`If I defy the authority of the pope, then anyone has the right to defy my authority. Gregory is the pope. He isn't a man tome, he is my pope.'

`Then help him! Do you think he wants to give away the papal states to Ladislas? Do you thinks he plans to kill this goose with its golden eggs which you have made so plump for him? What do you I think an old man can do when he is surrounded by Ladislas's army?'

`Well – ah, I see, all right. Then it is Ladislas who oppresses me.'

'You are a leader, my lord. You are the, cardinal and the general and the administrator to all these people after you are the servant of the pope but, nonetheless, you owe them all equally the salvation of your defence. When you summon an emergency meeting of the Bologna Council and explain the peril which seeks their destruction, you will tell them that they must order you to refuse this deadly threat to their rights, even to their lives, which will make this foreign tyrant their master. I can hear your eloquence as you warn them that Ladislas will bring them double their present taxation if they force

you to accept the pope's command. My God, it will make; you the most popular figure this city has ever known.'

His jaw stiffened. `All right. I have, made up my, mind,' he said. `I am going to summon an emergency meeting of the council and get this thing settled."

With the wholehearted support of the people of Bologna, Cossa resisted the pope's, orders. He cast himself adrift from the papacy, knowing well that Gregory would reward him well when Ladislas was driven out of Rome. Just the same, for insurance, he was going to see that the curia got better and better shares of the benefices and necessarily increased taxation – for only by reminding the apostolic chamber that he, Baldassare, Cardinal Cossa, was making such increased income possible would it be able to persuade the pope not to replace him as legatus a Latere. He would be walking; on the crumbling rim of the crust of the Church if he did less.

The Marchesa di Artegiana was fonder of Cossa than she was of other men. Cosimo di Medici was not any part of such feeling; he and the marchesa were mutual extensions of each other. By the quality and; nature of her life, men and women, except for her daughters, were much the same to the marchesa. Sex, which had been her grist for most of her life, she found neither momentous nor interesting. It was her work and there could be neither romance nor sentiment about it or about any other of her relations with men. Nonetheless, Cossa was a special man to her. The simple brutality of his ambition and the harshness of his greed comforted her. Cossa was as natural a leader as she had seen in a lifetime of hundreds and hundreds of men, including Hawkwood and Toreton. The benign respect which other leaders, important men of the highest distinction, gave him, and which the masses of people gave him, had strengthened, and polished his own lust to lead. The Medici hid singled him out as a potential pope. She was Cossa's keeper for the Medici, so she was expected to put him upon the throne of St Peter, When she did, there could be no end to the money. Her tithe would become an ocean of gold from a bottomless source and, because she would have made it clear to Cossa that it had been she, who had won the crown for him, she would also share in his share of the fortunes which were waiting to be made. She would be somebody. She would have lived up to and exceeded' the title the Medici had bought for her, and as her next step up the ladder she intended to be made a duchess, with each of her daughters being named a countess.

If the marchesa felt love (a difficult conception to understand), excepting always the love she felt for her daughters, it was for status. She had waited and toiled for it for many years, working her dignity and self-respect to the bone to get it. But always it had eluded her, until the night Cosimo di Medici had come to her house for the first time. When she thought about the struggles to get within striking distance of the money; she felt momentarily exhausted and empty and she experienced a wistful romantic need to fill all of Cossa's consciousness with herself. She dealt with this aberration by reasoning that it was men who were the romantics, that for all time women had only been trying compassionately to give men what they needed so badly; that, glorious mirror-sense, that achievement of looking into another's heart and seeing oneself with the eyes of the adorer. Not that Cossa was much of a romantic. His experience with women had been constant and compulsive, enjoying the physical profits of one body then moving on to the next. However, as she worked with him, as she managed him and he became more dependent upon her, she sensed his deepening need for her approval; and she knew he would finally recognize the need to call upon love, the blank-eyed mopery of romantic love, to build the echo chamber lined with mirrors, so that as he yearned for her his yearning would be self-fulfilling and he would be able to penetrate his own dreams of self by projecting them upon her, who, by her sighs and her sheep's' eyes, would make him more adoring of Cossa. That was the man's way. It didn't seem possible, but that was the way they wanted it to be.

She would need to build him up to love slowly so that it would be the more lasting. When love occurred to him, it would be what he wanted and it would be useful to her.

In a relatively short time – a pitiably short time, she thought Cossa conditioned himself to become obsessed with love for her. Even he was aware of the wilfulness of this, but he had reached a plateau on his long climb. The power he carried with him kept increasing in weight until some unconscious race memory he possessed, as all men possess, told him that he must find someone worthy enough to be allowed to admire his power and his set He pined for her when he was away from him and, sighed over her when she was near.

Nonetheless, he had to be sure she was worthy. He lived with her, in the present, reflected her into the glass of a fanciful future, and brooded about the possibility of her past. She was the Marchesa di Artegiana, but what did that signify? Who had been the marchese who had brought her to that title? Where were her lands. Where did she go when she told him that she must make long journeys to visit her daughters in Florence, in Paris, and in Mainz? When he gradually came to realize that he knew nothing about her, that made him fearful. He knew only that she had come to him from the Duke of Milan, and he knew it was inevitable that she had been the duke's lover; but where had she been before she knew him? What experience could have trained her to achieve such a man? She told him she was an associate of Cosimo di Medici, and Cossa had been careful to make Cosimo confirm this which Cosimo did with detached admiration and relish. He had asked the marchesa about Cosimo.

`What about him?' she said. 'I am fortunate enough to be paid a small commission from him for bringing new business to his bank.'

`That is all?'

`Cossa! He is intensely married! Besides it was I who brought him together with his only mistress.'

`What about Gian Galeazzo?'

`Whomever I met before I knew you should be meaningless to you. All I really can remember about Gian Galeazzo now is that he would have taken Rome and Italy were it not for your power against him.'

`The plague was the power against him.'

`No! You were in his stars. I – saw you there. Gian Galeazzo was guided by the stars. I served him in many ways, but he believed my real power was that I could read his stars and his fate was there to he seen. You were. there to be seen. How else do you think I knew to go to you if I had not seen it in Gian Galeazzo's stars, the stars which foretold that you would keep him planning in Pavia at the centre of the plague?'