The Malice of Fortune (50 page)

“My concern,” Messer Gabriello said, “is to negotiate with someone to protect Venetian homes and property—our traders have quite a sizable quarter in this town. If you need a room, come with me.”

I saw no reason not to accept. Until I made sense of these events, I was merely a blind man stumbling around in Fortune’s palace.

We needed cross only four streets to reach the Venetian quarter, where I was afforded a small room in a palazzo thought sufficiently secure that Messer Gabriello himself was lodged there. The building hosted a conclave of Venetian merchants; after seeing to my horse and baggage, I joined them by the kitchen fire. These Venetian gentlemen seemed almost cast from a mold, dark stubble against pale, gaunt cheeks; even the younger men appeared careworn.

I had finished a most welcome supper of hot cockerel stew, served from a big copper cauldron, when Messer Gabriello sought me out. “The duke’s people have gone back into the palazzo. What do you think happens now?”

I shook my head, a thousand possibilities rattling around inside it. “At this moment I can believe one thing only,” I told him. “That tomorrow morning Italy will have a new master.”

As I said this, I recalled something I had read in my Plutarch just the night before. When the ancient Roman dictator Sulla had begun his rise to power, it was said that a great trumpet blast was heard from the Heavens, “so loud, and shrill and mournful, that it frightened and astonished the entire world.” The Etruscan augurs, who believed that there are eight ages of the world, each allotted to a different type of man, prophesied that this trumpet signaled the dawn of a new age, in which an entirely changed world would be ruled by a “new sort of man.”

Now I had to wonder if all our
invenzioni
—artillery, printing presses,
scienze
, our rebirth of letters, art, and architecture, our new
world across the sea—had in fact inaugurated another new age, exceeding anything the ancients had imagined. And perhaps the ruler of this new age would be my rare man.

“Yes, Italy will have a new master,” I mused. “But God help us if he is also a new man.”

Before Messer Gabriello could begin to question this cryptic pronouncement, we were interrupted by several Italian soldiers who had marched right into the kitchen, their breastplates and helmets reflecting the fire, clearing a path for an officer I had never seen before. He stopped in the center of our gathering, propped the butt of his palm on the butt of his sheathed sword, and called out, “The Florentine secretary! Is he here?”

With no explanation whatever, I was returned to the central piazza and the great palazzo that stood over it—the same building Valentino and his
condottieri
had entered during the day, according to Messer Gabriello. I ascended an impressive stone staircase to the piano nobile and was escorted so hastily through a vast polychromed salon that I had little time to observe the dozen or so officers gathered around a map table, all of them still wearing armor, save the tall figure in a chamois cape.

I had not seen Leonardo since I had been snatched near Cesenatico, four days previously. While I could not yet regard him as a
compare
, in our last hours together we had shared grave dangers and great revelations—and his assistant had saved my life. So I was considerably relieved to see him. But until I knew more about the situation, I could not risk offering him more than a brief nod.

Leonardo peered over the heads of the soldiers, his eyes tracking me for a moment. Perhaps his brow furrowed a bit, but I could not find on his transparent face any meaningful sign of his duke’s fortunes.

I followed my escort into an empty anteroom and was shown at once into what was certainly the principal bedroom of the house, the large fireplace having a terra-cotta hood painted with an unfamiliar coat of arms. The bed was against the wall, with a small table set up
in the middle of the room, covered with scores of documents. The fire flickered brightly, but one of Leonardo’s globe lamps provided a more steady illumination.

Valentino sat straight up on a Roman-style camp stool, facing a writing lectern upon which he had propped several parchment sheets half covered with his own elegant script. Unlike the officers outside, he was unarmored, wearing only his black tunic and hose.

He put down his pen and got up, going more promptly than a servant to a small intarsia table that accommodated a carafe and several silver cups; after pouring the wine himself, he approached me with this communion. His face was entirely metamorphosed from the pale cipher I had known for months, his wind-burned complexion that of a farmer—or a
condottiero
during a campaign. There was a natural grace to his rare smile, yet I could not help but find—and fear—a certain ferocity.

“Rejoice with me, Secretary,” he said, handing me my cup and nodding to our toast. “I have achieved what God and mere Fortune could not. You must write your lordships at once and tell them that today I have ended tyranny—as I have planned since this summer, even before the conspirators met to form their league against me. I have employed these vile men as was necessary, but always one against the other, with the object that the petty tyrannies of the
condottieri
should end with my victory over the worst of them. Today this is done.”

I could not think how to respond.

Valentino gestured me to a cushioned chair. He squatted on his camp stool and leaned toward me, elbows on knees. “Vitellozzo Vitelli is my prisoner, in this house. I could stamp my foot now and he would hear it. The same for Oliverotto da Fermo and Paolo Orsini. Those of Oliverotto’s men who opposed us here in the city have been disarmed. Vitellozzo’s troops outside the city now receive their instructions from me. Tonight we will conclude our business here and tomorrow we will march on Corinaldo.”

Here Valentino offered a wry, tight smile—and once again turned the world upside down. I knew how skillfully he could create an empire of hope with mere words, yet his implacable eyes told me that this
was no fable he had invented. Recalling our conversation about the science of anticipation, I was persuaded to put aside all my previous assumptions. I could only believe that somehow he had done just as he claimed: he had anticipated the designs of the
condottieri
even as they attempted to lure him into their snare.

