Pasquale's Angel

by Paul J McAuley

  Piero shook his head again, and said, ‘The shadows are crowding me from my room. No light, boy, no light. How can poor Piero paint without light?’

  Pasquale lighted fat tallow candles, and set them before the scattered mirrors and lenses, so that their light glimmered through the big cold room.

  ‘The light doesn’t stay still,’ Piero complained, when at last Pasquale had finished.

  ‘That’s the nature of light, master.’ Wistfully, Pasquale thought of his angel—there had not been much time for contemplation of late. He cast his mind back to the glimpse he’d had of its glory, a reflection of the glory of its master, which, like the sun, could not be approached or looked at directly. Yet as sunlight dances upon the face of the waters and multiplies its glory in such a way that its raw beauty is made bearable to the human eye, so with an angel, surely, for it would be driven by the glory of its service, made bemused and breathless by its journey from Heaven to Earth. It moved, it would always move: it would be as restless as light on water. Oh, how to paint that! How to paint its face!

  ‘Bring light here,’ Piero said, and Pasquale carried a candle to the table. He saw that the pictures were delicately penned studies of fantastic animals cavorting or coiled amongst strange rock formations, sheet after sheet of drawings, and no beast like any other or like anything Pasquale had ever seen, even in the sketches made by travellers of devils cavorting in the weird Flemish paintings of Heaven and Hell.

  ‘Are these from the New World, master?’

  Piero tapped his forehead. In the candle-light Pasquale saw the skull under the skin of his secret master’s face, and knew that Piero did not have long to live. He had travelled far from humanity, and the journey had worn him out before his time.

  ‘From the country of the mind,’ Piero said. ‘Cristoforo Colombo was wrong to voyage out towards the edge of the Earth. There are unexplored regions far wider and wilder and stranger than any glimpsed by a scurvied sailor clinging to the top-gallant of the royal mast of his vessel, crying for landfall. The country of the mind lives inside us all, yet most know it not. You do not know it, boy, and until you do you won’t be able to paint your angel. Has the woman talked to you yet?’

  ‘She gave me one of your plants to eat, master.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what you saw—it won’t have been anything important. Only true masters see the truth. You’ll be going away soon. I had hoped that the woman would have had time to initiate you, but perhaps this is better. Anyway, the plants I have are losing their potency after all these years. I envy you, Pasquale. You’ll taste fresh híkuri, and I never will again. Have I told you about Pelashil’s people, the Wixarika?’

  ‘Several times, master.’

  ‘You’ll hear it one more time?’

  ‘Of course, master.’

  So Piero told Pasquale how the híkuri was hunted, using the same words as he had when he had first told his tale. He told of how it took place in the dry season before winter, of how, when the maize was still green but the squash had ripened, a party of Wixarika set out on a pilgrimage lasting twenty days. After two days of preparing costumes, of prayer and cleansing confessions, they took the names of gods and, led by a mara’akame who had taken the name of the god of fire, were led across the dry plain beneath the two sacred mountains, searching for deer-tracks, for without deer there could be no peyote, which appeared in the footsteps of the first deer in the morning of the world. The first of the small grey-green plants was always pierced by an arrow and ringed with offerings; the rest were carefully examined and scrupulously packed away. Piero had taken his first peyote on the first night of his first pilgrimage, and had been led by a spotted cat through a series of images set out like booths in a carnival, and had known upon awakening that he would be a mara’akame.

  Pasquale had heard this before, told in exactly the same way, but now he understood that everything Piero had told him, and all Pelashil had done, was to initiate him in this truth: that the world of visions was as real as the world of the artificers. He said, ‘Master, please forgive me. I doubted that you were a good man. I was wrong, and now I am in sore need of your advice.’

  ‘I know, I know. They think me stupid, or a fool or a madman, but I’m not. I know why the soldiers came here. Can I see it?’

  Pasquale took out the little device. Piero peered at it from every angle, and finally asked, ‘And does it fly?’

  ‘Master, as always you astound me. How did you know?’

  ‘Because Giovanni Rosso came looking for it, before the soldiers.’

