Mirror Mirror

To vouchsafe anyone passage to paradise.

Bring me her heart carved from her chest

THEsalonewas silent. Cesare had summoned Fra Ludovico to help him hobble down the stairs. Looking for the mouse? Looking for confession and penance? Cesare was a man of superstitions—he had believed in Prince Dschem’s fairy tale of the Tree of Knowledge, he believed in the mercy of the Church. He lit votives to Gesù and the Madonna, to Pan, to his hero Alexander the Great, and to Fortuna, all on the same altar. He played at prophecy with a volume of Virgil, opening it at random to read aloud the poet’s antique opinion on the decision of the moment.

Lucrezia sat and absently covered her lap with the red cloak that Bianca de Nevada had left behind. As she stroked it, and the day’s shadows began to gather, she fell into a reverie. Perhaps it was seeded by the afternoon with the little girl. Thoughts of her own girlhood at that same age—and later—came rising up.

She didn’t often revisit her past, for the future offered more succor.

As a child, she’d been as good as orphaned. Well, when your father is the Pope and your mother his mistress, and your nursemaids cardinals well placed in the Curia, even small domestic details of your childhood tend to seem freighted with portent.

After her father was elevated to the throne of Peter, the Vatican’s apartments and offices were as crowded as alleys on market day. The commodities on sale were pardons, favors, indulgences to shorten purgatorial jail sentences. Who in those crowded bazaars of the faith might have provided the companionship a girl might need? Not even the solemn sisters who oversaw the housecleaning of Christendom’s most magnificent palace to Christ.

All this had begun when Lucrezia was the age that Bianca was now—about eleven. The previous Pope, Innocent VIII, had taken ill. His doctors had bled three young boys as a propitiatory offering, to no avail. Innocent VIII had died. So had all three boys. On a sacrifice of their blood, her father, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, had been elected to the Papal See, and Lucrezia was removed from the care of her mother, Vannozza.

A famous Roman courtesan, Vannozza had spent her years as Cardinal Borgia’s mistress established conveniently near to his palace on the Piazza Pizzo de Merlo. She’d conducted her business with equal parts of hauteur and circumspection. She’d protested at the removal from her household of her older son, Cesare, whose career was being thrashed out by his father; she’d wept piteously when deprived of Lucrezia. But what rights are left to any mother when a father has made up his mind?—and since this father was newly elected Pope of the Roman church, Vannozza was required to bear her grief in silence as best she could. She didn’t refuse the Pope company when he required it, but she bridled—Lucrezia later realized, she must have bridled—that the Pope’s newest mistress, the clamorously attractive Giulia Farnese, was given part responsibility for the raising of Vannozza’s own Lucrezia.

Lucrezia had taken leave of her mother casually, mockingly. Well, her robust and homely father was in his ascendancy, and court life seemed more alluring than learning the arts of needlework at her mother’s elbow. Lucrezia had been fattened on the notion of Borgia supremacy, after all, and her mother wasn’t a Borgia—not even by marriage. With difficulty Lucrezia managed to choke back her impulse to correct her mother’s comportment—as Lucrezia left to take up her proper place in the Vatican palace, Vannozza’s tears and hand-wringing weren’t suitable gesturesat all —and besides, the girl didn’t envision what a profound change it would be. The distance to Vannozza’s door was, mathematically, exactly as far as the distance from it. Surely?

As it turned out, such measurements aren’t entirely governed by the laws of mathematics. The laws of politics and one’s personal humors alter the equation.

And Lucrezia, impressed with Giulia Farnese’s beauty, was cowed by it. Giulia was her own age, nearly,and her father’s lover. The paradox of that!

Before state affairs and court life began to restrict her liberty, the young Lucrezia haunted the servants’ quarters in the Pope’s fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo. She exchanged her silks and furs for her handmaiden’s broadcloth tunic and slipped out a window, and played tricks on fishermen struggling to find dinner in the filthy Tiber. To see how it felt, she’d laid down with shepherds in fields striped with the shadows of poplars. She’d wandered incognita—the daughter of a pope—giving free kisses among the tombstones and cypresses on the Capitoline Hill. In matters amorous, Lucrezia was finding herself talented. Too soon, her beauty became unique. Before long she couldn’t show her face inside or out of Saint Peter’s Basilica without being recognized.

Study came easily to her. She spoke four languages well. Without much effort she could hear in the rhythm of foreign tongues a certain implied meaning, even when vocabulary and the nuances of grammar escaped her. For a child with spotty tutoring, she engaged in her own private trivium: not grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, the traditional roster of subjects, but glamour, intrigue, and power. She followed the affairs of the court of the Pope with closer attention than most bishops. Once, when the Pope was indisposed, she even had managed the affairs of the Church for a short while, until she was prohibited by cardinals from signing a papal document with the question Ubi est penna vestra?—meaning not onlyWhere is your pen? but alsoWhere is your penis?

But she’d enjoyed governing, when the time arrived to try it. She’d spent those few months in 1498, when she was scarcely eigh-teen, asgovernatrice of Spoleto. Five long months there, married to one man, Alfonso of Aragon, and in love with another who would no longer have her. She was pregnant with the child who would be named Rodrigo, after her father, and she was saddled with the other one, the mortal mistake in her arms, the one who cried piteously at night, who wouldn’t be thrown over the edge of the aqueduct, all because of the meddlesome de Nevada . . .

