The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  I looked in the mirror and I imagined myself in Donna Zanobia’s place, lying on a stone slab in the Bigallo, stripped and exposed, my secrets flying out into the world. Just another dead woman. Although the room was hot I was shivering painfully, as though I had a quartan fever. Picking up the pall of velvet, I covered the mirror and stumbled over to the window, pressed my hands against the shutters through the curtain. My ghosts, I knew, were no longer contained by this locked door. They had been released and had sniffed the air of the living. I had felt them around me all day, though I’d tried to ignore them, walking back and forth across the city as if I might have lost them, shaken them off, made them slink back here to wait for my return. But they had stayed close by. From the moment I’d heard my name, and my brother’s name, coming from the mouth of a stranger, my ghosts became a part of this story. So if I am not to sound mad or deceitful, I will need to let them speak.

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER FIVE

  You can see the whole world from her bedroom window: the puckered golden floor of the valley, far below, soft hills that seemed, here and there, to have been gnawed by giant teeth to reveal the grey rock beneath the grass. To the south, the mount of Radicofani jutting up, its flat top a little bit tilted; if she screws up her eyes, she can see the tower of the castle. Further on, a line of low mountains that changes colour hour by hour, day by day: black, purple, green, hazy pink. Sometimes, in the summer, they aren’t there at all. Beyond the mountains, the sun rises and the world’s edge curves like the trembling arc of a soap bubble. Sometimes a raven swoops down from the woods behind the village that climb up to the summit of Monte Amiata; the girl will hear the hiss of wind across its great wings, then it will be in front of her, and for a moment she will be looking along its broad, glossy back, glinting oily blue and green. Then she will be riding out across the great gulf of air, breathless with the joy of it, until the bird grows smaller and vanishes into the hazy light and she imagines herself suspended above the earth, hovering on wings of her own. The Ormani crest is three black ravens on a white ground, standing in a row above a field of red. Her father sometimes tells her what his grandfather told him: that the first Ormani was a raven who flew down from Amiata and landed on a bare crag, where an old woman happened to be sitting. The old woman had been a saint, and she had turned the raven into a man. And the red? That was blood, her father will say, then laugh and change the subject.

  The girl likes to tell Bartolomeo, her brother, that Radicofani is the stump of the greatest tree that had ever lived, with a crown so high that the sun had been one of its fruits, that it had been cut down by giants, the same ones that had used the crag on which the village perched as a chair. He will roll his eyes and tell her that Radicofani, like everything else in Creation, has been made by God. The girl doesn’t see why God couldn’t have made an enormous tree, or giants, but Bartolomeo says He hasn’t, and that is that.

  The girl lives in the castle with her brother, and her mother and father. Once, a very long time ago, the whole village had been the castle. Some knight had climbed up here looking for solitude or safety and built a strong wall around the crag that jutted out from the skirts of Monte Amiata. As years turned into centuries, people realised that no one would be foolish enough to attack such a place and began to build their own houses inside the castle walls. They called it Pietrodoro, after the cliff that drops away from the end of the crag which, when seen from a distance, looks like a great seam of gold. The castle church became the village church. The Rocca, where Onoria lives, is just the keep of the original knight’s castle. There is an even grander house in Pietrodoro, a palazzo that stands across the little village square. Onoria doesn’t like to go inside that house, but her friends live there: her best friend, Federigo, his older sister, Smeralda, and their two little brothers. They are the only children she is allowed to play with, because they are of the same rank. It isn’t an easy thing to understand, especially when the children of the farmers and artisans who also live in Pietrodoro seem to know how to enjoy themselves. But there it is: Onoria’s family, the Ormanis, and Federigo’s people, who are called the Ellebori, have lived in Pietrodoro for ever. The Ormanis have been here as long as the mountain itself – so the villagers say. But not as long as the Ellebori, might be the reply, depending on who you were talking to.

