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He wonders when it started happening, this strange, intermittent anxiety, as he looks out over the garden nudging towards spring’s heady fulfilment; the flowers are already dipping their heads, drunk on all this unaccustomed sun. He isn’t sure, he only knows that he hears someone say ‘Florence,’ and his mind slips slightly to one side, like a man on a steep path whose foot tilts awkwardly over the edge, taking him unwillingly into the grass. It is a little disquieting, but not overly so. A flicker. It is the upset that Savonarola’s continued cursed existence inflicts, he is certain, on top of the upset of his sister forced into dodging suitors like a quick hind in a wood. Cesare stares glumly at the garden. If the friar had his way, even these flowers might be burned to grey nothing for the audacious sin of colour. He breathes deeply as a faint breeze lifts the ends of his hair, His Holiness advises patience for every ailment like a doctor with a bowl of leeches, but Cesare chafes against time. It flows past him and into history, full of the sunken gold of glory whilst his father keeps him on the red leash of the Cardinalate.
It is in the world’s most futile, circular pondering about the preservation of Lucrezia’s happiness that Cesare gets closer to the source of his own mental tremor. He is summoned to his father’s side, and the Pope regards him with those shrewd, dark eyes that can switch from affection to contempt like the shock of a sudden fall. He reveals Ascanio Sforza’s futile expedition to Florence with a scarlet hat, the friar’s cool rejection, the way he might yet be caught on a hook baited with the worm of heresy. Cesare watches his father’s thin mouth twist as he sketches the future in faint but decisive lines.
‘Of course, Cardinal Sforza says all of Florence despises Piero de Medici, and who can blame them? When you think of the vision of il Magnifico…God knows blood’s turned to water in those veins.’ He tilts his head slightly as he appraises Cesare, who knows he is thinking about sons. ‘Unfortunately, a great deal of Florence’s genius seems to reside now in its ambassador.’
There it is, that flicker, that irritant. It is true that Cesare knows the comings and goings of various emissaries and is more frustrated than not that they are so rarely…that one. Not that there is anything so rare and special about that one, not to look at, not until he opens his mouth.
Simply dressed, keenly aware and - as his father grudgingly admits - with a great deal of Florence’s counsel in his keeping, Cesare finds it easier to converse with Machiavelli than with almost anyone else. With Lucrezia, his soul is halved like a fruit. Micheletto can anticipate his more nefarious needs as though he were made of glass, and he and the Pope will sit in fire-lit rooms like this one and warmly hatch out serpents of intrigue from little black eggs. With Machiavelli, however, he feels his words are oddly naked and free. The Florentine is unmistakably an ally, but the world might yet be full of allies once they realise the scope of his ambition and this is different. He sips his wine meditatively, as His Holiness cradles the new and palpitating hearts of most unholy schemes.
When he brings his father the Medici gold, his hopes are dashed out against the rock of St Peter’s like the brains of a rabbit. There is to be no hard-earned post at the head of the Papal army and no bannered victories for him. At that moment, if his father had bothered to ask, he would not have revealed Niccolò’s hand in their sudden good fortune. He would have curled his fist over the name like a child asked to reveal the robin’s egg in his palm, who refuses to relinquish it, who lies that it is a stone.
***
He is drinking wine and listening to the chilling echo of Savonarola’s warped choir of little angels when Machiavelli brings news of Ludovico Sforza’s imminent assault on the Papal army. His eyes flick to Micheletto, who offers the smallest wry dip of his head, to the ambassador, to the suffocating secret room in his own black soul.
‘My brother’s a military man…I’m sure he’ll find a strategy to defend his army, and himself.’
Cesare doesn’t take his eyes from Machiavelli, who returns his gaze without censure, with comprehension. God’s children, as Michelletto sourly observes, are knocking at the door. Already, a ghastly pyre of beauty is building in the Piazza della Signoria like a woman about to be burned for practising magic, whose only crime was to stir too deep a passion in the hearts of men. The spectacle that night is ghastly, ghastly...he is glad to be dragged away from it and back to Rome by news of Juan's catastrophe at Forli. His brother's lies are combustible too. Cesare is tired. One fire at a time.
