A Brightness Long Ago, page 19
She’d made a mistake on the previous turn, or he’d done something brilliant. It doesn’t matter which, because she is about to pay the price.
* * *
Serrana has no desire to kill or maim the woman, though either might happen when he takes her down. She’s ridden well, bravely. What she did to the Giraffe rider (even if the man is a fool) was beautifully accomplished. He’s a horseman, a trainer, has ridden all his life . . . he can admire technique and cleverness.
Doesn’t matter, not when it comes to winning here. A wife and two children depend on him, and there is pride. He is the most feared rider in Bischio. He doesn’t hate her for being alive and free, he just has to beat her on this track, and her being a woman can’t get in the way of that. She can’t get in his way.
How many times has he seen a horse hit the wall at the Fontena Curve? Everyone knows that turn. The first-time riders are warned about it, brought here ahead of the race by their district captains, shown how the slope of the track goes towards the wall there even as you will be struggling to keep your horse away from it, at speed—especially if you are running first and second and on the last lap and the horse is tiring.
He’s second, just, right now, but he’s too near for her to work back, or even try, and she needs both hands on her reins, can’t give any attention to using her club against him as they near the turn or her horse will slide right into the wall and she’ll be crushed against it by his. He can’t surrender control to hit her, either, but it doesn’t matter, he’s on the inside. When she meets the wall, he’ll pull off, can slow briefly for control, she’ll be on the ground or her horse will be staggering, and the third- and fourth-place horses are well back of them.
He’ll do the last lap alone, in glory.
He doesn’t need her to fall or be hurt, although it is difficult for that not to happen at this speed. He just needs her helplessly behind him after that collision. Which is about to happen. Which is now. They are racing towards it. Still on the straightaway, the last of it, slope beginning, curve upon them. He allows himself a quick glance at her. He sees her look back at him, also quickly, in the same moment.
He doesn’t see fear. He should be seeing that, he thinks.
* * *
It was Ginevra’s first time in Bischio. It was also the first time Teobaldo had brought her out into the world with him like this, displaying her beside him, dressed in her best, claiming eyes wherever she moved.
And there was more now: he’d spoken to Guidanio Cerra, with her in the room, about tutoring their sons—the way the children of a lord are taught. She’d had to work to keep her expression calm, try to seem just . . . interested. In truth, though, it felt as if it might be the most important time of her life, this journey west to watch some horses race.
But standing beside him (they had seats, as befit Remigio’s lord, but everyone was on their feet), her thoughts just then were on the track—and with the woman riding there, on whom they had placed so much money, including some of her jewellery.
Ginevra della Valle had lain awake much of the night, after pleasing him (and herself) in love. She’d been afraid to fall asleep because she knew she’d dream of a future where they were wed, their sons acknowledged and legitimized, her older one named Teobaldo’s heir and . . .
And that would mean his current heir, his eldest, would have died in the east, in Sarantium, and she mustn’t wish for that, or dream of it, it would put her soul at risk.
Right now, this moment, she was not thinking about that, she was in a screaming crowd as she watched another woman and heard Teobaldo’s loud admiration of her. She felt no envy, no apprehension. She did not doubt his affection, she only needed to be wed.
She, too, was caught up in the excitement, even though she didn’t understand this race—the way the riders were allowed to club each other, or why Teobaldo and the young man they’d collected on the way here were screaming warnings to the girl as two horses, one of them hers, hurtled towards where they were standing, by the first curve past the start line. It had a name, this curve, it was apparently important, and dangerous.
“He has her! Jad rot his soul!” she heard the man she loved cry out.
Rage and pain in his voice. He rarely revealed so much. This was about more than a wager and money now, Ginevra thought, about more than spiting Folco d’Acorsi.
The crowd around her was a deafening thunder. The world shook with it. The woman’s dark red hair was streaming out behind her. That was wrong, even disgraceful, but it looked beautiful, Ginevra thought.
“Maybe not!” she heard Guidanio Cerra cry.
Teobaldo called him Danino, a child’s name. He did things like that to other men, asserting dominance. But she saw him look quickly at the younger man, who’d been allowed to stand with them because it was he—Guidanio, Danio, Danino—who had brought the information about a woman rider that might make them a great deal of money here.
Or not.
* * *
I do not, to this day, know what I thought could happen when I cried out as the two horses came to the curve. Why I denied what we were seeing: that she was trapped, approaching the deadliest part of the track.
Because Monticola was right, the Tower rider did have her.
But still I shouted what I did at the summit of my voice, raw with longing.
Perhaps I was willing it to be so. Perhaps I wanted Jad to hear me from behind the sun, as Adria raced towards us, and the wall.
* * *
“Holy Jad of Light, what is she doing?” Antenami Sardi screamed. He threw both hands in the air. He didn’t know what else to do with them.
