“It’s obvious.”
“You will tell them of the matter of Pisa?”
Nicholas nodded his head. “Will you take wine?”
“No. We are leaving now for Cesena in the Romagna.” Miguelito’s smile broadened. “I will see you again, after Urbino.”
“Oh?”
“Yes—if it fails, he will want you notified appropriately.” Miguelito nudged him, as if that were a joke they could share. He brushed by Nicholas and went out the door.
Nicholas pushed the door shut. When he turned, Stefano said, “Who was that?—Sweet Jesus, you are white as a ghost!”
“It’s nothing.” Nicholas went across the room to his chair; his legs were wobbling, although he could not tell if Miguelito’s threat had made him coltish, or only that his plans were at last to come to bloom. He sat down. Juan stood in the kitchen threshold, unsmiling, his eyes sharp. Nicholas raised his head.
“You may serve us now.”
“Who was that man?” Stefano asked. “On my life, Nicholas, you are still pale as death. What did he say to you?”
“Just a messenger.”
“What did he say?”
Nicholas put his hand up to his face, shielding himself from Stefano’s eyes. “Nothing—it was the cold wind in the doorway. That’s all. Why I paled.” He raised his voice. “Juan! Serve me!”
Unsettled, he spoke in Italian. Stefano cleared his throat. His gaze never left Nicholas. Not his interest so much as his right to an interest annoyed Nicholas and made him uneasy. He had no self any more that was safe from the man. Juan brought their meal on a tray painted with red poppies. Besides the soup, made of onions and dusted with a fine Italian cheese, he had brought them bread, a thick yellow butter, and a cake filled with slices of apple.
“Magnificent,” Stefano said. He leaned forward eagerly over the soup.
Nicholas could barely eat. He stirred his soup with his spoon, his eyes lowered. Everything in his plan against Urbino depended on speed and surprise. The roads were good, but a sudden rain, an accident, a landslide in a mountain pass, any unforeseeable freak would bring Miguelito back to his door with his looped bowstring in his hand.
Stefano leaned back. “Old one!” He snapped his fingers at Juan. “Come take this dish.”
“Damn you!” Nicholas flung his spoon down. “Stop ordering my servant about!”
Stefano goggled at him in round surprise. Juan came up and removed the empty soup dish.
“I will not have you ordering my servant around,” Nicholas cried.
“Calm yourself,” Stefano said.
“Per Baccho, I shall not listen to you speak so to me! I am not to be patronized, my man! Get out of my house!”
Stefano looked up at Juan, and returned his gaze to Nicholas; his expression was abstracted and pensive. Swollen with his feelings. Nicholas could not keep still; he cried again, “Get out!” and Stefano rose from his chair and left.
Juan stood in the kitchen doorway, watching the soup bowl in his hands. Nicholas could not meet the old man’s eyes. He pushed his chair back and went away to his bedchamber.
The surprise attack against Urbino would not come until well into the spring’s campaign. Valentino spent the first months of the warming year raising his army. He had no trouble there; soldiers grew in the Romagna as if the stones were dragon’s teeth. Nicholas read every report, talked to every traveler he could find from the north, and heard of turmoil and excitement but no real action.
Bruni hired a new scribe, who could barely write three words without a gross error. At first Nicholas corrected him patiently; then he kept the boy in the workroom during the afternoon to practice; finally he lost his temper and beat the boy with his walking stick.
The youth’s screams set the other scribes roaring with laughter; Bruni came down the corridor from his chamber to see what was happening.
Nicholas’s walking stick cracked its length. He let the sobbing boy go. Taking the stick into the sunlight by the archway that opened on the loggia, he inspected the split in the wood. Behind him, the other scribes screeched jibes at the beaten boy.
“Now, Messer Nicholas,” Bruni said.
Heavy feet sounded on the stair and a dusty man rushed into the room. “Arezzo!” he cried. “Arezzo!”
