Sung in Shadow, page 18
As the rest of them followed, he was already off his horse. Leaving the mare to admire her reflection in the cistern, Mercurio hammered on the church doors, singing out: “Plague! Fire! Famine, war and earthquake! Open for the love of God.”
Despite the promise of such extreme disaster, one door was very promptly drawn inward, and the dark interior of the church gaped from the sunset facade.
A little fat priest with a kindly chicken’s face came forth and smiled upon Mercurio.
“If you heard a cry of earthquake, Father,” said Chesarius, riding up and warming to the proceedings, “you must blame our winged messenger here.”
“There has been an earthquake all along the road,” said Mercurio. “We’ve been nearly shaken to pieces by the thudding hearts of the bride and groom. To marry them swiftly would be a charitable act. Not to say prudent.”.
“Enter the church,” said the priest, nodding, smiling, and stepped aside.
There was a brief furor as Luca Montargo, thundering round and round the cistern (unintentionally), vowed not to give his horse into the custody of an Estemba servant. This was resolved by Chesarius’ grimly pointing out his own man. Luca scowled but did not dare refuse the Ducal Tower. Somehow, he then dismounted, against the contrivance of the horse. The hired men, the empty palancinas, the seven beasts and the two servants went off towards the inn.
The western face of the town was losing its hot color, the door no longer gaped so black, so like a premature mouth into the night.
They walked in, and found the dark not dark at all, the narrow unglassed windows deepening, but candles burning on their spikes, many candles, an extravagance of them. By this light, as if entering into some banquet hall, the guests of God threw off their mantles. Each was revealed, a gaudy beautiful doll, in his true colors.
Luca Montargo, zebra-like on indigo and blue-striped legs, stared indignantly at Benevolo in brass silk, a blue ship worked on one shoulder, its timbers shot clean through by the Estemba Arrow—Benevolo was sometimes given to puns. Chesarius was sheer gold, the four scarlet rings linked to form a bizarre cross, and embroidered along every hem. Next to him was Mercurio in white with a dull-brass pineapple motif. Romulan’s suit of clothes might have been cut out of a morning sky.
The two little maids were in Chenti crimson; by contrast, Cornelia wore a very sober pink. Iuletta emerging from her mantle was clad defiantly in a gown of crimson lace over a camisola of pleated cream silk. The priest looked at this splendid regalia in silence. Maybe he guessed she had donned it in an angry fear, which in some ghostly way was still apparent about her, even though she herself seemed to have put it from her mind, forgotten her fear.
They had all saluted the altar and all immediately turned from it to each other, except for the priest. He, having eyed the crimson lace, and next the ducal colors on Chesarius, pattered to the altar and kneeled down there. (The priest, too, wore the colors of his House—God’s: faded vestments, and the magenta stola proper to the ceremony.)
Waiting for him, the rest became uneasy. Lacking most of the general forms of such an event—which forms, as aristocrats, they all knew well, they were at a loss in some odd, purely habitual way. Romulan, clasping Iuletta’s hands in his, was speaking softly to her. They resembled solemn children hovering in an antechamber for some festival to begin.
“The girl will miss the show she might have had,” Chesarius murmured, “if this had been done openly.”
“Hmmm.” Mercurio leaned on the stone wall, watching his two proteges intently. “They might be,” he said quietly, “a hundred miles off, might they not? And they make me age to see them. A year for every mile.”
“Ah yes,” said Chesarius. “There never was anything more aging than another man’s love affair. And you. When will you wed, Mercurio?”
“Oh, I’d wed Mercurio tomorrow, but he will not have me.”
“I mean take a wife.”
“Oh, you mean take a wife. When I must, and not one quarter second before.”
“I thought so. And does Estemba Primo never press you to marry and get sons, solitary heir that you are?”
“No. He’s too wise for that. He knows I know how matters stand with Estemba.”
“And you’d find it dull, besides.”
“For certain I would. What?”
“Getting sons. A lawful mattress.”
Mercurio glanced at him.
“Save your carving for the joint, dear Chesarius, I’ll not be dissected. And in the church; do you not blush?”
