The Enchantress of Florence (16 page)

Cannon fire broke out abruptly from the sides of the triremes and from the mighty swiveling cannons mounted on the decks of the Ottoman galleys, and the red flames and bright flashes of the big guns in the fog looked like small pieces of Hell in the midst of this formless Limbo. Rifle fire blossomed all around, a flickering garden of deadly red flowers. Nobody knew who was firing at whom, or how to act for the best, and a great catastrophe was imminent. Then all of a sudden, as if both sides understood their peril at exactly the same moment, a silence fell. No gun fired, no voice called out, no foghorn sounded. Stealthy movements began everywhere in the empty white. Argalia, standing alone on the deck of the flagship, felt his destiny grip him by the shoulder, and was surprised to note that destiny’s hand was trembling with fear. He turned to look. No, it was not Fate standing behind him, but Ceva the boatswain, no longer grim and terrifying, but an unnerved, beaten dog. “The Admiral needs you,” he whispered to the boy, and led him below decks to where Andrea Doria waited, holding in his hand the great horn of the flagship of the fleet. “Today is your day, little man, my storyteller,” the Admiral said softly. “Today you will achieve greatness by deeds instead of words.”

The plan was for Argalia to be lowered into the water and set adrift in a small dinghy, which he was to row away from the flagship as fast as possible. “On every hundredth stroke of the oars,” the Admiral said, “blow hard on this horn. The enemy will mistake subtlety for arrogance, he will accept the challenge of Andrea Doria’s
cornetto,
and will turn his ships toward you, thinking to capture a great prize—which is to say, my own person!—and in the meanwhile I will have the advantage of him and will strike him fatally from a quarter from which he expects no wound.” It seemed like a bad plan to Argalia. “And I?” he asked, staring at the horn in his hand. “When the ships of the Infidel are bearing down upon my little vessel, what am I supposed to do?” Ceva the Scorpion picked him up bodily and dropped him into the dinghy. “Row,” he hissed. “Little hero. Row for your fucking life.”

“When the fog clears and the enemy is vanquished,” said the Admiral, a little vaguely, “we’ll pick you up again.” Ceva gave the dinghy a hard push. “Yeah,” he hissed. “That’s what we’ll do.”

Then there was only the whiteness of the fog and the sound of the sea. Land and sky began to feel like ancient fables. This blind floating was the universe entire. For a time he did as he had been ordered to do, a hundred strokes of the oars, then a blast on the horn, twice, three times he did it, and never heard any answering noise. The world was mute and lethal. Death would come upon him in a noiseless watery rush. The Ottoman ships would bear down on him and crush him like a bug. He stopped blowing the horn. It became plain to him that the Admiral was uninterested in his fate and had sacrificed his “little storyteller” as casually as a man spitting a mouthful of phlegm over the side of a ship. He was no more than that gob of sputum, bobbing for an instant on the waves before he drowned. He tried to tell himself stories to keep his spirits up but could only think of frightening ones, a leviathan rising from the deep to crunch a boat in its gigantic jaws, the uncoiling of deep-sea worms, the breathing of underwater dragonfire. Then after a further time all the stories faded away as well and he was left without defenses or recourse, a lonely human soul drifting vaguely into the white. This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home, his family, his friends, his city, his country, his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning, of the whole of life except a temporarily beating heart. “I am absurd,” he told himself. “A cockroach in a steaming turd has more significance than I.” Many years later, when he met Qara Köz the hidden Mughal princess and his life finally acquired the meaning which destiny had in store for it, he saw the look of abandoned despair in her eyes and understood that she, too, had had to face the profound absurdity of the human condition. For that, if for no other reason, he would have loved her. But he had other reasons too.

The fog thickened around him, around his eyes, his nose, his throat. He felt himself beginning to choke. Maybe he would die now, he thought. His will had been broken. Whatsoever Fate brought, he would accept. He lay down in his little boat and remembered Florence, saw his parents as they had been before the plague deformed them, remembered boyhood escapades in the woods with his friends Ago and il Machia, was filled with love by these memories, and, a moment later, fainted.

When he awoke, the fog had vanished, and so had the eight triremes of Admiral Andrea Doria. The great
condottiere
of Genoa had simply turned tail and fled, and the foghorn in the dinghy had been a simple diversionary measure. Argalia’s little craft bobbed helplessly right in front of the assembled Ottoman navy like a mouse cornered by half a dozen hungry cats. He stood up in the boat and waved to his conquerors and blew the Admiral’s foghorn as loudly as he could.

