The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  Paolo was waiting for me at dawn. Police hours. He was eating a bowl of porridge and offered me some. I accepted for politeness’ sake though I never ate in the morning. It felt as though it was choking me, and I had to force it down with some watered wine.

  ‘So, I made some enquiries,’ said Paolo at last. ‘More porridge? My wife makes it with trout roes.’

  ‘Thank you. It was delicious. But I like to ride with an empty belly.’

  ‘Habit from the days when we didn’t have a choice, eh, Onorio? Do you remember the sky the morning of Jemmingen? My belly was empty that morning …’

  ‘Mine too. Any word of the Ormanis?’ I prompted.

  ‘Curiously enough, one of my informants at the Monte di Paschi told me that Don Bartolomeo withdrew a lot of money from his account there. Nearly a thousand scudi. That sort of thing doesn’t go unnoticed, as you well know.’

  The Monte di Paschi was the biggest bank in Siena and one of the biggest in Tuscany. Respectable to a fault. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Two days ago. He was with a man who looked as if he’d been riding with the devil behind him, my informant said. The bank clerk remembered that very distinctly. I got the feeling that they don’t fully approve of your Signor Ormani.’

  ‘Perceptive of them. Tell me, Paolo, do you have much trouble with bandits around here?’

  ‘Not between Siena and Pienza. Or Montepulciano, in the direction you’re heading. Why do you ask? Don’t tell me you’ve become a nervous traveller!’

  ‘A nervous man is a sensible man. No, it’s an interest of mine. I suppose I still dream of action.’

  ‘I dream of bums, mostly,’ said Paolo. ‘But yes, if I were the Grand Duke I would put a small army together and clear out all those warlords. The Aldobrandeschi are making life impossible in the Maremma.’

  ‘And the Ellebori, so I hear.’

  ‘Oh, the Ellebori. They keep to the Val d’Orcia. A repulsive clan. I’d love to hang them all here in the piazza, but they live in some impregnable village – not that I’ve gone anywhere near them. Fortunately for me, they’re someone else’s problem.’

  ‘So they are. Perhaps I’ll see you on my way back to Florence. And give my compliments to your wife: the porridge was delicious.’

  I left Siena and took to the Francigena. Because it was high summer, the road was crowded with pilgrims and it was hard to make any headway. As soon as we got to the gentle hills of the Crete Senesi I left the road and gave Sultan his head. Augusto Ellebori was two days ahead of me, but I had no way of knowing how much haste he was making. He had gone to the Monte di Paschi with a messenger or a retainer two days ago. Siena was a hard day’s ride from Florence. Assuming that the rider had brought news of Girolamo’s death, he must have left a few hours ahead of me. So Augusto knew that his plans had only half succeeded. His sister was still alive, and under the city’s protection: a dangerous witness. An enemy. But Augusto would have had no way of knowing that Smeralda had told me everything. As I sped southward, I knew he had ordered his own sister’s death simply because he suspected that she had played some part in the affair between Donna Zanobia and Vennini. What had been in Augusto’s heart when he had sent Girolamo into Florence? Spite? Vanity? Weakness? Had the idea that two women could be friends damaged the family honour so terribly, enough that a brother would go to his sister’s house to kill her with a dagger, face-to-face, with no proof of betrayal?

  Proof … I was starting to think like the rest of Florence, like every other man to whom it was fine, if not in truth required, to put a woman to death for daring to seek some morsel of pleasure. Or to help a friend find happiness. Or even, God forbid, be caught harbouring thoughts of her own. I had worked on a case this very year where a man had battered his wife to death with a hammer just for looking at a handsome apprentice. The Eight had merely sent the husband to work in Livorno for half a year and fined him fifty lire.

  I reached Buonconvento in the early afternoon and stopped by the Ombrone river that lies across the road there. I dismounted and let Sultan drink while I rested underneath the poplar trees that grew close to the bank. The water was sluggish and turtle-dove grey. Rivers are borders, and though this one was meaningless, I felt that I had crossed over some invisible but powerful dividing line. Behind me was Florence and the lands civilised by the Medici. In front of me were bandits and warlords. The wild lands. My home.

