The Malice of Fortune (25 page)

Outside the city, both the road and the surrounding
pianura
were entirely covered with a January snowfall that had arrived a month early, the snow heavy but dry, like coarse-milled grain. The north wind sweeping across the plain was bitterly cold, and icy specks still blew down from a sky that resembled a sheet of lead. But we had prepared as best we could. Damiata’s hood and cape were lined with sable; when she was seated on the mule, I could see that she was wearing thick woolen hose and an extra skirt beneath her black mourning dress. I wore most of my wardrobe, along with a farmer’s wooden shoes, these at least keeping my feet dry. Nevertheless, we would have to quickly finish our business with
Zeja
Caterina or the cold would mock—and make us forget—all our other fears.

With the rust-colored soil of the
pianura
freshly whitewashed, or so it seemed, one could see more easily the stamp the ancient Romans had placed so indelibly on this land. Not only was the straight line of the Via Emilia the testament of their surveyors, who possessed skills we have since lost; the entire plain to its east was divided into a vast checkerboard of fields, perfect squares of equal size, all precisely aligned with the Via Emilia like bricks against a mason’s plumb line. Over many centuries, the boundaries among these squares came to be marked by various means: irrigation ditches; narrow dirt and gravel roads; lines of mulberry trees or cypresses; rows of shrubs and hedges.

This vast grid was entirely different than the countryside I had known as a small boy. My father had owned a little land and a house at Sant’Andrea, near Percussina, about six miles outside the walls of Florence, from which he obtained nearly all his income and most of our food. There the fields, olive groves, vineyards, and forest draped the low hills in a patchwork that might have been sewn at a secondhand
shop. On a glaring August morning, I could run through stalks of blue-flowered flax almost as tall as I was, and if I squinted my eyes I could imagine I was in an ocean; in the next moment I had vanished into the sunless woods where we cut our kindling, listening to the rabbits and pheasants scatter, only to emerge a moment later into a chicken yard or hog sty.

We had little company on the road that cold afternoon, aside from a train of several mules burdened with great baskets of charcoal and a small band of cape-clad peasants, one of them with a pair of dead rabbits over his shoulders. The scant traffic, like the hunters’ pitiful yield, evidenced the scarcity of everything in this region, due both to the climate and to the army that had been living off the countryside. Seeing that we were foreigners, the peasants spit in the snow and made the
corne
against the evil eye.

The wind made conversation difficult, but it did not slow us much; I estimated that we had been gone barely an hour when I shouted, “I see our stone!” We had passed about a dozen crossroads, but these four corners were different, in that all were entirely exposed. Jutting from the earth at the corner nearest to us was a great slab of limestone, worn by time and probably half buried in the snow, although what remained was close to my height. I expected we would find that someone had carved a fawn on it, many centuries ago.

Yet when we came close enough to examine the carving, we discovered this was not so. The deeply cut letters were as tall as my hand, the Latin inscription still easy to read:
SANCTISSIMIS FAUNIBUS
, an ancient devotion to the Holy Fauns.

“Faun stone,” I said, wondering if this would be merely the most trivial of my mistaken assumptions. Across the road from this monument, in the far corner of the field, was a well, a gray masonry cylinder against the snow, beside it a wooden crane for the bucket hoist. “We’ll go over there and wait,” I said. “If we have to conceal ourselves, it will do.”

The road we crossed appeared to run beyond the flat horizon, perhaps going all the way to the Adriatic coast. This perfectly straight white path was bordered by endless rows of naked mulberry trees, their spiky limbs branching into delicate webs of twigs, these almost resembling black lace against the snowy fields.

Damiata stopped and stared down the road, studying this design of man and nature as if it were an augury of our fate. “Leonardo has made drawings like this,” she said in a nearly entranced voice. “I have never seen the like of them. He has flayed away the flesh to expose the veins, nerves, and sinews that run throughout us like rivers, streams, and creeks. Or like these mulberry branches.” She turned to me. “The maestro has found this secret world beneath our skin.”

She had her hood up, exposing only her face, and this dark frame made the blue of her eyes deeper than seemed possible. If the most profound blue available to our painters is the
ultramare
that comes from beyond the sea, you would have to sail the sea between here and our friend of blessed memory Amerigo Vespucci’s
mundus novus
a thousand times to obtain this hue.

Yet this gaze could metamorphose in a single blink, haunted in one instant, as sparkling as light off a wave in the next. To watch Damiata for more than a moment was not merely to become fascinated, in the sense of our modern Tuscan
affascinare
, but also to be reminded of the ancient Latin
fascinare
: to cast a spell.

So if in her eyes I appeared wary, it was only because I regarded them as the incorrigible thieves of all reason and good sense.

With tiny steps Damiata approached the well’s stone rim, which was frosted with snow. She peeked in but quickly drew back.

I came to her side and looked down, wondering what she had seen, finding nothing but a lightless void. At this time in my life, I had only begun my study of men’s natures—my
scienza
of men—and the well provided an allegory of my own efforts to imagine the face of this murderer: peering into the darkness with the conviction that something lay at the bottom, yet utterly unable to see it.

“Let us assume that two witches have already died for some secret regarding the Duke of Gandia’s murder,” I said, knowing that Damiata already believed this. “But were the
streghe
murdered in an effort to conceal this secret? Or to obtain it?”

“No doubt to conceal it,” Damiata offered at once. “The
condottieri
know the truth they hope to keep hidden.”

“That is the reasonable conclusion. But then why display the bodies in a manner that only drew attention to the victims?”

Damiata warily cocked her head. “What are you saying, Niccolò?”

