The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  I shared my misery with the great army of priests, monks, prostitutes, thieves, peasants, peddlers, and opportunists of every stripe that had followed Valentino’s army throughout the Romagna campaign. Whether on foot or bowing the backs of pitiful starving mules and oxen, day and night all proceeded almost single file along the Via Emilia, for to go where the snow had not been trampled was to quickly come to a halt.

  At Cesena, at last I received a grain of good news: Valentino and his army had stopped there, apparently for a stay of some length. Certainly Cesena was capable of sustaining the army for a little while, as well as being defensible; it is a walled city much like Imola and of similar size, but the principal fortress is a true citadel, perched atop a steeply sloped summit, with the city itself directly at its foot. If Valentino were to regret his accord with his brother’s murderers prior to the irrevocable union of their forces, he would find Cesena a suitable redoubt.

  Like the surrounding countryside, the city had been taken over by Valentino’s soldiers, who were billeted everywhere. But by various devices I was able to find a room in a large palazzo near the central piazza. The narcotic unguent that had been smeared on my flesh had evidently leached into my blood, afflicting me with weakness and fevers; for the next few days, as I attempted to recover from these ills, I struggled to find food and charcoal and attend to my dispatches, this requiring that I begin to reliably ascertain the strength of Valentino’s forces. I gravely feared that the duke’s troops, a great multitude to the Cesenate who had to lodge them, were nevertheless considerably outnumbered by the combined forces of the condottieri. Hence I saw nothing to relieve my suspicion that Valentino was marching south to consummate a peace that more resembled a surrender. My appeals to Agapito for an audience with the duke, in which I might have raised the conjoined fates of both Damiata and Florence, had fallen on resolutely deaf ears, this all the more evidence that Valentino was no longer concerned for either.

  As much as I was plagued by the demands of each day, each night found me host to yet more troubling desires. Like Petrarch’s Laura, whose distance—and death—only strengthened the poet’s attachment, my memories of Damiata bound me more desperately to her as the days passed without word. At night she came to me as a succubus, sometimes as feverish as I, her flesh like a bed warmer, at other times her eyelids rimmed with frost and her arms as cold as a corpse.

  Each time, I awakened with an almost unbearable regret, believing I had abandoned Damiata out on the pianura. In truth, I mourned for her as if my soul knew she was dead. It was as though I were a Ginevra degli Amieri of a far less fortunate sort, waking to discover that I had escaped death, only to find myself in a darkened tomb that would remain forever sealed.

  At the end of my eighth day in Cesena, still laboring over my dispatches, I leapt up at the knock on my door. The soldier who waited outside, a heavy cape over his cavalryman’s breastplate, did not have to tell me that the duke had sent him; he had similarly summoned me in Imola. I assumed I had been called to present what might well be the final performance of our Florentine cantafavola, which had so wearied both the singer and his audience.

  Our destination was the Governor’s Palace, a building no larger, excluding the considerable tower, than any number of private palazzi in Florence. Messer Agapito waited in the cramped vestibule. “His Excellency will see you now.”

  The duke’s secretary led me to a much larger chamber, well-lit by brass candelabra and a fireplace. Tapestries—one depicting a unicorn hunt—and purple velvet curtains draped the walls. Two cushioned chairs had been placed before the fire and Valentino stood beside them, attired in a white shirt tucked into riding breeches; his long, reddish hair, which appeared damp, fell to his collar.

  Never had the duke received me with such informality. In Imola, where I had often waited for him until well after the fourth or fifth hour of the night, I had become accustomed to a certain ritual: the bright light outside his study ensured that one was all the more discomforted by the lean, vigorous, yet almost doleful face that waited in the oblique light of his reflecting lamp.

  But it was not the duke’s features that made the deepest impression. At twenty-six, Valentino had the gravitas, as the Romans put it, of a far more mature man—along with an air of authority and power so resolute that I had seen the most experienced diplomats and condottieri leave his presence with trembling hands and blanched faces. Yet afterward one learned that voices were never raised, threats never issued.

