His retirement estate in eastern Ygrath, on the promontory he’d already chosen in his mind, seemed farther away this evening than ever before. He signalled for another round of wine for all of them, inwardly grieving for the blue-green sea and the splendid hunting woods by the home he’d probably never be able to build.
On the other hand (as they liked to say here), it appeared that his attempt to sooth the ire of this Rhamanus had been unexpectedly successful. The Governor had asked his wonderful Arduini—the true and only joy there was for him in this benighted place—to prepare an evening meal for them of an unforgettable order.
‘All of my meals are unforgettable.’ Arduini had bridled predictably, but had been mollified by a judicious mixture of flattery, gold ygras, and a quiet reminder (almost certainly not the truth, the Governor reflected unrepentantly) that their guest that evening had ready access to the ear of the King on Chiara.
The meal had been an ascending series of revelations, the service prompt, soothing and unobtrusive, the wines a sequence of complementary grace notes to Arduini’s undeniable artistry. Rhamanus, a man who appeared to keep his trim physique with some difficulty, had progressed from edginess through guarded appreciation, to increasing pleasure, ending up in a volubly expansive good humour.
Somewhere in the next-to-last bottle of dessert wine imported from back home in Ygrath he had also become quite drunk.
Which was the only explanation, the only possible explanation, for the fact that, after the dinner was over and The Queen closed for the night, he’d had their evening’s dark-haired waitress formally seized as Tribute for Brandin in Chiara and bundled directly on to the galley in the river.
The serving-girl. The serving-girl from Certando.
Certando, on the other side of the border, where Alberico of Barbadior held sway, not, alas, Brandin of Ygrath.
The Governor of Stevanien had been awakened at dawn from a fitful, wine-fogged slumber by a terrified, apologetic Clerk of the Council. Unclothed and without so much as a whiff of his morning khav he had heard—through the ominous pounding of a colossal headache—the nature of the news.
‘Stop that galley!’ he roared, as the horrifying implications fought their way through to register upon his slowly emerging consciousness. He had tried to roar, anyway. What came forth was a pitiful squeal that had been, none the less, sufficiently explicit to send the clerk flying, his gown flapping in his haste to obey.
They blocked the River Sperion, stopping Rhamanus just as he was raising anchor.
Unfortunately the Tribute captain then proceeded to reveal a stubbornness that ran stupefyingly counter to the most rudimentary political good sense. He refused to surrender the girl. For one wild, hallucinatory moment of insanity the Governor actually contemplated storming the galley.
The river galley of Brandin, King of Ygrath, Lord of Burrakh in Khardhun, Tyrant of the western provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm. Said galley then flying—rather pointedly—Brandin’s own device as well as the royal banner of Ygrath.
Death-wheels, the Governor reflected, were lovingly made for minor functionaries who essayed such manoeuvres.
Desperately, his brain curdling in the unfair brightness of the morning sunlight by the river, the Governor tried to find a way of communicating reason to a Tribute captain seized by the manifest throes of a midsummer madness.
‘Do you want to start a war?’ he shouted from the dock. He had to shout from the dock; they wouldn’t let him on the galley. The wretched girl was nowhere to be seen; stowed, doubtless in the captain’s cabin. The Governor wished she were dead. He wished that he himself was dead. He wished, in the most grievous inner sacrilege of all, that Arduini the master chef had never set foot in Stevanien.
‘And why,’ Captain Rhamanus called blandly from the middle of the river, ‘should my doing my precise duty by my King cause any such a thing?’
‘Has the sea salt rotted your miserable excuse for a brain?’ the Governor screamed, ill-advisedly. The captain’s brow darkened. The Governor pushed on, dripping with sweat in the sun.
‘She’s a Gertandan, in the name of the seven holy sisters of the god! Do you have any idea how easy it will be to goad Alberico into starting a border war over this?’ He mopped at his brow with the square of red cloth a servant belatedly produced.
Rhamanus, cursedly composed despite having drunk at least as much as the Governor the night before, seemed unimpressed.
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he pronounced airily, the words drifting over the water, ‘she’s living in Stevanien, she’s working in Stevanien, and she was taken in Stevanien. By my reckoning that makes her perfectly suitable for the saishan, or whatever our King, in his wisdom, decides to do with her.’ He levelled a finger suddenly at the Governor. ‘Now clear the river of these boats or I will ram and sink them in the name of each of the seven sisters and the King of Ygrath. Unless,’ he added, leaning forward, lowering his hand to the railing, ‘you would care to farspeak Chiara and have the King settle this himself?’
They had a saying here in the colony: naked between a fist and a fist. It was an exact phrase for the place where that insidious, cleverly calculated, viciously unfair proposition put the man to whom it was addressed. A phrase that described in precise and graphic terms where the Governor of Stevanien abruptly felt himself to be. The red cloth swabbed repeatedly, and ineffectually, at his forehead and neck.
One did not farspeak the King without, it had been painstakingly impressed upon all the regional administrators in the Western Palm, very compelling reason. The power demanded of Brandin to sustain such a link with his non-sorcerous underlings was considerable.
