The Shadow Master (7 page)

And she could still feel the point against her chest where the knife blade had touched. For just a brief moment she felt her legs wobbling, like they might collapse under her, but then she was filled with an anger that gave them strength. How dare anybody try to kill her in her own bed chamber? How dare they presume to make her a pawn in the battles between the Medicis and the Lorraines? She lay back down on her bed and wondered again about her mysterious saviour, certain that Lorenzo was behind it somehow. And resolved that when she awoke in the morning she would take up her paintbrushes and end this stupid war between the two Houses by painting over all their towers, replacing them with parklands and gardens where the citizens of the city could be free to enjoy their own lives.

 

 

X

Cosimo wished he had insisted on holding his brother's service in one of their small family chapels instead. It was too dark and too hot in the crypt under the cathedral. And he wanted to be alone with his brother, not crammed into a damp-smelling hole like this with too many family members and lackeys all about him. But protocol dictated a public funeral. Protocol dictated that Giuliano's mourners be allowed to see his coffin and weep and wail over it, whether their tears be genuine or not, while he stood there proud and brave.

So he stood at the back of the throng, on a slightly raised platform, watching the jostling crowd in the too small space, with his aged mother at his side. She was a little deaf but still sharp of mind, and had never forgotten he was her first born. He held her by the arm and, leaning close to her, said, “I am sorry to have brought you to such a miserable place as the funeral of your second born son.”

His mother muttered something and dabbed at her eyes with an ornate cloth. She had already lost two sons to sickness while they were young and one daughter to a riding accident. He and Giuliano were all that remained of her five children and she had often said they were each the man they were only because of the other. But Cosimo knew what was really in her head. The two boys were raised together, attended lessons together, were trained in fighting together, and it had always been Giuliano who was the better of them. But he was not the first born.

“Look at them trying to outdo each other in showing how much they loved him and how much his death fills them with grief,” he said to his mother softly. “But they don't know grief! I could fill the entire cathedral with my sorrow. I could fill the whole city until it pressed at the walls and threatened to break them under its weight. I could fill the known world with my sadness.”

She patted his hand in reply. He looked at her face, the tears welling in her eyes, and said, “I will have artists paint frescos and sculpt statues that capture my grief.” Then, “And a hundred years hence people will look at them and say, ‘Never has man known such grief as this'.” His mother turned to him and put a hand to his face. “I will show them what real grief is,” he said, taking her hand from his face and holding it tightly. Then his mother turned towards several of the people who approached them with their heads bowed to show their respect. Cosimo gave each a curt nod and watched them trying to work their way back through the press of bodies. “Giuliano deserved better than this,” he said, leaning closer to his mother. “He deserved a service in the cathedral above.” His mother nodded her head a little, as if agreeing, but knowing that it would have been against custom to do so.

Cosimo watched his mother closely and then said, “He was always wiser than me. He knew what courses of actions were ill-considered and which were not. He had a better eye for strategy than I ever did.” And then, in a whisper his mother could barely hear, “He would have made a better head of the House than me, wouldn't he?” His mother patted his hand again, not acknowledging if she had heard or understood him, and she smiled and nodded to another well-wisher who had come up and bowed to them. “But it was not in Giuliano's nature to covert it, was it?” Cosimo said. Then softer still, “When we were boys I told him I would kill him before I let him accede to the head of the House before me. And he just laughed as if it had been a jest, telling me rather to kill those who stood in front of me.”

He watched his mother greet another grieving couple, cousins of theirs, and he said softly, “If the situation were reversed and I lay there dead and Giuliano stood here alive, would you tell him that he was the favourite? That he would be a better leader of the House than me?” But his mother did not answer the question. He put his lips closer to her ear and said, “Everyone always loved him more than they loved me. He was the one who remembered everyone's name and children's names. He was the one who would readily help those in need, rather than grudgingly. They fear me and respect me, but I don't think so many would weep so at my death, do you?”

His mother still did not acknowledge what he said and it started angering him. “If I was dead, what would you tell Giuliano, that he would succeed without me? That he does not need me the way that I need him?” His mother leaned a little away from him now, as if she did not wish to hear this, but he pulled her back close to him and said, in a low hiss, “It was Giuliano who wished our father dead. Not me. He said I would never become leader of the House otherwise. He said we should pray regularly for his early death. Perhaps he prayed and planned for mine too, but that is not the way things have turned out, is it?”

In the emptiness of Giuliano's absence he found the angry words would not be stilled. “What if I had slain Giuliano?” he asked, pulling his mother tightly to him. “What if it was me who had hired the assassins to strike him down, simply to prove that I could live a life without him, only to find that I could not?” She lowered her head and he hissed, “If he was here now he would advise me to stop talking so. He would tell me that if it was anybody else than you I was blabbering to I would have to kill them afterwards. And I would have. He knew who needed killing and when.”

He felt his mother trying to pull away from him and then felt the platform they were on jostled from behind. There seemed to be more people in the crypt now. The air was hotter and he could hear murmurs of concern amongst the mourners as they were pushed and squeezed against each other. His mother, now being jostled from the other side, tried to shake her arm from his, but he was holding onto her tightly. “This is a fitting metaphor for our grief,” he said. “Let them keep coming and they will crush one another.”

Now he could hear yelps of alarm from those about them and he saw one woman fall to the floor. She screamed as she fell and the piercing shout had the same effect that the sight of an assassin's knife being raised in the air would have had. Everyone was suddenly pushing and shouting, trying to make their way to the stairs before they could be dragged by the deathseekers' hands to the ground and trampled. They had all carried the thought of deathseekers into the crypt with them and now had created it as something real. The fragile moment of considering the fate of Giuliano in the afterlife was replaced with the more immediate consideration of their own fates in this life. But the more people panicked the more fell and were trampled upon. Their own fear had become manifest to attack them.

