Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (8 page)

But Ezio was bound for Rome. Rome, he knew, would be where Cesare would go now, to regroup. It might even be that Cesare in his arrogance would think Ezio beaten, even dead on the road, like carrion. If so, then that could only be to the Assassin’s advantage. But something else was haunting Ezio. With Mario dead, the Brotherhood was leaderless. Machiavelli was a powerful force within it, and at present Machiavelli did not seem to be Ezio’s friend.

This was something that had to be resolved.

Along with the human survivors of the town, they had managed to bring livestock with them, and among the animals was the great chestnut warhorse Mario had loved so much.

He now mounted the steed, held for him by the old stable-master, who had managed to get out, too—though, alas, most of his horses had been captured by the Borgia.

As he reined the horse in, he took his leave of his mother and sister.

“Must you really go to Rome?” asked Maria.

“Mother, the only way to win this war is to take it to the enemy.”

“But how can you possibly succeed against the forces of the Borgia?”

“I am not their only enemy. And besides, Machiavelli is already there. I must make my peace with him, and work with him.”

“Cesare has the Apple,” Claudia said soberly.

“We must pray that he does not master its powers,” Ezio replied, though privately he felt great misgivings. Leonardo was in Cesare’s pay and Cesare’s power now, and Ezio was well aware of the intelligence of his former friend. If Leonardo taught Cesare the mysteries of the Apple—worse still, if Rodrigo got hold of it again…

He shook his head to rid himself of these thoughts. Time enough to confront the threat of the Apple when it presented itself.

“You shouldn’t be riding now. Rome is miles to the south. Can’t you at least give it a day or two?” asked Claudia.

“The Borgia will not rest and the evil spirit of the Templars rides within them,” rejoined Ezio drily. “No one will be able to sleep easily until their power is broken.”

“What if it never is?”

“We must never give up the fight. The minute we do that, we have lost.”

“È vero.”
His sister’s shoulders slumped, but then she straightened them again. “The fight must
never
be given up,” she said firmly.

“Until death,” said Ezio.

“Until death.”

“Take care on the road.”

“Take care on the road.”

Ezio leaned down from the saddle to kiss his mother and his sister before wheeling the horse around and onto the road south. His head was pounding with the pain of his wound and the exertions of battle. More than this was the aching of his heart and soul at the loss of Mario and the capture of Caterina. He shuddered at the thought of her in the clutches of the evil Borgia family—he knew all too well what fate might befall her in their hands. But Ezio also knew that if ever a person would go down fighting, she was that person. He’d have to skirt the Borgia troops but his heart told him that, now that his main objective had been achieved, to break the Assassins’ stronghold, Cesare would head home.

But the most important thing was to lance the boil that was infecting Italy, and lance it soon, before it could infect the whole body of the land.

He dug his heels hard into the horse’s flanks and galloped south down the dusty road.

His head was swimming with exhaustion but he willed himself to keep awake. He vowed he would not rest until he arrived in the broken-down capital of his beleaguered country. But he had miles to go before he would be able to sleep.

How stupid had he been…to ride for so long, wounded; and so far—only breaking the ride for the horse’s sake and then impatiently flogging the poor beast on before he was properly rested. Post-horses would have been a more sensible choice, but Campione was his last link with Mario.

Now—where was he? He remembered a crumbling, dingy suburb and then, rising out of it, a once-majestic yellow stone arch, an erstwhile gateway that pierced a formerly magnificent city’s walls.

Ezio’s impulse had been to rejoin Machiavelli—to right the wrong he had committed by not making sure that Rodrigo Borgia, the Spaniard, was dead.

But by God, he was tired!

He lay back on the pallet. He could smell the dry straw, its odor carrying with it a hint of cow dung.

Where was he?

An image of Caterina came suddenly and strongly into his mind. He must free her! They had to be together at last!

But perhaps he should also free himself
from
her—though part of his heart still told him that this was not what he really wanted. How could he trust her? How could a simple man ever understand the subtle labyrinths of a woman’s mind? And, alas, the torture of love didn’t get any less acute with age.

Was she using him?

