Sung in Shadow, page 19
Mercurio, having seen them all out like candles, Mercurio, sardonically beneficent, had come eventually away up the slope, kindled the mandolin and offered some slow embers of music to the gods of the hill, before laying the instrument aside and growing still, still to his very spirit, as the moon went out and the heart of the night gathered around him like a mantle.
Not that, despite his stillness, he was unaware of the nature of the environ, of the conversations of foliage, the black zephyrs of the dark hunting through the grass. Once or twice the silver-wire chirrups of the caged nightingale in the courtyard came to him. But mostly he had begun to listen to the stealthy whispering a couple of booted legs were making as they stole up through the myrtles toward him.
When the figure edged about and loomed suddenly before him, Mercurio’s muscles loosened and his stance subtly altered, yet he made no move.
“I’ll declare myself,” said the figure, a little blacker in silhouette than the night. “I am Saffiro Vespelli. Do you remember me? We spoke this morning. And yesterday.”
“I remember you.”
“You’re not amazed.”
“The innkeeper told me there had been a wasp buzzing about.”
“Buzzing?”
“Buzz, buzz, my dear. You bribed one of Estemba’s servants, I presume to learn my destination. Then came here and sat on a wall till you knew our business.”
“Something of that, more or less. But a secret marriage. By Jesus, you’ll have the Gattapuletta cat-pack after you for this. And the Montargos may wake up their grievances with Estemba as well. How do you like that?”
“Oh, I like it,” said Mercurio. “Where would we be without our delicious feuds.”
“And you also have,” said Saffiro, “a feud with me. Or did you forget it?” His voice quivered; it had the harp-strung note to it that belongs to some intense emotion of which the victim is himself uncertain, or at which he is in disorder. But it was a voice that meant to demand blood.
“A feud with you? Surely not,” said Mercurio.
“Surely,” said Vespelli. He paused, and made a gracious gesture over the stars. “It’s a pity. I heard you were better friend than enemy.”
Mercurio’s voice also had changed. It had grown silken, and impenetrable. A shield had been raised within the dark.
“Who told you that?”
“I can judge for myself. I see how you’ve befriended Romulan Montargo, who never gave you anything in payment.”
“Oh, alas. Is my friendship then to be bought?”
“I meant—I meant he uses you as the vine leans on the stock. And like the vine, when ready, the grapes will go elsewhere.”
“Ah,” said Mercurio. The silk was now fine steel, but it was doubtful if Saffiro, taut as that too-tightened harp string, registered this further change. “I see you have been reading old romances and got the pith of the matter wrong.”
“Not wrong. You treat him as a brother, he uses you, and now you’re in trouble up to your ears.”
“My ears shall be valiant and not mind it.”
“You’re in error, Mercurio.”
“And you are here, like the good little sacristan you are, to set me right.”
Saffiro walked over the grass and came up within two paces of the seated figure.
“Your leave to sit.”
“The hillside is as much yours as mine, sir.”
“Damn you then, I’ll sit.”
“It’s hardly needful you should send me to Hell for that. But then, you have another way in mind.”
Saffiro stretched his long legs on the turf.
“They also told me I’m no match for your sword. It’s not likely you will get in Hell’s gate from my blade.”
Mercurio laughed, soft as a cat’s paw in the blackness.
“By the Christ. A genius with the double phrase.”
Saffiro seemed in difficulties and hard-pressed. He thrust a wineskin, carried with care up the hill, into Mercurio’s relaxed hands.
“What’s this? Do you think I’ve not quaffed enough?”
“Red wine from the Bhorga. You prefer it, do you not?”
“So I do. It’s the only vintage can make me drunk. Ah, Saffiro, profit by the example of my dissolute life.”
“Drink it.”
“How urgent you are. Is it envenomed?”
“No.”
“A gift, then? Ah, yes, I see. I’m touched by your generosity. I call you bastard and you bring me wine. I note I’ve handled my acquaintances unwisely. Cur and idiot, I must say to a man, who will then award me half his fortune.”
“Mercurio,” Saffiro snarled, “do not, I beg you, mock me.”
“Do not, I beg you, beg me not. I mock everyone. Mock, mock, mock. An unhappy trait. Either you must endure it, or you must go home.”
Saffiro sprawled into the grass and the myrtle.
After a moment, Mercurio uncorked the skin and drank, his head tilted back, his eyes closed.
“Thank God,” he said at length, “for a corrupt grape. Who have you told, by the by,” he added, “that you would come here?”
“No one.”
“We love you for that, then, the Montargos and I.”
Saffiro stirred the grass with his long, ringed fingers, looking at the stars. He was himself fairly drunk, having kept pace somewhat with the revelers from beyond the inn gate.
“Speaking of blades,” he said finally, “I have one antique blade of the Vespelli Tower—I brought it with me.”
“Indeed, indeed.” Mercurio’s profound graveness tottered on the brink of extreme uncontrolled hilarity.
Irritated, Saffiro snapped: “I heard you were an authority. It’s bronze.”
“Ah. Bronze.”
