Plague in the Mirror

by Deborah Noyes

  Drawn closer to the shadowy edges of the market by her quite possibly insane guide, May keeps to open sunlight, walking through anything in her path, and it’s a good thing, because she wouldn’t be able to keep up otherwise; Cristofana moves nimbly, easily navigating stalls, wooden wheelbarrows, pigs, prancing roosters, and the man kneeling on the cobbles by the cow he’s just butchered, surrounded by meat, offal, and flies. May fights a big wave of nausea.

  “They’re at market every day now, these wandering preachers, ranting about the doomsday. But this one’s a true prophet, they say, a holy man who lived alone in a cave in the wilderness. He survived on berries and roots and wild boar he trapped and killed with his bare hands. Monks in the hills brought him barley bread and beans.”

  With the man has come a whole discordant parade. Small boys bang on drums and clang cymbals. Women stoop and wail. Seeing the confusion in her eyes when the Italian sermon begins, Cristofana repeats the man’s every word in a near whisper, translating deftly. “Death is come across the ocean,” he’s shouting, “dealing pestilence. This city has for too long offended God. It will burn like the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even now, Death is scything its way here on ships loaded with dainties and delicacies, shameless trinkets brought from the godless lands of the infidels in the East to indulge the vices of the rich. Death will pluck them from their scented baths and plant them in narrow pits and make of them a feast for worms. I saw under the altar of souls them that were slain for the word of God.”

  “Come with me,” Cristofana says, leaning, “and I will show you the way this world is going. When next you return, I may be gone. We all may be.”

  May finally makes the connection. Alarms sound in her sluggish brain. One of the first things Cristofana said to her the other time they visited this market, the time her double slipped through the portal and swapped worlds with her, without permission, was, Long ago, in the year of our Lord 1347, I caught a sparrow in my hands. . . .

  “What’s the date?” May whispers, and the horror must echo out in her voice.

  Cristofana studies her with interest. “Date?”

  “Today. What year is it? What month?”

  The howling preacher interrupts as if on cue. “There shall be famine, and pestilence, and earthquakes in diverse places. These are the beginnings of sorrows.”

  Cristofana sets off without answering, and May hurries after, searching the empty gazes of helpless, milling strangers and instinctively trying to avoid mangy chickens fleeing underfoot, and drovers and cattle flowing past in a crooked line, though she needn’t bother. None of them know she’s here. No one does. Not Liam, not Gwen. Not her parents. Just Cristofana.

  “The arches of the shops on the street are rented out to the wealthiest merchants,” says her guide, “but these have already left the city.”

  May glances inside at shadowy bolts of fabric and diseased-looking sausage links and sides of ham, swathed in flies, dangling in the windows; she tries to beat back her panic.

  “That man over there had wax amulets last week, made from Easter candles blessed by the pope. He’ll sell you pardons for your sins, salvation for every size purse. He has these on parchment, sacred documents fresh from Rome signed by cardinals or the pope himself. He has also the cheap stuff approved by mere bishops, priors, and archdeacons.

  “For a fee, the same man will consent for you to glimpse the holy relics in his pockets, brought here by providence. He’ll narrate their arduous journey from the Holy Land centuries ago here to the streets of Firenze, guided by God’s own hand. A truer miracle never was, he’ll say.

  “As for me,” she whispers, “I have seen enough wood from Christ’s cross to build Noah’s ark. But so great is this city’s fear of being struck down in a state of sin, who would scoff at divine protection? Do you see their faces? They believe, with all their hearts, and they are helpless.”

  Again, the itinerant preacher hoarsely punctuates Cristofana’s words. “And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him. . . . For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? . . . This was prophesied, and this has come to pass.”

  The holy man’s eyes are hollow and filmy and make May shudder. The drummer boys are marching to and fro, smiling, as if this is all one big Sunday parade.

  Cristofana pauses by the preacher and his entourage. She’s on a mission, it seems, and there’s no stopping or silencing her.