  It was half a day’s ride to Pietrodoro from here. I could be there by nightfall. I hid in a ditch and changed my cloth. Then I mounted Sultan and took us back to the road, going south.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sultan lost a shoe outside San Quirico d’Orcia. Our gallop must have loosened the nails. I led him the last three miles into the town, found a blacksmith, and decided that it was too late to press on south. All the inns were full of pilgrims, and there were no single rooms to be had. I paid the blacksmith a few coins to let me sleep in his barn and made a bed for myself in the straw. Strangely for me, I slept well, but woke early. Pilgrims were already gathering in the streets. I heard English being spoken, and Flemish. They had come a long way. For them, the journey was almost over. More than one of them looked ill, and I wondered whether they were going to Rome to die, or whether they had fallen sick on the road. Still, in another two weeks or less, most of them would be walking into Saint Peter’s. For these pilgrims, arrival would be an end in itself. Fulfilment, blessings, vows discharged, absolution – all by the act of arriving. It would be easy to become one of them: slip into the noisy crowd, let them carry me along to where my soul might find some healing. But no, the Rome I knew wouldn’t bring me absolution. That would have to come later, if it ever came at all.

  The blacksmith had reshod Sultan, though he told me that he was a little lame, and that I should be gentle with him for a few days. So I joined the pilgrims after all as they walked down the hill towards the golden swell of the valley, leading Sultan, who was indeed limping slightly. They were a friendly lot, laughing and chattering away in their tongues. The last time I had passed along this road I had been in very different company, following Don Orazio’s hearse as it lumbered north through December rain. I had learnt a pinch of many languages in my years as a mercenary, and I understood a few of my companions’ jokes and some of their songs.

  ‘Are you on pilgrimage?’ a friendly, sunburnt Englishman asked me in English, almost bellowing in that habit they have, as if all the peoples of the world beyond their island are hard of hearing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, because it seemed easier than denying it, and he clapped me on the back and began to tell me something about his journey, most of which I couldn’t understand but might have had something to do with bad food. I nodded politely, but I was thinking about the last time I had been in Rome. Don Orazio had died, and I had gone to witness the embalming of his body. Lying on the bed where he’d died in his brother the cardinal’s palazzo, he hadn’t looked like one of the great soldiers of Italy. His cheeks were stretched tight over the bones of his face, and his eyes had sunk into their sockets. He was naked, lying on a white sheet laid over a rough palliasse of straw. Death had already given his skin a tallow-yellow translucency. In the room with me were the surgeon, assisted by the cardinal’s cook and a couple of servants who might have been grooms, together with Don Orazio’s priest-confessor, and my own second in command, Lorenzo.

  I had looked on, my unease growing, as the men did their work. Though I’d seen every aspect of death countless times, I had still winced as the knife went into his flesh just above his manhood. It wasn’t the corpse or the controlled violence now being committed against it that had troubled me. It was that a man who had seemed like a giant to me was now lying here in front of a dozen eyes, reduced to stiff, ungainly limbs, ugly hair, blemishes and wrinkles, a manhood of surprising modesty. What had once been a man was no more, really, than a thing. And yet that thing had once been the man who had saved my life. Orazio del Forese could not keep his secrets any longer. He had left
himself defenceless, and I hadn’t wanted to be complicit.

  ‘He wanted this,’ I had whispered to Lorenzo, aware that I was trying to convince myself.

  Lorenzo had nodded. He was watching the proceedings with frank interest. ‘We’re taking Don Orazio more than two hundred miles,’ he had whispered back. ‘He’ll travel better this way.’

