Wolves in Winter (24 page)

‘Behold!’ cries Savonarola, and his voice, for all that it is thin and peevish, is full of a compelling certainty.

‘The Sword has descended; the scourge is fallen, the prophecies are being fulfilled. Behold, it is the Lord God who is leading on these armies. It has come!’

As he speaks, the crowd begins to murmur and sway, mechanically crossing themselves, clacking at rosaries like a gaggle of chickens. And then, hovering in the space above the pulpit, I see
it: a huge sword chased in silver, with the sun’s rays streaming down its blade and a bull being put to death, the flowing blood curving back into the pattern of the sword to form a motto. I
squint my eyes, but I cannot make out the words. The crowd behind me melts away, I am alone with my vision now, and the sword twists on its vicious point, dancing for me. Then I see the name
‘Divius Caesar’ engraved into the hilt. Caesar. Cesare. The monk is right and he was wrong. The wolf that will come over the Alps, the sword of God, is not hunchbacked, simple Charles,
or his strutting, arrogant cousin Louis, but the Pope’s own warrior. Cesare.

*

When I woke, there was a rider below the walls of the town. In the moment that I saw him, the bells of the Rocca began to toll the warning of invasion, echoed in moments by the
churches of the town. A rush of footsteps on the staircase and the Countess appeared, two of her captains panting behind her. She leaned over the parapet and watched the horseman pass the
Schiavonia gate. The city was so still that we could hear the hoofbeats as clear as if they walked beneath us. It stretched so long, that moment, the last seconds before the Countess of Forli
embraced her fate. Time held, stretched, a few more instants before a clap of thunder, fit to split the Rocca in two, burst above us, and the sky turned in an instant from turgid grey to black,
with the hiss of the rains sounding on the tiles in the time it took for our pupils to open to the dark.

‘How apt, Mora,’ my lady smiled, a real smile, the first I had seen for weeks. ‘Like a country masque, here the thunder, and now the devil himself.’

For the next hours I trotted behind her as clumsy as a convent
serbanza
let out for her first court ball. The garrison moved behind her skirts like dancers, heaving the guns into
position, lining up the powder kegs under the protection of the loggias, weaving the measures of my lady’s defiance along the walls of the citadel. The roar of the storm and the continuous
tolling of the bells were deafening. Then Caterina gave orders to begin the bombardment of the town, every report from the guns reverberating in our thudding hearts. The thunder and the cannon kept
pace with one another for that night, and the next. Neither the rain nor the barrage from the Rocca gave any quarter. I had thrown off my torpor – the torpor that had held the whole garrison
suspended for the time of waiting. Now I could be busy again. In the
farmacia
I had brewed a cauldron of mallow root, mixed with rosehip syrup to help it down. The potion causes the heart to
beat more strongly; it would keep the men alert. Every few hours, as the soldiers changed their positions, I went among them, dispensing spoonfuls like a nurse to the newcomers to keep their senses
sharp. My lady had ordered that no wine be given out just yet, the time for that would come.

On the third day, Valentino rode beneath the San Pietro gate and into Forli. The Council sent out twenty-five horsemen to greet him, assuring him that the city would submit to occupation without
a single blow of the sword. In response, Caterina trained her guns on the tower of the campanile. The rain and the smoke from the guns obscured the view from the walls, but beyond, in the
countryside, we could make out the massed ranks of the soldiers who accompanied him, a black swarm on the sodden hills. Ten thousand, came the reports, twelve thousand, fourteen. Like a mist, the
swarm formed into a column and trailed towards the walls. The piazza was so dark that the torches were set alight in their brackets, and they illuminated the figure on a white warhorse, surrounded
by his French courtiers in crimson and cloth of gold.

Always, it seemed to me, Valentino moved within his own prism of light. The rain was as hard as ever yet as his bearer carried the Borgia standard into the piazza, the streaming comet’s
tail of the pennant stretched itself into the sky and made a tunnel through the cloud, so that the tall, erect figure on his white horse seemed captured in a luminescent spiral, a valedictory
light, as when the last ray of a sunset recalls within it the fact of night. The guns were silent. Our ears had become so accustomed to their punishing boom, that it made the quiet seem enormous.
The garrison stood silent too, along the walls of the Rocca, surrounding my lady.

