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.”