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She is eighteen, he is twenty-three, and their brother is dead.
“Sister. Do you know how old Alexander the Great was when he died?” He asks Lucrezia, an absentminded finger tracing her collar bone. She bites her lip, hard at work straightening yet another plate of armor across his shoulder. Rarely does her brother speak as he has lately, rambling and excited. He’s brightened since Juan’s demise. “Thirty-two.”
“Ah.” Lucrezia does not think to the past. She sees ahead of her Cesare’s battles and glory, a marriage to a boy who will worship the ground she walks upon. “Look at this. I do wonder that your shoulders are too broad.” She passes a hand over the place where his shirt peaks out from in between, feels the heat of his flesh.
Cesare takes her chin between his thumb and forefinger, and here she finds the man who’s always waited. He is alive, her brother, and his jaws are open and ready to take.
“I doubt I’ll last so long,” he murmurs, his lips pressed against her ear. She angles against him, her body flush against his—the armor is there, always there between them like everything else—until each word sounds, and with them comes the widening of her eyes. “Great men rarely do.”
Cesare has never questioned whether or not he will be a great man; nor has Lucrezia; nor has the world and the way Juan’s blood runs through the Tiber. But Lucrezia presses her finger against his lower lip and imagines the teeth there as she says, “I would rather have you alive than great.”
Neither one can say if it’s a lie.
XXX
It’s been—eight? more than that—years since then and Cesare is laughing.
He does not feel the first lance hit, tearing through that gap in his armor as it takes his off his mount. He does feel the slam of the ground, the taste of the dirt and his own blood. But those are things he loves and he’s on his feet and ready to rip through them.
There they are, one after another. Small and nameless. What are they? The blood seeping from his wound is Borgia blood, and it has sent too many—not enough—to their deaths. He’ll add this lot to the rest of them, wants to hear them scream. His lance gouges someone’s throat; and he’s always felt that when the blade bites he can taste their flesh.
Only a man as acquainted with death as Cesare Borgia can feel without looking that his wound is mortal.
XXX
Lucrezia’s husband—the third of men who have slinked away and died when she wanted them to—is away, and so she may dance with her ladies and clap her hands the way he wishes she wouldn’t. You’ll never bring me a living child, the way you carry on.
Gonzaga and his ugly face and battle-scarred body. But it does her good, sleeping with a soldier. She belongs in the arms of someone who can bite her neck, savage her, remind her of him.
And Gonzaga can give him aid. She’ll whisper in his ear, spider-leg her fingers across his shoulders. Have you thought of my brother? It would do him good to feel the dearest love of a man after his own heart…
She hears them laugh, their sour words. Valentino is a lone wolf. But he is not alone. As long as her heart beats with his every breath, he will never be alone. At night she feels the ghosts of her brother’s lips against her forehead, her neck, her mouth. He’ll return soon enough; to kneel at her feet, to present her with his victories.
Lucrezia has not heard them shuffling the duty from man to man, whispering of what she’ll say. Will she scratch at them, claw out their eyes in her grief? These men do not know how to deal with a Borgia.
But she is not her father with his creaking voice, her brother with his swords and bloodied teeth. She turns to the friar with a smile, graciously receiving him not as a Borgia but the Duchess of Ferrara. Her rosied cheeks, her glittering eyes—she is a bed of roses with all her thorns. Just waiting to catch their bodies.
“My gracious lady. It is his grace, the Duke of Valentinois.”
Lucrezia falls to shadow.
XXX
Little by little his life slips, and so he fights on.
He twists his knife in another man’s gut, grins at the sound of death. They will die before him. Not some but at all—and as they fall upon him, he thinks of that. He thinks of all those who’ve laid their lives down for him, against him. Where are they now?
Great men die young, he told her. Great men never die.
Another blow to his stomach, a slash at his chest. Blood begins to gurgle in the back of Il Valentino’s throat. It is his own blood—
And he remembers a night with Lucrezia. Her blistered lip, cracked dry—I am imperfect, she’d said, looking in her mirror—and breaking between his teeth. She’d gasped in the way that Lucrezia gasps, girlish and sly and sharp beneath that slick invitation. And he’d tasted her blood; swallowed what must be his.
Cesare’s blood bubbles over his tongue. It tastes exactly the same.
XXX
“He fell in Viana. May God save his soul.” The good friar knows otherwise; he thinks of the one time he saw Valentino, a man possessed at his dying sister’s side. “Our sincerest condolences, my lady.”
No one will mean them. Like jackals they slaver over Cesare’s corpse, pick away the armor, the rings, whatever’s left of Valentino the man. As his killers surely have done.
“The more I try to please God”—God. The God he rose so far away from. The nights she spent praying to God, praying for him.—“the more he tries me.”
Lucrezia’s fingers reach for her cross and fall short.
The men kneel low, present something long and wrapped in unfurling cloth. She recognizes each and every faded bloodstain, the letters etched across the hilt. And all watch as Lucrezia Borgia strokes the remains of her brother, her breath catching as it would on those nights. The nights when he found her in black.
She might as well be kissing his bones.
XXX
Lying on the ground, he hears their cries.
Valentino! Il Valentino!
These men do not know his face, can’t match it to the man who a few years before would have had them quaking at his call. Cesare does not want so badly to live. (For great men die.) He only wants these men to die screaming, to cry out the way one would when he’d had them on the rack.
A day. A night. As many as he’d wanted.
“Do you pray for their souls?” Lucrezia had once asked him. She’d heard of that one man, the man that slandered them. The man that had different body parts scattered throughout the city. She’d slithered into his lap, her hand snaking up his thigh. And her breath was hot against his lips as she asked, “Do you ask God for their salvation?”
She’d gasped as his fingers climbed beneath her gown, hitched a sigh in tune with his answer. “What do I care for their souls?”
Her mouth had come down wet. “Good.”
Lucrezia, who shed tears when she last saw him on her sickbed. “I meant it. I’d rather have you alive than great.” Her fingers had slipped through his. “But it’s too late for that.”
Those men—the men he’d tortured—had cried out for God. No matter how heinous their crimes, they’d given their last breaths to Jesus.
His goes to Lucrezia.
XXX
The key turns; she sinks to the ground. There is Cesare’s sword in her lap. SPQR, it reads. For the protection of Rome, the Senate, the populace.
Do you even mean that? She’d once questioned, tracing the letters along his wrist.
Would you?
I prefer the other. Aut Caesar aut nihil. Believe me, brother; it’s more your taste.
It’s a long time before she realizes that her throat feels as if it’s been cut, that she’s been calling his name for hours. And nobody worries, no one looks for the duchess. For she does have that sword and she is Valentino’s sister. Best not to test a Borgia.
So she goes on. For perhaps her throat shall bleed; she might taste him there.
Cesare, Cesare, Cesare. Above and beyond Valentino, he was hers.
She was thirteen; he was eighteen. Their father was newly elected, and they walked their mother’s courtyard.
“Do you want to be the pope, Cesare?” Her arm laced through his; his body, even then, so aware of hers. “Like Papa?”
He’d scoffed then, leaning down to brush his nose against hers. “The pope is a slave to God. I’m a slave to no one.” The feel of his fingertip against her cheek, soft enough to close her eyes. “Except you, of course.”
It had been a joke then.
We are exactly the same. And she looks in her mirror, her tear-soaked face. Finds him bruised and beautiful and laughing. You weren’t yet thirty-two.
Again she says his name.