The walls were impressive. Forbidding and in good repair, defensive towers at intervals and a wall-walk all the way around for guards to patrol. The republic had never been taken by a foe. They boasted of that (he’d heard it already), but Pero judged that there was anxiety in that bravado. If Asharias or the Emperor Rodolfo or Seressa ever truly wanted to they could take this small republic.
Holding it, after making sense of the cost and distance of maintaining a siege, would be another matter. Which was—for all their celebrated diplomacy—probably where Dubrava’s true safety lay, as much as in these walls.
He saw the hangman’s gibbet outside the open gates at the Straden’s end. It had been entirely possible this morning that Danica Gradek’s body might swing there. There were two rotting bodies now. His mind turned from imagining it. He had seen a sufficiency of executions. Would they really hang a woman in Dubrava? He’d been told it had happened.
In a laneway running south he saw a girl in light green smile at him, then tilt her head in inquiry. He considered it. He was young, disturbed by dreams and desire, far from any of the women who cared for him even a little, those who had said their goodbyes at his farewell party.
He smiled at her but went the other way again along the wide street. He thought briefly of going to see those frescoes, but they weren’t really a temptation.
He felt a not-unpleasant strangeness, an awareness that he had begun a journey that could change everything in his life. At the very least it was a journey. He wasn’t binding books to pay rent while failing to find painting work and living in a crumbling, odorous room in the cheapest district of Seressa. He was moving now.
No one here knew him. What would they see, watching the Seressini artist Pero Villani walk by? A youngish man, slight, blue eyes, brown hair, long fingers. A thin beard that needed to be heavier—but what could you do about that? A pleasant face, surely? No harm in it. Some intelligence revealed? Perhaps. He thought: No one will know my name in any wine shop here. There was something exciting about that.
He went into the next one he came to. He took a table, ordered a flask of the island wine he now liked and a plate of grilled octopus. The proprietor brought him a dish of olives. There was no one to share any of it with but Pero realized, with surprise, that in this moment he would have to say he was happy.
He began to think for the first time about the details, the necessary craft of what he was journeying to do: about how he might paint the khalif. It really was true: there were artists who would kill for the chance to do this. Or a man might be killed on the way to doing it, or for saying the wrong thing, for saying anything in some parts of the palace compound in Asharias. It was reported that only mutes were allowed in the innermost quarters. He didn’t know if it was true. He was going to find out.
Pero wasn’t just a traveller on the roads of the world, not just another spy for Seressa, he was an artist, as his father had been, and he had a commission of great significance. He might not deserve it, but did every man receive what he deserved, for good or ill?
He sat in a Dubravae wine shop on a spring afternoon, enjoying his food, and he thought about portraits he had admired. He wondered what the khalif looked like. Tall, he had heard. Pale. A prominent nose.
You could be afraid, facing this sort of challenge. You might charge wildly towards it like a mad cavalryman into a line of pikemen. Or you could try to be mature, thoughtful, aware that Jad (and the Council of Twelve) had given you a gift—or the chance at a gift—and it needed your fierce attentiveness.
He paid the reckoning and went back into the street. Late afternoon now, the sun towards the sea and the clouds that way, the street and shaded arcades beginning to fill with people. Pero walked back west then up the steps, looking at the mountains beyond the walls and towers. Then he turned again to the Seressini hostel.
Leonora Miucci was there when he arrived.
Attentiveness to his art and journey and destination became considerably diminished.
Pero was self-aware enough to find it amusing, but only a little bit. He hesitated in the doorway of the reception room, looking at her.
She was dressed in black, a black hat covering pinned-up hair. She was sitting with Giorgio Frani, whose role was to advise the important citizens of his republic when they came through. She would be one of those, of course. Decisions involving money and travel would be being made concerning her. Perhaps they had already been finalized. Pero wouldn’t know, he had no reason to know.
Her mouth, he thought, shaped words beautifully when she spoke.
I am an idiot, he thought.
Frani was behaving like a high-ranking functionary, which he was, of course. He could be ingratiating or imperious at a moment’s notice, depending on who you were. He was being obsequious now. Pero didn’t like him. Liked him less when he saw how solicitously close the man had pulled his chair to that of the doctor’s young widow.
He tugged at his surcoat, smoothed his expression, walked into the room. He bowed.
“Signora Miucci,” he said.
She looked up at him. She smiled, then glanced down quickly, modestly. “Signore Villani! I had hoped to find you.”
She had hoped to find him?
Pero achieved a clearing of the throat. “I am at your service, signora.”
She said, “Would it impose too greatly upon your kindness to ask you to walk out with me? I have a matter upon which I would value your thoughts.”
He was fairly sure he managed a reply to this. Surely he must have, since they seemed, moments later, to be outside in the sunlight. That meant he’d said something appropriate, didn’t it?
On the street she spoke to her guard from the Djivo residence, instructed him to return home and say that Signore Villani would escort her back. Signore Villani nodded vigorous agreement.
