The Enchantress of Florence (2 page)

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Aboard the Scottish milord’s pirate ship

A
board the Scottish milord’s pirate ship
Scáthach,
named for a fabled warrior-goddess from Skye, a vessel whose crew had for many years been happily robbing and plundering up and down the Spanish Main, but which was presently bound for India on business of state, the languid Florentine stowaway had avoided being thrown summarily into the White River of southern Africa by pulling a living water-snake out of the boatswain’s startled ear and tossing it overboard instead. He had been found under a bunk in the ship’s forecastle seven days after the vessel rounded Cape Agulhas at the foot of the African continent, wearing mustard-colored doublet and hose and wrapped up in a long patchwork cloak made up of bright harlequin lozenges of leather, cradling a small carpetbag, and sleeping soundly, with many loud snores, making no effort to hide. He seemed perfectly ready to be discovered, and dazzlingly confident of his powers of charm, persuasion, and enchantment. They had, after all, brought him a long way already. Indeed, he turned out to be quite the conjuror. He transformed gold coins into smoke and yellow smoke back into gold. A jug of fresh water flipped upside down released a flood of silken scarves. He multiplied fishes and loaves with a couple of passes of his elegant hand, which was blasphemous, of course, but the hungry sailors easily forgave him. Crossing themselves hastily, to insure themselves against the possible wrath of Christ Jesus regarding the usurpation of his position by this latter-day miracle worker, they gobbled up their unexpectedly lavish, if theologically unsound, lunch.

Even the Scottish milord himself, George Louis Hauksbank, Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk—which was to say, according to the Scottish fashion, Hauksbank of Hauksbank, a noble not to be confused with lesser, more ignoble Hauksbanks from inferior places—was speedily charmed when the harlequin interloper was brought to his cabin for judgment. At that time the young rogue was calling himself “Uccello”—“Uccello di Firenze, enchanter and scholar, at your service,” he said in perfect English, with a low, sweeping bow of almost aristocratic skill, and Lord Hauksbank smiled and sniffed his perfumed kerchief. “Which I might have believed, wizard,” he replied, “if I did not know of the painter Paolo of the same name and place, who created in your township’s Duomo a
trompe l’oeil
fresco in honor of my own ancestor Sir John Hauksbank, known as Giovanni Milano, soldier of fortune, erstwhile general of Florence, victor of the battle of Polpetto; and if that painter had not unfortunately been dead these many years.” The young rogue made a cheeky, clucking noise of dissent with his tongue. “Obviously I am not the deceased artist,” he stated, striking an attitude. “I have chosen this
pseudonimo di viaggio
because in my language it is a word we have for ‘bird,’ and birds are the greatest travelers of all.”

Here he plucked a hooded falcon from his breast, a falconer’s glove from the empty air, and handed both to the astounded laird. “A hawk for the Hauksbank’s lord,” he said, with perfect formality, and then, once Lord Hauksbank had the glove on his hand and the bird upon it, he, “Uccello,” snapped his fingers like a woman withdrawing her love, whereupon to the Scottish milord’s considerable discomfiture they both vanished, the gloved bird and the birded glove. “Also,” continued the magician, returning to the matter of his name, “because in my city, this veil of a word, this hidden bird, is a delicately euphemistic term for the organ of the male sex, and I take pride in that which I possess but do not have the ill grace to display.” “Ha! Ha!” cried Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk, recovering his poise with admirable celerity. “Now that does give us something in common.”

