by Tanith Lee
Who had there been?
A captain of the palazzo guardsmen—alas, he had died last year of a sickness—and a companion of her cousins, from the Strotsi family—but only once, he was unworthy—and others, very many; she was profligate with her affections, then. Even on one night, when she was fifteen, she had fictionally brought into her bed an older man glimpsed in a wanderer on the canal… he had been blond-haired.
How did she know what a man would do with a woman? She had listened, observed. Intimations were all around. Besides, she was well read, and now and then had come upon some unvetted reference, in Catullus, for example.
All this was a sin, she knew. She had never revealed what she did, to a priest, or to any other. In the beginning, this was because she did not think it a sin. Then, when various dubious warnings were cast at her (by the nurse, her own mother, and the very priest who heard her confessions), Beatrixa was taken aback at their ridiculousness, their unwisdom. For how was this sin a sin at all? However, she had inferred enough not to deflower herself, which might otherwise, perhaps, have accidentally happened.
And now. Her tingling blood would bring her thoughts of only one man with whom to slake her body.
Save, he was no longer a man, but one of the dead.
She turned from the mirror and paced to and fro. The white dog, which had been lying by the window, got up and began to pace with her.
“Well, Leone,” she said to it, as they stalked up and down. “Well … shall we run away, just you and I? Shall we?”
The dog wagged its tail.
If only they might—yet, then, there was her father.
Beatrixa liked her father, loved him. It was he, indeed, who, by allowing her to read where she wished, had assisted her to think as she would.
She supposed she must always have been impressed by him, to some extent, he was a powerful and dramatic figure about the Palazzo Barbaron. But Andrea had won her over personally, too, not with constant attention, of which many of her female relatives provided too much, but through intermittant shows of firm interest, treating her as no other did. Once, when she was thirteen, and again a year later, he had taken her with him to Veronavera. There had been the usual ladies to care for her, of course, and she had had to travel in a slow carriage drawn by mules. But at the castle, a smoky, towering cliff, Andrea had spent time with her among the echoing chambers. He had shown her, in the Hall, the battle honors of the Barbarons, from the time of the Crusades. And the library in a turret, and the physic and fruit gardens enclosed by the great walls. He had had her taught to ride as well, on the hills above the river. And when she said she would have preferred to do this astride, like a man, he nodded, not shocked, but added, “You must wait for that Triche, till you’re wed. Then, why not.” She had thought at the time it was considered improper for a maiden to ride other than sidesaddle. But by now she knew that astride a horse, also, a girl might lose her maidenhead. Preposterous. She balked at such a precaution, yet saw its meaning.
For Andrea had infused her too with the awareness of house honor. And somehow, even before Andrea gave her much notice, Beatrixa had been concerned with the honor of the Barbarons.
And now, too. Now she was a woman. Still, she was proud of who she was, and of her name, and fastidiously kept up the duties of her position.
But she had ceased much to value them. It was because she valued Andrea that she stayed within the strict palisade of her station, and tendered it due homage. And she knew this as well. And sometimes it made her half afraid, for what if—what if she ceased to revere and love her father? Oh, this could never be—but if—if this were to take place—or, if he were to die….
Which brought her again to death, to the dead.
It was madness. Silvio was not dead. Was not a ghost. He was—a dream, one more lover she had conjured. A contrary one, an enemy. And if others had seen him too, and they had, no matter. He was gone now.
The dog called Lion bristled, and a soft growl rumbled in the engine of its body.
Beatrixa saw, across the room, in the mirror, the reflection.
She spun about.
An old man was sitting in her other chair, the adult one. His head was covered by white hair and he leaned it on a hand like a winter leaf. His face was fallen and deeply seamed, and out of it gazed two ink-black eyes that gave a silvery light. …
“Silvio—” the name came out of her like escaping life. And then, stupidly, “Why are you old?”
The old man said, “I believed you would prefer me like this. A feeble dotard. Too decrepit to lay a finger on you.”
