City of God (3 page)

“I will stay at the embassy,” Nicholas said.

She sniffed at him, her black brows tightening over her nose. She was the only one of the Borgias not fair and tall. Raising the mirror at arm's length, she watched herself in it, saying, “I shall send Piccolo.” Slowly she began to dance again, her skirts swaying out, and observed her steps in the mirror.

Nicholas bowed again and went out. Before he had gone many steps the pink-satin page reappeared and led him back through the unpainted rooms to the painted ones.

In the sala grande Nicholas withdrew by himself to the wall and propped himself on his walking stick. Before him the other courtiers wandered around the room, pausing to talk to one another. Nicholas fell to musing over what Angela Borgia had asked of him. She would want use of his house for only the most obvious reason, having no real interests beyond herself and her pleasures. Yet for that same reason her own resources were sufficient. There was more to her request than what it seemed.

“Let us go,” Bruni said, beside him.

Nicholas had not noticed him come up. He raised his head, frowning at Bruni's frown.

“What did he say?”

Bruni shrugged his shoulders, made broader by the heavy stuffing inside his coat. The chains he wore around his neck chimed together. “He said he can do nothing in the matter of the Lady of Forli, who is in his son's charge.”

“Did you manage to get him onto the subject of Valentino's invasion of Tuscany?”

“I could not get him off! He never stopped talking—he said we ought to be asking rather for our own safety than for the Lady of Forli, since we have angered him by supporting his enemies in the past. Then he sent me out again.” He looked fretfully around them at the other courtiers.

“What took so long, then?” Nicholas asked.

“I had to wait to talk to him until he had finished his game of cards.”

“Who was he playing with?”

Bruni gave him a sideways glance. “What does that matter? The divine Giulia.” He drew out the name to make the epithet ironical.

Nicholas started toward the door leading out, Bruni at his side, keeping silent. They went out through the antechamber and into the corridor. Most of the people waiting to see the Pope had either gotten in or gone home. Three or four men in half-armor, carrying pikes with ribbons on the hafts, were leaning against the wall, waiting to go on sentry duty when the audience ended. Halfway down the corridor, near a sunny window, several other men were clumped together talking. Nicholas touched Bruni's arm.

“The French.”

Bruni straightened, his face keen. The Frenchmen began moving out of their council, coming down through the shadows toward the Florentines, and Bruni moved to plant himself squarely in their path. Surrounded by his underlings in multicolored clothes, the Cardinal of Rouen saw Bruni, smiled, bowed his head without missing stride, and murmuring a vague greeting in French circled the Florentine to the doorway and went in.

“Our doom is sealed,” Bruni said.

Nicholas got him by the arm and led him away. When they were on the steps going down to the courtyard, Bruni said, “They are all against us now. Did you see him? Not even the common courtesy of an inquiry after my health!”

In fact Rouen had inquired, but in French, which Bruni did not speak. Nicholas said, “Oh, perhaps he was in a hurry.” They reached the double doors that led onto the courtyard and went out into the gusty, chilly day. Nicholas glanced up at the sky, where now gray clouds were shutting out the sunshine, and wondered if there would be rain.

“What do you think?” Bruni said.

“My opinion?” Nicholas barely glanced at him. “Such a creature as I has no opinions. I am fit only to run errands and risk my life.”

Bruni fluffed up his beard, smiling. “How tender you are today, Nicholas. Tell me your opinion.”

“If you think it would be worthy of your honor's hearing.”

“Of course I honor your opinions, my dear fellow. But you must admit, to lose fifty crowns would excite anyone to a careless word. It was not your fault, I am aware of that. Now tell me.”

“Pope Alexander would hardly suggest that you play cards with him if he intended your downfall.”

“Bah. You have a trivial mind.”

“Besides, they have just asked a favor of me.”

“What favor?”

“I do not know yet.”

“Nicholas, you are angering me. What favor?”

“The Pope's niece asked for the loan of my house.”

“That!” Bruni flung his arm out, discarding the whole matter. “That strumpet? You pin so much on the whim of a whore?”

