The Enchantress of Florence

  As for Qara Köz, however, when the door closed behind her and her Mirror she found herself unexpectedly drowning in a flood of existential dread. These sadnesses came over her from time to time, but she had never learned to be on her guard against them. Her life had been a series of acts of will, but sometimes she wavered and sank. She had built her life on being loved by men, on being certain of her ability to engender such love whenever she chose to do so, but when the darkest questions of the self were asked, when she felt her soul shudder and crack under the weight of her isolation and loss, then no man’s love could help her. As a result she had come to understand that her life would inevitably ask her to make choices between her love and her self and when those crises came she must not choose love. To do so would be to endanger her life. Survival must come first.

  This was the inevitable consequence of having chosen to step away from her natural world. The day she refused to return to the Mughal court with her sister Khanzada she had learned not only that a woman could choose her own road, but that such choices had consequences that could not be erased from the record. She had made her choice and what followed, followed, and she had no regrets, but she did, from time to time, suffer the black terror. The terror buffeted and shook her like a tree in a storm and the Mirror came to hold her until it passed. She sank onto the bed and the Mirror lay with her and held her, tightly, her hands hard upon Qara Köz’s biceps, held her not as a woman holds a woman but as a man does. Qara Köz had learned that her power over men would permit her to shape her life’s journey but she had also understood that that act of shaping would entail great loss. She had perfected the arts of enchantment, learned the world’s languages, witnessed the great things of her time, but she was without family, without clan, without any of the consolations of remaining within one’s allotted frontiers, inside her mother tongue and in her brother’s care. It was as if she were flying above the ground, willing herself to fly, while fearing that at any moment the spell might be broken and she would plummet to her death.

  What scraps of news she had of her family she hugged to her bosom, trying to squeeze from them more meaning than they contained. Shah Ismail had been her brother Babar’s friend, and the Ottomans had their own ways of knowing what was happening in the world. So she knew that her brother was alive, that her sister had been reunited with him, and that a child, Nasiruddin Humayun, had been born. Beyond that all was uncertainty. Ferghana, their ancestral kingdom, had been lost and perhaps it would never be regained. Babar had set his heart on Samarkand but in spite of the defeat and death of Shaibani Khan, Lord Wormwood, the Mughal forces didn’t seem able to hold on to the fabled city for any length of time. So Babar, too, was homeless, Khanzada was homeless, and the family had no permanent foothold on any patch of God’s earth. Maybe this was what it was to be a Mughal, to roam, to scavenge, to depend on others, to fight without success, to be lost. Despair claimed her for a moment. Then she shrugged it off. They were not the victims of history but its makers. Her brother and his son and his son after him: what a kingdom they would establish, the glory of the world. She willed it, foresaw it, brought it into being by the ferocity of her need. And she would do the same, against impossible odds in this alien world she would make her own kingdom, for she, too, was born to rule. She was a Mughal woman and as fearsome as any man. Her will was equal to the task. Quietly, to herself, she recited in Chaghatai the verses of Ali-Shir Nava’i. Chaghatai, her mother tongue, was her secret, her link to her true, abandoned self, which she had chosen to replace with a self of her own making, but which would of course be a part of that new self, its bedrock, its sword and shield. Nava’i, “the Weeper,” who once in a faraway land had sung for her. Qara ko’zum, kelu mardumlug’ emdi fan qilg’il. Come, Qara Köz, and show me your kindness. One day her brother would rule an empire and she would return as a queen in triumph. Or her brother’s children would greet her own. The blood ties could not be broken. She had made herself anew but what she had been, she would remain, and her heritage would be hers and her children’s to reclaim.

