The Malice of Fortune (53 page)

Followed by Michelotto, Valentino strode directly to us, his eyes sweeping quickly over me before fixing on Leonardo. “Maestro, you must calculate drop, weight, and range for the bombardiers.” He intended to fire on the escaping barge.

Leonardo’s gray-green eyes flickered with movements so fine that he might have been counting the thickly falling snowflakes. I had seen this same stare when he worked with his measuring sticks.

With no word or other indication, the maestro simply turned and walked away.

Valentino’s utterly placid face almost at once darkened with rage. “I did not give you leave to go! Do not walk away from me as if I do not exist!”

Michelotto unspindled the Spanish garrote he wore around his wrist and wrapped the ends of the slender cord around his broad fists.

Leonardo halted at the lip of the stairwell. Valentino put a restraining hand on Michelotto’s arm.

“Do you know where you will go from here, Maestro?” Valentino no longer raised his voice, but there was an uncharacteristic hoarseness to it. “You will return to the paint shop. You will leave behind only portraits of whores and decorated walls where monks slurp their soup. You will build nothing and be remembered for nothing.”

Leonardo appeared to sway slightly before he turned. “I remember the whirlwind that traversed Italy entirely when I was four years old. This great dark cloud that spun with furious and unrelenting violence, tossing up whole dwellings, trees, and herds of livestock before it.” The maestro spoke with the wondering, high-pitched tone of a little boy. “A remarkable stillness preceded it, as though the world had issued its last breath and the soul had gone out of it.” He blinked rapidly. “When the whirlwind had passed, it left behind an unimaginably obscene fetor, as though the bowels of the very earth had been ripped out …” Leonardo bowed his head. “In such fashion Nature destroys so that she can give birth.”

“
Sì
,” Valentino said, the word nearly a hiss. “We must destroy the old world before we can build the new.”

Remarkably, when Leonardo looked up, his eyes were on me, almost as if demanding instruction from his father.

I shook my head only slightly.

Nodding at me with equal economy, little more than a tic, the great maestro from little Vinci turned and descended the hidden stairwell. Yet even when he had disappeared entirely from sight, I could hear the precise cadence of his steps on the stone, tapping out the harmonics of a universe only he had the vision to see.

“The maestro will come back to us,” Valentino said placidly, now seeming to regard his engineer general’s defection as little more than a passing whim. “I understand him. A man of such vision must sometimes turn away from more practical considerations.” He looked at me with an expression convincingly like pity. “Just as I understand that you have been enchanted by the same witch who seduced me, so that she could betray my brother.” He glanced at Michelotto. “Secretary, do you know that Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto da Fermo are already dead?”

I nodded.

“But I have spared Paolo Orsini. Do you know why?”

I shook my head, struggling to make some connection.

“Because Signor Paolo did not conspire with the other two to
murder my brother.” Valentino nodded, his nostrils slightly flared. “At that time the Orsini sought peace with us. Seeking profit, the Vitelli wanted to prolong the hostilities. As they intended with this present scheme. Both Vitellozzo and Oliverotto put their knives into my brother. They made their confession before they died. But when they did so, they gave up another confederate.” A knife went into
my
breast. “On the night my brother was murdered, Damiata sent one of her
bravi
to Vitellozzo, with details of the route Juan would take after he left my mother’s vineyard.” Valentino paused and exhaled audibly through his nose. “I assure you I did not want to hear her name, Secretary. To hear Vitellozzo say it—that great misshapen, pestilent pig—was to rip out that part of me that was hers alone. A piece of my flesh.”

On this night of revelations, for the first time it occurred to me that Valentino could well be Giovanni’s father; perhaps Damiata’s precious son was this “flesh” to which he referred.

Valentino looked out to sea. “Damiata knows that evidence of her crime will soon reach my father. She believes she can still save herself with this scheme authored by Vitellozzo. Do you want to know what I wrote on this page she intends to take to His Holiness?”

I nodded, feeling almost as if I were seven again and had not properly prepared my lesson for Ser Battista.

“You see, Secretary, His Holiness declared his preference for my brother long before he made him captain general of the Church, years before my father even became pope. Duke of Gandia was by right my title. It went to Juan …” He blew out a scoffing breath. “I could give you a litany, Secretary. But it means nothing now.” He swept his arm toward the sea. “During the goat ride, I wrote on that page myself, as if I were addressing my father. I confessed to him that on the night we found Juan’s body, I offered a prayer of thanksgiving to the God who had abandoned me until then. The indifferent God who in some fit of mercy or justice—or simply cowardice—had surrendered Juan to the designs of Fortune and the Vitelli. So that, Secretary, is this ‘confession’ Damiata wishes to take to my father: I wanted my brother to die. Had I grown up with any faith in the power of the Lord, I would have prayed for it every night since I was a boy. But even God knows I had nothing to do with Juan’s murder.”

Burning with a hiss that seemed equal to a hundred
scoppietti
preparing to fire, the fuse of a bombard illuminated the gunners almost like day. Presumably they had found the range by their own devices. The initial explosion of the powder, however, was almost muted. But a great long flame erupted from the bombard’s blunt iron snout and the echo that followed it out over the water rattled my bones, such that the sound of the ball splashing harmlessly into the sea—to my great relief—seemed little more than a stone tossed into a pond.

