A Brightness Long Ago, page 22
On the other hand, as to not betraying those who had bribed him, he had never been tested by a sum quite so substantial as this just now—offered by the well-dressed, insistent person before him.
Someone of considerable wealth, the kind that made judging quantities of money seem an irrelevance, wanted to know who had come into the inn and taken a room any time from mid-afternoon on. He suggested they had probably ordered a bath.
There was only one such person. A man who’d kept his hood up when he entered, and had gone straight upstairs. People had various reasons for wanting privacy, it was hardly unusual. The man’s companion was still in the room, to the innkeeper’s left. This caused the proprietor to urge the new person to keep his voice down.
He did accept the money offered.
You would have to be a blue moon’s mad fool to refuse so much, and this man didn’t look dangerous. He was a little drunk, slurring his words, but most people were today, and he kept saying, “I mean no harm. I mean no harm at all, as Jad sees my heart.”
That was pious enough. The innkeeper told him the room, asked him to delay a bit, have a drink, not make it obvious what he was doing. There was someone watching by the far wall, he said.
“Aha!” said the well-dressed one, too loudly again. “A guard! I have found her!”
Her? thought the innkeeper.
Slipping the heavy purse into his tunic, he did resolve to go to his own quarters, where he had a sun disk on the wall, to pray for forgiveness. And, of course, for the god’s safe journey under the world, where he defended mankind every night from demons.
Those evening prayers didn’t happen, in the event.
Other men strode loudly into his inn shortly after the first man went upstairs. Half a dozen of them, five with swords and horsemen’s bows. They were led by someone lean and imperious, older, balding, with a neatly trimmed grey beard, also well dressed, if dusty from travel. He made the same demand of the innkeeper—without offering money.
Instead, this one said, coldly, “I am looking for someone. You will be hanged from a tree in the courtyard and your inn burned to the ground unless you tell me who came here this afternoon and took a room that had been arranged for them. If there is no one of interest we are gone, but I urge you not to test me.”
The innkeeper looked quickly over at the guard sitting by the eastern wall. He saw that this man was sitting up straight now. He saw that the fellow had gone rigid, as if fighting a sudden pain. He felt the same way.
He didn’t test this tall, cold man, clearly accustomed to being obeyed. He said what room had been taken, again. These men, unlike the earlier one, did look dangerous. They went up the stairs immediately, three soldiers, the grey-bearded man, two soldiers.
It was only after they disappeared, followed by angry voices upstairs, that the innkeeper realized he knew the livery they wore.
He swore. It was extremely rare for him to do that. But this man could burn the inn down if he decided to, with no risk or consequence.
“Who the fuck is in that room?” was what he said, softly. Only his wife, coming back behind the counter, heard him.
She laughed. “What do you know about that word?” she said.
He didn’t think anyone heard her say that.
* * *
Antenami was very pleased with himself, hopeful that two desires could be assuaged now that he had found her.
He had little interest in the family business. The ledgers and bookkeeping rules his brother had tried to teach him seemed desperately tedious. He understood them (in fact), but he didn’t care.
At the same time, he was entirely happy to deploy the wealth generated by their banking empire. They were beginning to rival Seressa, it was said—which could be dangerous, but that would be for his father and brother to address. Antenami had elected to be undisturbed if he was left to the side regarding such decisions, as long as he had money to spend. His older brother defined him as incapable. That was all right.
He’d spent family money this afternoon in the Falcon district. Three men had been paid sums. The third reported seeing their rider come down from a balcony in back of a house while singers were serenading her in front.
No, he had no idea where she’d gone, but she’d walked off in a cloak beside another man—and a third person had followed them, he said. North, he said. At a guess, to spend the night outside the walls. An assignation? He smiled a tavern smile. He hadn’t said anything to anyone because it amused him to see all those Falcon fools in front, more arriving all the time, hoping she’d come out to them. He was from the Goose district, adjacent. Let the Falcon people sing to her—pointlessly.
Antenami truly hoped there was no assignation. He didn’t think there was. Not a romantic one, at any rate. He believed himself to have instincts about women and horses. Better with horses.
He rode out with two of his men, north along the main road. Nothing useful at the first inn they checked. At the second one he found her.
* * *
I ought to have left, yes, but I’d gone back to the window at the end of the corridor. No one had closed the shutters I had opened before. There were lamps in the corridor now. The one nearest the window flickered in the breeze but didn’t go out. I leaned out into the wind. More torches in the courtyard, and many more people.
I wasn’t sure why I was lingering. Perhaps a wish, a longing, that she would open the door, step out looking for me. That she’d call me back to say . . .
To say what? This was dangerous folly—for her almost as much as for me. I didn’t want that. But I wasn’t ready to face the world again, walk down those stairs into the inn’s front room and hear men shouting excitedly about the brilliant ride of the Falcon’s woman in the Bischio square that day. And how they’d love to ride her, given half a chance!
From the wide bed, as I was dressing, she’d said, “Are you going to go with Monticola?”
