City of God

by Cecelia Holland

  “The stars in their courses fight against Florence.”

  “Indeed.”

  Nicholas had intended a joke. They were approaching the far bank, crowded with shops and churches. Garbage littered the shore under the bridge, and a line of brown foam marked the edge of the water. The ferry had just passed by on its way to Trastevere and the last little ripples of its wake were breaking on the rivershore.

  “You mock the stars,” Bruni said. “I tell you, Nicholas—that is folly.”

  “I see no reason why the movements of a few lights should determine the course of my life.”

  “Then you do not understand nature.” Leaving the bridge, Bruni slowed to let his secretary come even with him and crowded close to him, bent on the argument. “I tell you, all nature is of a piece, and what occurs in one part is reflected in some way in every other part—hence the value of learned study of the stars.”

  Nicholas rubbed his thumb on the gold handle of his walking stick. Bruni’s passion for astrology irritated him beyond reason.

  “What shall I tell the Signory?” Bruni said. “That nothing came of the meeting? How tired they must be of hearing that!”

  “As you yourself said, they ask the impossible. Nothing will force Valentino to release Caterina Sforza.”

  “That! Who cares about that any more—Valentino’s at our throats!”

  “Not really Valentino himself, is it? Only a few of his men.”

  Bruni snarled at him. “Vitelli! And Oliverotto!”

  Valentino’s two captains cherished feuds of long incidence with Florence. A sudden thought leapt into Nicholas’s head. Among Valentino’s captains, none was greater or more in favor than Gianpaolo Baglione. He stopped.

  “What are you doing now?” Bruni said, in a voice whining with irritation.

  Nicholas leaned on his walking stick, his gaze aimed down the river. “I met a man recently—perhaps—” he drew his lower lip between his teeth.

  “What is this now?”

  “I must go back. There is someone in the Trastevere who might cast some light on our difficulties.”

  “When will you come back? My letter to the Signory must go off with the next courier.”

  “Write it—I shall translate it into the cipher when I get back.” Nicholas started away through the city toward the Ponte Sisto.

  The Trastevere, as the name said, lay across the river from the rest of Rome, below the Leonine City in an elbow bend of the Tiber. It was a quarter of tavernas, tenement buildings, cow pastures, and fortresses gathered on the stony hillsides above the marshes. Cesare Borgia had a palace there, and the quarter was partial to the Pope’s son. Nicholas asked at the first piazza for directions to the Fox and Grapes and was sent off down a twisting lane, behind a haywain lumbering along on screeching wheels.

  The lane led him across a shoulder of the hill. Beyond the river a bell tolled, and others joined in, announcing the hour of noon. Soon everyone in Rome would be going home for dinner and the afternoon’s rest. Nicholas broke into a trot to pass the haywain and went down the far slope.

  In the warren of streets on the flat ground he lost his way, turning here and there among the vineyards and crumbling houses. The streets filled rapidly with people hurrying along, women coming from the baker’s with loaves under their arms, and men carrying their hoes and rakes. The street led him into a piazza where an old dry fountain stood, shaped like a scallop shell, and there he asked more directions of the idlers.

  The taverna was only three streets distant. Nicholas started off at a brisk walk. There was much yet to do today. The official letter to Florence, the secret letter that must accompany it, of which Bruni would know nothing, were still to be written and encoded. The Signory expected Nicholas to report independently, reviewing every act of Bruni’s. Of course Bruni acted very seldom, since the stars were always against him. Nicholas realized that he was yearning toward the Fox and Grapes, not for any good reason, but to see Stefano Baglione again.

  He slowed. In the rutted street ahead were children playing with a ball. On either side, the buildings rose in honey-colored stone, echoing the children’s voices. When he reached the end of the street, he stopped.

