Sung in Shadow, page 36
Nor did they last very long.
* * *
• • •
This harsh lesson—an end to obsequie before even it had begun—Susina attempted to teach her mother, who had surprised her by seeming to need it. “Now then, it’s past. Come, she’s lost, and nothing will bring her back.” (It might have been Cornelia herself talking so.) “She’s in Heaven, and where nicer if she was good enough. Better than any husband on earth. Did you never see the picture of an angel?”
In her own mind, Susina was wary of the chances of Heaven for Iulet. With no means to be sure, yet sure she was that the girl had found a way to kill herself, either with help from the dubious hermit Laurus, or without. There were poisons which could remove without evidence. Their existence had been known of since classical times. If so it had been, then to some fiery pit with that silly girl, who should have waited but a few hours more to get glad tidings, just as Susina had advised her. Having hesitated in awe at the noble stubbornness of her guest, Cornelia’s daughter had come at last instead to despise it. A stab of pity and regret made this emotion all the sterner. Where, after all, had been Iuletta’s stamina, bravery or strength? Why, Susina had seen young girls, younger than this Chenti maiden, endure far worse, and cling to life, tenacious as a vine. Of course, they were not stars in the sky, their atmosphere was never rarefied. And yet. Not to be loved, what was that? One could live without love. A great many did so, and lived well.
Susina, finding her dead, had posthumously cursed Iuletta in her heart. Not only for her precipitate stupidity. The pale young man, the Montargo’s servant, at her very elbow, who had come all the distance from Lombardhia to rescue his master’s wife, and viewed in her place a corpse. No, not only for that, but for the damnable consequences which followed after: that butcher-like lord of the Cat tribe, foul-mouthed as any man Susina had met, who came crashing about her house, threatening her, and all her girls and boys, and with not even the charity to offer a bribe for a discretion she would, being prudent, have awarded him without one. Cornelia, at the onslaught of Lord Chenti, Susina had wisely hidden away. “My mother, my lord, is sick to death with distress. I will answer for her, and for myself. I can hold my tongue and so will she.” “Ah, you poxy slattern!” he had bellowed. “Hold them so, or you’ll find yourself in a nastier spot than this.” And to speak of the Pox to her, in this clean house that was famous for its wholesomeness—It had given her a cautious satisfaction to hold her tongue also to him, on the subject of Romulan Montargo’s servant, sent himself by the secret way to freedom. Nor for that matter had she told Cornelia. With her charge dead, there seemed little point.
Dear God, when they had lifted her up, white wisp of a thing, and so beautiful, and carried her out, wrapped like a bolster for disguise. A cut flower. A fool.
And thereafter Cornelia, sitting over the wine all night, no longer weeping now, all wept out, wrung of tears, cheery blasphemies instead spilling from her: “Yes, she would make some angel a fine wife, so she would. God pardon me for thinking of it.” And never any suggestion that shrewd Cornelia, too, might have doubts of Iuletta’s fitness for Paradise.
Yet Susina, even as she conspired to liven her, saw the beginnings of a strange and insidious thing, which soon she was to perceive continuously. How her buxom billowy mother seemed to shrink, wrung not only of tears, but most curiously of flesh. Inside a week, caverns would appear under the bold eyes; inside three, only the slack and the big veins would be left of the busy hands. The death of flesh. There would come to be death in the hair, too, first only a peeling of its tint, which all this while had stayed fair under the veiling, fair as the tresses of a girl, finer and brighter than Susina’s own. Inside the year it would be thin and grey. There would set in a stiffness in one side, extending from the arm on which Lord Chenti had struck her. By the year’s end Susina, exasperated, would see an old and withered lady, laughing in a reedy cackle a laugh that never rose higher than her lips, that never reached as low as her heart. It somehow seemed Cornelia no longer had the wit to make do.
