Mirror Mirror

  Bianca had made no protest when Primavera’s grandson entered the kitchen, picked up a heel of bread with one hand and grabbed her own forearm with the other. He shoved the food in his mouth and yanked her from her seat roughly; she was dangling like a newly caught trout. She kicked not out of alarm but with an instinct for balance.

  Then Ranuccio barreled out the door, knocking the crown of Bianca’s skull on the stone doorframe, and she was abstracted with swimming sparks of pain. By the time she could focus her eyes through her distress and register something discernible, she was outside—this is the meadow, now this is the lower meadow, and Montefiore is retreating above me, like a storm cloud in reverse. Its low wings and barns close their arms against the bulk of the main house, its red roofline lowers like a furrowed brow.

  The house became richer, more obtuse, a red-brown rose growing in reverse, back toward secret potent bud.

  She saw the gooseboy who stood gaping at the side of the road, adrift in his snowy cackling blanket of friends. She tried to utter a Help me! or a What? or a Come now!, but all she could manage was a strangled sort of duck quack. He waved his hand and smiled at her—they were hardly friends, Bianca and the gooseboy, just people who lived on the same hill, basically—and then he and his downy companions had been swallowed up in the arms of apple trees, which in turn became an apron of apple trees sweeping in a single tide away from her. She was past Lago Verde and up to the bridge her father had forbidden her to cross.

  There Ranuccio stopped. Was he going to throw her over the side? Or did he somehow know about her father’s prohibition? But no—he was fishing with one hand inside his shirt. He came up with a sack of coins. He tossed them in the water. He was distracting the mudcreature! Must be so. He continued down the other side of the bridge, and she was being hustled away from Montefiore without further assault. As if this assault weren’t enough.

  Montefiore was becoming the dense irretrievable past, the dead childhood, dead, cold dead on its slab, and no mercy existed in the world or out of it to slap it back to life again.

  Ranuccio wasn’t a giant, though; not a mudcreature, not an ogre from some comic hearthside tale. He was a strong man and a big one, but he was only a man, and she was after all eleven; she ought to be able to figure this out.

  She hadn’t seen him often. Occasionally when the weather was harshest he would show up and share some food with his grandmother—either bring her some treat, a brace of pheasants or rabbits, sometimes a haunch of venison or a slithery set of steaks cut from the flanks of a boar. Primavera would prepare the meat; she was no stranger to the benisons of wild garlic, lemon, and black peppercorns from the East. But though Ranuccio and his grandmother shared a grief—the death of the generation between them—they seemed to have no other common language. In the years in which Bianca de Nevada had come to be aware of Ranuccio, his arrivals and disappearances had been conducted in an almost conspiratorial silence.

  Thumping against his side—for even as slight as she was, she had some weight, and so in time his muscles ached—she twisted and finally caught enough breath, and enough sense, to begin to complain. She yelped her confusion at first, and, her breath ignited, she began to wail, and to try to twist her arm free so she could beat against his side. “Where are you taking me?” she said. “Where are we going?”

  The promontory for which Montefiore was named leaned above them, and the house was lost in its leafy opacity. “Where is my home?” she demanded, more frantically. “Where are we going?”

  “A walk in the woods,” he said.

  “I’m not allowed to go alone into the woods.”

  “You aren’t alone.” He set her down and jabbed her playfully in the side with one hand, though with his other he continued to keep her wrist in a circling grip stronger, she imagined, than iron shackles could possibly be.

  “The dark is coming on, and Primavera will worry.”

  “The old smelly goose mother knows what this is about. Don’t worry about her.”

  “But she didn’t say a word to me. She would have told me—”

  “She didn’t want to alarm you. She wanted it to be a surprise.”

  Bianca stood still to consider this. There was so much unclear about how adults behaved, and Primavera, it was sure, was more quixotic and fickle in her behavior than most.

  “What is your intention?” said Bianca, as firmly as her quavering voice would allow.

