legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.
A Main Selection of the Literary Guild
ALSO BY ANNE RICE
Interview with the Vampire
The Feast of All Saints
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Beauty's Punishment
Beauty's Release
ALFRED A. KNOPF
NEW YORK ยท TORONTO
1999
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC., AND
PS3568.I265V58 1999
813'.54--dc2i 98-14209
CIP
Canadian Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rice, Anne, [date]
Vittorio, the vampire : new tales of the vampires ISBN
0-676-97186-5
I. Tide. PS3568.I22V361999
8i3'.54 C98-9324I2-5
A signed first edition of this book has been privately
printed by The
Franklin Library. A limited signed edition of this
book has been
published by B. E. Trice Publishing, New Orleans.
Manufactured in the United States of America First
Trade Edition
FRONTISPIECE: Farewell of Saint John the Baptist from
His
Parents by Fra Filippo Lippi. Duomo, Prato, Italy.
Scala/Art Resource, New York
Florence, Italy.
Italy.
By anyone's standards, I am a remarkable vampire,
most powerful, having lived five hundred years from
the great days of Cosimo de' Medici, and even the
angels will attest to my powers, if you
3
can get them to speak to you. Be cautious on that
point.
I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the
"Coven of the Articulate, " that band of strange
romantic vampires in and from the Southern New World
city of New Orleans who have regaled you already with
so many chronicles and tales.
I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact
or New Orleans. For now, I cannot know or care about
it.
4
As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the
overgrown stones of the place where I was so happy as
a child, our walls now broken and misshapen among the
thorny blackberry vines and fragrant smothering
forests of oak and chestnut trees, I am compelled to
record what befell me, for it seems that I may have
suffered a fate very unlike that of any other vampire.
I do not always hang about this place.
On the contrary, I spend most of my time in that
city which for me is the queen of all cities--
Florence--which I loved from the very first moment I
And it was under Cosimo's roof that I saw, as a
mortal boy of destiny and promise--yes, I myself saw--
the great guests of the Council of Trent who had come
from far Byzantium to heal the breach between the
Eastern and Western church: Pope Eugenius IV of Rome,
the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Emperor of the
East himself, John VIII Paleologus. These great men I
saw enter the city in a terrible storm of bitter rain,
but nevertheless with indescribable glory, and these
men I saw eat from Cosimo's table.
Enough, you might say. I agree with you. This is no
history of the Medici. But let me only say that anyone
who tells you that they were scoundrels, these great
men, is a perfect idiot. It was the descendants of
Cosimo who took care of Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo and artists without count. And it was all
I shall tell my tale naturally and effectively,
wallowing in words, for I love them. And, being an
immortal, I have devoured over four centuries of
English, from the plays of Christopher Marlowe and Ben
Jonson to the abrupt and harshly evocative words of a
Sylvester Stallone movie.
You'll find me flexible, daring, and now and then a
shock. But what can I do but draw upon the fullest
descriptive power I can command, and mark that English
now is no more the language of one land, or even two
or three or four, but has become the language of all
the modern world from the backwoods of Tennessee to
the most remote Celtic isles and down under to the
teeming cities of Australia and New Zealand.
I am Renaissance-born. Therefore I delve in all,
and blend without prejudice, and that some higher good
pertains to what I do, I cannot doubt.
As for my native Italian, hear it softly when you
say my name, Vittorio, and breathe it like perfume
from the other names which are sprinkled throughout
I wouldn't write a book to tell you that a vampire
was happy.
I have a brain as well as a heart, and there hovers
about me an etheric visage of myself, created most
definitely by some Higher Power, and entangled
completely within the intangible weave of that etheric
visage is what men call a soul. I have such. No amount
of blood can drown away its life and leave me but a
thriving revenant.
Okay. No problem. Yes, yes. Thank you!--as everybody
in the entire world can say in English. We're ready to
begin.
Except I want to give you a quote from an obscure
but wonderful writer, Sheridan Le Fanu, a paragraph
spoken in extreme angst by a haunted character in one
of his many exquisitely written ghost stories. This
author, a native of Dublin, died in 1873, but mark how
fresh is this language, and how horrifying the
expression of the character Captain Barton in the
story called "The Familiar":
Whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity
of what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact
I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does
exist beyond this a spiritual world--a system whose
workings are generally in mercy hidden from us--a
system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially
and terribly revealed. I am sure--I know . . . that
terious and stupendous--by agencies the most
inexplicable and terrific;--there is a spiritual
system--great God, how I have been convinced!--a system
malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose
persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the
torments of the damned!
What do you think of that?
I am myself rather mortally struck by it. I don't
think I am prepared to speak of our God as "dreadful"
or our system as "malignant," but there seems an eerie
inescapable ring of truth to these words, written in
fiction but obviously with much emotion.
It matters to me because I suffer under a terrible
curse, quite unique to me, I think, as a vampire. That
is, the others don't share it. But I think we all--
human, vampire, all of us who are sentient and can
weep--we all suffer under a curse, the curse that we
know more than we can endure, and there is nothing,
absolutely nothing, we can do about the force and the
lure of this knowledge.
At the end, we can take this up again. See what you
make of my story.
It's early evening here. The brave remnant of my
father's highest tower still rises boldly enough
against the sweetly star-filled heavens for me to see
from the window the moonlighted hills and valleys of
Tuscany, aye, even as far as the twinkling sea below
the mines of Carrara. I smell the flowering green of
the steep undiscovered country round
9
where the irises of Tuscany still break out in violent
red or white in sunny beds, to be found by me in the
silky night.
And so embraced and protected, I write, ready for
the moment when the full yet ever obscure moon leaves
me for the hideaway of clouds, to light the candles
that stand ready, some six, ensconced within the thick
ruggedly worked silver of the candelabra which once
stood on my father's desk, in those days when he was
the old-style feudal lord of this mountain and all its
villages, and the firm ally in peace and war of the
great city of Florence and its unofficial ruler, when
we were rich, fearless, curious and wondrously
contented.
Let me speak now of what has vanished.
10
2
MY SMALL MORTAL LIFE,
THE BEAUTY OF FLORENCE,
THE GLORY OF OUR
SMALL COURT--
WHAT IS VANISHED
I WAS sixteen years old when I died. I have good
height, thick brown hair down to the shoulders, hazel
eyes that I are far too vulnerable to behold, giving
me the appearance of an androgyne in a way, and a
desirable narrow nose with unremarkable nostrils, and
a medium-sized mouth which is neither voluptuous nor
stingy. A beautiful boy for the time. I wouldn't be
alive now if I hadn't been.
That's the case with most vampires, no matter who
says otherwise. Beauty carries us to our doom. Or, to
put it more accurately, we are made immortal by those
who cannot sever themselves from our charms.
I don't have a childish face, but I have an almost
angelic one. My eyebrows are strong, dark, high enough
over my eyes to allow them entirely too much luster.
thick brown hair, making as it does a curly, wavy
frame for the whole picture. My chin is slightly too
strong, too squared off for the rest. I have a dimple
in it.
My body is overmuscular, strong, broad-chested, my
arms powerful, giving an impression of manly power.
This rather rescues my obdurate-looking jaw and allows
to me to pass for a full-fledged man, at least from a
distance.
This well-developed physique I owe to tremendous
practice with a heavy battle sword in the last years
of my life, and ferocious hunting with my falcons in
the mountains, up and down which I ran often on foot,
though I had already four horses of my own by that
age, including one of that special majestic breed made
to support my weight when I wore my full suit of
armor.
My armor is still buried beneath this tower. I
never used it in battle. Italy was seething with war
in my time, but all of the battles of the Florentines
were being fought by mercenaries.
All my father had to do was declare his absolute
loyalty to Cosimo, and let no one representing the
Holy Roman Empire, the Duke of Milan or the Pope in
Rome move troops through our mountain passes or stop
in our villages.
We were out of the way. It was no problem.
Enterprising ancestors had built our castle three
hundred years before. We went back to the time of the
Lombards, or those barbarians who had come down from
the North into Italy, and I think we had
12
people known to history as the Etruscans.
Our household, being of the old feudal style,
scorning trade and requiring of its men that they be
bold and brave, was full of treasure acquired through
wars without count or record--that is, old silver and
gold candelabra and sconces, heavy chests of wood with
Byzantine designs encrusted on them, the usual Flemish
tapestries, and tons of lace, and bed hangings hand-
trimmed with gilt and gems, and all of the most
desirable finery.
My father, admiring the Medici as he did, bought up
all kinds of luxury items on his trips to Florence.
There was little bare stone in any important room,
because flowered wool carpets covered all, and every
hallway or alcove had its own towering armoire filled
with rattling, rusting battle dress of heroes whose
names nobody even remembered.
We were incalculably rich: this I had more or less
overheard as a child, and there was some hint that it
had to do as much with valor in war as with secret
pagan treasure.
There had been centuries of course when our
13
abandoned ruins.
Our nearest neighbor did rule his own mountain
enclave of villages in loyalty to the Duke of Milan.
But he didn't bother with us or we him. It was a
remote political matter.
Our walls were thirty feet high, immensely thick,
older than the castle and keeps, old indeed beyond
anyone's most romantic tales and constantly being
thickened and repaired, and inside the compound there
existed three little villages busy with good vineyards
that yielded marvelous red wine; prosperous beehives;
blackberries; and wheat and the like; with plenty of
chickens and cows; and enormous stables for our
horses.
I never knew how many people labored in our little
world. The house was full of clerks who took care of
such things, and very seldom did my father
14
fields, orchards of olive trees and vineyards. They
were all under our governance and loyal to us. If
there had been any war they would have come running to
our gates as their ancestors had done, and rightly so.
There were market days, village festivals, saints'
days, and a little alchemy now and then, and
occasionally even a local miracle. It was a good land,
ours.
Visiting clerics always stayed a long time. It
wasn't uncommon to have two or three priests in
various towers of the castle or in the lower, newer,
more modern stone buildings.
I had been taken to Florence to be educated
15
I was, however, a divided being. The mental part of
me had been nourished in Florence by excellent
teachers of Latin, Greek, philosophy and theology, and
I had been deep into the boys' pageants and plays of
the city, often taking the leading parts in the dramas
presented by my own Confraternity in my uncle's house,
and I knew how to solemnly portray the Biblical Isaac
about to
16
be sacrificed by the obedient Abraham, as well as the
charming Angel Gabriel discovered by a suspicious St.
Joseph with his Virgin Mary.
I pined for all that now and then, the books, the
lectures in the Cathedrals to which I'd listened with
they were in a trance of devotion.
Yes, I must have been a scamp. I know I was. I went
out by the kitchen. I bribed the servants. I had too
many friends who were out-and-out
17
routies or beasties. I got into mayhem and then ran
home. We played ball games and had battles in the
piazzas, and the priests ran us off with switches and
threats. I was good and bad, but not ever really
wicked.
When I died to this world, at the age of sixteen, I
never looked on a daylighted street again, not in
Florence or anywhere. Well, I saw the best of it, that
I can say. I can envisage with no difficulty the
18
to do it, but then again, I was raising new hawks,
training them myself and hunting with them, and the
country round was irresistible.
By this age of sixteen, I was considered bookish by
the clan of elder kinsmen who gathered at the table
every night, my parents' uncles mostly, and all very
much of a former time when "bankers had not run the
world," who had marvelous tales to tell of the
Crusades, to which they had gone when they were young,
and of what they had seen at the fierce battle of
Acre, or fighting on the island of Cyprus or Rhodes,
and what life had been like at sea, and in many exotic
ports where they had been the terror of the taverns
child on the night she died. And the child died with
her. I'll come to that quickly. Well, as quickly as I
can. I'm not so good at being quick.
My brother, Matteo, was four years younger than me,
and an excellent student, though he had not been sent
off anywhere as yet (would that he had), and my
sister, Bartola, was born less than a year after me,
so close in fact that I think my father was rather
ashamed of it.
I thought them both--Matteo and Bartola-- the most
lovely and interesting people in the world. We had
country fun and country freedom, running in the woods,
picking blackberries, sitting at the feet of gypsy
storytellers before they got caught and sent away. We
loved one another. Matteo worshipped me too much
Ah. This is too much for me! I didn't know how hard
this was going to be! Bartola. Kill anyone who touched
her! And now nightmares descend, as if they were
winged spirits themselves, and threaten to shut out
the tiny silent and ever drifting lights of Heaven.
Let me return to my train of thought.
My mother I never really understood, and probably
misjudged, because everything seemed a matter of style
and manners with her, and my father I found to be
hysterically self-satirical and always funny.
He was, beneath all his jokes and snide stories,
actually rather cynical, but at the same time kind; he
saw through the pomp of others, and even his own
pretensions. He looked upon the human situation as
hopeless. War was comic to him, devoid of heroes and
full of buffoons, and he would burst out laughing in
the middle of his uncles' harangues, or even in the
middle of my poems when I went on too long, and I
in ermine. His gloves were true gauntlets trimmed in
fox, and he had large grave eyes, more deep-set than
mine, and full of mockery, disbelief and sarcasm.
He was never mean, however, to anyone.
His only modern affectation was that he liked to
drink from fine goblets of glass, rather than old cups
of hardwood or gold or silver. And we had plenty of
sparkling glass always on our long supper table.
My mother always smiled when she said such things
to him as "My Lord, please get your feet off the
table," or "I'll thank you not to touch me until
you've washed your greasy hands," or "Are you really
coming into the house like that?" But beneath her
charming exterior, I think she hated him.
The one time I ever heard her raise her voice in
anger, it was to declare in no uncertain terms that
half the children in our villages round had been sired
by him, and that she herself had buried some eight
tiny infants who had never lived to see the light,
because he couldn't restrain himself any better than a
rampant stallion.
He was so amazed at this outburst--it was behind
closed doors--that he emerged from the bedchamber
looking pale and shocked, and said to me, "You know,
Vittorio, your mother is nothing as stupid as I always
As for her, when I tried to go in to her, she threw
a silver pitcher at me. I said, "But Mother, it's
Vittorio!" and she threw herself into my arms. She
cried bitterly for fifteen minutes.
We said nothing during this time. We sat together
in her small stone bedroom, rather high up in the
oldest tower of our house, with many pieces of gilded
furniture, both ancient and new, and then she wiped
her eyes and said, "He takes care of everyone, you
know. He takes care of my aunts and my uncles, you
know. And where would they be if it weren't for him?
And he's never denied me anything."
She went rambling on in her smooth convent-
modulated voice. "Look at this house. It's filled with
elders whose wisdom has been so good for you children,
and all this on account of your father, who is rich
enough to have gone anywhere, I suppose, but he is too
kind. Only, Vittorio! Vittorio, don't... I mean ...
with the girls in the village."
I almost said, in a spasm of desire to comfort her,
that I had only fathered one bastard to my knowledge,
and he was just fine, when I realized this would have
been a perfect disaster. I said nothing.
That might have been the only conversation I ever
had with my mother. But it's not really a conversation
because I didn't say anything.
She was right, however. Three of her aunts and two
of her uncles lived with us in our great high-walled
compound, and these old people lived well, always
sumptuously dressed in the latest fabrics from the
city, and enjoying the purest courtly life
to them all the time, which I did, and they knew
plenty of all the world.
It was the same with my father's uncles, but of
course it was their land, this, their family's, and so
they felt more entitled, I assume, as they had done
most of the heroic fighting in the Holy Land, or so it
seemed, and they quarreled with my father over
anything and everything, from the taste of the meat
tarts served at supper to the distractingly modern
style of the painters he hired from Florence to
decorate our little chapel.
That was another sort of modern thing he did, the
matter of the painters, maybe the only modern thing
other than liking things made of glass.
Our little chapel had for centuries been bare. It
was, like the four towers of our castle and all the
walls around, built of a blond stone which is common
in Northern Tuscany. This is not the dark stone you
see so much in Florence, which is gray and looks
perpetually unclean. This northern stone is almost the
color of the palest pink roses.
But my father had brought pupils up from Florence
when I was very young, good painters who had studied
with Piero della Francesca and other such, to cover
these chapel walls with murals taken from the lovely
stories of saints and Biblical giants in the books
known as The Golden Legend.
Not being himself a terribly imaginative man, my
father followed what he had seen in the churches of
Florence in his design and instructed these men to
tell the tales of John the Baptist, patron saint of
the city and cousin of Our Lord,
24
stiffer work of Giotto or Cimabue, that my elderly
uncles and aunts objected. As for the villagers, I
don't think they exactly understood it all either,
except they were so overawed in the main by the chapel
at a wedding or baptism that it didn't matter.
I myself of course was terrifically happy to see
these paintings made, and to spend time with the
artists, who were all gone by the time that my life
was brought to a halt by demonic slaughter.
I'd seen plenty of the greatest painting in
Florence and had a weakness for drifting about,
looking at splendid visions of angels and saints in
the rich dedicated chapels of the Cathedrals, and had
even--on one of my trips to Florence with my father--in
Cosimo's house, glimpsed the tempestuous painter
Filippo Lippi, who was at that time actually under
lock and key there to make him finish a painting.
I was much taken with the plain yet compelling man,
the way that he argued and schemed and did everything
but throw a tantrum to get permission to leave the
palazzo while lean, solemn and low-voiced Cosimo just
smiled and talked him down more or less out of his
hysteria, telling him to get back to work and that he
would be happy when he was finished.
25
forgot that glimpse of the genius Filippo, for that is
what he was--and is--to me.
"So what did you so like about him?" my father
asked me.
"He's bad and good," I said, "not just one or the
other. I see a war going on inside of him! And I saw
some of his work once, work he did with Fra Giovanni"--
this was the man later called Fra Angelico by all the
world--"and I tell you, I think he is brilliant. Why
else would Cosimo put up with such a scene? Did you
hear him!"
"And Fra Giovanni is a saint?" asked my father.
"Hmmmmm, yes. And that's fine, you know, but did
you see the torment in Fra Filippo? Hmmm, I liked it."
My father raised his eyebrows.
On our next and very last trip to Florence, he took
me to see all of Filippo's paintings. I was amazed
that he had remembered my interest in this man. We
went from house to house to look at the loveliest
works, and then to Filippo's workshop.
26
Conception of Christ in her womb, and the way we
played, he was supposed to be a pretty beguiling and
virile angel, and Joseph would come in and, lo, find
this overwhelming male with his pure ward, the Blessed
Mary.
We were a worldly bunch, but you know, we gave the
play a little spice. I mean we cooked it up a bit. I
don't think it says anything in scripture about St.
Joseph happening on a tryst.
But that had been my favorite role, and I had
particularly enjoyed paintings of the Annunciation.
Well, this last one I saw before I left Florence,
done by Filippo sometime in the 14408, was beyond
anything I had beheld before.
The angel was truly unearthly yet physically
perfect. Its wings were made of peacock feathers.
I was sick with devotion and covetousness. I
27
reconcile, and they are sad, and wise, and never
innocent, and always soft, reflective of mute
torment."
On the way back home, as we were riding together
through the forest, up a rather steep road, very
casually my father asked me if the painters who had
done our chapel were good.
"Father, you're joking," I said. "They were
excellent."
28
He smiled. "I didn't know, you know/' he said. "I
just hired the best." He shrugged.
I smiled.
was the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, a man
who had been our enemy whether we liked it or not
because he was the enemy of Florence.
But listen to what this man was like: he was
29
hideously fat, it was said, and very dirty by nature,
and sometimes would take off all his clothes and roll
around naked in the dirt of his garden! He was
terrified of the sight of a sword and would scream if
he saw it unsheathed, and he was terrified too to have
his portrait painted because he thought he was so
ugly, which he was. But that was not all. This man's
weak little legs wouldn't carry him, so his pages had
30
way, was not by the Duke's wife, poor thing, for she
was locked up, but by his mistress.
It was this marriage which led eventually to the
war. First Francesco was fighting bravely for Duke
Filippo Maria, and then when the weird unpredictable
little Duke finally croaked, naturally his son-in-law,
handsome Francesco, who had charmed everybody in Italy
from the Pope to Cosimo, wanted to become the Duke of
Milan!
It's all true. Don't you think it's interesting?
Look it up. I left out that the Duke Filippo Maria was
also so scared of thunder that he was supposed to have
built a soundproof room in his palace.
then my father commended the bold self-made Francesco
and his courageous peasant father.
There had been another great lunatic running around
Italy during earlier times, a freebooter and ruffian
named Sir John Hawkwood, who would lead his
mercenaries against anybody, including the
Florentines.
But he had ended up loyal to Florence, even became
a citizen, and when he departed this earth, they gave
him a splendid monument in the Cathedral! Ah, such an
age!
I think it was a really good time to be a soldier,
you know, to sort of pick and choose where you would
fight, and get as carried away with it all as you
wanted to.
But it was also a very good time for reading
poetry, and for looking at paintings and for living in
utter comfort and security behind ancestral walls, or
required money. What happened after that was absolute
mayhem.
Well, I could go on describing this wonderland of
Tuscany forever.
It is chilling and saddening for me to try to
imagine what might have become of my family had evil
not befallen us. I cannot see my father old, or
imagine myself struggling as an elderly man, or
envision my sister married, as I hoped, to a city
aristocrat rather than a country baron.
It is a horror and a joy to me that there are
villages and hamlets in these very mountains which
have from that time never died out-- never--surviving
through the worst of even modern war, to thrive still
with tiny cobbled market streets and pots of red
geraniums in their windows. There are castles which
survive everywhere, enlivened by generation after
generation.
Here there is darkness.
Here is Vittorio writing by the light of the stars.
Brambles and wild scratching things inhabit the
But it's very like the little plays we used to do in
my uncle's house, or those I saw before the Duomo in
Cosimo's Florence. There must be painted backdrops,
props of fine detail, wires rigged for flight and
costumes cut out and sewn before I can put my players
on the boards and tell the fable of my making.
I can't help it. Let me close my essay on the
glories of the 14008 by saying what the great
alchemist Ficino would say of it some years later on:
It was "an age of gold."
I go now to the tragic moment.
3
IN WHICH THE HORROR
DESCENDS UPON US
THE beginning of the end came the following spring. I
had passed my sixteenth birthday, which had fallen
that I year on the very Tuesday before Lent, when we
and all the villages were celebrating Carnival. It had
come rather early that year, so it was a bit cold, but
it was a gay time.
It was on that night before Ash Wednesday that I
had the terrible dream in which I saw myself holding
the severed heads of my brother and my sister. I woke
up in a sweat, horrified by this dream. I wrote it
down in my book of dreams. And then actually I forgot
about it. That was common with me, only it had been
truly the most horrid nightmare Td ever had. But when
I mentioned my occasional nightmares to my mother or
father or anyone else, they always said:
"Vittorio, it's your own fault for reading the
books you read. You bring it on yourself."
To repeat, the dream was forgotten.
the first warnings of horror to come, though I knew
them not to be, were that the lower hamlets on our
mountain were quite suddenly abandoned.
My father and I and two of the huntsmen and a
gamekeeper and a soldier rode down to see for
ourselves that the peasants in those parts had
departed, some time before in fact, and taken the
livestock with them.
It was eerie to see those deserted towns, small as
they were and as insignificant.
We rode back up the mountain as a warm embracing
darkness surrounded us, yet we found all the other
villages we passed battened down with hardly a seam of
light showing through the chinks of a shutter, or a
tiny stem of reddened smoke rising from a chimney.
Of course my father's old clerk went into a rant
that the vassals should be found, beaten, made to work
the land.
My father, benevolent as always and completely
calm, sat at his desk in the candlelight, leaning on
his elbow, and said that these had all been free men;
they were not bound to him, if they did not choose to
live on his mountain. This was the way of the modern
world, only he wished he knew what was afoot in our
land.
Quite suddenly, he took notice of me standing and
observing him, as if he hadn't seen me before, and he
broke off the conference, dismissing the whole affair.
I thought nothing much about it.
But in the days that followed, some of the vil-
lagers from the lower slopes came up to live within
the walls. There were conferences in my father's
chambers. I heard arguments behind closed doors, and
one night, at supper, all sat entirely too somber for
our family, and finally my father rose from his
massive chair, the Lord in the center of the table as
always, and declared, as if he'd been silently
accused:
"I will not persecute some old women because they
have stuck pins in wax dolls and burnt incense and
read foolish incantations that mean nothing. These old
witches have been on our mountain forever."
My mother looked truly alarmed, and then gathering
us all up--I was most unwilling--she took us away,
Bartola, Matteo and me, and told us to go to bed
early.
"Don't stay up reading, Vittorio" she said.
"But what did Father mean?" asked Bartola.
"Oh, it's the old village witches," I said. I used
the Italian word strega. "Every now and then, one goes
too far, there's a fight, but mostly it's just charms
to cure a fever and such."
I thought my mother would hush me up, but she stood
in the narrow stone stairs of the tower looking up at
me with marked relief on her face, and she said:
"Yes, yes, Vittorio, you are so right. In Florence,
people laugh at those old women. You know Gattena
yourself; she never really did more then sell love
potions to the girls."
"Surely we're not to drag her before a court!" I
said, very happy that she was paying attention.
37
"Gattena?" I asked, and then as my mother turned
away, refusing, it seemed, to say another word,
gesturing for me to escort my sister and brother
safely to bed, I realized the gravity of this.
Gattena was the most feared and comical of the old
witches, and if she had run off, if she was afraid of
something, well, that was news, because she thought
herself the one to be feared.
The following days were fresh and lovely and
undisturbed by anything for me and my Bartola and
Matteo, but when I looked back later, I recalled there
was much going on.