“This should've been my funeral,” said Cosimo, shouting, now, to his mother. “This is how I would like to be remembered.” And then the platform was upset by the pressing crowd and he felt his mother's arm being pulled from his own. He fought against the crowd now, pushing people away from him, reaching out for his mother as she sank into the mob. And it seemed to him, for just a moment, that she was withholding her hand from him, rather to be trampled by the mob than to be at his side. “Mother,” he called out. “Don't leave me.”

And then he had her hand and pulled her back to him. People flowed around them and he regained his feet. Then his mother looked into his face and placed a hand against the side of his face. Slowly she bent his head to her bosom, the way she had always done when he had come to her as a boy with some seeming great injustice. “My Cosimo,” she said. “My troubled little Cosimo. You'll always be my first born.”

 

 

 

XI

“The cook's assistant has been murdered.” The kitchen girl who found the dead cook's assistant told the kitchen hand who told the cook who told the steward who told the Captain of the Guard who told the Duke of Lorraine, who insisted for himself on seeing it, and then summoned Leonardo. It was inexplicable. The man had been murdered in the kitchen at some hour in the night, and lay dead over the kitchen bench, with his fat face in a bowl of soup and his fatter penis out, pointing into a soup pot.

“What does it mean?” the steward asked, as each person had asked their superior upon seeing the dead man.

“It is a warning,” the Duke said. “I have seen such before. They had intended to cut the man's manhood off and stuff it into his mouth. It is a punishment for betrayal.”

“Who did he betray?” the steward asked.

But the Duke only shook his head. “We have been attacked in our own house,” he said. “It is an outrage.” He fretted a little for what his wife would say and knew he needed to put on a face of rage while seeking good counsel from Leonardo. There were more mysteries here than could easily be answered by blaming the Medici deathseekers, and he was still pondering the possibility that one of the lesser houses was trying to trigger a war between the Lorraines and Medicis.

The cause of death was apparent enough, as the man had a short metal arrow protruding from the back of his skull. “It has been fired through the open window,” the steward boldly asserted. “A deathseeker has been prowling around the house looking for any target and found this unfortunate man.”

“But somebody must have been inside the room to take the poor man's tower of ivory out of his trousers,” said the cook.

The kitchen girl, who had been trying to steal surreptitious looks at the dead man's member, thought it looked nothing like a tower of ivory and a more apt metaphor might have alluded to a chicken's neck or perhaps a snail. But she knew nobody wanted to be disrespectful of the poor dead man and so said nothing. At least not until she was with the other kitchen girls later that day.

“Perhaps there were two assailants,” said the steward. “One who shot him and the other who did this thing. Or perhaps the man climbed in the window after slaying him and did this?”

“Impossible,” said the Captain of the Guard. “The window is too small for a man to climb in.”

“Perhaps a boy?” asked the steward.

“Perhaps,” said the Captain of the Guard. “That would mean two attackers. They would have had a harder time getting past our guards though. We would have noticed a man with a boy.”

“Then how they do this?” asked the cook.

“Leonardo will know,” said the Duke. The Captain of the Guard pouted his lips a little as if he doubted that the man could determine any more from the scene than he could himself. “I think the assassin fired the arrow from a long distance away. A lucky shot. He probably couldn't even tell who he was shooting at and was hoping it was a more senior member of the household. I mean, why kill a cook's assistant?”

“And who had he betrayed?” asked the cook, a little slower than the others to keep up with the pace of the conversation. He was still wondering where they were going to put the dead man's body and how he was going to be able to cook breakfast with him there.

“Perhaps he was, um, playing the bone flute,” said the steward, turning a little red at the presence of the kitchen girl. “At the time of his death.”

The cook looked at him aghast. “Such behaviour is not acceptable in my kitchen!” he said.

“Nevertheless,” said the steward, “It might explain things a little better than the vengeance theory.”

The Captain of the Guard considered it and wondered, if a man was slain while his ivory tower was erect, might it not stay erect? He wondered who would know the answer to such things. Leonardo, probably, as the Duke said. He seemed to know every other secret of the body. Rumour has it he performed experiments on the bodies of the dead to know how they worked. But rumour also had it that he could turn invisible and walk through walls. Perhaps he was in the room with them now, if that was the case. The man turned his head and looked around the room carefully and was surprised to see that Leonardo was indeed with them. The old man was standing in the doorway, out of sight, his thick eyebrows knit closely as he stroked his long unkempt beard, carefully regarding everything.

“No,” said the cook firmly. “Not in my kitchen. In the guards' house, perhaps, but not here. I would not permit it.” The standing of the kitchen and his role in the household had risen as the variety of foods became scarcer in the Walled City. Not only did he now supervise the growing of vegetable gardens in the courtyard but was charged with hunting down rare treats from across the cellars of the city, which citizens would exchange for sacks of plain grain. Just this last week he had obtained two jars of pickled onions – many of which were in the soup at the dead man's feet.

“How would you enforce it?” asked the steward. “You are not here all through the day and the night.”

“I would come to hear of it,” said the cook. “I would see guilt in the man's eyes.”

“So are you saying you can tell whenever a man has committed a sin?”

“I can tell whenever anyone of my kitchen staff has,” the cook insisted. The kitchen girl turned her head a little, making a vow never to let the cook look into her eyes and also to warn the other girls who worked in the kitchens too.

“These are all guesses,” said the Duke. “All I can be certain of is that someone has sent an assassin who has killed one of my household and that it shall not be allowed to go unpunished, be it a Medici or lesser house who is responsible.” His wife would be told of that vow and he hoped that would placate her while Leonardo solved the crime.