Niccolo searched frantically for some detail, some proof, some explanation that would convince the bandit of their innocence. But his mind had raced over everything and come up with nothing. He began to suspect that the only reasonable course open to him was, as the bandit had admonished, to say his prayers.
During the entire exchange, the archers had not lowered their bows or allowed the strings to go slack. When the time came, and the command was given, these men would not hesitate. There was no forgiveness in their eyes.
Pagolo was kneeling now, praying furiously and crossing himself. Niccolo had bowed his head in silent prayer.
“Are you ready?” began the bandit, but he was unable to finish. A clear, commanding voice rang out from behind him, “Let them go. They didn’t do anything.” The voice was that of a girl.
The bandit whirled. Pagolo collapsed. The archers wavered. Niccolo stared in disbelief. An angel.
From the dense brush on the other side of the road, a woman had emerged and was walking toward them. But not walking. She was drifting, moved by an otherworldly power. To Niccolo, her movements were so graceful and controlled, so fluid, that she could only be an angel.
A few seconds after the initial shock, Niccolo revised his original opinion. This apparition was not an angel, his numbed mind reasoned, for she was not dressed in white and gold, but all in black. He concluded, then, it must be Saint Catherine or Saint Rita.
In the dying light, it was indeed difficult to make out the approaching figure. The Archbishop, a cautious man, had motioned to several of his archers to turn and face her. He did not want any more surprises, especially not from behind his back. The woman stopped in front of the bandit chief. Niccolo strained his eyes, but could see little in the encroaching darkness. The outlines of her black dress were imprecise, and she dissolved into the dark shapes behind her. Her head was sheathed in black—he could not tell at this distance whether it was a veil or long, sleek hair. Only her face shone clearly through the murky shapelessness. Niccolo could have sworn that a single ray of light from heaven illuminated that face.
The girl spoke in a firm but strangely lifeless voice, addressing herself to the puzzled bandit, “You can let the boys go. It happened just as they say it did. Eight men on horseback attacked the three Jews. Their leader was dressed as a monk, and kept his face hidden. I saw it all from across the highway.”
“And I suppose you were out hunting too, like our gallant young gentlemen here? Are you with them?” asked Michele.
“No,” she replied, “I’ve never seen them before.”
“Who are you then, would you mind telling me? And what are you doing in the country at night, out on the open highway? Did you come here alone?”
“No,” she said in her disembodied voice, “I came with them.” Lifting her arm, she indicated the three dead bodies on the ground. “The Jew lying dead between those trees is my father.”
The odd procession made its way slowly through the Tuscan night. Bathed in the unreal silver light of the full moon, they could be seen on the hilltops, crossing the jagged ridges, silhouetted against the sky. In the lead was an agile man who moved without a sound, bow-legged, round-shouldered, long arms hanging loosely at his sides. Strung out behind the leader were others like him—small, wiry men descended from a race of small, wiry men. They were honest men who worked the land, pruned vines, cut stone, and forged iron; but when pushed, they could be hard men, inflexible men capable of defending and avenging themselves, of arming themselves to steal, and, if need be, to kill.
Following at a slight distance was a small goddess, wrapped in dark cloth, sitting erect on the back of a donkey. The animal was led by a boy whose bent head and listless, trudging steps betrayed his weariness. A latter-day Joseph, leading his child bride to the place where travelers stay. Another donkey carrying another boy, followed. This rider was stout, and he was sleeping fitfully, lulled by the rhythm of his mount. Repeatedly, his somnolent, bobbing head jerked to attention just in time for him to avoid taking a nasty fall. In his hand was a long rope attached to the neck of a strutting, defiant pig.
In the aftermath of the carnage, the Archbishop had taken charge. Issuing orders to his men, he saw to it that the scene was tidied up. A shallow grave was dug in the soft earth behind the log where Niccolo and Pagolo had hidden. The bodies were buried quickly, but not without reverence. Michele had asked the girl if she wanted to say a few words over the graves. She declined.
“You three come with me,” he said. It wasn’t so much an order as a statement. They complied, for where else could they go? It was now dark, and the city was sealed in upon itself for the night. The gates would not reopen until first light. And so it was that a column of a dozen men and three children wound its way up into the steep backcountry hills.
