Mirror Mirror

You supported him in his command of me to this task, Donna Lucrezia.

It was his strategy to follow every hope, however fantastic or mundane. It gave him peace. And what calmed him calmed us all. As you remember. But whatever deceit you’ve concocted to abuse us with, it isn’t worth my time nor your breath, which I see must be husbanded.

Nonetheless. I’ve accomplished the task with which I was charged.

Then you’ve done my family a great service. Thank you.

In exchange for my undertaking Cesare’s assignment, he was to keep my home and my family safe. He’s broken his agreement. I’ll have my words with him, and see how he can help to find my daughter.

You’ll have to find him first. In the afterlife.

He gaped. Murder?

Of course. That’s the only way Borgias agree to die.

He lowered his eyes to the stone dog. I’ve been away so long, he muttered, too long, for sure. I don’t even know what year it is, nor who rules the states of Italy.

Mincingly she said, There is a della Rovere in the Vatican. As Julius II. He pretends to dogood. He is of no interest to the Borgia enterprises. Florence has its Gonfalonier for life, and the Doge of Venice is a certain Leonardo Loredan.

That much I know, said Vicente. He paused to cough. I’ve had an audience.

She raised a plucked eyebrow.

I stopped to beg access to the Doge’s treasury—for permission to lodge safely there the artifact I stole, he said.

Please, Don Vicente. You’re not well. You don’t need to spend your breath on such lies. For one thing, a gentleman farmer wouldn’t dare to approach the Doge of Venice.

I dared approach you, once upon a time.

For another, it’s a crude ploy to pretend you found something Prince Dschem doubtlessly invented in a desperate moment.

I did indeed. I found the branch of the Tree of Knowledge, and with such a credential I bartered for an audience with the Doge. Duchessa, I had had many years to think about the negotiations between your family and mine. I found that I didn’t trust your brother to take possession of the entire artifact. I needed something to bargain with in the event he threatened me or my family. And wasn’t I wise? He who took a good deal of my life from me, and in the interim lost track of my daughter’s whereabouts—what right had he to this thing of unequaled magnificence?

So the Doge has the supposed relic of Eden.

He said, I left one Apple from the branch. I retained two of them for bargaining with.

Is that so? Let me see it.

I’ll remind you, respectfully, that I went on Cesare’s bidding.

I am his sister and his widow and his heir. Let me see it.

You don’t even believe it exists.

Convert me.

From his traveling sack he withdrew the few items of clothes he had acquired on his return journey. Within them, settled as lightly and safely as a walnut meat in a shell, reposed the sacred bough. He took it and lifted it with both hands. The stem shone as brightly silver as if a servant had only just finished buffing it, and the silver leaves shimmered delicately in an invisible wind from another climate. The two Apples remaining smelled of rosy sweetness, though from where the third had been plucked, a blemish of black tarnish knobbed.

Lucrezia Borgia lowered herself to her knees and made the Sign of the Cross. Upon the wood of this same tree was our Lord crucified, she said.

The tree is silver, said Vicente.

That is its aspect to our sight. It’s not silver, though; how could a silver tree support Apples in an eternal state of perfect ripeness? This is no artifact, but proof adequate for the revival of a failing faith.

One has to have faith first in order for it to be revived, he said. I am through with this thing, whatever it is. I want no more to do with it. How did Cesare die?

I wish his body were here, she said. He is buried in Navarre, they tell me. He was looking for the de Nevada family to raise up an army on his behalf.

There is no de Nevada family in Navarre, or none that would recognize this wandering cousin, said Vicente coldly.

You wrote to Fra Ludovico—?

I wrote lies for the purpose of protecting my daughter. Apparently it wasn’t enough. Now you must tell me, Donna Borgia. I don’t have any interest in sacred matters. I want to know how my daughter died.

She went off into the woods on her own and she never returned, said Lucrezia. Primavera’s grandson found her body at the foot of a cliff. He buried her in an unmarked grave in the forest.

I will see him now. Ranuccio, is that it? Do I remember? Ranuccio. Where is he?

You may not see him, said Lucrezia. He disappeared from the region shortly thereafter. I believe he was caught poaching a pig from the barns of Don Mercutio down the valley, and rumor has it he was done in as a pig might be done in. After a pause. I mean, on a spit.

Vicente said, Why was my daughter wandering alone in the woods? She was a timid sort.

She changed, said Lucrezia. She became brazen and feckless. I couldn’t stop her, though I did my best. I hope you appreciate my efforts. Primavera was no use at all, you know, and Fra Ludovico has become a simpleton. His spiritual warnings made no difference. As best I could, with the obligations of my marriage and my life at the court of Ferrara, I have stood in your stead as a parent, Vicente. She raised herself to her feet and held the bough in her arm as if cradling an infant. I’ve done what you asked of me, what you begged of me. But I couldn’t wander into her soul and make her love me or respect me. In the end she was a willful child, like most. Her ending was likely inevitable.

Vicente de Nevada stood too. He had to crush an inclination to beg pardon and leave the room, as the room was his, the house was his, even the sad history of what had happened to his daughter, whatever it was, belonged to him, not to Lucrezia Borgia. But unless she walked out of the room first, he would be ceding to her the right to the house, and this he was unwilling to do.

Tell me about your dog, she said, smiling at him. She put down the sacred bough and picked up a small pearl-handled knife.

The dog doesn’t figure in this story of grief. It has no name, he said.

It? she said. Not he or she? Poor thing. Come here, poor deformed thing.

The creature came forward warily.

