A Brightness Long Ago Read online

  ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY

  The Fionavar Tapestry

  The Summer Tree

  The Wandering Fire

  The Darkest Road

  Tigana

  A Song for Arbonne

  The Lions of Al-Rassan

  The Sarantine Mosaic

  Sailing to Sarantium

  Lord of Emperors

  The Last Light of the Sun

  Beyond This Dark House

  (poetry)

  Ysabel

  Under Heaven

  River of Stars

  Children of Earth and Sky

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Readers Guide copyright © 2019 by Penguin Random House LLC

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Map copyright © 2019 by Martin Springett

  Excerpt of four lines from “The Master” from New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 by Czesław Miłosz. Copyright © 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 by Czesław Miłosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kay, Guy Gavriel, author.

  Title: A brightness long ago / Guy Gavriel Kay.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | New York : Berkley, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018039450 | ISBN 9780451472984 (hardcover) |

  ISBN 9780698183285 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR9199.3.K39 B75 2019 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039450

  First U.S. Edition: May 2019

  Jacket art: birds by Adrian Hillman/Arcangel Images

  Jacket design by Lisa Jager

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  for

  REX KAY

  with love

  Lifelong support

  Trusted first reader

  Thank you, brother

  Contents

  Also by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Principal Characters

  Part OneChapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Part TwoChapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Part ThreeChapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Acknowledgments

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  The celestial spheres endlessly resound.

  But an instant is invincible in memory.

  It comes back in the middle of the night. Who are those holding torches,

  So that what is long past occurs in full light?

  —CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  (Characters are generally situated in their city of origin, not necessarily where they are when first encountered in the text.)

  In Seressa

  Guidanio Cerra, also called Danio, and sometimes Danino

  Alviso, his cousin, a bookseller in Seressa

  Brunetto Duso, a guard

  Duke Lucino Conti, afflicted by a stroke

  Ricci, acting as duke

  } neighbours of Guidanio

  Petronella

  Dario

  Maurizio

  In Macera

  Duke Arimanno Ripoli

  Corinna, his wife

  Adria, their youngest daughter

  In Acorsi

  Folco Cino d’Acorsi, lord of Acorsi, a mercenary commander

  Caterina Ripoli d’Acorsi, his wife, sister to Duke Arimanno of Macera

  Folco’s men:

  Aldo, his cousin and second-in-command

  Gian

  Coppo Peralta

  Leone

  Vanetta, Folco’s sister (deceased)

  In Remigio

  Teobaldo Monticola di Remigio, lord of Remigio, a mercenary commander

  Ginevra della Valle, his mistress, mother of his two young sons

  Trussio, his oldest son by his late wife

  Gherardo Monticola, brother to Teobaldo, chancellor of Remigio

  Monticola’s men:

  Gaetan, his second-in-command, from Ferrieres

  Collucio, a captain in his company

  In Avegna

  Guarino Peselli, founder of the celebrated school there

  Erizzio and Evardo Ricciardiano, brothers ruling in Avegna

  In Mylasia

  Count Uberto of Mylasia, called “the Beast”

  Novarro, his chancellor

  Morani di Rosso, chief steward of the palace

  Opicino Valeri, a merchant

  Erigio, his eldest son

  In Firenta

  Piero Sardi, a banker, ruling Firenta

  Versano, his older son

  Antenami, his younger son

  Ariberti Boriforte, a military leader

  In Rhodias

  High Patriarch Scarsone Sardi, nephew to Piero

  In Bischio

  Carderio Sacchetti, a shoemaker

  Mina Sacchetti, his aunt

  Leora, his daughter

  Carlo Serrana, a rider in Bischio’s race

  Also

  Jelena, an itinerant healer

  Brother Nardo Sarzerola, a cleric

  Goro Calmetta, a merchant of the city of Rosso

  Matteo Mercati, a celebrated artist

  Gurçu, khalif of the Asharites, besieging Sarantium

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER I

  A man no longer young in a large room at night. There are lanterns and lamps, torches in brackets, a handsome table, tall, shuttered windows, paintings in shadow on the walls. He is not alone. Even so, he finds his mind turning back to when he was, indeed, still young. We all do that. A scent carries us, a voice, a name, a person who reminds us of someone we knew . . .

