Max Brand

The Cat and the Perfume

Warsaw 2019

Contents

I. "GALLOP! GALLOP!"

II. WHEN A BORGIA SMILES

III. MASKED

IV. SACRIFICE FOR ITALY

V. CALLED BACK FROM THE DEAD

VI. THE SNAKE HISSED

VII. "I SMELL RATS!"

VIII. >DEADLY PERFUME

IX. MELROSE AND BORGIA

X. THE TURN OF A BLADE

I. “GALLOP! GALLOP!”

OUT of the Apennines the river plunged toward the flat strip of the Romagna, toward the gleam of the walls of distant Faenza that stands on the great Via Emilia; swiftly the river ran, and the road beside it, but swiftest of all was the gallop of Tizzo on a long-legged gelding that had made slow work through the climbing of the Apennines, but now on the downward slope stretched out in gigantic strides. And Tizzo let him run, only keeping a tight rein to balance the awkward beast on the corners. For a rain had ceased falling only a short time before and the river was frothed with new brown and bubbles and the big rocks beside the road flashed in the sun; the surface, being mere mud, was a treacherous footing, and the clumsy gelding needed a bit of steering. He was the fourth that Tizzo had ridden since he left Perugia. Even by the riverside the road sometimes went uphill. And now they came to a long rise up which the gelding started to gallop, fell to a trot, to a walk, and finally, in spite of spurring, stood still and let its head fall.

Tizzo, in a fury, tore the feathered cap from his head and dashed it on the ground; the steel lining of the headpiece clanged on a stone with a muffled note. Then, his passion leaving him as quickly as it had flared up, he slipped to the earth and glanced over the horse.

The eye of the gelding was dull, his muzzle twitched spasmodically, his sides heaved, and there was a tremor in his knees.

“Spent like a bad coin,” said Tizzo. “Done for and gone, and be damned to all long legs on men or beasts.”

He turned, his eyes straining toward the east, which was his goal, and through the strain of his baffled impatience he began to hear the musical conversation of the river, which talked to itself contentedly with many voices; he was aware of the blue of the sky, and the pines that climbed the mountains in thick, dark-green ranks. The river seemed to rush on with a redoubled speed and he was drifting back, back, losing fatal time in the race. A dim thunder began, behind him, and turned into a distinct rattling, and now a cart drawn by two mules appeared around the corner at the foot of the hill.

Tizzo at once stripped saddle and bridle from the dripping gelding. And from behind the saddle he took the leather-holstered ax which he hooked onto his belt so that the leather-covered head of it was behind his hip and the wooden handle sloped across his back toward his right shoulder. He wore, also, a short-bladed, light sword whose slender steel would be entirely useless to carve through the thick steel plate and the under-armoring of chain-mail of Milan such as men wore in Italy in the year 1500. The sword was balanced at the right hip by a slim-bodied little poniard, a very good instrument with which to look through the breathing holes of a visored helmet These were his weapons. He picked up his feather hat and put it on his head. That was the only defensive armor he wore. He had not even a shirt of fine mail under his long-sleeved, short-skirted jacket because his best guard was speed of hand and foot.

Now he stood waiting eagerly for the carter, with the wind ruffling the curled fringes of his flame-colored hair and tossing the plume in his steel-lined hat. At his call, the carter drew rein; the mules stretched their hind legs to keep the cart from rolling backward.

“When you went by me, back there,” said the peasant, “I saw the belly of your horse pumping and I guessed you’d come to a stand before long, highness.”

He added the last word out of respect to the plume and the edging of fur around the collar of the jacket. Tizzo flung bridle and saddle into the cart, laid his hand on the high edge of it, and vaulted lightly in.

“On toward Faenza, friend,” said Tizzo, “as fast as your mules can run; and if they gallop all the way, you get this!”

He held up a florin, beautifully new from the Florence mint. The peasant opened his eyes so wide that the pupils became pinpoints in the big white circles. “But the horse–to leave your horse–”

“My servants will pick up the beast when they come along behind me,” said Tizzo. “The whip! The whip! Gallop all the way, and you have the florin. Only half if the mules trot a step.”

THERE were no servants following him. No man could have followed the frantic course he had ridden since that night of tumult when he rode conquering into Perugia at the side of Giovanpaolo Baglioni and then saw, far before him, the man on the gray horse, such a horse as Tizzo never had seen before, a horse of silk, a horse that flowed over miles like the wind. He had intended to chase the rider no farther than the northern wall of Perugia; and then, a single mile beyond the town he was prepared to halt, but the imp of the perverse and the beauty of the gray, horse had led him on, and on. For four days he had been led, stopping for brief moment, hollow-eyed for the lack of sleep, hardly ever in sight of the fugitive but always guided by report, for when men saw the gray stallion, they did not forget it readily.

