The Malice of Fortune (48 page)

But I was wrong. As I continued to stare out toward the hill that now obstructed my view of Vitellozzo’s party, a rider on a white warhorse silently emerged atop it. For a heartbeat, he perched at the summit. And then he galloped toward me, snow rising up from the rapid hoofbeats in large puffs, like the smoke from dozens of
scoppietti
, all firing in sequence.

I wondered if Oliverotto da Fermo intended simply to trample me. Instead he powerfully reined the stallion to an abrupt, rearing stop, its forelegs flailing, then leapt from the saddle and quickly covered the several steps between us, his mail shirt chinging.

He did not, however, lunge at me with his knife—either comically or tragically. Instead Signor Oliverotto planted his feet and combed his blond curls with his fingers, almost as if I were a manservant holding his looking glass. When he did focus his pale blue eyes on me, he tilted his head only slightly, as though he did not require some particularly altered perspective in order to find my weakness. “You spoke with Ramiro da Lorca that night, didn’t you? Regarding me.”

Certainly he meant those moments before Ramiro’s arrest. I nodded.

“What did he tell you?”

As before, I believed that only the truth might save me. “He said that Valentino was protecting you. And he asked me to consider why.”

“Do you know?”

“I suspect because you were both at Capua, Signore. And you observed something there that His Excellency would not want the rest of Italy to witness.”

He tilted his head more severely. “I learned something even before I could shave.” Oliverotto seemed to be citing the phrase Valentino had used on the rampart, even as common as it was, so that I would recall that conversation. “Papa Vitellozzo showed me.”

He raised up his immense hands and held them open before me, all his digits spread wide, as if he believed the stigmata had appeared on his palms. Instead he quickly flipped his hands down and made a collar of sorts around my neck, though without touching me. Every muscle in my body clenched, preparing for death.

“If you strangle a woman while you are fucking her, it heightens her ecstasy. She comes at the threshold of death and returns to you, deeply grateful. Almost always she will want it again. But if you do not stop in time …” Oliverotto shrugged his massive shoulders. “I can tell you, by Jesus, there is a strange thing about that, as well. She doesn’t know fear until the last flicker of her life is about to go out. And that is a marvelous thing to see. At that moment, I don’t believe any man could keep from spewing his seed.”

Oliverotto lowered his hands and looked down at his sheathed dagger. “Now this,” he mused. “If you quickly gut a man with this, at once you can see his astonishment. But then he lingers. He must say farewell to the faces in his mind.” He shook his head, as if this stubborn persistence of life had presented him some difficult philosophical conundrum. “I think it is better to observe a man as he watches his wife or child die. Or his lover. Everything leaves him then, except the fear and grief an infant knows when it first enters the world. When that man’s anger is spent, he only wants to crawl back into the womb. You will see for yourself. When we come to Florence. Or perhaps even if you are able to get to Sinigaglia quickly enough.”

The scar-like creases that framed Oliverotto’s mouth twitched
more visibly than his lips, as he enjoyed the futility he saw in my eyes. My distress, however, was a trifle he did not intend to savor. He turned and started back to his horse.

“Is that why you spared me?” I called out, voice and limbs quaking. “So that I can witness another Capua?”

Oliverotto tugged at his saddle. His horse issued a long snort. After a moment he looked back at me.

I summoned all my will and took a step toward him. “I have a question to ask of you, if I might, Signore.” I knew I was risking even this reprieve. “It is the question the duke asked you that last time you saw him. At Cesena.” The question regarding the expression on his uncle’s face when he knew Oliverotto had betrayed him. “Have you had opportunity to consider your answer?”

He gave me a smile a woman would have regarded as charming. “My dear uncle Giovan just looked at me,” he said blithely, as if this were supper-table patter. “No fear, no anger.
Niente
. He was not even surprised. He had known that day would come, almost since the day I came into his house. Since I was six years old.”

My hair danced, given my previous deduction that this rare man would manifest his nature at a very young age. Carefully I asked, “Why do you suppose he knew this, even when you were a boy?”

“Because I was six years old when my uncle sold me into slavery.” Unlike the previous, this smile, though nearly as subtle, was intended for an enemy. “That was when my uncle sent me off to the Vitelli brothers. Three of them. Paolo, Camillo, and Vitellozzo. They began my instruction in this empty old house in Città di Castello. The first morning they brought me a little dog as my companion. That evening they made me kill it. With my hands. The next day the Vitelli brought me another dog. That evening …” He shrugged slightly. “And the third day the same. On the fourth day I strangled the little dog as soon as they put it in my arms. That was when I was deemed ready to begin my lessons as a soldier.”

This answer startled me as much as anything Signor Oliverotto had said. Leaving me to reflect on it, he swung himself back up on his horse, his cape flying and chain mail ringing. The stallion snorted out
a cloud and Oliverotto leaned across the beast’s neck, his face emerging from the steam like some sharp-featured demon spawned in Hell.

“It should also interest you to know that I saw the expression on the Duke of Gandia’s face when he recognized his killer.” He reined his horse to near-perfect stillness. “I was there that night. But I was not the murderer.”

Here Oliverotto wheeled the stallion so violently that its rump knocked me into the snow. When I was able to look up again, I saw him at some improbable distance amid the seemingly vaporous landscape, as though his horse had flown him into the sky.

CHAPTER
21

H
e who deceives always finds those who let themselves be deceived
.

I considered following Oliverotto’s tracks, and those of Vitellozzo’s party, all the way to Sinigaglia. But thinking better of it, I turned in the opposite direction. At once I was presented a vision far less elegant than the splendid party that had abandoned me: the victim of the recent
scoppietto
demonstration remained tied to the stake. The fourth ball had carved away half his jaw.

