Tigana

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Baerd looked at the cup that the woman named Carenna had just placed in his hands. It was of earthenware, rough to the touch, chipped at one edge, the unpainted colour of red soil.

  He looked from Carenna to Donar, the older, maimed man—the Elder, they called him—to the bearded one, to the other girl, Elena. There was a kind of light in her face as she looked back at him, even in the shadows of this house, and he turned away from that as something—perhaps the one thing—he could not deal with. Not now, perhaps not ever in his life. He cast his gaze out over the company assembled there. Seventeen of them. Nine men, eight women, all holding their own cups, waiting for him. There would be more at the meeting-place, Mattio had said. How many more they could not tell.

  He was being reckless, he knew. Swept away by the power of an Ember Night, by the undeniable truth of Donar’s dream, the fact that they had been waiting for him. By, if he were honest with himself, the look in Elena’s eyes when he had first come up to her. A complex tempting of fate, that aspect of it, something he seldom did.

  But he was doing it now, or about to do it. He thought of Alessan, and of all the times he’d chided or derided the Prince, his brother of the soul, for letting his passion for music take him down one dangerous path or another. What would Alessan say now, or quick-tongued Catriana? Or Devin? No, Devin would say nothing: he would watch, with that careful, focused attention, and come to his own conclusions in his own time. Sandre would call him a fool.

  And perhaps he was. But something had responded deep within him to the words Donar had spoken. He had borne the caul of his birth in leather all his life, a minor, a trivial superstition. A charm against drowning, he had been told as a child. But it was more here, and the cup he held in his hands would mark his acceptance of that.

  Almost twenty years, Mattio had said.

  The Others from the west, Donar had said.

  There might be little in it, or a great deal; or nothing at all, or everything.

  He looked at the woman, Elena, and he drained the cup to the lees.

  It was bitter, deathly bitter. For one panicked, irrational moment he feared he was undone, poisoned, a blood sacrifice in some unknown Carlozzini rite of spring.

  Then he saw the sour face Carenna made as she drank from her own cup, and saw Mattio wince ruefully at the taste of his, and the panic passed.

  The long table had been put away, lifted from its trestles. Pallets had been spread about the room for them to lie upon. Elena moved towards him and gestured, and it would have been ungracious to hold back. He walked with her towards one wall and took the pallet she offered him. She sat down, unspeaking, on the one beside it.

  Baerd thought of his sister, of that clear image of walking hand in hand with Dianora down a dark and silent road, only the two of them abroad in the wide world.

  Donar the miller swung himself towards the pallet on Baerd’s other side. He leaned his crutches against the wall and subsided on the mat.

  ‘Leave your sword here,’ he said. Baerd raised his eyebrows. Donar smiled, a hieratic expression, devoid of mirth. ‘It will be useless where we are going. We will find our weapons in the fields.’

  Baerd hesitated a moment longer; then, aware of even greater recklessness, of a mystic folly he could not have explained, he slipped the back-scabbard over his head and laid it against the wall beside Donar’s crutches.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he heard Elena saying from beside him. ‘It is easier that way.’ Her voice sounded oddly distant. Whatever he had drunk was beginning to act upon him. ‘It will feel like sleep,’ she said, ‘but it will not be. Earth grant us grace, and the sky her light.’ It was the last thing he heard.

  It was not sleep. Whatever it was, it was not sleep, for no dream could be this vivid, no dream-wind this keen in his face.

  He was in an open field, wide and fallow and dark, with the smell of spring soil, and he had no memory at all of coming here. There were a great many people—two hundred perhaps, or more—in the field with him, and he had no memory of any of them either. They must have come from other villages in the highlands, from gatherings in other homes like Mattio’s.

  The light was strange. He looked up.

