Tigana Part 2

Catriana simply ignored all of this, looking him up and down coldly. 'You are are going to need a wash and a change,' she said, from behind the scented handkerchief. 'I hadn't counted on that much of a reaction inside. But not having a surplus of astins to spend on bribes I couldn't think of a better way to get tavern-owners to bother looking for you.' going to need a wash and a change,' she said, from behind the scented handkerchief. 'I hadn't counted on that much of a reaction inside. But not having a surplus of astins to spend on bribes I couldn't think of a better way to get tavern-owners to bother looking for you.'

It was an explanation, Devin noted, but not an apology.

'Forgive me,' he said, with exaggerated contrition. 'I must talk with Menico-it seems we aren't paying you enough, in addition to all our other transgressions. You must be used to better things.'

She hesitated for the first time. 'Must we discuss this in the middle of Tannery Lane?' she said.

Without a word Devin sketched a performance bow and gestured for her to lead the way. She started walking away from the harbour and he fell in stride beside her. They were silent for several minutes, until out of the range of the tannery smells. With a faint sigh Catriana put away her handkerchief.

'Where are you taking me?' Devin asked.

Another transgression, it seemed. The blue eyes flashed with anger.

'In the name of the Triad where would would I be taking you?' Catriana's voice dripped with sarcasm. 'We are going to my room at the inn for a session of love-making like Eanna and Adaon at the dawn of days.' I be taking you?' Catriana's voice dripped with sarcasm. 'We are going to my room at the inn for a session of love-making like Eanna and Adaon at the dawn of days.'

'Oh, good,' Devin snapped, his own anger rekindling. 'Why don't we pool our funds and buy another woman to come play Morian-just so I don't get bored, you understand.'

Catriana paled, but before she could open her mouth Devin grabbed her arm with his free hand and swung her around to face him in the street. Looking up into those blue eyes (and cursing the fact that he had to do that) he snapped: 'Catriana, what exactly have I done to you? Why do I deserve that sort of answer? Or what you did this morning? I've been pleasant to you from the day we signed you on-and if you're a professional you know that isn't always the case in troupes on the road. If you must know, Marra, the woman you replaced, was my closest friend in the company. She died of the plague in Certando. I could have made life very hard for you. I didn't and I'm not. I did let you know from the first that I found you attractive. I'm not aware that there is a sin in that if it is done with courtesy.'

He released her arm, abruptly conscious that he had been gripping it very hard and that they were in an extremely public place, even with the early-afternoon lull. Instinctively he looked around; thankfully there were no Barbadians pa.s.sing just then. There was a familiar tight feeling in his chest, as of the apprehended return of pain, that always came with the thought of Marra. The first true friend of his life. Two neglected children, with voices that were gifts of Eanna, telling each other fears and dreams for three years in changing beds across the Palm at night. His first lover. First death.

Catriana, released, remained where she was, and there was a look in her own eyes-perhaps at the naming of death-that made him abruptly revise his estimate of her age downwards. He'd thought she was older than him; now he wasn't sure.

He waited, breathing quickly after his outburst, and at length he heard her say very softly, 'You sing too well.'

Devin blinked. It was not at all what he'd expected.

'I have to work very hard at performing,' she went on, her face flus.h.i.+ng for the first time. 'Rauder is hard for me-all of his music. And this morning you were doing the "Song of Love" without even thinking about it, amusing the others, trying to charm me ... Devin, I have to concentrate concentrate when I sing! You were making me nervous and I snap at people when I'm nervous.' when I sing! You were making me nervous and I snap at people when I'm nervous.'

Devin drew a careful breath and looked around the empty sunlit street for a moment, thinking. He said, 'Do you know ... has anyone ever told you ... that it is possible and even useful to tell things like this to people-especially the people who have to work with you?'

She shook her head. 'Not for me. I've never been able to talk like that. Not ever.'

'Why do it now, then?' he risked. 'Why did did you come after me?' you come after me?'

A longer pause than before. A cl.u.s.ter of artisans' apprentices swept around the corner, hooting with reflexive ribaldry at the sight of the two of them standing together. There was no malice in it though, and they went by without causing any trouble. A few red and golden leaves skipped over the cobbles in the breeze.

'Something's happened,' Catriana d'Astibar said, 'and Menico told us all that you are the key to our chances.'

'Menico sent you after me?' It was almost completely improbable, after nearly six years together. sent you after me?' It was almost completely improbable, after nearly six years together.

