And just now, it could have doubled for the Inferno. Perhaps one of the livelier rings of hell, with a few of the more energetic sins. Despair; yes, I saw plenty of that as I descended into a throng of servants wringing their hands and wild-eyed stewards perusing fistfuls of increasingly frayed lists. Vanity, certainly; I saw that too—the bride’s attendants preening everywhere there was a reflective surface and trying to pretend they weren’t counting the pearls on the bodice of the girl beside them. Wrath; plenty of that too as maids got their ears violently boxed for not being fast enough with a cup of wine, and pages shouted at each other with voices gone shrill from strain.
Dio. Weddings.
“Where are you going, dwarf?” a rude voice demanded as I made my way through the throng to a certain tapestry-covered archway. My eyes traveled up a pair of absurd cloth-of-silver pantaloons, a gold robe with a dagged edge that trailed the floor, and a broad collar of pearls and balas rubies.
“I see one of the Sultan’s concubines has gone astray.”
Juan Borgia flushed under his absurd turban with its ceiling-scraping plume and huge ruby. A suave Turkish prince had arrived in Rome as a hostage not long ago, and his flamboyant robes and pantaloons had been adopted by all the young fops in Rome. One could look out over a sea of turbans at Mass and not be sure whether one was in a church or a mosque.
“I wouldn’t expect a dwarf to understand the fashions,” he said, giving an eye to my ill-fitting Borgia livery. A year in the Pope’s service and I still didn’t have a doublet that fit around my oddly proportioned body.
“There’s some advantage at least in being a dwarf,” I answered the Duke of Gandia. “Even in a hat as silly as that one, I could still clear a doorway without ducking. Do try not to trip on those curly shoes, will you, and send the bride sprawling on her way to her husband?”
I swept a flourish of a bow and continued past him. Not wise, perhaps, to be rude to the Pope’s favorite son, but my viper tongue still required a fool now and then on which to exercise its edges, and Juan Borgia served admirably in place of drunken innkeepers and tavern cheats.
Lucrezia Borgia would pass through the streets of Rome on her way to the Vatican, escorted in her bridal procession by her brother the faux Turk and Madonna Giulia and a full hundred and fifty additional Roman ladies arrayed in their finest. Crowds would gather to see them pass, commenting on the jewels and the gowns and the splendor of the occasion, craning their necks and hoping for largesse until the moment the Pope’s daughter disappeared into the Vatican. I wondered idly what the crowds really thought of such pomp—a train of hundreds for the Borgia bride when most Roman girls went accompanied only by family and friends; diamonds and sables and pedigreed horses for wedding gifts when most girls got only embroidered belts or perhaps a length of cloth; a fifteen-thousand-ducat wedding dress when most fathers, on their yearly earnings of perhaps twenty-five ducats, could afford only a pair of new sleeves to dress up their daughter’s best gown.
If I knew crowds, they would be pleased by the pomp, dazzled rather than offended. The Borgias, in the eyes of most of the world including themselves, had been put upon the earth by God to lead sumptuous lives on behalf of the masses. Their pomp was God’s will.
I took the private route out of the palazzo, not caring to be crushed by eager crowds. A passage already existed between the Palazzo Santa Maria and the Vatican itself, by which the Pope could visit his mistress and family, and all Rome was abuzz with that bit of gossip too. At least three times a week the Holy Father quite openly dismissed his retinue and took the short walk from his papal apartments, and the satin-textured, intensely feminine world of the papal seraglio changed to an ordinary bustling Roman household as Giulia Farnese dispensed wifely kisses, Madonna Adriana called for another place at the table, and Lucrezia bounced for her share of fatherly hugs. The Holy Father could relax like any ordinary Roman merchant, sit down to a good cena with a pretty wife on one side and a capable mother-in-law on the other and a cherished daughter running to refill his wine cup. Common, happy domesticity: a drug even for Christendom’s most powerful man.
The fact that the woman who served as the Pope’s wife had a quite legal husband of her own stashed away in the countryside—well, that was a mere detail.
