The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  The children shuffle, spin and strike, repeating the same exercise until their arms burn, then another. What is keeping Papà? Onoria begins to ask herself. Augusto takes their daggers and shows them, with his sword, what to do next. He smells of sweat and stale orris root, and his shirt is stained yellow under the arms, so Onoria is glad when he goes back to his place under the tree. ‘Ready?’ she asks Federigo, who rolls his eyes in exasperation and nods.

  Onoria likes the way her feet move as if she is dancing and not pretending to fight. When Augusto at last decides to see if they have learnt anything, and tells them to square off and fight each other, Onoria finds that she can easily twist out of the way of Federigo’s weapon and slash him – lightly, because she doesn’t want to hurt her friend – across the legs and shoulders. When she has lured him towards her and slipped her sword along his arm so that it presses into the hollow below his collarbone, Augusto barks, ‘Stop!’ He pulls his brother, who is rubbing his shoulder, over to the shade of the tree, and shows him something in the book. Onoria is panting slightly: the sword, though made of wood, is still quite heavy. But she doesn’t want Augusto Ellebori to think she is tired, so she goes through the postures, twirling the sword above her head and lunging, side-stepping, lunging. She is trying to imagine what it might feel like to face someone with an actual sword, to have its point flashing across her vision, the terror of knowing you could be cut, or run through, in the blink of an eye. Or to do it yourself. She shakes off the thought and assumes the guard of the unicorn, left hand behind her back, sword at the level of her forehead, pointing forward. She shuffles, steps, twists her wrist and cuts the legs from under her invisible enemy.

  Augusto sends Federigo back towards her with a shove. The boy has a thin-lipped look that signifies annoyance. I want to stop too, she’s going to say, but just then Augusto orders them to begin. Federigo raises his sword, and Onoria crouches. She lets him come on, then taps him across the wrist. Federigo steps back, takes a lower guard; Onoria feints and lunges. The wooden blade slips across Federigo’s chest and under his arm, but instead of stopping, he grabs both her wrists. She has time to see him squeeze his eyes shut before his foot comes up and he kicks her, hard, between the legs.

  Pain comes down over her like a black hood. She dimly feels herself fall to her knees. I’m going to be sick, she thinks. A hand touches her arm and she flails it away. Hot tears force her eyes open. She sees Federigo’s shoes. ‘You …’ she croaks. He squats down and takes her shoulders. His face is white, and his mouth is twisted. Behind him, she sees Augusto, legs apart, fists on his hips, mouth wide. The ringing in her ears changes to his ugly laughter.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry, Onoria!’ Federigo hisses. ‘I’m sorry! He made me! That …’ He drops his voice even lower. ‘My brother said I wasn’t to be bested by a girl. He said he’d tell our father. And he showed me what to do in the book. I wasn’t going to do it, but I thought … I didn’t mean to kick you that hard, and I thought, seeing as you’re a girl …’

  ‘Oh, Madonna.’ Onoria wipes her face with a dusty hand. ‘Because I’m a girl, eh?’ she says through clenched teeth. ‘One day I’ll kick you there and then we’ll see!’ She pushes him away and stands up shakily. Federigo stands up too.

  ‘That’s enough for today, Augusto,’ the boy says, a surprising edge in his voice. He picks up his sword and slashes it angrily through the air. ‘I hate all this,’ he mumbles. ‘I’ll never be a soldier! I’ll tell Father when he comes home, you’ll see.’

  ‘If you can pull a filthy trick like that just because someone …’ Onoria bites down on the words that want to come out. Augusto is a brute – worse – but he is her best friend’s brother, and she has learnt respect from her father. ‘… I thought you were my friend,’ she mutters. But this time she lets him take her arm and help her up. ‘Go away,’ she says, trying to grin to show that she doesn’t really hate him. But perhaps she does. When the nausea ebbs, she goes over to Augusto and is about to hand over her sword when she sees an unpleasant little movement in the wrinkles around his eyes. Amusement, disdain, and something else that hangs in the air between them, as feral as the stink of his sweat.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, and makes a pretty curtsey. Then she hesitates, deliberately. ‘My father says you are a good swordsman. I was wondering, Don Augusto … There’s an attack that I don’t quite understand. Could you show me?’

