Tigana

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  The following spring the Ygrathen soldiers discovered a new form of sport. It had probably been inevitable that they would, one of the evil growths that sprang from the deep-sown seeds of Brandin’s vengeance.

  Dianora remembered being at an upstairs window the day it began. She was watching her brother and the apprentice—no longer an apprentice, of course—walking through a sun-brightened early morning across the square on their way to the site where they were labouring. White clouds had been drifting by overhead, scudding with the wind. A small cluster of soldiers came from the opposite side and accosted the two boys. Her window was open to air the room and catch the freshness of the breeze; she heard it all.

  ‘Help us!’ one of the soldiers bleated with a smirk she could see from her window. ‘We’re lost,’ he moaned, as the others quickly surrounded the boys. He drew sly chuckles from his fellows. One of them elbowed another in the ribs.

  ‘Where are we?’ the soldier begged.

  Eyes carefully lowered, her brother named the square and the streets leading from it.

  ‘That’s no good!’ the soldier complained. ‘What good are street names to me? I don’t even know what cursed town I’m in!’ There was laughter; Dianora winced at what she heard in it.

  ‘Lower Corte,’ the apprentice muttered quickly, as her brother kept silent. They noticed the silence though.

  ‘What town? You tell me,’ the spokesman said more sharply, prodding her brother in the shoulder.

  ‘I just told you. Lower Corte,’ the apprentice intervened loudly. One of the soldiers cuffed him on the side of the head. The boy staggered and almost fell; he refused to lift a hand to touch his head.

  Her pulse pounding with fright, Dianora saw her brother look up then. His dark hair gleamed in the morning sunlight. She thought he was going to strike the soldier who had dealt that blow. She thought he was going to die. She stood up at her window, her hands clenched on the ledge. There was a terrible silence in the square below. The sun was very bright.

  ‘Lower Corte,’ her brother said, as though he were choking on the words.

  Laughing raucously the soldiers let them go.

  For that morning.

  The two boys became the favourite victims of that company, which patrolled their district between the Palace by the Sea and the centre of town where the three temples stood. None of the temples of the Triad had been smashed, only the statuary that stood outside and within them. Two had been her father’s work. A young, seductively graceful Morian, and a huge, primal figure of Eanna stretching forth her hands to make the stars.

  The boys began leaving the house earlier and earlier as spring wore on, taking roundabout routes in an attempt to avoid the soldiers. Most mornings, though, they were still found. The Ygrathens were bored by then; the boys’ very efforts to elude them offered sport.

  Dianora used to go to that same upstairs window at the front of the house when they left by way of the square, as if by watching whatever happened, sharing it, she could somehow spread the pain among three, not two, and so ease it for them. The soldiers almost always accosted them just as they reached the square. She was watching on the day the game changed to something worse.

  It was afternoon that time. A half-day of work only, because of a Triad holiday—part of the aftermath to the springtime Ember Days. The Ygrathens, like the Barbadians to the east, had been scrupulous not to tamper with the Triad and their clergy. After their lunch the two boys went out to do an afternoon’s work.

  The soldiers surrounded them in the middle of the square. They never seemed to tire of their sport. But that afternoon, just as the leader began his familiar litany of being lost a group of four merchants came trudging up the hill from the harbour and one of the soldiers had an inspiration born of sheerest malice.

  ‘Stop!’ he rasped. The merchants did, very abruptly. One obeyed Ygrathen commands in Lower Corte, wherever one might be from.

  ‘Come here,’ the soldier added. His fellows made way for the merchants to stand in front of the boys. A premonition of something evil touched Dianora in that moment like a cold finger on her spine.

  The four traders reported that they were from Asoli. It was obvious from their clothing.

  ‘Good,’ the soldier said. ‘I know how grasping you lot are. Now listen to me. These brats are going to name their city and their province to you. If you can tell me what they say, on my honour and in the name of Brandin, King of Ygrath, I’ll give the first man who says the name back to me twenty gold ygras.’

  It was a fortune. Even from where she sat, high up and screened behind her window, Dianora could see the Asoli traders react. That was before she closed her eyes. She knew what was coming and how it was going to hurt. She wanted her father alive in that moment with a longing so acute she almost wept. Her brother was down there though, among soldiers who hated them. She forced back her tears and opened her eyes. She watched.

  ‘You,’ said the soldier to the apprentice—they always started with him—‘your province had another name once. Tell them what it was.’

  She saw the boy—Naddo was his name—go white with fear or anger, or both. The four merchants, oblivious to that irrelevance, leaned forward, straining with anticipation. Dianora saw Naddo look at her brother for guidance, or perhaps for dispensation.

  The soldier saw the glance. ‘None of that!’ he snapped. Then he drew his sword. ‘For your life, say the name.’

  Naddo, very clearly, said, ‘Tigana.’

  And of course not one of the merchants could say back the word he spoke. Not for twenty golden ygras or twenty times so many. Dianora could read the bafflement, the balked greed in their eyes, and the fear that confronting sorcery always brought.

