Pasquale's Angel Read online

  PRAISE FOR PAUL McAULEY:

  ‘Science fiction has seen fashions come and go, but there are still a few out there who keep the faith, and McAuley is one of the best’

  Independent

  ‘McAuley matches the best of his American rivals in zest and scope’

  Guardian

  ‘McAuley [has an] acute ability to get under his characters’ skins and convey a rich sense of place’

  The Times

  ‘Paul McAuley is better than most of the established giants in the field’

  Lisa Tuttle, Time Out

  ‘Complex and rich…vividly imagined, strongly plotted, a constant surprise’

  New Scientist

  ‘McAuley is one of our most versatile and talented SF writers. He’s created space opera in the grand tradition’

  Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY PAUL McAULEY IN GOLLANCZ

  400 Billion Stars

  Secret Harmonies

  Eternal Light

  Red Dust

  Pasquale’s Angel

  Fairyland

  Cowboy Angels

  The Quiet War

  Gardens of the Sun

  Copyright © Paul McAuley 1994

  All rights reserved

  The right of Paul McAuley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 1994 by

  Victor Gollancz Ltd

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0575 08659 3

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Mackays,

  Chatham, Kent

  The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  To V

  Salai, I want to make peace with you,

  not war. No more war, I give in.

  Leonardo Da Vinci,

  from his notebooks

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE – THE FEAST OF SAINT LUKE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO – AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART TWO – THE INTERRUPTED MEASURE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART ONE

  THE FEAST OF SAINT LUKE

  1

  Morning, just after dawn. The sky, for once clear of the murk spewed by foundries and manufactories, the rich blue of the very best four-florins-to-the-ounce ultramarine. Men ambling to work along the Street of Dyers, leather-aproned, long gloves slung around their necks, hair brushed back and tucked under leather caps. Clogs clattering on flagstones, cheerful shouts, the rattle of shutters raised as the little workshops opened up and down the street. Apprentices hanging skeins of coloured wool on hooks over workshop doors: reds, blues, yellows, vibrant in the crisp slanting light against flaking sienna walls. Then a hollow rapid panting as someone started up the Hero’s engine which by an intricate system of pulleys and belts turned the paddles of the dyers’ vats and drove the Archimedes’ screw that raised water from the river. A puff, a breath, a little cloud of vapour rising above the buckled terracotta roofs, the panting settling to a slow steady throb.

  Pasquale, who had drunk too much the night before, groaned awake as the engine’s steady pounding shuddered through the floor, the truckle bed, his own spine. Last year, when things had been going badly—the scandal over the commission for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and business, never more than a trickle, suddenly drying up—Pasquale’s master, the painter Giovanni Battista Rosso, had rented rooms on the second floor of a tall narrow house at the eastern end of the Street of Dyers. Although one room was only a closet, and the second, where Pasquale slept, was not much more than a passage with a bed in it, the main room was airy and light, and had a pleasant aspect over the gardens of the Franciscan friars of Santa Croce. On winter mornings, Pasquale had lain late in bed and watched the swarming shadows made on the ceiling of the narrow room by the lanterns of the dyers’ workmen as they passed by in the cold dark street below, and in spring he had turned his bed to face the opposite window so that he could watch the trembling dance of light and shadow cast through the leaves of the trees in the garden. But all that summer he had been woken at first light by the Hero’s engine, and now its vibration mingled with the queasy throb of his hangover as he groped for and failed to find his cigarettes.

  Too much wine last night, wine and beer, a great swilling indeed, and then he’d taken a turn at watch over the body of Bernardo, he and three others all armed with pistols in case corpsemasters discovered its hiding-place, all of them drinking thick black wine sweet as honey, waving the weapons about and as likely to shoot each other in drunken jest as any corpsemaster. Poor Bernardo, white and still, his face seeming rapt in the light of the forest of candles burning at the head of his coffin, the two silver florins that shut his eyes glinting, more money than he’d ever had in his short life. Twelve years old, the youngest pupil of Jacopo Pontormo, Bernardo had been knocked down by a vaporetto that morning, his chest crushed by its iron-rimmed wheel, and his life with it. Altogether a bad omen, for he was killed on the seventeenth of October, the eve of the feast of Saint Luke, the patron saint of the confraternity of the artists of the city.

  Other noises rising, floating through the open window. Automatic cannon signalling the opening of the city gates, their sounds arriving one after the other according to the law of propagation of waves through air, first near and loud, then further and fainter. The clatter of a velocipede’s wooden wheels over cobbles, its rider cheerfully whistling. Women, calling across the narrow street to each other, the small change at the start of the day. Then the bells of the churches, far and near, ringing out for the first mass. The slow heavy tolling of Santa Croce itself mixed with the beat of the dyers’ Hero’s engine and seemed to rise and fall as the two rhythms pulsed in and out of phase.

