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‘Don’t worry about it,’ Devin said. ‘I’ve survived this long without them. It’s just an old song, a memento of my father. If you stay with us we can make it a winter project to try to track them down.’
Menico would approve of that last bit, he knew. The troupe-leader had declared Alessan di Tregea to be a find, and cheap at the wages he’d asked.
The other man’s expressive mouth crooked sideways, a little wryly. ‘Old songs and memories of fathers are important,’ he said. ‘Is yours dead then?’
Devin made the warding sign with his hand out and two fingers curled down.
‘Not last I heard, though I’ve not seen him in almost six years. Menico spoke to him when he went through the north of Asoli last time, took him some chiaros for me. I don’t go back to the farm.’
Alessan considered that. ‘Dour Asolini stock?’ he guessed. ‘No place for a boy with ambition and a voice like yours?’ His tone was shrewd.
‘Almost exactly,’ Devin admitted ruefully. ‘Though I wouldn’t have called myself ambitious. Restless, more. And we weren’t originally from Asoli in fact. Came there from Lower Corte when I was a small child.’
Alessan nodded. ‘Even so,’ he said.
The man had a bit of a know-it-all manner, Devin decided, but he could play the Tregean pipes. The way they might even have sounded on Adaon’s own mountain in the south.
In any case, they had no time to pursue the matter.
‘We’re on!’ Menico said, hastily re-entering the room where they were waiting amid the dust and covered furniture of the long-unused Sandreni Palace.
‘We do the “Lament for Adaon” first,’ he announced, telling them something they’d all known for hours. He wiped his palms on the sides of his doublet. ‘Devin, that one’s yours—make me proud, lad.’ His standard exhortation. ‘Then all of us are together on the “Circling of Years”. Catriana my love, you are sure you can go high enough, or should we pitch down?’
‘I’ll go high enough,’ Catriana replied tersely.
Devin thought her tone spoke to simple nervousness, but when her gaze met his for a second he recognized that earlier look again: the one that reached somewhere beyond desire towards a shore he didn’t know.
‘I’d very much like to get this contract,’ Alessan di Tregea said just then, mildly enough.
‘How extremely surprising!’ Devin snapped, discovering as he spoke that he too was nervous after all. Alessan laughed though, and so did old Eghano walking through the door with them: Eghano who had seen far too much in too many years of touring to ever be made edgy by a mere audition. Without saying a word, he had, as he always had, an immediately calming effect on Devin.
‘I’ll do the best I can,’ Devin said after a moment and for the second time that afternoon, not really certain to whom he was saying it, or why.
IN THE END, whether because of the Triad or in spite of them—as his father used to say—his best was enough.
The principal auditor was a delicately scented, extravagantly dressed scion of the Sandreni, a man—in his late thirties, Devin guessed—who made it manifest, in his limp posture and the artificially exaggerated shadows that ringed his eyes, why Alberico the Tyrant didn’t appear to be much worried about the descendants of Sandre d’Astibar.
Ranged behind this diverting personage were the priests of Eanna and Morian in white and smoke grey. Beside them, vivid by contrast, sat a priestess of Adaon, in crimson, with her hair cropped very short.
It was autumn of course, and the Ember Days were coming on: Devin wasn’t surprised by her hair. He was surprised to see the clergy there for the audition. They made him uncomfortable—another legacy of his father— but this wasn’t a situation where he could allow that to affect him, and so he dismissed them from his thoughts.
He focused on the Duke’s elegant son, the only one who really mattered now. He waited, reaching as Menico had taught him for a still point inside himself.
Menico cued Nieri and Aldine, the two thin dancers in their grey-blue, almost translucent, chemises of mourning and their black gloves. A moment later, after their first linked pass across the floor, he looked at Devin.
And Devin gave him, gave them all, the lament for Adaon’s autumnal dying among the mountain cypresses, as he never had before.
