something primitive in them,” she said. “I know because I feel it, that wildness in my blood. It is something I have learned to . . . overcome. You read Eleanor’s memoir. You know what I am capable of doing. My strength was quite a wonder, once. It was a gift I never understood fully until it left me. I am certain that this strength was passed down from the Icemen. Giovanni and Guillaume inherited it from me. And you, I would guess, have inherited it, too.”
A fit of coughing overtook Vita. She sank into her pillows, her face sallow, her eyes filled with pain.
I stood to go. “You need to rest. I’ll get the supplies from Bernadette and bring them to Aki.”
“Wait,” she said, grasping my hand and pulling me back into my seat. “There is something else. Something I must ask of you before you go to them. A request.”
I sat at her side, feeling wary. What could I possibly do that she had not done already?
“As you know, Leopold lived among the Icemen for a number of years and returned with a child, my grandfather Vittorio. It was a secret, how Vittorio came to be born, even among the family. My father told Eleanor the truth because of the undeniable physical resemblance I have to them. What was not known to Eleanor, or to anyone else, were the details of Leopold’s relationship with my grandmother. Her name was Zyana. In his field notebook, Leopold describes Zyana at length, the birth of my grandfather Vittorio, and their life together. What was unknown to everyone, even to Eleanor, was that Leopold and Zyana had a second child. A girl.” Vita’s eyes bore into me as she spoke. “Leopold left her behind, abandoned her, with the Icemen.”
“But why would he do that?” I asked, feeling, for reasons I did not understand, deeply disturbed by the idea.
“It could have been that the girl had inherited her mother’s traits and looked more like them. By all accounts, Vittorio appeared to be more or less normal and could pass for one of us. He was blond and pale and exceptionally strong, like the Icemen, but he displayed nothing that would frighten people.” A look passed over Vita’s features as she spoke, and I wondered if she felt the pain of her own childhood. “There is also the unfortunate reality that girls were of little value to the Montebiancos back then. If Leopold had to make a choice between his two children, he would have surely taken his son. In any case, the daughter’s fate has plagued me for years. I assume that she, like so many of the tribe, died young. And even if Leopold’s daughter did not die in childhood, there is no guarantee she lived long enough to have children. Or that these children had children. It is very likely that Leopold’s descendants did not survive.” Vita smiled, her glittering eyes and ravaged features giving her the look of an ancient creature, one who has survived a great battle. “But on the other hand, it is also possible that they did. That is what you must find out.”
“But you went to the village,” I said. “Why didn’t you look then?”
“I did look,” she said. “I found nothing definitive. That doesn’t prove that Leopold’s descendants do not exist. The Icemen tell stories about their origins, but they have no system for keeping information, and so nothing has ever been recorded. They think of life and death differently than we do, not as a beginning and ending, but as a contribution and repayment to a life source. Death is a passage, one that is painful, but merely a movement to another realm. You will see, when you meet them, that their perceptions are very different from ours. They do not know how to classify or distinguish categories in the ways we do. For example, when I showed Aki the mulberry trees by the mausoleum and a citrus tree from the greenhouse, he used the same word for both, which means, roughly, “plant.” It is the same with human beings. When I ask if there is someone among them who is different, who has different features, perhaps, or maybe even a pigmentation to the skin that is different from theirs, they don’t understand my question. They are a tribe, with all its strengths and all its flaws.”
I felt suddenly overwhelmed by all that was being asked of me, not only by Vita, but by