by Melanie Rawn
He could barely force breath through his constricted chest. “He is dead,” Raimon managed. “It doesn’t matter any more if you have come.”
The woman disagreed. “Of course it does. The message is given, no? And must be obeyed.”
To bear enmity for years long past, such hostility for an ancient dishonor … He struggled not to shout condemnation. “We were not at fault. Not Grijalvas.”
“Of course you were. Why else did the Matra permit those women to be dishonored? Why else were the children permitted to be conceived? Why else were so many born? And why else was the Nerro Lingua so particular in its punishment of your family? You have been marked out by our Most Holy Mother as abomination. In her wisdom she has punished you for the dishonor, the taint, by visiting upon you the Nerro Lingua, and the Ecclesia follows Her guidance.” One thin hand clasped the silver lock into a knob-knuckled fist. “Pray within your walls as much as you wish, chi’patro, but the Mother and Her Son have no mercy for Grijalvas.”
Raimon cast off discretion. “Then you have perverted Them,” he accused. “You have polluted Their hearts with your selfish, misguided fanaticism—”
“Bassda!”
“—and one day we Grijalvas shall regain what we had, including the Holy Blessings of the Mother and Her Son, and they shall know the truth of how They are served by such as you and yours, and those of the Premio Sancto!” He was trembling with outrage. “—Nommo Chieva do’Orro!”
Her face now was pinched and white, ageless in asceticism. “Oh, yes,” she said acidly, “your sacred Golden Key. One would believe you worship that above the Matra ei Filho!”
“Not above the Mother and Her Blessed Son. Above the Ecclesia and its unholy politics.”
“The Ecclesia is—” And she broke it off.
“Oh, yes?” It was his turn to spill the acid. “Were you intending to say the Ecclesia is the Mother and Son? Oh, but to do so is basest blasphemy, heresy, no?—and what, do you think, would be adequate punishment for it? A plague? Another Nerro Lingua?”
“Nommo Matra ei Filho,” she murmured, as if in supplication. “I pray You give me strength—”
“To circumvent a family you believe tainted, when we were merely victims!”
“Whores,” she said icily. “Every one of them. The Rescue of the Captives proves it.”
Illumination kindled. “What is your family name?”
“The Ecclesia is my family. My name is Premia Sancta.”
“Before,” he said steadily. And then laughed bitterly. “But no, do not trouble yourself to dissemble. I believe I know the answer.” Raimon paused. “And is the Premio Sancto also a Serrano, as was the artist?” He paused, timing it. “As is the Premia Sancta?”
Dark eyes flashed. “Bassda,” she hissed. “I will hear no more from you!”
Raimon extended a hand. “The door is there,” he said plainly. “I suggest you use it. Adezo.”
When the woman was gone, when the room was empty of vilification and bitter family rivalry, Raimon Grijalva turned again to the man in the bed. Very carefully he knelt once more upon the frayed, thin rug, bowed his head, and began the simple prayer the Ecclesia would never offer. “Matra ei Filho … accept this man’s soul, who labored so long and well to serve You, his Duke, and his family.”
Long indeed, for a Limner. From birth through depletion to death, Arturro Grijalva had survived fifty-one years.
The tent was little more than a framework of willow withies, bound and braided with reeds in intricate knotwork patterns, overdraped with doubled panels, a flutter of pennons stitched with green into complex designs. The inner layer was a gauzy, loose-woven fabric of time-suppled flax; the outer, though rolled up and tied neatly into a perimeter hemming the top, was a heavier, close-loomed canvas, oiled against the rains of autumn and winter. The tent was neither round nor square but an odd marriage of both, a series of flexible, slightly curved panels fastened into a whole, seamless and apparently impervious to the vagaries of weather. And yet it was a tent.
In the center of Meya Suerta.
He had not been to this street before, because the Grijalvas kept to their Palasso and the artisans quarter. Today, during Fuega Vesperra, he had wandered purposely, rejecting the habits of his family, the cowardice that kept them sequestered. And he had discovered the tent. A tent wholly alien within the city, and yet ignored as if no one else saw it.
