Daughters of Babylon (17 page)

Now Lizibetta and their mother lay dead in a heap of broken bones a thousand feet below them. She’d never seen the poem, and she’d never asked Catarina to act as go-between. There’d been no backward glances from the woman he loved because, to Betta, Arturo was nothing but a stupid water boy.

Queen Eleanor had been watching the turmoil of his thoughts; there was nothing he could do about that. And while he fully intended to wring the truth out of Catarina’s scrawny neck, he could hardly tell his sovereign that the words of love she thought were written for her, weren’t.

Then it turned out that Her Majesty’s eyes were as readable as his. Arturo watched their tidal depths flow from tenderness to perplexity and finally, to surprise and pleasure. “I know you,” the queen said. “We met once long ago, at the cove in Talmont.”

Silvina heard the squeak of things that needed oiling.
“Allo, est quelqu’un là-haut
?” she asked again. “Is somebody up there?”

Wheels rolled along a bumpy surface, and footsteps grew louder, approaching the attic trapdoor. Standing midway up the stairs, she took hold of the railing with both hands, the way a non-swimmer grips the edges of a pool.

Black boots and black denim jeans, snug against a pair of long, lean legs descended the attic stairs—there were seven of them, stairs, not legs—she herself was on the eighth of seventeen—counting stairs, counting anything kept her senses orderly when they’d much rather fly off and switch places. He was coming down slowly, every ker-thump rattling the stairs and her nerves like the hunchbacks and phantoms in the black-and-white Lon Chaney films she used to watch with her grandmother. By the fourth step, there was no further doubt, anatomically, that the stranger in her attic was a man…in a dark leather bomber jacket with a fur collar. He was lean and tawny with an aquiline profile and raven black, shiny hair that he wore pulled back in a ponytail. Silvina stopped breathing and may have stopped counting. She descended backward a step or two, and the man disappeared.

It was a fluke of architecture. The attic trapdoor had been constructed at right angles to the central stairwell, which was only slightly wider than the ladder that had once connected the two floors. The bottom stairs of the attic lay beyond her sight line. If she’d been coming out of Viv’s bedroom at that moment, he and she would be standing face to face and, in every sense of the word, trapped.

“If you think you’re here to take something, we’ll have to talk.” Thinking of Vivian lent her courage. Thinking of how she died sapped it.

The man said nothing.

Silvina seized the opportunity during which an innocent, well-meaning intruder would explain himself to turn and hurry down the stairs, duck into the kitchen and rummage through the utensil drawer for something wood-handled and menacing. She returned, armed, to the base of the stairwell and watched the trapdoor judder. She heard a quiet expletive in a language that was neither English nor French. The loaded spring caught and with a
swoosh-fwump
, the stairs were swallowed like a tongue into the jaws of the attic. The change of air pressure caused Silvie’s ear drums to pop and the house to give off what sounded like a moan.

The man held a stack of file folders in one arm and looked down at her. He stood framed against the bathroom door, sidelit by the windows in Viv’s bedroom and the study at opposite ends of the corridor. Her synesthesia liquefied and poured him down the stairs, transforming him to a starry night, moonless and black and smelling of caramel. Sometimes, her disorder was utterly useless.

“Hello,” he said, and came down the stairs.

Silvie was still holding her weapon of defense upright between her breasts when he reached the ground floor. He was smiling, and curiosity softened his angular face. He started to laugh. She looked down. What she’d grabbed from the utensil drawer thinking it was a murderous butcher knife was a wood-handled wire whisk.

She laughed too, then thrust the whisk into his arms and dashed upstairs. “Don’t leave until we talk—sorry, I’ll be right back.”

When she returned, the whisk was on the counter in the
foganha
, and the man sat in the parlour on the chair that Dr. Shirazi had occupied two days before. He was riffling through papers in a brown accordion folder.

“Didn’t you hear me calling?” she said.

“Cell phones don’t work in this house.”

“What? I don’t mean on the phone. I was shouting hello, hello, and you didn’t answer.”

“Sorry, I thought you were getting poor reception on the landline. Why should I have thought you were talking to me?”

“Because you were in my attic?” she said, with an interrogative, adolescent flip at the end of each word. His chiseled Mediterranean features rearranged themselves, compelling her, awkwardly, to add, “I mean, Vivian’s attic.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Silvina Kestral. Who are you?”

“I am Gavriel Navarro.” He rose and held out his hand.

Her palm met his, their fingers curled with just the right amount of pressure—or maybe a little too much. Her hand dropped, and she sank into the nearest wing chair. “I didn’t notice a car in the driveway.”

“I got a lift with Jean-Luc.”

“That man takes everyone everywhere.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing.”

“I didn’t hear you drive up either.” Gavriel spoke flawless English with what Silvina guessed to be a Spanish accent.

“I don’t have a car. Not here. I have one at home, in Canada.”

“That’s not safe. You should have a car. There are good rentals in St. Jacques.”

“Why is it not safe? I used Vivian’s bike today. It’s old, but in pretty good condition.”

Gavriel looked at her, appeared to think a moment, and shrugged. “Well, I’m done for now. I should let you go.” He headed toward the door.

“Wait a minute.” Silvie popped up from the chair. “You can’t just walk out of here with those files. I don’t know what they contain.”

“They’re just a few poems.”

“Poems?”

