The Golden Key

by Melanie Rawn

  “For speaking out against me. I would be a fool to allow such idle talk, to allow agitators—no doubt gathered like vultures from Ghillas and Taglis—to incite the people of Meya Suerta to riot. But perhaps you would approve of them storming the Palasso. Perhaps we ought to throw Timarra out to them as a sop to their discontentment.”

  “I have heard no talk of storming the Palasso! They want to reconvene the Corteis. The Corteis will not even have as much power as your own conselhos—”

  “Only the power to interfere with taxation, to present any sort of ridiculous petitions they might then think they can impose as law. Even, Matra Dolcha, the right to sit in judgment on nobles or even on myself if they so see fit! How am I to govern with these restrictions? We do’Verradas have made Tira Virte a rich country, with prosperity and peace enough to enjoy those riches. They will destroy it in a decade with their quibbling and rioting and demands.”

  “You don’t know that would happen. The Corteis will only be an advisory body.”

  “And then?” Renayo crossed suddenly to a side table and poured himself tea from the silver urn. Everything in this room, except the white irises, came courtesy of his new wife. Renayo took his tea in one gulp and set the cup down so hard that it chipped. His face was flushed with anger. “Then you can be sure rogues and ruffians and men with no concern but their own gain would insinuate themselves into the proceedings. You can be sure every sort of criminal will be setting fire to this Palasso and murdering every man, woman, and child they find within these walls. As they did in Ghillas. Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not! But most of these discontented men are honest guildsmen and merchants. They have as much to lose as you do if the worst comes to pass.”

  “Eiha! I have raised a lunatic!” Renayo crossed back to his desk, shoved aside the table globe, sending a quill pen tumbling to the floor, and leaned across the desk to glare at Rohario. “Now you listen to me, young sir. Young noblemen have gotten involved with these seditionists before, thinking it an exciting diversion while they’re not out hunting. They have, each and every one of them, ended badly. I see you are just as light-minded. I wash my hands of you until you are ready to beg my pardon for this folly.”

  Rohario could not take his eyes off the pen, which leaked black ink onto the pale frost-and-lily Lillone carpet, which had cost, he now knew, as much as a year’s lodging at Gaspar’s inn. He forced himself to lift his eyes and look directly at his father. “I cannot do that.”

  The Grand Duke appeared to be on the edge of an apoplectic fit. “Then I banish you from my presence!”

  “Do I have your leave to go, Your Grace?”

  “Get out! Out!”

  Rohario bowed stiffly. He turned. He was a string drawn so tightly that a breath of air would set it thrumming. But he walked without faltering, he left the room without wavering, he spoke briefly, without a tremor, to the attendants outside.

  “I am going first to my rooms.”

  Not his rooms any longer. That his father would simply let him walk away stunned him. But perhaps Grand Duchess Johannah was already pregnant; perhaps Renayo thought he had no further use for his troublesome second son. Two stewards and two guards escorted him. His servants arrived, agitated and pale.

  “Don Rohario! How have you fared? Are you well? Is it true that His Grace has banished you? Surely, if you beg for his pardon—”

  Still half-stunned, Rohario gathered up his writing tools, rifled through his safe box until he found the deeds to his two properties. He unrolled them and considered the fine hand of Cabral Grijalva, which had rendered the scene and the transfer with loving detail. Rolling them up, he tucked them into a small trunk. He could not resist taking more clothes. Finally he gazed long and hard at the Birth of Cossima that hung over his mantel. It was a difficult farewell to the laughing baby who had brightened his every morning.

  “Regretto,” he said to his frantic body servant, to his downcast steward, “but I must go. Be sure to apply to Don Edoard. He will see that you find new positions.”

  “Eiha! It cannot be, Don Rohario. No one dresses as elegantly as you. All my fine work will be for nothing on some oaf who cannot tie his neckcloth with the least semblance of style or tell a well-cut coat from one which is merely fashionable. Let me come with you!”

  “When I am settled such that I can employ a body servant, you can be sure you are the only man I would trust for that job. But now is not the time, I fear.”