  ‘True.’ I had sighed and winced as the surgeon began to snip through the commander’s ribs with a pair of heavy shears. There it all was, all the hidden complexity. Soon it would all be scooped into jars, the body rinsed in wine and strong spirits, stuffed with rosemary, sage, flax and scented grass, then sewn up again. The cardinal’s plumber was waiting to seal the body into a sheath of lead. Then, only then, would it be secret again. But not from anyone in this room.

  ‘Lorenzo, I want you to swear that you’d never let anyone do this to me. Just bury me where I fall.’

  ‘Sure, Condottiere.’ Lorenzo had been frowning at Don Orazio’s heart, which the surgeon was handing to the cook. ‘Look at that. I thought it would be bigger, you know?’

  ‘That’s what a man’s heart looks like. If you’re looking for his courage …’ I breathed out slowly. Where’s your bravery now, old friend? I had been thinking. Where’s your skill? ‘Listen, Lorenzo, I’m serious. Don’t let anyone get their bloody hands on me. Just put me in a box and bury me.’

  Lorenzo had given me a curious look. ‘I didn’t think you were scared of anything, Condottiere.’

  ‘It isn’t fear,’ I’d hissed, ‘it’s …’ But what was it? ‘Dignity,’ I’d whispered finally. But that hadn’t been it at all. I had been afraid, then – not of death, but of what would happen to me afterwards. I’d be stripped, and then everything would be revealed. The confusion, the mockery, the revulsion … I would be dead, but I still feared it. Perhaps it was the thought of all my guile, all my discipline, my artfulness, reduced in a moment to pointing fingers and bawdy laughter. Or maybe it was pride. But I believe what I had feared the most was that those who discovered the secret of my life would think that I had been ashamed of my true sex. That they would assume I had rejected womanhood, that I had made some sort of choice. And I wouldn’t be able to tell them the truth.

  Soon the distant bulk of Monte Amiata appeared in the south-west. It hadn’t been very far from here that Don Orazio had found me, though I didn’t know where the little valley was, because I had been lost then. Lost, alone, hiding. I had had nothing left but prayer. And then I had been found. The surgeon’s wagon had carried me along this very road, feverish, half alive, with a new name and a new sex. My prayers had been heard – and then I realised that I was on a pilgrimage after all.

  I left the pilgrims before they arrived at the next station on their itinerary, which was Bagno Vignoni, where I had talked to the fat landlord about the Ellebori, almost seven years ago. I had no idea whether he was still there, but I didn’t want to be recognised in these lands. The towers of Rocca d’Orcia were a handy way marker: I got up on Sultan and let him amble along past the castle up on its hill, and paused in the village of Castiglione to buy a slab of bacon, a bag of chestnut flour, some cord and a dented copper pot in the market. Beyond the village, I found a track that led towards the straggling clumps of woodland spreading out from the feet of Amiata. People were working in the fields and groves: it was harvest time. They turned away when I rode by – plainly, an armed man in these parts did not signify anything good for them. After a while the trees began to close in around me: holm oaks and maples at first, then, as the track began to climb, beech and chestnut. I skirted a gully of exposed limestone and climbed a low, round hill. Another ravine led into a grove of young chestnut trees. Beyond, the track bit into the slope of the mountain itself. It was littered with dead leaves which crunched under Sultan’s hooves. As we climbed higher, they grew thicker and dryer. No one seemed to have come this way for a long time.

  Finally, I was surrounded by trees. It was very quiet. Every now and then a bird would cross my path, and once a deer bounded away, its gruff bark echoing. I saw the smoke from charcoal burning rising through the trees here and there across the slopes, but I never saw the burners. After a while the track I was following began to narrow, and then it petered out altogether. I dismounted and led my puzzled horse through the trees, climbing higher and higher. I was getting lost, but that was good. Memories were coming back to me, swelling like a choir. The abandoned garden where I’d sheltered must be nearby, but I didn’t find it. Rabbits watched me from clearings. I skirted a cliff and came across an old charcoal burners’ path that pointed southwards and up. Several times I had to get up on Sultan and have him trample through tangles of brambles and dying bracken. The sun had long ago dropped behind the summit of the mountain, but below me, the great valley was still bright, stretching away towards the low mountains I remembered so well, that were beginning to turn orange as the day ebbed. When the path turned a sharp corner around a bastion of rock, I found myself looking down on Pietrodoro.

