The Malice of Fortune (59 page)

The brothers of the Levant, having waited in the rotunda, proved agreeable to leading the three of us back the same way I had come. When we emerged from the earth, no stars in their “heavenly chariots” waited for us, as they had for Dante. Instead, the rain had lifted and all Rome lay before us, ash-gray and appearing to smolder in the light mist, the Tiber curling through the city like an enormous snake. In the distance were the great palaces of the Vatican and the massive cylinder of the Castel Sant’Angelo. The ruins of the ancient Roman Forum lay almost at our feet.

Damiata wrapped her arms around me, an embrace that was fierce and of the flesh. “Dearest, dearest Niccolò, I cursed God when I saw how he had brought you there but now I praise the Virgin that we are all safe. I never wanted to go down into that place but I had become so desperate, after waiting so many months, waiting for him to recover his health, to elect his own pope only to see him die … I knew that if Pope Julius restored Cesare’s office, I might never have another chance, that he could take my Giovanni anywhere …” She choked back a sob. “I thought that buried palace would be my tomb. But at least my son would live knowing I came back for him. Instead you saved us, Niccolò.” She held me away so that she could look at me. Her eyes were afire. “I have horses waiting for us at the Arch of the Septimii.” She took my hand. “We’ll say the rest down there.”

As the three of us descended the Palatine muck hand in hand, my family and my house on the Via di Piazza became vague and distant memories. Our progress down that muddy hillside, and then among the tumbled stones of the Forum, could have taken a hundred years and I would have savored every moment of it. When, midway through
this journey, Damiata glanced at me and smiled, I thought my heart would explode. The life I had left behind in Florence was but a shadow next to the life I saw beyond Fortune’s horizon, shared with the woman I so deeply loved.

The Arch of the Septimii rose from the mist, seemingly scaled to a world ruled by giants. Several
bravi
were already on their horses beneath the immense central span; they might have been equestrian statues of the Roman victors in the Parthian wars, the ancient triumph that had been carved in stone all over those thick columns and enormous marble slabs. These men had several extra horses, as if they anticipated traveling far and fast.

“Valentino’s people are looking for their master,” one of the
bravi
said to Damiata when we arrived. “Most have gone up to the Palatine. But there’s one nosing around down here.”

Damiata turned to me but we did not embrace. “Niccolò, I could not see why Cesare wanted that page, with his father already dead. It seemed merely part of his game. But as I told you, I was desperate.” She bit her lip. “Now I wonder if I have returned him the keys to the Kingdom.”

“No.” I was not merely comforting her. In truth, I had seen something on that page that even my science had not anticipated. “He is finished. I know that now. But not because of this new pope. It ended for him the day you brought that page to the Vatican.”

“Niccolò, I did not intend for Rodrigo Borgia to die. I thought Cesare’s confession was all about Capua and that owing to the pope’s weakened condition, I would find it easier to ransom this darling boy. I couldn’t see what you saw.” She smiled wistfully.

“Valentino allows us to will our own blindness,” I said, “with a skill no man before him has ever possessed. That is because deception was a craft both born and bred into him. The first man this lost, soulless little creature ever mimicked was the greatest liar in Christendom, a father whose deceit and worldly ambition were exceeded only by the son who observed him so well. The son Rodrigo Borgia soon came to fear, and in his own way cast out. That was what tormented Valentino like nothing else, that his father turned away from his own image, this mask the son had so arduously and devotedly crafted. And that
was the truth that killed the pope, to learn that his greed, deceit, and overweening ambition had found a perfect mirror in the son he always feared.”

Damiata crossed herself.

“But in the same way,” I assured her, “Valentino died with his father. He lost the mirror to which he had always returned, whenever he needed to find himself.” This was the Valentino I had witnessed moments before, trying and discarding a thousand masks, desperate to discover who he was. “Yet I believe he always wanted to shatter that glass, because it also reminded him that he was only an image of a man. He had to either steal or destroy the icons of his father’s heart, his own sister and brother. And in the end, he had to send his father Juan’s amulet. Cain’s final offering, after all the victories and conquests had failed to displace his dead brother in his father’s heart, was the proof of his fratricide. As much as he needed the pope’s power and treasury, Valentino had a greater necessity, perhaps even hidden from himself—to lead his father to Ravenna, as you said, to discover the fatal truth.” I cast my eyes over the ghost city that appeared to smolder around me. “And now Valentino has arrived at his own dreadful truth. He could live only as his father’s reflection. Without him, he is a shadow.”

“He is still a dangerous shadow, Niccolò. He will regret letting Giovanni and me go. He will come after us.”

“Yes. I fear so.”

“I have prepared for that.” Damiata put her hand on my arm, as if to comfort me. “You had to give him something, didn’t you, Niccolò? In exchange for sparing Giovanni and me.”

“His resurrection. He knows with all his animal instinct that Fortune has dealt him a fatal blow. If he did not know before tonight, he does now. But he believes I will become his apostle. I alone witnessed the
mappa
of his ambition and saw how far it extended.” I sighed for the Italy I saw vanishing in smoke, an empire consumed before it ever existed. “And I do believe. Not in him, but in the Italy he created for me. My own empire of hope. In time, I believe I will find the wisdom and courage to describe it. To write those words on the blank parchment he presented me tonight.”