Adult as she could be by now, at the age of twenty-six, she sat before the mirror and studied her face within it. Had so much happened in such a short time? In seven years? Vicente de Nevada, having learned of her residency there, had made his way to Spoleto, on the Umbrian flank of the Apennines. He had gone to hear Mass at the duomo. He had ventured forward and caught Lucrezia at the conclusions of the Sacrament. She’d been praying in front of Fra Filippo Lippi’s fresco, in which the Virgin hovers in robes of white and gold before God the Patriarch, who sets a crown of surpassing glory upon her head. Lucrezia had been jealous, not of the Virgin’s beauty, but of her crown.

I beg to speak with the Donna Borgia, said Vicente, in Spanish, and from her impious thoughts she had been torn, for the consolation of hearing the family tongue.

De Nevada asked for thegovernatrice ’s intercession with her brother Cesare. De Nevada had a motherless child, and his profession was agriculture; might Cesare, out of feeling for a fellow Iberian, secure the immigrant a position, perhaps even a small landholding?

Put the child in an orphanage till she’s older, and send her to be a nun when she’s ready, decreed Lucrezia. Neither my brother nor I have property we hand out for the asking. If you need work, Cesare is always looking forcondottieri. A mercenary earns good pay and can usually find a war to fight. Besides, I don’t oversee my brothers’ rare administrations of mercy.

Something in de Nevada’s expression—his refusal to consider farming the child out—made her feel a modest pity, though. She invited him to visit her in the castle. That afternoon, from a rampart, she watched the father and daughter make their way up the slope and be admitted to the interior courtyard.

There, despite a chill in the air, Lucrezia greeted them. She had dismissed her retinue of attendants and chaperones, and her husband was off hunting for the day. To prove her own motherliness, and as a badge of respectability, she kept the Punishment on her hip. He was docile enough until it proved inconvenient—his usual way.

She had arranged a table to be set with Castilian lace, and platters of fresh fruit and decanters of wine were at the ready. Vicente had the young girl by the hand. The young Bianca.

The child must have been three years old or so. Good-looking in her way, considering how lumpy and irregular children’s faces could be. The dark hair, the skin so white. Pale eyes, the color of water, set wide, and cunningly large, the way children’s eyes so often seem. The child was preternaturally self-possessed. She didn’t join the other urchins playing chase and seek games among the arches. She didn’t interrupt her father, pull at his sleeves, nor did she whine or fuss. She stood with both feet planted, her little stomach a smooth shallow bowl beneath the pleats of her green-black tunic. And while she stood and watched, too well behaved for belief, Lucrezia’s own Punishment thrashed in her arms, threatening to unbalance her onto the cobbles, maybe endanger the child growing within her.

Let me help you, said Vicente, a capable father. She despised him for having the nerve to assist without leave. But he had a natural touch, and the squirming toddler settled, and she hated Vicente for that talent too.

They exchanged a few remarks about life in Iberia, in Italy, about the weather and the church services in Spoleto. She asked why he had left his homeland in the first place. That might have been all. But Vicente had touched Lucrezia somehow, in some way she didn’t know—perhaps as a speaker of Spanish he reminded her of her brother, whose company she missed so? It was hard to say. And when the weather grew sharply colder, and a sudden squall fell like white nets around them, she found herself extending the hospitality of the castle to this newcomer. Spend a few nights, she had said; make your beds here. Until the snow lets up, at least. Little hope, really, of my finding you a foothold of property, but I can find you a bed and a meal.

That night, before Alfonso had approached her chamber to take his due as a husband, the Punishment squalled worse than ever. The wet nurses couldn’t calm him down, and she wouldn’t let them take him away for fear they would kill him before she had a chance. She would rather do the job herself so she could ensure that blame fell safely elsewhere. She’d thought it through often enough, hadn’t she? And here was de Nevada, a man of no apparent connections, presenting himself as a likely candidate. Fortune smiled on her, for once! She could accuse him and imprison him before morning, and no one would come forward to speak on his behalf.

Long after midnight, she wrapped a bunting around the sleeping child’s mouth to muffle any sudden cries, and she carried him down the steps of the courtyard and exited the palace by a side door. (She had seen that the guard would be deeply asleep thanks to a helpful powder in his evening ale.) She made her way across the brow of the mount, to where the bridge, stepping in Gothic arches on top of a Roman aqueduct, began its lofty walk from the castle, across the gorge carved out by the Tessino River, to the monastery on Monte Luco, the far side of the valley.

Even in the scatter of snow, her step was swift but sure, for she had taken the air and the views from the bridge many times before. It was guarded at the far end, she knew. But the near end was desolate. Not even a viper could swarm up the steep legs of the arches.

She went to where she judged the halfway point must be. She lay down the Punishment to unwrap him, to send him naked to his Maker, and good riddance—when, a whisper on snow, she heard a footstep or two coming from the direction of the castle, though no one could have seen her leave.

She turned and peered. A mist had come up on the valley’s western slope. If her pursuer was hidden from her, she must also still be hidden from him.

She hadn’t bargained at working hastily. Perverse to the last, the child chose this moment to wake. He kept writhing as she leaned against the edge of the rampart and readied herself to pitch the weight mightily, to clear the wide ledge in an arc and ensure fatality. She couldn’t get a firm enough footing. Damn. He seemed to have an animal’s instinct for what was happening.

Perhaps she would have to bash his head in first to reduce his form to dead weight. She gasped with the effort and drew her son back, prepared to batter the wall with his skull—and then the sound of nearer footsteps, a whisper becoming a rhythm through the rising mist.

