Shroud of Shadow (20 page)

Natil entered her master's room as Harold ordered more beer. A spirited woman, indeed. Quite a woman. And all that hair!

He considered that it was her hair that had first attracted him. Though there was certainly more to a woman than her hair. At least, he thought, more than the hair on her head!

He laughed, choked, spat a mouthful of beer out into the rushes on the floor. “Tapster!” he called, pointing to his cup. “Refill this thing!”

It was refilled. Several times. The tapster looked pleased. Harold's head felt even better. His mind, though, was racing about, flitting from music, to Natil, to travel, to Natil, to sex, to Natil . . . and to Natil . . . and to Natil.

Natil played for Jacob—wondering all the while why the music-hating wool magnate had suddenly taken such a fancy to bronze strings—and, afterwards, chatted for a few minutes about the dinner the night before.

“Those boys that Paul found: did they do all right with the music?”

“Very well,” said Natil. “They were quite the accomplished performers.”

“Good. I might hire them.” Jacob pursed up his lips, put his hands behind his head, leaned back against the pillows. “I'm going to give you a raise, Natil.”

“Me, sir?”

He glared at her. “You're the only Natil in the room, aren't you? Of course: you. I'm giving you a raise because I like you. I might throw you out tomorrow because I hate you. How do you like working for me?”

Natil smiled. She doubted that Jacob knew how much she would have liked to have been tossed out tomorrow . . . or even today. “Thank you, Mister Jacob.”

“Go on: get out. I'll have music with my dinner, too. Paul will be there. Just Paul. We'll be talking.”

Natil nodded. “As you wish, master.”

But as she was rising to leave, Jacob suddenly told her to sit down again. He leaned forward confidentially. “You've done some traveling, haven't you, Natil?”

“I have, sir.” Into Africa. Across Europe and Asia. Up into Siberia. Across the straight that separated the Old World from the New. Across what she now knew would eventually be called the Great Plains and into the forests of the Appalachians and the Catskills. Down into the jungles of Central America, the rain forest of the Amazon, and the broad pampas of the future Argentina. Up again, crossing tundra, crossing ocean, to Europe. Looking for Elves. Finding none but herself. And now she herself . . .

“I have traveled,” she said.

“All over.”

Natil nodded slowly. “All over.”

Jacob scowled, but Natil sensed that the expression was meant to disguise another. “You ever meet any gypsies out there?”

“A few, sir.”

“Did you ever see a woman with them . . . a thin woman? Blonde? Blue eyes?”

Natil blinked. The Romany were a dark people.

“Maybe . . . maybe her name was Marjorie.” Jacob was leaning forward, his hands clutching the comforter.

“I . . .”

“It's not important, mind you.”

“Of course, sir. I . . . do not think that I ever met a gypsy named Marjorie. Or with blue eyes and blond hair.”

“Oh.” Jacob nodded, flopped back in the pillows. “All right then. It really . . .” He fell silent, musing.

Natil rose and went to the door, her footsteps silent.

“It really isn't important,” Jacob said suddenly.

Knowing that any response on her part would, at best, only add to the old man's evident pain, Natil simply bowed. But when she turned and opened the door, she found Francis standing just outside the room, his ear pressed against what was now empty space.

“Good morning, Mister Francis,” she said primly.

Francis straightened. “Ah . . . yes. Good morning, Natil. God bless you.”

He did not see her wince.

While Natil had been talking with Jacob, though, Harold had been having a conversation of his own. Though most of the tavern's morning customers seemed inclined to keep to themselves, looking up with startled and even frightened faces when Harold shouted, or stamped his feet, or called for more drink, the shawm player had nonetheless found a friend among them: a common laborer who, apparently, liked the beer, because he bought it by the full measure. The man was listening patiently, even eagerly, as Harold drew out, one by one, his views on women, music, travel, politics, even religion, and expounded upon each with rising warmth.

“Yes,” Harold was saying. “I'm drunk, but you've got to listen to me, because there's wisdom in wine. Wine makes men wise and amorous and bold. They knew about that years ago! Listen . . .” He suddenly broke out in song:

“
Istud vinum, bonum vinum,

vinum generosum,

reddit virum curialem, probum animosum!
”

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

His appreciative audience of one admitted that, no, he did not know.

