Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

Alberico to promulgate and begin enforcing a law that no youth of less than seventeen years could buy a drink in Astibar.

Eanna’s dust-dry priests celebrated—in whatever ascetic fashion such men celebrated—their petty triumph over the priests of Morian and the elegant priestesses of the god: both of which deities were associated with darker passions and, inevitably, wine.

Tavern-keepers were quietly unhappy (it didn’t do to be loudly unhappy in Astibar), though not so much for the loss of trade as for the insidious manner in which the law was enforced. The promulgated law had simply placed the burden of establishing a patron’s age on the owner of each inn, tavern, or khav room. At the same time, if any of the ubiquitous Barbadian mercenaries should happen to drop by, and should happen— arbitrarily—to decide that a given patron looked too young . . . well, that was one tavern closed for a month and one tavern-keeper locked up for the same length of time.

All of which left the sixteen-year-olds in Astibar truly out of luck. Along with, it gradually became evident through the course of a morning, one small, boyish-looking nineteen-year-old singer from Asoli.

After three summary ejections along the west side of the Street of the Temples, Devin was briefly tempted to go across the road to the Shrine of Morian, fake an ecstasy, and hope they favoured Senzian green here as a means of succouring the overly ecstatic. As another, even less rational, option he contemplated breaking a window in Eanna’s domed shrine and testing if any of the ball-less imbeciles inside could catch him in a sprint.

He forebore to do so, as much out of genuine devotion to Eanna of the Names as to an oppressive awareness of how many very large and heavily armed Barbadian mercenaries patrolled the streets of Astibar. The Barbadians were everywhere in the Eastern Palm of course, but nowhere was their presence so disturbingly evident as it was in Astibar where Alberico had based himself.

In the end, Devin wished a serious head-cold on himself and headed west towards the harbour and then, following his unfortunately still-functioning sense of smell, towards Tannery Lane. And there, made almost ill by the effluence of the tanner’s craft, which quite overwhelmed the salt of the sea, he was given an open bottle of green, no questions asked, in a tavern called The Bird, by a shambling, loose-limbed innkeeper whose eyes were probably inadequate to the dark shadows of his windowless, one-room establishment.

Even this nondescript, evil-smelling hole was completely full. Astibar was crammed to overflowing for tomorrow’s start of the Festival of Vines. The harvest had been a good one everywhere but in Certando, Devin knew, and there were plenty of people with astins or chiaros to spend, and in a mood to spend them too.

There were certainly no free tables to be had in The Bird. Devin wedged himself into a corner where the dark, pitted wood of the bar met the back wall, took a judicious sip of his wine—watered but not unusually so, he decided— and composed his mind and soul towards a meditation upon the perfidy and unreasonableness of women.

As embodied, specifically, by Catriana d’Astibar these past two weeks.

He calculated that he had enough time before the late-afternoon rehearsal—the last before their opening engagement at the city home of a small wine-estate owner tomorrow—to muse his way through most of a bottle and still show up sober. He was the experienced trouper anyhow, he thought indignantly. He was a partner. He knew the performance routines like a hand knew a glove. The extra rehearsals had been laid on by Menico for the benefit of the three new people in the troupe.

Including impossible Catriana. Who happened to be the reason he had stormed out of the morning rehearsal a short while before he knew that Menico planned to call the session to a halt. How, in the name of Adaon, was he supposed to react when an inexperienced new female who thought she could sing—and to whom he’d been genuinely friendly since she’d joined them a fortnight ago—said what she’d said in front of everyone that morning?

Cursed with memory, Devin saw the nine of them rehearsing again in the rented back room on the ground floor of their inn. Four musicians, the two dancers, Menico, Catriana, and himself singing up front. They were doing Rauder’s ‘Song of Love’, a piece rather predictably requested by the wine-merchant’s wife, a piece Devin had been singing for nearly six years, a song he could manage in a stupor, a coma, sound asleep.

And so perhaps, yes, he’d been a little bored, a little distracted, had been leaning a little closer than absolutely necessary to their newest, red-headed female singer, putting perhaps the merest shading of a message into his expression and voice, but still, even so . . .

‘Devin, in the name of the Triad,’ had snapped Catriana d’Astibar, breaking up the rehearsal entirely, ‘do you think you can get your mind away from your groin for long enough to do a decent harmony? This is not a difficult song!’

The affliction of a fair complexion had hurtled Devin’s face all the way to bright red. Menico, he saw—Menico who should have been sharply reprimanding the girl for her presumption—was laughing helplessly, even more flushed than Devin was. So were the others, all of them.

Unable to think of a reply, unwilling to compromise the tattered shreds of his dignity by yielding to his initial impulse to reach up and whack the girl across the back of her head, Devin had simply spun on his heel and left.

He’d thrown one reproachful glance at Menico as he went but was not assuaged: the troupe-leader’s ample paunch was quivering with laughter as he wiped tears from his round, bearded face.

So Devin had gone looking for a bottle of Senzio green and a dark place to drink it in on a brilliant autumn morning in Astibar. Having finally found the wine