A Name in Blood (23 page)

Ranuccio lay on his back, pushed himself up on his elbows, and spat at Caravaggio’s boots.

‘This is your shaming for the insult you gave me.’ Caravaggio spoke loudly, so that the onlookers in the shadows of the Via della Scrofa would know that he had fought for his
honour.

He took one step back. Ranuccio’s features relaxed. Caravaggio saw that the ugly defiance of a moment before had been the expectation of death and that Ranuccio now believed he would be
allowed to live.

As he put his hand to his wounded head Ranuccio barely moved his lips to speak, but Caravaggio heard him. ‘I’ll make your whore Lena screw every john in the Evil Garden.’

Caravaggio’s ribs tightened. A single lunge, and his blade sank into Ranuccio, even as the man scuttled away from his thrust. He pierced him in the groin.

Ranuccio doubled up and rolled. Caravaggio felt the muscle and skin slicing on his sword, as though his hand dug inside the living flesh.

With a sudden outcry, Ranuccio’s brother jumped forward. He unsheathed his sword and came at Caravaggio. Now it was no duel. It was a battle, and Giovan Francesco had been a hero in the
field. Caravaggio thrust at his attacker, but Giovan Francesco gave him the simplest, most effective response. A parry and riposte in one motion, high, from inside the line of Caravaggio’s
sword. Caravaggio heard the scraping of the two blades, a million tiny contacts, the pitch rising as Giovan Francesco’s sword slid along his own. Then the tip had him below the ear. He
twitched his head away and his scalp turned cold.

Onorio shouldered Giovan Francesco off-balance and retreated with Caravaggio at his back. Mario was beside him, his sword en garde.

Ranuccio sat on the ground, doubled over. He opened his eyes, the lids coming apart slowly, weeping and red. He held his groin. Blood darkened his hands and soaked his turquoise pantaloons. His
face was full of shame, like a man embarrassed by incontinence.

Onorio kicked a rotten cabbage from the gutter. The muck of the street sprayed across the wounded fighter’s face. ‘May you rest in peace.’

‘I’m not dead,’ Ranuccio said.

‘You will be soon,
cazzo
.’ Onorio parried another thrust from Giovan Francesco.

Ranuccio spoke through white lips. His face was earnest, as if he were a parent explaining something simple yet vital to a small child. ‘I don’t want to die.’

Caravaggio opened his mouth, but he wasn’t sure if he wished to console Ranuccio or to apologize. Death had been a point of honour for them. Now it was something else, the seeping of blood
into the street, puddling between the cobbles and soaking into the vegetables dropped by traders on their way to market.

Mario and Onorio fought off the Tomassoni swordsmen as they went down the street. Caravaggio jogged on unsteady legs to the corner. The last thing he heard as he turned into the dark sidestreet
was the scream of agony as the Tomassoni gatekeepers raised Ranuccio.

He rode with his hand tight on the guide rope of his pack mule. The beast stepped easily under his few belongings and his painting materials. He pulled his hat down low to hide
the bandage on his scalp and threw his cape so that it covered his chin. He went south past the cow pastures in the old Imperial Forum towards the San Giovanni Gate. The guards lounged in the
shade. Pasted to the brown brick of the Aurelian walls was a wanted notice. It named Michelangelo of Caravaggio as a bandit for the murder of Ranuccio. Anywhere in the papal lands, a man presenting
Caravaggio’s severed head to the authorities might claim a reward. To signal the shame of his sentence and to persuade anyone who knew him that he was beyond aid, the poster depicted him
upside down, hung by his feet.

The face shown in ignominy on the notice was a simplified version of one he had painted himself: his self-portrait as a bystander to the martyrdom of St Matthew, glancing over his shoulder with
pity, fleeing the scene of the holy man’s killing.
The police employ art lovers to do their wanted signs
, he thought, with bitterness.

