MY FIRST POST was in Tirano. The Adda River flows through Tirano, on the westernmost boundary of Terraferma, Venice’s mainland territory. It is a walled town, with nothing much to recommend it. In September of ’04, the Blessed Mary had appeared to a local fellow named Omodei, and so there was a steady trickle of pilgrims to the area hoping they too would see the Madonna of Tirano.
Living in much greater comfort on the hill across the border were the monks in the town of Brusio. It had been founded five hundred years earlier as a monastery, and not much had happened there since. Heaven knows why we had to patrol it, but patrol it we did. We saw to it that those crafty monks never had a chance to frolic with the Madonna of Tirano.
I made my garrison life agreeable. I was the youngest of a band of rugged men, most mercenaries, most from foreign lands, and most from rough-hewn cultures. I was glad to be free of the insincerity and false laughter of Venice—but I did miss the clean sheets and the decent music, the casual ability to find something both man-made and beautiful. Still, I found the physical reality bracing: the hard mats, the dirt floors of the towers, even the flies and fleas and mud.
The towns we garrisoned were small and poor. There was little to do. We rotated guard duties, one week on, one week off; a week at the gate, a week on the wall, a week guarding munitions, a week in the piazza. After a few months, I was sent to another town, and some few months later, to another. Sometimes I was with the same group of men, sometimes not. I met a few fellow Venetians along the way, and each one of them gushed over me and cited me—and by association, of course, my family—as their inspiration to enlist. So my father had made much hay out of a little weed. I hoped the senator whose boots he had been licking sent plenty of wealthy customers his way.
I cannot say what my fellow soldiers did in their time off. I yearned for scholarship, and so to keep my wit sharp, I read and translated whatever I could get my hands on: bad poetry written by a mayor’s wife; archived reports of skirmishes at the larger fortress postings; the Bible. I played cards and chess with elder statesmen of the towns where I was stationed, and so had access to their books. I was the only soldier, to my knowledge, so keen on this kind of entertainment.
Within the meager rations of gunpowder allotted any garrison in peacetime, all soldiers study shooting—and here, at least, a small fantasy of mine came true: I was the best gunner of each place I was stationed, and not a man of them but was improved under my tutelage. I found this satisfying—although I was admittedly (at first) the least distinguished swordsman.
Gunpowder and its possibilities had changed the face of battle, but gunpowder was hard to come by, guns expensive and too cumbersome for a free lance to carry comfortably about with him, so blade against blade was still the common conflict. Realizing this, I made it my ambition to excel the most accomplished mercenaries I was stationed with. One such German had assisted Paulus Hector Mair to perfect the techniques of his recent fencing compendium. The man was pleased to take me as a student; to his credit, he was delighted when, after months of being fiercely humiliated by him, I bested him for the first time.
I had been taught the rudiments of fencing growing up, just as one is taught how to move chess pieces around the board without really being taught chess. I’d received further training at the Arsenal, but it was only here in the outlands that I became truly skilled. Thanks to my German tutor, I was soon known to be “good for a Venetian.” By my third year of practice, I was simply known to be good.
My reputation was not really deserved. Having no active enemy, soldiers sparred exclusively against one another; blood was rarely drawn, and nobody’s life was ever nearly in danger. I was not prideful of my skills. I was more talented than a few, more industrious than many, and more intelligent than most, but it was the world I knew, and after five years of it, I could imagine no other.
IN FACT, BY the time five years had passed, I was grown so skilled at fencing that I began to teach others the rudiments of the Bolognese style, especially the northern condottieri, who were relatively new to Italy. They presumed I was among the masters in the field despite my youth (I was not yet five and twenty), and thus a prodigy.
One afternoon, I was back in Tirano, site of my first posting, but now I was one of the veteran soldiers. It was a rainy day, which was not common; I was not on duty, I could not rouse anyone to dagger work, and outside exercise was impossible in the deluge. I found myself playing primero with some of the younger men, two of them from Venice—that was a rare thing indeed, for three native sons to be stationed together as infantry in the same godforsaken town. We were speaking of swordplay, as we often did, and these young colts were particularly taken with the theories of Camillo Agrippa.
In truth, Agrippa is among the best there is. As partial as I am to Marozzo, I know Agrippa is a practical improvement on him, simplifying Marozzo’s eleven guards to four. But I like the Marozzo training, for it offers subtle variations, while Agrippa, although pragmatic, lacks Marozzo’s artistry and adaptability. This would never carry as an argument with earnest young lugs, however, so I never tried to change anybody’s mind about it.
But this particular cluster of lugs was being disrespectful: they were extolling the virtues of Agrippa by denigrating Marozzo, oblivious that without a Marozzo, there could be no Agrippa. It is a particular gripe to me, when worthiness is denigrated in this fashion, and I was about to scold them for it.
But instead, on a whim, I decided to attempt something that was, for me, extremely novel: a harmless counterfeit. It was unlike me to counterfeit anything, ever; the inspiration caused me nervous amusement, as though I were about to perform before an audience. As I was studying my four cards, I scoffed, “Camillo Agrippa . . . That whoreson.”
They all glanced up, startled from their own cards. “You speak as if you know him,” one of the young colts said, almost rebukingly.
I shrugged. “We dueled when he was last in Venice.” The words came out of my mouth as smooth as silk drapes over alabaster. It was probably the first deliberate falsehood of my entire life, yet I found it effortless to keep a casual, even dismissive, expression on my face.
To a man, they all dropped their cards onto the wooden table. “What?” they gasped in unison, mouths hanging slack like fish, their faces sharply shadowed in the lamplight. The windows were all shut against the rain.
“The man is a buffoon,” I said contemptuously, examining my hand. I had a fluxus of hearts. I decided to discard the deuce, and reached for it.
