Sung in Shadow, page 33
More than a month had gone by without a letter from the Montargo Tower. His father had a choice of destinations to which he might send one. The proposed school with its square grey courtyards and perambulating debating scholars. The church close by, where the priests, for a voluntary sum, would retain messages written and verbal until the recipients might arrive. Or the lodging, some years ago a wealthy merchant’s house, and well-known being near the citadel.
Eleven days before, Doro had happened on a man in a tavern with some transaction due in Sana Verensa. Romulan had accordingly authorized Doro to pay this migrant to inquire after the Montargos, and bring back his results—either letters from Valentius or at least some picture of events. A further payment had been promised on his return, but the return had failed to occur. Even allowing for the duration of the fellow’s personal business, he should by now have sought them out. That he had not merely proved that thieves would hire out on cheaper rates than honest men. Content with what they had already given him, he had not bothered to earn it, or the rest.
One last foray to the college-school and the adjacent church, one last interrogation of the various servants about the lodging, and the sequence had ended. By the hour the candles came to be lit, only one course remained, and this Doro had put forth.
If Romulan smarted that he himself must stay in Lombardhia, there was no remedy. To go back in blindness, perhaps under death sentence, and doubtless with a Chenti or two ripe to try for him—that was the way of a fool. And he had learned that foolishness was permissible only when nothing else but one’s own life was dependent on it. She—his wife—was now reliant on the surety that he live. Maybe, his father, too. Maybe even that progression of forebears of whose role in his existence he had always been reluctantly aware. The last direct heir of his line, after Valentius. With Iuletta, that line could continue, his debt to the past, if debt there was, set straight. Iuletta, his wife. It was feasible (though it would be also incredible, astonishing) that already, between them, they had begun the continuance.
His wife. His father. The hill-held town—sharp with dawn, shadow-struck by day, biscuit-colored in the closing light—Verensa as he remembered it, the dust blooming, the towers rising like slender rocks, indigenous and natural. His birthplace, the backdrop to almost all the occasions of all his years, till now. Till now. Miles off. Severed from sight and knowledge—and from all news.
“Doro,” he said then, “can you start at first light?”
Doro grinned.
“I should be back inside two days.”
“Do be. Or I’ll ride after you, and damn Chenti and damn the Rocca.”
* * *
• • •
Night clung, soaked into every stone, would stay forever—then stirred, debated with itself, rose like mist and followed yesterday’s sun into the west. In the east, the new sun, which so constantly encircled the earth, or which the earth encircled—though never in the hearing of his Holiness—came up like a paper lantern on fire. The gates of Manta Sebastia were opened, and a single rider trotted forth and broke into a gallop on the sun-shot road.
The sky swept up into blue, and the dry extending land spread away, showing itself to Doro. Who, as he rode, spared scarcely a glance for it. Now and then a farm, with its pebbled russet roof, or trees pouring shade like water over the road, caught his physical attention, or the cry of some bird, floating toward the lakelike plains of distance, might alert his ears. His mind was elsewhere than the tawny landscape, its architecture and its verdure. Planning ahead toward the little river, and the highway’s end, beyond that to the best speed he could win on the track, and the nicer speed on the Padova road, where he might expect to be before noon.
Too prosaic to experience foreboding, Doro was, nevertheless, in a stern mood.
Eight miles from the river, as the day was climbing into its apex of heat and luster, Doro watered the horse at a pool below a rough and ragged village. Earlier, he had passed the inn which had given them food when Romulan lay sick. Someone had called a greeting to Doro, but he had not acknowledged it.
In sight of the river, by a line of trees resembling green swords, Doro’s horse missed its footing once, like a drunkard, and went lame.