“I haven’t decided. I need to decide.”
“You should do it,” she said. “It puts you in a palace in an honourable position. There are opportunities there.”
“I was in a palace in Mylasia.”
“Different. You know it. Folco hates Monticola, there is a history, but the man isn’t Uberto.”
“I know that. Do you . . . do you know why they . . . ?”
“Want to kill each other? Not entirely. There was a battlefield some time ago, but there have been many battles. There are other stories.”
“His eye?”
“Monticola didn’t do that.”
“So you don’t know . . .”
“They are mercenaries, rivals, they made their fortunes that way, they still do. There may be something about his sister, Folco’s. He has never told me. Neither has my aunt.”
My aunt. Adria was what she was.
I’d finished dressing by then. I said, “I should go. It will be bad for you if . . .”
“If a man is found here? Maybe. Only if they know who I am.”
I was looking at her. I was trying to memorize her. Against never seeing her again.
As if hearing me, she said, “I will want to know where you are, Danio. Will you try to let me know?”
It was generous. Courteous. I didn’t want to feel sorrow. I nodded.
She added, “I’ll tell you a thing about today. Folco knew Monticola was wagering on me to win. He sent me a note, with the start rope signal.”
I adjusted my belt and the knife there. I looked at her. I could have stayed all night, and beyond, with this woman. I said, “That’s why you didn’t want to win?”
“No. You were right about that. I’d never have been able to get away if I’d won the race. People would have worked hard to figure out who I am. But . . .”
“But it was an added pleasure, knowing Monticola’s bets would be lost?”
“For Folco it will have been.”
“And you like to please him?”
She didn’t smile. “I owe him for this life, the chance he gave me.”
She said gave me. I ended up thinking about that at the corridor’s end, by the window, in the wind. Not is giving me.
It wouldn’t have been an accidental word. A race, a triumph, and done, finished—on her own terms. Was that it? Today marking the end of a part of her life. And: I will want to know where you are.
People spoke words like that, I thought, to be kind, at parting.
I had a choice to make. Where would I be? This could mark an end and a beginning in my life, too.
I turned from the window to go back downstairs. It was time. I was thinking these things, distracted by the memory of her, sight and taste, scent and feel, when I saw Antenami Sardi come up the stairs and go to Adria’s door.
There was a lamp in the wall just beyond. I knew him from our meeting at the crossroads. Folco had been escorting him to Bischio.
He took a breath, put a hand on the wall to steady himself. He wasn’t sober. I didn’t know how he’d found her, but—
“Open for your greatest admirer!” he called abruptly, loudly. “I am Antenami Sardi and I have a proposal for you! Two proposals! One is . . . one’s about a horse . . .”
Easy to guess what the other was. But he might mean it about the horse. He’d been so proud of his own, coming this way in ignorance, to race it in Bischio. He could want her as a rider . . .
I stayed where I was. I considered climbing out through the window. I hadn’t checked for handholds that would get me down the wall, though, and you could break a leg jumping from here.
I could walk past him, I thought. I could go by quickly, as if leaving my own room, and . . .
I stayed. I didn’t think he was a dangerous man, I was certain Adria could deal with him, but I had just left her bed and . . . I stayed.
What we do in a given moment, what we don’t do, different paths in life.
There was no reply from the room, or none that I heard where I stood. Sardi knocked, five raps, five more. He said, “I mean only to honour you! To show my admiration. To reward you!”
Money, I thought. This man would be about money, and assume it would speak for him. He’d usually be right. And what he knew, what Bischio knew, was that the woman who had ridden for the Falcon district this morning was the orphaned daughter of a mercenary from Mylasia.
She’d said she was going to a retreat. But men like this one could propose alternatives. Still nothing from within, if his manner was a clue.
He drew himself up. He said, “You must let me in. There is so much we have to talk about!” He hesitated. “I know you did not try to catch the other horse. I know all about horses!”
And that, I thought, was dangerous. He’d be a rash, foolish man, with wealth and a sense of invulnerability, and he could do careless harm.
Except that he wasn’t invulnerable, even wrapped in money and power. Not to everyone. Not to mischance.
A clatter from the stairs. Men bursting into the corridor at the far end. Three, then one, a tall man. Two more. And they were armed. I stayed where I was. Too late to disappear now. I could only hope no one would look this way.
“Step back from that door!” the tall man said in a high, authoritative voice. I didn’t know him, but I knew that tone.
Antenami Sardi turned to him. He was not, I guessed, accustomed to being given orders. He said, “Go about your business. Do you have any idea who I am? Go piss in an alley somewhere and leave me alone!”
“Shoot him,” said the other man.
All it took. Two words. Two arrows.
Sardi fell, with a thump not a clatter, to the hallway floor. I saw his head hit hard. He made no other sound. My jaw dropped. I closed it. I was aware that my life was in extreme danger now. Why would they hesitate to kill an observer?
They almost certainly had no idea of his identity, but a very important man had just taken two arrows and might be dead. Probably was—with implications for all of Batiara.