One most particularly did not willingly undertake such a course of action in the very early morning hours when the King might be asleep. Most relevant of all, perhaps, one did not hasten to bespeak the mental presence of one’s monarch with a mind clogged and befuddled with the miasmic aftermath of wine, and over an issue that—in essence—might be seen to involve no more than the Tribute seizure of a common farm girl.
That was one of the fists.
The other was war on the border. With the brain-battering possibility of more than that. For who, in the name of the sisters and the god, knew how the devious pagan mind of Alberico of Barbadior worked? How he might regard—or decide to regard—an incident such as this? Despite Rhamanus’s glib analysis, the fact that the girl worked in The Queen made it obvious that she wasn’t really a Lower Cortean. In the name of the sisters, they couldn’t even seize a Lower Cortean for tribute! They weren’t allowed to, by order of the King. To take the woman, she had to be Certandan. If Rhamanus wanted to argue she was a resident of Stevanien, well that made her a Lower Cortean which meant that they couldn’t take her! Which meant that … he didn’t know what that meant. The Governor held out his sopping kerchief and it was exchanged for a fresh one. His brain felt as if it was frying in the sun.
All he had wanted out of his declining years in service was the quiet, mildly lucrative postings his family’s long, if fairly minor, support of Brandin’s original claim to succession in Ygrath had earned them. That was it. All he wanted. With a decent house on that eastern promontory one day where he could watch the sun come up out of the sea and go hunting in the woods with his dogs. So very much to ask?
Instead, a fist and a fist.
He briefly considered washing his hands of the whole affair—and let the cursed inhabitants of this peninsula chew on that for a phrase!—letting the imbecilic Tribute captain row his galley down the river just as he pleased. In fact, he realized, lamentably too late, if he had stayed in bed and pretended he’d not received the message in time he would have been entirely blameless in this affair of a drunken captain’s blunder. He closed his eyes, tasting the exquisite, vanished sweetness of such a possibility.
Too late. He was standing by the riverside in the blinding light and the heat of the sun, and half of Stevanien had heard what he and Rhamanus had just shouted back and for
th across the water.
With a small, diffident prayer to his own patron gods of food and forest, and a poignantly clear image of that seaside estate, the Governor chose his fist.
‘Let me on board then,’ he said as briskly as he could manage. ‘I’m not about to farspeak the King while standing on this dock. I want a chair and some quiet and an extremely strong mug of whatever passes for khav on a galley.’
Rhamanus was visibly nonplussed. The Governor was able to derive a certain sour pleasure from that.
They gave him everything he asked for. The woman was taken below deck and he was left alone in the captain’s cabin. He took a deep breath and then several more. He drank the khav, scalding his tongue which, as much as anything else, woke him up. Then, for the first time in three years of office, he narrowed his mind down to a pinpoint image as Brandin had taught him, and he framed, questioningly, the name of the King in his thoughts.
With profoundly unsettling speed Brandin’s crisp, coal, always slightly mocking voice was in his head. It was dizzying. The Governor fought to keep his composure. As carefully but as quickly as he could—speed mattered, they had all been taught—he outlined the situation they faced. He apologized twice, en route, but dared not risk the time required for a third, however much his lifetime’s instincts bade him to. What good were a career diplomat’s lifetime instincts when enmeshed in sorcery? He felt sick to his stomach with the strain and the discontinuity of the farspeaking.
Then, with a surging of his spirit, with glory, with paeans of praise to twenty different deities chorusing within him, the Governor of Stevanien was given to understand that his King was not angered. More: that he had been exactly correct in this farspeaking. That the political timing could not be better for such a testing of Alberico’s resolve. That, accordingly, Rhamanus should indeed be allowed to take the girl as Tribute but, and the King stressed this, very clearly identified as a Certandan. A Certandan who happened to be in Lower Corte. That fact was to be their claim of authority: no evasions about her being a resident of Stevanien or some such thing. They would see what sort of spirit this minor Barbadian sorceror had after all.
The Governor had done well, the King said.
The image of the house by the sea grew almost incandescently vivid in the back of the Governor’s mind even as he heard himself babbling—silently over the link Brandin made—his most abject protestations of love and obedience. The King cut him short.
‘We must end now,’ he said, ‘Do go easier on the wine down there.’ Then he was gone.
The Governor sat alone in the captain’s cabin for a long time, trying to reassure himself that Brandin’s last tone had been amused, not reproving. He was fairly certain it was. He was almost sure.
A very tense period had ensued. The galley was allowed to leave that same morning. In the fortnight that followed the King had farspoken him twice. Once to order the border garrison at Forese quietly increased but not by so much as to amount to further provocation in itself. The Governor spent an anguished sleepless night trying to calculate what number of soldiers would suit that command.
Reinforcements from the city of Lower Corte arrived up the river to supplement his own forces in Stevanien. Later he was instructed by the King to watch for a possible Barbadian envoy from Certando, and to greet such a one with utmost cordiality, referring all questions to Chiara for resolution. He was also warned to be on full alert for a retaliatory border raid from Sinave—and to annihilate any and all Barbadian troops that might venture into Lower Corte. The Governor had very little personal experience at annihilation but he swore to obey.
