Sung in Shadow, page 22
“Who said, ‘The price of love is death’?”
“Some impotent who hoped for long life.”
“I come back wed, and walk into a plague-burial.”
“Your father’s the only plague you need fear. A plague of Valentius. Ah, deliver us from such.”
“My father would make six of yours,” Romulan bantered absently.
“True. You would require six of Valentius to make one of Estemba Primo. Where, by the by, is Luca?”
Benevolo broke his song to say: “The Bhorga.”
“Excellent. So he’ll not be home ahead of anyone to babble.”
The street, after a quarter of a mile, gave way to another, and trotting up it they passed between two garden walls and so emerged on the edge of the Basilica square.
Driven indoors by hot weather or rumor of sickness, no one was about. Like an edifice of flour, the great white building loomed across the space. On the public cistern the light fell in blades, running the water through to the bottom. Birds like papers blew into an opaque sky.
Benevolo concluded the tracery of the lute.
“Someone is signaling to you from the Basilica steps.”
Mercurio glanced up the stair to the facade. Yesterday, from that same direction, Saffiro Vespelli had come rushing, flawed alter-image of Romulan, to intercept him.
“Crimson,” said Mercurio. “A pair of Chentis. It charms me we’re to greet the Montargos’ new kindred so rapidly. But perhaps it would be ill-advised.”
“What?” Romulan drew rein. “Run away from the cat-pack again? Can I not stay and make peace with them?”
“You can stay. I doubt you can make peace.”
Mercurio rode on, but Romulan did not, and Benevolo halted beside him. After a moment, Mercurio, too, eased the clove-colored mare to a standstill. He looked back, and then across the square. One figure remained on the Basilica steps. The other, a pink and mauve bouquet, hurried toward them.
“By the legs, Gulio, I think.”
“Gulio,” said Romulan. His mind moved backward, through trees and rain and doorways, to a lightning flash, and Gulio’s surprised and eager face, and the shouted words that had betrayed: ‘Pardo—there’s a rat in the wall! Because of that betrayal, Romulan had sprung into an orchard, rushed toward a window of rosy glass, and so met the power and puissance of love in the form of Iulet. To settle the score with Gulio now meant to deny the marriage that had followed.
Deny the marriage—I have come back wed. . . .
He was changed. The town, the world were changed. Only habit was familiar.
Gulio, smiling and waving, came to rest between their horses’ mouths, bowing, genuflecting; harbinger of habit and familiarity.
“Good morning.”
“Oh good morning, good morning,” Romulan and Mercurio soared into ecstasies of greeting.
“Dulcet Romulan Montargo,” Gulio said.
“Oh, dulcet yourself, indeed.”
“I’ve a message for you.”
“From a bawd, no doubt,” said Romulan, and felt ineffably cheered.
“From my kinsman, Leopardo Chenti.”
“From a bawd. You said,” Mercurio congratulated Romulan.
Gulio sneered, eyes narrowing.
“Would you say it to his face, Estemba?”
“Certainly not.”
“Coward then.”
“No, peacemaker. Save, we’re not making much peace.”
Romulan laughed. “Make peace with us, Gulio.”
Gulio menacingly put hand to sword hilt and was greeted by cheering and gesticulatory applause.
Gulio knew himself, though did not care to admit it, small fry. Nor was he in a joyous humor. Iuletta, that girl-creature, had been out all night attending some priest (she said) and on her coming home not half an hour ago, Gulio had been dispatched to inform Leopardo who, the story went, was loitering at the Basilica. Gulio had sought Leopardo there, and come on him at length in the graveyard, hanging on some House mausoleum (Suvio’s by the armorial markers), and spewing violently. Gulio, vaguely pleased to see the leopard so helpless, and also unnerved, stood by mumbling and somewhat in distaste. Eventually, Leopardo, death-faced, choking and with the eyes of insanity, straightened, looked about, and saw his witness. With an oath fit to rouse the buried ones all around, he struck Gulio a blow across the head that would have been murderous had there been any strength in it. As it was, Gulio tumbled against a tree, smudging the flesh on his bones. Thereafter, sulking and perturbed, he followed Leopardo’s weaving course among the tombs, and so to the cloistered colonnade that gave on the capella. Here Leopardo lay upright on the wall, his face in its carving.