  Pasquale made a last futile swipe for his cigarettes, groaned and sat up, and discovered himself fully clothed. He had a distinct impression that a surgeon had bled him dry in the night. Rosso’s Barbary ape sat on the wide window-sill at the foot of the bed, looking down at him with liquid brown eyes as it idly picked at calcined plaster with its long flexible toes. When it saw that Pasquale was awake it snatched the blanket from his bed and fled through the window, screeching at the fine joke it had played.

  A moment later a human cry floated up. Pasquale thrust his head out of the window to see what was going on. The window overlooked the green gardens of
Santa Croce, and the young friar who had charge of the gardens was running up and down the wide white gravel path below, shaking an empty sack like a flag. ‘You keep that creature of yours inside!’ the friar shouted.

  Pasquale looked either side of the window: the ape had disappeared. He called down, ‘He is inside. You should be inside too, brother. You should be at your devotions, not waking up innocent people.’

  The friar said, ‘I tell you, he was after my grapes!’ He was red in the face, a fat young man with greasy black hair that stuck out all around his tonsure. ‘As for innocence, no man is innocent, except in the eyes of God. Especially you: your profane and drunken songs woke me last night.’

  ‘Well, pray for me then,’ Pasquale said, and withdrew his head. He couldn’t even remember getting home, let alone singing.

  The friar was still shouting, his voice breaking in anger the way that fat men’s voices often do. I’ll see to your grapes, Pasquale resolved, as he lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. The first puff was the test: the trick was not to inhale too deeply. Pasquale sipped cool green smoke cautiously, then more deeply when it seemed that he would not lose the contents of his stomach. He sat on his rumpled bed and as he finished the cigarette thought about angels, and Bernardo’s sweet dead face. Bernardo’s family would try and smuggle their son’s body out of the city today, taking it back to Pratolino, beyond the jurisdiction of the corpsemasters.

  Pasquale poured water into a basin and splashed his face. Combing his wet springy hair back from his forehead with his fingers, he went into the main room of the studio and found his master already at work.

  Rosso and Pasquale had whitewashed the walls and floor of the big airy room just two weeks ago, and even at this early hour it glowed with pure light. The ape was curled up in the brocade chair, the blanket wrapped around itself, snoring contentedly, hardly stirring when Pasquale wandered in and Rosso laughed long and hard at his pupil’s bedraggled state.

  Rosso was working by the big window that overlooked the street. Its shutters were flung wide. He was using a feather to brush away charcoal from the lines of the underdrawing on the canvas that, sized, primed with oil, lead white and glue, had been standing against one wall for more than three weeks and was now propped on the work-table. He was barefoot and wore only his green work-apron, girdled loosely at his waist and falling to just above his knees. A tall pale-skinned man, with a shock of red hair stiff as porcupine quills, a sharp-bladed nose, and a pale-lipped mobile mouth. There was a smudge of charcoal on his forehead.

  Pasquale picked a big goose-quill from the bundle on the work-table and lent a hand. Rosso said, ‘How are we this morning? Did Ferdinand wake you up as I asked him? And what was the good friar shouting about?’

  Ferdinand was the Barbary ape, named for the late unlamented King of Spain.

  ‘He waited until I was awake before he took the blanket. And he did it because he likes my smell, not because of anything you told him. You couldn’t get him to drink a glass of water by asking if you chained him for a hundred days in the Araby Desert. As for the friar, he has a jealous soul. Do you like grapes, by the way? I’ve an idea to make our friend shout so loud he’ll burst.’

  ‘You’d have Ferdinand steal those grapes? You persuade him to do it, and I’ll believe you can talk to him with your fingers.’

  Pasquale switched away the charcoal dust that had accumulated at the bottom of the canvas. The lines of the underdrawing had to be all but erased, or else they would show through, or, even worse tint the oils.

  ‘Master, why are you doing this now? Shouldn’t you be dressed?’

  ‘Why, I only just this minute got undressed.’

  ‘Out with your bumboy, I suppose.’

  ‘That,’ Rosso said, ‘is none of your business. Besides, just because you couldn’t sweet-talk Pelashil into giving you more of that poison, there’s no need to take it out on me.’

  ‘Pelashil? Did I try?’ Pasquale did remember talking to her, never quite an argument, he more and more insistent about wanting to try the híkuri again, and she telling him that a drunken man would only be bewildered by the visions it gave, but she had come up and given him a kiss later, in front of everyone, and told him to come and see her when he was in his senses. Pasquale groaned, half in pleasure, half with guilt. Pelashil was the servant of Piero di Cosimo, a Savage brought back from the friendly shores of the New World and widely held to be his common-law wife. She was twice Pasquale’s age, dark and heavy-haunched, but Pasquale was attracted by the challenge of keeping her attention long enough to make her smile. She had no time for small talk, and if conversation bored her she would turn away. Her silences were long, not so much sulky as self-absorbed; her sudden, flashing smile was all too rare. Strangely, what Pasquale took seriously, the euphoric híkuri dream, the sense of diving deep into the weave of the world, Pelashil maintained was nothing more than entertainment. She wouldn’t even listen when he tried to tell her what he’d seen after he’d chewed the shrivelled, nauseatingly bitter grey-green button she had fed him in her hot, brightly decorated little room.

