The Malice of Fortune (26 page)

CHAPTER
2

I
t is always the case that where little is known, more is suspected
.

By the time the boy came to the faun stone, stars had appeared in half the sky—and a quarter-moon had begun to peek through the clouds that remained. “He must be their scout,” I said as we crossed the field to meet him, leading the mule along behind us.

He was even younger than the local boy I had employed to spy on Leonardo’s house; I did not reckon him more than ten or so years old, fair-haired, but with the same strangely grave and dour face found on so many of the Romagnole children, as if they had never been taught happiness. Those children’s faces were but one reason I believed so profoundly in Valentino’s vision, a Romagna where all citizens might enjoy the peace and justice they had long been denied. Presently, however, war had made this countryside a yet harsher place.

The boy wore the uniform of the
contado
: the hemp shirt and horsehair blanket, the wooden shoes. We had only said our
buonasera
when his high-pitched question rang in the darkness. “You want
Gevol int la caraffa
?”

“With
Zeja
Caterina,” I said.

“
Sì
. She is there.”

“Where is she?”

His hand shot out and he pointed to the north, straight down that endless, mulberry-lined road. “
Pianura
.”

Damiata and I both mounted the mule, as I did not want to give
these people an easy opportunity to separate us. I had little cause to regret my caution: the boy quickly snatched the halter and started off at a courier’s run, a pace I would have had difficulty following in my own clumsy clogs. By the time he had led us down the crossroad a good two miles, the clouds had almost vanished and the waxing moon was joined by the great band of stars across the center of the sky, as though a celestial road mirrored our route.

Quicker than a flea can jump, the boy turned us onto a narrow path we had not seen until we were on it. At times the barren branches nearly made a pergola over our heads. There was a perfume to that night I will never forget, the freshness of the snow wedded to the scent of Damiata: oranges, the merest tincture of roses, and a sharp, lily fragrance that still comes to me at times when I am not even thinking of her.

We entered nothing more than a footpath beside an irrigation ditch. The boy had to coax our mule onto it—or into it, as the case might be, because the mulberry branches were a dense thicket on either side, reaching out like fingers. When the mule had been set in the proper direction, the boy went around behind, presumably to push it by the rump. Instead I heard him say, “You go.
Zeja
Caterina.” With this he slapped the mule’s flank and by the time I turned to look for him, he had vanished into the grid of silver fields.

We had gone only several hundred paces when Damiata whispered, “Do you hear that, Niccolò? That little chiming. Like coins in a witch’s charm bag.”

“Someone is shadowing us.”

The chimes became a steady ching-ching-ching for a short time, then faded, leaving only the sound of the wind rattling the mulberry branches.

We might have gone another quarter mile when we heard a growl of sorts, somewhat like an old man clearing his throat. The hair on my neck rose.

The mastiff was as big as a boar. It had appeared so suddenly, its dark form distinct against the snowy path, that it might have been conjured by a
strega
. As it padded toward us, I could see well enough
the pale teeth and a head little smaller than a sower’s basket. And then the man crouched behind it.

The mastiff stopped, trembling in anticipation of its attack, the keeper shortening its leash like a crossbowman drawing his string.

The man’s words seemed to drift toward us, each a separate, huffing exhalation. “You.
Gevol int la carafa
?”

We both answered at once. “
Sì, sì
.”

The mastiff keeper allowed his lethal pet a snarling lunge before he put his entire weight against the leash and wrestled back the great oxen-like head. “Then this way you come.”

Taking the halter in the manner of our previous guide, the hooded mastiff keeper led us on a journey more wayward than Odysseus’s route from Troy to Ithaca: crossing field after field, sometimes going in one direction only to turn and go back the way we came. I took pains to keep my bearings by the stars, but otherwise found no recognizable landmarks.

I don’t know how long we had been on this voyage when Damiata turned to me with the suppleness of an acrobat, throwing her arm around my neck and pressing her forehead and nose against mine. Her eyes glittered and her scent swept every thought from my brain.

“Niccolò,” she whispered urgently, “if anything happens tonight you must leave me behind and go home. Go back to your baby daughter and learn to love your little wife. She is still just a girl. Love her and she will grow up for you.” Her lips were so close to mine that I could literally feel the warmth of her words. “But you should know this as well. I would not have offered myself to you, even in my grief, if I had not also desired it. If we survive this night—”

An owl flew over us, wailing like a spirit. As if he were following its flight, our guide yanked hard on our mule’s halter and we crashed over an irrigation ditch, breaking the ice and splashing cold water onto our feet. I clasped my hands beneath Damiata’s heart, to keep her from being thrown.

In short time I observed orange sparks at the edge of a large field,
then the outline of a watchman’s hut. This rude dwelling was larger than most of its sort—a family could have crowded into it—but no less a rag-and-bone-man’s shop of stones, reeds, and scavenged planks, the roof a trash pile of shattered tiles. The mastiff keeper gestured for us to dismount beside it.

Damiata said with little humor at all, “So this is Ravenna,” recalling the familiar saying. And I could only wonder if the truth we found here would, in fact, be the death of us.

The door was a flimsy screen of woven branches. Our guide gestured us inside, although he and his dog did not follow. A fire of grapevine and dry brush burned down to coals directly on the dirt floor. Behind it, illuminated like the enthroned Virgin in a sacred play, sat a woman whose chair was entirely concealed by her huge skirts and layers of shirts. Her features were strong, mannish, but she had plucked her eyebrows into thin curves, like a banker’s wife; a green kerchief covered her head. She appeared to be twenty-five, but perhaps she was only seventeen. On the
pianura
, a woman becomes a
vecchia
at Damiata’s age.

