Pasquale's Angel

by Paul J McAuley

  The note of the boiling-tubes of the ferry’s Hero’s engine rose in pitch, a keening whistle at the edge of hearing. The paddle-wheel thumped faster, spraying the deck with cold droplets of water. The ferry was coming about, heading into the quieter water along the edge of the river as it made for a landing at the foot of the city wall by the river gate. The head of the dead crewman was rocked back and forth by the vibration. Its eyes glimmered in the moonlight, blind and foolish-looking. Death makes fools of us all, Pasquale thought.

  Most of the crew of Savonarolistas had lined up on the landward side of the ferry, muskets and rifles bristling out at the stony barren shore. Pasquale called to the brute hireling, asking if trouble was expected, and the man grinned and drew his thumbnail across his throat.

  Rosso pushed away from the rail, where all this time he had leaned and watched Florence burn. He said, ‘We’re enemies to our own city now.’ Beside him, the ape shifted and rattled its chain. It hated water, and was uneasy and subdued on the little ferry.

  ‘You knew what road you were setting on,’ Pasquale said. ‘I hope to see your paintings, master, when you have your commissions.’

  ‘I do not know if I can paint again,’ Rosso said. ‘This is a bitter business, Pasqualino. You should hate me, and I would not blame you. I’ve been a fool.’

  Niccolò said, ‘There is always redemption.’

  ‘No talking,’ one of the masked Savonarolistas said. ‘You do what we want, now. All of you.’

  The shore was suddenly visible, and the city wall looming beyond. Signal-lights winked green and red atop the nearest tower. The ferry was aiming into a small cut that ran back into the shore along the line of the wall, labouring against the current. As it neared the mouth of the cut, lights rose up: rockets.

  At first Pasquale thought that they were signals from Savonarolistas waiting on the shore. But more and more rose, scrabbling quickly into the night and bursting in showers of white sparks at the tops of their toppling arcs. Pasquale remembered Giustiniani’s men sending rockets bursting through the panicky crowd in the Piazza della Signoria. Smoke blew out across the black river, softening the harsh glare released by the exploding rockets. The Savonarolistas started firing into the smoke, and red muzzle-flashes snapped back at them.

  The ape, Ferdinand, was sent into a frenzy by the noise, dashing to and fro in the narrow arc permitted by its chain. Rosso made a gesture, throwing up his hand, and at the same time the ape shrugged free of its chain; or no, Rosso had released it. It bounded away towards the foredeck, after the grapes that Rosso had thrown there. The brute hireling and Salai, his sword drawn, closed on it from different directions; the ape dodged both men by scampering up one of the rope stays of the ferry’s steam-vent.

  Rosso put a hand on either of Pasquale’s shoulders, and pushed him overboard.

  The shock of the cold water drove away Pasquale’s surprise. For a moment he thought he would drown in darkness; he made frantic frog-kicks, straining to free his hands, which were still bound behind his back. Then Rosso appeared beside him and got one arm under his chin. They were drifting away from the ferry, which had reversed its paddle-wheel as it tried to turn from the shore. Stray shots splashed and pattered around Rosso and Pasquale; one hit the water close to Pasquale’s face, tugging at the sodden folds of his jerkin as it sank. The ferry’s paddle-wheel stopped and the craft began to drift sideways in the current. It was silhouetted against the smoke and light from the shore; then something rushed out across the water, spitting sparks, and smashed into the stern.

  Rosso kicked and kicked, dragging Pasquale with him, and in a minute they were staggering up the shingle bank of a little backwater, where a handful of fresh corpses lay face down in the water, men killed by the fighting on the bridges, washed here by the river’s currents.

  PART THREE

  THE INTERRUPTED MEASURE

  1

  By the time Pasquale and Rosso had clambered across the jumble of flood-cast boulders and rotten tree-stumps on the river-bank, the exchange of shots between the Savonarolistas and the forces on the shore had ended. The ferry had run aground and was ablaze from end to end, and those Savonarolistas who had not jumped ship and chanced the dubious mercy of their enemies must surely have perished.

