Shroud of Shadow (31 page)

But this was not Edvard or Norman: this was Josef. For an instant, Omelda was relieved at the thought of Josef's gallant but pointless worship of anything feminine. He would not hurt her. He would not call her slut or whore. He would not force her. Instead, he would honor her, spout what fragments of Italian humanism he thought he understood, perhaps compose (badly) a poem for her.

But today he did not of these things. Instead, he bowed, stammered a faint greeting, and then sank back down on his stool, his boxy lute on his lap, his eyes on the table top.

Omelda felt faintly betrayed. “Is there . . . is there anything I can get you, Mister Josef?”

Josef looked up. “Will you . . . sit with me for a moment, my lady?”

My lady.
He had spoken the words as a thirsty man might speak of water. Omelda nodded and, when he had brought a chair for her, sat down . . . stiffly.

A long silence. Josef was staring at the table top again. Omelda fidgeted with both discomfort and pain. Finally, the would-be musician, poet, and philosopher spoke:

“I have always had the greatest admiration for women, Omelda.”

There did not seem to be any appropriate reply, so she merely nodded.

He fingered the lute. “I mean, even before I discovered the wonders of the Italian mind, it always seemed to me that all that was good and noble and beautiful resided in the soul of . . . woman.”

Again, there was nothing to say. As far as Josef appeared to be concerned, Omelda was someone to whom to talk. She might have been a dog, or a diary, or a wall.

“It seemed obvious to me that, given such beauty of form and excellence of heart . . .” Josef looked at her for the first time since he had begun to speak. “. . . I . . . I mean women in general . . .” He went back to the table top. “. . . that a certain nobility—no, beauty—of soul that is invariably denied the male sex could not but reside in womanhood.”

Omelda was staring at nothing.

“And it struck me . . .” Josef abruptly swung round to her, and his eyes were pale and bright. “. . . that I was a very fortunate man, as all men are fortunate, for . . . having come forth into the world out of that . . . goodness and nobility.” He blinked, looked away nervously. “Do you see my point?”

Omelda suddenly wanted to run, to be away. But there was nothing for her to run to, save for Edvard and Norman and their games. “I . . . don't think so,” she said.

Josef did not appear to hear her. She doubted that he was actually paying much attention to her. “And then . . . and now . . .” He twitched, fingered the lute, suddenly looked at it as though he wanted to smash it. “It seems to me . . .”

Omelda sat still, wishing that he would forget that she was there, wishing that Edvard and Norman, too, would forget.

Josef lifted his head. “It is all . . . dust,” he said solemnly. “All dust. Nobility, and excellence of heart . . .”

He seemed to be casting about in his mind, looking for some way out of a snare. “But there is . . . no nobility. And she . . .”

The lute clattered to the floor as he got up and began pacing. Omelda hoped that his steps might take him out of the room long enough for her to escape. But he turned to her, his eyes bright, his mouth set. “She brought me forth, and she cursed me by doing so. I . . . I . . .” He shook his fists. “I have to . . . to live like this, knowing that from . . . such as her . . .”

Omelda stared at him, shaking, her bruised and lacerated vulva burning with the pressure of the hard chair.

“Why didn't she stay away? Why didn't she die out there? It would have been better!”

She said nothing. She was a dog, a book, a wall. Indeed, Edvard and Norman had forced her to be all those things and more.

Josef went down on one knee before Omelda. She shrank away, but he clasped suppliant hands before her. “I want to tell you something, my lady. You must listen to me, for you are all that gives me hope in womanhood and virtue anymore.”

Womanhood and virtue. And bondage. And abuse. And rape.

“I cannot stay in this house,” said Josef, “for it tells me too much of my birth, too much of what I am. I am going to leave. No one knows this save you now, and you must keep it secret. I am going to leave . . .” He spread his hands. “. . . forever!”

He increased the spread of his hands as though to indicate just how long he considered forever to be. Omelda, wide-eyed and in pain, nodded.

“I am going to join the company of men,” said Josef. “I will know dirt, and disease, and a world in which there is nothing gentle. I will find my brother Karl, and become a . . . a soldier. I might die in a field in Italy, but I will die nobly, and without . . .” He glanced off in the direction of the master wing of the house, where Marjorie was slowly succumbing to pulmonary rot. “. . . without her.”

