chapter 11

Hoping it might be time to get something to eat, Matt went back upstairs in search of Rodrigo. He opened the door to the small room, finding Rodrigo with his back to him, busy at one of the packs they had brought.

“Found them!” Rodrigo exclaimed, and stood up. Turning around, he stopped as he saw Matt.

“Aren’t you a bit old to be playing with dolls?” Matt asked, and then followed Rodrigo’s glance past the open door. He crimsoned in embarrassment.

Francesca, standing by the window, finished adjusting the lover’s knot in the silver belt under the bosom of her long green linen dress. She took the two small figures, exquisitely costumed, that Rodrigo was holding. “They’re lovely,” she said. “I’ll take them to her right away. Good morning,” she added to Matt, unfazed, as she passed.

He held the door for her and then looked at Rodrigo.

“Don’t you knock?” Rodrigo asked, tucking in his shirt.

“You might have warned me,” Matt replied.

Rodrigo, reaching for his boots, plopped down on the coarse hempen sheets on the bed. Lifting his foot and pulling a boot on, he said, “We’ve got to get moving or we’ll be late.”

“Where are we going?” Matt asked in surprise.

“I don’t have time to explain,” he said as he tied the belt around the waist of his doublet, a bright carmine red. He reached for his hat and settled the wide pile of red and black on his head like a load of unfolded laundry. It had a rakish effect, when taken with his unruly mop of black curls and broad features, making him look even more like a prizefighter enjoying his newfound wealth. “You’ll find out soon enough. Let’s go.”

“What about something to eat?” Matt protested.

“Lisl will have something. We’ll eat on the way. Come on,” he commanded, as he pushed Matt out the door in front of him.

As they walked down the grand stairs from the second to the main floor, they saw Anna in the hallway below engaged in conversation with Francesca. Anna, keeping one of the dolls, handed the other back to her lady-in-waiting. “This one,” they heard her say in passing. “C’est très charmant.” Francesca, glancing up, caught Rodrigo’s eye. Matt saw the trace of a smile touch her lips and her eyebrows rise slightly. Rodrigo grinned, and then frowned as he saw Matt’s eyes on him.

“A waste of money,” Rodrigo said. “All the way from Paris. Fashion is a bitch goddess. Heaven help the poor souls who come under her sway. If you have any doubt about the primacy of base desire over sweet reason,” he continued, as they entered the kitchen, “then just consider the sight of an educated, intelligent, otherwise eminently practical woman confronted with the latest designs of the Parisian milliners. Lisl, my heart is yours for eternity,” he added to the cook as he gathered up a loaf of bread and a sizable wedge of cheese, adding a fat sausage before he closed the bag.

“But it’s unfair to the fairer sex to limit the enticements of fashion to their tender souls,” Rodrigo continued as they headed for the stable. “That might be the latest style,” he said, glancing at Matt’s head, “and I have noticed that it does catch the ladies’ attention, but personally I would feel naked, like a puppy fresh from the womb.”

Matt ran his hand through his hair, aware of the fact that he was probably the only man in Italy without bangs and with his ears exposed.

“There’s a reason why we have hair,” Rodrigo continued, checking the straps holding the sealed box to the back of the gray horse before mounting his own. With two soldiers in the rear, the party set off. Matt fell in next to Rodrigo as they rode out of the courtyard, pleased that it felt perfectly natural to be back in the saddle. All the stiffness and aching muscles of the first week’s journey were gone. The sweetish smell of the horse, the pull on the reins as she tossed her head, followed by a whuffling snort and jingle of the tack—it had become second nature to him. He patted the mare’s shoulder, feeling the rippling muscles under her warm hide.

“The cranium is fundamentally not pleasing to the eye,” Rodrigo continued, “and nature has developed this way to shield us from its view. Likewise the ears. Or the male ears, to be specific, which are as different from a woman’s as a seashell is from that of a snail.”

“Then why do we shave?” Matt asked, feeling his own exposed ears grow to the size of his mare’s. “Aren’t we interfering with nature’s plan?”

“That’s free will. Male features are designed to attract the female so that we can fulfill the primary injunction of the Lord, which is to go forth and replenish the earth. Some are more attractive than others, so nature has provided us with a way of tempering the effect, if we so desire.”

“Women don’t shave, and their features are often less than compelling.”

“They have other features that are compelling regardless of their form.”

“The stimulus may vary considerably but the response is the same.”

“Well put,” Rodrigo said.

The small party was climbing a steep path up the hillside behind the villa. The house, when Matt chanced to see it in a gap in the thick undergrowth, had grown small and toylike, a geometric paradise perched high on the edge of the valley below. The square of the villa, doubled by its shadow from the sun, still low on the horizon, and then echoed by the low rectangles of the outbuildings, was joined by the precise lines of the dark green hedges of the surrounding garden to the rows of crops that marched away across the surrounding hillside.

Matt had no more time to take it in than it was out of sight, and they had crested the top of the ridge and were swiftly descending the other side. An hour of riding, up and down, through a clearing and across a stream and then on a narrow dirt path winding between more fields, smaller and less lush in their narrow defile, struggling valiantly to hold back the overhanging forest that was always present, waiting patiently and silently, breathing with the quiet dark rustle of deep woods and unseen beasts.

The sharp stench of human waste assailed them as they rounded the bend of the path and discovered a large, wide clearing, a field that rose at one end to a low building with a large, smoking chimney. The sound of banging, like a giant with a bad cough, came from inside the thick earthen walls, while outside several huge vats of cast iron steamed over dancing red and yellow flames. Matt followed Rodrigo as they angled up the side of the field to stay as far upwind as possible from the drifting smoke, the sour bite of ammonia stinging their eyes and taking away their breath. Matt had gotten used to the smells of the Quattrocento—sweat and waste, exotic spices, the sweet floral scent of perfume doused on everything in sight, even the horses—but this was beyond anything he had imagined. A goatherd watched them pass with a dull glassy stare.

