A Shadow All of Light

  The performance was already well in progress when I arrived and I was pleased to see that my conjecture about the mechanics proved correct. There was a large Bennio-puppet mounted behind the scrim in the background and it imitated exactly the motions of the black-clad Bennio onstage, so that the two entities appeared as a single large one. The actor playing this role was not Cocorico; he lacked the mocking savagery of movement that made the Mardrake not only dangerous as a predator but lickerish as an aggressor. He had not the favored Jester’s finesse. Cocorico himself was probably hidden among the spectators, taking note how to improve the performance.

  Then, as the music became more excited, the monstrous appendages—tentacles with toothy maws, eyestalks, and a massive outsized pintle—grew from the beast like plants bursting suddenly from the earth. I could not see how this illusion was arranged; the footlights kept the mechanical operation in dark shadow. It was neatly done and elicited squeals and squeaks from the children scattered in the crowd. A few of the nursemaids giggled and blushed.

  I began to move closer to the stage for a better vantage when my left elbow was taken in hand and a gruff voice said in my ear, “Step this way, Master Falco.” I felt the point of a blade in a right-side rib.

  I could sense two of them, at least, so I followed the order without protest, allowing the hand to pull me along into the edge of the bordering grove.

  “I fear you are to have a rude awakening,” the voice said. I recognized the rural, southern-province accent and the voice too seemed very familiar, though distorted by the Jester-mask.

  “Who—”

  Then a heavy piece of the purple sky fell hard upon my head and I unwittingly buried my face in the grass.

  * * *

  As the voice had promised, my awakening was rude. Someone dashed a dollop of stinking liquid into my face and, as the world began to emerge from the darkness of my brain, I was grasped by the scruff of my neck, lugged across a small, dim room, and dropped into a chair made of iron slats. My mask was torn from my face.

  Seated across from me in an oaken chair with a thin leather cushion was a loutish, large man with coarse features, a nose broken in long time past, enormous hands that gripped the chair arms, and stiff blond hair unkempt. His voice sounded like the rattle of dried peas in a gourd. “Papa is dead,” he said.

  I failed to comprehend. “Papa?”

  “Yours,” he said, “and mine. Our father is dead.… For forty days and nights.”

  “Nights?”

  “I count the nights because I laid awake thinking.”

  “Thinking?”

  “You never credited I could, did you? Thought I was a slow-wit or un-wit. But I found you out, and didn’t take long about it.”

  “Osbro?”

  “I am your brother Osbronius, the one you struck down from behind with a spade as we were digging turnips. It felt good to thwack you down there in the park. Felt the best in a long time. I never forgot, just waiting out the time. I knew the hour would come and ho-ho it did. I could have struck you down dead.”

  “Why didn’t you? You must be angry enough to do so.” I rubbed my face, trying to wipe away some of that foul liquid.

  “We have plans for you. No good if you’re dead.”

  “We?”

  He gestured and I turned my head, painfully, to gaze upon two others in Jester motley, equally as large and menacing as my brother. These would be his associates who had waylaid me. Looking at them, I decided that this had not been their first experience in mayhem.

  “Where are we?”

  “Just where I want us to be.”

  “How did you bring me here?”

  “What do you care?”

  I did not care. My head was in such hurt that I babbled without purpose. Here he sat before me, as big and rough as a stunted tree, yet I could not grasp the fact. He had come from a past time that existed only as a dull memory and from a place that was now as a foreign country to me.

  “Our father, how did he die?”

  “You don’t care about that either.”

  “I would like to know.”

  “He wore out, is what I guess. The years kept piling on him till all he could do was tell me to do this chore and that one. About used him up, I guess. Died during the night. I found him in the morning and went to the magistrate. Then I went back to the house and got all the silver and copper I could locate and came the road to ’Docco. It had been in my mind for a long time to search you out, Todo.”

  “No one calls me Todo anymore.”

  “Falco—that’s what you go by. I know that. Thirty-two days I been watching you and asking. I know a lot. And you can call yourself King of the Islands, but you’re still Todo who walked away and left me to look after the old man and plod the furrow and boil the cabbages. Back in Caderia we heard a little about you and the fortune you were piling up by stealing shadows. I made my vow: Todo won’t enjoy that wealth forever. Part of it is mine. A big part. Maybe all.”

  He fell silent and breathed heavily. It was a long speech and he must have composed it again and again in his head. I was surprised he had not decorated it with spurious poetry and muddled philosophy, as he used to do.

  “I have no wealth,” I said. “I am only a household servant.”

  He raised his finger. The large Jester nearest my iron chair stepped over and slapped me smartly across my eyes.

  “We know what you are and where you live and what you do and where you go. When you lie, you are only asking me to break your bones. I don’t mind doing that.”

  My eyes had teared and I wiped my face again. My ears rang, but it seemed to me I heard the steady wash of tide below the floor. Smells of all sorts abounded—salt fish, tar, raw hemp, spices, all mingled with sandalwood, moldy lumber, and canvas. This little room served, or had served, as a counting room. We were in the rear of a warehouse on the harbor.

