A Bed of Earth

by Tanith Lee

  Grasotti, the fat one, had been only a bastard got on a girl of the house, but Como had recognized him. Como was honorable about that. He had been a child of Como’s old age, too, which probably made the old man feel it more.

  Meanwhile, there had been no word of Barbaron’s daughter having gone missing or suffered any insult. She, too, must have escaped the apparition, though one could only conjecture how. Then she had decided to say nothing. Who knew why? Perhaps she had liked Dario a little. And believed he had not meant what he had threatened—as, unarguably, if it had really come to it—he had not …

  Dario paused in his self-deceptions.

  He was in the passage that connected the sala to a generally neglected room. The passage was not well-lit, having no windows, but from the room itself a bright wedge of sunlight ran out of the half-open door.

  There was a sound in the room. What was it? A woman s gown, he thought, sweeping back and forth. The servant-girl Fiora maybe, opening the shutters to air the room’s fustiness.

  Well, nothing wrong in that. Why then did the sound seem so ominous? That, and the way a shadow abruptly blotted up the sun on the floor. …

  Dario had been going to that room. He sometimes met Fiora there. If they were quick, they could have some fun, squeezed in the great cupboard, with no one very likely to intrude.

  “Fiora?” asked Dario.

  Who else could it be?

  But it was not Fiora, for although she had opened the shutters, she had then been called to and detained in the attics by her duties.

  “Come now, what are you at, girl?”

  Something scraped the door open wide, and now it sounded like a sword.

  Dario backed away. He cursed himself and stood his ground. What a ninny he had become, since that night in the church.

  No one heard his shout of terror. The walls of the ancient palace were dense.

  Dario fled down the passage, through the sala, through an annexe and another corridor, and all the while the thing ran after him, holding out its wings as far as the space would allow, its neck stretched forward. He knew it was a bird. He knew that much. But though he had seen it, at the Ducem’s dinner, picking about around a fountain—he had forgotten, and now anyway, it was not the same. Dario knew it was too large for any bird. And surely neither was it merely animal, but some terrible, feathered golem invested by a sorcerer s will.

  The flamingo chased him to a flight of stairs. Running down them, he lost his footing. He was not badly hurt, but he had banged his head and felt dizzy. Trying to regain his feet, he saw the bird was gone.

  Then, Dario began to think that he was under a bane, or had been driven mad.

  Euniche’s own room—such was her standing, she had had one to herself since just before her marriage—was also in the attics. She went to it, as soon as she had collected herself a little. This was necessary. She needed to change her soiled private garments, her shift and curtella.

  Coming up through the house, she met some of the ladies, and had the sense as usual to behave fawningly. She also met Donna Caterina, who stared at her coldly but seemed not to recall the mislaid passionaria, nor that Euniche had been told to fetch it.

  I must say I was taken faint, Euniche thought.

  Already, her devious, practiced mind was working on the problem. Should she tell one of the men to go out and chase off the bird, or even capture it? By now it might have flown away. That would be better. Not to tangle herself up with its peculiarity. She had found this was always the best course, to avoid much overt participation in anything other than virtuous service.

  Dario could have warned Euniche that a sorcerous will that directs a golem does not hesitate in pursuit of what it wants. Does not, for example, let the golem fly off.

  Like a ray of rosy sun, dawn or sunfall, the flamingo picked its way through the house.

  Conceivably the Eel had been supernatural, if the story of its length and vigor were true. (And there had been many witnesses.) The flamingo was a fleshly reality. It did not therefore pass through walls, vanish, and reassemble. But, as Dario had partially fathomed, it had been possessed, and was moved by, an intelligence not its own.

  So it followed a route upward through the Palazzo della Scorpia and, now and then, when people approached along a corridor or from a doorway, it drew back into concealment.

