A Shadow All of Light

  He gave me his mildest and most placid gaze. “Why, I shall do neither. Our trade is honorable. I followed our agreement to the letter. I went with the baron throughout his house, showing him every trap, blind end, misstep, and pitfall that you two set out. I also gave him your plan showing all the dangers so that he could move into the rooms with a peaceful mind. When I had done these things, our agreement was completed. He paid over some coin and went to his other domicile to gather some goods he thought he would need. He was to return to the château just before dark and hide himself in one of those close rooms, protecting his precious candle ends.”

  “So there he will reside in safety with his precious lights about him, living a secluded life until old age.”

  “You have already reasoned that the girl who accompanies Veuglio, the one miscalled Sibylla, is one of the patients to whom he ministers for disorder of the mind and spirit. You know too that the shadow of the true, deceased Sibylla has been attached to this Dorminia and that it has learned the paths of the maze. Perhaps you had not thought that part of the baron’s shadow still clings to Sibylla’s, just as it did at the time of the murder. But if you had thought of that, you would know that Sibylla and Veuglio would be in communication and know every step that the baron now takes in his wanderings through his halls and passages. They share pieces of his single shadow, and what one part of it knows, so does the whole.”

  “That will be of small comfort to Veuglio,” I complained. “Merely to know when and where the baron steps is no great thing.”

  “Yet he may receive some satisfaction from his missteps. He may rejoice at the final one.”

  “I do not—”

  “The pair of you devised an intricate and ingenious maze,” Astolfo said, “but there is no plan so ingenious it may not be improved upon. After our agreement with the baron was concluded and fulfilled to the last detail, I made a last visit to the château and effected a few beneficial changes to your arrangement. Here is a copy of the altered chart. The baron was supposed to have it already in hand, but in a moment of forgetfulness I neglected to pass it on.”

  “You never forget.”

  “In fact, he is in need of his new chart at this very hour as he makes his way through the maze. You two must take the cart and hurry to the château to deliver it. The time is near. Speediness is urgent.”

  “If ’tis so urgent, why do we not mount and ride?” Mutano asked.

  “It may be that you will require the roll of canvas already loaded into the cart,” he said. “The cart is slow, but it is best to be prepared for eventualities. I pray, though, that you do not arrive too late.”

  I studied the new plan of the maze. At first I could see no change. Then I passed it to Mutano.

  He looked—and chuckled. “The true and utmost pattern of inventive simplicity.” His every sentence had become an oration.

  Astolfo reached down two mugs and filled them and we each accepted. “Better fortify yourselves before you go,” he said. Then he took up the ruined bird and handed it to Mutano. “And on your way, please give this capon a decent burial in the herb garden.”

  * * *

  We were weary of making again and again the journey to the château and back to the villa and since this was to be the end of it, we should have been glad. But we fell silent and spoke no more that night. Mutano took the reins and Mignonette, our little gray donkey, pulled our cart through the streets and out of the city. Only a few lights shone in the houses and taverns. Several of them winked out as the hours grew late.

  The moon seemed to take up half the sky and once we were in the open fields it laid upon all the land a cool sheet of powdery silver. The double track of our road went forward like two furrows in a linen counterpane and Mignonette’s hoofbeats were muffled, solemn as a dirge drum. At the end of the road sat the baron’s house like a great sculpture cut from a salt block. It appeared to float above the ground in this whitest light and it was as silent as the moon that stood above it.

  We tethered Mignonette outside and entered the silence of the courtyard. The battlements cast a black shadow here and in the middle of it were the shapes of two cats, shoulder to shoulder upon a parapet. We looked up to see them stark against the moon, Sunbolt and Asilia, watching us.

  We paused, then went on into the arcade. Mutano bore a roll of coarse canvas across his neck. He wore a short cloak with a tall collar to protect his skin. I carried a lantern and the new chart of the maze Astolfo had entrusted to me. At the end of the arcade a stair led to the gallery above. Here I lit the lantern and held it up this way and that to make certain the light was strong enough to show where lay and leaned and arched and bent the shadows we had placed.