  Onoria has to go there today. It is time for the fencing lesson that her father gives her and Federigo almost every day when he is at home and the weather is kind, and she has to fetch her friend, who is usually on time but hasn’t appeared yet. She wanders across the piazza, ignoring the looks she is getting from Father Giovanni, the village priest, and from the two older women drawing water from the deep well in front of the church. As usual, she is wearing a set of her older brother’s fourth-best clothes: Bartolomeo has never cared about his appearance, and the doublet and hose are drab and frayed. Still, she likes the way the hose feel against her legs, and the freedom they give her. You can climb over a wall in them, do things you could never do in a dress. Which, as she has always supposed, is the whole point of being a boy. It isn’t the state of her clothes that makes people stare at her – she understands that well enough. ‘I don’t want to be a boy,’ she’s explained countless times to her mother, to Federigo, to anyone who questions her. ‘I just want to be like a boy.’ It is because she chooses, whenever she can, to dress like a boy. Smeralda, in particular, disapproves, but that is because she is jealous, Onoria supposes. Her skirts don’t allow her to keep up when they chase pine martens through the olive groves or run races along the track which joins Pietrodoro to the mountain, a straight, flat, paved way running along a narrow spine of land between two rows of ancient cypress trees. Smeralda’s mother gets angry if she catches her shooting at targets in the old archers’ butts at the edge of the cliff below the church. But Smeralda, who is pretty – black hair, a little turned-up nose and rather small eyes that just make her freckles more adorable – is also a decent shot with a bow, and her skirts don’t get in the way of archery. Onoria has told Smeralda, more than once, that when she grows up she is going to be a condottiere in charge of her own company of mercenaries, and Smeralda has laughed rather sadly and said, ‘That’s just something you’ve made up. Girls don’t become condottieri.’

  ‘Go on, Ralda! You could be one too, if you wanted to be! We could ride together: Federigo, you and me,’ Onoria will say, although she knows it isn’t true. She only gets away with acting like a boy because her father indulges her. One day her mother will put her foot down and Onoria will be in a dress, listening to her parents arrange a marriage for her.

  She shivers as she goes through the big arched doorway of the Palazzo Ellebori, because the house always greets her with a waft of chilly, damp air, no matter how hot it might be outside. She pads through the entrance chamber, not bothering to look at the glowering Ellebori portraits, the enemy standard from some ancient battle, the antlers, the scrofulous wolf pelt. Somewhere below her, so her friends say, there is a little church carved out of the living rock, filled with the monuments and bones of countless dead Ellebori. The thought of that makes her shiver again: the living grown-up Ellebori are bad enough, let alone dead ones. Lodovigo Ellebori is about the same age as her own father, but has a creased, sun-polished face that looks to Onoria like a Roman mask in one of her mother’s books. He is thin and wiry, and always seems to be moving as if he is wearing armour. Lodovigo was a soldier like her father, but that isn’t something the two men ever talk about. His wife should be beautiful, but her delicate features, a more developed version of Smeralda’s, always seem to be hiding from themselves. Benedetta Ellebori walks two steps behind her husband, and Onoria has never heard her say anything to a grown-up that isn’t a reply to someone else’s question, though her tongue can be like a razor when she turns it on her children.

  But the person Onoria likes least is the oldest brother, Augusto. He is at least ten years older than Smeralda, the child of a previous marriage, of a woman w
ho has left no trace whatsoever of her existence in Pietrodoro apart from her son, though Onoria supposes that her bones are somewhere below her, mouldering in the family crypt. And Augusto is the first person Onoria sees that day, coming down the stairs in his usual costume of baggy, heavily slashed hose and stockings in a dirty shade of crimson striped with white, a padded doublet of the same colour with puffed-out sleeves, untied to the waist to expose an expensive but grimy linen shirt. His dark brown hair is long and greasy, and his face resembles his father’s, but where Lodovigo Ellebori’s features are mask-like, Augusto’s are mobile, always twisting into one expression or another, but all of them, to Onoria’s eyes, mocking and unkind. He wears a beard, but it is thin, combed out to a straggly point, and his moustaches bristle on either side of his thin lips like the whiskers of some dangerous, night-dwelling beast. He is tightening the laces of his codpiece, and Onoria knows he is doing it because she is there when he gives them a particularly hard tug so that the hard leather bulge rears up between his legs. He leers straight at her.

