‘Oh …’ said Treversari, plainly discomfited.
‘I am so happy that you are, at last, happy,’ smiled Julius. ‘Now, with your kind indulgence, may we ring the bell and get him in here – and the other monster too.’
On hearing the summons, Admiral Slovo entered the Council-chamber from its anteroom. Accompanying him was a nun, a woman so ancient that if he’d had a bare shred of chivalric feeling and if propriety had allowed, he would have felt obliged to assist her.
‘Your Holiness, your eminences,’ he said, bowing economically.
‘Slovo,’ said Julius, just as concisely, ‘we’ve another of those damn things (begging your pardon, Sister) in the best-not-discussed areas of life you’ve come to specialize in. Go and deal with it, will you.’
‘Certainly, Your Holiness,’ replied Slovo straightaway so that the Pontiff might not lose face by unjustified faith in his servants. ‘Might this be something of sufficient moment to be beyond those duties covered by my salaried remuneration? Will I be obliged to recruit assistance?’
Julius sympathized with such anxieties, for he too had eaten the bread of exile in his time and so knew the true joy that financial security supplies.
‘Yes to both,’ he said tersely. ‘Now remind me, what is it you usually require for overtime?’
‘One: freehold land in Capri,’ Slovo counted off on his black-gloved hand. ‘Two: a pardon-in-advance for “sins of temperament” …’
‘Oh yes,’ said the Pope, his bearded lip curling. ‘I remember about you now – the Tuscan Vice—’
‘Three: a choice item from the Vatican Library. Grant any one of these; and I will be pleased.’
‘In view of your task,’ said Julius, giving way to rare generosity solely in the hope of disconcerting Slovo’s impassive mask, ‘you may have all three.’
As experiments went it was an expensive failure and he henceforth resolved to take a leaf out of the Admiral’s own book, impulse-wise.
‘As to assistance,’ he continued, ‘that is being arranged. It is a mere matter of the Kings of France and Aragon, the Holy Roman Emperor, the rulers of Mantua and Ferrara; plus their respective armies, of course. They will render what little aid they can. I’ll even throw in my own forces and bind all in a formal treaty, how’s that? In fact, my people are arranging the details in some Franco-Flemish rat-hole even as we speak.12 That should be just about sufficient, don’t you think?’
‘I’m not sure,’ answered Admiral Slovo coolly. ‘It all depends on what I have to deal with. Besides, the great men you have named are notoriously duplicitous, nationalistic and self-interested. I am inclined to doubt they would pay the slightest heed to what a mere Roman Admiral might say.’
‘That all depends on what he might say,’ countered Pope Julius significantly. ‘Take it away, Sister …’
The aged nun was ready and waiting. ‘I have had a dream …’ She quavered.
‘She has had a dream,’ said Admiral Slovo.
‘So what?’ sneered the youthful Louis XII of France. ‘I have them all the time.’
‘Me too,’ agreed Maximilian I, ‘King of the Romans’, feeling free to speak now that someone else had ventured the first opinion. ‘Especially after I’ve hit the old cucumber brandy. The big difference, however, is that I don’t set two-thirds of Europe to war afterwards.’
‘But since we are all here,’ said Alfonsi d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, rather too hastily for his own good, ‘perhaps we should hear the story out.’
Ferdinand II of Aragon, a man much admired in that room for his duplicity (and deplored by history for the same reason), successfully waved everyone to silence. All being rulers in their own lands, they duly resented him for it ever after. ‘So,’ he said in a neutral tone, ‘this League is not, after all, a crusade against the Turks …’
‘No,’ confirmed Slovo. ‘That was to fool the Venetians.’
‘And neither is it a covert arrangement for countering a century of Venetian expansion,’ hazarded Louis XII.
‘No,’ agreed the Admiral. ‘That was to fool you lot.’
‘Therefore,’ summed up Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, dangerously calm, ‘it now becomes clear that we have invaded Italy, plunging Europe into war, risking all, on the say-so of a sleepless nun …’
‘Not just any old nun,’ added Slovo suddenly. ‘This is the famous Black Lady of the Palatine; the one who predicted the fall of Otranto.’
