Revelations

EIGHTY

They decided it would be best to marry in Venice. Sofia’s uncle was vicar general of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in the San Polo district and had offered to officiate-as soon as he realized that Ezio’s late father had been the eminent banker Giovanni Auditore, he had given the marriage his wholehearted blessing. Ezio’s connection with Pietro Bembo didn’t do any harm, either, and though Lucrezia Borgia’s former lover couldn’t attend, being away in Urbino, the guests did include Doge Leonardo Loredan and the up-and-coming young painter Tizian Vecelli, who, smitten by Sofia’s beauty, and jealous of Durer’s picture of her, offered, for a friendly price, to do a double portrait of them as a wedding tribute.

The Assassin Brotherhood had paid Sofia a generous price for her bookshop, and under it, in the cistern Ezio had discovered, the five keys of Masyaf were walled up and sealed. Azize, though sad to see them go, was also overjoyed at her new profession.

They stayed in Venice, allowing Sofia to acquaint herself with her scarcely known homeland and to make friends with her surviving relatives. But Ezio began to grow restless. There had been impatient letters from Claudia in Rome. Pope Julius II, long the Assassins’ protector, was approaching his sixty-ninth birthday and ailing. The succession was still in doubt, and the Brotherhood needed Ezio there to take charge of things in the interim period that would follow Julius’s death.

But Ezio, though worried, still put off making any arrangements for their departure.

“I no longer wish to be part of these things,” he told Sofia in answer to her inquiry. “I need to have time to think for myself, at last.”

“And to think of yourself, perhaps.”

“Perhaps that, too.”

“But still, you have a duty.”

“I know.”

There were other things on his mind. The leader of the North European branch of the Brotherhood, Desiderius Erasmus, had written to Claudia from Queens’ College at Cambridge, where the wandering scholar was for the present living and teaching, that there was a newly appointed Doctor in Bible at Wittenberg, a young man called Luther, whose religious thinking might need watching, as it seemed to be leading to something very revolutionary indeed-something that might yet again threaten the fragile stability of Europe.

He told Sofia of his concern.

“What is Erasmus doing?”

“He watches. He waits.”

“Will you recruit new men to the Order if there is a shift away from the Roman Church in the north?”

Ezio spread his hands. “I will be advised by Desiderius.” He shook his head. “Everywhere, always, there is fresh dissent and division.”

“Isn’t that a feature of life?”

He smiled. “Perhaps. And perhaps it is not my fight anymore.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.” She paused. “One day, you will tell me what really happened in that vault under Masyaf.”

“One day.”

“Why not tell me now?”

He looked at her. “I will tell you this. I have come to realize that the progress of Mankind toward the goals of peace and unity will always be a journey-there will never be an arrival. It’s just like the journey through life of any man or woman. The end is always the interruption of that journey. There is no conclusion. There is always unfinished business.” Ezio was holding a book in his hands as he spoke-Petrarch’s Canzoniere. “It’s like this,” he continued. “Death doesn’t wait for you to finish a book.”

“Then read what you can, while you can.”

With a new determination, Ezio made arrangements for the journey back to Rome.

By that time, Sofia was pregnant.