Mirror Mirror (15 page)

Whatever the unit of measure, hours or days or years, too many had passed since Vicente had left the high sanctuary of Montefiore in search of the branch from the Tree of Knowledge. The days on the farm in central Italy glowed in his memory with a rosy impossibility: Certainly olive trees could never have held such silvery light in their leaves, of an April morning; sheep had never lowed like lullabies, had they? And there had never been a María Inés, she of the delicate lemon flower scent, the alabaster breasts, the smile that broadened when she threw her head back in laughter. Of the haven she might have provided in the marriage bed, Vicente was certain he was imagining it from delirium born of loneliness. He was no longer convinced that woman could possibly have been created so accessible, so
responsive, so convenient: even God couldn't have imagined such a perfection.

Vicente's recollection of his wife's sex was clouded in his eyes, perhaps because his own sex, these years, had no memory of itself; he resentfully carried nothing but a small cold snail between his thighs, useless but for a dribbly piss. He wouldn't be surprised one day to wake up and learn that what had once passed as his genitals had crawled away in the middle of the night to bury themselves in a hole somewhere and rot in peace.

He wished that he and his wife had had children. How much more possible it might be to endure the passage of eternity if he knew that María Inés had born him a son or a daughter, or several. What a refreshing picture, to imagine somewhere in Italy or Spain a crowd of de Nevada children, cavorting in sunlight. But he knew that this couldn't have happened, for the hole in his heart around the notion of children was so severely black that he couldn't even venture to consider the subject directly. He could only deduce a full and permanent loss in this matter.

But perhaps God had selected him for this assignment: to live a half-death in a holy prison on a holy mountain, among masculine people and creatures and flies and rocks. (Where the spring lamb might come from every year, in a population said to be entirely of rams, was a holy mystery.)

Vicente had followed what guidance had been given him, long ago, and he had worked his way through the Papal States, north by Ferrara, up into the Venetian marches, and then by boat across the Adriatic to Dalmatia. For protection from brigands, he'd met up with a caravan of merchants, and proceeded to Montenegro, Rumelia.

By quick degrees the world had grown more barbarian in its inhospitable strangeness. When he ventured beyond the reaches of his adopted tongue, he occasionally could find a tradesman or a sailor with enough Spanish to indicate where he was, but once he left the coast and began the overland trek through Macedonia and Thessaly
he had little to trust in but his wits. He avoided wolves and thieves in the wilderness; he swam through a flash flood without drowning. Once he considered murder, when he got so hungry he thought his stomach would begin to digest his own heart for nourishment, but God forbade murder. Believing less in God than in God's laws, he went hungry until the hunger was slaked by Fortune, who gave of her excess a handful of nuts or a slow-running chicken.

The landscape became harsher. Deep forests alternated with stony hardscrabble slopes from which the ancient pagan Greeks had harvested their fulsome stories and upon which their descendants seemed to be dying of starvation. By and by, as those weeks of travel passed in the wheeling pinions of categorizable hours—dusk, dawn, and the hundred permutations between, how lovely, how luxurious, how fatally addictive, the passage of daily light—Vicente moved further into the realm of strange myth, away from the cycles of his adopted
patria,
his farm and home, and toward the strained attenuated life of mad monks and wild fire-breathing boars and the goal of the fruit of the Garden of Eden.

And he'd found what he was sent to find, and been discovered in the process, and tossed like a bug into a hole, and he waited to die, and wanted to die, and he didn't die. So was there a God or wasn't there?

He took out his recollections from time to time, revered them as private landscapes to which he could repair. The spread of his holdings at Montefiore, the far more distant Aragon of his childhood, these sites were available at will. How kind, the thought of a slope of pink and white blossoming almond groves in an Aragonese spring! But his memories seemed unpopulated. So he relied for mental exercise and diversion on the recalling of his approach and apprehension at Teophilos.

As Cesare Borgia had said, the long promontory of Agion Oros was almost an island. Using a sack of florins, the value of which Greek peasants easily recognized, Vicente de Nevada had induced a pair of brothers with a fishing boat to set out from Ouranopolis and take him
down the west side of the peninsula. For a day they drifted and fished. The brothers cared little for their passenger's intentions—they threw bread at him, and a fleece when a wind came up, but generally they were happy enough to do their work and ignore his presence.

Vicente spent his time making a mental chart of the shoreline. He noted the monasteries that cropped up on the sheer cliffs, like honey-colored hives generated spontaneously out of their stone foundations. He tried to memorize the pattern of mountains that loomed beyond.

When it seemed the brothers had caught enough to merit their efforts, they began to try to turn the vessel about, hauling on ropes to trim the sails. The fishing boat refused to cooperate. By the glowering expressions of the fishermen, Vicente grew alarmed. He could tell they thought the boat was bewitched. The darker it grew, the more resistance the boat developed, until at last the brothers had had enough. They fell upon Vicente and tossed him into the sea.

Though he was surprised, he was hardly disappointed, as he had come this far in order to go farther. So he struck out for land, and with backward glances saw the brothers bringing the boat around without further difficulty.

