‘Whatever his plans are, let’s nip them in the bud.’
By early dawn, Ezio had gathered a mounted force. They rode out the short distance to Zagarolo and had surrounded Micheletto’s encampment by sunrise. Ezio bore his crossbow on one arm, over the Bracer, and, on the other, his Poison Blade. There would be no quarter taken, though he wanted to take Micheletto alive.
The defenders put up a fierce fight, but in the end Ezio’s forces were victorious, scattering the diehards under Micheletto’s command like chaff.
Among the wounded, dead and dying, Micheletto stood proud, defiant to the last.
‘We take you, Micheletto da Corella, as our prisoner,’ said Machiavelli. ‘No more shall you infect our nation with your schemes.’
‘Chains will never hold me,’ snarled Micheletto. ‘Any more than they will hold my master.’
They took him in chains to Florence, where he took up residence in the cells of the Signoria, in the very cell where Ezio’s father Giovanni had spent his last hours. There, the governor of the city, Piero Soderini, together with his friend and adviser Amerigo Vespucci, and Machiavelli, interrogated and tortured him, but they could get nothing out of him and so, for the moment, they left him to rot. His days as a killer seemed done.
Ezio, for his part, returned to Rome.
‘I know you are a Florentine at heart, Niccolò,’ he told his friend at their parting, ‘but I shall miss you.’
‘I am also an Assassin,’ replied Machiavelli. ‘And my first loyalty will always be to the Brotherhood. Let me know when you next have need of me and I will come to you without delay. Besides,’ he added darkly, ‘I haven’t given up all hope of squeezing information out of that vile man.’
‘I wish you luck,’ said Ezio.
He wasn’t so sure they’d break him. Micheletto might be an evil man, but he was also very strong-willed.
52
‘Ezio, you must put Micheletto out of your mind,’ Leonardo told him as they sat in the Ezio’s studio in Rome. ‘Rome is at peace. This Pope is strong. He has subdued the Romagna. He is a soldier as much as he is a man of God, and perhaps under him all Italy will find peace at last. And although Spain controls the south, Ferdinand and Isabella are our friends.’
Ezio knew that Leonardo was happy in his work. Pope Julius had employed him as a military engineer and he was tinkering with a host of new projects, though he sometimes pined for his beloved Milan, which was still in French hands, and talked in his more depressed moments of going to Amboise, where he had been offered all the facilities he needed whenever he wanted them. He often talked of going once he had finished Pope Julius’s commissions.
As for the Romagna, Ezio’s thoughts turned often to Caterina Sforza, whom he still loved. A letter he’d received from her told him that she was now involved with the Florentine ambassador. Ezio knew her life remained in turmoil and that, despite Julius’s support, she had been dismissed from Forlì by her own people on account of the cruelty she had displayed when putting down the rebellion against her late intractable second husband, Girolamo Feo, and that she was growing old in retirement now, in Florence. At first his letters to her were angry, then remonstrative, then pleading, but she replied to none of them, and finally he accepted that she had used him and that he would never see her again.
Thus it was with relationships between men and women. The lucky ones last, but too often when they end, they end for good, and deep intimacy is replaced by a desert.
Ezio was hurt and humiliated, but he didn’t have time to wallow in his misery. His work in Rome consolidating the Brotherhood, and above all holding it in readiness, kept him busy.
‘I believe that as long as Micheletto lives, he will do his best to escape, free Cesare Borgia, and help him rebuild his forces,’ Ezio maintained.
Leonardo had problems of his own, regarding his feckless boyfriend, Salai, and barely listened to his old friend. ‘No one has ever escaped from the prison in Florence,’ he said. ‘Not from those cells.’
‘Why don’t they kill him?’
‘They still think they might get something out of him, though personally I doubt it,’ said Leonardo. ‘In any case, the Borgia are finished. You should rest. Why don’t you take your poor sister and return to Monteriggioni?’
‘She has grown to love Rome and would never return to such a small place now, and, in any case, the Brotherhood’s new home is here.’
