The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  More dangerous for me was my hairless face. I was surrounded by men with bristling beards, and those who went clean-shaven were shaving stubble from their faces every day. I watched them carefully, and when I thought the time must be right, around my fifteenth birthday, I bought a razor and learnt how to shave myself, soaping and scraping my smooth skin, and making sure that everyone saw me do it. If anybody asked why my beard was so sparse, I would tell them what a doctor had told me in Mantua: that the injury to my neck and face had no doubt caused a shock to my skin. Sometimes, after such a thing, a man’s hair may fall out entirely. I’d been lucky, I would say. I could have been left as bald as an egg. Regarding my bodily functions, fashion came to my aid. It was at that time that the fashion for martingale breeches was spreading, those things that come with a flap in the front – the martingale, to which the codpiece is attached – that one may loosen with just the untying of a couple of laces in order to piss or shit without the unseemly bother of pulling down one’s hose and underwear. I didn’t have to expose my backside, which I supposed must look like a woman’s, though I had no clear notion of what that might mean. The greatest effort I put into my deception was to commission, from an alchemist in Venice, a set of copper tubes, about the length of my forefinger, one end flared to a design I had carefully drawn for him. I always keep one in a little pouch sewn into the lining of my martingales. With a little sleight of hand, one of these allows me to let fly with as manly a stream of piss as any fellow in the world.

  I have often wondered how easy it would have been to maintain my deception in ordinary society, where women and men live side by side in equal numbers. Men, I have come to understand, are fundamentally unobservant. If they have no reason to look for something – the motivation of spite, perhaps, or greed, or jealousy – they won’t. Is that true of women? I don’t know, because I have spent so little time in their company, but I have always thought that women are far keener, far more astute at seeing the subtleties of life. I think I am. But is that just my own temperament, or something common to my sex? Again, I don’t know, because I have abandoned womankind. True, there were a few women in the company: some of the men had wives or mistresses who followed them; there were professional cooks; and a small, ever-changing band of whores who were not officially part of our number but who pursued the company as closely as egrets follow a herd of water buffalo. I kept all of them at arm’s length, and so the men called me a shy boy. That, at first, suited me. But like all men I was building a reputation, and I knew my reticence with women would not be a useful addition to mine. So I hid behind honour, as men often do. I let it be known that I held women to be my ideal, that my guide was that book my father had given me, the romances of King Arthur written by Rustichello of Pisa. The men in my lance were forbidden to treat a woman – any woman – with anything less than courtliness. The rule of our company was that rape was punished with death, but it was never enforced. When one of my men raped a farmer’s wife outside Orléans, though, I had him strung up. The company thought I was mad, but as I have said, madmen are lucky in battle, so with the perverse logic of soldiers I gained more respect, not less.

  Did I still want to be like a man, as I had when I was a girl? As I slipped into my twenties, that question didn’t trouble me very often. I had to be Onorio. He was the hiding place that Fortune had given to me, a gift of great worth and great complication. Onorio was the castle I had occupied to keep me safe, the palazzo which the Ellebori had not burnt. I had come to know him better than I had ever known Onoria Ormani, that little girl who had played at being someone, anyone, other than herself. And everything that Onorio did made him more real. He was in other people’s stories now. My lie had its – his – own life. He was more real, far more real, than Onoria. But Onoria was there too. She followed me everywhere, like the women following the camp. She was there between my legs, under the bindings around my chest, in my beardless skin. If only my comrades knew that I slept with a woman every night, that I shared her dreams. Someone once told me that breathing is a habit, not a natural reflex like the beating of our hearts. We learn it, and we can forget it too. Keeping Onoria secret was a habit as close to the very essence of my life as breathing itself. But I could never forget her, not for a moment.

  Then something happened, and it all changed, for both of us.

