Redder than Blood Page 4

  That done, she stood above the salver, and let her pure young blood, red as blood, slip down and dot everything, like a fragile yet hellish dew.

  Some got to their feet at this. They came along the hall and pressed near, straining to see. I was myself among them, they neither touching me nor I them, yet mingled. Each of us, it seemed, strove to judge between the blood and every other persona of red. Did this surpass it? Or this—surely—that, just there—or . . . that . . . or . . . not.

  Cremisia had herself moved away by now. The knifelet was once again concealed. She had, invisibly and accurately, staunched the wound to her thumb.

  It was not she who spoke at long last. Nor, come to that, the Prince-Tyrant Raollo. Some other anonymous voice broke through the re-clotting of soundlessness.

  “Great Lord—I cannot see a single thing that is more red.”

  “Nonsense,” said Raollo, but he was sluggish. All at once he seemed like the drunken sot he was. Slowly then he added, “She has outwitted me, the bitch.” And the merest whispers of censor at the term spirited around, like steam.

  He rose from his chair, and with his boot as he did so, deliberately or in mere drunk clumsiness, he tipped the tray, which clattered down, and each item slid and rolled off, even the dish of fire, and there was some needed scurrying then, to stop and stay, to prevent the catching alight of draperies and staining of garments. But Raollo held to his chair-back and glowered upon his daughter.

  “You have ensnared me before them all,” he said. “No, I can’t answer your excrement of a riddle. Is there an answer?”

  Level as any duelist she met the swill of his gaze with the clean blades of her own two eyes. “Yes, my lord. There is an answer.”

  “God hack-split it then, for I can’t come at it. You’ve won, you bitch-cat. So what do you want?”

  He did not need to ask. He knew.

  Conceivably all of them did.

  But she, who had not revealed the riddle’s reply, answered this other redundant question. “What do I want: That I may go free of this splendid place, my Lord, and of my renowned and honored family, and live my own life as I desire, in some other spot.”

  “And play there a harlot to a rancid dwarf,” growled Raollo, his tone muddled with saliva and malice and rage. Yet he could not deny her, of course. The most corrupt of such courts as his, in those enlightened and overlooked days, would not risk any ostensible denial of the bargain he had agreed to. He had been unable—all of them had—to say what was redder than blood. He must give in. “Go far off then,” he snarled. “And be orphaned of me and damned by me, and accursed of Christ. Take nothing with you but the clothes you have on your body. Nor ever come here again to beg another mote of me.”

  “I promise that I will not,” she said.

  And turning she walked from the hall, through all the lavish golden light, and the spillage of reds—none of which was redder that the blood of woman or man or child or beast. Away she went, and as she did, the whole picture abruptly sank and faded. And I lurched backward—snatching at a wall to save myself from a fall into the lightless, bloodless dark.

  4

  Veni morde malum amor mi

  In the time of pre-Christian Rome, malum meant an apple. In Christian times, certainly from the reign of Nero, and allied to the Older Testament of Genesis, and the Temptation in the Garden, malum might still mean an apple—but also Evil. Thus the world runs.

  • • •

  As I saw a hint of faint general lamplight ahead of me along the passage, in the staggering dark and night-chill of the house, great relief laved me over. Anceto, after all, must have come in. Despite his scarer’s words—dare not—Thank God. He had, obviously, a lamp; had maybe brought some beer or wine—or hot coffee, even better. Best of all, genuine human company. It was not I reckoned I had gone mad. I’d read of such ghostly adventures as had beset me in the Palazzo. But the notion of relief from it all, of actual ordinariness, was more than welcome.

  Two big doors of carved blond oak hung ajar. I pushed one wide, and there the new room lay. It was much smaller than the others I had been shown, or entered. A salon for conversation and intimate sociability, not feast and flamboyance.

  The lamplight was paler too, a melon-lemon glaze.

