“If we are victors, his family will welcome his return and Tardocco will proclaim its gratitude,” Astolfo said. “After the event he can reclaim his life of old.”
“That is why he is prompted to this action.”
“And what shall you do after it is over, assuming that we are successful?”
“Why, shall we not take up again our former lives also?”
“In the shadow trade, you mean?”
“Yes. What else might we do?”
He drank off his glass and leaned forward, elbows crossed on his knees, and spoke in a firm tone different from any I had heard him use before. “It has always been of secondary—nay, of accidental—importance to me, this business of umbrae. I am beginning to think I have given to it a sufficient amount of my lifetime.”
“You mean to give up shadows?”
He looked at me steadily, his expression mild as always but earnest in a new way. “My passion was at first and ever afterward to speculate upon the nature of the world—the truth, if there is one, that lieth within or beside or beneath or above the order of everything that is and is not.”
“You will pursue philosophy?”
“I began my investigation not with things, which are only materials, after all, but instead with shadows, which are commonly viewed to be but insubstantial hints, the dim echoes, of things. By thinking upon shadows, I hoped to make, as ’twere, a flanking sortie upon the riddle. If shadows are but the hints that objects and personages trace against the light, shall not the hint whisper more of essences to us than the objects themselves reveal?… So ran my thoughts at first.”
I reflected. “This seems a most roundabout method of proceeding. It is like studying the life of a spider by examining her web. If you never laid eyes on the spider itself, you would have an inaccurate and probably an exceeding strange notion of the animal. Her handiwork can tell you little.”
“Spiders perish by the thousands, leaving often their webs behind. The web is their essence, their signature upon the spaces of the world. The spider is a thing of parts—eyes, legs, mandibles, gut-pulp. The web is one single thing, beginning to end, no matter how complex the pattern it holds.”
“And so?”
“It required some little time before I understood the principle: Things composed of separate elements must pass away and discompose. A human person is made up of flesh, bones, blood, organs, and of mind and spirit. When a woman dies, her corpus becomes again those separate parts, and each of the parts, and the smaller parts of those parts, rejoin with the elements of earth and sky to which they are most closely related. Even stone, under the press of weather and the wear of time, can come apart to particles finer than the whitest flour.”
“But—”
“But the woman’s shadow is a unitary and undiscomposable entity. It may change in shape and tint and size and in details, but the material of which it is made is always consistent with its essence. Its soul and body are one and the same. The shadow therefore is eternal. That thing we call its caster is temporary and accidental. What is eternal is real. All else is transitory falsity.”
“Now I gain importance in my own estimation,” I said, “as one who trades in eternals.”
He sighed at my impertinence and signaled that we should try the liquor again. I was agreeable and wished my dainty glass larger, particularly because I comprehended that the maestro was bent upon talking at length in this vein. I listened attentively; I supplied him with questions. Though the matter of his talking had nothing to do with the crisis at hand, I did not interrupt and tried to follow the train of his thought. It was as if he had kept these notions in the dark bottle of his mind and now released the stopple and poured them out in a heady winelike stream.
At one point, he spoke of shadows as being possibly sentient entities and said that if that were the case, we could no longer treat them as insensible objects. “That is why I wish to make a more conformable arrangement with shadows before time harvests my weary flesh. I must rid me of my proprietary habits of mind and observe more closely, in case the shadows desire to communicate more fully than I have understood. When I relinquished my own umbra, my sympathies and comprehensions broadened and deepened. The same thing happened when I took your shade.”
“How now?”
“You have resolved to adopt your brother’s more dangerous part in the coming fray. Answer me this: Do you believe you would have done so if I had not nipped away your shadow the other day? Does its absence not exert you toward a warmer sympathy with Osbro—and with others also, perhaps?”
“I cannot say.”
“Think upon it.”
I set my little glass on the table and pushed it from me with the tip of my finger. “I will consider these matters after the conflict. The dangers at hand occupy all my mind. I take it that you approve of our exchanging roles?”
