Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

The Governor, when he learned what was happening, had vowed in red-faced rage to force the contemptible inhabitants to work wherever they were required by their masters of Ygrath. Force them with dungeon and lash and a death-wheel or three if needed.

The master chef, Arduini, had demurred.

One did not, Arduini had said, in a much-quoted display of artistic temperament, build up and maintain an establishment of quality by using enforced, surly labour. His standards were simply too high for that. Even the stable-boys at his restaurant, said Arduini of Ygrath, were to be trained and willing, and to have a certain style to them.

There had been widespread hilarity when that was reported: stylish stable-hands, indeed. But, Dianora learned, the amusement had turned to respect quite soon, because Arduini, pretentious or not, did know what he was doing. The Queen, the Ferraut trader told her, was like an oasis amid the deserts of Khardhun. In dispirited, broken Stevanien it cast a warm glow of Ygrathen civility and grace. The merchant lamented, though discreetly on this side of the border, the complete absence of any such traits in the Barbadians who had occupied his own province.

But yes, he said, in response to Dianora’s apparently casual question, Arduini was still struggling with staff problems. Stevanien was a backwater, and a backwater, moreover, in the most oppressively taxed, and militarily subjugated province in the Palm. It was next to impossible to get people to travel there, or stay, and since none of the trickle of adventurers from Ygrath had come so far from home to wash dishes or clear tables or tend to a stable—however stylish a stable it might be— there appeared to be a chronic need for workers from elsewhere in the Palm.

In that moment Dianora had changed every plan she had. She cast the line of her life, with a silent prayer to Adaon, in the direction of this chance information. She had been intending, with some real apprehension, to go northwest to Corte. That had always been the next-to-last destination in her plans. She had seriously wondered, almost every night as she lay awake, whether three years in Certando would be enough to shake off anyone pursuing the true history of her life. She’d had no good ideas about what else she could do, though.

Now she did.

And so it was that a few nights later, in the largest of the taverns in Fort Sinave, a cheerful crowd of young people watched their new friend drink more than was good for her for the first time since she’d arrived. More than one of the men saw cause for cautious optimism in that, with respect to possibilities later in the evening.

‘You’ve settled it then!’ Dianora cried in her attractive, south-country voice. She leaned for support against the shoulder of a bemused cartwright. ‘Hand to the new plough for me tomorrow. I’m over the border as soon as I can to visit The Queen of Ygrath! Triad bless her days!’

Triad shelter and hold my soul, she was thinking as she spoke, absolutely sober, cold to her bones with the sense of the words she was so glibly shouting.

They silenced her, laughing uproariously—in part to cover her words. In Barbadian Certando it was a long way from the path of wisdom to thus salute Ygrath’s Queen. Dianora giggled quite endearingly but she subsided. The cartwright and another man tried to see her up to her room afterwards, but found themselves charmingly put off and drinking together amid off-duty mercenaries in the one all-night tavern Fort Sinave possessed.

She was just a little too untutored, too country, to succeed in her ambitious hopes, they agreed sagely. They also agreed, a few drinks later, that she had the most extraordinarily appealing smile. Something about her eyes, what happened to them when she was pleased.

In the morning Dianora was dressed and packed and waiting very early at the main gate of the fort. She struck a bargain for passage to Stevanien with a pleasant-enough middle-aged merchant from Senzio carrying Barbadian spices for the luxury trade. His only reason for going to dreary, flattened Stevanien, she learned as they started west, was the new restaurant, The Queen. She took that coincidence as a good omen, closing the fingers of her left hand over the thumb three times to make the wish come true.

The roads were better than she remembered; certainly the merchants travelling them seemed to feel safer. Rolling along in the cart, she asked the Senzian about it. He grinned sardonically.

‘The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.’ He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. ‘Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.’

Not long after that she saw evidence of what he was talking about: they passed two death-wheels beside the roadway, the bodies of would-be thieves spreadeagled upon them, spiralling lazily in the sun, severed hands rotting in their mouths. The smell was very bad.

The Senzian stopped just across the border to do some dealing in the fort at Forese. He also paid his transit duties there scrupulously, waiting patiently in line to have his cart examined and levied. The death-wheels, he pointed out to her after, in the acerbic Senzian manner, were not reserved for highway thieves and captured wizards.

Thus delayed, they spent the night at a coach-house on the well-travelled road, joining a party of Ferraut traders for dinner. Dianora excused herself early and went to bed. She’d paid for a room alone and took the precaution of pushing an oak dresser in front of her door. Nothing disturbed her though, except her dreams. She was back in Tigana and yet she wasn’t, because it wasn’t there. She whispered the name to herself like a talisman or a prayer before falling into