A Bed of Earth

by Tanith Lee

  I remember her voice. I can hear it now, if I will only listen. I do not mean that she comes back to me like those ghosts and personalities and souls she told me of—or if she does, the physical mote in my spiritual eye blinds me to her. No, it is only love, I mean. It is only memory.

  But in the end, she had told it through, every single particle of their lives, and ours, all so strangely intertwined. And then she told me why the tangle was.

  Forgive me now, that I will not yet give you in turn that last note of the song. But as I only came to credit it fully through another circumstance, which happened at a later date—which happened four days ago, to be exact, and which is the reason I have sat down to write all this—allow me also to set that before you in its turn, before I render up the final answer.

  You may not, even then, believe me. You may say I am the liar, the romancer, or the madman. Or you may say death is the lie, the greatest madness and falsehood in all this world. Even if, perhaps, on the seventh day, you rest from thinking that, and holiday once more in doubt.

  I hope it is death which is the great lie. But Flavia at least I know did think so. Whatever else she was that night, she was not afraid, and though sorry to leave me, without any lasting sorrow, thinking we would meet again. And God knows how well I, too, long for that.

  When she finished speaking, then I saw the light run out of her. She seemed to grow small and old, yet she smiled at me.

  “Come here and kiss me,” she said.

  I kissed her, lightly, as one does with the very old, or the frail.

  “Be friendly to Pia, Bartolo,” she said. She sighed, “Be kind to yourself. I’m tired now. It must be time, I think.” When she said this, it was as if my heart tore open, as if the walls fell down. But then she smiled once more at me. “Until again,” she said, and then, looking past me, her face suddenly became not old but very young. “Why,” she said, in a different voice, a girl’s, “’Chesco, is it you?” (Franchesco was her dead husband’s name.) “Oh, then, of course I will. And Mumma, too—” at which her face lit up, full of a happiness even I had never beheld. Like a simpleton, I turned my head—though it was irresistible—to find who she spoke to. There was no one there that I could see. When I looked back, she had gone.

  I thought it must have been the next day before I saw that I was at home in my own house, and that Pia stood there looking at me, and that she had been crying.

  When we were young, she and I, she was jealous over small and petty things—if I noted a pretty woman on the lagoon, or in some other house, if I spoke even of a legendary classical beauty, such as Helena of Troy, or Dido. Then Pia would flare up at me, “Oh, you show me my place, Bartolo. You show me my worth to you.”

  Now Pia said, “Bartolome—Oh Bartolome—it’s so terrible a thing.”

  “You know,” I said. I was vague, callous perhaps. I thought she had found out, as she must, and was now to unleash her howls and spite.

  “Know?” said Pia, “I’ve known these four years and more. Oh, I was raw at you, then. But you didn’t abandon me, or despise me. She made you easier, if anything, your Flavia Tressi. I’ve learned not to mind. But this blow you’ve taken is a heavy one. I will do whatever you want, whatever I can.”

  I gaped at her as if I had never looked on her before. Perhaps I had not, properly.

  Then she went off and came back with a bowl of thick, hot soup, the dish she herself would always make, rightly not trusting our cook.

  “Eat a little of this now. It’s three whole days since you’ve taken anything but water. Look, here is some Roman wine. Micaeli who lifts the stones brought the barrel. The Guild Master sent it. And here is the spoon.

  She treated me like a child. I was one. I have said, I think, she was always at her best with children.

  SILVIO

  During the morning and the afternoon, Dionyssa was generally occupied. At Sta’ Bianca, there was plenty to do. And though naturally, no resident lady not herself a nun or lay-sister (there were five such residents here) need do anything, those that did were welcomed.

  In Dionyssa’s case, the welcome was quite hearty. She excelled in certain areas, they found, as with the gardens and the herbarium. (The other resident lady who sometimes liked to help, was less proficient, and now and then needed tactful, time-consuming redirection.) But Dionyssa was a gift to the nun-house

  It lay beyond Venus, on the Veneran plain, quite near to the town of Mariamba, where once a saint had lived, they said. Strangely, for nuns, they seemed unsure which saint.