  ‘I must return it to its maker. Master, you have talked with the Great Engineer. How can I see him? Will you take me?’

  ‘He understands me more than most. But we have talked but twice. I know him not. Not well enough for your purpose.’

  ‘But master, my life is in danger. I am in the middle of a struggle for a prize I would gladly give up, if I could.’

  ‘They say the Pope has left, retreated from the fighting in the streets.’

  ‘That’s true enough. I saw him with my own eyes.’ Pasquale described the scene at the gate that morning, watching his master’s face soften dreamily. Piero was a great supporter of the Medicis: after they had been overthrown he had left Florence too, for the New World. And when Pope Leo X had gained Saint Peter’s throne, Piero and Andrea del Sarto had contrived a carnival triumph whose theme was death. At the centre of the procession had been the Chariot of Death itself, drawn by black buffaloes painted with white human bones and crosses, on which stood a huge figure of Death armed with a scythe standing triumphant over tombs which opened and issued forth figures draped in black cloth on which were painted the bones of complete skeletons, so that by torchlight they looked like skeletons dancing in service of their dark lord. As death was exile from life, so the triumph symbolized the long exile from which the Medicis would return to their rightful place, and again rule Florence. But they had not returned. Florence in her triumph was still stronger than Rome. It was the last spectacle that Piero had staged, and afterwards he had retreated from the world.

  When Pasquale had finished describing the Pope’s retreat, there was a silence. At last Piero sighed heavily and said, ‘I will die with a heavy heart. How I danced not two days ago, Pasquale. How I danced. And now Florence stands alone again.’

  ‘This talk of death makes me uncomfortable.’

  ‘I envy you, Pasquale. Suppose you are caught and tried and executed—at least you will go to your death in the best of health, watched by thousands who will mark your passing as only the passing of a favoured few men is marked. You will march to your death to stirring music, on a fête-day, your every need having been catered for beforehand, and the announcement of your death will have been prominently placed in every broadsheet. How much better than most deaths, those small sullen private struggles. I do not fear death, Pasquale, but I fear the indignity of dying.’

  Pasquale had to laugh at this fantasy. It was a trick of Piero’s, to invert accepted truths and make them seem as exotic as the ceremonies of the Mexica, or any of the lesser nations of Savages.

  ‘You laugh at death,’ Piero said. ‘That’s good, at least. Well, I’ll look after the ape for you. I don’t mind that, although it will drive Pelashil mad, no doubt, and leave me entirely on my own. Poor Piero, they’ll say, with only an ape to mend his clothes and cook his food, and warm his bed.’

  Pasquale had forgotten about the ape, and asked where it was.

  ‘Out in the garden, eating the figs from my trees. It is happy there, Pasquale. Leave it be. Sheathe your burning sword, eh? Don’t drive it out. It knows no sin.’

  Pasquale supposed it was true. The ape had killed, but not out of malice and quite without intent or any knowledge of wrong, and so without guilt. Happy ignorance of the unremembering unfallen—how he envied it, remembering his own burden.

  ‘I may never see you again,’ Piero said. ‘That has just occurred to me.’

  ‘I’ll be back, master. I pr
omise.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Piero said quickly. ‘I prefer the sound of rain to that of idle conversation. I wish I could teach you more, but perhaps you know enough already. Let learning be your journey.’

  Pasquale cradled the device, turning its helical screw back and forth with a forefinger. So fragile a toy, on which the fate of empires rested. He said, ‘I’ll be as quiet as a church mouse, master, when I tiptoe back. And I’ll wait for a clear day, with no rain. But if you could tell me, please, how to gain an audience with the Great Engineer, I can be gone now, and leave you to your contemplations.’ Piero ruffled the raven’s feathers with a finger, so that the bird ducked its head in pleasure, regarding its master sideways with a round black eye shiny as a berry. ‘He loves birds,’ Piero said. ‘That’s what we talked about, mostly. I told him of the condor, that soars for hours on outstretched wings.’

  ‘But how do I gain audience, master? When I return the device I must make sure it is into his hands that it falls. I can make my own small talk, if I need to.’

  ‘He’s one of the saddest men I know. And one of the loneliest.’