With a sudden, feral movement she looked up at us. Damiata made a little gasp and I could feel the fear down to my numb toes. Her pale eyes had a quicksilver sheen, like a wolf’s. Peasants call this peculiar coloration
occhi burberi
—fierce eyes.

She spread her hands over her lap as if brushing crumbs from her mountain of skirts, displaying rings on every finger and the cheap bracelets that sheathed her wrists. “I am Caterina. What do you want to find?” Her Tuscan was surprisingly good.

“A murderer,” Damiata answered, far more quickly than I could. “A man who has murdered my dearest friend. And two other innocent women.”

The witch’s fierce eyes narrowed, a cat peering into torchlight. “You want to ask
Angelo bianc
?”

“Yes,” Damiata said. She glanced at me, uncertain. But we could no longer turn back.

The makeshift door creaked. Another young woman entered. Taller, darker, and more slender than Damiata, she wore only half as many peasant skirts, rings, and bracelets as
Zeja
Caterina. Her head
wobbled a bit and her eyes were unfixed, as if she had used opium. Or as if she had returned from a goat ride.

This
strega
was followed by a man in a wool tunic, at once identified by his unnaturally white, leather nose; as I had suspected, the men we had seen at that abandoned farmhouse were
magi
. More to my surprise, behind him trailed two children, a boy and a girl, neither older than eight or ten, both wearing hemp shirts and sorrowful little expressions; as if they were choirboys in the Corpus Christi procession, each carried a lighted wax candle. They made their way behind the witch’s throne, where a little tent had been constructed of two horsehair capes thrown over a frame of boughs. The children scurried inside like mice returning to their nest.

Leather-nose moved the enthroned
zeja
and her chair just enough to reveal another prop: upon a small table rested a clear glass flask sufficient to hold the contents of a wine bottle, although it had been filled only with water.

Zeja
Caterina again made that whisking motion with her hands, as if brushing something from her lap. But now a book rested atop her skirts, already open; she was pressing the leaves flat. I was certain I had missed the introduction of this item while I observed the children; the book had probably been concealed in the folds of her ample skirts. Nevertheless, had I been more credulous, I would have regarded its materialization as magical.

As the
zeja
turned the pages I could see that it was not a printed book; the text had been copied in a single column with wide margins, the stiff parchment nearly as soiled as the leather binding. It appeared to be a schoolboy’s text, probably a geometry. I believed I glimpsed squares and circles drawn in the margins, although the lines were faint.

“There are many great spells in this book,” the sorceress said as she continued to turn the leaves, her companion
strega
and the leather-nose wizard looking on as if she had produced a relic of the True Cross. At last
Zeja
Caterina appeared to obtain a suitable incantation. She peered into the tent and addressed the children inside, her Romagnolo so rapid and high-pitched that I could no more discern her words than I could understand a sparrow addressing her chicks.

This instruction was followed by a silence, except for the crackling coals and the creaking of the flimsy hut, as it shuddered in the wind.

The children began to speak in chirping Romagnolo, their cadence herky-jerky but their words recognizable. “
Angelo bianc, per vostr santite e mia purite
.” Here I divined the importance of these little sparrows: Holy Lucifer could only be summoned by the
purite
—virginity—of a child.

I never saw the
zeja
extend a sly hand over the flask on the table before her, but she must have done so, dropping some sort of agent into it, because the water billowed, taking on a reddish hue dotted with sparkles, some bright as fireflies.

“The clouds have cleared,” the
zeja
said. “The king has come.” A pen had materialized in her hand and she leaned forward and dipped it into a small clay inkwell; neither had I seen this previously, although the little vessel now sat in plain view on the table. “Who asks him?”

“Damiata.” She fearlessly raised her chin.

“Then you writes it,” the
zeja
said, turning the book sideways in her lap.

Damiata navigated around the fire, her hems stirring embers from the blazing coals. On the opposite side she took the pen and bent over. Damiata’s cape, belled by her own layers of skirts, blocked my view of the book and I could no longer see her face. I studied her back intently, but she offered no revealing shudder, no hint at all as to what she saw from her new vantage. Hence I could not say if the question Damiata asked, in a trembling voice, was a performance or a fear born of some childhood superstition: “Will this put my soul at risk?”

The witch’s wolfish eyes devoured Damiata. “Many great lordships has signed it.”

You can imagine how desperately I wanted to know the names of these “great lordships.” If one of them was Oliverotto da Fermo or Vitellozzo Vitelli—or even Paolo Orsini—his signature might connect him directly to the murder of the pope’s son. But I also knew that Damiata might well be dead in an instant if I so much as coughed.

Damiata began to turn the pages herself, the parchment whispering like dry oak leaves. With each movement of her arm, her shoulders
rocked very slightly. Hence it was quite noticeable to me when this motion stopped. Her shoulders rose with a quick heave.

Damiata’s trembling voice was certainly not a performance. “Did you see these men sign it?”

The witch’s nostrils twitched. Behind her the children tittered. Her fierce eyes still fastened to Damiata’s face, the
zeja
nodded just a bit. If she said anything, I did not hear it.

Behind me, however, I heard our guide’s voice, coming from outside. “
Licorn
.” This was certainly
licorno
. Unicorn. I assumed it was a password.

The mastiff keeper flew past me as if blown in by a whirlwind.

Damiata turned just as quickly, her face white. “Get the book!” she shouted at me. “They are all in—”