The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (31 page)

My mistress sounded relieved to be moved on from the thought of grim things like daggers in the night. But I looked up then and I saw Leonello, standing halfway down the steps into the garden as though he’d frozen in place. He was not smiling.

“Taking up eavesdropping now?” I demanded, scraping the last of the mask off my face. But he looked at me expressionlessly, and then he turned and reversed out of the garden.

Leonello

T
he masked man melted toward me from the vaulted shadows.

I jerked upright on my stone wall bench, breath freezing behind my teeth.
He found out
, I thought inconsequentially.
He found out I was asking questions, heard I was making inquiries about the women who died staked to tables.
Curiosity was said to kill cats; what would it do to dwarves?
Dio.

I wondered if the masked man would pin my palms to the floor with knives too, before he pulled my head back by the hair to bare my throat.

My thoughts might have frozen, but my hands did not. The finger blade at my wrist cuff popped into one hand and the knife tucked into my boot top leaped into the other as the man in black came padding noiselessly toward me, eyes glittering behind the half mask.

“Don’t kill me, little lion man,” Cesare Borgia said from behind the mask. “My father would not thank you for that.”

The Pope’s son tossed his mask aside, revealing the familiar lean Borgia face. Even with the mask, I should have recognized the neatly clipped auburn beard, the lithe serpentine grace, the ever-present shadow behind him who was blank-eyed Michelotto.
Just Cesare Borgia
, I thought, but my hands would not relinquish the Toledo blades. I had to force the knife back into its boot sheath, and when I looked down I saw my fingers were trembling.

“It is unwise to approach an armed man while wearing a mask, Your Excellency,” I said, and heard my voice come cool and remote into the odd echoes of the arched windowless chamber. “Your Eminence, that is. My apologies; I’m not yet used to the red hat.” Nor was Rome. The Pope had elevated a batch of his supporters to cardinals in order to bolster his votes in the College; that was business as usual in papal politics—but for one of those cardinals to be his own bastard son, and a boy of a mere eighteen years . . .

And when there were such strange and violent rumors beginning to circulate through the city about that same boy.

“I’m not used to the red hat myself, yet.” The new Cardinal Borgia looked around the stone vaults, lit by long beeswax tapers and casting odd flickering shadows over the wall benches. “And I come masked because I like a long lone ride from time to time. Better if my father’s enemies don’t know they can find me unattended.”

“What about your own enemies?” The question came unbidden.

He smiled. “I have no enemies.”

Of course not. “You’ve just come from Rome, Your Eminence?”

“Yes. Some news for my father, from the French and Spanish ambassadors.”

“Miles on a horse, just to give some news?”

“I did say I liked a long lone ride.”

Yes, he did. He was frequently alone, Cesare Borgia, taking only Michelotto for a guard when he went out. Unlike his brother who had never gone anywhere without a pack of thugs and toadies, and young Lucrezia who was always surrounded by Giulia Farnese and Madonna Adriana and a half-dozen other giggling women in the papal seraglio. But the Pope’s eldest son seemed to prefer his own company.

So did I, of course. But if there was anything I knew about the solitary men of the world, being one myself, it was that they kept their own company so they would not have to explain their actions to others.

What do you do in all those lone hours, Your Eminence?

He was stripping his riding gloves off now, tossing them down on the wall bench as he dismissed Michelotto. “Is His Holiness within?”

“With Madonna Giulia. He complained it was too hot, but she persuaded him to take the waters for his health, to ease his humours. They may be . . . some time.”

My mistress’s low rippling laugh bubbled from the other side of the door, and the sound of splashing. The hot springs of Viterbo were famous—the ancient Romans had bathed here, quipping in their clipped sonorous Latin instead of our lazy vulgar Italian as they soaked in the healing sulfur springs under the sky. Pope Nicholas V had ordered massive baths erected, and now instead of sunny skies and arching trees overhead we had a battlemented, crenellated pile of marble and stone. Now the bathers tripped down shallow flights of stone steps and flitted along vaulted halls in their towels to reach the same steaming-hot springs. Giulia Farnese had tugged her papal lover through the arched doors with a wicked little laugh, flicking his entourage back with one small white hand, and the doors had closed on her shriek as the Holy Father tossed his shirt aside to reveal a swarthy bull’s chest and tossed her bodily into the bubbling pool. There had been some quarrel between them after the Duke of Gandia’s departure, but all appeared to be mended.

