by Ken Hood
"What need have you of hexers if you have one good shaman?"
Toby had registered Hamish's slack-jawed astonishment a split second before that new voice at his back spun him around.
A bizarre figure came limping across the courtyard toward them. It was short and completely enveloped in a floating costume of many colors and many parts — panels and swatches in green and brown and gray, bedecked with ribbons and lace, beads and embroidery, bunches of feathers and wisps of grass, a design that was either completely random or fraught with great meaning. Some parts of it looked new, others were grubby and worn by many years of use. The dainty, pointed chin suggested a woman, but she might be a young girl, or even a boy. Her hair and the upper part of her face were hidden by a blindfold and an elaborate headdress. Around her neck hung a drum as large as a meal sieve, which she steadied against her hip with one small brown hand.
Obviously she had just come out of the villa, but how had she passed the guards in there? How had she even entered the camp unchallenged? The hob was not reacting as it did to gramarye. Was this one of the camp brats playing a joke?
To his credit, the don remained on his stool. A slight narrowing of his eyes was the only sign of tension as he crossed his legs and leaned back to rest his elbows on the table. "And who might you be?"
She smiled, revealing a perfect set of sparkling white teeth. "Are you not in need of a hexer?" Her voice had a singsong accent and a curious huskiness. "And are you not all faithful children of His Splendor the Khan, who has sent his son to direct you? Who doubts that the illustrious prince has sent his personal shaman to be your guide and protector against the demons of the foe?"
Toby did, but he bowed. Hamish just glowered.
The don frowned. "A battlefield is not a fit place for a woman!"
"Who is it a fit place for?"
For a moment he bristled at such heresy, then twirled up his mustache, which was usually a sign of amusement. He rose gracefully and bowed. "Don Ramon de Nuñez y Pardo at your service, madonna."
"And I am Toby Longdirk."
"Who does not know you? Am I not Sorghaghtani? And is not Chabi my eyes, who found you?" The shaman raised an arm, and the great white owl floated down to settle on it, then shuffled sideways until it stood on her shoulder. The shaman was not just a boy playing pranks.
The don had not been aware of the owl.
Hamish said, "How do we know that you are sent by the prince and not the Fiend?"
"Are you not still breathing?" Chuckling, Sorghaghtani perched on a stool and arranged her drum on her lap. She ran fingertips over the skin, raising barely audible tremors like distant gunfire. Her hands and the visible part of her face had a brownish olive cast that was not European. Inside those extraordinary hodgepodge draperies she might be young or old, but there could not be very much of her. She was brazenly sure of herself and her owl — nothing else was provable at the moment. "Is your imp distressed by my presence, Little One?"
Toby assumed she was speaking to him, as the owl was staring in his direction. "No. Do you keep a spirit immured in your pet?"
"Who is the pet and who the keeper? Is it wise of you to arrange your council and not include the illustrious Neguder?"
"I have never heard of anyone called Neguder." Toby was starting to believe he was holding this conversation with the bird and not the woman. She was inhumanly motionless, except for the resonant tremor of her fingers on the drum and the movement of her lips as she spoke.
"Who else would be military advisor to the splendid prince?"
"Is he competent?" barked the don.
The owl turned its head in his direction. "Competent?" the shaman shrilled. "Who asks if a Tartar general is competent?"
"I do. Is he?"
"How could he be, when all preferment in the army is based on birth, when the Horde has not fought a war in two centuries, when all the skills of the steppes are forgotten and the swords rusted? Who would trust a man who drinks himself to stupidity every night?"
The don looked ready to eat his mustache. "Then why should I invite him to anything?"
"Will you defy the express command of illustrious Prince Sartaq, noble son of Ozberg Khan, your exalted liege lord?"
"Show me this command!"
"Can you not wait and ask him yourself?"
"Why," snapped the don, "do you always answer questions with questions?"
"Does it annoy you?"
"Yes it does."
The woman smiled.
