`My lord, hear me.' Her face hardened with her will. 'I offer you command of the Milanese armies. They are still loyal to me; commanders and troops. My son is being prepared to show his disloyalty and to go along, with ambitious men who are not Visconti. You are being backed into a corner. Deny the Council of Pisa their choice and you will be cast into a corner of oblivion within the Church. You need what I have. I need what you have. We will share everything. You will cast out the interlopers and you will retrain my sons to be what their father was. Ruler of the north of Italy you will be and ruler of more than that if you but choose it.'

`Leave the sacred college?' he said. `Give up my place at Bologna?'

`Cossa, I speak to you of real power. You will leave nothing. You will give up nothing. We will lay down the terms of how the Church should be run and, if you wish to be first among the cardinals, they will confer: that upon you to win our favour. You will be the temporal ruler of Italy. And that is your true meaning. Combined with the gold of Milan, and with the force that it can buy, you will tell them what it is you want, not the other way round.'

His mind began to soften. He had almost agreed, mindlessly, with the marchesa and Cosimo because his father had imprinted upon his purpose so long ago that he was being sent away to become a lawyer so that he could go to great heights in the Church. He had put the two outsides together, sides which were in no way any part of him, and he had. accepted the banker's dream of a merchants' world because the marchesa had sold it to him.

If he were ever to accept the papacy, he might as well have agreed to become an alchemist or a werewolf. But he needed time to think about the destiny which this woman was offering to him. They would become intertwined if he agreed. There could be bitter troubles in that. Besides, if he told, her right now that he would accept what she offered, that would be the end of lovemaking for this night and perhaps for many nights to come…

While she lay asleep in, the darkness, before dawn the next morning, he crept out of her room, dressed, roused me and was out, riding off at the head of his lances before she awoke.

The Marchesa di Artegiana went from Pisa to join Cossa and brief him in full on what had been accomplished on his behalf at the council. It was the second such journey she had made since the meetings had begun. She spent an afternoon and a night with him at Montanta, a walled hill town off the beaten way between Siena and Viterbo, protected by cliffs. Its main piazza slanted upwards, houses huddling around a church which hugged the skirts of a towering castle where Cossa waited for her.

They were in a room with brilliant, bare, white walls. She was a good briefing officer. She reported on the finances – she had insisted that Cossa put up one fifth of the money needed to marry all of them in the enterprise, then she gave him a tally of his support and opposition among the cardinals, with her analysis of the state of mind of the general council, which, she said, was intent upon Church reform – at least the French were, and they dominated the meeting. She detailed the several current European national positions, as these could affect his candidacy or present problems after his election. She delivered head-counts of the informal caucuses within the sacred college, then projected a combined caucus of her own estimation as to how the election would go. She told him, last, that Sicily had been rejoined with the kingdom of Naples. When she had finished, she said simply, 'This time next month you will be pope.'

`You can never be sure of such things,' he said dryly.

`We can be sure. We are sure. It is done.'

'Do I not have the right to change my mind?' he said. 'To say, flatly, that if they offer it I won't accept it.'

`No joking, please,' she said. `This is important business.'

`Listen, Decima. I am grateful for all you have done on this thing, and you can be sure I'm going to see that the money you believe you have lost will be made available to you in some other way. But I have thought deeply about this and I am not the right man to be pope. I am a soldier, not a reformer. I am a lawyer, not a priest. They want a religious man and that certainly leaves me out. The whole thing, the way you have organized it, is the greatest kind of a compliment to you. You have accomplished the impossible, but if I took that job it would destroy me.'

She clung to the necessity to appear calm. She felt ill enough to vomit, but she had to remain serene and in charge of the discussion. The expression which went out to him from her huge dark blue eyes, behind which chaos danced drunkenly, was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. `Have you thought how what you have just said could affect Cosimo and the other bankers of Europe? Do you have any idea how this is going to hit the investments of D'Ailly and the King of France and the Archbishop of Mainz and all the other people who have bet fortunes on you to have this schism over?'

`I am sorry about that,' he said. `Let them make other plans with some other puppet.'

`Cossa! For Christ's' sake!' You will make enemies in the Church whom you will never be able to overcome. There are rich, powerful men waiting for you in Pisa now who expect you to make them cardinals.'

`Too bad.'

`What are you going to do when they come after you?'

`I'll think of something. I do have a few thousand soldiers, don't I?'

'Cossa – listen to me – no one is meant to be pope,' the marchesa said desperately. `But when a man devotes his life to the service of his Church so successfully-that his cardinal peers choose him and elect him pope – then he serves.'

`Stop playing with me like a fish, Decima.' We have a business arrangement. You and Cosimo outmanoeuvred and outslicked the cardinals and the princes and the businessmen – who don't give a damn who is pope so long as the common policy is to eliminate the schism. Why not? It was good policy for you and Cosimo. You get a tithe of my share and you probably have a tithe of Cosimo's share, and we can be sure that any businessmen who want to do business with the new set-up would have to pay you off. Never mind. Cosimo wants the Church's banking. Let me do it my way, let me put my own man in as pope and I'll see that the Medici get what they want. Cosimo's way isn't the only way. I have a better way. You'll make even more money when we do it my way.'

She wanted to die… For the first time in all her years on God's earth she wanted to die.

Cossa had been thinking of the alternatives ever since leaving Catherine Visconti. He would need the leverage of an enormous amount of money if he ever expected to achieve a kind of equality with Visconti. Then he would have to maintain it until, gradually, he no longer needed her for the conquest of Italy, nor to handle the German politicians. His plan to acquire wealth which would win him greater power when he' agreed to take over the armies and the fortunes of Milan had slowly evolved and shaped itself.

`First of all, I would hate to be the reformer who tries to take away from those cardinals and bishops what they have considered to be their own for a thousand years. But a mild pass at reform has to be made. A very religious, saintly, holy man has to be propped up at the top, where all Christendom can watch him pray while the reformers are carrying on the usual systematic looting inside the Church. That saintly fellow certainly isn't me, Decima. Or am I wrong again?'

`You mean it. You mean all of it.'

`When did I ever lie to you?'

`Who is going to tell Cosimo di Medici?'

`It depends on what you tell him, doesn't it? Look here, my darling woman, because of all the work you've done in Pisa, when I go into that conclave as a voting cardinal, I'll be in a position to name the next pope. Before I make him pope, I'll make sure that he knows who got it for him. We will make a deal. He'll do all the praying and the swaying in the processions and the confessing, while I run the show for him. I will be the first among his cardinals because' he won't be able to operate the Church without me. I will run his curia and the benefices and be in charge of the taxes. Now are you beginning to follow me?'