He learned to his delight that the natural defenses of Agion Oros were so considerable that the monks were casual about barring the monastery gates at night. Furthermore, during the day, the gates stood open and often unguarded, as the monks in silent procession went to their labors in orchards, fields, and pastures. From nooks and hides, Vicente spent several days watching the monks at their work. Once he saw a donkey pestered with horseflies, and knew that if donkeys and horseflies behaved here as elsewhere, rain was coming. They did. A cloudburst sent up a screen, and in slashing rain Vicente gained access to the courtyard through gates no one had stopped to close.
The next day he found a cloak on a peg, set aside for use in inclement weather by whichever monk most needed it. Though his new beard didn’t fringe and frazzle in the same way of Byzantine priests and acolytes, he made his cautious explorations. Vicente never heard a human voice raised in anything but apparent prayer until the day an ancient patriarch came across him with his hand on the door of the monastery’s treasury. The old man had shrieked like a woman, and monks appeared from nowhere, fierce as crows, to settle down upon Vicente and protect what was inside. Down into the dungeon he had been thrown.
Memories began to drift and become unsettled in his mind. Sometimes he said aloud—“Cesare, Duc de Valentinois, I came so much closer to achieving your quest than you thought I might.”
He said it. “Cesare, this hand nearly touched the fruit of the Garden of Eden.”
He said, “The stem was warm to the touch, like stone in a sunny garden, though the door was closed and locked and I had to smash the hinge with a boulder. Did I? Didn’t I?”
He rolled on his side and groaned. He said, “There are things I’ve forgotten, and that’s a mercy, but nobody remembers them on my behalf.” And in a flood of self-pity, he said, “The very stones of the world are as deaf as God, and God is as deaf as His stones. Will no one remember me, since I cannot remember myself?”
The stones must not have been as deaf as he imagined, for they answered, “God keeps His own counsel, but the stone hears you.”
He didn’t make a further remark, for to converse with the stones of his prison must be a sign of his mental collapse and maybe good Brother Death would show up at last. It was about time.
I am a gooseboy or am I a goose
I am a gooseboy or am I a goose
The margin that separates us is loose
Mirrormirror
BIANCA COULDN’T tell what they wanted, why they were pestering her so with questions. Did they want there to be a huge dowry available for her in Spain? Was Cesare after a new fund with which to rebuild an army? Or were they worried that their appropriation of her father’s house would bring trouble? Bianca knew little of the Orsini or the Colonna families of Rome, the Sforzas of Milan or the Medici of Florence. She did know their names, though, and their enmity toward Cesare Borgia was particular and public. Surely, in hiding from his many Italian enemies, the last thing he was worried about was a vengeful distant Spanish clan? Bianca wasn’t sure her relatives even existed. She’d never heard of them before—but then, four years ago, her father would have been unlikely to discuss matters of family relations with her.
Lucrezia drew a deep breath and leaned forward, and was about to embark upon a new line of questioning, when a ridiculous gabble sounded from the barnyard beyond, and the peal of boyish shrieking. Lucrezia’s head pivoted.
“Primavera,” she bellowed. “What is that bother?”
The only sound, at first, was of the nursemaid’s uncontrolled laughter.
“Primavera.”
Up from below at last came the old woman’s reply, clearly uttered with difficulty, as the laughter beneath it threatened to break through. “The geese have cornered the gooseboy in the pig’s trough,” she said. “Oh, it’s too good. He is hopping up and down and they are pecking his legs.”
Lucrezia whipped herself from her chair. “Crezia,” said Cesare.
“I won’t have it,” she said, and left the room.
Cesare rolled his eyes heavenward and made a holy gesture. “She is as kind as a saint,” he said to Bianca. “Saint Bathsheba, Saint Salome, anyway.”
“May I go now?” asked Bianca.
“Oh, stay the while,” said Cesare lazily, “the Scourge of the Apennines will take her time to rescue a useless gooseboy, won’t she, while her own beloved brother languishes on his rack of torment.”
Bianca said, “The gooseboy tends to get himself in a muddle. Perhaps I should go help your sister? Primavera moves too slowly to be of use, and Fra Ludovico is more scared of the geese than the gooseboy is.”
