Then the carriages and soldiers were gone, leaving only dust blowing in their wake, and a fading rumble. People slowly returned to what they had been doing, moving as if waking from a dream. As they began to pass through the customs post beyond the gate, Pasquale saw that each was stopped and questioned by armed militia.
Rather than risk immediate questioning, Pasquale lent a hand to the merchant and his half-dozen men. They cut the horses free, unloaded the wagon, and dragged it to the ditch by main force. The horses had been thoroughly shaken but were otherwise unhurt, and the merchant’s men were efficient. In less than an hour they had mended the traces and hitched up the horses and reloaded the wagon.
Early-morning traffic was moving up and down the road, making a detour around the wagon. The merchant thanked Pasquale, and asked after his friend.
‘He had to leave. A matter of honour.’
‘Yet I see you have his ape.’
Pasquale turned and saw Ferdinand sitting a little way off, and groaned. He had forgotten about the ape, yet here it was, and when it saw him looking at it it ambled over and flung its arms around his thighs in a clumsy hug.
‘I have nothing for you,’ Pasquale told it, his heart turning over at the thought of the death of his master.
The merchant looked at Pasquale shrewdly. ‘I won’t ask the how and the why of it, but I see you are in some trouble.’
‘I won’t inconvenience you further, signor, except to ask a small favour.’
The merchant, who was a shrewd, kindly man, laughed and said that Pasquale didn’t seem to be a dangerous criminal, if criminal he was, and if he wanted only to get past the militia then there was no problem. So it was that Pasquale rode through the gate on the wagon bench beside the merchant and his driver. The little square beyond, usually crowded with wagons, vaporetti and horses, and lined with stalls, was almost deserted. As the wagon rolled across the square, Pasquale saw that a frame-gibbet had been hammered together in the middle of the three-way junction on the far side. Half a dozen men, naked but for sacking hoods, hung from it, and each had a sign hung around his neck: I looted. Look on me and take heed.
Pasquale started to shake, seeing at once and all too clearly Rosso staring sightlessly, twisting in the wind. The merchant, misunderstanding, said that this was only night business, then shouted out as Pasquale jumped down from the wagon and ran, the ape pelting after him.
Pasquale was soon deep in the maze of alleys and yards somewhere between Santa Maria Novella and the Duomo. He recognized a fading mural of the Madonna on the wall of a shuttered shop, and walked on in the direction of the lodging-house where Niccolò Machiavegli had his rooms. The ape ambled behind him in such a way that Pasquale had the morbid fancy that somehow the essence of poor dead Rosso had become embedded in his pet, as dogs are supposed to grow to resemble their owners. So the ape, with its swaggering bow-legged walk and way of looking sharply around, imitated Rosso’s assertive yet nervous manner.
Signora Ambrogini was not pleased to see Pasquale; even less so to see Ferdinand. ‘I don’t suppose that Signor Machiavegli is with you,’ she said, peering through the finger-width gap she had opened after Pasquale had spent many minutes knocking on her door.
‘I wish that he was. Please, signora, I left something in his rooms that I must have.’
‘He was out all last night,’ the old woman said. ‘He may not be as old as me, but neither is he a strapping young brute like you.’
‘You can come with me,’ Pasquale said. ‘It will only take a minute.’
‘There was someone else here asking after his rooms. I sent him away and told him the militia would be after him.’
‘When was this?’
‘Not long ago. A foreign fellow. I have to set off for mass, young man. I suppose the churches will still be open.’
‘I’m sure they are.’ Pasquale fell to his knees in a dramatic gesture. ‘Please, signora, I implore you. I’ll return the key in a moment.’
‘Signor Machiavegli keeps strange friends,’ the old woman said, ‘but that was a good likeness of me, young man, even if you did make me look years younger than I am.’
‘That was a mere sketch. My thanks for this favour will be a portrait in oils!’
‘Paintings should be of beautiful subjects. I’m old enough that I don’t need flattery.’
‘None was intended, signora.’
