Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

“How can there be days after today?” she cried.

  “There just will be; time goes on,” I said. I looked at her carefully. “You go hide. I’ve got to see if there are other children I can help.”

  “Aren’t you one of the condottieri?” she whispered. I shook my head. She said, “Other children, you’re right, they’ll need help, I’ll go with you to help them….”

  “No! Hide! You can’t help anyone right now, and if you don’t hide, you’ll get hurt again. Hide in an alley or gutter, not in a building that can be torched.” I was done tearing strips of cloth and I took a deep breath and made my hands very gentle as I laid them on her leg. I closed my eyes and felt myself soften, hoping to invoke it, letting myself surrender to my pity for this child, and it started: the consolamentum, the sweet warm flow like clean water through my heart and out my arms. The girl quieted, stopped crying. When the consolamentum ended, I wrapped her leg. “This may hurt, but it’ll stop the bleeding.”

  “They killed my father,” she said softly. “They were laughing. He was lying on the floor with his eyes so empty. I have no other family. There’s no one to give me a dowry, so I’ll never marry, and what man would want me now anyway? I’m damaged, soiled. I’m nothing now.”

  “You can’t think that way,” I said hoarsely, tightening one of the cloth strips. I was sickened again by the cruelty with which grown men could treat a child.

  “My life doesn’t mean anything, with no parents, and now like this, and it hurt so bad, what they did to me!” She scrunched her narrow shoulders together and cradled her head in her arms. She had a thick mass of soft dark hair, but as she turned her head and sunlight caught her hair, I saw that it wasn’t black at all. Her hair was a variegated chestnut color, tousled through with rich red, umber, black, and even gold strands. I’d never seen anything like it.

  “Your life can mean anything you want it to,” I said fiercely. “You are not what has been done to you, you’re more than that! There’ll be work here in Volterra, rebuilding the city. Helping other children and women. Concentrate on that, on helping them. That will get you through!” She nodded, but her face was so waxy and bruised with pain that I didn’t know if she heard me. I was done wrapping the wound and I leaned back. “Hide somewhere safe—you know the good hiding places, children always do—don’t come out for any reason until you hear the condottieri marching out of Volterra!” She scrabbled up onto her hands and knees and then up onto her feet. She swayed, looked down, and covered her nudity with her hands. I stripped off my blue lucco and gave it to her, and she slipped the tunic on over her head.

  “Go,” I said, picking up my sword. She ran and I made my way onto the street. Looting and despoiling greeted my eyes. I stuck my sword into the shoulder of a condottiere who ran past, chasing a woman with an infant at her breast. He went down with a scream which I silenced with a quick slit across his throat. “Hide,” I called to the woman, who disappeared into an alley.

  “Hide” was a word I repeated a thousand times. It was the only help I could offer. I was one man fighting through an army of twelve thousand, each of whom seemed intent on committing the most horrifying atrocities. I lost track of how many I killed, I just kept following screams. The condottieri were lewd and wild, intoxicated with their own brutality. They acted like stampeding animals, without discipline or thought.

  I had just sent a condottiere into the afterlife to share the evil God’s ribaldry when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a familiar blue lucco fluttering. There was the girl, carrying a baby and leading four children across the cobblestone street from a burning wooden cottage toward a stone palazzo. The smaller children followed her in a line like ducklings behind their mother. People were still screaming and running in all directions, and I thought the children would make it to wherever the girl was leading them. Then shouts were raised. Three condottieri trotted laughing toward the children. The lead soldier broke into a run with his sword outstretched, the bloodied tip pointing directly into the round belly of the smallest child toddling at the end. I knew he meant to spit the child on his sword. I was faster than he was. The condottiere met my sword, instead of the plump tiny body of the toddler. His two comrades screamed and converged on me. But I had been wielding a sword for a hundred years, and even together, they could not hope to equal my skill and experience. They both lunged at me at the same time. I saw it coming with the first twitch of their thigh muscles and leapt out of the way. Then it was a lightning-fast parry, slash, back slash, and both men were dead on the street.

