The Botticelli Secret

35

I woke as if from a nightmare, queasy and hopeful. Sun gilded my window and the horrors of yesterday retreated for an instant, till memory called them to hand. I rose and stretched, my treacherous body hungry and thirsty, wanting succor, wanting to live. Marta came with my breakfast and I ate hungrily, not knowing what else to do. She brought me a magnificent gown, covered in its entirety in peacock feathers, with a mask to match. I stared at the crazy outfit, not comprehending.

“Carnevale” she said briefly.

Madonna. I had forgot.

Mutely I dressed, dumb as a puppet with no strength or will. I would be my mother’s creature, for I could no longer see a way to escape, no longer hope to see Brother Guido again. It mattered not what I did.

At Prime I was summoned to my mother who kissed me on the same cheek as the night before, and eyed me fondly in my finery. She was dressed all in white feathers and had changed her lion’s mask for a swan’s countenance which she donned as we passed outside. My father met us at the foot of the Giants’ staircase, where I had taken leave of Signor Cristoforo, in his corno hat and ceremonial gown. He did not greet me; I would have guessed that he had been told of my planned escape but for the fact that he never greeted me. I wondered how much he knew as he held out his hand to my mother and she placed her hand upon his.

As we progressed with the ducal retinue across Saint Mark’s Square the pigeons rose before us in a cloud of smoke. Venice was a menagerie—citizens dressed as parrots and lions cavorted with tigers and monkeys, courtesans covered their faces but exposed their breasts. Vendors sold masks and cups of wine; circus wights danced on stilts or juggled fire. Actors screeched their bawdy lines in grotesque leering masks. The sun shone relentlessly, but the air was freezing. My breath smoked, yet the crown of my head burned. I did not know where we tended—I did not care. I walked behind my mother and she talked constantly to me over her shoulder of the sights we were to see, in such a kind and interesting manner that I wondered if my poor brain had invented the events of yesterday. She was a weathercock, altering with the climate. Yesterday storm and darkness, today burning sun.

Apparently we were to progress through the square, so the people may see us, then embark on the Bucintoro at the San Zaccharia pier, to begin one of the most important rites of the festival—the Marriage of the Sea. My father was to take his barge to the center of the lagoon, and throw a priceless ring into the sea, to bring her favor on the city for the next twelve-month. I almost laughed—the San Zaccharia pier was the place I was to meet Bonaccorso Nivola.

The weather had another notion. Perhaps God, if there was one, was angered at the poor sailor’s fate, for the sky darkened quick as a frown and thunder rolled in from the mountains. Rain beat down from the heavens and the crowd scattered under the colonnades—forks of lightning jabbed silver and blue from the clouds. The courtesans screamed and fled, hiking their skirts to reveal their hairy legs, breasts bobbing as they ran. Feathers and fur flattened, costumes bled their cheap dye onto the paving in a dirty rainbow stream. Everyone sheltered under the loggias around the square, chattering and laughing in fear. I was briefly alone, blinded by rain, a small smile curling my lip—a pox on the Venetians and their Carnevale! I opened my eyes to the heavens, willing the lightning to strike me, hoping my sodden hair was still gold enough to tempt its bolts. As if in answer to my prayer I was blinded once more as the sky split—but the lightning did not strike me; it served to illuminate a sight I had looked at every day but never really seen.

Before the great dome of the basilica, high, high on a gilded platform above the great door, stood four bronze horses, bathed in fire, noble, necks arched, mouths frothing and forelegs pawing the ground. They stood over the city, a threatening quartet. Many years in the future my husband would tell me that they were in fact thieved from the Hippodrome in Constantinople, the only remaining quadriga of the Roman world, and a symbol of Venice’s secular might. But I am getting ahead of myself—that was long in the future, when I was married; at this point I had not even been reacquainted with my husband (I had met him, of course, more than once by this point in my history). That day, however, I thought I knew what the horses meant without any instruction. They meant the Apocalypse was coming to Venice. And I didn’t give a shit.

And yet at this very second of the world ending and my not caring, for some strange reason, my brain decided to make amends for my thickheadedness of yesterday. The pieces suddenly resolved themselves—as the four winds battered me from every point of the compass, as my shoes filled and the great square began to flood, as I alone held forth like a doomed ship at sea, I finally realized what I had been taught. The rain beat down on my head, and as if they arrived with the raindrops, three thoughts suddenly plopped into my head.

Credo Uno: Flora had thirty-two roses in her skirts. There were thirty-two points of the compass rose.

Credo Due: there were four winds of the wind rose and four horses before me.

Credo Tre: Zephyrus, the west wind, raped Chloris. Chloris, the lover of the wind. Chloris my mother. Chloris who was Venice.

I knew, as if the lightning bolt had finally lit the dark corners of my mind in an illuminating flash, that whatever secret this city held was in the horse that stood at the extreme left, the west horse, the ponente horse.

The Zephyrus horse.

