Sung in Shadow, page 38
“Come, then,” the magician said. Leaving the chests, the down-burning sunlight and Romulan together, he had walked to the doorway, still carrying the second robe.
“Wait,” Romulan burst out. “Wait, in God’s name.” And when Lauras took no notice and was gone, he said to the walls, “What am I to do?”
But as Lauras passed through into the landscape beyond the oratory door, his figure black and flat, soulless it seemed against the glow of westering light, Romulan came up behind him.
“Necromancer,” he said, “do you not require your luminous scroll—the Book of the Dead?”
Lauras turned, faceless silhouette, and held out to him the disguising robe, Romulan took it “This is damnation,” he said, and dressed himself, becoming thereby a hooded priest, darkened, silhouetted, and deprived of soul as Laurus was.
“It must be,” Romulan said, “some disgusting ceremony you mean to attempt, must attempt in order to call her back from the shadows. I’ll tell you now, do anything that would sully her, and I’ll kill you.”
“There is no ceremony. You yourself can wake her, with a kiss. You absence was, according to her words, her reason for death. Your presence will ensure her life. You must be the first thing that she sees.”
The priest began to climb away from the oratory. Romulan went after him. (The horse whickered as he passed it, thinking he came for it, falling quiet as he went on.) The hills were dappled with birdsong now, and rain hung sparkling on the grass. The scents of trees and plants were vibrant, and he recalled the perfume of her hair and skin. He sank on his knees in the grass, bowed to the soil, clutching it in his hands. He began to pray, but the prayers were uninspired, and as he prayed he almost wept, but his hurt and desperation could not sustain themselves. His passions had withered. When he pulled himself to his feet again, the priest was far ahead.
“Iuletta,” Romulan said, thrusting on up the slope, regaining ground quickly.
Sleep not death. If she slept and lived—
There had been the fraction of an instant, long ago, when he had seen her stand between him and some abyss. Yet she had thrown herself into the abyss before him.
No. She did not live. Mercurio, Valentius, Iuletta, each was gone for good. This was merely some nightmare he must act out. Perhaps some further experiment which the monstrous sorcerer was intent upon. (The marriage of Sun and Moon, the illusion of gold, Hell, flaming inside a crystal.) The sun was going down. But they would reach the gates—Verensa’s—before sunset.
* * *
• • •
As the ruby-red blaze diminished in the sky to a band, a ribbon, finally a thread, the garden of death turned black. The blind walls, pillars, porticos of its aristocratic mausoleums, which dominated the upland of the garden, became at first blocks of strident ebony on the ceiling of a lavender twilight, while downhill that lessening pool of scarlet bled away. Then, losing all contour and all pride with the light, they blended and embraced with the trees. As the fullness of the dark dripped down, the graveyard grew ominous and imposingly still. The perfume of growing things mingled with decaying stone and broken earth, and with some other component, perhaps imagined, unique to its situation. Above, the Basilica, a silvery diadem. Below, the sequined washes of the Lower Town, the mercantile quarter, the Bhorga. And floating far off in the air, like an island, the lamplit tops of the eternal towers. Yet these things were alien, having no influence it seemed upon this silent bedchamber of the dead.
Wrapped in the stigma and mystery of the garden, Saffiro Vespelli waited, leaning one shoulder on an upright of marble, his head sunk forward, himself in a sort of sleep that yet could partly hear and vaguely see, and hopelessly, tirelessly ponder.
Saffiro was exhausted and disillusioned. His personal feud with the Montargo had begun both to appall and to bore him. To avenge Mercuric Estemba was a pact with the antique rulings of romance. It had no true substance. Its purpose had been to assuage guilt and pain, and fear, that too. Its reality—these vigils, these seekings after an elusive villain who would not come to him, stunned and destroyed the healing force of Saffiro’s hate, and left him to confront the dismay within himself. That which he had sought to evade.
