The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,160
at my thoughts. My treacherous lids closed and sleep took me.
A tinkle of falling metal awoke me moments or hours later. Marta was gone from my side but my mother still regarded me lazily, a lioness watching her prey. But outside the carriage the world had changed again: I looked from the window to see enormous glassy lakes lying at the foot of emerald mountains. Still and serene, they invited the eye with their loveliness.
“The water is poisoned,” said my mother, following my gaze. It was the single thing she uttered to me on the journey. We had shifted once again, like the breath of the breeze ruffling the waters of the lake, disturbing and repainting the sky in its image. The wind had changed and the weathercock had turned. We were once again, for some unspoken reason, at war.
In another day we were passing through the massy city gates of Milan, a closed place, ringed with a rosary of walls and gates. I was once again in a ferment of impatience and excitement, and the moment the guards on the postern let us pass and closed their pikes behind us I began to look for Brother Guido in every doorway, to listen for his voice over the beat of hooves and the hollers of traders, to seek his features in the face of every noble and peasant we passed. I barely noticed long, wide roads with brand-new silver-stone buildings; nor the elegant Roman pillars of the colonnades that showed the new marched side by side with the old. Even the miraculous Duomo, with its forest of silver spires tipped with gold like a diadem, left me unmoved. It was not a place but a person that I sought.
At every moment I willed him to come to me, to snatch me from the carriage to press me to him and carry me away—even though I knew such things were not his monkish way. I tried to sit still and trust, but my heart sank as we approached a vast bloodred fortress with battlements like the wards of a thousand keys that would serve to keep me in and Brother Guido out. We passed through the great gates of a clock tower beneath the baleful eye of a coiled serpent carved in stone upon the castle arms. Poised to strike.
Inside, the stone walls were the brutal red of battle-gore, but the castle itself was beautiful; a fortress with a moated palace within. The round towers reached high into the orange sky, where strange shredded clouds the color of oxblood flew like pennants. Had Brother Guido penetrated these precincts, this barracks of a place? For a massive square of grass had become a parade ground—ranks upon ranks of soldiers were drilled through their paces. Hundreds of lean, tall young men all had cropped hair, curved swords, and cloaks of the same shade of ocher, a shade that was familiar to me but wouldn’t be pinned down by memory. The men reacted as one to the shouts of a man in armor mounted on a huge black brute of a horse. We descended from the carriage amid the maneuvers, my mother and I, but the soldiers were so well trained that not one of them spared two such visions a glance. The capitano, however, trotted over, and his steed pranced and reared like a statue, the huge black shadow near blocking the sun.
“Dogaressa!” he yelled, as if he still continued the drill. “This is delightful. And your daughter?” He jumped from the beast, and a single soldier broke rank to dangle from the stallion’s reins. The capitano threw his helmet onto the turf where it landed with a clank. A neat curtain of smooth black hair fell about his ears, cut like a pageboy’s, as if his man had placed a trencher on his head and sliced around it with the shears. Even more familiar now, he took off his iron gauntlets and offered us both a vast sweaty paw. The three words that he uttered—“Ludovico Maria Sforza”—were enough to make my mother drop to her knees. Thus I learned three things from this tiny encounter.
Cosa Uno: he was overlord of the whole place.
Cosa Due: my mother was much more in awe of this friendly, bluff soldier than she had been of that cold fish Sigismund.
Cosa Tre: he wore the golden ring of the palle on his left thumb. Such sights had long since ceased to shock me.