The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  ‘Ah …’ I was about to deny any such thing, but Don Orazio wasn’t listening to me.

  ‘The Pope, whose arse is the worst to nestle itself on the cushions of St Peter’s throne for two hundred years, has made an alliance with the King of France, and invited him into Italy. Because this is treachery of the basest kind, I have offered my services to the Duke of Alba, who has ordered me to join the Spanish armies at Naples. Gianbattista Tascha, who thought himself the cleverest of men, was plotting to take us over to the French. And to usurp me as head of the company, obviously.’ He laughed aloud. ‘He didn’t know that I had discovered his faithlessness – couldn’t conceive of such a thing, because he fancied himself a genius at plotting, as he fancied himself to be a genius at everything. I had made up my mind to get rid of him last week, but a mercenary company is a delicate thing – politically, that is – and I did not want to call him out as a traitor, because that would force any factions to show their hand. I wanted to deal with one traitor, not split my company. Anyway, I’d thought of poison, you know … Then he insulted you.’

  ‘You hadn’t planned this?’

  ‘No. But there was an opportunity and I seized it. Don’t look so upset, boy. That is what one does in war.’

  ‘I’m … I’m not upset, sir,’ I managed to say, although ‘upset’ barely scratched the surface of all the emotions I was suffering at that moment. ‘So, is there a war?’ I said shakily. It had seemed so peaceful here in the woods until a few minutes ago.

  ‘The war is over,’ said Don Orazio. ‘Thanks to you. That little war, anyway. The bigger one hasn’t even begun yet.’ He leant back in his chair. ‘Onorio. You’ve lived up to your name and served me well. And you’ll make a fine soldier. You must be proud.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I blurted. ‘I want to go home!’ But those last words came out as a fit of coughing, and then I was spitting blood onto the trampled grass floor of the tent as Don Orazio tried to put the cup of wine back in my hands.

  ‘You’re not healed yet,’ he said gently. ‘But I meant what I said. You’ll be joining my lance. I’ve never met a boy so plainly destined to be a fighting man. Fearless. Quite fearless. How many men can say that of themselves with any truth?’

  Later, as I lay curled up in the surgeon’s wagon as it lurched south along the Via Francigena, I thought about what Don Orazio had said. Fearless? When he had come upon me that afternoon I had been terrified. I had stood against him out of fear of what he would do to me. I had known almost nothing of the world outside Pietrodoro, and then it had come flooding in. The world, to me, meant only pain and terror, shame and death.

  I don’t remember, now, if I had ever believed I was going to live longer than a few days. I was going to Florence, but had that been anything more than a story I’d been telling myself, to keep my failing body moving? The truth was that I’d been waiting for death, and I had thought Orazio della Biassa was my end. The creature he’d seen as a brave boy was, in reality, a little girl whose contrary nature and loving father had turned her into … what? An ‘abomination’, the Ellebori had called me. ‘Capricious’, my mother would say, when I’d come home covered in mud, or burrs, or blood. Perverse creature. A girl who liked to pretend that she was a boy. A skilful, innocent little actor. That is what Don Orazio had stumbled across. An actor.

  My father, may God have mercy on him, was the finest swordsman of his time. I have heard that from many people, over the years, none of whom would ever guess my relationship to him. Like most men, he had expected to have a son into whom he could pour all that he valued about himself: his skills, his qualities, his honour. But for my poor father, that had not come to pass. His warrior son had died, and his bookish son had lived. And then there had been me. I had never wanted to be a girl – not for any strong reason, but simply because I envied the things I saw boys do. They were free. I wanted to run, to climb trees, to knock down old walls, to swear and cackle and fight. I hated the feel of heavy skirts. I didn’t flinch, as Bartolomeo always did, when my father fired his arquebus. So my father had let me pretend to be dead Tommaso, and of course I had played the role with every atom of my being. He’d taught me his art, and I would never have a finer teacher. Perhaps he’d never had a more eager pupil. But everything I learnt – and I learnt everything – I did so that I could play my role. It seems to me that a real boy would have gone along with this education for the love of the fight itself, of the sword, of blood. It seems strange to say, then, that I learnt to fight because it would teach me about being a boy. The rest of it happened – I have always, as I told you, been a perverse creature – almost by accident. What I am trying to say is that when I had drawn my dead brother’s knife and faced Don Orazio, I had been acting. For the last time, as I had thought. I was going to die in the way I thought men died, although I was beside myself with fear. What the colonnello had seen first had been my skill, my guardia becca cesa, the one part of me that wasn’t play-acting. The rest … He had been taken in. I had fooled him.

