The Enchantress of Florence (30 page)

What a short journey from
enchantress
to
witch.
Only yesterday she had been the city’s unofficial patron saint. Now there was a mob gathering at her door. “The back door is still open, Angelica,” the Mirror said. “Angelica, we will wait,” she replied. She was sitting in an upright chair by the side of a window in the
grand salon,
looking out at an angle, seeing without being seen. Invisibility was her fate. She remained calm. Then she heard the horses’ hoofs and rose to her feet. “He is here.” And he was.

Outside the Cocchi del Nero palace the Via Porta Rossa widened into a little square around which the Davizzi palace and the tower houses of the Foresi also stood. Argalia and the Janissaries, riding toward the square, were slowed by the gathering throng of witch-hunters. But they were determined, and heavily armed, and people let them pass. When they reached the palace façade the Janissaries cleared a space and when they were sure it was secure the doors were opened. A voice in the crowd shouted out, “Why do you protect the witch?” Argalia ignored it. Then the same voice shouted, “Who do you serve,
condottiere,
the people or your own lust? Do you serve the city and its hexed Duke, or are you in thrall to the hag who hexed him?” Argalia wheeled his horse around to face the crowd. “I serve her,” he said, “as I always have and will.” Then with around thirty men he rode into the inner courtyard, leaving Clotho in charge of operations outside. The riders halted around the well in the center of the courtyard, and the silent palace was full of noises, the whinnying of animals, the clatter of weapons and clamor of men shouting orders and replies. The servants of the household rushed out to offer drink and nourishment to the riders and their mounts. And now Qara Köz, like a woman waking from sleep, all of a sudden understood her danger. She stood at the head of the flight of stairs rising up from the courtyard and Argalia stood below her looking up. His skin was as white as death.

“I knew you lived,” she said. She did not mention his wounded arm.

“And you must live too,” he said. “The crowd is growing larger.” He said nothing of the aching of the wound in his right shoulder, or of the flame radiating outward through his body from it. He said nothing of the pounding in his heart when he looked at her. He felt short of breath after his long ride. His white skin felt hot to the touch. He did not use the word “love.” For the last time in his life he wondered if he had wasted his love on a woman who only gave her love until it was time to take it back. He set the thought aside. He had given his heart this once in his life and counted himself blessed to have had the chance to do so. The question of whether she was worthy of his love had no meaning. His heart had answered that question long ago.

“You will protect me,” she said.

“With my life,” he replied. He had begun to shiver a little. When he fell at the battlefield of Cisano Bergamasco his grief at the treason of Konstantin the Serb had been followed swiftly by the realization of his own folly. He had been caught out exactly as he had once caught out Shah Ismail of Persia at the battle of Chaldiran. The swordsman would always fall to the man with a gun. In the age of the matchlock musket and the light, swiftly movable field cannon, there was no room for knights in armor. He was a figure from the past. He had deserved that bullet as the old deserves to be destroyed by the new. He was a little light-headed.

“I could not leave,” she said. There was a note of surprise in her voice, as if she had learned something extraordinary about herself.

“You must leave now,” he replied, panting a little. They did not move toward each other. They did not embrace. She went away and found the Mirror.

“Now, Angelica, let us be ready to die,” she said.

The night was on fire. Flames rose everywhere into the brilliant sky. The moon was full, low on the horizon, tinged with red, huge. It looked like God’s cold, mad eye. The Duke was dead and only rumor ruled. According to rumor the Pope had damned “Angelica” for a murderous whore and was sending a Cardinal to take charge of the city and deal with its wild witch. The memory of the burning at the stake of the three head Weepers, Girolamo Savonarola, Domenico Buonvicini, and Silvestro Maruffi, in the Piazza della Signoria had not faded, and there were those who looked forward to the stench of incandescent female flesh. But it is in the nature of mobs to be impatient. By midnight the crowd had perhaps tripled in size and its mood was uglier. Stones were thrown at the Cocchi del Nero palace. The phalanx of Janissaries under Clotho the Swiss still held the entrance but even Janissaries tire, and some were nursing wounds. Then in the small hours as the mob bayed came fatal news. The militia of Florence, goaded by the unsubstantiated reports of the Pope’s fiat against the witch Angelica, had risen up to join the enraged masses and was marching to the Via Porta Rossa, fully armed. When Clotho heard this he knew that all three of his brothers were now dead, and he decided that he was ready to finish things.

“For the Swiss,” he shouted, and launched himself at the crowd with all his might, swinging a sword with one hand and a spiked ball on the end of a length of chain with the other. His fellow Janissaries looked at him in amazement, because the men in the crowd carried nothing more harmful than sticks and stones, but Clotho could not be stopped. The killing mist was upon him. People fell below his horse’s hoofs and were trampled to death. The crowd was wild with fear and anger, and at first everyone retreated from the maddened albino giant on his horse. Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes. All of a sudden the crowd stopped retreating, and right then Clotho on his horse with his sword raised to strike knew that he was done for. “Janissaries, to me,” he shouted, and then the crowd came at them like a flood, thousands upon thousands of screaming voices and grabbing hands and pounding fists, a rain of stones fell upon the soldiers, and men leapt at them like cats, pulling down the horses, dying under the warriors’ lashing weapons, but coming forward still, clawing, dragging, clutching, pulling, until the soldiers were all unhorsed, and still the trampling feet of the people came on, the crushing force of the swollen, swelling crowd, and all the world was blood.

