“You may hold a sword, but you’ll never be a nobleman,” I taunted him. “You’ll always be the son of a lowlife brothel keeper who enslaved and killed children!”
“I am a nobleman, the city fathers have made me one,” he said, righting himself on the horse, regripping his sword, and circling around me. “My father would be proud of me, I will fulfill his dreams!” Nicolo tried to steer his horse at me, but I slapped its rump and it shied back, nearly unseating him.
“It takes a snake to be proud of a snake.”
“You’re jealous because I have a father,” Nicolo cooed. He straightened on his horse and smirked, gathering the reins in his sword hand. “I went back to my father’s palazzo, Bastardo. I took a certain document that pertains to you. A certain letter that I will show to the Church fathers when the time is right. And then they will burn you!” Then he leaned down and punched my face with his free hand. Fury erupted within me. The superhuman strength I had called on before surged through me, and I reached up and pulled him down off his horse, tearing apart his leather stirrups. He screamed and tried to thrust the sword at me, but I knocked it away. Kicking him to the ground, I grabbed the sword. I aimed the tip at his throat.
He was panting, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. An acrid scent threaded through his cloying perfume: the odor of fear. I could kill him. I wanted to. I pressed the point of the sword into his Adam’s apple. A drop of blood beaded up. My hand trembled. I remembered how his father had once pressed a knife into my throat in the same manner. I did not want to be like Bernardo Silvano. And more than that, though that was powerful motivation, I did not want to attract divine attention to myself.
God was usually cruel, that much I knew from my life. I did not know whether He would be pleased or angry if I dispatched Nicolo, who was the spawn of cruelty and evil. Either way, killing Nicolo was likely to provoke His laughter. And I had had enough of God’s mirth.
Not from compassion but from fear of divine notice, and the suffering it engendered, I stepped away. I did not know how much greater my suffering would be in sparing Nicolo. I would not now be in this tiny cell, broken and bleeding. But I do not question my journey, because as Geber said, he who fails to keep turning the wheel thus set in motion damages the working of the world and wastes his life.
“You’re weak,” Nicolo sneered. “Your weakness will be my victory, Bastardo!” He mounted his horse, it reared up and I jumped back to avoid its hooves, and he sped off, laughing.
I returned to the Sfornos’ with a torn lip and black eye. Moshe Sforno stood in the kitchen by the fire. He raised his eyebrows, then set down his wineglass and came over to examine my lip and eye. His hands were gentle but firm as they probed the wounds, and I resolved that, when I was a physico, my hands would be friendly like that with my patients. The residue of tension left over from my encounter with Nicolo eased away with Sforno’s kindness.
“Wash up and you’ll be fine,” he said. “Nicolo Silvano?”
“Yes. Signore, I’m wealthy now. I have a home. And a business, a bottega for selling dyes.”
Sforno smiled. “Very good. Will you be moving out and operating the bottega?” He went to the wine cask and poured off a cup for me.
“There’s no hurry for Luca to leave,” Mrs. Sforno said. She entered the room wearing a plain brown apron over her dress and carrying potatoes, cabbage, and carrots in a basket. She did not look at me but set to work shaving and chopping carrots with her skillful paring knife, and soon had a pile of translucent orange shavings. Her yellow headdress was bent over the table. “You’re still young, Luca. It’s best for you to stay here and learn what Moshe has to teach you. He says you have talent and you’ll make a fine physico.”
“Thank you, signora,” I murmured, pleased to be accepted, even so offhandedly.
Mrs. Sforno went on, “Besides, you don’t know how to cook or clean and there are few servants about in the city for you to hire. You can rent out the dye shop—”
“You know about that?” I asked, surprised.
“Just because women stay indoors most of the time doesn’t mean they can’t get information,” she said tartly, sounding like Rachel. “So you’ll rent out the dye shop.”
“It won’t be easy to find renters, with so many dead,” Sforno noted.
