Ysabel

by Guy Gavriel Kay

“I guarantee I beat you both,” said Kate. “Please don’t kill us.”

  It felt so strange to Ned, over and above everything else, to be standing next to someone who was actually speaking words like don’t kill us, and meaning them.

  His life hadn’t prepared him for anything like this.

  The voice from the roof was grave. “I said I wouldn’t.”

  “You also said you’d done it before,” Kate said.

  “I have.” Then, after another silence, “You would be mistaken in believing I am a good man.”

  Ned would remember that. He’d remember almost everything, in fact. He said, “You know that your face is down in the corridor, back there?”

  “You went down? That was brave.” A pause. “Yes, of course it is.”

  Of course? The voice was low, clear, precise. Ned realized—his brain hadn’t processed this properly before—that he’d spoken in English himself, and the man had replied the same way.

  “I guess it isn’t your skull beside it.” Real bad joke.

  “Someone might have liked it to be.”

  Ned dealt with that, or tried to. And then something occurred to him, in the same inexplicable way as before. “Who . . . who was the model for her, then?” he asked. He was looking at the woman on the column. He found it hard not to look at her.

  Silence above them. Ned sensed anger, rising and suppressed. Inside his mind he could actually place the figure on the roof tiles now, exactly where he was: seen within, silver-coloured.

  “I think you ought to go now,” the man said finally. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story. It is no place for children. Believe me,” he said again.

  “I do,” Kate said, with feeling. “Believe me!”

  Ned Marriner felt his own anger kick in, hard. He was surprised how much of that was in him these days. “Right,” he said. “Run along, kids. Well, what am I supposed to do with this . . . feeling I have in me now? Knowing this is not the goddamn Queen of Sheba, knowing exactly where you are up there. This is completely messed up. What am I supposed to do with it?”

  After another silence, the voice above came again, more gently. “You are hardly the first person to have an awareness of such things. You must know that, surely? As for what you are to do . . .” That hint of amusement again. “Am I become a counsellor? How very odd. What is there to do in a life? Finish growing up; most people never do. Find what joy there is to find. Try to avoid men with knives. We are not . . . this story is not important for you.”

  Ned’s anger was gone as quickly as it had flared. That, too, was strange. In the lingering resonance of those words, he heard himself say, “Could we be important for it? Since I seem to have—”

  “No,” said the voice above them, flatly dismissive. “As you just put it: run along. That will be best, whatever it does to your vanity. I am not as patient as I might once have been.”

  “Oh, really? Not like when you sculpted her?” Ned asked.

  “What?” cried Kate again.

  In that same instant there came an explosion of colour in Ned’s mind and then of movement, above and to their right: a swift, coiled blur hurtling down. The man on the roof somersaulted off the slanting tiles to land in the garden in front of them. His face was vivid with rage, bone white. He looked exactly like the sculpted head underground, Ned thought.

  “How did you know that?” the man snarled. “What did he tell you?”

  He was of middling height, as Ned had guessed. He wasn’t as old as the bald head might suggest; could even be called handsome, but was too lean, as if he’d been stretched, pulled, and the lack of hair accentuated that, along with the hard cheekbones and the slash of his mouth. His grey-blue eyes were also hard. The long fingers, Ned saw, were flexing, as if they wanted to grab someone by the throat. Someone. Ned knew who that would be.

  But really, really oddly, he wasn’t afraid now.

  Less than an hour ago he’d walked into an empty church to kill some time with his music, bored and edgy, and frightened beyond any fully acknowledged thought for his mother. Only that last was still true. An hour ago the world had been a different place.

  “Tell me? No one told me anything!” he said. “I don’t know how I know these things. I asked you that, remember? You just said I’m not the first.”

  “Ned,” said Kate. Her voice creaked like it needed oiling. “This sculpture was made eight hundred years ago.”

  “I know,” he said.

  The man in front of them said, “A little more than that.”

