In the Company of the Courtesan (4 page)

She had a silk robe pulled around her, her hair tangled fiercely down her back and the skin around her mouth red and puffy from the scrape of the captain's stubble. But her eyes were bright enough. It is one of her great talents, to make it look as if her glass empties at the same rate as those around her, and so to remain clearheaded long after their lust has blended into the alcohol.

“I heard voices.” She took in the debris of the kitchen. “Who was here?”

“Ascanio. On his way back from Gianbattista's studio. The painter is taken and his work destroyed.”

“Oh! And Marcantonio and the press? What news of them?”

I shook my head.

“Ah me…” She moved to the table, sitting in his place and putting her hands palm-down on the table. She moved her head slowly to one side and the other, stretching her neck as if coming back to life after a long sleep. It is a gesture I know well, and there are times when the work is challenging or the night long and she likes me to climb up on the bench behind her and massage her shoulders. But not tonight. “Where's Adriana?”

I pointed to the cupboard. “Curled up with the twins.
Virgo intacta,
all of them. Though I can't guarantee for how long. How is our captain?”

“Sleeping in fits and starts, thrashing around as if he were still at war.” She paused. I did not ask. I never do. Which is why, I think, she often tells me. “You should have seen him, Bucino—he was a Spaniard to his loins. So concerned with his reputation that his anxiety undermined him. Maybe he is grown sick of his own power. I think he was almost glad to have someone else taking charge after so long.” She smiled a little, but there was no wit in it. The screams would have penetrated the shutters of the bedroom as easily as they had the kitchen. “But he is young underneath the grime, and I doubt we can trust to his protection for long. We must contact the cardinal. It's our only hope. Others will be fair-weather friends, but if he is still alive—and Charles's troops would have reason enough to be good to him, given how he has supported the emperor's cause in the Curia—I am sure he will help us.”

We looked at each other over the table, both of us no doubt weighing our chances.

“In which case, I should go now,” I said, because we both knew there was no one else. “If I move quickly, I might get back before the house is awake.”

She looked away as if it was still a matter for debate, then slipped her hand beneath her robe and put her fist down on the table in front of me. Underneath her grasp lay half a dozen rubies and emeralds, their edges a little chipped from where she had prized them out of their settings.

“For the journey. Take them. They can be your own set of pearls.”

 

The square was silent now, our neighbors either dead or more effectively gagged. Around me, Rome was caught between fire and dawn, part of the city glowing like hot coals in the dark while clouds of smoke billowed east toward a gauzy gray sky ripe with the promise of another perfect day for killing. I moved like Ascanio, close to the ground and the edges of the walls, before breaking into the main street. I passed a few corpses in the gutter, and once a voice yelled after me, but it was wayward and might have been a cry out of someone's nightmare. Farther down the street, a single figure came rolling toward me out of the gloom, moving as if in a daze and seeming not to see me. As he passed, I saw him clutching his shirt, with a bloodied mess of what might have been his own innards in his hand.

The cardinal's palazzo was off the Via Papalis, where the city gathers to gape at and applaud great church processions that pass through to the Vatican. The streets here are so fine you need to dress up even to walk along them. But the more the wealth, the greater the devastation and the heavier the stench of death. In the dawn light, there were bodies everywhere, some broken and still, others twitching or moaning quietly. A small knot of men were moving methodically through the carnage, poking around for leftover wealth like crows plucking out the eyes and the livers. They were too intent on their business to notice me. If Rome had been Rome and not a battlefield, I would have had to be more careful on the street. While I may be the size of a child, people still spot my rolling walk from a distance, and until they see the gold trim of my cloth—and even then, sometimes—they can tend to all kinds of cruel mischief. But that morning, in the chaos of war, I would have looked simply small, and therefore neither a promise nor a threat. Though I think that is not enough to explain why I didn't die. Because I saw enough children skewered and split into pieces as I went. And it was not because I had my wits about me either, for I stepped over the remains of all kinds of men, some of whom, from their clothing—or what was left of it—had had more status or wealth than I ever would, though little good it would do them now.

