The Moon and the Sun

by Vonda McIntyre

  “If it’s there to be seen,” Count Lucien said, “why has Mynheer van Leeuwenhoek not seen it?”

  “Because he wasn’t looking for it.” Suddenly shy—she had never confessed her ambition to anyone else—Marie-Josèphe spread her hands, releasing everything she had said. “Pay no attention—”

  “Have you no faith in my philosophical inclinations, Mlle de la Croix?” Count Lucien said mildly. “Am I incapable of understanding your theories?”

  “I don’t yet understand them myself, sir.” Marie-Josèphe glanced away, chastened. “They require time and work. I have too little of the former and too much of the latter.”

  Unwilling to say more about her unlikely dreams, Marie-Josèphe rose and fetched her drawing box from where it had fallen when she confronted the Chevalier. She searched beneath the remnants of her musical score for a fresh sheet of paper. The ripped pages fell onto the Persian rug. Marie-Josèphe gathered them up.

  “What is that?” Count Lucien asked.

  “His Majesty’s cantata. My wretched composition.”

  “It doesn’t satisfy you?”

  “I thought—thanks to Sherzad—I had achieved something beyond my ability,” she said. “Now I don’t know what to think.” She offered him a page of the score. “See for yourself.”

  He waved it off. “I haven’t the talent to imagine a piece from its written notes.”

  “M. Coupillet says I’m an amateur, a woman, and he says the piece is too long… In that he’s quite right.”

  “How does that make it wretched?”

  The melody soared in Marie-Josèphe’s mind, melding with the song Sherzad sang from halfway down the Grand Canal.

  “He hardly looked at it!” she exclaimed. “He said he wouldn’t direct it, he said women cannot—and he demanded, and I refused…”

  “His Majesty admired—”

  “Is His Majesty any different from the others?” Marie-Josèphe cried. “Does he want the music, or does he want my—my particular gratitude?”

  “You’ve many reasons to be grateful to him—”

  Marie-Josèphe bit back an angry response, an angry denial.

  “—but has he demanded your…particular gratitude?”

  “He’s been chivalry itself,” Marie-Josèphe said, embarrassed. “What I said was unworthy of him.”

  “Even his detractors—”

  “Detractors? Of His Majesty? In France?” Marie-Josèphe exclaimed.

  Nonplussed, Lucien fell silent. He chuckled. “Everyone agrees His Majesty possesses superlative judgment of music. If your piece is too long, shorten it. Ask the aid of young master Scarlatti, who is too young yet to be concerned with any woman’s particular gratitude.”

  “You underestimate Master Démonico. I did show it to him. He admired it. When he plays it, oh, it sounds…but Master Démonico plays celestial music for his finger-practice.” Marie-Josèphe scribbled a note to Domenico, sent it away with a servant, then squared the pages of the score and returned them to her drawing box. “Thank you for your good advice, Count Lucien. I’m glad you don’t reserve it for the King alone.”

  “You may show me your gratitude—”

  Marie-Josèphe looked up sharply.

  “—by playing the composition for me,” Lucien said easily.

  “Master Domenico’s skill—”

  “—is extraordinary. I admit it. I’d rather hear the music from your hands.”

  “It is very long.”

  “So much the better.”

  He poured more wine and looked out over the Grand Canal. They sat together in companionable silence and finished their picnic.

  Marie-Josèphe sipped her wine and nibbled one last pastry. The servant, out of breath, returned with an answer to her note, a page bearing Domenico’s brave attempt at courtly language in his scrawled childish handwriting: “Signorina Maria must not worry another single moment, I fancied she would wish me to play her composition, because everything having HIS MAJESTY’s glory as its end is marvelously exciting; and when the desire to please Signorina Maria is joined to it, what further aim could one have?”

  Marie-Josèphe showed the note to Count Lucien, folded it, and slipped it into her bodice, amused by Domenico’s response and grateful for it.

  The sun was halfway through the sky.

  “I must go,” Count Lucien said. “I must prepare for Carrousel.”

  “And I must attend Mademoiselle.” Marie-Josèphe picked up a stick of charcoal. “But, please, sit still a moment. Let me draw your hands.”