“In a few months it will be,” Mrs. Sforno said. “Half of Florence is gone, but people will move in, immigrants from all over. Many places are decimated by the Black Death, and people will come to Florence to rebuild their lives.” She sounded certain and reasonable as she continued with her work. “You’ll bank the rental income. Your money will stay where it is, in the bank. I don’t want you wasting it on gaming and dice or”—her white hand with the knife paused, and then went back to chopping—“or on any other unworthy pursuit.”
“Yes, signora,” I said solemnly, because I knew what she meant, and she needn’t have worried. I had long ago sworn to myself that I would never pay for sexual favors, if I ever wanted them, which seemed unlikely after my history.
“When you’re grown, you’ll move out, and you’ll have an honorable profession and good savings,” she finished firmly.
“Leah, you’re so practical, and kind, too.” Moshe Sforno wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and nuzzled her. I turned away. I felt both flattered that she cared enough about my welfare to decide for me this way and a little irritated that, yet again, someone else wanted to oversee my life. This was a gentler binding, of course, than Silvano’s. But I wondered if I would ever again be as free as I was on the streets, and if I would always harbor, like a sore tooth, this gnawing sense of not belonging. “Luca,” Mrs. Sforno said. Her voice held a warning note and I snapped around to face her. “Hire a tutor for your lessons. Rachel is not to go to the barn and be alone with you again. It’s not seemly!”
I was astonished, and a little afraid of the signora’s wrath, and it took me a moment to answer. I swallowed. “Yes, signora!” Then I fled to the barn.
After I washed up, I went back out into the city, to the once-crowded, now-desolate narrow street on the riverbank near the Ponte Santa Trinita where Geber had lived. I climbed the stairs to Geber’s apartment and was struck again by the emptiness emanating even into the stairwell. The door didn’t swing open for me of its own accord as it used to, but it did yield to me when I pushed it. I looked around at the room where I had spent so many confusing, stimulating hours. Outwardly, everything was as it had been: the tables were laden with strange objects and stills and bags and boxes and dead animals and stones and mortars with their pestles, but now, instead of everything being in motion, as if the room was somehow breathing its contents, everything was frozen, lifeless, vacant. I went to a table where a large orange butterfly lay with its wings spread wide. I picked up the dead insect and held it to my face to examine it closely. As my breath touched its antennae, it turned to fine brown dust that fell from my fingers and scattered on the table and floor. I cried out in astonishment, and at that moment, other objects on the table disintegrated: dried flowers, spools of thread, lumps of clay, a dead snake, a bowl filled with clear liquid—all turned to piles of dust. I whirled around, and the same thing was happening at all the other tables: bowls holding herbs or liquids, vials of paint or ink, linen squares, and beakers all evaporated into the fine brown dust. It took only a few heartbeats. Then the room was left with plain wooden tables which were bare except for dust, Geber’s illuminated manuscripts, and stacks of paper that he had written on. Even Zosimos’s three-beakers still, of which Geber had been so proud, was gone. I gathered the manuscripts together onto one table and went back to the Sfornos’.
FOUR YEARS PASSED that I lived in the barn and apprenticed with Moshe Sforno. I began as an empiric, learning by watching Sforno work. He saw patients with every disease and disorder imaginable, from leprosy to dropsy to bad breath, from broken bones to catarrh to epilepsy. I helped him set bones, tend fevers, dress and cauterize wounds, amputate gangrenous limbs, treat earaches t
hrough the insertion of a probe, use heated cups to draw humors to specific areas of the body, and administer purges and emetics. I learned about herbs and medicines, was instructed in the preparation and usage of plasters, poultices, fat-based ointments, unguents, and philters, though their preparation was mostly to be left to a trusted apothecary.
I hired a tutor to teach me Latin and Greek and then read Galen’s lengthy On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, On Complexions, and Ars parva, among others; Avicenna’s million-word Canon; and Hippocrates’s Aphorisms. Sforno went to great trouble to obtain the laboriously copied manuscripts for me, and insisted that I read the works in their entirety. I read more recent medical authors, too, such as Gentile da Foligno, who had died during the plague from attending the sick; Albertus Magnus, who wrote about human anatomy; and Arnald of Villanova, who discussed the function of air and baths, activity or exercise, sleep, food and drink, evacuations, and the emotions, in maintaining health. In Hebrew, I read Hunain Ishaq’s Ten Treatises on the Eye, Haly Abbas, Rhazes, and Maimonides’s treatises.
