Pasquale's Angel

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘Perhaps the guard is one of those giving chase.’ Shouts, and then a single pistol-shot. Niccolò said, ‘One thing is clear. We cannot stay a moment longer.’

  They turned the corner of the villa, ran down the wide gravelled path towards the gate. The path divided around a statue of a griffin sitting on its haunches, one front paw supporting a shield. As Pasquale ran past it, ahead of Niccolò, he felt something tug at his ankles. He stumbled, caught himself on hands and knees.

  Above him, the statue of the griffin stirred. It shook at every joint, then reared up on its hind legs. Pasquale crouched beneath it in terror and amazement. The shield fell with a wooden clatter. Steam burst from the griffin’s mouth and it made a tremendous grinding roar as its head turned to and fro. Its eyes were red lamps. All down the long path to the gate great flares burst into flame, hissing and sizzling and throwing up thick smoke that glowed whitely in the moonlight. Somewhere distant a brazen gong clanged and clanged.

  Then Niccolò was pulling at Pasquale, shouting that it was only a mechanical device, a festival trick. Pasquale got to his feet, feeling foolish. The griffin’s movements were already subsiding. Niccolò was right; it was a mechanical device of the sort constructed by artists or artificers as centrepieces for those great public spectacles so loved by Florentines. No magic—or not yet.

  Niccolò flourished a pistol, an odd weapon with a kind of notched wheel over its stock. ‘Have a brave heart,’ he said. His face was alive: Pasquale realized that this was what he lived for, desperate moments where courage and luck determined whether you lived or died.

  They ran on, and as they neared the gate its guard took a wild shot at them. Niccolò fired back as he ran, fired and fired again without reloading, the wheel of the pistol ratcheting around with each shot. The guard fled through the open gate, and a moment later Pasquale and Niccolò gained the dusty country road and saw the vaporetto jolting towards them at top speed, fast as a galloping horse, and wreathed in vast plumes of steam.

  They waved at it, and had to jump aside as it slewed to a halt, wheels spinning in the road’s soft rutted dirt. The driver shouted that they must climb in and released the brake at the same moment, so that Pasquale had to jump on to the load-bed and haul Niccolò after him, his arms almost starting from his sockets with the effort.

  There were pistol-shots as the vaporetto banged down the steep road. Something burst overhead, a bright glare that grew and grew until it outshone the full moon. By this floating magical light Pasquale saw that a carriage, perhaps the same one that had delivered poor Francesco to the magician’s lair, was chasing them at full tilt. Niccolò saw it too, and calmly told the driver to go faster. When the man started to argue, Pasquale took the florin from his scrip and held it over the driver’s shoulder. Without looking, the driver reached up and plucked the coin like a grape. The vaporetto leapt forward, throwing Pasquale and Niccolò backwards on to the load-bed’s rough planking.

  Niccolò rolled over on his belly, making a kind of choked laughter. ‘Did you see how that guard ran? I would have killed him if I could. I shot to kill. My blood was up.’

  ‘From your talk it still is,’ Pasquale said, feeling his bruises. He tried to sit up and a great jolt as the vaporetto shot over a hummock in the ill-made road knocked him back down again. He swore and said, ‘We still aren’t free yet.’

  ‘I have my pistol. The self-loading wheel does little for its accuracy, but rapid fire is certainly discouraging to those who face it. Did you see the guard? He ran like a Spaniard.’

  ‘This isn’t a war.’

  ‘Any kind of combat makes beasts of men. They revert to their base nature.’

  ‘You may have another chance to enjoy your base nature very soon,’ Pasquale said, squinting past the tattered clouds of the vaporetto’s exhaust into the night behind them. The black carriage had fallen far behind, for its horse could not keep up with the vaporetto’s breakneck downhill speed, but he was certain that it would not give up the chase.

  The slope of the road flattened out, houses crowding now on either side, and the vaporetto began to slow. The driver shouted that water in the boiler was low, that he would have to stop soon and refill it.

  ‘Go on as best you can,’ Niccolò told him.

  ‘If the tubes boil empty over the burners, they’ll blow,’ the driver said. ‘There’s an end to it.’

  Pasquale said, ‘I think you will need your pistol, Niccolò. They are gaining on us.’

