Mirror Mirror (12 page)

“It's a story of the Church,” said the mason after a while, in a rural accent Vicente had to work to understand.

“Everything is a story of the Church,” said Vicente cautiously. It didn't do to be rude to anyone, especially in a house of God.

“No, no, you mistake my meaning,” said the mason. “I've been here for days and the good brothers have read it to me. The walls are divided into panels, do you see?—and if you follow along and look from here to here, and then drop your eyes and look again, a story is told scene by scene. It's the truth about the Cross of Gesù. Can you make it out? There at the top, our father Adam is dying, and the Tree of Life is figured. It's from that tree that the Cross was cut. After the death of Our Lord, the Cross was lost, but then it was found, and
some descendant of our brother Lazarus, being dragged along to his grave, was raised from the dead. Raised up.”

The mason grinned; what teeth he had were brown. “I love that notion. I would relish the raising of my brother, Severino, so that I could explain the better why I murdered him in the first place, and then do it again.”

Vicente said, “Do you believe in such stories?”

The mason said, “I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don't work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.”

Vicente didn't want to enter a discussion about faith. He looked at the painting of the Tree of Knowledge.

“Even the mighty Valentino, bull of the Borgias, came here to pray,” said the mason. “The decorations are not all that old—within my father's lifetime, I think—and they have their own lure. I've heard tell that Cesare prayed here. When the mightiest of Roman families still relies on the floor of faith, what does that tell you?”

“That his father is the Pope,” said Vicente noncommittally.

“His father didn't paint this wall of faith, nor pay for it,” said the mason. “Take of it what you will. Even the Turkish infidel, friend to the Borgia, gaped at its beauty, they say. Its beauty makes one believe.”

What I believe, thought Vicente, is that Cesare Borgia came here, to pray and to plan his campaigns, and that Prince Dschem accompanied him. I believe that the Prince noticed Cesare's interest in the story picture here. I believe he used this story to his own advantage at the very end of his life, to try to secure his own rescue. He invented a fable to appeal to Cesare's superstitious nature, and now I'm chained to it.

But then what of those three silver eyes of God in Lucrezia Borgia's gradual? Very special work by Byzantine craftsmen? Or something more?

I'll take of it what I can, thought Vicente. He looked at a square of wall in which a king was sleeping against soft pillows as an angel descended in rosy light over the undefended shoulders and unwitting
expression of guards inadequate to their task. How lucky to have a seraphic assistant. But if I'm to have a vision, I must make it myself. I'm neither a sleeping king nor a working mason, and a farmer has little use of floors.

He looked at the painted scenes some more. He saw a city in terra-cotta here, a prophet there. Three men hoisted the vertical post of the cross, and the forward man put such muscle into the task that his genitals had become loose from their bindings and hung in undignified view. The horses were ready to stamp and snort, and one could almost smell their shit. The lances raised in battle were a thicket of strokes against a defeated sky. Here was an angel in an annunciation—why would no angel ever announce a message to Vicente? Here was a battle in terrible crowded circumstance—a battle as conducted on a loggia!—and here was Lazarus again, looking well rested enough. Here was a dwarf with his hand on his hip. Learning a new stature as he gazed soberly upon the cross.

It's all we can do, thought Vicente, to look, and invent our own stature, and see if we can measure up to it. Faith may cloud our eyes or open them; who can say?—but it's up to us to invent our intentions, and live up to them, or fail at the duty.

I intend to save my daughter, he said to himself. With faith or against it, that is what I intend. I have no papal father, like Cesare, no army behind me, no coffers to plunder. I have only my sense of that Borgia family, and the way that they turn, they turn; they always turn. If I'm not back quickly, and successfully, they will turn, against my Bianca if they can't reach me.

What miserable leverage Vicente had over Lucrezia would count for nothing in a contest with her brother. There was no angel available to guard Bianca, and Vicente required protection more rigorous than a groveling priest and a cursing cook could provide. Cesare lived by love and war. Since Vicente couldn't woo the man he'd have to pose a threat. Would that he had access to his own army of conscripts!

Well, who's to say he didn't? He looked at the armies in the painting again and thought: I'll borrow you or your kin.

He began to devise a protection, to invent in fiction what his luckless life had never provided him. A family, an army, a threat. Now: out to the
campo,
and surely in one of the narrow
vicoli
he could find a scribe for hire who could lend him a quill and ink, vellum and wax? And see that an epistle be delivered? Vicente would use the best of his coin to ensure the best product, and live on scavengings, and walk instead of ride, and do without lodging at inns. His trip would take longer, but, please God, his daughter would be safer.

Please God, that is, should there be such an Element in the heavens.

He turned toward the task and walked out of the door, alone.

The mason shrugged and went back to his work. He repaired the work of fifteen centuries before him as best he could. A floor of faith wasn't impervious to the effects of age.

The mason might have seen a shadow on the floor, had he had faith of a different sort. Indeed, he rubbed his eyes and decided he was tired, for though the candles in the iron trees seemed to burn as brightly as before, he was no longer as clear-eyed as he had been when he started an hour or two ago. In truth, the dwarf was there, lingering. He could catch up to Vicente in a moment. He wasn't much good as an angel and he didn't know why he was compelled to accompany the man on his quest. But the dwarf planted his feet on the floor of the church and gazed upon Piero della Francesca's painting of a dwarf witnessing a holy moment in the cycle of the True Cross. Scarcely fifteen feet away, a Lazarus was ready to rub his shoulders and work out the kinks in his muscles. The dwarf in the painting was looking at the Cross, but he was also looking across the span of holy painted space at the man raised from the dead.