* * *
• • •
Opening, broadening like a rose, the day, containing within it, as flies in amber, horses which went lame, greetings unanswered, towns of churches and towers. Containing with the’ rapid, unwilling prayer of the blue-eyed young man on his knees in the deep nave of San Bebastianus, the vixens’ cry: “Love for copper, love for gold!” from a lane between two brothels miles and miles away. And an unsleeping girl in a cochineal camisola poorly matched with the terracotta urn of basil at her elbow, leaning from her window slit, conversing with a young man, duncloaked, hooded and almost faceless, in the street below. A young man obviously a gentleman from the Higher Town, who claimed to be too poor to visit her tonight, yet asked questions all about the house and what girls Maestra Susina kept. A young man who embroidered his questions with wishes to be a glove on her hand or the linen next her breast, phrases got out with a desperate gallant insincerity that intrigued her. But in the end, when she went in and closed her shutters for fear of a noon-day blistering, it was a boy from the kitchen told Saffiro Vespelli of the black-haired angel and her fat wardress in the little room on the mezzanine.
Others, plumbing the depths of the merchant quarter for Cornelia, lacked success. Lord Chenti, by this night’s sunfall, would be in a new rage, alarmed, recanting, tearing up in one hand a letter (seven words) come from Troian Belmorio in response to a tentative message and a lavish gift: Sir, your daughter is dead to me. Strangling in the other Cornelia’s imagined neck. It was that gargantua who had coerced Iuletta into flight. Were they with the priest again? Which priest had it been? No, but that had been a lie. There was no priest, no oratory. Damn that fat slab of haggery. She had caused it all. That and the villainous Montargos, against whom he himself felt ready to take sword. That Cornelia might have fled to her daughter did not enter Chenti’s pulsing brain, despite his jibe to that effect. To his idea, the nurse’s child—Suzanna?—being a prostitute, was therefore mere flotsam, if not already deceased—as being in which state Cornelia, in the higher company of the Tower, had always referred to her. A rich whore with a house of her own did not fit with Chenti’s vision, and he had never been informed otherwise. Nor did he even consider that Cornelia, in her feckless abduction of Iulet, would have taken her to such a refuge. So, in the amber of the day, richening now, its resin solidifying about them all, Chenti trumpeted and schemed and made vows, not knowing himself a mere trapped fly along with all the others.
And in the wine-amber, Lady Chenti, bolt upright in her seat, her unblinking lizard eyes on nothing but some thought inside them, her hands snapped shut upon a pendant of gold, which, like her eyes, hid what it held: a lock of a dead man’s hair, glued by old blood. And in the room on the mezzanine, Cornelia snoring close by, Iulet Chenti, in the self-same position as her mother by some freak of genetic telepathy. Iulet bolt upright, her eyes wide, her hands tight upon the nothing which was all now she had left. And a scatter of walls away, Saffiro, drowsy and sick with heat and the Bhorga smells, and with a dream to kill or to die.
To die and be dead. Mercurio in his tomb, Valentius in his. Leopardo (who could have enlightened Lord Chenti in the matter of Susina) in the marble mausoleum of the Gattapulettas, and no longer informative. Troian on the brown hill, indulging in a vicious hunt, one cheek already bruised from a play fight of buffets with a friend, and the friend carried home, wrapping himself in the warmth of angry things. Troian who had drunk down the seeds of misogyny and who, tonight, would rape a girl in Marivero, telling her that he liked her resistance.
While Luca Montargo, the third witness at the ill-starred wedding, yellow as his fiendish horse, though not now from debauch but from a brush with the plague that had lodged that month in the Montargo Tower, dwelled with post-maledic despair on the futility of all things. But mostly the Argo fountain in the rectangular courtyard. And as he stared with positive hatred at the late afternoon light shuffled on and off the shining verdigris sail, he heard knocking on the stable entry, and, hating that too, walked through under the pile of the second floor veranda where the pigeons hatefully puttered, in time to hear a groom shouting for the visitor’s name and intention.
A name came in over the wall. The two Montargo guards loosened their stance, recognizing it. The groom shouted: “We have had the Summer Sickness here.”
“So have I,” called Doro. And swore at them until the gate was opened.
