A Song for Arbonne (37 page)

They rode back across the lowered bridge to the castle on its island just as the sun was rising beyond the river, sending light, finally, like a blessing into the room where Rosala lay. Bertran de Talair entered that room with the morning brightness, wearing his habitual amusement like a cloak, sardonic laughter barely hidden in his eyes. He looked at the countess first, and then to where the woman lay, and lastly he looked down, without speaking upon the cradle at the foot of the bed and saw the sleeping child.

After a long time during which his expression could slowly be seen to change, he looked back at the mother lying in the bed. The priestess of Rian had washed her and dressed her in a blue silk robe, and had helped her with her hair. It lay, long and golden in the mild sunlight, combed out upon the pillow and over the coverlet. Her eyes were as blue as his own.

"My congratulations," he said formally. "You have a handsome son. I wish him good fortune all his life."

She was registering everything she could: the light, clear voice, the scar, the mutilated ear, the way his expressive face had altered when he allowed the irony to recede.

"Galbert de Garsenc, High Elder of Corannos in Gorhaut, would take this child from me," she said, without preamble or pleasantry. Her voice was carefully measured; she had prepared these words while they waited for him to come. It was bald, graceless, but she was too weary to do this eloquently, she could barely manage to say what needed to be said.

"So I have been informed," he replied gravely. "I am afraid, under those circumstances, that accepting Guardianship for my child will be more than ceremonial."

"Under the circumstances, I believe that to be so."

"Will you take this upon yourself?" she asked.

"Yes," he replied calmly. And then, after a pause, "I will die myself before you lose this child to him."

Her colour rose sharply, he saw, and her breathing quickened, as if released from a rigid effort of control. "Thank you," she whispered. There were tears now—for the first time all night, though he could not know that. She turned her head and looked at the countess. "Thank you both. This makes him as safe as the world will let him be. I think I can rest now."

They saw her close her eyes. She was asleep almost as soon as she finished speaking. Standing on either side of the bed Bertran and the countess exchanged a long glance. Neither spoke for several moments.

Finally the duke grinned; Signe had been more or less expecting that, it was almost a relief when it came, a breaking of the heavy spell of this night.

"You did this," he said, "not I. Never reproach me."

"I did not think you would refuse a child," she said quietly. "There will be no reproach. We must be what we are, or we become our enemies." It was morning, she hadn't slept all night. She didn't feel tired though, not any more. She walked to the eastern window and looked out over the island and the river and the red and golden autumn colours of her land.

In the doorway, Roban the chancellor heard those words exchanged and watched his countess move to stand at the window. She looked terribly small and fragile there, beautiful as ivory. He remained silent, smoothing down the front of his shirt again, unnecessarily. He was contemplating not only the nobility of the sentiments just expressed but the rapidly growing likelihood that they would all be conquered and dead by the summer of the year to come.

The taverns of Lussan were thronged at the time of the fair, and there were a great many of them. It was, therefore, only sheerest bad luck that led Othon the animal-trainer into The Arch late that night after he'd already visited three other inns and had commenced his enjoyment of the Lussan Fair in typically liquid fashion. Rendered even more garrulous than usual, Othon was holding forth at a table of sundry reunited performers, describing the unusual travelling companion he'd had in his wagon. For a man known to travel with a snake and monkeys to characterize any companion as unusual was sufficiently droll to earn him more attention than customary.

"Yellow-haired and blue-eyed, she was," Othon declared, "and very likely a beauty, though it was hard to see given her… condition, if you take my meaning." He paused. Someone obligingly refilled his glass. "Not many women look their best when about to drop a babe, in my experience.»

Someone made a lewd remark linking Othon's experience to his monkeys. Amid the laughter the animal-trainer drank again and then went on, with the placid tenacity of a storyteller used to holding the floor against difficult odds. He did not notice the three men at the next table who had stopped their own conversation to listen to what he was saying.

