by Rice, Anne
But the golden cup was forced to my lips. My jaws were opened by Ursula’s hand, and the liquid poured down my throat. I saw my sword lifted before my closing eyes as if it were a cross, the long hilt, the handles.
Soft mocking laughter rose and blended with the magical and indescribable beauty of the choir.
Her red veil swirled about me. I saw the red fabric rise up in front of me. I felt it come down around me like a spellbinding shower, full of her perfume, soft with her tenderness.
“Ursula, come with me …” I whispered.
Those were my last words.
“Cast out,” cried the swelling voices above. “Cast out …” cried the huge choir, and it seemed the Court sang with the chorus, “Cast out,” and my eyes closed as the red fabric covered my face, as it came down like a witch’s web over my struggling fingers and sealed itself over my open mouth.
The horns blared forth the truth. “Forgiven! Cast out!” sang the voices.
“Cast out to madness,” whispered Godric in my ear. “To madness all of your days, and you, you might have been one of us.”
“Yes, one of us,” came Florian’s smooth unperturbed whisper.
“Fool that you were,” said Godric. “You might have been immortal.”
“One of us forever, immortal, imperishable, to reign here in glory,” said Florian.
“Immortality or death,” said Godric, “and these were choices royal, but you shall wander witless and scorned through the world.”
“Yes, witless and scorned,” came a childish voice at my ear. And then another, “Witless and scorned.”
“Witless and scorned,” said Florian.
But the choir sang on, obliterating all sting from their words, its delirious hymn growing ever more tremendous in my half-slumber.
“A fool to wander the world in contempt,” said Godric.
Blinded, sealed in the softness of the veil, intoxicated by the drink, I could not answer them. I think I smiled. Their words were too senselessly mingled with the sumptuous soothing voices of the choir. And fools that they were, they had never known that what they said simply had not mattered.
“And you could have been our young prince.” Was it Florian at my side? Cool, dauntless Florian. “We could have loved you as she loves you.”
“A young prince,” said Godric, “to rule here with us forever.”
“Become the jester of alchemists and old wives,” said Florian sadly, solemnly.
“Yes,” said a childish voice, “fool to leave us.”
How wondrous were the anthems that made their words mere sweet and contrapuntal syllables.
I think I felt her kiss through the silk. I think I felt it. I think. It seemed in the tiniest of feminine whispers, she said simply, without ceremony:
“My love.” It had her triumph and her farewell within it.
Down, down, down into the richest, kindest sleep that God can give, I sank. The music gave a shape to my limbs, gave air to my lungs, when all other senses had been abandoned.
9
ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH
It was pouring down rain. No, the rain had stopped. They still couldn’t understand me.
I was surrounded by these men. We were right near Fra Filippo’s workshop. I knew this street. I’d just been here with my father a year ago.
“Speak more slowly. Corrr … blub, it doesn’t make sense!”
“Look,” said the other one. “We want to help you. Tell me your father’s name. Speak it slowly.”
They shook their heads. I thought I was making perfect sense, I could hear it, Lorenzo di Raniari, why couldn’t they hear it, and I was his son, Vittorio di Raniari. But I could feel my lips, how swollen they were. I knew I was filthy from the rain.
“Look, take me to Fra Filippo’s shop. I know them there,” I said. My great painter, my passionate and tormented painter, his apprentices would know me. He would not, but the helpers who had seen me weep that day at his work. And then, then, these men would take me to the house of Cosimo in the Via del Largo.
“Fee, fee?” they said. They repeated my clumsy attempts at speech. I had failed again.
I started towards the workshop. I staggered and almost fell. These were honest men. I had the heavy bags over my right shoulder, and my sword was clanking against me, practically throwing me off balance. The high walls of Florence were closing in on me. I almost hit the stones.
“Cosimo!” I shouted at the top of my voice.
“We can’t take you to Cosimo like this! Cosimo won’t see you.”