Merchants, he was told, were to be advised to delay their plans to travel east for a little while; no orders, nothing official, merely a piece of advice a prudent businessman might wish to heed. Most did.
In the end nothing happened.
Alberico chose to entirely ignore the affair. Short of a willingness to have things escalate a long way there was nothing else he could do without losing face. For a while there was speculation he might punish some merchant or itinerant musician from the Western Palm who happened to be in his provinces, but there was no sign of this either. The Barbadians simply treated the girl as having been an established resident of Lower Corte—exactly as Rhamanus had so blithely opined the morning he’d seized her.
In the Ygrathen provinces, though, the girl was deliberately described as Certandan from the start—the woman from Barbadian territory that Brandin had seized, mocking Alberico all the while. She was said to be beautiful as well.
Rhamanus made his slow progression home through the rest of that summer and into the early fall. The galley took them downriver and all the collected inland tributes were transferred to the great Tribute Ship itself with its broad, filling sails. Slowly it made its way up the coast, collecting taxes and tariffs at the designated places in Corte and Asoli.
The harvest had indeed been bad in Corte, they had to struggle to meet the quotas there. Twice they rested at anchor for long periods while the captain led a company to an inland post. And all the while Rhamanus searched for women who might be useful as more than hostages or symbols of Ygrath’s manifest dominance. Women who might credit the saishan itself and so make the career of a certain Tribute captain who was just about ready for a landside posting after twenty years at sea.
Three possibilities were found. One was of noble birth, her existence revealed by an informer. She was taken only after her father’s manor in Corte had been, somewhat regretfully, burned to the ground.
At length, in the autumn turning of the year, beautiful even in flat, unlovely Asoli when the rains chose to relent, the Tribute Ship slipped through the tricky passages of the Strait of Asoli and entered the waters of the Chiaran Sea. A few days later, red and gold sails billowing triumphantly, it had sailed into the Great Harbour of the Island, celebrated in song for more years than could be counted.
The Tribute Ship of Rhamanus had carried gold and gems and silver and coinage of various kinds. It bore leather from Stevanien and wood carvings from Corte and great huge wheels of saull cheese from the west coast of Asoli. They had spices and herbs and knives, stained glass and wool and wine. There were two women from Corte and one from Asoli, and besides these three there was another woman and this one was different. This one was the dark-haired, brown-eyed beauty known throughout the peninsula by the time their voyage ended as the woman who’d come near to starting a war.
Dianora di Certando, her name was.
Dianora, who had intended to come to the Island from the very first, from the earliest glimmerings of her plan when she had sat alone before a dead fire one summer night in her father’s silent house. Who had hardened herself—as men in battle were said to have to do—to the thought of being captured and brought here and locked for life inside the saishan of the Tyrant. She had worked it out that far five years ago, a girl with death in her heart, with a father dead and a brother gone and a mother gone even farther away: images of all three of them rising in her dreams from the ashes of the burning in her land.
And death was still there, still with her on that ship. She still had those dreams, but with them now, as fabled Chiara drew nearer under the brightness of the sky, was something else: a bemused, an almost numbed incredulity at how the line of her life had run. How things had fallen out so completely wrong, and yet so precisely as she had planned from the first.
She had tried to see that as an omen, closing her left hand three times over her thumb to make her wish come true, as she entered that new world.
C H A P T E R 8
It was strange, Dianora thought, still moving through the crowded Audience Chamber as spring sunlight filtered down on Brandin’s court from the stained-glass windows above, how the so-clear portents of youth were alchemized by time into the many-layered ambiguities of adult life.
Sipping from her jewelled cup she considered the alternative. That she had simply allowed things to become nuanced and difficult. That the real truths were
exactly the same as they had been on the day she arrived. That all she was doing was hiding: from what she had become, and what she had not yet done.
It was the central question of her life and once more she pushed it away to the edges of her awareness. Not today. Not in any daytime. Those thoughts belonged to nights alone in the saishan when only Scelto by her door might know how sleepless she was, or find the tracks of tears along her cheeks when he came to wake her in the morning.
Night thoughts, and this was bright day, in a very public place.
So she walked over towards the man she’d recognized and let her smile reach her eyes. Balancing her chalice gracefully she sketched a full Ygrathen salute to the portly, soberly dressed personage with three heavy gold chains about his neck.
‘Greetings,’ she murmured, straightening and moving nearer. ‘This is a surprise. It is rare indeed that the so-busy Warden of the Three Harbours deigns to spare a moment from his so-demanding affairs to visit old friends.’
Unfortunately Rhamanus was as hard to ruffle or disconcert as he had ever been. Dianora had been trying to get a rise out of him ever since the night he’d had her bundled like a brown heifer out of the street in front of The Queen and on to the river galley.
Now he simply grinned, heavier with the years gone by and, latterly, his shore-bound duties, but unmistakably the man who’d brought her here.
One of the few men from Ygrath she genuinely liked.