24

 

Dioneo came to the dining room as Niccoluccio and Elisa were finishing their breakfast. He halted, and waited for Elisa to stand. He politely escorted her to the door. Then, after it was shut, he spun on Niccoluccio.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever paid attention to that woman,” Dioneo hissed, in a tone that made it clear he remembered exactly how much attention Niccoluccio used to pay her, “but she’s a well-known adulteress. If her cuckold husband hadn’t perished from the pestilence, he would have died of humiliation. Your reputation could be brought to ruin if you’re seen with her again.” Dioneo jabbed a finger into Niccoluccio’s chest, uncharacteristically hard. “Right now, your reputation is the only thing you have of value to anyone.”

Niccoluccio was too stunned to speak. Dioneo promptly returned to the dining room, where Niccoluccio could hear him informing Catella that Elisa was not to be allowed in again. Whether she cared or not, Niccoluccio knew she would obey her husband. That was the only kind of woman Dioneo would have married.

It was easy to catch up with Elisa. Niccoluccio dropped his jogging pace to a walk beside her.

Her mourning veil hid her until he was beside her. She glanced to him. Through her veil, he saw the skin underneath her eyes was stained. She said, “After the way your brother spoke to me, I didn’t think I would see you again.”

“Of course you would. I’m sorry I didn’t look for you.”

Elisa brushed a hand under her veil but, when she spoke, her voice was steady. “You had more important affairs.”

He didn’t, but there was no use saying that. That regret would follow him forever. Niccoluccio had never felt like he’d come home until he’d seen her. “I missed everything I shouldn’t have.” Elisa had summarized the years for him last night, but it felt unreal. She could only give him words, not experience.

“I missed a great deal, too, and I was here,” she said. “When Pietro died, I wanted to attend his funeral, but my husband wouldn’t let me.”

When Niccoluccio tried expressing his condolences for her husband’s death, she cut him off. “That man might as well have been my father’s husband, not mine. My father was the one who chose him. Certainly the only one I’ve ever met who liked him. I kept seeing Pietro, of course.”

“Of course.”

Elisa looked back to him. Her attitude had hardened since last night. She’d come to him desperate, looking for help. At night, she might have tricked herself into thinking she’d found it. Now, in the sunlight, she could see him as he really was.

Niccoluccio increasingly did not like what he saw reflected in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t needed to leave. But I don’t know how much help I would have been if I had stayed.”

“It’s all right,” Elisa said, bitterly. “It’s all the world that’s turned to shit, not just us.”

“There’s so much more to the universe than our world.”

Elisa turned. This time he couldn’t see her eyes under the veil. “You sound like a man getting ready to preach.”

“I need to share what’s on my mind with someone.” If Elisa was expecting to hear a streetside sermon, she was going to be surprised. After everything he had been through, Niccoluccio no longer needed religion to speak of God.

This world was a very small part of the cosmos. All the troubles of their lives would be washed away by time. Throughout his childhood, that had been a terrifying thought. Even in Sacro Cuore, he’d shied from it. Since meeting Habidah, though, it eased the pain in his joints, the heat lumped in his throat. If nothing that mankind accomplished was significant, then neither were its pains.

There were worlds covered in vast oceans; worlds of nothing but open sky. Worlds of fire and worlds of peace. All of them rich in their own peoples, and all of them so much unlike their world that he could never describe them to her or even imagine them. He’d wanted to weep when Habidah had told him of them. It had felt like grief at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure. These other worlds had no bearing on their world or on the pestilence, but it felt good to speak of them.

He had never met anyone in as much pain as Elisa. When they’d spoken of the dead, they had elided over her children. They were what she could least bear speaking about. She listened. Niccoluccio began to feel foolish, but he continued. He had spent so long at Sacro Cuore that he had forgotten how to speak to people.

She said, at last, “Your life at that monastery must have been much more interesting than I imagined, if this is the man it turned you into.”

“It was not the monastery that made me think like this.”

“You’ve been somewhere very strange, that’s certain,” she said. “I don’t think that any of it helped much, but I would still like to hear more. It might be nice to believe.”

Niccoluccio belatedly recognized the narrow streets. They were near the parish of San Lorenzo. His church was around the next intersection, beyond the shuttered bakery. “I didn’t mean to take you so far afield,” Niccoluccio said. “I wasn’t thinking, as usual. Would you like me to walk you back to your home?”

“I can find my way on my own, thank you. I came this way to listen to you.”

“Then would you like to… to make a habit of walking, like today?”

