A Bed of Earth

by Tanith Lee

  “Don’t be frightened,” he said, gravely now. “I didn’t want that, not with you.”

  Then he reached out and took her hand and held it a moment, before gently letting it go.

  “You may be touched then,” she said. “How did you know what I thought?”

  “I didn’t know. I don’t read your thoughts, Beatrixa. I’m not God.”

  “Do you credit God?”

  “Yes. I credit God. Though what He is I have no idea. To answer your question, on my wanderings … I’ve never met Him.”

  She regarded her hand. It tingled still from the crushing Dario had given it. Nothing else.

  Beatrixa knew that, though she had touched Silvio, and though he had felt solid, and alive, tangible, he had not felt like anything she had ever known. Not of flesh, certainly not of that. But not either of any other material—stone, silk, leather, wood, glass—not even like an animal’s skin, the flesh of his firm and well-made hand. Not even water—or air. What then—what? Not even … earth.

  “Are you dead?” she said to him.

  “Do I seem dead?”

  “You are of the spirit. I don’t know what you seem.” “Let me tell you, then, how you seem to me,” he said.

  She sat in the boat, waiting again. At last she asked, “What do I seem like to you, my lord?”

  “Like music,” he said. “You seem like music played low and sweetly and well, in the first dusk, when the stars come out.”

  Something moved inside her, pain, that was not pain.

  She thought, I do not know what manner of being he is. I’ve never believed properly in devils, though I think there may be a Hell. In Heaven I believe, and in the spirit. Is he from Heaven?

  There was a slight tremble against the boat and she looked up.

  They had reached an island. The island the others had talked about?

  Silvio stood, and stepped off on to the landing-place. He stretched out his hand to her, and she was afraid to touch it again, but she took it. And he seemed to lift her up through the night, without any strain to her arm, and set her down on the island.

  But still she did not know what it felt like, to touch, to be touched by, Silvio.

  “They said this was an evil spot,” she said.

  “It was, but it was happy once, too.”

  “Why have you brought me here?” she said.

  “So you could feel terra firma under your feet for a moment,” he said.

  She nodded. She said, “But Venus is all built on water.”

  “And the seas,” he said, “flow over other lands, far below. Earth is always at the bottom of it all.”

  There was the vague bulk of a house above. He did not take her there. They walked aside into a wild orchard of budding pomegranates. In the mythology of the Greeks, the pomegranate was the fruit of the dead.

  An old bench leaned among the trees. They sat here, a little apart. She thought, Who has sat here before us? Are they gone … so quickly gone, like poor Jacmo who died today … and are they then … like Silvio?

  For a while she did not say anything. The lagoon sipped at the shore. Across the stretch of it was a dimness like a cloud, all that could be seen of the fierce torches and the lights of Venus.

  “What shall we do now?” she said.

  “This is very like that first time we spoke. Why must we do anything?”

  She turned and looked at him. He appeared precisely like a young man, so cruelly handsome, so fine, so alive.

  “What do you want?” she said again. Her heart drummed in her throat.

  “What I have,” he said, as before. “And one thing else.”

  In fear, she looked away. Then, arrogantly, she looked back. “Which is?”

  “Not yet. I don’t mean to tell you yet.”

  “It’s so terrible?”

  “In part. And so much mine for the having.”

  She stood up, and walked off through the gnarled nets of the trees, and then of course he was simply standing in her path, and he said, “M’donna, you must return to your City.”

  Then the boat came to that end of the orchard on its own, and where the wall was broken now, they went through, and she thought, what would it have mattered anyway to him, if the wall, had been taller than a house and made of iron?

  I shall be damned for this. To converse with a thing not mortal and not divine.

  Then, in the magic boat, close to Silvio della Scorpia, whom already, for she had never been a fool, nor timid, she knew that she loved, Beatrixa fell asleep.

  A spell. Or only her exhaustion.

  When she woke, she found the boat had come to rest against a shadowy quay. This was a side canal off Fulvia. She was alone.