One of the pack put his large paw over mine to keep me from continuing the game. “Come now, Iago, you cannot make a comment like that and not expect us to want to hear the story. You dueled with the master? The master of all masters?”
I sighed, as if annoyed the game had been interrupted. “Only because he was a prideful ass. I would not have chosen to waste my time on him.”
“Waste your time?” one of the other soldiers squeaked.
“He is a worthy strategist,” I allowed, wondering what story I would end up telling them if they did not call me out. “But I believe the purpose of a duel is for two honorable men to meet, for honorable purposes, to determine who is the better swordsman. You would certainly think the creator of the greatest school of fencing ever conceived would, himself, hold such a position, but he challenged me for the most insipid of reasons.”
They were all still slack-mouthed. It reminded me of that childhood moment in Galinarion’s dining hall, when Roderigo and I had been caught during the egg incident. But then I had been telling the truth; now I was blithely inventing. I expected one of them to accuse me of gulling, but apparently the thought did not occur to a one of them.
Finally: “What was it, then?” somebody demanded in a hushed voice. “Why did Maestro Agrippa challenge you?”
Oh, dear. Now I must invent in detail. I decided to invent something ridiculous, so that one of them would call me out, and we could all have a laugh and return to our card game (which incidentally I was winning).
“We met at a party and he asked me what I thought of the cut of his beard. I thought it looked ridiculous, and I told him so,” I said. “He was offended.”
The foreign soldiers exchanged looks of astonishment, and a pale-haired youth opened his mouth, obviously about to accuse me of a falsehood. But one of the Venetians immediately declared, by way of explanation, “Iago is known in Venice for his bluntness. He really does say things like that.” The other Venetian nodded gravely in support of this. The towheaded foreigner closed his mouth, uncertain now.
I did not realize until that moment that I had a reputation. I had not been home for five years and assumed I was forgotten by everyone, except (perhaps) my immediate family.
The foreigner opened his mouth again. “You said you didn’t like his beard, so he challenged you to a duel?” he demanded. As if one unit, all leaned in a bit closer to me.
So they all believed there had really been a conversation. I could at that moment have told them I was lying, and we could have laughed, and returned to our card game, and I could have won a tidy sum. But now I was intrigued to see how far I could push their credulity.
“Even Agrippa is not so crude as that,” I offered. “I said I did not like his beard, and he, after a moment of astonishment at my rudeness, informed me that he considered it extremely well styled. To which I said, ‘You are of course entitled to your opinion, but I am entitled to mine as well, and since you asked me, I don’t like it.’ He said, with a forced laugh, ‘Well, I did not cut it to please you, anyhow,’ and I replied, ‘That’s good, because you have not pleased me at all, I think it looks ridiculous.’ ”
I paused a moment, to allow one of them to have the insight that not even Blunt Iago would really have had this conversation with one of the most famous military geniuses of our century. But not one of them considered I was counterfeiting.
“Then what happened?” a black-haired brute from Normandy demanded in hushed awe.
“He churlishly informed me that I had absolutely no taste or judgment in such matters,” I continued. “And I agreed with him, earnestly and proudly, explaining that I would not want to be an expert on the matter of absurd facial hair. At this point the fellow was near to apoplexy. He screamed that he’d never been spoken to so rudely in his life, and that if I did not renounce what I had said, he would force me out to the courtyard of our host, and measure swords with me right there.”
“What did you say?” the fair-haired youth demanded. By now they were all leaning Iago-ward on their stools.
I shrugged defensively. “I told him there was nothing to take back, I had spoke truth, and it would be dishonorable to now pretend it was an untruth.”
“So you went down into the courtyard right there, and dueled? In the midst of a party?”
Good heaven, they were actually going to make me invent a duel with Camillo Agrippa. I tried to think if I had any scars that I might pass off as remnants of the altercation. I recalled a faded scar on my right shoulder blade, a result of tumbling off a bridge railing while playing cavalry years ago with Roderigo. (He had been the horse.) I was not sure whom I should have win the duel, or under what circumstances it could have ended in a draw.
“I wanted to decline,” I said. “As I told you, I considered that a most improper reason to duel with anyone, especially a man who is supposed to be the living embodiment of military honor. But on the other hand, I could not imagine passing up an opportunity to duel with a master, so I accepted, and with tremendous fanfare and the entire population of the party following us, we stepped down into the torch-lit courtyard.” I glanced at the two youths from home. “You have never heard of this in Venice?” I asked, with the barest hint of a smile—something I hoped would trigger them to consider my words false.
“Whose house was it?” one of them demanded breathlessly.
“It was Pietro Galinarion’s,” I answered. “His courtyard is full of statuary, and guests, so we agreed that we would engage according to the rules of battle, rather than a private duel.”
A long pause. I stared at them; they stared at me. A similar expression on each face: on the one hand, this tale was incredible beyond incredible, but on the other hand, it must be true. As I held the gaze longer and longer, the Norman’s face expressed a hint of uncertainty, and I smiled at him with conspiracy, which I hoped he would take as an invitation to call me out. No such luck; he rather looked reassured, taking the smile to mean I was utterly confident in the tale I was telling.
“We drew, and measured swords,” I said. “And then—”
The sharp knocking startled all of us. The fair-haired soldier, closest to the door, jumped up and went to answer it.
Standing outside, rain streaming off his oiled canvas mantle, was a sodden man wearing the red-and-white livery of hired messengers from Venice. I recognized his face, for he was my father’s most regular and trusted courier. He recognized me too, for he stepped into the room with an authority that forbad anyone asking who he was; he crossed straight to me and bowed.
“Master Iago,” he said somberly, “it is my grievous duty to escort you home to Venice. Your honored father has just passed away.”