by Kate Quinn
A tricky business, asking questions over a hand of cards. One had to time the questions after wine had begun to loosen tongues, but before it had addled wits; after the game’s cards had been dealt, but before the tensity of the final hands set in. Men flushed with victory and money were quickest to talk, and I spent three weeks losing coin and gritting my teeth as my opponents made jests about little men who were short in luck as well as stature.
My heart thumped the first night I saw a man with a bull on his livery, and an uproarious game of zara got me the information that he worked in the household of Cardinal Borgia. But in came three more guardsmen bearing the Borgia bull, and over that night and the next I learned that they were all far too newly arrived in Rome to be the men I sought: hired just this past week from the country, to guard the Cardinal’s palazzo and the Palazzo Montegiordano, where he kept his not-so-secret cache of bastard children. All over Rome churchmen and noblemen alike were hiring more guards. Pope Innocent was sinking fast; every rumor reported him nearer death’s door, and everyone knew the city would erupt in chaos the moment he died. Rome always did at the death of her Holy Father.
Still—“That’s what I saw the guardsman wearing,” the hard-faced maidservant had nodded when I showed her a sketch of the Borgia livery with its red bull. “What kind of emblem is that for a man of God, I ask you? He won’t be Pope next, not with a sigil like that. Cardinal Piccolomini, he’s the one leading the odds now. Or Cardinal Sforza . . .”
I cared not two scudi who would wear the papal tiara after poor wheezing Pope Innocent breathed his last, but I oiled up to a good many Borgia guardsmen at the Inn of the Fig in the days following. “Give us a hint, you must know who the Cardinal will vote for, a big man like you working in his household!” And out the cards would come, and the coins, and the questions.
In three weeks, I had him. A big fellow with a cheerful ugly face, shirt half unlaced against the raging heat that refused to cool even in the night, sweat beading on his temples. I’d been steadily losing to him all night, enough that he looked at me with a benevolent gleam of friendliness, and when yet another round went against me, he shook his head and offered to buy me a tankard of wine.
“I always thought little men like you would be luckier than the rest of us,” he said, waving the maidservant over. “A full-size man’s supply of luck for a dwarf; that should make you a natural at primiera.”
I shook my head ruefully, sweeping away my winning hand that would have taken the pot had I bothered to play it correctly. “I’ve never been lucky, my friend.”
“Niccolo,” he said. “I’ve taken enough out of your purse, you might as well have my name in return. And a drink.”
An irritable-looking tavern maid slapped down my tankard, scowling as I blew her a kiss in thanks. “There’s a face that would sour vinegar,” I whistled as she turned away. “There was another one last night, dark-haired, pretty as a new day. I’d hoped to see her tonight.” Dropping a wink. “She liked me.”
“Good thing she isn’t here then, my friend.” Niccolo the guardsman leaned back in his chair, giving a proud slap to the Borgia bull on his doublet. “Every girl likes a man in a uniform best.”
“Don’t underestimate a woman’s curiosity.” I made a gesture from my prominent forehead to my broad chest to my short legs that didn’t reach the floor. “A girl sees this, and she wants to see more. You know how many I’ve had that way? I could cross Rome without putting foot to floor, hopping between the beds I’ve visited.”
“Get on with you,” Niccolo scoffed, but he looked interested. Most men are—base curiosity isn’t just a female vice. Men look at me and wonder secretly how a man of my size can perform a man’s most basic function. In the lowest quarters of Rome you can find shows where dwarves tup each other before an audience that has paid good coin to watch.
“Of course, when a woman’s had a dwarf, there’s no telling what else she wants.” I took another swallow of wine, letting it slosh on the table. “There was one woman . . .”
I told one of the dirtier stories in my arsenal, never mind that it came from a Venetian sailor with a gutter for a mouth, and not from my own memory. Niccolo the guardsman guffawed, topping me with a story of his own that I found just as improbable, and we ordered another tankard of wine and the room grew smokier and noisier as the night grew darker outside, and our voices dropped to a confidential pitch.
