“You kept an orchard,” Giovanni began pleasantly enough, pacing between the rows of trees. The fruit was entering its season. Giovanni plucked the ripest one he could find: red and round and wonderful. “Pomegranates.”
Marco picked a small round seed from the dirt, rolled it between his fingers, and tossed it down the slope.
“The fruit of Hell,” Giovanni said.
Marco gave him a hard look.
“A myth.” Giovanni tore open the fruit and offered half to Marco, who accepted it without thanks. The poet continued, “One of the stories the Romans used to tell. Pluto abducted the goddess Prosperpina, and the world fell into—”
“I don’t care.”
“Mercury was sent to rescue—”
“Leave me alone.”
Giovanni scooped out some of the scarlet seeds and put them in his mouth. The sudden sweetness made him moan.
He swallowed the juice, spit out the seeds, and said, “Anyway, Prosperpina ate six pomegranate seeds in Hell, which meant she couldn’t live only on Earth, but had to return to the underworld three months out of every—”
“What are you doing here?”
“Talking,” Giovanni said.
“Go away.”
“William sent me.”
Marco snorted. “Persistent. I’ll give him that.”
The knight tested the taste of his own pomegranate, seemed to like it well enough, and devoured the rest.
The poet finished his. “Rome is dying, Marco. There’s nothing for you here. Come to Cumae.”
“I thought you wanted to get rid of me.”
“You saved our lives.”
“I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”
“I owe you for that. If you come south, I can repay you.”
“With what?”
“You are a knight.”
“Am I?”
Unlikely, thought Giovanni, but said, “There is something in you that reminds me of Barillus.”
“The knight of Naples.”
Giovanni nodded. “I could introduce you to Queen Joanna. That is my offer.”
“I do not know this queen.”
“I know her well. Or did, in her youth. She is the granddaughter of King Robert the Wise, and a great sovereign in her own right: charming and eloquent at the royal court, but ruthless on field of Mars. Her territory stretches from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, from Umbria, Piceno, and the ancient land of the Volscians to the straits of Sicily. She held Avignon before she sold it to the pope.”
“What do I need with a queen?”
“There is great honor in service to a queen. Honor and fortune. Naples is the finest court in Italy. Not what it was in Robert’s day, but even now it is second only to Avignon. The queen is at war with Hungary. She needs good warriors. I could vouch for your skills, if not your honor.”
“Why do I need you?” Marco asked. “If I want to meet the queen, I’ll go to her myself.”
“Not that easy,” Giovanni said. “You need an introduction to court. Without it, you would be viewed with great suspicion. They might take you for a spy. The queen knows me. She likes my stories. If I tell your story, she will listen.”
“You speak of Naples.”
“Yes.”
“The old man spoke of somewhere else.”
“Cumae. It’s on the way to Naples. We will search for the gates of Hell. If we do not find them, which seems likely enough, then the quest ends there, and from Cumae it’s a short road to the royal court.”
“The girl believes the gate is there.”
“Nadja is an epileptic.”
“You think she’s deluded?”
“The girl has not had an easy life. God punishes her. For what, I cannot say. She has suffered much, and needs to believe in a higher purpose. Her visions give her meaning.”
“The old man has faith in her.”
“He is a man of faith.”
“You’re not.”
“I have been to Cumae,” Giovanni said. “In my youth, on my own quest, I traced the path of Aeneas. I entered the Sibyl’s cave and found nothing there. No gate. No mystery. Only darkness. There is no passage to the underwor—”
Inside the house, a child screamed.
The young boy ran from the dining room and past Giovanni, who tried to catch him, but the boy slipped past and ran outside. Giovanni let him go.
He found Nadja in the dining room, face-down on the tile amid broken shards from a toppled vase. Her body stiffened and jerked. She spasmed. Her eyes were blank, her face contorted. She began to vomit. Giovanni had never seen this before. It paralyzed him.
William rushed in. He rolled Nadja onto her side, letting the vomit drain from her mouth, then he cleared away the potshards. “Give her room.”
Giovanni stepped back and bumped into Marco just arriving.
The knight looked troubled. “She has a demon.”
“No,” said William. “This is her gift.”
After Nadja recovered, they helped her to the dining table, where they all sat together. Giovanni watched as William bandaged the cut on her forearm.
The first thing she said was, “Where is Nek?”
“The boy ran off,” William answered.
Nadja covered her eyes with her fingertips. She looked tired. “Am I that scary?”
“He’s only a child. He doesn’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
“Dante was epileptic,” Giovanni told her. “He fainted at a wedding feast. He fainted twice in the Inferno.”
William said, “Perhaps there’s some connection.”
“In canto three, Dante feels the earth shake, sees a flash of red light, and falls to the ground asleep.”
“It’s not like that,” Nadja said. “No light. Only music. A choir of angels.”
“In canto five, Dante swoons and drops like a corpse. In canto twenty-four, he compares Vanni Fucci to a man recovering from a seizure. And in the opening, of course, Dante says he came to himself in a dark wood. ‘I came to myself.’ As if the entire poem were a falling dream.”
