High above him, Cesare di Brescia lobbed Swan’s spear down into the mob of Orsini retainers. It plummeted like a bolt from the hand of Jove and struck – passing through most of the torso of one Davide di Lupio, who died as if spitted for roasting.
‘It’s a trap!’ Swan screamed again. ‘The Colonna are on us!’
Di Lupio’s spectacular death had driven the Orsini back.
Cesare threw the second spear. It, too, plummeted like a fury, but this one struck a man’s shoulder a glancing blow, hit the cobbles and pinwheeled, and struck three men glancing blows – broke an arm, broke a collarbone, knocked a man unconscious.
‘Follow me!’ Swan shouted, and he turned and ran back the way he’d come.
He’d forgotten the crossbowman.
He came back around the corner, and the man – as surprised as his target – raised his heavy bow. Swan threw himself flat, bouncing his already injured left hip on the stones of the filthy street.
The bolt struck the crowd of Orsini at his heels.
Swan had time to roll – painfully – behind one of the decorative columns that affected to classicise the façade of the Malatesta fortress. The main force of the Orsini ran into the new force coming up behind them.
Some men recognised their own white and red livery, but others – mere hired thugs, and men in the grip of fear – loosed weapons, threw spears, stabbed …
A dozen Orsini retainers went down in as many heartbeats. In the way of street fights, both sides broke away from the action, running back the way they’d come – and clearing Swan’s alley, leaving only corpses and a screaming victim of a sharp knife.
Almost at Swan’s head, a postern in the Malatesta façade opened. There stood two retainers armed with spears.
Behind them stood Sigismondo Malatesta himself, in half-armour.
‘Messer Suane?’ he asked. He laughed. ‘Are you in need of aid?’
‘And then Iso came and fetched me,’ the Malatesta lord said with satisfaction, ‘which enables me to provide you gentlemen with my hospitality.’
A dozen Malatesta men-at-arms had cleared the ends of the alley long enough for Cesare – and Alessandro – to get Colonna Primo to the ground and across the street. All of them had been offered every courtesy – dry clothes, hot wine, and a place by the fire in the great hall.
Sigismondo sat in a great chair, flanked by two of the largest boar hounds Swan had ever seen.
The Demoiselle Iso served Swan wine with her own hands. ‘I saved you,’ she said, her voice level.
‘I thank you, demoiselle,’ Swan said fervently.
‘I saw you come across the roofs.’ She smiled. ‘I desired you to come to me, and look, you did.’
Swan wasn’t sure what to make of that. ‘I heard your warning,’ he said. ‘How – why – did you decide to save me?’
She smiled, and her eyes smouldered. ‘Messire Swan, I knew it was you. I called to you, and you came.’
Malatesta tapped an ivory rod impatiently on the arm of his chair. ‘Iso, you will get us all burned for witchcraft. Messire Swan, my daughter – ahem – trifles with the hermetic arts, and exaggerates her powers.’
Swan couldn’t resist. ‘I cannot imagine that she could exaggerate her powers,’ he said. ‘She has saved me tonight from certain death.’
Iso smiled. She was tall – taller, close up, than Swan had thought her. She was also broad shouldered and deep breasted. The firelight lit the tops of her breasts and emphasised the darkness between them. She wore a long robe – the sort of over-robe that fashionable women wore over a kirtle and a shift, deeply cleft in front, but Swan’s sense was she had thrown it on over a night shift – or less.
Swan could see that his attention to the Demoiselle Iso was not pleasing to his host – the man who held all their lives in the palm of his hand.
But he could not take his eyes off her.
She basked in his admiration. ‘Ah, I knew you were … the one,’ she said huskily.
Swan almost reached out for her, there and then.
Alessandro took his left arm and his hand – as hard as steel – closed. Swan whirled, wincing in pain.
‘Could you abandon your lust for the lord’s daughter just for a moment and focus on the problem at hand,’ Alessandro said with a smile. ‘Before he throws us to the Orsini?’
Pain cut through the remarkable images he had been forming. He allowed Alessandro to drag him – it felt as if he was being dragged – step by step away from the Demoiselle Iso and towards a settle that two grunting servants had just carried from across the hall.
The exchange was covered by Malatesta attending to Colonna Primo. ‘I know you, do I not?’ he asked.
