Mirror Mirror Part 1

Mirror Mirror.

by Gregory Maguire.

The roofs of Montefiore

FROM THE arable river lands to the south, the approach to Montefiore appears a sequence of relaxed hills. In the late spring, when the puckers of red poppy blossom are scattered against the green of the season, it can look like so much was.h.i.+ng, like mounds of Persian silk and Florentine brocade lightly tossed in heaps. Each successive rise takes on a new color, indefinably more fervent, an aspect of distance and time stained by the shadows of clouds, or bleached when the sun takes a certain position.But the traveler on foot or in a hobble-wheeled peasant cart, or even on horseback, learns the truth of the terrain. The ascent is steeper than it looks from below. And the rutted track traverses in long switchbacks to accommodate for the severity of the grade and the crosscutting ravines. So the trip takes many more hours than the view suggests. The red-tiled roofs of Montefiore come into sight, promisingly, and then they disappear again as hills loom up and forests close in.Often I have traveled the road to Montefiore in memory. Today I travel it in true time, true dust, true air. When the track lends me height enough, I can glimpse the villa's red roofs above the ranks of poplars, across the intervening valleys. But I can't tell if the house is peopled with my friends and my family, or with rogues who have murdered the servants in their beds. I can't tell if the walls below the roofline are scorched with smoke, or if the doors are marked with an ashy cross to suggest that plague has come to gnaw the living into their mortal rest, their last gritty blanket shoveled over their heads.But I have come out of one death, the one whose walls were gla.s.s; I have awakened into a second life dearer for being both unpromised and undeserved. Anyone who walks from her own grave relies on the unexpected. Anyone who walks from her own grave knows that death is more patient than Gesu Cristo. Death can afford to wait.But now the track turns again, and my view momentarily spins back along the slopes I've climbed so far. My eye traces the foothills already gained, considers the alphabet of light that spells its unreadable words on the surface of the river. My eye also moves along the past, to my early misapprehensions committed to memory on this isolated outcropping.The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.Rest. Breathe in, breathe out. No one can harm you further than death could do. When rested, you must go on; you must find out the truth about Montefiore. Granted a second life, you must find in it more meaning than you could ever determine in your first.*1502 *The name of the worldTHE WORLDwas called Montefiore, as far as she knew, and from her aerie on every side all the world descended.Like any child, she looked out and across rather than in. She was more familiar with the vistas, the promising valleys with their hidden hamlets, the scope of the future arranged in terms of hills and light.Once a small dragon had become trapped in the bird-snaring nets slung in theuccellare . Bianca watched as the cook's adolescent grandson tried to cut it down and release it. Her eyes were fixed on the creature, the stray impossibility of it, not on the spinney in which it was caught. How it twitched, its webbed claws a pearly chalcedony, its eyes frantic and unblinking. (Despite the boy's efforts, it died, and his grandmother flayed it for skin with which to patch the kitchen bellows.)Bianca regarded visitors to Montefiore with fierce attention: emissaries of the world. But the bones of her home-the house itself-remained as familiar and unregarded as her own fingernails.Montefiore was larger than a farmer's villa but not so imposing as a castle. Too far from anywhere important to serve as acasale -a country house-it crowned an upthrust shoulder of land, so its fortifications were natural. On all sides, the steepness of the slope was a deterrent to invaders, and anyway, Montefiore wasn't large enough to interest thecondottieri who led their small armies along the riverbank on one campaign or another.Had Bianca an adult eye, she might have guessed from its mismatched roofs and inconsistent architectural details that many owners had lived here before her family arrived, shaping the s.p.a.ce with a disregard for symmetry or loveliness. When its masters had had money, they'd made attempts to drill a little grandeur into the old stone hull, like crisp starched lace tied under the wet chins of a droolingnonna . A recently completed interior courtyard, handsomely done with columns and vaults in the revived archaic style, provided relief from the roaring breeze.Except for the courtyard, though, most attempts at improvement had been abandoned in mideffort. Some windows were fitted with gla.s.s, but in most windows, squares of linen had been nailed to the shutter moldings, pale light conferring a sense of height and volume to the dark rooms. Along one retaining wall, a loggia ran unevenly, its walls inset with terrazzo putti whose faces had become bubonic with the remains of insect coc.o.o.ns. For half a century the chapel had stood with a roof beam and naked struts, the old cladding and tiles having been swept away in an arrogant gale. When the Januarytramontana bl.u.s.tered in, the geese sometimes sheltered there from the wind, though they seldom took communion.Fortunately too inaccessible to garrison an army, Montefiore was nonetheless valuable as a lookout. From time to time in its history it had been commandeered for its prospects. On a clear day one imagined one could glimpse the sea.What child does not feel itself perched at the center of creation? Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being. The particular geography of home always charms, but the geography of Montefiore was unarguably pastoral. The arrangement of Tuscan and Umbrian vistas, draped from the very threshold of home through diminis.h.i.+ng folds to the horizons, taught soft blues and browns to Bianca de Nevada. That was what they were there for; this brown, that blue; this here, that there.These moments, more or less, had their flas.h.i.