The priest was rising, turning about, and he had been transfigured by his swift communion with God. His face was sure and aesthetic. He beckoned with his hands, gracefully and powerfully, as if summoning spirits of great waters.
Romulan broke off his inconsequent speeches to Iuletta. His need had been to soothe her, keep her safe, her thoughts fixed only on him. To protect her had been virtually his most initial feeling for her, protection immutably mixed with a hunger to overwhelm. And now, focusing her observation upon him, holding her so, so he held his own attention, and no sudden misgiving could come near him. Yet, looking over at the beckoning priest, his face religiously ennobled, a comparative image of Laurus intervened, like a phantom. Harbinger of truth. No, Romulan at this moment could not and would not have sworn that to marry Iuletta Chenti was what he wished or what he required. And yet, the deed was like a mirage, it did not concern him. It was a way and a means only, and as such he would take it, for the truth also was that he could not let her go. And then, looking from the priest to Iulet, he became at once glad to wed her, for she seemed to flame up like the candles on the altar. If this would make her happy, why then he could be happy in it too, and he started forward to the priest, leading her eagerly.
Iuletta, seeing the transformation in the priest, had become conscious, as if for the first time, that she was about to be married, and her heart sprang into her throat. She grew both elated and afraid as Romulan drew her forward, and the priest and the altar came close. And as, in accordance with the priest’s mimed directions, she and her lover kneeled on the dry unliving floor to be blessed, she seemed to flow away from herself, out of her body, remaining totally aware of it, yet able to visualize its condition—not by sight, but in some other, more perceptive way. And even as the holy father began to speak over them the phrases that would bind her for ever, flesh and brain and soul, she who from her childhood had been taught that marriage, and the rites and vows of marriage, were of supremest value to her, discounted them all. She knew in this instant that he and she had no need of such auspices. That their liaison itself was valid, transcending everything. And that, had Romulan asked her, she would have gone with him in mortal sin to any pit or depth of earth of Hell, caring for nothing else but that she might comfort him.
So, as the priest invoked God and law to join them, the young man acknowledged he could be happy in another’s happiness, the young girl comprehended the same of herself. These words were not spoken aloud, as were others of duty, honor and endurance.
While, as the ancient ritual moved on, intimately involved and yet beyond it, the lovers forgot that they had momentarily found such selflessness in themselves.
* * *
• • •
“It is done. You are man and wife.”
The priest’s voice came from far off, but, accustomed now to obeying it, they turned and gazed at each other in awe, Adam and Eva in a dark and candlelit garden, and knew it to be so.
Romulan sought in his mind for something courtly to say to her, some poetic prose. Nothing was there to be said.
“Are you sorry, now?” he inquired of her dazedly.
She laughed silently, her eyes shining so he saw their blueness like day sky left behind in the night.
“No. Nothing can harm you. I was foolish, as you said.”
“You mean I’ve got a fool for a wife?”
“Oh,” she said, lowering her lashes, “she is a fool, for she will kill you with love.”
He kissed her and she returned his kiss, both with a kind of stillness. Their kisses had been a curious sort of proof of something, which now was proven. And in a very little while. . . . As if his thoughts ran also in her skull, her hand was tense and trembling in his. Yet warmly trembling, consenting. Some part of him had dreaded this symbolic first union a man must fashion with his wife. But from the contact of her hand, a chord sounded within him. His entire body waited on the brink of its own self-knowledge, fiercely and without reticence. As her trust made him gentle with her, her worship had made him strong.
They had walked, almost without noticing, to the church doors. Which were abruptly opened. Light dashed against them in a wave, and they stopped to face it, hands gripped, unafraid.
Nor was there cause to fear. The village piazza, having lost the redness of sunset, had now gained the new redness of torches. And this red lit up faces which smiled and grinned. Most of the village, in hiding on their arrival, had now manifested before the church. That the village knew what had taken place was evident.
The scent of burning pitch, together with the fragrance of Marivero’s surrounding trees, poured about the church doors. And now music started up, tabors, tambourines and lutes, and the crowd clapped and shook its brands. A small angelic-looking boy-child about seven or eight, a devilish black-eyed little girl of the same age, the former clad in blue, the latter in pink, came into the door, and held up garlands for the bride and groom, almost purple roses, the marriage color, like the stola of the priest, and wound between with vine-leaves, and myrtle the plant of Venus, which flourished wild on the hill.
