A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen

Author:Fred Saberhagen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JSS Literary Productions
Published: 2011-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

However great a claim the doings of Popes and Cardinals might have had on the popular attention, they were but little on my mind when I arrived in Rome. My search for Basarab, and of course for Bogdan as well, still ruled my mind and soul. The dusty roads and the clerical conflicts of Italy passed by me almost unobserved, except as they might lead me to a likely gathering place for foreign mercenaries.

I rode alone, and traveled most of the time at night, having decided that any human attendants were almost certain to be more trouble than they were worth. Some of my devoted band of followers in Romania had volunteered to come with me, but I had discouraged them. Could you have met them, good reader, you would understand why.

Having been only once molested by bandits—the encounter, at dusk, was brief indeed, and afterward I recovered a purse that one of the highwaymen had dropped—I reached Rome in due course. The Eternal City, then excited as it always was by papal turnover, was at least as much transformed as Florence had been since I had seen it last. A new bridge had quite recently been thrown across the Tiber, and the municipal water supply had been restored to a level of quality unknown since the time of the Caesars. Much of this civic improvement was the work of Sixtus IV, one of those Popes who had come and gone whilst I lay sleeping; the same man who in his spare time had once tried to arrange the murder of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as a means of settling some political dispute.

I approached Rome in an optimistic state of mind. By this time my Italian had regained some fluency, and I had achieved, as I thought, a fair amount of skill in asking questions. Alas, the answers were no better than before. The clue I had picked up at Careggi seemed worthless. No one with whom I spoke had heard of Bogdan, at least for the past several years; and at first no one had heard of Basarab, either.

And then, someone had. The first clue came by chance, in a conversation I overheard in a tavern frequented by soldiers. What they were saying confirmed what I had heard at the villa of Lorenzo, and put me definitely on what I thought was the right track.

My search led me first near the Vatican, and then directly into it. Understand that I am not speaking of the great church-and-single-palace complex that we see today, in 1492 Michelangelo and others had not yet begun the great rebuilding of St. Peter’s and its hundred corollary projects of renewal. Nor—let me emphasize again—were the Pope’s temporal domains limited to the miniature quaint city-state, a few scant acres in extent, familiar to the twentieth century. Rather all of Rome, and a large part of central Italy besides, more or less acknowledged His Holiness as temporal as well as spiritual ruler. More presently about that “more or less.

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