The Religion (6 page)

In all her negotiations with Starkey, sea captains, and knights, she'd never revealed her reason for wanting to go home. To have done so would have confirmed her in their eyes as the unbalanced female they already believed her to be. Only Amparo knew. Yet Carla guarded her motives out of more than mere diplomacy. She kept her secret out of shame. She had a son. A bastard son, stolen from her arms twelve years ago. And her son, she believed, was in Malta.

She opened the glass-paned doors that overlooked the gardens. The Saliba, distant relatives of her own family, the Manduca, had retreated to Capri to escape the Sicilian summer and had given Carla use of their guesthouse. It was elegant and comfortable, and came with a cook, a maid, and an openly contemptuous steward named Bertholdo. She'd already asked Bertholdo to arrange delivery of a message to Captain Tannhauser, at the Oracle, but the elaborately counterfeited shock which had greeted her request had convinced her it would take days to get him to obey. In any case, Bertholdo's inveterate hauteur would likely ensure the failure of his mission, if not life-threatening injury to his person by the Oracle's proprietor.

Carla looked out into the garden. Amparo knelt in the flower beds, rapt in communion with a tall white rose. Such eccentricities were normal for the girl and the freedom of spirit to indulge them made Carla feel jaded. An idea crossed her mind as she watched. Carla had no fear of going to the Oracle in person. To do so had been her first impulse. She'd negotiated often enough with the merchants of Bordeaux. She knew, rather, that to beard the notorious Tannhauser in his lair would be to assume the weaker position. If he could be lured to come to her, here amid the trappings of power, the advantage would be hers. Amparo, she now sensed, would bring Tannhauser to the Villa Saliba far more surely than she could herself. If the usual couriers would not do, Amparo would be the strangest messenger the man had ever received.

Carla walked out under the palm trees, upon whose shade the flowers depended for survival. Amparo kissed the white rose and stood up to brush the dirt from her skirts. Her eyes remained on the flowers as Carla stopped beside her. Amparo seemed calm. On rising she'd remained overwrought by what she'd seen in her vision glass the night before. The images she reported from her glass were so diverse, so extraordinary, that when one of them achieved some overlap with reality, Carla was inclined
to believe it mere coincidence. If one laid coincidence aside, symbols could bear any meaning according to their interpreter's desires. Yet Amparo never interpreted. She only saw.

She'd seen a black ship with red sails crewed by tiny monkeys blowing trumpets. She'd seen a huge white mastiff with a collar of iron spikes and bearing a burning torch in its jaws. She'd seen a naked man, his body covered in hieroglyphs, riding a horse the color of molten gold. And as the man had ridden by, an angel's voice had told her, "
The gate is wide but the path thereto is like a razor's edge
."

"Amparo?" said Carla.

Amparo turned her head. There was always an instant when Carla expected her to keep on turning and gaze into the distance, as if eye contact caused her pain and she'd rather seek something of beauty invisible to all but her. This had been Amparo's habit during their first months together and it remained her habit still with everyone but Carla. But Amparo looked at her directly. Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched-by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.

"Is it time to play?" asked Amparo.

"No, not yet."

"But we will."

"Of course we will."

"You're afraid."

"Only for your safety."

Amparo glanced at the roses. "I don't understand."

Carla hesitated. So ingrained was her habit of caring for Amparo that to ask her to enter a den of thieves seemed a crime. Yet Amparo had survived the streets of Barcelona, childhood years of violence and privation that Carla dared not imagine. Cowardice was not Amparo's flaw, even if in her heart of hearts, Carla believed it her own.

Carla smiled. "What need starlight fear of the dark?"

"Why, nothing." Amparo frowned. "This is a riddle?"

"No. There's something I want you to do for me. Something of the greatest importance."

"You want me to find the man on the golden horse."

Amparo's voice was as soft as rain. She saw the world through the eyes of a mystic. Carla was so familiar with the lens of Amparo's imagination that she no longer found it strange. Carla said, "His name is Mattias Tannhauser."

"Tannhauser," repeated Amparo, as if testing the integrity of a newly cast bell. "Tannhauser. Tannhauser." She seemed satisfied.

"I must talk with him today. As soon as possible. I want you to go into the port and bring him back here with you."

Amparo nodded.

"If he refuses to come-" continued Carla.

"He will come," said Amparo, as if any other outcome were unthinkable.

"If he will not come, ask him if he would receive me at his earliest convenience-but today, you understand. Today."

"He will come." Amparo's face shone with the strange joy that was as close as she came to a smile and which, in its way, was more than compensation.

"I'll tell Bertholdo to prepare the carriage."

"I hate the carriage," said Amparo. "It has no air and it's slow and cruel to the horse. Carriages are a nonsense. I'll ride. And if Tannhauser won't come with me, he's not the man who will walk the razor's edge-and so why would you want him to receive you later on?"

Carla knew better than to argue. She nodded. Amparo started to walk away, then stopped and looked back. "Can we play when I return? As soon as I return?"

There were two unvarying elements in Amparo's days, without which
she became distressed: the hour they spent each afternoon playing music, and the session she spent at her vision stone after dark. She also went to Mass every morning, but in order to accompany Carla rather than from any sense of piety.

"Not if Tannhauser is with you," said Carla. "What I have to say to him is urgent. For once our music must wait."

Amparo seemed astonished at her foolishness. "But you must play for him. You must play for Tannhauser. It's for him that we've practiced for so long."

They'd played for years and so this was absurd and, in any case, Carla found the idea quite unthinkable. Amparo saw her doubt. She took hold of Carla's hands and pumped them up and down as if dancing with a child.

