The Golden Key (16 page)

He believed. One day the prayer would be answered. One day another would come. One day Tza’ab Rih would be born in the breast of a man, even if he be a stranger. Even if he be born in what was now Tira Virte, that once was Tza’ab Rih. From the heart of the enemy would come Acuyib’s savior, a second Diviner. So he had seen in the magic, and had come to live among the enemy if not
of
him.

Death might be cleaner than living so, but Acuyib had not decreed it. And so the old man lived as he had lived for decades, secure beyond supposition in the certainty of his faith.

Alejandro scowled. Behind him stood the backdrop: A monstrous drape of purple velurro hemmed with braided gold cord, bedecked with massive tassels. Beyond
that
, albeit muffled, sounded the cacophony of the summer day: the drone of bees tending the scarlet vine blossoms spilling onto the sill of the unshuttered window; the staccato whirring of hummingbirds in competition with bees for nectar; the dueling songs of mockingbirds in complex conversation; the occasional outbreaks of laughter from the gardeners tending the courtyard below.

But where he was, the noise was far more prosaic and therefore wholly tedious: the tuneless humming of Zaragosa Serrano, intermixed with self-satisfied comments to the easel he faced; the scratch of chalk on pebbled, wood-speckled paper; the annoying half-whistle of breath sucked in and blown out between pursed lips.

Behind him, beyond him, the world beckoned. Alejandro fidgeted. He chafed. He felt the burgeoning of impatience that threatened to prove painful unless he found release. He could not be still much longer. He was made to move, not to stand stiffly, unnaturally, so a thin-faced, crimson-clad peacock could make annoying noises.

Alejandro, discommoded, scowled more blackly yet.

This time Serrano, looking up from his sketch, protested, albeit politely. “No—eiha, no, Don Alejandro … could you lift your chin again, grazzo?—only a moment longer, en verro …”

Alejandro did not lift his chin again. He continued to scowl.

“Grazzo, Don Alejandro—”

But Don Alejandro rejected the plea. “No more,” he declared, relaxing from the stiff pose into a natural posture. “You are too slow.”

“True art requires time, Don Alejandro—”

“Other artists don’t take so long.” The boy left the backdrop entirely and arrived to inspect the board on which the Lord Limner sketched his image. He scowled more deeply. “That isn’t me.”

Zaragosa’s chuckle was forced. “Subjects rarely recognize themselves … but of course it is you, Don Alejandro. This is but a rough sketch, the merest beginning—”

“It doesn’t look anything
like
me.”

“Perhaps not precisely, not just yet, but it shall, Don Alejandro—when I begin painting—”

With the definitiveness of youth, Alejandro shook his head. “I’ve seen Itinerarrios and street artists do better than that.”

That stung. Deeply. Zaragosa Serrano colored a deep and most unflattering shade of red much at odds with the crimson of his summer doublet.

Alejandro took careful note of it. “It is
my
face,” he pointed out reasonably. “I want it to be correct.”

Serrano, outraged, glared. “It
is
correct—have I not said it takes time? Have I not said that this is but the roughest of beginnings? Have I not said that once I begin laying on paint—”

“Yes, yes,” Alejandro interrupted, employing his father’s ducal impatience—it always got results. “But if it isn’t to look like me, why must I stand here for most of the day when I would rather be out there?”

Out there
was indicated by a wave of one arm, encompassing the unshuttered window. Summer sunlight poured in, as did temperate air and the sounds of the world beyond. But Zaragosa Serrano had struck Alejandro on many occasions as deaf to all but what he heard inside his head; it was a great jest among the Courtfolk that one could call him every epithet known to the language when he was caught up in his work, and he would merely grunt detached acceptance.

“This is to be your
Peintraddo Natalio
—”

“It won’t be my birthday for two months yet.”

“Of course, but a great work of art requires
time
—”

Alejandro stared penetratingly at the preliminary sketch a long moment, then shifted his unwavering hazel-eyed stare to the artist. “Even the Courtfolk say you are slow.”

Zaragosa Serrano, already red with barely contained frustration,
now turned corpse-candle white. Alejandro found it fascinating that mere words could hold such power over a man’s skin color.

“They say that?” Serrano’s chalk broke in his hand. “They say that?” He tossed down the pieces. “They say that, do they?” Now he snatched up a cloth and threw it haphazardly over the sketch. “Do they say that?”

Alejandro nodded gravely.

