Fiction: The Masque of Faith

For earlier Giancarlo stories: The Pillars of Hercules, The Siege, The Hired Blade pt. 1, The Hired Blade pt. 2, and his Flashing Blades Character Sheet

I was a young and tender age when I found myself coming into Roma. I had always dreamed of that sacred city as a little boy, but more because of the vice and sin it represented than out of any holy duty. It was enough to know that the Curia, that scheming cesspool at Roma's heart, was always after Venetian bounties, Venetian lands, their fingers always dabbling in the affairs of my fair home. I didn't go because I wanted to see the Pope or his toadies, whom I despise even to this day, but because I had met a woman—really not much more than a girl—on a moonlit canal one night and I could not forget her. This was in the full idiocy of my youth, you must understand, so I was willing to do anything to see her again, even travel to the seat of all vices.

And yet! Perhaps I was in luck, for some months before my arrival, who should be installed upon Saint Peter's Throne than Pietro Ottoboni—a Venetian! So as you can imagine my spirits were higher than would otherwise have been even as I strolled in from Ravenna. I sneered at powerful old men and made mock of their phallic noses and their disgusting wigs. The men of Roma appeared to be no different from the men of France; pompified, sisified dandies. A wig like that on the docks of Venezia would get you heaved in the Grand Canal for your troubles! Even Morosini, old fraud that he was, knew better than to wear a wig with his frippery. Though imagining his cannons blasting away the history of the Greeks still causes me to chuckle a little; those greasy oil merchants have long chafed under the Turks and proclaimed that they are the founders of all civilization. To see their monuments reduced to stone splinters and leaning columns never ceases to amuse, and we have Morosini to thank for that.

But I digress! I was there in Roma, near the Porto Flaminia after spending the night in a little coaching house on the road that winds its way down from Florence. Florentine innkeeps are of a much higher quality than Roman ones, or so I have found, and since the inn was visited by Florentines in great number they were required to keep their standards up. Not like those reeking cesspools down in the Aventine nor in the money-sucks of the Vaticani.