Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  “I didn’t need to say what I thought you already knew.”

  Dioneo ground his teeth, but didn’t bite back. “Go to Santa Reparata. It’s crowded, but people will listen to you. You can tell them to supp–”

  “I’m not taking part in this.”

  Dioneo stuttered to a stop. “You’ve already taken part.”

  “I’ve been dragged along. All anybody in this city can do after the pestilence is make the world worse.”

  “You wouldn’t dare to side with the papacy, not after what you’ve seen.”

  “I’m not siding with anyone. I’m withdrawing.”

  Dioneo sat there, mouth in a twist of confusion and frustration. Niccoluccio turned to the door.

  Dioneo said, “I never dreamed I would have to threaten to close my home to my brother. If you walk through those doors, don’t come back to mine. This is too grave for philosophical scruples.”

  “If that is what you feel obliged to do, then I cannot stop you.”

  “Go back to your whore, then!” Dioneo shouted at his back. Niccoluccio’s step caught, but he forced himself to continue.

  He marched past Dioneo’s secretary, trying to keep his face as composed as he hoped he had sounded. His bare scalp burned by the time he reached the plaza. He ran his fingers across his bare scalp. He felt as though there were a fire in his head. He leaned against the side of the Palazzo Vecchio, and only moved on when he noticed the disapproval of passersby.

  He walked in the first direction he could think of, toward the western gates. No attempt at calm could keep his breath from coming in quick, shallow gulps. He had nothing in Florence, no reason to stay. His family and his home had been the only reason he’d come. He had no home elsewhere. He had no money, little knowledge of the cities beyond Florence’s walls. If he tried to travel on his own, he would be no better off than he had been when he’d fled Sacro Cuore.

  Applying to join a monastery wasn’t an option either. He no longer felt a man of the church, which was tantamount to saying he was no longer a man of God. Losing his brother made him shake, but losing sight of God was what made him want to weep. And he couldn’t explain the reasons for it to anyone in this city.

  The pillars of smoke had dwindled to candle wisps, but shops remained closed and the streetside food carts and stalls had vanished into the ether from which they came. At least four men stood guard outside each church he passed. They stared at Niccoluccio as he went by.

  His feet turned south, toward the Arno. Elisa’s home.

  Elisa looked only mildly surprised to see him again so soon. When he was safely inside, he said, “You asked me earlier why suicide should be a sin. I don’t have an answer.”

  She needed a moment to understand. “Are you coming to me for support?”

  “I usually did. You and Pietro.”

  “Back when we were little older than children. Can’t you see how things are different?”

  She didn’t know what had just happened between him and his brother, and he wasn’t inclined to explain. “I never felt like I belonged in this city since the day I came back.”

  “Long before that, I’ll bet,” Elisa said.

  “I should have died at the monastery. Or frozen to death on the roads afterward. I have no right to be here.”

  Elisa glanced back to a half-opened door. Niccoluccio couldn’t see anything behind it, but the knob was covered in dust. “Maybe we should both be dead,” she said.

  A flood of guilt nearly pushed him to the floor. He’d come to her for some comfort, some grounding, but of course he wasn’t alone in feeling like this. Elisa had lost her children. However close he’d felt to his brother, she’d been closer to her family. She’d explained that before, with words he hadn’t tried hard enough to understand.

  “I’m beyond sorry. There’s nothing I can say to ease your suffering.”

  “I wish you hadn’t had to discover that the same way I did.”

  “How do you bear it?”

  “I don’t. And I won’t. What about you? Do you think you’ll find another monastery?”

  There were some parts of him that she couldn’t understand, not any more than he could her. He shook his head.

  “Then – would you like to stay with me?” He could hear the reluctance trailing from her voice.

  “Neither of us really wants that.”

  Elisa looked back toward the half-open door, and nodded.

  She said, “I hope I’ll be able to see you again, before–”

  “It will be as God wills it.” Short of God’s aid, neither of them were in control of themselves.