One afternoon, I went up to the highest lookout
window of the old tower where one guardsman, Tori, we
called him, was falling asleep, and I looked down over
all our land for as far as I could see.
"Well, you won't find it," he said.
"What's that?" I remarked.
"Smoke from a single hearth. There is no more." He
yawned and leaned against the wall, heavily weighed
down by his old boiled-leather jerkin, and sword.
"All's well," he said, and yawned again. "So they like
city life, or to fight for Francesco Sforza over the
Duchy of Milan, so let them go. They didn't know how
good they had it."
I turned away from him and looked over the woods
again, and down into the valleys that I could see, and
beyond to the slightly misty blue sky. It was true,
the little hamlets seemed frozen in time down there,
but how could one be so sure? It was
38
and that an agitation had gripped my mother, so that
she was no longer engaging in her endless courtly
chatter. Conversation was not impossible, but it had
changed.
But for all the elders who seemed deeply and
secretly conflicted, there were others who seemed
relatively oblivious to such things, and the pages
went about serving gaily, and a little group of
musicians, who'd come up the preceding day, gave us a
lovely series of songs with the viol and the lute.
My mother couldn't be persuaded to do her old slow
dances, however.
It must have been very late when an unexpected
visitor was announced. No one had left the main hall,
except Bartola and Matteo, who had been taken off to
bed by me earlier and left in the care of our old
nurse, Simonetta.
The Captain of my father's Guard came into the
hall, clicked his heels and bowed to my father and
said:
"My Lord, it seems there is a man of great rank
come to the house, and he will not be received in the
light, or so he says, and demands that you come out to
him."
39
Signore away?" the Captain asked.
"Tell him that he is most welcome to come into my
house as my guest," said my father, "that we extend to
him in the name of Christ Our Lord our full
hospitality."
His very voice seemed to have a calming effect on
the whole table, except perhaps for my mother, who
seemed not to know what to do.
The Captain looked almost slyly at my father, as if
to convey the secret message that this would never do,
but he went off to deliver the invitation.
My father did not sit down. He stood staring off,
and then he cocked his head, as though listening. He
turned and snapped his fingers, drawing to attention
the two guards slumbering at the ends of the hall.
"Go through the house, see to everything," he said
in a soft voice. "I think I hear birds which have
entered the house. It's the warm air, and there are
many open windows."
These two went off, and immediately two other
soldiers appeared to take their place. That in
40
I was out of my chair at once and after him. I
heard my mother cry out softly, "Vittorio, come back."
But I stole down the stairs after my father, and
into the courtyard, and only when he himself turned
around and pressed my chest hard with his hand did I
halt.
"Stay there, my son," he said with his old kindly
warmth. "I shall see to it."
I had a good vantage point, right at the door of
the tower, and there across the courtyard, at the
gates in the full light of the torches, I saw this
strange Signore who would not come into the light of
the hall, for he did not seem to mind this outdoor
illumination.
The huge gates of the arched entrance were
41
antique scabbard, and casually over one shoulder was a
cloak of the same wine-dark velvet trimmed in what
seemed to my distant eyes to be ornate gilt symbols.
I strained, trying to make them out, this border of
signs, and I thought I could see a star and crescent
moon worked into his fancy adornments, but I was
really too far away.
The man's height was impressive.
My father stopped quite far short of him, yet when
he spoke his voice was soft and I couldn't hear it,
and out of the mysterious man, who still revealed
nothing now of his face but his smiling
42
mouth and white teeth, there came a silky utterance
that seemed both surly and charming.
"Get away from my house in the name of God and Our
"Search it from top to bottom and batten it down and
call out the soldiery and fill the night with torches,
do you hear? I will have men in every tower and on the
walls. Do it at once. It will give peace and calm to
my people!"
We had not yet reached the supper room when
43
an old priest living with us then, a learned Dominican
named Fra Diamonte, came down with his white hair all
mussed, and his cassock half unbuttoned, and his
prayer book in his hand.
"What is it, my Lord?" he asked. "What in the name
of God has happened?"
you in this state, I will not tolerate this distress."
She touched her belly.
44
I realized she was with child again. And I
realized, too, that my father was really alarmed about
something. What could it mean, "Do not leave the
children alone for a moment"? What could this mean?
The chapel was comfortable enough. My father had
long ago provided some decent wooden and velvet-padded
prie-dieux, though on feast days everyone stood. Pews
didn't exist in those times.
But he also spent some of the night showing me the
vault beneath the church, which opened by means of a
45
When we came back up into the chapel, he put the
trapdoor right, laid down the ring, relaid the marble
tile, and the whole was quite invisible.
Fra Diamonte pretended not to have seen. My mother
was asleep and so were the children.
We all fell asleep before dawn in the chapel.
My father walked out in the courtyard at sunup,
when the cocks were crowing all over the villages
inside the walls, and he stretched and looked up at
the sky and then shrugged his shoulders.
Two of my uncles ran at him, demanding to know what
Signore from where dared to propose a siege against us
and when we were supposed to have this battle.
get to see my father alone, if I couldn't push my way
into the locked chambers where he sat with his uncles
and the priests arguing and fighting. Finally, I
hammered so loudly on the door and kicked so much that
he let me in.
The meeting was about to break up and he drew me
down by himself, and he said with wild eyes:
"Do you see what they've done? They took the very
tribute they demanded of me. They took it! I refused
it and they took it."
"But what tribute? You mean the children?"
He was wild-eyed. He rubbed his unshaven face, and
he crashed his fist down on his desk, and then he
pushed over all his writing things.
"Who do they think they are that they come to me by
night and demand that I tender to them those infants
unwanted by anyone?"
"Father, what is this? You must tell me."
"Vittorio, you will tomorrow be off to Florence, at
making a sound he rose to his feet, his fists on the
desk, seemingly uncaring of the light that the candles
threw on his shocked and wary face.
"What do you hear, my Lord?" I said, using the
formal address for him without so much as realizing
it.
"Evil," he whispered. "Malignant things such as God
only suffers to live because of our sins. Arm yourself
well. Bring your mother, your brother and your sister
to the chapel, and hurry. The soldiers have their
orders."
"Shall I have some supper brought there as well,
just bread and beer, perhaps?" I asked.
He nodded as though that were scarcely a concern.
Within less than an hour we were all gathered
inside the chapel, the entire family, which included
then five uncles and four aunts, and with us were two
nurses and Fra Diamonte.
The little altar was decked out as if for Mass,
with the finest embroidered altar cloth and the
thickest golden candlesticks with blazing candles. The
Image of Our Crucified Christ shone in the light, an
ancient colorless and thin wooden carving that had
hung on the wall there since the time of St. Francis,
We sat on plain brown benches brought in for us,
nobody speaking a word, for Fra Diamonte had that
morning said Mass and bestowed into the Tabernacle the
Body and Blood of Our Lord in the form of the Sacred
Host, and the chapel was now, as it were, put to its
full purpose as the House of God.
We did eat the bread, and drink a little bit of the
beer near the front doors, but we kept quiet.
Only my father repeatedly went out, walking boldly
into the torch-lighted courtyard and calling up to his
soldiers in the towers and on the walls, and even
sometimes being gone to climb up and see for himself
that all was well under his protection.
My uncles were all armed. My aunts said their
rosaries fervently. Fra Diamonte was confused, and my
mother seemed pale to death and sick, perhaps from the
baby in her womb, and she clung to my sister and
brother, who were by this time pretty frankly
frightened.
It seemed we would pass the night without incident.
It couldn't have been two hours before dawn when I
was awakened from a shallow slumber by a horrid
scream.
At once my father was on his feet, and so were my
uncles, drawing out their swords as best they could
with their knotted old fingers.
of the trapdoor, he threw it back and thrust into my
hand a great candle from the altar.
"Take your mother, your aunts, your sister and your
brother down, now, and do not come out, no matter what
you hear! Do not come out. Lock the trapdoor above you
and stay there! Do as I tell you!"
At once I obeyed, snatching up Matteo and Bartola
and forcing them down the stone steps in front of me.
My uncles had rushed through the doors into the
courtyard, shouting their ancient war cries, and my
aunts stumbled and fainted and clutched to the altar
and would not be moved, and my mother clung to my
father.
My father was in a very paroxysm. I reached out for
my eldest aunt, but she was in a dead faint before the
altar, and my father thundered back to me, forced me
into the crypt and shut the door.
I had no choice but to latch the trapdoor as he had
shown me how to do, and to turn with the flickering
candle in my hand and face the terrified Bartola and
Matteo.
"Go down all the way," I cried, "all the way."
They nearly fell, trying to move backward down the
steep narrow steps that were by no means easy to
descend, their faces turned towards me.
"What is it, Vittorio, why do they want to hurt
us?" Bartola asked.
"I want to fight them," Matteo said, "Vittorio,
give me your dagger. You have a sword. It's not fair."
50
aunts!
The air was cold and damp, but it felt good. I
broke out in a sweat, and my arm ached from holding
the big golden candlestick. Finally we sank down in a
huddle, the three of us at the far end of the chamber,
and it felt soothing to me to touch the cold stone.
But in the interval of our collective silence I
could hear through the heavy floor howls from above,
terrible cries of fear and panic, and rushing feet,
and even the high chilling whinnies of the horses. It
sounded as if horses had come crashing into the chapel
itself over our heads, which was not at all
impossible.
I rose to my feet and rushed to the two other doors
of the crypt, those which led to the burial chambers
or whatever they were, I didn't care! I moved the
latch on one, and could see nothing but a low passage,
not even tall enough for me, and barely wide enough
for my shoulders.
I turned back, holding the only light, and saw the
children rigid with fear, gazing up at the ceiling as
the murderous cries continued.
"I smell fire," Bartola whispered suddenly, her
face wet at once with tears. "Do you smell it,
Vittorio? I hear it."
I did hear it and I did smell it.
"Both of you make the Sign of the Cross; pray
51
spell victory.
Bartola and Matteo clung to me, on either side.
Above, there was a clatter. The chapel doors were
being thrown back, and then quite suddenly the
trapdoor was yanked up and open, and in the glimmer of
firelight beyond I saw a dark slender long-haired
figure.
In the gust my candle went out.
Except for the infernal flicker above and beyond,
we were committed unmercifully to total darkness.
Once again distinctly, I saw the outline of this
figure, a tall, stately female with great long locks
and a waist small enough for both my hands as she
appeared to fly down the stairs soundlessly towards
me.
How in the name of Heaven could this be, this
woman?
Before I could think to pull my sword on a female
assailant or make sense of anything at all, I felt her
tender breasts brushed against my chest, and the cool
of her skin as she seemed to be throwing her arms
about me.
There was a moment of inexplicable and strangely
sensuous confusion when the perfume of
52
hand, she raced up the stairway into the firelight.
I pulled my sword with both hands, rushed after
her, up and out into the chapel, and saw that she had
somehow by the most evil power all but reached the
door, an impossible feat, her charges wailing and
crying out for me, "Vittorio, Vittorio!"
All the upper windows of the chapels were full of
fire, and so was the rose window above the crucifix.
I could not believe what I beheld, this young
woman, who was stealing from me my sister and brother.
"Stop in the name of God!" I shouted at her.
"Coward, thief in the night."
I ran after her, but to my utter astonishment she
did stop, still, and turned to look at me again, and
this time I saw her full in all her refined beauty.
Her face was a perfect oval with great benign gray
eyes, her skin like the finest Chinese white enamel.
She had red lips, too perfect even for a painter to
make by choice, and her long ashen blond hair was gray
like her eyes in the light of the fire, sweeping down
53
standing now with the sword down, staring at me still
and at the sobbing children.
Suddenly her head turned. There was a whistling
cry, and then another and another. Through the door of
the chapel, seeming to leap from the fires of Hell
itself, there came another red-clad figure, hooded in
velvet and wearing gold-trimmed boots, and as I swung
my sword at him, he threw me aside and, in one
instant, cut off the head of Bartola and then severed
the head of the screaming Matteo.
I went mad. I howled. He turned on me. But from the
female there came a sudden firm negation.
"Leave him alone," she cried in a voice that was
both sweet and clear, and then off he went, this
murderer, this hooded fiend in his gold-trimmed boots,
calling back to her.
54
still clutched her sword as if it were not severed.
She replaced the limb I had cut off. I watched her. I
watched her put the limb in place and turn it and
adjust it until it was as it should be, and then
before my astonished eyes, I saw the wound I had made
utterly seal up in her white skin.
Then the loose bell sleeve of her rich velvet gown
fell down again around her wrist.
In a twinkling she was outside the chapel, only a
silhouette now against the distant fires burning in
the tower windows. I heard her whisper:
"Vittorio."
Then she vanished.
I knew it was vain to go after her! Yet still I ran
55
No. Please.
At dawn, finally, when the sun poured arrogantly
through the door of the chapel, when the fires had
died away, when the birds sang as if nothing had
happened, the innocent little heads of Bar-tola and
Matteo were lifeless and still, and very obviously
dead, and their immortal souls were gone from them, if
they had not flown at the moment when the sword had
severed these heads from the bodies.
56
I found my mother murdered in the courtyard. My
father, covered with wounds on his hands and arms, as
if he had grabbed at the very swords that struck him,
lay dead on the stairs of the tower.
The work all around had been swift. Throats cut,
and only here and there the evidence, as with my
had been left alive, and there was a hooded demon man
who had witnessed it, a vicious hooded assassin who
had slaughtered two children piteously
57
And whatever was the nature of this angel of death,
this exquisite Ursula, with her barely tinted white
cheeks and her long neck and sloping shoulders, I
didn't know. She herself might come back to avenge the
insult I had done her.
I had to leave the mountain.
That these creatures were not anywhere around now I
felt instinctively, both in my heart and from the
wholesomeness of the warm and loving sun, but also
because I had witnessed their flight, heard their
58
to find them and get them. And if they couldn't come
out by the light of day, then it would be by that
means that I would get them! I would do it. For
Bartola, for Matteo, for my father and mother, for the
humblest child who had been taken from my mountain.
And they had taken the children. Yes, that they had
done. I confirmed it before I left, for it was slow to
dawn on me with all my concerns, but they had. There
was not a corpse of a child on the place, only those
boys of my age had been killed, but anything younger
had been stolen away.
For what! For what horrors! I was beside myself.
I might have stood in the tower window, with
as if this were an ordinary day, dressed myself in my
best dark hunter's green silk and velvet, put on my
high boots and took up my gloves, and then taking the
leather bags which I could affix to my horse's saddle,
I went down into the crypt and took from my parents
and my aunts and uncles their very most treasured
rings, necklaces and brooches, the buckles of gold and
silver which had come from the Holy Land. God help me.
Then I filled my purse with all the gold ducats and
florins I could find in my father's coffers, as if I
were a thief, a very thief of the dead it seemed to
me, and hefting these heavy leather bags, I went to
get my mount, saddle him and bridle him and start off,
a man of rank, with his weaponry, and his mink-edged
cape, and a Florentine cap of green velvet, off into
the forest.
4
IN WHICH I COME UPON FURTHER
MYSTERIES, SUFFER SEDUCTION
AND CONDEMN MY SOUL TO
BITTER VALOR
NOW, I was too full of rancor to be thinking
straight, as IVe already described, and surely you
will under-I stand this. But it wasn't smart of me to
go riding through the woods of Tuscany dressed so
richly, and by myself, because any woods in Italy was
My head was swimming. And the landscape gave me
little time to think.
Nothing could have been more forlorn.
I came within sight of two huge ruined castles very
soon after my departure, copings and ramparts lost in
the greedy forest, which made me mindful that these
had been the holdings of old Lords who had been fool
enough to resist the power of Milan or Florence. It
was enough to make me doubt my sanity, enough to make
me think that we had not been annihilated by demons
but that common enemies had made the assault.
It was utterly grim to see their broken battlements
looming against the otherwise cheerful and brilliant
sky, and to come upon the overgrown fragments of
villages with their tumbledown hovels and forgotten
crossroads shrines in which stone Virgins or saints
had sunk into spiderwebs and shadows.
When I did spy a high distant well-fortified town,
I knew well it was Milanese and had no intention of
going up there. I was lost!
As for the bandits, I only ran into one little
ragged band, which I took on immediately with a deluge
of chatter.
. If anything, the little pack of idiots gave me some
have a florin for each of you if you can tell me
anything. We mean to cut them down on sight. I'm
tired. I'm sick of this."
I tossed them some coins.
They were off immediately.
But not before they let slip in talk of the country
round that the nearest Florentine town was Santa
Maddalana, which was two hours up ahead, and that it
would close its gates at night, and nobody could talk
his way into it.
I pretended to know all about that and to be on the
way to a famous monastery that I knew lay farther
north, which I couldn't possibly have reached, and
then threw more money over my shoulder as I raced off,
hollering out that they ought to ride on to meet the
band coming behind who would pay them for their
service.
I know they were debating all the time whether to
kill me and take everything I had or not. It was a
matter of stares and bluffs and fast talking and
standing one's ground, and they were just utter
ruffians, and somehow I got out of it.
I rode off as quickly as I could, left the main
road and cut towards the slopes from which I could see
in the far distance the vague outline of Santa
Maddalana. A big town. I could see four massive towers
all gathered near the obvious front gates, and several
The afternoon sunshine was brilliant but now at a
slant. I had to make for Santa Maddalana.
When I reached the mountain proper on which this
town was built, I went up sharply on the small paths
used by the shepherds.
The light was fading fast. The forest was too thick
to be safe so near a walled town. I cursed them that
they didn't keep the mountain cleared, but then I had
the safety of cover.
There were moments amid the deepening darkness when
it seemed virtually impossible to reach the summit;
the stars now lighted a glowing sapphirine sky, but
that only made the venerable town in all its majesty
seem ever more unattainable.
Finally the heedless night did plunge down amongst
the thick trunks of the trees, and I was picking my
way, counting on the instincts of my horse more than
my own failing vision. The pale half-moon seemed in
love with the clouds. The sky itself was nothing but
bits and pieces thanks to the canopy of foliage above
me.
I found myself praying to my father, as if he were
safely with my guardian angels about me, and I think I
believed in him and his presence more surely than I
had ever believed in angels, saying, "Please, Father,
help me get there. Help me get to safety, lest those
demons render my vengeance impossible."
I gripped my sword hard. I reminded myself of the
daggers I wore in my boots, in my sleeve, in my jacket
and in my belt. I strained to see by the light
of the sky, and had to trust my horse to pick his way
through the thick tree trunks.
At moments I stopped very still. I heard no unusual
sound. Who else would be fool enough to be out in the
night of this forest? At some point very near the end
of the journey, I found the main road, the forest
thinned and then gave way to smooth fields and
meadows, and I took the twists and turns at a gallop.
At last the town rose right up in front of us, as
it happens when you reach the gates by a final turn,
you seem to have been thrown up on the ground at the
foot of a magic fortress--and I took a deep breath of
thanks, no matter that the giant gates were firmly
shut as if a hostile army were camped beneath it.
This had to be my haven.
Of course the Watch, a sleepy soldier hollering
down from above, wanted to know who I was.
Once again the effort of making up something good
distracted me from wayward, near uncontrollable,
images of the fiend Ursula and her severed arm, and
the decapitated bodies of my brother and sister fallen
on the chapel floor in mid-gesture.
I cried out, in a humble tone but with pretentious
vocabulary, that I was a scholar in the employ of
Cosimo de' Medici come on a search for books in Santa
Maddalana, in particular old prayer books pertaining
to the saints and appearances of the Blessed Virgin
Mary in this district.
What nonsense.
65
insisted as he opened the small lower gate only a
crack, his lantern held high to inspect me.
I knew I made a good picture on my horse.
"De' Bardi," I declared. "Antonio De' Bardi,
kinsman of Cosimo," I said with fierce nerve, naming
the family of Cosimo's wife because it was the only
name that came into my head. "Look, kindly man, take
this payment for me, have a good supper with your wife
as my guests, here, I know it's late, I'm so tired!"
The gate was opened. I had to dismount to lead my
horse with lowered head through it and into the
echoing stone piazza right inside.
"What in the name of God," asked the Watchman,
"were you doing in these woods after dark alone? Do
you know the dangers? And so young? What is the Bardi
these days that they let their secretaries go riding
all over unescorted?" He pocketed the money. "Look at
you, a mere child! Somebody could murder you for your
buttons. What's the matter with you?"
This was an immense piazza, and I could see more
than one street leading off. Good luck. But what if
the demons were here too? I had no clue as to where
such things might roost or hide! But I went on
talking.
66
He ran out of pockets for the money, but managed
somehow to stuff it in his shirt and then led me by
torchlight to the Inn, banging on the door, and a
sweet-faced old woman came down, grateful for the
coins I thrust into her hand at once, to show me to a
room.
"High up and looking out over the valley," I said,
"if you please, and some supper, it can be stone cold,
I don't care."
"You're not going to find any books in this town,"
said the Watchman, standing about as I beat it up the
stairs after the woman. 'All the young people go off;
it's a peaceable place, just happy little shopkeepers.
Young men today run off to universities. But this is a
beautiful place to live, simply beautiful."
"How many churches do you have?" I asked the old
woman when we'd reached the room. I told her that I
must keep the lighted candle for the night.
"Two Dominican, one Carmelite," said the Watchman,
slouching in the little door, "and the beautiful old
Franciscan church, which is where I go. Nothing bad
ever happens here."
67
I fell on my plate like an animal. All I wanted was
strength. In my grief I couldn't even think of
pleasure. I looked out on a tiny bit of high star-
sprinkled sky for a little while, praying desperately
to every saint and angel whose name I knew for help,
and then I locked up the window tight.
I bolted the door.
And making sure that the candle was well sheltered
in the corner, and plenty big enough to last until
dawn, I fell into the lumpy little bed, too exhausted
to remove boots or sword or daggers or anything else.
I thought I'd fall into a deep sleep, but I lay rigid,
full of hatred, and hurt, and swollen broken soul,
staring into the dark, my mouth full of death as if
I'd eaten it.
I could hear distantly the sounds of my horse being
tended to downstairs, and some lonely steps on the
deserted stone street. I was safe, at least that much
was so.
Finally sleep came. It came totally and completely
and sweetly; the net of nerves which had
68
light, slipping down against the wall of the town and
giving my little chamber the attitude of a prison
cell.
I felt the cool fresh air come down around my neck
and felt it on my cheek. I clutched the sword tight,
listening, waiting. There were small creaking sounds.
The bed had moved ever so slightly, as if from a
pressure.
I couldn't focus my eyes. Darkness suddenly
obscured everything, and out of this darkness there
rose a shape before me, a figure bending over me, a
woman looking right into my face as her hair fell down
on me.
It was Ursula.
Her face was not an inch from mine. Her hand, very
cool and smooth, closed over my own, on the
69
my cheek gently, almost respectfully.
I felt the length of her body against me, the
definite swell of her breasts beneath costly fabric,
and the smooth length of her thigh beside me in the
bed, and her tongue touched my lips. She licked at my
lips.
I was immobilized by the chills that went through
me, humiliating me and kindling the passion inside me.
"Get away, strega," I whispered.
Filled with rage, I couldn't stop the slow smolder
that had caught hold in my loins; I couldn't
70
stop the rapturous sensations that were passing over
my shoulders and down my back, and even through my
legs.
Her eyes glowed above me, the flicker of her lids
more a sensation than a spectacle I could see with my
She lay against the very evidence of my desire. I
couldn't have hidden it. I hated her.
"Why? What for!" I said, tearing my mouth
71
loose. Her hair descended on both sides as she lifted
her head. I could scarcely breathe for the unearthly
pleasure.
"Get off me/' I said, "and go back into Hell. What
is this mercy to me! Why do this to me?"
"I don't know," she answered in her clever,
tremulous voice. "Maybe it's only that I don't want
you to die," she said, breathing against my chest. Her
infatuation of mind as well as body. On my
72
chest she climbed, and though she rode me, looking
down at me with exquisite smiling lips, she parted her
legs gently for me to enter her.
It seemed a delirious blending of elements, the wet
contracting secretive pocket between her legs and this
great abundance of silent eloquence pouring from her
gaze as she looked lovingly down at me.
Abruptly it stopped. I was dizzy. Her lips were
against my neck.
I tried with all my might to throw her off.
"I will destroy you," I said. "I will. I vow it. If
I have to chase you into the mouth of Hell," I
whispered. I strained against her grasp so hard that
my own flesh burned against hers. But she wouldn't
the fiend I'd seen in the firelight of my chapel,
needed no potions or spells to advance her cause. She
was flawless and intimately magnificent.
"Oh, yes," she confessed, her half-visible eyes
searching my face, "and I do find such beauty in you
it pulls on my heart/' she said. "Unfairly, unjustly
How am I to suffer this as well as all else?"
I struggled. I wouldn't answer. I wouldn't feed
this enigmatic and infernal blaze.
"Vittorio, get out of here," she said, lowering her
voice ever more delicately and ominously. "You have a
few nights, maybe not even that. If I come to you
again, I may lead them to you. Vittorio--. Don't tell
anyone in Florence. They'll laugh at you."
She was gone.
her left breast, just above the little nipple, made it
bleed.
"Witch!"
I rose up to grab hold of her, to kill her, and
instead felt her hand grasp my head, and there came
the pressure of her left breast into my very mouth,
irresistibly frail yet firm. Once again, all that was
real melted and was swept away like so much idle smoke
rising from a fire, and we were together in the meadow
which belonged only to us, only to our diligent and
indissoluble embraces. I sucked the milk from her, as
if she was maiden and mother, virgin and queen, all
the while I broke with my thrusts whatever flower
remained inside of her to be torn open.
