by Tanith Lee
“Give us our ground!” one of the della Scorpias shouted now.
“What, that ground you’d steal from our lord? No one has it, through your tricks. It lies there useless, and the graves of good men pile up on each other—”
They were speaking of the disputed burial ground on the Isle of the Dead. These words startled her. Half the time, she had always felt, none of them remembered any more why the two houses were supposed to hate and fight each other and did it only from some inner taste for violence. But apparently, too, they learned the original motive by rote. Dredged up into the overcharged dusk, it became a cue.
Suddenly, swords were out. She saw the flash of them, and moved forward even before she knew what it signified.
No one had come from the arches. Everything looked dark, and not even a voice had been raised indoors.
Slender and quite tall, in her cypress cloud of hair and her stately festival gown, its bodice stitched with little Barbaron Towers in gold and silver twisted thread, Beatrixa left the gateway and stood on the paving in the fallen light.
Her voice was low and vibrant for her build and her sixteen years. She used it coolly and clearly. “Put down your swords. This must end at once.”
It was not that she was unthinking. Only that she was rational and brave. She had known where this was going, and no one else had come.
The authority in her voice did check them for a moment. They looked at her, and one of her father’s men—a youth not yet her own age; she knew him—cried to her, alarmed, “M’donna Beatrixa … stay back … mind the blades—” As he did this, trying to protect her as she had meant to protect them all from each other, a della Scorpia man, taking the opportunity as if it were the most natural of actions, skewered the boy on a sword.
He went down, and the blood splashed Beatrixa’s skirt. Now, none of them paid any attention—they were fighting in earnest, dancing and yelling.
All light seemed bleeding from the sky, the world.
She leant over the boy—he was already dead. Her heart went cold. So quick, and all was over—
Then the flailing blades he had warned her against made her step back.
She had not heard anyone approach. In the next second, when a pair of hands took hold of her arms, she thought her father’s guards had finally arrived. Yet, turning, she saw, in the light of the torch they carried, they wore the wrong colors.
“Here’s a choice dainty. Beatriche did the oaf say?”
“That’s the old one’s daughter,” said another of the della Scorpias now grouped about her on the pavement. These were young nobles of their house; they ignored the underlings who were still fighting.
Beatrixa said, “Yes, I am Lord Barbaron’s daughter. Let go of me.
“What shall we do?” said the first one, who continued to hold her.
He, too, was well-liquored. She did not bother to struggle; she could feel, even in his cups, he was strong.
Another, also sopped, announced, “There’s a boat there. Let’s take the lady to some quieter place.”
Then she resisted. But it was of no use. So she shouted in her clear, dark voice. She sounded almost male—it was not the scream of a woman.
None of the Barbaron servants came to her aid—not amazingly; one more had gone down, the two remaining were fighting for their lives.
By then three of the della Scorpia upperlings had bundled her into the boat, and pushed the panicked oarsman off into the water.
Another of their number sprang into it with a whoop.
One rowed, in fading afterglow, up the choppy black canal toward the Laguna Fulvia.
If she had hoped, on the lagoon, where there were already a multitude of lights, to attract attention and rescue, it quickly became obvious to her she would not be seen. Or, people would see, but take her for one more dressed-up celebrant, either making a fuss from flirtatiousness—as many were—or vexed by some annoyance that was her own business. No daughter of a high house could be in the position in which Beatrixa now found herself. Therefore, she was fair game to those who had her.
This, they realized, apparently.
She knew well enough they would be sorry for their behavior, scared mindless at what they had done, once sober. But while the spirit of the wine lasted (and they had a wine-skin with them), they were certain it was a witty move.
They told her why, when they had maneuvered past the other boats, the mass of sails and oars, lanterns, laughing crowds, and gotten into one of the mostly unlit waterways leading through to Aquila.
“There’s a deserted island some way out. It has a bad name from someone who lived there. He did some terrible things.”
“She won’t know. Shall I describe them?”
“And there’s a church that comes out of the lagoon. A girl of our house threw herself into the water there. So the story goes. She did this because the evil villain on the island had raped and tortured her. Rather than come back to our family in such ruined disgrace, she took her life, and now she lies in the wet sea-mud, unhallowed at the laguna’s bottom—not even in a bed of earth.”
For a moment, they waxed maudlin.
Then one of them said, “Listen, Beatriche, daughter of fat Andrea, the one who betrayed her—sold her—to that evil lord, Ciara—that devil was one of yours. He was a Barbaron.”
“It was Gualdo Barbaron did it,” said the youngest one, “so the story has it.”
“Story? It’s no story. It is God’s veracity.”
“Well, Beatriche,” said the very strong man, who still kept hold of her with one arm, his free hand clamping both of hers (so long ago had she lost sensation in them that she ceased to feel the pain of his grip). “Well, what do you say? Are we just? Are you ready to pay us for poor Meralda della Scorpia?”
Beatrixa had once before heard this tale, or a snatch of it. How these had learned so much was questionable. Perhaps, over the years, Ciara’s servants had blabbed, or unseen watchers. Or it had grown, as sometimes the real facts do, out of thin air, out of vapor and the night—a fabrication that is ultimately the truth.
