City of God Read online

  “Certainly we desire only to serve Your Holiness,” Bruni said, in the uncomfortable silence. “However, the cold truth is that we simply cannot— cannot pay so much—not at once.”

  Alexander gave the bloom to the gardener. “The work of the shepherd is costly and unending, night and day. We are saddened that our errant children of Florence pursue their devilish interests to the detriment of the entire Christian Republic.”

  “We are utterly committed to the preservation of the honor of Res Publica Cristiana.”

  Nicholas had heard this all from his childhood on. Next they would summon up the ghastly specter of the Turk. He looked behind them, across the strip of green grass, to the palace. In a second-story window was a woman’s face, watching them.

  “Yet the Republic of Christendom is sore beset,” Alexander said. “From without—from within. Cruel the blows of the pagan, crueler yet the blows of her own children.” He nodded to the gardener, half-hidden behind an armful of long-stemmed flowers. “Pack them in snow, if possible.”

  The gardener murmured, “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  “She will be pleased,” the Pope said. “She will smile again.” He sounded wistful. Nicholas wondered which of his mistresses was to be coaxed back to smiles by the dying elegance of the flowers. It amazed him that a man so old and fat still devoted much of his time to sex.

  Bruni was saying, “Against the Turk, Your Holiness need only summon us, and Florence will empty her streets of her young manhood in the cause of the Crusade.” His voice rang with conviction, louder than before.

  The Pope ignored him. He put his fingertips to the flower. Abruptly he was smiling at Nicholas. “From Nepi, can one not see the mountains? Perhaps she can see the snow from her window. The flowers will surprise her—remind her of Rome.”

  It was his daughter then he missed. Nicholas bowed to him. “Your Holiness knows that the city is not truly Rome in the absence of the Lady Lucrezia.”

  “Your Holiness,” Bruni said, “let me have the pleasure of relating to my state that Your Holiness again bestows on us the warmth of your approval.”

  “When you pay our dear son the money you promised him,” the Pope said, “I will approve. Now go. I have no more to say to you.”

  Bruni bowed and spoke mellifluous leavetakings. Alexander extended his hand, and Bruni and Nicholas by turn applied their lips to the ring of Peter. As they left the Pope was smiling at the flowers as if he looked again on the face of his beloved exiled daughter.

  Bruni said, “Bah. You are a bewilderment to me, Nicholas— He spoke to you directly, and all you could do was prattle about that whore his daughter.”

  “He spoke to me of his daughter, Excellency.”

  “Nonetheless, that is why you fail so often in diplomacy. Then you must have turned his mind instantly to Florence and our business with him.”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  “That is the art, Nicholas. To lead men, not to echo them.”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  From Tuscany came daily reports of the ravages of Valentino’s troops. Cesare Borgia, demanding the money that the Republic had promised, settled his soldiers in the Tuscan countryside and let them do as they pleased. Nicholas kept lists of the complaints of the Florentines against Valentino’s men: so many bushels of grain stolen, so many vines burned, this woman repeatedly raped, that man flogged and castrated. The stories accumulated on his desk. He tried to read them with detachment, but the horror’s awakened some ugly response in him, and he found himself reading them over, his eyes jumping back to the beginnings of sentences, dwelling on the evils.

  He went daily to the Vatican, toying to gain an audience with the Pope for Bruni, but Alexander refused even to allow the Florentines into his morning gatherings.

  When he reported the latest rejection to Bruni, the ambassador threw his hands up over his head. “We are lost,” he said. He was sitting behind his desk, a novel open before him; as he took his hands from it, the book’s pages turned of themselves. “Venus and Mercury are in opposition, the Sun is in Gemini.”

  Nicholas said, “Still, Valentino has not attacked. Florence—”

  Bruni had left his chair. He prowled around the depths of his chamber, past the windows overhung with velvet that shut out the sun. “They say his men are filtering into the city. There is fighting everywhere. You know his tactic—he sends in people to riot and preach riot, so that most of his work is done before he comes within sight of the walls.”

