Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana

Another transgression, it seemed. The blue eyes flashed with anger.

‘In the name of the Triad where would I be taking you?’ Catriana’s voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘We are going to my room at the inn for a session of love-making like Eanna and Adaon at the dawn of days.’

‘Oh, good,’ Devin snapped, his own anger rekindling. ‘Why don’t we pool our funds and buy another woman to come play Morian—just so I don’t get bored, you understand.’

Catriana paled, but before she could open her mouth Devin grabbed her arm with his free hand and swung her around to face him in the street. Looking up into those blue eyes (and cursing the fact that he had to do that) he snapped:

‘Catriana, what exactly have I done to you? Why do I deserve that sort of answer? Or what you did this morning? I’ve been pleasant to you from the day we signed you on—and if you’re a professional you know that isn’t always the case in troupes on the road. If you must know, Marra, the woman you replaced, was my closest friend in the company. She died of the plague in Certando. I could have made life very hard for you. I didn’t and I’m not. I did let you know from the first that I found you attractive. I’m not aware that there is a sin in that if it is done with courtesy.’

He released her arm, abruptly conscious that he had been gripping it very hard and that they were in an extremely public place, even with the early-afternoon lull. Instinctively he looked around; thankfully there were no Barbadians passing just then. There was a familiar tight feeling in his chest, as of the apprehended return of pain, that always came with the thought of Marra. The first true friend of his life. Two neglected children, with voices that were gifts of Eanna, telling each other fears and dreams for three years in changing beds across the Palm at night. His first lover. First death.

Catriana, released, remained where she was, and there was a look in her own eyes—perhaps at the naming of death—that made him abruptly revise his estimate of her age downwards. He’d thought she was older than him; now he wasn’t sure.

He waited, breathing quickly after his outburst, and at length he heard her say very softly, ‘You sing too well.’

Devin blinked. It was not at all what he’d expected.

‘I have to work very hard at performing,’ she went on, her face flushing for the first time. ‘Rauder is hard for me—all of his music. And this morning you were doing the “Song of Love” without even thinking about it, amusing the others, trying to charm me . . . Devin, I have to concentrate when I sing! You were making me nervous and I snap at people when I’m nervous.’

Devin drew a careful breath and looked around the empty sunlit street for a moment, thinking. He said, ‘Do you know . . . has anyone ever told you . . . that it is possible and even useful to tell things like this to people— especially the people who have to work with you?’

She shook her head. ‘Not for me. I’ve never been able to talk like that. Not ever.’

‘Why do it now, then?’ he risked. ‘Why did you come after me?’

A longer pause than before. A cluster of artisans’ apprentices swept around the corner, hooting with reflexive ribaldry at the sight of the two of them standing together. There was no malice in it though, and they went by without causing any trouble. A few red and golden leaves skipped over the cobbles in the breeze.

‘Something’s happened,’ Catriana d’Astibar said, ‘and Menico told us all that you are the key to our chances.’

‘ Menico sent you after me?’ It was almost completely improbable, after nearly six years together.

‘No,’ Catriana said, quickly shaking her head. ‘No, he said you’d be back in time, that you always were. I was nervous though, with so much at stake. I couldn’t just wait around. You’d left a little, um, upset, after all.’

‘A little,’ Devin agreed gravely, noting that she finally had the grace to look apologetic. He would have felt even more secure if he hadn’t continued to find her so attractive. He couldn’t stop himself from wondering—even now— what her breasts would look like, freed from the stiffness of her high-cut bodice. Marra would have told him, he knew, and even helped him with a conquest. They had done that for each other, and shared the tales after, travelling through that last year on the road before Certando where she died.

‘You had better tell me what’s happened,’ he said, forcing his thoughts back to the present. There was danger in fantasies and in memories, both.

‘The exiled Duke, Sandre, died last night,’ Catriana said. She looked around but the street was empty again. ‘For some reason—no one is sure why—Alberico is allowing his body to lie in state at the Sandreni Palace tonight and tomorrow morning, and then . . .’

She paused, the blue eyes bright. Devin, his pulse suddenly leaping, finished it for her:

‘A funeral? Full rites? Don’t tell me!’

‘Full rites! And Devin, Menico’s been asked to audition this afternoon! We have a chance to do the most talked-about performance in the whole of the Palm this year!’ She looked very young now. And quite unsettlingly beautiful. Her eyes were shining like a child’s.

‘So you came to get me,’ he murmured, nodding his head slowly, ‘before I drank myself into a useless stupor of frustrated desire.’ He had the edge now, for the first time. It was a pleasant turnabout, especially coupled with the real excitement of her news. He began walking, forcing her to fall in stride with him. For a change.

‘It isn’t like that,’ she protested. ‘It’s just that this is so important. Menico said your voice would be the key to our hopes . . . that you were at your best in the mourning rites.’

‘I don’t know whether to be flattered by that, or insulted that you actually thought I’d be so unprofessional as to miss a rehearsal on the eve of the Festival.’

‘Don’t be either,’ Catriana d’Astibar said, with a hint of returning asperity. ‘We don’t have time for either. Just be good this afternoon. Be the best you’ve ever been.’

He ought to resist it, Devin knew, but his spirits were suddenly much too high.

‘In that case, are you sure we’re not going to your room?’ he asked blandly.

More than he could know hung in the balance for the moment that followed. Then Catriana d’Astibar laughed aloud and freely for the first time.

‘Now that,’ said Devin, grinning, ‘is much better. I honestly wasn’t sure if you had a sense of humour.’

She grew quiet. ‘Sometimes I’m not sure either,’ she said, almost absently. Then, in a rather different voice: ‘Devin, I want this contract more than I can tell you.’

‘Well of course,’ he replied. ‘It could make our careers.’

‘That’s right,’ Catriana said. She touched his shoulder and repeated, ‘I want this more than I can say.’

He might have sought a promise in that touch had he been a little less perceptive, and had it not been for the way she spoke the words. There was, in fact, nothing at all of ambition in that tone, nor of desire in the way that Devin had come to know desire.

What he heard was longing, and it reached towards a space inside him that he hadn’t known was there.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said after a moment, thinking, for no good reason, of Marra and the tears he’d shed.

ON THE FARM in Asoli they had known he was gifted with music quite early, but it was an isolated place and none of them had a frame of reference whereby to properly judge or measure such things.

One of Devin’s first memories of his father—one that he summoned often because it was a soft image of a hard man—was of Garin humming the tune of some old cradle song to help Devin fall asleep one night when he was feverish.