In any case, Beatrixa did not speak.
Then one of them cuffed her.
It was the most glancing blow, but in it was spelled her doom—and theirs. If they dared do even this, they would do all, rape, torture, murder—like the other woman’s—Meralda?—until the wine and its fire ran out.
So she said, quietly, “My name is not Beatriche. It is Beatrixa.”
“Your name is Barbaron and it stinks. But you do not. You smell of rose and ambergris.
“If you harm me,” she said, though it was not really worth the attempt, “you will cause such an eruption in the feud between our houses, my father won’t rest till everyone of your kin is stone-dead, and every stone of your house beneath the sea.”
They chortled, and drank.
Beatrixa sat, silent. She might escape death at their hands if she was patient and cunning. She had her own profound notion of honor, which did not necessarily exclude dying, but which did not invite it wantonly. But she was glad her captor clenched her hands so, for otherwise the men might have seen them shaking. And she did not want to give them that.
That year, the spring tides had only filled the church of Maria Maka Selena two-thirds of the way up the pillars of its nave. In the dark, far from shore, it was an eerie sight.
The moon was rising out of the sea, only a quarter moon, narrow-waisted as a girl. But the church shone with phosphorescence, and the nacreous face of its dead clock was another moon, this one more bright.
If they had passed the island they had mentioned, Beatrixa had not noticed. That was stupid, and she upbraided herself. She needed to be aware of everything, in case it might assist her.
“Well, Dario, shall we go inside?” (Dario was the strongest one, who held her, though less brutally now.)
“The house of God?”
“No longer. It’s Neptune’s house now.”
They laughed again, continuously ple
ased by their own style.
And the boat was rowed in at the carved door, which gaped from the water like a cave.
Weeds curtained down, palest brown and sleek azure in their own luminescence. Then the church opened out, its whitish columns, ringed by other floods, balanced in water, seeming to go down and down beneath it, both in actuality and in phantom reflection. The roof, decorated with metal stars and indigo, was only some twelve or thirteen feet above their heads. Dull-glowing angels with trumpets leaned out.
Everywhere, peculiar small, bluish lights floated about in the water, like lamp-wicks in oil. What caused that? Perhaps some tiny sea creature giving off its own radiance.
Beatrixa saw that flower heads and scraps of colored paper from the wedding confetti had also wended in here, as they had across all the lagoons.
Her captors were quieter now, disturbed by the drowned church despite their bravado.
She wondered where they would tie up the boat, or locate firmer ground, in order to do their worst to her. She could see no suitable landing-place.
This seemed to occur as well to them.
“Light another torch.”
The second torch was lit. Fresher light came, and at once the colors of the church turned to bronze, swart blue, sharp silver. The reflections hardened in the water and, trying now to observe everything in case it might help her, Beatrixa now stared deeply down into it.
“Shall we do it here, Dario?”
“Let me think.”
“Look, the altar’s above water too—it must be raised up. It’s broad, too.”
The youngest one said, uneasy now, “Should we go back to the bad island? Take her there, as Ciara did with our girl?”
Abruptly Dario let go of Beatrixa’s hands. For an instant she felt nothing, then the agony of blood running back in them.
“Row for the altar. I’ll have her there.”
“But … it’s the altar, Dario—”
“Do you think this place still sacred?”
“I’ve heard the fishwives come here to pray—”
Let them. God isn’t here any more. We’ll confess tomorrow.”
No one was amused now.
Beatrixa understood from their tones that the church had sobered them, not to realization of their colossal crime, but to a deadly earnest. For, yes, she heard her death in their voices.
As the boat started on, she got to her feet.
Dario lurched up beside her and, turning, she spat into his eyes, then thrust as him with all her might. She, too, despite her slenderness, was strong. He staggered, could not right himself, and crashed into the thick blue oil of the water.
Immediate pandemonium broke out. Dario splashing and calling, showers of liquid, the oar extended for him to grasp, the boat floundering, two others pulling at her, cursing, howling. And she thought, I must go in now. I must go in and die because there is no other way out—
And in that moment, something—dreamlike, impossible.
There beneath her, she saw, as if only through tinted air, the floor of the nave, the bases of the pillars. A man was kneeling on one knee there below at the foot of the long stair leading to the high altar. Although she had mostly forgotten, although she had not been reminded for most of the decade during which she had grown up, although she had never seen him in this adult shape—she knew who he was.
And the moment she did, pulled and wrenched this way and that in the careering boat, she saw how his golden head had lifted. He stood, and then he raised his face, and through the sea she beheld him, the man who had been the child under the canal.
The fragment of inattention had of course given them complete mastery of her again. Dario had wallowed back into the boat, swearing and hawking, and now he hit her across the face, so that she almost fell. The boat, upset again, nearly threw them all in the water.
“You bitch … you slut-whore … true Barbaron harlot—”
She was stunned. Not from the blow.
She could think of nothing.
