A Brightness Long Ago, page 25
She didn’t move. She was standing still, hands by her sides. She, too, was looking at me now.
I had never seen him like this. I felt an extreme sense of danger. How not?
I refused him. I had not known I would. I had walked back under two moons not knowing.
I said, “My lord, I am still a student learning Jad’s world, not a teacher of it. I am neither proper nor worthy as tutor to the sons of a nobleman. I am . . . I am sailing to Sarantium, lord.”
I hadn’t known I was going to say that, either.
He smiled. It was not a soothing smile. “And how do you mean that, student of Jad’s world? Are you going to fight Asharites on the walls there like my son, or are you just using an old saying?”
I’d underestimated him. It was just the old saying I’d meant. Guarino had taught us the phrase. It meant a feeling that one’s life was about to alter greatly, that a change was coming. I hadn’t thought he’d know it. I suppose I’d hoped that because of his son he might just think me heroic and leave it at that.
I was entirely sober. A good thing.
I said, “I do not know my future, lord. I am not a soldier and—”
“You continue to say that,” he said.
“It . . . continues to be true, my lord. I intend to visit with my teacher, then go home to see my parents, and make a choice there of what I’ll do.”
“You’ll pray for guidance, of course?” He was mocking me.
“I will, my lord.”
“And what sort of guidance would have you turn down a position in the palace of the lord of Remigio? What are you not telling me?”
Both of them in one wild night. Acorsi and Remigio. I look back and I wonder how I lived. Well, in a sense I know how. Two women saved me. Adria at the inn, and now . . .
“Teo, we cannot force a man to serve us,” she said. “He is allowed to be unsure of what he wants to do or be. Remember when you were young?”
“I knew with certainty what I wanted to do and be,” he said. But his voice was quieter.
“Because your father was lord of Remigio,” she said, “and raised you to command men. As I hope you will raise our sons.”
He turned to look at her. I drew a careful breath.
There was silence for what seemed a long time, then he stood up, the chair creaking, and the floor. He said, “If need be, love, I will. Some of it can begin when we are home.”
If need be.
If my other son dies in the east.
Almost indifferently, he said to me, “Go to bed. I am grateful for what you did, as to the race. It was a service and I will remember it. If you have need of me, ask. I have never been called ungenerous.”
“My lord,” I said. And turned to go.
“Wait.”
It was the woman. She took two steps towards me. She said, “If you decide, after going home and taking counsel, that you do wish to be a teacher of the young, let us know. We may find a suitable tutor before that, we may not.” She smiled. “I will be happy to see you in Remigio, in any case, Guidanio Cerra, and to pour you a cup of wine myself.”
She could stop your heart, that one.
“My lady,” I said. And fled, although moving slowly for the sake of appearances to the stairs. I went up, entered my chamber, closed the door behind me. I leaned back against the door.
I was shaking. I remember looking at the trembling of my hands.
And I had just decided, standing before Monticola in that hallway, not to go to him. Because all of these events were suddenly overwhelming? Because he frightened me? The sense that a wrong word spoken . . .
He terrified just about everyone. So did Folco. They were the same in that. I think, looking back, that they frightened each other, though both might have killed a man who said so.
I had been in a dangerous palace in Uberto’s palace in Mylasia, men had died there, two of them by my hand. Perhaps I didn’t feel ready for another one? Perhaps my brief taste of the wider world felt like enough that night? Home might be better, quieter. My parents, my cousin, a shop, books to read, the canals and bridges I remembered.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
We like to believe, or pretend, we know what we are doing in our lives. It can be a lie. Winds blow, waves carry us, rain drenches a man caught in the open at night, lightning shatters the sky and sometimes his heart, thunder crashes into him bringing the awareness he will die.
We stand up, as best we can under that. We move forward as best we can, hoping for light, kindness, mercy, for ourselves and those we love.
Sometimes these things come, sometimes they do not.
* * *
• • •
I LEFT IN the morning without seeing them again. I found Gil in the stable by the walls with the other Remigio horses and I saddled him and rode out. The sun was rising on my right as I left Bischio on a mild spring day. Going north, I passed the inn where Adria Ripoli might still be sleeping, or lying awake, or gone in the night.
I should not have ridden alone, not with the amount of money I was carrying. By the measure of any brigands I might meet, I was rich. I could easily have been robbed on that ride, with a valuable horse under me and no companions or guards, no weapon.
I wasn’t robbed, all the way north. Sometimes the wheel spins you good fortune for a time, even when you’re foolish. I decided, as the sun climbed on that first windy day’s riding, as I left them all behind me, that I might be feeling happy. I had escaped, I thought. I’d been caught up with Remigio and Acorsi and what lay between them, and I was free of it. I might have started singing as I rode. I don’t remember, but it is a thing I did when I was younger.
* * *
A young man appears to be telling his story. Others are having their stories told.
