Sung in Shadow, page 17
“I do trust I did not hurt you,” cajoled Leopardo, obviously determined to make a banquet of someone’s discomfort, patting and smoothing, dusting off, and even combing out Saffiro’s black hair with his fingers.
Saffiro stepped aside.
“I accept your explanation that you sought another than myself. I’m not offended.”
“Oh, not offended? Not? Truly not? Be calm then, my heart. I was in such agitation this warlike prince might ask recompense with sharp steel—” Grinning accommodatingly, Leopardo slunk toward Saffiro who, handsome face falling, and unknowing he did so, backed away. Leopardo screamed with laughter, literally screamed, in a maniacal sunburst of hair.
“Who—” Saffiro attempted to divert, “who was it you—”
“Who was it I took you for? Romulan of the Montargo tribe.”
“Montargo,” said Saffiro. Romulan Montargo had been the friend of Flavian Estemba since boyhood. How strange he, Saffiro, had been mistaken for that Romulan—“I myself,” Saffiro said proudly, “have something to settle with that fellow Mercurio, who consorts with the Montargo.”
“Perhaps,” said Leopardo, “we should make an alliance. Vespelli and Chenti against Montargo and Estemba. What a pity we’ve no more Chenti Primo daughters you could wed. You’ll have to wed me, Saffiro,” said Leopardo.
Flinching, becoming angry and panicked, Saffiro turned to walk away.
“Be careful of Estemba,” said Leopardo.
Feeling he should be stung by this, Saffiro now spun round again, reluctantly once more setting his hand to sword-hilt.
“Do you say I’m unequal to him?”
“You? Why, your prowess is renowned. Particularly when you’re in company with seven or eight of your brothers.”
Saffiro whitened and the sword began to lift. Leopardo, aware he could kill this one in two heartbeats, without fire, not wanting him, yawned.
At a loss, frankly stupefied, Saffiro let the sword drop back in its sheath with a clank.
“Did you know, dear Saffiro,” said Leopardo, “Mercurio Estemba collects all manner of antique swords, one of which, anointed centuries ago with the blood of a fiend, unerringly contaminates all that he even scratched thereby. Oh, beware of that awful sword, dearest wasp.”
Guessing, if not completely understanding how, he remained the butt of Leonardo’s joke, Saffiro nodded stiffly and stalked out of the colonnade.
Antique swords—yes, he had heard of that collection of Mercurio’s. Saffiro himself had once appropriated a Grechian sword of incised bronze from the Vespelli vaults—
Coming around to the head of the Basilica steps, Saffiro stopped.
Across the edge of the square, a man in brass and white was riding a clove-dark mare. Seeing Saffiro, he drew rein.
Instinctively, Saffiro had it all. Mercurio too had mistaken him, or else paused to be sure not to mistake him, for Romulan. Saffiro found himself, before he quite predicted his own actions, running down the steps and straight at the rider.
“You, sir,” Saffiro shouted, as Mercurio neatly sidestepped his horse from the path of Saffiro’s advance. “You owe me something.”
“Do I?” Mercurio Estemba was at his most bland.
“You insulted the Vespelli Tower.”
“Then I beg its pardon.”
The mare was already being guided away. Saffiro caught at the bridle.
“Mercurio, that’s not good enough.”
Mercurio Estemba leaned from the saddle. As he did so, the early blaze of the sun ran over his hair like golden water. Quite unroughly, he plucked the hand off the bridle and returned it to its owner.
“You have,” said Mercurio, “my most sincere and enduring protestations of love and honor for the Wasps’ Nest. And I, my friend, have no time to linger.”
The horse galloped away.
When the dust had settled, Saffiro, at his own pace, went after. He was not sure of his errand, merely sure he would not be fobbed off from whatever ritual of retribution or acquaintance had yet to be completed. Having reached the Estemba Tower, inspected its banners and its decadent walls, Saffiro loitered and presently encountered an Estemba servant, unhappy and thus susceptible to bribes.
