Many were the reasons that led people to the Sanctuaries. It had long been a jest that the priestesses of Adaon were the best birth doctors in the Palm, so numerous were the daughters of distinguished or merely wealthy houses that elected to sojourn at one of the god’s retreats at times that might otherwise have been inconvenient for their families. And, of course, it was well known that an indeterminately high percentage of the clergy were culled from the living offerings these same daughters left behind when they returned to their homes. Girl children stayed with Adaon, the boys went to Morian. The white-robed priests of Eanna had always claimed that they would have nothing to do with such goings-on, but there were stories belying that, as well.
Little of this had changed when the Tyrants came. Neither Brandin nor Alberico was so reckless or ill-advised as to stir up the clergy of the Triad against their rule. The priests and the priestesses were allowed to do as they had always done. The people of the Palm were granted their worship, odd and even primitive as it might seem to the new rulers from overseas.
What both Tyrants did do, with greater or lesser success, was play the rival temples against each other, seeing—for it was impossible not to see—the tensions and hostilities that rippled and flared among the three orders of the Triad. There was nothing new in this: every Duke, Grand Duke, or Prince in the peninsula had sought, in each generation, to turn this shifting three-way friction to his own account. Many patterns might have changed with the circling of years, some things might change past all recognition, and some might be lost or forgotten entirely, but not this one. Not this delicate, reciprocal dance of state and clergy.
And so the temples still stood, and the most important ones still flourished their gold and machial, their statuary, and their cloth-of-gold vestments for services. Save in one place only: in Lower Corte, where the statues and the gold were gone and the libraries looted and burned. That was part of something else though, and few spoke of it after the earliest years of the Tyrants. Even in this benighted province, the clergy were otherwise allowed to continue the precisely measured round of their days in city and town, and in their Sanctuaries.
And to these retreats came a great variety of men and women from time to time. It was not only the awkwardly fecund who found reason to ride or be carried away from the turbulence of their lives. In times of strife, whether of the soul or the wider world, the denizens of the Palm always knew that the Sanctuaries were there, perched in snow-bound precipitous eyries or half-lost in their misty valleys.
And the people knew as well that—for a price—such a withdrawal into the regimen, the carefully modulated hours of retreats such as this one of Eanna in its valley, could be theirs. For a time. For a lifetime. Whoever they might have been in the cities beyond the hills.
Whoever they might have been.
For a time, for a lifetime, the old woman thought, looking out the window of her room at the valley in sunlight at spring’s return. She had never been able to keep her thoughts from going back. There was so much waiting for her in the past and so little here, now, living through the agonizingly slow descent of the years. Season after season falling to the earth like shot birds, arrows in their breasts, through this lifetime that was her own, and her only one.
A lifetime of remembering, by curlew’s cry at dawn or call to prayer, by candlelight at dusk, by sight of chimney smoke rising straight and dark into winter’s wan grey light, by the driving sound of rain on roof and window at winter’s end, by the creak of her bed at night, by call to prayer again, by drone of priests at prayer, by a star falling west in the summer sky, by the stern cold dark of the Ember Days … a memory within each and every motion of the self or of the world, every sound, each shade of colour, each scent borne by the valley wind. A remembrance of what had been lost to bring one to this place among the white-robed priests with their unending rites and their unending pettiness, and their acceptance of what had happened to them all.
Which last is what had nearly killed her in the early years. Which, indeed, she would say—had said last week to Danoleon—was killing her now, whatever the priest-physician might say about growths in her breast.
They had found a Healer in the fall. He had come, anxious, febrile, a lank, sloppy man with nervous motions and a flushed brow. But he had sat down beside her bed and looked at her, and she had realized that he did have the gift, for his agitation had settled and his brow had cleared. And when he touched her—here, and here—his hand had been steady and there had been no pain, only a not unpleasant weariness.
He had shaken his head though in the end, and she had read an unexpected grief in his pale eyes, though he could not have known who she was. His sorrow would be for simple loss, for defeat, not caring who it was who might be dying.
‘It would kill me,’ he said quietly. ‘It has come too far. I would die and I would not save you. There is nothing I can do.’
‘How long?’ she had asked. Her only words.
He told her half a year, perhaps less, depending on how strong she was.
How strong? She was very strong. More so than any of them guessed save perhaps Danoleon, who had known her longest by far. She sent the Healer from the room, and asked Danoleon to leave, and then the one slow servant the priests had allowed to the woman they knew only as a widow from an estate north of Stevanien.
As it happened she had actually known the woman whose identity she had assumed; had had her as one of the ladies of her court for a time. A fair-haired girl, green eyes and an easy manner, quick to laugh. Melina bren Tonaro. A widow for a week; less than that. She had killed herself in the Palace by the Sea when word came of Second Deisa.
The deception was a necessary shielding of identity: Danoleon’s suggestion. Almost nineteen years ago. They would be looking for her and for the boy, the High Priest had said. The boy he was taking away, he would soon be safely gone, their dreams carried in his person, a hope living so long as he lived. She had been fair-haired herself, in those days. It had all happened such a long time ago. She had become Melina bren Tonaro and had come to the Sanctuary of Eanna in its high valley above Avalle.
