In the Company of the Courtesan (3 page)

“Gentlemen. We can offer you suckling pig with truffle sauce, roast capon, salted pike, and the choice of finest salamis—you would not believe their size….”

Their laughter turned to whoops of delight, and my lady laughed with them, though not enough to take her concentration off the prey in front of her. “Followed by marzipan, milk puddings, and sugared fruits, along with the best of our cellar. We have the highest-quality beeswax candles with scented oils, entertainment with sweet lute music such as the Holy Father himself delights in, and once you have eaten and drunk your fill, you can fall asleep on clean linen over fresh straw in the rooms and stables below. While for you, Captain”—and here she paused for just a second—“there is a carved bed and a goose-feather mattress soft as a cloud. Our house is yours for as long as you care to stay. When you leave, you may take your pick of whatever riches it possesses. All we ask is that you give us your protection from those who may follow.”

I daresay that if he was well born, he might have come across her like before. Or maybe he had lived on dreams till then. Well, she was real enough now. Each and every one of the men was watching him. While it is possible he might have done less killing than some of them—the ones who give the orders also yield something of the risk—he was clever enough to have earned their attention. And for now, at least, their obedience. Though that might have had as much to do with the smell of roasting pig flesh, which was rolling in waves through the open doors out into the square. I swear, even from the roof I could spot the drool on their lips.

He nodded, then glanced around him and grinned. “Roman hospitality! What did I tell you about it?” He yelled, and the roar rose up around him. “Put the cart into the courtyard and sheath your weapons. Tonight we sleep on soft beds with the lady Bianchini as our host. Let's show her how Spanish manners can match Roman wealth.”

Then he turned back to her and held out his hand. And, though it was no less bloody and stained than that of the man before, she laid her own gently within it and bowed.

 

As for me, well, I went back to juggling. In lieu of balls, after our guests had stuffed themselves stupid, I took half a dozen of my lady's pricked copper pomades and spun them through the air in the candlelight, though their musk perfume offered scant relief against so many gaping mouths belching bad breath. Drunken men can be a dwarf 's worst enemies, for their curiosity turns easily to violence, but these had had their fill of blood, for a while at least, and wanted only to be entertained. So they yelled and applauded my skills and grinned at my devil faces and guffawed as I waddled around the room with a napkin the shape of the papal crown on my head, blessing everyone who approached to touch my robes, each of them by now too drunk and raucous to know what else he might be missing. So it was that Adriana kept her virginity, the cook his kitchen knives, and our mistress her pearl necklace and her best Murano glasses. For that evening at least.

 

Not everyone survived, though. Before the night was out, the bloodlust returned and two men had skewered each other over the dining table. Ours was a house that had seen cardinals and diplomats gamble away the tribute of a small town over which of them should share my lady's bed that night, but no one before had died from pique over who should drink from the wineglass and who from the silver goblet. Within seconds one had his fingers around the other's throat, while his adversary was flailing at him with a knife. By the time the captain got down from the bedchamber, his clothes half on and his sword unsheathed, it was already over and both of them were on the floor pumping blood into puddles of red wine. They were so drunk that if it had been sleep rather than death, I daresay neither of them would have remembered it in the morning. We rolled them up in old sheets and bumped them down the stairs to the coolest part of the cellar. Above, the party continued unabated.

Eventually, excess exhausted them. In the yard, even the pigs slept, their great carcasses rolling and snorting over our hidden riches. The smell in the house was much the same. The place reeked of belches and urine, each room filled with heaving, snoring men, some in blankets, some on straw, some lying where they had fallen. At least they were loyal enemies now. Our doors were locked and bolted, with the posted sentries semicomatose, empty flagons by their sides. In the kitchen, the cook was asleep under the sink, while Adriana and the twins were inside the larder, the temptation of their various beauties locked out of harm's way for the night, and I was sitting on the table, picking scraps off pig bones and teaching Spanish swearwords to my lady's parrot, whom, though he would never thank me for it, I had saved from roasting earlier that evening. Outside, the sounds of the city were a ragged chorus from Hell: distant blasts of gunshot mixed in with staccato yelps and howls.

