Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

began to follow. Ducas spoke a few terse commands to Arkin, too low for Devin to hear. Arkin hesitated for a moment, clearly torn, wanting to come with his leader. But then, without speaking, he turned his horse the other way. When Devin glanced back a moment later, he saw that the outlaws were rifling the Barbadians’ bodies for weapons.

He turned to look over his shoulder again a few moments later but they were in open country by then, with the hills in shadow to the south and east and a grassy plain rolling north of them. The entrance to the pass could no longer even be seen. Arkin and the others would be gone from within it soon, Devin knew, leaving only the dead. Only the dead for the scavengers: one of them killed by his own sword, and another one a child.

The old man lay on his bed in the darkness of an Ember Night and the always darkness of his own affliction. Far from sleep, he listened to the wind outside and to the woman in the other room clicking her prayer beads and intoning the same litany over and over.

‘Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us, Adaon preserve us, Morian guard our souls. Eanna love us . . .’

His hearing was very good. It was a compensation most of the time, but sometimes—as tonight, with the woman praying like a demented thing—it was a curse of a particularly insidious kind. She was using her old beads; he could tell the thin, quick sound even through the wall separating their chambers. He had made her a new ring of beads of rare, polished tanchwood three years ago for her naming day. Most of the time she used that ring, but not on the Ember Days. Then she went back to her old beads and she prayed aloud for most of three days and nights.

In the earliest years here he had slept those three nights in the barn with the two boys who had brought him here, so much did her unceasing litany disturb him. But he was old now, his bones creaked and ached on windy nights such as this, so he kept to his own bed under piled blankets and endured her voice as best he could.

‘Eanna love us always, Adaon preserve us from all perils, Morian guard our souls and shelter us. Eanna love us . . .’

The Ember Days were a time of contrition and atonement, but they were also a time when one was to count and give thanks for one’s gifts. He was a cynical man, for sufficient and varied reasons, but he would not have called himself unreligious, and he would not, in fact, have said he’d lived a life unblessed, despite the blindness of almost two decades. He had lived much of his life in wealth and near to power. The length of his days was a blessing, and so too was the lifelong grace of his hands with wood. Only a form of play at first, a diversion, it had become something more than that in the years since they had come here.

There was also his other gift of skill, though few people knew of that. Had it been otherwise he would never have been able to shape a quiet life in this highland village, and a quiet life was essential because he was hiding. Still.

The very fact of his survival on the long, sightless journey all those years ago was a blessing of a special kind. He was under no illusions: he would never have survived without the loyalty of his two young servants. The only ones they had allowed to stay with him. The only ones who had wanted to stay.

They weren’t young nor were they servants any longer. They were farmers on land they owned with him. No longer sleeping on the front-room floor in their first small farmhouse nor out in the barn as they had in the earliest years, but in their own homes with wives beside them and children near by. Lying in darkness he offered thanks for that, as gratefully as for anything he had ever been given himself.

Either of them would have let him sleep in their home these three nights, to escape the unending drone of the woman in the other room, but he would not presume to ask so much. Not on the Ember Nights, not on any night. He had his own sense of what was appropriate, and besides, he liked his own bed more and more with the passing years.

‘Eanna love us as her children, Adaon preserve us as his children . . .’

He wasn’t, clearly, going to be able to fall asleep. He thought about getting up to polish a staff or a bow, but he knew Menna would hear him, and he knew she would make him pay for profaning an Ember Night with labour. Watery porridge, sour wine, his slippers cruelly moved from where he laid them down.

‘They were in my way,’ she would say when he complained. Then, when fires were allowed again: burnt meat, undrinkable khav, bitter bread. For a week, at least. Menna had her own ways of letting him know what mattered to her. After all the years they had their tacit understandings much as any old couple did, though of course he had never married her.

He knew who he was, and what was appropriate, even in this fallen state, far from home, from the memory of wealth or power. Here on this small farm-holding bought with gold fearfully hidden on his person during that long, blind journey seventeen years ago, sure that a murderous pursuit was riding close behind.

He had survived, though, and the boys. Coming to this village on a day in autumn long ago: strangers arriving in a dark time. A time when so many people had died and so many others were brutally uprooted all across the Palm in