'No,' Catriana said, quickly shaking her head. 'No, he said you'd be back in time, that you always were. I was nervous though, with so much at stake. I couldn't just wait around. You'd left a little, um, upset, after all.'

'A little,' Devin agreed gravely, noting that she finally had the grace to look apologetic. He would have felt even more secure if he hadn't continued to find her so attractive. He couldn't stop himself from wondering-even now-what her b.r.e.a.s.t.s would look like, freed from the stiffness of her high-cut bodice. Marra would have told him, he knew, and even helped him with a conquest. They had done that for each other, and shared the tales after, travelling through that last year on the road before Certando where she died.

'You had better tell me what's happened,' he said, forcing his thoughts back to the present. There was danger in fantasies and in memories, both.

'The exiled Duke, Sandre, died last night,' Catriana said. She looked around but the street was empty again. 'For some reason-no one is sure why-Alberico is allowing his body to lie in state at the Sandreni Palace tonight and tomorrow morning, and then ...

She paused, the blue eyes bright. Devin, his pulse suddenly leaping, finished it for her: 'A funeral? Full rites? Don't tell me!'

'Full rites! And Devin, Menico's been asked to audition this afternoon! We have a chance to do the most talked-about performance in the whole of the Palm this year!' She looked very young now. And quite unsettlingly beautiful. Her eyes were s.h.i.+ning like a child's.

'So you came to get me,' he murmured, nodding his head slowly, 'before I drank myself into a useless stupor of frustrated desire.' He had the edge now, for the first time. It was a pleasant turnabout, especially coupled with the real excitement of her news. He began walking, forcing her to fall in stride with him. For a change.

'It isn't like that,' she protested. 'It's just that this is so so important. Menico said your voice would be the key to our hopes ... that you were at your best in the mourning rites.' important. Menico said your voice would be the key to our hopes ... that you were at your best in the mourning rites.'

'I don't know whether to be flattered by that, or insulted that you actually thought I'd be so unprofessional as to miss a rehearsal on the eve of the Festival.'

'Don't be either,' Catriana d'Astibar said, with a hint of returning asperity. 'We don't have time for either. Just be good good this afternoon. Be the best you've ever been.' this afternoon. Be the best you've ever been.'

He ought to resist it, Devin knew, but his spirits were suddenly much too high.

'In that case, are you sure sure we're not going to your room?' he asked blandly. we're not going to your room?' he asked blandly.

More than he could know hung in the balance for the moment that followed. Then Catriana d'Astibar laughed aloud and freely for the first time.

'Now that,' said Devin, grinning, 'is much better. I honestly wasn't sure if you had a sense of humour.'

She grew quiet. 'Sometimes I'm not sure either,' she said, almost absently. Then, in a rather different voice: 'Devin, I want this contract more than I can tell you.'

'Well of course,' he replied. 'It could make our careers.'

'That's right,' Catriana said. She touched his shoulder and repeated, 'I want this more than I can say.'

He might have sought a promise in that touch had he been a little less perceptive, and had it not been for the way she spoke the words. There was, in fact, nothing at all of ambition in that tone, nor of desire in the way that Devin had come to know desire.

What he heard was longing, and it reached towards a s.p.a.ce inside him that he hadn't known was there.

'I'll do what I can,' he said after a moment, thinking, for no good reason, of Marra and the tears he'd shed.

On the farm in Asoli they had known he was gifted with music quite early, but it was an isolated place and none of them had a frame of reference whereby to properly judge or measure such things.

One of Devin's first memories of his father-one that he summoned often because it was a soft image of a hard man-was of Garin humming the tune of some old cradle song to help Devin fall asleep one night when he was feverish.

The boy-four perhaps-had woken in the morning with his fever broken, humming the tune to himself with perfect pitch. Garin's face had taken on the complex expression that Devin would later learn to a.s.sociate with his father's memories of his wife. That morning though, Garin had kissed his youngest child. The only time Devin could remember that happening.

The tune became a thing they shared. An access to a limited intimacy. They would hum it together in rough, untutored attempts at harmony. Later Garin bought a scaled-down three-string syrenya for his youngest child on one of his twice-yearly trips to the market in Asoli town. After that there were actually a few evenings Devin did like to remember, when he and his father and the twins would sing ballads of the sea and hills by the fire at night before bed. Escapes from the drear, wet flatness of Asoli.

When he grew older he began to sing for some of the other farmers. At weddings or naming days, and once with a travelling priest of Morian he sang counterpoint during the autumn Ember Days on the 'Hymn to Morian of Portals'. The priest wanted to bed him, after, but by then Devin was learning how to avoid such requests without giving offence.