  As he spoke, crossbow-quarrels flew out of the darkness with shocking suddenness. Most missed the vaporetto, but two thumped into the load-bed and promptly began to give off acrid white smoke. Pasquale wrestled one from the plank in which it had embedded itself. Its shaft was almost too hot to hold, and its point was hollow and fretted with slots from which the smoke poured. Pasquale threw the quarrel over the side, but burned his hand when he tried to pull out the second. Then more quarrels whistled past and he ducked down. One thumped into the splintered planks a hand’s breadth from his face, burying itself up to its flight feathers; an ordinary quarrel, but still deadly. The new crossbows fired quarrels with such force that even a glancing blow could kill a man.

  Niccolò clutched one of the posts of the load-bed, waving his pistol. The shaft of the smoking quarrel that was still embedded in the load-bed suddenly started to burn. In a moment, bright blue flames spread across the tarred planks. Niccolò steadied his pistol with both hands and fired back at the carriage, laughing wildly all the while, so that Pasquale feared he had lost his reason.

  The vaporetto made a sharp right turn on to the Borgo San Jacopo and was suddenly amongst a crowd of workers. Workmen flung themselves to either side as the vaporetto ploughed into their midst. They were the ciompi, the shift-workers of the sleepless manufactories. They were dressed in shabby patched tunics girdled with rope, shod in wooden clogs, and wore shapeless felt hats on their heads to keep off the night’s cold. Many were shaven-headed, a result of a scheme of the artificers to eliminate lice. They shouted and jeered as the vaporetto sped past. The carriage was very close now; Pasquale could see the driver standing on his bench, his arm rising and falling as he whipped the horse on.

  The driver of the vaporetto looked over his shoulder, his face white and his eyes reflecting the flames leaping up from the load-bed. He uttered a wordless cry and threw himself from his bench into the crowd. The vaporetto, rudderless, slewed and slowed, and ran into the wall of one of the houses that fronted the river. Its boiler-tubes split open and vented live steam; the burner-pan broke loose and spilled burning coals that set fire to the undercarriage.

  Pasquale jumped down at once, but Niccolò stayed defiantly atop the burning vehicle. He emptied his pistol at the carriage, which had pulled to a halt, its terrified horse rearing in its traces. Here was a picture for the broadsheet, Niccolò raving and firing his pistol through flames, the crowd backing away, the black carriage and its plunging black horse. It burned itself in Pasquale’s brain.

  Then Niccolò threw away his pistol and jumped down. Pasquale grabbed him and they ran. Ciompi parted before them like the Red Sea before the Israelites. More shots from the carriage. Pasquale saw a man in a hemp jerkin struck in the teeth by a pistol-ball; he collapsed spouting blood from his ruined mouth.

  Niccolò was out of breath, and Pasquale had to haul him along by main force. He was after all an old man of fifty, and for all his wiry frame not fit to run this race. Suddenly, he staggered and swore and clutched at his thigh. Blood welled over his hand. ‘I’m hit!’ he shouted, and seemed strangely exhilarated.

  Pasquale hauled him on, daring to look back and seeing the carriage stranded amongst the angry mob. The Ponte Vecchio was ahead. Its angle-tower loomed over the heads of the crowd. Pasquale and Niccolò limped on, dodging through streams of ciompi shuffling wearily towards their shanty-town hovels at shift’s end, or marching in resignation towards that night’s work. From a viewpoint high above Florence, from the top of the Great Tower perhaps, ther
e were no individuals visible in the gaslit crowd. Two men escaping with their lives were less disturbance than a pebble thrown in the river. Along the Borgo San Jacopo, there was a commotion around a burning vaporetto, and a carriage was surrounded by an angry mob, which suddenly drew back as the carriage was enveloped in a spurt of flame and coloured smokes, which blew away to reveal it empty. But this was only a temporary disturbance. All disturbances in the calm unfolding of the city’s routines were temporary, no more than an incalculably minute faltering, as of a speck of grit caught and crushed in a gear-train, in its remorseless mechanisms.