  Pasquale would have run to try and find Niccolò if Rosso hadn’t held him back. ‘We must save ourselves!’ Rosso said desperately.

  Filled with loathing and despair, Pasquale wrenched free and said, ‘He is my friend!’ Then he ran at Rosso and knocked him to the gravelly mud, and might have tried to kill him if voices had not sounded close by.

  It was a contingent of the city militia, searching for survivors of the ferry wreck. Pasquale and Rosso hid in a pit amongst freshly flayed bodies of horses and mules. By now both were racked by deep shivers, for their soaked clothes were icy cold and not likely to dry in the cold night air. Teeth chattering, they hugged each other for warmth, but both knew that their friendship had died amongst the stink of blood and the yellow grins of the dead animals.

  The militia’s search was in any case half-hearted. Moonlight turned the tumbled shore into a shadowy maze where a hundred men could have hidden from the searches of a thousand, and it was a cold night and the militia knew better than most that Sardinia was haunted by the shades of those who were disappeared for the convenience of the Signoria and the safety of the city. Besides, they had to pay for their ammunition out of their meagre stipends, and there was no point wasting it on any survivors of those who had (they supposed) stolen the ferry. They marched back to their warm guardroom without bothering to search the area properly, and they didn’t even report the incident: there was already enough madness that night.

  Rosso and Pasquale arose from their grave and made their way along a track winding between white boulders, over a little hill studded with rotted tree-stumps and the broken skeletons of horses and mules. Ribcages gleamed like ivory staves in the smoky moonlight. Halfway along, a shadow bounded up towards them, making a faint jingling. It was the ape, Ferdinand, its fur soaking wet and raised in little points.

  Rosso groaned, and cried out softly that he was cursed to bear this burden until he died. The ape made plaintive little hootings as Pasquale scratched behind its ears, and it seemed almost glad when Rosso took up its chain again. He roughly wrapped its length around his arm and hauled hard upon it, although the ape trotted along docilely enough between the two men, as if they were simply walking to their favourite tavern after a day’s work.

  But that time was over.

  They quickly reached a little gate at the base of a square ballistics tower, beside a channelled stream which ran out beneath the wall. A mill-house stood on the other side of the fast-running stream; chinks of yellow light showed between the big wooden shutters over its first-floor windows. But the gate was shut, of course, and Pasquale and Rosso didn’t dare bang on it and demand entry. It was quite clear that the militia were edgy that night, and would need little excuse to shoot a couple of shivering stragglers, so they had no choice but to pick their way around the wall to the nearest road, to await the opening of the Prato Gate at cock-crow. Walking at least kept the blood flowing.

  Rosso told Pasquale that he knew that this rescue would never make amends, but it was all he could do. He jerked the ape’s chain and said, ‘Perhaps you can sell the toy, if the Savonarolistas don’t find it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Pasquale said. He wasn’t convinced that Rosso’s help was motivated purely by a desire for redemption—anyone able to offer the flying toy to those who wanted it could name his price, although whether he survived the transaction was another matter entirely. As for his former master, Pasquale felt nothing but an empty pity, and that more for himself than for Rosso. He was suddenly cast adrift, rudderless, without a compass.

  ‘It’s not just that I can’t stomach torture,’ Rosso said. He was hugging himself as he walked, slapping his chest with crossed arms like a bird with clipped wings trying to take flight.

/>   ‘Niccolò found it hard enough,’ Pasquale said, finding in himself an unforgiving streak.

  ‘Of course, of course. I suppose that at the end I cannot betray my friends, or my city. It’s all very well thinking of these things in the abstract, but the actuality is quite different. It may seem I have no principles, but they are there all the same, buried deep.’

  ‘Then I suppose that you didn’t intend to murder Giulio Romano.’

  ‘No, no! That was a foolish accident. And besides, I wasn’t even in the tower.’

  ‘I thought you might have put the ape up to it in some way,’ Pasquale remarked, and even in the fading moonlight saw that his shot had gone home, for Rosso stumbled and cursed and walked on a little way before speaking again.

