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The Absent Shadow
I had well understood that Astolfo had regarded our present mission as being of utmost importance, but when he severed my shadow, he forcibly impressed upon me the ominous urgency of our undertaking. He must foresee and comprehend certain future emergencies that I could not glimpse. Otherwise, he would never have taken my umbra in so abrupt a fashion. Born in Caderia, I could not easily sympathize with the Feast of the Jester, nor understand its importance to the townspeople. Mutano, of a severely skeptical turn of mind, dismissed it as sham. Astolfo viewed it in his usual unhurried, thoughtful way: It was an established custom, and not to be perverted to base ends or used as a disguise for violence upon Tardocco. The custom must be protected.
So I attacked my separate duties with fresh resolve, even those that entailed some amounts of confusion and tedium—as did this immediate task of training my brother for his role in the impending conflict.
I had not expected that Osbro would be able to read a map. He could not read written words; “quill droppings,” he called them. Even so, I had drawn a map of the city, using for a general scheme old maps we had at hand, newly revised by my recent, hasty investigations, and he was able to keep the plan of the town orderly in his head. We sat side by side at the table in the small library and I reviewed the sheet with him. It was not necessary to gain a detailed picture of the river Daia, I said, in order to know its banks and piers and jetties, its depths and shallows, swift stretches and obstacles. He followed my instruction in patient silence, tracing with his finger on the page the courses and features as I described them. When he failed to understand he would give me a questioning look.
He did so now, tapping one section of the stream with a well-tended fingernail. “This?”
“Yes, here beneath this pier, a drain empties into the river. Bear well away from the pier or the inflow will turn your boat sidewise to the current. Then it would be difficult to straighten again. Are your navigational skills improving?”
He sighed. He would rather not have been sitting by lamplight during this jolly blue morning with its birdsong and sunbeams delighting the jolly outer world. From afar we heard the muffled, ragtag sound of revelry. It would soon be time for the Tumulus ritual celebrators to reach our grounds and he would fain be among the masqueraders. He was to accompany Mutano in the cart.
“I navigate the best I can,” he said, “but I don’t know the ways of boats. I think the one I’ve been given is not much of account. The what-you-name-it, the rudder, is clumsy and hard to turn. The flimsy thing seems hardly stuck together.”
“Sbufo rebuilt the boat according to the plan that he and Astolfo drew up. He is considered a good craftsman.”
“It looks like it’d fall apart if a gull lit on the front.”
“On the prow, you mean. If the boat falls apart, it is designed to do so. You have boasted of your swimming prowess. La Pluma taught you well, you claimed.”
“She did not teach me how to swim in rivers. We swam in a pool of Dove Creek under the willow trees. There were daisies in the grass along the bank.”
“I hope you will not tell me that she twined them into your hair.”
He reddened a little and returned his gaze to the map. “How about this place here?”
“A sandbar that is not always there. You need not fret about it. In fact, if you keep to the main current, in the middle of the stream for the most part, you need fret about little on the seaward course. When you enter the harbor it will be difficult to reach your object. The tide will be with you, but you will have to push hard to reach the ship.”
“If it is there.”
“As the maestro said, we must act as if it will be. We must act as if all his guesses were certain facts. Otherwise, we have no procedure at all.”
“I would like to know many things more.”
“As would I. Now, as you enter the harbor the dilapidated hulk called the Tarnished Maiden will be on your left-hand side. On the starboard lies the stretch of inner shore where the water is too shallow for ships to anchor. From that shore the great firelight will come. As soon as you see the flames leap up, you are to attack the pirate vessel, abandon your craft, and swim to the Tarnished Maiden. Do not be frightened by the appearance of the hulk but get you aboard where you will be safe.”
“All this I’ve been told already. Why should I fear what the old derelict looks like?”
“Because Astolfo says it may present a fearsome appearance. That is all I know.”
“And then?”
“Then your part in the fight is concluded until you row to the wharves. There is a dinghy for you and the others.”
“What others?”
“I do not know. Perhaps it is best not to.”
