Children of Earth and Sky (57 page)

Then Pero had risen from the bed—she watched his slim, naked form—to claim his bag and sketchbooks inside it, and she rose as well, letting him look at her, and opened a curtain letting in sunlight, and back in the bed she'd looked. And her heart had begun beating hard again, for a different reason.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my dear. Have you always been capable of this?”

“No,” he said. “Not like this. I haven't been able to stop drawing since leaving Asharias.”

“I have never,” she said truthfully, “seen anything like these.” And then, “Pero, I am a little frightened of you now. This is a kind of holiness.”

And Pero Villani, who was changed but still loved her, said, “I think I am going to do strong work, if allowed.” And what Leonora heard in his voice was pride, yes, but also wonder, even awe, at what seemed to be within him now.

And she felt, startled yet again, pride in him, as well. Already! And also wonder of her own, as she turned pages in the sketchbooks, seeing men and metal stars and fallen statues, fires that seemed to be moving, women selling fruit or silk in a marketplace, and the great soaring dome of a temple that had been a sanctuary when it was made.

And also . . .

“You've done so many hands,” she said. She saw page after page. “Why did you come to do . . . ?”

“I'm not sure,” he said, and stopped. And Leonora heard something (she'd been so
attuned
that day, she would remember, after), and she didn't ask him to say more about this, then, or at any time after, through all the years.

She put the sketchbooks aside, but not far from her, because she knew she'd need to look again. But first. First there really was, in fairness, in honour, for pride and for caring, something she had to find a way to say.

She propped herself on one elbow and smoothed his eyebrows (she had never done that with anyone before) with her other hand.

She said, “Will you stay the night?”

“If I may.”

“We will . . . we'd need to move you to a guest chamber.”

“Of course,” he said. And smiled again. “Or we might not get any sleep at all.”

Leonora felt a warmth within her, and desire, stirring, unsettling, and she said, “I believe I might be able to weary you enough for sleep, signore, given opportunity.”

He laughed.

And while he was laughing, Leonora heard herself say, or try to say, “Pero. I cannot . . . I will not . . .”

She faltered.

—

HE SAW HER
struggling for words she clearly
needed
to speak, and so he said them for her. He could do that, it seemed.

Smiling, after laughter, gravely, he said, “Love, you cannot leave here, this isle or this office. This is where you belong, where you are needed. You have been guided to harbour.”

She bit her lip. He had seen her do that before.

She said, “You can accept that? You understand?”

“I understand,” he said, “that if I tried to take you from this, if I acted in any way to deny it to you, I would be making a lie of saying that I love you.”

“You . . . no, it is about your life too, Pero! You are going to courts, to cities and power. To Rhodias and the Patriarch! Don't mock me, don't deny it!”

He shook his head. “We can never know if—”

“
I know!
” said Leonora firmly. “I have seen those drawings. Am I . . . am I the first?”

“You are.”

“Good,” she said. “I like that.”

“You are also the first woman I have ever loved.”

“I like that, too. If you can accept . . . if you are . . .”

“I will be content to know you are here and that you care for me. That I am allowed to come to you and be welcome.”

“Welcome?” she said. “Stay away too long and see how you are greeted, signore. We . . . we can build you a workshop. Do you think you could paint here?”

“That might be affected by how much sleep I am permitted at night.”

Leonora laughed. There was a new taste to the world, a feeling in her heart that might be joy. “The air here is said to be good for sleep. As to other things, we'll have to see, won't we?”

“It is allowed? That we do this?”

She smiled. “I will pray this evening and in the morning for Jad's forgiveness.”

“And me? Is it allowed for me?”

“I will also pray for you.”

He said, “I should like a studio here, then, yes.”

“I might even put you to work,” Leonora said, and he could see (because her face was already a holy book for him) something sparking. “Could you paint frescoes for us? In the sanctuary?”

“Could you afford my fees?”

“Oh. What are your fees, Signore Villani?”

He laughed—at himself. “I honestly don't know yet,” he said.

She touched his mouth with two fingers, just to do so. Because
she could. “You will tell me when you know.”

“I have to return to Seressa. To report to the council, and paint the duke, if he honours that offer. Then I will see what follows.”

“He will honour it,” she said.

“You seem very certain in these matters.”

She shifted over and then upon him, above, and kissed him, hands on his chest, her mouth where her fingers had just touched. “I am the First Daughter of Jad on Sinan Isle. I know many things.”

—

SHE COULDN'T TRULY
know, none of us can, but, in the event, much of what she told him that day, lying together for the first of many times through the years, shaping tenderness, would prove true.