He bent toward her. “I will have no reminders of my past,” he whispered. “None. My mind is made up. Farewell . . . forever!” He kissed her polluted hands as though they were fresh roses from a morning garden, then stood up and turned to go.

At the door he turned back. “Forever! Forever! Farewell!”

And then he left. Omelda rose, shaking, and hobbled away through the house, her stiff legs propelling her in whatever direction came to hand. Edvard and Norman found her, then, took her away, and used her for an afternoon's amusement.

But that night, as Omelda lay awake and in pain, she heard a side door of the house open and close, heard a creak from the stable, heard a rattle of the postern gate and a clatter of hooves. Josef, the humanist, was gone.

Natil wanted to leave. Natil did not leave.

It was the old dance once again, the stately and tragic pavane that had so indissolubly wedded Elf and human since the first primate had descended from the trees with a precious spark of sentience: Natil stayed because Marjorie—consumptive, avaricious Marjorie—needed her. The old woman was dying, and though instinct prodded Natil in the direction of the front door and bold departure (or the back door and furtive escape), she remained at the bedside to play the music of transition: liminal strains that might comfort one who was about to pass a threshold, a hand of sound to hold that of the dying woman until, at the doorway of the breathless realm, Marjorie would pull hers away and continue on . . . alone.

But music, like all things elven and immortal, was failing; and though Natil might comfort, she could no longer heal. Marjorie remained Marjorie, and even with an unceasing flow of melody laving her as though with the waters of rebirth, not the slightest glimmer of compassion or peace awakened within her.

“Play that one again, Natil.” Even her request for a song of solace was tainted with her habitual peevishness. “I liked that. Play it just the same. Play it now.”

Straining with long-pent and human anger against its chains of elven tolerance, Natil's heart urged her to spit and then leave, but: “I cannot play it as I did, Madam Marjorie,” she said calmly, “for I made most of it up as I played it. Such is the way of my music.”

Marjorie did not fall into the same immediate and virulent cursing that would have characterized her response to, say, a servant who had brought a dinner she deemed insufficiently hot, or an additional blanket of less than first-rate quality. There was, as Natil had realized, a streak of fear in Jacob's dying wife, one that stilled her curses and moderated her demands when she was speaking with the strange harper.

Fear. Natil had seen it before. Marjorie, it seemed, was afraid of no one and nothing . . . save the slender musician-maid of her husband's household. But now Marjorie, after a long look at the door as though wondering whether anyone were listening (a needless precaution: even the obsessively inquisitive Francis had given up on the frightful hag) and a glance at Jacob's chair (empty for now: Jacob had retired to his bed in order to recuperate from a day's worth of abuse from his former love) turned to her, her face holding a combination of terror and defiance. “You can play it the same way if you want,” she whispered. “I know you can. Your kind can do anything.”

And at the tacit accusation, Natil felt something wither inside of her. Her kind. What did that mean anymore? “I do not understand.”

“You're one of . . . of
them
.” Marjorie's eyes, detecting weakness on the part of one she had deemed essentially invulnerable, were bright. “I know.”

Natil felt empty. The feeling had grown habitual, a constant reminder of loss and homelessness. “One of . . . them . . .”

“They call you Elves. Demons. I know. I recognized you the first day we met. I know from the way you play. The gypsies taught you to play like that, after you cheated them of their birthright.”

First an Elf, and then a thief. Indeed, the world had changed! But Natil found herself shrugging off both accusations. The Elves were gone, faded; and this Natil who sat by the bed of a dying consumptive seemed to be in no way connected with their immortal lives. Natil lived in cities. Natil was a servant. Natil slept. Like her human sisters, Natil fought off the grasping hands of amorous males, stuffed her face with bread and meat, dreamed dreams of delusion and hope.

Elves awakening? She might as well dream of marrying a king, or of slipping five hundred years forward in time so as to join the impossible myth that had taken shape in her careworn brain.

