The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  I did not believe these words so much as the truth I had seen in her eyes, when she left me in the snowfield.

  “Niccolò, Vitellozzo Vitelli wanted me to take something to the pope. Something he expected to obtain here in Sinigaglia.”

  I nodded. “This page.”

  “I think so.”

  “Valentino insists it is a fraud,” I said.

  She bit her lip. “My only hope is that this page can free my little boy. Niccolò, I believe what you told Vitellozzo. That in it Valentino confesses to things that happened at Capua. Things the Holy See would never want known. Oliverotto himself said as much. I heard him.”

  The room seemed yet colder. “Tonight?”

  “I heard their final words. Through that tiny hole in the wall. While Valentino watched. His eye to that little hole.” Damiata shook her head numbly. “They sounded so distant. As though they were already in the pit of Hell. Oliverotto begged that his wife and children be spared. Despite everything I pitied him. ‘I know you are watching!’ he cried out. ‘By the Lord’s robe I have kept your secret to the death!’ ”

  I had already prepared myself to hear something like this. Nevertheless, the floor might have fallen away beneath me. “This secret Oliverotto kept. He didn’t mean Capua.” When Damiata only looked at me blankly, I added: “Oliverotto told me he saw Juan die. But he was not the murderer.”

  Damiata crossed herself and sank down onto the edge of the bed. “Vitellozzo, then.”

  An hour before, I could not have believed it myself. In truth, I had to silence my own doubts before I said, “No. Not Vitellozzo.”

  Damiata got to her feet, retrieved her cioppa from the bed, and wrapped herself in it before she looked up at me. Her cheeks glistened with tears. “My dearest Niccolò, you see things the rest of us cannot. Like all great gifts, it is also your curse. But while we were still at Imola, Oliverotto showed me something you have not seen. Weeks later, when I realized what it was, I did not tell you—as I said, I believed they would kill you if you went to them. He showed me a spiral made with little olives.” She went on to describe in detail how Oliverotto had carefully arranged the miniature olives on a silver plate, weeks before Leonardo deciphered the Archimedes spiral. “Niccolò, he was taunting me, as he had taunted the pope. As he toyed with Leonardo. He killed them all. Juan. The women at Capua. And the streghe at Imola.”

  My faith in my science wavered like a dying candle. I recalled Damiata sitting on our bed in Cesena and tracing a spiral in the air, when I had told her about the mappa of evil. I believed her account entirely, and why she had not told me this until now. But perhaps Fortune had merely employed coincidence to conceal the truth. I could only take on increasingly fragile faith what I had just seen.

  “If Valentino has confessed to his crimes at Capua, it will be enough,” Damiata said, comforting me. “You must believe that, Niccolò.” Her bosom rose. “I have already arranged to leave here and go back to Rome. To trade this page for my little boy. There is a barge sailing to Venice tonight.” She cupped my hands, but without touching the packet cradled within them. “Darling Niccolò, I trust you with my life and my Giovanni’s life. I must ask you to care for this until I complete my arrangements. In an hour, come to the wharf. I have bribed the guards at the north gate. But if I am arrested, then you must … Use this to save your own people, Niccolò. If you can, my son … But you must leave the seal intact. Otherwise the pope will say this is a fraud.”

  Damiata rushed to the door with little more than a whisper of fur. At the threshold, she turned.

  “Niccolò, you must imagine something for me … You are an old man, in his last days, which you spend in a lovely villa somewhere in the hills around Florence.” She blinked slowly, her lashes freighted by clinging tears. “You are in the garden, beneath the pergola, with your Primerana’s children playing all around you, and you are reading the Symposium, the part where Plato says that love is our desire to be whole, that each soul has a missing half, and although we might spend an entire life searching for that other half, when we encounter it, we know it at once. Yet the soul can never describe the object of its desire until it sees it—until then, that missing half is only a ‘dark and doubtful presentiment.’ So as you are reading these words, with the bees and cicadas buzzing and your grandchildren giggling, your mind goes back to the loves of your life, and you know that of them all, there was only one who made you whole.”