  ‘Attack, eh?’ Augusto’s lips pull back, showing a black tooth. ‘What do girls know about attack?’

  ‘It’s this one.’ She goes to the book and flips forward until she finds the page. ‘See, here. Can you explain the footwork?’

  Augusto snorts. ‘So easy.’

  ‘Oh! Perhaps you could show me!’

  She can see him considering, a little string of tics across his face: dubious, proud, then cruel. ‘All right, then,’ he says. ‘But don’t cry to your father if I’m not gentle.’

  ‘I promise,’ she says. She backs away from him, into the open yard. ‘The defence is like this, I think.’ She puts her weight on her back foot and holds the wooden sword upright in front of her, making it look clumsy, like a tired altar boy trying to hold one of those long candles straight. Porta di ferro, but badly done. Augusto has picked up his brother’s sword. He advances on her with a bandy-legged swagger.

  ‘Right,’ he says, taking position. He bounces a little on his knees, like an ape that Onoria once saw at the Viterbo fair. ‘It’s like this.’

  It isn’t hard to guess what he’s going to do: he’s going to hurt her, enough, probably, that she’ll never want to play at swords again and humiliate his little brother. He sniffs, rolls his shoulders. His left fist goes behind his back, his sword comes up. ‘Watch my feet,’ he barks, and obediently she drops her eyes, but only for an instant. As his wrist rolls and his sword hisses towards her forehead, she crouches and twists her body to the right, turns her sword across her chest, rovescio tondo. There is a clack of wood, and her sword is almost jerked from her, but she expected that. Her grip is good. Rising, she turns his sword, and all the force he has put into his blow – everything he intended to hit her with – carries him almost off balance. As his point drops towards the flagstones she catches her own blade with the flat of her left hand, pushes it forward, throws all her scant weight onto her front foot and lunges. The tip of her sword catches Augusto square on the breastbone. These wooden swords have soft, inch-wide rounded ends, but even so, the man paws at his chest with his left hand as he staggers backwards, wheezing in alarm. His heel catches the edge of a loose stone, and he trips and lands heavily on his backside.

  ‘Thank you for my lesson, Don Augusto,’ says Onoria. She bows to him, noting that his face has gone an apoplectic shade of red. ‘I found it very useful.’ Without waiting for a reply, she walks as steadily as she can from the courtyard.

  The Rocca is old, one of the oldest houses in Pietrodoro. The two noble families, whether they sprang from the mountain rock or not, have been facing each other across the village square for as long as anyone has been telling stories. Ormani and Ellebori, forever on opposite sides: Guelph and Ghibelline, Pope and Emperor, Florence and Siena. An Ormani died at Montaperti, centuries ago, when Siena massacred the Florentine Guelphs, and an Ellebori was killed at Benevento, when Florence and her allies got their revenge.

  But Pietrodoro, tiny, clinging to its crag like a swallow’s nest, is a long way from Florence or Siena. Inside its old walls, most people measure time by watching the mountain’s shadow move across the wide, golden valley below. Guelphs stopped fighting Ghibellines long ago, and young men went off to war for money, not honour. There used to be Ormanis in Florence, but no one in Pietrodoro has heard from them in generations. The Ellebori, who are cousins to the Siena Salimbenis, feel things more strongly, maybe, and since Florence conquered Siena, things have been tense again in the village. Augusto went off to fight for Siena, but he did it for money, not for love. Onoria’s father stayed out of the whole affair. �
��I’m retired,’ he said, and made a point of inviting Augusto’s father, Lodovigo, to the Rocca for a grand dinner. And Lodovigo accepted, because, since Grand Duke Cosimo became ruler of Tuscany, everyone has put aside the old rivalries and hatreds, and become Tuscans, pure and simple.

  This is the world as Onoria knows it. The old stories, to her ears, are all too complicated and stupid. Her father sometimes tells her how his grandfather and Federigo’s great-grandfather fought a little war across the square, with crossbow bolts thudding into the shutters and men shouting rude words to one another from the towers. And also, how men from each family would run out and fight in the square. What her father hasn’t told her, but which Bartolomeo, who always has his nose in some book or other, has found out from the family records, was that during this miniature war, her father’s great-uncle killed Federigo’s great-great uncle and hung his body upside down from the top of the palazzo tower for the whole town, including the poor man’s wife and mother, to stare at for days, until the families made peace and the great-great uncle was taken down and buried. She asked her father about it, and he went very serious and even bit his lip, which he only does when something has really upset him. So perhaps, she decided, it didn’t happen after all, and Bartolomeo made it up to frighten her.

