by Tanith Lee
“My dog—you have found out that I have a dog, your grace?”
“My grace has found out nothing. Chesare, who will be pleased to hear you call him so, remembers your little dog from the Ducem’s palace. It was such a good little dog. My sister especially noticed it. It never tried to chase the flamingo.”
By now, everyone else, even Omberto, had withdrawn. Chesare’s man had brought the gifts into the room, then left. Firelight ebbed and flowed. It was the first fire of the season, for the nights up here could be cold. Outside, the musician was playing the vighela, singing a lilting Spanish song, whose words gained appropriate mystery from not being understandable.
“I didn’t think you would have seen me,” she said.
“Really? I saw you very well. I don’t miss much, Beatrixa. Particularly a woman of such power.”
She glanced up at him. “Power?”
Borja smiled at her. He has the face of a wolf, she thought. But it did not increase her wariness. Oh no. She thought, They are not alike, yet he is like him. Like Silvio, she meant. This glittering quality, poised like a razor s edge between a maleness cultivated and sophisticated, and the unpredictable and ferocious, the lawless, the creature of the inner dark.
“Well,” he said. He put his hand across the low table and took hers. She was prepared to find his touch electric. It was. “What shall we do now?”
He seemed to know her through, all there was to know. That was part of his trick, obviously. Yet even so …
What shall we do now? And Silvio had replied—
She said, “Why must we do anything?”
“Why indeed. Let me tell you what I would like. To go with you somewhere even more private than this. To remove your garments, but leave you your jewels and your silver cap, perhaps your stockings and your silk shoes. And then, I wonder.”
She got to her feet and he rose quickly and came around the table. He took her by the waist, not at all bruisingly, and lifted her up high in the air. It was effortless. He stood there holding her up, her contact with the earth all lost to her, but for the grip of his hands around her waist. Women must like this, she thought. She thought she did. He let her down slowly, bringing her smoothly against him, and finally he put his hand behind her neck, fondling the mass of her hair, and bent his head and kissed her.
A rush of feeling, as if a sluice-gate broke, burst through her, dizzying, terrible, and glorious. She clung to him, and found to her horror she had taken fierce hold in turn of his hair, but before she could rectify this trespass, he laughed and said, “I thought so.” And he pulled her with him now, up the side stair to the rooms above.
They ran, he and she, into her bedchamber. It was nothing like Paradise. The walls were dank stone and hung with faded tapestry, and the bed was an uncooked porridge of lumps and cavities. The door slammed shut. The sound of it went on ringing in her head as she tugged at his clothing in her need to seize him, in her need to strip him as he stripped her.
“Well, Beatrixa,” he said as they landed on the riot of the bed, both of them half-undressed.
Her brain sat miles off and said, Who is he, this one? But she knew who he was. He was life. He was the world.
He pushed her legs apart. It was easy, she always rode astride.
“Yes,” she said.
“Say no,” he said.
“No, then.” And she scored his flanks with her nails.
He said, “Amor vincit omnia.”
As he thrust into her, unexpectedly she felt the pain, a wasp-stinging tearing hurt, at which she cried out, and, not to be denied, let him force closer inside, wrapping his body with hers.
Into the night he rode her and she, him, absorbed in the tumult of it. He was silent, thrusting and burning in her, until obliteration came. It voided her, and took away everything, even her love.
She lay under him. Sweat, heat, their breathing. Where were they? Who were they?
He said quietly after a moment, “I was rough with you. I never knew you were yet a virgin. Perhaps you should have told me.”
Oh, so that was the other wetness, not only sweat and lust, but blood. A virgin.
And he, and she, had thought she was no longer that.
“Yes,” she said, meekly.
He removed from her and lay on his back. “An honor I’m very conscious of,” he said, “to be first with you. You have been most generous, Beatrixa Barbaron.”