In equal measures stunned and rapt, I listened as Valentino went on in this triumphant vein for some time, describing how he had deceived the
condottieri
, first with treaty negotiations in which he had given the appearance of weakness, then by dispersing his troops in small units throughout the countryside; almost all the campfires I had seen on my way to Pesaro had evidently marked the locations of his soldiers. Without a hint of apology, the duke told me that he had not felt obligated to respect a treaty he had made while under threat by men who had no intention of keeping their own pledges—a maxim I continue to regard as entirely just, however much it has outraged those who believe
The Prince
is the Devil’s handbook. Any man who under all conditions insists on making it his business to be good, will surely be destroyed among so many who are not good.

“Secretary, their plan was to lead me here, see to my assassination even before I entered this house, take command of the pitiful remnants of my army, and march against your republic. They are all confessing the particulars down there.” He straightened a bit and tapped his toes on the floor. “But I had already envisioned their plan even before they had conceived it. I allowed their own natures to lead them to destruction. Had you been there this morning, when I met them outside the city, you would have seen their false faces, the kisses and embraces these conspirators offered me, as if I were some fool. These masters of deception did not believe that anyone could deceive them, simply because they were blinded by their own evil ambitions. Men are never content with what they have, Secretary.” Tilting back his head, Valentino emptied his cup and set it on the floor beside his stool. “Yet a man must never aspire to more than he can seize with his own hand.” His pale hand, now empty, appeared to close around an invisible object. “Whoever depends on another man’s armies depends on that man’s goodwill and good Fortune. But I resolved long ago to rely only upon
my own will. Now I have rid myself of the
condottieri
. By my efforts alone, Italy has been saved.”

Having offered this instruction in statecraft, which is also cited in
The Prince
, the duke turned with equally artful phrases to another subject. “Surely you recall, Secretary, that months ago I invited your government to come forward and declare its friendship for my person and our enterprise here. And if they would not, to understand that I would have difficulty in distinguishing the Republic of Florence from my declared enemies. Your government, it seems, decided to wait and determine if those enemies would absolve them of that decision, even though the men who conspired against me were the greatest threat to your own state. Now your lordships can plainly see how the success I have had against our mutual adversaries has benefited their interests. I have no doubt that your lordships, when you so inform them of my gesture, will acknowledge their obligation by offering their immediate assistance in my campaigns against Città di Castello and Perugia. By such means they will declare themselves friends.”

He rose abruptly, went to the fireplace, and stood before it with his back to me, as if our expected display of gratitude was not to be a matter of further discussion.

I could not breathe. Of course I knew the duke to be a demanding negotiator, and no man who had risked everything to obtain such a victory would be content to offer the spoils gratis to those who had merely sat on their thumbs. But he wanted my government to finance immediate attacks far into central Italy—conquests that would, if one were to plot them on a map, almost draw a noose around Florence herself.

Valentino’s mortal enemies had been vanquished, but where was this peace he had so desperately required, so that he and Leonardo could build a new world?

“I will write my government,” I said, struggling for words. For once I was grateful that I had no power to negotiate; I could even appreciate the wisdom of the Ten of War in sending a mere intermediary.

Valentino turned to face me once again, a leisurely motion, as if he intended to soften his demands. Yet my heart remained stuck in my throat.

“You know that Vitellozzo intended to accuse me of my brother’s murder.” His tone was more subdued. “That was to be their pretext to break the treaty.” As I had thought. “They intended to use the book. I obtained it from Vitellozzo. Along with the page he cut out of it. I will show you.”

Valentino walked quickly to the table littered with documents. From among these he plucked a page folded over twice, judging from its size; most of one side was occupied by an enormous medallion of red wax, impressed with a seal I could not make out because Valentino so quickly put it down again. “Vitellozzo intended for Damiata to deliver this page to the pope.”

I had to ask: “Where is Damiata now?”

He shook his head. I did not know whether to be relieved. “But I believe she will come to me. To beg for mercy.”

“Will you …?”

“I can’t know yet. We are still determining the truth.”

“I presume you expect at least one of your prisoners to confess, in the matter of your brother’s murder.”

Valentino glanced at me, his eyes narrowed and mouth pinched. “I know who murdered my brother, Secretary.”

I could not read this. Did he mean that Oliverotto and Vitellozzo had already confessed? But his look forbade me to inquire further, even as a panic rose inside me: Had they also confessed to Damiata’s complicity?

Again Valentino gestured at the sealed packet. “Do you know what is written here, Secretary?”

My tongue was thick. “I haven’t seen it, Excellency.”

He lifted his eyes but did not see me. I knew at once where he was.

“Some were whores. Some were not. The women we took captive at Capua.” Valentino’s nostrils flared wide, as though a hand were over his mouth and he was gasping for air. “I had one of them. One of the innocent. Entirely so, a girl of perhaps fifteen. A virgin. But she was willing—as a servant girl is willing when the master taps her shoulder at night.” As Marietta had been willing on our wedding night, her uncles banging kettles outside the half-open door. “Hoping to save herself from worse. And so I wallowed in the same cess-trench as those
Germans and Gascons. I disgraced myself entirely.” His complexion had paled. “I shamed myself forever.”