There is a maker, a shaper, behind all of them. It is the same with art on a dome, or a portrait done on a wooden surface, with gesso and not oil, for a reason. It is the same with a sculpture of hands. Someone made this, made choices doing so.
A song remembers a home, another conjures fear that home will fall to those who would destroy it. A poet places wine glasses on a fountain’s rim under stars. An artist sets his lost wife on a dome . . . amid stars. A dancer lets the music be what she is, until it stops. Someone made the music, someone plays it while she dances.
And there is also this, as to stories told . . .
There were once two young men, both exceptional, promising, more than that. They had already led men in battle. One was tall, well made, good with horses and weapons and tactics. Hot-tempered, but learning to harness that, use it. His father took a city-state and passed it on to him so he was already a lord, that father having given him the added gift of living long enough for the boy to become a man—and so survive, and hold his city, which was Remigio.
The other, from Acorsi, was shorter, broad-chested even when young, slope-shouldered, never handsome, with both eyes then, and a subtle, quick, incisive, trained cleverness. He was also very strong, celebrated for it. No one wrestled him for sport; he’d killed a man (mischance) in a bout at the court in Macera. He wielded a heavy, punishing sword. His grandfather, also a mercenary, had married the daughter of the lord of Acorsi and inherited there, so this one had two generations of lineage to assert a claim to nobility, one more than the other.
Such things have mattered in the world.
He did not lose his eye to the taller man. Their long war is not about that, though it is long and it is a war, and some do think it must be because of the eye. It is not.
There is a bitter tale to tell of how this feud began. It goes back before the two of them. They inherited it, with all else that they inherited. That mercenary grandfather in Acorsi had seduced the aunt of the other, and boasted of it after—leading to her death at her husband’s hand in Remigio.
It is often the telling that begins such things. Stories matter.
The tall one, the handsome one, not yet Remigio’s lord, still very young, went to a certain holy retreat not long after, to find the other one’s sister there among the Daughters of Jad, and he . . .
Ah. You see how this begins another tale? How one gives rise to another, and then others? Because he did not assault her that night, though the story told to the world was that he did—and it never stopped being told, because it suited some people to tell it.
But when the girl, Folco Cino’s sister Vanetta, first spoke to her father and brother she said Teobaldo Monticola had entered her chamber at night, having scaled the wall, and had terrified her at first, but that he had—she swore it before Jad by her hope of mercy and light when she died—never laid a hand on her.
They had talked, she said, for a long time. She did not say what about. Then he had bowed and expressed regret for frightening her when he left.
And her father, the lord of Acorsi, had told her, forcefully (a forceful man, that one), that she would say this to no one, ever, this denial of an assault.
She was ordered to keep silent to the end of her days about what had really happened, to let the world construe her silence as piety or shame, whichever they chose. But she would never speak of it, did she understand?
And so the girl became another weapon in a war. Then she died, very young, in a plague year, although after a life more interesting than one might imagine in a Daughters of Jad retreat, because she didn’t simply stay there placidly.
Her brother, along with their cousin Aldo, used to help her leave at times (yes, over the same stone wall at night) and bring her back, once or twice after several nights away (money changed hands on those occasions). Vanetta tasted the world that way, knew a different sort of laughter. Returned to her prayers.
But she did keep silent as to that night in her chamber. Perhaps she should not have obeyed her father in this. Much might have unfolded differently had she told the truth. (It was the truth.)
Or not. It might not have mattered. There was also a certain battlefield, when both men were still young . . .
So many stories that can be told, in and around and braided through the one we are being given. Don’t we all know that stories can be sparks leaping from the bonfire of an offered tale to become their own fire, if they land on the right ground, if kindling is there and a light breeze but not a hard wind?
Someone is deciding what to tell us. What to add, what not to share at all, or when (and how) to reveal a thing. We know this, even as we picture in our minds another young man, a tailor’s son from Seressa, remembering a spring ride, how he used to like to sing . . .
We want to sink into the tale, leave our own lives behind, find lives to encounter, even to enter for a time. We can resist being reminded of the artificer, the craft. We want to be immersed, lost, not remember what it is we are doing, having done to us, as we turn pages, look at a painting, hear a song, watch a dance.
Still, that is what is being done to us. It is.
Even so . . . we do turn the page, and can be lost again. And in that deep engagement we may find ourselves, or be changed, because the stories we are told become so much of what we are, how we understand our own days.
So, here it is again: a man on a horse in springtime, riding alone, and he is young and a breeze is blowing.
We turn the page. We learn that a year has passed. Flowers have died and returned. Green leaves again on the trees, another spring’s sunlight. A falcon soars, dives to kill.
It continues . . .
PART THREE
CHAPTER X
Seressa on its lagoon was often damp and rainy in spring, with fog in the mornings or a wind off the sea driving hard along the canals that ran that way. It was not a healthy place, thought the acting duke of Seressa, looking out from a window in the palace. Doctors did well there, without necessarily being useful.
