The Enchantress of Florence Page 20

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said in Persian.

  “Nobody in this place knows the meaning of fear,” she replied, first in Persian and then again in Chaghatai, her Turkic mother tongue.

  And beneath those words, the real words. Will you be mine. Yes. I am yours.

  After the sack of Tabriz, Selim wanted to stay in the Safavid capital for the winter and conquer the rest of Persia in the spring, but Argalia told him that the army would mutiny if he insisted on this. They had won the victory and annexed much of eastern Anatolia and Kurdistan, almost doubling the size of the Ottoman empire. It was enough. Let the line reached at Chaldiran be the new border between Ottoman and Safavid power. Tabriz was empty anyway. There was no food for the men or the cavalry horses or baggage camels. The army wanted to go home. Selim understood that an ending had been arrived at. Eight days after the Ottoman army entered Tabriz, Selim the Grim led his men out of the city and turned toward the west.

  A defeated god ceases to be divine. A man who leaves his consort behind on the field of battle ceases to be a man. Shah Ismail returned broken to his broken city and spent the last ten years of his life steeped in gloom and drink. He wore black robes and a black turban and the standards of the Safavids were dyed black as well. He never rode into battle again and swung between profound sadness and debauchery on a scale that showed everyone his weakness and the depths of his despair. When he was drunk he would run through the rooms of his palace looking for someone who was no longer there, who would never be there again. When he died he was not yet thirty-seven years old. He had been Shah of Persia for twenty-three years but everything that mattered had been lost.

  When she undressed Argalia and found tulips embroidered on his underclothes she understood that he was addicted to his superstitions, that like any man whose work is death he did what he could to ward off the last day. When she removed his undergarments and found them tattooed on his shoulder blades and buttocks and even on the thick shaft of his penis she knew for certain that she had met the love of her life. “You don’t need those flowers anymore,” she told him, caressing them. “Now you have me instead to be your good luck charm.”

  He thought, Yes, I have you, but only until I don’t. Only until you choose to leave me as you left your sister, to change horses again as you changed from Shah Ismail to me. A horse is only a horse, after all. She read his mind, and seeing that he needed further reassurances she clapped her hands. The Mirror came into the flower-heavy bedchamber. “Tell him who I am,” she said. “She is the lady who loves you,” the Mirror said. “She can charm the snakes from the ground and the birds from the trees and make them fall in love and she has fallen in love with you, so now you can have anything you desire.” The enchantress made a small movement of her eyebrow and the Mirror let her clothes fall to the floor and slipped into the bed. “She is my Mirror,” the enchantress said. “She is the shadow that shines. Who wins me, gets her as well.” At this point Argalia the great warrior admitted defeat. In the face of such an outflanking assault the only course left to a man was unconditional surrender.

  He was the one who renamed her “Angelica.” Defeated by “Qara Köz,” with its glottal stop and unfamiliar progression of sounds, he gave her the seraphic name by which her new worlds would know her. And she, in turn, passed the name on to her Mirror. “If I am to be Angelica,” she said, “then this guardian angel of mine will be an Angelica too.”

  For many years he had had the honor of being permitted, as a recipient of the Sultan’s favor, to reside in chambers in the Abode of Bliss, the Topkapi, instead of the spartan accommodation at the Janissary barracks. Now that the chambers had the added grace of a woman’s touch, they began to feel like a true home. But home was always a troubled, dangerous idea for men like Argalia to allow themselves to believe in. It could catch at them like a noose. Selim the Grim was not Bayezid or Mehmed, and did not think of Argalia as his indispensable right-hand man but as a probable, and dangerous, rival for power, a popular general who could lead his Janissaries into the inner sanctum of the palace, just as he had done once before, when he killed the Grand Vizier. A man capable of murdering the Vizier was also capable of regicide. Such a man had perhaps outlived his usefulness. As soon as they were back in Stamboul, the Sultan, while publicly lavishing praise on his Italian commanding officer for his part in the famous victory of Chaldiran, began secretly to plot Argalia’s destruction.