Sario, in its center, could not see how anyone might miss it. He had marked it instantly upon turning the corner. It had drawn him, brought him to its entrance with the colors, the patterns, the knotwork. It intrigued him to learn how it was attached to the ground, how it rooted into packed dirt and cobbles. Surely it was staked somehow; great winds occasionally howled down through the corridors of city dwellings, ripping away awnings, market stalls, cart shrouds. A tent could not withstand such.
Nor, he thought, should it withstand a festival day, or the city at all; and yet despite the throngs outside, fuzzily visible through the gauze, there was little sound. It was as if wax were stuffed into his ears, diminishing nearly all of the world’s song save for an understated hum, like the drone of distant bees. And despite the unruly crowd, its fabric and frame remained whole.
He knelt. Beneath his doubled knees lay a rug of intricate design, of strange ornate devices and stylized plant renderings at odds with Tira Virteian tastes. And the colors—eiha, the colors! He had known they existed, but never used them in his own work, which leaned more toward vivid hues as opposed to muted tones. He saw beneath him, despite the loomed fabric, the colors of another land: the rich rust of iron oxide; the pinker tones of rose-blushed sandstone; sparing but deep bloodied raisin verging on purple; seams of blue and green, though soft and barely visible. Unseen when examined but undeniably felt.
Like art … like passion … Accustomed to the warm subtle tones of Meya Suerta’s brickwork, its clay and cobbles and plaster sun-bleached ocher, oyster, and ivory, Sario’s eyes were drawn again and again to the rug, examining color, composition, theme but he could not identify the theme. That one existed he knew; the repetition of certain patterns made it obvious, the arched, knotted interlocking series of plant stems, leaves, petals, the meticulously clean-lined and oddly familiar borders. He should see the theme, should identify it. He had trained his eye for years to see the whole even in a vast array of infinitely intricate parts.
The response was instinctive, abrupt, characteristic. “I should use this …” Of a sudden, illumination: subtlety contained power as much as bold color.
Already his mind busied itself sketching the beginnings of a new work, a landscape of sere and sparing color, of brittle but binding tints unlike those he now employed. Even the tones of the flesh could be altered, when painting a portrait. “Sweet Mother …” He traced the stem of a woven plant “growing” from beneath a knee. “What I could do with this—”
Sound. He broke off thought, glancing up quickly to the flap that served as a door into the tent. He saw through gauze to the world beyond: the old man, and Saavedra.
Artistic absorption shattered. He felt again the confusion, the unease, the vague fear, though all was coupled with a perversely burgeoning fascination. What he said … what he told me … But questions he’d left unasked because he was made mute, too astonished by conception of new thoughts, strange thoughts, as yet fragmented and tentative. What the moualimo said to me—
Moualimo? No—estranjiero, an old foreign man wandering in wits the way it sometimes took them.
Moualimo. Yes—but what was there the old man could teach him? Color? Pattern? Sario glanced briefly at the loomwork beneath his knees. He has this to teach me.
The tent itself and the artistry of its appearance had been enough to bring him here; the invitation extended by the old man initially startled when Sario discovered him, whose expression then altered into delight and gratitude had been enough to leave him here. And then he had seen Saavedra in the crowd, had spoken of her—and the stranger had
gone to fetch her.
Now Saavedra was here, and he felt safe. She will understand.
She hesitated even as the old man pulled aside the drapery to admit her. Sario rose, blinking in the shaft of pure sunlight unadulterated now by the sheer netting of gauze, and waited.
’Vedra always understands.
Gauze-defined, day-diffused sunlight was gentle and immensely flattering. He saw the delicate mixture of expressions in her face: in the fine, clear gray eyes; the high, oblique cheekbones; the clean contours of jaw. The set of eloquent black brows divulged her concern, and the line of her mouth, pulled straight, compressed flat into unfamiliar severity. He wanted abruptly to soothe those concerns, to soften that mouth … “Luza do’Orro,” he murmured beneath his breath. “Oh, but I had forgotten.” And had become too consumed, too ambitious, too wholly Gifted to note more than with the artist’s eye instead of with the man’s.
