A Brightness Long Ago, page 34
“Soon, I think.”
“To Sauradia?”
She nodded.
“Sarantium?”
“Maybe later. If it is safe.”
“Why?”
Really. Why? Because a ghost had said . . . ?
“I have things to learn there,” Jelena said. And favoured him with her best smile.
She turned back and told the guards at the gate to have the commune leaders come out to talk to the administrator of the Firentine army immediately, before soldiers came and the morning altered in a bad way.
In the end, they invited Antenami inside. He entered willingly. No harm would ever come to him from them. His family would level their walls, burn the city to ash, salt the ground, hack each one of them into pieces for dogs and corpse birds if anything happened to him. They knew that.
* * *
• • •
THE COMMANDER OF the artillery-escorting portion of the Firentine army did consider—if briefly—killing the civic administrator attached to his force. He entertained this thought when he saw Antenami Sardi walk out alone from Dondi as he himself galloped up, at speed, raising dust on the road at the head of twenty riders.
Sardi’s servant, leading the magnificent horse Boriforte lusted to own, followed him out. It was stunning—the city actually opened its gates! Notwithstanding the presence of Boriforte and his men. It was almost an insult! They feared him so little? Sardi had—clearly!—gone inside alone and undefended.
What were the world and warfare coming to?
Piero Sardi’s younger son strolled, as if out for a pleasant morning in the countryside, towards where Boriforte halted his men, carefully out of arquebus and crossbow range. You learned those distances early. It was fundamental knowledge. Sardi was smiling. He lifted a hand in cheerful greeting.
“Captain!” he called. “I am pleased to see you. I can share good tidings the sooner.”
What Boriforte wished to say was, Fuck you, you rich, interfering fuck!
What he said was, “Good tidings are always welcome. But you must never again ride out like this, my lord. I am responsible for your safety.”
Sardi came up to him. His smile did not waver. “Sometimes we take risks,” he said, waving an aristocrat’s careless hand. He stopped smiling. “In addition, I was informed last night of your intention to approach these walls with hostile and deceptive intent, despite my instructions, which are also my father’s. We will discuss this in my tent at camp, and your explanation will be attached to the letters I send home and to Folco d’Acorsi. Dismount, please. I will get a discomfort in my neck looking up at you.”
Anger could disappear quickly when extreme apprehension replaced it, Ariberti Boriforte thought. He also thought, Oh, dear Jad.
It had seemed such a good idea the day before, to approach the city then allege, galloping back to camp, that a casual reconnaissance, a signalling of their presence, had been met by arquebus fire and crossbow bolts—and that this disrespect to Firenta could not be permitted. Not at the outset of a campaign!
Then they’d take and occupy this city and do what soldiers did and reap what soldiers reaped, before Folco arrived at Bischio to take over the army and most of the profits to be found.
It became important to discover who had talked to Sardi.
It might have been an error to have so many men privy to his plans. Spies were legion in an army, especially spies for the city officials accompanying them, interfering with what soldiers needed (or desired) to do.
“Dismount,” said Sardi, again. “My neck . . .”
He did not say please this time.
This man was not, Boriforte thought, the person he’d seen singing late at night, a cup of wine in his hand, in several of the better brothels in Firenta during the winter just past.
He dismounted.
He really did want to kill the other man, but there were twenty cavalry here and Dondi’s guards could see them from above the open gates, and . . . well, he didn’t particularly want to be castrated and beheaded and have his head spiked on the wall of Firenta.
“We were coming to do a sighting of the ground here, in case we needed to know the terrain,” he said.
“Were you?” said Sardi. “Let’s discuss it, shall we? And you can put that in a note to go with my letters. Do it all properly, right?”
“Properly. Yes,” Boriforte managed to say. His horse shifted and stamped beside him. He gestured with his free hand, and a rider came up to take the reins.
“Check the left rear hoof, I think,” said Antenami Sardi. “Shoe might be a concern.”
This man was, Boriforte thought, going to drive him mad.
He said, “You mentioned good tidings.”
“I did!” The young Sardi smiled. “Dondi has agreed to give us—today—eight thousand gold serales and then twenty wagonloads of grain in sacks—their own wagons and horses to pull them, too. It was all very easy. They have no desire to offend us. Or,” he added, quietly, “to have us do violence in a city that should soon belong to Firenta and pay taxes there.”
“Eight thousand?” Boriforte repeated.
It was an enormous sum for a small city to assemble immediately. He was doing numbers in his head.
“I believe,” Sardi said, smiling again, “our soldiers will be pleased when we tell them. No siege, no fighting, no delay, no wasting cannonballs we’ll need at Bischio. And a sum for each of them. And for the captains, of course, however you normally divide it.”
“Eight thousand serales. Today?”
“I said that. The grain to follow. We will leave men to wait for their wagons and escort them after us. I do have questions about how Folco intends to prevent Teobaldo Monticola from being ahead of him to Bischio. If we encounter his force before our main army arrives, are our cannons not lost? Aren’t we lost?”
“I wouldn’t worry about Folco,” said Boriforte, clinging to some pride as a military man, speaking of his superior.
