Astolfo went on: “What physical attributes did you observe that would contribute to his power as an artist?”
“I am surprised at his comportment. He is a creature of jerks and starts, wriggles and itchings. He contorts his body as continually and absurdly as his facial expressions change, yet his drawing is easy and gossamer; it seems to have been breathed upon the page.”
“We cannot suppose that the man who swills grape and engorges flesh at table is the same as he who stands before the easel. Once he engages the discipline of his craft, his demeanor and personality will change. The priest who expounds a pious and arcane theology in the morning is not the same as the identical priest you encounter that evening in the drunken brothel.”
“He coils and uncoils like an adder in embers.”
“To aid his way of seeing. Did you not take notice of his eyes?”
“They are of different colors.”
“The clear blue is quick and precise. The left eye, colored like the iron of a dagger-blade, was shattered blind in a street brawl. He has to move his head continually to see things in the round. The loss of sight in one eye has given him an advantage in depicting shadows.”
“He has, then, acquired a valuable infirmity.”
“He has made it valuable. His infirmities and eccentricities are avidly cultivated. His aloofness of manner and careless speech signal an independent spirit free of sycophancy, and this bravura elevates the fees he commands. Where another might eat toads to gain favor, Petrinius spits venom and is the more prized. His great mural when finished will stand as one of the most powerful of misanthropic statements. Many in this city shall be furious to recognize themselves therein. If he includes representations of their shadows, those will suffer sad decline. The scrap of shadow from the felon Malaspino has lent him more power. Some high-placed persons will be savagely drawn in his panoply of rascality.”
“’Tis risky,” I said. “Some there are of the nobility would have him taken off the planet if he set them cross-grain.”
“He depends upon his genius to protect him. Did you note what he said about how the shade was thieved in the first place?”
“He did not know. He said it was neither taken by force nor eased away quietly and subtly.”
“You know the first two ways in which shadows are taken?”
“By stealth,” I said, “and that is called severing. By violence, and that is called sundering. The third I do not know, as you have not yet informed me.”
“Yet you might easily think it out for yourself. How do you acquire a possession of another and leave no trace of theft?”
I was momentarily perplexed. “Well, I suppose if I purchased it, or if someone gave the thing to me—”
“If you voluntarily allow someone to take your shadow, it leaves no trace of theft or even of the act of taking. This act is called the surrendering.”
“People do not lightly give up their shadows,” I replied. “Under what circumstance would anyone do so?”
“That is the question I shall put to myself as I sleep. If my pillow is as informative as I hope it shall be, perhaps the three of us may need to wander about the city tomorrow,” Astolfo said. He and Mutano began their silent colloquy again, their fingers busy as a flock of sparrows in a mulberry.
I left them at it, retired to my solitary, almost barren room, doffed my clothing, bedded myself, and slept like a sentry relieved from a six-sandglass watch.
* * *
On the next morning, after my customary lone and frugal breakfast, I was standing in the east garden. My eyes were closed as I turned round and round, judging the placement of the shadows there. It is an error to suppose, as I had done before entering apprenticeship, that comprehension of shadows is exclusively a matter of the eye. All the senses are engaged. I listened to the breezes as they mingled darker and lighter tints together; I smelled the differences between those plants that were in the shade of wall or tree and those that stood in full sun; I tasted the perfumes of the air with the tip of my tongue; I felt on my face the dapple that fell upon me through the newly leaved plane tree. I heard with special pleasure birdsong, how when it pours from the interior darkness of a thick bush, it lightens and rises minutely in pitch as it trills out of the foliage into the bright day.
I thought that I was aware of all around me, but this illusion was rudely dispelled by a sudden, solid, but not vicious kick to my arse. Mutano, my comrade and the maestro’s bear-sized manservant, he who looked as if he would shamble when he walked, could move as silently as any midnight wraith. I was grateful to him for his boot up my backside. In another, similar situation an actual opponent could have buried a dagger in my spine.
