“You would never get near his palaces if you were. It is,” she smiled again, “perfectly devised to our purpose that you are what you are.”
Our purpose.
He opened his mouth and closed it.
She said, “We are not yet so old as to be a fool, Signore Villani. We know this may not be possible. We also know that Seressa will have raised this possibility with you. We know the Seressinis. Yes, you will be searched, and watched whenever you are close to the hound of night. But we lay this upon you as a task any Jaddite, loyal to the god and to the city that is lost, must take up with pride. You know what was done there twenty-five years ago. You know what Sarantium was for a thousand years. You may have a chance—how many men have had this?—to make redress for all that pain, for the golden centuries stripped away.” She paused. “I ask you to pray in Valerius’s great sanctuary—for me and for my husband and son and all the dead—whatever else happens when you are there.”
It wasn’t a sanctuary any more. The Asharites had turned it into one of their own temples. They had removed the altar, the sun disks, what mosaics had remained. Everyone knew that. She knew that.
Even so.
Even so. Pero knelt again before this woman whose unbending, unending pride and remembrance was a reproach to all of them. He said, “I am honoured that you have spoken to me, asked me these things. I will remember. And . . . I will do what I can.”
He astonished himself, saying the words.
She smiled at him again. It was not a gentle smile. It had been widely reported that she’d had two of her children strangled by eunuchs in the palace complex to smooth the way for her chosen, youngest child to the throne—the one who had taken the name Valerius XI, and had died in the last assault. Pero felt, disturbingly, as if he had entered into a story that wasn’t his own.
There came a scream, an appalling, mangled sound from outside.
“Ah,” said the old woman, lifting her head. “It is likely that someone has died. Let us go see. Today becomes better and better.”
She gestured. The frightened girl sprang forward and opened the door. They went through into the larger room. There was a dead man in the garden and a dead woman on the terrace.
“Very good,” said the empress-mother of Sarantium. “It was past time for this to happen.”
—
SHE WAS DYING on the dark-green flagstones. She’d had these stones imported from Varena, the great quarries there. If you knew where the best things in the world were and you had resources you could surround your life with beauty.
She heard the door open, footsteps, the old hag’s words. Past time for this to happen. She wished, she wished so much, with her last moments alive in the world, that she’d killed the other woman long ago. But the letters—those terrible letters—had crippled her.
There was considerable pain. She hadn’t known there could be so much pain. They said childbirth was very hard sometimes, but she’d never had a child. She wanted to speak, but felt blood bubbling in her mouth. This was what dying by a knife in the heart was, she thought. Killed by another woman. Added bitterness in that. There was! It was so hard, always so hard for any woman to make her way in a brutal world, and now . . .
A bright morning. It seemed to be growing dark. It was dark.
—
LEONORA WAS STILL HOLDING the cup. It contained what she was certain was poisoned wine. It made her uneasy to have it in her hand. Death on the lips from a silver cup. She looked at the body of the woman who had ruled here, very much like royalty. The flagstones of the terrace were green, some were dark with blood, almost to Leonora’s feet. Third time, she thought. Blood beside her, and someone dead. She was pleased her hand was steady, she didn’t want to spill the wine.
“Are you all right?” Danica asked. She had come out to the terrace.
Leonora nodded. Didn’t trust herself to speak. How had her life come to include violent death?
She saw Drago Ostaja coming over. He took the cup from her, gently. “I’ll look after this,” he said. He seemed uneasy, though. They had killed someone important. Danica had. The wine, the poison in it, that would matter in telling the story.
She heard a door open. The empress-mother came back into the room with Pero. The old woman walked past the writing desk. She looked at them all, at the woman lying dead. She said, “It was past time for this to happen.”
Leonora didn’t understand that. She turned back to Drago. “They might say we put it in the cup ourselves. Whatever . . . is in the wine.”
“They won’t,” said Eudoxia, who had been empress of Sarantium. She moved forward again, leaning only lightly on her stick. Pero stayed behind. “They will send people here and we will show them where she kept her poisons in vials, and in cups at the back of the cabinet, already poured, waiting.”
“Why? Why will you do that?”
It was Danica, who seemed someone unable not to challenge and confront, Leonora thought, even if she had knelt and kissed this woman’s slipper.
Eudoxia said, gravely, “Because she tried to poison us as well, years ago. She failed. As you see.” Such a cold smile. “We achieved an understanding after that.”
“She wasn’t from Rhodias, was she?” Leonora asked.
“Of course not. Seressini, born and bred. Carefully placed here.”
“As their spy?” Drago Ostaja asked. Leonora heard hope in his voice. If the Eldest Daughter had been a spy, then killing her might be acceptable.
The old woman smiled again. “We will wait for the rector to send us someone suitable. For the moment, a different matter needs to be addressed.”
“And that is?” Danica again.
“Who follows her as Eldest Daughter. That ought to be the doctor’s widow, don’t you agree?”
“What?” Leonora gasped. She stared. “I have no desire . . . and why . . . why would they ever accept me? There must be so many who . . . No! That makes no sense!”
