The rector turns to the guard named Jevic. “You did well. It has been noted. Have these bodies removed. Identify the one from above. Be respectful. Take them to the Orsat house, but send a man ahead to give warning, please. A mother will be greeting her dead child.”
He is looking at Vlatko as he says that.
Marin sees Orsat’s face crumple. A shaking hand covers his eyes. Marin looks again at the dead man on the floor. Vudrag. They’d played “Hunt the Osmanli” as children with wooden swords. Learned to handle small boats from the pier on Gjadina in summers gone. Later slept with island girls in vineyards after harvests on autumn nights.
The father is weeping now, he sees, and trying to both hide it and stop. It is difficult to watch. Marin sees Danica Gradek looking on. There is no sympathy in her features. She’s young, he thinks. Senjan, he thinks. The life they live there.
He feels tired now. He suddenly has a startlingly vivid image in his mind: open sea far from land, from the councils of men, a ship running before the west wind into a rising sun, and then it is as if he sees Heladikos falling from high, from his father’s chariot, into the white-capped waves.
We are always falling, Marin Djivo thinks. Even if we are the children of a god.
CHAPTER X
One of the two women Leonora had feared for this morning—someone she had never seen—was not dead, after all. The other, her friend, was apparently not going to be executed.
Danica, coming out of an inner room back into the council chamber, had looked briefly at her and nodded her head slightly. Leonora, standing with Drago Ostaja under the tall western windows of the palace, had found herself fighting tears again.
In truth, earlier today she hadn’t fought them.
She had hated the blustering aristocrat who had led them to believe he’d killed his daughter because he could, because she had shamed him by conceiving a child.
Was it any wonder that story had knifed into her so hard? Leonora Valeri of Mylasia thought. Any wonder at all? Should she have knelt in desperate gratitude back home that her own dear father had let her live? Had only killed the man she’d loved, and packed her off to a religious retreat?
She could picture the two of them together, Vlatko Orsat of Dubrava and Erigio Valeri of Mylasia. Imagined them downing cups of wine somewhere after a hunt, lamenting disgraceful daughters and some lost, false dream of honour.
But the other girl—Iulia—was not dead. I would never do that, this father had said, beside his dead son and red blood on marble.
Leonora had found no pity within her. Not then, not now, seeing him come out of that inner chamber with Danica and the Djivos and the rector and his clerks.
These people had tried to kill Marin. Danica—her friend Danica from Senjan—had killed the younger Orsat. Second time she’d ended a man’s life with Leonora right there.
Were the women all like this in Senjan? she’d asked on the Blessed Ingacia at sea. Apparently not. The stories of Senjani women severing enemy limbs and drinking the dripping blood were only that—stories. Useful ones, Danica had said from her cot in the darkness.
Nor could they control the winds or tides. Or feed their children during a blockade, she had added bitterly.
In the council chamber now, as order was gradually achieved, the rector of Dubrava moved briskly through a number of matters. The council had reassembled in their seats. They were still disturbed, afraid—and not a little excited, Leonora Valeri thought. Men were like that. Women, too.
She had the sense the rector was trying to restore calm with a dry precision. She doubted he’d succeed. Not with two deaths, and word of them surely rolling like waves through the city.
Issues were addressed, nonetheless. A secretary recorded. Probably very much as matters were handled by the Council of Twelve. She was hearing the rector of Dubrava speak, and she was one of the reasons they were assembled on a spring morning.
Danica Gradek, he said, late of Senjan, now residing in their republic, was to be fined one hundred Dubravae silver serales. Her offence: carrying secretly and using a weapon in the council chamber.
It was a large sum. But this was balanced and offset by an immediate commendation spoken from that handsome chair. Danica was praised for quick-wittedness and skill saving her employer’s life. Dubrava, the rector said, owed her thanks that murder had been forestalled. There was murmuring at that.
Two of their noble families, the rector said, had resolved unfortunate differences. He didn’t say anything about Iulia Orsat, which was good.
It became almost entirely about money after that. The Orsats had agreed to pay a large sum to the Djivos for the attack on Marin.
The rector spoke of gambling debts, two young men at odds over a wager. That would be the story, Leonora thought. All they needed was a story, it didn’t have to be a convincing one.
The rector stopped. Andrij Djivo stood up. He said that the Djivos would gladly pay Danica Gradek’s fine on her behalf. He spoke about her saving his child’s life. He said child. Marin, across the chamber, was expressionless.
The older Djivo turned to Leonora and bowed and said the same of her. That she’d saved Marin’s life. She was the one who had seen the crossbow above, he said. Both women in this chamber had the gratitude of the Djivo family. He expressed sorrow for the Orsats’ loss, spoke about the evil of gambling. He said he would be talking to both his sons about that. The older son looked indignant. Marin smiled thinly. The father thanked the council, took his seat.
The rector addressed Leonora. She faced him with a lowered gaze, wearing black. He spoke of their sorrow concerning her husband and a firm intention to do right by her. He asked, almost apologetically, if it was acceptable that they write her father regarding the ransom paid to the raiders. It was hoped her honourable family (that word again) would address this, realizing that the ransom would have been demanded of them had she been taken, and that she’d have been in great peril.
