Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course. There is really nothing to forgive, Scelto.’ She squeezed his hands tightly.

But in her heart she was bidding him farewell, knowing she must not cry. She looked into his honest, caring face, the truest friend she’d had for so many years, the only real friend actually, since her childhood, and she hoped against hope that in the days to come, he would remember the way she had gripped his hands and not the casual, careless sound of her words.

‘Let’s go,’ she said again, and turned her face away from him, to begin the long walk through the palace and out into the morning and then down to the sea.

THE RING DIVE of the Grand Dukes of Chiara had been the most dramatic single ritual of temporal power in the Peninsula of the Palm. From the very beginning of their dominion on the Island, the leaders of Chiara had known that theirs was a power granted by and subject to the waters that surrounded them. The sea guarded them and fed them. It gave their ships—always the largest armada in the peninsula—access to trade and plunder, and it wrapped them about and enclosed them in a world within the world. No wonder, as the tale-tellers said, no wonder it was on the Island that Eanna and Adaon had come together to engender Morian and make the Triad complete.

A world within the world, girdled by the sea.

It was said to have been the very first of the Grand Dukes who had begun the ceremony that became the Ring Dive. It had been different in those early days. Not actually a dive, for one thing, only a ring thrown as a gift into the sea in propitiation and token of acknowledgement, in the days when the world turned its face towards the sun and the sailing season began in earnest.

Then one spring, a long time after that, a woman dived into the sea after the ring when the Grand Duke of that time cast it in. Some said later she had been crazed with love or religious possession, others that she was only cunning and ambitious.

In either case, she surfaced from the waters of the harbour with the ring bright in her hand.

And as the crowd that had gathered to watch the Grand Duke wed the sea shouted and babbled in wild confusion and wonder, the High Priest of Morian in Chiara suddenly cried aloud, in words that would run down through all the years, never to be lost: ‘Look and see! See how the oceans accept the Grand Duke as husband to them! How they offer back the sea-ring as a bride piece to a lover!’

And the High Priest moved to the very end of the pier beside the Duke and knelt to help the woman rise from the sea and so he set in motion everything that followed. Saronte the Grand Duke was but new to his power and as yet unwed. Letizia, who had come into the city from a farm in the distrada and had done this unprecedented thing, was yellow-haired and comely and very young. And their palms were joined together then and there over the water by Mellidar, that High Priest of Morian, and Saronte placed the sea-ring on Letizia’s finger.

They were wed at Midsummer. There was war that autumn against Asoli and Astibar, and young Saronte di Chiara triumphed magnificently in a naval battle in the Gulf of Corte, south of the Island. A victory whose anniversary Chiara still remembered. And from that time onward, the newly shaped ritual of the Ring Dive was enshrined for use in time of Chiara’s need.

Thirty years later, near the end of Saronte’s long reign, in one of the recurring squabbles for precedence among the Triad’s clergy, a newly anointed High Priest of Eanna revealed that Letizia had been near kin to Mellidar, the priest of Morian who had drawn her from the water and bound her to the Duke. Eanna’s priest invited the people of the Island to draw their own conclusions about the schemes of Morian’s clergy and their endless striving for pre-eminence and power.

A number of events, none of them pleasant, had unfolded among the Triad’s servants in the months following that revelation, but none of these disturbances had come near to touching the bright new sanctity of the ritual itself. The ceremony had taken hold on the imagination of the people. It seemed to speak to something deep within them, whether of sacrifice or homage, of love or danger, or, in the end, of some dark, true binding to the waters of the sea.

So the Ring Dive of the Grand Dukes remained, long after all those feuding clergy of the Triad had been lowered to their rest, their names only half-remembered, and only because of their part in the story of the Dive.

What had finally brought an end to the ceremony, in much more recent times, was the death of Onestra, wife to Grand Duke Cazal, two hundred and fifty years ago.

It was not, by any means, the first such death: the women who volunteered to dive for the Grand Dukes always had it made absolutely clear to them that their lives were worth infinitely less than the ring they sought to reclaim from the sea. To come back without the ring left one an exile from the Island for life, known and mocked throughout the whole peninsula. The ceremony was repeated with another woman, another ring, until one of the thrown rings was found and claimed.

By contrast, the woman who carried a sea-ring back to the pier was acclaimed as the luck of Chiara and her fortune was made for life. Wealth and honour, an arranged marriage into nobility. More than one had borne a child to her Grand Duke. Two had followed Letizia to the consort’s throne. Girls from families of little prospect were not chary about risking their lives for such a glittering, hallucinatory