whole puzzle? There are many figures here. We cannot run off on this goose chase to Pisa for the sole reason that she is gazing on Botticelli with bedchamber eyes.”
Brother Guido smiled. “We can be sure, for it is not lust but love that shows us the way. Love is blind, but look, Luciana, he shows us how to see. We follow the arrow.” This time it was my turn to follow the point of a finger. Brother Guido indicated the fat flying cupid, with the blindfold covering his eyes. I watched further as the monk’s forefinger traced Cupid’s fiery arrow, which pointed directly to the ornamented head of the central Grace.
Flame-haired, as if the arrow had set her bright head alight, and crowned with the tower of Pisa.
We sat through the mass in the freezing chapel. Our flesh numb on the stones and our minds numb with discovery. Cowled once again in my cloak of miniver, I stole a sideways glance at Brother Guido. He was praying hard—really praying, as if he meant it. In the refectory after, I sat at the long tables among the ranks of silent monks, all eating in a polite, restrained manner as one of their number read from a holy text. Relieved that I would not have to talk, even to Brother Guido at my elbow, I shoveled bread and dried cod into my cowl and glugged my quota of beer, and felt oddly optimistic as we left the table to take leave of the abbot. We stood once more outside the little golden monastery; a day had come and gone and come again, and we knew much more than when we had arrived. Florence, the eternal city, still glittered below us in the valley. Were the assassins that sought us still there or closer at hand? I shivered and turned from the view to see the abbot approaching, followed by his little Sicilian monk holding two dancing ponies on a leading rein. The kind old fellow made us the gift of the two cob ponies in return for a promised benefice from the della Torres; Brother Guido promised to petition his uncle on our arrival in Pisa. As Abbot Giles of Cambridge said an affectionate farewell to Brother Guido I straddled the neckbone of my pony like a man and winced.
The old abbot reached up to me. “Brother Lucius, there is something in the saddlebag for you. But best to open it when you are down the hill.” His sweet smile reached his blind eyes but he turned before I could thank him, and hobbled back to the cloister.
By the time our mounts reached the bottom of the hundred stairs my crotch was already aching for all the wrong reasons as my pelvis bumped on my pony’s neckbone. When we rounded the corner I bade the brother wait while I opened my saddlebag. Inside was a fine sidesaddle for a lady, tasseled and pommeled and a comfort to my aching groin.
My smile lasted me all the way out of the Arno Valley, but as I turned to look my last at the city I’d lived in and loved in, I wondered if I’d ever see it again. As we rode seaward Florence was a little pain under my heart.
2
Pisa
Pisa, June 1482
10
I wasn’t that impressed by Pisa when we finally got there, for three reasons.
Ragione Uno: It was pissing with rain.
Ragione Due: everything was a bit like Florence but a lot smaller. The same river Arno ran through the center but in a slower, narrower stream; the palaces that lined the banks seemed smaller and less opulent than their Florentine counterparts, and the people, too, seemed smaller and less polished than their elegant cousins (excepting my companion, of course, who would stand above all men anywhere he went).
Ragione Tre: my arse was as raw as carpaccio and my sex so numb from my pony’s neckbone that I was sure I would never feel pleasure in fucking ever again. And to think I called the blasted animal “Pene” (penis) in the first place because at least that way I would get to ride one every day. Brother Guido looked thunder at me when I shared this little joke with him as we jogged along—he in turn dubbed his mount something pious: Aquinas, after one of his favorite writers or something. Anyway, I was being paid out for my jest now. I was in agony.
Don’t get me wrong, I was very glad to be in