  The soldiers laughed and jostled each other. One of them had a shrill cackle like a rooster. They turned to her brother.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly before they could even command him. ‘You have had your sport. They cannot hear the name. We all know it—what is left to prove?’

  He was fifteen, and much too thin, and his dark-brown hair was too long over his eyes. It had been over a month since she’d cut it for him; she’d been meaning to do so all week. One of her hands was squeezing the window-ledge so tightly that all the blood had rushed away; it was white as ice. She would have cut it off to change what was happening. She noticed other faces at other windows along the street and across the square. Some people had stopped down below as well, seeing the large clustering of men, sensing the sudden tension that had taken shape.

  Which was bad, because with an audience the soldiers would now have to clearly establish their authority. What had been a game when done in private was something else now. Dianora wanted to turn away. She wanted her father back from the Deisa, she wanted Prince Valentin back and alive, her mother back from whatever country she wandered through.

  She watched. To share it. To bear witness and remember, knowing even then that such things were going to matter, if anything mattered in the days and years to come.

  The soldier with the drawn blade placed the tip of it very carefully against her brother’s breast. The afternoon sunlight glinted from it. It was a working blade, a soldier’s sword. There came a small sound from the people gathered around the edges of the square.

  Her brother said, a little desperately, ‘They cannot hold the name. You know they cannot. You have destroyed us. Is it necessary to go on causing pain? Is it necessary?’

  He is only fifteen, Dianora prayed, gripping the ledge like death, her hand a claw. He was too young to fight. He was not allowed. Forgive him this. Please.

  The four Asolini traders, as one man, stepped quickly out of range. One of the soldiers—the one with the high laugh— shifted uncomfortably, as if regretting what this had come to. But there was a crowd gathered. The boy had had his fair chance. There was really no choice now.

  The sword pushed delicately forward a short way and then withdrew. Through a torn blue tunic a welling of blood appeared and hung a moment, bright i
n the springtime light, as if yearning towards the blade, before it broke and slid downwards, staining the blue.

  ‘The name,’ said the soldier quietly. There was no levity in his voice now. He was a professional, and he was preparing himself to kill, Dianora realized.

  A witness, a memory, she saw her younger brother spread his feet then, as if to anchor himself in the ground of the square. She saw his hands clench into fists at his sides. She saw his head go back, lifting towards the sky.

  And then she heard his cry.

  He gave them what they demanded of him, he obeyed the command, but not sullenly or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standing before the home of his family he looked towards the sun and let a name burst forth from his soul.

  ‘Tigana!’ he cried that all should hear. All of them, everyone in the square. And again, louder yet: ‘Tigana!’ And then a third, a last time, at the very summit of his voice, with pride, with love, with a lasting, unredeemed defiance of the heart.

  ‘TIGANA!’

  Through the square that cry rang, along the streets, up to the windows where people watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastward to the temples, and far beyond all of these—a sound, a name, a hurled sorrow in the brightness of the air. And though the four merchants could not cling to the name, though the soldiers could not hold it, the women at the windows and the children with them and the men riveted stone-still in street and square could hear it clearly, and clutch it to themselves, and they could gather and remember the pride at the base of that spiralling cry.

  And that much, looking around, the soldiers could see plainly and understand. It was written in the faces gathered around them. He had done only what they themselves had ordered him to do, but the game had been turned inside out, it had turned out wrong in some way they could but dimly comprehend.

  They beat him of course.

  With their fists and feet and with the flats of their cared-for blades. Naddo too—for being there and so a part of it. The crowd did not disperse though, which would have been the usual thing when a beating took place. They watched in a silence unnatural for so many people. The only sound was that of the blows falling, for neither boy cried out and the soldiers did not speak.

  When it was over they scattered the crowd with oaths and imprecations. Crowds were illegal, even though they themselves had caused this one to form. In a few moments everyone was gone. There were only faces behind half-drawn curtains at upstairs windows looking down on a square empty save for two boys lying in the settling dust, blood bright on their clothing in the clear light. There had been birds singing all around and all through what had happened. Dianora could remember.

  She forced herself to remain where she was. Not to run down to them. To let them do this alone, as was their right. And at length she saw her brother rise with the slow, meditated movements of a very old man. She saw him speak to Naddo and then carefully help him to his feet. And then, as she had known would happen, she saw him, begrimed and bleeding and hobbling very badly, lead Naddo east without a backwards look, towards the site where they were assigned to work that day.

  She watched them go. Her eyes were dry. Only when the two of them turned the corner at the far end of the square and so were gone from sight did she leave her window. Only then did she loosen her white-clawed hold on the wood of the window-ledge. And only then, invisible to everyone with her curtains drawn, did she allow her tears to fall: in love, and for his hurts, and in terrible pride.

  When they came home that night she and the servant-woman heated water and drew baths for them and afterwards they dealt with the wounds and the black and purpling bruises as best they could.

  Later, over dinner, Naddo told them he was leaving. That same night, he said. It was too much, he said, awkwardly twisting in his seat, speaking to Dianora, for her brother had turned his face away at Naddo’s first announcement.

