He makes his way down the spiral stairs from the castle battlements and out through the door that leads onto the piazza. The air is as frozen as the ground and his boots crunch into virgin snow, the only sound in a ghostly silent world. As he gets closer to the center, an extraordinary tableau emerges. The large shape becomes a butcher’s block, with a cleaving knife embedded in it, a ribbon of snow balanced like piped icing along its edge. And the object on the ground is revealed to be a man’s body, a nimbus of dark blood spreading out from where his head has been severed from his trunk. But it is not only the neck that has bled; the whole torso is an open wound, cloven from collarbone to groin and prized apart to resemble the splayed carcass of a cow. And beside it sits the head, black hair and beard coated in whirling flakes but still recognizable. Ramiro de Lorqua, the soldier who liked to grind boys’ bodies into fires, has been butchered like an animal and left on public display.
People are gathering now: men and a few women wrapped in mangy furs and blankets, their faces hardened by more than years. One or two nod or shake their heads, and someone spits into the snow, but no one says a word. The white silence sits heavy on them all. Whatever the sins of a man’s life, this public, barbaric death on a Christmas morning is a shock. As it is meant to be, Niccolò thinks. Hot blood on frozen snow: a theater of justice to balance a theater of cruelty, and a show of absolute authority. Once again he finds himself in reluctant admiration of this enemy prince.
Later that day, almost as an afterthought, a proclamation is nailed to the door of the town hall accusing the ex-governor of extortion in the sale of the city’s grain supplies. But Niccolò is more interested in the talk of the screaming that some now say they heard rising from the duke’s quarters nearby, as if an altogether darker confession was being pulled out of him.
A congress of losers, all of them, and I know most of what they do before they do it.
He is composing a dispatch in his mind when he arrives back at his lodging to find a messenger waiting: Duke Valentine and his men are to ride out tomorrow en route to Sinigaglia, where the city has formally surrendered to his troops. Florence’s envoy is offered an escort of his own and invited to join them.
He feels a hot knot of excitement rise inside him. Whatever it is, it has already begun.
CHAPTER 29
“It’ll never work.”
“In which case, Vitelli, you come up with something better. Because fuck knows, no one else will.”
Oliverotto da Fermo turns furiously toward two other men sitting huddled over the fire, their eyes fixed on the flames. As the soft skin of the conspiracy has peeled away with promises of pardons and profit, its hard core—those men who having rebelled and lost have nothing left to sell—is exposed. The Baglioni have scuttled back to Perugia, locking the city gates behind them, leaving Vitelli, da Fermo and the dregs of the Orsini family, Paolo and Francesco, deserted by their cardinal and cringing in the background. For weeks they and their troops have been camped outside Sinigaglia in the dead of winter negotiating the terms of the surrender. Soldiers of fortune are used to hardship in the field, but this is punishment, not work: guilty men reduced to blunt choices and blunter feelings; scalding fires, frozen nights, stomachs rolling from fear as much as hunger, while they curse and scratch at the lice that have found sanctuary in their filth. At least inside the city they have access to hot water and decent food. No wonder no one wants to leave.
“Valentine’s dispatch says he needs room only for his personal staff.” Da Fermo presses on. “Less than a hundred men.”
“He’s lying,” Vitelli growls again, his hands kneading away at his thighs in what has become an automatic gesture toward the pain that never leaves him. “He’d never come unarmed. The bastard is hiding an army somewhere.”
“Where?” da Fermo snaps back furiously. “For Christ’s sake, you heard the words coming out of de Lorqua’s mouth as clearly as I did: the new troops were left in Imola and de Lorqua himself watched the French march out a week ago. There is no ‘army’ anymore. He is coming to pick up the keys of his final conquest. He thinks he’s won.”
Vitelli laughs grimly. “What? And you think he hasn’t?”
“All I know is that we’re not dead yet. However much you act as if you might like to be. God’s bollocks, if you haven’t got the appetite for it anymore, stick the knife in yourself and give me control of your troops. I’ve still got a life to live.”