  At last he extricated himself from their clutches. At last he lugged the trunk down to the gates, which closed behind him. Mindful of what little coin he had left, Rohario carried the trunk for perhaps half a long block down the hill. But he was not accustomed to such labor and had to stop.

  “Amico!” He waved a hand and a young man driving a pony cart filled with barrels of olive oil pulled up beside him. “Might I pay you to convey me to the Wheat Sheaf and Sickle?”

  The young man had a round, laughing face, and a blue and black kerchief tied around his neck, trimmed with silver ribbon. “I know that place. But it’s out of my way. How much can you offer?”

  “Here it is, all of it,” Rohario said recklessly, pulling out his last mareia.

  “Eiha! You look to be a fellow after my own heart, though I wish I knew where to find clothes as fine as those. I’ll take you as a favor.”

  Rohario hoisted his trunk into the back and clambered up. “My thanks.”

  Cast out from his father’s house. Severed at last from his mother’s remains. It was too terrible to imagine.

  Free to make his own way, however clumsily. And not alone. The day looked brighter already.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Thirty-five days of Louissa’s nattering was enough to drive any man mad. Although her voice was soft, it had the odd and irritating quality of permeating any room she was in. Two days until the Holy Days of Penitenssia began, six until the Dia Fuega ball. The time had come to act. But right now, this last evening, with an icy rain spattering the paned window and Alazais engaged in embroidering a pillow cover while Louissa read aloud to her from the latest Doumas novel, Sario wanted only to escape from the attic.

  Louissa was not the curious sort, to go rummaging about the room once he left. In any case, he had trained Alazais to exacting specifications; she would safeguard his secrets as well as her own. He excused himself and left the attic.

  A few broadsheets lay tossed on Oliviano’s worktable. Sario noted them with a frown, then bent closer, intrigued. Someone had thought of illustrating the tracts.

  The printed pen-and-ink drawing depicted the hangings out on the border of the marshlands. Seven men dangled with limbs as lifeless as puppets; the eighth was still struggling. Women wept. Old men clenched their hands. A thin-faced child, cleverly thrust into the foreground, tugged threadbare clothing tightly around itself, face pinched with cold. Beyond, soldiers of the Shagarra Regiment, each one warm in a cape and padded by years of good eating, watched impassively.

  He knew this hand. He had studied her paintings and sketches in that brief month he had resided at Palasso Grijalva after returning from Ghillas. He never had managed to speak with her, except that once, in the zocalo, their interview broken by that damned riot that had erupted during the Iluminares Procession.

  He set the first broadsheet down and picked up another. This one pictured the Corteis as it might look, meeting in the Palasso Justissia.

  Eleyna Grijalva was drawing seditious material for the Libertistas. How had this happened? Her parents and uncle had sent her off to be the next Mistress.

  The third broadsheet showed a family begging in the streets while beyond, through a great lighted window, one saw into the dining hall of a nobleman’s palasso where a feast was taking place. It was too crudely sentimental for his taste. Did Eleyna suppose that if the Corteis reconvened, the poor would somehow miraculously vanish? For most of his lives, the Corteis had met in some form. It had only been abolished during—whose body was I in?—dur
ing Ettoro’s time, of course, while Arrigo II was Grand Duke. The Corteis had looked after its own, and its own had never, in his experience, included the destitute. There had always been poor people, and such people would no doubt remain in their Matraordained place. He felt no particular sympathy for them, although the baby’s face drawn lax with hunger was quite well executed, enough to stir a tendril of compassion in his breast. Footsteps and the sound of laughter came from the next room.

  Sario pushed the three broadsheets under an account book and pushed open the door that led into the main shop. He surveyed the room. Many customers crowded in, no doubt buying an extra share of wine and ale for the upcoming Penitenssia festivities. Once the Holy Days had been celebrated with more solemnity. In recent years it seemed to Sario that it had mostly become an excuse to get drunk for four days. Eiha!