  ‘Signorina Ormani,’ he says. His voice sometimes reminds Onoria of a burning fuse, smoking and sizzling with contempt. ‘I think I’ll join you today. I saw your father last night and he seemed to believe that I could assist him in his lessons. Hurry up, Federigo!’ he shouts up the stairs.

  Onoria’s friend wanders into sight across the landing. Federigo is Onoria’s age and looks like a male version of his sister: freckled, fine-featured, but with blonde curls instead of straight black tresses. This morning, like most days, he is dressed like Onoria in cast-offs. When he sees her, he waves sheepishly.

  ‘It’s so hot, Onoria! I thought perhaps Maestro Amerigo might spare us today.’

  ‘He was going to, but I insisted!’ Onoria grins. ‘Come on, lazy bones! There’s a bit of shade in our courtyard.’

  ‘Yes, hurry up, Federigo,’ says Augusto. ‘When you’re a soldier, there’ll be no turning up late when there’s action.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be a soldier,’ says Federigo. ‘Onoria’s going to be the condottiere, not me.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Augusto says, an unpleasant smile twitching his beast’s whiskers. ‘A boy who acts like a girl, and a girl – you are still a girl, are you not, Signorina Ormani? – who believes she is a boy. How amusing Pietrodoro has become. Like a Roman whorehouse.’ He brushes past her and goes out into the square. Onoria rolls her eyes at her friend and they follow him. The only good thing about Augusto is that he doesn’t spend much time in the village. He has been in Rome, Federigo told her yesterday, and before that with a mercenary company. Onoria is sometimes able to admit to herself that one of the reasons she dislikes Augusto Ellebori so much is that he is living a life that she will never be able to lead herself. Augusto is always ‘in Rome’ or ‘in Naples’ or ‘with the Count of Pitigliano’. When she reaches his age, she’ll be locked up in someone else’s house, pregnant with her fourth child.

  As they cross the piazza, Onoria sees Smeralda going into the church of Santa Clara. She is becoming more pious lately, Onoria has noticed. Then again, she is almost fifteen, and her parents are already looking for a husband. Perhaps she’ll become a nun, Onoria thinks. Better than being married. Gianozzo, her father’s steward, is talking with Francino the groom in the gateway of the Rocca. They bow respectfully to Augusto, and Gianozzo gives Onoria a wink after Augusto has strutted into the courtyard beyond the gate.

  ‘It’s hot today, Signorina Onoria. I’ll have Carlo send up some cold lemon water.’

  ‘Thank you, Gianozzo!’ The Rocca’s servants are almost equally divided in their approval or otherwise of Onoria’s strange habits. The steward is one of her allies, which is important. In fact, her father’s servants indulge her, and her mother’s do not. Onoria has long ago decided that the maids and the housekeeper just envy her. Who, after all, would choose to wear skirts and a bodice when there are doublets and hose in the world? It is absurd.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Here.’ Her father jabs at the open page, his finger coming to rest on one of the pairs of figures stacked across the paper: little men in shirts and tight hose, each one stretched wide into dancers’ poses, each one armed with a longsword and a dagger. ‘And here!’ His finger traces a circle around one pair of men. She leans over to see better, almost bumping heads with Federigo. In the drawing, both men are lunging, legs impossibly far apart, but one man’s sword has gone right through the other’s head and his dagger has lodged in his adversary’s chest, while the other man’s blades hover uselessly in the air. The poor man’s mouth is making a shocked O and little drops of inky blood are dropping from where the sword has gone into his face.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she whispers.

  ‘Yes, well, that’s …’ Her father, Maestro Amerigo Ormani, blinks apologetically.

  ‘The whole point. I know, Papà,’ she says, and smiles to show that she doesn’t mind, even though she does, a little bit.

  ‘You’ll never see such things, of course, cara,’ says. ‘You, on the other hand, Federigo …’ He reaches out and ruffles the boy’s hair affectionately.

  ‘Mmm.’ Federigo grimaces and shoots her a quick glance. She grins by way of reply. Her friend’s blonde curls have been tied back away from his face with a strip of rag, and she has done the same to her own straighter hair, pulling the knot as tight as she can so that her hair is as flat and as smooth against her head as sealskin.