Lucrezia turned and neatly sliced from one of the Apples a clean wedge. The juice beaded up on the knife. The moon-white flesh was flushed with pink and pale green and yellow. She held the knife down with the Apple slice on it, and for this supreme honor the beast found reason and means to develop a mouth. A hole in its top opened, more or less mouthlike, and a helpful tongue leaped out and gathered the Apple.

I adore feeding the hungry, just as the Scriptures tell us. Her words were tender but their delivery flat: she displayed an alchemist’s skeptical curiosity over a trial of elements.

The creature sat back and looked up at Lucrezia. It occurred to Vicente that it now had eyes, and lids that could blink. It blinked its stony lids. One dry tear broke from each duct and rolled to the terrazzo floor, there to shatter into a clot of dust and gravel. An improbable smell of rue.

It would seem you are telling the truth, she said. This really is the Apple of knowledge. It will give tongue even to the rock.

The beast turned to Vicente and put its head between Vicente’s knees. With its new tongue it licked Vicente’s hands.

Then the thing straightened up, like a little monkey, its forelimbs pivoting outward. On its hind legs it took a step or two. Lucrezia said, Honor to God, the thing is walking. She backed up a step, and picked up the knife again. Vicente.

The beast paid her no attention. With one of its forelimbs it reached forward and the stubby hoof was cloven in three. It helped itself to the rest of the Apple that Lucrezia Borgia had offered it. Vicente, she said, what license.

Vicente made no move. Confident as a three-year-old and about as tall, the stone beast walked on its hind legs, up to the hearth. Today’s fire was laid but unlit. The beast knocked the brush aside and shuffled through yesterday’s ashes to the back wall of the fireplace. It leaned its head and its shoulders—there was no denying they were now shoulders—into the wall. It disappeared into the stone as neatly as a corpse is swallowed by a flooded quarry.

Vicente was stirred by the audacity of the stone dog. Its disappearance after all these weeks was a bracing shock. Whatever had rescued him from the dungeon in Agion Oros had exacted its price and gone away. Had it been traveling beside him, invisible, incognito, in the Greek fishing vessel? Its stone weight interfering with the boat’s maneuverability? No proof of that. Who knows how long the stone had been with him, and in how many guises. Now it was gone.

He was bereaved further, this time for a stone.

The world seemed a punishing sleeve of bright changing lights and dark moods. Flawed and regrettable, the presence of it nonetheless clawed at one, claiming one’s attention. Get out, he said to the Duchessa de Ferrara, hardly believing his temerity. Get out of my house at once.

If Lucrezia Borgia was shaken, she didn’t show it. She put her white knuckles against the desktop and leaned across to him. In my own time and in my own way, and not before. I owe you nothing.

You owe me my daughter’s life, he said. Will you pay me with your own? He pushed the table with his hip, ineffectually; his hands strangled air.

She was frightened, though, and fell back. The bough with one remaining Apple slipped from her grasp and rolled along the hem of her garment. If you kill me you’ll never even learn where your daughter’s body is buried. You won’t know where to have Fra Ludovico sing her the last rites, which I could tell you even now.

No one will sing you last rites. No one in Italy will weep when you die, and the name Lucrezia will fall out of a fashion for a thousand years. But her parry had worked. His hands, hungry for resis-tance to overcome, paused.

You are a father without a child, she said. I am a child without a father. Surely we can understand each other’s grief? In days to come it will not seem so hard.

He looked at her as if the concept ofdays to come was impossible to decipher. Then his hands opened, palms outward. There is no way to live without her, he said.

You must make your confession to Fra Ludovico, she replied. Custom says God can speak even through the flute of a madman when forgiveness is required. Don’t presume to know what your life may become now until you have yourself absolved of your sins.

He spat at her display of piety. She made a wincing smile and said, I am as practiced at accepting absolution as I am at sinning with ever greater relish the next time. If you’re going to murder me, Don Vicente de Nevada, do it in a state of grace, anyway, for a more illustrious contrast of effects. Cesare always mentioned the satisfaction of it.

He looked sideways at her. She had dismissed him, and now faced the mirror. I must see to my hair, she spoke, almost to herself, in the way of certain women. She scooped up the single fruit on its silvery bough and held it alongside her face. It was such a feminine gesture, it brought back to him María Inés, and his child, Bianca, who would never become a woman. He turned to shutter his eyes, and followed the empty passage out into the empty world.

Mirror mirror

OUT OFour need we patronize our artists, we flirt with our poets, we petition our architects: Give us your lusty colorful world. Signal to us a state of being more richly steeped in purpose and satisfaction than our own.

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deepimpasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don’t in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

The holy find this some mincing proof of God. Damn them.

There was de Nevada, mourning the death of his daughter, and why shouldn’t he? But he came into the room and brought back the treasure we never believed he could achieve—that I doubted the existence of—and he also brought back to me the brusque male fact of my brother, and how dead he is. How I can never walk into the room again and have him mean something to me, even in his drunken lechery with other women; I can never even suffer the pain of knowing I’ve not quite caught his attention. There is no longer a Cesare Borgia with attention to catch. Don Vicente’s return brings it all up to me again; the phlegmatic humor rises in me and slashes hotly in my windpipe.

I lay the remaining Apple on its silver branch and turn to the mirror. The light has shifted somewhat and I almost feel visited—beside myself. It’s no doubt the effect of seeing that stone creature dissolve into the stonework of the fireplace, like a louse burrowing into the skin. It makes me feel that any wall or floor could shift its reliable shape and blurt forth into a creature again, as if the house were possessed of a stone ghoul. Uncomfortable. One would never be alone again, even in one’s boudoir.