I was let go. I fell. Helpless, unable even to
raise a hand to keep her from flying, I fell down,
weak and stupid onto the bed, my face wet and my limbs
trembling.
I couldn't sit up. I could do nothing. I saw in
flashes our field of tender white irises and red
irises, the loveliest flowers of Tuscany, the wild
Finally, shakily and with dim vision, I sat up. I
rubbed at my neck. Chills ran up and down my spine,
and the backs of my arms. My body was still full of
desire.
I squeezed my eyes shut, refusing to think of her
yet wanting anything, any source of stimulation, that
would soothe this awful need.
I lay back again, and was very still until this
carnal madness had left me.
I was a man again then, for not having been, at
random, a man.
I got up, ready for tears, and I took my candle
down to the main room of the Inn, trying not to make a
sound on the crooked winding stone stairs, and I got a
light from a candle there on a hook on the wall, at
the mouth of the passage, and I went back up, clinging
to this comforting little light, shielding the
shuddering flame with my cupped hand and praying
still, and then I set down the candle.
I climbed up and tried to see what I could from the
window.
Nothing, nothing but an impossible drop beneath me,
a sloping wall up which a flesh-and-blood maiden could
revenge as completely as I believed in her, this witch
whom I had touched with my very own fingers, who had
dared to kindle a wanton conflict in my soul, who had
come with her comrades of the night to slaughter my
family
I couldn't overmaster the images of the night
before, of her standing bewildered in the chapel door.
I couldn't get the taste of her off my lips. All I had
to do was think of her breasts, and my body would
weaken as if she were feeding my desire from her
nipple.
Make this subside, I prayed. You cannot run. You
cannot go off to Florence, you cannot live forever
with nothing but the memory of the slaughter you saw,
that is impossible, unthinkable. You cannot.
I wept when I realized that I wouldn't be alive now
if it had not been for her.
It was she, the ashen-haired one I was cursing with
every breath, who had stopped her hooded companion
from killing me. It would have been a complete
victory!
A calm came over me. Well, if I was going to die,
there was no choice, really. I would get them first. I
would somehow do it.
As soon as the sun was up, so was I, and walking
around the town, my saddlebags over my shoulder
casually, as if they didn't contain a fortune, I sized
It was a marvelously peaceful and prosperous town.
The forges were already at work, and so were the
cabinetmakers and also the saddlemakers; there were
several shoemakers dealing in some fine slippers as
well as the workaday boots, and quite a cluster of
jewelers and men who worked in a great variety of
precious metals, as well as the usual swordmakers, men
who made keys and the like and those who dealt in
hides and furs.
I passed more fancy shops than I could count. One
could buy fancy fabrics here, right from Florence, I
supposed, and lace from north and south it seemed, and
Oriental spices. The butchers were having a time of it
with the abundance of fresh meat. And there were many
wine shops, and I passed at least a couple of busy
notaries, letter writers and the like, and several
doctors or, rather, apothecaries.
Carts were rolling through the front gates, and
there was even a little crush in the streets now and
then before the sun was even high enough to come
fiercely down over the close-tiled roofs and hit the
bare stones on which I plodded uphill.
The churches rang their bells for Mass, and I saw
plenty of schoolchildren rushing past me, all rather
clean and neatly dressed, and then two little crews
being paraded by monks into the churches, both of
which were quite antique and had no ornament on the
front at all, save for statues deep in niches--saints
facades obviously having weathered the frequent
earthquakes of this region.
There were two rather ordinary bookshops that had
almost nothing much, except the prayer books one would
expect to find, and these at very high prices. Two
merchants sold really fine wares from the East. And
there was a cluster of carpet sellers, too, who dealt
in an impressive variety of country-made goods and
intricate carpets from Byzantium.
Lots of money was changing hands. There were well-
dressed people showing off their fine clothes. It
seemed a self-sufficient place, though there were
travelers coming uphill with the clop of horses'
hooves echoing on the barren walls. And I think I
spied one neglected and very much fortified convent.
I passed at least two more inns, and as I
crisscrossed through the barely passable alleyways
here and there, I ascertained that there were actually
three basic streets to the town, all running parallel
up and down the hill.
At the far deep end were the gates by which I had
entered, and the huge farmers' markets opened now in
the piazza.
At the high end was the ruined fortress or castle
where once the Lord had lived--a great cumbersome mass
of old stones, of which only a part was visible from
the street, and in the lower floors of this complex
there were the town's governing offices.
There were several small grottoes or piazzas,
79
busy, shuffling along with their market baskets and
their shawls in spite of the warmth; and I saw
beautiful young girls about giving me the eye, all of
them very young.
I didn't want any part of them.
As soon as Mass was over and school had begun, I
went to the Dominican church--the largest and most
impressive of the three I could readily see--and asked
at the rectory for a priest. I had to go to
Confession.
There came out a young priest, very handsome with
well-formed limbs and a healthy look to his complexion
and a truly devout manner to him, his black and white
robes very clean-looking. He looked at my attire, and
my sword, indeed he took me in very respectfully but
quite comprehensively, and obviously presuming me to
be a person of importance, invited me into a small
room for the Confession.
He was gracious more than servile. He had no more
than a crown of golden hair clipped very short around
the top of his bald head, and large almost shy eyes.
He sat down, and I knelt close to him on the bare
floor, and then out of me came the whole lurid tale.
With bowed head, I went on and on with it, rushing
from one thing to another, from the first hideous
happenings that had so stirred my curiosity and alarm,
to my father's fragmented and mysterious words and at
last to the raid itself and
80
word did I look up and realize that the young priest
was staring down at me in perfect distress and horror.
I didn't know what to make of his expression. You
could have seen the very same face on a man startled
by an insect or an approaching battalion of bloody
murderers.
What had I expected, for the love of God?
"Look, Father," I said. 'All you have to do is send
someone up that mountain and see for yourself!" I
shrugged, and implored him with my open hands. "That's
all! Send someone to look. Nothing's stolen, Father,
nothing's taken, but what I took! Go look! I'll wager
nothing has been disturbed except by ravens and
buzzards if such are like to go up there."
He said nothing. The blood was palpitating in his
young face, and his mouth was open and his eyes had a
dazed, miserable look.
Oh, this was too marvelous. A silky boy of a
priest, probably fresh out of the seminary used to
hearing nuns tell of evil thoughts, and men once a
year muttering resentfully about vices of the flesh
because their wives had dragged them to their duty
I became incensed.
81
assassins."
"No, no, no, Father," I pleaded, shaking my head.
"I saw her hand fall. I cut off the creature's hand, I
tell you. I saw her put it back. They were demons.
Listen to me. These are witches, these are from Hell,
these beings, and there's too many of them for me to
fight alone. I need help. There's no time for
disbelief. There's no time for rational reservations.
I need the Dominicans!"
He shook his head. He didn't even hesitate.
"You are losing your mind, son," he said.
"Something dreadful has happened to you, there's no
doubt of that, and you believe all this, but it didn't
happen. You are imagining things. Look, there are old
women around who claim they make charms..."
"I know all that," I said. "I know an ordinary
alchemist or witch when I see one. This was no side-
street magic, Father, no country bunch of curses. I'm
telling you, these demons slaughtered everyone in the
castle, in the villages. Don't you see?"
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"What is that?" I said coldly. I wanted to get
away. I had to find a monastery! Or a damned
alchemist. There were alchemists in this town. I could
find someone, someone who had read the old works, the
works of Hermes Trismegistus or Lactantius or St.
Augustine, somebody who knew about demons.
"Have you read St. Thomas Aquinas?" I asked,
choosing the most obvious demonologist of whom I could
think. "Father, he talks all about demons. Look, you
think I would have believed all this myself last year
at this time? I thought all sorcery was for backdoor
swindlers. These were demons!" I could not be
deterred. I went at him.
"Father, in the Summa Theologica, the first book,
St. Thomas talks of the fallen angels, that some of
them are allowed to be here on earth, so that
83
understand, I cannot do any of this without your
solemn permission."
"Yes, I know all that," I said. "What good will
this do? Let me see this Pastor."
Now I was being too haughty entirely, too
impertinent. I was exhausted. I was doing the old
Signore trick of treating a country priest like he was
a servant. This was a man of God, and I had to get a
grip on myself. Maybe the Pastor had read more,
understood more. Oh, but who would understand who had
not seen?
There came back to me a fleeting yet vivid and
84
This drew him out of his troubled ruminations. He
looked at me as if I'd startled him.
At once he gave his blessing and his absolution.
"You can do what you wish with the Pastor," I said.
"Yes, please, ask the Pastor if he will see me. And
here, for the church." I gave him several ducats.
He stared at the money. But he didn't touch it. He
stared at this gold as if it were hot coals.
85
"Father, take it. This is a tidy little fortune.
Take it."
"No, you wait here--or I tell you what, you come out
into the garden."
The garden was lovely, a little old grotto, from
which you could see the town sneaking up on the right
under the Seal of Confession. What are you going to do
if I don't leave?" I asked.
"I don't have to do anything, that's just it!" he
said. "Go away and take your misery with you." He
86
stopped, clearly at a loss, embarrassed perhaps, as if
he'd said something he regretted. He ground his teeth
and looked off and then back at me.
"For your own sake, leave/' he said in a whisper.
He looked at the other priest. "You go," he said, "and
let me talk to him."
The young priest was in a total fright. He left
immediately.
I looked up at the Pastor.
"Leave," he said to me in his low, mean voice, his
lower lip drawing back to reveal his lower teeth. "Get
crazy, you're imagining things. I'm trying to save you
from persecution and villainization."
I turned around at the door to the church and
glared him into utter silence.
"You've tipped your hand," I said. "You're too
merciless. Remember what I said. Break the Seal and
I'll kill you/'
He was as frightened now as the young priest had
been.
I stood looking at the altar for a long while,
ignoring him, forgetting him utterly, my mind
pretending to have thoughts in it, to be construing
and planning when all I could do was endure. Then I
made the Sign of the Cross and I left the church.
I was in utter despair.
For a while I walked around. Once again, it was
slightest evidence that this town somehow harbored the
demons, that Ursula had not found me here, but that I
had found her.
The mere thought of her overcame me with a cool,
inviting shock of desire. I saw her breasts, felt the
taste of her, saw in a blurred flash the flowered
meadow. No!
Think. Make some plan. As for this town, no matter
what the priest knew, these people were too wholesome
for harboring demons.
89
5
THE PRICE OF PEACE AND THE
PRICE OF VENGEANCE
AS the heat of the day started to really rise, I went
into the arbor of the Inn for the heavy noon meal and
sat down I by myself under the wisteria, which was
blooming magnificently over the latticework. This
place was on the same side of the town as the
me what was mine, whether I had kinsmen or not, but a
story of demons? I'd wind up locked up somewhere in
Florence!
And talk of the stake, of being burnt for a
sorcerer, that was entirely possible. Not likely. But
possible. It could happen very suddenly and
spontaneously in a town like this, a mob gathering,
denunciations by a local priest, people shouting and
running to see what was up. This did now and then
happen to people.
About this time, my meal was set out for me, a good
meal with plenty of fresh fruit and well-cooked mutton
and gravy, and as I started to dip my bread and eat,
up came two men who asked to sit down with me and buy
a cup of wine for me.
I realized one of them was a Franciscan, a very
kindly-looking priest, poorer it seemed than the
Dominicans, which was logical I suppose, and the other
an elderly man with little twinkling eyes and long
stiff white eyebrows, sticking up as if with glue, as
if he were costumed as a cheerful elf to delight
children.
think." I was talking with my mouth full, but I was
too hungry to stop. "Sit down, please." I started to
rise, but they sat down.
I bought another pitcher of red wine for the table.
"Well, you couldn't have found a finer place," said
the little old man, who seemed to have his wits about
him, "that is why I am so happy that God sent my own
son, back here, to serve in our church, so that he
could live out his days by his family."
"Ah, so you are father and son," I said.
"Yes, and I never thought I'd live so long," said
the father, "to see such prosperity come to this town
as has come. It's miraculous."
"It is, it is the blessing of God," said the priest
innocently and sincerely. "It's a true wonder."
"Oh, really, instruct me in this, how so?" I asked.
I pushed the plate of fruit to them. But they said
they had eaten.
"Well, in my time," said the father, "you know we
had more than our share of woes, or that's how it
seemed to me. But now? It's utter bliss, this place.
Nothing bad ever happens."
"It's true," said the priest. "You know, I remember
the lepers we had in the old days, who lived outside
the walls. They are all gone now. And then there were
always a few really bad youths, young men causing
people have returned to God with their whole hearts."
"Yes," said the old elfin man, shaking his head,
"and God has been merciful in so many other ways."
I felt chills on my back again, as I had with
Ursula, but it was not from pleasure.
"In what way is that, in particular?" I asked.
"Well, look around," said the old man. "Have you
seen any cripples in our streets? Do you see any half-
wits? When I was a child, why, when you, my son, were
a child"--he said to the priest-- "there were always a
few unfortunate souls, born ill formed, or without
good brains, you know, and one had to look out for
them. I can remember a time when there were always
beggars at the gates. We have no beggars, haven't had
any for years."
'Amazing," I said.
"Yes, true," said the priest thoughtfully.
"Everyone here is in good health. That's why the nuns
left so long ago. Did you see the old hospital shut
up? And the convent out of town, long abandoned. I
think there are sheep in there now. The farmers use
its old rooms."
"No one ever takes sick?" I asked.
"Well, they do," said the priest, taking a slow
drink of his wine, as though he were a moderate man in
this respect, "but they don't suffer, you know. It's
not like the old days. It seems if a person is like to
go, then he goes quickly."
"Yes, true, thanks be to God," said the elder.
'And the women," said the priest, "they are
lucky here in birth. They are not burdened with so
many children. Oh, we have many whom God calls home to
himself in the first few weeks--you know, it's the
curse of a mother--but in general, our families are
blessedly small." He looked to his father. "My poor
mother," he said, "she had twenty babies all told.
Well, that never happens now, does it?"
The little old man stuck out his chest and smiled
proudly. 'Aye, twenty children I reared myself; well,
many have gone their way, and I don't even know what
became of ... but never mind. No, families are small
here now."
The priest looked slightly troubled. "My brothers,
maybe someday God will grant me some knowledge of what
became of them."
"Oh, forget about them," said the old man.
"Were they a spirited bunch, might I ask?" I said
under my breath, peering at both of them and trying to
make it seem quite natural.
"Bad," muttered the priest, shaking his head. "But
that's our blessing, see, bad people leave us."
"Is that so?" I asked.
The little old man scratched his pink scalp. His
white hair was thin and long, sticking in all
directions, rather like the hair of his eyebrows.
"You know, I was trying to remember," he said,
"what did happen to those poor cripple boys, you
remember, the ones born with such miserable legs, they
were brothers ..."
"Oh, Tomasso and Felix," said the priest.
"Yes."
"They were taken off to Bologna to be cured.
remember, poor little child."
"Yes, yes, of course. We have several doctors."
"Do you?" I said. "I wonder what they do," I
murmured. "What about the town council, the
gonfalonier?" I asked. Gonfalonier was the name for
the governor in Florence, the man who nominally, at
least, ran things.
"We have a borsellino" said the priest, "and we
pick a new six or eight names out of it now and then,
but nothing much ever happens here. There's no
quarreling. The merchants take care of the taxes.
Everything runs smoothly."
The little elfin man went into laughter. "Oh, we
have no taxes!" he declared.
His son, the priest, looked at the old fellow as
though this was not something that ought to be said,
but then he himself merely looked puzzled. "Well, no,
Papa," he said, "it's only that the taxes are ...
small." He seemed perplexed.
"Well, then you are really blessed," I said
agreeably, trying on the surface to make light of this
utterly implausible picture of things.
'And that terrible Oviso, remember him?" the priest
suddenly said to his father and then to me. "Now that
was a diseased fellow. He nearly killed his son. He
was out of his mind, roared like a bull. There was a
traveling doctor who came through, said they would
cure him at Padua. Or was it Assisi?"
"I'm glad he never came back," said the old man.
"He used to drive the town crazy."
I studied them both. Were they serious? Were
95
"Oh, I know that's not quite the proverb."
"Don't tempt the Almighty!" said his father,
downing the dregs of his cup.
I quickly poured out the wine for both of them.
"The little mute fellow," said a voice.
I looked up. It was the innkeeper, with his hands
on his hips, his apron stretching over his potbelly, a
tray in his hand. "The nuns took him with them, didn't
they?"
"Came back for him, I think," said the priest. He
was now fully preoccupied. Troubled, I would say.
The innkeeper took up my empty plate.
"The worst scare was the plague," he whispered in
my ear. "Oh, it's gone now, believe you me, or I
wouldn't utter the word. There's no word that will
empty a town any faster."
"No, all those families, gone, just like that,"
said the old man, "thanks to our doctors, and the
visiting monks. All taken to the hospital in
Florence."
"Plague victims? Taken to Florence?" I asked, in
obvious disbelief. "I wonder who was minding the city
gates, and which gate it was by which they were
admitted."
The Franciscan stared at me fixedly for a moment,
as if something had disturbed him violently and
deeply.
The innkeeper gave the priest's shoulder a
96
loose jaw, and his deeply creased face looked sad
suddenly.
The very old man chimed in that there had been a
whole family down with the plague out in the country
not very long ago, but they had been taken to Lucca.
"It was the generosity of ... who was it, my son, I
don't..."
"Oh, what does it matter?" said the innkeeper.
"Signore," he said to me, "some more wine."
"For my guests," I gestured. "I have to be off.
Restless limbs," I said. "I must see what books are
for sale."
"This is a fine place for you to stay," said the
priest with sudden conviction, his voice soft as he
continued to gaze at me, his eyebrows knitted. 'A fine
place indeed, and we could use another scholar. But--."
"Well, I'm rather young myself," I said. I made
ready to rise, putting one leg over the bench. "There
are no young men here of my age?"
"Well, they go off, you see," said the elfin one.
"There are a few, but they are busy at the trades of
their fathers. No, the rapscallions don't hang around
here. No, young man, they do not!"
97
with you," he whispered.
I leant towards him. The innkeeper, seeing this
confidential manner, turned away and busied himself
somewhere else. The old elfin one was talking to his
cup.
"What is it, Father?" I asked in a whisper. "Is the
town too well-off, is that it?"
"Go on your way, son," he said almost wistfully. "I
wish I could. But I'm bound by my vow of obedience and
by the fact that this is my home, and here sits my
father, and all the others have vanished into the wide
world." He became suddenly hard. "Or so it seems," he
said. And then, "If I were you, I wouldn't stay here."
I nodded.
"You look strange, son," he said to me in the same
whisper. Our heads were right together. "You stand out
too much. You're pretty and encased in velvet, and
it's your age; you're not really a child, you know."
"Yes, I see, not very many young men in the
98
"Pray for me," I said. "That's all."
I saw in him a species of fear as real as that
which I had seen in the young priest, but it was even
more innocent, for all his age, and all his wrinkles,
and the wetness of his lips with the wine. He looked
fatigued by that which he couldn't comprehend.
I stepped free of the bench and was on my way when
he grasped my hand. I bent my ear to his lips.
"My boy," he said, "there's something... something
..."
"I know, Father," I said. I patted his hand.
"No, you don't. Listen. When you leave, take the
main road south, even if it's out of your way. Don't
go north; don't take the narrow road north."
"Why not?" I demanded.
99
went out the wide-open gates and into the open
country. The breeze was at once magnificent and
welcome.
All around me lay rich, well-tended fields,
vineyards, patches of orchard and farmhouses--lush and
fertile vistas which I couldn't see when I had come in
by darkness. As for the road north, I could see
nothing of it due to the immense size of the town,
whose uppermost fortifications were northward.
I could see, below on a ridge, what must have
100
been the ruins of the convent and, way down the
mountain and far off to the west, what might have been
Of course I couldn't hope to cover even one street
of the place, but I was determined to discover what I
could.
In the booksellers, I went through the old Ars
Grammatica and Ars Minor, and the big beautiful Bibles
that were for sale, which I could only see by asking
that they be taken out of the cabinets.
"How do I go north from here?" I asked the
101
bored man who leaned on his elbow and looked at me
sleepily.
"North, nobody goes north/' he said, and yawned in
my face. He wore fine clothes without a sign of
mending, and good new shoes of well-worked leather.
"Look, I have much finer books than that," he said.
me. She seemed tired and worn out. "You think it's
easy to take care of a sick child? Look in there."
102
I stared at her as if she'd lost her mind. But then
it dawned on me, clear and cold. I knew exactly what
she meant. I poked my head through a curtained doorway
and saw a child, feverish and sick, slumbering in a
dirty narrow bed.
"You think it's easy? Year after year she doesn't
get better," said the woman.
"I'm sorry," I said. "But what's to be done?"
The woman tore out her stitches and put down her
needle. She seemed past all patience. "What's to be
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looked at you. I mean God will be merciful. He's very
old/'
"Hmmm, I see," I said.
She looked at me with cold cunning eyes, as if they
were made of metal.
I bowed and went out. The old man had started to
take off his shirt again, and the other sister, who
had been silent all the time, slapped him.
I winced at it, and kept walking. I meant to see as
much as I could right now.
Passing through rather peaceful little tailors'
shops I came at last to the district of the porcelain
dealers, where two men were having an argument about a
fancy birthing tray.
Now, birthing trays, once used in practicality to
receive the infant as it came from the womb, had
become by my time fancy gifts given after the child
turned at once to snatch a handsome plate from the
shelf and pretend to be much impressed with it. "So
lovely/' I said, as if I hadn't heard them.
The merchant got up and started to extoll the
contents on display. The others melted into the
gathering evening outside. I stared at the man.
"Is the child sick?" I asked in the smallest most
childish voice that I myself could muster.
"Oh, no, well, I don't think so, but you know how
it is," said the man. "The child's smallish."
"Weak," I volunteered.
In a very clumsy way, he said, "Yes, weak." His
smile was artificial, but he thought himself quite
successful.
Then both of us turned to fussing over the wares. I
bought a tiny porcelain cup, very beautifully painted,
which he claimed to have bought from a Venetian.
I knew damned good and well I should leave without
a word, but I couldn't stop myself from asking him as
I paid, "Do you think the poor smallish weak child
and closed the doors, he said, "North, eh? Well, good
luck to you, my boy/' He gave a sour chuckle. "That's
an ancient road. You better ride as fast as you can
from sunup."
"Thank you, Sir/' I said.
Night was coming on.
I hurried into an alleyway and stood there, against
the wall, catching my breath as though someone were
chasing me. I let the little cup fall and it shattered
loudly, the noise echoing up the towering buildings.
I was half out of my wits.
But instantly and fully aware of my situation, and
convinced of the horrors I had discovered, I made an
inflexible decision.
I wasn't safe in the Inn, so what did this matter?
I was going to do it my way and see for myself.
This is what I did.
Without going back to the Inn, without ever
officially leaving my room in the Inn, I turned uphill
when the shadows were thick enough to cover me, and I
climbed the narrowing street towards the old ruined
castle.
Now all day I had been looking at this imposing
collection of rock and decay, and could see that it
was indeed utterly ruined and empty of all save the
birds of the air, except, as I have said, for the
Well, I made for the tower that overlooked the
town.
The government offices were shut up of course
already, and the curfew soldiers would soon be out,
and there was noise from only a couple of taverns that
obviously stayed open no matter what the law was.
The piazza before the castle was empty, and because
the three streets of the town took many a curve in
their way downhill, I could see almost nothing now but
a few dim torches.
The sky, however, was wondrously bright, clear of
all but the most rounded and discreetly shaped clouds,
very visible against the deeper blue of the night, and
the stars seemed exquisitely numerous.
I found old winding stairs, too narrow almost for a
human being, that curved around the useful part of the
old citadel and led up to the first platform of stone,
before an entrance to the tower.
Of course this architecture was no stranger to me
whatsoever. The stones were of a rougher texture than
those of my old home, and somewhat darker, but the
tower was broad and square and timelessly solid.
I knew that the place was ancient enough that I
would find stone stairways leading quite high, and I
did, and soon came to the end of my trek in a high
room which gave me a view of the entire town stretched
out before me.
There were higher chambers, but they had been
accessible in centuries past by wooden ladders that
could be pulled up, to defeat an enemy
and isolate him below, and I couldn't get to them. I
could hear the birds up there, disturbed by my
presence. And I could hear the breeze moving faintly.
However, this was fine, this height.
I had a view all around from the four narrow
windows of this place, looking in all directions.
And most especially, and important to me, I could
see the town itself, directly below me, shaped like a
great eye--an oval with tapered ends--with random
torches burning here and there, and an occasional
dimly lighted window, and I could see a lantern moving
slowly as someone walked in a leisurely pace down one
of the thoroughfares.
No sooner had I seen this moving lantern than it
went out. It seemed the streets were utterly deserted.
Then the windows too went dark, and very shortly
there were not four torches that I could see anywhere.
This darkness had a calming effect on me. The open
country sank into a deep dark tinge of blue beneath
the pearly heavens, and I could see the forests
encroaching on the tilled land, creeping higher here
and there, as the hills folded over one another or
sank steeply into valleys of pure blackness.
I could hear the total emptiness of the tower.
Nothing stirred now, not even the birds. I was
quite alone. I could have heard the slightest footfall
on the stairs down below. No one knew I was here. All
slept.
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What did I expect to see in this sleeping town?
Anything that happened in it.
