A Bed of Earth

by Tanith Lee

  In fact, I had never stayed a full night in Flavia’s bed, returning to my house often by the midnight bell, or at the worst, before Prima Vigile. Flavia and I would have preferred to remain longer together and to meet more frequently—generally one, at the most two days, in every week, were all we had. Then, it seemed to me a sacrifice we made for Pia’ s sake. But, really, no doubt I was indulgent enough to myself. Even today, however, I cannot say I am contrite, or would do anything differently. Rather, I wish I had been yet more selfish. Truly, indeed.

  The month of the Twins was gone. The Crab month had started, very warm, and with it the fetidness of the canals, drenching the City in a rain of stinks.

  “I have a vineyard and a little house, Bartolo, at Veronavera,” Flavia said to me, one baking noon as we lay on her sheets, the window shut despite the heat, because of the reek of the water below. “It’s in the hills above the town. We could be cool there.”

  “If only,” I said, “wishing could take us there.”

  She had spoken of the house once before. It was a property of her late husband’s, but until the breach over his resting-place was mended, she had not had the heart, she said, to go.

  “Now I would like to. Now and then I was there with him, and he taught me about the vine-stocks, and how to judge wine.” (She was certainly adroit in that.) “The vineyard is well managed, but I’ve not seen it for five years. Besides, I could attend to the reburial of his ashes in the vault, as he had wanted. There is every reason to go.” And then she added, straightforwardly as was her way, “If I went to Veronavera, Bartolo, might you come with me, and stay a short while? Would such a thing be possible?”

  I thought longingly of it.

  Then I said, I did not see how I could. Pia and I had already quarreled about my absences. How could I distress her further by a wider lapse?

  “Alas,” said Flavia. Then she kissed me. “Poor Pia. Never mind. I’ll be gone only a week or so. And I will bring back food for a feast, apricots and cherries from the orchard, and one of the best chickens to lay eggs for us. And the nicest wine.

  This was how she was, Flavia. Even that evening she sent me homeward early, and gave me besides a white rose in a pot to give to my wife. Another woman might have put poison on it—I had heard of such antics—but Flavia, though she was adept herself with herbs and healing potions, had nothing of that malice in her.

  “What do I say to her,” I said lamely, standing there with the rose. “I’ve never taken her a flower before.”

  “Then you should have done so, sir. Be off with you, and tell her it is a peace-offering, because you are most content when she’s smiling.”

  When I reached home, Pia seemed pleased to get the rose, and never asked what I was up to, but at that time she was rather distracted. Someone had brought word her own father was sick, and he would have no one to nurse him but her.

  I was astounded by this stroke of fate, for the stonemason, now retired and pensioned by the guild, lived out on the islands of Myrrhano, where the best glass in the world is made.

  “But Pia, do you feel you must go?”

  “Yes,” said Pia. And I saw a glint in her eyes that told me she meant to pay me back for our disputes. “When he is ill, no one can do anything with him except me. So I haven’t a choice. I’ll be gone at least fourteen or twenty days.

  “What shall I do?” I said, woebegone (nor can I exonerate my villainy), “left here with that cook of yours—”

  “Oh, you’ll do very well. Go out with your friends as you always do, in any event. Let them feed you and see to your comforts.”

  “Pia—”

  No. I must put my husband behind my father this once, Bartolo.”

  And so she went. And I told the cook she might do as she liked, I intended to visit my uncle’s old housekeeper in the country. As a lie it was not such a stretch, for Rossa lived only a few miles beyond Veronavera, though I knew I would not be seeing her.

  As for the guild, I arranged that I myself visit Verona to superintend the matter of the Tressi vault. It is not always unusual for a Master to take on such a task, and no one looked askance, while since these grave exchanges are normally not noised about no one would speak of it, either.

  It was at Veronavera that Flavia told me of the dream she had had of me, when she was six years old.

