Sung in Shadow, page 40
Romulan looked along their ranks, and saw the hawklike profile of a man who had died of a fever when Romulan himself was twelve years of age. And not much distance away another who had been killed at the height of Floria’s feud with the Lippis. The woman with the plumed fan turned to Romulan, and inclined her head graciously, without interest. How had she perished, and what sin had earned her the feasts and fires of Hell?
Wine stood on a table. He took up one of the peerless goblets—glass sheer as air—and filled the bowl from a jug of gold chased with silver. (The woman had looked away from him, as women in the world had not been wont to do so quickly.) He drank the crimson fluid from the glass. It seemed real, full and heady, the juice of a vineyard.
“It tastes of wine.”
Flavian glanced at him. The glance was very like the woman’s, courteous, barely seeing.
“And will taste of wine while you recall wine’s taste.”
“And to you?”
“Of nothing.”
“And to me, tomorrow, of nothing?”
“But not tomorrow. Here, there’s neither day nor night, no yesterday, and no today.”
Romulan lifted his brows, some joke almost on his lips—stillborn. And soon the wine would die on his lips also.
He set down the goblet, and as he again began, involuntarily, to scrutinize the hall, a pair of long unblinking eyes echoed his scrutiny. But this apparition was too recent. Romulan gazed, lips parted, his hand moving of itself toward the dagger in his belt.
The sleeves were correctly tied now, the hair, like ginger spice, was groomed. This stylish parcel hesitated beside Romulan, and then made to go on.
“Wait.” Romulan caught the flawless sleeve, and won back Leopardo Chenti’s stare.
“What, sir, do you want of me?”
“I am your assassin. What do you want of me?”
“Take your hand from my arm.”
“And my deathblow from your flesh? What if I cannot?”
Leopardo offered the slightest brushing with his fingers, and Romulan found his grasp had been suspended.
Betrayed by his own incorporeal form, Romulan said swiftly: “Think of your death, and remember who I am.”
“I remember you. You’re nothing to me.”
“I sent you here.”
“And someone has sent you.”
“If I could, I’d pay him for it.”
Leopardo’s eyes poured into his. They had a terrible depth that told only of unoccupancy, Yet, for a second, the mouth was wry.
“There’s no coin here, Romulan Montargo, to pay for anything. All is free. And all is worthless. Flourish in the bounty of the Duke.”
Trumpets sounded from somewhere inside the seams of the tower. The crowd made a suitable respectful noise. Romulan was taken with a horrid desire to laugh. Here the old man came himself. Lucifer the Prince. But what else?
Romulan took heed across the distance, between the headdresses, the caps, the mantled curls, of an entry of cloth-of-gold and black, while the trumpets peeled themselves to nothing. But the assemblage, already swaying like a young forest, next uprooted itself and flowed to the tables. Romulan, borne with them, seated himself, and when he looked again, beheld the Duke far off from him, a manikin framed by a tall ebony chair. Which did not greatly matter, since he had been named already, and that in a tomb by night.
There was food on the tables. Romulan reached toward it and drew back his hand. He saw how the other feasters did not feast, toying now with bread and pearls and meat and fans alike. Beside him, to his left, a woman puzzled over a jeweled book that had no words in it. To his right another cut up a peach into a myriad slivers with a tiny knife. Flavian Estemba was watching her. She was beautiful, yet there was no fascination now in the eyes of one who had been so enamored of beauty. Across the room, Leopardo Chenti sat like a figure of skillfully painted wax. Here, liking died, and hate died, with the dead.
No, all questioning was done. To this Romulan had descended, to this painless Nemesis that would destroy him a second time, melting away all that was within him, all that had made him a man, able to love, to rage, to mourn, all that had been himself.
Yet to this he had already turned, when alive, this dullness, this refusal of anguish and hope alike. Unwilling to believe some chance of happiness remained, incapable of summoning the force of prayer, inciting death in the Basilica garden. Yes, his sin, worse than all other sins, was that denial, and now justice had discovered him.
A faint murmur was blossoming from the tables, thickening, becoming a cry.
With offended shock, Romulan interpreted it as a call for the voice and mandolin of Flavian Estemba.
And Flavian was standing up, glancing about at them.
“Well,” he said. “What would you have me sing?”
“A song, Mercurio!” someone shouted, loud as recollection, and the formal mirth again started up.
“Oh, a song. I do not sing songs. I sing dreams, and they are nothing. And since you’ll have me sing nothing, I need not sing at all.”
The feasters in the hall answered with uproar, next with a sudden silence, from which there came the Duca’s voice like a low far drumming.
“To sing, Flavian Estemba: I request it of you.”
Flavian bowed to the ebony chair, with charm, without mockery, with no edge at all.
“I ask a favor in return. My minstrel’s fee.”
“Sing, Orpheus. And ask what you want.”
Flavian walked around the tables and between them, out on to the fire-freckled space of the floor. As he did so, he unslung the ivory cadaver of the mandolin from his shoulder.
The hall remained silent, and at the announcing chord, no fresh silence fell. Everyone of their faces was turned toward Estemba like flowers toward the sun. But faces that were void, faces that listened and heard nothing, as he had told them, faces that dreamed the hollow dreams of those who did not sleep.