“Yes, bronze, by the heaving stars. Oh, have it all, then. I thought I wronged you in that garden, spoke out of turn. I came to beg your pardon, but you make it difficult for me.”
“So I do,” Mercurio said very low.
“My brothers are fools,” Saffiro muttered hotly. “Your brothers are dead. Where do I go for instruction? So. I’d care to juggle wine cups and daggers as you do, ride as you do, dance, fence, sing . . . as you, may Hell devour you, do.”
“I see, I see. You perceive in me a tutor.”
“I perceive in you the enemy I would not take you for.”
Mercurio began to laugh. It was not the usual musical and dangerous laughter. He coughed and cawed and rolled on the ground, bent double as if in pain—he might have been weeping. And somewhere in his soul, possibly he was.
Ultimately, in an abysm of humiliation and rage, Saffiro rose. But in the midst of his first retreating stride, Mercurio spoke to him, and at Mercurio’s first word, Saffiro halted.
“Forgive me. You see I’m ill-company. Better ride home, brother wasp.”
“I am,” said Saffiro mournfully, “too drunk and too weary to ride home and spend an hour bribing the town guards to open the gate for me. Do you have any sort of chamber here? Can I share it? Or I’ll sleep on a bench in the yard.”
Mercurio, too, had risen to his feet. Tilting the wine skin once more, he once more drank.
“I’ve a room. You’ve paid for a share of it in wine. Here, drink yourself. Why be half-sozzled when you might be pickled as a fish?”
Saffiro took the skin and drank wine.
“A fish am I,” cried Saffiro, “the earth is my ocean.”
He careered in a circle. Mercurio caught him before he toppled down the hill. They began to aid each other solicitously toward the inn.
“Well, dear fish,” said Mercurio, “this is a fine thing. The blind leading the sighted.”
Saffiro, who was elated, made no attempt to object to this statement, or to fathom it.
* * *
• • •
A close yet not unpleasant warmth lay on the Higher Town of Sana Verensa, as if the night had wrapped it in velvet sheets. The moon which had ascended from among the towers, now went down among them, streaking their edges with a wet pale shine. Wet, too, was the glittering water of the Chenti fountains, spat from the mouths of the green copper cats. Leopardo lay full length in one of the shallow basins, the tepid bath up to the lobes of his ears, satin and linen soaked, hair soaked, face dappled by the downfalling spray. Lying there alone, he had conceived the notion the stars were showering from the sky on him, stars that were water-drops. How many, what an endless supply of them. Would there be any left in heaven by the time he vacated the fountain?
He had been to the Bhorga, to a hovel he knew where the sweet bluish hemp of Inde was available, with other oriental candies. To go to such a place too often would have bored him. The sensations such drugs produced were, for Leopardo, valuable only in their uniqueness. He had no dependence on them, and not a great deal of joy at their prospect. He had been in a raddled humor all day, ever since the mistake at the Basilica that morning. The Chenti Tower was a further irritant, being full of female fussings over Iuletta’s forthcoming marriage to Belmorio, and the fool herself gone off to bleat to some hermit priest. (Lady Chenti was secreted in her apartment, perhaps mourning, though he doubted it, the absence of her spouse.) The town itself had oddly emptied of life. Seeking Romulan Montargo here and there, Leopardo had continually not found him. It had been oppressively hot. The Bhorga had begun to stink. Leopardo, striving very hard to pick fights with all his companions and unable to do so—for they were canny and fearful, and knew him in a most hazardous mood—as each eluded him grew more vicious and more prone to aggression. Having had a woman, roughly and unthrillingly (as ever, the itch haphazardly scratched, made worse), having drunk and sobered, having eventually sought the smoky rat hole of the apothecary, he had ultimately woven a way home, his violence lifted to some soaring and insidious elevation, where every emotion mingled, unsatisfied yet fabulous.
“Sir,” a hesitant voice stole over the basin.
Leopardo looked through the fountain’s rain and beheld a servant. Leopardo stared at him, and the fellow made nervous placatory gesticulations, unaware of them.
“Sir, there’s some trouble.”
Leopardo stared on from his glowing leopardine eyes which, curiously, did seem almost luminous in the dark.
“Sir, the Lady Iuletta has not returned, and my lady, your aunt—”
“It is past two in the morning, and as you see, Caspa, I’m at my bath.”
“Sir, I’ve been asked to summon you to the Lady Electra.”
Hazily Leopardo, on his back, let the thought of that swim over him with the water.
“Caspa. Return to my darling aunt. Tell her, yesterday evening I was cut on the face by a poisoned ring. Tell her I’m now languishing, and far too sick to go to her.”
“Sir—please—”
Leopardo raised himself suddenly on one elbow, his face horribly reminiscent of that of the gold leopard on the Chenti roof.
“Do you argue with me?”
The servant moved away, waved his arms, sighed, and fled across the courtyard.
Leopardo lay down again on his back and visualized the resulting scene within doors. Fascinated, he felt his body, lapped by the milklike water, begin to respond even to this fancy. The woman in the Bhorga had been as nothing. He might have done as much for himself. In a while, one part of him, at least, was eager to return inside the Tower, and had already started in the prescribed direction.
