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

her absence. Or if she preferred, I was available to carry a message there for her.

      But haughtily she said: “If you will not help me to save my brother, then I will accept no other gifts or favors from you.” And as we parted matters between us were left in that unsatisfactory state.

      I felt the need of rest, but at the same time I was troubled by a vague uneasiness—from my early youth (as I have explained elsewhere) I have been immune to fear, but no sane person made an enemy of Cesare without feeling some unease about it. Therefore I chose for my place of retirement the newest of my several Roman earths, one I felt confident the Borgias did not know about.

      The location I had chosen for this facility was not far from dear Lucrezia’s poison laboratory. Intrigued by the riches of ruins underground, I had spent some of my spare time in reconnoitering the vicinity and had in the process located another buried chamber that was eminently suited to my special needs.

      The chamber in which I now established my new earth was another remnant of imperial Rome. Once it too must have been located on the surface of the ground. But now it formed a subterranean hideout, cut off virtually completely from the surface as far as access by breathers was concerned.

      To this remote cavern I had managed to convey most of the Transylvanian soil from one of the caches that I now considered only doubtfully secure. Naturally I did this work at night, when the smallest crevice served as well as an open door to let me through. And in my new earth I was able to rest securely through the following day.

      When night dawned again, I awoke feeling utterly tired of Rome, of Italy, of the entire situation in which I found myself. I felt convinced that the best thing to do was to put as much distance as I could between myself and the affairs of the Borgias as soon as possible. There was really nothing to hold me in the city any longer, nothing to keep me in Italy but my wavering affair with Lucrezia, and I foresaw no very smooth course for that in the immediate future. And there would of course be danger, subtle and miasmic, without any real prospect of anything in compensation. Borgia at the moment was too intensely concerned with his own survival to spend much time scheming for revenge, but with him one could never be too careful. I had no inclination to break my vow to Lucrezia with respect to her brother’s safety, and certainly no positive wish to die.

* * *

(Here there follows a period of silence on the tape, broken occasionally by sighs and mutterings too faint for intelligibility.)

* * * * * *

      There is a small narrative problem here, but I shall handle it this way: The following three or four years of my life, until approximately the end of 1506, constitute an interlude having little or nothing to do with the Borgias, belonging rather with a series of unrelated events that I may decide to chronicle at some time in the future. Therefore I shall now pass over this interlude in silence. Suffice it to say that I spent the bulk of those three or four years out of Italy, and most of the time away from my homeland also. Thus a considerable period elapsed in which I saw neither Lucrezia nor Cesare, though news of Duke Valentino did reach me on rare occasions.

* * *

      It was in late 1506 that I began to interest myself closely in Borgia affairs once again. The proximate cause of this renewed concern was a message from Lucrezia brought to me, in a far land, by Constantia, who had committed it to memory, word for word. This was the first time in several years that I had seen my little gypsy friend, and her visit, apart from any news she brought, gladdened my heart.

      In the interval since our last meeting, of course, the world had changed, though as so often happens the greatest changes were not immediately perceptible. Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, had died in 1498, and Columbus in 1506. The newest Pope, Julius II, was directing his considerable fierce energies to the task of creating St. Peter’s as we know it today, and to this end he had summoned to Rome a horde of artists and craftsmen, Michelangelo among them.

      Lucrezia, at the time I received her urgent message, had already begun to be intensely on my mind. Ferrara would have been the natural place for me to seek her, and indeed I was considering such a pilgrimage when her communication arrived. Her situation in Ferrara had not changed drastically, except that her husband’s father had died in the interval, and she was now the Duchess.

      Her message began appealingly, telling me that I was the only one she considered strong and trustworthy enough to save her brother now, from whatever immediate danger was posed by his swarm of enemies and his own nature. She was not specific about the danger. None of this surprised me particularly; what did somewhat surprise me was that I was not urged to go immediately to Navarre, where Cesare was now, but summoned to Ferrara first.

      I have said that it was not at all unexpected to hear that her brother was in trouble. I already knew that once the prop of his father’s powerful support had been knocked from under him, his own career had gone downhill rapidly. He had careened briefly around Italy, surviving episodes of imprisonment, escape, and exile. He had confounded his enemies by recovering from his near-fatal illness of 1503, and then rebounding from one fresh political and personal setback after another, but in three years the total sum of his bad fortune had proved too much for him. As it would have done, I suppose, for any man.

      Among