  Then, onward.

  I kept step with the directions on the map, though we were familiar with this first part of the maze. We followed along a corridor, then turned down one where the shadows crowded more thickly. At one point the lantern revealed a flight of stairs leading upward and I caught Mutano by the wrist. He looked at me. We consulted our diagram.

  Our new chart was genuine. The space was empty. There were no ascending stairs, as indicated in the former map, but only a stepped series of shadows illusory over an abyss dim and deep and, at bottom, black as the sky behind the midnight.

  Mutano nodded and we skirted the emptiness. A few paces brought us to a flight of stairs that we ascertained was true and solid.

  Down we went. I held the chart to our light and we stepped carefully, tentatively.

  On the stones we found the baron.

  I had never seen the man before and now I never would. What lay there was no man. Most bones were smashed by his fall. His brains were dashed out, his face a wet and scarlet rag. His broken shadow lay beside him, an appalling mockery of his figure. There was a slip of paper in his hand, a maze-chart sopped with gore, and the remains of a lantern scattered around it. Three candle stubs lay on the flagstones in a pool of blood.

  Mutano produced a small Sunderer and cut the ruined shadow from the corpse and secreted it in his cloak. He gave me a meaningful glance and then spread the canvas and we scooped the body onto it as cleanly as we could and rolled it over and tied it. I helped Mutano hoist it onto his shoulders and we started back. Mutano said nothing, but I knew he was pleased that the baron had been a man slight of figure.

  I folded the chart and slid it into my sleeve. We did not need it. We knew our way from here.

  We came out again into the great wash of silver light in the courtyard and breathed the nighttime gratefully. We brought our burden to the cart and I helped Mutano drop it in. Then, just as we were ready to mount the cart, those cats Asilia and Sunbolt began to sing a pure and intricate aria that climbed like a trellis of white roses into the moon and all the sky around. It was a lament, yet it held a note of happiness too, and I took pleasure in fancying that Veuglio and Sibylla might hear it above them in the nighttime wherever they were.

  He would be a different person now, the wise and patient Veuglio. He never had possessed a vengeful spirit, however angry he had become in the most painful hours. But now vengeance had been done and the episode that had so darkened his soul had been resolved by the artful hand of Astolfo. Now the blind sage would walk with his soul at peace, a figure of enlightened existence, a person above the level of the mass of personages.

  PART THREE

  A Feast of Shadows

  VIII

  Shadow of the Past

  The Feast of the Jester had come round again and was close upon us. It was a festival I disliked most thoroughly. Enough time had passed that Mutano had stopped deriding me, but I never forgot my earlier embarrassment and humiliation. During the Jester Feast, many of the citizenry dress in harlequin costume, and I was always reminded of the ridiculous outfit I had been duped into wearing when we had been involved with the jewel of the Countess Triana. That habiliment of silly ribbons and gaudy patchwork was one of the worst of the trials I had to endure during my apprenticeship to Astolfo. The return of t
he Feast brought the episode painfully to mind.

  The parks and plazas and fairgrounds and avenues held throngs of citizens in Jester guise, making themselves ready for the riotous festivities of the celebration. There were other costumes and roles in plenty. The gracefully mournful clown Petralchio was a popular figure, as were the personae of Capitano Trionfo, that overly bemedaled miles gloriosus, and the females, Columbina, the large-eyed, flirtatious wife of the Captain, and Audacia, the gamine who lived by her wits in the company of spies, smugglers, dicers, and coin-clippers.