Damiata clutched little Giovanni closer to her before she looked
up, her eyes as brilliant as flashes of lightning on the horizon. “More than anything, the Devil requires that we believe in him. But that ensures your family will be safe. Regardless of what you decide.”

I knew at once the choice she meant. I could see only her eyes, yet never had she been so naked before me, not even in the bed we had shared.

Her question was similarly unadorned and guileless: “Will you come with us?”

As often as I had dreamt it, I could not have imagined what it was like to truly hear those words. For the first time I was certain beyond any doubt that Damiata loved me as entirely as I loved her.

And I finally understood this: the only reason I had been unable to see the truth within my own soul was because I had not, until that moment, been able to see the truth in hers. At last, I knew myself. And I knew the answer I would give her.

As did she. She put her finger to my lips. “I know, Niccolò, I know. My darling, I have been places in your soul even you do not yet know. I have seen the man you will be, your profound kindness and deep intellect, your unending courage, the things you will do with your science of men … I have always known what your answer would be. But neither of us would ever know peace unless I had asked.”

“I will never have peace,” I said, hardly able to breathe, already adrift on an endless ocean of regret. “I can only hope that the children of Florence will know peace.”

Damiata’s eyes filled with tears, the perfect mirror of my own. She took my hands but did not embrace me. Yet somehow this clasp was more searing and intimate than our embrace on the hill above.

“My love, I once promised you I would see you again, and Fortune allowed me to keep that trust.” She could not blink quickly enough to keep up with her tears. “But now I must promise you that I will never see you again, not in this life. I must live for my Giovanni, and you for your family and your republic. It is only our souls, which searched for each other all these years, that will never again be parted.”

Here she heaved with a sob and I took her in my arms, although I knew I had also pushed the fatal spear through my heart. I drew in the scent of her hair as if I would never take another breath.

She clung to me as desperately as I clutched her. “Now you must go home, companion of my soul. Be happy with your life and remember your promise to me.” Then she whispered the last words of a life that had to end. Yet through some numbness of the senses and the soul, I did not believe—or refused to believe—that I had heard them.

Nothing in this life of mine has been more painful than standing beneath that ancient arch and letting Damiata go—not even hanging from a rope in the Stinche. When you are tortured, there is eventually a merciful numbness. You welcome your separation from the life you inhabit. At this parting, the very separation from that life—the life I so dearly wished to inhabit forever—was so excruciating I could not hope to survive it.

Yet Damiata herself left me the only possible remedy for my torment. Without looking back, she helped Giovanni onto the saddle in front of one of the riders, then mounted her own horse. The entire party slowly vanished into the mist, as if disappearing into time itself, the fading beat of hooves an echo of a lost empire, a memento of how, inevitably, everything human is reduced to dust and ruins.

Just when it seemed I would lose sight of her entirely, she turned. That was when I heard her final words, whispered within a mind that had mercifully spared them until that moment.

Remember me, my love, even when you reach the far bank of Lethe, even when I am once again only a vague presentiment in your soul. Because I promise you, my dearest, most darling Niccolò, I will find you in the next life
.

CHAPTER
30

I
t is and always was and always will be, that evil follows good, good evil, and the one ever the cause of the other
.

History will record that Julius II never appointed Duke Valentino his captain general; instead this warrior pope armored himself with steel rather than faith and led his own armies into the field. With a series of clever lies, Pope Julius contrived to have Valentino imprisoned, taking the maestro of deception entirely unawares. Like the
condottieri
whom he had outfoxed at Sinigaglia, Valentino could not believe that he would find another man’s word as worthless as his own—particularly as the new pope was well-regarded for his honest dealing. But I believe that Pope Julius, having suffered so much from the sins of the father, understood Rodrigo Borgia’s son as have few other men—and was wise enough not to allow him another opportunity to mirror all Italy’s hopes.

Nevertheless, Valentino continued to battle Fortune for the rest of his life, making desperate attempts to escape his confinement and return to power. At last exiled to Spain, he reached the border fate had set for him three days before the Ides of March,
anno Domini
1507, while employed on some minor errand for the King of Navarre. Although he was riding alone, Valentino attacked a party of three armored knights and their many footmen, taking dozens of wounds before he finally gave up his race against time and Fortune.

When considering Valentino’s efforts to conquer
Fortuna
, one cannot
but observe that the very defect of his soul offered him considerable advantage. To kill without hesitation or remorse, to deceive with a skill and ease born of a lifetime of practice, to observe humanity’s hopes and fears with an unnatural keenness—these traits are marvelously suited to a man ambitious for high office and great power. Yet no matter how lofty this rare man’s ascent, he remains enslaved by his own nature. Valentino possessed an intellect far superior to Nero, yet just as the latter was compelled to put on a wig and leave his Golden Palace at night, to risk his own life murdering and robbing his subjects like a gutter-dwelling cutthroat, Valentino condemned himself to live in a foul Labyrinth of deception and cruelty, which he could never escape.