  There are events going forward in this moment, but there is also a delay, a pause in the rush of people coming and going, and the past is closer at night.

  He is thinking of a story from when he was learning the world and his pla
ce in it. He cannot tell all the tale, and he won’t. We see only glimpses of history, even our own. It is not entirely ours—in memory, in writing it down, in hearing or in reading it. We can reclaim only part of the past. Sometimes it is enough . . .

  * * *

  The sailors say the rain misses the cloud even as it falls through light or dark into the sea. I miss her like that as I fall through my life, through time, the chaos of our time. I dream of her some nights, still, but there is nothing to give weight or value to that, it is only me, and what I want to be true. It is only longing.

  * * *

  • • •

  I REMEMBER THAT autumn night very well. It would be odd if I didn’t, since it set me on a different path from the one I’d thought I was on. It changed the arc of my days, as Guarino might have put it. I could easily have died. No arc at all, if so. I had images of knives come into my mind for a long time after. The one I carried, the one that had been used before my own.

  I owe my life to Morani di Rosso. I light candles to his memory. He was a good man; I think it is fair to say any friend of Guarino’s had to be. Morani was chief steward of the palace in Mylasia. He had accepted me on Guarino’s recommendation. Which is why I was in the palace on the night Uberto the count, also named the Beast, was killed by the girl.

  It seems necessary to say that though I was a pupil in Guarino’s school it was not because my father had any rank at all. Guarino, the best man of our time I believe, when invited to open a school at the court in Avegna made it a condition that he be allowed to admit a number of lesser-born children—clever ones, showing signs of promise—to be educated with the sons and some of the daughters of nobility.

  I was admitted that way. My father was a tailor in Seressa. I feel no shame in saying that. I know what he was, I know what I was, and am. The cleric in our neighbourhood sanctuary by the great canal was the one who noticed me. I had quickness, he declared, was a well-formed, well-mannered young man, had taken easily to my letters and numbers.

  Tailors in Seressa (and elsewhere) do have a little status. They enter the homes and intimate chambers of the great, conversing with them at fittings, learning their needs (not just in clothing), sometimes guiding those needs. Ours is a time when public display matters. Most times are, I suppose.

  At our cleric’s urging, my father mentioned me to one of his patrons, a member of the Council of Twelve, then the cleric wrote a letter to that same man, and . . . matters were set in motion. I have a memory of my mother the morning I left—she saved a yellow bird from the cat. She chased the cat away, then turned and hugged me goodbye. I don’t know if she cried; if she did, it was after I had gone.

  I spent seven years with Guarino in Avegna. There is a bust of him now in a palace courtyard there, outside the rooms where the school used to be. The school has been closed for years. Guarino is gone, my father (Jad defend his soul) is gone, many of those who mattered in my life are. It happens if you live long enough.

  In that school in Avegna I lived through and left my childhood. I learned to write with skill, not merely competence. To speak gracefully in good company and debate with clarity. To deal with weapons and the new form of accounting. To sing (with less grace, in truth), and to ride and handle horses—which became my joy in life.

  I learned to address my betters properly and my equals and inferiors also properly, and to do so with at least an illusion of ease. I was taught something of the history of Batiara and of events in our own time—though we were spoken to carefully as to that last, because certain things were not said, even at the school. Towards the end, I was helping with the younger students. I was in no great hurry to leave that sheltered place.

  Some of us learned to read texts of the Ancients. We learned of Sarantium in the east, the City of Cities, what it had been a thousand years ago, what it was now, and how the Asharites, the star-worshippers, threatened it in our time. We heard tales of emperors and charioteers.

  Those languages and stories of the past, along with access to Avegna’s palace horses, were a good part of why I stayed with my teacher longer than most. Those things, and loving him.

  I had begun to think I might become a bookseller and bookbinder at home in Seressa where the trade was growing, but Guarino said I was suited to serve at a court, to use and share what he’d taught me. He regarded that as part of his task, sending men and sometimes women into the world to have an influence, guide others towards a better way to be, during a time when violent men were ruling and warring through Batiara and beyond.

  Time enough to make and sell books later, he said—if you decide you want that. But first, take a position where you can give back some of what you have been given here.

  He’d written a letter to an old friend, which is how Morani di Rosso and Mylasia came into my life. Morani offered me a position at the court there. The Beast’s court.

