City of God (31 page)

Gonsalvo's eyes half-closed. “When my king summons me, I go.” He reached for his glass on the floor by his boot.

“And of course the defenders of Gaeta know that the French king is bringing an army to their relief,” Nicholas said. “Which surely accounts for their resolve.”

Des Troches cleared his throat in the racket of a stuttering cough. “The French will be no match for the battle-hardened veterans of Spain.”

Nicholas was staring intently into Gonsalvo's face. “The French army,” he said, “will be the largest to invade Italy since the hordes of Attila.” Let Gonsalvo see that Nicholas feared neither him nor Valentino.

“Attila also failed,” Gonsalvo said mildly. “You are well informed, my dear Dawson.”

“My post with Florence gives me access to much French information.”

“As your post with my lord Cesare gives you access to information on the other side?” Gonsalvo did not look angry; the webs of lines around his eyes were crinkled, as if he suppressed a smile.

“I do what I can,” Nicholas said.

That pomposity brought Gonsalvo to laughter. He raised his glass in a satirical salute. “I am sure of that.”

Nicholas felt Gonsalvo laughing at him; like an ass he had let the Spanish captain lead him deftly into revealing how seriously he took his own part in this. His ears burned when he remembered Valentino listening. Des Troches leapt into the spreading silence with a flurry of words.

“King Louis loiters in France. Who knows if he will even come to Italy? What use to spend more French blood in pursuit of a fantasy?”

There was a knock on the door, and des Troches jumped straight up from his chair. Nicholas relaxed down to his heels. He leaned over the arm of his chair and put his wine on the floor.

“Let them in,” he said to des Troches.

The other man sped away across the room. Nicholas sat back, his shoulders slumping, and found Gonsalvo's eyes on him.

“Señor Dawson, a draw, I think.”

Nicholas could not answer that. The door creaked; Valentino came into the room, Miguelito at his side, and des Troches behind him.

For several moments no one spoke save the two great men, smiling at each other, and giving one another compliments and assurances of love. Nicholas, des Troches, and Miguelito stood around them, motionless. Nicholas found himself drawn to the differences in the two men—Valentino taller by a head, young, and fair as the sun in its glory; and Gonsalvo, weathered more than aged, square-set and solid. Valentino stood with his head thrown back, and every motion of his hand caught and held the eye like the gestures of a magician.

They sat. Nicholas and des Troches went to bring them wine.

“What think you of our Spanish captain?” des Troches said, in the kitchen.

Nicholas poured the red wine into a glass. “He loves the contest.”

“Pah! He is a soldier, that is true of the breed.”

Nicholas thought not. The soldiers he had experience of all loved to win, and avoided even the threat of a test. He put the tall Venetian glasses on a tray and took them out, des Troches going ahead to hold the door.

In his chair by the fire Valentino was talking of some feat of arms; Gonsalvo sat hunched to one side listening, his chin in his hand. Nicholas took the wine in between them. Valentino took a glass and drank and plunged back into the recital of his deed, but Gonsalvo's gaze strayed, and he held the wine up to the light.

“Excellent,” he said, when Valentino had come to the end of his story, “most excellent, and your successes show how well you know your craft. For myself, I would be proud to own such fortune as attends you.”

“Fortune,” Valentino said. “I have shaped my destiny in my own hands, señor el capitan, and whatever becomes of me, I shall neither blame nor thank fortune.”

Nicholas went to the hearth. A damp chill was creeping into the room, and he sank down onto his haunches and put a log on the rails and stuffed tinder under it. Behind him, Gonsalvo was asking questions of the country north of Rome—how the French army would have to march south. While Nicholas was scraping the flint over the steel in his tinderbox, Miguelito knelt beside him.

“Here—you are ruining my nerves,” He took the box and struck sparks into the tinder flax. As they knelt over the fire, he said, “You seem to know one another—you and Gonsalvo.”

“What?” Nicholas said.

“Oh. You are so fiery with him. I have marked it in you, Nicholas—you are mild as a mouse on first meeting, it's only later you show teeth.”