“Let her take care of the cretin. You can amuse me. What do you know of the world, little mouse?”
She didn’t want to talk to him, but then, what harm could come to her from a man who couldn’t get off his pallet? “I’ve my small view of the world,” she told him. “I seldom leave the farm—only once or twice to the village at the ford of the river a few miles on, and then only with my father. Years ago. This is world enough for me, up here. I play with the birds. I climb the apple trees. I used to try to make friends with the servant girls, but since my father left, they have gone away too. Primavera feeds me, and when he remembers, Fra Ludovico sees that I keep to my devotions. I’ve learned a few letters and I can write my name, some modest sentences. I can swim; the gooseboy taught me how. I milk the cows when the farmer is too drunk to come up the hill to do it. I collect the eggs and help pull beans from their runners and tomatoes from their vines. I help Primavera move the potted lemon trees into the limonaia for the winter. In the summer I pick oleander, lavender bells, and fennel for the shrine in the chapel wall. I watch the moon in its swelling and its subsiding.”
He looked at her as if she were reciting the most intimate of love sonnets. “What a treasure your ignorance is,” he said. “Come sit by me.”
“I’m shy,” she said.
“I’m safe, I’m the brother of your guardian,” he said. “Shall I tell you of the world?”
She held her tongue, and pulled her stool forward a few inches, but still kept a distance from where Cesare was leaning his chin in his hand.
“What do you care of my battles, my successful campaigns, my reversals of fortune?” he said. “I’m old enough to be your father. By the time you were even born I was on my way to being ruler of half Italy. And I would have given the Holy Roman Emperor a good thwacking, and I might have taken on the bully king of France, who has no business in Italy. In another few months, had my father not died . . . Well, it might yet happen, my sweet mouse. Wait and see.
“But the world wags on. Had my esteemed father, Alexander VI, not died three years ago, I’d be lying on sheets of gold with docile girls and lusty boys eight times prettier than you are, instead of suffering here with my own unobliging wounds. And sickness I carry with me in my gut. It stings. I need a distraction. Come here.”
“Please, Don Borgia. Your sister will have a hard time with the gooseboy. I’m afraid he’s little more than a fool, but he likes me and trusts me. Let me go see to him, and release the Duchessa to keep you company. I’m not fit to entertain you. I know so little of the world of which you speak.”
“The world grows and shrinks at once,” said Cesare. “Is this a function of my being wise beyond my years, or is the age in which we live contorting itself with confounding knowledge? In this year of our Lord 1506, the Genoese navigator Columbus has died. Do you know of him? He was the one who brought back the news of Española, an island of Cathay so far across the cold Atlantic sea it might as well be Dante’s Malebolge. The Moor has been driven from Granada, and the Jew from much of Spain, and Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella cast their eyes on their western prospects, and the canny Lisboans too. I’ll go back to Navarre and find your dowry and claim it, and if it is enough for a single horse and a suit of mail, or if it helps to raise an army, I will not be stayed from my destiny. Come here, I say.”
Rehe
arsing the future for the world seemed to energize him.
She might never have the chance for such an audience again. Even if she wanted to flee—what might she learn, with care? She drew herself just a few inches forward and said, “Please, I know nothing of the world, except my father is lost in it. Do you know if he is alive? Do you know where he went, or why?”
“I know where, and I know why. To buy me a miracle.” He closed his eyes, as if his internal pain was mounting. “I could use a miracle now.” He opened his eyes again. They were swimming in tears. “Come, sit by my side, let me tell you what I suspect of your father’s whereabouts.”
What she might learn, what she might lose. It was another bridge to cross, and she was struck immobile in the middle. “It’s time for my prayers,” she said at last.
“I’ll teach you how to pray for mercy.” With a movement more forceful than she thought him capable of, he reached out and grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him. Her heart suddenly a blue onion in her chest, cold and layered and stinging in its own juices, she struggled. With one hand he encircled both her small wrists, and clamped them onto his thigh, forcing her to a kneeling position between his knees. She could hear her voice warble, a mockery of a song; she couldn’t make it form words, just an obbligato wail like a reed flute on a single high note.