Now, what did I think that was to be? I couldn't
have told anyone. But as I circled the room, as I
glanced again and again down at the few scattered
lights below and the hulk of the descending ramparts
beneath the glowing summer sky, the place seemed
loathsome, full of deceit, full of witchcraft, full of
payment to the Devil.
"You think I don't know where your unwanted babies
are taken?" I muttered in a rage. "You think that
people who are down with the plague are welcomed right
through the open gates of your neighboring cities?"
I was startled by the echoes of my own mur-murings
off the cold walls.
"But what do you do with them, Ursula? What would
you have done with my brother and sister?"
My ruminations were madness perhaps, or might have
seemed so to some. But I learnt this. Revenge takes
one's mind from the pain. Revenge is a lure, a mighty
molten lure, even if it is hopeless.
One blow from this sword and I can strike off her
head, I thought, and heave it out that window, and
then what will she be but a demon stripped of all
worldly power?
Now and then I half-drew my sword, then put
109
so much light, but as I narrowed my eyes and focused
my mind, I saw that this was out of the question.
There was no riotous glare on the few visible
clouds above, and the illumination, for all the
breadth of it, was contained as if it emanated from a
vast congregation gathered together with a fantastical
quantity of candles. How steady yet pulsing was this
orgy of fierce light!
I felt a chill in my bones as I looked at it. It
was a dwelling! I leant over the window edge. I could
see its complex and sprawling outline! It stood out
from all the land, this one luxuriantly lighted
castle, all by itself, and obviously visible from one
entire side of this town, this spectacle of forest-
shrouded house in which some celebration appeared to
require that every torch and taper be lighted, that
every window, battlement and coping be hung with
lanterns.
North, yes, north, for the town dropped straight
off behind me, and this castle lay north, and it was
that direction of which I'd been warned,
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but free of its gravity. Were they coming towards me?
Had I been charmed?
No, I saw this. Or did I?
There were dozens of them!
They were coming closer and closer.
They were tiny shapes, not large at all, the
largeness having been a delusion caused by the fact
that they traveled in packs, these things, and now, as
they came near to the town, the packs broke apart and
I saw them springing up to the very walls beyond me on
either side like so many giant moths.
I turned around and ran to the window.
They had descended in a swarm upon the town! I
could see them dip down and vanish in the blackness.
Below me on the piazza, there appeared two black
shapes, men in streaming capes, who
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His laughter filled the tower.
'Ah, but that does not hurt me, child, and if
you're so curious, well then, we'll take you too with
us to come and see what you long to see."
He caught me in a suffocating swaddle of fabric.
And suddenly I felt myself lifted off the floor,
encased in a sack, and I knew we had left the tower!
I was head down, sick to nausea. It seemed he flew,
carrying me on his back, and his laughter was now half
blown away by the wind, and I could not free my arms.
I could feel my sword, but couldn't reach the handle.
112
Desperately I felt for my dagger, not the one which
I must have dropped when I had been caught by him, but
113
moved, and swung the sword with one hand, clumsily,
but with all my force, hearing it smash into his side
with a sickening moist slosh of a sound. The gush of
blood in the bright light was horrific and monstrous.
114
There came his worst cry. He fell to his knees.
"Help me, you imbeciles; he's a devil!" he
screamed. His hood fell back.
I scanned the immense fortifications rising to my
right, the high crenelated towers with their
you're bloody dead!" I cried out. "You murderous
fiend, you're dead. Go get your head. Put that back
on!"
Ursula flung her arms around me, her breasts
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sealed against my back. Her hand imprisoned mine once
more and forced me to bow the tip of the sword to the
ground.
"Don't touch him," she screamed again, with a
threat in her voice. "Don't come near, I charge you."
One of the others had recovered the shaggy blond
head of my foe and held it up as the others watched
the body twitch and writhe.
"Oh, no, it's too late," said one of the men.
"No, put it back, put it on his neck," cried
"Bring them both," he called out. "Ursula, quiet
yourself, lest you frighten everyone."
I made a swift bid for freedom. She tightened her
grip. There came the pinprick of her teeth in my neck.
"Oh, no, Ursula, let me see what's to happen!" I
whispered. But I could feel the murky clouds rising
about me, as though the air itself had thickened and
was enfolding me with scent and sound and the sensuous
force.
Oh, love you, want you, yes, I did and can't deny
it. I felt myself holding her in the high moist
grasses of the field, and she lay beneath me, but
these were dreams and there were no wild red flowers,
and I was being taken somewhere, and she had but
which had all been taken from me. I nearly lost my
balance and fell backward.
The music was repetitive and dull and pounding as
it rose up from some faraway place below, with too
many muffled drums and the thin nasal whine of horns.
It had no melody.
I looked up. French, yes, the high narrow pointed
archway that led to a long balcony outside, below
which some great celebration was in noisy progress.
Fancy French, the tapestries of the ladies with their
tall cone-shaped hats, and their snow-white unicorns.
Quaint antique, like the illustrations in prayer
books of courts in which poets sat reading aloud the
boring and tedious Roman de la Rose, or the fables of
Reynard the Fox.
The window was draped in blue satin covered in the
fleurs-de-lys. There was old filigree crumbling about
white breasts bare almost to her nipples, beneath a
rich full little bodice of flowered red-and-gold
velvet.
At a desk, on an X-shaped chair, there sat the
Elderly one, his age quite true to the posture I had
glimpsed silhouetted against the castle light, and he
was pale as they, of the same deadly white complexion,
both beautiful yet awful and monstrous.
Turkish lamps hung on chains about the room, flames
glittering deep inside them, giving off a hurtful
light against my dazed eyes, and also a fragrance as
of roses and summer fields, something alien to heat
and burnt things.
The Elderly one had a bald head, as ugly as the
unearthed bulb of an iris, upended and shaved of all
root, and implanted with two gleaming gray eyes, and a
long narrow solemn uncomplaining and unjudging mouth.
'Ah, so," he said to me in a soft voice, lifting
one eyebrow, which was scarcely visible except for the
sharp arching wrinkle of his perfect white flesh. He
had thick slanting lines for cheeks. "You realize
you've killed one of us, don't you?"
On a great trestle-board table to my left lay the
dead blond thief who had hefted me body and soul into
his big cloth sack. Ah, the debt was paid in full.
He lay still, shrunken horridly, as if his limbs
had collapsed upon themselves, and his bloodless white
head, lids open on dark clotted eyes, lay against his
roughly torn neck. What a delight. I stared at one
skeletal hand of the being, which hung over the edge
of the table, white and like some shriveling creature
of the sea beneath a merciless sun on sand by the
oceanside.
'Ah, excellent," I said. "This man who dared to
abduct me and bring me here by force, quite dead,
thank you for the sight of it." I looked at the
Elderly one. "Honor demands nothing less. We don't
even have to talk of common sense, do we? And what
others did you take from the village? The wild old man
who tore at his shirt? The infant born small? The
weak, the infirm, the sick, whatever they'd give you,
and what do you give them in exchange?"
"Oh, do be quiet, young one," said the Elderly
solemn male. "You are courageous beyond honor or
common sense, that's plain enough."
"No, it isn't. Your sins against me demand I fight
"Well, you've very nearly got it right," said one
of the bearded soldiers in a deep bass of a voice. "We
are the Court of the Ruby Grail, that's our very name,
only we prefer that you say it properly in Latin or in
French, as we say it."
"The Court of the Ruby Grail!" I said. "Leeches,
parasites, blood drinkers, that's what you all are.
What is the Ruby Grail? Blood?"
I struggled to remember the prick of her teeth
against my throat without the spell which had always
come with them, but there it was, threatening to
swallow me, the drifting, fragrant memory of meadows
and her tender breasts. I shook myself all over.
"Blood drinkers. Ruby Grail! Is that what you do with
all of them, the ones you take? Drink their blood?"
The Elderly one looked pointedly at Ursula. "What
is it you're asking of me, Ursula?" he put the
question to her. "How can I make such a choice?"
"Oh, but Godric, he's brave and fine and strong,"
said Ursula. "Godric, if you but say yes, no one will
go against it. No one will question it. Please, I beg
you, Godric. When have I ever asked--."
'Asked for what?" I demanded, looking from her
solicitous and heartbroken face to the Elderly man.
"For my life? Is that what you ask? You'd better kill
me."
The old man knew that. I didn't have to tell him.
There was no way I could be given mercy at this
them again, seeking to bring down another or another.
Suddenly, as if quite angry and impatient, the
Elderly figure rose with surprising agility and
grabbed me by the collar as he swept past me in a
great graceful rustle of red robes, and dragged me
with him, as if I weighed nothing, out through the
archway and to the edge of the stone railing.
"Look down on the Court/' he said.
The hall was immense. The overhang on which we
stood ran all around, and below there was scarcely a
foot of bare stone, so rich were the hangings of gold
and burgundy. The long table below hosted a string of
Lords and Ladies, all in the requisite burgundy-red
cloth, the color of blood, not wine, as I had
believed, and before them glared the bare wood, with
not a plate of food nor a cup of wine, but all were
content and watching with cheerful eyes, as they
chattered, the dancers who covered the great floor,
dancing deftly on thick carpets as though they liked
this padding beneath their slippered feet.
There were so many interlocking circles of figures
moving to the throb and beat of the music that they
made a series of arabesques. The costumes embraced a
great nationality of styles, from the very French to
the modern Florentine, and everywhere there were gay
circles of red-dyed silk or the red field covered with
flowers or some other design which looked very like
stars or crescent moons, I could not quite see it.
It was a somber yet tantalizing picture, all of
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other witches and heretics.
I heard Ursula let out a little gasp. "Vittorio, be
wise," she whispered.
At her whisper, the man at the center of the table
below--he who held that very high-backed chair of
honor, which my father would have held at home--looked
up at me. He was blond-haired, blond as the shaggy one
I'd slain, but his long locks were pampered and silky
on his broad shoulders. His face was youthful, far
more so than my father's yet plenty older than my own,
and as inhumanly pale as all the rest, his searing
blue eyes fixing upon me. He returned at once to his
study of the dance.
The whole spectacle seemed to shiver with the hot
smoking quaver of the flames, and as my eyes watered,
I realized with a start that the figures worked into
the tapestry were not the quiet ladies and unicorns of
the small studious chamber from which we'd come, but
devils dancing in Hell. Indeed, there were quite
hideous gargoyles in the most violent and cruel style,
carved beneath the porch all around, on which we
stood, and I could see at the capitals of the
branching columns that held up the ceiling above us
more of the demonic and winged creatures carved into
the stone.
Grimaces of evil were emblazoned on the walls
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slightest opinion on the matter. "She wants us to
bring you into our Court as a reward for the fact that
you slew one of us, that is her logic."
His glance to me was thoughtful, cool. His hand on
my collar was neither cruel nor rough, merely simple.
I was a tempest of half-uttered words and curses,
when suddenly I realized I was falling.
In the Elderly one's grasp, I had fallen over the
rail, and in a second descended to the thick layers of
carpet below, where I was yanked to my feet, as the
dancers made way for us on either side.
We stood before the Lord in the high-backed chair,
and I saw that the wood figures of his regal throne
were, of course, animalian, feline and diabolical.
All was black wood, polished so that one could
smell the oil, and it mingled sweetly with the perfume
of all the lamps, and there came a soft crackling from
the torches.
The musicians had stopped. I couldn't even see
them. And then when I did, saw the little band quite
high up in their own little balcony or loft, I
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forearms and wrists. A huge chain of medallions hung
about his neck, each heavily worked circle of gold set
with a cabochon stone, a ruby, red as his clothing.
He held one slender naked hand curled on the table,
simply. The other I could not see. He gazed at me with
blue eyes. There was something puritanical and
scholarly about his bare hand, and the refinement and
cleanliness of it.
Across the thick overlapping carpets, Ursula came
with a quick step, holding her skirts in two dainty
hands. "Florian," she said, making a deep bow to the
Lord behind the table. "Florian, I am begging you for
this one, on account of character and strength, that
you bring him into the Court for my sake, for my
heart. It's as simple as that."
Her voice was tremulous but reasoning.
125
It was a beautiful voice, a voice of ringing
clarity and charm, tinged with the accent of the
French, which can in itself be so beguiling. It was
with a French restraint and regality that he expressed
himself.
He smiled at me, and his smile was gentle, as was
Ursula's smile, but not pitying, and not at all cruel
or sarcastic.
I had no eyes now for the other faces to the left
and the right of him. I knew only that there were
many, and some were men and some women, and the women
wore the stately French headdresses of
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stood.
The figures at the table might have been made of
china, so fixed they were. Indeed it seemed that the
very act of posing to perfection was inherently part
of their attentiveness.
"Oh, if I had but a crucifix," I said in a soft
voice, not even thinking about what I was saying.
"That would mean nothing to us," said the Lord
matter-of-factly.
"Oh, how well I know; your lady here came
127
into my very chapel to take my brother and sister
prisoner! No, crosses mean nothing to you. But it
would mean something to me just now Tell me, do I have
there are no guardian angels that I can see about you.
And we are always visible, as you know, for you have
seen us at our best and at our worst. No, not really
truly at our best, not at our finest."
"Oh," I said, "and for that I can't wait, my Lord,
128
for I am so in love with you all, and your style of
slaughtering, and there is of course the matter of
what your corruption has done to the town below and
how you've stolen the souls of the very priests
themselves."
"Hush, you work yourself into a mortal fever," he
said. "Your scent fills my nostrils as if the pot is
boiling over. I might devour you, child, cut you up
and give your pulsing parts up and down the table to
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But still the Lord remained unperturbed.
"Ursula," he said. "This can be considered/'
"No!" I cried out. "Never! Join you? Become one of
you?"
The Elder's hand held me powerless with clamped
fingers on my neck. I would only make myself foolish
if I struggled. Were he to tighten his grip, I would
be dead. And maybe that was best. Only I had more to
say:
"I will never, I won't. What? How dare you think my
soul so cheap you can have it for the asking!"
"Your soul?" asked the Lord. "What is your soul
that it does not want to travel centuries under the
inscrutable stars, rather than a few short years? What
and encroaches upon us, upon the forests which are
ours, so that we must be cunning where we would be
swift, and visible where we would be as the Gospel
'thief in the night/ "
"Why did you kill my father and my family!" I
demanded. I could keep silent no longer, I didn't care
how beguiling his eloquence, his soft purring words,
his charmed face.
"Your father and his father," he said, "and the
Lord before him--they cut down the trees that crowded
your castle. And so I must keep back the forest of
humans from mine. And now and then I must range wide
with my ax, and so I have, and so it was done. Your
father could have given tribute and remained as he
was. Your father could have sworn a secret oath that
required all but nothing of him."
"You can't believe he would have surrendered to you
our babes, for what, do you drink their blood or
sacrifice them to Satan on some altar?"
father live, as we let the stag live in the forest so
that it may breed with the doe. It's no more than
that."
'Are there any humans here?"
"None that can help you," he said simply
"No human guards by day?" I asked.
"No guards by day," he said, and for the first time
he smiled a little proudly. "You think we require
them? You think our small pigeon coop is not content
by day? You think we need human guards here?"
"I certainly do. And you're a fool if you think Td
ever join your Court! No human guards, when right
below is an entire village which knows what you are
and who you are and that you come by night and cannot
by day?"
He smiled patiently. "They are vermin," he said
quietly "You waste my time with those who are beneath
contempt."
"Hmm, you do yourself wrong with such a harsh
judgment. I think you have more love of them, in some
way or another, my Lord, than that!"
The Elder laughed. "Of their blood perhaps," he
said under his breath.
"You are fools if you do not think the townspeople
below will rise up and take this citadel by the light
of the day and open your hiding places!"
There was a rustling and noise throughout the great
hall, but no words, none at least that I could hear,
but it was as if these pale-faced monsters were
communing with each other by thought or merely
exchanging glances which made their ponderous and
beautiful garments shift and move.
"You are numb with stupidity!" I declared. "You
make yourselves known to the whole daylight world, and
you think this Court of the Ruby Grail can endure
forever?"
"You insult me," said the Lord. A bit of rosy color
came divinely and beautifully into his cheeks. "I ask
you with courtesy to be quiet."
"Do I insult you? My Lord, allow me to advise you.
You are helpless by day; I know you are. You strike by
night and only by night. All signs and words point to
it. I remember your hordes fleeing my father's house.
I remember the warning, 'Look at the sky/ My Lord, you
have lived too long in your country forest. You should
have followed my father's example and sent off a few
pupils to the philosophers and priests of the city of
Florence."
Ursula cried out under her breath, but I wouldn't
be stopped.
"You may have bought off the old generation of
idiots who run the town right now," I said, "but if
you don't think the worlds of Florence and Venice and
Milan are not moving in on you more fiercely than you
can ever prevent, you are dreaming. It's not men such
as my father who are a threat to you, my Lord. It's
the scholar with his books; it's the university
astrologers and alchemists who'll move in on you; it's
the modern age of which you know nothing, and they
will hunt you down, like some old beast of legend, and
drag you out of this lair in the heat of the sun and
cut off your heads, all of you--."
"Kill him!" There came a female voice from those
who watched.
"Destroy him now," said a man.
"He isn't fit for the coop!" screamed another.
"He's unworthy to be kept in the coop for a moment,
or even to be sacrificed."
Then a whole chorus let loose with demands for my
death.
"No," cried Ursula, throwing out her arms to the
Lord. "Florian, I beg you!"
"Torture, torture, torture," they began to chant,
first two and three and then four.
"My Lord," said the Elder, but I could scarce hear
his voice, "he's only a boy. Let us put him in the
coop with the rest of the flock. In a night or two he
won't remember his name. He'll be as tame and plump as
the others."
"Kill him now/' screamed one voice over all. And:
"Be done with him," cried others, their demands rising
ever louder in volume.
There came a piercing shout seconded at once: "Tear
him limb from limb. Now. Do it." "Yes, yes, yes!" It
was like the beat of battle drums.
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7
THE COOP
GODRIC, the Elder, shouted loudly for silence, right
at the moment that numerous rather glacial hands had I
tightened on my arms.
Now, once in Florence I had seen a man torn apart
by a mob. I'd been far too close for my own desire to
the spectacle, and had been nearly trampled in the
efforts of those who, like me, wanted to get away.
So it was no fantasy to me that such could happen.
I was as resigned to it as I was to any other form of
death, believing, I think, as powerfully in my anger
and my rectitude as I did in death.
But Godric ordered the blood drinkers back, and the
entire pallid-faced company withdrew with a courtly
grace that bordered upon the coy and the cloying,
heads bowed or turned to one side, as if a moment
before they had not been party to a rabble.
I kept my eyes fixed on the Lord, whose face now
showed such a heat that it appeared near human, the
blood pulsating in his thin cheeks, and
136
brown, and his blue eyes were filled with pondering
and concern.
"I say that he be put in with the others," said
Godric, the bald Elder.
At once, Ursula's sobs broke forth, as though she
could not restrain herself any longer. I looked over
to see her, her head bowed, her hands struggling to
completely shield her face, and, through the creases
of her long fingers, droplets of blood falling as
though her tears were made of it.
"Don't cry," I said, not even thinking about the
wisdom of it. "Ursula, you have done all you can. I am
impossible."
Godric turned and looked at me with one thickly
creased raised eyebrow. This time I was close enough
to see that his bald white head did have such hairs to
it, scant eyebrows of gray as thick and ugly as old
splinters.
Ursula brought up a rose-colored napkin from the
fold of her long high-waisted French gown, a pale pink
tissue of a thing stitched on the edges with green
leaves and pink flowers, and on this she wiped her
lovely red tears and looked at me, as if she were
crushed with longing.
"My predicament is impossible," I said to her.
"You've done all you can to save me. If I could, I
would put my arms around you to protect you from this
pain. But this beast here is holding me hostage."
There were outraged gasps and murmurs from
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a Prankish absurdity and delicacy to them, and of
course they were all demons.
The bald Elder, Godric, only chuckled.
"Demons," I said, "such a collection."
"The coop, my Lord," said Godric, the bald one.
"With the others, and then I may make my suggestions
to you in private, and with Ursula we shall talk. She
grieves unduly."
"I do!" she cried. "Please, Florian, if only
because I have never asked anything of this sort, and
you know it."
"Yes, Ursula," said the Lord, in the softest voice
which had issued from his lips yet. "I know that, my
loveliest flower. But this boy is recalcitrant, and
his family, when from time to time they had the
advantage over those of us who wandered from here to
hunt, destroyed those unfortunate members of our
tribe. It happened more than once."
"Marvelous!" I cried out. "How brave, how wondrous,
what a gift you give me."
The Lord was astonished and annoyed.
But Ursula hurried forward, in a flurry of dark
shadowy velvet skirts, and leaned over the polished
table to be close to him. I could see only her hair in
its long thick braids, twined exquisitely with red
velvet ribbons, and the shape of her gorgeous
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dress, suddenly appeared at my side, to assist Godric,
it seemed, in having me taken off.
Before I knew what was to befall me, a soft binding
of cloth was put over my eyes. I was sightless.
"No, let me see!" I cried out.
"The coop then, it is, very well," came the Lord's
voice, and I felt myself being taken away from the
room, fast, as if the feet of those who escorted me
scarcely needed to touch the floor.
The music rose again, in an eerie throb, but I was
mercifully being escorted away from it. Only Ursula's
voice accompanied me as I was carried up staircases,
my feet now and then bruised coarsely on the steps,
and the fingers that held me carelessly hurting me.
"Be quiet, please, Vittorio, don't struggle, be my
brave one now in silence."
'And why, my love?" I asked. "Why set your heart on
me? Can you kiss me without your stinging teeth?"
"Yes, and yes, and yes," she said in my ear.
139
We were high within the walls of the castle, that I
knew. And the courtyard itself was enclosed on all
four sides, and I could see as I looked up that the
walls were faced in white marble and there were
everywhere the narrow pointed twin-arched windows of
the French style. And above, the heavens had a bright
pulsing glow, fed no doubt by countless fluttering
torches on the roofs and abutments of the castle.
This was all nothing much to my eyes, except that
it meant escape was impossible, for the nearest
windows were far too high, and the marble too smooth
to be scaled in any physical way.
There were many tiny balconies overhanging above,
and they too were impossibly high. I saw the pale red-
clothed demons on those balconies looking down at me,
as though my introduction
140
peasant huts of mere straw, and open wooden shacks,
and little stone enclaves, and trellised gardens and
countless circuitous pathways.
It was a drunken labyrinth of a garden gone wild
under the naked night.
The fruit trees grew thick in clusters and then
broke open to reveal grassy places where people merely
lay staring at the stars, as if they were dozing,
though their eyes were open.
Myriad flowering vines covered wire enclosures that
seemed to have no purpose but to create some alcove of
privacy, and there were giant cages full of
141
fat birds, aye, birds, and cooking fires scattered
about--and big kettles simmering on beds of coals, from
Children, old women, the famed cripples who never
appeared in the town below, hunchbacks, and little
twisted bodies which had never grown to full size, and
big hulking men as well, bearded and swart, and boys
my age or older-- all of them shuffling about or lying
about, but dazed, and crazy, and looking up at us, and
blinking and pausing as though our presence should
142
mean something though they could not make out what.
I swayed on the landing, and Ursula held my arm. I
felt ravenous as the heavy fumes filled my nostrils.
Hunger, hunger such as I'd never known. No, it was a
pure thirst for the soup, as though there were no food
that was not liquid.
Suddenly the two gaunt and aloof men who had not
left us--they who had blindfolded me and dragged me
143
the jagged thorny branches of the blooming orange
trees, where fruit hung still, as though none of these
swollen, lethargic souls needed such a fresh and
bright thing as an orange.
The Lords took up a stance on either side of this
first kettle, and each, extending a right hand,
slashed his right wrist with a knife which he held in
his left hand, and let the blood flow copiously into
the brew.
A weak happy cry rose from those humans gathering
meekly around them.
"Oh, damnable, it's the blood, of course," I
brought me back to the castle had been rude huntsmen.
How well it was all thought out, but this, my narrow-
shouldered love, with her soft yielding arms and her
shining tear-stained face, was a pure Lady, was she
not?
"Vittorio, I want so badly for you not to die."
"Do you, dearest?" I said. I had my arms around
her. I could no longer stand without this support.
My vision was fading.
Yet with my head against her shoulder, my eyes
directed to the crowd below, I could see the human
beings surrounding the kettles and dipping their cups
into the brew, dipping their cups right where the
blood had fallen, and then blowing on the hot liquid
to cool it before they drank.
your night to give; give in honor of our new
acquisition."
Ursula seemed shamed by all of this, and held me
gently with her long fingers. I looked into her eyes.
"I'm drunk, drunk merely from the fragrance."
"My blood is only for you now," she whispered.
"Give it to me then, I hunger for it, I'm weak to
dying," I said. "Oh, God, you've brought me to this.
No, no, I did it myself."
"Sshhh, my lover, my sweet," she said.
Her arm coiled about my waist, and there came just
under my ear her tender lips sucking on the flesh, as
if she meant to make a pucker there on my neck, warm
it with her tongue, and then the prick of her teeth.
I felt ravaged, and with both hands in a fantasy I
reached out for her figure as we ran together through
the meadow which belonged only to us and to which
these others could never be admitted.
"Oh, innocent love," she said even as she drank
ing cooling dream of blue skies and tender breaking
stems, to turn and go to her. But out of the corner of
my eyes, I beheld something of such splendor and
magnificence that my soul leapt.
"Look, yes, you see!"
My head fell back. The dream was gone. The high
white marble walls of the prison castle rose above my
hurting gaze. She held me and stared down at me,
bewildered, her lips bloody.