It was Vicente. The one figured to stand as a culprit was interfering instead. He was aghast. He threw himself between her swinging arm and the wall, so the baby thumped hideously, but not damagingly, against his chest. Are you mad? hissed Vicente. My lady Lucrezia.

She slumped against the far wall with the back of her hand against her mouth. Who are you? Where am I? she quavered, working for time in which to gather her thoughts.

You don’t know what you are doing, he said. Come, take my arm, and I’ll walk you to safety.

It wasn’t hard to appear besotted with sleep, for she was dizzy with fright. If anyone were to learn what she had been about to do . . . Even for a Borgia, the slaughter of a child was extreme. By the time they had reached the castle side of the aqueduct, however, she’d prepared a defense and a strategy.

I’m slow to wake, she said. I suffer from fits of sleepwalking. It’s all as a dream, a horrid dream. Do me the honor of keeping my fretful condition a matter private between us. How lucky you were to come wake me and avert disaster.

He saw her in the morning. At a table in the solar, he sat down with the young woman and her husband as they broke their fast. His little girl sat on his lap. The Punishment had been sequestered far enough away so his morning screams couldn’t be heard.

I hope you slept well, said Lucrezia’s hapless husband.

Only so-so, answered Vicente, studying the bread in his hands. I had much on my mind and kept turning. I’m scarcely sure what I should do next. Donna Borgia, he continued, looking her in the eyes, I await your advice.

I’ve been thinking, said Lucrezia hastily, about your predicament. I believe with a little attention, Cesare or I may yet be able to find you a small estate, conferrable upon certain conditions.

I thought you considered that impossible, said Alfonso de Bisceglie, surprised at his wife.

I couldn’t sleep either, and I put my mind to the task. Her answer was brisk and the topic of conversation changed.

Thus had Vicente come into possession of Montefiore, after Lucrezia, privately, had had the previous owner smothered, to ensure the premises were available for new occupants.

Learning from her panic, Lucrezia had dismissed the Punishment from her life thoroughly as she had dismissed herself from her mother’s. In due course, she had given birth to Rodrigo, of more honorable lineage, of better disposition and capabilities than the Punishment. To protect him she had him raised far from herself too. There was reason, in his legitimacy, to worry about his prospects, and she wouldn’t see him besmirched by too close an association with her.

She looked at the mirror as these days, seven years past, reframed themselves. It was almost as if she could see the hills around Spoleto, dotted with ilex, lulled by the morose remarks of sheep. The palm trees, the threads of waterfall on the far slope of the canyon . . . She had never been able to guess why Vicente de Nevada had been awake and clever or bold enough to follow his royal hostess out of a dark guarded castle and across a mist-shrouded bridge. He had been certain enough of himself to leave his little girl behind, dozing under her blankets. Andshe had not been screaming through the night, with the pains of teething, of colic, of general disapproval of the world.

That same good little girl, now swaying her boyish hips at Cesare.

The Duchessa couldn’t bear what she had seen. Cesare was as good as dying—Lucrezia was no fool—and still the lecherous bastard had found the girl child alluring. Her own brother, the tenderest swift soldier ever to enter her bed—groping at a child. In a seizure of ire she gripped her stomacher and tore it. Good that he had bullied the priest off somewhere—probably to a local church with a real roof, so Cesare could take the sacrament in some sort of comfort. He enjoyed the penance almost as much as the sin. It didn’t matter where he had gone. He had left her, that much was clear. He was gone for good.

Sweeping up in a tempest of silks and ermine, before she knew what she was about, she pitched herself toward the door.

Primavera, she commanded. Where are you? Someone, get that old cow up here. Isn’t it true that she has a grandson who is a hunter? Primavera. He will come and have an audience with me, as soon as he can wash the blood off his hands. Primavera. Does no one listen when I call?

Primavera was out at the well, rinsing Bianca’s face. She heard Lucrezia Borgia bellow. Primavera’s lips set more firmly together. When, at last, she heeded the summons and stood to obey, her ankles shook.

Interview with an assassin

YOUappreciate the reward? She looked down at the soft purse of coins in her hands and shifted it gently back and forth, to make the musical remark of the money within more alluring. He wasn’t used to being in the house, at least not farther than the kitchen. He stood as if before a magistrate and looked her in the eye. Enough to ask about the service required.

Take the child from the house, deep into the woods, far beyond where anyone might find her.

There are woods enough to lose a child in.

I want her more than lost. I want her life.

The woods will take her life.

I want you to take her life.

She has seriously offended.

It’s not your place to ask why. Nor are you to find yourself capable of remembering this interview. You are a hunter. Wait until night has begun to fall, and take her life however you must.

You trust a lot to a man you don’t know.

You have an aged grandmother in my employ. You will want her to see her final days in comfort, not—otherwise.

I’ve no one else but an aged grandmother. My father and his brother were both killed in the bombardment of Forlì, and my mother died of grief soon thereafter.

What is your name?

I’m the hunter.

What does your grandmother call you?

Obedient.

Fair enough. Do as I say. Bring me her heart carved from her chest.

Ranuccio lifted his bearded chin.

I don’t want her to survive, to call on relatives from across the sea to avenge her abandonment. Make good my request and you shall have this purse, and your silly grandmother shall sleep on her own straw pallet until the end of her days. She threw the purse on the table. Her natural days.

