Immortal (22 page)

“Is there really a need for this confraternity?” a tall, stout man in fine clothes was saying. He was familiar looking and stood facing me, flanked by a lean, dark-haired man whose face also tugged at my memory. Facing him, with their backs to me, stood three red-cloaked magistrates.

“Signore Petrarca, the Confraternity of the Red Feather will do important work for the Church, stamping out the seeds of idolatry by identifying sorcerers, astrologers, prodigies, alchemists, augurers, spellmongers, satanists, and witches of all kinds!” one of the red-cloaked men facing him said hotly. “We will burn them and cleanse Florence!”

“Those things don’t exist except in the fantasies of ignorant folk, so why do we need to found a society to find and fight them?” Signore Petrarca asked. He was an older gentleman with an expressive, handsome face, and I suddenly recognized him: he was Giotto’s friend, the man who had intervened years ago in the Piazza d’Ognissanti, when the crowd had been about to burn me as a witch. He had aged since then and looked to be about fifty. “There are more important concerns: the unification of Italia, the return of the papacy to Roma, where it belongs…”

“I know of a witch who uses his black art to perpetuate his youth,” said one of the men who had his red-cloaked back to me. I recognized that loud grating voice with its hint of a whine. I felt for my sword, but it wasn’t by my side.

“If he were truly practiced in black arts, he would have cast a spell on you, Nicolo Silvano!” I exclaimed. Nicolo whirled around, flinging his red mantello over his shoulder.

“Bastardo!” he gasped. “This is the very sorcerer! Doesn’t the devil always know when he’s being spoken of?” He looked at me with a sneer curling his lips, the very image of his father: thin, knifelike nose, prominent chin, carefully coiffed beard cut close to his pockmarked face. The same perfume wafted out around him. Hatred scalded me from my toes to my scalp.

“Look well on the face of this sorcerer,” Nicolo spat. “It will not change!”

“Better my face than your ugly one,” I taunted.

“He doesn’t look like a sorcerer,” Petrarca mused, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes at me. “He looks like a rather handsome young man with poor taste in hat wear. See here, young man, can’t you find something a bit more dashing than a common foggetta?”

“How long will he look exactly like this?” Nicolo shouted. “He looked like a boy of twelve or thirteen for almost twenty years while he worked for my father! It’s witchcraft!”

“That’s older than your age, isn’t it?” Petrarca returned in a measured tone. “How would you know what he looked like before you were born?”

“I’ve heard rumors of his unusual youthfulness,” a man beside Nicolo said. He was pudgy with oily skin, and when I raked him with a contemptuous glance, I noticed the garb of a Dominican under his red magistrate’s mantello. He stuck his nose into the air.

“Rumors are like the fantasies of little girls,” I said, more calmly than I felt, “unreal. Are you a little girl, Friar, that you place your faith in them?”

“Exactly,” the stately Petrarca said. “We should doubt what we hear until we can verify it as truth. Indeed, we should embrace doubt itself as truth, affirming nothing, and doubting all things except those in which doubt is sacrilege!”

“Luca, we should be on our way,” Moshe Sforno urged me, jostling my elbow.

“But I can prove it, Signore Petrarca,” Nicolo said slyly. “I know of a letter that discusses his parents’ search for him, and how they kept the company of heretics, and this letter was written thirty years ago!”

“With all due respect, a thirty-year-old letter proves nothing,” demurred Petrarca.

“Look at his chest! He’s supposed to bear the mark of heresy on his chest!” Nicolo cried. The Dominican with him raised his eyebrows at me, and even Petrarca tilted his head in curiosity. I smiled coldly, parted my mantello, undid my farsetto, and slowly lifted my camicia. My chest was unblemished. Nicolo was not to be dissuaded. “He conceals the mark with black magic! Look closely at his face, and go examine a panel kept by the nuns of San Giorgio. His face is there, only a few years younger than he is now!”

“His is a fair face that a painter would want to paint.” Petrarca shrugged.

“Giotto painted it!” Nicolo cried, with a flourish. “Giotto, who died a decade before the Black Death! You can see he doesn’t age as normal people do, he’s some sort of freak, a demon in human form! He cast a spell on the great Giotto to paint him!”