Mirror, mirror, I spoke aloud, to steady my nerves, who is the fairest of us all?

I thought of my father, the great Pope Alexander VI, and how he had played at being the prelate of the Church of Rome. How he had had testicles of the sons of his enemies removed and gilded and returned to their owners in caskets beautifully inscribed with erotic carvings, to mock them. Yet he had also had baskets of overflow from our banquets brought out to those suffering from plague and famine on the banks of the Tiber just below Rome. What was fair in the use of power? Cesare’s friend Niccolò Machiavelli would have sharp praise for the man who used power to his best advantage. But Machiavelli didn’t consider the moral fairness in a ruler to be worthy of mention.

And who asks women to be fair, anyway, unless they do ask themselves?

I had sent Bianca away to be murdered, those long years ago. It seemed hard to remember. But my Cesare had cast his attention her way—he who had so little time left—and indeed, that was the last time we met in this life. A cock to every hen who staggered into his house, whether she was his equal or no. I couldn’t have that happen. Not for his sake; not for hers. Was murder the right alternative? Ah well, too late to decide otherwise now.

I looked upon myself the way I did when I was an adolescent. When life beckoned from the horizon. I could only imagine growing more beautiful, more powerful, more responsive to life’s beneficence and squalor. Back then, the figure who would look back at me in the looking glass was potent with mystery, more arresting than I could imagine actually seeming to anyone.

Now, the venerable Apple nodded perfectly against my cheek. Beside its immortal perfection I looked wan, a fishwife, a sister to old Primavera. I could see the thin struts of my shoulders making a yoke under my skin, and my neck arose from a shallow well. My eyes had fallen prey to a snare of webbed lines, too fine to be visible to anyone across the room—but what do we ever want but for someone to come nearer? And then all our imperfections are magnified.

I put my head to one side, criticizing my aging beauty. Who is fairer? I begged the mirror to lie and say No one; you are beautiful as a legend. I knew it wouldn’t lie. But I didn’t expect it to speak, either.

It spoke in the language of mirrors, not of words. A mist crept over the skin of the glass. Mistaking it for my hot breath upon it, I leaned forward to smear the fog away with my hand, to see some further truth, something consoling, that I hadn’t yet thought or imagined.

But when my hand reached out, I felt for an instant something other than the cold touch of glass. I cawed a sound of alarm. Before I fell to the floor, twitching with disbelief, I saw the child again. Bianca de Nevada. In my delusion she was no longer dead. She had a grave and magnificent expression. I can’t explain it. Puzzled curiosity. A raging patience. An articulate simplicity. A womanliness.

Or perhaps it was that she seemed like one who didn’t worry about what it meant never to be enough. The absence of such a care on her brow filled her with an unearthly beauty that I could neither achieve nor abide.

The return of the prodigal

THE CIRCLEof mist gave onto a room Bianca remembered, though for a moment she thought it was empty. By leaning near she could see beyond the margin—it was more like looking through a window than into a painting, for as her angle changed, more came into view. That was when she saw the woman on the floor.

Bianca couldn’t tell if she was weeping or—could it be?—thrashing in laughter. She rolled over and over, and her limbs seemed unfamiliar with each other. A white worm of spittle drooped from her lower lip. On the floor nearby lay a branch of an apple tree with a single fruit attached.

The woman there on the floor is convulsing, thought Bianca, and her heart moved cautiously. She reached out her hand, forgetting for a moment that she was entombed in a room without exits. Her hand met a barrier of hard air and couldn’t penetrate it.

As she regarded it further, she recognized the floor of thesalone of Montefiore, its shiny waxed bricks laid in herringbone. The woman who suffers is someone I know. It’s the woman at whose word my father left me; the woman who looked in upon my childhood with slight but steady interest.

It took Bianca a while longer to remember the name of Lucrezia Borgia. Borgia! With the reclamation of that single word, a tide of memories surged forward, and each small wavelet made her older and fiercer, but also more amazed and incredulous.

How she could think, these years later, of bits of childhood things that she hadn’t realized she was taking in. She had the whole of Italy in her mind—murkily, but there it was, a long pennant of a land, with so much to know, so much to appreciate. The shallow hills of rusty scrub in the south, and white villages around tourmaline harbors; and sweep after sweep of wheat and rape and olive, and gnarled nap of grapevine halfway up the slope of every river valley. The blue distances of the lower Apennines, the wind-twisted cypresses and the fierce patriotic pines; the sheep in a panic in the fold, the fox on the prowl in the hen yard. Everywhere, the ruins of Roman temples, like ancient discarded teeth of the long dead giants of the past. The polished glory of the states today, of Florence preening, of Milan preening, of Venice curled up knee-deep in the waves, of Rome too vain to preen. Siena, Lucca, and then Savoy, and the lakes of the Dolomites, splashes of blue and gold whenever you looked, except in snowstorms, when they went white and silver instead.

