21

 

The business of managing the parish of San Lorenzo was just that: a business. So much money passed between hands. Sacro Cuore hadn’t seemed like this, not at his level. Niccoluccio wondered if it had been all along.

For the first few days after he took office, all he knew was where the money was not going. His salary was a pittance, especially for the wealthy San Lorenzo parish, but it was enough to live upon. Most of San Lorenzo’s clergy were not so fortunate. They lived off parishioners’ donations. In San Lorenzo, that was easier than other neighborhoods, but even here clergy were poor. Some of them slept on the church floor.

Niccoluccio stayed in his office until it was too dark to read. He had spent the day poring over records of weekly tithes. There was no way to satisfy the bishop’s demands without charging double for services, and this in a city clamoring for long-delayed funerals. His only alternative was ransacking the parish churches and selling San Lorenzo’s triptych of John the Evangelist’s life. He was sure that the mob of San Lorenzo would have lynched him if he breathed the idea. He nearly contacted Habidah to ask for advice. The thought persisted, rising at odd moments.

His head hurt, and his eyes rested on needles. His back was stiff with idleness. He forced himself to his feet and ambled into the church. Dioneo and Ambrogiuolo were waiting.

Dioneo said, “You’ve made yourself too scarce since coming here. I’ve hardly had a chance to see my own brother.”

“I come back to your home every night,” Niccoluccio said. “The problem has been that you are not often there.” Dioneo wanted him to come carousing, as he had offered several times already.

Ambrogiuolo said, “You’re going to squander your fame if you don’t show yourself.”

“I don’t believe I’ve earned any fame.”

“Yet people are talking about you. The only survivor of Sacro Cuore! How could they not? A number of my friends and I will be dining together tonight. I would be pleased to have you join us.”

Niccoluccio was no fool. He had been put in San Lorenzo for a reason. Ambrogiuolo and Dioneo had wanted him to experience the strain of the papacy’s demands on the city. They’d made a compelling argument. Niccoluccio was a vowed servant of the church, but he no longer knew what to think of its highest members.

“This once,” Niccoluccio said. “And if you do not mind if I keep my peace for the evening.”

The three of them walked the twilit city in silence, past the shadow-spired cathedral and into the nearby ecclesiastical offices. Ambrogiuolo led him to a candlelit dining room. Stepping into the smell of roast mallard was like slipping underneath the veil of a waterfall. This was a different world from the one outside. Chatter filled his ears like a rumble of water.

Niccoluccio had once expected that men of the church would eat moderately. He wasn’t surprised to see the feast laid out. In addition to the mallard, there were legs of pork, pheasant, and a centerpiece of roast goose. The pomegranates and figs alone were more expensive than any meal at the monastery. Someone had brought silver spoons and knives. Malvesey wine and ale sat together in uneasy company.

Not all present were clergymen. Dioneo, of course, was a civil official. Two men wore the liveries of the Visdomini and the Tosinghi, two of Florence’s great families. A third was dressed in layers of folding robes, each a different color. Dioneo whispered in Niccoluccio’s ear that the robed man was the family’s new lawyer. Niccoluccio took the nearest open seat, next to the lawyer. Without waiting or asking, Dioneo scooped mounds of food onto Niccoluccio’s plate.

At Sacro Cuore, Niccoluccio had believed that he had conquered his senses. That Niccoluccio must have died there. As soon as he smelled the roast goose, Niccoluccio knew he was lost. It felt as though someone else were lifting his hand to his knife.

A few minutes later, his appetite half-sated, he began to hear the conversation. Dioneo’s friends had gathered to discuss the old bishop, whose life seemed to finally be nearing its end. Messengers flowed from his household daily, but the man himself hadn’t been seen in weeks.

The lawyer said, “No doubt his replacement will be little different. Another man of Avignon.”

Ambrogiuolo said, “No one living can remember the last time we had a Florentine for a bishop.”

The goose left Niccoluccio heady. He reached for the ale without thinking, and said, “Plenty of public posts aren’t filled by natives. The podesta, for example.” The podesta was a special police captain, always a foreigner. It was his task to keep the peace between the city’s noble families – such as the Tosinghi and Vosdomini men seated here.

Ambrogiuolo countered, “Clergymen do not police the city. Clergymen are of the city.”

Dioneo said, “You’ve served the diocese long enough to know that the church can’t function with the demands the bishop is placing on us. This is not a matter of selfishness. This is a matter of our trying to avoid riots.”

“What would you suggest as a cure?” Niccoluccio asked. “Rebel?”

Niccoluccio had been in the monastery for so long that he’d forgotten how to speak to the people of his home. He hadn’t meant to shock them, but the silence that swept the table was deep. The man across from him, a procurator from the cathedral chapter, cleared his throat. “Of course not. All we would wish to do is place a worthy man in the bishopric.”

Dioneo said, “Even if that means appointing him ourselves.”