+ng existence, circa 1500 anno Domini, though the name of a year means little to one who doesn't yet know the name of corruption.Lago VerdeTHERE WEREthe grapes to harvest, the sweeter first olives and the richer late ones, and the second cutting of hay to manage before an early frost sapped it of life. But the weather, this year, was benign, and the agricultural operations around Montefiore were conducted without delay, each in its time. Therefore, the cook's augury of chicken livers predicting success, Vicente de Nevada organized a corpus of laborers to continue work on ditch digging at the far end of the green lake.Still considered an unacceptable landlord-for the Spanish slant to his otherwise serviceable Italian-de Nevada was tolerated but not admired. Well, he was new in the district still, only these few years, having arrived from the suspicious unknown with a motherless child and a writ of occupancy sealed in a plum-colored wax. He was a quiet man and a gentle one, and his pa.s.sions, as far as the locals observed, didn't show in a manly, obvious way upon his face; so he wasn't admired. Who could take the time to study a man whose face was the same in winter or summer, in prayer or labor, on feastday or, presumably, at an auto-da-fe in his homeland, Spain? No, Vicente wasn't admired, but he was tolerated: he saw to it that the sick were tended, the dead blessed by the priest attached to Montefiore, and the wheat shared out and the apples in their time, and the joiner paid for his labors when a coffin had to be built.Vicente de Nevada loved his small holding, and since the weather was cooperating and the work crew needed encouragement, he pulled off his s.h.i.+rt and got hip-deep in the swampy water at the lake's draining edge. He helped to unsettle boulders that had rolled into the mud back in the time of Potiphar.Go on, a.s.sist the good man, you lazy cleric, said Primavera Vecchia, the cook.It wouldn't be seemly, said Fra Ludovico calmly. If you think he needs help, do it yourself.I'm watching the child.Leave her in my watch.What a mistake that would be. She'd wander up to her nose in the green water and drown before your eyes, while you tiptoed around squealing for an angel to come to her aide. I'd no more leave her in your care than I would my own soul.Hmmmph, said Fra Ludovico. I've never been persuaded you had much of a soul. More like a little damp anchovy stuck between your b.r.e.a.s.t.s, trying to breathe. That's what you smell like, anyway.The small girl balanced on the margin of the moment, toes in the water and heels in the mud. She was thinking that from the house, the small lake did look green, because regular flooding made the poplars stand knee-deep in water. But from here, on site, with the sun sliding westward, the water looked silvered, and there were flicking scales of sky blue and white as well as poplar green and an uncertain black.The reflections speckled her pale skin. She stopped to ruck her tunic a few inches higher. It was tied in a knot in back, with a vague hope of keeping it dry, but its hem was dripping.Bianca was interested in everyone's splas.h.i.+ng. She had listened carefully about the plan to irrigate a field farther along the slope by draining this wetland above. Her father grunted, holding the small of his back, sweating between the shoulderblades. In formal and courteous words he encouraged the workers. They grunted in mockery, equal parts affection and brave disrespect.He was the world to her, more than the house was, even.He felt her looking, and with his unvarying expression he turned and waved. It was that, and that alone, that kept the workers at their task. They would have preferred him on the bank, supervising, upbraiding them. But a man who would pause to wave at his daughter, even if his face didn't change-well, that was a gesture they could read. All together now, andlift. Lift.What did they know of how he cuddled her and protected her, of how he sat by her cot at night so she could sleep, of how quickly he started when a bad dream woke her? What did they know of the disagreements he had had with Primavera, who wanted to take the child to her pallet in the kitchen? They knew nothing of any of this.She wanted to walk across the water to him, to run on its mosaic of reflections, for even across this gla.s.sy s.p.a.ce she missed him. She cried out, selfish thing-don't disturb the man while he tries to shrink a lake-but her voice came out as a laugh across the water, no more precise than the call of a bird. He waved again.Come here,bambina , your behind is mucky, said Primavera, pulling herself off the rotting log on which she had sat.You've left a dent in this log, observed Fra Ludovico kindly.Bianca skipped on along the lake edge, making the old cook cross, and, with pins in her s.h.i.+ns, she hobbled after.Papa, Papa,babbled Bianca.Don't come down this way, said her father. We don't know which is the keystone boulder. When we've s.h.i.+fted the right one, the rest will give way, and the force of the water might be strong. Primavera, aren't you minding her?I am, but she must mind me first, said the cook.Fra Ludovico snapped out of the att.i.tude of prayer he'd been affecting and strode forward. He pa.s.sed the cook, kicking up a spray of dirt with his sandal, smirked, and swooped Bianca up out of harm's way.Leave her be, I'm capable, snorted Primavera.And lift, said Vicente,and lift, and the crucial boulder behaved. There was a suck of stone from mud, a small cataract. The men fell back, laughing, to see a waterworks succeed, at least for the moment. The pull wasn't strong enough to endanger anyone, but Primavera, heading for Bianca, trod on an ap.r.o.n of sand as it s.h.i.+fted, and she sat down suddenly, up to her ap.r.o.n strings in water. The laborers jeered, and with her deft tongue she cursed them imaginatively. Fra Ludovico all but pranced past, holding Bianca like a boon.The priest set her down and she ran to her father, across a shallow puddle left by the lake as it receded. She skidded and fell forward onto her hands and knees, as wet as Primavera, and laughing.Vicente de Nevada swept forward and slipped his hands under his daughter's armpits. You're a mucky mess, and will sleep in the barn with the pigs, he said. What's this, though?He handed Bianca back to the priest and said, Now stay out of the water, Bianca, it's unhealthy.Then he felt the puddle with his palms, and then his fingertips. He pried a slightly bowled edge of puddle up into the air. Or that's what it looked like.Water ran off it.You've unearthed a shard of the pagan past, said Fra Ludovico. A Roman s.h.i.