C H A P T E R 4
Escorting his father’s bier out of the eastern gate in the hour before sunset, Tomasso bar Sandre settled his horse to an easy walk and allowed his mind to drift for the first time in forty-eight intensely stressful hours.
The road was quiet. Normally it would have been clogged at this hour with people returning to the distrada before curfew locked the city gates. Normally sundown cleared the streets of Astibar of all save the patrolling Barbadian mercenaries and those reckless enough to defy them in search of women or wine or other diversions of the dark.
This was not a normal time, however. Tonight and for the next two nights there would be no curfew in Astibar. With the grapes gathered and the distrada’s harvest a triumphant one, the Festival of Vines would see singing and dancing and things wilder than those in the streets for all three nights. For these three nights in the year Astibar tried to pretend it was sensuous, decadent Senzio. No Duke in the old days—and not even dour Alberico now—had been foolish enough to rouse the people unnecessarily by denying them this ancient release from the sober round of the year.
Tomasso glanced back at his city. The setting sun was red among thin clouds behind the temple-domes and the towers, bathing Astibar in an eerily beautiful glow. A breeze had come up and there was a bite to it. Tomasso thought about putting on his gloves and decided against it: he would have had to remove some of his rings and he quite liked the look of his gems in this elusive, transitory light. Autumn was very definitely upon them, with the Ember Days approaching fast. It would not be long, a matter of days, before the first frost touched those last few precious grapes that had been left on chosen vines to become—if all fell rightly—the icy clear blue wine that was the pride of Astibar.
Behind him the eight servants plodded stolidly along the road, bearing the bier and the simple coffin—bare wood save for the Ducal crest above—of Tomasso’s father. On either side of them the two vigil-keepers rode in grim silence. Which was not surprising, given the nature of their errand and the complex, many-generationed hatreds that twisted between those two men.
Those three men, Tomasso corrected himself. It was three, if one chose to count the dead man who had so carefully planned all of this, down to the detail of who should ride on which side of his bier, who before and who behind. Not to mention the rather more surprising detail of exactly which two lords of the province of Astibar should be asked to be his escorts to the hunting lodge for the night-long vigil and from there to the Sandreni Crypt at dawn. Or, to put the matter rather more to the point, the real point: which two lords could and should be entrusted with what they were to learn during the vigil in the forest that night.
At that thought Tomasso felt a nudge of apprehension within his rib-cage. He quelled it, as he had taught himself to do over the years—unbelievable how many years—of discussing such matters with his father.
But now Sandre was dead and he was acting alone, and the night they had laboured towards was almost upon them with this crimson waning of light. Tomasso, two years past his fortieth naming day, knew that were he not careful he could easily feel like a child again.
The twelve-year-old child he had been, for example, when Sandre, Duke of Astibar, had found him naked in the straw of the stables with the sixteen-year-old son of the chief groom.
His lover had been executed of course, though discreetly, to keep the matter quiet. Tomasso had been whipped by his father for three days running, the lash meticulously rediscovering the closing wounds each morning. His mother had been forbidden to come to him. No one had come to him.
One of his father’s very few mistakes, Tomasso reflected, thinking back thirty years in autumn twilight. From those three days he knew he could date his own particular taste for the whip in love-making. It was one of what he liked to call his felicities.
Though Sandre had never punished him that way again. Nor in any other direct manner. When it became clear—past the point of nursing any hope of discretion—that Tomasso’s preferences were, to put it mildly, not going to be changed or subdued, the Duke simply ceased to acknowledge the existence of his middle son.
For more than ten years they went on that way, Sandre patiently trying to train Gianno to succeed him, and spending scarcely less time with young Taeri—making it clear to everyone that his youngest son was next in line to his eldest. For over a decade Tomasso simply did not exist within the walls of the Sandreni Palace.
Though he most certainly did elsewhere in Astibar and in a number of the other provinces as well. For reasons that were achingly clear to him now, Tomasso had set out through the course of those years to eclipse the memories of all the dissolute nobility that Astibar still told shocked tales about, even though some of them had been dead four hundred years.