  On clear days, the mountains far off along the plain, drifted closer. And in winter, their tops were white as the moon.

  The grounds of Santa Maria Sta’ Bianca held endless variety. A herb garden and a physic garden, a coppice wood (where local farmers were permitted to graise their pigs, in return for a regular fee of choice pork), also several ponds with fish. For recreation there was a cedar walk, a cypress avenue, and a curious topiaria, cut to the shapes of the Last Supper, with Christ and eleven Disciples carefully rendered, but with Judas left out. “There was a Judas,” the Mother of the house had told Dionyssa, when first describing the grounds, “But that bush died. A minor miracle. We did not dare put him in again.”

  Dionyssa had surveyed the spot. She had thought, Is there no forgiveness then? Even from the One who said we must forgive?

  But then she had crossed herself and asked His pardon. It was not God who did not forgive, but the thoughts of mankind, even of the generous nuns, who hated the Betrayer Judas, and would not suffer him even in a bush.

  By day, Dionyssa was often at work in the gardens, summer and winter. She would put on the dress of a lay-sister, tie up her hair in a scarf, and work beside them. She was usually at the ten o’clock morning service, too, and once a week at the evening one. She was not overly religious, but she liked to attend—most of the five other permanent guests did not bother, save when they must. It seemed a courtesy, to Dionyssa, since she lived now in this country, to observe some of its customs.

  Also, it passed the time.

  Other than the gardens and the herbarium, where she had brought a little knowledge and soon gained more, Dionyssa would take an hour or so to play her viola-lute, and the lap-harp. There was reading too, and in the library of Sta’ Bianca many books, not all of them concerned with piety. Other books came to her as well, by the kindness of Como della Scorpia. Some of these were in the Frankish tongue, as she had requested. Aside from all this, Dionyssa had acquired a black dog. He was from a litter of pups born to the Mother-minora’s own canine companion. “The disgrace,” had said the Mother-minora, laughing, “everyone of them black or brindle, and she such a perfect grey. Whose are they? Some imp’s I shouldn’t wonder.”

  The dog, whom Dionyssa accordingly named Beaumal, was mostly about her through the day.

  But, after the day, would come the night.

  “What, do you want to go out again?” The dog stared up at Dionyssa, whining. “You are more like a cat. Or a wolf. Are you a wolf, Beaumal, that always you want to run away when it’s bedtime? Go then. I will see you tomorrow.” And letting the dog from the door, Dionyssa closed it once more, and was alone with darkness.

  Such an affectionate and loyal dog. Why did he run off always at night when she went to bed? It happened now and then during the days, too, but then she supposed he found some other activity—he was friends with everyone—and she was often busy.

  At night, she missed him. He would have warmed the bed. She might have spoken to him as she lay awake, or when she woke, off and on, both of which she did so often.

  But it is Yves I miss.

  Would the pain never leave her? No, it seemed not. She did not weep now, but had hardly ever done so. The hurt was too deep for tears.

  She could only hope she would grow more used to it, her loss. That she would feel it less keenly if not less frequently. But it had been years now. Perhaps nothing could change.

  At least, Beaumal came back with mor
ning.

  “Good evening, my love,” he said.

  Dionyssa lay smiling in her sleep. There had been a time when she would not have understood even that small phrase, spoken as it was, in Franchian.

  Ma chère amie …

  She opened her eyes and saw Yves de Mars sitting there on the bed.

  He was, in the dark, clearly to be seen, although there was no moon, and few stars.

  I am dreaming. Let me not wake up, not for a while.

  “Yves?”

  “Yes. Here I am. I see you haven’t noticed I was gone at all.”

  It was what he had been used to say to her, returning from war. His eyes laughing and his face doleful, and behind it all, the shadow which, after a day or so, would fade. Until the next return. Until there was no return, and the shadow had him.