  If any sensed its presence, that was another thing. Some did, and flinched aside, hurrying on nervously into other areas of the house. Or some stood, looking about, half seeing it—a bleached carmine shadow among shadows that were brown or black. Or hearing a rustle of dust lost among other lesser noises; a stirring like a creeper, a woman s dress … feathers scraped softly on a wall. Once, the fieriness of a pink chrysolite passing over her vision, a girl with two or three gowns in her arms for sewing, had turned, startled. For what had she glimpsed? Nothing was there, only the sunbeams and the shed powders of the house, flickering against the plaster, a maroon curtain which hung straight down from its rod.

  For all who almost saw it, only Dario did see. Dario, and Euniche.

  Euniche was going to see it again.

  Reaching her chamber, Euniche shut the door. Then she stood quite still, regaining her poise.

  What had happened had been a silly business, except that the creature was undoubtedly savage, and she had been sensible to avoid it. Now that she had time to think about it, she guessed the bird came from the Ducem’s menagerie on the Rivoalto; she had heard he kept exotic fowl, along with his horses, deer, and lions. The wings of those birds were clipped, but sometimes the vital tufts grew back and then they could still fly.

  That she had mistaken the great bird for an angel of retribution, Euniche had, in her frontal mind, forgotten.

  The room was dim, for it was not big and the window was small, and closed by its opaque glass pane that she had no wish, now, to throw wide.

  Even with the window closed, she noticed a fishy odor in the room, come in, most likely, from the canals.

  There was another stench, too, and hastily Euniche began to strip off her gown, and next the dirtied curtella, and the rest. She bundled these away. She would wash them herself, later, because she wanted no one to know about her lapse in control.

  Naked, thin, and scrawny, her breasts shriveled and fallen, Euniche did not look less fearsome. In youth she had quickly learned to take no pride in her body. Only her brain did Euniche hugely respect, and this lack of self-regard, coupled to such intense vanity, showed in every line of her, clothed or bare. She was both states horrible, appalling.

  Having wiped herself with a cloth, she went to a chest that stood by the bed.

  Hers was a broad bed, and it had a frame—it had been the couch of her marriage. A piece of curtaining hung down around it and, as Euniche went by, the curtain shifted.

  Euniche stopped. She looked sidelong.

  The flame-bird stepped daintily out into the room. How the scrap of curtain had concealed it was debatable. How any of the curtains, shadows, angles of walls had done so, also unsure.

  It was too big for the room.

  And Euniche suddenly far too small.

  Yet there they posed, the ugly, fearful, evil thing confronting the beautiful, fearful, thoughtless thing which was being moved like a figure on a chessboard.

  Then Euniche gaped her mouth and spread her lungs to get enough air to scream.

  In that instant the flamingo struck forward with its long serpent’s neck.

  The bill carved like a blade through the middle of Euniche’s face, and down her body to the root of her belly. She was undone in one faultless seam that instantly offered up its scarlet lining.

  She was not dead. Her windpipe had been scored but not severed; her heart had not yet ceased.

  As she toppled over, she made a clucking sound. She lay helpless on her back, writhing when able, watching for some while as the flamingo tore her in ribbons, and the ribbons into threads.

  When it ended, her eyes were fixed, holding in ea
ch of them the image of her coral death.

  A day went by and no one knew where Euniche had gone. At last another woman went to her room—Euniche had always discouraged this.

  The door was shut and, getting no response, the visitor lifted the latch and glanced into the dimness.

  “I never knew she had such colorful clothes—for some festival perhaps, when she was young. Deep red and pink—left there in a heap on her bed.”

  What this woman saw was not clothing.

  Later, the smell made another investigation necessary. And then, they found her, what was left.

  “Is this house accursed?” Como’s steward had cried, tried beyond patience. Afraid to admit his fear.

  “Rats must have done it, sir. Rats, from the canal. She died, and they got in and found her—there is the tale of the old Lord Alberdo, who died in his bed and—”

  “The window was shut,” said the steward.

  “Not the door, though. That stood partly open.”

