by Celia Rees
We carried Guido between us, and Feste took us through the ruined house and out into a garden hard against the city wall. The garden was cultivated, with fig trees, orange trees, flowers and herbs. Broken steps led to a little door that opened directly into the wall.
We followed a winding staircase up to a long, narrow room. On one side, pointed windows opened on to the sea; on the other, they showed a jostling tide of terracotta roofs. Swallows and swifts flew in and out, swooping up to nests high in the rafters. The room was loud with their shrilling and chirruping. I looked about in wonder. There were birds perched about everywhere: some drab little sparrows, others far more exotic with bright plumage. Not all of them were real. Some were carved from wood, cloaked in feathers and painted in artful imitation of their living counterparts. The room was full of carvings: birds, animals, human figures. Puppets hung by their strings from the rafters. Saints and angels, devils and Madonnas stood grouped in corners as though whispering one to another.
Richly patterned fabrics covered the rough stone walls. A loom stood at one end, and from a corner came the sound of a spinning wheel. The spinner looked up as we stumbled into the room.
‘We need your help, Mother,’ Feste called.
She stilled the wheel, taking care not to break the thread, and came towards us. She was dressed like one of the wandering people, or those who came from the East: her headscarf fringed with little copper discs, the bodice of her red-and-purple dress heavy with rows of silver coins. As she walked the coins jingled together, and I had to plait my fingers behind my back to fight the temptation to cross myself. I knew her by reputation. Her name was Marijita and she was vjestica, a witch.
She smiled, as if she knew what I was thinking.
‘Don’t believe all you hear, my pretty.’
Feste called her ‘mother’, but there was no look of him about her. She was tall, her dark face lined, especially about the eyes, which sparked as dark and bright as those of the hoopoe that perched on her shoulder, its feathered crest erect, its orange head turned at the same angle as hers. Some whispered that her birds were so tame that they had to be the captured spirits of her enemies. She uttered a light trilling sound and the bird flew up to perch on a rafter, where it continued to stare down at us with beady black eyes.
‘Like I say,’ she said, looking at me, ‘don’t believe everything you hear.’
I began to introduce myself and her laughter chimed like the coins she wore.
‘I know who you are, little Duchessa. Does your father know you are here? Your mother?’ The gleam in her eye grew needle sharp. ‘Do they care?’ She took my chin in a firm grip. ‘You look like her. Lady Viola – she’s a strange one. From the sea she came, and the sea will claim her. And what about your father?’ She pinched my cheeks harder. ‘I don’t see much of him about you.’
Bunches of herbs hung down from the beams along with other things: dried and scaly, dark and leathery, the desiccated remains of snakes and lizards, toads, frogs and bats’ wings. Many came to her for charms, to ward off the evil eye, to guard against the sprites and spirits that haunt graveyards and deserted places, gather at crossroads, lurk under gateways or hover close to running water. Illyrians are a credulous people, ready to see malevolence everywhere, but she was no ordinary market charm seller or fortune-teller. My mother had never been to her, as far as I knew, but other ladies consulted her, including the Lady Olivia, who was of the country and as superstitious as any. Even my father sometimes summoned Marijita to find out which days were auspicious. My people keep the feast days and go to church on Sunday, but they are ever mindful of other forces at work around them and she was a mistress of that invisible world.
‘Let me see that wound.’ She examined the gash on Guido’s head, gently probing with her long, thin fingers. ‘Looks worse than it is. Boys have thick skulls. You, Count’s boy, fetch me some water.’
Stephano filled a basin while she went to a long cupboard set against the far wall. The shelves were crammed with different-coloured bottles and pottery jars. She took what she wanted and came back to Guido. She washed his face and swabbed at his matted hair, parting it carefully to find the long, jagged cut still oozing blood on his white scalp. She dabbed the wound with sharp-smelling liquid that made him wince. Then she threaded a needle and Guido did his best not to flinch as she held the edges of the gash together and sewed it as neatly as she would sew a seam.
‘There!’ She stood back to admire her handiwork. ‘That will heal clean and leave no scar.’
