Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  The words sent a pang through me from chest to belly.

  I would not stand where Fludd stands now. That would mean I should have injured her beyond the bearing of it. It puts me in mind of Nagasaki and how all liking, all affection, was gone from her voice.

  If this were a game, I might play it. But off the stage, and in cold reality…it is unbearable.

  Dariole took her dagger out of its scabbard.

  The light caught it: a glimmer of silver and blue in the steel. She touched her thumb to the edge, and took it away. A thin red line showed on her skin. Her eyes moved, looking at Fludd. She did not raise her head. She stared at him from under her lashes.

  Disturbed insects buzzed out through the cabin doorway. The musty smell of too much human inhabitancy made me wish to stop my nose. But what we do here will not be seen, and so the concealment, I suppose, is worth much revulsion.

  She is not a child, I thought. If she desires, truly, to kill him, can I force myself to be fast enough to prevent it? Even with what hangs on this?

  Fludd gasped, in my grip, and managed to speak. “Forgive me!”

  Dariole looked back at her knife. “Oh, now, that’s just silly.”

  Robert Fludd flung himself into a paroxysm.

  Almost, he took me by surprise. Shorter than I, and thinner, he was still no weak man; he thrashed, fuelled by the panic men have when they at last truly believe that they can be hurt.

  I shifted my grip, hooking one leg over his and scissoring him close under my ankle. I caught hold of his ruff, so that in straining he could only choke himself, and dragged his wrist further up his back, drawing his elbow and shoulder taut.

  That allowed me, crammed up against the ceiling beams as I was, to look down over Robert Fludd’s shoulder at Dariole.

  She, far too calmly, reached out to the front of his trunk-hose.

  “I’m sorry!” Fludd bawled, loud as a bull calf.

  I was not sorry I had no hand to gag him, nor did I call on Gabriel. Dariole deserves to hear this. Even if, by the disgust on her face, she is used to duelists who are far too willing to die rather than beg….

  She opened his hose, and slit open the front of his drawers with her dagger.

  “Please!” Fludd wept. “I’m sorry! I swear! I’m sorry!”

  His voice pitched high with terror. I went hot with shame for him.

  She reached into his clothes and scooped out his cod, flesh a pathetic white against the grey cloth of his trunk-hose. She put the sharp edge of her dagger into the root of his prick, among the sparse hair.

  Gabriel, by the door, rumbled, “Jesu!” in both admiration and disgust.

  Fludd’s body jerked in my arms: straining and choking.

  When I have seen Mlle Dariole kill, it is with sheer joy, as on the beach at Normandy, or, as later, with grief or rage.

  I said softly into Fludd’s ear, not knowing until then that I would speak: “You made her the woman who can do this.”

  White showed all around the pupils of his eyes, and slime ran out of his nose.

  Tears began to roll down Dariole’s cheeks, one after another.

  Her voice did not shake or quiver. “You’re not sorry. You just don’t want me to kill you. You’re lying in your teeth. I ought to cut off this and put it up your arse.”

  Dariole reached out to touch Fludd’s prick. Her face showed an expression of disgust as she pried the wrinkled small thing up by the foreskin. She stretched the limp flesh out from his belly.

  If it had been I, facing her now, I should have begged to be spared too—and not for erotic excitement. Did I not think, once, in London: she has the capacity to be a killer who kills without any remorse?

  I felt my sac contract, and my testes desire to crawl back up into my body.

  Dariole tightened her grip, taking a pinch of Robert Fludd’s foreskin between her thumb and finger, pulled his whole penis until it stretched out from his belly, and slashed her dagger down.

  Blood spurted, white flesh instantly reddened.

  Fludd shrieked like a woman in childbed. His body reared up in my arms.

  That startled me. Unprepared, I clenched every grip I had on him. His whole body jerked, involuntarily, away from her; a crack reverberated through my flesh.

  His right arm came limp, fluid, in my grasp.

  All the full weight of him slumped back against me.

  Dariole opened her hand.

  Only the tip of his foreskin lay in her palm. The merest pinch of flesh: less lost than a Jew does.