She saw all this, she saw the land with an encompassing catalogic clarity, though she had scarcely ever been off the hill at Montefiore, at least not in her living memory. She saw the dozen duomi like so many pepper pots on a table linen painted italia. She saw the separate characters of the seas and knew that the northern Adriatic swelled with different and more insidious force than the southern Tyrrhenian. She saw the remains of the Etruscans and the Athenians and the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and the Cretans and the Visigoths and the Franks, like so many spices scattered into a meat pie. She saw the roads spoking from Rome, a vast asymmetrical wheel. She saw Mithrais in his lair, and Jupiter broadly speaking to Neptune, thundercloud to wine-dark wave. She watched Romulus and Remus suckle from the wolf and then, when their appetites grew more human, eat her. She saw the bishops and the pagan priests and the soothsayers and seers, all much the same man, and she saw much the same woman nearby, watching and helping and performing her little anonymous sabotages. (She looked like Primavera, small and gnarled, an onion left in the root cellar too long, and gone a little soft.) She saw Christ wait in Sicily to be recognized. She saw Saint Peter crucified in Rome, and Savonarola roasted in Florence. She saw the rivers tie themselves in knots of blue, the clouds spell the names of popes in the sky, the rocks pick themselves up and rearrange themselves, and she saw Vesuvius and Aetna lose their tempers.

But it was Lucrezia Borgia that she cared about, Lucrezia Borgia who was as enmeshed in all this particularity as she herself was. The woman was now sitting on the floor with her legs stretched straight out in front of her. Then she opened her legs slightly and threw back her head and closed her eyes. Her pelvis lifted from the floor and she shuddered.

Bianca had often seen Fra Ludovico at prayer, and knew that his mutterings could grow so intense that he often forgot he wasn’t alone. (Well, he wasn’t; God was around somewhere.) Now, since Lucrezia Borgia couldn’t know she was being observed, Bianca felt sordid. She dropped her gaze and looked away. When she looked back—yes, as she’d feared; the window was gone. A matted bit of old cloth hung in its place, a tattered moth-eaten tapestry with a picture of a unicorn picked out in dirty white wool, and a hunter peering from a thicket.

She became impatient; the world of Montefiore had sprung up like a tang in her mouth, like a hexed appetite, and she would have more of it. Heartless, she called, where are you?

She looked about. The creatures were there, doing something. Making a meal of some sort. Uselessly. Can’t you scrape a carrot, even? she said. Give me that. Bianca had scraped few enough carrots in her childhood, but her hands were human hands and could invent a way to do it more efficiently than the dwarves.

They looked at her with baleful gloom, as if scraping carrots efficiently was their chief ambition in life.

She thought of several niggling things to say to the seven of them, but as she was sorting out which one, she realized with a start that she was clear that theywere seven. She could count them now. Martedì, mercoledì, giovedì, venerdì, she said to the four on one side; sabato, domenica, lunedì, she said to the others. What are you doing here all at once? They jostled like small children, eager and untroubled by sentiment, watching a cook wring the neck of a chicken.

What are you doing? said MuteMuteMute.

I’ll make you a meal, she said. Why not? I need things, though, things to cook with. She realized that though she’d eaten—occasionally—the sight of that apple in Lucrezia Borgia’s lap had made her hungry as hell. Hungry not to eat, but to feed someone.

Suddenly she became happy. Things to cook with? MuteMuteMute and Tasteless brought her a large earthenware jug that she recognized as a ghirarium, a storage jug for dormice. She lifted the lid and saw that skeletons of dormice were splayed on the ramps molded against the inside walls. You’ll have to do better than this, men, she said.

They became lively with the game of it. A bloody haunch of venison from a drawer, a splash of melted butter in the heel of a shoe. Eighteen ropes of garlic. A damp heap of hairy borage leaves. Four dried peas. A handful of pine needles and acorns, which she set aside as a garnish. Two giant potatoes, each one as large as the head of—was it Gimpy?—who carried them, one under each arm. A pot of fish eyes like buttons, all still damp and intelligent. Laboriously she lined the fish eyes up along a shelf, like the serving dishes for a party of sea horses, and the eyes followed her as she moved around the table. She’d serve them to Blindeye and see if they helped.

The room came into crisper focus as she worked, and a smell like real food began to fill the space. The dwarves took to tussling on the floor and singing mean songs about one another, and asking repeatedly when the meal would be ready. When it’s ready, she answered, stirring.

Bowls, she said at last. We need bowls.

They stopped their capering and looked at her.

Well, wash your hands and get your bowls, she said.

They looked; they all had, more or less, hands.

There’s a pump in the corner; use it, she told them. She pointed. By now she knew, yes, there it would be, and there it was.

They washed and splashed and plugged the pipe with their fingers to spray one another. They found bowls somewhere and brought them to the table. Bianca could locate no spoons, but soup could be drunk from a deep bowl. She used the first bowl as a ladle for the others. When she had supplied each of them with a meal, she found a small stool and sat down with them.

Let us thank God for our blessings, she said.

What blessings are those? asked Bitter.

Ourselves, one another, food, and bowls, and God, she answered. Come now, fellows. She made the holy hand gesture and dropped her eyes, and began to mumble in Latin. The dwarves watched her closely and did as she did, though they had no Latin to speak of, and mumbled nonsense instead.

When they were halfway through with their meal, a bubble of stone began to form in the floor near Bianca’s feet. She watched with curiosity as it swelled in a manner oddly organic. The floor’s calving, she remarked, and so it seemed; before her, in a minute or two, stood another dwarf, who looked less human than the others. He stood on two feet, tentatively, though his arms seemed not entirely convinced they were arms. He wore a tunic of sorts to cover his nakedness.

The dwarves looked at him as if surprised, as if unfamiliar with him. Yet he seemed to be something less than an invader. He seemed to know where he was. He looked at Bianca and nodded, as if there was something about her presence that was satisfying.