“An interesting night?” Gulio had at last inquired.
“Blast you with poxes, be quiet.”
“Ah,” said Gulio, and fell to studying Leopardo’s brocade shoulders.
In a while, Leopardo said into the wall,
“I was with a whore. The most accomplished and best of her sisterhood. And this sin I confessed.” At which he suddenly doubled over and lay curled against the stonework, making the most terrible sounds of unproductive nausea. Gulio, offended, gave ground. When the dreadful spasms ceased, Leopardo called to him. “Find me some wine, damn you.”
“Wine? I’d say you—”
“You’d say nothing. Go do it.”
The horrified Gulio had bolted to the nearest wine sellers. He had been in two minds whether or not to return, but ultimately fear of Leopardo had forced him to do so. Regaining the spot, Leopardo, however, was not to be found. Gulio searched indifferently, then himself leaned on the wall to sample the wine. In this method he was interrupted by the Cat, who crept up on him, seized the wine receptacle and drained it.
This done, Leopardo stood grinning evilly.
“I came on a cure for my ills,” said Leopardo. “I’ve been drinking holy water from the font.”
Gulio was shocked, and disbelieving. Nevertheless, prudently he smiled in response.
“What does it taste of, then?”
“Brimstone.”
Leopardo’s unblinking eyes swam slightly, and he swaggered from pillar to pillar, so Gulio must follow him all over again.
“I’ll tell you another thing.”
Gulio waited apprehensively.
“My aunt, Lady Chenti, Donna Electra, my uncle Chenti’s wife—” Leopardo broke off, so Gulio must prompt him with: “Yes, ‘Pardo?”
“Had a man in her bed last night. And my poor uncle from home, trustingly fornicating with his Bianca.”
Gulio did not like this idea, for it boded a unique trouble. But Leopardo turned and watched him until Gulio was forced to say:
“You know as much?”
“I know, beloved Gulio.”
Gulio, confounded, muttered, “What will you do?”
“Why, draw my sword, my darling, and skewer her. Skewer her to the length of my blade, forthwith.” At which he burst into frantic laughter, staggering with it, his eyes like colored flaming ice. In this way he pranced and stumbled out and around to the front of the Basilica, falling from carving to carving, beneath the bronze angels, sick, drunk, and maddened, beyond anything Gulio had ever beheld before. Then, to Gulio’s total stupefaction, Leopardo had flung himself against one of the huge opened doors, clinging there and striking his head against it. In the midst of this, three horses had come up into the square from the direction of the Lower Town. Nondescript mantles had been cast aside in the heat, and Gulio saw at once the colors of Estemba and Montargo—enemies Leopardo might be pleased to attack in preference to the delicate person of Gulio himself.
“Here come the shipwrights and the Duke’s fletcher.”
“What?” Leopardo said.
“Montargos and Estembas.”
“Montembas and Estargos, ho!”
“Looking for a brawl, no doubt.”
“I desire only Romulan, Valentius’ son. He owes me my cousin’s honor. Unless the musician is with them. I’ll tune his mandolin for him, see how he’ll dance to that.”
“Both, ‘Pardo. Romulan and Flavian Estemba together. And that half bastard, Benvolio or Benevolo or how he’s called.”
Leopardo unhung himself from the door. He strolled to the edge of the stair, drawing in long breaths, steadying himself. His cruel eyes grew clear and unpleasingly intelligent; he seemed to sober, fantastically, between one heartbeat and the next.
“God’s instrument,” said Leopardo.
Gulio took this for a sexual blasphemy, and laughed. Leopardo did not look at him.
“Will you try for me then, Sir Christ?” Leopardo said. “Gulio.” Gulio started. “Approach them and invite them to meet me.”
“I?”
“They will not bite you, gentle maiden. They’ll save their teeth for me.”
“And meet you where?”
“Here. Where but? The foot of God’s staircase.”
Gulio prevaricated. Leopardo reached and squeezed his shoulder, an agonizing pressure that showed the cat had his strength again, and all his appalling awareness.
