A Shadow All of Light

by Fred Chappell

  Sibylla giggled lightly, but Veuglio frowned. “This is nonsense,” he said. “You must be making a shadow-play of the hands that does not deceive even the children whom it amuses. Its effect is lost upon me, a blind man, even though I know what you are doing.”

  “You must recall the circumstances,” I replied. “You are a thief whose life hangs in the balance. You hardly know this dark corridor by daylight and not at all by night. Your senses are overwary and you fear making the softest sound. Suddenly on the wall before you appeareth the shape of a lion. You are in a state of mind easily to be misled.”

  I bent back my wrist so that the lion head lifted and then bent it forward so that the shape fell. There sounded a heavy knocking upon timber. An expression of puzzlement crossed the girl’s face.

  “What you have taken to be the shadow of an animal was only that of a sculpted door knocker,” I said.

  “Your accomplice, Signor Mutano, rapped the underside of the table,” Veuglio said.

  “True, but your young assistant was taken in, if fleetingly.”

  “She hath the disadvantage of being able to see. It has betrayed her more times than two.”

  “If all the world were as you, friend Veuglio,” said Astolfo, “my table would lack sorely. No one would buy my wares.”

  “Do not the olden philosophers declare that most men are as in my case, blind and without true understanding?” Veuglio said.

  “The sages are glad to point out the failings of others,” Astolfo said. “Upon the subject of sightlessness, they are wont to say that all who shun their particular strains of wisdom are blind.”

  “Tomorrow Signor Veuglio will accompany Mutano and me to Baron Rendig’s château,” I said, “and there he will point out to us our failings in regard to the guarding of the treasure, whatever thing it may be. We saw nothing precious there but the ring we ourselves had placed. Can we not let the matter lie until then and strike upon another theme?”

  “Perhaps we shall enjoy to have music,” said Veuglio. “Sibylla hath a singular voice for tune.”

  “Let us hear her sing,” I said. “What music, child, dost thou know?”

  “I have five songs,” she said. “‘The Dolors of the Faithful Knight,’ ‘The Ballad of the Unjustly Hanged,’ ‘The Queen Who Would and Yet Would Not,’ and ‘How Jason Came Home from the Thirsty Land.’”

  “What is the other?”

  “The fifth I do not sing and keep hope that I never shall.”

  “Thy choice, then,” I said.

  She sang out in a fine, thin voice like the trembling of a silver wire: “O Jason was a brave seafarer, And none was fairer than he…”

  Forty verses this song entrained, and they were sufficient to send us to a bed each and all.

  * * *

  The commission upon which Mutano and I labored at the baron’s château was on a vastly different scale from most of our undertakings. Here we did not dispose dribs of shadow to the allurement of Signorina Millifiore’s bosom nor tapered curlicues of colored shade to the ringlets of her coiffure. Large spaces confronted us, walls and ceilings and, of our most particular concern, floors. Stairs we studied and corridors and the great drains of courtyard and kitchen and stables. We investigated the one dry well in the center of the courtyard, Mutano letting me down on ropes to a sort of small chamber at the bottom. We traveled the upper stories with their dim hallways and the under-roof space where a pair of red owls nested. The cellars and larders we went through and we made everywhere extensive notes and sketches.

  The edifice contained three secret chambers; these were small, windowless, silent rooms that were barely furnished. One was located off a dank cellar corridor; a shabby little oaken door that looked as if it would open to a little-used storage space was sheathed with steel plate on the inside. This door guarded a room not much larger than the fireplace in Astolfo’s main library. In the center of this room stood a small, sturdy table with a low stool beside. The table was bare, but on the single wall shelf opposite sat a short pewter candleholder. It was empty, but three dirty candle stubs lay beside it, along with flint and steel and a tinderbox.

  There was another secluded room like this one on the second floor, and on the third and uppermost floor, still another. These doors looked most ordinary, but they too were steel-sheathed, as if shabby tables and dingy candle ends were handsome treasures.

