‘Was this message sent by Giustiniani?’
‘It was sent anonymously. It told of Romano’s betrayal, and asked that you be delivered to the south side of the Ponte Vecchio at a certain time. Why do you suspect Giustiniani?’
‘I saw a man killed at his villa,’ Pasquale said.
Cardano leaned forward. ‘That would be the missing man, Giovanni Francesco. It would explain all. It seems that Francesco was an accomplice of Romano, and it may be that he killed Romano to win all the glory for himself. In any event, he was killed in turn because he failed in his task.’
Pasquale decided not to tell them about the picture of the black mass, or of the flying device, or of Francesco’s attempt at blackmail. It could well be that Francesco was Romano’s killer—Romano would certainly have opened the door of the signal-tower to him—but it was unlikely that Francesco could have cleaned himself of Romano’s blood in the short time between Romano’s dying cry and the search which it immediately started. And even if Francesco was Romano’s murderer, why would he have gone to treat with Giustiniani? Surely he would have first tried to win back the box—it was in Taddei’s possession, and so within reach—and he would also have taken the flying device from Romano. For the moment, exhausted and more than a little drunk from the heady wine, Pasquale couldn’t unriddle it. He wished that he could benefit from Niccolò’s sharp, clear insight…and with a pang realized that he might never see him again. Giustiniani’s men might well have killed him in the confusion at the Palazzo della Signoria.
Taddei said, ‘You had better explain to us, Pasquale, just what happened at Giustiniani’s villa.’
When Pasquale had finished, omitting any mention of blackmail, there was a silence. Finally the cardinal said, ‘It pains us to hear how badly things have fallen out here. My cousin was thinking of presenting Raphael with a commission to complete the chapel which Michelangelo has left unfinished for so long.’
‘There’s no doubt that Giustiniani was the broker in Romano’s compact with Spain,’ Taddei said, ‘and would be still if he could. That is why his men tried to capture this boy. But Raphael’s assassination is the kind of devilry the Savonarolistas might use in their clandestine war. Suddenly it appears that we are playing a three-handed game here.’
The cardinal said, ‘Raphael’s body must be returned. For all that my family love Florence, my cousin cannot avoid war if he returns to Rome without it.’
‘Raphael was a guest of this city,’ Taddei told Pasquale. ‘That he was murdered is bad enough, although it can be excused as a Savonarolista plot. But that his body was taken and Florence cannot return it…There will in truth be war between Rome and Florence if it is not returned. And with the alliance broken, Spain will win all. It is well known that she will not be content with the south of Italy, but would rule all, and our colonies in the New World as well. The Spanish fleet has been standing off the coast this past week, and no doubt will land as soon as the alliance fragments into war. They have been funding the Savonarolistas for many years, and at last the unrest they have sought is coming about.’
Pasquale said, ‘Surely no one will attack Florence. We are defended by the genius of the Great Engineer, whose inventions defeated the armies of Rome and Venice after the assassination of Lorenzo.’
The cardinal said, ‘How ironic that Lorenzo’s son may have to make war on Florence because of this sorry affair.’
Taddei told Pasquale, ‘All states are now armed with similar weapons, copied from the originals that Florence has first used, and in many cases improving upon them. All governments have their rocket cannon, their mobile armoured shields, their Greek fire and the rest. If the Great Engineer has invented new weapons, then he has kept them secret even from the Signoria.’
Cardano said, ‘He is an old man. It is said that he is crazy, and obsessed with escaping a deluge that will end the world. What Spain hoped to learn I do not know, but in the end two men are dead for an invention which is of no use in war, and which in any case has now been revealed to all the world.’
‘You know that I saw your Great Engineer today,’ the cardinal said. ‘I will say that he seemed to have withdrawn from everything around him. He spoke not at all, and did not once look at the marvel of his cosmic engine, while his assistants worked to capture my cousin’s likeness with no word or order from him.’
‘He has not invented anything for a long time,’ Cardano said. ‘As his university has grown, so his own powers of invention have dwindled.’
Taddei said, ‘Nevertheless, this misadventure threatens the very existence of the Republic, and its renewed alliance with Rome.’