  ‘Can I simply walk into his tower? Is it as simple as that?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Piero said sharply, still stroking his pet. ‘Don’t be a fool. He is more closely guarded than the Pope, for the college of Rome can always elect another pope, but there will only ever be one Great Engineer. But although he is mostly shut up in his tower, his assistants walk here and there about town. There is one who haunts the kind of low taverns that you like, Pasquale. You could try and find him, I suppose. He has a taste for the low life, and for dirty pictures. He is called Nicolas Koppernigk, a poor threadbare sketch of a man, and a notorious miser to boot. You know him?’

  Pasquale remembered the cosmic engine, afire in the square. Koppernigk had proved that the Earth went round the sun, which was the centre of the universe. Or perhaps the other way round: it was all the same to him as long as the ground was always under his feet. He said, ‘This Koppernigk. How do I find him?’

  ‘Oh,’ Piero said vaguely, ‘one or other of the taverns of the Prussian student nation, I suppose. But first promise to change your clothes, Pasquale. Have you been swimming in the river at this late season?’

  4

  Rosso’s studio was like a battlefield. Everything had been overturned and smashed. Pasquale’s clothes, for which he had risked returning, had been slashed or systematically slit along the seams: the fine silk shirt for which he had paid ten florins; the white, lace-trimmed shirt of best English cloth and its matching white doublet with gold silk sewn inside deep slashes; the ordinary homespun shirts and hose; the big cape he had bought from an Albanian mercenary and lovingly relined; even his work-apron had been cut to ribbons. The heels of his second-best pair of boots had been broken off. A broad leather belt, which he had tooled with intricate patterns after the Moorish style, had somehow been snapped in two, and its brass buckle bent. His truckle bed was now truly broken-backed, and its mattress cut to ribbons.

  Pasquale ripped out the remains of the lining from the cloak and wrapped it around himself. The rest, all the clothes he had carefully collected or mended or sewn together himself, were beyond salvage.

  The main room of the studio was in as bad a state as Pasquale’s few possessions. The work-bench had been overturned, the grindstone cracked in two, the door of the little kiln broken off. Pigments had been spilt everywhere, making gaudy arcs and splashes across the floor, and every canvas had been slashed, every frame broken. In the half-light of dusk, Pasquale felt in the back of the kiln, and found the small cloth bag in which Rosso habitually kept the studio’s takings. It contained more than he’d hoped for but less than it should, considering the fees for the stiffener and for the broadsheet engravings. Rosso, had he still lived, would have been grievously short with the rent.

  Pasquale turned to go, and stumbled over the little panel he had so lovingly prepared. A hole had been kicked in it. He held it and felt nothing, for all that he had spent so much skill and time on preparing it. It was made of best seasoned poplar, glued and then braced, and given an ornate frame that Pasquale had gilded himself. He had sanded the wood and filled every small knothole and crack with sawdust and glue, then coated the panel with one thin and three thick coats of liquid size and covered the size with strips of linen. The next layers, of gesso grosso, or chalk mixed in size, had taken two weeks to prepare; each had been allowed to dry for several days and then scraped and sanded smooth before the next was applied. Finally, he had applied coats of gesso sottile, the first rubbed on by hand, the others each brushed on before the previous one had dried, eight in all. And after that had been dried in the sun, Pasquale had smoothed and scraped it with spatula and raffietti until it was as smooth and burnished as ancient ivory.

  All for some thug to put his boot through, in a moment.

  As he stood there, Pasquale heard someone coming carelessly up the stairs. A moment later there was a brisk hammering at the door. He found a little knife and unbent its blade between two floorboards and crept to the door, which he had left open.

  The monk who looked after the gardens of Santa Croce was fixing a magistrate’s notice with nails and a hammer. Pasquale caught the monk’s hand on the upswing, jabbed him in the neck with the point of the knife, where fat made two rolls at the collar of his habit, and caught the hammer when it dropped.

  ‘I don’t have any time,’ Pasquale said, ‘so please tell me straight. Did you see who did this?’

  The monk moved his head cautiously, a thumb’s width to either side. His eyes were fixed on the notice he had nailed to the door.

