A Brightness Long Ago, page 38
But the emperor and the Eastern Patriarch were still with them, their cleric wrote, leading all those left alive to fight for Jad and the City, and when death came for him in the morning, he would greet it with his soul at peace, knowing he was serving his god among brave, strong men. He asked for prayers in their sanctuary for all those who fell in the City of Cities, not just for himself, but he asked to be remembered, not forgotten. So the old man told us. I heard this, and my soul felt small, trivial.
They’d have died weeks ago. That was part of the horror.
These tidings were about a moment in the past, however new and raw they were for us. Time was strange when distance became a part of it. You learned of something, it destroyed you on a day when spring was ripening in the world—and it had happened long since.
Folco Cino d’Acorsi walked through the open doorway of the sanctuary and stood looking out at the grey stone walls of the retreat and the trees in the sunlit courtyard. Monticola followed him, went past, also looking out, before he turned.
Folco said to him, “I will not make war anywhere this spring or summer. Not for the Sardis or anyone else. I will return what they have paid me, or ask to apply it to next year. None of us should be fighting now.”
“We will next year, though?” the other man asked.
Monticola smiled with his mouth but not his eyes; his voice was flat, thinned out. The rest of us had followed them outside. I was last, reluctant to leave the sanctuary, that place of peace and prayer, with the sun disk and the altar offering something other than . . . what the world did.
“We are as we are,” Folco said in front of me as I came forward. I was looking at Monticola. “I am not a man to pray in a retreat for the rest of my days.”
“You could assemble a force to recapture the City!” the elderly cleric said suddenly, his voice strong. “The two of you could lead it!”
The commanders looked at each other.
“It will not happen,” Monticola said wearily. “There will be talk among those more powerful than we are, but it will not happen. Just as it never did when we might have sailed to lift the siege.”
Folco nodded. His cousin was beside him, I saw him in profile; Aldo Cino’s face, too, was harrowed.
Folco said to Monticola, “Will I cost you your own fees if I withdraw?”
The other man shrugged. “Probably not. I don’t know. I can do the same thing you do, face you at Bischio in a year.”
There was silence, then, “I deeply regret your loss,” Folco said quietly. “It is good you have other sons.”
“It is,” said Monticola.
“You need to live, to let them grow up.”
“You are advising me now, d’Acorsi?” A hint of anger. Or pain.
“I am sorry. I did not mean—”
“I can still kill you. In this courtyard, outside these walls. We were about to do that, remember?”
Folco looked at him. “We were. Is it what you want?”
Monticola’s mouth was a thin line. He said, “What I want? I want your admission, before this holy man on this terrible day, that you and your accursed father lied all these years about your sister. Failing that, I am of a mind and mood to kill someone, yes. You will do, better than anyone else I know.”
“And your sons? Your city? If you fall?”
“That won’t happen. Admit the lie, the Cino family lie, and we both ride home. Do not, and we fight—and you will die. Never doubt me. You will end your days here.”
What happened next is easily told. The words are simple, they are only words.
I heard a strangled sound to my right, beyond Folco, and I turned that way. I remember that. Then I actually moved, some instinct. I did. The elderly cleric lifted a hand. That I remember too.
And Folco’s cousin Aldo cried out, in raw, racked pain, “It was no lie, bastard! You ruined her!” And as he did so he drew his dagger from his belt and threw it.
I recall my hand moving, reaching, towards his arm, his shoulder, for some way to make this not happen—but I was on the wrong side. I had come out the door and stood on Folco’s other side. The accidents behind or beneath who lives and dies, what happens in the world.
I think I also cried out, but I can see Folco turning at his cousin’s words, towards the movement on his right, knowing already—moving swiftly but too slow (forever too slow)—his own hand flung out, desperately.
And I remember, I will always remember, Aldo Cino’s knife, thrown by a man celebrated for his skill, burying itself in Teobaldo Monticola’s eye. I will never not see that, for as long as I remember anything at all, I believe.
Probably some poets have since written about an eye taken then and an eye lost long ago . . . I haven’t heard such verses, but it is such an obvious association with those two men, and truth dies before good images, or stories.
* * *
• • •
FOLCO KILLED HIS cousin (whom he had loved since their childhood) with a dagger to the throat. Aldo was wearing armour that day, he couldn’t be stabbed in the chest. There was a great deal of blood, I remember some of it landed on me because I had moved that way, uselessly. It was on my cheek, like a stain, a mark.
I saw two clerics rush to Monticola, but he was already dead. We all knew it. He’d been dead before he fell. The elderly cleric was on his knees again, wailing in pain, both hands covering his eyes, as if to unsee horror in a holy place.
I wanted to do that.
I looked down at my hands and saw that, without realizing it, I must have drawn my knife. Folco had been faster—of course he had—and had killed his cousin for killing his lifelong enemy.
I looked at him, then I had to look away.
* * *
• • •
DO YOU RISK or lose your hope of light, he thinks, if you curse when you are dead? When you seem to be looking down on your own body and are swearing about the stupidity of dying here? Now? A blade in the eye—from Folco Cino’s cousin! Bitter fruit of a hard—lost—world.
