The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  I shrugged but felt wounded, as though she had made light of our intimacy.

  She wrapped her arms around me and kissed my neck. “I traded antiquities. Roman medallions, coins, cameos, small statues. Things I could conceal. And Latin and Greek manuscripts. I want you to know this, darling Niccolò, even if you can’t believe me. Since that afternoon …” I knew she meant the day Juan of Gandia had disappeared. “Since then, I have been chaste as Athena.”

  I did believe her, but not without a sad irony: I would have forgiven Damiata a thousand lovers—and well I may have—when I could not truly forgive my Marietta her one.

  Despite such brief regrets, the cares of my old life seemed as distant as the world outside. In one divine creature Damiata combined the perfect partner of my intellect and my flesh; when the latter was satiated and still tingling, she engaged the former, our conversation as inexhaustible as our passion. We spent hours comparing Catullus to Tibullus, Sallust’s Caesar to Caesar’s Caesar, Pico della Mirandola to Plato. One moment we were recalling the words of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Virgil’s Eclogues, the next laughing about the pleasures a certain cardinal found in his collection of Murano glass cucumbers.

  And then once again our flesh would speak in ways only our furtive souls could begin to understand.

  The second day of my new life was Christmas. “I had intended to go to Mass,” I told Damiata that morning, believing I could hear the faint strains of the O magnum mysterium from the cathedral down the street. “It would have been my first since I left Florence, may my own mother of blessed memory forgive me—I pray only that the God who holds her to His bosom does not permit her to witness my apostasy. But now my faith in the Holy Roman Church can sleep well for yet another year, having been spared even a brief awakening.”

  Damiata crossed herself. “No doubt it hurts the Holy Mother to see what the Church has become,” she said so gravely that I might have laughed. But her greatest gift was this innocence she still preserved, despite her familiarity with so many evils of the world—not to mention a Church she knew all too intimately.

  Eventually I did go out that Christmas, well after dusk, to see if I could learn anything at the Governor’s Palace. Making my way into a vestibule teeming with ambassadors, I was approached by my friend Pandolfo Collenuccio, who represented the Ferrarese interests; his care-seamed face was nearly consumed by his thick sable cap and collar. “Even Agapito has not stuck his head out tonight,” he said, frowning. “This court remains a marvel of security. So what do you think it means?”

  “When Valentino reveals the fate of Ramiro,” I said, “he will show us the die he has cast. If we are told Ramiro is guilty of nothing, then I believe the duke will stay in Cesena and defend himself against the condottieri.” Still uncertain of Oliverotto da Fermo’s fate, I did not venture that if Ramiro were absolved, perhaps the duke would produce Oliverotto as his hostage. “If Ramiro is less fortunate, I believe it will signal that the duke has little confidence in his own luck—and less in his own forces. In that event, Valentino will move his troops down to Rimini and possibly farther south, where he and his people will be absorbed into the armies of the condottieri—and compelled to pursue the purposes of Vitellozzo Vitelli rather than the designs of the Holy See.”

  “Here is wisdom.” Collenuccio offered me a rueful smile. “We have some Vernaccia back at our palazzo. Come toast the Nativity of our Lord—or the End of Days, as you wish.”

  “I had better write the Ten of War instead,” I demurred, although in fact I did not intend to write my government until I had a convincing sign of Ramiro’s fate. More truthfully, I added, “If Ramiro still lives among us, so does hope.”

  In the universe Damiata and I alone inhabited, the postponement of Ramiro’s fate was proof that we had somehow arrested not only Fortune’s spinning wheel but also the motion of the Heavenly Spheres, banishing time itself from our little sanctuary. After a late supper, as we held each other in the darkness, Damiata whispered, “ ‘We go to sleep and endless night,’ ” citing Catullus’s reflection on death. “Niccolò, this will be our endless night,” she murmured, her lips on mine, breathing her words into me. “But we will not sleep.”

