Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

‘Why didn’t I say goodbye to him?’ she heard him say in a strangled voice. ‘Why didn’t you make me say goodbye to him?’ She had never heard so much hurt in him. Not even when word had come that their father had died by the river.

Her heart aching, Dianora put the candle down on a ledge that once had held a portrait bust of her mother by her father. She crossed the narrow distance and took her brother in her arms, absorbing the hard racking of his sobs. He had never cried before. Or never so that she could see. She guided him into her room and lay down beside him on her bed, holding him close. They wept together, thus, for a very long time. She could not have said how long.

Her window was open. She could hear the breeze sigh through the young leaves outside. A bird sang, and another answered it from across the lane. The world was a place of dreaming or of sorrow, one or both of those. One or both. In the sanctuary of night she slowly pulled his tunic over his head, careful of his wounds, and then she slipped free of her own robe. Her heart was beating like the heart of a captured forest creature. She could feel the race of his pulse when her fingers touched his throat. Both of the moons had set. The wind was in all the leaves outside. And so.

And so in all that darkness, dark over and about and close-gathered around them, the full dark of moonless night and the darkness of their days, the two of them sought a pitiful illicit shelter in each other from the ruin of their world.

‘What are we doing?’ her brother whispered once. And then, a space of time later when pulse-beats had slowed again, leaving them clinging to each other in the aftermath of a headlong, terrifying need, he had said, one hand gentle in her hair, ‘What have we done?’

And all these long years later, alone in the saishan on the Island as this most hidden memory came back, Dianora could remember her reply.

‘Oh, Baerd,’ she’d said. ‘What has been done to us?’

IT LASTED FROM that first night through the whole of spring and into the summer. The sin of the gods, it was named, what they did. For Adaon and Eanna were said to have been brother and sister at the beginning of time, and Morian was their child.

Dianora didn’t feel like a goddess, and her mirror offered no illusions: only a too-thin face with enormous, staring eyes. She knew only that her happiness terrified her, and consumed her with guilt, and that her love for Baerd was the whole of her world. And what frightened her almost as much was seeing the same depth of love, the same astonished passion in him. Her heart misgave her constantly, even as they reached for their fugitive joy: too bright this forbidden flame in a land where any kind of brightness was lost or not allowed.

He came to her every night. The woman slept downstairs; their mother slept—and woke—in her own world. In the dark of Dianora’s room they escaped into each other, reaching through loss and the knowledge of wrong in search of innocence.

He was still driven to go out some nights to walk the empty streets. Not as often as before, for which she gave thanks and sought a kind of justification for herself. A number of young men had been caught after curfew and killed on the wheels that spring. If what she was doing kept him alive she would face whatever judgement lay in wait for her in Morian’s Halls.

She couldn’t keep him every night though. Sometimes a need she could not share or truly understand would drive him forth. He tried to explain. How the city was different under the two moons or one of them or the stars. How softer light and shadow let him see it as Tigana again. How he could walk silently down towards the sea and come upon the darkened palace, and how the rubble and ruin of it could somehow be rebuilt in his mind in darkness towards what it had been before.

He had a need for that, he said. He never baited the soldiers and promised her he never would. He didn’t even want to see them, he said. They crashed into the illusions he wanted. He just needed to be abroad inside his memory of the city that had gone. Sometimes, Baerd told her, he would slip through gaps he knew in the harbour walls and walk along the beach listening to the sea.

By day he laboured, a thin boy at a strong man’s job, helping to rebuild what they were permitted to rebuild. Rich merchants from Corte—their ancient enemies—had been allowed to settle in the city, to buy up the smashed buildings and residential palaces very inexpensively, and to set about restoring them for their own purposes.

Baerd would come home at the end of a day sometimes with gashes and fresh bruises, and once the mark of a whip across his shoulders. She knew that if one company of soldiers had ended their sport with him there were others to pick it up. It was only happening here, she’d heard. Everywhere else the soldiers restrained themselves and the King of Ygrath was governing with care, to consolidate his provinces against Barbadior.

In Lower Corte they were special, though. They had killed his son.

She would see those marks on Baerd and she had not the heart to ask him to deny himself his lost city at night when the need rose in him. Even though she lived a hundred terrors and died half a hundred deaths every time the front door closed behind him after dark—until she heard it open again and heard his loved, familiar footstep on the stairs, and then the landing, and then he came into her room