by Kate Quinn
“Careful, little lion man,” Cesare sang out, and dived between me and the bull, his blade carving a furrow along its shoulder. I rolled to my feet, flicking another knife into my hand, and we had no breath left for words after that. The bull spun between us, maddened and roaring, blood dappling its brown flanks, and we spun with it as the crowd screamed. I dodged the horns as Cesare attacked the haunches; then Cesare flung himself away from the hooves as I threw another knife into the massive throat, and we pivoted that bull between us like we’d been doing it all our lives. The beast bellowed, tiring and stumbling, and all I felt was a savage release. Finish it, I thought, but finish what? Finish who?
Finish it.
My biggest blade winged sweetly through the air, burying itself hilt-deep through the bull’s heart. A dying beat of that heart later, Cesare’s sword struck the bull’s head half off in a single stroke.
The beast fell between us with a crash that sent dust billowing up like the roars of the crowd. Laughter mixed with those roars—laughter for me, of course. In the ancient days when Rome was an empire, dwarves had fought and died in the great arena of the Colosseum, tossed to lions or pitted against teams of cripples and half-wits. Palate-cleansers between the big gladiatorial fights. I wondered if those dwarves had heard these same hoots of laughter as they died.
The shouting faded in my ears to soundlessness, the laughter to an empty ringing. I stood locked eye to eye with a pope’s son, both of us panting hard, with a dead bull and a river of blood between us. “My kill,” I said.
“Mine,” he said. Both our chests heaved like a forge’s bellows. “I took the head.”
“After I stopped the heart. My kill.”
“Our kill,” he allowed, and bent to wipe his blade clean along the bull’s hide. My knives were buried in that same hide, thrown one at a time, and I dropped to my knees to yank them free.
“Will I get my answer?” I said. With the heady rush of excitement fading I felt the sweat soaking my shirt and cooling rapidly in the winter breezes; a sting in my elbow where I had knocked it rolling sideways; the ache in my thighs that protested all the sprinting and tumbling. Deeper, more distant pains in my chest and hip, more long-healed wounds from the French. “Did you kill those women?”
“I know the ones you speak of,” he said. “And I did not kill them.”
Strange that I believed him, when a moment ago I had been so ready to think him guilty—but I did believe him. He could kill without blinking, that I was sure of—but lie about it? Not to a lowly dwarf, anyway. He would have flung it in my face just to see the look in my eyes.
“Pity,” I said, sliding the last of my little blades home into its boot sheath and rising. “I thought myself so clever for tracking you.” Though I should have known, really—how could he have killed that one girl, when he had been at odds with his father in the Vatican over Giulia Farnese being held for ransom? Cesare Borgia was merely a pope’s bastard, after all, not the Devil himself. No matter what he said. As for the dagger, it could easily have been stolen and used against him, to attach foul rumors to the Borgia name.
Foolish dwarf.
“Would you have killed me for it?” Cesare sounded curious, looking down at me, ignoring his sister’s cheering from the dais and Sancha’s imperious calling of his name. “If I’d done it?”
I hesitated. For Anna I’d killed the other two men who had been present at her death—but Anna was four years in her grave, and I could scarcely remember her face. It had been the chase that spurred me since then, not revenge. Boredom, not outrage. Perhaps that was ignoble, but a dwarf cannot afford nobility. “Probably not,” I said at last. “I am fond of living, after all, and the Pope would not look lightly on me for killing his son.”
“No. The Holy Father and I may not always see eye to eye—he will not give me his army to lead, and he will strike me across the face for daring to say that my brother is an incompetent ass.” Cesare slid his sword back into its scabbard. “But as much as my father and I quarrel, he would never allow anyone to harm me. Even if I had killed and raped your whores.”
I started back toward the dais. “How fortunate you didn’t, then.”
Cesare smiled faintly, leaning down to whisper in my ear just before vaulting up into the arms of his sister and sister-in-law. Just a handful of words, but they froze me in my tracks.
