“I killed someone,” he said.
“What?” The word burst out of Nicci as if it had been punched out of him. “Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to find out,” he said. “I panicked. I was fifteen years old and it was dark…and I was so scared.”
Nicci rubbed his hand across his lips. “What happened? An accident?”
Teo shook his head. “I was walking home one night and someone…someone attacked me. I don’t know his name. I never got the opportunity to find out. He had very cold, clear eyes. I remember that much. He had his hands around my throat and I remember seeing everything with strange and awful clarity, as though my eyes were desperate to snatch every last impression before I died.”
He paused, the ribbon so tight around his finger that the tip was a deep, ugly purple. “The moon came out,” he said. “From behind a cloud, and I saw that his eyes were grey. The coldest grey I’ve ever seen. Like stone. He wore a brooch – a serpent wrapped around a sword, I think. He was someone, Nicci. Someone with a name and a family and a device. And I killed him.”
“In self-defence,” said Nicci. “He was trying to kill you.”
“You don’t understand,” said Teo, too loudly, and then softened. Sighed. “I’m sorry…”
“No, it’s all right.” Nicci pulled the broken chair closer, so that their knees almost touched.
“When my father legitimised me,” Teo said. “He took me out boar hunting. And I hated it. You have no idea how much I hated it. So brutal. The poor creature just wanted to live. That was all. It wanted to be left alone, to raise babies and eat acorns. But it had to die. Because my father wanted to make a man of me. I was twelve – thirteen. I don’t really remember exactly, but I remember the screaming. Even now it sticks in my head. There’s something so human about the way pigs scream. When they came to slaughter the hogs at the monastery I used to make plugs out of wax and stuff them in my ears. That sound…”
He shivered. The ribbon hung loose – its curls relaxing – between his thighs. When Nicci touched his hand their fingers twined.
“When the boar was dead,” said Teo. “My father dipped his fingers in the blood and dragged them across my face. A hunter’s ritual. The blood ran into my mouth and the taste was…hot. Animal. Obscene. So very, very cruel. It sickened me instantly and the next thing I knew everything was dark. I fainted away, and my father was furious. Absolutely disgusted with me. He sent me for lessons after that. How to handle a sword and a bow. ‘I need sons,’ he said. ‘Not daughters. You’re too soft and you’ll never survive if you carry on that way.” Teo took a long breath. “And then it happened. That night.”
“You did nothing wrong in defending yourself,” said Nicci.
“Didn’t I? I had my dagger. I couldn’t reach my sword. Had the knife in my hand, but I couldn’t stab, because his knee was on my arm, holding it down. And I could feel my fingers going slack around the handle. But then…then he moved. His weight was on my knee and I knew that was probably my last chance. I grabbed the knife and swung it and it cut him here.” Teo gestured to his eyelid. “Across the eye. Pure luck, really. If it had glanced off his back I’d be dead, because there was barely any force behind the blow at all, but I was lucky enough to get him somewhere where it hurt. And that was enough. A second to catch my breath, and then I…” He paused. “I didn’t faint that time.”
“Teo…”
“I could have shown him mercy,” said Teo, with a strange steadiness that made Nicci think he’d gone over this a million times before, perhaps in the confessional, perhaps face down in front of an altar. Apologising. Absurd enough that he had to apologise for his body seeking the normal pleasures of youthful flesh, but doubly disgraceful that he had to apologise even for trying to keep himself alive. “I could have wounded him. And left him there. Hoped someone would find him. But I didn’t. I didn’t do that at all.” Teo swallowed hard. “I lost count of how many times I stabbed him.”
“Teo…stop. I would have done exactly the same in your position.”
Teo withdrew his hand and wiped his eyes. “Yes, and if you had you’d have hung for it,” he said. “The next day I confessed to a priest. He told me to confess to my father, so I rode to Prato. And there…there I was sick. It had rained that night, you see. The night when I killed…” He shook his head. “Anyway, I got caught in it, and I remember telling my father what I’d done, but everything after that is hazy, because I came down with such a fever. The kind that makes everything feel like burning and freezing all at once, like Dante’s devil in a lake of ice. I saw it, Nicci. I felt it. I knew it what it would feel like to roast for eternity, and that I was damned.”
