Damiata stopped and stared down the road, studying this design of man and nature as if it were an augury of our fate. “Leonardo has made drawings like this,” she said in a nearly entranced voice. “I have never seen the like of them. He has flayed away the flesh to expose the veins, nerves, and sinews that run throughout us like rivers, streams, and creeks. Or like these mulberry branches.” She turned to me. “The maestro has found this secret world beneath our skin.”
She had her hood up, exposing only her face, and this dark frame made the blue of her eyes deeper than seemed possible. If the most profound blue available to our painters is the ultramare that comes from beyond the sea, you would have to sail the sea between here and our friend of blessed memory Amerigo Vespucci’s mundus novus a thousand times to obtain this hue.
Yet this gaze could metamorphose in a single blink, haunted in one instant, as sparkling as light off a wave in the next. To watch Damiata for more than a moment was not merely to become fascinated, in the sense of our modern Tuscan affascinare, but also to be reminded of the ancient Latin fascinare: to cast a spell.
So if in her eyes I appeared wary, it was only because I regarded them as the incorrigible thieves of all reason and good sense.
With tiny steps Damiata approached the well’s stone rim, which was frosted with snow. She peeked in but quickly drew back.
I came to her side and looked down, wondering what she had seen, finding nothing but a lightless void. At this time in my life, I had only begun my study of men’s natures—my scienza of men—and the well provided an allegory of my own efforts to imagine the face of this murderer: peering into the darkness with the conviction that something lay at the bottom, yet utterly unable to see it.
“Let us assume that two witches have already died for some secret regarding the Duke of Gandia’s murder,” I said, knowing that Damiata already believed this. “But were the streghe murdered in an effort to conceal this secret? Or to obtain it?”
“No doubt to conceal it,” Damiata offered at once. “The condottieri know the truth they hope to keep hidden.”
“That is the reasonable conclusion. But then why display the bodies in a manner that only drew attention to the victims?”
Damiata warily cocked her head. “What are you saying, Niccolò?”
“Possibly there is a secret these streghe have concealed. But I do not believe it will tell us who murdered Juan of Gandia. Or those women.”
She made a little scoffing sound. “Then you believe we have come out here for nothing, except to invite our own deaths.”
“We are looking for a man of a peculiar nature,” I elaborated. “A very rare nature. And I believe that we cannot know him until we understand another sort of secret. A segreto that will not be found out here on the pianura but within him. Something that makes him different from other men.”
Damiata gave me the merest frown and a tiny pout—which made me almost insane with desire. So I required a moment to see this expression as one of deepest skepticism. “Do you intend to once again cite his vanity? His interest in games and riddles, Niccolò? Because far from being rare, this is the nature of so many men I have known. Particularly those of high station.”
Certainly I knew I could not easily convince Damiata of my arguments, when in truth I had not entirely convinced myself. Yet often in those days I committed myself to a rhetorical leap, hoping that before the end of my fall, I would discover something to which I could cling.
“I believe that this man is rare,” I said, “because we so rarely find him in our histories.”
“I have read Herodotus and Tacitus just as you have, Niccolò.” In fact, Damiata’s well-lettered challenge to my intellect had beguiled me no less than her beauty. “History is nothing if not a catalog of vain and cruel men.”
“Men who almost always kill at the prompting of some human passion or sentiment,” I said. “Ambition. Jealousy of other men’s power. Upon reaching the heights, they are consumed by the suspicion and fear they will lose everything to men much like themselves.”
“Yes. You have previously said you do not observe such sentiments or passions in these murders.” Her tone was peevish. “But isn’t it more reasonable to believe that this man’s greatest fear is that the full revelation of his crimes will compel the pope and even Valentino to seek vengeance, thus depriving him of both his station and his life?”
“I give you that reason does not provide us an easy explanation of this man’s actions—”
“Then you believe he is afflicted with a sort of madness. Some excess of choleric humors in the brain.”