  The one other appurtenance for each room was a small stoneware bowl set unobtrusively in a corner. Mutano lifted one to his nose. “It hath held cow cream,” he said.

  This then was the domicile we were to protect from intruders and thieves by arranging and disposing everywhere our deceptive shadows. Baron Rendig would not set a troop of guards in his house. He seemed to rate this unknown treasure so precious that he could trust no one to stay by it. Other systems of trapdoors, tripping wires, suspended broadaxes, and the like had proved as ineffective as the shadow mazes Mutano and I had set in place.

  I thought it a useless exercise to go with Veuglio through the château. He and Sibylla had traveled this house before, as he recounted, and had come to the secret rooms without being misled. That had been in the dark o’ the night and they had walked as stealthily as any jewel thief. He told us that the girl held a lantern before them as they walked.

  “What aid can a lantern lend a blind man?” I asked.

  “So that if there be others in the house they may recognize who we are and offer no threat,” he said. “Your Maestro Astolfo advised the baron I would be making a midnight trial of the shadow-tangle, so as to prevent my being taken for a thief, my cranium battered and my guts run through.”

  “Very well,” I said. “We have brought one of our lanterns from our Nighthouse and Sibylla must carry it just as she did at midnight, though it is now only forenoon. I will walk beside her to see how you wend your way and Mutano shall follow thee.”

  “Let us begin,” he said, and made straightway for a set of steep stone steps that led to the cellar passageway. I had to go smartly to keep pace with the old man.

  Here was a tedious chore. When we had completed our commission at this château, Mutano and I surveyed our work with no small pride. We had laid shadows athwart shadows and overlaid these with others. A thief who trusted to his eyes would find that an oblong darkness he took to be a corridor was a swift exit to the stony floor below; this passageway that opened to the upper balcony was actually an adit to the empty void around a parapet; that slant of light ahead that promised admission to the largest bedchamber was actually a slanted and shadow-applied mirror that would send one tumbling down a flight of breakneck stairs.

  One deception in which we took particular pride presented the sight of a gauzy curtain wafting in the breeze at a casement. Yet it was the rippling umbra of the surface of a stream that we had excised from the underside of a bridge and hung beside the large drain that fell two stories to a rock-ribbed culvert. To step through that imagined window was to step to a painful death.

  Many another ingenious illusion we had set in corners, at doorways, inside closets, and along galleries, and Veuglio and Sibylla passed by or through or about each one, finding sure footing at every step. He located each of the three secret rooms, advanced to their small tables, and felt his way to sit upon the stools. In the last one he said, “I detect the smell of tallow, but there is no candleholder on this table.”

  “The holder with the four stubs beside it sits in a shelf behind you,” I told him.

  “Ah,” he said, nodding.

  “And now this exercise is completed. Will you return to the villa?” I said.

  “Yes. I am beginning to tire.”

  We were concluded here for the time, I thought, but just as we were exiting the courtyard gate, Mutano gave a quick “Mrrr” and spun round in his tracks and lifted his head to look at the overhanging balcony. On top of the balustrade there sat a great orange cat looking down upon us with piercing gaze. Mutano returned this gaze steadily for a moment before following us o
utside and pulling shut the wide gate. I saw that he was excited but was trying not to show his agitation.

  That cat, I said to myself, must be Sunbolt, the beast within which Mutano’s true voice was lodged.

  * * *

  I did not mention my conjecture for a time, thinking it preferable to let Mutano broach the subject, if he desired. We were sitting in the east garden of the villa on a willow-wood bench beneath a great holly tree, nibbling at stalks of orchard grass, having been denied access to the new beer in the larder by our contrarious cook Iratus. Veuglio had declared that he needed rest and he and Sibylla had taken to their neighboring rooms.

  I spoke to Mutano in his cattish language. “Proof that our network of shadows may yet be efficacious is that there were no servants in the château. We have not yet given the baron our plan of the traps, and without it servants would be tumbling down stairways like barrels and dropping off balconies like walnuts from trees.”

