The Master of Verona pa-1

by David Blixt

  Something about the shadow made him draw his dagger. Stepping closer, he heard a sound until now drowned by the slap of the surf below. It was a gibbering whimper, made by a voice he knew.

  Placing the blade near at hand, the Moor knelt down and sent his hands questing into the shadow. At once he encountered flesh. It recoiled from his touch. "No-o-o!" cried a ghostly version of Ignazzio's tenor.

  "It's me," said the Moor.

  "Oh Master!" Ignazzio grasped the Moor's hands and dragged himself gasping into the starlight. "I'm sorry — so sorry..!"

  "Who did this?"

  Ignazzio doubled over in pain. He was covered in blood, which seemed to be coming from his midsection. "S-scarecrow! He was here — waiting! For months, he said! He knew we'd — we'd come here — bankers — "

  "Hush." Most of Ignazzio's clothes had been ripped away by some kind of blade, revealing the small, pudgy body. "You need not speak."

  The astrologer shook his head. "No — you have to — he, he said I–I had something of his! He searched me — I'm sorry, tell them I'm so — " Ignazzio's scream became a long whimper. "He took it, he took it!"

  "I know." The Moor had already seen the absence of the medallion with its twisted, twisting cross of pearls. He was busy examining the wound. A curved knife or sickle of some kind. Stabbed in the groin and torn upward almost to the breastbone. It was a marvel Ignazzio had lived so long.

  The dying man moaned, twisted. In a voice that was more complaining than grieving, he cried, "I never saw this in my stars!"

  The Moor sat and cradled Ignazzio's head in his arms. "The stars show the path, but not each step."

  "Oh dear God, dear Christ! It hurts so..!"

  "Shhh. Through this pain, there is peace."

  Ignazzio stared up with pleading eyes. "Master, I have served my purpose. Have I your goodwill?"

  The Moor nodded. "You have. That, and my thanks."

  "Then spare me, master! Spare me this — indignity!"

  Theodoro of Cadiz, one of many names this Moor used, leaned forward and kissed his pupil's forehead. Then he put one hand on each side of Ignazzio's head and, taking a shallow breath, he pulled up and to the left. There was a sound like splintering brush, a rattling exhale, then the shivers and convulsions that follow such a death.

  So. The medallion was worth more than they had thought. It was worth murdering for. Not only that, worth the effort of tracking them here. Or rather, waiting. Was he crouched nearby, listening still?

  The Moor wasted no more time. He laid his pupil's corpse across the mouth of San Antonio's cave with enough gold to pay for a decent funeral. Then he returned to the fisherman and boarded the rickety boat. Halfway to Messina he changed their destination. He disembarked in a small village and immediately disappeared into the Moorish community there. It was time to blend in, discard Theodoro and resume an old identity. Perhaps even his real one.

  But first he must write to Pietro. The boy needed warning. Their enemy was on the move again.

  Vicenza

  17 August 1316

  In June Cremona's Cavalcabo had stepped aside as ruler to be replaced by Giberto da Correggio, a rabid Scaliger foe despite the fact that his niece was married to Bailardino's brother. Annoyed by this appointment, the Scaliger and Passerino Bonaccolsi returned to their western war and laid siege to Cremona by land and water. Jacopo was not sorry to be among those left behind.

  There were those who were sorrowful, though. One was Bailardino, who regretfully refused to war against a relation — though it gave him an excuse to stay at home and play with his new son Bailardetto, just a year old.

  Another disappointed soul was Giuseppe Morsicato, barber, surgeon, and knight. He had not been at Calvatone, which he lamented, for they had certainly needed his skills. This year his master was not taking the Vicentine army out on campaign, and so Morsicato was forced to sit around the palace, wasting his days nursing cases of heatstroke and overindulgence.

  This particular evening found him at the Nogarola palace looking after an ailing squire. The youth was stricken with a summer fever and there was little to be done other than make him sleep. Morsicato's favored mixture of poppy seed juice and crushed hemp seeds would make the boy rest until his fever either broke or killed him.