“No. Consider his forethought, his calculation, his fastidious dismemberment of the corpses. He appears to have entire command of his faculties.” As I spoke, my sleeve brushed snow into the well; the glittering little shower vanished before it was consumed by the black water. “Not even the greatest of the ancients truly understood this sort of man.”
Damiata pushed a few stray hairs from her forehead; her delicate hand, sheathed in gray kid, was more lovely than a marble Aphrodite’s. “But Niccolò, you believe you have made a list of such men, do you not?”
I shrugged. “Plutarch tells us that Alexander, the tyrant of the ancient Thessalian city of Pherae, massacred entire populations for no reason at all, butchered men merely for his own perverse amusement, and worshipped as a deity the spear on which he had impaled his predecessor—yet he regretted nothing and wept only at the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache on the stage. Nevertheless, Plutarch did not observe that Alexander of Pherae was a rare man, even when compared to other tyrants. Our histories tell us of a few others who also derived a perverse amusement from their murders and cruelties. Demetrius and Perseus. The Roman dictator Sulla. The emperors Caligula and Nero. Plato believed that the cause of all such depraved behavior was a ‘disease of the soul.’ But this man’s disease or deformity of the soul is so rarely seen that no Hippocrates or Galen—or Marcus Aurelius or Augustine—has ever described it.”
“Niccolò, if this man is so different from other men, shouldn’t we know him at once? Didn’t the Romans know well the madness of Nero and Caligula, even though they were powerless to oppose them?”
“That is what confounds me so. Because for a time the people of Rome, even those closest to the tyrants, were deceived. This was true regarding Sulla as well. As though these men were able to mask their nature until their power was sufficiently established to permit their worst excesses.”
“What sort of mask?” She gave me a subtle wry smile. “I presume you do not mean this Devil’s mask Leonardo’s assistant has witnessed.”
Despite the importance of this question, I had no answer. Instead I stared into the well as if it were a black mirror. “Perhaps that is his secret,” I said. “The Sphinx’s riddle.”
It was not lost on Damiata that travelers who failed to answer the Sphinx’s riddle quickly found their ignorance fatal. “Perhaps you are correct in that respect, Niccolò. Tonight either we answer his riddle or Fortune will bring our journey to its end.” She took my arm and drew herself close. “I know I asked you before, Niccolò. You are familiar with women of my sort, aren’t you?”
At that point in my life I had enjoyed “conversation,” let us say, with the less gifted courtesans at the French court in Lyons, not to mention interludi dancers and singers in Florence. But I could hardly say I had known a woman of her sort.
Reading my silence if not my face, Damiata added, “Is that why you don’t trust me?”
“I trust that you were honest when you said I could not,” I told her lightly, not needing to recite the sins she had confessed to me: liar, thief, and whore.
Her smile revealed teeth as perfect as pearls. “If only I had known you in Rome, before everything … We would have been great friends. And I would not have required your trust.”
“If you had known me in Rome, I would have been merely one among the court of three dozen scholars camped on your doorstep, not daring to hope
for more than a nod.” This was a kind way of saying that a single night with her would have cost me a year’s expenses.
She cast her eyes down. “No. I believe I would have found you different than the rest. Or perhaps it is myself, not you, whom I flatter. Perhaps in those days, as I climbed to the heights, I was not so wise …” When she looked up, she might have put her finger on my heart—and a hand on my cazzo. “There is a connection between us, Niccolò.” Her teeth worked at her lower lip. “And it frightens me no less than I know it does you. As if long ago our souls conspired to bring us to this place. On this night.”
I would not have described this connection in such terms, yet in truth I felt it no less. I looked into the ocean of her eyes, unable to say if Damiata was Dante’s Beatrice, who would lead me to the Higher Spheres, or if she was a Circe, who had already bewitched me body and soul.
CHAPTER 2
It is always the case that where little is known, more is suspected.
By the time the boy came to the faun stone, stars had appeared in half the sky—and a quarter-moon had begun to peek through the clouds that remained. “He must be their scout,” I said as we crossed the field to meet him, leading the mule along behind us.