“Secretary, do you know what my father will do when he reads this so-called confession? My words, though merely babbled in a state of delirium, will rip open wounds that have never healed. His Holiness is an old man. I now regret that I even allowed Juan’s amulet to be dispatched to Rome after we found it on that woman … It nearly killed him. Just as we feared for his life in the days after Juan …”

Valentino shook his head bitterly, blinking away snowflakes as if fighting tears. I scarcely thought he was envisioning the loss of a beloved patriarch. But I little doubted the duke’s sincere concern for the merchant of forgiveness, whose sale of indulgences and Church offices had so liberally funded his conquests.

“Get up on the parapet,” Valentino said abruptly, as though only from that vantage could I truly comprehend the catastrophe that would follow, if the barge escaped. “I want to show you something.”

The pale stone parapet beside me rose to my chest, the flat top less than two
braccia
wide.

“Get up there.”

Placing my hands on stone so cold that it seared my flesh, I hauled myself up and knelt atop the parapet. Far beneath me, a silver-foamed fringe of the black Adriatic lapped against the rocks. All at once the blood drained from my head and I could not rise from my hands and knees. Every fiber of my will was suddenly devoted to clinging to this perch.

“Stand up, Secretary.”

I lifted my hands from the icy stone and rose unsteadily from my crouch. The sea, although nearly calm, appeared to roil with black swells; the wind, although merely a breeze, seemed almost a tempest.

It was as if Valentino were Lucifer falling from the sky, so swiftly
did he land on the parapet in front of me, having leapt with an almost unnatural strength directly from the platform below. But this must have been a more challenging feat than he had expected, because his body gyred as he straightened up. Being only an arm’s length from me, he held out his hands.

I thought for an instant that I should let him fall. But I reached out and we clasped each other as if we were playing the “little owl,” where you wrestle with only the hands touching. Here, instead of trying to throw one another down, we steadied ourselves.

“You see what we can do together.” It was as if Valentino had intended all along to make this demonstration. “I need to work with Florence. Your lordships must be persuaded that our concerns and objects are mutual. And you are the man best suited to lead them into the light. Your merchants and bankers sent you here only to make a perilous art of their craven, ceaseless vacillation. You know that, Niccolò.” This was the first time he had ever used my name. “And I know what it is to have one’s abilities unacknowledged. You are capable of far more than providing the Florentines a mere mouthpiece. I have come to value your keen observation of events, your deep understanding of men, your gifts of anticipation. Help me convince your countrymen. Let us build this new world together.”

At that moment I saw two nations: the Italy we have at present, the prostrate victim of the most foolish men, if not also the worst men; and an Italy that might yet hope to live in peace and prosperity, free of foreign domination, under some sort of
pax Caesareus
imposed by Valentino. And for another moment, one that was less madness than a triumph of reason over sentiment, I glimpsed the new world that I would help him build.

He saw this in my eyes more clearly than I could see it in my own heart. “Look to the sea, Niccolò. Look beyond it.”

The black horizon appeared infinite, a dark mirror to the vast prospect of Heaven I had seen in Damiata’s arms. Yet after a moment, I had the sense that a great windstorm rushed across this distant realm, so far away I could hear only the merest sibilance, whispers in a dream. Telling me something I had dimly perceived in my conversations
with Hannibal and Caesar, a truth that lay out there like some undiscovered world.
A new age
. I began to fly across that night sea, racing beyond the borders of love and hate and all the lesser sentiments that we believe animate our souls, the tempest now singing of a new life I had never imagined, not even in Damiata’s arms. A life of such power and majesty that my feet no longer required a tenuous purchase on that parapet, because I was no longer a man bound to the earth. I was an immortal flying to my place in the stars.

I have never felt anything like it since.

“You know now, Niccolò, don’t you? This is what life means when you throw aside your human frailties and challenge Fortune, every day and in every thing. You of all men know that if we wait on other men and on events over which we have no control, we Italians will not be free again in our lifetimes.” His hands were as hard as iron ingots. “Come with me, Niccolò, and help me defeat Fortune.”

“No man sees farther than you, Excellency.” My voice trembled. I was so far from the shore, free of all the tethers that might hold me back—family, home, our republic. Even Damiata had slipped from my arms.

He leaned closer and shifted his gaze slightly, as if locating some cranny in my soul where I had hidden my own secret. “But you, too, think you see something, don’t you, Niccolò. Something no other man has ever been able to see. You believe you can see me.” I would not call the exquisitely subtle expression on his lips a smile. “Tell me. What do you see?”

Valentino did not part his lips at all, yet it appeared that a little steam issued from them. And with hardly more effort, he pushed my hands so that my feet lifted from the stone and I knew I was going into the abyss. Then just as quickly he held me fast, to demonstrate how easily he could win this game. “I want you to tell me what you think you know.” Again he pushed, moving both my hands and my feet. “If you have an accusation, make it.”

These were almost the same words that had humbled Oliverotto da Fermo. But on that occasion Valentino had left Oliverotto the choice to retreat—to postpone his death, as it were. Here, still holding me
fast, he was not offering me even that Devil’s bargain. I could plunge silently into the cold black sea, or I could declare my own wavering faith in my untested, unproved, and perhaps worthless science of men.