“Keep your voice down,” Nicholas said. “In the next room, but he is busy. What—”
The courier strode off, heading straight for the poetry reading. Nicholas lunged after him, trying to grab hold again before the man could put them in the middle of a crowd, but the courier eluded him. He tramped on into the next room. Nicholas looked swiftly around him; some of the others in this room were watching, attentive.
In the next room Berocchi’s voice stopped. Someone said, behind Nicholas, “Is something wrong?”
He turned his head; the voice belonged to a slender young man in clothes so picked out with gold lace and pearls that he glittered. Nicholas bowed to him.
“I know nothing of it, Monsignor de’ Medici,”
The young man smiled. He had pointed eyeteeth. “You know me?”
In the next room, Bruni shouted, “Nicholas!”
“As your Magnificence might know,” Nicholas said, trying to sound unconcerned, “I began my career with the Florentine legation here when Florence was under your father.”
“Nicholas!”
“You have my leave, Messer Dawson,” the youth said smoothly, still smiling. “I believe your present employer calls.”
Nicholas started toward Bruni but before he could reach the door into the reading room Bruni was rushing forth, the Cardinal Orsini and others of the audience after him, and the courier on his heels. He gripped Nicholas by the arm. In a voice that probably reached well beyond the slumbering lions and oxen on the walls, he said, “I am recalled to Florence. The mob is throwing up barricades in the streets—”
“Excellency,” Nicholas said. “I beg you to lower your voice.”
“Piero de’ Medici is known to be in Arezzo!”
Nicholas kicked Bruni in the shin. Orsini and his friends boiled over with excitement, and the gilded boy at Nicholas’s elbow murmured, “Messer Dawson, you may find yourself again where you, began, soon enough.”
“By God!” Bruni shouted. “How dare you kick me!”
Nicholas looked away. At least Bruni was yelling on a safe topic. Bruni shouldered past him, shouting for a page. His face was grossly red. He wheeled to face Nicholas again.
“The legation is in your hands. Keep the peace there. I will—someone will send you instructions.”
The Cardinal summoned a page, who hurried away with Bruni to find the ambassador’s cloak. Nicholas wondered if Bruni would have the wit to save himself in the disordered Republic. Bruni disappeared out the door.
Around Nicholas the others began to chatter.
“Florence may fall! Well, it has not been a sturdy Republic.”
“What republic is?”
“Sometimes,” the Cardinal said, in a voice like an extended sigh, “it seems to me that the whole world is shattering around me.”
“Shattering perhaps,” said Giulio de’ Medici, “in order to be reborn! Ours is the age of glorious rebirth. We must keep heart at all times.”
The Duchess of Gravina elbowed her way in among them; her wide face was stern as any man’s, her upper lip feathery with fine white hair and her eyes fierce. “Rebirth!” she said. “Then it is a monster being born. Such men as the Borgias are its precursors, and events like this—”
“My lady.” The Cardinal bowed before her, and she clamped her lips shut. The other voices rose.
“We are seeing the end of things.”
“No—a new age,” the young de’ Medici cried again. “A beginning.”
“The disintegration of all value—”
That was someone on Nicholas’s other side, and a new voice there took up the argument.
“This is a time to return to the great age of the classical world. If we only keep our faith firm, we can!”
Nicholas listened to all this but said nothing. Whatever could be said was by that fact alone too simple to satisfy him. Perhaps none of it was true at all. Perhaps all that was happening was that people were trying to say what was happening to them, and the disintegration was not in things but in their knowledge of things. He struggled with the idea of a world of blind impact and unlaw, the only order a tenuous expectation of consistency from one moment to the next.
“Messer Dawson—”
He stirred himself. “I must take my leave. Serenity—”
Smiling, the Cardinal put out his ring to be kissed.
In the late summer heat every man of consequence fled Rome for the healthy air of the countryside. The Pope withdrew to his castle in the Alban Hills. Every morning Nicholas went to the legation, read the routine dispatches, and gave the clerks and pages what work there was. When they were done he sent them home.
From Florence and Bruni came no news. The crisis there had thrown even the sensation of Urbino into shadow. It was known generally that French troops from Milan were marching to the city, but no one cared to speculate what influence they might have; in any case there were only a few hundred Frenchmen stationed in Milan to begin with.
With the great men of Rome gone, the city was lifeless; nothing happened. No one even carried gossip of any interest. It was as if Rome were surrounded by a wall of silence, like the castle in the tale. By noon of each day there was nothing more to be done and Nicholas locked the doors of the legation and went home.
He dined in the garden. Stefano came to share his meal, nearly every day, and to pass the afternoon with him. They sat under the trees, where Juan burned wet rags to keep off the mosquitoes, and talked idly, or Stefano dealt out the cards of his tarocco deck on the table still scattered with crumbs from their meal.
The cards were becoming familiar to Nicholas. He sat watching them spin from his lover’s fingers. The Hanged Man appeared often, dangling upside down by one foot, the other leg crossed over the first at the knee, and a mad smile on his face. The Pope followed him, and the World, and the Lovers, of course man and woman. Stefano had said that the cards could tell the future. Nicholas made up antic interpretations of their order. A pinprick stabbed his neck; he slapped at it in a mindless reflex, his gaze fixed on the cards.
