by Sara Poole
I seized his sleeve and drew him off a little into an inglenook where we could be less readily observed. The pounding and sawing from the nearby wing of the Vatican Palace where Borgia’s grandiose apartment was under construction offered cover for private conversation. Even so, I kept my voice low.
“Not yet, but he will.”
“Are you certain?” Renaldo was not asking idly. Like almost everyone, he had bets placed with one or more of the hundreds of touts in Rome who took such wagers. He might also have entrusted funds to various of the merchant houses whose profits could be affected by the papal decree. In this, he and I were no different. Borgia had been more than generous—any sensible man is with his poisoner. I had no complaints, but I would have been thought a fool if I failed to make sound use of the information that came my way.
“He has no choice,” I said. “He must have Spain’s favor and their Majesties have made it clear that there is no other way to gain it.”
“But if Colombo is right—”
I nodded brusquely. All knew the problem that had so far stayed Borgia from signing the decree.
“If the Holy Father gives Spain what turns out really to be the Indies,” I said, “there will be war with Portugal. Everyone knows that. But all the scholars, the geographers, the mapmakers, all of them still say what they said when the great captain was peddling his crazed scheme to every court in Europe and being sent away empty-handed: The world is too big for him to have reached the Indies.”
In the weeks since the battered caravel La Niña limped out of an Atlantic storm to find shelter in the port of Lisbon, few had been able to speak of anything other than the astounding news she brought. Scarcely had the first reports reached Rome than Borgia set to work to determine how he might take advantage of whatever it was that had just happened.
To help him decide, we had endured a seemingly endless parade of sages who explained to him over and over exactly why, all claims to the contrary, Colombo could not possibly have reached the Indies. By all rights, he and his crew should have run through their provisions and perished at sea long before ever making landfall. That they had not could mean only one thing—they had found not the Indies with its great spice wealth coveted by all, but an entirely new, previously unsuspected land—Novi Orbis.
“What if they are wrong—?” Renaldo began but I would have none of it.
“The ancient Greeks knew the world’s girth and so do we. Colombo has found something else, something entirely new, whether he wants to admit that or not. It may be a place of unimagined riches or it may offer nothing but death and ruin. Spain will find out soon enough.”
The steward looked comforted by my reassurances yet something still troubled him.
“Have you heard the rumors?” he asked, bending a little closer so that I smelled the anise on his breath. It was not an unpleasant scent but it could not fully mask the nervous sourness emanating from his stomach.
“Which rumors? Each day, each hour brings new claims wilder than the last.”
“I don’t know how wild these are. Indeed, I fear they may be all too true. It is being said that man, Pinzón, captain of La Piñta, is dying of a disease no one has seen before. He is covered in strange pustules and consumed by fever.”
I had heard the same rumor and shared Renaldo’s fear, though I was not about to admit it. Sailors frequently returned home with all manner of ailments, but this was different. By all reports, no one had ever seen the scourge that was killing the subcaptain of Colombo’s fleet. Nor was he alone; several other men who had sailed with the great discoverer were similarly stricken. There were even reports, as yet unconfirmed, that the same symptoms were appearing among the whores of Barcelona, the city to which many returning crew members had gone.
“We must pray for him,” I said solemnly.
Renaldo paid that no more mind than I intended. “Of course, of course,” he said. “But about the decree—you are quite certain?”
I assured him that I was and pleaded a pressing need to be elsewhere, which was true enough. Moments later, I was crossing the vast piazza, crowded as usual with all manner of tradesmen, gawkers, priests, nuns, pilgrims, dignitaries, and the like. The Vatican was, as always, open for business.
The sun, drifting westward, was warm on my face and I felt as though I could truly breathe for the first time in hours. Even the muscles in the back of my neck that had become so tense as I waited upon Borgia unclenched, if only a little. Behind me, the crumbling hulk of Saint Peter’s lurked, more than a thousand years old and in dire danger of collapse. I did not look in its direction but as always, I was vividly aware of its presence.
Certain events the previous year haunted me still. Waking and sleeping, I relived the desperate search through Saint Peter’s for a lost child in the hands of a madman bent on ritual murder. What I had seen in the corpse-clogged catacombs was nightmarish enough but it faded to inconsequence when compared to the terror that had followed in the vast, abandoned garret under the basilica’s crumbling roof.
As though all that weren’t enough, I had gotten it into my head that one of my dark calling should not go out of her way to attract divine attention, as I surely would do were I ever foolish enough to face God again on the very rock where His Church was built.
Fortunately, there had been no need to do so. Borgia himself despised the dreary pile; he had visited it only a handful of times since becoming pope and spoke regularly of pulling it down. He had some scheme in mind to build a new, more glorious basilica that would stand as a tribute throughout time to his papacy. Sadly, the funds for such an ambitious enterprise did not exist and were not likely to anytime soon.
