Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

She glanced back at her castrate. ‘He is older than you, Scelto—he is almost sixty-five—and for reasons I don’t entirely understand he has said he must live here in the Palm another sixty years or so. All the sorcery in the world would surely not avail him to prolong his life that long if Iassica is as . . . exceptional as Tesios suggests. She would wear him out, however pleasantly, in a year or two.’

Scelto blushed again, and glanced quickly back over his shoulder. They were quite alone though. Dianora laughed, partly out of genuine amusement, but more specifically to mask the recurring sorrow she felt whenever this one lie had to be told: the thing she still kept from Scelto. The one secret that mattered.

Of course she knew why Brandin needed to stay here in the Palm, why he needed to use his sorcery to prolong his life here in what was surely a place of exile for him in a land of grief.

He had to wait for everyone born in Tigana to die.

Only then could he leave the peninsula where his son had been slain. Only then would the full measure of the vengeance he had decreed be poured out on the bloodied ground. For no one would be left alive in the world who had any true memory of Tigana before the fall, of Avalle of the Towers, the songs and the stories and the legends, all the long, bright history.

It would truly be gone then. Wiped out. Seventy or eighty years wreaking as comprehensive an obliteration as millennia had on the ancient civilizations no one could now recall. Whole cultures that were now only an awkwardly pronounced name of a place, or a deciphered, pompous title—Emperor of All the Earth—on a broken pottery shard.

Brandin could go home after sixty years. He could do whatever he chose. By then she would be long dead and so too would be those from Tigana even younger than her, those born up to the very year of the conquest—the last inheritors.

The last children who could hear and read the name of the land that had been their own. Eighty years, Brandin was giving himself. More than enough, given lifespans in the Palm.

Eighty years to oblivion. To the broken, meaningless pottery shard. The books were gone already, and the paintings, tapestries, sculptures, music: torn or smashed or burned in the terrible year after Valentin’s fall when Brandin had come down upon them in the agony of a father’s loss, bringing them the reciprocal agony of a conqueror’s hate.

The worst year of Dianora’s life. Seeing so much of beauty and splendour crumble to rubble and dust or burn down to ashes of loss. She’d been fifteen, then sixteen. Still too young to comprehend the full reality of what was being eradicated. For her father’s death and the destruction of his art—the works of his hands and days— she could mourn bitterly. And so too for the deaths of friends and the sudden terrors of an occupied impoverished city. The larger losses, the implications for the future, she couldn’t really grasp back then.

Many in the city had gone mad that year.

Others had fled, taking their children away to try to shape a life far from the burning, of the memory of burning, of hammers smashing into the statues of the Princes in the long covered loggia of the Palace by the Sea. Some had withdrawn so far into themselves—a madness of another kind—that only the merest spark was left within to make them eat and sleep and somehow walk through the waste spaces of their days.

Her mother had been one of those.

On the balcony in Chiara so many years later, Dianora looked up at Scelto and realized, from the blinking concern in his face, that she’d been silent for too long.

She forced a smile. She’d been here for a long time; she was good at dissembling. At smiling when it was needful. Even with Scelto whom she hated to deceive. And especially with Brandin, whom she had to deceive, or die.

‘Iassica is not a concern,’ she said mildly, resuming the conversation as if nothing had happened. Indeed, nothing had happened—only old memories come back. Nothing of weight or import in the world, nothing that mattered or could matter. Only loss.

She said, skilfully laughing, ‘She is far too unintelligent to divert him and too young to relax him as Solores does. I’m glad of your information though—I think we can use it. Tell me, is Tesios growing weary tending her? Should I speak to Vencel about assigning someone younger? Or perhaps more than one?’

She made him smile, even as he flushed again. It always seemed to go this way. If she could make them smile or laugh it would brush away the clouds like a wind, a springtime or an autumn wind, leaving behind the high clear blue of the sky.

Dianora wished, with an aching heart, that she’d known how to do that eighteen years ago. For her mother and her brother. For both of them so long ago. No laughter then. No laughter anywhere, and the blue skies a mockery, looking down upon ruin.

VENCEL, MORE AWESOMELY obese every time she saw him, approved Solores’s gown, Nesaia’s, Chylmoene’s, and then her own. Only the four of them—experienced enough to know how to cope with the exigencies of a formal reception—were going down to the Audience Chamber. The envy in the saishan during the past week had been acute enough to produce a scent, Scelto had said wryly more than once. Dianora hadn’t noticed; she was used to it.

Vencel’s shrewd eyes widened from deep in the manifold creases of his dark face as he studied her. She had the gem on her brow, set in a band of white gold that held back her hair. Sprawled on his couch of pillows, the head of the saishan played with the billowing