  There was no life to be made here, Naddo said with passionate urgency through a torn and swollen mouth. Not with the viciousness of the soldiers and the even more vicious taxes. If a young man, a young man such as himself, was to have any hope of doing something with his life, Naddo said, he had to get away. Desperately his eyes besought her understanding. He kept glancing nervously over to where her brother had now fully turned his back on both of them.

  Where will you go? Dianora had asked him.

  Asoli, he’d told her. It was a hard, wet land, unbearably hot and humid in summer, everyone knew that. But there was room there for new blood. The Asolini made people welcome, he’d heard, more so than in the Barbadian lands to the east. He would never ever go to Corte or Chiara. People from Tigana did not go there, he said. Her brother made a small sound at that but did not turn; Naddo glanced over at him again and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.

  Three other young men had made plans, he said to Dianora. Plans to slip out from the city tonight and make their way north. He’d known about it for some time, he said. He hadn’t been sure. He hadn’t known what to do. What had happened this morning had made up his mind for him.

  Eanna light your path, Dianora had said, meaning it. He had been a good apprentice and then a brave and loyal friend. People were leaving all the time. The province of Lower Corte was a bad place in a very bad time. Naddo’s left eye was completely swollen shut. He might easily have been killed that afternoon.

  Later, when he’d packed his few belongings and was ready to leave, she gave him some silver from her father’s hidden store. She kissed him in farewell. He’d begun weeping then. He commended himself to her mother and opened the front door. On the threshold he’d turned back again, still crying.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he’d said, in anguish, to the figure staring stonily into the fire on the front-room hearth. Seeing the look on Naddo’s face Dianora silently willed her brother to turn around. He did not. Deliberately he knelt and laid another log on the fire.

  Naddo stared at him a moment longer, then he turned to look at Dianora, failed to achieve a tremulous, tearful smile, and slipped out into the dark and away.

  Much later, when the fire had been allowed to die, her brother went out as well. Dianora sat and watched the embers slowly fade, then she looked in on her mother and went to bed. When she lay down it seemed to her that a weight was pressing upon her body, far heavier than the quilted comforter.

  She was awake when he came in. She always was. She heard him step loudly on the landing as was his habit, to let her know he was safely home, but she didn’t hear the next sound, which should have been the opening and closing of his bedroom door.

  It was very late. She lay still for another moment, surrounded and mastered by all the griefs of the day. Then, moving heavily, as if drugged or in a waking dream, she rose and lit a candle. She went to her door and opened it.

  He was standing in the hallway outside. And by the flickering of the light she bore she saw the river of tears that was pouring without surcease down his bruised, distorted face. Her hands began to shake. She could not speak.

  ‘Why didn’t I say goodbye to him?’ she heard him say in a strangled voice. ‘Why didn’t you make me say goodbye to him?’ She had never heard so much hurt in him. Not even when word had come that their father had died by the river.

  Her heart aching, Dianora put the candle down on a ledge that once had held a portrait bust of her mother by her father. She crossed the narrow distance and took her brother in her arms, absorbing the hard racking of his sobs. He had never cried before. Or never so that she could see. She guided him into her room and lay down beside him on her bed, holding him close. They wept together, thus, for a very long time. She could not have said how long.

  Her window was open. She could hear the breeze sigh through the young leaves outside. A bird sang, and another answered it from across the lane. The world was a place of dreaming or of sorrow, one or both of those. One or both. In the sanctuary of night she slowly pulled his tunic over his head, careful o
f his wounds, and then she slipped free of her own robe. Her heart was beating like the heart of a captured forest creature. She could feel the race of his pulse when her fingers touched his throat. Both of the moons had set. The wind was in all the leaves outside. And so.

  And so in all that darkness, dark over and about and close-gathered around them, the full dark of moonless night and the darkness of their days, the two of them sought a pitiful illicit shelter in each other from the ruin of their world.

  ‘What are we doing?’ her brother whispered once.

  And then, a space of time later when pulse-beats had slowed again, leaving them clinging to each other in the aftermath of a headlong, terrifying need, he had said, one hand gentle in her hair, ‘What have we done?’

  And all these long years later, alone in the saishan on the Island as this most hidden memory came back, Dianora could remember her reply.

  ‘Oh, Baerd,’ she’d said. ‘What has been done to us?’

  It lasted from that first night through the whole of spring and into the summer. The sin of the gods, it was named, what they did. For Adaon and Eanna were said to have been brother and sister at the beginning of time, and Morian was their child.

  Dianora didn’t feel like a goddess, and her mirror offered no illusions: only a too-thin face with enormous, staring eyes. She knew only that her happiness terrified her, and consumed her with guilt, and that her love for Baerd was the whole of her world. And what frightened her almost as much was seeing the same depth of love, the same astonished passion in him. Her heart misgave her constantly, even as they reached for their fugitive joy: too bright this forbidden flame in a land where any kind of brightness was lost or not allowed.