“Yes, I’m translating them.”

“Did you write them?”

“No.”

“Then they don’t belong to you.”

Gavriel had thick, black eyebrows; the eyebrows came down. “How do poems belong to someone?”

“Copyright. I don’t know. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m Vivian’s executrix. Nothing leaves this house until I’ve had a look at it.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realize that’s who you were. You should have said.”

“How did you get in anyway?”

Gavriel reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a brass key on a white satin ribbon.

“You have a key to this house?”

“Yes, Vivian and I have been working together.”

“On what?”

“A project.”

“She never mentioned you.”

“She never mentioned you either.”

Silvina was having a hard time liking this man. She wondered how many other copies of the key to Viv’s house were floating around the Pyrenees, or the world, for that matter, and she wondered if Olivier, grandson of Louis-Bernard and Orsine, knew of a good locksmith. Meanwhile, though, she had a more immediate situation.

“I’m sorry if I’ve come across like a banshee. I only arrived yesterday, I can’t check my emails or send text messages, and I miss my friend.” She smiled and gestured toward the wing chairs. “How about we have a glass of wine, some bread and cheese, and you can tell me about this project you and Viv were working on.”

He looked down at the folder in his arms.

“Unless you’re in a rush. Did I mention that no one in Cerabornes seems willing to talk to me?” She grinned, and finally, so did he.

“The wine sounds good, but I have a better idea,” he said. “How about I take you first on a personal, guided tour of
a Raiña dos Ceos?
Have you seen it yet?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s where you are, in Galician…the Queen of Heaven.”

The pools of Artemis Daphnaia
Principality of Antioch, Asia Minor
MAY, A.D. 1148

In the droplets of cascading waters of the sacred springs of Daphne, two figures were reflected, walking arm in arm, Bowers of laurel arched overhead, protecting Eleanor and her uncle from the scorching sun like the interlaced fingers of a million Naiads, guardians of water and flow. There was a hush within the glade of moss and waterfalls, along the paths and foot bridges that kept the city out and felt to Eleanor like the stillpoint at the center of the grandeur of Creation.

People talked, of course. The pair had been coming to the pools of Artemis nearly every day for five months, as if their prince, Raymond of Poitiers, could afford time away from Council and the threat of infidels sacking Antioch, as they’d sacked Aleppo and Edessa, did not hang like the sword of Damocles over him. It was the kind of behaviour one would expect from the progeny of the old Duke. William IX of Aquitaine, troubadour and composer of shameless verse, and his married paramour,
La Dangereuse
of Châtellerault,
lived under the delusion there was nothing more important than happiness, the pursuit of joy, unceasing appreciation of life, regardless of weather, tides and hellfire from pulpits. No wonder Louis, King of France, Eleanor’s poor husband, lay prostrate every day before the altar of St. Anthony.

A pair of swans that Eleanor had named Leda and Narcissus glided to the edge of a pool. She scattered a handful of pine nuts along the bank, and the two birds waddled out of the water, claiming in humour what they lost in grace. Raymond let go of his niece’s arm and sat upon a nearby bench, while she stooped to feed them from her hand.

“Why do you suppose, Uncle, that Daphne spurned the attentions of Apollo and begged to be transformed to laurel?”

“Now there’s a question I haven’t pondered in years. The common interpretation is that Daphne tired of the Sun God’s endless desiring and saw no other means of escape.”

“But why would one seek to escape desiring?”

Raymond laughed. “Answer that, and you shall win the boon of Artemis herself.”

Eleanor glanced over her shoulder. “I am trying to answer it, and so far, you haven’t.”

Her uncle was a fine-looking man with chestnut hair and beard of a lighter shade, and kind gray eyes. Only six years older than herself, he was, at thirty-two, in constant agony from years of tournament and battle but never spoke of it. A decade ago, he’d been distrusted by the people of Antioch for what they called his loose Aquitainian ways. Now, they basked in the commerce he encouraged from the Second Crusade, and approved of his attentiveness to Constance, their princess, who had been a mere child when they wed. Such was the fall and rise of public opinion.

Eleanor had adored Raymond for as long as she could remember. Her father’s only sibling, he included her in his play, while other boys thought the gangly Eleanor with her fondness for archery and falcons ought to stay inside and stitch with the women. He’d helped her with Greek and Latin, and composed stories of a Golden Age as if it were something neither from the past nor future but a state one attained from attention to the present.

She rose and joined him on the bench. “I’m waiting,” she teased, slipping a hand around his biceps.

He covered her hand with his own. “Very well. So the question upon the table is desire. I believe it is in our nature, both man and woman, to desire and with each sweet taste of attainment to seek more, to climb, to aspire. Trouble arises, not in the action but the object and its unwillingness to participate. Every day, missives arrive of another stronghold fallen, homes and lives destroyed, booty in human flesh carted away, and I wonder if our fear of the Final Judgment is misplaced, that in our aggression to take, to claim, we create a world in which the greatest desire is to be left alone.”

A dragonfly with wings of iridescent black lace hovered near them, hind end twitching. Eleanor held out her finger, and the insect landed. “Given your interpretation,” she said, “it would seem that my husband has achieved his ultimate desire. He can barely tolerate the sight of me.”

“It devastates me to hear that. Louis shows spirit enough in Council, but not that of a husband…not even that of a king, truth be told.”