“I’ll find a use for that, I’m sure.” She put the jug on the table and went out onto the landing. When she came back in, she said, “I told Vaiz to have something sent up from the taberna when she goes.”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
“We might as well eat. His Highness will be at dinner, anyway. He may be hours coming, and I’ll have run out of witty things to say by then.” She sat down beside him on the couch. She refilled her own bowl from the jug and said, leaning back at his elbow, “So, Lord Risto—why Tasso?”
“What?”
“Tasso. It’s an unusual posting, isn’t it? For a nobleman—though I suppose you are provincial and unimportant.” She smiled, coolly. “Even so, they like to keep your kind here on the Hill. They send peasants’ sons to do the dying.”
“I requested it.”
“A chance for glory?”
“A chance to be away from this place.”
“This place—said with such superiority. Away from politics, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“And yet here you are after all.”
“I guess it wasn’t much of a chance,” he said.
“You have no political ambition, Lord Risto?”
“I prefer to look my enemies in the eye.”
“It must be nice,” Ceno said, “believing you can solve all your problems at the edge of a sword. There is always more blood to spill. Endless opportunity for catharsis.”
“At least it’s honest.”
“What a justification!”
“They spill blood each day on the Hill. They just dress it up in words so you don’t have to face it squarely.”
“Yes—‘no greater threat to truth than palatability.’ That’s the Poet, isn’t it? So ‘land reform’ rather than ‘subjugation of native peoples and seizure of their property.’ If you are going to subjugate native peoples, you demand at least to be honest about it.”
“At least.”
“I can see the attraction. It is a very clear-headed way of looking at things.”
“I like to think right and wrong still play some part in it.”
“You’ll get over that,” she said, dryly, “especially if you stay in Choiro.”
“Have you gotten over it?”
“I do what I must.”
“Necessity makes an easy excuse. There’s always a choice.”
They were not joking now, and he saw that it had irritated her. The wine bowl wavered on her palm. “For you. For the son of the governor of Cesin. For a merchant’s daughter? You have no right to speak to me of choice, Lord Risto.” She was sitting very stiffly on the edge of the couch, her chin up, her free hand doubled to a fist on her thigh.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why? You’ve no more reason to apologize for yourself than I’ve got.”
“I offer you my apology even so.”
She let out a breath of laughter. “How terribly old-fashioned—to apologize. Did no one tell you?”
“I’m from Cesin. We still find regular bathing remarkable.”
She laughed. This time it was a real laugh, warm and rolling. She loosened a little beside him. He was conscious, very suddenly, of her closeness and of the clean, smooth curve of her neck and the straightness of her shoulders and the shape of her body beneath the soft folds of linen. He looked down into the wine bowl between his hands. He tipped it up and drank. Ceno watched him. “Have you a girl, Lord Risto?”
He wondered what she had seen in his face. He swallowed. “In every town between here and Tasso.”
She laughed again, but she was watching him closely. “No, we were wrong. You’ve no more choice than I have, do you? They pick it out for you from birth: the girl you’ll marry, the life you’ll live, the death you’ll die. Privilege, choice. It’s a lie they tell you, and they do it so well you start telling it to yourself. But underneath you’re as trapped as I am.”
“Some are. I wasn’t raised to see duty as the end. My father has no such conceit.”
“Bold words for a soldier. What about your mother? What does your father say when she speaks so liberally of duty?”
He turned the bowl in his hands and watched the sediments shift in the clear depths. “I don’t know,” he said. “She was dead at my birth.”
Ceno said, after a pause, “I’m sorry.”
It was on his tongue to ask why, sourly. He swallowed it and said nothing.
Ceno said, “Did he love her—your father?”
“He loved her. He doesn’t speak of her. For my sake, maybe: he spares me the guilt.” He had never talked about it to Alluin, and he had never realized the difficulty of putting it into words. “In Cesin there is a custom,” he said. “The wedding ring goes on the right hand when the spouse dies. My father wears his ring on his left hand. It’s been twenty years—it will have been, come this autumn.”
