Guy Gavriel Kay - A Song for Arbonne

Soresina, of course, was thrilled beyond words. She was vain, pretty and easily silly enough, in Blaise’s jaundiced opinion, to have precipitated exactly the sort of crisis with which they now found themselves dealing. If it hadn’t been the one incident, it would have been another, he was sure of it. There were women like Soresina at home, too, but they were rather better kept in hand in Gorhaut. For one thing, their husbands didn’t invite strangers into their castles for the express purpose of wooing them. However Maffour might try to explain the strict rules of this courtly game of love, Blaise knew an attempt at seduction when he saw one.

Soresina, manifestly uninterested in the newly resident poet in any genuinely romantic way—which no doubt reassured her husband more than somewhat—nonetheless contrived to lead Evrard on in every manner possible, given the constraints imposed by the extremely crowded spaces of a small baronial castle.

Mallin’s yellow-haired wife had a ripe body, an infectious laugh and a lineage substantially more distinguished than her husband’s: something that always added fuel to the fires of troubadour passion Blaise had been told by the discursive Maffour. He’d had to laugh; it was all so artificial, the whole process. He could guess, too easily, what acid-tongued Rudel would have said about this.

In the meantime, the celebrated southern spring came to Arbonne, with many-coloured wildflowers appearing almost overnight in the meadows and the high slopes about Castle Baude. The snows were reported to be receding from the mountain pass to Arimonda. As the poet’s verses grew in heat and passion with the quickening season, so did the throbbing voices of the joglars who had begun arriving in Baude as well, knowing a good thing when they saw one. More than one of the corans and castle servants had private cause to thank the troubadour and the singers and the erotic atmosphere they’d induced for amorous interludes in kitchen and meadow and hall.

Unfortunately for him, Evrard’s own cause was not aided by the all-too-evident reality that he was short, yellow-toothed and prematurely losing what thin hair he’d once had. Still, according to the great tradition, troubadours were supposed to be loved by the high ladies of culture and grace for their art and their fierce dedication, not for their height or hair.

Trouble was, Soresina de Baude didn’t seem to care much for the great tradition, or that part of it, at any rate. She liked her men to look like the warlike corans of the great days past. Indeed, she’d made a point of telling Blaise as much shortly after he’d arrived, looking artlessly up at his tall, muscled form and then glancing down and away in transparently feigned shyness. Blaise, somewhat used to this sort of thing, had been neither surprised nor tempted. He was being paid by Mallin and had shaped his own code in such matters.

What Evrard of Lussan shaped, later that spring, was something else. In brief, the little troubadour, having downed a considerable quantity of unmixed Miraval red wine with the corans one night, finally elected to translate his fiercely impassioned verses into modestly passionate action.

Inflamed by a joglar’s fervid rendition of one of his own ballads earlier that evening, the troubadour had left his sleeping place late at night and stumbled along dark and silent corridors and stairways to Soresina’s door, which happened, unfortunately for all concerned, to be unlocked: Mallin, young, healthy, tall enough, and rather urgently seeking heirs, had but lately left his wife for his own chamber nearby.

The intoxicated, verse-enraptured poet had entered the pitch-black chamber, felt his way over to the canopied bed and planted a lover’s kiss upon the lips of the satiated, sleeping woman he was busily making famous throughout Arbonne that spring.

There were a good many schools of thought evolving, in the aftermath of the event, as to what Soresina should have done. Ariane de Carenzu, queen of the Court of Love since the countess, her aunt, had passed the title to her, had proclaimed a session to rule on the matter later in the year. In the meantime, every man and woman Blaise encountered in the castle or outside it seemed to have an opinion on what he himself regarded as an entirely predictable, utterly trivial event.

What Soresina had done—quite naturally, or very unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective—was scream. Roused from post-coital dreaming, then realizing who was in her chamber, she cursed her stunned, besotted admirer, in a voice heard by half the castle, as a rude, ill-bred peasant who deserved a public whipping.

What Evrard of Lussan, wounded to the core of his all-too-sensitive soul, had done in turn was leave Baude Castle before sunrise, proceed directly to the nearest sanctuary of the goddess, receive benediction and consecration and, making his way to the coast, cross by boat to Rian’s Island in a retreat from the harsh, ungrateful society of women and castles that could so abuse the unstinting generosity of his art.

Safely on the island, away from the terrible storm and strife of the world beyond, he had begun soothing and diverting himself by composing hymns to the goddess, along with some undeniably witty satires on Soresina de Baude. Not by name, of course—rules were rules—but since the name he used now was the same one he’d coined to exalt the long-limbed elegance of her form and the dark fire of her eyes, no one in Arbonne was left even slightly in ignorance on this particular point. The students in Tavernel, Blaise had been given to understand by a seriously distressed Mallin, had taken up the songs and were amplifying them, adding verses of their own.

After a number of weeks of this, En Mallin de Baude—his wife an increasing object of amusement, his castle on the verge of becoming a byword for rustic bad manners, his conciliatory letters to Evrard on the island pointedly unanswered—elected to do something drastic.

For his own part, Blaise would probably have arranged to kill the poet. Mallin de Baude was a lord, if a minor one; Evrard of Lussan was no more than a travelling parasite in Blaise’s view. A feud, even a dispute between two such men, would have been unthinkable in Gorhaut. But this, of course, was woman-ruled Arbonne, where the troubadours had a power in society they could never have dreamt of anywhere else.

In the event, what Mallin did was order Blaise and his corans to cross to the goddess’s Island secretly by night and bring Evrard back. The baron, of course, couldn’t lead the expedition himself, though Blaise had enough respect for the man to believe he would have preferred to. Mallin would need some distance from the escapade, though, in the event that they failed. He had to be able to say his corans had conceived the scheme without his knowledge or consent, and then hasten to a temple of Rian and make appropriate gestures of contrition. It was all made particularly neat, Blaise had thought, by the fact that the leader of the corans of Baude that season just happened to be a hired mercenary from Gorhaut who didn’t, of course, worship Rian at all and might be expected to perpetrate such a sacrilege. Blaise didn’t mention this thought to anyone. It didn’t even really bother him; this was simply the way of things at a certain level of the world’s affairs, and he had more than a little familiarity with it.

Soresina, languishing and aghast at what an instinctive scream and outburst had wrought, had been energetically primed by a succession of visiting neighbouring ladies, rather more experienced in the ways of poets, as to how to deal with Evrard on his return.

If Blaise and the corans got to the island. If they found him. If he chose to return. If the sea monsters of Luth’s dark dreams chose not to rise up above their skiff, towering and dreadful in the pale moonlight, and drag them all down to death in the watery blackness.