Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

chair was concerned he was a cipher, a nothing. He wasn’t even there. Her question had not been meant to be answered; she didn’t really care who they were. She had someone else to deal with.

For a long time, a sequence of moments that seemed to hang forever in the silence, she looked Alessan up and down without speaking, her white, imperious features quite unreadable. At last, slowly shaking her head, she said: ‘Your father was such a handsome man.’

Devin flinched at the words and the tone, but Alessan seemed scarcely to react at all. He nodded in calm agreement. ‘I know he was. I remember. And so were my brothers.’ He smiled, a small, ironic smile. ‘The strain must have run out just before it got to me.’

His voice was mild, but when he finished he glanced sharply at Danoleon, and the High Priest read a message there. He, in turn, murmured something to Torre who quickly left the room.

To stand guard in front, Devin realized, feeling a chill despite the fire. Words had just been spoken here that could kill them all. He looked over at Erlein and saw that the wizard had slipped his harp out of its case. His expression grim, the Senzian took a position near the eastern window and quietly began tuning his instrument.

Of course, Devin thought: Erlein knew what he was doing. They had come in here ostensibly to play for a dying woman. It would be odd if no music emerged from this room. On the other hand, he didn’t much feel like singing just now.

‘Musicians,’ the woman in the chair said with contempt to her son. ‘How splendid. Have you come to play a jingle for me now? To show me how skilful you are in such an important thing? To ease a mother’s soul before I die?’ There was something almost unbearable in her tone.

Alessan did not move, though he too had gone pale now. In no other way did he betray his tension though, save perhaps in the almost too-casual stance, the exaggerated simulation of ease.

‘If it would please you, my lady mother, I will play for you,’ he said quietly. ‘There was time I can remember when the prospect of music would indeed have brought you pleasure.’

The eyes of the woman in the chair glittered coldly. ‘There was a time for music. When we ruled here. When the men of our family were men in more than name.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Alessan, a little sharply. ‘True men and wondrous proud, all of them. Men who would have stormed the ramparts of Chiara alone and killed Brandin long ago, if only through his abject terror at their ferocious determination. Mother, can you not let it rest, even now? We are the last of our family and we have not spoken in nineteen years.’ His voice changed, softened, grew unexpectedly awkward. ‘Must we wrangle yet, can our speech be no more than the letters were? Did you ask me here simply to say again what you have written so many times?’

The old woman shook her head. Arrogant and grim, implacable as the death that had come for her.

‘No, not that,’ she said. ‘I have not so much breath in me to waste. I summoned you here to receive a mother’s dying curse upon your blood.’

‘No!’ Devin exclaimed before he could stop himself.

In the same second Danoleon took a long stride forward. ‘My lady, no indeed,’ he said, anguish in his deep voice. ‘This is not—’

‘I am dying,’ Pasithea bren Serazi interrupted harshly. There were spots of bright unnatural colour in her cheeks. ‘I do not have to listen to you any more, Danoleon. To anyone. Wait, you told me, all these years. Be patient, you said. Well, I have no more time for patience. I will be dead in a day. Morian waits for me. I have no more time to linger while my craven child gambols about the Palm playing ditties at rustic weddings.’

There came a discordant jangling of harpstrings.

‘That,’ said Erlein di Senzio from the eastern window, ‘is ignorant and unfair!’ He stopped, as if startled by his own outburst. ‘Triad knows, I have no cause to love your son. And it is now more than clear to me whence his arrogance comes and his lack of care for other lives, for anything but his own goals. But if you name him a coward simply for not trying to kill Brandin of Ygrath then you are dying a vain, foolish woman. Which, to be perfectly frank, does not surprise me at all in this province!’

He leaned back against the ledge, breathing hard, looking at no one. In the silence that followed Alessan finally moved. His stillness had seemed inhuman, unnatural, now he sank to his knees beside his mother’s chair.

‘You have cursed me before,’ he said gravely. ‘Remember? I have lived much of my life in the shadow of that. In many ways it would have been easier to die years ago: Baerd and I slain trying to kill the Tyrant in Chiara . . . perhaps even killing him, through some miracle of intervention. Do you know, we used to speak of it at night, every single night, when we were in Quileia, still boys. Shaping half a hundred different plans for an assassination on the Island. Dreaming of how we would be loved and honoured after death in a province with its name restored because of us.’

His voice was low, almost hypnotic in its cadence. Devin saw Danoleon, his face working with emotion, sink back into the other armchair. Pasithea was still as marble, as expressionless and cold. Devin moved quietly towards the fire, in a vain attempt to quell the shivering that had come over him. Erlein was still by the window. He was playing his harp again, softly, single notes and random chords, not quite a tune.

‘But we grew older,’ Alessan went on, and an urgency, a terrible need to be understood had come