The Enchantress of Florence (15 page)

“Arcalia or Argalia,” said il Machia, very excited now. “That sounds like our friend all right.”

“Arcalia the Turk,” said the memory palace. “Wielder of the Enchanted Lance.”

“That complete bastard,” said Ago Vespucci, admiringly. “He did what he said he’d do. He went over to the other side.”

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12
}

On the road to Genoa an empty inn

O
n the road to Genoa an empty inn stood with darkened windows and open doors, abandoned by the innkeeper, his wife, his children, and all the guests on account of the Partly-dead Giant who had recently moved in upstairs. According to Nino Argalia, whose tale this was, the giant was partly-dead because while he was completely dead in the daytime he came to fearsome life at night. “If you spend a night in there you will surely be gobbled up,” the neighbors told the boy Argalia when he passed that way; but Argalia wasn’t afraid and went indoors and ate a hearty meal all alone. When the giant came to life that night he saw Argalia and said, “Aha! A snackerel! Excellent!” But Argalia replied, “If you eat me you will never know my secret.” The giant was curious, and also stupid, as is often the way with giants, so he said, “Tell me your secret, my little snackerel, and I promise I won’t eat you until it’s told.” Argalia bowed deeply, and began. “My secret is up that chimney,” he said, “and whoever gets up there first will be the richest boy in the world.” “Or giant,” said the Partly-dead Giant. “Or giant,” Argalia agreed, sounding doubtful. “But you are so huge that you won’t be able to fit.” “Is it a big treasure?” the giant asked. “The biggest on earth,” Argalia replied. “That is why the wise prince who amassed it hid it up the chimney of a humble roadside inn, because nobody would suspect that so grand a monarch would use such a stupid hiding place.” “Princes are dumb,” said the Partly-dead Giant. “Not like giants,” Argalia added thoughtfully. “Exactly,” said the giant, and tried to stuff himself up the chimney. “Too big,” Argalia sighed. “Just as I feared. Too bad.” The giant cried out, “By the gods, I’m not done yet,” and tore off one of his arms. “Not so wide now, am I?” he said, but still he couldn’t get up the chimney. “Maybe if you bit off the other one,” Argalia suggested, and at once the giant’s great jaws chewed up his remaining arm as if it were a mutton shank. But even that didn’t make the great brute narrow enough. “I have an idea,” said Argalia, “suppose you just send your head up there to see what can be seen?” “I don’t have any arms anymore, snackerel,” the giant said, sorrowfully, “so although your idea is excellent, I can’t very well detach my head by myself.” “Permit me,” Argalia replied smartly, and, picking up a kitchen cleaver, he jumped up on a table and cut through the behemoth’s neck—
snickersnee! snackersnee
!—with a single fluent stroke. When the innkeeper, his wife, his family, and all the guests (who had spent the night sleeping in a nearby ditch) learned that Argalia had beheaded the Partly-dead Giant, so that he was now totally deceased, by night as well as by day, they asked if he would help them out one more time and also behead the rapacious Duke of nearby U., who had been making their lives a misery. “Solve your own problems,” Argalia said. “That’s none of my business. I only wanted to have a quiet bed for the night. Now I’m on my way to sail with Admiral Andrea Doria and make my fortune.” And with that he left them flat and went off to find his destiny…

The story was completely untrue, but the untruth of untrue stories could sometimes be of service in the real world, and it was tales of this sort—improvised versions of the endless stream of stories he had learned from his friend Ago Vespucci—that saved little Nino Argalia’s own neck after he was found hiding under a bunk in the forecastle of the flagship of Andrea Doria’s fleet. His information had been out of date—the French had been dispatched by the Band of Gold some time ago—and when he heard that Doria was about to set off to fight the Turk he knew it was time for desperate measures. The eight triremes full of ferocious mercenaries armed to the teeth with arquebuses, cutlasses, pistols, garrotes, daggers, whips, and bad language had already been at sea for five days when the starving wretch of a stowaway was dragged by the ear into the presence of the great
condottiere
himself. Argalia looked like a dirty rag doll, dressed in rags and clutching a bundle of rags to his chest. Now, Andrea Doria was not a man of good character. He lacked all scruple and was capable of acts of extreme vindictiveness. He was tyrannical and vain. His bloodthirsty army of soldiers of fortune would have risen up against him long ago except that he was a great commander, a grand master of strategy, and was also entirely lacking in fear. He was, in short, a monster, and when he was displeased he looked as dangerous as any giant, whether half-deceased or not.

