The Botticelli Secret

14

Once outside, we meekly followed Tok for a little while, but it needed no more than a look and a little pressure of the hand to send me dashing into the dark crowd at Brother Guido’s signal. We snaked through the packed side streets, and only when we came to the riverbank, and were sure we’d lost our escort, did we lean against the balustrade, gasping for air. At last I managed, “Where now?”

Brother Guido shook his head. “We can’t go back to the palazzo,” he said. “Our best hope is to go downriver to the Medici palace, and petition to see Lorenzo ourselves.”

“Without your uncle’s introduction?”

“What choice do we have? We must hope that the family name is enough. And we have the painting as collateral. Come.”

We ran as fast as we could down the Lungarno Mediceo, weaving through the dark shuffling shapes of the saint’s-day revelers, until we saw the red mass of the Medici palace in the dying light. As I craned up at the house that loomed from the darkness—immense, forbidding, and the color of meat—I felt an extreme foreboding which almost made me open my bowels there and then. I grabbed Brother Guido’s sleeve.

“Don’t,” I panted. “Something isn’t right.”

“Many things, signorina. But we must do something. We cannot run forever.” He approached the grandiose steps lit by torches, where two armed guards were talking to a third man, maybe a tradesman or jongleur. But there was something familiar about the great height, the width of the shoulders. The giant turned.

The third man was Tok.

“It’s them!” he shouted to the guards. “Quickly!” And he gave chase.

Shit. How had he gotten here ahead of us? We turned as one and fled back to the river, trapped by crowds at either side. (What were they all waiting for? It was as if they had all gathered to witness our capture.)

Brother Guido led me quickly to a small private pontoon. He fumbled with the rope of the only moored boat as Tok thundered down the little pier, the planks bouncing under his weight, the two Medici guards following behind. In a flash of a blade I pulled the green glass knife from my hose and sliced the rope; one grateful glance from Brother Guido later, we collapsed in the bottom of the boat, panting like summer dogs, our lungs and limbs still aching from the chase.

As we drifted into the midstream of the dark river we saw Tok, bent double on the pontoon, looking murder at us as we slipped from his reach. As Brother Guido fished two splintered oars from the bottom of the bark, I felt confident enough to wave sweetly as the giant became a pygmy, and then a bend in the river took him from our sight. “And now what?”

Brother Guido was manning the tiller in an attempt to keep our vessel in the fast current. He shook his head, dark curls clinging to his forehead with the sweat of our pursuit. “For the first time,” he said, “I have not even a notion of how to proceed. My uncle—our one protection—is gone. I signed his death warrant the instant I sat with him at the festival. They knew from that moment I would show him the Prima-vera. You were right. We should have approached him more covertly.”

This was no time for triumph. “It was the oysters,” I said, sharing with him at last the growing notion I had had since yestereve. “The golden platter at dinner was meant for all three of us—the family trencher for the head of the table.”

He nodded with comprehension. “Then we must thank the Lord that neither of us ate them—you because of your dislike and me because of the fast. The saint did save me.”

Perhaps. But I shivered to think how close he had been to eating the oysters I had saved for breakfast—only Tok’s interruption had saved him from his uncle’s fate. Ironic now that Tok had been sent to kill us by Niccolò who, had he been a dutiful son and attended the feast, would have eaten from the same platter and died too. Madonna, my head hurt with the mathematics of murder.

Brother Guido spoke again. “If it had not been that way, they would have got him somehow. And now we have been prevented from our audience with Lorenzo, the only man who could pardon us. I know not what to suggest. Nor where to take you. We are drifting, literally and metaphorically. We are a leaf in the current, and we must place ourselves in the hands of God.”

I had no intention of letting God run this. “We can’t give up!” I said. “There must be somewhere we can go!”

Brother Guido looked me in the face. His eyes held no fight, his gaze was dull and dead. “No,” he said. “It is ended, but for a miracle.”

I cast desperately about me for a solution but could see nothing but the strange landscape of dark houses lining the Arno on either side. Then, like the pinpoint of the polestar, a light appeared in one window. Then another. Then all the way up and down both riverbanks, each window, each door, each terrace and balcony, was filled with torches or candles. Every lamp was lit, every rush dip given fire, every tinderbox struck. Could this be to do with us? Could this be the hue and cry that Tok had started to find us? No, surely not, for the whole city was suddenly alight, one glorious constellation. Then, as we watched, the lights flooded the river like stars falling to float on the dark water, as the crowds that lined the riverbank set little paper boats onto the tide, each little vessel carrying a single candle. This fairy flotilla drifted along with Brother Guido and me downstream until we were surrounded by the little flames like fiery lily blossoms. I smiled with delight, despite our situation, and saw Brother Guido smile too. “Is this our miracle?” I asked him.