The Devil grinned also, like the Hanged Man, fierce and agonized.
Nicholas scratched his arms, red and lumpy with insect bites. Stefano was turning out the cards again.
“Why do you do that over and over?”
“There’s nothing else to do.” Stefano waved the deck over the table, where half a dozen faces already lay looking up at the sky. “Shall I teach you the game?”
Nicholas shook his head. “I’ll watch. I’m better at that.”
In the heat and stillness of the city at the center of the world the cards took on an illusion of meaning. Perhaps they were keys, those cryptic figures with their symbolic names and rings of Hebrew and Greek lettering. Nicholas considered that he should have been a Platonist; then he could pick up the card called the World and put it in his purse, and never more worry about Duke Valentino.
At the thought he laughed, and Stefano’s head rose.
“What amuses you?”
“The heat has cooked my brain. Like an egg, Stefano.”
“Tell me.”
“No—no. It’s gone already.”
Stefano ruffled the deck with his long fingers. He wore the ruby on his left forefinger. “Tell me.”
Nicholas shook his head, smiling, and scratched his itching neck.
“If you ask me, your brain’s been soft since your little ride out of Rome last month.”
“Really? How so?”
Stefano turned, slinging one leg over the other, and folded his arm over the back of the chair. “I cannot say, to be truthful. Ask the old man. You let all manner of things go on that formerly would have stirred you up to a black sweat. Ask Juan.”
Juan was working in his garden. Nicholas could hear his tuneless singing beyond the box trees. Another mosquito whined in his ear and he cove
red his ear with his hand. The heat was making him sleepy and lecherous; he smiled at Stefano. He had not known until he lost Stefano how much loved him; now he was determined to keep him. It surprised Nicholas how that elementary decision simplified their relationship.
“You and Juan do as you like here, and nothing I say has any more effect than to entertain you.”
“I am a guest in your house,” Stefano said, and put down the cards. “You have never told me who stole you away from Rome, either—was it Valentino?”
Nicholas burst out in laughter. The insect hum sounded by his head and he slapped at it; the body broke against his fingers, spurting blood.
“No. It was not Valentino. It was Gonsalvo da Cordoba.”
Stefano’s eyebrows lowered over his sunburnt nose. “Who is that?”
“He is the captain-general of the Spanish army in Naples.”
“A Spaniard. We have enough of those, with Valentino and the Pope. I am surprised he brought you back again.”
“Why?”
“They are all treacherous. See what Valentino did at Urbino.”
“What think you of his work in Urbino?”
Stefano lowered his eyes, his eyelids like shells, moist with sweat. “If I were his man, I should never turn my back on him. It was shrewd, I warrant you that. And the lesser men can be thankful, since they took no wounds.”
Among the dirty crockery on the table was a napkin; Nicholas took it and wiped his bloody fingers. “Urbino was my work.”
His lover’s pale eyes widened. Nicholas imagined lions’ eyes like that. Stefano said, “What?”
“I gave him the plan. It was my scheme, all of it.”
Stefano looked down again at the deck. He turned over the top few cards one by one: the eight of swords, the Ace of pentacles, the Fool, the Hanged Man. Nicholas wondered if he believed what he had just heard.
“That’s where you are getting all the money,” Stefano said.
The Hanged Man glided across the table and out over the edge, onto the empty air. Nicholas bent to pick it up from the ground.
“Why did you tell me?”
“Why should I keep it from you?” Nicholas laid the card on the table. “That is the ring he gave me, when the plan worked and Urbino fell to him.”
Stefano gawked down at the ring. He shot a narrow look at Nicholas. “Well,” he said. “Do not turn your back on him, Nicholas.” He raked the cards into a heap and made a square deck of them again.
“It’s hot out here,” Nicholas said.
“Let’s go inside. I have to go soon anyway.”
“Soon?”
“We have some time still.”
For many days Nicholas had no word at all from Bruni. One day as he was walking through the horse market near the legation, someone called softly to him from an alley.
He looked; down in the shadow of the alley a hooded man beckoned furiously. Nicholas hesitated to go into the narrow darkened space, and the man called, “Messer Dawson! I have a message for you—” and waved a roll of paper.
Nicholas went down three or four paces into the alley and reached for the roll, but the hooded man hid it quickly in his cloak. His empty hand reappeared, palm up.
“Two crowns.”
Nicholas gave him fifty carlini. The man paused only a moment, shrugged, and gave him the message.
Heavily waxed and sealed, it required a strong knife to open; he took it back to the legation. There was no signature, only a bare page of script.
“My dear friend,” the letter began. “Since Saturn holds in his toils that fountain whence we two were wont to quench our thirst—”
Bruni, certainly. Nicholas smiled, and to his own surprise felt a sudden amused affection for the ambassador.
“Know you then that your Virgoan traveler, keeps his place here, although with nothing but doubt for tomorrow. The situation, as you might guess, wavers between the Jupiterians of the city and the Mercurians. Certain barbarian influences also make known their presence. I have cast my fate in with those supporting the Father of the Planets, in the person of one whose calls are Pisces Sagittarius. I trust you will unravel this mystery, and give me the benefit of your counsel. Sign me thus: no one.”
