Immortal (2 page)

“Bastard sword, that’s funny,” he said, having only just understood the joke. I exchanged a glance with Massimo, who, until now, had been standing off to the side, well out of the fray.

“Let’s go by the river and play at dice,” Massimo said. “I lifted some off one of the condottieri while they were watching you. He won’t miss them for a long time!”

“Oh no.” Paolo groaned. “I hate playing against you, Massimo, I never win!” His lower lip pushed out in a pout and his dark brow furrowed.

“Yes, but you always win at wrestling.” Massimo smirked. It was true, and I thought that Paolo’s victories would be harder won now that I had in my thoughts the old man’s advice about ingegno. Then I realized I could use the old man’s advice against Massimo, too; ingegno was a tool fit for many occasions. I looked around to thank the man, but he was distant, having passed along the beautiful green-and-white marquetry arches of the unfinished Santa Maria Novella. He must have felt my gaze, because he twisted around and raised a hand in farewell. I waved back, and he disappeared into the church.

Massimo leaned forward, his ears waggling. “I also lifted a few soldi, so we can buy food to eat while we play!”

“Sure, since you’re buying,” I said slyly, and Paolo laughed again.

“Sure, today I’ll buy!” Massimo agreed. He was generous when the mood struck him, though he would hoard his take when it didn’t. Today he would share, as long as we were playing one of the board games he loved. He had rummaged his chess board and various pieces of Alquerque and chess from the garbage piles behind
palazzi,
and he had taught us to play, though Paolo didn’t have the wit for them and I preferred to work to earn money for food. Massimo himself had learned the games from gypsies, who were amused by the combination of his contorted physiognomy and his clever mind. They took him up as an object of fascination one season, and then they moved on, as gypsies do, leaving him behind. Massimo liked to tell stories about his time with them, and he persisted in their habits. He and I would squat down outside a silk
bottega
on nice days and set up for a few hours of play. After taking in the old man’s advice that day on the piazza, I grew to be a worthy opponent, cagey in strategy. I would play in slow moves followed by sudden bold turns that threw Massimo off and left him grumbling about his loss. Massimo, clever as he was, never quite caught on to the value of the unexpected. It was the same with Paolo’s penchant for wrestling. He would lock me into a tight hold, but I would shout,
“Ecco, ufficiale!”
His grip would loosen as he turned to see, and I would wriggle out and trip him. Then I’d run like a dog from a surly master with heavy boots. Like Massimo, Paolo wanted to win, but unlike Massimo, Paolo would rain blows on me when he didn’t.

When winter came, the three of us shared food and rags and huddled together for warmth. When we grew especially hungry and, therefore, daring in our pursuit of food, we worked together to acquire it. I would engage some well-dressed old woman in conversation, inventing a story to keep her occupied, while Massimo, with his smooth, quick fingers, would empty her money purse of a few coins. Or Paolo would dart out under a carriage’s wheels and pretend to have been hit, and Massimo and I would threaten the driver, insisting that we would set up an outcry to attract ufficiali, priests, and spectators unless he gave us a few soldi. We had many such schemes for securing a meal, and time, like a swift-moving river, rolled on in these ingenuous pursuits until the day that caprice struck and the direction of my life was altered forever.

On that decisive autumn day, I was more ravenous than usual. It was after a stormy week of stinging rain and lightning that shrieked through cold air. We had spent the week huddled under the Guelf coat of arms on the church of San Barnaba in the teeming San Giovanni quarter in the heart of Florence. I went alone to the Mercato Vecchio late in the day, when the ufficiali were usually holed up in the
tavernas
drinking wine. I didn’t even stop to covet the
mercato
’s wares; I had no head for dreaming that afternoon, just a belly that hadn’t been fed in four days. I circled the central butchers’ pavilion, throwing wary glances over my shoulder for any sign of the police, but I was made bold by the dizzying mingled scents of food, fruit, wines, and oils. A good olive oil gives off a piquant aroma with bitter nutty undertones, and dried figs smell like honeyed meat. I prowled through stalls, my eyes sweeping the muddy ground for anything that had been dropped. At the same time, I looked for an easy mark amid the bustle of patrons cloaked against the changeable autumn weather. I soon spied a jittery old woman and her young granddaughter, plainly but not poorly dressed, with no maidservant following them to carry their purchases. They would be absorbed in each other and in the wares, too busy shopping, squeezing vegetables, sniffing melons, and counting
dinari
to notice a hand slipping away with a
paniota.

