Sung in shadow, p.13
Sung in Shadow, page 13
“Wait, but for what?”
“For your messenger.”
Romulan halted. He was now beyond himself, at his wits’ end, unsure whether to curse, or giggle like a child. So he waited, and watched as the priest took a small set of Panpipes from a shelf, blew off the dust, and brought them to his lips.
No melody issued from the instrument, but a series of sweet notes, thin as pins. Romulan discerned no phraseology, or even repetition, yet he guessed the purpose. Sure enough, a portion of sky flew suddenly in at the window, and a blue-grey dove perched, with a flirting contrivance of its tail, on the Ark rooftop of the water-clock.
The priest set down the pipes and took up the bird, which sat tranquil in his palm.
“You shall have ink and paper. A brief message, to fit the size of its bearer.”
Romulan, unwilling now, or skeptical—or both—said, “How will it find the way from here to the Chenti Tower?”
“A simple matter. Such birds are wise, when trained. I will remind her of the scent of those herbs I gave your Cornelia. I recall the woman’s mention of a young maiden, her charge. Maiden and nurse will have made up a sachet, for this is what such herbs are culled for. Sister dove, here, returns to her nest at sunset, among the towers of Sana Verensa. She will search carefully this evening until she finds a place where the herbs are recently kept. She is tame, as you see, and will render her message to the proper hand, for these herbs leave also a faint residue for many days. Either girl or nurse will do, since they are in collusion.”
“The plan sounds far-fetched and has holes like a sieve—”
Having seen the ink-horn, Romulan was already reaching for it.
* * *
• • •
The day, drawn up in a shower of gold, galloped away with, cast in its wake, a flaming sky. Every basking stone of the town was honey-colored, every upper vista limned with red-amber, and the plume-topped trees, that stood like oriental fans on the light, were black as ebony. Not a glass window that did not catch ablaze, not a fleck of gilding. And the air itself, shirred with birds, and harp-strung with the up-rising chimes of the campanile, was a great bath of transparent blushing clouds, swimming westward like dolphin.
Through this splendor on her articulate wings, flew the dove. Air and earth were the same to her. The sensational power of flight, after which thinking man craned and yearned—a thing of no moment or particular excitement. Her loveliness she had never enjoyed, or been told of; to the glory of the sunset she paid no heed. Nor did she know, poor innocent dove, happy ignorant dove, that she, as in some antique ritual, was to be the first sacrifice.
NINE
Leopardo, balancing in one hand the corpse of the dove (whose neck he had just broken), was uneasily surprised, as frequently, at his own viciousness. With Gulio and a couple of others, he had been aiming stones at a mark in the topiary garden. Chips and shards were hurled through the honey light, and when the target, a small bell fixed to one of the sculptured hedges, shook and sang, a crude cheer would go up. But half the satisfaction was in missing the bell, hitting instead the bush and spoiling thereby its shape.
Tonight, Lord Chenti was again from home. He had ridden south at sunrise to inspect an area of Chenti land located five miles from Padova, and would be away some two to three nights. There had also been, between bell-strikings, some discussion of this venture. It was well-known Chenti Primo kept two women at Padova, and a bet had even been laid as to which one he visited on this occasion. How to prove the bet was solved by the notion of watching the lordly gentleman on his return. In Leonardo’s phrase: “If he is leaning over to the left, it is Bianca. If walking or anxious to dismount, then we know it is the other wench, of whom I’ve heard strange tales.”
