Voice of the Falconer

by David Blixt

  “Florentines.” Cesco was busily thumbing his own blood off the image of Mercury on the coin at his neck. He never took it off, calling it his luck.

  Detto walked on for a bit, thinking. “I suppose they wanted to ruin his grave for all the nasty things he said about them.”

  “That was definitely part of it, but I suspect they wanted something more.”

  “What?”

  “They desire the poet’s bones buried in Florence, to their greater glory,” said the Moor from behind them.

  Detto looked to Cesco for confirmation. “But that doesn’t make sense! They exiled him!”

  Picking up a loose stone, Cesco sent it skipping down the dusty roadway. “As his fame grows, so does their shame. Today they want everyone to remember he was Florentine. As our shadow here says, it’s to their greater glory. Besides, they’d hate to miss out on the fare of the pilgrims who are currently staying in Ravenna to see his demi-sainted bones.”

  “Oh.” Detto’s brow furrowed. “So who was the man at the inn?”

  The answer sought in vain by the Moor was now freely given to Detto. “His name is Cianfa Donati, the great-nephew of the Cianfa Donati that Dante saw in the seventh bolgia of Hell’s eighth ring.”

  “And who was he?”

  “Tsk. You should read more. In life, he was a Florentine cattle thief and shop-breaker. In death, he gave God the fig.” Cesco made the rude hand gesture, his thumb between two clenched fingers. “This Cianfa is cut of the same cloth. He hired those men, thieves and killers all.”

  “Cianfa dove fia rimaso?” repeated Detto.

  “A line from L’Inferno. I doubt they’ll ever get the joke.”

  “Surely he would, though,” the Moor rumbled in Arabic. “Doth he know whom thou art?”

  Cesco was scornful. “No, mine ebony monster. I went unto him in Cupid’s robes, with thou as Hephaestus.” The Moor made a sound that could have been a grunt or a laugh.

  Coming to a gap in a wall, Detto slipped under, and Cesco barely had to duck at all. It was amazing to see how easily the Moor followed. For all his years (he had to be nearer sixty than fifty) he was as spry as he was silent.

  The two boys joked and re-enacted portions of the evening as they meandered through the sleepy city streets. Once they tried to lose their keeper by ducking through another wall gap far too small for him. When they halted to catch their breath a mile on, he was nowhere to be seen. But the moment they started off again, Cesco laughed and invited the Moor to emerge from the shadows and join them. When the Moor appeared, Detto muttered in Cesco’s ear, “How does he do that?”

  “I’m hoping he’ll show me,” Cesco whispered back.

  “Mreow,” said the Moor, which sent Cesco into paroxysms of laughter.

  Even Detto couldn’t help giggling. “What are we doing tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow we see if a pig can fly,” answered Cesco, wiping an eye and daubing his chin again. The bleeding had stopped. “Failing that, we’ll tie the doctor’s beard into such a knot that even the Gordians will die from envy.”

  “Who are the Gordians? Do we get to trick them too?”

  Cesco shook his head. “It’s been done.”

  The Moor remained silent, letting youth enjoy itself. If he read the stars aright, this might well be the duo’s last Ravennese adventure. Mars and Mercury shared the same house as the Sun. Something was about to change.

  “Will they be mad?” he heard Detto ask.

  “I can’t imagine why. We had our shepherd to guide us home.”

  Detto eyed their shepherd warily. They’d known each other for all the years of his life, but Detto’s father had never stinted in expressing ill-wishes for the Moor, and the son had inherited the father’s mistrust. But Cesco trusted the Moor, which created an impossible contradiction for poor Detto.

  “I’m sure they’ll find some reason to be mad anyway,” Cesco continued with a shrug. “From the sound of it, they have the searchers out. Or else it’s a midnight festival.”

  From a distance it certainly looked like a festival, the flickering lights resembling firebrands and metal-caged lanterns on the end of poles. Could the household really be so worried as to be searching for them in droves?

  The closer they drew to their abode, the greater the light – far too great. They heard frantic cries, shouts of panic, voices of men organized into teams with leather buckets in hand. A pair of double lines led to both the nearest fountain and well, the sea being just distant enough to be impractical.

