A Matter of Taste

Chapter 17

Around the middle of August, in the year 1503, word reached me at the distance of a few days' ride from the Eternal City that on the twelfth of that month both Pope Alexander and Cesare had suddenly been stricken desperately ill. There was grave doubt of the father's survival, and the son was incapacitated, prognosis uncertain.

The message arrived near midnight. It was in fact my old friend and former lover Constantia, Cesare's sometime lover (and, I believe, quite possibly Alexander's too), who brought me this information, at a speed greater than that attainable by any breathing human of the time.

I was to tell no one, but proceed to Rome as rapidly as possible, dropping at once all other business on which I was engaged. This created some awkwardness, which I dealt with as best I could, leaving a note at midnight for my immediate subordinate and taking wing from the nearest window, in bat-form, very shortly thereafter.

The news of course perturbed me, but actually almost any interruption would have been welcome at the time. I was still brooding over the sour aftertaste of my revenge, such as it had been, on Bogdan and on his fellow traitors. Why had my efforts been so fundamentally unsuccessful?

But now, as Cesare's faithful agent, I had much more pressing matters to consider. On hearing that the Borgias had been simultaneously stricken, the first thought that leaped to my mind—and to the minds of a great many of my contemporaries—was poison. One of their damned plots had somehow backfired on them; or Madonna Lucrezia, driven mad by their continued ill-usage of her as a political pawn, had finally struck back at her father and brother, or some rival faction had suddenly acquired a skill equal to theirs in the formulation and use of deadly potions.

Constantia on bringing me the news let me know that she favored this last opinion. She also voiced her sadness that her young and powerful lover had been so stricken.

So concerned was she for her lover's life, she informed me, that before leaving on her courier's mission she had once more pressed Cesare, this time urgently, to drink her blood and thereby become a vampire. But in his great stubbornness, his absolute determination to achieve political success, he had still refused.

That both father and son could have been felled by some ordinary illness was an explanation that no shrewd observer at the time was willing to believe. And yet with the benefit of hindsight such an accident seems the most likely cause. That was a bad summer for disease in Rome, in an era when all Roman summers were unhealthy; and in the perspective afforded by modern science, acute malaria seems the most likely diagnosis.

Constantia, after delivering her message to me and tarrying for the briefest of conversations, hastened on. There were still others to whom the alarming news must be conveyed.

Three or four days after the father and son had fallen ill, and while I was still hastening toward Rome, the Pope's life was already being despaired of. Important folk of every kind, Cardinals in particular, who had received the word as soon as I did or sooner, were rushing to be on hand when the end came, hoping thus to be best able to pursue their own advantage. At the same time others already on the scene, who had become closely associated with Alexander and had made enemies in the process, were moving prudently away from Rome, not liking what they foresaw as the aftermath of his demise.

Fortunately, once I got under way I was able to move faster than any breathing person, given the general state of transportation at the time. My actual journey to Rome took me less than a day.

On arriving at the papal palace I found everything in turmoil. Actually that word somewhat understates the degree of political, social, and religious confusion that obtained. At the time of my arrival the Pope was not yet dead, and I was pleased to hear that my employer Cesare still survived as well, though the condition of both men was still very grave. At once I started to make my way up to Cesare's apartments, which were directly above his father's.

But before I had taken half a dozen steps up the broad stairs, I was intercepted by a man I recognized as an agent of Lucrezia. He drew me aside and murmured privately that his mistress wished to see me immediately upon my arrival. The matter, she had said, was urgent.

I was startled. "Then she is here, in Rome?"

"Indeed she is, Don Ladislao." It appeared that Madonna had received the news of her brother's and father's sickness even before I did, and in response to an urgent plea from Cesare had hurried to the Eternal City from Ferrara, making the long ride disguised as a man. Her third and current husband, Alfonso d'Este, was no doubt as usual out in the countryside somewhere playing with his artillery, and largely indifferent as to whether his wife was home or not, so long as the appearances of propriety were preserved.

Duke Valentino, my informant confided to me, had summoned his sister, the family expert, to Rome because he wanted her to test him and their father for signs of poisoning.

