"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 career 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.