“You have two minutes,” he said to the boy, “to give me a reason why I should not throw you overboard immediately.”

Argalia looked him straight in the eye. “You would be most unwise to do so,” he lied, “for I am a person of strange and varied experience. I have sought my fortune far and wide and on these journeys I have executed a giant—
snickersnee! snackersnee
!—and slain the Soulless Sorcerer and learned the secrets of his spells, and mastered the language of snakes. I have met the king of the fishes and lived in the house of a woman with seventy sons and only one kettle. I can turn myself at will into a lion, an eagle, a dog, or an ant, so I can serve you with the strength of a lion, spy for you with the eye of an eagle, be as loyal to you as a dog, or conceal myself from you by becoming as small as an ant, so that you will never see the assassin who crawls into your ear and poisons you. In short, I am not to be crossed. I am small, but still worthy to be of your company, because I live my life according to the same profound principle as you yourself follow.”

“And what is that principle, might one inquire?” Andrea Doria asked, with some amusement. He had a protruding beard, a sardonic mouth, and a glittering eye that missed nothing.

“That the end justifies the means,” Argalia replied, recalling something il Machia liked to say about the ethics of using the mandrake root to seduce otherwise unattainable females.

“The end justifies the means,” Doria repeated in surprise. “Now that is damnably well expressed.”

“I made it up myself,” Argalia said, “for I am an orphan like you, rendered penniless in my youth as you were, forced into this line of work just like you; and orphans know that their survival requires them to be prepared to do whatever is necessary. That there are no limits.” What was it il Machia had said after the day of the hanged archbishop? “That only the fittest survive.”

“The survival of the fittest,” mused Andrea Doria. “A second infernally potent idea. Did you come up with that one, too?” Argalia inclined his head in a gesture of modest pride. “Because you were orphaned too,” he continued, “you know that while I may look like a child, I am no helpless babe. A ‘child’ is a safe and pampered thing, cocooned from the truth of the world, allowed to waste years in mere play—a creature who believes that wisdom can be acquired in school. ‘Childhood’ is a luxury I cannot afford, just as you could not. The truth about ‘childhood’ lies hidden in the most untrue stories in the world. Children face monsters and demons and only survive if they are fearless. Children starve to death unless they free a magic fish who grants them their heart’s desires. Children are eaten alive by trolls unless they manage to delay the creatures until the sun rises, whereupon the vile things turn to stone. A child must learn how to cast beans to tell the future, how to cast beans to bind men and women to his will, and how to grow the beanstalk upon which such magic beans are found. An orphan is a child writ large. Our lives are lives of fable and extremes.”

“Give this loudmouth philosopher something to eat,” Admiral Doria told his boatswain, an intimidating ox of a sailor named Ceva. “He may be useful to us before our journey’s done, and his goblin lies will entertain me until that time comes.”

The boatswain kept a firm hold of Argalia’s ear as he led him out of the captain’s cabin. “Don’t think you got away with this because of your fancy blather,” he said. “You are alive for one reason only.” “Ouch,” said Argalia, “and what is that?”

Ceva the boatswain twisted his ear harder. There was a scorpion tattooed on the right side of his face and he had the dead eyes of a man who had never smiled. “The reason is that you somehow found the guts, or the gall, to look him in the eye. If a fellow don’t look him in the eye he tears their liver out and feeds it to the gulls.”

“Before I’m finished,” Argalia replied, “I will be the commander making judgments of that sort, and you? You’d better look
me
in the eye, or else.”

Ceva cuffed him on the side of the head, without a trace of affection. “You’ll have to wait your turn, runt,” he said, “because right now your eye is only high enough to stare at my fucking cock.”

