Brandin had not yet entered the room of course, but Dianora saw Rhun, the slack-limbed balding Fool, shamble towards one of the servers carrying wine. Rhun, clumsy, grievously r.e.t.a.r.ded, was clad sumptuously in gold and white, and so Dianora knew that Brandin would be as well. It was an integral part of the complex relationship of the Sorcerer Kings of Ygrath and their chosen Fools.

For centuries in Ygrath the Fool had served as shadow and projection for the King. He was dressed like his monarch, ate next to him at public functions, was there when honours were conferred or judgement pa.s.sed. And every King"s chosen Fool was someone visibly, sometimes painfully afflicted or malformed. Rhun"s walk was sluggish, his features twisted and deformed, his hands dangled at awkward angles in repose, his speech was badly slurred. He recognized people in the court, but not invariably, and not always in the manner one might expect-which sometimes carried a message. A message from the King.

That part, Dianora didn"t entirely comprehend, and doubted she ever would. She knew that Rhun"s dim, limited mind was mostly under his own control but she also knew that that was not completely so. There was sorcery at work in this: the subtle magic of Ygrath.

This much she understood: that in addition to serving-very graphically-to remind their King of his mortality and his own limitations, the Fools of Ygrath, dressed exactly like their lord, could sometimes also serve as a voice, an external conduit, for the thoughts and emotions of the King.

Which meant that one could not always be sure whether Rhun"s words and actions-slurred or awkward as they might be-were his own, or an important revelation of Brandin"s mood. And that could be treacherous ground for the unwary.

Right now Rhun seemed smiling and content, bobbing and bowing jerkily at every second person he encountered, his golden cap slipping off every time. He would laugh though, as he bent to pick it up and set it again on his thinning hair. Every so often an overanxious courtier, seeking to curry favour in any way he could, would hastily stoop to pick up the fallen cap and present it to the Fool. Rhun would laugh at that too.

Dianora had to admit that he made her uneasy, though she tried to hide that beneath the real pity she felt for his afflictions and his increasingly evident years. But the core truth for her was that Rhun was intimately tied to Brandin"s magic, he was an extension of it, a tool, and Brandin"s magic was the source of all her loss and fear. And her guilt.

So over the years she had become adroit at avoiding situations where she might find herself alone with the Fool; his guileless eyes-unnervingly similar to Brandin"s-gave her genuine trouble. They seemed, if she looked into them for too long, to have no depth, to be only a surface, reflecting her image back to her in a fashion very different from that of the gold-plated mirrors, and at such times she did not like what she was made to see.

From the doorway, with the polished grace of long experience, Solores drifted to her right as Dianora moved left, smiling at people she knew. Nesaia and Chylmoene, chestnut- and amber-tressed, crossed the floor together, creating a palpable stir where they pa.s.sed.

Dianora saw the poet Doarde standing with his wife and daughter. The girl, about seventeen, was obviously excited. Her first formal reception, Dianora guessed. Doarde smiled unctuously across the room at her, and bowed elaborately. Even at a distance, though, she could read the discomfiture in his eyes: a reception on this scale for a musician from Ygrath had to be bitter gall for the most senior poet in the colony. All winter he had preened with pride over his verses that Brandin had sent east as a goad for the Barbadian when word had come in the fall of the death of Sandre d"Astibar. Doarde had been insufferable for months. Today though, Dianora could sympathize with him a little, even though he was a monumental fraud in her view.

She"d told Brandin as much once, only to learn that he found the poet"s pompousness amusing. For genuine art, he"d murmured, he looked elsewhere.

And you destroyed it, she"d wanted to say. she"d wanted to say.

Wanted so much to say. Remembering with an almost physical pain the broken head and sundered torso of her father"s last Adaon Adaon on the steps of the Palace by the Sea. The one for which her brother, finally old enough, had served as model for the young G.o.d. She remembered looking dry-eyed at the wreckage of that sculpted form, wanting to weep and not knowing where her tears were any more. on the steps of the Palace by the Sea. The one for which her brother, finally old enough, had served as model for the young G.o.d. She remembered looking dry-eyed at the wreckage of that sculpted form, wanting to weep and not knowing where her tears were any more.

She glanced back at Doarde"s daughter, at her young, scarcely contained exhilaration. Seventeen.

