A Brightness Long Ago, page 20
* * *
One miracle did happen that morning.
Not an exercise in skill and courage and preparation. No, it was a true one, and understood as such in the mind and heart of the person who experienced it—who had thought his life was over.
Carderio Sacchetti the shoemaker, heart pounding madly, too hopeful and terrified to scream, had watched the woman chase the Tower horse—and fail to catch it—and he’d buried his face in his hands and wept.
His aunt was crying as well, though hers were tears of happiness. She turned to him and cried, “Our ticket! Your wager! Nephew, we have won!”
And Carderio thought that death could not come too soon for him. It was his time. He wondered what would happen to the children. The infant would die, that he knew. Perhaps his brother would find a way to care for Carderio’s wife and the older two. His brother was a decent man. He’d be greatly burdened.
He reached into his tunic for his foolish, terrible wager. The blue ticket on Falcon to win. And what he saw, what he held in a suddenly shaking hand, was a green ticket.
A triana bet. Which he had not made. He knew he had not made it.
A sound escaped his throat. He had never made such a sound in his life. He turned the ticket over and over in his hand, which was now trembling so much he feared he would drop it.
It was green. It stayed green.
He had bet Falcon to win. Blue ticket. To win.
He looked at his aunt, who was said to be a kind of witch. But she wasn’t, he knew she wasn’t. She was a sad, maimed, angry woman who’d had her life destroyed here twenty-five years ago.
Then he thought, perhaps the betting stand man had made an error, had simply not believed anyone would be so foolish as to bet the Falcon woman to win, so had assumed it had to be a triana.
But no, he knew, he knew he’d been given, and pocketed, a blue ticket.
Which was now green. Which meant he had won, that they had more money than they’d ever had. He could hire a healer for the baby, buy food, and . . .
He began weeping again.
“Jad is good,” he managed to say, to no one, to the blue sky. “Something beyond belief has happened. I must go to our sanctuary!”
“Yes!” his aunt shouted. “We will pray, all of us. Jad bless that girl!”
He and his brother helped her away, his wife making a path for them. He was still weeping. It took a long time to get free of the square, through the tumult. As they went, he saw the woman, the rider, on the track, carried on the shoulders of Falcon district men. They were laughing and singing as if they’d won.
Tower had their southern rider upright, he saw. They were helping him walk away through the crowd. They were celebrating too, but not hoisting him aloft. Not this year.
Carderio Sacchetti never took his hand out of the pocket where the ticket was. He was afraid to look at it again in this crowd. In their sanctuary, later, kneeling before the sun disk, he did.
It was still green.
The Sacchetti family never forgot that day. The day a woman the city knew as Coppina, from the countryside near Mylasia, a cavalry officer’s daughter, did what she did on the Fontena Curve and came second in the race for Falcon.
They never saw her again, no one in Bischio did. She was, it was reported, gone that afternoon, unseen. She’d told people she was leaving to find a retreat, whatever happened. A virtuous woman. And such a rider! What she had done!
Kneeling in the Goose district sanctuary, Carderio Sacchetti promised his youngest child to the god if she survived. He promised it in a holy place, on that day.
She did live. Her mother’s milk came in strongly as soon as she had proper food herself, and a healer they brought, and paid, gave them a balm to rub on the infant’s body. She flourished. They all flourished, from that day. Carderio began selling shoes in a new style he invented—by accident (though he didn’t tell people that).
That infant, Leora, entered a Daughters of Jad retreat when she was ten years old. She was soon recognized to be both brilliant and pious. She learned to read and write in several languages, to work with numbers, much more. After many years she became Eldest Daughter there, a shining, greatly honoured figure in her own retreat, and beyond. She corresponded with powerful figures among Jad’s clerics throughout Batiara, and in many other lands.
It was said that by the time she died, at a great age and greatly loved, even the High Patriarch knew her name, and that prayers were spoken for her soul, with candles lit in Rhodias itself.
CHAPTER VIII
It was a tradition, openly discussed, that the man who won the Bischio race could spend that night, and many of the nights that followed, with pretty much any woman (more than one at a time, if he wished) in the district for which he’d won.
Some did decline this excitement, for a variety of reasons; one or two arranged nighttime encounters with men they liked. That was less talked about, but it happened. Victory came with rewards, not all of them financial, though there was that, too. The winning district would, after all, have a year of parades in Bischio led by their banner, lording it over the others.
Some years were more complex. If a riderless horse won the race—as had just happened—neither the district nor the rider would feel it entirely right to celebrate him. He was certainly paid—it would shame a district not to do that—but the nocturnal rewards were not as enthusiastically forthcoming.
In the present instance, the rider of the Tower horse, which had won today (riderless), was also in considerable discomfort.
Nothing broken other than ribs, which he’d dealt with before, but he really was in pain, and happier heading home to have his wife and a maidservant help him carefully into a bath—and out of it. No nighttime adventures ensued for some time, unless one deemed successfully turning over in bed an adventure.
