A Bed of Earth

by Tanith Lee

  And Jacmo said to her, “Even forever changes, Beatrixa. How else? It is For Ever.”

  None of them called her lady; she did not expect them to. But they spoke to her as if they were now far older than she, even Jacmo. But then, then, so they must be, here.

  Turning her head, she saw that Silvio looked away. What was it that he saw—or who?

  Silvio saw his mother, Meralda, who was riding a little grey palfry to his wedding. Her gown was emerald green, and she, too, had been garlanded with flowers. Her face was happy beyond all others. Intuitively, not understanding why that should be—did his joy still fuel hers, even now that he had gone over to another? Silvio sought after their former unity, his and Meralda’s. It seemed to him that it was no longer present. He had thought this had been the case since their last dialogue, when they had parted on her island. And even so, she was all gladness. Nor did she even look at him. No, she looked at the man who rode beside her, on the roan horse. He was dressed magnificently, as were all present. His hair was quite long, brown, and curling.

  My father?

  He is my father. In this place she has found him again, and he has found her.

  Beatrixa thought, He is angry. Why is Silvio angry?

  Was anger possible, in Heaven? Perhaps not to any but Silvio, or Beatrixa.

  We have not earned our stay here. We have never truly died. He scarcely, for he has never lived more than a day or so, and that as an atom. (How did she know this now?) And I never, in any form.

  They have given us this, she thought. They—whoever they may be. Or God. Or what must stand for God, here, since even here, it is not quite God’s country. (How too did she know that?) For that would be inexplicable to any but those who are worthy of it and reach it as their ultimate prize.

  The outskirts of Heaven, this. I’ve known always. We must visit them sometimes, in dreams—

  Silvio had urged his horse mildly through the crowd, which graciously parted to allow it. He came up by Meralda, his mother, and the man who must be the soul of Lorenzo Vai.

  “Well,” said Silvio, “and are you here?”

  They looked at him.

  He saw through them, not in any actual way, not now, but to the inner core of them both. They, too, had become one thing. They, too, were lovers, coupled by spirit.

  “She’s been a long time from me,” said Lorenzo Vai, or his soul, or what, here, his soul had masked itself to be. “I tried to find her often, long ago. She never could hear me, then. But you’ve set her at liberty, Silvio. Now she can choose where she’ll go.”

  “I? Liberty?—I never chained her.”

  But they were already gone from him. No longer to be seen.

  He, the arch-magus of two worlds, now had worked on him the true sorcery of that which outstrips sorcery. They were gone, quite gone. The man, his father, old as a sage inside his looks of that callow, gorgeous young gallant he had been, was no more. And she, his mother, whose blissful ignorance had aided and abetted Silvio’s greed and need of her, now vanished altogether, with only the sweetest and most gentle of forgetting, vanishing gazes.

  Bells rang, as they did in Venus. In a hall of open arcades above the sea, Beatrixa Barbaron and Silvio della Scorpia were married, not only in the sight but perhaps in the very shadow of God. Or not. Priests spoke to them, and boys chanted, witnesses presented themselves, incense fumed. Flowers were thrown, and colored confetti and jewels. Birds soared over them in the sky (if they were birds). The very stars seemed to dance in the midst of the open roof.

  In another hall, they feasted under complex gilded carvings and arches of green boughs, where roses bloomed that were not of the usual shades, but auburn, saffron, apricot, and cherry-colored, or purple like the robes of an emperor, or blue as lapis lazuli.

  The sun had still not risen. But there was a gap of light there, on the laval sea.

  How long do we have, how long before the dawn is ended?

  They were sung to their chamber, which was high in a tower, a walled terrace that looked into the sky which now, surely, was more blue, like the roses, than dark.

  There were none of the nastier jokes of such occasions. But there were the recollected bawdy ones—which apparently were not reckoned improper, here on the edges of Paradise. The food of the feast had been that way, too. The roast doves and cakes, the fruits and wines—they could not be real, they were not necessary—only for pleasure, only to make happy.

