Assassin’s Creed®

by Oliver Bowden

  ‘Are you sure? The news we’ve heard about our old house is very different. Messer Soderini was too late to save it. In any case, we want to stay with you. To help you.’

  The last remaining townspeople were filing into the dark tunnel now, and as they did so, a great hammering and crashing of blows fell on the door that divided the sanctuary from the outside world.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s the Borgia troops. Make haste! Make haste!’

  He ushered his family into the tunnel, bringing up the rear with the few surviving Assassin troops.

  It was a tough haul through the tunnel, and when they were halfway through Ezio heard a crash as the Borgia men broke through the door into the sanctuary. Soon, they would be in the tunnel themselves. He urged his charges forward, shouting at the stragglers to hurry and he heard the stamping of armed soldiers running down the tunnel behind them. As the group rushed past a gateway that ended one section of the passage, Ezio grabbed at a lever on the wall and, as the last of the Assassin fugitives rushed through, he yanked hard, releasing the portcullis gate. When it came crashing down, the first of their pursuers had caught up, only to be pinned to the floor by the heavy ironwork of the gate. His screams of agony filled the passage. Ezio had already run on, safe in the knowledge that he’d bought his people precious time to make good their escape.

  After what seemed like hours, but can only have been minutes, the passage’s incline seemed to change, levelling out and rising slightly. The air seemed less stale now that they were nearly out. Just at that moment they heard a heavy rumbling of sustained cannon fire – the Borgia must have unleashed their firepower on the citadel, a final act of desecration. The passage shook and eddies of dust fell from the ceiling; the sound of cracking stones could be heard, quiet at first but getting ominously louder.

  ‘Dio, ti prego, salvaci – the roof is coming down!’ sobbed one of the townswomen. The others began to scream as the fear of being buried alive flooded through the crowd.

  Suddenly, the roof of the tunnel seemed to open up and a torrent of rubble cascaded down. The fugitives rushed forward, trying to escape from the falling rock, but Claudia reacted too slowly, disappearing in a cloud of dust. Ezio wheeled round in alarm, hearing his sister scream, but unable to see her. ‘Claudia!’ he shouted, panic in his voice.

  ‘Ezio!’ came the reply, and as the dust cleared Claudia picked her way carefully across the debris.

  ‘Thank God you’re all right. Did anything fall on you?’ he asked. ‘No, I’m fine. Is mother all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ answered Maria.

  They dusted themselves down, thanking the gods they had survived this far, and made their way along the final stretch of the escape passage. At last they broke out into the open air. Never had grass, and the earth itself, smelled sweeter.

  The mouth of the tunnel was separated from the countryside by a series of rope bridges swung across ravines. It had been designed like this by Mario as part of a master escape plan. Monteriggioni would survive the Borgia desecration. Once the Borgia had razed it, it would be of no further interest to them, but Ezio would return in time and rebuild it once more as the proud stronghold of the Assassins. Of that Ezio was certain. It would be more than that, he promised himself; it would be a monument to his noble uncle, who had been so pitilessly slain.

  He had had enough of the depredations wrought on his family by pointless villainy.

  Ezio planned to cut the bridges down behind them as they fled, but their progress was slow as they were shepherding elderly and wounded stragglers. At his back he heard the yells and footsteps of their pursuers approaching rapidly. He was scarcely able to carry anyone on his back, but he managed to haul a woman whose leg had given out onto his good shoulder, and staggered forward across the first rope bridge, which swung dangerously under his weight.