I enjoyed reading, and found that I could read for as many hours as an oil lamp burned into the night, still waking in the morning feeling rested and buoyant. But I didn’t forget my more practical concerns. I engaged a sword master, and went to his residence near Santa Croce to practice with sword, dagger, and staff. This activity occasioned much teasing from Sforno and his daughters; it wasn’t the sort of thing Jews were wont to do. But I was always aware of Nicolo Silvano’s avowed enmity. By tacit agreement, neither of us wanting to jeopardize our newfound stations, we stayed apart for these years. I studied and he worked in the city administration. He seemed to have stopped, probably only temporarily, spreading tales about me. And, whether through my old acute senses developed in the brothel or through my knowledge of the man, I didn’t have to watch Nicolo at it to know that he, too, was practicing with his longsword. He intended to use it on me on the day that we came together decisively.
In four years, though I was over thirty, I looked and felt like a youth of eighteen. I was still lean and only middling tall, though I was well muscled. I still had reddish-blond hair and I wore it long and tucked up under an ordinary foggetta, which I chose over any other hat for its humbling effect. I never wanted to let myself forget who I was and where I’d come from: no one and nowhere. My chest was bare, without any mark to indicate heresy, as Silvano had once told me I should have. I wondered if I actually did belong to the nobles he had seen, even if the woman did have hair with the same unusual color as mine.
One dreary day, when winter had slicked over the gray stones of Florence with damp and locked the chill into the narrow streets, I went out, as I often did, with Sforno on a call. I didn’t know it, but it was one of those decisive days during which my whole life would change. We walked around the vast unfinished Santa Maria del Fiore. We came around to the other side of the long cathedral, almost bumping into a group of men who were talking, as groups of men often did in the city’s piazze.
“Is there really a need for this confraternity?” a tall, stout man in fine clothes was saying. He was familiar looking and stood facing me, flanked by a lean, dark-haired man whose face also tugged at my memory. Facing him, with their backs to me, stood three red-cloaked magistrates.
“Signore Petrarca, the Confraternity of the Red Feather will do important work for the Church, stamping out the seeds of idolatry by identifying sorcerers, astrologers, prodigies, alchemists, augurers, spellmongers, satanists, and witches of all kinds!” one of the red-cloaked men facing him said hotly. “We will burn them and cleanse Florence!”
“Those things don’t exist except in the fantasies of ignorant folk, so why do we need to found a society to find and fight them?” Signore Petrarca asked. He was an older gentleman with an expressive, handsome face, and I suddenly recognized him: he was Giotto’s friend, the man who had intervened years ago in the Piazza d’Ognissanti, when the crowd had been about to burn me as a witch. He had aged since then and looked to be about fifty. “There are more important concerns: the unification of Italia, the return of the papacy to Roma, where it belongs…”
“I know of a witch who uses his black art to perpetuate his youth,” said one of the men who had his red-cloaked back to me. I recognized that loud grating voice with its hint of a whine. I felt for my sword, but it wasn’t by my side.
“If he were truly practiced in black arts, he would have cast a spell on you, Nicolo Silvano!” I exclaimed. Nicolo whirled around, flinging his red mantello over his shoulder.
“Bastardo!” he gasped. “This is the very sorcerer! Doesn’t the devil always know when he’s being spoken of?” He looked at me with a sneer curling his lips, the very image of his father: thin, knifelike nose, prominent chin, carefully coiffed beard cut close to his pockmarked face. The same perfume wafted out around him. Hatred scalded me from my toes to my scalp.
“Look well on the face of this sorcerer,” Nicolo spat. “It will not change!”
“Better my face than your ugly one,” I taunted.
“He doesn’t look like a sorcerer,” Petrarca mused, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes at me. “He looks like a rather handsome young man with poor taste in hat wear. See here, young man, can’t you find something a bit more dashing than a common foggetta?”