  A flight of brisk steps led down to the next street. At the bottom a priest was riding by on a donkey. The Fox and Grapes was in the piazza just beyond. Nicholas flexed his fingers around the knob of his walking stick. He had no business here. Even if Stefano were a cousin of Gianpaolo Baglione’s, he could know nothing of the mighty condottiere’s thoughts and moves. He had said as much; he knew nothing. Nicholas swallowed. He wondered what he was doing here, when he had so much important work to do. He hurried away up the street, back in the direction he had come.

  The permanent legation from the Republic of Florence to the Court of the Pope rented office rooms in a palace of the Savelli family, in the Banchi quarter of Rome. From the building’s second story Nicholas could see across the tiled roofs of the neighborhood to the Tiber, and beyond the strip of water the long, protected corridor that the Pope was having built from the palace of the Vatican to the Fortress of Sant’ Angelo. The round building within its crenelated wall had, like other places in Rome, served a variety of purposes, being once the tomb of an early Emperor. During the great plague of a few centuries before Nicholas’s time, the angel Gabriel had appeared on the squat peak of the roof to signal God’s mercy: hence the current name.

  Nicholas walked along the loggia, his face turned outward toward the city, trying to compose himself after the long meaningless walk. At the far end of the loggia he came on Bruni, in his shirt, stooping to pour water from a can into one of the potted plants that grew in the open archways. A trickle of water ran from the bottom of the next pot on in the line.

  “What did you find out?” Bruni said.

  “Nothing. Have you written the letter?”

  “It is on my desk. You may use your judgment, of course—the phrasing might be inelegant. Perhaps too blunt. I’ll expect the final draft before five.” Bruni set down the can of water. “You’ll notice that I’ve indicated our difference of opinion.”

  “Thank you,” Nicholas said.

  “I will be in my chamber if you require me.”

  Nicholas withdrew into the next room, which was the main workroom of the legation. Usually the scribes were busy at work, bent over the long tables where they wrote out the documents and copies that kept the trash gatherers of the quarter well stocked with paper. The scribes were gone now, until the late afternoon when the workday resumed. Stacks of books and papers crowded the back ledges of the tables. The stools were neatly in place and the pens stuck up from their jars like tail feathers. The sweeper had already been here and the floor was shining, still damp in places from his mop. The smell of ink lingered in the air. Nicholas in his tracks, Bruni went out the doorway that opened on the long corridor beyond, where their offices were.

  The ambassador’s family was wealthy. The walls of his chambers were draped in carpets from the Low Countries, and the furniture, ornately carved and enlivened with touches of gilt paint, had come from Germany. Along the only wall without a window, rows of shelves held Bruni’s books. The windows were all heavily draped, and the room was dim and stuffy and close. Nicholas crossed from the door to the desk. Under a book lay two sheets of paper covered with Bruni’s rakish, disorderly script. Nicholas took them down to his own chamber, in the back in the building.

  In this cubicle there was room only for his desk and chair, his shelf of books, and the inward opening of the door. When he moved into this room there had been a second chair also, but he had removed it, to discourage visitors, and turned the desk to take up the space. He sat down behind the desk and read through Bruni’s letter.

  When he had finished it, he turned his head to look out the window. One shutter was open; he could see out over the small courtyard, paved in red brick, dotted with
the white droppings of pigeons and swifts. A trellis was strung over the top of the courtyard, four or five feet below Nicholas’s window, but the vines had not yet begun to put forth the summer’s growth of canes and leaves. Nicholas planted his elbows on the desk.

  Bruni’s letter was a masterpiece of ambiguity, its central premise being that Valentino would either attack or retreat, unless he remained where he was. He advised the Signory to negotiate with the Borgia prince but conclude nothing. That was the traditional strategy of the Florentine Signory anyway: wait and see what happens. Nicholas could not remember who the chief officers of the Republic were at the moment. Every two months, elections raised an entirely new government to power. Since Nicholas had last seen Florence well more than ten years before, most of these statesmen were just names to him. In the constant shuffle in and out of office no one made a decision unless it was forced on him. Still, they hated indecision in their underlings. If the Borgia threat cost the Republic dear, someone would suffer, and Bruni was vulnerable, being out of the city.

