A Shadow All of Light (50 page)

“Well—and are we ourselves ready?” Astolfo asked. “The moon will be dark for a very short space now. Within that time the attack will come upon us under cover of the deepest darkness and our enemies shall have the advantage of the weakened power of will of the whole citizenry.”

“I am prepared,” Mutano said. “I can play out my part on the
Tarnished Maiden
along with Sbufo and Cocorico.”

“I am prepared,” Osbro said. “I have been working with the boat and believe I know how to control it.”

“I have rehearsed my duties,” Sterio said. “I think I shall be credited.”

“What are your duties?” I asked. “I have not been told of them and do not know how they fit with those of my band of defenders.”

“You are not involved with Sbufo's part of our activities,” Astolfo said. “But let me introduce our valuable Misterioso client at last. Now that the Feast is done, there is no harm in your knowing his name. He is Signor Alfredo Tristia, a privy councilor to the magistracy of the city. He serves with us. His duty now is to return to his fellows of the Jester Society and inform them of everything that has occurred between him and us.”

Mutano slapped the table sharply. “We know of infiltrators in the Society! Why do we tell them of what we have done?”

“Might be, to smoke 'em out,” Osbro said. “The ones that are angry about what we did will act unfriendly toward the signor. The ones that wanted the ritual disrupted won't say anything. They will be the foe.”

“A distinction that lacks clear definition,” I said.

“But I know these men,” Signor Tristia said, “and their reactions will either confirm or disarm my previous suspicions. I shall be able to gain a reliable tally and I will report the number to Maestro Astolfo. And then my role is played out. I shall join my family in a village in the mountains for the time being. I cannot safely stay in Tardocco.”

“And so we only carry out our plans as before,” Mutano said, “with the added small advantage that we now have some vague notion how many false Jesters are leagued with the pirates. But also there is also the disadvantage that they know who we are and how many—or, I should say, how few.”

“And how vulnerable,” I said. “So they will hasten their attack before our numbers can grow.”

“How are our numbers to grow?” Mutano returned. “Except for the maestro's warnings in Jester-rhymes, the populace has no inkling of the struggle that impends.”

“Is that not a favorable circumstance?” Astolfo asked. “If we had to repulse a well-planned attack with an undisciplined citizen force, ill armed and untrained, the result would be a limitless carnage. To chop down beardless youths, braggartly bravos, enfeebled old men, and foppish nobles would be a merry pastime for Morbruzzo and his minions. Tardocco would suffer the fate of Reggio and all the other port cities that have fallen to sea-invaders. The only hope I can envisage lies in the strategy we have laid out.”

“Which must go exact at every point,” I said. “If one of us fail in any one detail, we are lost—and the town destroyed.”

“Well,” Astolfo said, “all here have signified their readiness except yourself. Are you prepared for the exercise?”

“I should like to speak to you alone on that score,” I replied.

He gave me a look which betrayed some surprise, a most unusual expression for the maestro. “In this matter, what touches one touches all. You may voice your concern here and now.”

I spoke firmly. “I think not.”

“Then you and I shall retire to the kitchen for a space while Mutano talks through our strategy once again.”

He rose. I followed.

*   *   *

A low rushlight was burning in a small, homely lamp in a shelf beside the sink, so that the room was gloomy. Astolfo sensed as much and said, “Let us take something a little more martial in spirit than tea.” He reached down a bottle of wine spirits from the cupboard and poured two little glasses. He set one atop the big butcher's block in the center of the room and hoisted himself up backward beside it. I pulled a leather-strap chair to a near table and sat.

“I do not believe that your courage fails,” Astolfo said.

“I mistrust Osbro's capabilities. He knows nothing about boats and currents and such.”

“Little is required to know.”

“I would be better placed in his part.”

“You cannot swim.”

“If all proceeds as it ought, I would have no need.”

“You risk your life pointlessly.”

“It is no great risk.”

He bethought himself a space, then said: “You wish to supplant your brother in the greater danger?”