  Between walls, she could see the torches that lit the great front of the Primo, and the dome aloft like the full moon. A bell began—how late, how late—it was the Prima Vigile they rang, first watch of morning.

  Nor was anyone about nearby.

  She got ashore awkwardly in her heavy skirt. Bewildered, as other girls had become that night, she instinctively strayed toward shelter. To the palaces by the Blessed Maria Canal, where her house had arranged to sleep that night.

  Beatrixa … felt herself now also to be a ghost. Though she passed among groups of late revellers, no one seemed to notice her. When she reached the gateway of the guest palace, she came against the guardsmen in a group, and when they saw her, they started, as if she had suddenly appeared from thin air.

  “M’donna—did you go out? You never did. Have you come from the Rivoalto … no, you never went there—”

  “No, no,” she said, “I was here all this while. I came out of that door over there. I’m just taking the air in the court.”

  The oddest dialogue. Which, as the night wheeled on towards dawn, was reinforced by a most curious aberration.

  It seemed her father had sent word she should not go to the evening feast on the Ducem’s island. Andrea had taken over only two of his sons, and his wife. After the fighting earlier, which had spread from the Barbaron bivouac all the way to the temporary accommodation of the della Scorpias, a number of other houses had kept their womenfolk indoors. Della Scorpia had, it seemed, avoided the Ducem’s feast entirely. Once the fracas had moved from servants to masters, and their guards, both of the warring families had sustained losses.

  If Borja was put out by gaps at the dinner tables, no one could say. But the Ducem decidedly was not best pleased—perhaps he had wished Venus to look united. (To add to his irritation, apparently, his flamingo had also escaped.)

  After the fray was curtailed, no Barbaron had thought to search for Beatrixa. Why should they? Only her maid knew where Andrea’s daughter had been when the trouble began. And the woman had not spoken, thinking her mistress had sensibly retreated indoors, as she, the maid, had advised her to. By the time the maid had determined that Beatrixa was nowhere in the palace—and her search had been belated and sketchy, besides—Lord Barbaron had gone over to the feast.

  “I was frantic, madam,” said the maid, who had been.

  “You were also too afraid you’d be blamed had you told anyone, let alone sent my father word. Where did you think I was?”

  “Well … M’donna … you know you go off sometimes … I thought—”

  “You are worthless to me,” said Beatrixa. Her face, which was no longer bruised, was instead like a stone. The maid shrank in horror. “If any violence had happened to me, which is what you suspected and were too cowardly to report, I might have died.”

  Beatrixa now found herself trembling. In this state, she did not trust herself with the woman. Nor did she want to reveal to anyone what had occurred. The opening so wide of the old wound of feud was already serious enough If her father were to hear that she had been abducted, not to mention the abductors’ plans—God knew, God knew. …

  But oh, she was so tired.

  “Get out. I won’t have you in my service. Send another of the girls to me.”

  “But lady … wh
at shall I do if you do this …?”

  “Be thankful I am alive to do anything. If I were not, it would be worse. Go to the stewardness. Tell her I will speak to her about you tomorrow.

  “Lady … no … I shall be thrown out in the alleys—”

  “It is what you deserve. But I won’t tell her that. I shall say you are very splendid, but that I am tired of your chatter. She’ll reprimand you and place you elsewhere in the house. Mend your ways. Never serve another of my family as you have dis-served me.”

  But I’m not fair. Thank God she did not speak.

  Later, before the mirror, Beatrixa remembered how Dario had struck her. And she could not find a bruise. Could it be he had not bruised her? Nor was her dress stained from the salty, splashing water—or from the blood of Jacomo, as she recalled. Had … his touch done this? What else had it done?

  Her white dog sat at her feet, watching her, uneasy. “All’s well,” she said, to reassure him. But it was not.

  She had imagined everything, or dreamed it. Where then had she been to? What had become of her? What would?

