Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

dew-drenched summer flowers, and in the high, unknown place of that dreaming Alais was filled with complex yearnings she could never have named aloud.

It was bitterly cold in the dungeon where they had thrown him at last. The stones were damp and icy, they smelled of urine and faeces. He’d only been allowed to put back on his linen underclothing and his hose. There were rats in the cell. He couldn’t see them in the blackness but he had been able to hear them from the beginning and he’d been bitten twice already as he dozed.

Earlier, he had been naked. The new Captain of the Guard—the replacement for the one who’d killed himself—had permitted his men to play with their prisoner before locking him up for the night. They all knew Tomasso’s reputation. Everyone knew his reputation. He had made sure of that; it had been part of the plan.

So the guards had stripped him in the harsh brightness of the guardroom and they had amused themselves coarsely, pricking him with their swords or with the heated poker from the fire, sliding them around his flaccid sex, prodding him in the buttocks or the belly. Bound and helpless, Tomasso had wanted only to close his eyes and wish it all away.

For some reason it was the memory of Taeri that wouldn’t let him do that. He still couldn’t believe his younger brother was dead. Or that Taeri had been so brave and so decisive at the end. It made him want to cry, thinking about it, but he was not going to let the Barbadians see that. He was a Sandreni. Which seemed to mean more to him now, naked and near the end, than it ever had before.

So he kept his eyes open and he fixed them bleakly on the new captain. He did his best to ignore the things they were doing to him, and the sniggering, brutal suggestions as to what would happen tomorrow. They weren’t very imaginative actually. He knew the morning’s reality was going to be worse. Intolerably worse.

They hurt him a little with their blades and drew blood a few times, but nothing very much—Tomasso knew they were under orders to save him for the professionals in the morning. Alberico would be present then, as well.

This was just play.

Eventually the captain grew tired of Tomasso’s steady gaze, or else he decided that there was enough blood flowing down the prisoner’s legs, puddling on the floor. He ordered his men to stop. Tomasso’s bonds were cut and they gave him back his undergarments and a filthy pest-infested strip of blanket and they took him down the stairs to the dungeons of Astibar and they threw him into the blackness of one of them.

The entrance was so low that even on his knees he’d scraped his head on the stone when they pushed him in. More blood, he realized, as his hand came away sticky. It didn’t actually seem to matter very much.

He hated the rats though. He’d always been afraid of rats. He rolled the useless blanket as tightly as he could and tried to use it as a feeble club. It was hard though in the dark.

Tomasso wished he were a physically braver man. He knew what was coming in the morning, and the thought, now that he was alone, turned his bowels to jelly.

He heard a sound, and realized a moment later that he was whimpering. He fought to keep control of himself. He was alone though, and in freezing darkness in the hands of his enemies, and there were rats. He couldn’t entirely keep the sounds from coming. He felt as if his heart was broken, as if it lay in jagged pieces at odd angles in his breast. Among the fragments he tried to assemble a curse for Herado and his betrayal, but nothing seemed equal to what his nephew had done. Nothing seemed large enough to encompass it.

He heard another rat and lashed out blindly with his rolled weapon. He hit something and heard a squeal. Again and again he pounded at the place of that sound. He thought he had killed it. One of them. He was trembling, but the frenzy of activity seemed to help him fight back his weakness. He didn’t weep any more. He leaned back against the damp slime of the stone wall, wincing because of his open cuts. He closed his eyes, though he couldn’t see in any case, and he thought of sunlight.

It was then that he must have dozed, because he woke suddenly with a shout of pain: one of the rats had bitten viciously at his thigh. He flailed about with the blanket for a few moments, but he was shivering now and beginning to feel genuinely ill. His mouth was swollen and pulpy from Alberico’s blow in the cabin. He found it painful to swallow. He felt his forehead and decided he was feverish.

Which is why, when he saw the wan light of a candle, he was sure he was hallucinating. He was able to look around though by its glow. The cell was tiny. There was a dead rat near his right leg and there were two more living ones—big as cats—near the door. He saw, on the wall beside him, a scratched-out image of the sun with notches for days cut into the rim. It had the saddest face Tomasso could ever remember seeing. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked back towards the glowing light and realized with certainty that this was a hallucination, or a dream.

His father was holding the candle, dressed in the blue-silver robe of his burial, looking down with an expression different from any Tomasso could ever remember seeing on his face.

The fever must be extreme, he decided; his mind was conjuring forth in this abyss an image of something his shattered heart so desperately desired. A look of kindness—and even, if one wanted to reach for the word,