"She tried to pretend she was a farmer's wife or some such, a smith, a carter, but it was easy enough to see she was no such thing at all. I've been in enough castles in my time to recognize nobility, if you know what I mean." The wit at his table attempted another jest, but Othon's voice rode over him this time. "We left her at the goddess's temple here, and it is my personal wager that some lord of Gorhaut'll have a babe by now through the aid of the priestesses of Rian—and isn't that a jest?"

It might have been, but it was also somewhat near to the bone that autumn season. Everyone knew how tense affairs had become between Gorhaut and Arbonne, and no one wanted to be the first or the most obvious to laugh in a tavern filled with unfamiliar men from many countries. Disappointed, Othon subsided into silence for a few moments, before beginning, with impressive optimism, a new, discursive account of his last visit to Barbentain. He had lost his audience by then, though, and was largely talking to himself.

The three men at the next table had not only stopped listening, they had settled their account and left The Arch. In the street outside, expensively lit by lanterns during the fair season, the three corans, who happened to be from Gorhaut, and more particularly from Garsenc Castle, had a hurried, highly agitated consultation among each other.

At first they considered drawing straws to see which of them would ride back to Garsenc with what they thought they'd learned. It could be done in two days if a man killed horses under him. A moment's further deliberation induced them to alter this plan. There might be some real risk in bearing these tidings, or there might be profit to be found—it was hard to tell with the lords of Gorhaut, and especially so with the de Garsenc.

In the end, they each elected to forego the ransoms they might earn in the tournament melee—the reason they'd come to Lussan in the first place—in favour of collectively riding north with the almost certain news that the missing wife of Duke Ranald was in Lussan at the moment. Carefully they avoided comment, even among themselves, on the possible implications of this. They returned to their own inn, paid their accounts, saddled horses and rode.

Part of the bad luck—all of it, in fact, from Othon the animal-trainer's point of view—was that one of the three pulled up suddenly just before the wide-open northern gates of walled Lussan and grimly pointed something out to the other two. Silent, visibly shaken by what he said, they exchanged frightened glances, each nodding agreement with this new conclusion.

They did draw straws then after all. The one who'd had the disturbing thought drew the short straw, perhaps appropriately. He bade farewell to the other two and watched them start off on the hard ride back through the mountain pass. He returned to their inn alone. Later that night he killed the animal-trainer with a knife between the ribs when the latter stumbled alone into an alley to relieve himself. It was an easy killing, in fact, though it brought him no particular satisfaction. No ruler could guarantee safety after sunset, even during a fair. He was breaching a truce by doing this, though, and, as it happened, he didn't much like doing that, but his own likes or dislikes weren't greatly important in a situation such as this one had become. He cleaned his blade at a splashing fountain and went back into The Arch for another flask of ale. Killing, he'd always found, gave him a thirst.

It would not do, he had said to the other two corans at the city gates, to have Ranald de Garsenc, or worse, the High Elder himself, asking why the loose-tongued old man had been permitted to continue prattling idly, spreading a vicious story that could only do harm to the family the three corans had sworn oaths to serve.

A crowded table had heard Othon tell his story, though, and rumour and gossip were the most vigorously traded items of any fair. It was all over Lussan by the end of the next day that a noblewoman from Gorhaut had come south to bear a child. A few people had even heard a second tale, that the countess herself, and the duke of Talair, had been seen together, first in Rian's temple and then the god's stone chapel in Barbentain just after dawn that morning. Some clever person mentioned the birth rites of Guardianship to someone else. That, too, was all over the fair by nightfall.

Othon's death passed virtually without comment. Knifings after dark among the travelling folk were too ordinary to be worth much discussion. The animals were sold to another trainer before the fair was over. One of the monkeys, surprisingly, refused to eat, and died.

"
A challenge!
" shouted the trovaritz from Aulensburg. The tavern was thronged, he wasn't loud enough, only those near him heard, and most of them laughed. The man, Lisseut saw from the next table over, was going to be persistent though. He climbed unsteadily onto his chair seat and then up on the table around which he and half a dozen other Gotzland musicians were sitting. He was roaring drunk, she saw. Most of the people in The Senhal were by then. She'd had two or three glasses of wine herself, to celebrate the beginning of the fair. Jourdain and Remy, after successful summer tours, one in Arimonda, the other among the cities of Portezza, were taking turns buying for the table while trading competitive tales of increasingly improbable triumphs.