  Had I been acting with Gianbattista Tascha, though? He’d called me a girl – dear God, he’d seen, or guessed, what I really was. He’d threatened me with all the foulness I had escaped from at the hands of Augusto Ellebori. I’d had no choice but to stand up to him. It is an unpleasant thing to admit, perhaps, but I never felt a moment’s guilt for killing him. When I’d fought him, it had been with everything I’d learnt from my father. I hadn’t been a girl pretending to be a boy, I had been my father’s pupil; and no, I hadn’t been afraid. Because that was what my father had taught me.

  ‘Turn fear into judgement,’ he’d said, whenever I’d flinched away from his wooden sword. ‘These guards you’re learning, these parries: they come from fear, from our instinct to protect ourselves, but we turn that fear into judgement. We don’t step out of the way of a blow because we fear it, but so that we can judge our opponent.’

  ‘Aren’t you ever frightened, then?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Of course! In a fight, a real fight, there is always fear. Fear comes from nature. It can’t be destroyed. That is why you practise, so that when you’re close with your enemy and his blade is right there in your face so that all you see is the glitter of the edge, how sharp it is, how deadly, you aren’t afraid. Instead of fearing your enemy, you judge your response. Conquer fear and you are left with prudence, discrimination. Have I told you this before?’

  ‘You have, Papà.’

  ‘Then let’s practise.’

  There in the wagon, I could hear his voice, patient but firm. All the time I had been acting the part of his son, my father had been teaching his daughter how to live. Fear becomes judgement. It was a strange thought. I was tangled up in things I didn’t understand at all, though I had done my fair share of the tangling. As I was remembering my father’s voice, I heard my mother’s as well, saying what she usually did, with a heavy sigh, when I came in for my lessons scratched by briars or with a black eye: ‘Mercy, Onoria! Why do you make yourself so ugly? One day the cock will crow, and you’ll be stuck that way for ever.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Well, the cock had crowed. Over the next few days I slowly learnt exactly what this was going to mean to me. Because I was still hiding, but now I was hiding in plain sight. It would have been simple if I could just have forgotten Onoria and reinvented myself as someone else. But I was not just changing names, I was abandoning one sex and taking up another, which was – as people, most particularly my brother Bartolomeo, had never ceased to tell me – a sin against both God and nature, and probably (although details were never supplied) against the actual laws of Tuscany as well. I had always been amused by this, but now that I was, in the crudest sense, trapped in the guise of a boy, I discovered that my situation was anything but funny.

  Nature was, however, on my side, at least partly. I was fourteen, but my monthly cycle had not yet started. My mother had begun to nag me about it. She blamed my boyish habits, particularly riding astride, and just that year had be
gun to issue vague threats about doctors and – worse – priests. Though when I had asked her about her own entry into womanhood, she had admitted, grudgingly, that she had not begun to bleed until her sixteenth year. Nor had my breasts really begun to grow. In this, I guessed I also took after my mother, who was not voluptuous. ‘Flat-chested,’ she would sometimes complain to my father, I think so that he would reply, as he always did, ‘Not as flat-chested as Grand Duchess Eleanora, but far more beautiful,’ which always made my mother blush, as the Grand Duchess was widely thought to be the loveliest woman in Tuscany. Now, the shirt and doublet which were my only clothes fitted badly enough to hide my natural shape, and if I hitched up my hose and kept my belt tight, the codpiece hid what was missing between my legs.

