Tigana (38 page)

Truly, he could have killed the man even as he stood there, helmet under his arm, eyes hypocritically lowered in a show of deference.

Oh, spring, perhaps, he’d said airily, as if such matters should not be of great moment to men of good will.

Sooner would be better, had said Grancial of the Second, softly.

Alberico had chosen to let his eyes show just a little of what he felt. There were limits.

Sooner would let whichever of us you chose have time to see to the proper handling of the land before spring planting, Grancial explained hastily. A little ruffled, as he should be.

Perhaps it is so, Alberico had said, noncommittally. I will give thought to this.

‘By the way,’ he added, as they reached the door. ‘Karalius, would you be good enough to send me that very competent young captain of yours? The one with the forked black beard. I have a special, confidential task that needs a man of his evident qualities.’ Karalius had blinked, and nodded.

It was important, very important, not to let them grow too confident, he reflected after they had gone and he’d managed to calm himself. At the same time, only a genuine fool antagonized his troops. The more so, if he had ultimate plans to lead them home. By invitation of the Emperor, preferably, but not necessarily. Not, to be sure, necessarily.

On further reflection, triggered by that line of thought, he did raise taxes in Tregea, Certando and Ferraut to match the new levels in Astibar. He also sent a courier to Siferval of the Third in the Certandan highlands, praising his recent work in keeping that province quiet.

You lashed them, then enticed them. You made them fear you, and know that their fortunes could be made if you liked them enough. It was all a matter of balance.

Unfortunately, small things continued to go wrong with the balancing of the Eastern Palm as autumn turned into winter in the unusually cold weeks that followed.

Some cursed poet in Astibar chose that dank and rainy season to begin posting a series of elegies to the dead Duke of Astibar. The Duke had died in exile, the head of a scheming family, most of whom had been executed by then. Verses lauding him were manifestly treasonous.

It was difficult though. Every single writer brought in during the first sweep of the khav rooms denied authorship, and then—with time to prepare—every writer in the second sweep
claimed
to have written the verses.

Some advisers suggested peremptory wheels for the lot of them, but Alberico had been giving thought to a larger issue. To the marked difference between his court and the Ygrathen’s. On Chiara, the poets vied for access to Brandin, quivering like puppies at the slightest word of praise from him. They wrote paeans of exaltation to the Tyrant and obscene, scathing attacks on Alberico at request. Here, every writer in the Eastern Palm seemed to be a potential rabble-rouser. An enemy of the state.

Alberico swallowed his anger, lauded the technical skill of the verses, and let both sets of poets go free. Not before suggesting, however, as benignly as he could manage, that he would enjoy reading verses as well-crafted on one of the many possible themes of rich satiric possibility having to do with Brandin of Ygrath. He had managed a smile. He would be
very
pleased to read such verses, he’d said, wondering if one of these cursed writers with their lofty airs could take a hint.

None did. Instead, a new poem appeared on walls all over the city two mornings later. It was about Tomasso bar Sandre. A lament about his death, and claiming—unbelievably—that his perverse sexuality had been a deliberately chosen path, a living metaphor for his conquered, subjugated land, for the perverse situation of Astibar under tyranny.

He’d had no choice after that, once he’d understood what the poet was saying. Not bothering with inquiries again, he’d had a dozen writers pulled at random out of the khav rooms that same afternoon, and then broken wristed, and sky-wheeled among the still-crowded bodies of the families of the conspirators before sundown. He closed all khav rooms for a month. No more verses appeared.

In Astibar. But the same evening his new taxes were proclaimed in the Market Square in Tregea, a black-haired woman elected to leap to her death from one of the seven bridges in protest against the measures. She made a speech before she jumped, and she left behind—the gods alone knew how she’d come into possession of them—a complete sheaf of the ‘Sandreni Elegies’ from Astibar. No one knew who she was. They dragged the icy river for her body but it was never found. Rivers ran swiftly in Tregea, out of the mountains to the eastern sea.

The verses were all over that province within a fortnight, and had crossed to Certando and southern Ferraut before the first heavy snows of the winter began to fall.

Brandin of Ygrath sent an elegantly fur-clad courier to Astibar with an elegantly phrased note lauding the Elegies as the first decent creative work he’d seen emanating from Barbadian territory. He offered Alberico his sincerest congratulations.

Alberico sent a polite acknowledgement of the sentiments and offered to commission one of his newly competent verse-makers to do a work on the glorious life and deeds in battle of Prince Valentin di Tigana.

Because of the Ygrathen’s spell, he knew, only Brandin himself would be able to read that last word, but only Brandin mattered.

He thought he’d won that one, but for some reason the woman’s suicide in Tregea left him feeling too edgy to be
pleased. It was too
intense
an action, harking back to the violence of the first year after he’d landed here. Things had been quiet for so long, and this level of intensity—of very public intensity—never boded well. Briefly he even considered rolling back the new taxes, but that would look too much like a giving in rather than a gesture of benevolence. Besides, he still needed the money for the army. Back home the word was that the Emperor was sinking more rapidly now, that he was seen in public less and less often. Alberico knew he had to keep his mercenaries happy.

In the dead of winter he made the decision to reward Karalius with fully half of the former Nievolene lands.

The night after the announcement was made public—among the troops first, then cried in the Grand Square of Astibar—the horse barn and several of the outbuildings of the Nievolene family estate were burned to the ground.

He ordered an immediate investigation by Karalius, then wished, a day later, that he hadn’t. It seemed that they had found two bodies in the smouldering ruins, trapped by a fallen beam that had barred a door. One was that of an informer linked to Grancial and the Second Company. The other was a Barbadian soldier: from the Second Company.

