The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (10 page)

The box was empty when I took it. I’d have sworn an oath on that. But the hand’s dried palm must have caught on the broken edges of the viewing window as I bundled everything up, because later I found the dark curled thing tangled in my cloak at the bottom of my pack, after I’d sold the pieces of the reliquary for far less than they were worth. I’d stared at it in horror, but what was I supposed to do then? I’d already taken ship, the cheapest passage I could find from Venice to Ferrara. Even if the boat had turned around on the spot, I couldn’t have taken the relic back—I’d have been arrested for desecration of a church.

I’d meant what I told Marco that first morning, sitting in those cramped little kitchens.
I can’t go back.
If I’d just stolen from my father—well, I’d likely be returned for whatever punishment he deemed fit. But a desecrator of church altars wouldn’t be forgiven. I didn’t know what punishment they had in Rome for desecrators, but I’d heard how other thieves of God had been treated. I could be strung upside down from a public gallows, hanging there while the crowds threw rocks and rotten vegetables at me, until the blood burst inside my head.

And if they found out just who I was—what I had been in Venice—well, I’d be shipped back there, to La Serenissima and the hands of my enemies. And I’d face a far worse punishment than hanging upside-down on a public gallows.

I shivered at the thought, tasting the sour tang of terror in my mouth again, and crossed myself as I looked at the dark shriveled thing in the nest of clothes. I certainly couldn’t throw it away like trash, but what
did
I do with it? I’d thought of leaving it at a shrine or an altar somewhere—but relics in the Holy City are a hundred to a
scudo;
likely the hand would just have been tossed away as rubbish. I couldn’t send it back to the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice, either; not without giving myself away.

I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with the thing.

I had to steel myself to touch it with my bare hand. I could cut a lamb’s throat for the kitchen spit as briskly and unsentimentally as any man; I could plunge my hand into a mass of still-steaming pig guts and empty them out for sausage casings; but I flinched as I picked up the withered hand and laid it on my bed. It felt dry and wrinkled to the touch, like a raisin.

I hesitated, then dropped to my knees beside it. It might not be my patron saint’s true hand, but it had still been sacred to her, a relic of her church. If I gave my prayers to it, she would hear me. Only, what
was
the proper prayer to a saint whom you have robbed and desecrated?

“Santa Marta,” I said finally, “don’t be angry with me. You know I couldn’t—you know I had to leave.” I was glad I didn’t have to get into that part of my story—the small matter of who I was. Being sanctified, Santa Marta would just
know
that without me having to go through all the sordid details. “I’m sorry I had to steal from you, I didn’t mean—”

I stopped. This wasn’t going well at all.

“Santa Marta,” I began again. “Help me to stay hidden here, and I dedicate all the dishes these hands of mine will ever make to you. The roasts, the fowl, the sauces, the sweets—all to your name. My hands and all their works, from this day, if you will forgive me my sins against you.”

I looked down at my hands. Scarred with old knife nicks, the faded burn on my wrist where a too-hot sauce had once splashed, the calluses from wrestling with spits and jerking feathers from dead pheasants. What saint besides the patron of cooks would want hands like that?

For the first time, I really looked at the curled-up hand now lying on my bed. A small hand like mine; useful for stuffing the cavities of small birds. Narrow fingers, one still wearing a filigreed gold band, the sort of ring a cook would choose because it wasn’t too elaborate to wear while kneading bread dough. The withered palm was broad—and was that the remnant of a callus at the base of the forefinger, in the same place where I had one after years of pressure from the handle of a knife?

I smiled for what felt like the first time in months. Maybe this wasn’t the true hand of my patron saint, but it
had
been the hand of a cook.

Maybe we still understood each other, Santa Marta and I. Maybe she wasn’t so angry with me after all. She had been at my side for Madonna Giulia’s wedding feast, after all—even if Marco did get the credit for it, the good saint and I both knew who had really pulled it off.

“It
was
a good feast, wasn’t it?” I asked the hand, and was rather disappointed when it didn’t move. If it had made the sign of the cross at me, I’d have known my vow had been heard.

Or maybe I’d have just fainted dead away.

“Carmelina!”
Marco’s bellow from the kitchens. “Why are you dawdling, little cousin? Those figs won’t stuff themselves!”

“Coming,
maestro
,” I called, and hastily found my spare apron to replace the soiled one. The hand I carefully wrapped in my finest linen kerchief and stored at the bottom of my chest. “Not as good as a silver and rock crystal reliquary,” I said aloud, rising. “But you’ll never be more needed than you are with me.”

I made the sign of the cross and whisked out of my little room that smelled like olive oil. I was a thief and a desecrator, and I was probably bound for hell one day, but Marco was right. Madonna Giulia’s figs were not going to stuff themselves.

CHAPTER FOUR

The sword of the Lord will descend swiftly, and soon.

—FRA SAVONAROLA

Leonello

T
he Inn of the Fig was a step or two grander than the kind of establishment where I normally made my living. The maidservants wore neat gowns and clean aprons and for the most part looked indignant if you thumped them on the hip after they brought your drinks. The wine was subtler, the tapers beeswax instead of smoky tallow, the trestle tables clean-scrubbed rather than sticky with wine, and the crowd of dusty traveling pilgrims and habitual gamblers had a greater sprinkling of velvet-clad boys escaping their tutors for a little noisy fun among the cards and commoners. Accordingly I bought a new shirt and polished my boots, brought a seldom-worn cap of faded velvet from the chest at the foot of my bed, as well as a few rings for my stubby fingers that weren’t silver but looked real enough, and for three weeks came nightly to the Inn of the Fig to play dice,
zara
, and all the other games of chance that I normally scorned. I ordered wine that I pretended to drink and ordered rounds that my fellow players drank to the dregs, and through it all I kept my ears open.

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 the 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—”