Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

with him, and he had no memory of any of them either. They must have come from other villages in the highlands, from gatherings in other homes like Mattio’s.

The light was strange. He looked up.

And Baerd saw that the moon in the sky was round and large and full, and it was green like the first green-gold of spring. It shone with that green and golden light among stars in constellations he had never seen. He wheeled around, dizzied, disoriented, his heart pounding, searching for a pattern that he knew in the heavens. He looked south, to where the mountains should be, but as far as his eyes could track in the green light he saw level fields stretching away, some fallow, some fully ripe with summer grain in a season that should only be spring. No mountains at all. No snow-clad peaks, no Braccio Pass with Quileia beyond. He spun again. No Castle Borso to north or east. Or west?

West. With a sudden premonition he turned to look there. Low hills rose and fell in seemingly endless progression. And Baerd saw that the hills were bare of trees, of grass, bare of flower and shrub and bush, bleak and waste and barren.

‘Yes, look there,’ Donar’s deep voice said from behind him, ‘and understand why we are here. If we lose tonight the field in which we stand will be desolate as those hills next year when we come back. The Others are down into these grainlands now. We have lost the battles of those hills over the past years. We are fighting in the plain now, and if this goes on, one Ember Night not far from now our children or their children will stand with their backs to the sea and lose the last battle of our war.’

‘And?’ Baerd’s eyes were still on the west, on the grey, stony ruin of the hills.

‘And all the crops will fail. Not just here in Certando. And people will die. Of hunger or of plague.’

‘All over the Palm?’ He could not look away from the desolation that he saw. He had a vision of a lifeless world looking like that. He shivered. It was sickening.

‘The Palm and beyond, Baerd. Make no mistake, this is no local skirmish, no battle for a small peninsula. All over this world, and perhaps beyond, for it is said that ours is not the only world scattered by the Powers among time and the stars.’

‘Carlozzi taught this?’

‘Carlozzi taught this. If I understand his teaching rightly, our own troubles here are bound up with even graver dangers elsewhere; in worlds we have never seen or will see, except perhaps in dream.’

Baerd shook his head, still looking out at the hills in the west. ‘That is too remote for me. Too difficult. I am a worker in stone and a sometime merchant and I have learned how to fight, against my will and inclination, over many years. I live in a peninsula overrun by enemies from overseas. That is the level of evil I can grasp.’

He turned away from the western hills then and looked at Donar. And despite the warning they’d given him, his eyes widened with amazement. The miller stood on two sound legs; his grey, thinning hair had become a thick dark brown like Baerd’s own, and he stood with his broad shoulders straight and his head held high, a man in his prime.

A woman came up to them, and Baerd knew Elena, for she was not greatly changed. She seemed older here though, less frail; her hair was shorter, though still white-gold despite the strangeness of the light. Her eyes, he saw, were a very deep blue.

‘Were your eyes that same colour an hour ago?’ he asked.

She smiled, pleased and shy. ‘It was more than an hour. And I don’t know what I look like this year. It changes a little for me every time. What colour are they now?’

‘Blue. Extremely blue.’

‘Well then, yes, they have always been blue. Perhaps not extremely blue, but blue.’ Her smile deepened. ‘Shall I tell you what you look like?’ There was an incongruity, a lightness in her voice. Even Donar had an amused expression playing about his lips.

‘Tell me.’

‘You look like a boy,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘A fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy, beardless now and much too thin and with a shock of brown hair I would love to cut if we had but half a chance.’

Baerd felt his heart thud like a mallet in his breast. It actually seemed to stop for an instant before beginning again, laboriously, to beat. He turned sharply away from the others, looking down at his hands. They did seem different. Smoother, less lined. And a knife scar he’d got in Tregea five years ago was not there. He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly weak.

‘Baerd?’ Elena said behind him, concerned. ‘I’m sorry. I did not mean to—’

He shook his head. He tried to speak but found that he could not. He wanted to reassure her, her and Donar, that it was all right, but he seemed, unbelievably, to be weeping, for the first time in almost twenty years.

For the first time since the year he had been a fourteen-year-old boy forbidden to go to war by his Prince’s orders and his father’s. Forbidden to fight and die with them by the red banks of the River Deisa when all the shining had come to an end.

‘Be easy, Baerd,’ he heard Donar saying, deep and gentle. ‘Be easy. There is always a strangeness here.’

Then a woman’s hands were briefly upon his shoulders and then reaching around him from behind to meet and clasp at his chest. Her cheek rested against his back and she held him so, strong and sharing and generous, while he brought his hands up to cover his face as he cried.

Above them on the Ember Night the full moon was green-gold and around them the strange fields were fallow, or newly sown, or full with ripened grain