And Susina, prosperous and tolerant as she had become, prosperously would tolerate this aged child, aware it was dependent on her charity as she, farmed out in infancy, had never been dependent on Cornelia. Another had drunk the milk of those breasts, due to be shriveled bags, another run to be hushed and caroled and made much of against that stalwart side, due to be a bundle of clothes growing too large for it. And the endless anecdotes of Iuletta’s babyhood, these too Susina must then put up with: How she had fallen down, how she had got up again; her quaint sayings, her precocious deeds.
And a few years after, by Cornelia’s own deathbed, Susina must hold the frightened and bewildered shrunken hand, and hear the poor pipe of her voice over and over inquiring, “Where is my poppy, my catling? Where is my young lady? She is a fine donna of the Belmorio Tower. Yes, I saw her wed. Her husband was a beauty of a man, his hair was black as a raven, and such a fine dancer’s legs on him—But will she not come in and visit me, now I’m fallen so sick?”
And, “There, Mother,” Susina would murmur, “you shall see her very soon.” Wondering, half in cynicism, half in foreboding, if Lord Lucifer would grant them space to greet each other, before he roused up the fires.
TWENTY-TWO
It seemed to Doro, where he noticed it at all, that the weather was abnormally oppressive, as if every atom of the abundant summer was gathering to produce strange alcohols of itself. The fierce clarity of the morning had given way to a brown afternoon, hot sun and overcast combining in the sky. The wild orchards, which occasionally overhung the Padova road, were loaded with fruit, weighed down, and already falls of damsons and apples rolled in the grass generating a low heady fume and clouds of drunken bees which dismayed the horse.
The streets of Sana Verensa had been buzzing like the bees until the first hour of the afternoon. That was the effect of the lavish Chenti funeral. Doro, secreted in the Montargo Tower, had seen nothing of it, nor had wished to.
At first light yesterday, the woman Susina had gifted him space and privacy to leave the brothel, before summoning perforce the old red Gattapuletta Cat himself. Doro sought Montargo, and once back there had found, as he suspected, some necessary dealings to accomplish. An odd thing and no mistake, that he should end up compelled to steal the seal-ring of Valentius in order that Valentius’ heir should have it. That, and certain strategic documents in a box in Montargo Primo’s study—these items Doro was privy to, and these items he had determined to come away with. When asking failed, and reason, Doro had resorted to a sly maneuver or two and a picked lock. The dispirited officiousness and confusion in the Tower oppressed him, and he was glad to get away from it, going from the house meekly and rather unnoticeably, with Romulan’s rightful property concealed in his cloak.
There could be no going back there for Romulan himself, so much was certain. There was little enough to go back to now, save an heir’s duty to the frowning stones themselves. Under the circumstances, such duty was worth nothing. To approach the gates of Montargo would be to incite death.
Fortunately, there were other places to which a son of the Montargo family could escape, with impunity and some wealth. The symbol of the ship was appropriate, for Valentius’ shipping interests were sound and far-flung, and would provide a path of flight and ultimately a foreign haven. A haven secure in a manner Lombardhia could no longer be reckoned to be. Tower feuds at the pitch the escalating Chenti-Montargo war had now reached had been known to spread over ducal borders, and miles beyond.
These matters Doro would put to Romulan. Somehow, he would put them, and at some juncture. But first there would be other words he must say.
Beside him, the sagging trees; above, the sinking sky. Within him this burden of news, weighing him down unutterably, unavoidably.
His spirits were on the ground, scuffed by the hooves of his horse along with the dust and the fallen damsons. His only consolation had come to be the length of road and therefore of time that lay between him and his accounting to Romulan. That it grew shorter step by step he was only too conscious, and, ashamed, he had not so far allowed the horse to slow its pace.
Wanting to, probably, he had by now forgotten Romulan’s vow to come after him, should he be late in his return to Manta Sebastia.
It was therefore with a woeful miscellany of feelings that Doro, less than a mile from the turning-off point of the road, glanced up and beheld another rider moving toward him in a whirlwind of coppery dust. Edging to the side of the thoroughfare to permit the other fellow free passage, asking himself vaguely who this could be, riding from the branching track that led eventually to Lombardhia, at the same instant totally and fatally informed of who it was and that the rider’s business, current too quickly, was with him.
