A Brightness Long Ago, page 40
“I believe you.”
He smiled. But when he spoke it was gravely. “Will you not stay with me, Jelena? At least consider it? This is not an impulse.”
She stood looking up at him. Someone jostled her and apologized, moving on.
“I think it is,” she said, “but an impulse you really mean. And I also mean it when I say I like being with you. But that is not my destiny, or yours. It is also true that I will miss you when I go.”
* * *
• • •
HE TRIED AGAIN, in Firenta, to induce her to stay. They spent nights together in the house where he placed her, but he knew it was only for a limited number of days—and nights. She gave him pleasure, and comfort, and he thought he might be offering the same to her. He had a sense, through that spring, that his life would be so much better for her presence.
He wasn’t wrong, but it was equally a truth that the purpose and direction of her life was not to make his better, and in time he even came to understand that.
One morning, while Jelena was still in Firenta, he was meeting with his father and brother in the palace. His father looked up from ledgers—they all had numbers in front of them. “Tell me who she is,” he asked, without warning.
Antenami didn’t bother pretending he was unaware of what this meant. He was doing better with his father than he ever had in his life, there seemed to be some sort of understanding, as if shutters had been thrown open, letting in light.
“Do not worry. She is a healer, a pagan, but she will be leaving soon, home to Varena.”
His brother looked up, smiling thinly. “A pagan?” Versano said. “That’s useful. We can give her to the clerics. It is a good time to let people vent some rage against infidels.”
Antenami kept his temper. He was discovering, among other things, that he didn’t fear his own anger as much as once he had, but it did need controlling. He said, quietly, “I’d kill you first.”
It was the calm tone, he thought, that caused their father to keep silent, watching and listening.
“What? For a pagan woman?”
“She saved my life,” he said.
“Oh,” said their father. “This is the one?”
“Yes.”
“Then we all owe her a debt.”
Versano grinned again. “Well, if Antenami is gritting his teeth and fucking her out of gratitude, he’s paid any family debt, I’d say.”
It was easier than one might have expected to put a remark like that into a . . . context of understanding. He did think he understood his brother better now.
He said, his tone measured, “You know, this may all be my fault. Father had to depend on you only. I was of no help in anything. I was distracted by the trivial, paid too little attention. But at some point, brother, it seems you became a mean little man. It ill becomes a Sardi. I’ve been remiss, but not any more. I’m going to keep an eye on that from now on.”
He thought he saw, from the corner of one eye, that their father’s mouth quirked briefly, before he lowered his head—as if to hide it—to his ledger.
“Fuck yourself,” Versano said.
Antenami let his brother see his smile, then returned to his own work.
* * *
• • •
SHE KNEW SHE couldn’t stay, interesting as Firenta was. It turned out she wasn’t afraid of a bigger city after all. They even needed healers here, though there would be real rivalry with the physicians in a city so wealthy. She sensed she might be in some danger, in the season of Sarantium’s fall.
War was suspended in Batiara, possibly elsewhere. Folco d’Acorsi had taken his company home, and the army of Remigio had also gone back, with the body of their lord. There could still be violence, many different kinds, Jelena thought.
With unpaid mercenary bands moving about, it would be genuinely reckless to be a woman on the roads alone. She told Antenami, after two months in the house he provided her, that she was ready to go home. Varena was just a stop, but one that mattered. He arranged for twenty men to escort her through the summer heat. She thought it was extravagant, far too many, but she didn’t deny him the gesture. On the morning she left, he wept in the bedchamber they’d shared.
To her surprise, Jelena was close to tears as well. She kissed him with all the tenderness she had in her.
His men took her home. She had written her family; they were surprised to see her but not astonished. That was all right.
She stayed two years, living in the house where she’d grown up. It was a violent, uncertain time across the water. Asharite forces were enforcing submission all through Sauradia. Submission meant paying taxes, mostly, including a head tax unless a family converted to their faith. It could also mean you were killed if you were rebellious. The taxes mattered to the Asharites. Empires were expensive.
She claimed a room in their house as a treatment chamber: the one with the old artifacts and the mosaic floor with birds. They were well outside Varena’s walls, but people began coming to her: from the city, from the countryside, from farther away after a while. She was skilled at what she did, had instincts and experience now.
One morning, in summer rain, she woke knowing it was time. She’d had a dream, but couldn’t remember it. A few days later she kissed her mother and sisters goodbye and hugged her father hard, and she left her family and home and went to the coast. She took ship across the narrow sea for Sauradia. Things were better there, by report. Some merchants were even going to Sarantium again, although there was supposed to be an embargo. The city was called Asharias now. A change in the world, that. There were always changes, Jelena thought.
Her mother had asked her why she was doing this. She ought to have had a good answer by then, but she didn’t. She repeated what she’d said to Antenami Sardi: I have things to learn.
It was true, at least; maybe a deep truth. She wasn’t sure.