  It was two miles away, balanced on the end of another fold in the mountain, already in shadow, a grey silhouette against the grasslands below. My heart jolted, and I had to gasp for breath. Even though I couldn’t see anything more than a shape, I knew my home with every drop of my blood, every splinter of bone.

  The path turned, and Pietrodoro dropped out of sight. But I had my bearings now. I followed it a little further, until a much smaller path dropped away downhill, a way etched through the undergrowth by generations of boar and deer. Leading an ever-more-reluctant Sultan, I followed it, sometimes scrambling, briars plucking at my clothes. It was getting dark. Sultan was beginning to stumble.

  ‘I know, I know: you aren’t a pack horse,’ I told him. I was looking for a piece of level ground where we might make camp when, in the gloom, I saw what looked like the tentacles of a sea creature waving above the ground. A little further, and I came to a place on the steep hillside where some landslip had felled a patch of huge trees many years ago. With another clench of my heart, I recognised the place where I had been terrified by the howling of wolves and had spent my second night alone.

  I decided to make camp there, in a grassy pit where a great plug of roots, soil and rock had been torn up. There was grass for Sultan, and plenty of dead wood to make a fire. I cooked myself a porridge of chestnut flour and bacon, and it seemed marvellous to me that I had salt to season it with, and pepper from a silver box, because what man leaves on a journey without those things? A man … As I sprinkled my salt, my pepper all the way from India, I wondered at the creature I had become, many years ago, among these very trees. Like Daphne fleeing from Apollo, I had passed through the forest and been changed beyond all recognition. I was coming home, but I was not the same person who had left, so was this a return, or something else?

  There were no wolves tonight. A waning moon drawing to the end of its last quarter was rising in the east. The bright scrape of crickets came from every thicket, and somewhere nearby, a nightjar whirred monotonously. On an impulse I took off my doublet and my shirt, unbound my breasts and stepped out into the dark wood. Strange creature. If anyone had seen me in the light of the waning moon, they might have believed they were looking at a forest spirit, a satyress, human above, beast below, stalking among the rocks and the twisted roots. And they would have feared me, because such a creature would be free: from humanity and its constraints, from God, from Mother Church – and freedom fills men with terror. But I wasn’t free. I felt alive, more alive than I had ever felt in my entire life. Not free, though. Not yet.

  I wrapped myself in my blanket and watched the stars flicker through the leaves. It was hardly light when I got up, stretched my stiff limbs, buttoned up my shirt over my unbound flesh and made my way quietly, carefully downhill, my sword belt across my shoulder. What had taken me a whole day all those years ago took me almost no time at all now. After less than an hour, judging by the gathering dawn, I heard the sound of water. Another few minutes brought me to a
clearing beneath a rocky outcrop, from which a trickle of clear water was falling into an ancient stone basin. I scrambled down to it and, kneeling on the damp stone, looked down at my reflection in Santa Celava’s spring.

  Time had finished what had just been started when I had last seen myself in this water. What had been an open wound was now an old scar. The girl was gone: she had vanished a long time ago. But she’d be gone anyway, I told myself. Onoria would be a woman now. It seemed to me, suddenly, that I had never stopped staring at that first reflection, the bloodied, frightened girl with butchered hair and eyes that had already seen the worst they would ever see. She was who I saw whenever I thought about myself, whenever I looked in my mirror or glanced down at a puddle in the street. And yet looking back at me now was a woman in a man’s shirt, a sword hanging from her shoulder, a scar that didn’t shape her face but made it fragile and at the same time defiant. Not a monster or a freak or an abomination, but a woman. Onoria had survived. She was here, where the saint who found lost things had come to drink, before Pietrodoro had existed, before Amiata had given birth to Ormanis and Ellebori.