CHAPTER 44
Levi was one of the few condottieri who hadn’t pawned his horse, and now his grey destrier set the pace for the stocky maremmano mounts Sofia and Pedro rode. Although not fast, they were dependable beasts. Rasenneisi weren’t natural horsemen, but Sofia had been taught to ride in John Acuto’s camp and Pedro was a fast learner.
They rode east, clinging to the Irenicon’s banks as long as possible. The further away from Rasenna they got, the more the Irenicon behaved like an ordinary river. It inclined downhill and north while their path was up into the Apennines. Thanks to his years as a soldier, scout and spy for John Acuto, Levi knew the quickest route through the so-called Alp of the Moon. Their small party could take narrow paths and passes that would have been precarious for an army carrying baggage. Even so, it was cumbersome going. The Arimunese side was steepest and they had to dismount and pull the horses along.
The Alp of the Moon, Etruria’s rooftop, marked the boundary of the Rasenneisi contato. On the far side lay the great flatness of the Marches of Arimunum. The air was thin and the north wind tireless, and when Levi stopped to get his bearings, the horses huddled together for warmth. The peaks of Monte dei Frati and Monte Maggiore loomed over them like horns. They were the source of the grey-blue Ariminus and the Albula River, which thundered south carrying tons of sediment yellow as amber into the great estuary which ancient Veii overlooked.
Levi decided they would follow the Ariminus, and ford it on the other side when its torrent was spent.
He hadn’t left his concerns back in Rasenna. ‘Can Uggeri keep the bandieratori out of trouble?’ he asked.
‘Making trouble’s what good bandieratori do,’ Sofia said. ‘The better question is, can Yuri keep the condottieri out of their way? Who knows? We just have to trust them.’
Levi didn’t like to be so pessimistic, but the hostility they’d faced in the Palazzo del Popolo was still preying on his mind. ‘Bombelli told me you were the one who suggested the people’s Signoria, Pedro. You still believe in it?’
‘It was my father’s idea; I just repeated it. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” He believed that, but God help us if it’s true.’
‘I’ve been around, kid. Rasenna’s Signoria isn’t perfect, but every other state that’s thrown off its Families has replaced them with tyrants. The Signoria makes mistakes, but so does everyone – even engineers.’
‘The difference is that engineers have ways to spot errors and correct them. In the Signoria it’s the loudest voices that get heard, and it’s always the rich who speak loudest. That’s fine in peacetime, but we’re going to war soon, whether Bombelli can bear the thought or not.’
‘What’s the alternative?’ Sofia said. ‘The Families again?’
‘We’ve already tried that experiment.’
Levi’s eyes narrowed. ‘Perhaps a government of philosophers?’
Pedro shook his head. ‘Giovanni told me how that ended in Concord. If engineers took over Rasenna we’d run it well for a while, but eventually we’d begin enriching ourselves at the common expense. Power accumulates like water forms in pools. Give me a practical problem and I can solve it, but there’s no solution to that.’
‘So you’re not going to participate any more?’
‘The only thing I’m sure of is that one less voice can only be a good thing.’
‘Your father trusted Bombelli,’ Sofia said.
‘So did I, once, but he’s changed. Fabbro the merchant had to get along with everyone. Fabbro the gonfaloniere is different.’
‘So you’ll hide in your tunnels as the towers fall above you,’ said Levi. ‘You know where that ends; there are plenty without your scruples seeking power for its own sake. You think your father would be happy with you letting them take it?’
Pedro stopped and looked around. ‘Are dreamers ever happy? Besides, you’re being dramatic. Things haven’t got that bad.’
The Signoria’s compromises faded with every mile they put between them and Rasenna, leaving space for other concerns. Levi had worn out his saddle travelling the South, trying to put together a coalition of Concord’s enemies, but now that was actually a prospect, he was concerned that it was the right coalition. ‘Be on guard,’ he warned them both. ‘Whatever else they are, the Ariminumese are not honest brokers.’
