“I have pursued Luca Bastardo for thirty years, and I say that you are that man, who has not aged since I was a child,” declaimed another voice. More torches lit Domenico Silvano’s countenance, and my breath was sucked into a cold void of fear in my gut. “Witchcraft keeps you youthful! Witchcraft prolongs your youth, and your sin brings down the wrath of God upon Florence!” I wanted to answer, but when I opened my mouth, the man to my right punched me hard in the gut, and I bent over, retching. “He does not deny it!” Domenico cried. “We don’t have time to subject this witch to the rack or the strivaletto to obtain his confession. We must act now to cleanse our city of this scourge of evil! Bind him, and prepare the stake! The letter my father has safeguarded for so long will serve as his indictment!”
I was seized by many hands and dragged forward. My hose tore against the rough cobblestones, and the skin over my bruising knees was cut into bloody stripes. I heard the harsh scraping of wood, and when the men briefly parted before me, I saw beams being laid down in the Piazza della Signoria. One of the beams was roped off and pulled erect. A dozen men worked on the scaffolding; it was only a few moments until the executionary apparatus was ready. I was pulled to my feet, many men spitting on me and pummeling me. I heard rather than felt two of my ribs crack, though I don’t know how I could have heard them when so many were screaming “Witch!” and “Sorcerer!” Wearing little but rags and blood, I was thrust against the post. A thick rope was wrapped around my shoulders and chest.
The angry crowd parted. Nicolo Silvano made his way toward me, hobbling with old age. He didn’t speak until he was close to me. “I knew this day would come, Bastardo. Think of my father as the flames nibble at your feet, then lick up your legs to fry your balls, then consume you entirely! It’s just punishment for your act of arson against the palazzo that was my inheritance!” He leaned closer so that his foul breath fanned my cheek. “I hope you enjoyed the gift I left there for you. Give my regards to Simonetta and the other whores when you see them in hell!”
A red haze obscured my vision, and then the old cool, clean desire to kill Nicolo spurted through me. Suddenly I was without hate or fear, without any emotion at all. “I should have killed you when you were cowering over your father’s dead body.” Then I spat at him.
“Your Jewess whore spat at me when I beat her to death,” Nicolo said. Rage boiled through me and Nicolo saw it. He laughed. “Yes, I enjoyed killing her.” Then he screamed. “Burn him! Burn him slowly, so that he suffers!” He laughed maniacally. Chunks of wood and kindling sticks were piled up around me. A man with a torch approached, to the cheers of the crowd. He gave the torch to Domenico Silvano, who licked his lips and smiled at me.
Then, rising up into the dark night as if from the stones paving the streets of the city, there was song: “She loved my massive TOOL so she never ever denied me her FAVORS,” chorused raucous drunken voices whose heavy accents declared them to be foreigners. The men around me turned to look. Through a gap in the line of their heads, I saw a group of condottieri weaving drunkenly, their arms wrapped around each other for support. The torchlight on their mantelli illuminated the colors of mercenary soldiers from the north.
“Hey, it’s a party!” a wheezy voice cried. A persnickety bray trumpeted out; the mercenary at the end was leading a gray donkey.
“Be gone!” shouted Domenico Silvano. “These are private proceedings!”
“We like parties! I don’t see no women, but we can send for ’em! If we can’t find any women, I don’t have a problem with them fluffy Florentine sheep!” the condottiere hollered. His comrades whooped. He let go of the rope and slapped the donkey, hard. It bucked up and then raced forward, snapping its teeth and kicking and causing consternation in the crowd around me.
“My donkey, get my donkey!” hollered another voice. “Damn it, you said you’d hang on to it, Hans, you small-dicked lout!” There was the rasp of a sword being drawn, and the condottiere who claimed the donkey leapt at the hapless Hans. Hans drew his sword in response and the two fell to fighting viciously. A third condottiere yelled, “I’ll get the donkey, I’ll get ’im, his legs are like Karl’s sister, she’s a nice piece of tail, only the donkey’s got a prettier face! Course, it don’t matter if you’re getting her from behind!” And with that, one of the condottieri broke from the others and charged into the crowd after the donkey.
