PROLOGUE – AD 1525
The plans for a new dating system were still only plans, as the time was not yet considered ripe to announce them to the world. So the year was still called anno Domini 1525. And the Pontifical Emperor was going to war.
Any time now, he would emerge onto the balcony above the monumental entrance to what was still called Saint Peter’s Basilica, although now it was a seat more of government than of the Church. (Not that there was any real distinction anymore, now that the latter was simply an instrumentality of the former.) There he would stand before the ranks of red-and-yellow-clad troops that filled the center of the vast square along with a variety of the High Engineer’s war machines. The citizenry that crowded the square’s periphery and spilled over into the colonnades surrounding it stared at those machines as they always did, and some made surreptitious signs against evil—very surreptitious, lest they join the prisoners whose wails could so often be heard from the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo, or even join the rotting corpses that hung from gallows lining the bridge over the Tiber to that ancient fortress.
John Blackfield—most Italians called him Giovanni Negrocampo, but even after decades in Italy he still stubbornly thought of himself by the name he had been born with in Lincolnshire forty-five years ago—stood in the forefront of the armed formations with a group of other senior officials, up to and including the Chief Secretary. With nothing else to do at the moment, he let his eyes wander over the façade of the basilica. It had only recently been completed, and familiarity had not yet had time to rob it of its power to inspire awe.
The Pontifical Emperor, disdaining the puerile repair-and-renovation efforts of Pope Nicholas V in the middle of the last century, had obliterated the crumbling old basilica begun by Constantine the Great, along with adjacent structures like the apostolic palace and Sixtus IV’s architecturally undistinguished chapel (named “Sistine” after him), and erected a structure worthy of himself. The overall plan was that of the High Engineer, working to the Pontifical Emperor’s specifications, although he had drawn on much of Italy’s talent for various elements of it. Even the Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti had overcome his long-standing detestation of the High Engineer when offered such an opportunity. There had been a certain amount of pouting among those assembled geniuses, for they had wanted to create the apotheosis of the new architecture, pushing the limits of modernity’s possibilities. But the Pontifical Emperor had been adamant; he had wanted something reminiscent of the ancient Rome’s empire in its stern, austere monumentality, but exceeding it in those qualities. So various daring proposals for domes seemingly afloat in the firmament had vanished into the realm of might-have-been. Blackfield stood in the midst of the High Engineer’s conception of what the Forum of Trajan had once looked like, only on a vastly larger scale, and gazed at a façade of colonnades upon colonnades. In a sense it was a hollow shell, for behind it most of the basilica was still unfinished, and would remain so for years. But the Pontifical Emperor had insisted that the façade be completed first, so it could begin without delay to overawe.
Blackfield turned and, out of sheer habit, surveyed the ranks of troops—the Pontifical Guard, which formed the core of the army and whose gonfaloniere or commander he was. Their uniforms were of the colors that had originally marked the livery of the Pontifical Emperor’s family. The proportion of pikemen to sword-and-buckler men among them was much as the Chief Secretary had recommended in his book on the art of war four years previously… but not quite, for they also included companies of men armed with a weapon the Chief Secretary had then disdained.
“I never thought much of those things,” said a familiar voice.
Reading my mind, as usual, thought Blackfield, turning and inclining his head to the man who had approached with his customary silence—a slender medium-tall man in his well-preserved middle fifties whose receding iron-grey hair was unfashionably short-cropped. His lean clean-shaven face was made memorable by two things: disconcertingly penetrating black eyes, and a ghost of a smile that seemed sly and knowing yet strangely sympathetic—a smile, Blackfield thought, whose subtlety would have done credit to one of the celebrated portraits the High Engineer had produced while wearing his painter’s hat. It was the same smile he had worn twenty-three years earlier, when Blackfield had known him as simple Niccolò Machiavelli, head of the Second Chancery which had conducted the foreign affairs of what had then been the Republic of Florence.
Blackfield smiled at his old friend. “See, Niccolò. I always told you that you were paying more attention to the old Romans than they deserved. Just because they didn’t have arquebuses—”
“It wasn’t just that, John,” Machiavelli protested. (He always got Blackfield’s name right.) “I was trying to emphasize that the most important element in war is the… I suppose you’d call it the human factor.”