  “If the Signory would send out a force to confront him—”

  “Are you mad? All he requires is the excuse.”

  “To tie him down,” Nicholas said. He knew nothing of military strategies, and he was bad at chess, but his idea seemed obvious to him. “So that he has to keep his men together.”

  Bruni snorted. His coat was off. His fine lawn shirt, embroidered and frilled with lace, was the brightest surface in the room, standing out against the drapery. “Nicholas, you tire of diplomatics. Do you crave a career as a condottiere?” He smiled unpleasantly and turned away.

  “The French king is crossing the Alps,” Nicholas said. “He will reach Milan in a matter of days. Valentino will have to withdraw.”

  “Or attack. With French help.”

  Nicholas pressed his fingertips to the top of the desk. “Let me go to the French.”

  “To be humiliated again? You heard how before half the Royal Court Niccolo Machiavelli was forced to listen to a recital of our sins. No.” Bruni raised his hands again, shaking his head. “In this we cannot rely on friends—former friends. We stand alone, as once we stood alone against the tyrant Giangaleazzo. I will not see the French.”

  Nicholas looked down at the leather-bound book on the desk. The title crossed the spine in gold leaf: Tales of Cathay. Bruni had turned toward the hidden window and drawn the drape aside a little to look out, his face knotted into a frown. Perhaps he learned such poses from his books. Nicholas said, “Very well, Excellency.”

  “You may go,” Bruni said.

  “Thank you, Excellency.”

  In the afternoon, walking home to his house, Nicholas, went out of his way to visit a small shop at the very edge of the city. He walked back through the pastures and woods of the Esquiline Hill. As he was moving along the path that curved along the lower slope, he came in sight of some children swinging on ropes hanging in the trees.

  He stopped to watch their broad pendulum sweeps across the bare ground beneath the trees. The children did not see him; they shrieked with laughter as they played, their hair flying and the rags of their clothes fluttering.

  Here the steep hillside was buttressed with a facing of brick, part of the extensive ruins that covered the hill, and he stood in the lee of the brick wall. His eyes followed the swinging ropes, measuring their motion. The speed did not vary, no matter how the child twisted or pumped. One child’s rope broke, and the child fell, then knotting the rope together began to swing again. Now the rope was shorter and swung faster. He watched the child work at his play, how he raised and lowered his body in time with the swing, and so drove the rope farther out and back. That was how the motion worked. The child, pumping his body up and down, changed the length of the pendulum and so enlarged the motion of the rope. Nicholas watched them for some time, enjoying his discovery. He wondered if the child would be able to get the rope swinging at all, if he began pumping with it perfectly still. Usually the children ran a few steps with the rope to start the swing.

  If he had asked such questions at the university, the professors would have referred him to Aristotle. He detested Aristotle; the children at their play seemed to have more of a practical sense of the world than the Stagirite philosopher.

  It was obvious to Nicholas that a knowledge existed other than Aristotle’s idea of knowledge, which was of the essential nature of things. Discussions of essences always diss
olved into mere opinion and fashion and had become more decorative than functional. Yet the relations between things could be understood exactly, and expressed exactly, leaving out the nature of the man thinking of them. All nature seemed composed of such simple consequences as the action of the swinging rope. There seemed everywhere in the world an order of a few simple relationships, endlessly repeated.

  The idea was an old one. In a previous century Cusanus had proposed that the mind of man, being finite, could know nothing of the infinite; man knew nothing but what was relative to him. Cusanus’ liberal and indulgent Church had spared him the heretic’s fire, but he had few followers of any importance.

  Nicholas had applied that thinking to his own work, but with no success. There seemed no such order in human nature as he saw in the swinging of the rope.

  The children sang as they wheeled through the air. Nicholas moved away. He strolled down across the slope, where goats grazed, and the voices of the children faded behind him.

  In the narrow street, going toward his house, he came on old Juan, a shawl over his humped shoulders. The servant had two chickens by the feet and a braid of onions in the other hand. The chickens were plucked from the necks down. Their full-feathered heads were ruffled.

