‘I did my best to please you both,’ said Admiral Slovo. However, I suspect that we’re just putting off the evil day.’
The Year 1508
PUTTING OFF THE EVIL DAY: In which I render a god homeless, mingle with Royalty, learning their dark and disgraceful secrets, and do the world a great favour for which it is not particularly grateful.’
‘What we have heard is monstrous enough,’ said Cardinal Treversari of Sienna. ‘I do not believe anyone else should know.’
Pope Julius, troubled by his various bodily ailments and a naturally fuseless temper, smote the table with his little gold-and-steel wand. If the Cardinal had been within easy reach, he would have copped it instead.
‘Damn your eyes!’ Julius exploded. ‘I’ve decided that this special concilium will agree on the additional disclosure. So why aren’t you agreeing? Didn’t you hear me?’
‘I could hardly fail to, but—’ replied Treversari nervously, not so old in years nor so steeped in virtue or despair as some of his colleagues around the table, as to be free of fear.
‘Then clean your ears out!’ bellowed Julius. ‘Before I do it for you!’ He indicated the attempt might be made with the wand’s sharp end and thereby signalled the discussion period closed.
However, before responsibility, killer-stress and venereal disease had changed him, Julius had been a reasonable man. The spectral remains of this youth bade him try once more to justify matters to his inner retinue of approved (but, alas, not trusted) Cardinals.
‘Look,’ he said, begrudging the waste of time that even this form of consultation represented, ‘we need him. This is his sort of thing; perhaps the Almighty designed him for it.’
‘I hope that is so,’ said Cardinal Guicciardini of Florence. ‘For if we or our times created him, then what judgement would await us?’
That was indeed a thought to conjure with – and then to be forcibly thrust aside. Pope Julius frowned.
‘But the knowledge he would have …’ protested Treversari, pushing his luck too far. ‘How will he react?’
‘No one will ever know,’ answered the Pope in a tone that the more perceptive realized meant a grim and perhaps short future for the Cardinal. ‘He is as inscrutable as the back of a corpse’s knee. Merely consider that if there should be problems, we can always kill him; I do not think he would mind unduly.’
‘Oh …’ said Treversari, plainly discomfited.
‘I am so happy that you are, at last, happy,’ smiled Julius. ‘Now, with your kind indulgence, may we ring the bell and get him in here – and the other monster too.’
On hearing the summons, Admiral Slovo entered the Council-chamber from its anteroom. Accompanying him was a nun, a woman so ancient that if he’d had a bare shred of chivalric feeling and if propriety had allowed, he would have felt obliged to assist her.
‘Your Holiness, your eminences,’ he said, bowing economically.
‘Slovo,’ said Julius, just as concisely, ‘we’ve another of those damn things (begging your pardon, Sister) in the best-not-discussed areas of life you’ve come to specialize in. Go and deal with it, will you.’
‘Certainly, Your Holiness,’ replied Slovo straightaway so that the Pontiff might not lose face by unjustified faith in his servants. ‘Might this be something of sufficient moment to be beyond those duties covered by my salaried remuneration? Will I be obliged to recruit assistance?’
Julius sympathized with such anxieties, for he too had eaten the bread of exile in his time and so knew the true joy that financial security supplies.
‘Yes to both,’ he said tersely. ‘Now remind me, what is it you usually require for overtime?’
‘One: freehold land in Capri,’ Slovo counted off on his black-gloved hand. ‘Two: a pardon-in-advance for “sins of temperament” …’
‘Oh yes,’ said the Pope, his bearded lip curling. ‘I remember about you now – the Tuscan Vice—’
‘Three: a choice item from the Vatican Library. Grant any one of these; and I will be pleased.’
‘In view of your task,’ said Julius, giving way to rare generosity solely in the hope of disconcerting Slovo’s impassive mask, ‘you may have all three.’
As experiments went it was an expensive failure and he henceforth resolved to take a leaf out of the Admiral’s own book, impulse-wise.
‘As to assistance,’ he continued, ‘that is being arranged. It is a mere matter of the Kings of France and Aragon, the Holy Roman Emperor, the rulers of Mantua and Ferrara; plus their respective armies, of course. They will render what little aid they can. I’ll even throw in my own forces and bind all in a formal treaty, how’s that? In fact, my people are arranging the details in some Franco-Flemish rat-hole even as we speak.[12] That should be just about sufficient, don’t you think?’
‘I’m not sure,’ answered Admiral Slovo coolly. ‘It all depends on what I have to deal with. Besides, the great men you have named are notoriously duplicitous, nationalistic and self-interested. I am inclined to doubt they would pay the slightest heed to what a mere Roman Admiral might say.’
‘That all depends on what he might say,’ countered Pope Julius significantly. ‘Take it away, Sister …’
The aged nun was ready and waiting. ‘I have had a dream …’ She quavered.
‘She has had a dream,’ said Admiral Slovo.
‘So what?’ sneered the youthful Louis XII of France. ‘I have them all the time.’
‘Me too,’ agreed Maximilian I, ‘King of the Romans’, feeling free to speak now that someone else had ventured the first opinion. ‘Especially after I’ve hit the old cucumber brandy. The big difference, however, is that I don’t set two-thirds of Europe to war afterwards.’
‘But since we are all here,’ said Alfonsi d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, rather too hastily for his own good, ‘perhaps we should hear the story out.’
Ferdinand II of Aragon, a man much admired in that room for his duplicity (and deplored by history for the same reason), successfully waved everyone to silence. All being rulers in their own lands, they duly resented him for it ever after. ‘So,’ he said in a neutral tone, ‘this League is not, after all, a crusade against the Turks …’
‘No,’ confirmed Slovo. ‘That was to fool the Venetians.’
‘And neither is it a covert arrangement for countering a century of Venetian expansion,’ hazarded Louis XII.
‘No,’ agreed the Admiral. ‘That was to fool you lot.’
‘Therefore,’ summed up Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, dangerously calm, ‘it now becomes clear that we have invaded Italy, plunging Europe into war, risking all, on the say-so of a sleepless nun …’
‘Not just any old nun,’ added Slovo suddenly. ‘This is the famous Black Lady of the Palatine; the one who predicted the fall of Otranto.’
‘That was twenty-eight years ago!’ barked Ferdinand. ‘And the walls were notoriously ruinous. I could have taken the place with a troupe of dancing bears!’
‘Who, moreover, foretold the death of Pope Alexander VI,’ Slovo gamely continued.
The assembled monarchs burst into laughter. The noise issued incongruously from their care-worn faces.
‘He was seventy-three!’ roared Alfonso.
‘And a behemoth of brandy consumption,’ added King Louis.
12
Pope Julius refers to Cambrai in North-East France, near the Burgundian Netherlands. Hence the association known to history as the League of Cambrai, contracted on 10/12/1508.