“That's Latin,” said Harold. “That's a Latin hymn . . . to Bacchus! Bacchus, the god of wine. Wine and wisdom! And did you know that song is . . . over three hundred years old. Now that's immortality. Heaven is for priests. Immortality . . .” He waved his arms about to give his audience the idea that he was talking about music, or maybe Bacchus, or maybe drink, or maybe something else. No matter. “. . . is for musicians! I'll take immortality over heaven any day. Any day at all. That's what
I
think.”

His audience nodded.

“Why,” said Harold, “there's more wisdom in Bacchus than there is in the Church! Yes, that's true.”

His audience was listening: eagerly. So were a number of the others in the room: frightened.

“I mean, what does the Church promise? Heaven.
I
say that heaven lies between a woman's legs. I've lived for twenty-two years, and I can tell you for a fact that any visions of heaven that I've been granted have come to me . . .” He choked, laughed. “Come . . . that's it. Ha!
Come
to me when my trusty prick was good and deep in womanflesh. That's heaven.”

The audience spoke. “That's heresy, isn't it?”

Harold, fuzzy and dull from drink, stared at him. “I suppose so.”

And Natil was now on the street, her soft shoes treading silently. She was looking for Harold. With her harp tucked under her arm, she poked into taverns, bakeries, eateries, examined the interiors of leather shops and shoe shops, knocked on the doors of impoverished instrument makers, her quick, elven eyes searching for that pouty face.

But Harold was in another part of the city, and though Natil would get there soon enough, she was not there yet. The shawm player was still talking, his audience still listening.

“Heresy . . . hmmm.”

“Dard sure it's heresy,” said the audience. “D'ye admit that?”

“Well . . .” Harold considered, then turned defiant. A man could have his thoughts and ideas, could he not? It was his own mind, was it not? He could think whatever he wanted, could he not?

“Yes,” he said, “I admit it. Guilty as charged!” He held up a hand as though to swear, laughed.

“But you've heard the teachings o' the Church,” said the audience. “Surely you dan disbelieve the Church!”

Harold fixed him with a glare. He was not Jacob Aldernacht's shawm player for nothing, and he wanted that understood. “The Church,” he said, “is run by men like me. And I'll bet that they find their little bits of heaven between women's legs, too.”

Natil entered yet another shop. She was asking questions now. The woman behind the counter wore the double crosses of a convicted heretic, and there was a haunted look about her eyes that was more than accounted for by the scars on her arms.

“Have you seen a man—” began the harper.

“Nay,” said the woman quickly. “Nay, I han't seen na'one!”

Natil stood for a moment, perplexed. Then: “Very well, madam. Good day.”

She turned and left. The woman ran after her as far as the open door. “God bless you, mistress! God bless you! God bless you!”

“You think the Church is wrong, then,” said the audience.

Harold was already nodding. “Wrong and wrong again. Why, if I were pope—”

“But you can't be pope.”

“I could be pope . . . if I were pope.” Harold had given up on bread and herring and beer an hour ago and had devoted himself exclusively to the worship of wine. “If I were pope, I'd get rid of this celibacy. Everyone could have his heaven right now.” He stared down into his cup. “No one's celibate, anyway,” he mumbled. “It just gets in the way.”

“But the priests are the ministers o' God.”

“The priests are men. Little venal men. Like . . .” Harold brightened, preened. “. . . like me.”

Gritting her teeth, Natil tried the churches and chapels. Crucifixes stared back at her, crucifixes that depicted the blood and torments of long ago—or last week—that had nothing to do with the grassy plain, the endless stars, and the vision of a Woman that Natil still remembered . . . but could no longer attain.

No Harold.

Harold's audience stood up. “I'm going to have to leave you, Harold.”

“I understand perfectly,” said the shawm player. “Do what you must do. I have . . .” He sniffed with an air of importance. Jacob Aldernacht's musician.
That
kind of man! “. . . work of my own to attend to.”

The audience nodded, paid his bill, and left. Harold tested his feet to determine whether they would support him. Next time: he would have to keep track next time.