  She sniffled, then smiled as if she had truly witnessed this vision. “Promise me, Niccolò. Promise me that when you are an old man, for one moment, you will bring Damiata back into your heart and imagine that my soul completed your own.”

  My own tears were already growing cold on my face. “I promise you.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Whoever is lucky in love should not play cards.

  An hour after Damiata left my room, I went out. The city was now entirely silent, the bodies collected from the streets, the snow falling without a sound. When I reached the north gate, I found it guarded by a dozen Italian mercenary cavalry. Damiata had bribed them well; they did not even issue a perfunctory challenge as I exited.

  The road ran beside the wall for about two hundred braccia before a ramp descended to the wharf. This platform, which rested on wooden piers sunk into the bed of the Misa River, extended from the city wall like a shelf. Tied up alongside it was a sailing barge of the sort you see on the Adriatic coast, with a single mast and a stout hull, the dark oak planking almost indistinguishable from the river and the open sea just beyond. Nothing moved on the deck, but light glimmered faintly through the cracks in the small shutters of the single cabin.

  I waited beside the barge for half an hour, listening to the hull thump gently against the wooden wharf, hearing nothing else save the whispering sea at my back. To my left rose Sinigaglia’s rocca, the pale round towers not even a bowshot distant. My mind whirled with every imaginable possibility, the multitude of lives I might live before the sun came up again. Few ended well.

  Yet when at last I saw Damiata gliding atop the snow with graceful dancer’s steps, I could believe that she was the only bride my furtive soul would ever desire. And unlike our previous meeting—or my own wedding—this bride walked directly to me and took me in her arms.

  “Laodamia had three hours when her husband came up from Hades,” Damiata murmured. “We will scarcely have three heartbeats.” She looked back toward the ramp. “Everything is ready. I must go.” She began to shiver.

  “Madonna! Soldiers! Coming!”

  A man raced down the icy ramp, cape flying, legs churning with comical fury as he tried to maintain his forward progress. He stopped a short distance from us, hot breath streaming from his mouth and nose, until Damiata gave him a “get on” gesture with her hand, which sent him back up the ramp.

  “Niccolò. I must have it now.”

  At that moment, the little packet inside my vest seemed as heavy as all my doubts. Perhaps it was only a fraud. Or perhaps that single page torn from a schoolboy’s geometry text would set in motion fates even Fortune had not imagined.

  I doubted I could even move my hand. Yet I did.

  As Damiata slipped the packet into her cioppa, the first soldiers appeared at the top of the ramp. Through the thickening snowfall, I could also see horsemen on the narrow road next to the wall, at least a dozen, along with as many foot soldiers, all of them armored.

  Damiata clutched my cloak and drew me to the swollen waist of the ship. A sailor emerged from the darkened stern and leaned over the railing to help her aboard. But she did not reach for his arms at once. Instead she took me in hers.

  “My darling Niccolò, I believe as the ancients did that great love journeys beyond the shores of fate.” Her voice already seemed the whisper of a shade. “You must trust me, companion of my soul. I will see you again.”

  With this promise, she touched her fingers to my lips. Perhaps it was only my imagination, or a beautiful if not reliable memory, but her eyes w
ere transparent at that last moment, as if I could see her soul through blue flames, and the most wonderful smile trembled on her lips.

  Then she turned and reached for other arms, to begin her journey.

  She had not even gotten over the railing when the first crossbow bolt went by my head, as swift as a falling star, buzzing like a cicada.

  Three or four more bolts came as rapidly as a heartbeat, some thwacking wood, at least one making a sickening, split-melon sound as it struck flesh. With a feral grunt the sailor helping Damiata fell back and as he did she slid over the railing like a dolphin pulled into a fisherman’s boat, disappearing behind the hull.

  I spun about in a crouch and looked toward the ramp, expecting to find the crossbowmen firing from atop it. Instead I observed nearly a parade of horses venturing down that treacherous slope, many of the frightened beasts slipping, none of the riders armed with bows, much less prepared to fire.

