Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

came early in Astibar town. It almost always did along that sheltered northwestern side of the province, overlooking the bay and the strung-out islands of the Archipelago. East and south the unblocked winds from the sea pushed the start of the growing season back a few weeks and kept the smaller fishing boats close to shore this early in the year.

Senzio was already flowering, the traders in Astibar harbour reported, the white blossoms of the sejoia trees making the air fragrant with the promise of summer to come. Chiara was still cold it was said, but that happened sometimes in early spring on the Island. It wouldn’t be long before the breezes from Khardhun gentled the air and the seas around her.

Senzio and Chiara.

Alberico of Barbadior lay down at night thinking about them, and rose up in the morning doing the same, after intense, agitated nights of little rest, shot through with lurid, disturbing dreams.

If the winter had been unsettling, rife with small incidents and rumours, the events of early spring were something else entirely. And there was nothing small, nothing only marginally provocative about them.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Coming down from his bedchamber to his offices of state, Alberico would find his mood darkening with every step in the apprehensive anticipation of what might next be reported to him.

The windows of the palace were open now to let the mild breezes sweep through. It had been some time since it had been warm enough to do that and for much of the autumn and winter there had been bodies rotting on death-wheels in the square. Sandreni bodies, Nievolene, Scalvaiane. A dozen poets wheeled at random. Not conducive to opening windows, that. Necessary though, and lucrative, after his confiscation of the conspirators’ lands. He liked when necessity and gain came together; it didn’t happen often but when it did the marriage seemed to Alberico of Barbadior to represent almost the purest pleasure to be found in power.

This spring however his pleasures had been few and trivial in scope, and the burgeoning of new troubles made those of the winter seem like minor, ephemeral afflictions—brief flurries of snow in a night. What he was dealing with now were rivers in flood, everywhere he looked.

At the very beginning of spring a wizard was detected using his magic in the southern highlands, but the Tracker and the twenty-five men Siferval had immediately sent after him had been slaughtered in a pass by outlaws, to the last man. An act of arrogance and revolt almost impossible to believe.

And he couldn’t even properly exact retribution: the villages and farms scattered through the highlands hated the outlaws as much as or more than the Barbadians did. And it had been an Ember Night, with no decent man abroad to see who might have done this unprecedented deed. Siferval sent a hundred men from Fort Ortiz to hunt the brigands down. They found no trace. Only long-dead campfires in the hills. It was as if the twenty-five men had been slain by ghosts: which, predictably, is what the people of the highlands were already saying. It had been an Ember Night after all, and everyone knew the dead were abroad on such nights. The dead, hungry for retribution.

‘How clever of the dead to use new-fletched arrows,’ Siferval’s written report had offered sardonically, when he sent two captains to carry the tidings north. His men had retreated quickly in whey-faced terror at the expression on Alberico’s face. It was, after all, the Third Company which had allowed twenty-five of its men to be killed, and had then sent out another hundred incompetents to do no more than elicit laughter, wandering about in the hills.

It was maddening. Alberico had been forced to fight back an urge to torch the Certandan hamlet nearest to those hills, but he knew how destructive that would be in the longer run. It would undermine all the benefits of the focused restraint he’d used in the affair of the Sandreni plot. That night his eyelid began to droop again, the way it had in the early autumn.

Then, very shortly after, came the news from Quileia. He had nourished such hopes there after the shocking fall of the Matriarchy. It was such an enormous, ripe new market for trade, an absolute harvest for the Empire. And one, most importantly, that would be brought into Barbadior’s aegis by that ever-vigilant guardian of the western borders of the Empire, Alberico of the Eastern Palm.

So much rich hope and promise there, and so little actual prospect of difficulty. Even if this Marius, this crippled priestess-killer on his precarious throne, chose to trade west with Ygrath as well as east that was all right. Quileia was more than large enough to offer bounty both ways. For a time. Soon enough it should be possible to make the uncouth fellow see the many-faceted advantages of focusing his dealings towards Barbadior.

In the evolution of the Barbadian Empire there had emerged a number of ways, a great many time-honoured ways, some subtle, some rather less so, of causing men to see things in a particular light. Alberico had a few thoughts of his own about even newer means of persuading petty monarchs to view matters usefully. He fully intended to explore them, once he was home.

Home, as Emperor. For that, after all, was the point, the point of absolutely everything. Except that the events of the spring utterly refused to cooperate.

Marius of Quileia sent a gratifyingly swift reply to Alberico’s latest benevolent offer to trade. An emissary delivered it directly into the hands of Siferval in Fort Ortiz.

Unfortunately, that brief gratification had been smashed and annihilated when the letter reached Astibar, carried north this time, in recognition of its importance, by Siferval himself. Couched in unexpectedly sophisticated language it contained a message that, however politely and circuitously phrased, was flat and clear: the Quileian regretfully judged that Brandin of Ygrath was the greater, firmer