Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

rotted your miserable excuse for a brain?’ the Governor screamed, ill-advisedly. The captain’s brow darkened. The Governor pushed on, dripping with sweat in the sun.

‘She’s a Certandan, in the name of the seven holy sisters of the god! Do you have any idea how easy it will be to goad Alberico into starting a border war over this?’ He mopped at his brow with the square of red cloth a servant belatedly produced.

Rhamanus, cursedly composed despite having drunk at least as much as the Governor the night before, seemed unimpressed.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he pronounced airily, the words drifting over the water, ‘she’s living in Stevanien, she’s working in Stevanien, and she was taken in Stevanien. By my reckoning that makes her perfectly suitable for the saishan, or whatever our King, in his wisdom, decides to do with her.’ He levelled a finger suddenly at the Governor. ‘Now clear the river of these boats or I will ram and sink them in the name of each of the seven sisters and the King of Ygrath. Unless,’ he added, leaning forward, lowering his hand to the railing, ‘you would care to farspeak Chiara and have the King settle this himself?’

They had a saying here in the colony: naked between a fist and a fist. It was an exact phrase for the place where that insidious, cleverly calculated, viciously unfair proposition put the man to whom it was addressed. A phrase that described in precise and graphic terms where the Governor of Stevanien abruptly felt himself to be. The red cloth swabbed repeatedly, and ineffectually, at his forehead and neck.

One did not farspeak the King without, it had been painstakingly impressed upon all the regional administrators in the Western Palm, very compelling reason. The power demanded of Brandin to sustain such a link with his nonsorcerous underlings was considerable.

One most particularly did not willingly undertake such a course of action in the very early morning hours when the King might be asleep. Most relevant of all, perhaps, one did not hasten to bespeak the mental presence of one’s monarch with a mind clogged and befuddled with the miasmic aftermath of wine, and over an issue that—in essence—might be seen to involve no more than the Tribute seizure of a common farm girl.

That was one of the fists.

The other was war on the border. With the brain-battering possibility of more than that. For who, in the name of the sisters and the god, knew how the devious pagan mind of Alberico of Barbadior worked? How he might regard—or decide to regard—an incident such as this? Despite Rhamanus’s glib analysis, the fact that the girl worked in The Queen made it obvious that she wasn’t really a Lower Cortean. In the name of the sisters, they couldn’t even seize a Lower Cortean for tribute! They weren’t allowed to, by order of the King. To take the woman, she had to be Certandan. If Rhamanus wanted to argue she was a resident of Stevanien, well that made her a Lower Cortean which meant that they couldn’t take her! Which meant that . . . he didn’t know what that meant. The Governor held out his sopping kerchief and it was exchanged for a fresh one. His brain felt as if it was frying in the sun.

All he had wanted out of his declining years in service was the quiet, mildly lucrative postings his family’s long, if fairly minor, support of Brandin’s original claim to succession in Ygrath had earned them. That was it. All he wanted. With a decent house on that eastern promontory one day where he could watch the sun come up out of the sea and go hunting in the woods with his dogs. So very much to ask?

Instead, a fist and a fist.

He briefly considered washing his hands of the whole affair—and let the cursed inhabitants of this peninsula chew on that for a phrase!—letting the imbecilic Tribute captain row his galley down the river just as he pleased. In fact, he realized, lamentably too late, if he had stayed in bed and pretended he’d not received the message in time he would have been entirely blameless in this affair of a drunken captain’s blunder. He closed his eyes, tasting the exquisite, vanished sweetness of such a possibility.

Too late. He was standing by the riverside in the blinding light and the heat of the sun, and half of Stevanien had heard what he and Rhamanus had just shouted back and forth across the water.

With a small, diffident prayer to his own patron gods of food and forest, and a poignantly clear image of that seaside estate, the Governor chose his fist.

‘Let me on board then,’ he said as briskly as he could manage. ‘I’m not about to farspeak the King while standing on this dock. I want a chair and some quiet and an extremely strong mug of whatever passes for khav on a galley.’

Rhamanus was visibly nonplussed. The Governor was able to derive a certain sour pleasure from that.

They gave him everything he asked for. The woman was taken below deck and he was left alone in the captain’s cabin. He took a deep breath and then several more. He drank the khav, scalding his tongue which, as much as anything else, woke him up. Then, for the first time in three years of office, he narrowed his mind down to a pinpoint image as Brandin had taught him, and he framed, questioningly, the name of the King in his thoughts.

With profoundly unsettling speed Brandin’s crisp, cool, always slightly mocking voice was in his head. It was dizzying. The Governor fought to keep his composure. As carefully but as quickly as he could—speed mattered, they had all been taught—he outlined the situation they faced. He apologized twice, en route, but dared not risk the time required for a third, however much his lifetime’s instincts bade him to. What good were a career diplomat’s lifetime instincts when enmeshed in sorcery?