The passage was unlit, but tiled and well swept. I kept pace with one shoulder brushing the wall, counting steps as I took out my knives and flicked their edges in the dark. A new set of knives, presented to me by His Excellency Cesare Borgia on the day after the Pope’s ascension, when I’d been offered a permanent position as Giulia Farnese’s bodyguard. “The charge of murder against you is gone,” the young Bishop had deigned to tell me, cocked back at his desk with his auburn hair mussed around its very slight tonsure. “But the charge can be resurrected if any more recreational murders come from those stubby little hands of yours. Understood?”
“Recreational murders,” I’d grinned. “I like that.”
“See you don’t get to like it too much. For murders in your daily line of work, perhaps you would care to have these.” And he’d tossed a bundled set of new finger knives at me, crafted along the lines of my old ones but a set of ten rather than four, exquisitely balanced little blades ranging from a mere inch in length to a pig-sticker of half a foot. “Perhaps you will not turn up your nose at this Toledo steel?”
He wanted my Toledo steel at his sister’s wedding today. “I’ll have you up close,” he said. “With the other guards beside His Holiness’s throne.”
I nodded. The cream of Roman nobility would be in attendance at the wedding of the Pope’s daughter, and the cream of a dozen other cities as well—Ferrara and Milan and Mantua and Venice—and the Borgia enemies would be thick among them. Should any decide to melt from the throng with murderous intent during the wedding vows, the papal guard would spring around the Pope, but I had different targets to protect: Lucrezia and Giulia. “The twin stars of the Borgia firmament,” I said in my most extravagant poet’s drawl, and gave a bark of laughter at myself for flights of fancy. Too much poetry; too many late nights translating a volume of Provençal troubadour verses I’d recently found. “Back to the ancient Romans,” I promised myself as I clambered up the final flight of shallow steps toward the private entrance into the Vatican. Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic wars; that simple straightforward Latin could knock the fancy language out of anyone, and the library at the Palazzo Santa Maria had a gorgeously engraved volume of the Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Even more than for the Toledo blades hidden in my belt and boot tops and wrist sheaths, I was growing spoiled for fine books.
“Oh, Gott im Himmel, save me from this day!” I heard a frantic mumble as I entered the new Borgia apartments the Pope had carved out for himself among the older, mustier chambers of the Vatican. “This is the end, this is the absolute end!”
“Messer Burchard.” I greeted the Pope’s master of ceremonies cheerfully. “What ails you today?”
The little German in his dusty black robe and his square cap crammed over a frizzing head of hair shook a fistful of lists at me. “Only the end of all order and sanity in God’s good earth, that’s all! Gott im Himmel!”
By which he could have meant the bridal attendants were late, the Pope had worn the wrong color shoes, or the pages had attempted to make their entrance without gloves. I had grown to know Johann Burchard well in the past months, generally because he was always rushing about as though his head were on fire or the world about to end, or perhaps both, and was therefore usually in need of someone to wail at. He could certainly not wail at the Pope, and the other officials tended to find pressing duties whenever he collared them, but my legs were too short to carry me out of earshot of his complaints.
“The ladies,” he began indignantly in his stiff German accents. “The ladies were first into the sala, just as arranged, and I’d planned the most beautiful little procession for them where they advanced by twos, and bowed to the Pope and kissed his shoe, and did any of them listen to
me? No! They just rushed in any which way, like cattle released into a pen, and not one of them paused to bow! It’s the end, Messer Leonello, it’s the absolute end of the world!”
“That the Pope’s shoe went unkissed?” I inquired.
“Moral decay! Tradition slips, propriety slips, then morality slips, and before you know it the end is nigh!” He ran through his lists again, wild-eyed. “Oh, why did I keep this position, why? I should have quit, that’s what I should have done. Before this wedding, I should have quit. Because there is no proper way to host an official wedding of the Pope’s daughter, attended by the Pope’s sons and the Pope’s concubine! None! Because by rights, none of them should exist in the first place!”
I looked at him with a certain degree of sympathy. I would not have wanted his job, that was certain: pasting papal legalities over the antics of the Borgia Pope and his offspring. It was certainly no job for a prim little German from Strasbourg who heard the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse if the Pope’s slipper went unkissed. “Cheer up, Burchard,” I said with a thump to his arm. “Another twelve hours and you can go get drunk.”
