The human mind—we have come to observe—tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s mite. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.
Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door.
To say we were pairs is to propose, to the human mind, a system of marriages among brothers, as if 3 and 4 were one unit together in all things, as if 3 and 4 gave to each other something denied to 5 or 2. This isn’t the case. To say we were pairs isn’t to propose an intimacy or a singularity among our pairings. It’s merely to say that we functioned, loosely, as teams of two, and it hardly mattered whether it was 1 or 7 on the other side of the table or the other end of the long saw or the other edge of the pillow. Indeed, until recently, we wouldn’t have known to identify 1 from 7, or 4 from 6, or a pillow from a saw. In our efficiency we were blind.
But one of us left, and we eventually noticed that he was gone.
There wasn’t enough of us to go around. It wasn’t 7 who was abandoned, nor any other one of us. It was the all of us, and then we learned to count to seven, and saw that we ought to have been able to count to the next number up, the seven plus one. But we couldn’t, for that one was gone. In his absence, we remembered once again our incompleteness.
We were shorn, softly and without pain, of our assurance. We noticed what was wrong. We began to notice one another.
The appetite for noticing having been awakened, we were ready to notice the girl who fell, faint from hunger and cold, at our threshold.
She might not have known it for a threshold at first. We have our clandestine ways. It might have looked to her like a log decom-posing in the forest or a ledge of gray granite outcrop. It’s never easy to see through the eyes of humans and guess what they think they are seeing.
But we saw her, in our bumbling unsatisfied way. We took her in. We dragged her over the threshold, aware, some of us for the first time, of the fringed pattern of muscled digits at the ends of our arms that, for lack of a better word, might as well be called hands. We used our hands—hands. Hah—and we carried her into the smokelight, the better to look upon her form.
We didn’t call her Bianca de Nevada, we didn’t say, “Wake up, Bianca de Nevada.” We didn’t know that was what she was called. We hardly knew, I think, that people had names.
But we cast our glances sidelong, to see if she was our missing one.
She seemed not to be, unless he had changed a good deal.
She had hair of graven black lines, fine lines, each distinct but with like inclination; they spread upon the pillow in a soft fan that moved as her head moved. The brows on her face were pale as the underside of a dragon’s gullet. Indeed, there was something of the look of a corpse about her, though we’ve come to realize this is true of all humans. They begin to die with their first infant’s wail. But it was truer of her, because of the tone of her skin.
Her limbs were long enough to have uncoiled from their embryonic spasm. Her lower trunk was clad in a skirt the color of dried moss, and her torso in a tunic of meadowlark brown. Her hands—far more clever than ours, more completely cloven into separate fingers—lay back on the pillow, curled slightly like the legs of a crawfish, and the tenderness of her palms was enough to make us weep, though we couldn’t say why, and I daresay to this day none of us would try to explain.
We didn’t discuss her or touch her, but we drew to her chin a blanket of webweed, for though we’re accustomed to the damp and the dark, we know human beings learn what we know only when they have died and been consigned to the soil.
For her comfort we kept away the mealworms and sliceworms and the dung beetles. One of us—none could say who, for we didn’t yet distinguish ourselves one from the other—sat near her shoulder and brushed decay away.
We had nothing better to do but sit and keep watch over her until she had finished her rest. It was likely that she slept three, perhaps four years, before she stirred.
When her eyelids did flutter, we became shy, as if caught in a common sin, though without the individual soul to save or lose, we were as incapable of sin as a scorpion.
She breathed in and out several times, and sat up. Her hair, we were interested to note, had become longer while she slept, and as she blinked her eyes, she caught her hair in the crook of her arm and shielded her bosom with it. (Her tunic had fallen away into separate threads and couldn’t behave as a tunic any longer.)
“Good Savior,” she said, “preserve me from this dream.”
We blinked; as none of us considered ourselves the Good Savior we didn’t think it proper to reply.
“Who are you?” she asked.
This was a remark more likely dedicated to our family, but the one who was gone—the one that, plus seven, had made us whole—was the one among us who was oldest and most capable of language. We worked our throats to find words within, with little success.
“I’m Bianca de Nevada,” she told us. “I’m the daughter of Vicente and María de Nevada of Montefiore, on the edge of Toscana heading toward Umbria. I’ve never seen your sort before. Who are you?”
The question occasionally invents the answer. We heard her words, and saw her pallor, and perceived that Bianca meant white. So names were characteristics, then, and we chose from among the characteristics of stone to invent ourselves, out of charity.
“Stone can’t see,” said one of us, blinking. “So call me Blindeye.”
“My limbs are like stone, so I’m Lame,” said another. “Or maybe Gimpy.”
“Stone can’t taste, so I’m Tasteless.”
“No more can stone smell, so I might be No-Nose, but if I could smell, I would smell Bitter. So call me Bitter and have done with it.”
“I didn’t quite hear the question; stone is hard of hearing. So you can call me Deaf-to-the-World, thank you for asking.”
“I’m Heartless, for I can’t feel,” said the red-bearded one, with a reluctant sigh.