All the others hushed. The courier was pulling his dispatch case off over his head. Nicholas’s fingers curled. He saw Bruni standing as if he grew up out of the marble floor.
“Excellency.”
Bruni started forward. “Give me the dispatches,” he said in a commanding voice.
“Arezzo,” the messenger said. He thrust the case into Bruni’s hands. “The most horrible rumors—”
“Shut up,” Nicholas called. “Whatever’s happened, keep it to yourself.” He dropped his broken stick and went around the room herding the scribes and the pages back to their tasks. To the beaten boy, he said, “Take this courier downstairs and give him some wine and help him get his boots off.” For that the boy need not know infinitives.
Bruni was disappearing down the corridor. His face grimy with tears, the boy shambled across the room to the courier. Nicholas cast a sharp look around him, to see that everyone else was occupied, and went down after the ambassador to his chamber.
Bruni settled himself behind his desk and slit the seal on the dispatch case with a knife. He spilled the letter packets onto the desk. There were many, but most of them were marked for some other destination than this office; only three were actually addressed to the legation, and only one was marked with the red wax that announced a special, secret message.
Nicholas stood on the far side of the office. He locked his fingers together behind his back.
“Arezzo,” Bruni said. “I knew there was a disaster coming, the sky’s most ominous.” He slit the red wax seals.
Nicholas said nothing.
The ambassador opened out the folded letter. A moment later he pushed it across the sleek surface of the desk toward Nicholas.
“Make of that what you will.” Bruni rubbed his palm over his eyes.
The message was short; wild rumors were traveling the roads from Arezzo, no direct word had reached Florence from the subject city in many days, and the Signory feared that something evil had taken place there. Bruni was to learn all necessary to an understanding of the situation. Nicholas glanced at the signature: the city’s Gonfalonier. He felt nothing, not even relief, only a cool distance from all this.
“Where do we begin?” Bruni was saying. “What can we do? Arezzo is much closer to Florence than to us. Why do they not simply send a messenger there to look? What do they consider me—a crystal-gazer?”
Amazed, Nicholas watched him take up the novel lying to one side of his desk and opened its pages. Bruni seemed to shrink down into his chair, settling himself to read. The little silence grew. Finally the ambassador looked up.
“You do it, Nicholas. This is your sort of work. Report to me when you have satisfied the request.”
“Yes, Excellency.”
Bruni was already deep into his novel. Nicholas gathered up the dispatches, stuffed them back into the case, and returned to the workroom.
When he had arranged to have various messages delivered, he went off across the Tiber to the Leonine City.
As he walked, the thought of Stefano forced its way into his mind. He had not seen Stefano since the night he had ordered him to go. Of course Stefano would not come back, and Nicholas did not intend to go to him. It was not what Stefano had done but what Nicholas had done that prevented it: he would not admit to being a frightened fool. The only way to save his dignity was to act as if he regretted nothing. Still he could not help thinking of Stefano every day, nearly every hour.
Where the street narrowed down to enter the lane of the bridge, the traffic crowded together, wagons and folk on foot and on mules, and N
icholas had to shorten his steps. Without his walking stick his hands seemed awkward no matter what he tried to do with them. The ripe smell of the river reached his nose. He passed a large orange cat sitting on the stone railing of the bridge. The cat turned its head to look at him; one eye was a brilliant luminous green, but the other had been gouged out and nothing remained but the oozing socket. Nicholas’s stomach heaved. He hurried on across the bridge.
With a crowd of monks and foreigners he walked up the street at the foot of the Vatican wall. Near the gate of the palace were wine sellers and orange sellers hawking their wares in several tongues. Everyone seemed to be shouting. Nicholas thought again of the cat. It was like an omen, somehow, like a messenger waiting there on the bridge for him, although what its message might have been he could not sieve from his confused imagination. The pavement under his feet, here and there marked with the Papal seal, was slippery with spilled wine and peelings of fruit. Near the palace entrance a man in foreign clothes was calmly pissing into the street in full view of every passer-by. Nicholas went up the street and into the palace. He told himself that his current height of feeling gave everything he saw a false reality; none of this meant anything, not even the cat.