I followed them, keeping my distance, then stealing closer. The girl was about my age, nine years, though plumper and much more innocent. She had wavy chestnut hair tied back in a red ribbon and a face shaped in a long oval just like her grandmother. They even moved alike, with the same tilt of their heads and similar hand gestures. For a moment I envied them their obvious closeness. It was a longing of mine to have a family. The closest I had were Massimo and Paolo, who would beat my pickings from me in an instant if they caught me with something desirable. Then I saw the grandmother haggling for some pastries, and the sentiment abandoned me like a discarded husk. There’s nothing like hunger to focus the mind.

I was trained entirely on them when someone bumped my shoulder. It was Massimo swiping past, and I groaned. He would want the old woman and girl. I wasn’t ready to relinquish them and turned to face my friend. He gave me a quizzical, apologetic look, his crazy blue eye tipping upward and his loose ears waggling. Then he pointed at me and bellowed, “Thief! This boy is a thief!”

My feet were well schooled in fleeing, that being the education I’d had until then, but I was so shocked by Massimo’s accusation that I froze. The little girl turned and looked at me, her pink lips dropping open in surprise. I waved my hands to placate Massimo, whose cries were attracting attention. “Thief, thief!” he yelled louder. I stumbled backward—right into the arms of a waiting ufficiale della guardia.

“I’ve got you, dirty thief!” the ufficiale growled.

“I’m not a thief!” I cried.

“Check his shirt,” Massimo urged. “I saw him stuff it in there!”

“There’s nothing on me,” I argued. But there was a subtle brush against my rib as Massimo leaned into me, pointing and jabbing, and my heart grew cold and quiet. There was something there now. The ufficiale thrust his hand into the tattered sash that bound my shirt.

“A signet ring!” the ufficiale cried. He waved it aloft, gold glinting between his thick fingers. “Where did you get this, scoundrel?”

“I didn’t take it!”

“It’s mine,” a cool voice said, tones of scorn ringing out. The crowd around me settled into a quiet that reeked of distaste. The grandmother pulled the little girl behind her. People pressed back as from a viper as a lean, well-dressed man made his way toward us. “It was in my purse just a short while ago. This young thief picked my pocket.”

“I never saw you, sir,” I protested, but the ufficiale slapped my ear, hard, so that it popped. Pain and an insistent buzzing swallowed my head. The man who claimed I had stolen his ring stepped closer to me, and I recoiled in fear. Wafting perfume, he bent his face down close to mine, so that I saw the acne pits on his lean cheeks and the brushstrokes in his coiffed dark beard. He had a pointy, protruding chin and a sharp, whittled nose like a blade. I turned my face away, gagging, and struggled in the ufficiale’s grip.

“Look at me, thief,” he breathed. I slanted my eyes upward. One side of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “You’ll do nicely, my fine lost boy.” He nodded, then straightened.

“He stole something from me that is more valuable than his miserable life,” Bernardo Silvano said. “He belongs to me now. He can work off his debt. That will be fitting punishment for the likes of him.” The crowd melted back silently, and Silvano dug his fingers into my shoulders. “Bind him,” he instructed the ufficiale, who produced coarse rope with which he jerked my wrists together behind my back. I protested and the ufficiale boxed my ears again. A trickle of blood warmed the pinna of my right ear. I looked, unbelieving and horrified, at Massimo, whom I’d considered a brother. He refused to raise his mismatched eyes to me. The rest of the onlookers turned away, the matter resolved, if unpalatably, in their minds. Silvano leaned over and took Massimo’s hand in his own. With his other hand, almost in a caress, Silvano dropped something into Massimo’s palm. Metal gleamed, and Massimo quickly clutched the florin to his chest. A whole florin; that would feed him for a month. Was that what I was worth, a month’s meals?