  Oliviano’s wife and four sons were busy behind the counter; Oliviano himself sat at a small table haggling with a young man who, by his quill pen and ink-stained fingers, was the new clerk. The clerk looked familiar, but Sario could not place him. After all these years, faces blended together; a nose, a lift of the eyebrow, a dimpling chin, might evoke memories of other faces, other times, and the two, mixing, lost their original essence and became just another half remembered vision. Chance meetings, Treaties, portraits, lovers, great upheavals, all had begun to blur into one inchoate mural out of which a few moments stood in stark relief. Only his portrait of Saavedra remained for him as clear and perfectly recalled as on the day he had laid down each brushstroke.

  The door to the street opened. A woman, hair hooded against the rain by a widow’s shawl, came in. She slid the shawl down to reveal a mass of luxuriant black hair. Il Cofforro would have loved to paint that hair. The clerk looked up; the two exchanged what Sario thought of as “a significant glance.”

  An instant later, he recognized her.

  Eleyna Grijalva! Not cozily ensconced with Don Edoard, nor safely confined to Palasso Grijalva. What were her parents thinking? Widow she might be, but she was young, pretty, and—most importantly—possessed of a talent he intended to mold. She could absolutely not be allowed to roam the streets of Meya Suerta.

  The door opened again, admitting the smell of the marsh and the sound of bell-ringers on their nightly rounds. “Curfew! Curfew!”

  The customers filtered away, complaining in muted voices about the curfew instituted ten days ago by the Commandante of the city guard. The clerk received his pay—knowing Oliviano, less than the work was worth—and rose. He and the Grijalva woman left together.

  Sario followed them.

  He kept to the shadows, as they did. He expected them to cross the Zocalo Grando without incident, but here, in the great square fronting the Cathedral, they stopped. It was cold and deathly quiet; not one soul stirred. The rain had ceased. But it was the curfew, not winter rains, that had brought soberness back to the city as it prepared for Penitenssia.

  The clerk lit a lantern. Moronno! A light was sure to bring guards down on them.

  Then Sario saw what Eleyna Grijalva was doing: she drew on the stone front of the cathedral, sketching, quickly but surely, a huge chalk mural. Grand Duke Renayo with the Shagarra Regiment at his back held a sword poised over a cluster of poor people who knelt on stone; behind them, a young man dressed in apprentice leathers waved the banner of the Libertistas.

  To profane the Cathedral! It was blasphemy. Sario admired her effrontery. It was the kind of thing he would have done: Qal Venommo. The poisoned pen.

  Once, the clerk shuttered the lantern. Secure in the shadow of the portallas, Sario watched a group of guards walk their horses through the zocalo by the light of their own torches. They passed through without incident and vanished down the Avenida Shagarra.

  The lantern flared back to life. A solitary bell tolled the midnight watch before Eleyna finished the mural. Lantern extinguished, the Grijalva woman and her companion hurried away down a side street, gray shadows against paler stone.

  Sario slipped after them. Once, they hid while another patrol stalked by. Once, they encountered a pair of night lurkers, but whispered words passed between them, a hiss of Corteis!—and on they went, unimpeded. At last Sario tracked them to their lair, a nondescript inn marked by the sign of a sheaf of wheat and a sickle. Eleyna and the clerk disappeared together under the entrance arch.

  Eleyna Grijalva and her talent belong to me. Mine to nurture and teach, to bring to fruition. I will make her flower, as no other man can.

  He did not intend to lose her to a clerk! To the callow, sentimental art of Libertista politics! Matra forbid her gift be squandered in such a way.

  Only he could make sure that she gain her rightful place among the great artists of the Grijalva line, even if she had not been blessed with the Luza do’Orro. A light shone in her, even if she did not have the Gift. That was the mistake the moualimos had made all along, thinking that only a Gifted male could be a great painter.

  Over the years, Sario had seen otherwise. There had been none to equal himself, of course, but over many lifetimes he had known, nurtured, fought with, and respected painters, Grijalva and otherwise, who had no Gift but only their eyes, their hands, and their ambition. Even foreigners, estranjieros never met but known through their work, might rival, though never surpass, his talent. All must be seen, must be studied, must be consumed, so that in time he could paint the masterwork that would dwarf all other achievements, that would confirm, for all to see, his mastery of the Golden Key.

