City of God (13 page)

They paid him better than the Signory; more promptly, too.

He could not rely on the other members of the delegation, even Bruni, to perform the ordinary tasks of day-to-day work. Without him constantly at their backs the scribes left out whole pages of documents, the aides spent their time at public gatherings flirting with pretty women rather than attending the great, and Bruni submerged himself in a book of poetry or a novel rather than read bad news. There was nothing Nicholas could do about Bruni. The others he harassed and scolded until even to him his voice sounded shrill as a witch's, and then, as if in revenge, his voice disappeared altogether.

He came in to the legation offices in the morning, just after six o'clock, and found Bruni's junior aide Ugo loitering in the courtyard. Nicholas crossed the flagstone yard toward the door into the building. Ugo moved to intercept him.

“Good morning, Messer Nicholas—may I ask how your throat is this morning?”

Nicholas frowned at him. He whispered, “No better,” and pushed by him to the stairs.

“Have you tried lemon and honey?” Ugo bounded after him into the building, still cool from the night's relief. “An old remedy of my nurse's. It always works for me.”

Nicholas croaked, “A pox on your nurse.” He climbed the narrow turning stair to the workroom. Here already the sun penetrated. The place smelled of stale sweat. A hundred flies clung to the white rims of the windows. Nicholas hung up his coat and walking stick. There was no one else here but him and Ugo, who was following after him faithfully.

“I want you to know, Messer Nicholas,” the young man said, “that I, if no one else—” he pressed his hand to his breast—“understand how intolerable you must find your present situation.”

Nicholas swiveled his head around to fix Ugo with a stare, amazed at such innocence. It was as if the young man had said simply, “I am the spy.” As soon as that thought entered his mind, he held it off, doubting; everything had two meanings. Perhaps the remark was innocent. He said something in a painful whisper and turned away.

Still Ugo nagged after him. “If there is anything I can do—”

At the threshold to the corridor, Nicholas wheeled around, one hand out to fend Ugo off. “Yes—you can stop making me talk and get to work on the Spanish dispatches.” He walked into the corridor.

“Messer Nicholas—I was hoping—”

He stopped and turned again, his voice echoing in his throat.

“I was hoping to take leave, until the next week.”

“No!”

“I have not—”

“No!” Nicholas stamped away down the corridor. This time Ugo let him go.

In the late afternoon, when Nicholas returned to the delegation, Bruni was on the loggia watering the palms. Nicholas stood in the archway. Bruni called, “Oh, incidentally, young Ugo will be gone the rest of the week.”

Nicholas stiffened.

“He has some family business to attend to,” Bruni said.

His back to Nicholas, he was bending over a pot with his pitcher of water; Nicholas could see only his legs and backside. A murderous desire came over him to knock Bruni's head into the palm and kick his backside. At the same time he would say, “I am leaving.” The urge like another man inside him yearned and yearned but was a coward. At length Nicholas went back into the workroom and down the corridor to his chamber.

His desk was heaped with work. He thrust it all aside and sat down and buried his head in his folded arms. It was absurd; he was near tears, and over nothing more than an order reversed by a superior. That happened to him every day.

He sucked in his breath, sitting up, lightheaded, with an evil in his stomach. He laughed at himself. When the Borgias had blackmailed him into their service he had imagined his life would change somehow. Like the rest of humankind he sweated his days out in routine and detail, all held together by the foolish hope that someday everything would change, something would happen; and he had supposed that Valentino's magic would transform him, too, into a creature of power.

He stroked his sweating hands together. The awful heat filled him with gloom. He felt sick. He laughed again. He was prey; men like him were born to be prey; just because Valentino preyed on him, would he become a predator too? His thoughts whirled. It was the heat that made him sick. The heat and work made him brain-sick.

Yet it was true that in Valentino he had a chance to change his fortunes. It would not happen if he waited for the Borgia prince to come to him asking for his help.

He pressed his hands to his cheeks. Within a few weeks the heat would break, and the delicious autumn would make Rome livable again. Gradually he became aware of something climbing on his ankle.