But his pain, his anger—his grief, to use a truer word—is somehow still about Trussio. He is hovering above his own dead body—and thinking of his son, who will have died in Sarantium.
Weeks ago. Weeks ago. If he’d been a truly caring father, shouldn’t he have woken in some night at the beginning of this spring and felt—known!—his son was dead?
But no, he was, or had been (he is dead), a caring, a proud, a loving father. He had hated to see his son go over the water to Sarantium. He had been unable to deny him the right to do so.
And a moment ago Folco Cino, born arrogant and subtle, both, had reminded him he needed to live to protect the younger children. That they would be terribly vulnerable if he was gone before they came of age and showed their own prowess. If they did do that.
And now he is gone. No use to them at all, no shelter. He is looking down in some in-between strangeness, and his small sons will be naked before the world, and he knows the world. Had known the world.
There is no chance for them, he thinks, and it makes him want to weep (do the dead weep?). No way they will survive his dying. Ginevra might live—as someone’s trophy. His brother, whom he has also loved, will probably be killed with the boys. Remigio will be too brilliant a prize. The cities of Batiara will fight like slavering hounds to claim it.
He has done all that he’s done to no purpose in the end. He is leaving no legacy, because of stupid, bitter, murderous Aldo Cino—who is lying on the ground by the sanctuary door, dead at Folco’s hand.
If he could see Aldo in this space, if the other man were somehow also hovering here (wherever here is), he’d risk his hope of Jad and light by telling him exactly what he thinks. You can’t kill a dead man, he supposes, but perhaps you can tell him what you’d have wanted to do to him, and let the god also know.
He ought to have been watching for something like a thrown blade when he mentioned Folco’s sister again. Everyone knew Aldo had loved her.
The truth of that thought burns, even here, unseen above the living.
It was because of Trussio. He had not been paying attention. He hadn’t even really known what he was saying. He had spoken violently to Folco about wanting to kill him, but the truth—his heart’s truth—is that he’d been thinking about being released from sorrow into . . . this.
Unworthy thought, since so many had depended on him—his children, Ginevra’s—and Folco had said as much.
And now there is nothing he can do except wait to see if Jad will forgive his sins because he’d loved some people truly, and had not committed nearly half the crimes alleged through the years.
A thought comes to him. A drifting tendril of an idea. And because he’d always been impulsive, had always believed that he could do things others could not, he bends what remains here of himself—of Teobaldo Monticola di Remigio, the finest commander of men in Batiara if not the world—and he aims his will at Folco, and at the young man, the Seressini he’d liked, standing beside d’Acorsi. He tries to make his thought, his desire, into a kind of dagger from beyond.
He hurls his need towards them for as long as he can, as hard as he can, with longing and despair, but even as he does he feels the shadowy space begin to change. This is not, it seems, a place where you can stay.
He sees those around his body, where it lies, becoming smaller, more distant. He can do nothing more to them, or with them. He can only drift—and wait for what will come now, and forever. It occurs to him that he had loved the world Jad had made, and his place in it.
He shapes a true prayer then, asking Jad’s blessing upon Ginevra and the children, and upon his brother who had been dear to him all his days on earth. And he wishes that he might be remembered as honestly as might be in a dishonest time. Probably too many things to want, he thinks, as thought comes to an end.
He looked towards what seemed to be a light, and did not know if it would be his, if mercy existed for such as he had been. He yearned, as we all yearn, but he did not know, since none of us can know.
* * *
The Asharites had overwintered outside Sarantium’s great walls, continuing the siege through the cold months, cutting off supplies to the city.
In spring, with new soldiers and additional artillery, they resumed their assault. The resources required to have wintered here, Trussio d’Acorsi had explained to Nardo the cleric, were colossal, wasteful. They made no sense, given the loss of men and animals that winter’s cold and disease imposed, and the cost of providing (inadequate) food and shelter and heat to allow at least some of the invading force to survive.
It could only be justified by a ferocious passion, Trussio said. But they knew by then, inside the city, that Gurçu the khalif had passion to spare. He wanted the city, he wanted them dead. He did not care how many among his own army died in winter or in battle—so long as he took Sarantium.
And he was going to do that. This morning. A morning several weeks before an encounter outside a sanctuary and retreat far to the west, where Trussio’s father would die, thinking of his son. The same retreat Nardo Sarzerola had left to come to the City of Cities. How could any man claim to understand the ways of Jad’s world?
Nardo was not a soldier, but prayers and piety would surely help save the city, he had thought, journeying here a year ago. He didn’t think that any more, though his faith was still with him. He would die with it, he knew.
They had spent the night, the last night, in each other’s arms, he and Trussio, too weary, too terribly hungry, to make love, but still alive in darkness, still needing the shelter another soul could offer, especially when there was love. He had known the son of Teobaldo Monticola was here, the father had told him as much in that roadway a year before. He had sought out the other man to salute him when he arrived, tell his story, why he had come. What had happened between them was a world removed from anything he’d thought would happen. It was a blessing. Had been.
Now, at sunrise, assembled before the gaping wound in the walls that the enemy cannon had torn, they stood with those who remained, and he knew it was the end. Last sunrise, last birdsong heard, dawn wind felt. The great walls and the sea had defended the city for a thousand years. They would not do so today.
The noise from the enemy beyond was another kind of wall, rising where the stones in front of them lay broken and exposed. Nardo felt Trussio squeeze his arm as the Eastern Patriarch finished the dawn invocation with the words and melody they used here. Nardo would have called it heresy, worth a pyre, once. Not any more, though a burning was coming.
They stood up. Everyone was so weak and frail with hunger. Gaunt men helping each other rise. Nardo looked at the tall man he loved, the one so unexpectedly found as his heart’s companion here at the end, and he saw in Trussio’s eyes that he, Nardo Sarzerola, was also loved, astonishingly.
A sound behind them. The emperor, coming from beside the Patriarch, approaching them. He saluted Trussio Monticola, heir to Remigio, among the highest ranking of those who had come to Sarantium—and had stayed. He offered him a kiss on each cheek, and then on the mouth, and then he did the same for Nardo, unworthy as the young cleric knew himself to be. He was here though, standing with these two.
The emperor said, in his light, mild voice, “We will see our god today, and can tell him we kept faith.”
No one else in the Jaddite world had done so, Nardo thought. He didn’t say it. Not now.
The emperor moved on, to salute and speak to others.
Nardo, holding a spear awkwardly, feeling heavy in the armour they’d made him wear, looked at Trussio.
“Goodbye,” said the other man. “You were an undeserved gift of tenderness. I am here and I love you. Try not to be afraid.”
Nardo shook his head. “I am past fear. You and I will be with the god in light today.”
Trussio offered his half-smile. He shook his handsome head. “I have too many sins to my name. I will not, I think.”
Nardo, with an effort, managed a smile in return. “But I do not have many sins, and you belong to me. I will bring you to Jad in light. Wait and see. Wait and see, love.”
Drums beyond the gap in the wall. Shouted commands heard, then the sound—a roaring—of many men coming for them. Coming now.
The emperor was calling them to form ranks. The banners of Jad and Sarantium were beside him, held by boys. They must be so afraid, Nardo thought. Trussio turned and went towards the very front, to take the initial charge when it came, and because he did that, so did Nardo, armour over his yellow cleric’s robe, and they died together that morning beside the last emperor of Sarantium, as the city fell.
CHAPTER XVI
I will swear until the last breath leaves my body that a wind rose in the courtyard just after Teobaldo Monticola died.
I have no idea what I could have done to change what happened there. But I dream, even now, in restless nights, of jarring Aldo’s arm or body with mine, or being next to Monticola, seeing the dagger drawn, pushing him, shouting the warning that let him live.
And what would our world have been, if so?
Perhaps as often as we dream of things we wish might come to be, we dream of what we wish had been otherwise. We are carried forward through time, but our minds take us back.
I will not say—it would be a lie—that I cared for Teobaldo Monticola. I respected and feared him. But he had been good to me from the time we met on the road so near to where his life ended. He was such a compelling man. He should never have died in such a way.
Neither should Aldo Cino d’Acorsi, if it comes to that. A bad end to that life, too, slain by the cousin he’d loved, his body later given to Monticola’s army to do whatever they chose with it—and everyone knew that certain things done to a body imperilled the soul. They did mutilate him. It was widely reported.
And what if Monticola had not said what he’d said in that moment—about Folco and his father? I think about that, too, and not just when I’m awake at night. Would Aldo have held his peace? Would the two men have fought in that courtyard? I don’t think either of them wanted to. Not then.
Words spoken should not be a death sentence, but they can be, they have been.
Both things—killing his cousin, surrendering the body—would have wounded Folco grievously. Giving Aldo to the men of Remigio was proper, it was necessary—but even that, and killing him, might not have been enough to stop Batiara from hurtling into an ugly war. One that could have started that day, west of the walls of the retreat, where two great armies had gathered.
But no. The bells were tolling above us. Sarantium had fallen, and the towering awareness of that cast a shadow over everything, even the murder of the lord of Remigio.
That wind did rise, however, I swear to it.
And it wasn’t a normal wind. I cannot tell you how I know this but I do. Perhaps because with that swirl and gust—a cold wind on a mild day—a thought came to me. Was given to me, imposed upon me. I have never had the right words. But I knew in that moment what I was going to do. What I seemed to have no choice but to do.
Folco d’Acorsi turned from looking down at two bodies and his gaze met mine, the one eye. He feels it, I thought. And I believe he saw it in me.
That same day he dictated a letter to the clerics and they began making copies. Folco would sign all of these and have the Eldest witness them. He gave me two, with instructions. He was calm, precise. But after, he went back into the sanctuary and prayed all night. I did the same, beside him.
Sarantium had fallen. Had been allowed to fall. At one point, towards dawn, he looked at me and we walked out, stiffly. We had a quiet conversation under the last stars, in the chill, standing by the doorway where two men had died.