Bianca heard the Duchess of Ferrara at the threshold of her father’s salone, and a voice like a storm came down between Bianca and Il Valentino. “Cesare, has the French disease made you mad? Release her at once.”
“Come and join me in my devotions, dear sister,” he growled. Lucrezia Borgia picked up the first thing she could grasp—a piece of faience—and she hurled it. Her aim was wild. The vase struck the mirror over the mantelpiece. The mirror was unharmed, but the vase’s earthenware slivers scattered with force. Bianca saw the blood spring like black gum on his forearm. He let her go so he could sweep shards off the top of his thigh, and this cut the side of his hand.
“Will you take a child to marry and bed her without benefit of a dowry?” asked Lucrezia icily. “Are you entirely insane?”
“I’m insane and I’m still a man,” he said to her, “and as you know well, my chill and beautiful spouse Charlotte is the sister of the king of Navarre and therefore lives too far away to be of wifely use to me—and has done so for seven years. I’m practically unmarried.”
“I won’t be bedded or married, either one,” said Bianca, but the Borgias had turned their attention and their contempt upon each other, and neither noticed or cared what she’d said.
Cesare’s voice was hard as iron. “And have you forgotten your infatuation for your powerful brother now he has lost stature in the eyes of the world? Now that he skulks under cover of darkness plotting useless campaigns of revenge? Allow me some comfort, sweet sister.”
“She is too small. You would only bruise her,” said Lucrezia.
“I’m talking about my comfort, not hers.”
“Get out of here,” said Lucrezia to Bianca. “How dare you linger and taunt my brother like that. Have you no shame? I suppose you haven’t, without a womanly woman to raise you correctly. The attitudes of a peasant, courtesy of your Primavera. Go.”
“How’s your gooseboy?” said Cesare tauntingly to his sister. Bianca fled.
She fell on the stairs, not from fear, but because she realized that blood was running off her temple. Shards from the vase must have struck her too. For a moment she couldn’t see. As she crouched there, trying to wipe her eyes clear of blood, she heard nothing at all, and then the sound of slippers brushing a few steps across the floor. Was Lucrezia Borgia approaching her brother to slap him or to kiss him, or to whisper something in his ear?
Bianca heard the Duchessa’s voice, a few tones lower than that in which she usually spoke. A voice of false solemnity and genuine menace.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who among us is fairest of all?” she said.
Bianca straightened up and listened, as if the mirror might answer. If it did, it was in a pitch too cerebral or too hushed for Bianca to hear. In any event, Cesare either mocked his sister or echoed the mirror’s answer when he said, “Well, it’s not you, sister. It’s that little mouse child, the daughter of our agent de Nevada. Doesn’t that just make your Borgia blood boil. What’ll you do about that?”
Lucrezia laughed, a houndish laugh, almost a baying. “You have so little power over me now, brother duke,” she said, and though her words were rough, her tone was intimate and cajoling. “The heyday of the Borgias is over almost before it’s begun. I’ll watch you rot in a grave before the decade is out, I’ll wager. But I’ll be damned if I see you casting glances at a child young enough to be your daughter.”
“You’re jealous because she’s lovelier than you,” he said. “You always were a jealous type. I still adore you, Crezia. Come here. Come to Cesare.”
Bianca tumbled down the stairs, blood in her eyes or no.
I am a hunter who cannot kill
I am a hunter who cannot kill.
The yearling unicorn haunts with taunting eyes,
Ready to lay its sacrificial head
Between my quivering thighs,
Asking the clemency of death
So it can yield
The song for which it lived.
But I am a man whose heart is stiff as stone.
Let unicorns and maidens plead for mercy,
For the wisdom death reveals, for a right of passage
Through the gates of horn to the sacred city,
To Gesù on its steps, to incorruptible parents
Restored from the grave and waiting with opened arms.
I will not grant that privilege to any.
I don’t possess credentials bright enough
To vouchsafe anyone passage to paradise.
