Mirror Mirror

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.

As to the farmwork—such was the awe in which the Borgias were held that thecontadini kept to their schedule of tasks without much supervision. Yearly the olive trees were cut back just far enough to allow a bird to pass through the main branches without its wing tips brushing the leaves. During the spring, the fields were planted on the seventeenth day after the full moon. Now that Lago Verde had a better channel for drainage, worries aboutmal aria —bad air—could be countered by a more conscientious attention to the letting out and the stopping up of the water flow.

Beyond, tenant farmers harvested the apples and grapes and olives, and hayed when haying was on, and slaughtered a spring lamb or two and an autumn hog, and a goose for the Christmas season. One could hardly have imagined a landlord was needed, so practiced were olive trees and ewes and meadows and apple orchards at producing, without instruction, their signature offerings. Or maybe the threat of Lucrezia Borgia’s inevitable return bullied the farm into behaving itself: that’s what Primavera said.

Bianca lived in her house like a child on an island—not quite alone, but a priest and a cook for company weren’t enough, either. She was about eleven years old now. She begrudged the sacrifice she’d been required to make, but she wasn’t a fool: she could tell that showing contempt to Primavera or Fra Ludovico would be misdirected. She misbehaved mildly, as was fitting for her age.

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go. And her father had made her promise. Would the terms of that promise ever expire? What if she were as old as—oh, a village maiden, or la Borgia, or Primavera even, and her father had never come back? Would she be bound to live and die on the hilltop all because she’d once given her word?

The notion of disobedience occurs, in time, to everyone. One summer day when the sky featured blazing, portent cloudscapes, Bianca decided she had to leave Montefiore, she had to break her promise and run away. If she could do nothing else, she’d begin a pilgrimage to find out what had happened to her father: to rescue him if she could, to mourn and pray over his grave if she must.

She got as far as the bridge at the bottom of the property, where the cultivation ended and the woods began, on slopes descending too steeply for agriculture.

She paced noisily on the well-worn boards to the middle of the bridge. She would gain the other side today, and her thumping was to drum courage in her.

She stopped, though; the echo of her footsteps seemed a warning. She remembered her father’s story about a mudcreature below the bridge. She leaned on the stone railings to look. Have you something to say to me? she said. If you’re going to protest, at least do it in person so I can try to argue you down.

The fact that the mudcreature didn’t speak didn’t mean it wasn’t there, of course. Silence can be tactical. Even God used silence as a strategy.

She looked. She peered further, both into the shadows and into the surface of the stream. The water today was high, but running slowly, and the surface reflective, trees and sky and rocks shivered into interlacing tendrils of green and blue and brown. It was so easy to imagine what might lurk beneath the gloss of the reflected world, a gnarled, hairy hand flexing to grab her ankle.

Gesù, she said, disgusted at herself. She couldn’t make herself pass. Not yet. Sometime when the bridge wouldn’t thump at her, when the water wouldn’t wink at her: then she would cross it. But today—and in several other tries that summer—she failed, and kept failing. Was it her promise to her father that waited under the bridge, with its hairy hand?

A Borgia entourage had arrived in the dark. A small one, only four horses. Lucrezia made her breakfast from the house stores and supplies she carried with her. Currants from Corinth, bread in honey, a glass of wine imported from Crete. She made a lazy inspection of the farm—the accounts, the state of the orchards, the gooseboy and his geese, the buildings and outbuildings, and in the evening she came to a conclusion. She decided that Bianca no longer needed a nurse, and Primavera could be let go.

Go where? said the cook, grinning as toothily as her teeth would allow.

Go. Retire. Haven’t you some feeble spawn to take you in? They’ve foisted you off on us for far too long. Go back to them and require that they obey the Fourth Commandment, and honor you, whether you deserve it or no.

There’s no one, said Primavera.

No one who will admit to it, murmured Lucrezia. Who could blame them?

I lost both sons to Cesare’s wars, said Primavera pointedly. The ill-fated attack on Forlì wasn’t good for our family line. They were stupid and cloddish but they were my sons, and they’re gone. My only grandson is a hunter, and seeing what conscription did to his father and uncle, he keeps out of the way of thecondottieri. He lives by his wits, no place special, and I can’t go roost in a tree with him. I haven’t got the hips for it. I should mention that he has no interest in displaying his handsome head on a stake on the walls of some castle Cesare wants to occupy, and therefore the lad uses his head, unlike others in his family.

