Sung in Shadow, page 7
The doors were opened. In uproar, twenty-two males exploded into the quite comparable uproar of the house.
A brief lobby gave straight on the Chenti banquet hall, old as the Tower, its ceiling high in the air and stained black with centuries of smokes. From the black overcast, as from its galleries and great stair, the rose-red flags of the House hung down, and high on the walls beneath, the antique swords, the arms and armor, the crested helms of the warlike Cat family. While under all those were flaunted the equally flamboyant signs of peace and prosperity, carved wood and gold inlay, tapestries, wall-hung Eastern carpets, panels painted by artists of a renown foreign to Verensa. The stone floor had been camouflaged with mosaic, a complex scene rarely to be viewed by a guest in its entirety, for when in use the hall was crammed, as now. These friendly, or passing-for-friendly Houses had been invited to represent themselves, and were duly here in the sour cream of Ottanta, the damson and charcoal of Retzi, and loud d’Ansini purple.
The feast tables stood about the walls, draped with damascene, and already groaning with pastry castles, roccas of melting ice, pyramids of many-colored fruit. The cost of candles had been high. Everywhere wax was on fire and dripping. Wax and incense composed the air, on which a thousand scents were overlaid—sandalwood and reseda being this month’s fashion. To that, the steam of wet garments had been added. Others had been caught in the downpour, it appeared.
Lord Chenti, backed by two wine-bearers in semi-bacchanalian garb—vine embroideries, wreaths of crimson grapes—met the latest arrivals in the door. The solicitous social approach, as their swordbelts were taken from them with their cloaks.
“Welcome, young sirs. Chenti is flattered by the visit of Estemba—please not to study our collection of swords, sir. I’ve heard your personal collection outshines everyone else’s. And Montargo, welcome. I trust your respected fathers are in good health?”
Mercurio bowed, a touch too courteously, an edge Chenti, so quick to speak of swords, quite missed. Romulan, also bowing, could hardly keep the smile off his face, for he had abruptly recognized the crimson of the bawdy servant-woman on the hill.
Cups of wine were handed to Romulan and the Estembas. They drank their host’s health, shaking rain off their long hair.
The floor was currently solid with Ottantas, Retzis, d’Ansinis, Chentis, Belmorios, and a sprinkle of intimate servants. Other servants, save Chenti’s own, had retreated from sight. Chenti musicians sat on a gallery in the old mode, tuning instruments, lutes, viols, mandolins and dulcimer chembalo, few of which were frequently audible above the general din.
The room was already growing hot. Outside the thunder complained, and lightning shot through high-up windows, unheeded.
“I see you have brought your own musicians, sir,” Chenti remarked.
“The rain caught their strings. I fear they’ll ring flat.”
“A shame. But I suspect one dry mandolin. Strings and blades are your domain, Mercurio. We’ll prevail on you for a song.”
They had forced a way, nodding and greeting, through the press, and come up against a table-side where a prodigious peacock of colored sugar framed Troian Belmorio, Belmorio Primo, and two or three younger brothers. They had, like most in the hot, scented room, a slightly drunken skittish air, even the old man, who came at Mercurio and clapped him on the back. With a pained look, Mercurio straightened from the blow. “I’ve been told to sing. Best leave me some ribs if you’d be so kind, my lord. And where is the betrothed maiden?”
“You shall see.” Chenti was knowing.
Romulan’s hair was already dry, its theatrical blackness somewhat waved by the action of damp and heat. Women of all ages contemplated him. Hardly a woman who saw him did not turn for a second, longer, regard. Such attention Romulan accepted with arrogance, an occasional shyness, a general uninterest. It had always been so. He was more intrigued by Mercurio’s reasons for attending this festival, for Mercurio had told him nothing of them, yet hinted broadly at some game or other. Of course, to drink and to dance might be sufficient, and to agitate others, brawls of words if not blades—both were apt enough for that.
Thinking of this, and feeling on him an attention that was neither female nor disposed to liking, Romulan turned his head, and met the long-eyed gaze of Leopardo Chenti. It seemed that across some thirty paces of mosaic, candle wax and human forms, Leopardo had singled him out. The observation was not actually a threat, more a calculation. Romulan, sensing himself weighed, would neither glance away nor move. At risk of dislocation of the neck, he gave Leopardo back watch for watch. The tableau was ended suddenly by a blast of tenor trumpets from the head of the banner-draped stairway.
