This instruction was followed by a silence, except for the crackling coals and the creaking of the flimsy hut, as it shuddered in the wind.
The children began to speak in chirping Romagnolo, their cadence herky-jerky but their words recognizable. “Angelo bianc, per vostr santite e mia purite.” Here I divined the importance of these little sparrows: Holy Lucifer could only be summoned by the purite—virginity—of a child.
I never saw the zeja extend a sly hand over the flask on the table before her, but she must have done so, dropping some sort of agent into it, because the water billowed, taking on a reddish hue dotted with sparkles, some bright as fireflies.
“The clouds have cleared,” the zeja said. “The king has come.” A pen had materialized in her hand and she leaned forward and dipped it into a small clay inkwell; neither had I seen this previously, although the little vessel now sat in plain view on the table. “Who asks him?”
“Damiata.” She fearlessly raised her chin.
“Then you writes it,” the zeja said, turning the book sideways in her lap.
Damiata navigated around the fire, her hems stirring embers from the blazing coals. On the opposite side she took the pen and bent over. Damiata’s cape, belled by her own layers of skirts, blocked my view of the book and I could no longer see her face. I studied her back intently, but she offered no revealing shudder, no hint at all as to what she saw from her new vantage. Hence I could not say if the question Damiata asked, in a trembling voice, was a performance or a fear born of some childhood superstition: “Will this put my soul at risk?”
The witch’s wolfish eyes devoured Damiata. “Many great lordships has signed it.”
You can imagine how desperately I wanted to know the names of these “great lordships.” If one of them was Oliverotto da Fermo or Vitellozzo Vitelli—or even Paolo Orsini—his signature might connect him directly to the murder of the pope’s son. But I also knew that Damiata might well be dead in an instant if I so much as coughed.
Damiata began to turn the pages herself, the parchment whispering like dry oak leaves. With each movement of her arm, her shoulders rocked very slightly. Hence it was quite noticeable to me when this motion stopped. Her shoulders rose with a quick heave.
Damiata’s trembling voice was certainly not a performance. “Did you see these men sign it?”
The witch’s nostrils twitched. Behind her the children tittered. Her fierce eyes still fastened to Damiata’s face, the zeja nodded just a bit. If she said anything, I did not hear it.
Behind me, however, I heard our guide’s voice, coming from outside. “Licorn.” This was certainly licorno. Unicorn. I assumed it was a password.
The mastiff keeper flew past me as if blown in by a whirlwind.
Damiata turned just as quickly, her face white. “Get the book!” she shouted at me. “They are all in—”
The mastiff keeper seized her braid and put his knife to her bared throat. Yet before I could leap across the fire a cannonball might have struck the back of my neck, occasioning a brilliant light in my head, followed by a blackness that threatened to swallow me.
I was blind only a moment but sufficiently long that when I could see, I was on the floor and Damiata’s attacker was stepping over me on his way through the open doorway.
“Follow him!” Damiata screamed. Leather-nose restrained her now, grasping her arm as well as her braid. “He has the book!”
I stumbled outside. The field of snow before me was illuminated like mother-of-pearl and I could see the fugitive and his dog slipping through a line of low brush at the perimeter.
Behind me, a little chime.
I turned and glimpsed only what appeared to be the flaring nostrils of a horse and a goat’s white beard.
This time the cannonball struck my temple, the light was an exploding sun, the blackness entire.
CHAPTER 3
Men are motivated much more by the hope of gain than by the fear of loss.
I awakened in Hell, my punishment tailored to all the defects of my life.
I, who could never remain still or in one place—as my family and friends have endlessly complained—was frozen for eternity into the position a child assumes in the womb, legs and arms drawn up as if to guard against the world and all its ills.
I, who always gathered the gang and led the conversation, was both mute and entirely alone in a darkness without end.
