The Enterprise of Death (2 page)

At long last the would-be royal pimp came into possession of the Egyptian jewel of a local merchant’s harem, a girl who caused even Boabdil’s rheumy eyes to sparkle and widen. She was little older than the son Isabella-née-Aixa had by this time borne Ferdinand, but the former king of Granada saw the potential her beauty hinted at and so he wheedled and maneuvered and finally managed to get her sent straight toward Gibraltar, accompanied by a dozen slaves to tend to her and two dozen eunuchs to guard her and three dozen servants to carry the crates of incense and wine and dates and other presents he included to help persuade Ferdinand to release Aixa.

Do not pity Boabdil, who committed vile sins in the name of fatherly love. When he heard that the ship carrying his nubile gift was sunk by Barbary pirates, he did not believe the herald and had him flayed, and the second one to bring him the same news he had burned alive, and the third he had quartered, and the fourth he had buried alive, but the fifth he believed, and was saddened. Having now lost two peerless beauties—which should not be possible in the first place, but pity the pedant who told Boabdil that—the former sultan finally gave up on freeing Aixa, and his sorrow was so pronounced that in his dotage he scarcely enjoyed his prodigious harem, or his sumptuous table, or his magnificent hunts, or his impressive stable, or his pleasure cruises.

As for Omorose, the young Egyptian girl Boabdil had sent to exchange for Aixa, she did indeed fall victim to piracy and shipwreck on the crossing from Ceuta to Spain. Rather than surrendering to the notoriously ruthless corsairs, the ship’s captain had sunk his own vessel, Boabdil’s incense perfuming the waves as the less suicidal crewmen dumped out the chests to use as rafts. The pirates were able to fish out most of the servants and slaves and eunuchs and sailors to sell into bondage, but a few drowned along with the captain, who had tied himself to the mast to ensure a proud end. Only Omorose and her least favorite slave, Awa, escaped both pirates and sea by dint of a courageous eunuch named Halim, and after a terrifying night at sea with Omorose sitting in a myrrh-stinking box as the other two clung to the sides, all three washed up on the coast of Spain.

Omorose was the oldest of the castaways and barely a woman herself, and her sheltered life had made her as skilled at taking charge of calamitous situations as it had at flying through the air. The two younger adolescents had weathered much harsher lives, thankfully, and Omorose deigned to heed their counsel when both Halim and Awa advised moving inland in search of fresh water. Instead of a stream or spring they found a gang of bandits, who wasted no time in tying their hands and feet. Omorose allowed her hands to be tied with a haughty dignity and poorly concealed relief at being discovered by someone, even if it was only a pack of mangy thieves. Halim took more umbrage at his mistress being thus detained and so had his nose broken before finding his own limbs bound, but Awa, who had fled bondage several times on her native continent only to find herself with a new master whenever she sought shelter, knew well when she was caught and obediently offered her wrists.

Off they went toward Granada, where the chief of the bandits had a brother who spoke the heathen tongue of the Moors and could appraise the worth of the incomprehensible foreign prisoners
accordingly. Away from the coast and over plain and mountain they went, into that highest Spanish range to avoid the known roads where servants of King Ferdinand might cheat an honest businessman and his partners of their fairly found booty. Up and up they went, along paths unfit for goats, until they were forced to take shelter from a thunderstorm in a narrow cave. None of the three Africans had ever known such chill as the wind whistling down into their damp shelter, their weather-ruined garments small protection, and there, in that cold, miserable cave, their nightmare began in earnest.

The corpse gaped up at its killer, who squatted over it with a panel of pine steadied on the ruffled velvet covering his thigh, intently sketching the dead man’s startled, stupid expression with a nub of charcoal tied to a thin stick. It had taken no small effort to locate this particular body, the first man the artist could be sure he personally had killed in the battle. The youth had not died in a manner any would call brave or noble, instead fumbling with his intestines like a clumsy juggler as they fell out of his split belly, and he looked even worse with the grime and blood and filth and the reek of shit and sunbaked offal, but soon he would become a saint. Which saint exactly, the artist had yet to determine, but a saint to be sure; it was the least he could do.

“You’re a sick bit of whore-crust, Manuel,” said a fellow mercenary as he cut the thumbs off the corpse nearest the one Manuel drew.

“Say what you will, Werner,” said Manuel, scowling down at his handiwork and finding the representation no more pleasing than its model. “At least I don’t fuck them, you godless piece of shit.”

“Somefinn’s in his arse,” a third man said with a laugh as he strode up behind them, and, giving Werner a wink, he trotted the last few feet and kicked Manuel in that very spot.

Slipping forward from the blow, Manuel held his sketch aloft as though he had stepped into a creek that proved deeper than it looked. His exposed left knee fell directly onto his subject and he cursed as the fashionable slit he had cut in the fabric welcomed the warm push of rank meat, gutlining now lining his hose. He scrambled up and pursued his guffawing assailant Bernardo, and after settling matters with that jackass Manuel had to go so far as to draw his hand-and-a-half before Werner would surrender the thumbs he had nicked from the artist’s kill.

By then the light was ruined, a crimson sunset outlining the Lombardy hillside Manuel trudged toward. The bald stone prominence rearing up into the bloody sky reminded him of a skull, with eye sockets and a nose formed from the command pavilions and the grove of mercenary tents at the base of the mount creating a jagged maw. But then he was an artist and so everything looked like a symbol for something else, and because he was also a soldier most of the symbols he saw made him think of death.

