A Brightness Long Ago, page 12
He had prayed, quickly, when the dust on the road gave way to a sight of banners—with a wolf emblazoned on them. The evil man proclaimed his identity, even as he wielded unjust power in the god’s world.
Nardo did not engage in careful weighing of decisions, normally.
He had stepped into the roadway in front of the approaching party, and he decided, as he did so, that they’d have to end his life, because he would not move from their path. Who knew what evils the Wolf was planning where he went? What innocents would suffer?
He was greeted civilly, but the forces of darkness were known to deploy false courtesy to lure men from Jad’s path. He was on that path, was Nardo Sarzerola, and not easily lured. Those who honoured the god to the doors of death were not only men and women of distant days, and one need not be a great man to be virtuous. Perhaps, indeed, courage in the service of Jad was what made a great man?
He said, hating the quaver in his voice, “I know you.”
“I’d hope so,” said the big man on the big horse. He still sounded diverted. “Else little point to banners or fame, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would say infamy!” Nardo snapped.
He was still unhappy about his voice. He’d never liked his voice. It was thin and rather high, and there was that wobble—as now—when he was excited.
“Ah,” said Teobaldo Monticola. “Is it infamy? Forever? It is decided? How that saddens me.”
A man behind him laughed.
Nardo said, stoutly, “I enjoin you to follow me to our retreat, to kneel before the sun disk in the sanctuary and seek absolution for your many crimes. It is never too late!”
“In truth, I have often found it too late for many things,” said Teobaldo Monticola. It was possible now to detect a note that was less amused. “For you, in this case, it will soon be too late to continue living and return home with your little basket.”
Nardo found that his legs were shaking under his robe. But he said, “I have made my peace with dying here.”
“Here? Dying here? To stop me from riding to watch the race in Bischio? You think Jad will honour such exhausting stupidity?”
When it was put that way . . .
But he would not let it be put that way!
“The god honours those who honour him!” Nardo liked the sound of that.
“Oh, Jad save my soul from misbegotten clerics dumped at birth by a sanctuary gate at night,” said the man on the horse in front of him. It was unclear how he knew the details of Nardo’s birth. Perhaps he was just . . .
One of the Blessed Victims, Boriforta, had been killed by twelve arrows. Some of the horsemen behind Monticola di Remigio carried short bows, Nardo saw. It was the time of the celebrated spring race in Bischio. It was likely true that this company was going there. Fifty men was not a warlike force, it was a proper guard for the lord of Remigio. Even so, this man’s was a blackened soul that had served the dark all his days!
“You still need to come with me to the sanctuary. Our revered Eldest Son will lead us all in prayer and you can repent of your crimes.”
“And add to your endowment?” Amusement again.
That would not be, Nardo thought, a bad consequence at all. And very good for him, too, should Nardo become the cause of substantial funds arriving.
“That will be for you and our Eldest to consider,” he said primly. “I am but a cleric there.”
“Then in Jad’s holy name, and by his blood and chariot, what arrogant fucking presumption makes you think you can block my way? Jad scorns the arrogant, remember?”
“The god’s name is defiled in your mouth!” Nardo said firmly. And knew, even as he spoke, that the words might kill him.
Monticola’s face reddened. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “It no longer amuses. My son is on his way to Sarantium, or on the walls already, to defend it with men and weapons I have provided him. How many of your sanctuary have heeded the summons, cleric?”
A troubling statement and question, no doubt about it.
Nardo suddenly felt out of his depth.
“His soul is his own,” he said. “You are not him.”
“Enough. You wish death, it is yours. Pray now. I grant you a moment.”
Someone moved forward from behind Monticola, a man on a dark-brown horse. He was as young as Nardo, and not in Remigio livery.
He said, “My lord? Might I speak?”
“Do so quickly,” said Teobaldo Monticola. “I have lost patience. Fools do that to me.”
“Then let him look foolish, my lord. Don’t make him a martyr, which is what he seems to want.”
“Go on.”
“But that’s it. We go on. He can’t stop us, my lord. He is a man in the road, and this road is well made and wide here. We go around him, on both sides, my lord. He is being a fool, and we can make it clear, if only to those in the fields there.”
A silence. Then Teobaldo Monticola threw back his head and laughed.
“Jad’s light! Why,” he said, “did none of my own men say this?”
The young man shrugged. “Perhaps all soldiers see an untaken castle or town left behind as dangerous. This man with his basket is no castle, my lord.”
A gust of wind swirled. The leaves in the wood were louder. The Wolf of Remigio said, “Guidanio Cerra, I am pleased I had you join us. You will lead the right-hand column, soldier or no. The left, follow me. Either side of our little cleric here. Harm him not, just pass him by!”
Which is what they proceeded to do. Nardo Sarzerola thought of striking upwards at Monticola with his staff as he went, but that wasn’t how you acted, and the moment passed too quickly in any case. He just stood there, dust and grit rising to sting his eyes and obscure his view of the world, including the god’s bright sun, as fifty horsemen went by him.
It felt . . . well, it did feel foolish.
