“They are three silver leaves from the branch of the Tree of Knowledge,” said Lucrezia. “They were sent to Prince Dschem as proof that his campaign had worked, at least at first. They will have to serve as whatever proof you need, Vicente de Nevada.”
“You don’t believe there is a Tree of Knowledge,” said Vicente, “and I don’t either.”
“I believe you have to go looking,” she said. “Maybe you’ll grow faith enough to find what the world has kept hidden all these centuries. Now, keep the memory of these in your heart and you won’t fail for courage. Go on your way, and come back to us soon, and change the course of history.”
“They look like small silver mirrors,” said Bianca.
“That’s all they look like,” said Vicente. “The half-folded leaves of an olive tree in winter are as silver as this, and more useful.”
Inside the chapel, struck by a resonant glory, Fra Ludovico began to sing the Credo in unum Deo.
“Take her away; I can’t bear this,” said Vicente. He wrapped himself in his cloak. While Primavera and Lucrezia Borgia snatched at Bianca’s limbs, and she twisted and almost escaped, her father tucked the page of scribbled notes into his sleeve and mounted his steed. He turned the mare’s head away from the chapel doors and toward the smoky blue horizon of the north. He was halfway down the road at a clip, scattering the gossiping geese on their way to the millpond and giving the gooseboy a morning’s labor to collect them, when Bianca broke free and began to follow.
The mare kicked up dust, and green growth cloaked the road as it turned into the woods. Her father had crossed the bridge. He was hidden from her, as he left her in her childhood forever and disappeared into a quest. She followed him as far as the bridge—right to the middle of it—the very middle. And went no farther.
The vision in San Francesco
IN THE absence of his beloved María Inés—an absence whose pang changed in character but grew no weaker as the years passed—Vicente de Nevada found himself ever more readily spooning his daughter up to his breastplate with a seemly devotion.
His taking leave of her, therefore, cut him as deeply as it did her. He had the more capable constitution, and he could make of his backbone a ridge of steel, and manage not to turn around, nor to turn back, though her sobs echoed behind him. He breathed through his mouth to keep from crying out in reply. His nostrils clogged effeminately.
His hard-earned house, his precarious foothold, Montefiore, hovered in his thoughts. He didn’t swing his shoulders to watch its roofs become lost in the green tide of uprushing foliage. Through all of Cesare Borgia’s cutthroat campaigns to subdue the petty dukes of the Papal States, Vicente de Nevada had managed to stay out of it. He hadn’t ducked from commitment to a cause, but he had learned by virtue of his foreigner status that it was sensible to keep one’s mouth shut when opinions were being catapulted about in a drunken rage.
Therefore he suffered gall of a bitter sort, to be wrested at last from his home for a different kind of campaign.
I’m not religious enough to believe in the assistance of angels, he thought, using the edge of a sleeve to catch the runoff from his sinuses. Were angels available to come to my aid, I’d scarcely recognize them. They’d be smart to move on to campaigns where their assistance might be put to better use.
I’m not overly religious, but perhaps the Duc de Valentinois, a master in so many things, has selected his agent wisely. For if I can’t be easily comforted by the notion of celestial helpers, nor can I read dark meanings into the writhings of coincidence. I can’t turn back merely because my spirits are low. Human spirits sink, that is what they do. I must just press on and go where I’m told and do what I can and expect nothing, neither help nor praise.
And to protect my child, my Bianca, my dove with the cautious eyes, I must leave her to the whims of the world. There is no hope for her if I refuse; there is no trickery I could effect that Cesare and Lucrezia between them couldn’t undo, or work against my favor.
What Cesare was capable of! His brutality was legendary, but legend is often just bombast, intended for effect. In Rome he had impressed his lovers of both sexes as a torero, bringing the enraged bull to a bloody end. In Florence the Borgias were pilloried, and Montefiore was near enough to Florence—on the border of the Toscana vineyards and olive groves—to pick up echoes of the latest rank opinions of Cesare. But in the long diagonal swath of duchies and strongholds that made up the Papal States, from Rome to the southwest up to northeasterly Rimini on the coast of the purple Adriatic, and then inland to Bologna, the roar of Cesare the Bull was fearfully deafening.
