Thorn

by Fred Saberhagen

  And Thorn was back again, even as he had gone, standing now beside the gas pumps with keys jingling in his hand. He was rattling them impatiently against a pump, with a muttering of what sounded like Latin oaths.

  Mary said, through her partially rolled-down window: “You hypnotized me, didn’t you? We were at the house…”

  “Your property that we went to retrieve is all in the rear seat. This damnable device will not … ah.”

  Very faintly, there came the sound of small motors, electricity.

  Mary turned to look into the rear seat of the Blazer even as the dim figure outside began to pump gas into its tank. There were here familiar string-tied boxes, one of them unopened since Chicago. There was the small, battered spare suitcase that she had all but forgotten. Things she evidently didn’t really need. All her essential stuff was now at Robby’s house.

  “Thank you,” she called out softly, turning back to the window.

  “It is I who should thank you. You have been of considerable help.”

  “How?”

  He didn’t answer. The desert here was high enough so that the night had grown quite cool. Mary breathed deeply of its coolness, meanwhile listening to a distant owl. Her thoughts were ready to go with the bird, fly through the night. Sadness was rapidly being replaced by a fierce though quiet elation.

  When Thorn had finished filling the tank, he came like a conscientious attendant to treat the windshield with a squeegee no one had bothered to lock away. That task complete, he vanished again in the direction of the building. This time Mary made a more intense effort to watch closely. But this time too Thorn simply disappeared.

  Then abruptly he was standing at the driver’s door again, opening it to get in. I don’t believe this, Mary thought, feeling delighted, as by some stage magician’s cleverness.

  “You had to go back in to return the keys,” she remarked cheerfully.

  “And to leave payment.” His voice seemed to chide her gently for having omitted anything so important. “Not, of course, at the outrageous rates listed on these signs.”

  “Oh, of course not.” Was this really her, so eager to be agreeable?

  He was now seated beside her, with the door closed. Looking at her. But for the moment he made no move to start the engine.

  Something in the way he looked at her made Mary sigh faintly and lean back in her seat. “You were right,” she said. “It was hard to go through that, but now somehow I feel sure those dreams aren’t going to bother me any more.”

  “I trust that they will not.”

  The moonlight was silver and strange. Mary had the feeling that she had never really looked at moonlight closely before.

  Again she was the one to break the silence. “I have the feeling,’’ she announced,’ ‘that when you kiss me I’m going to enjoy it very much.”

  One of his eyebrows went up. “Then I must seem churlish indeed to delay. But I would like to find a better place than this.”

  Thorn turned the key in the ignition. He was immune to personal fear, but not to horror. And he supped full on horror in the next moment, when he heard the strange reaction, and sensed the hellish fire of the bomb blast, blowing backward and upward at him from the engine.

  Chapter Twelve

  Our wedding night, or wedding morning rather, was spent at Careggi, the beautiful Medici villa which lay only a few miles outside the walls of Florence. Lorenzo praised that country retreat to me extravagantly as we rode out through the silently opened city gates before dawn, and told me that much of his childhood had been spent there. I was on my own stallion, Helen at my side on a docile young white palfrey that Lorenzo had begged her to accept as his own wedding gift.

  We reached Careggi just as the sun brightened the Tuscan countryside. Piero, gout and all, was waiting for us on the grounds, seated on the rim of one of the great stone fountains near the main house. The head of the Medici family rose to offer us greetings and congratulations, then led us to what would now be called a debriefing session, in the guise of a wedding breakfast at which the men and women of course sat down separately. The questioning was very polite and very smooth, and accompanied with intervals of real celebration; but in the course of an hour my hosts had managed to extract from me more information than I had been aware of carrying regarding the Boccalini and their affairs. When I was finally milked dry and yawning, Piero made flowery apologies for the delay, presented me with a jeweled collar and a warhorse as my own wedding gifts, and released me to join my bride. The sun was fully up by now, the day already growing warm.