***
Florence, when he reaches it again after leaving Benito Sforza staggering towards the walls of his mother's fortress, is grey and soured by ash. It gathers in the creases of the eye and the sill of every window. Cesare thinks of a gorgeous widow (or nun, his memory provides, with a dark look), who has covered her beauty with a dull veil. Machiavelli tells him, as Micheletto reclines with his usual cat-like languor on a scorched chair, that the people fetched more and more from their houses, threw every handsome thing in their keeping into the roar of the fire. The ambassador looks drained and defeated, as though the grime of the spent inferno has settled under his skin.
They walk through the eerily quiet streets, the kind of silence you get as a populace reels from a Rubicon. Cesare is almost surprised to see Machiavelli’s house in one piece, such was the loathing Savonarola seemed to reserve for him.
‘And you, Signor Machiavelli, have you brought your works to burn? Be sure we will visit your house!’
Cesare shudders at the memory; the self-satisfied smirk of triumph on the Dominican’s face as the man beside him smouldered with unconcealed hatred, distress, and - yes - even fear. They would come to the ambassador’s house, who would stop them? Cesare had wrung assurances from Niccolò that he would be safe enough, that he would flee and inform him at the first sign of serious harm. He realises, as they walk through these ghost roads as a pack, two things: firstly, Machiavelli had lied, and would have remained in Florence even if Savonarola had his fanatics drag him into the street by his hair, and secondly, how much time he’s spent on some glassy edge waiting for news in that precise hand. Now he understands his anxiety in the garden. Now he begins to understand.
Cesare’s spine, rattled from the road’s long hours, begins to soften its ache with a deep cup of wine and a walk into the hills outside the city. He is curious as to why the ambassador considers it so important he views this local spectacle, he has been warned they do not go to a happy event.
‘People believe she has the power to cast them into Hell,’ Machiavelli smiles mirthlessly as so-called witch screams, flames greedily consuming her feet, as the people punch the reeking air. When they return, the smell of scorched flesh is still haunting his nostrils as he follows Machiavelli to his study, a room that should not feel cramped, but does, with the sheer volume of volumes. Irritably, the ambassador elbows the shutters open wider to wring out the last of the day.
I must go.
- To open more shutters?
To let in more light. Yes.
‘As you can see,’ he says, ‘the spell cast here is both powerful and deep.’
Cesare looks for somewhere uncluttered by books and good candles to sit down, and quickly gives up. In any case, Machiavelli seems to have briefly forgotten his existence as he rummages in a drawer, and the Cardinal leans against the wall and watches his intent expression with fond amusement.
‘Apologies, Eminence, for all the bombast and divine revelation, there is still technically a government in this New Jerusalem that requires some running.’
Cesare raises his eyebrows briefly, he is still thinking about fire. ‘A thankless task.’
‘They all are, currently.’ Machiavelli hesitates for an instant, face blank with exhaustion, then he drops his head into his hands. The words come from behind them, as though he can’t bring himself to speak without some shield, even the defenceless wall of his own skin.
‘I have scraped out the marrow of my bones for Florence. I have wrung sleep out of my body like water and cramped my hands beyond recognition over a thousand letters. My life is in her service and I know I’m like any thankless servant, she will beat my best behaviour out of me and tug on my very last sinew like a dinner bell, and I will go my grave with the shape of her lovely boot on my back. Sometimes I think she'll always be a gilded child with her hand out, she takes and she takes and God knows how long she can go on taking.’
Cesare, with the dreaminess of fatigue, suddenly sees himself almost from above. A bolt of fire, the storming light at the head of an army, a torch to be followed into destiny; but this man is like an hour, subtle like a garden in darkness. He’s trying to put together a stubborn clock and people like de Medici and Savonarola keep breaking down his door and fumbling the order of the cogs. He feels sympathy strike him deeply, along with the knowledge that to feed his own dreams he will need a hundred cramped hands and fast horses, sleepless nights, and scraped marrow. A hundred Machiavellis, in truth. But of this man, there is just the one.
When Niccolò removes his hands from his face, it’s to take a long, measured breath, and raise an eyebrow slightly at the intensity of Cesare’s gaze.
‘You seem pensive, your Eminence,’ his lips twist a little in a sad attempt at a smile. ‘Please, don’t let my more maudlin thoughts trouble you.’
