A Brightness Long Ago, page 30
“Men who tried to kill a Seressini in their city, father! And Seressa has a leader new to his position who must not be seen to be weak! We appear weak because of this! Dear Jad, a bookseller?”
“I am allowed my own decisions as to who has done me harm!” He meant the book person.
He saw that she understood this. Her hands were clenched at her sides. She had ridden in the Bischio race last year, had come first of all riders. He had felt great pride.
Adria took a breath. She said, driving the words at him like a wind in winter, “That man saved my life, father. Folco knows it. I was sending business his way, out of gratitude. Tell me, how has a tailor’s son done the duke of Macera harm?”
He hadn’t known about that first thing she’d just said. He felt unhappily at a loss to answer her question. He didn’t like the feeling.
He said, “My daughter’s virtue and honour matter to the entire Ripoli family.”
“And your daughter knows it, and is about to choose a Daughters of Jad retreat with her mother and aunt. But you, father, you have caused Seressa to wonder . . . how could such an insignificant man possibly be a concern for Macera? What might make the duke want him dead, risking his own men and relations with Seressa? And then some in Seressa, which is a name in the world for shrewdness, may ponder and think . . . think that perhaps the daughter who ordered a book from this man had offered him more than coins?”
He looked at her. He swallowed. “Did you?”
“No!” she shouted.
One of the gardeners quickly moved farther away, towards the cypresses, then right in among them out of sight, the duke noticed. He experienced a wish to be there, too.
Adria said, “Father, this is the second time you have exposed me in a year! Do you understand how hard Folco worked to hide that it was you who almost had Antenami Sardi killed?”
He had nursed a vague hope she wouldn’t mention that.
She pushed on, forcefully. She was always forceful, he thought.
“And using the same men, father? Men known to be your guards? Do you want Seressa set against you as much as the Sardis would be if last year’s incident were to become known? You’d risk that much for this folly?”
“The Sardis don’t know,” he said, aware it was lame and knowing what she could say.
She did say it.
“The Sardis don’t know because other people protected you! Including me, right now!”
“What does that mean?” he demanded. “Why you?”
Another mistake. He made those. Didn’t everyone?
She said, her voice cold as a loveless life, “Because, father, if anything happens to that bookseller I will tell the world who put two arrows in Piero Sardi’s son last spring.”
He felt himself growing pale with outrage. “That would be a betrayal of your family! Of Macera!”
“Yes,” she said. “It would. So, don’t make me do it. I told you, he saved my life. I am not going to forget it.” She closed her eyes and opened them. Her voice changed, grew gentler, at last. “Father, he really did. I would not lie to you. Folco knows, because it involved something I was doing for him. Trust me. Stop this. Draft a clever letter to Seressa’s duke, send them money and gifts. Buy books from the bookseller.”
She seemed to have composed herself. Arimanno took a breath. She was impressive, his daughter. She was going to be a daughter of the god. That might help him as age and death drew near. Every man needed help, or his soul did. Candles and prayers, intercession invoked in a holy place. Jad knew, his errors were many.
He said, seeing her soften, “Will you sit with me?” He gestured to a stone bench by the bright flowers.
She smiled. She had a rewarding smile, he thought. She said, sweetly, “Of course, father.”
* * *
• • •
She let him see her smile when he asked her to sit. Men could be handled that way, even her father. Perhaps especially her father. And she still had something she needed from him.
They sat beside each other. She said, “Of course I would never reveal secrets to our enemies. You know that.”
He nodded. “It would surprise me, although you become impulsive when angry. You always have.”
Which was true. It was important to remember he was a fearful man but a very clever one.
“Perhaps the Daughters of Jad will calm me.” She smiled saying it.
He shook his head ruefully. “Unlikely. But growing older might. And having responsibilities, which you have never had.”
Also true.
Then he said, “I would like to live long enough to see what you are like when you are older.” That gave her pause. He went on, “How did he save your life, this Cerra?”
He was like this, her father, filing things in his mind to bring back. She’d hoped that question wouldn’t be asked.
She said, “I was doing something for Folco, as I said.”
“And met a bookseller?”
“He wasn’t a bookseller then. Father, it is better if—”
“It would betray Folco if you told me?” An eyebrow raised, and a fair point.
She answered with truth. “It would betray me.”
He was silent, looking around his garden, coming into spring. Eventually, he said, quietly, “The world will lose something when you go to a retreat, Adria.”
She hadn’t expected that. She felt herself flush. She said, “Thank you. I hope I will . . . that I can achieve things there. Isn’t that why we . . . ?”
“Why we are doing this? Yes. But even so.”
It was as good a moment as she was going to get.
She said, “The woman who saved Antenami Sardi’s life at that inn is the same woman who healed me.”
He looked at her. “After you did what you cannot tell me?”
“Yes, father. She has helped us twice now.”
“Should we send her money?”
“Folco paid her, both times.”