Later, when the stories from the night screamers who survived told of a hundred ways in which an enemy can squeeze gold out of seared and punctured flesh, it became clear that those who were butchered in that first attack were the lucky ones. But at the time it didn't feel like that. For every dead soul I passed, there was another barely living one, propped up against the wall staring at the stumps of his own legs or trying to push his guts back into his stomach.

Yet, strangely, it was not all awful. Or perhaps it was not all awful precisely because it was so strange. In places there was almost a sense of wild pageant to it. In the area closest to the Vatican, where the Germans now ruled, the streets were full of fancy dress. It was a wonder the invaders knew whom to fight anymore, so many of them were wearing their victims' clothes. I saw small men swamped by velvet and fur, their gun barrels high in the air laced with jeweled bracelets. But it was their wives and children who made the show. The women who follow mercenary armies are legendary, living as they do like cats in heat around the edges of the campfire. But these women were different. They were Lutherans, harpy heretics driven as much by God as by war, their children conceived and suckled on the road, thin and hard as their parents, their features blunt as woodcuts. On their stick bodies, the pearled gowns and velvet skirts fell like tents, the jeweled combs clung to limp hair, and swathes of priceless silk trains turned black in the blood and mud behind them. It was like watching an army of wraiths dancing their way out of Hell.

For the men, the church costumes were the greatest prize. I saw more than one “cardinal” rolling through the streets in fire-red robes, their hats on backward and great jugs of wine in their hands—though no one bothered dressing up in priests' robes, for even in chaos hierarchy rules and their cloth wasn't rich enough. Heretics may read the Devil in decoration, but they're as greedy as the next man when the gaudiness comes from real gold. There were no rich chalices or jeweled
monstranci
stamped into the mud that morning. Instead the sewers were clogged with smashed ceramics and wood: enough dismembered Madonnas and Jesus statues to keep the sculptors' guild at work for the next half century. Then there were the relics. Without belief, Saint Anthony's rib or Saint Catherine's finger is just another yellowed old bone, and that morning there were bits of saints littering the streets that pilgrims would have walked five hundred miles to kiss or pray to the day before. If they performed any miracles in the gutter, I never heard about it, though the Church would use that word soon enough to describe their recovery and the shrines would reopen as fast as any shops, so fast I swear that the next wave of gullible pilgrims would be shelling out their scudi to see what could as well have been a fishmonger's thighbone or a prostitute's digit.

Our cardinal's house was one of Rome's finest. My lady had been his favorite for years by this time, and he was as faithful to her as any marrying man might have been to his own wife. He was a clever man, an honored member of the pope's inner circle, as much a politician as a prelate, and right up until the last he had played his hand both ways, supporting the pope in his power games but also arguing the case of the emperor. His evenhandedness was well known, and in theory it should have saved his life. In theory…

There were two men with guns outside the entrance to his palazzo. I danced up to them, grinning and prancing like a man whose brain was as squashed as his body. One of them stared at me, poking me with a bayonet. I squealed in a way that always seems to delight men with weapons, and then I opened my mouth wide, stuck in two fingers, and brought out a small, glittering ruby, letting it lie in the palm of my hand. Then I asked if I could see the cardinal. First in pidgin German, then in Spanish. One of them answered in a vomit of words, then grabbed at me and forced my jaw open again, but what he saw there made him let me go fast enough. I repeated the exercise until there was another jewel sitting next to the first. Then I asked again. They took one each and let me inside.

From the main hall I could see deep into the courtyard beyond. A great pile of His Eminence's possessions were stacked up ready to go, though not all of them were deemed worthy. He was a cultured man, my lady's cardinal, with a gallery of precious artifacts whose value was their age as much as the weight of any precious metal. As I moved inside, I heard a cry from above and watched as a muscled, marble Hercules came hurtling down over the balustrade, his head and left arm undergoing instant amputation as he crashed onto the flagstones below. Halfway down the corridor, a man in a dirty shirt facing away from me was scrubbing the floor. He sat back, his gaze fixed on the decapitated head. The sentry went over and kicked him so that he fell onto his side. So much for His Eminence's allegiances: when an army hasn't been paid for as long as this one, clearly it makes no difference whether the booty comes from friend or from foe.