 

Somewhere in the dead of the night, the horror got closer when a man in one of the neighboring houses started screaming: a single, protracted screech of agony followed by moaning and shouting, then another scream, and another, as if someone was chopping off his limbs one by one. Those who keep their houses locked have something to save apart from their skins. Where does a rich merchant hide his coins or his wife her jewels? How many cuts do you have to suffer before you tell them where to look? What point to jeweled rings when you have no fingers left to wear them on?

The banging came at the side door at the same instant.

“Bucino? Adriana? Open up! For God's sake…” A rasping voice, then a more rasping cough.

One of the guards growled, then snored on. I opened the door, and Ascanio fell into my arms, his chest catching for breath and his face shiny with sweat. I helped him to the bench, and he gulped down some watered wine, the liquid slopping out of the cup with his trembling. “My God, Bucino,” he said, taking in the chaos of the kitchen. “What happened here?”

“We are occupied,” I said lightly, cutting him off a bit of leftover meat. “And have been entertaining the enemy.”

“Fiammetta?”

“Is upstairs with a captain of the Spanish guard. She used her charms to buy his protection.”

Ascanio laughed, but it rolled back into his lungs, and for a moment he couldn't speak for coughing. “Do you think when Death comes she'll offer to fuck it first?” Like every man in Rome, Ascanio had a longing for my mistress. He was assistant to the city's greatest printer-engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi, a man of stature enough to be an occasional visitor to my lady's soirees, and like his master, Ascanio knew the ways of the world. How many evenings had the two of us sat together while the powerful went to bed with the beautiful and we drank their leftovers, talking scandal and politics long into the night? While Rome was now being punished for its worldliness and decadence, it had also been a place of wonder and vibrancy to those with the talent or the wit to join. Though not anymore…

“How far have you come?”

“From Gianbattista Rosa's studio. The Lutheran devils have taken everything. I barely got out alive. I've been running all the way with my belly close to the ground. I know how you see the world now.”

He started to cough again. I refilled his glass and held it up to him. He had come from the country originally, with a fast brain and deft fingers for setting the letters into the press, and like me, his dexterity had got him further in life than he could have expected. His master's books were in the libraries of Rome's greatest scholars, and the workshop engraved the art of men whom the pope himself employed to beautify his sacred ceilings and walls. But the same press also inked satire and gossip sheets for Pasquino's statue in Piazza Navona, and a few years before, a certain set of engravings had proved too carnal even for His Unholiness's steady gaze, and Ascanio and his master had tasted the hospitality of a Roman jail, which had left them both with weak chests. There was a joke that they now mixed the ink for the paler washes with their own phlegm. But it was meant well enough. In the end they earned their living by spreading the news rather than by making it, and thus they were neither wealthy nor powerful enough to be anybody's enemies for long.

“Sweet Jesus, have you seen what's happening out there? It's a charnel house. The city is blazing halfway to the walls. Bloody barbarians. They took everything Gianbattista had, and then they set fire to his paintings. The last I saw him he was being whipped on like a mule to carry his own riches onto their carts. Ah! God damn it!” Under the draining board, the cook gave a grunt and knocked a wooden spoon across the floor, and Ascanio jumped like a fish out of water. “I tell you, Bucino, we're all going to die. You know what they're saying on the streets?”

“That this is God's judgment upon us for our sins?”

He nodded. “Those stinking German heretics are reciting the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah as they smash the altars and ransack the churches. I tell you, I keep seeing that madman hanging off the statue of St. Paul and ranting about the pope.”

“ ‘Behold the bastard of Sodom. For your sins will Rome be destroyed,' ” I said, rolling my voice down into my chest. It had been the talk of the season: how the wild man with flaming red hair and a naked, stringy body had come out of the country, climbed up onto St. Paul's stone shoulders with a skull in one hand and a crucifix in the other, damning the pope for his evil ways and foretelling the sack of the city within fourteen days. Prophecy may be a divine art, but it is an imprecise one: two months later he was still in prison. “What? You really think that if Rome had changed her ways, this wouldn't be happening? You should read more of your own gossip sheets, Ascanio. This place has been rank for decades. Pope Clement's sins are no worse than those of a dozen holy embezzlers who came before him. This isn't bad faith we're suffering from but bad politics. This emperor doesn't brook challenge from anyone, and any pope who took him on—especially a Medici one—always risked getting his balls squeezed.”