  “Old Caterina looked so sad today,” Juan said, just as if he and Nicholas had been in the midst of conversation. “Maybe her husband has left her again. He wasn’t in the butcher’s stall.” He shook his head and gathering the lacy spittle in his mouth spat it out onto the dust in front of them.

  Nicholas walked short to keep from leaving the old man behind. Juan chattered on, full of imagined gossip. After twenty years in Rome he spoke no Italian; he made up lives for all the people around him whose true lives he could not penetrate. There was a parallel between that and the way Bruni made up actions for the stars to suit the caprices of fortune in the affairs of Italy. Ahead was the gate to Nicholas’s house. He slipped his fingers into his wallet for his key.

  Nicholas brought home a friend to spend the night with him. As usual Juan slept in the kitchen. Past midnight, when Nicholas’s friend was asleep and Nicholas was dozing, Juan slipped in through the bedroom door.

  Nicholas sat up. The nightlight was burning a deep saffron flame on the window sill. His friend curled up in the bed beside him, his head on his folded arms. Juan put one finger to his lips and drew the door shut.

  “Someone is trying to force open the pantry window.”

  Nicholas lowered his feet to the floor and reached for his dressing gown. His friend stirred.

  “What is it?”

  “A burglar,” Nicholas said. He opened the drawer in the chest by his bed and groped for the candle he kept there. His friend, immediately awake, sprang out of bed.

  “Where is my sword? Where is this burglar?”

  “Be careful,” Nicholas said. He lit the candle from the nightlight, took Juan by the arm, and started him out of the bedroom. “We’ll make a lot of noise—maybe he will run away.” The candle fluttered and he let go of Juan to cup his hand around it.

  “Nicholas,” his friend said. “Don’t be a fool. Where is he?”

  “We aren’t certain there is only one.”

  “In the pantry,” Juan said past him to his friend. He spoke Spanish, but the words were close enough.

  “Then he must come through the kitchen, and the kitchen has no windows. Let’s see if we can trap him.” Nicholas’s friend threw open the window and, plunged out, knocking over the nightlight as he went.

  Nicholas gave Juan a narrow look, which the old man ignored. He marched ahead of Nicholas out to the main room of the house. Only the three candles on the table by the front door were lit. The painted mountains and clouds on the walls had faded into an intense gloom. Nicholas pushed Juan along ahead of him toward the kitchen; the servant’s impudence annoyed him and made him rough.

  As they were crossing the room a huge shape came silently out of the kitchen. Nicholas stopped dead, his scalp tingling with alarm. He clutched Juan’s arm. The gross monster glided forward, and the candlelight resolved it into a man wearing a floppy hat and carrying a sack over his shoulder.

  It was Stefano Baglione. He saw Nicholas; he wheeled to face him, and Nicholas saw the club in his hand.

  Juan shouted and lunged at the thief, his arms flailing. Nicholas dragged him back by the sleeve to his side. He dropped his candles and thrust out his open hand to show that he was harmless.

  “Don’t hurt us. I’ve sent for the watch.”

  Stefano granted at him. Juan twisted and struggled in his master’s grip and gave out a string of Spanish oaths. Stefano thrust his club under his belt. Leisurely, he went to the chest and took the silver plates and loaded them into his sack. He opened drawers and found the box of money and that also clinked into the sack. He was swift. Nicholas seemed hardly to have drawn two breaths between the time the thief entered the room and the time he turned back toward the kitchen. The door swung closed at his back.

  “Hah!” Juan cried. Nicholas let him go, and the old man pitched himself against the door, barring it with his body. Nicholas dragged a chair and a case over to hold the entrance.

  Inside the kitchen, there was a hoarse cry of surprise.

  Nicholas and Juan struggled with the weight of the oak table against the wall and hauled it up far enough to stop the edge of the door just as the heavy panel shook under a blow from the far side. The chair blocking it jumped at the impact but the table caught the edge of the door and held it closed. Juan screamed a curse. He and Nicholas heaved again at the table and got it across the doorway. The door shivered again, trembling under several blows, but the table held it firmly in the frame.

