The King's Agent (37 page)

She smiled back at him curiously, as if she could see all the thoughts working behind his amber eyes.

“You know, I rarely paint women; I find more that is interesting and worthy in the structural power of the male form, as I was taught.”

He did not say it as an insult, though it would be easy to perceive the words as such, and Aurelia did not take it so.

“But when I look at you, Monna Aurelia.” His gaze, burning now with creative passion, flitted between them. “When I look at you two together, I cannot help but wish for a brush and some canvas. Perhaps I shall put you both in a painting.”

She sputtered out the wine like water from a busted well, spattering the table and her face with red splotches.

Battista jumped to her side and dabbed her chin, blotting the drips of wine clinging there as he slapped her gently on the back.

“Are you all right?” he asked, hovering with concern.

Aurelia could only nod as the coughing spasm subsided.

“Does the thought not please you, Aurelia?” Michelangelo chortled as a serving maid rushed over and cleaned the table with a stained, damp rag.

“No ... I mean, yes ... but no.” Aurelia’s tongue tangled in her mouth, bereft of any coherent word to ply upon it. There was so very much of the absurd in the turns of her life—especially those encountered on this adventure—but that would be one far too bizarre to abide. She turned her acuity from Battista’s frowning inquisition and settled herself with a deep breath.

“Of course,
messere,
to be rendered by the master Michelangelo would be the greatest compliment of a lifetime.” She smiled with only the slightest quaver of deceit upon her lips. “However, I fear there is no time. As I am so much healed, I believe Battista and I will soon be continuing our quest.”

“Ah,
sì,
your quest.” Michelangelo seemed satisfied by her reply, if not pleased. He stood, the legs of his chair scraping against the stone terrace. “Then let us continue our tour. There are things you must see before you leave Rome.”

He brought them across the bridge at Sant’Angelo and slowly passed the towering cylindrical edifice, guarded and topped by stone angels.

“It was a mausoleum, first and foremost,” Michelangelo told them, “built by the Emperor Hadrian in the first century.”

“Second,” Battista corrected, but without a peep of superiority.

“Ah
sì, sì
. The second,” Michelangelo nodded his thanks. “It did not become a fortress until the late thirteenth, under Nicholas the Third. See that passageway?”

Aurelia followed the artist’s gesturing finger, her gaze finding and trailing the path of an elevated walkway, the Castel Sant’Angelo anchoring one end, the Vatican the other. Continuous parapets crowned the covered corridor of pale russet stone as the arches held it up from below.

“It provides safe passage for the pope, should a quick guarded retreat be needed.”

Battista glared with ill-disguised disdain at the fortress.

“You care not for this place, do you?” Aurelia asked him.

He looked down at her, crinkles of contempt smoothing away, though not completely. “No, I do not. Many a good citizen has been imprisoned in those walls.”

“Yes, it serves as a prison, and a place of execution,” Michelangelo said. “And in its center, it is rumored, there lies a treasury, a safe room for all the riches obtained by the popes, the art and the relics of both ancient and current civilizations.”

“Relics?” Battista stopped, staring at the castle, curiosity replacing his disdain.

Michelangelo pursed his lips with a vague shake of his head. “If the relic you seek was in the possession of the Vatican, I can assure you, any evidence of its existence ... and any who know of it ... would have disappeared long ago. Never underestimate the power within those walls, a force that has nothing to do with God.”

It was a respectful condemnation, if such a one existed, but a truth. She had heard the same from her guardians as they warned her never to come to this place.

Michelangelo led them west, to the right, and along the curving Borgo Santo Spirito. The crowds around them grew, cramming the lane with many a bowed and hooded head, many a rattling prayer bead. A tranquil hum filled the air, the sound of voices low with mumbled prayers. Soon, the looming wall surrounding the Vatican rose up before them.

As they turned into a vast courtyard, as soon as Aurelia placed one foot onto the pale, uneven flagstones—worn rounded and smooth by hundreds of years and thousands of pilgrims—she stopped, clutching her good arm over the injured.

