Mirror Mirror (11 page)

A hussy, though a highborn one. She wore her traveling gown so tight, so fitting on her well-sprung form; it could scarcely be comfortable. She'd continue north through the Papal States to Bologna, and travel then by canal to the Castello Estense in the duchy of Ferrara, there to join her husband, Alfonso d'Este. May she go in safety, thought Fra Ludovico. May her brother go in safety. May they go soon.

Vicente de Nevada appeared then, and Primavera with a peasant look of vengeance, scowling openly at the noble guests. She led young Bianca by the hand. Fra Ludovico straightened his spine and raised his voice. He began the reading of the Acts of the Apostles—chapter 5. “If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to naught: But if it be of God, ye can't overthrow it.”

Fra Ludovico was a simple man, a devout one, and he took his vocation seriously. He liked the message of the reading and said those verses again, this time in Italian, to make sure that the Borgias took note of what God was saying to them today.

He addressed the crucifix behind the altar, and when he turned around toward the penitents again, he saw the stolid Vicente weeping openly, and Bianca struggling out of Primavera's arms to go to him. “Shhh,” scolded Primavera, casting Fra Ludovico an apologetic glance. But Bianca wouldn't be consoled. She wrestled free. She pitched herself against the master of Montefiore and stroked his black beard. “
Papà,
” she murmured, as if she knew what must lie ahead for them. “
Papà,
don't leave me.
Papà,
don't.”

“Get her out of here,” roared Cesare, “I'm trying to pray, damn it.”

“I'll take her,” said Lucrezia. She hadn't bothered to open her gradual anyway. “Come to me,
cherubina.
”

“Don't bother yourself,” huffed Primavera, but she could get off the bench only with difficulty, as her arthritis was worst in the morning. By the time she struggled to her feet, Lucrezia Borgia had whipped Bianca into her arms and was hurrying up the nave with her.

“Stop, I'll manage her.” Primavera's voice was like a bellows in a foundry, thunder trying to whisper.

“Silence,” roared Cesare.

“I'll read from the Gospel of the Evangelist Saint Mark,” said Fra Ludovico. “Everyone listen.” But no one did. Bodyguards, nursemaid, Borgias, and the master of the house had all left the chapel mostly in fits of weeping and shouting. Fra Ludovico paused to try to collect some semblance of religious calm. But he found himself shouting out the open doors at them all:

“If this work be of men, it will come to naught.”

The dispersals were brief. Up on his stallion leaped the Duc de Valentinois, Cesare Borgia, devotions behind him and the rapture of conquest ahead. Let Lucrezia to her marriage and her affairs, let Vicente to his mission, to achieve the mightiest token of God left in the world or to fail. It was in their hands now. For Cesare, back to his friend Niccolò Machiavelli, back to the summoning of armies and the conquest of states, back to the pleasures of Rome rotting in the summer sun. In the balance of his thighs against the horse, in the heft of his strong backside in the saddle, his eyes sweeping over the hills in the vaporish dawn, he felt himself imperious, invincible. Despite the cold, his cock poked inside his garments. Morning Mass always did this to him, and it was a good way to start a day of bloody bullying.

He left without good-byes to his sister or his host, his thoughts on the road ahead.

“He has provided you a purse for your needs,” said Lucrezia to Vicente.

“He said a guard, a translator. The protection of my household,” said Vicente. “That was his promise. You heard it.”

“Would your daughter not be safer in a convent?” said Lucrezia.

“A child should have a parent and a home,” said Vicente.

“I had a pope and a palace,” Lucrezia countered. “I had no mother to speak of; the sisters of some tired order or other could do good work to care for your child.”

“Cesare may break his promises,” said Vicente coldly, “but I will hold you to yours, Lucrezia Borgia. You are no goose. You know I mean it.”

He had her. She said, “I will keep my word, then. I will see that your household is maintained and your child protected.”

“You take a good deal on yourself for your brother,” said Vicente, trying to disguise his contempt.

