"Kay,.Guy.Gavriel.-.Tigana" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)
She withdrew her hand a moment later.
He glanced over. "What's wrong?"
She shrugged. "I'd as soon it wasn't proclaimed throughout the Sandreni Palace and beyond," she murmured, looking straight ahead.
Devin lifted his eyebrows. "What would you rather they thought about us being upstairs? I just gave them the obvious, boring explanation. They won't even bother to talk about it. This sort of thing happens all the time."
"Not to me," said Catriana quietly.
"I didn't mean it that way!" Devin protested, taken aback. But unfortunately they were going down the stairs by then, and so it was with a quite unexpected sense of estrangement that he paused to let her re-enter the room before him.
More than a little confused, he took his place behind Menico as they prepared to go back out into the courtyard.
He had only a minor supporting role in the first two hymns and so he found his thoughts wandering back over the scene just played out upstairs. Back, and then back again, with the memory that seemed to be his birthright focusing like a beam of sunlight upon one detail then another, illuminating and revealing what he had missed the first time around.
And so it was that by the time it was his own turn to step forward to end and crown the mourning rites, seeing the three clergy leaning forward expectantly, noting how Tomasso struck a pose of rapt atten-tiveness, Devin was able to give the "Lament for Adaon" an undivided soul, for he was confused no longer, but quite decided in what he was going to do.
He began softly in the middle range with the two syrenyae, building and shaping the ancient story of the god. Then, when the pipes of Alessan came in, Devin let his voice leap upward in response to them, as though in flight from mountain glen to crag to chasm brink.
He sang the dying of the god with a voice made pure in the caldron of his own heart and he pitched the notes to rise above that courtyard and beyond it, out among the streets and squares of high-walled Astibar.
High walls he intended to pass beyond that night-beyond, and then following a trail he would find, into a wood where lay a hunting lodge. A lodge where pall-bearers were to carry the body of the Duke, and where a number of men-six, the clear voice of his memory reminded him-were to gather in a meeting that Catriana d'Astibar had just done the very best she could short of murder to prevent him learning about. He strove to turn the acrid taste of that knowledge into grief for Adaon, to let it guide and infuse the pain of the "Lament."
Better for both of us, he remembered her saying, and he could recapture in his mind the regret and the unexpected softness in her voice. But a certain kind of pride at Devin's age is perhaps stronger than at any other age of mortal man, and he had already decided, before even he began to sing, here in this crowded courtyard among the great of Astibar, that he was going to be the judge of what was better, not she.
So Devin sang the rending of the god at the hands of the women, and he gave that dying on the Tregean mountain slope all he had to give it, making his voice an arrow arching outwards to seek the heart of everyone who heard.
He let Adaon fall from the high cliff, he heard the sound of the pipes recede and fall and he let his grieving voice spiral downward with the god into Casadel as the song came to its end.
And so too, that morning, did a part of Devin's life. For when a portal of Morian's has been crossed there is, as everyone knows, never a turning back.
Chapter 4
ESCORTING HIS FATHER'S BIER OUT 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.
But now Sandre was dead and he was acting alone, and the night they had labored 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 into 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 rumors 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.
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