The seventh didn’t answer for a moment. When we looked at him, he said, “Stone can’t speak, so I’m Mute, Mute; always was Mute, always will be Mute. MuteMuteMute. Why do you even bother to ask? Why do you bother me so?” MuteMuteMute, it seemed, would have liked very much to talk, and was therefore irritable at being reminded of his debility.
But in the naming of ourselves for the first time, we felt the absence of our missing brother more strongly than ever. “And then,” one of us answered, “there is the departed one of us, who has more sense and more senses than the rest.”
“And his name?” asked Bianca.
“Next,” someone said, and we others thought about it, then nodded.
This is how we were born. She sat amidst us, more or less naked as a human baby, looking, but it was we older brothers—older than trees, older than wind, older than choice—who were born in her presence. Blindeye, Heartless, Gimpy, Deaf-to-the-World, MuteMuteMute, Bitter, and Tasteless: incomplete sections of each other, beginning our lumbering life of individuality—
—beginning our lumbering lives.
• 1512 •
The dwarves
STIRRING, AWARE of small pains. The chamber had a musty aspect, as of a catacomb or an ossuary. She couldn’t tell where the light originated. There were no apparent windows, there was no suggestion of sunlight, even behind panels of wood or draping folds of carpet. Yet she could see—she blinked—and the room swam into a cooler, more decisive focus.
br /> She sensed the arbitrary, the conditional. Only when she tried to tell herself what it was did it settle down, the way telling a dream makes a dream gain its legs and lose its mystery. The space was nothing like a room . . . and as the word room is spoken, even to deny a likeness, the nonroom-like space becomes more like a room, regardless.
There was a space that became more like a room as she considered it. The long stone on which she sat seemed, on reflection, to straighten its angles, as if tending to think itself a bed; and then, belatedly, it grew or acquired bedposts of a sort, which became more nicely carved the more Bianca thought about it.
Her clothes had fallen and rotted off her, nothing less than that—and she was naked beneath the slightly clammy sheet. Was it linen?—yes, a fine linen, and look at that embroidery stitching itself as she watched, making the complicated turn around the corner, and the small white rosettes blooming at intervals!
How peculiar to be naked, she with her lifelong shyness about her form. It was distracting. It therefore took her some time to register the conversation she seemed to be having with other matters of business in the room—bits of furniture, were they, or seven boulders arranged randomly?
No, boulders don’t speak, except in dreams.
The muscles of her neck ached and she urgently needed to urinate, not uncommon in a dream. So dreaming or not, she began to stretch and to draw the sheet around her, as modestly as she could. The sheet fed straps forward over her shoulders that bit where they ought, forming a yoke and bib and gown that allowed her to move with modesty. Then she stood and found a porcelain vessel for peeing into, and squatted above it.
One never pees in a dream, one only needs to. So what did it mean, that she could?
Only when she had finished and pushed her hair back from her forehead—the hair that fell now almost to her waist—did the opinionated rocks begin to shift. Had the rocks been speaking to her? She had a sense that they had: what an odd dream this was being. She couldn’t see them well at all. It was as if they drank the light in the room and emitted it as darkness, a kind of cloaking smudginess. She felt she was looking through a glass clouded with soot. She couldn’t make her eyes work correctly, rub them as she might. The creatures were neither naked nor clothed, so far as she could tell, only rather roughly cast. They had a look of—how to put it—character. She thought of the way an outcropping on a ridge will resemble, suddenly, a crouching dog, or an angel’s flexing wing, and once you have noticed it you can never pass by it unaware again.
How the edge of this boulder resembled the jutting brow of a scowling man.
A very small scowling man, but a man nonetheless, not a child. Nothing childlike at all.
And this one had a flared hump to one side that looked like a misshapen shoulder, drawn back; one could finish the thought of the boulder and imagine the swelling some inches down as a hand on a hip.
And this other, on her other side. A sense of its straining.
It was uncomfortable; she was surrounded by granite forms imitating creatures. It made her feel preyed upon.
She stood again, height being all she had against them. A painful tenderness in her groin, from where she had urinated. She groaned without caution.
She wanted to leave them, to train her eyes more carefully upon the walls of this chamber, and notice them into clarity: a wall of polished planks, of ruddy brick, of rusticated stones?—something to identify. Anything. Nothing would clarify unless she worked at it. She moved forward again, to leave the standing circle around her, and noticed—how had she missed it before?—that her fingernails had gone long and witchlike, ivory scythes splintered at the ends, capable of ripping skin. Her toenails curled like tusks, and nestled into one another like the overlapping segments of a flattish, chambered shell.
She felt she’d died and been buried, and was being restored to life, to a new life, as an animal. She was one step shy of being human now. Her breasts, though modestly sheathed in her gown of bedding, moved of their own new weight, and brushed against the cloth bib. The tender tips of her breasts blistered with a curious sort of pain, and she shook, from her elbows to her spine. The convulsion drew the cloth against her breasts again. She exhaled with a spasm of her cheeks and tongue, releasing a wordless sound of surprise.
Braised, tormented—the whole world leaning upon her in the form of a bedsheet fingering her skin—she stepped back, as if her sleep were still waiting for her on the bed, like body warmth left in the mattress for a few moments after you arise. As if she could subside back into sleep safely, and wake up some other time, some other way.
