Redder than Blood Read online

  “Enough,” I said aloud. Or supposed I had.

  And then, instead of another of the fiery surges, I heard a voice lift out of silence. Male, it seemed to be, if rather distant. It spoke in English. It seemed to read to me from one of those books I had read in the past.

  “And to her husband, Thesaio, she said this: ‘I have denied you a husband’s rights to me, for your own fastidious sake. Love and congress are not for you. God forbids it you, sir. I shall never bear you a son, nor shall I ever bear a son, nor any offspring to any man. For that is not either for me.’”

  And at this, rather than be shown a picture, I seemed to imagine one inside my own head, and how Cremisia, now clad in deepest scarlet, and in a bedchamber, presumably her own, spoke the words very mildly and reasonably to her unpleasant husband Thesaio. And I saw, or imagined I saw him slink away, vicious but inept.

  “Therefore,” the voice quietly explained, “she dwarfed the them all, these six male giants (one even unborn, never to be conceived, her son). They, who should by rights have ruled and quelled and crushed her life, and she herself. With some she managed them by her manner alone, as with the vile Thesaio. With others by cunning games and subterfuge, sometimes aided by her witch-nurse step-mother, a very old woman by now, yet still paramount in Cremisia’s household. The wicked brothers were diffused and held off, they say, by use of witchcraft itself. And her foul incestuous Uncle Marcaro easily—through pandering to his greater love of cuisine. And, as she had sidestepped the threat of pregnancy and further service ever after to a son, so she evaded her father, Raollo. They say that in one way she hypnotized him, for he could never make sense of her, nor properly grow angry with her. While in the end, as the story has it, she defeated him utterly by use of a riddle.”

  I had opened my eyes. I sat in darkness and waited, almost obediently, for another illustrating picture. Or for the voice to resume. The riddle: The Riddle.

  What had I thought—felt—so far? I had no notion. I believed myself also under some spell. If not as profound as the witch’s, nevertheless effective.

  You fool, my father soundlessly, voicelessly repeated. I had learned the tenor of his lessons well.

  In my own youth, I was in love with Cremisia, as one can only be inside the separating safety of time. For she was centuries gone, and her history, aside from written facts, unprovable. She had been lucky, that was all. Everything else—embroidery, exaggeration, and invented fairy tale.

  • • •

  She was twenty-six years old, Raollo’s daughter, when she met her predestined lover and spiritual husband.

  Until then, among her closest male acquaintance she had known only moral and intellectual dwarfs. Now she encountered a giant.

  Loro. (His patronymic is generally uncertain—although some have guessed at it: he may have been the bastard son of a lower prince of the d’Estinis, or the Calcapuas or a legitimate child born to a skilled blacksmith known only as ‘Roman’.)

  Edmund Sanger knew of this, it goes without saying. His extensive reading had seen to that. How strange it is, however (perhaps), that most of those who learned about Cremisia. Ranaldi, poet and sorceress, came to her history after they had read her work and gladly drowned in it. That she was a powerful woman, able often to get her own way in an age when, as a rule, women weighed in the balance no more than ‘a flower upon a soon-snapped stem’ is remarkable. Frankly her success seems to say less therefore of her character—than of Fate. Only the lucky stand a chance, regardless of ability or worth.

  So then, she met Loro d’Estini, or Calcapua or Romano, at the age of twenty-six. By the day of her death, when she was at least one hundred years of age, her lover-husband had been dead some decades. Even so he had lived long, having not been expected to. It was, in those days, unusual that he made old bones, since Loro, the mental giant, was physically a dwarf much under four feet in height.

  • • •

  The stories of their meeting are various. (Edmund himself had written of it.) Some other tales barely hold water—literally: Involved in an accident on the city river, Loro had leaped in and saved her. Or, she drowning in some lake in the hills, Loro, fortuitously in a boat, had raised her up. One other account had it she fell from a tower, perhaps at the push of one of the evil twin brothers, and Loro caught her in his arms. Though he was strong reputedly as a young horse, the very unmatch in their sizes would seem to deny this. (A man of six foot would have had trouble, though Cremisia was light and slender; the tower was some fifteen stories high.)