  The door opened. The man came in, her tulip prince. He had waited for the household to be asleep and now he had come to her, to them. The darkness did not leave her but it shuffled to one side and made room for her beloved in the bed. The Mirror, feeling her relax, released her and attended to Argalia’s garments. He was leaving for the city in the morning and everything, he said, would soon be arranged. She was not deceived. She knew that things would either go well or, if not well, then very badly indeed. Tomorrow night he might be dead and then she would have to make another survivor’s choice. Tonight, however, he was alive. The Mirror was preparing him for her with caresses and oils. She watched in the moonlight as his pale body flowered under her servant’s touch. With his long hair he might almost be a woman himself, his hands so long, his fingers so slender, his skin so improbably soft. She closed her eyes and could not tell which of them was touching her, his hands as gentle as the Mirror’s, his hair as long, his tongue as expert. He knew how to make love like a woman. And the Mirror with her brutal fingers could stab at her like a man. His sinuousness, his slowness, the lightness of his touch, these were the things that made her love him. The shadow was pushed into a corner now and the moon shone down on the three moving bodies. She loved and served him. She loved the Mirror but did not serve her. The Mirror loved and served them both. Tonight it was love that mattered. Tomorrow, maybe another thing would be more important. But that was tomorrow.

  “My Angelica,” he said. “Here is Angelica, Angelica’s here,” the two women replied. Then soft laughter, and groans, and one overloud shout, and little cries.

  She awoke before the dawn. He slept heavily, the deep sleep of one from whom much will be demanded when he wakes, and she watched him as he breathed. The Mirror, too, was asleep. Qara Köz smiled. My Angelica, she whispered in Italian. The love between women was more durable than the thing between women and men. She touched their hair, so long, so black. Then she heard noises outside. A visitor. The Swiss giants confronted him. Then she heard the man of the house go out and explain matters. She could see him for what he was, this Niccolò, a great man in the hour of his defeat. Maybe he would rise again, be pre-eminent again, but the house of defeat was no place for her. The defeated man’s greatness communicated itself readily, greatness of intellect and perhaps also of soul, but he had lost his war, so he was nothing to her, he could not be anything. She relied on Argalia completely now, counted on him to succeed, and if he did so she would rise with him and take wing. But if she lost him, she would grieve wildly, she would be inconsolable, and then she would do what she had to do. She would find her way. Whatever happened today, she would make her journey to the palace soon enough. She was meant for palaces, and kings.

  The birds hopped into the cages and stuck to the lime on the elm sticks. Ago and il Machia caught them up and broke their little necks. They would eat a delicious songbird stew later that day. Life still afforded them some pleasures, at least until the thrush migration ended. They returned to La Strada with two sacks full of birds and found happy Marietta waiting for them with glasses of good red wine. Argalia and his men had already departed, leaving behind Konstantin the Serb, with a dozen Janissaries under his command, to defend the ladies should the need arise; so Ago would have to wait to be reunited with the wanderer. Briefly he felt a pang of disappointment. Niccolò had described their old friend’s transformation into an almost effeminate but also utterly ferocious Oriental incarnation of Death—“Argalia the Turk,” the villagers were already calling him, just as he had prophesied long ago on the day he set out as a young boy to seek his fortune—and Ago had been anxious to see the exotic sight for himself. That Argalia had actually come home with the four Swiss giants he had dreamed up was already incredible enough.

  Then there was a footfall on the stair and Ago Vespucci looked up and it was as though Argalia had ceased to exist. He heard himself telling himself that no beautiful women had ever existed in t
he world up to that moment, that Simonetta Vespucci and Alessandra Fiorentina were the plainest of Janes, because the women coming down toward him were more beautiful than beauty itself, so beautiful that they redefined the term, and banished what men had previously thought beautiful into the ranks of dull ordinariness. A fragrance preceded them down the stairs and wrapped itself around his heart. The first woman was slightly lovelier than the second but if you closed one eye and blotted her out then the second woman looked like the greatest beauty on earth. But why would one do that? Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

  “Damnation, Machia,” he whispered, sweating lightly, the curse escaping his lips under the pressure of his emotions, after a long period during which he had forsaken swearing entirely, and the sack of dead thrushes fell from his hand. “I think I just rediscovered the meaning of human life.”