  And Baerd saw that the moon in the sky was round and large and full, and it was green like the first green-gold of spring. It shone with that green and golden light among stars in constellations he had never seen. He wheeled around, dizzied, disoriented, his heart pounding, searching for a pattern that he knew in the heavens. He looked south, to where the mountains should be, but as far as his eyes could track in the green light he saw level fields stretching away, some fallow, some fully ripe with summer grain in a season that should only be spring. No mountains at all. No snow-clad peaks, no Braccio Pass with Quileia beyond. He spun again. No Castle Borso to north or east. Or west?

  West. With a sudden premonition he turned to look there. Low hills rose and fell in seemingly endless progression. And Baerd saw that the hills were bare of trees, of grass, bare of flower and shrub and bush, bleak and waste and barren.

  ‘Yes, look there,’ Donar’s deep voice said from behind him, ‘and understand why we are here. If we lose tonight the field in which we stand will be desolate as those hills next year when we come back. The Others are down into these grainlands now. We have lost the battles of those hills over the past years. We are fighting in the plain now, and if this goes on, one Ember Night not far from now our children or their children will stand with their backs to the sea and lose the last battle of our war.’

  ‘And?’ Baerd’s eyes were still on the west, on the grey, stony ruin of the hills.

  ‘And all the crops will fail. Not just here in Certando. And people will die. Of hunger or of plague.’

  ‘All over the Palm?’ He could not look away from the desolation that he saw. He had a vision of a lifeless world looking like that. He shivered. It was sickening.

  ‘The Palm and beyond, Baerd. Make no mistake, this is no local skirmish, no battle for a small peninsula. All over this world, and perhaps beyond, for it is said that ours is not the only world scattered by the Powers among time and the stars.’

  ‘Carlozzi taught this?’

  ‘Carlozzi taught this. If I understand his teaching rightly, our own troubles here are bound up with even graver dangers elsewhere; in worlds we have never seen or will see, except perhaps in dream.’

  Baerd shook his head, still looking out at the hills in the west. ‘That is too remote for me. Too difficult. I am a worker in stone and a sometime merchant and I have learned how to fight, against my will and inclination, over many years. I live in a peninsula overrun by enemies from overseas. That is the level of evil I can grasp.’

  He turned away from the western hills then and looked at Donar. And despite the warning they’d given him, his eyes widened with amazement. The miller stood on two sound legs; his grey, thinning hair had become a thick dark brown like Baerd’s own, and he stood with his broad shoulders straight and his head held high, a man in his prime.

  A woman came up to them, and Baerd knew Elena, for she was not greatly changed. She seemed older here though, less frail; her hair was shorter, though still white-gold despite the strangeness of the light. Her eyes, he saw, were a very deep blue.

  ‘Were your eyes that same colour an hour ago?’ he asked.

  She smiled, pleased and shy. ‘It was more than an hour. And I don’t know what I look like this year. It changes a little for me every time. What colour are they now?’

  ‘Blue. Extremely blue.’

  ‘Well then, yes, they have always been blue. Perhaps not extremely blue, but blue.’ Her smile deepened. ‘Shall I tell you what you look like?’ There was an incongruity, a lightness in her voice. Even Donar had an amused expression playing about his lips.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You look like a boy,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘A fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy, beardless now and much too thin and with a shock of brown hair I would love to cut if we h
ad but half a chance.’

  Baerd felt his heart thud like a mallet in his breast. It actually seemed to stop for an instant before beginning again, laboriously, to beat. He turned sharply away from the others, looking down at his hands. They did seem different. Smoother, less lined. And a knife scar he’d got in Tregea five years ago was not there. He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly weak.

  ‘Baerd?’ Elena said behind him, concerned. ‘I’m sorry. I did not mean to—’

  He shook his head. He tried to speak but found that he could not. He wanted to reassure her, her and Donar, that it was all right, but he seemed, unbelievably, to be weeping, for the first time in almost twenty years.

  For the first time since the year he had been a fourteen-year-old boy forbidden to go to war by his Prince’s orders and his father’s. Forbidden to fight and die with them by the red banks of the River Deisa when all the shining had come to an end.

  ‘Be easy, Baerd,’ he heard Donar saying, deep and gentle. ‘Be easy. There is always a strangeness here.’