  “Let’s walk a while together and learn our intentions.”

  “If you let go of my hand, I can walk more comfortably.”

  “If I let go of your hand, you will run away.”

  “I will not run away.”

  “You will run away. I know children, and when they are scared they are foolish as hens. They bolt at the first chance they get. I tell you, there is little reason to be scared.” From a leather pouch slung on a strip of leather around his waist he picked a dagger with a handle of worn antler.

  She shrunk from him as best she could, as if she could shed her own hand and leave it there in his grip. Her underskirt had gone damp.

  “What use is that knife to you here?”

  “To protect us in the woods,” he said. “Do you see that it’s getting dark?”

  “I don’t see as much as I would like.”

  “Because it’s getting dark.” But the light in the sky was ample enough to shine on the silvered blade, making it stand out against the blue-black undergrowth. They poked deeper into the woods, and the sky darkened now as the canopy of trees closed above them.

  “If I let you go, you will run,” he said again, many minutes later, when the dark was no longer considering a visit but had moved in for the night. The only light was the luminescence of late summer bugs, the stripe of silver along the blade, and the wet in Ranuccio’s eyes. She could smell from her own body a sour moisture, the reek of her body’s fear.

  “If you let me go,” she said, and faltered.

  “. . . you will run,” he said, completing her sentence.

  And then she understood him. She stopped and stood still. He let her go. He raised his knife. He held the handle with one hand. With the fingers of his other hand he gripped the point of the very sharp blade teasingly. A single drop of black blood stood out on his thumb.

  She gave a genuflection that she didn’t know he could see, and then she turned and walked carefully away, into the dark.

  The heart of the woods

  RANUCCIO WAITED until the sound of the girl’s progress had become swallowed up in the back-and-forth of wind through leaves. Now there was the creak of an oak limb, now a silence through which a distant stream could be heard to murmur. Now a rush of wind again—and

  and—the world had sealed over, had healed itself of the girl’s presence, as if she had never lived. Had even forgotten her absence. Even he, used to hearing a beetle pause and inspect itself under a fallen log, was dizzy with the mystery of how fully she had been taken away.

  What was her name, even?

  He stopped to rest, leaning against a boulder. He hugged himself for warmth. What was to be done now? For the beautiful Donna Lucrezia had requested the child’s heart as proof of her death. Ranuccio didn’t understand the root of Lucrezia’s malice, but he was clear on this: she wouldn’t rest until she was certain her campaign had been carried out as requested. So there was the matter of the heart to consider.

  Ranuccio’s nonna was a fabulist, a pagan oracle, equally conversant with the saints and angels as she was with the crooks, shimmies, elves, and frostlings of local renown. Her wisdom hadn’t prevented the death of her sons in battle. So to avoid a similar fate, Ranuccio had taken to hunting in the forests that still surged like seas around outlying farms and past tillage and orchards.

  But, looking for something different by which to rule his depopulated life, he had also been drawn to the lures of Siena, and Arezzo, and even, two or three times, to the diadem of central Italy, Florence. And, though he had little language in which to cast h
is understanding, Ranuccio nonetheless found himself sympathetic to the sweet sound of discourse, to reason’s steady footfall from thought to thought, from proposition to proof, from thesis to antithesis, from the raw clever act of characterizing the world to the more serene bliss of categorizing it. Pico della Mirandola, a convert of Savonarola’s, had laid it out so clearly: A dog must always behave like a dog, and an angel could not but behave angelically.

  The world was wilderness on one side, full of twisting oak trees dropping their penile acorns, of wolves with ruddy jaws. Even the vines of ivy would reach their small dry-clawed hands up the inside of your calf and thigh if you lingered too long. And on the other side—the side Florence ruled over—it was rolled and leveled paradise, with cypresses and laurels trained to march in arithmetical arrangements, and gravel walks raked so purely that even the robins knew not to hunt for worms there, lest the symmetry be spoiled. Classical statues preened on cornerstone plinths, proposing by the perfection of their forms a range of states of being so sublime that Ranuccio had never had the temerity to ask for a glossary of their qualities.

