I had realized, from the first moment of Astolfo’s appearance, that my attempted burglary was only a staged mummery, a stratagem designed to force attention upon myself and away from some other occurrence, but I could not fathom what that might be. For the time being, I did not care. Despite my knocks and aches, I was perishingly hungry and fell upon the victuals like a gryphon tearing asunder an ox.
Afterward, I took thought whether the rough, damp stones of this springhouse might serve as a bed. I was much a-weary and though food had restored my spirits somewhat, my pains did not desist. The little players’ scene before the soldiery was but sham, but Astolfo’s blows had been authentic.
* * *
The stones made no easy pallet, but they must have afforded some portion of comfort, for I had to be awakened by Mutano’s kicking of my boot sole. When I opened my eyes I was startled. I knew the dumb man to be of unusual proportion but had become accustomed to his bulk. Now I looked up at him as I lay prone and he seemed as tall and solid as an astrologer’s tower.
I rose shakily and with much groaning followed him through the full morning light into the kitchen of the great house. Astolfo was there, seated, according to his wont, on the large butcher block in the center. He swung his legs idly and hailed me at my entrance: “How now, brave Falco? How like you the life of the thief? Is’t not a jolly existence, replete with surprise and unlooked-for reward? Have you determined to follow its ways to riches—or to the gallows?”
If I showed ill temper, his sarcasm would only sharpen. “When I take up thievery,” I said, “I shall make certain that my colleagues are trustworthy and do not betray me at whim.”
“Do you truly find me a whimsical man?”
“I must suppose that the painful blows I took and the embarrassment of my soul were parts of a design you had in hand. You will no doubt name them necessary parts.”
“We had to convince a skeptical guard troop and the cautious Chrobius,” he replied. “We may be assured that he was watching our playlet from a high window, trying to discover any trace of deception.”
I rubbed my rueful ribs tenderly. “He shall have been convinced,” I asserted. “And I am curious to know what Mutano brought away with him while all eyes were feasting upon my wretched plight. When did you cloak me in this clownish ribbon-dress? When I set out in the fore-dawn, methought I wore a shadow of subtle tints and colorations invisible in dawn light.”
“And so you did,” he explained. “This frock of giblets and flinders, which no sister of mine ever could wear, if ever I had a sister, served as undergarment to the shadow we cast over you at the last. But that shadow possessed some of its rainbow qualities because its genesis was in moisture. ’Twas the umbra of the actor Ortinio standing in mist with the light bright behind him. As you went along, throwing off animal heat from your exertions, and as the morning grew warmer, this mist-shadow dissipated, leaving you all checkered in parti-colored motley.”
“I hope you are content with the spectacle I made, for it could not have been completer.”
“Let us see how content we are to be, for I am curious about this prize myself.” He signed to Mutano, who nodded and with a grave smile unlaced a white leather pouch from his belt, fingered open the mouth, and poured into his left palm four small stones. I recognized them as black opals, ominous gems of grim reputation. They are warranted to bring ill fortune to whoever possesses them.
Astolfo counted them over. “Here is the sphericle; here the mandorla; here the small lozenge; here the larger cartouche.” He pointed out each shape as he went, then looked at Mutano. “It is the tiny arrow-leaf opal, then?”
Mutano smiled more widely and from the cuff of his ocher leather sleeve plucked forth another opal, even blacker than the others, which had been cut at one end into a sharp point.
Astolfo clapped his hands slightly, then rubbed them together. “So our surmise was correct. The piercing form had been chosen, though there is only superstition in the choice and no science whatsoever.”
I began, “I do not—”
“You no longer need to appear so ridiculous.” Astolfo reached out casually and ripped away my robe of ribbons, crushed it into a ball, and flung it on the flagstone floor. I stood now in a knee-length robe of coarse linen. “You will learn more thoroughly without reliving your embarrassment. Let us sip a mug of ale to help wash down the dusty matter of explanation.” He dropped from his perch lightly to the floor, rummaged three mugs from a cupboard, and poured them foaming from a stout stone jar. He, and then Mutano and I, raised our mugs in salute and tasted the brew. Such an ale would cheer even the glummest hour.