“I didn’t think your kind had the capacity for love,” Ceno said.
He looked into her face. She met his eyes. Her eyes were the color and quality of amber, strikingly clear and cold and hard—layers and layers of veneer built carefully up, dead things trapped beneath. She blinked and looked away. “From what I have seen,” she said. “It inconveniences the blood-spilling.”
There were footsteps on the landing.
It was not dinner up from the taberna. Vaiz came in from the vestibule with a Guardsman behind her. Ceno put her bowl on the table and stood, smiling. “Vigo. I’m sorry to drag you away from your dinner.”
The Guardsman, a lieutenant, came over from the archway, one hand on the pommel of his sword. There were more Guardsmen on the landing. Torien could see them in silhouette against torchlight, out through the vestibule. He stood, slowly, the wine bowl in his hands. Ceno had moved shrewdly away from him. There was not much opportunity for his knife. He supposed if he flung the wine bowl in the Guardsman’s face, he would have time to cut his own throat. It was a distasteful thought—not least because it would be a waste of wine. He did not move. The Guardsman came over and slipped the knife from Torien’s belt. He glanced over the wine bowl. “You might as well finish it, Commander,” he said. “You’ll be glad for it in a half-hour or so.”
He finished it. He caught a glimpse of her as he tilted the bowl: rigid as a statue, her chin up, her arms straight at her sides. He drained the bowl and set it down beside hers on the table. The dregs were bitter on his tongue. “You’ve done what you must?” he said.
She said nothing.
“I did enjoy the wine,” he said.
They had put a hood over his head on the landing, but he could tell by the slope of the street and direction of the wind that they were going up the Hill. They went quickly and in silence. Around them the Hill lay quiet. His head was pounding and the pain fluttering in his ribs, and he could not think except to stumble forward when the lieutenant shoved him. They turned this way and that through the streets on the Hill. He did not know the lay of the Hill very well, and he could not have kept track of the turns if he’d tried. He knew when they passed through a gate, because he heard the rattle of the bolt and the groan of the doors. Still no one spoke.
There was gravel underfoot now rather than paving stone, and he heard from somewhere the trickling of a fountain. There were more doors and then there was smooth, polished tile slipping under his feet. From the echoes of their footfalls, he knew he was alone now with the lieutenant. The echoes chased away and came rolling back. They were in an enclosed space, and through the hood he caught the scent of lamp oil and smoke. The lieutenant pushed him down into a chair and tore the hood from his head.
He recognized the room, though it took him a moment, blinking in the lamplight after the blackness of the hood. It was a small, square room, close and windowless but not dreary, lined on three walls with bookshelves and on the fourth with maps inked on vellum and stretched on wooden frames. The bust of the Emperor gazed down at him forlornly from one of the shelves. The
re was a desk in front of him and a quill case and papyrus. A tall, empty chair faced him across the desk. He had sat at this desk five months ago, and the chair across from him had been occupied by Maris Pavo. They had drunk chilled wine, and he had turned down a Guardsman’s commission worth twenty-four thousand eagles a year, a bonus of ten thousand, a private house on the Hill.
The lieutenant went out wordlessly, shutting the door behind him, and Torien heard the clink of a chain as the lieutenant locked the door from the outside. He did not, however, hear the lieutenant’s footsteps go away across the floor tiles. He reached across the desk for the quill case. Someone had been judicious enough to remove the pen-knife. He shut the case and shoved it back across the desk. He got up from the chair and wandered the perimeter of the room. He picked up the Emperor from the shelf and looked at him in his hand. He turned him over to test his weight. The chain rattled at the door. The lieutenant came in, holding the door wide. Through the doorway, Maris Pavo looked at him across the room.
“Whatever you learned in Tasso,” he said, “it was not piety.”
Torien put the Emperor back on the shelf. “I learned to make the most of the blunt objects available to me, sir.”
