A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

was only with some difficulty that I and others persuaded Corella to sheathe his weapon again.

      Looking closely at Valentino, I beheld certain lesions on his face that I did not remember seeing there before—of late he had affected to wear a mask much of the time—and seeing these eruptions made me think of certain other oddities I had observed during the last year or so. It came to me that in that period Cesare had started to display some signs of the infamous French pox.

      Once I got a good look at the illness now threatening Cesare’s life, it did look to me like malaria, with which everyone who then lived in southern Italy was more or less familiar. Many in Rome caught the disease in that unhappy summer.

      Duke Valentino at the time of his icy bath was in no shape to give coherent orders, to me or anyone else, so Michelotto and I simply stood by.

      But the physicians’ heroic measures succeeded, and the fever soon left the Duke. By the eighteenth of August, when word suddenly came from downstairs that his father the Pope was dead, Cesare himself was on the road to recovery, though still extremely weak.

      His immediate reaction on hearing that his father was no more—the news certainly came as no surprise—was to call Michelotto and myself to him, and dispatch us with orders to accomplish the looting of the papal apartments located just beneath his own. There, in the Pope’s own bedchamber, built into the wall directly behind his bed, was a vault in which Alexander had been wont to keep the bulk of the papal cash, jewels, and gold on hand.

      Michelotto saluted and was ready to leap into action. He got as far as the door of the room, where he stopped, looking back impatiently.

      I was still standing, frowning, beside Cesare’s bed.

      “Well?” the patient snapped at me in his exhausted voice.

      “Captain General,” I said, “you have just told me that the money and other valuables down there belong to the Church.” It was no secret to anyone that Alexander had, all along, been squandering Church funds to further his son’s career in any way he could. But that a Pope might choose to abuse his authority gave me no excuse to commit a robbery.

      Cesare had no idea what I was talking about. “Yes, and what of that?”

      “Sir, you are asking me to steal this money for you.”

      The glazed eyes of the sick man betrayed no hint of understanding. Feebly he endeavored to prop himself up in bed. At last he began to comprehend. Wearily he croaked: “What strange scruples are these? My father, while he breathed, was the Church, was he not? And so the money was his, and what was the father’s passes on naturally to the son.”

      I considered this a childish attempt to twist the logic of morality. “Certainly, my lord, a father may pass on his own property at will, to his son or any other heir he chooses. But that scarcely has any application in the present case.”

      Borgia glared at me. I had seen strong men quail at far milder looks from him. But my own gaze was unblinking. Sternly confronting my bedridden commander, I demanded: “When Alexander died, did the Church die? No. And you, Duke Valentino, will surely not maintain that you have become the Church?” The jaw of Michelotto, who had now returned to his chief’s bedside, dropped at that thought.

      I doubt that the Duke and his chief lieutenant would have treated anyone else in the circumstances with the patience they accorded me. In words of one syllable, as though they thought my intellect deficient, they explained the vital necessity for the Duke to replenish his own treasury in anticipation of hard times, now that his father’s support had been so suddenly removed.

      I listened patiently to what were for me irrelevancies. Borgia had treated me fairly, as far as I knew, up to this point, and so I owed him a fair hearing. But their arguments left me unmoved. Thievery was thievery. To suggest that the honor of Drakulya might stretch so far as to accommodate theft, and sacrilegious theft at that, more than verged upon deadly insult. I bit my tongue, telling myself to make allowances for fever.

      I was aware that Corella had for some time taken to carrying a concealed wooden dagger. I watched him carefully lest he might go so far as to draw it.

      I have no wish to dwell upon the scene. Vicious words were exchanged; the sick man all but called me a traitor. Or perhaps—certain words were said that I chose not to hear quite clearly—he actually did so, and I swallowed the insult because of his fevered illness and his fairness to me in the past. But I resigned from his service on the spot and stalked out. Rather, since I wished to remove myself from the Borgia’s presence with as little delay as possible, I flew out, changing shape right in his bedroom, and departing in bat-form through the window. The last sounds I heard behind me were the scream of a terrified servant and the shattering of a dropped chamber pot.

      Cesare, as I learned later, wasted little time or energy in hurling curses after me. He immediately dispatched his favorite henchman Corella to do the looting job. Michelotto took a few chosen fellows with him, and I have heard that the task was carried out with remarkable efficiency. Some two hundred thousand florins in coin, silver, and gemstones, all legally the property of the Church, were stolen that night to enrich Borgia’s personal coffers. During the coming weeks and months he was to have need of all of it, and more, to feed and arm such troops as he could raise, to pay bribes and buy support.

      On that same night that I left Borgia’s service Constantia arrived back in Rome. As soon as I became aware of her presence there was a miniature conclave, consisting of Cesare’s two closest female