Sung in Shadow, page 5
“I’m most glad for them,” said Romulan. He turned to comfort the horse, an excuse to regain his own bearings.
“You are Valentius’ son, of House Montargo,” said the priest. “That bough will do for tethering your beast. Then enter.”
Romulan did as he was told, acknowledging himself truly outdanced.
The interior of the oratory, thick-walled and cold, was white-washed as without, bare, and made oddly luminous by its glassless pencil lines of windows. No carving and no ornament remained, save the stout serviceable pillars that held up the roof. The altar supported a wooden cross, an ivory Jesus nailed to it. Otherwise, not a bowl or candlebranch. The priest, perhaps unknowingly, dominated this sparseness in his black garment, like a man-sized icon come to life. Though tonsured, the remainder of his hair, richly waving and the color of malt, fell to his shoulders, a parody of fashion. The crucifix which hung on his breast, unlike that set over the altar, was of gold, and complex with small, exquisite jewels. The face and hands which extruded from the holy robe were very pale, as if seldom exposed to sun or any element. The features of the face suggested strangeness, in a manner that owed nothing to their composition, which was quite ordinary. A look of total absorption held the countenance together, an inner absorption, mental, possibly spiritual. It was a clever face, and strong, but its cleverness and strength had nothing to do with the world. This man might walk through beauty or filth, through fire or flood or anguish, and not notice it, or at least not suffer it, for his brain was in constant flight, negotiating some other plain beyond all physical things. It would be facile for him to deny himself almost anything—food, drink, carnality, power, even riches, for the golden emblem of his piety was clearly important solely for its gaudy reminder of duty, not its value. Romulan, staring at Fra Laurus with a mingling of the inevitable respect for his cloth and an equally inevitable impatience, did not miss these signs of the aesthete, but catalogued them too readily as religious devotion. Another might have concluded it was not only God who directed this intellect. Intellect itself had become paramount, and God simply the clue and excuse for its dreams.
On entering, both had saluted the naked altar as a matter of course. Fra Laurus had then moved on, only to reverse himself in the midst of the short nave, looking gravely over Romulan’s head. Romulan began to feel the need to progress in some direction, conversational or geographic.
“Well, Father,” he said, “I’m here to be schooled. Or so my other father tells me.”
Laurus gazed downward, or outward, at him. The impression was, and had been from the beginning, of a man eyeing another from a long way off; and so he was, from some incalculable cerebral distance.
“Youthful gentleman,” said Laurus, “we should understand each other. Your father has sent a servant to me, asking that I should take you on in some manner as a student. This is not my function. It does not concern me to be a teacher. Some, by association with my personal studies, those lessons I set myself, have had their own faculties quickened. I will say to you what I have said to others. You may observe, you may assist, if you’ve a mind. My books and treatises, or a portion of them, you may peruse. You may come and go as and when you choose. Providing you meddle with nothing, disrupt nothing, treating my stores, my library and my privacy with honor, you are your own agent, and, for what it is worth, you can account yourself to your father as my pupil.”
Romulan smiled. It was a wicked smile, for he thought himself at an advantage.
“You take a wage for this, I hazard,” he said. “And a bribe from me, perhaps, since you suppose you cover for me in my lawless career.”
“In actuality, I take no money,” said Laurus.
“Then you’re unlike most others of your persuasion.”
“Quite unlike. Never make the mistake of thinking me like another.”
“Oh, pride, Father? Is that not a sin?”
“Worse than pride, to scorn the talents God gives.”
“You’re very talented, no doubt.”
“You cannot insult me,” said the priest. “It’s beyond your means.”
Romulan, unsure again, said sweetly in Mercurio’s way (learnt verbatim): “And blasphemous to try.”
“If you think so, then so it is for you, Romulan Montargo.”
Laurus went on, behind the altar, to where a second black curtain and second narrow door were visible. Romulan walked after, striking the pillars idly with his gloves.
“So things are only what we think them?”
On this occasion, Laurus did not reply.
