Immortal (21 page)

“Do you think it’s so easy to get rid of me?” The Wanderer shook his shaggy head with its black-and-gray mane of hair. “Long from now and far from here, we will meet again, Bastardo.”

“I wish you well, Wanderer,” I said. He raised his hand in farewell and shambled back down the cobblestone road into the city. A few steps later he looked back over his shoulder.

“Take care of the ass, eh, Bastardo? He’s an old friend, too,” the Wanderer called. I made a vaguely obscene gesture which provoked a laugh in the Wanderer. Slowly I grinned back. Then the Wanderer went on his way, and I resumed my walk back out into the Tuscan hills, to bury yet another friend.

Chapter
12

I FOUND MYSELF WITH MONEY
to surpass my farthest dreams. I went to the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo on the afternoon of the day after burying Geber and discovered that the Wanderer was right: Geber kept a substantial account of a thousand florins, which was augmented by investments in a wool factory and ownership of a vineyard in nearby Anchiano. Ginori, whom I’d called Rosso, had a third that many. However, Ginori owned the building that housed his shop and home, and he had an inventory of dyestuffs, bolts of fabric, and the other appurtenances of his trade. I was now wealthy, with all the tools of an established business. There were taxes to be paid, but I could take possession of Geber’s belongings and Ginori’s home whenever I chose. With half of Florence dead, legal matters pertaining to inheritance and bequest were being hurried along. Those who were left wanted to get back to the woolen cloth industry and international commerce, the grain trade and the artisanal profiteering, the banking and investing, the carnevales and the art that had made us Florentines, according to Pope Boniface, the fifth element of the universe.

I walked out of the palazzo in a kind of stupefaction. This inheritance meant freedom on a scale I had longed for but never thought I’d have. I had the means with which to support myself honorably. I would never again have to follow anyone’s directives. I would choose where I went, when. Hunger and cold were behind me, and more than that, I could even gratify myself.

It was a cool, wintry day with a vast yellow sky like buttermilk, and I held in my hand a sheet of linen paper with writing on it that noted my inheritance and gave me the right to withdraw funds from my new accounts. Outside on the piazza, a breeze sucked the paper from my hand and flipped it onto the ground. As I bent to retrieve it, a horse cantered up. Just as my fingertips grazed the paper, the tip of a longsword, the mighty spada da una mano e mezzo, landed on the paper a hair’s breadth from my fingertips. Nicolo Silvano was leaning down, sword arm outstretched, sneering.

“Collecting your inheritance, sorcerer?” he asked. “How long do you think you’ll have it before people realize what you are, the spawn of some unholy, long-lived evil? My father said he rescued you once when a crowd would have burned you for never aging!”

“Your father didn’t rescue me. Your father never did a good act in his miserable life,” I said coolly. “A great man rescued me and your father happened to be around to collect me.”

“My father was a great man! What was your father, a freak like yourself? Don’t you ever wonder, Bastardo, what kind of evil thing could sire a beautiful abomination like yourself and then lose you?” Nicolo laughed. “My father speculated about it!”

“What I wonder is none of your concern,” I said. I eyed his posture and seat. He held the sword awkwardly, as if it were new, and I knew he’d never had lessons in swordsmanship. I straightened in a quick burst and kicked it. It skittered up off the linen paper and almost clattered out of Nicolo’s hand; only his ungainly lurch forward on the withers of his horse kept him from dropping it. I squatted and grabbed the paper, simultaneously dancing out of the way of the horse’s clomping iron-shod feet.

“You may hold a sword, but you’ll never be a nobleman,” I taunted him. “You’ll always be the son of a lowlife brothel keeper who enslaved and killed children!”

“I am a nobleman, the city fathers have made me one,” he said, righting himself on the horse, regripping his sword, and circling around me. “My father would be proud of me, I will fulfill his dreams!” Nicolo tried to steer his horse at me, but I slapped its rump and it shied back, nearly unseating him.

“It takes a snake to be proud of a snake.”

“You’re jealous because I have a father,” Nicolo cooed. He straightened on his horse and smirked, gathering the reins in his sword hand. “I went back to my father’s palazzo, Bastardo. I took a certain document that pertains to you. A certain letter that I will show to the Church fathers when the time is right. And then they will burn you!” Then he leaned down and punched my face with his free hand. Fury erupted within me. The superhuman strength I had called on before surged through me, and I reached up and pulled him down off his horse, tearing apart his leather stirrups. He screamed and tried to thrust the sword at me, but I knocked it away. Kicking him to the ground, I grabbed the sword. I aimed the tip at his throat.