I watched him get up and turn toward me. He moved as if his legs were as bandied as mine, but then, being on his knees for so long would have been novel for a man of his high clerical stature. He recognized me right away, and his face lit up for a second hoping—what? That I was come leading an army of the great Roman soldiers, the likes of which probably last existed in the antiquity of which he was so fond? But the hope dissolved soon enough. As one of Rome's more erudite pleasure seekers, he had always had a certain nobility to his looks. Not now, though. His thinning hair was stuck to his head like tufts of grass clinging to hard ground, and his skin was almost yellow; his health, wealth, and worldly confidence had all drained away. There seemed little point in asking him for help. He wouldn't be alive that long. But while his world was collapsing, his brain was fast enough.

“Your mistress should know that there are no protectors or patrons left,” he said urgently. “The pope himself is besieged. St. Peter's is made a stable for the imperial cavalry, and with the Bourbon prince dead, there is no leader to stop the slaughter. The only hope is that the troops will turn on one another, and in the turmoil we may flee with our lives as they fight over the spoils. Tell her that she would do better to pretend piety or find another city where her beauty and her wit will be more appreciated. This Rome…our Rome…is gone forever.” He glanced back nervously toward the devastation of his life. “Tell her that I dream of her still as Mary Magdalene and intercede with God for her forgiveness along with my own.”

 

Though I moved as fast as I could, the journey back took longer. It may have been my despair, for with no champion to defend us, we now faced the prospect of being squeezed and squeezed until we burst. The world was collapsing, but the day was rosy bright and the pillage had begun in earnest again. I passed through streets where the cardinal's prophecy was already coming true and where the two armies were vying for the next kill. I moved fast, dodging in and out of backstreets until my legs grew numb from the effort and I had to stop to get the feeling back. Between his house and ours, a large troop of Lutherans was following in the footsteps of the Spanish, the violence all the greater because there was so little left to steal. I took the longer way to avoid them, skirting to the east and passing close enough to Marcantonio's press and workshop to see that the whole area was invaded or alight, its inhabitants either hostages or dead. By the time I reached our own quarter, the sun was overhead, its heat spicing the bloodlust. Our invaders had become defenders now, with Spanish and German soldiers howling and brawling with one another. This time I ran through my exhaustion, so that, when I reached our square, I was trembling as much from the numbing throb in my legs as from mounting fear. At our gate the sentries were gone, and the courtyard doors were thrown open to anyone who had the weaponry to walk in.

In the yard the pigs were squealing as they were herded against the walls, and a group of men, including the cook, were deep in shit and flagstones digging up the chests. In the frenzy for treasure, no one noticed a crumpled dwarf moving inside.

The kitchen was empty. I found Giacomo and Zaccano in the dining room, both sitting propped against a wall, smashed glass and pottery all around. As I approached, Giacomo looked up, but Zaccano remained with his head on his chest, a hole darker than the red velvet of his jacket under his left breast, but neat, so that it seemed neither cruel nor deep enough to have let out his soul. I stood myself directly in front of Giacomo so that our eyes were at the same level and asked him what had happened. He looked back at me and opened his mouth, but only a slow trickle of blood came out. Of Adriana there was no sign.

I moved to the staircase. On the bottom step, a figure was hunched over, trembling. Underneath the filth and the stink of him, I recognized our stable boy. There was a gash on his cheek and he looked scared out of his wits, but all of his limbs were intact, and in his fingers he was playing nervously with a single grubby pearl. No doubt he had deluded himself into believing that by betraying his mistress and her wealth, he would earn the rest of the necklace.