It remained, however, the pre-eminent mercantile city in the Jaddite world. The wealthiest, shrewdest, most opulent in its display. No one wanted to offend Seressa—or be targeted as a threat. And when fog or mist burned off under the sun rising beyond the lagoon, he believed his city was terribly beautiful.
He loved it. He knew it well. Dangers and glories, gold and stolen art, wharf rats and miasma, Carnival, canal-side murders in the night.
He might have taken a different path, had he not felt so much pride and love. The dukes elected to lead the Council of Twelve carried a heavy burden, sometimes had to do harsh things that placed their souls at risk. And the office certainly limited time and energy for commerce, where success had made them eligible for political power in the first place.
His father was dead, murdered in a political struggle years ago. He had an uncle, two brothers, nephews, a son almost of age to play his part in expanding and defending the family fortune. They could deal with it, he had decided. And, of course, his taking the position of greatest power in the city was not . . . well, it was hardly a negative thing for the family.
Some might aspire to a position on the council for the pursuit of greater wealth. He hadn’t. Duke Ricci (he was growing accustomed to the title) was where he was because he saw threats to his city everywhere (there were threats everywhere!), and a corresponding need to be vigilant and acute in fending them off.
He was a vigilant, acute man. He also wasn’t actually the duke yet. His was a more informal position carrying a formal title. The duke of Seressa, Lucino Conti—respected, honoured, venerable—had had what doctors were calling a stroke these days. It had left him paralyzed on one side and unable to speak. A lesser man would have simply been deposed—or smothered. The Council of Twelve, not ready to do either, or to hold the vote as to his replacement, had named Ricci to act in his stead. The fiction was that Conti was advising him. It was expected that the aged duke would soon go to the god, and there would be the usual voting manoeuvres then.
Ricci had no idea how long he’d hold this position but he was boldly certain he was the best person for it. Considerable sums had been spent to place him here, even temporarily, buying votes. It was now a matter of proving himself worthy of eventually ascending to the full rank and title.
He was in a study he had set up inside the palace, a smaller, more sequestered room than the one normally used by the dukes, certainly nothing like the great chamber where the council sat to debate and govern, or to receive emissaries, or those they’d summoned.
People didn’t much like being summoned by the Council of Twelve.
When he had someone brought to this comfortable room overlooking the lagoon they were less likely to be frightened, though some of them would have been if they’d known his thoughts.
Ricci had studied the philosophers and history. He admired and paid for art and architecture (some of what he’d bought was pure display, but not all of it). He had read poetry and even written verses to women and the god (when younger, much younger). But among the lessons he had learned in his years of life under Jad’s blessed sun was that attacking before you were attacked was generally a good thing. His father might not have died if he’d done that.
Another lesson, connected to that: you needed information to act wisely. You could never have too much information. Seressa was notoriously good at spying. He intended to make it even better, granted enough time.
This morning he was reviewing reports, a stack of them from within the city and beyond. These came three times weekly. Briefings on the arrival of ships, what cargo they carried. On merchants, or anyone else of possible note entering overland. Sudden departures.
There were also reports on events considered untoward among the citizens: erotic, financial, otherwise. Smuggling was common, punishment extreme. He was preoccupied, already, by pirates across the narrow sea in their small, walled, inaccessible city of Senjan. They were a nuisance, a growing one.
He was also trying to get a better sense as to the health of the Holy Jaddite Emperor in Obravic, and whatever they could discover about his eldest son, and heir, Rodolfo. An eccentric man, it was said. He wanted to know more. Such things could matter.
Plots and schemes and diplomacy of one sort or another were a large part of what Seressa was. Challenges and threats existed, shrouding the world’s truths. They needed to be burned away by knowledge, as the rising sun of Jad burned away the mist along the canals.
Right now, at his desk, he found himself staring at what was noted to be a third report on a citizen who had returned home last summer with enough money, unexplained as to origin, to buy into a business and then—this past week—pay for repairs and an addition to his father’s shop and home. They knew the son had paid, they knew his bank.
The father was a tailor, one Cerra. The son, Guidanio by name, was evidently a bookseller.
Evidently was a word he used with intent—in his mind, in speech. Some resources had been used by way of inquiry with the father, while he fitted one of Ricci’s brothers for a new dress robe. It was established that the son had attended the celebrated school at Avegna and had gone from there to Mylasia at what turned out to be a very dramatic time in that city’s recent history.
He had left Mylasia at some point after the count was murdered—with no indication in the notes of where he’d gone, what he had done. And now he was home, with considerable funds for a young man without any obvious means of having acquired those.
The matter was ambiguous but was likely nothing. Young Cerra might have gambled well, stolen cleverly (if it wasn’t in Seressa they didn’t care much). Or . . . he might be in the pay of someone, which would matter.
It was also possible he was the sort of person who could be useful to his city. His education was significant, certainly.