After they’d gone, after the dust had settled, he coughed and wiped at his eyes and looked about him. The flowers and leaves were as they had been. The labourers in the field had returned to their tasks. The sun was a little lower. The wagons of Remigio, guarded, carrying supplies, bringing camp followers—whores and mistresses, no doubt—appeared ahead of him. He could block those, but it would be ridiculous.
He was alive! The thought was sudden, intense. Clearly, clearly Jad had duties for him in the world yet. That was it. That was the message to take into his heart!
Shortly afterwards, because of certain words spoken to him on that road, with the deep meaning he found embedded in them, Nardo Sarzerola received the blessing of his Eldest and set forth, alone, to the east.
He took ship at Mylasia (clerics were not charged for passage), crossed the narrow sea and joined a party heading overland from Megarium.
He reached Sarantium in the autumn. He was entirely overwhelmed by the gold and glory there, it was beyond what a soul could imagine. He was rendered speechless with awe for a time by the grandeur of that city named the glory of the world for centuries. Many other men and women had been. Sarantium was what it was, even when endangered.
The liturgies of Jad were very different east and west. People had been killed for those differences. There were two patriarchs, one in Rhodias (Jad defend him!) and the one here in Sarantium. But they were all children of the sun god, and the infidel Asharites were trying to claim the City of Cities. Pious men could not stand for that, and Nardo Sarzerola was such a man.
He would die holding a spear, having aged a great deal in a short time—standing next to the eldest son of Teobaldo Monticola, whom he had sought out when he arrived. They had become the unlikeliest of companions. Their lives ended on the same day, within the innermost of the great triple walls, when Sarantium fell.
Young Monticola wore his family colours, carried a shield with a wolf upon it. He was a trophy for the conquerors. His severed head was paraded on a pike, then placed with others above the once-mighty landward gates. Nardo was just another cleric in a yellow robe. His body remained where it fell, was partly devoured by hungry animals, then burned on one of many pyres. The fall of the city shook the foundations of the world.
CHAPTER V
I had no intention of joining the company of Teobaldo Monticola di Remigio. I didn’t care one way or another about him. I knew his name and reputation, of course. He’d become the ruler of Remigio after his father had claimed it, and he was a celebrated commander of a mercenary force. He kept Remigio secure and the granaries full with the very large fees he made from cities like Seressa and Macera, or from whoever was High Patriarch, switching from one to another and back again, sometimes in mid-campaign, as all the mercenary leaders did. It was a turbulent, dangerous system but it was ours in Batiara then. It still is.
It had been discovered, long before, that it was less expensive for cities to hire mercenary companies in spring for several months than to equip and sustain their own militias year-round. In addition to which, an urban militia could easily turn on the leaders of a city. Much too easily.
Not that the mercenary system lacked weaknesses. A commander could become so strong he might take control of a smaller city. Or he might marry a daughter of a ruling family and inherit power in that way.
We live, it might be said, in unstable times. Dramatic, interesting, magnificent in many ways. But not stable. You would never say that.
Monticola di Remigio was often declared, in those years, to be the greatest of the mercenary leaders. It was possible that he was. He didn’t have many rivals. Perhaps only one.
He was said to be both hot-tempered and arrogant. There were stories told of savage things he had done, but there were stories like that about all the commanders, including Folco d’Acorsi, his enemy. Monticola, like his rival, had married a woman of better birth than him. He’d had a son by her and a daughter, before she died. He’d also had a number of mistresses, one of whom had borne him two more sons, more recently, and was said to be the great beauty of the age. People said that about many women associated with power, mind you.
But . . . I had nothing to do with him, no thought of him as I made my way west that day. Had I not encountered his party on the road, had I not previously decided that, before going to my teacher in Avegna then home to Seressa and my family, I’d see the celebrated race in Bischio, I’d have had an entirely different life.
Such reflections can make us feel less in command of our lives than we like. Fortune is a wheel, some philosophers taught. It takes us up or down, randomly.
The clerics say it is not random, that Jad has devisings we cannot understand. Guarino, always devout, guided us to think that way, for all his love of the ancient teachers. Sometimes, over wine at night, he’d acknowledge a different view.
Who among us, man or woman, is without contradictions?
* * *
• • •
I HAD STOPPED FIRST, in my flight from Mylasia, at the farmhouse from which Adria had been brought on the night she killed Uberto, back in the autumn. That was easy enough, though perhaps foolish. A copper coin to a labourer in a field guided me there.
The people living on that farm now had moved in after the couple who’d tenanted it—and had pretended the girl was kin to them—had fled in the night. The land was owned by the Valeri family, it turned out. I didn’t know whether to find that amusing or not.
Opicino Valeri’s sons, led by the eldest, Erigio, were at the centre of the emerging commune and council now. It hadn’t taken long.
I didn’t linger. I was in some haste, having just committed my second murder in Mylasia. You might have thought I was a dangerous man.
There was no reason for me to have gone to that farm. It wouldn’t tell me anything. I knew where Adria was going, if she survived. She’d invited me to come with them, to serve Folco, although she didn’t even know my name.