  The castle of Rocca di Pietrodoro is old, a tall, narrow keep sticking up out of the top of the village like a broken flagpole. The place was built, so her father says, in the time of the Lombards, though some of the people who live in the village are of the opinion that it grew up out of the mountain itself to protect them from Saracen raiders. She climbs painfully up the rock-cut steps that lead to the front door, a great, ancient archway carved with flowers and strange beasts, all now melted into stranger forms by centuries of wind and rain. The castle rises above her in two tiers: a more or less square block topped by fishtail crenellations, with slightly bulging walls which are a patchwork of old brick and older marble blocks, Roman columns and capitals, from which the keep of tallow-coloured stone juts up, stained with rust from the windows that pock it at odd intervals. Some recent Ormani lord topped it with a modern battlement which sits on the pinnacle like a fashionable hat on a crumbling statue. Other buildings cluster inside the curtain wall: the armoury, the bakery, storerooms.

  Onoria stops in the cool of the downstairs hall and puts her head against one of the tapestries that hang there: Hercules wrestling the Nemean lion. She loves Hercules, but she loves the lion more. She usually finds him comforting, but today the silence and stillness seem to make the pain worse, somehow, and she has to squat down and lean against the wall, eyes screwed shut. She thinks of Augusto’s crotch pressing against her and his slug-like finger stump, and then a picture appears in her head: Augusto, hanging head-down from the tower. At that, the pain recedes.

  ‘Onoria?’ She looks up to see her father standing above her. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I …’ The words are on the tip of her tongue: Augusto made Federigo kick me between my legs, then he laughed at me. She won’t tell him that. ‘Nothing. An accident. Federigo got me in the stomach with his sword.’ She looks up and smiles crookedly, deciding not to tell him about her sparring with Augusto. ‘He’s getting better, I think.’

  ‘Oh! My poor darling.’ Amerigo helps her up gently. ‘Your mother is right. I shouldn’t make you do all those things. She’ll have my ears for a necklace when she sees you.’

  ‘Don’t tell her, then!’

  ‘Dressed as a boy, spending time with animals … with men like Augusto Ellebori. Dear God, I am a neglectful father.’

  ‘No! You aren’t. Please don’t tell Mamma. I would die, really die, if I had to be a proper girl!’

  ‘Holy Mother!’ Amerigo crosses himself. ‘What on earth are you, if not a proper girl?’

  ‘Of course I am. But … Bartolomeo wants to be a priest, doesn’t he? Priests are proper men.’ She cocks her head at him, daring him to deny it.

  ‘Let us not get into theology, cara,’ her father says hastily. ‘I mean, yes, plainly they are.’

  ‘But they aren’t manly, like soldiers.’

  ‘Honestly, Onoria …’ But she knows her father. He’s uncomfortable because he doesn’t exactly disagree.

  ‘So Barto can be a priest, but I can’t be a condottiere. Boys can be unmanly priests, but girls can’t be ungirly soldiers.’ She folds her arms. ‘Well, I’m a girl and if I can’t be a condottiere like you, at least I want to learn how to fence, Papà. And when I’m as good as you …’ She tilts her head up and looks at him slyly. They both grin at the same time. ‘When I’m a bit older I’ll do what Mamma wants. But not just yet. Please, Papà.’

  ‘Ach.’ Her father sighs and shakes his head. ‘Perhaps … Well, Onoria, it can’t go on. You understand, don’t you? People are beginning to whisper. They’re mostly idiots, I do know that, but still. And that damned Father Giovanni gave me a lecture yesterday. In my own house.’ His voice is beginning to growl. Onoria knows that her father doesn’t like her mother’s confessor very much. Her father isn’t pious like her mother. It is an argument they often have: her mother trying to get her husband to go to church more regularly, her father growling that he is a soldier with a soldier’s honest faith, that he’s talked to God often enough on the battlefield to know that he is in good standing. Her parents argue quite a lot, but it is never very serious. Mostly, her father scolds her mother about Bartolomeo, who has never shown any sign of wanting to be a soldier like him, and her mother scolds her father about Onoria. So in a way, a convenient sort of balance is maintained.