“Leonello!” My mistress’s pale face leaned down from the height of the dais. “Guards, lift him up, it’s too tall—Leonello, what were you thinking! It’s bad enough watching the poor bulls die; you think I want to see you die, too?”
“Apologies, Madonna Giulia,” I said woodenly, allowing the guards to lift me up by the arms. They were laughing and ruffling my hair in the way I hated, telling me how funny I looked waddling after a bull, but I barely heard them. My ears buzzed; my legs had turned wobbly as Carmelina’s savory jellies, and my chest had gone cold as one of her Spanish ices.
Two short sentences in Cesare Borgia’s devil whisper.
I did not kill your whores, he had whispered. But I know who did.
CHAPTER FOUR
Into the endless screaming fall of dark
She tumbles, lovely daughter of the earth,
Her golden light extinguished in its birth.
A pomegranate stains her: prey and mark.
—AVERNUS, FROM SONNET IX: AURORA AS PERSEPHONE
Giulia
Illustrious people of great fame and renowned reputation rarely seem to live up to it in the flesh, do they? Well, my Pope being the exception—he was the only man I knew whose fleshly presence dwarfed his rank. But for the most part, people of renown were something of a disappointment when one actually met them. As Maestro Botticelli bowed to kiss my Pope’s ring in the great sala, I couldn’t help but think that he looked nothing like a titan of art whose brush had been kissed by God. He looked like a worn-out man of fifty with pouches under his eyes and gray heavily streaking his hair, and I could hardly understand his rough Florentine dialect as he mumbled his greetings.
“We are honored to receive you,” Rodrigo said, expansive. In truth, I think Maestro Botticelli could have done without the honor—he was eyeing Rodrigo as though he’d been put into a cage with a wolf. I’d scolded my Pope when he told me Maestro Botticelli was passing through Rome on a recent journey and had been commanded to present himself at the Vatican to discuss the possibility of painting me. “Rodrigo, really. He’s a follower of Fra Savonarola and all his rantings about the fleshly evils of the world. If he’s renounced the painting of sinful subjects, do you really think he wants to paint the Pope’s concubine?”
“Bah, he’ll be delighted,” Rodrigo returned. And then added a more ominous “If he knows what’s good for him.”
My Pope was all charm now, sitting through the last of his petitioners as the morning passed, then finally rising with a gesture of dismissal and ushering the artist to follow him out of the informal sala. “I fear I’ve a few more appointments this afternoon, Maestro Botticelli—God’s work is never done! Do accompany me, and we can talk further about this portrait of Madonna Giulia . . .” The rest of us trailed after my Pope: myself holding the gilt leather leash of my little pet goat, Leonello trotting at both our heels, an entourage of cardinals and bishops and their hangers-on gathering like a tail. I was the only woman, but I was used to that within the halls of the Vatican.
“Perhaps you’d like to see the frescoes in Our private apartments, Maestro Botticelli?” Rodrigo was saying warmly. “Maestro Pinturicchio has done splendid work, though he does have one figure left to paint in the Resurrection—”
“Is that figure—Madonna Giulia? In a Resurrection?” Maestro Botticelli looked as though he were about to choke on the sacrilege of it all.
“No.” I smiled, coming up beside his other elbow. “It’s the Holy Father who is to sit for Pinturicchio this afternoon. He’s been putting it off for months. All my sitting is done, thank the Holy Virgin.”
A spark of intere
st lit Botticelli’s sunken eyes. “In my experience, beautiful women enjoy being immortalized in paint.”
His gallantry was rusty, but genuine. “Well, I don’t,” I confessed, tugging my little pet goat away before he could start nibbling the painter’s sleeve. “It’s the dullest thing imaginable. And you are entirely to blame, Maestro Botticelli!”
“Me?”
“Your Birth of Venus, rather.” I tucked his hand through my elbow, guiding him after my Pope, who had broken ahead of his meandering entourage and was making for his private apartments with brisk strides. “I was only twelve when you completed the painting, but everyone was talking of it. Venus on her seashell, and who was she smiling at, and was it true the model was Marco Vespucci’s wife Simonetta. After that there wasn’t a girl alive who didn’t dream of being immortalized for the ages in paint.”
