Zo

by Leanne Owens

  ‘How old are you, child?’

  ‘I am ten.’

  ‘What else do you draw?’

  ‘I like to draw animals, but horses mainly. I like horses.’

  He patted the white stallion that chewed on his bit behind him, ‘Do you like this horse?’

  As her gaze passed from his stern countenance to the horse, her face transformed from wariness to joy and her words tumbled out, ‘He’s beautiful – like a dream. Is he from Spain? How old is he? What’s his name? May I pat him?’

  He laughed at her eagerness as she almost hopped from one foot to another waiting for him to give her the word to touch his horse, ‘Go ahead, little one – he will not hurt you.’

  Elli dropped her charcoal into a small bag hung around her waist and wiped her hands on her white dress, oblivious to the black marks she left behind on the fabric as she reached out to stroke the neck of the horse. He guessed correctly that she would rather ruin her clothes than leave as much as a fingerprint on the coat of his horse which she now stroked reverently.

  ‘His name is Perseus.’

  ‘Perseus,’ she whispered the name of her favourite Greek hero. ‘Perseus.’

  The horse turned his head and gently pressed his nostrils into Elli’s hair, breathing softly, his ears pricked as he enjoyed meeting this small human. Elli looked him in the eyes and smiled, her face alight as she enjoyed a silent conversation with the stallion, speaking with her hand on his neck and listening to the look in his eyes. Perseus nodded his head at the child then dropped his mouth to the lawn to grab a mouthful of grass.

  ‘He likes being your horse.’ Elli continued to stand next to the stallion, patting him, as she looked up at his owner, her dark violet eyes alight with sparks, her expression showing none of the usual reverence for his person.

  ‘So he should, he has the best of everything. I would be deeply offended if he said he wanted to belong to someone else!’

  ‘He did add that he’d like to be my horse,’ she raised her brows at him and smiled disarmingly. ‘But I don’t think you’re going to give him to me.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ he laughed at her impudence, amused at himself that the prattle of a child could hold him captive for so long. There were women older than he, with the bodies of goddesses and the wiles of sirens who were desperate to enchant him, but he had little time for them. He had too much to do and too much to learn to spend time with their games, and yet, he mused to himself, he wasted precious minutes with this youngster. It would be many years before she would be of an age to be sexually attractive, but her eyes, in their unusual shade of purple, entranced him. Her banter kept him standing talking to her when he should have been hurrying to the villa to check on the health of his grandfather.

  He bent down to her level and spoke softly, his dark eyes boring into hers, ‘I will not give him to you, but perhaps I’ll let you ride him back to the house if you promise not to steal him from me.’

  She met his gaze without wavering, ‘I wouldn’t steal him, but I would like to draw him, and then I’ll own him on paper.’

  ‘And will it look like Perseus?’

  ‘It will be Perseus,’ she declared with conviction. ‘He will come to life on the paper.’

  ‘So, you think you draw that well, or will you have someone draw him for you?’ he teased her.

  ‘I drew these,’ Elli motioned to her drawings, ‘and they look real.’

  ‘That they do. Well, as long as you draw one for me, so that I also own a paper Perseus drawn by...’ he cocked his head to one side, waiting for her to provide her name.

  ‘Eliga Spini,’ she bowed her head, remembering her manners in the presence of the teenage boy who would rule Florence. ‘My mother is staying here at the invitation of your mother.’

  ‘So, you know who I am?’

  ‘Of course, you are Lorenzo, son of Piero de’ Medici,’ all the names came running at her after so many hours of tutorage about the noble families of Florence, Milan, Naples and the other Italian states ‘Grandson of Cosimo de’ Medici, brother of Giulano...’

  He raised a hand to interrupt and stop her from parroting his entire family tree, ‘Enough! It seems you know my pedigree. Is a man no more than his breeding stock?’

  Elli carefully considered his teasing tone, and did not know if he expected her to answer or just smile like one of the older girls who knew how to flatter and charm. Her mother had advised she learn those traits while staying at the Villa Medici at Careggi.

