The whole party seemed sprightlier, more vigorous. Bianca felt like dancing. But the newcomer would have none of it. “Brothers,” he barked, and Bianca was surprised that such were the improved spirits in the room that she could understand the language now. “Brothers,” he said again, snapping, “I’ve returned, and you have forgotten who I am to you?”
The dwarves snapped out of their several reveries and games, and turned to him. “You petition for our attention,” said Heartless.
“I am your kin,” said the newcomer. He straightened up, and either the dwarves had grown more like him during the meal, or he more like them, for they seemed familial now, in look as well as language. “Do you forget me?”
“Well, yes,” said Heartless. “Actually.”
“I am—” He paused, as if not quite having sorted it out for himself. “I am Nextday, you cretinous lumpheads.”
They may never have heard the name before, and indeed Nextday seemed surprised by it himself, but somehow the concept made sense to them. The dwarves looked at Nextday with more careful, judging expressions.
“I was one of you before I left,” said Nextday, “and you’ve forgotten I was ever here. So I come back to claim my moment with you. Let us go to our work, now we are fed, and see what of the world can be seen.”
She could sense the change. The dwarves were full of purpose. They pushed back their chairs and went to cupboards and found cloaks and boots, and put them on. The whole room snapped into being. A wardrobe bolted into a corner, a bench popped along the wall; the floor brought forth a woven carpet, rather a nice one too, in golds and greens. The vague piles of mess retreated into darker corners, as if cowed by firmer intentions.
“Come,” said Nextday, “there is a lot to do yet, before night has fallen.”
“Take me with you!” said Bianca.
She knew she could go, now, because for the first time there was a door, a wooden-slatted door with stout iron hinges and a bolt and a lock besides. The door had a small hinged window of real glass, and the strangest yellow soup stewed on either side of the glass in an acidic, shrill sort of way. It took Bianca’s breath quite away when she realized it was nothing but sunlight.
She followed the dwarves out the door.
Beware beware
FOR A while they stood blinking. Bianca couldn’t tell what season it was, if any; the gentle rise on which the door gave was unkempt and confused. Wild rose blossoms, given over to the blowsiest excess, reclined on hoops bowed with ridges of snow. Spring ferns uncurled their tender heads in a runaway patch of autumnal gourds. The air had a glazed, unnatural quality, as if steeped in the air of something violently alcoholic. Undertones both of dry rot and damp decay. Bianca felt herself swim in her clothes, and eager to be out of them.
The dwarves seemed to have forgotten her. Nextday stood on a rock so he could be seen, and addressed his brethren. In the air his language was harder to follow. They were speaking about the mirror.
“What mirror is this?” said Bianca, pushing forward, reminding them that she was there.
Nextday said, “It isn’t your concern, nor should it be.”
“But I may be able to help.”
“You aren’t able to find your way through a draped doorway into the next room, or you’d have left our home long ago,” snarled Bitter. But Nextday continued for her benefit in a vernacular she could more easily follow. “I’ll remind us all what we are after, and let the world have at us if it must. We’re the ones who made the mirror; we’re to be the ones to reclaim it, if it’s to do no harm.”
Bianca had a thrilling sense of possibility similar to the sense a mirror gave: of otherness and familiarity at once.
“Tell me about the mirror,” she said.
Nextday considered her request. He said, “I’ve been learning much in these days. To speak of something, I find, can help clarify it in one’s own mind. Therefore I’ll tell you what I know, and perhaps I’ll learn something in how I put my knowledge forward.”
“Or perhaps I’ll reply with something you don’t yet know,” said Bianca helpfully.
“Thrills unbounded,” observed Bitter in a low voice.
“I hope she speaks better than she cooks,” said Tasteless. “I didn’t care for that stew at all, did you?”
“Be quiet,” said Heartless. “She can hear as well as speak.”
“Stay on the matter,” said Bianca, unflustered. “The mirror.”