Alessan di Tregea was with him all the way with the high, heart-piercing grief of the shepherd pipes and together the two of them seemed to lift and carry Nieri and Aldine beyond the surface steps of their dance across the recently swept floor and into the laconic, precise articulation of ritual that the ‘Lament’ demanded and was so rarely granted.
When they finished, Devin, travelling slowly back to the Sandreni Palace from the cedar and cypress slopes of Tregea where the god had died—and where he died again each and every autumn—saw that Sandre d’Astibar’s son was weeping. The tracks of his tears had smudged the carefully achieved shadowing around his eyes—which meant, Devin realized abruptly, that he hadn’t wept for any of the three companies before them.
Marra, young and intolerantly professional, would have been scornful of those tears, he knew: ‘Why hire a mongrel and bark yourself?’ she would say when their mourning rituals were interrupted or marked by displays from their patrons.
Devin had been less stern back then. And was even less so now since she’d died and he had found himself rather desperately fighting back a shameful public grief when Burnet di Corte had led his company through her mourning rites in Certando as a gesture of courtesy to Menico.
Devin also knew, by the smouldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morian’s fat-fingered priest—why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!—that though they might have just won the Sandreni contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.
They had won the contract. The second number hardly mattered, which is why cunning Menico had begun with the ‘Lament’. Afterwards Menico carefully introduced Devin as his partner when Sandre’s son asked to meet him. He turned out to be the middle son of three, named Tomasso. The only one, he explained huskily, holding one of Devin’s hands tightly between both his own, with an ear for music and an eye for dance adequate to choosing performers equal to so august an occasion as his father’s funeral rites.
Devin, used to this, politely retrieved his fingers, grateful for Menico’s experienced tact: presented as a partner he had some slight immunity from overly aggressive wooers, even among the nobility. He was introduced to the clergy next, and promptly knelt before Adaon’s priestess in red.
‘Your sanction, sister-of-the-god, for what I sang, and for what I am asked to do tomorrow.’
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the priest of Morian clench his chubby, ringed fingers at his sides. He accepted the blessing and protection of Adaon—the priestess’s index finger tracing the god’s symbol on his brow—in the knowledge that he had successfully defused one priest’s burgeoning desire. When he rose and turned, it was to catch a wink—dangerous in that room and among that company—from Alessan di Tregea, at the back with the others. He suppressed a grin, but not his surprise: the shepherd was disconcertingly perceptive.
Menico’s first price was immediately accepted by Tomasso d’Astibar bar Sandre, confirming in Devin’s mind what a sorry creature he was to bear such a magnificent name and lineage.
It would have interested him—and led him a step or two further down the hard road towards maturity—to learn that Duke Sandre himself would have accepted the same price, or twice as much, and in exactly the same manner. Devin was not quite twenty though, and even Menico, three times his age, would loudly curse himself back at the inn amid the celebratory wine for not having quoted even more than the extortionate sum he had just received in full.
Only Eghano, aged and placid, softly drumming two wooden spoons on their trestle table, said, ‘Leave well enough. We need not hold out a greedy palm. There will be more of these from now on. If you are wise you’ll leave a tithe at each of the temples tomorrow. We will earn it back with interest when they choose musicians for the Ember Days.’
Menico, in high good humour, swore even more magnificently than before, and announced a set intention to offer Eghano’s wrinkled body as a tithe to the fleshy priest of Morian instead. Eghano smiled toothlessly and continued his soft drumming.
Menico ordered them all to bed not long after the evening meal. They’d have an early start tomorrow, pointing towards the most important performance of their lives. He beamed benevolently as Aldine led Nieri from the room. The girls would share a bed that night, Devin was sure, and for the first time, he suspected. He wished them joy of each other, knowing that they had come together magically as dancers that afternoon and also knowing—for it had happened to him once—how that could spill over into the candles of a late night in bed.
