I was so deep in these soothing thoughts that I did not notice the man who had fallen in step with me until he skipped ahead, turned and bowed, very politely forcing me to stop. Polite or not, my hand went to the green stone of my knife hilt, for this was a city where people had fallen into the habit of slicing each other up over the most trivial slights. But this fellow was smiling and bowing again, and I decided he was probably not an assassin.
‘What do you want?’ I demanded crossly. An escape is an escape, and I was not going to let myself be troubled by duty, at least not for the rest of the day.
‘Sir Petrus Zennorius?’ I nodded, curtly. ‘My master would be vastly gratified if you would indulge him with a scant …’ He waved his arms gently, like seaweed in a rock pool. ‘A mere nibble, a morsel of your time.’ I sighed in exasperation and looked him up and down. Tall, dressed in sober colours – although the cloth was expensive – he held himself loosely, as if every sinew of his body were waiting for the command that would make him most appealing to whoever stood before him. But I was not in the mood for foppish interruptions.
‘And who is your master?’ I growled.
‘Cardinal John of San Lorenzo in Lucina,’ announced the man, with a sort of breathless triumph. He might have been announcing the end of the world, and my imminent acceptance into the bosom of the Lord – shoeless, at this rate. At least the angels would not be jealous. But wait. Cardinal John – John of Toledo, as I thought of him – what was he doing in Florence? A very powerful man indeed, far too powerful to have a fop like this wretch run errands for him. But perhaps he was not such a fop after all. He had a pale, indoor face, nondescript save for a slight wall-eye, and his hair was covered by a black coif tied tight. There was something steely beneath his apparent limpness. Perhaps that was why I still had a finger on the hilt of my knife.
‘Why would your exalted master require even a morsel of my day?’ I wondered aloud. But of course I knew the answer: a loan, a deposit – even, perhaps, a relic, though I was asked for those less and less these days. I would have to follow this nitwit, then. I had escaped the bank’s masonry, but not its responsibility. God’s liver! Iselda’s shoes would have to wait for an hour. ‘Very well, lead me,’ I said. ‘But I cannot stay long.’
‘No, no, of course not,’ simpered the messenger, and bowing again, he set off up the street.
I followed, admitting to myself as I did so that it was curiosity more than anything else that was steering me off course. For in those years the city of Florence was very much in the hands of families like the Amidei and Donati, who were loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick von Hohenstaufen. And Cardinal John – an Englishman, in fact, a Cistercian abbot who had ended up in Spain before receiving the call of His Holiness – was the pope’s man through and through. It would be hard to imagine a more staunch supporter of Pope Innocent, and such a fellow would not expect to be made welcome in Florence. No indeed: he would have to feel quite certain of his safety. And it was partly for that reason that I had begun to doubt that this simpering personage clicking along in front of me was as ineffectual as he seemed.
I had been heading towards Santa Trinità, and I was being led in that direction, but we passed the church and dived into the alleys between it and the river. The buildings ended and there was the Arno, sluggish and disreputable, its waters low, streaked with grease and dye from the tanneries and butchers upstream on the Ponte Vecchio. My guide turned to make sure I was following, and beckoned me onto the old wood of the Ponte alla Carraia. Why in the name of Saint Lawrence’s sizzling hide were we going to Oltrarno? He turned right into the Borgo San Frediano and after a minute halted beside the nondescript brick front of a church. San Frediano – I knew it only because, years ago, some workers repairing the floor had dug up a jumble of old bones and the ambitious deacon had tried to sell them to Captain de Montalhac as priceless relics of an ancient martyr. But now I caught on. San Frediano was also a Cistercian cloister, and where else would John of Toledo feel safe in this dangerous city?
The church was empty except for a man wrapped in a dark cloak, sitting in a pew in front of the altar. The messenger signalled for me to wait halfway down the aisle. He tapped across the tiles, bent and whispered something in the shrouded figure’s ear. Cardinal John of San Lorenzo in Lucina stood up and his messenger nodded to me. I squared my shoulders and marched towards them. I was in no mood to be intimidated. If they wanted something from me, they could ask. And there was nothing I wanted from them. I had seen the cardinal once before from a distance in the Lateran, but I recognised the triangular face, the hollow cheeks and the large eyes that seemed out of place in their owner’s austere visage. He held out his hand and, like the professional courtier I had come to be, I kissed his ring of office.