And Lucifer himself, his hands folded, his white and priestly brow bending, as if in concentration. . . . To rule such a kingdom, what could he be but a desert, like all the rest?
Then the song sank upward and gathered like black petals on the air.
Who can know where love will find us,
Love far darker than the night,
Love far colder than the snow—
That has been both warm and bright—
Sung in shadow, that was show;
Bitter-tasting are you now,
Music of sweet and delight.
The last notes sighed from the mandolin and were gone. The promised nothingness contained the hall. There was no applause, and only the lifted heads were lowered, in homage or wretchedness or the awesome inadequacy of unfeeling.
“I deserve no reward,” Flavian Estemba said. “But still I ask it.”
The Hell-Priest, ensconced in his black frame, inclined the head that was no longer tonsured, and from which the malt-colored hair cascaded to a golden breast properly innocent of a crucifix.
“Ask.”
“A gentleman feasts with you tonight, an acquaintance of mine, and recently married. He has looked around for his wife, Lord Duke, and not seen her. Though he’s good reason to think her here.”
“Mistaken reason. She lives.”
And at the phrase, as when he had seen Leopardo, for a few moments Romulan thought himself, too, to be alive.
Throwing back his chair, he strode up the hall, under the fiery vases, past all the banks of the damned, and came to the place where Laurus reclined, who was Lucifer. But before Romulan could speak, Flavian Estemba spoke again from the center of the hall.
“My fee, then, my lord. They say the living necromancer can compel the dead to talk with him. Cannot the Master of the Underworld draw down the living to converse with the dead?”
Lucifer raised his hand, and everywhere flames shattered. Darkness smoked outward from the walls and from the ceiling which had been light. Here it seemed was the shadow, in which dead lovers sang the songs they had vaunted at the sun of the world. The shadow of impending night.
“I have summoned her,” Lucifer said, “and she draws near. It is a dream she has, of nothing. See, where she comes.”
And the shadow folded apart like a breaking bud and from it came a woman, blown on a black wind of hair. She was like a ghost, translucent, luminous, tinted by indefinite colors. Her eyes were open, and now and then they blinked with a glorious glimmering languidness. Otherwise, her face was quite as void as the faces of the dead themselves. And, as the wind that made no sound blew her hair, the long waves of her dress, about her, she herself stood in the heart of its energy, motionless.
Romulan stepped away from the black chair and the Arch-demon. He moved toward the woman, hardly knowing that he did so, only that she drew closer to him. While at his back the priest said soberly: “The embodied fail to perceive the soil, even when most they look for it. Nor do they attend when most they entreat for chat. She’ll neither hear nor see, so faithless are the living to the dead.”
The hall was black now, all but the last flame of Iuletta, and there, as he went by, a man limned with her radiance, stepping aside as if in at a doorway, the mandolin on his shoulder bald-white a moment as a halved apple, before it turned away with him into the dark.
Alone, Romulan paused before the apparition of his wife.
“Bright angel,” he said to her, to her living ghost, that could not hear him, “bright angel, see how you teach the torches, that they fail and fade in shame. Bright love, I shall forget as I forget the taste of wine, the perfume of the rose—” The words he took for courtliness, and somberly he let them come, before suddenly he knew how he spoke, and that the measure of this language, its stylized cadences, was that of a prayer. Living or dead, he had not brought himself to pray to God. But now he prayed to Iuletta. The pilgrim before the icon, he asked unreasonably—for what he did not know. Until at last he met again her eyes, and saw that they had widened, and that, despite the pronouncement of Laurus-Lucifer, as if through a kind of veil they seemed to look at him. Those eyes which were his own, his eyes in the face of Iulet, which now were two sapphire lamps seeking across a huge gulf of night or perhaps of black water, two stars, two shining fractures in a colossal gate.
* * *
• • •
“Iuletta Montargo de Chenti.”
She turned, and faced the priest across the bare stone altar.
“No one,” he said, “is there.”
“I heard a sound.”
“The mules have been loosed for the present from the cart and are grazing outside, with the mare from Lombardhia. At sunrise,” Fra Laurus said, indicating the oratory’s open door patched by night, foliage and stars, “the young servant of the Montargos will arrive. His horse, by dislodging him and running off on the Padova road, kept him from his attempt to follow Romulan Montargo. Now he sleeps in a wayside barn. Just before dawn hell wake, and walk here across the hills. His name is Doro. You will find him bruised but astute.”
“But if another should come—” she said.
“No other will come.”
“Will you make it to be so?”
“I know it to be so.”
Iuletta pressed her ringed fingers to her throat, as if to communicate with the pulse which beat there, quickly, steadily. She was drowsy still, not so much from the effects of the stuporous drug with which he had duped her, more from the glow of the candleflame at which he had persuaded her to stare, until it had seemed to burn into and become her spirit.