“What is amiss?” Battista grumbled, throwing one arm protectively about her shoulders as his gaze flitted warily about the crowded courtyard. He pulled her close to the massive walls—at least seven stories high and fortified with circular towers—surrounding the grounds, the cool stone creating a shaded oasis.

“No, I am fine. Truly, Battista,” Aurelia assured him, touched by the fierce gentleness of his concern. “I just felt ...” Her voice trailed away and she turned to Michelangelo. “This is the place of St. Peter, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Michelangelo stretched out his arms. “All of this land, stretching to the castle, was part of what the ancients called the Ager Vaticanus, the Vatican Field. And it is just there where Peter was martyred, there he was crucified upon an inverted cross.” He pointed to a pink stone obelisk rising into the air, just to the south of the Basilica.

Aurelia shivered and Battista pulled her closer. She smiled up at him. “I can feel his spirit embrace me.”

“Many visitors say the same,” Michelangelo said. “Though it is only those who possess great spirit themselves.”

Stepping out of the walls’ shadow, he took them into the sunlight. As the crowd milled around them, Michelangelo pointed out the other highlights of the compound, the churches and palazzos, monuments and chapels, an ever-expanding hodgepodge of buildings, with each pope contributing his own touch to the structural composition.

“In the Basilica, you will find Giotto’s mosaic.” Michelangelo faced due west and the old building surrounded with scaffolds and men. “It has been under construction for years now. I sometimes think it will be lifetimes before it is complete.”

He moved toward it, as if impelled by his own eagerness to see it finished. “I have seen Bramante’s plans. It will be one of the greatest buildings known to man, if they can construct it.”

Aurelia stepped up beside him. “I have no wish to see any but your masterpiece.”

The artist ducked his head humbly. “Then far be it from me to deprive you.”

With Battista, he led her east, to an enclosed marble staircase and two large bronze doors at the top, two halberd-armed guards stationed to each side. With a barely perceptible tic of their heads, the guards parted for Michelangelo, who murmured a soft, “
Grazie.”

“What do you think of their uniforms?” Michelangelo waggled his brows and flicked his head at the guards left behind, his low voice echoing in the empty passageway.

Amused, Aurelia turned back. Brilliant and distinct with bold stripes of yellow and blue, the soldiers’ puffed pantaloons matched their stockings and their doublets, the latter accented with edges of bright red beneath crested breastplates. The skullcaps beneath their pointed, shiny helmets bore the same stripes.

“Quite debonair,” she proclaimed.

To which Michelangelo smiled broadly and, with a finger over his lips, declared, “I designed them as well.”

Aurelia’s face burst with stunned delight, turning to Battista and finding confirmation in his prideful grin.

Inside the portal, a barrel-vaulted hallway bright with whitewashed walls and multibranched chandeliers split in two directions.

Aurelia followed Michelangelo, staring curiously about, unable to contain the puzzled expression from creeping onto her face.

“I am sorry to disappoint you, my dear,” he said. “But we must traverse a part of the Apostolic Palace in order to reach the chapel.”

“What of its own entrance?”

“There isn’t one, really,” he told her. “Nothing large or ornate at any rate. It can only be reached through the palace. But none of its grandeur is lost for it. On the outside, it is but a plain rectangular building, as Pope Sixtus wished. There is no external decoration or architecture of any note. There is nothing to miss.”

“How extraordinary,” Aurelia breathed.

“It should not be overly crowded,” Michelangelo said as he led them through a series of small though resplendent rooms and passageways. “It is not open to the public at this hour and only a few are permitted access at this time of day.”

The hallway let out into a courtyard, which led to a small door in the side of a nondescript brick building. But just beyond lay Heaven itself.

A few steps in and Aurelia’s gaze, her whole head, lifted, and lifted still more, her whole body almost toppling backward at the exquisite vision opening above her. If not for Battista, and a steadying hand at her back, she would have fallen to the floor.

They were alone in the chapel, as Michelangelo had predicted, and she almost wished she could—dared—abandon all propriety and lie upon the cold stone at her feet, all the better to see the splendor overhead.

“T ... tell me,” she eked out the words, voice strangled through her bent throat, nostrils full of thick incense and burning wax.

