Sung in Shadow, page 27
Again, a space. And then again Valentius spoke to him, as if there had been no interruption of any sort.
“Contrary to your view of me, I’m not a man who hands over his only son to the rabble.”
“Oh,” Romulan said beautifully, “then in one instance at least, Father, you are unlike God.”
Blood came from the sun now. Appropriately, to end this day of blood, the sunset would be steeped in it. A wind, harbinger of sunfall, rose abruptly from the hills, and shook their mantles and their trees, and the piled cloth of disguise lowered from the oratory. It caught the sun-wheel, too, and whirled it round. Romulan stared at the glancing lights, and the pain in his hand began to ebb away becoming one with the wheel’s faint whistling. Until it did not matter.
“Listen to me,” Valentius said. The tone remained quiet, but his face, in the gathering red shadow, had despaired. “We have ill-understood each other, and so come to this pass, and now is no time to remedy that. If I ask you to trust me, you will not. If I ask you to obey me you will refuse. Where am I to turn, then, when I would help you? No, your marriage does not please me, but it’s done, and I prefer the honor of it to the deed of some greedy raping lout I thought you set on becoming. And no, Flavian Estemba was no friend I’d beg Heaven for you to have, but you clove to him in loyalty if you gave me none. I know you would not cause his murder, and I know you would take steel to the one who did. And if I’m to choose between Leopardo Chenti’s death and yours, then I thank God you hacked him even in mincemeat, if you live. There’s more. What is the purpose of saying it? I would have sent you to Lombardhia to keep you from all this, and now the preparations—so far advanced—will see you safe there. None came after us. But who knows if someone else, not your friend, will guess where you might be. Take my horse then. He’s fresh. Doro will ride with you. By midnight you will be across the boundary of the Duca’s lands. There, none of his laws or Verensa’s quarrels can touch you.”
And then, once more, patiently Valentius waited, leaving the silence for his son to fill. But Romulan now said nothing, merely staring on and on at the wheel of ruddy metal that spun and slowed, spun and slowed, on the wooden post.
Valentius turned a little way, noting Doro and the three horses, motionless as the trees between the sunset wind, moving with it as the trees did, the manes, the servant’s cloak, stirring. The sky was deeper now, scorched out, the color of old gilding, and of smoke in the east. A bizarre light lay on everything, even in shadow, where the darkness seemed to glow.
Valentius considered. He might walk to Romulan, lash out and render him senseless, then carry him to the horse and send him away in such fashion. But he must recollect, his son was fighter and swordsman. He had killed Leopardo Chenti, reckoned unkillable. He might not be so easy to dispatch.
So Valentius stood idly, unable to bring himself to any further effort His thoughts went back and back, knowing well how to wound him, showing him, what he had always known, the limitless failure of his dealings with this son, the masculine image of Valentina the beloved and the forfeited. Valentius was aware how love and fear had marked him. But for the first time, reading the written messages, Chesarius’, Benevolo’s, papers which could strike like knives, Valentius had allowed himself to confront his own knowledge of himself. He came then to the inner page which read: I gave him nothing, afraid to give it, and now he will take nothing from me. Everything of consequence in Romulan’s life had been conducted without Valentius’ participation. Yet Valentius might have been a sharer, he might have risked the sharing in the face of death, that ondrawing shadow of night which now hung so close on land and soul. Who could escape? To waste life was surely worse. But, no remedy now, no remedy and no way to help. Damn this boy, what did Valentius care what he had done, who wed, who harmed, who slain. Romulan was the child of his body, the last emblem of love which was left. And Valentina. Had she, some starry microcosm beyond the earth, beheld all this, these barren years, and condemned him?
Valentius’ mind, now, was fluid, flowing. But the sinews of his emotions were stiff, were mortised up. He could not move. And the wheel, making its curious little noise, spun and slowed. Spun and slowed.
Romulan said something then, ironically jarring him.
“If I run, what of Iulet?”
Valentius swept his mind of its litter and said,
“She is your wife. I will approach Chenti. It must be done with care, for I think we shall be at feud over this, though Chesarius has hinted at some bargaining. Iuletta, through you, has my name now, and can live, if she wishes, under my protection. Till you may return.”
