none the less acute for that: arrows and blades, wielded by the watchful priests and priestesses of Rian against falsely consecrated men come in secret in the night to the goddess’s holy island with a purpose of their own.
Said purpose being in fact extremely specific: to persuade one Evrard, a troubadour, to return to Castle Baude from his self-imposed exile on Rian’s Island in the depths of righteous indignation.
It was all genuinely ridiculous, Blaise thought again, pulling at the oar, feeling the salt spray in his hair and beard. He was glad that Rudel wasn’t here. He could guess what his Portezzan friend would have had to say about this whole escapade. In his mind he could almost hear Rudel’s laughter and his acerbic, devastating assessment of the current circumstances.
The story itself was straightforward enough—an entirely natural consequence, Blaise had been quick to declare in the hall at Baude, of the stupidity of the courtly rituals here in the south. He was already not much liked for saying such things, he knew. That didn’t bother him; he hadn’t been much liked in Gorhaut, either, the last while before he’d left home.
Still, what was an honest man to make of what had happened in Castle Baude last month? Evrard of Lussan, who was said to be a modestly competent troubadour—Blaise was certainly not in a position to judge one man’s scribblings against another’s—had elected to take up residence at Baude in the high country of the south-western hills for a season. This had redounded, in the way of things down here, to the greater renown of En Mallin de Baude: lesser barons in remote castles seldom had troubadours, modestly competent or otherwise, living with them for any length of time. That much, at least, made sense to Blaise.
But, of course, once settled in the castle, Evrard naturally had to fall in love with Soresina and begin writing his dawnsongs and liensennes, and his cryptic trobars for her. That, also in the way of such things here, was precisely why he had come, with the less romantic incentive, Blaise had caustically observed, of a handsome monthly payment out of Mallin’s wool revenues from last autumn’s fair in Lussan. The troubadour used a made-up name for his Lady—another rule of the tradition—but everyone in the vicinity of the castle, and surprisingly soon everyone in Arbonne who mattered at all, seemed to know that Evrard of Lussan, the troubadour, was heart-smitten by the beauty and grace of young Soresina de Baude in her castle tucked in a fold of the high country leading to the mountain passes and Arimonda.
Mallin was enormously pleased; that too was part of the game. A lovestruck troubadour exalting the baron’s wife enhanced Mallin’s own ardently pursued images of power and largesse.
Soresina, of course, was thrilled beyond words. She was vain, pretty and easily silly enough, in Blaise’s jaundiced opinion, to have precipitated exactly the sort of crisis with which they now found themselves dealing. If it hadn’t been the one incident, it would have been another, he was sure of it. There were women like Soresina at home, too, but they were rather better kept in hand in Gorhaut. For one thing, their husbands didn’t invite strangers into their castles for the express purpose of wooing them. However Maffour might try to explain the strict rules of this courtly game of love, Blaise knew an attempt at seduction when he saw one.
Soresina, manifestly uninterested in the newly resident poet in any genuinely romantic way—which no doubt reassured her husband more than somewhat—nonetheless contrived to lead Evrard on in every manner possible, given the constraints imposed by the extremely crowded spaces of a small baronial castle.
Mallin’s yellow-haired wife had a ripe body, an infectious laugh and a lineage substantially more distinguished than her husband’s: something that always added fuel to the fires of troubadour passion Blaise had been told by the discursive Maffour. He’d had to laugh; it was all so artificial, the whole process. He could guess, too easily, what acid-tongued Rudel would have said about this.
In the meantime, the celebrated southern spring came to Arbonne, with many-coloured wildflowers appearing almost overnight in the meadows and the high slopes about Castle Baude. The snows were reported to be receding from the mountain pass to Arimonda. As the poet’s verses grew in heat and passion with the quickening season, so did the throbbing voices of the joglars who had begun arriving in Baude as well, knowing a good thing when they saw one. More than one of the corans and castle servants had private cause to thank the troubadour and the singers and the erotic atmosphere they’d induced for amorous interludes in kitchen and meadow and hall.
Unfortunately for him, Evrard’s own cause was not aided by the all-too-evident reality that he was short, yellow-toothed and prematurely losing what thin hair he’d once had. Still, according to the great tradition, troubadours were supposed to be loved by the high ladies of culture and grace for their art and their fierce dedication, not for their height or hair.
Trouble was, Soresina de Baude didn’t seem to care much for the great tradition, or that part of it, at any rate. She liked her men to look like the warlike corans of the great days past. Indeed, she’d made a point of telling Blaise as much shortly after he’d arrived, looking artlessly up at his tall, muscled form and then glancing down and away in transparently feigned shyness. Blaise, somewhat used to this sort of thing, had been neither surprised nor tempted. He was being paid by Mallin and had shaped his own code in such matters.
What Evrard of Lussan shaped, later that spring, was something else. In brief, the little troubadour, having downed a considerable quantity of unmixed Miraval red wine with the corans one night, finally elected to translate his fiercely impassioned verses into modestly passionate action.
Inflamed by a joglar’s fervid rendition of one of his own ballads earlier that evening, the troubadour had left his sleeping place late at night and stumbled along dark and silent corridors and stairways to Soresina’s door, which happened, unfortunately for all concerned, to be unlocked: Mallin, young, healthy, tall enough, and rather urgently seeking heirs, had but lately left his wife for his own chamber nearby.
The intoxicated, verse-enraptured poet had entered the pitch-black chamber, felt his way over to the canopied bed and planted a lover’s kiss upon the lips of the satiated, sleeping woman he was busily making famous throughout Arbonne that spring.
There were a good many schools of thought evolving, in the aftermath of the event, as to what Soresina should have done. Ariane de Carenzu, queen of the Court of Love since the countess, her aunt, had passed the title to her, had proclaimed a session to rule on the matter later in the year. In the meantime, every man and woman Blaise encountered in the castle or outside it seemed to have an opinion on what he himself regarded as an entirely predictable, utterly trivial event.
What Soresina had done—quite naturally, or very unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective—was scream. Roused from post-coital dreaming, then realizing who was in her chamber, she cursed her stunned, besotted admirer, in a voice heard by half the castle, as a rude, ill-bred peasant who deserved a public whipping.
What Evrard of Lussan, wounded to the core of his all-too-sensitive soul, had done in turn was leave Baude Castle before sunrise, proceed directly to the nearest sanctuary of the goddess, receive benediction and consecration and, making his way to the coast, cross by boat to Rian’s Island in a retreat from the harsh, ungrateful society of women and castles that could so abuse the unstinting generosity of his art.
Safely on the island, away from the terrible storm and strife of the world beyond, he had begun soothing and diverting himself by composing hymns to the goddess, along with some undeniably witty satires on Soresina de Baude. Not by name, of course—rules were rules—but since the name he used now was the same one he’d coined to exalt the long-limbed elegance of her form and the dark fire of her eyes, no one in Arbonne was left even slightly in ignorance on this particular point. The students in Tavernel, Blaise had been given to understand by a seriously distressed Mallin, had taken up the songs and were amplifying them, adding verses