He looked around for Catriana but she had gone upstairs already. She’d kissed him briefly on the cheek though, right after Menico’s fierce embrace back in the Sandreni Palace. It was a start; it might be a start.
He bade good night to the others and went up to the single room that was the one luxury he’d demanded of Menico’s tour budget after Marra had died.
He expected to dream of her, because of the mourning rites, because of unslaked desire, because he dreamt of her most nights. Instead he had a vision of the god.
He saw Adaon on the mountainside in Tregea, naked and magnificent. He saw him torn apart in frenzy and in flowing blood by his priestesses— suborned by their womanhood for this one autumn morning of every turning year to the deeper service of their sex. Shredding the flesh of the dying god in the service of the two goddesses who loved him and who shared him as mother, daughter, sister, bride, all through the year and through all the years since Eanna named the stars.
Shared him and loved him except on this one morning in the falling season. This morning that was shaped to become the harbinger, the promise of spring to come, of winter’s end. This one single morning on the mountain when the god who was a man had to be slain. Torn and slain, to be put into his place which was the earth. To become the soil, which would be nurtured in turn by the rain of Eanna’s tears and the moist sorrowings of Morian’s endless underground streams twisting in their need. Slain to be reborn and so loved anew, more and more with each passing year, with each and every time of dying on these cypress-clad heights. Slain to be lamented and then to rise as a god rises, as a man does, as the wheat of summer fields. To rise and then lie down with the goddesses, with his mother and his bride, his sister and his daughter, with Eanna and Morian under sun and stars and the circling moons, the blue one and the silver.
Devin dreamt, terribly, that primal scene of women running on the mountainside, their long hair streaming behind them as they pursued the man-god to that high chasm above the torrent of Casadel.
He saw their clothing torn from them as they cried each other on to the hunt. Saw branches of mountain trees, of spiny, bristling shrubs, claw their garments away, saw them render themselves deliberately naked for greater speed to the chase, seizing blood-red berries of sonrai to intoxicate themselves against what they would do high above the icy waters of Casadel.
He saw the god turn at last, his huge dark eyes wild and knowing, both, as he stood at the chasm brink, a stag at bay at the deemed, decreed, perennial place of his ending. And Devin saw the women come upon him there, with their flying hair and blood flowing along their bodies and he saw Adaon bow his proud, glorious head to the doom of their rending hands and their teeth and their nails.
And there at the end of the chase Devin saw that the women’s mouths were open wide as they cried to each other in ecstasy or anguish, in unrestrained desire or madness or bitter grief, but in his dream there was no sound at all to those cries. Instead, piercing through the whole of that wild scene among cedar and cypress on the mountainside, the only thing Devin heard was the sound of Tregean shepherd pipes playing the tune of his own childhood fever, high and far away.
And at the end, at the very last, Devin saw that when the women came upon the god and caught him and closed about him at that high chasm over Casadel, his face when he turned to his rending was that of Alessan.
Chapter III
Even before the coming of cautious Alberico from overseas in Barbadior to rule in Astibar, the city that liked to call itself ‘The Thumb that Rules the Palm’ had been known for a certain degree of asceticism. In Astibar the mourning rites were never done in the presence of the dead as was the practice in the other eight provinces: such a procedure was regarded as excessive, too fevered an appeal to emotion.
They were to perform in the central courtyard of the Sandreni Palace, watched from chairs and benches placed around the courtyard, and from the loggias above, leading off the interior rooms on the two upper floors. In one of those rooms, marked by the appropriate hangings—grey-blue and black—lay the body of Sandre d’Astibar, coins over his eyes to pay the nameless doorman at the last portal of Morian, food in his hands and shoes on his feet, for no one living could know how long that final journey to the goddess was.
He would be brought down to the courtyard later, so that all those citizens of his city and its distrada who wished to do so—and who were willing to brave the recording eyes of the Barbadian mercenaries posted outside—could file past his bier and drop blue-silver leaves of the olive tree in the single crystal vase that stood on a plinth in the courtyard even now.
