Thorn

Chapter Seventeen

Oh, I could regale you now with all the sights and sounds and smells of fifteenth-century Rome. But it would be misleading, insofar as my story is concerned. The truth is, that at the time of my first visit to Rome I was scarcely aware of my surroundings except as they affected my search for Helen. I was beginning truly to wonder whether I might be the victim of some enchantment, so obsessively had this woman's image, in paint and sketch and memory, come to dominate my thought. Of course I wanted revenge on her, and on her lover—but gradually I was coming to realize that I wanted something more as well. More than mere vengeance, however ferocious, would be needed to give me satisfaction. What exactly the other thing might be, I did not know. But I hoped I would know, in the first moment when I looked on her again.

From Roman church to Roman church I plodded like a pilgrim, searching for the artist Perugino. I had not imagined there would be quite so many Roman churches. At my waist was the dagger that had once been left on a pillow, aimed at my head. Folded into my purse was a small bundle of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, likenesses of the sister of the King of Hungary. I was having trouble finding any places to dispose of these pictures where I might reasonably expect them to be helpful.

On the third day of my Roman search I found a small church where, one of its priests told me, an artisan named Perugino had been painting some murals a few months past. But the painter was certainly gone from the neighborhood now, gone completely away from Rome the priest thought, and his mistress with him if he had had one. The priest had never noticed any woman at all in Perugino's company, let alone one speaking Hungarian and bearing a resemblance to my sketches.

I thanked him, and took my search for Helen to one of the nearby taverns. There some local men said they thought they might have seen her—said it with an exchange of winks. They were sophisticated city-dwelling jokers, metropolitan wits who jested at the expense of the lovelorn barbarian on his fool's quest. Somehow it was not plain to them that I was seeking vengeance and not love. I left one dead, two wounded, and had to take my searching elsewhere. My best talents are not in diplomacy, nor in the craft of the detective either.

After I had spent another day in fruitless prowling about Rome I visited the precincts of the Vatican. There I located my former traveling companions, the Hungarian delegation come to ask for a Crusade; while waiting to see His Holiness they had taken lodgings near the old St. Peter's. In Florence, where I had dropped out, they had been joined by my old acquaintance Morsino. Now Morsino greeted me in friendly style; he looked grave, though, when I told him of my recent brawl, and he counseled me to make no further requests or demands for official help in any Italian city. King Matthias, Morsino thought, was no longer fully committed to the search. As long as Helen continued to remain out of sight, committing no more public scandals, that seemed to be enough for the king; and Morsino thought perhaps it ought to be enough for me as well. The idea seemed to be to let sleeping Helens lie where and with whom they would.

My own views, I promptly explained, were different. The king had sent me here with orders to search for Helen, and search for her I would, for my own honor as well as that of royalty. If he, Morsino, thought that he could organize the hunt in Rome more discreetly and effectively than I, well, he was welcome to take a hand. And this invitation the worried envoy at last reluctantly accepted.

I hung around St. Peter's environs for another two weeks, undergoing fits of restlessness that alternated with periods of almost immobile depression. Then Morsino's efforts at last bore fruit. An agent hired by him brought me a witness, a poor woman who swore she had once lodged near an artist and a Hungarian woman who had been living together in the neighborhood of the church where Perugino had done his painting. Shortly before their disappearance some months past my witness had heard the couple talking about moving on to Venice.

* * *

I am not going to write much in these pages about the next twenty months of my life. It was a period in which I did things that I am not proud of, and which there is now very little purpose in remembering. My leg was fully healed by this time, and I could ride and fight effectively. Good fighting men, and, even more, capable military leaders, were at this time very much in demand in Italy because of the ceaseless squabbling of the city-states and petty principalities, not yet forged into a nation. I had not been many days in Venice before I signed a soldier's contract with the eminent mercenary Bartolomeo Colleoni. My funds were running low; and I expected to retain enough time to myself, and freedom of movement, to allow me to continue the search for Helen.

Colleoni had then been for ten years the General in Chief of all the Venetian armed forces. But, like most of the other successful condottieri of the time, he had as his ultimate goal the carving out of his own personal domain. Some of his colleagues, like the founder of the Sforza dynasty in Milan, succeeded admirably in this enterprise. Many others failed miserably; but, like Sforza and Colleoni, most had had but little to lose when they began.

My new employer was famed for his vigor, both marital and martial, at an advanced age; for his ferocity (which was somewhat remarkable even for the time); his collection of rare books (when all books were rare); and for his pioneering efforts in the development of what would now be called field artillery. Whereas if he is remembered at all today outside of a few history books, I suppose it is only because of Verrocchio's titanic equestrian statue of him, still standing in a square in Venice . . . but I digress.

When Colleoni heard from me that I had lived in Florence recently, he took it for granted that I had served there as condottiere also. What else would he expect a foreign soldier to be doing? He promptly began to pump me for all the information I could give about the state of Florentine military preparedness: How many in the militia? How well were the fortified walls maintained? I told him what I could, which was not much, and he evidently took my reticence as evidence of praiseworthy loyalty to a former employer. I did not trouble to disabuse him of this idea. So it was that in the winter of 1466-67 I found myself serving as a company commander in Colleoni's nominally Venetian forces. I had under me about a hundred men—or, as the reckoning was usually kept then, thirty lances. In very early 1467 my troops and I were engaged in the investigation of the assassination of a Colleoni agent, the mayor of a village whose name I must admit I have forgotten but which could hardly mean anything to you now in any case.

The investigation was soon proceeding according to the standards of the time, which is to say that my men had taken a score of hostages, and we were on the point of beginning to hang some of them unless someone who knew something about the assassination should come forward. In fairness to myself I ought perhaps to be allowed to interject that the mayor had evidently been a good man, for his time; a good politician for any time, perhaps; and that I still think the assassins would fairly have deserved hanging if we had ever caught them.

Snow was in the village air, and misery was rife as usual among the populace. I found myself seated one morning at a writing table that might have belonged to some scholar, to judge by all the papers on it, in a house that was mine so long as I and my armed men chose to occupy it. I had sat down at the table to write out a report for Colleoni on the affair, and I suppose that those of my men who from time to time looked in at door or window assumed that the black frown upon my brow was due to the difficulty of wielding a pen in such a wise as to leave an intelligible message upon paper. Alas, no. I was even then something of a writer—I could at least set down my letters large and clear. What was troubling me were things more fundamental. I was grappling with matters of Conscience and the Law.

Contemplating the last year's work of my own hands, I found that it was not good. Oh, my activities had been legal, of course, or could be argued such, according to the contracts, the agreements, that I had with Colleoni, and he in turn with Venice. And there were the customs, traditions, treaties, oaths, and whatnot that established Venetian dominance over these poor sheeplike villagers I was oppressing.

All legal. Everything I did. And yet in the end it came down to my setting the edge of a blade, or the loop of a rope, against the throat of some poor wretch. Then whatever I said was law; and whatever he said meant nothing, if it were not agreement.

As if I—I, Drakulya!—were no better than a highwayman.

At home in Wallachia I had been Prince, and there too my word had been law. But there I myself had been the anointed ruler, which justified much—did it not?

The front door of my borrowed house creaked open, and there came in white light from the snowy day outside, and then a blurred human shadow thrown across my papers. Glad of any interruption, I looked up.

To behold Helen.