At another time they would have made a good father and son, these two, for the gap in age and experience between them is enough. But it is the younger soldier who is setting the pace now. It is exactly a year since he had carved up his own uncle like an apprentice butcher. How fast it moves, this wheel of fortune. From being poised at the top looking down over all others, he is now scrabbling along the ground to squirm free from the approaching weight.
“I tell you it could work. I keep a small force inside the castle, then, when he and his men are in, I open the gates to the rest of you. There are a dozen places in the town or inside the fortress where we might take him out.”
It is a feeble, whining little plan, reaching only as far as a mangled Borgia body felled by a dagger or a sniper’s crossbow and an ally in Ramiro de Lorqua, who had been alive and well when he left them before Christmas.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Paolo Orsini’s voice, like his face, is raw with cold and misery.
Da Fermo turns on him, but Vitelli gets in first.
“Then you’ll be too dead to care,” he snaps. Jesus Christ, if there is anyone he hates more than Cesare Borgia it’s this fawning lady boy who was the first to go crawling home as the wind changed. They should have slit his throat the moment he came back with the offer. Having been closest to the center of Borgia power, Vitelli knows better than all of them that what has been done will never be forgiven; that whatever double cross they might try, it will be trumped as surely as in a card game where your opponent holds more aces than there are in the pack. But however it ends, it could not be worse than the blunt blades that saw through his legs and stomach day and night. There had been a time when his hatred and need for revenge had given him at least momentary relief, but not anymore. Now all he looks forward to is death. Da Fermo is right. Better to go out fighting.
“So, we are agreed then?” he says, shifting his leg and letting out a satisfying growl. In the silence that follows all four men move a little closer to the fire.
December 30, 1502, and across the center of Italy the day brings a peerless pale blue sky and a thick coating of frost.
In Rome, Alexander wakes to a dispatch sent three days before, as Cesare and his personal guard marched out of Cesena. Once he has read it, the pontiff’s current bad humor dissolves as fast as early morning fog. His chaplains and his Master of Ceremonies can barely believe their eyes and ears when he arrives at the Sistine Chapel for morning mass with a beatific smile on his face, embracing his fellow cardinals, singing at the top of his voice, then staying on afterward for an hour of private prayer.
“There is nothing as special as these days following Our Savior’s birth, do you not agree, Johannes?” he says as he settles himself down to a frugal breakfast of leftover fish and red wine, ready to welcome the ambassadors who are, as ever, already lining up to see him. “You know when I was a boy in Xàtiva—sweet little place in the middle of the countryside, I have told you about it before—I stayed up one Christmas in the church after midnight mass, hid myself behind the altar and held vigil in front of the tableau of the nativity. It was a dreadful winter, I remember, the worst for years, but I never felt the cold. The Virgin’s gaze and the candle star warmed me all through the night. When they found me in the morning they were amazed. ‘Rodrigo has the makings of a great churchman’ is what my father and mother said. And how right they were, eh? The world is full of small miracles, don’t you think?”
Burchard, who has heard this before, as he has heard most of the sentimental stories that the Pope chooses to tell these
days, says nothing. These weeks have been a nightmare, and he lacks his employer’s capacity to move so effortlessly from storm to sunshine.
“Ah, Burchard, I am sorry if my ill humor has made your job difficult,” the Pope says. “As you know I have been most worried about my family. But Lucrezia’s health is returned, my son is saved from conspiracy and now it seems his old enemies have made their peace by securing the surrender of Sinigaglia. Sinigaglia. Sinigaglia…” He sings the word excitedly, as if on the edge of saying more. “Yes, yes, well…there is much to tell. But for now there is also much to do. We must set up new staging posts between the two cities to make sure the news flows freely. And with the danger passed, it behooves us to be generous to those around us. Cardinal Orsini, for instance. He has proved himself a most honorable fellow and we do not feel we have properly welcomed him back into the fold.