  ‘Come on!’ he yelled, encouraging the rearguard who were already engaging with the Borgia soldiers. He waited on the far side until the last of his men had reached safety, but a couple of Borgia had also made it across. Ezio stepped into their path and, using his good arm to wield his sword, engaged the enemy. Even hampered by his wound, Ezio was more than a match for his opponents; his sword parried their attacks in a blur of steel, taking on both blades at once. Stepping to one side, he crouched low under a wild swing from one man, while using his weapon to slice at the knee joint of the man’s leg armour. The soldier toppled, his left leg useless. The other attacker lunged down, thinking Ezio off balance, but Ezio had rolled aside as the blade clanged off the rocks, sending shards of stone skittering into the ravine. The man winced as the blow vibrated along his sword, jarring the bones of his hand and arm. Ezio saw his chance and, heaving himself upright, raised his sword above his foe’s lowered arm and across his face. The man went down, and in a single fluid movement Ezio brought his blade to bear on the ropes supporting the bridge. They severed instantly, slashing violently backwards across the ravine. The bridge concertinaed away from the rocks, and the Borgia men who had begun to cross fell screaming into the abyss below.

  Looking back across the ravine, Ezio saw Cesare. Next to him was Caterina, still in chains, which were held by a vicious-looking Lucrezia. Juan Borgia, the deathly pale Micheletto and the sweaty Frenchman, General Octavien, stood beside him.

  Cesare was waving something at Ezio.

  ‘Yours next!’ he screamed in fury.

  Ezio could see that it was his uncle’s head.

  12

  There was only one place for Ezio to go now. The way forward for Cesare’s troops was cut off and it would take them days to work their way around the ravine and catch up with the Assassin survivors. He directed the refugees to towns outside Borgia control, at least for the moment – Siena, San Gimignano, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia and Florence – where they would find sanctuary. He also tried to impress upon his mother and sister the wisdom of returning to the safety of Florence, whatever had happened to Villa Auditore and despite the sad memories the city held, and the fact that both were seized with a compulsive desire to avenge Mario’s death.

  Ezio himself was bound for Rome, where, he knew, Cesare would go to regroup. It might even be that Cesare in his arrogance would think Ezio beaten, or dead on the road, like carrion. If so, then that could only be to the Assassin’s advantage. Something else was haunting Ezio, though. With Mario dead, the Brotherhood was leaderless. Machiavelli was a powerful force within it, and at present he did not seem to be Ezio’s friend. This was something that had to be resolved.

  Along with the human survivors of the town was a number of livestock, including the great chestnut warhorse Mario had loved so much. Ezio mounted the steed, held for him by the old stable master, who had also managed to escape, though most of his horses had been captured by the Borgia.

  Reining his horse in, he took leave of his mother and sister.

  ‘Must you really go to Rome?’ asked Maria.

  ‘Mother, the only way to win this war is to take it to the enemy.’

  ‘But how can you possibly succeed against the forces of the Borgia?’

  ‘I am not their only enemy. And besides, Machiavelli is already there. I must make my peace with him so that we can work together.’

  ‘Cesare has the Apple,’ Claudia said soberly.

  ‘We must pray that he does not master its powers,’ Ezio replied, though privately he felt great misgivings. Leonardo was in Cesare’s pay now, and Ezio was well aware of of his former friend’s intelligence. If Leonardo taught Cesare the mysteries of the Apple – worse still, if Rodrigo got hold of it again …

  He shook his head to rid himself of these thoughts. Time enough to confront the threat of the Apple when it presented itself.

  ‘You shouldn’t be riding now. Rome is miles to the south. Can’t you at least give it a day or two?’ asked Claudia.

  ‘The Borgia will not rest and the evil spirit of the Templars rides within them,’ rejoined Ezio drily. ‘No one will be able to sleep easi
ly until their power is broken.’

  ‘What if it never is?’

  ‘We must never give up the fight. The minute we do that, we have lost.’

  ‘È vero.’ His sister’s shoulders slumped, but then she straightened them again. ‘The fight must never be given up,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Until death,’ said Ezio.

  ‘Until death.’

  ‘Take care on the road.’

  ‘Take care on the road.’