Gulio set out across the square, through the birds and the dust and the pollination of the daylight. He felt Leopardo’s presence behind him as he moved, thrusting him on. And so he came up to Estemba and Montargo, one of whom had the score of betrayal to settle, the other of whom had a swordsman’s reputation to rival ‘Pardo’s.
Having got through the preliminary bout of effusions and insults without delivering the ‘message,’ and with no sign of either party dismounting, Gulio, hand unhappily to sword hilt, found himself at a loss.
To his dislike then, Romulan, leaning from the horse, said charmingly to him, “Why not pretend, Gulio, you’re my kinsman.”
Incensed, Gulio glared. The glint of mockery was in the Montargo’s eyes for sure, yet his tone had been offendingly sincere. Mercurio Estemba, on the other hand, was invoking God.
“We have no feud, you and I,” said Romulan, smiling adorably. “Nor I with Leopardo, come to that, if he would see it.”
“He says otherwise. That you dealt lightly with his cousin.”
Romulan lowered his lid-fringes of jet-black lashes, seemed to consider, looked at Gulio and began: “Rather than deal lightly I—”
At which Estemba broke in.
“No. Not yet for that.”
Romulan appeared uneasy. Gulio was intrigued. Something else went on that might be interesting, being harmful only to others.
“Not yet for what?” said Gulio, and was himself broken in on by a fearsome yell that crossed the square, hitting him amid the shoulders like a javelin: his own name garnished with invective.
“Leopardo,” said Gulio hastily, “would meet you over there, by the steps.”
“If he’d meet us,” said Romulan, “let him come over here.”
“Or better still,” said Mercurio, “let him stay where he is. An urgent appointment, Gulio, bids us hence, else we could not bear to prise ourselves from your company.”
“Afraid to confront him then.”
“Bones water, the heart of a mouse,” said Mercurio.
Romulan, staring now at Leopardo on the steps, small as a figurine, said, “Why should I run? He’ll think for sure I dishonored her.”
“Let him think it. He can eat his thoughts tomorrow, gristle, beak and all. Leave it be.”
Romulan flushed slowly with an indecisive anger, noting his hands shook on the reins. Himself, he could not have said what was directing him. Everything had seemed all at once to have moved too swiftly and in too variable a sequence of ways. He was wed, he had lain with her. And through these primitive and innocent acts he had made a tangle of his life. Only the habit, the familiarity of the quarrel, the brawl, remained recognizable, easing. Though not to be considered any longer, for now her future rested upon his. He dared not play this game again, and yet, how the game drew him, the alluring perversity of foolishness.
He turned, presumably for guidance or to be ruled, toward Mercurio, and so was astonished yet again. For rather than the relaxed and lethal face of Mercurio’s judgment and caution, or the innocuous face of his play-acting, or the ironic beautiful face of enigma, Romulan beheld a new face, or in fact the inner face which he had never somehow surprised before. Mercurio had let fall the mask, abruptly too tired or too exasperated to maintain the rigid control that was necessary to keep it in place. Some part of him was, it seemed, disgusted by the childishness he found in Romulan. Stung, Romulan recoiled. It was a misinterpretation, but inevitable. The countenance of disapproval reminded him of his father. In the way of one often hurt by censure (from infancy, he had seldom thought himself free of it), all criticism led him to effect immediate retreat.
Not properly reasoning what he did, Romulan urged the gelding forward and across the square, toward Leopardo Chenti.
And Mercurio, for his part, sat and simply watched him go.
The sunlight blazed and Romulan rode through it, shining. Mercurio Flavian Estemba observed, as if the scene meant nothing at all to him. Within himself, the unavoidable hiatus had presented itself. He had attempted to miss looking into the depths of himself this morning, but helplessly, gradually, he had been persuaded to do so. These bottomless darkening spaces overwhelmed him, and the young man riding away toward another, the young bridegroom in his blue clothing, seemed at length no one that Mercurio remotely knew.