“No, Massimo!” I pleaded.

Massimo looked up at me and whispered, “I win!” Then he fled.

The ufficiale shoved me at Silvano. “Take him!” he growled. “Just so he stays out of trouble.”

“Trouble doesn’t interest me. I have other plans for him,” Silvano said coolly. Bile washed up on my tongue. I had never felt so alone and afraid. I jerked wildly away from Silvano, but his long silky fingers hid an uncanny strength, and he held me by the ropes around my wrists. He twisted them upward, forcing my arms into an unnatural position. Pain sliced through my shoulders and I groaned, falling to my knees. I looked around for an escape, for help, but there was none. Everyone had returned to their business. There was an old woman begging alms in a whiny voice, and I knew her from under the Ponte Vecchio, had even shared some scraps with her. Now she wouldn’t look at me. Massimo was gone, Paolo nowhere in sight. I thought bitterly that the old man from Piazza Santa Maria Novella was right, that God laughed. And His laughter was cruel and filled with the worst kind of mockery.

Silvano lifted me by my wrists, compelling me forward. “It’s not a far walk,” he said. “Just by the city walls. I’m sure you know where my beautiful establishment is. Everyone does.”

I thought of the discarded bodies, some cut up, always young, that drifted down the Arno from his establishment. “Beautiful isn’t what people call your establishment.”

“What do people know? Beauty is everywhere, in all things, and comes in many forms,” he replied cheerfully. He took up whistling a hymn as we moved through the streets. Twice I wrenched violently to escape him, and twice he caught me by the ropes around my wrists and yanked my arms viciously until I thought they would come out of their sockets. Once I threw myself on the ground, and he boxed my hurt ear so that the blood ran onto my neck. I stumbled forward. The Ponte Vecchio, with its little houses clustered like so many nests, barred the evening sky like a black ribbon stretched across an expanse of yellow silk. The city spread around us in harmonies of gray and ocher, and the hills of Fiesole beyond were already shrouded in the indigo shades of night. Its beauty made exquisite agony of the fate I knew lay ahead. My stomach bucked and heaved with terror, and despite the pain, I stumbled and flopped as much as I dared, desperate to prolong the walk. Silvano was patient, expertly twisting the rope to torture my wrists and hands, and then pressing me forward when I cried out. After some short time we arrived at the city walls, at a palazzo whose immaculate plastered facade belied everything that happened within it. I didn’t know the details exactly, and had never wanted to. I had, of course, witnessed all manner of fornication on the streets, but this place represented a darker, deeper level of fleshly sin. I knew from whispered conversations with Paolo and Massimo that the door that was now opening to swallow me belonged to the most famously depraved brothel in all of Tuscany.

Chapter
2

SILENCE GREETED US.
It was thick and clotted and overwhelmed me. It scared me as much as Silvano did, made me want to shrink into myself and hide. I wasn’t used to silence. The streets of Florence were never quiet. There were always sounds: drunken laughter, whinnying horses, dogs baying, bells ringing in the tower of the Badia Fiorentina, whores calling out, carriage wheels rattling on cobblestone streets, hammers clanging on anvils, boats clanking on the Arno, garbage from windows slopping wetly onto the flagstone street, stone-workers buzzing as they labored on the huge new church of Santa Maria del Fiore that everyone said would one day crown the city…. Even at night the streets vibrated with noise. I expected it. More, the babel had become part of me, like threads woven into a cloak make up the pattern of the fabric. This silence that seeped around me when I entered Silvano’s brothel was unnatural, poisonous. It was alien to me, alien thing that I was, with no family or name.

Silvano shoved me at two stout women who waited in the foyer. “Feed him and clean him, he smells like sewerage. Put him in Donato’s old room. He’ll work tonight.”