  But I had been surprised by her already, before that. I had arranged to meet her, as I thought in her carriage, where the Veronavera Road properly begins, beyond Venus. As I waited there then under a tree, up rode a well-dressed young man with his servant, and hailed me.

  “Your horse seems a good one, sir,” said he. “Better than mine, I’d think.”

  I wondered if he was a ruffian and meant to try to steal the horse, which I had hired. The servant, too, had muffled his face oddly, I thought, as robbers sometimes do—

  Then, something in the look of the servant, and next in the angle of the young man’s head, and his eyes under the unruly fringed locks—he had even a little beard too, and moustaches, in the Franchian or Spanish manner—made me suspicious.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Is this civil?” asked he.

  “Well,” I said, “perhaps not, as I’m impatient, waiting for my dear friend, a lady, who is late.”

  “Yes,” said Flavia, for it was she beneath the small, round, masculine hat and mass of loose hair, with the moustachios and beard stuck on (and her servant trying to look like someone I had never met, “and here I am.”

  “Is it you?”

  “Come now. You guessed. I saw it in your eyes. Don’t be shocked, dearest one. It’s safer for me on the road, and quicker, too.

  So we rode on to Veronavera—I, this youth who was my mistress, and Flavia’s servant.

  It was a glorious day, and out of the City it smelled already of fields and wild flowers, ripening grapes, and pleasure.

  We broke our fast in the garden of an inn where there were goats grazing under the quince trees. When evening fell we found another, and slept together, she and I, all that night in the clean rough bed. There she said to me, “This is Heaven on earth, my love.”

  Because it was summer and the road was easy, on horseback we made excellent speed. By noon of the following day, we reached the hill country above the town.

  Veronavera is old as Venus, a Roman outpost in ancient times. The Roman fort is there yet, now with extra walls, to hold the garrison—which included during that time the recent addition of the soldiers of Chesare Borja. But we did not think of them. The River Adza lay miles off below, a milky coiling, with the red-stoned town all along its banks, towered and sun-kissed among gardens of dark trees. Here the hills rose and fell, and beyond, across the gulf of distance, hung the smoke-blue cliffs of the mountains. Between these two vistas, I could make out a rocca-castle, also quite far off, yet gleaming in the sun. It was the Castello Barbaron.

  The Tressi house was small, but the vineyard and orchards ample.

  No sooner were we there than Flavia was off about her estate, greeting everyone and embracing some, even the men. None seemed put out by her appearance. Later on, she explained to me it was her own husband who had suggested it to her as the safest and fastest mode of traveling. “He saw to it,” she added, “that I learned to ride both sidesaddle and astride. He and I often journeyed like this. We found it amusing.”

  In the evening, though, Flavia took off her disguise, and was a fine lady in the cool, scented garden, amidst its arbor and oleanders.

  As I was coming down the stair of the house that dusk, someone passed me, which is the only way I can describe it, though no one was there.

  The stair was narrowish and turning, and the light almost gone from it, but I found I had drawn back to let something slip by and, as I did so, I caught a faint perfume. It was only a moment or so after that I seemed vaguely to see a woman—but in my mind only, the way you might recollect someone just glanced at a minute before and now gone away.

  When we ha
d dined, and Flavia had shown me all the garden again by starlight, I mentioned this phenomenon to her. She nodded and said, “Ah, that is Jinevra. So I call her.”

  “And who is Jinevra?”

  “A ghost, what else? I’ve seen her myself now and then, and rather more decidedly than you did. She wears a light-colored, long-waisted gown, and her hair is dressed high and veiled. Her face, I’m less sure of, but she is smiling always. There’s nothing horrifying about her, as with such things sometimes there is.”

  “We are told,” I said, musingly, “that there are no ghosts, since all souls sleep, or else they progress directly to the other world.”

  ‘Oh yes,” said Flavia, as if all this were the most ordinary of subjects. “But a ghost is not a soul, Bartolo.”

  “What is it, then?”