The ordinary citizens—weavers, artisans, shopkeepers, farmers, sailors, servants, lesser merchants—would enter the palace later. They could be heard outside now: gathered to hear the music of the old Duke’s mourning rites. The people drifting into the courtyard in the meantime were the most extraordinary collection of petty and high nobility, and of accumulated mercantile wealth that Devin had ever seen in one place.
Because of the Festival of Vines, all the lords of the Astibar distrada had come into town from their country estates. And being in town they could hardly not be present to see Sandre mourned—for all that many or most of them had bitterly hated him while he ruled, and the fathers or grandfathers of some had paid for poison or hired blades thirty years ago and more in the hope that these same rites might have taken place long since.
The two priests and Adaon’s priestess were already in their seats, seeming, in the manner of clergy everywhere, to be privy to a mystery that they collectively shielded from lesser mortals with the gravity of their repose.
Menico’s company waited in a small room off the courtyard that Tomasso had ordered set aside for their use. All the usual amenities were there, and some that were far from usual: Devin couldn’t remember seeing blue wine offered to performers before. An extravagant gesture, that. He wasn’t tempted though; it was too early and he was too much on edge. To calm himself he walked over to Eghano who was lazily drumming, as he always seemed to be, on a tabletop.
Eghano glanced up at him and smiled. ‘It’s just a performance,’ he said in his soft sibilant voice. ‘We do what we always do. We make music. We move on.’
Devin nodded, and forced a smile in return. His throat was dry though. He went to the side-tables, and one of the two hovering servants hastened to pour him water in a gold and crystal goblet worth more than everything Devin owned in the world. A moment later Menico signalled and they went out into the courtyard.
The dancers began it, backed by hidden strings and pipes. No voices. Not yet.
If Aldine and Nieri had burned love candles late last night it didn’t show—or if it did, only in the concentration and intensity of their twinned movements that morning.
Sometimes seeming to pull the music forward, sometimes following it, they looked—with their thin, whitened faces, their blue-grey tunics and the jet-black gloves that hid their palms—truly otherworldly. Which was as Menico had trained his dancers to be. Not inviting or alluring as some other troupes approached this dance of the rites, nor a merely graceful prelude to the real performance, as certain other companies conceived it. Menico’s dancers were guides, cold and compelling, towards the place of the dead and of mourning for the dead. Gradually, inexorably, the slow grave movements, the expressionless, almost inhuman faces imposed the silence that was proper on that restive, preening audience.
And in that silence the three singers and four musicians came forward and began the ‘Invocation’ to Eanna of the Lights who had made the world, the sun, the two moons and the scattered stars that were the diamonds of her diadem.
Rapt and attentive to what they were doing, using all the contrivances of professional skill to shape an apparent artlessness, the company of Menico di Ferraut carried the lords and ladies and the merchant princes of Astibar with them on a ruthlessly disciplined cresting of sorrow. In mourning Sandre, Duke of Astibar, they mourned—as was proper—the dying of all the Triad’s mortal children, brought through Morian’s portals to move on Adaon’s earth under Eanna’s lights for so short a time. So sweet and bitter and short a season of days.
Devin heard Catriana’s voice reaching upwards towards the high place where Alessan’s pipes seemed to be calling her, cold and precise and austere. He felt, even more than he heard, Menico and Eghano grounding them all with their deep line. He saw the two dancers— now statues in a frieze, now whirling as captives in the trap of time—and at the moment that was proper he let his own voice soar with the two syrenyae into the space that had been left for them to fill, in the middle range where mortals lived and died.
So Menico di Ferraut had shaped his approach to the seldom-performed Full Mourning Rites long ago, bringing forty years of art and a full, much-travelled life to the moment that this morning had become. Even as he began to sing, Devin’s heart swelled with pride and a genuine love for the rotund, unassuming leader who had guided them here and into what they were shaping.