Hamish leaned across the table, peering at her blindfold to see if it was genuine. "Why should we trust you? How do we know you are not sent by the enemy? Or are just a fake? How old are you?" He was seriously annoyed.
"Will you believe in me when I give you such boils on your backside that you cannot sit down?"
"Do that, and I'll wring your bird's neck and make it into soup. Why are you blindfolded?"
"If Chabi must be my eyes, will not the noon sun be too bright for her?"
"Well, yes, but…" Hamish straightened up. Frowning, he fell silent as he tried to puzzle out what that answer-question implied. At least the shaman had taken his mind off Lisa.
CHAPTER FOUR
They might be violent by nature, but soldiers of fortune were rarely monsters. The men of the Don Ramon Company were as concerned for the welfare of their souls as most other men, as heedful of the guidance of good spirits, and as abhorrent of demons' mindless evil. They were reasonably devout — but only reasonably. They would have as soon trusted their opponents not to use gramarye against them as they would have gone into battle wearing paper helmets. Only gramarye could fight gramarye, so the death of the company hexer had been the cause of much foreboding. If Longdirk tried to lead them to war before he found a credible replacement for the late Karl Fischart, he would march alone. Could they accept a woman? Even more unlikely, could they accept a shaman, whose style of conjuration would be so unfamiliar to them?
Could he? It was to be expected that the Tartar prince would show interest in the victor of Trent, but for Sartaq to assign his personal shaman to one of the smaller mercenary companies out of all the dozens in Italy was a gift horse with a very large mouth indeed. Was Sorghaghtani what she said she was? Whom did she serve? Hamish did not want to trust her, although he could not explain how he would test any adept for hidden loyalties. Toby was prepared to accept her because the hob seemed to. Either she was a hexer of such enormous power that she could blind the hob, or else she meant no harm. If he vouched for her, Hamish would go along, and the don probably would. How about the rest of the Company?
Sorghaghtani herself asked that question before he did. She also inquired why he did not invite all the officers to meet her at sunset in the courtyard and why he did not show her to her quarters in the meantime.
Since Fischart's death, the adytum held no spiritual threat to disturb the hob. Toby could go there now and had even inspected it a few days previously with the idea of turning it into a gunpowder store, eventually deciding it was too close to the villa. He conducted the little shaman there. She seemed pleased with the building and asked why he did not leave her to get on with her work.
He walked by it a few times during the day and each time heard her drum throbbing away inside as if she were performing some sort of shamanistic spring cleaning, but the hob paid no attention. Twice he tapped on the door to ask if she needed food and neither time was there any answer, but when he went to fetch her at sunset, she came out to meet him with her drum slung around her neck, all ready to go. An instant later the owl swooped down to settle on her shoulder.
"Do you need food, madonna?"
"Who? Why give me titles? If my mother called me Sorghaghtani, is that not good enough for you? Who can quest in the spirit world with a full stomach?" She hobbled off along the path. She was blindfolded, although the light would not bother her owl now. He could not tell whether her awkward gait meant that she was old or just badly shod. For all he knew, there was an adolescent insid
e that grotesque costume.
He caught up with her, staying on the non-owl side. "Have you cleansed the adytum of evil influences, Sorghaghtani, the shadow Oreste mentioned?"
"Have you sharpened the pikes, Little One?"
"You would rather I did not ask you questions?"
"Is not one of us enough?"
He could not tell if she was being humorous, since her face was hidden — he was so much taller than she that he could not even see the owl's goggle-eyed stare. He tried again. "I have assembled the officers. Will you tell me what you propose to do?"
"Why cannot you wait and see?"
"Do you ever say anything that is not a question?"
"Why do you ask?"
Toby sighed. "I'm beginning to wonder."
She chuckled, and that was an improvement.
"I have seen your owl many times in the last few weeks, and heard a drum. Was that you?"
"Who else?"
"Why were you spying on me?"
"Was I spying or just trying to find you?"