He sprang out of his chair like an Indian dancer. Landing on the threshold, he shook his leg madly in the air, his heart racing, until he saw the spider lying on its back on the floor a few feet away, wiggling its hairy black legs in the air. He put his foot down. The spider's fangs were like tusks. He took off one shoe and hammered the spider into a puddle on the tile.

“Nicholas,” Bruni said, behind him, “whatever are you doing?”

“Tarantula,” Nicholas said. His voice wheezed.

The spider's remains stank. He went around the mess to open the window as wide as he could. Bruni watched him from just outside the door, smiling.

“See how your hands shake.”

Nicholas said nothing, his voice exhausted.

He raked the papers off his desk into a drawer and locked it. “I'm going home.”

“Oh, now, Nicholas, no need for panic,” Bruni said sharply. “It's hours yet before the end of the day.”

“I'm going home.” Nicholas brushed by his chief and went on down the corridor.

He did not go home. Instead he walked across the city to the Ponte Sisto, the bridge that led to the Trastevere, where there was a mapmaker.

The shop was in a crowded lane in the shadow of Santa Cecilia. When Nicholas entered, someone else was occupying the mapmaker's attention. Nicholas went to the side of the narrow room, whose walls were built up with shelves from floor to ceiling, each shelf holding a roll of paper.

The smell of ink reminded him of the scriptorium in the monastery where he had grown up, where old Brother Leo had taught him to write the monk's hand. Once, coming cheaply on a fine edition of the gospels, Nicholas had sent it anonymously to the monks for their library. Of course Leo had been dead then for years. He wondered if the book had ever reached them. Strange, the power of the senses; the mere smell of ink opened so many old rooms. He wondered if they might guess, somehow, that the book had come from him.

On a shelf he found a map tagged
Donation of Constantine.
When he opened it out he saw the outlines of the states of central Italy. He rolled it up again and waited for the shopkeeper to finish his business with the other man.

Leaving the shop, he started home again, the map tucked like a loaf of bread under his arm. Evening had come. The sky was dark blue, still luminous, but here and there picked out with stars. The rims of the horizon, still pink and orange with the sunset, were made ragged with trees, the spikes of cypress, the flat umbrellas of the pines, and the ragged puffs of palms. In the east, swollen and yellow, the moon was rising like an alien face.

Nicholas hurried back toward the bridge. He did not like walking after dark in this quarter. The twilight confused his eyes. He passed a boy with a long stick, herding home a cow with a bell jangling around her neck. The sound followed him, fading slowly. He smelled cow dung. Small hope he would reach home with his shoes clean. On his left the moonlight glittered on pools of still water in a marshy meadow.

On the bridge, he came face to face with Stefano.

“What are you doing here?” Stefano said. “Were you looking for me?”

Nicholas did not deny it. They stood by the railing and exchanged the usual remarks. Finally Nicholas said, “Will you walk me home? You know this area swarms with thieves.”

Stefano put his head back and laughed. He leaned on his elbow on the railing of the bridge. “Yes, if you want. Of course.”

A passer-by called, “Eh, Bello!” Stefano waved his hand languidly in answer.

Nicholas set off across the bridge. It was not below this bridge, but nearby, that he and Stefano had first met.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Stefano asked, falling in beside him as he walked. “I thought you stayed at your work until nine or so.”

“Usually,” Nicholas said.

“Your voice seems better, at least.”

“Not much better.”

He told his lover of the tarantula. That led him backward to Bruni's remarks and to Bruni's letting Ugo take leave and to the amount of work Nicholas was expected to accomplish.

“They would not drive you if you were not the only one who could manage it all,” Stefano said, and later, “This Bruni seems a perfect ass.”

“He is,” Nicholas said.

They were walking by the Colosseo. The night was deepening around them, and the smoke of cooking fires and the sound of voices came from the hovels that were crowded along the lower wall of the ruin. There had been several cases of plague in the wretched huts; Nicholas swerved wide around the place and held his head turned to keep from breathing the poisonous air.

“What is that?” Stefano asked.

“Oh—this? A map.”