Pavo ducked in through the doorway. A slave girl followed at his heels, carrying a salver with a wine jug and two silver cups. “You can leave it,” Pavo said. She put the salver on the desk and bowed and went out. The lieutenant shut the door when she had gone and stood silently watching, his feet spread and arms folded.
Pavo came over beside Torien at the bookshelf. He was tall and hawk-faced, thin rather than lean, his face full of hollows in the lamplight, his broad shoulders beginning to stoop. There was an opaqueness in his dark eyes that hinted at blindness to come. There were cancer spots sprinkled here and there on his face and on the backs of his brown, muscled hands. He reached and touched Torien’s ribs very lightly. “They told me you offered no resistance.”
Torien looked down. There was blood in a half-moon stain on his tunic, spreading under the edge of the bandage. Pavo took him by the elbow back around the desk. “Sit,” he said. “I will look at it.”
Torien did not say anything. He sat holding the arms of the chair while Pavo opened his tunic and unwrapped the bandage and peeled off Antoni’s dressing to look. Pavo’s blunt brown fingers explored the edges of the wound very carefully. “This was not your work, Vigo?”
From the doorway, the lieutenant said, “No, sir.”
“Tell the girl to bring acetum and oil. Cloth as well—and hot water.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pavo ran his thumb over the cut on Torien’s cheek. “This has healed well. The other is a concern. It should have been let to rest. You’ve carried it from Tasso?”
“Modigne.”
“Overland?”
Torien did not say anything. Pavo did not seem to notice. He laid a hand on Torien’s forehead. His skin was rough and dry, like papyrus. “No fever, at least. That is a mercy.”
The girl brought the things and put them on the desk and stood holding the bowl of hot water and a towel on her arm while Pavo cleaned the wound and dressed it. Pavo worked silently and skillfully. Torien sat looking at the Emperor over Pavo’s shoulder. There was a tightness in him and he knew Pavo could feel it, but Pavo did not say anything. Pavo finished and washed his hands and dried them. Torien slid his tunic back on while the girl cleared the things off the desk. She went out from the room and the lieutenant closed the door behind her and Torien listened to her footsteps going away across the tiles.
Pavo poured wine into the cups on the salver. “From Inumæ,” he said, “my own vintage.” He put one cup in front of Torien. “What do you think?”
Torien took the cup and held it between his hands and looked down into it. His own face looked up at him from the smooth, dark red surface of the wine. “I was not raised to know viniculture, sir.”
“Neither was I,” Pavo said. “I have come to it very late. I had neither opportunity nor interest as a boy. Therefore, my efforts are still very much those of an amateur. That is why I’m asking your opinion rather than Vigo’s. The Lieutenant comes of very good family in Seragno, and winemaking is to him a matter of ancestral pride.”
Torien tipped the cup and drew a long mouthful of wine and rolled it over his tongue and swallowed. His throat was tight. The wine slid down heavily and unpleasantly and settled like a clenched fist in the pit of his stomach. Pavo watched his face. “I await your judgment,” he said.
“Maybe Brevade can find a market for it in Tasso, sir.”
Pavo took the other cup and sat down facing him in the chair across the desk. He said, “I’m not meant to take that as a compliment, I imagine.” His eyes ran a circle from Torien’s face to his ribs and back across his cheek. “Brevade’s work? It was clumsy of him.”
“To leave me alive, sir?”
“I am glad to have you alive. I mean that very honestly. The offer I made you five months ago still stands between us, if you are interested.”
Torien looked up from the cup in his hands. Pavo seemed amused. “Did you think I was going to put you on a rack?”
“You didn’t seem to have much compunction about Nico Briule.”
Pavo paused with his cup at his lips. “What was done,” he said, “was done out of necessity. Do not assume, childishly, that it was done without compunction.”
“Espere hung him alive on the gate wall when he’d finished torturing him. It took him four days to die.”