This time Nicci didn’t interrupt. He couldn’t think of anything he could say that would ever change Teo’s mind about this.
“I woke up alone,” Teo said. “I’m not sure how many days had passed, but when I got out of bed my legs almost went out from under me. I was so tired. I just remember wandering through that house – the new house, you know? It was even newer then – and everything smelled like fresh paint. Everything was so bright. The colours. When I saw my father with him…it was like I’d walked into a painting. I thought I had for a moment, because my head was still all scrambled up from the fever, but there he was. Standing in front of me.”
“Who?”
“Cosimo de Medici,” said Teo. “The duke. I knew his likeness from the paintings, and glimpses over the heads of crowds. It was like a dream. And my father said something about how I was the youngest, the one he’d been talking about, and that his Grace would have to excuse me, because I hadn’t been well. I barely remember the conversation we had, but it was nothing of substance. What was important was the implication that settled on me later.”
“And what was that?” asked Nicci.
“That I would never know the name of the man I killed. I would never face justice, because the Medici himself was standing there in my father’s house. That’s how it works. Power. Influence.” Teo wiped his eyes and shook his head. “I never want to become that person. The one who buys off scandal and murder with influence and friends in the right places. That’s why I went into the monastery, Nicci. Because I’m a coward. Because I should have confessed to the duke right there, and suffered the consequences. But I couldn’t do it. The longer it went on, the more I knew I could never confess, and all that I could do was pray, and hope that somehow God saw fit to forgive me for what I’d done.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. I always knew I’d pay, one way or the other. That one day someone would find out what I did to that stranger and come looking for me.” Teo sniffed hard. “I just…I didn’t expect an innocent man to die because of it.”
Nicci put both arms around Teo and held him as he cried, rocking him gently like the child he still was, in so many ways.
And yet not. Not so innocent as Nicci had first believed. It had been easy to see Teo as a saint, back when he tended pigs and wore the habit of a Benedictine, but take away the robes and Nicci could see the young nobleman there. The one who wore a sword and knew how to use it. The one whose father sat on the consigliere and who could buy him out of trouble. At once he had an ugly sense of all the ways in which the world could stain Teo. And hurt him all over again.
“You can’t blame yourself,” Nicci said. “You can’t. You don’t even know that whoever killed Brother Armando was looking for you. For all we know it could be completely unrelated.”
Teo swallowed hard and shook his head. “Everything is such a mess.”
“I know,” Nicci said, passing his hand over Teo’s head. The bare patch on his scalp felt like peach skin, as if the hair itself understood that Teo had never really belonged in a monastery. “I know, but you’re exhausted.” Nicci sat back and rubbed the dark patches beneath Teo’s eyes with his thumbs, and the boy submitted to the caress with an instinctive softness that ma
de Nicci afraid for the night ahead of them. “Look at you. You need to sleep. Rest. I don’t know how you’re not stark raving mad already, with those bells interrupting your sleep every five minutes.”
“I might be mad,” said Teo, with a small, nervous laugh. “Who knows?”
“Food,” said Nicci. “Food. Sleep. Rest. These are simple things. Things that you need. You’ll feel a lot saner once you’ve had them. Trust me.”
10
He opened his eyes in complete darkness, snapping awake to the toll of a distant bell that he could no longer hear.
The only sound was the soft sigh of wind through the olive trees, and the steady breaths of the sleeping man beside him. The straw mattress was softer than the one he was accustomed to, a near voluptuous pleasure, had it not been for the cilice scratching against his skin, reminding him of who he was.
A fox barked, and Nicci stirred. Teo felt Nicci’s breath against his cheek in the dark, hot as a brand. In the dark he could just make out the shape of Nicci’s beard, black against the white of his cheek. He lay on his stomach, one arm curled beneath him, his face turned towards Teo, who lay stiffly on his back.
