Tigana (25 page)

She said, skilfully laughing, ‘She is far too unintelligent to divert him and too young to relax him as Solores does. I’m glad of your information though—I think we can use it. Tell me, is Tesios growing weary tending her? Should I speak to Vencel about assigning someone younger? Or perhaps more than one?’

She made him smile, even as he flushed again. It always seemed to go this way. If she could make them smile or laugh it would brush away the clouds like a wind, a springtime or an autumn wind, leaving behind the high clear blue of the sky.

Dianora wished, with an aching heart, that she’d known how to do that eighteen years ago. For her mother and her brother. For both of them so long ago. No laughter then. No laughter anywhere, and the blue skies a mockery, looking down upon ruin.

Vencel, more awesomely obese every time she saw him, approved Solores’s gown, Nesaia’s, Chylmoene’s, and then her own. Only the four of them—experienced enough to know how to cope with the exigencies of a formal reception—were
going down to the Audience Chamber. The envy in the saishan during the past week had been acute enough to produce a scent, Scelto had said wryly more than once. Dianora hadn’t noticed; she was used to it.

Vencel’s shrewd eyes widened from deep in the manifold creases of his dark face as he studied her. She had the gem on her brow, set in a band of white gold that held back her hair. Sprawled on his couch of pillows, the head of the saishan played with the billowing folds of his elephantine white robe. The sun shining through the arch of a window behind him glinted distractingly from his bald head.

‘I do not recall that stone among our treasures,’ he murmured in his high, disconcerting voice. It was a voice so utterly inconsequential that it might lead one to underestimate the speaker. Which, as a good many people had discovered over the years, was a serious, sometimes a mortal mistake.

‘It isn’t,’ Dianora replied cheerfully. ‘Though after we return this afternoon may I ask you to guard it in my name among the other treasures?’

Scelto’s suggestion, that. Vencel could be corrupt and venal about a great many things, but not when it came to the formal aspects of his office. He was too clever for that. Again, a truth some had paid the ultimate price to discover.

He nodded benignly now. ‘It seems a very fine stone from this distance.’ Obediently, Dianora stepped nearer and inclined her head graciously to let him see it more clearly. The scent of tainflowers that he always wore after winter’s end enveloped her. It was too sweet, but not unpleasant.

She had feared Vencel once—a fear mixed of physical repulsion at his grossness and rumours of the things he liked to do with the younger castrates and some of the women who were in the saishan for purely political reasons, with no hope of ever seeing the outside world or the west wing of the palace and Brandin’s chambers. Long ago though she and the
saishan head had reached their understanding. Solores had the same unspoken pact with Vencel, and out of the delicate balance achieved thereby the three of them controlled, as best they could, their enclosed, over-intense, incense-laden world of idle, frustrated women, and half-men.

With a surprisingly delicate finger Vencel touched the gem on her brow. He smiled. ‘A good stone,’ he said again, this time in judgement. His breath was fragrant. ‘I must talk to Scelto about it. I know about such things, you see. Vairstones come from the north, you see. From my own land. They are mined in Khardhun. For years and years I used to play with them as trinkets, a monarch’s toys. In the days when I was more than I am now. For as you know, I have been a King in Khardhun.’

Dianora nodded gravely. For this too was a part of the unspoken terms of her relationship with Vencel. That however many times he might speak this wild fabrication of a lie—and he said it many times a day, in one variant or another—she was to nod knowingly, reflectively, as if pondering the message hidden in the grandeur of his fall.

Only in her rooms alone with Scelto could she give way to fits of girlish giggling at the very thought of the vasty saishan head being
more
than he was now, or at the subversive, deadly imitation Scelto could give of Vencel’s speech and gestures.

‘You do that wonderfully,’ she might say innocently, as Scelto dressed her hair, or polished her curved slippers till they shone.

‘It is a thing I know about, you see,’ he would reply if certain they were alone, his voice pitched high above its normal range. He would gesticulate slowly, expansively. ‘For as you are aware, I have been a King in Khardhun.’

She would laugh like a little girl who knew just how naughty she was being, the more out of control because of that very fact.

