A Bed of Earth

by Tanith Lee

He was warm and light yet strong, and he had that wondrous smell of new things that young animals and healthy children have.

  I walked down the path, and reached the cluster of horses, where I looked straight up and met the eyes of Beatrixa Barbaron.

  For it was she. Her dress was indigo-colored, and her face very pale. Her complexion and eyes were like Flavia’s. I had forgotten that would be so, but they were both Andrea’s daughters.

  “M’donna, this young gentleman tells me he belongs to you.”

  “Yes,” she said. She sat there, sidesaddle on the horse, rigid, and her hands showing the bones whitely as she gripped the reins. Where he had looked at me in approval, Beatrixa seemed the stricken one, the one who was afraid. Then she mastered herself. “He is my son,” she said. “I am Beatrixa Barbaron.”

  “He told me that you were,” I said.

  I found I too had begun to shake. The child sensed it at once, and stared at me again, now concerned. So I smiled and shook my head at him, and I, too, mastered myself.

  She said, “You will perhaps let me have your name, ‘ser.”

  “Bartolome da Loura. Settera Master of the Grave Guild.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I noted your guild. You must excuse us, my son and I, for interrupting your business.”

  “It’s seen to for now, madam.”

  Her servant was beside me. He was reaching finally for the child, to put him back on the mule where they had both been seated. I found I did not want to let go of the child. But naturally, I gave him over instantly. Then, he began to cry.

  The servant murmured, and coaxed him, but it was no use. Nor did he weep as children normally do, loudly, effusively. They were low, rough sobs, as if he could not help them. And all the while, he was looking back toward me, this child.

  “Give him up here,” said Beatrixa. The servant carried him over to her, and handed him up. The boy now went willingly enough but, seated in her lap, clasped in her arm, still he looked and looked at me. He said nothing. We should all, the rest of us, I believed, be most relieved at this. Beatrixa’s son was attributed, and by the father himself, to Chesare Borja. It would hardly be fortuitous, if he called me Dadda now.

  “Perhaps,” said Beatrixa. Her eyes were on the boy. “Perhaps, Valente, you might ask Messer da Loura if he will visit you this evening. Providing that he is free to do so.”

  My head was spinning slightly. The sun was flashing from every point of the world. I did not know quite what to say, I, an aging man in his forty-first year. But then she was in her twenties now, a woman evidently accustomed to wise judgment and self-command, and she was not quite steady. We were in the presence, she and I, and he too, the golden child, of some other thing, which was a mystery and a terror. We knew already what it was, yet did not know. Or would not.

  The boy—she had called him Valente—spoke, his eyes dry and shining again.

  “Come to see us, Messer da Loura, come this evening. We live in the castle. Do you know the one?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  The child frowned. It was only then, for that moment, I saw Borja in him, too. “Not sir,” he said.

  “If not, what shall I call you?”

  Beatrixa said, softly, “His friends call him by his name, ’ser Loura. And so may you, if you desire, seeing that, obviously, you are his friend.”

  So I swept him a bow, and promised him I would attend them, and employed his given name, since she had allowed it, Valente.

  She had named him, even, for Chesare, and Chesare had permitted this. In Franchia, it was Borja’s title, for his lands there, Duc Valent-en-Oise. Italy, when it called him that, made this out as Valentino. Valent—Valentino—Valente—one might suppose it apparent enough how the boy’s name derived.

  I had heard long before about Beatrixa’s child, and that the father, having seen him, had legally recognized him. For the mother, they said, Borja no longer had a sexual appetite, but they stayed on good terms. As well, for he kept a regular consciousness of the son. One way and another, Borja had not sired many children, and some of these, as with his wife in Franchia, were possibly dubious. You could not miss the fact that the boy’s unusual combination of extreme beauty and, for want of better words, the air of lawlessness about him—less in his demeanor than his eyes, and more ethereal than animal—might have been at once evocative to Borja of himself. In that way, Valente resembled his presumed father greatly.