The women nodded and one took my shoulder. She had a moonshaped face, dark brown hair, and slack eyes shot through with red veins. The other woman, younger and paler, with a strange red mark across her cheek, reached around my back, and my wrists popped free. I cradled them to my chest as I watched her pick up the cuttings. Through her filmy white shirt, I saw that her back was crisscrossed with red welts.

“Get rid of the lice,” Silvano said, disappearing down the foyer. “He’s meant for a fine class. And tend to his ear. Damaged goods fetch a lower price.”

Neither woman spoke as they led me through the palazzo. It seemed shrouded in shadows, with windows swathed in heavy fabrics and tall candles flickering, but even in the dark I could see that it was sumptuously furnished. Ornate tapestries decorated the walls and gorgeous carved furniture and painted chests adorned the corners. Despite my dread, I couldn’t help but ogle. I had often peeked in windows to sate my curiosity about the way other people, real people, lived, but I’d never actually been inside a palazzo. I gaped at the heavy candelabra and plush carpets, and once I caught a glimpse of someone small slipping behind a door. The women gave me no opportunity to dawdle, but took me straight to an atrium lit brightly with torches and lanterns. A large tub filled with steaming water awaited us. The moonfaced woman untied the sash around my shirt. I wasn’t used to such intimacies and I jerked back. Blank-faced and mute, she persisted, and the sash and shirt came off, followed by my breeches. Everything I owned in the world was, after all, a small, filthy pile of rags; even I could see it moving with insects. Shamed, I covered myself with my hands. The paler woman disappeared and returned with a small bottle and some cloth. I grabbed the bottle and took a deep swig of the green olive oil. It was thick and almost sweet on my palate, and I grunted.

“No, not yet,” she whispered, taking the bottle back gently but firmly. She motioned to the other woman, who grasped my head and tilted it. Then the paler woman poured a few drops into my injured ear. The oil slid slowly through the canal, and the burning inside my head eased. She tore off a small piece of the cloth, wadded it, and plugged my ear. Then she gestured for me to get into the tub.

“What is this?” I asked, touching the mark on her cheek. A few curls from her blond braid wisped against my fingers.

“A birthmark. Don’t worry, it’s not one of those that are the devil’s kiss,” she said.

“I don’t believe in the devil,” I confided. “A man once told me that God laughs, and I think God’s laughter is so cruel that there doesn’t need to be a devil.”

“Hush, now, boy, don’t speak such things, even in this place.” She pointed at the tub.

“What’s your name?” I asked as I climbed in. I sat and warm water lapped out around me in rings. It was my first bath. On summer days I had swum in the Arno, but that was about relief from the scalding heat. Cleanliness wasn’t the goal when I was dodging offal and excrement.

“I’m Simonetta, she’s Maria.” She smiled a little as she took up a boar-bristle brush from a tray beside the tub, as did the moonfaced Maria. Each also took up cakes of lye soap and set to work lathering me and scrubbing me with the brushes. I yelped and swatted the soap away, because it stung the rashes on my skin and the abrasions on my wrists. Maria rapped my knuckles with the back of the brush and I stopped resisting. The water turned muddy and cool. They soaped up my head, taking care to keep my damaged ear dry. Finally they pulled me out of the tub, still covered in soap, and used pails of water to rinse me. Something made the hair frizzle on the back of my neck. Someone was watching me. I peered into the shadowed corners of the atrium until I saw a young man under a trellis covered with grapevines.

“Hey!” I exclaimed, covering myself with my hands.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m Marco. I always welcome the new children.” The women glanced around nervously but then went back to work on me, brushing and rinsing. Marco stepped out of the shadows. He was several years older than me, tall and slim-hipped, with an elegant gait and black hair and black eyes framed by absurdly long lashes. He was quite beautiful, with a face like the porcelain dolls I’d seen in the bags of peddlers. He held something in his hand. “You’re the boy from the street?”

“Luca,” I said. “Luca Bastardo.”

“Don’t feel bad about that, we’re all bastards here”—he chuckled—“and worse. You hungry?” He tossed the thing in his hand to me. It was a small pastry and I snatched it gratefully from the air and gobbled it. Marco sighed. “He’s been planning to take you for a long time, you know. Silvano was waiting until he had use for you, and then last week he got rid of a boy who didn’t work well.”

