The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  “You cannot send Tommaso back out there!” I shouted.

  Leonardo turned and studied Giacomo, as if weighing his fitness for the task. Finally he said, “We are finished here. By tomorrow there will be nothing left. All of it swept into the sea.” He blinked away the stinging spray; one could imagine he was weeping. “It is ever thus for those who seek the True Light.”

  We retreated into the warehouse, although it occurred to me that we could as readily drown in there as out in the salt basins, if the waves rose high enough. Leonardo retrieved his diving apparatus, cradling it in his arms like a shepherd holding a dead ewe.

  “Have you considered,” I asked him, “that you are thinking too much of your own survey and not sufficiently of the actual words written upon that bollettino? ‘The deepest salt in Cesenatico.’ ”

  Leonardo was not listening.

  I continued my thought, having the attention of Tommaso and Giacomo, who watched me expectantly. “Perhaps we should look not for the greatest depth within the salt basins, but for the greatest depth of the salt itself.”

  Leonardo turned fully to me. His gray hair like a plaster upon his gray skin, he appeared as aged as Methuselah. “The greatest depth of salt? Dimmi.” This was a whisper instead of his usual strident demand. “Dimmi, Papà. Dimmi.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Prudence consists in knowing how to distinguish between various disadvantages, and turning the least bad of them to the good.

  As I led Leonardo and his assistants to the great mound of salt I had seen upon entering the town, the wind from the sea had only grown more fierce, the great hand now pushing at my back; the snow was falling so thickly that it seemed we would soon choke on it.

  “You cannot hope to excavate it!” Leonardo shouted when we reached the pale mound, which appeared to be almost twice my height. “This will require considerable men and machines!”

  “Neither can one or two men have excavated it deeply themselves!”

  Leonardo nodded, the snow swarming around his face. “We must divide the perimeter by four and each move around it in the same direction.” He called to his assistants, “Dig with your hands, at the very base, in the deepest salt!”

  The salt was heavy, tightly packed, and coarse; quickly my hands stung with cold and small cuts. I entirely disregarded these new discomforts, so intent on answering the question of Damiata’s fate that I paid no attention to a steadily rising roar. The water struck me while I was still kneeling, a wave of such force that it carried me two dozen braccia.

  Leonardo hauled me up by the collar and kept me on my feet while I spit out brine. We then struggled back to the mound, the water halfway to our knees and the swirling currents grabbing at our feet. I could see that the base of the mound had been narrowed by two braccia or so on each side; whatever had been buried there was likely to have been carried away.

  “I have her hair! I have her by the hair!” Giacomo’s shouts quickly vanished in the wind, but I clung to the desperate hope they raised:

  This woman might be alive. She still has her head.

  Possessed as if by a demon, I fought the current to reach Giacomo, who was on the side nearest the salt basins, where the flow was most swift. He stood with his arm elevated, as though holding up a lantern.

  The disembodied head was suspended from a long tangle of hair. A woman, her face tanned like cowhide, the desiccated skin drawn tight over her skull. Her lips had shrunk away from teeth bared like a salted ling. That was a blessing to me, if not to her, because I could see that her imperfect teeth were not Damiata’s lovely pearls.

  My relief was more a numbness than any sentiment at all. And it did not last long.

  “Here is another!” Leonardo exclaimed. I had only a glimpse of a bobbing head and a face obscured by the black hair plastered to it, when he shouted again, “Another! Tommaso! Come! Niccolò!”

  Tommaso arrived before me and plunged his arms into the water. Within moments a head appeared beside him like a fisherman’s float. Frantically I turned it to face me, finding only a countenance so withered I could not imagine a universe in which the lips and eyes I had kissed only two days previously had come so quickly to this.

  I flailed beneath the turbid water, clawing yet more madly at the salt, when something like seaweed stroked my arms; wrapping these tendrils around my hand, I pulled fiercely. The head popped up like an apple in a barrel. I imagined she was staring at me, yet her shriveled eyelids were entirely shut. Her bared teeth were hardly flawed at all, but as I struggled to find some likeness, I wondered if I would even recognize Damiata when I found her—and how would I retrieve my reason if I did?