  But Florence, and the legislated and unspoken regulae that governed its civic life, both appealed to Ranuccio and made him mute before his superstitious grandmother. Love and grief had bound them, and mutual hunger allowed them to sit down and share what the skill of the hunter and the skill of the cook could contrive between them to put on the table. But conversation had not been their habit.

  He had never told her, for instance, about the time he had come across a unicorn in a glade. He knew the lore about unicorns—that they only ever approached maidens, and in no conceivable way had Ranuccio ever been a maiden. But lore was only lore, a system of thinking decayed from some more ancient, blurry hypothesis, deteriorating toward a superstitious tic or ridiculous custom.

  He had been up to see Fra Tomasso, his confessor, a crippled Franciscan who had retired to an oratory carved out of a cave. The friar lived there with a beaky merlin that perched most days inside the awesome dried skull of a Cyclops. It seemed that Ranuccio was the friar’s sole disciple, and only an occasional one at that.

  Fra Tomasso had bled him for health, and heard his confession (fornication, avarice, contempt for the name of the Lord, that sort of incidental sin), and fed him a scupperful of oil that purged his bowels in a sudden and unpleasant way. So, on the way down from the oratory, feeling hollowed and pardoned and ready to sin again, he had been pleased to come across a small but steep, slightly sulfurous waterfall he’d not seen before.

  Ranuccio had shed his clothes and plunged into the pool beneath the waterfall with a cheery abandon, the more delicious for being so rare. When he emerged, cleaned outside now as well as, in every way that could be managed, within, he had staggered into the grove to find his clothes, and naked as Adam in Eden, he had startled the unicorn, who turned its head.

  The unicorn, by virtue of its characteristic utensil, was presumed always to be male, but Ranuccio found himself unwilling to look and see. What did it matter? In any event there was a radiance, that radiance that stories occasionally remember to tell, and Ranuccio was blinded by the sense of being visited by light itself. Perhaps, in the creature’s presence, Ranuccio’s own maleness was unmade, or his maidenness called forth. Or some other mystical transaction, too confounding in its airy whiteness to name.

  He knelt before the beast, and it seemed to Ranuccio that the unicorn hesitated. The hunter felt a stiff heat throb from its flanks, as if its suspicion could take on a thermal aspect. But Ranuccio put his hands down on his own thighs, turning his thumbs outward to reveal his open palms. He lowered his eyes. He heard the ground tremble, as hoof after hoof was set delicately down—in perfect synchronization, mountains a continent away were crumbling one by one. The creature brought its bath of light forward, and the great horn came near. Ranuccio could see ripples of gray-white line, fine as spiderweb, tracing through the ivorylike shaft, as if proof that the horn grew through minute accretion like anything else in this natural world. Then the unicorn set its horn into his lap. At once, Ranuccio’s eyes spilled with bruising tears and his cock trembled and released its scatter of milky pearl. Ranuccio was as fully emptied, as fully hollow, as it was possible for a grown human male to be, and the unicorn turned its head and looked upon the shattered possibility of a man, and made its request.

  The creature wanted to complete its life, to sing the song that gave its life meaning. It ought to have died naturally, and its song issued out of it in true time. But the world was changing. What had once been a dragon in a net was now just a bird born wrong, changed accidentally in its egg. Chicken livers could not tell the future precisely enough to prevent the death in war of a parent and an uncle. The unicorn had outlived its age. It was dog and angel both—damn Pico to hell—and there was no place for that much mystery in the world anymore.

  How could he deny the unicorn its death? Was it commonplace mercy or superior cowardice? But he could, and he did: he might be naked as Adam, but he couldn’t be as pure. Adam and Eve named the world between them, but Ranuccio wanted no knowledge unshared by his species. He would turn aside from the sacred Temptation and, in the consequence of it, risk the removal of the need for a Savior to redeem his other mundane sins.

