Sung in Shadow, page 9
“You shame me!” Chenti bellowed. Spit flew from his lips, striking Leopardo as the hand did not. “You shame me, shame yourself, Leopardo. Shame the House of Chenti.”
Leopardo had gone yellow. Transfixed in that hated grasp, belittled, helpless at last, and with a sickening awareness of how his impotence must appear, he writhed to his soul, and wished himself revenged and dead.
“My Lord Chenti,” Mercurio said brightly, “we beg your tolerance of our foolishness. Come, Romulan, I deduce we are waited for, somewhere or other.”
On the mosaic, Iuletta, unable to think what else to do, managed the young girl’s trick of semi-fainting, and dropped among Proserpina’s poppies.
As women poured around her, and she dimly heard Troian’s concerned exclamations, the lover she had drawn to the feast by magic, not having at any point actually seen her as something relevant, walked from her father’s Tower.
SIX
“He provoked me.”
“You let him provoke you.”
“Am I to stand smiling while he insults Montargo?”
“Why not?”
“Would you, if he’d slandered Estemba?”
“He did not.”
“Would you?”
“Perhaps.”
“You would not, bloody liar.”
“I was not by.”
“No. You were dancing with Chenti’s daughter, trying to stir trouble that way.”
“And would have done it, too, had I not been interrupted. A beautiful insidious trouble. A subtle trouble. Trouble like a bubble, water and air.”
“Mercurio—”
“I am, I confess, enslaved by Iuletta Chenti. Maybe I’ll wait till the marriage feast, then carry her off. Help me?”
In a white and flaming rage, Romulan stalked at his side, not to be amused or diverted from his grievance. They had not got far, some three streets from the Chenti Tower. (Around and about loomed other towers, a nighttime forest without boughs or foliage. The rain had slackened, the thunder still rolled and rattled from hill to hill like a huge wagon. Now and then came a lightning, and the tower tops glistened greyly. It was late, most of their lamps were out.) At a suitable distance, the musicians and the pair of kindred Estembas slunk through the puddles. Only four torches had been rekindled, sizzling and guttering. The three Montargo guardsmen, the five Estemba guards, were wary of shadows, walls, overhanging trees, the stairs and doors of buildings. Also, ludicrously, of each other. The breach between these two families, Ring-Arrow and Ship, was bandaged but not healed by friendship, a friendship now evidently strained, on Romulan’s side, to the utmost.
Abruptly, he stopped. Mercurio, one step ahead, also stopped, turned, and looked at him. The rest of the party, soaked to the skin, miserable and disgusted with the world, halted and stood kicking its heels, quietly grumbling.
“No man,” said Romulan, “shoos me from his house like a chicken.”
“And who did that?”
“Leopardo Chenti. Old Chenti. And, dear friend, you.”
Mercurio’s face did not alter.
“Do you think me,” said Romulan softly, “so incompetent, so instantly outmatched, such a dolt, such a—”
“I think I’m wet through, that I’d like a jug of decent rough wine, and some music that is not played as a cow is milked. Come and find that with me. Or go home.”
“You left a woman behind you in that house you said you liked.”
“She’ll keep.”
“Mine will not.”
“Oh, by God, what now?”
“I know which of the Chenti lodges Rosalena occupies. She told me.”
“She’s well-wed, and you no more likely to get a taste of her than a dog to fly.”
“Chenti’s daughter would be easier? But then, the wooing is everything, for you.”
“I’ll settle for what’s to be had. Unlike your own over-mounting, earth-shaking, star-toppling and gargantuan lusts, of which we all, my dear, stand in such awe.”
This last, said with the enormous respect of devastating sarcasm, finalized the debate.
Romulan swung about, balking only at a great lake of water between the cobbles. As he did so, Mercurio went after him.
“Come,” Mercurio said, in the most charming of all his voices, making amends, “let’s drink wine and discuss the cruelty of women to us. Women. . . . Never letting us have what we must have.”
He placed his hand on Romulan’s shoulder and was thrust off. Mercurio’s charm became very cold, his diction a razor.