So he’s off and gone, mused Lucrezia, in a pleasant threatening way.

Primavera was on her mettle. As it happens, he’s here today; when I saw that you’d arrived in the nighttime I sent for him, so he could provide us some meat for the table. He’s here to protect me should I need it.

You’re not listening, said Lucrezia. Go throw yourself on the mercies of the almshouse. Throw yourself off the precipice behind the apple orchard. I don’t care. Just stuff your personal items in the cleft of your bosom and take yourself elsewhere.

My knees won’t manage the slope anymore, said Primavera. I have to stay at Montefiore because I can’t maneuver myself down the hill.

Shall I arrange to have you rolled out in a barrel?

I’m sure you could, said Primavera. There are some wine casks in the village large enough. But you’d have to get them up here first. Now, will there be anything else, Donna Lucrezia? I’ve the girl’s supper to get.

Send her to me, said Lucrezia.

She has her supper to eat, said Primavera. I’ll send her to you when she’s fed.

You won’t correct me, said Lucrezia. You won’t dare.

I beg your forgiveness with all my heart, and trust in your legendary mercy, said Primavera dryly. She took herself off to the kitchen, histrionically wheezing on the stairs.

From the piano nobile Lucrezia listened to the sounds of cooking below. Primavera called Bianca to come clean her hands and wipe her face. Then she bellowed for Fra Ludovico to come bless the damned meal before it got cold. When the meal was over, Primavera bullied Bianca out of the rags and aprons of her everyday wear and into better clothes, and rubbed the Sign of the Cross on her forehead and pressed a leaf of basil into her collar. Then Bianca was released to become the audience of the de facto mistress of Montefiore, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchessa de Ferrara.

She held herself to one side of the door before she entered.

She wasn’t a saint stepping on ivory clouds, no matter how Fra Ludovico dreamed of her. Nor was she quite thebambina that Primavera remembered. She was at that age of halfling, that moment of sheerest youth that drives elders wild. She was Susanna at her ablutions, the more beautiful in her allure because the more innocent of it. Her bosom hadn’t swollen yet. She was as sleek as a kouros oiled for the games of wrestling in old Athens or Sparta, which Hellenic sculptors had memorialized in marble to emblemize human potential. One had been dug up in Ravenna recently and Lucrezia had bought it for her palazzo.

Come in, said Lucrezia Borgia.

Bianca stepped into the room. When her trips between Ferrara and Rome allowed it, Lucrezia Borgia stopped to supervise the development of Bianca’s poise and manners. Bianca couldn’t quite remember the arrangement by which she’d come to be a ward of the Duchessa, but it had to do with her father’s departure, so Bianca had cultivated a habit of caution.

Still, Lucrezia was so glamorous, so civilized, and spoke in such a dulcet hush. Bianca had to lean close to hear, and closer still. Come in, come in! Forward into the lamplight. The room is gloomy. I take it the old onion has fed you your supper?

Bianca nodded.

Turn, so I might look upon you, she said. And see how God has formed you in these months since my last examination. What sort of vestment is that robe; does the peasantnonna think you are a giantess?

Primavera had wrapped Bianca in a crimson cloak far too large for her.

This robe belonged to my mother, said Bianca. That’s what my father used to say. Feeling a fool, she shucked off the heavy garment, and laid it in folds carefully over the arm of a chair. Then she turned back to Lucrezia. She held her shoulders high but tucked her chin into the collar of her dress. Her eyes stayed trained upon the patterned carpet of red and blue that Lucrezia preferred to walk upon instead of to hang against the cold stone walls of the house for warmth.

You chose to wear a green like a Frankish bottle of may wine, and a white cascade of lace through the collar, said Lucrezia.

Primavera chooses my clothes, murmured Bianca. I don’t care about what I wear.

Nonetheless, you’re well clad. Clever fingers have stitched that bodice to show you off well. But you don’t observe the sumptuary laws. You are above your station. And the redness of that huge cloak! A laugh. Still, you’re a pretty enough child, Bianca.

Pretty enough for what, thought Bianca, but she said nothing.

Attend to me when I speak, my girl, said Lucrezia. It offends me for you to ignore my remarks.

I’m here to do your bidding, said Bianca, as evenly as she could given that her knees, as usual, were knocking. But I don’t know what you wish.

You will be a woman one day, said Lucrezia. You need guidance in the womanly arts of conversation, negotiation, deception, prayer, and the management of a private purse. Please, take your place in this chair. I will have a few words with you as a mother might do with a daughter.