  We continued this exploration for what seemed a dreadful epoch, though it can only have been minutes. “We have five now!” Leonardo called out, holding them all by the hair like some barbarian chieftain displaying his war trophies.

  I stood up, contemplating a terrible calculus. The five heads represented the four slaughtered streghe and poor Camilla. If the hand on my table augured a sixth victim, as almost certainly it did, her head might still be in this mound.

  “Boxes! There are boxes in here!”

  I made my way to Tommaso, who was trying to capture several bobbing wooden boxes the size of infants’ coffins—and I could hardly assure myself they were not. I helped him snare one but the others were swept to sea. Suddenly the water rose around me and to avoid being carried away, I had to grasp an outcropping of hard, compacted salt, breaking off a large chunk that allowed the water to pour in and prize away considerably bigger pieces.

  Like a swarm of wasps flying out from their nest, dozens of large brown melons infested the retreating wave, some streaming past, others striking my arms and chest. As I pushed them away, I felt the matted hair and skin like a dried fig even before I saw the grinning teeth and sunken sockets.

  “He has killed far more than five!” I shouted into the wind. And evidently he had been doing so for some time, as these heads were considerably more desiccated than those of his recent victims.

  My mind reeled. I knew that this butcher had always been subject to his evil nature. But I had never imagined we would discover this: the grisly archive of a rare man’s cruel history.

  Leonardo’s ravaged eyes followed the ghastly flotsam into the sea. “We must go to the higher ground now!” he called out, at once starting off, towing his own gruesome collection.

  I looked up and saw a wave rising two braccia above the surface of the water that had already inundated us. And it was coming with the speed of a charger in the lists.

  The next I knew, I was off my feet, spinning, my eyes and nostrils burning. The wave carried me at least a hundred paces faster than I could have run, until I tumbled like an empty clamshell over the ground beneath me. I plunged my hands into the wet clay and clung to the earth, knowing that if I was dragged back toward the sea I might never be seen again.

  At last, the water loosened its hold. I got to my feet and ran into the blinding snow, the wind at my back the only assurance that I was proceeding away from the sea. I did not know I had reached safe ground until I found myself trudging through thick drifts untouched by the last tongues of the devouring waves.

  I stopped and looked around but could see little more than the hand in front of me. “Maestro!” I called out, astonished at how the blowing snow trapped my voice, as if I had shouted into a pillow.

  It seemed I had entirely lost my companions. I could not return to Cesenatico, which might well be under water. My salvation, as I saw it, was that I might chance upon one of the huts or farmhouses I had seen while approaching the town. I would have to put my faith in treacherous Fortune, and hope to find shelter before my limbs became numb and I surrendered to the snow.

  As I moved on into the blizzard, I began to see a bit more, although I was little more comforted. The storm was not simply a bitterly cold pall; it was a roiling ocean of snow. At times I even imagined dark leviathans swimming past me, although these were certainly just th
icker swarms of snowflakes, hurried along by the winds.

  For an instant, one of these apparitions seemed to take a more recognizable form. I shouted, “Maestro!”

  This phantom ran toward me, unmistakably a man.

  “Tommaso!” I called out, first thinking that he had put the diving helmet back on, which would not have been a terribly foolish thing to do in those conditions. But then I remembered we had left Tommaso’s peculiar costume in the warehouse.

  A face emerged from the ashen shroud. A white goat’s beard. A stallion’s long nose and white mane. And in the middle of its forehead, a single long, black horn.

  Licorn. Unicorn. The word I had heard little more than a heartbeat before our Gevol int la carafa had ended. But it had not been a password. The mask I had only glimpsed that night—and which Giacomo had seen only from a distance days before—had not been the goat face of the Devil but rather this half goat, half horse, one-horned demon. The unicorn, a symbol of both purity and untamed passion, had been perverted into a mask of unspeakable savagery. “Licorn” had been the name a terrified gioca had attached to the Devil’s apprentice.