  ‘See. You hold the dagger thus.’ Augusto is standing next to the maestro. He reaches behind him and pulls his own blade from its sheath, flourishes it in front of the two children. The steel flashes in the sunlight, and Onoria’s eyes are filled for a moment with strange blue and purple shapes. She blinks.

  Augusto is missing the middle finger on his left hand, which, wrapped around the hilt, looks like a fat, pale spider. When he first returned from the wars, Federigo – to whom his brother was more or less a stranger – asked him how he had come to lose his finger. Onoria, as usual, was with her friend, and Augusto leant down and breathed into their faces. ‘Well, since you ask, little brother, I put it up the hole of a Tyrrhenian witch. And she bit it off!’ He barked out the last words and leant back, roaring with laughter at the children’s gaping mouths. ‘A woman’s hole bit off your finger, Augusto?’ Federigo breathed, looking green, and the man grinned evilly, but just then the Ellebori family confessor shuffled in the room, and Augusto grinned and shook his head. ‘No, no. It was an arquebus ball at Scannagallo,’ he said, so that the priest could hear.

  ‘I know he’s your brother, but that thing he said was disgusting,’ Onoria said to Federigo, later, when they were hunting lizards in the olive groves outside the wall.

  ‘Could it, though? You know …’ Federigo glanced towards Onoria’s lap with a look of near terror.

  ‘No! Don’t be so ridiculous!’ she snapped, and Federigo went pink with relief.

  A shutter creaks, and Onoria looks up to see her mother leaning out. The sunlight, slanting into the courtyard at a late afternoon angle, gleams on the pearls at her neck and in the lobes of her ears. A dark corkscrew curl comes free from the elaborate arrangement of plaits that crowns her head, and springs against her cheek. Onoria feels a warm surge of love. ‘Amerigo,’ Maria Ormani calls. ‘The bookkeeper needs you.’

  Her father sighs. ‘In a moment,’ he calls back. He turns to Augusto. ‘I’ll let you carry on with the lesson.’ Onoria, who knows her father better, she reckons, than anyone else in Creation, marks a slight frown that passes across his face after he says this, but then he is gone. Amerigo likes Augusto Ellebori as little as she does, but treats him with more respect than he deserves. It is because Augusto is a soldier, as her father once was, though her father led a famous condottiere company in Lombardy, and Augusto … no one exactly knows what Augusto did in the wars besides lose a finger, though he has a deadness around the eyes, and uses a blade with a skill that Onoria – as expert in such matters as the daughter of a fencing master can be – ha
s to admit is more than reasonable. But Onoria knows that the real reason why her father puts up with Augusto is pity. The war that Augusto returned from was the fight between Florence and Siena; Duke Cosimo against Sienese and Florentine rebels fighting for the French king. Augusto had been fighting on the Sienese side, and they had lost.

  The children dutifully pick up their wooden daggers and allow Augusto to shape their hands around the quillons. He is more gentle with Federigo; when it is her turn, he stands too close and makes sure that the hard orb of his codpiece is rubbing against her hip. His breath smells of garlic and cheese, and she doesn’t like the way the stump of his missing finger, smooth and polished like another little codpiece among the other fingers, kneads her skin.

  While Augusto leans against the trunk of the walnut tree that grows in the corner of the courtyard, the two children thrust and feint at one another. The dagger feels unnatural in Onoria’s left hand, but when at last they are allowed to pick up their swords – carved, like the daggers, from ash wood – she finds that she likes the way her hands balance each other out. Augusto makes them study the book again, prodding first one picture, then another. When Onoria tries to question one posture and puts her own finger on the paper, Augusto bats her hand away.

  They go at it again, circling one another in the centre of the courtyard, Augusto shouting directions and commands, sometimes demonstrating with his own sword, which sizzles through the air like a hornet. For a brute – for Augusto is exactly that – he moves with quick, sinewy dexterity, the grace of a predatory creature. Dancing, Onoria thinks, is taking pleasure in both your own grace and another’s. Augusto’s grace is entirely for his own pleasure, for his own use.