“—and there was the girl who liked a rope,” I confided in a slushy whisper. I was emptying a third of my cup on the floor for the inn’s dogs every time Niccolo went for a piss, but I knew how to play the part of a drunk. “She liked tying down, she did; arms staked out wide like Christ on the cross. She said it reminded her of His infinite sufferings.” I demonstrated, holding my arms out not just in imitation of God’s only Son, but of Anna on her table . . . and Niccolo’s cup halted on its way to his mouth.
“Dio.” I shook my head, reminiscent. “That girl, I used to think she was a runaway nun. She used to weep after I was done, beg me to cut her throat and take her away from her sins. I always thought someday some bastard might take her up on it. Leave her with her throat opened and her arms still spread like a crucifix.”
Niccolo’s cup thudded back down to the table, untouched, and I felt a small savage thrill bloom in my chest. Yes, I thought, yes, yes . . .
“Holy Mother,” he said, trying to laugh. “That’s a girl worth staying clear of, little man. Things go wrong with girls like that, you know?”
“Maybe.” I gave a careless shrug, but the bloom in my chest was spreading. It takes a very cold man indeed to listen untouched when he hears some vivid reminder of his last crime—and Niccolo, I judged, was anything but a cold man. His mouth was plastered wide in a grin, but the grin twitched at the corners and his eyes had stretched to show the white all around.
Better yet, he was more than halfway to drunk. And drink combined with guilt is a powerful loosener of tongues.
“You have your pleasure with the girl first,” I said, “and who cares what happens after? Not your fault if something goes wrong.”
“Sometimes it is,” he said. “Sometimes things go bad, and they go bad so fast—”
A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his neck. I watched it slide below his collar. “What went bad?” I murmured.
“He just wanted a girl, you know? A common girl—common girls do things the courtesans won’t unless you pay double.” Niccolo’s words were pottage in his mouth. Next sentence he’d be weeping; soon after that he’d be snoring on the table. I’d have to work fast.
“What then?” I encouraged, soft as a priest in a confessional.
Niccolo blinked hard, blinked again. “So we took him out.”
I traced a circle around the top of my tankard. “‘We’?”
Niccolo’s unfocused eyes no longer saw me. He stared over the table, and whatever he saw was horror. “Me and Luis, he’s the Cardinal’s man from Valencia, one of the stewards, he—I used to like him.”
“Don’t you anymore?” Spaniard. Not a Venetian; a Spaniard after all.
A shudder. “Not after what he— God save me.” Niccolo made a bleary sign of the cross. “God save her. The poor girl. I paid, I had a Mass said for her soul—”
“Did you, now?” I said softly. The bloom in my chest rose toward my mouth: a bitter flood of triumph. “Did you indeed, my friend?”
But he didn’t hear me. His head rested on his folded arms; he mumbled something incoherent and a moment later began to snuffle and snore.
I didn’t bring my cards when I came to the Inn of the Fig the following night. I brought a book instead—a tattered volume of Cicero’s letters that I knew mostly by heart. I’d had to sell the Iliad to pay for Anna’s burial. A sad, shabby little burial presided over by a priest who didn’t even bother to hide the fact that he was drunk; attended only by me and a few of the maidservants at the tavern. No family, of course—girls with loving families do not end their days staked by t
he hands to tavern tables.
I was reading through Cicero’s Consolatio again, boots propped on the table, when Niccolo ducked into the inn’s common room. It was not far from midnight, but he hailed me when he saw me, and I let him wheedle me into a game of dice. He seemed to remember nothing of the previous evening’s slurred secrets, though he made rueful jests about guards who couldn’t hold their wine well enough to at least stay awake. I assured him I’d fallen asleep long before he did, and proceeded to lose another purse. He was just beginning to loosen from wine and winning when a thin, irritable-looking man in a sober gray doublet came and seized him by the shoulder.
“Getting drunk again?” he demanded shortly. “You know His Eminence wants his guards sharp; we don’t know when we’ll be called to the Vatican. The captain will have your ears on a string if you aren’t at your place for the dawn shift! Up with you, up—” And he dragged at Niccolo’s big arm.