Yet I could see, in a fashion, because I, who never stayed with one idea for more than a moment, had been condemned to behold thousands of visions in a single instant: a procession of everyone I have ever known and loved and many other creatures and demons that have never existed; great battles such as Carrhae and Pharsalus teemed beneath me like anthills and I could make no sense of them; the entire senate of ancient Rome went past and I did not have time to ask one of them a single question. I visited places I had been—Lyons, Siena, Pistoia, Forli—and flew like a bird over places no man has ever been, cities like chests full of gleaming jewels, walls made of ivory blocks studded with pearls, flying endlessly through wonders my frozen body could never touch and my humbled brain could not hope to grasp.
There is sleep in Hell, however, or at least there was in this one. When I awakened again, the light was no less brilliant or painful than it had been in the last instant of my life, as if vinegar had been thrown into my eyes. I could move, although I wished I could not. My hands clawed entirely without volition; my knees heaved almost to my nose in excruciating spasms.
And I could speak. My father reappeared and we babbled for hours like washerwomen: the law, the Medici, Savonarola, Biondo’s histories, Aristotle’s Ethics, Cicero’s De officiis. My sisters made me sing the lauds Mama was always writing: O castita bel fiore, che ti sostiene amore … Yet this laud went on and on, not dozens of verses but hundreds. I had a furious argument with Albertaccio Corsini, paterfamilias of Marietta’s entire clan, about sending my little Primerana to her wet nurse at Terranuova. Marietta was there, weeping, yet when I held out my arms to her, she turned away, this being what in truth occurred when I still lived.
When at last I began to comprehend, however vaguely, the true nature of my situation, I imagined I was Archimedes in his bathtub and had just divined the secret of the cosmos. The light was one of several shafts the glaring sun had shot through the gaping chinks in the walls of a watchman’s hut, although this shelter was much smaller than the one I had previously visited. The bare floor was as cold as a grave and I was as naked as a newborn. And the place smelled as though a thousand country healers had filled it to the roof with all their disagreeable ointments and poultices.
I recognized that stink.
I bolted up, my head throbbing as if I had been kicked by a horse. A malodorous gum stuck to me everywhere—legs, nose, chest, back, balls. I wiped the stuff from my eyes and looked about. I had been covered with a horsehair blanket, my clothes and wooden shoes left in a pile at my feet. Whoever had moved me there had not wanted me to die. But he had also left on the floor beside me a small clay pot. It was almost empty, but there was a residue of the substance that had been smeared all over me: an unguent of hellebore, henbane, mandrake, and belladonna.
During the preceding night, I had been taken on the goat ride.
Despite the spasms in my legs and my seizing hands, I was able to put on my clothes and stumble outside. The sun on the field of snow nearly blinded me, but after a time I distinguished the footsteps of the lone man who had carried me there; his feet had been large but unmistakably human. Yet the single set of tracks that proceeded away from the hut were the Devil’s. That is, a man walking on stilts carved to resemble cloven hooves—the same man who the night before had also worn a goatlike Devil’s mask.
I numbly began to follow those tracks, hopeful that they might lead me to Damiata, certain that they would take me to a road. As I stumbled along, the truth began to trickle into my brain. The unguent that had frozen my limbs for the duration of the night had also been applied to
those poor women who had not awakened the next morning. Instead they had been rendered into a paralytic state—a “first death” of sorts—so that they could be precisely dismembered. Yet for a reason I could not fathom, I had only received this first death and not the second.
Almost certainly Damiata had been immobilized in the same manner. And I feared in my cold bones that the Devil would not spare us both.
I soon came to one of the frozen irrigation ditches that often divide the fields. It seemed the man in the Devil’s mask had met an accomplice—or someone—because the ice was broken in both directions. I ventured some distance one way, only to find no sign he had walked—either on stilts or on foot—past a row of cypress trees. Returning the other way, I similarly discovered that the broken ice ended at a thicket of naked mulberry trees. It was as though both these creatures had either leapt from tree to tree, or simply flown away.