‘Surely the fact they called a summit means they’re desperate as us,’ Pedro pointed out. ‘It means they will be numbered amongst Concord’s enemies, but they do it anyway. I mourn for John Acuto, as every Rasenneisi does, but continual suspicion is an indulgence, Levi. You’ve said yourself that a necessary precondition for Concord’s defeat is a strong league, and a necessary precondition for that league is trust.’
Levi considered the logic of this for a while. ‘They’ll try to dominate it,’ he said at last.
‘Let them.’ Sofia looked at him. ‘Someone must lead and the Ariminumese won’t submit to Rasenneisi – I dislike it as much as you, Levi, but what’s the alternative? We need the league more than any other. To go south in strength, Concord must go through us: that’s a fact. With a league at our back, Concord will have to think twice.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Levi said mildly.
‘I’d trust the devil himself if he’d help us defeat Concord.’
‘If I thought defeating Concord was Ariminum’s sole aim I wouldn’t care who held the baton. I’m just afraid they’ve come round to the idea for reasons that have nothing to do with Etruria.’
‘You mean they want help recapturing the Dalmatian colonies?’ Pedro suggested. ‘So that’s why you invited the Oltremarines.’
‘Whether Queen Catrina will come or not is another question. She’s not exactly on good terms with the Doge,’ Levi pointed out. ‘But we do need a counterweight.’
The talk fell away as they rode on, until at last they saw yellowed smoke bleeding over a hill. Beyond the rise, an avalanche of cloud tumbled over a still further peak, rendering hazy the sharp line of the mountain’s silhouette, like an ink-loaded brush drawn over damp paper. Levi moved to the front, but all three were on their guard and wary.
It wasn’t long before they came upon the burning mound, where two masked labourers were hacking and coughing as they fed black lumps to the flames. Except for a tall, skeletal tree bent under the weight of a senate of crows the hill was bare of life. The black-eyed birds and labourers paused to watch them as they rode by.
Sofia covered her mouth. ‘Smells like death.’
‘The sheep must have the murrain,’ said Pedro. ‘The farmers have been complaining about it at the markets.’
Levi held his nose and murmured, ‘The only time you need worry about farmers is when they stop complaining. You know what’s over that pass south and yonder? Gubbio.’
Sofia felt a stabbing chill at the name and pressed her heels to her mount. They rode quickly past to escape its bad luck and whatever miasma poisoned the air, not stopping until they reached a mountain clearing that overlooked the beginning of the Ariminumese contato.
They’d forded the Ariminus a while back, and now they saw its winding trail eased down the flat slope to empty into the lagoon, its strength spent, with sundry tributaries veering off to the south like deserters.
The last time Sofia had approached this city, she had taken another route from Concord. It was getting dark, and just as then, Ariminum’s twinkling lights glowed in the night like an aurora: the burning energy of ceaseless trade, the type of city Bombelli wanted to build, the city Giovanni’s bridge had made possible.
As Pedro and Sofia went to collect firewood, Pedro started to talk about Ariminum’s famous shipyard, which he was eager to see for himself. ‘Giovanni would be proud of you,’ Sofia said.
Their mutual esteem for the dead engineer made them affectionate to each other, but each was weighed down by things unsaid. Pedro had never dared tell Sofia that Giovanni was a Bernoulli – even if he could find the words, what would be the point of adding to her grief?
Sofia wondered if she could ever tell Pedro – or Levi, for that matter – the truth about Giovanni. She had always been vague about the manner of his death, intimating that he had drowned when the second Wave struck. There was no way to make people understand that, in one sense, Giovanni hadn’t died. But whatever he was, buio or man, he had sacrificed himself to save Rasenna, so perhaps that was all that mattered. At times she felt his presence, in her dreams, when cold rain struck her skin, when she looked into the undulating, leaping froth of the Irenicon going under the bridge …
Pedro picked up the wood and left Sofia to her thoughts and she gazed down at the two horns of Ariminum’s harbour stretching wide apart, welcoming the Adriatic, Ariminum’s ‘road’ to the great Middle Sea and the infidel lands beyond. To the north lay the great Venetian Gulf – more swamp than sea, to be sure, and cluttered with marsh islands and rocks, but the gulf was Ariminum’s back door to Europa, by which it avoided Concordian tolls. Growing up under Doc’s flag, Sofia had learned Rasenna, from its narrowest alleys to its highest tower-tops. It was a world complete unto itself – an illusion destroyed when she was taken to Concord. Now she knew that Rasenna was but one tower amongst many. Based on her last experience of negotiating with the Ariminumese, with John Acuto, the summit would be a protracted affair.