He beckoned me to follow him into the small library, where Astolfo sat in a worn leather armchair. He seemed half asleep when we entered and spoke in a lazy, almost slovenly drawl. This was his mode of speech when his mind was occupied with a problem. “My search has not been fruitless,” he said, “but its results are uncertain. We shall go within the hour to the workplace of the ballet master Maxinnio. Before we leave, you must drink the pot of tea which has been prepared for you. That will give you excuse and opportunity to examine his establishment. Mutano shall serve as our protector, if need be, and also as observer, for, to say truly, I do not know entirely what to expect of this visit. My surmise of the matter may be correct or it may err. At any rate, you and I shall go unarmed, but Mutano will bear his short sword.… And so, prepare.”
As bidden, I went to my room, performed brief ablutions, put on a clean doublet, and downed in hasty gulps the pot of bayberry tea that had been set out. Then I joined Astolfo and Mutano in the front of the main hall and we departed. Astolfo, I noted, had changed attire and was dressed in the customary gold-and-green trunks and doublet of a spice merchant. If he hoped to disguise himself, this clothing would not suffice. Master-of-shadows Astolfo was recognized by everyone in the city of Tardocco.
* * *
The door to Maxinnio’s establishment was a shabby, unvarnished affair of oak boards with a small square cutout to see through. It was opened by a girl of ten or twelve years in a gray scullery smock; she was unremarkable except for the great, dark, almond-shaped eyes set in her young, impassive face. The solemn eyes seemed older than the smudged face, a feature apart. Silently she showed us up the stairs to the studio salon.
Here were a half-dozen young girls stretching legs and torsos, clothed in the traditional white tights and frilly short skirts. Ranging in age from perhaps twelve to sixteen years, they leapt and pirouetted under the cold eye of a gray-haired chorus mistress. Maxinnio sat upon a campaign stool, looking without much interest upon the girls. The bored lutenist in his spare, wooden chair did not so much as glance at them.
Nor did Astolfo, as he hurried over to bow to Maxinnio and to press his unenthusiastic hand. Mutano and I gave each of the girls close and furtive examination, as we had been instructed to do. For me, such instruction was superfluous. These were remarkably pretty girls, in the very dawning of their beauty. I tried to ignore distraction, to concentrate on what I was looking out for.
“Strange colors for a shadow thief to wear, Astolfo,” Maxinnio said. “Why such a gaudy getup so early in the day?”
“Is it not jolly? I am happy that my thieving days, if ever there had been any, should lie behind me so that I can sport such livery as this. Today my green-and-gold signifies that I am just now in the service of another, a wealthy spice merchant who does not care to have his identity bruited about.”
“What have I to do with spice merchants, whatever motley they require you to wear?”
“He is wealthy, and that datum must interest you.”
“How so?”
“Because he is considering whether he may wish to invest funds in your company of dancers.”
“Did you bring this mass of gold with you, Astolfo, so that you require two ruffians to guard the treasure? Your dumb manservant I have seen before, this Mutton, or whatever he is ca
lled.”
“Mutano,” Astolfo said. “He is the most discreet of persons.”
“Let him keep so. But who is this clay-foot ox-goader by his side? He looks as if grasshoppers might spring from his codpiece.”
“He enjoys to be called Falco and I perceive he is in a state of discomfort. I think he may have been swilling ale even at this early hour, and if so shall not be in my service by this afternoon. Perhaps there is a place here where he may relieve himself.”
“Out the door and down the long hall to the end he will find a pissing room. If some girl has engaged it, he must hold his water until she leaves,” he said, and added: “I do not like the look of this Falco.”
“I plan to improve his appearance,” Astolfo said, and waved me away.
Mutano’s bitter tea had worked its way with me so that I fairly trotted down the gloomy hall to an open door within which stood a row of four stoneware pissing jars. No female was in the room, so I closed the door and went about my business, making sure, according to instruction, that my urination would be audible even through the walls. Anyone set to watch me would be satisfied with the legitimacy of my need.