+eld?I've unlaked it, not unearthed it, said Vicente.The lid of a large cauldron, said Primavera, huffing.The workers drew near, but in a huddle. They wanted to see and they didn't want to see.It's a mirror, said de Nevada wonderingly.He took it back to Montefiore and had it cleaned, and a beautiful frame carved for it.But what was it doing in Lago Verde? That was the question on everyone's mind, then, and for many years after.I'd guess that someone smuggled it out of Florence, to rescue it from the bonfires of Savonarola, said Fra Ludovico. Maybe then he suffered fiery hemorrhoids, thought better of his vanity, and pitched it in the lake as he pa.s.sed. We ought to have left it there.Have I admitted aloud to you something I have long suspected? said Primavera. You're afool . No one pa.s.ses this lake but to approach or leave Montefiore, and I've lived here since before mirrors were invented. I'd have known if this thing had a human owner. No, it's a creation of the water nymphs. I don't like it one bit. We ought to put it back.I'm not a fool, said the priest, but though it pains me to say it, for once I agree with you. We ought to toss it back in the deep.It's just a mirror, said Don Vicente de Nevada to his little girl, holding her in his arms high enough so she could see herself, and she could see him too, loving her. Can you see yourself? What do you see?I see Bianca, she said, and I seePapa.He smiled.Where isMamma ? she said, and craned her head this way and that, as if to peer beyond the mirror's ornate frame, around the frame's edges, into the watery recesses just out of view.Vicente de Nevada neither scowled nor winced. Evenly he answered her, as he always had. You can't see your mother; she is dead. This isn't a window to heaven. This is just a mirror.He didn't look for his wife there, nor was he the type of man to look at himself. Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness. When he did look, he saw the view reflected from the mirror, the view out thesalone 's windows, of Toscana and Umbria in fallow beauty, seductively ready for the next invading army.But Bianca always thought of it as a curved sheaf of lake, pleasingly cut from water and hung on the wall.What they told her, what she sawPRIMAVERA VECCHIAhad once had s.e.x with a squid. On washdays in high summer you could still see the marks like a row of puckered b.u.mps that the squid's pa.s.sionate hold had left on her skin. They began beneath her right breast, circled around her ample hip, and closed in on her cloistered area.What were you doing with a squid? asked Bianca.Everything a squid could manage to do, said the cook. Once you lose your husband to the wars, let me tell you, you become a fishwife in more ways than one.What wars?One or the other of them, I forget. I'm too old to remember what my feet look like, how can I remember my husband? Eat up your supper.Primavera was older than Gesu, or so she said. She knew how the world worked. She said: You, my child, were conceived in a snowy dale. The forests had lost their leaves, and the trunks of the trees had gone black with the wet of snow. I know this because of how white-and-black you are, that skin, that hair. Eat up that bread, haven't I told you already, before the mice get it.What doesconceived mean?Fra Ludovico wandered into the kitchen just then, sniffing for a s.h.i.+ngle of ham. Primavera said, It means thought up.Are you corrupting the child? asked the priest.I'm telling her of her origins.Fra Ludovico sat down at the table as if a symposium on the subject had been called. He said: In the year of Our Lord 1495, on a bright autumn afternoon of stubborn winds and warm rain that smelled unpleasantly of salted cod and violets, the dark-tressed Maria Ines, originally of Navarre, gave you life. After her difficult miscarriages, you were her first child to come to term, and your mother lived long enough to name you Bianca and seal her devotion with a kiss on your bloodied hairless scalp.Oh, the love she had for you, said Fra Ludovico. I performed the christening with one hand and anointed the forehead of the corpse with the other. And then your saintly mother flew to heaven and became an angel. Now be a saint like your mother, will you, and fetch me a sip of wine to go with this ham. I've a twinge.Primavera, when the girl had gone: You simple oaf, don't lie to her.Hush, you suppurating old boil of a peasant.You weren't present at the mother's death, and you know it. You're a priest, you aren't supposed to lie.I'm a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted. I would have performed the rites had I happened to be in the vicinity. You know I would.Bianca returned with the wine. The priest toasted his nemesis. May you choke on your G.o.dless superst.i.tions and spend eternity in coals up to your squid marks. Amen.Bianca, the kitchen fire is failing, and I left the kindling on a cloth at the bottom of the steps. Can you bring it to the hearth? asked Primavera. The girl, biddable enough, went off.I know you're an old fool, said the cook, but really, I'm surprised you would lie to the girl.My lie is a slender thing. It serves a purpose. Bianca should see that her birth ushered her mother into heavenly bliss. Isn't it true enough? And isn't it good for her to consider?Primavera: For all you know Maria Ines was a harlot. She may be writhing in h.e.l.l or removing an ocean with the lid of an acorn in purgatory. How can you promise Bianca her mother is in heaven?Fra Ludovico: The stories of heaven belong in the heads of children. If, as children grow, the stories evaporate?-oh well. They leave behind a residue of hope that changes how children behave.Primavera: That stinks more than your chamber pot.And are you going to heaven or h.e.l.l, do you think, with your heathen tricks and legerdemain?I'm not going to die at all, just to spite the architects of the worlds.Fra Ludovico crossed himself and ate some more ham.Bianca de Nevada returned with the kindling and helped Primavera stoke the fire. She didn't ask more about her mother: What was there to say? But Fra Ludovico, warmed by the wine and the fire, talked about an arterial system of grace that webbed together human affairs. When he left, Primavera raked the embers again.Look, child, she said. Is this a kitchen fire or is it the fires of h.e.l.l?There is a pot on a chain for our broad beans, said Bianca. I don't know if h.e.l.l has such a pot.Is your mother a dead woman or is she a broad bean?This was a harder question to answer. Once a mother started being dead, and was planted in the ground, what was to say she didn't emerge, eventually, as a broad bean? I'm not sure, said Bianca.Primavera said, You're young enough to be ignorant, but you are not a fool like some I know. Of course your mother isn't a broad bean.They say you are an onion, said Bianca, snuggling toward Primavera's lap.That only refers to my distinctive and refres.h.i.