It was just as well that no one seemed to notice, far less care, that I avoided setting foot inside Peter’s Church. I could not remember when I had last made the prerequisite confession for the cleansing of one’s soul. There had been that night the previous summer when I broke down and admitted to Borgia that the possibility that I had killed Pope Innocent VIII, the Vicar of Christ, God’s chosen representative on earth, troubled me. He insisted on giving me absolution and I, weak as I am, accepted. We were both rather drunk at the time, which perhaps helps explain it.
Since then I had killed no more than three times, always in response to the attempts on Borgia’s life and always as mercifully as I could, if that counts for anything. I told myself that to kill in defense of His Holiness did not constitute sin, which was not to say that I was without transgression. Relatively smaller offenses aside—fornication, alas on too rare occasion; lying, of course, as is always necessary in our world; working on the Sabbath, if the private studies I pursued for my own benefit could really be considered work—all that aside, the truth was that a day rarely went by when I did not contemplate murder.
I say contemplate in the sense of taking out an idea, turning it this way and that, considering how better to burnish and refine it, all in an exercise intended to give me some relief from the implacable reality that the mad priest Bernando Morozzi, the true mastermind behind my father’s death and, I suspected, the instigator of the attacks against Borgia, remained very much alive.
Unsatisfied with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain the previous year, the priest with the face of an angel and the soul of the Devil had plotted to secure a papal declaration banning them from all of Christendom. I had played my role in thwarting his evil ambitions but I had failed to avenge my father’s death. Thus far.
It would hardly do to explain any of that to some hapless cleric, who would then have to scramble about for an appropriate penance when there was none, since I was most definitely not contrite and I had absolutely no intention of mending my wicked ways.
Even so, the shadows cast by Peter’s crumbling rock still had the power to make me shudder. I quickened my pace, eager to be gone, if only for a little while, from the Vatican and everything it represented.
2
The clouds had drifted off to the east, leaving Rome bathed in the clear, golden
light all painters nowadays strive to capture but few ever can. I skirted the crowd and headed for the river, crossing by the Ponte Sisto. At the bankside just beyond the bridge, I engaged a grizzled boatman who, once satisfied that I had the coin to hire him, agreed to take me upriver several miles. Say what you will about Borgia, he had brought a far greater degree of order to Rome than the city had seen in many years. Ordinary women, that is to say without armed escort, could be out and about once again without fear of molestation. Not that there still weren’t problems, no city is entirely free of crime, but all agreed that this was one thing Borgia had done well and for that most Romans were duly grateful.
The house I was bound for lay just outside the northern reaches of the city near the pleasant village of Cappriacolla. I left the boatman at the river’s edge and walked a half mile or so along a lane shaded by oak and linden trees. Brief excursions to the country suit me well enough; I was enjoying the fragrance of wild rose and honeysuckle heightened by a deep note of manure as I came upon my destination.
It was a two-story residence built around an inner courtyard with a gate on one side wide enough to accommodate a carriage or wagon but narrow enough to be secured quickly in case of trouble. The stuccowork and other exterior details were very plain, as had been the style several decades before when the house was built. Overall, a visitor could be pardoned for mistaking it for the home of a prosperous country family content with its fields and vineyards.
As I approached, half a dozen oversized mastiffs ran out, cords of drool streaming from their floppy jowls. Individually, the mastiff can be among the most affectionate of dogs. In a pack, they will not hesitate to tear a strong man apart. The leader, a male who stood as high as my waist, threw back his immense head and barked deeply in warning. I stood where I was and extended my hand with the palm up. After a moment, the leader approached and sniffed me delicately. Satisfied that I was known to him, he barked again, more of a gentle woof to signal the others, and allowed me to proceed.
I entered through the single gate and crossed the courtyard to the ground-floor loggia. In the relative coolness there, I paused for a moment. Several of the floor-to-ceiling windows stood open. I could hear the hum of conversation competing with the somnolent drone of insects in the bushes outside.
Brushing aside the billowing white curtains, I stepped over the threshold into a large, well-proportioned room with a slate floor and a high, barrel-vaulted ceiling. The far wall was dominated by a stone fireplace above which hung a tapestry said to have belonged until recently to King Charles of France. How exactly the tapestry had come into the possession of the house’s owner was a matter for conjecture.
Had I wished to do so, I could have asked him about it. Luigi d’Amico was standing nearby as I entered. He smiled and came forward.
“Francesca, how good to see you!”
It was impossible to doubt the warmth of his welcome or to fail to return it in kind. D’Amico was a big, ruddy-faced man whose gruff good nature masked a brilliant intellect. He had grown up in humble circumstances but early on had shown a knack for understanding the arcane workings of money. On that basis, he had gone into banking and, what seemed like a very short time later, found himself in possession of a large fortune. Whereas most men in his happy situation become art patrons, paying to have themselves immortalized, d’Amico turned his attention to his true passion—natural philosophy. He told me once that he wanted to understand how nature works as thoroughly as he understood money, which would have been very thoroughly indeed.
“How is our dear friend, your employer?” he inquired after we had exchanged the usual pleasantries.
