Mirror Mirror (34 page)

As Lucrezia's confinement neared the end, she removed herself to Belriguardo, one of her
luoghi de delizie,
pavilions of delight. It wasn't a score of miles from Ferrara, but when she arrived and inspected the frescoed chambers, the cloistered gardens, the choice meals laid out to tempt her appetite, she turned away. She decided she would go to Montefiore instead, and settle in to give birth there, and pretend to be the widow of a farmer, with another kind of life.

She lay beneath sumptuous trappings of cobalt blue and gold, tossing and turning in her sheets of silvery silk. The physician would not allow her to travel. She was too near to term, she had had too many problems in the past.
I have had problems in the past,
she replied in her own mind,
and they all center around my appetite to know everything.

Had she been a farmer's wife—had she been Vicente's wife!—instead of the daughter of a pope, she might have had humbler tastes. She dashed the wine upon the floor and asked for clear mountain water instead. She laughed at the sight of the hefty haunches of the chambermaid who had to wipe up the mess.

I saw one bite of the Apple turn a headless dog into a squat man-cub, she remembered, a creature who took the Apple when offered and left with it into the chimney wall. I nibbled one small bite myself—and it hasn't changed me dramatically. I have had no immunity from illness or sorrow, and I hear the doctors murmur in the
antechamber. Maybe I needed more of the thing—with my wretched past, one small bite was too little. I need more.

Then she raised herself up on an elbow and recalled that one Apple remained. It was in the protection of the Doge of Venice, someone who had professed, from a distance, an admiration for Lucrezia Borgia. That was sensible enough, for Venice was within striking distance of Ferrara, scarcely a day's travel if the roads were good, the brigands busy elsewhere, and the weather helpful.

She had always meant to return to Venice, and now she realized it wasn't Montefiore but Venice that called her. The final Apple would heal her, would kill the child within her womb if such were needed. It would grant her some measure of fuller life than she, even with all her advantages of beauty and birthright, had ever managed.

She called upon the midwives, the surgeon, her confessor, and, an afterthought, her husband, and declared her intentions to take a retinue to Venice. The heat of the summer was almost upon them, she said, and the breezes off the Adriatic would calm her, would sing her new baby through the canal on easing tides.

“Yes,” said Alfonso, looking down his strong hooked nose at her, eager to be elsewhere. He glanced at the confessor and made a motion: Confer the appropriate blessings and administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction. If she continues to fail, we'll petition the Pope to send a more senior prelate, as befits her station.

She tried to flail at them, to rip the dressings of her bedstead.

Alfonso patted the pillow and blessed her mildly and without conviction, and withdrew his hand before she could bite it.

Her labor pangs began shortly thereafter, and the death knells sounded on her horizon. They weren't immediate but they were imminent; they were nextday. She wouldn't give in, though, until she had risen from her bed and made her way through the watery highways of Venice, to greet the Doge at his palazzo and bargain or beg or steal that Apple that rightly belonged to her.

Decades earlier, some hack of a poet seeking to make a reputation of his own by sullying hers had called her a Thaïs. He'd embellished
beyond recognition her appetite for venom, lust, and vengeance. A Thaïs, a Roman harridan, a maenad, a murderess, a corrupt and unforgivable harpy. Once she had laughed in delight at the sound of her fierce reputation. But she wouldn't be unforgivable; she would see to that. She would find the final Apple and lunge at it before it was too late. Learning all there was to know at last, she would find a good reason to forgive herself her random sins and well-cloaked crimes, and ensure she would be forgiven in the afterlife as well.

She was thirty-nine.

Fire and ivy

S
TUCK AS
we all are in the maw of time, the dwarves learned to age, and discovered a new variety of patience, one that required effort. Around the glass-lidded coffin they kept their vigil, even after the eyesight of Vicente de Nevada began to fail, and his memory to falter, and he returned to the hilltop bier with infrequency, and then not at all.

Springs came and went, interspersed with sequences of summer, autumn, and winter, in a regular pattern that, the dwarves decided, wasn't all that hard to follow. Their beards grew longer and grayer, and Gimpy showed up once with a pair of black scissors.

“Where did you get those?” asked Deaf-to-the-World.

“I bargained for them from a shoemaker,” he replied. “I did hard labor for a week, tanning leather in a foul warehouse, and for my efforts I was repaid with this implement.”

“What is it for?”

“Our beards are growing into the soil. Haven't you noticed?” Gimpy wandered about the clearing and snipped off the beards at waist height. Indeed, some of the dwarves had been rooting in the soil. The dog alone seemed impervious to hair growth, or maybe it was that he shed.

“What else are scissors good for?” asked Heartless.

“Oh, well,” said MuteMuteMute, looking around. “I suppose we could cut back the ivy growing over the coffin.”

No one could not think of a reason to protest, not even Bitter, so the dwarves, enjoying the mobility they hadn't realized they'd been lacking, gathered about the bier. Deaf-to-the-World, Tasteless, Heartless, Blindeye, and Bitter clutched handfuls of ivy and hauled it back. Gimpy and MuteMuteMute took turns snipping. Once they'd been accustomed to breathing through solid stone, and now they found gardening strenuous work. Well, they were aging too. Tasteless was losing his black-and-gold teeth, one by one, and Blindeye complained that white smears were beginning to cloud his vision.

When they had finished, they laid to one side a pile of dead ivy the size of a small house.

Midsummer day was approaching, 1519, and more of the world's timelessness was evaporating by the hour. MuteMuteMute fished from his pocket a tin box with a hot coal inside, and used the coal to light the older, browner parts of ivy. Within a short time the burning vines became a beacon on the hill, and they smoked all day, until by sunset they had attracted attention.

