Daughters of Babylon (30 page)

Catarina twisted the knife away from Arturo, who fell back on his heels, staring at the sniveling youth, and saw himself as he must have appeared all those years ago in Talmont, muddied and overwhelmed, a sack of soggy
bígaros
tied to his waist. And he looked at Cati, sister of Lizibetta, who, because of a few nights of Sicilian passion, had become his wife; and he looked at Eleanor who would always be a queen to him, with whom he’d not yet tasted the pleasures he dreamed of. And he felt a great rending, as of parchment torn from the Book of Life and saw himself, Arturo de Padrón, son of a fisherman, disappearing, unwritten, forgotten, between its jagged edges.

They moved like an elongated loop of happiness all day Thursday and into the evening past Silvina’s kitchen window, pouring expectation, exhilaration, and certainties of fun down the wooded slope into the apricot orchard. Poets and lovers of poetry carried backpacks and tents, folding chairs and firewood, and tramped back to help others. A dozen or so cars had parked in Silvie’s—Viv’s—driveway and lawn, but most of the Navarrosa guests arrived in Jean-Luc’s minivan. Gavriel had parked his motorbike beside Silvina’s Lexus and placed a yellow and black-striped sawhorse barrier behind them with No Parking signs in four languages.

Silvina stood in the kitchen at sunset on hold with her insurance company in Canada. There was no more activity from this window. They’d all be settled now in the shallow bowl of orchard with guitars, wine, and plates of food on their laps. The poet-founder himself had made more trips than anyone, hauling coolers of wine, beer, and soda, wearing the straw fedora he wore that night in Toulouse. Glorianne, the Gavriel Navarro fan club president, had made endless trips with her clipboard, wearing cork-soled espadrilles that sent her toppling and crying through the poplars, “I never bring the right shoes!”

Your call is important to us. Please hold, and the next available agent will be with you shortly.

Once the next agent became available, it took Silvina the length of a feature film plus credits to sort out her claim, listing contents, approximate value and purchase dates of original art, home theatre components, designer suits she’d worn once, designer bedding she slept in mostly alone. In texture if not content, it brought her back twenty-two years when a different set of circumstances took away her home, and she knew, sleeping under the stars that first scary night as a runaway, that she would never see her family’s iron cookstove or the silver samovar again. Silvie had found temporary solace at Twice Past Sunset, the derelict fishing lodge and cabins in the deep north woods where she’d spent so many happy summers with Dad. But then the Pop-Tarts and dried noodles ran out, and cold, bug-free nights warned her she couldn’t postpone whatever lay ahead much longer; so with a resilience she didn’t know she owned, Silvie walked back out to the highway and stuck her thumb out, pointing east, toward the Sudbury Theatre Centre and a formidable woman in tartan named Vivian Lansdowne.

She was next on the phone with Blythe when her heart leaped at the sight of Gavriel walking past her window with flowers in his arm. She started to walk toward the door holding the receiver until the cord reached its limit at the arched entry of the
foganha
. She placed the phone face down on the island, and the curl in the cord yanked it back to slam against the wall and dangle.

“Oops!” She bent down toward the swinging apparatus. “Sorry, Blythe, someone’s at the door. I’ll be right back.”

The flowers were wild and hand-picked—asters, Queen Anne’s lace, and chicory. Gavriel held them out. “I tied them with the twine, from the box I picked up, on the night our eyes met.” He spoke it with pauses and emphasis that caused the back of Silvie’s knees to go weak.

“Thank you.” She held the bouquet to her nose and breathed in the sweet caramel tang.

“I picked them myself,” he added, and they both laughed.

“They’re lovely.”

He wasn’t wearing the fedora, and his hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she noticed, not for the first time, how his eyes were like the forest at Twice Past Sunset. The shimmering play of light across river stones, layer upon layer of colours: russet, charcoal, hunter green, and flint. It was no freaking wonder he had thirty-four translators.

“I know you’re busy,” he said, “but we’re having a bonfire tonight, and I wanted to invite you.”

Workaholic panic grabbed her. “I haven’t started on those poems yet.”

“That’s okay, there’s plenty of time.”

“Well, all right then, thanks…I’ll see you later.”

She returned to the phone, dangling where she left it. “Sorry about that.”

“You have an admirer,” Blythe said.

“What? No, nothing like that. He’s just a…he’s a…well, he’s a friend.”

“And you’re writing poems!”

“God, no! Poems? Me?” Silvina cursed Jurassic-era phones that had no Hold feature. The flush behind her ears was practically throbbing.

Blythe laughed. “Chill, my dear. We all need some fun in our lives. Speaking of which, we need to set up a conference call with Alphonse.”

“Sure, but what’s fun about that?”

“Alphonse is fun. So is making money. Those expressions of interest from Stockholm, Berne and Salamanca are firming up as we speak, and so far, we have only one FST instructor— that is you. How thin can you spread yourself?”

“Thinner than is good for me, but that is fine news.”

Jean-Luc’s van pulled up in the space behind Gavriel and Silvina’s vehicles, and out poured five more guests with backpacks.

“What are your plans when you’ve finished with Viv’s house?”

“I don’t know. Until a few days ago, I thought I’d be enjoying buskers and shawarma at the Toronto Harbourfront. You want us to move the teacher training forward?”

“I think we should. How soon can we set up a call?”

Silvina’s usual,
I’ll get on it right away
, popped into her head, and then she saw the wildflowers lying on the island, long-stemmed and perky, their perfume riding crossbreeze between the open windows. “I’ll speak to Alphonse on Monday. I’m in the middle of something here.”

