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.”
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.