Their progress took them deeper and deeper into the wild countryside. Roads gave way to byroads, byroads to paths, and paths to tortured trails concealed almost entirely by brush. Niccolo could see fireflies, thousands of them. They were everywhere—down in the inky valleys, between the hills. He remembered what his grandmother had said. The souls of unbaptized children. So many lost souls flickering in the Tuscan darkness. Was the soul of the Jewish boy among them?
They passed a quarry. In the moonlight, Niccolo could make out the massive blocks of stone. The scene looked like an abandoned battlefield. The jagged stones were all that was left of some mighty struggle, rocks ripped from the earth by titans and hurled in anger. Broken columns were strewn about like the bodies of defeated giants.
Several times he turned to catch a glimpse of the girl on the donkey. She held her head high, eyes open. Once, the rays of the moon caught her full in the face, and she really did look like a creature from another world. Against the blackness of the night, her pale face seemed to hang suspended in the air, attached to nothing, a floating apparition.
The night air with its heavy burden of fragrances, cypress and pine, was gradually having a soothing effect on Niccolo’s inflamed imagination. He began to notice that, occasionally, with some mumbled salutation, one man or two would slip off and be swallowed up in the blackness. The number of outlaws up ahead was dwindling.
The Archbishop forged ahead, picking his way with assurance across the ragged landscape. Where was this bandit with the fearsome scar taking them? What did he have planned? Niccolo didn’t know if he was a guest or a prisoner, maybe even a hostage. He was preparing himself for the worst. He could imagine how bandits lived. Lawlessness and disorder, hiding from civilization in the rough hill country. Rowdy, depraved men and lost women living in tents, indulging themselves in Bacchanalian frenzies, sleeping drunk and exhausted on the dirty ground. He would be forced to endure the most depraved sorts of entertainments. Cockfighting.
Niccolo was drawn out of his nightmarish picture of the tawdry pleasures of outlaw life by a long, low howl in the distance up ahead. Michele stopped and, for the first time, turned and spoke to the boy. “Lupo! The wolf!” he said, grinning.
What kind of a man broke into a grin at the howl of a wolf? Niccolo wondered, but by this time he was too exhausted to care. Better to be torn apart by a wolf in the open than forced to drink blood, eat dog meat, and swear godless oaths at some barbarous bandit ritual.
The group continued along a trail cut in the living rock of a mountainside. To the left was a deep gorge, and the stones that Niccolo kicked over the side fell a long time before striking anything. The band of outlaws, by now, had disappeared entirely, straggling off one by one. Only Michele was left with his three charges, two boys and a strange girl. Niccolo tensed himself, waiting for the end, for the ferocious beast that would hurl him over the edge and into the void. He heard him coming. Did wolves have red eyes? The scampering feet, the fast breath. He strained to see.
Suddenly, a dark shape lurched into sight, left the ground with a leap, and hurled itself at the bandit chief. Niccolo gasped. Michele was rolling in the dust. He had the animal by the ears. Niccolo couldn’t believe his eyes! The
bandit was laughing. The animal was licking his face!
Finally, Michele pulled himself to his feet. “My dog, Lupo,” he said laughing. “I haven’t seen him in a week.”
Accompanied by the excited dog, the little band soon rounded the top of a low hill, and in this hostile land of gorges and gullies, they found themselves looking down on a rather large open space. And there was a house. An ordinary farmhouse. Off to one side was a pen with a dozen or so goats.
“We’re here,” announced Michele.
“We’re here?” blurted a surprised Niccolo. “You mean you live in a house?”
“It’s nothing extravagant,” said the bandit, a note of mock apology in his voice. “I do hope it won’t offend the sensibilities of our young gentlemen from the town.”
Niccolo, overcome with relief, was stammering, “But I thought bandits lived out in the woods, with, with . . . and . . . Oh, never mind.”
Within minutes, the weary group was installed before a bright, roaring fire. Niccolo looked around. A hearth. A table. Benches. Pots. After the horrors of the day, both real and imagined, he drank in the ordinariness that surrounded him. Real things. Solid things. Warmth and comfort. He sank deeper into his chair. It was padded. It was soft. The tension began to drain out of him. He slept.