Nicholas laid the letter down on his desk. Perhaps Bruni was justified; the crisis in Florence might well require exactly this sort of subterfuge, but Nicholas felt that the ambassador could have risked a little more clarity. He laid his two hands on either edge of the letter to hold it flat. The Jupiterians of the city versus the Mercurians: that eluded him. He thought perhaps the first reference was to the aristocrats of Florence, who had always resisted the broadly based Signory, and the second to the popular Republic, the fickle mob. The barbarian influences certainly were the French, whose arrival to defend Florence from the Borgias had been timely enough for the interests of the King of France. In that case Bruni was supporting the great families in their move to take control of the city back from the mob to whom Savonarola had delivered it, many years before. Pisces Sagittarius confused him, until he realized that the initials of the phrase were those of Piero Soderini, the dominant politician in Florence.
Nonetheless he wished Bruni had taken the chance of saying more exactly what he meant.
Bruni wanted advice. Lacking knowledge of the planets, Nicholas could hardly employ a similar code, and finally he wrote down exactly what he thought: that Bruni should watch all the sides in the controversy, try to choose the strongest, and support it, because the sooner the crisis was resolved the safer Florence would be.
With this letter in hand he started out of the building, to go find a certain Sienese merchant whom he knew to be staying in Rome overnight. As he went through the workroom, he noticed that the curtain over an archway onto the loggia was open, and when he closed it he noticed the palms on the loggia beyond.
They were wilting in the heat. The tips of their fronds were brown and yellow. Nicholas stood still, one hand on the curtain, his gaze fixed on the row of dying plants, and all his fresh affection for Bruni soured into rancor. He wished he had not seen the plants; now he would have to do something. He felt as if Bruni had deserted them purposely to irritate him. He would not water them himself; one of the pages could be ordered to do that, but the page’s work would have to be supervised and his failures reproved. Nicholas started to turn away, the plants like a new, burden on his back.
He turned around, full of a frivolous malice. Going out onto the loggia, he looked out, first, into the courtyard below; there was no one there, only a horse tethered at the far end of the yard, a pile of dung decorating the paving stone below its tail. Even the far balcony on the facing wall of the building was deserted, where customarily the old lady sat with her tatting. Nicholas lowered his gaze to the plants.
Going along the row of pots he pushed them one by one over the edge of the loggia. They smashed on the paving below. He went back into the workroom, took his coat, and went down the stairs.
When he emerged into the courtyard a groom was standing there, frowning at the mess of dirt and broken plants, the bits of bright pottery scattered all the way across the court to the far wall. As Nicholas passed, the young man said, “What happened, sir? Do you know how they fell?”
“I have no idea,” Nicholas said cheerfully, and without pausing went on his way.
In the Borgia Tower the anteroom to Valentino’s chamber was sweltering with late summer heat, the air dense and stale, and the light gloomy. Nicholas sat in the corner away from the fire. He was alone in the small room. He had been waiting over an hour; night was coming; more than six hours had passed since he had received Valentino’s summons. In that time Nicholas had considered the summons from every perspective. The message’s wording gave no hint why Valentino wanted to see him, a void Nicholas had tenanted with numberless demons.
The door into the inner chamber was on his
right. Now he was wondering if Valentino were there at all, if anyone were there.
The moments crept by. He began to stare at the door. No one had come in or out all the while he had been waiting. Surely the room was empty.
If he could go into that room—if he could catch even a glance of Valentino’s privy papers—
Now his gaze was fastened to the door. He was sure that the room was empty, but what if someone came in suddenly and surprised him there? He did not want to have to explain that to Valentino. Still, he would have no chance like this again, to look through Valentino’s privy papers. He could open the outer doorway so that he would hear anyone coming. Immediately he rejected that. Anyone passing by would see him where he should not be. He would have to take the chance. Only a few seconds. Just a look.
He went to the door and stood with his hand halfway to the latch, gathering up his courage. Just a few moments. He opened the door.
The room beyond was dark. On the table a single candle burned. Behind the table sat Valentino.
Nicholas startled down to his heels. He said, “Magnificence. Your pardon.”
Valentino left his chair. “What will you do with my pardon?” He sauntered around the table to the door and shut it. “What a mean-stomached mouse. You waited an hour and twenty minutes merely. Better be honest, mouse, you are too cowardly for the other. Make something of this.”
He swatted with his hand at a pile of letters on the table. Nicholas moved nearer the candle. Valentino had waited, sat there and waited, to see if Nicholas would steal into his room. Nicholas’s hands were wet. His neck burned with embarrassment. He remembered it as if he had watched it from above, himself fidgeting in his chair on one side of the wall and on the other Valentino waiting. He took a napkin from his sleeve and dried his hands. Behind him, Valentino laughed.
The three letters in the pile were short notes, nearly identical, in cipher. Nicholas saw the key at once and translated them out in his head.
“These are all notes agreeing to meet at Lake Magione in October,” he said.
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