Immortalized by some famous painter who would capture your face for the ages as Venus or the Virgin, and of course be in love with you as well, and the romance of it all was just entrancing, especially if you were twelve. The reality of sitting for a portrait was quite different: hours of shivering in a cold studio, getting a crick in your neck from holding your head at some exquisitely uncomfortable angle, and being chided by the painter, who was generally far too busy trying to match your skin tone in paint to even think about falling in love with you. I told Maestro Botticelli so, and he laughed.
“Madonna Simonetta complained of my cold studio too,” he agreed, a faint spark of laughter in his eye, and I liked him. I wondered if he regretted the decision not to paint anything more sinful than an Annunciation—maybe it had been the right decision for his conscience, but certainly not his prosperity. His hose and cloak were far too threadbare for this winter cold, and he looked haggard as though he hadn’t had enough meals.
Well, whether he painted me or not, I’d see he went back to Florence with a full purse. And a new set of clothes!
Poor Pinturicchio looked about to faint as he saw the stooped figure that followed the Holy Father into the Sala dei Misteri. “Maestro—” he stammered, and there was a great deal of bowing and complimenting and demurring over the finished frescoes, and Pinturicchio turned quite white when it became clear he was to work in front of his idol. “Surely His Holiness would rather sit for the Resurrection another day . . .”
Rodrigo looked tempted, but I scolded and chivvied him into his pose in the splendid jeweled cope that would show to such nice effect in the finished Resurrection, and he resigned himself. The cardinals and archbishops settled themselves about the walls, whispering behind ringed hands or going through documents as they waited, and the remaining pages, servants, and petty dignitaries squashed in as best they could around the clutter of paint and plaster, buckets and drapes and artist’s paraphernalia. Leonello settled on a stool at my feet, pulling out a book and ignoring us all utterly. He seemed to have suffered no ill effects from his hair-raising stint in the bullring—really, I could have clouted him for being so rash! “I shan’t kiss you next time you decide you feel like throwing your life away,” I’d scolded him. “I’ll knock you down and sit on you instead, until the madness passes!”
“Some things are worth risking one’s life for.” He looked sober and troubled at that, but he still went off whistling the way men always do when they feel they’ve proved some nebulous moral point with a totally unnecessary act of bravery.
“If Your Holiness will perhaps lift the chin?” Pinturicchio glanced at Maestro Botticelli, glanced at the Pope, and cleared his throat. “Just a touch—”
“We cannot read with Our chin in the air!” I stifled a smile at the irritation already rising in my Pope’s face. If there was anything Rodrigo hated, it was sitting idle—he’d looked about for Maestro Botticelli, ready to discuss my portrait, but the papal secretaries had come forward first with baskets of sealed letters and official missives, pleading for the papal attention. “How long will this take?”
“The merest, um—I will do a sketch only; I will transfer the Holy Father’s image to the wall in paint at a later time. Perhaps an hour—”
“You have half that,” my Pope said, and assumed the pose with his hands pressed together in prayer. He was to be shown kneeling at the tomb of Christ during the Resurrection, though hopefully Pinturicchio could paint that irritated expression into something a touch more exalted. Painted as he looked right now, my Pope just seemed irked that Christ was taking so long to climb out of the tomb.
“Perhaps I can read Your Holiness’s correspondence out loud?” I cajoled. “Save your eyes and Maestro Pinturicchio’s artistic sensibilities—” I sank onto a velvet stool at Rodrigo’s side and began reading the latest missive from Florence, as Pinturicchio sketched in quick motions—Drop the eyes, Your Holiness, and keep the hands pressed together. A buzz of conversation rose about the sala, and Maestro Botticelli wandered into the Sala dei Santi to examine Lucrezia’s painted figure as Santa Caterina. I’d expected him to show the impatience of genius, look irked that he was being forced to wait on the Pope’s pleasure, but now I rather thought he was hoping the whole idea of painting me would just go away if Rodrigo was sufficiently distracted by official business.