  Across the courtyard, one of Bruni’s young aides appeared on the balcony and began to hang his shirts out to dry. He saw Nicholas and smiled and waved his hand. Nicholas looked down at the letter on his desk. He worked at keeping the rest of the delegation at a distance, yet some of them were tireless in distracting him. He turned his mind back to the real problem, which was to make a hero of Ercole Bruni.

  He took out his cipher books and translated Bruni’s letter into code. As he worked he changed Bruni’s ambiguities into his own conviction that Cesare Borgia would not attack Florence, but only hoped to frighten the Signory sufficiently that they would buy him off. From years of doctoring Bruni’s reports he had such a skill at it that he needed change only one word in ten, leaving out the temporizing phrase, converting a subordinate clause into a full emphatic sentence. Midway through he stopped to cut another quill. No one in the Signory would heed the letter, but afterward no one would be able to hang Bruni. Unfortunately, because of his surgery the letter was coming out much shorter than Bruni’s original; he filled in with a general overview of what he took to be the Borgias’ plans for the Romagna.

  When he had done that he rewrote Bruni’s original in the ornate language the ambassador considered elegant.

  While he was taking this draft in to Bruni’s chambers, Angela Borgia’s little page Piccolo clattered down the corridor on his painted high-heeled shoes. Nicholas made him wait. He left the letter with Bruni, who was reading. Pretending that the key was in his desk, he left the little silken boy outside the door and went in to open and shut a few drawers. There had to be some way to discover why the Borgias wanted a secluded place for one night. He was afraid to spy directly on them; she had warned him, and the Borgias dealt finally with spies. He determined to follow the page back to the Leonine City and see where he took the key. He fingered the key from his purse and went back to give it to the page.

  Piccolo did not take the key to the Leonine City.

  Nicholas followed him easily; the rose and azure costume was visible for a whole street’s length in the quiet afternoon, and the boy’s short legs carried him at a pace well under Nicholas’s customary walking speed. In their long tandem, they crossed the city away from the Tiber, heading west and south, and passed through a ruined gate in an old broken wall. Halfway down the next little street, Nicholas stopped, his instincts warning him, and watched the little boy go through the gate in a wall.

  Nicholas withdrew into the mouth of an alleyway. He knew this wall, that gate: behind it was the chapter house of an order of Spanish monks.

  For several moments he watched the gate, until the little pink and blue figure came out again. The boy looked tired. He went on down the street toward Nicholas, but just before he would have passed by, he turned into another lane and went that way down the hillside. He was going straight back to the Leonine City.

  Nicholas remained in the alleyway for some time, watching the gate. No one else appeared, going in or out. There were back gates, of course, posterns, easy places to scale the wall. The key could be on its way elsewhere and probably was. Yet it was enough for Nicholas that its route had taken it through a house of monks loyal to the crown of Aragon. The Borgias were Aragonese. The crown of Naples rested at the moment on the head of a prince of Aragon.

  The French king disputed that, of course, and the Pope and the Pope’s son were supposed to be allied with the French. Nicholas went back down the street toward the embassy.

  He had his private letter yet to write. While he was bent over his pen worrying out phrases there was a knock on the door. He ignored it. He was working at the edge of his desk, where the light was brightest; the sun would set within moments behind the building to the west.

  After a moment the door behind him creaked.

  “Messer Nicholas.”

  It Was Ugo, Bruni’s junior aide. Nicholas did not raise his head from his work. “Yes.”

  “I wonder if I might ask your advice, Messer Nicholas?” Ugo shut the door behind him. He squeezed into the space between the edge of the desk and the wallshelf overflowing with books. “It’s about Giambattista, Messer Nicholas.”

  Giambattista was Bruni’s other junior aide.

  “I caught him reading his Excellency’s privy daybook.”