  Nor did anyone doubt he was Borja’s offspring. Beatrixa was infinitely sensible. She, of all people, would not have played Chesare false, which would have been the act of a madwoman.

  And there was the other proof, the proof that none but she and Borja himself could possess (but which Flavia had scried and told me of, when she told me all the rest): Beatrixa’s virginity. Borja was the first with her, and knew it. Otherwise, the time of conception must correctly coincide.

  I thought, as I rode up to the rocca late that afternoon, over the drenched hills, what did the boy call this true father then, if he addressed me as Dadda?

  “Oh. “ said Beatrixa presently, in response to something else, “he will call Chesare nothing but ‘my lord.’ Valente is vainglorious of Chesare, also. Boastful even. And his grace the Duke has himself no difficulty, that his son addresses him like his adoring servant.”

  “It would be hard for anyone,” I said, “not to fall under the spell of your son.”

  “His spell,” she said. She looked at me intently. After our earlier meeting, she had sharpened her glances it seemed, with a wetstone. “Are we to speak of spells?”

  But I am ahead of myself, and I must not jumble up my text so.

  Let me arrive firstly at her door.

  The dusk was beginning when I reached the castle, and stars were breaking through the opened roof of the sky. I was completely unsure what was to happen now, and had come there in the most odd condition, between dread and a kind of exhilaration. I felt young again.

  Let me say at this juncture, for perhaps I mislead you, neither my hunger nor my love had been stirred up by Beatrixa. (I would have been a fool, and worse, an old fool, I thought, if it had—to allow myself such feelings for a high-born lady half my age.) But no, the very thing which drew me to her—her look of Flavia—made me not able to consider her, even frivolously, in such a light.

  I had seen Beatrixa long ago, you may recall, at the Ducem’s feast for Borja. I was very taken with her, then. And so I pondered now if, just as the shade of Flavia was summoned for me by Beatrixa, my liking for Beatrixa at sixteen had been a premonition of my love-to-come for a woman my own age.

  However. I was politely conducted through a courtyard of the rocca, up some stone stairs reasonably ancient two hundred years before, and across the great hall, where the history of the Barbarons—banners, trophies, swords—hung like bats from the beams.

  She received me in a sala off this hall. It was the room where she had first dined with Borja—Flavia had described it, and now I saw it for myself, and Flavia had been accurate. But then, perhaps Flavia had even physically been here, once, when little, and long ago. As she was Andrea’s daughter, it was not impossible.

  Beatrixa stood up when I came in. She wore a far more homely gown, but her magnificent hair, which had been dressed and bound up for the Veronavera streets, was loose around her. In this way I saw, as I had not earlier, a little strand of grey was in it. Yet she was not more than twenty-three or -four.

  She invited me to sit down. I did so. So did she. And by her chair, an old white dog glanced up at me, dismissed me, and went once more to sleep.

  She said, “You are my son’s guest, ’ser Loura. But before he comes in, let’s talk a minute.”

  “Of course, madam. Whatever you think best.”

  “We go down frequently to the town,” she said, as if inconsequently, “Valente and I. He has always wanted to. And when there, he has always looked about him carefully.” She waited.

  I said, “A town can be an intriguing place to a child
.”

  “More,” she said, “as if he looked for something. Someone.”

  There started up in me again that vibration which was not fear or exuberance—and yet which was a relation to both.

  She seemed to see how it was with me. And I, too, could see she was the same as I.

  So I said, “Madam, let’s be plain. What is this thing you wish to say to me?”

  “Oh do I have something to say?”

  For all her authority and her sense, I saw she was a woman.

  “M’donna—”

  “Oh,” she said, “dispense with that. Use my name. I am Beatrixa. My son has trouble in speaking it still—as I did until I was more than six. He insists he use it though. So I am Veyatrida or Beatrilsa or some such. I think he only calls me Mumma when he wants to startle me. He has his own rules for names, and titles. Oh, he will call Chesare nothing but ‘my lord’—”

  And then we had the conversation I have already reported, which ended in her saying to me so sharply, “Are we to speak of spells?”

  “Why should we?” I said.