That bothered me, I remember. The part about the name. I was young.
I wasn’t going to Acorsi. It was time to go home. I still had that notion of a bookshop in Seressa, joining my cousin Alviso if he’d have me. I’d stop in Avegna. I had to tell Guarino about his friend, which would be hard.
In the meantime, it was spring. Flowers had returned, birdsong, the mornings were brighter. Hearts were brighter, including mine. I had survived a winter in a dangerous place, even though I was the one who had killed Opicino Valeri. I survived for the simple reason that no one knew it had been me. I’d been too unimportant, invisible, and I’d left the room right after.
Besides which, it had become evident almost immediately that Erigio wasn’t especially grieved by his father’s death. That happened in some families. The older man standing in the way of an ambitious son.
As a consequence, there was no great attention paid to who had killed Valeri. His actions, bringing armed men into the palace, stood to embarrass his children or place them at risk. He was removed from the palace quietly and buried quickly, body and perhaps memory.
You can say I was lucky. You’d be right.
I’d decided I would ride to Bischio before heading home, for no better reason than the season it was, flowers on hillsides, the famous race upcoming. And because I loved horses, loved them perhaps more than anything in the world.
I’d bought a good one with stolen money. The palace had been looted in the aftermath of Uberto’s death, by people from the city, by those of us within. I’m not proud of that either. I prayed for forgiveness all winter, kept my head down amid disruption, then killed the chancellor in his bed: hand hard over his mouth, knife into his throat, Morani’s name in his ear before he died.
I left that night under both moons, the stars dimmed by their light. A sense of freedom, the future ahead of me like the road I was on under blue and white light mingled, the sound of my horse’s hooves drumming.
* * *
Ginevra was being jolted about with almost every roll of the carriage’s wheels on the spring roads. She was also bored. She was never going to regret coming with Teobaldo to Bischio to see their race. But still . . .
She’d have been happier on horseback, but she knew that being in a carriage, shielded from the sun and common eyes, was a symbol of respect. It was an announcement to the world that she was worthy of that—and in the great scheme of things, her long dream, such a declaration mattered more than comfort.
She was trying not to make too much of it. Teobaldo was a capricious man and things could change. But she was here, with him, on the road west.
She had been the principal mistress and—she believed this—the genuinely beloved of Teobaldo Monticola for ten years now, since she was fifteen. They had children, both of them were sons, and his wife had died years ago.
Her campaign was underway: to be wed, and have the children legitimized. A campaign as carefully thought out as any battle or siege by a good commander. A legacy in it. None, really, without. Men weren’t the only ones who thought about legacies. And it mattered even more now with his eldest son in the east.
The east meant Sarantium, and there were some who thought that this might mean death. That the City of Cities was going to fall.
It was hard for her, surely for anyone, to imagine that the thunderous calamity of that might truly come to pass. The god would not allow it, even if his mortal children seemed to be doing little in the way of preventing it. But she was more than capable of imagining what Trussio Monticola’s death might mean for her—and her children—given that there was no other son alive from his marriage. She would never, as a pious woman, wish Trussio ill, but . . .
So Ginevra della Valle rode in a carriage like a wife, even if she wasn’t one, and was entirely happy to be going to Bischio and its festival and race. You could endure boredom for a time.
She carried her best jewellery and had two changes of expensive clothing for every day they’d be there. She was aware (of course she was) that she was beautiful, and that this mattered to him. Matteo Mercati was to paint her portrait after he returned to Remigio to finish Teobaldo’s. That mattered, too. Another marker. He was unpredictable (artists were) but he was celebrated. Another big, handsome, vain man, although that one’s interests did not lie with the women he painted. He’d want Teobaldo more than her. The thought diverted her.
But image, stature, wealth, the display of wealth. All of these signified. Status needed to be proclaimed, shown forth: in a jewelled necklace, a portrait by a well-known artist, the hugely expensive marriage of a daughter, the expanding of a palace or building of a sanctuary. People needed to know what you were—or declared yourself to be.
This might make it difficult for the lord of Remigio, probably the most renowned military leader of his day, to marry his longtime mistress when he might claim a bride from a distinguished family.
She had better lineage than Teo did, and he knew it, but the della Valle were not powerful, they added nothing for him, and power was the game they all played.
Her cards at the table were known to her: he did love her, she had two sons by him, she understood him extremely well, and it seemed that reassured and did not unsettle him. Some men, she often thought, could be like high-strung racehorses themselves, and not just when they were ridden in bed for pleasure.
Teobaldo had explained about the race they were travelling to see, what it was, how it was different from most, but it had been right after lovemaking and she was often vague in her thoughts at such a time. Not the best thing, but it was simply true that he pleased her deeply as a lover, always had, and she knew that pleased him, his vanity, which was good.
She heard voices outside. Men speaking lightly at first, then less so. This carriage in which she and a maidservant rode was covered, which would have been too hot in summer, but it sheltered her from wind and sun in this season, and she needed to protect her skin, which was fair. It did mean she couldn’t see anything unless she leaned forward and lifted the side flap back. She did so.