The cardinal nodded, suddenly grave. Cardano was staring at Pasquale with a dark intensity, his lower lip caught between his teeth.
Taddei said to Pasquale, ‘Understand that we do this out of dire need.’
‘It’s nothing personal,’ Cardano added.
There was a crash of armour; a dozen soldiers passed through the arch of the door at the far end of the room, marching in quickstep. Cardano drew a slim short sword and Pasquale sprang to his feet and lifted the stool to parry the blow. A second swing knocked the sword from the astrologer’s hand. The weapon flew the length of the Persian carpet and Pasquale ran and snatched it up and turned to face the soldiers, flicking it from point to point to keep them at bay.
For a moment, only the soft sounds of the fire.
Then a corporal made a sweeping movement and his pincer mace shot forward. Its toothed maw gripped the top of Pasquale’s head and his left shoulder. Pain lived between these points, pure as light.
The corporal twisted his weapon. Stone smashed into Pasquale’s hip, his back. The sword fell from his hand, ringing on the flagstones. His body was numb. He was looking up at the white vaults of the ceiling. At each of the bosses of the ceiling’s vaults a gilded putto, with round cheeks and a rosebud mouth, smiled down. A shadow fell across Pasquale. Cardano bent and gently pressed a reeking cloth to his nose and mouth.
6
The vaporous liquid that soaked the cloth did not put Pasquale entirely to sleep. It was as if he were hovering at the border of dreaming and waking, might again be in his truckle bed in the narrow little room of the studio he shared with Rosso and the Barbary ape, nursing the dull pain of a hangover and easing into the day. He felt motion, and dreamed, or thought he dreamed, that he was being carried swiftly on the back of a demon eagle, like the magician Gerbert, who had ridden a demon to save himself from the Inquisition and had lived to become Pope Sylvester II. The eagle turned its terrible horned face to him and with a flick of its wings tumbled him from its back. He tried to scream, but no words would come. A great mouth rushed at him, grinding its teeth as it opened and spat him out into night.
When Pasquale woke, it was to the jolting of a carriage. His head seemed cramped by a band of iron; his mouth was thoroughly coated with a foul sweet taste. He was lying on his belly on the carriage floor, slung lengthwise between benches where two soldiers sat. His hands were bound by a thin strong cord, and although his feet were free he did not yet have the energy or will to try and sit up, let alone stand.
The soldiers, as massive from his prone perspective as statues of Roman emperors, wore iron breastplates and helmets with an elongated beak and an upswept crest that broke into horns, the sort of fantastication loved by the Albanian mercenaries who were employed by private merchants to protect their wagon-trains. Taddei was making good his promise, then. Pasquale was being delivered as ransom for Raphael’s corpse.
The coach rattled to a stop, and one of the mercenaries leaned out of the window—Pasquale heard the bang as he slid the shutter back, then felt a draught of cold air—and shouted something to the driver. With the cold air, which helped revive Pasquale’s strength, came a diffuse sound like the roar of the sea, and a smell of burning.
The coach set off again, and the roar grew louder: men shouting; a random peppering of shots; screams. The carriage stopped again. One of the merce
naries was talking to someone, saying look, look, here was the pass, here was the seal of the Ten. The carriage door swung open, doubling the roar of the mob. A ray of lantern-light shot into the interior. Rough hands dragged Pasquale to a sitting position; just in time, he remembered to close his eyes. Let them think him unconscious.
The first mercenary said, ‘This is the piece of shit we have to deliver across the river.’
‘And by tonight,’ the second mercenary said.
A third, Florentine-accented voice said, ‘You’ll have to do the best you can, but you won’t get across this bridge, or any other.’
The first mercenary said, ‘It must be this bridge, Captain. We have important business at the other end. Here, it says we can ask for your help.’
The captain said, ‘I’m giving you my advice. It is all I have.’
‘Then keep it,’ the second mercenary said, ‘and give us a few men instead.’
‘You’ll need a fucking army to get through that mob,’ the captain said, ‘and I can’t spare even one man.’