The absence of Chenti invariably produced in Leopardo a fierce physical exuberance, and a mental quickening. At such times he was aware of moving at great speed, an awareness which excited and now and then astonished him. The prospects for havoc were always increased. In some disregarded corner of his brain, Leopardo recognized that he would eventually outstrip all bounds and bring the roof crashing upon his head. He looked forward to this hour blindly, with an insane crowing delight that possibly was the disguise of doubt. In the interim, he had been shamed by Chenti at the betrothal dinner, and before all the guests. This shame Leopardo had harbored, not referring to it—nor did any other dare to—not even considering it, yet unforgetting. Someone was in Leopardo’s debt for that shame, and since Chenti was inaccessible (save in elaborate, bloody dreams), the Montargo, Romulan, had become the debtor. Again Leopardo, having expended such energy on the chase and failing to catch his quarry, had sunk back into apparent indifference. But Leopardo was seldom indifferent to anything that had once touched him in any way. His goals, of whatever type, were obsessive. He had, for two months in Padova, bowed and beamed at a fellow student he had come to hate, until one night, when they sat drinking together, Leopardo had begun the poisonous banter he had long been preparing which finally persuaded the youth into drawing on him before witnesses. Leopardo killed him and escaped the law, though sent home to Verensa in disapproval. A peacock, a leopard, a prince—he saw himself through a shining haze. Others could only pierce that haze and reach him by processes of rage or insult or rivalry or some deep and personal intrusion. He was perverse and knew it and gloried in it. Others feared him for his madnesses. Others fearfully admired him. Perhaps he himself was one of these.
A handful of silver stars had been thrown out on the sunset sky, and with them a dove. It circled above the crennelations of the Chenti Tower, the gardens and the orchard, eventually flying over the topiary, back and forth, as if questing, confused as a hound on an elusive scent.
Gulio saw the dove. He called it “love-bird.” Leopardo said, “Let us show Love we love him not. See who can bring it down.”
Stones flew. The dove, unhurt, sped frantically toward the lower masonry of the Tower. The young men, howling, gave ground pursuit. Where the stairway lifted to the balustraded terrace, the dove seemed in two minds, beating back and forth. As it alighted on the balustrade before the stained-glass door of his cousin’s apartment, Leopardo took aim and flung his stone. Missing the dove, the stone might well have cracked Iuletta’s pretty glass (Oh! A thousand pities!) but the shot was true, striking the delicately ringed neck, and snapping it. A limp blue carcass, the dove, no longer a thing of air and grace, flopped clumsily off the balustrade on to the terrace. Leopardo ran up the stair, lifted the prize and waved it at his companions below.
Then, feeling the soft warmth of the dove dying like a coal in his palm, and the rapid stiffening of its tiny anatomy, he looked down at it and knew a sudden horror. Racing at such speed ahead of himself, not thinking to, he had set out to kill something, and had killed it. It was a fact, he had slain men with more composure; he had planned their deaths and believed them essential. Now he remembered a foaming horse stumbling under him, and how he had dug his spurs into it screaming, wishing it to get back life like a second wind.
In revulsion, he was about to cast the dead dove over the balustrade, when he beheld the scrap of parchment tied to its leg.
“What is it, Tardo?” demanded the idiots below, as he turned his back to them and bowed his apricot head.
“Quiet!” he shouted. “I’m praying for my victim.”
They laughed and fell still. Even Leopardo’s jokes were normally obeyed. One ran to pull the bell off the hedge, and tolled it.
Leopardo, dove in one hand, paper in the other, read.
My Lady Kitten. The sun rose today but gave me no light. Come to pray at Sana Vera tomorrow morning at nine, and at nine the sun will rise a second time, and everyone will cry: A miracle! R.M.
Leopardo raised his head and stared at Iuletta’s door of colored glass and, as it seemed to him, straight through it. So. So. Unbelievable as it was—that white fool had after all given sanctuary to Leopardo’s enemy. For who else but the Old Cat’s daughter would receive this touching whimsy of a title—Kitten? And who but the enemy would sign himself R.M.? (There were others who might have done, Roderigo Malaghela, Rufio de Mirrani. Leopardo chose to forget these appropriate names.) Such a messenger as the dove must somehow have been arranged between the two lovers. It had appeared at the last to know its destination. Now the curled head was thrown back. Leopardo guffawed lunatically. “What is it?” called the idiots in the garden and got no reply. Leopardo was so tickled by this fiendish bit of fortune, he did not know what to do with it. Any number of unorthodox reactions were presenting themselves to him, not least the glorious idea of himself keeping Iuletta’s tryst with the Montargo at the Basilica. That would be an impediment to passion and no mistake.