  He took her hand, squeezed it one last time before heading for the front door.

  When he got outside again, he didn’t know where he was headed, but he felt many times lighter. It was as though he’d dragged chains with him ever since he’d left Sacro Cuore – ever since he’d heard of the pest approaching – and he’d finally managed to lose them.

  His brother’s home was only a few streets away. If it weren’t for the interceding rooftops, he could have seen it. It might as well have been in Xanadu. His head still burned. He turned to the southwest, and the neighborhoods of porters and laborers who made their homes near the river. He’d been there a few times in the company of Pietro and Elisa, searching for privacy.

  There was more of that to be found now. As elsewhere, whole streets had been abandoned. Doors and windows were boarded over. Quarantine signs hung over them. Other houses had been left open to show off the rot inside. Most of the city’s dead had come through here, on their way to corpse barges. They’d left annihilation in their wake. The pestilence had cleaved through the neighborhood like steel through flesh.

  There were no corpses in the streets anymore, but indoors there would be plenty. Niccoluccio stopped outside one of the boarded-up houses. He had a good idea what he’d find inside, and the smell when he pried loose the boards and opened the door left no doubt.

  He counted three adult-sized bodies, each with several children. The house had only one room, and they all shared it. Three of the children were tucked underneath sheets as if to be tended on their sickbeds. Their skin was gray, and their hair had become wisps. Their bones poked through their elbows. One adult had a mummified infant glued to his or her chest.

  One of the children looked to have died long after the others. A girl, about seven years old, was in much better condition than the others. She looked as though she might merely be sleeping. but the skin on her arm had started to slip loose, and maggots had made a home of her belly. She’d laid down sideways to keep a bubo under her arm from tormenting her.

  The riots had started the fire in Niccoluccio’s head, but the heat had been there long before.

  There was no one to talk to but Habidah, and nothing to say except to hope that she had been listening all along. She might understand what he was about to do.

  Florence had cemeteries near every church. All of them had been overwhelmed with the dead. Still, when Niccoluccio visited the nearest churchyard, he found space in the margins of the last row of graves. Whether or not the church’s builders had intended to bury anyone in there, it was still consecrated ground.

  Finding a shovel proved of little difficulty. The last gravediggers had abandoned it against the side of the building.

  He started with the girl who’d died last. He wrapped her in one of the sheets, carried her through the streets. People stared and stood well aside. When he reached the cemetery, he dug as deep as he could before his arms lost their strength. He laid her down and recovered the blanket.

  He reused the blanket each time he had to carry someone, but it was so fouled that it didn’t serve as much protection. Dark, evil-smelling fluid dripped from the places the corpses’ skin had burst, and soiled his clothes. The blanket was more for their dignity than his.

  With so little space to dig, he had no choice but to bury the adults atop one another, next to the children. After he was sure each of them was far en
ough down that they wouldn’t risk spreading the pestilence, he filled in the grave. It was hardly the finest burial, but it was the best he could manage, and more than anyone else had been able to give.

  He sat and caught his breath. He’d fallen out of practice gravedigging since Sacro Cuore. His throat burned and a chill had settled into his core.

  Maybe that was how the pestilence started its work on its victims.

  If this was how he was to die, he would not complain. It was how he should have died long ago. He remembered the monks of Sacro Cuore standing one at a time to declare their intention to face the pestilence. He wondered how many of them would have made the same decision if they’d known all that would happen. He certainly wouldn’t have.

  Now he knew what was coming, and he wasn’t afraid. He wouldn’t call Habidah or seek any other kind of escape.

  He worked through the night breaking quarantine boards and burying the abandoned dead. Finally, he had to stop and rest. He sat against the back wall of the church, rested his head.

  The next time he looked up, the sun had traveled across half the sky. His stomach pained, but not from hunger. He just resisted the urge to vomit.