‘That was twenty-eight years ago!’ barked Ferdinand. ‘And the walls were notoriously ruinous. I could have taken the place with a troupe of dancing bears!’
‘Who, moreover, foretold the death of Pope Alexander VI,’ Slovo gamely continued.
The assembled monarchs burst into laughter. The noise issued incongruously from their care-worn faces.
‘He was seventy-three!’ roared Alfonso.
‘And a behemoth of brandy consumption,’ added King Louis.
‘And related to Cesare Borgia!’
This last contribution by Gonzago brought the amusement to a sudden close. The Pope’s famous son, the black-clad monster of the Romagna, might well be down but wasn’t yet out.13 Even though exiled from Italy and deprived of all power, he retained the ability to frighten.
Slovo smiled benignly, still master of the situation. ‘A degree of scepticism was in fact anticipated,’ he said. ‘Accordingly, a number of further, highly specific dreams were commissioned from said “Black Lady”. You may be interested to hear that the project was attended with astonishing success.’
The rulers looked on Slovo with suspicion.
‘Is that so,’ commented Louis in a sour voice.
‘Yes indeed, Your Majesty. His Holiness went so far as to say that such favour must betoken Divine blessing on our little enterprise. Here, your Lordships, see what you think.’
As he spoke, Admiral Slovo distributed wax-sealed scrolls, each personally addressed to the great men present. They eyed them gingerly, like unfired cannon.
Ferdinand of Aragon, in keeping with his intrepid spirit, was the first to break the spell, ripping the roll open and scanning the parchment within. Despite practice since youth in keeping his feelings well hid, he was unable to prevent a widening of the eyes and a retreat, indeed rout, of blood from the face.
‘How could she know?’ he hissed. ‘All my discretion …’
‘Wasted against an all-seeing eye,’ answered Slovo, trying to sound as non-judgemental as possible. It was not any of his concern how an over-stressed warrior chose to unwind.
Meanwhile, King Louis had opened his own missive – and gasped. ‘It’s not true!’ he wailed.
Admiral Slovo turned his inscrutable eyes upon the youth.
‘Well, OK, it is,’ the King conceded sullenly. ‘How many people know?’
‘The Pope, the Nun and I,’ replied the Admiral. ‘One person with the power to forgive and two others who do not matter.’
‘This is … dangerous information,’ said Maximilian, reading slowly and loosening his collar.
Gonzaga and Alfonso covertly stowed their letters away for future, private reference.
‘Dangerous perhaps,’ agreed Slovo reassuringly, ‘but intended for only the most restricted circulation.’ He gestured expansively in the way Pope Julius had specifically instructed him to. ‘Besides, these predilections of yours, and the equipment and body parts used to satisfy them; they are concerns for yourself – and perhaps your confessor – alone. The same liberal sentiment applies to those of you who have seen fit to murder close family members. His Holiness does not seek to wield nefarious power over you. All that is sought is your faith; faith in what has been dreamed.’
Maximilian coughed uneasily, ‘We have faith,’ he assured Admiral Slovo. ‘The faith of a saint in Christ. We are all ears, aren’t we, gentlemen?’
There was a babble of assent.
Slovo bowed slightly.
‘She has, as I’ve said,’ he continued, ‘had a dream …’
Slovo didn’t feel strongly one way or the other but nodded sagely all the same.
‘I could not live in such a world,’ agreed Alfonso angrily. ‘Where is the honour? Where the glory?’
‘Locked away for ever in some bourgeois safe-box,’ replied Gonzago of Mantua. ‘Kept hidden by little grey men and laughed to scorn!’
The Kings and Princes were all agreed. The Nun’s vision of the Year of Our Lord 1750, as recited by Admiral Slovo, had shocked them to their collective hollow core. Thoughts of an industrial Imperial Venice, awash with metal warships and studded with ack-ack guns, horrified them. It was bad enough that their date of birth obliged them to straddle the Medieval–Renaissance divide. That their posterity should be called on to embrace a future of slavery within Imperial Venice was the trigger to the release of powerful emotions.
‘I’m not having it!’ announced King Louis. ‘Oh no! I shall put a stop to this!’