Mercurio had come and gone. The servant had a message to take to Montargo and was nervous to deliver it for the sake of the feud. Eventually a portion of the message was disclosed. It concerned the hour before sunset, and the south gate, and the track which left the Padova road for the village of Marivero.
ELEVEN
It was, perhaps, a bride’s privilege to be late.
In the clear yet coppery light of ultimate afternoon, a small group of mounted men were to be seen by the roadside, about two hundred paces from Verensa’s south gate. They had been there, in various stages of stasis or motion, for almost an hour. In scarcely more than half an hour, the sun would begin to go down. Already the walls of the town had blushed to a terracotta shade, already the westerly ripples of clouds were drinking in the sun’s color as if porous. That eccentric clarity of vision was in progress, special to the climate and time of day, a clarity which seemed to intensify even as the light thickened and the haze of dust resting on the land became a blur like powdered ginger, as if what should obscure, did obscure, yet made the air incongruously more luminous and penetrable. The slightest nuance of movement was seemingly discernible for miles, which made the absence of human movement out of the adjacent gate all the more provoking.
Romulan, who had been trotting his horse up and down, making it act his own nervous inability to keep still, now rode over to Mercurio and said, “So much for your precious Cornelia, the bitch. She took our coins and stayed dumb. I’ll ride to Chenti’s Tower and get his daughter for myself, before they shut the town gate for the night.”
Mercurio shrugged. “My Cornelia, as you term her, liked the idea of an illicit marriage more than she liked the gold.”
“Or did you fail me?” Romulan demanded. Then frowned, caught Mercurio’s arm and said, “Forgive me that. You did not, I know. But Oh God, damn this delay.”
All the group were nondescriptly mantled. The nondescript, serious young man beside Mercurio leaned over to Romulan and said encouragingly, “The maid will be timid, perhaps. It may have been difficult to get away. This has been done often enough, but is still no small adventure to take on.”
Romulan, not the only prospective bridegroom to look as if he were on his way to his execution, thanked the young man tersely for his concern, begged his indulgence, and rode the horse at a canter fifty feet toward the gate, swerved, rode back, swerved, returned gateward—During this second maneuver, two palancinas with drawn curtains of fawn brocade were born out of the gateway.
“Hell’s fiery angels,” said Mercurio mildly. “I’d hoped she would have the wit to get the girl a mount.”
“Would that be seemly?” asked the serious young man.
“No, dear Chesarius, probably not. But this way we’ll be marching dead slow as in a funeral cortege, all night. Now do you suppose,” he added, “you can guess which of those curtained boxes has our Donna Cornelia in it?”
The second palancina was supported by four men, but the foremost by six, who seemed to be making somewhat heavy weather of the task.
Benevolo Montargo D’Estemba, seated astride the grey younger sister of Mercurio’s mare, laughed. (He was perhaps the most lighthearted of the party, and with least cause to be. This secret wedding might, quite likely, have stirred thoughts of his parents’ similar and ill-omened match.)
Mercurio’s servant and Chesarius’ man sat side by side, discussing the price of saddle leather, which seemed to be a point of great concern to them. A remote half-cousin of Romulan’s—one official Montargo witness had been deemed necessary—kept moodily apart under a hazel tree on a fierce yellow horse of uncertain temper. This Montargo, Luca, by name, mistrusted the Estembas and felt it incumbent upon him so to demonstrate. Romulan had not divulged the purpose of their outing until the youth was through the gate with him, whereat an altercation had ensued. Mercurio parted the combatants. Luca, automatically presenting Tower unity against The Enemy, was now obliged to go along with Romulan’s wishes.
The foremost palancina had halted in response to energetic commands from within, and the gesticulations of a boneless female hand through the curtains.
Romulan rode up to the conveyance and drew rein.
The serious young man, Chesarius, noted Romulan’s pallor and stark tension, and glanced away, too polite to dwell on it. What he thought of the matter was kept to himself, his slight, uninvolved objections had already been voiced to Mercurio, and answered. (As Chesarius moved, a slice of gold cut through by scarlet appeared under the edge of his tabby mantle. Chesarius was from the Rocca Tower, fifth and youngest brother to the Duca: in such circumstances, the very best companion and witness to be had.)
