Mirror Mirror

How the edge of this boulder resembled the jutting brow of a scowling man.

A very small scowling man, but a man nonetheless, not a child. Nothing childlike at all.

And this one had a flared hump to one side that looked like a misshapen shoulder, drawn back; one could finish the thought of the boulder and imagine the swelling some inches down as a hand on a hip.

And this other, on her other side. A sense of its straining.

It was uncomfortable; she was surrounded by granite forms imitating creatures. It made her feel preyed upon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do beg your mercy, she said.

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

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

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

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

And our departed partner is named Next, said Heartless.

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

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

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

Heartless shrugged.

How long have I been asleep here? she said.

It’s not long.

I’ve become a mature person. But I only remember falling in the forest.

You fell at our door.

Luck—?

Design.

Why?

You could be safe here.

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

We planned to be where you fell. It isn’t the same thing.

But how did you know?

Again, he shrugged.

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

You approve of our arrangements? he said brightly.

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

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

I’m here four years, or five, certainly. Or six?

I don’t know.

And what have you been doing in all those years?

Waiting. Waiting for you to wake up.

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

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

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

He considered. Slow thoughts.

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

What do you want of me? she said.

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

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

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

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

How does la Borgia know where your brother is? You’re speaking nonsense.

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

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

We want our looking glass.

A hole in the world

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

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

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

The floor was littered with rags, ladles, cooking pots, boots, axes, gems, urns, swords, pelts, skeletons of small animals, bundles of dried vegetables, hooded cloaks, blankets sour with mildew, locked books, calcified turds, platters, coils of rope, candles, censers, colorfully glazed storage pots sealed with wax, belt buckles, pearls, lilies in bloom from their tubers, eggs, keys on an iron ring, several cats, bedding, and corked vials carved from ivory.

There was still no door, no window, and she couldn’t say whether the dwarves disappeared or reappeared in the middle of the air, or if they just went and stood behind the bits of furniture for hours on end. It was almost as if they had some way of cloaking their access to the exit. As Bianca’s thinking grew sharper, she thought: Maybe they project themselves forward or backward, so that some semblance of them lingers in the air after the essence has already removed itself. At any rate, there was always a murkiness in their aspect.

At the beginning the dwarves seemed to have interchangeable attributes. She couldn’t keep them straight. The one with a red beard and a monk’s tonsure at breakfast seemed, at lunch, to have a red beard but a full head of curly white hair, and the monk’s tonsure was now being sported by the dwarf with the black teeth. Their voices were hard to track because only one of them ever seemed to speak at a time. Perhaps it was that they all had the same voice except the one who had said, crisply, that he was MuteMuteMute. But after a while it began to seem as if things were solidifying. As an exercise to prove herself canny, Bianca tried to catalog the dwarves’ attributes, and the harder she tried, the more the attributes seemed to stay put.

Heartless was the one who most often took the voice. He seemed to have a certain patience for Bianca. It wasn’t the patience of a dog, or of the vacant gooseboy, or of Primavera even; it was a patience with no expectation of a reward. Bianca grew to like the times when Heartless was there and the others, in their mysterious way, gone. He sat near her and ran fingers through his red beard, clearing it of pebbles, grit, sand.

She’d found a pot and underneath it, with some effort, she had located a fire. Though she couldn’t see a flue, the smoke from a healthy fire slithered elsewhere, somehow, and occasionally the pot was helpfully filled with cold water. So she could boil vegetables and leaves and scraps of meat. If she looked to the right or the left, and concentrated, she could find a table, and more often than not it was heaped with whatever she needed—a candle snuffer, a stole for warmth, a cut of lamb and a heap of onions, a tankard of warm milk.

Though she tried, she couldn’t find a key to fit in some door that she might locate one day.

But she found her memories, bit by bit, working backward. She remembered Ranuccio, the hunter, and his abduction of her from the kitchen. She remembered him without remorse or contempt. Indeed, as he was the last person she saw before her long, dreamless sleep, she remembered him well, as if she had known him well. The long chin, the neat beard, the feel of his hand around her wrist. Four, five, six years later, she could still feel the heat and the pressure of his palm and his fingers against her.

She remembered Primavera next. Primavera. It was as if Prima-vera were a huge egg of a woman, a moon, bowling along in the corridors of the house. Bianca felt a wealth of fondness toward the old woman, who seemed to have been present at the birth of the universe and grown old long before the first drops of the Flood burst from God’s vengeful clouds.