Nicolo drew his sword, flicking the tip of it onto my throat. But I felt no fear as I met his gaze. He wouldn’t kill me with these other men looking on. It wasn’t Nicolo’s style. He would wait until we were alone and my back was turned to run a sword through me. It was my task to be sure he didn’t find me thus. Nicolo pressed slightly, nicking my flesh. A drop of blood ran down over my Adam’s apple.

“Put your sword away before you hurt yourself with it, Nicoletta,” I sneered.

“I’ve left a gift for you at my father’s brothel,” he said, so only I could hear him. “Be sure you collect it!”

“This ugly episode has gone too far,” Petrarca said, stepping between us. He placed his index finger on the flat of the blade and pushed it aside. Nicolo let the sword drop, but he kept his stony eyes on me.

“The Confraternity of the Red Feather cannot be stopped,” Nicolo shouted. “We will hunt down and burn witches and sorcerers, destroying evil in Florence!”

“What about snakes, Nicolo?” I asked. “You’d better leave room for them in your charter else you’ll be exterminating yourself!”

“You would do well to rethink your position, Signore Petrarca,” the Dominican said. He gave me a scathing look. “If we rid Florence of the evil creatures in her midst, perhaps we can prevent a recurrence of the Black Death!”

“I am not inclined to believe that solution will work,” Petrarca answered mildly.

“Come, Silvano, your plans intrigue me,” the Dominican said. “I know a cardinal, beloved of the Holy Father Innocent VI, who would be well pleased with your confraternity. It’s his passion to cleanse the world so that God’s will can be established. He’s personally wracked with sorrow over the stain that Eve’s sin has visited upon mankind, and has worked for decades to eradicate it!”

“I will support you with all the power at my disposal,” added the first magistrate. He drew Nicolo away, with the Dominican alongside them.

But Nicolo turned and called, “Bastardo, give my regards to Simonetta when you see her. Tell her you’ll soon be joining her!” He threw back his head and laughed.

What had he done to sweet Simonetta? A red haze clouded my vision. I growled and lunged, but Moshe Sforno and Petrarca held me back.

“Let go, I won’t follow him,” I snarled in frustration. Sforno released me.

Petrarca was staring at me raptly. “If you good gentlemen will excuse us, walk with me, young man!” He placed his arm around my shoulders and led me off toward the Baptistery. He said nothing until we stood in front of Giotto’s bell tower, and the silence allowed me to calm myself. By the time I stood looking at the beauty which Giotto had created at such great expense to the city fathers, I was almost smiling, remembering Giotto’s humor and kindness.

“You look like a man caught in memory,” Petrarca observed. “I have a memory, too. A memory from a dozen years ago, when I stopped in Florence on my way to Roma.” He scowled and fingered his mantello. “I remember a boy of eleven years, being readied to burn at the stake. A boy who was clearly indentured to an evil man. Would it be possible for such a boy to be only eighteen now, all these years later? Even if this boy doesn’t bear some mark on his breast?”

His words were ones I feared but, this time, I didn’t contract with fear. I stayed soft in my chest, undefended. “My life is a tribute to God’s cruel humor, starting with my residence on the streets of Florence, continuing with my life in a brothel of perversions, and then as a guest of Jews, who themselves hold a precarious place in Florence. As for my origins, I only know a few fragments of a story, and some of the pieces don’t fit. I don’t know for sure.”

“You have the aura of the elect. Surely you are the son of refined people. You are too intelligent not to be!”

But of course, I would sound intelligent. The doors of my mind had been opened by the likes of Master Giotto and Moshe Sforno, Friar Pietro and the Wanderer and Geber the alchemist. Even Bernardo Silvano, loathsome as he was, had managed to impart something to me. “Of my origins, I remember nothing except begging on the streets of Florence.”

“It matters naught. ‘Memory brings forth not reality itself, which is gone forever, but the words elicited by the representation of reality, which as it disappeared impressed traces upon the mind via the agency of the senses.’ Augustine said that. I agree,” Petrarca said seriously. “Through our thoughts and our writings, we give form and meaning to our journey. You will tell your story one day, Luca Bastardo. In telling it, you will find meaning. That’s how you will uncover who and what you are.”

He reached into a leather pouch hanging from his shoulder by a strap and took something out. “Here,” he said, tossing it. “A gift for you. For your memories. I wish I were going to be around to read them!”