Dwarves made of rock have no capacity for faith, but that doesn't mean they have no appetite for it. Staring at the dwarf painted into the plaster, the other dwarf, the eighth dwarf, shed a richer shadow, and the mason, cursing mildly at what age was doing to his eyes, went to take his lunch early.

•
1506
•

Bianca awake

A
STORM
had come up from the south, a tarantella of wind and surging smells. Apple trees lost their limbs, and the cow byre its roof, and the cows could be heard singing in plainsong throughout the night. By morning the roads were slick with the fallen fruit of olive trees and smelled like a fine breakfast.

Fra Ludovico had had a vision in the middle of the night. He had thought it was dyspepsia at first, as he had met with a sausage of suspicious vintage, and his stomach had been shouting at him. But despite bouts of digestive grief Fra Ludovico had kept sinking into a velvety somnolence, pitched between sleep and a wakesome drowsing, and in that state of half-here-half-there, he had seen the girl stepping on clouds of carven ivory, for all the world like Saint Catherine of Siena in her mortal stoles and immortal graces. But she stepped toward a cliff edge and seemed not to realize it; and though the priest tried to cry
out, his voice—with the persistent laryngitis that afflicted him in dreams—was feeble. Too small a thread of warning spun out. She didn't hear. She walked on at her own pace toward a danger.

He stood, relieved his bladder, picked a shred of gristle from his teeth, and noticed, in the yard below, that visitors had arrived under cover of darkness. Sometime between midnight and dawn, during the hours pertinent to the sanguine humor.

The prelate was feeling his age. The years following the departure of his master hadn't been easy. First, Lucrezia Borgia had dismissed the overseer that Don Vicente had assigned to watch after things. Dismissed or removed from the district, it was unclear which, but in any case the hapless local governor was gone as gone. Fra Ludovico had little practice in standing up to strong beautiful women—not for nothing had he fled into the skirts of the Church instead of the more profane variety—but for all his timidity, his fondness for the true daughter of the house prevailed. He wouldn't leave Bianca alone to suffer at the hands of la Borgia, now the Duchessa de Ferrara. If suffer it would be: and he thought it would.

Well, who could doubt it, really? As far off the public way as Montefiore was, the rumors from Rome arrived, nonetheless. The glamorous Lucrezia, married first to Giovanni Sforza of Milan, didn't demur when her powerful father and brother declared Sforza to be impotent. The courts opined:
virga intacta.
End of marriage—naturally: Sforza had proven too unimportant a match for the Borgias' expanding ambitions. And what about the rumors that Cesare had dared murder a Spaniard whose amorous interest in his sister rivaled his own? Was Perotto Calderon's corpse found bobbing in the Tiber? Well, whose corpse, given enough time, wasn't?

In the way of things, Lucrezia had made a second marriage, to Alfonso of Aragon, Duc de Bisceglie, of the family of the King of Naples. All lutes and sonnets and garlands of posies, right? And Lucrezia was said to care for him, in her limited way, and to care for the notion of living by the sea even more. But a seasoned garroter broke
into the house one night—bad luck, wasn't it?—and Lucrezia once again found herself free to marry to her family's advantage. In his professional capacity Fra Ludovico cherished the sacrament of matrimony as a spiritual union, but he knew that in this time of internecine struggles it wasn't uncommon for a man or a woman to marry several times over. It took a highly cultured woman to manage to marry more advantageously each time her husband, through murder or carelessness or the decisions of the courts, happened to be disposed of.

All powerful families have their detractors. Fra Ludovico had no way of knowing which reports were true and which were slanderous gossip circulated by the competitive Roman families or by the vengeful Sforzas, whose reputation had been besmirched. Over the past few years Fra Ludovico had carefully remade himself from a solemn cleric into a harmless, beneficent idiot. It was a charade of witlessness designed to protect his position. And so carefully conceived. He knew, for instance, that Lucrezia Borgia had a delicate constitution and rank odors offended her. So whenever she was in residence, he would be sure to traipse through the ripest of cow muck and track it in onto Montefiore's clean, straw-strewn floors. He spilt milk on his garments and left it there to sour. When she confronted him in his disgrace, he affected a beatific smile and quoted Scipture in a raggle-taggle Latin.
Omnia alterans,
he would say in response to any criticism. She was educated classically, better than he was, but he needn't
worry about getting his references straight. His errors served to illustrate his general befuddlement.

With Primavera aging ever more decrepitly, Fra Ludovico felt he had to take larger responsibility. He liked to think, in his careful campaign, that he was cannier than a Borgia. Helpfully, his strategies also afforded him extra hours of napping and woolgathering, which conserved his strength for what he feared might be mortal combat someday.

Of course, Primavera did most of the work of caring for Bianca. The girl slept on a rush pallet next to Primavera's and helped with the household chores. The local maids came less often, as there was
little entertaining to speak of, and Bianca and Primavera managed whatever domestic work was required.