“That appalling man!” said Leonora Miucci, as they went down the stone steps. “Frani. He needs to be doused in a fountain to get rid of the scent he wears. Faugh! Forgive me. It was overwhelming. I needed a reason to get away!”
“Ah,” said Pero sagely. Then, “Yes.” And then, “Ah. Scent. Yes. He wears much of scent.”
Much of scent? He desired to strike himself in the head.
“Doused in a fountain,” she repeated.
“Doused!” he agreed happily. They reached the Straden. He saw a fountain, couldn’t think of a witticism.
She smiled at him. “Have you been inside the sanctuary by the palace yet?”
“No,” he lied.
“Shall we visit it? I would like to pray—for Jacopo, and in thanks for Danica’s life. And Marin Djivo’s. And my own, I suppose.”
“I can pray for all of those things,” Pero said, perhaps a shade too enthusiastically. She smiled again, lips together, eyes downcast.
There were more people inside the sanctuary this time. A rustle of prayers being spoken, men and women talking, almost certainly about what had happened this morning across the square. A balding cleric was arranging candles on either side of the altar for the evening service. A boy came running towards him from a side door, carrying an armful of white candles. He slowed at a glance from the cleric, walked the rest of the way.
They signed the disk, found a place to kneel beside each other, a little removed from others. Leonora Miucci wore no perfume (her husband had just died!) but Pero was painfully aware of a scent to her hair and a too-vivid presence. He felt dizzied and happy, both.
She finished her prayers, opened her eyes, remained kneeling by him. “You heard what happened this morning?”
“Some of it,” he said.
She told him the story. But people were not to learn, she said, that the Orsat girl was the reason her brother had been coming for Marin Djivo.
“I am trusting you,” she said. “And perhaps you can help me. I would like to visit the girl.”
“
Why?” Pero asked, surprised.
She glanced at him, not smiling this time. “Because I doubt visitors will be allowed. She’ll be alone. But her family may have difficulty saying no to me.”
Pero thought about it. He shook his head. “If she is with child and has been sent away to conceal it, her family will have no trouble declining visitors, signora. Especially strangers from Seressa.”
She sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
“I am sorry.”
She shook her head. “No. I need truths told to me.”
“I will do that,” said Pero. He restrained himself from adding, always. But then, after a moment, he said, “I did lie earlier, signora. I was here today. But since you wanted to see it, I . . .”
She laughed softly. Someone glanced over at them. She bit her lip, lowered her head decorously. She murmured, “A gentle lie then, Signore Villani.”
“I am permitted those?”
She didn’t answer.
They rose and walked out. They turned, without speaking, towards the harbour. He badly wanted her to take his arm but she did not. The crowd was behind them, walking the other way from the Rector’s Square, along the busy Straden as the sun began to set. See and be seen, the evening promenade on a day when there was so much to talk about.
The two of them went down to the stone dock and then along it towards the Blessed Ingacia, rocking by its pier, tied down with thick ropes, sails lowered, empty.
They stood in silence. They were alone.
Pero cleared his throat again. He said, “Look how the sunset lights those clouds. They are exactly where we need them to be for that effect.”
She looked for a long time. She said, “Did you ever think that ‘sunset’ is an inadequate word for how much beauty it can hold?”
And with that, with all of this—her presence, the evening’s graceful light, the salt in the breeze, the sea and the ships and the seabirds, the world given to them—it became too much more than his capacity for silence.
“I love you,” Pero Villani said. “I am sorry,” he said. “I will never embarrass or afflict you. You have my oath, on my parents’ graves.”
She flushed immediately, he saw. Looked at him then quickly away at the reddened clouds in the west and the beautifully darkening sky.
His heart was thudding, his mouth was dry.
She said, “You cannot love me.”
“I understand!” Pero exclaimed. His voice was odd, scratchy. “I mean only to tell you so that you know. Not to expect—”
“No. You cannot love me, signore. You do not know me at all.”
The hammer of one’s heart.
He said, “We can know someone for years and never nearly love them, and know another for days and be theirs for life. I am . . . that is what I am with you.”
She looked at him again. He saw tears.
He tried again. He said, “Signora, please, this is not to be a burden for you. I understand your terrible loss. I understand how presumptuous my words are. But please believe my respect for you. I only—”
“No,” she said again. “No . . . you cannot understand.”
The breeze off the water lifted and blew back strands of her hair under the black cloth hat she wore in mourning.
Pero Villani thought: These are the most important words I will ever speak.
He said, “I know there is a story here. I . . . signora, you are obviously from a noble family. You told us as much. And . . . forgive me, my lady, such women do not wed physicians from northern towns, to end up in Seressa. Or Dubrava.”
She had been flushed before, now she became very pale. White-faced, in fact. She stared at him in horror.
I have ruined my life, Pero thought.
“Is it so obvious?” she asked. Whispered it. She wiped at tears on her cheek. He wanted to do that for her.
He shook his head. “No! I have been . . . I have thought much about you, signora. I believe the Council of Twelve may have . . . that they may be a part of your life now?”