  “Broken bones have yet to make me rich,” I said. “If you have observed me for a time, you will know that.”

  “You deal in shadows with your master. There is profits in these shadows. You will share some of these profits.”

  “With you—and how many others?” I asked.

  “The others is no concern of yours.”

  Osbro’s manner of speaking suggested that he did not refer to the hirelings with us now. Persons of higher station and of broader connection were involved. Astolfo had suspected that a strategy was in play to disrupt the Feast of the Jester as a beginning and from that point to sow disorder throughout the city, making it vulnerable to threat. From what quarter and from whom the threat issued he did not know.

  “You demand some share of the profit of Maestro Astolfo’s enterprise,” I said. “Are you proposing to enter into a partnership? If you have services or intelligence to offer, he may well consider the notion; he welcomes new opportunities for trade. But you will have to negotiate with him, and he is accustomed to tight bargaining.”

  “You are our advantage,” Osbro said. He grinned. “I think he will come to terms if we send you to him piece by piece.”

  “You believe he holds me in such fond regard? He is not soft of heart.”

  “If he was to receive one of your hands, or only an ear, his heart might soften.”

  “A hand or ear might be got anywhere,” I said. “Mine are not so peculiar that he would recognize them. He would not believe you have me in your keeping. If I wrote a message and signed it in a certain particular way, he would understand our situation and might be willing to meet with you. He would of course demand certain conditions.”

  “In your message you would put some cypher to give us away.”

  “I will give you my assurance that I would not.”

  “Guido,” Osbro said, and raised his finger and again the big one stepped up and boxed my ear most heartily.

  “What can I give away?” I cried. “I do not know your associates or what they desire. I do not even know where I am. Come to that, I do not even know where the maes
tro is at this hour.”

  “How then would you send him a message?” Osbro asked.

  I had the impression that he hoped my response would be sufficiently inadequate that I must be pummeled again. “My colleague would deliver it,” I said. “He would await the maestro at our villa and acquaint him with the situation. A reply would return shortly.”

  “This man—‘colleague,’ you call him. Where is he?”

  “You will find him at the Nuovoponte, dressed in the garb of a minor tradesman. He is a large—”

  “Your Mutano is not so large that he may not be taken down,” Osbro said. He observed my expression. “Did I not tell you that we kept watch? We know your ways. We know who Mutano is.” His smile was a little too complacent, methought.

  “Why did you not also follow the maestro? Since he is the one useful to your purpose, you could have spared me blows.”

  “Why should I spare you? I am of mind that we have but started. We would have the three of you here together now, only Gracchio lost track of the old man.” He gave the silent one an unfriendly glance.

  “I am at a loss,” I said. “If you desired to confer with the three of us, you had only to come to the manse and knock at the gate. We are agreeable to trade and to new custom.”

  “We do not know the inner defenses of the house, only that it is well guarded. We like to maintain the ruling hand.”

  “There may be easier ways to pursue your desires. What is it that you aim at?”

  He nodded at the one called Gracchio, and as he approached I saw that he intended to kick my knee. I moved it slightly so that his toe struck a good part of the iron slat on which I sat. He did not cry out, and the Bennio mask hid his expression.

  “A great lot of questions you ask,” Osbro said. “These are things you do not need to know.”

  Well, I would have to know, if he was going to obtain answers. But his retort implied that he himself did not know what was to be divulged. Astolfo’s conjecture was beginning to be borne out. Some broad, dark strategy of large consequence was under way. My brother was connected to it, but he did not understand how he was being used. He was engaged in a game too complex for a digger of turnips.

  “Bring writing materials,” I said. “I will write out the message and you may con it over to see if I have betrayed you. You can examine the private sign by which he will know me.”

  Osbro pondered. His brow wrinkled and his gaze unfixed. At last he said, “We have nothing to write with.”

  “There is a tottery old desk there in the corner,” I said. “Some clerk must have cleared the bills of lading in this room. Perhaps some implements remain.”

  Guido and Gracchio walked over to the dusty desk and rummaged about. The top was cluttered with detritus: ends of rope, broken locks, broken glass, a black boot with the heel missing. The high top of the desk was furnished with two ranks of small compartments, one of which yielded a clutch of frazzled quills. From a side drawer Gracchio produced a stone inkwell encrusted with dried ink. He raised his mask and spat into the stone to dampen the ink. They brought these implements to Osbro and he waved them toward me.

  “Paper?” I said. Guido must have disapproved my pronunciation of the word. He delivered my forehead a straight blow with the heel of his palm.

  Gracchio found a length of rotten canvas on the floor. He held it up and tore off a square.

  “I will try,” I said, “but with these materials the words will be difficult to make out.”

  “Write,” Osbro said.

  I picked up a grainy board end that lay on the floor by my chair, spread the canvas out, and dipped the nearly useless pen. As I wrote, I spoke aloud: “Maestro Astolfo. I am held by some who threaten my life. They demand to confer with you and will do you no harm. Follow the bearer of this message. You will recall our secret sign.” With exaggerated motion, I made a series of intricate loops.

  Guido passed the scribbling to Osbro. He looked at me for a long moment, then accepted the writing and began to study. He held it up and pointed. “This is the sign between you?” I assented, and he nodded gravely.