They stopped, as planned, after the sixth stage, for their own sake and their listeners’. Tomasso had spoken with Menico beforehand, and the nobles’ progression past Sandre’s bier would now take place upstairs. After, the company would finish with the last three rites, ending on Devin’s ‘Lament’, and then the body would be brought down and the crowd outside admitted with their leaves for the crystal vase.
Menico led them out from the courtyard amid a silence so deep it was their highest possible accolade. They re-entered the room that had been reserved for their use. Caught up in the mood they themselves had created, no one spoke. Devin moved to help the two dancers into the robes they wore between performances and then watched as they paced the perimeter of the room, slender and cat-like in their grace. He accepted a glass of green wine from one of the servants but declined the offered plate of food. He exchanged a glance but not a smile—not now—with Alessan. Drenio and Pieve, the syrenya-players, were bent over their instruments, adjusting the strings. Eghano, pragmatic as ever, was eating while idly drumming the table with his free hand. Menico walked by, restless and distracted. He gave Devin a wordless squeeze on the arm.
Devin looked for Catriana and saw her just then leaving the room through an inner archway. She glanced back. Their glances met for a second, then she went on. Light, strangely filtered, fell from a high unseen window upon the space where she had been.
Devin really didn’t know why he did it. Even afterwards when so much had come to pass, flowing outwards in all directions like ripples in water from this moment, he was never able to say exactly why he followed her.
Simple curiosity. Desire. A complex longing born of the look in her eyes before and the strange, floating place of stillness and sorrow where they now seemed to be. None or some or all of these. He felt as if the world wasn’t quite as it had been before the dancers had begun.
He drained his wine and rose and he went through the same archway Catriana had. Passing through, he too looked back. Alessan was watching him. There was no judgement in the Tregean’s glance, only an intent expression Devin could not understand. For the first time that day he was reminded of his dream.
And because of that, perhaps, he murmured a prayer to Morian as he went on through the archway.
There was a staircase with a high, narrow, stained-glass window on the first-floor landing. In the many-coloured fall of light he caught a glimpse of a blue-silver gown swirling to the left at the top of the stairs. He shook his head, struggling to clear it, to slip free of this eerie, dreamlike mood. And as he did, an understanding slid into place and he muttered a curse at himself.
She was from Astibar. She was going upstairs as was entirely fit and proper to pay her own farewell to the Duke. No lord or newly wealthy merchant was about to deny her right to do so. Not after her singing this morning. On the other hand, for a farmer’s son from Asoli by way of Lower Corte to enter that upstairs room would be sheerest, ill-bred presumption.
He hesitated, and he would have turned back then, had it not been for the memory that was his blessing and his curse and always had been. He had seen the hanging banners from the courtyard. The room where Sandre d’Astibar lay was to the right, not the left, at the top of these stairs.
Devin went up. He took care now, though still not knowing why, to be quiet. At the landing he bore left as Catriana had done. There was a doorway. He opened it. An empty room, long unused, dusty hangings on the walls. Scenes of a hunt, the colours badly faded. There were two exits, but the dust came to his aid now: he could see the neat print of her sandals going towards the door on the right.
Silently Devin followed that trail through the warren of abandoned rooms on the first floor of the palace. He saw sculptures and objects of glass, exquisite in their delicacy, marred by years of overlaid dust. Much of the furniture was gone, much that remained was covered over. The light was dim; most of the windows were shuttered. A great many darkened, begrimed portraits of stern lords and ladies gazed inimically down upon him as he passed.
He bore right and again right, tracing the path of Catriana’s feet, careful to keep from getting too close. She went straight on after that, through the rooms along the outer side of the palace—none that offered onto the crowded balustrades overlooking the courtyard. It was brighter in these rooms. He could hear murmuring voices off to his right and he realized that Catriana was walking around to the far side of the room where Sandre lay in state.