Ezio had always maintained an inner room within his heart, where he was himself alone, where he had his
sanctum sanctorum
; it was kept locked, even to his most intimate friends, to his mother (who knew of it and respected it), to his sister, and, formerly, to his late brothers and father.

Had Caterina broken in? He hadn’t been able to prevent the killing of his father and brothers, and by Christ and the Cross he had done his best to protect Maria and Claudia.

Caterina could look after herself—she was a book that kept its covers closed—and yet—and yet—how he longed to read it!

“I love you!”—his heart cried out to Caterina, despite himself. The woman of his dreams at last—at last, this late in life. But his duty, he told himself, came first—and Caterina—Caterina!—never truly showed her cards. Her brown, enigmatic eyes, her smile, the way she could twist him around her little finger. Her long, expert fingers. The closeness. The closeness. But also the keen silence of her hair, which always smelled of vanilla and roses…

How could he ever trust her, even when he laid his head on her breast after they had made passionate love and wanted—wanted so much—to feel secure?

No! The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood! His mission and his destiny.

I am dead,
Ezio said to himself.
I am already dead inside. But I will finish what I have to do.

The dream dissolved and his eyelids flickered open. They bestowed a view of an ample but elderly cleavage descending toward him, the chemise the woman was wearing parting like the Red Sea.

Ezio sat up rapidly in the straw he’d been lying on. His wound was properly dressed now, and the pain was so dull as to be almost negligible. As his eyes focused, they took in a small room with walls of rough-hewn stone. Calico curtains were drawn across the small windows, and in a corner an iron stove burned, the embers from its open door giving the place its only light. Then the door was shut, but whoever it was with him in the room lit the stump of a candle.

A middle-aged woman, who looked like a peasant, knelt beside him, came within the frame of his vision. Her face was kindly as she tended to his wound, rearranging the poultice and bandage.

It was sore! Ezio winced in pain.

“Calmatevi,”
said the woman. “The pain will end soon.”

“Where’s my horse? Where’s Campione?”

“Safe. Resting. God knows he deserves it. He was bleeding from the mouth. A good horse like that. What were you doing to him?”

The woman put down the bowl of water she was holding and stood.

“Where am I?”

“In Rome, my dear.
Messer
Machiavelli found you fainting in your saddle, your horse frothing, and brought you both here. And don’t worry, he’s paid me and my husband well to look after you and your horse. And a few more coins for our discretion. But you know
Messer
Machiavelli—cross him at your peril. Anyway, we’ve done this kind of job for your organization before.”

“Did he leave me any message?”

“Oh, yes. You’re to meet him as soon as you’re fit at the Mausoleum of Augustus. Know where that is?”

“One of the ruins, isn’t it?”

“Dead right. Not that it’s much more of a ruin than most of this awful city is nowadays. To think it was once the center of the world! Look at it now—smaller than Florence, half the size of Venice. But we do have one boast.” She cackled.

“And that is?”

“Only fifty thousand poor souls live in this shanty-town of a city that once was proud to call itself Rome; and
seven thousand of them
are prostitutes! That’s got to be a record!” She cackled some more. “No wonder everyone’s riddled with the New Disease. Don’t sleep with anyone here,” she added, “if you don’t want to fall apart with the pox. Even cardinals have got it—and they say the Pope himself, and his son, are sufferers.”

Ezio remembered Rome as if in a dream. A bizarre place now, whose ancient, rotting walls had been designed to encompass a population of one million. Now most of the area was given over to peasant farming.

He remembered, too, the ruined wasteland of what had once been the Great Forum in ancient times, where sheep and goats grazed now. People stole the ancient carved marble and porphyry stones, which lay higgledy-piggledy in the grass, to build pigsties with or to grind down for lime. And out of the desolation of slums and crooked, filthy streets, the great new buildings of Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Alexander VI rose obscenely, like wedding cakes on a table where there was nothing else to eat but stale bread.

The aggrandizement of the Church was confirmed, back at last from the papal exile at Avignon; and above all the Pope—the leading figure in the international world, outclassing not only kings, but the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian himself—had his seat in Rome again.