  Ezio leaned down from the saddle to kiss his mother and sister before wheeling the horse round and onto the road south. His head was pounding with the pain of his wound and the exertions of battle. More than this was the aching of his heart and soul at the loss of Mario and the capture of Caterina. He shuddered at the thought of her in the clutches of the evil Borgia family; he knew all too well what fate might befall her in their hands. He would have to skirt around the Borgia troops, but his heart told him that now his main objective had been achieved – to break the Assassin stronghold – Cesare would head home. There was also the question of Caterina’s safety, though Ezio knew that if ever a person would go down fighting, it was she.

  The most important thing was to lance the boil that was infecting Italy, and lance it soon, before it could infect the whole land.

  Ezio dug his heels hard into the horse’s flanks and galloped south down the dusty road.

  His head was swimming with exhaustion, but he willed himself to keep awake. He vowed he would not rest until he arrived in the broken-down capital of his beleaguered country. He had miles to go before he would be able to sleep.

  13

  How stupid had he been to ride for so long wounded, and so far south, only breaking the ride for the horse’s sake. A post horse would have been more sensible, but the chestnut steed, Agnella, was his last link to Mario.

  Where was he? He remembered a crumbling, dingy suburb and then, rising out of it, a once-majestic yellow stone arch, an erstwhile gateway that pierced a formerly magnificent city’s walls.

  Ezio’s impulse had been to rejoin Machiavelli – to right the wrong he had committed by not making sure that Rodrigo Borgia was dead.

  But by God, he was tired.

  He lay back on the pallet he found himself on. He could smell the dry straw, its odour carrying with it a hint of cow dung.

  Where was he?

  An image of Caterina came suddenly and strongly into his mind. He must free her. They had to be together at last.

  But perhaps he should also free himself from her, though part of his heart told him that this was not what he really wanted. How could he trust her? How could a simple man ever understand the subtle labyrinths of a woman’s mind? Alas, the torture of love didn’t seem to get any less acute with age.

  Was she using him?

  Ezio had always maintained an inner room within his heart, a sanctum sanctorum that was kept locked, even to his most intimate friends, his mother – who knew of it and respected it – his sister, and his late brothers and father.

  Had Caterina broken in? He hadn’t been able to prevent the killing of his father and brothers, and by Christ and the Cross he had done his best to protect Maria and Claudia.

  Caterina could look after herself – she was a book that kept its covers closed – and yet … and yet, how he longed to read it.

  ‘I love you,’ his heart cried out to Caterina in spite of himself. The woman of his dreams at last, this late in life. But his duty, he told himself, came first, and Caterina … Caterina never truly showed her cards. Her enigmatic brown eyes, her smile, the way she could twist him round her long, expert fingers. The closeness. The closeness. But also the keen silence of her hair, which always smelled of vanilla and roses …

  How could he ever trust her, even when he laid his head on her breast after they had made passionate love, and wanted so much to feel secure?

  No! The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood! His mission and his destiny.

  I am dead, Ezio said to himself. I am already dead inside, but I will finish what I have to do.

  The dream dissolved and his eyelids flickered open, revealing a view of an ample but elderly cleavage descending on him, the chemise the woman was wearing parting like the Red Sea.

  Ezio sat up rapidly. His wound was properly dressed now, and the pain was so dull as to be almost negligible. As his eyes focused, they took in a small room with walls of rough-hewn stone. Calico curtains were drawn across the small windows, and in a corner an iron stove burned, the embers from its open door giving the place its only light. The door was shut, but whoever was with him in the room lit the stump of a candle.

  A middle-aged woman, who looked like a peasant, knelt beside him, just within the frame of his vision. Her face was kindly as she tended to his wound, rearranging the poultice and bandage.

  It was sore! Ezio winced in pain.

  ‘Calmatevi,’ said the woman. ‘The pain will end soon.’

  ‘Where’s my horse? Where’s Campione?’

  ‘Safe. Resting. God knows she deserves it. She was bleeding from the mouth. A good horse like that. What were you doing to her?’

  The woman put down the bowl of water she was holding and stood.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘In Rome, my dear. Messer Machiavelli found you fainting in your saddle, your horse frothing, and brought you both here. Don’t worry, he’s paid me and my husband well to look after you both. And a few more coins for our discretion. But you know Messer Machiavelli – cross him at your peril. Anyway, we’ve done this kind of job for your organization before.’