  { 17 }

  The Duke had locked up his palace

  The Duke had locked up his palace, afraid of an invasion by the rampant crowd, because in those days after the election of the first ever Medici Pope the city was in an ecstasy that hovered on the edge of violence. “People were playing the fool,” Argalia told il Machia afterward, “without respect of age or sex.” The noise of church bells sounding glorias was incessant and deafening and the bonfires threatened to ruin whole sectors of the town. “In the Mercato Nuovo,” Argalia reported, “young bucks ripped up boards and planks from the silk stores and the banks. By the time the authorities moved to stop it even the roof of the cloth merchants’ guild, the old Calimala, had been broken for firewood and burned. There were fires burning, they told me, up on the campanile of Santa Maria Fiore. This kind of nonsense went on for three days.” Noise and smoke choked the streets. There was fucking and buggery in every side alley and nobody gave a damn. Every evening a garlanded cart of victory was pulled by oxen from the Medici gardens in Piazza San Marco to the Palazzo Medici in the Via Larga. Outside the shuttered palace the citizenry sang songs in praise of Pope Leo X, and then set the cart and its flowers ablaze. From the upstairs windows of the Medici palace the new rulers hurled bounty down upon the crowd, maybe ten thousand gold ducats and twelve large napkins of cloth of silver which the Florentines tore to bits. In the streets of the city there were barrels of wine and baskets of bread, free for all to use. Prisoners were pardoned and whores grew rich and male babies were named after Duke Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo, or after Giovanni who had become Leo, and female children were baptized Laodamia or Semiramide after the family’s female grandees.

  It was impossible at such a moment to enter the city with a hundred armed men and seek an audience with Duke Giuliano. Sybaritism and firestarters ruled the streets. At the city gate Argalia presented his papers to the guards, and was relieved to learn that they had been told to expect him. “Yes, the Duke will see you,” they said, “but, you comprehend, not right now.” The Janissary force camped under the city walls until the fourth day, when the Florentine party for the Pope finally ran out of steam. Even then Argalia was not allowed to enter the city. “After dark tonight,” said the captain of the guard, “expect a noble visitor.”

  He knew how to make love like a woman and how to kill men like a man, but Argalia had never before faced a Medici duke in his pomp. However, when Giuliano de Medici rode into his encampment that night, with a hood over his head for secrecy, Argalia understood at once that the new ruler of Florence was a weakling, and so was that young nephew of his, riding by his side. Pope Leo was known to be a man of power, a Medici of the old school, inheritor of the authority of Lorenzo the Magnificent, his father. How concerned he must be to have entrusted Florence to the care of these second-raters! No true Medici duke would have skulked out of his own city like a thief just to meet a possible employee. That Duke Giuliano had chosen to do so proved he needed a strong man at his side to give him confidence. A military man. A tulip general to defend the City of Flowers. There was unquestionably a job vacancy here.

  In his tent, Argalia studied the noblemen by flickering yellow lamplight. This lesser spawn of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke Giuliano, was in his middle thirties, had a sad long face, and looked like he was in poor health. He would not make old bones. No doubt he was a lover of literature and art. No doubt he was a man of culture and wit. A liability on the field of conflict, then. It would be better if he stayed home and left the battle to those who were competent to fight, for whom fighting was their culture, killing their art. The nephew, another Lorenzo, was dark skinned, fierce of face, swaggering of manner; just one of a thousand twenty-year-old Florentine braggarts, Argalia decided. A boy, full of sex and himself. Not a man to be trusted in a scrap.

