Mirror Mirror (21 page)

She stood again, height being all she had against them. A painful tenderness in her groin, from where she had urinated. She groaned without caution.

She wanted to leave them, to train her eyes more carefully upon the walls of this chamber, and notice them into clarity: a wall of polished planks, of ruddy brick, of rusticated stones?—something to identify. Anything. Nothing would clarify unless she worked at it. She moved forward again, to leave the standing circle around her, and noticed—how had she missed it before?—that her fingernails had gone long and witchlike, ivory scythes splintered at the ends, capable of ripping skin. Her toenails curled like tusks, and nestled into one another like the overlapping segments of a flattish, chambered shell.

She felt she'd died and been buried, and was being restored to life, to a new life, as an animal. She was one step shy of being human now. Her breasts, though modestly sheathed in her gown of bedding, moved of their own new weight, and brushed against the cloth bib. The tender tips of her breasts blistered with a curious sort of pain, and she shook, from her elbows to her spine. The convulsion drew the cloth against her breasts again. She exhaled with a spasm of her cheeks and tongue, releasing a wordless sound of surprise.

Braised, tormented—the whole world leaning upon her in the
form of a bedsheet fingering her skin—she stepped back, as if her sleep were still waiting for her on the bed, like body warmth left in the mattress for a few moments after you arise. As if she could subside back into sleep safely, and wake up some other time, some other way.

Then the convulsion, which had had a teasing aspect as well as a frightening one, took a deeper bite of her body, lower down, and the soft pain of her groin sharpened. As if in her sleep she'd been impregnated by a wolf, and a young wolf cub was scrabbling at her interior to bite its own exit passage. She sank to her knees, her arms crooked behind and her elbows pressing down into the mattress. She flung her head backward and clenched her fists. Her knees hit the floor and lifted and hit the floor again. Like a bellows her thighs worked back and forth.

“Mamma,”
she said,
“Mamma.
Gesù Cristo.
Mamma, Mamma.
” Then her words gave way to mere syllables, lengthening inchoate sounds.

She voided her interior. The blood rolled and splashed, and bits of matter tore embery fingers against her insides. Whatever Primavera had predicted, it wasn't anything like this. Bianca waited for the blood to take a face, for its airy bubbles to sit and wink like eyes, or for a form to slither out of her on its sluice of organic juices and devour her. She closed her eyes to protect herself from seeing whatever it would be, and she rocked more exhaustedly from side to side. Her legs were slick, her buttocks and her heels slick, and she fell, almost fainting, as if she couldn't endure such loss of blood without a loss of breath or even life. She found herself rolled against one of the boulders, and then another. They were moving, they were closing in on her, like the stones of her tomb come to do their job, and her blood lapped against their roots and splashed their sides. She swooned.

When she came to consciousness—the same or another sort, she couldn't tell—the room had taken its own measure and settled down some.

There was no direct source of light, no oil lamps or hearth fires, no sunlight bleeding along the edges of a shuttered window. No windows
at all. But the space had volume and there was even some color, of a sandy, ochre-tinged sort.

She pulled herself to her feet and looked about. Along the edges of what she could perceive ran ranks of stone boxes, all large enough to contain human remains. Sarcophagi, she guessed, with carvings on the front and sides, and statues of smaller-than-life-size figures reclining on the lids.

It might have been horrifying, but it wasn't. It was nice not to feel alone. The long front panels illustrated scenes of war, naked Romans battling with naked Etruscans. The bas-relief was so heightened it almost looked as if the figures were going to detach from the stone. Greek letters, less regular than the human proportions, spelled captions she couldn't read.

The portrait sculptures up top were carved in an identical position. All the figures reared up on one elbow, pivoting on a hip, as if watching her. But their facial features had been eroded by age, and it wasn't easy to tell if they were male or female. They held shallow cups for celebration, and coins or wine were deposited within. She found it easy to accept a raised stone dish from a cheery effigy and drink a swallow of wine. Though open to the air of the tomb for a thousand years or two, the wine had aged well and was delicious.

Here were knives with handles of bone. Here, on the floor, bits of Roman glass. Here, an anomaly: a figure of Proserpina, her composure calm and unthreatening. She held one hand on her breast, as if feeling her own pulse, and her other hand was held out, offering a stone apple to the dead. It's not so bad, she seemed to say; half a life in the sun, half a life in the earth: I've learned to manage quite well. Call me Persephone and feed me a persimmon; call me Proserpina and hand me an apple. Whatever I have I share.

Her smile was sweet and eroded. Around her stood double-handled vases in black glaze, no doubt containing the ashes of the dead. It was a calm cinerarium. The only unpleasantness was a faint smell of
pietra fetida
—that stone with a faint reek of sulfur.

She couldn't tell what the floor was like, as she couldn't see much of it, except where her blood had splashed and dried gummily.

Standing amid the sarcophagi lurked the random uncarved boulders. She hunted about until she found a bucket that stood beneath a pump. Working the pump for what seemed hours, hoping that the hollow retching sound below indicated suction and water, she was rewarded at last with a gush of dusty water that quickly turned pure and cold, almost icy. She filled the bucket nearly to the brim and carried it to the side of the bed, and she began to scrub at the floor, to erase evidence of her blood flow.

She dabbed where she had to, where the blood reached, and as her eyes fell upon the first of the boulders, she remembered she had seen them vaguely featured with human characteristics. Now, though they remained still, she had an even stronger sense of presence. She mopped the blood gingerly, as if cleaning wounds, first from one and then another, and when she was done the bucket of water had gone red. She couldn't find a drain in which to slop it, and there was no door to the chamber—just walls and a floor. No windows, no door, no further world.