  Gabriel blurted out, “Good God, will you cut a man to pieces by inches!”

  I grunted; even a slight man’s unconscious weight is heavy, and Fludd was not so slight. “He’s fainted.”

  Dariole stared.

  Slowly, slowly, the intense look went out of her eyes.

  One hand came up, and she touched the shoulder of Robert Fludd’s doublet, where his flesh bulged under the cloth. She pushed at his arm, senseless and hanging limp as cloth itself.

  “He has dislocated the shoulder,” I said. “Or broken it. It can be put back.” I paused. “If you wish to. He will have the use of his arm again. It is, however, an easy and useful way to cause pain to a man, while it is so dislocated.”

  She nipped a tiny part of her lip between her teeth. The look she gave me had apprehensiveness in it. I went hot with shame of a quite different kind. Yes, I know these things; it is a part of my profession.

  “Are you done?” I said. “There will not be another chance.”

  “Put him down,” she ordered.

  Nodding to Gabriel got him to open the doors of the box-bed. I felt Dariole’s gaze on me as I draped the unconscious man on the pallet.

  Moving the out-of-place joint as I lowered him made him mew, half coming out of his faint. His head lolled. I laid him flat. His prick and balls caught in the flap of his breeches, hanging out in his lap, the cloth speckled with blood.

  This is no new situation for an agent of the state.

  It has been a comfort to me, in the past, that it was not my place to suggest either a surgeon, or a knife into the soft spot behind a man’s ear.

  Now….

  I began, “Dariole—”

  Her skin had gone yellow and white together; she looked as sick as Magister Robert Fludd himself. The sense of something, if not irreparable, then at least irreparably sordid, made me flinch internally.

  She said, as if to herself, “How can he be sorry? He knew what they’d do. He didn’t stop them. He sent them so Luke could do it.” She looked down at the blood on her hand. “Luke made me wet inside with this.”

  My vision became a flat white tunnel; I fixed every ounce of self-control on not reaching out, taking Fludd’s neck in my hand, and snapping his vertebrae.

  Dariole moved closer to the bed. I saw her survey the indisputable blood soaking the fly of his trunk-hose; the disfigured shoulder and useless arm. A line of white shone under Fludd’s eyelids.

  It cannot have been more than three minutes by the clock: it seemed to me that she stood and looked at him forever.

  Squatting down beside the bed, staring into his half-open eyes, Dariole wiped her blood-spattered fingers, and the fragment of his skin and flesh, down Fludd’s doublet.

  Her knuckles jarred his arm, free now of its socket. He whimpered, eyes rolling, mouth wet.

  She said, “You remember me. Every time you take a piss, you look down, and you remember me.”

  I have preserved him, I thought, looking at Fludd’s semi-conscious but living body.

  Now I must decide what use I will make of a man who—given time—can tell what Time itself will do.

  Gabriel Santon brought a tiny elderly brown man up from the forecastle, who jerked Doctor Robert Fludd’s arm back into his shoulder-joint with one seemingly careless snap.

  I shut Fludd in Dariole’s cabin, on public pretence of his “accidental injury” needing to mend, and watched Dariole herself sleep out on the deck, under the brill
iant stars. If I slept an hour or so in the day—and Gabriel a different hour—I found we might both serve to guard Fludd and Mlle Dariole by shifts at night.

  “Don’t tell her we’re watching her,” Gabriel muttered one night, at change of guard. “God alone knows what she’d do to us.”

  “She has been given much to consider,” I said. “She has not yet become used to the idea of not having killed Monsieur Fludd.”

  “Nor have I.” Gabriel shot me a look. “But you’re planning something. I know the signs of that.”

  The Santa Theodora sailed into the mouth of the Madovi River, and so upstream until we docked at her destination of Goa.

  This western coast of Hind appealed to me, lush as it seemed. I am perhaps at heart a traveller. I took us lodgings behind the new Basilica of Bom Jesus, locking Fludd in whenever I had cause to leave the rooming-house—Fludd’s slow recovery from his injuries making him a recluse in any case.