She had asked Brandin about it once. His Khardhun campaign had been only a marginal success, she learned. He was frank with her about such things by then. There was real magic in Khardhun, in that hot northern land across the sea, beyond the coastal villages and the desert wastes. A magic far greater than anything in the Peninsula of the Palm and equal to the sorcery of Ygrath.

Brandin had taken one city and established a tenuous control over some lands that lay on the fringes of the great desert stretching north. There had been losses though, serious losses, she gathered. The Khardhu had long been celebrated for their skill in battle, nor was this unknown in the Palm: many of them had served as well-paid mercenaries in the warring provinces before the Tyrants had come and made all such feuding irrelevant.

Vencel had been a herald captured late in the campaign, Brandin told her. He’d already been unmanned: a thing they did to messengers in the north, for no reason Brandin had understood. It had been manifestly evident where the castrate belonged when brought back to Ygrath. He had already, Brandin confirmed, been enormous.

Dianora straightened as Vencel withdrew his finger from the red gleam of the vairstone.

‘Will you escort us down?’ she asked. A ritual.

‘I think not,’ he said judiciously, as if actually giving thought to the matter. ‘Perhaps Scelto and Hala can manage that office between them. I have some matters that need my attention here this afternoon, you see.’

‘I understand.’ Dianora glanced over at Solores and each of them raised a spread palm in respectful salute. In fact, Vencel hadn’t left the saishan wing in at least five years. Even when he toured the rooms on this floor it was on a cleverly contrived rolling platform of cushions. Dianora could not remember the last time she’d actually seen him stand upright.
Scelto and Solores’s Hala attended to virtually all the formal out-of-saishan duties. Vencel believed in delegating.

They went down the stairway that led out from the saishan to the world. One flight below they accepted the scrutiny—respectful but careful—of the two guards posted outside the heavy bronze doors that barred access to and from the level where the women were. Dianora responded to their cautious glances with a smile. One of them returned it shyly. The guards were changed often; she didn’t know either of these two, but a smile was a start at bonding and a friend never hurt.

Scelto and Hala, dressed unobtrusively in brown, led the four women out of the saishan wing along the main corridor of the palace to the Grand Staircase in the centre. There the two castrates paused to let the women precede them. With some pride but not with hauteur—they were the captives and concubines of a conqueror—Dianora and Solores led the way down the sweeping stair.

They were noticed of course. The women of the saishan were always noticed when they came out. There were a number of people milling about in the marbled vestibule waiting to enter the Audience Chamber; they made way for the four of them. Some of the newer men smiled in a manner that had taken Dianora some time to accept.

Others knew her better and their expressions were rather different. In the arched doorway to the largest of the formal reception rooms she and Solores paused again side by side, this time entirely for effect—the blood-red gown beside the green—and then walked together into the crowded room of state.

As she did so—every single time she did so—Dianora offered an inward voicing of gratitude for the impulse that had led Brandin to change the rules for his saishan here in the colony he now ruled.

In Ygrath, she knew, this would never have been allowed. For a man other than the King or one of the castrates to see, let alone hold converse with a saishan woman was death for both of them. And, Vencel had told her once, for the head of the saishan wing as well.

Things had been different here in Chiara almost from the start. Over the years Dianora had learned enough to know that some of her gratitude should go to Dorotea, Queen of Ygrath, and her decision to remain there with Girald, her elder son, and not accompany her husband into his self-imposed exile abroad. Dorotea’s choice, or, depending on to whom one listened, Brandin’s decision not to demand the company of his Queen.

Somewhat instinctively Dianora always preferred the latter version of the story, but she was wise enough to know why that was so, and this was one of the things she never spoke about with Brandin. Not that the matter was taboo; he wasn’t that kind of man. It was simply that she wasn’t sure if or how she could deal with whatever answer he gave her if the question was ever asked.

