‘I’d do better to teach the pipes,’ Alessan smiled. ‘If music is part of your programme here.’
The priest’s mouth twitched. ‘Formal music,’ he said. ‘This is Eanna, not Morian, after all.’
‘Of course,’ said Alessan hastily. ‘Very formal music for the young ones boarding here. But for the servants of the goddess themselves …?’ He arched one of his dark eyebrows.
‘I will admit,’ said the sandy-haired young priest, smiling again, ‘to a preference for Rauder’s early music myself.’
‘And no one plays it better than we,’ Alessan said smoothly. ‘I can see we have come to the right place. Should we make our obeisance to the High Priest?’
‘You should,’ said the older man, not smiling. He began untying the apron-strings at his back. ‘I’ll take you to him. Savandi, your charges are about to commit assault upon each other or worse. Have you no control at all over them?’
Savandi spun to look, swore feelingly in a quite unpriestly fashion, and began running towards the games field shouting imprecations. From this distance it did indeed seem to Devin that the maracco sticks were being used by Savandi’s young charges in a fashion distinctly at variance with the accepted rules of the game.
Devin saw Erlein grinning as he watched the boys. The wizard’s lean face changed when he smiled. When the smile was a true one, not the ironic, slipping-sideways expression he so often used to indicate a sour, superior disdain.
The older priest, grim-faced, pulled his leather apron over his head, folded it neatly, and draped it over one of the bars of the adjacent sheepfold. He barked a name Devin could not make out and another young man—a servant this time—hastily emerged from the stables on their left.
‘Take their horses,’ the priest ordered bluntly. ‘See that their goods are brought to the guest house.’
‘I’ll keep my pipes,’ Alessan said quickly.
‘And I my harp,’ Erlein added. ‘No lack of trust, you understand, but a musician and his instrument…?’
This priest was somewhat lacking in Savandi’s comfortable manner. ‘As you will,’ was all he said. ‘Come. My name is Torre, I am the porter of this Holy Sanctuary. You must be brought to the High Priest.’ He turned and set off without waiting for them, on a path going around to the left of the temple.
Devin and Erlein looked at each other and exchanged a shrug. They followed Torre and Alessan, passing a number of other priests and lay servants, most of whom smiled at them, somewhat making up for their dour, self-appointed guide.
They caught up to the other two as they rounded the southern side of the temple. Torre had stopped, Alessan beside him. The balding porter looked around, quite casually, then said, almost as casually: ‘Trust no one. Speak truth to none but Danoleon or myself. These are his words. You have been expected. We thought it would be another night, perhaps two before you came, but she said it would be today.’
‘Then I have proved her right. How gratifying,’ said Alessan in an odd voice.
Devin felt suddenly cold. Off to their left, in the games field, Savandi’s boys were laughing again, lithe shapes clad in blue, running after a white ball. From within the dome he could hear, faintly, the sound of chanting. The end of the afternoon invocations. Two priests in formal white came along the path from the opposite direction, arm in arm, disputing animatedly.
‘This is the kitchen, and this the bakehouse,’ Torre said clearly, pointing as he spoke. ‘Over there is the brewhouse. You will have heard of the ale we make here, I have no doubt.’
‘Of course we have,’ murmured Erlein politely, as Alessan said nothing.
The two priests slowed, registered the presence of the strangers and their musical instruments, and went on. ‘Just over there is the High Priest’s house,’ Torre continued, ‘beyond the kitchen and the outer school.’
The other two priests, resuming their argument, swept briskly around the curve of the path that led to the front of the temple.
Torre fell silent. Then, very softly, he said: ‘Eanna be praised for her most gracious love. May all tongues give her praise. Welcome home, my Prince. Oh, in the name of love, be welcome home at last.’
Devin swallowed awkwardly, looking from Torre to Alessan. An uncontrollable shiver ran along his spine: there were tears, bright-sparkling in the brilliant sunlight, in the porter’s eyes.
Alessan made no reply. He lowered his head, and Devin could not see his eyes. They heard children’s laughter, the final notes of a sung prayer.