  These are the things then, Beatrixa thought, which will outlast all else. Delight and love. The rest—even honor, even despair—all swept away.

  But what can last for us? she thought.

  And she was sad, as she saw that he, too, her lover and husband, was sad. But their sadness did not belong here, as they did not.

  She remembered the flying child, and how Silvio had said “It’s myself.” And he was so in error.

  The guests ebbed from them. For them, what had all this been? Something kind they did, some dream or repayment for some other joy they themselves had received? A curtain fell across a doorway.

  In the wide and open chamber, Silvio and Beatrixa stood together, alone.

  “She has left me,” he said. “I mean, my mother. Now there’s only you.”

  And Silvio in turn recalled how Beatrixa had half-confessed, half-accused him, Who else have you left me to love?

  “Am I enough for you?” she said.

  “Always.”

  We have the dawn, she thought.

  I must never lose her, he thought.

  The dawn will end, even in a year. It will not be so long.

  I shall lose her. So much is unavoidable. How do I know? But I know.

  There was a bed, like a bed of the City, heaped with costly covers and feather pillows.

  To this they went, and, when they wished it, their clothes were gone from them. Naked as children, the man and the woman regarded each other. Speaking, they told each other each of the other’s beauty. They moved together, and all things were dismissed, even Heaven and the world, but for themselves.

  Across the flame-scaled sea, the sun began to rise. An inch at a time, a brilliancy that did not scorch or blind, but that filled the Heaven-country with immense and shining light.

  Gradual as a dye dissolving in water, the turquoise dark grew thin, and the blue of the sky appeared, a blue more blue than blue. And in the day sky, too, there were stars, golden stars.

  For the lovers, several comparative hours had passed. Silvio and Beatrixa had possessed them all. They had eaten up time, with each other’s flesh.

  Now they slept and did not see (yet in their sleep they saw, nevertheless) the waking sky, the sun that was like no sun.

  In sleep, too, they spoke, for the last time in that place.

  “It’s over. Where will we go now?”

  “Only God can know.”

  “We’ll be parted.”

  “Yes, I believe so. We have had too much together.”

  “Punishment, then.”

  “No, not to punish us. I was wrong thinking that. There’s no cruelty here, not even the flail of justice. We must work out our own amends, see to ourselves. Until we’re fit, and whole. But you and I—it can’t be, for us.”

  “Beatrixa, I would die in reality, any death at all, to keep you.

  “I would die to keep you. But that’s no use.

  “Is that a nightingale singing so loudly?”

  “A daylark, my love.”

  “This was worth more than the world.”

  “Silvio—it was worth more to me than Heaven.”

  BARTOLOME

  YEARS AFTER, WHEN SHE EXPLAINED IT to me, which she did without compromise, and under such circumstances that I could hardly argue with her, most of me did not believe it. Not a word.

  How could she know such extravagant things? Yes, she seemed skilled in witchcraft, if so I must call it. She understood the planets and the stars, herbs and salves. She understood the hearts of men and women. She was, besides, though
not pious, spiritual. But she was a romantic, too, a teller of stories and a dreamer of dreams—and that was all well and good, especially in a woman who could be, as well, as practical and wise as Flavia—but in this, in this, how could I think such things had ever happened, and if she said she knew they had, not put it down to her wanderings at that lamentable hour.

  Flavia vowed she had seen their history, those two, one of them dead or something stranger, and our history also, hers and mine, coming and going, like pictures in the fire.

  “I told you almost from the first, that I had this power, Bartolo.”

  “Yes, my best love, so you did.”

  I have said, I would not, could not argue at that time. In her eyes I saw, though, the shade of doubt—not in what she had scried or had to recount, but in my acceptance of it.

  On that night when she did tell me, there in the house by the weedy canal, to the south of the Diana Gardens, I listened to every utterance she made with tremendous care. Even some of it I wrote down, to keep it fresh for me, I said. Really to keep fresh her words, as I would have kept her voice if I could, inside a jar, as the sea keeps in a shell.

