Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

nightfall, but something kept driving him out to walk the streets, past the random fires that still smouldered on almost every corner. It was as if he was daring the Ygrathen patrols to catch him. To punish him for being fourteen in the season of war.

Two soldiers were knifed in the dark that fall. Twenty death-wheels were hoisted in swift response. Six women and five children were among those bound aloft to die. Dianora knew most of them; there weren’t so very many people left in the city, they all knew each other. The screaming of the children, then their diminishing cries were things she needed shelter from in her nights forever after.

No more soldiers were killed.

Her brother continued to go out at night. She would lie awake until she heard him come in. He always made a sound, deliberately, so she would hear him and be able to fall asleep. Somehow, he knew she would be awake, though she had never said a word.

He would have been handsome, with his dark hair and deep brown eyes, if he hadn’t been so thin and if the eyes were not shadowed and ringed by sleeplessness and grief. There was not a great deal of food that first winter—most of the harvest had been burned, and the rest confiscated—but Dianora did the best she could to feed the five of them. About the look in his eyes there was nothing she could do. Everyone had that look that year. She could see it in her mirror.

The following spring the Ygrathen soldiers discovered a new form of sport. It had probably been inevitable that they would, one of the evil growths that sprang from the deep-sown seeds of Brandin’s vengeance.

Dianora remembered being at an upstairs window the day it began. She was watching her brother and the apprentice—no longer an apprentice, of course—walking through a sun-brightened early morning across the square on their way to the site where they were labouring. White clouds had been drifting by overhead, scudding with the wind. A small cluster of soldiers came from the opposite side and accosted the two boys. Her window was open to air the room and catch the freshness of the breeze; she heard it all.

‘Help us!’ one of the soldiers bleated with a smirk she could see from her window. ‘We’re lost,’ he moaned, as the others quickly surrounded the boys. He drew sly chuckles from his fellows. One of them elbowed another in the ribs.

‘Where are we?’ the soldier begged.

Eyes carefully lowered, her brother named the square and the streets leading from it.

‘That’s no good!’ the soldier complained. ‘What good are street names to me? I don’t even know what cursed town I’m in!’ There was laughter; Dianora winced at what she heard in it.

‘Lower Corte,’ the apprentice muttered quickly, as her brother kept silent. They noticed the silence though.

‘What town? You tell me,’ the spokesman said more sharply, prodding her brother in the shoulder.

‘I just told you. Lower Corte,’ the apprentice intervened loudly. One of the soldiers cuffed him on the side of the head. The boy staggered and almost fell; he refused to lift a hand to touch his head.

Her pulse pounding with fright, Dianora saw her brother look up then. His dark hair gleamed in the morning sunlight. She thought he was going to strike the soldier who had dealt that blow. She thought he was going to die. She stood up at her window, her hands clenched on the ledge. There was a terrible silence in the square below. The sun was very bright.

‘Lower Corte,’ her brother said, as though he were choking on the words.

Laughing raucously the soldiers let them go.

For that morning.

The two boys became the favourite victims of that company, which patrolled their district between the Palace by the Sea and the centre of town where the three temples stood. None of the temples of the Triad had been smashed, only the statuary that stood outside and within them. Two had been her father’s work. A young, seductively graceful Morian, and a huge, primal figure of Eanna stretching forth her hands to make the stars.

The boys began leaving the house earlier and earlier as spring wore on, taking roundabout routes in an attempt to avoid the soldiers. Most mornings, though, they were still found. The Ygrathens were bored by then; the boys’ very efforts to elude them offered sport.

Dianora used to go to that same upstairs window at the front of the house when they left by way of the square, as if by watching whatever happened, sharing it, she could somehow spread the pain among three, not two, and so ease it for them. The soldiers almost always accosted them just as they reached the square. She was watching on the day the game changed to something worse.

It was afternoon that time. A half-day of work only, because of a Triad holiday—part of the aftermath to the springtime Ember Days. The Ygrathens, like the Barbadians to the east, had been scrupulous not to tamper with the Triad and their clergy. After their lunch the two boys went out to do an afternoon’s work.

The soldiers surrounded them in the middle of the square. They never seemed to tire of their sport. But that afternoon, just as the leader began his familiar litany of being lost a group of four merchants came trudging up the hill from the harbour and one of the soldiers had an inspiration born of sheerest malice.

‘Stop!’ he rasped. The merchants did, very abruptly. One obeyed Ygrathen commands in Lower Corte, wherever one might be from.

‘Come here,’ the soldier added. His fellows made way for the merchants to stand in front of the boys. A premonition of something evil touched Dianora in that moment like a cold finger on her spine.

The four traders reported that they were from Asoli. It was obvious from their clothing.

‘Good,’ the soldier said. ‘I know how grasping you lot are. Now listen to me. These brats