Feste leaned against a bench covered in carvings at different stages of completion. He whistled softly to himself and whittled away at a piece of wood, while above our heads the swallows whirled about like birds on a child’s stick.
‘Feste, stop whistling at my birds. You are confusing them.’
While she tended Guido I stood by the window, looking at a stone set on the sill: a milky white moonstone about as big as a man’s fist. I found my eyes drawn to it, to the different hues of violet and blue playing across its shining surface. This was the seeing stone that she used to tell the ladies’ fortunes. It was like looking up into the sky on a cloudy day. I began to see shapes there, and then something else in its depths: little dancing spots like agitated grains of sand. It was like being in that state between waking and dreaming when fancies take form. The spots began to come together and turn themselves into a fleet of tiny ships. I blinked, thinking it was a trick of the light, that an image had been captured from outside, like the pictures cast on to the wall in Father’s dark chamber, his camera obscura. I looked out of the window. The ships moving across the sea below were small carracks, coastal craft, nothing like the long war galleys that I had seen in the stone.
When I looked back, the stone was opaque. I could see nothing beneath the shining surface.
‘My shewstone.’ Marijita held the stone cradled in her two hands. ‘Before you came, I had a reading. I put the stone there for the sun to burn away any lingering darkness. You saw something.’
It was not a question and she did not need me to confirm it. She knew. Her hand went to the charm she wore round her neck, a cimaruta, an amulet, made in the shape of a branching sprig of rue and hung with tiny charms: a key, the moon and a serpent. I’d seen them before; many women wore them who held to the Old Belief. The charms represented the goddess in her triple form: the key of Hecate, the moon of Diana, the serpent of Persephone.
‘Is it finished, Mother?’ Feste asked. He had left off whistling and was inspecting her carvings, as though looking for something.
‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘You must be patient.’
She drew a cloth from the piece she had been working on, exposing it to Feste’s scrutiny. I had no idea what it could be. It looked just like a lump of wood to me.
Guido had recovered enough to wander over to where a sword hung on the wall. It was a Turkish yataghan, a fine weapon, with a hilt of mother-of-pearl and verses in silver and gold laid along its slender, curving blade.
‘Sharp enough for a man to shave himself,’ she said, as Guido tested the blade with his thumb. ‘When you have a beard to cut, perhaps it will be yours.’
She turned to where Stephano stood admiring a vest of chain mail covered in beaten silver discs which shimmered like fish scales.
‘Fine work.’ Her fingers fluttered over the shining surface. ‘It is said to have been worn by great Saladin himself and to have been blessed by the Prophet Mohammed, may peace be upon him. It is covered with verses from the Holy Qur’an.’ Although the majority worship Christ, there are those in Illyria who follow different faiths. Muslim and Jew live side by side with Christians. She made obeisance to other religions, like many in the town. ‘A gift from a soldier who had no further need for it.’ She plucked it up and measured it against Stephano. His fair hair had grown darker, it would be like his father’s, and his face had lost a child’s roundness, but he was still only halfway to a man. His chest was narrow and the yoke of the mail s
hirt stretched well past his shoulders; the shimmering length of it fell almost to his knees ‘Too big for you yet, boy.’ She threw the shirt aside and clapped her hands. ‘Do not wish to grow up too soon. Go away now and be children. When it is time, you will come back.’
With that, we were dismissed. We left her and followed the walls round, down into the town. The sun had fallen below the level of the battlements, the bright blue of the sky was darkening to purple and lavender, the air was loud with the sound of birds coming home to their roosts, bats just flying out. We linked arms, jumping down the steps that led down to the Stradun. The market had righted itself. The first lamps were lit and the wide street was busy with people coming out into the cool of the evening. There was little sign of the fighting that had broken out earlier, only a few rusty stains on the white paving stones. Feste stationed himself at a corner, set his battered hat in front of him and played and sang until he had collected enough to buy us lemon drinks sweetened with sugar, honey cakes and sweetmeats from the vendors. We went out into the harbour and sat on the wall together to watch the sun go down over the water. We ate and drank and laughed until the curfew bell summoned us back inside the city walls. I remember it better than yesterday. It was the last time that I was happy.