  We were in Croatia again, with a contract from the Habsburg commander to keep Ottoman raiding parties out of the flatlands along the coast. It was dull work: the Turks made it their business to keep us moving but not fighting, the worst thing for a company of soldiers. It was the spring of 1564. We had been resting, tired and frustrated, near a little Dalmatian town that sat among wheat fields and salt pans on one of the many peninsulas that jut out into the Adriatic Sea. There wasn’t much to do. I spent most of my time preventing the men from stepping across the line between foraging and pillaging the local population. There wasn’t much to pillage: a few farmhouses, a couple of hamlets, the usual windmills. On one of my solitary patrols I found a whitewashed church on a low hill overlooking the town. The people in those parts being Catholic, I decided to go in and pray to the Virgin and Santa Celava. I was kneeling in front of the altar when a nun appeared, looking disturbed to find a soldier in dusty boots and mail in her church. I let her know that she had nothing to worry about, and she brightened when she heard me speak Italian, because, as it turned out, she herself was from Venice and had come here, many years ago, to join the small convent which, to my surprise, I discovered was just behind the church. We talked for a while, about the news from Italy and the politics of the new pope, which interested her a great deal – another surprise – but she was Venetian, and those people have an insatiable thirst for news. I gave her some money so that she and her sisters in the convent, which was called Izvor, would pray for the souls of my family, and she promised she would do so.

  It was a few days later when, without warning, a strong force of Turkish cavalry appeared at the top of the peninsula. They had come to sack the town and weren’t expecting to find us there. As soon as the patrol galloped back with the news, the camp erupted. It was like the end of Lent: finally, there would be some action. There wasn’t time to get into our armour. I was already wearing a steel-studded doublet of defence, as I usually did, so I grabbed my helmet and my armoured gauntlets, shouted at my page – he winced, as he always did, at the cracks in my thin voice – to load my pistol, and buckled on my sword. My lance were mounting up, all of them jabbering excitedly. I rode to the front, and Paolo took his place next to me. The page – Martino, I think that one was called – handed up my pistol. Don Orazio came striding over.

  ‘You and Gentile are leading, Onorio,’ he said. ‘I want your lance on the right. Gentile will take the left. Give me something I can boast about to our employers. They’re beginning to question our value for money.’

  It was the kind of skirmish we had fought many times against the Turk. Today, our enemy were mounted raiders of the kind the Ottomans called akinji, lightly armoured with long dresses of chain mail and commanded by an Ottoman effendi. When we found them, he was riding at their head, a magnificent sight in his fluted armour, horsehair standard, and flag of red and green carried behind him by a bodyguard of armoured men with turbans tied around their helmets. We came upon them two miles up the road, at the point where our peninsula began to be pinched off from the mainland, where the land rose on one side in a long, low ridge. Not very far away, behind us, was the convent of Izvor, where I had met the Venetian nun. I pointed it out to Gentile Rondoni. He was a good, steady man from Florence who’d fought for Duke Cosimo at Manciano.

  ‘There are nuns there,’ I told him. ‘We can’t let the dogs reach it.’ Gentile crossed himself and squinted into the sun.

  ‘They haven’t seen us,’ he said. ‘And we’re above them.’

  Ahead was a place where the ridge dropped unobstructed by walls or trees. ‘There?’ I asked Gentile.

  ‘It’ll do very well,’ he agree
d, and we formed the lances up in ranks at the top of the slope among some grazing sheep. We had about a third of the company all told, eighty men against perhaps one hundred and twenty. It wasn’t long before they saw us, and there was a sudden blaring of horns and rattling of drums. Their ranks, such as they were, began to dash around, getting into the crescent formation in which the Turks liked to fight. I nodded at Gentile, and he nodded back.