The guests made suitable sounds, fanned down their noise, and drew aside against tables and walls. The musicians struck up a melody, as an arresting procession commenced its progress down the stairs.
First came girls dressed as moths, gilt masks over their upper faces from which delicate antennae rose, wings of wire and gauze trembling at their backs. Flowers floated from their hands, so they and all who should come after must tread on them, producing a heady fume of roses and mughetto. In the wake of the moths gambolled grasshoppers (tastefully or tactlessly in Belmorio’s exact green), their long wings glinting with spangles. The grasshoppers were acrobats, walking on their hands down the stair or catapulting into somersaults, wings cracking like whips. Behind the grasshoppers trod six men dressed as dragonflies, who bore on their shoulders a novel palancina, uncurtained and shaped like a huge whorled snail shell, gleaming the tints of mother-of-pearl. In the snail-shell sat a black-haired girl in a white gown borrowed from Grechian design with a thin gold chain under her breasts, crimson rosebuds and a little tower of gold-wire crown in her hair-dressing, and everywhere the sparkle of jewels. It seemed the betrothed virgin was coming, in the person of the eternally young empress of fairyland—her entrance being thus described by poets. After the snail shell swaggered a final four acrobats, clad as soldierly mice, banging their shields with their grey fur tails.
The crowd of guests applauded, laughing. It was a pretty sight, a concession to the whimsicality of a father who gave away his only daughter. And indeed, Lord Chenti, whimsical, was seldom to be thwarted. Hard and obdurate, his balancing sentiment was lavish, yet implacable. (There was a story he had once used his fist to break the nose of a man who had refused, from pride, a thrown coin in the street.)
Leopardo Chenti was drinking from a crystal cup and had turned from him, and so Romulan glanced at Mercurio. That face had grown ominously demure.
“What is it?” Romulan inquired, casually.
“Do you like the betrothed bride?”
“Do I like her? It’s if Belmorio likes her, is it not?”
Beyond the guest’s duty at such a function, Romulan had no concern for such a girl, already given to someone else. His eyes on her across the distance had seen only symbols, not a face or frame.
The moths, grasshoppers and mice had lined up at the stair foot as the dragonflies lowered the shell with due care.
“By the Mass, if they dropped her,” said Mercurio, “there’s a thought. Being made apparently of porcelain, she’d shatter. A hundred shards of white perfection. Scrabble, gentlemen, scrabble. See who’ll get what.”
“You like the betrothed bride,” said Romulan.
“Somewhat. I like her gadding about mostly.”
“Which gadding? Where gadding?”
“One day, child, I’ll tell you of a balcony. For now, honor bids me to silence.”
Deposited safely, Iuletta Chenti put her hands into the gloved paws of two smiling, genuflecting mice, and allowed herself to be drawn upwards, stepping free of the palancina.
Her fantastical face was for an instant almost maddened; she had a wild and savage expression—these were the seconds in which she searched for the results of magic. Then she faltered, her cheeks turned white, then red, her eyes aswim and enlarged. (A mouse solicitously caught her wrist.) These were the seconds in which she beheld the proof, the cunning of the spell she had cast. Beheld Romulan. How lucky that he stood only a foot away from Troian Belmorio, who in his red-haired hauteur and lust, took her aberration as the effect on her of himself. He was not alone in this misconception. Almost all the crowd took it for the same, all that saw it, and were charmed. Troian’s younger brothers, envious, poked him viciously with their elbows. Mercurio, mesmerized by sheer pulchritude, had become simply a sponge to receive it. While Romulan, still alert for Leopardo’s next move, had turned away at the exact point of Iulet’s perceiving him.
But Leopardo had amalgamated with the throng. A pale sunburst of hair intermittently revealed him, an incarnadine leg, but his back was now to the Montargo-Estemba-Belmorio cluster as it hung on the periphery of Troian’s second meeting with his betrothed.