  The Licorn was armed with the principal instrument of his monstrous trade, more sword than knife, curved like the scimitar of a Turk. It was not the ornate dagger that Oliverotto da Fermo had previously displayed, but the stature of the man who wielded it—not to mention the prodigious fist that clutched it—was so similar to Signor Oliverotto’s that only a fool would have been fooled by his mask.

  “Signor Oliverotto!” I shouted through the tempest. “I have witnessed your collection of heads! Is this what you summoned us to observe?”

  When he was close enough to gut me with a single lunge, he stopped. Another man seemed to take shape behind him, as though the blowing snow had compacted to create him.

  My breath burst out of me and my brain offered the distant observation that the scimitar had punched through my ribs with such force that all the wind had been expelled from my lungs. Just as strangely, despite the shrieking tempest, I clearly heard my cloak rip as the blade slashed it.

  I was on my back, staring up at the unicorn mask, the snow flying down at me like the ashes of my own funeral pyre.

  CHAPTER 18

  Those nearest to the Church have the least religion.

  My attacker settled to his knee beside me, his blade now elevated, poised to scythe through my neck. Miniature portraits flashed before me, as if illuminated by lightning: Mama and Papa and dear little Primerana; my sisters; even Marietta, a vision for which I was strangely grateful, as if at last I could apologize to her. Yet in that shadow, I lingered longest with Damiata. When I reached the far shore, she whispered, she would tell me the truth of my own soul.

  The Licorn’s body and blade came down at me in one motion and I closed my eyes, unwilling to witness my own death.

  I felt only an immense weight on my chest.

  “Are you alive, Messer Niccolò?” These words might have fallen from Heaven.

  Giacomo stood over me.

  My assailant moaned and his body shuddered atop mine. Giacomo bent down and appeared to reach into the creature’s massive back. I could see the knife he withdrew, though not the blood on it. But then the Licorn coughed and I could hear his drowning lungs. He began to gargle an Ave Maria.

  With Giacomo’s help I was able to push the nearly dead weight off me. I got unsteadily to my feet—and found myself entirely intact. Perhaps my attacker had struck me with a shoulder or arm; his blade had merely torn my coat. Whatever the case, Leonardo’s listless assistant had saved my life.

  “This man is still alive!” I shouted. I intended to rip off his mask and employ his own scimitar, if necessary, to discover what he had done with Damiata.

  “The maestro is up there!” Giacomo waved vaguely into the blizzard.

  I determined I would deliver this butcher to Leonardo, who might better understand how to clear the blood from his throat, so that we could take his full confession. Grasping his clothes, Giacomo and I began to drag the Licorn up a slope that seemed only to steepen with each step. I began to feel as hopeless as Sisyphus, condemned to eternally haul this burden uphill, my limbs now entirely frozen. If our dreadful ballast had not occasionally groaned, I would have regarded the entire effort as futile.

  Suddenly Giacomo fled into the snow. But even before I could call out, I saw him silently pounding on the vaporous door of what appeared to be merely the ghost of a house. Almost at once, he vanished inside.

  Arriving at the same threshold, I found another miracle. Before me was a farmer’s dining room, lit by a smoking fire, the table in front of the hearth spread with a Christmas offering: sausages, roasted thrushes, bread, beans, and polenta. The farmer and his family were nowhere to be seen—perhaps they did not want to be further importuned by the starving Imolese refugees—but the dead had most certainly come to feed. Leonardo knelt on the floor next to the table, the five heads scattered around him like a melon harvest, sticking his fingers into the gaping mouth of one of those terrible leather faces, as if he believed he would find something hidden there, perhaps a message from her murderer. Tommaso was also busy, prying the lid from the wooden box he had salvaged.

  “I have the agent of their deaths,” I said as I dragged the Licorn across the threshold, the snow blowing in with me. “He would have taken another head if Giacomo had not saved me. I am indebted to him for my life.” (A debt which Messer Giacomo made certain I paid, although that is altogether another story—that strange business with Leonardo’s portrait of Giocondo’s mistress.)