‘How fortuitous then,’ smarmed Slovo, ‘that His Holiness should have arranged five of Europe’s mightiest armies to be conjoined to execute your will.’
No one ever liked a Pope to be proved right – it had too many disturbing implications – but, for a man who had never been told No, the French monarch took the I told you so well.
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he snapped. ‘Together we’ll show ’em.’
Maximilian, the oldest present, had not been able to adapt to the news and was still in a state of shock. ‘But I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why? Why would they turn the skies dark with their war-craft, why burn a dead hinterland for leagues around their triple-walled Capital?’
‘It’s a new religion,’ said Admiral Slovo, as gravely as he could. ‘Some fresh ethic has arrived in Venice – that being the summation of the Black Nun’s dream and the cause of my Master’s concern. A new revelation breeds the fanatic in those it first visits, leaving them not disposed to be gentle with those of an earlier dispensation.’
The rulers looked from one to another in alarm.
‘Merchants can never rule,’ spluttered Louis incredulously.
‘Must never rule,’ corrected Maximilian.
After five minutes of similar anti-mercantile diatribe, Slovo felt satisfied that the Monarchs were sufficiently inspired by fear to act in the desired way, and he spoke again, ‘You need not destroy Venice,’ he counselled. ‘Europe needs someone to befuddle the Turk with trade and double-talk. What’s required is the removal of its new inspiration, the source of its burgeoning energies.’
‘This new religion?’ queried Maximilian.
‘The same,’ answered Slovo.
‘And how, pray, shall we do that?’ said King Louis superciliously. ‘Stick a sword in it?’
Entirely relaxed amidst these mere mortals, Slovo replied at once, ‘Just leave it to me. All you have to do is clear the way and keep the Venetian army off my back. In some manner yet to be determined, I shall do the rest.’
The Kings and Princes exchanged puzzled glances, not sure whether to be impressed or offended.
Admiral Slovo turned to them with a humour-free smile. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said by way of an explanatory aside. ‘It’s my sort of thing.’
‘Oh, thanks very much!’ said Numa Droz. ‘How can I ever repay you?’
The Swiss’s sarcasm could not be swept aside. Whilst conveniently absent-minded about favours, Droz never forgot anything considered an ill turn. Alone of all his debts, those he always settled in full.
Slovo’s horse picked up the chilly vibrations and had to be quietened before the Admiral could reply. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he protested. ‘Would you have been happy to miss out on a career opportunity like the League of Cambrai?’
Numa Droz was not placated. ‘Maybe not,’ he said, ‘but I was looking forward to a nice normal battle. Now I find it’s your trademark spooky stuff!’
‘May I remind you, Master Droz,’ said Slovo evenly, ‘that as my personal assistant you are the highest-paid mercenary in this army.’
‘And what good is money to me, if I’m in no fit state to use it?’
Admiral Slovo’s face became even more of a mask than usual. ‘My patience is exhausted,’ he said quietly.
Numa Droz then learnt the valuable lesson that wisdom (disguised as fear) could overcome even his own boundless ferocity. ‘If I don’t take this job,’ he said, ‘I’ll be dead, won’t I? Because then you’ll have told me too much about this “new religion” business. And even if I take you out now, I don’t doubt that orders for my death are already conditionally laid.’
Admiral Slovo frowned slightly in a pained of course, who do you think you’re dealing with? gesture.
‘On reflection,’ said Numa Droz brightly, ‘I’m delighted to accept this commission, Admiral, and am obliged for your recommendation.’
‘Good,’ said Slovo, giving the prearranged signal for the concealed handgunners to stand down. ‘So go over and sort out that bodyguard unit King Louis has forced upon us. Oh, and find out who’s Commander-in-Chief and fit us into his plan of battle, will you?’
‘It’s done,’ said Numa Droz, striding away.
Admiral Slovo had long observed that the safest course of action in a general engagement was to get stuck in. Those who remained aloof were asking to be selected as targets or easy pickings against unequal numbers. In due course, he therefore rode forward and charged with the French army, indulging in the usual hacking and stabbing of other mothers’ sons who had in no way offended him.