“Yes.”

“After this long time you have discovered a reservoir of fraternal affection. A season past, you might have called that sentiment an infirmity.”

“Perhaps so, but my argument stands. I am better fitted for these duties.”

“That may or may not be so. How comes it that Osbro knows how to swim and you do not?”

“He is my elder. While his tutoress, La Pluma, was teaching him to swim, she was teaching me to read.”

He chuckled and sipped daintily at the powerful liquor. “She was an instructress of varied talents.”

“And of joyous appetites.” I raised my little ruby-colored glass etched with a grape design and matched his imbibing in polite daintiness. This bit of a drop held a touch of heat.

“Well, it is true that the part you first took upon yourself is less difficult and much less dangerous than the venture with the boat. And in that other effort you would have your friends by you.”

“Torronio and Squint and Crossgrain, yes. They are indeed our friends. They are taking a large risk also. If the pirates are victorious in this struggle, they will execute the Wreckers when it is done.”

“The Wreckers?”

“So they call themselves after being falsely accused of drawing ships to wrack with deceptive signals.”

“They have been in hiding. How did you communicate with them?”

“I left a cipher message at two taverns. Torronio has paid observers about the town to keep abreast of affairs. He harbors hopes, I believe, of vindicating himself and returning to his former station in society.” I tasted the liquor again. Along with its dark heat there hinted fruit; cherry, perhaps.

“If we are victors, his family will welcome his return and Tardocco will proclaim its gratitude,” Astolfo said. “After the event he can reclaim his life of old.”

“That is why he is prompted to this action.”

“And what shall you do after it is over, assuming that we are successful?”

“Why, shall we not take up again our former lives also?”

“In the shadow trade, you mean?”

“Yes. What else might we do?”

He drank off his glass and leaned forward, elbows crossed on his knees, and spoke in a firm tone different from any I had heard him use before. “It has always been of secondary—nay, of accidental—importance to me, this business of umbrae. I am beginning to think I have given to it a sufficient amount of my lifetime.”

“You mean to give up shadows?”

He looked at me steadily, his expression mild as always but earnest in a new way. “My passion was at first and ever afterward to speculate upon the nature of the world—the truth, if there is one, that lieth within or beside or beneath or above the order of everything that is and is not.”

“You will pursue philosophy?”

“I began my investigation not with things, which are only materials, after all, but instead with shadows, which are commonly viewed to be but insubstantial hints, the dim echoes, of things. By thinking upon shadows, I hoped to make, as 'twere, a flanking sortie upon the riddle. If shadows are but the hints that objects and personages trace against the light, shall not the hint whisper more of
essences
to us than the objects themselves reveal?… So ran my thoughts at first.”

I reflected. “This seems a most roundabout method of proceeding. It is like studying the life of a spider by examining her web. If you never laid eyes on the spider itself, you would have an inaccurate and probably an exceeding strange notion of the animal. Her handiwork can tell you little.”

“Spiders perish by the thousands, leaving often their webs behind. The web is their essence, their signature upon the spaces of the world. The spider is a thing of parts—eyes, legs, mandibles, gut-pulp. The web is one single thing, beginning to end, no matter how complex the pattern it holds.”

“And so?”

“It required some little time before I understood the principle: Things composed of separate elements must pass away and discompose. A human person is made up of flesh, bones, blood, organs, and of mind and spirit. When a woman dies, her corpus becomes again those separate parts, and each of the parts, and the smaller parts of those parts, rejoin with the elements of earth and sky to which they are most closely related. Even stone, under the press of weather and the wear of time, can come apart to particles finer than the whitest flour.”

“But—”

“But the woman's shadow is a unitary and undiscomposable entity. It may change in shape and tint and size and in details, but the material of which it is made is always consistent with its essence. Its soul and body are one and the same. The shadow therefore is eternal. That thing we call its
caster
is temporary and accidental. What is eternal is real. All else is transitory falsity.”