  The girl kept moving across the street with the other children. I darted after them.

  “I told you to hide,” I said grimly, when I caught up with her.

  “Pick up those two.” She pointed at the toddler who had nearly been killed and another child in front of him who was only slightly larger. I grabbed one up in each arm and followed the girl toward the stone palazzo. She made her way to the back of the palazzo and went into a small pantry structure. “There’s a cellar down here,” she called. I followed her and she grunted and scooted away a flagstone on the ground. “I’m not the only one,” she said, pointing. I looked down into a dugout crawl space. Several pairs of eyes looked up out of the dark hole; other women and children were already tightly packed in.

  “Make room,” I said, handing down the toddler. Silently the women shifted for the other children to climb in. The girl went in last. I touched her head gently. “Stay hidden now!”

  “Condottieri dragged off their mother, and I couldn’t let them burn to death,” she said, eyes bright, and I knew she’d survive the day with her heart intact. It would take a terrible toll on her, but she’d survive. I pulled the flagstone back to cover the entrance, feeling sorrow for these people, but also relief that this one young girl would not let her essential self be destroyed.

  For the rest of that long terrible day of the sack of Volterra, I stayed on that nameless street, near the cellar. I shut down my senses and went into some terrible place inside myself, a relentless, lunatic place where even the Gods’ laughter couldn’t penetrate. I slaughtered any condottiere who came close to the hiding hole where the girl was. They weren’t men, they were dark moving shapes begging for the kiss of my sword. I wasn’t Luca Bastardo anymore. Or, rather, I was the Luca Bastardo who had killed seven patrons and the proprietor of a brothel as a boy.

  A sound beat against my ears. I was covered in sweat and blood and I was as tireless and obdurate as stone. A man was shouting. The man I was fighting was shouting. He was a skilled fighter, formidable, a challenge. He was trying to tell me something. I leapt back, sword ready. “What!” I demanded. There was a red mist before my eyes, and then dim gray streaks of light from the overcast sky unfolded. My hearing cleared with my vision.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, how many of my men have you killed, Bastardo?” said Federigo. He was looking at me with horror writ on the good half of his face.

  “How many women and children have your men raped?” I demanded. “How many old men have been cut down as they tried to defend their grandchildren?”

  “I know, I know, it’s bad,” he muttered. With no warning, the sky spat down fat raindrops which a split second later crystallized into solid sheets of water. Federigo wiped the rain from his face with the hand that wasn’t holding his sword.

  “How could you let this happen? Wholesale rape and murder—I’ll report it to Lorenzo!”

  “Who do you think ordered it?” Federigo retorted. For a moment, the whole world stood still, as if some condottiere’s axe had cleaved me in two. Of course, Lorenzo was capable of this, and he had lied to me when he said he didn’t want innocents killed. “I don’t like it, either,” Federigo said, his one good eye turning away. “But don’t you see the necessity? The Pope intends to control Florence, the territories plan to break free, everyone thinks Lorenzo is too young to hold the republic firm—everything is teetering on the brink. Lorenzo has to make a stand! He must show the world that he will lead and safegu
ard Florence as only a Medici can. My God, man, do you not know what will happen if the Pope puts his dimwit nephews in charge of Florence? They will ruin our city, and everything that the Medici have done, as patrons of art and learning and establishing the Platonic Academy, this will all come to an end!”

  “And that’s worth ruining lives for?” I asked bitterly. “Ficino’s right to ramble on about the soul is important enough for little girls to be raped after watching their fathers killed?”

  “We’re talking about civilization,” Federigo said with passion. “This is the price for it. Lorenzo de’ Medici is a great leader who doesn’t flinch from paying. We’re lucky he has this strength, and future generations will thank him for it!”

  “I don’t see how civilization depends on the slaughter of innocents!”

  “It depends on Lorenzo discouraging those who would seize his power and dismantle Tuscany,” Federigo returned. “Florence is at the very center of everything, all the advances in art and philosophy. We have to protect her! Lorenzo’s not happy about this. He’s going to make reparations. He’s coming here later to claim he didn’t know this would happen.”