“Of a sort,” he said. “ ‘Tis the festival of lights, the Luminara, held each year on the eve of Saint Ranieri’s day. I should have remembered that . . .”

He stopped, as if choked, and I scrambled to his side, dropping my oar overboard in my anxiety, fearing he was suffering a seizure. Quitter he may be, but he was the only ally I had left in the world. In the golden glow from a million lights, there was enough illumination to see how pale he had suddenly become. “What is it?” When he did not reply I took his shoulders and shook him like a doll. “Brother Guido? What?”

“The light!” he said, turning eyes on me that were now brighter than any torch in Pisa that night. “Follow the light! My uncle is showing us the way—his last words to me was our escape route.”

My heart began to pound again. “But where are they going? Where does the light lead?”

He pointed downriver. “To the ocean,” he said simply, as we followed the numberless floating torches that were leading us to the sea.

Very soon, before the city’s bells had rung another quarter, we began to see that our destination was not the open water but a place somewhat closer. For a trick of the current made every torchboat gather in a wide tributary, a sort of millrace, that lay like a lake at the foot of a tall, castlelike building. A bend in the river at this very place meant that the torches stopped, the fiery lilies pooling in a lake of fire, which was a beauteous sight to behold.

I felt three things at this point.

Cosa Uno: wonder at the sight.

Cosa Due: relief that we were not to set out to sea in a tiny wooden bark that only had one oar and was already sploshing with bilgewater.

Cosa Tre: a growing fear that we would be set alight. But soon it became clear that the hundred thousand torches were being doused by someone, or something, for the pinpoints of light were going out as they reached shore, as quickly as they had been lit. As our boat drifted in, we could see that numerous dark figures, each with a bucket, were dousing the candles as they came. I assumed that they were employed by the commune, to lessen the risk of fire on this dry spring night, but something silent and secret in the watchers’ manner made me hold my tongue, and sink down into the bottom of the boat at a single motion of Brother Guido’s hand. We bobbed into the bankside bulrushes and crept from our vessel onto the marshy bank. Brother Guido pulled me low in the bushes.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

“That is the Fortezza Vecchia, the old castle. See the crenellated tower high above?”

I looked carefully through the leaves. “You said the old castle,” I whispered. “What is it now?”

“The Arsenale.”

Even I knew what an arsenale was. I had slept with enough shipbuilders in my time. But I also knew that they were, usually, dependent on daylight for their constructions and did not work at night. “What’s going on?”

Brother Guido shrugged, beckoned. Bent double, we crept from the undergrowth to the foot of the fortress and followed the line of the curtain wall, secret in its massive shadow. As we drew close we could hear sounds of building work—hammering soldering, and sawing—and the shouts of workmen, which by some acoustic trick had been unintelligible on the silent water.

“The curve of the river, and the thickness of the old castle walls, must conceal the noise from the city,” whispered Brother Guido. He pointed up and we passed through a little doorway. Above us there loomed the derelict tower of the old castle, with half a spiral stair and rooks roosting in the eaves. We climbed as high as we could, away from the deafening cacophony, and at length reached the top of the tower. At our backs Pisa glittered like the firmament of Venus. But before and below us lay a sight belonging to warlike Mars.

On a man-made lake inside the massive ruined castle was a flotilla of immense ships at various stages of construction. With sturdy prows and crenellated forecastles, they resembled exactly a sight I had seen only yesterday. “The ship on the tower!” I whispered to Brother Guido in a sunburst of revelation, and he nodded hard and repeatedly. He had seen it too—the exact design of these warships had been etched onto the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and sat carved above the door of that great edifice. A clue, a cue, a code writ in stone. I felt it in my ribs as sure as day that this fleet of vessels was somehow connected to the Prima-vera and the cartone I held firmly in my bodice.

