A Shadow All of Light (47 page)

“The
Tarnished Maiden
? That derelict has lain in the harbor for years, awaiting its destruction by the owner. If Ser Arbolo had not died and his sons were not still at quarrel, it would be in pieces at the bottom of the waters. It is not fit for action—for anything.”

“So I would have thought also.… What is that sound?”

I listened and finally heard shouting and wild music a long way off. “Revelry. Some Feasters are impatient.”

“'Tis yet but a few days. They will tire themselves and sleep through.”

“Unlikely,” I said. “The antics and entertainments will begin in earnest now. I am looking forward to the gardeners' guild presentation of Perseus and the Mardrake.”

“You may be somdel disappointed,” Mutano said, “for Cocorico is not to perform the Mardrake role.”

“Why not?”

“The maestro has made him and Sbufo associate with me in our defensive maneuvers.”

“What can a dancer and a puppeteer do in the way of mounting a defense?”

“I cannot say, but maybe Astolfo will reveal his mind to you. Do you not confer with him in private today?

“In about an hour from now.”

“And I confer with you and Osbro afterward. The maestro is very secret in this business.”

*   *   *

I was to speak with Astolfo in the small library, but when I arrived the door was closed. This was unusual, for it was heretofore left open always as an invitation for Mutano and me to come study the lore of umbrae. Here stood shelves with every knotty, grime-laden text on the subject that had emerged since the invention of writing. Or so the weariness of my eyesight had often suggested.

I knocked and heard him invite me in and entered.

He was not visible. A long rank of lit candles sat on the table to my right and the curtains were drawn to let in light on that side. I closed the door, supposing that privacy was in order, and stopped some eight paces into the room.

There I halted, suddenly overcome with a sensation like nothing I had felt before. A dizziness powerful enough to cause me to totter struck upon me and I experienced a paralyzing bewilderment. It was something like rushing up a flight of stairs to come to the top and find that the steps ended and there was nothing there, nowhere to plant one's feet, so that one had to hold back by the balance of the toes alone. It was almost to plunge into the blue depths of empty sky. My breath flew out of my chest, and I gasped to bring it back. The room pitched and yawed like a vessel in choppy tides.

Such were the physical sensations. But there was another feeling too, a dreadful loss of some sort, as when one learns of the sudden death of a dear friend or relative, of an event so unforeseen it seems incapable of taking place in the world you know. Yet it does take place. It has already taken place. Some part of yourself has been subtracted, some aspect of your person has been canceled. At this moment and always afterward, you are a different being from what you had been and what you might have been.

Astolfo spoke from behind me. He had hidden behind the door as it opened. “Your shadow is safe,” he said. “It has found its place in the mirror.”

One of our large blue mirrors stood at his left-hand side. The servants must have brought it down from the hall on the third floor. I looked into it but in this light could discern nothing. “If I do not sit, I will fall,” I said.

He grasped my elbow and led me to the chair at the end of the table. “Compose yourself.” He took up the decanter there and poured a glass of ruby wine. “To restore you.”

I sipped and sipped again. The taste was different from any wine of my experience. I sniffed at it.

“No,” he said. “It is a vintage familiar to you. But as your spirit has altered, your senses too have already altered and many things you will now begin to know in a new ways.”

I took another sip, tasting. “I feel as if I just now forgot something important to remember.”

“You will find that you have not. Yet you will always feel that you have.”

I coughed. “Why did you steal my shadow?”

“You must not go into this impending combat wearing your primary shadow. Its loss in that way could mean death, or worse. Now your umbra is in the protection of the house. You must choose from our stock the one you will wear in the struggle.”

“It will not be the same. I have lost something of great value. I do not know why I say so.”

“It is a loss, but it brings advantages. You will find your nature more changeable, more quickly adaptive to fresh circumstance. You will gain facility with other languages; you will have a surer sympathy with other people and with animals. Witness Mutano, how cleverly he learned the feline dialect and how he communes with cats—with dogs too, if he so desired to learn. He could not do these things if he were still chained to his primary.”

