“Very well,” Lucrezia answered. “Bianca, will you sit?”
“I’d rather stand,” she said. Children didn’t regularly sit in the presence of their betters—primarily so that they could get a head start should they have to run for safety.
“Sit,” said Cesare. Bianca sat, though on the very edge of the stool he had indicated. Her heels drummed on the floor.
“I’ve made it my business to oversee affairs at Montefiore,” said Lucrezia in a formal tone, as if addressing an assembly of princes of the Church. “I’ve been tireless in turning over the papers involved in your father’s ownership of this establishment. There are tithes to be paid to the Church, there are costs to the guards who patrol the valley below and keep you safe from invasion and pillage. All this I’ve done out of love for your father.”
I doubt that, Bianca thought. In what ways could you love my father? For one thing, he’s been missing for half my life.
“It turns out that some time ago, blithering Fra Ludovico had a letter from Don Vicente. It was secreted into his book of devotions, and when confronted with its presence he didn’t seem to know what it meant. The first part was in Italian, and directed the cleric to maintain the letter in a safe place and present it to you when you were older. The letter then continued in Spanish. It was addressed to you. Have you read it?”
“I’m schooled in my letters,” Bianca admitted, “but not so that I can read in the language of my grandsires.”
“I thought not,” said Lucrezia smugly. “Shall I read it to you, translating as I go?”
“If it’s a letter from my father to me, perhaps I should wait until I’ve learned enough Spanish to read it for myself.”
“How ungrateful,” snapped Lucrezia. “I can understand how Fra Ludovico might have erred, in that he has become a halfwit; but for a young person you seem to have a head on your shoulders. Fra Ludovico understands no more Spanish than you do. Suppose the letter were a request for help? Suppose your father has fallen into the hands of brigands, or is wasting in an Ottoman prison? Suppose he knows a way you could help release him? Would you have him wait another six months until I could find a tutor for you, and then another six months beyond that until you’d learned enough to attempt a translation? Your father’s face might have become mantled with mildew by that time.”
Bianca flushed, knowing this could be true. Her lungs kicked in her, as if she were underwater; her vision watered and caused the room to stew. “If you must, then.”
“I don’t offer because I must. It’s nothing to me,” said Lucrezia. “You must petition courteously if you require my services.”
“Sister,” growled Cesare, but she cocked her wrist at him as if to say This is my hand to play; let me do it as I like.
“Please, Donna Borgia,” said Bianca then, wringing her hands together. “I most humbly entreat you to read my father’s letter aloud.”
“Very well,” said Lucrezia. “Since you’ve asked so nicely.”
She unfolded an uneven scrap of parchment that had become creased from being stored between the leaves of a breviary. “So it begins, Most beloved Bianca,” she said.
“I write in haste to put down a few details of your family of which you, as a child, have not been made aware. My work in the service of Il Valentino takes me far from you, and I must serve my Duke or risk upsetting what remains of our happy life as a traveling family who has found a welcoming home in the hinterlands of central Italy.
“I cannot know what fate will befall me as I march to a most unpredictable goal. However, should I fail to return before you have reached your maturity, I want you to know that there is help for you abroad. If famine or plague or the danger of war threatens your safety at Montefiore, you should make all haste to your mother’s family home in Navarre. There a treasury is reserved for our family’s use, and petition can be made to draw upon it once you have reached your womanly estate.
“If, however, news should come to the Castedo family of Navarre or to my kin, the de Nevada family in Aragon, that harm has befallen you, don’t worry: our cousins will mount an expedition and pitch battle against your enemies. Those countrymen of ours, the Borgias, have talents in intrigue that they didn’t invent wholecloth. The de Nevadas and Castedos could match them in cunning and outstrip them in cruelty. So let these words give you some comfort, that though I’ve become a simple farmer in Italy, there are impressive resources at my call—and at yours. Apply to the reigning Bishop of Navarre for help, and he will not fail you.
