The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  It has become quite famous, the duel I fought in Sicily. I won’t dwell on it. For me, once I had killed de Ricca’s companion, whose name had been Buenaventura de Consillariis – ironic, as he clearly wasn’t prone to good luck – I was able to fight de Ricca himself as though it was nothing more than a sparring match with my father in Pietrodoro. It was the release, I suppose: the worst thing that could have happened to my living self – almost the worst – had happened, and I had survived. But whatever the reason, my feet, my body, my arms all moved with magical ease, like the illustrations in my father’s book come to life. People who care about such things still remark on how my footwork was a perfect example of the Florentine style as taught by Francesco Altoni. De Ricca was a classical swordsman of the Bolognese school, and so the cognoscenti regard ours as a duel between two schools as much as between two people. The real fight, of course, was an invisible one between a man and a woman, though I wonder, if that had been known, whether the whole matter would have been mysteriously forgotten.

  Whatever the truth of it, we fought for almost fifteen minutes, which is a terrible length of time in the heat of an August day in Sicily. In the end, it might have been exactly those things which de Ricca had accused me of having lost which were his undoing, because as we duelled, neither of us with any great advantage over the other, his man’s pride began to rise, and with it his anger. It is a trait of men, that prideful rage. I have learnt to imitate it very well, but I don’t believe I have ever really felt it. But I can see it in others well enough, and I saw it in his overeager movements, the impatience in his steps. As he strutted, I stalked him. Della Corgna was in the crowd, in the front row, standing with Don Orazio, and I knew, I could almost feel, that de Ricca was performing for him, a young gamecock displaying his ferocity to an older one.

  He was an excellent swordsman, though, and I felt something like regret when he let his guard slip for the blink of a dry eye and I slashed the point of my sword across the upper part of his left arm. He cursed, staggered back, and circled me, carefully, knowing he was bleeding – not a terrible wound, but in that heat it would drain him quickly. He took the guard of the unicorn. I decided I needed to tire him, stepped in for a thrust, but instead of parrying he countered and the tip of his blade flashed past my eyes. I felt a sting on the side of my head and a warm wetness on my neck. He grinned. His sword came up again, inviting an attack, which I made, watching his eyes, knowing they were seeing my blood. I could feel his sudden eagerness, and showed him what he wanted to see, my chest left exposed by a mistimed thrust. He lunged across my blade, I turned my wrist, sent his arm wide, and with a perfect, stiff-legged stance, knees straight like one of Altoni’s own drawings, I lunged and thrust my sword into his ribcage up to the guard. I felt a great shiver go through him: it travelled into my hand through the steel. He was dead long before I stepped back and let him fall to the ground.

  When we finally took ship for Malta three weeks later, I was still something of a celebrity. As it turned out, de Consillariis had been a man with a dark reputation: a minor aristocrat from the countryside behind Palermo, he had killed several men and, so it was rumoured, his first wife, whom he suspected of having an affair with a servant. Both de Consillariis and de Ricca had been famous in their way, and that fame passed to me, as though it had been a contagion of the blood. No one whispered any more as I walked past or glanced down between my legs to see what my codpiece might be hiding. ‘Eunuchs don’t fight like that,’ I overheard someone say. ‘He certainly has something left down there.’ But such things were never said to my face. Even Ascanio della Corgna seemed impressed, which I counted as a great compliment. Just before we had set sail for Malta, he and Don Orazio had staged a mock duel with wooden swords to keep the men amused, and I had seen just how well he deserved his reputation. Not that my commander was far behind the master in skill, and after it was over, he told me that he had been della Corgna’s second in a famous duel near Perugia.

  ‘Ascanio told me he’d like to fight you,’ he said, and when I blinked, had laughed. ‘In friendship, Onorio. I would take that as a compliment. He’d kill you, of course, in a real fight.’

  ‘I suppose he would,’ I said. ‘But I’m younger. And I have both eyes.’

  ‘The arrogance of youth!’ Don Orazio said.

