Sung in Shadow, page 37
Doro began to speak, rapidly. He produced, one by one, every element of persuasion and logic and emotional coercion that he could lay hand to. The sentences were rough, and roughly cobbled together. If the arguments were flawless, he could not be certain Romulan paid heed. Yet, as previously, it seemed he listened, seriously and courteously, in a way Valentius had had, and Romulan himself never, never had, before today.
Romulan did indeed listen. The thick armor of acceptance was on him, and through it he could afford to hear even the most hurtful and energizing things, they did not really touch him, and it seemed that they never could touch him, or anything again. He was snared, too, by that bizarre disadvantage of the truly beautiful. He knew and did not know the picture he presented, that which brought him the violent responses of others, devotion or hatred, and which impaired the judgment of others more or less consistently. To himself he was himself, an inadequate machine that stumbled and cried out, and in this human condition, the reactions about him were a source of discomfort. Mercurio had spared him that, and with Iuletta had come a counterbalance, a mirror in which to see himself and also beyond himself. But no more.
How curious, that awakening yesterday, which had been, rather, like the descent into sleep, the extended sleep of oblivion. Where now was she, in perfect fact? In expurgation on some plain of the afterlife? Or in the Chenti sepulcher, which seemed to draw him helplessly toward itself, and for no purpose, none at all. For why pay calls upon the dead? Would they converse, would they stretch out their hands in welcome? Or did they peer in gratification through some trapdoor in the floor of Heaven?
For the first time, he found that he had sought perception beyond the grave, and was no longer assured of its character. Even Hell had become indefinite. Was he to think of Iuletta there, or anywhere, save where he had seen her, in the world of light and shade and flesh and breath and here and now? He was unable to visualize her in another form, and so could not visualize those extraterrestrial domains that might encompass her.
“With these papers, no one will gainsay you,” Doro said.
Romulan nodded.
He recalled Mercurio’s persuasions, drastic or mellifluous, brief or verbose, but always . . . persuasive. If Mercurio had lived, what would he say now? But if Mercurio had lived, now would not be now, but some other station on the highway of events. What was it the priest had said—If you think so, then so it is for you. The teaching of Christ, no less. He that believes in me—Ah, Laurus. If I could alter all this, by my belief. Oh, Laurus, I’d give up my soul—Romulan raised his head and felt the rain sprinkled through the trees mildly across his brow, his cheeks. Warm rain, warm as milk. When had he said those words? Before the Chenti betrothal feast, was it not?
Where was it Doro was talking of? The Levant. His proposed sanctuary. The cindery skies, the orange groves, the walled seaports pushed by their crumbling mountains into the ocean. Another world. And Verensa on her hills, never to see her towers again. And did that horrify him then? Verensa, where all his kin, of blood or heart, were changed into marble.
He had not slept last night, but paced about, and today he had been riding, and now he was all at once worn and weary, and to stop Doro prating he would do anything on earth.
“Yes, Doro,” Romulan said. “Then we’ll turn back to Lombardhia.”
And Doro, naturally, stopped. And as naturally re-started in a low voice: “—To Lombardhia?”
“Why not? Let me defy my stars. Let me not die. What do I care where I go or where I’m to be? To bloody damnable and accursed Lombardhia. And to the Levant, or to the surface of the moon, if there’s room for me to balance there. Yes, Doro. We’ll ride to Manta and reach the gates before sunset.”
Doro’s horse started forward with a jerk, and then, shying wildly, pranced backwards. Romulan’s horse shied at the exact and matching instant. As this occurred, Romulan became aware of a pale shimmer on the road some fifteen or sixteen paces away from them, a glare he had taken for rogue sunlight in the rain. Yet now the shimmer seemed to drift, pulsing, and as he gazed at it, harden into a coherent rounded image.
Romulan’s horse brought up its head and neighed sharply, rolling its eyes, sweating with fear. There was a new aroma above the scent of the freshened soil, the laved path of the road, indescribable, yet peculiarly arid in the wetness.
