City of God (21 page)

Nicholas went after them, keeping a respectful distance. The Cardinal paused to finish the contents of his glass, opened his hand, and let the glass drop. A page scooped it out of the grass.

“What is a star?” the Cardinal went on. His voice was high and feminine. “A crystal sphere, with an angel within to guide it across the sky—no more than that. To understand man, study men, not the stars.”

“I cannot believe that God would be so frivolous,” Bruni said. “Not—” hastily, one hand raised—“that I call in question a doctrine of the Church.”

“None would believe it of you. Will you join a few of us to hear the most excellent Messer Berocchi read his latest work?”

“Heavens. Another heroic narrative verse?”

The Cardinal's soft laughter rippled out. “I fear so. I understand this commemorates the recent triumphs of our splendid Duke Valentino.” Abruptly the Orsini stopped, turning, his silk hem sliding across the grass. “Messer Dawson, you will join us?”

Nicholas cleared his throat. Girolamo Berocchi's readings usually lasted hours.

“Excellent.” The Cardinal led them on across a lawn where a mass of young men were forming the lines of a dance. In a pavilion by the roses the musicians were tuning lutes and horns. Nicholas followed his master and the Cardinal into the vast Orsini palace.

“The stars,” the Cardinal was saying, in his velvety voice, “seem to be preparing another Neapolitan stew for us, if rumor is true, my dear Bruni.”

“Ah,” Bruni said.

They were crossing a vast hall, prepared for the comedy that was to be played at midnight, to cap off the evening. The stage covered one end of the room; from the paper-plaster arch hung loops of scarlet silk and scarlet ribbons wound down the two Doric columns that supported it on either side.

“Naturally I would not pry secrets from you”— the Cardinal took Bruni's arm in a comradely grip—“yet it does not entirely strain my ability to believe when I hear that the French intend to send a formal protest to Spain over the matter of Naples.”

“Such a tedious matter for a gathering of friends,” Bruni said. “You should press Nicholas for details, Monsignor—he keeps us all so very well informed on these little border disputes. Nicholas?”

“Excellency,” Nicholas said. Bruni knew nothing of the ferment in Naples. He followed the two elegant men ahead of him into the next room, where Orpheus and Eurydice walked and sang and wept across the walls.

There the poet had already begun to read. A clutch of somber men and women were arranged in attitudes of attention around the room, some in chairs, some standing or leaning against the plaster columns that pretended to hold up the ceiling. Nicholas still held his empty glass, but there was no place to dispose of it. Stopping behind an Orsini duchess, he let the Cardinal and Bruni go off to the front of the room. If he stayed near the door he could leave unobserved within a few moments. He put the glass in his hand down behind the chair where the Duchess of Gravina sat, and with his toe nudged it into the shelter of her vast skirts.

Berocchi, the poet, stood at a lectern of wood carved and painted to simulate a Doric column. As he read he gestured with one hand. His fingernails were painted red to heighten the power of this action. His poem, as usual, was in Latin dactylic hexameters. Nothing varied the singsong rhythm, with its strong step and weak steps like a drunk staggering home.

None of the listeners moved. They all appeared to have braced themselves up, even those on their feet, so that if they nodded off no slumping head or dangling hand would betray it. Nicholas stood fidgeting through several relentlessly awful lines.

Capua secessit caesim a verbis Caesaris—

Perhaps it was a subtle Orsini joke on Valentino.

Nicholas began to creep his way toward the door. It was a rare privilege of lesser rank that he could leave, and the Duchess of Gravina, for one, could not. By degrees he reached the door and slipped through into the next room.

Here the walls were painted with wild beasts, tamed by the music of Orpheus' harp. Several other people were gathered in groups by the open windows to talk. It was hot; Nicholas paused to loosen his coat. A man in riding clothes tramped in the door.

This man stopped to look around him. His boots were gray with mud. Behind the mask of dust on his face Nicholas recognized one of Bruni's couriers and hurried to reach him before he could call more attention to himself.

“Messer Dawson,” the courier said loudly, and clutched at Nicholas's arm. “Where is my lord Bruni?”