She stopped just short of the bakery. “If you would keep me distracted, I could not think of any greater kindness.” She extended her hand.

Niccoluccio clasped her fingers but did not kiss her knuckles. After a while, she walked back the way she had come. He had to make an effort not to follow.

He forced himself to turn to the Church of San Lorenzo. His thoughts still buzzed. He wanted to think about anything except the ledgers in front of him. But Sacro Cuore had taught him to put his labors above his love, and above even his peace of mind. Labor, Prior Lomellini had said, was the path to the peace of God.

An hour after lunchtime, he finished assembling a summary of the parish’s debts and loans. The results were as bad as expected. If the parish’s income remained diminished, and papal taxes high, the parish would have to call in all of its own loans to survive. That was, of course, contingent upon the parish’s debtors being able to pay. Niccoluccio knew very well that they couldn’t.

He had no solutions. If he had been in any position of power, he would have already bankrupted the church caring for the poor and the dead and the dying. The state of the church’s debts mattered nothing to what its mission in the world should have been. It was a good thing he had never been placed so high up. He was not cut out for this life, these decisions.

His feet carried him out of the church. He paused at a street cart to buy maslin bread, and didn’t think about where he was going. He needed to lose himself, as he’d used to sink into his chores at Sacro Cuore.

Instead, his thoughts kept sticking on Habidah.

When he called her, she asked, “So soon?” Again there was that disquieting moment when she didn’t sound like herself. It faded more quickly than last time, but he couldn’t put it out of his head.

He stammered, “I, uhm, I know. You have bigger problems than me to worry about.”

“Things have been going well here. The multiverse can be as much a kind place as a cruel one. Someday I hope to be able to show you that.”

Niccoluccio’s stomach fluttered. “What do you mean?”

“When you were with us, I’m not sure you had a chance to notice that one of our number was ill. His disease released him. Wherever he is in the multiverse, I’m sure he’s found more peace now than he had yesterday.”

Niccoluccio did remember an older man in Habidah’s home. If he had been suffering, he’d made no mention of it. “‘Released?’ You don’t mean ‘recovered,’ do you?”

“There was not much chance of that.”

Niccoluccio took a bite of his bread, as a pretense for not answering straight away. Habidah did not sound like the same person. He changed the subject: “I have perhaps too delicate a question for you. Forgive me if it is too much.”

“I can answer any question you would like.”

“What do your people think of love and sex? Is it…?” He had been about to ask if sex was a sin, but he couldn’t finish the question, even subvocally.

“What they are to me doesn’t matter that much. I get the idea that’s not what you’re asking. There are so many other worlds in the multiverse, Niccoluccio. Love means so many different things on all them. On some worlds, it’s a fault, and on others a virtue. There are places where it’s scorned and shameful, and others where it’s celebrated in public.”

“You can travel as you like, to any place that suits you?”

“Any place at all, Niccoluccio.”

A pang of jealousy faltered his step. “I think I would enjoy talking to you more about your worlds.”

That was nearly all Niccoluccio did over the next several days: talk, to Elisa and to Habidah. He hadn’t had so much female company since he was a child. So many of the books he’d meditated upon at Sacro Cuore, from Cassian’s Conferences to St Jerome’s Letters, had warned him against feminine company and feminine corruption. Even then, those parts had seemed the smallest part of the text.

On their next walk, Elisa said, “When I couldn’t attend Pietro’s burial, I spent all of my waking hours in prayer. I pray for him every night. I don’t know that any of it matters.”

“Every prayer is heard,” Niccoluccio said, automatically.

“What would a fallen woman matter?”

“You’ve always mattered to me.”

“I don’t believe that. You left. But on the chance you’re right, you’ve been a fool.”

Heat built under Niccoluccio’s throat. “You are not a fallen woman.”

Elisa laughed quietly, bitterly.

Nobody in Florence could see the world the way he did. He could try to explain it, but never succeed. Habidah was the only person who understood even a glimmer of it.

Their walks meandered through Florence’s more pleasant neighborhoods. The Baptistery and Cathedral of Santa Reparata wasn’t far from San Lorenzo. Other days, they walked along the Arno River and listened to the porters call to each other. Nothing compared to the peace of Sacro Cuore, but Niccoluccio’s spirits were increasingly intolerant of peace. It reminded him too much of his last days of gravedigging in the cold and empty cloister. There were flashes of that here, too, no matter how much he tried to look away. Dark, shuttered houses. Family stores abandoned. A leathery hand laying near an open shutter.

He caught Elisa looking at them, too. Most people ignored the dead, but not her. She said, “There are rooms in my house that look just as empty.”