  The fuses flashed first, lighting like candles atop the pale city wall almost directly above me. One, two, three, all in an instant. Men had begun shouting, so I could not hear the fuses hiss, only the dry thunderclaps that followed as the long beaks of the scoppietti spit flames. The balls droned and thwacked, the last slapping the canvas sail. Then another flash, the burst of light already dimmed by the cloud of smoke that hung over the rampart. The ball raised just a puff of snow as it smacked the wharf beside me, making almost the same sound as a ball that strikes flesh.

  I thought I might save myself by leaping onto the boat, but the river’s strong current had already pushed the barge entirely beyond me. I did not even take a breath before I decided to swim to it. As I tensed to leap into the frigid water, my mind was occupied by only one terrible question: When I climbed aboard that ship, would I find my love already growing cold, the life I so cherished bleeding out of her?

  I was struck in the middle of the back, the blow so hard that I thought it would drive me into the water. Yet almost before I could wonder if I had been shot, my feet flew out from beneath me and I was pulled backward with such violence that I went sprawling into the snow. Crystal flakes flew up around me.

  Then the entire world became still. I stared up into the unremarkable, bottega-keeper face of Michelotto—the last face Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto da Fermo had seen, only hours before. Valentino’s executioner had evidently effected my “rescue.” Holding a sparking torch in one hand, he offered me the other.

  “Stop your firing!”

  I looked toward the ramp. As if God had waved His hand, the veil of snow suddenly parted for the author of this command. Valentino rode his great black warhorse, although he was attired just as I had left him hours before, without even a cape, having merely exchanged his slippers for riding boots.

  The stallion advanced with short, prancing steps, as imperiously calm as its rider. The duke rode to the middle of the wharf, glanced up at the city wall as if to confirm his marksmen’s obedience, before he gently reined to a stop. For a moment, both rider and horse were entirely still, a living equestrian statue.

  A strange thing happened then. The wind had been almost calm most of the night, rising only slightly as it drifted in from the east. But suddenly there was a great inrush of air from the sea, not the sort of gust that accompanies a storm but a vast, whispering suction that seemed gently to pull us after it, once it had passed.

  I have always believed that was Fortune sighing.

  CHAPTER 25

  And the Devil, taking him up to a high mountain, showed unto him all the kingdoms of the world.

  Valentino wheeled his horse about and started back toward the ramp. Michelotto invited—or directed—me to follow with merely a single gesture of his formidable hand. We then proceeded at a pace so rapid that my racing mind was compelled to concentrate simply on keeping my feet. Moments after reentering the city, we began to cross a long drawbridge, this spanning the moat that ran partly around the rocca.

  I already knew I would be taken to a high place.

  Still at a run, we entered the courtyard of the fortress, which teemed like a Saturday market with armored soldiers of every sort, clamoring in a Babel of tongues. Upon reaching the far corner, we ascended the stone steps that spiraled within a great circular tower, finally emerging on the broad platform at the top. This perch was about twenty braccia across, protected by a stone parapet high enough to conceal the artillerymen, of whom there were more than a dozen, all employed at moving two ponderous iron cannons.

  The artillerymen were under the supervision of Valentino’s engineer general; Leonardo stood at one of the large crenellations that notched the parapet in several places. Michelotto delivered me directly to this post, then left us, disappearing back down the spiral stairs.

  Leonardo only glanced at me before he returned his attention to the night sea, his brow pinched. The escaping barge was far beneath us, its black hull all but invisible; the canvas sail appeared to float on the inky water. The briefly halted snowfall had already resumed.

  “Damiata is in that boat,” I said, breathless, my words catching. “I believe she has proof …” I realized I had no time to expound a theory still plagued with so many doubts. “Proof of … crimes. The duke—”

  The voices seemed to come from behind us, yet also from beneath us. I turned to see torchlight erupt from the sunken stairwell. Valentino’s head rose above the pavement, for an instant appearing to have been presented on the tip of a pike, much as he had displayed Ramiro. But he continued to emerge into view, his torso entirely intact yet nearly motionless, as if some great hand were lifting him from the depths of the earth.