Above Stevanien.
Had come, and had waited. Through the changing seasons and the unchanging years. Waited for that boy to grow into a man such as his father had been, or his brothers, and then do what a descendant in direct line of Micaela and the god should know he had to do.
Had waited. Season after season; shot birds falling from the sky.
Until last autumn, when the Healer had told her the cold large thing she had already guessed for herself. Half a year, he had said. If she was strong.
She had sent them from her room and lain in her iron bed and looked out at the leaves on the valley trees. The change of colours had come. She had loved that once; her favourite season for riding. As a girl, as a woman. It had occurred to her that these would be the last fall leaves she would ever see.
She had turned her mind from such thoughts and had begun to calculate. Days and months, and the numbering of the years. She had done the arithmetic twice, and a third time to be sure of it. She said nothing to Danoleon, not then. It was too soon.
Not until the end of winter, with all the leaves gone and ice just beginning to melt from the eaves, did she summon the High Priest and instruct him as to the letter she wanted sent to the place where she knew—as he knew, alone of all the priests—her son would be on the Ember Days that began this spring. She had done the calculations. Many times.
She had also timed it very well, and not by chance. She could see Danoleon wanting to protest, to dissuade, to speak of dangers and circumspection. But the ground was out from under his feet, she could see it in the way his large hands grew restless and the way his blue eyes moved about the room as if seeking an argument on the bare walls. She waited patiently for him to meet her gaze at last, as she knew he would, and then she saw him slowly bow his head in acceptance.
How did one deny a mother, dying, a message to her only living child? An entre
aty to that child to come bid her farewell before she crossed over to Morian. Especially when that child, the boy he himself had guided south over the mountains so many years ago, was her last link to what she had been, to her own broken dreams and the lost dreams of her people?
Danoleon promised to write the letter and have it sent. She thanked him and lay back in her bed after he went out. She was genuinely weary, genuinely in pain. Hanging on. It would be half a year just past the Ember Days of spring. She had done the numbers. She would be alive to see him if he came. And he would come; she knew he would come to her.
The window had been open a little though it was still cold that day. Outside, the snow had lain in gentle drifting folds in the valley and up the slopes of the hills. She had looked out upon it but her thoughts, unexpectedly, had been of the sea. Dry-eyed, for she had not wept since everything fell, not once, not ever, she walked her memory-palaces of long ago and saw the waves come in to break and fall on the white sands of the shore, leaving shells and pearls and other gifts along the curving beach.
So Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi. Once a princess in a palace by the sea; mother of two dead sons, and of one who yet lived. Waiting, as winter near the mountains turned to spring in that year.
‘Two things. First, we are musicians,’ said Alessan. ‘A newly formed company. Secondly: do not use my name. Not here.’ His voice had taken on the clipped, hard cadences Devin remembered from the first night in the Sandreni lodge when this had all begun for him.
They were looking down on a valley running west in the clear light of afternoon. The Sperion lay behind them. The uneven, narrow road had wound its way for hours up around the shoulders of an ascending sequence of hills until this highest point. And now the valley unrolled before them, trees and grass touched by the earliest green-gold of spring. A tributary stream, swift-running with the melting snows, slanted northwest out of the foothills, flashing with light. The temple dome in the midst of the Sanctuary gleamed silver in the middle distance.
‘What name, then?’ Erlein asked quietly. He seemed subdued, whether because of Alessan’s tone or the awareness of danger, Devin did not know.
‘Adreano,’ the Prince said, after a moment. ‘I am Adreano d’Astibar today. I will be a poet for this reunion. For this triumphant, joyous homecoming.’
Devin remembered the name: the young poet death-wheeled by Alberico last winter, after the scandal of the ‘Sandreni Elegies’. He looked closely at the Prince for a moment and then away: this was not a day to probe. If he was here for any reason it was to try, somehow, to make things easier for Alessan. He didn’t know how he was going to go about doing that though. He felt badly out of his depth again, his earlier rush of excitement fading before the grimness of the Prince’s manner.
South of them, towering above the valley, the peaks of the Sfaroni Range loomed, higher even than the mountains above Castle Borso. There was snow on the peaks and even on the middle slopes; winter did not retreat so swiftly this high up, this far south. Below them though, north of the contoured foothills, in the sheltered east–west running of the valley Devin could see green buds swelling on the trees. A grey hawk hung in an updraft for a moment, almost motionless, before wheeling south and down to be lost against the backdrop of the hills. Down on the valley floor the Sanctuary seemed to lie within its walls like a promise of peace and serenity, wrapped away from all the evils of the world.
Devin knew it was not so.
They rode down, not hurrying now, for that would have been unusual in three musicians come here at midday. Devin was keenly, anxiously aware of danger. The man he was riding behind was the last heir to Tigana. He wondered what Brandin of Ygrath would do to Alessan if the Prince was betrayed and taken after so many years. He remembered Marius of Quileia in the mountain pass: Do you trust this message?
Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.
Even before meeting Alessan, Devin had had his own thoughts about that. On the subject of the clergy his father had never been shy about speaking his mind. And now Devin remembered again Garin’s single candle of defiance twice a year on the Ember Nights of his childhood in Asoli. Now that he had begun to think about it, there seemed to be a great many nuances to the flickering lights of those candles in the dark. And more shadings to his own stolid father than he had ever guessed. Devin shook his head; this was not the time to wander down that path.
When the hill track finally wound its way down to the valley floor, a wider, smoother road began, slanting towards the Sanctuary in the middle of the valley. About half a mile away from the stone outer walls, a double row of trees began on either side of the approach. Elms, coming into early leaf. Beyond them on either side Devin saw men working in the fields, some lay servants and some of them priests, clad not in the white of ceremony, but in nondescript robes of beige, beginning the labours that the soil demanded at winter’s end. One man was singing, a sweet, clear tenor voice.
The eastern gates of the Sanctuary complex were open before them, simple and unadorned save for the star-symbol of Eanna. The gates were high though, Devin noted, and of heavy wrought iron. The walls that enclosed the Sanctuary were high as well, and the stone was thick. There were also towers—eight of them—curving forward at intervals around the wide embrace of the walls. This was clearly a place built, however many hundreds of years ago, to withstand adversity. Set within the complex, rising serenely above everything else, the dome of Eanna’s temple shone in the sunlight as they rode up to the open gates and passed within.
Just inside Alessan pulled his horse to a halt. From ahead of them and some distance over to the left they heard the unexpected sound of children’s laughter. In an open, grassy field set beyond a stable and a large residence hall a dozen young boys in blue tunics were playing maracco with sticks and a ball, supervised by a young priest in the beige work-robes.
Devin watched them with a sudden sharp sadness and nostalgia. He could remember, vividly, going into the woods near their farm with Povar and Nico when he was five years old, to cut and carry home his first maracco stick. And then the hours—minutes more often—snatched from chores when the three of them would seize their sticks and one of the battered succession of balls Nico had patiently wound together out of layers and layers of cloth, to whoop and slash their way about in the mud at the end of the barnyard, pretending they were the Asolini team at the upcoming Triad Games.
‘I scored four times one game in my last year of temple schooling,’ Erlein di Senzio said in a musing voice. ‘I’ve never forgotten it. I doubt I ever will.’
Surprised and amused, Devin glanced over at the wizard. Alessan turned in his saddle to look back as well. After a moment the three men exchanged a smile. In the distance the children’s shouts and laughter gradually subsided. The three of them had been seen. It was unlikely that the appearance of strangers was a common event here, especially so soon after the melting of the snow.
The young priest had left the playing field and was making his way over, as was an older man with a full black leather apron over his robes of beige, coming from where the sheep and goats and cows were kept in pens on the other side of the central avenue. Some distance in front of them lay the arched entrance to the temple and beside it on the right and a little behind, the smaller dome of the observatory—for in all her Sanctuaries the priests of Eanna tracked and observed the stars she had named.
The complex was enormous, even more so than it had seemed from above on the hill sl
opes. There were a great many priests and servants moving about the grounds, entering and leaving the temple itself, working among the animals, or in the vegetable gardens Devin could see beyond the observatory. From that direction as well came the unmistakable clanging of a blacksmith’s forge. Smoke rose up there, to be caught and carried by the mild breeze. Overhead he saw the hawk again, or a different one, circling lazily against the blue.
Alessan dismounted and Devin and Erlein did the same just as the two priests came up to them, at almost exactly the same moment. The younger one, sandy-haired and small like Devin, laughed and gestured at himself and his colleague.
‘Not much of a greeting party, I’m afraid. We weren’t expecting visitors this early in the year, I must admit. No one even noticed you riding down. Be welcome though, be most welcome to Eanna’s Sanctuary, whatever the reason you have come to us. May the goddess know you and name you hers.’ He had a cheerful manner and an easy smile.
Alessan returned the smile. ‘May she know and surely name all who dwell within these walls. To be honest, we wouldn’t have been certain how to deal with a more official greeting. We haven’t actually worked out our entrance routines yet. And as for early in the year—well, everyone knows new-formed companies have to get moving sooner than the established ones or they are likely to starve.’
‘You are musical performers?’ the older priest asked heavily, wiping his hands on the heavy apron he wore. He was balding and brown and grizzled, and there was a gap where two of his front teeth ought to have been.
‘We are,’ said Alessan with some attempt at a grand manner. ‘My name is Adreano d’Astibar. I play the Tregean pipes, and with me is Erlein di Senzio, the finest harp player in all of the peninsula. And I must tell you truly, you haven’t heard singing until you’ve listened to our young companion Devin d’Asoli.’
The younger priest laughed again. ‘Oh, well done! I should bring you along to the outer school to give a lesson to my charges in rhetoric.’