Riding up to the building Matt caught a glimpse of a calf tethered in the shadows, dressed in the armor of a knight’s steed. The pieces of armor, much too large and made up of mismatched odds and ends, clanked and swung like a tinker’s cart as the calf shook off the flies that swarmed about. One eye peered out through a gap in a helmet that had been secured to the top of its broad, flat head. Several horses were already tethered to the rail by the building. The magnificent black charger of the duke stood next to that of Leandro, distinguished from the other only by a white blaze on its face.

Matt dismounted and followed Rodrigo as he strode off toward the steaming vats. A short, wiry man with curly hair was gesticulating with one hand, as with the other he stirred the pot that was the source of the vile odor, the violent yellow of his short coat giving him the appearance of a parrot with clipped wings trying to get off the ground. A priest, his hands clasped behind him, nodded as the man chattered on.

“Ah, there you are!” the wiry man exclaimed as Rodrigo walked up to him. “You were right about the urine. What a difference! I have improved upon your recipe, however. The results are fantastical. The urine of a wine-drinker, Rodrigo. But not just any wine!” He stopped. “Can you guess?” he asked.

“How should I know?” Rodrigo replied.

“Guess!”

“Vernaccia.”

“Hah!” the man waved his hands in glee. “Not vernaccia, or, if it was, that’s not what makes the difference. The padre prevailed upon the bishop, who deo gracias et profundis maximus graciously allowed us a staph of his own urine! It’s the wineskin and the wine, so it’s twice-blessed.”

“Powerful are the ways of the Lord,” the priest said.

“You brought them!” Tommaso said, catching sight of the box on the gray horse. “Careful!” he shouted at the two assistants who had emerged from the shed and, squinting in the bright sun, were working the straps free.

“So we can go now,” Matt said.

“You want to leave?” Rodrigo asked, surprised.

“Why?” “We’ve delivered the box. We can go back.”

“To the villa? Is there some reason you need to get back there?”

“No,” Matt replied, thinking of Anna, and how she had looked in the hallway, talking to Francesca. “Not at all.”

“Where is the duke?” Rodrigo asked Tommaso.

“The duke?” Tommaso replied. “Oh, he’s inside.”

“I suspect it might be the mercury,” Rodrigo said to Matt as Tommaso darted to the horse and checked the box as the men lowered it to the ground, and then raced to meet them at the door. “I told him to be careful. Although they say he was not much different as a boy.”

Matt ducked under the low lintel of the doorway. The banging inside was almost deafening, shutting out all other sounds. Four boys stood in front of a machine against the end wall, each one in front of a pillar that rose slowly as they furiously cranked a wheel and then fell like a pile driver with a dull clang. One of the boys reached over to a stack of black bricks and lifted off the top one. As his piston reached the top and was about to fall, he opened a door at the base and quickly shoved the brick in, closing the aperture just as the heavy rod slammed down. He took the bucket from under the machine and dumped it into a bin close by.

Tommaso was yelling at Rodrigo, the words that poured out of him getting lost in the din. Rodrigo, shaking his head, finally grabbed the man by the shoulders and, putting his mouth right to his ear, shouted at the top of his voice. Tommaso jumped, nodded, and then went over to the boys, slamming each one with his fist between the shoulder blades. One by one they stopped spinning the wheels, the noise gradually diminishing as the pistons came to a halt.

“You see?” Tommaso asked, picking up a brick and showing it to Rodrigo, who hefted it, rubbed the surface, sniffed, and then nodded appreciatively. “And look at this!” Tommaso reached into the bin and lifted what appeared to be a handful of tiny pebbles. He then pulled out a small row of trays under the bin, one by one. “Here,” he said, reaching in and taking a small handful of black grain.

“Not bad,” Rodrigo said, taking the grain and sifting it from one hand to the other. “For the arquebus?”

“Yes.”

“Corned powder,” Rodrigo explained, seeing Matt’s incomprehension.

“Corn?”

“Gunpowder. We used to use it loose, like flour—”

“A total disaster!” Tommaso broke in. “No control. Pack it too tight, the gun doesn’t fire. Too loose and it explodes.”

“And it separates,” Rodrigo said.

“By the time you want to use it.” Tommaso said. “Sulfur to the bottom, carbon on top, saltpeter in the middle. What use is that? The last thing you need on the battlefield is to be shaking up a barrel of gunpowder. And the dust—caboom!” he shouted, waving his arms.

“So you take the stuff and wet it,” Rodrigo said. “Mix it with some wine—”

“Let it dry into cakes, pulverize it in this machine, and here it is.”

“Perfectly safe and usable anytime.”

“And twice as powerful. There’s the duke,” Rodrigo added, looking at the knot of men standing at the far end of the building.

“Rodrigo,” the duke said, as they walked up. His short red coat, gathered at the waist with a gold belt, was unadorned, and his tall boots, dark brown with the top turned down, showed the effects of heavy use. “Did you see this?” the duke asked, showing Rodrigo the gun he was holding in both hands. With the heavy barrel and the thick wooden stock that drooped like the heavy tail of a dragon, the weapon was almost as long as the duke was tall. Polished to a high luster, the barrel gleamed in the dim light, the octagonal facets perfectly straight. Leandro stood next to the duke. The priest, who had followed them in, crossed himself as he eyed the gun.

Rodrigo took the gun and hefted it. “So this is it,” he said to Tommaso. “Let’s see what it can do.”