+ng odor. Now, listen to me. When your mother died, she died. Maybe the saints came and put her in a sack and took her to visit with Saint Peter. Or maybe the worms broke their Lenten fast to chew on her delicious lips. n.o.body knows, but what's done is done, and your job is to be clever and not to listen to nonsense. Do you understand me?How do I know what is nonsense and what isn't?If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper up in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.She made a supper out of peppers and broad beans, ill.u.s.trating her point obscurely. Bianca ate heartily though she wasn't sure she understood the lesson.She would ask her father, though, when he returned.When Don Vicente arrived home a few days later, some latest necessary negotiation with the Papal legates having broken off unsatisfactorily, Bianca greeted him with the question. ButPapa, isMamma an angel or is she a broad bean?For once Vicente was in no mood. Who puts a notion like that in your mind?He fired the corrupt old matron, but Primavera refused to leave the kitchen. It would take me half a day to walk to the village, and you'd just have to send for me again when you changed your mind, and my hips aren't what they were.They never were anything much like hips, sniffed Fra Ludovico in pa.s.sing. But Primavera's point carried the argument, and Vicente relented.IsMamma dead? Is she really dead? Or is she an angel, or a bean, or something else?I'm surrounded by simpletons, said Vicente.But he remembered his daughter's birth-in a nook in a tavern on the road from Rome, when Maria Ines's water broke without warning. The baby came twisted and ought to have died, but the mother died instead. For a payment of florins her corpse was allowed to share a churchyard grave with a local merchant who conveniently had died the same day. (The merchant had been a widower and his dead wife wouldn't know he was buried with another woman until purgatory, when everything was too late to change anyway.)Whether Vicente began at once to love Bianca in place of her dead mother or whether he had to learn not to despise her for causing his wife to bleed to death, Bianca lived a lifetime without finding out. Fra Ludovico was wrong: Truth is as evanescent as lies, and dissolves in time. But as a father will, Vicente had taken Bianca in his arms, and he continued on the road through Spadina toward Spoleto.Except for that which pertained to the confusing and contradictory legend of her birth, Bianca de Nevada had been told little about Maria Ines de Castedo y Nevada. The flattering characteristics that memorialize the person who dies too young aren't altogether convincing. Maria Ines had been a saint, an angel, a paragon. But Bianca had to wonder. Had her mother never thrown a stone at a cat, or peed in the vegetable garden, or stuck out her tongue at the Archbishop of Pamplona? On these matters neither Primavera nor Fra Ludovico would comment.So Bianca came to consider her mother something like the stark unsmiling icon of the Virgin that Fra Ludovico kept propped up on a shelf in his cell. In the severe older style, unpopular these days, the piece showed judging black eyes, lips pursed as if reserving a mother's kiss for someone more worthy than Bianca.Papa?said Bianca, the question mark carried in the set of her small shoulders. Where isMamma now?He couldn't answer her inquiry. He held her instead and walked to the steeper side of the mount, where the wind raced up the east face of the slope with such speed that it could carry a piglet from a barnyard below and brain it against one of Montefiore's protruding roof beams.Vicente regarded his Bianca. Of her beauty there was no doubt, and no description would serve. But the name was correct.Bianca, a name referring to the polished whiteness of her skin, almost a marble from the Carrara region; andde Nevada, the father's family name, betraying his own humble status in the outlands of Aragon, but pertinent here:of the snowy slopes.And Bianca saw her father too, his wavy chestnut hair standing almost straight up in the wind. She couldn't see her mother in him, but she could see something that she guessed he might have learned from poor dead Maria Ines: a habit of love. So maybe growling Fra Ludovico was right about the contagious quality of blessings in human affairs.Don't leave, don't followCAN'T Igo with you? I'll be still and say my prayers.Her exposure to other girls limited, Bianca nonetheless had learned to sulk prettily enough. It didn't work, though. Her father wouldn't let her off the property. She could go no farther than the orchards and the higher of the hay meadows. Only as far as the bridge, and onto it, but not across it.The weather is terrible, he said, and s.h.i.+vered, though it was high summer and the goats sat panting in the shadows, too tired to bleat. Beyond the bridge a dreadful snow falls. My beard crusts over and in minutes my cloak is stiff as a cuira.s.s. I can't turn at the waist. If you were walking behind me and you fell and called my name, I wouldn't hear you: plugs of ice form in my ears.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. Papa,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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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. Youdisobeyed 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x, I'll do it with the help of a carrot and a soft loaf of bread folded in two.I know about s.e.x, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.e.x between wh.o.r.es and morons, said Primavera.Only a moron would have s.e.x with a wh.o.r.e, 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.n.o.body 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. Papa, 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 b.u.t.ter. The windows that had gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 thievesis 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 s.h.i.+t and gold and blood and the juice of wh.o.r.es. We scrub and arrange what pa.s.ses 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 l.u.s.ty 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 anI 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 p.i.s.sing 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 sisterIN THEshadows, I watched Don Vicente de Nevada hand his daughter to the housemistress and begin to shout orders. Some a.s.sociate was on the road, following along behind with an entourage that included a n.o.blewoman. They were making their way up the slopes at a slower pace, but would arrive in an hour or so.If the bedding was rank with disuse, it must be aired at once. Mulberry twigs scattered under the bedsteads, to draw the fleas from the mattresses. Flowers gathered for the tables, floors swept, pastries prepared, wine decanted. Everyone at Montefiore must come directly to receive instructions. Is there asparagus in the ground, or has it gone by?They ran to their