  News of Argalia’s precarious position came to his ears on account of Qara Köz’s decision to continue to satisfy his love for tulips. There were gardens all around the Abode of Bliss, walled gardens and sunken gardens, woodland areas where deer wandered freely, and waterside lawns sloping down to the Golden Horn. The tulip beds were to be found in the Fourth Court, and on the low hill at the northern end of the Topkapi complex, the highest point in the entire Abode of Bliss, where there were small wooden pleasure pavilions called kiosks. The tulips grew around them in great numbers and created an air of fragrant serenity and peace. The princess Qara Köz and her Mirror, demurely veiled, often walked in these gardens and rested in the kiosks, drinking sweet juices, speaking gently to the many palace bostancis, the gardeners, to get them to gather flowers for Lord Argalia, and to prattle idly, as women will, about the innocent gossip of the day. Soon all the garden staff from the lowliest weed-puller to the Bostanci-Basha, the head gardener himself, were deeply enamored of the two ladies and consequently loose-tongued as only true lovers are. Many of them remarked how swiftly the two foreign ladies had become proficient in the Turkish language, almost overnight, or so it seemed. As if by magic, the gardeners said.

  But Qara Köz’s true purposes were far from innocent. She knew, as all new residents of the Abode of Bliss swiftly came to know, that the one thousand and one bostancis were not only the Sultan’s gardeners but his official executioners as well. If a woman was convicted of a crime, it was a bostanci who sewed her, still alive, into a sack weighted down with stones and threw her into the Bosphorus. And if a man was to be killed, a group of gardeners grabbed him and performed an act of ritual strangulation. So Qara Köz befriended the bostancis and learned what they called, with dark humor, the tulip news. And soon enough the stink of betrayal began to overpower the fragrance of the flowers. The gardeners warned her that her lord, the great general, servant of three sultans, was in danger of being tried on trumped-up charges and sentenced to death. The head gardener himself told her so. The Bostanci-Basha of the Abode of Bliss was the Sultan’s executioner-in-chief, chosen not only for his horticultural skills but also for his running speed, because when a grandee of the court was condemned to death he was given a chance not granted to common men. If he could outrun the Bostanci-Basha he could live; his sentence would be commuted to banishment. But the Bostanci-Basha was famous for being able to run like the wind, so the “chance” was in reality no chance at all. On this occasion, however, the gardener was not happy about what he would have to do. “To execute such a great man would make me feel ashamed,” he said. “Then,” said the enchantress, “we must find a way out of the situation if we can.”

  “He will kill you soon,” she came home and told Argalia. “The gardens are full of rumor.” Argalia said gravely, “On what pretext, I wonder?” The princess took his pale face in her hands. “I am the pretext,” she said. “You have taken a Mughal princess as a spoil of war. He did not know that when he gave you leave, but he knows it now. To capture a Mughal princess is an act of war against the Mughal king, and, he will say, by placing the Ottoman empire in such a position you have committed treason and must pay the price. Such is the news the tulips have to tell.”

  Forewarned, Argalia had time to make plans, and on the day they came for him he had already sent Qara Köz and the Mirror, under cover of night, along with many treasure chests holding the wealth he had amassed on many successful military campaigns, and protected by the four Swiss giants and the entire company of his most loyal Janissaries, some one hundred men in all, to wait for him at Bu
rsa to the south of the capital. “If I run away with you,” he said, “Selim will hunt us down and murder us like dogs. Instead, I must stand trial, and after I am condemned I must win the Gardener’s Race.” It was what Qara Köz had known he would say. “If you are determined to die,” she told him, “I suppose I will have to allow it.” By which she meant, she would have to save his life, and it would be hard, because she would not be present at the scene of the great race.