The curtains of Cornelia’s palancina, now set on the road, opened again and the lady herself thrust forth head and shoulders. She, too, was plainly dressed, yet as ever veiled like a fully-rigged man-of-war.
“What trouble I’ve had,” Cornelia announced to Romulan. “Was there ever such a silly miss? You offer her marriage out of the generosity of your noble heart, and she—she shrieks she will not have it.”
Romulan turned to stone.
“She’s not with you,” Romulan finally said.
“Oh, yes, good and generous sir. She’s with me here. But you’d think I was bringing her to her death bed rather than yours. By God’s huge all-seeing Eyes—Heaven excuse the oath—any other maid would have run all the way to Marivero in bare feet over briars, flints and upturned nails, so she would.”
“She does not want me, then,” said Romulan. His face grew cruel and terrible and blind. He did not know what to do, and was about to wrench his horse’s head away from the litter.
But, “Yes, yes,” cried Cornelia, flapping up at him from among the curtains. “Want you? She’s very nearly dead of wanting you. Dismount, noble gentleman, and speak to her, for Heaven’s sake.”
Romulan complied almost involuntarily, flinging himself off the black horse. Striding around the litter to its far side, and dragging back the curtain, he stared down, and found Iuletta less than a foot away from him in a nest of gleaming and colorless silk.
“Well, girl,” he said. “Do you or do you not?”
She would not look up at him, but twisted a rose—white, Cornelia’s conceit, maybe—in her fingers. Abruptly he dropped to one knee and caught Iuletta’s wrist. The urge to pull her head about by its black hair and slap her face had warned him to a restraint that never in his life before, perhaps, had he exercised.
“I’ve spent the night and the day,” he said, “getting this arranged. Against my family, and against yours. Involving my friends, setting three or four Houses in uproar. And now you say this. Am I to be shamed and made a laughing-stock?”
“You did not ask me,” she said. Her voice was colorless as the silk mantle.
“Ask you? I thought you swore yourself born to love only me.”
“You left me,” she said. She looked merely at the rose, still endlessly twisting it, so he felt the flex of her wrist against his fingers. “You left me, and I knew I must bear it, so you should be safe. If you do this, you do it out of pity, because stupidly I revealed I loved you. I had a dream,” she said in a whisper. “I dreamed you died and I was to blame. I do not want you to die. I told you this.”
A silver bead, manifested, like magic dew, upon the rose.
Cornelia bulked beyond, patting her heart. The hired men stood about, down the road the wedding party waited on its fate, mostly watching the palancina. Romulan lifted the curtain of Iuletta’s hair very gently, and very gently drew her face upward and toward him, and unremembered who watched.
“On every occasion that we meet,” he said, “you shed tears. That hardly augers well. What is all this foolishness about dreams?”
“Dreams are not foolish. I—”
“If I say they’re foolish, they are. You must obey me, if you marry me, must you not?”
They looked at each other, until everything else became distant and faintly unreal.
Cornelia, closest to both of them, felt an almost indescribable pang, somewhere between arousal and astonishment, envy, compassion, and sorrow. Their combined aura was such that to be near them was both fatally desirable and unendurable to a spectator. Like two blazing candles, catching fire and melting into each other, the composite heat and brilliance might scorch anyone in the vicinity.
Romulan said, “Put on your veil, Iuletta, and get out. I’ll put you up on the horse with me. He’s docile and you weigh nothing.”
Cornelia objected feebly. “That’s not proper, sir—”
Neither of them took any notice. She did not expect them to.
When he lifted Iuletta up on to the black gelding, she sat above him a moment, her head raised, her features misted by the flimsy Eastern half-veil, like a princess in some legend. He did not entirely believe in her in that moment, but all his doubts were gone. Afraid, yet no longer afraid of being afraid, she waited for him, and when he swung back into the saddle behind her, bringing his arms around her to take the reins, their bodies pressed together as if in imitation of those several fevered embraces they had shared, the more feverish embraces which were now to come. Some absurd emblem of perfection seemed to have occurred. No one who saw could quite ignore it.