He was panting, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. An acrid scent threaded through his cloying perfume: the odor of fear. I could kill him. I wanted to. I pressed the point of the sword into his Adam’s apple. A drop of blood beaded up. My hand trembled. I remembered how his father had once pressed a knife into my throat in the same manner. I did not want to be like Bernardo Silvano. And more than that, though that was powerful motivation, I did not want to attract divine attention to myself.

God was usually cruel, that much I knew from my life. I did not know whether He would be pleased or angry if I dispatched Nicolo, who was the spawn of cruelty and evil. Either way, killing Nicolo was likely to provoke His laughter. And I had had enough of God’s mirth.

Not from compassion but from fear of divine notice, and the suffering it engendered, I stepped away. I did not know how much greater my suffering would be in sparing Nicolo. I would not now be in this tiny cell, broken and bleeding. But I do not question my journey, because as Geber said, he who fails to keep turning the wheel thus set in motion damages the working of the world and wastes his life.

“You’re weak,” Nicolo sneered. “Your weakness will be my victory, Bastardo!” He mounted his horse, it reared up and I jumped back to avoid its hooves, and he sped off, laughing.

I returned to the Sfornos’ with a torn lip and black eye. Moshe Sforno stood in the kitchen by the fire. He raised his eyebrows, then set down his wineglass and came over to examine my lip and eye. His hands were gentle but firm as they probed the wounds, and I resolved that, when I was a physico, my hands would be friendly like that with my patients. The residue of tension left over from my encounter with Nicolo eased away with Sforno’s kindness.

“Wash up and you’ll be fine,” he said. “Nicolo Silvano?”

“Yes. Signore, I’m wealthy now. I have a home. And a business, a bottega for selling dyes.”

Sforno smiled. “Very good. Will you be moving out and operating the bottega?” He went to the wine cask and poured off a cup for me.

“There’s no hurry for Luca to leave,” Mrs. Sforno said. She entered the room wearing a plain brown apron over her dress and carrying potatoes, cabbage, and carrots in a basket. She did not look at me but set to work shaving and chopping carrots with her skillful paring knife, and soon had a pile of translucent orange shavings. Her yellow headdress was bent over the table. “You’re still young, Luca. It’s best for you to stay here and learn what Moshe has to teach you. He says you have talent and you’ll make a fine physico.”

“Thank you, signora,” I murmured, pleased to be accepted, even so offhandedly.

Mrs. Sforno went on, “Besides, you don’t know how to cook or clean and there are few servants about in the city for you to hire. You can rent out the dye shop—”

“You know about that?” I asked, surprised.

“Just because women stay indoors most of the time doesn’t mean they can’t get information,” she said tartly, sounding like Rachel. “So you’ll rent out the dye shop.”

“It won’t be easy to find renters, with so many dead,” Sforno noted.

“In a few months it will be,” Mrs. Sforno said. “Half of Florence is gone, but people will move in, immigrants from all over. Many places are decimated by the Black Death, and people will come to Florence to rebuild their lives.” She sounded certain and reasonable as she continued with her work. “You’ll bank the rental income. Your money will stay where it is, in the bank. I don’t want you wasting it on gaming and dice or”—her white hand with the knife paused, and then went back to chopping—“or on any other unworthy pursuit.”

“Yes, signora,” I said solemnly, because I knew what she meant, and she needn’t have worried. I had long ago sworn to myself that I would never pay for sexual favors, if I ever wanted them, which seemed unlikely after my history.

“When you’re grown, you’ll move out, and you’ll have an honorable profession and good savings,” she finished firmly.

“Leah, you’re so practical, and kind, too.” Moshe Sforno wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and nuzzled her. I turned away. I felt both flattered that she cared enough about my welfare to decide for me this way and a little irritated that, yet again, someone else wanted to oversee my life. This was a gentler binding, of course, than Silvano’s. But I wondered if I would ever again be as free as I was on the streets, and if I would always harbor, like a sore tooth, this gnawing sense of not belonging. “Luca,” Mrs. Sforno said. Her voice held a warning note and I snapped around to face her. “Hire a tutor for your lessons. Rachel is not to go to the barn and be alone with you again. It’s not seemly!”

I was astonished, and a little afraid of the signora’s wrath, and it took me a moment to answer. I swallowed. “Yes, signora!” Then I fled to the barn.