He rubbed his neck. His doublet held at the neck a collar of fresh, stiff linen, and this fashionable dress was uncustomary to Osbro. He was used to the countryman’s open collar and spacious smock. “There is much we don’t know. It is like gathering roses in the dark o’ th’ night.”
“Astolfo says—”
My sentence was interrupted by Mutano, who, after a casual knocking of the doorframe, entered to tell us that the procession was drawing nigh to our eastern gate. It was nearing time to join with it.
I turned to Osbro. “We will discuss the map and the plan of action again if you desire.”
“If a question comes to me. But I reckon I got it in mind.”
We followed Mutano. He was striding along eagerly.
* * *
The cart stood just outside the gate, looking trim and handsome in the cool light. In the bed lay the coffin; it should contain, according to ritual protocol, an effigy of the ancient Bennio; the small stick-puppet Dirty Bennino that was Bennio’s mascot; and the shadow of the Ministrant that custom decreed must be buried in the Tumulus when the crescent moon stood in its zenith.
Defender waited in harness. When we arrived he turned his head to give Mutano a most reproachful look. He was no workhorse to plod along, trailing a cumbersome, humble cart; he was a proud mount, lively in spirit and courageous of heart. He did not understand why he had been consigned to this drab duty or why Osbro, Mutano, and I were dressed all in black trunks and doublet and with a short black cape lined with green. Astolfo had ordered this livery because it would stand out from the great display of harlequinades the revelers would wear. We would be able to recognize one another with ease.
“All must be dependable,” Mutano had said. “We cannot predict what will happen.” For that reason, Defender had been uncommonly well foddered and curried for the past few days. This was another of the numerous cautionary measures the maestro had set forth, many of them superfluous, as he had admitted. But he quoted the proverb, “A lace untied—and woe betide.”
We had laid a board across the front of the sideboards for a seat and on one side sat a fat cushion of harlequin cloth red and blue and yellow. This was for the driver, Mutano said.
“Why none for me? Why must I sit on bare oak?” Osbro asked.
“Defender declared he would not pull the cart with a ploughboy perched on a cushion like one of the grand,” Mutano replied. He had to speak loudly, for the procession was drawing closer upon us.
Osbro let the weak jest pass.
It was time for me to find a space across the roadway from which I could enter into the crowd as it passed, while keeping close to our conveyance, alert for possible trouble.
Now, as the procession passed around the slow, sweeping curve of the roadway that joins with the Via Daia, we heard more brightly the piping of flute and aulos. Drums rattled. Dogs barked. Pipes squealed. The noise of the trudging clogs and wooden-soled boots upon the cobbles was like the sound of a great rain hurtling upon a hard-baked plain. Now and again a trumpet or sackbut would bray, recalling the Jester’s mocking strain:
“Crambo and crooked Bennio goes,
But what the Jester knows, he knows.”
They were well in sight, the flautists
and pipers, the brasses and the drums, and after them came the populace of the city, so motley in dress, station, and degree that they resembled in total aggregate the idea of a bedraggled Harlequin, a communal personification. Yet they were different individuals. Nobles were borne forth in chairs and litters; wealthy burgers rolled along in gaudy two-wheeled carriages. But even the well horsed could go at no faster pace than the crowd afoot allowed. Scolding mothers and tipsy fathers, flustered nursemaids, one-eyed beggars, and wide-eyed scullery maids jostled against one another, each hindering the passage of each, some shouting, some singing, some silent and sullen.
Following this crush came the mountebanks. The Jester representation was the most popular, but there were Pantaloons and Columbinas and Petralchios by the dozens, walking upon their hands, or skipping, cartwheeling, tumbling, and leapfrogging when space afforded. The prettiest Columbinas found opportunity to strike poses—and to strike the faces of loungers who offered ungallant addresses.
Then came the trades—the cobblers, millers, weavers, carters, wheelwrights, potters, tinkers, seamstresses, locksmiths—workmen and their masters and apprentices, striding, sauntering, lolling, strutting, essaying what gait soever their feet might fancy. I saw the household of the cattery mistress, Nasilia, all in a group and observed that the crowd thinned about them, avoiding the smell they bore.