The peasant, with one half-frightened glance over his shoulder, began to beat the mules with his long staff; by the time the cart reached the top of the hill, the gray mules were galloping with the short-striding, stiff-legged swing peculiar to the race.

“You hurry, my lord,” said the peasant.

“Did you see a man on a gray horse?” said Tizzo. “A gray horse with four black points on its legs and a black silk muzzle?”

“I saw it,” said the peasant. “A half hour before you went by me–”

“Gallop! Gallop!” said Tizzo. “If you bring me up with him, ten florins! Ten florins, d’you hear?”

“I hear!” said the peasant, and struck his mules in turn.

“Was the gray horse weakening?” asked Tizzo.

“It was only trotting when I saw it,” said the peasant, “but it trotted faster than most horses would gallop, on a long road.”

“Was it thin as if from a hard journey?” asked Tizzo, eagerly. “Was it gaunt beneath, and the back roached?”

“No, highness. It seemed in good condition.”

“What a horse!” said Tizzo. “A Pegasus! A winged throne for a man; a glory and a triumph to the eye... Tell me, what was the look of the man that rode it?”

“A good, strong-built man,” said the peasant, speaking loudly over the rattling of the cart, the groaning of the heavy axles. “A man that might make one and a half of you, highness!” He glanced almost with a smile over the lithe, slight body of Tizzo, and measured his inches. He was not, in fact, a hair’s breadth above a middle height.

“A good, strong-built man–” said Tizzo, thoughtfully.

“You want to overtake him, very much? He wears a helmet at his saddlebow, and there is good steel plate from his neck to his knees; he has a two-handed sword, also!”

“Has he?” said Tizzo. “And a big-built man, with all that weight of armor to carry as well–and I with four horses dead beat behind me–and he with only one? No, it is not a horse. It is an immortal!”

“Perhaps,” said the peasant, with a touch of malice, “when your highness comes up with this armored man, you will be sorry that you caught him.”

“Sorry?” said Tizzo. “Tut, tut! It is a cousin of my wife’s sister, and he left home without a purse of money that he may need along the way. No fighting, my friend. No fighting, at all. Just a matter of pure friendship!”

The peasant looked into the eyes of his passenger and saw them glimmer as bright as the blue of flame that underlies the yellow tip. After that, the man kept his eyes upon the road they were traveling. He was trying to think. It seemed to him that he had seen a man with eyes like that, once in his life before.

“What’s forward in Faenza?” asked Tizzo. “Is the Duke of Valentinois in the town still?”

“Aye,” said the peasant. “Cesare Borgia is there with his Frenchmen and his Swiss and with his good peasants of the Romagna, too.”

“Will he make soldiers of them, as men say?”

“He will, as no other man can.”

“And who has the Borgia poisoned lately?” asked Tizzo.

“Poisoned?” said the peasant. “He poisons no man. The good duke is stern with his soldiers, friendly to all others.”

“The good duke?” said Tizzo.

“Aye, the good duke,” said the peasant, looking at Tizzo with surprise.

“Well,” explained Tizzo, laughing, “they say things about him in Rome. They say that the Borgias kill their man in an hour or in two years at their will. The wine they give is neither salty nor bitter. It has just the right breath of sweetness; it is a little richer in the aftertaste. He grows warm. He sweats with pleasure. He feels the strong wine mounting to his brain. He laughs–and in the middle of his laughter he becomes silent. He is dead. Or on the other hand, he goes home happily. The Borgias attend him cheerfully to the door. They send their servants to light him on the way home. He sleeps well. It is a month later before his eyes at noonday are as dim as evening light; his memory fails like that of any old dotard; food disgusts his sight; his hair falls, his teeth loosen, he crawls like a frost-bitten insect into his room and dies in the corner. Have you never heard stories like this about Cesare Borgia?”

“In Rome,” said the peasant, “they will say anything. I have an uncle who once went there in the Holy Year. Well, they will say anything in Rome, but up here we know the great duke very well.”

“How well do you know him?” asked Tizzo.

“I, with these eyes, have seen him take a great sword and stand to the charge of a bull, and cut off the head of the bull with one stroke. My God, how I howled. My throat still aches when I remember how I shouted. We all shouted.”

“That proves he’s a good man?” asked Tizzo.

“It proves he’s a man,” said the peasant, “and as for his goodness, ask the people of the Romagna what happens when other armies come among us. We do not care who wins. The victors are as great a plague as the defeated. For working people like us, there is no right in war. There is only wrong. I beg the pardon of your highness.”