  Not unwise, I thought, it being a Portuguese colony. A man can never tell how Spanish agents will react to the English. Or the French, if it comes to it.

  I set about seeking a ship sailing further west, otherwise bided my time, and—on the fourth day after our landing at Goa—felt it at last to be ripe.

  “‘Quen vim Goa excuse de ver Lisbon,’” I observed. “‘Who has seen Goa, need not see Lisbon.’”

  Mlle Dariole, one hand on her rapier hilt, looked about the cobbled square of the cathedral and raised her brows. Her lips twisted in an awkward attempt at a smile. “I don’t remember those in Lisbon….”

  It was unclear to me whether she referred to the feather-leafed trees surrounding the centre of the square, or the parrots, pigeons, and lizards that infested the place.

  Having returned to dressing in doublet and hose, in preparation for landing at Goa, Dariole had abandoned them for kosode and hakama as soon as the wet heat soaked in. As with Lisbon itself, a man may not move out of doors between the hours of noon and four. I urgently desired the onset of evening, for the cool—and for the evening tide.

  Avoiding the brightly and strangely dressed crowds as potential eavesdroppers, I steered her into the Basilica—more for the welcome chill of the Baroque stone after the heat outside than for any religious consolation. True, the white marble of the side-chapels had a variety of lurid gold-leaf decoration that one might see in any church in Lisbon. But, like the numerous Hind and Arab tongues I heard among the parishioners, as well as the ever-constant Portuguese, it had a streak of intriguing strangeness.

  I knelt in one side-chapel.

  “Are you content?” I said.

  Mlle Dariole dropped neatly down beside me, gazing up at the candles and the porcelain white face of Our Lady, and not across at me.

  “I wanted to hurt him.” Her voice broke the hot silence. “It’s horrible.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And it’s like somebody lifted a weight off me.”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  “Is this always what it’s like? If I killed him, would I feel any worse than this?”

  “I still do not propose to allow you his death,” I said. “I will explain why in a moment, now you are well enough to hear it.”

  She ignored me. Her hands shook where she clasped them in prayer. “I didn’t want to…make game with him.”

  Her eyes, in the cathedral’s shade, were big and dark.

  “You mean, that belongs to night-play,” I said. “Not the daylight world.”

  The ancient scent of candles and incense, familiar from childhood, is odd when mixed with the spices drifting in from the cooking-fires outside, and the flower-scent of Goa. Bright scarlet and green bird’s feathers blew in along the stone floors, with the dust. Almost Lisbon, almost France; not quite either.

  Mlle Dariole’s expression became intense. “Messire…you always wanted to be on your knees to me, didn’t you?”

  At another time I might have supposed such a question to be asked to humiliate me. Now, I saw it as a request for reassurance. I glanced across, unafraid to watch her while I supposedly prayed.

  “Mademoiselle, I have never been afraid of you in the way that Fludd was. I do not know how long I desired to be at your feet before I let myself know it. Let us say…some considerable time.”

  She flashed me a smile that vanished on the instant. “He was scared of me. What happens if I think I…want that again? I don’t think that would be good for me. Mixing the two: the night-world and….”

  Her voice trailed off.

  I said, “You will never have that kind of fear out of me, mademoiselle.”

  Her face I thought a picture: half-affronted, and half desiring to be reassured that indeed it was so.

  I could not help but smile at her. “I confess that it occurred to me, some time ago, that you have degraded me, whipped me, and held me up to public humiliation—but you have never hurt me. I regret to tell you, mademoiselle, that I know I am…safe…with you.”

  She turned her head to give me a small glare. Without her hat, tendrils of short hair were stuck by sweat down over her forehead. The fullness of her lower lip looked of such a softness that I desired to place my fingertip against it. All young man and young woman in the one body.

  “I could make you afraid,” Dariole said, with a magisterial sniff.

  “You can make me desire to put down my dignity.” I inclined my head to her. “When it’s a burden. For the rest…You are not a cruel woman. Or, you have a chance to avoid becoming so.”