  They saw him close his eyes then open them, staring coldly at Ned. The leather jacket was slate grey, his shirt underneath was black. “You have surprised me again. It doesn’t often happen.”

  “I believe that,” Ned said.

  “This is still not for you. You have no idea of what . . . you have no role. I made a mistake, back there. If you won’t go, I will have to leave you. There is too much anger in me. I do not feel very responsible.”

  Ned knew about that kind of anger, a little. “You will not let us . . . do anything?”

  A movement of the wide mouth. “The offer is generous, but if you knew even a little you would realize how meaningless it is.” He turned away, a dark-clad figure, slender, unsettlingly graceful.

  “Last question?” Ned lifted a hand, stupidly—as if he were in class.

  The figure stopped but didn’t turn back to them. He was as they’d first seen him, from behind, but lit by the April sun in a garden.

  “Why now?” Ned asked. “Why here?”

  They could hear the traffic from outside again. Aix was a busy, modern city, and they were right in the middle of it.

  The man was silent for what seemed a long time. Ned had a sense that he was actually near to answering, but then he shook his head. He walked across the middle of the cloister and stepped between two columns and over the low barrier back to the walkway by the door that led out to the street and world.

  “Wait!”

  It was Kate this time.

  The man paused again, his back still to them. It was the girl’s voice, it seemed to Ned. He wouldn’t have stopped a second time for Ned, that was the feeling he had.

  “Do you have a name?” Kate called, something wistful in her tone.

  He did turn, after all, at that.

  He looked at Kate across the bright space between. He was too far away for them to make out his expression.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  Then he turned again and went out, opening the heavy door and closing it behind him.

  They stood where they were, looking briefly at each other, in that enclosed space separated, in so many ways, from the world.

  Ned, in the grip of emotions he didn’t even come close to understanding, walked a few steps. He felt as if he needed to run for miles, up and down hills until the sweat poured out of him.

  From here he could see the rose again between the two pillars, behind the carving. People said she was the Queen of Sheba. It was posted that way on the wall. How did he know they were wrong? It was ridiculous.

  Directly in front of him the corner pillar was much larger than those beside it—all four of the corners were. This one, he realized, without much surprise, had another bull carved at the top. It was done in a style different from David and Goliath, and nothing at all like the woman.

  Two bulls now, one in the baptistry, fifteen hundred years ago, and this one carved—if he understood properly—hundreds of years after that. He stared at it, almost angrily.

  “What do goddamn bulls have to do with anything?” he demanded.

  Kate cleared her throat. “New Testament. Symbol of St. Luke.”

  Ned stared at the creature at the top of the pillar in front of him.

  “I doubt it,” he said finally. “Not this one. Not the old one inside, either.”

  “What are you saying now?”

  He looked over, saw the strain on her face, and guessed he probably looked a lot the same. Maybe t
hey were kids. Someone had pointed a knife towards them. And that was almost the least of it.

  He looked at the sculpted woman where Kate stood and felt that same hard tug at his heart again. Palecoloured stone in morning light, almost entirely worn away. Barely anything to be seen, as if she were a rendering of memory itself. Or of what time did to men and women, however much they’d been loved.

  And where had that idea come from? He thought of his mother. He shook his head.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Need a drink, Detective?”

  He managed a smile. “Coke will do fine.”

  KATE KNEW WHERE she was going. She led him under the clock tower and past the city hall to a café a few minutes from the cathedral.

  Ned sat with his Coke, watched her sip an espresso without sugar (impressed him, he had to admit), and learned that she’d been here since early March, on an exchange between her school in New York City and one here in Aix. Her family had hosted a French girl last term, and Kate was with the girl’s family until school ended at the beginning of summer.