The gooseboy, Michelotto, came thrashing through the summer growth. He was still a gooseboy, though he was twenty-two now. His shoulders were less hunched. Perhaps due to having enjoyed a hearty if belated introduction to the joys of the flesh, Michelotto was pleased that his right leg no longer trailed. Indeed, he was a specimen of surprising beauty. He had Lucrezia's aquiline nose and shapely chin, and his eyes were a liquid gray, water in a pewter goblet.

“You make a fire to call me here?” he asked.

Away from the farms and villages, the dwarves were rarely addressed
by a human. It took their ears a short time to remember how to decipher syllables.

“We make a fire to burn the ivy,” said Heartless.

“Oh, but look,” said Michelotto. “It doesn't seem to be burning.”

Michelotto seemed to be right. Anyway, he was more human than they, so the dwarves paid attention. They could see that the fire was burning. The leaves of the ivy seemed green as ever, though perhaps it was merely that they hadn't burned long enough. Leave it to a human to fiddle over such minute distinctions as
burned
or
not burned
in a matter of so few moments.

Michelotto went down on his knees before the coffin and leaned across it. He breathed on the glass and rubbed it with his hand.

“Is the box full of someone?” he asked. “I can't rub away the mist.”

Stoneheart said, “She waits in our time, while we have moved on into hers.”

“It's a maiden, then,” said Michelotto, more or less approvingly. The dwarves nodded.

Michelotto pressed his hands against the lid and felt as if for a spring lock release. “But the glass is very pure,” he said. “I can't see what is inside, for something like breath clouds the inside of the glass. But the breath makes a silvery beaded backing, and the oval glass does the work of a mirror. Try as I might, all I can see is myself.”

“That is ever the trouble with human beings,” snapped Bitter. The other dwarves looked at him with surprise. “Well, what of yourself do you see?” he continued, “if you must go on about it so?”

“Not very much,” said Michelotto, “and that's the sorry truth. There's not all that much of me to see.” He smiled at himself, though, forgivingly, and with a touch of his mother's self-admiration.

“May I open the box and view the corpse?” said Michelotto after a while. “Are these the remains of a saint, like Lucy of Narni? Perhaps a necessary holiness would be conferred upon me, and my mental slowness would be corrected. I'm surer of thought than I used to be, but even so, I could do with any blessing.”

“She has the innocence of a saint,” said Gimpy, “but she's only a young woman who has slipped sideways a few feet, into another realm.”

“Still, I'd like to have her blessing, even if she is dead. Will the body stink after all this time?”

“Little offends us,” said Tasteless, shrugging.

“Is it time?” asked Heartless. “Is it time already? We have been here only since morning, surely! I've hardly had a chance to contemplate.”

He lifted his nose and sniffed and listened. Several tears tracked into his beard, which was now more white than red. “The old threat is hearing the knell of bells calling for a funeral Mass,” he said. “The next danger may be kneeling here before us, for all I know. The only way to be kept from danger is to be kept dead, and all we decided to do was to try to keep her from the one who would destroy her then. Let life go ahead and destroy her now, in a new and novel way. We have no right to forbid it.”

Michelotto took this as permission to continue, and with more dedicated efforts, he worked at the clasps and hasps that secured the lid to the coffin. The dwarves didn't help. They stood back. Deaf-to-the-World backed into the fiery mountain of ivy, and yelped.

Michelotto laughed—silly little men!—and wrestled the lid, at last, away.

He leaned over and looked at Bianca de Nevada, and his breath stung in his chest.

“She hasn't changed a day,” he said. “And I remember her now, and the fate that befell her. She was my friend, my Bianca, my good true friend. How has she come to rest like a painted marble beauty in this box of wood and glass?”

“Your mother took every step she could manage to destroy her,” said Blindeye. “Here she lies, though, rich as rain. Isn't she delicate?”

Michelotto leaned over the box. The girl was unblemished and incorruptible. Her hair had grown in the box, and made for her a sort of black pool of netting, in which her pale face and her pale hands floated. The clothes in which she'd been put to rest may have rotted
away; it was impossible to tell, for the hair covered her as respectably as a nun's habit. Her eyes were closed, but the face appeared unsunken, unblanched. She looked as if she were asleep.

“May I kiss her?” he asked.

“No, no. No, Michelotto.”

The gooseboy turned to argue with the dwarf, who had professed to be excused from responsibility, to find that it wasn't the dwarf speaking. It wasn't any of them. It was someone else, pressing through a clot of undergrowth.

The dwarves thought it was Vicente, for he was the only one, besides them, who had come to sit with the girl. It had been some years since he'd shown up, and they had presumed his bad lungs, bad legs, bad eyes, had gotten the better of him at last, and death had allowed him some peace that life had withheld from him. But Vicente could only have gotten older, that much they were sure of, and this was a younger man, one they had never seen.

Michelotto had seen him before, but he couldn't remember his name. They hadn't known each other well. But he remembered the stride. The face was older, the beard and the temples flecked with early silver. The eyes were like knotholes into a deep and complicated tree.

“I came upon her just as you did, but held back, hardly believing my eyes,” he said. “Neither that she was there at all, nor that you opened the casket. But in any case, she's not there for you to kiss.”

“Who are you to say?” asked Michelotto.

“The one who put her here,” he answered. “Not knowing what I was doing.”

“I had heard you were slaughtered like a pig,” said Michelotto.

“I just disappeared. That's all.”

Heartless drove his thick fingers into his beard and fished out, one after the other, a stack of florins. “These,” he said to Ranuccio, “I believe are yours.”

“I didn't want them before and I don't want them now. Give them to the poor,” said Ranuccio.