“Hey, whadda you know about my sister?” cried Karl. “I’ll cut your heart out if you stole her flower!” He drew his sword and charged into the crowd. Bedlam broke loose. Condottieri drew their swords and charged each other, screaming and running into the crowd of men around me. The donkey brayed and layed about with its teeth and heels. Nicolo’s cohorts drew back, murmuring and unsettled, unsure of how to stop the melee.
Domenico swore. “Get back, get away!” he cried, waving the torch. He had to pull it back because the screaming soldiers were everywhere, intermingled with his own men. In the dark it was impossible for him to swing his torch with any accuracy. The condottiere chasing the donkey leapt close to me, swinging his sword as if to parry Karl’s strokes. Karl, a big man with blond hair, winked at me. Then, while looking forward, he sliced backward with his sword. It chopped into the ropes binding me to the post and they fell away. His sword moved so fast that it seemed almost a blur in the starlight, as if the stroke that freed me hadn’t happened at all. All the while he was screaming insults: “Stefan, you limp dick, yer mama’s even uglier than your sister, what’re you worked up about? Don’t tell me you ain’t got some of that good stuff, too? She’d had plenty of tool time before I got there!”
I didn’t wait for a formal invitation but leapt over the kindling, taking advantage of the moment when all attention was focused in other directions. A condottiere handed me a rolled-up bundle. “Put it on!” he snapped, then stepped in front of me when Domenico’s torch would have irradiated my face. The condottiere bawled out my song about the bosomy Napolitana lady and thrust his sword about in wide arcs that kept Nicolo’s men away. I unrolled the cloak, a mantello in the colors of the foreign mercenaries. I shrugged it on and pulled the hood up and then down low over my face. The donkey trotted up, and behind it came another condottiere who fell on me in a soppy embrace. “Friedrich, you’re a good lad! I wouldn’t want anyone else at my back when we’re fighting those flea-bitten, lice-covered Milanese!” He covertly pressed a short sword into my hand and lifted his head so that his hard-bitten blue eyes blazed into mine. “Don’t use it!” he whispered, without the trace of an accent.
He blubbered an apology, and suddenly all the condottieri grabbed each other and hollered apologies, and I knew what I had to do. I threw my arm around the condottiere’s shoulders and laid my head on him, as if muttering an apology. With the other hand I grabbed the donkey’s lead rope. I staggered out of the crowd as if drunk, my face pressed into the condottiere’s muscled shoulder while he rambled apologies. Through the slit of my hood, I saw Nicolo standing a few feet away. I didn’t need to see him, though. I would have felt him even if I were blind: the frigid empty presence of evil. My flesh crawled and my fingers burned with lust to stab my sword into him, to pay him back for Rachel’s death, and for the deaths of Simonetta and the children in the brothel, by spilling his blood all over the cobblestones. The condottiere felt me tense up. He pinched my cracked rib as he kept sobbing out regrets. Nicolo must have felt me, too, because he turned to look at the pair of us, me and the weepy condottiere. He said nothing, though he scowled in suspicion, and my heart beat so loudly that I was sure he could hear it. We walked past him while he stared straight at us.
In a few steps we rejoined the group, who were all linking up arms. One of the condottieri grabbed the donkey’s rope from me and another one hollered, “Hey, I know where there’s a real party! They have the prettiest women in town, well, most of them have all of their teeth, okay, some of them don’t look like Karl’s grandmother, but hey, they’re fun!”
We increased our pace into a trot, t
he donkey clip-clopping alongside us. A second later we heard furious shouts go up from the piazza.
“Game’s over,” the blue-eyed condottiere said to me. “Come with me!” He sprinted off at an angle away from the other condottieri. I followed him and we ran west along the Arno toward the Ponte alla Carraia. We got to the bridge, and instead of going over it, he led me down below to the water, where two figures waited with a small boat that bobbled up and down on the rollicking moon-slicked surface of the river. One of the figures was much smaller than the other.
“Cosimo,” I panted as the condottiere and I joined the two, “you got the melody wrong!”
Cosimo put down the hood of his mantello. “That’s right, you sang with the emphasis on ‘massive,’ not on ‘tool.’” He grinned at me. I ruffled his hair.