Then I felt a great tug of my sleeve. Marta, my millstone, had come for me and took me into the porch of the great basilica, where the ducal party dripped and steamed. Outside, the storm raged, the rain battered the great square till an inch of water stood on the ground. Acqua alta—high water had come; the sea made a bid to claim her city. My mother noted my presence with obvious relief—once again I realized that she cared for me and that she was pleased that I was safe. But I wasn’t safe yet; none of us were. God was not afeared to strike his own house. With the herald of a great thunderclap, a boom and crack sounded from above and masonry began to fall. My father shouted above the screams:

“The gold of the roof attracts the lightning; we must repair to the palazzo.”

It was the longest sentence I had ever heard him say.

He and my mother left first, followed by the crowd of ducal retainers. Marta was swept along with them, and I knew she could not yet miss me. I ducked into a niche and hid. I had no clear plan but to be as far away from my sorceress mother for as long as I possibly could. I needed space to think, space to act. As the atrium emptied I looked up, as if for inspiration, and saw before me a fantastic Roman mosaic of the four seasons. The figure of Spring, wreathed in flowers and mythical beasts coupling to reproduce—pairing off in this Noah’s ark against the flood—sheltered by verdant leaves, looked straight at me and pointed skyward with her hand. I knew then that I was right.

I crept into the great dark space of the basilica, the floor already glazed with an inch of rain. The ark was taking on water. The incense was choking, and the voices of my father’s priests were raised in supplication. They had failed to keep the plague from Venice, even to save my father’s first wife from the pestilence. But with touching faith they tried once again to keep this most biblical of disasters at bay. I hung around the narthex, looking for a door which I knew must be there, for the goddess of Spring had told me so. I found the little portal and climbed the stair, higher and higher into the gallery. As I wound upward into the cupola, Byzantine faces regarded me with interest from their great almond eyes, unmoved as the lightning snaked into the arched windows, attracted to the golden tiles that paved their haloes.

As I stepped out onto the balcony the rain hit me like a blow, lightning struck the dome above, once and again, and I thought I would be sizzled like a scallop. I ducked behind the nearest horse to shelter—ironic, really, that these steeds of the wind should now shield me from a tempest. Only a few moments ago I would have happily jumped from here to my death; now I clung to the beast that sheltered me, hiding under his belly as a foal would suck milk. I knew I was at the wrong extreme—the eastern horse—so I inched past eight long hind legs and eight massive copper balls. At the western-most horse I crept round to the front, clinging for life, and glanced up, dashing rain from my eyes. I looked into the huge, noble copper face of the Zephyrus horse, but his wild eyes told me nothing. He did, however, proffer his right foreleg, raised as a friendly cur would ask you to shake his foot. It felt natural to take the limb and I wrapped my frozen hand around the hoof, looking for an inscription, a clue, anything. The copper limb rang as the lightning struck the cupola again, humming faintly like a coin on a bell. The leg I held shook more, creaked, and fell into my hand. I barely caught the thing, and looked down, appalled at what I’d done—but it was hollow. Hollow, not heavy.

Madonna.

There was something within. I drew out a wooden roll, as long as my forearm, like a pin that pastry cooks use for flattening their pasticcio. Excited, I knew there must be something inside, a folded document, coins, a painting. I expected the roll to be hollow, a kind of cylinder, but it was solid wood. To be sure, there were markings upon it, but the grooves and curves, and crazy inscriptions, were meaningless to me. For all I knew it was merely a support that the copperwright had used to construct the beast, a skeleton to form the cast bronze, never meant to be seen by the eyes of admirers. I dropped the wood on the floor with a clatter, covered my face with my hands. When I took them away I knew that there would be someone standing before me, Marta or one of my father’s guards.

And there was.

“I am ready,” I said, “you can take me now.”

But the presence before me was neither of those I expected, nor was it a creature of this world. A great lion stood there on his hind legs, with a face made of wrought gold and the body of a man. The mask resembled my mother’s, save that it was a full-face mask not a half, a burning sun, a mane around the circumference like rays of fire, eyes and mouth open like the Bocca del Leone. Now I knew I was finished—the Apocalypse had come for me. The lion of Saint Mark—the creature I had feared since I had entered the Arsenale and sealed Bonaccorso’s fate—the ruler of this city, had come to devour me.

I am a Daniel.

“I am ready,” I repeated, “you can take me now.” I thought I was already dead, for the creature looked on me with eyes that I’d dreamed of, spoke with a voice that I knew.

“Luciana. It is I.”

I ripped the mask from his face, flung my arms around him fit to squeeze the life away, cried and laughed, would have kissed him a thousand times, but he held me away.

“No time,” he said. He picked up the wooden roll and pressed it into my hands. “Keep the map safe. Have courage. I will meet you in Milan.”

He looked straight at me once, as if memorizing my face, then he was gone in another flash of lightning as blue as his eyes, and Marta was upon me almost before I could hide the wooden roll in my sleeve.

Brother Guido must have passed her on the stairs.

By the time we left the basilica, the storm had passed and the sun shone again. The square was filled with water—the whole city stood on a mirror. I had never seen such a beautiful place. Marta, taking no chances, had an iron grip on my upper arm, a bruise tomorrow for certain. We waded in water up to our knees till we met the ducal litter coming for us, but I cared not.

He was alive.