Eschewing the golden raiment of some princes, he entered his conquered cities dressed in black, escorted by a retinue of a hundred black-clad soldiers. A Gonfalonier and Captain-General of the Church, a murderous hot-blooded assassin, a vigilant general able to endure the merciless tides of fate, what wouldn’t he do if he discovered Vicente had betrayed him? Cesare would murder his own mother if it might secure for him a better cut of meat at dinner.
No, there was nothing for Vicente to do but swing his steps toward the north and pretend at hope. And perhaps his sacrifice would convince the Fates or the saints or Fortuna or whoever held sway over human affairs to tender some mercy in his direction and deliver to him the impossible hidden branch from the Tree of Knowledge.
He would go north. He would. Just not immediately.
That he was a skeptic in matters of faith didn’t mean he was a fool. The irreverence and the upset in Fra Ludovico’s chapel had unnerved Vicente, and he wouldn’t undertake an impossible mission on behalf of his child’s welfare without applying for holy protection. One needn’t rely on the intercession of the saints, but nor should one appear to be uninterested in their favors, especially in what amounted to a sort of indentured thief’s holy pilgrimage.
So Vicente, with heavy heart, took himself to the nearest place for succor and for supplies, the walled city of Arezzo.
He was late in arriving and had to bed with a band of soldiers outside the walls, for the city gates had closed for the night. The food was simple and the wine watered, but he slept without fear of brigands. He had dressed as a peasant, and the purse supplied by Lucrezia was well hidden on his person.
He heard mutterings against Cesare and ignored them; he heard soldiers praying to the spirit of Savonarola, and marveled anew at the belief that Italians sustained in the survival of the spirit after death.
In the morning, when the doors had been opened and the livestock driven out to grazing fields, Vicente joined the throng of peasants doing their common business in the sunny campi and the shadowy alleys. He made his way up the sloping city streets to where the city’s main churches hunched under their impressive roofs and steeples.
The church of San Francesco seemed the quieter today, and there Vicente took up a post. Uncomfortable with Latin prayers, he petitioned for guidance and expected none. He was a poseur. Do I work with the intrigue of a Borgia, he asked, since I have unwillingly become the sinister arm of Cesare, or do I bring to this task my own cool head and sense of fair play? Do I march into this private battle with my daughter’s face stitched in the mind’s eye, or to conserve my strength do I retire thoughts of her until I return, if ever I should?
A monk with a rasping cough prostrated himself on the stone floor nearby and began to moan for release of a sort Vicente guessed might not be entirely pietistic. Vicente moved away, moved forward toward the altar.
Someone was working on the floor of the square sanctuary, refitting pieces of tiling, and several candelabra on their own iron stems were planted like trees of light, to help the mason see. Vicente’s eye was drawn to the walls, which had been ornamented with ranks of frescoed paintings. The colors were gaudy and not to Vicente’s liking; the images seemed the story of a common people, without the glow of hammered gold to signify the sacred. But he found himself studying the images as if for clues on what to do, how to behave. Perhaps, even, why—why bother to go for
ward at all, when all he loved was being left behind.
“It’s a story of the Church,” said the mason after a while, in a rural accent Vicente had to work to understand.
“Everything is a story of the Church,” said Vicente cautiously. It didn’t do to be rude to anyone, especially in a house of God.
“No, no, you mistake my meaning,” said the mason. “I’ve been here for days and the good brothers have read it to me. The walls are divided into panels, do you see?—and if you follow along and look from here to here, and then drop your eyes and look again, a story is told scene by scene. It’s the truth about the Cross of Gesù. Can you make it out? There at the top, our father Adam is dying, and the Tree of Life is figured. It’s from that tree that the Cross was cut. After the death of Our Lord, the Cross was lost, but then it was found, and some descendant of our brother Lazarus, being dragged along to his grave, was raised from the dead. Raised up.”
The mason grinned; what teeth he had were brown. “I love that notion. I would relish the raising of my brother, Severino, so that I could explain the better why I murdered him in the first place, and then do it again.”
Vicente said, “Do you believe in such stories?”