He spoke. The language was guttural, the accents dark and shapely. The seven dwarves flinched. Deaf-to-the-World said, It’s growling at us.

It wants some of our supper, said Tasteless. It’s a fool; the supper’s awful. Who calls this food?

Besides, there’s not enough to go around, said MuteMuteMute, which was hardly true; the pot was still nearly full. But the newcomer dwarf seemed to need a bone upon which to gnaw, or a scatter of pebbles on the floor, like seed thrown to the fowl.

The newcomer spoke again, more urgently. The resident dwarves leaned forward, as if trying to understand, but their patience was slim, and one after another they went back to their soup.

The newcomer came forward and pounded on the table. The dwarves smiled at him as one might smile at a child saying something innocent and stupid. But the soup seemed powerfully good, all of a sudden. They sucked at the marrow from the bones, they splashed the broth, they poked whole onions with their spoons so that onion sleeve gave birth to smaller slimmer onion baby, and onion baby regurgitated onion sleeve again, and so on.

Behave, said Bianca.

The newcomer growled like a dog. He made his throaty remarks again and again, more and more desperately. The seven dwarves began to make fun of him, to imitate his succulent murmurings and mime his anguished expressions. Oh, it wants to be loved, said Bitter. What a hopeless thing it is.

The visitor straightened up as if a new thought had occurred to him, and he brought out of an inner pouch a nice enough apple, from which one thick slice had been taken.

Oh, something sweet for after the soup, said Bianca. And I’ve been thinking about apples. Well, you’re kind enough to offer this, whoever you are.

She found a knife when she put her hand out for one, and she gripped its ivory handle firmly. When offered it, she took the apple, and she saw that the slice that had been taken out was roughly an eighth. She divided the remaining fruit—rare wonderful fruit!—into seven other segments. She offered a slice, one after the next, to the seven dwarves.

Each dwarf accepted the fruit. Each one took a piece in his dirty hand, and regarded it the way Fra Ludovico considered the Holy Host. Each one partook of the offering, for good or ill.

Bianca sat back, bemused, affectionate, interested. The chair was suddenly comfortable; it had cushions, and a small stool for her feet, carved in the Roman style.

The dwarves made little display of their satisfaction or their regret at the sweet, though they didn’t clamor for more nor immediately push away from the table. Gimpy folded his arms across his stout chest and achieved a look of reflection. Heartless stroked his beard—hewas the red beard!—and began fishing through his pockets as if for a pipe. MuteMuteMute smiled and began to hum a melody Bianca almost thought she remembered: a sprightly, cogwork melody with no apparent beginning or end. Deaf-to-the-World took up the knife and began to play with a splinter from the edge of the table, teasing it into a form of some sort. Tasteless sprayed a glorious smile in everyone’s direction and began to snore. Bitter scowled at his brother’s laxness and pounded one stubby finger on the table, as if rehearsing arguments internally so to be ready to drive points home when the conversation began in earnest. And Blindeye turned his head and looked at Bianca as if he had never seen her before. When she caught his eye, she smiled, but he ducked his chin and lowered his eyes, suddenly mortified at his temerity.

The whole party seemed sprightlier, more vigorous. Bianca felt like dancing. But the newcomer would have none of it. Brothers, he barked, and Bianca was surprised that such were the improved spirits in the room that she could understand the language now. Brothers, he said again, snapping, I’ve returned, and you have forgotten who I am to you?

The dwarves snapped out of their several reveries and games, and turned to him. You petition for our attention, said Heartless.

I am your kin, said the newcomer. He straightened up, and either the dwarves had grown more like him during the meal, or he more like them, for they seemed familial now, in look as well as language. Do you forget me?

Well, yes, said Heartless. Actually.

I am— He paused, as if not quite having sorted it out for himself. I am Nextday, you cretinous lumpheads.

They may never have heard the name before, and indeed Nextday seemed surprised by it himself, but somehow the concept made sense to them. The dwarves looked at Nextday with more careful, judging expressions.

I was one of you before I left, said Nextday, and you’ve forgotten I was ever here. So I come back to claim my moment with you. Let us go to our work, now we are fed, and see what of the world can be seen.

She could sense the change. The dwarves were full of purpose. They pushed back their chairs and went to cupboards and found cloaks and boots, and put them on. The whole room snapped into being. A wardrobe bolted into a corner, a bench popped along the wall; the floor brought forth a woven carpet, rather a nice one too, in golds and greens. The vague piles of mess retreated into darker corners, as if cowed by firmer intentions.

Come, said Nextday, there is a lot to do yet, before night has fallen.

Take me with you! said Bianca.

She knew she could go, now, because for the first time there was a door, a wooden-slatted door with stout iron hinges and a bolt and a lock besides. The door had a small hinged window of real glass, and the strangest yellow soup stewed on either side of the glass in an acidic, shrill sort of way. It took Bianca’s breath quite away when she realized it was nothing but sunlight.

She followed the dwarves out the door.

Beware beware

FOR Awhile they stood blinking. Bianca couldn’t tell what season it was, if any; the gentle rise on which the door gave was unkempt and confused. Wild rose blossoms, given over to the blowsiest excess, reclined on hoops bowed with ridges of snow. Spring ferns uncurled their tender heads in a runaway patch of autumnal gourds. The air had a glazed, unnatural quality, as if steeped in the air of something violently alcoholic. Undertones both of dry rot and damp decay. Bianca felt herself swim in her clothes, and eager to be out of them.

The dwarves seemed to have forgotten her. Nextday stood on a rock so he could be seen, and addressed his brethren. In the air his language was harder to follow. They were speaking about the mirror.