  “You’re well,” she said. “I’m so glad—to see you like this.”

  Jolting her, he said, “Ah, you mean because I’m dead. Let me tell you, mignon, it is an ideal state. Nothing wrong with it.”

  Dionyssa sat up in the bed.

  She said, slowly, slowly, “You are a little older, Yves.”

  “I wish to keep pace with you, though naturally you look as young as the day we met. Even so, years have passed.”

  “But—do the dead change?”

  “Of course, sweetness, if they want. It’s only mortal stuff that’s subject to earthly laws. I prefer this, unless you would like a younger husband.”

  “Are you a vision? Have you come to me in a dream? Is this you?”

  “What do you think? Do you think me a vision or a dream? Are you afraid? Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid. How could I be fearful of you?” She looked him up and down, at his dark eyes, his hair, his mouth, his body. Even his clothes were his own, his very best garments kept for festivals, with the Mars disc worked in orange thread, the skirted Frankish doublet trimmed with fur—

  “God is kind to us,” she said, “to allow us this. I am so glad to know—that you’re well. Your—spirit.”

  “It’s more than that,” he said.

  He leaned then across the bed, and kissed her lightly, as he had at the very first, on the lips.

  “Do I seem unreal?”

  “No. How can this be?”

  “You have already said, ma belle. God is kind.”

  As he took her into his embrace, as she felt against her the living breathing muscle and flesh of a man, a man known to her as her own hand was known, a man not dead but alive, Dionyssa thought, Yes, it is a dream. Before she gave herself up to it.

  But presently, lying stilled in his arms, she heard a dog howling in the night gardens (and seemed to identify the cry of Beaumal, who must truly be a wolf), but also she thought, No dream. He is here with me. No dream at all.

  Despite any foreboding or reason, he had gone back to the Palazzo Barbaron, eventually. He had with diligence looked for Beatrixa, as if he might find her. He did not. Silvio decided then that she was, as he had suspected, now kept invisible from him, or else, perhaps, that she had gone far away.

  They said a curse could not travel over water. But a spirit might. Over water or land. Anywhere.

  But they—God had joined them, possibly. Then sundered them. Whom God had sundered—no. He had lost her.

  Silvio mourned.

  It was a deep and silent process, that took many days, and in the world of men far longer. Or, it was over in a minute. But that minute had used up the years.

  He returned through the depths to his mother’s island in the green lagoon. He knew here, also, what he would find, and indeed he found it: nothing. Everything had disappeared. Instead, a glowing brightness, soft and serene, lovely in its absence of anything. This was what filled now that other place.

  Silvio flew or swam through it, and now and then he assembled something, as he knew he could, from the material of the radiant light. A tree, a stretch of water, or a flowering meadow. But, too, he sensed that something other lay beyond the light. Something he might not have.

  It irked him. Then it made him sad. He came away.

  For some while he roamed the physical City of Venus. He toyed with things and played with humankind, startling them, upsetting them. Then he was sorry for them. Sorry for it all.

  Again he mourned.

  And it seemed to him, though he had been gone a short while, which had been years in the real world, now he returned to the City—less than a year had elapsed, only months. But it was winter now.

  One night, he went again to the Castello by the Triumph Canal. He went to Andrea’s library, and idled there as he had before. And then, as if to an appointment, Andrea came in.

  He carried a candlebranch—it was late, the great house mostly in darkness. He wore a mantle over his shirt, and velvet slippers. He was old, surely he was old, white in his long hair that now was thin and coarse, what was left of it. And his fat had slackened.

  His eyes, sunk in pouches of discolored skin, looked round suspiciously. As if he guessed the library-haunt was there once more.

  Then nevertheless he seated himself and, taking up a pen, began to write on a sheet of fine Arabian paper.

  Silvio moved forward and stood behind Andrea, where his unseen shadow might fall across the sheet. He read, Beatrixa—

  That was all. That was all the old man, this old Andrea Barbaron, had written.

