Shroud of Shadow (12 page)

“The wheat's still there.”

“Yes . . .” She was suddenly wistful. “It's still there.” She glanced at the empty diner. “And I'm here.”

“I . . .” George's turn. “I stared at the mountains most of yesterday. I was up there, alone, and it just seemed right. And, you know, I . . . I took them with me when I left, because they're inside me now. Wherever I go. And it still seems right. Is that crazy or what?”

Sally shrugged. “No crazier than anything else.”

“Well, you've still got your wheat with you. Wherever you go.”

Struck by his words, she stood straight, her face as full of wonder as if she had been staring after a handsome man. “Yeah . . . I do.”

George smiled, sheepish of a sudden. “Be the wheat.”

Her lips moved silently:
Be the wheat.
“I never thought of it that way.”

“Crazy, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Bats.”

“But good bats.”

She nodded, still staring. “Good bats.”

She turned to him then, and all the scars of abandonment and disappointment fell away from her for a moment; and in that interstice of unabashed vulnerability, George understood—and knew that she understood also—that this meeting of two who were seeing, feeling, and touching an ineffable but immanent knowledge with tips of wonder was important, important above all else. Critical. Essential.

Shaking, Sally licked her lips, fought for words. “I'm . . . off in another five minutes,” she whispered. “What are you doing after breakfast?”

George shrugged. It seemed silly that, on a morning fraught with such consequence, he could think of nothing that he actually had to do. But perhaps, he thought, that was the point.

He laughed a little, shrugged, peered once again at the coffee spoon as though it held everything . . . and found that it did. “Anything . . . anything you want,” he said.

The business of Ypris was wool.

Even from far away, one could tell that. There was wool in the air, wool on the ground, wool in the earth. The dyers' vats were fragrant, and the slap and whiffle of the tenters' fields could be heard a mile away, as could the rhythmic tramp of the fulling hammers. The flocks of sheep themselves—fluffy and creamy white as pastry filling, their fleece uncut this early in the season—were spread widely across pastures that stretched all the way from the Bergren River to Malvern Forest.

Wool. Hypprux had its linen, but Ypris had its wool, and, sturdy burghers that they were, its citizens seemed bent upon biting their collective thumb at their northern rival. Linen might be used here for shrouds and sheets and shifts, but everything else was wool. Wool cloaks. Wool stockings. Wool shirts. Wool caps. Wool jackets and hats and slippers. Wool dressing gowns. Fine wool veils for the ladies. Thick wool doublets for the men. Wool carpets and hangings and tapestries of every kind.

A hundred years before, Ypris had been razed, but within fifty years, the people had returned in trickles and in streams, had rebuilt their city upon foundations of wool, and, in the end, had not only bought, outright, a charter and independence from the Baron of Hypprux in exchange for a cash payment rumored to be close to what it had cost Charles VIII to finance the Italian Wars, but had also ensured that their coffers would be speedily replenished, for Ypris had become synonymous with wool for most of Adria—indeed, for much of Europe.

And the Aldernacht family had become synonymous with Ypris.

The spire of Gold Hall, rising, appropriately, straight up from the center of town, completely overshadowed the church tower; and as Natil and Omelda entered the north gate, they could see that its pinnacle glittered with the brightness of solid gold. Everything was new in Ypris, and the two women blinked at the clean stone walls, the street cobbles round and even as eggs, the tiles roofs of many colors. The Yprisians—and the Aldernachts—had deliberately set out to best Hypprux, and they had succeeded, for the latter, though untouched by robber band or political conquest for five hundred years, seemed bent beneath its age, while Ypris, in contrast, was bright, shiny, young: its most ancient buildings had seen but two generations, and the great majority had gone up in the last ten years.

But if Hypprux was old, then what was Natil? For a moment, despite her determined promise to Omelda, despite her new-found unwillingness to fade, all the sorrow and despair came back to the harper. Men and women were young and growing. The Elves were old and fading, had already faded. Natil wanted desperately to join them.

But she dashed the thoughts from her as she dashed the sudden mist from her eyes. Humanity was young, but there was elven blood—minute and sleeping—even among this welter of mortal flesh, and someday that blood might take fire from the youth and the growth that had sustained it, ignite with alchemical fervor, and, perhaps, awaken.