He supposed that he had, to a certain degree, succeeded.
Certainly the ‘raid’ on the temple of Morian that Ember Night in spring so long ago was likely to linger a while yet as the nadir or the paradigm (all came down—or up—to perspective, as he’d been fond of saying then) of sacrilegious debauchery.
The raid hadn’t had any impact on his relationship with the Duke. There was no relationship to impact upon ever since that morning in the straw when Sandre had returned from his ride a destined hour too soon. He and his father simply contrived not to speak to or even acknowledge each other, whether at family dinners or formal state functions. If Tomasso learned something he thought Sandre should know—which was often enough, given the circles in which he moved and the chronic danger of their times—he told his mother at one of their weekly breakfasts together and she made sure his father heard. Tomasso also knew she made equally sure Sandre was aware of the source of the tidings. Not that it mattered, really.
She had died, drinking poisoned wine meant for her husband, in the final year of the Duke’s reign, still working, to the last morning of her life, towards a reconciliation between Sandre and their middle child.
Greater romantics than were either the father or the son might have allowed themselves to think that, as the Sandreni family pulled tightly together in the bloody, retaliatory aftermath of that poisoning, she had achieved her wistful hope by dying.
Both men knew it was not so.
In fact, it was only the coming of Alberico from the Empire of Barbadior, with his will-sapping sorcery and the brutal efficiency of his conquering mercenaries, that brought Tomasso and Sandre to a certain very late-night talk during the Duke’s second year of exile. It was Alberico’s invasion and one further thing: the monumental, irredeemable, inescapable stupidity of Gianno d’Astibar bar Sandre, titular heir to the shattered fortunes of their family.
And to these two things there had slowly been added a third bitter truth for the proud, exiled Duke. It had gradually become more and more obvious, past all denial, that whatever of his own character and gifts had been manifested in the next generation, whatever of his subtlety and perception, his ability to cloak his thoughts and discern the minds of others, whatever of such skills he had passed on to his sons, had gone, all of it, to the middle child. To Tomasso.
Who liked boys, and would leave no heir himself, nor ever a name to be spoken, let alone with pride, in Astibar or anywhere else in the Palm.
In the deepest inward place where he performed the complex act of dealing with his feelings for his father, Tomasso had always acknowledged—even back then, and very certainly now on this last evening road Sandre would travel—that one of the truest measures of the Duke’s stature as a ruler of men had emerged on that winter night so long ago. The night he broke a decade’s stony silence and spoke to his middle son and made him his confidant.
His sole confidant in the painfully cautious eighteen-year quest to drive Alberico and his sorcery and his mercenaries from Astibar and the Eastern Palm. A quest that had become an obsession for both of them, even as Tomasso’s public manner became more and more eccentric and decayed, his voice and gait a parody—a self-parody, in fact—of the mincing, lisping lover of
boys.
It was planned, all of it, in late-night talks with his father on their estate outside the city walls.
Sandre’s parallel role had been to settle visibly and loudly in to impotent, brooding, Triad-cursing exile, marked by querulous, blustering hunts and too much drinking of his own wine.
Tomasso had never seen his father actually drunk, and he never used his own fluting voice when they were alone at night.
Eight years ago they had tried an assassination. A chef, traceable only to the Canziano family, had been placed in a country inn in Ferraut near the provincial border with Astibar. For over half a year idle gossip in Astibar had touted that inn as a place of growing distinction. No one remembered, afterwards, where the talk had begun: Tomasso knew very well how useful it was to plant casual rumours of this sort among his friends in the temples. The priests of Morian, in particular, were legendary for their appetites. All their appetites.
A full year from the time they had set things in motion, Alberico of Barbadior had halted on his way back from the Triad Games—exactly as Sandre had said he would—to take his midday meal at a well-reputed inn in Ferraut near the Astibar border.