“Where are the others?” Cesare Borgia asked, looking around the vaulted antechamber. “The Holy Father’s entourage?” Doublets and shirts, discarded shoes and belts, a stack of snowy towels, and a chessboard and a flagon of wine lay scattered along the wall benches. I sat alone on a folded cloak under a silver branch of candles, a book resting facedown over my knee.

“Taken themselves to the next set of springs, since His Holiness indicated he did not wish company in this one.” Idly I moved a pawn on the chessboard beside me. The last players had abandoned their game partway through; black was eight moves from winning.

“You do not care for the baths, Messer Leonello?” Cesare Borgia discarded his cloak in a careless shrug, dropping it to the floor beside his mask.

“I killed my first man in a steam room,” I found myself saying. “I’ve never cared for them since.”

“Steam rooms, or killing?”

“Either.”

He flopped to the wall bench beside me. I moved another pawn on the chessboard, and he studied the pieces. “Black is nine moves from winning.”

“Eight.”

“Play me.”

It was not a request. “With pleasure, Your Eminence.”

The bass rumble of the Pope’s laughter sounded through the bolted doors to the bathing rooms, and I sat outside with the Pope’s son as he swiftly reset the chessboard. “Black or white?” I asked, and found my mouth inexplicably dry.

The gleam of his teeth showed in the dim room. “Black.”

I rotated the board. Carved ivory pieces standing in their ranks against carved ebony . . . but all I could see was blood welling in the dimple of a sweet, dead girl . . . and a black mask lying on a stone floor . . . and a dagger with a sapphire in its hilt.

I took a deep breath and moved my first pawn. “Go on,” I said. “Ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Did I truly kill my first man in a steam room?” Cesare Borgia was clever; I’d never get this conversation where I wanted it unless I made him curious.

“All right, Messer Leonello.” Cesare Borgia moved a black pawn to meet mine. “Did you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was seventeen. He stalked me there after a card game. I’d won the last
scudi
out of his purse, and he was angered.”

“You used a knife?” Another black pawn advanced.

“Poorly—the man slipped on the wet floor, down low enough for me to strike.” I moved a knight out onto the checkered field of battle. “I stabbed until he looked like a cut of cheese.”

“Sloppy,” said Cesare. “Only a clean kill is a good kill.”

“Surely any kill one can walk away from unscathed is a good kill?”

“No. Killing is a skill like any other. It should be practiced until it comes easily.”

“And what was your first kill, Your Eminence?”

“I am a man of the cloth, not the knife.” Cesare moved his bishop toward me, giving its little carved miter a caress.

“But you have killed.” I kept my eyes from straying to the mask on the floor. But I could see it, oh yes, I could see it very clearly. “I know the look.”

He looked at me across the board a moment, then shrugged. “A footpad. He wanted my purse.”

“And did you use a knife too?”

“Poorly.” The gleam of teeth again. “It took me four tries to cut his throat. But I was only sixteen.”

“Young.”

“We Borgias age quickly.” He advanced his queen. “We have to. We all die young.”

“Your father has not.” Another rumble of laughter came from the bolted doors as if in answer, accompanied by Giulia’s throaty murmur. Rodrigo Borgia sounded very vigorously alive indeed.

“The exception to the family rule.” Cesare dismissed his father. “My older brother died young—Pedro Luis. And one of my halfsisters in Spain.” He sounded remarkably unconcerned by their fates. “I imagine I’ll be next.”

“The thought doesn’t seem to trouble you.”

“Better to die young and in a saddle than in bed as an old man.”

“Perhaps.” I fingered my own queen; moved a bishop instead. “Tell me, why did you kill your footpad? Surely you could have chased him off.”

“He angered me. Besides, I wanted to know what it was like.”

“Killing?”

“Yes. I knew I would have to do it one day or another. And I thought, ‘Why not now?’” He took one of my pawns.

I took one of his knights. “Do you remember his face?”

“No. Do you remember your bathhouse drunk?”