“My lord said—”

“I heard.” Miguelito rose and leaned himself up against the wall again, his face turned away. The fire was glowing in the tinder; Nicholas bent down to blow on it.

After a while he took the empty glasses and filled them in the kitchen. The two men by the fire talked back and forth; Valentino talked most, while Gonsalvo spurred him on with questions.

“Of the French army,” Gonsalvo said at last, “what do you know of their commanders?”

“Less than I know of yours.” Valentino smiled. His hands, which had been busy with gestures, suddenly fell still on his knees. “Among whom I would number myself, if we can agree on the terms of the contract.”

Nicholas lifted his head, alarmed. It would not help Valentino's cause with Gonsalvo to bargain. Gonsalvo sat motionless for a moment, his gaze on Valentino, and his face smoothed clean of expression above the masking beard. Finally he held out his empty glass to Nicholas.

“The Italian condotta is something foreign to me—I do not understand the principle or the practice. What terms do you require?”

Reluctantly Nicholas went to fill the glass, his ears straining behind him to hear what they said. Valentino spoke lightly, almost carelessly. “I must protect my territories. After all, my domains lie between the French king and you. I will be placing myself in mortal jeopardy. The situation is delicate. My father's very safety may be at stake.”

“These are your terms?”

Nicholas had come to the kitchen door and had to go in after the wine. He heard nothing more. The door swung shut behind him. One of the candles in the kitchen had gone out and the long narrow room was gloomy as a church. He found the wine jar empty and took it into the pantry to fill it again. Valentino knew Gonsalvo little, to put a base price on service to him. Pouring the wine into the glass, he took it out again to the front room, where Valentino was saying, “—Florence, of course.”

“My superiors rather favor the de' Medici.”

Valentino sat unmoving as an Egyptian king in his chair. “I said my terms were high.”

It was Tuscany he wanted. Nicholas put the glass into Gonsalvo's hand, rough as old wood.

“Then there is the matter of Venice,” Valentino said.

Gonsalvo sipped the wine. He licked his lips with the tip of his tongue and brushed his damp gray moustaches back. He said, “Under the circumstances, my young friend, I think we can stop with the matter of Tuscany.”

“Ah?”

“I am not prepared to accept your contract.”

A wash of dark color flooded Valentino's face; his eyes blazed. “You have not listened to me.”

“I have.”

“I will not accept one inch less than what I have demanded!”

“I am offering you nothing,” Gonsalvo said.

Valentino exploded up from his chair; he stalked across the room, carrying the attention of the other men with him. Halfway to the far wall he wheeled, all his leonine beauty glowing with his rage.

“You will force me into the arms of King Louis.”

Gonsalvo remained in his chair, drinking his wine in slow sips. His face was gravely indifferent; he slouched on the arm of his chair.

“You shall have me as an enemy,” Valentino said, in a shaking voice. “Then perhaps you will learn to respect what I am.”

He strode out the door. Miguelito followed, slower, leaving the door open. The draft fluttered the candles and blew a gust of smoke from the fire into the room. Des Troches hurried over to shut the door. His face was furrowed with distress like an old hound's. In the dimness before the candles recovered, Nicholas looked down at Gonsalvo and saw the old soldier smiling.

Des Troches came back, looking much worried. He gave Nicholas a quick glance, as if seeking agreement, and said to Gonsalvo, “My lord, I shall escort you out of Rome again.”

Gonsalvo nodded. Silently he rose and gathered up his cloak and bundled himself into it, and with des Troches he went away into the garden. After a few moments Nicholas heard them leading their horses through the thick thorny brush toward the gate.

Nicholas poured another glass of the wine and sat down before his fire. What he had just witnessed still unnerved him. It was not merely that Valentino had so misplayed his part; that could be reversed. Something more fundamental showed through the whole argument, something irreconcilable between the two men. In Italy no man ever turned another down; the princes smiled and made their contracts and broke them later, when they could win some advantage thereby. Everyone knew that and accounted for it. Everyone expected to lose something here to gain something there. Gonsalvo had said that the condotta was foreign to him. He might have said as much of the whole Italian practice of war, fought on paper and paid for with promises, the credits of diplomacy. Gonsalvo bought his victories with blood.

