Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

fury had seemed to border on the irrational. He had clearly, his aides decided, been radically unsettled by whatever had happened in the forest. Certainly he didn’t look well; there was something odd about one of his eyes, and his walk was peculiar. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, it became manifest, as the local informers for each of the three companies began to bring in their reports, that Astibar town simply did not believe—or chose not to believe—that anything had happened in the forest, that there had been any Sandreni conspiracy at all.

Certainly not with the Lords Scalvaia and Nievole, and most certainly not led by Tomasso bar Sandre. People were commenting cynically all over the city, the word came. Too many of them knew of the bone-deep hatreds that divided those three families. Too many knew the stories about Sandre’s middle son, the alleged leader of this alleged plot. He might kidnap a boy from a temple of Morian, Astibar was saying, but plot against a Tyrant? With Nievole and Scalvaia?

No, the city was simply too sophisticated to fall for that. Anyone with the slightest sense of geography or economics could see what was really going on. How, by trumping up this ‘threat’ from three of the five largest landowners in the distrada, Alberico was merely creating a sleek cover for an otherwise naked land grab.

It was only sheerest coincidence, of course, that the Sandreni estates were central, the Nievolene farms lay to the southwest along the Ferraut border, and Scalvaia’s vineyards were in the richest belt in the north where the best grapes for the blue wine were grown. An immensely convenient conspiracy, all the taverns and khav rooms agreed.

And every single conspirator was dead overnight, as well. Such swift justice! Such an accumulation of evidence against them! There had been an informer among the Sandreni, it was proclaimed. He was dead. Of course. Tomasso bar Sandre had led the conspiracy, they were told. He too, most unfortunately, was dead.

Led by Astibar itself all four provinces of the Eastern Palm reacted with bitter, sardonic disbelief. They may have been conquered, ground under the heavy Barbadian heel, but they had not been deprived of their intelligence or rendered blind. They knew a Tyrant’s scheming when they saw it.

Tomasso bar Sandre as a skilled, deadly plotter? Astibar, reeling under the economic impact of the confiscations, and the horror of the executions, still found itself able to mock. And then there arrived the first of the viciously funny verses from the west—from Chiara itself—written by Brandin himself some said, though rather more likely commissioned from one of the poets who hovered about that court. Verses lampooning Alberico as seeing plots hatching in every barnyard and using them as an excuse to seize fowls and vegetable gardens all over the Eastern Palm. There were also a few, not very subtle sexual innuendos thrown in for good measure.

The poems, posted on walls all over the city—and then in Tregea and Certando and Ferraut—were torn down by the Barbadians almost as fast as they went up. Unfortunately they were memorable rhymes, and people didn’t need to read or hear them more than once.

Alberico would later acknowledge to himself that he’d lost control a little. He would also admit inwardly that a great deal of his rage stemmed from a fierce indignation and the aftermath of fear.

There had been a conspiracy led by that mincing Sandreni. They had very nearly killed him in that cursed cabin in the woods.

This once, he was telling the absolute truth. There was no pretence or deception. He had every claim of justice on his side. What he didn’t have was a confession, or a witness, or any evidence at all. He’d needed his informer alive. Or Tomasso. He’d wanted Tomasso alive. His dreams that first night had been shot through with vivid images of Sandre’s son, bound and stripped and curved invitingly backwards on one of the machines.

In the aftermath of the pervert’s inexplicable death, and the unanimous word from all four provinces that no one believed a word of what had happened, Alberico had abandoned his original, carefully measured response to the plot.

The lands were seized of course, but in addition all the living members of all three families were searched out and death-wheeled in Astibar. He hadn’t expected there to be quite so many, actually, when he gave that order. The stench had been deplorable and some of the children lived an unconscionably long time on the wheels. It made it difficult to concentrate on business in the state offices above the Grand Square.

He raised taxes in Astibar and introduced, for the first time, transit duties for merchants crossing from one of his provinces to another, along the lines of the existing tariff levied for crossing from the Eastern to the Western Palm. Let them pay—literally—if they chose not to believe what had happened to him in that cabin.

He did more. Half the massive Nievolene grain harvest was promptly shipped home to Barbadior. For an action conceived in anger he considered that one to be inspired. It had pushed the price of grain down back home in the Empire, which hurt his family’s two most ancient rivals while making him exceptionally popular with the people. In so far as the people mattered in Barbadior.

At the same time, here in the Palm, Astibar was forced to bring in more grain than ever from Certando and Ferraut, and with the new duties Alberico was going to rake a healthy cut of that inflated price as well.

He could almost have slaked his anger, almost have made himself happy, watching the effects of all this ripple through, if it wasn’t that small things kept happening.

For one, his soldiers began to grow restless. With an increase in hardship came an increase in tension; more incidents of confrontation occurred. Especially in Tregea where there were always more incidents of confrontation. Under greater stress the mercenaries demanded— predictably—higher pay. Which, if