  “Secretary.” This much had not changed; Valentino never addressed me as anything but “secretary,” to emphasize that my lords of the Palazzo della Signoria had been unwilling to send an actual ambassador. He gestured that I should sit in front of the fire and he took the chair beside me, his hands draped at ease over the gilded arms.

  Without another word, he stared at the fire for sufficient time that I might have recited a half-dozen Paternosters. Finally he spoke in a low, distracted voice. “You know the people here cast drops of oil on their Christmas log. They say they can prophesy from the various colors of the flames that flare up.”

  More silence followed, and then he asked me this: “How would you defeat Fortune, Secretary?”

  In our previous meetings, the duke had conversed with me seriously regarding affairs of state, and I believed that he credited my opinion on such matters—even if he did not take seriously the positions of my government. So I replied to this question, which seemed more suited to supper-table philosophy, just as earnestly. “First one must remove the blinders all men wear when Fortune is preparing her worst—when events are about to sweep them away. To defeat Fortune, men must anticipate such evils before they arise, and take prudent steps to avoid them. When the waters have already risen, it is too late to build dikes and embankments.”

  He made a flicking motion of his hand. “But men take action only when Fortune—or other men—have already undermined the foundations of their security. And when that edifice begins to topple they can only run for the doors. Why do you suppose that men refuse to anticipate events?”

  “It is the nature of men to see things as they are, not as they will be,” I answered. “But we have also abandoned the science of anticipation, which the ancients established. Instead, since the fall of imperial Rome, men have surrendered their fates to God, Fortune, and the Church—none of which will save us when the waters rise or the pillars of the house begin to fall.”

  “The science of anticipation. To see ahead, to peer through the clouds of complacency without relying on the fictions of prophets, seers, and stargazers.” Valentino spoke as if he were in a studiolo, examining some new antiquity or curiosity. “To anticipate events before Fortune herself can turn her great wheel. How would you create such a science?”

  “Here I would also follow in the steps of the ancients. Historians such as Titus Livy and Herodotus. I would look into the past, as they did, and speculate that the same forces that compel nations and empires to rise and fall will always be repeated, in endless cycle, throughout history. Understand the past, and one can anticipate what is to come. Understand the nature of men, and one can anticipate what men will do.”

  He nodded, but as if he did not entirely accept my prescription. “Then that is the error in this science of anticipation. The nature of men. Surely in this new age, this rebirth of humanity, we are changed men, different even than our own fathers. How can you anticipate a new man?”

  He had mined the very foundation of my science; had I been less fixed in my fundamental conviction, or had his question been more oblique, I might have accepted this chastisement. Instead I said, “The times change. Events favor one man’s character or nature over another’s. Yes, a new age will prefer a new sort of man, and he will rise, while men whose natures are less suited to the times will fall. But the nature of men does not change. From age to age, our desires, fears, and necessities are always the same.”

  He turned slightly, still not looking at me directly. “But a man can change h
is nature.”

  No man in Christendom was better suited to wage this argument; within a few short years Valentino had metamorphosed from an insignificant, scorned cardinal to a warrior-prince whose intelligence and ambition were fairly comparable to those of his namesake, Julius Caesar.

  “Just as the nature of men does not change,” I said, “the nature of a man does not change. Perhaps when his true nature has remained hidden, to outward appearances he is a new man. But he has merely discovered the gifts that were always within him.”

  “The gifts Nature has given him.” Here the duke nodded emphatically, as if I had resolved this question of a man’s immutable nature to our mutual satisfaction. The smoldering coals popped and a flame shot up, as though the elements shared our agreement. Yet Valentino scarcely contemplated this little prophecy at all, because almost at once he said, “You know nothing of her?”

  The tone of this remark was so ambiguous that I was not entirely certain that Valentino had posed a question, rather than stating a fact. But I was certain I knew the “her.” It seemed Leonardo had conveyed my message.

  “I have heard nothing from or of Damiata since she vanished on the pianura,” I told him. “The day before you marched out of Imola.”

