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

      It was on the evening of the next day, in March in the year of Our Lord 1507, when Cesare Borgia, alone in his field tent, opened one of the small sealed jars that I had carried to him from Ferrara on the instructions of his beloved sister. He followed his sister’s instructions, these printed in tiny coded symbols on the label, as he measured a small amount of the jar’s contents into a cup of wine that stood on his small folding table. He put the jar, and the spoon he had used as a measure, carefully away, well out of sight. Then he blew out his light, as a signal to his troops that he did not wish to be disturbed, except for some grave emergency.

      Around him the encampment of his modest army— no more than a couple of thousand men—was quiet.

      Presently, Constantia, unseen and unheard by any of those other men, came to him, moving wraithlike through the tiny opening at the closed flap of his tent. In solid woman-form again, she cast aside her clothing and joined Cesare in his narrow military bed.

      He had been lying very still, but he was not asleep. “Tell me” were his first whispered words. “What of Drakulya?” Constantia began weeping softly. “He is dead,” she said.

      “Staked properly through the heart, with wood? By your own hand?”

      “Yes.”

      “You actually saw his body disappear?”

      “Yes.” She was weeping more hopelessly than ever now. “Yes, I have seen him disappear.”

      “My dearest love! I knew that I could count on you!” Cesare sat bolt upright in the narrow bed and reached for the cup of wine that until now had sat untasted on the nearby table. In a moment he had drained it to the dregs. Throwing the cup aside, he seized the woman who lay with him.

      Borgia in his triumphant lust then knew her carnally, in the way of breathing man with breathing woman. Constantia wept on—for a little while—and yielded herself in silence to her deceived lover.

      Presently, as he had on so many other nights, he pulled her mouth against his body, offering her his blood in return for further ecstasy. And then, drunken as he was with wine and Borgia drugs and revengeful triumph over a hated enemy, feeling invincibly secure in his good fortune, he tempted fate. Taking my little gypsy’s unresisting hand, he used one of her own sharp nails to open the skin upon her breast. Then as a breather he enjoyed the final ecstasy, that of drinking vampire blood.

      A little after that, as debauchees, like other folk, are wont to do, Cesare Borgia fell asleep.

      And then, in the small hours of the morning, the gods of war threw dice and rolled a chance that altered all our lives. What actually occurred was some puny blunder of patrols in darkness, not a real attack on the camp—the rebellious Count Beaumont had neither the men or the nerve for any undertaking so bold as that. But the effect was disproportionate.

      Roused before dawn while still under the influence of the drug, given confused misinformation by some frightened sentries, Cesare behaved quite uncharacteristically. He mounted quickly and went charging out recklessly toward the reported enemy position, accompanied only by a terrified squire. All who saw him said later that Valentino acted in a bellicose, drunken fashion, all but losing control of his horse, superb horseman that he had always been.

      When he came upon a small squad of the enemy, he rode alone, rampaging in berserk fashion, right in among them—and was brutally butchered for his pains.

      When this happened Michelotto was still back in camp, not dreaming that his master was reacting to a minor crisis in such a mad, seemingly suicidal way.

      It was midmorning before Borgia’s friends and attendants could locate the place where he had fallen and gather him up. And by that time Cesare’s butchered body had long since ceased to breathe.

* * *

      It was midafternoon of the same day before a haggard, grief-stricken Michelotto entered, alone, a certain crumbling mausoleum in a long-disused cemetery on the far side of Viana. He was carrying a carpenter’s maul, and a long, thick, keenly sharpened wooden stake. Grunting, he dragged the heavy lid off the coffin on the right-hand side and stared down with hatred at the woman’s form, young and attractive in appearance, that lay so peacefully within.

      Corella raised his stake—and in an instant was seized from behind, turned around, and thrown staggering across the little room. I had been waiting in ambush beside Constantia’s still form, expecting that sometime during the daylight hours a would-be assassin would appear.

      “Drakulya!”

      “As you see—but I was expecting that your master would come to perform this task himself.”

            Michelotto’s features worked. “My master is dead.”

      For once the man had surprised me. I knew that Cesare had gone to answer some military alarm during the hours of darkness, for he had not been in his tent when I found Constantia there before dawn, heavily drugged and almost totally unconscious. Under my ministrations she had regained her senses long enough to whisper, as I was conveying her safely to her earth, a few details of what had happened to her in Borgia’s bed.

      Now she slept on, unwaking and undead, in a slumber that for all I knew might endure for years. And Michelotto, a wooden stake securely through his own heart, was soon laid to rest on the floor of the mausoleum near her feet.

* * *

      By the time I was able to rejoin the innocent breathing citizens who were mourning Borgia’s fall, and had laid my hands on his fresh corpse, the time was after noon. At the first touch of his cooling, stiffening flesh, I could sense that Borgia had been changed. His last drunken session with the drugged Constantia had been too much for him. Until I learned of his death I had been in a quandary as to what to do next, having taken an oath not to kill