  ‘Well, you guessed the main part of it, anyway. But no one put him up to murder. The ape climbed the signal-tower, it’s true, and I did set him to it, but not with the intention of killing poor Giulio. No, that was furthest from my mind, and I had thought the ape ready, for I had already trained it to retrieve grapes from a higher and higher place until it would climb anywhere I asked it. How do you think it so easily learned to steal those grapes from that silly monk?

  ‘We had arranged that Giulio would light the lamps of the signal-tower of Signor Taddei’s Palazzo at a certain time. I would signal in turn by briefly revealing a lantern, and then send the ape to collect the prize. We had to resort to such devices because all of Raphael’s disciples were being watched closely, as you might imagine. In fact, that was why I was there that night, because Giulio feared losing that which he had taken, and would entrust it to me instead, although I had no means of getting it to where it was supposed to be.’

  ‘Then it was Romano who stole the device, and not Salai after all.’

  ‘So you don’t know everything, Pasqualino. No, Salai told Giulio how to find the device, that is all, for we knew that suspicion would immediately fall upon him, as indeed it did, once the device was found to be missing. Giulio took the device with ease, when he and his master, Raphael, visited the Great Engineer. He also made pictures of the Great Engineer’s notes, for they were too convoluted for easy transcription, even if the Great Engineer did not write in mirror image. How Giulio sweated over each long exposure! The ape wore a harness, with a padded pocket for the glass plates.’

  ‘I see now how things fell out. That same day, Salai met with Romano at the service for our confraternity. But why would Romano pass the device and the picture plates to you?’

  ‘Quite simple. Our plan was beginning to unravel. He became nervous when the secret police made discreet inquiries of Raphael. He was worried that the apartments would be searched. After all, the device was discovered to be missing after Raphael’s party had visited the tower. We had already thought of this, of course, and thought too of a way of transferring the device and picture plates from one hand to the other without even meeting.’

  ‘So that was why you were waiting with your ape outside Signor Taddei’s Palazzo.’

  Rosso sighed. He seemed weary of the convolutions of his tale, yet set on again, like an ox plodding its round at a water-lift. ‘So indeed. After you left the tavern I collected the ape and went straight away to Taddei’s Palazzo, and there I waited, watching the signal-tower through a glass, with Ferdinand by my side watching as keenly as me. The devil was in him that night, I swear. When he saw the arms of the signal-tower move, he straight away climbed the Palazzo’s boundary wall and swarmed up the tower, without waiting for my order. You can imagine my feelings as I watched him climb, for all of our plans resided on the actions of that one animal. He climbed quickly and strongly, swarming up the side of the tower and disappearing into the open window. As to what fell out then, I can only guess, although I heard Giulio’s dreadful cry and must guess that the ape believed that Giulio was attacking it when he tried to take off the harness. Or perhaps Giulio merely made a gesture which the ape in its excitement believed to be a threat. However it fell out, they fought, and so Giulio was killed, and the ape came back down empty-handed. By then Taddei’s household had been roused by Giulio’s cry, and I had to make my escape. And so it was that you found the little device on Giulio’s body, and took it believing it a toy. And here we are, in the cold and the dark.’

  ‘Not for long,’ Pasquale said.

  They turned the corner of the city wall, and quit the stony ground of Sardinia for a rough heath that saddled away in the moonlight. There was a little wood and beside it a scattering of camp-fires, like a constellation fallen to Earth from the cold starry sky, with the dark shapes of wagons drawn around them.

  It was a night camp of travellers who had arrived too late to enter the city the previous day. There were mendicants and refugees from the farms hoping to find work in the city’s manufactories, and a train of wagons, a knight and his entourage, and a merchant’s party. Hawkers and whores from the city moved amongst them, selling food and wine, or plying the warm commerce. No one slept except the smallest children, for the camp was alive with rumours of what was happening in the city. Pasquale and Romano kept their own counsel, for there were bound to be spies and informers amongst the hundred or more people camped there, and simply said that they had been assaulted by footpads and thrown into the river. They had no coin to buy food, and charity was not immediately forthcoming, but at Pasquale’s goading the ape turned a few summersets and walked up and down on its hands, flipping stones with its feet.