The hissing would not stop. He was at the roadside again. The air was full of arrows. Hissing arrows. He was trying to pull the arrow from the dead man’s hand. The hissing was becoming louder. The slippery arrow in his hands turned into a snake. It curled tighter and tighter around his hands, hissing and spitting. He tried to run, but his legs were leaden. He couldn’t lift them. The snake was writhing and hissing. He struggled to keep it at arm’s length, but it was slithering up, up, toward his face, hissing, sucking its forked tongue in and out of its mouth and hissing.
Niccolo bolted in his sleep. His eyes popped open. He was awake, but the hissing would not stop. His heart was galloping in his chest. It was a long, frantic minute before he was able to take in his unfamiliar surroundings and reconstruct the events that had brought him here. Bringing his eyes and his memories into focus, he spotted the cause of the infernal hissing.
Two dozen birds of various sizes and shapes had been spitted and racked over the open hearth and were oozing their juices, drop by drop, into the fire. Niccolo sagged in relief. He let the warmth of the fire and the roasting smells wash over him.
“Hungry?” It was the voice of his host, the most notorious bandit in all of central Italy. The twisted scar on the outlaw’s face stood out even more strikingly in the orange firelight, like a fresh wound that refused to close. But the features behind it were kind—a generous mouth that curled into a smile, a strong jaw, a forehead lined with years of concern. There was compassion in his good eye. Niccolo was seeing these details for the first time. Earlier, just after the ambush, he had seen only the scar—and then the reputation.
“Ooo-fa, Michele! Pay attention to the quail! They’re burning on that side. Keep turning them.” It was another voice, a woman’s! So there was a Signora Bandit! A Mrs. Archbishop!
She rushed out of the shadows and swept into Niccolo’s line of sight, grabbing the handle of the spit from the Archbishop of outlaws and taking charge of rotating the roasting fowl. Michele’s wife or mistress—whatever she was—was a far cry from the diseased, toothless lushes Niccolo had imagined the consorts of outlaws to be.
Pagolo was awake now and squirming, orienting himself mentally, twisting around inside his clothes.
Michele spoke to his wife, “These are my guests, finally awake. Two nameless boys, found, as I told you, under mysterious and dubious circumstances.”
“Pulci, Giovanpagolo, at your disposition,” declared Pagolo, pompously.
“What an honor! A scion of the famous Pulci family. They used to be somebody in Florence,” teased Michele, “but then that was long before your time, eh, Giovanpagolo Pulci?” Pagolo scowled but attempted no defense of his family. Unfortunately, the outlaw was right. The Pulci had seen better days, certainly Pagolo’s branch of the family had.
“And our other gentleman,” continued Michele, “another illustrious Pulci?”
“No, my name is Niccolo Machiavelli.”
“My name, as I’ve already told you, is Michele, also known as the Archbishop. This is my wife, Cesca.”
Cesca looked down at the two boys and smiled. Michele smiled. Niccolo, more and more relaxed, was smiling too. Pagolo was looking suspiciously around. “Where’s my pig?” he demanded.
“Oh, that little pig you had with you,” said Michele. “That’s him on the bottom spit there, next to the duck. He’ll be ready to eat soon, though I don’t think there’s much meat on him.”
Pagolo was outraged. He sputtered, unable to mouth a coherent sentence. Instead, it was the bandit’s wife who spoke up. “Oh, Michele, stop teasing poor Giovanpagolo Pulci. He’s been through enough today.” She turned to the boy, “Don’t worry about your pig. He’s outside in the pen. Nobody’s going to eat him.”
“What I want to know,” continued Michele, “is why a young Florentine gentleman is out in the hill country with a piglet in the first place.”
“To find truffles, of course.” It was Cesca who answered her husband. “Am I right, Pagolo?”
Pagolo was mollified. She had won him over, and now he, too, was grinning. The easy camaraderie that was developing between them had succeeded in banishing both boys’ earlier fears and suspicions.
But suddenly remembering something, Niccolo sat bolt upright and looked frantically around. The Girl! Where was she? Had he imagined the whole thing?
“Don’t worry, she’s resting.” Cesca had immediately sensed his concern. “She wasn’t hungry. I gave her some warm bread soaked in almond milk and I made her an infusion. With chamomile. It’ll help her sleep.”