Then the convulsion, which had had a teasing aspect as well as a frightening one, took a deeper bite of her body, lower down, and the soft pain of her groin sharpened. As if in her sleep she’d been impregnated by a wolf, and a young wolf cub was scrabbling at her interior to bite its own exit passage. She sank to her knees, her arms crooked behind and her elbows pressing down into the mattress. She flung her head backward and clenched her fists. Her knees hit the floor and lifted and hit the floor again. Like a bellows her thighs worked back and forth.
“Mamma,” she said, “Mamma. Gesù Cristo. Mamma, Mamma.” Then her words gave way to mere syllables, lengthening inchoate sounds.
She voided her interior. The blood rolled and splashed, and bits of matter tore embery fingers against her insides. Whatever Primavera had predicted, it wasn’t anything like this. Bianca waited for the blood to take a face, for its airy bubbles to sit and wink like eyes, or for a form to slither out of her on its sluice of organic juices and devour her. She closed her eyes to protect herself from seeing whatever it would be, and she rocked more exhaustedly from side to side. Her legs were slick, her buttocks and her heels slick, and she fell, almost fainting, as if she couldn’t endure such loss of blood without a loss of breath or even life. She found herself rolled against one of the boulders, and then another. They were moving, they were closing in on her, like the stones of her tomb come to do their job, and her blood lapped against their roots and splashed their sides. She swooned.
When she came to consciousness—the same or another sort, she couldn’t tell—the room had taken its own measure and settled down some.
There was no direct source of light, no oil lamps or hearth fires, no sunlight bleeding along the edges of a shuttered window. No windows at all. But the space had volume and there was even some color, of a sandy, ochre-tinged sort.
She pulled herself to her feet and looked about. Along the edges of what she could perceive ran ranks of stone boxes, all large enough to contain human remains. Sarcophagi, she guessed, with carvings on the front and sides, and statues of smaller-than-life-size figures reclining on the lids.
It might have been horrifying, but it wasn’t. It was nice not to feel alone. The long front panels illustrated scenes of war, naked Romans battling with naked Etruscans. The bas-relief was so heightened it almost looked as if the figures were going to detach from the stone. Greek letters, less regular than the human proportions, spelled captions she couldn’t read.
The portrait sculptures up top were carved in an identical position. All the figures reared up on one elbow, pivoting on a hip, as if watching her. But their facial features had been eroded by age, and it wasn’t easy to tell if they were male or female. They held shallow cups for celebration, and coins or wine were deposited within. She found it easy to accept a raised stone dish from a cheery effigy and drink a swallow of wine. Though open to the air of the tomb for a thousand years or two, the wine had aged well and was delicious.
Here were knives with handles of bone. Here, on the floor, bits of Roman glass. Here, an anomaly: a figure of Proserpina, her composure calm and unthreatening. She held one hand on her breast, as if feeling her own pulse, and her other hand was held out, offering a stone apple to the dead. It’s not so bad, she seemed to say; half a life in the sun, half a life in the earth: I’ve learned to manage quite well. Call me Persephone and feed me a persimmon; call me Proserpina and ha
nd me an apple. Whatever I have I share.
Her smile was sweet and eroded. Around her stood double-handled vases in black glaze, no doubt containing the ashes of the dead. It was a calm cinerarium. The only unpleasantness was a faint smell of pietra fetida—that stone with a faint reek of sulfur.
She couldn’t tell what the floor was like, as she couldn’t see much of it, except where her blood had splashed and dried gummily.
Standing amid the sarcophagi lurked the random uncarved boulders. She hunted about until she found a bucket that stood beneath a pump. Working the pump for what seemed hours, hoping that the hollow retching sound below indicated suction and water, she was rewarded at last with a gush of dusty water that quickly turned pure and cold, almost icy. She filled the bucket nearly to the brim and carried it to the side of the bed, and she began to scrub at the floor, to erase evidence of her blood flow.
She dabbed where she had to, where the blood reached, and as her eyes fell upon the first of the boulders, she remembered she had seen them vaguely featured with human characteristics. Now, though they remained still, she had an even stronger sense of presence. She mopped the blood gingerly, as if cleaning wounds, first from one and then another, and when she was done the bucket of water had gone red. She couldn’t find a drain in which to slop it, and there was no door to the chamber—just walls and a floor. No windows, no door, no further world.
She sat back on her heels and looked the nearest boulder in the eye sockets, and said, “Well, forgive me my trespasses, then.”
“Ah, we forgive you who trespass against us,” said the boulder.
“I do beg your mercy,” she said.
“Don’t tire yourself. Mercy isn’t something we concern ourselves with.” The boulder was blushing to life, filling in its outlines with a rough musculature. A clothed, bearded obstinacy became slowly apparent—more or less like a man, though rather less than more. Not merely because of its stature, but also because it retained in its fixed expression something of the rock. It had eyes that didn’t move in its skull, but its skull could swivel on its torso (there seemed no neck), and the head moved back and forth, surveying things, almost as if it were waking up just as she had.