"I assume when you answer like that… I mean, I take that answer to mean that you were trying to find me."
"Do you?"
This was becoming more than a little irritating. "Warn me what you plan tonight, Sorghaghtani, because the hob — my imp as you call it — will not tolerate gramarye."
"Have I vexed it yet, Little One? Would it behave so well if I were a danger to you? How much will it do your bidding?"
"I try not to let it do anything. If I do, it will soon learn to bypass my controls and then overpower me. The tutelary at Montserrat warned me of that many times. Let sleeping demons lie."
The shaman chortled. "Tutelaries? You always believe tutelaries? Why do you carry it so strangely in your heart?"
"I do not carry it willingly at all. It cannot be exorcised, for we have grown too much together."
"Think you I cannot see that? Will not both become one soon?"
"Not soon. In many years perhaps, and I can only hope that then I will be the one who survives."
She did not offer her opinion of his chances.
* * *
Even before the horrors of Trent, Toby Longdirk had seen more manifestations of gramarye than most men, but not all of it had been violent and destructive. In the days before he learned to suppress its antics, the hob had often played tricks around him — often embarrassing, as when he found pretty things collecting in his pockets, sometimes deadly, but once in a while very convenient, almost as if it could think and were trying to please. So he knew gramarye, and yet Sorghaghtani's seance that evening was unlike anything he had ever witnessed before. It was subtle and stunningly effective, and the hob never stirred.
The courtyard was deeply shadowed, lit by a willowy moon in the pink dusk and the gleam of a few candles inside the villa itself. After the long-awaited payday, not all the officers of the Company were available to attend a council or competent to understand what was happening if they did, but the don had collected at least a score of them, perhaps thirty. They stood in small groups around the edges, under the trellises, staying well back, as if frightened the new hexer would turn them into goats to demonstrate her skills.
Toby presented Sorghaghtani, personal shaman to His Highness Prince Sartaq. He mentioned how honored and fortunate the Don Ramon Company was to have acquired such a hexer. The resulting silence might have come straight out of one of the age-old Etruscan tombs that were being excavated around Tuscany. Unless these men could be convinced, they would not persuade the rank and file.
"Are you always so mud-headed?" Sorghaghtani demanded shrilly. "What must I show you? Will you give me your hand, Little One, and stand at my back lest I fall off?"
Clutching his fingers in a powerful grip, she scrambled up on a stool and then the stone table itself. Evidently she could move as nimbly as a child when she wanted to, and his estimate of her age plummeted. She sat down cross-legged, gave the owl a wrist to step onto, and raised it overhead. Chabi spread her wings and floated away into the night. Sorghaghtani squirmed a few times as if to make herself comfortable on the hard tabletop, then settled the drum on her lap. "Do they understand that they must not speak, lest they anger the spirits?"
Of course they did not, so Toby passed the word. He stood ready behind the shaman and waited to see what she could do to convince this case-hardened crew of mercenaries.
For a long time she just drummed, but no one protested or made jokes or tried to leave. The rhythms were hypnotic and also restless, seeming to sing back and forth to their own echoes, although normally there were no echoes in the courtyard. To and fro, in and out, the sound went, surging and falling, then stopped abruptly, leaving a silence taut enough to raise the hair on a man's neck. The shaman sat hunched over her drum, motionless. When she spoke, the voice that rang out was female, but not hers.
"Mario! I, Angelica, speak. I need you. The mare foals tonight."
In the far corner, Mario Chairmontesi cried out.
Then another voice came from Sorghaghtani's throat, and this time Toby knew it, although he had not heard it for almost three years. "Ramon! Francisca am I. The new casa is ready, but servants… oh, to find servants!"
Wherever the don was standing in the courtyard, he did not comment, or if he did, the sound was lost in another voice: "Martin, my child! Hilda. So tall you are, so strong! Hilda with Ehingen am."