“Luis?” I said.
His eyes slid coldly over me. “Yes?” he said, and I heard the Spanish tang to his voice. A short man with clean hands and neatly trimmed nails. A tidy shirt and unspotted hose, a pen case at his belt instead of a knife. Just the sort of man to accompany a headstrong boy on a slum-hunt for cheap whores; keep him in line and clear up any resulting messes.
He dismissed me with a flick of his hand, chivvying again at Niccolo, who sheepishly got to his feet and gave me a nod of farewell. The Spaniard hurried him along, and for a moment the man’s shirt collar pulled away from his neck.
Barely visible at the base of his throat, I saw the beginning of three scratch marks. As if a woman had raked him with her nails, and very hard.
The Spaniard gave his collar an irritable tug and vanished into the crowd with Niccolo. I folded Cicero back into my doublet and rose. I’d have no more need for books tonight.
I stayed well back from them, tracking the sound of Don Luis’s high, irritated voice. I’d marked the area around the Inn of the Fig well during the daylight, and now I moved silently in the dark. The dangerous part of night: when the earliest risers have yet to venture out, when the last drunks are staggering home, when the lurkers hope to bag one more purse or one more kill before slinking home with the dawn. There is no time so good as the hour before dawn to commit murder.
I looped ahead of my prey, doubling through the dark almost under their noses, but they were too busy scouting the shadowed corners to search the ground almost under their feet. I slipped into the deep shadow thrown by a vast palazzo and waited for the two figures to cross the piazza. I should have waited further until they separated, until I could take them alone—but I didn’t want to wait. There were two of them, and both larger than me, but one was drunk and neither knew I was there. And it was dark, so very dark. Even a dwarf may seem a giant in the dark.
I took a deep breath and flung my voice into the night so it boomed.
“Don Luis!”
They halted, twisting their heads in the blackness. Clouds had slid over the moon; the night air was summer warm and acrid-smelling. I smelled mud, horse manure; heard a dog whine and what sounded like a beggar’s mindless weeping from an alley. Niccolo the guardsman was just a big shadow beside a shorter one, but I saw him cross himself.
“Don Luis!” I shouted again. “Why did you stake her hands to the table?”
The Spaniard’s head whipped toward the sound of my voice, seeking me out, the breath huffing short and angry through his nostrils. It was Niccolo, wine-stupid and darkness-blind, who mumbled, “She wouldn’t stay still.”
“Quiet!” the Spaniard hissed.
“She wouldn’t stay still,” Niccolo repeated, near tears, “and Luis said the boy would have better luck fucking her if she was still. And he took his knife—”
“I said quiet!” Don Luis shouted, and he obeyed his own words. He never spoke again.
I whispered no prayer as the knife left my hand. Santo Giuliano the Hospitaller is said to watch over the souls of murderers, but only penitent murderers, and I had never felt less penitent for any act in my sorry little life. I just murmured, “Anna,” and her name winged the blade from my hand straight as a spear. I saw the bare glint of metal in the dim moonlight fading through the clouds, heard the gurgle of blood trapped in the Spaniard’s throat, and knew I’d thrown true.
He pitched over onto the mud-fouled stones of the piazza, the apple of his throat cored by my knife. Niccolo the guardsman gaped for a moment, still peering through the darkness for a glimpse of me. Then he gave a wail and fled.
I had already slipped a second knife from my cuff, at the ready, but he stumbled as I made my throw. The blade sank deep into his hip rather than his back, and he gave a howl that set dogs to barking clear across the vast expanse of piazza. I cursed silently and flung a third blade through the dark, but that one missed altogether, clattering on the stones as Niccolo picked himself up and hobbled on.
My legs were far too short to achieve more than a spraddle-footed jog, an effort I’d pay for later when my bowed leg bones protested having to carry me so fast. I’d never be a match for any full-sized man in a footrace, or any able-bodied child for that matter. But for a wounded man with a knife in his hip, and a leg now bleeding and buckling beneath him? My scuttle was quick enough.