Of the others, she was less sure. She remembered Fra Ludovico a little, his blustery ways, his off-key singing. How he disguised his bravery as foolishness.

And then there was her father. She’d never forgotten him, ever, but he was so far behind her now. She’d been, what, six, seven when he left? And now she must be seventeen. Vicente de Nevada, who had left her to—to what? To follow some woman? To find his fortunes? To be rid of the burden? If she knew herself better, she’d know whether she could forgive him or not.

What was she, really? What had she become? What did it mean to be a girl, or a new woman, imprisoned on the crest of a lonely hill, imprisoned in a room without a window or door? She found herself dubious about basic personal matters—whether, for instance, she preferred peaches to figs, or the music of harps to the music of lutes. How could she be such a cipher? How could there be so little of her to know? And here she was, older and mature, but now as good as dead, with no one but ambulatory stones to talk to.

There had been other children at Montefiore, surely? In trying to picture them, she wasn’t sure if she was inventing them as effectively as, an hour ago, she’d come up with a fresh camisole.

She remembered a lad with an expression of permanent surprise on his face; that grass was green when he went out of doors seemed to come as a pleasant shock every time. He waded about the world with a gabbling hedge of orange beaks and downy flowers—the geese. She remembered geese. So he must be the gooseboy. Sweet dim thing.

She remembered the maids of the kitchen, who might have been her friends but for their rural ways. Though Bianca had slopped pigs and gathered olives and helped boil the tallow and hang out the laundry, she hadn’t been a candidate for their friendship.

So she had been lonely. Yes, now she could see it. Lonely, in part because she hadn’t been a rural farmhand. She had been the daughter of the house.

Montefiore.

She remembered it with a heady pleasure. The chapel without its roof, the steep walls on the house’s cliff side, the way the house otherwise sagged comfortably down toward the approaching slope, its red roofs like plums drying in the sun. If she was the daughter of the house, the house was her real parent. The only one that had lasted. I want to see Montefiore, she said to the principal dwarf, Heartless.

You are bitten with the usual human rage of wanting, replied the dwarf, munching on a bone that looked unsettlingly like a human digit.

Nonetheless, she said, I am human, or used to be, and I don’t see any shame in it. I want to see the place I come from.

Don’t we give you all that you need?

I have clothes, I have a book of devotions to read and a small Spanish guitar to play. I have food of exactly the quality and variety I can imagine but no finer, nothing to delight me by its novelty. If I am to be restricted to the apprehension of anything I’ve known in my previous life, then let it at least include memory. I want to see Montefiore again.

Aren’t you happy here? asked the dwarf, a bit morosely. And then more slyly, Were you ever happy there?

I was something there, she said. Aware of something sad, but real. Living on the forward edge of any ordinary day. Things happened. I don’t know how to answer your question about happiness. Happiness doesn’t signify. Can you give me what I ask?

She didn’t understand the equation by which her needs were met; at times she believed she was making the dwarves up herself. But Heartless, whose red beard seemed more and more likely to sit on his face and not wander off to someone else’s, finished his meal. He pushed the bone to one side and belched, and got down off his stool. He walked to the middle of the room and said, Were you to get what you want, poor thing, you wouldn’t want it. Isn’t the wanting richer?

I don’t know what is richer, she said. It’s not a question that interests me.

Then pick me up and help me, and you deal with your concerns as you must.

She didn’t want to touch him. She hadn’t touched any of them since the day she washed her menstrual blood from their stone feet. She was afraid he’d change in her arms. But he stood there with rude dignity, glaring, and she had no choice. She stood and approached him, and reached down and picked him up under the arms. She grunted with the effort. He was a boulder, after all.

Turn my face toward the wall, he said.

She did, with some trouble, and when she had cradled his seat in her braced arms, she leaned closer to the wall, which today seemed a hairy web of roots and skittering stones, and soil falling in soft dry fans upon the granite floor.

Heartless reached out and twisted aside two protruding tree roots with as little fuss as if they were made of softened wax. He poked them into gentle swags. In the space between them, framed like a window, he put out his left hand and smoothed the dirt. Then, having removed a stone or two and eaten them, he leaned forward and breathed on the rude circle he had implied with his hands.

The air turned silvery, a vertical plaque of fog. Again Heartless pushed forward his hands and smoothed it. He patted it down till the air was still and gray as a slice of ice cut from a frozen lake. He breathed again. With an expression suggesting he regretted her appetite for the past, he gestured at Bianca de Nevada.