  ‘God keep me from being arrogant. I don’t want to make a life of this,’ I told him. ‘Let me do my fighting at the head of my lance.’ But that wasn’t true. In my heart I remembered the Mother Superior’s words to me and swallowed the guilt that rose like bile in my throat.

  ‘I think you’d probably kill me, though,’ Don Orazio muttered, but I pretended I hadn’t heard.

  What we did on Malta has been written about many times, and I will not dwell on it. Besides, after all the waiting, it was over very quickly. We landed, Don Ascanio led us in a charge against the Ottoman army, who were already tired of the siege and beginning to retreat. It was a great victory and a dreadful massacre. When the survivors sailed away, they left thousands of bodies. After that, we were stuck on a ruined island peopled, it seemed, mainly by the dead. I couldn’t wait to leave, and we soon did. Don Orazio made an agreement to fight for the Habsburgs again, this time in Hungary. We arrived too late for the Siege of Szigetvár, though we saw some fighting with Turkish border raiders. I hoped our journeying would take us past the little convent on the coast, but we never went near there again. The next year we took ship to Spain and then to the Low Countries, where we fought with the Duke of Alba against the Protestants there, who were in open revolt against the Spanish crown. We stayed in that damp, grey country for three years. There were battles, but the men we lost – and we lost many – fell mostly to disease. Agues, winter fevers, consumption. Paolo coughed up his life in a Brussels hospital.

  I came to dread the winters, with their snow and frozen rivers. Though we were losing men, we were gaining more, and before the Battle of Jemmingen the company was twice as big as it had been in Malta. Don Orazio promoted me again. I had been a captain, in charge of my own famiglia of cavalry, two hundred men under my command; now I was constable, second in command of the company. This suited me: I could hide behind my rank and, anyway, I enjoyed the humdrum stuff of keeping a little army fed, housed and paid. I was imposing order on things. I was maintaining balance.

  Then, in 1570, the Holy League came together to fight the Turks, who had captured Cyprus. We turned our backs on the flat, dreary north and marched down through France into warmth. My joy when I saw the first olive tree is something I will never forget. A few months later we were back on Sicily. Ascanio della Corgna was there, and when we sailed out against the Ottoman fleet that was massing off the coast of Greece, our galleys were next to his in the first line.

  Lepanto. I will never escape it. A battle fought at sea, on lurching ships. We won. I lived. It was not the biggest battle I ever fought in, or the bloodiest, but there was a special horror to it. Men died in every way that a man may die: from water, steel, fire. Men died of fever as we rowed towards the enemy, and of exhaustion as they strained at the oars. Our ranks were filled with amateurs, high-born men who had joined for glory, but knew nothing at all of war: men in armour that it would have taken me a lifetime of fighting to pay for. And the Turks were not the raiders we had fought in Croatia and Hungary. They were the cream of the Sultan’s troops. Men on our ships heard the drumming and skirling of their musicians and puked in terror. But after all that, we won. We sailed back to Sicily. In Messina, while we were waiting to cross over to the mainland, Don Orazio announced that he was retiring to his lands. We would go to Rome and he would pay off the men and dissolve the company. The colonnello recommended me to a friend of his, a condottiere from Mantua, and I joined him as constable. We went back to Flanders, and laid siege to Alkmaar and Leiden. It was at Leiden that I received a letter from Don Orazio, who was in Rome. There was talk of the new pope resurrecting the Holy League, and the colonnello had gone to petition for leadership. He w
anted me at his side. I was heartily sick of Flanders, and I resigned my post and rode south.

  I found him in the palazzo of his brother the cardinal. Don Orazio had caught a cold riding south from Florence through a rainy November. ‘I just need to rest,’ he told me when I arrived. ‘This is a good opportunity for you. You’d make a good colonnello, Onorio. We’ve known each other for … how long is it now?’

  ‘Twenty years,’ I said, and the number seemed extraordinary to me.

