Mirror Mirror (23 page)

Vicente was undaunted by the creature's taciturn nature. He found that he was standing and swinging his arms with exhilaration as he recalled the excitement of seeing Montefiore for the first time. His lord and tyrant, that scandalous Cesare Borgia, had seen to it that Vicente was accompanied to the new home with a small party of mercenaries sporting the Borgia pennant and equipped with an iron-spiked battering ram. “In any event, there was no opposition to my taking possession of Montefiore,” said Vicente. “I came upon a place in mild disrepair, with sullen and uncommunicative
contadini
and house servants more or less attached to the property. They resented us at first. But they were won over. They took us in, and as time passed . . .”

He paused and looked at the stone beast, and several things happened at once.

“My Bianca, my sweetest Bianca. María Inés was dead, but she left me Bianca.”

As Vicente spoke her name, the beast straightened up for a moment, alert and, it even seemed, respectful. If it is courteous to bow before royalty, it is courteous to honor the humble who deserve it. The behavior of the stone beast—its rough brow elevated—gave Vicente de Nevada his first experience of acknowledgment in years. A response to something he said.

“Bianca de Nevada,” said Vicente. “My daughter.”

He had come here, those years earlier, as a way to protect her. He was to have secured the limb of a tree, history's most ancient tree, out of duty toward her. He had forgotten. He had let his imprisonment overwhelm his memory and his duty, not to
il Valentino
but to his daughter.

“I need to leave,” he said to the beast. “I need to claim that talisman and return. I can't tell if I've been gone for a year or a decade, but I've been
gone too long.
Let us finish this job, then, and away to Italy.”

The stone beast lowered its brow and turned (by which action Vicente decided the lower beveled side was the front, and the higher side approximated a cranial hump rising behind). It began to crunch its way into the hole from which it had been disgorged. A sound of scrunching and grinding. Small dry streams of sand and pulverized gravel spat out. The beast didn't merely reclaim its stone womb, though. It kept going, apparently. To judge by the noise, the creature was burrowing through rock. In its wake was a tunnel.

In his prime Vicente couldn't have fit through such a narrow passage. But he had wasted into a reptilian slip of a thing. Having nothing to claim as his possession, he began to make his escape from the dungeon cell of Teophilos.

The stone beast carved out a sharply angled turn. It started to burrow upward. The detritus slipped down and backward and hit Vicente in the face. With every passing moment of effort, Vicente felt a bit
more awake. He was aware of his breathing. Of the trembling inefficiency of his muscles. Of the sand in his lungs. He was aware that his flesh hung on his arms like rotting cotton cloth, and that his clothes were encumbering as a winding sheet. But his mind felt sharper and sharper. He began to feel affection for the stone beast, and to think the simple thoughts that he had once had for his hunting dogs. Good dog, he thought. Good boy. You have a nose I don't have, and eyes that can see through stone. Apparently. Good boy. And on we go.

When the beast had made another soft turn and begun to rise again, scrabbling, eating, bullying the rock aside—Vicente couldn't imagine how it was done—it occurred to him that they were following a path within the thick walls of the monastery itself. They were twisting around the soft curves of the building's grand and massive salient. They were following the straight line of the wall of an interior chamber. They might emerge any minute in a wine cellar, a laundry room, a chamber for storing herbs and root vegetables, an apothecary.

The stone beast paused at last and made a final exertion, and then pushed through. Vicente followed into a well of light that burned like pitch against his eyes.

It was probably a mercy that he cried in pain, for his tears moistened, cleansing his eyes of grit. The outlines of lighted things shivered. In time, he could sit up and look about himself, and clutch his knees in astonishment. He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; its gradations, recessions, protrusions; its startling and vulgar colors.

They had come into a room of prayer, with four high windows in a cupola overhead, shafting hot broiled light yellowly down from the sides of a high thin dome. Cristo Pantocrator was figured in gold leaf upon a wall, staring with massive cold love and patience. The Paraclete was opposite, serrated tips of fire crowning its head, seven olive branches in one claw and seven laurel bows in the other. Between the two, on an altar, stood a tabernacle. The corners were pillars of solid Persian lapis lazuli. The lintels and struts were knobbed with dusty jewels. Each wall was a piece of glass about as large as a
man's chest. Inside, resting on a golden armature specially carved to support the thing in a natural arc, was displayed the bough of the tree of Eden, with silver leaves, and three well-formed Apples in their first blush of ripeness.

Vicente felt little by way of awe. Whether the artifact was an object of profound theological implication or an exquisite work of art didn't matter. The whole room, with its motes of dust dancing slowly in the shafts of possessive light, seemed miracle enough. Gesù Cristo Himself, waving from beyond the glass, couldn't have made Vicente feel more staggered, joyous, alive.

The stone beast put out its two forward limbs. Easily it balanced on its hind ones and reared up. It raised its digitless arms and laid them with a soft clipping sound against one of the glass facades. It knows, thought Vicente, why I've come here. It's been dispatched, or it has dispatched itself, to be my guide. Was it a calcified angel of some sort, or a friendly stone dog? No matter. It did the duty of friendship. It raked its limbs gently across the glass. The tips of its limbs, where there ought to be paws, or hands, puckered and settled. One limb gently swept the glass out of the air, into a ball, as neatly as a film of morning hoarfrost can be scooped up and rounded.

Then the creature fell back. The bough stood ready for taking. It wasn't the beast's job to take it. It was Vicente's, and he knew it.

Tremblingly he reached in and detached the bough from its stand. He held it with no more reverence than he had held Bianca, when she had been a spray of eternity in his arms. Perfection of bone, breath, and blossom.