He regarded me with as much horror as though I’d suggested he attend the papal wedding in the nude. “Twelve hours? You think it will all end in twelve hours? Are you mad? The evening banquet and the subsequent dancing alone . . .”
I left Burchard to his Teutonic anguish and slipped into the crowds of silk-decked wedding guests already thronging the high-ceilinged chamber. The first of the private anterooms the Pope had staked out for himself, setting the great Pinturicchio to paint them with gorgeous new frescoes. Pinturicchio worked slowly, so the frescoes were not yet near done, but the walls had been hung for the time being with silken tapestries, the floors covered with Oriental carpets deep enough to cover my boot heels, every wall bracket gleamed with fresh gilt, the ceiling arched over the guests high-carved and corniced. The Pope’s throne had been brought in to loom over the proceedings on its own dais, and he already sat ensconced: Rodrigo Borgia no more, but Pope Alexander VI. I wondered if anyone else besides myself had thought it significant that he chose not an apostle’s name or a virtuous name—no Paul or John, no Innocent or Pius—but the name of a conqueror.
Even with the welcome refuge of his seraglio to relax him, a year on the papal throne had already worn grained circles under the eyes of Pope Alexander. But his heavy-lidded gaze was alert as ever as he looked out over the wedding guests, his heavy three-tiered papal tiara pushed back as nonchalantly as a cap on his black hair, and he lounged in his white and gold robes as Alexander the Great must have lounged as he contemplated Darius and the Persian hordes.
Until his daughter entered, flanked by his mistress. Then he had only the proudest and most tender of smiles.
The procession came with great pomp: a great fanfare of music, the Duke of Gandia in all his gaudy finery slipping back into place beside his father, Cesare Borgia coming behind almost unnoticed in his churchman’s robes. Archbishop of Valencia now, not just Bishop of Pamplona, but he still looked more like a lazy leopard dozing in the sun than a churchman. The guests fluttered, craned their necks, chattered excitedly among themselves . . . and yet the moment when it came was almost quiet: a girl of thirteen, swamped in jewels, slipping through the door into the crowded sala and pausing for a moment out of sheer nerves.
From my position squashed among the papal guards I saw Lucrezia Borgia swallow, her slim throat moving behind a collar of pearls and emeralds—and I saw Giulia, standing just behind, touch a finger to her elbow and murmur something too quiet to be heard. “Chin up,” I rather thought she would be saying. “You are the Pope’s daughter, so head high! Don’t worry about your dress; it has so many jewels it will fall into line all on its own.” For days before the wedding, Giulia had coached Lucrezia in her fifteen-thousand-ducat wedding dress, around and around the garden. “Glide, don’t struggle. Move with your skirts, not against them. That’s it, look how beautiful you are!”
She wasn’t beautiful, she was just young. Painfully young, and almost swamped under the weight of stiff jeweled brocade and ornate headdress and loops of pearls. But Giulia’s coaching paid off, because Lucrezia Borgia lifted her head and glided into the sala, moving at the center of her jeweled skirts like a shackled young swan. A rustle of admiration crossed the throng, and Giulia gave a smile of pride as she followed.
Dio. So much fuss, so much anticipation, so much expense, and the wedding itself was over in no time at all. Lucrezia knelt before her father on a golden cushion, facing her bridegroom—Giovanni Sforza, Count of Pesaro, an agreeable-enough looking fellow of twenty-six with a long nose and a fashionable beard. He looked pleased enough as he listened to the notary drone, and I saw Lucrezia cast little sidelong peeping glances at her bridegroom.
“Illustrious Sir, are you prepared to pledge yourself to, and to receive pledges from, your lawful spouse, and to marry the Illustrious Donna Lucrezia Borgia, who is here present and promises to become your wife?”
“I do,” Giovanni Sforza said, “most willingly.”
Lucrezia Borgia repeated her vows in a firm voice (Giulia had coached her on that too); the rings were given; a naked sword was lowered ceremoniously over the heads of the bridal couple; a brisk homily on marriage was delivered . . . and the thing was done. Burchard sagged with relief; I rather wished there had been an assassin to liven things up.