  Pasquale added, ‘The noise must have been considerable. You didn’t come and complain?’

  ‘I was…elsewhere.’

  ‘They may have been costumed as militia, or masked. Which was it?’

  ‘I wasn’t here!’

  The hammer made a very satisfactory noise as it thumped across the floor of the workshop. ‘No,’ Pasquale said, ‘you were at the Offices of Night and Monasteries, to judge by this scrap of paper. What’s this about a harness weighted with lead?’

  ‘To stop it climbing. I mean only to look after my garden. It is my duty, and your ape—’

  The monk watched, goggle-eyed, as Pasquale slashed the notice to ribbons.

  ‘Pray for me, brother,’ Pasquale said. ‘I’d speak more of this, but I have an important appointment with a scholar.’

  As he hurried down the winding stair, for the last time, he heard the monk shouting that he’d get a new notice restraining master and ape. You can bang on that drum all you like, fellow, Pasquale thought. Two days ago it might have frightened me, but no more.

  5

  Doctor Nicolas Koppernigk favoured the taverns used by students of the Prussian nation, where he held informal tutorials and took wine as his fee, being too parsimonious to buy his own. He had a cautious taste for the low life, so long as it cost him nothing, and preferred the company of students to that of his fellow artificers, of whom he was both jealous and suspicious.

  A band of strolling musicians was playing dance music in the square outside in the hope that they would please enough of the tavern’s patrons to gain a free meal. Small chance of that, Pasquale thought, who had a poor opinion of students in general, and Prussian students in particular. Students were no more than intellectual vagabonds, flitting from university to university until they found one that would sell them a doctorate; they had no discipline and no craft, and inhabited an airy world of ideas. As for Prussians, they lacked even the ideas, and had no ear for the finer aspects of music, liking only drinking-songs and bombastic marches.

  The tavern was noisy and smoky, filled with students shouting at each other across the tables, their faces beast-like in the flickering rushlights. One group was beating its table with beakers and singing a dreary tune in bad Latin:

  The British eat shit because it’s all they have,

  The Italians eat shit be
cause they’re dumb,

  The French eat shit because the Italians do,

  But we eat shit because we are strong loyal Prussians,

  Ha! Ha! Ha!

  Doctor Koppernigk sat in the furthest darkest corner with three swarthy lumpen-faced students who looked at Pasquale with ill grace when he bowed and introduced himself. Koppernigk started up in a kind of befuddled pop-eyed amazement. He was a gaunt man of about fifty, the cheeks of his bony face scraped red, his eyes set close beneath eyebrows that knit together to form a single line that lowered as he regarded Pasquale. He wore a fur-trimmed cap that sat askew his long greasy grey hair, and a long tunic of what might once have been rust-coloured fabric, but was now darkened to a blotchy black.

  Pasquale sat opposite Koppernigk and called loudly for more wine, and told the scientist that he would be a new pupil.

  Koppernigk’s suspicious gaze shifted to Pasquale’s face, jumped back nervously away. ‘What trick is this?’

  Pasquale lit a cigarette and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. ‘There is no trick at all, signor. I need your help, and Piero di Cosimo recommended me to you.’

  ‘I need no agent, and no pupils for that matter. I’m a philosopher, signor, no mere teacher.’

  ‘And yet you teach,’ Pasquale said mildly, smiling at the three students and getting more scowls in return. He showed a coin, and asked how much a private lesson would cost.

  Koppernigk allowed cautiously, eyeing the coin with a kind of hunger, that three times as much might be sufficient.

  ‘It’s yours,’ Pasquale said, and sat down when Koppernigk had shooed off his lumpen pupils like an old wife scattering chickens.

  ‘Now, signor,’ Koppernigk said, ‘you can ask me what you want, although I should warn you that I am notoriously short of answers.’

  ‘I must apologize, signor, for driving away your pupils for this night. But in many ways I’m no stranger to you. Ah! Perhaps this wine will help make amends.’ Pasquale beamed at the greasy drab who had thumped a flask of wine on the table, and gave her a clipped silver coin with a carelessness he certainly did not feel. ‘Please drink with me at least, good Canon, and hear my entreaty.’