Villani the Younger, as he named himself to honour his father, would paint three dukes of Seressa for the council chamber in the palace there, and many distinguished men and women of that city. He would paint the new, young king of Ferrieres and live at his court for a year, greatly rewarded. Another half-year in Obravic, painting the celebrated late-in-life portrait of the Emperor Rodolfo, and then his son and heir.

He painted the frescoes behind the altar in the principal sanctuary of Rhodias, and three portraits of the High Patriarch over many years. And then, as he began to change his preferred medium to sculpture and his renown grew even greater in that form, he was eventually commissioned to sculpt the statue of the great Patriarch for his tomb.

When a civic disturbance caused the destruction of the giant statues at the foot of the grand staircase of the palace in Seressa, it was Villani who went home to sculpt their replacements, which still stand. And he fashioned the memorial bust for Duke Ricci when he died at a great age, having lived his last years quietly on an island in the lagoon.

He also, later, created the statue and memorial for Duke Orso Faleri, who had guided Seressa through many serene years—after
addressing the troubles that followed an ambassador's unwise assassination attempt on a rival of the republic, in Obravic.

Through the years it was also Villani's habit to go each autumn back to Dubrava, where he had close friends and executed many commissions. He would live, during such visits, in a suite of rooms provided for him along with a workshop on Sinan Isle. The isle came to be known through the Jaddite world as a place of pilgrimage. People travelled to venerate and seek healing from the relics of the Blessed Eudoxia, and to see the frescoes there, called by one chronicler “the immortality of art.” Villani had painted these in the small sanctuary of the retreat, around the upper walls.

His first great sculpture was also done on the isle, the celebrated rendering of a woman's hands shaping a sun disk, which was set before the altar, always lit by candles on all sides.

And, years later (but not enough, for we are not always allowed enough) he carved the relief upon the tomb of Leonora Valeri Miucci, First Daughter of Jad on the isle, who was laid to rest in that sanctuary, along the western side, with flowers and light before her. Travellers coming there would often say that her face, in that rendering, had surely been done with love.

—

SHE
HAD MORE
than twenty years on Sinan, and a life that she felt—throughout, to the end—had been rich, astonishing, blessed. She was taken by a summer fever, as does happen. Leonora Valeri died among friends on the grounds of a holy retreat she had guided to importance in the world. She went to her god loved and admired, and content with what she had been granted.

She had two sorrows at the end, two absences. One was a child she had never seen and never ceased praying for, each morning and each evening of her life. The other was the man who would be coming here again (he'd written from Rhodias) to spend the autumn with her as he always tried to do—and who would now find her gone.

That pained her, dying. He would grieve so bitterly, she knew, since he loved her . . . as much as she loved him, in fact. Another astonishment through the years, another gift, the richest, even, in a life that at one time, when she was very young, crossing to Dubrava on a ship, had seemed certain to offer her no gifts or grace at all.

We cannot know. But sometimes there is kindness, and sometimes there is love.

I
t is sometimes the case that people with great experience will change a planned course of action—and be unable to explain why they did so.

This can be a chronicler shaping a story, a merchant on a buying trip, a king or his adviser making policy, a farmer choosing when to lay seed or begin to harvest, a ship's captain ready to set out from port who delays, unexpectedly—and then a wild storm comes that would have destroyed them on the sea.

It can also be a military leader, leading his band to harass an army, as he had done many times through the years, as he had just done earlier that spring.

They had been riding north at speed when Skandir woke one morning and walked away from the campsite to piss and spit into the scrubland. He returned to his company as they were eating a quick cold meal and making ready to ride.

“We are stopping,” he said.

He was always decisive when giving orders. He had been fighting Osmanlis since Sarantium fell. There were men—and one woman—in his company who had not been born when that happened.

“What do you mean?” It was the woman, their archer, the Senjani. The one who slept with him, which—perhaps—was what made her feel she could ask him questions. None of the others would have dared.

“I had a dream,” he said.

“We all dream,” she said.

“Danica. This wasn't a dream of fishing in a stream or fucking a whore.”

She was silent, but you could see that she wasn't happy. It was not possible any longer to doubt her courage or willingness to kill, her importance to this company. She trained all their archers now. Not everyone liked her, but many of these men disliked each other, so that didn't mean much. Some wanted to bed her, but that wasn't going to happen.

“What did you dream?” she asked, a quieter voice. Some were glad of the question—they wanted to know. Dreams were important.