“You are, my donna,” he said aloud, “the lodestone to my compass point,” and hurled himself out of the fountain in a detonation of spray.
He passed up through the house, which seemed quite silent, no great outcry over Iuletta’s absence. He himself scarcely considered it Reaching the door to the anteroom of his uncle’s bedchamber, he found it open. There was the servant mumbling, and—just from his sight around a screen of carven wood—she sat, for he felt her to be there, as one might be aware of the light of a fire thrown up beyond its enclosure. Cold fire.
“Well, well,” said Leopardo loudly. “But I’m here after all.”
The servant started and gazed at him, poor Caspa, all bowed over. Leopardo, soaked to the skin and the water plopping in a heavy glass fringe from his clothes to mirror his image on the floor, jerked his thumb imperiously at the doorway. The servant, not waiting for Electra’s command, hurried by and out. Leopardo looked interestedly at the water he had brought in with him. (Just so had Romulan, chased from the rain storm, stood in Iuletta’s room, if Leopardo had seen it.) But Electra did not emerge from her screen, or speak. Leopardo splashed to the doors and closed them with a crash, next removed his boots, emptied the water and slung them skidding across the floor. Prompted to sneeze, he did so vociferously. It was all done to anger her, and so apparently it did. Her voice came slicing around the screen: “This is no hour for your jokes. Come here.”
“So you can beat and poison me again?” He touched the quarter inch thread of wound on his cheek where her ring had cut into the flesh as she struck him. “I’m afraid of you, my lady. Truly, I deserve punishment, and entreated it. But you do not play fair with me.”
Behind the screen, he heard her stand up, the rustle of her garments as she did so.
“My lord, your uncle, is away,” she said. “It devolves on you, Leopardo, to act as protector to this House and to your female kindred.”
Leopardo walked water across the floor. He moved to the wooden screen and rapped it here and there with his knuckles.
“The Tower is haunted. A piece of wood which speaks. And with such a shrewish voice.”
He came around the screen and looked in at her on its other side. She was robed for bed, surprising him in white, a white over-gown clasped with a crimson jewel under her high breasts. Her hair was loose, the first time he had ever seen it so. The downpour of blackness made her look young in a way he had also never before seen, and like a sorceress of some kind. He pursued this mythical allusion, putting it in words halfway through.
“Lady Medea. She cut up her little nephew in bits and strewed him on the sea. Would you like to cut me up in choice joints, Aunt Medea?”
“It was her brother,” Electra said. “If you must rant, have at least your facts in order.”
“Oh,” he made big unblinking eyes at her, “my donna, what a scholar you are. What a wise and educated—”
“Be quiet,” she said. “Listen to me. Iuletta went out in the late afternoon to visit the hermit priest on the Padova road. She’s not returned. The gates are shut at sunset. What are we to think?”
“To think? Why, think anything. Let her sleep in the grass or on the hermit’s knees. Bloody Iuletta. Let her be lost.”
“Fool,” Electra rasped. “Chenti will go mad if the Belmorio bargain fails him. Do you think either of us will escape his wrath if Iuletta is harmed?”
“Oh, I blanch and quail. Oh, Heaven have mercy! Let him but lay one touch on me,” Leopardo said, “and I’ll break off the hand and feed him it.”
“One touch? He has touched you.”
“So he has, and I’ve borne enough of that old bullock’s roaring and mouthing. Does he reckon himself a match for me? And you, you think him so, do you?”
“Is your cousin,” said Electra, “with a man tonight?”
Leopardo paused, and grinned.
“God’s starry Genitalia. How should I know what that ninny does?”
“You are in half Verensa’s dirt up to your crown,” she said, sharp as a whip. “I thought you might have arranged it. Is it Estemba?”
“Estemba? You mean Mercurio-who-is-Flavian?” Leopardo laughed. “I think not. And am I a pimp now, my donna, in your eyes, that you suppose I’d sell my beloved little cousin to the highest bidder?”
“I do not know what you would do.”
“You do know. You know me very well.”
“I know nothing of you, save you’re mad and I may not rely on you.”
“You may rely on me to do two things. If Iulet were with some fellow and I came on them, I’d take the old privilege of the flagrante, and skewer both of them to their love-couch with my sword’s point. That is the first thing. The second, this: I will one day kill Lord Chenti your husband, and give you the flayed skin to hang up in your dragon’s cave, Madama Medea.”
Electra stared at him with her black eyes. It began to seem to him he could gauge the depths of them. He became hypnotized, and felt himself about to fall forward. He liked the notion of tumbling eons down into those darknesses and the crashing, stunning collision when he reached their floor. The apothecary’s drugs still worked in him. He wondered she could not feel his own sensations, and began to believe that possibly she did.
(All her words were an excuse. He knew she did not care about Chenti or the stupid daughter. But she would go on with any argument or debate to keep him here, the fountain water streaming from his clothes as if he had come to her from the primordial ocean, some sea-demon, who would soon carry her back with him, and drown her there.)