  Argalia had prepared his arguments. At the end of his long travels, he would say, he had learned this much: that Florence was everywhere and everywhere was Florence. Everywhere in the world there were omnipotent princes, Medici who ran things because they had always run things, and who could make the truth what they wanted it to be merely by decreeing it to be so. And there were Weepers everywhere too (Argalia had missed the time of the Weepers in Florence but news of the monk Savonarola and his followers had traveled a long way), Weepers who wanted to run things because they were convinced that a Higher Power had shown them what the truth really was. And everywhere there were also people who thought they ran things whereas in fact they did not, and this last group was so large that it could almost be called a social class, the class of Machias, perhaps, of servants who believed themselves to be masters until they were shown the bitter truth. This class could not be trusted, and the greatest threats to the prince would invariably flow from it. Therefore the prince must be sure of his ability to overpower the servants’ uprisings as well as the foreign armies, the assaults of the enemy within as well as attacks from outside. Everywhere on earth a state that wished to survive both these threats was in need of a puissant lord of war. And he, Argalia, perfectly represented the union of Florence with the rest of creation, because he was that necessary warlord, who could ensure his own city’s calm and security, as he had done in other cities, in the service of other masters far away.

  The Medici had returned to power a few months earlier with the assistance of Spanish mercenaries, “white Moors,” under a certain General Cardona. Outside the beautiful town of Prato they had faced the Florentine militia, il Machia’s pride, which was actually superior in numbers, but inferior in courage and leadership. The Florentine militia broke ranks and fled, and the city fell on the first day, after no more than the shadow of a struggle. After that the “white Moors” sacked the town with a ferocity that terrified Florence into dismantling its republic, getting down on its knees, and inviting the Medici back. The sack of Prato went on, and on, for three weeks. Four thousand men, women, and children died, burned to death, raped, cut in half. Not even the convents were safe from the lechery of Cardona’s men. In Florence, the Prato gate of the city was struck by lightning, and the omen was impossible to ignore. However—and this was the crux of Argalia’s argument—the Spaniards were now so hated by every Italian that it would be unwise for the Medici ever to rely upon them again. What they needed was a cadre of war-hardened warriors to take control of the militia of Florence and give them the backbone and organization they so plainly lacked, the fighting spirit which Niccolò, a bureaucrat by nature and not a man of war, had so patently failed to instill in them.

  Thus carefully distancing himself from his disgraced old friend, Argalia the Turk argued his way into the post of condottiere of Florence. He was pleasantly surprised to hear that he was being offered a permanent-service contract rather than one with a fixed term of a few months. Some of his fellow warriors in that time of the condottieri’s decline were hired for periods as brief as three months, and their pay was tied to their success in military ventures. By contrast, Argalia’s pay was good by the standards of the time. In addition, Duke Giuliano gave his new captain-at-arms a substantial residence on the Via Porta Rossa, with a ful
l staff and a lavish household allowance. “Admiral Doria must have recommended me highly,” he said to Duke Giuliano, readily accepting the generous terms. “He said you were the only barbarian motherfucker he wouldn’t want to come up against on land or at sea even if you were naked as an uncircumcised baby with just a kitchen knife in your hand,” the Duke elegantly replied.

  According to legend the Medici family possessed a magic mirror whose purpose was to reveal to the reigning Duke the image of the most desirable woman in the known world, and it was in this mirror that the earlier Giuliano de Medici, the uncle of the present ruler, who was murdered on the day of the Pazzi plot, first saw the face of Simonetta Vespucci. After her death, however, the mirror darkened and stopped working, as though unwilling to sully the memory of Simonetta by offering up lesser beauties in her place. During the family’s exile from the city the mirror remained for a time in its place on the wall of what had been Uncle Giuliano’s bedchamber in the old house on the Via Larga, but because it resolutely refused to function either as an instrument of revelation or as an ordinary mirror it was eventually taken down and placed in a storage closet, no more than a mere broom cupboard, concealed in the bedroom wall. Then all of a sudden after the election of Pope Leo the mirror had begun to glow again, and a servant girl was reported to have fainted when she opened the broom closet to find a woman’s face shining back at her from a cobwebbed corner, a stranger who looked like a visitor from another world. “In the whole city of Florence there is not such a face,” said the new Duke Giuliano when he was shown the miracle, and his health and demeanor seemed to improve visibly as he gazed into the magic glass. “Hang the mirror on the wall again, and I will give a golden ducat to any man or woman who can bring this vision of loveliness before me.”