“May return?” Romulan’s spirit re-entered his face, glaring and abstracted in the fiery shade, an angel from the Inferno.
Valentius, having caught the errant attention, said quickly, “Chesarius thinks Chenti can be bought, and offers to do it. The Duke, it seems, will consent if Chenti does, to pardon you as the valued avenger of ducal kindred. Then you will come back unstained, no doubt for some small extra fee. There are Levantine interests of the Montargos that have always charmed the Duke.”
“You’d do this.”
“I’d do this.”
“And Iuletta—my—wife—”
“And Iuletta your wife is now my daughter, by laws both phlegmatic and divine. My roof is therefore hers also. But first, you will go to Lombardhia. Nothing is settled yet. I will get you word when and how I can.”
Romulan took a step forward, but his eyes had widened, lost the place and the moment, looking into a light as preposterously brilliant as the sun—the sorcerous mirror of hope. Which all at once dashed itself in fragments as Valentius said:
“It seems you’re going then, after all, where I send you.”
He said it lightly, which also cost him something. He said it in an aching relief. He did not know the likeness of these words to the words Mercurio murmured, his golden head half on Benevolo’s arm, half in the dust, and the blood running like a costly dye from his body. It seems I’m going, after all, where you sent me. To Hell, where you sent me, to Hell, your sword the key in the gate of it, your wretched game, your gaming foolishness, the means. The price of love is death. My love, my death. The bitter of farewell, my dear, which bitterness is yours, for I am beyond all farewells. I am with the worms.
The words seemed spoken in Romulan’s brain. He heard them out. And then the control by which he had somehow held himself, its links weakened by the instant of hope, gave way. Romulan turned, for there was no hope, could be no hope, but there was death and there was despair, and an enemy at his back. To keep private from this enemy the agony that now rose up in him again, like the breath he could only snatch at, was impossible. To conceal his face was all he could attain.
He did not find the wall until he fell against it. The landscape swam and roiled like a great ship, like the Argo herself, nominatrix of his House. The storm broke from his brain and through his eyes. The grief would itself now take the world away from him and deliver him to darkness, and he was glad of it.
Valentius stood and saw this dark beast lay hold on his son, not knowing its impetus, while knowing its cause. The father, whose emotions remained locked away, was startled and appalled, was moved, was reduced, put at a loss. Not since childhood had Romulan ever wept in Valentius’ sight or hearing. And childhood’s impassioned anguish—one could not compare those uncomplex laments to this stifled and tormented paroxysm that drove all the young man’s body against the ungiving stone, and in stages down it, a thing that took breath and sight, that could deprive of sense and even consciousness.
Perhaps she reached out to him then, his Valentina, from whatever ethereal limbo she inhabited. Or perhaps it was that aspect of herself which had remained caught within him, undying, unrecognized. Valentius stepped free of himself. With an awkwardness that was not physical, nor mental, and which, whatever it was, he ignored, he went to Romulan and firmly pried him from the wall and from his knees, and lifting and supporting his son, held him in his arms, as he had not done since he was a child of six.
Romulan made no physical struggle; he was beyond it, hardly aware of anything. Yet the support, as he lay against and within it, caused him to make, through the harrowing spasms, some vague lost protest, wordless, indecipherable, grasped in a second.
“No shame to weep,” Valentius Montargo said. “Shame would be ashamed to shame a man for weeping, in this world.” He found then he could bring himself to touch the boy’s hair, which was like his mother’s, a shade stronger, coarser, the hair of a man. He caressed the hair, digging his fingers deeply to the skull beneath in hypnotic circling motions, as he would soothe a child, a dog, anything which came to him in its pain or distress to be healed, anything which he was not afraid to mark by his affection, lest death draw it from him. A second time. “When she died, your mother, I wept for her most nights of a year. I’d weep for her still, but the eyes grow chary of crying for what cannot be undone. You will find it so. We can bear what we must. But not yet. Not yet.”
