Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  One corpse looked different, a young woman with her hands folded across her bosom, as if she’d died praying. She was distinguished as a noblewoman by her sumptuous brocade gown. Black spots covered her delicate cheeks and neck. Her belly was swollen under her gown; she must have been with child. The plague had killed two here.

  “A terrible pestilence, and just beginning,” said a somber voice with a southern accent. It was a lean, dark-haired man who, despite the Neapolitan intonations, had a sculpted Frankish cast to his face.

  “You think it will get worse,” I said. He nodded.

  “Don’t get too close,” he said, jerking his chin at the dead woman. “It’s transmitted with evil speed from the dead to the living and from the sick to the healthy.” He moved away. The few people about were huddled into themselves, throwing suspicious glances at other pedestrians. I trotted after the man and fell into step with him.

  “Can’t the doctors cure it?” I asked loudly. The man turned and gave me a half smile.

  “Haven’t I seen you before today?” he asked.

  “If you patronize Bernardo Silvano’s establishment.”

  “No, no, I prefer to take my sport for free,” he murmured. “Somewhere else.”

  “Around the market?” I offered. His intense eyes perused my features, then he smiled.

  “Your face is reminiscent of a face in a panel in the abbey at San Giorgio,” he said. “Though that boy is two or three years younger. But you are very alike, indeed, an older twin.”

  I was afire with pleasure. “You know the glorious work of Master Giotto!”

  “As do you, evidently, though I wouldn’t have expected as much from one of Silvano’s charges,” he answered. We halted when rags sailed out of a window above us. There was a bang as the shutters slammed before the rags even landed in the street. I would have gone to look, but the man laid a cautionary hand on my shoulder. “Those probably came from some poor soul who died of this pestilence,” he warned. “People are desperate to rid themselves of anything that was even touched by the dead.” Two gaunt pigs raced up to the rags, took them in their teeth and hairy snouts, and shook them, the way pigs do. We stood watching as they snorted and grunted through the rags.

  “To answer your original question,” the man said, “no, the doctors can’t cure it. Either its nature is such that it can’t be cured, or the doctors are so ignorant that they don’t recognize its cause, so they can’t prescribe the proper remedy.”

  “Is it true it comes from the East?” I asked.

  “Yes, but it has changed along its journey,” he said. “In the East, those who were ill bled from the nose and then died. Now it shows its first signs by a swelling in the groin or the armpits. The swellings grow to the size of an egg.” He glanced at me. “Take care that you stay away from patrons with those swellings.” He spoke with knowing, but without judgment.

  I shrugged. “I may not have that luxury.”

  He shook his head, frowning. “Silvano, that vermin. How the city fathers can allow him to operate, I don’t know. There’s no need for such an abomination of an establishment. A man with unslaked lust can always find some other man’s wife with which to satisfy himself, if he has a mind to it. Women are mindless, like baubles. They’re easily seduced creatures.”

  “Some of the city fathers are Silvano’s patrons.”

  A thunderous expression crossed his lean face. “Sometimes I believe that God’s just wrath has visited this plague upon us, for our iniquities. Sin flourishes in Florence, and everywhere else; this plague cannot be simply the result of an unfortunate star. It would be a fitting expression of God’s justice if Silvano succumbed to the plague and died horribly!”

  “You speak like a cleric, but you don’t look like one,” I observed. He was well dressed but simply, in fabrics any Florentine would recognize as fine: a dark woolen mantello over a narrow, cotton-linen tunic, and ordinary but well-constructed black hose.

  “I’m a poet, though my father would have had me in law or business.” He smiled.

  “A poet like Dante?” I asked. Having always the gift of perfect mimicry, I recited Giotto’s quotation: “‘That which dies not and that which can die are nothing but the splendor of that Idea which our Sire, in Loving, begets…’”

  His thick dark eyebrows wagged. “Giotto, Dante, is Silvano running a school?” I laughed. The man pointed. “Look!” I followed his finger to where the pigs convulsed, squealing and frothing, eyeballs rolling in their wasted heads. In a few moments they stiffened and died.

  “From the clothes of the dead,” the man marveled. “The animals died in mere minutes from the rags a dead man wore!” We resumed walking, giving the dead a wide berth.

  “Will someone come to bury them?” I asked, twisting to look at where a father and son lay on the ground nearby.

  “Not their families. The city has hired porters called becchini with biers for the poor and middle class,” he said. “Priests are reluctant to approach the bodies, so civilized customs of holy rites for the deceased are being shortened. It won’t be long before those customs are suspended altogether.” He shuddered, gathering his dark mantello closer around his shoulders. “Some people are already throwing themselves into wild licentiousness, while others maintain the strictest regimens of denial and abstinence. This plague will bring an end to custom and law as we know them.”

  “It will be hard to keep from getting ill if the pestilence spreads through clothes and animals,” I observed. “Many will die. Whether licentious or abstinent.”

  “Indeed,” he said. A coach with its curtains drawn raced past us, the team of chestnut horses running full-out. He nodded at it. “They have the right idea, I think, in leaving the city.”

  “Won’t the plague follow them into the campagna, or meet them there?” I asked.