She would say later, “He is always polite, chivalrous, with me. He treats me very well. I’ve nothing to complain of. Sometimes he even discusses politics with me, tells me something of his plan for Italy. Once he told me of a dream he had. He is very just. He’s like that, with the places he conquers, so long as they are faithful and do as he wishes.”
Amor vincit omnia—everything is conquered by love. She would write to Andrea too, warning him, in cunningly chosen words that gave away nothing and revealed all. It could be advantageous to him this, that his daughter won favor with such a man. Such things could always be turned to use.
She did not of course mention to her father that Borja had found her still a virgin, and perhaps prized her offering the more for that. Andrea believed, as Beatrixa herself had, that her virginity was gone. He would have credited a secret marriage much less. But a marriage there had been, and a nuptual. In Heaven. Where it had not counted, it seemed, or counted in some other scales than those of the world.
Chesare Borja visited Beatrixa, as the passage of his military affairs, and other endeavors, permitted three or four times before the spring. That first year he even arrived in the two weeks before Christ’Mass, leaving her only to go straight to Rome. His interest in her was beneficial also for the castle. Some astounding luxuries were accrued during those first months, and a couple more during the following year.
By the end of that first year, however, his fancy for her was on the wane. This, too, was handled diplomatically and nicely. It was only in bed that he was sometimes, as he said, rather rough. But even there, not always. He could be languid, too, and lascivious. Or careless. Only a battlefield ever gained his absolute attention, that or Italy.
Once the second spring was there, he had virtually ceased to call on her. Until there came to be one significant occasion. But it was before that he told her about the dream.
“I have never told any other,” he said, “save for my sister, the Lady Lucretza d’Estro.”
It was a sexual dream. (He apparently made no demur either about sharing it with Lucretza, or the fact he had done so, with Beatrixa.) He had married Venus to secure the City and the state. Then, on the Rivoalto, bored to distraction by the court of Ducem Nicolo, this dream.
“Venus herself walked into my room. Do I mean the City or the goddess? Something of both.”
She had mounted him, he said, and used him. She was in her form bigger than most women, but provocative enough.
“The most intriguing thing,” he said to Beatrixa, lying against her, his hand upon her breast. “was that her hair was blue.”
“For the sea,” said Beatrixa, “perhaps.”
“Perhaps. But she marked me, I found it when I woke the following day. I sent for my physician, one takes no chances with those sort of things. He dosed me with some poison, liquid gold and arsenicum, I think it may have been. The marks went away.”
Beatrixa had wondered if this were a lie, as so many things were lies—even, like her virginity, when told as truths. Did Borja perhaps have the disease which all Italy blamed on the Franchians, and all Franchia on the Italians? It was too late to be anxious now. Besides, he had no signs of it, nor she.
She had also heard, in a letter from one of her cousins, of a bizarre wonder corresponding to his dream, that had occurred in Venus. An island had surfaced, it seemed, in the Aquila Lagoon. A small mound of earth, cleaving the open water. Since it had appeared about nine or ten months after Borja’s marriage with the City, popular wit named the isle Filia Caesini—Chesare’s Daughter.
She thought he had p
robably heard the tale. Even seen the island, as now she never would.
Why a daughter, though? In the rumors, his by-blows were always boys. Even his sister was supposed to have borne him a male child. And by the end of that second spring, when really he very seldom came to see her any more, Beatrixa, too, would have proof that normally his seed formed men.
BARTOLOME
BELIEF IS NOT ALWAYS NECESSARY for a miracle, and disbelieving seldom prevents disaster. I had no foreknowledge, I knew nothing, until it was already too late.
It was winter, dark and icy cold. This was in the months after I had turned thirty-nine years of age. I felt the cold more, maybe, as an older man will. But otherwise it had been a fine year. Pia and I were on reasonable terms, and there had begun to be some talk in private at my guild-house, which concerned my elevation to the Seven, that is, the seven Under-Masters who serve only below the Guild Master himself.
