Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  Chapter 8

  THE DAWN SUN OF MAY shed a blanched light like a watery mist over the city, and the bodies of the dead lay everywhere, cast without ceremony from their homes. But for the black bubboni, many could have been Florentines sleeping outdoors in unnatural positions, as after some infernal carnevale. From the number of bodies and the stench, I could guess that there weren’t enough becchini in the city to keep it clear. It would get worse as summer went on and the relentless heat arrived earlier and earlier in the day. I crossed the Arno, which undulated in a lazy silver ribbon under the bridges, heedless of the contagion and death sweeping the city.

  A few beggars and some common thugs waited in the courtyard of the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, a severe, imposing stone building with arched windows and a high tower rising above its three stories. It looked like a fortress from the outside, with its massive, rough-hewn stone walls, but the courtyard where I waited was handsome, with columns supporting a spacious vaulted portico and a ceremonial stairway leading to a grand open loggia on the first story. Those who were gathered eyed me, but I was too young and simply dressed to arouse their interest; it was clear that I didn’t have any money. We were joined by other men and boys whose threadbare clothes marked them as dye-workers. A handful of women also arrived, common prostitutes whose work had been eliminated by the plague. Those of us who weren’t sick still had to eat. I gave my name to a notary, who nodded wearily and recorded it in a ledger, and then I leaned against a stone wall and watched people gather. My ears pricked when I overheard a man say, “…and we walk right into the homes where everyone is dead.”

  His companion nodded vigorously. “You have to watch for ufficiali, though. Yesterday a man died in the door of his palazzo, and I went in to get his wife and babies and found three gold florins! The palazzo was empty, no maids or anything, and I could have taken more, but two ufficiali on horses came to watch me load the bodies. I had to tie the little ones onto their parents to get them stacked properly. Too bad about the ufficiali, or I would have taken a fortune!”

  The first man shook his fist. “They think they can command the city, even while everyone is dying or fleeing. We deserve to take what we find, if we have the balls to handle the dead. We risk our lives! The city owes us.”

  A burly, balding man standing nearby shrugged. “Servants are making the real money now. They can charge anything they want for their services, and nobles will pay. The nobles who are left in the city. Most have fled.”

  I goggled to contemplate finding an empty palazzo with its riches laid out for the plucking, and fair game because the owners were dead. I could acquire money and jewels, silks and furs, silver goblets and pearl necklaces, enough to take care of myself for a long while. I was pleased to find myself thinking in the old resourceful ways of the street, as I might have done had I remained free of Silvano, had I been spared years of savage indenture…. Then I remembered that I was now living with the Sfornos. This sort of planning was unnecessary, perhaps unseemly. Nor could I imagine Mrs. Sforno with her high cheekbones and averted gaze being pleased with anything I obtained in this fashion.

  A slender magistrate with an overly coiffed beard came out of the palazzo onto the loggia and then strutted down the steps. He wore giant red sleeves of brushed velvet which swooshed out around him as he swung his arms with his stride. Such adornment seemed obscene, when so many lay dead in the city. If it wasn’t a transgression of the sumptuary laws, then it should have been. His gaze flitted over the crowd and in a condescending voice he called out the terms of the work: how much we would be paid, how we should work until sundown but take a break at midday for a meal, where to find biers and planks on which to load the bodies, where to deposit them. Horse-drawn carts would take the bodies to the city boundaries, and when the church bells chimed vespers, we would meet there to dig burial trenches. Above all, he informed us, we were not to loot the homes of the dead and dying or we would be put in prison to rot with criminals who were already succumbing to the Black Death. Finally he suggested that we stuff our shirts with garlic and herbs, both to combat the fumes and to discourage the contagion. For this purpose, there was a wheelbarrow filled with the herbs beside the wooden planks, another one loaded with garlic bulbs. Then he walked through the crowd pairing people for the work.

