A Shadow All of Light (14 page)

“How does this fact serve Rutilius? I see advantage in it only for Maxinnio and the spectacle he is planning.”

“'Twould serve him ill,” he said, “and ourselves also. We must look for some other avenue of success or of escape.”

“How so?”

He shrugged. “I am a-weary of pondering and drawing up schemes. My wits are not so nimble as formerly. Why do you not tickle the ribs of your ingenuity and produce a plan for us to follow?”

“I shall attempt to do so,” I said. I sounded my words out light and eager, trying to disguise my unconfident apprehension.

“We will await with indrawn breath your masterpiece of machination,” Astolfo said. “You shall deliver it mid-morning tomorrow.”

Well, I would have to prepare some scheme or other for the morrow, that was certain. Certain too was the fact that it would be dismissed by the shadow master as harebrained, lackwitted, and impossible of execution. Therefore I did not trouble myself deeply about the matter and took his words to imply that this evening was mine to consume in whatever way I desired.

And so I stepped out across Tardocco to The Heart of Agate, these days my favored tavern in which to re-create body and mind. It was there, between bouts of tankards and bed-thumping, during one of those floating moments when I began to doubt the healthful value of such dissipation, that a glimmer of a notion entered my head and I abruptly and unsteadily betook me homeward. It was no thunderbolt conception, but even so I did not want to drown it in ale-swamp forgetfulness.

*   *   *

I rose late, only just before the appointed hour, composed my corpus as best I could, and went out of doors to greet Astolfo where he sat in the springtime splendor under the great chestnut in the east garden. He eyed me with humorous disdain, shook his head, but said nothing. Mutano, standing by a small rustic table, poured a foaming beaker of ale from a pitcher with a cracked spout. I tried to turn from the sight and smell of it, but he thrust it upon me and I drank and began to feel a little better. He had infused it with some sort of spice that so inflamed the palate I had to fumble for speech when Astolfo put his question.

“You cannot gauge with what eager anticipation we have waited your proposal,” he said gaily. “Speak out at once and dispel our anxiety.”

It hurt to swallow, but after I had done so, I said, “Did not you tell me that Ser Rutilius spent much of his youth in headstrong dissipations and carefree frivolities?”

He made no answer, so I plunged on. “He must have sown wild seed during this time. Perhaps he has fathered one or two that he knows nothing of. Perhaps he could be persuaded that the dancer is one of these, his own daughter.”

“What then?”

“Then he can have no use for her as bedmate and will leave her to stay as she is, where she is.”

“Yet he already adores her shadow to distraction. Will he not be proud to acknowledge the work of his flesh, seeing what dear loveliness it hath brought forth? Will he not be more avid than ever to have her within his house?”

“As his daughter—that is, as his supposed daughter—she may prevail upon him to accede to her wishes.”

“And will not a young girl of no fortune, apprenticed to a stiff-willed tyrant of the ballet, be pleased to find a wealthy and doting father and enter into a life of luxurious ease and well-being?”

“Not if she be wedded to her dance and its music,” I replied. “And that is what I saw when I watched her. It is difficult to imagine that she would give up the art willingly.”

“Willingly she gave up her shadow.”

Now I began to falter. “But that—that is different…”

He spoke as if from the depths of lassitude, uttering the very phrase I had foreknown. “This will not serve. The risks are too threatening.” But then he surprised me. “And yet, there is something in't to ponder on. Let us befriend our thoughts a while longer. You can be meditating upon it while Mutano instructs you in the brave art of the whip. The whip is a way of taking shadows you may not yet have considered.”

*   *   *

Three days passed in which Astolfo seemed to neglect the entire affair: the commission of Ser Rutilius, Maxinnio, and the shadowless dancer. I kept busy, of course; my training seemed never to abate for two hours together. Now the emphasis was on drawing. I had been ordered for a space of time last twelvemonth to draw the shapes of shadows splayed across irregular surfaces: the shadow of Mutano as he stood at the corner of the clay-walled springhouse in the back garden so that it appeared halved on both walls, the shadow of the black cat Creeper where he crouched by the rough stones of the outer wall, the shadow of my own left hand as it fell upon a clot of harebells.