“Walk with me,” Skandir said to her.

That meant, the others thought, that she might be told. She might or might not tell them, after. It was hard to know with Danica Gradek. The men in the camp—forty-one of them—watched those two walk off with the big dog, Tico, which was never far from her.

In fact, years later, when she was remembered in that part of the world, it would most often be for her yellow hair, for her skill with a bow, and for the dog that was always at her side.

—

“WHAT IS IT?”

They hadn't gone far. It was safe-enough country, though they were well into Sauradia by now. Borders were fluid, but the landscape had changed.

“I dreamed the fight on the road,” he said, looking away east, not at her.

“When I joined you?”

“Yes.”

“That is a good dream. You destroyed djannis and red-saddle cavalry there.”

“And lost almost every man I had.”

“They all knew that could happen!”

“No, they didn't. Nor do the men here, Danica. Especially the new ones. They think I am magical, invincible. That I'll shed glory on them like blossoms from a tree.”

He was angry and unhappy, she saw. She felt, suddenly, a little afraid. If he stopped now, if they
didn't
fight any more, what was her life? He said, “They believe because we've burned some villages and taken horses they cannot be killed.”

“I don't believe that.”

“I know you don't! But I've been thinking about that army. The serdars are going to be killed in Asharias if they have nothing to show for what they lost up north.”

They had heard by now about the cannons. They didn't know how that had happened, but it was a tremendous thing.

“Good! They are angry, and fearing death. They'll be reckless. Let us
bring
them their deaths.”

“The serdars? Danica, don't be a child.”

She stiffened. “I don't think I am,” she said.

“Not usually. But you are arguing against orders.”

“I am trying to understand them.”

“Why should you? Why would I need you to understand?”

A fair question. She wasn't a child, but she was young, and new to this, and he was . . . what he was. She shrugged. She was remembering that battle, too, now. Her brother, before he'd gone away.

And as had happened before, her silence caused Rasca to speak. He was, she had decided earlier, an endlessly surprising man.

“The dream is what I am telling the others, Danica. They'll understand a dream affecting decisions—they are from Trakesia. But I woke up feeling this was a mistake. That
something
is wrong about going to that road again, trying to find the army. I think
they will be looking to find us, in fact. In numbers, to carry back our heads, my head, as a small triumph.”

She looked at him. “Your head is no small triumph.”

“No. It wouldn't be.”

“And so you feel . . .”

“I do! I will challenge them anywhere and take risks doing it. But I won't throw away forty lives, or give those bastards a chance at a
victory
when they have just been shattered! Let Asharias kill those serdars for us. Does that satisfy you?”

“Not truly,” she said, being honest. “I would rather kill them ourselves.”

He turned to her then. She felt uneasy under his gaze. She sometimes did, as if she was too clearly seen
by him. He said, “Girl, do you want to die doing this?”

“I don't
want
it, but—”

“Then don't chase the dark. Danica, none of us help anyone if we're dead.”

“I know that!”

“We aren't heroes if we lead men into battles we will lose. Those battles may find us, but we need not race towards them. This is wrong. I feel it. I was about to make a mistake. Will you trust me?”

Under his gaze she said, “With my life.”

His expression became wry. “More likely your death, but maybe not right now.”

They walked back to the others and they mounted up and turned back south a little distance, then east again, to raid there through that spring and summer, far from the retreating army of Asharias.

—

IT SAVED THEIR
lives. They didn't know anything clearly, beyond the instinct of someone experienced, but a chronicler can sometimes tell, piecing a story together afterwards.

The serdars of the retreating Osmanli army were, indeed, casting about desperately for ways to appease the court and save their own lives. One remembered that the Trakesian rebel Skandir's band had been roaming the main road east-west, had harassed their supplies, killed a force sent after him. Four companies of two hundred men each were dispatched to ask questions in villages and scour the countryside for signs. To find and kill the man called Skandir, after twenty-five years of failing to do so.

People were interrogated. It was not an army in a state of calm. Some of those questioned died, some survived, though not necessarily in the same condition as before. A defiant Jaddite cleric was hanged outside a roadside sanctuary just east of where the rebel had fought the company sent after him.

No one knew anything. No one had seen him. Skandir had, it seemed, ridden south after that battle. He would be down that way, everyone said. No one would lie for that man, they said. He brought trouble wherever he went.

It was probably true. And the south, Trakesia, was large, wild, empty, dangerous, not yet pacified for Ashar. They were part of an army commanded to return to their barracks, with the leaders ordered on to Asharias.