Here he stood now, upon this hillside burial mound, charged with murderous waiting for one who, obviously, was elsewhere. Romulan, his father’s fortune doubtless now open to him, might spend it over the whole earth. If he had loved the girl enough to mourn for her, he would not risk mourning at her tomb, that tomb now twenty short paces from where Saffiro lurked like a cutthroat.
And for Flavian—did Flavian demand vengeance? (Flavian Estemba, perhaps not the superlative guide, the friend, the brother, but one who would corrupt.)
Saffiro’s inner voices now began to nag at him. If he were free of this, might he not be free of all of it? No guilt, no lingering alarm. All swept away with Mercurio by the cleansing brooms of hours and days and months. Without this task (imposed by Electra Chenti—do not think of her), perhaps one could be permitted to forget the deed and what one had learned, and what one owed . . . ? He reached for the wineskin that leaned with him on the stonework porch of the Retzis’ monument, and drank. Rough wine from the Bhorga, Flavian’s choice.
Saffiro sighed, and then snatched back his breath, and held it. For there was a movement through the garden, a rippling disturbance of darkness among the cypresses.
Almost involuntarily, setting down the wine, Saffiro’s gloved hand crossed his body and fell upon the hilt of his sword. In the cool of night, sweat started on his forehead and his spine.
Then, like phantoms, but not like the one who had troubled his brain, two figures stepped out onto the turf before the Chenti mausoleum. Saffiro released his breath again in a noiseless curse. Two priests of some mundane order, plain to his night-vision by the outline of their habits and the ubiquitous cowls. It seemed they looked around them, and he wondered sardonically what their business might be, and reckoned almost at once on some illegality, a hunt for stray skulls or wild mandrakes, that might prove amusing to a hidden watcher.
Then his humor perished in amazement. Producing some instrument from his robes, one of the holy men smote violently on the iron bar across the doors of the tomb. Once, twice, three times, four. At the fifth blow, the obstruction gave way and clattered down. A thrust, and the nearer of the doors swung inwards.
Then came a hiatus, a murmur of voices—Saffiro could make out nothing, save that one man seemed younger than the other, and in anger. Suddenly, this younger, angry priest strode forward, into the violated sepulcher. His companion smoothly followed him, and the broken-in door swung out again to close, with a rough appearance of wholeness, against its fellow.
Saffiro’s thoughts now babbled. He would have wished to silence them. Some spasm of pure knowledge had enveloped him. Even rogue priests, in search of remedial thigh-bones, did not crush in the doors of the tower-born dead. While the instrument of breakage had been a sword.
His hand locked on the hilt of his own blade, his heart pounding, Saffiro asked himself (in hopes of a firm denial), if one of those who had entered the mausoleum was not in fact, after all, the very man he sought, Romulan Montargo.
TWENTY-THREE
In the blackness, the tomb smelled of cold iron, colder powders, leisurely decays. And under everything, incoherent foulness came and went, threatening but insubstantial. Having entered, Romulan stood to one side, allowing the sorcerer to come after him. Yet the eerie brushing by of the Fra Magio’s long robe sent a chill across every inch of Romulan’s skin. An insidious panic, that had nothing to do with his intellect or reason, or even with his emotion, had begun to grapple with him, when a light broke and rinsed away the dark.
He saw the interior of the tomb, then, its ranked pillars, its hard scrolled couches with their freight of bones, cobwebs and jewels. He saw it all and despised it all, as something noisome and obvious. The unsubtlety of death. And fear left him, his anger returned, and the awful limping sorrow that could seem to find no meaning for him.
“So the Chentis sleep, then,” he said aloud. “The one I butchered, also, somewhere hereabouts. And where is she?”
“She is here.”
The light had been made or conjured, and fixed on two slender candles now stuck by their own wax to a slab of stone. Romulan stared at them, and from them to the points of two narrow Eastern slippers of ivory satin crusted over by gold, and from these to the long folds of a wine-colored gown.