  “You.” He pointed at me. At the same moment we recognized each other. Both of us flushed. I threw back my shoulders and stood straighter. I refused to be shamed ever again. Nor could I quell the joy I felt, knowing that just yesterday I had killed his ilk: men who went to church, drank wine with their guild-mates, and dressed their wives in fine dresses, who lived with self-contentment like God-fearing people, but then forced themselves on enslaved children. My fingers itched to wrap around his throat, and the bloodlust hummed in my belly like a long-denied hunger. News of my rampage through Silvano’s brothel must have spread. Florence was ever a city that reveled in gossip, even during the plague. And most of the patrons had had families, wives and parents and friends. I wondered how the city fathers planned to react. Perhaps Mrs. Sforno was right and soldiers would follow me to her door.

  Then the magistrate dropped his eyes, and satisfaction like a cool wine spurted through my chest. He meant to pretend that we’d never met, that he’d never climbed astride me, overlooking my silent tears of rage and violation, and paid handsomely for the pleasure of doing so.

  “What of me?” I challenged him. A deeper scarlet suffused his face.

  “You’re with that boy.” He flicked his finger and trotted off in haste.

  “Let’s get a bier,” I said to the other boy. Then I turned and saw a white-faced Nicolo staring at me. Unthinking, I leapt at him. My hands closed with inhuman strength around his throat. Last night I meant to spare him because he was a child, but that intention had fled my mind. Nicolo grabbed my wrists and tugged as his face turned blue and his feet slapped against the flagstones. The burly, balding man swatted me. I wouldn’t let go of Nicolo. He went limp and the man grabbed me under the arms and pulled me off him. Then he boxed my ears.

  “Are you stupid, boy, attacking someone on the steps of the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo?” he demanded, laughing. The little hair left on his head was red, and his short beard was teased with white strands. Somehow the red hair made his complexion pleasing and ruddy, rather than pale. He said, “This place is swarming with ufficiali and ministers and magistrates! They’ll throw you in prison before you can earn your soldi!” I shook him off and glared at Nicolo.

  “You crazy cur,” Nicolo hissed, rubbing his throat. “You killed my father, and I nearly vomited out my life with those feathers! I’m going to get you! I’ll make red feathers the last thing you ever see!”

  Before I could reply, the burly man dragged me away. “You’ll come with me. You’re young, strong. I can use such a partner.” Around a corner we found a stack of wooden rectangles. They were hastily made biers, three or four planks nailed together with another nailed crosswise at the top as a handle. The man released me and I stumbled, rubbing my shoulder.

  “I didn’t need you to intervene,” I said. “It’s not your affair.”

  He smiled, revealing a rotting blue front tooth. “I saw you save the Jew and his little girl yesterday. It was good of you. I don’t know if Jews are guilty of everything they’re blamed for, but I don’t like to see people killed. Enough people have died in the last few months.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to see you thrown in prison. They’d have had to lock you up if you’d killed someone out in the open, even scum like Bernardo Silvano’s son.”

  I eyed the man coldly. “Were you a patron of his establishment?”

  He shook his head and the warmth faded from his eyes. He went to a nearby barrel and grabbed a handful of cut greens, mostly wormwood, juniper, and lavender, and stuffed them under his camicia. “Before the plague, I had a wife who was good to me. I had no interest in the evil things Silvano’s place offered.”

  “How did you know that was
Nicolo Silvano, then?” I challenged him.

  “All Florence knew Bernardo Silvano and his son. Everyone who’s still alive here is talking about his slaughter last night. Only Nicolo mourns him. Silvano got the justice he deserved. So did his patrons. But what a man can get away with in a brothel is different from what he can do in public.” He grabbed a plank and dragged it past me, its shadow barely sweeping the ground in the early sun. “Revenge has to be private. Grab the other side, will you?”

  An ufficiale hailed us. “Rosso, ragazzo! Clear the bodies in the streets along the right-hand riverbank near the Ponte Santa Trinita!”

