The Spirit Ring (9 page)

      
"The pearls in that hairnet were worth more than this entire leaky boat," he said after a moment. But it sounded more of an observation than a complaint. "Let alone the day's catch." The fish in question lay covered in water in a wooden tub in the bow, the drying nets piled beside it.

      
"Not at that moment," Fiametta pointed out sturdily.

      
"True," he breathed. "Very true." Wearily, he leaned his head back, adjusting his hat for a pillow.

Fiametta, sitting in the stem with the steering oar, loosened the rope and let the boom swing out a little more squarely to the following breeze. It seemed miraculously calm and peaceful, with only the creak of the ropes, the slap of little wavelets, and the bubbling of the wake astern. It was a day for a picnic, not a ghastly massacre.

      
It wasn't a very big sail. Nor a fast boat. Nor a strong breeze. A determined horseman or two, paralleling them on the white road along the eastern shore, could outpace them. They had water in abundance, and certainly needed no food—her stomach was still stretched and leaden with the betrothal banquet—but sooner or later they must come to shore. Where hard-faced men would be waiting.... The green shoreline blurred as tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, wet annoying tracks. She ducked her head and rubbed the tracks with her sleeve. Darkening dots stained the red velvet, blood splashes. Captain Ochs's blood. She couldn't help it; she began to cry in earnest. Despite her weeping she kept the steering oar straight, guiding them between the two shores. Unusually, Master Beneforte did not demand she stop her blubbering or he'd beat her, but just lay and watched her, till she gulped her way back to coherence.

      
"What did you see happen in the castle, Fiametta?" he asked after a time, still supine. His voice was tired, unhurried now; despite the question, the tone steadied her. As best she could remember, she stammered out an account of the men, words, and blows she'd witnessed.

      
"Hm." He pursed his lips in thought. "I first guessed it was some long-laid treachery, Lord Ferrante assassinating his host.
      
Take the daughter and the dukedom.... But stupid, for he already had the daughter, and could do murder in secret at his leisure, if that was his mind. But if, as you guess, those strangers brought some slander sufficient to break the betrothal, then Lord Ferrante was hurried into his treachery. And will prove his wit—or lack of it—in the aftermath. He must carry it all the way through, now." He sighed. "Poor Montefoglia." Fiametta wasn't sure if he meant the Duke, or the dukedom.

      
"What do we do next, Papa? How do we get home?"
 

      
His face screwed up in distress, compounded with disgust. "My work in progress—the jewels, the money—all forfeit! My great Perseus! What a woeful day. If in my foolish pride I had not insisted on presenting the saltcellar at that banquet, we might have lain low, let the affairs of princes blow by overhead. Plow under one duke, raise another, as Fortune spins her deadly wheel. Maybe, if Ferrante had secured himself as tyrant of Montefoglia, he would have continued my commissions. Now—now he knows me. I hurt him. I fear that was a grave mistake."

      
"Maybe," Fiametta floated a cautious hope, "maybe Lord Ferrante will lose the fight. He could be already slain."

      
"Mm. Or perhaps Monreale really will get little Lord Ascanio out. I would not underestimate Monreale. In that case it's civil war, though. Oh, God save me from the madness of princes! Yet only the patronage of princes can support great works. My poor Perseus! My life's crown!"

      
"What about Ruberta and Teseo?"

      
"
They
can run away. My statue cannot." He brooded.

      
"Perhaps—if the soldiers come to our house—they won't notice the Perseus," Fiametta offered, frightened by this agitation, worsening his obvious illness.

      
"He's seven feet tall, Fiametta! He's a little hard to miss."

      
"Not so. He's all clothed in his clay, now, and he just looks like a big lump in the courtyard. And he's much too big to carry away. Surely the soldiers will look for gold and jewels that they can hide in their clothes." But would they take—say—a bronze death mask? That was certainly small and portable.

      
"And then look for wine," groaned Master Beneforte. "And then get drunk. And then start smashing things. Clay, and my genius, so fragile!" He looked as though he was about to cry himself.