He was a much-traveled milord, this Hauksbank of That Ilk, and older than he looked. His eye was bright and his skin was clear but he had not seen his fortieth year for seven years or more. His swordsmanship was a byword and he was as strong as a white bull and he had journeyed by raft to the source of the Yellow River in the Kar Qu lake, where he ate braised tiger penis from a golden bowl, and he had hunted the white rhinoceros of the Ngorongoro Crater and climbed all two hundred and eighty-four peaks of the Scottish Munros, from Ben Nevis to the Inaccessible Pinnacle at Sgurr Dearg on the island of Skye, home of Scáthach the Terrible. Long ago in Castle Hauksbank he quarreled with his wife, a tiny barking woman with curly red hair and a jaw like a Dutch nutcracker and he had left her in the Highlands to farm black sheep and gone to seek his fortune like his ancestor before him and captained a ship in the service of Drake when they pirated the gold of the Americas from the Spanish in the Caribbean Sea. His reward from a grateful queen had been this embassy upon which he was presently embarked; he was to go to
Hindoostan
where he was at liberty to gather and keep any fortune he might be able to find, whether in gemstones, opium, or gold, so long as he bore a personal letter from Gloriana to the king and fetched home the
Mogol
’s reply.

“In Italy we say,
Mogor,
” the young prestidigitator told him. “In the unpronounceable tongues of the land itself,” Lord Hauksbank rejoined, “who knows how the word may be twisted, knotted, and turned.”

A book sealed their friendship: the
Canzoniere
of Petrarch, an edition of which lay, as always, by the Scottish milord’s elbow on a little
pietra dura
tabletop. “Ah, mighty Petrarca,” “Uccello” cried. “Now there is a true magician.” And striking a Roman senator’s oratorical pose he began to declaim:

“Benedetto sia ’l giorno, et ’l mese, et l’anno,

et la stagione, e ’l tempo, et l’ora, e ’l punto,

e ’l bel paese, e ’l loco ov’io fui giunto

da’duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno…”

Whereupon Lord Hauksbank took up the sonnet’s thread in English:

“…and blessed be the first sweet suffering

that I felt in being conjoined with Love, and the bow,

and the shafts with which I was pierced,

and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart.”

“Any man who loves this poem as I do must be my master,” said “Uccello,” bowing. “And any man who feels as I do about these words must be my drinking companion,” returned the Scot. “You have turned the key that unlocks my heart. Now I must share a secret that you will never divulge to anyone. Come with me.”

In a small wooden box concealed behind a sliding panel in his sleeping quarters Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk kept a collection of beloved “objects of virtue,” beautiful little pieces without which a man who traveled constantly might lose his bearings, for too much travel, as Lord Hauksbank well knew, too much strangeness and novelty, could loosen the moorings of the soul. “These things are not mine,” he said to his new Florentine friend, “yet they remind me of who I am. I act as their custodian for a time, and when that time is ended, I let them go.” He pulled out of the box a number of jewels of awe-inspiring size and clarity which he set aside with a dismissive shrug, and then an ingot of Spanish gold which would keep any man who found it in splendor for the rest of his days—“’tis nothing, nothing,” he muttered—and only then did he arrive at his real treasures, each carefully wrapped in cloth and embedded in nests of crumpled paper and shredded rags: the silk handkerchief of a pagan goddess of ancient Soghdia, given to a forgotten hero as a token of her love; a piece of exquisite scrimshaw work on whalebone depicting the hunting of a stag; a locket containing a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen; a leather-bound hexagonal book from the Holy Land, upon whose tiny pages, in miniature writing embellished with extraordinary illuminations, was the entire text of the Qur’
n; a broken-nosed stone head from Macedonia, reputed to be a portrait of Alexander the Great; one of the cryptic “seals” of the Indus Valley civilization, found in Egypt, bearing the image of a bull and a series of hieroglyphs that had never been decoded, an object whose purpose no man knew; a flat, polished Chinese stone bearing a scarlet
I Ching
hexagram and dark natural markings resembling a mountain range at dusk; a painted porcelain egg; a shrunken head made by the denizens of the Amazon rain forest; and a dictionary of the lost language of the Panamanian isthmus whose speakers were all extinct except for one old woman who could no longer pronounce the words properly on account of the loss of her teeth.

Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk opened a cabinet of precious glassware that had miraculously survived the crossing of many oceans, took out a matched pair of opalescent Murano balloons, and poured a sufficiency of brandy into each. The stowaway approached and raised a glass. Lord Hauksbank breathed deeply, and then drank. “You are from Florence,” he said, “so you know of the majesty of that highest of sovereigns, the individual human self, and of the cravings it seeks to assuage, for beauty, for value—and for love.” The man calling himself “Uccello” began to reply, but Hauksbank raised a hand. “I will have my say,” he continued, “for there are matters to discuss of which your eminent philosophers know nothing. The self may be royal, but it hungers like a pauper. It may be nourished for a moment by the inspection of such cocooned wonders as these, but it remains a poor, starving, thirsting thing. And it is a king imperiled, a sovereign forever at the mercy of many insurgents, of fear, for example, and anxiety, of isolation and bewilderment, of a strange unspeakable pride and a wild, silent shame. The self is beset by secrets, secrets eat at it constantly, secrets will tear down its kingdom and leave its scepter broken in the dust.

“I see I am perplexing you,” he sighed, “so I will show myself plainly. The secret you will never divulge to anyone is not hidden in a box. It lies—no, it does not lie, but tells the truth!—in here.”

The Florentine, who had intuited the truth about Lord Hauksbank’s concealed desires sometime before, gravely expressed proper respect for the heft and circumference of the mottled member that lay before him upon his lordship’s table smelling faintly of fennel, like a
finocchiona
sausage waiting to be sliced. “If you gave up the sea and came to live in my hometown,” he said, “your troubles would soon be at an end, for among the young gallants of San Lorenzo you would easily find the manly pleasures you seek. I myself, most regrettably…”

“Drink up,” the Scottish milord commanded, coloring darkly, and putting himself away. “We will say no more about it.” There was a glitter in his eye which his companion wished were not in his eye. His hand was nearer to the hilt of his sword than his companion would have liked it to be. His smile was the rictus of a beast.

There followed a long and lonely silence during which the stowaway understood that his fate hung in the balance. Then Hauksbank drained his brandy glass and gave an ugly, anguished laugh. “Well, sir,” he cried, “you know my secret, and now you must tell me yours, for certainly you have a mystery in you, which I foolishly mistook for my own, and now I must have it plain.”

The man calling himself Uccello di Firenze tried to change the subject. “Will you not honor me, my lord, with an account of the capture of the
Cacafuego
treasure galleon? And were you—you must have been—with Drake at Valparaiso, and Nombre de Dios, where he took his wound…?” Hauksbank threw his glass against a wall and drew his sword. “Scoundrel,” he said. “Answer me directly, or die.”

The stowaway chose his words carefully. “My lord,” he said, “I am here, I now perceive, to offer myself to you as your factotum. It is true, however,” he added quickly, as the blade’s point touched his throat, “that I have a more distant purpose too. Indeed, I am what you might call a man embarked on a quest—a secret quest, what’s more—but I must warn you that my secret has a curse upon it, placed there by the most powerful enchantress of the age. Only one man may hear my secret and live, and I would not wish to be responsible for your death.”

Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk laughed again, not an ugly laugh this time, a laugh of dispersing clouds and revenant sunshine. “You amuse me, little bird,” he said. “Do you imagine I fear your green-faced witch’s curse? I have danced with Baron Samedi on the Day of the Dead and survived his voodoo howls. I will take it most unkindly if you do not tell me everything at once.”

“So be it,” began the stowaway. “There was once an adventurer-prince named Argalia, also called Arcalia, a great warrior who possessed enchanted weapons, and in whose retinue were four terrifying giants, and he had a woman with him, Angelica…”

“Stop,” said Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk, clutching at his brow. “You’re giving me a headache.” Then, after a moment, “Go on.” “…Angelica, a princess of the blood royal of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane…” “Stop. No, go on.” “…the most beautiful…” “Stop.”

Whereupon Lord Hauksbank fell unconscious to the floor.