He made a wry face. “Of course he did. And . . .” She could see him thinking. “And he is commanding his army for the Sardis now.”
Being fearful, she thought, could make a man perceptive, alert, if the fears did not rule him. She said, “She has written me, it came this morning. She’s in a small city near Bischio. She fears it will be attacked. I intend to write Folco about this, but I need one of your couriers.”
“You sent your own courier to Seressa.”
She made herself smile, to ease the sting. “Do you want to discuss why I was forced to use my own?”
He turned away again. “Not really.”
“Good. Then we won’t.” She heard a sound, looked up. “Mother is here.”
He glanced the same way. “Jad help me,” he said. “Both of you at once?”
Adria laughed.
But the tidings her mother came bearing were for her, about her.
They’d found what Corinna Ripoli, duchess of Macera, believed to be the best retreat for her daughter. A large, well-known one near Rhodias. They would take her this summer, and the understanding was she’d follow the current Eldest Daughter in that role. The proposed cost, the duchess added, turning to her husband, was high.
“Of course it is,” Adria’s father said.
“We will negotiate,” her mother said.
“Of course we will,” said her father.
This summer, Adria was thinking. It was upon her, then. She could almost picture the garden around them in its summer hues, and she’d be gone. A life could change—your life—so quickly.
She realized her father was looking at her. She turned back to him. She thought she saw tenderness in his eyes. He loves me, she thought.
“It seems we all have letters to send in various directions,” Duke Arimanno said to his youngest child. “I’ll have them carried wherever they need to go.”
Adria wondered if she was about to cry. She excused herself before that could happen. She went riding later. Midday was not the best time, but it wasn’t hot yet. It wasn’t summer. Not yet.
After, she wrote two letters—one to Folco, one to Seressa. She ordered another religious text in the second one. She named the retreat near Rhodias where she would be going.
It was odd, writing down the name, saying it aloud to herself. She would be expected to live and die there.
She joined her parents and brothers for sundown prayers in the palace sanctuary. She prayed for forgiveness, she always did, for the killing of Uberto of Mylasia. She sought within herself, she always did, for any contrition, failed to find it.
I am, Adria Ripoli thought, not ideally suited to become an Eldest Daughter of Jad. For some reason the thought made her feel better.
There was music after the evening meal. She danced with her father. He loved music. He was a good dancer, better than her.
“I propose,” he said as they moved apart on the floor, then came back together, “to write the duke of Seressa that I feared my headstrong daughter was forming an attachment to a tradesman, and sought—foolishly—to forestall it.”
“You have a headstrong daughter?” she asked.
He smiled. “I can write a different letter.”
She shook her head. “It is all right. You will give the bookseller an undeserved reputation, but men like having those.”
“Sometimes, some men.”
Her turn to smile, but it took an effort. She was still feeling . . . difficult things. “You may have to send me to a Daughters of Jad retreat. To curb my excesses.”
She saw, to her surprise (a day of surprises, this), that he was also dealing with emotion as they danced.
“Rhodias,” he said, “is very far, Adria.”
He hated travel. She hadn’t thought about that.
She said, firmly, “If you do not visit me I will not pray for you.”
He squeezed her hand after she spun through a turn and came back. “Then I will have to visit, because if you don’t pray for my soul there’s no point to any of this, is there?”
He was, Adria realized, close to tears. So was she again, but only because of him, she told herself.
* * *
• • •
SHE WENT UP the small, winding staircase that led from her rooms to the palace roof, something she liked to do: mornings, sunset, sometimes in the dark, as now.
They’d dined and danced late. It was night when she came out onto the flat roof, the waxing blue moon risen among the stars. It was windy but she had a cloak.
She’d always liked the night, its stars and moons. Jaddites prayed for the return of the sun, for the god’s safe journey, but Adria had sometimes thought how you could also need the nighttime, the intimacy of it, the privacy. Lovers did, surely. Needful as night was the phrase that came to her.
She could remember a cleric teaching her, a child in this palace, how Jad’s pre-eminence was shown by the way the rising sun chased away the stars and the two moons (or dimmed those two to pale, weak things in the daytime sky). She’d asked—at eight or nine years of age—why it couldn’t then be said that Jad was chased down in the west by them, and they ruled the night as his sun ruled the day.
The cleric, indignant, had instructed her father to have her beaten for that impiety. He’d not dared to touch her himself, of course. Her father had heard the story, suppressed a smile (she’d already learned to recognize when he was doing that), dismissed the cleric, appointed another.
Her mother had called Adria into her chambers (she still remembers how wonderfully scented she’d found those rooms, always) and told her, also smiling a little, that her thoughts were clever but that girls—and women—needed to be cautious as to cleverness. Not to deny it, but to use it shrewdly to affect the world, tilt it subtly. If one was known to be confrontational, obstinate, challenging, it made it hard to do that tilting, Corinna Ripoli told her daughter.
