City of Flowers Read online

  The likeness had been made before Falco’s accident and showed him standing straight and proud, very conscious of his lace collar and holding a sword that scraped slightly on the ground; he had been about eleven then.

  Fabrizio was in no doubt that his brother’s death would hasten his father’s, though he was no longer in a hurry to become Duke Fabrizio di Chimici the Second. He felt much too young to be both head of the family and in charge of all the schemes his father had put in place. Now he wished he had been one of the younger sons and without such a weight of responsibility to look forward to.

  But he squared his shoulders and resumed his walk. At least he could accede happily to one of his father’s plans. Fabrizio was to be married soon to his cousin Caterina. And she was his favourite of all the cousins, from the time they had played games together as children at the summer palace in Santa Fina. A smile played round Fabrizio’s fine mouth as he thought of Caterina.

  That was the one good thing to come out of poor Falco’s death – he refused to think of it as suicide – all the di Chemici weddings. His two remaining brothers were to be married at the same time and his cousin Alfonso, Duke of Volana, too. There would be hardly any unmarried di Chimici left – apart from fussy little cousin Rinaldo – and it was clear that his father Duke Niccolò wanted them all to get on with breeding his descendants as fast as possible. Well, Fabrizio was willing; Caterina was a pretty and lively girl and he had no doubt she would produce a superior crop of heirs.

  Sky passed a day at school that felt almost normal. He was used to being in the sixth form now, but he had never quite felt part of the school and had no close friends there.

  The trouble was, he looked the part of someone cool and trendy and he knew that lots of girls were initially attracted to him. He was tall for his age and he wore his gold-brown hair in dreadlocks. But he didn’t listen to any kind of rock music. It reminded him too much of his father. Rosalind sometimes played the Warrior’s CDs, which were the only ones she had that weren’t classical or folk, and it made Sky almost literally sick.

  He used not to care about his father but, ever since the singer had ignored Sky’s letter, written from the heart of despair, he had begun to hate the very idea of him. He knew that the Warrior’s music was having a fashionable revival at the time, because it had featured in a film that broke box office records, but Sky didn’t see the film and he never told anyone of his connection with the singer.

  If he could have been interested in football, he might have felt less of a fish out of water at school. He had the physique for it but just couldn’t raise the enthusiasm. He supposed it was because he had more important things to think about. He probably wasn’t the only student at his school looking after a sick parent; he’d read an article once about how many carers there were under the age of sixteen – really small kids like nine-year-olds, looking after parents in wheelchairs.

  Well, he was better off than they were; he was seventeen, and his mother wasn’t ill all the time. But he didn’t know anyone else in his position and he felt set apart, somehow marked. And it showed. Gradually, the friendly overtures had tailed off and the girls wrote him off as useless too.

  There was just one girl, though, quiet and fair, whom he really liked, and if she had ever shown any interest in him, things might have been different. But she was inseparable from her fierce friend with the dyed red hair and tattoo, so Sky never got up the courage to talk to her. Still, they were all doing English AS, so at least they were in some of the same classes.

  It didn’t take Sky long to reach home, since his flat was in a house right next to the school. He dawdled, wondering what he would find there, whether his mother would still be feeling OK or back in bed unable to move. But he was quite unprepared for what he did find. On the doorstep to their flats stood a small blue glass bottle, with a silver stopper in the shape of a fleur-de-lys. It was empty and incredibly fragile, just sitting there on the step, where anyone might knock it over.

  Instinctively, Sky picked it up and took out the stopper; a heavenly smell wafted out of it, more delicious than anything in his mother’s store of oils and essences. Was it meant for her? There was no message attached to it.

  He let himself in through the front door and then into their ground-floor flat. Rosalind had sold the one that the Warrior had paid for and bought this smaller one less than a year ago because she couldn’t manage stairs any more. The newly converted house still smelt of fresh paint and plaster. That and the smell of flower essences greeted Sky’s return.