She sat back on her heels and looked the nearest boulder in the eye sockets, and said, “Well, forgive me my trespasses, then.”

“Ah, we forgive you who trespass against us,” said the boulder.

“I do beg your mercy,” she said.

“Don't tire yourself. Mercy isn't something we concern ourselves with.” The boulder was blushing to life, filling in its outlines with a rough musculature. A clothed, bearded obstinacy became slowly apparent—more or less like a man, though rather less than more. Not merely because of its stature, but also because it retained in its fixed expression something of the rock. It had eyes that didn't move in its skull, but its skull could swivel on its torso (there seemed no neck), and the head moved back and forth, surveying things, almost as if it were waking up just as she had.

“Gesù,” she said. “Preserve me from this dream. Who are you?”

The boulders spoke—the others first—naming their incapacities,
naming their attributes as stone. Blind, deaf, mute, and lame; lacking in smell, lacking in the ability to savor. The one nearest her, the one who seemed most like a figure, said, “I am Heartless, for I cannot feel.” With the severe expression of an owl he turned his head and glared at her.

“Heartless,” she said, nodding, as if able at least to understand this much.

“And our departed partner is named Next,” said Heartless.

She didn't know what he meant. She was busy trying to understand that he was really speaking. She wasn't sure she could see his lips move, but perhaps the beard and untrimmed mustaches concealed motion.

The other stone senses shifted, like heavy creatures in swiftly flowing water: ponderously, thoughtfully, so as not to lose their balance. She couldn't be sure of their sexes—male or female, or whether they had sexes at all. But Heartless seemed the most finished in form, perhaps because he stood the nearest, and he was clearly male, anyway, from his overly bristling eyebrows to the pouching groin.

“I'm bewildered,” she said. “Talking to a stone. How can this be?”

Heartless shrugged.

“How long have I been asleep here?” she said.

“It's not long.”

“I've become a mature person. But I only remember falling in the forest.”

“You fell at our door.”

“Luck—?”

“Design.”

“Why?”

“You could be safe here.”

“How did you know I would fall at your threshold, though? As I recall it, nothing was chasing me. I had fled a hunter, I'd been told not to return to my home. The night was a terror, the woods scrabbling their twig fingers—but how in all the world could I fall right where you planned?”

“We planned to be where you fell. It isn't the same thing.”

“But how did you know?”

Again, he shrugged.

“How much time have I slept here? There are chores to do,” she said, straightening up. “If not chores at the farm, then surely, chores here.”

“You approve of our arrangements?” he said brightly.

“Not as gloomy as I'd have imagined. But how long have I been here? I am older—my arms feel like paddles, my breasts turn at their own speed, my legs are monstrously long. Look at these nails. It'll take days to file them down.”

“You've been here long enough to grow, I suppose,” he said without interest.

“I'm here four years, or five, certainly. Or six?”

“I don't know.”

“And what have you been doing in all those years?”

“Waiting. Waiting for you to wake up.”

“Standing here around me? For years? What did you do all that time?”

“To the extent we are capable,” he said with a slight grin, “we were thinking.”

“What do you think, then?” she demanded of him.

He considered. “Slow thoughts.”

The others came forward a little. They were like small children with decrepit faces. Their heads were large, noses bulbous and raw, beards tattered, or patchy, or bushy as broom. There was a family resemblance of a sort, but only a little variety in the stitching on a sleeve, the color of a cloak. One had a full set of very black teeth inset with gold bands—an arresting sight.

“What do you want of me?” she said.

Heartless made a sign, dotting the air with a series of poking motions, as if writing something with his finger. “Once we wanted to change into something more human than we are. Now we only want our brother back. Without him, we shift, we adjust. We need to know where he is.”

“I have nothing to do with your brother,” she said.

“Perhaps you do,” he answered. “He went to your father to propose a bargain, and when your father left, our brother went with him. We guess that your guardian, la Donna Borgia, can tell us where he is.”

She had forgotten about her father, about Lucrezia. She had forgotten about the world beyond the room. It hurt her head to think of it.

“How does la Borgia know where your brother is? You're speaking nonsense.”

“I'm speaking truth,” he answered. “Your guardian now stands before our looking glass. We want it back. We want to look in it and see our brother. We don't want to change any more. We change before your eyes.” It was true. The lips were more red, the fingers more divided; the beard looked less like carved granite and more like human hair. “We want to be whole and alone, and she has divided us into segments, as if we were lost individuals, the way humans are. We aren't humans.”

“You are dwarves,” she said, asking more than stating. He turned his head.

“We want our looking glass.”

A hole in the world

T
IME BEGAN
to pass in a more customary fashion, which is to say that Bianca grew to be able to see better. The dwarves left her alone. At first she would sleep and wake fitfully, but in time more regularly. The befurred darkness overhead looked less like the inside of a marsupial pouch and more like a ceiling, with carved rafters, and a chandelier made of four stag skulls, with full racks intertwining, and candles set in their forking branches.

Though Proserpina remained to smile vacantly ahead, the accoutrements of the tomb seemed to be disappearing. Were the dwarves smartening things up while she was asleep? Providing a more habitable space for her? Or was she organizing it herself, out of interior boredom and memory?

In time, the walls of the chamber became paneled halfway up with a wormholed chestnut sadly in need of oiling. Above the chair rail the walls were sheathed in a sort of green stone with a pale black striation,
and nooks and shelves and crannies were cut in them any which way. There were long, deep shelves, suitable for salvers or shields to be slotted in, and cubbies large enough for nothing more than a mug, a ring, a pair of gloves. But the shelves were too high for the dwarves, for they were all empty.