A Shadow All of Light (25 page)

The others gathered round to gaze and wonder, but only Torronio supplied a useful thought. “Your adders,” he said, “must share something of the nature of the Vale's flora. We have guarded the health of our plants by hiding them away from the light. Try if darkness will restore them to serpents.”

I placed the lengths of root and vine in the bag, but no change transpired.

“Perhaps,” he said, “a momentary darkness is insufficient. It may be that the deep nighttime only will reveal what they are.”

“Perhaps,” I said, shaking my head over this conundrum that but added to our store of ignorance.

We finished our preparations and departed the place of this mount that walled off the Dark Vale from the rest of the world.

*   *   *

I had anticipated encountering Mutano at the place where Torronio and the Wreckers had abandoned him. He did not know of my connection with his situation and of my small but sweet retribution for his overly strenuous methods of training me in the shadow trade. I had pictured myself riding into his bivouac with Torronio at the head of our band of makeshift plants-men, exhibiting with dramatic flourish the specimens we had obtained, and flaunting my triumph with pretended nonchalance.

We made good time on the journey back and our spirits lightened as we came farther away from the Vale. No rain had fallen in recent days and we could follow backward our track with ease for a long while. Then at one point in our trace that seemed most familiar, all evidence of our passing disappeared. Our surroundings seemed less well known here, and I wondered if we had strayed. I spoke my misgiving to Torronio.

“There was one spacious width in this road I am sure I would recognize,” he said. “It cannot be far ahead.”

I reflected then that Mutano had been keeping a solitary watch for three days and nights and might have devised a way to recover his losses from the Wreckers, if he expected them to pass this way again.

We trudged around a slow bend and Torronio pointed and said, “There we made our camp. I recall how wide the space was and what refreshment that hospitable canopy of leaves offered. Yet there is no sign of our encampment. That man—Mutano, you call him?—must have moved along to where he came from, trusting to fortune for shelter and direction.”

“He is not one to joy in a long journey afoot,” I replied. “Something is amiss. Let us keep keen watch for trickery.”

As soon as I spoke, that cooling canopy of leaves came falling down upon us, covering us over, men and beasts, with a coarse, tatterdemalion netting of rope and rags and thongs all interlaced with foliage. It offered an obstruction that the five of us ought to have made short work of, but I think our wits as well as our bodies had been weakened by our recent struggles. Boxes and baggage went tumbling; my comrades swore and wrestled against the tatty netting, even as it grew tighter around us.

And then there was Mutano, of course, with a short staff in his left hand and a rope that served as drawstring for the netting in his right. With the rope he pulled the reticulate mass close about our ankles; with the staff he poked and belabored us in every undefendable place our carcasses presented. All the while, he was howling in the way that cats do, with a wailing that sounds like angry grief to men but signifies ardency of erotic joy to the claw-foot race. As soon as I saw the happy smirk on his face, I knew that Mutano had understood that not only was I involved in the waylaying of him but that indeed I must have planned the whole business. My surmise was confirmed by the severe drubbing his staff laid upon my ribs.

We were too pressed upon one another to unlimber our blades, but Sneakdirk managed to squirm a small dagger from inside his doublet. He began sawing at a joint knot, but Mutano spied him and with a sharp stroke broke the blade and, to judge by the outcry, one of Sneakdirk's fingers into the bargain. Then, with expressive motions of his hands and contortions of his features, he made known that we were to divest ourselves of iron and push all weapons onto the ground outside our leafy cage. He encouraged us heartily with licks and pokes and as a matter of course I received the most and the heartiest.

Further expressive pantomime indicated that we were to thrust our hands through the netting, and when we did so he bound our wrists and set us free one by one. He stood us in a line and stalked back and forth before us, purring like any fat house puss sated with cream. Now and again he paused and with a knock or two brought our stances to more erect, military postures.

Here was another sad moment for poor Falco. Pleased with myself as we had come back along the track, I had been spinning fancies of the commendations I would receive from Maestro Astolfo, of the coin I would collect from my herbalizing, and of the trinkets and cates and amorous companionship I would purchase. But now again I was under Mutano's thumb, or beneath his heel, and must bow to his will.