Bring me her heart carved from her chest
THE salone was silent. Cesare had summoned Fra Ludovico to help him hobble down the stairs. Looking for the mouse? Looking for confession and penance? Cesare was a man of superstitions—he had believed in Prince Dschem’s fairy tale of the Tree of Knowledge, he believed in the mercy of the Church. He lit votives to Gesù and the Madonna, to Pan, to his hero Alexander the Great, and to Fortuna, all on the same altar. He played at prophecy with a volume of Virgil, opening it at random to read aloud the poet’s antique opinion on the decision of the moment.
Lucrezia sat and absently covered her lap with the red cloak that Bianca de Nevada had left behind. As she stroked it, and the day’s shadows began to gather, she fell into a reverie. Perhaps it was seeded by the afternoon with the little girl. Thoughts of her own girlhood at that same age—and later—came rising up.
She didn’t often revisit her past, for the future offered more succor.
As a child, she’d been as good as orphaned. Well, when your father is the Pope and your mother his mistress, and your nursemaids cardinals well placed in the Curia, even small domestic details of your childhood tend to seem freighted with portent.
After her father was elevated to the throne of Peter, the Vatican’s apartments and offices were as crowded as alleys on market day. The commodities on sale were pardons, favors, indulgences to shorten purgatorial jail sentences. Who in those crowded bazaars of the faith might have provided the companionship a girl might need? Not even the solemn sisters who oversaw the housecleaning of Christendom’s most magnificent palace to Christ.
All this had begun when Lucrezia was the age that Bianca was now—about eleven. The previous Pope, Innocent VIII, had taken ill. His doctors had bled three young boys as a propitiatory offering, to no avail. Innocent VIII had died. So had all three boys. On a sacrifice of their blood, her father, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, had been elected to the Papal See, and Lucrezia was removed from the care of her mother, Vannozza.
A famous Roman courtesan, Vannozza had spent her years as Cardinal Borgia’s mistress established conveniently near to his palace on the Piazza Pizzo de Merlo. She’d conducted her business
with equal parts of hauteur and circumspection. She’d protested at the removal from her household of her older son, Cesare, whose career was being thrashed out by his father; she’d wept piteously when deprived of Lucrezia. But what rights are left to any mother when a father has made up his mind?—and since this father was newly elected Pope of the Roman church, Vannozza was required to bear her grief in silence as best she could. She didn’t refuse the Pope company when he required it, but she bridled—Lucrezia later realized, she must have bridled—that the Pope’s newest mistress, the clamorously attractive Giulia Farnese, was given part responsibility for the raising of Vannozza’s own Lucrezia.
Lucrezia had taken leave of her mother casually, mockingly. Well, her robust and homely father was in his ascendancy, and court life seemed more alluring than learning the arts of needlework at her mother’s elbow. Lucrezia had been fattened on the notion of Borgia supremacy, after all, and her mother wasn’t a Borgia—not even by marriage. With difficulty Lucrezia managed to choke back her impulse to correct her mother’s comportment—as Lucrezia left to take up her proper place in the Vatican palace, Vannozza’s tears and hand-wringing weren’t suitable gestures at all—and besides, the girl didn’t envision what a profound change it would be. The distance to Vannozza’s door was, mathematically, exactly as far as the distance from it. Surely?
As it turned out, such measurements aren’t entirely governed by the laws of mathematics. The laws of politics and one’s personal humors alter the equation.
And Lucrezia, impressed with Giulia Farnese’s beauty, was cowed by it. Giulia was her own age, nearly, and her father’s lover. The paradox of that!
Before state affairs and court life began to restrict her liberty, the young Lucrezia haunted the servants’ quarters in the Pope’s fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo. She exchanged her silks and furs for her handmaiden’s broadcloth tunic and slipped out a window, and played tricks on fishermen struggling to find dinner in the filthy Tiber. To see how it felt, she’d laid down with shepherds in fields striped with the shadows of poplars. She’d wandered incognita—the daughter of a pope—giving free kisses among the tombstones and cypresses on the Capitoline Hill. In matters amorous, Lucrezia was finding herself talented. Too soon, her beauty became unique. Before long she couldn’t show her face inside or out of Saint Peter’s Basilica without being recognized.