By the time the sun went down at the end of that bright late-summer day every person in that inn—servants, masters, stable-boys, chefs, children and patrons—had had their backs, legs, arms and wrists broken and their hands cut off, before being bound, living, upon hastily erected Barbadian sky-wheels to die.
The inn was razed to the ground. Taxes in the province of Ferraut were doubled for the next two years, and for a year in Astibar, Tregea and Certando. During the course of the following six months every living member of the Canziano family was found, seized, publicly tortured and burned in the Grand Square of Astibar with their severed hands stuffed in their mouths so that the screaming might not trouble Alberico or his advisers in their offices of state above the square.
In this fashion had Sandre and Tomasso discovered that sorcerers cannot, in fact, be poisoned.
For the next six years they had done nothing but talk at night in the manor-house among the vineyards and gather what knowledge they could of Alberico himself and events to the east in Barbadior, where the Emperor was said to be growing older and more infirm with each passing year.
Tomasso began commissioning and collecting walking sticks with heads carved in the shape of the male organs of sex. It was rumoured that he’d had some of his young friends model for the carvers. Sandre hunted. Gianno, the heir, consolidated a burgeoning reputation as a genial, uncomplicated seducer of women and breeder of children, legitimate and illegitimate. The younger Sandreni were allowed to maintain modest homes in the city as part of Alberico’s overall policy to be as discreet a ruler as possible—except when danger or civil unrest threatened him.
At which time children might die on sky-wheels. The Sandreni Palace in Astibar remained very prominently shuttered, empty and dusty. A useful, potent symbol of the fall of those who might resist the Tyrant. The superstitious claimed to see ghostly lights flickering there at night, especially on a blue-moon night, or on the spring or autumn Ember Nights when the dead were known to walk abroad.
Then one evening in the country Sandre had told Tomasso, without warning or preamble, that he proposed to die on the eve of the Festival of Vines two autumns hence. He proceeded to name the two lords who were to be his vigil-keepers, and why. That same night he and Tomasso decided that it was time to tell Taeri, the youngest son, what was afoot. He was brave, not stupid, and might be necessary for certain things. They also agreed that Gianno had somehow sired one likely son, albeit illegitimate, and that Herado—twenty-one by then and showing encouraging signs of spirit and ambition—was their best hope of having the younger generation share in the unrest Sandre hoped to create just after the time of his dying.
It wasn’t, in fact, a question of who in the family could be trusted: family was, after all, family. The issue was who would be useful and it was a mark of how diminished the Sandreni had become that only two names came readily to mind.
It had been an entirely dispassionate conversation, Tomasso remembered, leading his father’s bier southeast between the darkening trees that flanked the path. Their conversations had always been like that; this one had been no different. Afterwards though, he had been unable to fall asleep, the date of the Festival two years away branded into his brain. The date when his father, so precise in his planning, so judicious, had decided he would die so as to give Tomasso a chance to try again, a different way.
The date that had come now and gone, carrying with it the soul of Sandre d’Astibar to wherever the souls of such men went. Tomasso made a warding gesture to avert evil at that thought. Behind him he heard the steward order the servants to light torches. It grew colder as the darkness fell. Overhead a thin band of high clouds was tinted a sombre shade of purple by the last upward-angled rays of light. The sun itself was gone, down behind the trees. Tomasso thought of souls, his father’s and his own. He shivered.
The white moon, Vidomni, rose, and then, not long after, came blue Ilarion to chase her hopelessly across the sky. Both moons were nearly full. The procession could have done without torches in fact, so bright was the twinned moonlight, but torchlight suited the task and his mood, and so Tomasso let them burn as the company cut off the road on to the familiar winding path through the Sandreni Woods, to come at length to the simple hunting lodge his father had loved.
The servants laid the bier on the trestles waiting in the centre of the large front room. Candles were lit and the two fires built up at opposite ends of the room. Food, they had set up earlier that day. It was quickly uncovered on the long sideboard along with the wine. The windows were opened to air the cabin and admit the breeze.