Michelangelo snorted but with little glint of humor in it.

“It was nothing but blue paint and gold stars. The commission offered was enormous, or so I thought at the time. But the pope paid far more to others for far less work.” Michelangelo rubbed the space between his eyes, hand held almost protectively over his distinctive nose, the lines of struggle etched tellingly across his face. “It must have been Raphael’s charm, my own could never compare to it, which brought him such treasures.”

Battista stepped behind the artist, wrapping his strong, protective arms over the man’s chest, leaning down to whisper in his ear, “Raphael will be remembered. You,
caro mio,
will be glorified. True compensation is far more satisfying.”

Michelangelo rested his head onto the arms creating a shield about him, taking in all the succor offered. Aurelia stared at these men, their tenderness heartbreaking, their beauty a creation of God as surely as the masterpiece above them. How many people had the tools to create such masterpieces and simply refused them for their own misguided fears.

“When Julius set me to the task, I knew it had been at the urging of others, those who would keep me from my chisel, those who would see me fail.”

Aurelia wrenched her gaze from the ceiling to look at Michelangelo, needing to look him in the eye. “You triumphed, over them, over all. You created this, but this made you the grand master.”

The hollows beneath the elder man’s eyes grew darker, a brush of fatigue painting his wrinkled face, and he stared at the nave before them, unwilling or unable to turn his gaze upward. “It was an ascension that felled me, I assure you.”

They stood side by side in the narrow center aisle of the chapel, his voice a low guttural rumble echoing through the cavelike chamber. He told them of the long years of anguish and turmoil as he set about his task, beginning with the design of an appropriate scaffold, one that put no holes in the ceiling, as that proposed by Bramante would have done. Michelangelo spoke of his struggle with vertigo, the dizzying, nauseating condition that had assailed him since he was thirteen and working on the Santa Maria Novella.

“How many times I vomited into a bucket through ... all this.” He waved his hand at the ceiling twenty meters over their heads. “It is a wonder I had any meat left on my bones.”

“I have heard,” Aurelia whispered, bending now sideways from the waist as her neck grew fatigued, “that you were obliged to convince Pope Julius of your design.”

Michelangelo laughed at her polite choice of words. “We argued like Crusader and infidel, I being the Crusader, of course. But to answer, yes, what I wanted went far beyond his original vision and I had to convince him to love it, though love it in the end he did. He interrupted me constantly, and constantly I had need to assure him.”

The artist walked farther up the aisle, Battista passing him and continuing on, as Michelangelo gestured to the three horizontal tiers of the side walls. On his right, the muted tones of golds and blues detailed the stories of Christ as rendered by Pietro Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. To the left, the south wall depicted the Story of Moses with the same diffused shades by the same artists, the paintings frescoed upon the middle tiers.

“Julius wanted the Apostles to be adorned over these stories, simple renderings, one for each of the pendentives.”

Aurelia stretched her neck once more to the triangular segments supporting the vaulted ceiling.

“But there was far too much more of man’s spiritual journey to be said. There was too much space available in which to say it.” Michelangelo sat on the edge of a pew, elbows upon his knees, head in his hands. He recalled painful memories; they were there in every curve and bow of his slight body, the pleasure of the achievement muddied by the struggle of its creation.

Aurelia moved not an inch, eyes locked upon the vision above as if locked upon Heaven itself. She could only imagine how such an achievement had drained so much of his energy—every creation kept a piece of its creator—and why he had failed to be productive for so many years afterward, his creative juices dried, the blood of it painted on this ceiling.

“Is that—” The words tripped over her lips as she pointed to a particularly intriguing scene within a lunette, but Michelangelo stopped her.

“There are more than three hundred figures above us, my dear. I would need many days to tell you of them all.” He reached for her hand, his affection tempering his glibness. “I am not sure it is meant to be taken as individual pieces, but as a whole. Yes, I could tell you that there are nine scenes from the book of Genesis. There are the Apostles and prophets, and the ancestors of Christ. But there have been so many who have analyzed the work.” He shook his head. “They try to wrench the spirit of it away with their academia.”