Mirror Mirror (6 page)

“You would always hear me,” she said, laughing. “You hear me when I wake up to go in the night, though my water is less than a spoonful.”

He tried again. “I tell you, the world is a terrible place to be. I don't want you to come with me until you're older, for if something happened to me, what would become of you?”

“What could happen to you?” she asked.

“Well, a tree might fall on my head and turn my brains into whisked eggs.”

His drollery was ineffectual. “
Papà,
really.”

“Look,” he told her, “here at Montefiore, Fra Ludovico and Primavera Vecchia can keep you safe. But should anything ever happen to me, you are not to come looking.”

“I don't understand why.” She lowered her chin and glared at him with a severity uncommon in a child.

“Because anything that could happen to me could happen to you. If I was in trouble somehow, it would be a comfort to know you were safe here, and not getting into mischief on my behalf. I lost your mother, through no fault of my own.” His voice was stern. “I won't lose you too, nor even waste my time worrying about it, providing you obey me.”

“You go and come, and go and come, and nothing ever happens to you.”

“I go and come, and play my games, and stroke my beard and nod my head and hold my tongue, all to keep us safely overlooked up here. These are boisterous times, and too many men are greedy for everything. You stay here. You give me your word?”

She wouldn't.

“Bianca,” he said, “this bridge on which we stand. Up there is Lago Verde, and the stream runs out, beneath this bridge, to water our lower fields, and eventually to join the other rivulets and power the mill at the edge of the village. You can see the noisy stream, the rushes, the wrens at their work, the hills beyond. But what don't you see?”

“I don't see why you have to leave again,” she said.

He snapped at her, “You don't see men thieving for riches. You don't see the cavalry or the foot soldiers. You don't see”—here he
lowered his voice, trying another approach—“you don't see the ornery creatures who live under the bridge.”

She looked at him with suspicion and mock contempt, but he could tell he had found his weapon.

“If you come down here alone, a little slip of a thing as you are, one of them will leap from their damp burrow and snatch you away. And then I'll come home, and cry,
Bianca, Bianca!
And you'll be gone, and no one to tell me where you went. But I'll know, Bianca. I'll know. You
disobeyed your father.
”

“What do they look like?” she asked.

“Scarier than Primavera,” he said. “I don't want to terrify you, so that's all I'll say. Now kiss me, and let me be on my way.”

She kissed him and let him go. And, more or less, she believed him that the weather in the world was brutal. Every time he came home, it took longer and longer for him to shake off the frozen look on his face, and thaw at the sight of her. Then, when summer had passed and the autumn rushed goldenly in, he was gone again, and this time for a long time—more than a week. Long enough for the staff to relax into mild disbehavior.

“The wall by the back stairs wants a coat of lime wash,” said one of the maids. Someone had been drawing instructional diagrams for the others and the male figure looked rather too much like a naked Fra Ludovico for anyone's comfort.

“You're lucky the old fool doesn't take this staircase,” muttered Primavera. “He'd collapse in mortification and brain himself on the stone landing, and go on to swell the community of souls in heaven and bore them eternally. No, Bianca, you are forbidden to go look. When the time comes to tell you the glorious nonsense of sex, I'll do it with the help of a carrot and a soft loaf of bread folded in two.”

“I know about sex,” said Bianca. “I've seen the ram and the ewe.”

“And what precisely can you see about the romance between the ram and the ewe?”

Very little, as it turned out. But Bianca was crafty enough to disguise her ignorance and wouldn't say.

The girl had all too few amusements, sequestered as she was. The gooseboy was friendly but vague, and preferred the company of geese. The servant girls from the village thought Bianca was too young for her friendship to be worth cultivating. So needling Primavera or Fra Ludovico was one of Bianca's rare entertainments. At lunch:

“I want to see the funny drawings. Why can't I?”

“What funny drawings?” asked Fra Ludovico.

“Someone has sketched schemes of sex between whores and morons,” said Primavera.

“Only a moron would have sex with a whore,” said Fra Ludovico. “Bianca, I forbid you to examine these diagrams. You would weep with fright and grief.”

“I can see her laughing herself sick,” said Primavera. “Or getting ideas. Usually, for the sake of honesty, I have to chop the carrot in half so as not to get a young girl's hopes up.” A pause. “There's really nothing to compare to a squid.”

“I see a horse,” cried the gooseboy, who frequently cried what he saw, though most often it was shapes in the clouds. But today he was right, and Don Vicente would arrive by nightfall.

Fra Ludovico posted himself in a chamber to pray that Don Vicente might bring good news to their windswept perch, though he would never elaborate the nature of the hopes he had; his was too lofty a station for him to descend to common gossip. “You don't know what you pray about,” snorted Primavera, “that's why you won't tell us. You pray for a reason to pray, that's all. And it doesn't come.”

“It'll come soon enough,” said Fra Ludovico bitterly. “I've been to Rome, after all; I know how quickly peace concludes.”

“If I fell asleep into my grave now, I'd have nothing to think about but the children war has taken from me,” snapped Primavera. “No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on.
Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.”

“Something worse always comes along. That's what I'm praying about.”