The young Colonna bowed. ‘My lord has no reason to know me, as I have been but little in the public eye, but I am Bernabo Colonna.’
Malatesta barked his remarkable, wolfish laugh and turned his sleek head to look at his daughter. ‘What a prize you have brought me, my dear,’ he said.
She curtsied.
Alessandro pursed his lips. ‘My lord,’ he began, and paused.
Malatesta nodded. ‘My Lord of Colonna, let me say that so great is my regard for your father’s estimable house that I will see you escorted home tomorrow by fifty men-at-arms – in armour. Until then, please accept the hospitality of my poor house, and come someday to visit me in Rimini.’
Colonna bowed to his host – and to his rescuers – and allowed himself to be taken off to bed by servants.
Malatesta leaned forward in his great chair. A boar hound rose at the motion – came to the lord’s hand and sniffed his fingers, then turned and lay full length again.
The Demoiselle Iso sank gracefully beside the great dog, pulled his ears and began to scratch at him, roughing his fur until the huge animal rolled and let her scratch his belly. Her posture was graceful to the extreme, almost like something an Eastern dancer would assume, one leg outflung and her whole body leaning towards the dog, and the motion exposed much of one breast and the matching shoulder.
Alessandro swatted him in the arm. Swan yelped.
‘You counted on my hospitality,’ Malatesta said to Alessandro.
Di Bracchio bowed. ‘My lord, your sense of honour is so well known—’
‘What, for its flexibility?’ Malatesta said with a laugh. ‘By my sword, Di Bracchio, you are the least trusting man I know. Yet you put your head under my axe …’
‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ Di Bracchio said.
‘My captain says that you fought ten times your numbers and came away unhurt,’ Malatesta said.
Cesare raised his left hand, which was cut so deeply between the third and fourth fingers that he seemed to have a blood claw. ‘My lord, I would not go as far as unhurt.’
Malatesta, all contrition, sent his secretary for his doctor.
Then he looked down at his daughter. ‘Iso – time, I think, to take yourself back to your bed.’
‘I am well satisfied here, my lord,’ she said, playing with the dog. In that one sentence, with its tone of girlish insolence, Swan gathered that Sigismondo Malatesta, great captain, tyrant of Rimini, was not the lord of his daughter.
He grumbled in his deep voice and subsided. He turned his glare on Swan. ‘And you, sir – you, too, thought my hospitality so good as to revisit it?’
Swan bowed. ‘My lord, I owe you – and this beautiful lady – my poor life, and I will endeavour to repay your hospitality.’
Malatesta nodded. ‘Come, that’s handsome, ain’t it, Di Bracchio? Your lieutenant promises to repay my hospitality, and given his well-known powers of acquiring classical pieces, I imagine he might repay me at that. And you? Will Bessarion repay me for you, or has your failure to arrange the election for him caused him to lose his fancy for you?’
Alessandro smiled. Swan knew it to be a smile that could bode ill for its target. ‘I cannot say what my master will or will not do,’ he said.
Malatesta crossed his booted feet and leaned back. He reached
over the side of the chair. His hand found his daughter’s head, and he began to stroke her hair. Swan thought he’d meant to pat one of the dogs. Or not. There was something … exposing in his caress.
‘You know that he has lost – eh? The French cardinal rose today and demanded his defeat – because, they said, of his beard.’ Malatesta laughed his wolfish laugh. ‘Because by wearing his beard, he shows that he is still a Greek churchman, and not really a Latin. Or so says His Eminence of France.’
Iso shrugged out from under her father’s hand with an angry twist of her head.
His hand fell across the back of the dog, and the dog, surprised, snapped at it, lightly mangling his fingers.
Wrenching them away, Malatesta slammed his fist into the dog, which gave a pitiful yelp and shrank away.
‘I think you lesson my own animals against me,’ Malatesta said to his daughter.
‘If they think you foul, you have only yourself to blame,’ she said.
‘You …’ Malatesta rose from his chair. Servants ran towards him. He snapped his fingers. ‘The Demoiselle Iso is for bed.’
‘I am not,’ she said. ‘I enjoy the company.’ She rested a hand on Swan’s right arm.