"Aha. And have such signs been found?"

"You will have to speak to my mistress about that."

"Then conduct me to her instantly."

My guide led me away at once, out of the palace and into a nearby garden, where an uncomfortable-looking stone bench proved surprisingly movable. Inside the cavity thus disclosed, stairs went steeply down below ground level.

"Where is she hiding, then? In a catacomb?"

"Something very like it, Captain. If you will please follow me."

We went down, and down, and down again, with intervals of lateral progression through thin tunnels. At one point I believe we were actually in a subbasement of the palace. Some of the stonework around me was indeed as old as the catacombs, but other parts were new. The Vatican, I realized, was changing rapidly, almost before the eyes of one who visited the area as often as I did. Alexander on becoming Pope had hurried into construction of an addition, called the Torre Borgia, to the papal palace. His addition, I thought, must be the part above me now. In succeeding years he had ordered additional remodeling. Probably his experience with the falling roof remained much in his mind.

I had not been entirely serious when I spoke of catacombs, those vaults and passages whose walls were lined with the bones of Christians, the majority of them interred more than a thousand years before my time. But now here we were among them, for a brief distance anyway. Then out again, into a passage of much more recent creation.

The air was close and dank. The way for a long time had been completely dark, at least to breathers' limited perceptions, except for the torch my guide was carrying.

And now a peculiar smell, even worse and stranger than those to be expected in a cave beneath a city, began to tease my nostrils. I became more and more convinced as we proceeded, that I smelled, of all unlikely things—a bear.

People I knew still spoke of how a whole bear, roasted in its hide, had been among the dishes served at a papal feast once given for the King of Naples. So the thing was not utterly impossible. Still, unwilling to sound foolish if I should be mistaken, I said nothing to my guide.

At last we emerged from the confusing series of tunnels into a surprisingly roomy chamber that I assumed to be our final goal. Sconces mounted high on the curved walls held torches that both stimulated and tested the circulation of the buried air, and gave light enough for even a breather's eyes to take in a scene of fantasy.

I blinked, and came near rubbing my own eyes. In the middle of the high chamber a large bear, one of the species then much favored by traveling entertainers, hung head down from the ceiling, suspended in an elaborate network of chains and ropes. I could hear the animal's wheezing, labored breathing. The beast hung almost motionless in its bizarre suspension, too nearly dead to struggle or make any other sound. A dozen feet below it, tubs and basins on the chamber floor caught what liquids dripped or trickled from its shaggy, slowly dying body. Around those receptacles, workers were busy with chemical and alchemical apparatus—in those days the difference was lost on most of us, including me. These toilers looked up at our entrance, then went back to whatever it was that they were doing.

With a total lack of comprehension I studied the animal's dark fur, the yellow teeth, black open lips still trickling slime. Since my transformation I had gained a certain empathy with the lower orders of creation, and I could share, through channels other than those of the common senses, the sensations of the bear. Dim pain and outrage burned like banked-up fires, but they would not burn much longer.

Letting my gaze drift away from the bear, I surveyed the room in which we stood, which was strange and wonderful enough in itself. Roman portrait murals, their colors faded and encrusted with nitre through the centuries, looked down from the walls. For what purpose this room might have been constructed I had no hope of guessing. Ancient Rome, the city of the imperial Caesars, was of course never far away. On Palatine Hill the ruins of their palaces were grazed by sheep, overgrown with olive trees, and entwined in myrtle and rosemary.

"We wait here for a moment," said my guide, meaning that I should do so, while he went ahead to report my arrival. Waiting, I called to the technicians to ask them about the bear. One of them explained to me that the object of this exercise was to collect what the bear vomited, or voided by other means, and by judicious mixing, evaporation, and distillation create from those substances the finest poison.

Whilst I was pondering this, Madonna Lucrezia entered the room, beautifully dressed as she almost always was, and greeted me with her sweet smile, though with some restraint because of the others present. "Captain Ladislao, it is very good to see you."

"And for me to see you, my lady. More than good, it is essential." I kissed her hand. "I rushed to Rome as quickly as I could when the horrible news reached me. I have not yet seen either His Holiness or your esteemed brother. I trust they are—?"