  PART TWO

  AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

  1

  The caravan of carriages which carried His Holiness Pope Leo X, lately Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, his advisers and attendants, his page-boys and cooks, his dwarfs and jesters, including his favourite, Father Marioano, his physicians and his Muslim rackmaster and bodyguard, and cardinals Sanseverino Farnese, Luigi de’ Rossi, Lorenzo Pucci, Lorenzo Cibò and Giulio de’ Medici, and their own lesser entourages of servants, moved in a great cloud of dust visible for many miles as it toiled past the little villages of Pozzalatico and Galluzzo. A squadron of the Swiss men-at-arms marched at the rear, their burnished chestplates, helmets, pike-heads and halberds glittering like a river in the clear fall sunlight; a pipe and drum band of fully fifty men in scarlet and white uniforms marched ahead.

  Rumours of the procession’s approach flew ahead of it as birds fly ahead of a forest fire. The chain of signal-towers along the Siena road passed messages back and forth in a continual flutter of semaphore arms. As the procession reached the brow of the last hill before the valley of the Arno, it began to pick up a tail of private citizens who had ridden out on horseback or private carriage or vaporetto, adding to the official escort of city militia that flanked the papal procession as it rattled down the long dust-white road, banners flying and drummers beating a frenzied marching-beat even though their hands were blistered and bleeding.

  It was noon when the procession at last reached the great open space before the Roman Gate in the city walls. Here it stopped, and with a flurry of attendants the Pope climbed down from his carriage. He wore a dazzling white silk rochet embroidered with heavy gold thread, white gloves of fine kid, embroidered with pearls, and white silk slippers. He was a heavy man, with a coarse face and bulging short-sighted eyes, rolls of fat at his neck and a generous paunch. A jewelled tiara was pinned to his vigorous black hair. He looked bothered by the fussing of his attendants, although he bore it with stoicism, and did not neglect to wave to the crowd gathered at the gate.

  A mounting-block was brought, and the Pope was helped on to it. He drew out a little brass spyglass and stood for a few minutes looking at the city in the valley, spread either side of the channelled river beneath its own umber haze. He turned this way and that, taking in the bristling defences of the rebuilt walls: the organ cannon, rocket-launching tubes, ballista, broad cannon, and from each tower the diamond shapes of tethered man-kites flying high in the brisk wind. He focused on the Great Tower rising out of a tumble of red-tiled roofs and dominating the square crenellated tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, the great gilded dome of the Duomo beyond, topped by its shining gold ball and cross. The smokes rising from the manufactories along the river, the angular maze of docks packed like a pincushion with clustered masts of ships, the complex geometry of the sluices and channels and gates that tamed the flow of the Arno: the Pope looked at them all.

  Perhaps he was thinking of the cruel assassination of his father in the Duomo, at the hands of the Pazzi conspirators, or of the uprising against the tyranny of his uncle which until now had banished every one of his family from the Republic. At any rate, tears rolled down his florid cheeks as he put away the spyglass and submitted to the indignity of being hauled on to the side-saddle of a fine white Arab stallion. Although he was a passionate huntsman he was a poor rider, and suffered from anal fistulas that made sitting in a hard narrow hunting saddle agony after only a few minutes.

  Still, he was smiling as the procession ponderously got under way again, and became a pageant that slowly rolled through the great gate and along the Via Maggio.

  Crowds lined the wide street, ten deep. The Pope ceaselessly signed his benediction with plump hands cased in pearl-trimmed white leather gloves. Half watched in silence, remembering the heavy yoke of Giuliano de’ Medici’s rule when, bent on revenge for the assassination of his brother, Lorenzo, he had purged half the city’s merchant families and robbed the rest to repay his debts, or remembering the words of Savonarola’s famous sermon which had started the brief but bloody civil war in which the Medicis had been overthrown. Savonarolistas in the pay of the King of Spain had been busy defacing walls with slogans culled from their exiled leader’s published works, and workmen were still busy washing them away as the procession moved past. The other half of the crowd, drunk with faith or wine, or both, cheered and waved pennants and shouted out their approval.

  Palle! Palle! Papa Leone! Palle! Palle!