Swan winced as if Alessandro had again gripped his bruised left wrist.
‘Do you know,’ Malatesta said, his voice carefully controlled, ‘that if you provoke me too far, demoiselle, I will order you punished? And that would humiliate me in front of my guests. Which might cause me to have them killed, simply so that word of my wayward daughter’s impolitic and lewd disobedience never came to be whispered in the world.’
‘Punish me?’ she asked.
The two of them – father and daughter – locked eye to eye. She was about to say something.
Swan could feel it. She was going to say something irretrievable.
‘My lord collects antiquities,’ he said brightly. ‘Had my lord heard of the so-called “Ring of the Conqueror”? I had it in my hands for a few weeks. Cardinal Bessarion has it now.’
Alessandro’s look beamed his thanks. Malatesta’s eyes fell on him, and the weight of his regard might have pressed Swan to the floor. But Swan sensed that Malatesta wanted free of the contest with his daughter as much as the rest of them.
‘Do you think your cardinal would part with such a treasure? The very ring of Alexander?’ Malatesta said softly. ‘What kind of stone does it have?’
Swan hooded his eyes so that he would not give away his pleasure – he knew he’d hooked his man. ‘My illustrious lord – it is a diamond, the size of a woman’s fingernail, engraved with the head of Herakles.’
‘How can one engrave a diamond?’ Malatesta asked. ‘Is the ring … hermetical?’
Swan hesitated, unwilling to reveal his derision of hermeticism in such company. Finally he allowed himself a small smile. ‘Certainly I was not injured while wearing it,’ he confessed. ‘And the Turks had every opportunity to try.’
‘I’m surprised that the Grand Turk didn’t seize it. I hear he is a great collector of jewels.’
‘My lord, he spared no effort to take it, but it slipped through his fingers,’ Swan said.
Malatesta glanced at his daughter. She favoured Swan with a smile. ‘And have you seen the Grand Turk?’ she asked.
Swan bowed. ‘Messire Di Bracchio and I have both had that honour,’ he said. He grinned at Alessandro. ‘At least, I think it was an honour.’
Malatesta wrinkled his nose. ‘He is a great lord. And the Bishop of Ostia gave you both the most remarkable public testimonial on his return.’ He glanced at Swan. ‘When the election is over, you may inform your master that I would like to see the Ring of the Conqueror, and perhaps even to offer for it.’
He waved his fingers in gentle dismissal. The three men bowed in unison, first to the lady and then to the lord, and were led away.
Seated on the edge of a barracks-room bed, Swan struggled with his borrowed hose.
‘You don’t know anything about her, do you?’ Alessandro said.
Swan shook his head. ‘Messire di Porto, the secretary, said I should ask you.’
Alessandro lay back. Cesare was not quite asleep, and he snorted.
‘For a moment, I thought he was going to have us killed,’ Alessandro said. ‘I think you saved us with the ring. You know that, as far as he’s concerned, you offered the ring as our ransom.’
‘Christ and his saints – did I?’ Swan paled.
‘It was well done, even if it gives the bearer all the powers of Satan,’ Alessandro said.
‘I agree,’ Cesare said. ‘I like being alive.’
Swan shook his head. ‘I noticed no powers,’ he said.
Alessandro laughed. ‘You are a charming fool, Tommaso Swan. You blew up a Turkish galley with a firebomb and you were not even singed, and you think the ring has no powers?’
‘I’m a lucky devotee of Mother Church and Madama Fortuna,’ Swan said.
‘I’m so glad that we’ve made you Italian enough to believe two mutually exclusive things at once,’ Alessandro said. ‘The Demoiselle Iso is Malatesta’s first child, by his first mistress.’ Di Bracchio’s voice sank to a very quiet whisper. ‘The wicked tongues of Rome say that she is herself Malatesta’s third mistress.’
Even to the jaded, there are some sins worse than others. ‘The devil, you say,’ Swan spat.
‘Just so. Malatesta’s no friend of mine. And I merely repeat the malicious gossip of that old woman, Alberti. But my young Englishman, you brought us here, into the house of the Wolf. He is not merely wicked, or self-serving. He is of another order.’
‘Christ on the cross,’ Swan muttered. ‘Alberti?’