  A building was burning, the monstrous illumination blotting out the stars just breaking through the clouds above.

  All amusement vanished in an instant. Detto stood rooted to the spot. “Cesco, that’s…”

  “Our house!” Sprinting forward, Cesco made to run into the flaming house down the road. The Moor was after him a moment later, wrapping him about the waist and lifting him off his feet to keep him back.

  “Let me go! Let me go! My poems! My lute! Everything I’ve ever composed! My whole life —”

  “— is already up in smoke,” rasped the Moor, fighting the boy’s mad struggles. “If I let go, you will be too.”

  “Devil take you, Tharwat, let me go!”

  The Moor turned Cesco around roughly and slapped his face, hard. “Stop! Cesco, stop! Breathe. Listen. Nothing that has been created cannot be created again, better. You carry your art in you. Within the blaze are only the physical manifestations. Let them go.”

  “Not just mine! Don’t you realize – his words! In his own hand! The only copy!”

  The Moor nodded. “That is a terrible loss. But the work exists in a thousand copies by now. Breathe, and reason.”

  Furious tears pooling in his eyes, Cesco’s lower lip trembled for several moments. Then he fell limp. “You’re right.”

  Wary lest it be a ploy, the Moor set the youth’s feet back on the cobblestones. “Fight the fire, but do so wisely. Not even you, little dancer, can run between flames.”

  Cesco threw the Moor a sour glance before running to join the nearest line, casting water so furiously at first that he spilled more than he conveyed. The Moor watched with real concern. Cesco’s hatred of fire was only slightly less than his loathing of cats, both rooted in unrecollected experiences.

  After looking for the house’s master, the Moor joined the line near the flames. Recogned as a servant from the burning house, he was accepted by the Ravennese. Reaching for the first leather bucket, a distant corner of his mind inquired, Why this house? Why now? But he set those questions aside as he grabbed, heaved, passed back, grabbed, heaved, passed back.

  The flames were tremendous, the cause of saving the house already lost. The main task now was to keep the fire from spreading. In that, the citizens of Ravenna were moderately successful. Dawn found two singed yet whole edifices flanking the smouldering hulk that for eight years Cesco had called home.

  By then none of the house’s inhabitants were to be found. They had vanished into the smoke-filled, flickering night.

  ♦ ◊ ♦

  Some hours before that dawn, during an exhausted pause, the Moor had discovered the house’s owner, likewise resting. Ser Pietro Alaghieri’s head of fine brown hair was blowing free, his face sooty and tired. Twenty-seven years old, in recent years he had begun to look more like his father – his face had thinned a bit, making it appear longer. He didn’t own his father’s beak of a nose, but the solid jaw was the same, and the full lips. The three parallel scars on his forehead were always more visible when he was flushed. His large brown eyes streamed water, though from smoke or tears it was impossible to tell. His twin hounds ranged alongside of him, tails low, whimpering as they looked at their former abode.

  When the Moor approached, one hound snuffed his hand. “They were with me.”

  “I know. I found them a couple minutes ago and sent them to the convent, under guard.” Pietro’s voice was so hoarse from shouting and breathing smoke, he sounded almost like the Moor. “So tell
me, Tharwat, where the Devil had they gone this time?”

  Tharwat al-Dhaamin explained in remarkably few words. At the end, Pietro shook his head. “Donati? Antonia knows him, I think. My mother certainly did. He was a cad even then. Damn. So, what did Cesco do to him? Do I want to know?”

  Tharwat patted the nearest of the skittish hounds. “To his credit, he kept Detto’s role in the last act to a cameo.”

  Pietro’s wry smile showed he appreciated the Moor’s choice of words. “He is a trifle theatrical.” Tharwat raised an eyebrow. “All right, more than a trifle. Still, we were very lucky they weren’t in their room. I was in a fire as a boy.” He shook his head, suppressing a shiver at the memory.

  “I did not know that.”

  “When they sentenced my father to exile they looted and burned our house. We escaped, but with nothing. If not for my mother’s relations, we would have starved.”