  “Reparations? To mutilated children? To women who will bear bastard children that no one will want to look at in nine months? People are dead, lives are ruined! For civilization? You can justify horror on this scale like that?”

  “I’ve explained it to you, you can choose to understand or not,” Federigo snarled. “Lorenzo needed an ugly job done and he chose me to execute it! I was paid for it and I did it!”

  “That’s why they call it whoring,” I said softly. Federigo lifted his sword and I thought he was going to strike and I made ready to take him down. I would enjoy it, too.

  He swore, then turned away with a contemptuous curl of his lip. He sheathed his sword and then hurried off to take shelter under the eaves of a nearby palazzo. I followed him and saw him take something out of his mantello and fumble with it. He bent over it anxiously, murmuring “I don’t want the rain to ruin this, it’s a rare polyglot Bible….”

  “You took a Bible?”

  “I collect manuscripts, I have a library, and this Bible is beautiful and rare….”

  “You looted some Volterran’s library and stole a religious article? Is this more of that civilization that you’re willing to defend at any price? What use is your civilization if it doesn’t keep you from inflicting suffering on people?” I was repulsed, and under my gaze Federigo’s jaw jutted out. I spat, “You’re no better than the animals you lead!”

  “This is war, Bastardo, it’s not supposed to be pretty!” he snapped.

  I felt the cool clean grip of my sword in my hand, and I wanted to kill him. But that wouldn’t solve anything. It would only bring Lorenzo’s wrath upon me. He’d want to punish me, but he wouldn’t even do it himself. He’d simply recall the Silvanos whom he’d sent out of the city on various pretexts. “How much longer is the sack supposed to last?”

  “Until sundown. I’m pulling the men back now. The rain will calm them, too, and put out the fires.”

  “Get your men off this street,” I said bitterly. “Keep them away. Anyone who sets foot here is a dead man.”

  Chapter 19

  MY LIFE CHANGED AGAIN after the sack of Volterra. That evening, the rains poured with such force that they set off a mudslide, further devastating the city. Federigo’s troops marched out at sundown, and when the gates closed behind them, I pushed open the flagstone and let out the women and children who’d hidden in the cellar. One blue-veined, parchment-skinned elderly woman had died during the wait. I lifted her out and gave her to the other women to bury. I worked through the night to help the Volterrans tend to the injured. Men had lost limbs and women had been raped and sliced into, with that particular inhumanity that war engenders in the crazed minds of soldiers. The evil God seemed to have emerged from this battle victorious.

  The rains stopped the next morning, though the sky remained overcast. I had once been told that a tea of cohosh root would prevent pregnancy, and I repeated that to many women, apologizing that I didn’t remember how to prepare the tea. I reunited children with their mothers and I helped wives find their husbands and fathers and sons, whether dead or wounded.

  By midmorning the next day I was hungry and tired, and I sat down against the rough stones of the city wall to rest. Everything hurt: my arms and shoulders and back from swinging my sword, my thighs from lunging, my throat from screaming, my jaw from grinding my teeth in anger at the destruction I’d witnessed. I was covered in mud and blood and I couldn’t remember when I’d eaten last. I closed my eyes and banged my head back, gently, but with enough force to feel the ragged edges of the stones against my head. Then something grazed my fingers, and, wearily, I opened my eyes. A plate of food was thrust into my hands.

  “You have to eat.” It was the girl whom I’d been too late to save from the condottieri. She was now clean, her long hair plaited back away from her exquisite heart-shaped face, and she was wearing a nice gonna with a pale pink giornea over it, an incongruous color amidst the devastation.