  ‘A lifetime. And you are still as much of a locked book as you were when I first met you. Do you remember that day?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When I’ve shaken off this bloody cold, I’ll help you gather your own company. Men will follow you, Onorio. A good leader has secrets. I’ll tell you a few of mine when I’m better. I owe you that, at least. So, goodnight, Onorio. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Two days later, Don Orazio died in his sleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Rain was drifting in thick, grey cobwebs out of the mountains beyond Fiesole, and I was soaked to the bone as I rode through the Porta al Prato and into Florence in the early afternoon of a January day. I had no real idea what time it was, but as I rode across the muddy open space inside the walls and into the Via della Scala, it became unpleasantly obvious that I had missed lunch. People were trudging about: the better off wrapped in cloaks, the poorer ones in bits of oilcloth or blankets. Everything was dull – even the painted Virgins in their wall niches seemed to have swapped their aquamarine cloaks for slate grey. The air smelt strongly of mildewed straw. I had never been to Florence before in my life, though I had heard about it countless times from my mother and father. Florence was the heart of everything good in the world, everything noble and rich and clever. The Ormanis had come from here; they, too, had been noble and rich. The city wasn’t making a good impression so far, though.

  A bedraggled woman near the steps of San Lorenzo was holding a tray heaped with rushes, through which threads of steam rose enticingly. ‘Carp tortes,’ she croaked as I passed, so I dropped a coin into her hand, and waited as she rummaged beneath the rushes and handed up two almost hot pies. I ate quickly as I rode down busier streets towards the Duomo, licking my fingers and cursing as I saw that buttery flakes of pastry were melting into my cloak. I wanted to make at least a reasonably good impression, after all, and I had almost arrived at my destination.

  Being back in Tuscany was still strange to me. We had ridden up the Via Francigena alongside the covered wagon carrying Don Orazio’s body, through Viterbo, past Lake Bolsena and across the high country beyond Acquapendente. My companions were my second in command Lorenzo Guarini, Gentile Rondoni, two other capos and six men, most of them from Don Orazio’s own lance. One day we had ridden over a wooded ridge and I was suddenly looking down into the country where I had been born. We dropped down into the long, wide valley towards the fang of Radicofani. We stayed there for a night, after we’d ridden past the place where I had fought and killed Gianbattista Tascha. The next morning, I woke feeling ill. Perhaps it was the vile food of the inn where we were staying, but I mounted my horse with a heavy sense of dread as well as a heaving stomach. We hadn’t had good weather for our journey, but that day the sky was blue, and the air was like crystal. The dark bulk of Monte Amiata, which I had been staring at for two days now, passed slowly on our left. The road rose and fell across the brown hills and limestone gullies of the Val d’Orcia. This was the golden country I had looked down on, that I had dreamt of soaring above, when I was a girl. It wasn’t golden now, but dun-coloured and muddy, yet still I knew that I was tracing paths that I had once traced with the tip of my finger, eyes screwed up against the sun. The laden wagon trundled on, pulled by two long-suffering oxen. We stopped for lunch, even though I told my companions I would rather push on to Bagno Vignoni. I refused the evil-smelling salami from the inn, and sipped on watered wine as I waited for the others to finish. Soon enough, they did. We crested another ridge and, as one of the long arms of the mountain drifted behind us, I saw it.

  High up. That was how I remembered Pietrodoro. High up, on a crag of honey-coloured stone that, below the church at the tip of the village, dropped sheer into terraced slopes of olives. Had I really thought I could keep my eyes from it? The sun was bright and starting to sink towards the top of the mountain. I rode along with my eyes on the track, but how can we resist our dreams? So I looked up. Of course, I looked up, into the sun, and saw it. A golden smear, a brush stroke, a fleck of loose gilding – nothing more.

  Perhaps I thought that it hadn’t been real after all. Perhaps I thought I really had dreamt it. I looked away, and back again, and it was still there. Just a village, I told myself. I never lived there. It was true: I understood, with a lurch of the bad food in my guts, that Onorio Celavini had never lived in Pietrodoro. I had to lean forward and rest my head on my horse’s neck.

