Tigana. Guy Gavriel Kay

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      There were certainly no free tables to be had in The Bird. Devin wedged himself into a corner where the dark, pitted wood of the bar met the back wall, took a judicious sip of his wine—watered but not unusually so, he decided— and composed his mind and soul towards a meditation upon the perfidy and unreasonableness of women.

      As embodied, specifically, by Catriana d’Astibar these past two weeks.

      He calculated that he had enough time before the late-afternoon rehearsal—the last before their opening engagement at the city home of a small wine-estate owner tomorrow—to muse his way through most of a bottle and still show up sober. He was the experienced trouper anyhow, he thought indignantly. He was a partner. He knew the performance routines like a hand knew a glove. The extra rehearsals had been laid on by Menico for the benefit of the three new people in the troupe.

      Including impossible Catriana. Who happened to be the reason he had stormed out of the morning rehearsal a short while before he knew that Menico planned to call the session to a halt. How, in the name of Adaon, was he supposed to react when an inexperienced new female who thought she could sing—and to whom he’d been genuinely friendly since she’d joined them a fortnight ago—said what she’d said in front of everyone that morning?

      Cursed with memory, Devin saw the nine of them rehearsing again in the rented back room on the ground floor of their inn. Four musicians, the two dancers, Menico, Catriana, and himself singing up front. They were doing Rauder’s ‘Song of Love’, a piece rather predictably requested by the wine-merchant’s wife, a piece Devin had been singing for nearly six years, a song he could manage in a stupor, a coma, sound asleep.

      And so perhaps, yes, he’d been a little bored, a little distracted, had been leaning a little closer than absolutely necessary to their newest, red-headed female singer, putting perhaps the merest shading of a message into his expression and voice, but still, even so . . .

      ‘Devin, in the name of the Triad,’ had snapped Catriana d’Astibar, breaking up the rehearsal entirely, ‘do you think you can get your mind away from your groin for long enough to do a decent harmony? This is not a difficult song!’

      The affliction of a fair complexion had hurtled Devin’s face all the way to bright red. Menico, he saw—Menico who should have been sharply reprimanding the girl for her presumption—was laughing helplessly, even more flushed than Devin was. So were the others, all of them.

      Unable to think of a reply, unwilling to compromise the tattered shreds of his dignity by yielding to his initial impulse to reach up and whack the girl across the back of her head, Devin had simply spun on his heel and left.

      He’d thrown one reproachful glance at Menico as he went but was not assuaged: the troupe-leader’s ample paunch was quivering with laughter as he wiped tears from his round, bearded face.

      So Devin had gone looking for a bottle of Senzio green and a dark place to drink it in on a brilliant autumn morning in Astibar. Having finally found the wine and the tenuous comfort of shadows he fully expected to figure out, about half a bottle from now, what he should have said to that arrogant red-maned creature back in the rehearsal room.

      If only she wasn’t so depressingly tall, he thought. Morosely he filled his glass again. Looking up at the blackened cross-beams of the ceiling he briefly contemplated hanging himself from one of them: by the heels of course. For old time’s sake.

      ‘Shall I buy you a drink?’ someone said.

      With a sigh Devin turned to cope with one of the more predictable aspects of being small and looking very young while drinking alone in a sailor’s bar.

      What he saw was somewhat reassuring. His questioner was a soberly dressed man of middle years with greying hair and lines of worry or laughter radiating at his temples. Even so:

      ‘Thank you,’ Devin said, ‘but I’ve most of my own bottle left and I prefer having a woman to being one for sailors. I’m also older than I look.’

      The other man laughed aloud. ‘In that case,’ he chuckled, genuinely amused, ‘you can give me a drink if you like while I tell you about my two marriageable daughters and the other two who are on their way to that age sooner than I’m ready for. I’m Rovigo d’Astibar, master of the Sea Maid just in from down the coast in Tregea.’

      Devin grinned and stretched across the bar for another glass.

      The Bird was far too crowded to bother trying to catch the owner’s rheumy eye, and Devin had his own reasons for not wanting to signal the man.

      ‘I’ll be happy to share the bottle with you,’ he said to Rovigo, ‘though your wife is unlikely to be well pleased if you press your daughters upon a travelling musician.’

      ‘My wife,’ said Rovigo feelingly, ‘would turn ponderous cartwheels of delight if I brought home a cowherd from the Certandan grasslands for the oldest one.’

      Devin winced. ‘That bad?’ he murmured. ‘Ah, well. We can at least drink to your safe return from Tregea, and in time for Festival by a fingernail. I’m Devin d’Asoli bar Garin, at your service.’

      ‘And I at yours, friend Devin, not-as-young-as-you-look. Did you have trouble getting a drink?’ Rovigo asked shrewdly.

      ‘I was in and out of more doorways than Morian of Portals knows, and as dry when I left as when I’d entered.’ Devin rashly sniffed the heavy air; even among the odours of the crowd and despite the lack of windows, the tannery stench from outside was still painfully discernible. ‘This would not have been my first or my tenth choice as a place for drinking a flask of wine.’

      Rovigo smiled. ‘A sensible attitude. Will I seem eccentric if I tell you I always come straight here when the Sea Maid is home from a voyage? Somehow the smell speaks of land to me. Tells me I’m back.’

      ‘You don’t like the sea?’

      ‘I am quite convinced that any man who says he does is lying, has debts on land, or a shrewish wife to escape from and—’ He paused, pretending to have been suddenly struck by a thought. ‘Come to think of it . . .’ he added with exaggerated reflectiveness. Then he winked.

      Devin laughed aloud and poured them both more wine. ‘Why do you sail then?’

      ‘Trade is good,’ Rovigo said frankly. ‘The Maid is small enough to slip into ports down the coast or around on the western side of Senzio or Ferraut that the bigger traders never bother with. She’s also quick enough to make it worth my while running south past the mountains to Quileia. It isn’t sanctioned, of course, with the trade embargo down there, but if you have contacts in a remote enough place and you don’t dawdle about your business it isn’t too risky and there’s a profit to be made. I can take Barbadian spices from the market here, or silk from the north, and get them to places in Quileia that would never otherwise see such things. I bring back carpets, or Quileian wood carvings, slippers, jewelled daggers, sometimes casks of buinath to sell to the taverns—whatever’s going at a good price. I can’t do volume so I have to watch my margins, but there’s a living in it as long as insurance stays down and Adaon of the Waves keeps me afloat. I go from here to the god’s temple before heading home.’

      ‘But here first.’ Devin smiled.

      ‘Here first.’ They touched glasses and drained them. Devin refilled both.

      ‘What’s СКАЧАТЬ