  It promised to be a long night, and he was hungry. Morsicato's wife had been asleep when he'd gotten the call and so hadn't ordered the maid to send food with him. Typical of Morsicato himself, he simply forgot. That was the way it always was — the urgencies of his profession overrode all practicality. Now, having seen the squire and tended him as best he could for the moment, the balding doctor with the forked beard made his way down to the kitchens of the Nogarola palace.

  He spent twenty minutes scrounging food from the cupboards, ending with a good cold pheasant leg and a hunk of hard, crusty bread. He tried to find something other than wine to sop the bread in and was rewarded with some broth, which he spooned into a large wooden bowl. Having been a soldier, this was a meal he could appreciate. It was similar to a campaign supper, which was appropriate — most of the doctoring he'd done in his life had been on one battlefield or another.

  It had been after his first battle (dear God, decades ago) that he'd learned how to set a broken arm, bind a broken head, and saw off a limb that would otherwise grow gangrenous. His amateur skill and steady stomach was noticed and he'd been trundled off to Padua to learn medicine. It was noteworthy that even during the flare-ups of the interminable war with Padua, any Veronese wishing to study medicine could go and learn. There were never enough doctors — especially ones skilled in battlefield treatment. It was his luck that he was good at all aspects of war.

  I ought to be with my patient. He gathered what was left of his meal and climbed the stairs chiding himself for his thoughts of war. His first knighthood had had nothing to do with battle. He'd been doctoring on loan to the late emperor's army when he'd restored the adopted son of one of Heinrich's men. As everyone knew, the rescued boy had actually been Heinrich's own bastard. The Emperor had been grateful enough to create Giuseppe Morsicato a knight of the Order of the Knights of Santa Katerina at Mount Sinai. Morsicato's twin knighthoods by Cangrande and the Anziani of Vicenza had followed shortly thereafter, given out of a kind of piqued pride, so now Morsicato carried three Orders of Knighthood on his shoulders. All for saving a bastard son of a bastard ruler.

  His mind came inexorably around to progeny, and bastard heirs. One in particular, under this very roof.

  Thinking of the boy, Morsicato decided to check on the little scoundrel. Passing his patient's door, he continued on down the hall until he reached Cesco's door. Something was odd, but it took him a moment to realize what was missing. There should have been a guard here. Instead there was a closed door lit only by the moon shining in the casement at the end of the hall.

  Something glistened on the tiled floor. Not even a pool. A few drops, nothing more. But he was a doctor. He knew blood when he saw it.

  Laying his dish aside, Morsicato glanced about. No weapons hung on the walls because the little imp had proven too successful at prying them down. Morsicato only had the thin knife he used for probing wounds. It would have to do.

  Leaning his ear against the door, he heard a rustling, then a whisper. "Where are you, my little puppy? Come out and play."

  The voice was playful. The drops on the floor were not. Morsicato wondered how many there were and where they had hidden the body of the guard.

  He could try the door. But if he made noise they'd be warned, and he'd have to break it down anyway. And noise was his friend, not theirs. Stepping back, he lowered his left shoulder and ran, bursting the door open with a great rending of wood. Knife ready, Morsicato stumbled into the chamber, looking about quickly.

  They had a covered lantern. It was the first thing he saw, and almost the last. A blade came at him and he threw himself aside. The Scaliger would have rolled, or blocked it, or done some dazzling feat of physical prowess. Morsica
to barely avoided being gutted, stumbling into a table. He dropped to his rump and ducked under the table as the second blow came. "Aiuto! Aiuto!" he hollered, kicking at his attacker's shins.

  There was a shuddering vibration over his head, then the table lifted into the air. Morsicato was struck in the head as the table was tossed aside by a second man. Morsicato threw himself forward and lunged out blindly with his knife. He felt a jolt as his blade met flesh. A kick from the second man jerked his arm, twisting the knife. Someone yelped and fell on him. They struggled while the other man kicked them both.

