Sung in Shadow, page 10
“Your cousin draws blade as another man draws breath.”
But, “Romulan,” she said—and found herself abandoned.
And now she felt herself enmeshed in some terrifying masculine sport, she the target at which all took aim. She comprehended nothing, and each seemed her enemy, mocking her. Even Romulan seemed so. What use were her feeble feminine sorceries against the living freedom of a man who came and went as he required? She could never bring him to her, never have him as that willing slave she had fantasized, this prince of men kneeling at her feet—
Her tears began again suddenly, and, as they did so, were cancelled.
Through the interminable violence of the storm, new notes of violence were sounding.
Far, far off had come a shout, several shouts. A slammed door of thunder had intercepted these. But from the very mouth of the thunder something seemed to burst. Something ran through the topiary garden below the Tower, for she heard, in one of the random, soon-ended cessations of the rain, steps beating their way along the paths. Lightning blanched the long rosy window that gave from her room on to the terrace. Distant reflections of branches, angles of the masonry, were flung across the stained glass, disjointed and horrible. For a moment Iuletta retreated from the window, and then some streak of perverse stubbornness changed her. She had been frightened enough. Angry and disillusioned, she ran to the casement, opened it and stared out across the terrace to the storm-contorted garden and the orchard beyond. Whatever was abroad in the awful night she would face it, give it the lie back in its teeth.
The rain, holding off all of half a minute, now resumed. At first she could tell nothing through it, till a sequin of dark reddish light—a smoldering torch—seemed to flicker in the depths of the orchard; then another and another, moving up and down rather than forward or back—as if some search were in progress.
Leopardo! It could be none but he. Some malign mischief he had devised, yet one more male who would scornfully make her days wretched. Trembling with her anger now, she reached to draw the window shut again—and started in fear as a man’s voice called softly from the rain and dark and invisibility directly below the terrace.
She stayed quite still a moment then, yet reckoning on her loathly cousin, yet meaning to close the window. But even through the tumult of the weather, something in the voice, which she had never heard until now, stayed her. It was not Leopardo, that was sure. Nor any she recognized.
“Lady,” it called again, soft, pitched under the roll of the rain. “My donna.”
Bewildered, and in bewilderment strangely impelled, Iuletta raised her mantle to shield also her head, and stepped out on to the terrace. The liquid night tore round her, animate, warm, frenetic. Reaching the balustrade, she looked down. A figure stood among the flowering bushes at the stair base. She could see very little of its character, only hear now the fast breathing of a man who had been running. Having come out, she did not know what she should say, and was dumb. He, too, said nothing. Then there came again a muffled yell from the orchard.
“Lady,” said the figure below her, “your kinsmen are in pursuit of me and will probably kill me. If I beg you for mercy, do I get it?”
“Pursuit,” she faltered. “What have you done?”
“Incensed Leopardo Chenti.”
Her heart stopped, then regained itself with an agonizing rush.
“By what means?” she gasped. Somehow he heard her.
“There was a quarrel at dinner. Perhaps you saw it.”
She leaned on the balustrade, not knowing where she was, or anything, save who stood below.
“Lady,” he said, “for God’s sake take pity—or call Lord Chenti or some guard to stop this. I’m Valentius’ son, Montargo’s heir. Does this House require another blood-feud on its hands?”
“Come up,” she said. The clarity of her voice amazed her. As he dashed toward her up the steps, she moved, puppetlike, to the window, and when he gained the terrace, finding she could not look at him, she hid her face in her mantle and pointed to the colored glass and the room beyond. Propriety and all else had become quite meaningless. “Go in there.”
He obeyed her gladly. She followed him, shut the casement, and almost fell against it, aghast, her back to him.
Romulan stood facing into the exotic bedchamber, not yet having seen it, coughing for breath, with water falling from his garments to form a series of seas and isthmuses with the tessellated floor.