  This performance brought not money but bowls of soup and dry black bread, and cigarettes and a flagon of smooth red wine from the merchant, an elegant man in a brocaded caped tunic, with rings on every finger of his white hands. He was not much older than Pasquale, and took a liking to him, all the more so when he discovered that Pasquale was a painter, and where he was from. For an hour they talked about Fiesole, which the merchant knew well, and the broken axle-tree which had delayed the merchant’s journey, and the paintings which the merchant had inherited from his father, and the murder of Raphael, which the merchant had heard from a signaller who had passed on the news.

  The sky grew milky as dawn approached. Pasquale fell asleep and woke to find himself covered in a blanket stiff with rime. He had slept only an hour, but now it was light enough to see the city wall stretching away, prickly with weaponry, and the roofs and towers beyond it, and many threads of smoke already rising amongst them.

  The camp was stirring about him. People were hitching horses to wagons, dousing camp-fires, picking up bundles of possessions and loading them on carts and travois, heading along the muddy road towards the Prato Gate. The hawkers and prostitutes were already clustered before its arch, yawning and discussing the night’s work.

  Pasquale wandered through the disintegrating camp, looking for Rosso, and at last spotted the ape lurking in the shadows of the little wood. It scampered up to him as he approached. It had lost its chain, and was clearly agitated, for it kept dashing ahead of Pasquale and then running back to clutch his leg.

  In that way the ape led Pasquale through the little wood. Pasquale was amused, and then annoyed, and at last frightened. In the midst of the wood was a grandfather oak which sent its long limbs twisting out in every direction above the humped, mossy ground. The ape sat down on its bottom and wrapped its arms over its head and rocked back and forth.

  Pasquale left it and slowly walked around the oak to where Rosso hung. He had wrapped one end of the chain around one of the heavy lower branches, and the other around his neck. The toes of his leather slippers brushed frost-shrivelled grass-stalks as his corpse turned back and forth in the bitter wind which had sprung up with the rising sun. Crows had already found him and pecked out his eyes, and blood redder than his hair streaked his cheeks like the tears of the damned.

  2

  As Pasquale ran out of the wood, heartsick and horrified, the ape scampering at his heels, there was a distant flourish of trumpets. The city gates were opening.

  But by the time Pasquale gained the road he saw that
something was wrong. Those who had been waiting to pass through the customs post were being beaten back by squads of city militia. Hawkers dropped their trays and fled; prostitutes picked up their skirts and ran, screaming imprecations. Those too slow to run, or those brave or foolish enough to stand their ground, were knocked aside. The soldiers’ staves rose and fell and rose and fell, and there was a glitter of swords.

  A squad of cavalry burst out of the deep shadow beneath the arch of the gate, riding at full gallop, scattering militia and onlookers alike. Pasquale saw the merchant’s wagon founder as it was driven off the road, its horses screaming horribly as they tumbled into the ditch.

  More riders burst forth from the gateway, riding on either side of a string of coaches whose drivers flogged their teams with long whips. Sharpshooters in cork-lined breastplates and smooth helmets fitting close to their skulls lay on the roofs of the coaches, and more cavalry brought up the rear. This party passed in a thunder of wheels and hooves, and men bawling like beasts, and a great cloud of dust.

  Pasquale saw that the middle coach was drawn by a team of white horses, and that it flew the cobalt-blue banner of the Vatican. He had a glimpse of a man’s face peering through the thick glass window, a heavy coarse-featured face with unshaven jowls and small, short-sighted eyes. The man looked angry yet resolute, and his fierce stare burned in Pasquale’s vision even after the coach had thundered past.

  All around Pasquale, people had stopped what they were doing and swept off their hats; some even dropped to their knees, careless of the wheels of the coaches that rattled past less than an arm’s length away. Pasquale understood then. The Pope was leaving, fleeing the riots that threatened to tear Florence apart.