She hoisted me in her arms. I was as helpless as a
child. She carried me down the stairs, and there was
nothing I could do to rouse my limbs.
It seemed all the world above was tiny figures
ranging on balconies and battlements and laughing and
pointing with their tiny outstretched hands, so dark
against the torches all around them.
Blood red, smell it.
"But what was it; did you see it in the field?" I
asked her.
"No!" she cried. She looked so frightened.
I lay on a heap of hay, a makeshift bed, and the
poor underfed demon peasant boys stared stupidly down
at me with bloodshot eyes, and she, she wept, her
hands again to her face.
"... time for the Mass."
"You won't take him tonight."
"Why are they crying?" I asked. "Listen, Ursula,
they've all started crying."
One of the scrawny boys stared right into my eyes.
He had a hand on the back of my neck and a warm cup of
brew to my mouth. I didn't want it to slop down my
chin. I drank and drank. It filled my mouth.
"Not tonight," came Ursula's voice. Kisses on my
forehead, on my neck. Someone snatched her away. I
felt her hand hold tight to mine, then I felt her
pulled away.
"Come now, Ursula, leave him."
"Sleep, my darling," she cried in my ear. I felt
her skirts brushing me. "Vittorio, sleep."
The cup was thrown aside. Stupidly, in utter
intoxication I watched the contents spill and sink
darkly into the mounded hay. She knelt before me, her
mouth open and tender and luscious and red.
She took rny face in her cool hands. The blood
poured out of her mouth and into mine.
"Oh, love," I said. I wanted to see the field. It
didn't come. "Let me see the field! Let me see it!"
But there was no meadow, only the shocking sight of
her face again, and then a dimming light, a gathering
embrace of darkness and sound. I could no longer
fight. I could no longer speak. I could no longer
When next I opened my eyes, it was morning. The sun
hurt me, and my head ached unbearably.
A man was on top of me, trying to get my clothes
off me. Drunken fool. I turned over, dizzy and sick,
sick to vomiting, and threw him off, and with a sound
blow knocked him senseless.
I tried to get up but I couldn't. The nausea was
intolerable. All around me others slept. The sun hurt
my eyes. It scalded my skin. I snuggled into the hay.
The heat beat down on my head, and when I ran my own
fingers through my hair, my hair felt hot. The pain in
my head throbbed in my ears.
"Come into the shelter," a voice said. It was an
old crone, and she beckoned to me from beneath a
thatched roof. "Come in, where it's cool."
"Curse you all," I said. I slept. I drifted.
Sometime during the late afternoon I came to my
senses.
I found myself on my knees near one of the kettles.
I was drinking in a slovenly wretched manner from a
bowl of brew. The old woman had given it to me.
"The demons," I said. "They are asleep. We can . .
. we can ..." but then the futility of it overcame me.
I wanted to throw away the cup, but I drank the hot
brew.
"It's not just blood, it's wine, it's good wine,"
said the old woman. "Drink it, my boy, and feel no
pain. They'll kill you soon enough. It's not so
terrible."
When it was dark again, I knew it.
I rolled over.
I could fully open my eyes, and they did not hurt
as they had in the day
I knew that I had lost the whole arc of the sun in
this drugged and stupid and disastrous languor. I had
fallen into their plans. I had been helpless when I
should have been trying to rouse these useless ones
around me to mutiny. Good God, how could I have let it
happen! Oh, the sadness, the dim distant sadness ...
And the sweetness of slumber.
"Wake, boy/'
A demon voice.
"They want you tonight."
"Oh, and who wants me for what?" I asked. I looked
up. The torches were alight. All was twinkling and
glowing, and there came the soft rustle of green
leaves overhead--the sharp sweet smell of the orange
trees. The world was woven of dancing flames above and
the entrancing patterns of the black leaves. The world
was hunger and thirst.
The brew simmered, and that scent blotted out all
else. I opened my mouth for it, though there was none
of it near me.
"I'll give it to you," said the demon voice. "But
sit up. I must clean you up. You must look good for
tonight."
"For what?" I said. "All of them are dead."
"Who?"
"My family."
"There is no family here. This is the Court of the
Ruby Grail. You are the property of the Lord of the
Court. Now, come, I have to prepare you."
"For what do you prepare me?"
"Get up, boy. They'll want you. It's almost midnight."
"No, no, not almost midnight, no!" I cried out.
"No!"
"Don't be afraid," he said, coldly, wearily. "It's
useless."
"But you don't understand, it's the loss of time,
the loss of reason, the loss of hours during which my
heart beat and my brain slept! I'm not afraid, you
miserable demon!"
He held me flat to the hay. He washed my face.
"There, there, you are a handsome fine one. They
always sacrifice those such as you right away. You're
too strong, too fine of limb and face. Look at you,
and the Lady Ursula dreaming of you and weeping for
you. They took her away."
'Ah, but I was dreaming too ..." I said. Was I
talking to this monstrous attendant as though he and I
were friends? Where was the great magnificent web of
my dreams, the immense and luminous majesty?
"You can talk to me, why not?" he said. "You will
die in rapture, my pretty young Lord," he said. 'And
you'll see the church all alight, and the Mass; you'll
be the sacrifice."
"No, I dreamed of the meadow," I said. "I saw
something in the meadow. No, it wasn't Ursula." I was
talking to myself, to my own sick bedeviled mind,
talking to my wits to make them listen. "I
151
"It's the clock, striking the third quarter of the
hour. It's almost time for the Mass. Don't pay
attention to the noise. It's the others who'll be
sacrificed. Don't let it unnerve you. Just so much
common weeping."
152
HAD NEVER SEEN IT
HAD ever a chapel been more beautiful? Had ever white
marble been used to such an advantage, and from which
I fount of eternal gold had come these glorious
curlicues and serpentine adornments, these high-
pointed windows, illuminated from without by fierce
fires that brought into the perfection of jewels their
tiny thick facets of tinted glass to form their solemn
narrow and seemingly sacred pictures?
But they were not sacred pictures.
I stood in the choir loft, high above the
vestibule, looking down over the great nave and at the
altar at the far end. Once again I was flanked by
ominous and regal Lords, who seemed now to be
absolutely fervent in their duty as they held me firm
and standing by the arms.
My mind had cleared, but only somewhat. The wet
cloth was once again pressed to my eyes and forehead.
The water was as if from a mountain stream of flowing
melted snow.
153
Paintings covered the cove behind the altar. Demons
dancing in Hell, graceful among the flames as though
they bathed in a welcome radiance, and strung above
them on loose and unfurling banners the golden letters
from St. Augustine's words, so familiar to my study,
that these flames were not the flames of real fire but
only the absence from God, but the word "absence" had
been replaced by the Latin word for "freedom."
"Freedom" was the word in Latin worked into the
high white marble walls, in a frieze that ran beneath
the balconies on either side of the church, on the
same level as this, my place, in which more of the
Court beheld the spectacle.
Light rose to flood the high-groined arches of the
roof.
And what was this spectacle?
The high altar was draped in crimson trimmed in
gilt fringe, its abundant cloths short enough to
reveal the tableau in white carving of figures
154
less grotesque about the Crucified God if He Himself
had been there.
My guards held me firm. Had I tottered?
From the assemblage around me and behind me, from
those whom I had not even regarded, there came
suddenly the muted roll of drums, ominous and slow,
mournful and beautiful in their own muffled
simplicity.
At once there followed a deep-throated chorus of
horns, in lovely weaving song and effortless sweet
intermingling, playing not the repetitious chord music
of the night before, but a strong plaintive and
imploring polyphony of melodies so sad that they
flooded my heart with sadness, stroked my heart and
made the tears nearly spring to my eyes.
Oh, what is this? What is this blended and rich
155
This music alone might have engaged me, filled my
soul, its threads of melody interweaving, overlapping,
harmonizing and then drifting apart. It left me no
breath to speak or eyes for other things. Yet I beheld
the statues of the demons who ran from right to left--
so like the Lords and Ladies of the Courtly table of
last night--from the imposing figure of their Devil.
Were they blood drinkers all, these terrible gaunt
saints of Hell, carved from hardwood with its own
reddish mahogany glint, in their stark stylized
garments, cleaving to thin bodies, their eyes half-
lidded, their mouths open, and against each
156
lower lip two white fangs, as if made from tiny bits
and devout kiss, and into their bodies, by the will of
God, they shall take my life's blood, my rapture, my
soul's ascent through their own, so as better to know
both Heaven and Hell in their Dark Service."
The reed organ played its solemn song.
Into the Sanctuary of the church, there pro-
157
ceeded now, to the fullest most lustrous strength of
the polyphony yet, a stream of priestly figures.
I saw the Lord Florian in a rich red chasuble as if
he were the bishop of Florence himself, only this
garment bore the Cross of Christ impudently upside
down in honor of the Damned One, and on his untonsured
took their positions ranked down the long marble
Communion Rail.
Once again, there rose the magnificent chorus of
voices around me, falsettos mingling with
158
true sopranos and the throbbing basses of the males,
as redolent of the woodlands as the wooden horns, and
beneath it all the heavy driving brass declaration.
What did they mean to do? What was this hymn which
now the tenors sang, and what was the answer that came
from all the voices so close to me, the words in Latin
unstrung and only incoherently enveloping me:
"Lord, I am come into the Valley of Death; Lord, I
am come to the end of my Sorrow; Lord, in thy
deliverance I give life to those who would be idle in
159
guard beside me. "Watch, for what you see here you
will never see between Heaven and Earth again, and as
you will go unconfessed to God, you will burn in
darkness forever."
He sounded as if he believed it.
"You have no power to damn my soul," I whispered,
trying in vain to clear my eyes, not to so love the
weakness that still caused me to depend upon their
clamping hands.
"Ursula, farewell," I whispered, making of my lips
a kiss.
But in this miraculous and private little moment,
seemingly unnoticed by the whole congregation, I saw
her head shake in a small secretive negation.
No one saw because all eyes were now on another
spectacle, far more tragic than any of the controlled
and modulated ritual we had beheld.
dreamed, and once again came the bright green
limitless meadow to my eyes, and once again, as Ursula
ran from me, as her spirited young form rushed across
the high breaking field of grass and lilies, there
rose another figure, another familiar figure--.
"Yes, I see you!" I cried out to this vision in my
half-rescued dream.
But no sooner had I recognized it, locked to it,
than it vanished; it was gone, and with it was gone
all comprehension of it, all memory of its exquisite
face and form and its meaning, its pure and powerful
meaning. Words fled from me.
From below I saw the Lord Florian look up, angered,
silent. The hands beside me dug into my flesh.
"Silence," said the guards next to me, their
commands overlapping one another.
The lovely music rose higher and higher, as though
the climbing soprano voices and the throbbing, winding
horns would hush me now and pay tribute only to the
unholy baptism.
The baptism had begun. The first victim, an ancient
from their backs, to see them washed and then
delivered to stand trembling along the stretch of
marble balustrade.
It happened very fast.
"Cursed animals, for that is what you are, not airy
demons, no!" I muttered, struggling in the grasp of
the two loathsome minions. "Yes, cowardly minions,
both of you, to be a party to this evil."
The music drowned out my prayers. "Dear God, send
my angels to me," I said to my heart, my secret heart,
"send my wrathful angels, send them with your fiery
sword. God, this cannot be borne."
The Communion Rail now had its full complement of
victims, naked and trembling all, and blazing with
carnal human color against the luminous marble and the
colorless priests.
The candles flickered on the giant Lucifer, with
its great webbed wings, who presided over all.
The Lord Florian now stepped down to take the first
Communicant in his hands, and lowered his lips to
drink.
The drums beat fierce and sweet, and the voices
twined and reached to Heaven. But there was no Heaven
here beneath these branching white columns, these
groined arches. There was nothing but death.
All the Court had begun to make two streams along
they wanted, and some shared, and one victim was
passed from one to another, and so on it went, this
mockery, this lurid, predatory Communion.
Only Ursula did not move.
The Communicants were dying. Some were already
dead. None struck the floor. Their pliant dried-up
limbs were captured silently and deftly by the
attendant demons, and bodies were whisked away.
More victims were still being bathed. Others were
taken to the Rail. On it went.
The Lord Florian drank again and again, one child
after another put before him, his slender fingers
capturing the small neck and holding it as he bent his
lips.
I wonder what Latin words he dared to speak.
Slowly the members of the Court slipped out of the
Sanctuary, moving down the side aisles again to pivot
and take their old stance. They had had their fill.
All through the room the color of blood infused
once pallid faces, and it seemed to my misted vision,
to my head so full of the loveliness of song, that
they all were human now, human for this little while.
"Yes," said Florian, his voice arching out soft and
sure to my ears over the length of the nave. "Human
now for this one instant, with the blood of the
living, incarnated again, we are, young prince. You
have understood it."
'Ah, but Lord," I said, in my exhausted whisper, "I
do not forgive it."
An interval of silence fell. Then the tenors
declared:
"It is time, and the midnight hour is not
finished."
The sure and tight hands in which I was held
focused me now to the side. I was spirited out of the
choir loft and down the winding screw stairs of white
marble.
As I came to myself, still supported, staring up
the center aisle, I saw that only the baptistry fount
remained. All victims were gone.
But a great cross had been brought into the hall.
It had been positioned upside down, to one side of the
altar, and forward, at the Communion Rail.
The Lord Florian held up for me to see five huge
iron nails in his hand, and beckoned for me to come.
The cross was anchored into place, as though it had
often been brought to this spot. It was made of rich
hardwood, thick, heavy and polished smooth, though it
bore the marks of other nails, and no doubt the stains
of other blood.
The very bottom of it fitted right at the Railing
itself against the marble banister, so that he who was
to be crucified would be three feet above the floor
and visible to all the worshippers.
"The worshippers, you filthy lot!" I laughed. Thank
God and all his angels that the eyes of my father and
mother were filled with celestial light and could see
nothing of this crude degradation.
The Elder revealed to me in his outstretched hands
two golden goblets.
164
grew immense behind the glittering pontifical figure
of Florian. My feet did not touch the marble. All
around me the members of the Court turned to attend my
progress, but never so much that their eyes were not
upon their Lord.
Before the baptismal fount my face was washed.
I tossed my head, twisting my neck, throwing the
water impudently on those who tried to bathe me. The
acolytes were in fear of me. They approached and
reached hesitantly for my buckles.
"Strip him," said the Lord, and once again he held
up the nails for me to see.
"I see well enough, my cowardly Lord," I said. "It
is nothing to crucify a boy such as me. Save your
soul, Lord, do that! And all your Court will wonder."
The music swelled from the loft above. The chorus
came again, answering and underscoring the anthem of
the tenors.
There were no words for me now; there was only
candlelight and the knowledge that my clothes were
about to be taken from me, and that this horror would
take place, this evil inverted crucifixion, never
sanctified by St. Peter himself, for the inverted
cross not now to be a symbol of the Evil One.
165
immense long red veil that hung to her feet, and threw
it out so that it descended like a cloud of red around
her. Beside her, an acolyte appeared with my very
sword in his hand, and my daggers.
Once again the tenor voices implored:
"One soul released to go forth into the world, mad,
and bearing witness only to the most patient ears to
the power of Satan."
The chorus sang, a riot of melody erupting from
them, and it seemed a swift affirmation had overtaken
their song.
"What, not to die!" I said. I strained to see the
face of the Lord in whose hands all of this rested.
But he was blocked from my view.
Godric the Elder had come between. Opening the gate
of the marble Communion Rail with his knee, he moved
down the aisle towards me. He thrust one of his golden
cups to my lips.
"Drink and forget, Vittorio, else we lose her heart
and her soul."
166
down my throat. I saw my sword lifted before my
closing eyes as if it were a cross, the long hilt, the
handles.
Soft mocking laughter rose and blended with the
magical and indescribable beauty of the choir.
Her red veil swirled about me. I saw the red fabric
rise up in front of me. I felt it come down around me
like a spellbinding shower, full of her perfume, soft
with her tenderness.
"Ursula, come with me ..." I whispered.
Those were my last words.
"Cast out," cried the swelling voices above. "Cast
out. . ." cried the huge choir, and it seemed the
Court sang with the chorus, "Cast out," and my eyes
closed as the red fabric covered my face, as it came
down like a witch's web over my struggling fingers and
sealed itself over my open mouth.
The horns blared forth the truth. "Forgiven! Cast
out!" sang the voices.
"Cast out to madness," whispered Godric in my
167
their words, its delirious hymn growing ever more
tremendous in my half-slumber.
(A fool to wander the world in contempt," said
Godric.
Blinded, sealed in the softness of the veil,
intoxicated by the drink, I could not answer them. I
think I smiled. Their words were too senselessly
mingled with the sumptuous soothing voices of the
choir. And fools that they were, they had never known
that what they said simply had not mattered.
'And you could have been our young prince." Was it
Florian at my side? Cool, dauntless Florian. "We could
have loved you as she loves you."
"A young prince," said Godric, "to rule here with
us forever."
168
169
tormented painter, his apprentices would know me. He
would not, but the helpers who had seen me weep that
day at his work. And then, then, these men would take
me to the house of Cosimo in the Via del Largo.
170
"Fee, fee?" they said. They repeated my clumsy
attempts at speech. I had failed again.
I started towards the workshop. I staggered and
almost fell. These were honest men. I had the heavy
bags over my right shoulder, and my sword was clanking
against me, practically throwing me off balance. The
care for him."
"No, no, no, I need to talk to Cosimo!" I shouted.
Again, they shrugged and shook their heads.
171
Suddenly I stopped. I rocked and steadied myself by
rudely grabbing hold of the younger man's shoulder.
I stared at the distant workshop.
The street was no more than an alleyway here,
barely sufficient for horses to pass and for the
pedestrians not to be injured, and the stone facades
all but closed out the slate-gray sky above. Windows
were opened, and it seemed that a woman could reach
across upstairs and touch the house opposite her.
I knew the rolled curls of the one, whose head was
crowned with a wreath of small perfectly matched
flowerlets, his loose mantle crimson, his undergarment
a bright clear sky blue trimmed in gold.
And the other, I knew him as well, knew his bare
head and soft shorter hair, and his golden collar, and
the insignia on his mantle, and the thick bands of
ornament on his wrists.
But above all I knew their faces, their innocent
pink-tinged faces, their serene full yet narrow eyes.
The light melted down, somber and stormy still,
though the sun was burning up there behind the gray
sky. My eyes began to water.
"Look at their wings," I whispered.
panels, the yawning mouth beyond which the work was
carried out.
The other angel shook his head somberly. "I don't
go along with it," he said in the most serene and
lilting voice. "We can't go that far. Do you think
this doesn't make me weep?"
"What?" I cried out. "What makes you weep?"
Both angels turned. They stared at me. In unison,
they collected their dark, multicolored and spectacled
wings close to themselves, as though they meant to
shrink thereby into invisibility, but they were no
less visible to me, shining, both so fair, so
recognizable. Their eyes were full of wonder as they
gazed at me. Wonder at the sight of me?
"Gabriel!" I cried out. I pointed, "I know you, I
know you from the Annunciation. You are both Gabriel,
I know the paintings, I have seen you, Gabriel and
appeared light, near translucent, as though the fabric
were not of a natural weave any more than their
incandescent skin was natural. All of their makeup was
more rarefied, and fine-woven with light.
Beings of air, of purpose, made up of presence and
of what they do--were these the words of Aquinas coming
back to me, the Summa Theologica on which I had learnt
my Latin?
Oh, how miraculously beautiful they were, and so
safely apart from all around them, standing transfixed
in the street in their quiet wide-eyed simplicity,
pondering as they gazed with compassion and interest
at me.
One of them, the one crowned with flowers, the one
who wore the sky-blue sleeves, the one who had so
caught my heart when I had seen him in the
Annunciation with my father, the one with whom I had
fallen in love, moved towards me.
He became larger as he drew closer, taller,
slightly larger all over than an ordinary being, and
so full of love in the soundless shuffle of his loose
Florentine street, oblivious to the men who could not
see him as he stood now so close to me, letting his
wings spread out and then folding them again tight, so
that I only saw the high feathered bones of them above
his shoulders, which were sloped like those of a young
boy
His face was brilliantly clean and flushed with all
the radiant color Fra Filippo had painted. When he
smiled, I felt my entire body tremble violently with
unadulterated joy
"Is this my madness, Archangel?" I asked. "Is this
their curse come true, that I shall see this as I
gibber and incur the scorn of learned men?" I laughed
out loud.
I startled the gentlemen who had been trying so
much to help me. They were thoroughly flustered.
"What? Speak again?"
But in a shimmering instant, a memory descended
upon me, illuminating my heart and soul and mind all
in one stroke, as though the sun itself had flooded a
dark and hopeless cell.
"It was you I saw in the meadow, you I saw when she
drank my blood."
Into my eyes he looked, this cool collected angel,
with the rows and rows of immaculate blond curls and
the smooth placid cheeks.
"They can't see us," said the angel to me simply.
Again came his smooth easy smile. His eyes caught the
light falling from the brightening sky as he peered
into me, as if he would see deeper with every moment
of his study
"I know/' I answered. "They don't know!"
"But I am not Gabriel, you must not call me that,"
he said very courteously and soothingly. "My young
one, I am very far from being the Archangel Gabriel. I
am Setheus, and I'm a guardian angel only." He was so
patient with me, so patient with my crying and with
the collection of blind and concerned mortals around
us.
He stood close enough for me to touch, but I didn't
dare.
"My guardian angel?" I asked. "Is it true?"
"No," said the angel. "I am not your guardian
angel. Those you must somehow find for yourself.
You've seen the guardian angels of another, though why
and how I don't know."
"Don't pray now," said the old man crankily. "Tell
us who you are, boy. You said a name before, your
father, tell us."
The other angel, who stood as if too shocked to
move, suddenly broke his reserve and he too came
forward in the same silent barefooted style, as though
the roughened stones and the wet and dirt could not
'And you, you are in the other painting, I know you
too, I love you with my whole heart," I said.
"Son, to whom are you speaking?" demanded the
younger man. "Whom do you love with your whole heart?"
"Ah, you can hear me?" I turned to the man. "You
can understand me."
"Yes, now tell me your name."
"Vittorio di Raniari," I said, "friend and ally of
the Medici, son of Lorenzo di Raniari, Castello
Raniari in the north of Tuscany, and my father is
dead, and all my kinsmen. But--."
The two angels stood right before me, together, one
head inclined towards the other as they regarded me,
and it seemed that the mortals, for all their
blindness, could not block the path of the angels'
vision or come between me and them. If only I had the
courage. I so wanted to touch them.
The wings of the one who'd spoken first were
rising, and it seemed a soft shimmer of gold dust fell
from the awakening feathers, the quivering, sparkling
feathers, but nothing rivaled the angel's meditative
and wondering face.
"Let them take you to San Marco," said this angel,
the one named Setheus, "let them take you. These men
mean well, and you will be put in a cell and cared for
by the monks. You cannot be in a finer place, for this
is a house under Cosimo's patronage, and you know that
Fra Giovanni has decorated the very cell in which
you'll stay."
angel with the simplest shrug, looking wonder-ingly at
his companion. Nothing characterized their faces so
much as subdued wonder.
"But you," I said, "Setheus, may I call you by
name, you'll let them take me away from you? You
can't. Please don't leave me. I beg you. Don't leave
me."
"We have to leave you," said the other angel. "We
are not your guardians. Why can't you see your own
angels?"
"Wait, I know your name. I can hear it."
"No," said this more disapproving angel, waving his
finger at me as if correcting a child.
But I would not be stopped. "I know your name. I
heard it when you were arguing, and I hear it now when
I look at your face. Ramiel, that's your name. And
both of you are Fra Filippo's guardians."
"This is a disaster," whispered Ramiel, with the
most touching look of distress. "How did this occur?"
Setheus merely shook his head, and smiled again
generously. "It has to be for the good, it must be. We
have to go with him. Of course we do."
"Now? Leave now?" demanded Ramiel, and again, for
all the urgency, there was no anger. It was as though
the thoughts were purified of all lower emotions, and
of course it was so, it was perfectly so.
Setheus leaned close to the old man, who couldn't
of course either see him or hear him, and he said in
the old man's ear:
"Take the boy to San Marco; have him put in a
our charge; how can we do such a thing without
permission?"
"It's meant to be. This is permission. I know that
it is," said Setheus. "Don't you see what's happened?
He's seen us and he's heard us and he's caught your
name, and he would have caught mine if I hadn't
revealed it. Poor Vittorio, we are with you."
I nodded, almost ready to weep at the sound of
myself addressed. The whole street had gone drab and
hushed and indistinct around their large, quiet and
flushed figures, the finespun light of their garments
stirring about them as if the celestial fabric were
subject to the invisible currents of the air which men
cannot feel.
"Those are not our real names!" said Ramiel
scoldingly to me, but gently, as one would scold an
infant.
Setheus smiled. "They are good enough names by
which to call us, Vittorio," he said.
"Yes, take him to San Marco," said the man beside
me. "Let's go. Let the monks handle all this."
The men rushed me towards the mouth of the street.
"You'll be very well cared for at San Marco," said
Ramiel, as though he were bidding me farewell, but the
two angels were moving beside us, and only falling a
little behind.
180
our pace.
'All right/' said Setheus. "Don't worry so, Vitto-
rio. We're coming."
"We can't simply leave our charge like this for
another man, we can't do it," Ramiel continued to
protest.
"It's God's will; how can it be otherwise?"
'And Mastema? We don't have to ask Mastema?" asked
Ramiel.