It hadn't been a difficult swim, even for someone whose experience of water was limited to duck ponds, sluggish rivers, and Lago Verde. The northern Aegean seemed warm to him, though what did he know of the source of its currents? Across its peacock-feather waters and past the islands of the Sporades and the Cyclades, and beyond the hump of Crete with its minotaur's maze, the sands of the Saharas were said to stretch. Perhaps the hot breath of Africa leaned heavily on the water. Or maybe his passage was charmed. In any event, he made it ashore without mishap. There was a landing and a rude dock of sorts, but no soul about.

He couldn't light a fire, having no tinder or spark, so to warm himself he began immediately to find his way up the slopes, through gray scrub, gnarled aromatic stuntpine, grasses with gritted edges that cut and stung. He wasn't long in the wilderness, circling about to get a good look at the nearest monastery, when he came across what must
have been a roadside shrine of some sort. Here hung a tin icon of a figure of indeterminate gender, and a clay cup supplied with a lump of wax: a votive. Protected from the weather in a tin box beneath the ledge he found a helpful flint and tinder, and so within a few minutes Vicente had made himself a small fire and driven the worst of the chill from his bones.

He had said a prayer for the safety of someone, but María Inés was already dead, and he couldn't now remember for whom he'd been praying, nor, for that matter, to whom, either.

He learned to his delight that the natural defenses of Agion Oros were so considerable that the monks were casual about barring the monastery gates at night. Furthermore, during the day, the gates stood open and often unguarded, as the monks in silent procession went to their labors in orchards, fields, and pastures. From nooks and hides, Vicente spent several days watching the monks at their work. Once he saw a donkey pestered with horseflies, and knew that if donkeys and horseflies behaved here as elsewhere, rain was coming. They did. A cloudburst sent up a screen, and in slashing rain Vicente gained access to the courtyard through gates no one had stopped to close.

The next day he found a cloak on a peg, set aside for use in inclement weather by whichever monk most needed it. Though his new beard didn't fringe and frazzle in the same way of Byzantine priests and acolytes, he made his cautious explorations. Vicente never heard a human voice raised in anything but apparent prayer until the day an ancient patriarch came across him with his hand on the door of the monastery's treasury. The old man had shrieked like a woman, and monks appeared from nowhere, fierce as crows, to settle down upon Vicente and protect what was inside. Down into the dungeon he had been thrown.

Memories began to drift and become unsettled in his mind. Sometimes he said aloud—“Cesare, Duc de Valentinois, I came so much closer to achieving your quest than you thought I might.”

He said it. “Cesare, this hand nearly touched the fruit of the Garden of Eden.”

He said, “The stem was warm to the touch, like stone in a sunny garden, though the door was closed and locked and I had to smash the hinge with a boulder. Did I? Didn't I?”

He rolled on his side and groaned. He said, “There are things I've forgotten, and that's a mercy, but nobody remembers them on my behalf.” And in a flood of self-pity, he said, “The very stones of the world are as deaf as God, and God is as deaf as His stones. Will no one remember me, since I cannot remember myself?”

The stones must not have been as deaf as he imagined, for they answered, “God keeps His own counsel, but the stone hears you.”

He didn't make a further remark, for to converse with the stones of his prison must be a sign of his mental collapse and maybe good Brother Death would show up at last. It was about time.

I am a gooseboy or am I a goose

I am a gooseboy or am I a goose

The margin that separates us is loose

Mirrormirror

B
IANCA COULDN'T
tell what they wanted, why they were pestering her so with questions. Did they want there to be a huge dowry available for her in Spain? Was Cesare after a new fund with which to rebuild an army? Or were they worried that their appropriation of her father's house would bring trouble? Bianca knew little of the Orsini or the Colonna families of Rome, the Sforzas of Milan or the Medici of Florence. She did know their names, though, and their enmity toward Cesare Borgia was particular and public. Surely, in hiding from his many Italian enemies, the last thing he was worried about was a vengeful distant Spanish clan? Bianca wasn't sure her relatives even existed. She'd never heard of them before—but then, four years ago, her father would have been unlikely to discuss matters of family relations with her.

Lucrezia drew a deep breath and leaned forward, and was about to embark upon a new line of questioning, when a ridiculous gabble
sounded from the barnyard beyond, and the peal of boyish shrieking. Lucrezia's head pivoted.

“Primavera,” she bellowed. “What is that bother?”

The only sound, at first, was of the nursemaid's uncontrolled laughter.

“Primavera.”

Up from below at last came the old woman's reply, clearly uttered with difficulty, as the laughter beneath it threatened to break through. “The geese have cornered the gooseboy in the pig's trough,” she said. “Oh, it's too good. He is hopping up and down and they are pecking his legs.”

Lucrezia whipped herself from her chair. “Crezia,” said Cesare.

“I won't have it,” she said, and left the room.

Cesare rolled his eyes heavenward and made a holy gesture. “She is as kind as a saint,” he said to Bianca. “Saint Bathsheba, Saint Salome, anyway.”

“May I go now?” asked Bianca.

“Oh, stay the while,” said Cesare lazily, “the Scourge of the Apennines will take her time to rescue a useless gooseboy, won't she, while her own beloved brother languishes on his rack of torment.”

Bianca said, “The gooseboy tends to get himself in a muddle. Perhaps I should go help your sister? Primavera moves too slowly to be of use, and Fra Ludovico is more scared of the geese than the gooseboy is.”