“Yes, if you explain to Osbro carefully his new duties. And you must send word to Torronio that a substitution has been made.”
“I shall do these things. What else must I attend to?”
“I know of naught else now, but leave me alone with my thoughts.”
“Good night,” I said.
I went into the library, where the others sat in conference at the table with maps and lists spread out before them. I tugged Osbro aside and began to acquaint him with his newly acquired role.
XI
The Shadows Among Us
We could afford no longer delay. The night following my private meeting with Astolfo and the subsequent hour with my colleagues, I walked to the Daia. I took obscure byways alongside the parks and plazas. The houses I passed in this midnight hour were silent and dark and I fancied there were eyes upon me behind curtained windows—but then I smiled at my apprehensions. I knew these domiciles by daylight as the ordinary houses of shopkeepers, lesser officeholders, ship owners, and the like. It was only foolish little fears that made the back of my neck feel so unprotected.
I reached the river unmolested and, I assumed, unobserved.
The sky was full of stars, but they were more distant than ever and the night was one of the darkest I could recall. I could see no lights as I shoved off from Sandpoint Landing a little distance above the upper park. The lanterns and torches that had brightened the Jester’s Feast were quenched and the tents and pavilions and reviewing stands taken down. Only the barking of two restless dogs marked the silence. Tardocco was still under the pall of its disappointment with the failed festival.
Feelings had run high at first and rumors arose that violence might beset Maestro Astolfo; his hand in the disaster was widely suspected. But the occasional loud outbursts had now given way to a general discontented muttering, a surly public mood from which no reprisal would emerge. Even so, the maestro kept close to his studies and strategies in our villa and did not show himself outside the house.
These studies and plans required his keenest attention, and ours as well. Mutano, Osbro, and I were at his side from the beginning, and in the later development the puppet masters Sbufo and Cocorico were to join us, as were Torronio and his associates, though always under cover of darkness. Our strategy was intricate, composed of several parts that must fit closely, and I was to be the principal agent of action. This was the role I had requested, distrusting Osbro’s ability to carry it through. Astolfo ascribed my taking the role to fraternal affection. If this were true, his surmise was justified by premises I did not understand.
At any rate, here I was, determined to guide our little craft down the Daia into the harbor bay. It was a balky vessel, some twelve feet long by five across, with only a rudimentary rudder to point her and a flimsy pole to keep her off the banks and some infrequent silted shoals. Osbro had tried his hand at piloting her and had named her the Reluctant Maiden, playing upon the name of the deserted hulk in the harbor called the Tarnished Maiden.
It was not so imposing a boat as to deserve any name at all, though she was indeed reluctant to obey her tiller. She had been made over
to look as if she were adrift, an orphan escaped from her moorings. Such wayward vessels were not rare, particularly during the times of festival when owners flushed with wine or overly eager to impose themselves upon women were careless of their duties.
She was to be unremarkable, to attract not even casual notice, insofar as that were possible. And she was to move and otherwise appear as if unmanned, and so I had to lie prone on her bilgy bottom for much of the length of my journey. I was required also to raise my head above the gunnels to find my bearings and to ascertain the positions of stars, but for the most part I must drift blindly down the river, trusting to instinct and my preparatory study of the currents—and to fortune.
If the Reluctant Maiden nudged her prow against a pier or any other obstruction, she would come all apart to separate pieces. I would be boatless in the swift reaches of the upper river—I, a man who could not swim.
If she ran aground or cracked sidewise against one of the moored boats scattered along the irregular banks, I might well be discovered by agents of our enemy. The hour of attack upon the town was nigh. We hoped it would not come this night, for we must strike first. This suddenness would be one of our few advantages, we being so pitiably few in force. If I were found out, that would be mortal for our strategy—and for me too. I was armed only with my short sword and a brace of daggers. Beside me in the boat lay a pike with a rusty old lancet blade; it would be of little use in defense; the barge pole might make a more effective weapon.