"Why should we ask Mastema? Why bring care to
Mastema? Mastema must know."
And there they were, arguing again, behind us, as I
was hurried through the street.
The steel sky gleamed, then grew pale and gave way
above to blue as we came to an open piazza. The sun
shocked me, and made me sicken, yet how I wanted it,
how I longed for it, and yet it rebuked me and seemed
to scourge me as if it were a whip.
We were only a little ways from San Marco. My legs
would soon give out. I kept looking over my shoulder.
The two lustrous, gilded figures came on, silently,
with Setheus gesturing for me to go along.
"We're here, we're with you," said Setheus.
"I don't know about this, I don't know!" said
Ramiel. "Filippo has never been in such trouble, he
181
said the old man, shaking his head as he escorted me
along, the young madman in his charge with the
clanking sword.
"My boy, be quiet now," said the other man, who
took the larger burden of supporting me. "We can
understand you only too well now, and you are making
less sense than ever, talking to people that no one
can see and hear."
"Fra Filippo, the painter, what's happening with
him?" I demanded. "There's some trouble."
"Oh, it is unbearable," said the angel Ramiel
behind me. "It is unthinkable that this should happen.
And if you ask me, which no one has and no one will, I
believe that if Florence were not at war with Venice,
Cosimo de' Medici would protect his painter from
this."
"But protect him from what?" I demanded. I looked
into the eyes of the old man.
"Son, obey me," said the old man. "Walk straight,
and stop banging me with that sword. You are a great
Signore, I can see this, and the name of
182
to the great painter?"
I turned, and the two angels suddenly covered their
faces, as tenderly as ever Ursula had covered hers,
and they started weeping. Only their tears were
marvelously crystalline and clear. They merely looked
at me. Oh, Ursula, I thought with excruciating pain
suddenly, how beautiful are these creatures, and in
what grave do you sleep beneath the Court of the Ruby
Grail that you cannot see them, cannot see their
silent secret progress through the city streets?
"It's true," said Ramiel. "It's all too terribly
true. What have we been, what sort of guardians, that
Filippo has gotten himself into this trouble, that he
is so contentious and deceiving, and why have we been
so helpless?"
"We are only angels," said Setheus. "Ramiel,
183
We had come to San Marco. We stood in the Piazza
San Marco right before the doors of the monastery,
which were flush with the street, as was the case with
all such buildings in Florence, as if the Arno never
overflowed its banks, which it did. And I was glad,
oh, so glad to see this haven.
But my mind was rampant. All memories of demons and
horrid murder had been swept clean from me in an
instant by the horror that the artist whom I cherished
most in all the world had been put on the rack like a
common criminal.
"He sometimes ... well," said Ramiel, "behaves like
a common ... criminal."
"He'll get out of it, he'll pay a fine," said the old
184
man. He rang the bell for the monks. He patted me with
a long, tired, dry hand. "Now stop crying, child,
digested wine and blood.
The whole horror of the Court of the Ruby Grail
seemed manifest in this moment. Hopelessness seized
me, and I heard the whisper of demons in my ear,
witless and scorned, and I doubted all that Td seen,
all that I was, all that had transpired only moments
before. In a dreamy woodland, my father
185
and I rode together and we talked of Filippo's
paintings, and I was a student and a young lord and
had all the world before me, and the strong good smell
of the horses filled my nostrils with the smell of the
woods.
"Let them take you inside, and then you must sleep a
natural sleep, and when you wake we'll be with you."
"Oh, but it's a horror, a story of horrors," I
whispered. "Filippo never painted such horrors."
186
"We are not painted things," said Setheus. "What
God has in store for us we will discover together, you
and Ramiel and I. Now you must go inside. The monks
are here. Into their care we give you, and when you
wake we will be at your side/'
"Like the prayer," I whispered.
"Oh, yes, truly," Ramiel said. He raised his hand.
I saw the shadow of his five fingers and then felt the
silken touch of his fingers as he closed my eyes.
10
IN WHICH I CONVERSE WITH
THE INNOCENT AND POWERFUL
SONS OF GOD
WOULD sleep and deeply, yes, but not until much later.
certain sublime ways in which no other monastery was.
As all Florence knew, Cosimo had lavished a fortune
on San Marco, maybe to make up for all the money he
made by usury, for as a banker he was a taker of
interest and therefore a usurer, but then so were we
who had put money in his bank.
Whatever the case, Cosimo, our capo, our true
leader, had loved this place and given to it many many
treasures, but most of all perhaps its marvelously
proportioned new buildings.
His detractors, the whiners, the ones who do
nothing great, and suspect all that isn't in a state
of perpetual disintegration, they said of him, "He
even puts his coat of arms in the privies of the
monks/'
His coat of arms, by the way, is a shield with five
protuberant balls on it, the meaning of which has been
the name of God shall I say to these people in this
House of God?
No sooner had that thought popped out of my sleepy
head and, I fear, my drugged and sleepy mouth, than I
heard Ramiel's laugh in my ear.
I tried to see if he was at my side. But I was
blubbering and sick again, and dizzy, and could make
out only that we had entered the most tranquil and
pleasing cloister.
The sun so burnt my eyes that I couldn't thank God
yet for the beauty of the square green garden in the
center of this place, but I could see very starkly and
sweetly the low rounded arches created by Michelozzo,
arches which created gentle colorless and humble
vaults over my head.
And the tranquillity achieved by the pure columns,
with their small rolled Ionic capitals, all of this
added to my sense of safety and peace. Proportions
were always the gift of Michelozzo. He opened up
things when he built them. And these wide spacious
Trying desperately not to heave up my guts again, I
relaxed all my limbs as I saw this Florentine
enclosure.
Down around the cloister, down around the burning
hot garden, the large monk, a bear of a man, beaming
down at me in habitual and inveterate kindness,
carried me in his burly arms, while there came others
in their flowing black and white robes, with thin
radiant faces seeming to encircle us even in our rapid
progress. I couldn't see my angels.
But these men were the nearest to angels that the
world provides.
I soon realized--due to my former visits to this
great place--that I was not being taken to the hospice,
where drugs were dispensed to the sick of Florence, or
to the pilgrims' refuge, which was always swarming
with those who come to offer and pray, but up the
stairs into the very hall of the monks' cells.
In a glaze of sickness in which beauty brought a
catch in my throat, I saw at the head of the stairway,
spread out on the wall, the fresco of Fra Giovanni's
Annunciation.
My painting, the Annunciation! My chosen favorite,
the painting which meant more to me than any other
thought. Try not to remember her soft fingers being
pulled loose from you, you fool, you drunken fool, try
not to remember her lips and the long thick kisslet of
blood slipping into your own open mouth.
"Look at it!" I cried out. I pointed one flopping
arm towards the painting.
"Yes, yes, we have so many/' said the big smiling
bear of a monk.
Fra Giovanni was of course the painter. Who could
have not seen it in one glance? Besides, I knew it.
And Fra Giovanni--let me remind you one more time that
this is Fra Angelico of the ages-- had made a severe,
soothing, tender but utterly simple Angel and Virgin,
steeped in humility and devoid of embellishments, the
visitation itself taking place between low rounded
arches such as made up the very cloister from which we
had just come.
As the big monk swung me around to take me down the
broad corridor--and broad it was, and so polished and
austere and beautiful to me--I tried to form words as I
carried the image of the angel in my mind.
I wanted to tell Ramiel and Setheus, if they were
still with me, that look, Gabriel's wings had only
simple stripes of color, and look, how his gown fell
in symmetrical and disciplined folds. All of this I
saw them in the street and in the paintings. But you
see in the painting by Fra Giovanni, the halo is flat
and surrounds the painted face, a disk hard and golden
right on the field of the painting
The monks laughed. "To whom are you speaking, young
Signore Vittorio di Raniari?" one of them asked me.
"Be quiet, child," said the big monk, his booming
bass voice pushing against me through his barrel of a
chest. "You're in our tender care. And you must hush
now, see, there, that's the library, you see our monks
at work?"
They were proud of it, weren't they? Even in our
progress when I might have vomited all over the
immaculate floor, the monk turned to let me see
through the open door the long room crowded with books
and monks at work, but what I saw too was Michelozzo's
vaulted ceiling, again, not soaring to leave us, but
bending gently over the heads of the monks and letting
a volume of light and air rise above them.
It seemed I saw visions. I saw multiple and triple
figures where there should only be one, and even in a
flash a misty confusion of angelic wings, and oval
faces turned, peering at me through the veil of
supernatural secrecy.
"Do you see?" was all I could say. I had to get to
that library, I had to find texts in it that defined
the demons. Yes, I had not given up! Oh, no, I was no
babbling idiot. I had God's very own angels at my
assistance. I'd take Ramiel and Setheus in there and
We know, Vittorio, wipe the pictures from your
mind, for we see them.
"Where are you?" I cried out.
"Quiet," said the monks.
"But will you help me go back there and kill them?"
"You're babbling," said the monks.
Cosimo was the guardian patron of that library.
When old Niccolo de' Niccoli died, a marvelous
collector of books with whom I had many times spoken
at Vaspasiano's bookshop, all of his religious books,
and maybe more, had been donated by Cosimo to this
monastery.
I would find them in there, in that library, and
find proof in St. Augustine or Aquinas of the devils
with which I'd fought.
No. I was not mad. I had not given up. I was no
gibbering idiot. If only the sun coming in the high
little windows of this airy place would stop baking my
eyeballs and burning my hands.
"Quiet, quiet," said the big monk, smiling still.
"You are making noises like an infant. Hhhhh. Burgle,
gurgle. Hear? Now, look, the library's busy. It's open
to the public today. Everybody is busy today."
He turned only a few steps past the library to take
me into a cell. "Down there . . ." he went on, as if
cajoling an unruly baby. "Only a few steps away is the
Prior's cell, and guess who is there this very minute?
It's the Archbishop."
"Antonino," I whispered.
"Yes, yes, you said it right. Once our own
Antonino. Well, he's here, and guess why?"
smoothed back my hair.
This was a clean large cell. Oh, if the sun would
only stop. What had those demons done to me, made me
into a half-demon? Dare I ask for a mirror?
Set down on a thick soft bed, in this warm, clean
place, I lost all control of my limbs. I was sick
again.
The monks attended me with a silver basin. The
sunlight pierced brilliantly upon a fresco, but I
couldn't bear to look at the gleaming figures, not in
this hurtful illumination. It seemed the cell was
filled with other figures. Were they angels? I saw
transparent beings, drifting, stirring, but I could
catch hold of no clear outline. Only the fresco burned
into the wall in its colors seemed solid, valid, true.
"Have they done this to my eyes forever?" I asked.
I thought I caught a glimpse of an angelic form in the
doorway of the cell, but it was not the figure of
either Setheus or Ramiel. Did it have webbed wings?
Demon wings? I started in terror.
But it was gone. Rustling, whispering. We know.
"Where are my angels?" I asked. I cried. I told out
the names of my father and his father, and of all the
di Raniari whom I could remember.
"Shhhhh," said the young monk. "Cosimo has been
told that you are here. But this is a terrible day. We
remember your father. Now let us remove these filthy
clothes."
195
fount? No. I saw the fresco, the holy figures, dimly,
and more immediately the real live monks who
surrounded me on their knees on the stone, their big
sleeves rolled back as they washed me in the warm,
sweet-scented water.
"Ah, that Francesco Sforza . . ." they spoke in
Latin to one another. "To charge into Milan and take
possession of the Dukedom! As if Cosimo did not have
enough trouble, without Sforza having done such a
thing/'
"He did it? He has taken Milan?" I asked.
"What did you say? Yes, son, he has. He broke the
peace. And your family, all your poor family murdered
by the freebooters; don't think they'll go unpunished,
rampaging through that country, those damned Venetians
..."
"No, you mustn't, you must tell Cosimo. It was not
an act of war, what happened to my family, not by
human beings ..."
"Hush, child."
Chaste hands sponged the water over my shoulders. I
sat slumped against the warm metal back of the tub.
196
danger had passed.
"I am not mad!" I said clearly
"No, not at all, only grief-stricken."
"You understand me!"
"You are tired."
"The bed is soft for you, brought specially for
you, hush, don't rave anymore."
"Demons did it," I whispered. "They weren't
soldiers."
"I know, son, I know. War is terrible. War is the
Devil's work."
No, but it wasn't war. Will you listen to me?
Hush, this is Ramiel at your ear; didn't I tell you
to sleep? Will you listen to us? We have heard your
thoughts as well as your words!
I lay down on the bed flat on my chest. The monks
brushed and dried my hair. My hair was so long now.
Unkempt, country Lord hair. But this was an immense
comfort to be bathed and gentlemanly clean.
197
robes. His hands were so clean. "You are in a special
cell. Cosimo has sent men to bury your dead."
"Thanks be to God," I said.
"Yes."
So now I could speak!
"They are still talking down there, and it's late,"
said the monk. "Cosimo is troubled. He'll stay the
night here. The whole city is filled with Venetian
agitators stirring up the populace against Cosimo."
"Now hush," said another monk who appeared
suddenly. He bent down and lifted my head to place
another thick pillow beneath it.
What bliss this was. I thought of the damned ones
imprisoned in the coop. "Oh, horrors! It's night, and
they're waiting for the horrible Communion."
198
The thin monk with the remarkably scrubbed hands
knelt by me. He smoothed my forehead. 'And the
beautiful sister, the sister who was to be married, is
she too ... ?"
"Bartola! She was to be married? I didn't know.
Well, he can have her head for a maidenhead." I wept.
"The worms are at work in the dark. And the demons
dance on the hill, and the town does nothing."
"What town?"
"You're raving again," said a monk who stood beyond
the candles. How distinct he looked,
199
A strange thought came to me. It rung in my
consciousness with the clarity of a golden bell. I
myself possessed no guardian angels! My angels had
left me; they had departed, because my soul was
damned.
I had no angels. I had seen Filippo's because of
the power the demons had given me, and because of
something else. Filippo's angels argued so much with
each other! That's how I had seen them. Some words
came to me.
200
They came back to me from Aquinas, or was it
painting of different incidents, in sequence, and
above, Christ was standing in His same smooth and
multiwrinkled pink robes, but here He was agitated, as
agitated as Fra Giovanni could make Him, and Christ
had lifted His left hand, as if in wrath.
The figure who fled from Him was the Devil! It
201
was a horrid creature with the webbed wings I thought
Td glimpsed earlier, and it had hideous webbed feet.
It had dewclaws on its webbed feet. Sour-faced and in
a dirty gray robe, it fled from Christ, who stood firm
in the Desert, refusing to be tempted, and, only after
this confrontation, then had the ministering angels
unnatural. To what can I compare it? It was not foul
like urine; it was like water that is full of minerals
and metal and will leave a chalk on you and choke you.
It was bad!
202
I put it aside. Very well then. Time to study. Time
to take up the candles, which I now did.
I went out of the cell. The hall was empty and
glowing in the pale light that came from tiny windows
over the low-ceilinged cells.
I turned to my right and approached the doors of
the library. They were unlocked.
I entered with my candelabra. Once again, the
tranquillity of Michelozzo's design brought a warmth
to me, a faith in all things, a trust. Two rows of
arches and Ionic columns moved down the center of the
203
stand here forever, dreaming, near to things of the
mind, and things of the soul, and far away in memory
from the wretched enchained town on its cursed
mountain and the castle nearby, which at this very
moment probably gave forth its ghastly, ugly light.
Could I discern the order of this wealth of books?
The very cataloger of this library, the very monk
who had done the work here, the very scholar, was now
the Pope of all Christendom, Nicholas V
I moved along the shelves to my right, holding high
204
had thought it so very fascinating and funny and so
much poppycock. Oh, what a fool Td been.
I took down the hefty fat volume, number nine of
the text, slipping it into the crook of my arm, moved
to the first desk and then carefully placed the
candelabra in front of me, where it would light me but
throw no shadows under my fingers, and I opened the
book.
"It's all here!" I whispered. "Tell me, St.
Augustine, what were they so that I may convince
Ramiel and Setheus that they must help me, or give me
the means to convince these modern Florentines, who
care about nothing right now but making war with paid
soldiers on the Serene Republic of Venice up north.
Help me, Saint. I'm telling you."
Ah, Chapter Ten, of Volume Nine, I knew this . ..
lived there with them forever. Evil, evil. Well, this
is proof, and I have it here, and I can show it to the
monks!"
I read on, skimming to find the kernels that would
make my case grow. Down to Chapter Eleven:
Apuleius says also that the souls of men are demons.
On leaving human bodies they become lares if they have
shown themselves good, if evil, lemures or larvae.
"Yes, lemures. I know this word. Lemures or larvae,
and Ursula, she said to me that she had been young,
young as me; they were all human and now they are
lemures/'
According to Apuleius, larvae are malignant demons
created out of men.
I was overcome with excitement. I needed parchment
and pens. I had to note the place. I had to mark down
what I had discovered and go on. For the next point
was obviously to convince Ramiel and Setheus that they
had gotten into the biggest--.
My thoughts were brought to an abrupt halt.
Behind me, a personage had come into the library. I
heard a heavy footfall, but there was a muffled
quality to it, and a great darkening occurred behind
I turned slowly and looked over my shoulder.
'And why do you choose the left?" asked this
personage.
He rose up before me, immense and winged, peering
down at me, his face luminous in the flicker of the
candles, his eyebrows gently raised but straight so
that there was no arch to them to make them anything
but severe. He had the riotous golden hair of Fra
Filippo's brush, curling beneath a huge red battle
helmet, and behind him his wings were heavily sheathed
in gold.
He wore a suit of armor, with the breastplates
decorated and the shoulders covered with immense
buckles, and around his waist was a blue sash of silk.
His sword was sheathed, and on one lax arm he wore his
shield, with its red cross.
I had never seen his like.
"I need you!" I declared. I stood up, knocking the
bench back. I reached out so that it would not clatter
to the floor. I faced him.
"You need me!" he said in muted outrage. "You do!
You who would lead off Ramiel and Setheus from Fra
Filippo Lippi. You need me? Do you know who I am?"
It was a gorgeous voice, rich, silken, violent and
piercing though deep.
"You have a sword," I said.
"Oh, and for what?"
have gleaned from your feverish mind. Of course I
know. You need me, you say, and Fra Filippo Lippi lies
in bed with a whore who licks his aching joints, and
one in particular that aches for her!"
"Such talk from an angel," I said.
"Don't mock me, I'll slap you," he said. His wings
rose and fell as if he were sighing with them, or
gasping rather, at me in umbrage.
"So do it!" I said. My eyes were feasting
fiendishly on his glistering beauty, on the red silk
cloak that was clasped just below the bit of tunic
that showed above his armor, at the solemn smoothness
of his cheeks. "But come with me to the mountains and
kill them," I implored him.
"Why don't you go yourself and do it?"
"Do you think I can?" I demanded.
His face went serene. His lower lip gave the
smallest most thoughtful pout. His jaw and neck were
powerful, more powerful by far than the anatomy of
Ramiel or Setheus, who seemed more youths, and this
their splendid elder brother.
"You are not the Fallen One, are you?" I asked.
"How dare you!" he whispered, waking from his
slumber. A terrible frown broke over him.
"Mastema, then, that's who you are. They said your
name. Mastema."
He nodded and sneered. "They would, of course, say
my name."
"Which means what, great angel? That I can call on
you, that I have the power to command you?" I turned
"Put down that book!" he said impatiently yet
coolly. "There is an angel standing before you, boy;
look at me when I speak to you!"
(Ah, you speak like Florian, the demon in that
far castle. You have the same control, the same
modulation. What do you want of me, angel? Why did you
come?"
He was silent, as if he couldn't produce an answer.
Then, quietly, he put a question to me. "Why do you
think?"
"Because I prayed?"
"Yes," he said coldly. "Yes! And because they have
come to me on your account."
My eyes widened. I felt light fill them up. But the
light didn't hurt them. A soft cluster of sweet noises
filled my ears.
On either side of him there appeared Ramiel and
Setheus, their milder, gentler faces focused on me.
Mastema raised his eyebrows again as he looked down
at me.
"Fra Filippo Lippi is drunk," he said. "When he
wakes up, he'll get drunk again until the pain stops."
"Fools to rack a great painter," I said, "but then
you know my thoughts on that."
'Ah, and the thoughts of all the women in
Florence," said Mastema. 'And the thoughts of the
great ones who pay for his paintings, if their minds
were not on war."
"Yes," said Ramiel, glancing imploringly to
Mastema. They were of the same height, but Mastema
209
didn't turn, and Ramiel came forward some, as if to
catch his eye. "If they weren't all so carried away
with war."
"War is the world," said Mastema. "I asked you
before, Vittorio di Raniari, do you know who I am?"
I was shaken, not by the question, but that the
three had now come together, and that I stood before
them, the only mortal being, and all the mortal world
around us seemed to sleep.
Why had no monk come down the passage to see who
whispered in the library? Why had no Watchman of the
night come to see why the candles floated along the
passage? Why the boy murmured and raved?
Was I mad?
It seemed to me quite suddenly and ludicrously that
if I answered Mastema correctly, I would not be mad.
This thought brought from him a small laugh,
neither harsh nor sweet.
Setheus stared at me with his obvious sympathy.
Ramiel said nothing but looked again to Mastema.
"You are the angel," I said, "whom the Lord gives
permission to wield that sword." There came no
response from him. I went on. "You are the angel who
slew the firstborn of Egypt," I said. No response.
"You are the angel, the angel who can avenge."
He nodded, but only really with his eyes. They
closed and then opened.
210
"God has given me no leave to punish these demons
of yours. Never has God said to me, 'Mastema, slay the
vampires, the lemures, the larvae, the blood drinkers/
Never has God spoken to me and said, 'Lift your mighty
sword to cleanse the world of these/ "
"I beg you," I said. "I, a mortal boy, beg you.
Kill these, wipe out this nest with your sword."
"I can't do it."
"Mastema, you can!" declared Setheus.
Ramiel spoke up. "If he says he cannot, he cannot!
Why do you never listen to him?"
"Because I know that he can be moved," said Setheus
without hesitation to his compatriot. "I know that he
can, as God can be moved."
Setheus stepped boldly in front of Mastema.
"Pick up the book, Vittorio," he said. He stepped
forward. At once the large vellum pages, heavy as they
were, began to flutter. He put it in my hand, and
marked the place with his pale finger, barely touching
the thick black crowded writing.
I read aloud:
And therefore God who made the visible marvels of
Heaven and Earth does not disdain to work visible
miracles in Heaven and Earth, by which
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from me to guard it from my tears.
A noise had penetrated our small circle. Monks had
come. I heard them whispering in the corridor, and
then the door swung open. Into the library they came.
I cried, and when I looked up I saw them staring at
me, two monks whom I didn't know or didn't remember,
had never known.
"What is it, young man? Why are you here alone
crying?" the first spoke.
"Here, let us take you back to bed. We'll bring you
something to eat/'
"No, I can't eat it," I said.
"No, he can't eat it," said the first monk to the
other. "It still makes him sick. But he can rest." He
looked at me.
I turned. The three radiant angels stood silently
staring at the monks who could not see them, who had
no clue that the angels were there!
"Dear God in Heaven, please tell me," I said.
212
that he must have anything he desired."
"Go on, leave him now," said Setheus softly.
"Hush," said Ramiel. "Let Mastema tell them."
I was too flooded with sorrow and happiness to
respond. I covered my face, and when I did so I
thought of my poor Ursula, forever with her demon
Court, and how she had wept for me. "How could that
be?" I whispered into my own fingers.
"Because she was human once, and has a human
heart," said Mastema to me in the silence.
The two monks were hurrying out. For one moment the
collection of angels was as sheer as light, and I saw
through them to the two retreating figures of the
monks who closed up the doors as they left.
Mastema looked at me with his still, powerful gaze.
"One could read anything into your face," I said.
213
those awful wretched prisoners, and you must stand
before the townsmen, or let loose that crippled flock
and flee."
"I understand."
"We can move the stones away from their sleeping
places, can't we?" asked Setheus. He put up his hand
to hush Ramiel before Ramiel could protest. "We'll
have to do it."
"We can do that," said Mastema. "As we can stop a
beam from falling on Filippo's head. We can do that.
But we cannot slay them. And you, Vittorio, we cannot
make you go through with it, either, if your nerve or
your will fails."
"You don't think the miracle of my having seen you
will uphold me?"
214
discourses of Scripture.
"Don't read those words to me; they don't help me!"
I said. "Can she be saved? Can she save her soul? Does
she possess it still? Is she as powerful as you are?
Can you Fall? Can the Devil come back to God?"
He put down the book with a swift, airy movement
that I could scarcely follow.
'Are you ready for this battle?" he asked.
"They'll lie helpless in the light of day," said
Setheus to me. "Including her. She too will lie
215
endow them with color or splendor or individuality,
and they had no garments or motion to them or anything
that I could love.
"What is it? Why won't they speak to me? Why do
they look at me that way?"
"They know you," said Ramiel.
"You're full of vengeance, and desire," said
Setheus. "They know it; they have been at your side.
They have measured your pain and your anger."
216
"Good God, these demons killed my family!" I
declared. "Do you know the future of my soul, any of
you?"
"Of course not," said Mastema. "Why would we be
here if we did? Why would any of us be here if it were
ordained?"
again that I would do it, yes, I would do it, I would
do it.
'At dawn," said Mastema, "the monks will have fresh
clothes laid out for you, a suit of red velvet,
217
and your weapons freshly polished, and your boots
cleaned. All will be finished by then. Don't try to
eat. It's too soon, and the demon blood is still
churning in you. Prepare yourself, and we will take
you north to do what has to be done in the light of
day."