“Good,” said Sardi. “If you say not to, I won’t. Shall we ride back to camp? I find I’m hungry. I was going to eat in Dondi, they invited me, but then someone saw you coming.”
Eight thousand. Twenty wagons, Boriforte thought. The idiot had done amazingly well.
He still wanted to kill him. And he really needed that letter, as described, to not be sent to the father, or to Folco. The world, Boriforte thought, could be challenging. A man might be hemmed in on all sides sometimes.
They rode back. At the camp, Sardi, unexpectedly, let him be the one to share the news. The army cheered loudly and for a long time. But it would be known quickly, if it wasn’t already, who had negotiated this—that it hadn’t been their commander.
Hemmed in. All sides. You might as well go be a cleric in a Sons of Jad retreat, wear a scratchy yellow robe and a disk around your neck, light candles at all hours, wake in winter nights to kneel and pray . . . bound by so many pious rules. No horses, weapons, fires, blood. No life.
CHAPTER XIV
I left Seressa for Remigio by ship before word arrived of what had happened in Macera. So I hadn’t heard about Adria before I met Teobaldo Monticola again.
I don’t think I’d have done anything differently, but it is impossible to know. We cannot go backwards in our lives then unspool them in another way, to compare. There is no life where I did not go with her down a stairway in Mylasia, or find her at an inn near Bischio, where she didn’t ride in a springtime race long ago, or die on another stairway at home.
I was truly unimportant, in any case, whatever I might have felt. A minor representative of Seressa sent to address certain money matters with the lord of Remigio. Sent because Duke Ricci had decided, for his own reasons, that I seemed promising, and because I’d told him I’d met Monticola and he’d shown me favour.
Seressa has always been good at finding even the smallest advantages. I began to learn that then. I know it extremely well by now.
Brunetto Duso was with me on that journey, for the first time. He was the leader of those guards who had been in the square to escort me to the duke. The ones who had missed the presence of an assassin on a roof.
“Do you want the guard leader executed?” Ricci had asked me at the end of our meeting, after he’d offered me a post, and my first journey by sea.
“What?” I exclaimed, genuinely dismayed.
“He failed. He was assigned to bring you to me safely.”
“He did bring me safely here, my lord,” I said.
“Only because you saw the man on the roof. Neither he nor his men did.”
I stared at him. He was new to his great office then but it didn’t seem that way. He sat calmly at his desk, holding the spectacles he used. I said, “Would you really kill him if I said I wanted you to?”
“Of course. Or I’d not have asked.”
“Not even to test me?”
He smiled. “I could note your reply and have him killed, regardless of what you say, Guidanio Cerra.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Or don’t for any desire of mine. They did catch the man quickly.”
“They did. Very well. Would you like him assigned to you? I will have him advised that he owes you his life.”
I blinked. “I am to have a guard?”
“And an escort. As befits a representative of the council.”
I swallowed. This was happening quickly. “That would please me, if he . . . if he wishes to be . . .”
“His wishes,” said the acting duke of Seressa, “do not matter at all.”
They’ve come to matter to me. Brunetto is a presence in my life, a constant, a friend. He’s still with me all these years later, neither of us young any more.
Adria is an absence. No one living knows what that means, how often I remember her, even now. It is foolish, I concede it. Sometimes we are foolish. But isn’t it also true sometimes that the only way a person survives after they die is in the memories of others?
* * *
• • •
IT TURNED OUT I was comfortable at sea, which has been helpful in the years between then and now. Brunetto was continuously unwell, still is if a sea is rough.
We poured oil over the railing to bless the journey, then hugged the coastline south, pulling into harbours at day’s end. There were raiders from Senjan in these waters, they even crossed to this coast, we were told, and we did have commercial goods on board. (Why waste a voyage by not carrying goods to sell?)
I liked watching the dolphins that flanked and followed the ship, and I liked the taste and bite of salt in the wind. I was still working to deal with what had happened to me. I had been a bookseller, and now . . .
One evening, the white moon rising over the water, we moored in the harbour of Mylasia, paying the port fee to do that.
I had complex memories that night, seeing those walls and the lights of the palace in the dark. I’d killed two men there, had a friend slaughtered in the square by a mob.
We were a Council of Twelve ship, we didn’t take on passengers, and no one entrusted mail to the Seressinis, they knew it would be opened. On the other hand, we were the ones who guarded this sea for all merchants and ports, our war galleys defending against Asharite raiders and—as best we could—against the Senjani pirates. Mylasia and Remigio, all the cities down the coast, were permitted to have trading ships pull into their harbours only on payment of an annual fee to us.
That was—in part—why I was on my way to Remigio. Mylasia’s taxes would be collected by someone else, later in the season, by contract. Which was just as well for me. There could be people who knew me there, and I really didn’t want to be known.
A few days later, a wind whipping our sails from the east, we saw Remigio on a rise of land above the water, the dome of a new-built sanctuary gleaming in the late-day sun. We swept into the deep, sheltered harbour of Teobaldo Monticola’s city, flying the flag of Seressa, Queen of the Sea, and bearing an official envoy—me.