Bianca sat, and the silence was profound and grew somewhat tense, as if Lucrezia was studying her and finding her wanting. Perhaps she was intended to speak? I know little about Donna Lucrezia, Bianca said at last. I don’t know if you have a daughter.

I have you, said Lucrezia, which is as close as I come. There are other children, boys, here and there; and at a masquerade ball at Lent the sad miscarriage of my new child began. I’m bereft. This causes me to move from place to place.

She looked less bereft than bored. Bianca felt her skin prickle. The loss of a child must be a pitiful thing, she said guardedly, but with feeling too, as she couldn’t help but think about the loss of her father, and how such a condition became constant, like an appendage or a tumor. Hello, this is I, and these my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I’ve learned how to hump it about with me, so pay it no mind.

I should have liked a daughter, said Lucrezia, but perhaps it’s for the best. She turned and gazed at the mirror that hung over the mantel ledge. When she continued, it was in a voice as if she were speaking to herself, to control her passions: the undertones trembled. When my father died three years ago, and the triple crown of Rome passed first to Pius III, the House of Borgia was protected, and Cesare’s career as the temporal arm of the Papal States in Italy seemed secure. But the new prelate saw fit to live only the month, and no amount of judicious payment could effect another election that favored our line, so under the reign of Julius II, we have been hounded. Hounded! And much of our family’s wealth has been appropriated. They say Cesare has been secreted out of the country, hoping to appeal to the King of France for the rights to the duchy of Valentinois.

Bianca heard the cautionary phrasing. They say this? Is it true?

Her question brought Lucrezia sharply back. You aren’t as empty-headed as you appear, she said. Did I bring myself to murmur in your presence? Oh, I did, but no matter, for you are as bound to this crop of house on this old Etruscan hill as your feeble nursemaid is. Don’t look in the corner of the room, my dear, but someone is here, secretly and without defenses.

Despite herself, Bianca’s head swiveled, and she saw that a mattress had been set up in the shadows. Coverlets were mounded upon it. A man was just then propping himself up on his elbow, blinking.

For an unholy instant she thought it might be her father, and she started with an expression of joy.

Such a welcome, said the man—Cesare Borgia, for it was he—and Bianca fell back, chastened. Cesare had seen the involuntary gasp of a smile, the hopeful eyes, and he worked himself out of his stupor and sat up. Who is this young thing then?

I told you. She’s the child of Don Vicente de Nevada. She’s the only one of the family left behind, now that the mother is dead this past decade, and the father lost on your fool’s errand.

Lost? Lost?

You said she was a child, said Cesare, watching Bianca appreciatively. You said she was still bound in a baby’s apron.

Well, she’s grown then, said Lucrezia crossly. I forgot that children grow.

What a natural mother you are. He looked at Bianca with an expression of sweetness. Come here, then, my dove. Sit beside me.

His sister snapped at him. We’re after something other than succor. Cesare, remember your aims.

There’s more than one way to tease a secret out of a young thing, he said. A soldier can be hung in a cage in the sun till he confesses, or he can be wooed into submission if he’s pretty enough. Come here, come here, my little mouse.

Bianca knew enough not to come forward. A mouse doesn’t accept invitations from a cat, she said politely. A mouse wouldn’t know how to converse with a cat.

She’s got the trim of your sails! Lucrezia hooted with unprincipled glee.

I’m not well, said Cesare, I need some tending. Be a good girl.

Bianca wasn’t a reticent child when it came to pirouetting about the farm buildings. She played with the gooseboy and teased her old nursemaid, and endured Fra Ludovico’s tender smiles and muttered benisons. But she thought that the man who smiled at her from a half-raised position was less cat than panther. Clearly he wasn’t well, and hadn’t been for some time. He must have paid for his adventures with a burden of infirmity taxing his soldier’s body. The skin fell on his cheeks and his hair had no gloss. But the panther inside Cesare’s exhausted form was still healthy and handsome. It was the panther that frightened Bianca. She stayed where she was.

Some small trinket on the desk snapped in Lucrezia’s hand—perhaps a comb made of tortoiseshell. She flung its pieces in a glittering handful at the mirror, and the tines clicked like toenails against the glass. Brother, you’re hounded like a fox, and as near to cornered as you have yet been. You’re broken down with the ailment that killed our father, or some version of the French disease calculated to rot your nose off your face. You’ve squandered the strength you commanded. Don’t bring this desperate campaign down to a seduction.