In the early hours of the morning, a little before dawn came over the inn at Marivero in a silent, extraordinary tide, Flavian Estemba had dreamed that he was damned. It had been a savage and unlikely dream for a man who did not, generally or seriously, deal in such terms, and who could not in his intellect credit any such fancy as Hell, or Lucifer. Yet, Lucifer he had seen, tall as a tower, a blackish cloud, staring at him eyelessly though inescapably, until at length the face became that of a very old woman, whose eyes were the improbable Tyrian blue of Romulan’s, or Iuletta’s, and from this awful stare, more than from the cloudy visage of the Fiend, Mercurio could read his condemnation and his sentence as if they had been written large therein. For what, then, had he been damned? For sin? For a guilt and religious sensibility that his waking mind rejected? Or was it love that had damned him?
In the shade of these curious metaphysics, the daytime world seemed meaningless, his life also, meaningless, for all at once the external impression of codes and practices, which he despised and which amused him, had caught him up, revealing themselves in the long term as inexorable. So he sat his horse, and disdained it all. The dream, the threat, the day, Leopardo, the companion who, turning his back, plunged toward misadventure—what did any of these items matter in such a world, whose unpatterned and senseless and unforgivable tenses drew it upon him and would, ultimately, allow no refusal.
And even as he sat there, so disdaining these things, these unanswerable, inexorable things, it is possible that at some nadir of his unconscious he became aware, nor perhaps for the first time, of the clever solution of his own death.
Dimly then, like someone half-asleep and wholly uninvolved, he beheld Romulan dismount below the Basilica stair, beheld Leopardo moving down the steps toward him in parodied courtesy. But did not hear what was said, nor feel it needful.
“Mercurio,” said Benevolo urgently. “Mercurio.”
“What?”
“Will you let them fight? Leopardo will settle for no less. Romulan’s just wed, and she’s the Leopard’s cousin.”
“It had slipped my mind.”
Mercurio yawned. It was not an affectation, but that strange convulsion of airlessness connected to malaise or anguish. Misunderstanding, as Romulan had, Benevolo grew partly frantic.
Gulio had trotted back to the stair and lurked there, watching the dialogue of the two adversaries.
Leopardo waved his arms like a madman, some threat or mock at a threat. His face was ghastly, drained—yet every other aspect indicated wild energy.
Dust rose like a swarm.
Flavian Estemba glanced, and saw Benevolo hurtling his little horse across the square, calling. With raised eyebrows, Leopardo and Romulan had turned to look at who was about what. Benevolo rode straight at them. He waved his arms just as Leopardo had done. In a minute, one or other of the Montargos would give the marriage away. But what did that matter either? (As the boy drew nearer, the two young men discounted him, and resumed their confrontation.)
Flavian Estemba became aware of his divorce from reality, but could not seem to recall himself to the world of the Basilica square. An image of his enfeebled father, a ruin like the Estemba Tower, had ludicrously intervened. Mercurio studied his father objectively, conscious objectivity was a shield against hurt. And then, in his turn, Mercurio remembered Saffiro, drunkenly and exhaustedly sprawled across the inn mattress, his black hair spilled, asleep. Suppose, not the mattress but the street, not sleep but death. Not Saffiro but Romulan.
Romulan stepped back as Leopardo swung his hand out to shove at him, and Romulan noted, with sartorial silliness, that Leopardo’s sleeve was inadequately tied. The hand, deprived of force, flapped on his chest. Romulan, pushed beyond endurance, said, “I only restrain myself for her sake. I would not sprinkle her name with your foul blood.”
“But you’d part her, cleave her, clog her,” said Leopardo. “Or was it some other poet she trysted with last night and—let me see—made the sun rise a second time?”
“You do not know my intention to her.”
“Do I not? Ram and board, shipmaster.”
“If you would shut your mouth, I would tell you—”
Benevolo had reached them, but was again ignored. He broke out:
“Romulan, go home.”
“Yes,” said Leopardo. “Good advice. Go home before I send you there in portions.”
Until this instant neither (unlike Gulio), had set hand to hilt.
Even in fury and in habit, Romulan had so far kept his head. But now it was oddly borne in upon him that Chenti, too, kept his. Chenti who was mad, and clearly never more a lunatic than now. This revelation, perceived all at once, checked Romulan, and Benevolo also—virtually in the same moment. Each stared at the sickly face of the Chenti in perplexity, and Benevolo, swinging off the grey horse and sending her aside with a mild tap, opened his mouth to speak again, when Leopardo, with a skull-like grin, hauled steel from scabbard.