The Gotzlanders began rhythmically banging their heavy flagons on the wooden table. The noise was so insistent it shaped a lull in the din of sound. Into that space in the noise the trovaritz on the table shouted again: "
A challenge!
"

"Damn that man," said Remy, in the middle of a story about a night in Portezzan Vialla when his music had been sung at the commune's summer feast while he had sat at the high table with the most powerful men of the city. Aurelian had been doing the singing, of course; Lisseut was still vexed at times that her lanky, dark-haired friend would continue to suspend his own steady rise among the ranks of the poets to revert to a joglar's role and spend a season lending the lustre of his voice to enhance Remy's name.
Friendship,
Aurelian had said mildly when she'd challenged him, and:
I like to sing. I like singing Remy's songs. Why should I deny myself those pleasures?
It was extremely hard to pick a fight with Aurelian.

"A challenge to the troubadours of Arbonne!" the Gotzlander roared. With the ebb in the tavern noise he was clearly heard this time. Even Remy turned around, his expressive face going still, to stare at the man balanced precariously on the next table top.

"Speak your challenge," said Alain of Rousset from their own table. "Before you fall and break your neck." He was much more assertive these days, Lisseut noted, with some pleasure. She'd had something to do with that: the success of their partnership, the recognition now beginning to come for both of them.

"Won't fall," said the trovaritz, very nearly doing exactly that. Two of his fellows had hands up, steadying him. A very crowded room had become remarkably quiet. The man reached downward urgently. Another of the Gotzland musicians obligingly handed him up a flagon. The trovaritz took a long pull, wiped his moustache with the back of his hand and declaimed, "Want you to show why we should keep following Arbonne. In our music. We do all your things in Aulensburg, there're singers in Arimonda 'n Portezza. Do
everything
you do now. Do it as well! S'time to come out from your shadow." He drank again, swayed, added in the stillness, "Specially 'cause you may not
be
here a year from now!"

Two of the others at his table had the grace to wince at that and haul the trovaritz down, but the thing had been said. Lisseut reached for anger but found only the sadness and the fear that seemed to have been with her since Midsummer. It didn't take brilliance to see enough of the future to be afraid.

There were four troubadours at their table, though she knew Aurelian would not volunteer his own music. He could sing for them, though. Remy and Jourdain exchanged a glance, and Alain cleared his throat nervously. Lisseut was about to speak her suggestion when someone took the matter away from all of them.

"I will make answer to that challenge, if I may." She knew the voice, they all knew the voice, but they hadn't seen the man come in. No one had even reported that he was in Lussan. Looking quickly around, Lisseut saw Ramir of Talair, carrying his lute, coming slowly forward from a corner at the very back of the tavern, picking his way carefully between tables of people to the center of the room.

Bertran's joglar had to be sixty years old now at least. He seldom toured for the duke any longer. Long past were the days when Ramir carried his lute and harp and Bertran de Talair's music to every castle and town of Arbonne, and into most of the major cities and fastnesses of the other five countries. He lingered in Talair mostly now, with a suite of rooms of his own and an honoured place by the fire in the hall. He hadn't even come to Tavernel for Midsummer the past two years. There had been some overly febrile speculation among the younger performers both seasons that it might soon be time for En Bertran to select a new joglar. There was no higher status imaginable for a singer; dreams or night-long sleeplessness could be shaped of such a fantasy.

Lisseut looked at the old performer with a mingling of affection and sadness. She had not seem him for a long time. He did look older now, frail. His round, kind face, scarred by a childhood pox, seemed to have been part of her world forever. A great deal would change when Ramir was gone, she realized, watching as he came shuffling forward. He didn't walk very well, she saw.