‘They don’t,’ Cesare spreads his hands in gesture of transparency. ‘I simply wish you were more…greatly appreciated.’ He trails off, remembering the smooth map in his hands like a hollow bone.
The light you bring to us is much appreciated.
‘I must say that goes a long way to soothing the stings of the Signoria.’
Cesare laughs then, flashing his strong teeth. ‘I can never tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.’
‘No, indeed,’ and this time the minutest quirk of that mouth is real, the cardinal is sure of it, as sure as he is of the fact that he shouldn’t be watching his mouth. ‘No one can.’
***
‘You should be more careful of him, your Eminence,’ Micheletto says quietly. Somehow, with horrifying precision, reading Cesare's mind.
‘How so?’ Cesare, exultant after Savonarola’s reluctant capitulation to a trial by fire, merely clears his expression into one of innocent enquiry, tipping their host’s wine against the back of his throat. Machiavelli is still haunting his desk despite the night’s uneasy step towards victory, and Cesare finds his thoughts straying away from this balcony, from the lights of Florence before him, to those hands and their skilful work of ceaselessly stitching words.
His henchman shrugs. ’I thought he would weep when they burned the Botticelli, but he would not have wept for that burning woman.’
‘He didn’t exactly seem happy about it, besides, did we weep?’
Micheletto inclines his head. ‘No, but we are cut from blacker cloth.’
Cesare gives him a deceptively bland smile. ‘I thought you just said we shouldn’t underestimate the weave or colour of our host.’
Micheletto grimaces, and merely drinks a little and emanates a vague disapproval which vanishes diplomatically as Machiavelli joins them, ink on his cuffs.
‘My apologies, I was…’
‘Engaged in a thankless task?’ The cardinal finishes for him, filling a cup with wine. Niccolò takes it gratefully, raising it briefly to them both.
‘Naturally, but it’s a privilege to have you, both of you, back in Florence…may your mission finally meet with success.’
Cesare avoids Micheletto’s eye, which has a dull gleam to it like a blunt knife. It crosses his mind that his sweet assassin might be experiencing something as base and improbable as jealousy. The thought sends a thrill through his stomach and his mouth runs with saliva, as though he’d bitten into an apple - at the sudden, intrusive thought of his mouth on an apple, everything goes liquid.
A stray dog cracks the moment with a volley of barks, and Machiavelli slips easily into the persona of gracious and amusing host so well that Cesare could almost forget his earlier plunge into despair. The ambassador’s household is sparse, and when he wanders off to fetch them all more wine, the cardinal deliberately leans out over the balcony and scans the darkness of the street below, determined to ignore whatever churning tension his most loyal shadow is wrestling with.
Mercifully, Micheletto leaves the field with grace.
‘I should secure the perimeters of the house,’ he says, leaving his cup on the balcony’s white stone arm next to his master as he vanishes like a drop of ink into a river at night. When Machiavelli returns, Cesare feels a knocking at his throat, quickly draining half his cup in one hard swallow. He attempts something like small talk and Machiavelli - perhaps simply out of sheer desperation - finally remarks on the colder air and draws them both inside.
‘You seem troubled,’ he says, bluntly. Cesare feels the room fuzz around him a little. The wine is Neapolitan, and robust, like a red hammer. ‘You must know he really would need a miracle to evade you this time, and despite his insistence that God hands them out to him like bread rolls, he will not make it from a fire unscathed.’
‘I…’ Cesare glances into the room inside himself full of things he’d like to say, and kicks the door shut. Instead, he finds himself ranting about Juan, the fury and terror that strains against the inside of his skin at such injustice as opportunity races ahead of him on winged sandals. How Juan’s failure at Forli is both a sour lump in his throat and a source of dark delight. How the envy burns almost, (ah, fire, fire again), until he feels like a werewolf ready to tear off his human mask and lay waste indiscriminately with jaws and claws.
‘Your brother, from what I understand, would make a diabolical Cardinal.’
Cesare snorts with laughter. ‘He makes a diabolical everything, and besides, that describes at least half of them in their own base, grasping, short-sighted way.’
‘Indeed, it was Orsini who tried to poison your father after his election, was it not?’
‘Mmm,’ Cesare leans his head against the tall back of his chair, remembering the horrors of that night all too well. His breath catches at the thought of how close Lucrezia had come to the end of an assassin’s blade. He shoves the thought away as Machiavelli idly swirls his wine.