“I surrender,” he shouted. “Come and get me, you godless Turkish swine.”

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13
}

In the children’s prison camp at Usküb

I
n the children’s prison camp at Usküb
(said the memory palace)
there were many tongues but only one God. Each year the press gangs roamed the expanding empire to levy the devshirmé tax, the child tribute, and took the strongest, cleverest, best-looking boys into slavery, to be changed into instruments of the Sultan’s will. The principle of the Sultanate was governance by metamorphosis.
We will take your finest offspring from you and we will transform them utterly. We will make them forget you and turn them into the force that keeps you under our heel. By your own lost children will you be ruled.
In Usküb where the process of change began there were many tongues but only one uniform, the baggy-trousered garb of the Ottoman recruit. The hero’s rags were taken from him and he was washed and fed and given clean water to drink. Then Christianity was taken from him as well and he was obliged to put on Islam like a new pair of pajamas. There were Greeks and Albanians in Usküb, Bosnians and Croats and Serbs, and there were
mamlúk
boys, white slaves, from up and down the Caucasus, Georgians and Mingrelians, Circassians and Abkhazas, and there were Armenians and Syrians as well. The hero was the only Italian. Florence did not pay the child tribute, though it was the opinion of the Osmanlis that that would change with time. His captors pretended to have difficulty with his name,
al-ghazi,
the conqueror, they called him for a joke, or
al-khali,
the empty one, the vessel. But his name wasn’t important. Argalia, Arcalia, Arqalia, Al-Khaliya. Nonsense words. They didn’t matter. It was his soul that had to be placed under new management just like everyone else’s. On the parade ground in their new outfits the sullen children stood in ranks before a man in a frock, whose white hat was as tall as his white beard was long, the one rising three feet above his brow and the other falling an equal distance from his chin, giving him the appearance of possessing a head of immense length. This was a holy man, a dervish of the Bektashi order, and he had come to convert them to Islam. In their many accents the angry, frightened boys parroted the necessary Arabic sentence about the one God and his Prophet. Their metamorphosis had begun.

While he was traveling in the service of the republic il Machia never stopped thinking about the palace of memories. In July he galloped down the Ravenna road to Forlì to persuade Countess Caterina Sforza Riario to let her son Ottaviano fight alongside the Florentine forces for considerably less money than she wanted, because if she refused she would lose Florence’s protection and be at the mercy of the terrible Duke Cesare Borgia of Romagna, the son of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. The “Madonna of Forlì” was a woman so beautiful that even il Machia’s friend Biagio Buonaccorsi broke off from sodomizing Andrea di Romolo to ask Niccolò to bring home a drawing of her. But Niccolò was thinking about the nameless Frenchwoman standing like a marble figure in her boudoir at Alessandra Fiorentina’s House of Mars. “Hey, Machia,” Ago Vespucci wrote, “we need you back here fast because without you there’s nobody to organize our nights of boozing and cards, and besides that, this Chancery of yours is full of the bitchiest assholes in Italy, all trying to get us fired—so all this riding about of yours is bad for business too.” But Niccolò wasn’t thinking about intrigue or wild living, or, rather, there was just one woman’s body he was hoping to debauch, if he could just find the key that unlocked her secret self, the suppressed personality hidden beneath the memory palace.

Il Machia sometimes saw the world too analogically, reading one situation as an analogue of another, quite different one. So when Caterina refused his proposal he saw it as a bad omen. Maybe he would fail with the palace of memories as well. Soon afterward, when Cesare Borgia attacked and conquered Forlì exactly as predicted by Niccolò, Caterina stood on the ramparts and showed the Duke of Romagna her genitals and told him to go fuck himself. She ended up a prisoner of the Pope in Castel Sant’Angelo but il Machia interpreted her fate as a good sign. That Caterina Sforza Riario was a prisoner in Pope Alexander’s castle made her like a mirror of the woman kept in a darkened room at Queen Alessandra’s House of Mars. That she had exposed herself to Borgia meant that maybe the palace of memories would agree to do the same to him.

He returned to the House of Mars where the
ruffiana
Giulietta grudgingly agreed to let him have unrestricted access to the memory palace, because she, too, hoped he could wake that somnambulant lady up, so that she could start acting like a proper courtesan instead of a talking statue. And il Machia’s reading of the omens turned out to be accurate. When he was alone in the boudoir with her he led her gently by the hand and laid her down on the four-poster bed with its suitably French draperies of pale blue silk embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lys. She was a tall woman. Things would be easier if she was lying down. He lay beside her and caressed her golden hair and whispered his questions in her ear while he unbuttoned her seraglio inmate’s bodice. Her breasts were small. That was all right. Her hands were clasped at her waist, and she made no objection to the movements of his hand. And as she recited the memories that had been buried in her mind she seemed to be unburdening herself, and as the weight of the memories lessened the lightness of her spirits rose. “Tell me everything,” il Machia whispered in her ear while he kissed her newly exposed bosom, “and then you will be free.”