Shortly, even the radiation of the sun could no longer excuse Doro of recognition.
The horse was reined in a few feet away, and the unmistakable countenance was before him, and the blue eyes that seemed at first alive with anger.
“Doro! In the Name of God—”
“Yes, sir. I was delayed. I’m sorry. But you should not be here.”
Romulan said nothing to this, and for a few moments then they sat their horses, facing each other through the settling dust, not speaking.
It began to come to Doro that Romulan’s face had grown extraordinarily still, almost immobilized. The lips were sealed together and the eyes very wide, no longer angry, if they had ever been. Unlike the face, the hands on the reins were nervous and agitated. Doro began to see in this face, these hands, some dreadful indication of prior knowledge. And even as he thought this, Romulan said:
“Tell me what it is.”
“There’s no good way to tell it. The report is bad.”
“I know that. Say it out.”
“We had no letter from your father, sir, because he could send no letter. On the night you rode for Lombardhia, he was killed outside Montargo. A stabbing. It’s supposed the Chentis are to blame.” Doro paused. Romulan said nothing, did not look away. It was all too plain he was waiting to hear something further. “Another,” Doro said, “another has also died.”
It was so quiet, here on this stretch of the road. Bees still harvesting somewhere, and a bird singing, and now and then the tamp of the horses’ hooves as they lifted them and set them down. But these sounds composed the quietness. They were not compatible with the speech that must continue to be pulled out, somehow, through his mouth.
And then Doro found he did not need to speak for a while.
“Iuletta,” Romulan said. There was nothing in his voice at all. “You are contriving to tell me she’s dead. Tell me how, then?”
Doro straightened.
“It’s generally reckoned of—some illness.”
“And the truth?”
“Perhaps, she may have taken poison.”
Romulan looked away at last. He looked along the road, in the direction of the town, which was not visible from here, only the pastel umbras of its hills.
Doro said, “Chenti Primo would have her wed the Belmorio, and at the altar, so the story runs, she refused him. And the Chentis cast her out. She went with the old nurse, whose daughter is in trade in the Bhorgabba.”
“A whore.”
“Just so. But Iuletta was received honorably and discreetly there, and kept from the ways of the house. And there she was to wait until—but it seems—”
“It seems she was to wait for me and thought I had forsaken her,” Romulan said gently. His eyes after all were lowered now, and his hands as immobile as his face had been. “Because I lay sick, and my father lay dead, and neither of us had therefore the means to send to her.”
“It may have appeared so.”
“It did appear so. It appears, too, she had but little faith in me. It appears she thought very little of me altogether.” Something grated in the voice, and was gone. Almost idly, Romulan added, “Of course, it has been some while. I trusted her safe, did I not, safe in Montargo. But she, very likely, might have judged I was done with it all, the marriage, the compact of love. All of it. Yes.” His hands lightly woke the reins. The horse began to move forward. “And my father, too,” Romulan said. He was past Doro before Doro quite knew it, the horse trotting on along the Verensa road.
Doro set his own horse after it.
“My lord, there’s nothing to be gained in Verensa. The Chentis are gluttonous to murder you, or if not the Duca has ruled—”
“I care nothing for the Duca. Less for the Chentis.”
“The sentence either way is for your death.”
“Less than for both of them, what may happen to myself. There is no one to need me living, now.”
Doro said, riding beside him:
“The Lord Valentius sent you away to keep you unharmed. He died crediting this. If you could ask him now what he desired—”
“He would desire that I remain unharmed in Lombardhia.”