Now it was Niccoluccio’s turn to blanch. “The pope would never allow that.” That was rebellion, whether they called it so or not. The papacy guarded few rights more jealously than that of appointing bishops.

“The people of Florence would back us,” Dioneo said. “Clement would have to muster the force to convince us otherwise.”

The lawyer said, “It’s been done before,” and left it at that.

All of them knew what that meant, even should their conspiracy succeed. Excommunications. Possibly an interdict for the whole city, barring clergy from performing services, even Last Rites. In a city ravaged by pestilence, that would spark a revolt. All had happened in Florence before. These men had fallen silent when he’d mentioned it not because they were appalled by the thought, but because they hadn’t wanted to call it what it was.

Niccoluccio ate in silence, allowing the conversation to turn to more comfortable matters. In spite of the church’s financial difficulties, the cathedral chapter was buying the land of pestilence victims to speculate on prices. More important, though, was falconry. The lawyer had just purchased a new falcon, his second, and was anxious to pit it against his friends’.

Niccoluccio’s head spun from ale. The juices of roast goose lingered on his tongue. As his dinner companions began to stand, Niccoluccio turned to the door. It would have been wiser to stay with his brother, travel in a group, but Niccoluccio kept going and didn’t look back.

He gave no farewells. He just walked. No one came after him. The firelight leaking through the open door dwindled behind him. Before long, his footsteps were alone in the night.

Niccoluccio sang a hymn under his breath as he marched. Though the words came to him easily, the melody didn’t quite end up like he remembered. Lomellini would have tanned his hide if he’d heard.

Niccoluccio had gotten accustomed to walking the cloister after dark, on his way to Vigils or his early morning labors. He’d known the path as surely as if he could see it. Here, some desultory lights from homes and a half-shrouded sky were all he had to guide his way. Few people risked traveling in night’s miasmatic winds. It occurred to him then that he would do well to be afraid. He shrugged the thought away. If a robber came upon him, he had nothing worth taking, not even his life.

His hymn quieted as he got farther from the cathedral. The streets narrowed. There were fewer signs of the pest at night. No boarded doors, no empty houses, at least none that he could see. He could almost pretend Florence was as he had left it, half his lifetime ago. He remembered the smells too well, the pig shit and nightsoil and moldering rot, but it all seemed so much stronger than he remembered.

He should not have come back here. He realized that at once, though the strange burning had been building up in his throat for days. The grease on his lips proved that he succumbed to temptation too easily. He should have gone with Habidah, wherever she was. Failing that, he should have lost himself in the wilderness. He didn’t want to live like this. Given his options, that was tantamount to saying that he didn’t want to live at all. A mortal sin. As with all sins lately, it took effort to push the thought of it away.

His hymn ended. He trudged through the winding streets, under an ever-darkening sky, only half-sure where he was going.

In the manner that Habidah had taught him, he asked, “Are you there?”

Her reply took a long moment. “I’m here, Niccoluccio.” Her voice sounded so much like she was right beside him. As before, in the back of his mind, a deep disquiet settled over him. The first few words she spoke hadn’t sounded like her. He told himself that it was just their means of communication giving him difficulty. She had said that there may be times when, due to the arrangement of the stars above them, they may not be able to talk right away.

As though her voice were like someone trying on a glove, though, it didn’t take her long to sound like her. “I’m sorry if I sounded distracted. We’ve been busy. Things are looking up. Several new agents are coming to help us.”

Something about the way she said that left him unsettled. He swallowed to cool the heat in his throat. “I agreed to come back here to help you learn about our ways of living,” he said. “Could you also tell me about yours? Your home? I feel it would do me a great deal of good. I only need know a little if you have better things to do.”

Habidah let out a long breath, as if deciding how much to say. “I come from several lands grouped together, into countries collectively called the Unity. It’s… it’s larger than I can describe. Larger than I can imagine. I don’t think any human could. Take a thousand continents the size of Europe and stack them atop each other, and then add a million more, and all cosmos above them.”

She paused to give Niccoluccio a chance to absorb that. Of course he couldn’t. She’d said before that she’d come from another land, another continent. He hadn’t believed her, and she seemed to know it. It was still astounding how fast the pretext disappeared.

She said, “It has cities made of glass and diamond and gold, worlds of perpetual lavafalls, or seas of clouds. I grew up on the side of a volcano larger than every land you’ve seen on a map. I swam in green oceans the size of this world.”

Niccoluccio ought not to believe this, either. Everything he’d seen of her and the wonders she’d worked made it impossible not to. He hoped his voice didn’t sound broken. “Are the people of these places Christian?”

“Of all the places we’ve visited, yours is the only one with a religion like it.”

That ought to have cut him to the quick. He’d known the answer before he asked. It hadn’t mattered then any more than it mattered now.

He let out a cold breath. If any of his brothers from Sacro Cuore had been able to hear his thoughts, they would have told him he was damned. He couldn’t convince himself that they were wrong, but neither could he rouse himself to care.