Romulan imagined himself to be winning. “All things, Spiritual Father? Sin and virtue, for example? Heaven? Hell? When my debauched road—my father will have mentioned my debauched road—ends in the Pit, I presume that hot irons and the vasts of flame will be illusory.”
“I perceive,” said Laurus, “you do not credit Purgatory, or the Inferno.”
Romulan beamed. He did credit them, but they were far away. His youth, his vitality and his looks assured him he was immortal, invulnerable, and changeless.
“Not to credit them is to miss them, according to your song.”
“To disbelieve in anything,” said Laurus, “implies belief either formerly, or to come. Who denies the unseen shadow?”
The curtain had been attained and folded fan-wise on its rings. The inner room of the oratory was revealed.
Not meaning to, more by way of exclamation than anything else, Romulan crossed himself.
The chamber was by no measure the retirement of a priest, rather the insularium of a magician.
The area had, apparently, no windows, but a heavy hanging lamp of Eastern design, plus two or three drooling stands of candles, gave light to everything. There were open cabinets of books, more, there were sealed jars of dull glass containing mummified parchments. There were various representations of the Earth as envisioned by her mystics, and as exotic as they were unalike. There was an astrolabium, a clepsydra accurately a-drip. There were charts of the heavens, representing the stars and their houses in weird images of the zodiac. There was a brazen turtle mounted on a pedestal of cloudy jade. There Were rows of alembics, crucibles, miniatures braziers, pots, urns, and other vessels in which things grew. There was the athanorus—the alchemist’s oven—incapable of disguise, yet put out boldly for all to behold.
In the middle of the room a table, much scorched and disfigured by use. And before everything, guarding it, a terrible stuffed creature that looked to have been alive and animate once, the size of a horse and in every particular a dragon.
“Fear nothing,” said the priest. There was neither amusement nor caution in his voice. It was patently a matter of form to pronounce such words.
“Fear? By God, does my father know where he sent me?”
In Romulan’s voice there were both.
“There’s nothing unlawful. I have never performed an unlawful practice.” Again, a formula. “Such things are of interest, but merely for speculation. My pursuits are medicine, science, the indulgence of God’s disciplines of debate, consideration and inward search.”
Romulan’s head began to ring ominously like the orb of a bell. Something in the room, indeed most of it, oppressed him. His nature told him here was a joke, a story worth recounting, an anecdote to entertain. Yet a feverish darkness hove suddenly into his awareness, something of the flickering light, the pall of herbs—yet more. He did not identify the lower register of death—although skulls of animals and bones of all sorts lay about, they did not, in the forefront of his senses, name themselves. The miasma attendant on the magician. For, just as disbelief implied belief, so the activities of magic implied the awful and insecure world that had inspired them.
Laurus did not note the effect upon his visitor, or, he was so used to such effects, he paid no heed. His next speech was another automatic response.
“You have seen, and may now depart. Return if you desire it. Or not. As your wish prompts you.”
Romulan drew breath to retaliate with some respectful jibe, but the light and dark began to revolve. There was no Mercurio now to take care of him. Romulan turned and walked quickly and drunkenly out of the cell. He was already making excuses for himself—the Fero scratch gone poisonous, the drugs of the Fra-Magio—as he flung one arm around a pillar to support himself and leaned his forehead on the coldly sweating stone. He heard the door of the cell closed softly, as if beneath the sea. And thinking of his father’s blunder of judgment, Romulan sourly laughed.
Presently, his head began to clear. He went, almost running, between the pillars and out of the arched door.
Yet one more omen: what had commenced as a zephyr had become a mantle of wind, rolling back and forth among the hills. There were scuddings and frecklings in the sky that had not been there before, causing the grassy shoulders of land to billow and kaleidoscopically to alter their color. As he unlooped the reins of his horse from the pine bough, Romulan saw a comical yet almost dreamlike apparition start to spill down the slope through the fluctuations of sun and wind. At first, still slightly stupefied, he could not make out what it was. Then the parts drew nearer and were translatable.