‘But it is also easy to see your father’s reasoning.’
‘You think armour doesn’t suit me?’ He is forcibly, shamefully, reminded of Caterina’s eager hands on him, her appreciation for the hard muscles of shoulder and stomach…’You should wear armour, this body of yours deserves nothing less…’ Machiavelli shakes his head.
‘I only mean that on the board the insecure player needs a piece black with his own fingerprints, strong and without limitations, able to slide off at angles. You know that, you posses one yourself, he is lurking like a lethal spider somewhere in my house right now.’
‘You think I am covered in my father’s fingerprints?’ Cesare smiles briefly at the thought of Micheletto’s reaction to being compared to a spider by this man. He’d probably secretly enjoy it.
Niccolò shrugs. ‘What would you do to the man who would depose him?’
‘I…’ Cesare fumbles the fast, composed answer, which is that even if the Pope falls, and his own fortune with him, he would find a way to save Lucrezia, Vannozza…But that is not what Machiavelli is asking. The truth is that when he thinks of his father - his callousness, his unquenchable energy for intrigue, his infuriating mixture of foresight and naïveté, his fickle affections - it hurts to realise that for his sake he would pour molten lead down the throat of every man alive.
***
They have retreated, with the last of the wine, to the ambassador’s study. The man’s office is connected by a slim door to his bedroom, and this is taking up more space in Cesare’s head than is allowed. He has decided to bring the conversation back to fire, even as his stomach tilts at the memory of the grotesque slump of the witch's body. The ghost of ash can still be smelled here, as he leans against the frame of the open window.
‘Strange element, isn’t it? We cleanse and cook with fire, as well as destroy with it…you purge a plague house with fire.’
‘No stranger than water; a flood can kill as easily as a cup can slake thirst or a bath can cleanse the body.’
Cesare purses his lips. ’Is it the intrinsic nature of all things, then, to have these Janus faces as we do? Even the basest of elements have their deceits?’
‘Ask a farmer,’ Machiavelli says heavily. ‘Famine is always a rain away, but I wonder why we so often lend our human faults to inhuman things…the rain is not disloyal, merely indifferent, and that is much more frightening.’
‘Yes, the old gods were gods of the soil and the sea.’
‘Of course,’ Machiavelli half shrugs, looking out over the dark rooftops. ‘We propitiate most fervently those great ones whose chief power is abandonment.’
Cesare’s eyes squint in the candlelight. It’s late and he’s tired and Machiavelli is orbiting a hard planet somewhere beyond tired, but he would have to be dragged from this room by his ankles. He is bound and in thrall to thoughts that have ambushed him over the last few months more stealthily than any hired knives of the Sforza. When the ambassador takes a considering breath as though about to speak again, Cesare is seized by the wine in his blood, his co-conspirator, and pushed. He leans over and puts a hand over Machiavelli’s mouth.
The ambassador doesn’t move, only meets the Cesare’s eyes over his fingers. Cesare hesitates, he fancies he can hear their heartbeats like a pair of spooked horses, and yet he does not feel uncertain - or misunderstood, or judged, the man before him has not balked at anything he’s said or done - why break the habit of what feels like a lifetime. There is so much he wishes he knew how to say, though, now:
You smell of cypress and parchment and dedication. I could hear you talk for hours, for days, and that is why - for my sanity - I must stop you talking now. You told Savonarola’s urchin-warriors that your face didn’t lend itself to vanity but let me tell you, I would give a great deal to have you beneath me tonight as I would have an empire beneath me forever. I am impulsive and brilliant and I get what I want. You are cunning and urbane and strategic and do you? Ever? Get what you want? Stop shrugging away my compliments with that pained humility. I will wipe your modesty away - hard - with the back of my hand, with my praise, with my body.
He says nothing, he takes his hand from Niccolò’s lips and drags them to his own. They both taste of wine, of mutual admiration, of still-beautiful things saved from the fire. Cesare laughs, his fist curling in the other man’s hair. He rejoices like any conqueror when the stout walls fall, when he takes down a boar with spears or a rival with the sword, there is jubilation like this.