At that, Toby really did feel the hairs on his neck prickle, for Ehingen could only be a spirit or tutelary, so the woman who had spoken was dead. But he had no time to wonder what Martin Grossman was thinking before another spoke, and another, faster and jostling, as if the voices were struggling to take their turn in the shaman's mouth — not wives or lovers, only mothers, and more than half of them naming the spirit that now cherished them. Most spoke in Italian, but others used German or French or Spanish. Some, like Hilda, spoke as if to children. One just wailed incoherently, perhaps a wraith with no tutelary to care for it. One said plaintively, "You never knew me." The audience was reacting. Men tried to answer, or ask questions, or call back those who had spoken and fallen silent. Others tried to hush them as they waited for their own message. Some merely howled. Many wept as the significance sank in, and the weeping was infectious.
Barely audible through the rising hubbub, the last voice of all spoke very softly in the lilt of Gaelic. "Meg, Tobias. You do not remember, but I am with you. Proud I am." He had expected Granny Nan…
With him? None of the others had said that. Oh, spirits! No, no! Never in the years he had been possessed by the hob had he considered that it had been, in its witless, blundering, indifferent fashion, the nearest thing Tyndrum had to a tutelary. Only to the hob could the souls of the dead in Strath Fillan appeal for succor. So had it cherished them? All of them or some of them? When the hob left its haunt and went on its travels in Toby Longdirk, did it in some sense take them with it? He had no time to think of the implications, for the seance was over, and Sorghaghtani toppled backward into his arms.
She weighed nothing. He stood and cradled her as he would a child while his mind scrambled to recall every nuance of those faint words. You do not remember… Of course not, for Meg Campbell had died giving birth to a bastard rape-child, and she had been only a child herself. All around the courtyard, the officers of the Don Ramon Company were shuffling toward the exit — going alone, not in groups, not speaking. But a lot of them seemed to be weeping, and Toby realized that his own cheeks were wet, and his throat ached. Meg Campbell, the mother he had never known…
The shaman mumbled and began to stir. She had proved her skills. She had turned a score of intractable mercenary veterans into sniveling children.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lucrezia Marradi had two brothers. The elder, Pietro — poet, patron of the arts, head of the family bank, and, hence, head of the family — in his spare time ran city and state as a family fief. The younger was illegitimate, but bastardy mattered little in Italy, and he had followed a notable c
areer in spiritualism, rising rapidly in the College until he was one of the senior cardinals, perhaps a future Holy Father. Early in March, Ricciardo Cardinal Marradi paid a visit to his native city, of which he was officially arch-acolyte.
Relieved that he would not have to send Hamish to Rome, Toby wrote asking for a meeting at His Eminence's convenience. He took the precaution of routing the request through the Magnificent. He waited, with growing concern. He asked again. He took the matter to Benozzo's successor, Cecco de' Carisendi, but the old man seemed unable to comprehend the seriousness of the problem — there was very little he did comprehend. It was on the tenth and final day of the cardinal's visitation that the captain-general and his deputy were summoned to the Marradi Palace to meet him. Toby took Hamish along.
He had been hoping and expecting that the meeting would be private, but they were shown into a busy antechamber, teeming with the usual crowd of sycophants and supplicants, and there they were left a long time. The snub itself was disturbing, both because it would soon become common knowledge in Florence and because anyone could guess why the captain-general needed to call upon the cardinal. Even when they were led through into the next high-ceilinged, overdecorated hall, they had not done with waiting. In the center the great man was holding court within about a score of people — mostly acolytes, male and female, but also four or five members of his family, including his brother and sister — and they were all just standing there having a loudly jolly chat, punctuated by much laughter. Clerks and stewards wandered around to no clear purpose.
The don was not noted for his patience. Cooling his heels always made his head hotter, and already he was muttering Castilian things under his breath. Eventually a chancellor arrived to confirm the visitors' identities, as if silver helmets were two-a-penny in Florence. Another wait. Then three of the courtiers kissed the cardinal's ring and departed. Everyone else remained, but now it seemed that the visitors were to have their audience.
