Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

He thought her beautiful beyond words. No one had asked for her hand. And though he knew she was truly pleased for Selvena and not grieving at all for herself, this knowledge didn’t stop him from feeling a difficult sorrow whenever he looked at her amid the already building excitement of Selvena’s wedding preparations.

So he asked her, a little too casually, if she wanted to come with him, and Alix glanced up quickly from her labours in the kitchen with a sharp, worried look in her dark eyes, and Alais said, even more quickly, with a fervour rare for her: ‘Oh, Triad, yes! I would love to come!’

It happened to be her dream.

One of her oldest dreams, never requested, never even spoken aloud. Alais could feel how high her telltale colour had suddenly become. She watched her father and mother exchange a glance. There were times when she envied them that communion of their eyes. No words were spoken, they didn’t seem to need words much of the time. Then Alais saw her mother nod, and she turned in time to catch her father’s slow smile in response to that, and she knew she was going to sea in the Maid for the first time in her life.

She had wanted to do so for so long she couldn’t even think back to a time when the desire hadn’t been there. She remembered being a small girl, light enough to be lifted up by her father while her mother carried Selvena, going down to the harbour in Astibar to see the new ship that was the key to their small fortune in the world.

And she had loved it so much. The three masts—they had seemed so tall to her then—aspiring towards the sky, the dark-haired figurehead of a maiden at the prow, the bright-blue coat of fresh paint along the railings, the creak of the ropes and the timber. And the harbour itself: the smell of pitch and pine and fish and ale and cheese, wool and spice and leather. The rumble of carts laden with goods going away to some far part of the known world, or coming in from distant places with names that were a kind of magic to her.

A sailor in red and green walked by with a monkey on his shoulder and her father called a familiar greeting to him. Her father seemed to be at home here, he knew these men, the wild, exotic places from which they came and went. She heard shouts and sudden raucous laughter and voices raised in profane dispute over the weight of this or the cost of that. Then someone cried out that there were dolphins in the bay; that was when her father had lifted her up on his shoulders so she might see them.

Selvena had begun to cry at all the fierce commotion, Alais remembered, and they had gone back to their cart shortly after and ridden away, past the watchful, looming presence of the Barbadians, big, fair-haired men on their big horses, guarding the harbour of Astibar. She had been too young to understand what they were about, but her father’s abrupt silence and expressionless face, riding by them, had told her something. Later, she learned a great deal more, growing up into the occupied reality of her world.

Her love of the ships and the harbour had never gone away. Whenever she could she would go with Rovigo down to the water. It was easier in winter, when they all moved to the town house in Astibar, but even in spring and summer and early fall she would find excuses, reasons and ways to accompany him into town and down to where the Maid was berthed. She gloried in the scene, and at night she dreamt her dreams of oceans opening before her and salt spray off the waves.

Dreams. She was a woman. Women did not go to sea. And dutiful, intelligent daughters never troubled their fathers by even asking to be allowed such a thing. But it seemed that, sometimes, on some mornings completely unforeseen, Eanna could look down from among her lights in the sky, and smile, and something miraculous might be freely offered that would never have been sought.

IT SEEMED SHE WAS a good sailor, adjusting easily to the swing and roll of the ship on the waves as the coastline of Astibar scrolled by on their right. They sailed north along the bay and then threaded their way through the islands of the Archipelago and into the wideness of the open sea, Rovigo and his five seamen handling the ship with an ease that seemed to her both relaxed and precise. Alais was exhilarated, watching everything in this unknown world with an intensity that made them laugh and tease her for it. There was no malice in the jests though; she had known all five of these men for most of her life.

They swung around the northern tip of the province: a cape of storms, one of the men told her. But that spring day it was an easy, mild place, and she stood at the railing as they turned back south, and watched the green hills of her province pass by, sloping down to the white sand of the shores and the fishing villages dotted along the coast.

A few nights later there was a storm, off the cliffs of northern Tregea. Rovigo had seen it coming at sunset, or smelled it in the air, but the coastline was rocky and forbidding here, with no place to put in for shelter. They braced for the squall, a respectful distance off shore to keep clear of the rocks. When it hit, Alais was down below in her cabin, to keep out of the way.

Even this weather, she was grateful to discover, didn’t bother her very much. There was nothing pleasant about it, feeling the Sea Maid groan and shake, buffeted in darkness by wind and rain, but she told herself that her