“Possibly there is a secret these
streghe
have concealed. But I do not believe it will tell us who murdered Juan of Gandia. Or those women.”

She made a little scoffing sound. “Then you believe we have come out here for nothing, except to invite our own deaths.”

“We are looking for a man of a peculiar nature,” I elaborated. “A very rare nature. And I believe that we cannot know him until we understand another sort of secret. A
segreto
that will not be found out here on the
pianura
but within him. Something that makes him different from other men.”

Damiata gave me the merest frown and a tiny pout—which made me almost insane with desire. So I required a moment to see this expression as one of deepest skepticism. “Do you intend to once again cite his vanity? His interest in games and riddles, Niccolò? Because far from being rare, this is the nature of so many men I have known. Particularly those of high station.”

Certainly I knew I could not easily convince Damiata of my arguments, when in truth I had not entirely convinced myself. Yet often in those days I committed myself to a rhetorical leap, hoping that before the end of my fall, I would discover something to which I could cling.

“I believe that this man is rare,” I said, “because we so rarely find him in our histories.”

“I have read Herodotus and Tacitus just as you have, Niccolò.” In fact, Damiata’s well-lettered challenge to my intellect had beguiled me no less than her beauty. “History is nothing if not a catalog of vain and cruel men.”

“Men who almost always kill at the prompting of some human passion or sentiment,” I said. “Ambition. Jealousy of other men’s power. Upon reaching the heights, they are consumed by the suspicion and fear they will lose everything to men much like themselves.”

“Yes. You have previously said you do not observe such sentiments or passions in these murders.” Her tone was peevish. “But isn’t it more reasonable to believe that this man’s greatest fear is that the full revelation
of his crimes will compel the pope and even Valentino to seek vengeance, thus depriving him of both his station and his life?”

“I give you that reason does not provide us an easy explanation of this man’s actions—”

“Then you believe he is afflicted with a sort of madness. Some excess of choleric humors in the brain.”

“No. Consider his forethought, his calculation, his fastidious dismemberment of the corpses. He appears to have entire command of his faculties.” As I spoke, my sleeve brushed snow into the well; the glittering little shower vanished before it was consumed by the black water. “Not even the greatest of the ancients truly understood this sort of man.”

Damiata pushed a few stray hairs from her forehead; her delicate hand, sheathed in gray kid, was more lovely than a marble Aphrodite’s. “But Niccolò, you believe you have made a list of such men, do you not?”

I shrugged. “Plutarch tells us that Alexander, the tyrant of the ancient Thessalian city of Pherae, massacred entire populations for no reason at all, butchered men merely for his own perverse amusement, and worshipped as a deity the spear on which he had impaled his predecessor—yet he regretted nothing and wept only at the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache on the stage. Nevertheless, Plutarch did not observe that Alexander of Pherae was a rare man, even when compared to other tyrants. Our histories tell us of a few others who also derived a perverse amusement from their murders and cruelties. Demetrius and Perseus. The Roman dictator Sulla. The emperors Caligula and Nero. Plato believed that the cause of all such depraved behavior was a ‘disease of the soul.’ But this man’s disease or deformity of the soul is so rarely seen that no Hippocrates or Galen—or Marcus Aurelius or Augustine—has ever described it.”

“Niccolò, if this man is so different from other men, shouldn’t we know him at once? Didn’t the Romans know well the madness of Nero and Caligula, even though they were powerless to oppose them?”

“That is what confounds me so. Because for a time the people of Rome, even those closest to the tyrants, were deceived. This was true
regarding Sulla as well. As though these men were able to mask their nature until their power was sufficiently established to permit their worst excesses.”

“What sort of mask?” She gave me a subtle wry smile. “I presume you do not mean this Devil’s mask Leonardo’s assistant has witnessed.”

Despite the importance of this question, I had no answer. Instead I stared into the well as if it were a black mirror. “Perhaps that is his secret,” I said. “The Sphinx’s riddle.”

It was not lost on Damiata that travelers who failed to answer the Sphinx’s riddle quickly found their ignorance fatal. “Perhaps you are correct in that respect, Niccolò. Tonight either we answer his riddle or Fortune will bring our journey to its end.” She took my arm and drew herself close. “I know I asked you before, Niccolò. You are familiar with women of my sort, aren’t you?”

At that point in my life I had enjoyed “conversation,” let us say, with the less gifted courtesans at the French court in Lyons, not to mention
interludi
dancers and singers in Florence. But I could hardly say I had known a woman of her sort.

Reading my silence if not my face, Damiata added, “Is that why you don’t trust me?”

“I trust that you were honest when you said I could not,” I told her lightly, not needing to recite the sins she had confessed to me: liar, thief, and whore.

Her smile revealed teeth as perfect as pearls. “If only I had known you in Rome, before everything … We would have been great friends. And I would not have required your trust.”

“If you had known me in Rome, I would have been merely one among the court of three dozen scholars camped on your doorstep, not daring to hope for more than a nod.” This was a kind way of saying that a single night with her would have cost me a year’s expenses.

She cast her eyes down. “No. I believe I would have found you different than the rest. Or perhaps it is myself, not you, whom I flatter. Perhaps in those days, as I climbed to the heights, I was not so wise …” When she looked up, she might have put her finger on my heart—and a hand on my
cazzo
. “There is a connection between us, Niccolò.” Her
teeth worked at her lower lip. “And it frightens me no less than I know it does you. As if long ago our souls conspired to bring us to this place. On this night.”

I would not have described this connection in such terms, yet in truth I felt it no less. I looked into the ocean of her eyes, unable to say if Damiata was Dante’s Beatrice, who would lead me to the Higher Spheres, or if she was a Circe, who had already bewitched me body and soul.