No, she will not sing for them. Of course she will have to talk sometimes, but as long as she makes her voice raw as she did today she can fool most of them. The dispensary bird will be the hardest. She is clever, even has some wit in her, though God knows how she keeps it flowering in this tomb of dried-up old flesh. Sixteen years! Imagine! Locked in that cell for sixteen years with just books and stinking bottles for company. And all that strange poetry about heaven and earth and divine remedies …
Still, if she had to work anywhere in this prison, the dispensary would do well enough (better than a lifetime spent blind and hunched with a pen in your hand—most of the magpies in the scriptorium looked dead already from the effort). At least on her shelves there are some wonders to be learned, if you could tell the consistency of blood from poppy syrup. You could put a whole convent to sleep if you knew the right recipe. She sees an image of a line of nuns, sipping deep from the communion wine, then keeling over one by one. The sheer viciousness of the thought makes her smile. The only one who might survive is that young gargoyle with the harelip that runs like a dredged canal from her mouth into her nostrils. She can barely drink at all. Ugh. At dinner she has to bend her head back at an angle to make sure the water in her mug doesn’t dribble into her bowl.
It makes her sick even to think about it. Maybe her father chose this place deliberately, knowing it to be packed with monstrosities: hunchbacks, idiots who smile when there’s nothing to smile about, the one whose right foot follows half an hour after her left, and—the most scary one of all—the novice with the poxy face, the scars so angry she might even have been lovely not so long ago.
The girl from the Dominici family who lived not far from her had suffered the same horror: one Sunday flicking lizard tongues at the boys beneath her veil in church, six weeks later so foul and pitted that her headdress at mass was thick as a winter curtain and everyone who sat near to her said they could hear her sobbing behind it. The story was that she asked to be put into a convent because she could not bear to be among sweet faces anymore. For who would possibly want her now? Oh, dear God, what if this one still has the disease, or some other kind of pox slides in through the windows here? They would all be dead or maimed within weeks. No. Please, please, Virgin Mother, don’t let such a thing happen!
Love opened my left side with his right hand, and there within my very heart he planted a laurel tree, so green that its rich hue exceeds the color of all emeralds.
She can feel hot tears flowing again. Ha! Outside she registers the footsteps of the watch sister moving into the cloisters on her rounds, and she moves swiftly to blow out the candle, so swiftly that the wax from the flame spatters onto her fingers.
She winces from its heat, then registers the change as it coagulates and sticks to her fingers. Hot wax. Like a seal. Of course! A seal. Yes!
As soon as she finds bigger stones, she will use the candle to seal the paper around them. At least that way she will be ready when he comes. Because come he will. She is sure of it.
THESE THINGS ZUANA has never seen and probably never will:
The ocean
The great veins underneath the earth where precious metals grow
The monster known as the lamia
A newborn baby
The insides of a dead person
Though when it comes to the last she has been closer than most.
HER FATHER WAS by no means the first to take his knife publicly to a human corpse. By the time he stood up in the lecture hall of Ferrara University his butcher’s apron tied around him, anatomical dissection was already an accepted part of medical education in cities such as Bologna and Padua. (The great Vesalius himself worked for many years in Padua, and it was there that he laid the foundation for his book on the fabric of the human body; this is a fact Zuana has known for so long that she cannot remember anymore when she was told it first.) But thanks to scholars like Mancardi and Brasalola, Ferrara was not far behind, and by the time she was old enough to understand the difference between a vein and a muscle a public dissection was taking place under the auspices of the university every other year: an audience of a hundred or more medical students bundled into thick cloaks and hats, packed alongside a few strong-stomached Ferrarese citizens with the curiosity and appetite to look inside themselves.