The servant rode in on a scarecrow horse, both of them white with dust as if oiled and dipped in flour. Sliding from the saddle, the man stood in the yard, perhaps seeking evidence of neglect, perhaps scenting dolor and confusion. But Doro, worn out by walking, by bartering for a horse, by nearly coming to blows over a horse, by hard riding on a thing ill-fed and untrained and disobedient and probably not a horse at all, required mostly a drink of wine and a catholic admittance to Valentius’ study. What he received, however, was Luca’s imperious cry across the cobbles: “Where have you left Montargo Uno?”
Doro looked, bowed staccato, and replied:
“Where my lord his father had me conduct him. And where,” said Doro generally, “is Lord Valentius?”
There was a silence. Then Luca told him where Valentius was.
“Oh God and burning Hell,” said Doro. And after that nothing for some while.
At length, unasked, one of the guards informed Doro of the circumstances of death, and who at present held authority in the Tower—on the heir’s behalf.
Then Doro came over to Luca, bowed more adequately and said, “Sir, is the Lady Iuletta here?”
There followed a form of verbal and hierarchical chaos. Luca privy to one outdated set of secrets, and unwilling to admit as much to an underling. Doro privy to another set more current, and growing too impatient to reveal them. Both additionally hampered by something neither of them knew: the actual incidents that made up Iuletta’s second wedding. Rumor there had been effectively trammelled. The story ran that the lady, still weak from her illness, had faded away in the capella. The ceremony was therefore postponed until her full recovery. But subsidiary rumors sprang from this story like young leaves. Troian had refused the girl at the last instant, having found some impediment or imperfection. Chenti Primo had cancelled the match, having been slandered by Old Belmorio in the Basilica. It was, though, fairly agreed that Iuletta was once more sick unto death in her father’s house. Mostly these last snippets were not offered by Luca, who presently turned on his shoe heels and went off, having informed Doro only that Iuletta Chenti was expiring of plague in the Chenti Tower.
Doro bolstered this by a round of: “Is it so?” “Yes, so it is,” with the three grooms now out in the yard and the Montargo guardsmen. He got it down with the aid of two cups of wine. Then he managed to obtain a real horse, folded himself more firmly in his drab cloak, and rode out again—in the direction of the Cat Tower of Chenti-Gattapuletta.
Prosaic Doro was, but not dull. Five years behind him, Doro had seen Valentius’ son grow up in Montargo, robbed first of the smoothing influence of a dead mother, and then of the directive comfort of the living love-dead father. Doro knew. He had watched from a slope the scene between father and son, and cursed softly with relief at it. Now to tell Romulan Valentius was slain, stabbed in the back by the kinfolk of Romulan’s wife. And to conclude by telling, as maybe he would have to, that the seemingly beautiful winsome bride Romulan had called to in his delirium, was also dead. . . . Doro would not shirk, but he could guess what would come after, the unravelling of all those fragile threads that bound together brain and heart and soul and flesh.
The day was shortening even now and Doro tired to his very blood. But he must get to Chenti and find out, how carefully, all he could. For if she died, he must know. He could only hope Romulan would not cleave to his threat to come after him, if return were tardy.
Smitten sideways by sun, all the towers looked out of true and ready to crash in the streets. These towers. Would they still stand in a hundred years, or in four hundred? And if they did, would men still be at feud, still killing one another? Or would the earth have grown so sad by then that she would wither like a vine? Or would the terror and sorrow finally drive men to fight within themselves, to free themselves of themselves, to change as never in all the centuries since the Garden?
Strange thoughts for Doro. Something from the wine and his tiredness.
But already the gold-plated lion-leopard gleamed overhead and before him like a spangle, and his own world blotted out the future.
The amber turned black after an intercession of purple. The flies, still captive, continued their operations.