      
"You saved the saltcellar."

      
"Accursed thing. I've half a mind to pitch it in the lake. Let it bring bad luck to the fish." He didn't move to do so, though, but hugged the bundled cloth tighter to himself.

      
Fiametta drew up some cold lake water for them both in the fisherman's tin cup she found under the rear seat. Master Beneforte drank, and squinted in the afternoon glare, scrubbing his wrinkled brow with hooked fingers.

      
"The sun is troubling you, Papa. Why don't you put on that straw hat, to keep it from your eyes?"

      
He plucked it up, turned it over, and snorted. "Stinks." But he put it on. It did shade his jutting nose. He rubbed his chest. There was still pain there, a deep ache, Fiametta judged by his awkward movements as he turned on his side, then back again, in a futile quest for ease.

      
"Why didn't you use magic to escape the castle, Papa?" She remembered Lord Ferrante raising his fist, and the glaring putti ring. "Or... or did you?"
If I had been a trained mage, I would have done something to save the brave captain.
Would she have? The confusion and terror of that moment had overwhelmed her. She'd barely been able to save herself from her own skirts.

      
"Magic in the service of violence is a very perilous thing." Master Beneforte sighed. "I have done magic, and God save me I have done violence, even to murder—I've told you of the time I took vengeance upon a corporal of the Bargello for the death of my poor brother. I was twenty and hot and stupid, then. It was a great sin, though the Pope gave me a pardon for it. But I have never done violence
with
magic. Even at twenty I wasn't that stupid. I used a poniard."

      
"But Lord Ferrante's spirit ring—twice I saw him use it to do violence."

      
"Once, it bit him for his pains." Master Beneforte smiled in his beard, but his smile fell away. "That ring was more evil than I'd feared."

      
"What is a spirit ring, Papa? You said you'd seen one before, in possession of the lord of Florence, and it wasn't a sin."

      
"I
made
the spirit ring now on the hand of Lorenzo d'Medici, child," Master Beneforte confessed with a low sigh. From the shadow of the straw brim, he glanced uneasily at her. "The Church forbids them, and with reason, but I thought the way we had this one devised, I might cast such a powerful work and yet not be tainted. I don't know.... You see, if a corpse is preserved unshriven and unburied (which is against holy law), the new-riven spirit tends to linger by the body. And with proper preparations that ghost can be harnessed to the will of a master."

      
"Enslaved?" Fiametta frowned. The word had the distaste of iron on her tongue.

      
"Yes, or... or bonded. How it came about in Florence was, Lord Lorenzo had a friend, who was dying in great debt. He struck a pact with the man. In exchange for his soul's service to the ring upon his natural death, Lorenzo would care for and look after this man's family. Which oath Lord Lorenzo has kept to this day, as far as I know. Lorenzo also swore to release the spirit if he feels his own death approaching. Ghost magic is immensely powerful. I feel there was no sin in what we did. But if some more narrow-minded inquisitor ruled otherwise, Lorenzo and I could burn at the stake back-to-back. So keep this story to yourself, child." Master Beneforte added reflectively, "We hid the body in an old dry well, beneath some new construction of the d'Medici in the heart of Florence. The ring's power diminishes when it is taken too great a distance from its old bodily home."

      
Fiametta shivered. "Did you see the dead baby, when the casket of salt burst open?"

      
Master Beneforte blew out his breath. "Yes. I saw it."

      
"That cannot have been some little sin."

      
"No." Master Beneforte's lips compressed. "You saw it closer—was it a girl-child?"

      
"Yes."

      
"I greatly fear... that may have been Lord Ferrante's own still-born daughter. Unnatural...."

      
"Still-born? Or murdered?" Surely it was only the poor who secretly strangled unwanted daughters.

      
Master Beneforte bowed his head. "That's the trick of it, you see. A murdered spirit has special powers. Special rage. A murdered, unbaptized, unburied infant..." He shuddered, despite the heat.