What mirror is this? said Bianca, pushing forward, reminding them that she was there.

Nextday said, It isn’t your concern, nor should it be.

But I may be able to help.

You aren’t able to find your way through a draped doorway into the next room, or you’d have left our home long ago, snarled Bitter. But Nextday continued for her benefit in a vernacular she could more easily follow. I’ll remind us all what we are after, and let the world have at us if it must. We’re the ones who made the mirror; we’re to be the ones to reclaim it, if it’s to do no harm.

Bianca had a thrilling sense of possibility similar to the sense a mirror gave: of otherness and familiarity at once.

Tell me about the mirror, she said.

Nextday considered her request. He said, I’ve been learning much in these days. To speak of something, I find, can help clarify it in one’s own mind. Therefore I’ll tell you what I know, and perhaps I’ll learn something in how I put my knowledge forward.

Or perhaps I’ll reply with something you don’t yet know, said Bianca helpfully.

Thrills unbounded, observed Bitter in a low voice.

I hope she speaks better than she cooks, said Tasteless. I didn’t care for that stew at all, did you?

Be quiet, said Heartless. She can hear as well as speak.

Stay on the matter, said Bianca, unflustered. The mirror.

We are a race more stalwart, more stubborn, than yours, said Nextday. We’ve spent arcs of years thinking a single thought. But in our vast and tedious life, we’ve come to realize that what divides us from the quixotic human race is the quality of quickness. Cut to the quick, they say; the quick and the dead, they say: They mean life, liveliness, when they saythe quick. And we see that if we’re to benefit at all from our neighbors here—the human herd—we must quicken.

So, being adept at all things having to do with the earth—the soil, the mines, the precious stones and metals, the juice of lava—we found it easy to ferret out the secrets of the Venetians. We blew a quantity of glass and shaped it into a shallow bowl, and painted the inner skin with a coat made of tin and quicksilver. We made for ourselves a mirror that could look like an eye into a room, so we could watch how humans look at themselves, and learn by their example how to look at ourselves.

A clever trick, said Bianca, and possibly a mean one.

Minerals have no morals, and we are little more than ambulatory stacks of minerals. We weren’t stymied by reservations. But we suffered a setback. To ready the mirror, we left it out in the air so its shape could fix, and it could adjust to the code of the world in which humans live, and not to our code. Then to cure it we submerged it in a bath of water. But it sank, and we couldn’t see it. It had become invisible to us.

Lago Verde, said Bianca.

We watched it being reclaimed. From a distance we saw that it worked, well enough. But quicksilver is strong enough stuff when found in nature, and stronger still when dwarves work with it. It corrupts the mind, and confounds the separate humors. It can make humans suspicious of cabals in every crowd, of treason at every turn. It causes tremors and drooling. It’s a dangerous substance to humans.

Can’t you just steal it back? To protect the humans who found it, if nothing else? said Bianca.

Nextday said, Humans can steal all kinds of things; perhaps that is what makes them change and shift and thrive so. Dwarves can’t steal.

But you told me that minerals have no morals, she said. If you can’t steal, perhaps you are made of more than minerals.

Cleverness is unbecoming in a corpse, sneered MuteMuteMute.

And you stole the secret of glassmaking from the Venetians, she pointed out.

Is this a court of judicial law? Are we on trial? said Lame. Goodness, I’d have worn something more attractive.

If it’s a question of donation, let me just give you the mirror, said the girl. It’s as simple as that, surely? If my father is dead, then the house is mine, and I’ll have nothing in the house that doesn’t rightly belong to me.

Nextday looked at her with a quiet sort of consolation. He didn’t offer an opinion about whether her father was dead or not. He only remarked, The house isn’t quite yours. And we don’t steal.

What do you do, then? she said. Where do you go? What is your task?

Nextday said, I am going to take my kin to Arezzo, to see the fresco in the choir. Someone has painted a dwarf on the wall there, a creature of dignity and intelligence, calmly interacting with the family of man. Perhaps he is both a dwarf and a human being; this is something of which we have not heard. We are too long underground. Now we’ve awakened, now we’ve eaten—

If you can call that food. Pfaaah, muttered Tasteless.

—now we are above, and more solid in new forms than we expected. Nextday looked about at the small men in tunics and leggings, hoods and boots. We must pass in the world and see how we fare. Perhaps, though it had hardly begun, the time for the mirror is done, and now it’s time to look with our own eyes.

He blinked sadly at Bianca. Can we leave you safely here?

Of course, she said.

You are not to run off, he told her. Donna Borgia would see that you were killed again.

I have not died yet, she said, laughing.

No, he said. All but that, but not that, no.

With that he began to lead his brothers away. Heartless came up and pressed his hand to hers, but then hurried after his kind.

Such was the increased corporeality of the tribe that she could see them leaving, and waving at her, and hear them when they were gone, tramping softly in the impossible season. When their boots no longer thudded upon the rock or skittered stones on the pebbley path, she could hear them hissing musically through their lips, like infants walking down the lane to greet the goat in his pen or the fowl pecking for breakfast along the verges.

She sat down and looked around her. The exterior of the dwarves’ home had the aspect of a hummock at first, little more than a mound of grass on the side of a hill, but as she looked it shrugged off its green roof and grew scales of pantiles. The sloping sides of the dwelling straightened themselves up and became timbered, and the windows made an effort to line themselves up on something of a parallel, to be more pleasing. The hill dropped some bulk behind, and what remained looked more like a cottage, more or less freestanding, with a chimney of stone and chipped brick, and a smell from within of mushrooms, sage, and Parma cheese.