Romulan’s suspicions were now setting. Mercurio, in his usual humor, intended to make courtly love to another man’s intended, before the eyes of both parental families. A faint jealousy, that normally arose in Romulan when any other human thing completely claimed his friend’s attention, coupled to a converging desire to be similarly outrageous, now drove Romulan to notice a woman at the far end of the room. She was an almost perfect opposition for the black-haired bride Mercurio fancied, this one, and with white roses in her honey hair. Her face was finely made, with ineffable eyes. To improve matters yet further, becoming aware of Romulan’s scrutiny, she scorned him, and averted her head to speak to a companion. Romulan, with all the young man’s pleasure in challenge and the subsidiary fear of success, recharged his goblet and made the journey over the mosaic toward her.
“My donna,” he said, musically, falling easily into one of Mercurio’s most charming stances, “the chamber grew dark, but there you were, a lamp to guide me.”
The woman, a handful of years his senior, perhaps Mercurio’s age, viewed him coldly. Instinctively, by her coldness and by something in her eyes, he knew himself safe; she was a gamester, too.
“I will call my husband, sir, to light you in another direction.”
“I will only leave you if you tell me your name.”
“Why, pray?”
“Just so. To pray with, for it’s sure to be as Heavenly as you are.”
“Your bad wit earns you my ugly name.”
“Ugly, my donna?”
“Certainly, if it is to be prayed with by you. I am called Rosalena.”
“A rose who is called a rose. How could they call you by any other name?”
“And now you may go away.”
“How can I leave you? I know you, and am in your power.”
* * *
• • •
Electra Chenti in crimson almost black, a diadem of Grechian influence in her upcombed hair from which unravelled a veil like a golden spider’s web, studied her narrow hands and the thirteen rings that gripped her fingers. She cared little for any of them. There was only one she hated—on the marriage finger of her left hand. The scalding room had not tinted her white cheeks at all. Yet she had warmed a fraction. To a perverse, bitter joy that her daughter, too, must suffer marriage.
There was small kindness in Lady Chenti. She had been reared to passionless ritual, sold at thirteen to a high bidder, raped on her marriage night, and thereafter raped on a selection of other occasions, filled, delivered, finally freed to return to the mask of passionless ritual once more. Iuletta meant nothing to her. Iuletta had been a token, and ultimately, when Chenti’s further efforts had produced no other child, no desired son and heir, Iuletta had become a symbol of Lady Chenti’s unwillingness to cooperate. Chenti had soon left his wife alone. He created other sons in the Tower, bastards he could legalize. Even Leopardo, whom he did not like, might act male heir if commerce, or a boiling up of Versensa’s internal strife, demanded it. As for Iuletta, she had shown her only possible worth in alliance-promoting beauty. Electra Chenti had borne the child in considerable agony, had watched the child as she, Electra, was shriven and alotted last rites—it had been for some days quite certain the mother would die—having lived had turned the child over to Cornelia to wetnurse in the aftermath of the woman’s own stillbirth, and subsequently to raise. Thereafter, Electra Chenti did not concern herself with Iulet beyond the mother’s duty of imposing on her the formats of morality, religion and deportment, those same warmthless things her own mother had taught her. To all intents and purposes, Iulet was simply a pupil to Electra. As long as the pupil did her credit, Electra was satisfied. To see her downfall—the betrothal—pleased Electra as at the fate of some mistrusted stranger.
That Belmorio was young and handsome did not change Electra’s opinion. Ostensibly, she was cynically glad the girl had fared better than the mother in this respect. Beneath the gladness, if such it could be called, very deep, the mother added it to her store of wrongs. But otherwise she knew perfectly well that even an idyllic marriage would shortly stabilize into impostment, distress, the horrors of childbearing, and the additional horrors of used uselessness.
The banquet had been in progress some three hours, and was now running down into drinking, music, and a clamor to dance. The remnants of chickens and assorted gamebirds, stuffed with lemons, oranges, grapes, basted with wine and honey, lay in pilfered skeletal form, still in the process of hackery, or being cleared away. Disemboweled pies, pomaded veals in tatters, cakes gutted, pickled and smoked fishes with only their tail fins intact (and not always), peaches padded by sweet mince now unpadded, pastries smashed, candied nuts, lakoums, gelatinas, caramelos, all, all in ruins. And at the center, the saddest casualty, the four-foot-long image of the leopard off the roof, meatloaf with raisins from a mold, and lacquered with saffron so it had shone like gold, lay in pieces, poor thing, to rise no more. (Electra Chenti had not eaten much. She seemed to have no appetite for anything, even sleep.)