“Then I shall be less myself than before.”

“Less a Falco in some indefinable measure, yes. But not less a man.”

“Mutano told me that he had given up his shadow because you advised him to do so. For a thief of shadows, or a dealer, to retain his primary left him vulnerable, you told him. He did not speak of these advantages you name.”

Astolfo smiled. “He does not know of them—or at least he has not thought about them. He
surrendered
his shade, and his mind is at peace with the exchange. Your shadow was
severed,
and so you have a sense of violation. The results shall be similar in the end.”

“Why did you sever mine? I would have given it up willingly.”

He shook his head. “You would not. You thought to sever it yourself but could not bring yourself to do so.”

“How come you to know that?”

“It is written into the history of the shade. I have examined these umbrae for many years. They retain the marks of intention as well as of deed for those who can distinguish the signs. Have you not deduced the characters of men from their shades? This ability is but a refinement of that one.”

“Then you may know many other things about me I would not wish known.”

“I am almost certain that I do, but I know not which ones they may be. You have attempted to read my shadow time and again. What have you learned that I would keep concealed?”

“You do not wear your primary. You store it safe away in the jewel in the leopard's-head buckle. If I read your present shadow closely, I only read the history, a small bit of it, of another person.”

“Your thought is largely true, but the umbra of another changes when it is attached to me—and the history of that person is changed also.”

I took a swallow of the wine, then drained the glass. I was becoming accustomed to the new taste of the familiar vintage. “You claim, then, that you can transform the past life of another simply by assuming his shadow?”

“Transform, no. But an alteration occurs. And it is not
the
past life in singular number. We all have innumerable past lives and wear them the way we wear innumerable shadows.”

“I must find time to study these matters.”

“I urge you to do so. Meanwhile, you must choose an umbra to keep you company in the combats near upon us. You know your tasks assigned and when they are to be fulfilled. Choose accordingly.”

I rose, placed my hand on the table to steady myself, and spoke softly. “Very well.”

As I was leaving, Astolfo began to extinguish the candles.

*   *   *

I mounted the stairs. Tall lancet windows on the other side of the hall let in a mellow late summer light. No shadow companioned me. I was strongly aware of the fact. Even though I am engaged in the complex trade of umbrae and think upon them unendingly, I am usually not much more attentive to my own than are most other people. I take it for granted, knowing, without knowing, its position nigh to me and the general look of it. It is like a part of the body, unobtrusive as long as nothing ails it.

Now I had none. I did not feel unclothed. One's shadow often mingles with other shadows, as when one walks through woods or stands in the shade of a wall, and then it is unseeable; there is no feeling of nakedness then because the knowledge that it still exists and will make its presence known in the light is constant.

This sensation was more like a kind of loneliness that settles upon the spirit at a certain marked time. Some episodes of our lives close forever; the experiences we had felt during those times we shall never experience again. So it is when friends or siblings or pet animals die or when a lover bids one farewell forever or when we forget the sound of a piece of music but longingly recall our former fondness for it.

Having never before been without a shadow, I had never desired to have one. But now I did, and this sensation too was novel. It was not like hunger or the spur of lust. Perhaps many of us wish for a friend, a silent confidant who knows our desires and fears without our having to confess them, a respectful but impartial other whose otherness is not a separating quality. Perhaps that friend is and has always been our shadow, an amicus whose absence is the first palpable sign of its past presence.

The shadow is one's other that is not another.

*   *   *

For my role in the invasion defense I needed, I thought, a dark shadow, black but not conspicuously so, with the ability to move furtively. Our battle was to be nocturnal. Yet it had to be able to withstand a sudden onslaught of light as a necessary part of our counteroffensive tactic. I recalled such a one as being stored in the fourth mirror in the row and I went to it, to stand and peer.