The horses’ hooves echoed under the gate, and then he was out in the fields. Rome was behind him, and Lena as well. He hadn’t asked her to join him in his flight. He had imperilled
his immortal soul, perhaps already damned it. Contentment would be forever denied him. He didn’t wish that she, too, should be endangered, shrouded by the malign shadows of his capricious
spirit.
I can’t take Lena with me, knowing that soon I’ll invite another expulsion
, he thought
. And don’t forget the Tomassonis in pursuit, after my blood. Too dangerous
to involve her.

He left Lena without explanation. He feared that if he had told her where he was going, she might have volunteered to accompany him to hell.

II

MALTA
A Name In Blood
1607

6

P
ortrait of the Grand Master

At the prow of the galley, Caravaggio squinted into the glare of the sun off the swells. His lungs filled as if he was drawing clear air from beyond the far horizon. Only now did he understand
how fear had constricted him in the crowded streets of Naples, where he had spent the last year. Everywhere had been the untrustworthy shadows, the assassins stalking him. The backstreets of the
Sanità proved that Baglione was wrong – darkness didn’t cover up your mistakes; it laid bare your vulnerability.

The open sea brought a sense of safety. Here there were no suspicious echoing footfalls, no soldiers rushing down from the new Spanish Quarter with bottles and daggers. He wasn’t even
concerned that those who waved them off from the quay had called out, ‘God save you from the galleys of the Arab corsairs,’ or that he had been ordered to carry his sword until they
docked in Malta in case of attack. The pirates enslaved those they captured, but Caravaggio hadn’t been free since he had killed Ranuccio.

Under his feet, two decks of slaves laboured at their benches. The splash of the oars was a soft tenor over the regular bass of their breathing. The loathsome odour of their defecations emanated
from the hatches. The sea darkened emerald to olive. He cursed. He might as well have been tethered like the wretches below decks.

He looked along the length of the ship. Bigger than the galleys of Genoa and Spain and Venice, one hundred and eight oars and two massive sails, a shallow draught for raiding the inlets where
the pirates had their lairs.
The Capitana
, flagship of the new Admiral of the Knights of St John of Malta: Fabrizio Sforza Colonna.

Costanza’s son emerged from under the scarlet awning across the poop deck at the stern of the ship. He laid a brotherly arm over the shoulder of one of his red-surcoated knights and called
out an order to the helmsman. His teeth gleamed like the waves in the sun. His skin was regaining its colour after his time in jail. Relaxed and confident like a host with his guests in his own
hall, he passed among the sailors.

A few soldiers gamed with dice on the deck. Fabrizio threw down a coin and bent to read his numbers. He swore with good humour and enjoyed the laughter of his marines at their commander’s
loss.

He came to Caravaggio’s side at the prow and lifted his leg to balance against the bulk of the figurehead. ‘I feel as I used to when you and I would run out into the mulberry fields,
just the two of us. No one to tell us what to do.’

‘Freedom was an illusion then, too.’

Fabrizio pursed his lips. Caravaggio regretted his words. His friend had been in a condemned cell almost two years. He might be forgiven for feeling childlike in his sense of liberty.

‘Not an illusion for me,’ Fabrizio whispered.

Caravaggio heard the recollection of fragile memories in the new Admiral’s voice. ‘You’re right that we escaped everyone back then – for a while at least.’ The dry
hills of Calabria striped the horizon a few miles distant. He squinted into the glare off the waves.

‘We shall escape again, in Malta. Just as we did back then.’

Caravaggio’s features sharpened.
Does he think I’ll be in his bed again so easily?
‘I’m coming to Malta because I gave my word to your mother.’

‘Then you are bound.’

‘I am bound.’

The soldiers bellowed at the fall of the dice. One of them tumbled onto his backside, shoved by the angry loser. Fabrizio called out and the fight was defused. The game went on in sullen
silence.

‘Don’t blame my mother, Michele. It’s an opportunity for you. The Grand Master of the Knights agreed to take me on, in return for your presence on Malta. Your art will bring
prestige to the new city he’s building. I’m pardoned for killing the Farnese boy, and you’ll get some good commissions. What else could Mama do?’