This was another sadness in Ezio’s life. After an illness, his mother, Maria, had died. Claudia, after her abduction at the hands of the Borgia diehards, had given up The Rosa in Fiore, and the brothel was now controlled by Julius’s own network of spies, who used different girls. La Volpe had negotiated with his colleague Antonio in Venice to send Rosa, now older and statelier but no less fiery than she had been when Ezio knew her in La Serenissima, to Rome to run it.
There was also the problem of the Apple.
So much had changed, and when Ezio was summoned to the Vatican for an interview with the Pope, he was unprepared for what he would hear.
‘I’m intrigued by this device you’ve got, said Julius, coming as always straight to the point.
‘What do you mean, Your Holiness?’
The Pope smiled. ‘Don’t prevaricate with me, my dear Ezio. I have my own sources and they tell me you have something you call the Apple which you found under the Sistine Chapel some years ago. It seems to have great power.’
Ezio’s brain raced. How had Julius found out about the Apple? Had Leonardo told him? Leonardo could be curiously innocent at times, and he had wanted a new patron very badly. ‘It was vouchsafed to me, in a manner I find hard to explain to you, by a force from an antique world to help us. And it has, but I fear its potential. I cannot think that the hands of Man are ready for such a thing, but it is known as a Piece of Eden. There are other pieces, some lost to us and others perhaps left hidden.’
‘It sounds very useful. What does it do?’
‘It has the ability to control men’s thoughts and desires. But that is not all: it is able to reveal things undreamed of.’
Julius pondered this. ‘It sounds as if it might be very useful to me. Very useful indeed. But it could also be used against me in the wrong hands.’
‘It is what the Borgia were misusing when they tried to gain total ascendancy. Luckily, Leonardo, to whom they gave it to research, kept its darkest secrets from them.’
The Pope paused once again in thought. ‘Then I think it better if we leave it in your care,’ he said at last. ‘If it was vouchsafed to you by such a power as you describe, it would be rash to take it away from you.’ He paused again. ‘It seems to me that, when you feel you have no further use for it, you should hide it in a safe place, and maybe, if you wish, leave some kind of clue for any worthy successor – possibly a descendant of yours – who perhaps alone will be able to understand it, so that it may once more have a use in the world for future generations. For I do believe, Ezio Auditore – and perhaps I am being guided by God in this – that in our time, no one but you should have custody of it. It may be that there is some unique quality, some sense that enables you to withstand using it irresponsibly.’
Ezio bowed and said nothing, but in his heart he acknowledged Julius’s wisdom, and he couldn’t have agreed more with his judgement.
‘By the way,’ Julius said, ‘I don’t care for Leonardo’s boyfriend – what’s his name? Salai? He seems very shifty to me and I wouldn’t trust him. It’s a pity Leo seems to, for apart from that one little weakness the man is a genius. Do you know, he’s developing some kind of lightweight, bulletproof armour for me? I don’t know where he gets his ideas from.’
Ezio thought of the Codex Brace Leonardo had re-created for him and he smiled to himself. Well, why not? Now he could guess the source of the Pope’s information about the Apple, and he knew that Julius had revealed it deliberately. Fortunately, Salai was more of a fool than a knave, but he’d have to be watched all the same, and, if necessary, removed
.
After all, he knew what the nickname Salai meant: ‘little satan’.
53
Ezio made his way back to Leonardo’s studio soon after his audience with the Pope, but he failed to find Salai at home, and Leonardo was shamefaced about him. He had sent Salai into the country and no amount of persuasion would get him to reveal where. This would have to be a problem for La Volpe and his Thieves’ Guild to deal with. It was clear that Leonardo was embarrassed. Perhaps he would learn to keep his mouth shut in front of the boy in future, for he knew that Ezio could get Leonardo into a deal of trouble. Fortunately Leonardo was still more of a help than a hindrance, and a good friend, too, and Ezio made this very clear to him. But if there were any more breaches of security – well, no one was indispensable.
Leonardo wanted to make it up to Ezio, though.