Amused, embarrassed, Romulan accepted the garland like a king from the angelic boy, who stared at him in wonder. The musicians were too good for the village, the garlands too diligently woven to have been made gratis.
“Oh God, Mercurio. You’ve been busy here.”
Mercurio, innocently amazed, waved the accusation aside.
Romulan watched Iuletta bend like a flower-stalk herself to receive her garland from the little girl. For a second it seemed to him they had passed into their future, that these children were their own. Such notions took him by surprise, as Iuletta’s beauty, burnished now by the torch-fire, took his breath away.
This additional ceremony pleased her, she touched the garland with reverence, and once more he was glad since she was glad.
“Some show after all,” said Chesarius, turning startled but not displeased to accept himself a garland of leaves and blue corn-daisies from a buxom girl rather older than the child in pink.
“Simply an escort to the inn,” remarked Mercurio. He bent his own golden head for a garland to be placed on it, kissing the girl on her summery cheek.
Through the doorway they had by now vacated there walked the priest, still lambent with his dignity, lifting his hands so the crowd fell quiet. From behind him, moving out on to the piazza, came two beaming men, bearing on their shoulders a miniature Virgin two feet tall, veiled and robed in white, with a face of delicately painted wood.
The priest rendered his blessing to the crowd, the pretty Madonna presided. Countless hands rose and fell in a motion like birds’ wings, describing the cross before breast and brow.
Preceded by the Virgin and the priest, and by small children who threw flowers and yet more flowers, so they stepped on a carpet through the perfumed and gilded darkness of the narrow streets, the friends and witnesses coming after, and the whole unwinding streamer of the crowd, to the gleeful, part-oriental rhythms of the musicians, wed like Christians, garlanded like pagans, the lovers walked toward the inn.
And at the inn, the gate to the courtyard standing open, saw geese baked with apples and cakes rouged with sugars, and veritable urns of wine gleaming in the yellow lamplight.
Cornelia, scenting goose, remembered her own wedding day to Iuletta’s maids, who were not listening, one of whom indeed was making eyes at Benevolo, while he, lofty and self-conscious, encouraged her.
A nightingale in a cage hung on the pergola, sang madly, to free its voice if not itself from prison.
Iuletta said, “Do you recall the nightingale in the orchard? And how I said you would forget me.”
“You note, I quite forgot you.”
“I thought I should not see you again. Oh unthinkable thought. And then to Manta Sebastia—”
“I cannot, I divine, be sent off to Lombardhia now.”
They discovered themselves seated under a starily flowering hedge.
Fountains of wine cascaded into cups. Beyond Mercurio’s shoulder, Luca Montargo was earnestly telling Chesarius the virtues of his ghastly horse.
Like the hedge, the sky had flowered in stars.
TWELVE
The room was very small and the bed large, with high black posts, round which flowers had been twined. Flowers and stars looked through the slender window, whose shutters stood open. Aromas of flowers and night, wood and wine, and irregular dim bursts of noise from the courtyard, came in at this window, and presently the pale moon would pass there, and eventually the dawn. But not yet.
Mercurio, by turning the feast into a bacchanal, had allowed the married lovers space and means to escape, unfollowed, or scarcely—Romulan’s last sight of his friend had shown Mercurio herding a drunken Luca and a giggling village maiden from the stair with the threat: “Keep your place, sir, or I’ll feed you to your horse.” The priest, too, had been drinking and eating at the tables, and waxed merry. Cornelia had taken a fancy to him, unexpectedly, and hung on his every word. “Such learning!” she would cry, and the priest would bashfully lower his eyes. The others—Romulan had lost sight of them. They had become golden shadows, swirling at the periphery of his thought and feeling. Iuletta, the center of his awareness, appeared to have worked some spell on him indeed. Each movement that she made, slight as it might be, communicated to his senses. She raised a goblet to her lips, he seemed to feel the cup against his own, and next, like the cup, he felt the pressure of her mouth drinking from his. The black hyacinth hair slid across the point of her shoulder where the gown left it pure and nacreously bare, and he experienced the smoothness of her skin beneath his fingertips, as if they and not the curl had brushed it; and next he knew how that hair of hers would feel to him as it ran across his own body, and the scent of it as he buried his face in its depths. It became an effort of will not to grab at her, to fondle her, caress her before the whole crowd, and this he would not do, having seen something of the sort go on at other men’s weddings. But to stop looking at her was impossible, and she, though she hardly looked at him once, was, he knew, acting out these things for him, making her world only to enrapture him, drawing breath to pleasure only him.