  That night I shared with her a body reborn, emptied of all the dross with which life had burdened us. I imagined myself Dante in the arms of Beatrice, flying like an upward-flung lightning bolt toward a vast, uncharted zenith, transformed by the ineffable brilliance of “the love that governs Heaven.” Yet nothing in that Heaven blazed more gloriously than the shrouded glimmer of Damiata’s eyes.

  Near the end of a mostly silent night, Damiata whispered to me, “Niccolò, when we have to leave this room, can you trust me?”

  Until she had asked it, I could not have imagined I would still find that question so difficult to answer.

  “I should tell you about my wedding day,” I said as prologue. “My engagement to Marietta was the last thing poor Papa tried to do for me, not three weeks before he died—I would have dishonored his memory if I had broken it off. The next August the entire famiglia Corsini brought Marietta across the Ponte Vecchio more like Caesar than a bride, seated on a gilt chair that resembled a throne, wearing a white dress with gold brocade sleeves and so many pearls in her veil that she might have been caught in sleet—with half the Wool Guild and what seemed the entire populations of Fiesole and Terranuova following after her.”

  Here my recitation became more difficult. “On the day we were engaged, Marietta had been a child who more resembled the plaster dolls on her bed. In little less than a year she had miraculously grown into a woman. Of course she seemed no more eager to be my bride than had the plaster doll, but I credited that to nerves and the heat. Only as the wedding banquet wound on through that evening did I observe that Marietta had already given away her affections.”

  “Her amore was there? I hope he was not a relative.”

  I had to laugh. “In fact he was presented as a relative. He was a pretty boy her own age, with a man’s nose and chin and a cherub’s complexion. I thought I was a spectator at a comedy, with all their carrying on—the sighs, the glances, even some furtive, fleeting kisses. But I wasn’t the only one to observe the performance—their devotion was so obvious that even the relentless Corsini busybodies were compelled to say, ‘Oh, look at the sweet cousins, how they love each other.’ Yet I soon learned that this boy was merely a cousin of Marietta’s brother-in-law. So there you have a story Boccaccio could have written—I had believed that the greatest challenge of my wedding night would be to persuade Marietta from her juvenile indifference for all men. I never imagined that she had already acquired the taste.”

  “But she slept with you.”

  “It was the only way to get rid of all the Corsini loitering outside the half-open bedroom door, banging the kettles and pots, waiting for the display of the bloody sheet. I am almost certain Marietta bit her lip to ensure their satisfaction.”

  “Not every girl bleeds the first time.” Damiata stifled a little giggle before she added, “Of course I bled the first dozen times.”

  “I assure you I didn’t accuse Marietta of deceiving me. Jealousy cannot be considered among my failings as a husband …” I trailed off into tongue-tied silence. Having gotten this far, I could go no further.

  Damiata’s shadowed face was above me. “God’s Cross.” I could see the glint of her eyes. “Now I understand.”

  “Primerana was born eight months and three weeks after our wedding night.” The truth, at last uncorked, was as bitter as a river of gall. “God forgive me. I can’t believe that darling little girl is my own daughter.”

  Damiata stroked my face. “You can’t know. Between eight months and ten months, you can’t be certain. More likely she is yours. I know how much you already love her. Can you say you don’t see anything of yourself in her?”

  “I have scarcely seen her, between her wet nurse in Terranuova and this embassy. And now Marietta has already taken Primerana with her, back to
her brother-in-law’s house—the same brother-in-law whose cousin is her boy lover. If I don’t return to Florence, the Corsini famiglia will clutch them all to their bosom as if the Machiavelli had never existed. Even if I am truly Primerana’s father, she will not have one fleeting memory of me. She will never even hear my name.”

  I knew that this prophecy had carelessly wounded Damiata, because I could feel the little tremor that preceded her silence. Finally she said, “My greatest fear is that my precious Giovanni will remember my name. And on his lips, it will be a curse.” Her breath on my face seemed colder. “If nothing else, the Borgia will see he is taught that.”