Leopardo turned. Now immune to his self-disgust he tossed the corpse of the dove at Gulio, who, dodging it, fell down aggrieved on his varicolor hose.
“Scatter, flies,” Leopardo said. “I’m tired of you.”
“Oh, tired of us, ‘Pardo?”
“Tired. Sick to vomiting. Go, you vermin, you two-legged plagues.”
Grumbling, coaxing him, but as always relaxed to be leaving him, they went toward the water garden, thence doubtless into the house and out of it. (Gulio smoothed his rose, gold and vermilion legs as he went, hopping like a stork.)
Leopardo waited, then hammered violently on the glass window-door.
“Iuletta! Iuletta! Darling Cousin! Best girl!”
Someone had said the fool was a-bed, the women’s weakness, or some such excuse for lounging. Well, let her get up and endure a slice of real trouble.
“Iulet-violet Rose of roses. Kitty-kitty-kitty!”
A window was opened, but not the one whereat he knocked. Looking up and a short distance along the dexter jut of the Tower beyond the supported box where Iuletta was housed, he soon spied the narrow opening and the narrow figure poised in it.
“What is this noise?”
Leopardo composed his face to a sinister politeness.
“Dearest Aunt. What noise?”
“The noise you make. Were you at your cousin’s door?”
“Just so. I had a gift I—”
“You are mannerless. To behave in such a way by a young girl’s chamber. Do you think her one of your women from the Bhorga?”
“I have no women in the Bhorga,” said Leopardo. He had begun to shiver slightly with tension. “I find I cannot—But I’m sure you comprehend me, donna.”
She was gone. The shutter slammed.
Leopardo stood smiling, ready to race straight up the side of the building and to force the window—but it would be better to employ the stairs. The scintillating mood of Chenti’s absence and Iulet’s stupidity and all it entailed now refocused. As ever, Electra put other matters from his mind, or else all other matters were complementary to her. Even the dove, broken and bruised afresh by its fall onto the walk below, now had a use.
Dashing up inside the spine of the house, he knew himself to be an agent of the Devil. And knew she waited for that agency, that deviltry, to come to her.
That time in the stone garden, when Electra happened on him in the tears of his rage, he had found himself confronted at length by a worthy adversary, one who was not afraid of him and who would play his game to the full, as he saw it. No one before or since had been capable of this. His hated uncle strove to crush him, and all others avoided, placated, ranted—or merely ran. But Electra, by her one caress, and by her everlastingly bitter tongue, her cold, cold icy blaze, would raise sword against sword on each occasion. Allies, too, against the old man—though neither would admit it, in their separate obscure ways they grasped as much. All this, more than any other thing, more than the lust by which he named it, magnetized him to her. In fact sex, at twenty-one, had already begun to bore Leopardo. He had forced his first girl at eleven years of age, and with her, as with all the numerous others he had had since then, it had been an unexploratory, snatching, selfish process, whereby he had denied himself, unknowing, the almost unendurable ecstasies dependent on physical involvement. Love songs were his mock mainly because sexual love, to him, was a myth. Inside him, cheated, the well-springs of his excellently made, beautifully coordinated, strong, young and sensitive body, lay in wait for him like demons, and perhaps had augmented those other demons which drove him.
He reached the lobby that gave on the apartments of his uncle, and stopped, for there she stood. It appeared she had been supervising the re-hanging of a tapestry, which now hung crookedly enough. Servants had been sent away. Yes, she had expected him, though of course she said, “What do you want?”
“Your good opinion,” he said. “As ever.”
“At the banquet, you spoke of strangling me. By saying such things and by acting as you do, you make me suppose you demented.”
She turned to the tapestry and began to tug, with sadistic elegant little motions, at its lopsidedness.
He walked up to her and thrust the dead dove over her shoulder, almost in her face.
“Look what I found in the gardens.”
She did not flinch. She merely moved away from him.
“You revolt me,” she said. He knew she did not care what he did, so long as it provided the excuse to berate him.
“You would not dance with me. You have made me cruel.”
“Go away,” she said. “Go with your companions to the Bhorgabba. That is where you are happy.”