Just after her own seventeenth naming day she had stolen half of the silver from her father"s hidden strong-box, begging pardon of his spirit and her mother"s blessing in her heart, and asking the compa.s.sion of Eanna who saw all beneath the shining of her lights.

She"d gone without saying good-bye, though she had looked in a last time by carried candlelight, upon the thin, worn figure of her mother, uneasily asleep in the wideness of her bed. Dianora was hardened, as for battle; she did not weep.

Four days later she"d crossed the border into Certando, having forded the river at a lonely place north of Avalle. She"d had to be careful getting there-Ygrathen soldiers were still ranging the countryside and in Avalle itself they were hammering at the towers, bringing them down. Some yet stood, she could see them from her crossing-place, but most were rubble by then, and what she saw of Avalle was through a screen of smoke.

It wasn"t even Avalle by then, either. The spell had been laid down. Brandin"s magic. The city where the pall of smoke and summer dust hung so heavily was now called Stevanien. Dianora could remember not being able to understand how a man could name the ugly wreckage of a place once so fair after a child he had loved. Later that would become clearer to her: the name had nothing to do with Brandin"s memory of Stevan. It was solely for those living there, and elsewhere in what had been Tigana: a constant, inescapable reminder of whose death had meant their ruin. The Tiganese now lived in a province named Lower Corte-and Corte had been their bitterest foe for centuries. The city of Tigana was the city of Lower Corte now.

And Avalle of the Towers was Stevanien. The vengeance of the King of Ygrath went deeper than occupation and burning and rubble and death. It encompa.s.sed names and memory, the fabric of ident.i.ty; it was a subtle thing, and merciless.

There were a number of refugees in the summer Dianora went east, but none had anything remotely resembling her own fixed purpose and so most of them went much further away: to the far side of the Certandan grainlands, to Ferraut, Tregea, Astibar itself. Willing, anxious even, to live under the spreading tyranny of the Barbadian lord in order to put as much distance as they could between themselves and their images of what Brandin of Ygrath had done to their home.

But Dianora was clinging to those images, she was nursing them within her breast, feeding them with hate, shaping hatred with memory. Twin snakes inside her.

She only went a handful of miles across the border into Certando. The late-summer fields of corn had been yellow and tall, she remembered, but all the men were gone, away to the north and east where Alberico of Barbadior, having carefully consolidated his conquests of Ferraut and Astibar, was now moving south.

He was master of Certando by the end of the fall, and had taken Borifort in Tregea-the last major stronghold to stand against him-by the following spring after a winter siege.

Long before then Dianora had found what she was looking for, in the western highlands of Certando. A hamlet-twenty houses and a tavern-south of Sinave and Forese, the two great forts that watched each other on either side of the border that divided Certando from what she learned to call Lower Corte.

The land so near the southern mountains was not nearly as good as it was farther north. The growing season was shorter. Cold winds swept down from the Braccio and Sfaroni ranges early in fall bringing snow soon after and a long white winter. Wolves would howl in the wintry nights and sometimes in the morning strange footmarks could be found in the deep snow-marks that came down from the mountains and then returned.

Once, long ago, the village had been near to one of the roads forking northeast from the main highway down from the Sfaroni Pa.s.s-in the days when there was still overland trade with Quileia to the south. That was why the ancient tavern was so large in a village now so small, why it had four rooms upstairs for the travellers who had not come for a great many years.

Dianora hid her father"s silver south of the village on a thickly wooded slope away from the goatherd runs, and she went to work as a serving girl in the tavern. There was no money to pay her of course. She worked for her room and the scanty board available that first summer and fall, and she laboured in the fields with the other women and the young boys to bring home what they could of the harvest.

She told them she was from the north, near Ferraut. That her mother was dead and her father and brother had gone to war. She said her uncle had begun to abuse her and so she had run away. She was good with accents and she had the northern speech right enough for them to believe her. Or at least to ask no questions. There were many transients in the Palm in those days, questions were seldom pushed too far. She ate little and worked as hard as any in the fields. There was actually little enough to do in the inn, with the men away to war. She slept in one of the rooms upstairs, she even had it to herself. They were kind enough to her after their fashion, and given the nature of things in that time.