Afterward, I stood listening for a moment, then stole to the door and opened it gradually. The hall was deserted and I went into it, going along slowly and silently, stopping by each of the doors to listen for any sound within.
At the end of the hall was a stairway, and I fancied that music sounded from the floor above. I mounted quietly to the door that closed off the stairs at the top. Here I heard distinctly the soft strains of harp music. When I tried to ease the door open, I found it locked. I was gratified. To pry back this lock with a short strap of stiff leather was the work of brief moments. Anyone inside would be unlikely to guard closely a locked door.
When I inched it ajar and peeped through I could see clearly because a panel of the roof was drawn back and daylight poured down upon a lank, abstracted youth with curly locks who sat playing his harp as if rapt by the music he produced. A girl dressed all in white tights to her neck danced in the sunlight. She did not wear the usual pleated dancer’s skirt.
She could not be above sixteen years and so slender within the white sheath she wore that she looked like a spiral curl of silver as she made a slow turn with her hands held aloft. On her toes she barely touched the floor and so weightless-seeming were her motions that a puff of air might have carried her up and away like the downy dandelion seed. She looked upward, following the line of her arms to her small, long-fingered hands, and her blonde hair hung long and free down her back. She would be the principal dancer of Maxinnio’s troupe, and she danced in the shaft of light as the spirit of loneliness. She moved as if she were the only being in a separate world. I felt that in looking upon her I looked upon my own spirit as I sometimes conceived it in melancholy humor—alone and uncompanioned in a moment of halted time, in a place that could not be reached from ordinary space. If every human soul is an orphan, as Astolfo once averred, this young girl embodied the soul of that soul.
I watched her, transfixed for long moments, before I recognized one of the things that caused her to emit such an atmosphere of solitude. Although she danced within a wide beam of full daylight, she cast no shadow on the polished maple floor. Shadowless, she seemed to burn in her space, a cool, silver flame as pure as starlight frozen in ice. The absence of a shadow attached her more closely to the music; she seemed a part of the music, as if when the harpist gently rippled his strings, he was caressing her figure with his fingertips, bringing from her, and not from his instrument, the strains and measures that fell upon my ears.
With difficulty I brought myself away down the stairs and returned to the salon where Maxinnio and Astolfo held conference among the other dancers. All the way back again through the dim, grimy hallway the sight of the silver dancer floated before me. When I came into the room with the harsher light and the different music and the prancing girls, the sensation was disagreeable. Everything, and especially the dancers, seemed tawdry and dull and clumsy. Aforetime I had found the room pleasant enough, but now it was immediately stale, flat, and tiresome.
Astolfo greeted me. “Well, Falco, you have been gone a good long time space. I must congratulate you on your bladder capacity. Perhaps we shall engage for you in a pissing tournament.”
“It was tea and not ale that I had drunk,” I said. “My innards are not so avid to entertain mere tea.”
“Must we spend more time hearing how your oaf makes water?” asked Maxinnio. “I hold the subject a shallow one.”
“Perhaps we have overstrained your hospitality,” said Astolfo. “Now that I have learned from you that you have no desire and no need to open your company to the investment of my client, we may decide our business is concluded.”
“It is well concluded, Astolfo,” Maxinnio declared. “I do not know why you have come knocking upon my door, with unsavory fellows at your heel, blathering some suppositious story about a spice merchant. Whatever underhand affair you have under way, I am to be left out. And there’s an end on’t.”
“I am sure you know best,” Astolfo said. He bowed and then Mutano and I bowed and the gray-smocked, great-eyed girl showed us down the stairs to the street. The lute music grew louder behind us.
* * *
When I told Astolfo about the dancer I had spied upon, we were sitting in his large kitchen. He enjoyed this room, with its enormous oven, its walls glowing with copper pans and kettles, its smells of breads and spices. He drew himself up backward and perched on the huge butcher block. We drank new ale from clay tankards and chewed on black bread and sour goat cheese.