She was crying, soundlessly.
“I have no life,” she said.
He was remembering her walk to the railing of the Blessed Ingacia. He had known—she had been so fierce, so purposeful—that she meant to go over the side into the sea.
Fierce, he thought. One of the things she was.
“My lady, there are moments when we can believe that,” he said. “Then Jad, or fortune, or our own decisions can change everything.”
She looked up at him. A small, elegant woman in the black of mourning. He felt like apologizing again—for presuming to speak any words at all. He kept silent, waiting.
She wiped at her cheeks again. Behind her, far down, three children appeared on the dock. They glanced at the two of them, and Pero imagined the annoyed, disdainful look children could reserve for adults in a place where they were used to playing. He watched them walk then run the other way, farther along. Another ship was moored down there, its cargo had been unloaded, a few mariners were dealing with the last stages of tying the sails. The sun slipped behind the lowest line of clouds. It was chillier now.
Leonora Miucci took his arm.
“Come,” she said.
They didn’t go far. She walked him only to an empty wine barrel sitting against the stone breakwater. She let go of his arm, turned, and neatly pushed herself up on it. Pero had an incongruous memory of his blind friend by the bridge in Seressa, sitting in just this way.
Or, not quite this way.
“I have never been married,” she said calmly. “My name is Leonora Valeri. I was sent to the Daughters of Jad outside Seressa to bear a child. The father was murdered by my family. They took the child from me when it was born. I have no idea where it is. The Council of Twelve offered me a way out of that terrible place if I would spy for them, pretending to be wed, since doctors must have a wife to serve here. I agreed. I agreed, Signore Villani. And now I am lost, I have no honest position, no proper life. But I will not go back to that retreat or be an instrument for the council somewhere else, as I expect they will now demand. You cannot even respect me, Signore Villani, let alone . . . anything else.”
—
“I HAVE NEVER BEEN MARRIED,” she heard herself saying, by the water, not far from the boat that had brought them here. And then she said more. She told him so much. And there was such a strange feeling of relief, release, to not be lying to this man. Even if it meant he would walk away from her now, she thought.
She did not believe he would become hard, an enemy, any kind of predator, but he would surely turn and go—so that he, a kind person, might step free of the darkness she seemed to carry with her.
Both the men who had cared for her had died, after all.
She looked at Villani: his manner seemed younger than his years. His eyes were blue and his fingers beautiful. This was an artist, she reminded herself, on his own long journey now. He would do best to walk her home then set about pursuing his fortune and fate.
She lifted her chin defiantly. Hold to pride, she told herself. She felt cold, not just the breeze, but also . . . altered by what she’d said. Freed by truth.
Pero Villani said, gravely, “Now I see why the Orsat girl disturbs you, signora.”
He had not yet turned away. His long brown hair was moving in the wind off the water. She nodded, not trusting herself to reply.
He said, “Perhaps we will find a way to visit with her. Let me think on that.”
We?
“Have you even heard what I said?” Leonora demanded.
“All of it,” Pero Villani replied. He smiled. Women will have liked that smile, she thought. “I will still grieve for Doctor Miucci, but I am happy you are not his widow.”
She shook her head. Men could be, they often were, so innocent.
“To the world I am. I mu
st be. Seressa is humiliated if anything else is believed. I am bound to the Council of Twelve. They control my life. I have to go across to that isle tomorrow, to the retreat. There is a woman there to whom their spies in Dubrava report.”
She could see Sinan Isle from where they were, right in the entrance to the harbour. Gjadina, the larger one, was out of sight to the north.
He smiled again. “I know about her,” he said. “I have an invitation as well. More a command, I suppose.”
“You do?”
He looked at her. “Do you think Seressa would send a man to Asharias, to stand in the presence of the grand khalif, and not give him duties beyond painting?”
“That is . . . that is dangerous,” she said, after a moment.
He nodded. “They did tell me I could decline.”
“And you didn’t.”
“I have very little at home.” He thought a moment. “But . . . as to tomorrow. No one here knows the woman on that isle is Seressini. How will she explain your coming to her . . . ?”
Leonora made a face. “The Daughters of Jad extend care and compassion to all women who are alone. They wish to console me, offer spiritual guidance while I am here.”
“Indeed,” he said, drily.
“Yes. In the eyes of the world I am the grieving widow of a cruelly slain doctor. A good man, I will add. He was kind. He told me he wanted us to be truly wed.”
“And you said?”
He had been looking at the isle, now he turned to her. His manner was thoughtful. He had seemed nervous before. He didn’t now. As if truths told had calmed him.
“I told Jacopo Miucci I could not marry without my father’s consent and he would never give it. Nor would I burden any man with my shame.”
“And if a man were to say it is no burden but an honour to have you at his side?”
“I would say he was foolish and childlike. Especially if he was on his way to Asharias.”
His face fell.
She said, “You cannot care for me that way, Signore Villani. I have trusted you, though. And I will be grateful to have you as a friend while you are here. I only have the one.”