  Sario returned to his atelierro at dawn. Alazais slept peacefully. The night’s work brought back old and troubling memories: Qal Venommo, the poisoned pen.

  It was Zevierin who had drawn those caricatures of Arrigo. He had never found proof, but he knew it had been Zevierin, with Leilias’ connivance. What had been the result of all that fighting between Tazia and Mechella? Nothing important—except the destruction of Rafeyo’s hopes and life.

  Sario opened the chest and carefully unwrapped his skull, setting it on the table. They regarded each other, he and the skull, living eyes met with empty dead ones. Yet not dead, because Sario still lived and would always live. His own eyes stared at him from the Peintraddo Memorrio, his eyes in a dozen different faces. He could not always remember what name went with which face, but what did that matter? All were Sario. Sario alone mattered.

  And Saavedra, of course. What he did, he did for her and for the greater glory of Grijalva art. Not for himself.

  He sat down in the chair—Alejandro’s much-repaired chair, he thought idly—wet a brush with his saliva, and began to paint a watercolor portrait of Louissa. Her delicate hands, clutching a garland of wild geraniums, grew gnarled and swollen as he filled in their color. For the next two days, while he and Alazais had need of her services as they made ready to leave, she must only wonder at the aching in her hands. The full assault of the bone-fever—the arthritis, as the physicians named it now—must wait. Louissa’s deterioration must in no way be linked to him. Her eyes in the portrait gained the faintest film of white….

  But no. He was remembering Tomaz. There was no need to make her blind. He painted tiny cracks in her lips and a slight swelling to her throat. She must become mute. If the Viehos Fratos had made Tomaz mute, Sario would never have learned what he needed to know, but that had been the moualimos’ mistake, thinking nothing important would be left Tomaz once his hands and eyes were ruined. Matra! That had been long ago. He glanced at the skull. Long ago, and Tomaz long since turned to dust.

  Alazais stirred, coming immediately awake. It was an unnatural habit of hers, not one he had taught her. She was either oblivious or alert.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in her childlike way. He could never predict what questions she would ask.

  “I am protecting you.” He finished the portrait and surveyed it with a frown. Not his best work but sufficient to the task. He left it to dry while he penned a quick note.

  To Familia Grijalva.

  If you are d
esirous of knowing the whereabouts of one of your own, you will find her at the Sign of the Wheat Sheaf and Sickle. For your own protection you would be well advised to recover her, for she is involved in Libertista agitation. Look to the broadsheets. That she lives in a common inn does not speak well for the reputation of the family.

  For your own good, I sign myself; A Concerned Observer.

  “When Maessa Louissa comes, Alazais, you will ask her to pack your things.” Once the watercolor was dry, he tucked the paper inside a chest and locked the lid. Then he took the message downstairs and asked Oliviano to pay a boy to deliver it to Palasso Grijalva.

  Louissa arrived. She received the news—that they would be leaving in two days:—with a downcast face and many abrupt protestations of sorrow, delivered in a newly hoarse voice. But she collected the various gowns she had ordered at different dressmakers, showed Alazais how to carry herself in them, how to hold her hands with half gloves, with a shawl, with a fan. She packed Alazais’ things carefully, with little reminders of proper names for fabric and the correct occasion for certain styles. She did not complain of pain in her hands, but Sario watched her carefully and saw that she paused to rub her knuckles frequently. Having suffered the bone-fever himself in more than one life, he recognized the gesture.

  On the second evening he paid her a generous sum, and she left, still crying.

  “Are you going to kill her?” asked Alazais dispassionately.

  “Why would you think such a thing?” he asked, genuinely curious. He had made no such suggestion to her.

  “She knows we have been here.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “You have your father’s political instincts, I see. Ought I to kill her?”

  “She was kind, but she is no longer useful.”