“It moves,” Doro said, rational and very quiet.
“Does it have a shape? It seems to me it does.”
“Yes. The shape of an egg.”
They held their horses as best they could, and the shining shape, which was like an egg, blew toward them. It whispered as it came, and Romulan felt all the hairs of his body shift. The horses pawed the ground. Was this some proof, some omen, of the existence of phenomenal things?
There began to be a shadow now, within the glowing egg, bisecting it. He remembered the golden ray which had bisected the silver crescent in the magician’s insularium. Laurus. Laurus. Romulan leaned forward, staring, his breath and his thought going together. For the magician-priest stood before him on the road, rimmed by ovoid colorless fire.
“What is it?” Doro said.
“A man. The priest—” Romulan, forcing himself to answer, felt his strength flowing away into the sphere of light. It drained him to fuel itself, oil for a lamp, no more.
Doro was crossing himself. Romulan laughed. He shouted, breathless, across the road:
“Well, you’re here. What do you want?”
He could see Laurus quite clearly now, the mantle, the sunless skin, the orderly features. Even the glint of the crucifix on the breast. And the left hand uplifted, delivering one single, minimal gesture, that of beckoning. Once only.
“What,” Romulan said, “you would not have me rush to safety? You’d have me tangled in the snares of my foes, would you, sorcerer-priest?”
There was a sizzle like fat thrown on a fire. Something exploded, resembling cannon-shot in the distance.
Save for themselves and their trembling animals, the road was empty.
Romulan swung himself from his horse, and commenced the work of soothing it. His eyes were blank and oddly darkened as if from some drug, and as his hands moved, his face grew still again, and uninhabited.
Doro was unsure what he himself had witnessed. He had seen the glow, and in the glow a dark patch rather like the contours of a man. But he would not have sworn to it, nor to the presence of the occult. The weather might itself invent weird creatures. He had heard tell of them, entities such as those lights which danced on the masts of storm-running ships. As for the priest, Laurus, there had been some sort of hinted aversion to him at the brothel Doro had not liked.
“He sheltered me before,” Romulan said. He was steady, bemused but not alarmed, still insulated by his general state, which Doro recognized. “Shelter, and foul medicine, for I think he knew I had taken up with the plague. And then, he predicted my father would come after me. What, by Christ, does he want from me now?”
“Nothing,” said Doro promptly. “Lef’s—”
“Something. Something his black magic wishes of me.” Romulan suddenly turned, his body tensed, his arms outflung in a ridiculous drama that was terrifying. “He’s a necromancer, Doro. Doro—can he raise the dead for me, do you hazard?” And grinning, he turned back again. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “let me see.” And he was in the saddle in that insane showman’s leap Flavian Estemba had taught him, and the horse was away, pelting down the road with him. Again, again, in the direction of Sana Verensa, her pitiless towers, and death.
* * *
• • •
To approach now from another quarter the hermit’s oratory, which he had visited three times before, that was something, perhaps, to weaken the power of repeated things.
The horse was not overly tired, and fear had galvanized it. As he deserted him, however, poor Doro had seemed in difficulties with his own mount. And now they were left behind. A look past his shoulder awarded Romulan the vacant road, glittering as sun slit the cloud.
In the tumult of the ride there was a senseless exhilaration. Only arrival could end it, but ended it would be. For it was no more than some jest to think the hermit might rouse the dead. Had Romulan not, once before, suggested such a thing and mocked it? Why now then hurtle toward the place, his chances given to the winds, when one minute before he had decided to protect himself? Had there been real witchcraft performed on the road, not some dream or fantasy, and was it the spell which magnetized him?
Yes. The mirage had seemed real. The priest within the sphere of sheeny lightning, beckoning. And if Lauras could do such a thing as that—
Birds spiraled up from a ragged field and a spoke of sunlight broke, sheer and yellow, through the stalks and across the road. Impulsively, Romulan pulled the horse’s head around and sent it in through the field, running diagonally now toward his destination. (Perhaps the oratory would not be there, gone up in the air as the birds had done, or slid down into Hell beneath.)