Matters were equally complicated in the Falcon district.
They had not won, though their rider was the first person to the finish, and given that they had not had a result so splendid in half a century, they celebrated through the afternoon and night and for days after. Children were seen on window ledges and portico railings demonstrating, with varying degrees of success, the double-leg kick used to unhorse the Tower rider.
One man, trying to do the same, fell off an upper-level balcony and broke his collarbone late that night. Too much wine.
It was certainly the case that a great many men and a few of the women of the district would have been delighted to celebrate with their rider. To celebrate her, reward her with private company, should she have wished it.
Unfortunately, Coppina, their tall, red-haired wonder, was nowhere to be found after riding their horse in the procession back to the Falcon district sanctuary. She had smiled and waved to the cheering crowd, though she’d seemed obviously in some discomfort—and had used that as an excuse to withdraw, immediately after.
Of course they permitted that. It had been a hard, physical race.
But when, after darkfall, various persons attended at the house where she was quartered and knocked on the door of her rooms to invite her to dine with the district leaders, there was no answer.
In the morning, the owner of the house unlocked the door and they discovered that she was not within, and the bed had not been slept in.
This actually saved the Falcon district some money. They had assembled a sum as a reward for the woman even though she hadn’t formally won. After discussion, half of it was given to the sanctuary and half assigned to next year’s race funds.
Her disappearance (shutters opened, descending from the balcony) was understood as piety. Coppina had told them this race would be her last appearance in the world before she joined the Daughters of Jad somewhere.
She had evidently done just that. Perhaps sooner than expected, but . . .
She became, in Bischio, something of a legend. Girls—and not only in the Falcon district—were named for her, and a number of boys were named Coppo, the obvious equivalent.
She was never found, not by Bischio. There were rumours, later, about her perhaps not being who she’d claimed to be, including suggestions she’d even been of noble birth, but nothing was ever known for certain, and memorable moments accrue stories of all kinds. We are drawn to stories, we live for them.
* * *
She wasn’t in great pain, but she was exceptionally tired, and her mind was still racing with exhilaration. She wanted a hot bath, but that would have to wait. She did change out of her muddy clothes. She put on a fresh tunic and overtunic and then the riding trousers again; there were reasons. She pinned her hair back up. There was a plate of sliced meats and cheeses in the room and she paused to eat. She was, unsurprisingly, hungry. She drank only a little wine. She needed her wits about her.
Her rooms were at the back of the apothecary’s house, over a laneway. She knew Folco would have determined where she was, and that he’d have someone waiting.
She didn’t linger for nightfall. It would get busy down there after dark; laneways were for assignations. And she didn’t want to have to stay mouse-quiet in this room when people came to her door. There had been offers and promises already. They were extremely happy in the Falcon district.
She opened the tall shutters. She stepped out on the balcony, as if giving herself some air in the afternoon light, in case someone was watching. She looked along the lane. Saw Folco’s man almost immediately because he let her see him. He stepped forward from a doorway opposite. It was Gian. The only person there. Adria smiled at him. He didn’t smile back; he wasn’t a man who smiled much. Capable, though, possibly more so than anyone Folco had other than his cousin Aldo.
Gian held a cloak over one arm. He looked up and down the lane and nodded. She didn’t wait. There was no reason to wait. She went over the railing and used crevices in the wood of the house to work her way down. Gian came forward and reached a hand to help her but she didn’t need it. He gave her the hooded cloak and she put it on.
“He says it was well done,” he said.
“What do you say?”
“The same.” Which was pretty much what you could expect from Gian.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“I’m here.”
He gave her a sword and swordbelt to strap on, for the disguise. She was tall enough to pass for a man with her hair pinned and under a hood. There was mud on her cheeks and forehead, but the hood would hide it, and people weren’t especially clean just now in the streets of Bischio.
It was crowded when they reached the square at the end of the laneway. She heard music. Gian led her out.
The city gates to the north were open. They made their way through in a crowd. She pretended to be talking to him. He didn’t pretend back very well, but that was all right. Someone passed him a flask and he did the right thing and drank then handed it to her, and she took a pull from a bad wine—which was remarkably satisfying, just then.
There were horses waiting, held by another of Folco’s men, about twenty minutes’ walk beyond the walls. She really was tired, and her body was stiffening; it was even hard to mount the horse. She tried not to let Gian see that.
If he did, he didn’t show it.
They rode through afternoon sunlight, passing thinning numbers along the road. Most people would stay in the city until late tonight. Adria wasn’t paying much attention. They came to an inn and passed it, then they reached a second one and rode into a crowded courtyard and gave their horses to a servant there.
There was a room booked for her—in Gian’s name. She asked the innkeeper if a bath could be brought up. She was told it was already in the room—he’d been given that instruction earlier, it appeared—and that hot water would be provided immediately.
She went up. The stairs were a slight problem by then. She was beginning to ache. Gian stayed in the common room.