  Her eyes blinked, focused: what I thought might be a miraculous movement of Our Lady’s hand disclosed itself the flick of a green lizard’s tail. Dariole watched the beast. She shifted on the hard tiles.

  “Mademoiselle.”

  I waited until she looked across at me, even though she still clasped her palms together in prayer.

  “If I’m to bring Fludd back to England, I have enough to contend with with storms, shipwreck, slavers, and the undeniable fact that if Gabriel must guard Fludd any longer, he’ll probably kill him.”

  She did not want to smile; I saw so much. The corner of her lip moved, nonetheless.

  “Mademoiselle…perhaps, you did need to kill Robert Fludd.”

  I made it almost a question.

  With her eyes fixed on the motionless lizard, she spoke in a low tone. “I thought if I had revenge, it would be…. What Luke did to me: that it would wipe it out. Make it never have happened.”

  “Ah.”

  The lizard vanished with the instant disappearance of its kind. I could have laughed to see how, within half a heartbeat, both Dariole and I, by habitual reaction to movement, had hands on sword-hilts where we knelt, and a keen idea of the locations of all priests and other worshippers.

  Her shoulders untensioning, she said, “Nothing can do that, can it? Make it not have happened? Even if the future can be altered, we’re stuck with the past.”

  “Yes. I have no other answer for you.”

  Dariole looked back at me. “Is it evil if I do feel better, messire? For hurting him?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  She nodded slowly. “I think so too. But…I do.”

  The burning white sun spread fan-rays across the stone floor, pushing into the brown shadows of the Basilica by way of the great door to the outside world. As it swung to, patches swam in my vision. One man in a black cassock walked past us, his sandals clacking loudly.

  Dariole turned her head back from watching him diminish towards the Baroque splendour of the main altar. “I’ll tell you something, messire. I’d been thinking, after Sister Caterina, that I could be proud—that I was the one special enough to upset all Fludd’s calculations. But, you know what? All that means is, I’m somebody not…normal. Someone who’s—bizarre. Deviant.”

  “‘Prodigious,’ ‘rare,’ and ‘strange,’” I said. “These are also words.”

  Dariole shook her head, not even smiling at strange. “Messire, a madman or a beggar would have done just as good. U
pset his plans. You know that?”

  It was beyond me not to touch her hands, where she clasped them palm-to-palm. A second passed before she drew them back.

  “And you know what else?” She looked at the Virgin’s pallid lips. “I managed to spoil his calculations, but that’s not the end of it. I still have to be this person I am. The one he hurt. The one that—isn’t like other women.”

  Quite involuntarily, I muttered, “Thank God!” under my breath.

  Dariole looked at me.

  Things are not done with, put aside, I thought. This is only the beginning.

  “Why do you want Fludd alive?” she asked.

  I could not repress either a smile or affection at her directness.

  “One reason is this. If a man were to lay a bet, it would be that Robert Fludd did not make his way out to the Japans without first calculating by what ship he could safely arrive—and also, by which ship he could safely return, if Nihon became an ill place for him.”

  After a moment Dariole dipped her head in what I took to be assent.

  I rose to my feet, genuflecting towards Our Lady. The wooden geta Dariole wore clattered on the stone, walking from the side-chapel.

  “Yes,” she said. “Travel by ship…terrifies me, frankly, messire! Given how much luck we must’ve got through by now….”

  She makes such admissions as if they harm her self-worth not at all.

  I said, “If I weren’t sick for home, I might let that terror persuade me to live the rest of my life in Hind. However. Monsieur Robert Fludd can tell us which ships safely withstand storms, are not wrecked on reefs or lee-shores, and are not subject to attack and murder by pirates.”

  “He’ll lie!” Dariole exclaimed.

  “He might.” I saw Dariole give an excited nod, and inclined my head to her. “But not if they are the same ships on which he is travelling with us.”

  The steel sunlight, battering from above, made her squint her eyes into slits. She took out of her obi the folded parasol that she kept by her rapier, and moved her hands to construct its shelter.

  “Why can’t I kill him?” The oval of shade released her to open her eyes again, and gaze up at me. “Because you want him to do mathematics for you?”