Tigana (98 page)

Authors: Guy Gavriel Kay

BOOK: Tigana

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‘But?’ Sandre asks.

‘But he’s the man who saved us all, everyone knows it, everyone knows who he is now. After a dozen years of being on the roads he knows more people who matter in each province than anyone else. He’s the one who gave the rest of us the vision. And he’s the Prince of Tigana, too, and in his prime. I’m afraid’—he grimaces at the word—‘I don’t see how he can avoid this, even if he wanted to. I think for Alessan it is just beginning now.’

They are silent a moment.

‘What about you?’ Devin asks. ‘Will you go with him? What do you want?’

Baerd smiles. ‘What do I want? Nothing nearly so high. I’d badly like to find my sister, but I’m beginning to accept that she’s … gone, and I think that I may never know where, or how. I’ll be there for Alessan whenever he needs me, but what I most want to do is build things. Houses, temples, bridges, a palace, half a dozen towers here in Avalle. I need to see things rising, and I … I suppose it’s part of the same thing, but I want to start a family. We need children here again. Too many people died.’ He looks away for a moment towards the mountains and then back again. ‘You and I may be the lucky ones, Devin. We aren’t Princes or Dukes or wizards. We’re only ordinary men, with a life to start.’

‘I told you he was waiting for Elena,’ Sandre says gently. Not a gibe, the voice of a friend, speaking with deep affection. Baerd smiles, looking into the distance again. And in
that moment his expression changes, it grows charged with a fierce, bright pleasure:

‘Look!’ he cries, pointing. ‘Here he comes!’

From the south, winding out of the mountains and the hills of the highlands along a road that has not been used in hundreds of years there comes a caravan, many-coloured, stretching back a long way. There is music playing beside it and ahead, with men and women riding and on foot, donkeys and horses laden with goods, at least fifty banners flapping in the wind. And now the tunes drift up to the three of them, bright and gay, and all the colours are flashing in the morning light as Marius, King of Quileia, comes riding down from the mountain pass to the wedding of his friend.

He is to spend the night in the Sanctuary where he will be formally welcomed by the High Priest of Eanna—whom he will remember as the man who brought a fourteen-year-old boy to him over the mountains long ago. There are barges waiting in Avalle to take them down the river to Tigana in the morning.

But the right of first greeting is Baerd’s, in Alessan’s name, and he has asked the two of them to ride here with him.

‘Come on!’ he cries now, joy in his face. He urges his horse forward down the sloping path. Devin and Sandre glance at each other and hasten to follow.

‘I will never understand,’ Devin shouts, as they catch up to Baerd, ‘how you can possibly be so pleased to see a man who calls you Pigeon Two!’

Sandre gives a cackle of glee. Baerd laughs aloud, and mimes a blow at Devin. The three of them are still laughing as they slow their horses to swing around a cluster of sonrai bushes at a wide curve in the downward trail.

And it is there that they see the riselka, three men see a riselka, sitting on a rock beside the sunlit path, her long sea-green hair blowing back in the freshening breeze.

A F T E R W O R D

T
igana
is in good part a novel about memory: the necessity of it, in cultural terms, and the dangers that come when it is too intense. Scelto’s decision at the end of the novel is a reflection of that, and so is the George Seferis passage that served as one of my epigraphs. The world today offers more than enough examples of both pitfalls: ignorance of history and its lessons, and the refusal to let the past be past.

So, accepting that this is precarious terrain—an author’s memories of a book about remembering—what does that imply, so many years after the writing?

Well, one might consider caution as a byword.

I doubt there’s any other novel I’ve written for which I’d even attempt a reconstruction of the earliest seeds of the book. But
Tigana
happens to have had a number of quite specific and very powerful elements in its origin, and some of these I can (or I have persuaded myself I can) reconstruct.

Some time in the latter part of the 1980s I began seeing in my mind a hunting cabin in the woods, in some Medieval or Renaissance setting. There was someone unexpected (from the point of view of those inside) sitting in the window. In those early days, I had not the least idea who that was or what else happened, but I knew that a book would unfold from whatever took place in and around that cabin.

There exists a photo—I think I saw it first in
LIFE
magazine—from Czechoslovakia in 1968, the time of the “Prague Spring” when a brief, euphoric flicker of freedom animated that Iron Curtain country before Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed it.