“Ah, you understand; you heard me.”
But the man now cocked his ear. An honest merchant, drenched to the skin in his somber green robes, and all because of me no doubt. I wouldn’t come in out of the rain. No sense. They’d found me lying in the rain right in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria.
“It’s coming back, it’s coming clear.”
I saw the entrance to Fra Filippo’s workshop up ahead. The shutters were being taken down. They were opening it up now that the thunderous storm had ceased, and the water was drying up on the stone streets. People were coming out.
“Those men in there,” I shouted.
“What, what are you saying?”
Shrugs all around, but they aided me. An old man held my elbow.
“We should take him to San Marco, let the monks care for him.”
“No, no, no, I need to talk to Cosimo!” I shouted.
Again, they shrugged and shook their heads.
Suddenly I stopped. I rocked and steadied myself by rudely grabbing hold of the younger man’s shoulder.
I stared at the distant workshop.
The street was no more than an alleyway here, barely sufficient for horses to pass and for the pedestrians not to be injured, and the stone facades all but closed out the slate-gray sky above. Windows were opened, and it seemed that a woman could reach across upstairs and touch the house opposite her.
But look what was there, right before the shop.
I saw them. I saw the two of them! “Look,” I said again. “Do you see them?”
The men couldn’t see. Lord, the two figures before the shop were bright as if illuminated from within their flushed skin and loosely girdled robes.
I held the shoulder bags over my left shoulder and put my hand on my sword. I could stand, but my eyes must have been wide as plates staring blindly at what I beheld.
The two angels were arguing. The two angels, with their wings moving ever so slightly in time with their words and their gestures, were arguing with each other where they stood, right before the shop.
They stood oblivious to all humans who passed them and couldn’t see them, and they argued one with another, both angels blond, both angels I knew, I knew these angels, I knew them from the paintings of Fra Filippo, and I could hear their voices.
I knew the rolled curls of the one, whose head was crowned with a wreath of small perfectly matched flowerlets, his loose mantle crimson, his undergarment a bright clear sky blue trimmed in gold.
And the other, I knew him as well, knew his bare head and soft shorter hair, and his golden collar, and the insignia on his mantle, and the thick bands of ornament on his wrists.
But above all I knew their faces, their innocent pink-tinged faces, their serene full yet narrow eyes.
The light melted down, somber and stormy still, though the sun was burning up there behind the gray sky. My eyes began to water.
“Look at their wings,” I whispered.
The men couldn’t see.
“I know the wings. I know them both, look, the angel with the blond hair, the ringlets in rows coming down his head, it’s from the Annunciation, and the wings, his wings are made like the peacock, brilliantly blue, and the other, his feathers are tipped in the purest dust of gold.”
The angel with the crown of flowers gestured excitedly to the other; from a mortal man, the gestures, the posture, would have evinced anger, but it was nothing so heated as that. Th
e angel was only seeking to be understood.
I moved slowly, pulling loose of my helpful companions, who couldn’t see what I saw!
What did they think I stared at? The gaping shop, the apprentices in the deep shadows within, the meager half-tinted flashes of canvases and panels, the yawning mouth beyond which the work was carried out.
The other angel shook his head somberly. “I don’t go along with it,” he said in the most serene and lilting voice. “We can’t go that far. Do you think this doesn’t make me weep?”
“What?” I cried out. “What makes you weep?”
Both angels turned. They stared at me. In unison, they collected their dark, multicolored and spectacled wings close to themselves, as though they meant to shrink thereby into invisibility, but they were no less visible to me, shining, both so fair, so recognizable. Their eyes were full of wonder as they gazed at me. Wonder at the sight of me?
“Gabriel!” I cried out. I pointed, “I know you, I know you from the Annunciation. You are both Gabriel, I know the paintings, I have seen you, Gabriel and Gabriel, how can it be?”