work, as humans will, with vigorous shortsightedness. As if the presence of a fresh pastry can change how the world works. As if flowers might interrupt the flow of slow ire, or a better bottle of wine halt in its path the progress of verdigris upon a bronze statue of a horse and rider in some town square.But I sat in the shrubs, biding my time and chewing the haunch of some boar that had crossed my path. I enjoy the spasmodic tics of human endeavor, the aimless urgency, the pride of it. Thesuperbia . Hurrying feet, muttered curses, cross remarks sent winging about the estate. The child fled to keep out of the way, and hunched on the bottom step of the outer staircase, hugging her knees to herself.I could make out the very lashes on her inky eyes, you see, I could smell her very purity.Vicente was tersely chiding a maid about the unsavory state his better attire seemed to be in. From the kitchen, Primavera's voice rang with impatience. Fra Ludovico kept himself safely out of the way, polis.h.i.+ng the ornamental candlesticks to be used at Ma.s.s. So Bianca happened to be alone when the entourage rounded the last steep curve in the road and drew abreast along the stone wall that sh.o.r.ed up the gardens hanging above. The urchin stood there with her chin dropped, studying the roof of the palanquin, until the mounted soldier said, Run and tell the lord of the house we have arrived.Who is it? said Bianca, a reasonable enough question, as the man was only one, andwe implied a pair at least.The Duc de Valentinois and his sister.A pale hand appeared in a seam of velvet drapes, as if considering whether or not to open them to the light. My eye fell on the jewel, an irregularly faceted ruby of uncertain clarity but with striking purple depths.Oh, said Bianca, a friend to play with.Then the hand disappeared-perhaps the sister had caught a glimpse of Bianca, or had realized that a voice so youthful wasn't worth the effort of attending. The brother apparently knew his sister well and waved the bearers on. Sweating and grunting, the attendants pressed forward until the equipage had been lifted up the last rise to the villa's front door, and set down on a length of tapestry laid out for the purpose.De Nevada. You rascal, we're here, shouted the man. You'll leave us languis.h.i.+ng like a fishmonger and his prize salmon out here?The attendants stood back. As Vicente rushed out, in a robe of charcoal blue, the curtains in the palanquin parted and the sister emerged, blinking as if she'd just woken from a sleep.Bianca moved forward from the shadows to see.I am a girl who did no wrongI am a girl who did no wrong.I walked this side of Gesu when I could.I kept an angel in my ap.r.o.n pocket.I do not think it did me any good.CesareTHE MANwas a young brute, one of those handsome men who knock mountains to one side in order to clear the view. Primavera was both smitten and on her guard. She saw how his feet gripped the ground as he dismounted, as if his boots were filled with bronze feet, as if he were in the act of being cast already as his own statue. His dark eyes were tigers, prowling to strike at threats.Vicente, he said, a basin of water for the face, a basin of wine. There are plans to arrange tonight, and little enough time.That man has a storm of beauty in his face, said Primavera, backstairs. He looks as if he could easily wrestle any squid out of the water.He is a monster sinner, said Fra Ludovico, fussing at his vestments. Don't you know who it is? It's Cesare Borgia, the son of the Spanish Pope. To plot a vendetta, no doubt, to lay waste to more of our homeland. Is he requisitioning troops again?His campaigns cost me the lives of both my sons, said Prima-vera. They were fools to allow themselves to be conscripted, but they were my fools. I hope Don Vicente is cannier than they were, rest their souls.He's a guest of our master, said Fra Ludovico. Don't get any ideas about dis.h.i.+ng up vengeance or anything foolish like that, or we'll all be slaughtered in our beds before morning.I like a man who wears his implement so prominently, said one of the maids. It makes my work easier. She rubbed her bosom as if polis.h.i.+ng a k.n.o.b of furniture.I like a man who needs forgiveness so obviously, said Fra Ludovico primly. It makes my work clearer.He's a young one, to have taken so many lives in war, said Primavera. Lives of his soldiers, lives of his enemies. Now, what cruel nonsense does his handsome head plot with our good master? Bianca, take this salver of cheese and fruit upstairs. Bianca! Where is the child?LucreziaINEEDEDthe air, I needed freshness on my skin. I needed to see what was to be seen. I didn't wait for the hand of my brother to prompt me from the carriage. I, the daughter of a pope, I, who had been thegovernatrice of Spoleto at the age of nineteen, I never waited for prompting.Vicente. The comfort of reacquaintance. I used our common Iberian tongue, toying with his Christian name as a courtesan teases a drunken courtier, with malice and pleasure at once. Vicente, before you are seduced into intrigues of state by my brother, be so good as to favor me with your welcome.I awaited a kiss but accepted his hand. It's best to acquiesce to custom, at least when one is in the country. Avoiding his eyes, I trained my attention on the child instead, feigning an interest I didn't possess.Who are you, who looks on a Borgia with impunity? I said, though the child had hidden her eyes behind her father's legs. I could examine Vicente's form while pretending to play find-the-child. A tiresome pretense, but even a young Borgia had to observe some proprieties, as scurrilous spies are always lurking about to report on our deeds and misdeeds.Bianca, murmured her father, surely you remember my Bianca?I haven't taken her measure before, I answered. She was a s.h.i.+t-smeared froglet the last time I was by. Why, she's turning into a person.They do, you know, said Vicente.Let me see thecherubina, then, I said. Come to Lucrezia, child.The child was wary. She didn't obey me until her father nudged her forward.And we looked at each other, that girl and I. She out of childish curiosity and caution, I out of the need to have something to talk to her father about. I had no native interest in this child. I attest to that now. I would have been happy never to see her again. She was no more than a saucer of spoiled milk to me.Though she had her beauty, I'll grant you that. She curved, rushlike, against her father's well-turned calf. She had the face of a new blossom, a freshness and paleness one could imagine some sorcerer growing in a moonlit garden. Her hair was pinned up in a womanly fas.h.i.