“I’ve arranged passage cross country to Città di Castello, and I start as much before dawn as a crowing cockerel can wake me. I do this with the knowledge that every step advancing me toward my goal is a step I will be eager to retrace to come home to you. Be good, my sweet Bianca, and keep your father in your prayers and in your heart. Be mindful that only love could make me leave you, and if the Love that governs our days is merciful, it will be love that returns us to each other too. If not in these days of our lives, then in the long golden day without sunset, in heaven.”
Lucrezia cleared her throat. “How very tender. Your father’s humor is melancholic as well as phlegmatic.”
Bianca couldn’t speak for the tears in her throat. After all these years, to hear her father’s words. Papà! Though unschooled in treachery, she knew enough to guess that the Borgias wouldn’t hesitate to fabricate a letter from her father if they thought they could gain by it. But this was her father’s voice, without compromise, without doubt. The rawness of his grief at parting from her brought her own loneliness back to her, and she wept silently but openly, as if he had only left that morning, and all the intervening years that had passed so far were yet to be endured. And who knew how many were left, before the reunion in heaven or on this wretched earth?
“How recently has this arrived?” asked Bianca. “May I go ask Fra Ludovico?”
“He’s dotty as a dormouse,” said Lucrezia. “I asked him the same question and he answered, tomorrow, or the week after, I’m not sure.”
“But do you have any word from my father?” Suddenly she was emboldened to ask. “On your behalf he left on a campaign: what you have heard?”
“Nothing, but silence means nothing in itself,” said Lucrezia, turning a common viperous thought of Bianca’s into a posy.
“Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop?” said Cesare.
“You ask me questions and you don’t answer mine,” she said.
“Let me suppose you didn’t hear what I said. Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop?”
“I don’t know a Tuscan cock from an Umbrian hen,” said Bianca desperately.
“What is meant, herein, by ‘womanly estate’?” mused Lucrezia.
“He must mean that a dowry or a debt to be discharged can be effected when Bianca comes to marrying age, of course,” said Cesare. “How old are you, little mouse?”
“She is a child still, with the chest of a boy,” scoffed Lucrezia.
“You were engaged to be married when you were eleven,” Cesare reminded his sister. “That disgusting cherubino from Valencia.”
“I was the daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia,” she snapped. “I’d have been engaged in utero, had it benefited the family fortunes, as you know very well. Despite Vicente’s implication of wealth and connections, the de Nevada family is neither powerful nor clever. This letter may be a ruse to confound us.”
“We weren’t meant to see it,” said Cesare.
“Of course we were. It’s written in Spanish. Who else at Montefiore would have been able to read it?”
“It’s written in Spanish to keep news of the family wealth away from prying eyes. Else the threat of kidnapping and ransom might apply.”
“Let me think. It could be a ploy. On the other hand, the threat of retaliation by loyal cousins . . . I never knew de Nevada well, but he didn’t seem the scheming sort. Was he clever enough to plan a strategic defense of his daughter like this?”
“W
as he?” Bianca was affronted. “You mean is he.” She didn’t know or care whether her father was clever; she cared that he still was.
“The first rule of success, my dear sister, a rule you should have mastered by now, is not to underestimate the deviousness of your enemies.”
“Oh, but who is an enemy?” asked Bianca, meaning it rhetorically: Certainly not us: we’ve given our father’s years to some campaign of yours! Some years, but not a life.
“You’re not an enemy, you’re a bother. We’ve learned nothing from you. Run on now, and take the ridiculous cloak with you.”
“Oh, let the mouse stay,” said Cesare.
Shades of rock
THE YEARS peeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time. Vicente had lost the ability to read time from the spatter of light the high window allowed to trail across the wall of his cell. Some days he couldn’t imagine whether it was starlight or sunlight, and other days—or nights—he felt that each individual stone was outlined with a pressure of silver edging, as if its crystals were yearning to make useful luminescence for him.