But when he looked up, he saw soldiers entering the tavern, and in a few moments more he discovered that he did not have to worry about whether his feet would support him or not.

Natil, arriving a few minutes later, found not a trace of Harold. He had obviously never been there. No one remembered him, no one had seen anyone of the sort that morning.

God bless you, mistress! God bless you! God bless you!

Alone in the Aldernacht kitchen, Omelda was washing again, washing the floor, sending gray water across the gray flagstones with large, sweeping strokes of her big brush while, in her mind, she heard plainchant.

Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor.

Shrouded in a fog of song, unwilling to lift her voice in unison with it ever again, Omelda stared with ox-like stubbornness at the wet flagstones as though by so fixating upon the mundane and material she could keep herself from being swept away by her obsession. She stared, she scraped bits of bread and meat out of the cracks, she scrubbed at tracked-in dung. It was stupid, human, messy work. It was her work: the work of a mental prisoner.

This morning, though, the plainchant was vying with other concerns, for in the pocket of Omelda's gown was a piece of paper with writing on it: a poem. It was the latest of several anonymous offerings, the first having appeared about a week after she had entered the Aldernacht household. Slipped under the door of her tiny room while she was away, scrawled in a labored imitation of the cursive writing used in Rome, it was (again like the others) penned in wretched Italian. A love sonnet. Birds, unrequited passion, the seasons, fashionable melancholy based in obscure meditations: all the Petrarchian motifs had been scrambled together and spilled out onto the page in a kind of rhyming stew that was painfully marked by an overwrought sense of its own deathless immortality.

O, graceful little sparrow, you so wing . . .

Omelda had winced at the new verses as she had winced at the old. A nun from an abbey in which learning was still prized, she knew Italian quite well, as well as French, German, Spanish, Latin, some Greek, and even a little Arabic and Hebrew. She was literate and well read, and she knew good imitations of Petrarch when she read them. This was, most assuredly, not a good imitation.

And sorrowing for times past I hear sing . . .

Lavabis me . . .

Combined with the plainchant, the poor Italian muddled her brain even more than usual this morning, and she was crying again. She did not want to be in the Aldernacht house, not with Natil gone, but if she left, she would be hunted and captured, and her true status and origins would most likely be discovered. Natil would then be beyond her forever. And so, her tears falling into the suds and the sludge, she continued to wash the floor.

A step behind her, a polite cough. Dully, she looked over her shoulder. Josef Aldernacht was standing in the doorway, his hair curled and topped with a wreath of flowers, his fine Italian clothes hanging limply on his thin frame. One of Jahn Witczen's boxy lutes was in his hands, and he was smiling at her with the air of a young lover contemplating the gift of a rose from his beloved.

She knew then the origin of the poems.

“Mistress Omelda,” he said with what Omelda understood as an attempt at a courtly bow. In the midst of things, though, his lute clacked into a counter and set the strings ringing, and as he hurriedly silenced them, he bent too fast and his wreath fell off.

Omelda stared dully. “Good morning, Mister Josef,” she said.

He resettled his wreath, cleared his throat. “Please,” he said, “call me Josef. I am a humanist. The lineage of my beliefs stretches back to sunny Italy, to Urbino, where Baldassare and Giuliano and their circle of dear and devoted friends knew each other by first name. There were no pretensions of nobility there, no titles, only humanists and lovers of humanity.” He bowed again. “I expect the same in my household.”

Omelda nodded slowly.

Unaware of her fog, he grinned, swung up a leg, and planted himself on the counter. “Much better, O woman.” He set the lute on his lap. “You should know, Omelda, that I am a great admirer of womanhood. All that is pure and noble and graceful dwells by nature in the fair sex. And I will even go so far as to agree with my comrade in spirit, Giuliano de' Medici, that there are countless ways in which women equal or surpass their brothers in ability, wisdom, and virtue.” He sighed at his own words, the wrath in his hair drooping of a sudden to cover one eye. “Don't you agree?”

In her present condition, Omelda could neither agree nor disagree with anything. She simply did not have the mental space in which to form an opinion. But she knew what her owners expected of her, and so she nodded, plodding ahead with her task. More water. Scrub. Scrape. “Yes,” she said, “of course.”