Other than all this, there was Flavia, whom I saw now regularly once in every week, and in whose house I stayed always on that night. I had told Pia, long before, this recurrent absence was to do with secret business of the guild, and she had accepted this from me without a ripple. By now, for the procedure had now gone on nearly three years, she was accustomed to it. Did I feel guilty at lying to her so routinely, or that my lie had included also the guild? No, I had no guilt. I too, was accustomed by then. And Flavia—she was my life’s blood. It was my time with her that gave me life and reason for all the rest.
But Flavia had been gone at Verona the past three weeks, and the freezing weather had convinced me she would not yet be coming home. So when Pia said, “What, are you to be under my feet again tonight, husband?” I had said I was glad of the respite from my work.
We went early to bed. I seem to recall the Luna Vigile had sounded, but perhaps that came a little after.
Pia was asleep, but I lay thinking.
To this hour, I can recollect nothing of those thoughts but I know they were trivial, and of no significance.
Then came a pounding on the house door.
Both Pia and I sat up, she in a taking.
“Hush, Pia. Thieves don’t knock. Someone wants to speak to me urgently, or he would never venture out so far.” For the house, you will perhaps remember, lies by the sea-wall of Silvia, on a bare spit of land, with only a few blasted trees for company.
So I went down in my bedshirt, with a candle, and undid the door—Pia’s cook and the boy, needless to say, had not stirred.
There at the door, bowed against the bitter night as if crippled by it, stood Flavia’s younger servant, Anso.
For an instant, I made no sense of it. It meant nothing at all, and was only inexplicable. Then my guts turned to gall within me.
“What?”
“Oh God, Messer Bartolome—you must come with me now.”
It was like the summons of death, not to be avoided, and everything at once surrendered to it—and so it was.
“Tell me why.”
He told me. He was in tears.
Something made me turn, and there stood Pia in her mantle, shielding her own candle with her hand, although there was no wind.
I said, or someone who spoke for me, “Pia, I must go out. Something has happened. Don’t be afraid. I am well, and will be back when I can, but it make take some time.”
Then I ran upstairs again and got into my clothes, or I must have done, for later I found I was dressed, but I remember nothing of it. Nor of how I went with him and got in the waiting boat he had ready. We were rowed across the City, through all the never-ending twisting dark of night and water, and it seemed to take a century—and only that comes back to me, how long it took, but very little else, until we reached the house south of the Diana Gardens.
She had wanted, Anso said (as he stooped there at my door) to come back. She said she had more comforts for winter in the City, and only some dispute on the estate had compelled her away at that season. Also she had wanted, it seemed, to see me.
Even in such weather, she had spurned a carriage. To ride was quicker, she always said so, and indeed she was not in error. They had made fair time, and by that day’s overcast, dreary afternoon, the City was in sight.
There are woods there, close to the thoroughfare. Abruptly four men came riding out of the trees and straight up on the road. They were a nasty-looking gang, and Flavia said instantly that she believed they were robbers.
Because of robbers, she always journeyed in her male disguise, and plainly dressed. As a rule, such cut-throat bands are more inclined to prey on the obviously wealthy, or on somewhat larger bodies of travelers, where there is more likelihood of booty.
But these fellows wanted dealings, it seemed. They partially blocked the road and said they feared a hard winter, and would the young gentleman spare them a few pence.
Flavia got hold of the bridle of her servant’s horse, and rode straight up to the robbers, calling cheerily, “We’ve little enough, but you are welcome to it,” and just as she was level with them she kicked in her heels and hit Anso’s horse across its withers with her crop. Next moment, the two of them shot through the scattering bandits, and were pelting on down the road towards the gates of Venus.
“Their horses were nothing, poor ill-used, starved things, no better than sheep,” said Anso. “She knew what she was at, too. They had a bad eye, those men. It was more than money they wanted.” It seemed they had liked the look of two young men, both seeming not much more than boys, for though to be a woman on the road is chancy, to be a youth is sometimes no better.