  Flavia pondered a second, as she would always do when thinking how best to tell me of something in which I was unversed. (As I have said, she was extremely clever and well-read, which I am the first to avow I am not.)

  “Great happiness or great anguish or hurt can leave a mark behind them, Bartolo. The way a shoe is worn to the shape of the foot that always dons it. Or as a blow to the flesh may leave a scar. These wearings and scars are on the skin of time and of the earth. And sometimes still we see them, though not always, and not always very well. The one I call Jinevra was happy in this house, and has left the impression of her happiness. But I know of a terrible house in a village near here, where no one can live, and they must pull it down, so full is it of something dreadful left behind.”

  I cannot say if I believed what she said, although I was always inclined utterly to believe her in everything.

  But anyway, I smiled and said, “But I’ve heard stories, Flavia, of ghosts that speak and hold conversations, or others that throw articles of furniture about a room. How can that be, if they are only such scars, such memories as you say?”

  “These aren’t ghosts of the same kind. Yes, I’ve heard, too, of such happenings. And—you must allow me to say, I have now and then spoken to a ghost myself.”

  “You’re a witch. I’ve always suspected.”

  “Some would think so. I’ve a kind of facility for seeing ghosts. Some do, and others not.”

  “Well, and what did you learn from these different ghosts?”

  “Usually, my dear, that they were lost and wretched, and wished only to be elsewhere. Either to be alive again, or in Heaven, where their souls had already gone.”

  “Now I’m lost also, Flavia. What do you mean?”

  We sat down in the arbor, and Flavia told me what she believed to be the truth. I remember every word.

  “When we are to be born, and the flesh we are to inhabit is growing in our mother’s womb, our soul comes often to visit and regard it. It comes so often that the child will stir and shift about, and so the mother thinks her baby is already ensouled, which in a way it is, the soul being always so near to it, and to her. Some women speak of sensing a guardian at such times—what they sense is the soul of the child itself, watching over itself-to-be, and them. At last, the soul claims its flesh entirely. Then, or soon after, the child is born. Before that, however, the visiting soul has made for itself, within the shell of the child, a potential for its life. Which is, if you will, the physical soul, or character, it will come to have. For through this character, while alive, the soul will learn what it wishes in the world. Now, Bartolo, this personality may become so overbearing during a lifetime, that it can hide all remembrance of the soul from the mind. Indeed, the physical soul may often end by becoming far more insistent and vigorous—though far less strong—than the true soul which made it. Or how else is the earth so full of wrongdoing, confusion, wickedness, and misery—for no soul is ever capable of those states, unless a physical character rules it, hiding from it all it has been, and will be again. Only death finally separates the soul from its other lesser self. And at death even, for a time, the soul may still think itself the physical creature it was, slave to the passions and sorrows of the flesh. This passes. This passes, then we relearn the greater passions and joys, and are free, and that is the real Heaven.”

  “But you say, if I understand you, that what I would call a ghost—I mean, that tribe of ghosts which talk and appear to live independently in this world still—they are the phantoms solely of a man’s character—what he has been, while in the flesh?”

  “How else do they seem,” she asked, “but as pale or extravagant copies? They cleave to what they have had—or have wanted to have. They try to live on always as they were. Or as they meant to be.”

  “But the soul’s gone—”

  “Yes, Bartolo. No soul is ever trapped in such a way.”

  Perhaps it was the wine, or the night, or being with her like this, and knowing how brief would be our holiday, but melancholy stole over me. I said, “Poor godforsaken things, then.”

  “God forsakes nothing,” she answered. And kissed me.

  Much later, when we were still in bed, she told me how she had dreamed of me when she was six years old, and I also six, for I had already learned (she did not obscure such things) that she was of an age with me.