‘She is still alive then?’ Alessan asked, looking up at last.
‘She is,’ said Torre emotionally. ‘She is still alive. She is very—’ He could not finish the sentence.
‘There is no point in the three of us being careful if you are going to spill tears like a child,’ Alessan said sharply. ‘Enough of that, unless you want me dead.’
Torre gulped. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered. ‘Forgive me, my lord.’
‘No! Not “my lord”. Not even when we are alone. I am Adreano d’Astibar, musician.’ Alessan’s voice was hard. ‘Now take me to Danoleon.’
The porter wiped quickly at his eyes. He straightened his shoulders. ‘Where do you think we are going?’ he snapped, almost managing his earlier tone again. He spun on his heel and strode up the path.
‘Good,’ Alessan murmured to the priest, from behind. ‘Very good, my friend.’ Trailing them both, Devin saw Torre’s head lift at the words. He glanced at Erlein but this time the wizard, his expression thoughtful, did not return the look.
They passed the kitchens and then the outer school where Savandi’s charges—children of noblemen or wealthy merchants, sent here to be educated—would study and sleep. All across the Palm such teaching was a part of the role of the clergy, and a source of a goodly portion of their wealth. The Sanctuaries vied with each other to draw student boarders—and their fathers’ money.
It was silent within the large building now. If the dozen or so boys on the games-field with Savandi were all the students in the complex, then Eanna’s Sanctuary in Lower Corte was not doing very well.
On the other hand, Devin thought, who of those left in Lower Corte could afford Sanctuary schooling for their children now? And what shrewd businessman from Corte or Chiara, having bought up cheap land here in the south, would not send his son home to be educated? Lower Corte was a place where a clever man from elsewhere could make money out of the ruin of the inhabitants, but it was not a place to put down roots. Who wanted to be rooted in the soil of Brandin’s hate?
Torre led them up the steps of a covered portico and then through the open doorway of the High Priest’s house. All doors seemed to be open to the spring sunshine, after the shuttered holiness of the Ember Days just past.
They stood in a large, handsome, high-ceilinged sitting-room. A huge fireplace dominated the southwestern end and a number of comfortable chairs and small tables were arranged on a deep-piled carpet. Crystal decanters on a sideboard held a variety of wines. Devin saw two bookcases on the southern wall but no books. The cases had been left to stand, disconcertingly empty. The books of Tigana had been burned. He had been told about that.
Arched doorways in both the eastern and western walls led out to porches where the sunlight could be caught in the morning and at eve. On the far side of the room there was a closed door, almost certainly leading to the bedchamber. There were four cleverly designed, square recesses in the walls and another smaller one above the fire where statues would once have stood. These too were gone. Only the ubiquitous silver stars of Eanna served for painted decoration on the walls.
The door to the bedroom opened and two priests came out.
They seemed surprised, but not unduly so, to see the porter waiting with three visitors. One man was of medium height and middle years, with a sharp face and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He carried a physician’s tray of herbs and powders in front of him, supported on a thong about his neck.
It was at the other man that Devi
n stared, though. It was the other man who carried the High Priest’s staff of office. He would have commanded attention even without it, Devin thought, gazing at the figure of what had to be Danoleon.
The High Priest was an enormous man, broad-shouldered with a chest like a barrel, straight-backed despite his years. His long hair and the beard that covered half his chest were both white as new snow, even against the whiteness of his robe. Thick straight eyebrows met in the middle of a serene brow and above eyes as clear and blue as a child’s. The hand he wrapped about the massive staff of office held it as if it were no more than a cowherd’s hazel switch.
If they were like this, Devin thought, awed, looking up at the man who had been High Priest of Eanna in Tigana when the Ygrathens came, if the leaders were all like this then there were truly great men here before the fall.
They couldn’t have been so different from today; he knew that rationally. It was only twenty years ago, however much might have changed and fallen away. But even so, it was hard not to feel daunted in the commanding presence of this man. He turned from Danoleon to Alessan: slight, unprepossessing, with his disorderly, prematurely silvered hair and cool, watchful eyes, and the nondescript, dusty, road-stained riding clothes he wore.