“We are a race more stalwart, more stubborn, than yours,” said Nextday. “We’ve spent arcs of years thinking a single thought. But in our vast and tedious life, we’ve come to realize that what divides us from the quixotic human race is the quality of quickness. Cut to the quick, they say; the quick and the dead, they say: They mean life, liveliness, when they say the quick. And we see that if we’re to benefit at all from our neighbors here—the human herd—we must quicken.
“So, being adept at all things having to do with the earth—the soil, the mines, the precious stones and metals, the juice of lava—we found it easy to ferret out the secrets of the Venetians. We blew a quantity of glass and shaped it into a shallow bowl, and painted the inner skin with a coat made of tin and quicksilver. We made for ourselves a mirror that could look like an eye into a room, so we could watch how humans look at themselves, and learn by their example how to look at ourselves.”
“A clever trick,” said Bianca, “and possibly a mean one.”
“Minerals have no morals, and we are little more than ambulatory stacks of minerals. We weren’t stymied by reservations. But we suffered a setback. To ready the mirror, we left it out in the air so its shape could fix, and it could adjust to the code of the world in which humans live, and not to our code. Then to cure it we submerged it in a bath of water. But it sank, and we couldn’t see it. It had become invisible to us.”
“Lago Verde,” said Bianca.
“We watched it being reclaimed. From a distance we saw that it worked, well enough. But quicksilver is strong enough stuff when found in nature, and stronger still when dwarves work with it. It corrupts the mind, and confounds the separate humors. It can make humans suspicious of cabals in every crowd, of treason at every turn. It causes tremors and drooling. It’s a dangerous substance to humans.”
“Can’t you just steal it back? To protect the humans who found it, if nothing else?” said Bianca.
Nextday said, “Humans can steal all kinds of things; perhaps that is what makes them change and shift and thrive so. Dwarves can’t steal.”
“But you told me that minerals have no morals,” she said. “If you can’t steal, perhaps you are made of more than minerals.”
“Cleverness is unbecoming in a corpse,” sneered MuteMuteMute.
“And you stole the secret of glassmaking from the Venetians,” she pointed out.
“Is this a court of judicial law? Are we on trial?” said Lame. “Goodness, I’d have worn something more attractive.”
“If it’s a question of donation, let me just give you the mirror,” said the girl. “It’s as simple as that, surely? If my father is dead, then the house is mine, and I’ll have nothing in the house that doesn’t rightly belong to me.”
Nextday looked at her with a quiet sort of consolation. He didn’t offer an opinion about whether her father was dead or not. He only remarked, “The house isn’t quite yours. And we don’t steal.”
“What do you do, then?” she said. “Where do you go? What is your task?”
Nextday said, “I am going to take my kin to Arezzo, to see the fresco in the choir. Someone has painted a dwarf on the wall there, a creature of dignity and intelligence, calmly interacting with the family of man. Perhaps he is both a dwarf and a human being; this is something of which we have not heard. We are too long underground. Now we’ve awakened, now we’ve eaten—”
“If you can call that food. Pfaaah,” muttered Tasteless.
“—now we are above, and more solid in new forms than we expected.” Nextday looked a
bout at the small men in tunics and leggings, hoods and boots. “We must pass in the world and see how we fare. Perhaps, though it had hardly begun, the time for the mirror is done, and now it’s time to look with our own eyes.”
He blinked sadly at Bianca. “Can we leave you safely here?”
“Of course,” she said.
“You are not to run off,” he told her. “Donna Borgia would see that you were killed again.”
“I have not died yet,” she said, laughing.
“No,” he said. “All but that, but not that, no.”
With that he began to lead his brothers away. Heartless came up and pressed his hand to hers, but then hurried after his kind.
Such was the increased corporeality of the tribe that she could see them leaving, and waving at her, and hear them when they were gone, tramping softly in the impossible season. When their boots no longer thudded upon the rock or skittered stones on the pebbley path, she could hear them hissing musically through their lips, like infants walking down the lane to greet the goat in his pen or the fowl pecking for breakfast along the verges.