* * *
• • •
“OH, TEO, SEE who has come to us! It is my darling Danio!”
She recognized me the moment I entered, from the far end of their reception room. I hadn’t been announced yet. It was, I will admit it, deeply flattering. But Ginevra della Valle was that sort of woman. My sense is she’d had to be observant from the start, to emerge where she now was . . . sitting beside the lord of Remigio, married to him as of the winter.
That had happened, yes. Word had crossed Batiara swiftly, because such things mattered. The Wolf of Remigio was married again, claimed and tamed by a longtime mistress of celebrated beauty. Tamed in this regard, at least.
She was a remarkable person. Dangerously attractive and dangerously clever. Being called my darling here could be good or bad for me. I wasn’t in a position to know. I did see men turning to look at me, closely.
Monticola, in hunting clothes on his throne, was smiling, unruffled, although I was certain he’d needed her voiced alert to recognize me in formal clothing and a new office. He’d only known me as a hanger-on to his men, one who’d amused him on the road then done him a service—winning him a great deal of money.
“Danino it is,” he said. “You have risen far in a year. Come forward.”
I had only a basic idea of protocol, though one of those on the ship, a man named Queratesi, had been advising me in a perfunctory way. I had the sense that it was his considered view that he, not I, ought to have been appointed the council’s representative on this trip, not merely one of those accompanying me. Still, he was too experienced to visibly sulk, and he’d told me a few things.
I walked to the edge of the carpet below their cushioned chairs and bowed, removing my hat. “My lord,” I said, “I have risen only enough to be permitted the pleasure of seeing you both again.” That sounded about right.
Ginevra della Valle, in green and gold beside her lord, smiled prettily. “Such a sweet man!” she said.
She stood up, as if impetuously, came down the three steps, and kissed me on the cheek, rising on tiptoe. She wore golden earrings and a scent that offered a hint of the east. There was a murmur in the room.
“Do you want me to kill him in a rage?” Monticola asked. He was grinning.
“I would poison your wine if you did!” she exclaimed, laughing. She gathered her skirts and went back up to her seat beside him.
I took a chance on a jest. “Doing that would hardly help me, if I was already dead.”
Monticola laughed, but briefly. “As I recall,” he said, “you were going home to be a bookseller when you declined service with me. And now . . . ?”
Dangers, always. How swiftly they could come. He could see me as having rejected him—and his children. And he was not one to be easy with that.
“I was a bookseller, my lord. Until very recently. Someone tried to assault me in Seressa, and Duke Ricci summoned me to speak about it. He then decided I was worthy to be tested with a mission.”
“To our court, because we knew you and might share more than we would with a stranger.” It was the woman, not the man who said this, and it was a statement, not a question.
Both of them, I reminded myself: the need to be cautious.
I wondered if I would ever be like these people, in this quick, probing way. Or in any way that mattered. Would I become a figure drifting on the edges of their world? Or be binding and selling books again by summertime?
I said, “My lord, my lady, Seressa lives by gathering information. So do you. But I have no task in that regard. I am too inexperienced. I am here only to address a matter of . . . monies owed this spring.”
I had been told by the duke how to put that last phrase, even to the pause. He’d rehearsed me in it. There were reasons. He’d explained them and what I was to watch for. Seressa was what it was, my city.
* * *
• • •
THERE WERE ABOUT forty people in the audience chamber. Monticola didn’t order it cleared. We withdrew, instead, into a smaller room through a door behind their chairs. Himself, me, Brunetto as my man, two officials of the court. One, very well dressed, had a twisted hand; that would be Gherardo Monticola. I’d been told about him: his brother trusted him more than anyone alive. He had a benign look. I had been advised it was misleading.
I said, after the door closed behind us, “Have you found a tutor, my lord? For the children?” It seemed an important thing to ask.
Monticola looked at me. His expression was not welcoming. With his size and reputation and that narrowed gaze, he was genuinely intimidating. He said, “Why would that matter to a representative of the Council of Twelve? Or a bookseller?”
I cleared my throat. “We can have interests beyond our roles, lord. I was honoured to have been asked. I am sorry if the question is an intrusion.”
He stared, but I could see something change. He was a changeable man. Towards violence sometimes, sometimes the other way.
“We have a tutor, yes. From Varena. For half a year, now. I am modestly pleased, not more than that.”
I thought of a jest, an apt quote, and didn’t say it. I waited.
He said, “To business. I owe Seressa eight thousand. You are bringing me . . . ?”
This was why we were in a private room.
“Fifteen thousand serales, lord, to supplement what Bischio is paying you. Macera has proposed the same.”
“And you are carrying the sum from Macera, as well?”
“I am.”
“So, we will receive bank drafts for twenty-two thousand serales from you today? Fifteen from Macera, seven from Seressa—fifteen less the eight we owe?”
I turned. It was the brother who had spoken, a deep, strong voice. Gherardo, who administered the affairs of Remigio while Teobaldo was away—and in good part, also, while he was at home, I’d been told.
