A Matter Of Taste, Fred Saberhagen [love story books to read TXT] 📗

speculate on the identity of my juvenile poisoners, and for the time being I was forced to allow that problem to wait.

      The next few hours of that night I spent listening while Constantia brought me up-to-date on what we both considered important current events. I had been in the earth with the Etruscan for about eight years; this was the Jubilee Year of 1500, so proclaimed by the Pope.

      Naturally the identity of the current Pope was among the things I was most eager to learn, in an effort to reorient myself to a changed world. Constantia quickly informed me that the Borgia, Alexander VI, still held his position as Vicar of Christ. This was of great importance to the political and military situation in general. Certainly I would not have been surprised to learn that he had already gone to his reward. Popes as a rule are elderly men when elected—Alexander, I knew, had been sixty-one when he assumed St. Peter’s chair—and in that century the average length of a reign was less than a decade. Alas for Christendom, Cesare Borgia’s father still sat there.

      Constantia talked with me a little longer and then departed, having naturally, as she said, her own affairs to attend to. We made tentative arrangements to meet again.

      The later part of that evening and much of the next I spent mingling with the breathers in several marketplaces of suburban Rome. In the first of these I obtained new clothing. In all of them I listened much and spoke little, only now and then engaging cautiously in conversation. I soon was able to confirm much of what my former lover had told me, of events that had transpired whilst I was underground. Quietly I raged within myself at my own weakness that had caused me to lose eight years in sleep—at the malignancy of that incredible girl-child who played so recklessly with poisons—at my own stupidity in falling prey to one of her concoctions—and at the thought of Bogdan and Basarab, who were now most likely gone out of my reach again, gone far if not forever.

      Of course by this time my juvenile poisoner, whoever she was, would be a child no longer, if she still lived. She would be about twenty, as I calculated, and her brother some five years older—but I still had no idea of who they were, beyond the fact of their belonging to the privileged class. Had I not been devoted already to vengeance on others, I might have tried to seek them out. Alas, it proved unnecessary for me to do so.

      Among other information I had gleaned from Constantia was that for several years during my latest nap the fanatical reformer Savonarola had been in virtual control of the city of Florence. Fra Girolamo had been bent on establishing a Florentine government that would serve the interest of God’s poor as well as of the wealthy. Like most such plans, his miscarried. Eventually he had been betrayed to his enemies, arrested, publicly strangled, and his body burnt upon the scaffold—so much for reform. In general, the leaders of church and state alike had been pleased to see their last in this world of that pesky monk. The Medici family were now once more in control of Florence, though from things I overheard I deduced that their rule was neither so firm nor so beneficial as it once had been.

      On the next night—which I, to be on the safe side, planned to spend in a different earth—Constantia kept her appointment for our meeting, and we were able to have a second conversation.

      This time it pleased her to speak of Bogdan and Basarab, or, more accurately, to inform me that since her arrival in Italy she had heard nothing of them.

      “But, my prince, if they have indeed become condottieri here, then I should think that the place to seek them would be with Cesare Borgia.”

      There were a number of men named Cesare around, and at first I saw no reason to establish a connection with my little poisoner’s escort. “Ah, yes. The Pope’s son. What is he doing now?”

      Constantia related the young man’s accomplishments to me at some length—indeed, everyone in Italy was now interested in the career of Cesare Borgia, who had recently been appointed captain general of the papal army.

      Always one to enjoy a juicy bit of gossip, Constantia informed me that in June of 1497, Cesare’s older brother, Juan, until then their father’s favorite choice for a military leader, had been murdered under most mysterious circumstances in the streets of Rome.

      “Murdered by whom?”

      No one knew, but during the years following many had come to blame Cesare.

      By 1498, at the age of twenty-three, Cesare had with Alexander’s blessing resigned his appointment as Cardinal, and had been dispatched upon an important diplomatic expedition, carrying an immense treasure—which included silver urinals, among other improbabilities—to the court of the French king at Chinon.

      Alexander’s most ambitious and dangerous child had remained in France until 1499, when he had ridden south of the Alps with Louis XII, monarch of France, on his flamed and ultimately ill-fated expedition to Naples.

      I frowned at Constantia. “Are you telling me that the French invaded Italy in force?”

      “You might say that, I suppose. Well, yes, they certainly did, but in the end it came to nothing, and the only battle they really fought was when they were trying to get home again.”

      I had already missed the peak of the Jubilee Year in Rome. The month of February had been carnival, when pilgrims thronged in from all across Europe, seeking special indulgences. In that month Cesare had arrived in the city in considerable state, bringing with him prisoners from his most recent military expeditions. The purpose of these campaigns had been the subjugation of some of the petty lords of the Papal Territories, who had been minded to remove themselves from under the temporal authority of Christ’s Vicar. Evidently Cesare, despite his youth, was already a most effective leader, in war and