“Oh, I know. But still, you were being too old-fashioned, thinking in terms of arquebuses as they were in your youth. Nowadays…”
“Well,” Machiavelli reminded him, “I could hardly be expected to foresee all the changes our old friend the High Engineer would bring about, could I? Nobody else did.”
Blackfield only grunted. He’d long since learned better than to debate with Machiavelli.
The High Engineer’s wheel lock was expensive—too expensive, Blackfield had once thought, to ever be more than a luxury of elite pistol-wielding cavalrymen who had never been able to effectively use matchlocks on horseback. But the Pontifical Emperor had spared no expense, and his arquebusiers were now armed with a weapon that, unlike the old matchlocks, could actually be relied upon to fire at the squeeze of a trigger.
“It wasn’t just the High Engineer,” Blackfield said. “The Pontifical Emperor also adopted—and improved—the volley-fire tactics invented by Vitellozzo Vitelli.” After murdering him, he didn’t add. Not that he really needed to keep quiet about it; nobody lamented Vitellozzo, who besides being a talented tactician had also been a turd. So had all the other condottieri disposed of at Sinigaglia in the coup that had really begun the Pontifical Emperor’s rise to supreme power.
“Yes,” Machiavelli nodded. “So now, instead of firing as individuals with weapons not noted for accuracy, our soldiers blast away everything in front of them by firing in unison by ranks, one rank succeeding another to keep up a continuous fire. Although… have you heard of the High Engineer’s latest idea?”
“No. What?”
“He’s developed a way of cutting spiral grooves the length of the inside of an arquebus’s barrel.”
Blackfield blinked. “Why?”
“It seems it puts a spin on the ball, which causes it to fly straight, resulting in unprecedented accuracy at great ranges. Expensive, of course, and it makes the arquebus slow to load. But the Pontifical Emperor has ordered him to produce some, to allow specialists to pick off enemy officers from what is thought to be out of range.”
“Hmm…” Blackfield wasn’t sure he liked that idea.
But if there was one thing he had learned in the last, unbelievable twenty-three years, it was that his likes and dislikes had absolutely no effect on the degree to which the High Engineer’s genius, combined with Machiavelli’s chilling new approach to statecraft, both of them at the service of the Pontifical Emperor’s dynamic—if not demonic—will to power, could change the world.
Never mind. One must change with it. And it was a course to which he had irrevocably committed himself long ago.
“Speaking of the High Engineer…” murmured Machiavelli. He turned and inclined his head, as did Blackfield and all the other assembled dignitaries.
These were educated men. They weren’t ignorant peasants or town scruff. They didn’t believe tales of pacts with the devil in exchange for forbidden knowledge. Of course not. Still, the group of high officials parted like the Red Sea, edging nervously away from the tall figure that approached, walking with more of a spring in his step than seemed right for a man who had attained the truly exceptional age of seventy-three.
It occurred to Blackfield that nowadays the High Engineer certainly looked like a wizard. Known in his youth as a dandy, he had come to prefer dark, austere robes like the one he wore today. He had also been renowned as extraordinarily handsome, and now his features had settled into an image of arcane wisdom beyond ordinary human ken. And his long, wavy silvery-white hair merged with an even longer beard of the same color and texture to frame those features. And yet, in another way—the way he moved, and his seeming immunity from the ailments of old age—he somehow seemed far younger than he should be.
It was an incongruity that contributed to the impression he gave of being somehow uncanny—fey, in the word of Blackfield’s pagan British ancestors.
But at least, Blackfield thought, taking his customary refuge in practicality, it made it easier to connect him with the younger Leonardo da Vinci he had met twenty-three years before, even then employed as military engineer by the man who would become the Pontifical Emperor.
“Maestro,” said Machiavelli gracefully, and Blackfield mumbled it in unison. The other officials looked with a mixture of uneasiness and envy at the familiarity these two shared with the High Engineer.
“Niccolò,” said Leonardo with a smile. “Ah, and Giovanni… excuse me, John. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes, Maestro. We’ve both been away on the Pontifical Emperor’s business—not that our business is in any way to be compared to yours.”