  “It may be that he will reside there almost alone,” Mutano said. “He claims no near kin. He seems to live in such fear of losing his treasure that he will abide no other company.”

  “He is of no ordinary make,” I said. “I have conceived a curiosity about this treasure. What is so precious to a man that he will give over a château to contain its secret? Its worth is not to be valued in silver.”

  “Something touching his very life, is’t?”

  “It will be of value perhaps only to himself and of little interest to your ordinary thief. But if so, why will he need such protection? We must know more of this baron. What have you heard rumored?”

  “Little,” Mutano said. “I have not inquired directly, but when he is mentioned a wariness creeps into the tone of the conversation. Some of the dwellers of the lanes and byways know of him and show a fearfulness. He has a troop of armed men who obey his direction. I would call them disciplined and merciless. None of them goes alone to carouse and they do not speak to others than themselves. I have heard darker hints, yet as of now they are but wisps.”

  “We will follow further. I should also like to know whether Veuglio is the only person with skill in the avoidance of our measures. I am puzzled by his art.”

  “Some things we may surmise,” Mutano said. “Being blind, he is much aware of the differences in the heats o’ th’air, the changes in coolness from one place to another. He will also feel the pressures of draughts upon his skin that you and I are oblivious to. Odors he readeth and, as we well know, every kind of shadow bears its own smell.”

  “All true. Yet mass them all together and they do not account. He and the girl trotted through our mazes and around our pitfalls as if led by the hand.”

  “You walked by his side through the château, but I walked behind and could see the shadows of the pair. Sibylla’s umbra informed him of perils.”

  “Her shadow?”

  “I observed clearly that it swiftly recoiled, drawing close to her body when she approached a doubtful spot. At this recoilment, she changed the direction of her going so swiftly and smoothly it was difficult to see. Also, her shade would stretch out before her or to either side, as if a light were lowered beside her corpus. The look of it was like a dog sniffing the soil on the trace of a boar.”

  “He receives intelligence from her shadow?”

  “So I believe. At first, I thought this stretching and withdrawing to be illusory, but after watching closely, I was convinced that it was the case. The thought came to me that this ability might be common to the shades of those who guide blind men, for I have seen them make remarkable turns and recognitions, so cleverly done that they are hardly noticeable.”

  “As have I. Todow, the blind juggler in Daia Plaza, can distinguish by touch one silver eagle from another though they be minted in the same hour.”

  “And I thought, as we traced through the hallways, that perhaps for such guides their shadows act as do whiskers on a cat, to guard and guide them in the dark. But it is more than that. Some communication passes.”

  “If such does take place and we could bring to light the nature of it—”

  “This theme has much occupied Astolfo of late,” Mutano said. “I have suspicioned he hath in hand a momentous project he is not ready to unfold to us.”

  “If shadows had motion and power of thought, they could be led to act. Imagine us, under Astolfo’s direction, commanding an army of umbrae. If the girl’s shadow spoke in some wise to Veuglio, perhaps that is what the maestro desired for us to observe,” I said.

  He rose and began to make a circuit of the garden, stalking along slowly. I walked beside but kept silent, not wishing to disturb his course of thought. He spoke as if to himself, his feline sounds softened to a near purr, regular and unhurried. “I have conceived a hard notion. If we could learn the speech and custom of shadows, we could no longer buy and sell and alter their shapes and inner natures. Such cruelties must not be laid upon volitional beings.”

  “Animals are such beings,” I said, “and yet may be brought under our sway.”

  “Not all of them. The lion, the pard, the python do not bend to my will.”

  “Nor did your mount, Defender, when first you encountered him. But by patient stages, the two of you have sealed a silent pact from which both of you obtain much good.”

  “Yet we do things to animals that perhaps we should not. This thought hath plucked at my mind of late.”

  “You lost your voice to the cat Sunbolt,” I said, “and since that time you have had to speak in the tongue of cats. This has drawn you close to animals. You do not look upon them now as you used to do.”