  “I am very sorry.” The Moor looked at the flames still licking the sky. “Do we know how this began?”

  “No. But it was no accident. Can you see to read?”

  Kneeling, the Moor blinked repeatedly to clear his eyes, then studied the screw of paper Pietro handed him, unjumbling the coded characters and their various meanings. All at once the meaning revealed itself. Tharwat felt his breath catch. “You are correct. This was deliberately done. To delay us? To kill? Do we know who?”

  “No, just why. Someone knows.”

  “Why not attack before now?”

  “Because the person behind this had nothing to gain. Until now. That really only leaves one option.”

  Perhaps the Moor’s thinking apparatus had been smothered by the smoke. Of course, Pietro had already had hours to parse the meaning of the news. “Which came first, the fire or the note?”

  “The note. Castelbarco sent the courier pell-mell for Bologna. Reached me this afternoon. I rode like the Devil to get here and found the house burning. Virgil and Cato were frantic, weren’t you boys?” Pietro patted the dogs vigourously.

  A few Ravennese stopped by to offer their condolences. Pietro thanked them. Most had not done so, whispering that this was God’s punishment for his sins.

  The well-wishers gone, Tharwat said, “It is regrettable that your studies have been interrupted yet again.”

  “It’s always something. Besides, it looks as though my unruly charge is about to be taken off my hands for good.” Taking the message back into his possession, Pietro loosed a sour laugh. “The arsonist and the courier probably passed each other on the way here.”

  “Cesco has a cut on his chin from his adventures this evening. The doctor should look to it.”

  “He’s treating burns at the moment, with Esta’s help. Damn, it’s tempting to say the hell with the house and get horses and go. But people will wonder —”

  “Let them. Follow your instincts. At best this was a delaying tactic, at worst attempted murder.”

  “Or a destruction of documents,” said Pietro, reminding the Moor of all that had been in the house. Years of writing. His father’s writing. All the originals, in his father’s own hand – gone. That alone was an immeasurable loss. Still, the strong-box with the most valuable papers might have survived. There was one paper in particular they would need now.

  “In any event, if we delay we are handing the enemy a gift.”

  “Unless the road is watched. This might be to spook us out into open ground.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No.” Pietro massaged the muscles above his right knee, working to ease the stiffness from an old wound. “Look – here’s Novello’s steward, bringing men.” Guido Novello da Polenta was the lord of Ravenna, and a long-time admirer of Pietro’s father. “Novello won’t be far behind. I’ll talk to him, explain. The time for secrets is past. He’ll help, maybe loan us some soldiers. He’s a good friend. And he feels guilty about me already.” Pietro’s voice was full of sadness. Despite his recent troubles, Ravenna had been good to him. Now he had to leave.

  The Moor rose. “I will find the doctor and his wife and send them to the convent to prepare the children. I myself will remain until the fire cools and see if the document survived.”

  “Don’t bother.” Pietro smiled for the first time. “Even if the strong-box is intact, the paper won’t be in it.”

  The Moor paused, then nodded in approval. “You trust no one.”

  “A lesson hard learned.”

  “A valuable one. Allow me to add to your worries. You said only one person stood to gain from the fire. I can name at least three.” Walking away, the Moor left Pietro to run through the names of their enemies. It was a long list, and inconclusive.

  Four

  Ser Guiseppe Morsicato, once doctor-barber to princes and armies, now a glorified nursemaid to two willful brats, climbed the steps to the Church of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi, the house of Dominican nuns right in the heart of the city. It was an hour before Lauds and he’d already been up all night, with no prospect of sleep in sight.

  He’d sent Esta home to pack his traveling bag. That had been an argument. Then he’d told her not to wait for him but to return to salving the burns of the firefighters. That had been an argument. In another week it was the anniversary of their marriage, and he was going to Verona, alive or dead, without her. That had been an argument. He’d won two battles, only to lose the important one. This night showed every sign of not working out well for him.

  At least it wasn’t my house that burned.

  Reaching the massive door, he rang the bell as softly as he could. After a wait the panel slid open and the porter stuck his head out. The old man was half blind and toothless, unable to leer, much less threaten the virtue of the women he guarded. “Whozzit?”