  In the silence that followed I cautioned myself: now that Valentino seemed to have committed his entire army, as well as his own fate, to reconciliation with the condottieri, he might earnestly hope that Zeja Caterina’s “book of spells”—and its imputation of his allies’ guilt—was never seen again.

  Valentino turned fully to me. We were face-to-face, with a disquieting intimacy; certainly this had been his intent when he had set this stage.

  “This book you mentioned to my engineer general.” Valentino placed his pale hands on his thighs. “Did you see what it is?”

  I had to swallow the rock in my throat before I could shake my head. “Damiata saw it. The names in it.”

  “It is Euclid’s Elements. A schoolboy’s geometry. But to our credulous peasants it might well be the magic of Solomon. Those women—the streghe—brought it to the Rocca. Not recently. More than a year ago, when all my condottieri were in Imola—Vitellozzo, Oliverotto, Paolo. Another Orsini cousin as well.” My scalp prickled. “It was an amusement for everyone. These country streghe with their fraudulent prophecies. And the gioce that followed. Witch games of the most basic sort.”

  I needed to say nothing in response; he had himself indicted the condottieri for his brother’s murder.

  Yet Valentino next spoke in a musing tone, as if he wished only to distract himself from the grim truth written in the pages of a schoolboy’s geometry. “To truly defeat Fortune, Secretary, it is not sufficient merely to anticipate the changes and catastrophes she will inevitably bring. At best you will merely become Fortune’s accomplice and more often her servant, waiting on her human proxies to do their worst. No. To defeat Fortune you cannot merely peer into the past and find a mirror of the present. You must look ahead and see what has never been seen. A future even Fortune has not imagined.” He returned his gaze to the fire. “Secretary, I have a very great enterprise under way here in the Romagna. What we build here will shortly secure the salvation of all Italy. That is why Fortune has chosen this moment to bring a very great intrigue against me.”

  I waited for him to elaborate. Then, unwilling to let my desperate hopes simply slip off into his silence, I said, “The condottieri—”

  His hand came between us so quickly that I expected he would strike me. Yet he merely held it there, fingers spread, perhaps a palm’s width from my face. “Yes. You see the condottieri as the principal agents in all this, because you know of their past enmity toward my family. But Secretary, I do not need the fingers of this hand to count the gentlemen under my own roof whom I can trust without reserve, who would not betray me for a price.”

  I did not find this entirely surprising; Damiata had told me that Valentino suspected some treachery among his intimates. While it was hard to believe that the duke’s entire household had turned against him, I could easily conclude that at least one traitor remained under his roof: a man familiar with the details of Leonardo’s mappa, who had conveyed them to the murderer.

  “And Secretary, you are overlooking something else.” Valentino lowered his hand. “Listen carefully now.” His voice was only faintly sibilant, like the breeze that sighs among the beech leaves in summer. “You know nothing of her.”

  This, I was certain, was not a question.

  CHAPTER 6

  Don’t you know how little good a man finds in the things he long desired, compared to what he expected to find?

  “The day I first saw Damiata … I was twenty years old.” Valentino leaned back, his chair creaking slightly. “It was spring, a cerulean day after a rain, in that marvelous garden at Ascanio Sforza’s palazzo, with all those topiaries and an entire grove of trees—pomegranates, lemons, oranges.” He spoke as if the intervening years had vanished. “She was standing in this little grove, her shoulders bare, all alabaster, her dress fitted so closely that the gold embroidery seemed like veins of fire on a skin of satin. Until that day I had thought my own sister the only truly beautiful woman …” He shook his head with tiny, rapid motions. “Damiata was not a woman who had strolled in there in her gown and pearl slippers. She was Diana glimpsed at her bath. Her hair was golden then, and the breeze gathered it with phantom fingers, each strand a thread spun of light.”