  ‘Order the charge,’ I said to Paolo, because my voice wasn’t good that day. ‘Draw swords, no pistols.’ Paolo stood up in his saddle and yelled the order. We began to canter, the slope giving us more weight and speed, ignoring the arrows which were flying un-aimed towards us, and were into the Turks before they could set their spears. Their line buckled like thin tin struck with a hammer, and then it was all hand-to-hand. Gentile went down almost at once, hit on the helmet with a battle-axe, but he staggered to his feet and began looking around, dazed, for his mount. The effendi, the sun glinting off the gilding on his armour, his pointed helmet plumed with peacock feathers, was levelling his spear at him, and I spurred my horse at the Turks, tugging the reins to make her rear and plunge. Her hooves knocked the spear out of the effendi’s hands and caught the Turkish horse on the head. It must have been blinded, because it turned and bolted wildly through the press of fighting men, the effendi shouting at it and pulling uselessly at its reins. I tore after them, slashing at a figure in a huge feathered hat who was raising his bow at me, kicking away another’s horse with my spurred heel. I managed to draw my pistol and fired it at the effendi’s back, but I hit his horse instead, sending up a fountain of blood from the back of its skull. It dropped dead in full stride, and the Turk flew over its neck and crashed into a pile of stones left by a long-ago ploughman. I reined in over him, sword ready, but it was obvious he was as dead as his horse. I dismounted quickly, thinking that this was a sad end for a brave man. But he would have a purse, and there was a dagger in his sash with a handle and scabbard of gold studded with gems. I found his purse and took the dagger too, thinking to give them out later as a prize.

  But I had to get back into the fight. I had chased the man right through the press of men and beyond it. Some of the Turks had seen that their commander had fallen and were beginning to run away. I vaulted up onto my horse and pulled her head around. As she reared and wheeled, I saw three horsemen break away from the fight and gallop towards me, one of my men right on their tails. My horse jumped towards them, and I stood up in the stirrups to aim a blow at the leading man. As I swung at his head – I was aiming backhanded at the long moustaches flowing back across his cheeks, as his head was swaddled in an enormous red turban – I realised, too late, that the next man in the group had dropped the point of his spear and was coming at me full tilt. My sword was already hissing through the air. It met the Turk’s face, and the impact jerked me up and back. Blood sprayed, and through it I just had time to see the second man’s teeth bared in a furious grin, before the point of his spear caught me between the legs.

  I screamed, though I felt nothing except a great numbness, and found myself pitching out of my saddle onto the shaft of the spear that had impaled me. It almost took my weight before it sagged and snapped. The last thing I saw before the ground flew up into my face was Paolo’s sword going through the Turk’s neck.

  I must have passed out, because I opened my eyes, maybe only moments later, with a sensation that I remembered from childhood: that I had had a dream of pissing and woken to find that I had pissed in my bed. I was lying in a warm wetness that was spreading out from between my legs, though one of them, my left, I couldn’t feel at all. Hooves slammed into the earth a few inches from my head, and I instinctively curled into a ball, though that leg refused to move. There was a rushing in my ears and a bright purple light, and when I could see again I was looking up at Paolo, who was kneeling over me. I could feel his hands tugging at something below my waist and long moments passed before I remembered that he shouldn’t be doing that. No matter what the reason, he must not do that.

  ‘No,’ I said feebly, and tried to bat his hands away, but my arms felt as if they were boneless.

  ‘You’re bleeding to death, Capo,’ Paolo said. His fingers continued to tug and pry. I knew what he was doing: untying the stays of my martingale.

  ‘Stop!’ I hissed, but it was too late. I felt the laces give, and the flap of cloth and its bulging codpiece being pulled roughly aside. I tried to push my hands down, to hide …

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Paolo’s voice was full of the deepest horror. He was staring between my legs as if into the mouth of hell itself. I managed to lift my chin to see as well. There was my martingale and codpiece, drenched in blood, lolling against my leg like a freshly skinned rabbit. And in the fork of my legs … nothing. Nothing but a welling pool of dark blood. With that sight came the pain, worse than anything I’d ever felt.

  ‘Don’t tell, Paolo! You mustn’t tell!’ I pawed at his arms, because this was the end, the end of my great lie. ‘Go away,’ I begged. But it wasn’t me. It was Onoria speaking in her woman’s voice, the voice she would have had if I’d ever let her grow into a woman. ‘Go! Leave me to die here, for God’s sake!’

  ‘I’m not leaving you, Capo! Look, it’s … it’s not so bad, perhaps …’ I felt his hand on the inside of my thigh. That was worse, almost, than the pain. His fingers fluttered, brushed across hair, folds, absences … ‘Oh, Holy Mother, Capo. I’m so sorry. I’m going to bind it … I don’t know what to bind!’

