The Enchantress of Florence (17 page)

At the siege of Trebizond it rained every day. The hills were full of Tartars and other heathen. The road down from the mountains turned to mud, so deep that it reached the bellies of the horses. They destroyed the supply wagons and carried the bags on camels’ backs instead. A camel fell and a treasure chest broke open, sixty thousand pieces of gold lying on the hillside for all to see. At once the hero, with the Swiss giants and the Serb, drew swords and mounted guard around the Sultan’s fallen wealth until he, the emperor, arrived on the scene. After that the hero was better trusted by the Sultan than the king’s own kin.

At last the stiffness had gone from her limbs. Her body lay loose and inviting upon the silken sheets. The stories she was telling now were of recent date. Argalia had grown up and was almost as old as il Machia and Ago. Their chronologies were united once again. Soon she would have finished and then he would wake her up. The
ruffiana
Giulietta, an impatient creature, goaded him to take her while she slept. “Just stick it in there. Get on with it. No need to be gentle. Give it to her good. That’ll open her eyes.” But he had decided not to ravish her until she awoke of her own accord, and won the assent of Alessandra Fiorentina in the matter. The memory palace was an exceptional beauty and would be handled delicately. She might be no more than a slave in a courtesan’s house but she would receive this much respect.

Against Vlad III the
voivode
of Wallachia—Vlad “Dracula,” the “dragon-devil,” the Impaler Prince,
Kazikli Bey—
no ordinary power could have prevailed. It had begun to be said of Prince Vlad that he drank the blood of his impaled victims as they writhed in their death throes upon their stakes, and that drinking the living blood of men and women gave him strange powers over death. He could not die. He could not be killed. He was also a brute of brutes. He cut off the noses of the men he killed and sent them to the prince of Hungary to boast about his prowess. These stories made the army fear him and the march into Wallachia was not a happy one. To encourage the Janissaries the Sultan distributed thirty thousand gold pieces and told the men that if they won they would be given property rights and regain the use of their names. Vlad the Devil had already burned down the whole of Bulgaria and impaled twenty-five thousand people on wooden stakes, but his forces were smaller than the Ottoman army. He retreated and left scorched earth behind him, poisoning wells and slaughtering cattle. When the Sultan’s army was marooned in desolation without food or water the Devil King launched surprise attacks. Many soldiers were killed and their bodies stuck onto sharpened sticks. Then Dracula retreated to Tirgoviste and the Sultan declared, “This will be the devil’s last stand.”

But at Tirgoviste they saw a terrible sight. Twenty thousand men, women, and children had been impaled by the devil on a palisade of stakes around the town just to show the advancing army what awaited them. There were babies clinging to their impaled mothers in whose rotting breasts you could see the nests of crows. At the sight of the forest of the impaled the Sultan was disgusted and withdrew his unnerved troops. It seemed that the campaign would end in catastrophe, but the hero stepped forward with his loyal group. “We will do what must be done,” he said. One month later the hero returned to Stamboul with the head of the devil in a jar of honey. It turned out that Dracula could die after all, in spite of the rumors to the contrary. His body had been impaled as he had impaled so many others and left for the monks of Snagov to bury as they pleased. This was when the Sultan understood that the hero was a superhuman being whose weapons possessed enchanted powers and whose companions were more than human also. He was accorded the highest honor of the Osmanli Sultanate, the rank of Wielder of the Enchanted Lance. In addition, he became a free man once again.

“From now on,” the Sultan told him, “you are my right hand as my right hand is, and a son to me as my sons are, and your name is not a slave name, for you are no longer any man’s
mamlúk
or
abd,
your name is Pasha Arcalia, the Turk.”

A happy ending, il Machia thought drily. Our old friend made his fortune after all. As good a place as any for the palace of memories to conclude her account. He lay down beside her and tried to picture Nino Argalia as an Oriental pasha fanned by bare-chested Nubian eunuchs and beset by harem lovelies. Feelings of revulsion arose in him at the image of this renegade, a Christian convert to Islam, enjoying the fleshpots of lost Constantinople, the new Konstantiniyye or Stamboul of the Turks, or praying in the Janissaries’ mosque, or walking without a care by the fallen, broken statue of the emperor Justinian, and reveling in the growing power of the enemies of the West. Such a treasonous transformation might impress a good-natured innocent like Ago Vespucci, who saw Argalia’s journey as the kind of exciting adventure he himself was not interested in having, but to Niccolò’s mind it broke the bonds of their friendship, and should they ever meet face to face they would do so as foes, for Argalia’s defection was a crime against the deeper truths, the eternal verities of power and kinship that drove the history of men. He had turned against his own kind, and a tribe was never lenient with such men. However, it did not occur to il Machia then, or for many years afterward, that he would ever see his boyhood companion again.

The midget Giulietta Veronese stuck her head round the door. “Well?” Niccolò nodded judiciously. “I think, signora, that she will presently be awake and restored to herself. As for me, for my small part in the renewal of her personhood—of the human Dignity which, great Pico tells us, stands at the very heart of our humanity—I admit I feel a little glow of pride.” The
ruffiana
blew exasperated air through a corner of her mouth. “It’s about time,” she said, and withdrew.