"For Tannhauser! For Tannhauser!" Again she made his name peal like a bell. Her face shone. "Imagine it, my love. We'll play for him as we've never played before."

The beginning with Amparo had been hard. Carla had found her while taking her early morning ride, on a crystalline February day when the mist still smoked around her horse's knees and the first cherry trees were in bloom. The mist concealed Amparo from view and their paths might never have crossed if Carla hadn't heard a high, sweet voice piping like the sorrow of angels across the landscape. The voice sang in some dialect of Castilian and to a melody of its own devising which carried the wing-beat of death. Whatever its meaning, the song's otherworldly beauty made Carla draw in her mount.

She discovered Amparo in a break of willows. Had she not already known from the voice, she'd have been hard-pressed to say whether what lay curled around a trunk, half buried under a mass of rotting leaves against the frost, was female or male, or whether it was human at all but a woodland creature of fantastic origin. Apart from a filthy pelt drawn about her throat, and the remains of a pair of woolen hose, she was naked. Her feet were large for her build, and blue, as were the hands clasped together between her breasts. Both of her arms, from shoulders to wrists, were blemished by livid bruises, as was the pale, translucent skin stretched across her rib cage. Her hair was raven black and coarsely
chopped and pasted to her skull by clots of mud. Her lips were purple with cold. Her eyes of different hues showed no sign of anguish or self-pity, and in not so doing seemed to Carla more piteous than any she'd ever seen before. Amparo would never say how she came to be in the forest, starved and filthy and frozen near to death. She would rarely speak of any past at all, and only then to answer yes or no to Carla's guesses. But later that day, when she submitted to Carla bathing her with hot water, there was blood and slime clotted around her pudenda, and some of the marks on her body were from human teeth.

On this first encounter, Amparo would not look her in the eye. It would take weeks before she would do so and it remained an honor seldom granted anyone else. When Carla dismounted and took her by the arm, Amparo screamed so piercingly that Carla's horse almost broke free of its tether. The animal's distress brought Amparo springing to her feet. She comforted the horse and murmured softly in its ear, quite unconcerned for her own pathetic estate. When Carla wrapped her cloak around Amparo's shoulders, Amparo didn't demur, and though she declined the saddle, she was content to walk alongside holding the bridle. Thus, seven years ago, had Amparo arrived at Carla's household, accompanying her mistress home with the long green cloak trailing behind her, like some barefoot and ragamuffin page in a tale untold.

The members of Carla's household, her priest, her very few acquaintances in the village, and those local gossips whose numbers were far greater, were unanimous in thinking Carla ill-advised-indeed, as mad as the girl herself-in taking the waif to her bosom. Amparo, then hardly in her teens, was prone to violent outbursts at obscure provocations and to spending hours in conversation with the horses and dogs, whom she serenaded with a passion in her silvery voice. She refused to eat meat or fowl of any kind, sometimes disdained fresh bread, and on her preferred diet of nuts, wild berries, and raw vegetables never added an ounce to the emaciated condition in which she'd been found. Her refusal to look the priest in the eye, and the fact that her own were of different colors, were sure signs, it was commonly agreed, of diabolic leanings.

Carla stood by the girl through tantrum and trance, through the sudden disappearances that could last for days, through the social humiliations and offers of exorcism, and through Amparo's apparent inability to reciprocate her affection. She seemed insensible to the feelings of others;
or if not insensible, entirely indifferent. Yet in the loyalty Amparo developed toward her, in her sharing of the discovery of her vision glass and the revelations it provoked, in her struggle to learn basic etiquette and the tenets of proper bearing, and most of all in the naïve genius she brought to their study of music, Amparo revealed a love deeper and more enduring than most mortals know. They were strange friends, then, yet no two friends were ever closer.

Did Carla love the girl, she sometimes wondered, because of some spell cast in the mirror of recognition? That mirror in which all those who've been cast out may see themselves? Or because, in her isolation, she needed someone to love and the girl just happened to be there? Or was love not always some conspiracy of isolation, recognition, and chance all intermingled? It didn't matter. The girl won her heart. It was Amparo, who had no past, who'd inspired and propelled Carla on this quest to redeem her own.

"I won't go to Messina until you tell me," said Amparo. "Shall we play for him or not?"

Carla's heart quickened at the thought. Such things weren't done. To invite a man-a man of dubious reputation-to a strange villa and without so much as an introduction subject him to their Art? It was unheard-of. Tannhauser would consider them mad. Her mind told her that to play for him would be folly. Her heart said it would be magnificent. Amparo waited for her answer.

"Yes," said Carla, "we'll play for him. We'll play as we've never played before."

Amparo said, "You will take me with you, won't you? If you left me behind, I couldn't bear it."

She'd asked this question innumerable times since they'd started on this journey but from now on things might change. Would Starkey permit it? Would Tannhauser? For the first time, Carla answered without knowing if she could keep her promise. "I'll never leave you behind."

Again, the unsmiling glow of joy illuminated Amparo's face, and another inspiration sprang forth. "Wear the red dress," she said.

She saw Carla's face.

"Oh yes, the red dress," insisted Amparo. "You must."

Carla had commissioned the dress, during their sojourn in Naples, for reasons she couldn't fathom even at the time. The bolt of silk had captured her: a fantasy of color that had traveled across desert and sea from Samarkand. The tailor had seen its reflection in her eyes and had clasped his hands in communion with some vision of her own that she couldn't yet see, and he'd promised her a union between the silk and her heart's desire whose harmony would delight a pillar of stone.