In any case, with Dorotea remaining in Ygrath there were few high-born court ladies willing to risk the seas and the Queen’s displeasure in journeying to the colony in the Palm. Which meant an extreme scarcity of women at Brandin’s new court in Chiara, and this, in turn, led to a change in the role of the saishan. The more so since—especially in the early years—Brandin had deliberately ordered the Tribute Ships to search out daughters of distinguished houses in Corte or Asoli. On Chiara he made the choices himself. From Lower Corte, which had once borne a different name, he took no women at all, as a matter of absolute policy. The hatred there ran both ways and too deep, and the saishan was not a place to let it fester.

He’d sent for only a few of the women from his saishan in Ygrath, leaving it largely intact. The politics were straightforward: control of the saishan was a symbol that would confirm the status and authority of Girald, now ruling as Regent of Ygrath in his father’s name.

With such changes here in the colony, the new saishan was a very different place from the old; Vencel and Scelto had both told her that. It had another kind of mood to it, a different character entirely.

It also had, among all those women from Corte and Chiara and Asoli and the handful from Ygrath, one woman named Dianora, from Certando. From Barbadian-ruled Certando.

Or so everyone in the palace thought.

It had almost started a war, Dianora remembered.

In the days after her brother left home, sixteen-year-old Dianora di Tigana, daughter of a sculptor who had died in the war, and of a mother who had scarcely spoken since that day, resolved that she would point her own life towards the killing of the Tyrant on Chiara.

Hardening herself, the way she heard that men in battle were forced to do—the way her father must have tried to do by the Deisa—she had begun preparing to leave her mother in the hollow, echoing house that had once been a place crowded with joy. Where the Prince of Tigana had walked in their courtyard, an arm flung about her father’s shoulders, discussing and praising the works in progress there.

Dianora could remember.

Entering the Audience Chamber she checked and approved her reflection in the wall of gold-plated mirrors on the far side of the room, then her eyes sought, instinctively, those of d’Eymon of Ygrath, the Chancellor. The second most powerful man in the court.

He was, predictably, already looking towards Solores and herself, his glance precisely as bleak as it always was. It was
a look that had bothered Dianora when first she came. She’d thought d’Eymon had taken a dislike to her, or, worse, that he somehow suspected her. It wasn’t long before she realized that he disliked and suspected virtually every person who entered this palace. Everyone received the same glacial, appraising scrutiny. It had been exactly so, she gathered, in Ygrath as well. D’Eymon’s loyalty to Brandin was fanatical and unwavering, and so was his zeal in protecting his King.

Over the years Dianora had developed a respect, grudging at first, and then less so, for the grim Ygrathen. She counted it as one of her own triumphs that he seemed to trust her now. For years now—in fact—or she would never have been allowed to spend a night in Brandin’s bed while he slept.

A triumph of deception, she thought, with an irony whose teeth were all directed inward against herself.

D’Eymon made an economical circling motion with his head and then repeated the gesture for Solores. It was what they had expected: they were to mingle and converse. Neither of them was to take the chair set beside the Island Throne. They did sometimes—and so had the beautiful, unlamented Chloese before her surprising, untimely death—but Brandin was quite punctilious when guests from Ygrath were among them. At such times the seat beside him stood pointedly empty. For Dorotea, his Queen.

Brandin had not yet entered the room of course, but Dianora saw Rhun, the slack-limbed balding Fool, shamble towards one of the servers carrying wine. Rhun, clumsy, grievously retarded, was clad sumptuously in gold and white, and so Dianora knew that Brandin would be as well. It was an integral part of the complex relationship of the Sorcerer Kings of Ygrath and their chosen Fools.

For centuries in Ygrath the Fool had served as shadow and projection for the King. He was dressed like his
monarch, ate next to him at public functions, was there when honours were conferred or judgement passed. And every King’s chosen Fool was someone visibly, sometimes painfully afflicted or malformed. Rhun’s walk was sluggish, his features twisted and deformed, his hands dangled at awkward angles in repose, his speech was badly slurred. He recognized people in the court, but not invariably, and not always in the manner one might expect—which sometimes carried a message. A message from the King.

That part, Dianora didn’t entirely comprehend, and doubted she ever would. She knew that Rhun’s dim, limited mind was mostly under his own control but she also knew that that was not completely so. There was sorcery at work in this: the subtle magic of Ygrath.