Free Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood by Oliver Bowden Page B

before.”
    “Did he leave me any message?”
    “Oh, yes. You’re to meet him as soon as you’re fit at the Mausoleum of Augustus. Know where that is?”
    “One of the ruins, isn’t it?”
    “Dead right. Not that it’s much more of a ruin than most of this awful city is nowadays. To think it was once the center of the world! Look at it now—smaller than Florence, half the size of Venice. But we do have one boast.” She cackled.
    “And that is?”
    “Only fifty thousand poor souls live in this shanty-town of a city that once was proud to call itself Rome; and
seven thousand of them
are prostitutes! That’s got to be a record!” She cackled some more. “No wonder everyone’s riddled with the New Disease. Don’t sleep with anyone here,” she added, “if you don’t want to fall apart with the pox. Even cardinals have got it—and they say the Pope himself, and his son, are sufferers.”

     
    Ezio remembered Rome as if in a dream. A bizarre place now, whose ancient, rotting walls had been designed to encompass a population of one million. Now most of the area was given over to peasant farming.
    He remembered, too, the ruined wasteland of what had once been the Great Forum in ancient times, where sheep and goats grazed now. People stole the ancient carved marble and porphyry stones, which lay higgledy-piggledy in the grass, to build pigsties with or to grind down for lime. And out of the desolation of slums and crooked, filthy streets, the great new buildings of Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Alexander VI rose obscenely, like wedding cakes on a table where there was nothing else to eat but stale bread.
    The aggrandizement of the Church was confirmed, back at last from the papal exile at Avignon; and above all the Pope—the leading figure in the international world, outclassing not only kings, but the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian himself—had his seat in Rome again.
    And hadn’t it been Pope Alexander VI who’d divided, in his great judgment, the southern continent of the New Americas, through a vertical line, between the colonizing countries of Portugal and Spain by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the same year the New Disease broke out—for the first time in Italy—so badly in Naples? They called it the French disease—
morbus gallicus
. But everyone knew it’d come back from the New World with Columbus’s bunch of Genoese sailors. It was an unpleasant affliction. People’s faces and bodies bubbled morphews and boils, and in the last stages their faces were often pressed out of all recognizable shape.
    And in Rome, the poor made do on barley and bacon—when they could get bacon. And the dirty streets harbored typhus, cholera, and the Black Death. As for the citizens—there were the ostentatiously rich, to be sure; but as for the rest, they looked like cowherds and lived as badly.
    What a contrast to the gilded opulence of the Vatican! Rome, that great city, had become a rubbish heap of history. Along the filthy alleys that passed for streets, in which feral dogs and wolves now roamed, Ezio remembered churches, which today were falling apart, rotting refuse, deserted palaces that reminded him of the probable wreck (as his prophetic soul told him) of his own family seat in Florence.
    “I must get up. I must find
Messer
Machiavelli!” said Ezio urgently, flinging the visions from his mind.
    “All in good time,” replied his nurse. “He left you a new suit of clothes. Put them on when you are ready.”
    Ezio stood, and as he did so his head swam; but he shook himself to clear it. Then he donned the suit Machiavelli had left him—new linen, and a hood of soft wool with a peak like an eagle’s beak. Strong, soft gloves and boots made of Spanish leather. He dressed himself, fighting the pain the effort caused him. When he was done, the woman guided him to a balcony. Ezio realized then that he had not been in some shrunken hovel, but in the remains of what had once been a great palace. They must have