  Morsicato heard footsteps in the distance, many of them, pounding their way towards Cesco's room. He'd awakened the household. Extricating themselves, Morsicato's foes ran to an open window. Morsicato tried to follow, but one of the villains knocked the lantern off its resting place, spilling oil and fire across the floor. Morsicato cringed back from the burst of heat. Grabbing a tapestry off the wall he threw himself down to smother the flames. At once he was engulfed in pitch blackness.

  The darkness was brief. Torches from the hallway created flickering shapes on the wall in the room. Then the chamber was filled with armed men — two knights with swords, some servants with chamber pots poised for throwing, a page with a sword much too big for him to wield usefully.

  Bailardino appeared, shoving his way to the front. His expression was one of disgust. "What the hell is it? What's he done now?"

  "Two men — " gasped Morsicato. "No guard — I tried to — "

  Instantly Bailardino changed his tune. "Get a light in here!" The torchlight showed a room that had been thoroughly ransacked. "Bloody hell." Bail issued orders to search the courtyard and the surrounding streets at once. The knights and the page ran out, encountering more men in the hall and recruiting them for the chase. More lamps were lit, and Morsicato tried to assess the damage.

  The room was a shambles, and not just from the brief fight. Quiet but determined, the two men had been tearing the room apart, looking for something. Someone.

  Trembling, Morsicato reached the child's bed. He was unaware of holding his breath until the air hissed out of him. He glanced over at Bailardino. "Look at this."

  "What is it?"

  The bedding and mattress of straw were hacked to shreds. No blood. No flesh. No sign of the child.

  "Where is he?!" The frantic question came from the door. In her robe, her long tresses released from their coil for the night, Katerina della Scala was a lovely sight. Until one noticed that her face was the colour of day-old ashes. At a run she crossed the room to gaze down upon the ruined bed. Silent tears formed at her eyes. Her hands twitched slightly. "Where is he?"

  "This wasn't a kidnapping," her husband said, touching a loose feather floating in the air. "They mistook the pillow for him at first."

  His wife had already come to the same conclusion. "Then he was hiding."

  Morsicato looked around the room. "If that's true, they hadn't found him by the time I interrupted them. He must still be here."

  Their adult eyes scanned the room in the same arc, left to right and back again. They saw no place for a child to hide that had not been ransacked.

  "Where could he have gone?" asked Morsicato.

  From above, there came a stifled giggle.

  As one their eyes traveled up to the rafters. Setting his right foot on the ruined bed, Morsicato gripped the wooden struts of the crossbeam above. With an awkward hop, he pulled himself up. Bail's hands made a cup for the doctor to stand on, lifting the doctor until the forked beard jutted over the massive wooden brace.

  Twinkling green eyes flecked with gold gazed back at him. "H'lo."

  "Hello, Cesco," replied the doctor with a heartfelt sigh. He sent a look of triumph down to the others, then found himself being used as a ladder by the child. Stepping first on Morsicato's head, then his shoulders, the child dropped lightly onto the bed.

  How he got up there they could never afterward discover. But clearly when he'd heard the scuffle outside the door, he'd climbed to a place of safety and waited in complete silence while the intruders searched for him. The timber was wider than his small body, entirely hiding him from view.

  From the remains of his bed, two-year-old Cesco grinned up at his foster mother. But for the tear-streaks down his face, he might have been unaffected by the events of the night. "Here I am, m'donna."

  She made no move to embrace him. All sign of emotion vanished in the blink of an eye. Her gaze was level, her voice calm. "I've been wondering where you hid when I looked for you. I shall remember to look where only monkeys, not men, may go." The child was momentarily downcast. Katerina held out a hand. "Come. Since you've made a mess of your room, you are being demoted. You shall spend tonight in the nursery."

  Cesco's entire face lit up. The nursery was the room where his foster brother slept. The only time one could count on Cesco to be well behaved was when he was with Katerina's young son. Bailardetto. Which meant they were often kept together.

  At the door Katerina turned to her husband. "I'll write to Francesco."

  "I'm Cesco," said the boy.