I’ll find out what we need to know, he said to his sister. In my weakened form I can still break your neck, Donna Lucrezia, should I decide.

But Bianca could tell that Lucrezia held sway over her brother. He brought himself up to a sitting position, steadying himself on the cot with both hands like an aged man. The panther in him retreated, though it seemed to Bianca perhaps more dangerous for it to be hidden. She had a sense of being awake to peril in a way she had never known, and only because of how Lucrezia and Cesare spoke with each other. A peril as evident in their courtesy as in their sharpness.

State your business to her, now that I’m awake enough to listen, he said.

Very well, Lucrezia answered. Bianca, will you sit?

I’d rather stand, she said. Children didn’t regularly sit in the presence of their betters—primarily so that they could get a head start should they have to run for safety.

Sit, said Cesare. Bianca sat, though on the very edge of the stool he had indicated. Her heels drummed on the floor.

I’ve made it my business to oversee affairs at Montefiore, said Lucrezia in a formal tone, as if addressing an assembly of princes of the Church. I’ve been tireless in turning over the papers involved in your father’s ownership of this establishment. There are tithes to be paid to the Church, there are costs to the guards who patrol the valley below and keep you safe from invasion and pillage. All this I’ve done out of love for your father.

I doubt that, Bianca thought. In what ways could you love my father? For one thing, he’s been missing for half my life.

It turns out that some time ago, blithering Fra Ludovico had a letter from Don Vicente. It was secreted into his book of devotions, and when confronted with its presence he didn’t seem to know what it meant. The first part was in Italian, and directed the cleric to maintain the letter in a safe place and present it to you when you were older. The letter then continued in Spanish. It was addressed to you. Have you read it?

I’m schooled in my letters, Bianca admitted, but not so that I can read in the language of my grandsires.

I thought not, said Lucrezia smugly. Shall I read it to you, translating as I go?

If it’s a letter from my father to me, perhaps I should wait until I’ve learned enough Spanish to read it for myself.

How ungrateful, snapped Lucrezia. I can understand how Fra Ludovico might have erred, in that he has become a halfwit; but for a young person you seem to have a head on your shoulders. Fra Ludovico understands no more Spanish than you do. Suppose the letter were a request for help? Suppose your father has fallen into the hands of brigands, or is wasting in an Ottoman prison? Suppose he knows a way you could help release him? Would you have him wait another six months until I could find a tutor for you, and then another six months beyond that until you’d learned enough to attempt a translation? Your father’s face might have become mantled with mildew by that time.

Bianca flushed, knowing this could be true. Her lungs kicked in her, as if she were underwater; her vision watered and caused the room to stew. If you must, then.

I don’t offer because Imust. It’s nothing to me, said Lucrezia. You must petition courteously if you require my services.

Sister, growled Cesare, but she cocked her wrist at him as if to sayThis is my hand to play; let me do it as I like.

Please, Donna Borgia, said Bianca then, wringing her hands together. I most humbly entreat you to read my father’s letter aloud.

Very well, said Lucrezia. Since you’ve asked so nicely.

She unfolded an uneven scrap of parchment that had become creased from being stored between the leaves of a breviary. So it begins, Most beloved Bianca, she said.

I write in haste to put down a few details of your family of which you, as a child, have not been made aware. My work in the service of Il Valentino takes me far from you, and I must serve my Duke or risk upsetting what remains of our happy life as a traveling family who has found a welcoming home in the hinterlands of central Italy.

I cannot know what fate will befall me as I march to a most unpredictable goal. However, should I fail to return before you have reached your maturity, I want you to know that there is help for you abroad. If famine or plague or the danger of war threatens your safety at Montefiore, you should make all haste to your mother’s family home in Navarre. There a treasury is reserved for our family’s use, and petition can be made to draw upon it once you have reached your womanly estate.

If, however, news should come to the Castedo family of Navarre or to my kin, the de Nevada family in Aragon, that harm has befallen you, don’t worry: our cousins will mount an expedition and pitch battle against your enemies. Those countrymen of ours, the Borgias, have talents in intrigue that they didn’t invent wholecloth. The de Nevadas and Castedos could match them in cunning and outstrip them in cruelty. So let these words give you some comfort, that though I’ve become a simple farmer in Italy, there are impressive resources at my call—and at yours. Apply to the reigning Bishop of Navarre for help, and he will not fail you.