Varied bands of young folk followed, their dress parading some of the causes and factions of Tardocco. The charities for the crippled and wounded and leprous sent maidens with baskets of blossoms to strew; the guild of Green Knights and Verdant Ladies sent a quartet of lads and lasses decked out in foliage that served as scanty clothing; the Red Fletch Society of Archers lent the procession a line of tall sharpshooters, so attractive of feature as to make maidens blush at their own fancies.
At the last trailed those of grave visage: the savants and pedants, the scriveners and keepers of documents, the philosophers natural, moral, logical, and cosmological. Some of these were robed and wore the pomegranate-shaped hats peculiar to their academies; others affected for modest purpose the homespun garb of carpenters and smiths. Among them trod the priests of colorful deities and mystic tenets in silks and velvets and bleached linens, barefoot or shod in homely sandals.
This latter flock was raucously attended by a rabble of grinning urchins and querulous dogs. Many of the urchins were pebble-pelters, and they recalled Bennio’s old cry:
“Pay no reverence to the graybeards old;
Their pizzles are puny and their brains are mold.”
The crowd parted on the other side of the roadway, allowing Mutano and Osbro to insert our cart into the procession. When we joined the progress and our cart was known as the vehicle for the harlequin coffin, a shout went up and a nearby trumpeter sounded a tucket. Then the procession went forward again at its uncertain pace.
I could see nothing amiss, no Jester-figure poised to leap aboard the cart and tumble out the coffin or to seize the reins from Mutano and speed the cart away from the rout, ruining the necessary, prescribed ritual Such a gambit would not be possible, anyway; the crush was too close-packed.
So I walked along, watching Defender as he nosed ahead. I took careful note of the members of the march. Two housemaids were gossiping about a Bennio of their neighborhood and finding that they differed in estimate of his character. The tall one with the high-crowned hat of white felt recounted how this local Jester had comforted a lad during his long illness and, by causing him to smile at his jollities and japes, had restored his appetite so that the medico then was able to bring him to health. The shorter, portly one in black bombazine complained that this same Bennio had filched a ring from her sister and given it to her rival for a certain Giacomo’s affections.
“Giacomo the smith’s prentice, you mean?”
“Yes. That is the one.”
“Who received this ring from Bennio?”
“A hussy named Cecilia.”
“She of the house of Masilio?”
“Yes.”
“Then the Jester but returned the ring that belonged to her already. She was betrothed to Giacomo, only he claimed to change his mind. ’Twas a shame upon her. But when Bennio returned the ring the shame was on her betrayer. Giacomo has now repented and sues to win her back. It was a good deed of the Jester.”
I stepped away from this chattering pair and fell in behind a piper who was at the moment not tootling but making repair to the mouthpiece of his instrument. The remarks of those two women were typical of the accounts of the Jesters that were always abroad during Feast days. Some saw the Bennio as an instigator of mischief; others knew him as a purveyor of helpful deeds. They were glad to forgive his coarse and fleering ways, his pinching and poking and playful buffets. For every face he presented to the gaze he had also an obverse, and both of his faces were widely witnessed and consistently contradictory. Astolfo had voiced a thought about the original Jester that I did not comprehend: “Every jest at which you laugh is also one at your own expense.”
The maestro was nowhere to be seen. All Mutano and I knew was that he would be close to us during the burial ceremony, looking on, like myself, to forestall whatever tribulations might befall. He would be disguised, I suspected, as another of the Bennios who infested the late afternoon landscape. Our cart was to join the Ministrant at the Tumulus, there to be unloaded by four dark-robed members of the Jester Society.
The brief rite would then take place, with the Ministrant uttering the traditional phrases and making the traditional gestures. There would be chanting and dancing by torchlight and then the torches and all other lights would be extinguished. The coffin would be thrust into the ground and sod laid over it. At the moment the final clod thumped down upon the small harlequin coffin, the moon would be at its zenith and upon its face would appear the features of the original Bennio—his cocked supercilious eye, his hooked nose, his sneering grin and up-jut goatee, the cap with its jaggedly cut headband low on his brow.