Nicci had put on a shirt for modesty, even though the night was like a furnace room. Without looking, Teo knew that the thin, sweaty shirt was already crumpled around Nicci’s waist, and that beneath it he was bare, face down, and burning. He’d been in the same position himself, a thousand times over, waking up mid thrust as that absurd, insatiable organ impelled his hips against something, a thin mattress, a wooden bed, or – most shameful of all – a hand that had somehow found his cock in his sleep.
He was three quarters asleep, sunk too deep in the sensual heaviness of tired flesh. Every beat of his heart was delicious, tugging knowingly at the weight that lay swollen and untouched against his stomach. “Please,” he said, and couldn’t be sure if he’d spoken aloud, or even what he was asking for.
The fox barked again, a high, weird ghostly sound. Nicci shifted once more in his sleep and then his thigh – the full length of his bare, warm thigh – came to rest against Teo’s.
Please. Please.
Teo’s head fell to one side, facing Nicci. Their breaths – Nicci’s slow and steady, Teo’s stuttering and frantic - mingled. The side of Teo’s neck still burned from the touch of Nicci’s hand, a thoughtless caress offered in a moment of anxiety. When was the last time anyone had ever touched him like that? His drowsing, uncontrolled mind plunged headlong into wickedness, whispering about what it might be like if there were nothing between them. No shirt, no cilice, just two shameless expanses of skin rubbing against each other.
“Please,” he said, and this time he was sure he’d spoken aloud. It came out in a thin, keening whine. His hands burned to touch, but his limbs were too heavy to lift them, and so he sunk again, layers of consciousness peeling away to leave nothing but the sweet solid throb that rose from the place between his legs.
He woke alone in daylight. The hair shirt had resisted all attempts to stay tied at the waist and it had ridden up, baring him from the belly down. His cock stood up hard and fat and red, absurd and impudent. Teo sat up and pulled the cilice down over it, wrapping the rough fabric around his shaft in attempt to mortify the wayward flesh, but the silken monster only bristled with further interest at the texture.
He needed the discipline. He needed the chapel floor. He needed someone to tell him that God’s love was worth his chastity, because this was beyond sin. This was abomination.
Teo pulled on his borrowed hose and shirt, desperate to cover his sinful flesh. Of all the tests that God could have thrown his way, why this? Why this lust? Why not a woman? Or maybe this was just God’s way of laughing at him, because he was already damned.
Somewhere he heard splashing. He stepped out into the bright sun and peered around the corner of the hut, and what he saw there almost took him out at the knees.
Nicci was washing himself.
He was stark naked in the morning sun, happily scrubbing his armpits from a bucket perched on a low, cracked stone bench. He stood side on and everything was on show. Everything. Lean, black furred legs, flat belly, wiry arms. Water ran down over his body, slicking down the dark hairs on his torso and streaming off the end of his cock, limp but plump in a thicket of wet black curls.
“Oh,” said Teo. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Nicci shook out his damp hair and laughed at his blushes. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m nearly done.” He took his shirt from a nearby tree branch and pulled it on, covering himself only a little. The shirt clung where it touched and revealed the wet patches of dark hair at his heart and his crotch. “There’s a bucket for you at the end of the bench. Nice and clean. And cool, too.”
“Thank you,” said Teo, his mouth dry. He was hard again, and as Nicci approached he felt sure that Nicci could see him tenting the front of his untucked shirt. Worse, some demonic part of him wanted Nicci to see.
“No problem,” said Nicci, and gave him a companionable pat on the shoulder as he passed by and went into the hut to finish getting dressed.
His knees trembling, Teo approached the bench and set the other bucket upon it. He hesitated there for a moment, shocked and half-sickened, the other half furious that this – of all things – was the next temptation he had to face.
“All right,” he said, and stripped with a kind of defiance. If this was what God saw fit to visit upon him, then God deserved to look at it too.
He’d stood naked in front of others before, but always in a dark abbey bathhouse. Now, with the sun on his skin, his shamelessness seemed only to inflame his lust further. He was aching, impossibly hard, his knees weak and his hand irresistibly drawn to the place he knew he should never, ever touch.