He picked up the purse and weighed it in his hands and didn’t speak at first. It was as if he’d never come across coin before. They both heard the sound of hisnonna ’s voice calling the chickens in. It was an old voice, and the only one left he knew. He said, I can hope to commit a murder and to eliminate a child. I can decide not to ask questions about your reasons.

Can you also manage to forget that we have ever discussed any of this?

Any of what? he said, and smiled for the first time.

A walk in the woods

BIANCA HADeaten already, but she sat in the kitchen helping Primavera prepare a meal for the Borgias. It felt safe there—well, safer than anywhere else. Primavera was scowling and cursing protectively. What is that monstrous bitch up to, that your face is covered with blood? she’d said.

There wasn’t anything to say, because Bianca could hardly describe what had happened, or why. It was an accident, she insisted.

You were standing like a docile sweet orphan and a vase flew into your head by accident?

I’m not an orphan.

Of course not, and a vase isn’t a bird with silver wings either. The blood in your eyes, mercy. I should tell you about blood.

Please, Primavera, not that again. I know about that.

Upstairs, Lucrezia had picked up a lute and tuned it. The familiar melody that skittered down the stairwell was lopsided, its syncopation the result, perhaps, of a snapped string not yet replaced. Primavera didn’t talk over the sound of the music. She supervised a joint of pork bound in strings, and took from a hook in the chimney stack a parcel of olives she’d been smoking. Sharply, her worry showing, she told Bianca to stir the white beans simmering in a pot suspended from a chain in the kitchen fireplace.

Bianca’s eyes were cleared of blood. She was glad to have something common to do—stir the beans—and already she felt better. She was afraid that the presence of blood was going to bring Primavera around to discussing her favorite topic, the imminent arrival of a young woman’s menses. Bianca was neither skittish of her female development nor eager for it. But Primavera, sensitive to her own desiccation, found no more enjoyable a topic than the rehearsal of what the monthly complaint was like. The cramps, the mess, the induction into a life of fecundity and danger.

Tonight Primavera restrained herself. She felt the atmosphere curdle and pause. The house had a musty air, as if an atmosphere of grief was leaching through the stones from an underground source. No obvious message in the beans or the clouds. Ranuccio had bought her a chicken and wrung its neck, and after she finished cutting it she’d spill its liver and see what mischief was afoot.

What was the source of the sour miasma? Had a rat died beneath the floor joists, and was it extruding its malodorous juices? Or was the spirit of the house’s previous owner making itself felt? When she wasn’t being a superstitious seer, Primavera was a realist. Her grasp, increasingly, was on the present. If the ghost of the former landlord was bent on causing their skin to crawl, he was doing it effectively, but he was still no more than a ghost, and in any contest, the quick overcrowded the dead in all geographies but the churchyard and the spiraling corridors of hell.

Or might it be a more recent arrival, the ghost of Vicente de Nevada himself? Perhaps, months ago and far away, he’d met his end and his ghost had taken its time returning to the family home.

Primavera knew it didn’t do to turn a blind eye on such things. She descended to the cold keep below the stairs to get a dip of oil. Intestines spilled in augury should then be cooked and eaten, for the sake of economy as well as spitting at the fates. Below steps, she heard a gasp from the kitchen. It took her a minute to turn—she’d put on a few pounds lately. She needed to step down a level or two and find room to negotiate her bulk on a flat bit of flooring rather than to risk twisting on a stair. By the time she returned to the kitchen, she saw the stool on which Bianca had been sitting, overturned in a clumsy way. The spoon for stirring the beans was on the floor.

Bianca had made no protest when Primavera’s grandson entered the kitchen, picked up a heel of bread with one hand and grabbed her own forearm with the other. He shoved the food in his mouth and yanked her from her seat roughly; she was dangling like a newly caught trout. She kicked not out of alarm but with an instinct for balance.

Then Ranuccio barreled out the door, knocking the crown of Bianca’s skull on the stone doorframe, and she was abstracted with swimming sparks of pain. By the time she could focus her eyes through her distress and register something discernible, she was outside—this is the meadow, now this is the lower meadow, and Montefiore is retreating above me, like a storm cloud in reverse. Its low wings and barns close their arms against the bulk of the main house, its red roofline lowers like a furrowed brow.

The house became richer, more obtuse, a red-brown rose growing in reverse, back toward secret potent bud.

She saw the gooseboy who stood gaping at the side of the road, adrift in his snowy cackling blanket of friends. She tried to utter aHelp me!or aWhat? or aCome now!, but all she could manage was a strangled sort of duck quack. He waved his hand and smiled at her—they were hardly friends, Bianca and the gooseboy, just people who lived on the same hill, basically—and then he and his downy companions had been swallowed up in the arms of apple trees, which in turn became an apron of apple trees sweeping in a single tide away from her. She was past Lago Verde and up to the bridge her father had forbidden her to cross.

There Ranuccio stopped. Was he going to throw her over the side? Or did he somehow know about her father’s prohibition? But no—he was fishing with one hand inside his shirt. He came up with a sack of coins. He tossed them in the water. He was distracting the mudcreature! Must be so. He continued down the other side of the bridge, and she was being hustled away from Montefiore without further assault. As if this assault weren’t enough.

Montefiore was becoming the dense irretrievable past, the dead childhood, dead, cold dead on its slab, and no mercy existed in the world or out of it to slap it back to life again.