This visage of the Jester anyone might sight any time of year in clear weather with the moon in crescent phase. Only the ritual of the Feast brought the image to fall sharply upon the eye, to the wonderment of children and the amusement of their parents, and to the fond reminiscence of the old folk. The Jester was at home in the moon once again: Let Autumn come with his cornucopia; let Winter follow, shivering in his white, beggarly rags. Clown Bennio will have put his humpy shoulder to the wheel of the year and nudged it onward in its course.
My most pointed attention I gave to the many Jester figures. Our client, il signore Misterioso, had caused us to believe that the counterfeit Jesters were part of the forces bent upon the seizing of Tardocco. I watched as many as I could, noting which ones were accompanied by dogs and subtracting them from suspicion. A false Jester would not have had time to train an animal. I kept a careful eye on the children as they watched the Jesters at their antics. If any hint of fearfulness appeared in their eyes, I subtracted those Jesters also, having concluded that the true Jesters had something of a sinister cast to their characters which would alarm children, however slightly. Most of the remaining clowns were ordinary citizens no more skilled at the role than I was. Among this cram of folk the infiltrators would be hard to distinguish and I tried to think of details that might single them out. Astolfo had asked Osbro about accents and vocabularies, but the general hubbub obscured much of the talk. The Jesters whom I took pains to walk among were mostly silent, except when the impulse rose strong within them to burst into one of the old refrains:
“Once he stands in the moon uprose,
The world well knows what Bennio knows.”
The procession was enlarging in number. From parkways and side streets and alleys celebrants poured into the press. The day was growing late—the western sky was purpling, the eastern going silver-gray. The moon was visible, a sliver like a toenail paring, but it was not yet at zenith. The noise of the people had grown quieter, though horns still bleated now and again and an indecent rhym
e or two burst forth at intervals like shooting stars into a twilight sky. It would be yet a while before solemnity took hold, but I began to feel its imminence.
I edged toward the cart, needing to take a place close by it before we reached the Tumulus. As I made my way across, I saw one of the Jesters who was following a swaggering bravo produce from his busker’s shoe a dainty scissors and neatly clip away the purse that hung by a thong from the youth’s embroidered linen belt. I pretended to lurch into the thief, excusing myself clumsily. “Mi spiace, signor. Scusi.” “Per n’ente,” he replied, revealing with his dialect that he was no native. I could not place the origin of his accent. Now I looked to find other Jesters close by who would be associated with him, but I could spot none with certainty. He may have been no more than an ordinary thief, come to the Feast for the rich pickings.
As I brushed by the young man who was the victim, I turned and pointed at the Jester and made a scissors-sign with my fingers. The hero felt for his purse, then grasped the Jester by the wrist and demanded the return of his silver. As this altercation continued, two other Jesters came forward to take the thief’s part, shouting angry words in that same dialect. The conflict broke off when the thief dropped the purse to the cobblestones and dodged into the crowd and his confederates disappeared.
I could not decide. Were these four men among the force of infiltrators? Their outland accents would seem to furnish evidence. Yet why would an invading band risk making its presence known with petty thievery? Also, this incident took place so far from our cart that the false Jesters could offer it no threat.
We are still battling cobwebs, I thought.
* * *
Now the Tumulus came into sight. Here was the grassy pyramid, about one story in height with two smooth, well-grassed, small terraces built into its sides. Upon one of the terraces was mounted an earthen platform where the Ministrant stood with two black-robed aides beside him. He was robed in a violet-blue silk the color of the darkening sky above us. A hood covered his head and below it hung a Jester-mask different from all the others present. It was Bennio’s form, but the face was of shiny white, a polished lacquer, while the mouth and eyebrows and daggerlike goatee were not red but of the darkest black. Around the eyes were large black circles and the mouth too was black, not shaped in the fleering grin but downturned in a deeply mournful expression. The Ministrant moved his head slowly from side to side and the mask made it seem that he was searching through the crowd to sight specific individuals.
A Shadow All of Light Page 37