To look into those dark blue mirrors where umbrae are stored is like looking into an empty concert chamber to see what echoes remain. It is as much a matter of projection as of perception. At first nothing is there. Then, as eyes accustom, hazy shapes appear—or almost appear. In time these shapes acquire characteristics, partly seen and partly remembered from the first encounters. One may say as much of acquaintances newly met after years have passed. “Is that truly you, Jacopo?” we say, descrying features half recognizable beneath the changes time has wrought upon them.

Minutes drew past as I stood, trying to sort out one half shape from the others. When I fastened at last upon the entity I wanted to call forth, I discovered my gaze could not steadily fix upon it. The shade I sought seemed to avoid my attentiveness, drifting behind other umbral figures. The chore was something like trying to hold in mind one certain passage of smoke from a campfire as it ascended into the nighttime.

Something was distracting me, and finally I comprehended. A shadow I did not desire to wear was making itself known to me, standing unmoving while the others wavered and slipped into the depths or sidled toward the edges of the glass.

I rested my eyes upon it and was at first not impressed. It was not as dark as the one I had sought, nor had it the other's force of presence. It was a dark gray-blue hard to make out in the glass and its outlines were more sinuous than martial. I fancied it not the most proper for the warrior-personage I must become.

But as my examination continued, I began to see these characteristics in more useful terms:
discretion, gracefulness, judiciousness, persistence,
and
alertness.
These were qualities that Astolfo and even Mutano had remarked as lacking in me at times. It seemed that this shadow sensed those weaknesses and designed to repair them.

I turned the mirror sidewise to the light from the windows and stood straight and still before it.
“Friend,”
I said, and after slow moments the shade came from the glass, passed through my body, and took its place on the floor, joined to my right foot-sole. In its course it touched my
vis
like the quick dust-brushing of a moth wing.

 

X

The Absent Shadow

I had well understood that Astolfo had regarded our present mission as being of utmost importance, but when he severed my shadow, he forcibly impressed upon me the ominous urgency of our undertaking. He must foresee and comprehend certain future emergencies that I could not glimpse. Otherwise, he would never have taken my umbra in so abrupt a fashion. Born in Caderia, I could not easily sympathize with the Feast of the Jester, nor understand its importance to the townspeople. Mutano, of a severely skeptical turn of mind, dismissed it as sham. Astolfo viewed it in his usual unhurried, thoughtful way: It was an established custom, and not to be perverted to base ends or used as a disguise for violence upon Tardocco. The custom must be protected.

So I attacked my separate duties with fresh resolve, even those that entailed some amounts of confusion and tedium—as did this immediate task of training my brother for his role in the impending conflict.

I had not expected that Osbro would be able to read a map. He could not read written words; “quill droppings,” he called them. Even so, I had drawn a map of the city, using for a general scheme old maps we had at hand, newly revised by my recent, hasty investigations, and he was able to keep the plan of the town orderly in his head. We sat side by side at the table in the small library and I reviewed the sheet with him. It was not necessary to gain a detailed picture of the river Daia, I said, in order to know its banks and piers and jetties, its depths and shallows, swift stretches and obstacles. He followed my instruction in patient silence, tracing with his finger on the page the courses and features as I described them. When he failed to understand he would give me a questioning look.

He did so now, tapping one section of the stream with a well-tended fingernail. “This?”

“Yes, here beneath this pier, a drain empties into the river. Bear well away from the pier or the inflow will turn your boat sidewise to the current. Then it would be difficult to straighten again. Are your navigational skills improving?”

He sighed. He would rather not have been sitting by lamplight during this jolly blue morning with its birdsong and sunbeams delighting the jolly outer world. From afar we heard the muffled, ragtag sound of revelry. It would soon be time for the Tumulus ritual celebrators to reach our grounds and he would fain be among the masqueraders. He was to accompany Mutano in the cart.