  “Messer da Loura—Bartolome, if you’ll allow—we are caught in a spell, you and I. And he, my son. And you, I think, know it perfectly well. And I wish us to be frank and thus decide how we stand, before I can let Valente see you. Is my meaning clear?”

  “Yes. But not what I can say to you.”

  “You can tell me,” she said, “why you are the exact twin of my lover and my son’s true father. He was most often, for me, a very young man, not twenty. But once he was old, and many ages between. When momentarily he was forty years, then he looked as you do.”

  “What?”

  Despite everything Flavia had said—or because of it, of denying it, being bemused by it—I stared and stumbled.

  Beatrixa said, “I don’t mean either, my lord the Borja, as you well know. I mean the man who was the son of Meralda della Scorpia and Lorenzo Vai.”

  “Silvio,” I said.

  I heard her breathe very deeply inward, and out again. “Yes. Oh now, Bartolome, there’s no going back for you. For you can only know his name if you know everything.”

  “I do know—I’ve been told, by one I trusted—I do know everything.”

  “Why?” she said. She gazed at me simply now. Her eyes were limpid, her fine hands folded on her knee.

  She waited in patience for me to tell her. And you also have waited, and for longer perhaps than she. I ask your pardon that I made you wait, as I asked hers. I will render now the last thread of this tale, as my beloved one did, like her not knowing if you have believed any of it, let alone if you can believe this.

  We are between deaths.

  That is, between the waters of the outer life, which surround this one. And, while living in the world, between the last life we have lived—and died—here formerly, and the next death, which must come.

  This, Flavia told me. How a soul moves from body to body, at bodily death returning into the light, leaving the light to return again on to the earth—till all is accomplished. Whatever that All is thought to be, for that she never explained. Perhaps she did not yet comprehend.

  It was I who was to have been born the son of Meralda and Lorenzo Vai. My soul it was which haunted the atom of life then growing in her womb. My soul which therefore accompanied her, stricken, into the depths of the Aquila Lagoon, and saw her perish there, and her own soul, paying no heed to mine, go far away.

  Silvio was what I should have been, what I had intended to be, in this, my life. A nobleman of Venus, or an illegitimate urchin scrambling in the war-camps or studios of Lorenzo’s luck. Whatever else, and by whatever other name, a della Scorpia in partial blood.

  But that I could not become, for Meralda had drowned herself, and with her what I would have been. Instead, the character I was so busy moulding for myself about the fleck of flesh in her womb, that became the ghost—of what had never lived. My ghost, if I—that other intended I—had survived.

  As for myself, there was my life gone before I had had it. Yet I would not go back out of the world. For I had a cause there, a committment. It was more than the will to live again in body. It was a bond I had made before birth, with another unborn soul—Flavia’s.

  If I meant to be a bastard child of della Scorpia, she was to be (and this she achieved, and was) a bastard of the enemy House of Barbaron.

  And so, our scheme: at thirteen it would have happened, through the seeming vagaries of random chance, she and I would meet. Our earthly union would then have formed. How we were to have accomplished its fulfilment I cannot imagine, and nor did she. But we had, it seemed, vowed. To love, and so to wed, and so to begin the repair of the Barbaron-Scorpia feud, which had existed all those decades, and was set to go on for centuries, the murderous emnity over the Isle graveyard and the right to a bed of earth.

  With Meralda’s death, this plan was lost to us. And yet it seems my soul would not utterly give up its attempt to gain the world and the City. And so it searched for another embryonic life, one either unwanted by, or else awarded to it (to me) by the generosity of some other soul. This life—the best I could hope for at such quick notice—lodged in the womb of my drunkard mother, the progeny of my drunkard father. A sentence to likely death for any child, if it were not tenacious, and, once born, also of likely death—if not rescued. But I took my place there, it was all I had to take. And tenacious I was, and in due season, rescued I was too.

  And so I am here, Bartolome da Loura di An’Santa, Settera Master of the Gravediggers Guild and citizen of Venus.