How strange, all this. To wake to life, too bewildered to be angry, and soon too much in awe of this magician to be so. And then, to gaze on fire, and after to be lifted from the couch of death, to be led and supported and shown death itself, lying on a lawn by night, under the cruelly constant moon, who would obscure nothing, not even the face which next Iuletta must lean close to see. To see Romulan, as she had never thought to see him again, and to see him not, for he was no longer at hand inside the glove of flesh. Yet, so at the very first she had witnessed him, carried up as if dead, offered before her like a sacrifice. His eyes seemed only sleeping now, as hers had been. Might she not waken him? How strange, how strange. Surely the most awful despair should have rushed her away with it, but had not. Quiet as the night, she bowed above him, quiet as the night she followed the tall priest when he took up Romulan from the ground and bore him to the little gate, the alleyway and the cart with its stoical mules. And, the dead concealed within the cart, and she shawled over by some homely cloak that had the smell of sage and straw, they rode through Sana Verensa, under the high red windows of the towers, one tower with a huge cat upon its topmost roof, by the pallor of the Emperor’s Monument, to the gate and its fast rank bribery—and so into the open land beyond.
Here was the route she was said to have taken on the eve of her marriage to Romulan. In the cell of the hermit’s oratory she had lain in the lie, when in reality she had lain in the arms of her husband, between the posts of the inn bed and the tumbled flowers and sheets. Now Romulan was to lie here, in that liar’s cell she had never visited, on the stone floor of it, while moonlight poured over him once again from round-topped windows. There had been chests here, too, but they had gone away into the cart. The priest, his own haulier, was a strong man, but perhaps the chests were unfilled. Now the cell was totally the possession of her lover. Alone there he lay, as he would lie alone forever. She looked to see, and saw a haunting flame like a topaz on a candle. The flame stood between her and the death of Romulan and her pitiless insurmountable agony, the blade in her breast that was the sword of utter loss.
She knew it all, the magic potion that had played her death, the slaughtering in earnest of her love. How long before the miniature flame would also die and she would know her tragedy and go mad? But there were no words to ask the wise and uncanny priest. And now, in any case, he spoke to her.
“Come, Iuletta.”
Dazedly, yet with a curious certainty, she went with him, from the altar, into the cell. And beheld death again, before the priest gestured her to look up.
Then, beautifully, and with the miraculous grace of the magus, he beckoned, and a gentle light bloomed all about them. It had no source, this light, and perhaps she imagined it, or he gave her to imagine it.
Composed, in the aura of that which she had always intuitively credited—magic, the human psychosm, the majesty of all gods and One—her lips curved as if with pleasure.
“In the myth of the Egepsti,” the magician said to her, “when Osirus perished at the hands of his red-haired enemy, his wife, Isetta—whose name is not unlike your own—sought his body and took it away with her to the swamps beside the River Nilus. And here, by means of her sorcery, and through the vitality of her love, she permitted him who was dead to live. Answer if you hear me, Iuletta Montargo de Chenti.”
“I do hear, Father,” Iuletta murmured.
“Then I will tell you of yourself. Heed me carefully. There is in you the Chaldean seed, the grain which is the root of Power. You have turned to the longing of the flesh, and so the seed will wither, but not yet. Still you are not all of the flesh, and these things which have seemed random chance to you have been the searchings of your essence, of your soul. Indeed it was you yourself, and not the harlot’s herbal witchery, which brought this man to you. And now, if you will it, may bring him to you once again.”
“But,” Iuletta faltered, prettily, almost childishly. “But I can do nothing—”
“And do you,” said Fra Laurus, “believe this?” Iuletta’s eyes rose to his, stared, became two floods of seeing sightlessness. “Do you, who love, accept that your love is finished? Though the sword passed through his body a thousand times, do you believe in it?”
Iuletta lifted her hands to her face, and held her face between her hands, staring through the priest into the heart of the flame.
“No,” she said. Her eyes returned, and leveled on his like two spears. “No, spiritual Father.” And the flame dissolved in the bluest smoke, she let down her hands, her face grew stern, severe, losing all its beauty in a sudden transfiguration, dehumanized and limitless. “No.”
“Then,” he said, “it is with you.”
Her eyes blinded her, and when she saw again, the priest was gone.
Then, for several minutes, she became indeed a child. She ran to the door and found only the night, star-splashed and voiceless, and with the horse munching placidly nearby under the pines. The cart and the mules had departed, and when she ran out on to the grass, the moonlight pulled away the shade from the hills and showed that the priest was no longer anywhere among them.
So then she ran back into the oratory and fell down at the altar and sobbed and begged, until it came to her that her tears and prayers had no substance, that despair and agony had not yet seized on her. And then she got up, politely crossing herself before God, and walked back slowly to the door of the cell, forgetting Him.
There was no longer any illumination save that of the moon. Its description of Romulan was so heartless and so bloodless. No store was to be set by it.
Iuletta’s beauty, which had already returned, reflected up at her from the white face on the floor. So she kneeled at last, and kissed the mouth. There was no warmth in his lips, yet she kissed them again, and once again, and so her own warmth was imparted to them. At this, she took his hands and held them to her breast. As she did so, she felt the strangest tingling in her palms and fingers, as if some supernatural chemical had been absorbed there. She considered it, and then she received it into herself, and dismissed it immediately.
