Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) Page 6

  “Sorry,” Felix said quickly, “my fault. Still getting used to the roll of the ship, I guess.”

  Simon Koertig smiled at him and showed his open palms.

  “No apologies needed, friend. Every old salt was new once, so they say. You’re that banker, no? Felix…?”

  “Rossini,” he said, and they shook hands.

  “I’m Simon. The captain speaks highly of you. Off on business?”

  “Hopefully good business. Have you sailed with Captain Iona for long?”

  Simon shook his head. “No, no, this is my first run. It’s a terrible thing. One of his crewmen was in a barroom brawl that went bad. Took a knife right between his ribs, and nobody even saw the bastard that did it. My old captain just retired, and I was looking for a new crew to sign on with. Funny how one man’s loss can be another man’s gain.”

  “You made a smart choice,” Felix said. “Iona’s tough, but he’s a good man and a fair captain.”

  “It’s a good stretch of sea, too. Did you see the dolphins?”

  Felix tilted his head. “Dolphins?”

  “Mm-hmm. Bottlenoses, entire schools of them. They’re all around, out here. Want to see?”

  Felix nodded. Simon waved him over toward the ship’s railing, in the shadowy gloom between the dangling lanterns.

  “If you lean far enough over—” Simon started to say, pointing down toward the water, but he was cut short by Iona’s booming voice.

  “Brother!” the captain called out. “Been looking everywhere for you! I picked up a bottle of Itrescan brandy in port, and it’s demanding to be shared. Far too good for the likes of my mouth alone. Bring your friend Werner, if he’s not still puking his guts up in the cargo hold.”

  Felix smiled and patted Simon’s shoulder.

  “Sounds like a command I can’t refuse,” he said with a laugh. “I’d better go. Thanks, though! Maybe tomorrow.”

  Simon watched him go. He smiled with gritted teeth at Felix’s back.

  “Right,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Chapter Nine

  Amadeo sat on a marble bench in the shade of an iron tree, watching his friend slowly die.

  Pope Benignus sat beside him, looking up at the elaborate sculpture. Sunlight filtered through the tree’s black boughs and glistened off leaves sharper than knives. Benignus wore robes of ermine shot through with gold thread, in contrast to Amadeo’s plain brown cassock. The amulets at their throats were the same, though, simple imitations of the great dark tree dangling from silver chains.

  “I never liked it,” Benignus said. The elderly man’s eyes seemed hazy, as if he couldn’t quite focus.

  “Sir?” Amadeo asked, startled out of his thoughts. They’d been sitting in silence for a good ten minutes, just taking in the sun in the garden courtyard. The sandstone walls and ornate archways of the papal manse rose up around them, fencing them in under the noonday sky.

  “The tree,” Benignus said. “It was my father’s idea. He wanted something…strong. Something to show the Gardener’s power. A tree that could never blow down, or be chopped down, or grow sick and die. A tree of iron.”

  The tree was the centerpiece of the gardens. Flowers in every color of the rainbow bloomed around it in spiraling patterns, lifting their faces to the sun. A rustling caught Amadeo’s attention. He glanced over to see a squirrel dart into the bushes.

  “He forgot,” Benignus said, “that a tree of iron can’t bloom. Amadeo, would you do something for me?”

  The pope stood slowly, and Amadeo quickly rose to help him to his feet.

  “I cannot disrespect my father’s wishes,” Benignus said. “But when I’m gone? Tear that damned thing down. Plant a real tree here. One that bears fruit.”

  Benignus turned his face from the tree and took Amadeo’s arm. They walked together along a pebbled path.

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” Amadeo said. “Not anytime soon.”

  Benignus laughed, then doubled over as his hoarse chuckle turned into a coughing fit. Amadeo handed him a handkerchief, helping him to press it against his lips. When the fit passed and the pope stood straight once more, Amadeo took the handkerchief back. Blood spattered the white silk. He folded it and tucked it away.

  “You are my confessor and aide, Amadeo, not my surgeon. My surgeon has a grimmer outlook and, I hate to say it, a bit more experience than you in these matters.”