I freed his bloody corpse and laid him in the snow, prayed briefly for God’s mercy on his soul, then took off at a quick pace. Soon enough I encountered some farmers and determined that Pesaro was the nearest city on the Via Emilia—and also where I thought I might find Valentino’s army, if the duke was bound for Sinigaglia and his appointment with the
condottieri
.

For much of the journey to Pesaro, I traveled across the snowy fields or along the mule paths and irrigation ditches, having observed too many companies of mercenaries on the roads; the allegiances and discipline of these soldiers were always suspect, regardless of who employed them. As I kept moving throughout most of a bitter night, I saw their campfires winking like the zodiac all across the countryside. I assumed the
condottieri
had cleverly divided their forces into many smaller units, so that their true numbers would not be apparent until they reached Sinigaglia. And I wondered if Valentino was walking into a more deadly snare than I had supposed.

I reached Pesaro at daybreak on 30 December, although I had to inquire at a tailor’s
bottega
to be sure of the date; I was also told that Valentino and his army had stayed in and around Pesaro the previous night and had left early that morning, bound for Fano. Here Fortune favored me once again, because I went to the
stufa
, both for news and to bathe and wash my clothes, and there I ran into a courier who was known to be reliable. For several of my few remaining ducats, he agreed to ride to Cesena, retrieve my writing things and papers, along with a few items of clothing, and return as quickly as possible.

I found a cot in a tiny room next to the
stufa
and was so weary that I slept at once, although feverishly. I dreamed I was back in our house on the Via di Piazza, where we had a workroom on the first floor, this opening onto the street on one side, the courtyard we shared with several other families on the other. At the end of the summer the flax was delivered from the fields, already braked and combed, so that it resembled great hanks of grayish-brown hair, as if some giantess had been shorn—or so it seemed to five-year-old Niccolò. Mama always brought in several women to spin these flax fibers into thread, although often she spun as well, as did my two sisters, who were years older than I. On this day a half-dozen distaffs stood in the workroom, reminding me of the scarecrows I saw in the country, because each was just a stick on a tripod, with a bundle of the hair-fine flax stuck at the top, about the size and shape of a woman’s head. With the peculiar self-awareness one sometimes has in dreams, I knew that these flax bundles were intended to represent the heads I would see many years later at Cesenatico, so that it seemed little Niccolò was receiving some dreadful prophetic vision.

Yet I also observed that someone was standing on the threshold that led out onto the street. The flax workroom was flooded with light, but it seemed as dark as a moonless night outside, so that our visitor was nothing but a shadow, as faceless as the creature whose death I had so recently attended. And I knew at once that this visitor was the master of another sort of workshop, where living flesh was rendered into a perverse
disegno
.

His voice slithered like a serpent across the floor. Every hair on my body stood up and I felt myself drawn into the air, entirely off my feet.
You are almost here, Niccolò. In the center of my Labyrinth. But you will not see my face until I turn away
.

I awakened covered with sweat as if I were at the bath, my forehead nevertheless like ice, the words this maestro of Death’s workshop had whispered into my dream still echoing in my head. As much as my intellect told me this could only have been the voice of either Vitellozzo Vitelli or Oliverotto da Fermo, some baffling intuition stood between me and the certainty that either was a monster in the guise of a man. Vitellozzo remained a cipher, even face-to-face. And as closely as Oliverotto’s dreadful words matched the murderer’s deeds, a nagging voice of my own told me that Oliverotto was not a rare man; his casual brutality and naked ambition had become all too common among the
condottieri
. He had been bred to violence and murder, not born to it. And I believed that some vestige of his tormented soul regretted the evil tutelage that had begun when he was forced to strangle a little dog.

In truth, I could only see that whatever the differences between Vitellozzo and Oliverotto—those of a stern, cruel father and his rebellious son—they were both conspiring to cast suspicion on Valentino himself. Of course, they were too clever to baldly accuse the duke of his brother’s murder; instead I had been led to the missing page of Euclid’s
Elements
, which Vitellozzo might well have removed himself, in order to fraudulently represent it as some sort of confession Valentino had made during his goat ride. And with equal subtlety, Oliverotto had implied that he had witnessed the Duke of Gandia’s murder yet had not wielded the knife, which certainly left Valentino suspect, given that the duke already appeared to be protecting some secret he and Oliverotto shared.

Hence it occurred to me that this was the witness for which I had been summoned: to cast doubt on Valentino, so that the guilty could continue to elude justice. And in this they had to some extent succeeded, because those doubts had a hard kernel of credence that would not go away, like a seed in one’s shoe.

It had been dark for several hours when a knock came at my door, whereupon my courier entered like the deus ex machina in a Greek drama. All of the clothing and papers he brought in a single leather sack were items I had left behind in Cesena, save one large packet, wrapped in fish paper, that had just been delivered from Florence.

Almost since I had arrived in Imola three months previously, I had been begging my correspondents in Florence to send me a copy of Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
. No work of the ancients—much less us moderns—so carefully illuminates the character and natures of various eminent men, and I had been desperate for some insight into the unfathomable Valentino. But I had long abandoned all hope that it would ever arrive.

So to unwrap that packet and find the
Parallel Lives
, after all the misfortune I had experienced, was little less than a miracle to me. My edition had been printed in the shop of Bartolomeo de Zanis in Venice; the work was not bound, although it had been thumbed through a good bit, with some writing in the margins. I took a moment to savor the woodcut printed on the first page, which portrayed Theseus killing the centaur at the wedding of Pirithou and Hippodamia; I regarded this as an ironic emblem for several of the matters that so consumed my thoughts.