“We shall celebrate the fall of Sinigaglia together, for he has kinsmen in my son’s employ who have shown themselves faithful again. A dinner, I think, in our families’ honor, here in our apartment tomorrow night: some good friends and perhaps a few of Rome’s ‘ladies’ to aid our digestion. Oh, don’t worry, Burchard, you do not need to attend. I would not want the rise of your nose spoiling harmless old men’s fun. Now. Let us have our first ambassador. Venice today, I think. It will annoy them especially to hear of this triumph.”
Dawn has yet to break when the duke and his men leave the little town of Fano to start the fifteen-mile journey down the coast to Sinigaglia. They travel for a while in darkness, the only evidence of their presence a few burning torches, the jangling of harnesses and the crunch of hooves breaking the ice on thin puddles.
A few miles out of town they stop. To their left a watery sun is rising over the Adriatic, giving way to a landscape of flat scrubland on both sides, moving gradually into rolling hills to the west. The dull light reveals the company of men: sixty-odd horsemen, twenty of them soldiers, the personal bodyguard dressed in heavy leathers with swords at their waists, the rest members of the household, better equipped for cooking than for fighting.
There is one man, however, dressed for conquest: Cesare Borgia rides in full armor. Soon the sun will start to play with all that polished steel, the smooth curved breastplate, the reptile joints of the leg coverings and the burnished dome of the helmet with a plume of black feathers sprouting from the top. All in all, a most unnecessary vanity for such a small army. But then not everyone has arrived yet.
The horses, grown tired of waiting, are pawing at the ground, sending clouds of steam snorting into the air, while the riders stuff their hands under their armpits against the bitter cold. Only Cesare sits impassive, his visor up, eyes trained out into the distance watching. These last nights, since leaving Cesena, he has slept long and soundly, at peace with himself and the rest of the world. For a man fueled by impatience and jags of energy, it is a new experience, and he has savored every minute of it. An ocean of time stretches out in front of him, as long and open as the road ahead. What starts here now will have reverberations deep into the future. My God, if only every day could be like this one.
The meeting between the duke and his condottieri has been arranged for midday at a wide bend in the road half a mile outside the walls of Sinigaglia.
Vitelli and the Orsini arrive with good time to spare, da Fermo remaining with a small force inside the city, as agreed. The sun has burned off the frost and the air is bright and clear, still not a cloud in the sky. A perfect winter’s day. The best kind of weather to kill or be killed, Vitelli thinks as he holds his half crippled body up on the broad back of his mule—no longer able to sustain the harshness of a horse saddle beneath him.
He pulls at the mule’s head, to stop it from grazing, and as he does so he notices how the horses around him are becoming skittish, their heads tossing to and fro against the bit. Over the years he has learned to listen to such animals, for they always pick it up first: the tremor that seems to move for miles under the earth itself, the drumbeat that human ears only hear now as wind mixed with the noise of the sea.
He scours the distance. Nothing. Nothing. Then something. Yes, definitely something: a few random glints of light, sun glinting off metal, like coded signals across enemy lines. He lifts himself up as best he can to watch it unfold. The long bend of the road ahead allows him to read each element as it comes into view.
The cavalry comes first: four or five abreast in full armor and a figure on a white horse out in front, the standard-bearer next to him, the red and yellow color clash of the Borgia crest and the Duchy of Valentinois spread out in the breeze. After, come the men-at-arms, too many to count. They must have marched from Imola days ago, camped out somewhere waiting for the moment to reunite.
What happened? Did de Lorqua change sides yet again, bringing them false information, or is his silence a more sinister sign? Well, cruel men meet cruel ends; there is no point in second-guessing the game now. Vitelli glances toward the Orsini, both of them ashen faced, their mouths open in awe. When he turns his eyes back, it is in time to see a single horseman and a section of cavalry break off at a gallop. At first he thinks it is a charge, feels his nerves singing in response, but it soon becomes clear they are wheeling around them on their way toward the town. In front, it has to be Michelotto; there are not many men of his modest stature who ride as confidently as they kill.