“Filho do’canna!” The Lord Limner forgot entirely he was not to swear before his Duke’s son—who of course knew all the words anyway, having spent time in the kitchens, in the stables, even in the guardroom, where every male born appeared to have intimate knowledge of a wide array of wondrously dramatic invective. “All of them, the pigs and sows … they know nothing of greatness, nothing—they spend their hours painting their pox-plagued faces, when they would do better to allow me to paint them on canvas the way they
wish
their flesh to look, each and every one of them—chiros all of them, rooting in filth for the single delicacy of gossip, of intrigue, of political expediency!—while I spend every hour of my day laboring to serve as the Duke wills it … what then, are they lacking the stench of human wastes? Merdittas albas, are they?” His foot crushed the discarded chalk into the stone floor, grinding it into powder. “What am I but Lord Limner, after all?—
Lord Limner
, appointed by the Duke himself to document the lives of the do’Verradas, the business of the city, the duchy—even of such chiros as those who inhabit the Court …” His face now was empurpled. “Do you think it is easy for me? Do you think I find it effortless to spend my days begging and pleading for a nobleborn to ‘turn this way, lift your chin, hold the smile just so—ah, no,
this
way, if you please—oh, a moment longer’…
bassda!
I am ill-used indeed for my time, my talent. I should paint them all as what they are, and call it
Il Chiros do’Tira Virte
… and it should be a masterwork to reflect the truth of this Court!”

Alejandro blinked. “I should like to paint you the way you are this moment. And call it
Il Borrazca.
”

But the storm that inspired Alejandro’s title had blown itself out. Now, in its aftermath, a trembling and fearful Lord Limner gathered his inconsequential dignity and took it—and himself—out of the atelierro.

The campaign thus was won, and with little effort expended. Alejandro, grinning, made his escape into the day.

Claiming illness, Sario fasted for two days. He drank nothing but water. On the morning of the third day he rose, collected his urine in a clean receptacle, filled a single glass vial with a portion of the contents, sealed it, set it aside.

The night before, though it was summer, he had lit his brazier. Into an iron pot he had placed small chunks of amber, the resin of trees; now it was melted, ready for use.

He washed his hair in clean rainwater and, while it was still wet, took up a knife and cut a hank from the back of his neck. With infinite care he trimmed the hair so that its shape, density and texture mimicked that of a brush; he then carefully married the trimmed hair to the slender stick of unpolished wood, tied it on with thread, then sealed it with melted resin.

Next he drank an infusion that, within five minutes, drove up his body’s temperature alarmingly. Feverish, racked with shudders and tears, he clung stubbornly to two vials and murmured prayers that he had not miscalculated; when within moments he broke out in a rolling sweat, he thanked the Mother and Her Blessed Son and collected both tears and perspiration in the bottles, sealed them, set them aside.

He spat prodigiously into a fourth tiny vial, sealed it as well, put it with the others.

He opened a finger with a heated lancet, counted the dollops of blood as they fell into a tiny bottle, sealed it also.

Urine. Tears. Sweat. Saliva. Blood.

One more fluid to be harvested before he could make the magic work.

His breathing quickened. Quietly he rose and slipped out of his sleeping smock. He looked down at his body: still boyishly slender, lacking the flesh, the muscle, the power of an adult male. But he was a male withal, though young yet, and all of him knew it. Most mornings proved it.

This morning he had not spilled his seed. He found it somewhat annoying; he had been prepared. But now it would require something more than dreams, than imaginings, than unknown instinct crying out for release though he knew little of what it was.

He was virgin still, and would be until sent to the fertile women for Confirmattio. Not for tumbles in dark corners was he; not for secret assignations in the midst of night. Nor were any of them, who might be Gifted. A boy’s awakening was very nearly a sacred thing in the Grijalva family, because so much of their livelihood, their survival, depended on it.

If he were fertile, he was not Gifted. If he sired a child, he was
nothing but a man. And for such as he, in whose brain and body burgeoned such talent and ambitions, fertile seed would prove his undoing.

What he had done this morning was forbidden; he had not yet undergone Confirmattio, was not yet admitted, not yet permitted such knowledge, such power as what he undertook. But time ran on swiftly, too swiftly; he dared not let it go without accelerating his own grasp upon it, to control it before it controlled him.

Before it controlled him.

For a moment his spirit quailed. What he undertook now was a watershed in his life. If he turned his back on it, rejected it, life went on as it had. If he grasped it, if he accepted the responsibility, life was forever changed.

I’m just a boy
, his inner self said.

In boyhood was safety. In mediocrity also. In lack of ambition. In the serene acceptance of one’s limitations.

I could be just like everyone else. I could paint, and teach, and maybe sire children, live out my life in peace.

But the Light in his heart, his soul, flared up in conflagration and burned to ash the trepidations. All that remained was the talent, the Light, the hunger.

He stared fixedly at random motes caught upon pale sunlight slanting through warped shutters. “I am Sario Grijalva. I
will
be Lord Limner—because now I know how.”

One more fluid to be collected. He was young, but he knew how. His body had taught him.

He need only think of
her.

  EIGHT