The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  "I should never fail madonna," he said. "What misadventures might she take to, without me?"

  "I would have escaped those two," she said, self-defensive.

  "Of course you would," he said, ignoring truth. "You were well on your way. But you would have splashed that lovely gown."

  She thought he mocked her. But she looked at him and thought not. It was a day as bright as yesterday had been stormy.

  And they ran the bull. They ran the black bull through the walkways from the far northern section of Venezia, once having to pull it from the canal, and chased it to the great piazza, to the very front of the holy cathedral, where it met its fate.

  Giacinta hid her eyes. "It's cruel," she said.

  "The bulls pay the penalty," her harlequin said.

  "What penalty?"

  "For our sins. But listen," he said, slipping an arm about her as they walked, "I shall tell you the real reason for the bull-running, which not many know. Once upon a time, when the sun was much younger, when there were no storms and no need of sea gates, we were off fighting the Paduans. Our neighbor Ulric of Aquileia attacked us. We attacked him back, and we won. And instead of plundering his city, we were, of course, moderate. We fined him in cattle. And that year we held carnevale for the first time, and slaughtered beef instead of our neighbors, and held festival instead of war. We were even then an enlightened city, you see. And every year since, we remember our civilized act, even when the Aquileians ceased paying us the thirteen sacrifices. Every year we hold carnevale. And we risk our lives only with the bulls, which feed the poorest of our citizens. We are merchants. The sacrifice reminds us that nothing comes free."

  "You are no merchant."

  "Would it matter to madonna if I were?"

  She had never quite asked herself. She had assumed. Now she made up her mind. "No. Never."

  He kissed her fingers, held them close, and a tingle went up from them, right to her heart.

  They walked, the gondola long abandoned. They dodged the egg-throwers, whose porcelain eggs burst with petals and perfume. They ate savory pastries from a strolling peddler, and drank wine from the public barrel in the piazza, and danced, oh, they danced and skipped to the songs of strolling violins and flutes, among crowds well-gone with wine. Then the square began to glow with lights from unshuttered windows, and the canals to shimmer with light from lanterns on the gondolas, and all the city was alive with music and laughter, with pranks and simpering gnagas, with foolish pantalones and balanzones, and black and white harlequins less dignified than hers.

  "I must get home," she said at last.

  "No, stay," he said. "Carnevale only truly lives at night."

  "My Nonna," she said, "will never forgive me. Please let me go."

  "Then I shall walk you home," he said, and took her to the place where the curtained gondola waited.

  So they glided in grand safety up the Serpentine, with its firefly glows, lit by their own lantern, and with the curtains drawn back, in the privacy of night.

  Then he kissed her, gently, quietly, and touched her cheek below the mask. For a moment she could hardly breathe.

  "Set me ashore," she said. "I mustn't."

  "No, no, madonna. I beg your pardon. I'm taking you straight home."

  Don't, she thought, but held it secret. She caught her breath. "Tomorrow," she said. "Tomorrow I'll come out again."

  He held her hand. He kissed it. "You have caught my heart, madonna."

  "Tomorrow," was all she could say.

  Nonna was, of course, cross with her, slipping in late. But by next noon Nonna took her nap, and she met her harlequin on the water-stairs. They went to watch the day's bull-chase, and to have crustata in the piazza, and to watch a puppet show, before the clouds darkened, and the whole afternoon became thunderous and lightning-shot. There were frightening rumors abroad, as there always were, in dark storms.

  "The gates will hold," her harlequin assured her, as they sheltered in the gondola, rain beating on the canopy, and the gondolier quite drenched. "I saw them this morning."

  "Are you a merchant, then?" The port was out there, and the ships.

  He ignored her question. "Pietro," he said to the gondolier, "The Ca d'Oro, if you please."

  Without a word the gondolier swung their bow over, and they tended toward the Grand.

  "Why there?" Giacinta asked, grown anxious. It was a famous place, but shut, long shut, since the last owner gave it up, so the story was, two centuries ago.