  "Hush." Katerina led him away, leaving Bail and Morsicato looking around the disorderly chamber.

  The doctor said, "She realizes what this means?"

  "Not much slips by her. I'd better go find where they hid the guards. I hope they're hurt, not dead."

  Morsicato followed Bailardino out of the child's room. "They had accents. I don't know what kind — it wasn't familiar to me."

  "Splendid. Now the enemy is hiring mercenaries."

  But the doctor's mind had already moved on to imagine what Katerina's note to Cangrande would say.

  He might have been surprised at the tone of the letter. She used a code known only to her father's children, of whom only two remained. After describing the evening's events, she added a coda that proved she'd come to the same conclusion as the doctor:

  The stakes of your game have changed. This time they did not seem intent on taking Cesco. They appear bent on murdering him. The time for your precious secrets may be past. Next year he will be three, and you know what the astrologer's charts say. If you know who is threatening the Greyhound's future you must take whatever steps you deem necessary to stop them.

  Arriving three days later, Cangrande's reply was characteristically brief:

  I have no proof, and will make no accusations without proof. If you want to see the boy live, you'd best protect him better. Or else trust the stars. Isn't that what you always told me?

  Reading this, Katerina balled up the note and threw it in the fire.

  Twenty-Nine

  Ravenna

  15 May 1317

  The May sun above reflected off the waters of the Rubico River. Pietro reached into his saddlebag and lifted out a hunk of cheese, made locally. Today was an idyll. The weather was glorious, the ride unhurried. Returning from a lecture in nearby Rimini, he pondered the topic: the need for good judges in this lawless world. "There's a real need," the professor had pronounced in the open-air theater, "for justice in the world today. And if the world needs knights to enforce laws, doesn't it also need judges and advocates to decide what those laws are, what they mean? Judges are more important than knights because, in the end, it's the judges who have to decide what justice is."

  Riding along on Canis, Pietro now wondered, Isn't the man who enforces the justice as important as the man who decides what justice is?

  Pietro was coming to love the Law. Before going to university he could never have imagined loving a concept. Oh, he knew his father loved poetry. But now he understood. What poetry was to Dante, law was to his son.

  It was a passion two years in the making. After the brief stay in Venice, where Ignazzio and Theodoro had picked up the scarecrow's trail, Pietro had gone to Bologna. It was supposed to be a pretense, Pietro feigning studious pursuits while waiting for news of their quarry. But weeks had turned into months, and for Pietro the end was lost in the means.

  Growi
ng up in Florence, Pietro had been trained in the basics of learning: grammar, logic, music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric. But a hundred miles north of Florence, young men were striving daily to know more. Eschewing the common precepts of learning, they came to La Cittia Grossa, where the learning was as impure as the sausage invented here. Mortadella — bones, gristle and hooves, the deadest part of the pig, turned into a delicious meal. So the faculty explored the darker sides of life to find the unsavory but longed-for truths.

  Bologna was second only to Paris as a repository for written knowledge. But unlike Paris, where the students ran around creating unchecked chaos, students at the Studium of Bologna made the rules and hired the faculty. Many of the students were already practicing doctors and lawyers. The motto here was Bononia Docet — Bologna Teaches.

  Pietro had been greeted as a kind of celebrity — he was, after all, the son of the great Dante, famous not only for his poems but his essays and lectures, many of them having taken place right there in Bologna. Through Cangrande's subtle influence Pietro had started by taking classes in law, but soon he couldn't resist dabbling in other topics. He'd found himself thrust headlong into new ideas, scandalous thoughts having to do with the body as the root of truth, or Truth. The new art of opening up the dead for knowledge of anatomy and alchemy was as horrifying as it was enlightening. The latest argument in the new field of theology was that sex was the path to God. It was one the students had embraced.

  Then, just after Calvatone, Pietro had received a coded letter from Cangrande. It was quite common for letters to be coded, having to pass through so many hands. Typical of the Scaliger, this letter didn't mention the stain on his honour. Instead, he had been entirely solicitous of Pietro's situation: