City of God (20 page)

“My homeland is Navarre,” Nicholas said. “Sometime in the future, perhaps, the Aragonese will swallow up that land and people as he has every other space in the peninsula, but as of now, he has not.”

He had forgotten the pain in his legs; he sat up straight and stiff in the chair, cocked forward a little, aiming his words like blows at Gonsalvo. The man he refused glorified his refusal. He exalted in standing against Gonsalvo.

“Then,” Gonsalvo said, “will you not consider that Cesare Borgia is a cruel, treacherous man whose highest standard is his own untempered will? A man is only as good as him he serves, Señor Dawson.”

“No,” Nicholas said.

But he no longer imagined himself ennobled by the argument.

Gonsalvo shut his eyes. “I could keep you here until you agreed.”

“You could,” Nicholas said. “But the news will reach Valentino very soon that I have been taken off, and it will require little effort on his part to discover where, and by whom, and then I should be of no use to you.”

“In any case, I am not a Borgia. I will not keep you here. You may return to Rome.” The Spanish captain got lithely to his feet. His smile was gone; a frown twisted his brows, and he looked older, restless with anger. He looked no more at Nicholas. With his fist he knocked sharply on the door.

When it opened, he spoke to someone out in the next room. “Take him back to his house. Be there by sunrise.” He tramped out of the room.

A file of soldiers came through the door to Nicholas and took him away. They hurried him through the villa to the courtyard and boosted him onto another saddle. When his skinned thighs closed on the leathers, he groaned in pain. The soldiers mounted their horses and they trotted away.

Just before dawn, as Nicholas and his soldiers rode through the Appian Gate, a dozen men on foot set on them.

The Appian Gate was little used, the soldiers having chosen it for that reason, and the road was bordered in meadows and old ruined walls. From these hiding places more men rushed, and the soldiers shouted and surged across the dirty road. Nicholas was dragged from the saddle. Exhausted, half-crippled, he could not struggle; he felt himself carried off through a fighting mob. A moment later he dropped to the ground.

On hands and knees, his mouth full of dust, he scuttled blindly away from the shouting and fighting and the clatter of hoofs. He scrambled into high grass and came to a wall of brick. Pushing himself to his feet, he ran along the wall until he came to a place where the bricks had tumbled down and left only a few feet of the wall standing, and flinging one leg over this ridge he climbed into the safety and darkness beyond. Crouching down, he put his hands against the cool brick, lowered his head, and breathed deeply of the dusty air.

Farther down the street someone shouted, “This way!” The horses galloped off, and the racket of fighting faded away.

There was a tree growing up just behind him, which explained the darkness. He put his cheek to the brick of the wall. There was no sound; he was alone. He wiped his face on his sleeve. The wind stirred the tree's branches.

Just as he was about to look out through the gap in the wall a foot tramped down on the road outside.

He recoiled, crouching down again in the wall's shelter. His hackles rose. Casting around him he found a loose brick and took it into his hand for a weapon. The heavy footsteps in the road were coming toward him, grinding on the dirt of the road. They reached the wall; they stopped.

“Nicholas?”

It was Stefano. Nicholas lowered his hand and dropped the brick.

“I am here,” he said, and went forward through the broken wall.

“The old man could say only that someone had carried you off,” Stefano said. He put the chair down beside the tub and sat on it. “What happened?”

“I had an interview with a Spanish knight,” Nicholas said. “He felt I needed an escort.”

“Then you weren't really in danger?”

“I thought I was,” Nicholas said.

He settled down to his neck in the hot water. The soap bit into his lacerated thighs. He shut his eyes. A sense of well-being invaded him with the warmth of the bath; everything now seemed less important and much more entertaining. Juan brought in another bucket of hot water and poured it in over Nicholas's feet.

“I didn't really rescue you, did I?” Stefano said. “Old man, the glasses. The Spanish were bringing you back by themselves.”

Nicholas put out one soapy hand to Stefano's. “I feel myself rescued.”

Stefano was pulling the cork out of a bottle of wine; Juan stood behind him with glasses in his hands. The cork slid with a
thok
out of the bottle.