  Two figures only were present, neither of them Anceto. One I had beheld before, the other only in my mind. He sat on a low chair, a book, huge as in those days so often they were, across a pedestal before him. He was handsome and young. I surmise he looked, maybe, either a touch younger—or more mature—than his years. I noticed then a tawny silky hound leaned relaxedly against his very short, very strong leg.

  She however was stationed by an open window, though which faintly drifted the night aroma of jasmine, and other fragrant nurtured plants.

  As before, she was clad in red. Blood red, if not a red any more red than blood. Her loose raven wings of hair were wound with pearls—white, and chains of jet-stones—black.

  She had been looking out, and now she turned. In age, I guessed she was about thirty-five, which in her era generally would seem older, though she did not.

  I had, and have seen, close to, many women of great loveliness, and of many differing types. But none like her. Her beauty surely held a dagger’s edge that did not cut, a soft caress that stung. Or, she was only peerlessly beautiful, perhaps, only that. The previous sights I had had of her here, in the palace of her forebears, had been paintings on glass. This alone was real.

  My weariness sloughed from me, leaving me light-headed and adrift.

  I knew, back in the 1500s, Raollo had sent his men also after her, despite the bargain of the riddle. But they failed to find her, or else they refused to do so. And Loro quickly spirited her off, as he had done with himself, hundreds of miles away to some area that has never been satisfactorily defined. Some even declared the lovers visited England, or the Eastern Lands, India . . . A decade after, when Raollo and his fellow tyrannical masters of the Ranaldi had, one way or another, sunk in graves out of history’s sight, Cremisia reinherited the Palazzo in Corvenna.

  By that time, Thesaio having himself died from some plague, Loro and she were wed. Loro took her name, a reverse of custom unheard of and barely managed. Until his demise, and, finally, in her hundredth year, Cremisia’s own, they resided at the palace. And, it seemed, as Anceto had described, on nights of the near-full moon, they did so still.

  Loro—who but he—glanced at me only, nodding politely, as though to a known and trusted acquaintance, always acceptable, if seldom a visitor. But she held my gaze, and it was impossible to look away. There was nothing flirtatious about her. It was a kind and affectionate air she had, it seemed, for me. I was a distant cousin, perhaps, largely unknown, but familial none the less.

  I did not, I swear to this, imagine such a welcome. Doubtless, it was how she would seem to very many, who found themselves able to behold her. She was patient with the living.

  Then she spoke. To begin with, I think it was the Italian of the Renascence. Soon—I have no idea how—gradually her words altered to an English I assimilated at once, as most speech eventually, if unconsciously, must have done, when I watched the pictured scenes.

  “Be seated, good friend. Will you try some wine?”

  How in the world could I sit upon this uncertain couch, or drink the wine of ghosts? Or was I the ghost—for them, being not yet born?

  “Yes, yes, thank you, Madonna. Gladly. You are generous.”

  And I sat, quite securely. And she it was who brought the cup to me, ready-filled. It was Venetian glass, the palest green, like fresh cucumber altered to crystal. The wine was the shade of a noble sherry, and—when I tried it, expecting anything—empty air, poison—of a pleasing mellow taste.

  It eased me too.

  She took a glass also to her husband. She did not drink. She said, “So you know of the riddle I coined to tr
ap my oppressor?”

  What could I say. “Yes, Madonna.”

  (I am always reminded that the old Italian honorific Madonna, means not only ‘my Lady’ but also the Virgin Maria. The discrepancy, with Cremisia, was less.)

  “Then,” she said, “Signore, shall I reveal the answer? Or have you already guessed it?”

  I took too much of the wine. I coughed.

  The beautiful dwarf spoke his baritone from the chair:

  “That vintage always catches me just the same, Signore, at the first glass.” But the silken dog had opened its elegant mouth and I could see it laughed at me, if not churlishly. Under Loro’s chair was too another such dog, this one stretched out and dreaming, if ghosts can dream. Momentarily I fretted as to where the third hound was, but soon enough it sprang in through the open moonless window, and dropped from its mouth, at Cremisia’s red-slippered feet, neither a dead shrew nor a mangled rabbit, but a single unspoilt spray of jasmine, white as the sinking stars. Which she lifted, and smoothing the canine head, put into her hair.