Vicente set the artifact on the floor while he looked around for a sack or a casket in which to carry it. He didn't need to bother. With its strange limbs the beast secreted the thing somewhere in the folds of its stone form. It disappeared, harbored in stone.

They turned and left the treasury. From a distance Vicente could hear the soft keening of monks at prayer. Possibly they were on duty, guarding the doors. He wished them well and was sorry for their loss.

Back into the flank of the wall they crawled. The stone beast had
to go first, being able to intuit the way somehow, and Vicente to follow. Since Vicente couldn't rebuild the wall behind him, their mode of escape would be obvious. Who knew how long it would be before an alarm was raised and a party dispatched to reclaim the stolen relic? Perhaps quite a while, Vicente thought, and hoped, and, yes, prayed. Perhaps the monks looked in on their most precious possession only on the highest of high holy days, or on the ascension of a new bishop or prelate.

Or perhaps they checked on it on the hour; it was impossible to know.

The stone beast burrowed. Vicente followed. They traced a long tunneled route through stone as cold as ice. In time they emerged on a beach of broken shale. All about them burned stars, making a spangled mess in the sweet black sky.

Al-iksir

T
HE SLIGHTEST
poem of my dear Pietro Bembo, smuggled into my chambers when the dreadful Duca de Ferrara is away, and I tremble before unfolding the page. It might be anything. It might say anything. It might contain the secret that will make me more alive. I open the page. It's a poem, it's a thing of beauty, it's a testament of love, it is everything a woman could want. It isn't enough.

I can hear the legend they make of my life already. I can hear the scoundrels practicing their slanders and half-truths about my vices. Donna Lucrezia, they say, in voices falsely honeyed: a patroness of the arts, a whore of Babylon, a murderess and a communicant, a mother and a mistress, a daughter and a Diana. They exaggerate my romances. They miss the point. Gossip serves some purpose. May their purposes fail in the end.

Sometimes I dream of the water. I saw the sea in Naples, of
course, and I am no stranger to views of our cold alexandrine Adriatic, of the more limpidly turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea. But I've not sailed out beyond the sight of land, out between the slipping thumbs of waves and the shapely varnished disc of the heavens. I've never been beyond reach of father or brother or husband or lover. I should like not to turn my back on my life, but I would be grateful for an escape from the tyranny of family.

I was in Ferrara when I heard that Cesare had died in Navarre. Died as a common soldier, fighting naked in a senseless campaign, one morning before dawn. He still thought he might regain some foothold of power from his wife, or threaten the family de Nevada until they came up with an army or funds to hire one. I took to my chamber. For a month I relived our childhoods. By day I honored our family devotion through my penances of grief and guilt. By night I remembered our crimes of love in dreams that came without cost or consequence, the only regret being to awake from them.

I loved my brother. He had held my hand during the investiture of our father into the See of Rome. I admired his ambition and his cruelty. I collaborated with him in campaigns against the world, against our father, against our respective spouses. He could look at me and make me smoke with need just by angling a glance in my direction from beneath a single raised eyebrow. My insides felt as if singed and sanctified with frankincense from Araby.

What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake? This Cesare had given me, and this, in dying, he took from me.

His death occurred perhaps a year after I had sent that child out to the forest. In that vicious year nothing had gone right—perhaps as a punishment to me, perhaps just as proof of how callous the world could be. Cesare's career being ended, horribly, I had my third husband, Alfonso d'Este, Duca de Ferrara, as an occasional visitor to my bed; and Ariosto to sing me his epic romances; and to tease me with sonnets, Pietro Bembo. But it was with the death of Cesare that my
world began to end too. For what could my husband, my lovers manage to mean to me?

With what ferocity did I push my court into diversions, though. Masques and balls, operas and recitations, feats of valor and feats of humiliation, lectures on alchemy, lectures on theology, lectures on the art of lecturing. And from each distraction I learned two things. There was always some small nugget to please or perplex me, accompanied by the larger and tired knowledge that nuggets of pleasure couldn't alter fate nor massage the broken heart into working properly again.

Niccolò Machiavelli would come and talk to me about Cesare. We drank wine in tall red goblets. We remembered Cesare's ambitions, his strengths, his loves. I think Machiavelli loved Cesare as much as he admired him, though I think he rightly feared him more than anything else. We talked about Florence, about the Republic; we remembered Savonarola and the bonfire, and how sad that the Medici themselves hadn't been included among the baubles to be scorched.

Machiavelli would leave. Darling Bembo would come, the love, and try to disarm my grief with the attention of his hand, his sex, his nibbling lips. The coy code names we had, the pretense at pretenses. As if my husband knew nothing, or, if knowing, as if he might care at all.

But I had a mind as well as a heart, and a curiosity as well as an ambition. And I paid attention. Ferrara has its university—perhaps not on a par with Bologna or Paris, Württemberg or Oxford, but it attracts eager students. Once, eager to try a student again, I cloaked myself beyond recognition and slipped into the galleries. It happened that an alchemist was speaking in the scholarly language of Latin, and it had been too long since I'd heard the Latin of Rome, of my childhood. I listened with grave joy as a slip of a thing, a lad, asked questions about the Elixir of Life.

“
Elixir,
” said the sage, “is derived from a term of the Moor—
al-iksir,
though they steal that root word from the Greek
xieron,
meaning a dry and powdery substance. A tincture.” I listened with keener interest. The Borgia family has always had a fondness for what
can be accomplished by the judicious application of a particular tincture in a particular glass of wine.

The young lad persisted and asked questions about quicksilver. One of the three elements on which the universe is based, said the lecturer. In days long gone by, wealthy Spanish families used it to coat a shallow basin, large enough for bathing in.