chapter one
Rome, 1527
My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal
city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment.
Italy was a living chessboard for the ambitions of half of Europe in those days. The threat of war was as regular as the harvest, alliances made in winter were broken by spring, and there were
places where women bore another child by a different invading father every other year. In the great and glorious city of Rome, we had grown soft living under God’s protection, but such was the
instability of the times that even the holiest of fathers made unholy alliances, and a pope with Medici blood in his veins was always more prone to politics than to prayer.
In the last few days before the horror struck, Rome still couldn’t bring herself to believe that her destruction was nigh. Rumors crept like bad smells through the streets. The stonemasons
shoring up the city walls told of a mighty army of Spaniards, their savagery honed on the barbarians of the New World, swelled with cohorts of German Lutherans fueled on the juices of the nuns
they had raped on their journey south. Yet when the Roman defense led by the nobleman Renzo de Ceri marched through the town touting for volunteers for the barricades, these same bloodthirsty
giants became half-dead men marching on their knees, their assholes close to the ground to dispel all the rotting food and bad wine they had guzzled on the way. Inthis version, the enemy was so
pathetic that,\ even were the soldiers to find the strength to lift their guns, they had no artillery to help them, and with enough stalwart Romans on the battlements, we could drown them in
our piss and mockery as they tried to scale their way upward. The joys of war always talk better than they play; still, the prospect of a battle won by urine and bravura was enticing enough to
attract a few adventurers with nothing to lose, including our stable boy, who left the next afternoon.
Two days later, the army arrived at the gates and my lady sent me to get him back.
On the evening streets, our louche, loud city had closed up like a clam. Those with enough money had already bought their own private armies, leaving the rest to make do with locked doors and
badly boarded windows. While my gait is small and bandied, I have always had a homing pigeon’s sense of direction, and for all its twists and turns, Rome had long been mapped inside my head. My
lady entertained a client once, a merchant captain who mistook my deformity for a sign of God’s special grace and who promised me a fortune if I could find him a way to the Indies across the
open sea. But I was born with a recurring nightmare of a great bird picking me up in its claws and dropping me into an empty ocean, and for that, and other reasons, I have always been afraid of
water.
As the walls came into sight, I could see neither lookouts nor sentries. Until now we had never had need of such things, our rambling fortifications being more for the delight of antiquarians
than for generals. I clambered up by way of one of the side towers, my thighs thrumming from the deep tread of the steps, and stood for a moment catching my breath. Along the stone corridor of
the battlement, two figures were slouched down against the wall. Above me, above them, I could make out a low wave of moaning, like the murmur of a congregation at litany in church. In that
moment my need to know became greater than my terror of finding out, and I hauled myself up over uneven and broken stones as best I could until I had a glimpse above the top.
Below me, as far as the eye could see, a great plain of darkness stretched out, spiked by hundreds of flickering candles. The moaning rolled like a slow wind through the night, the sound of an
army joined in prayer or talking to itself in its sleep. Until then I think even I had colluded in the myth of our invincibility. Now I knew how the Trojans must have felt as they looked down
from their walls and saw the Greeks camped before them, the promise of revenge glinting off their polished shields in the moonlight. Fear spiked my gut as I scrambled back down onto the
battlement, and in a fury I went to kick the sleeping sentries awake. Close to, their hoods became cowls, and I made out two young monks, barely old enough to tie their own tassels, their faces
pasty and drawn. I drew myself to my full height and squared up to the first, pushing my face into his. He opened his eyes and yelled, thinking that the enemy had sent a fatheaded, smiling
devil out of Hell for him early. His panic roused his companion. I put my fingers to my lips and grinned again. This time they both squealed. I’ve had my fair share of pleasure from scaring
clerics, but at that moment I wished that they had more courage to resist me. A hungry Lutheran would have had them split on his bayonet before they might say Dominus vobiscum. They crossed
themselves frantically and, when I questioned them, waved me on toward the gate at San Spirito, where, they said, the defense was stronger. The only strategy I have perfected in life is one to
keep my belly full, but even I knew that San Spirito was where the city was at its most vulnerable, with Cardinal Armellini’s vineyards reaching to the battlements and a farmhouse built up and
into the very stones of the wall itself.
Our army, such as it was when I found it, was huddled in clumps around the building. A couple of makeshift sentries tried to stop me, but I told them I was there to join the fight, and they
laughed so hard they let me through, one of them aiding me along with a kick that missed my rear by a mile. In the camp, half the men were stupid with terror, the other half stupid with drink.
I never did find the stable boy, but what I saw instead convinced me that a single breach here and Rome would open up as easily as a wife’s legs to her handsome neighbor.
Back home, I found my mistress awake in her bedroom, and I told her all I had seen. She listened carefully, as she always did. We talked for a while, and then, as the night folded around us, we
fell silent, our minds slipping away from our present life, filled with the warmth of wealth and security, toward the horrors of a future that we could barely imagine.
By the time the attack came, at first light, we were already at work. I had roused the servants before dawn, and my lady had instructed them to lay the great table in the gold room, giving
orders to the cook to slaughter the fattest of the pigs and start preparing a banquet the likes of which were usually reserved for cardinals or bankers. While there were mutterings of dissent,
such was her authority—or possibly their desperation—that any plan seemed comforting at the moment, even one that appeared to make no sense.