  "Why not there?" her harlequin said lightly. "Do you trust me?"

  "Yes," she said, only a little lie, and the gondolier delivered them to the water-stairs of the Ca d'Oro, that ancient palace. The door there was bound with corroded brass, and eaten with moss and rot at its bottom, where the water lapped up against the wood. It looked entirely forbidding, desolate.

  Thunder cracked as her harlequin skipped out onto the steps, and proved to have a large and ornate key. He opened the ancient water-stairs door, and held out a hand to her.

  Rain was falling by now. The gondolier had made fast to the ringbolt there, and pulled the storm-cover across the well. She was doubtful and afraid, but her harlequin had never been other than courteous and protective of her. It made sense to go somewhere out of the rain, and she gave him her hand, and carefully negotiated the water-stairs, up, through the mossy doors and into a stucco hall with an immediate upward stairs.

  An aged candlestick sat dusty, in a nook. Her harlequin found a match somewhere about his person and lit the candle, which sent a wind-fluttered light up to a barrel vault above their heads, and to ancient ormolu on faded azure walls in the hall above. Cobwebs were much in evidence.

  "I shall show you the ballroom," he said. "Few have seen this sight, this century."

  He ascended the stairs, holding his light carefully, so that she could see her way, and led her up to a chamber so vast their light did little but spark off an array of mirrors.

  "Stand still," he said, and went the circuit of the hall, touching light to candles, indeed, many of them new candles.

  Light glittered about them, reflecting their images in a hundred mirrors, across a well-swept and polished floor. At the side of the room stood a table, and on that table a sweating pitcher, and blown-glass goblets, and a platter of crusted bread and cheese and meat, with two chairs.

  "Supper," he said. "I had it laid, and the floor swept, in hopes you would join me here."

  She feared he meant her to become his lover, and the whole tale wanted to burst from her lips, how she was to marry di Verona, how important it was to Nonna, how she had only just escaped for a last holiday, a last breath of freedom. But it did not rush out. She said nothing. She looked around her, stunned to silence.

  "And now you are here," he said, and drew back a chair for her. "Do sit. Please."

  She sat, stiff and fearful. By degrees, by a cup of wine, a morsel of bread and cheese and sweet pastry, she accepted his strange hospitality while the storm raged and thundered. She was alone, and shut behind walls, and wished she were home.

  But he asked no more than to kiss her hand, when all was done, and to hold it in his, and to say he hoped she would have no fear of him, or of this place.

  "I know who you are," he said. "And I know di Verona has asked you to his ball. May I ask you to mine?"

  "Who are you?" she asked, that brutal, all-ending question of her dream.

  "Hush," he said, and stopped her lips with a touch of his finger. "Hush. In carnevale, deceptions are allowed, between lovers. The mask is the moment. Never question."

  "I can't be your lover," she protested. "Let me go."

  "I would never hold you against your will," he said, and pressed something into her hand. It was his key. "Come here, come here for safety, any time you need it. Come here tomorrow, and trust no harm will come to you, ever in this world, while I can protect you." He tipped her face up, and kissed her a second time and lingeringly on the lips, and this time she felt nothing but safety
in his arms—safety of a sort she had never felt in anyone.

  But he would not pursue his advantage.

  "If you come tomorrow," he said, "if you come here tomorrow, I shall tell you I love you, madonna. But I would never take advantage of your trust."

  "I will come back," she promised him.

  "Will you dance?" he asked, and she looked about, wondering if he had hid musicians, too.

  But there was no music. The rest was a dream, dancing in silence in a glittering hall all their own, and looking down from the fretted windows, afterward, onto the lights on the Grand Canal. She would have gone to bed with him, she knew she would have, if he had asked, but after they had drunk, and danced, and stood there, arms about each other, he pressed her hand and said he should get her home, straightway, or he might, after all, break his word.