Her heart stopped in her breast.
She said, “You told me that … you couldn’t read my thoughts.”
“I can’t read them. I have come up here on other nights, since our last meeting in the church of Maka Selena. I’ve watched you sleeping, dreaming. When you dream, sometimes you speak aloud.”
“What do I say?” she whispered.
She knew, if it were so, what she must have said. In her dreams she had not denied herself the vision of Silvio that, awake, she refused.
And he, reading her or not, said nothing now.
“Why are you here?”
“That song again. I am here because I like to be here. I must tell you anyway, Beatrixa Barbaron, you could not have me even if you would. I mean, you couldn’t lie with me in the carnal mode, thigh to thigh—”
She felt her cheeks grow hot, then cool.
“Since you’re a ghost,” she said acidly.
“Am I a ghost? Do you think me a ghost? What do you think me?”
“A trickster.”
“Yes. But not with you.”
“It’s all one. A cat is still a cat, even if you dress it in a mouse-skin.”
“The old riddle. Answer this one then: I have me a wolf from the plain, and a ewe-sheep, and a bag of fragrant clover. And I must take them over the lagoon, from one side to the other side. But my boat will only hold myself and one of these other things at one time, the wolf, the sheep, or the clover—or go down. How then am I to transport them? For if I take them one by one, two of them must stay together on one shore or the other, without me. And though the wolf will not eat the clover, the sheep will eat it, or if I leave the sheep with the wolf on either shore, the wolf will eat the sheep.”
She stared hard at him. This lively old man, sitting up now, eager and alert with his puzzle, offering it to her. He had said, he liked to play.
She replied slowly, “There is something like this in Pliny, and in Babrius too.” She frowned, remembering it with care, and she was a moment like a solemn child, posted there in the body of a young woman. “You must first take the sheep across to the other shore and leave it there. Come back for the wolf and leave that on the other shore—but return with the sheep. Then leave the sheep on the first shore again, and take the clover across where the wolf is. Then return lastly for the sheep once more.”
“Perhaps,” said the old man. No, he did not look so very old now. His hair was much longer, fuller, and of a ripening shade. “Or, there is another way.”
“None,” said Beatrixa. “It’s a problem of logic, and has only one answer.”
“And I, it seems, have only this one small boat. But also having foresight, I understood that one day I would have to transport a wolf, a sheep, and a bag of clover. So then, I chose a wolf-cub and a lamb, and brought them up together, feeding them by hand, bedding them in the same pen. Farmers will do this, and then keep the wolf as a guard dog. It will guard the sheep with its life, let me tell you, and the sheep will run to the wolf in any tribulation. In addition, I shall have made sure the sheep has often had a taste of clover, but before ever I allowed this, I had sprinkled the clover with something sour no sheep would care for. Soon my sheep had no wish to sample any clover, thinking all of it tastes foul. Thus, on the momentous day, I can take any of my three possessions across the lagoon, leaving any other two of them alone together. The wolf won’t eat the sheep, thinking t
hey are brother and sister; the sheep won’t eat the clover thinking it will taste, as ever, bad. While I can do as I want.”
“This is a parable of forethought, then. Or of manipulation by cunning,” said she with asperity.
“How stern you are.” (He was no longer old. He had been seventy, forty, thirty. Now he was young, two or three years her senior, and his hair was like a flood of molten gold.)
“You are not meant, Signore Silvio, to alter the rules of logic.”
“Why not? What am I, sweetheart, if not the proof that logic will not always apply.”
“Oh,” she said.
He smiled. His beautiful, overwhelming smile, that dissolved her bones, weakening her, so she sat down on the stool by the mirror.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “Have you heard of Beatifica, the saint who brought the saving fire?”
“I’ve heard of her. The Church—”
“Confound the bloody Church,” he said mildly, “listen. They burned her in turn, as a heretic. But her heart would not burn. It was saved in a golden box and kept in the church of the Lullaby of Tears, La’Lacrima. Here it worked miracles. The lame walked, the blind became able to see, and the dumb to speak. Have you heard of that?”