Ranuccio wasn’t a giant, though; not a mudcreature, not an ogre from some comic hearthside tale. He was a strong man and a big one, but he was only a man, and she was after all eleven; she ought to be able to figure this out.

She hadn’t seen him often. Occasionally when the weather was harshest he would show up and share some food with his grandmother—either bring her some treat, a brace of pheasants or rabbits, sometimes a haunch of venison or a slithery set of steaks cut from the flanks of a boar. Primavera would prepare the meat; she was no stranger to the benisons of wild garlic, lemon, and black peppercorns from the East. But though Ranuccio and his grandmother shared a grief—the death of the generation between them—they seemed to have no other common language. In the years in which Bianca de Nevada had come to be aware of Ranuccio, his arrivals and disappearances had been conducted in an almost conspiratorial silence.

Thumping against his side—for even as slight as she was, she had some weight, and so in time his muscles ached—she twisted and finally caught enough breath, and enough sense, to begin to complain. She yelped her confusion at first, and, her breath ignited, she began to wail, and to try to twist her arm free so she could beat against his side. Where are you taking me? she said. Where are we going?

The promontory for which Montefiore was named leaned above them, and the house was lost in its leafy opacity. Where is my home? she demanded, more frantically. Where are we going?

A walk in the woods, he said.

I’m not allowed to go alone into the woods.

You aren’t alone. He set her down and jabbed her playfully in the side with one hand, though with his other he continued to keep her wrist in a circling grip stronger, she imagined, than iron shackles could possibly be.

The dark is coming on, and Primavera will worry.

The old smelly goose mother knows what this is about. Don’t worry about her.

But she didn’t say a word to me. She would have told me—

She didn’t want to alarm you. She wanted it to be a surprise.

Bianca stood still to consider this. There was so much unclear about how adults behaved, and Primavera, it was sure, was more quixotic and fickle in her behavior than most.

What is your intention? said Bianca, as firmly as her quavering voice would allow.

Let’s walk a while together and learn our intentions.

If you let go of my hand, I can walk more comfortably.

If I let go of your hand, you will run away.

I will not run away.

You will run away. I know children, and when they are scared they are foolish as hens. They bolt at the first chance they get. I tell you, there is little reason to be scared. From a leather pouch slung on a strip of leather around his waist he picked a dagger with a handle of worn antler.

She shrunk from him as best she could, as if she could shed her own hand and leave it there in his grip. Her underskirt had gone damp.

What use is that knife to you here?

To protect us in the woods, he said. Do you see that it’s getting dark?

I don’t see as much as I would like.

Because it’s getting dark. But the light in the sky was ample enough to shine on the silvered blade, making it stand out against the blue-black undergrowth. They poked deeper into the woods, and the sky darkened now as the canopy of trees closed above them.

If I let you go, you will run, he said again, many minutes later, when the dark was no longer considering a visit but had moved in for the night. The only light was the luminescence of late summer bugs, the stripe of silver along the blade, and the wet in Ranuccio’s eyes. She could smell from her own body a sour moisture, the reek of her body’s fear.

If you let me go, she said, and faltered.

. . . you will run, he said, completing her sentence.

And then she understood him. She stopped and stood still. He let her go. He raised his knife. He held the handle with one hand. With the fingers of his other hand he gripped the point of the very sharp blade teasingly. A single drop of black blood stood out on his thumb.

She gave a genuflection that she didn’t know he could see, and then she turned and walked carefully away, into the dark.

The heart of the woods

RANUCCIO WAITEDuntil the sound of the girl’s progress had become swallowed up in the back-and-forth of wind through leaves. Now there was the creak of an oak limb, now a silence through which a distant stream could be heard to murmur. Now a rush of wind again—and

and—the world had sealed over, had healed itself of the girl’s presence, as if she had never lived. Had even forgotten her absence. Even he, used to hearing a beetle pause and inspect itself under a fallen log, was dizzy with the mystery of how fully she had been taken away.

What was her name, even?

He stopped to rest, leaning against a boulder. He hugged himself for warmth. What was to be done now? For the beautiful Donna Lucrezia had requested the child’s heart as proof of her death. Ranuccio didn’t understand the root of Lucrezia’s malice, but he was clear on this: she wouldn’t rest until she was certain her campaign had been carried out as requested. So there was the matter of the heart to consider.

Ranuccio’snonna was a fabulist, a pagan oracle, equally conversant with the saints and angels as she was with the crooks, shimmies, elves, and frostlings of local renown. Her wisdom hadn’t prevented the death of her sons in battle. So to avoid a similar fate, Ranuccio had taken to hunting in the forests that still surged like seas around outlying farms and past tillage and orchards.

But, looking for something different by which to rule his depopulated life, he had also been drawn to the lures of Siena, and Arezzo, and even, two or three times, to the diadem of central Italy, Florence. And, though he had little language in which to cast his understanding, Ranuccio nonetheless found himself sympathetic to the sweet sound of discourse, to reason’s steady footfall from thought to thought, from proposition to proof, from thesis to antithesis, from the raw clever act of characterizing the world to the more serene bliss of categorizing it. Pico della Mirandola, a convert of Savonarola’s, had laid it out so clearly:A dog must always behave like a dog, and an angel could not but behave angelically.