Go ahead, then. Look, if you must.

The beast in the wall

VICENTE PRACTICEDremembering the tricks that weather could play on the eyes.

—How fog could shroud the features of a person, making them seem, at a distance, little more than the suggestion of a human.

—How the sky could glow with pale-colored ribbons after a rainstorm.

—One night the moon had bloomed over the plains with the color of the juice of a blood orange.

—One day the moon had swaggered up to the sun and punched it in the eye, and the world had gone midnight at midday. Birds had lost their bearing and smashed against the walls of the kitchen garden, and Primavera had made a stew of them.

In the absence of any real weather in the dungeon, Vicente designed days, months, whole seasons in his mind. But how odd, wasn’t it, that the crispest memories were of aberrations. The snow in April, that one year, when icicles formed on the clematis blossoms. The year it thundered at midnight, Christmas Eve, aborting the service. Was that 1500, when all of Europe was readying to be overrun by hellish vermin, in preparation for the doom of time? But whatever had been borne that frightful year had skittered away without much damage, smothered by the smooth round of normal days. And it was ordinary days—the lazy passing of sun over the orchards, hour by hour—

It didn’t do to consider how much he missed them. He just imagined them and let them drift away.

Since he couldn’t be getting younger, he must be aging. As his muscle tone went, so, perhaps, his mind. He therefore wasn’t as surprised as he might have been to notice one day that a portion of the wall seemed to be bowing. Perhaps it was a sort of erosion. He had been in here an awfully long time, after all.

For a while the wall just seemed to swell, like a bubo, though mercifully free of that certain rankness. Finally (after hours, or days, or weeks? Who could say?) the growth detached, and an accretion of boulder stood on its own single footing. Vicente, when he could pull himself to his feet, found he could walk around it. The place from which it had been evacuated seemed a deeper pocket than such a stone would require.

He sat and looked at it, on and off. Indefinitely. It seemed at times to have the character of a creature, though he knew if he began befriending random boulders, his final mental collapse was near. The stone had no face, which was the confounding part. Four legs clumped closely together, more or less the same shape, each lumpy with a bit of knee, slightly splayed at floor level to suggest a padded foot. The legs terminated above in a domed and sloping brow.

There was no mouth, or none he could be sure of. An orifice puckered at one side, off center, though it might as easily be an anus as a mouth, or an ear. Or just a beauty mark of sorts. The stone didn’t radiate menace, though in a way Vicente would have welcomed even menace, to vary his days.

Then one evening (he still could tell day from night, mostly, thanks to the high window), the thing suddenly shook itself violently, like something belabored with a whip, and straightened up. Its lumpy brow elevated slightly, with a bestial sort of intelligence. Though there were no discernible sensory organs, Vicente had the impression he was being observed.

He began to speak in Spanish—most of his thoughts had reverted to the tongue of his mother. As well as he could remember, he told the thing how he had come to be here. The act of speaking brought words back to his tongue and thoughts to his head. Fra Ludovico. Fra Ludovico, for instance, of all ridiculous men! He’d been a figure of some ridicule, but how nice to find him around in the memory, capable of being mentioned.

The creature stretched its legs and shrugged its headless shoulders. A fruity, indecent odor emerged from somewhere, but it didn’t last long and at least it smelledwarm . And that was something.

Vicente said, I’ve come to this miserable scrag-end of the world to find the food that fed the beginning of our race. I’ve come to find the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

The creature betrayed no surprise at this, though perhaps it didn’t understand Spanish. Or perhaps it had no way to demonstrate surprise except by curling its sort-of-toes, which it did from time to time expressively.

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

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

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

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

Bianca de Nevada, said Vicente. My daughter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Al-iksir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not just in Spain, I wanted to say. Perhaps remembering stories of his grandfather, Pope Alexander VI had such a basin created in the gardens at Tremante. A sumptuous afternoon was to be had, as the sun heated the water. One could shuck one’s heavy clothes and step in, as if descending into a mirror. The many times I sported myself therein, heedless of opinion. Cesare with me once or twice, more often than not my father looking on . . .

A foolish notion, continued the lecturer, as quicksilver has many dangerous effects upon our species. It can provoke drooling, and lassitude, and lapsing into a mental state of sharp terror, in which one can believe that conspiracies against one are being whispered in every quarter.