“Yes. But the miracles were long ago.”
“Belief grew less strong. And then, some years back the box disappeared. It was searched for, but never found—like other things in this city of water.”
“I have heard that, too.”
“Well,” he said, “I know where the Box of the Heart is.” She looked at him. She scarcely heard what he said at all. “I’ve seen it, Beatrixa Barbaron, sweet wolf never trained to love us, we poor della Scorpia sheep. I’ve seen the casket with the heart of a saint.”
She shook her head,
“Your della Scorpias are the wolves,” she said flatly. “Where is the casket then?”
“Under Silvia. In the mud. Deep down. You are the wolves.”
“Our emblem was once an eagle. Now it is a tower. How is the casket there?”
“Probably stolen. By one whose boat would only carry a single item, and had too much in it, since the heart of a saint would weigh a great amount—and the boat sank, and the casket went into the salt-mud. The Silvia Lagoon was once a marsh. I was named for the Silvia Lagoon. I’ll tell you now why I am here.”
He got to his feet, and crossed the room and stood above her. She gazed up into his face, and was blinded, and even the Heart of Beatifica could not have helped her.
“Go to your father,” said Silvio della Scorpia. “Say that you have something to ask.”
“… and then?”
“Then ask him this: When was it that he met with Meralda della Scorpia.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“He will understand you. He will go flaming red and mad, or white as stone.”
“Why—why?” She too had stood up, and as she did so, he caught her against him.
And she felt, the length of her flesh, the pressure of his body that was not, and could not be flesh, or anything of the world, that truly she could never have or be possessed by—and she seemed turned to snow.
“I said, Beatrixa, I would give you a question, not answer one.”
“Why are you so adamant—what has he done, my father, that you want to—to drive him mad?”
“Ask. He may tell you. If he doesn’t, his face will tell it all. Be prepared for him to strike you, too. That’s nothing to you, is it? You’re brave. Meralda was not. She had not one hundredth part of your courage—nor of your good luck.”
His face, too, told her everything. It was like a demon’s—handsome, not foul, and the worse for that.
“Am I to have heard of Meralda della Scorpia?”
“Have you not? I think you have. If so, perhaps you can put it together alone. But ask him anyway, Andrea Barbaron, your lord and father. Ask him.”
And in that terrible moment, he shook himself free of her. This rejection of flesh was as she had once heard a lightning-strike described. Scalding yet cold, glittering. He had killed her—yet she was still standing there, drained of blood and life.
He was her enemy.
As her eyes cleared, she saw that he was gone once more, had vanished into air, as a spirit or devil always could.
She went to the Castello library in the morning, quite late, at the time when house business was usually being concluded.
Sure enough, Lanto and Oliviotto were collecting up their papers, and the ledgers were being put away.
Andrea Barbaron turned around, saw her, and grew affable.
“Good day, Triche. How are you?”
“Very well, my lord.”
“You look a little pale. Some early peaches came this morning from the garden at Verona. You must eat some.”
“Yes, Father, then I will. Thank you.”
“And look,” he said, coming towards her, nearly jocular, “these books have arrived, too. You’ll want to see them, I expect.”
The secretaries were bowing, going out.
Beatrixa stood straight in the summer light of the windows.
Andrea gazed back at her, narrowing his eyes. When he did this, a crafty, porcine look came over him. He was very heavy now, a bulkily-muscled, fat, high-colored man in his high-colored mantle of Barbaron red.
What do I know of him? Nothing. Lord, Father—these were titles.
“What is it?” he said.
“I have something to ask you.”
“It must be no joking matter, this something.”
“I think not.”
“Come, sit down here at the table. Drink this wine.”
Don’t be kind to me. Because, presently, all that may end for ever—
Yet, why should it? Demons lied. It was their faculty. They lied.