There are actually two photographs. The first shows a number of Communist Party functionaries in a room, wearing nondescript suits, looking properly sombre. The second is the same photo. Almost. There is one functionary missing now, and something I recall as a large plant inserted where he was. The missing figure—part of the crushed uprising—is not only dead, he has been erased from the record. A trivial technical accomplishment today, when the capacity we have for altering images and sound is so extreme, but back then the two photographs registered powerfully for me, and lingered for twenty years: not only killed, but made to never have been.

Another starting point: there’s a play called
Translations,
by Brian Friel. It is basically an extended, passionate debate between a village teacher in Ireland and the leader of an English survey team that has been traversing the countryside, mapping it carefully and—more importantly—
changing the names of places,
from Gaelic to English. Both men are aware of what is at stake: when you want to subjugate a people—to erase their sense of themselves as separate and distinctive—one place to start (and it is sometimes enough) is with their language and names. Names link to history, and we need a sense of our history to define ourselves. When Maoist China decreed that history
began
with their own Long March, and introduced an education system to back that up, eradicating thousands of years of the past (or trying to), they knew exactly what they were doing.

It is hardly an accident that separatist movements so often involve attempts to reclaim a lost language. In Provence, highway signs often give place names in both French and the
almost-lost Provençal tongue. The independence movement in Wales has incorporated attempts to reclaim their language as one of public discourse (a reaction to the English refusal to allow it to be used in schools or even schoolyards once upon a not-so-long-ago time). In Quebec, the often bitter struggle between Separatists and those who wish to remain a province of Canada finds a battleground in language.
Tigana
was an attempt to use magic to explore these themes: erasing a people from the record of history by stripping them of their name.

A story like this needs a setting. Another strand to mine, even before it
was
a story, came from reading early Italian Renaissance history. The record of that brilliant and brutal time brought home to me how long-delayed Italian coherence and identity was because of the savage feuding among the city-states. Internal warfare made them not only incapable of repelling the ambitions of France and Spain, but led the Italian cities to
take turns inviting them in
—so long as the outside army did a proper job of raping and pillaging hated Milan or Venice or Florence or Pisa on behalf of whichever city had extended the invitation. The boot of Italy became my Peninsula of the Palm, with the ambience of olive groves and vineyards I wanted, and my model for Brandin of Ygrath became that of a Borgia or Medici prince, arrogant, cultured, far too proud. Alberico, opposing him, was a crude, efficient Politburo survivor.

The novelist Milan Kundera fed my emerging theme of oppression and survival with his musings about the relationship between conquered peoples and an unstable sexuality: what I have called “the insurrections of night.” The underlying ideas, for me, had to do with how people rebel when they
can’t
rebel, how we behave when the world has lost its bearings, and how shattered self-respect can ripple through to the most intimate levels of our lives.

I wanted to start a book about subterfuge and deception with an outright lie—and the first sentence of chapter one does that. I wanted to work with music, the mobility of musicians in a relatively immobile society, and to re-examine the mage-source bond from
Fionavar,
showing a darker side to such a link—and that wish found an outlet in Alessan’s binding of Erlein. I hoped to explore, as part of the revolt the book would chronicle, the idea of the evils done by good men, to stretch the reader with ambiguities and divided loyalties in a genre that tended (and still tends) not to work that way.

The debate between Alessan and Erlein is meant as a real one, not a plot device. The assertion made by the bound wizard that the roads of the eastern Palm are safer under Alberico than they were under Sandre d’Astibar is
intended
to raise a question about the legitimacy of pursuing one’s quarrels—even one’s quest for a people’s obliterated identity and past—by using others as unwilling instruments. By the same token, this is also true of the rage Alessan’s mother feels, seeing her son coolly attempting to shape a subtle, balanced
political
resolution for the entire peninsula, where she sees only a matter of hatred and blood and Tigana’s lost name.

These are ambitious elements for what was also meant to be a romantic adventure. They intimidated me as they began to emerge; even recording them now I find myself shaking my head. But beneath them all lies the idea of using the fantasy genre in just this way: letting the universality of fantasy—of once upon a time—allow escapist fiction to be more than just that, to also bring us home. I tried to imagine myself with a stiletto not a bludgeon, slipping the themes of the story in quietly while keeping a reader turning pages well past bedtime.

It is a matter of gratitude and pleasure for me to have a sense, so many years after the first release of a generously
received book, that it might have happened that way: those first ideas and images and wishes becoming foundation pieces of the novel, the themes sliding in, people awake into the night.

This is how I like to remember it, at any rate.

Guy Gavriel Kay

Table of Contents

TITLE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

PROLOGUE

PART ONE