In the last instants of his flight, he had been brought to panic. That and lack of breath, not prudence, had subdued his voice. The panic shamed him, enraged him, as this new predicament did. Hearing him blundering through the garden, some light woman of the house, immodest and inquisitive, had come out on her balcony to spy. He had seen nothing of her but a shape in the storm. But he had begged refuge with her, and now was trapped. Between self-consciousness and dislike, he could not bring himself to glance at her, and so said, with heavy irony, “Your generosity is much appreciated, madama. To let a desperate man into your room at such an hour. Please be assured, you have nothing to fear from me. Your honor is safe.” (No doubt much to your disappointment.)
Iuletta had reversed her position. She leaned still against the window, but facing into the room—as if she did not mean him now to escape from her, all her slight flesh, all the fragile panes to prevent him. The silk mantle, top-heavy with water, had slipped off her hair, her shoulders, and she clutched it across her breasts, not feeling it, or anything at all. She had become simply a pair of eyes and a heartbeat, incapable of speech or motion.
Getting only silence in return for cynical politeness, Romulan guessed uneasily that he must after all turn and confront the probably voracious creature who had let him in. Apprehensive, a very little excited, he moved about and stared straight at her. So he saw Iuletta Chenti for the first time, not ten feet away. Rose silk, white skin, a stream of black hair crystalled by rain. Two eyes like blue glass, leaded with black lashes. Fifteen. Beautiful. And, in feminine form, his double.
There ensued a long, long hiatus.
Each was riveted by a stupefied recognition. Their faces had become almost blank, and their eyes, either seeing only the other inhabitant of the room, almost sightless.
Presently, however, through Romulan’s first astonishment there drove another, more mundane and more imperative. Like a song never listened to, yet suddenly remembered, the identity of this person had established itself.
“You’re Chenti’s daughter,” he said. His voice was rough and sounded ridiculous to him.
Unable to vocalize at all, the girl nodded.
Taking himself by surprise, Romulan laughed, one staccato shout. It was absurd. Chenti’s daughter. And to have seen her all evening, yet not seen her—how could he not have seen her, when she was—Puzzled, unnerved, struggling, he frowned at her, then quickly rid himself of the frown. In truth, she must be terrified. (Why then let him in, a strange man, to this regal apartment of pink trees and little jewelry books?) Loftily he nodded in turn to her, and took command of his voice.
“Lady, by Christ I swear I will not harm you. You’ve done me a wonderful kindness.”
Her reaction was unprophesied.
“You!” she cried, her own voice regained in fierceness as she had not been able to gather it in humility. “You, Romulan Montargo—how dared you come to this window? My window—how dared you?”
Amazed again, he shook his head.
“I did not know it was yours, my donna—”
“You did. I insist that you did. You do this to make a jest of me. Perhaps you schemed it with ‘Pardo.”
“Oh, trust me, nothing further—”
“Or with your friend. Oh, it is some game.” Childish, breathtaking, she threw her hands before her face and began to cry bitterly. Unheeded, the silk slid down her body, leaving her in her lace-trimmed linen shift. Through this, as through smoke or cloudy glass, the form of her was indefinitely visible, the sculptured stem, the highlights and the shaded, always-curving lines. Her naivety, her loveliness, the heart-stopping sensuality of the very young girl—the virgin—caught him by the throat. No other sort of woman could have moved him in such a way. In a single instant he desired her, pitied her, admired her, longed both to mar and to magnify, and to protect—most of all to protect her—from the longings she herself had conjured. So he went to her, drew up the fallen mantle and wrapped it around her, leaving only the rain-sopped end to trail upon the ground. And then, because to touch her pleased him, he left his arms about her, holding her lightly between his hands.
“You utterly misjudge me,” he said to her. “I was in fear for my life. No one but God guided me here.” Recklessly, growing drunk all over again, he added: “I’ll never cease to thank Him that He did.”
At that, she raised her head. Water beaded her lashes now, as her hair, but no ugliness had come with weeping. It seemed she could never be ugly. And again he laughed, at her, in sheer delight, which was in that second like Mercurio’s delight in her, aesthetic and humane.