  Leonardo knelt beside our captive and listened to another gargling Ave Maria. He put his fingers to the beast’s thick neck, endeavoring to find his heartbeat, only to discover a little string; pulling on this, the maestro produced a small, red leather pouch.

  Quickly I stuck my fingers inside this charm bag and extracted the sole contents: three tarnished, battered, squarish little bells. They rang—or chimed—faintly as I examined them. “Witch bells,” I said. “My father’s tenant farmers wore them, believing that a strega would pause to count each chime and become distracted from her evil designs.” Recalling this sound from my night on the pianura, I shuddered so deeply that my teeth chattered. These bells had announced to us, and to this creature’s pitiful victims, that we were in the unwelcome company of the Devil’s apprentice. Or perhaps the Devil himself.

  “We must remove his disguise before he suffocates,” Leonardo said, now examining the helmet mask, which appeared even more lifelike in the light: it had been assembled from the white hide of a stallion, the beard of a goat, and even the horn of an actual antelope. “It is sufficiently well-constructed that it might fool Nature,” the maestro added admiringly.

  I asked Giacomo, “Could this be the mask you saw in the woods that day?”

  Giacomo reluctantly nodded. “He looks enough like the Devil, doesn’t he?”

  Leonardo glanced up at us before he deftly drew the mask over the dying man’s head.

  All four of us gasped.

  “No face at all.” Giacomo repeated his words of a few nights previously, when both he and I had encountered this man, as well.

  And Giacomo’s description was no less apt than it had been that night. Nature herself seemed to have sent the Licorn to us with only the rudiments of a face, most of it a great pink-and-white scar, with two round beads for eyes, two slits for the nose, and another for the mouth. This tormented flesh was less livid than it might have been, however, because it was dusted all over with the glittering residue of some chalky white powder.

  “I believe this substance is powdered moonstone,” I said; there were great veins of this luminous chalk in the vicinity of Imola. “It would appear that the two masks were in fact only one. This man sometimes wore the mask of the licorno and at other times just the ruin of his face, concealed beneath this powder, like a whore hiding the pox with a layer of ceruse.”

  I knelt beside him, anxious to extinguish the s
park of pity I felt for his deformity. “What happened to you?”

  His eyes swiveled to me, black as peppercorns, absent lids or brows. He answered in good enough Italian, though with a Romagnole inflection, blood frothing on his slit of a mouth. “I was … turned … over the fire.” Strangely, he seemed fiercely vain of this ordeal and its terrible result. “To save … my soul.”

  “When a child is born feetfirst,” Tommaso said, “the midwives here tie him to a spit and turn him over the fire three times. Otherwise he will fall into the stregoneria.”

  “The credulous idiots succeeded only in burning him like chaff,” Leonardo said, his mouth sagging with scorn.

  Again I had to look at the unicorn’s gruesome harvest, if only to be certain of the count. “Did you bring another woman’s head to Cesenatico? Within the last two days?” Here I relied on Leonardo’s judgment that the hand had been severed within that time span.

  His head rolled from side to side. “Three weeks … ago. Two streghe … from Imola.”

  Hope lifted me a little; evidently Zeja Caterina and her colleague had been these last two. But then I had to ask, “The hand you left in my room. How did you obtain it?”

  “Imola … the strega … we kept it … in snow.”

  Leonardo’s lips quivered. Evidently he had neglected to observe that the hand might have been packed in snow for some time; perhaps he had also failed to consider that he had not collected all the parts from the last two streghe.

  But a great wave of relief washed over me. Although Damiata’s fate remained a cipher, I could reasonably believe that this monster had not butchered her.

  Nevertheless, there remained a hard truth I had yet to hear. I grasped the beast’s jaw so urgently that it seemed my fingers would puncture his scars, which were not thickened or callused after so many years, but felt as smooth and fragile as frogskin. “You said ‘we’ kept that hand in snow. You mean you and your master. Who is he?”