‘You can push the key under my door when you’ve finished,’ Signora Ambrogini said. ‘I haven’t missed second mass since ten years ago, and that was on the day that my husband died. And don’t you let that animal in the room.’
Pasquale took the long iron key, gabbled his thanks, and ran up the winding stairs, slapping every turn with his palm. The room was as he and Niccolò left it, and the little flying device sat like a little boat on the sea of papers on the writing-desk at the high window.
Just as Pasquale had finished folding a sheet of stiff paper into a box for the little device, and was stowing it away in his scrip, a face appeared at the top of the window. It was upside down, its shock of red hair swinging back and forth. It was the stilt-man who had led the others in the Piazza della Signoria. The man grinned at Pasquale and then his hand swung sharply down. A pane of glass shattered, and orange smoke blew in.
Pasquale ran, and heard the rest of the window smash to shards behind him. He tumbled down a whole turn of stairs and picked himself up and ran again, Ferdinand at his heels, not stopping to return the key (which he had anyway left in the lock), not stopping until he was streets and streets away, and then stopping only to regain his breath before running again, to the one place left in the whole city where he could be sure of safety.
3
Pasquale had to bang on the door of Piero di Cosimo’s house for a full five minutes before it swung open a crack. Pelashil peered sleepily at him. ‘I must see him,’ Pasquale said. ‘Please, you must let me in.’
The woman pushed the door wider, leaning back against the wall so that Pasquale had to brush past her as he entered. Her glossy black hair was down over her face, and when she raised a hand to push it back Pasquale glimpsed her small breasts inside her loose shirt. Ferdinand bounded through the door and scampered down the passageway. Pelashil shut the door and said, ‘The old man sleeps. You be quiet, Pasquale, and the ape.’
‘You know Piero likes Ferdinand. Please, I need to speak to him. Well, of course, and to you.’
Pelashil smiled slowly. She was not conventionally pretty, but a woman who, when she smiled, was utterly changed, so that a man would do all he could to see that smile again. Despite himself, Pasquale responded to her smile with one of his own. She embraced him quickly, then stepped back, wrinkling her snub nose. Chocolate freckles dusted its bridge. ‘You stink of the river! And there is mud in your hair. I will wash you. When did you last wash? You are shy of water, and yet you have so much of it. In the desert, we wash with sand.’
‘I’ve been in the river, and that’s enough water for anyone. I’ll tell you about my adventures, but first I must speak with Piero. It’s very important.’
‘You’re too young to know anything important. Go to him, if you must.’
Piero di Cosimo owned the whole house, but lived and worked in the big draughty room that took up most of the ground floor. Lit only by a series of rigged mirrors that reflected sunlight to every corner, at this early hour everything in the room was in shades of sepia, that pigment drawn from the pulpy body of the common cuttlefish. Big canvases leaned against one wall, their painted surfaces turned away from the light; one set on a trestle was roughly covered with a paint-spattered sheet. When he had returned from the New World, Piero had made his money by painting small wooden decorative panels, spallieri, to private commissions. His scenes of the life of the Savages of the high deserts had been especially popular in a time when anything to do with the New World was fashionable. But now he painted for no one but himself, and kept everything.
As well as paintings, the studio was clutt
ered with bits of old furniture, tables with one or more legs broken and lashed together, a broken-backed couch in which Pasquale knew that mice nested, rickety stools, an old cassone with a cracked front panel and its top entirely missing. Bits and pieces of machinery too, for Piero was fascinated by the inventions of the artificers, and he scavenged broken machines and tried to repair them or make them into something new. There was an automatic music-player, all the strings in its scallop-shaped iron frame frayed or snapped, and the hammers bent or missing. A tantalus cup. A colonial long rifle with an octagonal barrel fully two braccia long. A kind of plush puppet moved by clockwork sat slumped on a bench, legs splayed in front of it, head drooping. A clockwork prognostication engine, its springs broken and its jammed registers permanently showing Patience Becoming Virtue. A machine that at a turn of a handle was supposed to mix and grind pigments, but which in Pasquale’s experience only spattered clouds of fine tinted dust over the user; an automatic double-entry abacus; an automatic loom broken into pieces and put back together with the idea that pictures could be generated using its punch-cards; a clock driven by complex gearing to equalize the progressively diminishing power of its barrel-spring. The tick of the clock’s ratchet escapement was for a moment the loudest thing in the room, and then Piero’s pet raven saw the ape and shifted on its perch with a scaly scratching and croaked, ‘Danger.’