  We met, Flavia and I, if not as we had planned. Love, it transpires, persists both sides of the grave. Love is everywhere, and I have known it well. It is the most holy thing and the most fearful, on the earth, but what we have of it here is but the phantom, as all things are, of the love to which we return.

  And yet, I am here still. I am here, and she is gone.

  Oh, Flavia.

  Flavia said my will was so strong, even in another body, it kept for me the appearance I should have had as Meralda’s son, resembling her father, Justore, but with her beauty—which in myself I can never find. This likeness was imprinted on the human form I took, perforce—which should have had no look of that at all. I wonder my drunken sire did not doubt me after all. Perhaps he did, and it made his beatings more brutal. Silvio, too, assumed this same look, Silvio who should have been one with me and I with him, two parts of one whole man. Silvio, who had removed now, so Flavia said, to another life in this world. But it would seem he had an uncanny glamour I, and no other man, ever has had, lacking as he did the anchor either of soul or flesh. This quality he has, somehow, extended to his son.

  For Valente is Silvio’s. Though he did not break Beatrixa’s chastity more than light breaks crystal, it was taken, and his essence filled her up. She carried this second ghost invisibly within her, almost, she said, aware of it, until the seed of a living man—and of all men, Chesare Borja—quickened her.

  Yes, Valente is Silvio’s son. Flavia knew, Beatrixa knows, and so do I. Silvio’s son—and therefore mine. I, who never in any liaison of my life have got a woman with child, as if I, too, must wait until some other might complete physical creation for me.

  I see Silvio in Valente, as I never saw Silvio. Yet, he and I are linked, while I linger in this world, and in this body. Flavia demonstrated that what I might learn, Silvio might, if he willed, discover. For example, as with Euniche’s betrayal of Meralda, of which I was told, and which Silvio therefore knew, and so acted out his vengeance from it. He was drawn to me in other oblique ways, but only ever once directly. That was when he rose to this earth by my house on the Silvia Lagoon, scaring the cat and annoying Strabica. He named himself for that lagoon, too. He could not get closer to my own name.

  But it was when he met Beatrixa Barbaron that the last magic—Flavia’s and mine—worked itself out. For they, like we, were tugged together by a cord of steel. They took our places, never seeing what they did. They
played our love-scene, which we had meant to play. And so, by the strangest ways, they worked the ending of the feud.

  Beatrixa informed me that night in her sala, that she herself was responsible for this. She had suggested to her father by letter (they never otherwise communicate) that he might give up the burial-land to the della Scorpia family. “He sometimes values my advice,” she said. “He has no religious feelings on ash burials, not now. And it’s better they have the ground than no one.”

  Did she know, in saying this, that she showed me, too, how she had now finished her part, that part which was not truly hers, but what we had vowed, our aim, Flavia’s and mine.

  But I do not anyway remember our spiritual plan. I do not remember how it was. Only Flavia, and her voice, telling me all she did, as she lay dying.

  For a great time, then, it seemed Beatrixa and I did not speak. Then we exchanged some ordinary talk. We spoke of the harvest, I recollect, and a smoky-dotted foal, bred from the leopard-spotted horse that Ducem Nicolo gave to Borja, which foal was her son’s other pride and joy.

  The old, white dog got up while we were at this, chatting with each other as if we had been familiar all our lives, as we had. The dog padded to me, and sniffed me, then lay down against my legs.

  “He was afraid of Silvio,” she said. “My Leone is choice in his fellowship. But he has no quarrel with Valente.”

  Soon after, the child came to the door, from the stair that led to the floors above. How he knew to arrive then, I cannot determine.

  He was as I recalled, but for one thing. His mother had schooled him somewhat, and he no longer called me Dadda, but Bartolo. His face though was still keen with affection and expectancy. And now I might admit to myself why I loved him.

  Since I have been back in the City, I have looked very long at myself in Pia’s mirror. I can see the resemblance. It would be gross to deny it, now, it is striking enough. He might well be mine, or the della Scorpias’, at any rate, and I a della Scorpia too. But he has also that element of Chesare. Thank God, for all their sakes.