  He looked into the fire as if this vision were present in the glowing coals. “I was a little cardinal, a fool in a red cap who served only as a basket for the benefices and other income of the office, scarcely allowed to hold the door at even the most meaningless events. Pissing my life away in the Vatican latrines. But in that garden, on that day, I saw a goddess come down from the stars, a divine messenger meant only for me. And on that day I promised myself something.” The sibilance in his voice had become a slight tremolo. He closed his eyes. “A new life.”

  I did not dare say that I, too, understood that promise.

  “I want to believe her, Secretary. I want to believe in her, because she is part of who I am.” Here he began to lightly tap the fingertips of both hands on his thighs. “But my father has heard nothing from her. You have heard nothing. I have sent soldiers back to Imola to search for her. We have looked everywhere and have found not a hair of her.”

  I was relieved, in part, to learn that Valentino’s people had in fact undertaken the search I had so desperately urged. But why was he only now inquiring of me, when I might have been more useful than anyone in this endeavor?

  He went on: “We have found nothing to suggest that she has come to a sad end. Nothing to tell us that she has gone elsewhere. Nothing at all.” He continued to tap his fingertips against his thighs. “Yes, I want to believe in her. But she betrayed my brother.” Valentino allowed this accusation to hang in the air, as if content to echo his father’s suspicions. His elaboration, when it came, was murmured like a prayer. Or a confession. “We both betrayed him.”

  An abyss had opened at my feet.

  “She became my lover only weeks before Juan was murdered. I will not tell you I was seduced.”

  Now I could only think: What else did she withhold from me?

  “Of all that Juan had been given, of all that I, in turn, had been refused, I coveted her most of all, even more than I coveted glory and wealth. And believe me, Secretary, beneath that absurd cardinal’s hat my father clapped on my head, I craved glory and wealth no less than the gut of a starving man screams for a crust. And she knew my desire.” A single fingertip tapped up and down. “We betrayed my brother twice. In her bed. After the first time I vowed that I would not go back to her. But I could not …” He shook his head as though marveling at Damiata’s singular powers of attraction. “The second time was the last day of my brother’s life. In the afternoon, because he was coming to her that night. She expected him to come from the Vatican, across the Sant’Angelo bridge. I told her no, that I wa
s dining with Juan that evening at our mother’s vineyard on the Esquiline, next to San Martino ai Monti. I believe she knew then that Juan was lying to her, that when he left our supper he intended to visit the Contessa della Mirandola’s house near the Santa Maria del Popolo.” The duke’s exhalation was audible. “To this day I don’t know. But to this day I still question …”

  He opened his eyes and sat forward. “Everyone knew that the condottieri had their knives out for Juan. First, because he had enraged the Orsini with his campaign against them, even if he achieved nothing. And second, because the Vitelli, who did most of the fighting for the Orsini, saw it to their profit to continue the hostilities with my father, even when the Orsini began to discuss peace. Yet Juan did nothing to secure his person. When he went out at night he took along a drunken groom or two and rarely wore his armor. His only defense was his wandering nature—no one could say when or where he would go.” Valentino now tapped his thighs so rapidly that his fingers might have been playing a moresca on a flute. “I have always wondered if Damiata told them where he was that night, and where he would go later. Told this to one of the Vitelli, I believe. Or perhaps Damiata simply told someone who told the Vitelli. She was furious about Juan’s dalliance with the contessa. Ordinarily she could conceal her anger. As she concealed so many things. But I was with her that day. I saw …” He blinked as if trying to see his former lover through the veil of years. “Damiata had ears and mouths all over the city. She had a thousand ways to accomplish her betrayal.”

  His fingertips ceased their tattoo. He stared at his hands, as if wondering why they had stopped. “And I, in my own way, was her accomplice. I told her the fatal truth about Juan’s plans for that night, fully knowing that I would feed her anger over his new lover. Of course I was mad with desire for her. But I also believed she was another gift, much like the captain general’s office, that Juan had so carelessly squandered. So I, too, willfully betrayed my brother.” The words drew his lips tight, as if he had swallowed sour wine. “ ‘The Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him …’ ”