“Why me?” I asked, intrigued.

Marco shrugged. “I heard him speak about a beautiful noble woman with hair like yours. She came through Florence looking for her son, and she wept as she asked people if they’d seen him. Silvano always laughed about it.”

“I had a mother who looked for me,” I said, wonderingly.

“You’re lucky, she wanted you. I was left here by my parents. They got three florins for me. That’s the most Silvano’s ever paid for one of us.”

I swallowed the last crumb and licked my fingers. “My friend Massimo only got one florin for me.”

“I was worth more than you because I wasn’t covered with dirt and lice,” Marco teased, wagging his black eyebrows playfully. I scowled and he shrugged. “Good friend, that Massimo.”

It was my turn to shrug. People do what they must to survive. The streets of Florence had taught me that. I shouldn’t have been surprised, except perhaps that Massimo hadn’t sold me sooner. Trust was not to be indulged in by such as me. Maybe I had once had parents, but for as long as I could remember, I had been alone in a way that other people weren’t. “At least it wasn’t my parents who sold me!” I said.

“At least I knew my parents,” Marco returned, grinning. “Did you ever try to find yours?”

“I never really thought about them,” I admitted. “I was just glad they didn’t strangle or drown me.”

“Sometimes I think it would be better if my parents had killed me, instead of selling me to Silvano. Maybe if I hadn’t been so beautiful.” Marco’s face shuttered with despair, as if it really were made of porcelain, as if he weren’t a living thing. It was a look I would see often on the faces of the children at this establishment.

I ventured softly, “Is it bad here?”

“Very bad, but they feed you well,” he said flatly. “You can’t work if you’re not well fed. He’s going to beat you soon. Whatever you do, don’t resist! And don’t scream. He likes that and it’ll make him hit you more.”

“I’ve been beaten before and I never screamed,” I said, with some pride. I was no doughy girl to shriek at a little pain. Many times I had withstood Paolo’s fists when he knew I had bread or meat and he wanted it. I often hid myself when I acquired something. The burnt-out walls of the old granary market at Orto San Michele, or the wooden supports of the Ponte Santa Trinita, those were good hiding places. I would have given anything to be squatting there now. I knew all the hiding places in Florence, all the secret passages and shortcuts. Some of my faith in ingegno trickled back into me and I lifted my chin. “I won’t let him beat me! Even if he does, I won’t be here long. I’ll find a way to get out.”

“There’s no escape from Silvano!”

“I’ll think of something. I’ll use ingegno,” I said with certainty. “I’ll run away.”

“He’ll find you and bring you back.”

“If Silvano knows who my parents are, I’ll find them, and they’ll protect me,” I said vehemently. “Or I’ll hide. I know everywhere there is to hide in Florence!”

“No one can protect you from Silvano.” Marco looked at me with pity. “There’s no leaving this place. You’ll see. You have to learn that if you don’t do what he wants you to, it will go hard on you. You’ll be hurt. You could be killed. He enjoys killing.”

“In the Arno, the bodies—” I started. Maria and Simonetta were pouring some flowery scented potion on me and rubbing it into my skin with coarse mitts. They had left lye soap caked in my hair to kill the lice, and my scalp tingled with heat, but I shivered. I remembered the corpse of a young woman, little more than a girl, that I’d seen floating out in the water. She had been famous, a beautiful and desirable courtesan. Everyone knew she had lived here. The ebbing water had exposed her slashed face, ribbons of skin floating out with her hair, and her horribly burnt hands with her arms reaching up out of the water to end in blackened nubs.

“When someone’s displeased him, he makes a demonstration. It’s always bloody. Don’t displease him. Please, Luca Bastardo, take my advice. You seem like someone I could talk to, someone like me who could survive in here. Don’t make it worse for yourself.”