“There are florins and weapons in the boat,” said Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici. “My man Alberto here will get you out of the city. I’ll make arrangements so that you’ll be able to get money from any of my agents or offices anywhere in the world.”
“It’s good of you to help me, signore,” I said. “You, too, Cosimo. Was that your plan?”
“Partly.” The boy nodded, looking delighted, and his father smiled and put his hand proudly on his son’s shoulder. “You are my friend!”
“He would have been arrosto if we hadn’t arrived when we did,” Alberto said grimly. “They had him tied to the stake and were lighting the tinder.”
“A timely arrival,” I commented. Indeed, the perfection of the timing led me to suspect divine merriment, because what hand other than that of the kindly God whose presence I had felt earlier could arrange my rescue with such exquisite deftness?
“You brought my son back to me alive,” Giovanni said. “I’ll always help you.”
“So will I,” Cosimo said. “Luca, I’ll get that letter for you, the one that Papa says the confraternity has. I’ll give it to you and you’ll be safe then.”
Giovanni squeezed his son’s shoulder fondly. “But now, Luca, it’s time for you to leave Florence, and my advice to you is—”
“I know,” I said, “don’t come back.” It comforted me to find myself in the company of a deity again, after decades of absence. I knew that with this companionship, though fragile and suspect because of its divinity, my purpose and my longing would not fade to extinction. So I got into the little boat with Alberto and passed at midnight from the city I loved.
Chapter 15
“I WANT TO GO IN, but I’m afraid,” the boy said in a musical voice. He stood with his back arched and his hand on his knee, and then he angled his golden head back toward me so I saw his face for the first time. It was strikingly beautiful, and I was nearly overcome by a spasm of a memory that was in fact a nightmarish fantasy; I could see Bernardo Silvano, with his bladelike nose and jutting chin, putting his venal hand on the boy’s head in delight, crowing at the thought of the money he would bring in. I shook myself to escape these strange thoughts, focused again on the boy. It’s not vanity but simple observation that leads me to say that my own face was the handsomest I had ever seen until the very moment that I laid eyes on this gracefully shaped boy of eleven or twelve.
Recalled to Florence after six decades by my protector Cosimo de’ Medici, I had come first to Anchiano, outside Vinci. I wanted to check on the vineyard bequeathed to me over a hundred years ago by the burly, red-haired Arnolfo Ginori with whom I’d worked as a becchino when the Black Plague first struck. The fine day had enticed me on a trek up Monte Albano, which on one side descended toward the Arno Valley and Florence, and on the other rose toward craggy heights filled with great boulders, cold streams, and mysterious caves. In wandering, I’d stumbled on the boy, who now turned back to the mouth of the cavern, his hand shading his eyes from the bright early-summer sun. Its glare was partly absorbed and partly reflected by the scree field and overhanging rocks around us.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked the boy. I knelt beside him.
“It’s dark and threatening,” the boy answered, and abruptly sat down beside me.
“But there might be marvels inside.”
“Yes. Yes!” he cried. “I want to see if there’s something marvelous inside!”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? To brave the dark, closing in all around with its ominous possibilities, in order to discover the marvels within?” I asked. I plucked a few blades of grass and ripped them into long green threads. “Shadows are very important. They give depth to the light.”
The boy puckered his brow. “You’re not just talking about this cave,” he said. He wound a finger through a golden ringlet. “The question is, are you talking about yourself, or about me?”
“So he’s clever as well as beautiful!” I laughed. He joined in, his trill spilling out into the air, and it was as if the sun came out from behind storm clouds. I couldn’t help but stare at him, amazed by his looks and his lyrical voice.
“You’re beautiful, too,” the boy said. He had widely spaced eyes set in a perfectly sculpted face. “But you’re not just beautiful; you’re lively, with many expressions. I like faces like yours, that are interesting, whether beautiful or ugly. Tell me, signore, would you change the way you look? Are you grateful to your parents for giving you such beauty? How has it shaped your life? Have you found more love because of it? Has it been a curse or a blessing for you?”