“A map? Are you sailing somewhere?”

Nicholas prepared a lie, but Stefano waved one hand at him and said, “If it is work, don't tell me.”

They walked up the dark lane toward Nicholas's gate and passed through the garden. Juan opened the door of the house for them.

Nicholas put the map on the table by the door and shed his coat. Stefano was already across the room, at the sideboard. The sound reached Nicholas of wine splashing into a glass. That irritated him, as it always did, Stefano doing here whatever pleased him, Stefano acting master of the house. His gaze fell to the map again.

“Bring me a glass,” he said, and unrolled the map.

The chart was done in a patchwork of blues and greens and yellows, with the names of the states in heavy black letters. Nicholas, who left Rome as seldom as possible, found the Romagna with some difficulty; he had imagined it much nearer Rome. He saw at once why the Borgias were hot to ally with Ferrara, which stood between the heart of the Papal States and Venice, the Pope's old enemy.

“I should have looked at this much sooner.” He sat down in his chair with the map on his knees. Stefano brought him the wine; Nicholas did not look up.

He ticked off the cities that Valentino had already taken. There was art to his campaigning; he had concentrated his attack so far on the cities along the Via Emilia. From his readings in Xenophon Nicholas knew the importance of lines of communication in warfare. The Borgias had been systematic in their attack on the Romagna. Yet several cities and strongholds remained outside their control.

To Nicholas, Urbino stood out; it was closer to Rome than the others and controlled the approaches to the heart of the Romagna. He wondered why it had gone untaken.

Juan was shuffling his feet behind Nicholas's chair. He wanted to bring in the meal. Nicholas shook his head.

“Not now. I'm not hungry.”

“I am,” Stefano called.

Juan coughed; Nicholas waggled his hand to him to go away. He circled Urbino with his forefinger. That was the city of Federigo da Montefeltro, the great condottiere of the previous generation, who had built a huge palace there. Federigo's son ruled it now. Guidobaldo. Scraps of information about Guidobaldo jumped up from his memory. Married to a sister of the Marquis of Mantua, they had no children, and a nephew of tender age was his heir. A quiet man, Guidobaldo kept a court of scholars and philsophers, where his wife shone like a jewel.

“No, no,” Stefano was saying. “Here. On the table.”

Nicholas glanced up. With his hand Stefano guided old Juan about. The old man put down a platter on the table Stefano indicated. He was serving Stefano with Nicholas's dish, with Nicholas's dinner. They were putting hot dishes down on the olivewood table, whose beeswax finish would be ruined.

Stefano pulled his chair up to the table, sat, rubbed his hands together, his face alight with appetite. Juan waited beside his chair. Juan loved having someone to wait on. Stefano shook out the white napkin and laid it on his knees.

“Nicholas.” He looked over at Nicholas. “What is it?”

Nicholas cleared his throat. After all, he had sent Juan away.

He said, “Have you ever been to Urbino?”

“Never.”

Nicholas turned back to the map.

Ugo came back the following Monday to his duties at the legation. Nicholas watched him narrowly for two days after that. He was sure now that Ugo was the spy who had betrayed him to the Borgias. Only a few days before, Valentino had sent Nicholas a fat purse and a letter full of fair words thanking him for the trivial work he had done; therefore Valentino could not know the calumnies with which Nicholas packed his dispatches to the Signory. Whoever the spy was, then, he knew only that the dispatches were forged over Bruni's signature. Ugo could know that.

Nicholas gave twenty carlini to Ugo's manservant. “Where did your master spend his leave-time?”

The manservant slid his hand with the money into his purse and did not remove it. “I shall tell him that you asked, Ser Niccolo.”

“Do.”

“He has a light o' love,” the manservant said.

“Boy or girl?”

Without humor the servant laughed in his face. “A girl.” He walked away across the paving stones of the courtyard.

“I have read your report on the Romagna,” Bruni said. “Only a summary, of course, nothing new, but shrewdly said, Nicholas.”

“Thank you,” Nicholas replied. He was proud of the report. “I saw a map. Somehow in that I saw the entire problem in a new way.”