He knew that some days must be wintry, for a fine snow managed to filter in through the slitted aperture, and failed to melt for hours on end, but lay like the ghost of a carpet for him to regard. His fingers ached and stung, and then lost feeling. Other days he might catch the sharp sweet smell of a newly cut meadow. He was most aware in the spring, for once a year the monks butchered a lamb, likely for the paschal celebration, and in a matter of hours what started as the stench of searing flesh and bubbling blood became the aroma of choicest meat.
Always, there were the sounds of bells, as the monasteries across the rough forested hills of Agion Oros tolled their times to God and signaled news of their continued existence to one another.
Occasionally the sound of winds, or of distant birds of the sea, spiraled down to his celibate ears.
Once he heard a donkey bray, and he laughed for a while, at the gait of its voice picking its ungainly way through the air.
Never, though, did he hear the monks at prayer or at chant. Indeed, he rarely saw more than two of them at a time. Whenever the door of his prison opened, two new monks brought in his food, or clean clothes occasionally, and swapped a fresh empty bucket for the stinking fly-struck bucket of shit he had prepared for them. Maybe the monks were on a rotation, but there were too many of them for Vicente to identify by sight or voice. They all wore black robes, and the black hair on their chins raveled halfway down their chests identically. Every now and then one might smile a bit more kindly than the others, as he delivered bread and vegetables in broth, or a pastry with pistachios and honey, or a flagon of cool welcome water. But Vicente had not learned enough Greek to be able to converse. Besides, the monks were either living under vows of silence or, without a woman leading them in the arts of conversation, they had lost the capacity to chatter.
Whatever the unit of measure, hours or days or years, too many had passed since Vicente had left the high sanctuary of Montefiore in search of the branch from the Tree of Knowledge. The days on the farm in central Italy glowed in his memory with a rosy impossibility: Certainly olive trees could never have held such silvery light in their leaves, of an April morning; sheep had never lowed like lullabies, had they? And there had never been a María Inés, she of the delicate lemon flower scent, the alabaster breasts, the smile that broadened when she threw her head back in laughter. Of the haven she might have provided in the marriage bed, Vicente was certain he was imagining it from delirium born of loneliness. He was no longer convinced that woman could possibly have been created so accessible, so responsive, so convenient: even God couldn’t have imagined such a perfection.
Vicente’s recollection of his wife’s sex was clouded in his eyes, perhaps because his own sex, these years, had no memory of itself; he resentfully carried nothing but a small cold snail between his thighs, useless but for a dribbly piss. He wouldn’t be surprised one day to wake up and learn that what had once passed as his genitals had crawled away in the middle of the night to bury themselves in a hole somewhere and rot in peace.
He wished that he and his wife had had children. How much more possible it might be to endure the passage of eternity if he knew that María Inés had born him a son or a daughter, or several. What a refreshing picture, to imagine somewhere in Italy or Spain a crowd of de Nevada children, cavorting in sunlight. But he knew that this couldn’t have happened, for the hole in his heart around the notion of children was so severely black that he couldn’t even venture to consider the subject directly. He could only deduce a full and permanent loss in this matter.
But perhaps God had selected him for this assignment: to live a half-death in a holy prison on a holy mountain, among masculine people and creatures and flies and rocks. (Where the spring lamb might come from every year, in a population said to be entirely of rams, was a holy mystery.)
Vicente had followed what guidance had been given him, long ago, and he had worked his way through the Papal States, north by Ferrara, up into the Venetian marches, and then by boat across the Adriatic to Dalmatia. For protection from brigands, he’d met up with a caravan of merchants, and proceeded to Montenegro, Rumelia.
By quick degrees the world had grown more barbarian in its inhospitable strangeness. When he ventured beyond the reaches of his adopted tongue, he occasionally could find a tradesman or a sailor with enough Spanish to indicate where he was, but once he left the coast and began the overland trek through Macedonia and Thessaly he had little to trust in but his wits. He avoided wolves and thieves in the wilderness; he swam through a flash flood without drowning. Once he considered murder, when he got so hungry he thought his stomach would begin to digest his own heart for nourishment, but God forbade murder. Believing less in God than in God’s laws, he went hungry until the hunger was slaked by Fortune, who gave of her excess a handful of nuts or a slow-running chicken.