I gazed into the dark cave. “Both.” This boy asked questions that probed too deeply into my unresolved heart. The danger from the Silvano clan had kept me away from Florence for six long decades this time, but the instant I returned, so did the questions. Somehow the stony Tuscan city of my boyhood always insisted that I confront myself. It had imprisoned me as a child in Silvano’s brothel, yet given me wings with Giotto’s art. It had given me an education through the alchemist Geber and the Hebrew doctor Moshe Sforno, and then it had cast me out, not once, but twice. It promised me a grand destiny of love and passion, but then held that in abeyance. It forced me to witness man’s inherent capacity for murder, evil, and betrayal, and to know that I was capable of those things, too. And here I was, almost within sight of the city walls, with the old ineluctable questions spiraling back to tear at my shielded heart with renewed ferocity: what were my origins and what did my gifts, my differences, mean? When would the promise of the night of the philosopher’s stone manifest itself? Questions, questions, still no answers. I would like to introduce this interesting child to the Wanderer, I thought; they could question each other.
“I faced a dark cave once,” I said.
“What did you do when you faced the cave?” The boy sounded intrigued.
“I went in, and I fought with myself,” I said, closing my eyes and clenching my fists. “I had an amazing vision. A vision of things to come.”
“Tell me your vision!” he commanded, serene in his knowledge that I would obey him.
“Why do you want to know?” I asked, to tease him.
“I want to know everything!” he said intensely. “I want to explore and examine and investigate everything, I want to find out the secrets of life and death and the earth and nature and everything!” He leapt to his feet and his shapely hands gestured with passion. “I want to understand how the eye sees, and how a bird flies, and how gravity and levity work, and what the nature of force is, and what the sun and moon are made of, and the exact internal structure of a man’s body, and the experience of nothingness—”
“I understand!” I held up a hand. “You want to know everything!”
“Except Latin,” he said, clenching his fists alongside his head. “I’m not good at that. It’s like I know it, but I’ve forgotten it, and there’s some secret gate within me that is closed, and it keeps me from becoming fluent. But everything else, yes, that I want to know!”
“A friend once said to me, ‘Anytime you can learn for yourself, experience for yourself, apprehend directly and with no intermediary, you must do so!’” I said.
“Your f
riend was wise,” the boy said seriously. “I have thought about it often, and I believe that although nature begins with reason and ends in experience, we must do the opposite. We must begin with our own experience and from this proceed to investigate the reason!”
“These are weighty thoughts for one so young,” I observed sympathetically, because I, too, had been yoked to oppressive thoughts as a child. Perhaps that was why I had avoided them as a man in exile, and why they rushed back in, ready to gore me, when I returned home.
“Am I supposed to wait until I am old to think deeply?” he replied. He narrowed his luminous eyes. “You seem familiar, as if I already know you…. Your wise friend, did he speak those words to you when he was dying?”
I nodded, remembering with a sharp, sweet pang Geber the Cathar alchemist, frail and covered with oozing bubboni in his workshop. Then I willed myself to the simple peace that I had enjoyed over the last sixty years, during which I had traveled the world, practicing my art as a physico, quietly offering the consolamentum to anyone who needed it, trying to heal pain and alleviate suffering while I eluded the Confraternity of the Red Feather. Finally I said, “My friend died a good death. He was alive when he died.”
“I know what you mean. Perhaps while we think we’re learning how to live, we’re actually learning how to die. If we’re honest. So tell me honestly about your vision,” the boy insisted with a charming smile, and I knew there was no escaping it.
I smiled and sighed at the same time. I gazed out over the mountain with its colorful profusion of wildflowers. An eagle circled overhead. I lay down to look up into the infinite blue sky. My shoulders were tense and my spine was clutched tightly by the long muscles of my back, as if I’d been thrown from a horse and stood immediately, unhurt but internally shocked. What had this unusual boy said to me, that he wanted to understand nothingness? I couldn’t conceive of such a desire. My deepest desire had always been to know fullness, the fullness of love and belonging. I had tasted it once in the arms of Rachel Sforno, and now that I was but a few minutes of celestial arc away from Florence, that old desire was suddenly back in full force.
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