Guy Kay - Tigana

"No!" Devin exclaimed before he could stop himself.

In the same second Danoleon took a long stride forward. "My lady, no indeed," he said, anguish in his deep voice. "This is not…”

"I am dying," Pasithea bren Serazi interrupted harshly. There were spots of bright unnatural color in her cheeks. "I do not have to listen to you anymore, Danoleon. To anyone. Wait, you told me, all these years. Be patient, you said. Well, I have no more time for patience. I will be dead in a day. Morian waits for me. I have no more time to linger while my craven child gambols about the Palm playing ditties at rustic weddings."

There came a discordant jangling of harpstrings.

"That," said Erlein di Senzio from the eastern window, "is ignorant and unfair!" He stopped, as if startled by his own outburst. "Triad knows, I have no cause to love your son. And it is now more than clear to me whence his arrogance comes and his lack of care for other lives, for anything but his own goals. But if you name him a coward simply for not trying to kill Brandin of Ygrath then you are dying a vain, foolish woman. Which, to be perfectly frank, does not surprise me at all in this province!"

He leaned back against the ledge, breathing hard, looking at no one. In the silence that followed Alessan finally moved. His stillness had seemed inhuman, unnatural, now he sank to his knees beside his mother's chair.

"You have cursed me before," he said gravely. "Remember? I have lived much of my life in the shadow of that. In many ways it would have been easier to die years ago: Baerd and I slain trying to kill the Tyrant in Chiara… perhaps even killing him, through some miracle of intervention. Do you know, we used to speak of it at night, every single night, when we were in Quileia, still boys. Shaping half a hundred different plans for an assassination on the Island. Dreaming of how we would be loved and honored after death in a province with its name restored because of us."

His voice was low, almost hypnotic in its cadences. Devin saw Danoleon, his face working with emotion, sink back into the other armchair. Pasithea was still as marble, as expressionless and cold. Devin moved quietly toward the fire, in a vain attempt to quell the shivering that had come over him. Erlein was still by the window. He was playing his harp again, softly, single notes and random chords, not quite a tune.

"But we grew older," Alessan went on, and an urgency, a terrible need to be understood had come into his voice. "And one Midsummer's Eve Marius became Year King in Quileia, with our aid. After that when we three spoke the talk was different. Baerd and I began to learn some true things about power and the world. And that was when it changed for me. Something new came to me in that time, building and building, a thought, a dream, larger and deeper than trying to kill a Tyrant. We came back to the Palm and began to travel. As musicians, yes. And as artisans, merchants, athletes one time in a Triad Game year, as masons and builders, guards to a Senzian banker, sailors on a dozen different merchant-ships. But even before those journeys had begun, mother, even before we came back north over the mountains, it had all changed for me. I was finally clear about what my task in life was to be. About what had to be done, or tried. You know it, Danoleon knows; I wrote you years ago what my new understanding was, and I begged your blessing for it. It was such a simple truth: we had to take both Tyrants together, that this whole peninsula might again be free."

His mother's voice overrode his steady passion then, harsh, implacable, unforgiving: "I remember. I remember the day that letter came. And I will tell you again what I wrote you then to that harlot's castle in Certando: you would buy Corte's freedom, and Astibar's and Tregea's at the price of Tigana's name. Of our very existence in the world. At the cost of everything we ever had or were before Brandin came. At the price of vengeance and our pride."

"Our pride," Alessan echoed, so softly now they could barely hear. "Oh, our pride. I grew up knowing all about our pride, mother. You taught me, even more than father did. But I learned something else, later, as a man. In my exile. I learned about Astibar's pride. About Senzio's and Asoli's and Certando's. I learned how pride had ruined the Palm in the year the Tyrants came."

"The Palm?" Pasithea demanded, her voice shrill. "What is the Palm? A spur of land. Rock and earth and water. What is a peninsula that we should care for it?"

"What is Tigana?" Erlein di Senzio asked bluntly, his harp silent in his hands.

Pasithea's glance was withering. "I would have thought a bound wizard should know that!" she said corrosively, meaning to wound. Devin blinked at the speed of her perception; no one had told her about Erlein, she had deduced it in minutes from a scattering of clues.

She said: "Tigana is the land where Adaon lay with Micaela when the world was young and gave her his love and a child and a god's gift of power to that child and those who came after. And now the world has spun a long way from that night and the last descendant of that union is in this room with the entire past of his people falling through his hands." She leaned forward, her grey eyes blazing, her voice rising in indictment. "Falling through his hands. He is a fool and a coward, both. There is so much more than freedom in a peninsula in any single generation at stake in this!"

She fell back, coughing, pulling a square of blue silk from a pocket in her robe. Devin saw Alessan begin a movement up from his knees, and then check himself. His mother coughed, rackingly, and Devin saw, before he could turn his eyes away that the silk came away red when she was done. On the carpet beside her Alessan bowed his head.

Erlein di Senzio, from the far side of the room, perhaps too far to see the blood, said, "And shall I now tell you the legends of Senzio's pre-eminence? Of Astibar's? Will you hear me sing the story of Eanna on the Island shaping the stars from the glory of her love-making with the god? Do you know Certando's claim to be the heart and soul of the Palm? Do you remember the Carlozzini? The Night Walkers in their highlands two hundred years ago?"

The woman in the armchair pushed herself straight again glaring at him. Fearing her, hating her words and manner and the terrible thing she was doing to her son, Devin nonetheless felt humbled in the face of so much courage and such a force of will.

"But that is the point," she said more softly, sparing her strength. "That is the heart of this. Can you not see it? I do remember those stories. Anyone with an education or a library, any fool who has ever heard a troubadour's sentimental wailing can remember them. Can hear twenty different songs of Eanna and Adaon on Sangarios. Not us, though. Don't you see? Not Tigana anymore. Who will sing of Micaela under the stars by the sea when we are gone? Who will be here to sing, when one more generation has lived and died away in the world?"

"I will," said Devin, his hands at his sides.

He saw Alessan's head come up as Pasithea turned to fix him with her cold eyes. "We all will," he said, as firmly as he could. He looked at the Prince and then, forcing himself, back to the dying old woman raging in her pride. "The whole Palm will hear that song again, my lady. Because your son is not a coward. Nor some vain fool seeking a young death and shallow fame. He is trying for the larger thing and he is going to do it. Something has happened this spring and because of it he is going to do what he has said he will do: free this peninsula and bring back Tigana's name into the world."

He finished, breathing in hard gasps as if he had been running a race. A moment later, he felt himself go crimson with mortification. Pasithea bren Serazi was laughing. Mocking him, her frail thin body rocking in the chair. Her high laughter turned into another desperate fit of coughing; the blue silk came up, and when it was withdrawn there was a great deal of blood stain. She clutched at the arms of her chair to steady herself.