Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (45 page)

Robert glanced over at Cardinal Cyriac, who was waiting politely out of earshot, watching a snow-white peacock trundle its carriage of feathers almost over his slippered foot. The cardinal did not like the intimacy between the great man and the man who once saw to his candles, not least because he feared that the boy (hardly a boy, but boyish in body and energies) would ask to be removed from his household. He knew he had been less than generous toward his concubine of late, but seemed unable to stop himself; intellectually, the boy had something about him of the dog who feared so much to be kicked that kicking it seemed obligatory.

“Your Holiness, I had a dream that troubled me. I should perhaps not let such matters disturb my peace.”

The pope floated his hand before Robert’s gaze, which was focused somewhere left of the Holy Father’s foot, and lifted that hand gracefully,
taking the younger man’s attention with it until he found himself looking into the pope’s ocean-blue eyes. It was a gesture he knew from his days as cubicular; this pope did not insist on the same sort of deference other powerful men did.

He wanted men to look into his eyes, which were powerful instruments of persuasion, benevolence, or, more rarely, blame.

“Dreams are sometimes folly and sometimes fact. If we could choose between the two, we would not need our Josephs and Daniels, would we?”

Robert shook his head.

A manicured bush full of some exquisite blue-and-white flower moved in the cold breeze behind Clement’s head. He was waiting to be told about the dream.

So Robert told him.

He omitted the fact that he had awakened in his clothes with his stockings wet from dew. The dew of the vineyards.

The pope tilted his head just a little, a paternal smile coming to his lips and his eyes.

“Are you sure this was a dream, Robert?”

“What else could it have been, Papa?”

Something tickled his hand, and he lifted it to see a fly with a body of brilliant gold rubbing its forelegs. It flew off again as if it had never been there. The smell of tansy welled up again in his nose.

“I hate to pronounce the word,” the Holy Father said, “but I think you can guess it.”

Witchcraft.

The word leapt into being and disappeared again as swiftly as the fly had.

The pope’s eyes gleamed just a little as if in confirmation.

“It is no secret that we move in strength against the Arrogant One’s hold on this world. Is it so unlikely that He would seek to stop our enterprise? And is it unlikely that He would seek to blacken our good name with His sorceries? The girl in your dream will have shown you her own villainies to confound you.”

“Do you think they mean you some harm, Papa?”

“It would serve the Cruel One’s purpose; I am turning mighty wheels against Him. Surely He trembles at the thought that we might seize from Him the city of Christ and David. Surely He dreads the check He will suffer when we remove from us His agents, the Jews.”

“I believe,” Robert said, nodding, “I believe the little girl in the dream is pretending to be the page to Chrétien de Navarre, the Comte d’Évreux.”

The pope’s eyes registered something.

The older man stepped closer.

Robert watched the white silk glove rise again, the weak sun flashing in the sapphires of the pope’s rings as he laid his hand upon his former cubicular’s shoulder. He was struck again by the majesty of this man, with his robes the color of aubergine, the pure white zucchetto on his head; he felt the warmth of the man even through the silk glove, even through his own vestments. His father had seemed mighty to him, but he only laid hands on Matthieu and Robert to strike them or yank them out of his way.

He wanted to cry at how deeply accepted he felt.

“You are perceptive and brave. And you are loyal, Robert. You have our gratitude,” the pope said, the smile lines around his eyes deepening. “And you will have much more than that.”

Robert’s breath caught in his throat with excitement and gladness.

“Cardinal Cyriac,” the pope said, calling the red-robed figure to him. “It is our pleasure to elevate this faithful servant, though to what position we have not yet determined; be as a father to him, and know that we shall return your every kindness to him tenfold.”

Dismissed, the cardinal and the young man walked out of the garden, passing by the cages of the pope’s zoo.

We shall return your every kindness to him tenfold

The cardinal moved his lips as he silently repeated the pope’s words, trying to plumb them for their true meaning. He glanced past his self-satisfied lover, whose expression was not so bold it could be called a smile, and at the enclosures of the Holy Father’s bestiary.
Something was wrong with the lions. It took him a moment to register what it was.

They were both in the same cage now.

The new, black-maned one sat kingly on its haunches while Misericord hunched miserably in his corner with something like fear in his demeanor.

A chill passed down the cardinal’s left side.

Those cages don’t communicate.

He blinked his eyes, sure they must have deceived him earlier.

He looked back at the black-maned lion, which yawned, curling its tongue lazily. When it noticed him looking at it, it did a very curious thing.

It stared directly at him, its mouth standing open, and moved its tongue over its teeth as if counting them.

THIRTY-FOUR

The lodgings at which the pope had placed the Comte d’Évreux and his page sat practically in the shadow of the hulking palace, quite near St. Peter’s church. The series of slanting and hunch-shouldered workers’ houses that had occupied the place before had been pulled down four years earlier, the lumber carted to the palace and cheerfully burned in its kitchens and beneath its baths—it was as though the palace had eaten them. Pope Clement had continued his predecessor’s policy of building up a stone Avignon to replace the wooden one, and the Elysium House was a fine example of the new extravagance.