“Now I gain importance in my own estimation,” I said, “as one who trades in eternals.”

He sighed at my impertinence and signaled that we should try the liquor again. I was agreeable and wished my dainty glass larger, particularly because I comprehended that the maestro was bent upon talking at length in this vein. I listened attentively; I supplied him with questions. Though the matter of his talking had nothing to do with the crisis at hand, I did not interrupt and tried to follow the train of his thought. It was as if he had kept these notions in the dark bottle of his mind and now released the stopple and poured them out in a heady winelike stream.

At one point, he spoke of shadows as being possibly sentient entities and said that if that were the case, we could no longer treat them as insensible objects. “That is why I wish to make a more conformable arrangement with shadows before time harvests my weary flesh. I must rid me of my proprietary habits of mind and observe more closely, in case the shadows desire to communicate more fully than I have understood. When I relinquished my own umbra, my sympathies and comprehensions broadened and deepened. The same thing happened when I took your shade.”

“How now?”

“You have resolved to adopt your brother's more dangerous part in the coming fray. Answer me this: Do you believe you would have done so if I had not nipped away your shadow the other day? Does its absence not exert you toward a warmer sympathy with Osbro—and with others also, perhaps?”

“I cannot say.”

“Think upon it.”

I set my little glass on the table and pushed it from me with the tip of my finger. “I will consider these matters after the conflict. The dangers at hand occupy all my mind. I take it that you approve of our exchanging roles?”

“Yes, if you explain to Osbro carefully his new duties. And you must send word to Torronio that a substitution has been made.”

“I shall do these things. What else must I attend to?”

“I know of naught else now, but leave me alone with my thoughts.”

“Good night,” I said.

I went into the library, where the others sat in conference at the table with maps and lists spread out before them. I tugged Osbro aside and began to acquaint him with his newly acquired role.

 

XI

The Shadows Among Us

We could afford no longer delay. The night following my private meeting with Astolfo and the subsequent hour with my colleagues, I walked to the Daia. I took obscure byways alongside the parks and plazas. The houses I passed in this midnight hour were silent and dark and I fancied there were eyes upon me behind curtained windows—but then I smiled at my apprehensions. I knew these domiciles by daylight as the ordinary houses of shopkeepers, lesser officeholders, ship owners, and the like. It was only foolish little fears that made the back of my neck feel so unprotected.

I reached the river unmolested and, I assumed, unobserved.

The sky was full of stars, but they were more distant than ever and the night was one of the darkest I could recall. I could see no lights as I shoved off from Sandpoint Landing a little distance above the upper park. The lanterns and torches that had brightened the Jester's Feast were quenched and the tents and pavilions and reviewing stands taken down. Only the barking of two restless dogs marked the silence. Tardocco was still under the pall of its disappointment with the failed festival.

Feelings had run high at first and rumors arose that violence might beset Maestro Astolfo; his hand in the disaster was widely suspected. But the occasional loud outbursts had now given way to a general discontented muttering, a surly public mood from which no reprisal would emerge. Even so, the maestro kept close to his studies and strategies in our villa and did not show himself outside the house.

These studies and plans required his keenest attention, and ours as well. Mutano, Osbro, and I were at his side from the beginning, and in the later development the puppet masters Sbufo and Cocorico were to join us, as were Torronio and his associates, though always under cover of darkness. Our strategy was intricate, composed of several parts that must fit closely, and I was to be the principal agent of action. This was the role I had requested, distrusting Osbro's ability to carry it through. Astolfo ascribed my taking the role to fraternal affection. If this were true, his surmise was justified by premises I did not understand.

At any rate, here I was, determined to guide our little craft down the Daia into the harbor bay. It was a balky vessel, some twelve feet long by five across, with only a rudimentary rudder to point her and a flimsy pole to keep her off the banks and some infrequent silted shoals. Osbro had tried his hand at piloting her and had named her the
Reluctant Maiden,
playing upon the name of the deserted hulk in the harbor called the
Tarnished Maiden.