+on, despite her youth, and its blackness, under a net of simple unornamented cord, had a steepness to it, a depth. Odd how such things strike one. Her eyes were hidden from me; she wouldn't look up. Her skin was white as snow.I am a woman who slept with my father the PopeI am a woman who slept with my father the Pope.They say I did, at least, and so does he.And who am I to make of the Pope a liar,And who is he to make a liar of me?What I saw thenSOME OFus are born many times. Some are born only once. Primavera says that some are born dead and live their whole lives without knowing it.I can't say much about earlier childhood memories. One knows things with a complicated and unreliable conviction. The sky-blue sky is as blue as the sky. White beans in a brown pot are more delicious than milk. The purr of cats and the claws of cats are not the same thing. One can't remember how one learned to breathe, at least the first time.But then one is born anew, usually at the moment that the breath begins again after it has been held.I released the air of my lungs, and breathed again, and looked at my father's visitor. And I remember her with a vividness that strikes me, to this day, as preternatural. But surely this is true of all children?-that one day they come upon an awareness of themselves, of their own knowing, and in that moment they shuck their animal natures off and begin to h.o.a.rd the treasury of knowledge that will make them capable of grief and remorse as well as pity and love?In looking at Lucrezia Borgia, I was aware of myself looking: I was aware of myself. I was a dark twist of child hiding behind my father, and she was a coil of effervescent flame in the reception yard before the safehold of Montefiore.She peered at me (I know to say this now) with the eyes of a child. For all her grandeur and hauteur she wasn't as grown up as she thought. She had other things on her mind, and she wasn't good at disguising her boredom. So I had an uninterrupted access to her, and saw the woman called the flower of her time, the Roman lily.Lucrezia bit her lower lip, pretending to play with me, though I knew she was playing at something else. She tucked her small chin into her embroidered collar, then c.o.c.ked her head and looked at me slantwise. She was displaying all her best angles-to her brother, to my father, to slack-jawed Fra Ludovico in the background for all I knew. She had the smooth forehead of a pale squash, and her hair spilled out of her bindings with liberty and energy. It was as yellow and crimped as dried tendrils of runner bean at the end of season. She loved herself, that much was sure. I didn't have a vocabulary for beauty at the time. But she was bewitching: and I knew it right then, that moment too. In knowing that much, I began to grow up.I am a rock whose hands have appet.i.tesI am a rock whose hands have appet.i.tes.I am a rock whose appet.i.tes have hands.I am a thing unresolved into courteous shapeliness.I am a creature excluded from limbo and h.e.l.l,A thing of which heaven prefers to stay well unaware.Neither pet, nor beast of the fields, or beast of the woods,Nor idiot kept, more or less, in the warmth of the hearthFor the sometime amus.e.m.e.nt of humans and sarcastic angels.Nothing exists but it rests on me, at the start,At the end; but I keep to myself, as no one will have me.A moment agoI watch the affairs of men from the penumbral sanctuary.It is 1502. Vicente, the widower, tries to keep a low profile in his aerie. Lucrezia Borgia, with her hair newly dyed, is on her way from Rome to Ferrara. At twenty-one she is married for the third time, to Alfonso D'Este. Her father, wicked Pope Alexander VI, has only a year to live. Machiavelli won't publishThe Prince for a decade yet, but he is busy scrutinizing the life and pursuits of that splendid soldier, Lucrezia's brother, Cesare Borgia. The discovery of Espanola by some adventurer put out from the court of Their Catholic Majesties, Isabella and Ferdinand, means that the whole planet goes into a fierce wobble: tides sweep up into the front doors of St. Mark's in Venice, earthquakes rock the Levant, pyramids are lost again in sandstorms, as every chin in Europe turns away from Byzantium and toward Lisboa and Castile. The East is about to sink into the dust of mystery-again-as the light of reason blinds the west. The world is coming to its senses, as if awakening out of a deep sleep, says Erasmus. And Bianca de Nevada, seven years old, aware of none of it, equally unaware of me, watches and listens to the people standing on the gra.s.s before her.A stroll in the countryTRUNKS, PROVISIONS,caskets were unloaded, and Don Vicente kept trying to urge the guests in the door, but Cesare was too jittery to be housed, and he walked up and down in the forecourt, talking his political predictions aloud.It's been a few years now since that viper, Savonarola, was put to death, and Florence regains her strength and vanity by the minute. He burned the vanities, but he couldn't burn out the high regard Florentines have for themselves. And for that he was immolated. What a pure, savage end for him.Don Vicente, who had known something of roasting ofconversos by Torquemada in Spain, flinched at the flippancy. But he stood like a Roman legionnaire, his fine shoulders thrown back. We can discuss things over a libation, he said soothingly. Welcome, my lord. His grip on Cesare's forearm strengthened-in this case the handshake betraying its Roman origins: to a.s.sess whether a man might have a knife hidden beneath the sleeve of his tunic.There are strategies to consider, said Cesare, confirming Vicente's worries, but the famous sister yawned ostentatiously and pulled at her brother's tunic.Later for all that, later, she said. I've spent a good part of these hours behind curtained views. We've been on the road from Rome three days already. I need to stretch and to see something. Don Vicente, let me ask for your arm. I'm faint as a dowager who has taken Madeira at noon. She looked about as faint as a lightning bolt. Conduct a tour for me; show me some rural interest. Take me for a stroll. Show me something, anything. The views. The geese. Yes, show me the geese.I can loan you the arm of Fra Ludovico, said Vicente. Fra Ludovico looked terrified and began to busy himself with his sleeves.My father is the Pope of the universal Church, said Lucrezia. I have more spiritual companions.h.i.+p than I can bear. Leave Fra Ludovico to his hours. My brother can spare you for a while, Don Vicente. I insist, Cesare, I will have my exercise.Very well; I'll stay and pose questions of state to the de Nevada daughter, said Cesare, pointing at Bianca and making her nervous.

