a mere heartbeat, an instant impression that we had the same green eyes and gold hair, that we were even wearing the same hue of green gown. But as she came toward me and I slipped from consciousness, I could even see that her expression held the same half-smile of Flora; she found amusement in this predicament.
As I fell to the ground, insensible, I knew three things.
Cosa Uno: Brother Guido was wrestled to the floor by two Medici men-at-arms with pikes; there could be no escape for him.
Cosa Due: the crowd parted to allow the dogaressa to come to me, and I could see through to the Primavera with a straight and uninterrupted view of Flora’s last rose. It had a green stem and a glossy leaf, and it was falling to the ground. I fell with it. And as I fell, I thought,
Cosa Tre: I had found my Vero Madre.
6
Venice
Venice, August 1482
29
Water, light.
I was a babe again, rocked in the watery sac of Vero Madre’s womb. I was a child, rocking in her arms. I was a woman, rocking in a boat. Water beneath me. Light above. I opened my eyes and the world spun around me like a top. Light below me, water above. I was propped against velvet cushions in a golden boat. The prow of the boat was curved and slatted like an executioner’s axe. Behind, a servant pushed us along with a pole, betraying the fact that the water was no more than waist deep; there were no countless fathoms below, just a shallow ditch. As I was to learn, many things in this place were not what they seemed.
The sky above was dull silver, the sun a white lunar orb, hanging low trying and failing to burn through the thick gray arras. Around and about me was a city made of glass. On both sides of this channel of water were great crumbling silver palaces rising directly out of the water. Hundreds and thousands of skinny windows were crowned with roundels of glazed panes that watched me like eyes. The houses dissolved into the lagoon and their reflections carried on with no interruption—they were one continuous mirror image broken into mercury by the wake of our boat. In my altered state I knew not what was real and what was not. There was no horizon where the water met the sky, and fine white mist swirled around us to further befuddle the senses. After the hot Tuscan sun ‘twas quite a sea change. I was in a looking-glass land, an isle of smoke and mirrors.
I was in Venice.
And the sovereign of this waterland sat before me in the boat, her masked face turned to the prow like a ship’s figure-head, her sumptuous form still as an effigy. I felt sick and closed my eyes again. I knew from the bitter gritty taste in my mouth that I’d been drugged, for however many days it had taken to get me here.
I was not ready to wake. Not yet.
And now, before I wake, while I am in limbo for a few moments, a babe waiting to be born, while I am suspended in glass once again, it is time. I must tell you at last the story of how I came from Venice as a baby in a bottle.
Most of it I got from the nuns who took me in, for I was too young to be sensible of my fate. I have thought of my journey many times, though, as if seeing it through my own infant eyes: a tiny babe is wrapped in swaddling bands and placed gently into a bottle—a huge green jar, a fishbowl of a thing with a thick-lipped rim. The baby lies still at the bottom, soothed by the swaddle, looking calmly at the light scattered by the glass, with little eyes as green as the bottle. Then soft, white bread is packed around the baby, the sweetest warmest dough, pulled from the center of the loaf by dexterous hands as white as the flour. The baby is packed comfortably now in the white bread, like a cherub on a cloud. The woman that does all this opens her robe, and pulls at her milky breasts till the bread is soaked in her juices. She squeezes her dun nipples as if she milks kine, the full breasts giving forth milk the pale blue of the veins that map the rounded flesh. The baby smells the milk and puts out her