he was waited upon by the Counts of Sevrino, and Moergeli, the most famous Swiss herbalist.
When Cossa felt strong enough again, we picked up the advance of his army, which was following the Neapolitans. We travelled to Radicofani, then crossed by way of Abbatia and the town of Piano, where in a green meadow the people made us shelters of brushwood and received the cardinal with cheering and rejoicing. He gave them his blessing from horseback and rose on to Aquapendente, then to Bolsena, which had been a populous town destroyed by Hawkwood. Only its rich soil, the convenient lake and its position on the road to Rome had saved it from complete destruction. As we rode towards Orvieto, I told Cossa about what he had babbled in his sickness. Cossa said, `It must be that we live in many places at once. What you tell, me I said seems so real to me that I must have been there at Castrocaro as I said it to you here in a delirium.
The next day we came to the rocky mountain about six stades high, rising in the middle of a valley. The plateau on top was about three miles around. Cliffs, none lower than twenty ells, were its walls. Ladislas had hit the town five days before, leaving half-ruined towers and crumbling rubble, but the church of the Blessed Virgin, the inferior to no church in Italy, stood intact in the middle of the city; its interior walls and floor were of vari- coloured marble and its wide, high facades were filled with statues whose faces stood out from the white marble as if alive. Cossa led his men to the episcopal palace, where he went to bed in the middle of the afternoon and slept until midnight.
I sat at Cossa's bedside until he awoke. `They have a, pretty good cook here,' I told him. `He's no Bocca but he's better than anything we've had since we left Bologna – whenever that could have been.'
`I'm not hungry,' Cossa said. `What else?'
`Four women are staying here. They're not town women. The kitchen people say they just came in here yesterday and took over. They're been throwing a lot of money around.'
‘Women? Cossa said. Alone?’
'They're alone inside this palace, if that's what you mean. They have a troop of soldiers in the north courtyard, maybe fifty men.'
`Well, I woke up too late to do anything about four women, but at least the idea makes me hungry. Tell the cook I'm coming down.'
In the anteroom before the dining hall, Cossa found the Duchess of Milan seated on a sofa facing the door as he entered. Two ladies-in-waiting were standing behind her; another was beside her on the sofa.
'Good evening, my lord cardinal,' the duchess said, and at that moment the ladies withdrew from the room. Cossa stood still with astonishment. All at once, again, he was bewitched by the demanding sexuality of the woman. The inexplicable feeling which he had spoken to me about two days earlier – about the human mind being capable of inhabiting places in separate worlds simultaneously with the present world – returned to him. Surely each time he saw this woman he had left reality behind? He was hallucinating under the power of the loose lasciviousness of her mouth and the feverish glitter in her eyes, as she seemed to offer her body and withdraw it at the same instant. They had had only two encounters before that night, the latest five years earlier in the tower above Milan, but she was still compellingly sensual, even if time and the Visconti blood had left hawks marks, on her face.
`The world has stopped,' he said.
‘Of the two times we were together, only once was it an accident,' she said. `Now again, as the last time, I have to talk to you.'
`Speak quickly so that we may return to our destiny,' he said.
`When it was confirmed to me by Filargi; the Archbishop of Milan, that the Council of Pisa was on the verge of electing you as their pope, I was so distraught that I swooned away for two days. I could not believe that you would allow such an imprisonment to happen to you.'
`You could not believe that I could be pope?' he asked.
`I could believe in an instant that all the world was capable of conspiring to, persuade you to be pope but I could find no sane reason why you would agree to give your life over to saying endless masses, to mumbling perpetual benedictions morning and night, to wrapping yourself insides the stink of sanctity.'
`I do not see it that way,' he lied.
`You are a man, and you are a great soldier. There is nothing more for you to be.'
He tried to make light of it, but the inferences and their consequences which she rained upon him began to shake him. He had never thought of the papacy except as a business, but what she said it was – what it had been even for Boniface – even for Boniface. They would ordain him and he would spend the rest of his life within a cloud of holy incense disputing with old men, about the number of angels on a pinhead. They would demand that he confess to them every day so that he could be purified to accept communion every day. He could not contemplate that. He had too little to confess, there were only things like never telling his father about what rested in Carlo Pendini's grave – and too much time left to waste it on ecclesiastical nonsense.
`You loved me,' she said. `Your body said you loved me. We have a greater destiny together than the papacy.'
`My bones creak,' he said. `I am lame with gout.'
`We can rule Italy.'
I have come upon you too quickly tonight. I can think only of one thing, one close, passionate thing – not shadows in the distance:' '
`My lord cardinal,' she said with urgency. `If Pisa dissolves this schism – if France, agrees to go along with that sacred notion they will be intent only upon the reform of the Church. What you desire from a papacy will be ignored. When they elect you, they will do so believing that they control a model pope – a disciplined lawyer and soldier, who by their special conjuring will have been transformed into someone devoutly religious, concerned with stroking away the Christian disappointments of Europe. You – a man trained to dip his hands into the treasure chests of the Church, a man to whom lust is far more natural than piety – will have to turn your back upon life. You will have to move and speak only as they tell you to move and speak. Your freebooting days will be done.'
He stared at her, his desire for her building higher.
`My lord, hear me.' Her face hardened with her will. 'I offer you command of the Milanese armies. They are still loyal to me; commanders and troops. My son is being prepared to show his disloyalty and to go along, with ambitious men who are not Visconti. You are being backed into a corner. Deny the Council of Pisa their choice and you will be cast into a corner of oblivion within the Church. You need what I have. I need what you have. We will share everything. You will cast out the interlopers and you will retrain my sons to be what their father was. Ruler of the north of Italy you will be and ruler of more than that if you but choose it.'
`Leave the sacred college?' he said. `Give up my place at Bologna?'
`Cossa, I speak to you of real power. You will leave nothing. You will give up nothing. We will lay down the terms of how the Church should be run and, if you wish to be first among the cardinals, they will confer: that upon you to win our favour. You will be the temporal ruler of Italy. And that is your true meaning. Combined with the gold of Milan, and with the force that it can buy, you will tell them what it is you want, not the other way round.'
His mind began to soften. He had almost agreed, mindlessly, with the marchesa and Cosimo because his father had imprinted upon his purpose so long ago that he was being sent away to become a lawyer so that he could go to great heights in the Church. He had put the two outsides together, sides which were in no way any part of him, and he had. accepted the banker's dream of a merchants' world because the marchesa had sold it to him.
If he were ever to accept the papacy, he might as well have agreed to become an alchemist or a werewolf. But he needed time to think about the destiny which this woman was offering to him. They would become intertwined if he agreed. There could be bitter troubles in that. Besides, if he told, her right now that he would accept what she offered, that would be the end of lovemaking for this night and perhaps for many nights to come…
While she lay asleep in, the darkness, before dawn the next morning, he crept out of her room, dressed, roused me and was out, riding off at the head of his lances before she awoke.