At length, when the food had ceased to taste and the wine had carried him to a plain where he would soon have lifted her in his arms and run out of the courtyard with her (a barbaric tradition several might have applauded), Mercurio had somehow drawn the assemblage into some mad game or other, nodding as he did so, a nod perceptible only to Romulan. So he and she had got up and gone away, and now they had come into this sweet-smelling room, warm as a dove and fresh with the darkness, and with only a pair of tawny candles to give light.
But their hands had parted, and the bed had now come between them. He gazed at her across the bed, and suddenly a kind of nervousness after all did get hold of him—that she might be timid, that he, with this passion on him, might dismay her. A thousand Bhorga jests seemed capable of springing up like rank plants about the room, and the strange ethic, that put carnality to war with love, beset him. Even as he foundered, however, she lifted her eyes to his, eyes that blazed and faltered and went quickly down again. And then, her cheeks dark with blushing in the candlelight, her fingers unsteady but determined and quick, she began to pluck asunder the ties of her lace gown, and when it slipped away, of the camisola, and cast it also aside. Astonished, he beheld her again only in an almost transparent shift, and that cloud of her hair, and the room beat with his blood, dulling and brightening, dulling and brightening. And in the brightness she kneeled on the bed, reached, caught his wrist and pulled him mutely toward her.
He did this mute bidding and found himself beside her, and as swiftly covering her, the shift dismissed and all of her glowing pulsing slimness contained beneath his body. And as he discovered her then, with his lips, his hands, every inch of his flesh, all this exquisite feminine country now his by right, her own hands worked their way in through his garments, and like two warm creatures separately live, also found him out. Oh, she was not afraid. Her abandon was beautiful and frantic, like that of some nymph in legend coupling with a god. In fact, he must ask her to let go of him, slip free of her, laughing, to get rid of his own clothing. Then returning to her embrace and so into an extraordinary unspeaking desperate whirlpool that each appeared to gain solely through the medium of the other. Barely hampered by virginity or unpractice, their bodies seemed to know each other as their souls had seemed to. And this ecstasy, though quite new, was yet simple, unavoidable, essential, as necessary to them as the air. So that in their innocence, it was as if they had invented both the condition and the act of love, and performed it here, beautifully and surely, for the first time in the history of mankind.
* * *
• • •
On the grassy slope above the inn, where the myrtles grew, Flavian Estemba sat like a piece of classic statuary, watching the last lights fade away from the apertures of the building below. He had turned the festivities into a riot. There had been a juggling contest, which he himself, whirling five wooden cups and a razor-edged dagger in the air, had won. There had been some Moorish dancing. The musicians had become as tipsy as most of the dancers and the dancing had ended. The priest had been helped home. Cornelia had laughed till she swooned and been revived with goose liver. It was noticed the bridal pair had absconded and certain ribald jokes were hurled at random shutters of the inn. Grave Chesarius, uproariously drunk and crowing like a cockerel, had shinned up some ivy and arrived to make a commotion at the wrong window—the innkeeper’s wife had spilled forth and almost brained him with a chamber pot. There had been a horse race, of which Luca Montargo had been the victor, and of which he continued the victor, since the yellow horse refused to stop. (They came back much later.) Benevolo and the Chenti maid had flirted and challenged each other very nearly into bed, at which point both became affrighted and drew back in terror, the girl to hide behind Cornelia, the boy to get more wine from the kitchen, and sink to sleep over the table there. The second Chenti maid had primly fallen to reading a book. Chesarius’ manservant, having a woman in the village, had gone off with her. Mercurio’s man had found friendly company in a cornfield. (Nothing was so stimulating as the proximity of true lovers.)