“And so,” he said, “for saving you from the Leopard’s dagger I must put up with this, must I?”
“Put up with nothing,” Romulan answered. “I am going back to Chenti.”
“Which is the act of a fool. At least go home, not there.”
“Why the surprise I’m a fool, since you already think me one? I’ll go to Chenti. And you, Estemba, may go to Hell.”
“May I? Thank you. But I’m sure you know the way better than I, having been sent there more often.”
Mercurio turned, and with an autocratic gesture that sommoned torches, houseguard and kin, he strode away along the street, into and beyond the curtains of rain.
Romulan, left alone suddenly with a single torch, the three Montargo guards, and a universe of running water, not even the argument to warm him, stopped again and abruptly shuddered.
The thunder took another turn about the sky. In its wake, the tired bell rang from the campanile, the voice of time, or fate. It was two of black morning. And what now? Some cheerless vigil under some pie-dish-hearted woman’s lattice. Stupid, stupid. Yet he was sworn to it, that unvowed vow of anger. Sworn not to leave Chenti without some parting shot.
Embarrassed by the sodden Montargo guard, the solitary torch-bearer, Romulan as he went past bade them go home. The disjointed protest flared and was lost, as the torch was lost, in the rainy dark.
* * *
• • •
There had come to be a lot of noise before the Tower of the Polished Cat. As Romulan stepped onto the street, he heard a sinister burst of it. A moment more, and he beheld Chenti’s stairway with its pink-lighted posts and seven or eight torches gusting above and between them. Figures, black on the lights and phantasmagoric with rain, jigged about, reminding him of certain pictures of the Inferno. Fiendish cat-calls and laughter augmented the ideas. These were not merely guests going home.
The art of it would be to sidle by without much advertisement. Rosalena’s lodge was the far side, but around a small wall-formed alley, secluded, if he could get to it.
Yet Jupiter, that old exiled god of storms, was not it appeared on the side of Montargo tonight.
Almost level with the stairway, looking askance at it, Romulan interpreted the curious scene as one last eccentric drinking party grafted on the packed-up revel of the betrothal banquet. Out in the rain, dice were being thrown, torches whirled about, fifteen men crouching, jumping, cursing, and assuaging internal dryness. Occasionally a wine cup of heavy metal would toll down the steps. At this the raucous yells and quips would increase. Chenti Prima must be dead-drunk and leaden in his bed to permit such a Bhorgabba riot on his threshold. The leader of it could be no one but that very one with whom Romulan had had dealings earlier. It needed no sixth sense to guess as much. Leopardo’s reputation in most matters was generally known among his peers, even those who might forget his House or its color. To dice and drink in the rain was characteristic.
Romulan was almost by, unseen, when luck passed sentence. Firstly, another of the ever-tumbling wine cups tumbled. Clanging from stair to stair, and over the landing it came, down the ultimate flight, struck paving, bounced up, flew, carved through water and rolled, almost to Romulan’s feet.
Immediately, Romulan sprang back into one of the vertical interstices that pierced the wall behind him. As he did so he heard the order from the stair: “Ah. Fetch me my cup, Gulio.” Delivered slurred yet unmistakable, in the tone of his most recent enemy.
Down the stair, slouching and hiccupping, came slim, intoxicated Gulio, talking idly to the air about slavery.
Scat-eyed, he would never, in the usual way, have determined Romulan’s atoms from the wall, but as Gulio bent, picked up the silver cup and drew erect, Lord Jupiter cast his conclusive vote.
A lightning, vigorous and blankly white, froze the town. For a second, scarcely a shadow sustained itself, and with the pale-rimmed glares of amazement and anguish, the Chenti Gulio and Romulan Montargo regarded each other—frozen for the duration of the lightning’s freezing, and beyond it.
Invocations fluted from the stair.
“Gulio, Gulio!”
“Sweet Ganymede, bring back the cup.”
“The levinbolt struck him.”
“Oh, Gulio, have you been turned to salt? Come and let us lick you, it will give us a thirst.”