“What Spanish knight?” Stefano poured wine into the glasses that Juan held out. “Old man, a glass for you.” He gestured broadly to carry his meaning over the gap in language.

“Don't give him orders,” Nicholas said.

He was falling asleep. He did not want to tell Stefano about Gonsalvo.

“Let him drink with us,” Stefano said. “I am not giving him orders. What do you think, that he is your slave? Your property?”

Juan stood watching them, attentive. Nicholas put out his wet hand again and took a glass from Stefano.

“Bring a glass for you yourself,” he said in Spanish to Juan.

The old man bowed and went off across the room to the kitchen. Stefano had not understood; his gaze fixed steadily on Nicholas's face, he did not smile or look easy until Juan reappeared with a third glass. Then Stefano spread his broad smile across his face. He filled Juan's glass and raised his own.

“To—what shall we drink to? To life! To life.”

Nicholas drank of the familiar red wine.

In the afternoon after he had slept his fill Nicholas met Stefano on the riverbank, near the broken bridge and the place where they had first met. The bank of the Tiber there was thick with trees. Pairs of lovers strolled or sat or sprawled in the shade beneath the branches. Nicholas kept to the narrow sunlit path at the edge of the bank. He and Stefano walked along a hundred feet without speaking; at last Nicholas stopped. From his purse he took the ruby ring that Valentino had given him and held it out.

“Here. This is for you.”

Stefano gave him a sharp look of surprise. Taking the ring, he held it to the light, and a low whistle escaped him.

“Four hundred crowns at least. Five, maybe.”

“At least,” Nicholas said dryly. He started off again down the path.

Stefano walked along beside him, trying the ring on his fingers until he found the best fit. He held his hand into the sunlight so that die ring glittered and the ruby shone fiery red. Suddenly he turned to Nicholas, as if to kiss him.

Nicholas thrust him off. “Not here—with all these folk about.”

“You are ashamed,” Stefano said.

“This place is full of eyes.”

Stefano let out a yell of laughter. He looked broadly about them. “I see no one heeding anything but his own lust.”

“They are indecent.”

“I do not understand you. You must turn the simplest things into scholars' matter.” Stefano spread out his arms and tipped his head back so that the sun shone on his face. “The day is beautiful. We are free men. Care about anything more than that, and you are asking for trouble.”

Nicholas laughed at that. He was pleased Stefano thought him complex. They turned away from the river and followed an overgrown path through the trees toward the lower ground. As they left the shelter of the trees, a painted whore approached them.

“Gentlemen, let me serve you, both at once!”

Nicholas went by behind her, Stefano passed before her. They went on down toward the ancient ruins in the meadow beyond. There were two old temples, a few hundred feet apart, in the grass there; one was round and light, and the other massive, its great columns half-sunk into the marshy ground, toppling under their own weight. Nicholas slowed his feet. The ground squelched under him.

He had come this way often but now for the first time the ruins disturbed his mood. It was so easy to look on this airy shape of stone and think: a temple of Vesta. That meant nothing to him, a handful of words in an old book. What the ancients had thought here, who had believed in Vesta, he could no more recover than he could replace the flesh on a skeleton of dry bones. Those who spoke of restoring the antique world to life could believe in that only because there was so little known of that past that it assumed any shape desired of it.

“You are right,” he said. “I am a hypocrite.”

“What are you talking about now?” Stefano asked. He was admiring the ring again, his arm stretched out.

Nicholas thought of his conversation with Gonsalvo. He had not denied the Spaniard out of loyalty to Valentino. The more he tried to isolate his reasons into a logical order the more confused he became; as he thought about what had happened, his memory of it changed, and he began to wonder if he remembered what had actually taken place or if he were reconstructing what he desired to have done. Not loyalty to Valentino had inspired him, but the will to enlarge himself.

“Well, well,” he said, “there is nothing to do but admit it, I suppose. And no one else does any different.”