William set a piece of paper on the table before Nadja, then offered her a stick of charcoal. “Show us what you saw.”
She drew a long thin shaft, barbed at one end.
Marco spoke first. “An arrow?”
“Spear,” she said. “Bleeding at the tip.”
“Lancea Longini.” Giovanni could hear the excitement in his own voice.
William studied the image. “Yes. It could be the Lance of Longinus.”
“What is that?” Nadja asked.
“The weapon that pierced the side of Christ.”
Giovanni leaned forward. “It was the Holy Grail that caught the blood.”
William nodded. “The Lance and the Grail are forever bound to each other by the blood of our Lord.”
“I had another dream,” Nadja said quietly.
“When?”
“Days ago. In the woods. Before those men...”
“Attacked us, yes. Go on,” William encouraged her.
“I saw Marco with a spear. It was shining with light, like a torch.” She turned to Marco. “You will need this weapon to fight the demons in the dark.”
Marco scowled.
“We must find the Lance,” William said.
Giovanni asked the girl, “Do you know where it is?”
Nadja shook her head. “I saw a man. He gave the Lance to Marco.”
“Who was he?” William asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of man?”
“He wore a crown.”
“A king?”
She shook her head. “A crown of leaves.”
“Leaves?” Giovanni felt a sudden thrill. “What kind of leaves?”
Nadja drew another picture.
Giovanni recognized it at once. The laurel crown. Only one man wore a laurel crown. A man known to collect antiquities. A man rumored to be an epileptic.
The wor
ld’s greatest living poet.
“Petrarch.”
CHAPTER 15
After consulting the friars at the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Giovanni reported back that Francesco Petrarch had left the city and now resided in Padua as a guest of the Carrara. The pilgrims set out from the villa the next day.
Marco watched them go. They had promised to return to Rome with the Holy Lance, but the knight did not think he would see them again. He cared little for William and Nadja, and nothing for Giovanni, but they were the only people he knew.
When the pilgrims had disappeared behind the Palantine, Marco wandered around his vast estate, from the orchards to the gardens, from the cenacle to the cellar, dressed in clothes fetched from the linen room. The clothes fit, but nothing else did. This is not my home. He needed something, but what? A war? A cause? A friend? Perhaps the poet was right. Perhaps his future lay in Naples, in the service of a queen. Only one way to find out. He caught up with the pilgrims at Saint John’s gate. They were resting outside the portcullis and did not look surprised at his arrival.
“I will see this Holy Lance,” he said, and promised nothing more.
Giovanni wanted to visit Florence and check up on his children, but William counseled against it, fearing delay as much as pestilence, so they kept to the lesser roads and smaller villages, lodging one night in Monteriggioni, where the poet purchased four bowls of ribollita, a hearty vegetable soup mixed with stale bread. To Giovanni it tasted like home.
Later that evening, as William prayed and Marco practiced with his sword, waging battles with branches and wars with weeds, the poet absented himself to the enceinte and sat alone atop the stone wall that ringed the city, staring out over moonlit Tuscany. This wall was famous for its fourteen towers. Dante had mentioned them in describing the giants that circled Cocytus, the lowest level of Hell. Giovanni sat near the gate tower above the road that lead to Florence, wondering if Dante had ever sat here looking back toward the home from which he was exiled.
He saw Nadja approach along the wall. She sat down beside him. “I didn’t know you had children.”
“Four children by three mothers in two cities,” he said. He was especially fond of Jacopo, who lived with his mother in the Florentine parish of San Ambrogio. He wished he could see how the boy was faring. “I give them money when I can. I have nothing to give them now.”
“Time.”
“Little enough of that. I need to go to Naples.”
“To see this other woman?” she asked. “You love her more than you love your children?”
“More than anything.”
“Do you write poems for her?”
“All my poems are for her.”
“Is she married?”
“Dante was in love with a married woman. Beatrice Portinari. After she died, he walked through Hell to find her.”
“I asked about you, not Dante.”
“Without Dante, I am nothing.”
“What’s her name? This woman you’re in love with?”
“Maria d’Aquino. Daughter of King Robert.”
“A princess?”
He shook his head. “Illegitimate. Like myself. The king married her off when she was fifteen.”
“And you slept with her?”
Giovanni let the question hover. He rolled over on his side, showing her his back. “She sleeps with the angels now.”
In the pine woods outside Ravenna they turned off the main road and slept in a pilgrim’s cell at the convent of San Stefano dell’Uliva, sharing their room with an old man whose right foot had been amputated years before. He was traveling alone, by foot and by crutch, to visit the tomb of Saint Anthony in Padua.
The next morning Giovanni asked to see Sister Beatrice, who agreed to meet them in the afternoon at the tomb of her father.
Dante’s sarcophagus lay in the church of San Pier Maggiore. When the pilgrims entered they found the basilica empty except for an old nun who stood near the poet’s garlanded tomb reading some papers in her hands. She turned at the sound of visitors and recognized Giovanni, who introduced Sister Beatrice to the others.
