ice-blue eyes which stare at her as if they want to eat her. Ti chiamerai Clara, she said.
And so, Maria and Clara, the two extraordinary children, would grow up under the protection of the ordinary souls who had adopted them, and as wards of the trees and mountains in their respective lands.4 In Burgundy, the coming of the little girl embellished the seasons and caused the crops to prosper, and everyone suspected she was magic—although, deep in their Christian selves, they refused to entertain the idea. But there was a moving halo around her, and they could see she knew how to talk to the trees and the animals in the forest. She was a joyful, affectionate child, who brought happiness to the old grannies on the farm, and warmed the heart of André and Rose, her adoptive parents. They had lost their own children in infancy, and didn’t know which saint to thank for the late gift of this child who was so lovely and cheerful. In Santo Stefano, Clara spent most of her time in the kitchen with the old housekeeper, listening to her tales of the Sasso. The priest treated her like his daughter, but he was a man of little depth, for whom she felt polite indifference, and the joy she took in her mountains meant this did not matter. All day long, she ran up and down the slopes and learned the only maps that mattered to her heart, those of the stones on the paths and the stars in the broad sky. The girls grew, one darker than twilight, with brown eyes and skin of honey, the other heart-stoppingly fair, with her sky-blue gaze and complexion like hawthorn blossom—and until they turned ten, nothing noteworthy happened beyond the confirmation of their grace, so that those who loved them could sleep in peace and perform their consecrated devotions before the Lord.
Then they turned ten, and the wheels of fate began to turn more quickly before resuming a falsely peaceful pace. In Burgundy, the villagers obtained the confirmation that the little girl was magic when a fantastic beast appeared one snowy night—that of her birthday—as they were searching for the child in the dark, for she hadn’t come back to the farm. The men found Maria on the hill in the middle of a clearing, in the company of the creature, which initially appeared to be a big white horse, then turned into a wild boar, and finally a man, and so on in a circle dance of species that left them all gasping for breath. Finally, the creature vanished before their eyes, and they went back down to the farm holding the little girl tight in their arms. Now, we know that this was Tagore, who’d come to give Maria the vision of her arrival in the village, because he thought, as did Solon and Petrus, that the powers of the children would be nourished by the knowledge they would gain from their own story as they grew up. The little girl from Spain learned that she’d been adopted and saw her special skills grow ever stronger—for talking to the animals in the fields and shelters, for discerning the pulsations and figures the trees traced in the air of her countryside, for hearing the song of the world in a symphony of energy that no human being has ever perceived, and for increasing the talents of those men and women who shared her life. The day she turned eleven, finally, another fantastic beast appeared before her in the shape of a mercurial horse combined with a hare and a gray-eyed man, whom we recognize as Solon, come in daylight for the first time to meet his daughter.
It was on that day that proof of treason was found. The Head of the Council had been spied on, and the enemy launched an intimidating attack in the form of tornadoes and arrows of smoke. And this confirmed what we had known ever since his cursed soul had passed through the human world and he had become the leader in Rome: Aelius was in possession of the gray notebook; another pavilion and another bridge had been built; he could move back and forth between the two worlds and play with the climate as he liked. The only good thing in all this misfortune was that Aelius had never had any faith in the prophecy Petrus had unearthed in the library and, during the Council sessions, he’d always sat