Caravaggio remembered the relief on Costanza’s face as she explained the deal. She had called him to her chambers in the palace of her cousin the Prince of Stigliano, where he had lodged
during his year in Naples. She had seemed younger by a decade, and Fabrizio was the cause. He remembered then how she used to glow when she came across the two boys in the gardens of her estates.
I had always hoped I was the source of the joy
, he thought.
Foolish of me. Fabrizio is her blood.
He glanced at the handsome, welcoming features of the man at his side.
I still
wish it. But I’m like a pilgrim who competes with the Son of God for the Virgin’s love.

‘You had commissions in Naples, of course.
Our Lady of Mercy
at the Pio Monte is a masterpiece,’ Fabrizio said. ‘But you were too much in danger there. The Tomassonis
can’t get you in Malta.’

Our Lady of Mercy.
Another Madonna with Lena’s features. This time drained and grey-skinned, pouring out the compassion Caravaggio craved. ‘Yes, Malta is so remote, it might
as well be the Indies.’

Fabrizio’s skin was smooth and fresh. He wore his confidence like the embroidered cape on his shoulder, loose and dashing. He pushed his hair, straw and gold, back from his brow and sucked
at his lip. His hesitant eyes sought to meet Caravaggio’s gaze. ‘Do you think of him, Michele?’

‘The man I killed?’

Fabrizio nodded, and his hair fell in a swoop over one eyebrow.

‘He’s more implacable than his vengeful brothers,’ Caravaggio said. ‘He pursues me everywhere. No doubt to Malta as well.’

‘It seems sometimes a greater death to have survived my duel than to have been the loser,’ Fabrizio said. ‘Do you ever feel as though all your freedom and happiness expired
with him?’

‘I was cut off from freedom and happiness the day I left your mother’s house,’ Caravaggio said. ‘There’ve been some times over the years when I sensed it again, but
mostly I felt like a heavy man on boggy ground.’

Since that jab into Ranuccio’s groin, every day and with every stroke of his brush Caravaggio had measured his soul’s jeopardy. He reached for Fabrizio’s shoulder. ‘When
freedom is open to you, you know only restriction. You end up taking a man’s life, perhaps just to see if even that greatest of the Lord’s commandments is yours to transgress with
impunity. You and I are bound to the most sacred things by what we have done.’

Fabrizio snorted a sad laugh. ‘A test from God?’

‘No.’ Caravaggio’s voice was wondering. ‘A gift.’

Fabrizio gripped Caravaggio’s wrist and squeezed it.

Caravaggio flicked his eyes along the boat to signal the care they must take when together.

Fabrizio removed his hand. ‘Scipione wants you to stay on Malta only so long as it takes to get the Tomassonis to agree to your pardon. The family still demands revenge for
Ranuccio’s life.’ He craned his neck to check on the four ships in line behind them. ‘On Malta, you’ll be safe from the Tomassonis. But watch out for the knights, Michele.
They’re pledged to live as monks, except when they go forth to kill the infidel Turks. Some find themselves more given to killing than to praying.’

‘What does that have to do with me?’

‘These knights are all noblemen. A German knight needs to show four generations of nobility on each side of his family to enter the Order. A Frenchman must be free of the blood of a
commoner in all four grandparents, and the Spanish and Portuguese knights have to demonstrate that they’re untainted by Jewish heritage.’

‘And you?’

‘We Italian knights must be noble in all four lines for two hundred years.’

In the hold below, the lash cracked over the slaves at their oars.

‘So they’re not really monks,’ Caravaggio said. ‘They’re princes.’

‘Princes, and pirates preying on Turkish shipping. When they get back into port, their entertainment is whoring and the taverns. The senior knights exert slight control. Back in the Evil
Garden, Michele, you could hit people on the head and Cardinal del Monte would get you out of jail. If you pick a fight with one of these knights, I warn you it’ll be as though you declared
war on the finest families of all Europe. The Pope himself thinks twice before he writes a rude note to a knight. Play the humble artisan. Stay clear of them.’

Fabrizio’s voice was like the drone of a mosquito, so distant that it seemed almost to be a figment of Caravaggio’s imagination, until, with a sudden crescendo, it was there on his
skin and gone by the time he could slap at it.
The humble artisan.