  So this night did not bring sleep, but neither was it endless. Still holding Damiata to me, I watched the dawn trace gray lines through the shutters of our small window. Shortly after, sound also seeped into our little sanctuary, but this was not the great mill wheels of fate grinding into motion or even the rising of the little city. It was a gentle buzz, as if several people were conversing just beneath our window or outside our door.

  I got up and dressed; I had on my cape before Damiata opened one eye in fetching fashion and smiled at me. I told her, “The army may be preparing for something.” I was deliberately vague, not wanting to suggest what I most deeply feared, that Valentino’s dwindling troops were preparing to leave Cesena and proceed south, to join the superior forces of the condottieri. “I’ll go out and see.”

  I descended to the icy street, finding the sky as gray as an oyster shell. A few lonely snowflakes still drifted down. Past the next corner several be-caped workmen crunched hurriedly along, but otherwise the street was empty. The sound that had drawn me outside, however, was more evident, a murmur that seemed to come from the vicinity of the piazza. A crowd, issuing a quiet and reverent soughing.

  Crossing several streets, I reached the piazza, which opened up before me in a single blink, teeming as if the entire city had been summoned there. I did not need to inquire as to the reason for this gathering. The tower of the rochetta stood like a Titan in the pit of Hell above a lake of dark wool hoods and fur caps. And the condemned man would soon appear, I was certain, in its highest window.

  Among the sea of caps I observed Leonardo da Vinci’s conspicuous gray mane, close enough to the foot of the tower that he risked being kicked in the head when the condemned man reached the end of his rope. As I made my way toward him, I was struck that the collective tenor of the crowd altered, the farther I ventured into this lake of men. The hushed speculation in guttural Romagnolo I heard at the periphery gradually gave way to whispered, anxious prayers, and then to the sort of awed silence usually inspired by the shroud of Christ. I had entered this region of mute reverence, although I was still eight or ten braccia from Leonardo, when I saw Ramiro da Lorca.

  His closed eyes were so swollen and discolored that it appeared plumbs had been stuck into the sockets. The rest of his blocky face was covered with bruises, each the artifact of a question that had not been answered—or an answer that had demanded another question. I had advanced two more paces when I observed that the sole support of Ramiro’s battered head was a pike fixed into the meat of his truncated neck.

  Stunned by this grim vision, not to mention the death of my hopes, I was unable to appreciate the entire spectacle until I had almost reached Leonardo. A simple linen mat had been placed over the new snow, just beneath the sheer massif of the tower. On this canvas lay Ramiro’s body, still attired in an expensive brocade robe, beside it a butcher’s block and a bloody cleaver with a blade as long as my forearm.

  With his gray hair and drawn face, Leonardo was of a piece with a world that appeared entirely ashen. I did not think he had even noted my arrival, until he turned and said at once, “You must come with me. I have succeeded in explaining everything.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Nothing is worthier of a warrior than to foresee the designs of his enemy.

  So quickly did Leonardo’s lunging steps lead me across the little city, that I found myself in his warehouse, lit like springtime by his globe lamps, as if I had been flown there on the back of a goat. We stood before one of his banquet tables, now littered with an accumulation of geometric models such as learned men keep in their studioli: cones, cylinders, and more elaborate, many-sided forms made of paper or thin shaved wood.

  Directly beneath us was a machine, this consisting of a wooden box about a palm in height and a braccia long and wide, with a rod and a small crank protruding from one side. Atop this box was a flat, round, platter-like piece of wood almost as wide as the box itself, with a shiny surface like a potter’s glaze. The round wooden plate did not appear to lie directly upon the top of the box but seemed to be suspended just above it by an axle in its center, like the wheel of a cart that has been tipped on its side.

  I was scarcely surprised that Leonardo did not at once explain the purpose of the contraption. Instead he extended one of his great crane-wing arms and gathered up a volume I had not observed, as it was also concealed beneath drawings. The binding was expensive morocco leather, dyed a rich Tyrian purple.