“Do you remember when Chrobius showed us the diamond and the things he said then to the countess?”
“He lauded her generosity,” I answered, “but lamented the late infirmities of her mind.”
“Good. And do you remember how he termed these debilities?”
“He said that she began to lack sufficient and proper will-call.”
“Yes. Will-call. In your wide and profoundly thorough perusal of the writings of sages and mages, have you ever encountered this odd word?”
Something nibbled at the rearward of my memory like a mouse in the corner of a meal bin. “Is there not a school or maybe a cabal of philosophers who have formulated certain notions about the nature of authority, about who should be allowed to rule, and how succession of princes, counts, and other nobility should be arranged and that … that…” The memory of the fusty, worm-eaten manuscript crumbled away in my mind-sight.
“Perhaps ’twill aid your recollection to note that this gabble of thinkers is sometimes denominated by their deriders as the Prickalists or Pricktolists.”
“The Masculinists,” I said. “Yes, they who believe it is graven by the stars upon the tablets of fate that only men are to bear sway over other men and over women. That, they believe, is the true and natural order of things. Any female who occupies a throne or any other seat of power is reenacting some ancient and illicit act of usurpation that has brought the world into its present state of degraded confusion.”
“Now you have got it,” Astolfo said. “Those who follow this course of thought will not allow that it is legitimate for a woman to rule or to have power over any others, excepting her children, her animals, and her female servants.”
“So, if Chrobius subscribes to this way of thinking—”
“He may desire to overthrow any woman in a seat of state. Yet what sort of woman, what exemplar of the female mind, will he distrust, fear, and perhaps envy most?”
“The woman who is three-in-one,” I said, “the triply endowed, triply powerful woman who is child, beauty, and crone in one.” The thought of it so fired my enthusiasm that I drained off my mug and held it out to be replenished.
He pretended to demur. “We are not to the end of this knotty length of string. You had better keep your wits clear to think the pattern through.”
“You are in fee to me for another ale and many another after that,” I said, “because of the ugly drubbing you laid upon me at the palace.”
He grinned, and Mutano poured me full again.
“But I cannot cipher how Mutano’s stealing of that small black-opal arrow can hinder the schemes of Chrobius.”
“He stole nothing; he traded for the opal. You have studied the lore of precious stones. You have read how jewels, and diamonds in particular, partake of or share into after being long in their possession, the spirits of their owners.”
“Yes. I recalled to you the instance of Erminia, whose jewel crumbled when she died, but you dismissed the tale.”
“’Tis worn thin from too much wear, but ’tis applicable. I have no quarrel with its kernel. Now you have read also that the nature of one stone can be transformed by keeping it in proximity with another and that the black opal is an especially debasing companion.”
“In Maxilius’s De gemmae et spiriti mundi, there is a lengthy—”
“Yes, and in Bertralius, Ronio
, Militiades, and many another. Chrobius had paired the countess’s diamond with a pernicious opal while the casket stood nighttimes in her bedchamber. By little and little, it drew one part of her tripartite spirit into the diamond, the opal serving as conduit. In due season, the other sides of her nature would also follow and the diamond itself would cloud to dull gray and finally to black. She herself would be left a husk, without memory, without spark. She would be lifeless in her mind, her body deteriorating like a drift of snow melting in the first heats of springtime.”
“And Chrobius would then seize her state.”
“No, he hath no lineage of blood. The people would not countenance the usurpation. But her third husband, the count with whom he is leagued, would return from exile, pretend to care for the countess in her infirmity, and bring all power to himself.”
“This diamond found in the sea chest, this legacy of her second husband, has not proved the happy largess she thought it.”
“It was no legacy. Chrobius or some accomplice secreted it there to be found.”