“I understand you perfectly,” said Tizzo. “And Cesare Borgia?”

“Well, you should see the difference! He will have no stealing, no taking of men’s wives and daughters, no plundering of wine-shops, no commandeering of food, no slaughtering of our cattle, our pigs, our chickens. No, no! The good duke stops all of that. He asks in the towns merely for bed, fire, and roof for his soldiers. He pays for everything else. And for the men who fail to obey his commands–well, God help them! I saw two fine fellows hanging by the heels from the windows of his own sleeping apartment in the palace only the day before yesterday. Great, big, wide-shouldered fighting men–hanging there like pigs at the autumn slaughtering time. And what had they done? Why, no great thing at all. They simply had taken a fancy to a girl, that Angela, the daughter of the old vintner; and when she ran they followed her into the house, and knocked her father over the head when he tried to stop them. Why, they didn’t kill the old man. Half of one of his ears is gone, but otherwise he’s as well as can be; but the good duke would not have it. And he hanged them out of his windows. No–there is a man to follow–there is a man to die for!”

“Perhaps,” said Tizzo–and then he broke out with a shout. “Do you see? Do you see?”

“The walls of Faenza? Yes,” said the driver.

“Damn the walls of Faenza along with the Romans that built them first; I see something better; I see my fellow of the gray horse turning in at that gate, yonder. Do I not? Are my eyes lying to me?”

“No, my lord. I see it, also. I see him turn to scan the road this way–and now he passes on into the tavern.”

“Tavern?” said Tizzo.

“The Giglio Rosso, highness. And there a man that can afford to buy them can find the good wines of Tuscany, so good that they are food and drink all in one moment.”

“Gallop!” said Tizzo. “Gallop, gallop!”

And off they rode.

II. WHEN A BORGIA SMILES

THE rider of the gray horse knelt on the carpet beside the bed in the best room of the Giglio Rosso, with the arched windows giving on a pleasant garden; for the tavern had been a charming villa, in better days, and in the garden it offered on this hot day the delightful spectacle of half a dozen little fountains that raised trembling arms of silver into the sun. But the traveler had no eye for these things or for the luxurious appointments of the chamber, nor for the thin-faced, white-skinned man who stood in a corner. His whole regard was bent, with a modest discretion, on the man who lay lounging on the bed. He was half-dressed. One riding boot was on, smearing mud on the silken covering of the bed, the other boot lay on the floor. He had pulled off his jacket from one shoulder, but the other inert arm still remained in a sleeve. He lay, in fact, as though he had been struck down by a mortal wound and was now dying, or dead. No one could be sure of his expression, since he had a small mask across the upper part of his face. Under the edge of the cloth, one could see a red, pimply eruption on account of which, perhaps, he used the mask. The lower part of his face was covered with a short, heavy beard and cropped mustaches. He was a big man, and even the mask could not entirely obscure his large, handsome features.

“I remember you, Dino Sanudo,” said a slow, weary voice. “Why do you come rushing here all the way from Perugia? What is wrong?”

“I have been chased, my lord,” said Sanudo. “The man is at my heels now.”

“Chased?” said the other. “And by one man–all the way from Perugia?”

“I have played the decoy, my lord of Valentinois. I have brought him here as a present to you. Giovanpaolo will pay a great deal of money for the life of this man who follows me.”

“Giovanpaolo is an exile from his city,” said Cesare Borgia.

“He has returned; he has taken the town,” said Sanudo.

The Borgia closed his eyes and sighed.

“The traitor?” he inquired. “The rich one?”

“Dead, my lord.”

“Delia Penna?”

“Dead, my lord.”

“Delia Penna, too? Who killed him?”

“Was he a friend of yours, my lord?”

“He was.”

“The man who follows me is the one who slew him.”

Cesare Borgia raised a finger.

“What is the name of this man?”

“Tizzo of Melrose.”

“Italian and English?”

“A mongrel half-breed with red hair; his father is that condottiere, that Baron Melrose.”

“Bonfadini, if this Tizzo, this redhead spark from the fire, enters the Giglio Rosso, have him secured for me.”

The white-faced fellow in the corner bowed and left the room instantly.

“Tell me of the retaking of Perugia,” said the Duke of Valentinois and the Romagna.

“It was a question of might,” said Sanudo. “And a sudden attack. There was the question of Giovanpaolo Baglioni fighting like an Achilles; and that heavy-handed Englishman, Melrose, striking in; and the surprise troubled some of the defenders; they would not stand when they saw the iron chains across the street cloven in two.”

“Ha?” said the Borgia, suddenly lifting himself on one elbow. “Cloven in two? By whom?”

“By this same Tizzo.”

“A giant, is he?”

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