If Nicci came back and caught him…
Teo stifled a cry as he wrapped his fingers around himself. Three strokes was all it took. His seed flew from him like a devil being cast out, and his knees almost went out from under him.
He washed himself off and got dressed, feeling dazed and sick and ashamed of himself. Deep down he’d always known there was a problem, another reason why it would have been better in everyone’s interest if he just devoted himself to God and God alone. But now. Of all the times for it to come back to haunt him. And of all the people he could have desired, he had to crave the one whose loss would hurt him more than any other.
“I expect you’re worried about your father,” Nicci said, when Teo emerged with a face so full of care that his frown had settled into a headache above his eyebrows.
“I’m worried about a lot of things,” said Teo. “I feel like my whole life has been shaken up and turned upside down. Everything I thought I knew is wrong.” His head throbbed, his headache threatening to turn into one of those strange, sickening ones where he saw lights and smelled strange perfumes. He leaned heavily against the bole of an olive tree and looked out over the treetops towards the nearby town. The breeze carried the sound of abbey bells – Prime or Terce? His internal clock was already broken, as if it had never really been part of him in the first place.
“I was a disaster of a monk,” he said, more to himself than anyone else.
“No, you weren’t,” said Nicci, coming to join him in enjoying the view. “You were happy there.”
“No. I wasn’t. I was only guilty and wishing I could be better. And now I know that I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I can’t, Nicci. I can’t.” Teo sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I convinced myself of so many things. That the abbot of San Bendetto could never be bought. That he wouldn’t preserve the lie about Brother Sandro’s stigmata. That the abbey was ever a place of sanctuary for me, or for any of us. You once told me that you never wanted to be the thief who stole what peace I’d managed to find in the world, but the truth is that there was never any peace for you to steal.”
Nicci swayed closer, his shoulder bumping against Teo’s. “I don’t know what to say,” he said, his
hand open between Teo’s shoulder blades. “Everything you’ve been through…is there anything I can say to make things even slightly better?”
Only that you love me. And that you’ll never leave me. “I don’t know.”
Nicci’s hand slipped lower, curling around the side of Teo’s waist and pulling him in. Teo fell against him in a kind of swoon, half adoring, half appalled. Friends. This is what friends did. They embraced. They kissed. They got drunk and told one another they loved one another.
“All I can say is that I’m here,” said Nicci, and pressed a kiss to the damp edge of Teo’s hair. Fond. Brotherly.
“I know. And I’m so glad of you.”
There was a cough behind them. Teo almost jumped out of his skin.
It was Nicci’s mother. She had to be. They had the same aquiline nose and bright, dark eyes. The still coloured parts of her white streaked hair were the same raven black as Nicci’s.
“It’s all right,” Nicci said, his hand on Teo’s upper arm. “Teo, I would like you to meet Susanna Tredici di Volpaia – my mother. Mamma, this is Teo, whose name you don’t need to know, since he’s not actually here.”
“As you say,” she said, smiling slightly as if at a private joke. She greeted Teo with a polite kiss on both cheeks. She smelled of earth and sweat, as though she’d been working in the garden. “Well,” she said, kissing Nicci. “If neither of you are here, you may as well not come and have dinner tonight.”
“Thank you,” said Nicci. “We won’t.”
“Good. At seven?”
“We won’t be there.”
She nodded and turned back to go back down the path. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said. “And pick me some wild basil for the pot. I’m making rabbit stew.”
Back at the monastery Teo had used to dream of days like this: long, uninterrupted stretches of time where he and Nicci might talk about everything and nothing for as long as they liked. But even they had been broken up by the abbey bell, clanging through his dreams, the only place where he was free to curse and complain. Now there was nothing, no steady but brutal rhythm of monastery life. All that remained was a kind of drifting, like a boat whose moorings had been cut, or like the thistle seeds that floated past on the hot afternoon breeze. He watched the gossamer wheelspokes whirl and glisten as the seeds tumbled across the deep blue sky. Beside him, Nicci lay on his back in the grass, eyes closed and one forearm thrown across them. Such idleness. So many opportunities for sin.
The Thief Of Peace Page 11