Piero was sleeping on a truckle bed in one corner of the room, behind a screen painted with scenes of the happy isles of the New World. Pelashil went to him and shook him by the shoulder until he woke and feebly tried to push her away. She shrugged and cast a smouldering look at Pasquale before departing.
Piero drew the filthy blanket around himself. His vigorous white hair stood up in all directions around his nut-brown wrinkled face, and he scratched and rummaged in this cockade for a full minute before getting up and scuttling to a far corner of the room and making water into a basin on a stand. Moving so as to keep his back half-turned to Pasquale, Piero opened the window and threw the basin’s contents out into the wild garden, where vines scrambled unchecked over untrimmed trees, and hedges had grown monstrously shaggy.
Pasquale said, ‘Master, have I offended you?’
‘You’ve been a bad boy,’ Piero said, still managing to keep his back half turned as he scuttled back to his corner and carefully lowered himself on to the bed. He stretched out slowly and clutched the top of the blanket to his neck with his knobbly arthritic hands. He finally looked full at Pasquale and said, ‘I’m asleep. You’re a dream.’ And with that his head fell on to the greasy clout he used as a pillow and he commenced to breathe deeply and raggedly through his open mouth.
‘You’ve been taking that stuff again,’ Pasquale said, but there was no reply. He added, ‘You should eat. Dreams aren’t everything.’
There was a pan of hard-boiled eggs on the stove-top—Piero economically boiled them up in big batches when he boiled his size or glue—but when Pasquale cracked one it gave off a nauseous sulphur reek, and he saw that its white was tinged copper-green.
‘Pelashil should cook for you,’ Pasquale said, because this usually roused Piero into an argument about oppression, with Pasquale telling him that he shouldn’t have brought her back from the New World if he didn’t want her oppressed, and Piero replying that this was precisely the point, elaborating one or another fantastical argument along the lines that slavery is freedom, and freedom slavery. But this time Piero defiantly stayed asleep, or at least maintained the pretence. Pasquale sat down on a broken stool and watched the old man for a while. Perhaps he dozed, for Pelashil was shaking him by the shoulder, and now Piero really was asleep, snoring with his mouth open to show rotten black teeth in pulpy gums.
Pelashil put her finger to her lips and led Pasquale out into the scullery, where a pot-bellied stove radiated heat, and blankets woven with bright geometric shapes covered the flaking calcined walls, so that it was like being in a tent in some far Moorish land, where the sun blazes so hot at midday that the sands of the desert fuse into glass.
Half-dazed with exhaustion, forgetting why he had come here, Pasquale allowed Pelashil to undress him. His clothes were stiff with mud. She washed his body with a damp cloth, and then thrust a bowl of soup into his hands. Burnt crusty bread had been broken into it, so that he could eat it without a spoon. He wanted to know where the ape was, and she shrugged and pointed to the garden; she had let it out. When he tried to get up to see what had become of it, she pressed him back, and with a strange inward smile bowed her head, brushed his chest with her wiry black hair, then moved lower, so that his manhood stirred to the tickling touch and he groaned and drew her to him.
When Pasquale woke, the sliver of sky that showed through the window had darkened, like a scrap of violet cloth caught amongst the tangled branches of the untrimmed trees of Piero’s garden. Pelashil was dressing with careless languor, pulling a tarnished white gown over her tawny skin. Pasquale watched her, swoony with tiredness and affection, and asked her where she was going.
‘Work,’ Pelashil said. ‘He earns nothing, I must.’