  As soon as Selim the Grim in the throne room of the Abode of Bliss pronounced the sentence of death on the traitor Argalia, the warrior, knowing the rules, spun on his heel and began to run. From the throne room to the Fish-House Gate it was about half a mile through the palace gardens, and he had to get there before the Bostanci-Basha in his red skull-cap, white muslin breeches, and bare chest, who was already in hot pursuit and gaining on him with every stride. If he was caught he would die at the Fish-House and be thrown into the Bosphorus where all the dead bodies went. As he ran between the flower beds he saw the Fish-House Gate ahead, heard the footsteps of the Bostanci-Basha close behind him, and knew he could not run fast enough to escape. “Life is absurd,” he thought. “To survive so many wars and then be strangled by the gardener. Truly is it said, there are no heroes who do not learn the emptiness of heroism before they die.” He remembered how as a young boy he had first discovered the absurdity of life, alone in a small rowboat in the middle of a naval battle in a fog. “All these years later,” he thought, “I am having to learn the lesson all over again.”

  No satisfactory explanation was ever given of why Sultan Selim the Grim’s fleet-footed head gardener suddenly fell down clutching his stomach just thirty paces from the end of the Gardener’s Race, or why he then succumbed to a bout of the foulest farting anyone had ever smelled, releasing blasts of wind as loud as gunshots, and crying out in pain like an uprooted mandrake, while Argalia ran past the finishing post at the Fish-House Gate, mounted the horse waiting for him, and galloped on into exile. “Did you do something?” Argalia asked his beloved when he met her at Bursa. “What could I have done to my dear little Basha?” she answered, wide-eyed. “To send him a message thanking him in advance for slaying you, my vile abductor, along with a jug of Anatolian wine to demonstrate my gratitude, that is one thing, yes; but to calculate exactly how long a certain potion stirred into the wine would take before it had its effect on his stomach, why, that would be quite impossible, of course.” When he looked into her eyes he saw no sign of any subterfuge there, no indication that she, or her Mirror, or both of them together, might have done anything to persuade the gardener to fail in his duty, perhaps even to take the drink at a time specified in advance, in return for a moment of bliss that would last such a man a lifetime. No, Argalia told himself, as Qara Köz’s eyes drew him deeply into their spell, nothing of that sort could have happened. Behold the eyes of my beloved, how guileless they are, how full of love and truth.

  Admiral Andrea Doria, captain of the fleet of Genoa, lived, when he was on dry land, in the suburb of Fassolo outside the city walls, in front of the San Tomasso gate at the northwest entrance to the harbor. He had bought a villa here from a Genoese noble called Jacobo Lomellino because it made him feel like one of the ancient toga-wearing, laurel-wreathed Romans who lived in grand sea villas like the one at Laurentinum described by the younger Pliny, and also on account of the harbor view that allowed him to keep an eye on exactly who was coming to or going from the city at any given time. His galleys were moored right outside the house in case quick action was required. So naturally he was one of the first people to see the ship from Rhodes that was bearing Argalia back to Italy, and through his spyglass he made out the large number of heavily armed men on board wearing the uniforms of Ottoman Janissaries. Four of them were apparently albino giants. He sent a messenger down from the terrace where he sat to instruct his lieutenant Ceva to sail out to meet the Rhodes vessel and find out what the new visitors might have in mind. This was how Ceva the Scorpion came face to face again with a person he had abandoned in enemy waters.

  The man whom Ceva did not yet recognize as Argalia had positioned himself before the mast of the Rhodes ship dressed in the spreading turban and flowing brocade robes of a wealthy Ottoman prince. His Janissaries were behind him, fully armed and at the ready, and standing beside him, appearing to draw all sunlight toward themselves so that the rest of the world seemed dark and cold, were the two most beautiful women Ceva had ever seen, their beauty unveiled for all to behold, their loose black locks blowing like the tresses of goddesses in the breeze. As Ceva came aboard the Rhodes transport ship with a detachment of the Band of Gold right behind him the women turned to face him and he felt his sword drop from his hand. Then there was a gentle but inexorable downward pressure on both his shoulders, a pressure he discovered he had no desire whatsoever to resist, and suddenly he and all his men were kneeling at the visitors’ feet and his mouth was uttering unaccustomed words of greeting. Welcome, good ladies, and all these who watch over you.