The mason said, “I believe in the floor. I put it in place and I walk on it. Faith is a floor. If you don’t work at making it for yourself, you have nothing to walk on.”
Vicente didn’t want to enter a discussion about faith. He looked at the painting of the Tree of Knowledge.
“Even the mighty Valentino, bull of the Borgias, came here to pray,” said the mason. “The decorations are not all that old—within my father’s lifetime, I think—and they have their own lure. I’ve heard tell that Cesare prayed here. When the mightiest of Roman families still relies on the floor of faith, what does that tell you?”
“That his father is the Pope,” said Vicente noncommittally.
“His father didn’t paint this wall of faith, nor pay for it,” said the mason. “Take of it what you will. Even the Turkish infidel, friend to the Borgia, gaped at its beauty, they say. Its beauty makes one believe.”
What I believe, thought Vicente, is that Cesare Borgia came here, to pray and to plan his campaigns, and that Prince Dschem accompanied him. I believe that the Prince noticed Cesare’s interest in the story picture here. I believe he used this story to his own advantage at the very end of his life, to try to secure his own rescue. He invented a fable to appeal to Cesare’s superstitious nature, and now I’m chained to it.
But then what of those three silver eyes of God in Lucrezia Borgia’s gradual? Very special work by Byzantine craftsmen? Or something more?
I’ll take of it what I can, thought Vicente. He looked at a square of wall in which a king was sleeping against soft pillows as an angel descended in rosy light over the undefended shoulders and unwitting expression of guards inadequate to their task. How lucky to have a seraphic assistant. But if I’m to have a vision, I must make it myself. I’m neither a sleeping king nor a working mason, and a farmer has little use of floors.
He looked at the painted scenes some more. He saw a city in terra-cotta here, a prophet there. Three men hoisted the vertical post of the cross, and the forward man put such muscle into the task that his genitals had become loose from their bindings and hung in undignified view. The horses were ready to stamp and snort, and one could almost smell their shit. The lances raised in battle were a thicket of strokes against a defeated sky. Here was an angel in an annunciation—why would no angel ever announce a message to Vicente? Here was a battle in terrible crowded circumstance—a battle as conducted on a loggia!—and here was Lazarus again, looking well rested enough. Here was a dwarf with his hand on his hip. Learning a new stature as he gazed soberly upon the cross.
It’s all we can do, thought Vicente, to look, and invent our own stature, and see if we can measure up to it. Faith may cloud our eyes or open them; who can say?—but it’s up to us to invent our intentions, and live up to them, or fail at the duty.
I intend to save my daughter, he said to himself. With faith or against it, that is what I intend. I have no papal father, like Cesare, no army behind me, no coffers to plunder. I have only my sense of that Borgia family, and the way that they turn, they turn; they always turn. If I’m not back quickly, and successfully, they will turn, against my Bianca if they can’t reach me.
What miserable leverage Vicente had over Lucrezia would count for nothing in a contest with her brother. There was no angel available to guard Bianca, and Vicente required protection more rigorous than a groveling priest and a cursing cook could provide. Cesare lived by love and war. Since Vicente couldn’t woo the man he’d have to pose a threat. Would that he had access to his own army of conscripts!
Well, who’s to say he didn’t? He looked at the armies in the painting again and thought: I’ll borrow you or your kin.
He began to devise a protection, to invent in fiction what his luckless life had never provided him. A family, an army, a threat. Now: out to the campo, and surely in one of the narrow vicoli he could find a scribe for hire who could lend him a quill and ink, vellum and wax? And see that an epistle be delivered? Vicente would use the best of his coin to ensure the best product, and live on scavengings, and walk instead of ride, and do without lodging at inns. His trip would take longer, but, please God, his daughter would be safer.
Please God, that is, should there be such an Element in the heavens.
He turned toward the task and walked out of the door, alone.
The mason shrugged and went back to his work. He repaired the work of fifteen centuries before him as best he could. A floor of faith wasn’t impervious to the effects of age.