“Espere was an animal, functional to a specific end. Nico was a casualty of war. I mourn him as I mourn the rest of my dead.” Pavo drank and lowered the cup and looked into it. “It is what Vigo would call rustic,” he said, “but I am also what Vigo would call rustic, so I do not disdain. However, it is not a summer wine.”
“You and I have different ideas of compunction, sir.”
“Inevitably. You have held command five months. I have held it forty years. You can spare me the condescension until you’ve had blood on your hands—and you will get blood on your hands, if you continue much longer in command.” Pavo looked up at the lieutenant in the doorway. “Vigo, tell the girl to bring some of the white.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you eaten?” Pavo said to Torien.
“I’ve been locked in an office.”
“And dinner for the Commander, Vigo,” Pavo said.
For a while, there was traffic in and out through the door. The girl came to clear the desk and pour white wine in new cups. A pair of kitchen boys brought the dinner on trays. There was a cold duck breast and cucumbers and black olives in vinegar and a sticky honey pastry with almonds. The fist in his stomach unclenched a little, and he remembered how hungry he was. He had eaten nothing but Antoni’s barley porridge since his fever had broken on the road. He ate a little of the duck and some of the cucumbers and found he could not eat any more. The lieutenant, Vigo, had come over to the desk to say something into Pavo’s ear, and Torien sat looking at the wine cup in his lap and pretending he was not trying to hear. Pavo listened and said nothing. He took out a quill and wrote something on papyrus and rolled up the papyrus and gave it to the lieutenant. “Wait outside,” he said, “until I have need of you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The Lieutenant shares your sense of compunction,” Pavo said to Torien, as Vigo went out, shutting the door. “It was his responsibility to see you did not make it past the gates, therefore a personal failing to find you spent the evening on Chæla Ceno’s couch. I have tried to reassure him you and the former Lord Senna made an unrivaled art of slipping in and out of the city. He prefers self-flagellation.” Pavo wiped the nib of his quill and laid the pen back in its case. He looked up. “I admit I expected Senna would be with you. As I remember it, you were inseparable.”
Torien said, looking at the wine cup tight in his hands, “He’s dead. A month ago in Tasso. We met a Mayaso raiding party on the Road.”
>
There was a moment’s silence.
“I hadn’t heard,” Pavo said. “I’m sorry.”
“He was a casualty of war. I mourn him as I mourn the rest of my dead.”
He felt Pavo’s eyes on him like a physical weight. “You wrote his family?”
“By law there was no family. I didn’t know the protocol.”
“There is a time and place for protocol and a time and place for disregarding protocol. You should have written.”
Torien did not say anything.
“I will see to it that his father is informed—or perhaps it would be better if you told him yourself. It will mean more coming from you. Alvero knows you were close.” Pavo’s eyes were steady on his face. “One question raises another,” he said. “Tell me who brought you to the city. Obviously, it was not young Senna.”
He heard himself say, distantly above the pounding of his heart, “I came alone.”
“Up the river, it must be, with such a wound.”
“Yes.”
“Impressive. Dio Valle did not make it past Salina. Lieutenant Aregne sent an alert from Modigne.”
His own voice again, detached from the rest of him: “Maybe I was more careful.”
“I am willing to believe it, though I am pleasantly surprised. Caution has never been one of your greatest strengths. The real difficulty lies in the fact that the river has been impassable for three weeks below Manola.”
Torien studied his wine cup and said nothing.
“You did not come on foot,” Pavo said. “Even without that little memento from Brevade, you could not have come in two weeks on foot from Modigne.”
A fly settled on the rim of the cup. Torien shook it off and watched it glide away over the desktop to land on the uneaten duck.
Pavo said, “Who else besides Salvo Briule knew your business in Choiro?”
“Lieutenant Aregne, apparently.”
“Who else?”
Torien did not say anything.
“I have already dealt as necessary with your officers at Tasso, if it interests you,” Pavo said. “I will deal with Briule presently.”
Blood Road Page 22
