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to the chitarrone that hung from pegs on the instrument cabinet and took it down, testing its strings for pitch. “The drones are a little flat,” he remarked as he worked the pegs.
    “They often are,” she said, playing a bit of a plaintive lament she had heard him sing from time to time. She knew the words were by Lorenzo de’ Medici—the one the Fiorenzani had called il Magnifico—and that they had special meaning to di Santo-Germano; that struck her as odd, since the Fiorenzan poet-banker and uncle of the reigning Pope Clemente had been dead for nearly forty years, but there were a number of odd things about her patron, as she had come to realize, and this was one of the least perplexing of his many puzzles. She changed to a refrain she was developing for one of her own songs. “I have been trying to find a way to develop the main theme that isn’t too obvious, but I haven’t found it yet.”
    One of her four household servants came into the music room carrying a lit fuse-string; he proceeded to touch this to the wicks of the hanging oil-lamps, gradually filling the room with wavering, golden light. Then he bowed and left the two alone, heading for the kitchen and his evening meal of fish soup and bread.
    When the chitarrone was in tune, di Santo-Germano began to play on it, not de’ Medici’s song, but something Pier-Ariana had never heard before, in a mode with which she was not familiar:

    “West lies the abode of sunset,
The place of day’s end, and life’s;
West lies the realm of nightfall,
Of sleeping, of darkness;
West lies the home of death
Of eternity, of immortality.
I go westward, homeward bound.”
     

    “What a strange song,” Pier-Ariana said when di Santo-Germano fell silent. “It’s not Italian, is it? You translated it from another tongue, didn’t you?”
    “Yes; I learned it in Egypt,” said di Santo-Germano, and did not add that he had first heard it during the centuries he had served in the Temple of Imhotep, tending the dying.
    “Most unusual,” she said, wanting to say something. She looked up at him. “You know many songs I’ve never heard.”
    “And you invent songs no one but you has ever heard before, a far more remarkable accomplishment than a feat of memory.” He began to play the chitarrone again, its long neck and angled peg-box held easily against his shoulder, allowing the drone-strings to hum in sympathy to the chords he summoned from the frets. He began the Plum Blossom Lament, which he had learned in China a thousand years ago; its recurring three-note phrases,

    “Will you, oh, will you please tell me,
Little blossoms, where has my lover gone?”
     

    as heartbreaking as any popular ballad of knightly romance.
    “I like that. I don’t know the mode, do I?” She played out the triad on her virginals.
    “It is not precisely a mode. It has only five tones, each a whole step apart; it isn’t often heard in the West, but it is everywhere in the East, along with others,” he said, and demonstrated it on the chitarrone.
    She copied it on the keyboard. “It doesn’t seem very versatile,” she remarked when she had played it a few times.
    “The Chinese don’t find it so,” said di Santo-Germano. “But it is what they are accustomed to hear, as you are accustomed to modes.”
    Pier-Ariana’s smile widened. “And you offer all you have heard, to enhance my music.”
    “I offer it for whatever use you may want to make of it, even if it is only to entertain you at the end of a very warm May afternoon.” He returned the chitarrone to its wall-pegs and smiled down at her. He was very grand tonight, in dogaline-and-doublet in black damask silk, his dogaline sleeves turned back and fastened with ruby brooches at the shoulder to show the silver-satin lining and his dark-red silken doublet sleeves beneath artfully slashed to reveal his white camisa and its cuffs of short ruffles. On his chest, his pectoral, a black sapphire disk with raised silver