Mary Gentle (72 page)

When I have seen Mlle Dariole kill, it is with sheer joy, as on the beach at Normandy, or, as later, with grief or rage.

I said softly into Fludd’s ear, not knowing until then that I would speak: “You made her the woman who can do this.”

White showed all around the pupils of his eyes, and slime ran out of his nose.

Tears began to roll down Dariole’s cheeks, one after another.

Her voice did not shake or quiver. “You’re not sorry. You just don’t want me to kill you. You’re lying in your teeth. I ought to cut off
this
and put it up your arse.”

Dariole reached out to touch Fludd’s prick. Her face showed an expression of disgust as she pried the wrinkled small thing up by the foreskin. She stretched the limp flesh out from his belly.

If it had been I, facing her now, I should have begged to be spared too—and not for erotic excitement. Did I not think, once, in London: she has the capacity to be a killer who kills without any remorse?

I felt my sac contract, and my testes desire to crawl back up into my body.

Dariole tightened her grip, taking a pinch of Robert Fludd’s foreskin between her thumb and finger, pulled his whole penis until it stretched out from his belly, and slashed her dagger down.

Blood spurted, white flesh instantly reddened.

Fludd shrieked like a woman in childbed. His body reared up in my arms.

That startled me. Unprepared, I clenched every grip I had on him. His whole body jerked, involuntarily, away from her; a crack reverberated through my flesh.

His right arm came limp, fluid, in my grasp.

All the full weight of him slumped back against me.

Dariole opened her hand.

Only the tip of his foreskin lay in her palm. The merest pinch of flesh: less lost than a Jew does.

Gabriel blurted out, “Good God, will you cut a man to pieces by inches!”

I grunted; even a slight man’s unconscious weight is heavy, and Fludd was not so slight. “He’s fainted.”

Dariole stared.

Slowly, slowly, the intense look went out of her eyes.

One hand came up, and she touched the shoulder of Robert Fludd’s doublet, where his flesh bulged under the cloth. She pushed at his arm, senseless and hanging limp as cloth itself.

“He has dislocated the shoulder,” I said. “Or broken it. It can be put back.” I paused. “If you wish to. He will have the use of his arm again. It is, however, an easy and useful way to cause pain to a man, while it is so dislocated.”

She nipped a tiny part of her lip between her teeth. The look she gave me had apprehensiveness in it. I went hot with shame of a quite different kind.
Yes, I know these things; it is a part of my profession
.

“Are you done?” I said. “There will not be another chance.”

“Put him down,” she ordered.

Nodding to Gabriel got him to open the doors of the box-bed. I felt Dariole’s gaze on me as I draped the unconscious man on the pallet.

Moving the out-of-place joint as I lowered him made him mew, half coming out of his faint. His head lolled. I laid him flat. His prick and balls caught in the flap of his breeches, hanging out in his lap, the cloth speckled with blood.

This is no new situation for an agent of the state.

It has been a comfort to me, in the past, that it was not my place to suggest either a surgeon, or a knife into the soft spot behind a man’s ear.

Now….

I began, “Dariole—”

Her skin had gone yellow and white together; she looked as sick as Magister Robert Fludd himself. The sense of something, if not irreparable, then at least irreparably sordid, made me flinch internally.

She said, as if to herself, “How can he be sorry? He knew what they’d do. He didn’t stop them. He
sent
them so Luke could do it.” She looked down at the blood on her hand. “Luke made me wet inside with this.”

My vision became a flat white tunnel; I fixed every ounce of self-control on not reaching out, taking Fludd’s neck in my hand, and snapping his vertebrae.

Dariole moved closer to the bed. I saw her survey the indisputable blood soaking the fly of his trunk-hose; the disfigured shoulder and useless arm. A line of white shone under Fludd’s eyelids.

It cannot have been more than three minutes by the clock: it seemed to me that she stood and looked at him forever.

Squatting down beside the bed, staring into his half-open eyes, Dariole wiped her blood-spattered fingers, and the fragment of his skin and flesh, down Fludd’s doublet.

Her knuckles jarred his arm, free now of its socket. He whimpered, eyes rolling, mouth wet.

She said, “You remember me. Every time you take a piss, you look down, and
you remember me
.”

I have preserved him, I thought, looking at Fludd’s semi-conscious but living body.

Now I must decide what use I will make of a man who—given time—can tell what Time itself will do.

Gabriel Santon brought a tiny elderly brown man up from the forecastle, who jerked Doctor Robert Fludd’s arm back into his shoulder-joint with one seemingly careless snap.

I shut Fludd in Dariole’s cabin, on public pretence of his “accidental injury” needing to mend, and watched Dariole herself sleep out on the deck, under the brilliant stars. If I slept an hour or so in the day—and Gabriel a different hour—I found we might both serve to guard Fludd and Mlle Dariole by shifts at night.

“Don’t tell her we’re watching her,” Gabriel muttered one night, at change of guard. “God alone knows what she’d do to us.”

“She has been given much to consider,” I said. “She has not yet become used to the idea of not having killed Monsieur Fludd.”

“Nor have I.” Gabriel shot me a look. “But you’re planning something. I know the signs of
that
.”

The
Santa Theodora
sailed into the mouth of the Madovi River, and so upstream until we docked at her destination of Goa.

This western coast of Hind appealed to me, lush as it seemed. I am perhaps at heart a traveller. I took us lodgings behind the new Basilica of Bom Jesus, locking Fludd in whenever I had cause to leave the rooming-house—Fludd’s slow recovery from his injuries making him a recluse in any case.

Not unwise, I thought, it being a Portuguese colony. A man can never tell how Spanish agents will react to the English. Or the French, if it comes to it.

I set about seeking a ship sailing further west, otherwise bided my time, and—on the fourth day after our landing at Goa—felt it at last to be ripe.