While the feast had ruled at the tables, sometimes spilling through on to the central area—mock battle for a pigeon’s breast, a swarm of runaway glazed quinces trapped by servants—a variety of diversions had passed down the hall. Knights of Chentis past, and, naturally, Belmorios, tabarded and exotically mailed, had gone by with banners. A lady on a white horse had ridden through, the horse behorned to resemble a unicorn. Cherubs and satyrs had scattered flowers and vine leaves. Finally Venus appeared, attended by the warriors of Mars, herself lace-veiled but dressed in daring Eastern garb that left free much of her fine skin, and borne in a golden chariot trailing roses. In the traces some fifty odd, mostly white, mewling but well-trained cats. With assistance from the Martian army, the cats hauled Venus past the master table. Level with Belmorio, a Cupid, eyes bandaged in fine gauze, winged and with bow and arrow, tossed a bag into the air and released a cloud of doves to cries and cheers from the assemblage and an externally restrained but irrepressible interest from the dray cats.
Electra Chenti, if any of this excited her, gave no sign. Troian and his sire were plainly tickled—the Dove of Belmorio’s emblem having been honored in so appropriate a manner. Iuletta seemed feverish. She gave her attention to Troian as if afraid to look away from him. A young man with ashy golden hair, one long white leg, one long brass-yellow leg, a salt-white doublet and contrary linen dyed to complement the brassy hue, was placed to the Belmorio’s right. Brass-and-White had angled himself so he might see Iuletta, and in turn sat with indolent absorption, also watching nothing else, or very little. Chenti himself, big with triumph and goodwill, ordered his stewards, ate and drank, and was now rising, laughing, his face artistically toning with his pleated gown, to call the musicians to order.
Almost all the doves had been recaptured. A quelling of feathers and music was succeeded by a quelling of hubbub. Servants scurried to clear the floor of its bruised flowers.
“My good friends!” Lord Chenti was a drop drunk. (What matter? Not less manly or less in command for that.) “We tidy the floor. We let the musicians breathe. And what more opportune. A prince of singers is among us with his own music-makers.” Chenti leaned toward the Estemba placement “Flavian. You pledged us a song.”
Mercurio was bashful. “I?”
The crowd laughed now, and began to harangue the Estembas. They always liked this joke of aristocrats aping entertainers: comedians, clowns, minstrels.
Presently Mercurio rose, smiling to himself, holding out one hand for peace. It seemed he withheld some secret information, which they might win from him, by and by.
“Well,” he said. “What would you have me sing?”
“A song, Mercurio,” someone shouted, one of the Retzi tribe.
“Oh, a song. I do not sing songs.”
Mercurio glanced down each of the long tables. The multitude did not daunt him. He knew he could please them, for they were eager to be pleased tonight. Here and there a group was standing up, and in one such the indigo doublet of Romulan Montargo, with its embroidery of ships and combers, was leaning to a woman’s arch profile amid white roses.
“If I sing, I ask a favor in return. My minstrel’s fee.”
The guests liked this, too. Some called, offering items not always wholesome. They were very well-wined. Mercurio waved them down again. This time, he raised his brows at Lord Chenti, who slapped the damascene.
“Sing, Apollo. And ask what you want.”
Mercurio gestured to the Estemba page behind his chair. As the boy hurried away to the lobby, Mercurio walked around the tables and between them, out onto the mosaic floor. One could see something of the picture now. It was from myth, the abduction of Proserpina. Mercurio continued until he stood on the heads of Pluto’s jet-black horses, on their nostrils blooming ruby chips of fire. As he did so, the boy came back and shyly across to him with the pale fruit of the mandolin. Mercurio, with the composure of one alone in a private chamber, began to tune the instrument. As the boy turned, Mercurio reached out and gently caught his shoulder. “Stay, soul. I’ll need you for the descant.”