  Then a woman’s hands were briefly upon his shoulders and then reaching around him from behind to meet and clasp at his chest. Her cheek rested against his back and she held him so, strong and sharing and generous, while he brought his hands up to cover his face as he cried.

  Above them on the Ember Night the full moon was green-gold and around them the strange fields were fallow, or newly sown, or full with ripened grain before the planting-time, or utterly bare and desolate and lost, in the west.

  ‘They are coming,’ someone said, walking up to them. ‘Look. We had best claim our weapons.’

  He recognized Mattio’s voice. Elena released him and stepped back. Baerd wiped his eyes and looked to the west again.

  And he saw then that the Ember war was giving him another chance. A chance to make right what had gone so bitterly wrong in the world the summer he was fourteen.

  Over the hills from the west, far off yet but unnaturally clear in the unnatural light, the Others were coming: and they were clad, all of them, in the livery of Ygrath.

  ‘Oh, Morian!’ he whispered on a sharply taken breath.

  ‘What do you see?’ Mattio said.

  Baerd turned. The man was leaner, and his black beard was differently trimmed, but he was recognizably the same. ‘Ygrathens,’ he said on a rising note of excitement. ‘Soldiers of the King of Ygrath. You may never have seen them here, this far east, but that is exactly what they are, your Others.’

  Mattio looked suddenly thoughtful. He shook his head, but it was Donar who spoke.

  ‘Be not deceived, Baerd. Remember where we are, what I have told you. You are not in our peninsula, this is no battle of the day against your invaders from overseas.’

  ‘I see them, Donar. I know what I see.’

  ‘And shall I tell you that what I see out there are hideous shapes in grey and dun, naked and hairless, dancing and coupling with each other as they mock us with their numbers?’

  ‘And the Others for me are different again,’ Mattio said bluntly, almost angrily. ‘They are large, larger than men, with fur on their spines running down into a tail like the mountain cats. They walk upon two legs but they have claws on their hands, and razored teeth in their mouths.’

  Baerd wheeled again, his heart hammering, looking west in the eerily lucid green light of wherever they were. But still, in the middle distance, pouring down out of the hills, he saw soldiers with weapons: swords and pikes and the undulating knives of Ygrath.

  He turned to Elena, a little desperate.

  ‘I do not like to name what I see,’ she murmured, lowering her eyes. ‘They frighten me too much. They are creatures of my childhood fears. But it is not what you are seeing, Baerd. Believe me. Believe us. You may see the Others in the shape of your heart’s hate, but this is not the battle of your daytime world.’

  He shook his head in fierce denial. There was a deep surging in his spirit, a rushing of blood in his veins. The Others were nearer now, hundreds of them, streaming out of the hills.

  ‘I am always fighting the same battle,’ he said to her. To her and the two men. ‘All my life. Wherever I am. And I know what I see out there. I can tell you that I am fifteen years old now, not fourteen or I could not be here. They would not have allowed me.’ A thought struck him. ‘Tell me: is there a stream west of us, a river below where they are descending now?’

  ‘There is,’ Donar said. ‘Do you want to join battle there?’

  A red, fierce joy was running through Baerd, wild and uncontrollable.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Oh, I do. Mattio, where do we claim our weapons?’

  ‘There.’ Mattio pointed southeast to a small nearby field where tall stalks of corn were growing, in defiance of what should have been the season. ‘Come. They will be at your stream very soon.’

  Baerd did not speak. He followed Mattio’s lead. Elena and Donar went with them. Other men and women were in that field of corn already and Baerd saw that they were reaching down to pluck a stalk to be their weapon in the night. It was uncanny, incredible, but he was beginning to take a part of the measure of this place, to understand the magic that was at work here, and a corner of his mind, which worked outside and around the stern logic of day, grasped that the tall yellow grain that was so endangered was the only weapon possible tonight. They would fight for the fields with grain in their hands.