Anticipating how he would react, Habidah said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”

“It’s all right,” he said, leaning against a brick wall. “I’ll get better.”

“You have a unique vision. All of the Abrahamic religions on this world do. Few in the Unity see the body and the mind as separate in the way you do. I’ve appreciated learning about it.” She hesitated, and seemed to realize that she wasn’t helping.

“I ought to focus on the assignment you gave me, not all these politics.”

She said, “Don’t worry as much about the assignment. The new agents will help us fill in a lot of the gaps in our knowledge.”

He said nothing to that, and she didn’t elaborate. She hadn’t said it with any malice, and yet dread tickled the back of his throat.

He didn’t know which of them had cut the power that bound their voices, but he didn’t speak to her again for the rest of the night. Maybe she was always listening. It would have been comforting to think so.

More likely, though, he was simply beneath her notice.

He figured out where he was without trying hard. He could still see the silhouette of the cathedral and the Tower of the Castagna. Both landmarks so near meant that his brother’s home was scarcely a fifteen-minute walk away.

The candles by the windows were still lit. They usually were. Dioneo spent most of his nights away. He claimed politicking at late dinners, but even his children knew that he had a mistress, a widow.

Niccoluccio fumbled his key and tried to fit it to the lock, a more difficult operation than he imagined. His fingers kept disobeying. On his third try, the door opened of its own accord. Dioneo’s wife, Catella, stood behind it. Niccoluccio stood there a moment, key drooped in his hand. Catella always retired long before Dioneo returned home.

Catella curtsied and stepped back. She moved quickly, anxiously. “Beg your pardon, Brother Niccoluccio. You have a guest. I thought you would be back at your usual time and let her stay, but after it got late I didn’t want to turn her out to the dark.”

“Who?”

“She said she was a friend of yours, from across town.”

Niccoluccio couldn’t think of any woman friends aside from Habidah. He strode past Catella and into the parlor. His head was light at the thought of Habidah.

The woman seated in the parlor stood as he entered. She was not Habidah. He nearly didn’t recognize her. Like everyone in Florence, she’d changed. Ivy-vine wrinkles crawled around her eyes. She’d shed weight and become unpleasantly slender. Her hair had turned stringier.

He stammered her name at the same moment that it occurred to him. “Elisa?”

Her voice choked. “I’d heard you’d come back to Florence, but I didn’t think you would… I mean, I didn’t believe…”

Niccoluccio stepped closer. Over the years, he’d thought he’d hardened his heart to this woman. He’d pushed her memory away, carefully and deliberately. He’d regretted the things they’d done and prayed for forgiveness for her as well as for him. During his last few years at Sacro Cuore, he’d thought of her as he might someone dead, so far away and lost she’d seemed.

All his effort fell away at the sight of her. Before he knew it, he was embracing her.

Her hair smelled of the peppers people used to ward off the pestilence. She wrapped her arms around him. He could hardly hear her over the pounding in his ears.

“…believe you’d survived! My parents died, my husband, his parents, our children, even Pietro…”

Holding her was something between a memory and a dream. He wasn’t sure he would have sounded any more coherent if he’d tried to speak. He stayed with her until she got her voice under control.

So much of what he’d believed at Sacro Cuore was without foundation. It had existed only in his head. He’d never dreamed of a world as large as the one Habidah had given him. He’d been so small that he’d tried to never allow himself to think of Elisa, who had been part of his life longer than anyone but Dioneo.

How amazing it was that he’d ever thought of himself as better for that.

When she was able, she let go. He led her to a cushioned chair, and sat across from her. She said, “People at churches have been saying your name. When I heard you’d come back, I had to see you. I didn’t think it was possible. Everyone else in my life is gone.”

Some of her words were just catching up with him. “Husband?” he stammered.

She nodded. “God has seen fit to extinguish all of the lights of my life. My children…” For a moment, Niccoluccio thought she was going to weep again, but she held her voice together. “They left me behind. I didn’t think that I would find any part of my life again.”

“Pietro, too?”

“Taken the first week the pestilence visited Florence, almost.”

The news sent a spike through his heart, as deep a gouge as it had been when he’d discovered his father’s death. Pietro was another enormous part of him that had lapsed into silence while he’d been at Sacro Cuore.

He saw it so clearly now. He thought he’d been looking into the face of God, but all he’d done was stare at brick walls.

He said, “I had no idea. There are no words adequate to contain my condolences. Every time I think the world could not hold more misery, I find out its depths go even deeper.”

“Even that seems pale next to what I’ve heard you went through. Your whole monastery–”

“If my brothers were here, they would be the first to tell you that God has not taken your children to deprive you, but to receive them into Grace.”

Elisa had always been perceptive. She asked, “Would you say that?”

He had no answer suitable for her hearing. None that he wanted to say to himself. When she offered her hands, he accepted them into his. “You and I have a great deal to talk through before we get to that.”