***
It’s not as awkward as he feared. Machiavelli’s customary smooth restraint gives way to something fluid and generous. His hands are everywhere Cesare needs them, his breath shudders with an exquisite rhythm against the cardinal’s neck. His body trembles though, the fine way a deer’s body does, and Cesare is so eager to turn that tremor into abandon that he rushes it, tears at clothing, is uncharacteristically clumsy. Machiavelli is always open to new information, and so he pulls away, regarding him with a mild interest belied by the flush on his cheeks and the demonic glint of his eyes in candlelight.
‘Would you prefer this to be over soon, or do you have somewhere to be?’ He says, slowly but without rancour. ‘There isn’t a wrong answer, I’m just curious.’
Cesare exhales hard, suddenly almost ashamed. ‘Neither, I’m simply out of practice.’
‘Hard to believe,’ Machiavelli drawls.
‘With men.’
‘Ah,’ the ambassador smiles briefly, and brushes a thumb against Cesare’s lips. He feels it in the soles of his feet.
The light you bring to us is much appreciated.
Just a beginning
Perhaps to spare him any more explanations, Machiavelli falls to his knees, kisses the oysterish indentations of his hips, takes him into his mouth. Cesare pushes himself as deeply as he can into the man’s throat, slowly, to give him some - if not quite enough - time to adjust. The half-moan, half-protest is enough for him to make promises to God he cannot keep.
Cesare Borgia, for all his arrogance, is still thin ice. Not yet solidified, eager to hold weight but moved still by undercurrents. Machiavelli is all undercurrents and so, when Cesare feels his knees giving out, he hardly minds at all when the other man rises and draws him swiftly towards that siren door. His lips at the nape of Niccolò’s neck and his nails creating livid crescents in his hips make lighting the candles more difficult, but once they are lit he can see the ambassador’s bedroom is as unadorned as he is. There is a moment of brief mutual calculation as they stagger to the bed in a savage delirium of kisses. Cesare is, naturally, the stronger of the two, but for someone hellbent on the world’s submission, that isn’t really what he wants here. He isn’t sure yet what he wants. He does know, as Machiavelli buries his teeth in his shoulder and Cesare hisses, then laughs in delight, that they will work it out. He feels quartered into these parts: affection, longing, danger, affinity. He feels like rare meat, stuck with an iron rod to see if he runs clear or bloody. Savonarola was right, he is a sodomite and a heretic. He is ablaze right now, at the stake of Machiavelli’s spine.
***
The friar has lost his incendiary gamble.
Caged like some horrible bird, he gurgles insults at them as he is hauled off to Rome. Cesare grins as he and Micheletto watch him being drawn away from Florence like a thorn from the tender sole of a foot. They make ready to follow the odd parade to the city, wondering what they’ll find on the road, how the public might react to this blistered skin who was both idol and enemy.
There has not been a great deal of time for goodbyes, just enough to turn a meeting officially concluding his mission into a hasty, hungry straining of limbs against the ambassador’s desk. Machiavelli had been impeccably courteous and reserved in the morning, after Cesare had stolen away through the black halls to his own bed and he had realised, meeting his eyes over his interminable paperwork that this man, who is so sure of everything had not been sure. The cardinal is invigorated by Savonarola’s fall and has shed any self-consciousness, so he had laughed, and gripped the high collar of Machiavelli’s robe, and shown him the depth of his farewell with a sort of masterclass in spit-slicked hands and bitten lips, because everyone is wearing too many layers and the household is awake. He will, he swears to himself, judge a little less on appearances in future. Who knew someone so meticulously neat and unassuming could become so totally unravelled? With his hair mashed like a halo around his face and Cesare’s eager fingers in his mouth?
They ride away from Florence’s noble, long-suffering walls. There is faint, quill-like scratching on the underside of his ribs, it must be Machiavelli, preparing another of his sly maps. Cesare feels his own hands cramp in sympathy. No matter, soon the ambassador himself will make for Rome and Cesare can kiss those palms into openness again. He kicks his horse into a canter, ignoring Micheletto’s sour look as he breaks into some old Spanish song about flowers, so old now it is a mere childhood refrain lingering like mould in his brainstem.
Still humming, long after he’s forgotten the words, he takes his mount from the path onto something greener and sweeter, somewhere the rain hasn’t yet visited its violent neglect. He asks a dissident blessing from those old, old powers of drought and plenty. He takes himself willingly into the grass.