Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“My study. You are at the Orphic Lodge of the Benandanti, in the Blue Ridge mountains. People come here to work—students, visiting professors, classical scholars. But only the Benandanti see the inside of this room—Benandanti, or their guests,” he added. “Giulietta—”

I stiffened and drew away from him. “I’m not Giulietta. Whoever the hell she was. I’m Lit—Charlotte Moylan—”

I walked to the window, peered out at the mountains, a river threading between autumn-gold trees, all beneath a sky so blue it made my eyes ache.

“And I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing here.” I turned back to Balthazar. “Where’s Axel Kern? I thought…”

My voice trailed off: I wasn’t sure exactly what I had thought. “I thought I would find him—through that door, in Bolerium—”

“You would have.” Balthazar leaned against a desk, its surface covered with stacks of books, curling parchments, a silver tray holding the remnants of a meal. He still wore his formal evening clothes, though his iron-gray hair was tousled, his face more worn than when I had seen him last. He stared at me, so frankly delighted that I blushed. “But you were diverted.”

He walked over and eased himself on the window seat beside me, gazing out at the mountains with a proprietary air. “You’re not an adept, Giulietta— Lit ,” he corrected himself. “You’re something far more unusual—and dangerous.”

“What’s that?” I snapped. I continued to stare out the window, desperately hoping he couldn’t tell how frightened I was. Whatever had happened to me—falling through a tear in the fabric of the world, stumbling through doors at Bolerium and ending up on the Eurasian steppe—I very much wanted to believe that those things were accidents.

But even if I hadn’t known I would end up at the Orphic Lodge, I had chosen to walk through that portal at Bolerium. And that seemed to have upped the ante in whatever cosmic game I was part of. I recalled a moment in my childhood—the aftermath of that same Irish funeral, a whiskey-fueled wake where I’d watched my father argue strenuously with an Augustinian priest. Something about free will, and living with the consequences of one’s decisions no matter how dire…

I started as a breath of chilly air nosed through an open window, smelling faintly of river-mud. Balthazar reached to shut the window, gently touched my wrist.

“You’re a sort of prodigy, Lit.” He picked up an odd-looking toy that rested on the velvet seat cushion, a model of the solar system made of wire and polished stone beads. “A savant…”

“Ralph Casson didn’t think I was a savant. He said I was a Malandanti.”

Balthazar’s hand tightened around the shining array of wire. There was a small blister on his thumb. As I stared, the blister swelled, burst into a red star that bled down to stain the cuff of his dress shirt. “Malandante,” he said. “Malandanti is the plural.”

He let the wire toy drop back to the seat and looked at me, his eyes grim. “And I hope very much for your sake, Lit, that you are not a Malandante.”

Faster than I would have thought possible, he grabbed me by the shoulders. “Listen to me—you have no idea what you have walked into. This is a battle that has been going on for longer than there have been words to describe it. You have no part in this fight, Lit. Do you understand? You know nothing of the Malandanti—they would use you and discard you as casually as you would throw away a piece of paper. You would be destroyed—”

“So?” I spat, knowing my voice sounded thin and frightened. “So everybody dies, it’s not like—”

“It is not like anything you can imagine. Because you would not die, Lit, any more than I have died. Not now that you have become aware. For four hundred years I could bear this world and my place in it, the constant watchfulness and the eternal, eternal waiting—but only because I knew you were safe. Giulietta Masparutto, whom I saw burned to death, but who was then claimed by the Malandanti—I knew that she slept, and would be reborn, and die, and sleep only to be born again. All of this for centuries, thousands of years, perhaps. And as long as she was not aware of who or what she was, she was safe. Even in life, she would be sleeping.

“And so always I was sustained by the thought that she c ould be there, somewhere. Even if I never saw her, even if I was never able to find her again—it was enough. I could serve out my duty to my masters, knowing that she might be alive but with no memory, no knowledge of what she had been, nor of what she might be. And the cycle would have gone on, endlessly—if not for Ralph Casson.”

“Ralph Casson!” I tried to pull from him. “Ralph fucking Casson didn’t create me! I wasn’t waiting for him to make me come to life—”

“I did not say he created you,” said Balthazar. “I said he made you aware. Do you know why Giulietta was executed, Lit?”

His fierce gaze made me look away. “Because she slept with you,” I muttered. “And they thought she was a witch…”

“She was a witch. By their terms—she had the sight, she knew I was a Benandante the first time she laid eyes on me, covered with dust and carrying my scrolls in a rotting leather sack. She did not know precisely what a Benandante was, but she knew me for something more than what I seemed to be. She was sixteen when we met, she had been her own cousin’s lover for two years already—she was no child, any more than you are. And she did not know what she was, any more than you do.

“I was the one who told her of our work; of our fight against the Malandanti. Because I loved her; because I wanted her to join me. I—I thought that if she knew, it might be possible—that my superiors might have permitted us to marry—that she might then have helped us, helped me to fulfill my part in all of it…”

He fell silent. His grasp upon my shoulders loosened, and I drew back.

“I think you’re crazy,” I said. “But even if it were all true—and I know it’s not—why should I listen to you? You betrayed that girl—you let them burn her at the goddam stake—”

“There was no betrayal. I was going to help her, I had no idea that the Conclave had condemned her to death—”

“You were afraid. You were afraid of them, and you were afraid of—whoever she was.” I tilted my head back and regarded him coldly. “That was how the story went that Ali told us.”

Balthazar sighed. He ran a hand across his brow and sat back down on the window seat, shoving aside the model of the planets and watching me with bleak eyes. “They were all afraid of her.”

“Because she was so powerful?”

“No. Because she was so angry. Not bad-tempered—she was good-natured, too easily led into bed, too kind when it came to helping her father and her cousins. But she had a very great rage, sometimes it seemed that everything would make her angry—babies dying of the flux, her own mother dying as she struggled to give birth to her tenth child, her friends and cousins becoming pregnant before they were fourteen years old—all of it enraged her—”

“No shit.”

“—but there was nothing she could do about it. For herself, she took herbs, and was very careful in her lovemaking so as not to get with child. But she would shout at the others when they got pregnant, she would shout at the parents whose children died—she shouted at the village priest, and when he tried to force her confession during the sacrament of penance, she kicked him.”

I laughed. Balthazar smiled ruefully. “I was a bit afraid of her, as much as I was afraid for her. Not that she would hurt me—she loved me, and we argued very rarely—but because I knew her rage would draw attention to her.”