The world was wilderness on one side, full of twisting oak trees dropping their penile acorns, of wolves with ruddy jaws. Even the vines of ivy would reach their small dry-clawed hands up the inside of your calf and thigh if you lingered too long. And on the other side—the side Florence ruled over—it was rolled and leveled paradise, with cypresses and laurels trained to march in arithmetical arrangements, and gravel walks raked so purely that even the robins knew not to hunt for worms there, lest the symmetry be spoiled. Classical statues preened on cornerstone plinths, proposing by the perfection of their forms a range of states of being so sublime that Ranuccio had never had the temerity to ask for a glossary of their qualities.

But Florence, and the legislated and unspokenregulae that governed its civic life, both appealed to Ranuccio and made him mute before his superstitious grandmother. Love and grief had bound them, and mutual hunger allowed them to sit down and share what the skill of the hunter and the skill of the cook could contrive between them to put on the table. But conversation had not been their habit.

He had never told her, for instance, about the time he had come across a unicorn in a glade. He knew the lore about unicorns—that they only ever approached maidens, and in no conceivable way had Ranuccio ever been a maiden. But lore was only lore, a system of thinking decayed from some more ancient, blurry hypothesis, deteriorating toward a superstitious tic or ridiculous custom.

He had been up to see Fra Tomasso, his confessor, a crippled Franciscan who had retired to an oratory carved out of a cave. The friar lived there with a beaky merlin that perched most days inside the awesome dried skull of a Cyclops. It seemed that Ranuccio was the friar’s sole disciple, and only an occasional one at that.

Fra Tomasso had bled him for health, and heard his confession (fornication, avarice, contempt for the name of the Lord, that sort of incidental sin), and fed him a scupperful of oil that purged his bowels in a sudden and unpleasant way. So, on the way down from the oratory, feeling hollowed and pardoned and ready to sin again, he had been pleased to come across a small but steep, slightly sulfurous waterfall he’d not seen before.

Ranuccio had shed his clothes and plunged into the pool beneath the waterfall with a cheery abandon, the more delicious for being so rare. When he emerged, cleaned outside now as well as, in every way that could be managed, within, he had staggered into the grove to find his clothes, and naked as Adam in Eden, he had startled the unicorn, who turned its head.

The unicorn, by virtue of its characteristic utensil, was presumed always to be male, but Ranuccio found himself unwilling to look and see. What did it matter? In any event there was a radiance, that radiance that stories occasionally remember to tell, and Ranuccio was blinded by the sense of being visited by light itself. Perhaps, in the creature’s presence, Ranuccio’s own maleness was unmade, or his maidenness called forth. Or some other mystical transaction, too confounding in its airy whiteness to name.

He knelt before the beast, and it seemed to Ranuccio that the unicorn hesitated. The hunter felt a stiff heat throb from its flanks, as if its suspicion could take on a thermal aspect. But Ranuccio put his hands down on his own thighs, turning his thumbs outward to reveal his open palms. He lowered his eyes. He heard the ground tremble, as hoof after hoof was set delicately down—in perfect synchronization, mountains a continent away were crumbling one by one. The creature brought its bath of light forward, and the great horn came near. Ranuccio could see ripples of gray-white line, fine as spiderweb, tracing through the ivorylike shaft, as if proof that the horn grew through minute accretion like anything else in this natural world. Then the unicorn set its horn into his lap. At once, Ranuccio’s eyes spilled with bruising tears and his cock trembled and released its scatter of milky pearl. Ranuccio was as fully emptied, as fully hollow, as it was possible for a grown human male to be, and the unicorn turned its head and looked upon the shattered possibility of a man, and made its request.

The creature wanted to complete its life, to sing the song that gave its life meaning. It ought to have died naturally, and its song issued out of it in true time. But the world was changing. What had once been a dragon in a net was now just a bird born wrong, changed accidentally in its egg. Chicken livers could not tell the future precisely enough to prevent the death in war of a parent and an uncle. The unicorn had outlived its age. It was dog and angel both—damn Pico to hell—and there was no place for that much mystery in the world anymore.

How could he deny the unicorn its death? Was it commonplace mercy or superior cowardice? But he could, and he did: he might be naked as Adam, but he couldn’t be as pure. Adam and Eve named the world between them, but Ranuccio wanted no knowledge unshared by his species. He would turn aside from the sacred Temptation and, in the consequence of it, risk the removal of the need for a Savior to redeem his other mundane sins.

How he communicated this to the creature, he didn’t know. Did the creature pull back its horn? Did the hunter swoon? He was dressed, and singing a long ridiculous song about a Knight Templar, almost home by dusk, when he came back to his senses and remembered what had happened in the glade by the waterfall.

Ranuccio never spoke of it to a soul. He didn’t confess it to Fra Tomasso in later conversations.

What the exchange had done for him—to him—became evident only in time. He was a hunter, a castaway in the shrinking forests of late medieval Italy, and, single-minded and uneducated, he’d been bred and raised to hunt and kill for food. And now he couldn’t perform the duty without a certain cost to his spirit. He did kill, of course—it was that or die of starvation. He used arrows and traps, snares and cudgels; he netted when he needed. Once he even experimented with a short rifle, though the gunpowder stank and the noise seemed to rip the very trees out of the ground.

But he didn’t kill without dread and shame, realizing that the lower creatures, the deer and fowl and boar, the rabbits, the wild pigs, all resisted, all preferred their lives to their deaths. The unicorn had offered its life, had petitioned for its death, and he’d failed, as a professional hunter, to oblige. He might learn, in the afterlife, whether his failure was a virtue or a fault, but in the meantime he suffered with not knowing.