“Manny, my little cowherd!” Albrecht von Stein did not stand to greet Manuel, reminding the artist at once why he despised the captain who sat across the obscenely heavy ebony table he insisted be brought from camp to camp with him. Von Stein was a large and hairy man whose blunt face would not have seemed amiss in some turnip field instead of wheedling at foreign courts, and his ogreish manners were little better than his looks. Were the bulk of Manuel’s fellow mercenaries not also Swiss who would testify to his military prowess upon returning to Bern, thereby aiding in his local ambitions, the artist would have sought out a less odious captain to serve under.

Von Stein had followed the scent of bloody metal south just as surely as Manuel had, however, and the mercenaries of Bern had gravitated to von Stein’s service rather than working directly with the French or the various local—and therefore unstable —dukes
and mayors. The Lombardy city-states were constantly pouring coin into the trough-coffers of the French and Imperial commanders providing the muscle for their squabbles when the foreigners were not fighting each other directly, and the old crown-eater did have a knack for tactics. Noticing the disheveled state of Manuel, von Stein pouted in the same fashion he had at a dinner several years before upon realizing the young artist he had just met was not actually gentry.

“But you’ve spoiled your pretty little dress!”

“I think a splash of color lends it something distinctive,” said Manuel as the flap of the tent fell behind him. “Papal paint and all that.”

“Oh, that’s good, good.” Von Stein nodded. “Can’t have too many cute names for the wet red, and it’s distinctive to be sure. But do you know what the Emperor said about your little hose and silk and all? Your baubles and laces?”

Manuel knew what the Emperor Maximilian, former employer and current adversary, had said because von Stein had already told him thrice on the campaign road—another hazard of knowing the commander personally before enlisting in the mercenary company. “No, what did he say?”

“He said
let them
.” Von Stein beamed, thrilled as ever to recite the magisterial ruling as Manuel sweated in his brightly colored confection of puffed sleeves and tight hose, swatches of padding and finer cloth stitched jauntily onto the garb by the artist’s nimble-fingered niece. “About wearing that foppery and all, instead of proper attire.
Let them
, he said,
let them have something nice in their wretched, miserable lives!
As if we were hurting for sport or coin down here where all good men are trampled, as if we were wretched to play at wars other than his!”

“How generous of him,” said Manuel. “I don’t know how men could manage to serve were they lacking in ostrich feathers for their hats.”

“For all that piss, the plume of your toque is brighter than most.” Von Stein frowned. “Or do an old soldier’s eyes mistake your halo for mere millinery accoutrement?”

“I find a handsome presentation best for ingratiating oneself with the enemy. When they turn to fetch me wine and cheese I run them through. It’s quite less than Christian, really.”

“You give me the impression you don’t enjoy the work I pay you for,” said the captain, his frown deepening. “A pity when the butcher has no stomach for slaughter, and that’s all these little squabbles have been. How’s your wife?”

“Well, last I heard. And yours?”

“Well.” Von Stein narrowed his eyes.

“Well.” Manuel cleared his throat. “A very deep subject. But while it’s true I don’t relish the slaughter, as you say, I do appreciate the coin. One dead Milanese or Venetian or whoever will buy a lot of paint, the useful sort, and when we return to Bern I would beg the privilege of having your wife model for me—the powers that be mentioned a possible commission for the cathedral’s choir.”

“Oh!” Von Stein perked up. “What sort of painting do you have in mind? Nothing provocative, mind you—my wife is a lady.”

“I haven’t decided on the motif yet,” said Manuel. He had—she would be Salome, and John the Baptist’s head would be as closely modeled on her husband’s as Manuel dared.

“She will be delighted, simply delighted,” said von Stein. “She’s been pressing me to ask, but, I don’t know, I thought it might, well, it might seem …”

Manuel was taken aback that von Swine, as he was rather unimaginatively dubbed by his men, had actually demonstrated something resembling decorum. “Tell her it is my dearest wish, and that I hesitated to ask only out of respect for her esteemed husband.”

“Oh, wonderful! Good, good.” Von Stein nodded enthusiastically, and Manuel felt a twinge of self-loathing to put his verbal fingers even the slightest bit under the codpiece of the man’s raging ego. “So we need to get you home safe to paint, and you don’t like this business anyway, so …”

“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t need the money,” said Manuel. “And if I had enough to go home I … I don’t have enough to go home yet. Sir.”

“Now you do.” Von Stein plunked a bag down on the table, a purse closer in size to a saddlebag than a pouch. The captain leaned forward, clearly delighted with his presentation. Manuel waited to see if the man’s enjoyment would shrivel if he let it alone long enough, but when the smile did not fade Manuel sighed and took the bait, reflecting that unless one is quite blond or white of hair having teeth that match your beard is a most unfortunate circumstance. The captain’s beard was a pepper-flecked auburn.

“A raid at midnight into a fortified city? A one-man assault on a gunner embankment? An assassination?” Manuel hefted the bag, poorly concealing the strain it took to lift it.

“An errand. You deliver something to the Andalusian border, then you go home. None of that Papal dye or what have you, unless complications arise. Brigands on the road, that sort of thing.”

“Spain?” Manuel cocked his head at von Stein. “What do I deliver? And how many men do I pick to go with me?”

“Five men, and I’ve already picked them. Werner—”

Manuel cursed.

“Bernardo—”

Manuel cursed louder, glowering at the stained knee of his hose.

“And the Kristobel cousins. The three that are left—”

“Two.”

“Eh?”

“We’re down to two Kristobels as of this afternoon, which is still two too many. Why do I get the dregs?”

“Are you really asking? We march tomorrow, Manny, you would prefer I give you my best and boldest?”