  Her last name was Wenger. She planned to do languages in university, or history, or both. She wanted to teach, or maybe study law. Or both. She took jazz dance classes (he’d guessed something like that). She ran three miles every second or third day in Manhattan, which was not what Ned did, but was pretty good. She liked Aix a whole lot, but not Marie-Chantal, the girl she was staying with. Seemed Marie-Chantal was a secret smoker in the bedroom they shared, and a party girl, and used Kate to cover for her when she was at her boyfriend’s late or skipping class to meet him.

  “It sucks, lying for her,” she said. “I mean, she’s not even really a friend.”

  “Sounds like a babe, though. Got her phone number?”

  Kate made a face. “You aren’t even close to serious.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because you’re in love with a carving in a cloister, that’s why.”

  That brought them back a little too abruptly to what they’d been trying to avoid.

  Ned didn’t say anything. He sipped his drink and looked around. The long, narrow café had two small tables on the street, but those had been taken, so they were inside, close to the door. The morning traffic was busy—cars, mopeds, a lot of people walking the medieval cobblestones.

  “Sorry,” Kate Wenger said after a moment. “That was a weird thing to say.”

  He shrugged. “I have no clue what to make of that sculpture. Or what happened.”

  She was biting at her lip again.

  “Why was he . . . our guy . . . why was he looking down there? For whatever it was? Could it have been the font, something about the water?”

  Ned shook his head. “Don’t think so. The skull and the carved head were the other way, along the corridor.” He had a thought. “Kate . . . if someone was buried there, they’d have walled him up, right? Not left a coffin lying around.”

  She nodded her head. “Sure.”

  “So maybe he was thinking the wall might have just been opened up. For some reason.”

  Kate leaned back in her chair. “God, Ned Marriner, is this, like, a vampire story?”

  “I don’t know what it is. I don’t think so.”

  “But you said he made that carving in the cloister. You do know how old that thing is?”

  “Look, forget what I said there. I was a bit out of it.”

  “Nope.” She shook her head. “You weren’t. When he came down from the roof I thought he was going to kill you. And then he said when it was done.”

  He sighed. “You’re going to ask how I knew,” he said.

  “It did cross my mind.” She said it without smiling.

  “Bet Marie-Chantal wouldn’t bug me about it.”

  “She’d be clueless, checking her eyeliner and her cellphone for text messages. Am I bugging you?”

  “No. Does she really get text messages on her eyeliner?”

  Kate still didn’t smile. “Something did happen to you back there.”

  “Yeah. I’m all right now. Since he left, I feel normal.” He tried to laugh. “Wanna make out?”

  She ignored that, which was what it deserved. “You figure it’s over? Just something to do with . . . I don’t know.”

  He nodded. “That’s it. Something to do with I don’t know.”

  He was joking too much because the truth was that although he did feel all right now, sitting here with a girl from New York, from now, drinking a Coke that tasted exactly the way it was supposed to—he wasn’t sure whatever had happened was over.

  In fact, being honest with himself, he was pretty certain it wasn’t. He wasn’t going to say that, though.

  He looked at his watch. “I should check in before lunch, I guess.” He hesitated. This part was tricky, but he was a long way from home and the guys who would needle him. “You got a phone number? We can keep in touch?”

  She smiled. “If you promise no more comments on my roommate.”

  “Marie-Chantal? My main squeeze? That’s a dealbreaker.”

  She made a face, but tore a sheet out of a spiralbound agenda she pulled from her pack and scribbled the number where she was staying and her cellphone number. Ned took from his wallet the card on which Melanie had neatly printed (in green) the villa address, the code for the gate, the house phone, her mobile, his father’s, the Canadian consulate, and the numbers of two taxi companies. She’d put a little smiley face at the bottom.

  When she’d handed the card to him last night he’d pointed out that she hadn’t given him their latitude and longitude.

  He read Kate the villa number. She wrote it down.

  “You have school tomorrow?”

  She nodded. “Cut this morning, can’t tomorrow. I’m there till five. Meet here after? Can you find it?”

  He nodded. “Easy. Just down the road from the skull in the underground corridor.”