The empress was still smiling. Leonora could see Pero, behind her, looking shaken.
Eudoxia of Sarantium said, “It will make extremely good sense after we have done our part and proposed it to the daughters and to Dubrava, Signora Miucci. And don’t you have good reasons for not returning to Seressa? Or Mylasia? We did read the letters sent from the Council of Twelve concerning their passengers on the Blessed Ingacia. Including the parts in secret ink.”
“She let you do that?” Danica asked.
“She had no choice.”
There was a silence. “Will they accept her?” Danica finally asked. Her voice was thoughtful.
The empress was still smiling, this time with a hint of genuine amusement. “You don’t think we can deal with religious women on an isle in the harbour of Dubrava?”
Danica shook her head. “I am certain you can, your grace. You can deal with Dubrava and Seressa, with us, with this dead woman. With everyone.”
“Everyone but the Osmanlis in Sarantium. But we are not dead yet, and prayers can be answered, miracles occur, by the grace of Jad.”
She looked, Leonora thought, indomitable, and terrifying. And what she had just said was true. Leonora would not go back west. There was no home for her across the narrow sea. Was there one on this isle? She didn’t know, but . . .
“I don’t have to be Eldest Daughter,” she said hesitantly. “I can just—”
“Yes, you do,” said Eudoxia. “They will only agree to this—the Twelve in Seressa—if that is what you become. We have to put it to them that way or they will insist you return, to be used.”
To be used. Leonora surrendered. It wasn’t so hard to do, after all.
She did feel a need to say, “I have no true vocation in Jad. No real desire to live only among women.”
The empress-mother of Sarantium threw her head back and laughed aloud.
“And you think this one did?” she a
sked, finally. “With people murdered for her by that dead mute in the garden? You will be better for the women here, by far, than she ever was. And this is a place where you might—you might—claim some control over your life.”
Leonora looked at her.
“You will help me do that?”
“We will, but for our own reasons. Do not mistake us.”
Leonora stared at her. She felt her heartbeat slowing. People helped you or they hindered you or they went alongside you for a time, but it was your own life.
“I won’t,” she said.
—
PERO’S FIRST THOUGHT, moving forward to stand behind the old woman, was, She cannot have planned this! And then he thought, She’s more adept than even the duke and the Twelve.
His next thought, looking at Leonora on the terrace in sunlight, hearing her exchange with the empress, was: She is lost to me.
She had never been his, he reflected later, on the small boat, bouncing back across choppy water to Dubrava. The breeze was behind them, the sun overhead. He was silent; Danica Gradek, beside him, was the same.
Leonora had remained on the isle.
The lives of men and women, Pero Villani thought, had not been shaped or devised to give us what we desire. He had read that somewhere.
Nearing the docks he saw a tall figure waiting for them. Marin Djivo had come down to the harbour.
“Oh, Jad, thank you!” Drago Ostaja muttered fervently.
Pero understood. Someone was going to have to go to the rector and council, to begin the process of explaining what had just happened. Marin was so much a better person for that than any of them.
Pero glanced at Danica on their bench in front of the sail. She was looking at Marin as they approached, her own hair blowing, her features almost expressionless.
Almost. He saw something unexpected there. He was an artist, after all, trained to study faces, seek out the soul in them. His father had taught him some things before he died too soon and left his son to make his way in the world.
—
A NUMBER OF EVENTS followed upon those of that morning on Sinan Isle. It is a mistake to think that drama is steady, continuous, even in tumultuous times. Most often there are lulls and lacunae in the life of a person or a state. There is apparent stability, order, an illusion of calm—and then circumstances can change at speed.
The wine brought from the isle was given to a trusted alchemist. One of the rector’s principal advisers, a pragmatic man, fed some of it to a small dog first. Nothing happened to the animal for a day but it died, convulsing, the next morning.
Later that next day the alchemist determined that there was, indeed, a deadly compound infused into the wine. He identified it as a slow-acting poison, although the dog’s death had anticipated this, and by then boats had gone across to Sinan and come back with other vials and wine cups. The alchemist was kept busy. His conclusions, shortly afterwards, added further confirmation.
A certain number of untimely deaths in Dubrava, hitherto regarded as reflecting sudden, tragic illness, were now seen in a different light.
It also emerged that the Eldest Daughter of the Sinan retreat had not been, as she had always said, from a distinguished family near Rhodias. She was Seressini and a spy: that republic’s principal source of information (and some deaths) in Dubrava for years.
This was not received with anything resembling delight by the Rector’s Council or the merchants of the city.
It was pointed out, by the rector himself, that they had always known Seressa spied here, as it did everywhere, as Dubrava itself sought information in all ways it could. This did little to ease tumult in the council chamber. There was, for many, genuine dismay that a holy office had been abused in this way. It spoke to godlessness, even heresy. Along with a blunt letter sent to the Council of Twelve, another went to the High Patriarch and a third to the Emperor Rodolfo in Obravic, outlining the story.
The world needed to know of this Seressini perfidy, and some might be in a position to offer more than condemnation. Any trading sanctions against the Queen of the Sea could only help Dubrava’s merchants, of course.