“He can see us,” said the angel who had been gesturing so pointedly. His voice was subdued but seemed to reach my ears effortlessly and gently. “He can hear us,” he said, and the wonder in his face increased, and he looked above all innocent and patient, and ever so gently concerned.
“What in the name of God are you saying, boy?” asked the old man beside me. “Now, collect your wits. You’re carrying a fortune in your bags. Your hands are covered in rings. Now speak sensibly. I’ll take you to your family, if you’ll only tell me who they are.”
I smiled. I nodded, but I kept my eyes fixed on the two startled and amazed angels. Their clothes appeared light, near translucent, as though the fabric were not of a natural weave any more than their incandescent skin was natural. All of their makeup was more rarefied, and fine-woven with light.
Beings of air, of purpose, made up of presence and of what they do—were these the words of Aquinas coming back to me, the Summa Theologica on which I had learnt my Latin?
Oh, how miraculously beautiful they were, and so safely apart from all around them, standing transfixed in the street in their quiet wide-eyed simplicity, pondering as they gazed with compassion and interest at me.
One of them, the one crowned with flowers, the one who wore the sky-blue sleeves, the one who had so caught my heart when I had seen him in the Annunciation with my father, the one with whom I had fallen in love, moved towards me.
He became larger as he drew closer, taller, slightly larger all over than an ordinary being, and so full of love in the soundless shuffle of his loose and gracefully spilling clothes that he seemed more immaterial and monumentally solid, more perhaps the very expression of God’s creation, than anything of flesh and blood might be.
He shook his head and smiled. “No, for you are yourself the very finest of God’s creation,” he said in a low voice that stole its way through the chatter that surrounded me.
He walked as if he were a mortal being, with clean naked feet over the wet dirty stones of the Florentine street, oblivious to the men who could not see him as he stood now so close to me, letting his wings spread out and then folding them again tight, so that I only saw the high feathered bones of them above his shoulders, which were sloped like those of a young boy.
His face was brilliantly clean and flushed with all the radiant color Fra Filippo had painted. When he smiled, I felt my entire body tremble violently with unadulterated joy.
“Is this my madness, Archangel?” I asked. “Is this their curse come true, that I shall see this as I gibber and incur the scorn of learned men?” I laughed out loud.
I startled the gentlemen who had been trying so much to help me. They were thoroughly flustered. “What? Speak again?”
But in a shimmering instant, a memory descended upon me, illuminating my heart and soul and mind all in one stroke, as though the sun itself had flooded a dark and hopeless cell.
“It was you I saw in the meadow, you I saw when she drank my blood.”
Into my eyes he looked, this cool collected angel, with the rows and rows of immaculate blond curls and the smooth placid cheeks.
“Gabriel, the Archangel,” I said in reverence. The tears flooded to my eyes, and it felt like singing to cry.
“My boy, my poor wretched boy,” said the old merchant. “There is no angel standing in front of you. Pay attention, now, please.”
“They can’t see us,” said the angel to me simply. Again came his smooth easy smile. His eyes caught the light falling from the brightening sky as he peered into me, as if he would see deeper with every moment of his study.
“I know,” I answered. “They don’t know!”
“But I am not Gabriel, you must not call me that,” he said very courteously and soothingly. “My young one, I am very far from being the Archangel Gabriel. I am Setheus, and I’m a guardian angel only.” He was so patient with me, so patient with my crying and with the collection of blind and concerned mortals around us.
He stood close enough for me to touch, but I didn’t dare.
“My guardian angel?” I asked. “Is it true?”
“No,” said the angel. “I am not your guardian angel. Those you must somehow find for yourself. You’ve seen the guardian angels of another, though why and how I don’t know.”
“Don’t pray now,” said the old man crankily. “Tell us who you are, boy. You said a name before, your father, tell us.”
The other angel, who stood as if too shocked to move, suddenly broke his reserve and he too came forward in the same silent barefooted style, as though the roughened stones and the wet and dirt could not mar him or harm him.
