The great bells tolled. In the stunned silence of the pitiless midday sun the crowd fell to their knees and beat their breasts, though none knew why. Very few noticed that the Magus had leapt down from his bier, thrown himself on the ground, and was sobbing like a child.
As the little Princess lay on her bier, the diadem slowly slipped from her forehead, and the eternal sun of ancient Greece wove flowers of gold in her radiant hair.
1923
THE TYRANT
DUKE GALEAZZO’S new Commander-in-Chief came marching at the head of his army through the triumphal arches of Milan. To welcome their returning soldiers the city had put on display some of the prodigious wealth that had accumulated under the Duke’s sagacious rule. The clothes worn by the burghers were worth fortunes. Banners hung from balconies, fluttering proudly in the wind. At banqueting tables across the city the poor were to be Galeazzo’s guests.
The King of France’s younger daughter, who was passing through on her way to a nunnery in Rome, could only marvel at the unparalleled splendour. But she was sorry that the Duke, whom she had never seen, was not there in person. The gossip was that there was another purpose to her visit, and certainly the French court would have welcomed a connection with the powerful Duke of Milan. But so far he had lived a life of confirmed celibacy, and the chronicles of scandal had never managed to link his name with any sort of bedfellow. It was said that he kept himself aloof from love in order not to be blinded by passion and fall prey to the wiles of a woman.
The procession had now reached the market square, where the crowd was at its greatest and most distinguished. Strange rumours were circulating. Their source was unknown, but everyone was convinced that the day of celebration was about to witness something that had never happened before — the Duke would come down into the city and make his appearance in the square before his triumphant general. Everyone looked forward to his coming with intense curiosity, not least because very few people had any idea what he looked like — not the colour of his hair, or even how old he was. This was because since infancy he had not once, in all his extremely long reign, set foot outside his castle, and had never visited the city he ruled with such great prudence and care.
The Commander-in-Chief, a stout, powerfully built military man, halted his horse before the cathedral. He was still unfamiliar with the customs of the Milanese Court and imagined that the Duke would now ride out to meet him, clap him on the shoulder in front of the assembled crowd and invite him to a princely feast in the castle; the wine would flow until dawn, he and the Duke would be on first-name terms, and they would live as true friends ever after.
A fanfare of trumpets sounded and the Duke’s feared personal guard, clad from head to foot in steel, rode into the square. Many of them were huge, grim-faced Hungarians and Germans, men who had no dealings with the citizenry.
The guard fanned out in line. Now everyone was certain that the Duke would step forward, and thousands of eyes focused on one point. But the person they saw was an emaciated old Benedictine, the Duke’s Chancellor. The monk made a humble bow, informed the Commander that the Duke was unable to be present, and that he had come instead, as his representative. He would receive his report and give him his instructions for the rest of the day. The arrangement was that that the Commander and the leaders of the mercenaries were to be feasted in the Council House.
The Commander’s triumphant face instantly darkened, his head dropped, and he followed the little old man into the Council House. The French King’s daughter left the same day.
The banners were rolled up and trundled off, and the flowers given away. People pulled their hats down over their eyes and took no pleasure in the free canteens. The old feeling of hatred that seemed to have been briefly forgotten was back again. If two pairs of eyes met over a raised glass, it was to drink silently to the Duke’s demise. If a sixteen-year-old burnt with a nameless ardour, it was because he saw himself as a future tyrannicide, while the older folk simply regretted that the time for that great day was not yet ripe. Once again, the dark shadow of the invisible tyrant lay across the city.
But the Duke, who never knew a single day’s rest, and who had never tasted wine in his life, had risen at dawn that morning and worked away at his never-ending tasks of administration. Only for a moment had he glanced out of the window and then, with a small smile of total indifference, he had turned to his Chancellor and observed: “What a lot of people! And every one of them a taxpayer of mine, while I pay taxes to no one…”
His entourage, ageing churchmen grown grey-haired in their studies and black servants alike, had heard this many times before. Not one of them was a Milanese. Galeazzo thought of the people’s hatred as a sort of endemic disease that the children of the city carried with them from the cradle and of which not one of them would ever be cured. He knew that — setting aside the blood of conspirators and those sacrificed in his perennial wars of defence — no stain of tyrannical behaviour, however construed, or of cruelty, was attached to his name. And yet there was not one person born in Milan in the last forty years who had not come into the world under the sign of the tyrannicide.
As the huge crowd broke up and despondently drifted away, a rather different sort of ceremony was taking place inside the Court. This was the day when Ippolyto turned sixteen. Ippolyto (known affectionately as Lytto) was a pageboy of noble birth assigned to the Duke’s inner cohort of attendants, and the one person, it seemed, for whom Galeazzo felt any personal warmth. To mark the occasion he had presented the boy with a finely worked dagger, which seemed to signify that so far the page had served him with a boyish devotion but from now on he would be expected to defend his lord and master by arms and manly strength. Lytto was thrilled, not so much by the gift itself but by the fact that he had been given it at all, and he kissed the Duke’s cold, ring-studded hand with a totally spontaneous ardour. His radiant delight brought a smile to the Duke’s lips, and he stroked the boy’s head. That action, more than anything else, made it Lytto’s happiest hour. He could not remember anyone ever touching his long golden hair so gently before.
The fact was that Ippolyto had come into the world some sixteen years earlier as the child of a guilty love. His mother was a high-ranking lady intimately connected with the Duke’s inner circle, and his arrival, it seems, had caused a considerable scandal. No way could be found to conceal the situation from the all-seeing, endlessly gossiping Milanese people, and Galeazzo had decided to have the boy brought up at his side, shielded from prying eyes by a veil of invisibility. The years passed, and his plans for his protégé developed further. He came to see that this young man, who had grown up in the chilling, rarified air of the Court, without parents, a proper home or family tradition, was a real treasure, and he felt that if he could keep him away from the maniacal ideas of the Milanese people during these highly impressionable years and instil in him the disciplined ethos of the court and something of his own rather cold personal charisma, then thoughts of treason would never take hold of him. The boy would become his faithful follower, someone he could trust whatever the circumstances — the sort of adherent he had never previously had.
This scheme, like everything else, he carried out precisely and with great circumspection. Thus from the age of ten little Lytto had set aside his childish toys and spent his days in the Duke’s service. He was a serious young man, conscientious by nature, and he performed his duties well. Galeazzo jokingly called him “my walking memory” for his habit of politely drawing his attention to anything he forgot. By now the Duke was beginning to age. Not only was his memory weaker but his body was becoming more susceptible to cold, and Lytto was always to hand with a pillow, a fur coat or a soft footstool for his easily chilled limbs. The strain of too much mental work had made the Duke surprisingly delicate: he could no longer tolerate bright light, or noise, or any kind of slovenliness and dirt; and during his hours of rest only Lytto was allowed near him. With his silent, cat-like tread, his pale young figure that proclaimed both his outer purity and inward innocence, and the comforting gaze of his large eyes with their permanent expression of wonder, his entire person seemed to have been woven from the ‘dim religious light’ of the holy church itself.