  “Probably, but those who flee have a better chance. I will be leaving the city.”

  “I would like to do that,” I mused. “Leave the city, leave Silvano’s establishment far behind. In its way, it’s as bad as the plague.”

  “I’ve heard stories of murdered and disfigured children.” The poet nodded. “It’s said that Silvano kills those who try to leave.”

  “Would anyone stay otherwise?” I asked, bitterly.

  He laid his hand on my shoulder. “If you could leave, go anywhere to escape Silvano’s and the plague, where would you go? What would you do?”

  “A game of fantasy.” I smiled warily. “I don’t indulge myself.”

  “Fantasy can be a strong wind, blowing open the doors of your mind, or a support through a dark time. It is more than diversion. You must bring yourself to it,” the poet urged. I looked at him with large eyes, never having considered such things. When patrons came to my room and I soared toward Giotto’s frescoes, I did so literally. Or so I believed. And the fervor of those experiences convinces me even as I wait in my stone cell for my executioner that they went far beyond fantasy. There’s a dividing line between the real and the unreal that breaks sometimes and allows the two halves to mix, like fluids in an alchemist’s alembic. It has been my lot in this long life to plunge often into that mixture.

  Back then, so long ago, I spoke of the simple things in my heart. “I would go out to the hills where I can hear the cicadas in the olive groves and see the pastures turning green. I’ve never been beyond the city walls, but I hear that in the campagna, the wheat fields move in the breeze like the Arno does. I would go to nature to find what is holy.” Then I looked at him, remembering Giotto. “I would go with a friend, and sit at his feet and listen to him, for ten days straight. I would just listen to him.”

  We fell silent, passing through the large grassy Piazza Santa Maria Novella, the very place where I had first met Giotto. Pious Dominicans still preached here on the grassy lawn in front of their church, but none were in evidence now. For all their piety, priests feared the Black Death as much as anyone else. Where were their Holy Trinity and nine orders of angels in the face of t
his pestilence? A tangle of bodies lay at the edge of the square.

  “Ten,” the poet muttered. “Unshriven, unburied.” Cries arose from the web of small streets to the west behind the church. We exchanged glances. The shouts grew louder and thrummed with an ugly tension. Words of hate and murder lifted above the clamor.

  “They are screaming about Jews,” he noted. “The crowd will make scapegoats of them.”

  “The Jews didn’t bring the plague. Why should they be scapegoats?” I puzzled.

  “People will have someone to blame for their suffering.” The poet shrugged. “It’s in our nature. Someone else, preferably. Few can long tolerate blaming themselves.”

  “But, if anything, God brought the plague—you said it was His wrath!”

  “We cannot blame God, nor are Florentines likely to look in a mirror and repent. Florentines are a proud lot. Whoever those Jews are”—he waved his hand toward the growing outcry—“they will be blamed and likely killed. The plague will indirectly claim more victims.”

  “It’s not right that people blame Jews, or witches!” I said, remembering how close I had come to being burned that long-ago day.

  “There are many good and honorable Jews. I have known some myself.” The poet’s brow puckered. “But their souls are lost to hell through lack of faith. Does it matter when they die?”

  “Every life matters.” I quickened my step. “What kind of faith would say otherwise?”

  “Perhaps a longer life would give them a chance to turn to Christian truth,” he agreed, not quite keeping pace with me, “to kneel before the clergy and be baptized and redeemed.”

  “It will give them more time to see how false the clergy is,” I snapped, thinking of the friars who made their way to Silvano’s.

  “I have to go,” I said, gesturing toward the uproar. “I know what a crowd will do when they blame someone for the city’s problems.”

  “Then I take my leave of you, young admirer of Giotto and Dante,” he said. He smiled and placed his hand over his heart and bowed. “I hope you will find my humble work as worthy of your admiration. I am Giovanni Boccaccio, and I will see that my poetry finds its way to you.”

  “My name is Luca Bastardo, and I can’t read,” I admitted.

  “But perhaps one day you shall read, Luca Bastardo,” he said. He pointed. “Go, to whatever destiny awaits you.” His portentous, perhaps facetious, words were accurate: my destiny was about to change, dramatically and forever.

  Chapter 6

  BY THE TIME I REACHED THE SOURCE of the uproar, the crowd had grown to about sixty strong. They were an ugly, swarming mass, having boxed against the stone wall of a neighborhood church two figures: a bearded man and the child sheltered in his arms. The crowd seemed to share one mind, and that mind was filled with hate that pressed against the man and child like walls moving in. I wondered how it was that I so often bore witness to people at their worst. Was it because I myself had committed unthinkable acts?

  “Dirty Jew!” one man was screaming.

  “You brought the plague on us!” screamed a poor dye-worker wearing coarse robes and a frayed foggeta. He trembled as if with fever, but I knew it wasn’t from the plague but from anguish: many had been lost in the crowded slums around the dye houses. After the plague there would be few left to labor in the cloth industry on which Florence depended.

  “I can’t take care of my children, or I’ll die!” a woman screeched. “My children are dying alone! Dirty Jews, you brought the Black Death!”