She had three guards with her. She’d made money in two years, saved some even after insisting on paying her parents for her lodging and treatment room. She could have contacted Antenami, even after two years, asked for another escort, but that felt wrong by then, an incurring of obligation with nothing offered in return, and she didn’t do it. She had—everyone who knew her said it—a foolish measure of pride. That wasn’t about to change, she had long ago realized.
She had no idea where she was going in Sauradia. She knew little about it, which became a bit frightening as she went east from the town where the ship docked, into remote, wild countryside. The trees were different, and many of the autumn wildflowers (it was autumn by then).
She could have stayed on the coast, gone south to Dubrava, by all accounts a splendid city, and one that wanted healers. She wasn’t certain why she didn’t do that, what she was looking for—or being summoned to.
One day, on a wide east-west road, the party of merchants she had joined with her guards came to a place where the forest was being cut back by loggers, up a slope to the north, and there, right there, Jelena felt a presence. Something huge, a power in the wood. She didn’t understand. With that came a fear different from any she’d ever known. She thought she heard a roaring in the forest. It took her breath away. She was trembling.
She had to stop in the road to regain control of herself. Her guards stopped, too, looking at her. But a moment later she realized that what she really needed was to keep moving, to get away from this place. She had no idea what was in the forest, and no one else appeared to hear anything. It was only her. That had happened before, but not like this.
Her terror receded a little, and then a little more as they moved on. Jelena took a cloth and wiped cold sweat from her face. She felt her heartbeat gradually slow. She didn’t look to her left, though, as they went. She kept her eyes ahead, aware of the trees but not looking at them.
Later that day they came to a small domed sanctuary of Jad, a low fence surrounding it. The merchants wanted to stop and pray, so did two of her guards. Jelena didn’t go in. Not that day. She remained outside with the other guard.
Later, she would go inside that sanctuary and see what was on the dome—an old mosaic of the Jaddite god, shown gaunt, dark-bearded, dark-eyed, in the eastern fashion. It was powerful, mysterious, but he wasn’t her god. Tesserae sometimes fell in there, the mosaic had been done long ago. She did wonder, at times, who had made it. The clerics didn’t know. It was too old, placed overhead too far back in time. Things were always being lost, including knowledge.
That first day she and the guard strolled a little farther along the quiet road. It was a pleasant afternoon, leaves changing colour, not falling yet, a sharp brightness in the air. She remembered these things after.
Just beyond the sanctuary they came to a village, not walled or anything of the sort. It was just a hamlet, a place where charcoal burners, foragers, hunters, those who farmed the small plots she could see south of the road, could live together for protection, comfort, the warmth of being with other people. And be close to a sanctuary and a burial ground.
A dog came out to them. You needed to fear those generally, but this one was gentle, a golden colour, cautiously curious. Jelena extended a hand, despite the guard’s quick warning, and the dog licked her fingers, then butted its head against her legs.
“You’ve made a friend,” called a woman, smiling from a doorway.
“Seems that way,” Jelena replied, smiling in return.
“I have soup heating, if the two of you are hungry,” the woman said.
“That would be wonderful,” Jelena said.
She never left that village for the rest of her days, which were long, despite all the violence that came into the world and did not pass them by, even there.
One night a very tall man with hard eyes and a sword wound came riding, because by then the hamlet was known to have a healer. She let him in to her house, quietly, because he was being hunted by the Asharites and his being there put them all at risk.
In her treatment room she cleaned and dressed his wound by lantern light. They spoke little. He thanked her, wouldn’t stay. He knew he brought danger. He paid her and left in the dark.
He returned many times, always at night, always quietly, always hunted, injured again, or with an injured man, always going back to war, to his lifelong rebellion, when he left her. Some nights he did stay, however, lying with Jelena for comfort, in shared desire and need, for the shelter that she gave and took, the shelter that she was, all her days.
Shelter can be hard to find. A place can become our home for reasons we do not understand. We build the memories that turn into what we are, then what we were, as we look back. We live in the light that comes to us.
CHAPTER XVII
Brunetto was with me for most of the ride from the place where Teobaldo Monticola died. He has been with me for many of the rides and sea voyages of my life, though this is not the story of those journeys. It is my part in a tale of people and events long ago, when I was young and touched lives brighter than my own.
I have had a friend in him all these years. He knows, I think, how much I value that. I think of the morning we met, when I almost died by an arrow ordered by Adria’s father, as I stood in the doorway of the building where I lived.
On the ride east that year I made him leave me where the road branched, several days from Remigio. I was doing something possibly death-seeking, and there was no need, no reason, for him to be with me for that. I gave him one of the two letters Folco had entrusted to me, for the duke in Seressa.
It was better, in any case, that I be alone, I’d decided. No one of any rank—I had a title and office on this mission for Seressa—was ever alone on a journey in Batiara. Arriving before the gates of Remigio by myself would carry a message.
I hoped so, at any rate. She had said she’d kill me if he died.