When the light and the place were right-morning usually, and in certain of the higher fields-she could look away to the west across the border towards the river and see the remaining towers and the smoke above what had been Avalle. One morning, late in the year, she realized that she couldn"t see anything any more. That she hadn"t, in fact, seen anything for some time. The last tower was gone.

Around that time the men had begun to come home, beaten and weary. There was work again in the kitchen and waiting on tables or behind the counter of the bar. She was also expected-and had been preparing herself for this as best she could all through the fall-to take a man up to her room if he offered the going rate.

Every village seemed to need one such woman, and she was the obvious candidate here. She tried to make herself not mind, but this was the most difficult thing yet. She had a mission though, a reason for being here, a vengeance to enact, and this, even this, she would tell herself, going up the stairs with someone, was a part of it. She hardened herself, but not always, and not quite enough.

Perhaps that showed through. Several men asked her to marry them. One day she caught herself thinking about one of them as she wiped down the tables after lunch. He was quiet and kind, shy when he took her upstairs, and his eyes would follow her movements in the tavern with a fierce concentration whenever he was there.

That day was when she knew it was time for her to leave.

She was a little surprised to realize that almost three years had gone by. It was spring.

She slipped away one night, again without a farewell, remembering her arrival even as she went. Meadow flowers were blooming beside the path into the hills. The air was clean and mild. By the mingled light of the two moons she found her buried silver and walked away without looking back, taking the road north towards the fort at Sinave. She was nineteen years old.

Nineteen, and sometime in the past two years she had grown beautiful. Her angular boniness had softened, even as her face lost its last traces of girlhood. It was oval, wide at the cheekbones, almost austere. It changed when she laughed though-and for some reason she still knew how to laugh-becoming warm and animated, the unexpected dance in her dark eyes seeming to promise things that went deeper than amus.e.m.e.nt. Men who had seen her laughing or who had caused her to smile at them would encounter that look again in their dreams, or in the memories that lay on the border of sleep and dream, years after Dianora had gone away.

At Sinave the Barbadians disturbed her, with their oppressive size and careless, casual brutality. She forced herself to be calm and to linger there. Two weeks would be enough, she judged. She had to leave an impression and a memory.

A carefully constructed memory of an ambitious, pretty country girl from some hamlet near the mountains. A girl usually silent during the tavern talk at night but who, when she did speak, told vivid, memorable tales of her home village to the south. Told them with the distinctively laconic diction and round vowels that would have marked her anywhere in the Palm as being from the highlands of Certando.

The tales were usually sad-most stories were in those years-but once in a while Dianora would offer a wonderfully droll imitation of some highland rustic voicing his considered opinion on great affairs in the wider world, and those at the table where she was sitting would laugh for a long time.

She appeared to them to have some money, earned very likely in the way that pretty girls usually came to have some money. But she shared a room with another woman at the better of the two hostelries within the walls of the fort, and neither of them was ever seen to invite a man upstairs. Or to accept an invitation to go elsewhere. The Barbadian soldiers might have been a problem-indeed they had been over the winter-but orders had come from Astibar, and the mercenaries were under a tighter rein that spring.

What she wanted to do, Dianora confided one night to the loosely knit group of young men and women she had joined, was to work in a tavern or dining-place that saw a better cla.s.s of person coming through its doors. She"d had two hands full and more, thank you, of the other sort of inn, she declared.

Someone mentioned The Queen in Stevanien, across the border in Lower Corte.

With a heartfelt, inward sigh of relief Dianora began asking questions about it.

Questions to which she"d known the answers for three days; during which time she"d sat among these selfsame people every night planting subtle hints in the hope that the name might emerge spontaneously. Subtlety, she"d finally decided, was wasted among young Certandans here on the border, and so she"d practically had to drag the conversation over to the subject she wanted.

Now she listened, seemingly enraptured and wide-eyed, as two of her recent acquaintances animatedly described the newest, most elegant Ygrathen innovation in Lower Corte. A dining-place that boasted a master chef brought all the way from Ygrath itself by the current Governor of Stevanien and its distrada. The Governor, it emerged, was notoriously fond of wine and food, and of good music played in comfortable chambers. He had helped establish the new chef in a set of rooms on the ground floor of a former banking-house, and now he basked in the reflected glory of the most elaborate, most luxurious eating-place in the Palm. He dined there himself several times a week, Dianora learned.

For the second time.