  ‘But you’re not a man,’ she said bluntly, unable to invent flattery, ‘you’re a boy. You are only a few years older than I.’

  Lorenzo feigned offence, ‘Not a man? You are harsh in your judgement.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Has no one told you that you should not always be so brutally honest? You could have told me that I am a great man, far greater than my pedigree.’

  ‘You probably will be a great man one day, Lorenzo de’ Medici, but you are the same age as my brother, and he is still a boy most of the time.’ She wrinkled her nose up as she considered his name. It was a very grand name. ‘Do your friends call you Lorenzo?’

  ‘They call me lots of things,’ he grinned at her, ‘some of them not suitable for repeating to young girls. Sometimes they shorten my name to Lor or Loro, if either suit you.’

  Elli considered the names and shook her head, ‘No, no. I don’t think it suits me. I shall use the other end of your name and call you Zo.’

  ‘Zo?’ Lorenzo chuckled. ‘I have never been called that. What if I insist that you call me Signore de’ Medici?’

  Elli shook her head seriously, ‘Then I may call you some of those things that your friends call you.’

  Once more, Lorenzo burst out laughing, and then glanced up at the Villa Medici where his family had gathered these past days. ‘My grandfather always tells me that I must remain humble, that I must remember to not rise up above my fellow man,’ he smiled at Elli, feeling an inexplicable sense of friendship with the girl. ‘I think he’d be pleased that I met a child who thought I was no more than a boy, and renamed me.’

  A bell rang in the distance and worry crossed the face of Lorenzo. He came to the villa at Careggi because his grandfather’s health had declined and the time for change loomed over the family. He looked down at the face of this child and wondered if she would have a part in that change. He could not know that she would become so important to him that, in less than thirty years, the bells would be ringing for his life as he lay in this villa, looking one last time upon her perfection. As his dark eyes met hers, he felt the hand of fate touch them briefly, and he shivered, but he did not know what it meant.

  ‘I have to go,’ he muttered. ‘My grandfather is not well. He has asked for me.’

  ‘He is dying,’ Elli told him, her violet eyes large with empathy. ‘My mother has told me.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ he snapped at her, suddenly annoyed at this child who dared to speak to him of such things. He, Lorenzo de’ Medici, did not have to listen to a nobody who claimed another artist’s work as her own.

  He mounted Perseus and cantered to the house, leaving her gazing after him in adoration. Elli had not noticed his plain features. To her, he had been an angel sent from God to rescue her from the nightmare that now resided deep in the shadows of her mind. She sighed. She decided she would marry Lorenzo de’ Medici.

  An hour later, her mother laughed at her ambition. ‘Women like us, we don’t marry a Medici!’ she chortled as she placed careful stitches in the leaves of a tree on her cushion cover. ‘I am lucky to be a friend of his mother, but the Medici men marry to increase their power and wealth, and we have very little of that.’

  ‘What if I love him?’ Elli asked, her chin poked out at a defiant angle, upset at her mother’s laughter.

  ‘You are ten. You love horses and dogs and sweet food, not young men who are born to rule Florence.’

  ‘What if he falls in love with me?’

  ‘Again, Elli, you are
ten,’ her mother paused, her hand hovering above her needlepoint as she regarded her precocious daughter. ‘You will need to wait until you are thirteen or fourteen before any man will be interested in you and, believe me, he won’t be a Medici. We are a from a lesser nobility and have modest wealth. If you are beautiful at marriageable age, we should be able to negotiate a step up from our level, and the older and uglier the man is, and the more beautiful you are, the higher that step can be. It is just the mathematics of marriage when you are a woman.’

  ‘But don’t you love Papa?’

  ‘Love?’ her mother choked on the word and snorted in amusement, shaking her head. ‘Love has little to do with who you marry, dearest. I am sure the fine stories of men and women who love each other are excellent entertainment, but open your eyes, little one, the stories merely distract us from what is true. I have found my measure of happiness in obeying your father, running our house, and raising my children, although one daughter causes me no end of trouble with her silly questions and her expectations.’