  She remembered her promise to Nonna, the invitation to di Verona's ball, only when he had, in a moderate rain, set her safely on her own water-stairs, and she was halfway up the steps inside.

  She turned back, she opened the water-stairs door onto the dark rush of rain, the lapping water, to tell him, to change their rendezvous. But he was gone, the curtained gondola disappearing into the dark down the Raceta.

  She could not tell him she had made a terrible mistake.

  She could not tell Nonna, or fail her attendance at di Verona's ball. Nonna had asked nothing but this of her, after sheltering her all her life. And she had never failed a promise to her Nonna, never since she was in pigtails.

  What can I do? she asked herself. What else can I do but what nonna wants? He says he will tell me he loves me. We would become lovers. But where is a choice for me?

  At noon the following day, Nonna took no nap. Nonna sat all afternoon and supervised her hair, her dressing in her finery, with new petticoats, and with a great deal of fuss among the servants to clean splashes of mud from the violet silk. But it was good, thick fabric. It had dried spotless, and the black lace and the white petticoats were fresh-pressed and crisp. The plumes were renewed, her hair coiffed to perfection around the festival bonnet.

  "No more foolishness this evening," Nonna said sternly. "You have had your days of folly. Now attend to a woman's duty, and please this man. It is essential. It is life to us."

  "Yes, Nonna," she said, hiding all bitterness. There was no slipping away, no explanation. And the storm that had broken yesterday still rumbled and flashed in her windows, the heavens as roiled as her heart.

  It was still raining, and the canals were running high, when she went to the stairs to wait. There would be a gondola, Nonna said, and Nonna set the servants to watch down by the front door, while she waited and took a cup of tea standing, so as not to crush the newly-freshened gown.

  "It is here," the servants reported, in awe, running up from below. "With gold curtains, and servants, and umbrellas against the rain."

  She wished the gondola and its finery might sink to the bottom of the Priuli. But she went down, and boarded it, and sat miserably inside as it took its gliding way toward the Acqua Dolce.

  Onward then. Lightning flashed through the curtains and thunder crashed. She wished a sudden bolt from the heavens might strike the gondola, a death unexpected, and she might never have to attend this wretched ball.

  But in due time it swerved over, knocked against buffers, and with halloos and cursing the gondolier handed her to the duke's servants bearing umbrellas, who brought her under a wind-billowed awning, and so up into a brightly lighted passage to a reception hall.

  There was sparkling wine, there was white wine and red wine, there were sweets heaped up, the sight and smell of which disgusted her. There were very many attendees whose colors she knew, and the banners of Sienna and Verona were displayed, and the banner of Milano, which was her own.

  Music began, signaling the processional, and a young man presented himself, a man in il duco's azure blue.

  "Il duco has wished me to lead the lady in," he said. "I am his cousin, Fedorico."

  A handsome young man, but not the rank of il duco himself, and not to Nonna's wishes.

  "I shall stand here," she said haughtily. "And you may say to il duco that I am stranded here, for want of courtesy."

  "Signorina," the young man said, scandalized.

  "Signore," she said, "shall I write down my message, or can you possibly remember it?"

  It was what Nonna would say, when a servant failed her expectations, and she was angry, by now, and judged that if Nonna could deal with people in such a way, so could she, on Nonna's business.

  "Signorina," the young man said, bowed, and walked stiffly off.

  So she stood, and stood, until the foyer was empty of incoming guests, and at last the same young man came back.

  "Il duco wishes you to come," the young man said.

  "I should have written it down," she said, in mock regret, but now with a little qualm of fear she refused to show. "Try again, signore."

  That brought Cesare himself, a Cesare as frowning as herself, a Ce-sare who snatched her hand and hurt it, leading her toward the stairs.

  "I provided you an escort," he said.

  "One that let you disclaim inviting me," she said, her back stiff in her tight lacings, and the moving air wafting chill on her exposed bosom. She might have felt naked, a few days ago, before her young harlequin had kissed her. Now she was armored in steel and anger. "Now I have you for escort, as promised."