“There,” he said, and found he could not move, either to advance or to turn away. Yet his eyes traveled on. They discovered shimmerings where the light now spilled and dusks where the shadow waited to return. They discovered the soft swell of the breast, where two hands lay on a silver flower. They discovered scatterings of black paper, the petals of uncanny charcoal roses, and one petal lying on the white marvellous curve above the edge of the gown, the fluted brim of the camisola. Garnets smoldered steadily. The black petal on the white surface of the breast (where once he had lain blinded as the fountains of life sprang from his loins to hers, their arms locked about each other as they drowned together), the black petal did not quiver, but stood like a blot, opaque, immobile. And now, the hair, hair blacker than the rose petals, brighter than the darkness. And so the slim arch of the neck, and so the sculpted chin, the chiseled underlip, blushed by some cosmetic—and so—and so—the straight line of the nose, the fragile plane of the cheek, the hollows where the lashes lay like black wings, the lids made of nacre, the brows of sooty feathers, the forehead of milk-white glass with a mauve pearl lying a little sideways on it, and the grapebloom roots of the hair, and the hair again and the gold bees which held the chain of the pearl to the hair hardly shining, losing the light, and the black nothing beyond.
“You should approach, Romulan Montargo,” Fra Laurus said.
Romulan felt the floor heaving under his feet and his eyes clouded over. He recalled the insularium, where first this oppression had fastened on him. He smelled death and rottenness, and needing to cry aloud, he shouted at the priest.
“I’ve seen her. Do what you have to. Try to bring her soul out of her mouth.”
But: “Approach,” the priest said again, and nothing else.
And Romulan, pushing the clinging cowl from his head, went forward, peculiarly compelled by the uninsistence of the voice.
Coming close, however, he did not look at her, dizzy, his sight dazzled by the candles, it was easy to see nothing of anything. Yet it seemed necessary to speak.
“I’m here. What next?”
“Take up her hand.”
“She’s wed to death. Is it honorable to touch another man’s wife?” Romulan turned away.
The priest repeated, softly, “There is nothing to repel you. Take her hand.”
So, he leaned and let his fingers close over hers, shutting his eyes as he did so, as a pain quite physical, grey and screaming, rose in his side, in his ribs, his heart; that was utterly non-physical, only the clamor of grief. And this went from him almost instantly, leaving him once more in the other state, through which he was able to endure all this.
“Notice,” the priest’s voice murmured, “the fingers are warm, and flexible.”
Romulan held the hand of Iuletta. It did not seem warm to him, but cool, waxy and immovable. Opening his eyes, he beheld her rings staring at him. They had sent her into the dark with riches, as befitted the legal child of a mighty House. He pictured Lord Chenti blustering, deciding her portion, that she should gleam to confront the quick. The pearl was exquisite and rare, they had given her that. Or was it the Belmorios’ gift, maybe, before she humiliated them at the altar. The chain and its pearl, the gems on her dress. Her rings. Not his ring, of course, the marriage token. Who had had that? Maybe the whore-daughter in the Bhorga had filched it. For some reason, the pain struck at him again when he thought of this. He dropped her lifeless hand and straightened. She had no look of the grave, and no scent of it, either. Pure and delicious she lay stretched before him. Her face was cruel in its repose, for she seemed almost to be smiling.
He visualized her despair and her degradation, how she had penned the letter, waited for its reply. How she had uncorked the phial and drunk. He saw her suddenly in poisoned torture, writhing on some filthy brothel floor, alone, suffocating, blood running from her mouth. The smile could be the aftermath of some grimace, and misleading as to the nature of her death. He should turn back and wring the windpipe of this priest, this necromantic dabbler. Do it now. He did nothing.
It was a fragrance of cinnamon and incense which caused him at length to look about. A small cake of aromatics had been lighted and placed on the floor, a safeguard against the fetor of the tomb.
Romulan said, “I thought there would be some show by now. The scroll with the green figure on it. A raucous invocation. Is it blood you need? Use mine, all of it if you wish, for her sake. Only pardon me if I forget courtesy and laugh at you.”