  But there, of course, lay my most vexing challenge. I might have changed my name, but I still had to piss. In a company of two hundred men, where privacy meant almost nothing, I was in danger whenever my bladder was full. At first, I pretended I had the flux, which wasn’t so far from the truth. I would stagger away from the wagon, find the nearest bush and squat down. But in the camp, and especially when we were on the move, it was the habit of most men, when the urge took them, to simply pull down their hose, pull out their things and let fly. You will perhaps laugh when I tell you how shocking I found this at first. I, who had thought to master every point of acting like a man. But at home, my father had never done that; Bartolomeo certainly hadn’t. Federigo was a modest sort and usually went behind a tree. The village peasants knew not to piss in full view of Donna Onoria. And now here I was, assailed virtually all the time by the sudden appearance of hairy, spotty bums and streaming male organs. It seems almost unbelievable, but so innocent was I that the only word I knew for the organ of generation was ‘thing’, although by the end of my first week with the company of Don Orazio della Biassa I knew dozens, as it seemed impossible for soldiers to utter the simplest sentence without inserting some reference to sexual parts, the generative act, or defecation. Of course, as part of my disguise, and because their inventiveness was, I had to admit, quite extraordinary, I learnt all these words.

  But while I learnt how to swear, I still didn’t know how I was ever going to piss in public. Fortunately – the good fortune appears in retrospect, but it certainly didn’t seem fortunate at the time – my dilemma was solved by one of the riders in Sebastiano Morelli’s lance. He was an almost handsome man, around thirty years old, who I first noticed because his taste in clothing was particularly gaudy in the way of soldiers’ fashion, which in those days meant doublets and hose artfully and expensively slashed to resemble rags: pinked and ribbed leather, dangling laces, metal eyelets and studs. It was the style of the Swiss landsknechts, though I didn’t know that yet, and indeed I had heard men call him Il Svizzero, but I didn’t pay him much mind until I began to notice that, whenever we were close to one another, he kept his eyes fixed on me. At first, he just stared, but soon he got bolder, contorting his face into all manner of leers and grimaces, which at first I took for the symptoms of a rotting tooth. Then he took to grabbing his codpiece and rubbing it whenever he saw me, and I knew exactly what he wanted.

  By that time I had left the wagon. The surgeon’s mistress had more or less thrown me out. I think she was bored with cooking for me. So I had taken up my place in Don Orazio’s lance, which, I discovered, was a squad of twenty-five mounted men. There were seven lances in the company, each with its caposquadra. I had no rank at all. Don Orazio found me a horse, an old gelding whose back was starting to go but could still carry the weight of someone small, and I rode along behind the lance, keeping my head down. The majority of the company ignored me: most because I was insignificant, a few because they had liked Gianbattista Tascha. Most, that is, except for Il Svizzero.

  We were on the border between Tuscany and the territories of the Pope, in the high country just north of Lake Bolsena. The company had halted for the midday meal on a plateau dotted with clumps of pines and oaks. I badly needed to piss, so I hobbled my poor old horse, picked out a line of scrubby oak trees and made my way over to them, in some discomfort as my bladder was so full. My sword was hanging from my saddle, but I was wearing Tommaso’s knife, for which Messer Asdrubale had found a sheath. He was more interested in me now, after the fight, and after he’d heard that I was the son of a master swordsman. I was trotting across the patch of open ground between the company and the trees when I happened to glance behind me. A group of seven or eight men had gathered and another man was striding, quite quickly, towards me. The others were talking in loud, harsh voices, and they seemed to be egging him on. I could see from his clothes that it was Il Svizzero. He saw me notice him and began to pump his fist in front of his crotch.

  That all men want to put their thing inside women was a fact I’d learnt, in the most roundabout and delicate terms, from my mother. That some men also want to do that thing to other men, and even boys, was something I had discovered only since joining the company. ‘Oh, and Onorio,’ Don Orazio had said to me, the morning he had formally introduced me to the lance. He’d spoken quietly, out of the hearing of the other soldiers. ‘There is every kind of man in an armed company. Good, bad, mostly both, as and when it suits them. We haven’t had a young fellow like you with us for a while. A few of them will want to fuck you. They’ll think …’ He’d pointed to the puckered, healing scar across my face and neck.

  ‘What will they think?’ I stammered, blushing and horrified.

  ‘They’ll think that someone’s done it before.’ He shrugged.

  ‘But they didn’t! They didn’t!’ I was Onoria in that moment, but once again my ruined voice saved me. The indignant squeak that came out meant that only Don Orazio heard me. Which, of course, was for the best.