Not such an ugly grave, she said to herself, not an ossuary, not a churchyard; no, quite respectable.

Respectable, but lonely, after a while. The sun went behind a cloud and the more wintry aspects of the garden seemed to dominate.

Then, when she was just about to give up and go inside, she heard a noise in the brambles, and she called out, Who is there? She turned to see a figure make its way across the clearing.

The figure in the clearing

IWASN’Tlooking to find you, said the figure. Are you a goose?

I know you, said Bianca.

All my geese know me, he said proudly.

I’m not a goose, she said. But I know you just the same.

He bit the corner of a fingernail.

You’re the gooseboy, she told him.

I know, he replied. I’m looking for the lost goose.

I am lost, in a sense, she said, and she began to laugh, and in a sense I am a goose—but not the one you’re looking for.

Can you help me find her? he said. The house is full of hunger, and they will have a goose upon the table.

Do you remember me? she said.

Not if you weren’t with the other geese.

I was, sometimes.

He looked at her sideways. I’ve never met a spirit of the woods before, he said. Primavera used to say that the wood spirits are as old as Roman times and I must beware hags and graybeards. You don’t look much like a hag.

Nor a graybeard. She was teasing him, but that she had always done. Do you really not know who I am?

Neither goose nor dryad. Some saint with loosened garments? He saw that her tunic was unlaced. She put her hands to her breasts and covered them.

Not a saint, she said and sighed. I never lived enough to have the chance to become a saint. Saints have to endure trials, and I was too innocent even for a trial.

How do you know me?

You are the gooseboy from Montefiore. But she didn’t know his name. Had she ever known his name? He was too simple to need a name, just the gooseboy, or, addressed directly,Boy.

As she had grown and changed, so had he. A young man now, he was somewhat stooped of shoulder, as if practicing to be a codger. One leg seemed shorter than the other, or withered; anyway, it kept itself slightly arched behind, looking a bit like a high-spirited colt’s rear leg. Without much success his cheeks and lips were trying to grow a beard. His chin was stronger than it had been, though his eyes were still jittery with caution.

I am your friend, she said.

If I’ve learned anything from the kitchen tales that Primavera used to tell, it’s that the likes of me are to beware of friends like you, he answered. Maidens of unusual friendliness, that sort of thing.

Don’t be a fool, she said. He flinched and retreated.

I am only looking for my lost goose, nothing more.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I merely mean this: don’t you recognize me? I am your friend from long ago. Bianca, who played with you in the road below the house.

His eyes looked more hooded than ever. Bianca died years ago. Are you her spirit?

I didn’t die, she said. I just—went away.

What do you want with me?

She shrugged. To help you find your goose, I suppose. What else does a friend want, but the same thing?

If you aren’t going to ensnare me into your wicked bed, he said, sounding faintly disappointed, you may as well help me find my goose. Have you seen her? It’s the one with the long neck.

Don’t they all have long necks?

Well—yes, now that you mention it.

Where are the other geese, while you look for the lost goose?

With themselves, of course.

Safe?

As safe as geese can get. Which isn’t very safe, I admit; after all, I keep them together and free of the fox only so they might end up roasting on the spit.

She said, I’ll help you find her. Where are you looking?

Here and there. He indicated to the left, to the right, broadly and without fuss. She looked around, and began to take in the world again.

Beyond the clearing, there was no correction to the world. The trees had a certain snap to them, a self-assurance, that was offensive at first. They didn’t shrug themselves into more respectable shapes, more graceful curves; those limbs that were ragged with disease or hollowed by the boring of insects stayed ragged, insouciant. As she ventured a few steps farther, the rocks and stones jabbed her tender soles, and a fly pestered her about the ears. The air grew colder again by degrees and wouldn’t warm as she might have preferred it to. It was, in short, the real world.

She took his hand and they walked together, he with his lopsided lope, she gingerly, to protect her feet. It was bizarre and even cruel, in a way, to see the world insist on being itself, with so little regard for them. Coming upon an ungainly promontory, they had to scramble around it, as it neither retreated nor developed convenient footholds for their use. Balsam pitch smeared against her gown, rubbing a gummy mark in it. Her breasts were cold and the tips of her breasts stiffened uncomfortably. She ought to have willed herself some decent clothes, but she hadn’t remembered the world to be so unaccommodating.

I don’t know your name, she said.

I am the gooseboy, he told her fondly, as if to have heard that she could forget was proof enough that they had once known one another.

But your other name, she said. I’ve a name. Bianca. Bianca de Nevada. It felt odd in her mouth. Didn’t you have another name?

Michelotto, he said. Nothing more.

Michelotto. She found herself smiling. I think we were friends once.

I think so too. He said it out of a passion to please, not from conviction.

They skirted a stand of slender trees with slender trunks like the legs of fawns, and bodices of white leaf.

How many geese have you? she asked.

Seven, he said, or eight.

Seven when one is missing, eight when one is found?

Seven or eight.

Well, there they are, then. They had come to a gentle dip from which a spring burbled; a vernal pool shimmered with the reflection of a gaggle of geese. White curvets upon green water. Four, five, six—seven.

Seven! he said. That’s the right number, I think. So she’s come back.

She came back while you were looking the other way.

That’s often the way you find someone who is lost, he said. He smiled at her as if he were competent, just for a moment, and his gaze looked clear and friendly. In all her childhood she hadn’t thought of him as much more than a goose himself, and the realization caused her grief.