  And then he put down the pen and pushed back the chair and stood and turned and confronted Silvio, standing not ten inches from him.

  Andrea’s eyes wandered over Silvio’s features.

  “What do you want of me? Haven’t you done enough?”

  “Yes,” Silvio replied. He had felt Andrea’s breath on his face. “As much as I meant to. And considerably more.” “What are you?” said Andrea.

  Silvio thought, He can’t see me, or hear me, yet he knows I am here. He too has gained another awareness than he had.

  “Your daughter’s lover.” Silvio said.

  But now Andrea said, “What? What? Are you there? What are you?”

  “Some things, then, you don’t like to hear, so you won’t. I took her from you, old man. But she was taken also from me.

  “I will have a priest to this room,” Andrea said. “See if that works.”

  “It will work,” answered Silvio.

  He passed by Andrea, not impertinently going through him, and took up the paper on which Beatrixa’s name had been written. Perhaps it was a letter. Even though it entailed only one word.

  Andrea watched the paper skimming off across the room.

  Then slowly he grinned. He did not, then, look so old any more.

  “Take it, if you want,” he said. “Do as you like.”

  And then he turned and went out, leaving behind him the burning candles, which Silvio himself presently extinguished.

  So he took her written name away with him, and one other thing, too. It was the Casket of the Heart, which had lain till then in a cabinet in Andrea’s apartments. Silvio knew this, once he set his mind to it. He seemed always able to know everything, in this fashion—everything that was of the physical world, or had been. (Only one thing he could never learn—the light beyond the light.)

  Silvio undid the cabinet by psychic pressures on its locks, and lifted out the Casket, and sprang out through the window with it. The closed window, that was.

  Perhaps Andrea had been sleeping in his bed while all this went on. Silvio had given up any interest in Andrea now. He did not even go to see.

  The Casket then, Silvio bore to the lagoon. Not Silvia, but Aquila. He drew it with him down deep into the black, icy winter water, the cold of which would have killed a live man in seven minutes. He sank to the floor of mud, and there he walked, Silvio walked on the sandy mud which was the sea-bed there, the earth-bed under the ocean.

  Glacial fish issued sluggishly from the glooms and quivered back to them. Others lay asleep in apertures of stone, looking like sleek daggers.

  He skirted dr
owned boats, wanderers, fishing-craft, one vessel with an illustrated sail done in gemmy dyes, which now the water had bleached to—ghosts.

  Silvio noted the skeletons of men here and there. There were always these. He glanced at them, but had no need to investigate them, despite the fact it was bones that he sought.

  She had gone in just by the church of Maria Maka Selena. But currents swilled about the lagoons, and seasons and more than three decades had also done this.

  Silvio found the remains of his mother at last, simply because they were hers, and his mother was what she had been, if only for a day or so. He found her death then, in the lagoon. (And his own death curled inside her, no longer there in any form that might be recognized. There, for all that.) As in the world, bones were all she had finally left him.

  He thought he was far off from the City now, but he was not yet against the irregular shallows of the sandbars, out where the open sea began.

  Silvio gave the Casket of the Heart of Beatifica to his mother’s bones, positioning the box where he himself had lain, at the pelvis. He murmured to the bones what he did, that he put into their keeping the relic of a saint. He did not know either that it was the heart of a dog. He had never looked. And anyway, however well-read and clever, he might not have known the difference.

  With his hands, as a mortal man would on the land, Silvio built a mound above the burial spot. He made for her, and for the Heart, a bed of earth.

  But then, because he was not, and never had been a mortal man, Silvio gouged great torrents of the mud out of the laguna’s floor, and hauled them by will alone towards this place. He piled it up, earth upon earth, pebbles, shale, shell, shawling sand, marine detritus, pieces of the rocks. He piled it high, and higher, rising with it. The active fish fled away. A silver shark, which came to observe, swerved off into the calmer water.