      
"Do you still think nothing in the world could be all black?"

      
"Mm." He huddled down in the boat. "I confess," he whispered, "I begin to have grave doubts of the hue of Uberto Ferrante's heart."

      
"An infant could not have chosen to bond its spirit. She must be enslaved," said Fiametta, frowning deeply. "Compelled, without knowing why."

      
One corner of Master Beneforte's mouth curved up. "Not anymore. I released it from the ring. It sprang away in that great flash you saw."

      
Fiametta sat up. "Oh, good Papa! Oh, thank you!"

      
He raised his brows, bemused by her eager approval, warmed in spite of himself. "Well... I'm not so sure how good it will prove. Lord Ferrante must have gone to great lengths to bind those powers to his will. His rage will be unbounded, to so lose all his trouble in an instant. The burn on his hand will be as nothing compared to the loss of such a potency. But the burn will remind him. Oh, dear, yes. He will remember me."

      
"You've always wanted to be remembered."
 

      
"Aye," he sighed. "But I fear this fame could be too final."

*****

      
The afternoon wore on. The southerly breeze pushed the crude boat along at little more than a walking pace, but unfailingly. The shoreline crept through its changes, farms and vines and patches of forest to the right, rubble and scrub and sheer rock faces growing higher and wilder to the left. To Fiametta's relief, Master Beneforte slept for a time; she prayed he would feel better when he woke. And indeed, when his eyes blinked open again in the slanting light of late afternoon, he sat upright for the first time.

      
"How go we?"

      
"I think we're going to run out of lake and light at about the same time." She almost wished the lake would run north forever. But when the shifting hills had parted around that last curve, they'd revealed not another stretch of lake, but the capping shoreline, with the tiny village of Cecchino huddled on its edge.

      
"As long as we don't run out of wind."

      
"It's grown more erratic, the last little while," Fiametta admitted. She made another adjustment to the sail.

      
He stared at the cloudless turquoise bowl of sky, arcing between the hills. "I trust there will be no storm tonight. For becalming, we have oars."

      
She glanced at the oars with unease. There went her last hope of avoiding the dreaded shore, even if the wind failed, which it seemed inclined to do. Over the next half-hour their progress slowed to a crawl.

      
The surface of the water grew silken, and the little slap of wind waves against the hull muted to pure silence. The village was still a mile off. She gave up at last and lowered the sail.

      
She jiggled the heavy oars into the oar locks, and made to sit on the center bench.

      
"Give over," Master Beneforte snorted. "Your puny little girl arms won't get us there before nightfall. He evicted her from her place with a wave of his hands, and took it over. With a grunt, he started them forward with powerful sloshing strokes that made whirlpools spiral away from the oar blades into the smooth water. But after two minutes he stopped, his face grown gray again even against the orange glow of sunset. He gave up the oars to her without even arguing, and was very quiet for a time.

      
It was dusk when Fiametta's last aching pull nosed the bow onto the pebbled beach. Stiff-legged, they stumbled out of the boat and dragged it another foot up onto shore. Master Beneforte let the bow rope drop to the gravel crunching underfoot.

      
"Will we stay here the night?" Fiametta asked anxiously.

      
"Not if I can get horses," said Master Beneforte. "This place is too small to hide in. I won't begin to be easy till we're over the border. Hole up somewhere beyond Lord Ferrante's reach, till things sort themselves out."

      
"Will we ever get to go home again?"

      
He gazed south over the darkening lake. "My heart stands in my courtyard in Montefoglia, covered with clay. By God and all the saints, I will not be sundered from my heart for long."

      
Over the course of the next hour, they discovered that fisher-folk were not notable horsemen. Boats, after all, did not require expensive hay and grain. They were handed from one head-shaking peasant to another, less and less hospitably as the night grew darker. At last Fiametta found herself standing with her father in a shed at the end of the village, looking at a fat white nag that was over-at-the-knees, gray-headed, bewhiskered, and venerable.