“How long will he look exactly like this?” Nicolo shouted. “He looked like a boy of twelve or thirteen for almost twenty years while he worked for my father! It’s witchcraft!”
“That’s older than your age, isn’t it?” Petrarca returned in a measured tone. “How would you know what he looked like before you were born?”
“I’ve heard rumors of his unusual youthfulness,” a man beside Nicolo said. He was pudgy with oily skin, and when I raked him with a contemptuous glance, I noticed the garb of a Dominican under his red magistrate’s mantello. He stuck his nose into the air.
“Rumors are like the fantasies of little girls,” I said, more calmly than I felt, “unreal. Are you a little girl, Friar, that you place your faith in them?”
“Exactly,” the stately Petrarca said. “We should doubt what we hear until we can verify it as truth. Indeed, we should embrace doubt itself as truth, affirming nothing, and doubting all things except those in which doubt is sacrilege!”
“Luca, we should be on our way,” Moshe Sforno urged me, jostling my elbow.
“But I can prove it, Signore Petrarca,” Nicolo said slyly. “I know of a letter that discusses his parents’ search for him, and how they kept the company of heretics, and this letter was written thirty years ago!”
“With all due respect, a thirty-year-old letter proves nothing,” demurred Petrarca.
“Look at his chest! He’s supposed to bear the mark of heresy on his chest!” Nicolo cried. The Dominican with him raised his eyebrows at me, and even Petrarca tilted his head in curiosity. I smiled coldly, parted my mantello, undid my farsetto, and slowly lifted my camicia. My chest was unblemished. Nicolo was not to be dissuaded. “He conceals the mark with black magic! Look closely at his face, and go examine a panel kept by the nuns of San Giorgio. His face is there, only a few years younger than he is now!”
“His is a fair face that a painter would want to paint.” Petrarca shrugged.
“Giotto painted it!” Nicolo cried, with a flourish. “Giotto, who died a decade before the Black Death! You can see he doesn’t age as normal people do, he’s some sort of freak, a demon in human form! He cast a spell on the great Giotto to paint him!”
Nicolo drew his sword, flicking the tip of it onto my throat. But I felt no fear as I met his gaze. He wouldn’t kill me with these other men looking on. It wasn’t Nicolo’s style. He would wait until we were alone and my back was turned to run a sword through me. It was my task to be sure he didn’t find me thus. Nicolo pressed slightly, nicking my flesh. A drop of blood ran down over my Adam’s apple.
“Put your sword away before you hurt yourself with it, Nicoletta,” I sneered.
“This ugly episode has gone too far,” Petrarca said, stepping between us. He placed his index finger on the flat of the blade and pushed it aside. Nicolo let the sword drop, but he kept his stony eyes on me.
“The Confraternity of the Red Feather cannot be stopped,” Nicolo shouted. “We will hunt down and burn witches and sorcerers, destroying evil in Florence!”
“What about snakes, Nicolo?” I asked. “You’d better leave room for them in your charter else you’ll be exterminating yourself!”
“You would do well to rethink your position, Signore Petrarca,” the Dominican said. He gave me a scathing look. “If we rid Florence of the evil creatures in her midst, perhaps we can prevent a recurrence of the Black Death!”
“I am not inclined to believe that solution will work,” Petrarca answered mildly.
“Come, Silvano, your plans intrigue me,” the Dominican said. “I know a cardinal, beloved of the Holy Father Innocent VI, who would be well pleased with your confraternity. It’s his passion to cleanse the world so that God’s will can be established. He’s personally wracked with sorrow over the stain that Eve’s sin has visited upon mankind, and has worked for decades to eradicate it!”
“I will support you with all the power at my disposal,” added the first magistrate. He drew Nicolo away, with the Dominican alongside them.
But Nicolo turned and called, “Bastardo, give my regards to Simonetta when you see her. Tell her you’ll soon be joining her!” He threw back his head and laughed.
What had he done to sweet Simonetta? A red haze clouded my vision. I growled and lunged, but Moshe Sforno and Petrarca held me back.
Immortal Page 21