“Of course you may write my father,” Leonora said gravely.
What else could she have said?
Other matters concerning her, the rector indicated, would be dealt with in due course. He trusted she was comfortably housed with the Djivos?
She was, Leonora said. They had been gracious beyond measure at this sad time.
Plans for a service for Vudrag Orsat, a member of the council, were discussed. Council members, the rector advised, would be informed as to when it would take place. Civic functions and meetings would be suspended at that time, except those related to security.
They left the chamber. All of them spilled out into the midday-bright square and street. Leonora walked home with the Djivos and Danica and the captain on a day in spring.
She didn’t linger at the house. She asked for an escort. She had her instructions from the Council of Twelve and needed to follow them until some way to be clear emerged. If it emerged.
The Djivos sent a guard with her.
It was too soon to declare in public that she would not return home. Or rather, not return to Seressa—which was not her home and never had been. Home was lost. She’d talked to Danica about it the night before. Then expressed the thought she was being hopelessly self-absorbed, asking her friend to advise her when the other woman was to be tried tomorrow, with a hangman waiting.
Danica had smiled. She had one smile that conveyed no real happiness or pleasure at all. She had a different one, Leonora had noted, one that could warm you, but was rare.
But today had become a brighter day. Danica might owe her life, Leonora thought, to the Orsats attacking Marin Djivo. A person’s fate could change in such a way. Men and women could live or die randomly, the way dice fell in a tavern game. She thought about Jacopo Miucci. She was still trying to hold on to his face in her mind.
She was guided along the Straden, then up a narrower street of stone steps. The guard knew where the
y were going. She didn’t, only the name of the house she’d given him.
She wondered if she’d ever see that promised compensation for Miucci’s death. Almost certainly not. It would surely be sent to the Council of Twelve, to manage in their wisdom for the doctor’s young widow.
Men died, money squared accounts. Vlatko Orsat had proposed a sum for his son’s attempt at murder and Andrij Djivo had accepted it. He seemed a rigidly virtuous man. It might be difficult to be the son of such a person, Leonora thought. But there were worse things.
She’d expected Danica to have to speak for her life this morning. Leonora had been prepared to tell what she’d seen, what had been done on the ship to the man she’d called her husband—and then to the raider who’d killed Miucci.
Marin had been there to do the same, and Drago (a man she liked) had been ready to do so. That one would rather face pirates or demons from the darkness below the world than make a speech, she’d decided.
None of it had happened. It was not even mentioned that Danica had been one of the raiders boarding a ship, seizing goods, killing a man, extracting a ransom for that man’s wife.
No testimony had been required. Leonora remembered relief in Drago Ostaja’s face.
Her own relief had also been real. They’d seen crows on the gibbet outside the gates, and rotting bodies. Crows took eyes first, unless there were entrails spilling. They’d had gibbets in Mylasia.
The steps of this street continued climbing north, but her escort now turned to the right along another street parallel to the Straden. Then he stopped outside a door.
Leonora looked at a handsome building and went in.
—
EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON the artist Pero Villani had also learned, with more relief than he’d have expected, that there would be no execution of the Senjani raider.
He was Seressini, judged important, and was given the news personally. He believed they expected him to be unhappy, hearing it. He kept his expression noncommittal.
He had stature now for the first time in his life, because of his mission to Asharias. He was residing above the Straden in the handsome residence for prominent Seressinis. Tomo had a place in the servants’ quarters.
An official appointed by the Council of Twelve managed here and assisted travellers, with the aid of a sizable staff. The official was, apparently, the son of a member of the Council of Twelve. Pero found it an exceptionally comfortable place. Of course he had been living in a room above a tannery only days before.
The Blessed Ingacia had carried a letter advising the Seressini officials about him. It had made for some flurry and fluster since there had been no advance word, but these were well-trained men. A short time after having his goods carried up from the harbour, Pero was assigned a room and having a drink by the fire with the man in charge, a smooth-featured personage named Frani.
He found it difficult to judge whether Frani, a man of effusive gesture and speech, considered him brave or foolish regarding the journey he was undertaking. He claimed to have known of Pero’s father. It might be true. He asked questions about the dramatic events on the Blessed Ingacia. Pero answered as best he could. Giorgio Frani smiled often, clasped his hands thoughtfully, nodded. He was partial to a floral scent.
Pero took a walk in the afternoon then dined with some merchants and another artist that night, and then the next, in the Seressini residence. Tomo ate with the servants downstairs. At times they heard laughter from down there. At times Pero wished that was where he was.
The other artist was an older man painting frescoes in a sanctuary near the landward gates. He was at pains to establish seniority to Pero. He mentioned distinguished colleagues, other commissions. One in Rhodias.
Everyone was senior to Pero, really, but he was the one chosen by the Council of Twelve to go to Asharias to paint a portrait of Gurçu, ravager of Sarantium, grand khalif of the Asharites.
It caused them to regard him differently.
