In the Company of the Courtesan Read Online Free PDF Page B

slipped her hand beneath her robe and put her fist down on the table in front of me. Underneath her grasp lay half a dozen rubies and emeralds, their edges a little chipped from where she had prized them out of their settings.
    â€œFor the journey. Take them. They can be your own set of pearls.”
    Â 
    The square was silent now, our neighbors either dead or more effectively gagged. Around me, Rome was caught between fire and dawn, part of the city glowing like hot coals in the dark while clouds of smoke billowed east toward a gauzy gray sky ripe with the promise of another perfect day for killing. I moved like Ascanio, close to the ground and the edges of the walls, before breaking into the main street. I passed a few corpses in the gutter, and once a voice yelled after me, but it was wayward and might have been a cry out of someone’s nightmare. Farther down the street, a single figure came rolling toward me out of the gloom, moving as if in a daze and seeming not to see me. As he passed, I saw him clutching his shirt, with a bloodied mess of what might have been his own innards in his hand.
    The cardinal’s palazzo was off the Via Papalis, where the city gathers to gape at and applaud great church processions that pass through to the Vatican. The streets here are so fine you need to dress up even to walk along them. But the more the wealth, the greater the devastation and the heavier the stench of death. In the dawn light, there were bodies everywhere, some broken and still, others twitching or moaning quietly. A small knot of men were moving methodically through the carnage, poking around for leftover wealth like crows plucking out the eyes and the livers. They were too intent on their business to notice me. If Rome had been Rome and not a battlefield, I would have had to be more careful on the street. While I may be the size of a child, people still spot my rolling walk from a distance, and until they see the gold trim of my cloth—and even then, sometimes—they can tend to all kinds of cruel mischief. But that morning, in the chaos of war, I would have looked simply small, and therefore neither a promise nor a threat. Though I think that is not enough to explain why I didn’t die. Because I saw enough children skewered and split into pieces as I went. And it was not because I had my wits about me either, for I stepped over the remains of all kinds of men, some of whom, from their clothing—or what was left of it—had had more status or wealth than I ever would, though little good it would do them now.
    Later, when the stories from the night screamers who survived told of a hundred ways in which an enemy can squeeze gold out of seared and punctured flesh, it became clear that those who were butchered in that first attack were the lucky ones. But at the time it didn’t feel like that. For every dead soul I passed, there was another barely living one, propped up against the wall staring at the stumps of his own legs or trying to push his guts back into his stomach.
    Yet, strangely, it was not all awful. Or perhaps it was not all awful precisely because it was so strange. In places there was almost a sense of wild pageant to it. In the area closest to the Vatican, where the Germans now ruled, the streets were full of fancy dress. It was a wonder the invaders knew whom to fight anymore, so many of them were wearing their victims’ clothes. I saw small men swamped by velvet and fur, their gun barrels high in the air laced with jeweled bracelets. But it was their wives and children who made the show. The women who follow mercenary armies are legendary, living as they do like cats in heat around the edges of the campfire. But these women were different. They were Lutherans, harpy heretics driven as much by God as by war, their children conceived and suckled on the road, thin and hard as their parents, their features blunt as woodcuts. On their stick bodies, the pearled gowns and velvet