‘Have him sell one of his paintings,’ Pasquale said. He stood up and punched at the air with his fists. It was so warm that it felt like a solid substance. ‘If he sold no more than one, he could live as he does for the rest of his life.’
Pelashil shook her head. ‘No! He needs them. He lives there.’
‘In the paintings?’
‘In a place he finds by making the paintings,’ she said. ‘He is the first mara’akame of your people, but perhaps not the last. You can learn much from him, Pasquale. I followed him because he is a great mara’akame. He has travelled far along the branches of the Tree of Life.’
Pasquale said, ‘I thought that Piero had enslaved you, to make you follow him, to make you share his bed.’
Pelashil made a sound that was half exasperation, half laughter. She started to fasten her dress across her breasts. ‘When I first knew him he was younger and more virile, but not as advanced in knowledge as he is now. Power takes power.’
‘You left your people because you wanted to? I always thought…’
‘That I am his servant? No more than you are the servant of Rosso. Ah, why do you start at the mention of your master’s name? What is wrong?’
‘I have much to tell you, Pelashil, but I’m not sure if this is the right time.’
Pelashil finished fastening her dress, and calmly wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, casting a corner of it over her head. ‘If I tell you one thing, Pasquale, you must promise not to tell anyone else.’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re a handsome boy, full of life. You shouldn’t stay here in this city. When you took Piero as your secret master, I knew that in your heart you were a traveller like him.’
‘Pelashil, I may have to leave soon. Will you go with me?’
‘I became the servant of a foreign magus because it is the only way a woman of my people can gain real power. Our own mara’akame speak only to other men, although in the past there have been female mara’akame. But although they would not speak to me, they spoke to Piero, and set him on the road to wisdom. He has been walking that road ever since, and I have followed.’
‘The plant he eats…you eat it too?’
‘Was it not me who gave it to you? All of my people eat it. Only we know where to find the true peyote, híkuri, and how to gather it, on the pilgrimages to the sacred land.’
‘I thought it would help my painting, Pelashil. That’s why I took it.’
‘You are still like the rest of your people, Pasquale. You are not in balance. You are ruled by the makers of things, of machines, but they see only half the world. Híkuri reveals the truth behind what we think we see.’
Pasquale thought of Piero’s experiments with devices discarded by the artificers. He said, ‘Then Piero wants to understand both.’
‘He stands in the middle. He is the first mara’akame to do so. Those who follow him will f
ind it easier, and go further. Now listen to me. You must not stay here. You bring trouble.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Men came here. Soldiers of the city. Look for you. He was scared by that. You must leave, to keep him safe. And think about what I told you. I will watch over you, because you are about to take the first step.’
And then she was gone, leaving Pasquale to reassemble his clothes from where they had been scattered about the little room. So he was being chased not only by the Savonarolistas, but by the city government too, no doubt put up to it by the merchant Taddei. If they caught him, he would be sent straight away as ransom for Raphael’s corpse. And Giustiniani’s men would by now have ransacked Niccolò Machiavegli’s rooms and be searching for him, for the device he had accidentally acquired. He knew what he must do. It was the only thing he could do. He must return it to its owner.
Piero was standing at a table in the big room, where candles made little islands of unsteady light. His hands spread to take his weight, he leaned over drawings that were scattered like leaves across the table. He had wrapped his blanket around himself in the style of a senator from ancient Rome, leaving one bony shoulder bare, and with his unkempt white beard and elf-locked hair he resembled Saint Jerome in his study, lacking only the traditional attributes of lion and cardinal’s hat.
As Pasquale came into the room the raven shifted on its perch and ruffled its wings. Pasquale said, ‘Are these new pictures, master?’
Piero didn’t look up, but slowly shook his head.
‘The woman has left soup for you, master. You should eat.’
‘Cooks grow monstrous fat on the odours of cooking alone,’ Piero said, ‘which is as well, for food grows repugnant to them, just as coal is hateful to a Westphalian miner, and he instead burns wood in his grate.’
It was no use forcing Piero in these matters. Pasquale said, ‘If you’re not hungry, master, I quite understand.’
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