That journey could make someone’s fortune and name—if he survived it. Pero could see how an older artist might chafe and bridle, meeting him. He didn’t say a great deal or rise to any challenges. He promised to come see the frescoes before going east. Frani, scented, declared them magnificent.
They had been told over dinner that the Rector’s Council was to meet on the third morning after the Blessed Ingacia arrived, to make decisions concerning the women who had come on the ship. Pero supposed he ought to have endorsed, as the others did, the idea of hanging the Senjani raider. The word of choice at the Seressini residence seemed to be maggots.
He didn’t. Support the idea, that is. Danica Gradek had impressed him from the moment she’d loosed an arrow at one of her own, and he’d seen that Leonora seemed to trust her, and he was urgently in love with Leonora Valeri by then, so his views were affected by that.
This matter of being in love was not anything he’d expected to encounter on the road to Asharias. Or anywhere, at this stage of his life. It was one thing to desire a woman, whether you paid for her or she was a friend, or an aristocrat looking for amusement. This feeling was a world away from such things. From everything, really.
He had already decided that it was not anything he could ever speak to her about. She’d be going back to Seressa. Her husband had been killed, her life thrown into chaos and grief.
Money was involved. Giorgio Frani had expounded on that. He liked talk of money, it seemed. The matter of her ransom would be delicate, Frani had observed with enthusiasm. Did Signore Villani have any knowledge of her family, their circumstances? Signore Villani regretted to say he did not.
What he did know was that Leonora Miucci didn’t need an unknown artist paying court to her, now or ever. He couldn’t pay court to her. He had no social position at all. The very notion—given what had happened to her—was an insult, ill-bred. Unthinkable.
It was surprising how easy it was to think about the unthinkable if you’d had a few glasses of wine on a spring night.
She was intelligent, graceful, clearly well-born, and in his dreams and reveries Pero could unfortunately still hear the sound of her urgent voice through the thin walls of the ship’s chambers in the nights before her husband died.
The wine in Dubrava was quite good. The best was pale, slightly sweet, from the island of Gjadina, he’d been told. They’d passed the island on the way into the harbour.
It was early on the third afternoon now. The Rector’s Council had met this morning. There had been confused word of violence in the chamber. Tomo, back from the square, told Pero there had been weapons used, that men were dead. The officials here were waiting for clearer tidings with excitement and eagerness. Violence made some people eager, Pero thought.
Frani came and reported to him, shortly after, that the Senjani woman was apparently not to be hanged. A disappointment, he said.
Pero took another walk alone, along the street and then down the steps to the Straden. He turned left towards the sanctuary on the square near the Rector’s Palace. There were white clouds west, beyond the ships in the harbour. A light breeze blew. The square was crowded in the sunlight. He heard a rise and fall of intense conversation. More eagerness.
He pushed through the crowd and entered the sanctuary, which was quieter. He made the sign of the sun disk and he knelt and prayed—for ease of mind and heart, for safety on the road ahead, for success at the end of that journey and a safe return.
He was painfully aware, amid everything else, that he was expected to paint the portrait of the ruler who could fairly be called the most important man in the world. Pero’s only formal portrait of anyone significant had been burned by his subject so her husband would never see it.
He was also expected to spy. He had heard tales of what the Osmanlis did to spies if they were discovered. There was another thing he’d been asked to do. He tried not to think about that.
Befor
e rising he prayed, as always, for the souls of his mother and father, that they might be with Jad in light. He could have used his father’s counsel now, he thought. It was sometimes difficult to accept that he was alone, deemed a man in his own right.
It was time, however, Pero thought. You had to grow into your own significance—or come to terms with the lack of it.
He had immediate tasks here. He was to find merchants planning a journey east. His instructions were to join such a party for the security it would offer. Frani and his officials at the residence knew of no groups assembling yet, but their role was to aid him, and this was one of the things they did. It might take some time or it might not, Pero had been told.
He’d asked last night if any Osmanli officials were in Dubrava (he’d been instructed to do that as well). None were, it seemed. They might arrive at any time. He had been offered more of the good pale wine and reminded that it was early in the season.
Information as to Osmanli military intentions had not yet reached Dubrava. War, if it came (it probably would come, was the prevailing view), was likely to take place again in and around the emperor’s fortress of Woberg, far to the north of the road from Dubrava to Asharias. But war was a wild beast and never predictable. One of his drinking companions last night, a round-faced trader in optical instruments, going no farther than Dubrava (and glad of it, he’d said), had put it that way.
Pero signed the disk, rose, and left the sanctuary. He crossed the Rector’s Square again and strolled the length of the Straden to the gates.
Dubrava was not Seressa, but it was a handsome city, and no street in Pero’s own was as wide and straight as this one was. The canals and the necessary bridges precluded that back home. He walked past solidly built homes of three or four storeys, mercantile rooms, warehouses, several wine shops. Red roofs everywhere, a signature of Dubrava.
He passed three fountains, people gathering at them as they did at fountains everywhere. Mostly women, filling pitchers and buckets, sharing tidings and laments. Laughter. The women watched him pass, appraisingly. The street would fill up at day’s end, he knew. That also happened everywhere as people came out to see and be seen at sunset.
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