“Some impotent who hoped for long life.”
“I come back wed, and walk into a plague-burial.”
“Your father’s the only plague you need fear. A plague of Valentius. Ah, deliver us from such.”
“My father would make six of yours,” Romulan bantered absently.
“True. You would require six of Valentius to make one of Estemba Primo. Where, by the by, is Luca?”
Benevolo broke his song to say: “The Bhorga.”
“Excellent. So he’ll not be home ahead of anyone to babble.”
The street, after a quarter of a mile, gave way to another, and trotting up it they passed between two garden walls and so emerged on the edge of the Basilica square.
Driven indoors by hot weather or rumor of sickness, no one was about. Like an edifice of flour, the great white building loomed across the space. On the public cistern the light fell in blades, running the water through to the bottom. Birds like papers blew into an opaque sky.
Benevolo concluded the tracery of the lute.
“Someone is signaling to you from the Basilica steps.”
Mercurio glanced up the stair to the facade. Yesterday, from that same direction, Saffiro Vespelli had come rushing, flawed alter-image of Romulan, to intercept him.
“Crimson,” said Mercurio. “A pair of Chentis. It charms me we’re to greet the Montargos’ new kindred so rapidly. But perhaps it would be ill-advised.”
“What?” Romulan drew rein. “Run away from the cat-pack again? Can I not stay and make peace with them?”
“You can stay. I doubt you can make peace.”
Mercurio rode on, but Romulan did not, and Benevolo halted beside him. After a moment, Mercurio, too, eased the clove-colored mare to a standstill. He looked back, and then across the square. One figure remained on the Basilica steps. The other, a pink and mauve bouquet, hurried toward them.
“By the legs, Gulio, I think.”
“Gulio,” said Romulan. His mind moved backward, through trees and rain and doorways, to a lightning flash, and Gulio’s surprised and eager face, and the shouted words that had betrayed: ‘Pardo—there’s a rat in the wall! Because of that betrayal, Romulan had sprung into an orchard, rushed toward a window of rosy glass, and so met the power and puissance of love in the form of Iulet. To settle the score with Gulio now meant to deny the marriage that had followed.
Deny the marriage—I have come back wed. . . .
He was changed. The town, the world were changed. Only habit was familiar.
Gulio, smiling and waving, came to rest between their horses’ mouths, bowing, genuflecting; harbinger of habit and familiarity.
“Good morning.”
“Oh good morning, good morning,” Romulan and Mercurio soared into ecstasies of greeting.
“Dulcet Romulan Montargo,” Gulio said.
“Oh, dulcet yourself, indeed.”
“I’ve a message for you.”
“From a bawd, no doubt,” said Romulan, and felt ineffably cheered.
“From my kinsman, Leopardo Chenti.”
“From a bawd. You said,” Mercurio congratulated Romulan.
Gulio sneered, eyes narrowing.
“Would you say it to his face, Estemba?”
“Certainly not.”
“Coward then.”
“No, peacemaker. Save, we’re not making much peace.”
Romulan laughed. “Make peace with us, Gulio.”
Gulio menacingly put hand to sword hilt and was greeted by cheering and gesticulatory applause.
Gulio knew himself, though did not care to admit it, small fry. Nor was he in a joyous humor. Iuletta, that girl-creature, had been out all night attending some priest (she said) and on her coming home not half an hour ago, Gulio had been dispatched to inform Leopardo who, the story went, was loitering at the Basilica. Gulio had sought Leopardo there, and come on him at length in the graveyard, hanging on some House mausoleum (Suvio’s by the armorial markers), and spewing violently. Gulio, vaguely pleased to see the leopard so helpless, and also unnerved, stood by mumbling and somewhat in distaste. Eventually, Leopardo, death-faced, choking and with the eyes of insanity, straightened, looked about, and saw his witness. With an oath fit to rouse the buried ones all around, he struck Gulio a blow across the head that would have been murderous had there been any strength in it. As it was, Gulio tumbled against a tree, smudging the flesh on his bones. Thereafter, sulking and perturbed, he followed Leopardo’s weaving course among the tombs, and so to the cloistered colonnade that gave on the capella. Here Leopardo lay upright on the wall, his face in its carving.