At length he opened a door which proved to be the last. She was alone inside a very large chamber, standing by the side of a huge fireplace. There were three bronze horses on the mantelpiece and three portraits on the walls. The ceiling was gilded in what Devin knew would be gold. Along the outer wall where a line of windows overlooked the street there were two long tables laden with food and drink. This room, unlike the others, had been recently cleaned, but the curtains were still drawn against the morning brightness and the crowd outside.
In the thin, filtered light Devin closed the door behind him, deliberately letting the latch click shut. The sound was a loud report in the stillness.
Catriana wheeled, a hand to her mouth, but even in the half-light Devin could see that what blazed in her eyes was fury and not fear.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ she whispered harshly.
He took a hesitant step forward. He reached for a witticism, a mild, deflecting remark to shatter the heavy spell that seemed to lie upon him, upon the whole of the morning. He couldn’t find one.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘I saw you leave and I followed. It . . . isn’t what you think,’ he finished lamely.
‘How would you know what I think?’ she snapped. She seemed to calm herself by an act of will. ‘I wanted to be alone for a few moments,’ Catriana said, controlling her voice. ‘The performance affected me and I needed to be by myself. I can see that you were disturbed too, but can I ask you as a courtesy to leave me to my privacy for just a little while?’
It was courteously said. He could have gone then. On any other morning he would have gone. But Devin had already passed, half-knowingly, a portal of Morian’s.
He gestured at the food on the tables and said, gravely, a quiet observation of fact and not a challenge or accusation, ‘This is not a room for privacy, Catriana. Won’t you tell me why you are here?’
He braced for her rage to flare again, but once more she surprised him. Silent for a long moment, she said at length, ‘You have not shared enough with me to be owed an answer to that. Truly it will be better if you go. For both of us.’
He could still hear muffled voices on the other side of the wall to the right of the fireplace and the bronze horses. This strange room with its laden, sumptuously covered tables and the grim portraits on the dark walls seemed to be a chamber in some waking trance. He remembered Catriana singing that morning, her voice yearning upwards to where the pipes of Tregea called. He remembered her eyes as she paused in the doorway they’d both passed through. Truly he felt as if he were not entirely awake, not in the world he knew.
And in that mood Devin heard himself say, over a sudden constriction in his throat, ‘Could we not begin then? Is there not a sharing we could start?’
Once more she hesitated. Her eyes were wide but impossible to read in the uncertain light. She shook her head though and remained where she was, standing straight and very still on the far side of the room.
‘I think not,’ she said quietly. ‘Not on the road I’m on, Devin d’Asoli. But I thank you for asking, and I will not deny that a part of me might wish things otherwise. I have little time now though, and a thing I must do here. Please—will you leave me?’
He had scarcely expected to find or feel so much regret, over and above all the nuances the morning had already carried. He nodded his head—there was nothing else he could think of to do or say, and this time he did turn to go.
But a portal had indeed been crossed in the Sandreni Palace that morning and in exactly the moment that Devin turned they both heard voices again—but this time from behind him.
‘Oh, Triad!’ Catriana hissed, snapping the mood like a fish-bone. ‘I am cursed in all I turn my hands to!’ She spun back to the fireplace, her hands frantically feeling around the underside of the mantelpiece. ‘For the love of the goddesses be silent!’ she whispered harshly.
The urgency in her voice made Devin freeze and obey.
‘He said he knew who built this palace,’ he heard her mutter under her breath. ‘That it should be right over—’
She stopped. Devin heard a latch click. A section of the wall to the right of the fire swung slightly open to reveal a tiny cubbyhole beyond. His eyes widened.
‘Don’t stand there gawking, fool!’ Catriana whispered fiercely. ‘Quickly!’
A new voice had joined the others behind him; there were three now. Devin leaped for the concealed door, slipped inside beside Catriana, and together they pulled it shut.