  His skin burned from long hours under the sun. He braced himself against the wall, heaved himself to his feet, and returned to the streets. Dizziness made him waver. More people were out. Yesterday’s troubles seemed to have ended, no doubt leaving his brother’s faction in control.

  The dead would have been buried eventually. The city would bring its gravediggers. But the gravediggers from the countryside were notoriously irreligious and treated the dead like bundles of logs. No, it was best that he do whatever little he could. It was a better service to the city than any he’d done as treasurer.

  Habidah told him, “You don’t have to do this to yourself.”

  Niccoluccio startled. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, accidentally aloud.

  “I’ve been tracking your heartbeat, your body temperature. You’re sick, and you’re moving rather than resting.”

  Niccoluccio didn’t answer, and she didn’t speak again.

  His next two corpses were both children, on the floor of a one-room house with no beds, nestled together. Their faces had decayed into gray shadows. He couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls. Passersby stepped back from him as he carried them, one after the other, to their graves. After he finished, people lined up to watch him as he trudged to his next house. They didn’t say anything.

  After he’d exhausted the available space at the first churchyard, he turned to other cemeteries farther away. Blisters stung his hands, and his legs and shoulders ached from lifting.

  By mid-afternoon, his stomach had stopped hurting. All he felt, as he marched under the shadow of his growing number of watchers, was hollow. His forehead prickled with sweat even as he shivered. He should have felt hungry.

  After sunset, he no longer had an audience, but he continued until it was so dark that he couldn’t tell one house from its neighbor. Then he dug fresh graves, ready for tomorrow. When his arms at last gave out, he sat hunched under a church wall. The air bit his scalp. He shivered uncontrollably, and swallowed bile.

  “Why were you so bent on saving me?” he asked Habidah. He wondered if she heard his teeth clattering. “Why me and not these children, or my brothers, or this whole city?” It was the first time he could remember feeling bitter toward her.

  “All I’ve ever done is what I’ve needed to,” Habidah said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She didn’t answer, even when he asked again.

  Niccoluccio wasn’t woken by the cold, or even the blazing pain in his shoulders. Rather, it was the shouting man running down the street. When Niccoluccio sat upright, the man’s words were drowned out by the rush of blood in his ears.

  Dawn had only just brushed the sky. Rain clouds were gathering in the west. He could already feel their bite. The pit in the center of his stomach widened. He crouched to his side, and retched a trickle of watery, greenish fluid. The rush of pain from his head nearly made him faint. His vision dwindled to a blood-encircled tunnel.

  It took too long for his vision to return to normal. His pulse drummed in his ears. Still no buboes, but it hardly seemed to matter. He staggered to the street, but the commotion had passed. He was left with a shroud of darkness, and a fog of thoughts.

  Time, then, for the next bodies. An old woman had died in an abandoned tavern kitchen. The rooms above were all empty, so the owners had either died elsewhere, or fled the city. By the time he returned from her grave, the sky had brightened enough that he could see smoke rising again from the corners of the city.

  One of the locals had risen early to watch Niccoluccio carry his burdens. Niccoluccio nodded to the smoke, mouth open with an unasked question.

  The man bowed his head. He, too, was tonsured – a monk. “Begging your mercy. News is that the pope hasn’t waited for an answer to the interdiction. He sent for help from Queen Joanna. She’s back in Naples and raising an army. They want to force our bishop to abdicate.”

  Niccoluccio looked to the smoke. After a while, and without any other choice, he resumed his work.

  Before he’d finished digging the next grave, he sagged on his shovel. When he looked up, the fires had grown larger. Some seemed to have spread to houses. A fire spreading out of control could be as destructive to Florence as the pestilence.

  Though some people had come to watch him again, the streets were unusually quiet for this time of morning. He gathered as much of his energy as he could manage. His next cadaver was a bony young woman who probably looked little different in death from how she had in life. His arms threatened to give out halfway through filling her grave. His knees buckled, and several times he nearly collapsed, leaning on his shovel – until a pair of hands helped him to a seat.