Thomas and Delphine had sequestered themselves in their room, having excused themselves from the midday feast that an English duke was putting on in the courtyard. The sounds of revelry had been floating up to them for nearly an hour, and, as the revelers emptied pitcher after pitcher of the pope’s wine down their gullets, more and more often the Valois and English lords who had once faced each other across battlefields now united in good-natured mockery directed
at the window of the man they took for the Comte d’Évreux and his Navarrese page. This was precisely what Thomas had feared—though he bore the face and body of the dead man, he did not share his memories, and the world of high-placed men, though embracing all of Europe, was as small and incestuous as a village.

He was dangerously near betraying himself as an impostor.

“Is my lord of Navarre taken ill?” shouted the young William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, in the boxy, snub-nosed French of English nobility. “For I should have liked to have a wrestle with him.”

Delphine used the tip of her comb to trace the hem of a woman’s dress on the wall hanging near the window. It was the simple comb of her mother’s, brought from Normandy—she had flung the ivory comb from the stag orchard into the muddy street the instant Thomas had given it to her.

“No, my lord Salisbury, he will not wrestle you. He was only wont to wrestle his little brother until Charles grew a moustache. Now he wrestles other men’s wives.”

“That is too much, my lord,” laughed another Frenchman, though it was hard to hear him over the horsy guffaws of Sir William, who displayed a foreigner’s overappreciation of French wordplay, as well as an Englishman’s amusement at French adultery.

“I but jest. If our good Chrétien would poke his head out his window, he would see that I am all smiles.”

Thomas felt vertiginously insulted and also pleased that the Comte d’Évreux was being insulted.

“Leave him be; he is ill from the other night’s excess.”

“Then how does he propose to face tomorrow’s excess?”

A messenger had come the day before, crying the news below every window: Since the plague had killed so many cardinals, a new one was to be created tomorrow night; the celebration would be held outside, in the open courtyard of the palace, and open to all.

Now Delphine traced the legs of a knight, skipped chastely past his middle, and rejoined the outline at his belly. Past the tapestry knight, a young girl and her father bent in the field, their faces turned
away, gathering sheaves. She traced them, too. It soothed her to keep her hands busy while she waited for a helpful thought to come. For once, Thomas would have been grateful to see the heavy-lidded gaze that meant she was about to use words that were somehow not hers. Neither of them knew quite what to do while waiting for an invitation to see the pope, an invitation that might not come at all.

He shuddered at the thought of trying to stab the false pope
in camera
, let alone in front of a table full of knights and a company of guards.

It doesn’t matter.

I’ve come here to die.

“Give us at least your head, my lord of Navarre, so we may know you are not dead!” shouted up the English duke.

“You’d better,” said Delphine, now tracing a little dog.

Thomas smoothed his unfamiliar, closely shorn hair and wiped at his beardless chin before thrusting his head out the window to general applause. He waved a hand at the celebrants.

“Come down,” one said.

“No,” Thomas said. “Our friend is quite correct; I ate more than a young man should at the warrior’s feast, and have paid an old man’s price for it.”

The table below erupted with laughter.

“Where’s Don Eduardo de Burgos?” another shouted. “He’ll purge it out of you with
jerez
!”

Thomas swallowed hard at this.

“But,” he continued, waving the last comment away, “with temperance and prayer, I should be whole by this evening. If my lord the earl does not throw me to the ground too roughly.”

They laughed again.

“Well, get back to your sickbed,” said the Valois, “and no more excuses tonight. Though you should send your page down for a bowl of this stew. It’ll make a man of him. Oysters, ginger, and pepper.”

Thomas made as though to vomit, provoking a cheerful “Hoooo” from the table, then withdrew his head and closed the shutter. It was struck by what sounded like a plum.

Delphine raised an eyebrow, impressed.

“Now go get us a bowl of that stew,” he said.

The soldiers came an hour later.

Delphine had eased out of the bindings that flattened her modest unboyishness and sat upon her pallet near the window. The spear was around her neck. Thomas was scraping at the bottom of his bowl with a crust of hard bread, eager to get every drop of the spicy stew.

The sound of boots on the stairs froze them both.

They looked at one another.

These were not the light footsteps of the chamber boys, one of whom, Isnard, had made fast friends with Delphine in her role as page, nor was this a solitary messenger.

The knock, though expected, startled Delphine when it came.

She squeaked like a mouse.

The knock came again.

The hand that knocked wore mail.

“Who is it?” Thomas barked, sounding lordly.

“Servants of His Holiness,” said an unimpressed voice. “Now open this door.”

This was no invitation.

They were discovered.

Delphine confirmed her fears by peeking through a hole in the wooden shutters; two men wearing chain mail and the cross-key emblem of the palace stood in the courtyard below the window, one of them chasing off a kitchen girl who had been clearing up. Both men carried poleaxes.

Delphine clutched the case that held the spear.

“I’m sick,” Thomas said. “My neck is swollen and my throat hurts.” He sneezed loudly as punctuation.

“Amazing how many people we knock for feel the plague coming on. Open the door or I’ll break it down. And you won’t like your trip to the palace if I do.”

Thomas took up his sword and Delphine shook her head at him, wide eyed.

“What, then?”
he whispered.