  “Rosso, my daughter used to tease me with that name,” the burly man called back, laughing. So we set off westward toward the river, where the streets were densely inhabited and the bodies would be plentiful. Other pairs of becchini headed in other directions. Their voices, joking and grumbling, trailed along behind them, the only vital sounds in the sick and dwindling city. We passed the grain market at Orsanmichele, its recently rebuilt loggia crowned with two stories for storing grain, a reminder of the rich and bustling times Florence had known. Now the market was empty except for a few vendors from the contado.

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he answered in a low voice. “And about my children. I had two sons and a daughter. My older son was about your age, thirteen years. My daughter was ten, a pretty thing. I could have married her well, to a high-ranking guildsman or even a lesser noble. She had a nice disposition and pretty hands, would have bred well and brought honor to her husband. And my youngest son was full of trouble and fun. I miss them.”

  “When did they die?”

  “A month ago. My poor daughter’s hands were completely disfigured with black spots, and they hurt her terribly.” His broad face was writ with a despair so complete and so accepted that it took me a moment to identify it. Then I realized I was seeing the same kind of unalloyed hopelessness I’d seen in the barren eyes of the children at Silvano’s, when the body continues to live though the soul has expired.

  “You’ve lost everything,” I said quietly. He nodded. I asked, “Do you wish you’d never been married and had children, to spare yourself this mourning?”

  “Oh no. I had fifteen sweet years with my wife—we were very happy. Our parents arranged the marriage, but we were well suited. We soon came to love each other.”

  “I have sometimes hoped to have a wife of my own,” I said shyly. “A pretty wife who loves me as I love her.”

  “Love is a great blessing, the greatest gift that the Lord gives us,” he said solemnly. “It makes a man whole in a way he couldn’t imagine before.” He sighed. “I only wish the plague had taken me, too. But then”—he paused, his balding head drooping—“because I was spared, I could bury them. They didn’t have to lie around and wait for a stranger to throw them onto a bier like this. After I buried them, I closed my shop and came to do this work, until the plague takes me—most of the becchini fall ill and die. Everyone is dying.”

  “You buried your family with your own hands?” I couldn’t imagine how painful it must have been to have a wife and children, to love them and then to lose them.

  He nodded. “I couldn’t get a priest to give them the offices of the dead, so I built coffins and took them out into the hills by San Romolo and buried them and prayed over them myself. I hope that’s good enough to send their souls toward heaven.”

  “It must be,” I assured him. “What could be more sacred than a father’s love for his children?”

  Rosso shrugged. He paused to wipe off the sweat beading on his face, and then pulled off his mantello, folded it, and tied it like a voluminous belt around his thick waist. I followed suit, because I was perspiring, too. He said, “It’s warm, after a cool spring. The priests would have us believe that no one comes to God except through them.”

  “What do priests know?” I said, remembering several at Silvano’s. “From what I’ve seen, they’re gluttons or drunks, horny or grumpy or both, and looking to sell relics and indulgences and to advance in their order. No one’s going anywhere through them except straight to hell.”

  Rosso laughed mirthlessly. “Keep those thoughts to yourself. Men have burned for less.” I shrugged and we trudged through streets littered with bodies toward our assigned section. When we arrived, he told me to work on one side of the street while he worked the other.

  “We’ll get, oh, four bodies on the bier, depending on size,” he said. “We’ll pile them there, that’s where the cart will pick them up.” He indicated a small piazza where two streets joined. “It’s simple work. We just go back for more bodies and clear as many as we can.”

  So I crossed over to my side of the street, where a body sprawled facedown on the cobblestones. When I rolled it over, I saw that it was a blond boy about my age. His features were coarser than mine, and his vacant eyes were blue, unlike my dark ones. His cheek bore a raised black welt as big as a hen’s egg. He was wrapped in an expensive green velvet mantello which fell open, revealing black bubboni all over his naked body. As I gripped his arm to move him, I noted that he was still warm and his limbs were still soft and pliable. I dragged him over to the bier, upon which Rosso was heaving the bodies of two men. They reeked of a putrid stench and I screwed up my face and pinched my nose shut.