  “I have faith,” Amadeo said.

  “And faith can move mountains,” Benignus said with a gentle smile, “but it usually doesn’t grow new lungs for an eighty-year-old man. I’ve had a good run, but you and I both know my curtain is falling. Best to prepare for it, with as much dignity as I can still muster, than to shake my tiny fist at the heavens.”

  “Is that why you wanted to walk in the garden? To talk of loss and grief?”

  “More practical than that. There have been rumblings in the College of Cardinals.”

  Amadeo nodded. “I have heard them. There is talk of mounting a succession challenge questioning your son’s…moral fitness.”

  “My beloved friend, you have a talent for putting a pretty face on disasters. I have heard everything they say about Carlo and then some. Most of it nothing but fantasies and lies.”

  Amadeo didn’t say anything for a moment. He thought to the night before and the discovery of the dead merchant’s ledger.

  No, he thought, no need to burden him with that.

  Benignus patted his hand. “Most of it. I may be losing my vision, but I am far from blind. Carlo has neither the maturity nor the piety that this post demands, but did I, when I stepped into these shoes? I was wild once, too. Your father molded me. Taught me. Cultivated me like the Gardener himself, trimming away my weeds and strengthening my roots.”

  “Where are you going with this, Bene?”

  “The groundswell in the College is the work of a few ambitious schemers. Most of the cardinals are undecided. You are respected, Amadeo. People listen to you. If you make a strong show of support for Carlo—”

  Amadeo shook his head. “I’m just a parish priest with a very special job. Nobody’s leader.”

  “Yet the people flock to hear you speak. The cardinals are, whether some of them like to admit it or not, beholden to the people. The problem is Cardinal Accorsi. He’s plotting something.”

  “What do you think he’s after?”

  “I think,” Benignus said, “he wants to be wearing my slippers five minutes after my feet go cold. Accorsi has always been an ambitious viper. The College would not choose him, though, even if he did force through a succession challenge and remove my son from the running. He cannot get the votes. So what does he gain from all this?”

  “Perhaps,” Amadeo said carefully, “he honestly believes that Carlo isn’t the right choice.”

  “What do you believe, Amadeo?”

  Papal guards in white tabards, their chests emblazoned with the silhouette of the iron tree, hauled open the garden doors and stood sharply at attention as Benignus and Amadeo walked inside. Amadeo led his friend down a long vaulted corridor lined with oil paintings, holding his arm.

  “I believe that a father’s love is unconditional,” Amadeo said. It was the kindest answer he could manage.

  “And I believe that you can do for Carlo what your father did for me. You can reach him, Amadeo. You can bring out his inner greatness, chisel away his weakness like a sculptor finding a statue inside a shapeless block of marble.”

  Amadeo smiled sadly as they walked into the audience chamber. A throne of carved ivory stood at the end of a long green rug, flanked by tubs where shrubs and wildflowers grew in beds of rich black loam. Sunlight streamed though arched windows thirty feet above their heads, casting crisscross shafts of light and shadow across the vast chamber. Courtiers, scribes, and minor cardinals flocked to one another in tiny clusters, whispering their petty intrigues. No heads turned as Amadeo helped Benignus into his throne.

  “I am as a ghost,” the pope said w
ith a wan smile. Amadeo set a small velvet pillow behind Benignus’s head.

  “You are alive and well,” Amadeo said, “and as far as your son goes, I fear you think too highly of me.”

  “You have such kind words for everyone but yourself. I think…oh, hello.”

  Amadeo turned his head. A few feet behind him and off to one side, Rimiggiu the Quiet knelt down on one bended knee.

  Rimiggiu was a short, swarthy man with a neat black beard, hailing from the southern crescent of Carcanna. He dressed in simple cotton workman’s clothes. Most thought him a mute, but Amadeo knew the man could speak. He just preferred not to. He also knew that Rimiggiu was no ordinary servant. He had a special purpose in Benignus’s household, just as Amadeo did, but from a decidedly different angle—an angle Benignus took great pains to keep Amadeo isolated from.