  ‘What’s wrong, Condottiere?’ Lorenzo asked me.

  ‘Nothing. I was … I was thinking about the colonnello. He made me who I am, you know. We would ride through country like this – poor, bad soil; mean little villages – and he’d say to me: This is the kind of place where soldiers come from, Onorio. They don’t come back to them, though.’

  ‘Sounds like the colonnello, all right,’ Lorenzo agreed. ‘We rode right past my parents’ farm once—’

  ‘I remember that.’

  ‘And he made some comment or other. He was right, though. I’ll go back, stay for a year. Find some girl, knock her up, and woof! I’ll be off, looking for another company to join.’

  ‘The colonnello’s going home,’ I pointed out.

  ‘The colonnello is dead, Condottiere.’

  We rode on, and I didn’t look back. That night we stopped at the pilgrim hostelry in Bagno Vignoni. The landlord insisted on welcoming the body of a hero of Lepanto by killing a pig and sending a boy to the church to have the bells rung. Later, as we were eating – a far better meal than the night before, but my gut was still unsettled – the landlord, who spoke in a thick dialect which, with a shock, I recognised, because it was almost the same as that of Pietrodoro, asked us if we’d had any trouble on the road. I said we had not, that I thought Duke Cosimo kept the peace in these parts.

  ‘Ah, the Grand Duke, God keep him,’ the landlord said. I detected a less than enthusiastic tone in his voice and told him so in a friendly way. Over the years I had lost my own accent and spoke like what I was: an officer in command of men from all corners of Italy and beyond. I would have passed for a gentleman in Milan or Palermo. A foreigner, anyway, to this fellow. He sighed and poured us all some more of his best wine – ‘The pilgrims don’t get this,’ he’d assured us, though it wasn’t much good – before leaning back in his chair and scratching his round belly.

  ‘Duke Cosimo. Yes, we’re all his subjects now. All Tuscans together. And that’s lovely. I’m a Tuscan man to the marrow in my bones. But Duke Cosimo is in Florence, and all these nice laws of his, they flutter down here like tired swallows and expect everyone to magically follow them, just because they smell like Florence and have the Medici balls on the seal.’

  ‘No great love for Florence, then?’

  ‘Were you at Scannagallo?’ the landlord asked, his eyes suddenly narrowed.

  ‘Scannagallo? In 1554? I was twelve,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, you would have been.’ We all laughed. ‘Well, before Scannagallo we were part of the Sienese Republic down here. A lot of us remember that.’

  ‘And that still causes trouble?’

  ‘It wasn’t so long ago.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ I could have told him that my father had fought in that battle on the side of Florence, and so had the man whose body was currently resting in the landlord’s barn. Instead I said, ‘I thought the last of the Sienese surrendered to the Duchy a long time ago. 1559, wasn’t it, at Montepulciano?’

  ‘Ah, but there are some who haven’t.’

  ‘Haven’t surrendered?
’

  ‘I won’t say that. Who haven’t lost hope in the Sienese cause, more like.’

  ‘You one of them?’ asked Lorenzo bluntly, waving a well-picked pork rib at him.

  ‘Me, sir? Holy Virgin, no! I’m as good a subject as Duke Cosimo could wish for. You don’t sound like a man from these parts,’ he said to me. ‘I’m a good judge of voices – I hear them from all over Christendom here. I’d say you’re from … don’t tell me! Padua!’

  ‘I’m from Mantua,’ said Lorenzo disgustedly. ‘He doesn’t sound anything like a Paduan. Where are you from anyway, Condottiere? I thought you were from Orvieto.’

  ‘Close enough,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well. You don’t sound like an Orvietan either.’ The landlord sniffed. ‘As I was saying, if you were from these parts you’d know of the great families – the Aldobrandeschi, the Piccolomini, the Capacci …’