There were two long beats of not liking the answer.

“I was hoping tomorrow,” Blythe said, “but if you’re busy, you’re busy.”

Silvie touched the fringed, cornflower blue tip of a chicory petal.

“So,” her employer continued, “have you managed to come across those journals of mine yet?” Her question was broken up by a triple beep, the sound of Call Waiting, a feature Silvina didn’t know the phone had.

“Um…no, I have been keeping an eye out, but so far, all I’ve found are Viv’s daybooks, and they’re all from her theatre years.”

“Okay. Well, then, I’d better let you go. I have a Board meeting that started eight minutes ago. Silvie…”
Beepbeepbeep.

“Yes?”

“I am sorry about your condo. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” She hung up, and the phone rang. “Hello?”

“Silvina, Ms. Kestral, I am so glad to have caught you at home. I hope this is not an inconvenient time. It’s Tariq, Dr. Shirazi—how are you?”

The Court at Poitiers
Duchy of Aquitaine
NOVEMBER, 1172 A.D.

“To create, Madame,” said Wiley Forrest, “requires an altogether different pattern than to sustain.”

Eleanor, queen of England now and wife of Henry II for twenty-one years, inspected the variety of quills Wiley had spread across the table with inkpots and parchment. The sharpened wing feathers appeared to be organized in order, not of size, but of the raptorial nature of their original owners. Peregrine, kestrel, eagle, owl, swan, goose, jackdaw.

“Give me an example,” she said, picking up a kestrel feather.

“Certainly.” He ran a hand through a thick brush of copper hair that rose back from his brow like a tufted hummock in perpetual breezes. “Shall we take a fictitious situation, or would you prefer something more rooted in reality?”

“Oh, fictitious, please! Life has far too much reality for my liking these days.”

They were in her private offices, well past the dinner hour, the palace wing locked and guarded. Downstairs in the Great Hall,
cossantes
were still being danced and wine jugs poured with great liberality for the emissaries from Navarre and Aragon-Barcelona.

Wiley had yet to sit down at the large oval writing table with Eleanor, Arturo, and Bilqees. An Irish poet and satirist, he had trouble sitting still. He much preferred to perch or squat, pretend to lean, relax, and then to spring, and it was this agility of movement in the one-eyed exile that prompted Eleanor to employ him as official court jester, even before she’d read his outrageously funny verse.

A highly trained Celtic
file
, poet or “one who sees”, Wiley had taken up the dangerous art of satire, a form of poetry outlawed in Ireland because of its ability, believed magical, to unseat and disempower. If he’d not been born to seventeen unbroken generations of
filid
, a status of poets nearly equal to kings, the twenty-year-old would have been put to death; instead, the offended monarch ordered his left eye gouged, his “sorcerer’s eye”, and the poet, still bleeding, to be banished on a rotted coracle into the Irish Sea. After many weeks, Wiley landed,
sans
vessel and mostly dead, onto a beach in Brittany where he was carried to the palace of the Breton lord who admired Eleanor for her policies in support of ducal autonomy. That was two years ago, the year coincidentally—or perhaps not—that Rosamund Clifford, a Welsh noblewoman, replaced Eleanor in her husband’s affections. She and Henry, the parents of five sons and three daughters, now maintained separate courts, he in London, she in Poitiers, city of her birth.

Today, in honour of their diplomatic guests, Wiley wore the embroidered eye patch of a spider with a lion’s head and legs in alternating stripes of red and yellow, a playful composite of the coats of arms of Aquitaine, Navarre, and the Catalonians. It was one of his milder folderols.

“Very well,” Wiley said. “Two steps are needed before one picks up the quill or the needle, whatever your intended form.” He glanced at Eleanor with his flashing green eye and at the black and white feather she was twiddling.

“
Hop-là
!” Oops! She chuckled and set the quill down.

“Let’s take the issue, for example, of the usurpation of power. Imagine that your lands are threatened by aggressive forces from all sides.”

Eleanor looked over at Arturo who, for eighteen years now, had been
Cabaleiro
Arturo, Sir Arthur, of the Royal Order of the Knights of St. James. One of Henry’s first acts after their coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1154 was to appoint Arturo of Padrón as Knight Dedicate to Her Royal Majesty in reward for services rendered in protection of the Queen’s person.

“What say you, Arturo? Is the lust for Aquitaine by kings and noblemen real or figment?”

“That would depend on who you ask,” Arturo said, pointedly giving no attention to Wiley.

“I’m asking you. You were present at Limoges when my husband confirmed possession of Toulouse to that butcher of a cousin, Ramon. You were present at the pre-coronation of young Henri, our second-born, as future king of England, Normandy, and Anjou—and you served at Henri’s nuptials to the daughter of Louis, King of France, whom we both know, perhaps better than anyone. All these calculations and maneuvers, do they benefit or threaten Aquitaine?”

“They could go either way. For now, we should be grateful that His Majesty has allocated Aquitaine to Richard, who shows signs of quite a different temperament than his brothers.”

“True,” she said. “Richard is only sixteen, yet our people adore him. They are calling him their Lion Heart. He was conceived in England, did you know that, Wiley? It was the night the King and I buried our sweet firstborn, William. He was only three, died of the ague brought on by that accursed damp chill. I love the English, but I still can’t get their weather out of my bones.” Though the fire burned a steady warmth, Eleanor rubbed her arms and shivered. “I had not known until that day that grief could be ferocious and stir one’s passion, but I knew within moments of our lovemaking that a new son was on his way.”