  “It’s not only men with cures for the soul who warn,” she says, “but those who trade and travel. Merchants and the men who drive animals to the distant markets, these all speak of bandits raiding their carts, of cheap and abandoned goods, of multitudes leading teams of horses with bulging packs away from the towns. The words you penned on your paper book —”

  “Are you saying you understood them . . . my notes about plague?”

  “In your scholar essay?” she says coyly. “Yes. I’ve said that my mother was English — herself the child of a great scholar. She taught me to read to spite Papa.” She leaves the bigger question of comprehension, of understanding what she read and of what it means in this moment, this lifetime, unanswered. Unanswerable. “Your words are confirmed now every day in the streets of Firenze. It’s whispered that each and every rotten corpse the Tartars flung over their walls, the Genoese lifted like a clumsy log. They jogged their ugly, unwanted gifts through town and — heave-ho — hurled them into the harbor. But how will a besieged city fight an enemy within as well as without? Soon the pestilence awoke inside Caffa’s walls. The survivors took to their ships. They sailed for the Mediterranean, to Messina and Genoa, bringing their burden with them.

  “The Great Mortality moves just so over land and sea. It is moving as we speak. The truth is right here at market. Look.” Cristofana waves May over near a girl with a basket, who flinches to hear Cristofana murmuring, seemingly, to herself, but then Cristofana turns her attention almost immediately, hypnotically, back to the preacher. “Usually, her basket is overflowing. All along this wall, she and other girls would stand competing with the clamor of tough old birds, women who sell the dried chestnuts, cheese, and mustard seeds — all manner of good things to make vegetable flans and pies and ravioli with. You see, there are no more craftsmen or wool and flax dealers, either . . . and only the one butcher. Even the dice players and the moneylenders with their green cloth tables are gone. Everyone hoards food and charges too much. To succeed at market now, you must be a purveyor of medical, magical, and spiritual protection against sickness. You must sell potions, like that man over there. He carries the best pottery and bone charms.”

  Cristofana begins threading her way through the crowd again, and May, lost and otherwise in thrall by terror, follows obediently, looking wherever her guide motions. “It is God’s will that medicine will be effective only if taken by a blameless person, but now the holy men are upstaged when a leech or a cunning woman lays out a table with protective charms and potions. My own lady swears by them and spends every florin she has to save her hide as well as her soul.”

  Cristofana stops in her tracks, turning. She leans close and whispers with violent intensity, “I care little for my soul, bella. I love my body. I love my sharp eyes, my knowing nose, my clever hands.” She lets those hands hover intently over May’s ghost shoulders, staring into faint, transfixed eyes.

  We correspond.

  “I do not wish to die. Not for Heaven’s sake or any other.” The hands fall to her sides. “You will help me?”

  In a split second, May tears her gaze away, remembering the closing words of the chapter she was copying out before Cristofana showed up that morning: Before it was over, between one-eighth and one-half of the population of Europe would fall down dead with plague.

  She bolts, running as fast as she can — it feels like flying with no obstructions, nothing to contain her but gravity — retracing her crooked, crowded path to the alley behind the abandoned shop, and the
sideways 8, and the relief of an invisible exit.

  The last thing in the world May wants is to go back. Ever. But her better judgment erodes quickly.

  With so many questions and only Cristofana to answer them, May stops sleeping through the night. She stares at the ceiling in the dark. She tosses and turns, and her mind and body ring with waiting.

  The trouble is that Time Present — even among supportive (if complicated, in Liam’s case) friends in a magnificent city like Florence — pales right now in the deep, dark shadow of Time Past. Her brush with Old Florence, the intrigues of a crazy girl wearing her face and flesh, the historic enormity of the Black Death, and her meeting with the beautiful artist — not to mention what the plague means for him and others like him — all begins to rule May’s every sensible thought and impulse.

  If Gwen and Liam have noticed any odd behavior on her part, they don’t speak of it. They seem to get that May needs space, and they let her be preoccupied when she has to be.

  Who was he, and would he survive?

