Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

They spent the second night at another inn beside the river, just outside the walls of Stevanien, having arrived after sundown curfew closed the city gates. They ate alone this time, and she talked to the Senzian until late. He was decent and sober, belying the clichés about his decadent province, and it was clear that he liked her. She enjoyed his company, and she was even attracted to his dry, witty manner. She went to bed alone though. This was not the village in Certando: she had no obligations.

Or not those kinds of obligations. And as for pleasure, or the ordinary needs of human interaction . . . she would have been honestly uncomprehending if anyone had mentioned them to her.

She was nineteen years old and in Tigana that-had-been. In the morning, just inside the city walls, she bade farewell to the Senzian, touching palm to palm only briefly. He seemed somewhat affected by the night before but she turned and walked away before he could find whatever words his eyes were reaching for.

She found a hostelry not far away, one where her family had never stayed. She wasn’t really worried about being recognized though; she knew how much she had changed and how many girls named Dianora there were scattered across the Palm. She paid in advance for three nights’ lodging and left her belongings there.

Then she walked out into the streets of what had been Avalle of the Towers not very long ago. Avalle, on the green banks of the Sperion just before the river turned west to find the sea. There was an ache building in her as she went, and what hurt most of all, she found, was how much the same a place could be after everything had changed.

She went through the leather district and the wool district. She could remember skipping along beside her mother when they had all come inland to Avalle to see one of her father’s sculptures ceremoniously placed in some square or loggia. She even recognized the tiny shop where she’d purchased her first grey leather gloves, with coins hoarded from her naming day in the summer for just such a thing.

Grey was a colour for grown young women, not for little girls, the red-bearded artisan had teased. I know, six-year-old Dianora had said proudly that autumn long ago. Her mother had laughed. Once upon a time her mother had been a woman who laughed. Dianora could remember.

In the wool quarter she saw women and girls working tirelessly, carding and spinning as they had for centuries in doorways open to the early-summer early-morning light. Over by the river she could see and smell the dyeing sheds and yards.

When Quileia beyond the mountains to the south had folded inward upon its matriarchy, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, Avalle had lost a great deal. More perhaps than any other city in the Palm. Once poised directly on one of the two main trade routes through the mountains, it had found itself in danger of sudden inconsequentiality. With a collective ingenuity bordering on genius the city had decisively shifted its orientation and focus.

Within a generation that city of banking and trade to north and south had become the principal centre in all of the Palm for works in leather and for sumptuously dyed wool.

Hardly missing a beat, Avalle pursued its new prosperity and its pride. And the towers kept rising.

With a catch to her heart Dianora finally acknowledged that she had been carefully working her way around the edges of Stevanien, the outlying districts, the artisans’ quarters, looking outwards only and into doorways. Not into the centre, up towards the hill. Where the towers were gone.

And so, realizing that, she did look, standing stock still in the middle of a wide square at the bottom of the street of the Woolguild. There was a small, very beautiful temple of Morian fronting the square, done in marble of a muted rose colour. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked up and beyond.

And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.

The wide beautiful streets seemed even wider than before. But that was because they were almost empty. There was a muted swell of noise over to her left where the riverside market still was, but the sound was not a fraction, her memory told her, not a fraction of what it had been in mornings that were lost.

There were too few people. Too many were gone, or dead, and the Ygrathen soldiers were all the more visible because of how empty the streets were. Dianora let her gaze travel past the temple up the line of the broad boulevard beside it towards the heart of the city.

We can and we will build wide and straight, the people of Avalle had said; even in the very beginning, when towns everywhere else were tortuous warrens of twisty alleys and crooked lanes easy to defend. There will be no city like ours in all the world, and if need comes for defence we will defend ourselves from our towers.

Which were gone. The squat ugly skyline jarred Dianora with a painful discontinuity. It was as if the eye was tricked, looking ceaselessly for something it knew had to be there.

From the earliest days of that broad, elegant city on the banks of the Sperion towers had been associated with Avalle. Assertions of Tiganese pride—sheer arrogance they called it in the provinces of Corte and Chiara and Astibar. They were symbols of internecine rivalry as well— as each noble family or wealthy guild of bankers or traders or artisans thrust its own