Gulio took command of his voice.
“Hah, ‘Pardo! There’s a rat in the wall.”
Silence grew on the stair and movement ceased. Then Leopardo’s voice:
“What kind of rat?”
Gulio, anxious to please, happy to be amid his own, thrilled at his wit, sang out: “A rat off a sinking ship!”
Leopardo, torchlit and like a torch himself, was now obvious on the stair.
“A Montargo. Oh, which?”
“Rosalena’s swain.”
“She has so many.”
Laughter.
“You inquired his name, ‘Pardo. Surely you remember?”
“Ah, me. Could it be the baby who came with his Estemba nurse-maid?”
They had begun to come down the stairs now.
There were sixteen, but in the bizarre displacements of fire and water, they looked more. Naked swords were rasping and glinting as they came from their sheaths.
Cold now, with no anger, no audience, a single blade against so many, of whom one was mad Leopardo, Romulan knew an unaccustomed reluctance. Such odds had never been laid on him. And there was no other by to take his part.
The thunder spoke again, closer, galvanic.
Romulan broke from his cover, awarded Gulio a shove that sent him sprawling, and raced for the end of the street Even as he ran, baying and howling rose at his back, and the slash and slap of feet through puddles. Romulan knew then a hideous elation. It was almost funny to play hare to this pack of dogs. Funny that they might catch, mutilate, even kill him. Eyes wide, Romulan laughed as he ran. He saw his father’s figure bent over his corpse, saw Mercurio, could not be sure what Mercurio would do at his death, rejected one image after another, all as he fled.
Re-achieving the street’s end, swerving into a side alley, he was all at once floundering in mud. His sword beat on a wall, unbalancing him so he skidded. The pack screamed after him, approaching, not yet arrived. He was no longer thinking. Leaves struck his face, next a bough. Another lightning showed how, heavy with fruit, the arms of trees had come over their wall, hanging level with his head. On the lightning now the thunder, an appalling bang directly above, that trembled the earth at his feet. The rain, revitalized, became an avalanche, blinding him, smiting him. He was all at once sick of everything, of rain, of fight, of flight, of quarrels, of wine. He took handfuls of the tree and leapt. Slithering, dragging and dragged, the sound of rent leaves quite lost in the clash of the deluge, Romulan flung up into the tree, through it, out of it, and fell down into a sea of wet bushes on the inside of the wall.
Rain fell in his eyes, mouth, nostrils. He moved on to his side and lay panting, crazy, unutterably depressed by everything. Around him, denseness tintinnabulating and gushing with water, and giving off the piercing scent of fruit trees in rain and night. An orchard, probably Chenti’s own, enclosed him. God’s Heart!
Vaguely, like a dream, he heard the welter of Leopardo’s mob go by beyond the wall.
Was this safety?
Romulan crawled on to his knees, pushed branches away and stood up. The half-healed Fero sword-cut in his arm had begun to throb and burn. Could it be this foolish hurt that had caused his flight? This absurd intimation of a death which, being young, he did not truly believe in? So slight a wound, which would leave a scar almost finer than a thread. The first scar. As important perhaps as the first woman, if poets were at all to be credited.
He took a pace, stumbled, almost fell.
Far before him, a sort of useless beacon, a rosy glimmer, shone into the dark, no larger than his middle finger, some long low window of the house.
And what was Mercurio doing? Was Mercurio to be won back? What had Romulan said? He could not recall, only the friend striding off into distance.
Romulan leaned on one of the trees, rain plastering him to its trunk. He looked at the rose window, unable to decide now whether to go back, go farther, or to linger. And so, lingered, until he heard the vague dreamlike din of curses and slitherings renewed about fifty paces off over the wall.
“He’s here, where else, impudent brainless wretch? In Chenti’s own grounds.”
“Give me a shoulder someone. Your hand.”
A tree shook. Jeers rang out. Someone splashed down in the mud of the alley. Leopardo’s voice came like a knife: “If I take him here, I’ll slice him in bits.”