“An interesting night?” Gulio had at last inquired.
“Blast you with poxes, be quiet.”
“Ah,” said Gulio, and fell to studying Leopardo’s brocade shoulders.
In a while, Leopardo said into the wall,
“I was with a whore. The most accomplished and best of her sisterhood. And this sin I confessed.” At which he suddenly doubled over and lay curled against the stonework, making the most terrible sounds of unproductive nausea. Gulio, offended, gave ground. When the dreadful spasms ceased, Leopardo called to him. “Find me some wine, damn you.”
“Wine? I’d say you—”
“You’d say nothing. Go do it.”
The horrified Gulio had bolted to the nearest wine sellers. He had been in two minds whether or not to return, but ultimately fear of Leopardo had forced him to do so. Regaining the spot, Leopardo, however, was not to be found. Gulio searched indifferently, then himself leaned on the wall to sample the wine. In this method he was interrupted by the Cat, who crept up on him, seized the wine receptacle and drained it.
This done, Leopardo stood grinning evilly.
“I came on a cure for my ills,” said Leopardo. “I’ve been drinking holy water from the font.”
Gulio was shocked, and disbelieving. Nevertheless, prudently he smiled in response.
“What does it taste of, then?”
“Brimstone.”
Leopardo’s unblinking eyes swam slightly, and he swaggered from pillar to pillar, so Gulio must follow him all over again.
“I’ll tell you another thing.”
Gulio waited apprehensively.
“My aunt, Lady Chenti, Donna Electra, my uncle Chenti’s wife—” Leopardo broke off, so Gulio must prompt him with: “Yes, ‘Pardo?”
“Had a man in her bed last night. And my poor uncle from home, trustingly fornicating with his Bianca.”
Gulio did not like this idea, for it boded a unique trouble. But Leopardo turned and watched him until Gulio was forced to say:
“You know as much?”
“I know, beloved Gulio.”
Gulio, confounded, muttered, “What will you do?”
“Why, draw my sword, my darling, and skewer her. Skewer her to the length of my blade, forthwith.” At which he burst into frantic laughter, staggering with it, his eyes like colored flaming ice. In this way he pranced and stumbled out and around to the front of the Basilica, falling from carving to carving, beneath the bronze angels, sick, drunk, and maddened, beyond anything Gulio had ever beheld before. Then, to Gulio’s total stupefaction, Leopardo had flung himself against one of the huge opened doors, clinging there and striking his head against it. In the midst of this, three horses had come up into the square from the direction of the Lower Town. Nondescript mantles had been cast aside in the heat, and Gulio saw at once the colors of Estemba and Montargo—enemies Leopardo might be pleased to attack in preference to the delicate person of Gulio himself.
“Here come the shipwrights and the Duke’s fletcher.”
“What?” Leopardo said.
“Montargos and Estembas.”
“Montembas and Estargos, ho!”
“Looking for a brawl, no doubt.”
“I desire only Romulan, Valentius’ son. He owes me my cousin’s honor. Unless the musician is with them. I’ll tune his mandolin for him, see how he’ll dance to that.”
“Both, ‘Pardo. Romulan and Flavian Estemba together. And that half bastard, Benvolio or Benevolo or how he’s called.”
Leopardo unhung himself from the door. He strolled to the edge of the stair, drawing in long breaths, steadying himself. His cruel eyes grew clear and unpleasingly intelligent; he seemed to sober, fantastically, between one heartbeat and the next.
“God’s instrument,” said Leopardo.
Gulio took this for a sexual blasphemy, and laughed. Leopardo did not look at him.
“Will you try for me then, Sir Christ?” Leopardo said. “Gulio.” Gulio started. “Approach them and invite them to meet me.”
“I?”
“They will not bite you, gentle maiden. They’ll save their teeth for me.”
“And meet you where?”
“Here. Where but? The foot of God’s staircase.”
Gulio prevaricated. Leopardo reached and squeezed his shoulder, an agonizing pressure that showed the cat had his strength again, and all his appalling awareness.