  She did laugh this time, after a second.

  They paid for their drinks and said goodbye outside. He watched her walk away through the morning street, then he turned and went back the other way, along a road laid down two thousand years ago.

  CHAPTER III

  The morning shoot was wrapping when Ned got back. He helped Steve and Greg load the van. They left it in the cathedral square, illegally parked but with a windshield permit from the police, and walked to lunch at an open-oven pizza place ten minutes away.

  The pizza was good, Ned’s father was irritable. That wasn’t unusual during a shoot, especially at the start, but Ned could tell his dad wasn’t really unhappy with how things had gone this first morning. He wouldn’t admit that, but it showed.

  Edward Marriner sipped a beer and looked at Ned across the table. “Anything inside I need to know about?”

  Even when Ned was young his father had asked his opinions whenever Ned was with him on a shoot. When Ned was a kid it had pleased him to be consulted this way. He felt important, included. More recently it had become irksome, as if he was being babied. In fact, “more recently” extended right up to this morning, he realized.

  Something had changed. He said, “Not too much, I don’t think. Pretty dark, hard to find angles. Like you said, it’s all jumbled. You should look at the baptistry, though, on the right when you go in. There’s light there and it is really old. Way older than the rest.” He hesitated. “The cloister was open, I got a look in there, too.”

  “The important cloister’s in Arles,” Melanie said, dabbing carefully at her lips with a napkin. For someone with a green streak in black hair, she was awfully tidy, Ned thought.

  “Whatever. This one looked good,” he said. “You could set up a pretty shot of the garden, but if you don’t want that, you might take a look at some of the columns.” He hesitated again, then said, “There’s David and Goliath, other Bible stuff. Saints on the four corners. One sculpture’s supposed to be the Queen of Sheba. She’s really worn away, but have a look.”

&
nbsp; His father stroked his brown moustache. Edward Marriner was notorious for that old-fashioned handlebar moustache. It was a trademark; he had it on his business card, signed his work with two upward moustache curves. People sometimes needled him about it, but he’d simply say his wife liked the look, and that was that.

  Now he said, looking at his son, “I’ll check both tomorrow. We’ve got two more hours cleared so I’ll use them inside if Greg says the stitched digitals this morning are all right and we don’t have to do them again. Will I need lights?”

  “Inside? For sure,” Ned said. “Maybe the generator, I have no idea how the power’s set up. Depending what you want to do in the cloister you may want the lights and bounces there, too.”

  “Melanie said they do concerts inside,” Greg said. “They’ll have power.”

  “The baptistry’s off to one side.”

  “Bring the generator, Greg, don’t be lazy,” Edward Marriner said, but he was smiling. Bearded Greg made a face at Ned. Steve just grinned. Melanie looked pleased, probably because Ned seemed engaged, and she saw that as part of her job.

  Ned wasn’t sure why he was sending the team inside. Maybe taking photos tomorrow, the sheer routine of it—shouted instructions, clutter, film bags and cables, lights and lenses and reflectors—would take away some of the strangeness of what had happened. It might bring the place back to now . . . from wherever it had been this morning.

  It also occurred to him that he’d like a picture of that woman on the column. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew he wanted it. He even wanted to go back in to look at her again now, but he wasn’t about to do that.

  His father was going to walk around town after lunch with two cameras and black-and-white film to check out some fountains and doorways that Barrett, the art director, had made notes about when he was here. Oliver Lee had apparently written something on Aix’s fountains and the hot springs the Romans had discovered. Kate Wenger had just told him about those. She just about forced you to call her a geek, that girl.

  For the book, Ned’s father had to balance the things he wanted to photograph with pictures that matched Lee’s text. That was partly Barrett Reinhardt’s job: to merge the work of two important men in a big project. His idea, apparently, was to have smaller black-andwhite pictures tucked into the text that Lee had written, along with Marriner’s full-page or double-page colour shots.