A Borgia doesn’t need to bathe in a quicksilver pool to believe this, for it is always true and always has been.

The more common term is mercury, continued the alchemist, and the mineral is derived from cinnabar. The celestial body that we call Mercury is red, as the poison of quicksilver. The lost chapter ofThe Secret of Secrets by Rhazes, the Persian alchemist, concerned itself with the bodies of the world—the metals, stones, and salts—and the volatile liquids, or spirits. Though Rhazes couldn’t complete the transmutation of base metals into gold, as the Emir of Khorassan had required, and was fatally thumped on the head with his ownSecret of Secrets, there is much we learned about how the world is arranged, in its secret inclinations.

I listened, for secret inclinations are of abiding interest to a woman. In sometimes being able to determine the secret inclinations of others, woman has her signal advantage over man. I left with instructions to my attendant to summon the curious student.

In due course he presented himself at court and, without tedious delay, in my bed. He wasn’t personally possessed of any Secret of Secrets, to my mind, and my attempt at spiritual corruption was an uncharacteristic failure. I couldn’t induce in the young man anything approaching physical ecstasy. Oddly beardless, perhaps he was deficient in the manly properties. But he did chatter engagingly about the nature of quicksilver, and I learned from him much that would prove useful. He styled himself Paracelsus, though in his adoring letter of thanks and apology he signed his nameTheo. Bombast von Hohenheim.

I gave what I could, in those years, and waited out my days. My father was gone, my dear brother was gone, and who was there to promote? My husband would always be an Este, not a Borgia. My young Rodrigo was being raised apart from me, as I in my day was raised apart from my mother. I had one miscarriage after another, and nothing worthwhile to occupy my time. I even considered becoming devout, in some benighted homage to Cesare’s flares of faith.

Then at the age of thirteen Rodrigo died. We’d lived apart for eight years, and he died apart from me. I had imagined, eventually, he would grow old enough to deserve my company, strong enough of character not to be corrupted by me. I was anticipating that day with joy. It wasn’t to be.

So more and more often I took to repairing to Montefiore. It pleased me for its obscurity. There, without courtiers to entertain or ignore, I pretended at being the widow of a farmer, and nothing more. I sat at the window and watched the laborers at their jobs. I berated the ancient Primavera, who no longer saucily answered back. I invented false confessions for Fra Ludovico. (Father, there were three beautiful brothers, each untutored in love, and their own father dead from the famine, so how were they to learn with no whore to teach them? Out of the mercy for which I am so well known, I took them to my bed, Father, at the same time, and in the following way . . .) I enjoyed trying to talk him into an occasion of sin beneath his robes.

I was in thesalone one afternoon, considering the range of alembics, the crucibles of ground minerals, and herbs I had Primavera gather by the roadside. A dog began to bark in the field beyond, and there was something urgent in its barking. Sometimes acinghiale will lurch from the woods and stray too near the farm, and I always had the gooseboy on my mind, for he was slow of wit and liable to wander into the jaws of a wild boar without noticing. I stood and looked out the window to see the commotion.

Primavera was spinning in the sun, and squinting, for her eyes were no longer strong. The gooseboy was slack-jawed—as usual, no surprise. Fra Ludovico had fallen to his knees as if beholding an apparition. He needed Latin for the moment: Ecce homo. But it wasn’t Cristo Himself stopping for lunch at Montefiore, but Vicente de Nevada, trudging up the sloping road, accompanied by something that looked from this distance like a dog without a head.

I admit that my days had not been filled with surprise of late, and what is life without surprise? I had never expected to see Don Vicente again. I had not expected that someone would need to tell him that, despite his sacrifices, his daughter was dead.

I stepped to the mirror and passed a hand over my hair, and then tore from my scalp a circlet of pearls, to appear more common. I bound my stomacher with quick hard pulls of the cords.

I hurried down the flight of steps from the door of thesalone to the terrace below the loggia. I stood with my hands on both my cheeks, to appear as I truly felt: terrified and overjoyed.

Vicente

HE SAWDonna Lucrezia appear, in a black cloud of silks paneled with gold brocade, like a thunderstorm slotted with stripes of lightning. He had to catch his breath, for the years in a dank dungeon had done their mischief in his lungs, and there were certain exercises he’d never undertake again. The last few miles, the soft approach up and down the succession of hills, slowly rising toward Montefiore’s red roofs, had seemed to take longer than the weeks and weeks between Ouranopolis and Venice. But there was the famous Borgia, more beautiful than ever. More beautiful than any fishwife of the Adriatic or courtesan of the Doge. More beautiful than anyone but his Bianca.