I’ve arranged passage cross country to Città di Castello, and I start as much before dawn as a crowing cockerel can wake me. I do this with the knowledge that every step advancing me toward my goal is a step I will be eager to retrace to come home to you. Be good, my sweet Bianca, and keep your father in your prayers and in your heart. Be mindful that only love could make me leave you, and if the Love that governs our days is merciful, it will be love that returns us to each other too. If not in these days of our lives, then in the long golden day without sunset, in heaven.

Lucrezia cleared her throat. How very tender. Your father’s humor is melancholic as well as phlegmatic.

Bianca couldn’t speak for the tears in her throat. After all these years, to hear her father’s words.Papà! Though unschooled in treachery, she knew enough to guess that the Borgias wouldn’t hesitate to fabricate a letter from her father if they thought they could gain by it. But this was her father’s voice, without compromise, without doubt. The rawness of his grief at parting from her brought her own loneliness back to her, and she wept silently but openly, as if he had only left that morning, and all the intervening years that had passed so far were yet to be endured. And who knew how many were left, before the reunion in heaven or on this wretched earth?

How recently has this arrived? asked Bianca. May I go ask Fra Ludovico?

He’s dotty as a dormouse, said Lucrezia. I asked him the same question and he answered,tomorrow, or the week after, I’m not sure.

But do you have any word from my father? Suddenly she was emboldened to ask. On your behalf he left on a campaign: what you have heard?

Nothing, but silence means nothing in itself, said Lucrezia, turning a common viperous thought of Bianca’s into a posy.

Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop? said Cesare.

You ask me questions and you don’t answer mine, she said.

Let me suppose you didn’t hear what I said. Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop?

I don’t know a Tuscan cock from an Umbrian hen, said Bianca desperately.

What is meant, herein, by ‘womanly estate’? mused Lucrezia.

He must mean that a dowry or a debt to be discharged can be effected when Bianca comes to marrying age, of course, said Cesare. How old are you, little mouse?

She is a child still, with the chest of a boy, scoffed Lucrezia.

You were engaged to be married when you were eleven, Cesare reminded his sister. That disgustingcherubino from Valencia.

I was the daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, she snapped. I’d have been engaged in utero, had it benefited the family fortunes, as you know very well. Despite Vicente’s implication of wealth and connections, the de Nevada family is neither powerful nor clever. This letter may be a ruse to confound us.

We weren’t meant to see it, said Cesare.

Of course we were. It’s written in Spanish. Who else at Montefiore would have been able to read it?

It’s written in Spanish to keep news of the family wealth away from prying eyes. Else the threat of kidnapping and ransom might apply.

Let me think. It could be a ploy. On the other hand, the threat of retaliation by loyal cousins . . . I never knew de Nevada well, but he didn’t seem the scheming sort. Was he clever enough to plan a strategic defense of his daughter like this?

Was he? Bianca was affronted. You meanis he. She didn’t know or care whether her father was clever; she cared that he stillwas .

The first rule of success, my dear sister, a rule you should have mastered by now, is not to underestimate the deviousness of your enemies.

Oh, but who is an enemy? asked Bianca, meaning it rhetorically: Certainly not us: we’ve given our father’s years to some campaign of yours! Some years, but not a life.

You’re not an enemy, you’re a bother. We’ve learned nothing from you. Run on now, and take the ridiculous cloak with you.

Oh, let the mouse stay, said Cesare.

Shades of rock

THE YEARSpeeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time. Vicente had lost the ability to read time from the spatter of light the high window allowed to trail across the wall of his cell. Some days he couldn’t imagine whether it was starlight or sunlight, and other days—or nights—he felt that each individual stone was outlined with a pressure of silver edging, as if its crystals were yearning to make useful luminescence for him.

He knew that some days must be wintry, for a fine snow managed to filter in through the slitted aperture, and failed to melt for hours on end, but lay like the ghost of a carpet for him to regard. His fingers ached and stung, and then lost feeling. Other days he might catch the sharp sweet smell of a newly cut meadow. He was most aware in the spring, for once a year the monks butchered a lamb, likely for the paschal celebration, and in a matter of hours what started as the stench of searing flesh and bubbling blood became the aroma of choicest meat.

Always, there were the sounds of bells, as the monasteries across the rough forested hills of Agion Oros tolled their times to God and signaled news of their continued existence to one another.