  The apocryphal aside, it seems most likely Cremisia met Loro at one of the many places she by then frequented. She had long since wrested a lot of freedom from her father, let alone her overmatched husband. Quite how she did this remains, as demonstrated, something of a mystery. (Fate; the witch.) Her talents as a poet do seem to have enabled much of it. (By the age of twelve her poetry had escaped the confines of the house, and was feted everywhere in the city, even in the palazzo of the Duke himself. Indeed, before her sixteenth birthday, her verses were read and sung far beyond Corvenna. In France they spoke of her, in Spain, the Germanian kingdoms. To Persia it was said many of her words had been smuggled, where, of course none could agree any female should ever be able to write such marvels.)

  Wherever she went about the city, undeniably, she was accompanied by servants and guards of the Ranaldi. ‘So crowded round was she by her escort,’ ran a comment of the time, ‘barely could a single petal of this rose be noted within the red-uniformed hedge.’

  Nevertheless, one close summer evening in the Pallina Bianca Square, Cremisia was honored by the city, at the ending of a festival, with a reading of her verse. Which feat was performed, ably and with exquisite beauty, by Loro.

  Despite his lack of height, the dwarf’s head and throat were large and sculptorally formed, the rest of his body muscular and limber, and his barrel chest like a ‘sounding bell’. (He had lungs of the finest Spanish leather, some would tell you, their easy expansion enough to put to shame those of the best actor or singer in town.) Loro’s hair was long, shining, in color like new-poured honey. He washed it, and his body, every day, with sandalwood soap from the East. His eyes were green as spring leaves. His teeth were strong as the rest of him, and snow white, save for one, just to the right side, knocked out in a battle he had had with three great dogs, set on him in malice by some enemy. Loro had won the battle, claimed the dogs as his prize of victory, and taken them to his lodging (funded by the Duke). Here, loved, well-treated and respected by Loro, they changed their ways, and became playfully docile with him as puppies, if standing as tall as he. But woe betide any after who meant Loro harm.

  When he had read her poem through—the popular view is it was her Morning Devotion—a silence hung like a trance. After which applause split the air, the very sky. Loro smiled and bowed. He was neither vainglorious nor servile. A prince among men was Loro.

  A little later in a quiet private garden above the square, he and Cremisia met. None detailed quite how, or what they said, but some had views and invented their language, florid and enamored. The nearest shot came from the pen of Andoros, another poet, a man of taste and generosity. ‘Never since the Golden Era of Virgil, or Homer, or the Luminous Sappho on her Isle of Maidens, has any possessed the Divine Cremisia’s gift, she who created her verses as a god of the Old World created lands and seas. And the excellent Loro, reciting, himself like a young god, caught every eye and heart and mind, even hers, in the net of his brilliance. Oh what a meeting then was theirs. The piffling matter of height, between such deities, is not in question. Be sure, before the sinking of the rose-red sun, their hands had grown together, as soon their lips must do. Not two separate souls then, but twined together life-long, inseparable and complete. And if one of them should speak the words of love, both speak them, in one voice. But never listen! Only gods can bear the beauty such a song. We should fall dead on hearing it, as the moth p
erishes in the lamp flame.’

  3

  Others would have locked her in a coffin of glass. But Loro kissed her awake.

  I had read of their meeting in several versions, some extravagant. I think perhaps it was even less dramatic than that which Andoros refers to. Loro had simply been employed to entertain at the Ranaldi Palace, where by then Cremisia again resided. He spoke her poetry (flawless, flawlessly). It was the Morning Devotion, or the Star Prayer. She listened. Afterward, somewhere, sometime, authors of their own destiny, they contrived to meet. But following that start, were not to be parted.