  Without benefit of words or manners, without intrusion or fumbling, the artist in Old Florence seemed to see right into May as if he knew a secret shortcut to her soul. In moments, he thrilled her senses and made every fiber of her feel greedy and alive with now, and yet he isn’t here now . . . and how would May ever find him again, and warn him, if she didn’t go back? If Cristofana didn’t invite her back.

  The sketch on the artist’s easel, terrible and beautiful at once, is as much a mystery as he is. Thanks to all the reading she’s been doing and her tourist treks with Gwen, May knows that the image she saw and can’t forget — one suggesting the artist may not need a warning, that he’s well aware of what’s coming — very likely has no (surviving) precedent from his own day. Before and during the Renaissance, artwork was commissioned either by the Church or by powerful patrons who dictated style and subject matter. There was nothing gothic or strange or surreal about it. Maybe May’s mystery man was a stranger in his day just as she was.

  May tells herself that her obsession with going back has a practical side. If she can find a way to disable the portal, her double and the plague (and even the artist, if that’s what it takes to stay safe) might all slip away into a mist of disbelief.

  It makes sense, after all, that Cristofana, a self-professed orphan with nothing and no one to lose in her own world, wants a way out of Hell — the Black Death is about to rip through her Florence and level everyone in its path — and this is something May can’t give her without losing everything. But on the other hand, sensibly speaking, if May doesn’t figure out how to close the portal for good, she’ll live in dread. She’ll go through the summer — her life, possibly — looking over her shoulder.

  But as of now, if the invisible passage is going to open again, only Cristofana can open it, and it may be that only she can close it again, and keep it closed.

  Keep your friends close, May’s always heard, but your enemies closer, and for the first time those words make sense. But how can she affect anything if she doesn’t even know what Cristofana is? Her twin isn’t a ghost. She may look like one, at least in May’s world, and sure, she’s dead — literally speaking — has to be, since she lived in some other century (if not dead, then certainly past), but May has seen with her own eyes that Cristofana’s Florence, that timescape, for lack of a better word, still exists, just not now.

  Cristofana exists in it, and so does the man in the workshop.

  Her twin has a portable doorway and crosses through it, moving back and forth; she even brought May through, back to some moment in the Middle Ages, which is hardly the point May or any sane person would dial to if they had their own personal time machine, because it’s dark and filthy, full of funk and disease, and hard for women especially, or so May is reading, so she was taught in school. All this she knows. But what does she really know?

  Pull one small stitch from an old tapestry, or from time, and it becomes something else. The picture alters. The outcome changes.

  Almost two weeks later, Cristofana comes for her, and May can’t help it. She goes willingly, drawn as if by invisible threads. May might be the specter in this place, but it’s her twin acting like the Ghost of Christmas Future from that Charles Dickens story, all drawn eyes and doomy gestures and pointing. She moves with her usual stealth and speed, though, and May can hardly keep up on her macabre tour of a changed city.

  They visit abandoned shops, basement hovels full of rain and echoes, and once-grand villas where dirty men and boys recline on beds of filthy straw. These squatters whisper to Cristofana in lewd voices or try to touch her as she passes, though she evades them easily. They’re too weak and demoralized to exert themselves, and they rarely notice the baffled shadow in an Old Navy dress and leather sandals behind her. Most people don’t see the figment that is May . . . or don’t believe their eyes if they do.

  Because these squatters light cooking fires on the floors, the once-beautiful drapes and paintings in these homes are black with soot. Some villas, Cristofana warns, are barred and well guarded. Their noble inhabitants — those who haven’t already fled to the countryside — dress and dine as they always have. With their backs straight, they play the lute and tell tales and pretend the world outside is gone.

  Following, at the edge of her nerves, May tries to work out a way to ask the question that’s dogged her since Cristofana turned up: Where is he? She has no idea how to find the artists’ quarter on her own, though she does recognize in passing certain stern towers hemming in the cobble streets, towers that still exist in Florence Present.