  Flavia said she saw me lying on a bare floor, and that I had been beaten, and there was all about an effluvia of rage and violence and hopelessness. “I knew you,” she said, “as I knew you again when first we met last month. I might say, I don’t know how I knew you. But I remember there was, too, in the dream, a man, who lay in a chair snoring, and by him an empty wine-bottle—no, it was a skin, the kind they sell in the markets.” I said nothing. I had never told her of my drunkard father and his drunken wife. “I took you in my arms,” said Flavia. “You were so thin and cold, and you’d been vomiting. But you were like my brother. I told you everything would soon be well, for I felt it would be.”

  Before I could stop myself, I said to her, “It was. My uncle rescued me from that Hell.”

  She asked nothing. She said, “Of course. Forgive my trespass, Bartolo. But I do see things, sometimes. I don’t frighten you?”

  “I could never be afraid through you, sweetheart.”

  “I’m glad. For I wanted to tell you how I’d seen you before. We were intended to meet. I think … it was a plan we had made, before we were born, you and I.”

  With this I did not concur. I thought we would, had we planned it, have arranged things better, so both of us had liberty to join our lives as one.

  There was to be one more suprising moment. It seemed then largely irrelevant, among the earthly joy of our lovemaking, the constant magic of her company, the brevity of our days and nights together.

  I had gone alone to the town to see about opening the Tressi tomb. She had told me they would doubtless hear, in her late husband’s house, that she had now a lover, but she was no longer a girl, and providing it was not made too obvious in Veronavera, nothing would be said. In fact, I had sole dealings with her husband’s sister, a sprightly old lady with only praise for Flavia. (The fellow who had opposed the burial here was apparently now too sick to see me.)

  “It was,” said the old woman, chattering to me merrily enough, “all such a foolish business. To blame Flavia for another’s sake, and then hold my brother responsible.” She must have seen how I became alert—anything to do with Flavia naturally interested me. Then she told me what, plainly, was not any secret, except I had never heard it.

  The Tressi anger with Flavia’s husband had arisen from an initial annoyance at his marrying Flavia, then a girl of decent family, well-dowered and only thirteen.

  “I was the one who said to him, Messer da Loura, that he should consider her bastardy no obstacle. She was born inside wedlock, as many are who aren’t at all the children of their legal fathers. And besides, the legal father had recognized her and made no trouble about it, giving her his name until she wed my brother and became a Tressi.”

  Who then had been Flavia’s actual father? I did not ask, of course. But the old lady, bright as a polished sequin,
told me without prompting. (I believe she was quite proud of it.) My Flavia was the daughter of Andrea, Lord of House Barbaron.

  SILVIO AND BEATRIXA

  (The Ghost Day)

  Tonight, the moon had risen, which it did not always do. Over the lagoon it blazed, its face here and there flecked by lavender traceries. Where the white reflection seared the water, eels were leaping, hundred upon hundred of them, like an endless cracking of liquid silver whips, breaking the moon-mirror into a thousand pieces.

  Silvio stood watching the eels.

  He was far from the palazzo, far off across the island. Here everything was dark, but for the moonlight, and fireflies of green and gold which danced in the stone-pines above him.

  His mother must have wanted the moon to rise. He had not thought of it, yet there it was.

  He had always known certain areas of the island altered, now and then, as he or she moved over and through them. Besides, he and she saw things a little differently. For example, the gardens which clustered about the house were not quite the same when Silvio looked at them, as when Meralda looked. She, of course, invested them with all the aspects of gardens she remembered. And he, with elements which he had recently seen, in the other world of mankind, the world which living men assumed, despite their prayers, was the only definite one.

  Their unmatched images of the island had never bothered either of them. Or, they did not cause him any anxiety. But perhaps Meralda really did not like there to be apparent discrepancies.

  Though she would, from the first, admit that any animal, plant, or inanimate article might be summoned by wanting it, she still seemed then to credit these apparitions with reality. And they were not real. None of their world was. At least, only the stuff from which it had been made up—only that was real. Yet this malleable material—what it was he did not know, nor did he greatly care. To him, it was usual. He was accustomed to it.