STUCK AS we all are in the maw of time, the dwarves learned to age, and discovered a new variety of patience, one that required effort. Around the glass-lidded coffin they kept their vigil, even after the eyesight of Vicente de Nevada began to fail, and his memory to falter, and he returned to the hilltop bier with infrequency, and then not at all.
Springs came and went, interspersed with sequences of summer, autumn, and winter, in a regular pattern that, the dwarves decided, wasn’t all that hard to follow. Their beards grew longer and grayer, and Gimpy showed up once with a pair of black scissors.
“Where did you get those?” asked Deaf-to-the-World.
“I bargained for them from a shoemaker,” he replied. “I did hard labor for a week, tanning leather in a foul warehouse, and for my efforts I was repaid with this implement.”
“What is it for?”
“Our beards are growing into the soil. Haven’t you noticed?” Gimpy wandered about the clearing and snipped off the beards at waist height. Indeed, some of the dwarves had been rooting in the soil. The dog alone seemed impervious to hair growth, or maybe it was that he shed.
“What else are scissors good for?” asked Heartless.
“Oh, well,” said MuteMuteMute, looking around. “I suppose we could cut back the ivy growing over the coffin.”
No one could not think of a reason to protest, not even Bitter, so the dwarves, enjoying the mobility they hadn’t realized they’d been lacking, gathered about the bier. Deaf-to-the-World, Tasteless, Heartless, Blindeye, and Bitter clutched handfuls of ivy and hauled it back. Gimpy and MuteMuteMute took turns snipping. Once they’d been accustomed to breathing through solid stone, and now they found gardening strenuous work. Well, they were aging too. Tasteless was losing his black-and-gold teeth, one by one, and Blindeye complained that white smears were beginning to cloud his vision.
When they had finished, they laid to one side a pile of dead ivy the size of a small house.
Midsummer day was approaching, 1519, and more of the world’s timelessness was evaporating by the hour. MuteMuteMute fished from his pocket a tin box with a hot coal inside, and used the coal to light the older, browner parts of ivy. Within a short time the burning vines became a beacon on the hill, and they smoked all day, until by sunset they had attracted attention.
The gooseboy, Michelotto, came thrashing through the summer growth. He was still a gooseboy, though he was twenty-two now. His shoulders were less hunched. Perhaps due to having enjoyed a hearty if belated introduction to the joys of the flesh, Michelotto was pleased that his right leg no longer trailed. Indeed, he was a specimen of surprising beauty. He had Lucrezia’s aquiline nose and shapely chin, and his eyes were a liquid gray, water in a pewter goblet.
“You make a fire to call me here?” he asked.
Away from the farms and villages, the dwarves were rarely addressed by a human. It took their ears a short time to remember how to decipher syllables.
“We make a fire to burn the ivy,” said Heartless.
“Oh, but look,” said Michelotto. “It doesn’t seem to be burning.”
Michelotto seemed to be right. Anyway, he was more human than they, so the dwarves paid attention. They could see that the fire was burning. The leaves of the ivy seemed green as ever, though perhaps it was merely that they hadn’t burned long enough. Leave it to a human to fiddle over such minute distinctions as burned or not burned in a matter of so few moments.
Michelotto went down on his knees before the coffin and leaned across it. He breathed on the glass and rubbed it with his hand.
“Is the box full of someone?” he asked. “I can’t rub away the mist.”
Stoneheart said, “She waits in our time, while we have moved on into hers.”
“It’s a maiden, then,” said Michelotto, more or less approvingly. The dwarves nodded.
Michelotto pressed his hands against the lid and felt as if for a spring lock release. “But the glass is very pure,” he said. “I can’t see what is inside, for something like breath clouds the inside of the glass. But the breath makes a silvery beaded backing, and the oval glass does the work of a mirror. Try as I might, all I can see is myself.”
“That is ever the trouble with human beings,” snapped Bitter. The other dwarves looked at him with surprise. “Well, what of yourself do you see?” he continued, “if you must go on about it so?”
“Not very much,” said Michelotto, “and that’s the sorry truth. There’s not all that much of me to see.” He smiled at himself, though, forgivingly, and with a touch of his mother’s self-admiration.
“May I open the box and view the corpse?” said Michelotto after a while. “Are these the remains of a saint, like Lucy of Narni? Perhaps a necessary holiness would be conferred upon me, and my mental slowness would be corrected. I’m surer of thought than I used to be, but even so, I could do with any blessing.”
“She has the innocence of a saint,” said Gimpy, “but she’s only a young woman who has slipped sideways a few feet, into another realm.”
“Still, I’d like to have her blessing, even if she is dead. Will the body stink after all this time?”
“Little offends us,” said Tasteless, shrugging.