I watched the torchlit workers, hundreds and thousands of them. The sailmakers swarmed over the great ships like ants, the smelters and welders were as busy and hot with their hammerings as blacksmiths in hell. The smell of cedarwood was strong in my nose, the tar for the ropes, and the canvas of the sails. Then Brother Guido tapped my shoulder; I turned to look and there, beyond the fortress where the river was dark, was the dusky shape of another ship, and another beyond that, and another beyond that, as far as my eyes could strain into the night. Had the torches progressed farther down the river they might have fired the whole armada and reduced them to charcoal. These ships were complete, ready, and finished right to the last detail. The closest ship’s crow’s nest was next to the tower where we stood, and nearly as high. The flag of Pisa, emblazoned with the city’s cross, fluttered so close I could have caught it in my hand. Madonna. What was going on?

My gasp was a little too loud. Shouts were given from below and the shipbuilders began to point. Half a dozen ran to the stair.

“The river!” cried Brother Guido, and took my hand, as if to jump into the dark deeps.

I yanked his arm nearly from its socket. “You’re crazy! It’s too high!” I hissed, for we were a good forty feet from the inky water. “Here.” With a great leap I jumped riverward but made it to the crow’s nest of the nearest ship and held out my hand to Brother Guido. “Jump!”

He leaped, became tangled in his habit, and scrabbled at the edge of the crow’s nest platform. I grabbed both his hands. “Don’t panic!” I looked into terrified eyes. “I have you.” Although in truth my poor shoulder tendons screamed from the strain of his weight. “Find the rigging with your feet!” I gulped as his sandals scrabbled on the newly tarred ropes and found a foothold, but no sooner was he stable than I was down and past him, swarming down the rigging like a monkey. If we could reach the bank before they reached us . . . if we could reach the bank before they reached us . . . I was down on the deck, but footsteps sounded on the gangplank. “We’re trapped,” I mouthed at the following brother. “The hold, quick!” I swiftly located the entrance, lifted a grille behind the mainsail, and dropped below, with Brother Guido following so hard behind that he almost squashed me. We rolled behind a pile of sacks and lay still, breathing as low as we could. We could feel footsteps above, see planks buckling under men’s weight, and hear voices questioning. The flare of a torch flooded through the grille, as the watchmen searched the hold from above. I knew if they came below, we would be discovered; but after a cursory wave of the torch, footsteps sounded on the gangplank again, as the searchers moved to the next ship.

After a long moment, Brother Guido made as if to rise, but I held him back—we must wait till they were well clear. I resolved to count a thousand heartbeats, but had only got to three hundred before I felt a jolt, and an odd sensation in my stomach. I sat bolt upright. “We’re moving!” Brother Guido leaped to his feet. “Quick!”

We scrambled to the deck, but by the time we reached the ship’s side rail, there was already a stretch of black water between us and the bank too wide for any mortal to jump. We turned slowly, both knowing what we would see. A half-circle of torches surrounded us, each one illuminating the ugly countenance of the sailor that held it. Tanned, scarred, and practically toothless to a man, wrinkled and knobbled with muscle as a bag of walnuts, they did not look welcoming. Fuck.

The tallest and ugliest of the collection approached, clearly the captain. He shone a torch in Brother Guido’s face, while his mate did the same service for me. Except the first mate’s greeting was to grin and fondle my tits. I spat neatly in his face, an instant before his captain fetched him a ringing slap. The first mate turned to spit out a tooth, shrugged, and resumed his torch-holding duties, seeming to hold his captain no ill will. Madonna. They were roughnecks indeed.

Brother Guido, bristling at the insult to my person, obviously decided to begin on the offensive. “I am the nephew of Lord Silvio della Torre,” he announced, as if he had just stepped before the pope himself.

The Capitano did not seem impressed, and said with great economy, “So?”

“And I demand that you let us go in peace.”

The Capitano sucked on a hollow tooth, and rubbed his dry beard till the lice ran, their little pewter bodies visible in the torchlight. If ever an apothecary strayed aboard, he’d have his work cut out. “Can’t do that,” was the reply, not noticeably hostile, merely matter-of-fact. “Once you’re here, you’re here.”

“And where is here,” spat Brother Guido, gaining courage from the captain’s indifference.

“Here is the fleet of the Muda.”

I saw Brother Guido’s eyes flare open with surprise, then close instantly as the Capitano hit him with the butt of his torch.

Just an instant before the first mate did the same to me, and all went black.