And wondering, all along, in the crusty margins between dreaming and waking, if the unicorn was still waiting, or if it had found a more capable murderer.

He hadn’t been able to murder the child, either, but he found a young buck and ably brought him down. The deer’s hind legs crushed in unnatural position beneath him, Ranuccio straddled the powerful neck and pulled the head back, and readied himself for the reckoning that the creature would do with his eyes.

The deer didn’t do as he ought. He didn’t fight or thrash, he didn’t stiffen at the threat of the knife’s wild bite. It was as if he too had met the unicorn in the woods and had learned about this moment.

It was as if—in a wild fantasy, he grappled to understand—it was as if the buck were as good as the girl’s mother, that reportedly beautiful María Inés, so intent on the life of her abandoned child that she would die a second time to help the hunter build an alibi, to buy the child time and safety. The mere sex of the creature didn’t alter the mercy or the value of the sacrifice.

Thank you, he murmured, and slit the deer’s throat.

The heart of the woods, he said to Lucrezia when, the next morning, he handed her the wooden casket she had requested.

I am a rock and my brothers are rocks

I am a rock and my brothers are rocks

And our family name is patience.

Grinding our lunch can take most of a decade.

Step soft, we’re a beach: step firmly, a landslide.

At the head of the sky is a burning stone,

A circlet of stars, a mirroring moon, an eye of blinding gold.

At the bottom of every sky is a world;

At the foot of its forested mountains, always a stream.

We aren’t the gold nor the blue nor the slope.

We aren’t the stream nor the sound of its rushing.

We are the bed on which the world rests,

Its criminal patience, its bleak stupid patience.

Seven

was less than we were used to being. We had once been the number one more than seven, we clots in the earth’s arteries. But the noisy one left and maybe for need of him we were stricken with attention. When we were only seven, there was something wrong.

It was a matter of balance. There is a smug assurance among pairs, a possibility of completion that other creatures lack. We knew enough of the world of beasts and men to see how males burrow and females furrow, but the comfort of pairing isn’t critically dependent on that exercise.

We lived without the caw and twitch of sex, or to date we had. Unaware of parents but for the mothering hills and the smothering sky, we made do with what we knew: each other. We had no names. We couldn’t count until one of us left, and then we learned to count to seven, and to figure out odd from even. With a departed companion, there was a looseness to our group. There was a way in which we were incomplete, and, perhaps, more alert because of that hunger.

The human mind—we have come to observe—tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s mite. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.

Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door.

To say we were pairs is to propose, to the human mind, a system of marriages among brothers, as if 3 and 4 were one unit together in all things, as if 3 and 4 gave to each other something denied to 5 or 2. This isn’t the case. To say we were pairs isn’t to propose an intimacy or a singularity among our pairings. It’s merely to say that we functioned, loosely, as teams of two, and it hardly mattered whether it was 1 or 7 on the other side of the table or the other end of the long saw or the other edge of the pillow. Indeed, until recently, we wouldn’t have known to identify 1 from 7, or 4 from 6, or a pillow from a saw. In our efficiency we were blind.

But one of us left, and we eventually noticed that he was gone.

There wasn’t enough of us to go around. It wasn’t 7 who was abandoned, nor any other one of us. It was the all of us, and then we learned to count to seven, and saw that we ought to have been able to count to the next number up, the seven plus one. But we couldn’t, for that one was gone. In his absence, we remembered once again our incompleteness.

We were shorn, softly and without pain, of our assurance. We noticed what was wrong. We began to notice one another.

The appetite for noticing having been awakened, we were ready to notice the girl who fell, faint from hunger and cold, at our threshold.

She might not have known it for a threshold at first. We have our clandestine ways. It might have looked to her like a log decom-posing in the forest or a ledge of gray granite outcrop. It’s never easy to see through the eyes of humans and guess what they think they are seeing.

But we saw her, in our bumbling unsatisfied way. We took her in. We dragged her over the threshold, aware, some of us for the first time, of the fringed pattern of muscled digits at the ends of our arms that, for lack of a better word, might as well be called hands. We used our hands—hands. Hah—and we carried her into the smokelight, the better to look upon her form.

We didn’t call her Bianca de Nevada, we didn’t say, Wake up, Bianca de Nevada. We didn’t know that was what she was called. We hardly knew, I think, that people had names.

But we cast our glances sidelong, to see if she was our missing one.

She seemed not to be, unless he had changed a good deal.

She had hair of graven black lines, fine lines, each distinct but with like inclination; they spread upon the pillow in a soft fan that moved as her head moved. The brows on her face were pale as the underside of a dragon’s gullet. Indeed, there was something of the look of a corpse about her, though we’ve come to realize this is true of all humans. They begin to die with their first infant’s wail. But it was truer of her, because of the tone of her skin.

Her limbs were long enough to have uncoiled from their embryonic spasm. Her lower trunk was clad in a skirt the color of dried moss, and her torso in a tunic of meadowlark brown. Her hands—far more clever than ours, more completely cloven into separate fingers—lay back on the pillow, curled slightly like the legs of a crawfish, and the tenderness of her palms was enough to make us weep, though we couldn’t say why, and I daresay to this day none of us would try to explain.

We didn’t discuss her or touch her, but we drew to her chin a blanket of webweed, for though we’re accustomed to the damp and the dark, we know human beings learn what we know only when they have died and been consigned to the soil.