  We make our own choices sometimes, sometimes they are made for us.

  I’ve thought often about what my life might have been had I gone home to Seressa instead and opened or joined in running a bookshop. My cousin Alviso had just started one, alongside one of the smaller canals. But Alviso hadn’t been to the celebrated school in Avegna. He hadn’t had that gift in his life. Opportunities given are responsibilities. They taught us that.

  So, I went to Mylasia. There were and there are bad men ruling some of the larger and smaller city-states of Batiara, but I don’t think many would dispute that Uberto of Mylasia was among the very worst in those days.

  It was interesting, I suppose it still is, how vicious men can take power and be accepted, supported by those they govern, if they bring with them a measure of peace. If granaries are full and citizens fed. If war doesn’t bring starvation to the walls. Uberto was a man who had sealed an enemy in a cask to see if he might observe the soul escaping when his prisoner died.

  If men and women are to be killed we want that to happen somewhere else. We are like that, even as we pray. In these years, as hired armies go up and down the hills and river valleys, fighting for a city-state that’s hired them or raiding for themselves, as High Patriarchs war with half the nobility and conspire with the other half, some have seen the conflicts of the great as sweet, seductive chances to expand their own power.

  Villages and towns are destroyed by angry, hungry soldiers, then sacked again a year later. Famine comes, and disease with it. In times of hard peril, a leader strong enough—and feared enough—to keep his city safe will be permitted a great deal in terms of viciousness, what he does within his palace.

  There was no secret to it. Uberto of Mylasia was well known for what happened in his chambers at night when the mood was upon him. There were stories of youthful bodies carried out through the smaller palace gates in the dark, dead and marred. And good men still served him—making their peace with our god as best they could.

  Balancing acts of the soul. Acquiescence happens more than its opposite—a rising up in anger and rejection. There are wolves in the world, inside elegant palaces as well as in the dark woods and the wild.

  People sent their daughters away from Mylasia and the nearby farms in those years because Uberto was what he was. When young girls sufficiently appealing were not readily found, he had boys brought to him.

  It was known, as I say. We’d heard the tales in Avegna. Some of the others at school, better born than I, had even joked that having women brought to them (no one joked about the boys, it would have been a risky jest) was one of the appealing aspects of power. They didn’t talk—to be fair—about killing them, just the pleasures of a night, or more than one.

  Uberto never had anyone brought for more than one night. Most of his guests survived, went home, were even rewarded with coins—given that marriage would be difficult for the girls, after, and the boys were shamed.

  Not all left his palace alive, however. Not all of them did.

  * * *

 
• • •

  THE FIRST WAY I might have died that windy autumn night was if Morani had not sent me for wine by way of the servants’ stairs when word came that the girl had arrived.

  When someone was brought to the count at night, Morani took the post outside Uberto’s chambers himself. As if he would not burden another soul with what this was. He had done so for years, apparently.

  That summer and fall he liked me to stay with him before and after the arrival—but not when the girl or boy came up the stairs. This had happened three times already. That night was the fourth. I do not believe in sacred numbers, I am just telling my story as I remember it.

  Outside the count’s rooms Morani and I would converse of the wisdom of the past. I’d recite poetry for him, on request, while behind the door Uberto did what he did. We would hear things sometimes. Morani’s face would be sorrowful, and I thought I saw other things in him, too. Mostly he would keep me talking—about philosophers, precepts of restraint, learned indifference to fortune’s wheel. He’d drink the wine I’d brought up, but never too much.

  He couldn’t protect me from knowing what was happening, only from being part of sending someone in. He did have me stay with him after. Perhaps he found it hard to be there alone. Perhaps he thought I needed to learn some of the dark things about the world, alongside the bright ones. In certain ways, I have since thought, that is the condition of Batiara in our time: art and philosophy, and beasts.

  Had I been standing beside him when the girl was led up the staircase between torches, had the guards who brought her seen me with him there, I’d have been held equally responsible, without any least doubt, for what ensued.

  But they did not see me. Only Morani was there to greet her gently, usher her through the door after searching her, carefully, for any weapon she might have. The guards would have done so downstairs already, but as the palace’s chief steward, Morani was formally responsible outside that door.