The Malice of Fortune (27 page)

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

M
en 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

T
hose 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.