He sniggered at my words and took another gulp of wine. The screaming began once more. The merchant again? Or maybe the banker this time? Or the fat notary, whose house was even bigger than his paunch and who earned his living creaming off cuts from the bribes he processed into the papal coffers. On the street, he had a voice like a gelded goat, but when it comes to agony, one man's screams sound much like another's.

Ascanio shivered. “What do you have that's so precious you wouldn't give it up, Bucino?”

“Nothing but my balls,” I said, and I tossed two of my lady's pomades high into the air.

“Always the smart answer, eh? No wonder she loves you. You may be an ugly little sot, but I know a dozen men in Rome who'd swap their fortunes for yours, even now. You're a lucky fellow.”

“The luck of the damned,” I said. Strange how, now we were so close to death, the truth seemed to tumble out so easily. “Ever since my mother first looked at me and fainted in horror.” And I grinned.

He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. “I don't know what to make of you, Bucino. For all your twisted limbs and fat head, you're an arrogant little bastard. Do you know what Aretino used to say about you? That your very existence was a challenge to Rome, because your ugliness was more true than all of its beauty. I wonder what he'd make of all this, eh? He knew it would happen too, you know. He said as much when he blasted the pope in his last
prognostico.
”

“Just as well he isn't here then. Or both sides would have set fire to his pen by now.”

Ascanio didn't say anything, just slid his head down on the table as if it was all too much for him. There was a time when you would have found him hunched over the machines late into the night, running off newly printed gossip sheets to keep the city informed of its own bowel movements. He had liked being on the edge of it all then; I daresay it made him feel like he owned a slice of it. But the rankness of a prison cell had drained his spirit and pumped bitterness into his veins. He gave a groan and started up. “I have to go.” But he was still trembling.

“You could stay here, for a while at least.”

“No, no, I can't…. I—I have to get out.”

“You going back to the press?”

“I—I don't know.” He was up and moving around now, the energy of nerves, twitchy and jumpy, eyes everywhere at once. Outside, our neighbor's screams had turned to wild, sporadic moaning. “You know what I'm going to do as soon as this is over? Get my stinking carcass out of here. Set up somewhere on my own. Taste the good life for myself.”

But the good life was seeping away all around us. His eyes darted around the room again. “You should come with me, Bucino. You can do accounting in your head, and those juggler's fingers would be good with the typesetting. Think about it. Even if you make it through this, the best whores last only a few years. This way I could see us both right. I've got money, and with your knowledge of the backstreets, I bet you could find us a way out of here safely tonight.”

There came a sound from inside the house. Someone was up and moving. Ascanio was at the door before I could answer. He was sweating again, and his breathing was rough. I went with him to the main entrance, and, because he had been a friend of sorts, I told him a back way through to near the gate of San Spirito, where yesterday there had been a city wall but now there would be a gaping hole. If he made it that far, he might stand a chance.

Outside, in the darkness, the square was empty. “Good luck,” I said.

He kept close to the wall, head down, and as he turned the corner, it struck me that I would never see him again.

As I came back into the kitchen, I noticed something lying on the floor under the table, something that must have fallen from beneath his jacket as he got up to leave. I slithered down and retrieved a fabric purse. Out of it slipped a small, scarlet, leather-bound book: Petrarch's sonnets, its perfect skin tooled with gold lettering and fixed with silver corners and an elaborate silver barrel lock with a set of numbers running across it. It was the stuff of a scholar's library and the kind of object that would have made any printer's reputation in a new city. I might have gone after him if I hadn't heard footsteps on the flagstones outside. As it was, I slipped the volume underneath my doublet the second before my lady arrived in the doorway.