Almost at once the palace of memories began to murmur in her sleep. Her voice strengthened and Niccolò realized she was telling the last story, the story that was embedded in the very doorway of the memory palace that had colonized her brain, the tale that had to be told as she passed out through that doorway and reawakened to ordinary life: her own story, which unfolded backward, as if time were running in reverse. With growing horror he saw rising before him the scene of her indoctrination, saw the necromancer of Stamboul, the long-hatted long-bearded Sufi mystic of the Bektashi order, adept in the mesmerist arts and the building of memory palaces, working at the behest of a certain newly minted Pasha to commit that Pasha’s exploits to this captive lady’s memory—to erase her life to make room for Argalia’s no doubt self-aggrandizing version of himself. The Sultan had given him the gift of this enslaved beauty and this was the use he had made of her. Barbarian! Traitor! He should have died of the plague along with his parents. He should have drowned when Andrea Doria cast him into that rowboat. To be impaled on a stake by Vlad Dracula of Wallachia would not have been too harsh a punishment for such misdeeds.

Il Machia’s mind was full of these and other angry thoughts when from nowhere there rose up an unwanted image from the past: the boy Argalia teasing him about his mother’s porridge cures for sickness. “Not the Machiavelli but the Polentini.” And Argalia’s old song about an imaginary porridge girl. If she were a sin then I would repent her. If she were to die then I would lament her. Il Machia found tears running down his cheeks. He sang the song to himself,
And if she were a message then I would have sent her,
singing softly, so as not to disturb the flesh and blood damsel he had brought back from the palace of distress. He was alone with the memory of Argalia, with only his new sense of outrage and the old, sweet memory of childhood for company, and he wept.

My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur of Bourges, merchant of Montpellier. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur. My father was a trader and brought nuts and silks and carpets from Damascus to Narbonne. He was falsely accused of poisoning the King of France’s mistress and fled to Rome. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur who was honored by the Pope. He was made captain of sixteen papal galleys and sent to the relief of Rhodes but he fell ill on the way and died. My name is Angélique and I am of the family of Jacques Coeur. While my brothers and I were trading with the Levant I was abducted by pirates and sold into slavery to the Sultan of Stamboul. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter. My name is Angélique and I am. My name is Angélique.

He slept beside her that night. When she awoke he would tell her what had happened, he would be gentle and kind, and she would thank him like the lady she had once been, a girl of well-bred mercantile stock. He pitied her for her bad luck. Twice taken by Barbary pirates, once from the French, a second time from the Turks—who knew what assaults she had been subjected to, how many men had had her, or what she would remember of such matters, and even now she was not free. She looked as refined as any aristocrat but she was just a girl in a house of pleasure. But if her brothers were alive they would surely rejoice to have her returned, their hidden sister, their lost beloved Angélique. They would buy her back from Alessandra Fiorentina and she could go home, to wherever home might be, Narbonne or Montpellier or Bourges. Maybe he could fuck her before that happened. He would discuss that with the
ruffiana
in the morning. The House of Mars was in his debt for increasing the value of its formerly damaged asset. Lovely Angélique, Angélique of the sorrows. He had done a fine and almost selfless thing.

That night he had a strange dream. An Oriental
padishah
or emperor sat, at sunset, under a little cupola at the apex of a pyramid-like five-story building made of red sandstone, and looked out over a golden lake. To his rear there were body-servants wielding large feathered fans, and beside him stood a European man or woman, a figure with long yellow hair wearing a coat of colored leather lozenges, telling a tale about a lost princess. The dreamer only saw this yellow-haired figure from behind, but the Padishah was plainly visible, a big, fair-skinned man with a heavy mustache, handsome, much bejeweled, and tending a little to fat. Evidently these were dream-creatures he had conjured up, for this prince was certainly not the Turkish Sultan, and the yellow-haired courtier did not sound like the new Italian Pasha.
“You speak only of the love of lovers,”
the Padishah said,
“but we are thinking of the love of the people for their prince. For we have a great desire to be loved.”

“Love is fickle,”
the other man answered.
“They love you today, but they may not love you tomorrow.”

“What then?”
the Padishah asked.
“Should I be a cruel tyrant? Should I act in such a way as to engender hatred?”

“Not hatred, but fear,”
the yellow-haired man said.
“For only fear endures.”

“Don’t be a fool,”
the Padishah told him.
“Everyone knows that fear rubs along very nicely with love.”

He awoke to screaming and light and open windows, women running everywhere while the midget Giulietta screeched into his ear,
“What did you do to her?”
Courtesans without their finery, their hair a-straggle, their faces unpainted and dirty, their night-clothes askew, ran shouting from room to room. All the doors had been flung open and daylight, enchantment’s antidote, poured brutally through the House of Mars. What harridans these women were, what poxy, uncouth rodents with bad breath and ugly voices. He sat up and struggled into his clothes.
“What did you do?”
But he had done nothing. He had helped her, cleansed her mind, set her spirit free, and barely laid a finger upon her. Certainly he didn’t owe the
ruffiana
any money. Why was she harassing him so? Why the commotion? He should leave at once. He should find Ago and Biagio and di Romolo and have some breakfast. And no doubt there was work to be done.
“You stupid fool,”
Giulietta Veronese was shouting,
“to meddle in what you didn’t understand.”
Something had happened here. He was presentable now and moved through the un-magicked House of Mars with as much dignity as he could muster. The courtesans fell silent as he passed. Some of them pointed. One or two were heard to hiss. There was a shattered window in the
grand salon,
on the side that overlooked the Arno. He needed to know what had happened. Then the house’s mistress stood before him, La Fiorentina, still beautiful without a shred of cosmetic assistance. “Mr. Secretary,” she said with icy formality. “You will never be welcome in this house again.” Then she left him in a flurry of petticoats and the crying, the lamentation started up again. “God damn you,” said Giulietta the
ruffiana.
“It was impossible to stop her. She ran from that room where you slept on like a rotting corpse, and nobody could get in her way.”