“No. I’ve begged every madam in the district to find me a trull with a thin white body, little squeezed lemons of breasts; black hair, black graveyard eyes . . .” (He noticed dimly, becoming partly delirious, that her gown was of a greyish-pink—it must be her jibe to wear pastel.) “ . . . but no luck. And until there’s one like that, the itch remains unscratched. I burn, my donna. I fry and bake and scald. Oh!” cried Leopardo to the roof, “who’ll put out these fires?”
“Even your soul is filthy!” she shouted. “As your filthy words. You’d defile me with them. I will not listen.”
She had raised her voice. It was the first time she had ever done so with him. He sensed some barrier giving way and braced himself automatically, as if she might rush at him, attack him—braced himself with great willingness. But it seemed the barrier, smashed, revealed only another palisade behind itself. She stood panting, but she was quiet again. In that moment he had almost felt her flesh fastened on his.
“You will not listen. Yet you stay to listen,” he said.
“I will stand no more of this from you.”
“Ah, lady. I am the one who stands.”
She caught the lewd meaning as if she herself had devised it for his lips to say. Her face seemed to retract, her pale mouth sewn together, but her eyes enlarging. Like his own, these eyes would seldom blink. She walked toward him now, neither fast nor slowly. It came to him that when she was sufficiently close he would take hold of her. But one of the narrow hands reached him first. She slapped him across the left cheek, and as his head swung at the impact, across the right cheek also, weird parody of Christian ethics. The blows were hard, steely enough they numbed his flesh, so for some minutes he did not feel the smart where one of her rings had cut his cheekbone.
He stepped back involuntarily, and her hand fell.
“Insult me again,” she said, “and I will set others to lesson you who can do so better than I.”
“No one,” he said, “can lesson me better.” His hands shook, his wrists and arms, his legs, but from strength, not weakness.
“We shall see.”
“So we shall.”
“Go,” she said. “Get from my sight Or I’ll call your uncle’s men.”
“Such terror overcomes me.” He skipped away, twirling the dead bird. “I’ll tell them you’re a sorceress who has bewitched me. I am so virtuous, who will trust your word against mine?”
When he had danced from her sight, Electra Chenti raised her own hand, which had struck him, and studied it. Presently, she put it to her lips, laid her mouth against it, held it to her.
Notes from a lacquered mandolin and a thread of voice drifted like zephyrs about the room. The turquoise afterglow, filtered by strawberry glass and milky glass, spread its panes of pink-blue and blue-green and violet and lavender over the floor.
Dance with me while time is yet slow,
Clocks run faster far than you know;
Wear your rose flesh like a glove
For roses wither. Fear it, love.
Sing no more your dragonfly song,
All things are mortal, life is not long:
There is an ending to all that’s begun.
So, my love, you shall not repent
Sweet wine spilled, warm kisses spent.
Night is close to end our day,
There is no sin, love, but to delay—
There is no sin, my love, but to delay.
Iuletta played adequately if not brilliantly. Her voice was neither strong nor peerless, yet had a fragile clear quality which could charm. Linked to her beauty of appearance the effect was fey and frankly marvelous. Tonight, however, the clarity of her tone was lacking, for as she slowly sang, she slowly wept. She had lain in her bed all day, weeping, and her complexion was temporarily flawed, though neither lids nor chiseled nose had swollen. The reddening of her eyes had only made them, if at all possible, bluer.
Her condition of insoluble despair had finally sought relief in song. She felt, with the intensity only fifteen could know. And it was a true and dreadful intensity, no less to be credited because one found her wracked in the throes of it. It seemed to her she could not live if she were not loved, if she might not exist in the scope of the loved one. Before she had spoken to him, before he had held her, embraced her, made such vows to her as he had made, before all that, there had been some measure of an option left to her. But no longer. She knew herself as a part of him. She knew herself, in separation, mortally severed and bleeding to death. A year ago last night he had promised not to forget her. Yet he had forgotten. If he had remembered, somehow, by any means—mundane or extraordinary—he would have got word to her. But no, no word, no sign. He had lit her like his candle. The cold airs of truth had blown her out.
