Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

from him. They wrote paeans of exaltation to the Tyrant and obscene, scathing attacks on Alberico at request. Here, every writer in the Eastern Palm seemed to be a potential rabble-rouser. An enemy of the state.

Alberico swallowed his anger, lauded the technical skill of the verses, and let both sets of poets go free. Not before suggesting, however, as benignly as he could manage, that he would enjoy reading verses as well-crafted on one of the many possible themes of rich satiric possibility having to do with Brandin of Ygrath. He had managed a smile. He would be very pleased to read such verses, he’d said, wondering if one of these cursed writers with their lofty airs could take a hint.

None did. Instead, a new poem appeared on walls all over the city two mornings later. It was about Tomasso bar Sandre. A lament about his death, and claiming— unbelievably—that his perverse sexuality had been a deliberately chosen path, a living metaphor for his conquered, subjugated land, for the perverse situation of Astibar under tyranny.

He’d had no choice after that, once he’d understood what the poet was saying. Not bothering with inquiries again, he’d had a dozen writers pulled at random out of the khav rooms that same afternoon, and then broken wristed, and sky-wheeled among the still-crowded bodies of the families of the conspirators before sundown. He closed all khav rooms for a month. No more verses appeared.

In Astibar. But the same evening his new taxes were proclaimed in the Market Square in Tregea, a black-haired woman elected to leap to her death from one of the seven bridges in protest against the measures. She made a speech before she jumped, and she left behind— the gods alone knew how she’d come into possession of them—a complete sheaf of the ‘Sandreni Elegies’ from Astibar. No one knew who she was. They dragged the icy river for her body but it was never found. Rivers ran swiftly in Tregea, out of the mountains to the eastern sea.

The verses were all over that province within a fortnight, and had crossed to Certando and southern Ferraut before the first heavy snows of the winter began to fall.

Brandin of Ygrath sent an elegantly fur-clad courier to Astibar with an elegantly phrased note lauding the Elegies as the first decent creative work he’d seen emanating from Barbadian territory. He offered Alberico his sincerest congratulations.

Alberico sent a polite acknowledgement of the sentiments and offered to commission one of his newly competent verse-makers to do a work on the glorious life and deeds in battle of Prince Valentin di Tigana.

Because of the Ygrathen’s spell, he knew, only Brandin himself would be able to read that last word, but only Brandin mattered.

He thought he’d won that one, but for some reason the woman’s suicide in Tregea left him feeling too edgy to be pleased. It was too intense an action, harking back to the violence of the first year after he’d landed here. Things had been quiet for so long, and this level of intensity—of very public intensity—never boded well. Briefly he even considered rolling back the new taxes, but that would look too much like a giving in rather than a gesture of benevolence. Besides, he still needed the money for the army. Back home the word was that the Emperor was sinking more rapidly now, that he was seen in public less and less often. Alberico knew he had to keep his mercenaries happy.

In the dead of winter he made the decision to reward Karalius with fully half of the former Nievolene lands.

The night after the announcement was made public— among the troops first, then cried in the Grand Square of Astibar—the horse barn and several of the outbuildings of the Nievolene family estate were burned to the ground.

He ordered an immediate investigation by Karalius, then wished, a day later, that he hadn’t. It seemed that they had found two bodies in the smouldering ruins, trapped by a fallen beam that had barred a door. One was that of an informer linked to Grancial and the Second Company. The other was a Barbadian soldier: from the Second Company.

Karalius promptly challenged Grancial to a duel at any time and place of the latter’s choosing. Grancial immediately named a date and place. Alberico quickly made it clear that the survivor of any such combat would be death-wheeled. He succeeded in halting the fight, but the two commanders stopped speaking to each other from that point on. There were a number of small skirmishes among men of the two companies, and one, in Tregea, that was not so small, leaving fifteen soldiers slain and twice as many wounded.

Three local informers were found dead in Ferraut’s distrada, stretched on farmers’ wagon-wheels in a savage parody of the Tyrant’s justice. They couldn’t even retaliate—that would involve an admission that the men had been informers.

In Certando, two of Siferval’s Third Company went absent from duty, disappearing into the snow-white countryside, the first time that had ever happened. Siferval reported that local women did not appear to be involved. The men had been extremely close friends. The Third Company commander offered the obvious, disagreeable hypothesis.

Late in the winter Brandin of Ygrath sent another suave envoy with another letter. In it he profusely thanked Alberico for his offer of verses, and said he’d be delighted to read them. He also formally requested six Certandan women, as young and comely as the one Alberico had so kindly allowed him to take from the Eastern Palm some years ago, to be added to his saishan. Unforgivably the letter somehow became public information.

Laughter was deadly.

To quell it, Alberico had six old women seized by Siferval in southwestern Certando. He ordered them blinded and hamstrung and set down under a courier’s flag on the snow-clad border of Lower Corte between the forts at Sinave and Forese. He had Siferval attach a letter to one of them asking Brandin to acknowledge receipt of his new mistresses.

Let