I tracked Niccolo across the piazza and into the maze of dark twisting streets beyond. Idiot, I told myself harshly, you’ll be robbed and murdered yourself in streets like these. Foolhardy for any man to set foot in Rome’s lawless alleys once dark fell; sheer insanity for a dwarf who was anybody’s prey even in daylight. But I heard Niccolo panting before me, moaning whenever he had to lean his full weight on that weakening side; I smelled his blood rank and metallic against the night smells of tallow smoke and sewage, and another finger knife had already somehow found its way from the tiny sheath inside my belt seam to my hand. You could let him go, a voice in my head suggested, maybe even the voice of Santo Giuliano, who would like me to repent for my taking of life. The man who had staked Anna’s hands with knives was dead, after all, and Don Luis had likely been the one to cut her throat. But Niccolo must have held her down, too. He’d protested, perhaps; winced from the pangs of guilt; even bought Masses for her soul—but he had held her down, all the same, and I felt not one drop of mercy.
Ahead of me, my quarry was slowing. I heard whimpers in his gasps, and the scent of blood came even more sharply to my nose. He must have tugged my knife out of his hip; the wound would be running freely now. I hesitated when he turned limping and panting over the Ponte Sant’Angelo—it provided a long straightaway, and I could have flung my finger knife at the shadowy shape scurrying away across the bridge. But it was my last knife, and if I missed I’d be weaponless, and if there was one bitter lesson I’d learned it was never to be without a weapon. I’d have to take Niccolo up close, and I quickened my screaming legs to a splay-footed sprint. Pilgrims crossed the Ponte Sant’Angelo for a look at the Basilica San Pietro, but I didn’t think that was Niccolo’s goal.
I trapped him within sight of the Palazzo Montegiordano’s vast façade. He was stumbling and whimpering ahead of me, looking back over his shoulder in frantic terror to see what thing was chasing him through the shadows. Maybe he thought it was Anna, come from the grave to wrap her butchered hands about his throat. I veered to scrabble a stone out of the gutter, slimy with sewage water and rat droppings, and sent it thudding into the small of his back. He let out a scream and went down, and before he could clamber to his feet I was squatting over his back like an incubus. I grabbed a handful of his sweat-slick hair, yanking his head up and setting the knife point at his throat.
“Niccolo,” I purred into his ear. “Tell me who the boy was.”
“What boy?” He was weeping now. “What boy? I don’t—”
“The boy in the mask. The one you took out for a night in the slums, and somehow cards and wine led to staking a girl on a table. I know you remember who she was.” I spared a glance for the imposing facade of the Palazzo Monteg
iordano. There were more guards in the Borgia bull, standing watch under the torches—any instant now they’d notice the little struggle in the street just outside their circle of torchlight. I tightened my grip on Niccolo and lowered my voice. “The boy in the mask—who was he?” Another young guard in the Palazzo Montegiordano, perhaps, someone Niccolo had taken under his wing? A page? Someone richer; maybe a cousin of Don Luis or some young bravo who was a guest at one of the Cardinal’s banquets? “Tell me his name.”
Niccolo thrashed, gibbering in terror, but I sank all my weight into his shoulder blades and he couldn’t dislodge me. I might have a child’s legs and arms, but I had the torso of a man, and I was heavier than I looked for a man just a hand-span taller than four feet. I had him pinned like a dog, and he froze when the point of my knife drew blood at his throat.
“Who—who are you? The whore’s brother?”
“Anna,” I whispered into Niccolo’s ear in a venomous hiss. “Her name was Anna.”
And a stunning blow took me across the back of the head.
I caught a bare glimpse of a guardsman with a red bull on his chest, gazing down at me as I toppled from my perch on Niccolo’s shoulders. The guard reversed the pike he’d used to club the back of my head and drove the butt into my wrist, and through a blaze of pain I could feel the knife slipping from my fingers. No, I thought, no, a dwarf can never go without a weapon. But my weapon was gone, and I blinked to see the sickly gray of dawn lightening the sky as boots thudded past me, thudded toward me, thudded all around me.