It was soon discovered that I possessed no talent as a draughtsman, but Astolfo explained that the case was of small moment. This exercise was to train my discernment of the shapes that surfaces can make of umbrae; it was a study in recognitions.

But this new assignment of drawing was less a geometry exercise and more in the vein of art. I sat with a sheaf of paper, trying to render likenesses not of shadows but of their casters: garden urns, hyacinths, a quince bush, the sleeping form of Creeper, the huge hands of Mutano. Now and again Astolfo would stop by, leaf through a handful of my drawings, and with a finely pointed length of graphite make swift corrections. Each of his strokes was a revelation and, though I learned much in a short time, it was clear that I was destined to be no Manoni or Petrinius, and I felt, as I often had before, that many hours were misspent.

I was pleased, therefore, when Astolfo informed me we were to pay another call upon Maxinnio and that I should prepare to answer certain questions that might be put to me. “I do not foresee that he will query you,” Astolfo said, “but it is ever best to prepare. You are to recall each detail about the dancer you saw who has no shadow. If you are asked, you must answer truthfully.”

“He will not be glad to find we know of her,” I said. “If he offer to fight, shall I combat him?”

“I do not think you would fare brilliantly in swordplay with a dancing master. We must soon lesson you in dancing to lessen your pudding-footed lubbardness.”

“But if he offer fight?”

“He will not,” Astolfo said. “Go ready yourself. We leave within the hour.”

*   *   *

Yet when we set out again Astolfo had buckled on that sword he called the Deliverer. This time he did not bedeck himself in the cut and colors of a spice merchant, all green and gold, but wore his ordinary habit of russet doublet and trunks, and soft boots whose floppy tops concealed ingenious pockets. He carried now a rolled case of pliable leather, of the sort used to transport largish maps.

We walked at leisurely pace into this seedy square of town with its sleepy shops of tailors and shoemakers, tinkers and tapsters. When we knocked at the street door of Maxinnio's establishment, it was opened again by the young girl who had attended us before. This time, at Astolfo's suggestion, I observed her more closely, but she was only as I remembered: a thin little thing of medium stature, with the jet hair and great dark eyes that shone like wet onyx. Of her figure in the dingy, gray scullery smock I could tell little.

When she led us into the rehearsal salon, the scene was as before, with the severe ballet mistress yapping crossly at her charges, the weary lutenist fingering along in rote fashion, and the lanky Maxinnio on his leather campaign stool, rapping the floor rhythmically with a short silver-headed cane.

He did not weep for joy at our appearance. “Here you are again, Astolfo,” he snapped. “It seems you feel bound by some compulsion I cannot fathom to honor me with your presence and with the company of your overgrown henchmen.”

“I bid you good morrow,” Astolfo said in his mild voice.

“Have you auctioned off all your store of spices? I see you fitted today in a more customary livery.”

“Today I come in my own interest and not in that of the merchant.”

“That merchant who did not exist in the first place.”

“That is true,” Astolfo said. “But you must not complain of being deceived. You did not credit my tale from the beginning. I had not really thought to deceive someone so perspicacious as Maxinnio.”

“Now I sniff arrant trickery,” he replied. “I warn you that if I grow impatient with your pitiable ruses, I shall have my troupe of young girls pitch you through the window onto the cobblestones. They will likewise defenestrate these two footpads that hang to you like baubles on earlobes.”

“Cry you mercy,” said Astolfo. “The day is too shiny new; a shame if violence should mar it. I came only to acquaint you with some intelligence that may not yet be in your possession.”

“You came to monger gossip? I think you will not expect to be paid for this intelligence, as you call it.”

“Only look upon these drawings I have brought. I am curious to know your judgment of these works.” Astolfo untied the laces of the leather case and began to unroll it.

“The only artworks in which I am now interested are the designs for my new ballet,” Maxinnio said. “The preparatory sketches are useless and we must begin them anew.”

“But only glance at this bit of handiwork.” Astolfo unrolled a drawing on fine-wove paper and held it up before the dance master.