Then the surface of the water parted, as if for the ejection of a great fish.
All motion otherwise, apart from the rocking of sea and boat, ceased.
They had turned to look. They had become statues.
Up from the depth rose the man. He emerged fluidly and simply, as if born upward by some smooth machinery. And then he was there, above the water. And they saw, the four della Scorpias and Beatrixa Barbaron, that he was standing now, feet apart, easy, as if upon a tesselated floor—on the water itself.
His hair was not wet. It hung around him dry, dense, and shining, to his waist. His clothes were not wet. And so it was not difficult for any of them to see what he wore. His fashionable doublet, which clothed a slimly muscular body, was deep chestnut, his hose and shoes the palest and most couth of yellows. On his breast, and embroidered in thick gold along his sleeves, was a scorpion that held a flowering branch in its claws, worked in a very elaborate and fetching pattern. The colors and emblem of the della Scorpia house from whence, those ten or so years ago, he had told Beatrixa he came.
The youngest of the men in the boat spoke hoarsely.
“What is it Dario?”
“By Jesu … how do I know … some trick. It’s some trick left from the Borja pageant … it’s not real—”
“Good evening, sirs,” said the unreal thing, standing there in perfect equilibrium on the sea. “My kinsmen, I believe.”
“It talks!”
“It’s a trick. He’s standing on something under the water, just below the surface.”
“Oh, do you think so?” said the man on the sea. And he sprang forward, a vast leap, and stood beside the boat now, exactly by it where the water was deep, deep, or the boat must already have grounded. “You are in error, gentlemen.”
One of them fainted, plunging straight down into the boat as the slain boy, Jacomo, had done on the canal paving earlier that night. The boat swung. And he stood there, not inconvenienced at all, steady, relaxed.
“My name—” he said, when the boat had righted itself again. “I am Silvio della Scorpia. And you have there a lady who is not of our house or family. Give her to me.”
What happened then resembled no human activity. The three conscious men hurtled from the boat. In the water, they at once began, with much thrashing, to swim away, out of the church, even while one cried that he could not swim, the other two hauling him with them. It was the instinctive flight of beasts. The man who had fainted revived at these sounds, bent over, and vomited into the water.
Indifferent, Silvio della Scorpia watched this, only stepping aside, as someone would on a street, to avoid the regurgitated mess.
“Well,” said Silvio, once the retching had stopped. “Do you want to be off, too?”
And the last man also slid into the water, and feebly pushed himself away.
After this, only Beatrixa remained in the boat, standing, her hands loose at her sides, the bruise on her cheek even more vivid against her pallor.
Silvio della Scorpia stepped into the boat with her. “Shall we sit down?”
She sat, and he beside her.
Two tears ran from her eyes, that was all. “I thought I should be killed. By their—attentions, if nothing else.”
“Yes, it seemed likely.”
“How is it you are here?”
“I come and go,” he said, “as I want.”
“I can see that,” she said. “What are you, that you can come and go in such a way?”
“What do you think?” he said.
It was all a dream now. Perhaps she had perished, perhaps they had killed her after all, and this was some hallucination at the edge of death. The boat was moving, softly, quickly, without an oar. They glided into a side-cave or chapel of the church, next through and along a corridor all shimmering with candles or moonglow or water or some other element not belonging to the world. …
“I don’t know,” she said, “what you can be. I remember you from when I was a little girl. I
remember … your face, and your hair.”
“Did you never look for me before?” he said.
“Yes. I looked everywhere. I waited always, for a year, more than that. But you never came back. They tell children that such beings don’t exist—or they say they are demons of the Devil.”
“I’m a demon, then. For I do exist, as you see.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t believe you do. And yet you are here.”
The boat flowed through a skeletal arch and came out on the lagoon.
The broken ring of moon was higher, colder. There was no sign of the della Scorpia men. Maybe they, too, had been drowned, like the girl they had spoken of and had thought to avenge.
“What do you want?” Beatrixa asked.
“What I have. And one more item, perhaps.”
“No, I meant what was your purpose?”
He smiled his beautiful smile. It filled her with a great calm, and also an ache of longing—for what? For what? She wanted in that instant to touch him, but surely he would be insubstantial, or—like the water, unable to be grasped in any way.
“My purpose,” he said, thoughtfully. She had not supposed he would reply. “I am at play,” he said.
“Then you played at saving me.”
“If I’m a minion of Lucefero,” he said, “I must have done it to get something from you in return.”
“My soul …”
“Do you think you have one?”
“Yes.”
“You have something,” he said. “I would not call it that.”
“Is it—” she waited. She looked away from him, “Is it what you are? That something not a soul?”
“Oh, Beatrixa Barbaron, how skilled you are in argument.”
She turned, and now he was no longer a man, but the recollected child again, sitting there by her, as she had seen him last. And then that too was gone, and in the boat with her was only a core of radiance, a blue-green, white-golden light. And she put her hands to her mouth, and in that instant he came back, a young man perhaps a year or two older than she, and dressed in the height of elegance and wealth and the dyes of the della Scorpia blazon.