‘But?’ Sandre asks.
‘But he’s the man who saved us all, everyone knows it, everyone knows who he is now. After a dozen years of being on the roads he knows more people who matter in each province than anyone else. He’s the one who gave the rest of us the vision. And he’s the Prince of Tigana, too, and in his prime. I’m afraid’—he grimaces at the word—‘I don’t see how he can avoid this, even if he wanted to. I think for Alessan it is just beginning now.’
They are silent a moment.
‘What about you?’ Devin asks. ‘Will you go with him? What do you want?’
Baerd smiles. ‘What do I want? Nothing nearly so high. I’d badly like to find my sister, but I’m beginning to accept that she’s . . . gone, and I think that I may never know where, or how. I’ll be there for Alessan whenever he needs me, but what I most want to do is build things. Houses, temples, bridges, a palace, half a dozen towers here in Avalle. I need to see things rising, and I . . . I suppose it’s part of the same thing, but I want to start a family. We need children here again. Too many people died.’ He looks away for a moment towards the mountains and then back again. ‘You and I may be the lucky ones, Devin. We aren’t Princes or Dukes or wizards. We’re only ordinary men, with a life to start.’
‘I told you he was waiting for Elena,’ Sandre says gently. Not a gibe, the voice of a friend, speaking with deep affection. Baerd smiles, looking into the distance again. And in that moment his expression changes, it grows charged with a fierce, bright pleasure:
‘Look!’ he cries, pointing. ‘Here he comes!’
From the south, winding out of the mountains and the hills of the highlands along a road that has not been used in hundreds of years there comes a caravan, many-coloured, stretching back a long way. There is music playing beside it and ahead, with men and women riding and on foot, donkeys and horses laden with goods, at least fifty banners flapping in the wind. And now the tunes drift up to the three of them, bright and gay, and all the colours are flashing in the morning light as Marius, King of Quileia, comes riding down from the mountain pass to the wedding of his friend.
He is to spend the night in the Sanctuary where he will be formally welcomed by the High Priest of Eanna—whom he will remember as the man who brought a fourteen-year-old boy to him over the mountains long ago. There are barges waiting in Avalle to take them down the river to Tigana in the morning.
But the right of first greeting is Baerd’s, in Alessan’s name, and he has asked the two of them to ride here with him.
‘Come on!’ he cries now, joy in his face. He urges his horse forward down the sloping path. Devin and Sandre glance at each other and hasten to follow.
‘I will never understand,’ Devin shouts, as they catch up to Baerd, ‘how you can possibly be so pleased to see a man who calls you Pigeon Two!’
Sandre gives a cackle of glee. Baerd laughs aloud, and mimes a blow at Devin. The three of them are still laughing as they slow their horses to swing around a cluster of sonrai bushes at a wide curve in the downward trail.
And it is there that they see the riselka, three men see a riselka, sitting on a rock beside the sunlit path, her long sea-green hair blowing back in the freshening breeze.
Afterword
Tigana is in good part a novel about memory: the necessity of it, in cultural terms, and the dangers that come when it is too intense. Scelto’s decision at the end of the novel is a reflection of that, and so is the George Seferis passage that served as one of my epigraphs. The world today offers more than enough examples of both pitfalls: ignorance of history and its lessons, and the refusal to let the past be past.
So, accepting that this is precarious terrain—an author’s memories of a book about remembering—what does that imply, so many years after the writing?
Well, one might consider caution as a byword.
I doubt there’s any other novel I’ve written for which I’d even attempt a reconstruction of the earliest seeds of the book. But Tigana happens to have had a number of quite specific and very powerful elements in its origin, and some of these I can (or I have persuaded myself I can) reconstruct.
Some time in the latter part of the 1980s I began seeing in my mind a hunting cabin in the woods, in some Medieval or Renaissance setting. There was someone unexpected (from the point of view of those inside) sitting in the window. In those early days, I had not the least idea who that was or what else happened, but I knew that a book would unfold from whatever took place in and around that cabin.
There exists a photo—I think I saw it first in LIFE magazine—from Czechoslovakia in 1968, the time of the ‘Prague Spring’ when a brief, euphoric flicker of freedom animated that Iron Curtain country before Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed it.
There are actually two photographs. The first shows a number of Communist Party functionaries in a room, wearing nondescript suits, looking properly sombre. The second is the same photo. Almost. There is one functionary missing now, and something I recall as a large plant inserted where he was. The missing figure—part of the crushed uprising—is not only dead, he has been erased from the record. A trivial technical accomplishment today, when the capacity we have for altering images and sound is so extreme, but back then the two photographs registered powerfully for me, and lingered for twenty years: not only killed, but made to never have been.
Another