But when he turned back to the High Priest he saw that Danoleon was squeezing his own eyes tightly shut as he drew a ragged breath. And in that moment Devin realized, with a thrill that was oddly akin to pain, where, despite all appearances, the truth of power lay between these men. It was Danoleon, he remembered, who had taken the boy Alessan, the last prince of Tigana, south and away in hiding across the mountains all those years ago.
And would not have seen him again since that time. There was grey in the hair of the tired man who stood before the High Priest now. Danoleon would be seeing that, trying to deal with it. Devin found himself hurting for the two of them. He thought about the years, all the lost years that had tumbled and spun and drifted like leaves or snow between these two, then and now.
He wished he were older, a wiser man with a deeper understanding. There seemed to be so many truths or realizations of late, hovering at the edge of his awareness, waiting to be grasped and claimed, just out of reach.
‘We have guests,’ Torre said in his brusque manner. ‘Three musicians, a newly formed company.’
‘Hah!’ the priest with the medicine-tray grunted with a sour expression. ‘Newly formed? They’d have to be to venture here and this early in the year. I can’t remember the last time someone of any talent showed up in this Sanctuary. Can you three play anything that won’t clear a room of people, eh?’
‘It depends on the people,’ said Alessan mildly.
Danoleon smiled, though he seemed to be trying not to. He turned to the other priest. ‘Idrisi, it is just barely possible that if we offered a warmer welcome we might be graced with visitors happier to display their art.’ The other man grunted what might or might not have been an apology under the scrutiny of that placid blue gaze.
Danoleon turned back to the three of them. ‘You will forgive us,’ he murmured. His voice was deep and soothing. ‘We have had some disconcerting news recently, and right now we have a patient in some pain. Idrisi di Corte, here, our physician, tends to be distressed when such is the case.’
Privately, Devin doubted if distress had much to do with the Cortean priest’s rudeness, but he kept his peace. Alessan accepted Danoleon’s apology with a short bow.
‘I am sorry to hear that,’ he said to Idrisi. ‘Is it possible we might be of aid? Music has long been known as a sovereign ease for pain. We should be happy to play for any of your patients.’ He was ignoring for the moment, Devin noted, the news Danoleon had mentioned. It was unlikely to be an accident that Danoleon had given them Idrisi’s formal name—making clear that he was from Corte.
The physician shrugged. ‘As you please. She is certainly not sleeping, and it can do no harm. She is almost out of my hands now, in any case. The High Priest has had her brought here against my will. Not that I can do very much any more. In truth she belongs to Morian now.’ He turned to Danoleon. ‘If they tire her out, fine. If she sleeps it is a blessing. I will be in the infirmary or in my garden. I’ll check in here tonight, unless I have word from you before.’
‘Will you not stay to hear us play, then?’ Alessan asked. ‘We might surprise you.’
Idrisi grimaced. ‘I have no leisure for such things. Tonight in the dining hall, perhaps. Surprise me.’ He flashed a small, unexpected smile, gone as quickly as it appeared, and went past them with brisk, irritated strides out the door.
There was a short silence.
‘He is a good man,’ Danoleon said softly, almost apologetically.
‘He is a Cortean,’ Torre muttered darkly.
The High Priest shook his handsome head. ‘He is a good man,’ he repeated. ‘It angers him when people die in his care.’ His gaze went back to Alessan. His hand shifted a little on his staff. He opened his mouth to speak.
‘My lord, my name is Adreano d’Astibar,’ Alessan said firmly. ‘This is Devin … Asoli, whose father Garin you may perhaps remember from Stevanien.’ He waited. Danoleon’s blue eyes widened, looking at Devin. ‘And this,’ Alessan finished, ‘is our friend Erlein di Senzio, who plays harp among other gifts of his hands.’
As he spoke those last words, Alessan held up his left palm with two fingers curled down. Danoleon looked quickly at Erlein, and then back to the Prince. He had grown pale, and Devin was suddenly made aware that the High Priest was a very old man.