After the child tribute had been gathered
(the memory palace said)
it was taken to Stamboul and distributed among good Turkish families to serve them and to be taught the Turkish language and the intricacies of the Muslim faith. Then there was military training. After a time the boys were either taken as pages into the Imperial Seraglio and given the title of
Ich-Oghlán,
or else they entered the Janissary Corps as
Ajém-Oghlán.
Raw recruits. At the age of eleven the hero, the mighty warrior, the Wielder of the Enchanted Lance and the most handsome man in the world, became, God be praised, a Janissary; the greatest Janissary fighter in the history of the Corps. Ah, the feared Janissaries of the Osmanli Sultan, may their renown spread far and wide! They were not Turks, but the pillars of the Turks’ empire. No Jews were admitted, for their faith was too strong to be altered; no gypsies, because they were scum; and the Moldavians and Wallachians of Romania were never harvested. But in the time of the hero the Wallachians had to be fought, under Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, their king.

While the memory palace had been telling him about the Janissaries il Machia’s attention had wandered to her lips. She told him how the cadets were inspected naked on arrival in Stamboul and he thought only about the beauty of her mouth as it formed the French word
nus.
She spoke of their training as butchers and gardeners and he traced the outlines of her moving lips with his index finger as she said the words. She said their names were taken from them and their family names as well and they became Abdullahs or Abdulmomins or other names beginning with
abd,
which meant slave and indicated their status in the world. But instead of worrying about the deformation of these young lives he only thought that he didn’t like the shapes her lips made when she spoke those Oriental syllables. He kissed the corners of her mouth as she told him of the Chief White Eunuch and the Chief Black Eunuch who trained boys for imperial service and told him that the hero, his friend, had begun as chief falconer, an unheard-of rank for a cadet. He knew that his lost friend, the boy without a childhood, was growing up as she spoke, growing up in her telling of him, having whatever it is that children have instead of a childhood when they don’t have a childhood, changing into a man, or into whatever a child without a childhood becomes when he grows up, maybe a man without a manhood. Yes, Argalia was acquiring martial skills that caused other men to admire and fear him, he was gathering around himself a coterie of other young warriors, child-tribute cadets from the far frontiers of Europe, as well as the four albino Swiss giants, Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D’Artagnan, mercenaries captured in battle and auctioned off in the slave markets of Tangier, and a wild Serb named Konstantin who had been captured at the siege of Novo Brdo. But in spite of the importance of this information he found himself drifting into a reverie as he watched the small movements of the memory palace’s face as she spoke. Yes, Argalia had grown up somewhere, and achieved various feats, and all of this was information he should have, but in the meanwhile here were these slow undulations of lips and cheek, the articulate movements of tongue and jaw, the glow of alabaster skin.

Sometimes in the woods near the farm in Percussina he lay on the leaf-soft ground and listened to the two-tone song of the birds, high low high, high low high low, high low high low high. Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman’s body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of which were aspects of the surface deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected from the what-ness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery.

Here in this woman’s body the mystery could be seen. This apparently inert being, her self erased or buried beneath this never-ending story, this labyrinth of story-rooms in which more tales had been hidden than he was interested to hear. This toothsome sleepwalker. This blank. The rote-learned words poured out of her as he looked on, and while he unbuttoned and caressed. He exposed her nudity without compunction, touched it without guilt, manipulated her without any feelings of remorse. He was the scientist of her soul. In the smallest motion of an eyebrow, in the twitch of a muscle in her thigh, in a sudden minuscule curling of the left corner of her upper lip, he deduced the presence of life. Her self, that sovereign treasure, had not been destroyed. It slept and could be awakened. He whispered in her ear,
“This is the last time you will ever tell this story. As you tell it, let it go.”
Slowly, phrase by phrase, episode by episode, he would unbuild the palace of memories and release a human being. He bit her ear and saw a tiny answering tilt of the head. He pressed her foot and a toe moved gratefully. He caressed her breast and faintly, so faintly that only a man looking for the deeper truth would have seen it, her back arched in return. There was nothing wrong in what he did. He was her rescuer. She would thank him in time.