A vast blowing balloon of crimson vapors was a fat woman, mounted on a little donkey that seemed, with every step, about to crumple. Behind, also donkey-mounted, a crimson page with a crimson sunshade to maneuver over the lady’s exuberantly veiled head. Behind these twain, a man on a grey horse, the single guard common to an important servant’s excursion, and maybe needful since House colors were so bravely in evidence.
Romulan, mindful of his own attire, tried to award the crimson dye with a tower and a name, but could not call it up. Which in itself was auspicious, the most ripe of enemies being instantly memorable. Besides, a woman and her page, servants at that, should seek no conflict. In addition, their destination appeared to be the oratory he himself had just left. Religious council was required, or an impromptu shriving not to be trusted to the brothers in the Basilica. (Romulan told himself he did not accept Fra Laurus’ avowal: I take no money.) Or could it be the voluminous lady sought other, less respectable items from a sorcerer-priest?
Now the faintness had passed, Romulan was glad to prove himself himself once more. Leading the gelding, he began to climb directly toward the descending party. They had already seen him. The rider on the grey horse had hand to sword hilt, but that was only show. To draw on an aristocrat would not be politic. Romulan dressed his face in its most charming and unpredictable smile, and as the woman rode close enough to see him fully, he turned it fully on her.
Romulan was not prepared for her answer.
For one breath she gaped at him, her eyes popping as if she strangled. Then she let out a short shriek, reminiscent of the fowlyard.
“Oh Jesus and Maria and all the Heavenly Host!” she squawked.
The guard, the page, Romulan, each was dumbfounded.
“Oh, the villain. The devil! The saint!”
The guard recovered himself. He pulled a lemon-sucking face.
“Has this gentleman in some way offended or demeaned you, donna?”
“Ah!”
Romulan, spokesman for the crimson males in their astonishment, said, “Madama, I’ll guess you take me for another.”
“Not so,” she said, patting her bosom as if to scold the palpitating heart. “It’s fate, God’s grace, so it is. The beauties of an archangel, who could forget them, the Lord forgive me. What House are you?”
This was not etiquette at all. Romulan bowed mockingly.
“If you know my colors, then you know my House, madama. I refrain from boasting, save to my peers.”
“I’m acquainted with one,” said the woman slyly, winking, “your peer, as Eva to Adam. She’d tremble to know.”
“I see, gentle lady,” said Romulan courteously, “you are a bawd, and crimson is the tint of your comfit-shop.”
At which he made the flamboyant actor’s leap aboard the black horse that took watchers generally by surprise, and these no less than the rest. As he raced for the hilltop and the Padova-Verensa road, Romulan heard a dim outcry at his back, soon lost. The encounter had cheered him up. He was ready to laugh now properly at all of it, his father, the priest, the glimpsed abyss, since they had been spiced by the outrageous woman on the donkey.
The wind, precursor of a summer storm, hit the dust great blows, driving it to Verensa before him.
FOUR
“Praise Christ! He is a Montargo. And no Montargo has laid murderer’s hands on any of your kin for more than seven years.”
This recommendation, thrilling from the lips of Cornelia, announced her arrival in Iuletta’s bedroom.
“Who is a Montargo?” asked the girl. She was pale and demure in a dark white gown embroidered by a briary of roses. Pearls were braided in her hair, sewn on her under-sleeves, raindropped on her bodice. Cornelia, not having supervised this dressing, looked askance at it.
“Who?” Iuletta repeated, as Cornelia advanced to pluck and twiddle pointlessly and busily at curls, lace, folds.
“Why, he you’d die for. He you cannot live without.”
Iuletta’s delicate pallor whitened. Her eyes became the shade of the purple core of a peacock’s feather. She was extraordinary, and for an instant, Cornelia fell back from her aghast at this unconscionable loveliness.
“How do you know?” whispered Iuletta Chenti. “Have you seen him? Spoken with him? How—”
“Spoken with him, yes, and a saucy rogue. Seen, yes, and a handsome one. I was not twenty paces from Fra Laurus’ retreat when I met the wretch.”
“Laurus?”
“This Romulan Montargo, dizzy girl.”
“Romulan,” said Iuletta. She lowered her lids. Tears ran through the black lashes. Even the name had moved her unbearably.