  Onoria lies awake for a long time that night, wondering if she should tell her father about Augusto, how he turned Federigo against her, and how she beat him at swordplay, although she also humiliated him, she knows, and that is a bad thing. But the next day, her father leaves for Montalcino, where he is thinking of starting a school of swordsmanship, and it is raining. The day after that, Federigo comes around as if nothing has happened. But something has happened, a good thing: his brother has left Pietrodoro as well, to join a condottiere’s company. The two go back to their life of chasing lizards in the walls of the Rocca, hunting rabbits in the olive groves and climbing the old oak trees that line the road down to the valley, but in the mornings Onoria has lessons with her mother and Bartolomeo, where she must wear a dress or be punished. Endless hours of Virgil from the big book in her parents’ bedroom. Aeneas and his Trojans. So horribly, horribly boring.

  There is a half-collapsed stone hut in the terraced groves below the Rocca, still with part of its roof, some sticks that had once been peasants’ furniture and a small bread oven set into one wall, which is where Onoria keeps another set of boy’s clothes – hose, tunic, serge doublet and a pair of worn but tough shoes, all once belonging to Bartolomeo – rolled into a bundle along with her rabbit-hunting bow and arrows. Every time she pulls them on she thinks how funny it is that her brother’s old cast-offs allow her to do all the things he disapproves of.

  He isn’t really a bad person, her brother. In a sense – this is something Onoria is just beginning to understand – he is caught just as painfully in the trap of expectations as she is herself. It’s the fault of her mother’s uncle, Archbishop Capacci, who went to Rome to be made a cardinal but caught the plague and died instead. Bartolomeo is going to complete that journey for her mother’s family.

  It isn’t the journey that her father wants, though. Onoria barely remembers her oldest brother Tommaso, who was the little swordsman, the little condottiere, the joy of Amerigo and the future of the Ormanis. Tommaso, who fell off his pony and broke his leg, only for the bone to fester and kill him before his twelfth birthday. Onoria is older, now, than Tommaso will ever be. Bartolomeo, at ten, was promised to the Church, and her mother won’t let her father change that.

  And Onoria herself? Well, daughter of an Ormani and a Capacci, she is destined to be married. No more or less than that. Her husband will be a nobleman from one of the old Tuscan families that
align themselves with the Medici Grand Duke. Her father wants to restore the Ormani fortune. He has his eye on some of the rich land around Montalcino and a place under the new Medici sun. With a son in Rome and a daughter married to a Pucci or a Ruccelai, or even an Orsini cousin … The Ormani name will be gone, but Onoria will carry the Ormani blood into a bright future.

  Meanwhile, Bartolomeo, who will never be Tommaso but will be a cardinal, and even, one day, pope – why not? – will be leaving soon. At the end of the summer he will be ordained, and then he’s off to Bologna to study law. A distant cousin of her mother’s, who happens to be a Monaldeschi, has secured him an important benefice in Orvieto. He’ll be a bishop before he’s twenty. For now, he is teaching her Latin grammar, not because anyone thinks that girls should know such things, but mainly to keep her from climbing trees and coming home covered in dirt. She’d much rather be taught by him than by Father Giovanni, who smells and leans too close to her. Even her mother, usually the kindest of women, gets peevish when she teaches Onoria. But her brother, in so many ways a storyteller’s idea of a scholar – pale, on the thin side, careless of his appearance, but also surprisingly handsome – loves books the way she loves swordplay. She understands that.

  ‘I want Papà to come home, so he can go on teaching me to fight,’ she says to him one morning, just to annoy him.

  ‘I know you do,’ he answers, surprisingly patiently.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather be outside too, Barto? It’s such a lovely day! I could show you a sparrowhawk’s nest …’

  ‘You always want to get away, don’t you, Onoria?’ he says. To her continued surprise, he shuts his primer and steeples his fingers on top of it, one of his strangely mature habits.

  ‘Yes!’ she says defiantly.

  ‘And you can, for now. Papà lets you get away with all sorts of nonsense.’

  ‘You’re just jealous!’ There is sunshine being wasted, and all of a sudden, she is furiously resentful.