She sat down and looked around her. The exterior of the dwarves’ home had the aspect of a hummock at first, little more than a mound of grass on the side of a hill, but as she looked it shrugged off its green roof and grew scales of pantiles. The sloping sides of the dwelling straightened themselves up and became timbered, and the windows made an effort to line themselves up on something of a parallel, to be more pleasing. The hill dropped some bulk behind, and what remained looked more like a cottage, more or less freestanding, with a chimney of stone and chipped brick, and a smell from within of mushrooms, sage, and Parma cheese.
“Not such an ugly grave,” she said to herself, “not an ossuary, not a churchyard; no, quite respectable.”
Respectable, but lonely, after a while. The sun went behind a cloud and the more wintry aspects of the garden seemed to dominate.
Then, when she was just about to give up and go inside, she heard a noise in the brambles, and she called out, “Who is there?” She turned to see a figure make its way across the clearing.
The figure in the clearing
I WASN’T looking to find you,” said the figure. “Are you a goose?”
“I know you,” said Bianca.
“All my geese know me,” he said proudly.
“I’m not a goose,” she said. “But I know you just the same.”
He bit the corner of a fingernail.
“You’re the gooseboy,” she told him.
“I know,” he replied. “I’m looking for the lost goose.”
“I am lost, in a sense,” she said, and she began to laugh, “and in a sense I am a goose—but not the one you’re looking for.”
“Can you help me find her?” he said. “The house is full of hunger, and they will have a goose upon the table.”
“Do you remember me?” she said.
“Not if you weren’t with the other geese.”
“I was, sometimes.”
He looked at her sideways. “I’ve never met a spirit of the woods before,” he said. “Primavera used to say that the wood spirits are as old as Roman times and I must beware hags and graybeards. You don’t look much like a hag.”
“Nor a graybeard.” She was teasing him, but that she had always done. “Do you really not know who I am?”
“Neither goose nor dryad. Some saint with loosened garments?” He saw that her tunic was unlaced. She put her hands to her breasts and covered them.
“Not a saint,” she said and sighed. “I never lived enough to have the chance to become a saint. Saints have to endure trials, and I was too innocent even for a trial.”
“How do you know me?”
“You are the gooseboy from Montefiore.” But she didn’t know his name. Had she ever known his name? He was too simple to need a name, just the gooseboy, or, addressed directly, Boy.
As she had grown and changed, so had he. A young man now, he was somewhat stooped of shoulder, as if practicing to be a codger. One leg seemed shorter than the other, or withered; anyway, it kept itself slightly arched behind, looking a bit like a high-spirited colt’s rear leg. Without much success his cheeks and lips were trying to grow a beard. His chin was stronger than it had been, though his eyes were still jittery with caution.
“I am your friend,” she said.
“If I’ve learned anything from the kitchen tales that Primavera used to tell, it’s that the likes of me are to beware of friends like you,” he answered. “Maidens of unusual friendliness, that sort of thing.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. He flinched and retreated.
“I am only looking for my lost goose, nothing more.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I merely mean this: don’t you recognize me? I am your friend from long ago. Bianca, who played with you in the road below the house.”
His eyes looked more hooded than ever. “Bianca died years ago. Are you her spirit?”
“I didn’t die,” she said. “I just—went away.”
“What do you want with me?”
She shrugged. “To help you find your goose, I suppose. What else does a friend want, but the same thing?”
“If you aren’t going to ensnare me into your wicked bed,” he said, sounding faintly disappointed, “you may as well help me find my goose. Have you seen her? It’s the one with the long neck.”
“Don’t they all have long necks?”
“Well—yes, now that you mention it.”
“Where are the other geese, while you look for the lost goose?”
“With themselves, of course.”
“Safe?”