  How he communicated this to the creature, he didn’t know. Did the creature pull back its horn? Did the hunter swoon? He was dressed, and singing a long ridiculous song about a Knight Templar, almost home by dusk, when he came back to his senses and remembered what had happened in the glade by the waterfall.

  Ranuccio never spoke of it to a soul. He didn’t confess it to Fra Tomasso in later conversations.

  What the exchange had done for him—to him—became evident only in time. He was a hunter, a castaway in the shrinking forests of late medieval Italy, and, single-minded and uneducated, he’d been bred and raised to hunt and kill for food. And now he couldn’t perform the duty without a certain cost to his spirit. He did kill, of course—it was that or die of starvation. He used arrows and traps, snares and cudgels; he netted when he needed. Once he even experimented with a short rifle, though the gunpowder stank and the noise seemed to rip the very trees out of the ground.

  But he didn’t kill without dread and shame, realizing that the lower creatures, the deer and fowl and boar, the rabbits, the wild pigs, all resisted, all preferred their lives to their deaths. The unicorn had offered its life, had petitioned for its death, and he’d failed, as a professional hunter, to oblige. He might learn, in the afterlife, whether his failure was a virtue or a fault, but in the meantime he suffered with not knowing.

  And wondering, all along, in the crusty margins between dreaming and waking, if the unicorn was still waiting, or if it had found a more capable murderer.

  He hadn’t been able to murder the child, either, but he found a young buck and ably brought him down. The deer’s hind legs crushed in unnatural position beneath him, Ranuccio straddled the powerful neck and pulled the head back, and readied himself for the reckoning that the creature would do with his eyes.

  The deer didn’t do as he ought. He didn’t fight or thrash, he didn’t stiffen at the threat of the knife’s wild bite. It was as if he too had met the unicorn in the woods and had learned about this moment.

  It was as if—in a wild fantasy, he grappled to understand—it was as if the buck were as good as the girl’s mother, that reportedly beautiful María Inés, so intent on the life of her abandoned child that she would die a second time to help the hunter build an alibi, to buy the child time and safety. The mere sex of the creature didn’t alter the mercy or the value of the sacrifice.

  “Thank you,” he murmured, and slit the deer’s throat.

  “The heart of the woods,” he said to Lucrezia when, the next morning, he handed her the wooden casket she had requested.

  I am a rock and my brothers are rocks

  I am a rock and my brothers are rocks

  And our family name is patience.

  Grinding
our lunch can take most of a decade.

  Step soft, we’re a beach: step firmly, a landslide.

  At the head of the sky is a burning stone,

  A circlet of stars, a mirroring moon, an eye of blinding gold.

  At the bottom of every sky is a world;

  At the foot of its forested mountains, always a stream.

  We aren’t the gold nor the blue nor the slope.

  We aren’t the stream nor the sound of its rushing.

  We are the bed on which the world rests,

  Its criminal patience, its bleak stupid patience.

  Seven

  was less than we were used to being. We had once been the number one more than seven, we clots in the earth’s arteries. But the noisy one left and maybe for need of him we were stricken with attention. When we were only seven, there was something wrong.

  It was a matter of balance. There is a smug assurance among pairs, a possibility of completion that other creatures lack. We knew enough of the world of beasts and men to see how males burrow and females furrow, but the comfort of pairing isn’t critically dependent on that exercise.

  We lived without the caw and twitch of sex, or to date we had. Unaware of parents but for the mothering hills and the smothering sky, we made do with what we knew: each other. We had no names. We couldn’t count until one of us left, and then we learned to count to seven, and to figure out odd from even. With a departed companion, there was a looseness to our group. There was a way in which we were incomplete, and, perhaps, more alert because of that hunger.