The claws of grief let Romulan go suddenly, as before. Then, coming back to himself, he found he was not stretched out on the ground, but inside the walls of a safety he had known only with one, and glimpsed only with another, and never dreamed to find as he found it, here.
Embarrassed yet consoled, consoled and warmed as if by wine, he moved back from Valentius’ support, and looked at him.
Valentius smiled, himself drained and emptied. There was no victory in truth.
“The sun is almost out,” Valentius said. “And the horse is waiting. Doro has a cloak for you. I’ll take the gelding back to Verensa.”
“They’ll have shut the gates,” Romulan said, expressionless.
“They will, however, reopen one at sight of a gold coin.”
“For God’s sake, go carefully,” Romulan said.
“And you, go more carefully even than I.”
Romulan turned then and ran toward the slope. Halfway up it he checked, and swung about. He looked back toward the oratory where, under the now all-blood-red sky, his father stood watching him.
“Run, boy!” Valentius shouted, his voice rising clear through the dark on the ground. “Run for Lombardhia.” And softly, as Romulan, turning about again with one momentarily upflung arm, obeyed him: “And live long, and let God guard you, my only son.”
* * *
• • •
Under the sky of Leopardo’s blood, Electra Chenti walked through the streets to the Rocca.
She walked in the torn net of her bloodstained dress, the embroidered camisola that in its turn bore the brown stains of human blood which was dry. She walked in the ribbons of her torn hair, a veil dropped over it like a fall of blackish reddish soot. She walked with the scratches staring on her cheeks and throat, as the women had walked of old, who mourned, and she walked barefoot. And from this madness her eyes looked forth, her sane, inclement eyes.
Lord Chenti, expected home that afternoon or evening, prepared for even in the midst of catastrophe, had not yet come. Nor had word come of any captured, any sentenced, or of the Duke’s ruling on events. The bell had stopped tolling. In the lower town, the plague seethed, mostly forgotten.
The band of Chenti cousins, coming home to their lodges or to the Tower and informed of everything, stood about stricken by uncanny fears. Some sought out Gulio. They demanded his account. They cross-questioned him, they screamed at him.
Removed now to a more suitable chamber, washed and bound and dressed in new linen, unflawed damask, the sleeves of the doublet correctly tied, fenced in by candles, a priest chanting, the incense streaming by, the body of Leopardo Chenti lay on a draperied table, stretched for inspection. The eyes were sealed now, the hands lax on a prayer book of bossed gold. No wound visible. Irreproachable. The kindred filed in and out. Women fainted. Men swore oaths. The priests replaced each other, and the censers swung.
As the sky reddened, and reddened on its redness, when Chenti still had not come home, when word still went unpublished as to ducal decree, Electra came from her apartments, unaltered in her rags and tatters. In the hall some of the male kindred had gathered, drinking, arguing. They fell silent as she entered like a dreadful ghost among them.
“The Duke does not speak,” she said. “I shall go to him, as I am.” She did not say: I shall ask for blood. She said: “I shall ask for justice.”
A few voices, drunkenly upraised, attempted dissuasion.
“No,” she said. “The Duca pays no attention to the strength of this House, to all its fine young men.” (They withered at her unstressed, implicit scorn.) “My lord is from home. Let us see what one frail woman can do.”
Then, she walked from the hall, and so from the house, the guards by the entrance gaping at her.
Men decided she must not proceed alone. Their pride was stirred up, the wine aided in that. They called for torches and for their servants, and went out with their swords.
So she walked, and they walked behind her, some thirty-five to forty men spread on the streets, crimson clad, wearing black linen for mourning, servants and masters, and the torches trailing greenish-yellow over the darkening blood-cast sky, against the massive walls, the slanting stairs, beyond which the myriad towers rose and ever rose. Groups craned out of windows where the lamps were just now blushing up, women leaned down, and other men pressed back into doorways and under archways. “The Chentis are on the street.” “The cat-pack is out for Montargo blood.” Armored in its own pageant, the procession did not speak, save with the slide and chink of swords as it strode, and with its shadows thrown boundlessly before and behind it as the torches dipped and changed hands. And before them all, the woman walking, Lady Death.