“Goodness, is Fra Savonarola quite serious?” I wrinkled my nose as I finished reading the friar’s ranting letter out loud. “Does he really think dice and lip rouge and wine are signs that the world is ending?” I could think of a dozen other omens that couldn’t be called favorable—putting Juan Borgia at the head of an army certainly seemed like a recipe for all sorts of cosmic disaster, and last winter there had been reports of a strange dead creature with a woman’s face and an elephant’s trunk washing up on the banks of the Tiber, and hadn’t that had everyone wondering if the end was nigh. But lip rouge?
“Apparently Savonarola is going to scourge Florence of all frivolity and make it into a Holy City to point the way for the rest of the world.” Rodrigo’s voice was very dry. “Cards are to be forbidden within the city’s walls, not to mention dicing and drinking and gambling of all sorts. Women are to give up their fine clothes, for fear of bringing heavenly wrath down upon their godly menfolk. And paintings depicting the naked female form are not to be allowed either.”
“Such paintings are only forbidden in homes where there are unmarried girls.” Maestro Botticelli spoke up unexpectedly in his rough Florentine voice, wandering back into the Sala dei Misteri in time to hear our words. “Fra Savonarola would not have the virgin minds of Florence’s womenfolk corrupted.”
“But when you count servant girls too, almost every home in Florence has unmarried girls,” I pointed out.
“Unmarried, but perhaps not virgin,” Rodrigo chuckled. “How does Fra Savonarola plan to tell the difference? Lift their skirts?”
“He is a holy prophet.” Maestro Botticelli’s lined face was set. “He gives us visions sent direct from God.”
“So do you, with your paintings,” I said, conciliatory. “I would be sad to see no more Venuses come from that brush, Maestro Botticelli.”
“Only clothed Venuses. By Fra Savonarola’s decree, to keep us all from eternal damnation.”
Really, priests. War and famine all around them; poverty and foreign armies and that dreadful disease with pustules that the French had brought with them, and somehow damnation was at hand because of naked women. Not even real naked women—naked women in paint! I ask you.
But I heard a certain subdued rustle of agreement among a few of the watching cardinals, those more straitlaced men inclined to be shocked by my Pope and the earthier of his attitudes. Perhaps Rodrigo heard that rustle too, because his heavy brows came together above his nose. “There is nothing in the beauty of the female form to offend Our eyes,” he said in a tone that brooked no discussion. “Did God not create that form with love and with reverence, just as He created the form of man?”
The straitlaced rustle died, and Maestro Botticelli retreated with a flush on his cheeks, perhaps realizing he was arguing with the Holy Fath
er Himself. Rodrigo shrugged irritated shoulders at the whole business, and dictated a rapid response to one of his secretaries. I put the letter from Savonarola aside and read a missive from a Medici in Florence next; then another letter from Lord Sforza requesting money to pay his soldiers—“What is the man, a human drain on Our treasury?” The prioress of a local convent wrote her thanks for a recent benefice, and then there was the report of a Franciscan friar who had shown signs of the stigmata—“Bah, his order needs pilgrims to refill the coffers. That’s one way to attract them!”
My Pope kept a team of secretaries on the trot, periodically breaking his pose to sign something, and as one letter followed another my voice grew scratchy. I scanned the next missive, and shook my head. “Another complaint about Sancha, I’m afraid. This time it’s the envoy from Mantua—‘By her gestures and aspect, it seems the sheep will put herself easily at the disposal of the wolf.’” I wondered if the wolf was supposed to be Cesare or Juan. I’d seen the Tart of Aragon coming out of both bedchambers on a fairly regular basis before Juan left with his army. I wished I could show her to Fra Savonarola, as proof positive that female debauchery would not bring about the world’s end. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could truly be summoned by lecherous women, then Sancha’s parade of lovers would have had all Rome hearing hoofbeats months ago.
“Take a sworn declaration,” Rodrigo said carelessly to one of his secretaries. “Find someone useful in her household who can testify all things are as they should be. Preferably someone elderly and male. ‘In the household of the Princess of Squillace, the government of the ladies is of such good order’ and so on. Next.”