When Maxinnio blinked his eyes wide and gave a start that shook his whole body, I edged around to see what image must have produced such a reaction. I judged it would be in our interest for me to give but a lackadaisical, cool look at the drawing, but when I saw the figure there I too was surprised and intook my breath audibly. Maxinnio did not notice, staring fixedly as he was, oblivious to all else.

Here was the dancer without a shadow, the girl I had spied through the cracked door on the floor above. This was her face uplifted, her figure weightless and elongated, her arms raised above her flowing hair, her slender hands thrusting into the light of day. My late exercises in art, clumsy as they had been, gave me to appreciate, to savor, the achievement that lay on the sheet Astolfo upheld.

When Maxinnio turned his eyes from the drawing to the shadow master, his face was full of rage, every feature contorted. He looked for all the world like one of those small statues of demons that are set out to fend away evil spirits from temple gardens. When he spoke, his voice was low, choking with fury. “I would have your life for this.”

“My henchmen, as you name them, will answer for my safety,” Astolfo said. “Anyway, why do you threaten? I have brought this exquisite picture as a gift for you.”

“This dancer is my secret. She is the guarantee of my success with the new entertainment. I do not understand how you come by her likeness. She has not been seen abroad. I keep her close. No one is to see her until the ballet of
‘The Sylphs of Light'”
is presented in the new season.”

“She will not appear in your dance of sylphs. She will never dance in public.”

“She must. All is settled and cast as in stone.”

“You have rescued from a meager and grudging life many a young girl,” Astolfo said. “You have made the pliable ones into dancers and found employment for some of the others. But your interest in them reaches only so far as the boundary of your professional purposes. You know little of where they come from or who they are or may have been.”

“I maintain neither orphanage nor almshouse,” Maxinnio said. “The girls learn to be not persons but only dancers. They learn to live solely for dance, as I do live.”

“And that is why you do not know even the true name of this girl. That is how you could with impunity strip her of her shadow, sell it away so she could not retrieve it, and present her onstage in perfect purity.”

“I could easily rid them all of their shadows. But only this one embodies the ideal I search for. It is not shadow-lack that composes her perfection.”

“But I have found that she is the natural daughter of a great and powerful noble who does not care to have her prance before the garlicky, mutton-gorging rabble. You are to hand her over to me to deliver to him and thus spare your own life and the lives of those in your employ, at the same time preventing the razing of this place to smoking embers.”

“Who is this giant terror you threaten me with?”

“You shall not know that.”

“How do I know that he exists?”

“Because I tell you so and have the picture of her.… Here, look you upon this other likeness. What do you observe?” Astolfo rolled up the drawing of the dancer and gave it to Mutano, who secured it with a black satin ribbon. Then he unfurled another drawing and held it up as before.

Maxinnio gave this new image a puzzled glance, then leaned forward in his little chair and peered closely. “I think I know this shadow,” he said, “but I cannot say how.”

“It is the shadow of your silver dancer, the shade you bartered away.”

He shook his head. “No. Her shadow is a thing of unparalleled grace. There is something askew about the drawing of this one. It is impaired. It looks as if some wasting disease has befallen it, some distemper that racks its shape.”

“That is the condition it has acquired since it left your hands. This drawing depicts how the shadow now looks at this moment. I shall deliver it to the girl's father. From this picture of her shadow he will draw certain conclusions about how she is being treated here. When his anger is at its flaming peak, I shall tell him your name and show him where to seek you out.”

“You would play me false and destroy me and my work.… For what purpose?” Maxinnio demanded. “There has been no enmity between us. I hold you in perfect indifference. If you go to ruin me, it will be only in order to fatten your purse.”

“The father will reward me when his daughter is restored to him. There may be payment also for you.”

“I care not.” Maxinnio clenched and unclenched his hand, rapped the floor with his ebony cane. “Heap your coin till it drown you. My concern is with my
‘Sylphs of Light.'
If I could spare my silver dancer, she should go to her father on wings of wind. But the entertainment cannot afford her absence.”