  But the guise of Bennio was the favorite of everyone, from small boys to those tubby merchants who bulged out of the traditional harlequin costumes like porridges overflowing boiling pots. Not many were well suited for the role. Bennio was a legend from the earliest times of Tardocco, almost as established a symbol of the city as the harbor’s Mardrake. He had been a surly, misshapen little man who conceived it his duty to chasten the excessively virtuous, robed in their pietistic airs, and to chastise the imperious wealthy, most of whom had amassed their fortunes by unscrupulous methods. He was despised by the haughty few and beloved by the unstudious many. His Feast had been initiated immediately upon his disappearance from the world. No one had recorded witness of his death and his final fate remained mysterious. Some there were who maintained that he was, in some unplumbable fashion, immortal and that someday, while the Feast was being celebrated, he would reappear.

  “Why is such a crabby, cross-grained, deformed figure so revered?” I once had asked.

  “He is the obverse face of the aspect we like to present as our true selves,” Astolfo had replied. “He is the truth that unmasks the fine and noble countenance that flatters us when we peer into our mirrors. His is the voice that sounds in our ears at midnight, saying, This misdeed is your own; this was the crime you committed; your unrevenged wickedness is not forgot.”

  “He is a corrective?”

  “A tonic—and a bracing one. You see with what pleasure the people celebrate his Feast.”

  “That is so,” I said.

  And now for the third time in twelve days, a seasonal Bennio was visiting our manse. This time Mutano and I were invited to confer with Astolfo and the Jester. The first two times they had met in private and the maestro had divulged nothing of the substance of their conversations.

  He introduced him, saying, “You recognize our guest, Bennio the Jester?”

  I nodded, and Mutano said, “And many another Bennio do I see all about in recent days.”

  “Our Bennio here is a member of the Society of Jesters and he comes to seek our assistance during the impending festival.”

  The Jester said, “I am also a member of the Civic Council and on their behalf, as well as that of the Jester Society, I do request your aid. We shall be grateful.”

  “Doth some fraction of this gratitude take the shape of coin?” Mutano asked. “My purse is as slender as a frostbitten pizzle.”

  I knew that Mutano had expended generously of late. He had so warmly exercised his newly regained voice in amatory pursuits that his funds had been exhausted before his desires were sated.

  “We have arranged with Maestro Astolfo,” the Jester replied.

  He was the mildest version of a Bennio one might conceive. His voice was cultivated and not raucous, his manner polite, his gaze searching rather than mocking. His physique fitted well to the Bennio character, for his back was curled like a viol-head, his shanks were spavined, and his calves were crooked. But no scurrilous rhymes had he salted into his discourse and no fleering expression crossed his unassuming and ordinary countenance. During the festival, he would be constrained to wear a heavy mask with the wonted shaggy eyebrows, the ugly, painted grin, the curvature of red goatee that jutted toward the sharply hooked, enormous nose. Only with such a mask could he be credited as a Jester.

  I took the fellow to be in daily life a man of affairs, a broker of grains, perhaps, or a skilled keeper of accompts. He must make a singularly modest clown, and I wondered how many of the other Jesters so prominent in our public spaces led lives equally unnoteworthy.

  Astolfo spoke to him. “Mutano is anxious about payment just now,” he said. “There is a lass with flaxen hair in Cobblers’ Lane who is accomplished with the harp. She flatters him that he can sing.”

  Mutano shook his head glumly. There were no secrets from Astolfo.

  “I accept your word that he is trustworthy,” the Bennio said.

  “I am warrant for him and for Falco.” Astolfo indicated me with a nod. “And, come to that, your commission seems none so difficult. We are to construct the ritual coffin of the traditional materials and to the traditional specifications and accompany it in the general procession to the Tumulus. There we are to aid in interring it in the Jester’s Boneyard. You are to be chief Ministrant at the burial, seeing that the likeness of the Jester in its coffin is settled into the earth and heaped over with clay and sod.”

  “Everything must be performed punctiliously,” the Bennio said. “It is extremely important that the rituals are carried out according to custom. If there is a misstep or a gesture out of order, the consequences are unforeseeable but destructive.”

  “Why so?” Mutano asked. “Is it not so much mummery-flummery enacted to entertain crowds of gapers and japers? The Feast of the Jester is a time of confusion, of license and mockery, of swillage and careless tuppery. Why is this burial of an empty coffin so important?”