For her comfort we kept away the mealworms and sliceworms and the dung beetles. One of us—none could say who, for we didn’t yet distinguish ourselves one from the other—sat near her shoulder and brushed decay away.

We had nothing better to do but sit and keep watch over her until she had finished her rest. It was likely that she slept three, perhaps four years, before she stirred.

When her eyelids did flutter, we became shy, as if caught in a common sin, though without the individual soul to save or lose, we were as incapable of sin as a scorpion.

She breathed in and out several times, and sat up. Her hair, we were interested to note, had become longer while she slept, and as she blinked her eyes, she caught her hair in the crook of her arm and shielded her bosom with it. (Her tunic had fallen away into separate threads and couldn’t behave as a tunic any longer.)

Good Savior, she said, preserve me from this dream.

We blinked; as none of us considered ourselves the Good Savior we didn’t think it proper to reply.

Who are you? she asked.

This was a remark more likely dedicated to our family, but the one who was gone—the one that, plus seven, had made us whole—was the one among us who was oldest and most capable of language. We worked our throats to find words within, with little success.

I’m Bianca de Nevada, she told us. I’m the daughter of Vicente and María de Nevada of Montefiore, on the edge of Toscana heading toward Umbria. I’ve never seen your sort before. Who are you?

The question occasionally invents the answer. We heard her words, and saw her pallor, and perceived thatBianca meantwhite. So names were characteristics, then, and we chose from among the characteristics of stone to invent ourselves, out of charity.

Stone can’t see, said one of us, blinking. So call me Blindeye.

My limbs are like stone, so I’m Lame, said another. Or maybe Gimpy.

Stone can’t taste, so I’m Tasteless.

No more can stone smell, so I might be No-Nose, but if I could smell, I would smell Bitter. So call me Bitter and have done with it.

I didn’t quite hear the question; stone is hard of hearing. So you can call me Deaf-to-the-World, thank you for asking.

I’m Heartless, for I can’t feel, said the red-bearded one, with a reluctant sigh.

The seventh didn’t answer for a moment. When we looked at him, he said, Stone can’t speak, so I’m Mute, Mute; always was Mute, always will be Mute. MuteMuteMute. Why do you even bother to ask? Why do you bother me so? MuteMuteMute, it seemed, would have liked very much to talk, and was therefore irritable at being reminded of his debility.

But in the naming of ourselves for the first time, we felt the absence of our missing brother more strongly than ever. And then, one of us answered, there is the departed one of us, who has more sense and more senses than the rest.

And his name? asked Bianca.

Next, someone said, and we others thought about it, then nodded.

This is how we were born. She sat amidst us, more or less naked as a human baby, looking, but it was we older brothers—older than trees, older than wind, older than choice—who were born in her presence. Blindeye, Heartless, Gimpy, Deaf-to-the-World, MuteMuteMute, Bitter, and Tasteless: incomplete sections of each other, beginning our lumbering life of individuality—

—beginning our lumbering lives.

•1512 •

The dwarves

STIRRING, AWAREof small pains. The chamber had a musty aspect, as of a catacomb or an ossuary. She couldn’t tell where the light originated. There were no apparent windows, there was no suggestion of sunlight, even behind panels of wood or draping folds of carpet. Yet she could see—she blinked—and the room swam into a cooler, more decisive focus.

She sensed the arbitrary, the conditional. Only when she tried to tell herself what it was did it settle down, the way telling a dream makes a dream gain its legs and lose its mystery.The space was nothing like a room . . . and as the wordroom is spoken, even to deny a likeness, the nonroom-like space becomes more like a room, regardless.

There was a space that became more like a room as she considered it. The long stone on which she sat seemed, on reflection, to straighten its angles, as if tending to think itself a bed; and then, belatedly, it grew or acquired bedposts of a sort, which became more nicely carved the more Bianca thought about it.

Her clothes had fallen and rotted off her, nothing less than that—and she was naked beneath the slightly clammy sheet. Was it linen?—yes, a fine linen, and look at that embroidery stitching itself as she watched, making the complicated turn around the corner, and the small white rosettes blooming at intervals!

How peculiar to be naked, she with her lifelong shyness about her form. It was distracting. It therefore took her some time to register the conversation she seemed to be having with other matters of business in the room—bits of furniture, were they, or seven boulders arranged randomly?

No, boulders don’t speak, except in dreams.

The muscles of her neck ached and she urgently needed to urinate, not uncommon in a dream. So dreaming or not, she began to stretch and to draw the sheet around her, as modestly as she could. The sheet fed straps forward over her shoulders that bit where they ought, forming a yoke and bib and gown that allowed her to move with modesty. Then she stood and found a porcelain vessel for peeing into, and squatted above it.

One never pees in a dream, one only needs to. So what did it mean, that she could?

Only when she had finished and pushed her hair back from her forehead—the hair that fell now almost to her waist—did the opinionated rocks begin to shift. Had the rocks been speaking to her? She had a sense that they had: what an odd dream this was being. She couldn’t see them well at all. It was as if they drank the light in the room and emitted it as darkness, a kind of cloaking smudginess. She felt she was looking through a glass clouded with soot. She couldn’t make her eyes work correctly, rub them as she might. The creatures were neither naked nor clothed, so far as she could tell, only rather roughly cast. They had a look of—how to put it—character. She thought of the way an outcropping on a ridge will resemble, suddenly, a crouching dog, or an angel’s flexing wing, and once you have noticed it you can never pass by it unaware again.