Vicente had no choice but to be courteous. A stroll, then, he said to la Borgia, and to his daughter, but you, come with me. The Duc de Valentinois has no interest in talking to an infant. He is only being kind.Bianca fled to her father's side. Oh, we are to be a walking nursery? said Lucrezia. Very well then. I ought to have brought my own babe, Rodrigo. He is four. Beware the cliff edge, my babe; a childish foot can make a misstep and the rocks below-you see them?-look sharp and unwelcoming.Bianca ran ahead of her father and the n.o.blewoman. She was glad to be out of harm's way, since harm seemed coiled in the military man left behind in the courtyard of Montefiore.The path, this side of the bluff, sloped down in a gentle zigzag to some outbuildings: a croft, a lean-to for the shepherds; the diminished Lago Verde beside a vigorous and well-pruned olive orchard. The walls were littered with the leavings of goats, who liked to leap over any obstacle. And below, the bridge that Bianca was forbidden to cross.Though she was prohibited from the world beyond the farm, she loved to hear the noise of village life sc.r.a.ping beyond her confines. As she fell asleep, on nights when the wind was still, she could sometimes hear tenants singing, joking, building their cooking fires and banking their sleeping fires, leaping up at threats real or imagined. They were safety to her, the vinemaster, the gooseboy, the shepherd, the ostler, the hunter, the smith, the girls who did floor was.h.i.+ng and laundry, and the lads who organized the haying and cured the hams and pressed the olives and then cleaned the stones and pressed the grapes when they were ripe. Life on a farm was a universe in itself, but, since the cows had long since been moved out of the bier in the ground floor of Montefiore, Bianca felt she had only a distant relations.h.i.+p with thecontadini who came and went to work, and who thrived on the farm's yield.The news from Rome, said Vicente after a time, to avert attention from the expressive pressure of la Borgia's arm upon his.Oh, Rome, said Lucrezia, my brother will call it a circus of toadies, my father a nest of vipers. To a n.o.blewoman it's all private chambers. We women work by gossip and innuendo. A man is a c.o.c.k in armor, a ridiculous proposition; a woman is a hen in veils. Less vivid to see but no less ridiculous to consider. But indulge my appet.i.te for a view, Don Vicente. That long line of hills there-is that Cortona?Nothing like Cortona, said Vicente. Nowhere near it.Understanding how the land chooses to spread itself about isn't my strength. What I long for is the sea. Can we glimpse it from here?We can't. We're as inland as we can be, between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas.Above a crumbling bank by the side of the path Lucrezia found an old stone sill that had been set upon an ancient protruding root. It would make a good seat. She tried to lever herself up, but her gown kept catching on the fringe of smaller exposed roots. She pouted meaningfully, and Vicente, who didn't care to touch her, obligingly came forward. He gripped her by the waist as if she were hardly lighter than his daughter, and he set her down. His hands stayed on her waist to secure her there.I can see everything, said his guest. Goats and geese, hills and meadows, vines and laborers, the gooseboy and the gamekeeper. It does my heart good. She sighed, and Vicente, who found her canny and alarming, relaxed a little. Though so often after an effect-and who wasn't?-she had a reservoir of genuine feeling, it seemed.Cesare would give you the news from Rome in one manner, she said, continuing the conversation from before, and I another. You know his motto-Aut Caesar, aut nihil-either Caesar or nothing. Well, I tire of it. He has his game to run, and I mine. The old pepper can't keep on forever, you know, and when he goes, the fight to succeed him will be intense.Vicente raised an eyebrow.My father, she said curtly. My dear father. The most roundly defamed Bishop of Rome in the history of our holy Church. You know what lies the Orsini spread about him? Theinfessura.It's no secret that people credit the so-calledinfans Roma.n.u.s as being the fruit of a monstrous union between my father and me. And the august Bishop of Rome allows such nonsense to circulate. He believes it unnerves his enemies to think him capable of such wickedness. He doesn't think of the cost to my reputation.I can have no opinion about such matters; I'm a country farmer-The things they report. Simony and nepotism the least of it. They whisper about wh.o.r.es taken on the floors of the ducal apartments. Wh.o.r.es stripped of their clothes and required to pick up chestnuts with their nether lips, while bishops make ready the available crozier for penetration.My child is present, said Vicente desperately. She is a young girl, and even more innocent than most.Lucrezia breathed in and out in sudden anger, and muttered, almost under her breath, They weren't chestnuts, anyway, they were jewels. But it wasn't clear to Vicente whether she was jesting or not.The truth, she went on, the truth, dear sir, is that I'm a young woman, and these times frighten me. Do you remember a few years back, when a monster was dug up from the mud of the banks of the Tiber? It was huge and deformed; it had the head of a woman and its behind was bearded. The peasants of Rome went mad for fear that G.o.d was signaling the end of civilization. At the close of the third set of five hundred years since Gesu's birth. But I think civilization isn't ending, just changing. And the power to change it belongs in the hands of the mighty.She held out her hand, a pretty delicate thing, pale as pounded leather.I don't know why you are speaking to me of this, said Vicente.I like to speak in the language of my father, she said simply. Cesare prefers the Italian tongue as spoken in Rome, and I hear more of sacred Latin than my ears can bear. At home we sang to ourselves as we spoke, in that tone of Spanish that evokes blood oranges and tenor lutes. You give me a greater pleasure than you realize. You provide for me a comprehending ear for this secret familiar tongue we share.Vicente nodded, indicating he saw it as a duty and an honor both.After a long pause, she said, He will not be the lord of all Italy if he does not concentrate his attentions. He must dismiss the distractions from his mind. You will have to help him in that. It is what I ask on his behalf, before he asks it.I am happy to provide the succor of my home for a rest and a respite, a distraction from the campaigns, he said.She studied the workings of the farm before her. How are the geese? she asked. I trust the boy saves them from the foxes in the hills?The boy does well enough, said Vicente. A goose does not ask much of life, after all.No, she admitted. Those who ask much are more likely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose.Well, the boy is good to them, said Vicente softly.There's merit in that, I suppose, she