‘It says—’
‘I can read it,’ the captain said sharply, ‘which is more than you can. Bring me the man who wrote it and I might listen to you. Instead, I’ll tell you what you can do, and that’s turn this carriage round and try and get a ferry-boat across the river down by Sardinia. The seal on that piece of paper might possibly impress some poor oarsman.’
The second mercenary said, ‘We report you, when we return. I remember your face.’
‘You do that. Meanwhile, turn round and get off the bridge. Anyone trying to force a way through that mob will only inflame them further. Try a ferry. If you have no luck with your bit of paper you can always steal the boat. That’s what you mercenaries are good at, isn’t it?’
Both mercenaries swore at the captain, fluently and inventively, and the man laughed. Then there was a rattle of steel in the distance, a great shout and the captain cried, ‘Now you see why you must turn back! Turn back right now!’ A cannon boomed out close by and the carriage rolled forward a pace as its horses started.
The carriage door slammed so hard the vehicle rocked. Pasquale allowed himself to be laid back on the floor and risked opening an eye as the two mercenaries argued in their own guttural language. Firelight flickering on the roof of the carriage, a glimpse of heads moving past outside the window. Then the horned helmet of one of the mercenaries blocked the view as the man leaned out of the window and shouted to the driver to get on. The driver must have argued, because the mercenary swore and shouted that they must reach the far end of the bridge, to go, go now, go now at a gallop!
The carriage lurched forward so abruptly Pasquale rolled against the boots of the mercenaries, who kicked him back as one might roll a log, bruising his hips and shoulders. Blows thundered on the sides of the carriage; a window was punched in with a sharp clatter. The carriage rocked as the blows doubled and redoubled; then the carriage gained speed.
Shots, thunderous in the small space. The mercenaries were crouched at either window and firing pistols through them at a rapid rate. Pasquale started to sit up, feeling an airy panic, and one of the soldiers cried out and fell backwards, sprawling across him.
Pasquale felt the man’s hot blood soaking his tunic. He writhed beneath the dead weight and groped for the man’s belt with his bound hands, but could find no knife. Then the weight shifted and the first mercenary lifted him by the hair so that he howled as he was dragged from the carriage into noisy firelit night.
They were on the Ponte Vecchio. It looked like the gateway to Hell. Shops burned in unison on either side, their roofs fallen in, flames leaping high and sparks whirling higher. Broken acetylene lanterns spat hissing geysers of yellow flame. The far end of the bridge was crowded with men, their faces red-lit by fire, their eyes pinprick glints. Some capered on the parapet, or on the roofs of those shops not yet burned. A great ragged chanting came from them, and a rain of small missiles, visible only as they arced down through the firelight. Most passed over the carriage, but some struck the pavement around it, stones smacking with sharp thumps, bottles shattering. A corpse lay a few braccia away, and others were scattered up and down the roadway, indistinct bundles in the leaping firelight.
Shots plucked the air overhead—soldiers holding the barricade through which the carriage had driven were returning fire. Pasquale saw a man spin and topple from the parapet into the river below, any sound he might have made in his last fall lost in the howl of the mob.
On either side of the burning bridge, along the bank on either side, buildings burned too, squatting over their inverted reflections.
The mercenary wound his fingers in Pasquale’s hair and jerked his head back. The mercenary said, ‘Your bastard militia shot the driver and Luigi. You try and run and I shoot you. I shoot you dead.’
Pasquale’s mouth was dry. He rubbed his tongue over his palate until saliva flowed and said, ‘I think your master wants me alive.’
‘I was told to deliver you to the other side of this bridge, that’s all. Dead or alive makes no difference to me. But I think the soldiers back there want you alive, or they’d use their cannon on us, like they used on the mob to keep them back.’
‘What would you have me do?’
The mercenary wrenched Pasquale’s head again, and started to march him backwards. ‘We’re walking back there, and you tell them to guarantee safe passage across the river. Maybe they listen to a fine gentleman like you.’