  The women had finished their own breakfast somewhat earlier. Helen had been bathed and perfumed under the direction of the ladies of the household, and was already installed in a second floor room that in years past had served, so I was told, as a bridal chamber for members of the family. I was now, amid some merriment, conducted thence myself.

  Closing the door of this room behind me with a weary sigh, I turned to the great bed to discover my new wife fast asleep. I hardly needed a second look to make sure that this was no coy bridal ruse, but only the natural result of great exhaustion. I did not intend to wake her; I myself had had almost no sleep during the past two days, and at the moment rest felt more attractive than any other sensual delight. Yet when I had undressed and turned back the covers, I paused to look. Nightclothes of any kind were still the rare exception rather than the rule, and my bride’s whole inventory of physical charms was available for inspection. The wholesale removal of rags and grime had left visible a number of bruises I had not been able to see before, along with a few half-healed scabs. But it was a young body, basically healthy and of a trimly attractive shape. It seemed likely that it would give me considerable pleasure, and might bear me strong, healthy sons as well.

  Pulling a cover over us both, I let my head fall back in weariness upon a pillow. But the finely woven bed canopy above was bright with morning, my mind was full of a hundred concerns, and sleep refused to come at once.

  That there should be an unfamiliar, girlish breathing at my side in bed was in itself no strange phenomenon. But it was strange, very strange, to reflect that this particular sound would not only grow familiar, but it could nevermore be lightly put away. At least she did not snore.

  * * *

  It was approximately mid-day when I awoke, with my right shoulder gently going numb under the steady pressure of a smallish head covered with brown curls. I needed a moment to identify the head with certainty. The hair looked much different since it had been washed, and there was also a delightful difference in the smell; my slowly awakening senses discovered some essence of the flowers of the Tuscan countryside.

  The girl was still in a deep sleep. She was not clinging to me, exactly, though she lay with one arm across my chest—again I got the impression rather that I was the rocky protuberance upon which she had been cast ashore by the storms of life.

  Gently I eased free my deadening arm, drew open the bed curtains, and looked around the room. Someone had been in while we slept— bedroom privacy was not valued then as much as now, and anyway the curtained bed provided it. Fresh clothing of fine cloth and the latest cut had been laid out for us both, upon a pair of great wooden chests that served both to decorate the room and provide storage.

  Atop a third such chest leaned paneled Magdalen, her back propped against the wall. I considered her presence, and understood from it that all my few possessions must already have been brought here from the Medici house in town. From this in turn I understood that my wife and I would be expected to avoid the city, at least while the affair at the Boccalini house was still fresh. Which seemed to make obvious sense.

  Shortly after being dislodged from my shoulder, Helen had moved voluntarily in her sleep, turning on her back and pulling the cover up close under her chin. She lay with pretty pink lips parted to reveal surprisingly good teeth. Reclining with my head propped up on one hand, I studied her. I found myself turning my gaze from her flesh to the Magdalen’s fresh
ly painted face, and back again. As I have mentioned, the painting was still unfinished, but the work remaining to be done consisted of details of the woman’s dress and of the background. As far as I could see, the modeled face was nothing short of absolute perfection. It was Helen, and yet was not—it seemed rather that the living face beside me had somehow failed to reach its own ideal.

  That I, Vlad Drakulya, now had possession of both breathing flesh and painted image, was a fact; and the more I considered this fact the more momentous it grew, the more pregnant with a significance whose nature I could not grasp at once. Like other men of the fifteenth century, I was usually more than half ready to see omens, hidden meanings, wonders spiritual and supernatural. Even in the warm sunlight of midday.

  Helen, this girl of hardly more than half my size or age, stirred in her sleep beside me. Then she turned on her side away from me, and a moment later snuggled backward till her soft flank touched me under the light cover. I forgot the painting, and moved to accomplish the one thing still necessary to seal our marriage completely in the eyes of God and man. Helen, only half awake at first, resisted me mechanically—but then, as she awoke fully, she relaxed, and even gave some evidence of enjoyment.