Lucrezia drew herself up, unsure whether this was a compliment or not. “Don't double back in a week and hope to escape Cesare's notice. He'd only hack your daughter to pieces and send you on your way again.”

“I'm on a fool's errand,” said Vicente, “which will cost me my life.”

“Look,” said Lucrezia. She unlatched her gradual and beckoned Bianca forward to see. The illuminated pages fell open and the sudden sun made of the vellum a blinding platter. But even in all that shining, as if the very words of God were singing in light, there was a sequence of brighter shapes, like three drops of fire.

Vicente had to shade his eyes to see. He could barely tolerate the glare. They were ovate in shape, like the slits of skin that pucker about our eyes, and they seemed to blink like eyes too.

“They are three silver leaves from the branch of the Tree of Knowledge,” said Lucrezia. “They were sent to Prince Dschem as proof that his campaign had worked, at least at first. They will have to serve as whatever proof you need, Vicente de Nevada.”

“You don't believe there is a Tree of Knowledge,” said Vicente, “and I don't either.”

“I believe you have to go looking,” she said. “Maybe you'll grow faith enough to find what the world has kept hidden all these centuries. Now, keep the memory of these in your heart and you won't fail for courage. Go on your way, and come back to us soon, and change the course of history.”

“They look like small silver mirrors,” said Bianca.

“That's all they look like,” said Vicente. “The half-folded leaves of an olive tree in winter are as silver as this, and more useful.”

Inside the chapel, struck by a resonant glory, Fra Ludovico began to sing the Credo in unum Deo.

“Take her away; I can't bear this,” said Vicente. He wrapped himself in his cloak. While Primavera and Lucrezia Borgia snatched at Bianca's limbs, and she twisted and almost escaped, her father tucked the page of scribbled notes into his sleeve and mounted his steed. He turned the mare's head away from the chapel doors and toward the smoky blue horizon of the north. He was halfway down the road at a clip, scattering the gossiping geese on their way to the millpond and giving the gooseboy a morning's labor to collect them, when Bianca broke free and began to follow.

The mare kicked up dust, and green growth cloaked the road as it turned into the woods. Her father had crossed the bridge. He was hidden from her, as he left her in her childhood forever and disappeared into a quest. She followed him as far as the bridge—right to the middle of it—the very middle. And went no farther.

The vision in San Francesco

I
N THE
absence of his beloved María Inés—an absence whose pang changed in character but grew no weaker as the years passed—Vicente de Nevada found himself ever more readily spooning his daughter up to his breastplate with a seemly devotion.

His taking leave of her, therefore, cut him as deeply as it did her. He had the more capable constitution, and he could make of his backbone a ridge of steel, and manage not to turn around, nor to turn back, though her sobs echoed behind him. He breathed through his mouth to keep from crying out in reply. His nostrils clogged effeminately.

His hard-earned house, his precarious foothold, Montefiore, hovered in his thoughts. He didn't swing his shoulders to watch its roofs become lost in the green tide of uprushing foliage. Through all of Cesare Borgia's cutthroat campaigns to subdue the petty dukes of the
Papal States, Vicente de Nevada had managed to stay out of it. He hadn't ducked from commitment to a cause, but he had learned by virtue of his foreigner status that it was sensible to keep one's mouth shut when opinions were being catapulted about in a drunken rage.

Therefore he suffered gall of a bitter sort, to be wrested at last from his home for a different kind of campaign.

I'm not religious enough to believe in the assistance of angels, he thought, using the edge of a sleeve to catch the runoff from his sinuses. Were angels available to come to my aid, I'd scarcely recognize them. They'd be smart to move on to campaigns where their assistance might be put to better use.

I'm not overly religious, but perhaps the Duc de Valentinois, a master in so many things, has selected his agent wisely. For if I can't be easily comforted by the notion of celestial helpers, nor can I read dark meanings into the writhings of coincidence. I can't turn back merely because my spirits are low. Human spirits sink, that is what they do. I must just press on and go where I'm told and do what I can and expect nothing, neither help nor praise.