Romulan’s anger returned because in that moment he was ferociously afraid. For half an instant, he stood, a battleground between the frantic wish to stay and meet Leopardo as he came over the wall—as surely he would do—and the renewed inclination to escape. Then he ran.
And, having nowhere in fact to run toward, he chose, with inevitable instinct, the lighted window ahead of him.
They had put her to bed under the crimson canopy. They had pecked and squabbled over her comforts. Lady Chenti, a dark reed, had bowed (“Are you well, now?”) pitiless, above her. The question, spoken and favorably replied to, she had gone away. The one person Iuletta had wanted to see—was desperate to see—Cornelia—did not come at all. On the subject of Cornelia’s absence, one of the little maids giggled. She reminded Iuletta of the secondary feast the servants had had, the fine cast-offs of the banquet, and half the wine. It was a tradition which Lord Chenti, grudging yet hide-bound, kept up. Cornelia, certainly, had approved. The servants had listened in fascination as Cornelia’s conversation grew more and more ribald, less and less shocked at itself. Eventually, roaring drunk as any good madam of the Bhorga, Cornelia had been hoisted up by six male servants and borne, singing her own requiem, to her chamber. No, Cornelia would not be available to comfort and soothe her charge tonight.
And why should Iuletta be in need of comfort? No one was out of patience with her. Even the fainting fit had been deemed maidenly and quite proper. It had shown her of gentle breeding, susceptible. More, it had aided the company over those awkward moments when the Estemba-Montargo contingent had vacated the house, Troian Belmorio had stood biting his thumbnail, and Leopardo and Chenti Primo had fallen back from their vitriolic clinch. Iuletta was approved of, and might now lapse and sleep a sweet angelic slumber, dreaming of the bridegroom she had enchanted, and her virtuous usefulness to her father.
Iuletta did not sleep. When her apartment, lights still burning, had been emptied of all its bustling attendants, she rose. She flung over herself a silk mantle, and began to pace about, for all the world like her insomniac mother.
To begin with, she wept also. But her state was too mixed for a solitary expression, and soon her tears dried. (She flinched at every thunder and lightning.)
The gold-haired man in brass and white, unknown, had yet seemed partly familiar. Something in his movements, and in his voice, only half attended to. . . . Attractive, he had confused her. In her anxious hidden fever (for Romulan was everywhere, yet did not see her, did not come to her) Iuletta was prepared to make a display with this handsome stranger, and was meaning herself, though quite distrait, to shine brilliantly in the dance. Estemba danced as he sang—perfectly, with grace and strength. His touch kindled her oddly, for she was not sure what it wished of her. It was quite unlike the ardent touch of Troian Belmorio, unlike all other brief tactile encounters she had received when dancing. Estemba had smiled at her, looked at her, obviously rapt. And then: “May I hope to see you again at Susina’s brothel?”
Before she could snatch her scattered wits, another man had swept her away in the whirlwind of the Turcanda. Turning her head—false movement, the dance decreed the head at this moment should be thrown back—she saw Mercurio sweeping off his own exchanged partner.
When Iuletta was returned to him, her hand was even icier than before. He took it and said, “You’re not to be afraid of me. A matter of honor, child-lady. I’ll tell no one. But what in Heaven’s name were you doing there?”
Her lips parted, she whispered, “Cornelia took me there—visiting.”
“Visiting? The harlotry? And who’s Cornelia?”
“My—my nurse.”
“Oh, dear heart, what milk you must have sucked there.”
Iuletta blushed, beautifully, almost all she did being beautiful.
Mercurio watched her.
“You ravish me,” he said to her. “I adore you. How could I harm one night-colored tress on that exquisite head?”
Misunderstanding, she said, “I’m betrothed.”
“So you are. So I perish. No matter. I’ll worship you from a distance, as our ancestors worshipped Venus. Am I granted permission to do that?”
Unsure, her heart thudding, she had seen beyond his shoulder then and said in a voice like death, “Oh sweet Jesus—Leopardo has drawn on him—”
