“And anything I can give you,” he said. “Wherever I am.”
Men and women were waiting for them in the street when they came out. They had been seen, of course, and there were loud, excited greetings, and questions. Impossible questions, Pero thought.
He left Djivo to deal with them—this was the other man’s home, not his. He told Tomo to take his goods, including his gifts from the khalif, to the Seressini residence. He walked down to the harbour and found a boat to carry him to the isle.
—
HE WAS CHANGED, she could see it. She felt unexpectedly anxious. A heightened feeling to the morning, as if her senses were sharpened.
She had greeted him, he had bowed to her. They were on the terrace now, shaded from the sunlight. He was looking at the water. He was quiet. He had grown up by the sea, she thought.
She poured wine. She said, “Did you do what you went east to do, Signore Villani?”
He turned to her, courteous, grave. He was dusty from the road. He had come straight here, it seemed. A man who’d said he loved her before he’d gone away. He would be, she thought, dealing with where they were sitting, with what she was now. That was part of what lay underneath this morning.
“I did, my lady.”
“And so you met the grand khalif?”
“I did.”
“And are you pleased with your work? Was he?” She smiled. “I know the two do not always have the same answer.”
She was trying to make him smile. She wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like her. She sat down.
He said, “Both are true this time, I believe. He was good enough to say as much. But I . . . signora . . .”
She looked at him. Really not the same man who’d gone away, and he hadn’t been such a long time east. Men went back and forth to Asharias all the time from here, didn’t they?
“Tell me,” she said. “If you are willing to.”
A pause. She did feel anxious, there was no denying it. She put her hands in her lap.
He said, “I still love you, Leonora. I told you I was not an inconstant man.”
A rush of colour to her cheeks, she could feel it. She hadn’t expected those words. Not this way, perhaps not at all.
He said, as if he was carrying a thought forward, “I shouldn’t be here. I should be dead. In Asharias or on the road.”
And suddenly, remarkably, she didn’t feel anxious or doubtful any more. Something became startlingly clear, vivid as the sea beyond him in this light. She felt changed herself, or . . . she felt as if she understood a change, at last.
She said, “I don’t believe that, Signore Villani.” And as he looked at her, she said, “Pero, you should be exactly where you are. On this terrace. With me.”
She saw him smile then, or the beginning of one. She could cause there to be more than just a beginning, she thought. She said, before she could stop herself, “We will take a midday meal, you will tell me what you feel you can share. I want to hear, and I have stories to tell you. Then, but only if it pleases you, signore, we can retire to . . . to my chamber and . . . entrust ourselves to each other.” She could feel the colour in her face again. She kept her eyes on his.
“If it pleases me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He shook his head, as if in wonder.
“Beyond words,” he said.
A new thing in his voice. Hearing it, she was startled by desire. Yes, startled. That would be the word for today, Leonora thought.
—
LYING BESIDE HIM, after, she understood that there were many truths arriving swiftly. You could call it (she would call it) a memorable afternoon.
She had wondered if her life had taken her to some place far from certain intimacies. But . . . it wasn’t so. It wasn’t, she now knew, lying on her bed with him.
Also, it appeared that artists from Seressa, or this one, might be more experienced and attentive in some matters than the boy she’d loved in Mylasia, however wonderfully urgent and ardent, or a doctor known only for days but defined by gentleness, remembered that way.
Then Pero had risen from the bed—she watched his slim, naked form—to claim his bag and sketchbooks inside it, and she rose as well, letting him look at her, and opened a curtain letting in sunlight, and back in the bed she’d looked. And her heart had begun beating hard again, for a different reason.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my dear. Have you always been capable of this?”
“No,” he said. “Not like this. I haven’t been able to stop drawing since leaving Asharias.”
“I have never,” she said truthfully, “seen anything like these.” And then, “Pero, I am a little frightened of you now. This is a kind of holiness.”
And Pero Villani, who was changed but still loved her, said, “I think I am going to do strong work, if allowed.” And what Leonora heard in his voice was pride, yes, but also wonder, even awe, at what seemed to be within him now.
And she felt, startled yet again, pride in him, as well. Already! And also wonder of her own, as she turned pages in the sketchbooks, seeing men and metal stars and fallen statues, fires that seemed to be moving, women selling fruit or silk in a marketplace, and the great soaring dome of a temple that had been a sanctuary when it was made.
And also . . .
“You’ve done so many hands,” she said. She saw page after page. “Why did you come to do . . . ?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, and stopped. And Leonora heard something (she’d been so attuned that day, she would remember, after), and she didn’t ask him to say more about this, then, or at any time after, through all the years.
She put the sketchbooks aside, but not far from her, because she knew she’d need to look again. But first. First there really was, in fairness, in honour, for pride and for caring, something she had to find a way to say.
She propped herself on one elbow and smoothed his eyebrows (she had never done that with anyone before) with her other hand.