Of course, Flavia could ride as well as any man, and both their mounts were good ones. Behind them the gang did their best to pursue, but made a sow’s ear of it by all accounts.
Anso was even laughing, with excitement at their narrow escape, and the breakneck speed of their flight. And the arch of the Porta Vene, as I have said, was in sight and getting closer by the second.
“We were safe by then, Messer Bartolome. That was it—we were safe.”
There was traffic ahead there, he said, some carts approaching the gate though it was almost evening, before the City should close herself to the land. And then a kind of explosive yet soundless severance came, as if a piece of the light had snapped and toppled out of view.
Anso looked over his shoulder. He was brave, Anso. Despite the robbers, when he saw, he jerked his horse around immediately and galloped back.
It was a stretch of ice, less in width than a ribbon, he said. Her horse had hit this ice with its left front and back hoofs, skidded, and gone down. As it fell, unable to help itself, it threw Flavia on the ground, then rolled across her.
He said the first thing she said to him, as she lay there and he came up, was, “Is the horse well, Anso?”
“Yes, lady,” he said. For he saw it had now regained its feet, shaking itself over and slewing its eyes, but unhurt. Then he drew his knife and faced along the road. But the cutthroats had already vanished back into the wood. He realized presently that some of the men farther down near the gate (carters they were) had seen the incident, and were now running up, and this was why the robbers had made off. At the time he only saw that he could now concern himself with Flavia.
He kneeled down and asked her what he should do.
Her eyes were shut. Her face, he said, had no blood in it, and he thought no wonder, it was out on the road—but then he saw it was not blood, only wine from a skin that had been on the saddle. And then he hoped.
But she said, “I must get home. When they come, tell them to lift me. It won’t matter how.”
“But they must take great care,” he said.
“No need,” she said. Then a small thin trickle, like the wine, ran from her mouth, and he knew, as she did.
The carters assisted them, and after that, others. They got her into a boat, and so through the City to her house, where she was carried in. She told Anso to bring all the herbs and powders from her chests, and she would instruct him in what to mix and how,
and he did this, and when he had the tincture ready, he and the other servant helped her to drink it. Then she seemed better, and she said, “You must go and fetch Bartolo, please. As quickly as you can. I am so sorry for his wife, but it can’t be avoided.”
Then, by my door, Anso wept again. There had been, he said, so many delays, and it was night by then, and he had been in a fight with a wanderlier who would not take him, thinking him drunk or mad. But here he was at last before me, and I must come at once. Pray God it was not already too late for her to bid me farewell.
When I went into her room and saw her on the bed, which I had so often shared with her, I, like Anso, thought she had been mistaken. She was propped up on the pillows, her brown, dark hair combed out, and though she was pale, her eyes were clear and intelligent, as I had always seen them. (Like stars, I had said, like stars.) But then, something about her—I think it was her utter stasis, as if she were already from her body, only there still, in the eyes and mouth, to see me and speak to me—well, then I knew her looks lied, and she and Anso had not.
I have seen and attended the dying and the dead many times. What else, it is my trade.
But this was not like that.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “here I am. What can I do for you?”
“You can listen, Bartolo,” she said. “I have a lot to say, and you must hear it through. I should have spoken before, but there was never the proper hour for it, and now it’s late, my darling, but I have just enough time. If you will be patient and attend.”
So I sat down in the chair, and I listened, and she told me all she had perceived, through her curious and pure magic. She told me the life of Meralda, which I had known already, and of Meralda’s son, Silvio, who had never lived in this world until he was a man, and of Andrea Barbaron, and of Beatrixa, and of Dionyssa de Mars—of them all.
I did not once contest what she said, although, as I told you, I did not think she could know so much. Not that I judged her a liar. She believed in all she said. After, as I have told you too, I also came to believe it. Or, if you will, for six days I do so, and on the seventh, I rest from believing. For even God had to rest, it seems, from the unconscionable wonders He Himself had wrought. And we tiny atoms are sooner tired than a god.