  Ah, but I was happy in that room with them. If I could have remained, or some next time gone back—but plainly even the least sensible supernatural laws of this world would never allow that. Cautiously I sipped my wine.

  “Madonna, Sua Excellenza, merely to sit with you—I am privileged. Yes, if you will, explain the riddle. I don’t understand it. I never have.”

  Now she laughed. Her laugh was music. And he smiled at me. “Some,” he said, “make out they do. Few have ever had the proper answer.”

  “Which is very simple,” Cremisia said. “So simple one can miss it, like the darkened coin left in the sunflower’s heart in the old story.”

  Beyond the window I saw then, suddenly, the very last cloud-veil of the moon slipping into the darkened city.

  In my hand the glass was cold.

  “What is redder than blood,” said Cremisia Ranaldi. “Nothing is redder than blood. Nothing at all. Proprio niente. Nihil. The answer therefore is: Nothing.”

  A great bell had struck. Deafened by it I sat. “But Madonna—”

  “Nothing, Signore, is redder than blood. Yet, if the answer is Nothing, then what does Nothing signify?”

  She waited. I set down the glass, afraid I should drop it, ghost-crystal or not. I said, “Nothing is—the lack of anything—No Thing—the absence of all—”

  Cremisia said, “No, Signore. In this we have misunderstood. Nothing is the absence of anything we may understand. It is invisible in this world, has no presence or substance, neither sight nor sound, touch nor taste, not even, usually, any feeling of itself. It is the vast and unknowable sea that rings us round and lies beyond the physical reality of life, and out of which fly amazements and miracles unforetold. It is what awaits us, just as it is the fount from which we sprang. And being Nothing, we cannot here remember it, just as, here, we fear to enter it again. It is Un-ness, it is Death, it is the empty and unknowable ending. And yet, and yet, in fact it is only perceived in this way since we have here no words for it, no channels of our clever physical minds able to capture and convey its being, either to others or ourselves. It is—here—so unlike here, and what we too are when here, that we find no method to visualize or reclaim it. Or—if some great poet or mystic somewhat may, he, being lost for words, can only resort to symbols, architypes most others will dismiss. Only before, or after life, do we know it. When we are one with it, with Nothing, nothing at all, Nihil. Only then.”

  I was glad I had put down rather than dropped the goblet. I said, stammering a little, “Your words, Madonna, fill me with terror and depression.”

  “Never let them,” she said. “If they do, you have not grasped what I say. Nothing is Everything that is not in the world; nor ever could be. Nothing is the name that has been given to the Truth.”

  Another silence then. My teeth chattered. I was so cold. We hold to our flimsy hopes and beliefs, our prayers—our dreams—To have one of the dead inform me that only annihilation waited—

  She shook her head. The pearls and jets made music with the jasmine in her hair.

  “No, no,” she gently said. (She had read my thoughts?) “Ah, Loro, my darling, shall we show him? It is partly possible to us,” she said, “as now we are.”

  And he nodded. And my heart, I believe, stopped—and then—before I could protest or run away, the room turned to the color of blood, than which nothing was more red. And in the vastness of its scarlet I was subsumed. Lost. Over.

  • • •

  I awoke in his arms: Anceto, strong as a lion, was carrying me across the bridge on the canal.

  Behind and around his head, the dawn singed the sky, not red now—could ever anything be red again?—a sort of stony blue.

  “What—” I said—“why—”

  “Fear nothing, Edmondo, I have you safe.”

  “Did I die?”

  He smiled down at me, his expression just visible in the gloaming. “No, Edmondo. You fainted, or you slept. Just inside the little side door the caretaker found you, and called to me.”

  How had I got there? I seemed to have tramped the whole of the Palazzo through. The dark had drowned me. But before the dark—

  Dully I said, “You waited all night.”

  “Hush,” he said, “rest now. I have seen all this before, you must remember. And you are my dear friend. We’ll talk later, at the inn.”

