A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (ebook pc reader TXT) 📕

to remember his former ally and friend, the ferocious mercenary Signor Ladislao, once sent here by the King of Hungary. Had Lorenzo been anything like his usual energetic self, with the unexcelled Medici intelligence network at his command, he could very likely have provided Ladislao’s supposed son or nephew with vital information. But such, alas, was not to be.

      I arrived at the villa about the time the Paduan doctors, at great expense, were feeding Lorenzo powdered pearls in wine, a concoction no more harmful, if considerably more expensive, than most of the other remedies of the time.

      Not that I, a stranger to the attendants, was allowed in to see the sick man at once. While waiting in a shaded courtyard garden for my chance to speak to my old friend, I found a white-robed, black-cloaked friar tarrying somewhat impatiently, with the same expectation. We introduced ourselves, and thus I had the chance to converse briefly with the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, who had dropped by in hopes of being able to hear the potentate’s confession and give him absolution.

      Savonarola was a small man, with a thick-lipped, worried-looking face; during our single brief meeting, I never saw him smile. His nose was huge enough to provoke taunts—had it been set upon another’s face. I think everyone who ever met this man understood at first glance that he was to be taken seriously.

      Around us in the flower garden, bees prospered among early blooms, and stone fountains splashed and played. What did we talk about? It is hard to remember a sermon after so many centuries. Savonarola was of course concerned for my immortal soul—he took that attitude with everyone he met. Also he was absolutely fearless regarding his own safety in this world. I do recall that when the subject of the upper hierarchy of the Church in Rome came up, the impetuous monk openly expressed his great contempt for all of them, the Pope included, condemning in the strongest terms the thousand corruptions that most of them practiced. Fortunately for the Dominican, Pope Innocent was soon to die, and Alexander, his successor, had at least one virtue—he was as thick-skinned as the bull that bestrode his family coat of arms, as far as personal insults or accusations were concerned.

      My turn came first to see Lorenzo—most likely because I had already hinted to the steward of a bribe. As soon as this potential offer had been discreetly realized, I was admitted for a brief visit to the dying man.

      Lorenzo the Magnificent, pale and diminished as dying men are wont to be, showed little interest in my presence as he received me in his sunlit, ornate bedroom. Though still comparatively young, he was much changed from the robust youth of more than twenty years ago that I remembered. No one at the villa except Lorenzo himself was at all familiar to me, and apparently none of them remembered Signor Ladislao. Even Lorenzo’s memory, as he lay dying, was certainly imperfect, and I was not sure whether he truly grasped my identity or not. We each had something to say about art, and toward the last he looked at me as if he did remember me.

      And perhaps he did. For on turning over the name of Ladislao, he did finally recall that the man had come from far-off Wallachia. And, this leader of the Medici, dying as he was, beginning to perceive everything from the viewpoint of eternity, was not greatly impressed by the fact that I had not aged in more than twenty years.

      Lorenzo, speaking automatically as it were, the mercantile instincts of the Medici still in control, asked me a question or two on politics, having to do with who was ruling in my homeland now, and I gave him such answers as I could. Political ambition had become the least of my concerns. I suppose I must have realized that I, in my present mode of mainly dusk-to-dawn existence, punctuated by trancelike sleeps sometimes extending over weeks or months, was in no condition to rule anything. However, my ignorance of current events in Wallachia was of little moment, for Lorenzo’s gaze remained for the most part fixed upon eternity and he paid scant attention to my answers.

      Even from the viewpoint of eternity, I was accepted as a man, and this was pleasing. Ever since the beginning of my trans-Alpine journey, my confidence in my ability to appear among breathing humans and be accepted as one of themselves had grown almost daily. So far I had confined my appearances in society mainly to the hours of darkness, though for some time now—as at Careggi—I had been able to demonstrate to my own satisfaction that daylight, at least of the dim and indirect variety, was not necessarily unbearable to my kind.

      Only now and then, as I had moved across the Alps and into Italy, did I encounter anyone who appeared to suspect that there was something really extraordinary about me. No one in the suburban villa, with the possible exception of the Dominican, fit into this category; and the worthy Savonarola had much else on his mind.

* * *

      I was still at Careggi when Lorenzo the Magnificent died, more peacefully than any great man has a right to expect, on the ninth of April, 1492.

      As soon as the head of the House of Medici was dead, Savonarola hurried back to Florence to begin his campaign to take over and reform the city, and I moved on to Rome in search of the traitor Basarab, to whose whereabouts I thought I had received some clue.

      But let Basarab go, for the moment. Ultimately he proves unimportant. It was in Rome, a city I had visited only briefly during my breathing days, that I had my first contact with the Borgias.

      Lucrezia, whose illegitimate father Rodrigo Borgia was soon to become Pope Alexander VI, was in that year only twelve years old and living in a Roman household that also included one or two of