Tigana

by Guy Gavriel Kay

He was regretting the question; this was no time to be putting a burden of false certitude upon the Prince.

We are not the last free generation. There will be ripples of tomorrow that run down all the years. Our children’s children will remember us, and will not lie tamely under the yoke.”

When power is gone the memory of power lingers.

It is the simple truth that mortal man cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower while others live to dwindle

into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amid the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the running of the life lines and the fate lines of men.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.

the life he’d woken to this morning—seemed almost inconceivable to him now, as if he’d already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide. Devin wondered how often men did what they did, made the choices of their lives, for reasons that were clean and uncomplicated and easily understood as they were happening.

Though there it may be a matter of five of one hand, five of the other:

The politics of art, Dianora decided, was at least as complex as that of provinces and nations.

She watched. To share it. To bear witness and remember, knowing even then that such things were going to matter, if anything mattered in the days and years to come.

Behind the deep, effortless courtesy and the genuine camaraderie, there existed a line they learned not to try to cross.

“You’ll be better company by a long go than my mouth talking wisdom with only my own ears to hear.”

“We are free men. There is always a choice.” “Some choices are closed to some of us.” It was, surprisingly, Sandre. He moved forward to stand a little in front of Devin. “And some men must make choices for those who cannot, whether through lack of will or lack of power.”

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

Sadness, and a distinct stir of longing. Devin realized that he wanted that shared history for himself, wanted to be a part of that self-contained, accomplished fraternity of men who knew this scene so well. He was young enough to savor the romance of it, but old enough—especially after this past winter and his time with Menico—to guess at the price demanded for those memories and the contained, solitary, competent look of the two men in front of him.

The old man smiled a wintry smile.

Do you want freedom to be easy, Erlein bar Alein? Do you think it drops like acorns from trees in the fall?”

Whatever Alessan was feeling or remembering now would have nothing of the unreal about it. It would all be raw, brutally actual, the trampled fabric of his own life.

And somewhere in his mind and heart—fruits of a long winter of thought, and of listening in silence as older and wiser men spoke—Devin knew that he was not the first and would not be the last person to find in a single man the defining shape and lineaments for the so much harder love of an abstraction or a dream.

He wished he were older, a wiser man with a deeper understanding. There seemed to be so many truths or realizations of late, hovering at the edge of his awareness, waiting to be grasped and claimed, just out of reach.

He liked when necessity and gain came together; it didn’t happen often but when it did the marriage seemed to Alberico of Barbadior to represent almost the purest pleasure to be found in power.

No more than that; no greeting, no effusions.

And words, the ones she would want to say, were just another reaching out towards making something whole, weren’t they? Towards bridging the chasms. And in the end that was the point, wasn’t it? There was no bridge across for her.

She had not wanted to hear that; anything like that. Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

The irony was coruscating, it was like acid in his soul.

am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.”

I knew it when I saw you in that window. In the moment before you leaped I knew that I loved you. Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul’s journeying.” Bright star of Eanna.

The harbor of his soul.

He had known it, he had always known it. Had feared the man not as a coward does, but as one who has taken the measure of something and knows exactly what it is.

The novelist Milan Kundera fed my emerging theme of oppression and survival with his musings about the relationship between conquered peoples and an unstable sexuality: what I have called “the insurrections of night.” The underlying ideas, for me, had to do with how people rebel when they can’t rebel, how we behave when the world has lost its bearings, how shattered self-respect can ripple through to the most intimate levels of our lives.