She hadn’t done particularly well as to cautious, Adria thought on the palace roof. But she was no longer a child, and there were different lessons to learn now. Her mother and aunt still had things to teach her, just as Folco and her father did. Her father—a sudden thought—truly loved her. It wasn’t just about usefulness, or the possible lack of it. She considered this, looking out. He would have a long way to travel to see her near Rhodias. He’d promised he would.
She was on the city side of the roof, above the palace wall, though all the towers rose higher. From here she could see Macera in the dark. Some lights still flickered in the city but not many at this hour. To her right she could have seen far out into the countryside if it had been day: fields, forests, as far as the river. If she crossed to the other side of the roof, she’d be above the walls and towers that defended against foes from without. A palace was a fortress in their time.
She didn’t feel tired. It had been an eventful day. She now knew where she was going, for one thing. A new life far away from here, an entirely new life. It would not do, she thought wryly, to propose in a Daughters of Jad retreat that the sun god might be balanced equally by Kindath moons or Asharite stars. She looked out and down, smiling a little.
And so Adria became the one to sound the alarm that night, and save the palace and her family, and thereby change the course of history in Macera, Batiara, possibly the wider world—for who can know how far the ripples of events can run?
She saw torches in the city, moving towards the palace. This was unusual at night. There were lights in any city after dark, but these were all coming this way, converging, and could only have been seen from up here, or by guards on the city-side wall or towers.
Then she saw the main palace gates below swing open. Something that should not have happened, ever, at night.
Six of the nine night guards there, it was later learned, had been suborned, and the three who had not been were the first to be killed.
She knew what this was, what it had to be.
“Guards!” she screamed. “The city gate! We are under attack!”
She kept shouting it, down to the forecourt. As soon as she saw men moving in response, she wheeled and ran as fast as she could across an uneven roof to the far side, and screamed from there at the guards on the wall that faced the countryside. There were barracks outside the city where her father’s best troops were quartered. She shouted to the wall and towers, to anyone below, her heart pounding.
She heard responses, saw men moving. Arimanno of Macera had good soldiers, he paid them well and on time, always, and they were effectively led. This was a substantial part of where the taxes on his city and hinterland went. Macera paid, some had said in secret gatherings all winter, for its own subjugation.
Almost all of the soldiers turned out to be loyal, which, with Adria’s warning, turned out to be enough, in a hard, close, savage fight.
Her father had always feared his city as much as any threat from outside. One is not foolishly anxious or afraid if there really are those who want one deposed and dead, who see themselves ruling. The Abbato and Conditti families of Macera were loftier in lineage than the Ripoli. They could—they did—regard Arimanno as a clever upstart, taxing them to pay for his own wildly expensive elevation to a dukedom.
They could take a cue—it later emerged that they had—from events in Mylasia following the assassination of Count Uberto. True, Mylasia had no ruling lord now—it was a commune led by merchants—but the lessons you extracted from history were yours to choose, weren’t they?
The rising of those two rebellious families—and those who cast their lot with them—was defeated, in the event.
It was, however, a near thing. The rebels did get into the forecourt through the opened gates on the city side. They rushed through it with purpose. Some did make it into the palace and started up the main stairs towards the family’s living quarters. If the duke and his three living sons could be slain, the soldiers—it was believed—could be told as much and would change allegiance towards those who could pay them, since the Ripoli would have no one left.
A soldier’s loyalty is more fickle than a girl’s was the saying.
Sayings are not always true—as to soldiers, or girls—and the rebels never did get up the main stairway to the duke’s chambers. Some went up a second, smaller staircase; they all knew the Macera palace well.
There, also, they encountered guards, if a smaller number. And there they also found the duke’s youngest daughter, holding a sword on the stairway.
Adria had been stabbed in Mylasia, a knife in the thigh. A good healer and the god’s mercy could get you past something like that. She was feeling strong and angry (and fearful for her family) as she came down to join the two guards defending the back stairwell. Two guards and the duke’s daughter, for the moment, against half a dozen coming up towards the family quarters.
There were other guards arriving behind her, she heard them shouting and clattering through the living quarters, headed for this stairwell and the main one. Behind her was the thing that mattered. You couldn’t help from too far behind, and their loyal men below would have to fight up here through the courtyard. They’d need time.
One of the men in front of her engaged an attacker to his left. Killed him, in fact. But that engagement left room for another rebel to shoulder past against the wall of the stairwell. Adria thrust with her sword. She felt it drive into flesh. But the man—she never saw him clearly—thrust back with his own blade.
There was a shocking degree of pain. She fell backwards and to one side as reinforcements came running down to join the fight. One of these saw her and swore savagely. He dropped his sword to pick her up. He carried her, still cursing, up past the others, back the way he’d come, towards the family quarters. She cried out as he stumbled on the top stair. There was pain with every movement, she felt blood pouring from her. Again. But this wound was in the stomach, below her ribs. It was bad, she knew it was. She thought of Jad. You were supposed to think of the god, weren’t you? He was under the world now, far away.