A crude, short paddle lay by the pike. If I had not gathered enough momentum to reach my objective when I got into the bay, I would employ it—to little effect, I thought. Stuffed beneath the box that housed the tiller was an inflated oilskin bladder Sbufo had fashioned as a flotation pillow for me when the boat disjointed itself.
With the thought of reducing my visibility, I cloaked with the shadow that had made itself my comrade. Its gray sinuosity might be less conspicuous than a sharply black blot against the starlight. In a night so deep as this, if I made my motions gradual and kept close to the inner shadows of the sides, I should go unseen. The umbra I wore had another use also, one even more important to my well-being.
The length of the vessel from the stubby little bowsprit to about one-third of the way to the stern was covered over with black cloth, part painted canvas and part worn and damaged velveteen. This covering had been patched together from various sources, principally from the small tent that had enclosed the shadow-devouring plants during the Green Knights and Verdant Ladies’ presentation of the story of Perseus and Andromeda. The covering served now the same purpose as before, shielding from the light as many of the umbra-eaters as Mutano and I had been able to crowd into the space. If an unhappy accident occurred and the plants found a way to come at my shadow it would be perhaps more difficult for them to discern than one of velvet black. A paltry protection, I thought. I was in danger as much from the plants inside my boat as from the enemy outside it.
Now that I was upon the Daia our offensive was under way. Osbro would be in the company of Torronio and his crew, Squint and Crossgrain and the others, on the western beach of the bay. There a narrow stretch of silvery sand lay in a crescent along the water in front of a grove of palms and its line of tall, thick undergrowth. Double trenches had been dug from one end of the beach to the other. The bottoms of the trenches were lined with gunny and old canvas and over this covering were laid stooks of long rushes that had been soaked in oil. To top off his preparation, Torronio had flooded the trenches with all the flammable liquids he could lay hands on.
All this lighter together ought to make a sizable and surprising conflagration. Torronio only awaited my signal to spark it. Osbro should now be at his station there with Torronio, watching for the first entrance of my Reluctant Maiden into the bay waters. We must act in concert; the double watch at the trench sites should make us a little safer.
The most bothersome difficulty was that I had no way of keeping an exact time; an approximate timing would have to suffice. I had a shuttered lantern of the kind we used when tending the shadow-eater plants in the converted stable and the candle it contained was graduated with bits of scarlet string tied round to mark off some of the important points I must pass. But I could open it only now and again to snatch a brief glimpse of the taper for fear its flicker would give me away. I must resist the temptation to open the shutter more often than completely necessary.
Too much the success of our enterprise depended upon guesswork. Where had I drifted to by now? I could hear only the silken murmur of water sliding seaward and its gentle push against the sides of the boat. I would not cover enough distance in my voyage to make use of the stars to determine landward points, but I could keep the boat fairly well aligned with the aid of star positions.
Now I smelled something different in the Daia water, an odor of fetid orts and slops, of the carcasses of spoiled meat and fowl, and the leakage of jakes. I was at the spot where the large drain from the rows of the great houses rolled into the river beneath its surface. The complaints of the larger populace against this noisome adulteration were continual and not modest in volume. The Council had taken no steps to halt the poisoning and to protect the Daia because they could not think how to do so. “We lack imagination,” Ser Vennio Colluccio said, confessing the truth. Maestro Astolfo had offered a plan to the Council which they had rejected on the grounds that none of them could understand what he had proposed.
This drain was a landmark. I was now a little less than a quarter of the way. I ventured a glimpse of the candle and found it shorter by that correct amount. Soon my ungainly boat would gather speed as small tributaries—streams and pebbly creeks and runoff from springs—fed into the river. To prevent my having to raise my head above the gunnels, the tiller had been fitted to protrude into the boat through the stern, and this arrangement made the handling of the rudder clumsier than it would otherwise have been, for the slot through which it was allowed to move back and forth was but a short two feet. In my practice attempts that had been sufficient room, but I had doubts upon this matter when it came to the hour of action.