And to protect my child, my Bianca, my dove with the cautious eyes, I must leave her to the whims of the world. There is no hope for her if I refuse; there is no trickery I could effect that Cesare and Lucrezia between them couldn't undo, or work against my favor.

What Cesare was capable of! His brutality was legendary, but legend is often just bombast, intended for effect. In Rome he had impressed his lovers of both sexes as a
torero,
bringing the enraged bull to a bloody end. In Florence the Borgias were pilloried, and Montefiore was near enough to Florence—on the border of the Toscana vineyards and olive groves—to pick up echoes of the latest rank opinions of Cesare. But in the long diagonal swath of duchies and strongholds that made up the Papal States, from Rome to the southwest up to northeasterly Rimini on the coast of the purple Adriatic, and then inland to Bologna, the roar of Cesare the Bull was fearfully deafening.

Eschewing the golden raiment of some princes, he entered his conquered cities dressed in black, escorted by a retinue of a hundred
black-clad soldiers. A Gonfalonier and Captain-General of the Church, a murderous hot-blooded assassin, a vigilant general able to endure the merciless tides of fate, what wouldn't he do if he discovered Vicente had betrayed him? Cesare would murder his own mother if it might secure for him a better cut of meat at dinner.

No, there was nothing for Vicente to do but swing his steps toward the north and pretend at hope. And perhaps his sacrifice would convince the Fates or the saints or Fortuna or whoever held sway over human affairs to tender some mercy in his direction and deliver to him the impossible hidden branch from the Tree of Knowledge.

He would go north. He would. Just not immediately.

That he was a skeptic in matters of faith didn't mean he was a fool. The irreverence and the upset in Fra Ludovico's chapel had unnerved Vicente, and he wouldn't undertake an impossible mission on behalf of his child's welfare without applying for holy protection. One needn't rely on the intercession of the saints, but nor should one appear to be uninterested in their favors, especially in what amounted to a sort of indentured thief's holy pilgrimage.

So Vicente, with heavy heart, took himself to the nearest place for succor and for supplies, the walled city of Arezzo.

He was late in arriving and had to bed with a band of soldiers outside the walls, for the city gates had closed for the night. The food was simple and the wine watered, but he slept without fear of brigands. He had dressed as a peasant, and the purse supplied by Lucrezia was well hidden on his person.

He heard mutterings against Cesare and ignored them; he heard soldiers praying to the spirit of Savonarola, and marveled anew at the belief that Italians sustained in the survival of the spirit after death.

In the morning, when the doors had been opened and the livestock driven out to grazing fields, Vicente joined the throng of peasants doing their common business in the sunny
campi
and the shadowy alleys. He made his way up the sloping city streets to where the city's main churches hunched under their impressive roofs and steeples.

The church of San Francesco seemed the quieter today, and there Vicente took up a post. Uncomfortable with Latin prayers, he petitioned for guidance and expected none. He was a poseur. Do I work with the intrigue of a Borgia, he asked, since I have unwillingly become the sinister arm of Cesare, or do I bring to this task my own cool head and sense of fair play? Do I march into this private battle with my daughter's face stitched in the mind's eye, or to conserve my strength do I retire thoughts of her until I return, if ever I should?

A monk with a rasping cough prostrated himself on the stone floor nearby and began to moan for release of a sort Vicente guessed might not be entirely pietistic. Vicente moved away, moved forward toward the altar.

Someone was working on the floor of the square sanctuary, refitting pieces of tiling, and several candelabra on their own iron stems were planted like trees of light, to help the mason see. Vicente's eye was drawn to the walls, which had been ornamented with ranks of frescoed paintings. The colors were gaudy and not to Vicente's liking; the images seemed the story of a common people, without the glow of hammered gold to signify the sacred. But he found himself studying the images as if for clues on what to do, how to behave. Perhaps, even, why—why bother to go forward at all, when all he loved was being left behind.