“But why does Mutano hold not one but five black opals?”
“We do not know the design of the one Chrobius paired with the diamond and were forced to surmise, choosing the most often favored designs in which that gem is usually cut. Fortune was with us.”
“But now Chrobius will see his opal absent, will think upon my stupid burglary attempt and its childish farce, and know that you—”
“He will not find the opal missing, for Mutano substituted a harmless bit of obsidian in that shape to lie in the casket by the diamond. It hath no occult powers and in time the countess’s spirit will escape its imprisonment and she shall be three-in-one again, and whole.”
“Yet he shall observe her transformation, her renewal, and know—”
“He will know that we know his scheme and that if he move against her we can reveal all upon him.”
“Why not do so at once?”
“Better to watch and wait. Hath he confederates in the palace? Has he formed secret alliances with other princes, other provinces or forces? He shall be aware of our gaze, and if he does attempt any hidden plan we shall detect it forthwith.”
“So we do nothing for the present.”
“We watch and wait. You may improve the time by further study of gems, and Mutano will begin your preparation for exercises in the wearing of shadows—how to don them without causing damage, how to choose the best for the task at hand, how to fit them to your form, how to move within them so that you seem a play of light and dark and not a peasant clopping through a murky fog.”
“This is a more entertaining exercise than any you have set me to undertake so far,” I said. “There may be enjoyment in it.”
“As may be,” said Astolfo. “Yet this too is a discipline requiring rigor. And has Mutano ever disappointed you in a policy of rigor?”
I looked at Mutano’s broad smile, and did not much like the cast of it. “No,” I said, “he has not.”
* * *
We had arranged for the unmasking of Chrobius to take place in three stages in our next and final visit to the court. The first stage was for me to be brought before the countess in chains and shackles, bearing the marks of ungentle treatment. I was to make confession of my dastardly fictitious crimes and she was to conceive and pronounce punishment.
This little prelude was to afford us opportunity to observe the countess, to see whether or not we could discover changes in her demeanor, in the movements of her mind, in the health of her physic. We were also to observe Chrobius for any hint that he had found out Astolfo’s replacement of his conduit opal with an innocuous shard of obsidian, or for any change about him that might betoken danger to the countess or to us.
Our audience with her this time proceeded in the beginning similarly to the first one. We were received, as then, before her imposing, elaborately carved chair in the large salon. Now Mutano was present as guard over me, and he found it his part in the acting to cuff me about the jaw from time to time and to give my ankles an occasional contemptuous kick. This part he played with unfeigned relish.
I stood before the countess, Mutano on my right-hand side, Astolfo on the other, and Chrobius off to the left behind us. I mumbled out the rigmarole Astolfo had rehearsed me in: how I had planned to steal the great diamond, keep it secret till I could use it to buy my way into the good graces of the bloody pirate Morbruzzo, and then join with him in a campaign of pillage, enslavement, and destruction of the city of Tardocco. But now, following the shadow master’s minute regimen of iron discipline, I had become a miserable and sniveling penitent content to live or die in any fashion at the countess’s desire.
She spoke to Astolfo. “What think you, sir? Is his penitence genuine or only a further sham with which he hopes to escape the severest sentence?”
He inclined his head, his expression ambiguous. “I believe that at this moment he is sincere, in this hour of the day. But who can read what thought will come tomorrow to such a viper’s-knot of a mind?”
“You have him securely in hand?”
“Yes, milady. My man Mutano looks to him closely.”
At these words Mutano fetched me such a sharp slap that blood dripped from my nose. This, I thought, was overacting the part. I longed to take his place in our drama; I would devise any number of painful cranks and pinches that would send him reeling—if we but exchanged roles.
“Then I leave final judgment to you, Astolfo,” said she. “If he is reformable, well; if not, mayhap the world should be unencumbered of him.”
“Milady.”
“Now as to the diamond,” she said. “In what condition will you say it stands?”