  ‘Mum,’ he called, though she would have heard his key in the lock. ‘I’m home!’

  She wasn’t in the living room or the tiny kitchen, and he knocked on her bedroom door with a sick feeling that something terrible had happened to her. But she wasn’t there and when he went back to the kitchen, he found her note:

  .

  Gone to supermarket; there won’t be any biscuits till I get back.

  .

  Sky smiled with relief; when had she last been well enough to go shopping on her own? That was usually his job, every Wednesday afternoon after school, lugging plastic carrier bags on to the bus and then putting everything away. His mother must have taken the car, though; she couldn’t have managed on the bus.

  Sky took the damp wash out of the machine, put it in the tumble-dryer, washed up the breakfast things from the morning and looked in the cupboards to see what he could make for dinner. Normally, he would make a start on peeling potatoes or chopping onions, but he thought he’d better wait and see what his mother brought back with her; maybe she had planned something.

  He fed Remedy, because the tabby rescue cat was in danger of tripping him up by twining round his legs, then made himself a cup of tea and sat down at the table, where the little blue glass bottle stood looking innocent and at the same time significant. Remedy leapt on to the chair beside him and started washing. Sky sighed and got out his school books and read a short story for French.

  Sandro was delighted with his new master. Everyone knew about the Eel; he was becoming a figure to be reckoned with in Giglia. He now had dozens of spies working for him and bringing information back to the di Chimici palace from all over the city and beyond. It was just the kind of work Sandro enjoyed, following people and hanging about eavesdropping on their private conversations. He would have been happy to do it for nothing.

  Sandro was small and quick-witted and completely inconspicuous, one of those many young boys, none too clean and a bit ragged, who hung about the busy places of the city, hoping for a few cents in return for running errands. But actually he had silver in his pockets, expenses paid to him by the Eel, because he might need to buy a drink for an informant or offer a small bribe for information.

  Now Sandro was tailing one of the Nucci clan and it couldn’t have been easier. Camillo Nucci was so obviously on his way to an assignation that Sandro had to stifle a chuckle; the young bravo in the red cap kept looking over his shoulder as he walked past the di Chimici’s grand new building of Guild offices off the main piazza and across the stone structure that was still called the Ponte Nuovo, even though it had been built two hundred years before.

  A lesser spy might have lost the Nucci on the bridge, with its crush of people, its butchers’ shops and fishmongers and chandlers. But not Sandro. He had guessed where his quarry was headed, anyway – the half-built palazzo on the other side of the river. The Nucci family, the only one anywhere near close enough in wealth to rival the di Chimici, had started building their grand palazzo five years before and it was still not finished.

  But, if it ever was, it would be much bigger than the Ducal palazzo on this side of the river, and that bothered Sandro; he was a di Chimici man through and through. It stood to reason that his masters must have the best, the biggest and the grandest of everything. Take the coming weddings; weren’t the young princes and their cousins to be married in the great cathedral by the Pope himself, their uncle Ferdinando, who was coming specially from Rem
ora to conduct the most lavish ceremony the city had ever seen?

  Camillo Nucci had reached the walls of his father’s palazzo-to-be and was talking to his father and brothers. Sandro saw to his surprise that the second storey was nearly complete; it wouldn’t be long before the Nucci palace was finished after all. But why was young Camillo making such a mystery of his evening stroll, since he was joined only by other members of his family? Nothing remarkable about that. But Sandro followed them into a nearby tavern anyway.

  And was rewarded by seeing them joined by a couple of very disreputable-looking men. He couldn’t get near enough to hear their talk, unfortunately, but he memorised every detail of their appearance to tell the Eel. His master was sure to be interested.

  ‘Do you think this was left for you?’ Sky asked his mother when he had unpacked the shopping for her.

  Rosalind was looking tired again now and had flopped down on the sofa, kicking her shoes off as soon as she had got in. She looked at the little bottle in his hand.

  ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty though, isn’t it?’