‘Thank you for coming to see me, my son,’ he said. He spoke in English, though his speech had been warmed by the southern lands in which he had spent his life. In this he sounded, I supposed, somewhat like myself.
‘Any opportunity to serve Mother Church,’ I replied, icily polite.
‘Of course. I knew you could be relied upon. Now, if you can bear another short walk, shall we allow Remigius to lead us?’ Without waiting for my reply, he inclined his head meaningfully towards the messenger, who all of a sudden seemed to have found a new tightness in his joints. He strode out of the church with us close behind.
‘You are not married, are you, my son?’
‘No, Your Eminence.’
‘Iselda de Rozers – is that her name? Charming, by all accounts. You are such a fortunate man, Sir Petrus. But the godly, my son, the godly seek the sanctity of the vow of marriage.’
‘Might I enquire where we are going, Your Eminence?’ I asked.
‘Certainly. We are going to visit an alchemist.’
I blinked. I had obviously not heard properly. ‘An alchemist? That is … unexpected.’
‘So much is, my son, especially in these times. Don’t you agree?’
Did this require a diplomatic answer or a casual one? I had been trying, quite successfully, to remove unexpectedness from my life these past three years. As a banker I dealt in stability and safety. As a banker … A thought struck me and I stole a glance at the cardinal. He did not look like a charlatan, nor did he seem particularly gullible. But alchemists and bankers both concerned themselves with gold. I sighed. I did not have the time for fool’s errands, and if my suspicions were correct I was, at this moment, being taken for a mooncalf. Surely the Church had not come to believe in the transmutation of base metals? How ridiculous. But then I caught something in John of Toledo’s expression. There was a jest here. Was I being made the butt of some juvenile sort of ecclesiastical japery? A cardinal and that ridiculous Remigius, trying to set up one of the richest bankers in Christendom for … for what, exactly? And then an even less palatable thought struck me. What if I were not being set up for a joke, but for something entirely different? Iselda and I had been more than scrupulous about appearing to the world as perfect Christians – obsessively so, given our business and our clients. But this short walk … By ‘alchemist’, did the cardinal, by any chance, mean Inquisitor, someone who brought truth from the vile matter of heresy, as an alchemist brought forth gold from dross? Very carefully I laid my forefinger back onto the hilt of my knife.
At that moment, thrumming through the air and the walls of the houses, came a low, muffled but powerful BOOM.
‘What the devil …’ Cardinal John glanced at Remigius, and for a moment the two men looked quite stricken. Then Remigius gathered himself.
‘If Your Eminence will forgive me?’ he muttered, and all his floppy exquisiteness transformed itself suddenly into hard, purposeful angles. He sprinted off and vanished round a nearby corner.
‘Follow me,’ snapped the cardinal, and set off briskly after him.
My tumbling thoughts had not yet ordered themselves in my skull by the time we had negotiated a brief tangle of mean, smelly passageways and climbed the
gentle slope of the Monte San Giorgio. In a few minutes we had found Remigius had stopped in front of a nondescript doorway in a low building of wood and brick that was slowly leaning across the alley as if it meant, one day, to kiss the house opposite. He was hammering on the door, listening, and then hammering again. As we trotted up, the handle shook and the door creaked open. I had expected to see some wild-eyed creature in the robes of a magus, but instead a very young Cistercian novice appeared, his face as white as his robes, where those were not spattered with drying blood and streaked with soot.
‘Ah. Ivo. What in Christ’s name is going on?’ said the cardinal. The young man looked at us with red-rimmed eyes and slumped against the door, dragging it wider. Now I saw thin lines of blood running from his ears. Remigius draped himself against the jamb and bowed elegantly as John of Toledo stepped past him.
No Inquisitors, just a large, cluttered room, walls dark, stained with smoke, lined with shelves groaning under the weight of jars, boxes, stacks of parchment, the skulls of men and beasts, skins, lumps of stone. The one window was filthy and let in a thin beam of whey-coloured light that struggled through thick ropes of smoke that coiled slowly midway between floor and ceiling. I stood, blinking, breathing in the heavy air. Flies were humming, a single deep note.