“Now, now,” said Cornelia, seeking to divert, “who is coming to the Chenti Tower that you’re dressed this way?”
“Belmorio,” said Iuletta. Her lids were raised again. In the midst of passion, some previous passion still held some sway, it seemed. “I am to meet him formally. My father wishes it.”
“And we talking of another.”
Iuletta flung about and seized Cornelia’s meaty wrist in her strong little cat’s paw.
“But did you gain the things we shall need?”
“Yes, yes, God forgive me. And lied to obtain them. And was not believed. That priest, that Lauras. A strange man, though holy, doubtless. Nor a man, for a priest is not a man—But I’d swear he knew what I had in mind, asking for such simples and powders. Heaven preserve me if he should decide I am a witch. But he seems to have no concern, will take no payment, even. We are all part of some plot of his that none of us can divine. Or else no part of it and he takes no care of what we do—we may do anything. For shame, he should have ranted at me, he should. What use is he? But there, I never could make sense of a fellow that will not bed. Unless he will. May God excuse my mouth. But He knows, there are plenty in that line that will. Called a bawd, too. Well, something in that, perhaps,” and Cornelia abruptly emitted her atrocious laugh. Jovially she elaborated: “Your knight was with Lauras. It was Lauras gave me his name and House. And you need not trouble for the young man’s health, either. He was in fine fettle.”
Iulet stood before her glass, tears smoothed away, rearranging the pearl-braided hair that Cornelia had tweaked askew. Iulet was calm as only a person in strong agitation can be.
“Well,” she remarked, “if I cannot have one, there is the other to be had.”. .
“There’s my sensible poppy and my wise rose.”
“Or there is death.”
This last Cornelia pretended not to hear.
Iuletta, raising her skirts a fraction to clear her silken shoes, floated toward the inner door of her apartment. Her other hand on the door ring, she said, “Did you ever know one who died of love?”
“Indeed,” said Cornelia. “It’s quite common, they say, in the trade.”
Iuletta turned the ring with a vicious grating sound.
“My mother says you are coarse, nurse.”
Cornelia, for once circumspect, answered nothing. Lady Electra Chenti, wed at thirteen to a husband three times her own age, and delivered of her first—and only—child one year later, had retained at twenty-nine the figure and skin of a young girl, simply adding to it the resentful acidity of extreme old age.
At as discreet a distance as her tidal crimson allowed, Cornelia dogged her charge along the corridor, across a lobby, and on to the winding stair that led to the eastern courtyard.
It was latest afternoon, the blustery sun positioned westward, shooting the town through every eyelet and loophole with fine red shafts. In the Chenti water-garden fountains jetted from the mouths of green-copper cats. The gusty outer air was warm, flavored by vines which gave off a stormy odor on the enclosing walls, and dazzled with iridescent spray. Above, the sky was a shining haze of blown mellow cloud into which the horizons of the town dissolved. Below, manicured trees staggered heavily and collected themselves. Dense curls were lifted and replaced and the tissues of gowns and mantles shaken.
In an aureole of red light and flame-red hair, handsome face burnished to bronze, elegant figure displayed in a heroic, conceivably natural stance, Troian Belmorio gripped Lord Chenti’s palm. Like differentiated subjects in a tableau, Troian, his handful of supporting kindred and their couples of pages, in Belmorio’s rich murky green and its liberal slashings of gold. While Chenti red, and the unmatched red of the day’s end, surrounded them like a sea of blood. In previous eras, no man of any House would tread inside another family’s tower, whatever the pretext, for fear of poison, or a more candid blade in the guts. Belmorio and Chenti, in these softer times, had decided to forget their dead, and join ranks against other Houses whose enmity was fresher—Fero, Malaghela, or Suvio. Wealthy Chenti, besides, was a catch. Belmorio a similar catch, being one of the three or four who had links to the Ducal House—witness the Ring-and-Dove device on Troian’s gold chain. (Next to it hung a small portrait, mostly guess-work, but fetching and true in pigments, of Iuletta.)