Karalius promptly challenged Grancial to a duel at any time and place of the latter’s choosing. Grancial immediately named a date and place. Alberico quickly made it clear that the survivor of any such combat would be death-wheeled. He succeeded in halting the fight, but the two commanders stopped speaking to each other from that point on. There were a number of small skirmishes among men of the two companies, and one, in Tregea, that was not so small, leaving fifteen soldiers slain and twice as many wounded.

Three local informers were found dead in Ferraut’s distrada, stretched on farmers’ wagon-wheels in a savage parody of the Tyrant’s justice. They couldn’t even retaliate—that
would involve an admission that the men had been informers.

In Certando, two of Siferval’s Third Company went absent from duty, disappearing into the snow-white countryside, the first time that had ever happened. Siferval reported that local women did not appear to be involved. The men had been extremely close friends. The Third Company commander offered the obvious, disagreeable hypothesis.

Late in the winter Brandin of Ygrath sent another suave envoy with another letter. In it he profusely thanked Alberico for his offer of verses, and said he’d be delighted to read them. He also formally requested six Certandan women, as young and comely as the one Alberico had so kindly allowed him to take from the Eastern Palm some years ago, to be added to his saishan. Unforgivably the letter somehow became public information.

Laughter was deadly.

To quell it, Alberico had six old women seized by Siferval in southwestern Certando. He ordered them blinded and hamstrung and set down under a courier’s flag on the snow-clad border of Lower Corte between the forts at Sinave and Forese. He had Siferval attach a letter to one of them asking Brandin to acknowledge receipt of his new mistresses.

Let them hate him. So long as they feared.

On the way back east from the border, Siferval said in his report, he had followed an informer’s tip and found the two runaway soldiers living together at an abandoned farm. They had been executed on the site, with one of them—the appropriate one, Siferval had reported—castrated first, so that he could die as he’d lived. Alberico sent his commendations.

It was an unsettling winter though. Things seemed to be happening
to
him instead of moving to a measure he dictated. Late at night, and then at other times as well, more and more as the Palm gradually turned towards a distant
rumour of spring, Alberico found himself thinking about the ninth province that no one yet controlled, the one just across the bay. Senzio.

The grey-eyed merchant was making a great deal of sense. Even as he found himself reluctantly agreeing with the man, Ettocio wished the fellow had chosen someone else’s roadside tavern for his midday repast. The talk in the room was veering in dangerous directions and, Triad knew, enough Barbadian mercenaries used the main highway between Astibar and Ferraut towns. If one of them stopped in here now, he would be unlikely in the extreme to indulge the current tenor of the conversation as merely an excess of springtime energy. Ettocio’s licence would probably be gone for a month. He kept glancing nervously towards the door.

‘Double taxation now!’ the lean man was saying bitterly as he pushed a hand through his hair. ‘After the kind of winter we’ve just had? After what he did to the price of grain? So we pay at the border, and now we pay at the gates of a town, and where in the name of Morian is profit?’

There were truculent murmurs of agreement all around the room. In a tavern full of merchants on the road, agreement was predictable. It was also dangerous. Ettocio, pouring drinks, was not the only man keeping an eye on the door. The young fellow leaning on the bar looked up from his crusty roll and wedge of country cheese to give him an unexpectedly sympathetic look.

‘Profit?’ a wool-merchant from northern Ferraut said sarcastically. ‘Why should Barbadior care if we make a profit?’

‘Exactly!’ The grey eyes flashed in vigorous agreement. ‘The way I hear it, all he wants to do is soak the Palm for everything he can, in preparation for a grab at the Emperor’s Tiara back in Barbadior!’

‘Shush!’ Ettocio muttered under his breath, unable to stop himself. He took a quick, rare pull at a mug of his own beer and moved along the bar to close the window. It was a shame, because the spring day was glorious outside, but this was getting out of hand.

‘Next thing you know,’ the lean trader was saying now, ‘he’ll just go right ahead and seize the rest of our land like he’s already started to do in Astibar. Any wagers we’re servants or slaves within five years?’

One man’s contemptuous laughter rode over the snarling chorus of response triggered by that. The room fell abruptly silent as everyone turned to confront the person who appeared to find this observation diverting. Expressions were grim. Ettocio nervously wiped down the already clean bar-top in front of him.

The warrior from Khardhun continued laughing for a long time, seemingly oblivious to the stares he was receiving. His sculpted, black features registered genuine amusement.

‘What,’ said the grey-eyed one coldly, ‘is so very funny, old man?’

‘You are,’ said the old Khardhu cheerfully. He grinned like a death’s head. ‘All of you. Never seen so many blind men in one room before.’

‘You care to explain exactly what that means?’ the Ferraut wool-merchant rasped.

‘You need it explained?’ the Khardhu murmured, his eyes wide in mock surprise. ‘Well, now. Why in the name of your gods or mine or his should Alberico bother trying to enslave you?’ He jabbed a bony finger towards the trader who’d started all this. ‘If he tried that, my guess is there’s still enough manhood in the Eastern Palm—barely—that you might take offence. Might even …
rise up!
’ He said that last in an exaggerated parody of a secretive whisper.

He leaned back, laughing again at his own wit. No one else did. Ettocio looked nervously at the door.

‘On the other side of the coin,’ the Khardhu went on, still chuckling, ‘if he just slowly squeezes you dry with taxes and duties and confiscations he can get to exactly the same place without making anyone
mad
enough to
do
anything about it. I tell you, gentlemen’—he took a long pull at his beer—‘Alberico of Barbadior’s a smart man.’

‘And you,’ said the grey-eyed man leaning across his own table, bristling with anger, ‘are an arrogant, insolent foreigner!’