Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

Trained to control, being what they were, the clergy quickly fell silent. And in silence they made way for her, to follow behind in orderly rows of crimson and smoke-grey.

She knew they would make Scelto trail behind them. He could not be part of this procession of the rites. She knew she had not properly said farewell to him. Hers was not a life meant to be made whole.

They went west down the corridor to the Grand Staircase. At the top of the wide marble stairs Dianora paused and looked down, and she finally understood why the saishan had been so silent. All the women and the castrates were gathered below. They had been allowed out, permitted to come this far to see her pass by. Holding her head very high and looking neither left nor right she set her foot on the first stair and started down. She was no longer herself, she thought. No longer Dianora, or not only Dianora. She was merging further into legend with every step she took.

And then, at the bottom of the staircase, as she stepped onto the mosaic-inlaid tiles of the floor, she realized who was waiting by the palace doors to escort her out and her heart almost stopped.

There was a cluster of men there. D’Eymon, for one, and Rhamanus as well, who had stayed in the Palm as she’d been sure he would, and had been named as Brandin’s First Lord of the Fleet. Beside them was Doarde the poet, representing the people of Chiara. She had expected him: it had been d’Eymon’s clever idea that the participation of one Island poet could help counterbalance the crime and death of another. Next to Doarde was a burly, sharp-faced man in brown velvet hung about with a ransom’s worth of gold. A merchant from Corte, and a successful one clearly enough; very possibly one of the ghouls who had made their fortune preying on the ruins of Tigana two decades ago. Behind him was a lean grey-clad priest of Morian who was obviously from Asoli. She could tell from his colouring, the native Asolini all had that look about them.

She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her there was from Lower Corte and she knew him. A figure from her own internal legends, from the myths and hopes that had sustained her life this far. And this was the one whose presence here almost froze the blood in her veins.

In white of course, majestic as she remembered him from when she was a girl, gripping the massive staff that had always been his signature, and towering over every man there, stood Danoleon the High Priest of Eanna in Tigana.

The man who had taken Prince Alessan away to the south. So Baerd had told her the night he saw his own riselka and went away to follow them.

She knew him, everyone had known Danoleon, his long-striding, broad-shouldered pre-eminence, the deep, glorious instrument that was his voice in temple services. Approaching the doors Dianora fought back a moment of wild panic before sternly controlling herself. There was no way he could recognize her. He had never known her as a child. Why should he have—the adolescent daughter of an artist loosely attached to the court? And she had changed, she was infinitely changed since then.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him though. She had known d’Eymon was arranging for someone to be there from Lower Corte, but had never expected Danoleon himself. In the days when she had worked in The Queen in Stevanien it was well-known that Eanna’s High Priest had withdrawn from the wider world into the goddess’s Sanctuary in the southern hills.

Now he had come out, and was here, and looking at him, drinking in his reality, Dianora felt an absurd, an almost overwhelming swell of pride to see how he seemed to dominate, merely by his presence, all the people assembled there.

It was for him, and for the men and women like him, the ones who were gone and the ones who yet lived in a broken land, that she was going to do what she would do today. His eyes rested on her searchingly; they were all doing that, but it was under Danoleon’s clear blue gaze that Dianora drew herself up even taller than before. Behind them all, beyond the doors which had not yet been opened, she seemed to see the riselka’s path growing brighter all the time.

She stopped and they bowed to her, all six men putting a straight leg forward and bending low in a fashion of salute not used for centuries. But this was legend, ceremony, an invocation of many kinds of power, and Dianora sensed that she must now seem to them like some hieratic figure out of the tapestry scrolls of the distant past.

‘My lady,’ said d’Eymon gravely, ‘if it pleases you and you are minded to allow us, we would attend upon you now and lead you to the King of the Western Palm.’

Carefully said, and clearly, for all their words were to be remembered and repeated. Everything was to be remembered. One reason the priests were here, and a poet.

‘It pleases me,’ she said simply. ‘Let us go.’ She did not say more; her own words would matter less. It was not what she would say today that was to be remembered.

She still could not take her eyes from Danoleon. He was the first man from Tigana, she realized, that she had seen since coming to the Island. In a very direct way it eased her heart that Eanna, whose children they all were, had allowed her to see this man before she went into the sea.

D’Eymon nodded a command. Slowly the massive bronze doors swung open upon the vast crowd assembled between the palace and the pier. She saw people spilling across the square to the farthest ends of the harbour, even thronging