  As soon as the first dance was over, I pulled some pillows into better position for both of us, and we lay there side by side, regarding each other and the world from a nest of greater physical comfort than either of us had lately been accustomed to.

  “My bride,” I meditated aloud. There was a grave expression in those dark young eyes now fixed on mine, and I was trying to fathom what might be going on behind them.

  “Yes.” The one-word answer somehow conveyed, I thought, her willingness to accept bride-ship as a starting point and to see where it might lead. And I was cheered by the fact that she did not seem to be a heavy talker. Reticence by day and a lack of snoring by night would count for much.

  A light warm breeze was stirring the fine gauze curtains at our open window. I could hear gardeners at work not far outside. They were digging, snipping branches, scraping at the earth. A good male voice rose lightly in Italian song. We were a floor above ground level, secure against casual observation from outside, but from where we lay much greenery was visible. The grounds at Careggi were quite as impressive as the house. When I sat up fully in our bed and pulled its curtains farther open I could glimpse graveled walks, distant lawns being smoothed by grazing sheep, and beds of massed flowers. There was a fountain, studded with statuary and rimmed by concentric rings of masterly stonework. All shimmered in late summer’s warmth.

  “Ah,” said Helen, in a new tone. I looked and saw that she had just discovered the painting. Next moment, without pretense of modesty, she had slipped out of bed and gone to inspect it at close range.

  “I wish my face was truly so,” she said at last.

  “But I think the artist has accurately caught your beauty.” I was an experienced husband, you will recall.

  “But no, this is really a marvel. I never had the chance to take such a good look at it before—I was always on the other side of it, you know, when I was posing.”

  “I agree, a marvel. Too bad it is unfinished.”

  Without turning, Helen gently waved one hand in my direction, dismissing that objection; and, certainly, the painting was essentially complete. “I think,” she said in Italian, “that boy has been touched by the good God.”

  But my mind was turning elsewhere. The two of us had important matters to talk about, and I judged the time had come. “Helen.”

  A hand on one bare hip like Donatello’s David, she turned her head at the new sound in my voice, and probed me with her eyes. Then slowly she returned to stand beside our bed. She took the hand that I extended to her, then paused, fingering its ring. The circlet was then still fat with gold. Helen looked at it, and at the untanned groove worn by it into my finger underneath. “You have been married before, my lord,” she said.

  “It will please me for my wife to call me Vlad. Particularly on such private occasions as this. Yes, I have been married. My first wife is now two years dead.”

  “I will pray for her soul.”

  “Thank you.” Sooner or later, I supposed, I would be called on by Helen for some explanation of her predecessor’s leap from the parapet; she would learn something of that tragedy from others even if I never brought it up. But right now I was not going to mention it.

  “And you have children?”

  “They are staying with relatives at present.” I sighed; another subject that could wait. But Helen’s question had brought back to me my grief for the son I had loved most. He was a love-child indeed, born to a favorite concubine. He had been riding with me, before my saddle, when I began that last ill-fated retreat from the Turks, the withdrawal that had degenerated into a desperate flight, and had ended for me only with my personal surrender to Matthias. During that fiasco my son had been lost, and when I spoke to Helen on that morning at Careggi, I thought him dead.

  “Helen. There is a matter between us that I wish to dispose of now. I intend to speak of it this once, and then never again. Nay, let me put it this way—in future I will not even have this subject mentioned in my presence.”

  Of course she knew what I was bringing up; she must have known that it was coming sooner or later. Her eyes were withdrawing from me as I spoke, though they still looked in my direction. Her royal chin was lifting.

  I went on in a businesslike tone: “I mean of course these shameful escapades of yours during the past few years, since you broke off your betrothal to the Sforza. The whoring and debauchery.”

  “You say whoring?” Some sparks flared up; she pulled her hand free with a jerk.