Gulio set out across the square, through the birds and the dust and the pollination of the daylight. He felt Leopardo’s presence behind him as he moved, thrusting him on. And so he came up to Estemba and Montargo, one of whom had the score of betrayal to settle, the other of whom had a swordsman’s reputation to rival ‘Pardo’s.
Having got through the preliminary bout of effusions and insults without delivering the ‘message,’ and with no sign of either party dismounting, Gulio, hand unhappily to sword hilt, found himself at a loss.
To his dislike then, Romulan, leaning from the horse, said charmingly to him, “Why not pretend, Gulio, you’re my kinsman.”
Incensed, Gulio glared. The glint of mockery was in the Montargo’s eyes for sure, yet his tone had been offendingly sincere. Mercurio Estemba, on the other hand, was invoking God.
“We have no feud, you and I,” said Romulan, smiling adorably. “Nor I with Leopardo, come to that, if he would see it.”
“He says otherwise. That you dealt lightly with his cousin.”
Romulan lowered his lid-fringes of jet-black lashes, seemed to consider, looked at Gulio and began: “Rather than deal lightly I—”
At which Estemba broke in.
“No. Not yet for that.”
Romulan appeared uneasy. Gulio was intrigued. Something else went on that might be interesting, being harmful only to others.
“Not yet for what?” said Gulio, and was himself broken in on by a fearsome yell that crossed the square, hitting him amid the shoulders like a javelin: his own name garnished with invective.
“Leopardo,” said Gulio hastily, “would meet you over there, by the steps.”
“If he’d meet us,” said Romulan, “let him come over here.”
“Or better still,” said Mercurio, “let him stay where he is. An urgent appointment, Gulio, bids us hence, else we could not bear to prise ourselves from your company.”
“Afraid to confront him then.”
“Bones water, the heart of a mouse,” said Mercurio.
Romulan, staring now at Leopardo on the steps, small as a figurine, said, “Why should I run? He’ll think for sure I dishonored her.”
“Let him think it. He can eat his thoughts tomorrow, gristle, beak and all. Leave it be.”
Romulan flushed slowly with an indecisive anger, noting his hands shook on the reins. Himself, he could not have said what was directing him. Everything had seemed all at once to have moved too swiftly and in too variable a sequence of ways. He was wed, he had lain with her. And through these primitive and innocent acts he had made a tangle of his life. Only the habit, the familiarity of the quarrel, the brawl, remained recognizable, easing. Though not to be considered any longer, for now her future rested upon his. He dared not play this game again, and yet, how the game drew him, the alluring perversity of foolishness.
He turned, presumably for guidance or to be ruled, toward Mercurio, and so was astonished yet again. For rather than the relaxed and lethal face of Mercurio’s judgment and caution, or the innocuous face of his play-acting, or the ironic beautiful face of enigma, Romulan beheld a new face, or in fact the inner face which he had never somehow surprised before. Mercurio had let fall the mask, abruptly too tired or too exasperated to maintain the rigid control that was necessary to keep it in place. Some part of him was, it seemed, disgusted by the childishness he found in Romulan. Stung, Romulan recoiled. It was a misinterpretation, but inevitable. The countenance of disapproval reminded him of his father. In the way of one often hurt by censure (from infancy, he had seldom thought himself free of it), all criticism led him to effect immediate retreat.
Not properly reasoning what he did, Romulan urged the gelding forward and across the square, toward Leopardo Chenti.
And Mercurio, for his part, sat and simply watched him go.
The sunlight blazed and Romulan rode through it, shining. Mercurio Flavian Estemba observed, as if the scene meant nothing at all to him. Within himself, the unavoidable hiatus had presented itself. He had attempted to miss looking into the depths of himself this morning, but helplessly, gradually, he had been persuaded to do so. These bottomless darkening spaces overwhelmed him, and the young man riding away toward another, the young bridegroom in his blue clothing, seemed at length no one that Mercurio remotely knew.