Forward and back again he strode, looking us over severely, taking close views of Torronio and Squint. Myself he hardly deigned to notice, until with a smart rap to a shinbone he directed me to follow him apart. He seated me on the scabby butt of a fallen plane tree. Pointing with his staff, he indicated which boxes, bags, and canvas-wrapped vials he desired Squint to bring forth and place on the ground before me.

Then commenced the most awkward and intense lesson in grammar a backward schoolboy could ever have endured. I had gathered some smattering of Mutano's feline dialect over time, but now I was to learn in earnest what the different growls and half growls, the purrings hoarse or mellifluous, the quiet or importuning meowings intended to convey.

He thumped a box of stoppered vials with his staff, a stout green length of ash with a few leafy twigs dangling, and uttered what was unmistakably a question:
“Mrowwwr-mirr?”

When I shook my head uncomprehendingly, he boxed my ears. His notion seemed to be that I understood him well enough but pretended not to. I was accustomed to such blows from Mutano. What vexed me more was the laughter it drew from the Wreckers where they stood all in line by the fallen netting. It was good to note, though, that Torronio did not join in.

In fact, I did perceive what my shadow-trade colleague wished to find out, but the situation confused me. Did he expect me to answer him in the cat language? A slap to my forehead brought me around.

Yet I could not return answers I did not have. “These plants we gathered in dark of deepest night in the darkest of valleys,” I said. “We worked quickly and crudely, more by sense of touch than by sight. We only gathered in the mass and have had no opportunity to examine our findings.”

“Mrr mrr-mrr mrrieu?”

“Yes, I believe them to be of sound value,” I said, after puzzling for long moments. “I could not set a price. In a sense, they are beyond price, for our man Goldenrod gave up his life to find them.”

Mutano's eyebrows rose and his expression grew pensive. This was something he could not have known.

“He was forewarned,” I said.

He touched one of the oblong boxes with his green staff.
“Murr rr.”

“Best not to unseal the baggage here. Sunlight has a deleterious effect upon this flora of the darkness. We have already lost several fine specimens.”

“Mir?”
He gave me a skeptical look but let the matter go. He brought from an inner pocket of his doublet a square of soiled vellum and thrust it at me. It was the map he had made from study of the old books, the map that had brought him here by a toilsome, hindrous journey.

I shrugged and he pushed it into my face. Then he flung it down and held out his hand, demanding my more helpful map to take him back to Tardocco.

Here was a point requiring careful judgment. If I handed over the false map immediately, he might suspect something amiss, knock me over, and ransack my clothing. If I held back for long, I would be inviting bruises purple and yellow. I decided to chance three blows before pretending to give in and present the deceptive document. But Mutano was no tyro in the skill of tendering punishment, and one solid thwack upon my shoulders sealed my decision.

Groaning and swearing, I brought out the counterfeit, with all its elaborate notations and whimsical instructions. Mutano examined it front and back, then turned about for the advantage of better light and pored it over. I retained all confidence in this map wherein I had mingled the true and the misleading with judicious balance. Many of the features he would know from his travel or by hearsay; others were in plausible relations with those he knew; still others were but mere brain-wisps and shared likeness with no place on the round earth.

After long study, he tucked it inside his doublet. Then he turned his attention to the Wreckers. His grin broadened as he surveyed them, and I surmised that he was proud to have caught the five of us in the same trap we had laid for him, dropping from the trees. At length he tapped Crossgrain on each of his shoulders, like a prince knighting a worthy squire, and motioned him forth, always keeping his staffless hand near his sword hilt. Under his direction, Crossgrain began gathering up the containers and loading them on the mounts and mules. Goaded by the staff, Squint aided in the task.

Mutano looked at the sky to ascertain that a half day's light remained, then mounted Defender and departed, taking with him not only our herbal treasures but all our weapons and almost all the food we had robbed him of.

We watched him out of sight, then all eyes turned upon Falco.

“Now, Stalwart,” said Torronio, “Thou'st brought us to a pretty pass. Are we to starve in this wilderness or have you another lame-witted scheme to bring us to destruction?”