  Here was a crucial point. I had taken no pains to make the words fully legible and the crude canvas blurred their contours, but Astolfo ought to be able to make them out. The complot you feared is under way. Guard yourself. Prepare. The secret sign was a meaningless scrawl.

  If Osbro could read, I was in for a long and bloody time of it.

  He raised his head from his examination. “You say your Mutano is at the Nuovoponte?”

  “Dressed as an ordinary tradesman,” I said. “He is half a head taller than me—”

  “We know what he looks like,” said Osbro. “And these two will meet him and force him to take them to your master and bring both of them back here and we’ll settle up on our ground and on our terms. No lackeys sneaking around secret passages to knife us. That’s why you wanted us to go to your big house. In this place I will set the rules.”

  “You mean to have all advantage,” I said.

  “Yes I do, yes.” He turned to the duo of Jesters and gave orders.

  When they left on this errand, he leaned back in his seat and regarded me anew. “You don’t look like I thought you would.”

  “You’ve been watching me. My appearance cannot surprise you.”

  “I mean, when I first saw you. Different then.”

  “I must say that I admire your espial,” I said. “We are a wary crew. If someone is keeping watch, we always know. Many there are who thirst after the maestro’s secrets.”

  “You still think me witless. It is not so hard to spy.”

  “I do not call you witless. Perhaps I have too much vaunted my own wit. Perhaps my brain is none so keen as I believed.”

  We fell silent for a long space, each feeling the strangeness of meeting after so long a time.

  “Do you remember our mother?” I asked.

  He would not answer. I listened to the tide, trying to picture where the piers stood that it washed against. I tallied smells in my head; there was one odor unusual but almost familiar. I tried to recall and then Sandalwood, I thought. Where had I met it before?

  At last he spoke. “I blame the old man. Like she was a donkey, how he treated her. Working her like a donkey. Beating and cursing. She broke down early, but I remember her quiet and kind. She wept much.”

  “Yes. I saw you weeping once along with her.”

  “Well, I didn’t cry when the old man died. Glad he’s gone. I could have made things easier for him in the last times, but I didn’t.”

  “He beat you too.”

  He looked at the wall behind me. “Sometimes.”

  “Often.”

  “Yes. But there came a time he had to stop, if he wanted to live.”

  “I thought about it too, doing him in.”

  “You have no nerve for it.”

  “You beat me more often than he did. I took courage to strike back.”

  “To sneak from behind. I whipped you because it was your fault I got so many welts. He was always harder on me.”

  “We’re both free of him now. Why need you come against Astolfo? I could find a place for you in Tardocco where you might learn things that would be helpful for many years to come.”

  “I want what you have. By rights, the greater part is mine.”

  “I have little. But Mutano and I could teach you—”

  “Enough of this,” he said. “I am too old to be learning magic shadows and such trickery. Easier to take what you gave gathered. Now I am going to tie you to that chair and wait hidden outside to see who arrives. If my men are followed by Astolfo’s men, I’ll see ’em before they get here.”

  He took down a length of chain hanging on the wall and brought it three times about my chest and locked it behind me. He had come prepared with a lock. That meant that he had visited this place and chosen the room in which to imprison me. He was not trusting to improvisement but was keeping to a plan. I could not decide if the plan was h
is own.

  I struggled but the chain was tight upon me and the links pinched my flesh when I moved. “I need to piss,” I said.

  “No you don’t,” he said. He closed the door tight when he left but did not lock it, there being no lock.

  * * *

  I sat still, trying to lessen the cruelty of the chain, and thought. There was much to try to comprehend. The loss of my father was not burdensome because I had taken for granted he had died long ago. Osbro I had pictured as taking a wife or a hire-wench to do for him as he farmed the small patch of land for half its produce, the other half going to Lord Merioni—or by this time to the lord’s heir. I had imagined my brother as becoming accustomed to his lot, thinking of me only in idle moments, if at all. It did not occur to me that he could have designs upon me in my station. I had dissevered that time of my life and thought it swallowed by oblivion. But here was Osbro, and in a position to do me ill. His rise in fortune was swift.

  Yet he had arrived in the city in the same predicament as I—ignorant of cultured life and with no local family or friends through whom to make acquaintance and lacking most of the skills required to make a living. I had formed a scheme, based solely on a tissue of improbable rumor, to burrow myself into the trade of shadows, and I had chosen the rashest of ways to do so. Great good fortune had been my ally—and the fact that Astolfo perceived that the umbrae might become for me a vocation, a labor of love, and not a profession or, at worst, a means of conversion to petty crime. I had possessed an advantage without knowing of it.

  Osbro would have none. He too would have arrived friendless, hungry for advancement and profit, but without a specific ambition. He would present himself at a hostel or a tavern like The Iron Coulter where exiles from plough and pasture sought refuge in Tardocco. At one of these sites he would have loitered, watching and listening as his silver dwindled, hoping to fasten upon some method to search me out. He said that talk about me had reached Caderia. What he had heard would be only speculative exaggeration, but plausible to his ears.