I had doubts upon many matters, doubts upon doubts redoubled. Sbufo and Cocorico were the cleverest puppet masters, contrivance-builders, and originators of stage effects that Tlemia Province ever had seen, but the project that the maestro had envisioned and laid upon them was large in conception and onerous of construction. Mutano was with them as guard and overseer on the Tarnished Maiden and if the enemy boarded that decrepit hulk he could fend off the intruders for a good long while. Pirates or no, they would rarely have met Mutano’s equal with weaponry.
Still, if the old ship had not been refitted properly, or if some pulleys and linchpins and blocks and hinges did not move at will, my colleagues would be helpless to prevent all of them from meeting a damp destiny at the bottom of the bay. The crux of the action was in the timing of its parts.
For the pirate ship had now arrived and was lying at anchor toward the seaward mouth of the harbor. The Tarnished Maiden sat only three ship’s-lengths aft of it toward the wharves. The pirate crew would see no danger in this invalid derelict—which had recently listed more than usual, as if slowly taking on water, and so our enemy had anchored closer than prudence normally would suggest. Mutano had first sighted their presence and reported it to Astolfo. The seemingly careless position of the pirate vessel was encouraging.
But that was the intelligence of yestere’en, and it was the present moment that pressed upon me. If I were not occupied with the toil of directing the boat, I might have fallen prey to a palsied fear.
A particularly difficult stretch confronted me at this point, where two streams poured in from the left bank and another, slightly southward, from the right. The conflicting currents created a sort of slow, wide whirlpool that might turn my Maiden in a circular path. If the stern got pointed downstream, I would be unable to square it about before the swifter flow of the Daia caught me. I needed the force of the river full at m
y stern when I reached the bay, for our plan was to ram the pirate vessel and it would require all the strength I could gather to propel me across the calm water. There was no thought of an impact powerful enough to inflict damage on the big ship, but a direct, head-on contact was necessitous. Any different contact would be in vain.
So when the currents on the stern from portside began to force the bow to port, I strained on the tiller with all my might. I glanced into the river, trying to see the flow of the currents. I caught my breath and managed to stifle a startled oath. The water was scattered with faces, faces everywhere, bearing the crooked nose and unbalanced grin of Bennio the Jester.
It took a short moment for me to comprehend that these were masks. The revelers of the Feast had pitched their masks into the river and streams, disgusted by the collapse of the ceremonies. The masks thumped gently against the sides of the Maiden and there was a disheartening moment when the boat stalled and the Daia began to tug it about. I was able to hold fast, though, and then the opposing current took hold and the prow righted and came around toward the big yellow star, Egeria, that drooped over the harbor, a familiar guide for all mariners who sailed the coastline.
The Maiden was now moving quickly and steadily and Tardocco slipped by me on both sides, a great unconscious presence in the nighttime. I could smell the odors of the town: the dusty-grass smells of the racetracks, the beery, stale fumes of taverns and stews, the aromas of fresh bread from the bakeries that must labor in the night, the unmistakable musks and eye-watering perfumes of Nasilia’s cattery, the faint whiff of salt in the mild breeze from the open sea. These smells were guideposts that told me in loose terms my positions on the river.
The cattery smells reminded me of Mutano’s stratagems. My cumbrous comrade had conferred with Sunbolt and reached an agreement. The great orange cat, perhaps as a gesture of gratitude for the gift we had given him of his new mate Asilia, had agreed to gather to our cause a brief alliance of the cats of harbor-side. These were to be our spies, taking note of the beggars and broken-down sailors and ship-jumpers and escaped slaves, relaying what intelligence they might. It could not be completely reliable intelligence because the feline race, and the wild and independent males in particular, have little interest in the deeds and motions of human beings, except as these affect their dietary situations. Even so, Mutano had been able to collect some details and had made some plausible surmises and had relayed them to Astolfo. The arrangement still held; those cats even now observed activity and gave disordered and often confusing reports.