None of the officers leading the search felt personally at risk. It was the serdars who would be so. Indeed, promotions were likely when senior figures were executed. They turned back, all four companies, cavalry and infantry.

The hanged man was cut down by people from the village and his fellow clerics two days later—when they felt it was safe to do so. He was buried with rites in the cemetery behind the sanctuary, another small person in the world, another victim of the wars.

—

DANICA G
RADEK STAYED
with Rasca Tripon until the end, which came a little more than two years later, in that same village, in fact.

He had begun to experience dizziness, have trouble breathing. He had fallen once from his horse. It was autumn, not campaign season, and the Osmanli armies at that time were ferociously engaged in the east in the aftermath of changes at court and rebellion among the tribes there, who had never yielded to being ruled from Asharias.

It was judged safe to bring him north.

Four of them accompanied him to the village where he said the only woman he trusted as a healer lived. She had been his lover once. Danica knew that by then. She remembered the woman, too.

The man known then and after as Skandir died in that house. Not in the treatment room but in the healer's own bed on a morning bright and windy when the red-gold leaves had begun to fall. Two women each held one of his hands, one young, one old, both sorrowing.

“I never thought it would be in a bed,” were his last words. “I believe I served Jad. I am sorry for some things.”

They made a pyre for him that night, that the Osmanlis might never know he had been there, that no grave might lie anywhere to be despoiled. That people might even believe he was still alive, out in some unassuaged wildness of the world, red-bearded, riding a horse, tall and stern, ferociously unyielding, fighting the changes that had come, in memory of Sarantium.

He gave his ring to Danica before he died.

She stayed another season with what remained of his band in the south. She was an important member of that company by then, but it had been held together by the force and will of their leader and it drifted apart, as leaves scatter, as lives do.

She went north alone with her dog, leaving behind stories and a memory for a time down south. Some newborn girls were named Danica in those years, though it had never been a name known in Trakesia before she was there with Skandir.

Neven stayed on the four farms through the winter to let his Sauradian become fluent with use—that was what he told himself. There was also the difficulty of winter travel in this part of the world. The north wind came with a lean wolf's bite. There was snow and there
were
wolves, hungry in the dark. On clear nights the moons and winter stars shone hard and bright. The stream south of them froze over. He had never seen that before. You could walk across it.

The language was not a difficulty. It had been, he reminded himself, the first tongue he'd have ever spoken. He had no memories of doing so, but whatever stories his mother or sister had told him would have been in Sauradian. He wanted to be
perfect
with it now. He couldn't really say why, and at some point began to wonder if he was delaying because he was afraid of the next step.

When he became aware of that feeling, Neven knew it was time to go.

In addition to which, he realized he was becoming a problem on the farm and he didn't want to be. These people had been good to him. He had worked hard, but that didn't always ensure that people were good to you.

“If you ever touch my daughter,” Zorzi had said (mildly enough) when the offer was first made that he stay and work with them, “I'll have to kill you.”

“I don't think you could,” Neven had replied, also mildly, “but I will never touch her. My word on it.”

There had been a moment of tension when he'd said it that way, then Zorzi had laughed and said, “That will do for me.”

One of the brothers (the older one, Mavro) had given Neven a narrowed look, but over time he'd come to easy enough dealings with Mavro, with all three men.

Milena was different. He never said or did anything that could offend her (or her family), and he was aware, early on, that there were discussions going forward between her father and Jorjo, who owned one of the other farms and had a son named Dimitar.

It was nothing to do with Neven, except that Milena seemed to want it to concern him. He liked her. She was pretty enough, strong and hard-working. She asked him questions about the world, and himself. She wanted to know things, Milena.

He managed to avoid the questions that were about his own life. He just said he came from the east and had “reasons” for heading southwest. He stressed this: that he was going on. Milena asked questions all the time, at the table and in the field, or she'd come find him at workday's end just to talk.

“Do I smell of onions?” she asked once.

“No,” he'd said. “And what's wrong with onions?”

“Some people say they smell bad.”

“Oh. Well, maybe they do. But you don't.”

She'd nodded briskly, as if he'd said something important. He didn't tell her that he'd spent many nights in tents with large, unwashed soldiers.

He'd have had to be more innocent than he was not to see she wouldn't be unhappy if he approached her in the dark, or by the stream as the weather warmed. But he'd made a promise, and he had no wish to spend his life here. Not that it wasn't a good-enough life they lived on these farms, but it wasn't his life. Or, not what he wanted for his life. Though he wasn't yet sure what that was.