Oliver Bowden: Revelations

Dogan, though lacking Yusuf ’s elan, made up for this by his organizational skills and his complete devotion to the Creed. He might make a Mentor one day, Ezio thought. But his own feelings seemed to have been cut adrift. He no longer knew what he believed, if he believed in anything at all, and this, with one other thing, was what had preoccupied him during the long voyage home.

Home! What could he call home? Rome? Florence? His work? But he had no real home, and he knew in his heart that his experience in Altair’s hidden chamber at Masyaf had marked the end of a page in his life. He had done what he could, and he had achieved peace and stability-for the time being-in Italy and in the East. Could he not afford to spend a little time on himself? His days were growing short, he knew, but there were still enough of them left to reap a harvest. If he dared take the risk.

Ezio spent his fifty-third birthday, Midsummer’s Day, 1512, with Sofia. The days permitted him by Selim’s visa were also growing short in number. His mood seemed somber. They were both apprehensive, as if some great weight were hanging over them. In his honor she had prepared a completely Florentine banquet: salsicce di cinghiale and fettunta, then carciofini sott’olio, followed by spaghetti allo scoglio and bistecca alla fiorentina; and afterward a good dry pecorino. The cake she made was a castagnaccio, and she threw in some brutti ma buoni for good measure. But the wine, she decided, should come from the Veneto.

It was all far too rich, and she’d made far too much, and he did his best, but she could see that food, even food from home, which had cost her a fortune to get, was the last thing on his mind.

“What will you do?” she asked him.

He sighed. “Go back to Rome. My work here is done.” He paused. “And you?”

“Stay here I suppose. Go on as I have always done. Though Azize is a better bookseller than I ever was.”

“Maybe you should try something new.”

“I don’t know if I’d dare to, on my own. This is what I know. Though-” she broke off.

“Though what?”

She looked at him. “I have learned that there is a life outside books.”

“All life is outside books.”

“Spoken like a true scholar!”

“Life enters books. It isn’t the other way round.”

Sofia studied him. She wondered how much longer he’d hesitate. Whether he’d ever come to the point at all. Whether he’d dare. Whether he even wanted to-though she tried to keep that thought at bay-and whether she’d dare prompt him. That trip to Adrianopolis without him had been the first time she’d realized what was happening to her, and she was pretty sure it had happened to him as well. They were lovers-of course they were lovers. But what she really longed for hadn’t happened yet.

They sat at her table for a long time in silence. A very charged silence.

“Azize, unlike you, has not sprung back from her ordeal at Ahmet’s hands,” said Ezio, finally, and slowly, pouring them both fresh glasses of Soave. “She has asked me to ask you if she may work here.”

“And what is your interest in that?”

“This place would make an excellent intelligence center for the Seljuk Assassins.” He corrected himself hastily. “As a secondary function, of course, and it would give Azize a quieter role in the Order. That is, if you…”

“And what will become of me?”

He swallowed hard. “I-I wondered if-”

He went down on one knee.

Her heart was going like mad.

They decided it would be best to marry in Venice. Sofia’s uncle was vicar general of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in the San Polo district and had offered to officiate-as soon as he realized that Ezio’s late father had been the eminent banker Giovanni Auditore, he had given the marriage his wholehearted blessing. Ezio’s connection with Pietro Bembo didn’t do any harm, either, and though Lucrezia Borgia’s former lover couldn’t attend, being away in Urbino, the guests did include Doge Leonardo Loredan and the up-and-coming young painter Tizian Vecelli, who, smitten by Sofia’s beauty, and jealous of Durer’s picture of her, offered, for a friendly price, to do a double portrait of them as a wedding tribute.

The Assassin Brotherhood had paid Sofia a generous price for her bookshop, and under it, in the cistern Ezio had discovered, the five keys of Masyaf were walled up and sealed. Azize, though sad to see them go, was also overjoyed at her new profession.

They stayed in Venice, allowing Sofia to acquaint herself with her scarcely known homeland and to make friends with her surviving relatives. But Ezio began to grow restless. There had been impatient letters from Claudia in Rome. Pope Julius II, long the Assassins’ protector, was approaching his sixty-ninth birthday and ailing. The succession was still in doubt, and the Brotherhood needed Ezio there to take charge of things in the interim period that would follow Julius’s death.

But Ezio, though worried, still put off making any arrangements for their departure.

“I no longer wish to be part of these things,” he told Sofia in answer to her inquiry. “I need to have time to think for myself, at last.”

“And to think of yourself, perhaps.”

“Perhaps that, too.”

“But still, you have a duty.”

“I know.”

There were other things on his mind. The leader of the North European branch of the Brotherhood, Desiderius Erasmus, had written to Claudia from Queens’ College at Cambridge, where the wandering scholar was for the present living and teaching, that there was a newly appointed Doctor in Bible at Wittenberg, a young man called Luther, whose religious thinking might need watching, as it seemed to be leading to something very revolutionary indeed-something that might yet again threaten the fragile stability of Europe.

He told Sofia of his concern.

“What is Erasmus doing?”

“He watches. He waits.”

“Will you recruit new men to the Order if there is a shift away from the Roman Church in the north?”

Ezio spread his hands. “I will be advised by Desiderius.” He shook his head. “Everywhere, always, there is fresh dissent and division.”

“Isn’t that a feature of life?”

He smiled. “Perhaps. And perhaps it is not my fight anymore.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.” She paused. “One day, you will tell me what really happened in that vault under Masyaf.”

“One day.”

“Why not tell me now?”

He looked at her. “I will tell you this. I have come to realize that the progress of Mankind toward the goals of peace and unity will always be a journey-there will never be an arrival. It’s just like the journey through life of any man or woman. The end is always the interruption of that journey. There is no conclusion. There is always unfinished business.” Ezio was holding a book in his hands as he spoke-Petrarch’s Canzoniere. “It’s like this,” he continued. “Death doesn’t wait for you to finish a book.”

“Then read what you can, while you can.”

With a new determination, Ezio made arrangements for the journey back to Rome.

By that time, Sofia was pregnant.

“What took you so long?” Claudia snapped, then pulled him to her and kissed him hard on both cheeks. “ Fratello mio. You’ve put on weight. All that Venetian food. Not good for you.”

They were in the Assassins’ Headquarters on Tiber Island. It was late in February. Ezio’s arrival back in Rome had coincided with the funeral of Pope Julius.

“Some good news, I think,” Claudia went on. “Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici is going to be elected.”

“But he’s only a deacon.”