In the early hours of the morning, a little before dawn came over the inn at Marivero in a silent, extraordinary tide, Flavian Estemba had dreamed that he was damned. It had been a savage and unlikely dream for a man who did not, generally or seriously, deal in such terms, and who could not in his intellect credit any such fancy as Hell, or Lucifer. Yet, Lucifer he had seen, tall as a tower, a blackish cloud, staring at him eyelessly though inescapably, until at length the face became that of a very old woman, whose eyes were the improbable Tyrian blue of Romulan’s, or Iuletta’s, and from this awful stare, more than from the cloudy visage of the Fiend, Mercurio could read his condemnation and his sentence as if they had been written large therein. For what, then, had he been damned? For sin? For a guilt and religious sensibility that his waking mind rejected? Or was it love that had damned him?
In the shade of these curious metaphysics, the daytime world seemed meaningless, his life also, meaningless, for all at once the external impression of codes and practices, which he despised and which amused him, had caught him up, revealing themselves in the long term as inexorable. So he sat his horse, and disdained it all. The dream, the threat, the day, Leopardo, the companion who, turning his back, plunged toward misadventure—what did any of these items matter in such a world, whose unpatterned and senseless and unforgivable tenses drew it upon him and would, ultimately, allow no refusal.
And even as he sat there, so disdaining these things, these unanswerable, inexorable things, it is possible that at some nadir of his unconscious he became aware, nor perhaps for the first time, of the clever solution of his own death.
Dimly then, like someone half-asleep and wholly uninvolved, he beheld Romulan dismount below the Basilica stair, beheld Leopardo moving down the steps toward him in parodied courtesy. But did not hear what was said, nor feel it needful.
“Mercurio,” said Benevolo urgently. “Mercurio.”
“What?”
“Will you let them fight? Leopardo will settle for no less. Romulan’s just wed, and she’s the Leopard’s cousin.”
“It had slipped my mind.”
Mercurio yawned. It was not an affectation, but that strange convulsion of airlessness connected to malaise or anguish. Misunderstanding, as Romulan had, Benevolo grew partly frantic.
Gulio had trotted back to the stair and lurked there, watching the dialogue of the two adversaries.
Leopardo waved his arms like a madman, some threat or mock at a threat. His face was ghastly, drained—yet every other aspect indicated wild energy.
Dust rose like a swarm.
Flavian Estemba glanced, and saw Benevolo hurtling his little horse across the square, calling. With raised eyebrows, Leopardo and Romulan had turned to look at who was about what. Benevolo rode straight at them. He waved his arms just as Leopardo had done. In a minute, one or other of the Montargos would give the marriage away. But what did that matter either? (As the boy drew nearer, the two young men discounted him, and resumed their confrontation.)
Flavian Estemba became aware of his divorce from reality, but could not seem to recall himself to the world of the Basilica square. An image of his enfeebled father, a ruin like the Estemba Tower, had ludicrously intervened. Mercurio studied his father objectively, conscious objectivity was a shield against hurt. And then, in his turn, Mercurio remembered Saffiro, drunkenly and exhaustedly sprawled across the inn mattress, his black hair spilled, asleep. Suppose, not the mattress but the street, not sleep but death. Not Saffiro but Romulan.
Romulan stepped back as Leopardo swung his hand out to shove at him, and Romulan noted, with sartorial silliness, that Leopardo’s sleeve was inadequately tied. The hand, deprived of force, flapped on his chest. Romulan, pushed beyond endurance, said, “I only restrain myself for her sake. I would not sprinkle her name with your foul blood.”
“But you’d part her, cleave her, clog her,” said Leopardo. “Or was it some other poet she trysted with last night and—let me see—made the sun rise a second time?”
“You do not know my intention to her.”
“Do I not? Ram and board, shipmaster.”
“If you would shut your mouth, I would tell you—”
Benevolo had reached them, but was again ignored. He broke out:
“Romulan, go home.”
“Yes,” said Leopardo. “Good advice. Go home before I send you there in portions.”
Until this instant neither (unlike Gulio), had set hand to hilt.
Even in fury and in habit, Romulan had so far kept his head. But now it was oddly borne in upon him that Chenti, too, kept his. Chenti who was mad, and clearly never more a lunatic than now. This revelation, perceived all at once, checked Romulan, and Benevolo also—virtually in the same moment. Each stared at the sickly face of the Chenti in perplexity, and Benevolo, swinging off the grey horse and sending her aside with a mild tap, opened his mouth to speak again, when Leopardo, with a skull-like grin, hauled steel from scabbard.