The approaching figures came up into the square, the suck of the sodden ground muffling their steps.

‘Look at him,’ sneered my lady, ‘the Catalan bastard come courting.’

Valentino too was dressed in crimson, wetted to the colour of dried blood, the cloth of gold lining to his sleeves drawing the lemon-coloured sunlight towards him. His face was obscured by a
soft cap of the same tissue, a white feather curling coyly over his cheek. He was too distant to make out anything other than the soft set of his broad mouth. I watched my lady’s face, I
watched her take in the ease with which he sat his horse, the movement of his hips languid in time with the push of its shoulders, the taper of his waist and the spread of his back under the tight
cloth. Despite their treacherous submission, the people of Forli had not turned out to greet their new ruler, so it was a solitary figure which circled the square three times, slowly, his lance
resting at his hip in the conqueror’s gesture, reclaiming the fief for St Peter. It was so quiet. I knew I ought not, but I thought he was beautiful.

*

In Florence I had seen two paintings: the soul in purgatory and the soul damned, both framed in ribbons of gold. In the first, a resigned figure cast up suffering eyes to the
rays of what I supposed was Heaven, in the second the same figure was a howling gargoyle, mouth agape, eyes swollen in frenzy, flanked by two horned demons with lolling tongues. Maestro Ficino said
such stuff was nonsense, that it played only upon the fears of the ignorant, who had not been taught that the soul’s essence communed with celestial entities, that spirit was too subtle to be
confined by demons and pitchforks. So I thought that I did not believe in Hell. I think, though, that if my master had stood there that day on the walls of the Rocca, and seen it all as I did, he
would have changed his mind.

The Forlivese had believed Valentino would be merciful, but he had made no such promises for his French troops. The cross in the piazza was their first victim. The revered statue of San
Mercuriale – venerated by the people for generations – was torn down and dragged ignominiously around the square. Within hours of their arrival the roofs of the city were smouldering
under the ceaseless rain. The streets were black with French locusts, one after another workshops and warehouses were looted, so that we heard glass smashing and the thud as beams fell to the
fire.

‘They’ll be at the wine shops next,’ remarked one of the Countess’s men.

He was right, and for a while a grim calm fell on the city as the barrels were broken out and the troops swarmed in huddles to drink. We waited there, mindless of the soaking, gelid rain,
helpless, watching. I pulled at my lady’s sleeve.

‘Look, they’re moving up, to the convent.’

The height of the Rocca gave us a clear view over the whole city, with the nunnery of Santa Maria enclosed within the walls on the north-eastern side, so close, it seemed, that we might have
reached through the mizzle to pluck a leaf of ivy from its walls.

‘Turn the guns,’ she ordered.

The Countess had seen battle before. I did not know whether she wanted to fire Forli’s beloved convent for revenge; or whether my lady hoped to give the sisters a kinder fate than that she
knew awaited them. For a few moments, the cannon smoke obscured Santa Maria as the shot found its target. The tower of the nuns’ chapel swayed drunkenly, then slowly, hovering a moment in the
sudden space beneath it, collapsed. The upraised arms of the Virgin, toppled from her niche, lodged in the walls as her veiled head crashed to the ground. Roaring with rage, they went on.

‘They will have barred the doors?’ I asked.

‘Surely. All the maids of the city will be inside,’ she replied, her mouth set tight.

But the doors might have been sculpted in butter for all the protection they gave.

I wanted to stop my eyes when I saw them dragging the women through the town, the nuns in their dark habits and the lighter dresses of the girls, their hems already smeared with blood. They
brought them praying and weeping across the city, right up to the walls of the Rocca. We could hear them, above the gunfire, the steady murmur of the nuns, calling on the Mother of God to save
them, the screaming of the girls, calling on their Countess to save them.

‘My lady, we might open the gates.’

‘We can keep them off long enough to get the good sisters inside.’

‘No.’

‘My lady—’

‘I said no. Do you challenge me?’

She had done worse, I knew. This was not the first time she had stood on the ramparts of her fortress, defying those who came against her, this was not the first time she had closed her ears to
pleading and her heart to pity.