  He stopped walking and did not reply for a space. Then he spoke in a tone almost mournful: “That is true.”

  “And if I mistake not, you saw this Sunbolt at the château, perched upon a battlement.”

  “I saw a cat.”

  “And I saw the change of your countenance. You must not dissemble with me.”

  “It was the one called Sunbolt. But I do not know if he still possesses my voice. I was surprised to see him there, alone upon the parapet. And the thought of him is strange, alone in the château, with all those rooms empty, including the kitchens and larders, which were stocked with only a jug or two of cream. Sunbolt walks a lonely patrol, inhabiting there almost alone.”

  “Except when the baron and his occasional manservant are present,” I said.

  “That is but one more puzzle. We know of houses, châteaux, and even of fortified castles built for the purpose of protecting treasures. Many princes and other nobles have built strong houses in which to lock up their gold and other baubles. Many a house has been constructed to keep a female chastely under key. The Lady Aichele has constructed a curious lattice-walled garden that only she could enter and in it planted the rarest of her many, far-brought plants. But what this baron secludes away, I cannot surmise, for the places most secure within his château are mean, dusty little rooms that would not dignify a hound turd.”

  “We will visit again,” I said. “We shall go stealthily and observe what it is like when we are unknown to it. And we shall recover your voice from that cat, who can get no good out of it in any way.”

  “He may find little use for it, but it is not likely he will willingly yield it up,” Mutano said. His tone was as glum as a pallbearer’s cloak.

  “But I have formed a scheme,” I said, “and you shall hear it at length tomorrow morning in the east garden.”

  * * *

  In truth, I had formed several schemes that had to be joined in overlapping fashion, like tiles on a roof, to be effective. As I outlined the steps, Mutano shook his head slowly, his expression a study in doubtfulness. “This plan you propose is more a maze than our shadow-tangle in the château.”

  “A maze through which a blind man made easy progress,” I said. “Let us go at methodical pace, a step at a time. First, if a man were to have his shadow stolen in a tavern called The Double Hell, can we conjecture who the thief might be?”

  “�
�Tis not a dishonest house,” he said, “yet sometimes the sly-fingered Mercurius awaits his prey therein. Even so, The Double Hell is where the unskilled go to dice their fortunes away. Thieving, being unnecessary, is uncommon.”

  “I shall return to the musk-house of Nasilia and speak to the keeper of the door, the woman called Maronda. I shall tell her that I have discovered the culprit responsible for the loss of her brother’s shadow. I shall tell her that I will deliver this person to her in return for a vial of the most alluring musk she has in store from a female cat in heat. This vial will cost us a silver eagle, or at least a handful of coppers.”

  “This suits not,” Mutano complained.

  “Suit it must, if you are to regain your voice. Unless we are willing to part with a little coin, she may not credit our story.”

  “For what purpose, this vial of musk?”

  “We will come to that. During the while that I arrange with Maronda, you are to take the largest of our lanterns from our herbage workshop, polish the mirror inside it to the highest degree of clarity, and make certain the shutter works easily and quickly. We must be able to prepare the lantern to emit the narrowest and sharpest of rays and then to snap shut upon the instant.”

  “I will do as you say,” Mutano replied, “but if this flimsy web you weave ravels under your hand, you must replace my coin and add more to the sum.”

  “Well,” I said.

  We left by the same gate but parted company at the roadway,

  * * *

  There is a strangeness about a great deserted house like the baron’s château; the emptiness speaks a light sadness to the senses, a kind of longing like that of a young wife, perhaps, whose husband is at sea. The hollowness of such an edifice in this early hour of the night caused me to fancy that if one would strike it on the far wall with a club the whole of it would resound like a kettledrum.

  We needed to enter no farther than the courtyard. Before coming, I had sketched out a hasty diagram showing that we would place our vial of musk, embedded in a nest of velvet, close to the projecting wall that presented the great doorway to the entrance hall. We would station us behind the corner there, out of the cat’s line of sight, and trust that the attraction of the musk would mask our presence.