  It was the monk he’d spoken with earlier. Without a word, he took Niccoluccio’s shovel and resumed filling the grave. There were two others, two women, with him. They took turns digging the next while Niccoluccio sat and rested.

  They helped him to his feet and escorted him back to the street, past another line of watchers. There were more of them this time – about thirty. Niccoluccio pointed them to the next house on his list, and they helped him carry the hefty man who’d died within.

  The most remarkable thing was that no one spoke. They seemed to know what to do the moment he indicated the house. When he grabbed the corpse’s legs, they took the arms. None of the corpses he’d carried had felt so light, so distant.

  He sat to rest while they dug. Afterimages swam in front of his eyes. His head spun. He checked again for buboes. Nothing. His followers finished and continued.

  He got up to follow, and his vision disappeared down the end of a dark tunnel.

  The next time he was conscious, drizzle kissed his cheeks and lips. Someone was trying to drip water into his mouth. He sputtered, hacked a cough, and pushed the hands away. When his vision returned, he saw the monk holding a bowl.

  Niccoluccio’s throat burned, but the water only made it worse. He waved him away and fought to stand. Somehow he managed to get upright. On another day, he would have appreciated the gesture. Bread and water were as poison to him.

  Throughout his childhood and monastic career, he’d drunk deeply of the lives of the saints, and tales of their agonies. He’d thought he’d understood why so many of the saints had chosen their suffering. He’d thought of agony only as a trial to be endured, but this was very different. It changed him and how he perceived himself. It forced him to hold himself at a remove from all the evil influences of his body.

  This was the suffering he’d shirked at Sacro Cuore. His brothers had accepted it. He would still have his chance.

  The monk asked him something, but Niccoluccio didn’t hear. Clarity was not one of the blessings of this new state. He went past the people watching him.

  His followers milled outside an unused dockhouse, as if uncertain whe
ther to go in. Niccoluccio led them in. A pair of vagrants had gone inside to die. Niccoluccio uncovered the bodies, and the others lifted.

  His followers outpaced him on their way to the graveyard. Niccoluccio gradually fell behind. He stumbled into an alley between houses. He leaned against the grimy wall and caught his breath. More smoke spires twisted across the sky, merging smoothly into the dark clouds overhead. The light rain wasn’t enough to put the fires out.

  His energy had fled him. He craned his neck to look at the sky. The fires had been burning all day now. When he strained his hearing, he could hear yelling, though it was difficult to tell what was real.

  He allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and picked his way down the alley. The boundary between this neighborhood and the next wasn’t discreet. The houses grew taller and their sides cleaner. He stepped into a boulevard twice as large as any he’d visited over the past few days.

  The street was so bustling that, for a moment, he could have mistaken it for an ordinary day. There were no carts, though. The shops were closed. The men passing bore wore grim faces, and were all headed in one direction.

  A pot-bellied man with hair like the head of a mop stopped and stared. He looked up and down Niccoluccio’s filthy habit with a flash of recognition. “It’s Prior Caracciola’s brother!”

  One of the few women elbowed him. She said, “Leave off. He’s a monk.”

  “Prior Caracciola’s brother used to be a monk. It was all an act. Another trick.” He seized Niccoluccio by his filthy collar. “Are you a monk? Swear it to me in the name of God if you are.”

  Niccoluccio fought to speak through the pressure. The idea of lying occurred only briefly. “I am no longer a monk.”

  That was all the excuse the man needed to smash his forehead into Niccoluccio’s nose.

  Niccoluccio staggered into something hard. He couldn’t have kept his balance if he’d tried, and he didn’t. He slid to his knees. Before he could breathe, another pair of hands grabbed him and yanked him back up.

  Someone punched him between his ribs. Another blow landed, and again, lower. Niccoluccio gasped, but couldn’t draw any breath. His vision tunneled into darkness. He landed on his side and felt a hard kick against his stomach. Its impact felt muted, as though it were happening to some other person.