Later yet, he began to be called upon in the taverns. There were no age laws for drinking in northern Asoli, where a boy was a man when he could do a day in the fields, and a girl was a woman when she first bled.

And it had been in a tavern called The River in Asoli town itself on a market day that Devin, just turned fourteen, had been singing 'The Ride from Corso to Corte' and had been overheard by a portly, bearded man who turned out to be a troupe-leader named Menico di Ferraut and who had taken him away from the farm that week and changed his life.

'We're next,' Menico said, nervously smoothing his best satin doublet over his paunch. Devin, idly picking out his earliest cradle song on one of the spare syrenyae, smiled rea.s.suringly up at his employer. His partner now, actually.

Devin hadn't been an apprentice since he was seventeen. Menico, tired of refusing offers to buy the contract of his young tenor, had finally offered Devin journeyman status in the Guild and a regular salary-after first making clear how very much the young man owed him, and how loyalty was the only marginally adequate way to repay such a large debt of grat.i.tude. Devin knew that, in fact, and he liked Menico anyway.

A year later, after another sequence of offers from rival troupe-leaders during the summer wedding season in Corte, Menico had made Devin a ten-per-cent partner in the company. After making the same speech, almost word for word, as the last time.

The honour, Devin knew, was considerable; only old Eghano who played drums and the Certandan deep strings, and who had been with Menico since the company was formed, had another partners.h.i.+p share. Everyone else was an apprentice or a journeyman on short-term contract. Especially now, when the aftermath of a plague spring in the south had every troupe in the Palm short of bodies and scrambling to fill with temporary musicians, dancers, or singers.

A haunting thread of sound, barely audible, plucked Devin's attention away from his syrenya. He looked over and smiled. Alessan, one of the three new people, was lightly tracing the melody of the cradle song Devin had been playing. On the shepherd pipes of Tregea it sounded unearthly and strange.

Alessan, black-haired, though greying at the temples, winked at him over the busyness of his fingers on the pipes. They finished the piece together, pipes and syrenya, and humming tenor voice.

'I wish I knew the words,' Devin said regretfully as they ended. 'My father taught me that tune as a child, but he could never remember how the words went.'

Alessan's lean, mobile face was reflective. Devin knew little about the Tregean after two weeks of rehearsal other than that the man was extraordinarily good on the pipes and quite reliable. As Menico's partner, that was all that should matter to him. Alessan was seldom around the inn outside of practice-time, but he was always there and punctual for the rehearsals slated.

'I might be able to dredge them up for you if I thought about it,' he said, pus.h.i.+ng a hand through his hair in a characteristic gesture. 'It's been a long time but I knew the words once.' He smiled.

'Don't worry about it,' Devin said. 'I've survived this long without them. It's just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it a winter project to try to track them down.'

Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages he'd asked.

The other man's expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. 'Old songs and memories of fathers are important,' he said. 'Is yours dead then?'

Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.

'Not last I heard, though I've not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaros for me. I don't go back to the farm.'

Alessan considered that. 'Dour Asolini stock?' he guessed. 'No place for a boy with ambition and a voice like yours?' His tone was shrewd.

'Almost exactly,' Devin admitted ruefully. 'Though I wouldn't have called myself ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren't originally from Asoli in fact. Came there from Lower Corte when I was a small child.'

Alessan nodded. 'Even so,' he said.

The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner, Devin decided, but he could could play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaon's own mountain in the south. play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaon's own mountain in the south.

In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.

'We're on!' Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.

'We do the "Lament for Adaon" first,' he announced, telling them something they'd all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the sides of his doublet. 'Devin, that one's yours-make me proud, lad.' His standard exhortation. 'Then all of us are together on the "Circling of Years". Catriana my love, you are sure you can go high enough, or should we pitch down?'

'I'll go high enough,' Catriana replied tersely.

Devin thought her tone spoke to simple nervousness, but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized that earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a sh.o.r.e he didn't know.

'I'd very much like to get this contract,' Alessan di Tregea said just then, mildly enough.

'How extremely surprising!' Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.

'I'll do the best I can,' Devin said after a moment and for the second time that afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.

In the end, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them-as his father used to say-his best was enough.

The princ.i.p.al auditor was a delicately scented, extravagantly dressed scion of the Sandreni, a man-in his late thirties, Devin guessed-who made it manifest, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed his eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didn't appear to be much worried about the descendants of Sandre d'Astibar.