Cesare was awake. ‘I like him. He hates women – but most priests do. He’s brilliant – a genius – a wit. A pillar of the Liars’ Club.’
‘Liars’ Club?’ Swan asked, bewildered.
‘You know many of them. The best Latinists in the Curia. They sit by one of the pillars in Saint Peter’s and mock each other and God and everything else. Alberti is their … leader.’ Cesare laughed. ‘Well, he was. He’s in exile now – working for the Wolf in Rimini. Building a truly ugly church, or so I’m told.’
‘And reporting to us about the Wolf,’ Alessandro whispered. ‘Beware, these are deep waters. I am no good man, Tommaso, but I say truly – Christ has never entered into this house.’ Alessandro stripped rapidly to his shirt and then drew his side sword and propped it, hilt up, against the plaster wall at the head of his bed.
Swan imitated him.
In daylight, the lair of the Wolf seemed both warm and pleasant. The food was delicious, and the Wolf’s captain, Montorio, and the men-at-arms who joined them at breaking their fast, were men of their own sort, and untouched by the Wolf’s malevolence – if, indeed, he had any. Montorio was a well-bred man from Verona, with a Roman head and curling black hair, and he set himself to be a good host.
When the meal was done, all three men were brought their clothes – clean and in some cases restitched. And then they found themselves riding through the streets – streets as quiet as the day after Christmas. It was Holy Saturday – the whole world was fasting for Lent.
They rode with a clattering escort of armoured gens d’armes across the Tiber and all the way to the Colonna palazzo, where Colonna himself emerged to tender thanks to Montorio. The Wolf’s captain accepted the thanks graciously, his gloved hands on his heart, and he bowed to the ground and sank to one knee. ‘My Lord Malatesta asks us to inform you of his respectful pleasure at being of service to so notable a family,’ he said.
Lord Colonna seemed to doubt what he heard, and if his son had been a horse he might have had his lips peeled back to look at his age and condition, but when the Malatesta men-at-arms clattered back out of the Colonna courtyard, Swan, Di Brescia and Di Bracchio remained behind, free and undamaged.
Colonna Primo was whispering forcefully to his father, who embraced him for a long time. And then he turned to the three supporters of Bess
arion and shocked them by sweeping them the sort of bow that they would have given him.
‘My lords – and such I would make you, if only I could – what can I offer three men who have saved my son’s life?’ He beamed at them.
Di Bracchio returned his bow with all his vast Venetian grace. ‘Nothing, my lord, but the pleasure of the doing,’ he said.
Cesare di Brescia almost choked. It was Swan’s turn to take his friend’s arm ungently, and squeeze like a vice, and whisper, ‘Shut up.’
An hour later they were back at the tavern that was the Bessarion party headquarters.
‘For myself,’ Di Brescia said, ‘I would not have minded some concrete expression of their satisfaction, considering’ – he raised his heavily bandaged left hand – ‘that I may yet perish of gangrene, that I ruined my best suit of clothes, and missed a meeting that was years in the planning and might have led—’
Alessandro pulled him into a chair. ‘Might have led to the loss of your immortal soul, and more likely of your life.’ He grinned one of his rare, boyish grins. ‘Cesare had an assignation with Orsini’s mistress.’
Cesare leapt as if stung. ‘How?’ he asked.
Di Bracchio rolled his eyes. ‘Saving Colonna Primo will not be rewarded by a purse of ducats,’ he said.
Swan yawned. ‘More’s the pity.’
When they had all had a cup of warm wine, Alessandro left them to attempt to meet the cardinal. Although the cardinals in conclave were not supposed to have any contact with the outside world, most of them managed it, and there were channels. He sent Swan back to the cardinal’s palazzo with a dozen hired men-at-arms to keep it from being burned. He also ordered Swan to escort the clerks and scribes back to the cardinal’s house.
‘The time for secrecy is past. If we have lost, we have lost. I am more concerned now that the rage of the Orsini will vent itself on our people and the cardinal.’ He shrugged.
Swan made his plans with the precision he’d learned in the Order, but his convoy across the city was unchallenged. The city was as quiet as a man with a hangover. Good Friday had seen too much violence for a city supposedly given over to God. Holy Saturday was as quiet as the grave.
Tom Swan and the Head of St George: Part Seven Page 4