.
8
‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun’
VIOLETTA
‘From the sea she came, and the sea will claim her.’
Marijita was a soothsayer. That is the trouble with prophecies. Once they are made, you wait for them to come true. I could not get it out of my mind. I found myself watching my mother, listening to her conversation for any hint that she might be going on a ship, or taking a voyage, but it didn’t happen like that at all.
Two years passed. It was the summer when I was twelve. We were at the summer palace when my mother disappeared. Her clothes and sandals were found on the beach, left in a neat pile as if she had gone for her early morning swim. She was never seen again. Servants and soldiers searched the coast for miles in both directions. Lookouts stared out to sea until their eyes were red and aching with tiredness, but they saw nothing but the restless waves.
My father ordered boats both large and small to take up the search, ranging far out to sea, along the coast and out to the offshore islands, in case she had been swept out by tide and current. The fishermen coming into port were questioned as to whether they had seen anything and sent straight back out again. Day after day the search went on, but there was no sign of her, living or dead.
At last my father called off the searching. He declared a period of mourning and made arrangements for an elaborate funeral. The empty coffin was draped with her purple colours and paraded through the town on a splendid bier drawn by six matching black horses. It was buried in the family vault with full funerary rights and all due ceremony, but people were struck by the strangeness and muttered that no good would come of it. Such things fed their superstitions. The spectre of the empty coffin was to haunt the city for a long time to come.
MARIA
My lady went into the deepest mourning, deeper by far than for her father or brother. She went triple-veiled and dressed in cypress black. She gave the running of her household over to Sebastian, which is what he had always wanted, and withdrew from the world. She took to the upper rooms of the palazzo, cutting herself off. She allowed no one to see her, not even me, not even Feste. She lived like an anchoress, taking food through a small shuttered window. The only person allowed to see her was Marijita, who arrived at the dead of night and left in the early morning, speaking to no one, as if she’d taken a vow of secrecy.
Feste took it badly. He had been in my lady’s household from a small child. They had played together and he had taught her all sorts of tricks: how to walk on stilts and whistle like a bird. He had been her father’s Fool, then hers. He won’t thank me for telling you, but he pined like a dog, sitting outside her door for weeks, for months. He climbed up to her balcony and sang and played so sweetly that the birds stopped their voices and the bees their buzzing, just to listen. All to no purpose. She would not let him see her, or even acknowledge that he was there. He worried himself to a shadow and was like to die of grief, until I told him to look to Violetta. She was motherless, her father otherwise occupied, Lady Olivia too immersed in her own sorrow to take notice of anybody else. Who would care for her now? I thought they might comfort each other. At last he took himself off to the palace. In truth, I wanted him out of the way. Lord Sebastian had never liked him, and the hatred was returned in brimming measure. Feste has a sharp mocking tongue and does not try to guard it. He was safe while my lady was there to laugh at his wit, but without her protection he was vulnerable. One word out of turn and Lord Sebastian would snuff him as quickly as he would pinch out a moth.
Once Sebastian realised that Lady Olivia’s withdrawal was permanent, he was not long in destroying her household. He went abroad, and in his absence the young men who made up his retinue took over bringing everything into dissolute disarray. My lady’s loyal servants and followers left one by one. They’d had enough of the insults, the violence, the drunken, vile behaviour. Months went by. My lady did nothing to intervene. Toby and I saw the year out, but when Lord Sebastian came back after the Winter Festival he seemed surprised to see us there. It was as if the disrespect and disorder had been a deliberate campaign. He had us banished. It broke my heart to leave. I would have stayed with my lady, braved any amount of humiliation and cruelty – such things mean nothing to me – but I was given no choice. I packed with a knife at my back. Armed men took Toby and me to a waiting ship and stood guard on the dock until we sailed. I cried bitterly all the way here.
VIOLETTA
I mourned her in my own way.