The sight of Florence’s dead may have reminded Niccoluccio of home, but this was Elisa’s home. To live as she did would have been like walking through Sacro Cuore’s empty cloister every day. The effort and the grief of it would have driven him to his knees.

Late that night, he told Habidah this. She said, “One of the troubles with mortality is that, no matter how much there is to see in the world, or worlds, there’s never enough time to experience it. Or enough to forget the things you would rather not take with you.”

Niccoluccio said, “You must be enormously tired of my sharing all this. I know this isn’t why you left me the ability to speak with you.”

“I’ll allow it,” Habidah said, with a trace of amusement. It made him start. He hadn’t ever heard her amused when they’d spoken in person. It reinforced the feeling that he was speaking to someone other than the woman he’d met. Maybe speaking to her like this just made it that much harder for them to understand each other.

He said, “There are times when I wish I could see your face. I don’t think I can ever get used to speaking to anyone like this.”

“Someday.”

He raised his eyebrows. He had expected to never see her in person again. Certainly that had been the impression she had left him with. She didn’t bring it up again.

Their walks sometimes took them through the Palazzo Vecchio. Even after the pestilence had left Florence a husk, there were always people there, always busy. Today, the city’s nineteen military companies mustered their strength in the plaza, one at a time, to take a count of survivors and hand out promotions. Niccoluccio watched them gather. The rest of Florence hadn’t seemed to realize it yet, but these men were being readied to defend their city.

Nearly every day, he spotted armed and escorted riders heading out of the city, bearing messages for countryside castellans and peacekeepers. Florence didn’t rule its surrounding towns, not officially, but it exerted so much pressure over them that it might as well have. Florence needed to see which of its picked men had survived the pestilence and replace those who hadn’t. Should Florence be faced with a war, those towns would be the backbone of its defense.

All this was tied to his brother and his allies’ campaign of tensions against the papacy, no doubt. Elisa watched, too. She said, “I don’t understand how anybody could think of fighting so soon after the pestilence. Then again, I never understood fighting to begin with.”

Niccoluccio shrugged. Cities rose and cities fell. It was that way throughout this world, and he was sure on many others as well. He wished he had something remotely comforting to tell her about it.

 

The next morning came with a hard thumping at the door. It was only by the time that Niccoluccio had stumbled out of bed that he heard the other sounds – hollering, metal clanging like banging on pans, and the ragged voice of a crier.

Niccoluccio and Dioneo reached the door at the same time. Thanks to the hoarse crier, Niccoluccio already knew what had happened.

The old bishop had died.

Niccoluccio followed Dioneo outside. The neighborhood was far more bustling than it should have been at this or any hour, full of hollering and impromptu marches. “Finally, finally!” men shouted up and down the street. More were lighting a bonfire at the end of the street. Several houses’ windows were illuminated with candles.

Niccoluccio wondered if he had underestimated the city’s antipathy for the bishop until he spotted a group of five men banging harshly on the door of one of the homes without candles. One way or another, the rest of Florence was going to be intimidated into appearing to celebrate the bishop’s death. Catella raced to place candles in her windows.

Niccoluccio turned to Dioneo, but Dioneo was gone, already charging through the crowds. Niccoluccio hesitated, unwilling to go back to a house in which he no longer felt welcome, and equally unable to follow Dioneo.

Instead, he did what he did every time he’d felt unsettled: labor. He returned to the Church of San Lorenzo. He’d double-checked and triple-checked his accounts, but he took them out again.

With all of Florence focused elsewhere, he had plenty of peace inside to work. He stared without seeing. After half an hour of trying to read, he closed the ledgers.

“I would have thought that the pestilence would change things like this,” Niccoluccio told Habidah. “That people would see how fragile their lives are.”

“I hate to disillusion you. Our worlds are infested with a pest much like yours. It’s only made the squabbling worse. What do you want to do?”

He hadn’t done any work more exhausting than walking in weeks, and he still felt ready to collapse. There was only one answer he could give, and he didn’t want to. “Nothing. I don’t care about anything I’ve been made to do.”

Habidah turned to a much more trenchant question: “What are you going to do?”

The answer had been building up in his throat for days. So long as he could avoid saying it, it didn’t have to come true. But Habidah had taken his choice away. He couldn’t keep it hidden from her like he could from himself.

“I’m going to leave,” he said. “I have nowhere to go, but anywhere would be better than this.” Not for the first time, he imagined himself left for dead in that deserted northern wilderness. Until now, the idea had never come as a relief.