‘Up there,’ said Cardinal John.
The alchemist’s head was staring down at us from the ceiling. At least, I assumed that was who I was looking at. Like a small, shaggy ape it squatted, wedged between a rafter and a beam, leering. The rest of him sat in a high-backed chair before a workbench cluttered with papers, vials, alembics and bits of stone and metal, in the midst of which spread a dark flower of charred wood and blackened shards. The body was leaning forward slightly, propped on its arms, which were burned and blistered. There was a strong smell of roast meat in the air which masked something else, something …
‘Brimstone?’ I asked Ivo. The young novice was at my side, looking as if he was about to puke down the front of his robes.
‘WHAT?’
‘Brimstone … damn. BRIMSTONE?’
‘IF YOU SAY SO,’ he bellowed, his voice rich with rising bile.
‘What happened here?’ the cardinal leaned over and shouted in the poor boy’s wounded ear.
‘There was nothing I could do!’ The lad was trembling, his voice raised over a sound only he could hear. ‘I … I came at first light, as instructed, with the letter and the gold—’
‘All here,’ said Remigius, holding up a charred purse.
Ivo threw him a terrified glance. ‘And he was very excited, as you said he would be, Eminence. He said he was going to put on a demonstration for you, and he ran around like a madman – he was a madman – sticking foul powders under my nose and grinding, mixing, cooking up devilment … I didn’t know what was going on, did I? He was bending over his pestle and mortar, trying to light an oil lamp with a taper, there was a flash …’ Ivo dragged his hands down his face, his red eyes staring. ‘I didn’t hear anything then, but now I do! Now I do!’
‘God’s breechclout! Get outside, you idiot!’ The cardinal grabbed the novice’s shoulder and shoved him towards the door. The lad took a last wild look around the room and vanished into the light outside. Meanwhile, Cardinal John was squinting up through the swirling dust motes at the head. ‘Get that broom,’ he said to me, more politely. I saw it, leaning against the wall. As soon as I handed it to him he passed it to Remigius with a nod. The messenger made a face, raised the broom handle first, and began to jab at the head.
‘Stuck fast,’ he hissed. ‘Ah. There it goes.’ He gave a last prod, and in a sudden flurry of wet hair and pallid skin it fell off its perch and landed with a hollow thud at our feet. Remigius stooped and, grabbing it by a forelock, picked it up and held it dangling before him. The head swung like a lazy pendulum, spinning slowly, and a blue eye, dull and dead, seemed to regard us one by one. The other eye was lost in a churned welter of charred flesh.
‘Give me that,’ said the cardinal. He took a handful of hair and held the thing up in front of him.
‘You bloody fool,’ he muttered malevolently into the ruined face.
‘Who was he?’ I asked the cardinal.
‘Called himself Meister Nibelungus. German – of course, with a name like that – from Franconia. An odd sort of fellow, but then again: alchemists …’ To my relief he stopped twirling the head and set it down on the workbench, so that it gazed up with its one good eye at the stump of the neck where it had so recently made its home. I leaned over and closed the eyelid: that gleam of dulling blue was beginning to play on my nerves.
‘Your Eminence, why exactly did you bring me here? This is not, I take it, what you intended me to see,’ I said. Cardinal John turned from examining a row of misshapen skulls and shook his head.
‘Alchemists. Heretics and devil-worshippers, in my opinion. Judging by this mess, our friend Nibelungus did not stumble upon the Philosopher’s Stone … or there again, perhaps he did, eh?’ He chuckled.
‘A little extreme, as epiphanies go,’ I agreed, to be polite.
‘I had intended you to meet him,’ he said, ruefully. ‘Meanwhile, it seems that his labours are at an end. What a shame.’ He winced as he examined the bloody stump of the man’s neck. ‘Careless. Now then, you are as courtly as they say, my son. You have not demanded to know why you are here.’
‘I was about to, never fear,’ I said. I should have been angry – angry, at the very least – but the carnage in this room seemed to have drained all the outrage from me.