Whatever Ceva the Scorpion said, Argalia’s tall stories must have had something to do with his survival too, because it turned out that the monstrous Admiral Andrea Doria had a weakness for such tales, just like any dumb giant. In the evenings when the sea was black and the stars burned holes in the sky the Admiral would smoke an opium pipe below decks and call for the story-filled boy. “As your Genoan ships are all triremes,” Argalia would say, “you should carry cheese on one deck, breadcrumbs on another, and rotting flesh on the third. When you come to the Island of Rats, give them the cheese; the breadcrumbs will please the denizens of the Isle of Ants; and as for the rotting flesh, the birds of Vulture Island will appreciate it. After that you will have mighty allies. The rats will gnaw through all obstacles for you, even through mountains, and the ants will perform all those duties that are too delicate for human hands. The vultures, if you ask them nicely, will even fly you to the top of the mountain where the spring of eternal life gushes out.” Andrea Doria grunted. “But where are these infernal islands?” he wanted to know. “Admiral,” the boy replied, “you’re the navigator, not I. They must be on your charts somewhere.” In spite of such cheeky remarks he lived to tell another tale another day—
once upon a time there were three oranges and inside each one a beautiful girl who would die if you didn’t give her water the moment she came out of the orange
—and the Admiral, wreathed in coils of smoke, would mumble confidences to him in return.

The sea was full of murder. The caravels of the Barbary pirates marauded through these waters, plundering and kidnapping, and since the fall of Constantinople the galleys of the Osmanli Turk or Ottoman navy were active here as well. Against all these maritime infidels Admiral Andrea Doria had set his pockmarked face. “I will drive them from the
Mare Nostrum
and make Genoa mistress of the waves,” he boasted, and Argalia did not dare to offer any contrary or irreverent word. Andrea Doria leaned toward the silent boy, his eyes milky with
afim.
“What you know and I know the enemy knows as well,” he whispered, half lost in his opium dream. “The enemy, too, follows the orphan’s law.” “What orphan?” Argalia asked him. “Mahomet,” Andrea Doria replied. “Mahomet, their orphan god.”

Argalia had not known that he shared his orphan status with the Prophet of Islam. “The end justifies the means,” Andrea Doria went on in a thickening, slow voice. “See? They go by the same rule as we do. The One Commandment.
Whatever it takes is the choice we makes.
So their religion is the same as ours.” Argalia took a deep breath and asked dangerous questions. “If that is correct,” he said, “then are they truly our enemies? Is our proper adversary not our antithesis? Can the face we see in a mirror be our foe?” Admiral Andrea Doria was close to unconsciousness. “Quite right,” he mumbled as he slumped back in his chair, beginning to snore. “And, anyway, there is one enemy I hate more than any Mohammedan pirate scum.”

“Who is that?” Argalia asked.

“Venice,” he said. “I’m going to fuck up those pretty-boy Venetian bastards as well.”

As the eight Genoan triremes sailed in battle formation, hunting down their prey, it became plain to Argalia that religion had nothing to do with anything. The corsairs from the Barbary states weren’t bothered about conquering anybody or spreading the faith. They were interested in ransom, blackmail, and extortion. As for the Ottomans, they knew that the survival of their new capital city of Stamboul depended on getting food into the port from elsewhere, and so the shipping lanes had to be kept open. They had also begun to have acquisitive notions and had sent ships to attack ports along and beyond the shores of the Aegean Sea; and they didn’t like Venetians, either. Power and wealth and possessions and wealth and power. As for Argalia, at night his dreams, too, were full of exotic jewels. Alone in his fo’c’sle bunk he swore a private vow. “I will never return to Florence as a pauper, but only as a treasure-laden prince.” His quest was really very simple. The nature of the world had become clear.

When things seemed clearest, however, they were invariably at their most treacherous. After a victorious engagement with the pirate ships of the Barbarossa brothers of Mytilene, the Admiral was dripping satisfactorily with Saracen blood, and having presided over the execution of the captured pirates—they were coated with pitch and burned alive in the main square of their own hometown—he conceived the daring notion of entering the Aegean and taking the battle to the Osmanlis in their own “home” waters. But as the Band of Gold entered that legendary sea and faced the Ottoman galleys head-on an occult fog arose from nowhere and blotted the whole world from view; as if some Olympian mischief was at work, as if the ancient gods of the region, bored with the long tedium of an age in which they no longer held sway over men’s affections and loyalties, had decided to toy with them, to ruin their plans, just for old times’ sake. The eight Genoan triremes attempted to hold their battle line, but the fog was disorienting, it was filled with the howls of ghouls and the shrieks of witches and the stink of disease and the wailing of the drowned, and even those hardened mercenaries soon enough began to panic. The system of foghorns which Admiral Doria had instituted against just such a day quickly broke down. Each of his ships had been given its own individual signal of short and long blasts, but as the mercenaries panicked in that miasma of death and superstition their communications lost all clarity, and so did the foghorns of the Ottomans, until nobody knew where they were, or who was friend and who was deadly foe.