Stefano gave him a sharp oblique look, but he said nothing. On his hand the ruby glinted in the sunlight. Nicholas rubbed his hands together. They were walking down toward the path that led through the marshes where the Circus Maximus had been; goats grazed on the hillside beyond, and their coarse wool hung in shreds on the branches of the thorn brushes all around. Nicholas felt like a fool for having seen so little how the world was ordered by self-interest, because once he accepted that, the chaos of human motive that had always defied his analysis fell into order with a marvelous clarity. Whatever men professed, they did what served them. Nor could he see a fault in it since they would be mad to do otherwise. Stefano was walking beside him, and he reached out and took hold of the younger man's hand.

Instantly Stefano clutched his hand tight. “What are you thinking about?” he said.

Nicholas laughed. They turned onto the path through the marshes.

Nicholas knocked on the door to Bruni's chamber, “which he did seldom; usually he came there only on the ambassador's invitation. The lack of custom worked at Bruni as well, because when the big man opened the door he looked surprised to see Nicholas there.

“Excellency,” Nicholas said, without any formality, “I must ask your attention on a matter personal to me.”

“Ah?” Bruni said.

They were still standing in the doorway, with the threshold between them. Nicholas put his hands behind his back.

“Excellency, the Signory has fallen badly into arrears on my salary.”

“Ah,” Bruni said, and looked distressed. He backed out of the doorway. “Come in.”

Nicholas followed him into the dim, over-decorated room. Bruni did not go to his desk but paced up and down across the room a few times, while Nicholas stood just inside the doorway and watched him.

“I can assure you that this is no fault of mine,” Bruni said. “In fact the Signory has been lax in paying me, as well.”

Nicholas cleared his throat. “Your Excellency's family is resident in Florence, able to bring pressure to bear on your behalf.” He happened to know that Bruni had received a bank draft for his back salary within the week.

“For certain payments, yes, but as you must know—” Bruni's back was to him, but he turned his head to look over his shoulder at Nicholas—“being watchful as you ever are, I have been paying the couriers' and scribes' wages out of my own purse, and for that I have not been recompensed.”

“All the more reason, Excellency, why you should do your best to see us all paid.”

Bruni had stopped at the window and was pulling the draperies apart with one hand so that he could peer through into the yard beyond; there was an alley there, full of horse dung, nothing to look at. He said, “Nicholas, if you need money, I will be happy to loan you any reasonable sum.”

“I should rather take my due from the Signory,” Nicholas said.

“Every diplomat in Rome is underpaid.”

That was true. The Spanish ambassador to the Curia had been paid nothing since his arrival in Rome several years before. Nicholas made no comment on it, curious to see what Bruni would say next.

“Very well,” the ambassador said, and turned and faced him. “I will do what I can. But expect nothing, I promise nothing.”

“I cannot see,” Nicholas said, “why I should expect to work when I am not to expect to be paid.”

Bruni's eyes widened, and the corners of his mouth tucked down in an unhappy scowl. “For the Republic,” he said. “For the Republic. For the city.” His voice fell to a reverent hush. Suddenly, snapping his head back, he spoke in full voice again. “You have my leave to go. I have said that I will do what I can to help you, I have no more time for these matters.”

“Yes, Excellency,” Nicholas said, and went out of the ambassador's chamber.

The garden of Cardinal Orsini was perfumed with orange trees. Lanterns hung everywhere in the twilight; the breeze turned them, swaying and bobbing in swarms of moths and mosquitoes. Nicholas, lingering on the edge of the terrace, was wishing that he could go, home, take off his clothes, and sleep in the cool of his bedchamber. He raised his glass and lost the perfume of the oranges in the aroma of the wine.

Below him, Bruni was saying, “Alas, my dear Cardinal, the stars are inscrutable. One sees their meaning too late to prevent disaster.”

They walked across the grass, Bruni in his high four-cornered hat, and the head of the Orsini family in his soutane, the color blotted out to black in the darkness.

“You will pardon me, most excellent orator,” the Cardinal was saying. A page brought him wine in a thin-belled Venetian glass. “I do not share your enthusiasm for blaming all that befalls us on the movement of a few stars.”