  ‘But empty,’ said Sky, still puzzled. ‘Shall I put it with your other bottles?’

  ‘No, it would outclass all my plastic refillables,’ said Rosalind. ‘Just put it on the mantelpiece – unless you want it?’

  Sky hesitated. It seemed a girly thing to want a blue perfume bottle in his room, but the little phial seemed to speak to him in some way he didn’t understand.

  ‘OK,’ he said, putting it temporarily on the living-room mantelpiece. ‘What shall I cook tonight?’

  ‘How about spag bol?’ suggested his mother. ‘That’s nice and easy and we can eat it on our laps. It’s ER tonight.’

  Sky grinned. His mother loved hospital dramas but always closed her eyes during the gory scenes and operations. You would have thought she’d have had enough of doctors and nurses, but she lapped it all up.

  He went away to chop onions and peppers. Later, after they had eaten and Rosalind had seen even less of ER than usual, because it had involved a multiple road traffic accident, Sky carried her to bed. She was very light, he realised, and she had fallen asleep before he had time to help her into her nightdress or to clean her teeth.

  But Sky didn’t have the heart to wake her; he left her on the bed and went to do the rest of his homework. Then he washed up, put out the wheelie bin, folded the dry washing for ironing the next day, changed the cat litter, hung his damp jeans in the airing cupboard, locked up and eventually got into bed at half past eleven.

  He was exhausted. How long can I carry on like this? he wondered. True, his mother had been much better that day but he knew from experience that she would be even more wiped out than usual the next day. He started to calculate the ratio of good to bad days she had had recently. Time, the doctor had said, but how long was enough time to make her well again?

  If he looked ahead to the next few years, Sky could see nothing but difficulties. His mother wanted passionately for him to go to university and have the chances she had thrown away for herself, and he was just as keen. But how could he leave her, knowing that some days she wouldn’t eat or be able to shower or even feed the cat? He envied other boys his age who could leave home in a year or two and go to Kathmandu if they wanted without worrying about their mothers. He’d probably have to settle for a college in London and living at home.

  Remedy climbed on to Sky’s chest to purr happily. He ruffled the cat’s ears. ‘Easy being you, isn’t it?’ he said. Then he remembered the bottle. Despite Remedy’s protests, he got up again and fetched it from the living room. He lay in the dark, sniffing the wonderful scent that came from it and feeling strangely comforted. The cat had stalked off in protest; these were not the kind of smells he liked and there were far too many of them in the flat as it was – give him kipper any day.

  I wonder where it can have come from? was Sky’s last thought before drifting off into a deep sleep, the bottle in his hand.

  When Sky woke, he was not in his bedroom but in somewhere that looked like a monk’s cell. There was a cross on the whitewashed wall and a wooden prayer desk and he was lying on a sort of hard cot. The bottle was still in Sky’s hand and the room was filled with the wonderful smell of flowers, but he knew it wasn’t coming from the bottle.

  He got up and cautiously opened the door. He found himself in a dark, wood-panelled room like a laboratory, filled with glass vessels like those used in chemistry lessons. But it didn’t smell like a lab; it smelled like his mother’s collection of essences, only much stronger. Light was coming from a door at the side of the room and Sky could see into an enclosed garden. People in robes were digging in the beds and tending plants. What a peculiar dream, he thought. There was a lovely atmosphere of calm and freedom from pressure.

  He stepped out into the sunshine, blinking, still holding the bottle, and a black man, robed like the others, took him by the arm and whispered, ‘God be praised, it has found you!’

  This is where I wake up, thought Sky, but he didn’t.

  Instead the man pushed him back into the laboratory and hurried into his cell, bending over a wooden chest.

  ‘Put this on,’ he said to Sky. ‘You must look like the other novices. Then you can tell me who you are.’

  Chapter 2

  The Hounds of God

  Sky felt as if he were sleepwalking, as he let the monk, or whoever he was, throw a coarse white robe over his head and then a black cloak with a hood. Underneath he was wearing the T-shirt and shorts he had gone to bed in, an odd detail for a dream to include, he thought.