The stone beast hung back, skulking in his shadow. On the shores of Agion Oros, once the sun had opened its Cyclops eye again, the beast had seemed less marmoreal. Its limbs took on the snapping energy of a puppy’s, and its aspect was marginally more animal. So Vicente began to think of the creature as an improperly made dog, one with a faceless knob that passed for a head. The companion had certainly helped him obtain passage in every instance, as no one wanted to be bitten by a stone dog that had no mouth.

Lucrezia Borgia met him at the bottom step. She held her hands out at last. Her fingers touching his were like lilies set against burned twigs.

Welcome to Montefiore, she said. NotWelcome home, he noticed, but here were Fra Ludovico and Primavera to do that.

He didn’t turn to them yet. He could hardly get his breath. He hoped before he would need to ask, a shutter would fly open, a voice would ring out. Her hands would lift in the air in the gesture of surrender to the impossibility he knew he was manifesting: that, after all this time, he had come back.

But the day kept its secrets. The house teased him. His retainers and his unexpected houseguest waited for him to speak. With difficulty he discharged a clutch of phlegm and found his words. Donna Lucrezia. My house is yours. He couldn’t continue with the formal language, though. He couldn’t afford to spend his breath in pleasantries. My daughter. Where is my daughter?

Oh, there’s much to tell you, she answered, but we won’t speak out here. You need to change those hideous rags. Come in, my friend. I’ll decant some—

Primavera? he said. What is the state of affairs here?

Primavera kept silent. He pressed her to explain, but she spilled tears down the netted wrinkles of her cheeks, and shook her head.

Primavera, he demanded. His voice was a croak, a whisper.

Fra Ludovico said, She can’t answer your questions, Don Vicente. She doesn’t have the faculties.

Has she lost her mind?

She has lost her tongue, in some accident or feat of vengeance. It was ripped from her mouth. She could never write, as you might remember, so there’s no way to learn what happened to her.

With some surprise, Lucrezia said to the priest, You’ve become coherent with the return of your employer. I haven’t heard you make so much sense in years.Your tongue will have to come out next.

I have no idea if what I say is true, of course, continued Fra Ludovico hastily. For all I know, Primavera slept with the famous squid again and in a dangerous moment of passion swallowed her own tongue.

What nonsense is going on here? Where is Bianca?

Vicente. Lucrezia laid her hand on his sleeve. I’ll tell you what I know, but not here, not in front of them. You don’t understand about Fra Ludovico. In your absence he’s gone mad and he gabbles like a lunatic.

Where is she? Vicente turned around and around, and the stone dog followed him in stone circles.

Here’s gabbing like a lunatic for you, my lady, said the priest. No one keeps news of a child from her parent. Don Vicente, listen: by force of will or by the will of force, Bianca made her escape from this prison. We don’t know where she is or what has become of her. I pray for her departed soul daily. He made to comfort Vicente, but the weakened man twisted and sat down on the ground, his legs giving up.

You’ve been a comfort, clearly, said Lucrezia icily. Escort him to the piano nobile, you two. I’ll prepare a restorative for him.

When he had come to his senses some, he dried his face and looked about. The stone dog was sitting on its hind limbs alertly. Lucrezia reigned from behind a table of inlaid marble. Three candles, nearly invisible in the strong daylight, shifted their slender flames.

I’d hoped to tell you news you could rejoice in, she began.

He didn’t speak. But he turned and looked at Lucrezia. Though his lungs were enfeebled after his years in prison, his eyes seemed fine. He had learned that he hadn’t tired of looking at things. Even now his eyes were greedy. The beautiful Borgia woman lifted her slender neck to be looked at. Her chin had the tight articulation of a well-made lady’s silk slipper. He could imagine burying his damp eyes into that proffered hollow. But his years of celibacy stayed his mind from considering any pleasure more fervent than consolation.

His visions of Bianca—memories of her in this room—were of a child who didn’t yet come up to his lowest rib. If he had seen his girl as a young woman on the road five miles out, he passed her without knowing. Would he know her again if he found her?

He said at last, Let’s finish the business first. I’ve brought Cesare the token he hired me to find.

She rolled her eyes. Cesare isn’t in a position to care, so you can save your breath. I’m not the desperate man grasping at straws that he was. I have no interest in sham and trickery.