  ‘Is that me, Mamma?’ Elli asked, her eyes round with delight at being called the troublesome one.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Gilia Spini smiled at her daughter. ‘Now, no more nonsense from you. You can join the thousands of girls who dream of marrying a Medici, when it will never happen, and be miserable. Or, you can learn the lessons required to run a house, marry the man chosen for you, and find happiness in your duty.’

  ‘Yes, Mamma,’ Elli sighed. She knew enough to agree with her mother and keep her rebellious thoughts silent. If her mother said she would never marry Lorenzo de’ Medici, then that simply meant she would never talk about it, but she could still dream. No one could stop her from dreaming.

  As Elli made her way back to the rooms where she and her mother were staying while guests of Lucrezia de’ Medici, people began rushing from one point to another in the villa. Elli slipped behind one of the imposing marble statues to watch the hurrying figures and listen to the hushed voices and whispers that were rippling through all the visitors and workers at the villa. Cosimo de’ Medici had passed away.

  Although they expected his death, it set the villa into a flurry of action as messengers departed to find family members and associates in Florence, and one headed to the Pope in Rome. Elli stayed in the shadows of the statue, watching the action, overhearing the muttered words as people walked past, and she wondered about the meaning of death. Would he go to heaven? What was heaven?

  She also wondered about Lorenzo. He was fifteen, and though that seemed very grown up to her, it made him the same age as her second oldest brother, and he still acted in childish ways with pranks, and even played with his favourite toys when he thought no one watched. Fifteen was old in many ways, she knew, and her family expected her to be a married woman by then, but her brother still cried when his dog died, and laughed when she fell over. There was much of childhood left in fifteen, or, there should have been. She doubted Lorenzo had the luxury of choosing childhood over growing up.

  An hour passed, then two, and finally Elli moved from her position as a watcher of the villa and decided that she would find Lorenzo. One of the servants had said that he looked very controlled and noble as he said his final goodbye to his grandfather, but Elli knew about acting, she had to act all the time about liking the other girls her age when she thought they were silly. Lorenzo would have been acting. Everyone knew he loved his grandfather. He would be devastated about losing him. Certainly, sadder than her brother when a horse killed his dog, and she remembered how much he had cried at that loss. In which case, she wondered, where would he go? To his own quarters? To the garden? Would he keep on being noble and brave and stay around all these rushing, hushing, gushing people?

  Where would she go if she needed to be unhappy with no one to see her? She smiled. Of course. He would go the stables. To Perseus. That is where she would find him. And maybe she would never marry him, but she could be his friend.

  With her paper and charcoal under one arm, Elli darted around the hallways and rooms of the villa to make her way to the cool, dark stables on the western side of the house. Tip-toeing quietly, she looked over the doors at the horses until she saw the white Perseus standing with his head lowered towards the corner of his stall. Quietly, she peeped over the stable door and saw Lorenzo sitting in the corner, his knees drawn up, his arms wrapped around them, and his face buried in the gap between his knees. His shoulders shook slightly as he sobbed silently for the loss of the man who had taught him, mentored him, and loved him.

  Elli swung the door open just far enough to slip through, took a breath to make herself brave, and went to sit beside the boy who would one day be the most powerful man in Florence, if not all of Italy. She didn’t really understand what all the talk about his future meant, but she did understand sadness, and it was her nature to help those who were sad.

  As she sat next to him, he looked sideways briefly, but seeing only the child from the garden, he chose to ignore her. Little children knew nothing of what the world meant, he thought to himself, and it would not do to be angry at her for her invasion of his private space in his moment of grief. Do not be angry at the innocents, his grandfather had often told him, always seek to protect them, as that is what the truly strong will do while the weak strive to hurt them.

  Another few minutes and his emotions would be under control and he could return to help organise all the tasks that followed the passing of his grandfather.

  A small hand slid over and rested on his hand, the touch cool and soft on his skin and, surprisingly, very comforting.

  ‘I know you’re sad,’ the child’s voice told him, ‘and it is alright to be sad.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Lorenzo whispered to her without any maliciousness. ‘You are too young to know what this all means.’