They herded them together, perhaps thirty or so, surrounding them with a wall of staves and bayonets. Then one woman was dragged forward, falling to her knees, her white head cloth slipping into
the mud, her face washed bright with the rain turned up to us, desperate.

‘It is Suora Cecilia.’

I knew her, I had seen her often when I went to the porch of the convent to buy herbs and dried fruits for the Countess’s
farmacia
. Sometimes she would put aside a twist of candied
rose petals or cherries in a paper for me. A kind woman, her pale face gently laced with wrinkles. She had taken her nun’s name for the saint of music, she told me, because her greatest joy
was offering her voice to God when the sisters sang the orders. That voice had sung Matins this morning and now it was cracked and broken, calling again and again on her lady to save her. They
pushed her down in the filth and her shift rose up, exposing the soft flesh of her thighs that no one had ever seen. Then a blow from a boot silenced her, and they began.

I had never seen Venice. I had often wondered about it, that city on the water where all the wealth of the world passed through. I had heard of the women there, those prized and beautiful
creatures whom even kings would beg for a night of favours. They had a custom there, that if one such woman betrayed the man who had her in his keeping, his friends would take her, one after the
other, to punish her. Seventy-five was the longest any of them had lasted, I heard, amidst the sniggers of the grooms back in Careggi. It took six until Suora Cecilia’s body lay broken in the
mire, but as they pushed the others forward, one after the next, I could not bear to count. The Countess could not fire on them, even had she wished to, they were too close to the foundations of
the walls, and they knew it. She stood it out, my lady. She had warned the people of Forli that they would have no quarter. Even as I hid my face in my cloak and sickened groans of the men about us
were drowned by the whoops and cheers of those below, she watched, looking down, her countenance as calm as the statue of the Madonna which lay shattered in the street.

Hell came to Forli that day. One by one they took them, and those that lived were left to crawl away in the dark. They took their clothes and burned them, and left them to creep away naked with
nothing to cover their shame. There were not many, I think, who wished to live. When, at last, it was done, I was flensed inside, scoured out with weeping. I begged that I might be allowed to go
down, with my bag of medicines, to go amongst them and see what I might do to help. I should not have cared if they had taken me too; I should have gone gladly, if it meant I could give some
succour to those poor damned creatures.

‘There is nothing to be done for them, Mora. Forli had made its choice. This is war.’

I did not care if I angered her, I did not care if she dashed me from the walls with her own hands.

‘For shame, my lady, for shame.’ I tried to stare her down, then I turned my back on her and walked slowly to the stairwell. I could feel her eyes on my back as I left her.

‘Mora.’ Reluctantly, I went back. She bent her face down to mine then, her hand on my shoulder was trembling.

‘I cannot bend, Mora, I cannot. But it does not mean that I cannot feel.’

That evening, in the Rocca, we danced. With the bodies in the mud outside, we danced. For the troops in their miserable encampment in the park, it was a sorry Christmas feast. But my lady had
platters of roast meat sent out to them, and despite the driving rain insisted that the shuttered windows of the sala be opened, so that the light and the sound of the lutes and the scent from her
Moorish incense burners might drift through the night to the Palazzo Numai, where Valentino was lodging. None amongst us had any stomach for it, yet the Countess was implacable. That night, and the
nights that followed, we would be gay, that the sound of our rejoicings should reach Valentino’s ears and he would know that she cared nothing for him, that every day the Rocca would be
relieved.

From dawn to dusk, the guns bombarded the city, then as it grew dark my lady would send for me to dress her and reappear in one of her finest gowns, silver or azure fringed with gold, for all
the world as though she were still the Pope’s beloved daughter and not his enemy. We lined the window seats with the plate spared from the carts to Florence. The Countess ordered us to place
candles and mirrors against it, so that the rich gleam could be seen by the wretched souls in the streets below, whom the French had forced to pin white crosses to their remaining pathetic rags as
a sign of the occupation. Caterina still believed that the Rocca would hold, that Florence or Venice would send troops, but as the year looked set to turn, even as she danced proudly over the
wreckage of her city, I sensed that in her heart, she knew she was alone.