replied.Under the twists of thornbankwhere I took my rest, I heard them speak. The coquettish wife and the widower. I heard them go on, about the puling exercises of the Holy Father, the gonfalonier of Florence, the vengeful evicted Medici, the breakaway state of Pisa, the interest of Spain and France in the Kingdom of Naples, the security of Venice, Il Moro of Milan. They talked in large concentric circles, as if any of it mattered: as if Cesare Borgia, Duc de Valentinois, has the power to sink roots in Romagna. Like other mortals, he'll die before Romagna knows he has been born.I was more interested in the beast pulled from the mud of the Tiber. How had the Tiber conspired to lose her grip on one of its own sinews? What keeps a river in its banks but the spirits of the drowned, the t.i.tans and Nereids, whose time has pa.s.sed, and who in shame and righteous humility cover themselves with their watery blanket?What did it say about the movement of time, about what was about to happen, that I could understand the hummingbird spin of human voices?I might have gone back to my brothers then and there. But I let them stay where they were, and waited to learn what next I could learn. I followed the distinguished woman and the hilltop farmer when they left the spectacle of geese and pond and millworks. I emerged, more a shadow of a rock than a rock itself, and accompanied them unawares. I was there when Donna Borgia saw the looking gla.s.s for the first time.The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction. Or height. Like a dwarf, for instance. Or a young child.What lies in the mirrorTHIS ISa lovely looking gla.s.s, I said to Don Vicente. It's only as lovely as what it reflects, he answered, though his courtliness was studied and heavy.With more care to amuse, he continued, We found it in a shallow end of the lake you pa.s.s on your way up the hill. How it got there is a mystery, but it can't have been there long; there is nothing warped or rotted about it.Clearly it must be a mirror from the workshop of the devil, I said. Does it have a message for us?Fra Ludovico won't even come in this room, said Don Vicente. He is even more superst.i.tious than his old crony and foe, the cook.Looking gla.s.s, what do you see? I murmured. My neck was as white as the swans of Castelfiore and I breathed deeply, to cause the exposed area of my clavicle to lift and promote my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Do you see the corrupted heart of a sinner or the soul of a saint in the making?I suppose it only sees what you show it, said Don Vicente.Shall I show it more?He didn't look at me. He looked in the mirror instead. Who is the fairest of all? he whispered. Did he mean to compare the pair of us, the Lucrezia who stood in the mirror and the Lucrezia who stood before it? A mirrored image has no cologne to seduce; is purer for that. While I had dabbed myself with attar of Persian roses.He drew in his breath, and I knew that the work I had managed poorly in the farmyard was conducted better before a looking gla.s.s.My sister, said Cesare at the door, in admiration. Will you never learn to govern your clothing?Prince Dschem's secretSUPPER WASput out by Primavera and her helpers, and the better of the wine casks tapped, and tapers lit. Fra Ludovico was requested first to pray and then to sing, and then to shut up and go away.At length, Primavera and the staff were excused too. When they tarried in the antechamber giggling and picking over sc.r.a.ps, Cesare took it upon himself to yell them down the stairs. He waited until he heard the door slam shut. Go bolt it, he said to his host. When that was done, Cesare refilled his goblet with wine and said, We're here on a mission. Let my sister explain the matter while I dine. Then I'll make a proposal.Lucrezia made a face and pretended to yawn, though Vicente could see she was crucially involved. Do I talk, dear brother, about the peninsular wars? About your ambitions for a duchy in Italy? About what you've done right, and what you've failed to manage yet?Don't fiddle with me. You know your task. Talk about the Turk, Lucrezia.I will offer succor, thought Vicente. This is my table, my food, my wine. This is what is wanted, the distraction. I'll listen as a host ought.La Borgia took a sip of her watered wine. I don't know what you follow of the workings of the world, she said to Vicente. You're a farmer; you're occupied with your ownpatria, your house of Montefiore. How much do you notice of thecondottieri that pa.s.s within your sight? You're no fool, and the view from Montefiore is generous. But your concerns are of the farm, not of the state.That's true enough, he said, a farm is all I can manage.It takes a strong man to deal with the scheming Sforzas of Milan, the Medici struggling for Florence, the Doge of the Serene Republic of Venice, the Orsini and the Colonna and the d'Este clans, to say nothing of us blameless Borgias. She laughed; she liked the game of chess as played by princ.i.p.alities. While you've been breeding your pigs and clearing your land, we've struggled with the ambitious French King as he headed to annex the Kingdom of Naples. Oh, Don Vicente, the alliances s.h.i.+ft by the week. The murders are epidemic. Mercy, the men who are declared dead before they have been diagnosed with illness! The reputations we lose between lunch and dinner.How attractive to see a woman pursue ladylike pleasures, said Cesare over a hank of pork. Get to the Turk.We're a practical family when we're in public, said Lucrezia. We're known for our sensible alliances and our deft way with poison. Is it a reputation we don't deserve? No one takes the time to refute it. Gossip serves its own purposes.Beyond our sh.o.r.es on many sides live the Moor, as you may know. And the Caliphs to the east are the wisest and shrewdest among them. There is a king, the son of Mahomet II, named Bayezid. Do you know of him?Vicente shook his head. Lucrezia was correct in her a.s.sessment of his concerns. After his evacuation from Spain and his wanderings, his had learned to be a local heart.When Mahomet II died, Bayezid succeeded to the throne. Bayezid had a younger brother named Dschem, who even as a lad without whiskers cut a fine figure. Prince Dschem possessed his own appet.i.te for power. He objected to his brother's rule and was duly crushed, but he escaped to Rhodes. There, the canny Governor-Knight handed him over to my father's predecessor in the Holy See, and when my father was elevated to the Papacy he took charge of the Prince.As a prisoner of war? asked Vicente.As a prominent houseguest who was too amusing to be allowed to return home, interpolated Cesare.The Sultan Bayezid wanted his brother barred from Constantinople, said Lucrezia. Sensibly enough. If the brother remained in Rome as a hostage of sorts, the Sultan could be expected to postpone mounting an attack against the West-after all, his brother might be endangered. And the Sultan even sent Innocent II the spear of the centur