The grief (and fear) in her, in all of Remigio, would be raw, an open wound. They were unprotected now; the woman, the two children, the city. I was doing something foolish, going there. Brunetto had said so over and again as we rode. And I’d had no good reply. The thought of doing this had just come in the courtyard of the retreat. It felt right, but it also didn’t feel as though it had been entirely my own decision. It had been given to me. I am not going to be able to explain this any better, even now, years after.
I saw Remigio on a windy morning, the sea beyond, grey and agitated. It sometimes seems to have always been windy in my recollection of those days. I know this is not true, but truth and memory do not easily dance together, as we say in Seressa.
I was, as I’d thought I would be, behind the news of what had happened, though many days ahead of the returning army of Remigio bearing the body of their lord.
They opened the gate for me and I rode through. I was a man alone, no threat, and a guard on the wall remembered me, confirmed I was who I said I was. Seressa shielded and defined me.
I was escorted to the palace. I saw signs of construction halted as we went. Everything would be halted in Remigio now. Except, perhaps, a drumbeat of fear that would surely be growing. The streets were eerily empty for a spring morning. I realized that the sanctuary and clock tower bells were not ringing. I wondered when they’d stopped. I felt the wind blowing from the sea.
They took my horse at the palace gates. I remembered the expansive, handsome room as they opened its door and I entered. I had not changed from my ride; I was dusty and dirty, I didn’t know if that would be seen as disrespect, but it hadn’t been my choice. I’d have happily gone somewhere to wash and change. There was no formal announcement of my presence as I entered, though they’d obviously been told I was here. A runner from the gates.
“Oh, look,” said Ginevra della Valle, “Seressa honours us again.”
A different voice from the last time, when everyone had heard her pleasure at seeing me—or her simulation of it. This time there was cold bitterness. I shivered, I remember.
She wasn’t sitting on one of the two thrones. She stood in front of them in a long, black, belted gown, her hair coiled under a black lace cap. Near her, a step below, stood Gherardo Monticola, the brother with the twisted hand. The one who had never been a soldier, let alone a commander. Other skills, that one.
There had been forty people or more last time, now there were eight or ten, and as many armed guards. I could feel fear and anger, they weighted the room. It occurred to me that kneeling might be wise.
But I couldn’t kneel. I was still a representative of Seressa’s duke and council and we were stronger, far more important than Remigio. There were rules for this.
I have been in that situation once or twice since. Your role can limit and control you at risk of your life. It happens. Sometimes it has killed people.
I did bow. I came several steps nearer and did so again, to both of them. Straightening, I kept my head as high as I could. You are Seressa, I told myself.
They waited. No one spoke, so I had to. I said, carefully, “My sorrow is great, my lady, my lord. I was there, I saw him killed. I saw the man that murdered him also killed. I know they are bringing him home.”
“We know it too,” said Gherardo Monticola. “Why are you here?” He was brittle, sharp, grieving, angry.
It was a good question, of course. I had had some days to shape my answer. I am a man, I have found, who does better with time to think.
I said, “I have a letter to give you, and—if you allow it—a thought or two to share.”
“Why would I want your thoughts?” Ginevra said.
The brother looked back up at her, briefly. No expression, but she did register his glance. She said, to him, “I told this one I’d kill him if Teobaldo died.”
“Why him?” Gherardo asked.
“I had reasons,” she replied.
I noticed a tall, exceptionally handsome man among the small number here. I knew who this was. I had never met him but his fame was widespread, and the stories about him. This would be Mercati, the artist. He’d been working here on various commissions. They had been building and decorating in Remigio. He was someone else Teobaldo and Folco had been fighting over—and he was wanted in Macera, and by the Patriarch, and Firenta. He was the artist of the day, and remained so for years after. We pursued him, too. Seressa was never going to lag when it came to emblems of status.
He wouldn’t stay in Remigio now. Not so much the idea of any danger to him, but this was a man who went where he was paid, and money would become a problem here with no mercenary army led by their lord. Mercati was, I saw, observing us with a predatory attentiveness. We were rabbits in a field, he was a hawk overhead. He would use this day, I thought. We weren’t a matter of sorrow or concern to this man, we were material for a painting or a sculpture. Our faces, postures, the mood in the room, the morning light from the windows.
Artists, I thought (for the first time but not the last), could be cold people.
Then I forgot about him, because Ginevra said, “I meant what I said to you, Guidanio Cerra. I had a vision of this.”
I swallowed. “Had I been able to stop it, my lady, I’d have done so at whatever risk. I did try. I was . . . on the wrong side.”
“The wrong side,” she repeated bitterly. “That sounds accurate. People die for being on the wrong side, you know.”
“My lady, I meant that when—”
“I know what you meant. You say you have a letter.”
I wasn’t about to die immediately, it seemed. It is hard to explain, but I really had thought, all the way to Remigio, even entering that room, that she might have me killed. Brunetto, trying to dissuade me from going there, had feared the same thing. It wasn’t just me.
“I do,” I said, and reached into my small purse for it.
“This is from . . . ?” It was Gherardo, deep-voiced, a voice that penetrated a room.