  ‘I know you loved your grandfather, and he loved you, and now he has gone, and duty falls heavy on you.’

  The sage words were at odds with the youth of the girl, and he raised his head to look more closely at her, his eyes red from crying.

  ‘My mother,’ Elli nodded at him like a wise old woman, ‘says that we can’t find happiness in love, we have to find it in duty. When love makes you upset like this, perhaps she is right.’

  ‘Sometimes, duty is a fearsome thing,’ he wiped at his eyes. ‘But not for you. You are just a girl. You have no idea of what duty faces me.’

  She patted his hand and smiled in a motherly fashion, not at all perturbed by his words. ‘Is it as bad as being told that I must marry the fattest, ugliest man in Italy so that my parents can feel better about themselves? That I have to run his house and have his children and be a good wife, even though he is fat enough to squash me and ugly enough to make me sick?’

  Her words made Lorenzo smile despite his grief. ‘Indeed, that is a duty to be feared.’

  ‘I think so,’ she sighed, ‘but enough of me. I am sorry about your grandfather. I know how much you cared for him. I should say that he has gone to heaven, and is at God’s side, but I don’t know if that’s true. Our priest says that is what happens to good people when they die, but he lies, so I don’t know if that is true.’

  Lorenzo snorted at her candidness, ‘Your priest lies?’

  ‘He’s a dreadful liar,’ she shook her head sadly at the deceptiveness of Father Giotto. ‘He hurts some of the village boys and then lies about doing it. But the boys aren’t lying. So, if he lies about that, how do I know if he’s telling the truth about heaven?’

  ‘How, indeed,’ Lorenzo agreed with her, his eyes twinkling. ‘Of course, you do realise that you should not mention these things to people. The Church can get very angry at those who speak against a Priest.’

  ‘Oh, I know not to mention it,’ she smiled at him, her violet eyes alight with humour. ‘I might not know if there’s a heaven, but I do know hell is there if you disagree with a priest.’

  Lorenzo laughed at her outrageous cheek, his sorrow momentarily forgotten. Who in all of
Italy would dare speak up against a Priest and the Church? It was unheard of, and yet wickedly amusing to hear the innocent chatter of a child who spoke in truths that no one else uttered for fear of the Church’s retribution.

  ‘Are you not worried that I will tell the Priest on you?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ Elli looked at him with trusting eyes. ‘You are not mean like Giro.’

  ‘Giro?’

  ‘A boy from Ferrara where I come from. He is twelve and he told Father Giotto that I am evil and I should burn in hell.’

  Taken aback by the vehemence of her words, Lorenzo widened his eyes questioningly at her.

  ‘Giro is ugly. If he was fat and old, he would be the sort of man my father would expect me to marry. He stares at girls like the cat watches mice.’ She rubbed the skin on her arms with both hands. ‘I feel like lice are crawling over me when he looks at me. I told my brothers to stay away from Father Giotto because he hurts boys, and Giro overheard me and ran straight to tell him what I had said. He laughed when Father Giotto hit me across the mouth for speaking such things, but I only spoke the truth.’

  ‘No more speaking such truths, then,’ Lorenzo gave her small shoulder a pat, ‘especially not where that ugly Giro can overhear you.’

  ‘Can I speak them to you, though?’

  Looking at the upturned face that gazed at him so adoringly, he smiled and tapped her lightly on her rebellious little chin. ‘I think I would like that. But we must not let anyone overhear us as I would not like to think of another priest hitting you.’

  ‘Pwah,’ she made a disgusted face. ‘Most of them love hitting children. I’m sure to get hit no matter what I say or don’t say.’

  Her words troubled him. His family and the Church were woven together, and he had been brought up to believe in the Pope as God’s chosen representative on earth…and yet, hadn’t Pope Callixtus III, dead these past six years, been more concerned with advancing his Borgia family than God’s word? Hadn’t his grandfather been adamant that they, the Medici family, claim the papacy so that their family could prosper? Was the Church truly about doing God’s work or was it about power, the sort of power that saw a priest hit a small child across the mouth for speaking a truth about his brutality?