Even before the militia arrived, the crowd parting like the sea to allow the armed men through, the Janissaries outside the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero were no more, and with the axes taken from the fallen warriors the crowd was attacking the three great wooden doors of the palace. In the courtyard behind those doors, Argalia the Turk and his remaining fighters, mounted on their horses and wearing full battle armor, had set themselves to make their last stand. “The greatest shame of all is to die at the hands of men you have captained in war,” Argalia thought, “but at least my oldest companions will die with me, and there’s honor in that.” Then matters of honor and shame fled from his mind because Qara Köz was leaving, and it was time for last words to be spoken.

“It’s lucky that mobs are so stupid,” she said, “otherwise Ago and the Mirror wouldn’t have been able to get to the back door down the lane. It’s lucky that I took your friend Niccolò’s advice, or there would be no plan, and nobody would be outside with empty wine barrels to hide us in and a cart and fresh horses to take us away.”

“In the beginning there were three friends,” said Argalia the Turk, “Antonino Argalia, Niccolò ‘il Machia,’ and Ago Vespucci. And at the end, too, there were three. Il Machia will have faster horses waiting for you. Go.” The fever had taken hold of him now, and the pain of the wound was very great. He had begun to shake. The end would not be slow in coming. It would be hard to remain mounted very long.

She paused. “I love you,” she said.
Die for me.

“And I you,” he answered.
I am already dying, but I will die for you.

“I have loved you like no other man,” she said.
Die for me.

“You have been the love of my life,” he replied.
My life is almost gone, but what remains I give up for you.

“Let me stay,” she said. “Give me up. That will end it all.” Again, in her voice, the note of surprise at what she was allowing herself to say, to offer, to feel.

“It’s too late for that,” he said.

The last fight of the Invincibles of Florence, their final defeat and destruction in the Riot of the Via Porta Rossa, took place in the courtyard of what was afterward known as the Bloody Palace. By the time the battle was over the witch and her assistant were long gone, and when the people of Florence discovered their flight their anger seemed to vanish, and like men waking from a dreadful dream they lost their appetite for death. They
came to themselves,
and were no longer a mob, but a crowd of individual sovereign entities, all of whom went mumbling back to their homes, looking ashamed, and wishing they didn’t have blood on their hands. “If she has flown,” somebody said, “then begone to her and goodbye.” There was no attempt at pursuit. There was only shame. When the Pope’s Regent arrived in Florence the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero was locked and shuttered, and the seal of the city was placed upon it, and no one lived there for over one hundred years. And once Argalia the Turk had fallen, rendered unconscious by the septicemia blazing through his body, once he had been stabbed through the neck, as he lay dying of the infection, by a militiaman’s ignoble pike, the age of the great
condottieri
came to an end.

And the River Arno, as if cursed by a witch, remained dry for a year and a day.

“She had no child,” the emperor observed. “What do you say to that?”

“There’s more,” the other replied.

Niccolò saw Ago in the distance as the dawn was breaking, Ago at the reins of the cart with the two wine barrels on the back, and he gave up his plan of catching thrushes, set down the birdcages, and went to prepare the horses himself. He could ill afford the gift of two horses, but he would make it nevertheless, and without regret. Maybe this was how he would be remembered, as the man who assisted in the escape from her pursuers of the Lady of the
Mogor,
the princess of the blood royal of the house of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, the erstwhile enchantress of Florence. He shouted upstairs to his wife and told her to prepare food and wine at once, and to pack more that could be eaten on a journey; and, hearing the note of crisis in his voice, she leapt out of bed, did as he asked, and did not argue, even though it was not pleasant to be woken from an unusually deep sleep and given unceremonious orders. Then Ago clattered up in front of the Machiavelli house, breathless, frightened. Argalia was not with him. Silently il Machia’s eyebrows interrogated Ago Vespucci, who drew a finger across his neck, and then burst into tears of fear, excitement, and grief. “Open the barrels, for God’s sake,” Marietta Corsini came out of doors to say. “They must be bruised half to death inside there.”

Ago had put cushions and bolsters inside the barrels and made hinged doors in their sides, and little ventilation holes, but in spite of his efforts the two women emerged from their hiding places in bad shape, red-faced, gasping and in pain. They accepted water gratefully but refused food on account of the effects of the journey on their stomachs. Then without further ado they asked for a room where they could change their clothes, and Marietta showed them into the main bedchamber. The Mirror followed Qara Köz, carrying a small bag, and when the two women emerged half an hour later they were men, dressed in short tunics—red and gold for Qara Köz, green and white for the Mirror—with belts knotted around their waists, wearing woolen hose for riding, and boots of chamois leather. Their hair had been hacked short and tucked under close-fitting skull-caps. Marietta breathed in sharply when she saw their legs in the tight hose, but said nothing about it. “Will you not eat a little before you go?” she asked, but they would not. They thanked her for the bag of bread, cheese, and cold meat she had prepared for them. Then they went outdoors and found il Machia and Ago waiting. Ago still sat up on his cart. The barrels were no longer aboard, but the two chests of the ladies’ possessions were there, and another bag, containing Ago’s clothes and all the money he had had to hand, including several large-denomination bills of exchange. “I’ll get more when we reach Genoa,” he said. “I have my checks.” He looked Qara Köz in the eyes. “You ladies can’t travel alone,” he said. Her eyes widened. “So,” she replied, “at a moment’s notice, when asked for your help, and seeing our predicament, you are ready to step away from your home, your work, your life, and flee with us into an unknown future, out of one peril and, who knows, into many others?” Ago Vespucci nodded. “Yes, I am.” She went over to him and took his hands in hers. “Then, sir,” she said, “we are yours now.”