Occasionally the sound of winds, or of distant birds of the sea, spiraled down to his celibate ears.

Once he heard a donkey bray, and he laughed for a while, at the gait of its voice picking its ungainly way through the air.

Never, though, did he hear the monks at prayer or at chant. Indeed, he rarely saw more than two of them at a time. Whenever the door of his prison opened, two new monks brought in his food, or clean clothes occasionally, and swapped a fresh empty bucket for the stinking fly-struck bucket of shit he had prepared for them. Maybe the monks were on a rotation, but there were too many of them for Vicente to identify by sight or voice. They all wore black robes, and the black hair on their chins raveled halfway down their chests identically. Every now and then one might smile a bit more kindly than the others, as he delivered bread and vegetables in broth, or a pastry with pistachios and honey, or a flagon of cool welcome water. But Vicente had not learned enough Greek to be able to converse. Besides, the monks were either living under vows of silence or, without a woman leading them in the arts of conversation, they had lost the capacity to chatter.

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 adoptedpatria, 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

BIANCA COULDN’Ttell 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.

Let her take care of the cretin. You can amuse me. What do you know of the world, little mouse?

She didn’t want to talk to him, but then, what harm could come to her from a man who couldn’t get off his pallet? I’ve my small view of the world, she told him. I seldom leave the farm—only once or twice to the village at the ford of the river a few miles on, and then only with my father. Years ago. This is world enough for me, up here. I play with the birds. I climb the apple trees. I used to try to make friends with the servant girls, but since my father left, they have gone away too. Primavera feeds me, and when he remembers, Fra Ludovico sees that I keep to my devotions. I’ve learned a few letters and I can write my name, some modest sentences. I can swim; the gooseboy taught me how. I milk the cows when the farmer is too drunk to come up the hill to do it. I collect the eggs and help pull beans from their runners and tomatoes from their vines. I help Primavera move the potted lemon trees into thelimonaia for the winter. In the summer I pick oleander, lavender bells, and fennel for the shrine in the chapel wall. I watch the moon in its swelling and its subsiding.

He looked at her as if she were reciting the most intimate of love sonnets. What a treasure your ignorance is, he said. Come sit by me.

I’m shy, she said.

I’m safe, I’m the brother of your guardian, he said. Shall I tell you of the world?

She held her tongue, and pulled her stool forward a few inches, but still kept a distance from where Cesare was leaning his chin in his hand.

What do you care of my battles, my successful campaigns, my reversals of fortune? he said. I’m old enough to be your father. By the time you were even born I was on my way to being ruler of half Italy. And I would have given the Holy Roman Emperor a good thwacking, and I might have taken on the bully king of France, who has no business in Italy. In another few months, had my father not died . . . Well, it might yet happen, my sweet mouse. Wait and see.

But the world wags on. Had my esteemed father, Alexander VI, not died three years ago, I’d be lying on sheets of gold with docile girls and lusty boys eight times prettier than you are, instead of suffering here with my own unobliging wounds. And sickness I carry with me in my gut. It stings. I need a distraction. Come here.

Please, Don Borgia. Your sister will have a hard time with the gooseboy. I’m afraid he’s little more than a fool, but he likes me and trusts me. Let me go see to him, and release the Duchessa to keep you company. I’m not fit to entertain you. I know so little of the world of which you speak.

The world grows and shrinks at once, said Cesare. Is this a function of my being wise beyond my years, or is the age in which we live contorting itself with confounding knowledge? In this year of our Lord 1506, the Genoese navigator Columbus has died. Do you know of him? He was the one who brought back the news of Española, an island of Cathay so far across the cold Atlantic sea it might as well be Dante’s Malebolge. The Moor has been driven from Granada, and the Jew from much of Spain, and Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella cast their eyes on their western prospects, and the canny Lisboans too. I’ll go back to Navarre and find your dowry and claim it, and if it is enough for a single horse and a suit of mail, or if it helps to raise an army, I will not be stayed from my destiny. Come here, I say.

Rehearsing the future for the world seemed to energize him.

She might never have the chance for such an audience again. Even if she wanted to flee—what might she learn, with care? She drew herself just a few inches forward and said, Please, I know nothing of the world, except my father is lost in it. Do you know if he is alive? Do you know where he went, or why?

I know where, and I know why. To buy me a miracle. He closed his eyes, as if his internal pain was mounting. I could use a miracle now. He opened his eyes again. They were swimming in tears. Come, sit by my side, let me tell you what I suspect of your father’s whereabouts.