Ranged behind this diverting personage were the priests of Eanna and Morian in white and smoke grey. Beside them, vivid by contrast, sat a priestess of Adaon, in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.

It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasn't surprised by her hair. He was was surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable-another legacy of his father-but this wasn't a situation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from his thoughts. surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable-another legacy of his father-but this wasn't a situation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from his thoughts.

He focused on the Duke's elegant son, the only one who really mattered now. He waited, reaching as Menico had taught him for a still point inside himself.

Menico cued Nieri and Aldine, the two thin dancers in their grey-blue, almost translucent, chemises of mourning and their black gloves. A moment later, after their first linked pa.s.s across the floor, he looked at Devin.

And Devin gave him, gave them all, the lament for Adaon's autumnal dying among the mountain cypresses, as he never had before.

Alessan di Tregea was with him all the way with the high, heart-piercing grief of the shepherd pipes and together the two of them seemed to lift and carry Nieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently swept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the 'Lament' demanded and was so rarely granted.

When they finished, Devin, travelling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from the cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the G.o.d had died-and where he died again each and every autumn-saw that Sandre d'Astibar's son was weeping. The tracks of his tears had smudged the carefully achieved shadowing around his eyes-which meant, Devin realized abruptly, that he hadn't wept for any of the three companies before them.

Marra, young and intolerantly professional, would have been scornful of those tears, he knew: 'Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?' she would say when their mourning rituals were interrupted or marked by displays from their patrons.

Devin had been less stern back then. And was even less so now since she'd died and he had found himself rather desperately fighting back a shameful public grief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Certando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.

Devin also knew, by the smouldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morian's fat-fingered priest-why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!-that though they might have just won the Sandreni contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.

They had had won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the 'Lament'. Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when Sandre's son asked to meet him. He turned out to be the middle son of three, named Toma.s.so. The only one, he explained huskily, holding one of Devin's hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for music and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august an occasion as his father's funeral rites. won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the 'Lament'. Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when Sandre's son asked to meet him. He turned out to be the middle son of three, named Toma.s.so. The only one, he explained huskily, holding one of Devin's hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for music and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august an occasion as his father's funeral rites.

Devin, used to this, politely retrieved his fingers, grateful for Menico's experienced tact: presented as a partner he had some slight immunity from overly aggressive wooers, even among the n.o.bility. He was introduced to the clergy next, and promptly knelt before Adaon's priestess in red.

'Your sanction, sister-of-the-G.o.d, for what I sang, and for what I am asked to do tomorrow.'

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the priest of Morian clench his chubby, ringed fingers at his sides. He accepted the blessing and protection of Adaon-the priestess's index finger tracing the G.o.d's symbol on his brow-in the knowledge that he had successfully defused one priest's burgeoning desire. When he rose and turned, it was to catch a wink-dangerous in that room and among that company-from Alessan di Tregea, at the back with the others. He suppressed a grin, but not his surprise: the shepherd was disconcertingly perceptive.

Menico's first price was immediately accepted by Toma.s.so d'Astibar bar Sandre, confirming in Devin's mind what a sorry creature he was to bear such a magnificent name and lineage.

It would have interested him-and led him a step or two further down the hard road towards maturity-to learn that Duke Sandre himself would have accepted the same price, or twice as much, and in exactly the same manner. Devin was not quite twenty though, and even Menico, three times his age, would loudly curse himself back at the inn amid the celebratory wine for not having quoted even more than the extortionate sum he had just received in full.

Only Eghano, aged and placid, softly drumming two wooden spoons on their trestle table, said, 'Leave well enough. We need not hold out a greedy palm. There will be more of these from now on. If you are wise you'll leave a t.i.the at each of the temples tomorrow. We will earn it back with interest when they choose musicians for the Ember Days.'

Menico, in high good humour, swore even more magnificently than before, and announced a set intention to offer Eghano's wrinkled body as a t.i.the to the fleshy priest of Morian instead. Eghano smiled toothlessly and continued his soft drumming.

Menico ordered them all to bed not long after the evening meal. They'd have an early start tomorrow, pointing towards the most important performance of their lives. He beamed benevolently as Aldine led Nieri from the room. The girls would share a bed that night, Devin was sure, and for the first time, he suspected. He wished them joy of each other, knowing that they had come together magically as dancers that afternoon and also knowing-for it had happened to him once-how that could spill over into the candles of a late night in bed.

He looked around for Catriana but she had gone upstairs already. She'd kissed him briefly on the cheek though, right after Menico's fierce embrace back in the Sandreni Palace. It was a start; it might be a start.