The palace was crowded, although the Pope was receiving no one. Nicholas wandered from one room to the next. With Angela Borgia gone off to Ferrara he had lost his prime source of information and one of his chief means of gaining entry to the inner circles of the Borgias. Of course he was a hireling of the prince now, but he could not trade too openly on that, lest the Signory learn of it.
He did not consider that he had betrayed the Signory. They had made mistakes, and he was only making use of that; they had betrayed themselves. Nothing would come of it all anyway, in the end, nothing ever did.
In a long narrow room, among other familiars of the Borgia court, he found Valentino’s secretary.
“I need some information,” Nicholas said.
The secretary was eating a peach. In his free hand was a napkin poised to catch the dripping juices. Calmly he bit into the fruit, swallowed, and said, “Of what sort?”
“The campaign against Arezzo. My emp—the Signory of Florence is hot to know what is happening there.”
The secretary laughed, holding his lips tightly closed to keep in the juice of the peach. He touched his lips with the napkin. “What can I tell you of that, who planned the whole of it? Except possibly this: Piero de’ Medici is coming to Arezzo.”
“Possibly you could tell me that,” Nicholas said.
It was a decorative addition to the plan that he had not considered, to bring the exiled prince into the rebellion.
“And the rest of the campaign goes well?”
“Excellently well,” the secretary said, having nothing left in his fingers save the pit of the peach; he looked around him for some way to discard it Nicholas took it from him.
“Allow me the honor.” He bowed, and the secretary, his smile more natural, gave him an elegant courtesy in reply. Nicholas left. As he passed over the bridge below Sant’ Angelo, he flung the peach pit into the Tiber.
“What can I tell them?” Bruni said. “There is no hope to give them.”
Nicholas went back to the door into the ambassador’s chamber and opened it, so that he could see down the corridor and make sure that no one spied. His eyes directed there, he said, “They do not need hope, only facts. Arezzo is in the hands of Valentino, and I have heard that the citizens of Pisa are offering him their city—”
“Holy Mary, Mother of Mercy.”
“But the forces that protected Florence last year have not changed. The French are committed to keeping the Republic independent of the Pope. The presence of the Spanish army in Naples will only strengthen their resolve to help us.”
Bruni was shaking his head, his face long with gloom, and his arms folded over his breast. “You have misread the thing—the Spanish are the Borgias’ protectors, and the protectors of the de’ Medici, and they, not the French, possess the main force in Italy. Close the door! Do you want the entire quarter to hear us?”
Nicholas toed the door shut; no one seemed interested in spying. As usual the drapery was closed over Bruni’s windows and the chamber was gloomy as a crypt. Nicholas took out his tinderbox to light the two candles on the wall behind Bruni’s desk. At the blooming of the light Bruni jerked his head away.
“Excellency, we must have light to compose the letter.”
“I cannot write the letter,” Bruni said.
“Surely Valentino is trying to frighten the Signory into negotiating. We must help them—”
He stopped. Bruni was opening a drawer of his desk; he was removing from it a leather-bound novel, the same one he had been reading when Nicholas left that morning for the Leonine City.
“I cannot write the letter,” Bruni said. “You write it, Nicholas. You always change everything I say anyway.”
“Excellency.”
Bruni spread the novel open on his desk. “This is a fine story, Nicholas. The knight’s true-love puts him to every test, and yet he remains pure of heart and ever-faithful.”
Nicholas’s mouth hung open; he stood like a day-scholar, gaping, while Bruni spoke. Not Ugo, then, but Bruni himself must have made Nicholas’s work known to Valentino. Bruni had known all the while what Nicholas was doing in the letters. Bruni, who now lowered himself into his novel and read himself away. Nicholas went out of the office.