  Nicholas stepped back. He wondered if Juan had recognized Stefano.

  “He won’t starve,” he said, and Juan laughed. Nicholas cuffed him.

  “I will not have you speaking directly to my guests.”

  Juan bowed, awkward, a parody of a courtier. “You are a cowardly man. Someone must protect the house.”

  “I am rational, not cowardly.”

  The banging on the kitchen door ceased. Nicholas went through the bedroom to the window and looked out.

  His friend trotted toward him through the shrubbery. His face was round with pleasure. The dry herb scent he wore could not mask the smell of his sweat. He brandished his sword grandly in one hand.

  “I threw the storm shutters up. He won’t be out of there for a while. Have you summoned the watch?”

  “Wait until morning,” Nicholas said. “If the watch sees you here the gossips will plague you all around Rome.” He did not want to give Stefano Baglione to the watch. Surely an accomplished thief would find his way out by morning.

  They went to bed again. Juan slept at the foot of the bed on the floor. In the morning, Stefano was still fast in the kitchen.

  “Call the watch,” his friend said. “I’ll say I was just passing and happened in.”

  “No,” Nicholas said.

  “Oh, Nicholas. I helped you catch him—can’t I be here for the kill?”

  Nicholas coughed into his rounded hand. “Yes, you did catch him. Thank you very much, I had no idea you were so resourceful. But you must consider your family, and your career. The Church frowns on such as we did last night. Trust me now. Go before someone sees you.”

  His friend left, disgruntled, holding the scabbard of his sword with one hand to keep it free of his legs. Nicholas had always supposed that he carried the sword for show. It was certainly out of place on a churchman’s belt.

  Juan was scraping candle wax off the floor in the sitting room. Nicholas went around the outside of the house to the pantry window.

  The shutters were heavily barred with stakes from the garden. He pulled them down and lifted the shutters from the hooks above the window, tilting them up against the wall beneath it. Within the window the pa
ntry was dark and quiet.

  “Stefano,” Nicholas said.

  For a moment there was silence; then footsteps grated on the stone floor. Nicholas backed up, out of reach. Stefano appeared in the window, bare-headed, his coat open down the front. He looked quickly out the window from one side to the other and swung agilely through the narrow opening.

  He was bigger than Nicholas remembered. His red-blond hair hung disorderly around his ears and over his shoulders.

  “You didn’t call the watch,” he said.

  Nicholas started off through the garden, going toward the front door. “Get out,” he said, over his shoulder.

  “Wait,” Stefano called. “Let me talk to you.”

  Nicholas wheeled, angry, his skin prickly and warm inside his clothes. “You did not want to talk to me last night.”

  As soon as those words left his mouth he regretted revealing so much interest.

  Stefano was standing beside a fat oak tree, the shadows of leaves on his face and shoulders. He said, “You told me that you would come to my place. Was that just to get rid of me?”

  Nicholas walked away again, stiff with unreasoning temper. The big man came after him.

  “I don’t like being played with lightly.”

  At that Nicholas laughed, and he stopped and faced Stefano again. “Revenge? Is that why you came to rob me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I paid you in good coin.”

  “There was more to it than that. I’m no whore.”

  “Really? You bargain like one.”

  “Why didn’t you call the watch?”

  “It could be embarrassing, if you decided to talk about me—and I was with someone else.”

  They were standing at the corner of the house; as Nicholas spoke, the front door opened, and old Juan came out on the walk to shake his broom. He saw Stefano and his jaw dropped. Nicholas turned back to Stefano.

  “I’ve been busy. The times are very difficult.”

  “Who was he? The man you were with last night?”

  Nicholas shook his head, dismissing the question. Juan was staring at them, the broom cocked back in his hand. With someone watching, the talk between Nicholas and Stefano turned into low comedy; Nicholas pulled on his sleeve, embarrassed and amused. He nodded to Stefano, but he could not meet his eyes.