He was even younger than the local boy I had employed to spy on Leonardo’s house; I did not reckon him more than ten or so years old, fair-haired, but with the same strangely grave and dour face found on so many of the Romagnole children, as if they had never been taught happiness. Those children’s faces were but one reason I believed so profoundly in Valentino’s vision, a Romagna where all citizens might enjoy the peace and justice they had long been denied. Presently, however, war had made this countryside a yet harsher place.
The boy wore the uniform of the contado: the hemp shirt and horsehair blanket, the wooden shoes. We had only said our buonasera when his high-pitched question rang in the darkness. “You want Gevol int la caraffa?”
“With Zeja Caterina,” I said.
“Sì. She is there.”
“Where is she?”
His hand shot out and he pointed to the north, straight down that endless, mulberry-lined road. “Pianura.”
Damiata and I both mounted the mule, as I did not want to give these people an easy opportunity to separate us. I had little cause to regret my caution: the boy quickly snatched the halter and started off at a courier’s run, a pace I would have had difficulty following in my own clumsy clogs. By the time he had led us down the crossroad a good two miles, the clouds had almost vanished and the waxing moon was joined by the great band of stars across the center of the sky, as though a celestial road mirrored our route.
Quicker than a flea can jump, the boy turned us onto a narrow path we had not seen until we were on it. At times the barren branches nearly made a pergola over our heads. There was a perfume to that night I will never forget, the freshness of the snow wedded to the scent of Damiata: oranges, the merest tincture of roses, and a sharp, lily fragrance that still comes to me at times when I am not even thinking of her.
We entered nothing more than a footpath beside an irrigation ditch. The boy had to coax our mule onto it—or into it, as the case might be, because the mulberry branches were a dense thicket on either side, reaching out like fingers. When the mule had been set in the proper direction, the boy went around behind, presumably to push it by the rump. Instead I heard him say, “You go. Zeja Caterina.” With this he slapped the mule’s flank and by the time I turned to look for him, he had vanished into the grid of silver fields.
We had gone only several hundred paces when Damiata whispered, “Do you hear that, Niccolò? That little chiming. Like coins in a witch’s charm bag.”
“Someone is shadowing us.”
The chimes became a steady ching-ching-ching for a short time, then faded, leaving only the sound of the wind rattling the mulberry branches.
We might have gone another quarter mile when we heard a growl of sorts, somewhat like an old man clearing his throat. The hair on my neck rose.
The mastiff was as big as a boar. It had appeared so suddenly, its dark form distinct against the snowy path, that it might have been conjured by a strega. As it padded toward us, I could see well enough the pale teeth and a head little smaller than a sower’s basket. And then the man crouched behind it.
The mastiff stopped, trembling in anticipation of its attack, the keeper shortening its leash like a crossbowman drawing his string.
The man’s words seemed to drift toward us, each a separate, huffing exhalation. “You. Gevol int la carafa?”
We both answered at once. “Sì, sì.”
The mastiff keeper allowed his lethal pet a snarling lunge before he put his entire weight against the leash and wrestled back the great oxen-like head. “Then this way you come.”
Taking the halter in the manner of our previous guide, the hooded mastiff keeper led us on a journey more wayward than Odysseus’s route from Troy to Ithaca: crossing field after field, sometimes going in one direction only to turn and go back the way we came. I took pains to keep my bearings by the stars, but otherwise found no recognizable landmarks.
I don’t know how long we had been on this voyage when Damiata turned to me with the suppleness of an acrobat, throwing her arm around my neck and pressing her forehead and nose against mine. Her eyes glittered and her scent swept every thought from my brain.
“Niccolò,” she whispered urgently, “if anything happens tonight you must leave me behind and go home. Go back to your baby daughter and learn to love your little wife. She is still just a girl. Love her and she will grow up for you.” Her lips were so close to mine that I could literally feel the warmth of her words. “But you should know this as well. I would not have offered myself to you, even in my grief, if I had not also desired it. If we survive this night—”
An owl flew over us, wailing like a spirit. As if he were following its flight, our guide yanked hard on our mule’s halter and we crashed over an irrigation ditch, breaking the ice and splashing cold water onto our feet. I clasped my hands beneath Damiata’s heart, to keep her from being thrown.