Primavera left to supervise the preparation of the evening meal. Bianca followed her and mooned about the kitchen, getting underfoot and upsetting a pot of broth, till Primavera scolded her and sent her off.

Fra Ludovico, to Bianca's knock, replied yawnily, “I'm deep in prayer, child. Go away.”

She threw stones in the well, but the well didn't throw them back, and she went to the top of the back staircase, where the local girls had begun covering the offending images with lime wash.

“What is that supposed to be?” she asked, pointing.

The girls had no use for her. Had she been the sister of one of them, they might have been kind; but they were always serving, and had few advantages, and the pleasure of sisterhood among them was more luxurious than the appeal of being kind to a younger child. And the girls could see that as the lone child of the local landholder, Bianca was far more likely to attract a desirable husband than they, which made them less than sympathetic to her loneliness.

So the drawings they were covering up were especially galling, and they had to choose their strategy of cruelty. In the end the puddle of soapy water on the top step did their work for them. Down she went, three steps at a time, while the girls laughed.

“Nobody pushed her,” they agreed, affronted, when Primavera arrived.

Bianca bled a little and cried, but she cried less than she bled, and then she stopped bleeding, and went to wait for her father in the apple orchard.

The orchard was gently terraced into four broad earthwork steps, each one lined with a double row of trees. The time of apples was nearly here; the first windfalls were jeweling the ground with carmine and green. Bianca knew her father, who was kind to his animals, would bring his mare here, once she'd been unsaddled and watered. He would let her take advantage of a few apples.

Bianca didn't fret but sat quietly in the verdant shade of the top level. She couldn't see through the descending boughs, but she would hear the mare nicker and stamp, and she would run down with arms outstretched, gaining speed on each of the four slopes.

It was closing on evening by the time he arrived. She ran to him. “
Papà,
” she cried, for more-than-a-week had seemed to her little-less-than-a-year. She didn't mean to complain of her fall, only to show him who she was, in case he'd forgotten.

But he turned and saw her, and shrugged away the mare's nuzzling head. He didn't notice his daughter's bruise or the scab. Which seemed odd. He said merely, “What a fledge of your mother you are, and ever more so,” and he took her hand in his as he hurried her toward the house. He didn't ask her about what had happened while he was gone. He had something on his mind.

The sun was a stout ball of glowing blood in the haze of thin clouds, and then broke through. The stones of Montefiore were copper butter. The windows that had glass winked blindingly back at the sun. Everything in the world had an eye and could watch. From beyond, the hoofs of another horse rang out.

She shuddered with a child's pleasurable shiver of fear. She wanted her father to stop, hold her, attend to her. “Something is watching us,” she murmured. He thought she meant the moon, rising over the house on the other side, a silver sentinel, and she did. But she meant something dark as well as bright, and in that she was correct.

A pack of dirty thieves

is what they called us. They had no better words for it, not knowing whether we were beasts or men. We knew no better than they did what we were, for we had little language of our own—no names, back then, few habits of civilized living. But we didn't steal. Dirty vagabonds, the lot of us, back then, but not thieves.

Back then, I say, meaning a past moment I can postulate must have existed, but can't in truth remember for itself.

We might have become more human—sooner than we did, if indeed we ever have—did we move according to the rhythms of human beings.

We hear the bells of the chapel on the blossom-scented winds of May, and we realize it's time to pray. If we are to be human we must pray as humans do. So we put down our tools and scour the muck from our nails, for we have learned you must not come to chapel smelling of corpses and shit and gold and blood and the juice
of whores. We scrub and arrange what passes for our clothes, and mat down our manes to look more like human hair, and we tuck our cloven feet into sacks of soft leather called boots, and we traipse to the chapel to pray.

And when we arrive the candles are dark, the doors are closed and bolted, the crowds of faithful are snoring their lusty dreams under every swaybacked rooftop in the village. We think, oh, so this isn't the time to pray, then. And we go home, trying not to laugh at the dreams of humans, which are draped like tattered clouds above their homes until the sunlight bleaches them invisible. As we trudge home, the snow crunches under our feet, the icicles dangle like white marble fringe on the pines. Time moves differently for us.

This happens again and again. After some decades I think—I think it was I who thought this, though the notion of an
I
is still a confusing one—I think this: When humans hear the bells of faith, they are there at once. When dwarves hear it, they arrive too late.

But our lives are longer than human lives. Just yesterday Primavera Vecchia was slipping off the lap of her grandmother and landing in the basket of onions and pissing on them. They made a better soup for it, those onions. Today Primavera is hairy of chin and tomorrow no one will remember who she was.

Our lives are more secret too. Humans shorten their lives by gossip, and dwarves can barely talk. Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.

I was in the shadows on the night of the copper moon. I had been following her father to lay a bargain at his door, to spend my words in the hope of an exchange, to negotiate for the return of what we'd lost. But he was frightened of the coming dark and spurred his tired horse up the last slope before I could trudge into his path and confront him.

So I followed behind, and heard what I saw, and saw what I heard. As he and the girl-thing came down from the orchards, the moon and sun both witnessing, a horseman arrived on a stallion, caparisoned in black and red, and said, “Have you readied the house? He's here.”

Trouble and his sister