Nicholas filled his mouth with the ripe stony wine. For the first time he doubted that his way could contain Gonsalvo's.

It was well before ten o'clock. He thought of going down into the city for a late supper and a boy. At the same time he remembered Juan, sleeping on the hard floor of the church. It was a long way down to the tavernas, and already ten o'clock. He went out to the street, hailed a passer-by, and gave him ten carlini to go to the church and send Juan home.

He waited by the gate, standing inside the post where the chilly spring wind did not reach. The moments dragged on; he began to wonder if his messenger had taken the ten carlini straight into the nearest wine shop. Then at the end of the street, in the night shadows, a shadow moved, walking toward him. He went outside the gate and gestured broadly. The old man raised his hand in answer. Nicholas went up the path toward his house.

Valentino went out of Rome again, to hunt in the campagna. He sent no word at all to Nicholas Dawson, who realized uneasily that he was blamed for the humiliation the Borgia prince had suffered at his house. Nicholas considered writing another letter to Valentino, suggesting another approach to Gonsalvo, and instantly pushed the thought out of his mind. He was a little afraid of bringing himself to the Borgia's attention. The French were gathering an army to cross the Alps; perhaps when every southbound road in Italy fluttered with the lily banners, Gonsalvo would change his mind and open the matter again himself.

In May a dispatch came from Florence to the legation in Rome that repeated almost by the word the meeting between Valentino and Gonsalvo da Cordoba at Nicholas's house.

The Florentines attributed their knowledge of the secret meeting to a French dispatch. Nicholas read it with a feeling of panic. He stood in Bruni's chamber, under Bruni's eyes, and struggled to keep his fear from showing in his face. He himself went nameless in the report, which only said that the two captains had met at a private house in Rome. He laid the dispatch down on Bruni's desk.

“Valentino has made a mistake,” he said.

Bruni emitted a skeptical sound. “Gonsalvo, don't you think? Or do you imagine Valentino's support could not help the Spanish?”

“I mean only that a man in Valentino's place would profit more by keeping news like this secret as long as possible.” Nicholas touched the thick pale paper as it lay on the desk. “I wonder how the French came by their information.”

“They have their sources, naturally. They could not do otherwise.”

“Indeed.” Nicholas's eyes were fixed on the dispatch; he longed to take it away to his own desk to copy. He could foresee circumstances when he might need every evidence he could find of what it said.

“What does that remark mean?” Bruni scowled at him. “By the Mother of God, Nicholas, you are becoming cryptic as a sibyl.”

“I mean,” Nicholas said, lifting his gaze to meet Bruni's, “that it serves the interest of the French far more than anyone else—that we should learn now of this falling out between Valentino and Spain.”

Bruni's eyes widened. Above the shaved edges of his beard, his cheeks sucked hollow. “Do you mean that they have falsified this? That it is untrue?”

Nicholas shrugged his shoulders. “It's foolish to accept anything at face value, these days.”

“By God.” Bruni slapped his desk with both hands. “You may be right.”

Nicholas could think of no excuse to have the dispatch to himself for a while, since he had already read it. He lingered a moment, trying to make up a plausible story, but suddenly Bruni rose to his feet and took the dispatch in his hand.

“I'll see to this.” He folded the paper and stuffed it into his wallet. “Good morning, Nicholas.”

Now Nicholas could only take his leave of the ambassador. Bruni called for his servant; he was going somewhere, taking the dispatch, perhaps to the astrologer he favored so often. Nicholas went back to his chambers.

At noon he left early, fifteen minutes before two bells rang, and walked through the swarming Monday markets toward the bridge to the Leonine City. It was the height of the morning and the city's wives were bargaining for lettuce and fresh strawberries and eggs. The pulped leaves of vegetables littered the street and the air reeked bitterly of burned garlic, oil, and roasting chicken, Nicholas kept one hand on his wallet. He skirted the masses of beggars and children that rushed at every passer-by. Even the balconies and windows of the ramshackle buildings along the river were crowded with folk at market; they let down baskets on ropes to the vendors who pushed their carts of asparagus and oranges, almonds and cheese along the Tiber's muddy bank.