I caught Petrarca’s gift in midair. It was a lavish gift for a stranger: a calfskin bound book with blank white vellum pages. It was thick and beautiful, the calfskin soft and supple, a pleasure to hold in my hand. It still is, as I sit in my small cell with the walls pressing in again. The pages are nearly full now; I have filled them as I await my execution. The time here, though short, would have crawled if it weren’t for Francesco Petrarca’s gift and Giotto’s small panel of St. John, both of which were brought to me by Leonardo il Maestro himself, after the soldiers of the Inquisition dragged me to this cell. Back then I thanked Signore Petrarca profusely; such notebooks were rare and costly. He laughed off my stammered words of gratitude in his mercurial way.

“We stand before Giotto’s brainchild, and were you not his protégé? I knew the Master only briefly, but his was an honorable friendship, and I have cherished it faithfully. If you were beloved of him, that more than suffices for me.”

So he remembered me from Giotto’s side, too. I swallowed. “You know my secret, and you don’t think me a sorcerer? You aren’t tempted by Nicolo Silvano and his confraternity?”

Petrarca shook his head. “He is, ah, rather unappealing, with that heavy perfume and superstition.” He shrugged. “If the Author of all times and ages permits you to wander for a longer time than most, who am I to question that? Who are you to gainsay the grace of His gift?”

It was the first time my agelessness had been presented to me in the light of God’s grace, and I stared at Petrarca, unable to speak at all. I saw myself whole in an entirely new way. He laughed again and took my arm and told me that we must now be good friends, since we had both been befriended by Giotto.

LATER, AS EVENING WAS COMING ON,
after I had spent a few hours grimly ruminating on what Nicolo had meant about a gift, I went to the brothel. I was reluctant to do so, but also, with the contradictory logic of the heart, I wanted to. I wanted to see my old prison from the perspective of freedom. And I had to face whatever it was that Nicolo had left for me. So I sped off toward the city walls on the eastern end of town, running through twisting streets where chasms created by tiny cottages wedged in between massive towers let small dapples of light onto the damp and dark cobblestones. Finally I came to the palazzo that I had promised myself I would never again enter. The front windows were bare and let the light in; I had pulled down the drapes all those years ago. The place seemed deserted, as so many buildings still were, four years after the first onslaught of the plague that had devastated Florence. As I slowly ambled toward the door, the tiny responsive hairs on the back of my neck lifted and pulsed. Something was terribly wrong. As I pushed open the door to the brothel, my hand trembled.

Inside it was silent, as it had been during Silvano’s long dominion. I had not left it thus. When I walked out with the blood of eight men on my arms and chest, children openly milled about and talked and the maids gossiped as they cleaned up the bodies. In killing, I had brought life to the palazzo. Simonetta hugged me and wished me well in my new home, and I assured her that Nicolo would not come back, because I’d threatened him with dire consequences.

I called out, but no one answered. I went through the foyer into the hall and became aware of the sickly sweet smell of rotting flesh. All the doors were closed, and when I opened the first one, I saw a small form on the bed. “No!” I shouted. My heart thumped as I ran to the bed. It was one of the small, delicate children from Cathay, one of Silvano’s last acquisitions. She hadn’t been in the palazzo long before I’d liberated it, and her spirit hadn’t yet been broken. She had a sweet laugh like little bells trilling. She had barely grown in the years I’d been gone, and now, her slanted eyes stared unseeing out of her triangular yellow-skinned face. Her throat had been cut.

I vomited, then lurched out of her room. Next was the room of a young blond boy and he lay crumpled in a heap, facedown, on the floor. His throat, too, had been slit. I was crying as I ran upstairs into the private wing. I banged open Simonetta’s door, saw her plump form on her bed. She lay as if asleep, her long blond braid trailing off the luxurious velvet pillow that was one of the features of this palazzo. Her chest wasn’t moving, and her eyes with their engraved crow’s-feet were peacefully closed. There was neither blood nor mark on her neck, but she was dead. Her sweet seamed face with its red birthmark was rolled to one side, and her worn hands were folded at her breast. Nicolo must have given her poison. I collapsed on the floor. Simonetta had been kind to me, and now she was dead for it. Nicolo, vile thing that he was, had killed his own mother. It was an unthinkable atrocity. If I hadn’t left to live at the Sfornos’, perhaps she would have been saved. I should not have abandoned her. Regret and rage wouldn’t save her now. I didn’t try to stem the tears that dripped down my face.