  ‘That’s better,’ said the monk. ‘Now you can walk with me round the cloisters and we can talk without anyone thinking it unusual. They’ll just take you for a new novice.’

  Sky said nothing, but followed his companion back out into the sunshine. They were in the enclosed garden he had seen from the open door. It was a square shape, surrounded by a sort of covered walk, like the ones you get in cathedrals and abbeys in England.

  ‘I am Brother Sulien,’ said the monk. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Sky.’ He hesitated. ‘Sky Meadows.’

  It had always been an issue for him, his hippy-dippy name, as he thought of it. And it was even worse combined with his mother’s surname; it made him sound like a kind of air freshener or fabric softener.

  ‘Sky? That isn’t a name we use here,’ said Sulien, after considering it. ‘The closest would be Celestino. You can be Celestino Pascoli.’

  Can I really? thought Sky. What sort of game are we playing? But still he said nothing.

  ‘You have the talisman?’ asked Sulien, and Sky realised he was still holding the little glass bottle. He opened his fist. A strange feeling was beginning to creep over him that this was not exactly a dream, after all.

  ‘Who are you?’ Sky asked finally. ‘I don’t just mean your name.’

  The monk nodded. ‘I know what you mean. I am a Stravagante – we both are.’

  ‘You and me?’ Sky asked disbelievingly. He couldn’t see how he and this mad monk, as he was beginning to think of him, could both be anything the same at all, except human beings and black.

  ‘Yes, we are both part of a Brotherhood of scientists in Talia.’ The friar stepped out into the garden, gesturing Sky to follow. ‘Look behind you.’

  Sky turned and saw nothing.

  ‘What?’ he asked, confused.

  Sulien gestured to the ground and Sky saw with a shock that, although the friar’s shadow stretched out behind him, black as his robe, at Sky’s feet there was nothing.

  ‘The talisman has brought you here from your world, because there is something you can help us with,’ continued Sulien.

  ‘What, exactly?’ asked Sky.

  ‘Exactly what, we don’t know,’ said Sulien. ‘But it will be dangerous.’

  *

  The night before, Sandro had stayed with his quarry until he was sure there was nothing more to be gained, then strolled back to his side of the r
iver. A short walk through the great Piazza Ducale, where the government buildings were, brought him to the left flank of the cathedral. He felt more comfortable when he could see Santa Maria del Giglio; her bulk was reassuring and the little streets and piazzas snuggled up to her like kittens seeking the warmth of a mother cat.

  Sandro felt himself to be one of those kittens; he was an orphan, who had grown up in the orphanage that stood in the lee of the cathedral. Clever as he was, and resourceful too, Sandro had never learned his letters or expected to enter any profession, so he had been delighted to be recruited by the Eel.

  Now he could afford to throw a few small coins to the ragamuffins who played in the street outside the orphanage even at this late hour. He had been one of them not so long ago and it made his heart swell to think how far he had come.

  He stopped in the little square where people played bowls; he had a ghoulish interest in it because of the horrible murder that had happened there a generation ago. One of the di Chimici had stabbed one of the Nucci to death; that was all the boy knew, but it fascinated him. He imagined the blood staining the paving-stones and the cries of ‘Help!’ as the young nobleman bled to death under the flickering torches of the piazza. Santa Maria had not been able to protect him. Sandro shuddered enjoyably.

  He walked on past shops and taverns selling all kinds of delicious-smelling food and drink, feeling secure in the knowledge that he would get supper. He cut up the Via Larga, the broad street leading away from the cathedral towards the di Chimici palace. The Eel didn’t live there, of course; Duke Niccolò was too canny for that. But he wasn’t far away, either. He lodged close enough to the Duke to be with him in minutes if sent for.

  *

  ‘Why don’t I have a shadow if we are both Strav . . . what you said?’ asked Sky. ‘You seem to have one.’