And hadn’t it been Pope Alexander VI who’d divided, in his great judgment, the southern continent of the New Americas, through a vertical line, between the colonizing countries of Portugal and Spain by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the same year the New Disease broke out—for the first time in Italy—so badly in Naples? They called it the French disease—
morbus gallicus
. But everyone knew it’d come back from the New World with Columbus’s bunch of Genoese sailors. It was an unpleasant affliction. People’s faces and bodies bubbled morphews and boils, and in the last stages their faces were often pressed out of all recognizable shape.

And in Rome, the poor made do on barley and bacon—when they could get bacon. And the dirty streets harbored typhus, cholera, and the Black Death. As for the citizens—there were the ostentatiously rich, to be sure; but as for the rest, they looked like cowherds and lived as badly.

What a contrast to the gilded opulence of the Vatican! Rome, that great city, had become a rubbish heap of history. Along the filthy alleys that passed for streets, in which feral dogs and wolves now roamed, Ezio remembered churches, which today were falling apart, rotting refuse, deserted palaces that reminded him of the probable wreck (as his prophetic soul told him) of his own family seat in Florence.

“I must get up. I must find
Messer
Machiavelli!” said Ezio urgently, flinging the visions from his mind.

“All in good time,” replied his nurse. “He left you a new suit of clothes. Put them on when you are ready.”

Ezio stood, and as he did so his head swam; but he shook himself to clear it. Then he donned the suit Machiavelli had left him—new linen, and a hood of soft wool with a peak like an eagle’s beak. Strong, soft gloves and boots made of Spanish leather. He dressed himself, fighting the pain the effort caused him. When he was done, the woman guided him to a balcony. Ezio realized then that he had not been in some shrunken hovel, but in the remains of what had once been a great palace. They must have been on the
piano nobile
. He drew in his breath as he looked at the desolate wreck of a city spread out below him. A rat scuttled boldly over his feet. He kicked it away.

“Ah, Roma,” he said ironically.

“What’s left of it,” the woman repeated, cackling again.

“Thank you, Madonna. To whom do I owe…?”

“I am the
Contessa
Margherita degli Campi,” she said, and in the dim light Ezio could see at last the fine lines of a face once beautiful. “Or what’s left of her.”

“Contessa,”
Ezio said, trying to keep the sadness out of his voice, and bowed.

“The
mausoleo
is over there,” she replied, smiling and pointing. “That is where you are to meet.”

“I can’t see it.”

“In that direction. Unfortunately, you cannot see it from my
palazzo
.”

Ezio squinted into the dark. “What about from the tower of that church?”

She looked at him. “Santo Stefano’s? Yes. But it’s a ruin. The stairs to the tower have collapsed.”

Ezio braced himself. He needed to get to his meeting place as safely and as quickly as possible. He did not want to be delayed by the beggars, tarts, and muggers who infested the streets by day and even more by night.

“That should not be a problem,” he told the woman.
“Vi ringrazio di tutto quello che avete fatto per me, buona Contessa. Addio.”

“You are more than welcome,” she replied with a wry smile. “But are you sure you are fit enough to go so soon? I think you should see a doctor. I’d recommend one, but I can’t afford them anymore. I have cleaned and dressed your wound, but I am no expert.”

“The Templars don’t wait, and nor can I,” he replied. “Thank you again, and goodbye.”

“Go with God.”

He leapt from the balcony down to the street, wincing at the impact, and darted across the square dominated by the disintegrating palace in the direction of the church. Twice he lost sight of the tower and had to double back. Three times he was accosted by leprous beggars and once confronted a wolf, which slunk away down an alley with what may have been a dead child between its jaws, but at last he was in the open space before the church. It was boarded up, and the limestone saints that adorned its portal were deformed by neglect. He didn’t know whether he could trust the rotten stonework, but there was nothing for it—he had to climb.

He managed it—though he lost his footing on several occasions and once his feet fell free over an embrasure that collapsed under them, leaving him hanging by the tips of his fingers. But he was still a very strong man, and he managed to haul himself up, out of danger—and at last he was on the top of the tower, perched on its lead roof. The dome of the mausoleum glinted dully in the moonlight several blocks away. He’d go there now and wait for Machiavelli to arrive.