  “Archimedes authored a treatise known as On Spirals,” Leonardo said as he opened the volume and began to turn the yellowed old parchment leaves. The text was Greek, copied in a fine hand. But Leonardo soon paused where another hand, equally fastidious, had written in the margin, in Latin, with a different nib and slightly darker ink.

  “Read it,” the maestro instructed me, as if I were an apprentice in this shop.

  I did so, aloud, offering my own translation into Tuscan:

  If a straight line, one end being fixed, is made to revolve at a uniform rate on a plane until it returns to its starting position, and if, at the same time as this straight line revolves, a point moves at uniform rate along this straight line, starting from the fixed end, that point will describe a spiral in a plane.

  My bewildered expression prompted Leonardo to add, “I will demonstrate.” Here he returned to his box with the platter on top, at which point I observed that this perfectly round wooden plate was in fact covered with a thin layer of wax. Leonardo employed his right hand to very slowly but smoothly turn the crank, so that the wooden wheel spun with no variation in its speed. With his left hand the maestro produced a silver stylus such as draftsmen use, placing it at the center of the wheel; as it turned, he slowly drew the stylus in a perfectly straight motion toward the outer edge. The effect of this motion, combined with the revolving wheel, was to inscribe a remarkably uniform spiral in the wax.

  “I have created an Archimedes spiral,” Leonardo said, returning to his bound treatise. “This construction provided Archimedes with important proofs. Proofs that cannot be understood without his definitions.” He began to read, offering his own translation. “ ‘Let the length which the point that moves along the straight line describes in one revolution be the first distance.’ ” The maestro plucked up one of his notebooks and a piece of chalk. He began drawing from a central point in the page, making a line that wound around like the spiral he had made on the wax platter—except that he stopped when he had gone only one revolution around that center point. Without the aid of a measuring stick or straightedge, he drew a perfectly straight line from that center point to where the spiral had completed its first revolution.

  Turning to another page of the treatise, Leonardo once again drew in his notebook. He did not require a compass calipers to make an almost perfect circle, using the line he had previously drawn as the radius of this circle. “And here Archimedes tells us, ‘Let the circle drawn with the origin of the spiral as its center and the first distance as its radius be called the first circle.’ ”

  “The square is the first circle,” I said, reciting the inscription on the bollettino he had shown me a few days before. The hair rose at my neck. “What in the name of God and Mankind …”

  Leonardo had already produced his mappa of Imola; with none of his customary dithering, he placed atop it the tracing he had previously shown me in Imola, demonstrat
ing the figure of a circle within a square. But now he placed above this another tracing tissue of the same size, smoothing it into place, so that I could see well enough the geometric figures drawn upon it.

  Leonardo had proved himself a better prophet than I. Because this was no mere disegno.

  This was the Devil’s map of evil.

  The topmost of the two tracings Leonardo had placed upon his mappa was similar to one I had seen in his studio more than two weeks previously—which on that occasion he had, in his frustration, covered with beans. The beans were now absent, so that I could again see the points where the cruelly butchered pieces of the two bodies had been found. Although the arrangement of these points had appeared entirely haphazard on my prior viewing, now they were connected by a line that looked as if it had been traced around a nautilus shell—or, to be more precise, represented the first revolution of an Archimedes spiral. Around this, the maestro had drawn the “first circle” with that “first distance” as its radius.

  But that spiral was not even the most astonishing feature of this new construction. Leonardo had also indicated the four compass points where the first dreadful set of quarters had been found, and he had drawn the circle on which these points lay—the same circle that circumscribed the city of Imola on his original map. In addition, he had shown the four points that marked the location of the second set of butchered quarters, and he had drawn the square into which that inner circle had been so tightly fitted. This square, in turn, was just as tightly inscribed within the “first circle” defined by the first revolution of the spiral. Circle, square, then circle, all perfectly fitted, one within the other.