The day was definitely turning cold. They walked down toward the river, with the high sloping wall of the Vatican on Nicholas's right. For a dozen strides the wall sheltered them from the cutting edge of the wind, but as they turned to follow the street the breeze took them in the face. Nicholas hunched his shoulders. Ahead, the street divided, with one fork running under an archway toward the Ponte Elio and the other turning back up the slope toward San Pietro. In an open-air taverna at the crossroads, foreigners in foreign clothes leaned over a table, arguing in a foreign tongue. Two Franciscans walked by Nicholas, going up toward the gate into the Vatican.

“I do not believe that she intends to use my house herself,” Nicholas said.

“I think you are a fool. Besides, you saw how the French cut us dead.”

“Florence is an old ally of France—if they meant to betray us they would smother us with their attentions.”

Bruni made another swooping gesture with his arms. “I cannot fathom your reasoning. How can you construct such palaces of inconsequence?”

“What else did His Holiness say?”

“I have told you everything.”

“Will he permit us to talk with the Lady of Forli, at least? Give her some comfort?” The dungeons of Sant' Angelo were miniatures of Hell. Perhaps they could induce the woman to yield something of value in return for her freedom, although she had already lost nearly everything she had.

“I tell you, he will not even consider talking about her. This time we have been given an impossible task, Nicholas. Impossible.”

They walked under the archway. Ahead of them, the narrow street was packed with monks: another Lenten procession. Until they reached the bridge there was no chance to pass by, and Bruni fumed at having to shorten his stride.

“I do not understand him,” Bruni said.

“Who, Excellency?”

“The Pope. He is always the same! Whatever happens, he laughs, he makes jokes, he plays cards, he chases women—he has no sense of the gravity of the world.”

They had reached the bridge at last. Nicholas made for the railing, where they could edge past the monks, and stepped short to let Bruni precede him. He smiled at Bruni's back, relishing Bruni's comment on the Borgia Pope.

“Mercury is retrograde,” Bruni said over his shoulder. “Mars is in Leo. There is nothing to be done when the stars themselves are our enemies.”

“The stars in their courses fight against Florence.”

“Indeed.”

Nicholas had intended a joke. They were approaching the far bank, crowded with shops and churches. Garbage littered the shore under the bridge, and a line of brown foam marked the edge of the water. The ferry had just passed by on its way to Trastevere and the last little ripples of its wake were breaking on the rivershore.

“You mock the stars,” Bruni said. “I tell you, Nicholas—that is folly.”

“I see no reason why the movements of a few lights should determine the course of my life.”

“Then you do not understand nature.” Leaving the bridge, Bruni slowed to let his secretary come even with him and crowded close to him, bent on the argument. “I tell you, all nature is of a piece, and what occurs in one part is reflected in some way in every other part—hence the value of learned study of the stars.”

Nicholas rubbed his thumb on the gold handle of his walking stick. Bruni's passion for astrology irritated him beyond reason.

“What shall I tell the Signory?” Bruni said. “That nothing came of the meeting? How tired they must be of hearing that!”

“As you yourself said, they ask the impossible. Nothing will force Valentino to release Caterina Sforza.”

“That! Who cares about that any more—Valentino's at our throats!”

“Not really Valentino himself, is it? Only a few of his men.”

Bruni snarled at him. “Vitelli! And Oliverotto!”

Valentino's two captains cherished feuds of long incidence with Florence. A sudden thought leapt into Nicholas's head. Among Valentino's captains, none was greater or more in favor than Gianpaolo Baglione. He stopped.

“What are you doing now?” Bruni said, in a voice whining with irritation.

Nicholas leaned on his walking stick, his gaze aimed down the river. “I met a man recently—perhaps—” he drew his lower lip between his teeth.

“What is this now?”

“I must go back. There is someone in the Trastevere who might cast some light on our difficulties.”

“When will you come back? My letter to the Signory must go off with the next courier.”

“Write it—I shall translate it into the cipher when I get back.” Nicholas started away through the city toward the Ponte Sisto.