  “Be careful, Scorpion,” said the Ottoman prince in perfect Florentine Italian, and then, imitating Ceva’s own speech, “’cause if a fellow don’t look me in the eye I tears their liver out and feeds it to the gulls.”

  Now Ceva understood who was standing before him and began to rise, groping for his weapon; but found that for some reason he was stuck down there on his knees, and so were all his men. “But then again,” Argalia went on, thoughtfully, “right now your eye is only high enough to stare at my fucking cock.”

  The great condottiere Doria, his beard and mustache flooding down from his face in mighty waves, was posing as the sea-god Neptune for the sculptor Bronzino, standing naked on the terrace of his villa holding a trident in his right hand while the artist sketched his nudity, when to his considerable consternation a heavily armed band of scoundrels marched up from his private jetty to confront him. At their head, quite amazingly, was his own man Ceva, the Scorpion, behaving like a lickspittle toady, and in the center of the group, wearing hooded cloaks, were what appeared to be two female persons, whose identity and nature he could not at once determine. “If you think a bunch of brigands and their whores can take Andrea Doria without a fight,” he roared, grabbing his sword in one hand and brandishing the trident in the other, “let’s see how many of you leave this place alive.”

  At this point the enchantress and her slave threw back their hoods and Admiral Doria was suddenly reduced to blushing stammers. He retreated from the advancing group in search of his breeches, but the women appeared to pay his nakedness no attention at all, which was, if anything, more demeaning still. “A boy you left for dead has returned to claim his due,” said Qara Köz. She spoke perfect Italian, Doria could hear that, though plainly this was no Italian girl. This was a visitor for whom a man could lay down his life. This was a queen to worship and her associate, who looked like a mirror image of the royal lady, only faintly inferior to the original in pulchritude and charm, was also a beauty to adore. It was impossible to think of battle in the presence of such wonders. Admiral Doria, clutching a cloak around himself, stood open-mouthed as the strangers approached, a sea-god in thrall to nymphs arising from the waters.

  “He has returned,” said Qara Köz, “as he promised himself he would, like a prince, with a fortune to his name. He has cleansed himself of the desire for revenge, so your safety is assured. However, he asks you for that reward which, in the light of his past service and his present mercy, must plainly be his due.”

  “And how much might that be?” Andrea Doria asked.

  “Your friendship,” said the enchantress, “and a good dinner, and safe conduct through these lands.”

  “Safe conduct in what direction,” the Admiral asked. “Where does he propose to go with such a cut-throat band?”

  “Home is the sailor, Andrea,” said Argalia the Turk. “Home is the man of war. I have seen the world, had my fill of blood, made my packet, and now I’m going to rest.”

  “You ha
ven’t stopped being a child,” Andrea Doria told him. “You still think that home, at the end of a long journey, is a place where a man finds peace.”

  { 16 }

  As if all Florentines were cardinals

  As if all Florentines were cardinals, the despised poor of the city pre-empted the red-clothed eminences sealed in the Sistine Chapel and lit bonfires to celebrate the election of a Medici Pope. The city was so full of flame and smoke that from a distance it seemed to be burning down. A traveler coming this way at sunset—this traveler, coming this way now, along the road from the sea, his narrow eyes, white skin, and long black hair giving him the look not of a returning native but of an exotic creature out of some Far Eastern legend, a samouraï, perhaps, from the island of Chipango or Cipangu, which was to say Giapan, a descendant of the redoubtable Kiushu knights who once defeated the invading forces of the Chinese emperor Kubilai Khan—might believe himself to be arriving at the scene of a calamity, and might very well pause in his tracks, reining in his horse and holding up a general’s imperious hand, a hand accustomed to being obeyed, to take stock. Argalia would remember that moment often enough in the coming months. The bonfires had been lit before the cardinals’ decision had been taken, but their prophecy proved to be correct and a Medici Pope, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, Leo X, was indeed elected that night to join forces with his brother Duke Giuliano in Florence. “Considering that those bastards were back in the saddle, I should have stayed in Genoa and gone off sailing with Doria on his fighting ships until the world came to its senses,” he told il Machia when he saw him, “but the truth is I wanted to show her off.”