She unlocked the door with the big key and sat on the large bed. She took off her man’s cloak. There was a knock, almost immediately. She opened the door and sat down again on the bed and watched two girls bring water for the tub that had been set in the middle of the floor. They went back and forth several times.
There was a fire going. The two girls didn’t show any surprise to discover she was a woman. It crossed her mind that people might meet here in secret for any number of reasons. She tried to pull her boots off, but needed one of the servants to come and help. She made a small joke about it, but the girl didn’t laugh. She was very young.
When the bath was ready she undressed and slipped in. It was hot. Wonderfully so. She had one of the girls stay, to help wash her hair and back. She scrubbed her face and hands, watching the water darken. When she was clean, she had more hot water brought to warm the tub again, and she slipped down as far as she could, knees up, of necessity, and closed her eyes. She may have slept.
After a while—she wasn’t sure how long but the water had cooled and the girl was gone—she heard another knock at the door.
“What is it?” she said. No point pretending not to be there.
“I might have been promised a kiss on a stairwell in Mylasia,” someone said.
She’d assumed it was Gian knocking. It wasn’t Gian.
* * *
I spent the first part of the afternoon, after we ate at the house Monticola had been given, joining the others in collecting our winnings.
It was evidently a good idea to do so quickly. Once, I was told, a tout had fled Bischio the night before the race, taking all the wagers made with him. He was unmarried, but his mother and father had been killed, also his sister and her husband and their infant child, and both houses had been seized by the city commune and sold, the profits going to make some redress for the theft.
The man was then hunted across Batiara. He was found in a room above a portside tavern in Seressa, awaiting passage across to Sauradia in two days. He was castrated and thrown into the lagoon. The money remaining, found in the room, was brought back.
Absconding with wagers had not been a significant concern since then, apparently.
But if bet shop proprietors might be disinclined to flee with their bets, they might still run out of ready money if they’d done badly . . . it was wiser to collect quickly, especially as Monticola didn’t plan to linger.
Today his soldiers wore their livery with the wolf decal. I wasn’t one of his mercenaries, but I did move through Bischio with four armed soldiers. We were collecting and carrying large sums of money on drunken, crowded streets. It was useful for people to know who we were.
We went back to the house regularly, dropped off our coins, went out again. It took some time. Along the way, I cashed my own bet slips where I’d made my wagers. None of the tout shop owners could be said to be particularly happy to see us. They’d have been even less so, I thought, if Adria had won the race and Monticola was cashing those bets at the outrageous odds given. He’d have ruined many of them, I thought.
I still believed she’d held back, while looking as if she was driving the horse as hard as she could. She didn’t want to win, she wanted to be able to leave, slip back to Acorsi unknown, probably as soon as she could, and . . .
That gave me a thought.
I can’t even claim to have been steered to folly by wine. We’d been moving too quickly to drink much. That was promised for the evening celebration. You can do impulsive, reckless things completely sober.
Or, well, I could, when I was young. I kept seeing her in my mind as we went through the city. Images, moments: on that grey horse today, going in to Uberto, on the hidden palace steps, walking away under stars outside Mylasia.
Once my tasks for Monticola were done, I went back into the city alone. It was easy to find where she’d been staying in the Falcon district. A number of men and women were singing outside a large house. She was in there, I was told. Maybe, I thought. I was offered a flask and took a long pull before handing it back.
I went around to the rear of the house, going some distance up the street before turning towards the laneway I expected. I stood in a doorway and waited. She might have left already, but I didn’t think so. They’d taken her to the sanctuary with the horse first, someone had said.
After a while I realized I wasn’t the only one there. I wasn’t seen. The other man—same side of the lane, another doorway closer to the house where Adria was—was watching that house. If someone was here, I thought, she hadn’t left.
So I was also watching when she came out on her balcony and then down to the street. He gave her a cloak and a sword to look like a man, and they walked up the lane and into the crowded square, for all the world like two more people celebrating. I had a moment to feel pleased with myself, and another to wonder what in the god’s name I was doing.
I followed, keeping them in sight. Just another person celebrating. A woman kissed me, and then a man did, energetically. Adria and her escort went out through the city gate in the midst of that happy, noisy crowd, and I followed them along the road north, still among many people.
When they claimed horses I had to keep walking, but I had an idea what they were doing, what Folco would have arranged, and after about an hour, perhaps a little more, with the sun now setting on my left, I came to an inn beside the road. I looked into the stables, and saw the horses they’d ridden.
Clever of me to figure it out, I suppose, though I knew even then this wasn’t the wisest thing I’d ever done. But neither had it been prudent to help her escape Mylasia, I thought.
Unsound reasoning, my beloved teacher would have said: an earlier folly does not make sense of a later one.
I think, looking back, I might want to argue that when we make a decision, a choice, folly or otherwise, there are paths that close off immediately. Others open up as possibilities—and some actions can even feel compelled, for one reason or another.