  “Your filthy people killed our Lord and brought the plague!” shouted another man. He was rawboned and tanned, a farmer come in from the campagna, and he held a pitchfork that he waved in menace. Shrill shouts of affirmation went up. Someone threw a small rock. The Jew turned to cover the child’s body with his own. The rock bounced off his shoulder and thunked on the cobblestones by his feet. Another rock flew at him, this one larger. It hit him in the ribs. Even through the waspish catcalls and screams of the crowd, I heard him grunt in pain. I crept down a side alley and circled around to get closer, and as I came out to the side of the Jew, he was frantically turning again and again to protect his child from the hail of rocks. I envied this child who knew the kind of parental protection that I had never received, and I wanted to help.

  Around the Jew were scattered fist-sized and larger rocks, and his nose poured red roses of blood onto his beard and mantello. I glimpsed the child’s terrified face. Tears ran down her soft white cheeks, on which was cast a shadow that looked like a bruise. The man with the pitchfork threw it, and before thinking, I darted out to deflect it. One sharp tine scraped my arm. I felt too much fire in my blood to pay attention.

  “Bubboni!” I yelled, pointing toward the back of the crowd. “That man’s sick! He will infect us all! Bubboni!” Cries of “Where, where?” and “Bubboni!” rose up.

  “No one here has the plague!” howled the farmer. “It’s a trick!”

  I pointed insistently. “Bubboni! The Black Death! He’s coughing! He’ll kill us all! Run, run, or die!”

  Panicked cries went up and two women broke from the crowd, shrieking and running. A hoary old man hobbled after them. Suddenly the whole crowd erupted in pandemonium. People ran everywhere, screeching in confusion and fear. I turned to the Jew, saying “This way!” I motioned him to follow me into the alley. From my old days on the street I knew of a sewage gutter that came to an end at a brick wall, but the wall had an uneven surface with good handholds and footholds and it could be scaled. Behind the wall was another alley that ran to an outlet opening onto a parallel street. The Jew immediately sprinted after me, clutching his daughter to his chest. I came to the stone wall and scrambled up, sat astride it, and then reached down.

  “Give her to me so you can climb over!” I said. The man with the pitchfork and three other men carrying sticks had followed us, undeterred by my ploy. The Jew glanced over his shoulder and passed her up to me with large, trembling hands. Her arms reached up and wound tightly around my neck. Her cheeks were smeared with her father’s blood.

  “I’ll hold them off so you can take her to safety!” he whispered.

  “Climb, you’ll both be safe!” I urged him. Another rock whizzed toward him, spinning up at an angle when it hit the wall. “Come on!” I said to the Jew. He scrambled up and I leapt down on the other side, sinking to my knees with the little girl pressed against me. A moment later the Jew landed beside me. On this side of the wall, the space of the alley opened up so that blue sky poured in and a slice of the sun was visible over the tops of the tall stone buildings.

  “You saved my daughter’s life. And mine. I am indebted to you forever.”

  “I don’t want your debt,” I said.

  “I owe you,” he insisted. “More than I can ever repay. Look, your arm is bleeding. I can help you, I’m a physico, a physician,” he said. “Come with me to my home and I’ll tend it.” He grasped my arm gently by my wrist and laid his other hand alongside the long, weeping gash. A warmth flowed from his palm into my arm—the first healing touch I had ever experienced. Something in my chest eased. The wound clotted and stopped dripping. I looked at the Jew in surprise. His thick dark brows lowered over his sharp blue eyes. “It’s deep. You don’t want to trifle with it, especially with this plague about. I can stitch it and give you an unguent so it doesn’t take an infection. You don’t want to die of an infection.”

  I pulled my arm back, but reluctantly, because the warmth of his hand had been so comforting. “I never get an infection. I always heal. I don’t need your services.”

  “Why, because I’m a Jew?” He straightened and looked full into my eyes, a grave and intelligent look that insisted I tell him the truth.

  “Because I’m a whore,” I said bitterly. “I wouldn’t bring shame to your home!” I indicated the little girl, who clung to her father’s torn mantello. She stared at me with luminous blue eyes, her thumb stuck in her mouth.

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matt
er. Come with me, let me care for your arm.”

  “It matters to me.” I drew myself up.

  The Jew stroked his daughter’s hair. Finally he asked, “Which establishment?”

  “Bernardo Silvano’s.”

  A look of revulsion came over his angular face. “They’ll kill me surely for what I am about to say…” The apple of his throat bobbed as he swallowed, then plunged ahead. “I saw how you handled yourself today. You look thirteen, small for your age, but shrewd. You conduct yourself like a man. You can take care of yourself. You don’t have to stay there. You don’t have to be…to do that anymore. I’ve heard what Silvano does to children who try to leave him. But you can defend yourself. You’ll think of a way. Do you hear me? You can defend yourself!”

  “Against a troop of armed condottieri?” I retorted.

  “Look around. How many condottieri are left in Florence? People are fleeing. War with Pisa or Lucca isn’t important when people are dying on the streets. How many soldiers are left in Silvano’s employ? Not many, I’ll wager.” He was gazing into my eyes as if there was something I should understand, but didn’t.