  “They are hardly my best feature,” he said. “I might at least have had dainty hands and feet.”

  “Your hands are beautiful.” She sketched, but his rings distracted from the lines. She took his hand, amazed at her boldness—I must be drunker than I thought! she said to herself—and removed one of his rings. The warmth of his fingers caressed her palm. He might as well have caressed her face, her breasts, for heat flushed across her cheeks and her throat.

  He submitted to her whim until she touched the sapphire ring set in gold, the one he always wore.

  “I never take it off,” he said. “His Majesty gave it to me when I returned to court.”

  “Very well,” Marie-Josèphe said, disappointed, for her will could never compete with the King’s. She put his other rings back on his fingers. She closed the drawing box on the music score, and on the unfinished drawing of Count Lucien’s hands.

  25

  A LONG LINE OF OPEN CARRIAGES drew up around the eastern end of the Grand Canal. His Majesty graciously hosted His Holiness; they rode alone in a carriage magnificently gilded, its sides and wheel-spokes studded with diamonds. It occupied the central spot, with the best view. The royal family and other visiting monarchs flanked the King’s carriage. His Majesty’s courtiers arranged themselves in the second row. Servants hurried among the fantastic carriages, offering wine and pastries, fruit and cheese.

  Marie-Josèphe rode in Monsieur’s coach, squeezed between Madame and Mademoiselle, facing Monsieur and the Chevalier de Lorraine. She wished desperately that she were riding Zachi, her afrit. She would gallop away to the pigeon loft and wait for news from the galleon.

  In the next coach, with his wife Mme Lucifer, Chartres lounged lazily, exchanging languorous glances with young ladies of the court. He ignored Mlle d’Armagnac and her peacock feathers. Marie-Josèphe supposed he had found another mistress. Chartres noticed Marie-Josèphe’s coldness no more than he responded to Mlle d’Armagnac’s wistful sighs; he had not even noticed, or if he noticed he had not mentioned, that Marie-Josèphe no longer visited his observatory, she never looked into his compound microscope, she never borrowed his beautiful slide rule.

  Marie-Josèphe’s coldness to Lorraine provoked him. With every jog of the carriage, he moved his feet closer to hers, till the soles of her shoes pressed back against the riser of the carriage seat. He rubbed his toe against her ankle. At the same time, he whispered to Monsieur and casually slipped his fingers beneath Monsieur’s gold-embroidered coat to caress Monsieur’s thigh.

  Madame left off admiring her new diamond bracelet.

  “Your feet are too big, M. le chevalier,” Madame said. “Kindly give us a bit of room.” She rapped his knee sharply with her fan. Marie-Josèphe’s love for Madame brought the tears she was fighting close to spilling over. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

  “Madame, you wound me—my feet are renowned for their daintiness.” Lorraine drew his feet away from Marie-Josèphe’s ankles. “Perhaps you have my feet confused with another part of my body.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Madame, affronted. “Your tongue, I have no doubt.”

  Monsieur gave his wife a glance of amused disbelief. Lorraine for once was speechless. Lotte trembled with laughter repressed as forcibly as Marie-Josèphe’s tears. Blushing, Marie-Josèphe suddenly suspected what Lotte was laughing at, and why she could not laugh aloud. Madame, who serenely feigned ignorance of any second meaning to her comment, wo
uld not like to know that Mademoiselle understood it.

  “Look at Queen Mary!” Lotte said. She pointed to the carriage of James and Mary, next to His Majesty’s. “She’s a pirate, that woman! Can’t you make dear Haleeda give me a few more minutes of her time?”

  “If Mme la Reine tries to stand up,” Madame said drily, “she will topple over.”

  Mary of Modena wore a headdress impossible in its height and grandiosity. Ribbons and lace spilled down her back and fluttered from wires an armslength above her head. If she were riding in a closed coach it would never fit.

  “Mlle Haleeda chooses her own commissions,” Marie-Josèphe said apologetically to Lotte. Her brother might refuse to sign the papers, but Marie-Josèphe considered her sister free in name if not in fact.

  “Madame the Queen,” Lotte said, “is more generous with her rewards—”

  “Generous with His Majesty’s money!” Madame said.

  Haleeda rode in the Queen’s carriage, bearing her handkerchief. Marie-Josèphe, astonished, could not choose between delight for her sister’s triumph and terror for her risk.

  I should be delighted and terrified, Marie-Josèphe thought, for triumph carries risk as certainly as failure.

  The footman placed the steps. Marie-Josèphe climbed from Monsieur’s carriage and hurried to the bank of the Grand Canal.

  “Sherzad!” she called. She sang to the sea woman. For long minutes she feared Sherzad would not come to her, but finally the sea woman’s tails flicked a spray of water at her feet.

  “Sherzad, will you leap for His Majesty?”

  Sherzad swam, rolling over and over, her hair streaming around her. Two hundred paces from the end of the canal, she turned and swam toward His Majesty’s coach, speeding at a terrific rate. She leaped, surging from the water. She landed with a tremendous splash. Amazed, the guests exclaimed and applauded.

  Marie-Josèphe found Count Lucien, mounted on Zelis and attending His Majesty. She searched for reassurance, for a nod to say the galleon had found Sherzad’s treasure. He met her gaze; grave, he shook his head.

  Sherzad leaped and spun in the air, her dark skin catching the evening light. She splashed down, spattering His Majesty.

  “Again!” His Majesty exclaimed.

  Sherzad leaped again, turning end for end, silhouetted against the sinking red sun and the mass of scarlet and yellow and orange clouds. She dove into the water without a ripple. The sunset reflected from the Grand Canal, turning it into a golden road.

  “Again!” His Majesty exclaimed.

  Instead of leaping, Sherzad swam to the bank and struggled up, leaning her elbows on the stone rim.

  She sang to the King, spilling the beauty of her story and the desperation of her plea into the air between them. Marie-Josèphe listened—watched—with her eyes closed to blot out the canal, the court, the gilded carriages, and her friend Sherzad imprisoned.

  Should I interpret? she wondered. Should I tell His Majesty of Sherzad’s family, the beauty and the freedom of the sea, the adventures, her grief for her dead lover?

  Sherzad’s song compelled sympathy without words.

  Marie-Josèphe opened her eyes. His Majesty tapped his fingers impatiently.

  “Make her leap, Mlle de la Croix.”

  “I cannot, Your Majesty. I can only beg it of her.”

  “Leap, sea monster! I command you.”

  Sherzad snorted, slid underwater, and vanished.

  Marie-Josèphe ran to His Majesty’s carriage and flung herself to the ground beside it. On her knees she reached into the open carriage and touched the King’s shoe.

  “She begs you to release her, Sire. I beg you. Please. Please.”

  “The ransom saves her. She proposed the agreement.”

  “A few more hours—”

  His Majesty drew his foot from Marie-Josèphe’s hand.

  “May I withdraw, Your Majesty?”

  “Certainly not. I’ve invited you to Carrousel. I expect you to attend it.” He rapped on the side of the coach. “Drive on.”

  Yves hardened his heart against the sea woman’s pleas and his sister’s supplication. Midnight would bring Sherzad’s doom. He could not save the creature, he could not save his sister from grief, or from her own stubborn folly. He could only save himself.

  I can please the King, he thought, and the King will order me to continue my work. I can anger the King, and lose his aegis, and spend the next year, the next ten years, the rest of my life, in a cell in a monastery reading treatises on morality.

  If he had doubted it before, he now knew that Louis the Great, the Most Christian King, possessed more worldly power than any other man, more worldly power than the Prince of Rome. No matter that his influence had declined with war and famine, no matter that neither his Carrousel nor his sea monster would restore his youth. Louis in decline remained superior to any other prince’s summit.

  Yves thought, If I could make His Majesty immortal—or if he believed I made him immortal…

  The carriages drew up in front of the chateau, in the Ministers’ Courtyard, facing the Marble Courtyard.

  The Marble Courtyard was transformed for a performance. The sea-machine rolled waves of blue and gold across the back of the stage, while layers of clouds hung above it. Thousands of candles turned the dusk to daylight. Draperies of sky-blue velvet concealed the doors and windows of the chateau. M. de la Lande conducted a lively tune.

  “Where’s M. Coupillet?” Marie-Josèphe whispered.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Lotte said. “Such a scandal—His Majesty dismissed him.”