"Still alive, dear friend. But I fear scarcely more than that." Lucrezia, looking uncharacteristically worried, gestured at the bear. "We are testing certain of their bodily discharges even now, having fed them to the animal. But so far there is no evidence of poison. So it appears that I will have no urgent mission for you today."

"One of your laboratory workers gave me rather a different explanation of this experiment."

"Ah, my workers. They show great devotion and are only doing their best to keep my little secrets." Excusing herself for a moment, Lucrezia began to talk to the chemical technicians, conferring on the progress of the experiment.

Once more I looked around the chamber in which we stood. The more details of the architecture and decoration I examined, the more I found myself gaping like the veriest tourist, marveling and blinking in amazement.

No doubt, I thought, one of the imperial Caesars had once inhabited this room. Such was the impression made by the high doorways, mostly blocked, the columns, some of them broken, and the few statues, battered but essentially intact, that still maintained their poses in the high niches of the wall. Except for the lamps brought by the latest generation of breathing occupants, the vast chamber was in darkness now, and its farther reaches were choked with rubbish. Once, I thought, this room must have stood much higher, resting freely upon the surface of the earth, while Caesar—Claudius, perhaps, or Caligula?—trod its marble floor. And somehow over the centuries it had been buried, encroached upon and covered by one generation after another of Roman buildings and pavements, litter and debris. How did such things happen? I began to have a sense of what a personal life of centuries might entail, besides the postponement of eternity.

Lucrezia had concluded her conference with her workmen. I returned my attention to the lovely woman who was concerning herself with bear vomit, and as courteously as possible expressed my curiosity as to how the Borgias, and she in particular, had happened to become so expert on the subject of poisons.

She laughed and said we had more urgent things to talk about, and I never received much of an explanation. But the opinion of my later years is that probably the first tendencies toward toxicity, when she and Cesare were mere children, had been cultivated by some old nurse. I wonder sometimes whether that nurse might have been a vampire too.

Lucrezia guided me out of the main chamber of the subterranean laboratory, and into another and more private room, where we might converse more freely. Harking back to our first meeting, Lucrezia went on to assure me, without my asking, that her and her brother's discovery of an anti-vampire venom had been purely serendipitous, and I their first subject only by sheer accident. Actually the two adolescents, as they then were, had been seeking a dependable aphrodisiac—a goal which, unhappily, had continued to elude her researches.

Lately her chemical researches had been allowed to lapse. With the added responsibilities of Lucrezia's new family in Ferrara—here she looked at me sharply, to make sure I understood she took those responsibilities seriously—she had little time and no longer much inclination for such pursuits. However, if it should turn out that her brother and her father had been poisoned—

I was glad, observing sweet-faced Lucrezia at this time, that I was not the one who had attempted to do her brother harm.

Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the private room, we exchanged a kiss or two to cement our own relationship. This led to a more fervent exchange of endearments, and I fear I must now report that poor Cesare and Alexander had to wait.

While I am on the subject of the Borgia poison, the one so effective against the nonbreathing component of humanity, let me say here that I believe one of its vital components must be some compound of burnt and powdered wood. I have reason to believe that liqnum vitae might be particularly effective, but the final determination must await a new round of research.

Madonna Lucrezia and I both delighted in our subterranean meeting, but neither of us wanted to dally overlong. Within the hour I was hurrying aboveground to the Vatican, where I resumed my delayed efforts to get in to see Cesare.

The Pope on being stricken had taken to his bed in his usual apartments, and Cesare, likewise, in the rooms he normally used, which were just above those of his father. Both men were still in the chambers when I arrived.

I was told that the Pope, on the day before my arrival in Rome, had recovered enough to play cards; but then the indefatigable physicians had their way, and bled him once again. Still he lingered, but perhaps the bleeding was really the finishing stroke.

Cesare, when I was admitted to his room at last, still clung fiercely to life and swore even in a delirium of fever that he would recover. I offered what I could in the way of hearty encouragement, though silently I admitted to myself that he looked in a bad way. I wondered whether I should add my urgings to those of Constantia, advising my leader to save his life by becoming a vampire, even if that meant giving up his chances to be a king.