When I finished my account, he closed his eyes and nodded. “The dancing master must have been asked to prepare an important entertainment for the municipality and has designed a particularly gratifying dance. You glimpsed her in rehearsal, Falco, and were transported. The full spectacle shall surely glow famously.”
“It is a sight worth living to see,” I avowed.
“Maxinnio will not be eager to give over this paragon of dance to Ser Rutilius.”
“He will not give her over,” I said. “Nor would you once you had set eyes upon her.”
“You are certain it is her shadow in the Ser’s cage of glass?”
“It can be no other.”
“Then we must find out our choices. What would Rutilius do if we delayed a while and then reported to him that we could not trace the caster of his shadow?”
“He would pay others to discover her.”
“How might they do so?”
I thought. “He would tell these others that we had failed. Then they would follow in our footsteps, seeking any sort of intelligence. By that time our visit to Maxinnio’s dancers would be known and they would find the silver dancer and inform Rutilius.”
“When once Rutilius knew that we had seen her, he would consider that—”
“That we had betrayed him, having designs of our own. He would not be pleased.”
“What of the girl, once he knows where and what she is?”
“He will abduct her, despite all that Maxinnio can do.”
“And then?”
I shrugged. “I cannot say. He shall have attained his desire. He shall possess the girl.”
“The consequence of this possession?”
“I cannot say.”
“There can be but one consequence. Did you gain any impression of her? Not of the dancer, but of the girl apart from the dance?”
I waited, but nothing came to mind. “I think there is no girl apart from the dance.”
He blinked his eyes and nodded once, gravely. “Because she casts no shadow. Like the music itself, she casts no shadow. She has been changed like those boys lopped of their coillons to become soprano singers, pure vessels of the art. Apart from her dance, she hardly exists. Petrinius understood this matter. His drawing of the shadow has more vital spirit, more spark of the soul, than does the shadow itself. And the shadow has more breath of spirit than
does the girl who cast it.”
“How does this fact serve Rutilius? I see advantage in it only for Maxinnio and the spectacle he is planning.”
“’Twould serve him ill,” he said, “and ourselves also. We must look for some other avenue of success or of escape.”
“How so?”
He shrugged. “I am a-weary of pondering and drawing up schemes. My wits are not so nimble as formerly. Why do you not tickle the ribs of your ingenuity and produce a plan for us to follow?”
“I shall attempt to do so,” I said. I sounded my words out light and eager, trying to disguise my unconfident apprehension.
“We will await with indrawn breath your masterpiece of machination,” Astolfo said. “You shall deliver it mid-morning tomorrow.”
Well, I would have to prepare some scheme or other for the morrow, that was certain. Certain too was the fact that it would be dismissed by the shadow master as harebrained, lackwitted, and impossible of execution. Therefore I did not trouble myself deeply about the matter and took his words to imply that this evening was mine to consume in whatever way I desired.
And so I stepped out across Tardocco to The Heart of Agate, these days my favored tavern in which to re-create body and mind. It was there, between bouts of tankards and bed-thumping, during one of those floating moments when I began to doubt the healthful value of such dissipation, that a glimmer of a notion entered my head and I abruptly and unsteadily betook me homeward. It was no thunderbolt conception, but even so I did not want to drown it in ale-swamp forgetfulness.
* * *
I rose late, only just before the appointed hour, composed my corpus as best I could, and went out of doors to greet Astolfo where he sat in the springtime splendor under the great chestnut in the east garden. He eyed me with humorous disdain, shook his head, but said nothing. Mutano, standing by a small rustic table, poured a foaming beaker of ale from a pitcher with a cracked spout. I tried to turn from the sight and smell of it, but he thrust it upon me and I drank and began to feel a little better. He had infused it with some sort of spice that so inflamed the palate I had to fumble for speech when Astolfo put his question.
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