This was much more than a positive political development for her, though: the opportunity to escape Rasenna before every fool in the street could see she was pregnant was God-sent. She felt her stomach with mixed dread and excitement: life, inside her and growing, like an idea in one’s mind, but much more. This was real. But the summit was unlikely to last more than a few weeks at best; what should she do when it concluded? Stay until she had the baby then return with an ‘orphan’? She knew Rasenna; no one would be fooled by that charade. And if Isabella was right, neither option was safe.
But it was hard to consider abstract danger when the prospect of humiliation was so much more real. Sofia had grown up with the boys of Workshop Bardini; she had heard the mockery pelted at unmarried mothers. Some families had a grim solution to the shame: a midnight drowning. There were many Rasenneisi – like Maddalena Bombelli – who’d rejoice to see the proud Scaligeri heir brought low. Even worse than the mockery, she feared the high-minded pity of the matrons. Only now that there was a small chance of avoiding this would Sofia admit to herself how scared she had been.
When she wandered back to the fire, Levi was saying to Pedro, ‘Don’t get your hopes up about the shipyard, kid. We’ll be lucky if they don’t make us camp outside the walls like last time. Right, Sofia?’
She smiled in acknowledgement. In the silence, the fire popped and winds howled between distant peaks. Levi threw some more wood on. ‘Tired, huh? Tomorrow’ll be easier.’ He smiled at Sofia. ‘It’s downhill all the way—’
‘I’m with child.’
Pedro and Levi looked at each other in alarm, then back at Sofia. She stared at them as if ready to fight. ‘There it is! It’ll be impossible to hide soon.’
‘Contessa!’ Levi smiled wanly. ‘Congratulations!’
‘You mean commiserations. You mean who’s the father? Well, I won’t say but I can tell you I don’t intend to return to Rasenna until after. You called me Contessa, Levi, but I gave up that title. The Scaligeri name’s all I have now, and if this gets out, I won’t even have that.’
‘You can count on my discretion,’ Pedro said.
‘Thank you,’ Sofia said, and turned to Levi.
‘How can you even ask?’ He was indignant. ‘I’ll defend your honour with my life.’
‘All I ask is silence.’
The riding next morning was smoother, as Levi had promised. The ground levelled off into a great green flatness; beyond the city’s high walls it ran seamlessly into the sea. An awkward silence had troubled breakfast and more than once Levi caught Pedro looking at him narrowly as he stamped out the fire.
Sofia was riding slowly behind. Levi fell back into step beside her. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Fine.’
‘Look, that’s where the Hawk’s camp was – remember?’
Sofia said absently, ‘Yes.’
Levi took hold of her arm. ‘Look here, damnit! I’ve never blamed a soldier for having fun when they get an opportunity – a girl just pays a higher penalty, that’s all—’
‘Fun?’ She pulled her arm away. ‘It wasn’t like that!’
Levi’s face clouded. ‘Who?’
‘It wasn’t like that either. It was … something else. I told you and Pedro out of respect. Respect my privacy.’
Levi nodded quickly. ‘I understand. Forgive me.’ He flicked the reins with forced casualness and rode ahead. Pedro looked back as he caught up and Levi saw again the suspicion behind his glance. ‘How dare you, boy? She’s almost half my age!’ It was a weak defence; that had never stopped a condottieri before, but Pedro knew the truth when he heard it and apologised.
The road was lined by poplars which overshadowed it like long fangs; the trees were overshadowed themselves by the soaring columns of a ruined Etruscan aqueduct. When Pedro wondered aloud that no one repaired it, neither Levi nor Sofia replied, though either might have told him that Ariminum had no lack of water. As the party rode up to Ariminum they kept their distance from each other and their fears private.