“No. He would want you in better security than that.” Calmly and sensibly, though it was not ethically at all the time, Doro began to broach the plan of escape, the seal ring and the documents, the shipmaster who should be employed, the vessel and the route. Next he moved to monetary concerns, mentioning bankers and how they might best be dealt with. Romulan listened. It was evident that he listened. Once or twice he nodded, and once he said, “Yes.” Nevertheless, he continued to ride in the wrong direction. Eventually Doro produced the seal ring and extended it. Romulan, turning in the saddle, took the ring but did not draw it on to his finger, where indeed it might not have fitted, for Romulan’s hands were of another mold than Valentius’ had been, the articulate hands of a swordsman. This mark on him of what he was, this key almost to what had come about, checked Doro even as Romulan checked, curling and uncurling his ringers about his father’s ring. And they rode on, unhurriedly, toward Verensa. Which was death.
Finally Doro declaimed, in a tone of intense casualness, “If we turn the horses now, we should reach Manta before sunset.”
“With ease,” Romulan said. He rode on, playing with the ring, his eyes on the horizon of insubstantial hills.
“My lord,” Doro said.
“Go back,” Romulan said. “Go back without me. I’d not haul you after me into this.” He fell silent, and Doro waited. After a minute, Romulan said to him, “There’s nowhere in the whole world I wish to be, or to journey to. But this place I know. And they are there. Both of them. My father, and my wife.”
“No, my lord,” Doro said. “They are not.”
“Religious pedantry. Very well. In the sky, then, my father in the cloud there, and Iuletta waiting to arise with the morning star.”
“My lord—”
“I brought them this. Their deaths are on me, as Flavian’s death is on me. And Leopardo’s, for that matter.”
Doro was repelled by the reasonable adult voice of the young man riding beside him. Doggedly he kept up, would not leave go. But there seemed nothing more to say for the present.
“Doro, return yourself to Manta.”
“I was instructed to guard you and shall do so,” Doro said after all, embarrassed.
“Oh, God.” Romulan laughed very softly. He palmed Valentius’ ring abruptly and put it away inside his doublet, which was of a dull, cold blue, nondescript on the streets of Manta Sebastia, but sufficient to kill him in Verensa, of course. “Would you believe me, Doro, if I told you that I knew, before you spoke of it, my father’s death, and hers?”
“I saw that in your face.”
“Did you? Yes, perhaps. Yesterday, in the black of the morning before the sun climbed—I woke suddenly, and knew her dead. I used that day in discussion with myself, scolding myself I was an idiot. And by the time they rang midnight from the citadel, I understood my father also—And so, today I came after you, and every beat of the beast’s hooves was like the bell, the bloody death bell I heard when Mercurio died on my sword and when—” Romulan relinquished words, and as he did so the alternating light of the sky closed over. Across the amberous clouds there flickered a sheen of lightning and after a second or so the thunder tumbled down on the land, dry and sullen and strangely spent.
In the wake of the announcing storm, tossed coins of rain were broadcast on the dust. Doro caught at the bridle of Romulan’s horse and tugged, trotting his own animal under a stand of trees beside the road. Romulan did not resist and his horse came willingly.
“Shelter from the weather,” Doro said. It was a pretext, but it might serve, maybe.
The darkness seemed to fence them in under the trees, shadows unsnarling from their branches. The distant hills ran down into the rain.
Romulan sat motionless, watching the water slant beyond the enclosure, his hands loose, relaxed and elegant. In his handsomeness, the long black hair on his shoulders, his clothes fashionable, everything about him hinting at a paragon, he distressed Doro, for he was beyond him. In rank, in person, in all things. Such a being was not to be managed. Particularly now it had assumed this ghastly self-defeating strength.
Romulan seemed to guess some aspect of Doro’s frustration. At length, Romulan indicated the rain. “You were looking for my tears,” he said. “Well, you must make do with these. Let the sky weep for me, Doro. Now I can only weep blood.”
The lightning came again, a broad flash, the progress of which might almost be examined. The thunder was tardy, some way away. The trees rattled above them. Soon the water would work through and there could be no more pretense for remaining stationary in this spot. The scents of the slaked dust, earthy and unexpected, filled the nostrils, seeming to bring a promise of some sort. But of what?