“It has been polluted by some means or other,” he replied. “You were correct to observe that its shine had somewhat muddied and its brightness occluded. Yet it is such a grand diamond, such a valiant one, that I believe it must possess inherent strong virtue to regenerate itself, to purge the darkness from it.”
“That would be a joyful event.”
“My advice is, Bright to bright and never night. That is to say, milady, ’twould be best not to shut it away in casket or box or vault, surrounded by black gloom and tomblike silence. Better to bring it to its own likeness and let it breathe and find itself again. Your own physic may strengthen along with it, milady, for it is well attested in the accounts of history and the writings of sages that the health of the possessors stands in close relation to the condition of the stones they possess. I could furnish many a treatise and pluck from memory countless examples.”
He paused and cleared his throat. “Perhaps, if you have time and patience, you might hear the little-known story of the Lady Erminia and her opal. It so closely was attached to her thoughts and moods that it changed hue and, some have said, even its shape as her own thoughts journeyed and her moods shifted.…”
And then Astolfo went on to tell at length, with intriguing detail and in high-colored language, that tale of Erminia of which he would brook no syllable from my lips. I found this most irritating and might even have preferred another of Mutano’s blows to Astolfo’s elaborate account of the Lady Erminia’s opal. I rattled my chain and Mutano, as if to oblige my unspoken thought, delivered a solid kick to my shin.
Astolfo was concluding: “So, as you see, the connections between possessor and possession are intimate and enduring. For the sake of the stone and for the sake of your own well-being, I would pray you to place the diamond upon a sheet of the snowiest linen on a table in an open room, with two lamps set about it day and night to shed upon it the warmest and most lucent light. I am certain that you will then see it returned to its former brilliance.”
“It may be as you propose,” the countess said, “but I mislike exposing my diamond in such a public area, so prominent to the eyes of all, with everyone passing by and about. Why, ’tis to welcome thievery with a handwrit invitation delivered upon a salver.”
Her doubtful remark brought us to the third part of Ast
olfo’s scheme.
“It will be broadly approachable, milady. So it must be constantly guarded and its care must be given over to the responsibility of one who is completely—nay, slavishly—devoted to your welfare. It must be guarded by a person whom no taint of suspicion can ever join to, one who has served you faithfully for many a long season, someone you have learned to trust without stint or reservation.”
“You intend my minister Chrobius,” she said.
“But milady—” Chrobius stepped forward and made as if to remonstrate.
“Our Chrobius hath many a weighty matter already in his charge,” the countess said. “There are affairs of state which pluck at his attention like hungry children at their mother’s apron. Matters of finance bedevil him, rumors of armed revolt, whispers of intrigue and conflict. Every day his hours are so overfull with such considerations that they spill out of their allotted times like oat grain pouring from a torn sack.”
“If’t vex not your forbearance, milady, let me plead,” Astolfo said, “for I believe there is no charge in all your affairs so urgent as this one. It touches directly upon your health and therefore upon the safety of your lands and dependents. I would urge you to create a special, particular office. Let Chrobius become ‘Master of the Jewel.’ If any stratagem advance against it, he shall find it out, though it be hid like an adder coiled in a cave in the cliffs of Clamorgra.”
With the mention of Clamorgra, Chrobius’s change of expression showed that he understood the allusion to his ugly scheme. He came forward with unexpected quickness for an elderly man. “Milady Countess, I feel I must turn away from this sudden and injudicious honor. There are affairs of—”
The countess giggled merrily and clapped her hands like an excited child. She drummed her heels on the rung of her chair. “Master of the Jewel!” she cried. “Oh, that is a dear, a precious title. I do love the ring of it.”
“Yet it is a grave responsibility and much hangs upon the office,” Astolfo warned. “If anything were to happen to the Great Countess Triana Diamond, as the gemologists now name it, all the consequence would be upon the head of the Master of the Jewel, and Chrobius must stand to answer.”