  Despite the pain, or perhaps because of it, my head was beginning to clear. And as it did, I found something. A spark, an idea. A fragment of my shattered lie. Whatever it was, I let it fill my mind. I tried to move my arms again, and found I had command of them. I looked down again. What looked like a bowl filled with blood was, I realised, the blood-soaked front of my shirt, knotted up against my groin. With as much strength as I could find I grabbed Paolo’s wrist and pulled it away. I hoped I had done it soon enough.

  ‘What’s … what’s left?’ I managed to say. I could still act. It somehow made the pain less bad. ‘It’s still there … Paolo, tell me it’s still there!’

  ‘The spear’s gone right through your thigh. But I think your … I don’t want to say it, Capo.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake … Cock? Balls? Oh, fuck – both? If it’s both, in Christ’s name just strike off my head now, Paolo!’

  Paolo bit his lip. The poor fellow looked as if he was in more pain than me. I still held on to his wrist. I could feel my nails digging into his flesh. But I saw. It was plain on his face: he didn’t know. His fingers had told him one thing, but his head hadn’t believed them. It had told him another story, and he couldn’t even bring himself to believe that. Because there was no worse thing that one soldier could tell another: that his manhood was gone. He didn’t want to tell me that. I could see it in his eyes. Meanwhile, the idea in my own head was still unfurling.

  ‘I can feel them,’ I said, my voice choosing that moment to drop into one of its odd growls, which seemed to convince Paolo, because he crossed himself with bloody hands and tried to smile. One of the Turks was lying beside me; Paolo drew his dagger and began to cut strips of silk from the corpse’s robe, which he bound tightly around the wound in my thigh, while I pressed my wadded shirt up against my groin. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked, to distract him from thinking too hard about what he was doing. ‘I saw Rondoni go down. Is he all right?’

  ‘Far as I know,’ he said. ‘Look, we’re chasing them, the fucking dogs.’ He gasped as I tried to raise myself. ‘No, don’t sit up, Capo!’

  ‘Listen, Paolo.’ I took hold of his collar and pulled his face down towards mine. ‘There’s a convent, a Catholic convent, about half a mile from here. I want to be taken there. One of the nuns has some skill in medicine. I’d rather have a nun examine me down … down there, than Brunetti the fucking surgeon. Can I trust you?’ Paolo nodded eagerly. ‘I knew I could. Because I want no one to hear about this. Do you understand?
Brunetti would tell the whole camp. The fucking Sultan would hear about … about this. Take me to the nuns. And don’t tell a fucking soul, Paolo. Swear it.’

  ‘I swear, Capo.’

  ‘Swear you’ll go to hell if you don’t keep this secret.’

  ‘I swear! I’d never—’

  ‘I know. Now get me onto my horse.’

  ‘Jesus, Capo! What are you talking about?’ He glanced in horror to where my hand was clamped between my legs. ‘You can’t ride!’

  ‘I’ll ride side-saddle. And that’s another thing you’ll never breathe a fucking word about.’ I even managed a grim little chuckle.

  It wasn’t even half a mile to the convent of Izvor, but every step my horse took brought a fresh refinement of agony. Paolo had lifted me bodily into the saddle, and I let myself fall against her neck, my right hip taking all my weight, the pommel digging into my ribs. I told Paolo to ball up the cloth of one of the dead Turks’ turbans and put it between my knees, to keep my legs apart. Then we set off, Paolo leading my horse by the reins. Now that I was off the ground, I could see for myself how the lances had chased the Turks back the way they had come and were now hunting stragglers across the flatland between where we were riding and the sea. The pain didn’t let me think of anything except keeping my body in the saddle. I watched as the church appeared out of the heat haze, white shimmering, coming together into roof, bell tower, door. The nuns must have come out to watch the battle, because we were still some distance away when two black shapes detached themselves from the white dazzle of the church and hurried towards us. It seemed like another day of agony, but I suppose it was only a few minutes more before hands were reaching up to me.

  ‘What will I tell the company?’ Paolo asked, as he carried me like a child into the church.

  ‘Tell them that the sisters are tending to me. Tell them I am wounded in the leg. And that is the truth, Paolo. You don’t even have to lie.’