  EUNICHE

  The palazzo of the della Scorpias had been young three centuries ago. For the last hundred years it had taken on a look of age and sallow weathering, yet it remained defiant. Its Scorpion escutcheon was cut deeply into the facade, its banners were hung out. As with the newer palazzo of its enemy, Barbaron, a gallery ran around the middle story, but was framed by the horseshoe-shaped arches of the East. The columns of the ground floor had capitals of acanthus leaves. Beyond the great door, its vestibule contained the marble staircase mentioned previously, and the mural of a Caesar, these now dulled by some further years of existence.

  Yet people wear worse.

  Far inside the hive of the house, which was now once again in mourning, Euniche stood in a long room, overseeing, watching the antics of others. Her hands and lips were folded. She was still as a statue, and in the heartless spring sunshine, her shadow stretched black on the floor.

  Once, a generation before, Euniche had been the maid of Meralda della Scorpia. But Meralda had vanished from the scene in veils of sinister speculation. How then had Euniche, one of the foremost agents of Meralda’s downfall, clung on? More apposite, how had she arrived at this moment as a thin, stately woman past her fifty-second year, once wed, once widowed, and clad in a gown of thick brocade, with a gold chain over it, and small pearls in her ears?

  You might read it all in her face. Oh yes. Where Euniche had been harsh and uncomely at nineteen, now her unnerving mask was carved, like the stonework on the palazzo, with her own escutcheon.

  She had learned early, on Meralda, what she liked best—to get power over others. Euniche had even purely rejected the riches of bribery in order to have this. But in the end, through her wiles, her spying, her insidious and useful and trustless assistance to all her superiors in the house of the della Scorpias, she had come by the riches too. At first sorry for her—she was ugly and beneath them, but so willing to please, to fetch and carry, and subtly to flatter—they grew to rely on Euniche. For Meralda’s disappearance, they did not blame her. Euniche had rushed in good time to the ladies of the house, crying that her mistress was gone and could not be found, and although Meralda had acted so strangely just before, it had not been a maid’s place to question her behavior, till now. And Euniche was plainly ignorant, as were they all, of Meralda’s conniving nature, or her schemes. … Even when certain rumors of Lorenzo Vai surfaced, no stigma became attached to the upright and obviously distressed Euniche. She had misjudged Meralda’s character just as they, the great ones, had.

  Then Euniche was given a place with another daughter of the house, an older and more obedient one. And in this context Euniche learned, by her watchfulness and the use of her disgusting, slithering brain, so much—that soon she gained even more power, and also a jewel, and later some money.

  At length she was looked on as a chaperone of the house, dedicated to her charges and the family, a loyal retainer of some standing. And so in her thirtieth year she fastened on a man, a lesser steward, and by means of her prospects and her stash of coins, elbowed him into marrying her. It was a childless, loveless awful union, that ended after a while when her husband made off with death. Thereafter Euniche was a widow, and wore black like her shadow. Of all dark things, she truly was a reminder of night, or of the grave.

  Now there she stood, with her snake’s face.

  And all around, the angry misery of these high ones. They had lost a son of the Lord Como—not to a sword-cut, it seemed, but by drowning, and the body not recovered. And even in the lower caste, there was grief. Underlings had also died. A guardsman, and a personal servant of Como’s. And more.

  Avid for all such news, Euniche had looked so very sorry. She loved to be around the tears, listening, nodding with such sympathy. She had done everything she could. Lapping up their hurt like blood.

  “Euniche, will you go down to the courtyard, and find M’donna Caterina’s little passionaria? She laid it by and forgot, and no wonder.”

  This came from one of Como’s brother’s granddaughters, a haughty girl Euniche had her eye on, and so always liked to run errands for.

  “At once, lady.”

  Euniche descended by a back stair to the palazzo’s yard.

  The house crowded this area. The court was welllike, deep but not particularly large or airy, and overhung by an inner gallery above. Even so, an acacia tree, currently bare, grew in a plot at the yard’s center, supported in summer by terra-cotta vases of roses and spindly hollyhocks.

  Caterina’s little handbook of saints was on the bench. It was expensive, hand-painted and hand-written too, by the Priests of the Sorrow. And here it lay, carelessly forgotten.