He had known. His body had known. He was no child, no innocent, awkward mennino to remain ignorant of such things. He had been Confirmed years before according to the rites of the family: four women in his bed, four fertile women for several nights each, and none of them got with child. And neither were any of them, beyond the first, unsatisfied with his efforts.
He was infertile, not unable. As he had told her once. As was proved time and again when he desired a bedding, though all too often the fire of his loins sublimated itself in art.
Only she understood him. Only she ever had.
Sario opened his mouth to speak, to explain what had happened, what the stranger had told him, to share with her as always what was in his heart, but Saavedra herself forestalled him. She slid a quick, wary sidelong glance at the old man as he came in beside her, then looked only at Sario. He could see she was frightened. And also rigorous in duty. “You are summoned.” She clipped her words. “Seminno Raimon.”
He could not help himself. “Let him wait.”
It shocked her. “Sario—”
“Let him wait, ‘Vedra.” It was not what he had intended, this whip-quick, decisive tone. But urgency fed him now; he sensed a completeness and purpose, as if a pattern never known broken was abruptly mended. And the old man’s expression, oddly, was serenely satisfied. “What he has told me—”
“What?—in his ‘hidden language?’ In his hidden tent?”
“The tent isn’t hidden, ‘Vedra—”
“I didn’t see anything until he brought me inside!”
“I did. I saw from the end of the street!”
“So you did,” the old man said complacently. “Acuyib has blessed you with the inner vision.”
Saavedra did not lack for decisiveness. “You have been summoned,” she repeated. “Matra Dolcha, Sario, have you forgotten what you are?” She indicated with a subtle movement of her head the chain and key against his breast, tangled in creases of wilted, soiled lawn. “We are not to refuse the responsibilities of our family.”
“What does Raimon want?”
A second quick, slicing glance at the old man. “I don’t know,” she said tersely. “But—he was not himself.”
Sario grimaced. “He is of the Viehos Fratos. No one may be himself, once he is of their number.”
“Sario!” Color stained the delicate tones of her face, so that the bone of her jawline stood out pale in taut relief. “This man is estranjiero!”
“Not here.” The old man’s rebuke was gentle but crisply definitive. “Not within my home. And no more estranjiero than either of you, who share my blood.”
“Your blood!” Shocked. Angry. Uncertain of all but confusion. “I am a Grijalva—”
“And chi’patro,” the old man reminded her. “Both of you. I myself am not. I can count back all of my generations to Acuyib’s Great Tent itself, but you are more than what you believe.”
“Tza’ab,” Saavedra breathed. “That’s what you are. I recognize the turban from the painting … from Piedro’s Death of Verro Grijalva. It is a different color, but it is the same.”
“Ai, I am found out!” The old man, unexpectedly, retained most of his teeth, though they were stained yellow; now he flashed them briefly. “Zev’reina, I beg you—give me time—”
“I have none!” She was, Sario noted with an artist’s detached eye, white and black at once: white of face, of lips; black of eye as pupils dilated. “And neither does he have time.” She turned sharply to Sario. “You are summoned to Seminno Raimon.”
“Let him wait.” The Tza’ab quietly echoed Sario’s words of a moment before. “Truly, you will see the sense in it. I promise.”
“And what is it worth, your promise?” Sario had never seen Saavedra so rude before, or so frightened. “What are you to us? Estranjiero—foreigner and enemy—”
“Not to you. None of those things. One is not estranjiero or enemy within these walls, beneath my roof, breathing the very air exhaled by Acuyib.” The ancient face reflected no hurt, no offense, that she should be so discourteous in a place he had welcomed her. “You have come home, Children of the Golden Wind. And at least one of you will never stray again.”