At Susina’s house, the guests were more numerous and less known tonight than usual. Not necessarily a useful factor under the circumstances. For though the door to the small apartment on the mezzanine had been firmly locked from within, once or twice it had been hammered on. The first time, Cornelia’s startled cry had boosted the casual to the intent. With yodelings and kicks at the woodwork, five gentlemen had laid siege to the door—“Ho! There’s a plump chicken in here, not too young a one either. Glad for attention at bargain rates.” Susina had been forced to call upon assistance from her three courteous and large-thewed houseguards. Even when the riot was dispersed, unfortunate attention had been drawn to the door and the fundamental evidence that it was locked.
“Come now, Susina. Who’s hidden away in the chamber?”
“My mother, sir,” Susina had answered.
Her wit had been hailed, but she had not been believed. However, settling on more available fare, most of the guests had presently gone off to their pleasures. A succeeding batch sat drinking in the courtyard rather longer, but inevitably at last, a drunk patron careering up the stair with his choice, awarded the locked door a playful blow. Now, Cornelia was too wise to give tongue. But nevertheless, the guest, with the idée fixe of the sozzled: “Why lock this door, dearest Susina? Open it. It is the room I most desire to lie in.” And “Now, Susina of Susinas, open or I will burst the timbers.”
When this powder keg had been dampened (with grape-juice improved by storage), Susina took stock. Four guests yet lingered in the court, but they were docile patrons, well known. A fifth man lay asleep on a bench and should be no trouble, having already paid much for little. It was the sixth visitor who began to concern her. He had come in behind the first three customers, and sat over his wine, grudging of coins but engaging now and then in fierce conversations with her girls. Of these the girls reported only that he was more bothered by who worked at the house than interested in employing their services. And he, too, it now seemed, had grown obsessed by the locked door, for he had begun to watch it steadfastly.
“Well, sir,” Susina said, going over to him and replenishing his wine herself with the gracious bow that trickled her nipples over the rim of her dress. “Well, but we do not seem able to please you. Have you seen nothing to your taste? There are certain others I may show you. We do, I assure you, understand also the Eastern fashion here. Or you have, perhaps, special requirements. If you could bring yourself to intimation—”
“I heard,” said the young man, an aristocrat, aggressive, familiarly though unfriendly drunk, “I heard you have a new whore.”
“You refer to Cassia? I regret she is at a supper tonight.”
“Not any Cassia.”
“I have,” Susina said, “three most alluring boys, who—”
“Not a—a boy. A girl. A girl from a tower. A kitten of a girl. Guess who I mean? Behind that bloody door which screams, perhaps.”
Susina was perturbed. She did not wish to set her private guard on this one. The cloak had slipped somewhat and she glimpsed jewelwork. His rings were spectacular and he was foolish to flaunt so many in the Bhorga.
“Handsome lord,” said Susina, “we have no noble ladies here engaged secretly in the trade, as some other houses of joy boast that they do. If that’s your hope, you’ll have to seek elsewhere.”
And at that he came to his feet and seized her wrist. There was a dagger in the ringed fingers now, pressing its point in the mound of her breast. The last awake customers held their breath, and so did she. He was tipsy enough, and for some reason disturbed enough, to scar her nastily if she shouted for her guard, or even if she did not. Susina lifted her hand quietly to brush his lips, as if toying with him, and drove one of her own rings hard up into the base of his nose. He staggered back, of course, in agony, blinded by tears, and the knife clattering on the ground. Then, she called her guard, and calmly she told him, for she was strident only in jest, that he might expect to be unwelcome at her house henceforth. Her men were also quite courteous with him, and only laid him on the street, he choking with pain and humiliated emotion. After the door shut, he crouched by the wall until his head began to breathe and see again.
Saffiro knew that, as in the past, he had misjudged his target and his road. Fool. Why had he gone inside the place? Why? Because in some manner he had wished to terrorize the girl he now knew for certain was concealed there. Because he had seen her a bride, and other things had followed that seeing, making him superstitious about her. Because her lover had murdered his friend. Yes, he had wished to behold Iuletta Chenti Montargo with anguish in her eyes. He would behold it. But not yet—