  He stepped in among the others in that cornfield, careful of where he walked, and he bent down and grasped a stalk for himself. It came free easily, even willingly to his hand in that green night. He walked out on to fallow ground again and hefted it in his hand and swung it cautiously, and he saw that already the stalk had stiffened like metal forged. It sliced through the air with a keen whistling sound. He tested it with a finger and drew blood. The stalk had grown as sharp as any blade he’d ever held, and as true to his hand, and it was many-edged like the fabled blades of Quileia, centuries ago.

  He looked away to the west. The Ygrathens were descending the nearest of the hills. He could see the glint of their weapons under the moon. This is not a dream, he told himself. Not a dream.

  Donar was beside him, grim and unwavering. Mattio stood beyond, a passionate defiance in his face. Men and women were gathering behind them and all around, and all of them held corn swords in their hands, and all of them looked the same: stern and resolute and unafraid.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Donar said then, turning to look out upon them all. ‘Shall we go and fight them for the fields and for our people? Will you come with me now to the Ember war?’

  ‘For the fields!’ the Night Walkers cried, and raised their living swords aloft to the sky.

  What Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar cried he cried only in his heart and not aloud, but he went forward with all of them, a stalk of corn like a long blade in his hand, to do battle under the pale green moon of that enchanted place.

  When the Others fell, scaly and grey, blind and crawling with maggots, there was never any blood. Elena understood why that was so, Donar had told her years ago: blood meant life, and their foes tonight were the enemies, the opposite, of any kind of life. When they fell to the corn swords nothing flowed from them, nothing seeped away into the earth.

  There were so many of them. There always were, swirling in a grey mass like slugs, pouring down out of the hills and swarming into the stream where Donar and Mattio and Baerd had come to make their stand.

  Elena prepared herself to fight, amid the loud, whirling, green-tinted chaos of the night. She was frightened, but she knew she could deal with that. She remembered how deathly afraid she’d been in her first Ember war, wondering how she—she who could scarcely have even lifted a sword in the daytime world—could possibly battle such hideous creatures as the nightmare ones she saw.

  But Donar and Verzar had assuaged her fears: here in this green night of magic it was the soul and the spirit that mattered, here it was courage and desire that shaped and drove the bodies in which they found themselves. Elena felt
so much stronger on the Ember Nights, so much more lithe and quick. That had frightened her, too, the first time and even afterwards: under this green moon she was someone who could kill. It was a realization she had to deal with, an adjustment to be made. They all did, to one degree or another. None of them were exactly what they were under the sun or the two moons of home. Donar’s body on this night of war reached backwards, further every year, towards a lost image of what he once had been.

  Just as Baerd’s, very clearly, reached back as well, more than one might have guessed or expected. Fifteen, he had said. Not fourteen, or he would not have been allowed. She didn’t understand that, but she had no time to puzzle such things out. Not now. The Others were in the stream, and now they were trying to clamber out, clad in the hideous shapes her mind gave them.

  She dodged a scything axe-blow from a creature dripping with water as it scrambled up the bank towards her, and as she did she gritted her teeth and slashed downward with an instinctive deadliness she never would have known was hers. She felt her blade, her living sword, crunch hard through scaly armour and bury itself in the maggot-infested body of her foe.

  She pulled the weapon free with an effort, hating what she had done, but hating the Others more, infinitely more. She turned—barely in time to block another ascending blow and withdraw a step before two new, gape-jawed assailants on her right. She lifted her blade in a desperate attempt to ward.

  Then suddenly only one of the Others was standing there. Then neither of them.

  She lowered her sword and looked at Baerd. At her stranger on the road, her promise given by the night. He smiled grimly at her, tight-lipped, standing over the bodies of the Others he had just killed. He smiled, and he had saved her life, but he said nothing to her at all. He turned and went forward to the edge of the river. She watched him go, saw his boy’s body stride into the thickness of battle, and she wasn’t sure whether to give way to a rush of hope because of his deadly skill or to grieve for the look in his too-young eyes.