Handing the papers to Giovanni, she said, “Read these and tell me what you think.”
He glance at them. “Epitaphs?”
“Every poet in Italy has written one. Except you.”
“I’ve written dozens.”
“Where are they?”
“Smoke and ashes.”
“I’ve been collecting these for years,” she said. “When the new tomb is built, I will need to pick one for the marble. I’d very much like your opinion.”
“Of course.” Giovanni withdrew to a spot beneath a window, where the light was better.
William said, “I knew your father,” and told her the story of Dante’s stay in Oxford.
Giovanni returned and handed her one of the poems. “This one. From Bologna.”
She glanced at it. “Master Giovanni del Virgilio. Yes. Petrarch was of the same opinion. Thank you.” She tucked this and the others into one of her sleeves.
Giovanni asked, “Will you be taking your father back to Florence?”
She answered him with disdain. “They wouldn’t have him when he was alive.”
“The priors offered to end his exile,” Giovanni said. “They begged for his return.”
“On what terms? That he confess to barratry? Taking bribes? Stealing money? Selling offices? Who could believe such calumny and lies? My father never did these things. The priors tried to destroy him. They wanted him, yes. On his knees, they wanted him. Now they want to shrine him in that wretched city? I say no. They cannot have him. Florence tried to break him, but my father beat her like the whore she is. My father beat them all. He will be remembered when Florence is dust and ashes and salted earth.” She touched his tomb. “Poor father. Requiescat in pace. They will never have his bones.”
They crossed the Bacchighlione River, entered Padua at the Santa Croce gate, and went to Saint Anthony’s basilica to pay their respects to the holy relics before continuing on. The Carrara family resided in the Reggia, next to the Duomo. Giovanni gave his name to a guard, asked if Francesco Petrarch was within, and was soon met by the majordomo.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Giovanni Boccaccio.”
“The poet?”
“Yes.”
“Please, come inside.”
The majordomo asked them to wait in the library, where Giovanni found copies of several books that he himself had written: Filostrato, Teseida, and Amorous Fiammetta. He was showing these to Nadja when another man entered the room, a man in his middle forties who wore a toga and a laurel crown.
“Which of you is Giovanni Boccaccio?” Petrarch asked from the doorway.
“I am.”
Beaming a smile, Petrarch stepped forward, clapped Giovanni on the shoulders, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Welcome, old friend. I’ve met you many times by candlelight, in the quiet of an evening. Now here you are. I know you well, and not all. You are truly a gift to our language.”
Giovanni felt a blush. “Whatever gifts I possess have come from you and Dante.” He introduced Petrarch to the others.
The laureate shook Marco’s hand. “A pleasure as always.”
“You know me?” Marco asked.
“Don’t I?”
William said, “Our friend took a blow to the head. His past escapes him.”
“Interesting.”
“If you knew me before,” Marco said, “I would be grateful for your recollections.”
“Perhaps I am mistaken. No matter. You are certainly welcome here, Marco da Roma. Please, all of you, join me for dinner. The day is dying and you must be famished.”
As he led them down the hallway, Petrarch marveled aloud: “Boccaccio! In Padua! Today is a blessed day.”
Petrarch regaled his guests in the main hall. Servants tended table; musicians played; young girls danced. The feast reminded Giovanni of Naples in the years before
the pestilence.
The meal began with fresh fruit and apple verjuice. The soup was a zanzarelli in the Roman style: eggs, cheese, and breadcrumbs in a chicken broth spiced with saffron. Two servants poured dark wine from the Carrara vineyards. Next came dollops of dressing on collops of meat: quail and culver and leveret. This was followed by sugar-glazed chicken, eel stuffed with dried figs, and almond milk. Giovanni, Marco, and Nadja indulged themselves beyond all desire, but William resisted temptation, turning most of it away.
Petrarch said, “You’ve scarcely touched your food, Father.”
“Enough is as good as a feast.”
“I will not have you starve to death at my table. Even a mendicant must eat.”
“Thank you for your concern, Francesco, but I assure you I am quite healthy. Young people often ask me how I got to be so old. You know what I tell them?”
“That you’ve killed all your enemies?”
“Prayer and fasting,” said the friar. “Think only of God, and always leave the table a little hungry.”
Giovanni stood up from his bench and called for a lyre. A musician offered up his instrument. Giovanni tested the strings and found them satisfactory. Standing before the others, he closed his eyes and sang “The Lay of Orpheus,” about a troubadour who descended into Hell to rescue his lady love, only to lose her again.
After applause gave way to silence, Petrarch suggested, “A tale, Boccaccio. Give us a story.”
“Give me a theme.”
“A love story,” Nadja said.
“Good versus evil,” said William, “where the Devil is defeated.”
Giovanni said, “Perhaps I can do both. Have you heard the one about putting the Devil back into Hell?”
Marco and Nadja said no. Petrarch said nothing. William said, “I might have heard that one, but tell it anyway.”
“Are you sure, Father?” Giovanni asked.
“Yes, yes. The others should hear it.”
“If you insist.”
“I do. As I recall, it’s a very uplifting story.”
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