And then again the wondering extraordinary recognition overtook each of them. Their resemblance to each other, a thing not everyone would see, but which they, perforce students of themselves, saw and were lost in. They were surely like brother and sister. More, they were each other. And what formed between them now, though narcissistic, was yet innocent and vital, and quite irresistible.
They gazed. And then, like the Trump of Doom, from the garden below there came a cacophony of brutal noises. Leopardo’s army of fifteen, having reached the base of the Tower and cheated of a quarry, giving tongue to frustration.
The grisly din had an immediate effect on Iulet. She cast herself against Romulan, against drowned clothing and the firm musculature beneath, and clasped him resolutely.
“They shall not take you,” she muttered. Her voice was primitive, and he felt her surprising strength. She would protect him. Touched, and set ablaze by her action, he found he was no longer concerned with Leopardo, indeed scarcely credited his existence in a universe that comprised, for this minute, only himself and Iulet.
“Let them take me. How should I care? Heaven is here, and you an angel in Heaven. If they kill me they will only send me back to you. I should die happy—”
“Hush,” she said. “If you die, then I must die, too.”
The veracity that seemed to underlie her words stunned them both. He had often spoken as now he did, she never. And by the gleam of her honesty, he seemed to glimpse, though without acknowledgment or admission, his own. So once more they stared, guiltily, caught out. And as they did so, they heard phrases stabbing out of the hubbub below.
“He’s gone, was never here. ‘Pardo, we misjudged him.”
“Yes. How should he run into Chenti’s own orchard?”
“He was ahead of us in the alley, gave us the slip.”
“I’m weary, ‘Pardo. Let’s to bed, for God’s sake.”
“Or go in and drink some more, ‘Pardo. Eh, ‘Pardo?”
And at last Leopardo’s voice, rising like a vicious bird from the cellars of the darkness.
“Or maybe he’s secreted with my chaste cousin. Ho, Iuletta! Iuletta! Who warms your bed tonight?”
The yowls amalgamated in improvisations on this theme and pluvious mirth. They were worn and wet, sobering and therefore dulled. None believed, least of all Leopardo himself, that the white fool, his uncle’s brat, who left her candles burning from fear of shadows, would have the life in her to lure a man into her bedroom. As they roiled into the house, Leopardo played with one fond visualization, that of catching the silly girl in flagrante, and plunging a sword through both her and a Montargo lover. He went in grinning, not recalling Mercurio’s song, how eyes could wound, as well as blades.
With the illogical suddenness of nature, the storm had dissipated, flowed away beyond Sana Verensa, away over the hills, away from the world. A stillness bloomed, and stars began to shine from every quarter of the sky.
“The cat-pack has gone,” Romulan said at last.
“Be sure, my love,” she said, “before you risk yourself.”
“Your love,” he said. “Am I your love?”
She lowered her eyes. The black fringe of her lashes lay on her cheeks.
“No,” she said.
“Who then? Tell me, I’ll seek and kill him.”
She looked up and laughed at him, finding the humor of what he said before he knew it himself. He began to laugh, too, the third laughter, and the most real.
“Well,” he said, “I think you like me.”
“No, I do not like you at all.”
“It must be more than liking, then.”
“Or less.”
“Perhaps love is less than liking.”
“Oh,” she said, “never tell me so.” Then she glanced away and murmured, “Cornelia would say I am wicked and wanton.” And then again the sapphire eyes blazed up at his. “Cornelia went to Laurus’ cell in the old chapel by the Padova road, and fetched herbs from him. I worked a witchcraft on you. Oh, I have ensorcelled you. Forgive me, forgive me, I brought you here and bound you to me!”
Her evident horror amused him, and also filled him with heat. He drew her back to him, against him, every line of her body pressed to his, and the flame engulfed him.
“And now I bind you. That’s fair.”
“I should have died if you had not come to me,” she said.
“I am here.”