  "Damn you."

  "I am la duchesa's granddaughter," she said. "Did you ever think I was not?"

  He tightened his grip, crushing her hand. "Never defy me."

  "I have choices," she said, "and you do not. To have my grandmother's name, you do not have a choice, signore."

  "You have her tongue, that's very clear."

  "I do," she said, and smiled dazzlingly at all about her, weeping and sick inside, as she came down into the hall.

  The storm crashed outside. Certain fools drank too much too early and languished by the serpentine pillars of the grand ballroom, saying, like the prophets in the cathedral, that soon there would be no Venezia to rule, that the sea gates were doomed to fail, and that the flood would rise, and that they would all be swept away if they took di Verona's coin and settled here. Certain fools talked of the floods to come, and how they would set out the choice of their wine cellars and drink them all, when the flood began to rise. Others said that the failure would be catastrophic, and there would be no sipping of wine at all, that wise men would go back to higher ground—such fragments of conversation she heard, while she danced with di Verona, who held her hand too tightly, and who said that he would rule the city before it drowned. He would take back Verona, and she would be an apt bride for a conqueror, full of spite and fury.

  "How should you ever rule?" she challenged him, hating him the deeper the more intimately she faced him, the more their bodies grazed each other. She wore the bauta, white, anyone's mask. He wore a lion's mask, in gold and azure and sable, and plumes were its mane, a heraldic creature, snarling at the world.

  "By blood," he said. "Here, and then Verona, I promise you. Have faith, Sforza, in your husband to be."

  "You have not courted me," she said, a fading defiance.

  "I need not. You're bought and paid for. Your grandmother will have her fine furnishings, and her garden. She cares for nothing else, believe me. We announce it tomorrow, and you have no appeal."

  It was true. It was all too true. In all the world she had met only one kindly creature. Everyone else only pretended kindness, even her servants, because it was bought and paid for, and they had no choice.

  "I want some chilled wine," she said, out of breath from dancing. Others dutifully applauded their duke, as they left the floor for the side of the room. "It's far too warm."

  He wrenched her hand to his lips. "Command me, dare you, to fetch your wine?"

  "Shall I fetch it myself, and have every servant stare?"

  "Shameless girl."

  "Utterly," she
said, protected behind her mask. "One who must be won. Like the city."

  She felt his body heat, greater than her own, and sensed she had just challenged a predator, a cruel and determined predator, and by so doing, had set the harsh conditions of the rest of her life.

  Unless . . . she said to herself as he walked away and snapped his fingers at a servant, who brought her the wine. Unless, she thought, she could not be won at all.

  "Three days," she heard as she sipped her wine. She stood near the group of the duke's men. "In three more days, at the Palazzo," but it was all part of the dizzy, overheated room, until, again, her wine finished, di Verona set her cup down and brought her up against him, face to face.

  "What will happen three days from now?" she asked, challenging him.

  "Where did your hear this three days?"

  "Oh, I have ears, signore."

  "In three days, in three days, the Doge's ball. And you will have an invitation," he said in a low voice. "I shall give it to you. And I shall escort you there. Do you understand me?"

  She understood too much, from far back, now that she understood things she had heard, having heard him and Nonna plotting together, when they regarded her as part of the furnishings. She stared into the lion's face, confronted its gleaming white grin inches from her face, and said, because she had not chosen to be meek: "Perhaps. Perhaps I shall."

  "You will, fool woman. And you will appear with me tomorrow, in the grand processional, and in the square, where we shall announce our wedding. Remember your function. You are nothing necessary. An ornament. People love a wedding. A public betrothal. It will quite seduce them."

  "Shall I? I might if you please me."

  His hand wounded her arm. "Think of your grandmother. Think of her comforts, and of your own future. You can end, or you can begin."

  She could not meet her harlequin. She would not bring him into so great a danger. This man would kill him, if she fled tonight to their trysting place, and tried to find him, tried to explain her failure of their rendezvous.