The mason might have seen a shadow on the floor, had he had faith of a different sort. Indeed, he rubbed his eyes and decided he was tired, for though the candles in the iron trees seemed to burn as brightly as before, he was no longer as clear-eyed as he had been when he started an hour or two ago. In truth, the dwarf was there, lingering. He could catch up to Vicente in a moment. He wasn’t much good as an angel and he didn’t know why he was compelled to accompany the man on his quest. But the dwarf planted his feet on the floor of the church and gazed upon Piero della Francesca’s painting of a dwarf witnessing a holy moment in the cycle of the True Cross. Scarcely fifteen feet away, a Lazarus was ready to rub his shoulders and work out the kinks in his muscles. The dwarf in the painting was looking at the Cross, but he was also looking across the span of holy painted space at the man raised from the dead.
Dwarves made of rock have no capacity for faith, but that doesn’t mean they have no appetite for it. Staring at the dwarf painted into the plaster, the other dwarf, the eighth dwarf, shed a richer shadow, and the mason, cursing mildly at what age was doing to his eyes, went to take his lunch early.
• 1506 •
Bianca awake
A STORM had come up from the south, a tarantella of wind and surging smells. Apple trees lost their limbs, and the cow byre its roof, and the cows could be heard singing in plainsong throughout the night. By morning the roads were slick with the fallen fruit of olive trees and smelled like a fine breakfast.
Fra Ludovico had had a vision in the middle of the night. He had thought it was dyspepsia at first, as he had met with a sausage of suspicious vintage, and his stomach had been shouting at him. But despite bouts of digestive grief Fra Ludovico had kept sinking into a velvety somnolence, pitched between sleep and a wakesome drowsing, and in that state of half-here-half-there, he had seen the girl stepping on clouds of carven ivory, for all the world like Saint Catherine of Siena in her mortal stoles and immortal graces. But she stepped toward a cliff edge and seemed not to realize it; and though the priest tried to cry out, his voice—with the persistent laryngitis that afflicted him in dreams—was feeble. Too small a thread of warning spun out. She didn’t hear. She walked on at her own pace toward a danger.
He stood, relieved his bladder, picked a shred of gristle from his teeth, and no
ticed, in the yard below, that visitors had arrived under cover of darkness. Sometime between midnight and dawn, during the hours pertinent to the sanguine humor.
The prelate was feeling his age. The years following the departure of his master hadn’t been easy. First, Lucrezia Borgia had dismissed the overseer that Don Vicente had assigned to watch after things. Dismissed or removed from the district, it was unclear which, but in any case the hapless local governor was gone as gone. Fra Ludovico had little practice in standing up to strong beautiful women—not for nothing had he fled into the skirts of the Church instead of the more profane variety—but for all his timidity, his fondness for the true daughter of the house prevailed. He wouldn’t leave Bianca alone to suffer at the hands of la Borgia, now the Duchessa de Ferrara. If suffer it would be: and he thought it would.
Well, who could doubt it, really? As far off the public way as Montefiore was, the rumors from Rome arrived, nonetheless. The glamorous Lucrezia, married first to Giovanni Sforza of Milan, didn’t demur when her powerful father and brother declared Sforza to be impotent. The courts opined: virga intacta. End of marriage—naturally: Sforza had proven too unimportant a match for the Borgias’ expanding ambitions. And what about the rumors that Cesare had dared murder a Spaniard whose amorous interest in his sister rivaled his own? Was Perotto Calderon’s corpse found bobbing in the Tiber? Well, whose corpse, given enough time, wasn’t?
In the way of things, Lucrezia had made a second marriage, to Alfonso of Aragon, Duc de Bisceglie, of the family of the King of Naples. All lutes and sonnets and garlands of posies, right? And Lucrezia was said to care for him, in her limited way, and to care for the notion of living by the sea even more. But a seasoned garroter broke into the house one night—bad luck, wasn’t it?—and Lucrezia once again found herself free to marry to her family’s advantage. In his professional capacity Fra Ludovico cherished the sacrament of matrimony as a spiritual union, but he knew that in this time of internecine struggles it wasn’t uncommon for a man or a woman to marry several times over. It took a highly cultured woman to manage to marry more advantageously each time her husband, through murder or carelessness or the decisions of the courts, happened to be disposed of.