“I am afraid . . .” Natil fingered her harp. At times, she wondered that she was still able to play it. Perhaps all the songs were delusions also, as were all the memories—joys and sorrows both. Would she fade? Probably not: she would die hacking up blood and bits of lung just like this old woman before her. “I am afraid that you are wrong, Madam Marjorie. I am only a harper. As human as you.”

It was the truth. It hurt her that it was the truth, hurt her badly, and the pain in her heart obviously found in her voice enough of an egress to make even one such as Marjorie blink, stare, grimace with the expression of a woman who had been proven wrong by mere physical fact.

“As . . . as human as I . . .” Marjorie peered at the harper as though seeing her for the first time, blinked again. “And . . . you're right, aren't you? You're just a woman, aren't you?”

“It is so,” said Natil. “Just . . . a woman . . .”

Fear vanished, to be replaced by contempt. Marjorie lifted a peremptory finger. “Play something more. Don't give me any more excuses.”

“I am tired, Madam Marjorie,” said the harper, rising. “I would like to go to bed.”

Marjorie heaved herself up to protest, started coughing, threw up blood. The dark red stains spread out on the white linen sheets. “One more song,” she managed between gouts.

Natil weighed her harp in her hand, then shrugged and sat down. Helping and healing. The old dance still held her. She could not leave this terrible house. She could not even leave this bedroom.

With the strings blurring and doubling to her eyes, then, she played one more song, one that, years ago, she had heard sung by a simple village priest who in turn had learned it from an old monk: a simple bit of plainchant from the Cluniac rite for the dead. But voices and hearts and needs had modified it both in melody and in words, and over the years it had mutated from the second ecclesiastical mode to a scale that was essentially alien to the corpus of Christian rite, and from a plea addressed to a transcendent Deity to the cry of a child for its mother:

A porta inferi

erue, Domina,

animam meam.

Natil played the loss she felt, the bitterness of the tears she could not seem to shed for a life she could hardly remember. With simple statements of the music and even simpler harmonies, she allowed a fifteen-second melody to build into an hour's improvisation as Marjorie, satisfied at having gotten what she wanted, settled back on her pillows with her gnarled hands folded and a half smile on her face.

Her eyes were closed, and so immersed was Natil in her music and in her deeply private grief that she did not notice when the old woman stopped breathing. But when the harper came out of her trance, wiped the webs of music from her sight, and looked up, she discovered that Marjorie had died, passing quietly out of life with a last benediction from a once-immortal hand.

She touched Marjorie's cold fingers. Once, Elves had helped people to live. Now they helped people to die. But, she reminded herself, she was not an Elf. She was just a woman.

She stood up, fatigued, sorrowing. It was very late, and the house was dark and quiet. Jacob, doubtless, had collapsed into his bed, or over dinner, or at his desk, his body simply refusing to endure yet another nocturnal vigil over his wife's slowly eroding body. Perhaps there were watchmen at the gate, and perhaps an accountant or two still labored by candlelight over columns of Aldernacht figures—profit and loss, credits and debits—but, here in the house, Natil was alone with the dead, the dead she had helped to die.

She wondered for a moment about Wheat and Hadden. Was that the reason that the Elves would come back? To help the world die? Was that old derelict on the street the emblem of the entire planet? Varden's vision had contained much more than the hope and promise of future rebirth. He had seen things . . . terrible things. Wars that wrapped the globe in destruction, and weapons that could incinerate millions in a heartbeat, and forests and lakes dying, and the earth itself poisoned.

Was that the reason? Or was it indeed all (the doubt coming back) just delusion? Natil no longer knew. Perhaps she had been harping too long, blending myth with song for too many years.

Marjorie's fingers had been cold even in life. Now they were more than cold. The eagle feather in Natil's braid fluttered in a stray draft, and she recalled what the friends who had given it to her had said to the dying.

She bent low, kissed the still face. “Good hunting, Marjorie,” she whispered.

And then she picked up her harp, rose, left the room. Her tasks were done, her duties all ended. She could leave. She cared little about Aldernacht greed or the willingness of a bitter old man to besiege an entire town over a runaway serving girl. She was a harper. She could go anywhere. And if, as she had for so long deluded herself, she had once been an Elf, then where she would eventually goo—where she now so fervently prayed that she could still go—not even Jacob Aldernacht with his money and his ships and his private army could follow.