Had she really just turned her back on him? This lump of a servant who hung her head like a donkey but spoke as if she were bantering at the
mentidero? She wasn’t stupid, that much had been obvious in the way she had grasped Víctor’s ruthlessness—no, his master hadn’t sent someone to assassinate the monk on the bridge, but he could have.
“Why don’t you want to show me your skill?” he asked. “Do you use
some kind of heathen talisman? Are you afraid I’ll recognize the language of your miracles? I saw you cover your mouth in that little pantomime yesterday.”
Her shuffling steps halted and she peered back at him. She didn’t seem to scare easily, another interesting quality, but this was fear she couldn’t hide. If that was what it took to make her pay attention, so be it.
“What language are you using?” he persisted. “You needn’t fear me. Not in this at least.”
Still she said nothing. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought, well past her first bloom if there’d been a bloom. Poor, unmarried, illiterate. Still, poor meant she was desperate. Unmarried meant there would be no fool husband to appease or eliminate. And if she couldn’t read then she couldn’t write and was at less risk of causing trouble. There was nothing more dangerous than a woman with a pen in her hand. “Arabic?” he asked. “Sanskrit? Hebrew?” It was like talking to a doll with glass eyes. “Whatever it is, you won’t get away with it at the torneo. I can help you with that.”
She kept her eyes on her feet, her shoulders still hunched, but he could see she was considering, her curiosity captured. “You can?”
“I can. The power is not in the speaking. You can learn to form the words in your mind as if you were about to speak. It isn’t hard.”
“Sing,” she mumbled. “I sing the words.”
A beginning. “I don’t suppose you can read? It would be easier if you could.”
“And easier still if I knew how to speak French and dance a pavane?”
There was that ready wit again, wit that shouldn’t belong in this odd girl’s mouth.
“Very well, since you cannot picture the words on the page, try to hear them in your head. Listen to them being spoken. Hear the song in the dark.”
He took her hand and she flinched. Her palm was thickly calloused and there was dirt beneath her nails.
“Your skin is hot,” she muttered.
“You see, I only look like a corpse.”
Her brows jumped and her lips pressed together as if she were afraid to laugh.
“Close your eyes,” he told her. She frowned. “I have no plans to assail your virtue.”
She looked almost angry at that. Some vanity, then. An easy trait to leverage. “This will not work,” she grumbled. But she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her lashes were black against her cheeks, heavily freckled by the sun.
“Let’s hope for your sake that it does. I don’t think your clapping and whispering will fool Antonio Pérez.” The room was quiet. Her hand lay limp in his. “You are thinking how strange it is to be in this room, to stand this way together. Forget me and this house and this street and all of
Madrid. Think only of the quiet, the stillness. All is empty as it was for God before He set about creation, before the first word was spoken. Now, let that word take shape, interrupting the silence. Hear it in your head, a song for you alone.”
“The melody—”
“Hum the melody, or sing it. But keep the words to yourself.”
Her chest rose as she breathed in, her head tilted back, her tongue touched her lips, then a soft hum emerged from her, the tune odd, a bounce from one note to the next. It made him think of people arriving at a party, one after another, the crowd growing boisterous.
Her hand tightened in his.
The bean on the desk hopped like it had been placed in a hot pan. Then there were two beans, three, ten. A flood of them. They cascaded over the edge, scattering onto the floor.
Her eyes popped open and she snatched her hand back from his, clutching it to her chest.
“There, now. You needn’t be so stubborn. Víctor will be pleased.” “Does the king have a great appetite for beans?”
That startled a laugh from him, a dry bark that might have been mistaken for a shout. He was out of practice.
“How did you know I didn’t need the words?” she asked. “Where did you learn this?”
He remembered Heidelberg, Al-Azhar, Khanbaliq, Granada. Late nights spent reading by candlelight, Arabic, Aramaic, the shapes of hieroglyphs, inscriptions wrought in bronze, the world opening beneath his fingertips.
“I will tell you if you tell me which language you sing in.” “Spanish,” she lied.
“No great miracle has ever been worked in Castilian.” “And why is that?”
“Because it is a language that spends its power in command and conquest. But you were wrong when you said you didn’t need the words. You do need them. Just as God did when He set this whole miserable clockwork running. Language creates possibility. Sometimes by being used. Sometimes by being kept secret. I will see you again tomorrow, Luzia
Cotado.”
“What am I to do with all of these beans?”
“Add them to the soup,” he said, and took some pleasure in being the one to turn his back on her.