* * *
It was her father Arimanno, the duke, a man so prepared in life he made Folco look impulsive and careless, who had told her once—they’d been out riding, in fact, she’d been about fourteen years old—“Always try to have something in reserve, daughter. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing. There are always reversals.”
This isn’t a reversal so much as a catastrophe, but the idea is the same. She is about to be ridden into the Fontena Curve. Her left leg, her injured one, will hit first. Not that this is about an older wound. If they crash into the wall as hard as they are about to and Sauradia goes down, she can die here.
What she has isn’t the soundest something in reserve one might devise, but it is all she can use right now. It occurs to her that life can be simpler when there are no responses but one, however frail it might be. And she is a good rider. Also—a complex thought—she is her father’s daughter, after all, and it seems she always will be, however far away she goes, however hard she tries to be something other than a Ripoli of Macera.
Because she’s practised this with the horse when no one else was on the track.
End of the straightaway. It has to be right now. This can’t be done once they are into the curve. She prays. She does do that, what fool would not pray?
She throws away her club. She needs both hands.
She grips the pommel of her saddle with her left hand—she’d required a higher pommel than usual of the Falcon team leader. He hadn’t asked why. She wouldn’t have explained. She grabs with her right for the back of the thin saddle. Not much purchase there, but it has to be enough, it is what she has. She lets go of the pommel and swings her left leg (healed now) over the front of the saddle, over her horse’s neck. Grabs for the pommel again. She is not holding the reins at all now, Sauradia is running free, but they’ve practised this and it has to be enough. Her head is towards the wall. She knows what that means, if they hit.
And then that screaming crowd in Bischio sees something never done before in their race. Something no one present in that morning sunlight will forget for the rest of their days, short or long, easeful or terrible, as fortune and the god decide.
She is strong. Long and lean, and strong. She holds herself in place with both hands as the two horses pound down the straightaway, near the wall, too near. Leaning back, she pulls both legs up to her chest, riding sideways—you can call it riding sidesaddle, the way courtly women sometimes do—but this is not that. This is not that.
And as the southern rider, four-time winner on this track, flings a startled glance her way, Adria kicks, uncoiling as fiercely as she can, gripping with both hands at her saddle, using her stomach muscles to hold and thrust, and she hits him hard, in the side, chest-high, with booted feet.
He doesn’t just fall, he flies.
He actually flies off his horse. There is a moment when he is airborne, looking her way still, his dark eyes showing an incalculable astonishment. Then he falls to the track and bounces, and rolls, and lies there, as she swings herself back into the saddle, left leg over the horse’s neck again, the other way, and reclaims the reins as the now-riderless Tower horse runs ahead of her, and in the space that creates she brings Sauradia off the rail, out of danger, slowing a little to negotiate the slope. And then she is free, still riding, safe, alone.
Alone in front of every rapturous, stunned, wildly transported person in the centre of Bischio. She is at the centre of all the god’s created worlds for a moment, it feels like. It does.
They’ll think you can’t fight back, she remembers: the old woman, who had been crippled here, on that same wall.
And then Adria realizes something else, and what had already seemed perfection becomes even more.
* * *
Ginevra had spent her entire time here trying to convey detached elegance. She was adept at that—but that poise was gone now. She was shouting with everyone else. How can you not? she was thinking.
What the woman out there had just done was so . . . improbable!
“We will win!” she heard herself cry. “Teobaldo, she’s winning!”
But then, to her astonishment, he shouted, “No! No! She is not! Come on, woman, ride! For me! Oh, Jad, ride!”
She looked at the man on her other side, the young one who might tutor her sons, who had told them about this woman riding for Folco d’Acorsi. He was not shouting, perhaps the only person who wasn’t. She saw his face as he watched the woman on the grey horse gallop along the far side of the track towards the final turn to the finish line. There was wonder—but also something else in his eyes.
She felt, quite unexpectedly, some desire for a man who could close himself around a private awareness like that in the midst of a crazed tumult. She wanted to know what it was, that inner thing. Felt a wish to slip it out of him, prove she could be skilled enough, her allure mastering his will . . .
If he was coming to Remigio, she’d need him to love her, Ginevra della Valle thought—for her sons, their future, their fate. But watching him watch the woman with the red hair circle the track, she realized that wasn’t likely to happen. He was elsewhere engaged. Lost.
It bothered her, a little.
And she still didn’t understand what Teobaldo was screaming about.
* * *
“Great glory to Jad in the sun!” cried Antenami Sardi. He became aware his hands were still high over his head. He brought them down. “Did you see that?” he shouted.
The man beside him, the dignitary from the Tower district, was also shouting, and smiling, and pumping a fist in joy. That was generous, Antenami thought: Tower had just lost the race, their rider lay on the track, but his companion was still caught up in the excitement of what they had seen the woman do.
“I’d take a lost bet to have seen that, too!” he shouted in the other man’s ear.