Come back with me, he said. They will be happy to see you.

Who is there? she asked.

Donna Borgia, for one. He paused as if trying to remember the others.

Her fear was profound, though she didn’t know why. She pulled back and said, You are trying to lure me back!

I am looking for my goose, nothing more, he said. You must believe me.

Play with your geese, gooseboy, she said, and pushed him on the shoulder. He stumbled and fell to one knee, and while he maneuvered and huffed to find his balance, she fled.

It wasn’t hard to find the dwarves’ cottage. While she was gone, while she had ventured into the world, it had solidified more. A rich moss adhered to one wall. The door was now lime-washed and opened in two segments, like the door of a byre. A concavity shaped like a shell at the top, perhaps a shrine, was set in the side wall. She went to look. Within stood no Virgin with open hands, no carpenter with a Child on his shoulders, as she might have expected to see. Instead, a crudely carved stone tree with a coil of serpent wrapped around its base. A single apple, outsize, weighed down one branch. The serpent ignored the apple. Though its head was turned toward Bianca, its fangs were weathered into stumps.

Interviews

VICENTE FOUNDFra Ludovico in the little yard behind his cell, where he was keeping watch over a kettle. He was boiling up berries and bark, which Vicente remembered was the basis of some unsavory potion famous for the stupor it induced. The foul smell was comforting in its familiarity.

Are you the mad priest or the quiet sage today? Be the coherent one, if you can; I have to hear someone making some sense.

Fra Ludovico seemed less interested in conversing with Vicente than in governing the flame and making sure sediment didn’t scorch on the bottom of the pot and ruin the batch. But he said, Sit, sit, my friend, and Vicente squatted, upwind of the drift of vapors.

I left you in charge, he began.

You didn’t leaveme incharge, said Fra Ludovico. In charge of la Borgia? I can’t even get up on a donkey anymore without a ladder, a hoist, and a week of fasting. The notion of asking me to govern a Borgia! But I did my part nonetheless, you know.

Yes. You played the part of a blithering fool. What for?

A canny disguise. So I might be considered harmless, and not need to be disposed of. So I might protect my position and protect your daughter.

But you didn’t protect her.

I did what I could. If you’re going to blame me for the way things happen in human affairs, you’re wasting your breath. Have a drink instead. It isn’t ready but it’ll burn your tongue and stop your nonsense.

Vicente asked Fra Ludovico for more information about the disappearance of Bianca. He wanted a more certain sense of when the disaster had happened. The old priest—for by now he was old—shook his head and tried to remember. It was close to the time that Primavera’s grandson disappeared, he said at last. And she will know exactly when that was. She will know, he added, though she won’t say, of course. She can’t.

But how many years ago? Your cheek has gone hoary, and I can’t escape the sad eyes of Primavera. I gather I’ve been away about a decade, but when in that span of years did Bianca disappear? And what prompted it?

I measure time by the seasons of the Church, began Fra Ludovico, and every year begins anew, with Advent; it’s the same year, over and over, indistinguishable one from another—

I’ll turn you out on your fat old behind, you pious fool—

About six years, more or less.

This was clearer but hardly a comfort. But why? What happened? How had she changed?

She changed only as every child changes, no more, no less. I appreciate your sorrow, but you must understand: Had I seen signs that she intended to flee I would have intercepted her. She was still docile enough, still a timid child in her way. Well, you’d never let her meander—

Vicente gave him a look. I’ll say what I will, said the priest. I blame you no more than I blame myself, Don Vicente; facts are as they are. You rarely took her as far as the village.

She was achild.

And she grew up while you were gone. Or began to, anyway.

Was she threatened here? Soldiers sniffing around?

We enjoyed the customary blight of daily life. We delighted in tedium.

Vicente could sit no longer. He strode back and forth, stroking his beard. Have you blessed what you can of her spirit? In the event she has died? Have you performed the offices of the dead?

She was blameless, said Fra Ludovico. About that you can rest assured. I’m no theologian, Don Vicente, but I can’t bring myself to worry for the state of her soul in the afterlife. She was too pure a child to need serious pardoning. He stirred more vigorously. Besides, I used to note that you didn’t take much stock in my feeble efforts.

Who are you to deny a child spiritual benefit because her father is a doubter? Vicente overturned the pot, scalding the priest’s bare toes. Fra Ludovico yipped in pain and irritation. Are you a pope, to determine who deserves forgiveness for their sins? You have no right to deny my child sanctity. You have no way to see into her heart.

You’ve been changed by your adventures, I see. I suppose I might as well get used to it. Now look. I have my convictions. Maybe they are born of a little too much liqueur in the colder days, but they are convictions just the same. And I don’t sense that Bianca has departed this life.

What are you saying?

Nothing more than what I’ve already said. No hunting dogs have found her body in the woods. Villagers, whose gossip and conjecture often signifies, have been as mystified as we at Montefiore are. Primavera insisted on augury after augury, trying to learn the truth, and she could read no sign of Bianca’s demise in any entrails. That was when the old sow could still speak, of course, though her tongue became detached shortly thereafter.

For blasphemy?

If she’d been subject to that punishment for blasphemy, she’d have been mute since she was three. He continued. Maybe Bianca escaped over the hills to Ravenna. Maybe she found a little convent somewhere and offered herself to Christ. In any case, I’ve more to do than say the Mass of the Dead for a healthy young girl who lights out on her own.

Vicente hugged his elbows. You didn’t go after her.