I stared at Marco. His face was serious. With the single exception of the old man at the Piazza Santa Maria Novella telling me to use ingegno, no one had ever before told me to take care of myself. Now here was Marco pleading with me to do so. Massimo, my brother from the streets, hadn’t felt this way. I asked, with some suspicion, “Why do you care what happens to me?”

“Because I care about myself,” Marco said, turning away and pacing. “I’ve been here for eight years. I’ve learned how to stay alive. Most children break into pieces; they wither and die. I stay alive by protecting what’s good inside me. That’s all we have in here, and if we’re not careful, what we’re forced to do makes it go away.”

“I don’t think people have much goodness inside them,” I said, biting off the words.

“Some people do. Not the patrons. That’s one of the reasons I’m nice to the other children. It makes me different from the patrons. It gives me something to live for.” He lifted his head as if he’d heard something. “Take care of yourself, Luca!” He waved and vanished back into the shadows.

“Shush, we work,” Simonetta breathed. A frisson of fear coursed up the back of my neck, but when I looked around, I didn’t see anything. Her eyes flicked toward a window and I glanced there. Perhaps I sensed movement out of the corner of my eye, but the window was empty, like a mirror with no one behind it. The suggestive absence terrified me more than if Silvano had stood in front of me. I fought the urge to cover myself. If he knew that I knew he was watching, perhaps it wouldn’t please him.

THE LAST PLUM CLOUDS HAD VANISHED
into the stars when Simonetta and Maria finally stepped back to survey me. My hair fell in a straight red-blond sheet down my back to my shoulder blades, my skin was scrubbed pink and shiny all over, and a soft musky scent wafted out from me. I held the crook of my arm to my nose and sniffed, smelling myself, feeling myself. Was I still me? I’d never imagined I could look or smell this way. Simonetta licked her thumb and brushed it across my left eyebrow. The inner hairs of that brow bristled straight up; I’d seen that before, on a windless morning when the capricious Arno was flat and silver and showed my face to me. Simonetta scowled at my eyebrow, then shrugged. Maria held out a gauzy yellow
camicia
and I slipped it on, relieved not to be naked. They led me back through the palazzo.

We took a different hall, just as opulent as the first, and came to a dining room. On the table was set a roast boar with an apple in its mouth, a plate of roast fowl, a bowl of steaming bean soup, a small round of bread, and a basket of figs and grapes. The savory smell of rosemary and crispy fat perfumed the air. I ran to the table and grabbed up the soup, gulping it down in loud slurps. It must have been delicious, because the food in that place always was, but all I cared about was assuaging the ache that beat in my blood and stomach. Then I tore into the fowl, ripping off a drumstick with one hand and a hunk of breast meat with the other. I was reaching for the second drumstick when Silvano spoke behind me.

“You eat like a starving dog.”

I froze, my fingers still locked into the soft hot meat of the succulent bird. Slowly I drew my hand back and then turned to face Silvano. He stood in the threshold, holding a long, weighted silk sack that swung back and forth like a pendulum. He stepped closer, scrutinizing me. With his free hand he lifted up a lock of my newly clean hair, then let it fall. A quiver started in my spine, but I stilled it before it could grow into a shudder.

“You clean up well,” he said, with a satisfied smirk. “I knew you would.” He moved his hand in a slow circle so that the lumpy sack swung in a wider arc.

“There are rules in this establishment,” Silvano said, his pointy chin quivering with venomous pleasure. “Rules that must be followed at all times.” His hand moved faster and the sack picked up speed. “You will be clean and quiet,” he said. And then he flicked his wrist, a tiny, expert motion, and the bag blurred toward me. It snapped into my ribs with a force that rocked me on my feet.

I opened my mouth to scream and Marco’s words rang in my brain:
“And don’t scream…. It’ll make him hit you more.”
SoI exhaled slowly through my open mouth. The sack was still circling. Silvano wasn’t done; he was going to hit me again. I couldn’t help myself. Despite Marco’s warnings, I darted around to the other side of the table. Panic like lightning flickered in every limb, every vein. There was nothing but fear of the pain. Silvano tittered and followed me, herding me against the wall.