But I refrained—the choice was up to him, and if he wanted advice he would ask for it. Either Caesar or nothing—what a motto! What a man! Or so most of his friends and associates agreed. I could not fail to be impressed by the way he commanded fierce loyalty among them, a demonstration even more marked now in his time of helplessness.

On the night I have been describing, I arrived at Cesare's apartments, and argued and pushed my way in, just a few minutes before the time his physicians decided to stuff his delirious body, wracked with fever, into a bath of icy water in an effort to save his life.

Michelotto, who was now sitting in almost continuous attendance upon the sufferer, drew a blade and threatened these supposed healers—it 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 companions and myself. The newly orphaned Lucrezia and Cesare's devoted vampire lover listened sympathetically to my complaints regarding his behavior. Both said they understood my position, but still both remained angry with me for resigning from his service now in his hour of need. They, of course, remained unquestioningly determined to do all they could to save their beloved Cesare.

I in turn listened sympathetically to the pleas of the two women and swore quite truthfully that I had no plans to become the enemy of Valentino, who from my first hour in his service, down to my last, had treated me well. I agreed never to play an active role against the Duke—unless, of course, he first should try to strike at me.

This last proviso unreasonably alarmed Borgia's tender sister, who, after all, had much to be alarmed about. Yielding at last to Lucrezia's tearful pleas, I took an oath that even in the event of Cesare's someday attacking me, I should never kill him, nor inflict injury upon him beyond the absolute requirements of self-defense. She wanted me to swear my devotion to his welfare in even stronger terms, but in the case of a man who had impugned my honor, I could not. No, not even for her.

Shortly after my departure from this meeting, as I was informed later, the women hastened to meet with Cesare himself, mainly to urge him yet again to consider becoming a vampire. But whatever pleas or arguments were pressed in favor of such a move on the Duke's part, they were urged in vain. Cesare, quite lucid now though still kittenishly feeble, swore that this illness, whatever its cause, was not going to kill him. Moreover he was still going to be the ruler of Italy, as his father had intended. Time was to prove the first claim quite correct, the second false.

As for myself, I returned to the palace on that same night. Belatedly it had occurred to me that I might remove some at least of the Pope's treasure to a safe place, and later see that it was handed over to some good bishop, far from Rome, or somehow to the poor. Alas, the brigands had been there in Alexander's rooms before me. Not only the treasure in the vault, but all else of value, down to the candlesticks and bed curtains, had been taken. Scavenging jackals had come through on the trail of the great predators.

The Pope's body, too, had already been removed, and this made me curious. Drifting silently through one hall and chamber after another, I sought to find him. Looking back, I think that it was also in my mind to see whether he, adopting the advice now being given to his son, had turned vampire at the last moment.

To me, Cesare's condition had suggested nothing more sinister than severe malaria. But when at last I beheld the body of the dead Pope, who had been stricken at the same time, I was suddenly not so sure.

A wax taper, stuck in a plain wooden holder, burned at the head of the ordinary table, and another at the foot, but otherwise this holy relic had been left completely ignored and unattended. In some neighboring room, guards were making a racket, quarreling about some minor piece of loot—from what they were shouting, I gathered that there were more valuable wax candles there.

Unobserved—not that anyone would have cared—I assumed the solidity of man-form and came closer to the rude catafalque. Perhaps the best thing most people could have found to say about the late Pope in his present condition was that he certainly was not a vampire.

I counted myself fortunate in not being required to breathe, and my stay beside the bier was brief. Alexander's body was blackening and rotting quickly, and swelling also, so that the clothing that had been put upon him when he died was stretched to bursting at the throat, as if his collar had been an instrument of strangulation. In the morning, as I was told much later by an eyewitness, the men who came to bury him could not force his distended carcass into the prepared coffin. They were unanimously drunk, for which I cannot blame them, and they chanted obscene songs as with a rope they dragged the villain's remains from his bier, through marble hallways and courtyards, to his hastily dug grave.