  (How she eluded her husband during this is conjecture. Most likely is the idea Thesaio had retired elsewhere into seclusion.) At first also, the affair was secret. But both the caring and the cruel will gossip. Through what else is the bulk of history retained?

  Raollo learned. He upbraided his daughter. She stood before him (so some texts have it) like a slender willow that is made of steel.

  Loro was barred from the palace, the city. Given the scandal, even the Duke could not prevent this. It rather appears Raollo’s assassins may have been set on Loro’s heels. His dogs assisted him, and he and they fled unscathed.

  “He is Nature’s aberration,” Raollo had bellowed, wine-full and drunk as the wine-skin, dangerous as life. “And you, you mindless minx, are already married to the noble Thesaio. Despite his parting from you, which now fails to astound me.”

  “I am married to Loro,” she seemingly replied—was she really so extravagantly foolish?—“He is my husband in the sight of every god, and of God Himself also.”

  Accordingly, or merely in passing, Raollo imprisoned her in her suite at the Palazzo. After some months, she must have persuaded her way out.

  They contend the witch-nurse was dead by then, but maybe, having been so powerful, she was able to visit, armed with advice.

  And thus. And so.

  • • •

  The next picture was before me. It was large as a wall. And presently, now without any trepidation, I found myself in the midst of it, as if inside an actual chamber of three dimensions, and formed of tactile stuffs, light and sound, scents and vibrations. I was there, standing upon the floor, the walls about me.

  Another Banquet Hall, with all the correct appurtenances. This time too the feast was being conducted more selectively. Not courtesans but respectable wives, or at the worst respectably accepted mistresses, sat by their lords.

  Veni morde malum amor mi.

  They were playing that again the old melody, the clear exalting lute of a voice, neither male nor female, to offer the Latin words: Come bite the apple, my love . . . the Snake recommended it! How can it do harm—

  Cremisia is credited with the words of this song, in their mellifluous Latin. Which seems to suggest she wrote them—a Latin scholar!—in her sixth or seventh year. Perhaps possible. She did write as an adult sometimes in good Latin. And was like no other.

  Nor was she now in the Hall of the feast.

  I myself seemed to have my own body about me, and no camouflaging period costume had been put on it. I seemed to myself, as I had half an hour before, tattered and tired, a misplaced visitor from the future.

  It was true, none of the busy stewards or servitors collided with me. Yet neither did they pass through me, nor I through them. Where I stood, at and on the edges of the tessellated floor, whose pattern showed ivory dolphin leaping and merry, russet gods with green garlands and purple grapes, I could stare about freely, apparently, a disturbance to nothing.

  I did not think I was dreaming. No longer did I reason I was under any sort of spell. I had, somehow, very intimately been enabled to witness the past. Look then, carefully, and take note.

  She did not enter in the fashion she had when a child. Instead there came a pause in the song, and next the soft warble of a pipe, less a fanfare than the eerie signal of a goddess straying from a grove.

  I had seen her in hallucinatory white and imagined scarlet. Now her gown was black as a widow’s, though ornamented with threads of gold and silver. A single smart man, her personal steward, paced after her. He seemed as composed as she, while two maidens moved just behind him, they dressed in smooth bluish-gray, like the darker doves.

  Raollo was, what else, drunk. And older now, no doubt in his fifties, wore it even less well than previously. But too, trained in and used to drunkenness, he was lucid enough.

  “Ha, my daughter!” he exclaimed. “What now?”

  Did he recall the scene of her childhood, the spice-filled, flattering apple which the same song had once heralded? If she interrupted his feasts, she must, obviously, perform some sort of show or act to flatter him. (The books do say that now and then she had been called in to recite some suitable verse, her own or another’s. She had a beautiful voice. And she was by then famous, after all.)

  No music, it had left off. Maybe an intense quiet, as the revelers, ‘respectable’ as they might be, craned to hear.

  “I have come, sir,” said Cremisia, “to ask you a riddle. And if you cannot answer it, to claim a boon of you. Do you allow this?”