After I washed up, I went back out into the city, to the once-crowded, now-desolate narrow street on the riverbank near the Ponte Santa Trinita where Geber had lived. I climbed the stairs to Geber’s apartment and was struck again by the emptiness emanating even into the stairwell. The door didn’t swing open for me of its own accord as it used to, but it did yield to me when I pushed it. I looked around at the room where I had spent so many confusing, stimulating hours. Outwardly, everything was as it had been: the tables were laden with strange objects and stills and bags and boxes and dead animals and stones and mortars with their pestles, but now, instead of everything being in motion, as if the room was somehow breathing its contents, everything was frozen, lifeless, vacant. I went to a table where a large orange butterfly lay with its wings spread wide. I picked up the dead insect and held it to my face to examine it closely. As my breath touched its antennae, it turned to fine brown dust that fell from my fingers and scattered on the table and floor. I cried out in astonishment, and at that moment, other objects on the table disintegrated: dried flowers, spools of thread, lumps of clay, a dead snake, a bowl filled with clear liquid—all turned to piles of dust. I whirled around, and the same thing was happening at all the other tables: bowls holding herbs or liquids, vials of paint or ink, linen squares, and beakers all evaporated into the fine brown dust. It took only a few heartbeats. Then the room was left with plain wooden tables which were bare except for dust, Geber’s illuminated manuscripts, and stacks of paper that he had written on. Even Zosimos’s three-beakers still, of which Geber had been so proud, was gone. I gathered the manuscripts together onto one table and went back to the Sfornos’.

FOUR YEARS PASSED
that I lived in the barn and apprenticed with Moshe Sforno. I began as an empiric, learning by watching Sforno work. He saw patients with every disease and disorder imaginable, from leprosy to dropsy to bad breath, from broken bones to catarrh to epilepsy. I helped him set bones, tend fevers, dress and cauterize wounds, amputate gangrenous limbs, treat earaches through the insertion of a probe, use heated cups to draw humors to specific areas of the body, and administer purges and emetics. I learned about herbs and medicines, was instructed in the preparation and usage of plasters, poultices, fat-based ointments, unguents, and philters, though their preparation was mostly to be left to a trusted apothecary.

I hired a tutor to teach me Latin and Greek and then read Galen’s lengthy
On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, On Complexions,
and
Ars parva,
among others; Avicenna’s million-word
Canon;
and Hippocrates’s
Aphorisms.
Sforno went to great trouble to obtain the laboriously copied manuscripts for me, and insisted that I read the works in their entirety. I read more recent medical authors, too, such as Gentile da Foligno, who had died during the plague from attending the sick; Albertus Magnus, who wrote about human anatomy; and Arnald of Villanova, who discussed the function of air and baths, activity or exercise, sleep, food and drink, evacuations, and the emotions, in maintaining health. In Hebrew, I read Hunain Ishaq’s
Ten Treatises on the Eye,
Haly Abbas, Rhazes, and Maimonides’s treatises.

I enjoyed reading, and found that I could read for as many hours as an oil lamp burned into the night, still waking in the morning feeling rested and buoyant. But I didn’t forget my more practical concerns. I engaged a sword master, and went to his residence near Santa Croce to practice with sword, dagger, and staff. This activity occasioned much teasing from Sforno and his daughters; it wasn’t the sort of thing Jews were wont to do. But I was always aware of Nicolo Silvano’s avowed enmity. By tacit agreement, neither of us wanting to jeopardize our newfound stations, we stayed apart for these years. I studied and he worked in the city administration. He seemed to have stopped, probably only temporarily, spreading tales about me. And, whether through my old acute senses developed in the brothel or through my knowledge of the man, I didn’t have to watch Nicolo at it to know that he, too, was practicing with his longsword. He intended to use it on me on the day that we came together decisively.

In four years, though I was over thirty, I looked and felt like a youth of eighteen. I was still lean and only middling tall, though I was well muscled. I still had reddish-blond hair and I wore it long and tucked up under an ordinary foggetta, which I chose over any other hat for its humbling effect. I never wanted to let myself forget who I was and where I’d come from: no one and nowhere. My chest was bare, without any mark to indicate heresy, as Silvano had once told me I should have. I wondered if I actually did belong to the nobles he had seen, even if the woman did have hair with the same unusual color as mine.

One dreary day, when winter had slicked over the gray stones of Florence with damp and locked the chill into the narrow streets, I went out, as I often did, with Sforno on a call. I didn’t know it, but it was one of those decisive days during which my whole life would change. We walked around the vast unfinished Santa Maria del Fiore. We came around to the other side of the long cathedral, almost bumping into a group of men who were talking, as groups of men often did in the city’s piazze.