218
with it all of a peaceful evening long by the fire. My
daggers were ready.
I climbed out of the bed and dropped down to my
knees in prayer. I made the Sign of the Cross.
219
"God, give me the strength to send in your hands
those who feed on death."
It was a whisper in Latin.
One of the monks touched me on the shoulder and
smiled. Had the Great Silence not yet ended? I had no
idea. He pointed to a table where there was food laid
out for me--bread and milk. The milk had foam on the
top of it.
I nodded and smiled at him, and then he and his
companion made me a little bow and went out.
220
and length, but having no time to ask for a barber to
cut it shorter than my shoulders. At least it was long
enough, and had been for a while, to stay back over my
shoulders and off my forehead. It was luxurious to
have it so clean.
I dressed quickly. My boots were a little snug
because they had been dried by a fire after the rain.
But they felt good over the thin hose. I made right
all my fastenings and positioned my sword.
The red velvet tunic was plaited along the edges
with gold and silver thread, and the front of it was
richly decorated with the silver fleurs-de-lys, which
is the most ancient symbol of Florence. Once my belt
was tightly fastened, the tunic didn't come to halfway
My angels stood before me, my very own guardians,
in long flowing robes of dark blue, which appeared to
be made of something lighter yet more opaque than
silk. Their faces were ivory white and shimmering
faintly, and their eyes were large and like opals.
They had dark hair, or hair that seemed to shift as if
it were made of shadows.
They stood facing me, their heads together, so that
their heads touched. It was as though they were
communing silently with one another.
They overwhelmed me. It seemed a terrifying
intimacy that I should see them so vividly and so
close to me, and know them as the two who had been
with me always, or so I was to believe. They were
slightly larger than human beings, as were the other
angels I had seen, and they were not tempered by the
sweet faces I had seen on the others, but had
altogether smoother and broader countenances and
larger though exquisitely shaped mouths.
"Because we are sent to do it, and will be with you
until you die."
"Lovelessly?" I asked.
They shook their heads again in negation.
Gradually the light brightened in the room. I
turned sharply to look up at the window. I thought it
was the sun. The sun couldn't hurt me, I thought.
But it wasn't. It was Mastema, who had risen up
behind me as if he were a cloud of gold, and on either
side of him were my arguers, my advancers of the
cause, my champions, Ramiel and Setheus.
The room shimmered and seemed to vibrate without a
sound. My angels appeared to glisten, and to grow
brilliantly white and deep blue in their robes.
All looked to the helmeted figure of Mastema.
An immense and musical rustling filled the air, a
singing sound, as if a great flock of tiny golden-
throated birds had awakened and rushed upwards from
the branches of their sun-filled trees.
I must have closed my eyes. I lost my balance, and
the air became cooler, and it seemed my vision was
I turned and entered a dim courtyard, my breath
suddenly taken from me by the height of the walls that
surrounded me, climbing to the distinct cube of the
bright blue sky.
Surely this was only one courtyard, the one at the
entrance, for before us there loomed another immense
pair of gates, quite large enough to admit the
greatest haywagons imaginable or some newfangled
engine of war.
The ground was soiled. High above on all sides were
windows, rows upon rows of the double-arched windows,
and all were covered over with bars.
"I need you now, Mastema," I said. I made the Sign
of the Cross again. I took out the rosary and kissed
the crucifix, looking down for a moment at the tiny
twisted body of Our Tortured Christ.
The huge doors before me broke open. There was a
loud creaking sound, then the crumpling of metal
bolts, and the gates groaned back on their hinges,
revealing a distant and sun-filled inner court of far
greater size.
The walls through which we walked were some thirty
to forty feet in depth. There were doors on either
side of us, heavily arched in worked stone and showing
the first signs of care that I had glimpsed since we
entered.
Here, as I stood up, I saw windows such as I
remembered, hung with rich banners and strung with
lanterns that would be lighted by night. Here I saw
tapestries carelessly thrown over window ledges as if
rain were nothing. And very high up I saw the jagged
battlements and finer white marble copings.
But even this was not the great courtyard that lay
beyond. These walls too were rustic. The stones were
soiled and untrodden in many a year. Water was pooled
here and there. Rank weeds sprang from crevices, but,
ah, there were sweet wildflowers, and I looked at them
tenderly and reached out to touch them, and marveled
at them, existing here.
More gates awaited us, these two--huge, wooden,
banded in iron and severely pointed at the top in
their deep marble archway--gave way and sprang back to
let us pass through yet another wall.
Oh, such a garden greeted us!
As we made our way through another forty feet of
darkness, I saw the great groves of orange trees ahead
of us, and heard the cry of the birds. I wondered if
they were not caught down here, prisoners, or could
they soar all the way up to the top and escape?
Yes, they could. It was a great enough space. And
here was the fine white marble facing I remembered,
all the way to the summit, so high above.
As I made my way into the garden, as I walked on
the first marble path that traversed the beds of
violets and roses, I saw the birds coming and going,
circling broadly in this wide place, so that they
could clear the towers that rose so distantly and
majestically against the sky.
Everywhere the scent of flowers overcame me. Lilies
and irises were mingled in patches, and the oranges
were ripe and almost red as they hung from the trees.
The lemons were hard still and touched with green.
Shrubbery and vines hugged the walls.
The angels gathered around me. I realized that all
along it was I who had led the way, I who had
initiated any movement, and it was I who held us all
still now, within the garden, and that they waited as
I bowed my head.
"I am listening for the prisoners," I said. "But I
can't hear them/'
I looked up at more of the luxuriously decorated
balconies and windows, the twin arches, and here and
there a long loggia, but made of their style of
filigree, not ours.
I saw flags fluttering, and all were in that dark
blood-red color, stained with death. I looked down for
the first time at my own brilliant crimson clothes.
"Like fresh blood?" I whispered.
"Tend to what you must do first," Mastema said.
"Twilight can cover you when you go to the prisoners,
but you must take your quarry now."
"Where are they? Will you tell me?"
"In deliberate sacrilege, and in old-fashioned
rigor, they lie beneath the stones of the church."
226
"The door there, and the stairs beyond it. The
church lies on the third floor, up to our left/'
I made for the door without further delay. I rushed
up the steps, taking turn after turn, my boots
clattering on the stone, not even looking to see if
they followed me, not wondering how they did it,
knowing only that they were with me, feeling their
presence as if I could feel their breath on me when no
breath came.
At last we entered the corridor, broad and open on
our right to the courtyard below. There was an endless
strip of rich carpet before us, full of Persian
flowers deeply embedded within a field of midnight
blue. Unfaded, untrammeled. On and on it went until it
turned, ahead of us. And at the end of the corridor
was the perfectly framed sky and the jagged speck of
green mountain beyond.
"Why have you stopped?" Mastema asked.
They had materialized around me, in their settling
garments and their never-still wings.
"This is the door to the church here, you know it."
"Only looking at the sky, Mastema," I said. "Only
looking at the blue sky."
'And thinking of what?" asked one of my guardians
in his toneless, clear whisper. He clung to me
suddenly, and I saw his parchment-colored fingers,
weightless, settled on my shoulder. "Think-
227
then I opened wide one side and then the other, though
why I made such a vast and broad escape for myself I
do not know. Maybe it was a passage for my mighty band
of helpers.
The great empty nave lay before me, which last
night no doubt had been crowded with the gaudy blood-
drenched Court, and above my head was their choir loft
from which the most ethereal dirge had come.
Sun violently pierced the demonic windows.
I gasped in shock to see the webbed spirits
emblazoned so immensely in the fractured and welded
fragments of glittering glass. How thick was this
glass, how heavily faceted, and how ominous the
expressions of those webbed-winged monsters who leered
at us as if they would come alive in the blazing light
of day and stop our progress.
There was nothing to be done but to rip my eyes off
them, to look down and away and along the great
sprawling marble floor. I saw the hook, I saw it as it
had been in the floor of my father's chapel, lying
flat in a circle cut in the stone, a hook
228
when I had been brought to this place.
I saw him and saw his fierce burning yellow eyes,
fine gems set into the red marble, and saw the white
ivory fangs that hung from his snarling upper lip. I
saw all the fanged demons who lined the walls to the
right and the left of him, and all their jeweled eyes
seemed greedy and glorying in the light.
"The crypt," said Mastema.
I pulled with all my might. I couldn't budge the
marble slab. No human could have done it. It would
have taken teams of horses to do it. I locked both
hands more tightly around the hook, yanking it harder,
and still I couldn't budge it. It was like trying to
move the walls themselves.
"Do it for him!" Ramiel pleaded. "Let us do it."
"It's nothing, Mastema; it's only like opening the
gates."
Mastema reached out and pushed me gently
229
into a pit of them," said Ramiel. "Mastema, move
them."
"Let me move them," said Setheus.
I drew my sword. I hacked at the first of the
spears and knocked off its metal point, but the jagged
wooden shaft remained.
I stepped down into the crypt, at once feeling a
coldness rise and touch my legs. I hacked again at the
wood, and broke off more of it. Then I stepped beside
it, only to find with my left hand that I felt a pair
of spears awaiting me in the uneven light. Again I
lifted my sword, the weight of it making my arm ache.
230
me, embracing me and carrying me down in a soft
plummet to the floor of the chamber.
I was at once let go. And I scrambled around in the
dimness until I found my sword. I had it now.
I stood up, panting, holding it firmly, and then I
looked up at the sharp distinct rectangle of
brightness above. I shut my eyes, and bowed my head,
and opened my eyes slowly so as to become accustomed
to this deep damp dusk.
231
Here the castle had no doubt let the mountain rise
up under it, for the chamber, though vast, seemed made
of only the earth. At least this is what I saw before
I was yanked back out of the clutch of his fingers
only just in time. I turned to see Ramiel holding me,
and then he closed his eyes and bowed his forehead
into my shoulder.
"Now you know their tricks. Watch it. You see.
232
It folds its arm back now. It thinks it's safe. It
closes its eyes."
"What do I do! Ah, I'll kill it!" I said.
Snatching up the veil in my left hand, I raised my
sword in my right. I advanced on the sleeping monster,
and this time, when the hand rose, I snared it with
the veil, swirling the fabric around it, while, with
my sword, I came down like the executioner on the
above.
"Lucifer, you see that?" I called out. The echo
233
came back to taunt me, "See that? See that? See that?"
I rushed to the next. "Florian!" I cried out, as I
grabbed the veil.
Terrible error.
When he heard his name, his eyes snapped open even
before I had drawn abreast of him, and like a puppet
yanked on a chain he would have risen if I had not
struck him hard with my sword and gashed open his
chest. Expressionless, he fell back. I brought the
234
heads languished, greasy and blackening, and the mass
thickened and the ashes were only a few.
Did they suffer? Did they know? Where had their
souls fled on invisible feet in this harsh and
terrible moment when their Court was dissolved, when I
roared in my work and stomped my feet and threw back
my head and cried and cried until I couldn't see
through my tears.
I had done with some twenty of them, twenty, and my
sword was so thick with blood and gore that I had to
wipe it clean. On their bodies, making my way back to
go down the other side of the crypt, I wiped it, on
one doublet after another, marveling at how their
white hands had shriveled and dried up on their
their rich robes, and the two simpler, plainer, more
somber souls--all of them looking at me in utter
suspense. I saw Setheus look at the pile of smoldering
heads, and then again at me.
"Go on, poor Vittorio," he whispered. "Hurry on."
"Could you do it?" I asked.
"I cannot."
"No, I know that you are not permitted," I said, my
chest aching from the exertion and now the talk I
forced from myself. "I mean could you do it? Could you
bring yourself to do it!"
"I am not a creature of flesh and blood, Vittorio,"
Setheus answered helplessly. "But I could do what God
told me to do."
I went on past them. I looked back at them in their
glorious radiance, the cluster of them, and the
I could hear my heaving breaths. I let the edge of
my sword drag, singing on the stones. I licked at my
parched lips. I didn't dare to look at them, though I
knew they were collected only a few yards from me,
staring at me. And in the thick stillness, I heard the
crisping and sizzling of the burning heads of the
damned.
I thrust my hand inside my pocket, and I drew out
the rosary of amber beads. My hand shook shamefully as
I held it, and then I lifted it, letting the crucifix
dangle, and I hurled it at her, so that it struck her,
just above her small hands, right on the white swell
of her half-bared breasts. It lay there, the crucifix
nestled in the curve of her pale skin, and she didn't
so much as stir.
The light clung to her eyelashes as if it were
dust.
Without excuse or explanation, I turned to the next
one, ripping off the veil and assaulting him or her, I
hit the floor, and with my sword I speared it through
its dripping stump of a neck. "Know me, monster?" I
cried again to the fluttering eyes, the gaping,
drooling red mouth. "Know me?"
I walked with him to the pile of the other heads
and laid him like a trophy on top of it. "Know me?" I
wailed again.
And then in a fury I went back to my work.
Two more, then three, then five, then seven and
then nine, and then some six more, and the Court was
finished, and all its dancers and Lords and Ladies
were dead.
And then, reeling to the other side, I made swift
work of those poor peasant servants, who had no veils
to cover their simple bodies, and whose feeble half-
starved white limbs could scarce rise in defense.
"The huntsmen, where are they?"
"At the far end. It is almost dark in here. Take
great care."
"I see them," I said. I drew myself up and caught
my breath. They lay in a row of six, heads to the wall
like all the others, but they were perilously close
together. It would be a hard approach.
ripped back my sword and chopped the hand off him.
"Die, bastard, you who stole me with your fellow; I
remember you."
And at last I came to the final one and had his
bearded head hanging from my hand.
Slowly I walked back with this one, kicking others
before me, others I had not had the strength to hurl
very far, and I kicked them like so much refuse until
the light fell on all of them.
It was bright now. The afternoon sun was coming in
the west side of the church. And the opening above
gave forth a terrific and fatal heat.
Slowly I wiped my face with the back of my left
hand. I laid down my sword, and I felt for the napkins
the monks had put in my pockets, and I took these and
cleaned my face and cleaned my hands.
Then I picked up my sword, and I went to the foot
of her bier again. She lay as before. The light was
nowhere near her. It could not have touched any of
them where they lay.
She was safe on her bed of stone, her hands as
still as before, fingers beautifully folded, the right
hand over the left, and on her mound of white breast
there rested the Crucified Christ in gold. Her hair
that she'd worn when I'd seen her. Only the deep rich
blood red was the same, but all the rest was splendid
and ornate and new, as if she were a regal princess,
always prepared for the kiss of her prince.
"Could Hell receive this?" I whispered. I drew as
close as I dared. I could not bear the thought of her
arm rising in that mechanical fashion, the sudden
clutch of her fingers on the empty air or her eyes
opening. I couldn't bear it.
The points of her slippers were small beneath her
hem. How daintily she must have lain down to her rest
at sunrise. Who had pulled closed the trapdoor, whose
chains had fallen? Who had set the trap of the spears,
whose engines I had never inspected or compassed with
my thoughts?
For the first time in the dimness, I saw a tiny
golden circlet on her head, lying just around the
crown and fixed by the tiniest pins into the waves so
that its single pearl rested on her forehead. Such a
small thing.
Was her soul so small? Would Hell take it, like the
fire would take any tender part of her anatomy, like
the sun would burn to horror her immaculate face?
In some mother's womb she had once slept and
dreamt, and into some father's arms been placed.
What had been her tragedy to bring her to this foul
and reeking grave, where the heads of her slain
companions lay burning slowly in the sun's ever
patient, ever indifferent light?
I turned on them. I held my sword down at my side.
Ramiel covered his face and turned his back on me.
Setheus continued to stare but shook his head. My
guardians only gazed at me with their level coldness,
as they always had. Mastema stared at me, soundlessly,
concealing whatever thought he possessed behind his
serene mask of a face.
"No, Vittorio," he said. "Do you think a bevy of
God's angels has helped you past these barriers to
leave one such as these to live?"
"Mastema, she loved me. And I love her. Mastema,
she gave me my life. Mastema, I ask in the name of
love. I beg in the name of love. All else here has
been justice. But what can I say to God if I slay this
one, who has loved and whom I love?"
Nothing in his countenance changed. He only
regarded me with his eternal calm. I heard a terrible
sound. It was the weeping of Ramiel and Setheus. My
guardians turned to look at them, as though surprised,
but only mildly so, and then their dreamy soft eyes
fixed again, unchanging, on me.
"Merciless angels," I said. "Oh, but such is not
fair, and I know it. I lie. I lie. Forgive me."
"We forgive you," said Mastema. "But you must do
what you have promised me you would do."
"Mastema, can she be saved? If she herself
renounces ... can she ... is her soul still human?"
No answer came from him. No answer.
"Mastema, please, tell me. Don't you see? If she
can be saved, I can stay here with her, I can wring it
out of her, I know I can because her heart is good.
241
..."
"Vittorio," came the whisper from Ramiel. 'Are your
ears stopped with wax? Can you hear those prisoners
starving, crying? You have not even set them free yet.
Will you do it by night?"
"I can do it. I can yet do it. But can I not stay
here with her, and when she finds she is all alone,
that all the others have perished, that all the
promises of Godric and Florian were tyranny, is there
no way that she can render her soul to God?"
Mastema, without ever a change in his soft cold
eyes, slowly turned his back.
"No! Don't do it, don't turn away!" I shouted. I
caught hold of his powerful silk-clad arm. I felt his
unsurmountable strength beneath the fabric, the
strange, unnatural fabric. He gazed down at me.
"Why can't you tell me!"
"For the love of God, Vittorio!" he roared
suddenly, his voice filling the entire crypt. "Don't
you realize? We don't know!"
He shook me loose, the better to glare down at me,
his brows furrowed, his hand closing on the hilt of
his sword.
242
to touch her, couldn't bear to touch her, and he
backed away from her, shoving me away, forcing me back
as he did.
I broke into weeping. The sun shifted, and the
shadows began to thicken in the crypt. I turned
finally. The patch of light above was now pale. It was
a rich radiant gold, but it was pale.
My angels stood there, all gathered, watching me
and waiting.
"I'm staying with her here," I said. "She'll wake
soon. And I'll put it to her, that she pray for God's
grace."
I knew it only as I said it. I understood it only
as I made it plain.
"I'll stay with her. If she renounces all her sins
for the love of God, then she can remain with me, and
death will come, and we will not lift a hand to hasten
it, and God will accept us both."
"You think you have the strength to do that?"
Mastema asked. 'And you think it of her?"
243
from a canyon into which he's fallen."
"But it is not such a thing, and I cannot."
"Then let us stay with him," said Ramiel.
"Yes, let us stay," said my two guardians, more or
less at the same time and in similar muted
expressions.
"Let her see us."
"How do we know that she can?" asked Mastema. "How
do we know that she will? How many times does it
happen that a human being can see us?"
For the first time I saw anger in him. He looked at
me.
"God has played such a game with you, Vitto-rio!"
he said. "Given you such enemies and such allies!"
244
245
the chance I meant to give her, that she throw herself
on the mercy of God, and that we leave this crypt and,
if necessary, find the priest who could absolve her
human soul of all her sins. For if she could not make
a perfect confession for the love of God alone, well,
then, the absolution would surely save her.
I poked around the crypt, stepping among the
drying-up corpses. What light there was gleamed on
dried founts of blood that ran down the sides of the
stone biers.
At last I found what I had hoped to find, a great
ladder that could be lifted and thrown up to the
ceiling above. Only, how could I wield such a thing?
246
I dragged it towards the center of the crypt,
bald head of Godric, which was now black like leather
with its yellowed slits of eyes, and I piled these
heads where the light could not fail to continue its
work on them.
Then, stumbling over the ladder, I fell on my knees
at the foot of Ursula's bier.
I sank down. I would sleep this little while. No,
not sleep, rest.
247
Not willing it, indeed, fearing it and regretting
it, I felt my limbs go limp and I lay on the stone
floor, and my eyes closed in a blessed restorative
sleep.
How curious it was.
I had thought her scream would awaken me, that like
"Blessed Vittorio," she said. Then clasping me
about the waist, she rose upwards and we passed the
broken spears, without so much as touching their
splintered tips, and found ourselves in the
248
chapel in the dusk, the windows darkened and the
shadows playing gracefully but mercifully around the
distant altar.
"Oh, my darling, my darling/' I said. "Do you know
what the angels did? Do you know what they said?"
"Come, let's free the prisoners as you wish," she
told me.
I felt so refreshed, so full of vigor. It was as if
I'd suffered no exhausting labor at all, as if war
hadn't worn down my limbs and broken me, as though
249
victims are free now. This is our time, yours and
mine, come."
Her skirts went out in a great dark circle as down
we flew, down and down, down past the windows, and
down past the walls, until my feet were allowed to
touch the soft ground.
"Oh, Lord God, it's the meadow, look, the meadow,"
I said. "I can see it as clearly under the rising moon
as ever I saw it in my dreams."
A sudden softness filled me completely. I twined
her in my arms, my fingers digging deep into her
rippling hair. All the world seemed to sway about me,
and yet I was anchored in dance with her, and the soft
The tiny crucifix dangled down against my neck.
"But you must do this for me, you who let me live
below, you who spared me and fell asleep in my trust
at the feet of my grave, you must do this..."
"What, blessed one?" I asked. "Tell me and I'll do
it."
"Pray first for strength, and then into your human
body, into your wholesome and baptized body, you must
take all the demon blood out of me which you can, you
must draw it from me, and thereby free my soul from
its spell; it will be vomited forth out of you like
the potions we gave you, which cannot hurt you. Will
you do it for me? Will you take the poison out of me?"
I thought of the sickness, of the vomit that had
will draw off the blood as if from a cankerous wound,
as if it were the corruption of a leper. Give it to
me, give me the blood."
Her face was motionless above mine, so small, so
dainty, so white.
"Be brave, my love, be brave, for I must make room
for it first."
She nestled in against my neck, and into my flesh
there came her teeth. "Be brave, only a little more to
make room."
'A little more?" I whispered. 'A little more. Ah,
Ursula, look up, look up at Heaven and Hell in the
sky, for the stars are balls of fire suspended there
by the angels."
But the language was stretched and meaningless and
became an echo in my ears. A darkness shrouded me, and
when I lifted my hand it seemed a golden net covered
it and I could see far, far away, my fingers shrouded
in the net.
The meadow was suddenly flooded with sunlight. I
She opened her mouth, and from her came the stream
of blood, the deep dark kiss of blood. "Take it from
me, Vittorio."
'All your sins into me, my divine child," I said.
"Oh, God help me. God have mercy on me. Mastema--."
But the word was broken. My mouth was filled with
the blood, and it was no rank potion mixed of parts,
but that searing thrilling sweetness that she had
first given me in her most secretive and perplexing
kisses. Only this time it came in an overwhelming
gush.
Her arms were tucked beneath me. They lifted me.
The blood seemed to know no veins within but to fill
my limbs themselves, to fill my shoulders and my
chest, to drown and invigorate my very heart. I stared
up at the twinkling playing sun, I felt her blinding
and soft hair across my eyes but peered through its
golden strands. My breath came in gasps.
The blood flowed down into my legs and filled them
to my very toes. My body surged with strength. My
organ pumped against her, and once more I felt her
subtle feline weight, her sinuous limbs hugging me,
my body so full of her blood, echoed off stone walls!
The meadow was gone or never was. The twilight was
a rectangle high above. I lay in the crypt.
I rose up, throwing her off, back away from me as
she screamed in pain. I sprang to my feet and stared
at my white hands outstretched before me.
A horrid hunger reared up in me, a fierce strength,
a howl!
I stared up at the dark-purple light above and
screamed.
"You've done it to me! You've made me one of you!"
She sobbed. I turned on her. She backed up, bent
over, her hand over her mouth, crying and fleeing from
me. I ran after her. Like a rat she ran, round and
round the crypt, screaming.
"Vittorio, no, Vittorio, no, Vittorio, no, don't
hurt me. Vittorio, I did this for us; Vittorio, we are
free. Ah, God help me!"
And then upwards she flew, just missing my
outstretched arms. She had fled to the chapel above.
"Witchlet, monster, larva, you tricked me with your
illusions, with your visions, you made me one of you,
you did it to me!" My roars echoed one upon the other
as I scrambled about in the dark till I found my
sword, and then dancing back to gain my momentum, I
too made the leap and cleared the spears and found
She backed up into the bank of red flowers that
barely showed in the starlight that passed through the
darkened windows.
"No, Vittorio, don't kill me, don't do it. Don't,"
she sobbed and wailed. "I am a child, like you,
please, don't."
I tore at her, and she scrambled to the end of the
sanctuary. In a rage, I swung at the statue of Lucifer
with my sword. It tottered and then crashed down,
breaking on the marble floor of the cursed sanctuary.
She hovered at the far end. She dropped down on her
knees and threw out her hands. She shook her head, her
hair flying wildly from side to side.
"Don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me. You
send me to Hell if you do; don't do it."
"Wretch!" I moaned. "Wretch!" My tears fell as
freely as hers. "I thirst, you wretch. I thirst, and I
can smell them, the slaves in the coop. I can smell
them, their blood, damn you!"
I too had gone down on my knees. I lay down on the
marble, and kicked aside the broken fragments of the
hideous statue. With my sword I snagged the lace of
the altar cloth and brought it down with all its many
red flowers tumbling on me, so that I could roll over
into them and crush my face into their softness.