Pasquale couldn’t believe the fool, and laughed right in his face. The mercenary lost his temper and knocked Pasquale down. Pasquale saw his chance. He rolled under the carriage, scrambled to his feet on the other side, started to run towards the barricade, the only thing he could think to do, waving his bound hands above his head and shouting that he was kidnapped. Behind him, the howl of the mob doubled: it was surging forward. Little lights blinked and flickered amongst the militia behind the barricade; then the first bullets struck the paving-stones around Pasquale. One grazed the parapet and went whooping away into the darkness over the river.
Pasquale threw himself down and tried to make himself as small as possible. Incendiary quarrels rained down too, and where they struck the coach they started to burn. The mercenary suddenly sat down, clutching his pierced breastplate. Burning quarrels littered the paving-stones; horribly, one had set fire to a corpse, which in a hideous parody of life slowly writhed in the middle of a ball of orange flame and greasy smoke as the heat shrivelled its muscles.
A cannon boomed. Its round whistled overhead, skimmed the top of a burning shop and vanished into the darkness beyond. The mob retreated, men trampling their fallen fellows in panic. The two horses harnessed to the carriage stamped forward, eyes rolling, foam running from their mouths as they pulled against the brake.
Pasquale ran towards the carriage, for it was the only shelter on the bridge. With his hands crossed and bound, he couldn’t use the grab-rail, but he got a foot in a bracket and kicked up. The driver slumped on the bench; Pasquale got blood on his hands when he untangled the reins from the dead man’s grip. He kicked back the brake and flicked the reins across the horses’ sweating backs and they promptly charged towards the mob. For an exhilarating moment, it seemed that Pasquale might succeed, but then the carriage smashed into an overturned velocipede which tangled in the spokes of the front wheels. The carriage slewed, its iron-bound wheels dragging rooster-tails of sparks from the paving-stones.
The horses stumbled, mad with panic because they were caught in a narrow corridor between burning buildings. Pasquale tried to haul on the reins, but had no strength left. The carriage slewed towards a burning butcher’s shop and Pasquale jumped, rolling over and over.
As he staggered to his feet, two men ran at him from the mob. No, one was an ape. It was the Barbary ape, Ferdinand. It squatted a little way from Pasquale, gazing at him with brown, intelligent eyes. The man who caught hold of the ape’s iron collar and grinned down at Pasquale was Giovanni Rosso.
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7
As the mob surged forward, striking up their jeering chants again, Rosso squatted and cut the cord which bound Pasquale’s wrists. Pain surged into Pasquale’s fingers. Skin had been torn from every knuckle, and more pain came when he flexed his hands, fearful that he had broken bones.
He hadn’t.
Rosso helped him through the dense-packed swirling mob. Pasquale had once spent a day watching the madmen stagger to and fro amongst the rocks and skinned carcasses of horses and mules at Sardinia, noting and sketching. Those same expressions surged around him now, from incoherent rage to slack-mouthed idiocy. Heat beat on either side from the burning butchers’ shops. The smell of roasting meat was sickening. The light shaking above the writhing bodies of the mob was vermilion and cinnabar and gold. Sweat, the stink of smoke reaching back into the throat, the crisp noise of the fires. When the cannon boomed out almost everyone dropped to his knees, then slowly picked himself up and moved forward again.
‘They could kill us all with one shot!’ Pasquale shouted to his master.
‘And smash the bridge, most likely,’ Rosso shouted back. ‘No, they’re firing to let us know they can, angling shot over into the flood-channel where it’s deepest. The time for killing hasn’t come, not yet. They need orders for that.’
Pasquale’s head was swimming, and it didn’t seem in the least odd that his master should be here to help him. He asked, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Away from here. Before they do get orders to aim the cannon into the crowd and clear the bridge with chain-shot. Ever seen that? Pairs of small iron shot linked by a chain maybe a span apart. One will cut a man in two. They call them the Great Engineer’s balls, because they will never engender a child.’
After Pasquale and Rosso reached the far end of the bridge, shouldering past opportunistic hawkers and their customers, they took the steep steps down to the New Walk that had been cantilevered out above the river not five years ago. It was a promenade much in favour with the artificers, who could look on the system of channels by which they had tamed the Arno, on the Great Tower in which the chief of their number lived, and the manufactories which had made them wealthy and powerful.
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