  Not meaning to, I drifted. From my mouth came a scatter of dreamlike words. “You’re too young, Anceto, but still like the father I never had . . .”

  “Rest then, my dear son,” he answered.

  And so I did.

  • • •

  We were at another inn, a little taverna at the core of three twisted streets, with a distant architectural church—a view only, high on a hill, as unrelated to us as the sky to a cave. I slept all that day, or I must have done, and in the evening we ate and drank in the usual nicely vine-hung yard. Moths came to our candles, then flew upward, more intent on the unguttering flame of a full moon.

  “Tell me nothing,” Anceto said. I had not uttered a revealing word. “Remember what I have told you of my cowardice and prudence.”

  “How do I seem, then?” I asked him, as midnight struck creakily and all round in seventy different voices, that night taking well over ten minutes to establish itself on all sides.

  “A man worn to his bones. Yet—” Anceto paused—“as now and then also I have seen, uplifted. If so, I am glad for it. But you must reveal no word of why.”

  “I know the riddle’s answer.”

  “Hush.”

  Stubbornly I added, “I saw her. Near as you.”

  “Of course you did. I never doubted you would.”

  “She is beautiful.”

  “Of course she is.”

  “The rest is madness.”

  He said, with playful sternness, “As your English Shakespeare has it, The rest is silence.”

  And then I laughed. It rang around the court, making one or two remaining drinkers glance up. But I was docile enough. They let us be.

  And Anceto wagged his finger at me, then put the finger over his lips.

  “You’ve been,” I said, “the best guide and the most loyal friend to me. How, Anceto, can I repay you?”

  “I know you have no money,” he said, and grinned.

  “Not much—but yet—”

  “I will take nothing,” he said. But then he leaned across, and in the muted moth-light of the candle, he kissed me on the mouth. It was the most decorous kiss, but nevertheless, a lover’s.

  After which, calmly and separately, we repaired to our cramped and rickety beds.

  The next morning he was gone, but our lodging and supper, even my breakfast, had been paid for.

  To this hour I am unsure if he was quite real, or also some form of physica
lly perfect ghost. But God knows, I shall never forget him, Anceto. Never. Here . . . or anywhere.

  Epilogus

  Then what is the answer to the riddle? If it is Nothing, then what does Nothing, in this context, mean? How I wish I might tell you. But, evidently, I don’t know. How can I know? What then, in the storm of Red, did I see? Or after the tempest altered—for alter it did—did I see then? Again, I wish I might tell you. How I wish I might. But I cannot, cannot remember. Only this can I relate.

  Something there was. Something that apparently we call Nothing. I can neither speak of it nor remember it. Not a sight, not a sound do I retain. Although the ghosts of the Palazzo I summon, at any moment to my memory, my voice and pen, and present them to you. But that second sequence—or that glorious abyss beyond my conscious awareness—that I can never call back, for either myself or any of us. Why should you therefore credit that eccentric Edmund Sanger, son of the illustrious actor-architect Joseph William, ever received a vision of utter and pristine Truth he cannot, even in a dream, recapture? Why indeed.

  All I can offer is this (without a single remembrance or image, or even incoherent wisp of correspondence), even so I knew, in those eradicated moments, and I know still: That there, there outside the gates of any physical state or world we may inhabit, something is—which, being so unlike, so beautiful and radiant and eternal—can never be transported into living life, not even by a word. Brighter than fires, more soft than fur, better than the best—nameless, non-communicable, absolute. And, without a bookmark in our hearts or brains to enable us to find it while here, yet there—there it nevertheless is, and will be ever. There is nothing to fear or to regret. There is no end. Only always a Beginning—that not even the most lucid scripture, or most transcendent art (even that of the Scarlet Lily, Cremisia Ranaldi) can recreate. We touch upon it, yes, I believe we do, in our greatest poets (which is why, if only as a ghost, she could undo the door). In the best of love or joy, that too—but all of this is a shadow. The shadow of the Nothing which is Everything.