“Be of better cheer,” I said. “Let us find our former camping ground; it cannot be far down this pathway. You will recall that we made a cache of provisions there to replenish us homeward.”

This sentence struck a more pleasant note, but Sneakdirk reminded me that now we had no horse.

“After we find our provisions, we shall have but a five-day march to Tardocco.”

“Why go we there?” he asked. “The noose awaits us, and this Mutano will anticipate our coming.”

“If my cartographic skills stand good, we shall arrive before Mutano by some hours if not days. Then I shall make arrangements.”

“Arrangements?”

“Let us stir along,” I said. “I shall enlighten you as we go.”

*   *   *

We did arrive before Mutano's advent and I brought my companions directly to our town villa.

When I introduced Torronio to Maestro Astolfo, the shadow master looked him over side to side, bottom to top. Then he spoke in his calm voice: “I know the set of these features. Are you not of the family Binnoto? There is a certain length of jawline—”

“My name is Torronio. That is all the world need know.”

Astolfo's gaze rested on him still, those mild gray eyes never roving from his face. “There was a story of one of them who fell into disfavor with the clan and fared into the forest to live as a celibate hermit and ponder the ills of life.”

Torronio sighed. “Celibate I am, and for a long while. But the ills of life thrive stoutly without my thinking on 'em.”

Astolfo nodded. “And you are confederate with Falco in this scheme to gull his friend and cohort, my man Mutano?”

“If Stalwart be Falco, then I am bound with him. As for gulling, are we not the parties injured? We have not the herbal treasures we labored after and this Mutano, wherever he may be, enjoys their possession. I am no coney to cheat and delude; if I rob, I rob forthrightly, in order to keep spirit and corpus united.”

Astolfo turned to me. “I must inform you, Falco, that lately such exotica of greenery has dropped from fashion. You will recall Ser Marchiotti, who prided himself on his great collection of noxious plants. He hath fallen prey to a peculiar, miasmic lily and his health is much shaken. The exotica mania may be running its course.”

“Have we then no buyers?” asked Torronio.

“Have you any wares?” Astolfo inquired.

“We shall have within three days or fewer such oddments of nature that even the most jaded of the Green Knights and Verdant Ladies will vie anxiously for them,” I said. “These specimens follow behind us by messenger.”

I did not say that the messenger was Mutano and that I had stationed Sneakdirk, Crossgrain, and Squint a half league above Tardocco on the Via Auster to waylay him and once more lighten him of his precious burdens. I counted upon my delusive map to bring him down from the mountains by the Via Auster and not the Via Boreas to eastward.

“Perhaps you overvalue this cargo,” Astolfo suggested.

“I think not,” I said, and went on to describe the character of some of the plants we were bringing forth. The march from the mountains had made us dusty, weary, and footsore, but its tediousness had given me time to think on our travails in the Dark Vale and upon the things we found there. I recalled the silence that was thicker than silence, with the whispery sibilance at its heart; I recalled the mucid, velvety leaves and blooms of the shrubs and how they rubbed upon our clothing and how the vine tendrils sought for our patches of bare flesh. I pondered the fetid gum that clung to us and sublimed to white powder in sunlight and thought long upon the black adders that changed their forms to become hard roots and vines.

“I believe the flora and fauna of that valley to league in convolvement together,” I told Astolfo. “Their mainstay food is the shadows of animals, though they doubtless derive some nourishment also from rain and soil. It is not that they eat shadows as donkeys munch down hay. They take into themselves the shadows they capture and within them are preserved the living shades of passersby—of the troops and caravans and robber bands and solitaries who come that way. Undoubtedly, they also hold captive from early times the shadows of bears and boars and deer and suchlike. All these shadows are interwoven into a single entity through the roots and vines underground and above. It is a thing like—like a fisherman's net.” I'd almost said,
Like the leaf-net that Mutano dropped upon us from treetop,
but bit my tongue in time. “They propagate by means of an evil-smelling slime that blind snakes exude, crowding amongst 'em. And all this dark herbage, together with the serpents and some invisible flying creatures like black moths, make up, all of them at once, a single intelligence, darkly knowing, ravenous in its need for animate shadows.”