‘I’ve been thinking about Cesare,’ he said, with his usual eagerness.
‘Oh?’
‘In fact I’m very glad you’ve come. I’ve found someone I think you should meet.’
‘Does he know where Cesare is?’ asked Ezio.
If he did, thought Ezio, Micheletto would cease to matter. If he didn’t, Ezio might even consider letting Micheletto escape from prison – for Ezio knew the Signoria well – and using the man to lead him to his master. It was a dangerous plan, he knew, but he wasn’t going to use the Apple except as a last resort. He found the burden of the Piece of Eden increasingly disturbing, having had a series of strange dreams, of countries and buildings and technology that couldn’t possibly exist … Then he remembered the vision of the castle, the remote castle in a foreign land. That at least was a recognizable building of his own time. But where could it be?
Leonardo brought him back from his musings.
‘I don’t know if he knows where Cesare is. But he’s called Gaspar Torella, and he was Cesare’s personal physician. He’s got some ideas I think are interesting. Shall we go and see him?’
‘Any lead is a good one.’
Dottore Torella received them in a spacious surgery on the Appenine, whose ceiling was hung with herbs, but also with strange creatures such as dried bats, the little corpses of desiccated toads and even a small crocodile. Torella was wizened and a little bent in the shoulders, but he was younger than he looked, his movements were quick, almost lizard-like, and the eyes behind his spectacles were bright. He was also another Spanish expatriate, but he was reputed to be brilliant, so Pope Julius had spared him – he was, after all, a scientist with no interest in politics.
What he was interested in, and talked about at length, was the New Disease.
‘You know, both my former master and his father Rodrigo had it. It’s very ugly indeed in its final stages, and I believe it affects the mind, and may have left both Cesare and the former Pope affected in the brain. Neither had any sense of proportion, and it may still be strong in Cesare – wherever they’ve put him.’
‘Do you have any idea?’
‘My guess is somewhere as far away as possible, and in a place he could never escape from.’
Ezio sighed. So much was surely obvious.
‘I have called the disease the morbus gallicus – the French disease,’ Dr Torella plunged on enthusiastically. ‘Even the present Pope has it in the early stages and I am treating him. It’s an epidemic, of course. We think it came from Columbus’s sailors, and probably Vespucci’s too, about seven or eight years ago when they brought it back from the New World.’
‘Why call it the French disease then?’ asked Leonardo.
‘Well, I certainly don’t want to insult the Italians, and the Portuguese and the Spanish are our friends. But it broke out first among French soldiers in Naples. It starts with lesions on the genitals and it can deform the hands, the back and the face, indeed the whole head. I’m treating it with mercury, to be drunk or rubbed on the skin, but I don’t think I’ve found a cure.’
‘That is certainly interesting,’ said Ezio. ‘But will it kill Cesare?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then I must still find him.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Leonardo, excited by yet another new discovery.
‘There is something else I’ve been working on,’ said Torella, ‘which I think is even more interesting.’
‘What is it?’ asked his fellow scientist.
‘It’s this: that people’s memories can be passed down – preserved – from generation to generation in the bloodline. Rather like some diseases. I like to think I’ll find a cure for morbus gallicus, but I feel it may be with us for centuries.’
‘What makes you say that?’ said Ezio, strangely disturbed by the man’s remark about memories being passed down through the generations.
‘Because I believe it’s transmitted, in the first instance, through sex – and we’d all die out if we had to do without that.’
Ezio grew impatient. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said.
‘Don’t mention it,’ replied Torella. ‘And by the way, if you really want to find my former master, I think you could do worse than look in Spain.’
‘In Spain? Where in Spain?’
The doctor spread his hands. ‘I’m a Spaniard, so is Cesare. Why not send him home? It’s just a hunch. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.’
Ezio thought, It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack … But it may be a start.
54
Ezio no longer kept the location of his lodgings a total secret, but only a few knew where they were. One of them was Machiavelli. One night Ezio was awoken by him at four in the morning when there was a deliberate, urgent knocking at the door.