On a more immediate matter, the high cleric of Dubrava had a meeting with the rector and the latter’s most trusted advisers. He emerged proclaiming his support for the idea that the new Eldest Daughter on Sinan Isle should be someone who might not have been expected. She was very young, but had rank and family easily distinguished enough (and easily confirmed, this time) to make the appointment suitable.
The widowed Leonora Miucci of Mylasia, just beginning to mourn her husband’s terrible murder, had expressed a willingness to remain on the isle and to make redress in her own pious, wronged person for the evils of her predecessor.
It was understood that the retreat’s honoured guest, the Empress Eudoxia of Sarantium, had graciously undertaken to guide and support the new Eldest Daughter in her first months and even years (if Jad was kind).
It was also understood in Dubrava that Leonora Miucci might well send tidings to Seressa, given her husband’s origins, but since everyone knew this it was not untoward. Better to know than not, always.
Nearer to home, a routine matter for a city of commerce and trade, the Djivos, the well-known merchant family that had been at the forefront of many dramatic events of late, now elected to send a small party with goods (jewellery and finished cloth, it was assumed) to join a Seressini group headed east to Asharias.
There were, as always in spring, rumours of war, but the belief was that the Osmanli campaign path would—as it usually did—lie to the north of the merchants’ route towards the great city, and in any case the Osmanlis wanted western goods from honest merchants.
The Djivo party was to be led by the younger son, Marin, with servants, animals, and four guards. One of these last was the troubling Senjani woman. It was considered a good thing that she was leaving the city. With luck she might never come back. The full party, fair-sized now, also included an artist from Seressa, one Villani—commissioned, by report, to paint a portrait of the grand khalif himself.
If that was true, the man’s fortune was made, it was declared over spring wine in Dubrava. If he knew how to paint, it was pointed out. If he survived, others noted.
—
THE WORLD IS A GAMEBOARD, an Esperañan poet had declared, in still celebrated lines, centuries ago. The pieces are moved, they do not control themselves. They are placed opposite each other, or beside. They are allies or enemies, of higher or lower rank. They die or they survive. One player wins and then there is another game on the board.
Even so, the rise and fall of fortune for empires, kingdoms, republics, warring faiths, men and women—their heartaches, losses, loves, undying rage, delight and wonder, pain and birth and death—all these are intensely real to them, not simply images in a poem, however brilliant the poet might have been.
The dead (with exceptions impossibly rare) are gone from us. They are buried with honour, burned, thrown into the sea, left on gibbets or in fields for animals and carrion birds. One needs to stand far away, or look with a very cold eye, to see all this roiling movement, this suffering, agitation, as pieces only, moved in some game.
Filipa di Lucaro was one of those who had a proper burial with rites before and candles after, in the small cemetery beside the retreat on Sinan, overlooking the vineyard and the sea. This was insisted upon by the woman who replaced her there. The dead woman’s dead servant, the mute, Juraj, was returned to his family, who came for his body in a fishing boat from along the rocky coastline north of Dubrava.
It is not known what they did with him.
PART THREE
CHAPTER XIII
There were demons that sought to claim your soul for darkness. There were ghosts and spirits, frequently malevolent. The dead did not always lie quietly.
Followers of all faiths knew these truths.
You walked a twilit country path at peril, and when night fell, with or without moons, it was madness to be abroad. You could die in a ditch of a fall, having lost sight of the road.
You lived your life in intimate proximity to its sudden end. Prayers were more intense because of this. Help was needed, under sun, moons, stars—and some reason to hope for what might come after.
Laughter was also necessary, and found, in spite of—or because of—these close and terrible dangers. Simple pleasures. Music and dance, wine, ale, dice and cards. Harvest’s end, the taste of berries on the bush, tricking the bees from a hive full of honey. Warmth and play in a bed at night or in the straw of a barn. Companionship. Sometimes love.
There were reasons for fear in every season, however, in every place where men and women tried to shape and guard their lives.
Autumn brought the dread of a killing winter. If it rained too much, if the harvest failed or was limited, some would die in the coming months as surely as a weak, wintry sun would rise to see it happen.
If storms came and smashed the moored fishing boats to wreckage, or sank them amid lightning and wild seas, hunger followed in coastal villages. If enough firewood could not be found and cut and stacked (and defended), people died of cold in the north.
If wolves came gaunt and howling over hard-packed snow and killed the livestock, assuaging their own desperation, people would also die. Disease found men and women (and always children) made weak by lack of food. Starving mothers had no milk for newborns.
Brigands came down from hills or out of dense, black forests. City walls might be proof against all but the worst of these, but what defence had a farmhouse, a lonely retreat, the cabin of a charcoal burner? The silver moon and the blue would swing up the sky and set, while fires took homes and lives. Stars wheeled slowly above snow.
Even in summer there were terrors. If pirates or corsairs, raiding from the Majriti all the way to the harbours of Ammuz, took the longed-for grain convoys, people starved in cities.
Walls, it was often said, could do nothing against famine.