  The Bennio looked at him with mild surprise. “But the coffin is not empty,” he said.

  “I have heard,” I said, “that it contains only an effigy of the Jester, together with a specimen of the small stick-puppets called Dirty Benninos.”

  “Those are included in the coffin,” he said. “I shall have them delivered to you. But the coffin also contains a shadow to be buried with the figures.”

  “Whose shadow?” I asked.

  His tone was resigned. “In this case, mine own.”

  * * *

  Astolfo explained.

  We were occupying our accustomed seats in the small library, sipping at a voluptuous dark wine cool in an earthenware jug. A pleasing draught it was, but not strong enough to divert us from our thoughts.

  “There is of course a Society of Jesters,” he said, “and they take it upon themselves to perpetuate the Feast and preserve the memory of their great original. He was the first, they say, to make his vocation as a clown an accepted profession. Some claim he was the first of all Jesters, but that notion beggars credence. It is written that his gibes and mimes and epigrams and satires served to restrain the province councilors and the upper ranks of the military from grasping overmuch power and from abusing what they had already obtained. He kept watch upon their plots and stratagems and underhand processes. He gained the eyes and ears and then the hearts o’ th’ people and persuaded them to look with skeptical gaze upon all the doings of the leaders. He was the watchdog and the tocsin that made the citizens alert to—”

  Mutano interrupted. “All this I have heard since the time I was an urchin with mine own Dirty Bennino clutched to my chest. I sang the song that all did sing:

  ‘Crambo and crooked Bennio goes,

  But what the Jester knows, he knows.’

  And I would laugh the snarling laugh that followed the rhyme.”

  He did so and I judged from his new-found voice that Mutano could fill the Jester role passably well.

  “You remember clearly,” Astolfo said. “I suspect that Falco too could spell out a familiar Jester’s rhyme or two. Yet perhaps, in the interest of mercy, he will forbear.”

  I kept silent even though a couplet bubbled unwelcome into my brain: This foolish world you hold so dear, Bennio bids to kiss his rear. Then others crowded into my head, and I gazed out the open window into the late summer garden to drive them away. They were like those simple, repetitive tunes of childhood that burrow into the mind and buzz and chirp and will not silence.

  “Still, it is all only ce
remonious sham,” Mutano said.

  “Sham, flummery, vanity—if so, that matters not. It is custom and, as the ancient Plinius Secundus hath written, custom rules all behavior. A sentiment the larger populace clings to is that if we fail to revere and celebrate our Jester, we shall become always more susceptible to the deceptions and treacheries of those who hold authority over us. It would be like losing a certain power of judgment that helps to make us wary as citizens. And that in turn would make the city more susceptible to foreign attack.”

  “This description lays large responsibility upon a cap-and-bells, a curlicue spine, and some trite, scabrous rhymes,” I said.

  Astolfo blinked at me and asked, “Is my description of the importance of Bennio inaccurate?”

  I considered. “It is accurate in the main.”

  “Then let us proceed, looking upon our task as our duty, as well as being to our profit. The Jester Society may gap its coffers for us, if we can fulfill its commission.”

  “You have told this Bennio that the task seems none so difficult. He must have laid down further conditions or warned you of some hindrances,” I said.

  “He and a few of his trusted colleagues believe that their Society is being undermined by foes of the Jesters or adulterated by the apostasy of some of its present members. He would enlist us, on behalf of his group of select associates, to discover who these impostors are and what their purposes might be. To be successful, we must do so before the ceremony at the Tumulus takes place. That is but a fairly short time from now.”

  “Why must this time limit be in place?” I asked.

  “The Bennio who is our client had been chosen by lot, as is the custom, to be the Ministrant at the burial ceremony. It is not known to the city at large that the shadow of the Ministrant is taken from him beforehand and laid in the coffin alongside the two other likenesses. It is the duty of the Ministrant to sacrifice his shadow for the general welfare.”