  “But he wasn’t—he didn’t—” Marie-Josèphe thought, guiltily, He offended me, but I didn’t mean him to be humiliated, I didn’t mean him to be banished, I should never have told Count Lucien—

  “He persuaded M. Desmarest to write grands motets, then took credit for the music! His Majesty could never forgive such a thing.”

  Marie-Josèphe’s guilt subsided, to be replaced by embarrassment. Silly fool, she thought, to think an insult to you might earn retribution.

  The chamber orchestra’s music turned ominous, then gave way to the brilliant notes of young master Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord, playing Marie-Josèphe’s score as the background for the ballet.

  Marie-Josèphe caught her breath.

  Domenico’s technique did justice to Sherzad’s music. Démonico is wonderful! she thought. He played from memory: the score remained in her drawing-box.

  Marie-Josèphe closed her eyes. The Inquisition advanced ominously on the sea people.

  The audience gasped. Beside her, Lotte shivered deliciously. Marie-Josèphe opened her eyes.

  An awful monster leaped from the rolling waves. The demon danced across the stage. It resembled Sherzad, Sherzad made to look horrible, her face all protruding fangs and long ears and twisted goat-horns, bloody lips and great red eyes. Painted sea monsters dived among the waves as the dancer cavorted.

  A golden chariot descended from the clouds. Tritons appeared, sounding a fanfare with their trumpets. The horses of Apollo stepped like clockwork across the stage, pranced in place as the sun god descended, and sank out of sight beneath the waves.

  The harpsichord sang with a joyous, victorious air, the theme of Sherzad’s freedom.

  His breast shining with a gold sunburst radiating diamonds, Apollo confronted the sea monster. The short sword gave small protection against the sharp talons of the creature; like knives, the talons scored Apollo’s small round shield. Yet as the combatants danced, the sea monster gradually yielded to Apollo’s will, cringing before him, embracing his knees, bowing its head in willing submission to collar and chain.

  That isn’t what Sherzad sang! Marie-Josèphe cried to herself. Despite the ballet, Sherzad’s song telling Sherzad’s story thrilled her; the music existed for anyone who would take the trouble to see it.

  Apollo led the sea monster across the stage. In the shadows beside the harpsichord, a tenor rose to sing, accompanied by D
omenico’s sublime technique.

  Apollo, god of the sun,

  Your flight creates the dawn.

  Your might conquers the sea,

  Your light gilds the waves,

  The creatures of the ocean

  Surrender to your glory!

  The music ended. Tenor, Apollo, and Domenico bowed to His Majesty, while the sea monster prostrated itself on the stage. His Majesty nodded and smiled, accepting their representation of his triumph. Around him, royalty and aristocracy, cardinals and bishops applauded him. He took their tribute as his due.

  “What a wonderful performance!” Madame exclaimed. “What lovely music! Did Signor Scarlatti compose it?”

  “Sherzad composed it, Madame,” Marie-Josèphe said.

  “The sea monster!” Madame laughed. “You composed it yourself—how talented you are!”

  “Marie-Josèphe, dear heart, don’t cry,” Lotte whispered.

  Count Lucien rode Zelis to Cardinal Ottoboni’s carriage. He bade Yves dismount and attend his King.

  Yves bowed to His Majesty and kissed Innocent’s ring.

  “Your success pleases me, Father de la Croix.”

  “Your Majesty. I—”

  Yves glanced at Marie-Josèphe, but she could not possibly hear what he was about to say. Perhaps she would never forgive him for the choice he had made.

  “Your Majesty, Your Holiness,” he whispered, so no one else could hear. “I’ve proved—proved the effect of the sea monster’s strange organ. It is…as you hoped.”

  His Majesty remained as impassive as the practice of fifty years of rule could make him. Innocent reacted with dismay.

  “Cousin,” he said to Louis, “consider. If this is true—what does God mean us to do? The Church must examine the creature. I must have it.”

  “I will see,” His Majesty said. “M. de Chrétien, if you please.”

  Yves glanced up, into the clear grey gaze of Count Lucien. The count regarded him with utter contempt. He had heard what Yves said, and he knew it for a falsehood.