“I never remember the men I’ve killed.”
True.
I gave a reminiscent whistle, tapping the carved crown of my white queen. “The one I remember is the woman.”
False.

“A woman?”

“A whore,” I lied, making up the details haltingly as though made uneasy by a bad memory. “She tried to rob me, afterward. Everyone tries to rob a dwarf. I fought her; she pulled a little knife out. I got it from her . . .” A shrug. “Women die differently than men.”

A black rook advanced, taking my knight. “Do they?”

I had no idea, and no intention of ever putting the theory to the test. “They do,” I lied, giving a bitter little laugh. “The bitch deserved it, but I still remember her face. Did you ever kill a woman, Your Eminence?”

The question fell into the vaulted room like a drop of water into a pool, spreading outward in silent ripples. There was a barely perceptible pause, and then—

“Careful,” said Cesare Borgia pleasantly, moving his knight. “Your king is in danger.”

I slid my king out of harm’s way. “I take it that is a no?”

“Take it however you wish, little lion man. I will tell you this—women aren’t worth the effort of killing.”

“Some might disagree. Did you ever find that man who staked those whores to the table?”

“As long as the crowds are quiet and do no more muttering about sacrifice to devils, who cares if we find him?”

“I thought you might be burning to find him, Eminence. If only to discover how he came to use your dagger on the last girl.” I had been turning that piece of information over in my mind since I’d first heard it, overheard from Giulia Farnese and her maids. Just a vicious bit of slander, I’d thought at first; no different from any other vicious slander that habitually circulated about the great. But then wildfire rumors overtook the city, and I found myself wondering.

“Ah.” Cesare looked amused, sliding a bishop one square. “You think I did it?”

“No.” I sacrificed a pawn. “You would never be so stupid as to leave your dagger behind to implicate you.”

“Perhaps I was arrogant rather than stupid,” he suggested. “Perhaps I wished to see how far I could go, and still get away with it.”

“An interesting notion.” My mouth was paper dry. “Did the first three girls not garner enough attention?”

“Three?” Bland. “I thought there were only two.”

“Three.” Anna, the first of them. She did appear to be the first, with her four-times-clumsily-slashed throat. No other girls had turned up on tables before her that I could find out. Another girl after that, one I had not even known about, killed a few months later. Then Carmelina’s fruit-seller friend, and finally the girl in the Borgo. And each woman, according to the answers I’d ferreted out from a few quiet chats with the Borgia guards, the idle city constables, the tavernkeepers where the bodies had been found—each woman had died more neatly than the last. Their throats gaping in progressively tidier slashes.

Killing is a skill like any other.
Cesare’s words whispered in my ear.
It should be practiced until it comes easily.

“On the other hand,” Cesare Borgia said serenely, studying the chessboard, “perhaps my dagger was stolen by some enemy of my father’s, and used to stir up ill feeling against me. Cardinal della Rovere would have sacrificed a whore’s life in an eyeblink, if it would have kept me from getting my red hat.”

“That does seem more likely,” I agreed. It
was
more likely, so why was I sweating in this cool stone room?

“And either way, why should anyone care?” Cesare shrugged. “They were only whores.”

“Only whores,” I echoed. “What, indeed, does it matter?”

Cesare Borgia’s black eyes found mine over the chessboard. I smiled back. “You aren’t paying attention, little lion man,” he said, and gave a wave of his elegant hand over the board. “I believe the win is mine in six moves.”

“So it is.” I tipped my king with a flick of the finger. “Another game, Your Eminence? And perhaps you will tell me your news from the French and Spanish ambassadors . . .”

We talked lightly, our voices even as I reset the board. Threats from France; apparently their king had threatened invasion to press his claim to Naples. “And from Spain more serious news—Juan has arrived in Barcelona and has already managed to offend everyone. Roaming about the city whoring and fighting and killing stray dogs. I imagine our Holy Father will write Juan an angry letter.”

“Indeed.”

I won the second game. Cesare Borgia rose, stretching lightly like a long-bodied cat. “You fight a good game of chess, Messer Leonello. You play like a Roman—encircling defenses and sudden piercing attacks from the rear guard.”

“You play like a Spaniard, Your Eminence. No retreat, not ever.”