  Euniche picked it up. She opened the passionaria at random, idly curious, yet as always instinctively on the lookout—spying now upon the saints.

  She could not read the Latin, of course.

  But there was the most startling picture painted there. Against a blue sky, a fiery angel dived earthward, its face enraged and snarling, its sunset wings spread wide, and in its hand a flaming sword.

  Above, over the courtyard, there came the sound of wings.

  Euniche lifted her head. She did not yet glance up. She knew that this sound was utterly inappropriate.

  Birds constantly flew by. Pigeons and sparrows, the ferocious soaring gulls from the lagoons. Those wings did not have this sound. These hissed and clattered—and then another shadow threw night into the court.

  Euniche looked up.

  She gave a thin whine, and the passionaria slipped from her hands.

  The angel dived. Straight out of the ether, out of the steely spring sun.

  It was redly pink, like coral, but the undersides of the vast wings were also sable, and the flaming sword had a jet-black tip.

  Euniche shrieked—but no noise left her.

  The angel fell directly upon her, she thought, and she felt the flames of its blush-black wings sear her face—and then it smashed with a lashing shatter of small branches into the acacia tree.

  Euniche crouched on the ground. She did not know what had happened. She felt her face; it was not burnt off. She fancied she had soiled herself …

  But it was not an angel. It was only a bird—a pink improbability of one.

  It hung there in the tree, the wings half folded, black one side, coral the other, its long neck like a serpent, and with a sword of a beak. Its eyes, though, were red, and stared down at her, soullessly, like pins.

  Then it propelled itself out of the cradle of ripped branches, and plummeted to the courtyard floor.

  Euniche got up. She stood with her arms held out as the bird held out its wings. Then it closed its wings. Its legs were long, lacquered stilts and, raised on them, it was very nearly Euniche’s own height.

  Euniche did not pray. Had she realized that she no longer had a right to? No, for she would pray often in the church, asking all sorts of blessings for
her masters.

  She began to back away, and the bird of flame began, like a dancer, to come towards her.

  This was very slow. It was measured—yes, a dance.

  Then she turned and ran, stumbling on her skirt, tearing it, leaving the pricey book, trying only to get back into the house. At the side entry under the gallery, she threw herself in and, turning, thrust shut the heavy door. It had almost reached her—a mass of flames and night—almost, but not quite.

  She lay against the door a moment. Then she scuttled off, down the passage.

  Outside, Ducem Nicolo’s flamingo rose ponderously up again and lit upon the railing of the internal gallery. There were windows all along the wall, the shutters of only one of which had been undone, to let in the sun and air. One, obviously, was enough. The flamingo stepped through.

  Dario, a member of Lord Como’s band of nephews, was walking glumly through his ancestral house.

  He and his friends, all save poor Grasotti, had had a lucky escape. And he had pondered if, after all, what had happened in the drowned church might have been an ill dream. But no, it was real.

  What then had that creature been, that seeming man, who rose out of the water and stood on it and was not wet, and sent them away with a power of fear only something unnatural and unhuman could wield?

  It seemed later to Dario that the being might have been some emanation of the della Scorpia clan itself (it wore their blazon). It had, then, risen to correct them in a fatal error. For what they had done in drink, grabbing old Barbaron’s daughter—and what they would have done, which, sober, did not bear thinking of—would have brought down God knew what disaster on the della Scorpia House—and principally therefore, on Dario.

  You could not fight even the most repulsive enemy with such weapons. Rape of a high-born woman was beneath a proper nobleman.

  As the headache of the wine faded, so Dario’s uneasiness grew more insistent. They had sworn not to speak of it, he and the others who got away. Grasotti, though, had gone down in the lagoon. They had said subsequently, he had been caught in the fighting by the canal, fallen into the water and, unable to swim more than a few strokes, sunk before they could reach him. Como had brought divers from Silvia to try to find the body. (The nephews had already attempted to, of course, hence the wreck of their clothes that night.)