Someday. Perhaps. Natil had come to be convinced that she was beginning to see that someday, that perhaps.

“What do you usually do to find a position, Omelda?” she said.

Omelda was still more than a little dubious of Natil's plans. “I knock on doors.” She shrugged. “Nearly everybody needs someone for something. But . . .” She looked depressed. Here in a city that hummed along like a well-regulated loom, unemployment or idleness seemed out of place, job hunting a fool's errand. “Can't I just stay with you?”

Natil shook her head. “You cannot live in the open, and therefore you must have a roof. I do not need a roof, nor do I want one, but I will make sure that I stay near you . . . and teach you.”

Simple words, complex task. She still wondered how she would accomplish it.

Omelda looked at the sky, winced involuntarily at the bigness of the blue vault. “I'd make a bad shepherdess.”

Natil touched her shoulder. “Peace, beloved. We will find you something in a house.”

As usual, they headed for the square. Even if Omelda found work, Natil would still need money; and if Omelda failed, Natil would need money all the more.

It was a market day, and the square was crowded with shops and stalls, each profession and craft grouped together as was the custom. Over at one edge were the horse sellers. At the other, the bakers' fires sent up a haze of smoke. In the center, dominating all, the weavers and the fullers presided, while, about them, the butchers carved, the leather workers squinted at their labor, the carpenters and the furniture builders and the instrument makers eyed one another suspiciously.

One of the latter, though, was also eyeing Natil, or rather, her harp. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man whose gray hair and gray beard and weathered expression made his years seem much greater than she sensed they actually were; and his stall seemed rather an aggregation of the products of all the trades immediately about him, for hung on the walls and suspended from the ceiling and standing on the floor was an assortment of lutes, harps, chairs, cabinets, recorders, hardwood chests, tables, and even a number of travelers' staves. Unfortunately, to Natil's eye, most everything displayed seemed to resemble more or less the thick-walled, iron-bound strongbox that sat in the middle of the shop like a square toad. Instinctively, she clutched her slender harp to her side.

“You want to play while I look?” Omelda was listless.

Natil pulled her gaze away form the man in the shop. “I think that would be best.” She looked up at Gold Hall, which bounded one entire side of the market square. Its spire rose up above everything, was visible anywhere one went in the city or the surrounding countryside. “It must be very hard to become lost in Ypris. You will be able to find me easily enough.”

Omelda, listless and resigned, nodded. “I'll be back,” she said, and she turned away.

Natil looked after her for a moment. “I know you will, beloved,” she said softly. “And I will be here for you.”

Her words, hearkening back as they did to the old ways, the ways of help and healing, made her feel light, elven, and for a moment, she wondered whether she had caught a glimpse of starlight out of the corner of her inner eye. But starlight lay not in the present, but in the future—with George, and with Sally who wanted to be the wheat.

Another hopeful thought. She lingered over it, smiling faintly, and then she found a place to sit, set out her cap, and began to play the wheat, weaving into her bronze strings a sense of green shoots climbing out of the ground, of yellow fields ripe and ready for the scythe, of (her human dreams bespelling her now as much as reality was bespelling George and Sally) blue Colorado sky and pines and aspens. Her fingers moved on their own, her mind guiding them only with the thought of the desired evocation, and the melody grew with the wheat and arched as widely as the sky.

She was deep into the web and texture of the music when a voice—derisive, almost accusing—spoke up beside her.

“Are you using that shit?”

As though she had been backhanded, Natil started and almost dropped her harp. The world of Ypris and commerce came back, the market square came back, the cap, now dotted with appreciative coins, came back . . . and so did the strange man who appeared to be a combination of carpenter, furniture builder, and instrument maker. He was standing at her elbow, and his pale eyes were peering at her harp as though he wanted nothing more than to snatch it out of her hands and take it apart.

“Well?” he said. “Are you?”

Shaking, Natil swallowed, struggled to regain her composure and courtesy. “I am afraid I do not under—”

“Those strings of yours.” The pale eyes glared at her for a moment, turned again to her harp. “They're bronze.”