  Even the Gardener’s ambassador needs a spy, Amadeo thought.

  Rimiggiu handed Benignus a folded letter. He unfurled it and read it over, holding it inches from his fading eyes.

  “Winter’s Reach?” he said to Rimiggiu. “You’re sure?”

  Rimiggiu nodded, his face grave.

  “Dante Uccello,” Benignus mused. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in some time.”

  “The orator?” Amadeo asked. “Wasn’t he hanged for treason in Mirenze years ago?”

  Benignus folded the letter back up, handing it to Rimiggiu. “Good work. Stay on it.”

  Rimiggiu bowed deeply and trotted away. Benignus looked back to Amadeo and shook his head.

  “Our enemies are playing strange games, my friend.”

  “Can I help?” Amadeo said.

  “No. That kind of work is…not for the honest of heart. Best leave it to a man like Rimiggiu. From you I must ask a far greater, far more important favor.”

  Amadeo braced himself. He knew what was coming.

  “I believe in my son,” Benignus said, “and I believe in you. Just as I believe that when I pass on from this world, my enemies will try to sway you, to claim your support for their own ambitions.”

  “Bene—” Amadeo started to say, but he fell silent from a wave of Benignus’s frail hand.

  “Swear to me,” Benignus said, “that you will support and serve my son, just as you serve me.”

  “Is my simple word not sufficient?”

  “Not for this. For anything else but this. My line must not end in shame. Carlo must be pope, and you must be his guide. Swear to me.”

  Amadeo dug his fingernails into his palms. His mouth went dry, his tongue feeling limp and useless as a dead fish.

  “Is it that important to you?” he managed to ask. The light in Benignus’s tired eyes, the hope etched on his withered face, was his only answer.

  Amadeo walked to the edge of the flowerbed at Benignus’s side. A clay pot rested on the edge of the tub, filled with warm water for the plants. He held out his right hand, palm upturned, over a clump of wildflowers, and gripped the pot with his left.

  “I swear, by the Gardener’s creations, that I will serve Carlo as I serve you. I swear it by the water that gives us life.”

  He tilted the pot slowly. Water trickled down, splashing his palm, slipping between his fingers to spatter the flowers below.

  “I swear it by the soil that grows our sustenance.”

  He pressed his palm to the dirt, feeling the rich black loam squish against his fingers. An impression of his hand remained when he pulled it away and touched his fingers to his heart.

  “And I swear it by this beating heart, may it ever thrive on truth.”

  Benignus closed his eyes and smiled. He reached out, clumsily, and managed to take hold of Amadeo’s wrist.

  “You have lifted a burden from my soul, old friend,” Benignus said. Amadeo just stood there with a thin smile frozen on his face.

  Was the burden a thousand pounds and made of lead? Because I know where it went, Bene.

  “I should go,” Amadeo said, desperate for fresh air. “You have courtiers to indulge, and I have a sermon to write.”

  Benignus looked serene as he released Amadeo’s wrist. “Yes, yes, of course. You have an entire flock to look after, and I am only one congregant. A terribly needy one at that. Thank you again, Amadeo. You are a good friend to me.”

  Amadeo stepped back, bowed his head, and turned to leave as a small flock of supplicants swooped in on the ailing pope, flourishing their requests like children hoping for new toys.

  * * *

  Amadeo didn’t stop walking until he was back out in the garden courtyard feeling the sunlight against his skin. His stomach churned, and he took deep breaths, trying to calm it.

  Bene, what have I done? Of all the things to ask of me, why that?

  He went back to the tree and sat down on the edge of a bench, resting his head in his hands as he tried to calm down. The sound of trilling laughter drifted across the courtyard and drew his eye.

  Benignus had become a father late in his life. Carlo was thirty going on seventeen, and he eschewed priestly robes for a silken vest with slashed sleeves, looking like he was set for a night out on the town. He had his father’s coal-black hair—or at least, Amadeo’s memory of what his father’s hair had looked like long ago—but beyond that the two men couldn’t have been more different.