  “Come on, it’s good, ham and hard cheese and bread with olive oil,” she said softly. She was right, I had to eat, though my stomach still churned with fire at the wanton brutality I’d witnessed. Slowly I took a bite of ham. She watched me with her intelligent large eyes, which were pale brown with flecks of green and gold and even black against very white sclera. Her eyes are as variegated as her hair, I thought, though I did not know then that those eyes would haunt me for the rest of my life. Even now, I can still see them in all their hundred moods: narrowed and sparkling with laughter, or dancing with quick thought, or widened in playful mischief, or black pupils swollen with love and desire. She was like quicksilver, no one had more expressions and humors than she did. But back then, she was just a pretty young girl watching me eat, and I was almost repulsed by my attraction to her. I had long since vowed, by Giotto’s art and by everything else I held holy, never to direct my lust at a child. I pretended to ignore her and ate with more gusto. She gave me a tentative smile which I did not acknowledge and moved away.

  When I was done eating, I leaned my head back and slept for an hour. I woke because someone was gently tonguing my ear. In my somnolent state I thought it was the pretty girl, which made me smile and roll my head around with drowsy interest. Then I remembered how young she was and I leapt to my feet with a startled exclamation. But the lascivious friend was none other than my trusty steed Ginori.

  “Ginori!” I hugged him unabashedly. He whinnied and stamped, wanting to go home. “We can’t leave now, there’s work to do,” I told him. He rubbed his nose on me, understanding.

  “I knew that was a friend of yours,” said the girl, coming up from his other side. “I saw him trotting around, sniffing the air, and I just knew he was following your strong smell!”

  “Anyone would smell strongly after fighting the way I have.”

  “That’s not what I meant!” She blushed. “I meant that you’re strong, strong and brave the way you helped me and so many others, so you must have a strong and brave smell!”

  “No matter how I smelled, Ginori would find me anywhere. This is one of the great horses of the world,” I said, laughing and scratching his neck. He was covered in muck and blood, but as I ran my hands over him, I found no injuries.

  “I’ll wash him and brush him for you,” she offered shyly. She was clasping her hands behind her back and rocking on her clogs, looking unbearably lovely.

  “You have other work to do, ragazza,” I said sternly, refusing to be charmed by her. “Volterra needs you now. Ginori is a grand old man and he’s been in many battles. He knows how to be patient.”

  “Do you want more food? Or some wine? How about fresh clothes? You’re wet and dirty, I can get you fresh things!” Her words tumbled over each other.

  “I’ve been wet and dirty and worse, many times before.”

  “You don’t have to be now. I’ve told
people how you helped me. Volterrans are very grateful. They’ll give you anything you need.”

  “I can take care of myself. If I need anything I’ll scrounge it up.” I shrugged. At this she sniffed and flounced off with her skirts twitching around her rump in a way that would be trouble in a few years. I turned back to Ginori, who nuzzled me, looking for food. “Big trouble in a few years,” I told him. He nickered back. I led him out into the street to find food. When he’d eaten his fill, I meant to get back to helping the Volterrans reconstruct their lives.

  LORENZO RODE INTO VOLTERRA in the late afternoon. With much fanfare, he arrived on one of his magnificent black stallions, surrounded by a chattering coterie of friends, advisers, and hangers-on. They were a group of about thirty men, looking clean and well fed and wearing the chatty, blank faces of those unscathed by tragedy. Lorenzo dismounted at the city gate and walked in, exclaiming in loud dismay at the sights before him. I was setting the broken arm of a young blond woman who’d been raped and beaten and left in an alley for dead. But people are always more resilient than they ever imagine they can be, and she’d crawled out of the alley to the makeshift staging area where I and the town physico and some midwives were tending the injured. We heard Lorenzo and his party enter the city and she lifted her bruised face up to me. I shrugged and she pursed her swollen lips over the gaps in her mouth where teeth had been punched out. I felt her arm bone with my fingers and it seemed straight, so I wrapped it with strips of cloth so it could mend. The pretty girl came over with a pitcher of wine and some cups tucked in a bag on her shoulder, and she poured the blond woman a cup.

  “Isabella, your hair is messy, why don’t I comb it for you?” the girl crooned, patting the woman’s head softly as she swallowed the wine.

  “I’m done,” I said, tying the last strip. “I don’t think you’re bleeding inside. I can’t be sure. Rest for a few days. Don’t work yet. See how you feel in three days’ time.”