Children of Earth and Sky (23 page)

He pushed through the crowd and entered the sanctuary, which was quieter. He made the sign of the sun disk and he knelt and prayed—for ease of mind and heart, for safety on the road ahead, for success at the end of that journey and a safe return.

He was painfully aware, amid everything else, that he was expected to paint the portrait of the ruler who could fairly be called the most important man in the world. Pero's only formal portrait of anyone significant had been burned by his subject so her husband would never see it.

He was also expected to spy. He had heard tales of what the Osmanlis did to spies if they were discovered. There was another thing he'd been asked to do. He tried not to think about that.

Before rising he prayed, as always, for the souls of his mother and father, that they might be with Jad in light. He could have used his father's counsel now, he thought. It was sometimes difficult to accept that he was alone, deemed a man in his own right.

It was time, however, Pero thought. You had to grow into your own significance—or come to terms with the lack of it.

He had immediate tasks here. He was to find merchants planning a journey east. His instructions were to join such a party for the security it would offer. Frani and his officials at the residence knew of no groups assembling yet, but their role was to aid him, and this was one of the things they did. It might take some time or it might not, Pero had been told.

He'd asked last night if any Osmanli officials were in Dubrava (he'd been instructed to do that as well). None were, it seemed. They might arrive at any time. He had been offered more of the good pale wine and reminded that it was early in the season.

Information as to Osmanli military intentions had not yet reached Dubrava. War, if it came (it probably would come, was the prevailing view), was likely to take place again in and around the emperor's fortress of Woberg, far to the north of the road from Dubrava to Asharias. But war was a wild beast and
never predictable. One of his drinking companions last night, a round-faced trader in optical instruments, going no farther than Dubrava (and glad of it, he'd said), had put it that way.

Pero signed the disk, rose, and left the sanctuary. He crossed the Rector's Square again and strolled the length of the Straden to the gates.

Dubrava was not Seressa, but it was a handsome city, and no street in Pero's own was as wide and straight as this one was. The canals and the necessary bridges precluded that back home. He walked past solidly built homes of three or four storeys, mercantile rooms, warehouses, several wine shops. Red roofs everywhere, a signature of Dubrava.

He passed three fountains, people gathering at them as they did at fountains everywhere. Mostly women, filling pitchers and buckets, sharing tidings and laments. Laughter. The women watched him pass, appraisingly. The street would fill up at day's end, he knew. That also happened everywhere as people came out to see and be seen at sunset.

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—”