  ‘Did he leave me any message?’

  ‘Oh yes. You’re to meet him as soon as you’re fit at the Mausoleum of Augustus. Know where that is?’

  ‘It’s one of the ruins, isn’t it?’

  ‘Dead right. Not that it’s much less of a ruin than most of this awful city nowadays. To think it was once the centre of the world. Look at it now – smaller than Florence; half the size of Venice. But we do have one boast.’ She cackled.

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Only fifty thousand poor souls live in this shanty town of a city that once was proud to call itself Rome; and seven thousand of them are prostitutes. That’s got to be a record.’ She cackled some more. ‘No wonder everyone’s riddled with the New Disease. Don’t sleep with anyone here’, she added, ‘if you don’t want to fall apart with the pox. Even cardinals have it – and they say the Pope himself, and his son, are sufferers.’

  Ezio remembered Rome as if in a dream. A bizarre place now, whose ancient, rotting walls had been designed to encompass a population of one million. Now most of the area was given over to peasant farming.

  He remembered too the ruined wasteland of what had once been the Great Forum in ancient times, but where sheep and goats now grazed. People stole the ancient carved marble and porphyry stones, which lay higgledy-piggledy in the grass, to build pigsties or to grind down for lime. And out of the desolation of slums and crooked, filthy streets, the great new buildings of Popes Sixtus IV and Alexander VI rose obscenely, like wedding cakes on a table where there was nothing else to eat but stale bread.

  The aggrandisement of the Church was confirmed, back at last from the Papal exile at Avignon. The Pope – the leading figure in the international world, outclassing not only kings but the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian himself – had his seat in Rome once more.

  Hadn’t it been Pope Alexander VI who’d divided, in his great judgment, the southern continent of the New Americas between the colonizing countries of Portugal and Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494? It was the same year the New Disease broke out in Naples in Italy. They called it the French Disease – morbus gallicus – but everyone knew it had come back from the New World with Columbus’s Genoese sailors. It was an unpleasant affliction. People’s faces and bodies bubbled up in pustules and boils, and their faces were often pressed out of all recognizable shape in the last stages.

  Here in Rome, the poor made
do on barley and bacon – when they could get bacon – and the dirty streets harboured typhus, cholera and the Black Death. As for the citizens, on the one hand there were the ostentatiously rich, whilst the majority looked like cowherds and lived just as badly.

  What a contrast to the gilded opulence of the Vatican. The great city of Rome had become a rubbish heap of history. Along the filthy alleys that passed for streets, in which feral dogs and wolves now roamed, Ezio remembered churches which today were falling apart, rotting deserted palaces that reminded him of the probable wreck of his own family seat in Florence.

  ‘I must get up. I must find Messer Machiavelli,’ said Ezio, urgently flinging the visions from his mind.

  ‘All in good time,’ replied his nurse. ‘He left you a new suit of clothes. Put them on when you are ready.’

  Ezio stood, but as he did so his head swam. He shook himself to clear it, then donned the suit Machiavelli had left him. It was new and made of linen, with a hood of soft wool that had a peak like an eagle’s beak. There were strong, soft gloves and boots of Spanish leather. He dressed himself, fighting the pain the effort caused him, and when he was done, the woman guided him to a balcony. Ezio realized then that he had not been in some shrunken hovel, but in the remains of what had once been a great palace. They must have been on the piano nobile. He drew in his breath as he looked at the desolate wreck of the city spread out below him. A rat scuttled boldly over his feet. He kicked it away.

  ‘Ah, Roma,’ he said ironically.

  ‘What’s left of it,’ the woman repeated, cackling again.

  ‘Thank you, Madonna. To whom do I owe … ?’

  ‘I am the Contessa Margherita deghli Campi,’ she said, and in the dim light Ezio could see at last the fine lines of a once beautiful face. ‘Or what’s left of her.’