  The Pope rode slowly, with two pages leading his white stallion by its gold-encrusted bridle. Eight Florentine citizens of noble birth held over his head hoops of moire silk cunningly locked together to form a canopy in the shape of a butterfly’s wings. Despite this shade, the heat of the day soon turned the Pope’s heavy face an alarming tinge of purple. Now and again he would halt to admire the banners and decorations that hung from every building, or watch the staging of brief tableaux. In one, a child dressed as an angel announced the birth of Christ to a young woman dressed as the Virgin, and burning halos swung above both their heads while a mechanical dove fluttered down and emitted a ray of dazzling light that struck a mirror stitched into the woman’s dress above her womb. In another, an actor in the burnished silver armour of Saint Michael fought a copper-scaled mechanical serpent, piercing it through its mouth so that it gushed realistic blood from every orifice. There was a brief pageant in which Cristoforo Colombo stepped from his boat through waves represented by twisting blue cloths, to be greeted by actors naked but for loincloths and with feather head-dresses and skins stained red with tobacco juice, the noble Savages of the Friendly Isles of the New World. Further on, Amerigo Vespucci was received by King Motecuhzoma II of the Mexican Empire, who was seated on a small white pyramid amidst a cornucopia of maize, hog plums, guavas, pitahayas, avocados, sweet potatoes and manioc set on gold and silver plates.

  The Pope only glanced at this last tableau before jogging his horse forward. Rome supported the contention of Spain that the Savages of the New World, from the innocent Indians of the Friendly Isles to the proud bloodthirsty Mexican and Mayan empires, must be conquered in the name of Christ, and that Florentines were endangering their souls by consorting with Savages and accepting them as equals.

  At each halt the Pope’s huge escort stopped too; by now it was stretched so far down the street that by the time the tail had halted the head was setting off again. At each halt the drummers drummed and the pipers blew shrill trills; chamberlains threw coins into the crowd from bulging moneybags; the men-at-arms marched smartly on the spot, their faces luminous with sweat; and cardinals leaned out of their coaches and craned forward to see what now had caught His Holiness’s attention, for later they would have to remark on every feature of the procession. Firecrackers and coloured smokes made the soldiers uneasy. On the rooftops, sharpshooters armed with the latest long-barrelled rifles stood against the sky, watching for any trouble.

  So the Pope gradually made his way down the Via Maggio and across the bridge of Santa Trinità, riding slowly beneath a triumphal arch of canvas and wood painted by the workshop of Raphael and erected only that day by over two hundred men. Fully five hours after he had mounted his horse at the great gate, Pope Leo X finally entered the Piazza della Signoria to a tremendous clangour of bells and thunder of cannon that set every bird in Florence on the wing.

  The welcoming shouts were louder and more numerous there, for the
more favoured citizens had been drinking sweet white wine from gilded barrels, and there were trestle-tables groaning with food under awnings pitched along the sides of the square. Spectators leaned out of every window of every building, and the confraternities raised up their standards and banners so that a flock of strange hieratic images of saints seemed to bend their attention towards the Pope as his horse was led slowly across the square. Patterns of coloured light revolved across the plastered front of the First Republic Bank, swarming in the gathering dusk.

  The councillors of the Signoria and other officials sat on a canopied stage, with the miraculous statue of the Madonna, brought from Impruneta and arrayed in cloth of gold, raised on a platform behind them. The pair of pages led the Pope’s horse to them and men rushed forward and assembled a kind of platform around the horse so that the Pope could step from the side-saddle directly on to the stage. The Gonfalonier, bareheaded, in black silk robes slashed with scarlet, stepped forward and knelt at the feet of the Pope and kissed the tasselled tips of His Holiness’s white slippers while priests shook bells and swung censers which poured forth sweet sandalwood smoke and aspersed everyone in range with holy water.

  The Pope raised up the Gonfalonier and kissed him ceremonially, his hands either side of the Gonfalonier’s face as if he were his most beloved son. The crowd cheered wildly.

  And in the middle of the square, with a rattle of gears barely disguised by a fanfare, the two halves of the huge cosmic egg swung open in front of a great white curtain. Along the edge of the bottom half of the egg were windows engraved with the signs of the zodiac and illuminated by lamps. There was a sudden flare of light as the lensed lamps of the sun in the centre of the engine were ignited and, to strange stately music played by a host of mechanical devices, actors, costumed according to poetic descriptions of the planets and standing on gold discs, rotated slowly and smoothly in their orbits.