  May can’t stop thinking about the man, even or perhaps especially, anxiously, in the midst of Cristofana’s tour of horrors. His face keeps looping through her thoughts, distracting from her mission, which is ostensibly to figure out how the portal works and disable it, protect or seal herself off from Cristofana once and for all. She feels like what she used to accuse Sarah and Jenna back home of being when they let their boyfriends or would-be/should-be boyfriends cloud their brains, let attractions get in the way of everything — school, friendship, family, the world — idiotic and self-absorbed. What does it say about her that she’s here on a guided tour of Hell, with no thought but his eyes, his hands? If it’s some escapist thing, she can’t help it. She can’t stop.

  But to ask after him, to give Cristofana that much insight into her, is to give her too much. So May bites her tongue as her twin marches her past barren fields beyond the city, where farm animals wander blankly in the tall grass, untended; past foreign flagellants parading between the towers in deserted streets, whipping their bare backs with knotted cords, splashing blood, chanting psalms, promising the end of the world.

  When May finally pleads, “What do you want from me, Cristofana? Why are you showing me all this?” the other girl won’t answer, only looks back with those knowing eyes, familiar and strange — the trick of a fun-house mirror. One minute her expression is bleak and distant; the next it’s full of winking menace. May is afraid of her, but not too afraid to feel intrigued or, as now, impatient. “If there’s nothing we can do, why am I here?”

  “I ask myself this every day, bella. And why should you have an answer, when I do not?”

  Their next stop is the villa of Cristofana’s rich employer and his wife. Both have recently died, which seems to come as no surprise to her. The house is hushed and full of flies. Looking around furtively, Cristofana partially closes the door to the bedroom where husband and wife lie blotched and bloated in their paneled bed. She begins rifling through trunks in the hallway, toying with the lady’s silks and feathers and finery, a litter of hungry kittens circling her ankles.

  “Can’t we do anything for them?” May repeats, motioning toward the half-closed door, behind which the prostrate pair looks anything but serene in death. The smell in here is overpowering, and for a moment May has to fight off real nausea, above and beyond the queasiness of being ghosted in the past. It’s a weird sensation, si
nce whatever’s in her stomach has to be incorporeal like the rest of her; she can no more vomit here than touch or taste. “Can’t we bring someone for them?” she pleads.

  “There is no one.”

  Cristofana has already explained that the priests and doctors are mostly dead themselves, that those left standing will not enter a plague house wherein there are no sick left to save.

  “The human dead are no more in our thoughts,” she declares, waving a hand, “than dead goats. And if we draw attention, it will only bring the bechini.” She waves toward the bedroom. “They’ll rob my master’s heirs and rape me, given the chance.” She looks up, her eyes vacant a moment, sensing May’s question. Cristofana always reels a question from the silence long before May knows to ask it. “The bechini are criminals, men condemned to man the oars of galley ships. When they offered to help bury the dead, they were set free. And now they roam like the ravenous wolves that circle the city walls at night, smelling death. Like fools, we threw the gates wide open. There. That is the trunk I want.”

  Cristofana herds the needy kittens away with her foot, holding another key up to the scant light penetrating heavy drapes. The lock makes a satisfying clunk. She begins to root through the trunk, twining herself in a beautifully crafted shawl. “They say women are too free now, whores, every one.” She holds up her arm to admire the embroidery. “That society no more knows right from wrong or evil from otherwise. They let a woman wear her hair flowing and her bodice cinched, and they don’t blink when she lifts her skirts to cross the mud. Look at you.” She laughs. “Your legs. Could they see you, this would have shocked and horrified. Today not so much. The wealthy hire in musicians . . . they called me in once to sing . . . they let a woman sing now. When the widows are sick — like the mother of my mistress when her children forsook her — they let their male servants tend to them and touch them, because they have no one else.”

  “You’re the one who should think about what you’re touching,” May says. “For example . . . that?” She points at the shawl and the pile of clothing belonging to the dead woman. “It’s contagious, you know, this sickness, horribly. Do you know what contagious means?”