In short time I observed orange sparks at the edge of a large field, then the outline of a watchman’s hut. This rude dwelling was larger than most of its sort—a family could have crowded into it—but no less a rag-and-bone-man’s shop of stones, reeds, and scavenged planks, the roof a trash pile of shattered tiles. The mastiff keeper gestured for us to dismount beside it.
Damiata said with little humor at all, “So this is Ravenna,” recalling the familiar saying. And I could only wonder if the truth we found here would, in fact, be the death of us.
The door was a flimsy screen of woven branches. Our guide gestured us inside, although he and his dog did not follow. A fire of grapevine and dry brush burned down to coals directly on the dirt floor. Behind it, illuminated like the enthroned Virgin in a sacred play, sat a woman whose chair was entirely concealed by her huge skirts and layers of shirts. Her features were strong, mannish, but she had plucked her eyebrows into thin curves, like a banker’s wife; a green kerchief covered her head. She appeared to be twenty-five, but perhaps she was only seventeen. On the pianura, a woman becomes a vecchia at Damiata’s age.
With a sudden, feral movement she looked up at us. Damiata made a little gasp and I could feel the fear down to my numb toes. Her pale eyes had a quicksilver sheen, like a wolf’s. Peasants call this peculiar coloration occhi burberi—fierce eyes.
She spread her hands over her lap as if brushing crumbs from her mountain of skirts, displaying rings on every finger and the cheap bracelets that sheathed her wrists. “I am Caterina. What do you want to find?” Her Tuscan was surprisingly good.
“A murderer,” Damiata answered, far more quickly than I could. “A man who has murdered my dearest friend. And two other innocent women.”
The witch’s fierce eyes narrowed, a cat peering into torchlight. “You want to ask Angelo bianc?”
“Yes,” Damiata said. She glanced at me,
uncertain. But we could no longer turn back.
The makeshift door creaked. Another young woman entered. Taller, darker, and more slender than Damiata, she wore only half as many peasant skirts, rings, and bracelets as Zeja Caterina. Her head wobbled a bit and her eyes were unfixed, as if she had used opium. Or as if she had returned from a goat ride.
This strega was followed by a man in a wool tunic, at once identified by his unnaturally white, leather nose; as I had suspected, the men we had seen at that abandoned farmhouse were magi. More to my surprise, behind him trailed two children, a boy and a girl, neither older than eight or ten, both wearing hemp shirts and sorrowful little expressions; as if they were choirboys in the Corpus Christi procession, each carried a lighted wax candle. They made their way behind the witch’s throne, where a little tent had been constructed of two horsehair capes thrown over a frame of boughs. The children scurried inside like mice returning to their nest.
Leather-nose moved the enthroned zeja and her chair just enough to reveal another prop: upon a small table rested a clear glass flask sufficient to hold the contents of a wine bottle, although it had been filled only with water.
Zeja Caterina again made that whisking motion with her hands, as if brushing something from her lap. But now a book rested atop her skirts, already open; she was pressing the leaves flat. I was certain I had missed the introduction of this item while I observed the children; the book had probably been concealed in the folds of her ample skirts. Nevertheless, had I been more credulous, I would have regarded its materialization as magical.
As the zeja turned the pages I could see that it was not a printed book; the text had been copied in a single column with wide margins, the stiff parchment nearly as soiled as the leather binding. It appeared to be a schoolboy’s text, probably a geometry. I believed I glimpsed squares and circles drawn in the margins, although the lines were faint.
“There are many great spells in this book,” the sorceress said as she continued to turn the leaves, her companion strega and the leather-nose wizard looking on as if she had produced a relic of the True Cross. At last Zeja Caterina appeared to obtain a suitable incantation. She peered into the tent and addressed the children inside, her Romagnolo so rapid and high-pitched that I could no more discern her words than I could understand a sparrow addressing her chicks.
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