“You still have faith in me, then?”
Machiavelli shrugged. “You blundered. Once. Because fundamentally your instinct is to show mercy and trust. Those are good instincts. But now we must strike, and strike hard. Let’s hope that the Templars never know that you are still alive.”
“But they must already know!”
“Not necessarily. My spies tell me there was a lot of confusion.”
Ezio paused for thought. “Our enemies will know soon enough that I am alive—and very much so! How many do we fight?”
“Oh, Ezio—the good news is that we have narrowed the field. We have wiped out many Templars across Italy and across many of the lands beyond its boundaries. The bad news is that the Templars and the Borgia family are now one and the same thing. And they are going to fight like a cornered lion.”
“Tell me more.”
“We are too isolated here. We need to lose ourselves in the crowds in the center of town. We will go to the bullfight.”
“The bullfight?”
“Cesare excels as a bullfighter. After all, he is a Spaniard. In fact he’s not a Spaniard, but a Catalan, and that may one day prove to be to our advantage.”
“How?”
“The king and queen of Spain want to unify their country. They are from Aragon and Castile. The Catalans are a thorn in their side, though they are still a powerful nation. Come, and be cautious. We must both use the skills of blending in that Paola taught you so long ago in Venice. I hope you have not forgotten them!”
“Try me!”
They walked together through the half-ruined, once-imperial city, keeping to shadows where there was shadow, otherwise slipping in and out of crowds as fish hide in rushes. At last they reached the bullring, took seats in the more expensive and crowded shady side of it, and watched for an hour as Cesare and his many backup men dispatched three fearsome bulls. Ezio watched Cesare’s fighting technique: He used the banderilleros and the picadors to break the animal down before he himself delivered the coup de grâce, after a good deal of showing off. But there was no doubting his courage and his prowess during the grim ritual of death, despite the fact that he still had four junior matadors to support him. Ezio looked over his shoulder at the box of thepresidente of the fight: there he recognized the harsh but compellingly beautiful face of Cesare’s sister, Lucrezia. Was it his imagination or had he seen her bite her lip until it bled?
At any rate, he had learned something of how Cesare would behave in the field of battle—and how far he could be trusted in any other kind of combat.
Everywhere there were Borgia guards, watching the throng, just as there had been in the streets before. And armed with those lethal-looking new guns.
“Leonardo…” he said involuntarily, thinking of his old friend.
Machiavelli looked at him. “Leonardo was forced to work for Cesare on pain of death—and a most painful death it would have been. It’s a detail—a terrible detail, but a detail nonetheless. The point is, his heart is not with his new master, who will never have the intelligence or the facility fully to control the Apple. Or at least I hope it isn’t. We must be patient. We will get it back—and we will get Leonardo back with it.”
“I wish I could be so sure.”
Machiavelli sighed. “Perhaps you are wise to be doubtful,” he said at last.
“Spain has taken over Italy,” said Ezio.
“Valencia has taken over the Vatican,” Machiavelli replied. “And we can change that. We have allies in the College of Cardinals, some powerful. They aren’t all lap-dogs. And Cesare, for all his vaunting, depends on his father, Rodrigo, for funds.” He gave Ezio a keen look. “That is why you should have made sure of this interloping Pope.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I’m as much to blame as you are. I should have told you. But as you said yourself, it’s the present we have to deal with, not the past.”
“Amen to that.”
“Amen.”
“But how do they afford all this?” Ezio asked, as another bull foundered and fell under Cesare’s unerring and pitiless sword.
“Papa Alexander is a strange mixture,” Machiavelli replied. “He’s a great administrator and he has even done the Church some good. But the evil part of him always defeats the good. He was the Vatican’s treasurer for years and found ways of amassing money—the experience has stood him in good stead. He sells cardinal’s hats, creating dozens of cardinals virtually guaranteed to be on his side. He has even pardoned murderers—provided they have enough money to buy their way off the gallows.”
“How does he justify that?”
“Very simple. He preaches that it is better for a sinner to live and repent, than to die and forgo such pain.”
Ezio couldn’t help laughing, though his laugh was a mirthless one. His own mind went back to the celebrations to mark the year 1500—the Great Year of the Half-Millennium. True, there had been flagellants roaming the country in expectation of the Last Judgment, and hadn’t the mad monk Savonarola, who’d briefly had control of the Apple, and whom he had himself defeated in Florence—not been duped by that superstition?
Fifteen hundred had been a great jubilee year. Ezio remembered that thousands of hopeful pilgrims had made their way to the Holy See from all parts of the world. The year had perhaps even been celebrated in those small outposts across the far seas to the west in the New Lands discovered by Columbus and, a few years later, by Amerigo Vespucci, who had confirmed their existence. Money had flowed into Rome as the faithful bought indulgences to redeem them from their sins in anticipation of Christ returning to Earth to judge both the quick and the dead. It had also been the time when Cesare had set out to subjugate the city-states of the Romagna, and when the king of France had taken Milan, justifying his action as being the rightful heir—the great-grandson of Gian Galeazzo Visconti.
The Pope had then made his son Cesare captain-general of the papal forces and Gonfaloniere of the Holy Roman Church in a great ceremony on the morning of the fourth Sunday of Lent. Cesare was welcomed by boys in silk gowns, and four thousand soldiers wearing his personal livery. His triumph had seemed complete: the previous year, in May, he’d married Charlotte d’Albret, sister of John, king of Navarre, and King Louis of France—with whom the Borgia were allied—gave him the Dukedom of Valence. Having already been Cardinal of Valencia, no wonder the people gave him the nickname Valentino!
And now this viper was at the peak of his power.
How could Ezio ever defeat him?
He shared these thoughts with Machiavelli.
“In the end, we will use their own vainglory to bring them down,” said Niccolò. “They have an Achilles’ heel. Everyone does. I know what yours is.”
“And that is?” snapped Ezio, needled.
“I do not need to tell you her name. Beware of her,” rejoined Machiavelli, but then, changing the subject, he continued, “Remember the orgies?”
“They continue?”
“Indeed they do. How Rodrigo—I refuse to call him Pope anymore—loves them! And you’ve got to hand it to him; he’s seventy years old.” Machiavelli laughed wryly and then suddenly became more serious. “The Borgia will drown under the weight of their own self-indulgence.”
Ezio remembered the orgies well. He had been witness to one. There’d been a dinner, attended by fifty of the best of the city’s army of whores, given by the Pope in his Nero-like, overdecorated, gilded apartments. Courtesans, they liked to call themselves, but whores for all that. When the eating—or should it be called feeding?—was over, the girls danced with the servants who were in attendance, clothed at first, but later they’d shed their clothes. The candelabra that had been on the tables were set down on the marble floor, and the nobler guests threw roasted chestnuts among them. The whores were then told to crawl about the floor on all fours like cattle, buttocks high in the air, and collect the chestnuts. Then almost everyone had joined in. Ezio remembered with distaste how Rodrigo, with Cesare and Lucrezia, had looked on. At the end, prizes were given—silk cloaks, fine leather boots, from Spain of course, mulberry-and-yellow velvet caps encrusted with diamonds, rings, bracelets, brocade pouches each containing a hundred ducats, daggers, silver dildos—anything you could imagine—all awarded to those men who had had sex the maximum number of times with the crawling prostitutes. And the Borgia family, fondling each other, had been the principal judges.