It was as if the sun had gone from our lives, leaving everything in shades of grey. It is possible to gradually forget its brightness and grow used to living in cold and darkness. Even in the depths of winter one is conscious of the year turning, but I knew that the light would not come back again.
That year it seemed as if Nature herself shared in our sorrow, as if Demeter mourned anew for her lost daughter, Persephone. The ground froze iron hard. Birds dropped from the trees as the wind howled from the north, scattering the ships before it and bringing freezing rain that broke the trees and shrouded everything in glass. Then the snow came, blanketing a world from which all brightness had been removed. This year there was to be no Winter Festival, no holiday, no feasting, no celebration of Our Lord’s birth and the year’s turning. It was as if there could be no spring.
The only ritual my father kept was the Feast of the Epiphany, the most important date in the city’s calendar. Every year, in the Procession of the Magi, our most holy relic was paraded through the town and shown to the people. The canopied reliquary was carried by four cowled monks, with priests swinging silver thuribles, sending up white clouds to fill the frosty air with the sweet, musky smell of frankincense. Behind them came a great pageant led by my father on Pegaz, his grey stallion, caparisoned in scarlet and azure, with his guard following, their armour shining, then all the leading families, dressed in their finest.
It was always a great occasion, vivid with colour and the flash of gold and silver, but that year it was more like a funeral procession. The people watched in pinched silence as the sombre parade wound past them. There was no colour anywhere, the thuribles were stilled and even the burnished gold of the reliquary seemed as dull as tarnished brass.
The golden reliquary, studded with gems and cunningly wrought by the goldsmiths of Byzantium, holds one of the most sacred relics in Christendom: the gift of myrrh offered to the Infant Jesus by the magus Caspar. The precious substance is contained in a small silver-lidded cup of great antiquity, set with precious stones and still containing the myrrh used to anoint the body of Our Lord. It came to our country from Constantinople. It was being taken by ship to Venice when a great storm blew up. The ship was lost with all hands, but the relic floate
d to shore by miraculous means and was found by a fisherman. He took it to a holy man who built a church to contain the precious object and the town grew up around it.
The cup came home, for the people believe that Caspar, a learned prince, set out from somewhere along our coast and travelled east to Persia to become a magus. The relic was regarded with great awe by Illyrians, doubly identified with the founding of our country. The reliquary was processed round the city, taken to each canton, to be reverenced by the people living there, then returned to the cathedral to be opened at the appointed time when the gift was judged to have been given.
I was in the cathedral, sitting next to Stephano. We only ever saw each other in church now. The Lady Olivia did not attend. And neither did Sebastian. She took the sacraments in her room. He was either away or did not feel the need to go to church. His absences were noted. Some said he had sold his soul to the Devil. At my father’s invitation Stephano had joined us in our pew. We sat next to each other on that day, our shoulders and elbows so close that I could feel the warmth of his body through the cloth. I set my breathing to match his. We had been kept separate, but we were growing up. Our thirteenth birthdays had just passed. In Italy, girls can be married when they are fourteen. Who knew what next year would bring? I twisted the ring on my finger and looked sideways at him. A little of the gloom of the last months lifted as he smiled and touched his hand to mine. The ring almost fitted now.
That glimmer of joy did not last. I had been thinking about us, dreaming of our future, when I heard a gasp. The reliquary stood open on the altar, but the holy vessel was no longer inside. Men hid their faces. Women cried, tore at their hair and ululated as they do when someone dies. Cries of dismay and distress spread like a wave through the congregation, spilling out into the streets.
Not knowing what else to do, the priest closed the reliquary, uttering prayers and invocations. When he opened the doors, the cup was back. It was in its usual place. Wails of horror turned to sighs of relief and fervent prayers of thanks. Some swore that the cup had been there all along, but enough people were willing to take an oath that, when the doors were first opened, the reliquary was empty. Stephano and I among them. Some saw the restoration as a miracle, but I don’t see it like that. The disappearance was a warning. If it was not heeded, then the relic would be lost to us forever and Illyria with it.