The Master of Verona

"I'm Cesco," said the boy.

"Hush." Katerina led him away, leaving Bail and Morsicato looking around the disorderly chamber.

The doctor said, "She realizes what this means?"

"Not much slips by her. I'd better go find where they hid the guards. I hope they're hurt, not dead."

Morsicato followed Bailardino out of the child's room. "They had accents. I don't know what kind — it wasn't familiar to me."

"Splendid. Now the enemy is hiring mercenaries."

But the doctor's mind had already moved on to imagine what Katerina's note to Cangrande would say.

He might have been surprised at the tone of the letter. She used a code known only to her father's children, of whom only two remained. After describing the evening's events, she added a coda that proved she'd come to the same conclusion as the doctor:

The stakes of your game have changed. This time they did not seem intent on taking Cesco. They appear bent on murdering him. The time for your precious secrets may be past. Next year he will be three, and you know what the astrologer's charts say. If you know who is threatening the Greyhound's future you must take whatever steps you deem necessary to stop them.

Arriving three days later, Cangrande's reply was characteristically brief:

I have no proof, and will make no accusations without proof. If you want to see the boy live, you'd best protect him better. Or else trust the stars. Isn't that what you always told me?

Reading this, Katerina balled up the note and threw it in the fire.

Twenty-Nine

Ravenna

15 May 1317

The May sun above reflected off the waters of the Rubico River. Pietro reached into his saddlebag and lifted out a hunk of cheese, made locally. Today was an idyll. The weather was glorious, the ride unhurried. Returning from a lecture in nearby Rimini, he pondered the topic: the need for good judges in this lawless world. "There's a real need," the professor had pronounced in the open-air theater, "for justice in the world today. And if the world needs knights to enforce laws, doesn't it also need judges and advocates to decide what those laws are, what they mean? Judges are more important than knights because, in the end, it's the judges who have to decide what justice is."

Riding along on Canis, Pietro now wondered, Isn't the man who enforces the justice as important as the man who decides what justice is?

Pietro was coming to love the Law. Before going to university he could never have imagined loving a concept. Oh, he knew his father loved poetry. But now he understood. What poetry was to Dante, law was to his son.

It was a passion two years in the making. After the brief stay in Venice, where Ignazzio and Theodoro had picked up the scarecrow's trail, Pietro had gone to Bologna. It was supposed to be a pretense, Pietro feigning studious pursuits while waiting for news of their quarry. But weeks had turned into months, and for Pietro the end was lost in the means.

Growing up in Florence, Pietro had been trained in the basics of learning: grammar, logic, music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric. But a hundred miles north of Florence, young men were striving daily to know more. Eschewing the common precepts of learning, they came to La Cittia Grossa, where the learning was as impure as the sausage invented here. Mortadella — bones, gristle and hooves, the deadest part of the pig, turned into a delicious meal. So the faculty explored the darker sides of life to find the unsavory but longed-for truths.

Bologna was second only to Paris as a repository for written knowledge. But unlike Paris, where the students ran around creating unchecked chaos, students at the Studium of Bologna made the rules and hired the faculty. Many of the students were already practicing doctors and lawyers. The motto here was Bononia Docet — Bologna Teaches.