My senses still confused, I tramped through the fields until the afternoon sun began to turn snow to slush, calling Damiata’s name until my throat was raw. I did not even succeed in rousing the natives of this boundless plain. Again and again I saw gray columns of smoke against the gesso-white pianura, yet whenever I reached the farmhouses, the fires appeared to have been put out and there was never an answer to my shouts and knocks.
At last I determined that I could best aid Damiata by returning to Imola and organizing a search. When I found the Via Emilia, the sky was already turning a charcoal hue, the scent of snow again in the wind. Yet strangely, my feet were lifted by a stern if not cheerful resolve. This was inspired by Damiata’s last words to me: They are all in—certainly she had meant that several of the condottieri were the “great lordships” who had signed Zeja Caterina’s “book of spells.” If so, that book was the sacred text, let us say, that would connect the condottieri to the murdered women—and indict them in the murder of the pope’s son.
And as I crunched over the gray clods of frozen slush, it occurred to me that somehow the Devil’s apprentice responsible for my present distress had followed Damiata and me to the Gevol int la carafa, despite every effort of the gioca to elude him. Yet if he had in fact obtained the book he was seeking, he would have had no further use for me—and my goat ride would have ended differently. I could only have been spared because that book was still out on the pianura, in the hands of some desperately frightened strega or mago—and I was still regarded as someone who might yet locate it.
For the same reason, I could assume Damiata had also been spared. In truth, after knocking me senseless, had this Devil’s apprentice sensibly pursued the mastiff keeper who fled with our sacred text, Damiata might have had considerable opportunity to escape him entirely.
I arrived in Imola after dark, to find the city transformed since the previous afternoon. Wagons and pack mules flooded the streets, laden with every sort of goods, from folding chairs and weavers’ looms to sacks of seed and baskets of chestnuts. The entire population seemed to have joined this procession: frantically bustling merchants and their bravi, sullen candle-shop girls, bewildered street vendors, greedy-eyed priests (who find in every tumult the hope of profit), and frightened workers in their horsehair capes.
Such was the instability of my mind that I hardly gave this activity a thought. Instead I went at once to the Palazzo Machirelli and ran up the stairs to Damiata’s rooms, insane with the hope that I would find her waiting just as desperately for me. I must have pounded on her door like a pazzarone, because the little watchman, Sebastino, smelling like the bottom of a wine barrel, had to come up and tell me she had not returned.
I trudged across the courtyard and climbed the stairs. Against my door I observed what might have been a bundled cloak. And a pale leg sticking out.
With equal measures of horror and hope, I leapt up the final steps.
The penitent at my door lifted his buried head.
“Lucca!” I shouted. “What in the name of God and Mankind are you doing here?” This was my youthful spy, whose commission I had extended in my absence, largely because he needed the little enough that I paid him.
“Msir Niccolò, they bring more things.”
The fears I believed I had put behind me on the Via Emilia, not to mention all the poisons that had leached into my body, seemed to rush straight to my heart.
I knew precisely the sort of “things” that had been brought to Leonardo’s anatomy workshop.
CHAPTER 4
Those who are besieged should not trust anything they see the enemy do continually, but instead should always believe that beneath such repeated actions lies a deception.
I pounded on the pedestrian door set into the immense oaken gate of Leonardo’s palazzo, barking “I am expected!” when the viewing grate slid aside. The door was opened for me without challenge—the aforesaid greeting often obtains this result—and I found myself in the well of a large inner courtyard lit only by a peculiar light, this issuing from a doorway at the far end.
“Where is the maestro?” I addressed my question to a poorly shaved but well-dressed servant; I could only envy his green damask tunic. Nevertheless the unfortunate man had but one eye and one hand, probably a punishment for theft and some other transgression; Leonardo’s household was evidently a refuge for criminals, defectives, and frauds. Before he could reply I heard a peculiar noise, a distant “Aaahhh.”
I tasted something foul, a fetor that clung to the back of my tongue.