She said, “Will you stay the night?”
“If I may.”
“We will . . . we’d need to move you to a guest chamber.”
“Of course,” he said. And smiled again. “Or we might not get any sleep at all.”
Leonora felt a warmth within her, and desire, stirring, unsettling, and she said, “I believe I might be able to weary you enough for sleep, signore, given opportunity.”
He laughed.
And while he was laughing, Leonora heard herself say, or try to say, “Pero. I cannot . . . I will not . . .”
She faltered.
—
HE SAW HER struggling for words she clearly needed to speak, and so he said them for her. He could do that, it seemed.
Smiling, after laughter, gravely, he said, “Love, you cannot leave here, this isle or this office. This is where you belong, where you are needed. You have been guided to harbour.”
She bit her lip. He had seen her do that before.
She said, “You can accept that? You understand?”
“I understand,” he said, “that if I tried to take you from this, if I acted in any way to deny it to you, I would be making a lie of saying that I love you.”
“You . . . no, it is about your life too, Pero! You are going to courts, to cities and power. To Rhodias and the Patriarch! Don’t mock me, don’t deny it!”
He shook his head. “We can never know if—”
“I know!” said Leonora firmly. “I have seen those drawings. Am I . . . am I the first?”
“You are.”
“Good,” she said. “I like that.”
“You are also the first woman I have ever loved.”
“I like that, too. If you can accept . . . if you are . . .”
“I will be content to know you are here and that you care for me. That I am allowed to come
to you and be welcome.”
“Welcome?” she said. “Stay away too long and see how you are greeted, signore. We . . . we can build you a workshop. Do you think you could paint here?”
“That might be affected by how much sleep I am permitted at night.”
Leonora laughed. There was a new taste to the world, a feeling in her heart that might be joy. “The air here is said to be good for sleep. As to other things, we’ll have to see, won’t we?”
“It is allowed? That we do this?”
She smiled. “I will pray this evening and in the morning for Jad’s forgiveness.”
“And me? Is it allowed for me?”
“I will also pray for you.”
He said, “I should like a studio here, then, yes.”
“I might even put you to work,” Leonora said, and he could see (because her face was already a holy book for him) something sparking. “Could you paint frescoes for us? In the sanctuary?”
“Could you afford my fees?”
“Oh. What are your fees, Signore Villani?”
He laughed—at himself. “I honestly don’t know yet,” he said.
She touched his mouth with two fingers, just to do so. Because she could. “You will tell me when you know.”
“I have to return to Seressa. To report to the council, and paint the duke, if he honours that offer. Then I will see what follows.”
“He will honour it,” she said.
“You seem very certain in these matters.”
She shifted over and then upon him, above, and kissed him, hands on his chest, her mouth where her fingers had just touched. “I am the First Daughter of Jad on Sinan Isle. I know many things.”
—
SHE COULDN’T TRULY know, none of us can, but, in the event, much of what she told him that day, lying together for the first of many times through the years, shaping tenderness, would prove true.
Villani the Younger, as he named himself to honour his father, would paint three dukes of Seressa for the council chamber in the palace there, and many distinguished men and women of that city. He would paint the new, young king of Ferrieres and live at his court for a year, greatly rewarded. Another half-year in Obravic, painting the celebrated late-in-life portrait of the Emperor Rodolfo, and then his son and heir.
He painted the frescoes behind the altar in the principal sanctuary of Rhodias, and three portraits of the High Patriarch over many years. And then, as he began to change his preferred medium to sculpture and his renown grew even greater in that form, he was eventually commissioned to sculpt the statue of the great Patriarch for his tomb.
When a civic disturbance caused the destruction of the giant statues at the foot of the grand staircase of the palace in Seressa, it was Villani who went home to sculpt their replacements, which still stand. And he fashioned the memorial bust for Duke Ricci when he died at a great age, having lived his last years quietly on an island in the lagoon.
He also, later, created the statue and memorial for Duke Orso Faleri, who had guided Seressa through many serene years—after addressing the troubles that followed an ambassador’s unwise assassination attempt on a rival of the republic, in Obravic.
Through the years it was also Villani’s habit to go each autumn back to Dubrava, where he had close friends and executed many commissions. He would live, during such visits, in a suite of rooms provided for him along with a workshop on Sinan Isle. The isle came to be known through the Jaddite world as a place of pilgrimage. People travelled to venerate and seek healing from the relics of the Blessed Eudoxia, and to see the frescoes there, called by one chronicler “the immortality of art.” Villani had painted these in the small sanctuary of the retreat, around the upper walls.
His first great sculpture was also done on the isle, the celebrated rendering of a woman’s hands shaping a sun disk, which was set before the altar, always lit by candles on all sides.