At a nod from Tomasso the steward led the servants away. They would go on to the manor further east and return at daybreak. At vigil’s end.
And so they were left alone, finally. Tomasso and the lords Nievole and Scalvaia, so carefully chosen two years before.
‘Wine, my lords?’ Tomasso asked. ‘We will have three others joining us very shortly.’
He said it, deliberately, in his natural voice, dropping the artificial, fluting tone that was his trademark in Astibar. He was pleased to see both of them note the fact immediately, their glances sharpening as they turned to him.
‘Who else?’ growled bearded Nievole who had hated Sandre all his life. He made no comment on Tomasso’s voice, nor did Scalvaia. Such questions gave too much away, and these were men long skilled in giving away very little indeed.
‘My brother Taeri and nephew Herado—one of Gianno’s by-blows, and much the cleverest.’ He spoke casually, uncorking two bottles of Sandreni red reserve as he spoke. He poured and handed them each a glass, waiting to see who would break the small silence his father had said would follow. Scalvaia would ask, Sandre had said.
‘Who is the third?’ Lord Scalvaia asked softly.
Inwardly Tomasso saluted his dead father. Then, twirling his own glass gently by the stem to release the wine’s bouquet, he said, ‘I don’t know. My father did not name him. He named the two of you to come here, and the three of us and said there would be a sixth at our council tonight.’
That word too had been carefully chosen.
‘Council?’ elegant Scalvaia echoed. ‘It appears that I have been misinformed. I was naively of the impression that this was a vigil.’ Nievole’s dark eyes glowered above his beard. Both men stared at Tomasso.
‘A little more than that,’ said Taeri as he entered the room, Herado behind him.
Tomasso was pleased to see them both dressed with appropriate sobriety, and to note that, for all the suavely flippant timing of Taeri’s entrance, his expression was profoundly serious.
‘You will know my brother,’ Tomasso murmured, moving to pour two more glasses for the new arrivals. ‘You may not have met Herado, Gianno’s son.’
The boy bowed and kept silent, as was proper. Tomasso carried the drinks over
to his brother and nephew.
The stillness lasted a moment longer, then Scalvaia sank down into a chair, stretching his bad leg out in front of him. He lifted his cane and pointed it at Tomasso. The tip did not waver.
‘I asked you a question,’ he said coldly, in the famous, beautiful voice. ‘Why do you call this a council, Tomasso bar Sandre? Why have we been brought here under false pretences?’
Tomasso stopped playing with his wine. They had come to the moment at last. He looked from Scalvaia over to burly Nievole.
‘The two of you,’ he said soberly, ‘were considered by my father to be the last lords of any real power left in Astibar. Two winters past he decided—and informed me—that he intended to die on the eve of this Festival. At a time when Alberico would not be able to refuse him full rites of burial—which rites include a vigil such as this. At a time when you would both be in Astibar, which would allow me to name you his vigil-keepers.’
He paused in the measured, deliberate recitation and let his glance linger on each of them. ‘My father did this so that we might come together without suspicion, or interruption, or risk of being detected, to set in motion certain plans for the overthrow of Alberico who rules in Astibar.’
He was watching closely, but Sandre had chosen well. Neither of the two men to whom he spoke betrayed surprise or dismay by so much as a flicker of a muscle.
Slowly Scalvaia lowered his cane and laid it down on the table by his chair. The stick was of onyx and machial, Tomasso found himself noticing. Strange how the mind worked at moments such as this.
‘Do you know,’ said bluff Nievole from by the larger fire, ‘do you know that this thought had actually crossed my mind when I tried to hazard why your Triad-cursed father—ah, forgive me, old habits die hard—’ His smile was wolfish, rather than apologetic, and it did not reach his narrowed eyes. ‘—why Duke Sandre would name me to hold vigil for him. He must have known how many times I tried to hasten these mourning rites along in the days when he ruled.’
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