Leonardo made a gesture of modest denial, but they all knew what he had been up to. (Or, rather, one of the things he had been up to. No one interest could ever exclusively occupy that transcendent intellect for any length of time, which was why he’d always had trouble finishing things.) Two decades earlier, he had almost been engaged by the Turkish Sultan Bejazit II to build a bridge across the Golden Horn from Constantinople to Pera. It had come to nothing. But to cement his cordial relations with the new sultan Suleiman (already known as “the Magnificent”), The Pontifical Emperor had lent him the High Engineer’s services. Now the bridge crossed the eight-hundred-foot span on arches through which a ship could sail, precisely calculated according to the High Engineer’s ideas of harmony and interlocking balance. It was one of the wonders of the world. This, in addition to a solemn though secret assurance of consent to Suleiman’s ambitions in Hungary, had led the sultan to agree to refrain from any further advances against the Pontifical Emperor’s ally Venice.
Blackfield chuckled to himself. Suleiman was in for a surprise, as everyone had been who had ever trusted the Pontifical Emperor’s word. When the sultan actually invaded Hungary the tacit agreement would be instantly forgotten, and the claim to that kingdom acquired by the Pontifical Emperor when he had absorbed the old title of Holy Roman Emperor would be a useful pretext for the next—and grandest—stage in the great plan of which he himself was one of the few to be privy.
All at once, files of red-and-yellow-clad trumpeters suddenly appeared on the upper terraces of the basilica’s façade. Raising their instruments in unison, they commenced the fanfare that was the work of the great French composer Josquin des Prez, who like so much of Europe’s talent had been drawn irresistibly in by the lodestone of newly imperial Rome. It had been one of his last works before his death four years earlier, and now it always preceded the Pontifical Emperor’s appearance. All three men hastened to their proper places, and Blackfield ran a gimlet eye over the lines of his men, just before the Pontifical Emperor emerged onto the balcony.
He was in his fiftieth year, but—astonishingly and a bit disturbingly—he looked very little older than he had in his twenties, when he had been called the handsomest man in Italy. That had been before the French disease introduced by Charles VIII’s invading army in 1494 had disfigured his face with blotches and caused him to habitually wear a mask. But whatever mysterious physick had saved his life in 1503 had, just as miraculously, cleansed him of that affliction, and also granted him unnatural longevity. His long dark-brown hair and neatly trimmed reddish-brown beard were barely touched with grey. His face (like his figure) was somewhat heavier than it had once been, but he still had the classically regular features that had caused artists to start using him in his younger days as a model for Christ. Nowadays no one dared mention the irony of that. Nor did anyone dare comment on the odds against him and his angelically beautiful sister (and rumored lover) issuing—illegitimately, of course—from their rather porcine father, Pope Alexander VI.
Noted as a flamboyant dresser in his youth, he had long since taken to wearing a costume of somber black which stood out with brutal vividness amid his peacock-like courtiers.
And beside him but a few steps behind came another figure—tall, gray-robed, and with a hood concealing features which Blackfield had never clearly glimpsed.
It was the Councilor, only just returned from one of his periodic lengthy absences.
The cheers that had greeted the Pontifical Emperor seemed to decrease in volume a bit at the sight of that mysterious figure—reflecting a fear far beyond the general nervous suspicion that the High Engineer must have sold his soul to the devil. But then they resumed, with redoubled vociferousness. After all, there were those gallows on the Tiber Bridge to consider…
The Pontifical Emperor began to speak of the expedition he was about to lead across the Alps, to crush the heresy of the mad monk Martin Luther and exterminate the rebellious German nobles who had rallied to it. But Blackfield wasn’t listening. The sight of the Councilor had called his memory back to times before that mysterious personage had first appeared. Back to the time when all had seemed to inexplicably change. Back to June 1502, when he had commanded the escort for Francesco Soderini, Bishop of Volterra, and Niccolò Machiavelli, sent by the Signoria of Florence to negotiate with the man who was later to become the Pontifical Emperor but who then was known as Duke Valentinois (his French title),Il Valentino (as the Italians called him), or Duke of the Romagna.
He had also been known by his name: Cesare Borgia.
Yes, thought Blackfield. It had been soon after that when he had first met the Councilor. The Councilor… and one other. One just as mysterious. One he had never been able to forget.
It all came back to him, from across the gulf of twenty-three years…