The landscape became harsher. Deep forests alternated with stony hardscrabble slopes from which the ancient pagan Greeks had harvested their fulsome stories and upon which their descendants seemed to be dying of starvation. By and by, as those weeks of travel passed in the wheeling pinions of categorizable hours—dusk, dawn, and the hundred permutations between, how lovely, how luxurious, how fatally addictive, the passage of daily light—Vicente moved further into the realm of strange myth, away from the cycles of his adopted patria, his farm and home, and toward the strained attenuated life of mad monks and wild fire-breathing boars and the goal of the fruit of the Garden of Eden.
And he’d found what he was sent to find, and been discovered in the process, and tossed like a bug into a hole, and he waited to die, and wanted to die, and he didn’t die. So was there a God or wasn’t there?
He took out his recollections from time to time, revered them as private landscapes to which he could repair. The spread of his holdings at Montefiore, the far more distant Aragon of his childhood, these sites were available at will. How kind, the thought of a slope of pink and white blossoming almond groves in an Aragonese spring! But his memories seemed unpopulated. So he relied for mental exercise and diversion on the recalling of his approach and apprehension at Teophilos.
As Cesare Borgia had said, the long promontory of Agion Oros was almost an island. Using a sack of florins, the value of which Greek peasants easily recognized, Vicente de Nevada had induced a pair of brothers with a fishing boat to set out from Ouranopolis and take him down the west side of the peninsula. For a day they drifted and fished. The brothers cared little for their passenger’s intentions—they threw bread at him, and a fleece when a wind came up, but generally they were happy enough to do their work and ignore his presence.
Vicente spent his time making a mental chart of the shoreline. He noted the monasteries that cropped up on the sheer cliffs, like honey-colored hives generated spontaneously out of their stone foundations. He tried to memorize the pattern of mountains that loomed beyond.
When it seemed the broth
ers had caught enough to merit their efforts, they began to try to turn the vessel about, hauling on ropes to trim the sails. The fishing boat refused to cooperate. By the glowering expressions of the fishermen, Vicente grew alarmed. He could tell they thought the boat was bewitched. The darker it grew, the more resistance the boat developed, until at last the brothers had had enough. They fell upon Vicente and tossed him into the sea.
Though he was surprised, he was hardly disappointed, as he had come this far in order to go farther. So he struck out for land, and with backward glances saw the brothers bringing the boat around without further difficulty.
It hadn’t been a difficult swim, even for someone whose experience of water was limited to duck ponds, sluggish rivers, and Lago Verde. The northern Aegean seemed warm to him, though what did he know of the source of its currents? Across its peacock-feather waters and past the islands of the Sporades and the Cyclades, and beyond the hump of Crete with its minotaur’s maze, the sands of the Saharas were said to stretch. Perhaps the hot breath of Africa leaned heavily on the water. Or maybe his passage was charmed. In any event, he made it ashore without mishap. There was a landing and a rude dock of sorts, but no soul about.
He couldn’t light a fire, having no tinder or spark, so to warm himself he began immediately to find his way up the slopes, through gray scrub, gnarled aromatic stuntpine, grasses with gritted edges that cut and stung. He wasn’t long in the wilderness, circling about to get a good look at the nearest monastery, when he came across what must have been a roadside shrine of some sort. Here hung a tin icon of a figure of indeterminate gender, and a clay cup supplied with a lump of wax: a votive. Protected from the weather in a tin box beneath the ledge he found a helpful flint and tinder, and so within a few minutes Vicente had made himself a small fire and driven the worst of the chill from his bones.
He had said a prayer for the safety of someone, but María Inés was already dead, and he couldn’t now remember for whom he’d been praying, nor, for that matter, to whom, either.