“Aahhhh.” Now the sigh was louder and higher. A boy. Or a woman.
“Agh! Agh! Agh!” These were the sort of cries I would hear years later, when the Medici lodged me in our Stinche prison.
I ran through the illuminated doorway into a dank hallway that smelled like a church in July, when the bodies buried beneath the floor begin to stew. With each frantic step I perceived the light waxing and no sooner had I turned a corner than it erupted from the tile floor.
I stood there blinking, until I was able to see the wooden steps beneath me.
A cellar. The smell more resembled a funeral in August.
“Agghh! Agghh! Aggghhh!” This was neither a woman nor a beast but some unholy choir assembled of both.
I clattered down the stairs, all too certain I had arrived at the very moment Damiata was being cut into pieces.
My descent ended in a pit no painter of the Last Judgment has ever portrayed. A zodiac of illuminated globes appeared to hang in the air above Satan’s own banquet, the main repast the entire bloated corpse of a woman, set upon a trestle table and opened from throat to groin like a gutted sow. I shouted, “What the cazzo diavolo are you doing to her!”
“She was discovered this morning at a farm near Cantalupo, absent a single mark of violence upon her.” Through the glare of the floating globes, I observed the author of this pedantry: Leonardo da Vinci stood near the back wall of his cellar, attired in a butcher’s smock, upon which he wiped his hands.
Reluctantly, I renewed my examination of the corpse. A fleshy woman, entirely naked, her pale arms at her sides and legs spread a bit, she had been laid out on linen so stained and soiled an Englishman would refuse to dine off it. Her dark hair framed a somewhat livid face, yet even in the brilliant light her eye sockets were empty black pits. Evidently the violence had been done to her in this place, by means of the saws and polished blades that lay beside her. But no anatomist’s instruments could have metamorphosed my Damiata into this. For the first time since she had vanished, I was relieved to know I would have to look for her elsewhere.
“We have proved the cause of her mortality,” Leonardo said. He stood before a lead tub, which was shaped like a coffin and raised on a stone platform, so that the rim reached to the height of his waist. At each end of the metal tank a miniature sun rose atop a lampstand; the light source was a candle somehow enclosed in the center of a large glass globe, despite the latter appearing to be filled with water. Evidently this medium rendered the brilliant light unnaturally steady.
“As you might expect in this capit
al of all stupidities,” Leonardo continued in his theater-organ tenor, “the wheat-field sages attribute her death to some demonic agent. With presumably every means of destruction at his avail, Satan instructed one of his minions to insert a large piece of dried apple at the entrance to this woman’s breathing tube. Giacomo. Show him.”
I turned to find Leonardo’s Adonis, Messer Giacomo, presiding over his own table, upon which had been distributed various organs that appeared to have been removed from the corpse. To my untutored eyes, this arrangement resembled a zampogna—a peasant bagpipes—although this instrument had but one pipe, as thick as a barge rope but only half as long as my arm, crowned with a sort of crest. At the other end of the pipe was a pair of glistening purple bladders that put one in mind of fresh ox livers. Messer Giacomo clutched the crest atop the pipe with one hand, while with the other he pressed down on one of these bladders.
“Ah! Ah! Agghh!”
Hence I came to the understanding that the bladders were lungs, the pipe a windpipe; Giacomo had been squeezing his inelegant notes from that poor woman’s dead flesh. Of the countless frauds and fables wherein a corpse speaks, no storyteller had ever imagined a truth such as this.
Finished with his playing, Leonardo’s maestro of lungs plucked something from his table and displayed it delicately between his thumb and finger. The brown chunk was hardly bigger than a Spanish olive.
“I think it reasonable to propose that the woman herself swallowed it,” Leonardo said. “As we have demonstrated, her lungs and larynx, indeed the whole apparatus of her breathing, remain entirely without damage. Had she spit out that single bite or masticated it more thoroughly, she might have lived another forty years.”
The Malice of Fortune Page 18