And, years later (but not enough, for we are not always allowed enough) he carved the relief upon the tomb of Leonora Valeri Miucci, First Daughter of Jad on the isle, who was laid to rest in that sanctuary, along the western side, with flowers and light before her. Travellers coming there would often say that her face, in that rendering, had surely been done with love.
—
SHE HAD MORE than twenty years on Sinan, and a life that she felt—throughout, to the end—had been rich, astonishing, blessed. She was taken by a summer fever, as does happen. Leonora Valeri died among friends on the grounds of a holy retreat she had guided to importance in the world. She went to her god loved and admired, and content with what she had been granted.
She had two sorrows at the end, two absences. One was a child she had never seen and never ceased praying for, each morning and each evening of her life. The other was the man who would be coming here again (he’d written from Rhodias) to spend the autumn with her as he always tried to do—and who would now find her gone.
That pained her, dying. He would grieve so bitterly, she knew, since he loved her . . . as much as she loved him, in fact. Another astonishment through the years, another gift, the richest, even, in a life that at one time, when she was very young, crossing to Dubrava on a ship, had seemed certain to offer her no gifts or grace at all.
We cannot know. But sometimes there is kindness, and sometimes there is love.
CHAPTER XXVI
It is sometimes the case that people with great experience will change a planned course of action—and be unable to explain why they did so.
This can be a chronicler shaping a story, a merchant on a buying trip, a king or his adviser making policy, a farmer choosing when to lay seed or begin to harvest, a ship’s captain ready to set out from port who delays, unexpectedly—and then a wild storm comes that would have destroyed them on the sea.
It can also be a military leader, leading his band to harass an army, as he had done many times through the years, as he had just done earlier that spring.
They had been riding north at speed when Skandir woke one morning and walked away from the campsite to piss and spit into the scrubland. He returned to his company as they were eating a quick cold meal and making ready to ride.
“We are stopping,” he said.
He was always decisive when giving orders. He had been fighting Osmanlis since Sarantium fell. There were men—and one woman—in his company who had not been born when that happened.
“What do you mean?” It was the woman, their archer, the Senjani. The one who slept with him, which—perhaps—was what made her feel she could ask him questions. None of the others would have dared.
“I had a dream,” he said.
“We all dream,” she said.
“Danica. This wasn’t a dream of fishing in a stream or fucking a whore.”
She was silent, but you could see that she wasn’t happy. It was not possible any longer to doubt her courage or willingness to kill, her importance to this company. She trained all their archers now. Not everyone liked her, but many of these men disliked each other, so that didn’t mean much. Some wanted to bed her, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“What did you dream?” she asked, a quieter voice. Some were glad of the question—they wanted to know. Dreams were important.
“Walk with me,” Skandir said to her.
That meant, the others thought, that she might be told. She might or might not tell them, after. It was hard to know with Danica Gradek. The men in the camp—forty-one of them—watched those two walk off with the big dog, Tico, which was never far from her.
In fact, years later, when she was remembered in that part of the world, it would most often be for her yellow hair, for her skill with a bow, and for the dog that was always at her side.
—
“WHAT IS IT?”
They hadn’t gone far. It was safe-enough country, though they were well into Sauradia b
y now. Borders were fluid, but the landscape had changed.
“I dreamed the fight on the road,” he said, looking away east, not at her.
“When I joined you?”
“Yes.”
“That is a good dream. You destroyed djannis and red-saddle cavalry there.”
“And lost almost every man I had.”
“They all knew that could happen!”
“No, they didn’t. Nor do the men here, Danica. Especially the new ones. They think I am magical, invincible. That I’ll shed glory on them like blossoms from a tree.”
He was angry and unhappy, she saw. She felt, suddenly, a little afraid. If he stopped now, if they didn’t fight any more, what was her life? He said, “They believe because we’ve burned some villages and taken horses they cannot be killed.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I know you don’t! But I’ve been thinking about that army. The serdars are going to be killed in Asharias if they have nothing to show for what they lost up north.”
They had heard by now about the cannons. They didn’t know how that had happened, but it was a tremendous thing.
“Good! They are angry, and fearing death. They’ll be reckless. Let us bring them their deaths.”
“The serdars? Danica, don’t be a child.”
She stiffened. “I don’t think I am,” she said.
“Not usually. But you are arguing against orders.”
“I am trying to understand them.”
“Why should you? Why would I need you to understand?”
A fair question. She wasn’t a child, but she was young, and new to this, and he was . . . what he was. She shrugged. She was remembering that battle, too, now. Her brother, before he’d gone away.
And as had happened before, her silence caused Rasca to speak. He was, she had decided earlier, an endlessly surprising man.
“The dream is what I am telling the others, Danica. They’ll understand a dream affecting decisions—they are from Trakesia. But I woke up feeling this was a mistake. That something is wrong about going to that road again, trying to find the army. I think they will be looking to find us, in fact. In numbers, to carry back our heads, my head, as a small triumph.”
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