  Followed by Michelotto, Valentino strode directly to us, his eyes sweeping quickly over me before fixing on Leonardo. “Maestro, you must calculate drop, weight, and range for the bombardiers.” He intended to fire on the escaping barge.

  Leonardo’s gray-green eyes flickered with movements so fine that he might have been counting the thickly falling snowflakes. I had seen this same stare when he worked with his measuring sticks.

  With no word or other indication, the maestro simply turned and walked away.

  Valentino’s utterly placid face almost at once darkened with rage. “I did not give you leave to go! Do not walk away from me as if I do not exist!”

  Michelotto unspindled the Spanish garrote he wore around his wrist and wrapped the ends of the slender cord around his broad fists.

  Leonardo halted at the lip of the stairwell. Valentino put a restraining hand on Michelotto’s arm.

  “Do you know where you will go from here, Maestro?” Valentino no longer raised his voice, but there was an uncharacteristic hoarseness to it. “You will return to the paint shop. You will leave behind only portraits of whores and decorated walls where monks slurp their soup. You will build nothing and be remembered for nothing.”

  Leonardo appeared to sway slightly before he turned. “I remember the whirlwind that traversed Italy entirely when I was four years old. This great dark cloud that spun with furious and unrelenting violence, tossing up whole dwellings, trees, and herds of livestock before it.” The maestro spoke with the wondering, high-pitched tone of a little boy. “A remarkable stillness preceded it, as though the world had issued its last breath and the soul had gone out of it.” He blinked rapidly. “When the whirlwind had passed, it left behind an unimaginably obscene fetor, as though the bowels of the very earth had been ripped out …” Leonardo bowed his head. “In such fashion Nature destroys so that she can give birth.”

  “Sì,” Valentino said, the word nearly a hiss. “We must destroy the old world before we can build the new.”

  Remarkably, when Leonardo looked up, his eyes were on me, almost as if demanding instruction from his father.

  I shook my head only slightly.

  Nodding at me with equal economy, little more than a tic, the great maestro from little Vinci turned and descended the hidden stairwell. Yet even when he had disappeared entirely from sight, I could hear the precise cadence of his
steps on the stone, tapping out the harmonics of a universe only he had the vision to see.

  “The maestro will come back to us,” Valentino said placidly, now seeming to regard his engineer general’s defection as little more than a passing whim. “I understand him. A man of such vision must sometimes turn away from more practical considerations.” He looked at me with an expression convincingly like pity. “Just as I understand that you have been enchanted by the same witch who seduced me, so that she could betray my brother.” He glanced at Michelotto. “Secretary, do you know that Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto da Fermo are already dead?”

  I nodded.

  “But I have spared Paolo Orsini. Do you know why?”

  I shook my head, struggling to make some connection.

  “Because Signor Paolo did not conspire with the other two to murder my brother.” Valentino nodded, his nostrils slightly flared. “At that time the Orsini sought peace with us. Seeking profit, the Vitelli wanted to prolong the hostilities. As they intended with this present scheme. Both Vitellozzo and Oliverotto put their knives into my brother. They made their confession before they died. But when they did so, they gave up another confederate.” A knife went into my breast. “On the night my brother was murdered, Damiata sent one of her bravi to Vitellozzo, with details of the route Juan would take after he left my mother’s vineyard.” Valentino paused and exhaled audibly through his nose. “I assure you I did not want to hear her name, Secretary. To hear Vitellozzo say it—that great misshapen, pestilent pig—was to rip out that part of me that was hers alone. A piece of my flesh.”

  On this night of revelations, for the first time it occurred to me that Valentino could well be Giovanni’s father; perhaps Damiata’s precious son was this “flesh” to which he referred.

  Valentino looked out to sea. “Damiata knows that evidence of her crime will soon reach my father. She believes she can still save herself with this scheme authored by Vitellozzo. Do you want to know what I wrote on this page she intends to take to His Holiness?”