And he thought abruptly of galloping to Marivero, Iuletta on the gelding before him, and thrust the vision away. It had hurt him to think of her, the first time he had felt the pain of it. And now he urged the horse to greater speed, to leave the pain behind him for the birds to tear and destroy with their beaks.
The land already rose and fell, and soon, smashing through the tall grasses, half surprised, he drew the horse in hand above a rolling slope, and saw the stone pines grouped below him. Beyond them, the oratory, very small, only its topmost angle tinctured by the westering sun.
How brief the ride had been, or seemed to be. And now he was here, and what should he do here? Turn back, Doro’s voice said within him.
Not aware he did so, Romulan shook his head. Exhilaration had ceased.
He rode the horse at an amble down the slope, the grasses bending now away from them and springing up behind. The flowers that had rilled the grass with fire were dead.
A little wind was turning the sun-wheel on the post and he heard it whining, dimly, but did not look to see, as he came up to the door. He tethered the horse, utilizing the bough of the pine tree, as always before. The mechanical slave failed to call out at him as he did this. And going to the door he found it would open.
When he entered the whitewashed drum of the building, it seemed to have faded and to have shrunk. There was something strangely lacking, as if a presence had been removed from it; removed as the cross with the ivory Christ, its solitary ornament, had been removed.
Romulan walked to the second door behind the altar. He had sought this hermitage three times. At the first a peevish cynical brat, the second, a ranting bully, the third, dying of grief and terror, crawling on his knees, plague on him and all the unbearable anguish of life itself. This fourth time he stood at the entrance of the magician’s cell, what was he now? He considered himself, and found he no longer knew what or who he was, or what he might become. Seeing that he might presently be slain, perhaps this did not matter very much.
He drew the black curtain aside. As he raised his hand to knock on it, the second door opened.
Within, the cell was filled by daylight. Startled, Romulan glanced about, missing the source of the light entirely in his disorientation, then comprehending that a line of round-topped windows were revealed where only one was ever visible formerly. As the windows had appeared, so the sorcerous paraphernalia had disappeared. Not a map, not an astrolabe, not a point-toothed fish remained. Even the table was gone, the candle stands and the lamp. Even the stuffed dragon, the turtle on its eminence of impure jade. Only a phalanx of great chests towered along one wall.
The magio stood beside the chests, his hands folded before him.
Romulan Montargo gazed at him, an extended searching gaze, no more adolescent, no more merely askance or defiant. After a moment, Romulan said, “Did I see what I reckoned I saw, on the Padova road?”
“If you saw anything which brought you here, then be assured, it found you at my will.”
“Another boast? I’m to quake at your genius and your supernatural strength? I’m past such antics, spiritual Father.”
“Attend. It’s only this: I supposed you near and sent to summon you, if you would obey the summons. You have done so.”
“How was it achieved?”
“By means of the mind, and the mind’s capacity. This is superfluous to your needs, to know so much. A message has waited on you.”
“From whom?”
“From one that you come back to mourn.” The hands of Fra Laurus unfolded, and held out to him a leaf of paper.
Romulan came to it raging and at last afraid.
“What? Some ghost has come flapping in and wailed for pen and ink? Dare I read it?”
“Read. Though it will bring you no pleasure to do so. A necessary preface.”
Romulan, hardly intending it, took the paper and looked down at it. He saw a delicate tracery of letters, never seen, known at once: the handwriting of Iuletta Chenti.
Pious Father, grant me the blessing of your attention for the length of this. I would speak to you of a woman who has lost all her substance in the world.
He read on. He held himself in a vise, and read it all. And when it was done, ocular ducts dryer than bones, hands steady, and voice unchanged, he lifted his eyes and met the remote intelligent eyes of his tormentor.