“Can this be good, Setheus?” he asked. But his pale iridescent eyes were focused on me with the same loving attention, the same rapt and forgiving interest.
“And you, you are in the other painting, I know you too, I love you with my whole heart,” I said.
“Son, to whom are you speaking?” demanded the younger man. “Whom do you love with your whole heart?”
“Ah, you can hear me?” I turned to the man. “You can understand me.”
“Yes, now tell me your name.”
“Vittorio di Raniari,” I said, “friend and ally of the Medici, son of Lorenzo di Raniari, Castello Raniari in the north of Tuscany, and my father is dead, and all my kinsmen. But—.”
The two angels stood right before me, together, one head inclined towards the other as they regarded me, and it seemed that the mortals, for all their blindness, could not block the path of the angels’ vision or come between me and them. If only I had the courage. I so wanted to touch them.
The wings of the one who’d spoken first were rising, and it seemed a soft shimmer of gold dust fell from the awakening feathers, the quivering, sparkling feathers, but nothing rivaled the angel’s meditative and wondering face.
“Let them take you to San Marco,” said this angel, the one named Setheus, “let them take you. These men mean well, and you will be put in a cell and cared for by the monks. You cannot be in a finer place, for this is a house under Cosimo’s patronage, and you know that Fra Giovanni has decorated the very cell in which you’ll stay.”
“Setheus, he knows these things,” said the other angel.
“Yes, but I am reassuring him,” said the first angel with the simplest shrug, looking wonderingly at his companion. Nothing characterized their faces so much as subdued wonder.
“But you,” I said, “Setheus, may I call you by name, you’ll let them take me away from you? You can’t. Please don’t leave me. I beg you. Don’t leave me.”
“We have to leave you,” said the other angel. “We are not your guardians. Why can’t you see your own angels?”
“Wait, I know your name. I can hear it.”
“No,” said this more disapproving angel, waving his finger at me as if correcting a child.
But I would not be stopped. “I know yo
ur name. I heard it when you were arguing, and I hear it now when I look at your face. Ramiel, that’s your name. And both of you are Fra Filippo’s guardians.”
“This is a disaster,” whispered Ramiel, with the most touching look of distress. “How did this occur?”
Setheus merely shook his head, and smiled again generously. “It has to be for the good, it must be. We have to go with him. Of course we do.”
“Now? Leave now?” demanded Ramiel, and again, for all the urgency, there was no anger. It was as though the thoughts were purified of all lower emotions, and of course it was so, it was perfectly so.
Setheus leaned close to the old man, who couldn’t of course either see him or hear him, and he said in the old man’s ear:
“Take the boy to San Marco; have him put in a goodly cell, for which he has plenty of money, and have him nursed to health.”
Then he looked at me. “We’ll go with you.”
“We can’t do that,” said Ramiel. “We can’t leave our charge; how can we do such a thing without permission?”
“It’s meant to be. This is permission. I know that it is,” said Setheus. “Don’t you see what’s happened? He’s seen us and he’s heard us and he’s caught your name, and he would have caught mine if I hadn’t revealed it. Poor Vittorio, we are with you.”
I nodded, almost ready to weep at the sound of myself addressed. The whole street had gone drab and hushed and indistinct around their large, quiet and flushed figures, the finespun light of their garments stirring about them as if the celestial fabric were subject to the invisible currents of the air which men cannot feel.
“Those are not our real names!” said Ramiel scoldingly to me, but gently, as one would scold an infant.
Setheus smiled. “They are good enough names by which to call us, Vittorio,” he said.
“Yes, take him to San Marco,” said the man beside me. “Let’s go. Let the monks handle all this.”
The men rushed me towards the mouth of the street.
“You’ll be very well cared for at San Marco,” said Ramiel, as though he were bidding me farewell, but the two angels were moving beside us, and only falling a little behind.