They came to the Rocca, and the ascent to the doors was blocked by guards, as they might have expected. Their business with the Duke was inquired after, and their business with the Duke was stated. This business being relayed within, the Duke slammed his hand flat down on the table and gained his feet with two or three choice blasphemies.
“You see how it runs, Chesarius? They petition me, and half the town has seen them.”
“Perhaps you might convince Verensa,” Chesarius coldly said. “They have come personally to entreat your pardon for Romulan Montargo.”
Obliged by arcane courtesies, the Duke let the woman into the Chitadella, but with two only of her male kin to support her, and lacking their weapons. He received them in the hall, whose walls of dressed stone striped with the gleaming of swords and draped only by the ringed sigil banners, intimated the fortress and its strength.
Standing on the dais, he let them approach him, and cursed under his breath this harpy Electra Chenti, mourning publicly like her namesake, forcing his hand now, where he had not wished to be forced.
“Well, lady,” he said to her, however, “we bow to your bereavement. To lose the one that stood in place of a son to you, and to your lord, that is a desolation indeed.”
“Then recompense us, Prince,” she said.
“Where’s your husband?” the Duca said.
“Delayed on the road, or he would plead here in my stead.”
(And that I doubt, madama. And surely, if in your stead, not in your state.)
“Well, what’s your suit?”
“The law of God. An eye for an eye.”
The Duke, annoyed, could not resist.
“Whose eye, then, my donna, has been put out?”
He was not prepared for her reaction.
“The eye of my heart, my brother’s son, my nephew, my flesh, my blood, my life!” And she began to rend herself again, in front of him, filling him with a horror of the degeneracy of women, their primaeval wildness, their ability to rush beyond reason and overthrow the tenets of good policy.
“Hold her from herself!” he roared at the two dumbfounded men by her sides. With some difficulty, they did so. “Madama,” he said to her, meeting her evil eyes, “to mourn is your right. To take leave of your senses in my hall is frank bad manners. If you ask me for the death of Romulan Montargo—”
“I do not ask,” she cried, “I do not ask it. I demand it. The House of Chenti,” she said, “demands it.”
“If,” the Duca repeated woodenly, “you ask for Romulan Montargo’s death, you may go home well satisfied. I, too, have lost kindred at the villain’s hands.” He sighed. He scowled at her, at the wickedness looking from her face as if around a narrow door. “Go to your house, lady. There’s plague abroad, which your gathering may well have helped to spread. When taken, the Montargo’s soul will be shifted by means of a strangler’s noose.
“Words to this effect shall be published in the town at sunrise tomorrow.”
* * *
• • •
Of all the Chentis, Gulio was perhaps the last to hear this joyful news. By then, he had news of his own, which, ultimately, he prudently did not disclose.
He had grown very drunk as the day wore on, and by the time the last stains of bloody mulberry and bloodiest blood had left the sky, he was drunk enough to be brave. The taunts and insinuations of his fellows had disturbed him. Leopardo’s death disturbed him. He had been too afraid to pay his respects to the corpse. Some superstitious vision of the body sitting up, pointing at him and calling him a coward, as other cousins had now called him frequently, made Gulio giggle and writhe. In his innermost self, Gulio was thankful for ‘Pardo’s death, as all of them were most certainly thankful. And yet, with that warped and envenomed presence had passed also a brightness and a glamour from the Tower. As darkness fell, they each cast about themselves for some means to simulate a light.
To Gulio’s unease had been added one other mite. The bothersome story the Leopard had rendered him before the fatal meeting in the square. Lord Chenti’s wife, ‘Pardo had said, had lain with another man. This tale had mingled, in Gulio’s muddled intelligence, with ‘Pardo’s constant harping on Iuletta and Romulan Montargo playing the beast with two backs. The drunker Gulio grew, the more it seemed the Montargo had been creeping about in the house all night and night after night, shinning up creepers and over balustrades to get in. Lying now in the mother’s bed and now in the daughter’s. At some point then, a fearsome plan came to Gulio, as it seemed to him worthy of Leopardo himself.