“Ah . . . indeed . . .”

The man shook his head. “Brass. Got to be brass. Haven't you looked at real Irish harps? They use brass. Brass all the way: top to bottom. Their tone is supposed to be . . .” He spread his arms, flapping them out like wings. “. . . melting. Melting.” He nodded, glared again at her instrument. “That's not a real Irish harp you've got there.”

“That . . . is true,” said Natil. She plucked a chord, letting its sound ripple out like the chiming of bells.

“That's just it,” said the man. “You have to study these things. Trial and error is all well and good, but for building real instruments, you just can't beat a background in boxes. Now, if you'd talked to me before you built that thing, you'd have known that you should have strung it with brass. You should have made the forepillar shorter. You should have made the soundbox bigger.” He nodded toward his shop. “Now, over there is a real Irish harp.”

Natil noted again the similarity between his strongbox and his harps . . . none of which, strongbox included, looked particularly Irish. “As you wish, sir.”

“I could have built you a better one,” he said. “
I
don't work by trial and error.” His pale eyes swooped down on Natil's harp again. “I've got . . .” He peered at the strings, shook his head disdainfully. “. . . equations.”

Natil was still shaking from the brutality with which she had been torn from her music. “Equations.”

“Yup.” He nodded vigorously. “I can build anything. And I can built it right the first time. Equations. It's all equations.”

“All right, Jahn,” said someone else. For the first time, Natil noticed that the strange instrument maker had a companion. “That's enough,” he was saying. “I want to hear her play some more.”

“I can't see why, Mister Josef. She's playing it all wrong.”

Mister Josef was a flaxen-haired man who seemed both a little too young for his face and a little too old for his clothes, for although he was obviously in his mid-thirties, he was dressed foppishly in the Italian style, and his hair was elaborately curled. In one hand he carried one of the strongbox lutes, from his belt hung a little leather book with a silver clasp, and the feather in his scarlet cap waved back and forth as he smiled and nodded at Natil. “Jahn is probably right,” he said. “He's always right about things like that. He's studied all about how real harpers play. But . . .” His hand flew to his heart. “. . . you certainly play well enough. Divine. Absolutely divine. I've never heard anything like that before.”

“I am . . .” Natil wanted nothing more than to resume her harping. “I am sure that you have not.”

Josef nodded, nodded again. “They must play that way in Italy. Is that where you learned to play that way? Everything that's divine comes out of Italy. I mean, have you
heard
some of those songs they sing? Oh!” Again, his hand went to his heart.

“They . . . do play very beautifully indeed.” Natil glanced about. In the course of her playing, she had managed to attract a substantial number of listeners, but though for now they were waiting eagerly for her to continue playing, she knew that their patience would not last.

“Have you been in Italy?” Josef pressed.

“Ah . . . I . . . ah . . . have.”

“Urbino! Say it! You must have been in Urbino.” Josef would have clapped his hands had he not been holding a lute in one of them. “Ah! Guidobaldo da Montefeltro! Baldassare Castiglione! The gentlemen! The gentlewomen! Ah, all the light of Europe in one place!” He leaned down, his watery eyes peered at Natil as though she were a fish in a bowl. “Surely you were there.”

In fact, Natil had indeed been there for a few days, and, at this moment, with a plainly hostile maker of strongboxes with musical pretensions on one side and a wealthy fop on the other, she wished that she were back in that sun-warmed courtyard beneath a clear Italian sky, the women and men of that peaceful fellowship listening to the sound of an elven harp—bronze strings and all—and an elven harper.

They had not known who she was or where she was from, but they had known beauty, and though Natil did not now want to admit her presence there, she must have looked wistful, for Josef forgot himself to the extent that he did indeed clap his hands together (wincing as he found the neck of the lute between them). “I knew it! I knew it!” Immediately, he offered his hand. “I must remember my manners in the presence of one who was welcomed—and rightly welcomed—at that august court. I am Josef Aldernacht. This . . .” He indicated the maker of strongboxes. “. . . is Jahn Witczen, of Prague. He builds all my instruments.”