‘Niccolò! What are you doing here?’ Ezio was instantly alert, like a cat.
‘I have been a fool.’
‘What happened? You were working in Florence – you can’t be back so soon.’ Ezio already knew something grave must have happened.
‘I have been a fool,’ Machiavelli repeated.
‘What’s going on?’
‘In my arrogance, I kept Micheletto alive,’ sighed Machiavelli. ‘In a secure cell, to question him.’
‘You’d better tell me what’s going on.’
‘He has escaped! On the eve of his execution!’
‘From the Signoria? How?’
‘Over the roof. Borgia diehards climbed onto it during the night and killed the guards, then they lowered a rope. The priest who gave him his last confession was a Borgia sympathizer – he’s being burnt at the stake today – and he smuggled a file into his cell. Micheletto sawed through just one bar on the window. He’s a big man, but it was enough for him to squeeze out and climb up. You know how strong he is. By the time the alarm was raised, he was nowhere to be found in the city.’
‘We must seek him out, and’ – Ezio paused, suddenly seeing an advantage in this adversity – ‘having found him, see where he runs. He may yet lead us to Cesare. He is insanely loyal, and without Cesare’s support his own power is worthless.’
‘I have light cavalry scouring the countryside even now, trying to hunt him down.’
‘But there are plenty of small pockets of Borgia diehards – like those who rescued him – willing to shelter him.’
‘I think he’s in Rome. That’s why I’ve come here.’
‘Why Rome?’
‘We have been too complacent. There are Borgia supporters here too. He will use them to make for Ostia and try to board a ship there.’
‘Bartolomeo is in Ostia; no one will escape him and his condottieri there. I’ll send a rider to alert him.’
‘But where will Micheletto go?’
‘Where else but Valencia, his home town.’
‘Ezio, we must be sure. We must use the Apple, now, this minute, to see if we can locate him.’
55
Ezio turned and, in the bedroom of his lodgings, out of sight of Machiavelli, he drew the Apple from its secret hiding place. Carefully, he took it out of its container with gloved hands and placed it on the tab
le in his bedroom. Then he concentrated. Very slowly the Apple began to glow, and then its light brightened until the room was filled with a cold illumination. Next, images – dim at first and indistinct – flickered onto the wall and resolved themselves into something it had shown Ezio before.
‘It’s a strange, remote castle in a brown, barren landscape; very old, with a massive outer barbican, four main towers and an impregnable-looking square keep at its centre,’ he explained to Machiavelli.
‘Where is that rocca? What is the Apple telling us?’ Machiavelli shouted from the other room.
‘It could be anywhere,’ Ezio muttered to himself. ‘From the landscape, Syria perhaps? Or,’ he said, as with a sudden rush of excitement he remembered Doctor Torella’s words, ‘Spain!’ he shouted to Machiavelli. ‘Spain!’
‘Micheletto can’t be in Spain.’
‘I am certain he plans to go there.’
‘Even so, we don’t know where this place is. There are many, many castles in Spain, and many similar to this one. Consult the Apple again.’
But when Ezio tried again, the image remained unchanged: a solidly built castle on a hill, a good 300 years old, surrounded by a little town. The image was monochrome and all the houses, the fortress and the countryside were an almost uniform brown. There was only one spot of colour, a bright flag on a pole on the very top of the keep.
Ezio squinted at it.
A white flag with a red, ragged cross in the form of an ‘X’.
His excitement mounted. ‘The military standard of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain!’
‘You can see their standard!’ yelled Machiavelli from the other room, his voice contracting with excitement. ‘Good. Now we know what country. But we still don’t know where it is. Or why we’re being shown it. Is Micheletto on his way there? Ask the Apple again.’
The vision faded and was replaced by a fortified hill town, from whose fort flew a white flag crisscrossed with red chains, their links filled in yellow, which Ezio recognized as the flag of Navarre. Then there was a third and final picture: a massive, wealthy seaport, with ships drawn up on a glittering sea and an army gathering. But no clue about the exact location of any of these places.
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