Chesarius, his attention having returned to the lovers despite his will, remarked: “There is no lord like unto love,” misquoting slightly.
“Ah, my dear Chesarius,” said Mercurio softly, “can it be even your gravity collapses at the onslaught of sentiment?”
Benevolo, with a ribald cheer, threw his cap in the air and caught it. Luca Montargo’s horse sidled as he stared. The man-servants had stopped discussing leather prices.
Romulan and Iulet, black-haired on the black horse, flew down the road toward the group, and right past it.
With a whoop, Benevolo was in pursuit, and Luca Montargo pelted after, more at the will of the startled yellow horse than his own. The hired men were hoisting Cornelia’s litter and the palancina with Iuletta’s maids, where two little veiled girl-faces were peering out.
“Best stay with the baggage,” Mercurio said to his servant, indicating the litters. Chesarius nodded to his own man.
The two servants fell behind to serve as out-riders. Mercurio and the Duke’s brother galloped after the rest through the luminous dust.
The path which led to Marivero lay a mile down the Padova road. The track itself, little better than an indentation made and permanently renewed by soles, hooves and wheels of diverse sorts, passed east of the road. Even on foot, it was a journey of no more than half an hour.
The sun was settling into its dust-scarves of ginger and cinnamon, and bright smoke, as if from a burning city, flooded the horizon and drowned the hills. Something of the beauty of this westering glare rode with all of them, though mostly they were unaware of it as a source of their pleasure. Only Mercurio, turning once in the saddle to glance back toward the town, consciously responded to the kiss of the sunlight and its warmth, receiving from it the impression of some earlier time, perhaps a thousand years before his birth, with a strange and bittersweet nostalgia.
Soaked in the sunset, Marivero gathered at the foot of a hill. Small, intrinsic to itself, unwalled, baked together by its summers and frozen into the roots of the earth by its winters, it boasted a marketplace, a pile of houses leaning on each other, an inn, a church. For a modest wedding it had, therefore, all that was required. (Indeed, the houses and the market might have been dispensed with.) Some whim of nature and the hour had also made Marivero attractive to the eye. Dark green trees crowded around it and closed in the edges of the track as it descended the hill, barring it with a fallen colonnade of shadows. The village, when it came in view, showed henna-red in the last glow of the sun. A white star stood ornamentally in the sky directly over the belltower of the church.
Looking down into the piazza, one saw a public cistern, the ranks of doors and alleymouths, the shut portals of the church. No human thing seemed abroad.
The pace had slowed on the track, to permit the two litters to regain ground. Romulan and the girl were still at the head of the caravan, but once or twice he had shouted some comment or quip over his shoulder to Mercurio, and gotten therefrom a suitable reply. Now Estemba and Chesarius drew level with the black gelding, and all three men gazed at the village some twenty paces down the track. Behind them the palancinas lunged to catch up, and Benevolo and Luca, having dropped back, rode side by side, ignoring each other.
Chesarius said, “So quiet. Can it be someone warned these people to stay indoors?”
“Where’s the danger to them in a marriage?” said Romulan.
“Oh, some danger,” said Mercurio, “if frenzied kindred are liable to descend, mouths a-foam and blades a-flop, to stop it.”
He had moved about to regard Iuletta who, resting against Romulan, unspeaking and large-eyed, watched the village also, her head turned on her exquisite throat with a play of curved angles, soft shadings, which made the stance like that in some ethereal painting.
“Or perhaps,” said Mercurio, “they fear to be struck sightless by such beauty, and are indoors blindfold under the bedding.”
Iuletta looked at him. He beheld something in her face, which was changed subtly, yet for all time, behind the wisp of veiling. How to name this alteration? Surely, not love alone. “There’s no trouble here,” he said to her. “Marivero is safe for this as that star is safe in the sky. And I was here some six hours ago, or less, and made arrangements with the priest. Come on, my children. Come and get wed.” He urged the mare by them, and trotted her down the track, riding first into the apparently deserted piazza.