Michele and Cesca went about removing the spits from the fire and preparing the table for the meal. Niccolo watched, marveling at the absurdity of the situation. He was here at the mercy of the most bloodthirsty bandit of his day. But the bandit had a house, and a wife (and what a wife!). He had a dog. He even had a sense of humor. He had a pleasant smile, and he was about to serve them what looked like a delicious dinner. Nothing made sense anymore. This day had unhinged too many of his assumptions about the order of things. Monks were cold-blooded killers, and the cold blooded-killer was a charming and generous host, with a beautiful wife and a house and a dog . . .
“A tavola!” Cesca’s voice rang out, interrupting Niccolo’s musings and calling everyone to the table. Michele helped her lift a broad wooden trencher and place it in the middle of the table. On the board was a bed of thick slabs of coarse, crusty Tuscan bread. The bread served as the base from which rose a mountain of roasted fowl—the bigger birds were at the bottom—fat ducks from the coastal marshes, game hens, and pheasants. Then came grouse, squab, turtle doves and pigeons, and at the very top, tiny thrushes, roasted whole with their heads still on. Each small bird was garnished with an olive in its beak.
Pagolo’s eyes lit up at the sight of this spectacular pile of food. “My father always told me that contadini ate awful food. Country people survive on moldy bread and thin gruels, he said, turnips when they can get them.”
“And when we’re lucky, we get a cup of warm water, to wash it down,” said Michele. “But tonight, since we have the honor of the company of Giovanpagolo Pulci, citizen of the republic of Florence, we’re making an exception. Go on, Pagolo, eat. Enjoy yourself. If that’s not enough food, we’ll fix you something else afterward. Maybe something to suit your refined city tastes—delicate peacock tongues sautéed with the livers of little fishes. And you can sprinkle rosewater on it, as they do in France!”
Everybody laughed, and Pagolo took the ribbing in stride. But no sooner had he resolved one problem, than another arose. “Don’t I get a knife?” he asked.
“What for?” said Michele. “Use your hands!”
Pagolo thought of protesting, but
his resistance was fast disappearing. The lure of the birds, their golden, crispy skin, and the hearty bread soaked in their juices proved too much for him to dally any longer in squeamishness or conversation. Within a minute, he was eating so fast that, several times, he bit into his soft, fat fingers.
Aside from the food, there was nothing else on the table but a wooden cup and a brocca, a decorated ceramic pitcher, full of wine. Michele filled the cup, drank deeply, and sighed. He refilled it and passed it on to his wife. She drank, and then it was Niccolo’s turn. As they feasted, eating the smaller birds first, and working down the mountain to the larger ones, the single cup went round and round, circling and recircling the table too many times to count.
When all had eaten their fill, there was still a lot of meat on the table. But there was also a considerable pile of bones to indicate just how hungry the company had been. The board was removed, and Cesca brought a salad of fennel bathed in sleek green olive oil. The sweet licorice felt good in Niccolo’s mouth. It rinsed his palate and refreshed him. He knew too, from his father, that it should help him digest the heavy meal he had just consumed.
Michele was teasing Pagolo again. “I wanted to apologize for calling you ‘fat boy’ this afternoon. I should have said, ‘plump boy.’ Anyway, Pagolo, are you full? Maybe you’d like some zucchini cooked with calf’s brains, or little eels fried in butter?”
“You know what they eat almost every day at Pagolo’s?” Niccolo volunteered, beaming. “Beans! Florentine broad beans!”
Michele burst into laughter, so Niccolo continued. “Pagolo’s father is so stingy that he bought a special table for the kitchen. It’s long, but only about a foot wide, so everybody had to eat on the same side, sitting next to each other. In the winter, he moves the table close to the hearth, and everyone eats with their backs to the fire. That way, he can build a small fire instead of a big, roaring one to heat the whole room. He saves money on firewood.”
Michele and Cesca were laughing good-naturedly at this revelation of the true state of affairs in Pagolo’s family. Pagolo was sated, and he took it philosophically. The wooden cup, stained purple form many years of use, continued to circulate.
Machiavelli: The Novel Page 8