The Trastevere, as the name said, lay across the river from the rest of Rome, below the Leonine City in an elbow bend of the Tiber. It was a quarter of tavernas, tenement buildings, cow pastures, and fortresses gathered on the stony hillsides above the marshes. Cesare Borgia had a palace there, and the quarter was partial to the Pope's son. Nicholas asked at the first piazza for directions to the Fox and Grapes and was sent off down a twisting lane, behind a haywain lumbering along on screeching wheels.

The lane led him across a shoulder of the hill. Beyond the river a bell tolled, and others joined in, announcing the hour of noon. Soon everyone in Rome would be going home for dinner and the afternoon's rest. Nicholas broke into a trot to pass the haywain and went down the far slope.

In the warren of streets on the flat ground he lost his way, turning here and there among the vineyards and crumbling houses. The streets filled rapidly with people hurrying along, women coming from the baker's with loaves under their arms, and men carrying their hoes and rakes. The street led him into a piazza where an old dry fountain stood, shaped like a scallop shell, and there he asked more directions of the idlers.

The taverna was only three streets distant. Nicholas started off at a brisk walk. There was much yet to do today. The official letter to Florence, the secret letter that must accompany it, of which Bruni would know nothing, were still to be written and encoded. The Signory expected Nicholas to report independently, reviewing every act of Bruni's. Of course Bruni acted very seldom, since the stars were always against him. Nicholas realized that he was yearning toward the Fox and Grapes, not for any good reason, but to see Stefano Baglione again.

He slowed. In the rutted street ahead were children playing with a ball. On either side, the buildings rose in honey-colored stone, echoing the children's voices. When he reached the end of the street, he stopped.

A flight of brisk steps led down to the next street. At the bottom a priest was riding by on a donkey. The Fox and Grapes was in the piazza just beyond. Nicholas flexed his fingers around the knob of his walking stick. He had no business here. Even if Stefano were a cousin of Gianpaolo Baglione's, he could know nothing of the mighty condottiere's thoughts and moves. He had said as much; he knew nothing. Nicholas swallowed. He wondered what he was doing here, when he had so much important work to do. He hurried away up the street, back in the direction he had come.

The permanent legation from the Republic of Florence to the Court of the Pope rented office rooms in a palace of the Savelli family, in the Banchi quarter of Rome. From the building's second story Nicholas could see across the tiled roofs of the neighborhood to the Tiber, and beyond the strip of water the long, protected corridor that the Pope was having built from the palace of the Vatican to the Fortress of Sant' Angelo. The round building within its crenelated wall had, like other places in Rome, served a variety of purposes, being once the tomb of an early Emperor. During the great plague of a few centuries before Nicholas's time, the angel Gabriel had appeared on the squat peak of the roof to signal God's mercy: hence the current name.

Nicholas walked along the loggia, his face turned outward toward the city, trying to compose himself after the long meaningless walk. At the far end of the loggia he came on Bruni, in his shirt, stooping to pour water from a can into one of the potted plants that grew in the open archways. A trickle of water ran from the bottom of the next pot on in the line.

“What did you find out?” Bruni said.

“Nothing. Have you written the letter?”

“It is on my desk. You may use your judgment, of course—the phrasing might be inelegant. Perhaps too blunt. I'll expect the final draft before five.” Bruni set down the can of water. “You'll notice that I've indicated our difference of opinion.”

“Thank you,” Nicholas said.

“I will be in my chamber if you require me.”

Nicholas withdrew into the next room, which was the main workroom of the legation. Usually the scribes were busy at work, bent over the long tables where they wrote out the documents and copies that kept the trash gatherers of the quarter well stocked with paper. The scribes were gone now, until the late afternoon when the workday resumed. Stacks of books and papers crowded the back ledges of the tables. The stools were neatly in place and the pens stuck up from their jars like tail feathers. The sweeper had already been here and the floor was shining, still damp in places from his mop. The smell of ink lingered in the air. Nicholas in his tracks, Bruni went out the doorway that opened on the long corridor beyond, where their offices were.