  What did he do, Raollo? Some accounts have it he glared suspiciously and was loath to agree, and only the intervention of some powerful other, then present, persuaded him to go along with the ‘Fair lady’s request’. Protocol, such as existed at most of the Renascence aristocracy’s public occasions, might also have bound him to acquiesce. This had, after all, a classical ring to it. But other retellings of Cremisia’s life declared he was only too swinishly jolly then not to comply.

  “What else, my little duck? Ask away. Let’s see if we can fathom your little feminine conundrum.”

  And so I reach the instant of the riddle. How frequently through the centuries it has been quoted. For needless to tell, that night none solved it, thinking it at first too simple, and after that obtuse, insane even, nonsensical. “My riddle, my Lord, is this,” said Cremisia. “What is redder than blood?”

  “Why—” he vehemently began again. Then stopped, his mouth ajar, contemplating somewhat, at last. Lamely he added, after a moment. “Why, girl, many things.”

  “I request,” she said, “their names.”

  At which, finally scowling in concentration, irritation, he reeled off some inevitable and trite list of subjects and objects. About the hall, too, his men, and perhaps a few of the less modest ladies, added examples.

  Cremisia waited, flawless in her glittering black. She was herself, ever and always, composed of three colors, black and white, and red. Flamia, her wise and lunatic mother, had seen to that. Cremisia waited, and the hall, flush-faced, barked and fluted and yelled its suggestions. And then silence returned, and Cremisia nodded to her steward who, calling out himself in a deep, carrying tone, caused the hall doors again to open. At this, in was borne an enormous silver salver, so huge it took sixteen strong youths to bear it. As it passed each table, each bench and chair, as it mounted the steps to Raollo’s dining platform, every person there gazed and pointed. Some laughed, some jeered, some applauded, some shook their heads. And I—the future phantom at the feast—I peered long and hard at the flat gigantic silver tray and what it carried. They were all, not astonishingly, red things on it, some bright, some dark, some of a succulent medium mellowness. Apples lay there, berries, plums, other fruit, even vegetables—legumes, shoots, leaves—roses, flowers of many types, both real and formed from cloth; bowls of wine from different regions; gems—garnets, rubies—combs of deep-sea coral; scarves and girdles of velvet or sheer Florentine silk; leather dyed and burnished; metal goods, weapons with copper opulent inside them; feathers of birds; skins of creatures that had been deer or serpents, or dragons or frogs; pots of ink, of paint, of rouge and carmine; Arabic spice; glassware from Venice, sacred candles from Rome, plate from China; shoes and gloves; chess pieces; dolls; and other stuff, so much, unquantifiable, a chaos, a crowd of sights, a
nd of red. And at the center of the tray, firmly enough fixed it did not shift about, there was a hollow red bowl in which burned coals with a somber red glow, and now and then a tiny snake-tongue of flame licking out; a red, these, as clear as water . . .

  Dazzled, dizzied by the afterimage, I glanced up. The tray had gone by, it rested now on the dais, about the height of Raollo’s knee. And he pored over it, as if counting, laughing still, at a loss, superior in his ignorance and carefree in his limitations.

  “Such red,” he remarked soon enough. “We must vaunt my daughter for her artistic collation.”

  And the ignorant and limited feasters again applauded.

  And back came silence, on its cue.

  “What, there,” said Cremisia, and her trained voice fell silver-sure in even the thickest ear, “is redder, then, redder than blood.”

  The cries, like a brief little hail—“That!” “That!” “The apple!” “The sash!” “The comb!” “The girdle!” “The fire!” “All and any of it,” drawled Raollo.

  “But,” said Cremisia, calmly, “it is not. Let me show you.”

  And from her sleeve she took the smallest tiniest blade, a miniature tool for the trimming of a thread or a polished nail. When she slit the pad of her thumb with it there was, it was true, a shallow gasp of shock—thrill or disapproval, who could say.