The festivities moved out to the Sala Reale after that, a high-arched hall that had already been prepared with stools, padded benches, and liveried pages with trays of sweetmeats. The guests chattered and circulated, freed from the stifling confines of Burchard’s propriety and the small sala. I obeyed my orders and drifted, keeping my charges in my sight. Lucrezia, stiff with the importance of the moment, sitting between her papal father and her new husband as the first dishes were presented . . . Giulia moving effortlessly through the crowd, laughing and easy, drawing every eye . . . little Joffre in a slashed-velvet doublet, pop-eyed with the effort to behave like a prince . . . Cesare, dark and lounging, lifting his cup across the room to his sister and winning from her the first effortless smile of the evening . . . Still no assassins, and a troupe of players came out, painted and masked, to launch into one of those mindless comedies that seem inevitable at all weddings, and I thought, How Anna would have loved this.
Had my friend been alive, I would have smuggled her in to watch this gathering of the greats. Gotten her a temporary job as serving maid, perhaps. But of course, Anna could not ever have been here to gape at the young bride’s jeweled gown, or marvel as the Pope settled himself in his throne with all his Spanish arrogance. If Anna had not died, I would never have swum into the Borgia orbit at all.
The comedy was succeeded by a more classical offering; a Latin play by Plautus that the Pope silenced halfway through, bored and frowning. Giulia Farnese slid from her chair to curl on the step below his throne, her fingers stealing upward to twine with his inside his sleeve, and he smiled down at her as a poet hastened forward with a pastoral eclogue. Papal thunder, abated by a woman’s slow-burning smile.
I could hear Anna’s voice, but not remember her face. It had been a long time since I’d thought about the man who had escaped me: the one in the mask who had helped kill her. I’d done for the other two, after all. No need to look for the third. Especially not with Cesare Borgia warning me just what would happen if my knives stirred up any trouble, for any reason other than protecting his family. I was certainly no hero—bringing a murderer in a mask to justice wasn’t worth having my own murder charges resurrected.
The eclogue concluded with a flourish, and a roll of laughter and applause crossed the vast sala. Women were squealing and fighting over the passed trays of sweets, and I recognized Signorina Cuoca’s little fluted tourtes with the rosewater glaze, her stuffed and sugared figs, her colorfully dyed marzipan treats. I never understood how that unsmiling stalk of a woman with her fiery glares and dark Venetian curses could produce such a
iry delights in food. On the dais, Lucrezia looked far too excited to eat, but Giulia reach up to press a slice of candied pear into her papal lover’s mouth, and he unhurriedly sucked the sugar from her fingertips.
What is wrong with me? I wondered in some irritation. Everything I had ever dreamed of—money in my purse that did not depend on the fickle luck of the cards; good food when I wanted it; a soft bed; books enough to drown in; and spectacles like this for marveling and mockery. But all I felt was discontent rising in a gray tide, and I couldn’t shake the thought of Anna. I didn’t miss her—I remembered how her giggle had sometimes grated on me, how her breath was stale and how her openmouthed awe at the doings of the great had brought cutting japes out of me until her eyes welled with hurt. I didn’t miss her, not really . . . but maybe I missed the taut, focused fury of the chase I’d launched on her behalf. Fool, I mocked myself. Fool to be dissatisfied just because you’re bored.
But perhaps the soft bed and the easy money and good food wasn’t all I needed to be happy. “What is it you most wish for?” Cesare Borgia had asked me at our first interview.
Books. To be tall. To matter.
One of three, surely, was not at all bad in this unlucky world. The Borgia library was splendid. If I grew bored sometimes—and bodyguarding could be an idle, tedious business—then a good book did much to distract my restless brain.
“Little man!” The ambassador from Milan paused in a tipsy lurch across the sala. “Juggle for us, little man!”
“No.”
The ribald comedies ended as the skies outside darkened, and one by one the guests began drifting for the doors, casting longing looks behind them to where the Pope had gathered his most intimate circle of allies and enemies. A private cena, I knew; perhaps twenty or thirty guests, and every ambassador present took note of those who stayed—those who mattered. Cardinal della Rovere, spouting hatred toward the rival who had beaten him for the papal throne; Cardinal Sforza, who oozed complacency for having sold his vote in the papal Conclave for this marriage of Lucrezia Borgia into the Sforza clan; Adriana da Mila, for once just beaming instead of counting her ducats . . .