A silence fell, a terrible silence full of my own
wailing. I could feel my strength, feel it even in the
timbre of my voice, and the arm that held the sword
without exhaustion or restraint, and feel it in the
painless calm with which I lay on what
255
Oh, she had made me mighty.
A scent overcame me. I looked up. She stood just
above me, tender, loving thing that she was, with her
eyes so full of the starlight now, so glinting and
quiet and unjudging. In her arms she held a young
human, a feeble-minded one, who did not know his
danger.
How pink and succulent he was, how like the roasted
pig ready for my lips, how full of naturally cooking
and bubbling mortal blood and ready for me. She set
him down before me.
He was naked, thin buttocks on his heels, his
trembling chest very pink and his hair black and long
and soft around his guileless face. He appeared to be
dreaming or searching the darkness, perhaps for
angels?
"Drink, my darling, drink from him," she said, "and
then you'll have the strength to take us both to the
Good Father for Confession."
I smiled. The desire for the feeble-minded boy
before me was almost more than I could endure. But it
was a whole new book now, was it not, what I might
endure, and I took my time, rising up on my elbow as I
looked at her.
"To the Good Father? You think that's where we'll
go? Right away, just like that, the two of us?"
She began to cry again. "Not right away, no, not
right away," she cried. She shook her head. Beaten.
I took him. I broke his neck when I drained him
dry. He made not a sound. There was no time for fear
or pain or crying.
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watching for my howls and wails, and ever catching
hold of me to kiss me and ply me with her sobs when I
shook with rage.
"Come out of here," I said.
It was just before sunrise. I told her I would
spend no day beneath these pointed towers, in this
house of horrors, in this place of evil and filthy
birth.
"I know of a cave/' she said. "Far down the
mountains, past the farmlands/'
"Yes, somewhere on the edge of a true meadow?"
"There are meadows in this fair land without count,
my love," she said. 'And under the moon their flowers
shine as prettily for our magical eyes as ever they do
for humans by the light of God's sun. Remember His
moon is ours.
'And tomorrow night . . . before you think of the
priest . . . you must take your time to think of the
priest--."
"Don't make me laugh again. Show me how to fly.
Wrap your arm around my waist and show me how to drop
from the high walls to safety in a descent that would
shatter a man's limbs. Don't talk of priests anymore.
Don't mock me!"
". . . before you think of the priest, of
Confession," she went on, undeterred in her dainty
sweet
257
258
13
CHILD BRIDE
WE didn't put the torch to Santa Maddalana. It was too
much of a pleasure I to hunt the town.
By the third night, I had stopped weeping at
sunrise, when we retired together, locked in each
other's arms inside our concealed and unreachable
cave.
And by the third night, the townspeople knew what
had befallen them--how their clever bargain with the
Devil had rebounded upon them-- and they were in a
panic, and it was a great game to outsmart them, to
hide in the multitude of shadows that made up their
twisted streets, and to tear open their most
extravagant and clever locks.
In the early hours, when no one dared to stir, and
the good Franciscan priest knelt awake in his cell,
saying his rosary, and begging God for understanding
of what was happening--this priest, you remember, who
had befriended me at the inn, who had dined with me
and warned me, not in anger like his Dominican
brother, but in kindness--while
259
patience and grace. I could scan a mind, find a sin
and eat it with a flick of my tongue as I sucked the
blood from a lazy, lying merchant who had put out his
own tender children once for the mysterious Lord
Florian, who had kept the peace.
One night we found that the townsmen had been by
day to the abandoned castle. There was evidence of
hasty entry, with little stolen or disturbed. How it
must have frightened them, the horrid saints still
flanking the pedestal of the Fallen Lucifer in the
church. They had not taken the golden candlesticks or
the old tabernacle in which I discovered, with my
groping hand, a shriveled human heart.
On our last visit to the Court of the Ruby Grail, I
took the burned leathery heads of the vampires from
the deep cellar and I hurled them like so many stones
through the stained-glass windows. The last of the
brilliant art of the castle was gone.
Together, Ursula and I roamed the bedchambers of
the castle, which I had never glimpsed or
260
The game became ever more invigorating to me. For
now, those who remained were quarrelsome and
avaricious and refusing to give up without a fight. It
was simple to sort the innocent, who believed in the
faith of the vigil light or the saints to protect
them, from those who had played with the Devil and now
kept an uneasy watch in the dark with sword in hand.
I liked to talk to them, spar with them verbally,
as I killed them. "Did you think your game would go on
forever? Did you think the thing you fed would never
feed on you?"
As for my Ursula, she had no stomach for such
sport. She could not endure the spectacle of
suffering. The old Communion of Blood in the castle
261
lighted room at night, playing a game of cards with
himself, as if he did not even now guess what was
going on.
On the fifteenth night, it must have been, when we
arrived in the town, we knew at once that only two
persons were left. We could hear the little old man
singing to himself in the empty Inn with the doors
open. He was very drunk, and his wet pink head gleamed
in the light of the candle. He slapped the cards down
on the table in a circle, playing a game of solitaire
called "clock."
The Franciscan priest sat beside him. He looked
262
up at us, fearlessly and calmly, as we came into the
Inn.
I was overcome with hunger, ravening hunger, for
the blood in them both.
Ursula looked at me in confusion. She didn't know
what was in my mind. I had never witnessed her
speaking to any human being except for me myself and
for the children with whom she'd played--in other
words, only with those for whom her heart had
quickened and whom she did not mean to destroy.
263
What she thought of the little man and his son, the
Franciscan priest, I couldn't guess.
The old man was winning the card game. "There, you
see, I told you. Our luck!" he said. He gathered up
his greasy loose cards to shuffle them and to play
again.
The priest looked at him with glazed eyes, as
as we are, and you have seen us. You have seen hellish
things; you have seen sloth and treachery,
264
cowardice and deceit. You see devils now, vampires.
Well, I want you to know that with my own eyes I saw
angels, true angels, magnificent angels, and that they
were more glorious than I can ever tell you in words/'
He regarded me thoughtfully for a long time, and
then he looked at Ursula, who sat troubled and looking
up at me, rather afraid that I would unduly suffer,
and then he said:
"Why did you fail them? Why did they come with you
in the first place, and if you had the aid of angels,
265
another card. "What separates them now from a good
Confession is weakness and the fear of Hell if they
must give up their lives."
The priest stared at his father in amazement.
So did I.
Ursula said nothing. Then she kissed me on the
cheek. "Let's leave them now," she whispered. "There
is no more Santa Maddalana. Let's go."
I looked up, around the darkened room of the Inn. I
looked at the old barrels. I looked in haunted
perplexity and appalling sorrow at all things that
humans used and touched. I looked at the heavy hands
of the priest, folded on the table before me. I looked
at the hair on his hands, and then up at his thick
child bride." She looked at the priest with renewed
animation. "I was, you know. They came to my father's
castle and purchased me as such, they said that I must
be a virgin, and the midwives came and brought their
basin of warm water, and they examined me and they
said I was a virgin, and only then did Florian take
me. I was his bride."
The priest stared fixedly at her, as if he could
not move if he wanted to move, and the old man merely
glanced up again and again, cheerfully, nodding as he
listened to her, and went on playing with his cards.
"Can you imagine my horror?" she asked them. She
looked at me, tossing her hair back over her shoulder.
It was in its ripples again from the plaits in which
she'd had it bound earlier. "Can you imagine when I
climbed onto the couch and I saw who was my
bridegroom, this white thing, this dead thing, such as
we look to you?"
silk, and all this he tore from me, and took me first
with his lifeless, seedless stone-hard organ and then
with his fang teeth, like these very teeth which I
have now. Oh, such a wedding, and my father had given
me over for this."
The tears coursed down the priest's cheeks.
I stared at her, transfixed with sorrow and rage,
rage against a demon I had already slaughtered, a rage
that I hoped could reach down through the smoldering
coals of Hell and find him with fingers like hot
tongs.
I said nothing.
She raised her eyebrow; she cocked her head.
"He tired of me/' she said. "But he never stopped
loving me. He was new to the Court of the Ruby Grail,
a young Lord and seeking at every turn to increase his
might and his romance! And later, when I asked for
Vittorio's life, he couldn't refuse me on account of
our vows exchanged on that stone altar so long ago.
After he let Vittorio leave us, after he had him cast
down in Florence, certain of Vittorio's madness and
ruin, Florian sang songs to me, songs for a bride. He
sang the old poems as though our love could be
revived."
"Yes," she said in her exquisite voice, with
certainty and a small accepting smile. She clasped my
left hand in hers and rubbed it hard and tenderly.
"Children forever. But he was only a young man,
Florian, just a young man himself."
"I saw him once," said the priest, his voice thick
with his crying but soft. "Only once."
'And you knew?" I asked.
"I knew I was powerless and my faith was desperate,
and that around me were bonds that I could not loose
or break."
"Let's go now, Vittorio, don't make him cry
anymore," said Ursula. "Come on, Vittorio. Let's leave
here. We need no blood tonight and cannot think of
harming them, cannot even ..."
"No, beloved, never," I said to her. "But take my
gift, Father, please, the only clean thing which I can
give, my testimony that I saw the angels, and that
they upheld me when I was weak."
"And won't you take absolution from me, Vittorio!"
he said. His voice rose, and his chest seemed to
increase in size. "Vittorio and Ursula, take my
absolution."
"No, Father," I said. "We cannot take it. We don't
want it."
"But why?"
14
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
SHE didn't lie.
We journeyed that night to my I father's house. It
was nothing for us to I make that journey, but it was
many miles for a mortal, and word had not reached that
forlorn farmland that the threat of the night demons,
the vampires of Florian, was gone. Indeed, it is most
likely that my farms were still deserted because
ghastly tales were given out by those who had fled
Santa Maddalana, traveling over hill and valley, mouth
to mouth.
It didn't take me long to realize, however, that the
great castle of my family was occupied. A horde of
soldiers and clerks had been hard at work. As we crept
over the giant wall after midnight, we found that all
the dead of my family had been properly buried, or
placed in their proper stone coffins beneath the
chapel, and that the goods of the household, all of
its abundant wealth, had been taken away. Only a few
wagons remained of those which must have already
steward were keepers of the accounts of the Medici
bank, and on tiptoe, in the dim light of a star-
studded sky, I inspected the few papers they had left
out to dry.
All of the inheritance of Vittorio di Raniari had
been collected and catalogued, and was being taken on
to Florence for him, to be placed in safety with
Cosimo until such time as Vittorio di Raniari was
twenty-four years of age and could thereby assume
responsibility for himself as a man.
Only a few soldiers slept in the barracks. Only a
few horses were quartered in the stables. Only a few
squires and attendants slept in proximity to their
Lords.
Obviously the great castle, being of no strategic
use to Milanese or German or French or Papal
authority, or to Florence, was not being restored or
repaired, merely shut down.
Well before dawn, we left my home, but before
going, I took leave of my father's grave.
I knew that I would come back. I knew that soon the
trees would climb the mountain to the walls. I knew
that the grass would grow high through the crevices
and cracks of the cobblestones. I knew that things
human would lose all love of this place, as they had
lost their love of so many ruins in the country round.
I would return then. I would come back.
That night, Ursula and I hunted the vicinity for
the few brigands we could find in the woods, laughing
gaily when we caught them and dragged them from their
horses. It was a riotous old feast.
'And where now, my Lord?" my bride asked me
veil of wild blueberries that would hide us from all
eyes, including that of the great rising sun.
"To Florence, my love. I have to go there. And in
its streets, we'll never suffer hunger, or discovery,
and there are things which I must see with my own
eyes/'
"But what are those things, Vittorio?" she asked.
"Paintings, my love, paintings. I have to see the
angels in the paintings. I have to ... face them, as
it were."
She was content. She had never seen the great city
of Florence. She had, all her wretched eternity of
ritual and courtly discipline, been contained in the
mountains, and she lay down beside me to dream of
freedom, of brilliant colors of blue and green and
gold, so contrary to the dark red that she still wore.
She lay down beside me, trusting me, and, as for me, I
trusted nothing.
I only licked the human blood on my lips and
wondered how long I might have on this earth before
someone struck off my head with a swift and certain
sword.
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15
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
THE city of Florence was in an uproar. "Why?" I
asked.
It was well past curfew, to which I no one was
paying much attention, and there was a huge crowd of
students congregated in Santa Maria Maggiori--the
Duomo-- listening to a lecture by a humanist who
pleaded that Fra Filippo Lippi was not such a pig.
No one took much note of us. We had fed early, in
the countryside, and wore heavy mantles, and what
could they see of us but a little pale flesh?
I went into the church. The crowd came out almost
to the doors.
"What's the matter? What's happened to the great
painter?"
"Oh, he's done it now," said the man who answered
me, not even bothering to look at me or at the slender
figure of Ursula clinging to me.
The man was too intent on looking at the lecturer,
who stood up ahead, his voice echoing sharply in the
overwhelming large nave.
"Done what?"
273
be a man.
"Well, he asked for the fairest of the nuns to pose
for the altarpiece that he was painting of the blessed
Virgin, that's what he did," said the first student,
black-haired and deep-eyed, staring at me with a
cunning smile. "He asked for her as a model, asked
that the convent choose her for him, so that the
Virgin he painted would be most perfect, and then..."
The other student took it up.
".. . he ran off with her! Stole the nun right out
of the convent, ran off with her and her sister, mind
you, her blood-kindred sister, and has set up his
household right over his shop, he and his nun and her
sister, the three of them, the monk and the two nuns .
. . and lives in sin with her, Lucrezia Buti, and
paints the Virgin on the altarpiece and does not give
a damn what anyone thinks."
There was jostling and pushing in the crowd about
us. Men told us to be quiet. The students were choking
on their laughter.
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beside me.
"Tormented," I whispered. "Tormented." His face
came back to me, the monk glimpsed years ago in
Cosimo's house in the Via Larga, the man arguing so
fiercely to be free, only to be with a woman for a
little while. I felt the strangest conflict within,
the strangest darkest fear. "Oh, that they don't hurt
him again."
"One might wonder," came a soft voice in my ear. I
turned, but I saw no one who could have spoken to me.
Ursula looked about.
"What is it, Vittorio?"
But I knew the whisper, and it came again, bodiless
and intimate, "One might wonder, where were his
guardian angels on the day that Fra Filippo did such a
mad thing?"
I turned in a mad frantic circle, searching for
275
"But where are we going?"
"To the house of Fra Filippo, to his workshop.
Don't question me now."
Within moments we had found our way, echoing and
clattering down the narrow street, and we stood before
the doors that were shut up and I could see no light,
save in the third-story windows, as though he had had
to flee to that height with his bride.
No mob was gathered here.
But out of the darkness there came suddenly a
handful of filth heaved at the bolted doors, and then
another and then a volley of stones. I stepped back,
shielding Ursula, and watched as one passerby after
another slunk forward and hurled his insults at the
shop.
Finally, I lay against the wall opposite, staring
276
oil."
I was chastened by her firmness. I kissed her hand
again. I told her I was sorry. I held her to my heart.
How long I might have stood with her there, I don't
know. Moments passed. I heard the sound of running
water and distant footsteps, but nothing of
consequence, nothing which mattered in the thick night
of crowded Florence, with its four- and five-story
palaces, with its old half-broken towers, and its
churches, and its thousands upon thousands of sleeping
souls.
A light startled me. It fell down upon me in
277
bright yellow seams. I saw the first, a thin line of
only for that."
"Is that a command, Ursula?" I asked. My eyes were
so clouded I could scarce see the poised flat kneeling
figures of Ramiel and Setheus.
But as I tried to clear my vision, as I tried to
gather my wits and swallow the ache in my throat, the
miracle I feared more than anything in this world, yet
craved, yet hungered for--that miracle commenced.
Out of the very fabric of the canvas, they
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appeared simultaneously, my silk-clad blond-haired
angels, my haloed angels, to unravel from the tight
weave itself. They turned, gazing at me first and then
moving so that they were no longer flat profiles but
full robust figures, and then they stepped out and
tonelessly.
"Every time you ever look at one of his paintings,
you will see us," said Setheus, "or you will see our
like."
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There was no judgment in it. There was merely the
same lovely serenity and kindness that they had always
bestowed on me.
But it was not finished. I saw behind them, taking
dark shape, my own guardians, that solemn ivory pair,
draped in their robes of shadowy blue.
How hard were their eyes, how knowing, how
disdainful yet without the edge which men lend to such
passions. How glacial and remote.
My lips parted. A cry was there. A terrible cry.
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make her on the face of the earth, with my arms
stretched back to hold her so that she could not, must
not, be taken away.
"Ah," said Mastema, nodding, smiling. The sword was
uplifted. "So even now you would go into Hell rather
than see her die!"
"I would!" I cried. "I have no choice."
"Oh, yes, you have a choice."
"No, not her, don't kill her. Kill me, and send me
there, yes, but give her one more chance ..."
Ursula cried against my shoulders, her hands
clinging to my hair, catching hold of it, as if by
means of it she'd be safe.
"Send me now," I said. "Go ahead, strike off my
head and send me to my judgment before the Lord that I
may beg for her! Please, Mastema, do it, but do not
Through the streets we were being dragged, and
suddenly there appeared before us a great crowd of
idle mortals issuing from a wine shop, drunken and
laughing, a great jumble of swollen, natural faces and
dark breeze-tossed clothes.
"Do you see them, Vittorio? Do you see those upon
whom you feed?" Mastema demanded.
"I see them, Mastema!" I said. I groped for her
hand, trying to find her, hold her, shield her. "I do
see them, I do."
"In each and every one of them, Vittorio, there is
what I see in you, and in her--a human soul. Do you
know what that is, Vittorio? Can you imagine?"
I didn't dare to answer.
The crowd spread out over the moonlighted piazza,
and drew closer to us, even as it loosened.
"A spark of the power that made all of us is within
each of them," cried Mastema, "a spark of the
invisible, of the subtle, of the sacred, of the
lovely gleaming and numinous presence, this precious
and unquenchable fire.
I pivoted, my garments snagging around me, and I
saw this flame envelop Ursula. I saw her living and
breathing within it, and, turning back to the crowd, I
saw again that each and every one of them lived and
breathed in it, and I knew suddenly, understood
perfectly--I would always see it. I would never see
living human beings, be they monstrous or righteous,
without this expanding, blinding, fire of the soul.
"Yes," Mastema whispered in my ear. "Yes. Forever,
and every time you feed, every time you raise one of
their tender throats to your cursed fangs, every time
you drink from them the lurid blood you would have,
like the worst of God's beasts, you will see that
light flicker and struggle, and when the heart stops
at the will of your hunger, you will see that light go
out!"
I broke away from him. He let me go.
With her hand only, I ran. I ran and ran towards
the Arno, towards the bridge, towards the taverns that
might still be open, but long before I saw the blazing
flames of the souls there, I saw the glow of the souls
from hundreds of windows, I saw the glow of souls from
beneath the bottoms of bolted doors.
I saw it, and I knew that he spoke the truth. I
I cried out and cried out and let my cries echo over
the water and up the walls on either side. I was mad
with grief, and then through the darkness there came a
toddling child towards me, a beggar, already versed in
words to speak for bread or coins or any bit of
charity that any man would vouchsafe him, and he
glowed and sputtered and glittered and danced with
brilliant and priceless light.
16
AND THE DARKNESS GRASPED IT NOT
OVER the years, every time I saw one of Fra Filippo's
magnificent creations, the angels came alive for me.
It was I only for an instant, only enough to prick the
heart and draw the blood, as if with a needle, to the
core.
Mastema himself did not appear in Fra Filippo's
work until some years later, when Fra Filippo,
struggling and arguing as always, was working for
Piero, the son of Cosimo, who had gone to his grave.
Fra Filippo never did give up his precious nun,
Lucrezia Buti, and it was said of Filippo that every
Virgin he ever painted--and there were many-- bore
Lucrezia's beautiful face. Lucrezia gave Fra Filippo a
son, and that painter took the name Filippino, and his
work too was rich in magnificence and rich in angels,
and those angels too have always for one instant met
my eyes when I came to worship before those canvases,
sad and brokenhearted and full of love and afraid.
In 1469, Filippo died in the town of Spoleto, and
there ended the life of one of the greatest painters
the world has ever known. This was the man who was put
on the rack for fraud, and who had debauched a
convent; this was a man who painted Mary as the
frightened Virgin, as the Madonna of Christmas Night,
as the Queen of Heaven, as the Queen of All Saints.
And I, five hundred years after, have never strayed
too far from that city which gave birth to Filippo and
to that time we call the Age of Gold.
Gold. That is what I see when I look at you.
That is what I see when I look at any man, woman,
child.
I see the flaming celestial gold that Mastema
revealed to me. I see it surrounding you, and holding
you, encasing you and dancing with you, though you
yourself may not behold it, or even care.
From this tower tonight in Tuscany I look out over
the land, and far away, deep in the valleys, I see the
gold of human beings, I see the glowing vitality of
beating souls.
So you have my story.
What do you think?
Do you not see a strange conflict here? Do you see
a dilemma?
Let me put it to you this way.
Think back to when I told you about how my father
and I rode through the woods together and we spoke of
Fra Filippo, and my father asked me what it was that
drew me to this monk. I said that it
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Filippo was a storm unto himself. So am I.
My father, a man of calm spirits and simpler
thoughts, smiled at this.
But what does it mean in relationship to this tale?
Yes, I am a vampire, as I told you; I am a thing
that feeds on mortal life. I exist quietly,
contentedly in my homeland, in the dark shadows of my
home castle, and Ursula is with me as always, and five
hundred years is not so long for a love as strong as
ours.
We are demons. We are damned. But have we not seen
and understood things, have I not written things here
that are of value to you? Have I not rendered a
conflict so full of torment that something looms here
which is full of brilliance and color, not unlike
Filippo's work? Have I not embroidered, interwoven and
gilded, have I not bled?
Look at my story and tell me that it gives you
nothing. I don't believe you if you say that.
And when I think back on Filippo, and his rape of
Lucrezia, and all his other tempestuous sins, how can
I separate them from the magnificence of his
paintings? How can I separate the violation of his
vows, and his deceits and his quarrels, from the
splendor which Filippo gave to the world?
I am not saying I am a great painter. I am not such
a fool. But I say that out of my pain, out of
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I write of blood thirst that is never satisfied. I
write of knowledge and its price.
Behold, I tell you, the light is there in you. I
see it. I see it in each and every one of us, and will
always. I see it when I hunger, when I struggle, when
I slaughter. I see it sputter and die in my arms when
I drink.
Can you imagine what it would be like for me to
kill you?
Pray it never takes a slaughter or a rape for you
to see this light in those around you. God forbid it
that it should demand such a price. Let me pay the
price for you instead.
THE END
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Cornell University Press.
Professor Trexler has also written other wonderful
books on Italy, but this book is a particularly rich
and inspiring one, especially for me, because
Professor Trexler's analyses and insights regarding
Florence have helped me to understand my own city of
New Orleans, Louisiana, better than anything directly
written by anyone about New Orleans itself.
New Orleans, like Florence, is a city of public
spectacles, rituals and feast days, of demonstrations
of communal celebration and belief. It is almost
impossible to realistically explain New Orleans, and
its Mardi Gras, its St. Patrick's Day and its annual
Jazz Fest, to those who have not been here. Professor
Trexler's brilliant scholarship gave me tools to
gather thoughts about and observations pertaining to
those things I most love.
Other works by Professor Trexler include his Journey
of
289
Lippi, published by Scala, text by Gloria Fossi, which
is for sale in numerous translations in Florence and
other places in Italy as well. The only other book of
which I know that is exclusively devoted to Filippo is
the immense Fra Filippo Lippi by Jeffrey Ruda,
subtitled Life and Work, with a Complete Catalogue. It
is published by Phaidon Press in England and
distributed in America by Harry N. Abrams.
The most enjoyable books for the general reader
that I have read on Florence and on the Medici have
been by Christopher Hibbert, including his Florence:
The Biography of a City, published by Norton, and The
House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall, published by
Morrow.
There is also The Medici of Florence: A Family
Portrait, by Emma Micheletti, published by Becocci
Editore. The Medici by James Cleugh, published
originally in 1975, is available now through Barnes &
Noble.
Popular books on Florence and Tuscany--travelers'
observations, loving memoirs and tributes--abound.
Primary sources in translation--that is, letters and
diaries and histories written during the Renaissance
in Florence--are everywhere on library and bookstore
shelves.
In trying to render correctly Vittorio's quotations
from Aquinas, I used the translation of the Summa
Theologica by Fathers of the English Dominican
Province. In dealing
290
building, and there are many books available on the
architecture of Florence entire. I owe a debt of
gratitude not only to the museum of San Marco for
having so beautifully preserved the architectural work
of Michelozzo, so praised in this novel, but for the
publications readily available in the shop there on
monastery's architecture and art.
In closing, let me add this: if Vittorio were asked
to name a recording of Renaissance music which best
captures the mood of the High Mass and Communion which
he witnessed at the Court of the Ruby Grail, it would
inevitably be the All Souls' Vespers, requiem music
from Cordoba Cathedral, performed by the Orchestra of
the Renaissance led by Richard Cheetham--though I must
confess, this music is described as circa 1570--some
years after Vittorio's fearful ordeal. The recording
is available on the Veritas label, through Virgin
Classics London and New York.
In closing these notes, allow me one final quote
from St. Augustine's The City of God.
For God would never have created a man, let alone an
angel, in the foreknowledge of his future evil state,
if he had not known at the same time how he would put
such
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292
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book was set in Monotype Dante, a typeface
designed by Giovanni Mardersteig (1892-1977).
Conceived as a private type for the Officina Bodoni in