Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

tariffs and internal levies, along with the criminal justice fines and confiscations, had winced inwardly and cursed the conjunctions of his planets. Why, when he strove so hard to be decent and uncontentious in everything he did, to leave any waters he entered as unruffled as possible, did he have so little luck?

Short of a massive midsummer military assertion there was no way to force more money or goods out of this impoverished region. If Brandin had seriously wanted to extract real wealth out of Stevanien he would have been better advised not to have so successfully smashed the city and its distrada to its knees.

Not that the Governor would have even dreamt of letting such a furtive thought come anywhere near his lips. But the reality was that he was doing the best he could. If he squeezed the leather or the wool guilds any harder than he was they would simply start to fold. Stevanien, already thinly inhabited—and particularly bereft of men in their prime years—would become a town of ghosts and empty squares. And he had explicit instructions from the King to prevent that.

If the King’s various orders and demands rammed so violently up against each other, in such patent contradiction, what, in all fairness, was a middle-echelon administrator to do?

Not that such a plaint could be used with this bristly, unhappy Rhamanus. What care would the captain have for the Governor’s dilemmas? The Tribute Ship captains were judged by what came home to Chiara in their holds. Their job was to put as much pressure on the local administrators as they could—even to the point, sometimes, of forcing them to surrender a portion of their own levies to bring the contents of the ship nearer to the mark. The Governor had already resigned himself, dismally, to doing just that by the end of the week if the last hurried sweep of the distrada that he’d ordered didn’t produce enough to satisfy Rhamanus. It wouldn’t, he knew. This was an ambitious captain he was dealing with, and there had been a tenuous harvest in Corte last fall—Rhamanus’s next stop.

His retirement estate in eastern Ygrath, on the promontory he’d already chosen in his mind, seemed farther away this evening than ever before. He signalled for another round of wine for all of them, inwardly grieving for the blue-green sea and the splendid hunting woods by the home he’d probably never be able to build.

On the other hand (as they liked to say here), it appeared that his attempt to sooth the ire of this Rhamanus had been unexpectedly successful. The Governor had asked his wonderful Arduini—the true and only joy there was for him in this benighted place—to prepare an evening meal for them of an unforgettable order.

‘All of my meals are unforgettable.’ Arduini had bridled predictably, but had been mollified by a judicious mixture of flattery, gold ygras, and a quiet reminder (almost certainly not the truth, the Governor reflected unrepentantly) that their guest that evening had ready access to the ear of the King on Chiara.

The meal had been an ascending series of revelations, the service prompt, soothing and unobtrusive, the wines a sequence of complementary grace notes to Arduini’s undeniable artistry. Rhamanus, a man who appeared to keep his trim physique with some difficulty, had progressed from edginess through guarded appreciation, to increasing pleasure, ending up in a volubly expansive good humour.

Somewhere in the next-to-last bottle of dessert wine imported from back home in Ygrath he had also become quite drunk.

Which was the only explanation, the only possible explanation, for the fact that, after the dinner was over and The Queen closed for the night, he’d had their evening’s dark-haired waitress formally seized as Tribute for Brandin in Chiara and bundled directly on to the galley in the river.

The serving-girl. The serving-girl from Certando.

Certando, on the other side of the border, where Alberico of Barbadior held sway, not, alas, Brandin of Ygrath.

The Governor of Stevanien had been awakened at dawn from a fitful, wine-fogged slumber by a terrified, apologetic Clerk of the Council. Unclothed and without so much as a whiff of his morning khav he had heard— through the ominous pounding of a colossal headache— the nature of the news.

‘Stop that galley!’ he roared, as the horrifying implications fought their way through to register upon his slowly emerging consciousness. He had tried to roar, anyway. What came forth was a pitiful squeal that had been, none the less, sufficiently explicit to send the clerk flying, his gown flapping in his haste to obey.

They blocked the River Sperion, stopping Rhamanus just as he was raising anchor.

Unfortunately the Tribute captain then proceeded to reveal a stubbornness that ran stupefyingly counter to the most rudimentary political good sense. He refused to surrender the girl. For one wild, hallucinatory moment of insanity the Governor actually contemplated storming the galley.

The river galley of Brandin, King of Ygrath, Lord of Burrakh in Khardhun, Tyrant of the western provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm. Said galley then flying—rather pointedly—Brandin’s own device as well as the royal banner of Ygrath.

Death-wheels, the Governor reflected, were lovingly made for minor functionaries who essayed such manoeuvres.

Desperately, his brain curdling in the unfair brightness of the morning sunlight by the river, the Governor tried to find a way of communicating reason to a Tribute captain seized by the manifest throes of a midsummer madness.

‘Do you want to start a war?’ he shouted from the dock. He had to shout from the dock; they wouldn’t let him on the galley. The wretched girl was nowhere to be seen; stowed, doubtless in the captain’s cabin. The Governor wished she were dead. He wished that he himself was dead. He wished, in the most grievous inner sacrilege of all, that Arduini the master chef had never set foot in Stevanien.

‘And why,’ Captain Rhamanus called blandly from the middle of the river, ‘should my doing my precise duty by my King cause any such a thing?’

‘Has the sea salt