“Is it time?” asked Heartless. “Is it time already? We have been here only since morning, surely! I’ve hardly had a chance to contemplate.”
He lifted his nose and sniffed and listened. Several tears tracked into his beard, which was now more white than red. “The old threat is hearing the knell of bells calling for a funeral Mass,” he said. “The next danger may be kneeling here before us, for all I know. The only way to be kept from danger is to be kept dead, and all we decided to do was to try to keep her from the one who would destroy her then. Let life go ahead and destroy her now, in a new and novel way. We have no right to forbid it.”
Michelotto took this as permission to continue, and with more dedicated efforts, he worked at the clasps and hasps that secured the lid to the coffin. The dwarves didn’t help. They stood back. Deaf-to-the-World backed into the fiery mountain of ivy, and yelped.
Michelotto laughed—silly little men!—and wrestled the lid, at last, away.
He leaned over and looked at Bianca de Nevada, and his breath stung in his chest.
“She hasn’t changed a day,” he said. “And I remember her now, and the fate that befell her. She was my friend, my Bianca, my good true friend. How has she come to rest like a painted marble beauty in this box of wood and glass?”
“Your mother took every step she could manage to destroy her,” said Blindeye. “Here she lies, though, rich as rain. Isn’t she delicate?”
Michelotto leaned over the box. The girl was unblemished and incorruptible. Her hair had grown in the box, and made for her a sort of black pool of netting, in which her pale face and her pale hands floated. The clothes in which she’d been put to rest may have rotted away; it was impossible to tell, for the hair covered her as respectably as a nun’s habit. Her eyes were closed, but the face appeared unsunken, unblanched. She looked as if she were asleep.
“May I kiss her?” he asked.
“No, no. No, Michelotto.”
The gooseboy turned to argue with the dwarf, who had professed to be excused from responsibility, to find that it wasn’t the dwarf speaking. It wasn’t any of them. It was someone else, pressing through a clot of undergrowth.
The dwarves thought it was Vicente, for he was the only one, besides them, who had come to sit with the girl. It had been some years since he’d shown up, and they had presumed his bad lungs, bad legs, bad eyes, had gotten the better of him at last, and death had allowed him some peace that life had withheld from him. But Vicente could only have gotten older, that much they were sure of, and this was a younger man, one they had never seen.
Michelotto had seen him before, but he couldn’t remember his name. They hadn’t known each other well. But he remembered the stride. The face was older, the beard and the temples flecked with early silver. The eyes were like knotholes into a deep and complicated tree.
“I came upon her just as you did, but held back, hardly believing my eyes,” he said. “Neither that she was there at all, nor that you opened the casket. But in any case, she’s not there for you to kiss.”
“Who are you to say?” asked Michelotto.
“The one who put her here,” he answered. “Not knowing what I was doing.”
“I had heard you were slaughtered like a pig,” said Michelotto.
“I just disappeared. That’s all.”
Heartless drove his thick fingers into his beard and fished out, one after the other, a stack of florins. “These,” he said to Ranuccio, “I believe are yours.”
“I didn’t want them before and I don’t want them now. Give them to the poor,” said Ranuccio.
“Ah, I’m poor enough,” said Heartless, and put them back in his beard. “You were the one who brought her to us. Did you know that?”
“I don’t know where she’s been, nor, hardly, where I’ve been. And I’ve never seen you in my life.”
Ranuccio Vecchia had confessed his deed in the forest not to Fra Tomasso, but to his grandmother, Primavera, who hadn’t been able to keep her tongue still, and for her gossip had lost it. To protect what was left of Primavera’s life, he’d disappeared from the district. He housed himself, for his penance, under the tutelage of the abbot at Cirocenia, reading what could be found of the Alexandrine and Coptic monks and the desert fathers.
The abbot has released him at last, divining that it was time for him to request forgiveness of the girl’s father. Ranuccio had been making his way to Montefiore across the spines of the hills, trying to avoid the temptation of villages and farms. The smoke on a promontory attracted his attention as he approached, though. It was in his path, so he decided to steal up and peer at what was happening.
“It is hardly possible that the Signorina de Nevada lies here in perfection,” he admitted. “Perhaps I’ve died, and my soul makes its last perambulation about the world, to face its sins and to accept its punishment.
“I might have kissed her in the forest, but she was a child, and it would have been a kiss of Judas, leaving her to her fate,” said Ranuccio. “And so, Michelotto, as far as I can determine, you have no right to interfere. A kiss now cannot kill her further.” He knelt at the coffin’s edge and put his hands beneath Bianca’s shoulders, and pulled her up a few inches. Her head fell softly back and her mouth opened. The teeth were pearls and the breath, if breath it could be called, smelled thinly of apple blossoms. Ranuccio put his mouth to hers and apologized.