“Keep your voice down,” Nicholas said. “In the next room, but he is busy. What—”

The courier strode off, heading straight for the poetry reading. Nicholas lunged after him, trying to grab hold again before the man could put them in the middle of a crowd, but the courier eluded him. He tramped on into the next room. Nicholas looked swiftly around him; some of the others in this room were watching, attentive.

In the next room Berocchi's voice stopped. Someone said, behind Nicholas, “Is something wrong?”

He turned his head; the voice belonged to a slender young man in clothes so picked out with gold lace and pearls that he glittered. Nicholas bowed to him.

“I know nothing of it, Monsignor de' Medici,”

The young man smiled. He had pointed eyeteeth. “You know me?”

In the next room, Bruni shouted, “Nicholas!”

“As your Magnificence might know,” Nicholas said, trying to sound unconcerned, “I began my career with the Florentine legation here when Florence was under your father.”

“Nicholas!”

“You have my leave, Messer Dawson,” the youth said smoothly, still smiling. “I believe your present employer calls.”

Nicholas started toward Bruni but before he could reach the door into the reading room Bruni was rushing forth, the Cardinal Orsini and others of the audience after him, and the courier on his heels. He gripped Nicholas by the arm. In a voice that probably reached well beyond the slumbering lions and oxen on the walls, he said, “I am recalled to Florence. The mob is throwing up barricades in the streets—”

“Excellency,” Nicholas said. “I beg you to lower your voice.”

“Piero de' Medici is known to be in Arezzo!”

Nicholas kicked Bruni in the shin. Orsini and his friends boiled over with excitement, and the gilded boy at Nicholas's elbow murmured, “Messer Dawson, you may find yourself again where you, began, soon enough.”

“By God!” Bruni shouted. “How dare you kick me!”

Nicholas looked away. At least Bruni was yelling on a safe topic. Bruni shouldered past him, shouting for a page. His face was grossly red. He wheeled to face Nicholas again.

“The legation is in your hands. Keep the peace there. I will—someone will send you instructions.”

The Cardinal summoned a page, who hurried away with Bruni to find the ambassador's cloak. Nicholas wondered if Bruni would have the wit to save himself in the disordered Republic. Bruni disappeared out the door.

Around Nicholas the others began to chatter.

“Florence may fall! Well, it has not been a sturdy Republic.”

“What republic is?”

“Sometimes,” the Cardinal said, in a voice like an extended sigh, “it seems to me that the whole world is shattering around me.”

“Shattering perhaps,” said Giulio de' Medici, “in order to be reborn! Ours is the age of glorious rebirth. We must keep heart at all times.”

The Duchess of Gravina elbowed her way in among them; her wide face was stern as any man's, her upper lip feathery with fine white hair and her eyes fierce. “Rebirth!” she said. “Then it is a monster being born. Such men as the Borgias are its precursors, and events like this—”

“My lady.” The Cardinal bowed before her, and she clamped her lips shut. The other voices rose.

“We are seeing the end of things.”

“No—a new age,” the young de' Medici cried again. “A beginning.”

“The disintegration of all value—”

That was someone on Nicholas's other side, and a new voice there took up the argument.

“This is a time to return to the great age of the classical world. If we only keep our faith firm, we can!”

Nicholas listened to all this but said nothing. Whatever could be said was by that fact alone too simple to satisfy him. Perhaps none of it was true at all. Perhaps all that was happening was that people were trying to say what was happening to them, and the disintegration was not in things but in their knowledge of things. He struggled with the idea of a world of blind impact and unlaw, the only order a tenuous expectation of consistency from one moment to the next.

“Messer Dawson—”

He stirred himself. “I must take my leave. Serenity—”

Smiling, the Cardinal put out his ring to be kissed.

In the late summer heat every man of consequence fled Rome for the healthy air of the countryside. The Pope withdrew to his castle in the Alban Hills. Every morning Nicholas went to the legation, read the routine dispatches, and gave the clerks and pages what work there was. When they were done he sent them home.