  I let her break my grip. “If ‘whoring’ is the wrong word,” I answered coldly, “then pray instruct me, what should the right one be?”

  With that I expected for a moment that she might try to strike me. But then her body sagged in weariness, and she sat down on the edge of the bed, not touching me. Curls of dark hair hid her face.

  Finally she spoke. “Men, as you know, have taken me by force. And, yes, at times I have sold myself, for food, for survival. And yes, I have known lust for men.” Helen paused, still looking away from me. “That is all I care to say.”

  “It is enough. More than enough, indeed. Understand that I demand no apologies, confessions, explanations, for anything that you have done up to now. All that is over, finished, wiped away completely, and I shall never reproach you with it.” I drew breath. “What I do demand concerns your conduct from this moment forward. It must be that of a model wife of exalted birth: virtuous, modest, obedient. In every detail beyond reproach.”

  Helen had lifted her face enough for me to see her eyes under the dark hair; but I could not read them. She gave me an inspection that went on for what seemed a long time, and still I could not guess what she was thinking. When she spoke it was only to ask a question that seemed to me insultingly irrelevant. “How long do you mean for us to stay here, in this house?”

  My hand seized her wrist; if she had not been Matthias’s sister, it would have taken her by the throat. “Have you been listening to me, woman? I want to know that what I say is understood.” My voice was still not loud; I have never been one for shouting much.

  Helen gasped and leaned forward, easing the pressure on her forearm. “Yes, my lord Vlad—I have heard and will obey. I meant my wedding vows—every bit as seriously as you meant yours.” When I released her arm she sighed, and closed her eyes, and rubbed it gently.

  “Then I will gladly proceed to answer your question. I believe our hosts will be happy to entertain us here for a day or two. Meanwhile some other arrangements will doubtless be made. It will be suggested that we might like to travel, leaving the region of Florence, at least for a tune, lest our presence here become known and be an embarrassment. The news of our wedding is doubtless already on its way to your royal brother—our royal brother, now. Perhaps we will go to Pisa, or Genoa, and wait there fo
r a while to know his pleasure.”

  “But I thought … you mean it is possible that we will not soon go back to Hungary?”

  “It would please you to remain in Italy?”

  She hesitated. “Yes. Yes, it would.”

  “I would say that it is more than possible.” And Helen appeared relieved to hear this news.

  As I had predicted, the two of us spent the remainder of that day and all the next as honored guests at the Medici villa. We rested, and did what newlyweds in all times and places are supposed to do. Our hosts called upon me to demonstrate some tricks of fencing, for which they offered appreciative applause. We joined them in conversation, the skills of which I believe I first began to appreciate when in that household; and in games, and music, and in listening to the poetry of Lorenzo and others. On our first evening at Careggi I had the pleasure of meeting the beautiful Lucrezia, Piero’s devoted and intelligent wife, who looked much too young to be the mother of grim-faced, beard-stubbled Lorenzo. You can see her beauty still, in the face of Ghirlandajo’s St. Elizabeth.

  I remember Lucrezia talking alone with Helen, at great length, while I was telling Lorenzo as much as I could about King Matthias’s artistic patronage. In particular Lorenzo wanted to hear more of the royal book collection. Later that night I could see that Helen had been weeping; but I chose not to question her about it. Experienced husband or not, perhaps I made a great mistake.

  On the morning of our third day at Careggi, as I had more or less expected, my bride and I were cordially invited by our hosts to visit a house they owned in Pisa. Pisa was a small city at no very great distance from Florence, and at the time under Florentine—and therefore Medici-political domination. We were loaded with more presents, and furnished with an escort for the journey.

  The house, when we reached it, proved to be no more than a comfortable cottage; no doubt it looked smaller than it was because we came to it from the opulence of a palace. Yet I was content with its modest comforts, considering it only a way station on the road to power and glory; and it seemed to me that Helen was content also. She had recovered from whatever had made her weep, and was playing the role of devoted wife to my fullest satisfaction.