The priest stood across from him now, the other side of Iuletta’s serene corpse. He observed her, no more than that, but intently, with great watchfulness.
Romulan’s pulses hammered against his flesh. His entire body paused in terrified expectancy, a yearning dread, for some event he knew impossible.
Getting no answer to his challenge, he made a wild pass before the face of the priest, and when Laurus lifted his eyes to him, said: “I may kill you yet. Tell me the agenda of this rite, or it shall be now.”
With simple logic the priest answered,
“Your sword was broken on the door.”
“Not my hands, however.”
“And do you suppose yourself a match for me, Romulan Montargo?”
Romulan glared at him, into the composed face, the hermit’s eyes gazing from their mountaintops. Something had caused the candles to flare up; the pallor of the magician’s skin, so intensified, grew mask-like. It seemed then as if it might be, all of it, a mask, this face, this tonsured fashionable hair, the body—or at least the robe in which the body was concealed. Only the eyes looked through, to give away the nature of what had so sheltered itself.
Romulan, trying to fathom it, come on it, was abruptly half afraid. It was no fear he knew, nothing rational. It was unexplained. But surely, in that moment, he did judge himself less than this priest of darkness.
The young man lowered his gaze. Very civilly he said, “No match at all, of course. Accept that I am duly cowed.” And regarded the girl’s hands crossed on the silver rose. The pain had gone. He had no urge to lament. He did not know her, this was not Iulet.
“All that must be done,” said the priest then, “is to wait patiently.”
“Until she wakes.”
“Exactly so.”
“May I ask how long a wait? You see, Father, I’ve some business in the Levant.”
“It seems to me it should be soon. The positive moment is unknown to me.”
“Unknown?” Romulan glanced up. The blue eyes lilted, bowed. “But, omniscient Father, you seem to have a knowledge of all things. You seem to assume the role of God. Or would it be his rival in the cellerage?”
Romulan moved from the slab where the unrecognized maiden lay.
“And so,” he said, “I will listen for your gladsome cry of triumph, outside, where the air is clean. Or else I may seek the covered cart you told me attends for you in the alley below the graveyard. May set it afire and send it running for the Bhorga. Rouse the town and lead the good people here to applaud your infallible art.”
The priest stood beside the dead girl, bending a little toward her now, to lay two fingers against her temple.
Romulan wrenched open the doors of the tomb and went out into the freshness of the night.
The moon was rising, and as he leaned a second on the angels by the door, the melancholy light seemed to calm some vital nerve within him. He wished then, with a dreary desire like that of an old man, for a resting place.
But presently he left the unloving support of the angels. He began aimlessly to cross the stretch of land that divided this sepulcher from another that a stone glove wound with stone flowers identified with the Retzi family.
So, between two cypress trees, he met with Saffiro Vespelli.
Saffiro was very drunk; it had seemed needful to be. Drink if not hatred now kindled him, and drink seemed to become hatred as he saw again Romulan Montargo’s exceptional face, garlanded in its black hair, above the blasphemously adopted habit.
“Now,” said Saffiro precisely, and impressively swirled out his sword from its scabbard.
Romulan glanced at it. His appearance did not change.
“And what,” he said, “is my quarrel with you?”
“Draw,” said Saffiro, “and discover.”
“Oh, pray tell me first.”
“I mean to recompense one you killed.”
“Leopardo Chenti.”
“Not he. The one you claimed your friend. Mercurio Estemba.”
Still Romulan remained, detached it seemed, uninterested.
“Chenti slew him, not I.”
“Liar! Felon and traitor. Devil. Backstabber.”
“So many titles,” said Romulan.
“So many, and all vile. Each earns you death.”
“Which I gather the Duke has decreed for me.”
“No, the brink is nearer than that.”
“Sir,” Romulan said, with great gentleness, “if you would keep from cutting off your nose, or some other, conceivably more valuable part, you should refrain from waving your blade in the air like a daisy which, I assure you, it is not.”