“Well,” Romulan said. “I am astonished, sir, you invite me here to peruse this. Do you think yourself safe from me, now I know you were the agent of her death? Now I may wonder what agony she endured from your bungling potion, despite her pleas, or what pangs she surfers now, in the other world, for her craven suicide, which act you abetted so punctually. She was my wife, magician. You’ve stolen her from me like a robber. What are you? Not what you say, for sure. If you’d followed the injunctions of your calling, false priest, she would be here for me, still. Oh, she says not, but would she have dared some other method when she was so fearful of all means but this soft drowsy death she trusted you, you viper, to give her? No.” At each emphasis, his voice stumbled, and righted itself again swiftly. He saw the words dance on the paper, blacker than pitch: Her husband has grown impatient . . . abandoned her. Only to be dead, that is what she most wishes for. He hated her, he hated her feebleness and her lack of faith. She had deserved betrayal, then, since she had only looked for betrayal, and merited death by entreating it Yet: “You foul devil of a priest, you Laurus. Tell me why I should not kill you as bloodily as I can devise and send you after her to suffer Hell as she now does? I’d say it was my right, to have vengeance for my wife. Since, but for you she would have lived.”
Fra Laurus refolded one hand, this time upon his golden crucifix.
“She lives.”
The world grew motionless. Not a blade of grass, not a mote of dust could bend, or spin. The light curtaining the windows became darker, for the sun had hesitated in the sky, its effulgence faltering. Birds, deprived of volition, would be showering out of the air as the rain had done. The hills—
“She lives,” Romulan said. He spoke from the midst of the stasis of all things, and now his words lay on the room, meaningless but unable to depart, and he must hear them forever, and know their absurdity forever.
“The rivers and the streams of life,” Fra Laurus said, “when one is in accord with them, bear destiny faultlessly along those routes and toward those goals which provide harmony both in the spirit of the earth and in the soul of man. Anything which jars this harmony, anything which has no purpose in the wholeness of the scheme, may be controlled. At times one must not seek to intervene. At times, even, some tragic flaw may prove essential to the whole. At other times I will stretch out my hand. I once explained this to you, Romulan Montargo.”
“She lives,” Romulan said again, or else the words reiterated themselves.
“She lives. I had her letter, delivered to me in the depth of night. I foresaw her able to harm herself as she promised. She asked for poison. I sent her Curaris. What is Curaris? An elixir known to the Egeptsi, but believed, in origin, to have been brought aboard papyrus ships from the continent of Atlantus, of which your Plato will have informed you. Mixed with certain other juices, the cordial has this property, it will induce trance. The muscles grow quiescent, the limbs rigid. The heart beats at a rate no physician can detect unless primed with the cause, not always then. To the recipient, it will seem to be a sleep. To the observer, no less than death.” The priest’s eyes looked down on him from their heights. “So she drank it, and so fell into this sleep, was taken for dead and interred in the Chenti tomb. As I judge the working of the medicine, she’ll wake tonight.”
The shadow of a bird went by each window in turn, and the world drew breath and lived again.
“I think I must be mad,” Romulan said. “Madness like a contagion, had from you.”
“No madness. She sleeps, is quick, and will wake up. Nor should she wake alone there.”
“The mausoleum—she lies there?”
“Where else? They thought her well-qualified.”
“Festering bones, and air like the strangler’s noose—it would kill her in earnest to revive in such a spot. But then, she’s dead. She’s dead.”
The priest began to stir. Over his head he drew the cowl of his robe. From the shadow that lay across the foremost chest, he took up a drapery, a priestly garment identical to his own.
“You know very well what you risk in entering the town, and in seeking the sepulcher of the Chentis, especially. Here is your disguise, since you thought to bring nothing for yourself.”
Romulan made no move to take the robe. Ridiculously he caught himself listening, thinking to detect the blunted sound of hooves on grass—Doro riding down the slope to the oratory. But Doro was delayed. The horse, skittish with fear of the lightning’s egg on the road, would not be managed, or had run away. Doro would not enter to add his commonplace sense to this senselessness.