  Rosso, who understood his pupil, laughed and made the sign of a cuckold’s horns on his forehead. ‘For shame, Pasqualino! You take advantage of a poor crazy old man.’

  ‘Perhaps I want to follow in his footsteps, and see for myself the New World. We could go, master, you and I. We could make a fresh start.’

  Rosso said, ‘I’ll not hold you to your contract if you want to leave. God knows you’ve learned all you will from me. Go if you want, but don’t break an old man’s heart and steal his servant. Old men need the warmth of women.’

  ‘Think of the light, master, and think that a man can live like a king for the rent you pay for this place.’

  ‘A king of Savages? What kind of honour is that?’

  ‘I know you will tell me you have your reputation here,’ Pasquale said. ‘I’m sorry to have mentioned it. You should get dressed for the procession.’

  ‘We have plenty of time before the procession.’ Rosso stepped back and looked critically at the underdrawing. It was the deposition of Christ, looking down the length of His dramatically foreshortened body as He was tenderly cradled by His disciples.

  ‘Surely this can wait.’

  ‘I have to finish it in two weeks, or I’ll be fined. That’s what the contract stipulates.’

  ‘You’ve been fined before. And we have to finish the wall for that light-show.’

  Rosso had agreed to paint patterns on a newly plastered wall as part of an artificer’s scheme to amaze and entertain the Pope. Years ago, the spectacles celebrating the visit of a foreign prince would have been entirely provided by artists; now, they were reduced to assisting in the devices and designs of the artificers.

  ‘We will paint the wall tomorrow. I can’t afford to break that contract, and neither can I afford to break this one. We’re close to asking Saint Mark for half his cloak. Listen, if Signor di Piombino likes the picture, he may offer his private chapel to us. How would you like that, Pasqualino? Perhaps I would be able to engage new pupils.’

  ‘You’ll have to find a new bed, then. Mine is too narrow for two, and has a groove in it so deep I dream I’m buried alive.’

  ‘It has to be narrow to fit in the room. Ah,’ Rosso said with sudden exasperation, ‘what’s the point of new pupils anyway!’ His mood had swung around as it so often did these days. Pasquale knew his master was not recovered from the business with the director of the hospital, who had seen devils in the sketch of a commissioned painting where saints should have been, and loudly described how he had been tricked to any who would listen. Rosso said, ‘Maybe I’ll let you do the whole chapel, Pasqualino. But I feel like painting this, at least. It’s time it was finished. And there’s that panel you’ve been working on. When are you going to make a start on it? As for this, don’t worry, it’ll be a piece of piss to do. We’ll start by shading it across, right side brighter than the left. I sold one of your prints, by the way
.’

  Pasquale had found some of yesterday’s bread. Chewing hard, he said, ‘Which one?’

  ‘You know, the kind the women buy, the kind for which they never quite dare ask outright. She was a pretty woman, Pasquale, and blushed all over, I swear, as she tried to make me understand what she wanted. Put some oil on that bread, although how you can eat after all you’ve drunk…you won’t spew, I hope.’

  Pasquale had made a number of studies for that kind of print—they were called stiffeners, in the trade. He had found a model in one of Mother Lucia’s girls, a compliant whore who would pose for pennies, and hold the same pose for an hour or more without complaint. He said, ‘Which one exactly? How much did you get?’

  ‘An early one,’ Rosso said carelessly. ‘Very virile, with cocks running rampant through it.’

  ‘That? It was pirated this spring.’

  ‘Yes, and the copy has improved on your original—the passage with the arms of the man holding the bladder and cock on a pole is much freer. Still, our blushing customer wanted a print of the original, which is a compliment of kinds, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, I’ll do another.’ Pasquale wiped oil from his hands on a bit of cloth and picked up the blackened goose-quill. ‘Are you really going to use this underdrawing, or are you going to start over again?’

  ‘Oh, I think this has promise. Although I don’t like the positioning of the two figures lifting the legs. Maybe I’ll move them back a little.’

  ‘It will spoil the lines of their arms, surely. Besides, if you lift a heavy weight, your arms are close to your sides, so they must be close to the body.’

  ‘Here’s my pupil, telling his master what he’s about.’

  ‘What about my fee for the print?’

  ‘As for that, it is already spent. Don’t look at me like that, Pasqualino. One must pay rent.’

  ‘Yesterday you said the rent could wait.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for the studio,’ Rosso said and winked.

  ‘Which bumboy was it last night? The Prussian with the scar?’