What she might learn, what she might lose. It was another bridge to cross, and she was struck immobile in the middle. It’s time for my prayers, she said at last.

I’ll teach you how to pray for mercy. With a movement more forceful than she thought him capable of, he reached out and grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him. Her heart suddenly a blue onion in her chest, cold and layered and stinging in its own juices, she struggled. With one hand he encircled both her small wrists, and clamped them onto his thigh, forcing her to a kneeling position between his knees. She could hear her voice warble, a mockery of a song; she couldn’t make it form words, just an obbligato wail like a reed flute on a single high note.

Bianca heard the Duchess of Ferrara at the threshold of her father’ssalone, and a voice like a storm came down between Bianca and Il Valentino. Cesare, has the French disease made you mad? Release her at once.

Come and join me in my devotions, dear sister, he growled. Lucrezia Borgia picked up the first thing she could grasp—a piece of faience—and she hurled it. Her aim was wild. The vase struck the mirror over the mantelpiece. The mirror was unharmed, but the vase’s earthenware slivers scattered with force. Bianca saw the blood spring like black gum on his forearm. He let her go so he could sweep shards off the top of his thigh, and this cut the side of his hand.

Will you take a child to marry and bed her without benefit of a dowry? asked Lucrezia icily. Are you entirely insane?

I’m insane and I’m still a man, he said to her, and as you know well, my chill and beautiful spouse Charlotte is the sister of the king of Navarre and therefore lives too far away to be of wifely use to me—and has done so for seven years. I’m practically unmarried.

I won’t be bedded or married, either one, said Bianca, but the Borgias had turned their attention and their contempt upon each other, and neither noticed or cared what she’d said.

Cesare’s voice was hard as iron. And have you forgotten your infatuation for your powerful brother now he has lost stature in the eyes of the world? Now that he skulks under cover of darkness plotting useless campaigns of revenge? Allow me some comfort, sweet sister.

She is too small. You would only bruise her, said Lucrezia.

I’m talking about my comfort, not hers.

Get out of here, said Lucrezia to Bianca. How dare you linger and taunt my brother like that. Have you no shame? I suppose you haven’t, without a womanly woman to raise you correctly. The attitudes of a peasant, courtesy of your Primavera. Go.

How’s your gooseboy? said Cesare tauntingly to his sister. Bianca fled.

She fell on the stairs, not from fear, but because she realized that blood was running off her temple. Shards from the vase must have struck her too. For a moment she couldn’t see. As she crouched there, trying to wipe her eyes clear of blood, she heard nothing at all, and then the sound of slippers brushing a few steps across the floor. Was Lucrezia Borgia approaching her brother to slap him or to kiss him, or to whisper something in his ear?

Bianca heard the Duchessa’s voice, a few tones lower than that in which she usually spoke. A voice of false solemnity and genuine menace.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who among us is fairest of all? she said.

Bianca straightened up and listened, as if the mirror might answer. If it did, it was in a pitch too cerebral or too hushed for Bianca to hear. In any event, Cesare either mocked his sister or echoed the mirror’s answer when he said, Well, it’s not you, sister. It’s that little mouse child, the daughter of our agent de Nevada. Doesn’t that just make your Borgia blood boil. What’ll you do about that?

Lucrezia laughed, a houndish laugh, almost a baying. You have so little power over me now, brother duke, she said, and though her words were rough, her tone was intimate and cajoling. The heyday of the Borgias is over almost before it’s begun. I’ll watch you rot in a grave before the decade is out, I’ll wager. But I’ll be damned if I see you casting glances at a child young enough to be your daughter.

You’re jealous because she’s lovelier than you, he said. You always were a jealous type. I still adore you, Crezia. Come here. Come to Cesare.

Bianca tumbled down the stairs, blood in her eyes or no.

I am a hunter who cannot kill

I am a hunter who cannot kill.

The yearling unicorn haunts with taunting eyes,

Ready to lay its sacrificial head

Between my quivering thighs,

Asking the clemency of death

So it can yield

The song for which it lived.

But I am a man whose heart is stiff as stone.

Let unicorns and maidens plead for mercy,

For the wisdom death reveals, for a right of passage

Through the gates of horn to the sacred city,

To Gesù on its steps, to incorruptible parents

Restored from the grave and waiting with opened arms.

I will not grant that privilege to any.

I don’t possess credentials bright enough