“‘Quen vim Goa excuse de ver Lisbon,’” I observed.
“‘Who has seen Goa, need not see Lisbon.’”

Mlle Dariole, one hand on her rapier hilt, looked about the cobbled square of the cathedral and raised her brows. Her lips twisted in an awkward attempt at a smile. “I don’t remember
those
in Lisbon….”

It was unclear to me whether she referred to the feather-leafed trees surrounding the centre of the square, or the parrots, pigeons, and lizards that infested the place.

Having returned to dressing in doublet and hose, in preparation for landing at Goa, Dariole had abandoned them for kosode and hakama as soon as the wet heat soaked in. As with Lisbon itself, a man may not move out of doors between the hours of noon and four. I urgently desired the onset of evening, for the cool—and for the evening tide.

Avoiding the brightly and strangely dressed crowds as potential eavesdroppers, I steered her into the Basilica—more for the welcome chill of the Baroque stone after the heat outside than for any religious consolation. True, the white marble of the side-chapels had a variety of lurid gold-leaf decoration that one might see in any church in Lisbon. But, like the numerous Hind and Arab tongues I heard among the parishioners, as well as the ever-constant Portuguese, it had a streak of intriguing strangeness.

I knelt in one side-chapel.

“Are you content?” I said.

Mlle Dariole dropped neatly down beside me, gazing up at the candles and the porcelain white face of Our Lady, and not across at me.

“I wanted to hurt him.” Her voice broke the hot silence. “It’s
horrible
.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And it’s like somebody lifted a weight off me.”

“Yes. That, too.”

“Is this always what it’s like? If I killed him, would I feel any worse than this?”

“I still do not propose to allow you his death,” I said. “I will explain why in a moment, now you are well enough to hear it.”

She ignored me. Her hands shook where she clasped them in prayer. “I didn’t want to…make game with him.”

Her eyes, in the cathedral’s shade, were big and dark.

“You mean, that belongs to night-play,” I said. “Not the daylight world.”

The ancient scent of candles and incense, familiar from childhood, is odd when mixed with the spices drifting in from the cooking-fires outside, and the flower-scent of Goa. Bright scarlet and green bird’s feathers blew in along the stone floors, with the dust. Almost Lisbon, almost France; not quite either.

Mlle Dariole’s expression became intense. “Messire…you always wanted to be on your knees to me, didn’t you?”

At another time I might have supposed such a question to be asked to humiliate me. Now, I saw it as a request for reassurance. I glanced across, unafraid to watch her while I supposedly prayed.

“Mademoiselle, I have never been afraid of you in the way that Fludd was. I do not know how long I desired to be at your feet before I let myself know it. Let us say…some considerable time.”

She flashed me a smile that vanished on the instant. “He was scared of me. What happens if I think I…want that again? I don’t think that would be good for me. Mixing the two: the night-world and….”

Her voice trailed off.

I said, “You will never have that kind of fear out of me, mademoiselle.”

Her face I thought a picture: half-affronted, and half desiring to be reassured that indeed it was so.

I could not help but smile at her. “I confess that it occurred to me, some time ago, that you have degraded me, whipped me, and held me up to public humiliation—but you have never hurt me. I regret to tell you, mademoiselle, that I know I am…safe…with you.”

She turned her head to give me a small glare. Without her hat, tendrils of short hair were stuck by sweat down over her forehead. The fullness of her lower lip looked of such a softness that I desired to place my fingertip against it. All young man and young woman in the one body.

“I could make you afraid,” Dariole said, with a magisterial sniff.

“You can make me desire to put down my dignity.” I inclined my head to her. “When it’s a burden. For the rest…You are not a cruel woman. Or, you have a chance to avoid becoming so.”

Her eyes blinked, focused: what I thought might be a miraculous movement of Our Lady’s hand disclosed itself the flick of a green lizard’s tail. Dariole watched the beast. She shifted on the hard tiles.

“Mademoiselle.”

I waited until she looked across at me, even though she still clasped her palms together in prayer.

“If I’m to bring Fludd back to England, I have enough to contend with with storms, shipwreck, slavers, and the undeniable fact that if Gabriel must guard Fludd any longer,
he’ll
probably kill him.”

She did not want to smile; I saw so much. The corner of her lip moved, nonetheless.

“Mademoiselle…perhaps, you did need to kill Robert Fludd.”

I made it almost a question.

With her eyes fixed on the motionless lizard, she spoke in a low tone. “I thought if I had revenge, it would be…. What Luke did to me: that it would wipe it out. Make it never have happened.”

“Ah.”

The lizard vanished with the instant disappearance of its kind. I could have laughed to see how, within half a heartbeat, both Dariole and I, by habitual reaction to movement, had hands on sword-hilts where we knelt, and a keen idea of the locations of all priests and other worshippers.

Her shoulders untensioning, she said, “Nothing can do that, can it? Make it not have happened? Even if the future can be altered, we’re stuck with the past.”

“Yes. I have no other answer for you.”

Dariole looked back at me. “Is it evil if I
do
feel better, messire? For hurting him?”

“I think so, yes.”

She nodded slowly. “I think so too. But…I do.”

The burning white sun spread fan-rays across the stone floor, pushing into the brown shadows of the Basilica by way of the great door to the outside world. As it swung to, patches swam in my vision. One man in a black cassock walked past us, his sandals clacking loudly.

Dariole turned her head back from watching him diminish towards the Baroque splendour of the main altar. “I’ll tell you something, messire. I’d been thinking, after Sister Caterina, that I could be proud—that
I
was the one special enough to upset all Fludd’s calculations. But, you know what? All that means is, I’m somebody not…normal. Someone who’s—bizarre. Deviant.”