“No!” the commune leader shouted back. “No, no, no! We are winning! We will win! Look at our horse! First to the finish, it doesn’t matter if there’s a rider!”
Antenami looked. It wasn’t hard to see. The riderless Tower horse was still galloping, nearing the last curve before the half straightaway to the finish, and it was several horse lengths ahead of the woman.
Such a strange race, he thought again. Impossibly so! But what stories he’d have to tell!
He watched the woman slap at her horse’s neck, working the reins, straining to make up ground. Antenami narrowed his eyes. He did know horses, and riding.
* * *
It is beyond anything she could have dreamed. No man will finish ahead of her. Folco will win his triana bets, she will be honoured and applauded, but not have to stay, be a part of parades for days after winning the Bischio race. Tower will win—and celebrate all day and night, all week. She’ll slip away: remembered, but not thrust into the city’s eye.
She lets herself appear to be working hard with Sauradia, urging him on, but her knees hold back and so he holds back. He’ll look like an exhausted, gallant horse at the end of a gruelling race, chasing one that carries no rider, light, flying ahead of them.
She could catch up, she thinks.
She is entirely certain she doesn’t want to, for so many glorious reasons.
* * *
I had known it yesterday, walking the streets, placing bets on the Falcon’s woman rider, every fifth one a bet to win, at odds so great it would earn a fortune for Monticola. But my wagers with my own money had been the triana, to come in the first three, because I knew who she was.
And watching Adria Ripoli chase the Tower district’s riderless horse—careful to be seen urging on her own—I knew I’d been right.
If it is ever known who I am, I cannot do any of these things any more.
She needed to stay hidden—which meant not winning this race. Too many people would see her if she did, so many questions would emerge. And this was the daughter of the duke of Macera, and she was doing this for Folco d’Acorsi.
But also for herself, I thought.
I wondered, suddenly, if Folco’s cautious wagers had been based on this knowledge: that she was at risk if she came first. It might be so. I wondered if I’d ever be as subtle, as in command of stratagems, of the world, as that man—if he had anticipated this.
I watched her finish second to the wildly bolting Tower horse, ahead of all the other riders. She lifted a hand at the end, but only briefly. She hadn’t won. But of course she had.
She didn’t know my name.
* * *
Carlo Serrana, four times champion in Bischio, riding for Tower that year, had fallen from horses a hundred times. He wasn’t too badly hurt. Even walked off the track, moved awkwardly for a week or two, but he recovered.
Nonetheless, something happened to him that morning. He never rode the Bischio race again.
Nor did he ever explain why. He might not have been able to. He kept his breeding stable, didn’t lose any of the mercenaries, aristocrats, wealthy merchants keen to buy horses. His horses were very good, he had a superb eye, everyone knew it.
He even passed the ranch on to his son because he trained him, too, and their business kept going. In his later years, he’d sit by a winter fire in a tavern in the city, or on his own loggia in good weather, and tell stories of his racing days, remind people that horses he’d ridden out onto the track in the square had won the Bischio race five times.
It was even true.
* * *
She lets Sauradia slow past the finish line. She comes up to the Fontena Curve again. They have removed the Tower rider from the track. Looking into the stands here, which are thundering still, visibly rocking as she approaches, she sees a big man under a wolf banner.
Perhaps she should resist, but in that moment she feels too exalted, too impossibly pleased with life, so she angles Sauradia towards the wall, to where he is standing in the first row, and she smiles at Teobaldo Monticola di Remigio, and holds up two fingers, for second place, and sees his head snap back. Then, to his credit, to his very great credit, he laughs.
Because the note she’d been sent by Folco the night before, by way of the woman attending her in the Falcon district, had not just told her what signal the Tower rider would use for the men holding the rope, it had also told her that Monticola had men wagering throughout the city on her, and that some were betting her to win. She’d been recognized by someone, in other words.
Now she smiles at the lord of Remigio, thinking of those lost bets. He’ll still have done well, which is why he can laugh, but she decides that right now, out here on the track, she can let him know they’d known.
Beside him is a woman of extraordinary beauty. She is looking at Adria with a quizzical expression, but women have done that all her life, even her sisters, it is nothing new. What hits Adria harder is seeing the man with them. Because she knows him, and he’d saved her life in Mylasia.
And here he is, with Monticola di Remigio, looking at her with an expression she can’t read, or perhaps doesn’t want to. She’s shaken, though. Of all things on this day . . .
She lets her eyes move on but not her thoughts. She sees the Falcon district leaders running across the track towards her and her horse, waving their arms, screaming and capering with joy, and it seems evident that a celebration is going to happen after all, because what has taken place this morning is unknown in the memory of anyone present, and Falcon coming second, with a woman riding for them, is . . . it is a miracle! Some of them are crying as they come up to her. A miracle!