He pushed the goblet towards her. In the crimson glass, the Barbaron tower, hatched with gold. What had they ever talked of, her father and she? Cerebral topics, or frivolous meaningless things—
Yes, I will ask, but not as you would have me do it, Silvio della Scorpia, my enemy, my devil.
“There is an old story, Father. I heard it in childhood, oh, I forget where I heard it. But unsuitably, it’s begun to unsettle me. I say unsuitably, not because it isn’t a horrible story—it is—but because it concerns the house of our foes, the Scorpion house.”
Trying to scan his features, her own eyes flickered. She steadied them.
Andrea thought in turn, I have seen eyes like those behind a drawn sword. (And, she saw him think it.)
“Don’t prevaricate. You’re my daughter. Speak out.”
“A high-born girl of that house, Meralda was her name.” His face had not altered, nor his color. He simply waited.
Beatrixa looked away from him, and took a mouthful of the wine he had poured for her.
She knew the tale, who did not? And she had already been reminded by the threats of the della Scorpias who abducted her. Originally she had heard maids’ chatter, one stormy night when the sea had roared and the lagoons churned. Meralda, betrothed to an evil lord, had fled with her lover, some artisan. Had been betrayed or caught. Tortured, murdered, discarded into Aquila. Down in the salt-mud, like the Casket of the Heart.
She had not heard from the chatter any mention of Meralda’s betrayers. (The servants would have kept one rumor at least that night away from Beatrixa’s honed, childish ears.) While the della Scorpia louts, sitting by Beatrixa in the boat, had accused another—Gualdo.
But Silvio—what had he intended? What did he mean?
Ask him: When was it that he met with Meralda della Scorpia. He will go red and mad and white as stone and strike you—
If he is the one—if he did this, my father, gave her to such an end—if he says that it was he—how will I ever look at him again, or, if there is one scrap of a soul in him, he at me, his own daughter, if, if he did this thing—
“Meralda, yes,” Andrea said. “I’ve heard of it. Much of Venus
talked of her, for a while.”
“Yes, that story,” Beatrixa said.
“Well, I’m surprised it stays with you. Yes, a grim affair. But it’s done. Thirty years and more, done.”
“Perhaps.”
“What does that mean? Come, Triche, this isn’t like you.”
Beatrixa gathered herself up. “Then, my lord, let me ask you—” she began. She stopped. The breath of life seemed to leave her. She stared, rigid, beyond Andrea’s bolstered shoulder to where, across the sunny room, Silvio stood beside a cabinet of large, gilded books. The light caught them, and him, and all the embroidered gold of his doublet and his hair. “I—” she said, “I would ask you, sir—” And Silvio shook his head at her. He raised his hand and touched his own lips, as if sealing them, then again he shook his head. His face was unnervingly grave, as she had most often witnessed it. Not as she had beheld it last.
“What can you see?” Andrea turned sharply, looking behind him.
“There is—” she faltered.
“What? There’s nothing—what is it?”
“There is nothing there,” she said.
She stared on at Silvio, whom Andrea could not see, or was not permitted now to see. Silvio had begun to laugh. She could hear it, this male, musical laughter. And Andrea could not hear it. But then Silvio reached out and pulled all the books from the cabinet, flinging them down. They fell with a crash on to the floor.
“Blood of Christ!” Andrea lunged up from his seat.
“Who’s there?” he roared. He strode over the room, lurching slightly, huge against the light, and as he went he passed through Silvio della Scorpia, who stood there laughing at him.
Andrea halted. This, something of this sort, had happened before. He glanced down at the fallen volumes, and saw his shadow thrown there from the sun and beside it, a second shadow that, even as he observed it, faded like moisture on a hot stone.
“This room is haunted,” Andrea said. He was not greatly unnerved, only somewhat startled. “It’s gone now. What did you see?”
“I don’t know. But yes, it’s gone.”
With a grunt, he bent and picked up one of the books, carried it back to the table, and slapped it down there.