  ‘You can look after yourself. I give you leave to defend yourself in whatever way you please. I’m sure you’ll be fine. But be careful.’

  Il Svizzero was gaining on me. I was almost at the trees. I couldn’t turn back, because then he would catch me in the open, and do the dreadful thing to me while the whole company watched. And then they would all, of course, discover my secret. They would kill me, no doubt. No doubt I would want them to. But here was the edge of the small copse of trees. There was no time to think. The man was right behind me. I could hear the flapping of his ridiculous doublet. I darted between two pine trees and into sudden shade.

  I almost tripped on a branch and took a panicked glance around me. Woodsmen, perhaps charcoal burners, had been at work recently: most of the oak trees had been roughly coppiced, and I was in a small clearing where the ground was thick with twigs and small branches. The bigger trees were quite widely spaced, and bushy cypresses were growing up into the sunlight, looking like a conference of big green bears. Somehow, I remembered my father’s advice: turn fear into judgement. Il Svizzero was already crashing through the outermost trees. I picked up a sturdy sawn-off branch and pushed myself into the frondy embrace of one of the cypresses.

  Just in time: an instant later, Il Svizzero shoved his way into the clearing. I swear he was panting. His eyes were as big as saucers; if he had been a dog, his tongue would have been halfway to his shoes. ‘Where are you?’ he called, in a rough voice full of sharp foreign corners. ‘I want my fun!’

  If Il Svizzero had ever read the Metamorphoses of Ovid with the same diligence that my mother had forced me to spend on it – though I’m sure Il Svizzero couldn’t read a single letter; he didn’t appear to be the scholarly type – if he’d spent hours, as I had, on the story of Apollo and Daphne, he would have beheld a sort of Daphne in reverse. He stood there panting, dancing on the balls of his feet with the energy of his lust, and turned his head eagerly as he heard the rustle of branches, in time to see me step out of the heart of the cypress tree, my wooden club gripped in both hands. Something changed in his face, though whether it was triumph or fear I never found out, because I brought the branch down onto his ridiculous slashed cap with all my strength. He dropped straight down, a
s though his legs had vanished into thin air, and pitched backwards into a snarl of twigs. I hadn’t intended to kill him … Or had I? I’d chosen the club and not my knife. But in any case, I saw with a certain amount of relief that he was still breathing, although blood was running freely from a long gash in his scalp. It was then that my body reminded me why I’d come here in the first place. I pulled down my hose and prepared to squat, then had another thought. Stepping out of my hose entirely, I planted my feet wide apart and conducted my first experiment in pissing while standing up. It wasn’t altogether successful, and extremely messy, and Il Svizzero got quite a splattering, but I saw how, with a little practice, it could be managed.

  After I’d restored my clothing I relieved the would-be rapist of his dagger. He was beginning to stir, moaning feebly. I thought for a moment, then bent down and sliced through the lacing of his codpiece, pulled it off and shoved the dagger through it as if it were a thrush for roasting. Then I sawed through his belt, cut off the buttons of his hose and the points attaching it to his doublet. He was blinking now and trying to make words. I gave him a kick and, carrying the spitted codpiece before me like the trophy it was, left the wood and walked back to the company. Il Svizzero’s comrades were waiting where he’d left them. When they saw me come out alone they began to hoot and bray, thinking, I suppose, that their friend was still savouring his conquest. They were nudging each other, and as I got closer they began to shout, to ask me who I wanted next. Then one of them pointed to something behind me. I had reached them by that time and they had seen that I held a dagger in my hand. Glancing over my shoulder I saw Il Svizzero stagger out from among the trees, his hose halfway down his thighs and his face covered in blood. The man nearest me was a bearded, older fellow from Sebastiano Morelli’s lance, one of the men who had been making it a habit to leer at me. I walked up to him and held out the dagger, so that the point was a foot or so away from his chest, but loosely, so that the codpiece dangled limply, laces flopping like the legs of a dead creature. Or like a jester’s sceptre. He gawped. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. There was nothing, really, to be said. I went back to my horse while Il Svizzero’s friends rushed over to see what had befallen him.