She lay on him, her head tilted back, her eyes closed. There was no other law on earth but that he must kiss her, and so he did. The kiss perpetuated itself. It seemed to have no end. Somehow they breathed, their mouths never parting from each other, or perhaps they did not need to breathe, drawing breath from the elements of each other, as fish did from oceans.
Finally, with the expression of one drugged, Iuletta removed herself from his embrace. She stepped back, and said seriously to him:
“You must not ask any more of me.”
Unsatisfied, wanting, yet he was light-headedly exhilarated both by her intimation that he might think to seduce her and the fact that she trusted him to abstain.
“I will not. Though it grieves me.”
“You must go,” she said. “Sweet love, you must go before the first light comes.”
He went to the glass door and opened it, and saw the storm had vanished, and the mosaic of stars appeared.
She, coming after him, looked first at the garden, the orchard, determining its emptiness. The watchmen of all the gates would be sheltered still from the rain, and possibly asleep. The villainous cousin and his crew had certainly not disturbed them. Said cousin and crew were now themselves indoors.
“It’s safe,” she said. “Go now, Romulan, at once.” And flung her arms about him, securing him to the spot.
Again their bodies and their mouths met. Again they were submerged.
In the orchard, alarming them so they fell once more apart, a nightingale began its melody, a harp which had waited out the storm.
“Will you think of me today?” she asked him.
“Of nothing else.”
“Shall we meet again?”
“How not? My life is nothing without you.”
“You will forget me when the sun rises.”
“I will forget the sun and think it is you, walking toward me from the east.”
The words were enough like Troian’s greeting in the water garden that she shivered and became afraid, for this love she had willed so hard to have was complex in achievement. Romulan took her hands, kissing them.
“Swear you’ll not forget me,” she said.
“I could more easily forget myself.”
“Swear it.”
“I swear it. And will you pray for me, angel?”
“Yes.”
He left her abruptly, as if knowing fascination with her would otherwise delay him. But on the third step he paused, looking back at her, her whiteness side-lit by the glowing room against the serene embers of night, accompanied by the chirruping of the nightingale.
“Pray for me, Iuletta,” he said again. And then, throwing back his head to take in the sky, “But who would need to pray? The sky is prayer enough, so full of stars—”
And springing down the stair, into the close-drawn shades below, he was gone without a backward glance.
SEVEN
Framed by the morning doorway, Valentius Montargo had stood perfectly immobile some five or six minutes, regarding his sleeping son.
Outside and beyond the door, the pillared veranda and the courtyard below were very quiet, save for the rustling noises of the huge fountain-ship. On the roofs, doves purred and fanned their wings. The sky was blue as the tiles of the pool, flecked with only the faintest and most iridescent clouds, the heat of the day already imminent. By contrast, the room inside the door was cool, its shutters folded closed. On the surface of the bed, uncovered and naked, Romulan lay asleep, left arm flung out (unbound, marred by its incipient scar), head turned toward the right shoulder, legs quiescent, unconscious and still as death.
And death was what Valentius saw on him, like a fine glaze. Not merely through the classic pose, like that of some expired young hero or god sprawled on a tomb, nor the undersea quality of the skin in the dimness. No, death as a mathematical deduction. The mother had died when the boy was six years of age, without any true cause, being unexposed to danger of any sort, protected, cherished, but all at once putting her hand to her head, saying there was a sound in her ears like bees, falling, carried indoors, lifeless inside seven days. Valentius and Valentina—how odd their names had been almost one, just as their affections. A love match, and seven years of love, and seven days of agony, and thirteen years of emptiness. Death had been love’s price. He had been nineteen when he wed her, twenty-six when he lost her. Twenty-six and afraid, Valentius had withdrawn his love from the boy, and so surreptitiously withheld it from the adolescent, who, as he gained years, gained more and more of the mother’s translated image, and less and less of her tranquility. Romulan ran toward death, courted disaster. It had been simple enough for that dark angel to kill the protected woman. But how much easier to slay the son, who offered himself to every sword, every lightning bolt of malice and savagery.