“Tolerably well.” Somewhat to my surprise, d’Amico had never tried to use our association to obtain information about Borgia. There were only two possible explanations for this—that he possessed a character of unique nobility seen nowhere else on earth or that he had sources within the Vatican better than myself. As much as I liked him, I was reasonably certain that the latter was the case rather than the former.
“That is good,” he said as we went to join the others. That day there were a dozen of us. Almost all were men, but with my arrival, the group included two women. We had each made our way separately to the house. It was one of several locations where we met, taking care not to frequent any one place often enough to attract attention.
Our caution was necessary because we had all committed ourselves to a life in pursuit of knowledge, even when that put us at odds with the dictates of Holy Mother Church. If that is not exciting enough for you, if perhaps you had hoped that I was on my way to an amorous encounter to be described in salacious detail, let me remind you that for our efforts to plumb the secrets of nature we risked being accused of heresy and condemned to the flames burning throughout Christendom. I am all in favor of the moans and even occasional screams that accompany passion’s fury. It is those wrung from the unfortunates condemned to the agony of death by fire that keep me awake at night.
But I digress; it is a habit of mine.
We called ourselves Lux, for the light we hoped to bring into the world. I was the youngest and newest member of the group, to which my father had belonged before his untimely death. The others were gathered around a table at the far end of the room. Only one I had expected to see there was missing—Rocco Moroni, a glassmaker of extraordinary skill who had brought me into Lux. Two years before, Rocco had been so misguided as to my nature as to approach my father with an offer of marriage. He knew me considerably better now, and I fancied he was glad of his escape, but he remained my true friend and the unknowing object of my amorous fancies. Before I could contemplate his absence, my attention was riveted on the large map that was the subject of the group’s scrutiny.
“Juan de la Cosa drew it,” D’Amico said, naming the captain of La Santa Maria, the vessel wrecked upon the reef of what Colombo was calling Hispaniola. “One copy is on the way to Their Most Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella. The other is here.”
“I will not ask how you managed to acquire it,” I said.
Hearing my voice, a woman at the table looked up. “I think we can all surmise how he did it,” she said with a smile. “La Cosa is said to be very unhappy with the great Colombo’s treatment of him. He is determined to claim credit for himself.”
Sofia Montefiore was a middle-aged woman with a sturdy build and a cloud of silver hair pinned up haphazardly around her plain but pleasant face. She was also an apothecary and a Jewess. We had become friends the previous year, drawn together in part by the bond of both being women working in a man’s profession.
I bent forward as she spoke, studying the map. La Cosa had depicted a coastline that looked nothing at all like the Indies as it was known to those who had ventured so far in search of spices worth more than their weight of gold in Europe. His was an alien shore different from any seen before. If he was right … Mother of God, how much hung on his veracity.
“Is La Cosa in good health?” I asked.
“No pustules,” Luigi responded cheerfully with unspoken reference to the dying Pinzón. “So far as we know. He seems to be in his right mind. Besides…” He dropped his voice, engaging all of us in his confidence. “Let us not forget the cod fishers.”
Therein lay the crux of the matter. I am assuming that you eat cod, are heartily dependent on it for your well-being as is everyone I know, and therefore you understand its importance. But in case you are some species of being unknown to me, let me say that for hundreds of years the fishermen of Portugal have gone out to a vast northern fishery, which they are loath to discuss in any particular, and from there they have brought back cod in quantities sufficient to feed the greater part of Europe.
Some of the Portuguese, in their cups, have claimed to know of landfall west of where they take their cod. Some even claim to have encountered wild Norsemen with tales of other lands still further distant. Lands that it was said had been settled in centuries past only to fall victim to fierce savages who ex
pelled the Norse, a rather startling thought given their own well-earned reputation as marauders and warriors.
None of which would have mattered had not Colombo and his brother been rumored to have made a voyage north many years ago during which it was said they almost froze, ate a great deal of cod, and drank a clear and potent liquor with the Norse, who told them tales of the westward lands, which they claimed stretched farther than a man could walk in many days.
So it was said.
I bent closer still, studying the map. La Cosa had crafted it intricately, showing such isles as he had encountered but setting them apart from what he clearly believed to be a true coastline.
If he was right … how much hung on that.
“It is amazing,” I said. “If the calculations are correct—”
I was referring to the measurements made by the ancient Greek Eratosthenes, his work being well known to the Arabs, rediscovered by ourselves and confirmed many times over. As a result, any intelligent person with a mind to discover it can know the girth of the world. Only a very few, Colombo among them, have insisted that the world is much smaller and the Indies, therefore, must lie within westward reach.
“If they are correct, Colombo truly has found Novi Orbis, the New World.”
I looked up at the man who had just spoken. He was in his late twenties, a few inches shorter than d’Amico, with a dark, neatly trimmed beard and mustache. His expression was almost childlike in its innocent curiosity. This despite the fact that he wore the black and white habit of the most feared order in Holy Mother Church, the Dominicans.
Friar Guillaume could scarcely contain his excitement. He traced a finger above the coastline, careful not to touch the parchment, and sighed with delight.
“A new world,” he said. “It defies imagining. Truly, Creation holds far more marvels than our poor minds can encompass.”