THIRTEEN
Forty-three years had not yet robbed Duke Baltran of a powerful, easy grace. Smoothly he hooked his right leg forward across the pommel, then simultaneously turned in the saddle and kicked free of the left stirrup to jump down all of a piece, landing lightly and balanced as a fencer. The informal dismount had not been taught by the Premio Chevallo charged with instructing him in equine mastery as a boy, but adopted as a time-saver by a vigorous, active young man. It made him feel young to employ it even now, despite the occasional twinges in his knees. It was easier—and politically sound—to let the others see him so vigorous than to admit to the first depredations of bone-fever, a common complaint of folk living in a city built so near marshland. The Grijalvas were riddled with it.
Far better to be of another family entirely than that sadly weakened bloodline! One silver-banded rein was draped across the stallion’s massive neck; the other the Duke tossed at the young groom come out at a run from the stable block to tend his master’s mount.
Baltran did not hesitate as his companion, clattering up to join him, also dismounted—as quickly, though with markedly less grace as he briefly caught spur in stirrup—but strode across the flagged courtyard even as he stripped leather gloves from his hands. Nor did he hesitate as that companion hastily threw reins at the horse-boy and scrambled to catch up; both men were tall, but the Duke had had more years to accustom himself to the length of his stride.
“Patro—”
“I have told you, no?” Baltran deposited the dusty gloves into the waiting hands of a servant come out to aid him even as he walked toward the Palasso. “It simply is not done.”
“But—”
“There are reasons for it, Alejandro. Can you imagine what your mother might say?”
Alejandro matched him now stride for stride, moving with loose-limbed ease that promised to echo his father’s grace if he ever finished growing. “Why would she have to know?”
“She wouldn’t have to know, Alejandro, but she would. Women do. The servants attending you and your mistress would know, and they would whisper of it to their friends, who would then know; and the friends would tell their friends, and soon enough the women attending the Duchess would know—and there you have it. The Duchess herself would know, and she would have plenty to say.”
“I could keep her elsewhere.”
“Your mother?” Baltran grinned at his son’s horrified expression. “No, no—eiha, have you no sense of humor?” Still walking, he began to unlace the cords of his leather hunting doublet. “Ah, but no, there is no humor in this—I should recall it myself. It is never amusing when a boy wishes to take his first mistress.” More laces undone, the chest-flap pulled wide, the garment divested and shed into the deft hands of his body-servant. “I have no objection if you wish to keep a mistress, Alejandro, but I would suggest you select another.”
“But I want her,
Patro—”
“Why? Because she took you to a place you had never before experienced? Because she made you feel things you had not expected to feel?” Baltran, taking pity—his son’s face was white and tense—halted and swung to face his Heir. “Matra, I know—I do know, Alejandro … but it cannot be done. It should not be done.”
“But I am the Heir … and if I desire it—”
“Alejandro.” Baltran summoned patience. “Alejandro, you are indeed the Heir, and you will be able to do many things in life when and as you wish them. But they should only be done after much thought.”
“I have thought, Patro.”
The Duke waved the body-servant away despite the sweat-soiled folds of shirt clinging to his torso; he would not strip here in the courtyard, and neither would he make his son trail him into the Palasso like a submissive puppy begging for attention. “You have thought, Alejandro, yes. I have no doubt. But there are details perhaps you have not considered.”
“Details?” Given ground to stand, courage kindled: Alejandro was less rushed now and coolly insistent. “I want her. You don’t. What more is there than that?”
“Political concerns.”
“She’s a mistress, not a princess … what value does she have in politics?”
Baltran untied soiled cuffs and began to roll back full sleeves, displaying thick, tanned forearms. “She was my mistress, Alejandro—and she is a Serrano. While she may well seek an alliance—perhaps even a marriage—with a wealthy nobleman, it would not serve for her to leave my bed for yours.”
The son was annoyed. “You have another woman in yours, Patro.”
The father grinned easily. “So I do. And for all you know, it may even be your mother … but that is not your concern. You must think again, Alejandro, and see what lies ahead. Gitanna Serrano, cast off from the Duke but given to the Heir … aside from the problem of your mother’s reaction, there would be the reaction of the Court.”