  The flamingo had made Euniche into a nest, upon the bed, and there it had sat, as if to warm an egg of its own kind, its black legs tucked under and folded behind it.

  After a day had passed, however, it left her, lifted the latch of her door with its bill like a curved sword, which had killed Euniche. It went through a passage or two, still unseen, and soon found an exit to the outer City and the water.

  Perhaps it fed from the lagoons. Presently it flew back to the gardens of the Rivoalto. It came there by night, and if any had noticed it, they, too, would have thought it an angel, a vision of some other world—or the wine-bottle. Its wings had been clipped and had stayed clipped. How it could fly anywhere would be a mystery.

  Altogether there were twenty flamingoes on the Ducem’s island. Eventually it was noted that twenty remained. Ducem Nicolo had other worries. Nobody told him the mislaid bird had come back.

  SILVIO

  FROM THE ISLAND, the lagoon stretched away in all directions, its water like pale green silk. No other shore was ever anywhere visible.

  It was a warm, soft day of clear light. The days were long, and always like this. The sky was turquoise blue, crossed only by a few lambent, creamily-golden clouds. The sky had also a tint of green sometimes, which, after the slow riot of sunset, would intensify. Prolonged glowing dusks hung over the island, holding the copper, viridian, gilt, and amethyst of a peacock’s feather. The nights were calm and sewn with large stars.

  As he climbed the island, walking up through the groves of myrtles and lilacs, which were flowering, Silvio stopped and regarded for a moment an obelisk which stood among the trees. It was made of the finest marble, smooth and white with translucent veins, and all about it the island’s grass had been scythed to velvet.

  He imagined this obelisk was a monument to his dead father. Though unmarked, it had always been here. Sometimes he had seen his mother come down through the groves and linger beside it. But he had never asked her what it signified. There was so little about her he did not know, this seemed not to matter.

  Now Silvio went to the marble, and walked once around it. That was all he did.

  Violets were growing in the grass at its foot. Silvio leaned down and plucked some up for the woman in the house. Then he went on.

  His mother’s palazzo lay at the apex of the island. A hill pushed from the slope, and cypress trees ran along its shoulder, casting their royal shadows. Then the building appeared.

  The palace was of three stories, with a gallery running around the middle floor, and with Byzantine arches. In the sun, it burned a vibrant apricot color.

  Silvio had known the palace all his life. He had grown up in it through a swift, bright childhood to the prime of a young manhood that did not change.

  And his mother, of course, neither did she change one jot. She was still the slender and beautiful girl he had seen from the first. Yet, despite this, they were mother and son, very definitely that.

  He had never missed or been curious about his father. Silvio knew everything about him. He was aware, too, of how his father had died, and why, although his mother had never spoken of it, or even obliquely referred to it. Silvio, also without reference, understood what she herself had suffered.

  They did not need to discuss such things. Nor need he tell her what he had done, would do. She did, however, undoubtedly know.

  Yet now, for the first, Silvio was a little perturbed. For something in his game had subtly altered.

  It had happened, if he were honest—and he had never felt the need to be anything else, with himself—when he had met the child-girl in the Barbaron house. He had set out to meet her, impatient, since she took so long to grow up (unlike himself). After meeting her, he had been restless for a while. He had not gone back. And the minutes had dripped down and become years. Then he glimpsed her again, and she was suddenly grown. She was a woman.

  He had intended … what? Perhaps it was not planned, exactly—he preferred to improvize. It did not signify, anyway. Fate, the current which brought to him everything he wanted, had brought her in the rambling boat, along the filthy and turgid water of Aquila. So he came out once more to meet her, Beatrixa Barbaron.

  Silvio thought of a bird. A bird appeared. It was like a flamingo, yet its hues were more startling, damson, crimson, and flaming orange. It was positioned at a pool, feeding, its head curved over oddly to do this, as he had seen the other one do—the other flamingo that he had removed from the Ducem and sent visiting in the della Scorpia house.

