Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

How stupid had he been…to ride for so long, wounded; and so far—only breaking the ride for the horse’s sake and then impatiently flogging the poor beast on before he was properly rested. Post-horses would have been a more sensible choice, but Campione was his last link with Mario.

Now—where was he? He remembered a crumbling, dingy suburb and then, rising out of it, a once-majestic yellow stone arch, an erstwhile gateway that pierced a formerly magnificent city’s walls.

Ezio’s impulse had been to rejoin Machiavelli—to right the wrong he had committed by not making sure that Rodrigo Borgia, the Spaniard, was dead.

But by God, he was tired!

He lay back on the pallet. He could smell the dry straw, its odor carrying with it a hint of cow dung.

Where was he?

An image of Caterina came suddenly and strongly into his mind. He must free her! They had to be together at last!

But perhaps he should also free himselffrom her—though part of his heart still told him that this was not what he really wanted. How could he trust her? How could a simple man ever understand the subtle labyrinths of a woman’s mind? And, alas, the torture of love didn’t get any less acute with age.

Was she using him?

Ezio had always maintained an inner room within his heart, where he was himself alone, where he had hissanctum sanctorum; it was kept locked, even to his most intimate friends, to his mother (who knew of it and respected it), to his sister, and, formerly, to his late brothers and father.

Had Caterina broken in? He hadn’t been able to prevent the killing of his father and brothers, and by Christ and the Cross he had done his best to protect Maria and Claudia.

Caterina could look after herself—she was a book that kept its covers closed—and yet—and yet—how he longed to read it!

“I love you!”—his heart cried out to Caterina, despite himself. The woman of his dreams at last—at last, this late in life. But his duty, he told himself, came first—and Caterina—Caterina!—never truly showed her cards. Her brown, enigmatic eyes, her smile, the way she could twist him around her little finger. Her long, expert fingers. The closeness. The closeness. But also the keen silence of her hair, which always smelled of vanilla and roses…

How could he ever trust her, even when he laid his head on her breast after they had made passionate love and wanted—wanted so much—to feel secure?

No! The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood! His mission and his destiny.

I am dead, Ezio said to himself. I am already dead inside. But I will finish what I have to do.

The dream dissolved and his eyelids flickered open. They bestowed a view of an ample but elderly cleavage descending toward him, the chemise the woman was wearing parting like the Red Sea.

Ezio sat up rapidly in the straw he’d been lying on. His wound was properly dressed now, and the pain was so dull as to be almost negligible. As his eyes focused, they took in a small room with walls of rough-hewn stone. Calico curtains were drawn across the small windows, and in a corner an iron stove burned, the embers from its open door giving the place its only light. Then the door was shut, but whoever it was with him in the room lit the stump of a candle.

A middle-aged woman, who looked like a peasant, knelt beside him, came within the frame of his vision. Her face was kindly as she tended to his wound, rearranging the poultice and bandage.

It was sore! Ezio winced in pain.

“Calmatevi,” said the woman. “The pain will end soon.”

“Where’s my horse? Where’s Campione?”

“Safe. Resting. God knows he deserves it. He was bleeding from the mouth. A good horse like that. What were you doing to him?”

The woman put down the bowl of water she was holding and stood.

“Where am I?”

“In Rome, my dear.Messer Machiavelli found you fainting in your saddle, your horse frothing, and brought you both here. And don’t worry, he’s paid me and my husband well to look after you and your horse. And a few more coins for our discretion. But you know Messer Machiavelli—cross him at your peril. Anyway, we’ve done this kind of job for your organization before.”

“Did he leave me any message?”

“Oh, yes. You’re to meet him as soon as you’re fit at the Mausoleum of Augustus. Know where that is?”

“One of the ruins, isn’t it?”

“Dead right. Not that it’s much more of a ruin than most of this awful city is nowadays. To think it was once the center of the world! Look at it now—smaller than Florence, half the size of Venice. But we do have one boast.” She cackled.

“And that is?”

“Only fifty thousand poor souls live in this shanty-town of a city that once was proud to call itself Rome; andseven thousand of them are prostitutes! That’s got to be a record!” She cackled some more. “No wonder everyone’s riddled with the New Disease. Don’t sleep with anyone here,” she added, “if you don’t want to fall apart with the pox. Even cardinals have got it—and they say the Pope himself, and his son, are sufferers.”

Ezio remembered Rome as if in a dream. A bizarre place now, whose ancient, rotting walls had been designed to encompass a population of one million. Now most of the area was given over to peasant farming.

He remembered, too, the ruined wasteland of what had once been the Great Forum in ancient times, where sheep and goats grazed now. People stole the ancient carved marble and porphyry stones, which lay higgledy- piggledy in the grass, to build pigsties with or to grind down for lime. And out of the desolation of slums and crooked, filthy streets, the great new buildings of Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Alexander VI rose obscenely, like wedding cakes on a table where there was nothing else to eat but stale bread.

The aggrandizement of the Church was confirmed, back at last from the papal exile at Avignon; and above all the Pope—the leading figure in the international world, outclassing not only kings, but the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian himself—had his seat in Rome again.

And hadn’t it been Pope Alexander VI who’d divided, in his great judgment, the southern continent of the New Americas, through a vertical line, between the colonizing countries of Portugal and Spain by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the same year the New Disease broke out—for the first time in Italy—so badly in Naples? They called it the French disease—morbus gallicus. But everyone knew it’d come back from the New World with Columbus’s bunch of Genoese sailors. It was an unpleasant affliction. People’s faces and bodies bubbled morphews and boils, and in the last stages their faces were often pressed out of all recognizable shape.

And in Rome, the poor made do on barley and bacon—when they could get bacon. And the dirty streets harbored typhus, cholera, and the Black Death. As for the citizens—there were the ostentatiously rich, to be sure; but as for the rest, they looked like cowherds and lived as badly.

What a contrast to the gilded opulence of the Vatican! Rome, that great city, had become a rubbish heap of history. Along the filthy alleys that passed for streets, in which feral dogs and wolves now roamed, Ezio remembered churches, which today were falling apart, rotting refuse, deserted palaces that reminded him of the probable wreck (as his prophetic soul told him) of his own family seat in Florence.

“I must get up. I must findMesser Machiavelli!” said Ezio urgently, flinging the visions from his mind.

“All in good time,” replied his nurse. “He left you a new suit of clothes. Put them on when you are ready.”

Ezio stood, and as he did so his head swam; but he shook himself to clear it. Then he donned the suit Machiavelli had left him—new linen, and a hood of soft wool with a peak like an eagle’s beak. Strong, soft gloves and boots made of Spanish leather. He dressed himself, fighting the pain the effort caused him. When he was done, the woman guided him to a balcony. Ezio realized then that he had not been in some shrunken hovel, but in the