  A pair of women clung to Carlo’s arms, giggling, draped in forest-green habits. Novices from the Order of the Harvest. Amadeo knew he should get their names, speak with their matron, but he was too tired and disgusted to care. Carlo spotted him, disentangled himself from the women, and waved, grinning like a loon.

  “Amadeo! Hey, hey!” he called, dropping into the bench beside him and throwing an arm around Amadeo’s shoulder. His breath stank of cheap red wine. The women milled about, giggling and whispering to each other.

  “Carlo,” Amadeo said flatly. “Enlightening some of the novices, I see.”

  “Oh, you know. I enlighten them a little, they enlighten me a little, we swap some parables. Hey. Seriously. How’s my father?”

  “He would be better if you spent a little time with him.”

  Carlo winced. His arm dropped from Amadeo’s shoulder.

  “He doesn’t need me around,” Carlo said, giving another, less confident smile. “He’s got you!”

  “Every father needs his son.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll embarrass him?” He said it jokingly, like a playful challenge, but Amadeo thought he saw something else behind the facade.

  “No,” Amadeo said. “Because you love him. And he loves you.”

  The smile faded. Carlo kicked the toe of his shoe into the dirt. His voice was soft.

  “My father is going to die, Amadeo.”

  “In time, yes.”

  Carlo looked at him, suddenly frantic, almost pleading. “I shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

  Amadeo put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

  “What you have to deal with, right now,” he said, “is that there is an ailing man in there who very much wants to spend his remaining hours with his son. You can make him proud, Carlo.”

  “It would help,” said a woman’s voice at their backs, “if you didn’t gallivant around with whores.”

  Livia, Carlo’s sister, stood regal and serene in a black brocade gown. Her charcoal hair was piled on her head in a wave, fixed in place with a silver pin. She looked at the two novices and fluttered an irritated hand.

  “Yes. I called you whores. Leave.”

  “Hey!” Carlo snapped, shrugging off Amadeo’s hand and standing to face her. “You can’t talk to them like that.”

  Livia arched an eyebrow. “Why? Have you not paid them yet? I’m sorry, my mistake. They’re only sluts.”

  One of the novices ran off with tears brimming in her eyes. Carlo called to her, flailing his arms, chasing her across the garden with the other novice in tow. Amadeo watched them go without a word. Livia dropped into Carlo’s seat, sighing like she’d just hauled a sack of bricks across the courtyard. />
  “A bit harsh,” Amadeo said lightly.

  “Was I wrong?” she asked.

  “I said harsh. Not wrong.”

  “And that,” she said, “is the next leader of our Mother Church. Gardener help us all.”

  “Your father has faith in him,” he said.

  “And do you?”

  He had to think about how to answer that.

  “I have faith in your father.”

  Livia looked him over, her emerald eyes birdlike and keen.

  “You have a smudge of dirt on your right hand. And another on your cassock, just over your heart.”

  Amadeo nodded. “So I do.”

  She favored him with the ghost of a smile, showing him the smudge of soil on her own right hand.

  “Look,” she said, “we’re twins.”

  Amadeo chuckled. “He got you too, hmm?”

  “‘And so I swear to love my brother as I love you, Father,’” Livia recited with a sweet smile, which faded to her usual dour frown in a heartbeat.

  “And was that love, just now?”

  “My love can be cruel,” Livia said. “You know my father is a good man, and a holy man, but he can be a manipulative old bastard too.”

  “I can’t argue that,” Amadeo said with a faint smile. “But he believes Carlo is a better choice than anyone the College of Cardinals could bring to the table.”

  “Hrm. And with that worm Accorsi leading the charge, he might be right. Best choice in a barrel of rotten apples. No matter what, we’re all going to bite down on a maggot.”

  “A disturbing but possibly apt metaphor. You have a talent for those.”

  Livia swiveled her hips on the bench, curling her legs underneath, to turn toward Amadeo.

  “I’m eight years older than Carlo,” she said.

  “So you are,” he agreed.

  “If I had been born a man,” Livia said, “I’d be the next pope.”

  “I’m not sure there is much value in that sort of speculation—”