  Everything went on as it should, as he wished. As his mother wished. Everything. And so, why perturbation? Silvio put his doubt aside.

  Looking up, he saw his mother had just come out on the palazzo’s gallery. She wore a white gown, her hair dressed ornately, with polished jacinths.

  She had not noticed him yet. She always smiled the instant she beheld him. Her exquisite face lit up like the beautiful sunrises, and made him at once glad and happy and strong.

  He was her life, he knew. She, his.

  Of course, she was his mother, and he, her son.

  The flamingo rose suddenly into the turquoise air and flapped away over the cypress trees, a flaming rose in the sky.

  PART THREE

  Love

  She is coming, my own, my sweet;

  Were it ever so airy a tread,

  My heart would hear her and beat,

  Were it earth in an earthy bed,

  My dust would hear her and beat,

  Had I lain for a century dead;

  Would start and tremble under her feet,

  And blossom in purple and red.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  Maud

  BARTOLOME

  IT WAS EARLY SUMMER, and the month of the Twins, before Chesare Borja took his official leave of us.

  The Ducem had got up, for a farewell, a grand mascera on the Rivoalto, with actors to depict Madonna Lucretza as Beauty, the female Twin, and Chesare as Valor, the male. In Venus, these Twins stay also emblems of the goddess Venus, and her lover Mars, the god of war. Borja was reportedly pleased by this, though I heard he had slept poorly on the island. They said anyway he was more prone to work all night with his maps of conquest than to slumber or entertain women. (Half the rumors of him speak only of his lusts, worse than his father’s; the other half, of his miserly abstinences.) Presently he was gone, however, and his fair sister with him. But they only crossed the River Lungo, to her husband’s city of Ferrachita. And meanwhile, the agreed portion of his troops, with their commanders, remained—both in the City garrison, and in those garrisons at Veronavera, and out on the island of Torchara. (I also heard that the wig of the boy actor who had been Lucretza in the mascera, and which had been dyed to that same marvelous peach shade as her own natural hair, sold for fifty gold duccas in the Setapassa. That, too, may be a lie.)

  In any event, my mind was full of my own affairs. I had been puzzled and a little disturbed by my interview with Lord Como della Scorpia. This slight anxiety was not decre
ased when I learned the outcome of the fight along the Blessed Maria Canal, and how one of Como’s lower sons had drowned. To add to the upheaval, Pia became ill with a congestion, and was put to bed for a week. Some of her closest women friends flocked in and out to nurse her. Their kindness I did not doubt but, when at home, I was glad of any excuse to be away again. Pia’s doctor then told me of an apothecary’s shop near the Gardens of Diana, which dealt in Eastern spices and herbs known for their help in sickness. There I went, as soon as I could. It was a longish way.

  I left Pia propped up and telling cards with one of her friends, and I remember how, her cards obviously being no use, she thanked me so prettily, and said to her companion I was a good husband, and a saint to her. This stabbed me through, I confess. As if somehow I knew what was to happen next.

  Oh, I cannot deny it. Here and there, since the fourth year of our marriage, I had known other women. Not many, but a few. And spring and early summer that year had woken up in me some sleeping lion. I had recognized it, and paid it no heed, for I was well into my thirties by then, and expected nothing that way.

  The Gardens of Diana lie behind Fulvia, uphill. They were once a property of a prince of Venus, but now his palace was pulled down. Instead some classical statuary had recently been dug up there, notably a Diana with her hounds, old as ancient Rome.

  The apothecary’s shop lay in an alley across the Centurion’s Bridge, on the Neptune side—that is, the pagan side.

  I entered it, and told the old man’s assistant what had been recommended. Then the apothecary himself came out, peering from a seeing-lens fixed in his right eye. “Yes, she will need galingala, nutmeg and ginger, cloves … and powder of pearl, I think. She has had no trouble when eating a fish with a shell?” I said not, and off he went to make up the dose.