Numa Droz, who had to watch his back against the French as well as worry about the enemy and the Admiral, was in his element and effortlessly efficient. Amidst the scrum, he saved Slovo’s life countless times and cleared the necessary space for his Master to observe and ponder. The King’s elite troop of Scottish archers performed the same function as an outer circle of expendables.
As luck would have it, it all worked rather well. Self-tuned into a high state of awareness, the Admiral’s mind picked up the air-borne vibes before the coarse and licentious soldiery, before even the well-bred nerve endings of the metal-covered Gallic aristocracy. He bravely embraced what was seeping invisibly through the ether, then painfully managed to claw free from its grasp. How wise, he reflected, was Pope Julius – or the Providence which directed him – to select me for this task. So few other men could have done it.
Despatching a stradiot by a simple parry-feint-blade slide (they didn’t seem to teach that basic move or its counter any more), he looked about for the source of his sensory experience. It was soon located and full comprehension thereby gained. He reined his horse back and sought the ear of Numa Droz.
‘It’s all sorted,’ he said, his natural dignity marred by all the jostling and a flesh wound on the face. ‘I know what’s going on now. Cut me a way back. We’ll need to be quick.’
It soon became clear that Slovo was right about the need for expedition. What he had already felt now began to affect the grosser sensitivities of the Allied army and, in turn, their professional performance. Before long they would cease to fight; soon after they would start to flee.
In the memoirs of his old age (acquired, read and then burnt by a Sicilian Bishop in the eighteenth century), Admiral Slovo’s account of the Battle of Ghiaradadda (14/5/1509) refers to an alien sensation that began as calm but soon mellowed into an indifference disguised as tolerance. It then intensified (a contradiction in itself) into a loss of vivacity and ended, most horribly, in the featureless but enduring grey plains of boredom. If Admiral Slovo had not already been on first-name terms with philosophical misery, he could not have fought off, even temporarily, so terrible a foe.
Slowly, but surely, it was this very foe that was leading to the unravelling of the Allied army. As the last determined man in that army, Admiral Slovo made it his business to take charge of the artillery.
‘Do you see that obelisk I’m pointing at.’
‘Behind the Venetian lines – with all the people round it? The grey thing beside the Officers’ latrines?’ checked the gunner. ‘Yes, I see it.’
‘Desist fire on all else bar that until it is destroyed,’ ordered Slovo. ‘There could be monstrous gold in this for you, you appreciate—’
‘I don’t need bribing,’ said the cold-eyed man. ‘I take a pride in my work. That box is bloody dead: you watch!’
Such myopic stupidity inspired confidence and sure enough, soon after, the guns spoke united and deadly, like the voice of God.
Admiral Slovo turned to address his remaining colleagues. ‘The obelisk to which I referred is presently departing this vale of tears,’ he said. ‘Our troops will then regain their confidence and the Venetians will run away. You will proceed to the obelisk’s remains and convey to me as prisoners those remaining about it.’
And that’s just what happened.
When Numa Droz and the Scots returned with their prisoners, the Swiss looked furtive and guilty.
‘It’s like this,’ he said, avoiding the Admiral’s eyes. ‘We could have been back sooner but I stopped to get some heads.’ He held up a damp-bottomed canvas sack. ‘All those running people – just too tempting. There’ll be a quarter off my invoice for the lapse – I insist.’
It meant nothing one way or the other to Slovo since Pope Julius was picking up the bill. He didn’t even acknowledge the confession, being too busy studying the crop of serviceable captives, yet he stored it up as possible future ammunition against the Swiss.
There were a dozen of them, some a little damaged in transit but basically of merchantable quality, all dressed from head to foot in grey. One was distinguished by the paler grey of his robes, but otherwise this was a brotherhood, united even in defeat, that glared wildly at Admiral Slovo.
‘I think I know you,’ said Slovo in a kindly tone to the one man singled out by his clothes.
‘Murderer!’ spat the grey man in return.
‘And knowing you,’ Slovo continued unperturbed, ‘I suspect I now know all. I apologize for the largely wasted errand, Master Droz, but would you kill these others please? It transpires they are incidental.’
Popes and Phantoms Page 18