  With Ugo before him and talking, Nicholas finally raised his head and looked into the broad swarthy face. Ugo’s eyes gleamed with a feral shine.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Nicholas said.

  “I thought you would want to know.”

  Nicholas jerked up on his feet. He was so angry the words rushed together in his throat and he sputtered like a fool. Then he shouted, “No! I don’t want to know!” He dropped down into his chair. His cheeks were hot. He swiped with his hand at Ugo. “Go away.”

  “Messer Nicholas—”

  “Go away!”

  The young man fumbled open the door and left. Nicholas sat with his pen over the paper. They were always trying to draw him into their petty feuds. He could fritter away his time as Bruni did, on nothing, if he allowed them to intrude on his work. After the interruption he could not write; he was too distracted even to read the last few words he had written before Ugo broke in on him. They treated him as if he had nothing of importance to do. Trying to enmesh him in every petty vice of embassies. He forced himself to read the last sentence he had written. He read it again. His mind steadied. This was important, this analysis of events, judgment, and reason. He read the sentence a third time, reassured, put his pen to paper, and followed out the thought.

  When Nicholas arrived at the house of his friend Amadeo, with whom he was to dine, there were already several other people there. He gave his walking stick and coat to the servant and took his place at the table. Another servant brought him a glass of wine.

  Amadeo took a deep interest in the relics from the antique world that were to be found all over Rome; it seemed sometimes that hardly a day passed without some laborer, cultivating the earth in a vineyard, digging up an art work of classical times. With his large fortune, got in trade, Amadeo had managed to acquire a number of pieces. His house was filled with them. In this room, where he was accustomed to entertain his friends, chunks of sculpted marble stood in niches in the walls and on pedestals formed like Corinthian columns, and slabs of low-relief hung on the walls. The slabs on the walls were a special collection of Amadeo’s, being specimens of the phalluses in low-relief that the old Romans had put up on the gates and outer walls of their houses to ward off evil spirits.

  At the table—actually three tables, set up to form a U—Amadeo’s friends sat talking in Latin, about the historian Livy. Nicholas sipped his wine. It comforted him that Amadeo had no taste for good wine. He bought what was expensive and the wine sellers knew it and loved to cheat him. The men near the head of the table were talking about the decline of virtue from the early Republic to Livy�
��s own time.

  “For Livy, of course,” one man said, “virtue meant something quite other than for us.”

  “Another example, my dear friend, of the decline in virtue,” said a man across the table, and the others laughed, applauding the neat Latin pun.

  Nicholas disagreed with the premise of their conversation but he said nothing. Once he had believed, as they did, that Livy should be read by the letter, but he had realized that the ancient historian had despaired of his fellows and to remind them of their duty he presented an idealized past as an example. People did not change so much from age to age. The uses a state might make of people changed. Nicholas did not expound on these thoughts. His Latin was more Benedictine than Ciceronian and he had no desire to be laughed at.

  A few moments later Amadeo came in.

  “Nicholas,” he said, and came and sat down on Nicholas’s right, all smiling. “I was afraid you might not come.”

  “You must excuse me for being late,” Nicholas said. “We are quite overwhelmed with work at the legation.”

  “But you are here. What else matters? Later—after dinner—there will be some other interesting guests.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “You will see.”

  At that Amadeo took his place at the head of the table, and called for the servants to bring in the dinner. After the soup, there was a platter of chickens stuffed with plums; and then, to everyone’s amazement, asparagus, which set off a clamoring that Amadeo reveal where he had gotten asparagus before Easter. Amadeo smiled and smiled and would not tell anyone anything.

  At any rate the asparagus was woody. Nicholas did not eat very much.

  After the fruit and cheese the table was cleared away and talk went to Valentino and the affairs of the states of Italy. Now everyone was speaking in Italian. Nicholas sat cutting thin slices of apple with his knife and putting thin slices of white cheese on top, eating each one before he went on to make the next.