“As safe as geese can get. Which isn’t very safe, I admit; after all, I keep them together and free of the fox only so they might end up roasting on the spit.”
She said, “I’ll help you find her. Where are you looking?”
“Here and there.” He indicated to the left, to the right, broadly and without fuss. She looked around, and began to take in the world again.
Beyond the clearing, there was no correction to the world. The trees had a certain snap to them, a self-assurance, that was offensive at first. They didn’t shrug themselves into more respectable shapes, more graceful curves; those limbs that were ragged with disease or hollowed by the boring of insects stayed ragged, insouciant. As she ventured a few steps farther, the rocks and stones jabbed her tender soles, and a fly pestered her about the ears. The air grew colder again by degrees and wouldn’t warm as she might have preferred it to. It was, in short, the real world.
She took his hand and they walked together, he with his lopsided lope, she gingerly, to protect her feet. It was bizarre and even cruel, in a way, to see the world insist on being itself, with so little regard for them. Coming upon an ungainly promontory, they had to scramble around it, as it neither retreated nor developed convenient footholds for their use. Balsam pitch smeared against her gown, rubbing a gummy mark in it. Her breasts were cold and the tips of her breasts stiffened uncomfortably. She ought to have willed herself some decent clothes, but she hadn’t remembered the world to be so unaccommodating.
“I don’t know your name,” she said.
“I am the gooseboy,” he told her fondly, as if to have heard that she could forget was proof enough that they had once known one another.
“But your other name,” she said. “I’ve a name. Bianca. Bianca de Nevada.” It felt odd in her mouth. “Didn’t you have another name?”
“Michelotto,” he said. “Nothing more.”
“Michelotto.” She found herself smiling. “I think we were friends once.”
“I think so too.” He said it out of a passion to please, not from conviction.
They skirted a stand of slender trees with slender trunks like the legs of fawns, and bodices of white leaf.
“How many geese have you?” she asked.
“Seven,” he said, “or eight.”
“Seven when one is missing,
eight when one is found?”
“Seven or eight.”
“Well, there they are, then.” They had come to a gentle dip from which a spring burbled; a vernal pool shimmered with the reflection of a gaggle of geese. White curvets upon green water. “Four, five, six—seven.”
“Seven!” he said. “That’s the right number, I think. So she’s come back.”
“She came back while you were looking the other way.”
“That’s often the way you find someone who is lost,” he said. He smiled at her as if he were competent, just for a moment, and his gaze looked clear and friendly. In all her childhood she hadn’t thought of him as much more than a goose himself, and the realization caused her grief.
“Come back with me,” he said. “They will be happy to see you.”
“Who is there?” she asked.
“Donna Borgia, for one.” He paused as if trying to remember the others.
Her fear was profound, though she didn’t know why. She pulled back and said, “You are trying to lure me back!”
“I am looking for my goose, nothing more,” he said. “You must believe me.”
“Play with your geese, gooseboy,” she said, and pushed him on the shoulder. He stumbled and fell to one knee, and while he maneuvered and huffed to find his balance, she fled.
It wasn’t hard to find the dwarves’ cottage. While she was gone, while she had ventured into the world, it had solidified more. A rich moss adhered to one wall. The door was now lime-washed and opened in two segments, like the door of a byre. A concavity shaped like a shell at the top, perhaps a shrine, was set in the side wall. She went to look. Within stood no Virgin with open hands, no carpenter with a Child on his shoulders, as she might have expected to see. Instead, a crudely carved stone tree with a coil of serpent wrapped around its base. A single apple, outsize, weighed down one branch. The serpent ignored the apple. Though its head was turned toward Bianca, its fangs were weathered into stumps.
Interviews
VICENTE FOUND Fra Ludovico in the little yard behind his cell, where he was keeping watch over a kettle. He was boiling up berries and bark, which Vicente remembered was the basis of some unsavory potion famous for the stupor it induced. The foul smell was comforting in its familiarity.