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.”
“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 about 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.