  “It’s me, Adamo. Morsicato. I’m looking for Suor Beatrice.”

  “My my my!” chuckled the porter. “Another visitor! Come to take the children off our hands? The Abbess won’t be pleased. She’s gotten them out of that Godless house at last!”

  Morsicato could hear female voices murmuring in the yard beyond the door. “Adamo, let me in. I need to speak with Suor Beatrice.”

  “Is her brother with you? He’s not welcome in a house of God,” added the porter acidly.

  “No, Ser Alaghieri is back fighting the fire.”

  “Ser Alaghieri! What did he do to deserve knighting? This fire is God’s vengeance, says I. Serves him right, says I! The Abbess thinks so, too!”

  It took a further five minutes of wrangling before Morsicato was allowed to enter. Within, all was as he expected. In a city largely built around timber, fire was the most dreaded of calamities. The sisters of Santo Stefano were busily preparing their cloister to shelter any injured or dispossessed people – any not bearing the name Pietro Alaghieri. Christian charity only extended to Christians.

  Properly dressed even at this hour, the nuns scurried from store rooms to guest rooms, the more level-headed among them preparing salves. Morsicato ran a professional eye over their preparations and grunted with something like approval. Then he asked Adamo to guide him to Suor Beatrice and the children. “This way, dottore.”

  They passed the stair to the Dormitory, the lines of trestle beds with only one door, beside which the Abbess nightly slept like a cat. The old girl was no fool. Indeed, rumour said that in her youth she had played the fool with clergy and the laity alike, and knew too well what went on behind closed doors. That was why there were no doors whatsoever in the Convent of Santo Stefano dell’Ulivi of Ravenna.

  Suor Beatrice was in the Scriptorium with the boys. Detto was fast asleep on a pallet. Cesco lay with his eyes closed. But that meant nothing.

  “Suora,” murmured the doctor in greeting.

  Rising to her feel, Suor Beatrice looked him over, and Morsicato realized he must look a sight. His beard, usually neatly forked, was a mass of bristles with layers of ash and soot among the black hair. His bald scalp was covered in smudges from wiping his hands over it.

  With anoth
er woman, even a nun, he would have felt self-conscious. But he’d known this girl since before she’d taken her vows. She had a practical streak that would make Zeno the Philosopher proud.

  Her greeting demonstrated that quality. “Can anything be saved?”

  He shook his head. Lips pressed thin, she ushered him in. Seeing an older nun was present to chaperone, Adamo went off to inform the Abbess of the doctor’s arrival. Morsicato hoped it would provoke no great interest. He was a frequent visitor, called for when a patient was beyond the sisters’ powers.

  Suor Beatrice led the doctor to the table bearing a bowl of sooty water and some rags she had used to clean the boys. Mopping at his face, she asked, “Is anyone badly hurt?”

  “Not that we know of. Ahh, thank you.” He bowed his head so she could scrub at him. “No, everyone’s accounted for. But Pietro’s lost his records of the benefice, I think.”

  “Oh no!” groaned Suor Beatrice. “It will make his reinstatement that much harder.”

  “Yes. And other papers were lost – some belonging to your father.”

  The twenty-three year old novice called Suor Beatrice trembled very slightly, her worst fears realized. But Antonia Alaghieri was her father’s daughter. She shed no tear, busying herself with cleaning the doctor’s face.

  Morsicato looked past her at the Scriptorium. He was still surprised that the girl had chosen the Dominicans. It was the Benedictine Rule that suited Suor Beatrice to the ground. Ora et labora – ‘pray and work.’ Perhaps the reputation of this particular convent had attracted her. Which is to say, it wasn’t a whorehouse.

  No, this particular abbey was run more like a well-drilled military company. The sisters never any time for idleness, and from the moment Antonia Alaghieri had set foot within the cloister, her talents were seized upon by the Abbess, a lady far too shrewd to miss what a lucrative skill the young novitiate brought with her. For years Antonia had been in charge of the production and distribution of her father’s works, making Suor Beatrice the obvious candidate to provide a new source of income for the abbey – the making of books.