The tall man moved forward, stepping fastidiously over the body on the floor. He knocked at the same door, Adria’s.
He said, clarifying many things, “Daughter, open now. You are coming home with me.”
Holy Jad, I thought. And then, This is impossibly bad.
The duke of Macera had just had a Sardi shot, possibly killed. Also: Adria, and the end of a life she’d lived.
She’d guessed it was ending, I thought. She’d probably been planning it herself. I didn’t think she’d imagined it would happen this way—and not by her own choice.
The door opened. She stepped out. She looked down at Sardi, then at the man in front of her.
She’d clothed herself, in what she’d worn coming here.
“This is unexpected. How pleasant to see you, father,” she said, with an unsettling calm. “I do regret you’ve seen fit to expose who I am, and to have your men—in livery I see, easily identified—shoot someone you really should not have shot.”
He seemed taken aback. “A drunken man trying to bed you? Of course I will have him—”
“That is Antenami Sardi you’ve just killed, dear father. Piero’s younger son. Tell me, how much money do you owe the Sardi bank?”
I was holding my breath.
“Oh, Jad,” said Duke Arimanno of Macera. “Oh, holy Jad! How could I . . . why didn’t you . . . ?”
“Why didn’t I what? Tell you? What are you doing here, father? What could possibly have made you leave home? Why are you here?”
The duke looked at the fallen man again. He stepped back a little. He gestured, almost helplessly. “Your . . . your mother . . .”
“Ah! Mother demanded you come fetch me home?” Adria laughed. Very different laughter from when we’d been together in that room. She pointed at the man on the floor. “This is a disaster. For everyone!”
“It may be,” came a different voice, from behind the Ripoli guards. “It probably is.”
The guards turned quickly, one drew his sword.
I saw Folco d’Acorsi at the top of the stairs, another man behind him. The one who’d brought Adria here.
Folco said, calmly, “Has anyone troubled themselves to confirm he is dead?”
“How lovely!” said Adria. “Let’s everyone come to the inn where I was to spend a night unknown!”
“Folco!” cried the duke. “It’s you! Jad be praised!”
“Arimanno,” d’Acorsi replied, nodding his head. “You are far from home. And have placed me in a difficult position.”
“I have placed you?” The duke’s manner changed, his voice went higher. “Given what you had her doing here? Folco, it’ll be worse for you when I—”
“Arimanno, stop. Listen to me. I am retained by the Sardis this year. This man is under my protection. You just put arrows in him.”
“Oh,” said the duke of Macera, after a moment.
Oh, I thought.
I’d actually forgotten that Folco was both Ripoli’s brother-in-law and the Sardis’ mercenary captain, paid by them to prevent anything remotely like this.
“Who,” said Folco d’Acorsi, “is by the window? Show yourself or be killed.”
He didn’t miss much, even with one eye. And if he didn’t kill me, the duke of Macera would. I was a witness.
I walked forward towards all of them. I was thinking as fast as I ever had in my life.
* * *
• • •
SHE IS THINKING as fast as she ever has in her life.
She believes Guidanio will die here. Her father’s men are tense and uncertain and so is her father and that can lead to violence. Folco seems calm, but he always does, and she knows this is bad for him.
She still can’t believe her father is here. Folco had assured her that no one in her family would come to Bischio. It is not the sort of thing the Ripoli do, especially not her father, who never likes leaving Macera, or even his palace, except to hunt. He is a man who has his food tasted and his bedroom searched by guards before he goes to sleep at night.
Her mother is different. Her mother terrifies her father (not Adria, not for a long time). But . . . how had she learned Adria was here? Who could have . . . ?
There may have been, she thinks, more than one spy in Folco’s palace in Acorsi.
It makes sense, that her parents will have assigned someone to keep a distant, careful eye on their daughter. Folco has probably figured this out by now, she decides.
But he hadn’t, before, or had known and wrongly judged what her family might do. A mistake. I make mistakes, he’d told her, more than once. Never assume I don’t.
She says, “No one is to harm this man.”
“Why?” says her father.
“Why?” says Folco.
She has an answer, but not one she wants to say, about his saving her in Mylasia. It opens up so many other problems. But Guidanio speaks first.
“Because I am the tutor of Teobaldo Monticola’s young sons, here innocently, and I must assume neither of you wants a war with him, especially if he is in the right. You will not remember me my lord Folco but we met at two roads coming here. Signore Sardi spoke of wishing to race his horse?”
“I remember that. Not you. Why,” says Folco, “are you here, so innocently?”
Danio has come forward into the light. He says, “To express the lord of Remigio’s gratitude to the young woman who rode for the Falcon district. He won a considerable sum wagering on her. He sent me with a purse. Even though she said she intends to seek out the Daughters of Jad, money can be of assistance in retreats. I was instructed to say that.”
“Then why were you at the end of the corridor?” Folco’s voice is hard. She can see he is dubious, though he knows about the wagering.
“My lord, I heard someone on the stairs and I withdrew, to be discreet until he left.”