  It was nearly two years ago, that night. Early in the season, in the Capricorn month, and cold. I remember the cold, like the cold in that dream I had of Meralda, down at the laguna’s bottom. I remember that night as if it had been yesterday night, and tomorrow I shall remember as if it were tonight. To my final day on this earth, I will remember that night, the last I ever spent with my lovely one, my Flavia, south of the Diana Gardens.

  Now, however, I must tell you that I believe it all, everything she said. That is, I believe it as much as one may do, here in the mortal state (for now and then, too, I doubt). I have come to it in little rushes, the way a child learns what is truly good for it.

  I cannot give definite assurance of how or why. You may say, perhaps it is only I want to keep her with me still, and that is how I must do it, preserving the truth as she reckoned truth, along with her image in my mind.

  It was then, that night, Flavia who told me how, all those years before, Beatrixa Barbaron was discovered by one of her maids, who had gone up to see, belatedly, to the candles in her chamber.

  The door was unlocked, and going in, the maid found Beatrixa lying on the floor insensible.

  For some while there had been a great storm crushing its way across the sky, and one thunderclap there had been which seemed to shake the palace to its cellars. The maid thought at once that her lady must have fainted from the shock of it, as one or two had done elsewhere in the house.

  When she bent over her mistress, the maid saw Beatrixa’s eyes were just opening.

  “There, there, M’donna,” said the maid, “the worst has passed on.”

  “Has it?” Beatrixa asked her. And then, as if from some way off, she added, “So much does pass.”

  The maid was concerned, and assisted her to rise.

  Beatrixa was not her usual calm and ordered self. Indeed, the maid said later, she would never have believed Beatrixa, of all of them, would swoon at thunder. She seemed agitated and hurried, yet curiously listless too.

  “How long has it been?” Beatrixa then inquired.

  “M’ donna?”

  “I mean, how long have I been gone from the City?”

  The maid, still thinking it was the thunderclap which had done all this, and eager to reassure her lady, said, “Oh, only a few minutes, madam.”

  “In God’s name,” said Beatrixa. She crossed herself. And then, startling the girl, she shook out her hand as if she had done something irrelevant, foolish even. She said, “It was only a sunrise, but I would suppose it lasted the length at least of a summer afternoon. But time would be different, there.”

  Something in all this attracted the maid’s attention. She said, rather frightened, “Where, madam?” And then, since either she was no simpleton, or because she was ironically more credulous than most, “You have been to somewhere else while you lay senseless? Where, oh where?”

  At this Beatrixa looked at her, and her dark face cleared.

  “She said to me, ‘Nowhere at all, don’t be nervous. It was only my fancy.’ But, oh, she said it to comfort me. I do think she had a glimpse of some other sphere. I’m afraid even to wonder about it.”

  Beatrixa, presently allowed the maid to see to her clothing, and prepared herself for sleep. When the girl was gone, Beatrixa lay down in the bed, alone. She thought she would always, hereafter, lie alone. For either she had sinned with demons, or she had been to a land above most others, and like the saints, who deserve to travel there, returning, undeserving, she was bereft. Besides, she had lost her love, her only love. When this happens, as I, too, know, snow falls on the heart.

  But I will also speak of Silvio, and what Flavia said of where he found himself when he, too, woke, ghost, or whatever I must call him—I am unsure, though Flavia did name his condition, which was that of a character or personality existing without flesh or soul.

  Silvio woke up and found himself lying, not on the island which had been his mother’s, and which he himself had anticipated, but on the chill tesselations of a floor in a wide, high room. He knew at once he was in this world, our world, which was so drab after the island, let alone the panoply of that higher plane he had also seen.

  Getting to his feet, he passed through at once, and before he thought about it, a heavy, ancient cabinet that stood against one wall. And this bitterly entertained him. He saw he was yet, whatever else had been rent from him, a magician in the world of men.

  The room, said Flavia, was a grand one, but bleak, dismal in the coming of an overcast earthly dawn. Cobwebs hung from beams above, but with these, certain blazons of the house. As the light flowed in like water through the thick-glazed windows, Silvio could be in no doubt of where he now was.