  “You get used to it,” Rosso said, with a raise of his reddish-brown eyebrows. “Almost.”

  “People can get used to anything,” I agreed, thinking with wistful irony that it was better when they didn’t have to. I paused, taking in the quiet street with its gray flagstones and shuttered windows and disfigured corpses whose clothes seemed to melt in the humidity. In the background, the river burbled and sluiced under the bridge. All things came to death and destruction; eventually, I must, too, even if I didn’t age the way other people did. And my freakish agelessness would, perhaps, give me opportunities that other people didn’t have. I was gifted, and if I was also cursed, at least I could promise myself that I would never again capitulate. I had bought myself this right by killing Silvano. From now on, when I didn’t like my circumstances, I would change them.

  I went back for another body. Near the boy lay two corpses, a withered old woman whose white head rested on a middle-aged man’s belly, a similar cast to their faces: mother and son. One of his hands gripped one of hers. If it hadn’t been so awkward, I would have dragged them together to the bier, to preserve their intimacy, which I envied. If the plague took me this day, no one would clasp my hand and accompany me. Was my birth similar, attended by some blemish that caused my parents to want to lose me, as Silvano had taunted? If I really was the lost son of foreign nobles with pure blood, why hadn’t they found me long before now? I stood out; I was not being arrogant when I acknowledged that. My striking looks were unusual, the shade of my hair rare.

  Had my parents, indeed, known their blood to be spoilt in me? Had they ever loved me as Sforno and Rosso loved their children? Over the years, I had wondered only rarely about my parents this way. On the streets I was too busy securing food. Marco had piqued my interest in my parents, but at Silvano’s, I was occupied with the ignominy of the work, with the ecstasy of the paintings that saved me, and, above all, with the knowledge that if I attempted to escape, as I surely would have if I’d discovered my parents, other children would have paid for my deeds with their lives. I could not let that happen. Now I was free and I could explore my origins and find out about myself, learn why I was different from other people. I would fulfill my other dreams, too: earning money, learning to read, even marrying. Above all, I would avoid the attention of the evil God who sent children into slavery, prospered murderers and rapists, and cursed the earth with lethal plagues. I didn’t know how I would accomplish this, I was just determined to do so.

  I was ruminating on this when a soft tapping caught my attention. I looked up; a man whose face was obscured behind a gauzy, billowy curtain in a second-floor window was waving. His hand lik
e an imp called me to him. I glanced around for ufficiali. When I saw none, I gently laid down the bubboni-crusted twin toddlers hoisted upon my shoulders. I went to the door under his window. Inside I saw a small hallway which led to spiral stairs. I climbed to the second floor, where a door swung open for me. A finger of saffron smoke poked out of the door and curled, as if beckoning. Curious, I entered.

  Inside the room were several tables set with wondrous equipment: flasks and alembics and small pots breathing up flames that licked the bottoms of bubbling flasks. There was a profusion of objects whose names and functions I did not know. I looked around in wonderment.

  “You’re intrigued by the appurtenances of my art,” the man said softly, from his seat on a bench by the window. “That’s a start. You’ve the minimal intelligence to be curious.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” I responded, and turned my attention to him. He was of middle age, short, slim, and lithe, with coarse black-and-white hair and a narrow, beardless face. He wore a black tunic, and the slits in his sleeves revealed a black camicia underneath. Across his lively eyes stretched some apparatus that sat on his nose—another marvel. He saw me staring and tapped the thing on its side, by the outside edge of his thick black eyebrow.

  “Don’t stare, boy, speak up and ask. These are eyeglasses. Invented more than sixty years ago, but not yet worn by the popolo. They enhance the vision.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.