Nicholas worked over the letter until long after the rest of the legation had gone; by the time he shut up the offices and went away to his home and his supper, night had fallen.
The sky was moonless, sprinkled with stars sparkling in their subtle colors, and the air was humid and warm. Tomorrow would be a hot day, the first day of the summer. Nicholas enjoyed the walk, only wishing that he had his walking stick. He had seldom needed its support but the feel of the knob and the sound tapping in the road had added something to the walk. Also he thought that it made him look more interesting. He was crossing the piazza below the Campidoglio when he noticed several men following him.
He stopped at once. From here the way was narrow and dark, and he knew better than to lead a pack into such a place. Immediately the men surrounded him.
“Don’t be foolish,” Nicholas said. “The watch will come by at any moment.”
There were four of them, all standing very close to him. He opened his hands and closed them again.
“I have no money.”
Something hard struck his arm from behind, numbing it to the elbow. “Get your hands up!”
He put up his hands. They could see he had no weapon, nothing but his tongue, which ran out of control.
“I have no money. You’re wasting your time. The watch will come by any moment now.”
A blow on the side of the head knocked him to the street. He knew they would kill him. He had come so happily, so innocently to this.
“Wait,” a rough voice said, “that’s Il Bello’s honey man.”
“He’s rich! Get his purse.”
“Il Bello is a bad man to run against.”
“He says he has no money anyway.”
They were going. They were leaving him alone there. Disbelieving, he lifted his head, and the last to go cast him an angry look and swung his foot at him, which Nicholas dodged by rolling over. Now that man too was hurrying away across the empty piazza.
In the tower of the Aracoeli, up on the hill, a bell began to toll.
Nicholas stood up, his coat filthy with grit and his left arm still a lump without feeling. Il Bello: Stefano. He tugged at his clothes. His hose was torn on one knee and he had lost a shoe. All the bells in Rome were beginning to toll around him and he could hear the monks assembling on the stairs of the Aracoeli, behind him, but he did not turn.
Stefano: Il Bello. He began to walk painfully toward his home. It didn�
�t matter, really. Stefano did not matter, and it was a weakness to long for him, especially now, when at last Nicholas’s own influence and work were of weight in Rome. That was important, not Stefano. He lifted his head up, he was walking along under the trees that lined the street toward the Colosseo, and the dusty air pent under their broad canopies brushed over his face. His arm was tingling to life again, throbbing. His life he owed to Stefano, whom he had cast out. He dragged himself painfully back to his house, where Juan would care for him.
Fixed as usual on the recovery of Pisa, the Florentine Signory paid little heed to the rebellion in Arezzo, although Nicholas wrote two letters describing the situation there as needing quick action. Then in the height of the summer, Piero de’ Medici, head of the exiled house, entered Arezzo with Vitellozzo Vitelli, a captain of Valentino’s who owed the Signory a blood debt for the killing of his brother; the Aretines packed the streets to cheer them all the way to the palace. The Signory panicked. A courier rushed orders to the Florentine ambassador with the French king to plead for help, and duly enough King Louis sent orders to his troops in Milan to support the city against Valentino.
Talk of this dominated every gathering in Italy through the summer. No one marked it especially when Duke Valentino, with the cannon borrowed from his new ally Guidobaldo da Urbino, marched away across Guidobaldo’s territory to attack Camerino.
In the heat of the summer night Nicholas slept in snatches, tormented by dreams. He woke once before midnight and went out to the kitchen for a cool glass of wine to settle his sleep. Juan slept on his cot in the narrow space between the wall and the wooden table. Nicholas slipped past him; the old man turned and broke into a hollow snore. Nicholas drank his wine and returned to his bed.
Yet he did not sleep. He lay on his back, thinking of Stefano.
Somewhere nearby a dog began to bark. Nicholas rolled over; the sound penetrated his ears like thorns. He rolled over again, trying to stop his ears with the pillow. The light sheet slid off his body and he clutched at it and pulled it up over his shoulders.
City of God Page 14