‘The answer is before you,’ he said, tapping gently at the centre of the charred circle on the workbench. Remigius, whose long fingers were tinkling through the litter of broken glass at its far edge, looked up and narrowed his eyes.
‘Alchemy? My dear cardinal, you surely … I mean, I have gold enough, and this is far from the business of Mother Church, is it not?’
‘Ha ha.’ Cardinal John laughed perfunctorily. ‘Nibelungus was not searching for gold or the Philosopher’s Stone when this happened.’
‘What, then?’
‘The Drug.’
He said it under his breath, though it was an ordinary enough word.
‘Medicine? Medicine did this to him? What, in the name of … of …’ My voice was rising, and John of Toledo was eyeing me sharply. ‘Your Eminence, I certainly know nothing, not one thing, about medicine.’ Then light, such as it was, dawned. ‘Ah. Some ingredient was required? Some esoteric tincture? Dried mummy powder? Really, Your Eminence: you of all people should reject this superstition.’ I fell into a whisper. ‘I suppose Your Eminence has some malady, and …’
‘Not I,’ said Cardinal John.
‘The Holy Father, then.’ I looked at him, frowning.
‘No, not Innocent. His opposite.’ John of Toledo was studying me so intently that he might have been counting the pores on my nose.
‘Wait – we are speaking of the emperor? Frederick is ill?’ I said, surprised out of my anger. ‘And what affliction was this drug supposed to cure?’
‘Ah, well. Not cure.’
‘Oh.’ Suddenly I hardly dared draw breath. ‘So this was poison.’
The cardinal chuckled, but his teeth were clenched. ‘Oh, indeed. A poison for the whole world.’
‘What are you conjuring here, Your Eminence?’ I asked him quietly but urgently. ‘I will have no part of it: you may be sure of that.’
‘This was not a plot, Sir Petrus – your conscience may rest easy.’ The cardinal seemed to be making a jest, but his voice was smooth and cold. ‘I wanted to show you a glimpse of what is to come – it seems I was too ambitious, however.’
‘To come? Poison is as old as the mountains,’ I said. ‘If you mean to poison Frederick, I would rather not know about it.’
‘As a businessman?’
‘You need only ask me where my loyalties lie, Your Eminence,’ I told him, icily. ‘Indeed yes, I am a businessman, and so my loyalty stands with my clients. Am
ongst whom I count the most pious King of France, various of your own esteemed colleagues, and indeed the Holy Father himself. I’m guessing that you already know I have also dealt with several of the emperor’s more important allies – Ezzelino da Romano for one. But, again as a businessman, I have found that Frederick’s warring in Lombardy has disturbed the flow of trade, and that does not help my bank.’
Cardinal John leaned over and picked up the head once more. He began to swing it lazily between us like a censer. ‘Let me put it bluntly, my son. Are you Guelph or Ghibbeline? We are in Florence, after all, and you have certainly had to answer that question before.’
‘Your Eminence, I am, like you, an Englishman, and my liege lord is Richard, Earl of Cornwall. By that token alone I am Guelph: England is for the Holy Father.’ It was not hard to inject just the right note of self-righteousness into my voice, and I could tell from the cardinal’s face that he was convinced. Of course he was: I claimed as many allegiances as I had customers, and could make my honour bristle for each of them. But in truth my only loyalty was to the few people I loved, and the rest, to me, was nothing but gaudy show, cheap and flashy as the stuff hung out on Venetian holidays. Still, cheap as I held it, my skill had kept me alive thus far: alive and rich.
‘Nicely put, Sir Petroc,’ said the cardinal. ‘I did not bring you here to question your loyalty, but to strengthen it.’
‘I still have no idea what you mean,’ I insisted. The cardinal seemed to have relaxed: he was smiling again.
‘Unlike you, the wretched Nibelungus was neither scrupulous nor a good businessman – and apparently not the great alchemist his reputation promised.’ He set the head down again and wiped his hands on his robe.
‘Apparently.’ We stood there listening to the alchemist’s blood drip, drip, drip onto the scorched wood.
‘We heard he was brewing something the emperor intended to use against the Holy See,’ the cardinal said at last.
The Fools’ Crusade Page 2