‘Eanna guard us all,’ Torre whispered from behind them.
Alessan looked pointedly around at the open archways to the porches. ‘This particular patient is near death then, I take it?’
Danoleon’s gaze, Devin thought, seemed to be devouring Alessan. There was an almost palpable hunger in it, the need of a starving man. ‘I’m afraid she is,’ he said, keeping his tone steady only with an obvious effort. ‘I have given her my own chamber that she might be able hear the prayers in the temple. The infirmary and her own rooms are both too far away.’
Alessan nodded his head. He seemed to have himself on a tightly held leash, his movements and his words rigidly controlled. He lifted the Tregean pipes in their brown leather sheath and looked down at them.
‘Then perhaps we should go in and make music for her. It sounds as if the afternoon prayers are done.’
They were. The chanting had stopped. In the fields behind the house the boys of the outer school were still running and laughing in the sunlight. Devin could hear them through the open doorways. He hesitated, unsure of himself, then coughed awkwardly and said: ‘Perhaps you might like to play alone for her? The pipes are soothing, they may help her fall asleep.’
Danoleon was nodding his head in anxious agreement, but Alessan turned back to look at Devin, and then at Erlein. His expression was veiled, unreadable.
‘What?’ he said at length. ‘Would you abandon me so soon after our company is formed?’ And then, more softly: ‘There will be nothing said that you cannot know, and some things, perhaps, that you should hear.’
‘But she is dying,’ Devin protested, feeling something wrong here, something out of balance. ‘She is dying and she is—’ He stopped himself.
Alessan’s eyes were so strange.
‘She is dying and she is my mother,’ he whispered. ‘I know. That is why I want you there. There seems to be some news, as well. We had better hear it.’
He turned and walked towards the bedroom door. Danoleon was standing just before it. Alessan stopped before the High Priest and they looked at each other. The Prince whispered something Devin could not hear; he leaned forward and kissed the old man on the cheek.
Then he went past him. At the door he paused for a moment and drew a long steadying breath. He lifted a hand as if to run it through his hair but stopped himself. A queer smile crossed his face as if chasing a memory.
‘A bad habit, that,’ he murmured, to no one in particula
r. Then he opened the door and went in and they followed him.
The High Priest’s bedchamber was almost as large as the sitting-room in the front, but its furnishings were starkly simple. Two armchairs, a pair of rustic, worn carpets, a washstand, a writing desk, a trunk for storage, a small privy set apart in the southeastern corner. There was a fireplace in the northern wall, twin to the one in the front room, sharing the same chimney. This side was lit, despite the mildness of the day, and so the room was warmer though both windows were open, curtains drawn back to admit some slanting light from under the eaves of the porticoes to the west.
The bed on the back wall under the silver star of Eanna was large, for Danoleon was a big man, but it too was simple and unadorned. No canopy, plain pinewood posts in the four corners, and a pine headboard.
It was also empty.
Devin, nervously following Alessan and the High Priest through the door, had expected to see a dying woman there. He looked, more than a little embarrassed, towards the door of the privy. And almost jumped with shock when a voice spoke from the shadows by the fire, where the light from the windows did not fall.
‘Who are these strangers?’
Alessan himself had turned unerringly towards the fire the moment he entered the room—guided by what sense, Devin never knew—and so he appeared controlled and unsurprised when that cold voice spoke. Or when a woman moved forward from the shadows to stand by one of the armchairs, and then sit down upon it, her back very straight, her head held high looking at him. At all of them.
Pasithea di Tigana bren Serazi, wife to Valentin the Prince. She must have been a woman of unsurpassed beauty in her youth, for that beauty still showed, even here, even now, at the threshold of the last portal of Morian. She was tall and very thin, though part of that, clearly, was due to the illness wasting her from within. It showed in her face, which was pale almost to translucence, the cheekbones thrust into too-sharp relief. Her robe had a high, stiff collar which covered her throat; the robe itself was crimson, accentuating her unnatural, other-worldly pallor—it was as if, Devin thought, she had already crossed to Morian and was looking back at them from a farther shore.