And still the army keeps on coming. Finally he makes out Swiss pikemen from King Louis’s army, the bearded giants of the battlefield. My God, he had almost forgotten them. Where were they? Faenza? Forlì? Wherever it was, they will have marched from there, as they do now, in perfect measured unison to the sound of the roll of drums, their steel-tipped staves held out like a mobile stockade in front of them. If a man didn’t know better, he might think he was watching a crusading force making its way to the coast to set sail for the Holy Land. All this to crush a miserable little band of rebels.
When the front line is maybe fifty yards away from them, the duke raises his arm to halt the horses, and little by little the metal orchestra falls silent behind him.
For a long time the two sides just watch each other. What are they waiting for? Vitelli thinks. He puts his hand on his sword hilt. What would he give for a good battle now? A death in glorious bloody cuts, given as well as received. Except he knows that is not how it is going to end.
Then, as the duke and his guard start to move forward again, Vitelli sees da Fermo and his men riding in from the side with Michelotto behind them. What excuse had he given to draw them out from the town? What the hell is going on here?
Cesare, agile even in full armor, is already pulling off his gauntlets as he reaches them, his face wreathed in smiles, grabbing hands and clasping arms with everyone around, shouting welcome. But Vitelli first and foremost.
“Ah, Comrade Vitelli, we’ve not kept you waiting long in this ball-biting cold, I hope. It can’t be good for your condition.” He turns. “And da Fermo? How are you, man? Yes, yes—I know what you are thinking. I bring a big force for a small town. But it’s not for Sinigaglia. Oh no. This is the start of the next campaign, and we are here to pick up you and your men. For what is the Borgia army without my faithful condottieri, eh? Now we are reunited, let us get ourselves inside the town and celebrate.”
And as Vitelli turns his mule and rides off next to the duke—for what else can he do?—he glances about to see the others, similarly smothered in greetings, corralled back along from where they came.
The walls of the city come into view: the main gate open, the bridge that leads to it flanked by two lines of Cesare’s cavalry, a guard of his own escort to welcome the conquering hero into town. So slyly and smoothly done, oiled by warm words and comradely smiles. As they disappear in through the gates, the horsemen fall in line behind them, freeing the way for the rest of the army to follow, irrevocably separating the rebel leaders from their own men. What soldier could not applaud the choreography?
The farce of friendship need last only a
little longer. As far as the fortress courtyard, where once they are dismounted, Cesare’s men hustle the four of them upstairs, arms tight around them like the best of comrades, the grip so firm that no one can reach his sword.
Behind him, Vitelli hears Paolo Orsini’s squeaky voice, begging to be let go. Followed by Cesare’s booming laughter. “Oh, no, but you are needed now, Lady Paolo. How could we sit in front of the map of Italy and plan our route of triumph without you?”
When they are finally inside the room and the door closed, the soldiers fall away, to join a line of others waiting, their swords already unsheathed.
“Gentlemen,” Cesare says casually, glancing first at Michelotto, then back to them. “It is good to see you all again. You will forgive me if I leave you for a little while. Six hours in the saddle have taken their toll on my bladder.”
My God, you bastard, Vitelli thinks, you are not even interested in watching us die.
“Go piss yourself,” he yells as they drag him and da Fermo toward two chairs. “You don’t even have the balls to do the job yourself.”
Cesare stops for a second, turning on his heel, the casual smile rigid on his face.
“You’re right, Vitelli. I only have ‘balls’ when it comes to killing men. Cockroaches I leave to others.”
“Fuck you. Fuck every one of you Borgias,” Vitelli screams, straining against the cords, kicking wildly. “I’ll see you all in hell.”
And for one glorious moment before the garrote bites, he feels no pain at all.
It is growing dark by the time Niccolò and his appointed escort reach the gates of Sinigaglia. For a moment it seems they may not let him in at all, for it is clearly more than the soldiers’ lives are worth to act without authority. But his name is on the list, as promised, and there is even a sequestered lodging ready for him.