From Florence and Bruni came no news. The crisis there had thrown even the sensation of Urbino into shadow. It was known generally that French troops from Milan were marching to the city, but no one cared to speculate what influence they might have; in any case there were only a few hundred Frenchmen stationed in Milan to begin with.

With the great men of Rome gone, the city was lifeless; nothing happened. No one even carried gossip of any interest. It was as if Rome were surrounded by a wall of silence, like the castle in the tale. By noon of each day there was nothing more to be done and Nicholas locked the doors of the legation and went home.

He dined in the garden. Stefano came to share his meal, nearly every day, and to pass the afternoon with him. They sat under the trees, where Juan burned wet rags to keep off the mosquitoes, and talked idly, or Stefano dealt out the cards of his tarocco deck on the table still scattered with crumbs from their meal.

The cards were becoming familiar to Nicholas. He sat watching them spin from his lover's fingers. The Hanged Man appeared often, dangling upside down by one foot, the other leg crossed over the first at the knee, and a mad smile on his face. The Pope followed him, and the World, and the Lovers, of course man and woman. Stefano had said that the cards could tell the future. Nicholas made up antic interpretations of their order. A pinprick stabbed his neck; he slapped at it in a mindless reflex, his gaze fixed on the cards.

The Devil grinned also, like the Hanged Man, fierce and agonized.

Nicholas scratched his arms, red and lumpy with insect bites. Stefano was turning out the cards again.

“Why do you do that over and over?”

“There's nothing else to do.” Stefano waved the deck over the table, where half a dozen faces already lay looking up at the sky. “Shall I teach you the game?”

Nicholas shook his head. “I'll watch. I'm better at that.”

In the heat and stillness of the city at the center of the world the cards took on an illusion of meaning. Perhaps they were keys, those cryptic figures with their symbolic names and rings of Hebrew and Greek lettering. Nicholas considered that he should have been a Platonist; then he could pick up the card called the World and put it in his purse, and never more worry about Duke Valentino.

At the thought he laughed, and Stefano's head rose.

“What amuses you?”

“The heat has cooked my brain. Like an egg, Stefano.”

“Tell me.”

“No—no. It's gone already.”

Stefano ruffled the deck with his long fingers. He wore the ruby on his left forefinger. “Tell me.”

Nicholas shook his head, smiling, and scratched his itching neck.

“If you ask me, your brain's been soft since your little ride out of Rome last month.”

“Really? How so?”

Stefano turned, slinging one leg over the other, and folded his arm over the back of the chair. “I cannot say, to be truthful. Ask the old man. You let all manner of things go on that formerly would have stirred you up to a black sweat. Ask Juan.”

Juan was working in his garden. Nicholas could hear his tuneless singing beyond the box trees. Another mosquito whined in his ear and he covered his ear with his hand. The heat was making him sleepy and lecherous; he smiled at Stefano. He had not known until he lost Stefano how much loved him; now he was determined to keep him. It surprised Nicholas how that elementary decision simplified their relationship.

“You and Juan do as you like here, and nothing I say has any more effect than to entertain you.”

“I am a guest in your house,” Stefano said, and put down the cards. “You have never told me who stole you away from Rome, either—was it Valentino?”

Nicholas burst out in laughter. The insect hum sounded by his head and he slapped at it; the body broke against his fingers, spurting blood.

“No. It was not Valentino. It was Gonsalvo da Cordoba.”

Stefano's eyebrows lowered over his sunburnt nose. “Who is that?”

“He is the captain-general of the Spanish army in Naples.”

“A Spaniard. We have enough of those, with Valentino and the Pope. I am surprised he brought you back again.”

“Why?”

“They are all treacherous. See what Valentino did at Urbino.”

“What think you of his work in Urbino?”

Stefano lowered his eyes, his eyelids like shells, moist with sweat. “If I were his man, I should never turn my back on him. It was shrewd, I warrant you that. And the lesser men can be thankful, since they took no wounds.”

Among the dirty crockery on the table was a napkin; Nicholas took it and wiped his bloody fingers. “Urbino was my work.”

His lover's pale eyes widened. Nicholas imagined lions' eyes like that. Stefano said, “What?”

“I gave him the plan. It was my scheme, all of it.”