  “When everything else is taken from us,” Flavia said, “sometimes our only course is to seek close kindred, however alien to us they may be.”

  The banners hanging there were of the Scorpion, dulled gold and ochre, on a faded chestnut ground. The room was the great, old, neglected sala of the della Scorpia Palazzo, that lies behind Laguna Aquila.

  Silvio himself was not best pleased to find himself there.

  He walked about the sala, looking at objects in it indifferently. But he knew it was the memories his mother had implanted, in his noncorporeal body, these solely which had brought him here.

  And where else might he go? Heaven (if Heaven it had been) had closed its gates to him. He thought he recollected even some voice in sleep which had turned him out, like Adamus from Eden. And the green island, he sensed had vanished, as emerald Meralda had, going away on her journey without him, her hand in that of Lorenzo Vai.

  What then would Silvio do, here in this house of his ancestors where, presumably, in some inexorable way, he belonged?

  If he were to live here, might he not still cross the City, and find out Beatrixa in her own venue at Barbaron?

  No sooner did he think this, than a stroke of purest agony and sorrow thudded home against and within him. It was like a mortal wound, which he would never have felt. This was a spiritous one, and must be worse.

  Silvio knew in that second that Beatrixa was gone from him forever. That what had joined them had been, by their very union—broken. To all the world, he might hereafter make himself known and seen, but to Beatrixa never again might he appear, let alone speak to her, or touch her. And in some terrible manner he thought, too, that she might be, of all things physical, herself invisible—to him. For they had joined elsewhere, they had been made one, but only for that given time. And the payment for it, which both instinctively had known, was eventual utter separation. Nor was this a punishment. It was mere logic.

  He thought that he would go to the Castello by the Canal of the Triumph, would stride in through the walls and up to her bedchamber and find her, and see.

  Then, his heart failed him. Silvio leaned against the wall and wept. He knew he
did not dare this. Because, he foresaw also, it would be no earthly use.

  He had lost Beatrixa, and she had lost him, perhaps—certainly—forever.

  But he—he had lost everything save life—which anyway he had never had.

  Exactly then, a door to the sala opened.

  A woman entered.

  She wore a black gown, and her pale yellow hair was confined in a stiff, gilded net. She walked straight across the floor, went to a chest by the wall, and pulled up the heavy lid.

  Silvio watched all this. And then, to his slight, deadened surprise, the woman half glanced at him. She murmured, “Please, my wish isn’t to disturb you. I only came—to look at this again.”

  She saw him clearly, as mortal things did when he did not mask himself from them. For an instant, he had a vicious urge to vanish before her eyes and alarm her. But then he saw, her face was marked with tears.

  “My lady,” he said, “what’s your trouble? Can I help you?”

  Why did he, of all creatures, say such a thing? Like calls to like, it seems. He had returned to the della Scorpia house, and in his own grief, he saw hers, and hated it for her, that dark companion.

  “Sir, you’re kind. But, no. Of course, you don’t know me. I came back a stranger to this house.”

  “I, too,” he said.

  He had walked over to her to stand a few feet away. Curiosity had not left him, either. He gazed into the chest, and saw a penon-flag there, one which bore no resemblance to anything of the della Scorpias. It displayed a rust-red flaring disc he took for a representation of the sun, on a quartered ground of black and white.

  “My husband’s device,” the woman said simply. “He died at Fensa, in Borja’s army. The Duke Chesare was dulcet, and told me my husband had been one of his favorites among the Franchian captains. The Duke said he had always liked to hear my husband sing. Perhaps this was a falsehood, but I thought not, when he said it to me. Yves told me that Borja remembers everything, and every particular skill any of his men may have—in case one day it might be useful to him.”

  Silvio looked at her. From her words he deduced two things, that she was loving, yet pragmatic. She had, not peculiarly in this familial house, a little look of his mother, but without her beauty. Mostly, in those moments, this woman reminded Silvio of Beatrixa, unbearably of her, for it was more than he could bear.